characters being exactly what they were, and makes us understand them. The one flaw, perhaps, is in Teiresias. That aged prophet comes to the king absolutely determined not to tell the secret which he has kept for sixteen years, and then tells it—why? From uncontrollable anger, because the king insults him. An aged prophet who does that is a disgrace to his profession; but Sophocles does not seem to feel it.
Sophocles is thus subject to a certain conventional idealism. He lacks the elemental fire of Æschylus, the speculative courage and subtle sympathy of Euripides. All else that can be said of him must be unmixed admiration. Plot, characters, atmosphere are all dignified and 'Homeric'; his analysis, as far as it goes, is wonderfully sure and true; his language is a marvel of subtle power; the music he gets from the iambic trimeter by his weak endings and varied pauses is incomparable;[1] his lyrics are uniformly skilful and fine, though they sometimes leave an impression of laboured workmanship; if they have not the irresistible songfulness of Æschylus and Euripides, they are safe from the rhodomontade of the one, and the inapposite garrulity of the other. And it is true that Sophocles shows at times one high power which but few of the world's poets share with him. He feels, as Wordsworth does, the majesty of order and well-being; sees the greatness of God, as it were, in the untroubled things of life. Few hands but his could have shaped the great ode in the Antigone upon the Rise of Man, or the description in the Ajax of the 'Give and Take' in nature. And even in the
- ↑ W. M. Heracles, i. p. 21. It is Ionic style: weak endings, elisions at the end of the verse (like Achaios of Eretria), ἡμὶν for ἡμῖν, shortening of a long vowel or diphthong before another vowel.
