drawn; and the struggles between interest and duty—or rather between what seem to him two conflicting duties—are interesting, if not highly tragic. But the play has one prominent feature which mars the whole effect to our English taste, No man can be a hero, to our notions, whose sufferings are wholly physical; and far less one who demands our sympathies for such sufferings by physical expressions of pain. Upon a Greek audience, no doubt, the effect was different. The enjoyment of life was very keen among the Athenians: they also felt bodily pain more keenly, with their sensitive organisations, than we do, and they certainly expressed their feelings with far less reticence. For them, the diseased foot, and the cries of agony to which it gives occasion, had possibly a real tragic interest. To us it is not so. All the ingenuity and ability of critics fails to make such a subject anything but distasteful to an ordinary English mind. We almost forgive the Greeks for leaving Philoctetes behind, if he was always shrieking and bemoaning himself after the fashion assigned to him in the play. It is one of the hardest things connected with continued bodily suffering, when it finds vent in audible groans and complaints, that instead of rousing the sympathies of those in attendance on the sufferer, it is too apt to dull and weary them. Cries and complaints may be unavoidable, but to our notions they are always undignified and unmanly. Our cold and stern temper demands that pain be borne in silence—ignored altogether, so far as possible. Its audible expressions belong with us to comedy, not to tragedy. Even in
