Yet these objects of reverence were sufficiently removed in time to give scope for a free handling of the fables concerning them; a freedom used more deliberately by Sophocles than by Shakespeare.
Let it be imagined for a moment that in the sixteenth century the Warwicks and Talbots, the Cliffords and the Suffolks, of English history, had been universally believed to be of divine origin; that their real presence had been then supposed to affect the fortunes of the parishes in which their bones were laid, and to influence affairs of state;—that whole counties had claimed to be related to them by blood. And let it be further imagined that the merest outline of their life-history was generally known, so that the poet was as free to mould their destinies as those of Posthumus, Imogen, or Prospero. Then we may have some hint of the difference in regard to opportunities for affecting popular feeling, between Greek tragedy and the Elizabethan drama.
But it is not less true that, while the modern dramatist has even an embarrassing range of choice, in the traditions of all nations, in classical poetry and in popular fiction, the Greek tragedian was bound within the sphere of national heroic legend. And the fables which this contained, however numerous and varied in detail, tended to ring the changes on a few striking incidents which had been impressed on the rude fancy of a primitive time. The avenger of blood, the outcast homicide, the fulfilment of the curse, the return of the exile, the recognition of the stranger, the protection of the suppliant, the purification of the polluted, the horrors of incest and parricide, are topics which continually recur. These ancient and often grotesque conceptions the poet had to make the vehicle of his art in holding up his ideal mirror to a more refined and reflective age. It would be a flagrant misconception to credit him with the invention of his fable. The story of Œdipus, for example, could never have been invented by Sophocles. What he has done is to make the weird tale a
