Ion and Irus, are a whit too good to be true, and a little too metrical, smooth, and polished, to be vigorously effective. We will not go so far as to assert with a recent writer (famous in the Anti-Church and State circuit, and not unknown on the "floor of The House") that ancient civilisation not only exhibits little benevolence, and wants tenderness, but also shows none of the healthier moral sensibilities—that "it is not humane—nor can it be pretended that the most intimate converse with it through the medium of its literature tends to elicit or to cultivate our more generous sympathies;"[1] but we may pretty safely ignore in the venerable Argive heathens the benevolence, tenderness, healthy moral sensibilities, humanities, and generous sympathies, which their histrionic doubles on the boards of Covent Garden displayed so winsomely. Evidently they have had the schoolmaster abroad and the missionary among them. They have been handsomely evangelised, and gone through the curriculum of a polite education. Ion especially is good and wise enough to deserve benefit of clergy, whatever parricidal or suicidal freak he may indulge in. He has plainly read the Bible and the Elizabethan dramatists, and moulds his manners and eloquence accordingly. But, after all, it goes against the grain to affect levity in speaking of one so finely and delicately wrought as this royal orphan of the temple, some of whose words so penetrate the soul. Witness his logic on the Immortality of man:
Cle. O unkind!
And shall we never see each other?
Ion (after a pause). Yes!
I have ask'd that dreadful question of the hills
That look eternal; of the flowing streams
That lucid flow for ever; of the stars,
Amid whose fields of azure my raised spirit
Hath trod in glory; all were dumb; but now
While I thus gaze upon thy living face,
I feel the love that kindles through its beauty
Can never wholly perish; we shall meet
Again, Clemanthe!
Witness, too, his description of love triumphing over death in the plague-blighted homes of Argos, and his appeal from Adrastus the ruthless tyrant to Adrastus the sportive child, and his compact with his old playmate Phocion, when the latter would ante-date the coming sacrifice. The framework of the tragedy is not, perhaps, very artfully constructed, nor the exigencies of stage effect carefully studied, nor the subordinate actors individualised in any memorable degree: but, on the whole, "Ion" is surely a fine play, and a moving—a thing of beauty, and therefore a joy for ever. Or if "for ever" will not stand as a logical sequent to such an æsthetic and Keatsian antecedent—if literary immortality be too infinite a conclusion to deduce from such a premise—let us at least give the will, which is penes nos, for the deed, which is not; and take up our parabolè, and say, in easternly devoutness, O Ion, live for ever! and may thy shadow never be less!
"The Athenian Captive" is thought by some, in the face of that stubborn thing, fact, to be a better acting play than "Ion." It is generally allowed to be inferior in poetry and style. Passages and lines there are,
- ↑ Bases of Belief. By Edward Miall, M.P. P. 41–2.
