Page:Sophocles (Classical Writers).djvu/34

28 reminded that the "Greek serenity" did not exclude the indulgence of this melancholy humour. But tragedy is neither the product nor the cause of moral languor, nor of the spirit that questions whether life be after all worth living. The pessimist definition of the art as one whose purpose is to detach the spectator from the will to live, however applicable to the Hercules Furens or to Hernani, bears no relation to the Prometheus or the Antigone. These works are the expressions of an age of hopeful energy, and have the effect of deepening the conviction that liberty, affection, truth, are realities that make life, indeed, "worth living." Tragedy did not spring up in Ionia, but in Attica. Its authors were not "great souls despising the affairs of little states," but children of a queenly city in whose destiny their own was merged. It was the fulness of the life surrounding them, the imminent birth of a transcendent future, the unfamiliar vision of an ampler world, that roused them to probe the mystery of human existence, which thus assumed new aspects, and to recast the wild imaginings of former ages. The dark tradition of an inevitable fate, of a curse pursuing many generations, of the caprice and envy of the gods, were received by them, but in no unquestioning spirit. Not that they state questions; for their business was not to make men think but feel. But while repeating ancient saws about fatality and envy, they do not leave them unmodified. And largely as these traditional notions enter into the works of Æschylus and Sophocles, inseparable as they were from the legends which they handled, they have not the chief emphasis: we are not made to feel that they had the first place in the poet's thoughts. In Æschylus they are met by another set of ideas, at once more original and more inspiring, such as the supremacy of Justice, and the evolution of Order out of Disorder.

1. In Herodotus, as we have seen, the belief in righteousness appears in the crude form of Nemesis, and of the certainty of retribution, especially when