Page:The New Monthly Magazine - Volume 099.djvu/41

Rh be he singular, dual, or plurimal—and Orpheus, who brought Wisdom into Greece, and married her to immortal verse, and by his music subdued l'Inferno itself, "creating a soul under the ribs of death"—and Musæus, priest of the mysteries of Orpheus, and perhaps his son. Homer is amply discussed—large place being given to what Hartley Coleridge calls the Wolfish and Heinous point of view, and due stress laid on the good old conservative creed, which believes in the strict individuality of the bard. To divide, the stanchly orthodox feel, is to destroy:—" that fame which has so long resisted time, change, and mortal accident, would crumble into ruins—an immense blank would be left to the imagination, an aching void in the heart—the greatest light, save one, shining from the depth of time, would be extinguished, and a glory pass away from the earth." Homer, therefore, is assumed to be, not a class, but a man; not an abstract, impersonal Un-Self and Co., but our familiar childhood-honoured Homer's own Self; the man we came to know in connexion with Donnegan's obsolete lexicon, and Pope's sonorous verse; the well-known blind old man of Scio'a rocky isle—who was born in one of the seven states hexametrically immortalised,and not in all seven at once, not in seventy times seven, as the German theory would imply.—Hesiod is designated the most unequal of poets; sometimes daringly and ardently imaginative, at other times insufferably low, creeping, tame, and prosaic; in his didactic poetry, rising occasionally into a high and philosophical strain of thought, but commonly giving mere trite maxims of prudence, and the most common-place worldly cunning; without any of Homer's refined gallantry, and, indeed, something very like a misogynist and a croaker.—The three great tragic poets of Greece are ably portrayed, though without, perhaps, any very original criticism or subtle discrimination: the "intrepid and fiery" Æschylus, on whose soul mighty imaginations trooped so fast, that, in the heat of his inspiration, he stopped not to accurately define or clearly develop them—like his own Prometheus, stealing fire from heaven to inspire and vivify his characters—however mighty his theme, always bringing to it a kindred emotion, but never losing his stateliness in his passion, never denuding his terrors of an unearthly grandeur and awe. Sophocles: always perfect master of himself and his subject; conscious of the precise measure of his own capacities; maintaining, undisturbed, his majestic course, in calm and beautiful progression; in everything lucid and clear, never forgetting the harmony and proportion of the whole, in the variety and complexity of the parts—his philosophy musical as is Apollo's lute—his wisdom made visible in the form of beauty. Euripides: appealing less to the imagination than to the sensibilities and the understanding—loving to triumph by involving us in metaphysical subtleties, or by dissolving us in tears, and scarcely ever labouring to attain the great object of the other tragedians, a representation of serene beauty;—a mind more penetrating and refined than exalted; holding up to nature a mirror rather microscopic than ennobling; intent on depicting situations the most cheerless and externally desolate, so that "Electra appears tottering not only beneath the weight of affliction, but of a huge pitcher of water; and Menelaus mourns at once the mangled honour of his wife and the tattered