Page:The Theatre of the Greeks, a Treatise on the History and Exhibition of the Greek Drama, with Various Supplements.djvu/138

 120 SOPHOCLES. productions so entirely and absolutely Greek as the Tragedies of Sophocles. If we would understand them at all, we must always bear in mind that he was the successor of ^schylus ; that he in- tended rather to follow up and improve upon his predecessor and contemporary, than to create an entirely new species for himself. Art always follows at the heels of genius. Genius creates forms of beauty; art marshals them, and sets them in order, forming them into groups and regulating the order of their successive appearances. Genius hews rude masses from the mines of thought, but art gives form and usefulness to the shapeless ore. JEschylus felt what a Greek Tragedy ought to be, as a religious union of the two ele- ments of the national poetry; and he modelled bold, colossal groups, such as a Phidias might have conceived, but not such as a Phidias would have executed. Sophocles, with a highly cultivated mind, and a deep and just perception of what is beautiful in art, was en- abled to effect an outward realization of his great contemporary's conceptions ; and what was already perfected in the mind of ^schy- lus, this he exhibited, in its most perfect form, before the eyes of all Athens. The Tragedy of Sophocles was not generically dif- ferent from that of ^schylus ; it bore the same relation to its fore- runner that a finished statue bears to an unfinished group. For when Sophocles added a third actor to the two of ^schylus^ he gave so great a preponderance to the dialogue, that the chorus, or the base on which the three plays stood, was unable any longer to support them ; in assigning to each of them a separate pedestal, he rendered them independent, and destroyed the necessary connexion which had previously bound them together ; so that it became from thenceforth a matter of choice with the poet, whether he repre- sented with Trilogies or with separate plays. As we have before said, we think Sophocles did both : the number of his satyrical dramas shows that his exhibitions were principally Tetralogies, and we are willing to accept the statement in Suidas, that he sometimes brought out his Tragedies one by one. What ^schylus, following liis natural taste, practised in the internal economy of his pieces, for instance, in the exclusion of every thing beneath the dignity of Tragedy, this Sophocles adopted as a rule of art, to be applied or departed from as the occasion might suggest. The words which 1 Tpeis d^ [viroKpiras] Kal aKrjpoypacpiav I,0(I)0k]s. Arist, Poet. IV, i6. Tbv 5^ TplTOv [i'TTOKpiTriv'] 1,o(pOKT]S, Kal avvtnXrjpMaev rrjv Tpayipdlau. Diog. Lacrt. in Plat.