34 P. H. Frye 
spirit of prophecy at the door of the Atreides’ palace. For this 
reason I hesitate to call the problems of private morality deeper 
and necessarily more tragic, after the current manner of speak- 
ing. But at all events they are different; and it is these prob- 
lems, raised by spontaneous impulses and by promptings of con- 
science hopelessly at odds with the determinations of life and 
society, which are Sophocles’ peculiarly. 
In Prometheus and the Oresteia the tragic schism is wholly 
external; it is due to a maladjustment which may be corrected 
without permanent harm to the persons involved. But every 
anomaly felt as tragic is not to be explained or reconciled so 
happily. There are instances in which it is inherent and fatal; 
in which it involves an organic lesion. It is so with Oedipus; 
not only is his crime his own but the responsibility is his also. 
Unlike the Aeschylean Orestes he acts by and for himself and at 
his own peril. To be sure, it may be said that like Prometheus 
he acts in behalf of others and in the interests of the general 
whether or not by prescription. But there is a difference. It 
is not without intention that Sophocles has centered the drama, 
not upon that portion of his protagonist’s career which has been 
mazed and darkened by celestial counsels, but rather upon that 
portion in which he, the child of fate—zais rvyys, .as he calls him- 
self with cruelly unconscious irony—has the temerity to act by 
his own lights with infatuate confidence in the clarity of his own 
vision—he, the puppet of destiny, blindfold from birth, who has 
never taken a step with a full sense of the conditions and con- 
sequences of his action. It is this pretender to clairvoyance, this 
dabbler in enigmas, the reader of the riddling Sphinx, whom 
Sophocles represents as pretending lightheartedly to unravel the 
mystery of his own being. He is a great criminal, to be sure; but 
he has become so inadvertently and as a result of such a skein 
of fatality that it is doubtful whether his lot would not be wholly 
pitiful (as, indeed, many have found it, le grand Corneille among 
them, who have failed to attend strictly to the action) if it were 
not for the pertinacity with which he is seen to pursue destruc- 
tion in insensate conceit of his own sufficiency. And to the same 
effect the length of time which is supposed to have elapsed since 
332 
