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should be the form in which it naturally moved and found its free play. In a Trilogy all the effects must be gigantic: characters in huge outline displaying the great primary passions and beliefs in a simple sequence; some great cardinal event in mythology or history, staged in a literary form built up of blocks and masses of poetry. The convention stood far aloof from reality and probability, and Aeschylus gloried in it. His improvements in scenic trappings and fittings were designed to enhance the splendour of the spectacle, to make the ocular appeal suit the verbal appeal of his magnificent diction. Sophocles developed this line of improvement with a different purpose: he felt that poverty of scenic furniture was a part of the difficulty with which he was to struggle-the alienation of tragedy from reality. We allow for the conventions of every art, but the art perishes if the conventions are felt to be ridiculous. The "This lantern doth the hornèd moon present" style of staging was one stumbling-block the more to the ordinary citizen (whose verdict he sought to gain, mind you: no writing for a succès d'estime), who could not make himself at home in the older Tragedy, could not raise and sustain the proper emotions to such a height of aloofness from reality and

probability. Therefore Sophocles welcomed the aid to illusion which he found in the newlydiscovered resource of perspective scene-painting; he accepted the Aeschylean embellishments in dress, &c., modifying them with a view to the life-like rather than the pictorially and plastically splendid. The difference between his and Euripides' handling of these means, is that Euripides makes straight for pure realism, Sophocles for so much realism as will reconcile > his public to the convention which required a tragedy to be a dignified tableau, without abandoning the convention. He reduced the pomp, then, and also the harsh and artificial elements in the workmanship of Aeschylus; but, thirdly, comes the most important of all, "he altered the style of diction."

This is the point of view from which we must make our fullest survey of Sophocles: he is essentially the artist in words.

I have alluded to the sophist influence. With the sophists begins the study of style as a craft, the study of grammar as a specified art. Rhetoric is the Greek for style. The first philologists are Gorgias and his contemporaries. Self-conscious use of language is visible in the solemn puns which surprise us in Pindar and Aeschylus. But the next generation begins to play with language

analytically. The delight in words for their own sake, their individual sonorousness, their balances and correspondences in formal composition, all the self-conscious craftsmanship in language, is developed by the early school of rhetorical sophists. The Athenians delighted in the full, rounded, leisurely manner of the early prose; as such style always charms till the secret of it is discovered, and "all can raise the flower now, for all have got the seed." The intellect apprehends the meaning long before the ear has done with the pleasure of taking in the elaborate volume of the phrase. You see it in Gorgias, in Thucydides' highly worked-up passages, rather more rudely in the Old Oligarch, and nauseously imitated in Atticist rhetoricians. It is language striking conscious poses, turning round to admire itself -like the Ovidian versification, nimium amator ingenii sui. Presently it caused a reaction towards the dry brevity of Lysias. Sophocles is much too fine an artist to be content with a style whose beauties can be formulated, laid down in a rule for reproduction when required. With him, as with Plato (and it is only true of the very greatest stylists), ars est celare artem.

It has been shown that the effects in the architecture of the Parthenon are partly derived from following a very subtle rule of thumb

instead of exact measurement, slight modifications of the mathematically exact. Herein lay

the difference between Attic architects and Roman imitators; herein Ruskin taught the difference between genuine Gothic and Sir Gilbert Scott. So in Sophocles it is comparatively rare to find a sentence formally balanced in exact antithetical style. His art is to be never posing, and yet never slipshod; never on parade, yet always keeping a natural ease of carriage. He differs from Aeschylus and from Euripides in his handling of iambic metre. And the divergence between his earliest and his latest work is notably small. It was many years before he realised the ideal of tragedy which he had set up within himself. Edipus up at Colonos is a work of his old age. But taking any ordinary base of calculation-incidence of caesura, position of long words in the line there is the closest similarity between Ajax and Edipus Coloneus, though written perhaps at some forty years' interval. The sweetness, smoothness, and ease are the same. But there are differences. In his earliest work he is not free from the Aeschylean tendency to make the individual line a unit in construction: which contributes to the alienation of the dramatic diction from the common spoken diction. Sophocles does not set up ranges of colossal

statues in word, but must always be adjusting the figure to its precise value in the group, and the group to its function in the edifice. From this splendid Aeschylean intemperance he gradually frees himself, cautiously and with extreme tact drawing the poetical style nearer the conversational, and so assisting in the illusion of reality. The most salient example is the use of elision at the end of the sixth foot, which carries the line into the next without pause (Edipus Rex, 29, and examples there cited). This was known as eidos Zopóκλειον.1 But without this metrical licence you can see in Edipus Coloneus, 495, 577, 737, 1311, the way in which he adapts his line to be spoken and not declaimed. To be classed with this is his change of vocabulary: in Ajax (partly because the Epic subject invited it) the diction is coloured with Epic words and phrases; in Edipus Rex it approximates closely to the vocabulary of Antiphon in prose. He makes no revolution like Euripides with the introduction

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1 "One source of feebleness in this passage, and it is one of frequent occurrence in all Lord Byron's plays, is his practice of ending his lines with insignificant monosyllables. Of, to, and, till, but, from, all concur in the course of a very few pages. more inharmonious system of versification, or one more necessarily tending to weight and feebleness, could hardly have been invented."--Heber (on Marino Faliero, Act v. sc. I). Doubtless there were episcopally minded critics who rebuked Sophocles in like terms !