ing and triumphant "grip" of the tragic misfortunes of Oedipus
and Orestes, the combination of the course of fate and the [Greek:
hamartia] of the individual, is totally absent. The wooing of Merope
by Polyphontes is not so much preposterous as insignificant, though
Voltaire, by a touch of modernism, has rescued it or half-rescued it
from this most terrible of limbos. The right triumphs, no doubt; but
who cares whether it does or not? And Mr Arnold, with the heroic
obstinacy of the doctrinaire, has done nothing to help the effect of a
scheme in itself sufficiently uninspiring to the modern reader. When
he was at work upon the piece he had "thought and hoped" that it would
have what Buddha called "the character of Fixity, that true sign of
the law." A not unfriendly critic might have pointed out, with gloomy
forebodings, that a sign of law is not necessarily a sign of poetry,
and that, as a prophet of his own had laid it down, poetry should
"transport" not "fix." At any rate, it is clear to any one who reads
the book that the author was in a mood of deliberate provocation and
exaggeration--not a favourable mood for art. The quiet grace of
Sophocles is perhaps impossible to reproduce in English, but Mr
Arnold's verse is more than quiet, it is positively tame. The dreary
_tirades_ of Polyphontes and Merope, and their snip-snap
_stichomythia_, read equally ill in English. Mr Swinburne, who has
succeeded where Mr Arnold failed, saw by a true intuition that, to
equal the effect of the Greek chorus, full English lyric with rhyme
and musical sweep was required. Mr Arnold himself, as might have been
expected from his previous experiments in unrhymed Pindarics, has
given us strophes and antistrophes most punctiliously equivalent in
syllables; but sometimes with hardly any, and never with very much,
vesture of poetry about them. It is absolutely preposterous to suppose
that the effect on a Greek ear of a strophe even of Sophocles or
Euripides, let alone the great Agamemnonian choruses, was anything
like the effect on an English ear of such wooden stuff as this:--

"Three brothers roved the field,
And to two did Destiny
Give the thrones that they conquer'd,
But the third, what delays him
From his unattained crown?"

But Mr Arnold would say "This is your unchaste modern love for
passages and patches. Tell me how I managed this worthy action?" To
which the only answer can be, "Sir, the action is rather
uninteresting. Sa