204 SWINBURNR S TRAGEDIES. 



OUTIS. That thou led st sheep fits not for leading men. 

 CHORUS. To sleep-sealed eyes the wolf-dog barks in vain.&quot; 



We protest that we have read something very like this, we 

 will not say where, and we might call it the battledore and 

 shuttlecock style of dialogue, except that the players do not 

 seem to have any manifest relation to each other, but each 

 is intent on keeping his own bit of feathered cork continually 

 in the air. 



The first sincerely popular yearning toward antiquity, the 

 first germ of Schiller s &quot; Gotter Griechenland s,&quot; is to be 

 found in the old poem of Tanhauser, very nearly coincident 

 with the beginnings of the Reformation. And if we might 

 allegorise it, we should say that it typified precisely that 

 longing after Venus, under her other name of Charis, which 

 represents the relation in which modern should stand to 

 ancient art. It is the grace of the Greeks, their sense of 

 proportion, their distaste for the exaggerated, their exquisite 

 propriety of phrase, which steadies imagination without 

 cramping it it is these that we should endeavour to 

 assimilate without the loss of our own individuality. We 

 should quicken our sense of form by intelligent sympathy 

 with theirs, and not stiffen it into formalism by a servile 

 surrender of what is genuine in us to what was genuine in 

 them. &quot; A pure form,&quot; says Schiller, &quot; helps and sustains, 

 an impure one hinders and shatters.&quot; But we should 

 remember that the spirit of the age must enter as a 

 modifying principle, not only into ideas, but into the best 

 manner of their expression. The old bottles will not 

 always serve for the new wine. A principle of life is the 

 first requirement of all art, and it can only be communicated 

 by the touch of the time and a simple faith in it ; all else is 

 circumstantial and secondary. The Greek tragedy passed 

 through the three natural stages of poetry the imaginative 

 in -ffischylus, the thoughtfully artistic in Sophocles, the 

 sentimental in Euripides and then died. If people could 

 only learn the general applicability to periods and schools 

 of what young Mozart says of Gellert, that &quot; he had written 

 no poetry since his death 1 &quot; No effort to raise a defunct 



