CHAPTER IV.
ANTECEDENTS: ETHICAL—THE AGE OF TRAGEDY.
Jonson's often-quoted eulogy on Shakespeare, "He was not of an age, but for all time," is in one sense true of all great tragedy, which is assured of permanence, because it springs from universal human nature. But tragedy is also the birth of a particular time. It is a plant that seldom flowers, and requires the concurrence of many causes for its full development. Many races have had the rudiments of the drama, and in several these have reached a certain maturity. But the great tragedies of the world are very few, and the nations which have produced them have done so only at one stage of their career.
I. Before describing the ethical antecedents of the work of Sophocles, it may be permissible here to interpose a few general remarks upon a point which is liable to misconception—the aim of tragedy.
1. The primary aim of tragedy is to excite universal sympathy for an ideal sorrow, and to give expression and relief to human emotion. In a great community there is a mass of grief and care which in the common daylight of the market-place and the assembly is conveniently ignored. Thus each heart is left to a knowledge of its own bitterness, and pines in isolation. But when men are drawn together to a spectacle of imagined woe, placed vividly before the faithful witness of the eye, the fountain of tears within them is unlocked, and society
