Page:Tragedies of Sophocles (Plumptre 1878).djvu/83

Rh entail a tremendous punishment. The curse that haunted and hovered over the houses of Pelops or of Labdacos, exercised on him, as for the two great tragedians who were his rivals, an almost irresistible fascination. The madness that fell upon Aias, the ten years' agony of Philoctetes, seemingly so far beyond all that they had deserved, were, for that very reason, fitter subjects for the poet's work than sufferings more accurately proportioned to demerits would have been. Tragedy requires for its subject-matter, not mere physical pain or violent catastrophe, but suffering in its awfulness and its mystery; not a Providence making its awards in this life visibly, and at once, on a scale of precise adjustment, to "point a moral, and adorn a tale," but One whose "path is in the great waters, and whose footsteps are not known," "visiting the sins of the fathers upon the children," and working, through strange and unexpected ways, towards its final issue. But what is to be noted in the poet's way of dealing with such elements in the mystery of man's life is, that he is always careful to bring into prominence the fact that the suffering is not merely the result of a transmitted curse, but is connected very closely with defects of