upon herself, her hopes of Orestes but the expectation of safety and comfort in lieu of desolation. The mind of Antigone glows with youthful impulse, chastened by matured principle, while Electra exhibits little else than the accumulated bitterness of continued years of misfortune. Even her mournings at the supposed death of Orestes teem with selfishness, while the consciousness that she is "unmarried, at her age," is almost ludicrously dwelt upon at every opportunity! Bulwer has rightly observed that the interest excited by the splendid description of the chariot race and of the pretended death of Orestes, is lessened by the knowledge that it is a feigned story, and the appearance of Orestes excites little interest, because we are fully prepared for it. The catastrophe of the play, like that of the Choephora of Eschylus, is bold and animated, but the death of Ægisthus has too much of deliberation. Nevertheless the cool, deathly purpose of Orestes is replete with the retributive terrors of divine justice, and the death of the murderer in the very place of his own crime was a necessary sacrifice to the notion of an avenging deity and mindful fury. Orestes is the very embodyment of this principle, but his character is drawn with less strength than in Eschylus. Clytemnestra is not the Clytemnestra of Eschylus, she lacks the tact and boldness of the heroine of the " Agamemnon." She here appears rather as the sophistical sensualist, striving to supply the want of truth by violence, and yielding to superstition and impiety at the same moment. Nay, the Clytemnestra of Æschylus has certain qualities almost commanding respect. Her bold energy and haughty indifference to consequences equal the mad devilry of Lady Macbeth, but in Sophocles Clytemnestra is scarcely a tragic character. paltry and sophistical reasoning with Electra renders the abuse with which it is accompanied almost contemptible. The “TRACHINIA" is, dramatically speaking, the worst of the existing plays of Sophocles. Its beauties lie in the feminine gentleness of Deianira, and in occasional strokes of poetry in the choruses. The character of Hercules is light, vindictive, and contemptible. 66 We now arrive at two plays, the heroes of which have been repeatedly compared with one another, viz., the "AJAX” and 'PHILOCTETES." And yet the catastrophe in both is different. Ajax is led to death by despair resulting from disappointed ambition and revenge. It is not the frenzied despair of a Jocasta, but the deliberate despondency that a series of annoyances have wrought in a sensitive mind. Like Cato, he almost reasons himself into suicide, but, unlike him, he has no sublime hopes of futurity to gladden the act. The tender and soothing character of Tecmessa fails to soften his stern determination, but the sight of his only son gives occasion to one of the noblest bursts of parental tenderness found in any dramatic work. Still there is a selfishness in the honourable character of Ajax. He dares not, for his wife and child's sake, endure the shame, and face the enemies, to which he was to leave them subject. Trifling as is the character of Teucer, there is a warm and healthy generosity, and useful intrepidity, that, though less heroic, is more estimable than the feverish passion of Ajax. Of his concluding farewell Bulwer observes:-"It is characteristic of the Greek temperament that the personages of the Greek poetry ever bid a last lingering and half-reluctant farewell to the sun. There is a magnificent fulness of life in those children of the beautiful Hellas; the sun is to them as a familiar friend; the affliction or the terror of Hades is in the thought that its fields are sunless. The orb which ani mated their temperate heaven, which ripened their fertile earth, in which they saw the type of eternal youth, of surpassing beauty, of incarnate poetry,-human in its associations and yet divine in its nature,-is equally beloved and equally to be mourned by the maiden tenderness of Antigone, or the sullen majesty of Ajax." Philoctetes is the very contrary to Ajax, yet, to use the words of Schlegel, "if Ajax is honoured by his despair, Philoctetes is equally ennobled by his constancy." Without the comforts, without the practical ingenuity of Defoe's hero, he is the classic Robinson Crusoe, and spends a long lapse of years amidst birds and beasts, whose only friendliness was in providing him with food. The tortures of disease, and the rankling remembrance of Grecian ingratitude cease not to harass him, yet his mind rises superior; and, as Winkelmann observes, Philoctetes, like Laocoon, "suffers with the suppressed agony of an heroic soul never altogether overcome by his pain1." In perfect simplicity and clear dramatic construction this play almost deserves the encomium of an ingenious scholar, who styles it the "masterpiece of the Athenian stage." There is so perfect a unity of events, and so consistent a prosopopæia, that we are never shocked by incongruity. Well has Bulwer asserted, that "the character of Neoptolemus is a sketch which Shakespeare, alone could have bodied out." With all his natural generosity and honour, he is still easily persuadedbut, when once aroused to shame, his better feelings remain fixed and immoveable. The simple taking away and restoring of the bow and arrows is at once the test of his character and the incident of the play. If anything can be found fault with, it is the entry of the god at the conclusion of the piece. But this was necessary to preserve the consistency of Philoctetes in his hatred of the unworthy Greeks, to aid the interests of the generous Neoptolemus, and-to finish the play. I have but one more remark to make, and that is directed against the extraordinary idea of Wunder, judiciously disregarded by Hermann, that verses, particularly in the Trachiniæ, were often added by the performers. I am perfectly aware that Garrick, John Kemble, and Macready have 1 Schlegel, p. 109. 2 Mr. G. Burges, pref. to Philoctetes. sucessively appeared as the re-modellers of Shakespeare or Beaumont and Fletcher: but I believe their efforts were generally directed to popularizing the plays they altered. Now, if this end could be answered, by adding unintelligible verses, I have nothing to say. If not, Wunder had better seek to amend or explain the many passages he cannot understand, than adopt that easiest of all critical edge-tools, the pruning knife. Wunder is an able interpreter, an ingenious man, and a correct Grecian. But, for the histrio-critics of the Greek Drama-we have about as much belief in them, as in the comic powers lately attributed to the guard in the "Antigone," after the joke had lain concealed for rather more than two thousand years! |