SWINBURNE'S TRAGEDIES. 225 



taste for the exaggerated, tlieir exquisite propriety of 

 phrase, which steadies imagination withotit cramping it, 

 — it is these that we should endeavor 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 sur- 

 render of what is genuine in us to what ivas genuine 

 in them. "A pure form," says Schiller, "helps and 

 sustains, an impure one hinders and shatters." 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 natui-al 

 stages of poetry, — the imaginative in ^schylus, the 

 thoughtfully artistic in Sophocles, the sentimental in 

 Euripides, — and then died. If people could only leam 

 the general applicability to periods and schools of what 

 young Mozart says of Gellert, that " he had written no 

 poetry since his death " ! No effort to raise a defunct 

 past has ever led to anything but just enough galvanic 

 twitching of the limbs to remind lis unpleasantly of life. 

 The romantic movement of the school of German poets 

 which succeeded Goethe and Schiller ended in extrava- 

 gant unreality, and Goethe himself with his enerring 

 common-sense, has given us, in the second part of Faust, 

 the result of his own and Schiller's common striving 

 after a Grecian ideal. Euphorion, the child of Faust 

 and Helen, falls dead at their feet ; and Helen herself 

 soon follows him to the shades, leaving onl}^ her mantle 

 in the hands of her lover. This, he is told, shall lift 

 him above the earth. We fancy we can interpret the 

 10* o 



