volcanic passions. Tragedy, we are told by Aristotle, acts through Terror and Pity, awakening in our bosoms sympathy with suffering; and to suppose this is to be accomplished by the "meditative repose which breathes from every verse " is tantamount to supposing a battle-song will most vigorously stir the blood of combatants if it borrow the accents of a lullaby.

Insensibly our notions of Greek Art are formed from Sculpture; and hence, perhaps, this notion of repose. But acquaintance with the Drama ought to have prevented such an error, and taught men not to confound calmness of evolution with calmness of life. The unagitated simplicity of Greek scenic representation lay in the nature of the scenic necessities; but we do not call the volcano cold, because the snow rests on its top. Had the Greek Drama been exhibited on stages like those of modern Europe, and performed by actors without cothurnus and mask, its deep agitations of passion would have welled up to the surface, communicating responsive agitations to the form. But there were reasons why this could not be. In the Grecian Drama, everything was on a scale of vastness commensurate with the needs of an audience of many thousand's, and consequently everything was disposed in masses rather than in details; it thus necessarily assumed something of the sculpturesque form, threw itself into magnificent groupings, and, with a view to its effect, adapted a peculiar eurhythmic construction. It thus assumed slowness of movement, because it could not be rapid with effect. If the critic doubts this, let him mount on stilts and, bawling through a speaking-trumpet, try what he can make of Shakspeare; he will then have an approximative idea of the restraints laid upon the Grecian actor, who, clothed so as to aggrandize his person, and speaking through a resonant Mask, which had a fixed expression, could not act, in our modern sense of the world, but only declaim; he had no means of representing the fluctuations of passion, and the poet therefore was forced to make him represent passion in broad, fixed masses. Hence the movement of the Greek Drama was necessarily large, slow, and simple.

But if we pierce beneath scenic necessities and attend solely

to the dramatic life which pulses through the Grecian tragedies, what sort of calmness meets us there? Calmness is a relative word. Polyphemus hurling rocks as school-boys throw cherrystones, would doubtless smile at our riots, as we smile at buzzing flies; and Moloch howling through the unfathomable wilderness in passionate repentance of his fall, would envy us the wildest of our despair, and call it calmness. But measured by human standards I know not whose sorrow "can bear such emphasis" as to pronounce those pulses calm which throb in the Edipus, the Agamemnon, or the Ajax. The Labdacidan Tale is one of the sombrest threads woven by the Parcæ.

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The subjects selected by the Greek dramatists are almost uniformly such as call into play the deepest and darkest passions madness, adultery, and murder in Agamemnon; revenge, murder, and matricide in the Choëphora; incest in Edipus; jealousy and infanticide in Medea; incestuous adultery in Hippolytus; madness in Ajax; and so on throughout the series. The currents of these passions are for ever kept in agitation, and the alternations of pity and terror close only with the closing of the scene. In other words. in spite of the slowness of its evolution, the drama is distinguished by the very absence of the repose which is pronounced its characteristic.

Here it is we meet with the first profound difference separating Goethe from the Greek dramatist. The repose which was forced upon the Greek, which formed one of his restraints, as the hardness of the marble restrains the sculptor, Goethe has adopted under conditions which did not force him; while the repose, which the Greek kept only at the surface, Goethe has allowed to settle down to the core. In what was accidental, temporal, Goethe has imitated Greek Art; in the essential characteristic he has not imitated it. Racine, so unjustly treated by Schlegel, has given us the passionate life of the Greek Drama, in spite of his Madame Hermione and Monsieur Oreste; in imitating the slow scenic movement he has also imitated the dramatic agitation of the under-current.

Goethe's Iphigenia, then, we must cease to regard according to the Grecian standard. It is a German play. It substitutes

profound moral and psychological struggles, for the passionate struggles of the old legend. It is not Greek in ideas nor in sentiments. It is German, and transports Germany of the eighteenth century into Scythia during the mythic age, quite as absolutely as Racine places the Court of Versailles in the Camp of Aulis; and with the same ample justification.* The points in which Goethe's work resembles the Greek, are, first, the slowness of its scenic movement and simplicity of its action, which produce a corresponding calmness in the dialogue; and secondly, a saturation of mythic lore. All the rest is German. And this Schiller, as a dramatist, clearly saw. "I am astonished," he says, "to find this piece no longer makes the same favourable impression on me that it did formerly; though I still recognize it as a work full of soul. It is, however, so astonishingly modern and un-Greek that I cannot understand how it was ever thought to resemble a Greek play. It is purely moral, but the sensuous power, the life, the agitation, and everything which specifically belongs to a dramatic work is wanting. Goethe has himself spoken slightingly of it, but I took that as a mere caprice or coquetry; now I understand him." This is very different from Herder's assertion that the piece is as much above Euripides as Sophocles is above Euripides.

Schiller adds, however, that apart from the dramatic form, Iphigenia is a marvellous production, which must for ever remain the delight and wonderment of mankind. This is striking the right chord. A drama it is not; it is a marvellous dramatic poem. The grand and solemn movement of its evolution responds to the large and simple ideas which it unfolds. Its calmness is majesty. In the limpid clearness of its language, the involved mental processes of the characters are as transparent as the operations of bees within a crystal hive; while the

* This error of local colouring, which critics more erudite than acute have ridiculed in Racine, is not only an error commanded by the very conditions of Art, but is the very error committed by the Greeks themselves. In this play of Iphigenia, Euripides has committed anachronisms as gross as any chargeable to Racine; and justly: he wrote for the audience of his day, he did not write for antiquity.

constant strain of high and lofty music which sounds through the poem makes the reader feel as if in a holy temple. And above all witcheries of detail there is the one captial witchery, belonging to Greek statues more than to any other works of human cunning-the perfect unity of impression produced by the whole, so that nothing in it seems made, but all to grow, nothing is superfluous, but all is in organic dependence, nothing is there for detached effect, but the whole is effect. The poem fills the mind; but beautiful as the separate passages are, admirers seldom think of passages, they think of the wondrous whole.

I cannot in language less than hyperbolical express my admiration for this work considered in itself; but as a drama, I think an instructive parallel might be drawn between it and the Iphigenia of Euripides. The enormous superiority of Goethe in intellectual stature, even aided by the immeasurable advantage he has to us of writing in a language which is in some sort our own, would not cover his inferiority as a dramatist. In the following outline a few points may briefly be touched.

In Euripides we have this groundwork: Iphigenia, about to be sacrificed at Aulis, was snatched away in a cloud by Diana, and a hind substituted in her place; she is now priestess of Diana in Tauris, where she presides over the bloody sacrifice of every stranger thrown on the inhospitable shores. Orestes and Pylades, in obedience to the oracle, come to Tauris intent on bearing away the Image of Diana: that accomplished, Orestes is to be released from the Furies who pursue him. The two are seized, and brought to Iphigenia for sacrifice. A recognition takes place; and she aids them in their original design of carrying away the goddess. They are pursued by the Scythians, but Minerva appears, to cut the knot and calm the rage of Thoas.

This story Goethe has modernized. The characters are essentially different, the moral elements at work are different, and the effect is different. His Iphigenia, every way superior to the Greek priestess, has the high, noble, tender, delicate soul of a Christian maiden. Forced to fulfil the duties of a Priestess,

she subdues by her mild influence the fierce prejudice of Thoas, and makes him discontinue the barbarous practice of human sacrifices. She, who herself had been anointed as a sacrifice, could she preside over the sacrifice of another? This sympathy is modern. No Greek would have suffered her own personal feelings thus to rise up in rebellion against a religious rite. The key note is struck here, and this tone sounds through the whole piece.

Iphigenia is melancholy, and pines for her native shores, in spite of the honour which attends, and the good she effects by her influence on Thoas. The fate of her family perturbs her. Thoas has conceived a passion for her.

Thou sharedst my sorrow when a hostile sword
Tore from my side my last, my dearest son;
Long as fierce vengeance occupied my heart,
I did not feel my dwelling's dreary void;
But now, returning home, my rage appeased,
My foes defeated and my son avenged,

I find there's nothing left to comfort me.*

And he expresses a hope to "bear her to his dwelling as a bride", which she gently evades; he then taxes her with the mystery in which she has shrouded herself. She answers

If I concealed, O king, my name and race,
'Twas fear which prompted me, and not mistrust:
For didst thou know who stands before thee now,
And what accursed head thy arm protects,

A shuddering horror would possess thy heart;
And, far from wishing me to share thy throne,
Wouldst banish me perchance.

Thoas replies, with generosity, that nothing shall make him cease his protection.

* In all extracts from the work, I avail myself of the translation by Miss Swanwick (Selections from Goethe and Schiller), which is many degrees superior to that of the late William Taylor (Survey of German Poetry, vol. III). Feeling, as I profoundly feel, the insuperable difficulties of translating Goethe into English, it would ill become me to criticise Miss Swanwick's version; but it would also be very unjust not to add, that all versions miss the exquisite beauty of the original, and resemble it no more than a rough woodcut resembles a Titian.