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Alfieri, or Racine, or Addison, men of no despicable genius? The Greek tragedy is not narrow for ancient Greece; that is to say, it occupies itself with the full field of Greek tragic thought: but the modern classical school is narrow. It has sought intensity by exclusion and limitation; it deepens the river, not by an abundance of waters, but by narrowing in the banks. Eschylus rolls along with.a sound of great waters. Racine lashes a canal into foam. The peculiarities of form and the choice of subjects, which were natural and indispensable to Greek art, serve only as devices to countenance the poverty of that of France. The ancient tales are stripped bare, necessarily so, of the hallowed associations of religion and patriotism and ancestral piety which clung to them in Greece, and remain naked exhibitions of human passion. Sophocles gives us the deep-seated workings of the hearts of men, and the terrible and inscrutable mysteries of mortal destiny, set to solemn music, clear and penetrating in its tones, if not rich in its harmony; like Milton's scathed angels, moving

"In perfect phalanx to the Dorian mood

Of flutes and soft recorders."

But his field embraces more than this. It is not the vagaries and struggling passions of the simple human heart that inspire his tragedies, but of hearts which are the field of action for the dread supernatural powers,— hearts which are swayed from their nature by divine wills, which bear the burden of ancestral crimes, and embody the destinies of nations. But you cannot have this in modern plays. When Racine's Phèdre ascribes the fierce. flames of her unlawful desires to the anger of Venus, and tells of her vain sacrifices on the altar of the goddess, the extenuation, which must have raised something of sublime pity in a Greek heart, falls dead and unmeaning on our ears; it seems trivial, a sort of classical decoration, which interferes with our interest, if it affects us at all. Phèdre

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does indeed agitate us powerfully, because our attention undistracted is tied down to the contemplation of a single frantic passion and a woman writhing under its torturing influence it is not a play to be seen from a distance, or that could be acted in mask or buskin; but it needs an audience who can catch each altered tone and every change of feature, and calls for the heart-piercing cries, the working features, the pale flashes and spasmodic action of Rachel. French tragedy screams through all its monotonous cadence, its stilted diction, and its formal limitations of time and place and persons. The same in great measure is true of Alfieri, in whom, however, speaks, if not a higher genius, a stronger and more ardent nature. "Narrow elevation," says Mr. Arnold, "is the characteristic of Alfieri." Perhaps we should rather say narrow intensity; and one or the other is the highest tragic characteristic of the modern classical drama. Nor is the form of the Greek drama more clearly reproduced than its matter. Mr. Arnold well describes the influence and beauties of the Athenian choruses; their interpretative and enforcing functions; the repose that lyric song affords to the strained emotions; and the balanced rhythmic symmetry which their answering parts give to the whole play. But the French school dispenses with this characteristic feature; or uses it, if at all, stripped of what makes it most characteristic. In brief, the modern classical drama has borrowed not the form but the mere shell of that of Greece, and even that narrowed and angularised; and though it has preserved a set of classical ideas to which it appeals, and a sort of classical phraseology which it uses, these are conventional and external only. There is this marked difference between the influence of ancient literature on the modern literature of England and of France, that in the former, ideas and forms, so far as they were adopted at all, were digested and assimilated; in the latter they were simply employed to overlay and varnish there was no native growth to swallow them up

and be enriched by them; they were greater in every way than that with which they came in contact, and were cruelly hacked and compressed to meet its meaner requirements. Mr. Arnold is fully aware of this; but he

makes some confusion: he uses the term 'classical school,' but what he really means by the term is the school of ancient Greece itself. He sees, or feels rather, that you cannot adopt its special and intricate beauty of form without adopting something of its inner essence; and when he enters the lists as a writer in this school, he writes something not like the Cato of Addison, or the Irene of Johnson, but as like as he can to

"The mellow glory of the Attic stage,

Singer of sweet Colonus and its child."

But the true ancient drama, which could not strike root in France or Italy, can still less hope to do so in England. In architecture, we have done much as the French did in poetry, we have introduced and used freely a dwarfed and conventional classical school. We have also built occasional specimens more or less true to the real Greek types; but these latter stand, and must ever stand, as curiosities. We cannot live in Greek houses, nor worship in Greek temples. Vain is Mr. Arnold's hope to see an English literature "enriched," as he expresses it," with the forms of the most perfectly formed literature in the world." As well might he bid us retrieve the discipline of Sparta, or replant the "groves of Academe." When we have rebuilt the Greek theatres, it will be time to reintroduce the Greek drama.

But this is no reason why Mr. Arnold should not, if he pleases, write a Greek play. Such an exercise, involving as it does a close and minute study of the details of ancient masterpieces, may be of infinite value to the poet's self, cannot be read (at least if done as well as it is here done) without interest by educated men; and it may possibly exercise a wider influence. It is professedly

an attempt on the part of the author to give English readers a knowledge of what Greek tragedy was to teach them the secret of its beauty and power. And it is not impossible that something may be thus taught. True, there is no royal road which can give us any adequate knowledge and real appreciation of ancient art; true that this process is rather beginning at the wrong end, and that instead of Merope teaching us what Greek tragedy is, we ought to know what Greek tragedy was to understand what Merope is; true that those will read it with the greatest pleasure and the highest appreciation who have got a standard with which to compare it,-gathered associations to which it can appeal,-in whose memories it stirs the half-effaced recollection of those pleasures when the intellect and imagination in their first active spring reaped the fruits of schoolboy drudgery, and first comprehended how great a thing they had gained. Yet for all this, half a loaf is better than no bread; and many men possess an instinct which enables them to gather from secondary sources alone a real insight into the subject of their inquiry; they manage to get hold of a sort of imaginative touchstone, and by means of it to pick out what is genuine, and discard what is adulterated. You can learn less perhaps of Greek literature than of any other through the medium of translations and imitations; but you had better read translations and imitations of the things themselves than be content with descriptions of them, and better read descriptions of them than know absolutely nothing of them.

Still, if Mr. Arnold's object was to extend the knowledge of Greek tragedy, and increase the English appreciation of it, he ought to have written a translation, not an imitation. He has stated his reasons for not doing so; and no doubt the latter is far pleasanter to write, and affords a better field for the powers of a poet; but, for evident reasons, it is far less valuable to others to have Mr. Arnold's idea of what a Greek play was than Æs

chylus' or Sophocles' idea. If he approach the English reader any closer by an imitation than a translation, it is by being so far false to his model of a true Greek play. If, on the other hand, his object is the resurrection of the Attic drama, we don't see why the imitation should stop short of the language. If it be advisable that we should possess Greek subject-matter, expressed according to Greek ideas in Greek poetical forms, why not put it into Greek words too, and make an exact reproduction and a sealed book of it? Is ancient subject-matter, then, excluded from modern art? No; but it is one thing to attempt to reproduce ancient art, and another to use what we know of ancient life as the subject of modern art. It is difficult, indeed, most difficult, to do even this on the one side is the danger lest by seeking for accuracy poetry become lost in antiquarianism; on the other, lest in our ignorance we content ourselves with delineating skeleton passions, and not men. Shakspere did the most that can be done in his Coriolanus and Cæsar he grasped ancient characters as firmly as he could; and then he delineated them, not only in English language, but in English forms of art, and through the medium of English ideas and English habits of thought. What we controvert is, the idea, openly expressed by Mr. Arnold, that there is an unworked side of English literature, in the direction of direct imitation of that of Greece.

Yet the play of Merope merits notice, if for no other reason, because the genius of its author stands very distinct among those of his contemporaries; and this work is an effort to exert and extend its most salutary influence. There is a pleasure in reading Matthew Arnold's poems which can be derived from few other poets of the day. He has a nice sense of the beauty of form, and to huddle together disjecta membra of poetry gives him no satisfaction; he knows, and in all his writings proves that he knows, that finish of execution and harmony of

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