is to him but another word for the unknown incalculable . element of "our little life." Yet amidst the darkness which surrounds the human lot, Sophocles is possessed by the conviction that obedience to the "eternal laws" of equity, piety, and mercy contains the assurance of blessedness, and that no lasting harm can happen to the noble soul that holds fast its integrity.
The ethical worth of Sophocles is well summed up in Mr. Matthew Arnold's description of him as the man "who saw life steadily and saw it whole." He is not, like Æschylus, a prophet possessed with visions of high truths, which he sets forth in acted parables adapted to an almost childlike imagination, but a poet expressing to an audience of considerate men what he and they alike recognise as truths that
"in manhood darkly join,
Deep-seated in our mystic frame."
He accepts with unqualified reverence the traditionary religious basis as handed down to him. The sovereignty of Zeus, the omniscience of Apollo, the continuance of life in Hades, the blessedness of the initiated; and again, the dreadful power of Fate and of the doom that has once gone forth,—all these are objects of his sincere belief and reverence, and enter as living elements into the fabric of his art, for they were constituent elements of the life that he knew. But that which dominates all else, the vital force which gives character and harmony to his work, is his intense interest in human life as such; his contemplation and portrayal of man as man.
1. In the Periclean age, reflecting persons for the first time formed a clear conception of Human Nature. It is his firm grasp of this idea from the intellectual side that above all else gives permanent value to the work of Thucydides. The same thought is not less clearly apprehended by Sophocles in the form of feeling, although in his mind it is never dissociated from the recognition of powers above humanity, of "a divinity that shapes our ends." Less speculative than Æschylus,
