gloom to which we had been led.
Neoptolemus, touched with generous remorse, steals back to give the
betrayed warrior his weapons--he is watched by the vigilant Ulysses--
an angry altercation takes place between them. Ulysses, finding he
cannot intimidate, prudently avoids personal encounter with the son of
Achilles, and departs to apprize the host of the backsliding of his
comrade.--A most beautiful scene, in which Neoptolemus restores the
weapons to Philoctetes--a scene which must have commanded the most
exquisite tears and the most rapturous applauses of the audience,
ensues; and, finally, the god so useful to the ancient poets brings
all things, contrary to the general rule of Aristotle [373], to a
happy close. Hercules appears and induces his former friend to
accompany Neoptolemus to the Grecian camp, where his wound shall be
healed.. The farewell of Philoctetes to his cavern--to the nymphs of
the meadows--to the roar of the ocean, whose spray the south wind
dashed through his rude abode--to the Lycian stream and the plain of
Lemnos--is left to linger on the ear like a solemn hymn, in which the
little that is mournful only heightens the majestic sweetness of all
that is musical. The dramatic art in the several scenes of this play
Sophocles has never excelled, and scarcely equalled. The contrast of
character in Ulysses and Neoptolemus has in it a reality, a human
strength and truth, that is more common to the modern than the ancient
drama. But still the fault of the story is partly that the plot rests
upon a base and ignoble fraud, and principally that our pity is
appealed to by the coarse sympathy with physical pain: the rags that
covered the sores, the tainted corruption of the ulcers, are brought
to bear, not so much on the mind as on the nerves; and when the hero
is represented as shrinking with corporeal agony--the blood oozing
from his foot, the livid sweat rolling down the brow--we sicken and
turn away from the spectacle; we have no longer that pleasure in our
own pain which ought to be the characteristic of true tragedy. It is
idle to vindicate this error by any dissimilarity between ancient and
modern dramatic art. As nature, so art, always has some universal and
permanent laws. Longinus rightly considers pathos a part of the
sublime, for pity ought to elevate us; but there is nothing to elevate
us in the noisome wounds, even of a mythical hero; our human nature is
too much forced back into itself--