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 until the stone began to kindle with the glow of a responsive life, and what just now was a blank faultlessness of beauty became loveliness warmed by a human soul. Sophocles lived in the ancestral legends of Greece otherwise than Æschylus lived in them. Æschylus felt the grandeur and the terror of their broadest aspects, their interpretation of the strongest human impulses, their commentary on problems of destiny: Sophocles dwelt on their details with the intent, calm joy of artistic meditation; believing their divineness; finding in them a typical reconciliation of forces which in real life are never absolutely reconciled—a concord such as the musical instinct of his nature assured him must be the ultimate law; recognizing in them, too, scope for the free exercise of imagination in moral analysis, without breaking the bounds of reverence; for, while these legends express the conflict between necessity and free-will, they leave shadowy all that conflict within the man himself which may precede the determination of the will.

The heroic persons of the Sophoclean drama are at once human and ideal. They are made human by the distinct and continuous portrayal of their chief feelings, impulses, and motives. Their ideality is preserved chiefly in two ways. First, the poet avoids too minute a moral analysis; and so each character, while its main tendencies are exhibited, still remains generic, a type rather than a portrait. Secondly—and this is of higher moment—the persons of the drama are ever under the directly manifested,