SWINBURNE'S TRAGEDIES. 213 



stiff, reminding one of Landor in his attempts to repro- 

 duce the antique, the lyrical parts are lyrical in the 

 highest sense, graceful, flowing, and generally simple in 

 sentiment and phrase. There are some touches of nature 

 in the mother's memories of Althea, so sweetly pathetic 

 that they go as right to the heart as they came from it, 

 and are neither Greek nor English, but broadly human. 

 And yet, when we had read the book through, we felt as 

 if we were leaving a world of shadows, inhabited by less 

 substantial things than that nether realm of Homer 

 where the very eidolon of Achilles is still real to us in its 

 longings and regrets. These are not characters, but out- 

 lines after the Elgin marbles in the thinnest manner of 

 Flaxman. There is not so much blood in the whole of 

 them as would warm the little finger of one of Shake- 

 speare's living and breathing conceptions. We could 

 not help thinking of those exquisite verses addressed by 

 Schiller to Goethe, in which, while he expresses a half- 

 truth so eloquently as almost to make it seem a whole 

 one, he touches unconsciously the weak point of their 

 common striving after a Grecian instead of a purely hu- 

 man ideal. 



" Doch leicht gezimmert nur ist Thespis Wagen, 

 Und er ist gleich dem acheront'schen Kahn; 

 Nur Schatten und Idole kann er tragen, 

 Und drangt das rohe Leben sich heran, 

 So droht das leichte Fahrzeug umzuschlagen 

 Das nur die fliicht'gen Geister fassen kann; 

 Der Schein soil nie die Wirklichkeit erreichen 

 Und siegt Natur, so muss die Kunst entweichen." 



The actors in the drama are unreal and shadowy, the 

 motives which actuate them alien to our modern modes 

 of thought and conceptions of character. To a Greek, 

 the element of Fate, with which his imagination was 

 familiar, while it heightened the terror of the catastrophe, 

 would have supplied the place of that impulse in mere 



