broken exclamations of sorrow and dismay. "What," they ask, "has prompted such an outrage? Why has he thus doomed himself to blindness"—
"As in the land of darkness, yet in light,
To live a life half-dead, a living death"?[1]
No man's hand has smitten him, replies Œdipus, save his own; but he has been fast bound to the wheels of a cruel necessity, and it is Apollo who has prompted such grim handiwork. Corneille gives the spirit of his justification;—
"Aux crimes malgrè moi l'ordre du ciel m'attache,
Pour m'y faire tomber a moi-même il me cache;
Il offre, en m'aveuglant sur ce qu'il a prédit,
Mon père à mon épée et ma mère à mon lit.
Hélas! qu'il est bien vrai qu'en vain on s'imagine
Derober notre vie à ce qu'il nous destine!"
Then he breaks out into passionate self-reproach, as he recalls with remorseful tenderness those old familiar scenes of his youth—
"All fair outside, all rotten at the core;"
the woodlands of Cithæron, the court of Polybus, and that "narrow pass where three ways met." No guilt or misery, he declares, can be like his. Let them then drive him forth from the city of his fathers, and let them hide him for ever from the sight of men, and from the light of day.
Creon now enters, and, with a nobility alien to his
- ↑ Samson Agon., 1. 99.
