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As we said at the beginning, therefore, the differences in the imitation of these arts come under three heads, their means, their objects, and their manner. So that as an imitator Sophocles will be on one side akin to Homer, both portraying good men; and on another to Aristophanes, since both present their personages as acting and doing.
On the other hand, most of the mature men who have been wise enough to do the latter, have shown themselves incapable of focusing their minds steadily upon a single point of experience. Wholeness and steadiness of vision few are the men who, like Sophocles, have possessed them both. The same author, therefore, has almost never been able to write great short-stories and great novels.
A few letters of the alphabet were sprinkled round the dome. Closely stood together in a ring round the dome were Plato, Aristotle, Sophocles, and Shakespeare; the literature of Rome, Greece, China, India, Persia. One leaf of poetry was pressed flat against another leaf, one burnished letter laid smooth against another in a density of meaning, a conglomeration of loveliness.
The fateful lives of OEdipus, for example, and of his family, of Agamemnon, and of his unhappy offspring these were shown in action in the orchestra of the theater of Dionysus again and again, by Æschylus, by Sophocles, by Euripides, and by many another poet-playwright of that splendid epoch whose works have not descended to us.
His whole life was spent at Harvard College, with the exception of a few short expeditions to Europe; and his influence there steadily increased until it became a power that was universally recognized. He was a short, thick-set man, like Sophocles, but as different as possible in general aspect.
The mountains and hills rose all around us, Lykabettos, Kolonos the home of Sophocles Hymettos, and Pentelikon with its marble quarries, made an undulating line of gray against the horizon, while away at the left was the Hill of Mars. How still it was! How wonderful! The rows of lights from the city converged towards the foot of the Acropolis like the topaz rays in a queen's diadem.
And over all the teaching hangs the menace of the impending examination, the riddling Sphinx which, as Seeley said in a telling quotation from Sophocles, forces us to attend to what is at our feet, neglecting all else all the imponderables in which the true value of education consists.
In Greece, after Eschylus and his stupendous deities, came Sophocles, who restrained them with a calm wisdom, and Euripides, who made them human, but still the mysterious Orphic deities remain and stir us when reading the earlier page. Mr. O'Grady would not have the Red Branch cycle cast in dramatic form or given to the people.
"I also was a fool," said Sophocles, who was weeping from his one eye and trembling all over, "for if I had stayed upon land I would not have been drowned." "Since you both acknowledge it," sighed Socrates, "I will confess that I also am a fool, and have always been one; but I looked so wise the people insisted I must know everything!" "Yes, yes," Sophocles groaned, "the people have murdered us!"
His words have often occurred to my mind since, and they seem as good to me now as at the time when he uttered them. For certainly old age has a great sense of calm and freedom; when the passions relax their hold, then, as Sophocles says, we are freed from the grasp not of one mad master only, but of many.
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