the accomplishment of its purpose, but it uses them for the ends of Justice. "The real instruments," says M. Girardin, " by which Fate works, are men's unbridled passions; it strikes down the murderer by the murderer, and punishes the crime by the crime. But Justice appears beyond and above these furious impulses, and directs them, in spite of themselves, to that mysterious goal towards which it tends."[1] To the audience, who knew the story well, no suspense could have been so agonising as to watch the misguided king rushing headlong to his doom—to see him weaving himself the fatal chain of evidence which was to convict him of murder and incest,—and this without their being able to raise a voice to warn, or to stretch out a hand to save. And mingled with this feeling was that indefinable sympathetic fear—always strongly excited by the sight of sufferings to which we may be ourselves exposed—the dread which haunted each man among the audience lest he might himself some day prove an Œdipus. No one would have disclaimed the idea of his committing such monstrous sins with a more fervent sincerity than the criminal in this tragedy. "Is thy servant a dog, that he should do these things?" he would have asked; and yet, influenced by some mysterious impulse, he had done them all. And, lastly, the spectators must have felt that natural but selfish pleasure of looking down, like the gods of Epicurus, from the vantage-ground of their tiers of seats, on the storm of conflicting passions, the love and the rage, the hatred and the despair, which convulsed the
- ↑ Cours de Lit. Dramat., i. 189.
