Page:Tragedies of Sophocles (Plumptre 1878).djvu/82

lxxx and to prove untrue to his high calling as a poet But here, too, it is characteristic of the spirit in which he wrote that he puts these vehement protests into the mouths of those who are chief actors in his dramas, and in whom they answer to transient, often to merely momentary phases of thought, not into the odes of the Chorus which represent the higher teaching of the ideal spectator, reading the world's lesson rightly, and pointing to an order which fulfils itself in the midst of all seeming disorder and confusion. Hyllos may call on men "not to forgive the Gods, seeing the mischief that they do;" Philoctetes may complain that, "honouring the Gods, he finds the Gods as base;" but the Choral Odes still assert the temper of reverence, the spirit which submits and waits, and controls impatience, and represses wrath, as the great duty of all men.

The thought of a Divine discipline, ordering men's lives aright, is brought out yet more clearly in the way in which the dramas of Sophocles deal with another great element of tragedy, the mystery of suffering, apparently undeserved by him on whom it falls, of an evil destiny transmitted from generation to generation, of crimes into which the criminal falls unconsciously, but which, in spite of that