re the fruit of his own folly. God is still on his
side and his death is a patriotic triumph, not, like the death of
Heracles, who resembles him in so many ways, merely the final proof of
the all-powerful malignity of fate.

No one will venture to differ from Jebb on such a question without a
sense of great temerity. But perhaps the truth is that one who had
lived all his life, as Jebb had, in the closest intimacy with the Greek
drama, would be apt to feel small differences from {243} it too much
and broad resemblances too little. To the shepherd all his sheep
differ from each other: the danger for him is to forget, what the
ignorant stranger sees, that they are also all very much alike. So
Jebb is no doubt perfectly right in the distinction he makes: but he is
surely blinded by his own knowledge when he argues from it that _Samson
Agonistes_ "is a great poem and a noble drama; but neither as poem nor
as drama is it Hellenic." Of that question comparative ignorance is
perhaps a better judge. For it can still see that the broad division
which separates the world's drama into two kinds is a real thing, and
that Milton's drama belongs in spite of differences unquestionably to
the Greek kind and not to the other, both by its method and by its
spirit. There can be no real doubt that it is far more like the
_Prometheus_ or the _Oedipus_ than it is like _Hamlet_ or _All for
Love_. Probably no great tragedy of any sort can be made without that
sense of the contrast between man's will and the "superhuman
controlling power" of which Jebb speaks as peculiarly Greek. Certainly
it is present in the greatest of Shakspeare's tragedies, and not seldom
finds open expression. "There's a divinity that shapes our ends."

{244}

But the point is that in _Samson_, the note of which is always the
classical, never the mystical or romantic, this sense is present, not
in Shakspeare's way, but substantially in the Greek way. The fact that
Samson is free and that his God is his friend does not prevent his
feeling just in the Greek way that God's ways are dark and inscrutable,
past man's finding out, and far above out of the reach of his control.
It does not prevent his being helpless as well as heroic, fully
conscious that all his strength leaves him still a weak child at the
absolute disposal of incomprehensible Omnipotence. So the whole
atmosphere of the play, as well as its formal mould, will always recall
the Greek tragedies. A