tially concern him. His business is with their inward man; with their feelings
and behavior in certain tragic situations, which engage their passions as men;
these have in them nothing local and casual; they are as accessible to the
modern poet as to a contemporary. The date of an action, then, signifies nothing: the action itself, its selection
and construction, this is what is all-important. This the Greeks understood far
more clearly than we do. The radical difference between their poetical theory
and ours consists, as it appears to me, in this: that, with them, the poetical
character of the action in itself, and the conduct of it, was the first consider
ation; with us, attention is fixed mainly on the value of the separate thoughts
and images which occur in the treatment of an action. They regarded the
whole; we regard the parts. With them, the action predominated over the
expression of it; with us, the expression predominates over the action. Not that
they failed in expression, or were inattentive to it; on the contrary, they are
the highest models of expression, the unapproached masters of the grand style:
but their expression is so excellent because it is so admirably kept in its right
degree of prominence; because it is so simple and so well subordinated;
because it draws its force directly from the pregnancy of the matter which it
conveys. For what reason was the Greek tragic poet confined to so limited a
range of subjects? Because there are so few actions which unite in themselves,
in the highest degree, the conditions of excellence: and it was not thought that
2. Perhaps alluding to poems such as Tennyson's William Wordsworth (1814), respectively. The Princess (1847) and Alexander Smith's Life 4. See Virgil's Aeneid, book 4. Oresteia: a trilogy Drama (1853) or to the modern novel. of plays by Aeschylus that tells the story of Aga3. Long poems hv Goethe (1797), Rvron (1818), memnon's murder by his wife, Clytemnestra, and Alphonse-Marie-Louis de Lamartine (1836), and the vengeance taken by their son, Orestes.
.
137 8 / MATTHEW ARNOLD
on any but an excellent subject could an excellent poem be constructed. A few
actions, therefore, eminently adapted for tragedy, maintained almost exclusive
possession of the Greek tragic stage; their significance appeared inexhaustible;
they were as permanent problems, perpetually offered to the genius of every
fresh poet. This too is the reason of what appears to us moderns a certain
baldness of expression in Greek tragedy; of the triviality with which we often
reproach the remarks of the chorus, where it takes part in the dialogue: that
the action itself, the situation of Orestes, or Merope, or Alcmaeon,5 was to
stand the central point of interest, unforgotten, absorbing, principal; that no
accessories were for a moment to distract the spectator's attention from this;
that the tone of the parts was to be perpetually kept down, in order not to
impair the grandiose effect of the whole. The terrible6 old mythic story on
which the drama was founded stood, before he entered the theater, traced in
its bare outlines upon the spectator's mind; it stood in his memory, as a group
of statuary, faintly seen, at the end of a long and dark vista: then came the
poet, embodying outlines, developing situations, not a word wasted, not a
sentiment capriciously thrown in: stroke upon stroke, the drama proceeded:
the light deepened upon the group; more and more it revealed itself to the
riveted gaze of the spectator: until at last, when the final words were spoken,
it stood before him in broad sunlight, a model of immortal beauty. This was what a Greek critic demanded; this was what a Greek poet endeav
ored to effect. It signified nothing to what time an action belonged; we do not
find that the Persae occupied a particularly high rank among the dramas of
Aeschylus, because it represented a matter of contemporary interest:7 this was
not what a cultivated Athenian required, he required that the permanent ele
