Page:Tragedies of Sophocles (Plumptre 1878).djvu/77

Rh during nearly their whole extent, parallel with each other. The poet must have been familiar enough with the half grotesque form, the sharp irony, the playful gentleness, the deep and subtle questionings which we picture to ourselves as the centre of a group of loving and admiring disciples, indicating the natural enemy of all pretence, and baseness, and unreality. The thinker must have been oftentimes among the spectators in the Dionysiac Theatre, who listened with intent eagerness to the dramas of the poet. Can we form any estimate of their relation to each other? Were they working in the same direction, or was one counteracting and neutralising the influence of the other?

The inquiry is obviously one of some interest. The other great dramatist of the time was conspicuously the poet of the Sophists. It was the stock charge against him, that he familiarised men with subtle distinctions and perverted casuistry. The line,—

became the representative of all the lax morality by which the rising generation of statesmen were, or were supposed to be, affected. True, it might be urged, that what he did was but done as a dramatist; that, as such, he had the right of representing different forms of character; but it was felt, and felt naturally, that a poet who uses dramatic machinery as a vehicle