and from Macbeth to
The Winter's Tale or Cymbeline. For although the supposed date of the
Antigone was long subsequent to the poet's first tragic victory, the
forty years over which the seven plays are spread saw many changes of
taste in art and literature.

Footnote:
1 _Three Plays of Sophocles:_ Blackwood, 1873.

* * * * *

PREFATORY NOTE TO THE
EDITION OF 1883

I. The Hellenic spirit has been repeatedly characterized as simple
Nature-worship. Even the Higher Paganism has been described as 'in
other words the purified worship of natural forms.'[1] One might
suppose, in reading some modern writers, that the Nymphs and Fauns,
the River-Gods and Pan, were at least as prominent in all Greek poetry
as Zeus, Apollo, and Athena, or that Apollo was only the sweet singer
and not also the prophet of retribution.

The fresh and unimpaired enjoyment of the Beautiful is certainly the
aspect of ancient life and literature which most attracted the
humanists of the sixteenth century, and still most impresses those
amongst ourselves who for various reasons desire to point the contrast
between Paganism and Judaism. The two great groups of forces vaguely
known as the Renaissance and the Revolution have both contributed to
this result. Men who were weary of conventionality and of the weight
of custom 'heavy as frost and deep almost as life,' have longed for
the vision of 'Oread or Dryad glancing through the shade,' or to 'hear
old Triton blow his wreathed horn.' Meanwhile, that in which the
Greeks most resembled us, 'the human heart by which we live,' for the
very reason that it lies so near to us, is too apt to be lost from our
conception of them. Another cause of this one-sided view is the
illusion produced by the contemplation of statuary, together with the
unapproachable perfection of form which every relic of Greek antiquity
indisputably possesses.

But on turning from the forms of Greek art to the substance of Greek
literature, we find that Beauty, although everywhere an important
element, is by no means the sole or even the chief attribute of the
greatest writings, nor is the Hellenic consciousness confined within
the life of Nature, unless this term is allowed to comprehend man with
all his thoughts and aspirations. It was in this latter sense that
Hegel recognized the union of depth with brightness in Greek culture:
'