SWINBURNE'S TRAGEDIES. 



the essential requisites of human interest and universal 

 belief. He accordingly chose a Jewish mythus, very 

 near to his own heart as a blind prisoner, betrayed by 

 his wife, among the Philistines of the Restoration, and 

 familiar to the earliest associations of his hearers. This 

 subject, and this alone, met all the demands both of 

 living poetic production and of antique form, the 

 action grandly simple, the personages few, the pro 

 tagonist at once a victim of divine judgment and an ex 

 ecutor of divine retribution, an intense personal sympa 

 thy in the poet himself, and no strangeness to the 

 habitual prepossessions of those he addressed to be over 

 come before he could touch their hearts or be sure of 

 aid from their imaginations. To compose such a drama 

 on such a theme was to be Greek, and not to counterfeit 

 it ; for Samson was to Milton traditionally just what 

 Herakles was to Sophocles, and personally far more. 

 The "Agonistes" is still fresh and strong as morning, 

 but where are " Caractacus " and " Elfrida " 1 Nay, 

 where is the far better work of a far abler man, 

 where is " Merope " 1 If the frame of mind which per 

 forms a deliberate experiment were the same as that 

 which produces poetry vitalized through and through by 

 the conspiring ardors of every nobler passion and power 

 of the soul, then " Merope " might have had some little 

 space of life. But without color, without harmonious 

 rhythm of movement, with less passion than survived in 

 an average Grecian ghost, and all this from the very 

 theory of her creation, she has gone back, a shadow, to 

 join her shadowy Italian and French namesakes in that 

 limbo of things that would be and cannot be. Mr. 

 Arnold but retraces, in his Preface to " Merope," the 

 arguments of Mason in the letters prefixed to his classi 

 cal experiments. What finds defenders, but not readers, 

 may be correct, classic, right in principle, but it is not 



