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Updated: May 19, 2025
But the whole of the tragedies of Sophocles are separately resplendent with peculiar excellencies. I will not undertake to weigh the respective merits of these pieces against each other: but I own I entertain a singular predilection for the last of them, because it appears to me the most expressive of the personal feelings of the poet himself.
"Euripides," says Aspasia, "has not the fine manners of Sophocles; but," she adds good-humoredly, "the movers and masters of our souls have surely a right to throw out their limbs as carelessly as they please on the world that belongs to them, and before the creatures they have animated." Manners require time, as nothing is more vulgar than haste.
Such a notion, that has obtained an unaccountable belief, I shall hereafter show to be at variance with all the poetry of the Greeks with their drama itself with their modes of life and with the very elements of that human nature, which is everywhere the same. But Sophocles, in the character of Antigone, personifies duty, not passion.
Yet Mr. Matthew Arnold, a living English poet, writes that Sophocles 'saw life steadily and saw it whole. This is true of no man, not of Shakespeare nor of Goethe, much less of Sophocles or Racine. The phrase itself is as offensively out of date as the First Commandment."
Whoever aspired to become a leader in politics, in art, in literature, or in philosophy, made his way to the capital, and so, with almost bewildering suddenness, there blossomed the civilization of the age of Pericles; the civilization which produced aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, Herodotus, and Thucydides; the civilization which made possible the building of the Parthenon.
ADAM SMITH confessed his satisfaction at this pleasure to Professor Dugald Stewart, while "he was reperusing, with the enthusiasm of a student, the tragic poets of ancient Greece, and Sophocles and Euripides lay open on his table." Dans ses veines toujours un jeune sang bouillone, Et Sophocle
It would be of no avail, I submit, to point out to Sophocles, as Spencer pointed out to Kant, that a knowledge of the early condition of man would have made short work of these sublimities, that the cosmical man was before the ethical man, in whom we discover very little evidence of these majestic laws of such universal and undeniable validity.
He has made excellent translations of Sophocles, Euripides, and of "Daphne and Chloe," that idyl of Longus that charmed both Goethe and Catherine II. He chooses the characters of his new poems from Greek and Latin mythology, and from themes inspired by an ardent love of paganism.
It was inconceivable, he said, that there could have been at the Homeric period five or six poets equal to the production of the Iliad and the Odyssey. Great poets appeared at long intervals. As he reckoned them, there had been but six given to the world Homer, Shakespeare, Dante, Milton, Sophocles and Æschylus. With the exception of the last two, there had been great spaces of time between these.
On the other hand, most of the mature men who have been wise enough to do the latter, have shown themselves incapable of focussing 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.
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