temporaries,[1] has, perhaps, its nearest parallel in the later years of the life of Goethe.[2] In many respects, indeed, it is far nobler and more admirable. The Greek had risen to the highest truth within his reach, and had heartily embraced it. The German had been brought into contact with a higher truth, and had set himself in antagonism against it. The art of the one was made instrumental in asserting a Divine order, and teaching men to revere it. In that of the other all experiences of life were made subservient to Art for its own sake, and the crowning lesson, after all phases of character, passion, cynicism, philosophy, impurity, is simply that of a supreme Epicurean selfishness.
So the life ended. It remained for those who had known him, and survived, to show how they regarded
- ↑ "Loved every way by all men."—Vit. Anon. So he was emphatically ὁ τραγικὸς, as Homer was ὁ ποιητής.
- ↑ It is interesting, with this parallelism in our minds, to examine the judgment which the one poet passed upon the other, "Sophocles, when he wrote his pieces, by no means started from an idea. On the contrary, he seized upon some ancient, ready-made popular tradition, in which a good idea existed, and then only thought of adapting it, in the best and most effective manner, for the theatre. . . . . His characters all possess the gift of eloquence, and know how to explain the motives for their actions so cunningly, that the hearer is almost always on the side of the last speaker. One can see that, in his youth, he enjoyed an excellent rhetorical education, by which he became trained to look for all the reasons and seeming reasons of things If there be a moral in a subject it will appear, and the poet has nothing to consider but the effective and artistic treatment of his subject. If a poet has as high a soul as Sophocles, his influence will always be moral, let him do what he will. Besides, he knew the stage, and understood his craft thoroughly."—Eckermann's Conversations of Goethe, i. pp. 369, 372, 382.
