νευροσπαδὴς ἄτρακτος, αὐτὸς ἂν τάλας
εἰλυόμην δύστηνος ἐξέλκων πόδα
πρὸς τοῦτ’ ἄν.
The dull repetition of πρὸς τοῦτο and of ἄν; the extremely slow movement of the penultimate line with its three spondees and the word-ending at the close of the second foot; above all, the manner in which the whole dragging sentence leads up to the monosyllable ἄν, so rare at the end of a sentence, and there stops dead, is a marvellous suggestion of the lame man’s painful progress and of the way in which at the end of his endurance he falls prone and spent upon the object of his endeavour.
Specially striking phrases are not common. Sophocles obtains his effect not by brilliant strokes of diction, but by the cumulative effect of a sustained manner. There are such dexterities of course, like Antigone’s πόθος τοι καὶ κακῶν ἄρ’ ἦν τις,[405] and the cry of Electra to her brother’s ashes:—[406]
τοίγαρ σὺ δέξαι μ’ ἐς τὸ σὸν τόδε στέγος
τὴν μηδὲν εἰς τὸ μηδέν.
A poet who can, by that infinitesimal change from τὸν μηδέν to τὸ μηδέν, indicate the very soul of grief, may claim to be one of the immortal masters of language.
Modern readers find one great fault in this poet—colourlessness, coldness, an absence of hearty verve; he seems a little too polished and restrained. The truth is that in Sophocles the Attic spirit finds its literary culmination. Æschylus lives in the pre-Periclean world; Euripides is too restless and cosmopolitan to reflect the spirit of one nation only; Plato and Demosthenes belong to the age of disillusionment which came after Ægospotami; and Thucydides, though he shows many Attic qualities, is without limpidity. Anyone, then, who would understand the Athenian genius as embodied in letters must read Sophocles. He will find the most useful commentary in the Parthenon and its friezes, and in the remains of Greek statuary. One of the most marvellous and precious experiences in life is to gaze upon works like the so-called Fates in the British Museum, the Venus of Melos, or the Ludovisi Hera. Many a casual visitor has glanced for the first time at these works and known strong disappointment. A mere piece of marble accurately worked into a female face or figure; majestic to be sure—but is this all? If he will look again he at last perceives that the stone has put on, not merely humanity, but immortality. An invisible glow radiates from it like the odour from a flower. We have never found any name for it but Beauty. It is indeed the quintessence of loveliness, delicate as gossamer yet indestructible as granite. So with the tragedies of Sophocles: it is possible to read the Œdipus Tyrannus in certain moods and find it mere frigid elegance. But, as with the beauties of Nature, so with the glories of art, it is the second glance, the lingering of the eye beyond the careless moment, that surprises something of the ultimate secret.
For reticence is one of the notes of Athenian art. No writer ever effected so much with so scanty materials as Sophocles; he carries the art of masterly omission to its extreme. Shakespeare attempts to express everything; the mere exuberance of his phraseology is as wonderful as anything else in his work. But even King Lear or Hamlet, being written by a man, share the weakness of humanity and leave the foundation of life undisclosed. Such a disability may daunt the scientist; it is the salvation of the artist; for the effect of all art rests on co-operation between the maker and the spectator of the work. In literature, then, the author knows that he must omit, and the reader or hearer must supply for himself the contributions of his own heart and experience. How much then is he to omit? On the varying answers to that question rest the different forms of literature and the divergent schools of each form. Sophocles has left more to his hearer than any other writer in the world. Another note of Athenian art is simplicity. It is not crudeness, nor naïveté, nor baldness of style. In a thousand passages of Sophocles, Thucydides, and Plato, the line between savourless banality and the words they have written is fine indeed, but that little means a whole world of art. Many a fine author—Marlowe is a conspicuous example—writes nobly because he writes violently, or with a conscious effort to soar. But let him once trip, and he sprawls in bombast or nerveless garrulity. Simplicity without baldness is the most difficult of all literary excellences, and is yet achieved everywhere by Sophocles except when he rises to a different level, of which we shall speak later.