SOPHOCLES. "This spot is holy, one may clearly tell, And sacred olive, and within its depths Thick-haunting nightingales trill forth their songs." 49 The scenes are sweet but tame and garden-like, and they contain in brief about all that Sophocles dwells on with pleasure of the landward beauties of the country. But he has frequently pleasant and appreciative references to the sea, and especially to the sea in storm "As when a wave, where Thracian blasts blow strong On that tempestuous shore, Up surges from the depth beneath the sea, And from the deep abyss Rolls the black wind-vexed sand, And every jutting peak that drives it back But while there is comparatively little of rural scenery in Sophocles, and while that little is mostly of the lovely domestic kind, he shows perhaps, as an advance on his predecessors, a slightly deepening tone of tenderness and passion for flowers and nightingales and groves, and an increased tendency to speak of them for their own sake, and not for simile's sake alone or to set off man to advantage. And while he has advanced in his conception of the drama, and made it a 1 Oedipus Coloneus, Plumptre's translation, from which other quotations in verse are taken. D thing of beauty as a whole, he has also drawn our attention more closely than his predecessors to the beauty of character; and morally and theologically he has reached, by hints and implications, a higher platform than Aeschylus or Homer. In Homer morality among gods and men was comparatively a matter of will and power-as arbitrary as custom with ourselves, and often a very low custom at that; and in Aeschylus the arbitrariness had given way to its opposite, an immanent power of righteousness in things which appeared among men in the moral necessity of Fate. But in Sophocles the objective rule of righteousness, which is also the will of the gods, becomes one with the subjective liking, the purer moral sense and feeling of mankind; and so fate and freedom are reconciled in goodness in the identification of the individual with the universal life, ours with God's. Antigone recognized in her feelings for her brother and her resolve to bury him the voice of the gods, and consequently the unity of her moral life with theirs and with the law of the universe. "Nor did I deem thy edicts strong enough, They are not of to-day nor yesterday, But live for ever, nor can man assign When first they sprang to being. Not through fear Before the gods to bear the penalty Of sinning against these." And similarly in the Oedipus Tyrannus it is beautifully said, "May destiny still find me winning the praise of reverent purity in all words and deeds sanctioned by those laws of range sublime, called into life throughout ADVANCE IN MORAL FEELING. 51 the high clear heaven, whose father is Olympus alone; their parent was no race of mortal men, no, nor shall oblivion ever lay them to sleep; a mighty god is in them, and he grows not old." 1 There was thus in Sophocles the conception of an eternal and inviolable rule of righteousness in the will of the gods, and it might be expressed in the deeper moral instincts of human nature with which it was in unison. There were the glimmerings of "the Light which lighteth every man that cometh into the world.” But man in various ways and from various causes might then as now misinterpret the will of the gods, and misread the rule. And in Euripides we have at least one pathetic picture which shows an advance in moral feeling over anything of the kind in either Aeschylus or Sophocles. In the Choephori Orestes is made to kill his mother Clytaemnestra in the most cold-blooded, matter-of-fact way. "Follow me," he said to his mother, "I wish to slay thee close beside his corpse (Aegistha's) here; for when he was alive too, thou didst use to deem him better than my father. Go sleep with him in death, since thou dost love this man, and him whom thou wast bound to love thou loathest." And he killed her with apparently as little feeling as he would a beast. The representation is the same in the Electra of Sophocles, but with this added touch of cold-blooded vengeance, that Electra shouts in encouragement to her brother, "Strike, if thou hast strength, a double stroke." But while, in the Electra of Euripides, Orestes performs the murder as a duty and at the instigation of his sister and of the gods, as he thinks, he does the deed reluctantly, and while covering his face with his robe. 'Professor Jebb's translation. "Orestes. To what dreadful deeds, O thou most dear, hast thou thy brother urged Electra. With anguish'd mind, I know, thou didst proceed, When heard thy wailing mother's piteous cries. Orestes. These words, whilst with her hands she stroked my cheeks, Burst forth, Thy pity I implore, my son.' Soothing she spoke, as on my cheeks she hung, That bloodless from my hand the sword might fall. Orestes. Holding my robe before mine eyes, I raised The murder The change is a most significant one. of even a mother in revenge for murder had evidently been esteemed a sacred duty-demanded at once by the gods and by him who had been sent beneath the earth, Agamemnon slain; but the great reluctance of Orestes in Euripides to do the deed the feeling that it was opposed to all the better instincts of the heart, a thing unnatural and horrible--was not far from the belief that it was a deed, not demanded, but abhorred and forbidden by the gods and the "laws of range sublime whose father is Olympus." It is not only indicative of a change in moral sentiment, but predictive of a change too in religious creed, which will modify strangely the artistic judgment and the contents of art, as well as the actual practice and daily relations of men in society. 1 All the quotations from Euripides in this chapter are from Potter's trans lation. NATURE IN EURIPIDES. 333 53 But if Euripides bears us a stage onwards in moral and religious culture, he also leads us a step in the development of the taste for natural beauty. In frequency and length of reference to landscape, and in the love with which he apparently lingers on it and describes it, he is ahead of all his predecessors; and in the literature of Greece he may be called par excellence the dramatist poet of the picturesque. He loved the light of heaven with a pure and fervent passion, and he never tired of its sweetness. It is constantly in his song; and so are the streams with their lucid flow, or whirling, eddying through the plains. Of all the objects of nature the light and the rivers are the most frequently and most lovingly mentioned by him. But like all the bards of his time, and of all times, he also loved the meadows, the fountains, and the flowers. "O that his son he ne'er had laid Where with their herds the herdsmen stray'd, Where rolls the lucid streams along, And the green mead profusely pours For goddesses which lovely grew.". (Iphigenia in Aulis.) And like his great contemporaries, and Homer before him, he has of course to sing of the nightingale. But his song has in it a new note of passion, and it is more deliberately emphatic and prolonged. "On thee, high-nested in the museful shade By close-enwoven branches made, Thee sweetest bird, most musical Of all that warble their melodious song The charmed woods among, Thee tearful nightingale, I call: |