Page:Tragedies of Sophocles (Plumptre 1878).djvu/42

xl and the intellect and will of man on the other, would end, as it seemed likely to end, in crushing and subjugating the latter, or in some far off atonement and reconciliation of the two,—all this, and much more than this, was brought before the thousands who heard his trilogies, and among others before the mind of Sophocles.

It would be absurd to suppose that he remained unaffected by a force acting so powerfully and so directly. The statement of the old biographer that he learnt tragedy from Æschylos may be true in this sense, that in the dramas of Æschylos, as they were performed year by year, he found a discipline for his own mind. That the one dramatist was in any more formal way the instructor of the other, we have no reason to believe. But the study was not that of a mere imitator. A mind in which the perception of beauty and harmony had been developed to its highest power, was not likely to be satisfied, however much it might admire it, with the Titanic strength of Æschylos. What a later age embodied in the form of the mythus that Æschylos learnt in no musician's school, but that Dionysos himself had appeared to