^!16 SWINBURNE'S TRAGEDIES. 



and which is important enough to deserve it. Do we 

 show our appreciation of the Greeks most wisely in 

 attempting the mechanical reproduction of their forms, 

 or by endeavoring to comprehend the thoughtful spirit of 

 full-grown manhood in which they wrought, to kindle 

 ourselves by the emulation of it, and to bring it to bear 

 with all its plastic force upon our wholly new conditions 

 of life and thought *? It seems to us that the question is 

 answered by the fact, patent in the history of all the fine 

 arts, that every attempt at reproducing a bygone excel- 

 lence by external imitation of it, or even by applying the 

 rules which analytic criticism has formulated from the 

 study of it, has resulted in producing the artificial, and 

 not the artistic. That most subtile of all essences in 

 physical organization, which eludes chemist, anatomist, 

 and microscopist, the life, is in eesthetics not less shy of 

 the critic, and will not come forth in obedience to his 

 most learned spells, for the very good reason that it 

 cannot, because in all works of art it is the joint product 

 of the artist and of the time. Faust may believe he is 

 gazing on " the face that launched a thousand ships," 

 but Mephistopheles knows very well that it is only 

 shadows that he has the skill to conjure. He is not 

 merely the spirit that ever denies, but the spirit also of 

 discontent with the present, that material in which every 

 man shall work who will achieve realities and not their 

 hollow semblance. The true anachronism, in our opin- 

 ion, is not in Shakespeare's making Ulysses talk as Lord 

 Bacon might, but in attempting to make him speak in a 

 dialect of thought utterly dead to all present compre- 

 hension. Ulysses was the t3^pe of long-headedness ; and 

 the statecraft of an Ithacan cateran w^ould have seemed 

 as childish to the age of Elizabeth and Burleigh as it 

 was naturally sufficing to the first hearers of Homer. 

 Ulysses, living in Florence during the fifteenth century, 



