involved so great a hero in so dreadful a calamity. The following scenes down to the death of Ajax, might appear to have been intended merely to enforce this impression, by representing the language and the effects of his despair when restored to the consciousness of his real situation. The concluding part, that which follows the main catastrophe, would according to this view have been introduced with as little necessity as the part corresponding to it in the play last examined, though it might be allowed possible to find some excuse for the addition in national opinions and feelings foreign to our own. If however this were the correct view of the tragedy, it would certainly deserve to be considered as the most faulty in its composition of all the remaining works of Sophocles. The fault would lie not merely in the want of unity between the two portions, which would be only accidentally connected with one another and would have no interest in common, but also in the dramatic anticlimax, in the gradual abatement of the terror and pity which the opening of the play so powerfully inspires. For Ajax has no sooner recovered his senses than the thought of death occurs to him as absolutely necessary. But he contemplates it, not as an evil, but as a certain remedy and refuge. He finds consolation in the consciousness of his unalterable resolution not to survive his shame, and in the conviction that no human power can prevent the execution of his purpose. The nearer his end approaches the more collected and tranquil he becomes: so that we are led to view him in a new light, and forget the awful lesson inculcated by the goddess in the opening scene.
It would perhaps be presumptuous to assert that the taste of Sophocles was too pure, to admit an episode at the end of a play such as that of Johannes Parricida which disfigures Schiller's Wilhelm Tell. But on the other hand we ought not to impute such a defect to any of his compositions, without carefully examining whether the parts which seem to hang loosely together, may not be more intimately united under the surface. On the other point we may venture to speak more confidently, and to maintain that Sophocles could never have meant to concentrate the whole moral effect of a tragedy in the first scene, so that it should be gradually softened and weakened as the action proceeded, and that a construction of
