the doctrine of which is repeated in 241-2 of the same play, and in other passages in his dramas, notably in Choephoroe, 950-955, and in Eumenides, 495, συμφερει σωφρονειν ὑπο στενει. The fact that suffering and calamity have resulted in blessing is emphasized as strongly in the concluding drama of the Orestean Trilogy, the Eumenides, as it is in the Œdipus Coloneus. Again, when Professor Butcher says that "in Sophocles the divine righteousness asserts itself not in the award of happiness or misery to the individual, but in the providential wisdom which assigns to each individual his place and function in a universal moral order," he says what it is very difficult to understand. Surely in the case of each one of the protagonists in Sophocles, to employ the word in its non-technical sense, their deserts are very exactly meted out. Antigone deliberately courts her fate by setting the law at defiance, though she knew what the penalty was, and falls, but has her compensation in the applause of her own conscience and "in the faith that looks through death." Ajax paid the penalty, as the poet emphasizes, for brutality and impious insolence; Œdipus suffers for his impetuosity and intemperance, but, his punishment exceeding the offence, the balance is adjusted for him in final triumph over the sons who had wronged him, in procuring blessings for his protector, in the peace of the soul, and in a glorious death. Clytemnestra and Ægisthus well deserve their fate, as, in addition to committing their crime, they continue ostentatiously to glory in it. In the Trachiniæ Hercules is punished for a base and cowardly murder, followed by an act of cruel and indiscriminate vengeance, retribution coming on him through the sister of the man thus murdered, and the daughter of the prince on whom this iniquitous vengeance had been wreaked, as Deianeira, but for Iole, would not have sent the poisoned tunic. Sophocles has even altered the legend to emphasize the guilt of Hercules. The Philoctetes, indeed, is the only play which lends any support to Professor Butcher's statement. Here the gods undoubtedly condemn a man to a life of torture that their designs, irrespective of the individual, may be fulfilled, and that Troy may not fall before the appointed time; but how fully, how nobly is he compensated! It seems to us that the award of happiness and misery to the individual, in accordance with desert, is as conspicuous in the ethics of Sophocles as it is in the ethics of Shakespeare. And it is the more conspicuous, when we remember the hampering conditions under which Sophocles had to work, the limitations conventionally imposed on the treatment of the legends.
We wish we had space to comment on Professor Butcher's admirable, though somewhat defective, chapter on the dawn of Romanticism in Greek poetry, but we must forbear, and repeat our thanks to him for a book full of interest and instruction, not the least of its charms being the lively and graceful style in which it is written.
FOOTNOTES:
[35] This blow has, since these words were written, been inflicted. See supra pp. 45-75.
[36] So he says, Poet., xxvi., of epic and tragedy, that each ought not to produce any chance pleasure, but the pleasure proper to it (δει γαρ ου την τυχουσαν ἡδονην ποιειν αυτας αλλα την ειρημενην, i.e. οικειαν).
THE PRINCIPLES OF CRITICISM [37]
[37] The Principles of Criticism. An Introduction to the Study of Literature. By W. Basil Worsfold. London: Allen.
Bishop Warburton said that there were two things which every man thought himself competent to do, to manage a small farm and to drive a whisky. Had Warburton lived in our time, he would probably have added a third—to set up for a critic. What the author of the best critical treatise in the Greek language pronounced to be the final fruit of long experience, culture, and study, directed and illumined by certain natural qualifications, has now come to be represented by the idle and irresponsible gossip of any one who can gossip agreeably. Agreeable gossip and good criticism are, as Sainte-Beuve and others have shown, far from being incompatible, the misfortune is that they should be confounded; but confounded they are, and the confusion is the curse of current literature. We have recently observed, with concern, that the rubbish which used formerly to be shot into novels and poems is now being shot into criticism, and that there appears to be a growing impression that the accomplishments which qualify young men for spinning cobwebs in fiction and manufacturing versicles can, with a little management, serve to set them up as critics. There is not much more difficulty in forming an opinion about a book than there is in reading it, and as criticism in the hands of these fribbles becomes little more than the dithyrambic expression of that opinion, the profession of criticism is one in which it is delightfully easy to graduate. It requires neither learning nor knowledge, neither culture nor discipline. It is neither science nor art; it is the gift of nature, a sort of "lyric inspiration." With principles, with touchstones, with standards, it has nothing whatever to do. Its business is to declaim, to coin phrases, to juggle with fancies and to say "good things."