Page:Tragedies of Sophocles (Plumptre 1878).djvu/90

lxxxviii of his dramas would, however, be incomplete without some mention of it. The characteristic so described seems in him, and in other writers who possess it in different degrees, to spring from a keen sense of the incongruities of human nature, and the disappointments of human life. Men promise much, and perform little. They think they are marching onward to fame and greatness, when the ground is opening between their feet, and they are sinking into destruction. They boast of their strength when they are really displaying their weakness. Like Œdipus, they solve the riddle of the Sphinx, and are blind to the riddle of their own life. They imagine themselves to be asserting some high principle, when they are simply yielding to passionate impulse, and cloaking it with the garb of morality or religion. The good are not without a touch of baseness. The base are not without an element of good. Words spoken in condemnation of others come home afterwards to the man's own soul, with a strange and terrible retribution. There is something like a pitying tolerance for all men and all forms of character, together with the sense of the littleness that mixes itself with all, which reminds us (different as the two writers were in everything else) of that strange union of sympathy and