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of heroism to which he has adapted his Iphigénie.' Let me add a word on his underplot and on his alteration of the conclusion of the drama the praise or blame of each of which is entirely his own. It has been seen that there is no trace in Euripides of Racine's Eriphile, the unknown daughter of Helen, whose love for her captor Achille and rage at his coldness lead her to try to destroy her rival and perish in the attempt. Perhaps her vehement fervour may make her a dangerous rival in some minds to Racine's calm and lofty heroine; especially after her crimes have been expiated by her tragic fate. Certainly the fit of jealousy she causes Iphigénie in the second act helps to destroy that majestic lady's resemblance to the Greek maid who has as yet loved no man but her father. On the other hand, Eriphile's story is interesting in itself, and by making her evil devices recoil upon herself, Racine succeeds in rescuing Iphigénie without the intervention of a goddess, and in dismiss ing her and Achille to marriage and happiness. I remember that I once thought this conclusion extremely beautiful and satisfactory. I was very young then. I cannot say that I am quite of the same opinion now. I have come to think that sorrowful line in the Lyra Apostolica '

"He 'bides with us who dies, he is but lost who lives "

especially true of the friends we make in the ideal world of poetry. Why does Racine deprive his amiable Iphigénie of the honour of dying for her country, to confer it on the spiteful Eriphile? Can we fancy Iphigénie's married life a very happy one? Can we so completely forget Homer as to avoid thinking of our heroine in after years as a second Blanch, torn between the disputes of her husband and her father? Even if so, Racine himself reminds us that his brave Achille is doomed to an early death.

In one of his hero's best speeches he refers to that prediction, which casts a softening shade over all his brilliant exploits in the 'Iliad.' What has Iphigénie then in store for her but years of anxious expectation, like Penelope's, closed by lamentations bitter as those of Andromache over her fallen husband? I confess that I prefer the conclusion of the 'Iphigenia in Aulis.' It seems to me to conform to a higher standard than Racine's does. By representing the goddess as delighting in obedience rather than in blood, it exhibits a broken ray of the traditions of a purer light, struggling amidst heathen darkness. It despatches Agamemnon and Achilles to Troy with hands unstained by virgin blood; but each having paid a heavy price for the honour of avenging his country. Above all, it spares Iphigenia from resigning the high praise of saving Greece to any meaner hand. Her offering is not rejected, but accepted in a higher sense. She is not dismissed, after all her conflicts and her selfdevotion, to the common lot of women. Instead, we leave her to breathe the pure, cold air of the loftier eminence which the gods have set apart for her-a pledge that they have not finally forsaken her house, terrible as are the evils which await ita beacon-light which may yet guide its remnant to safety.

If we prefer the version of Iphigenia's story in Euripides to Racine's, I think we must give a yet more decided preference to his representation of character. Racine's personages are mostly conventional; their individuality is very faintly marked. We look in vain to them for an exhibition of that gradual development of character beneath the pressure of the outer and the conflicts of the inner world, which it is the grand object of the drama to set before us. Now, compared with Racine's, the characters in the 'Iphigenia in Aulis

of Euripides are very life-like. (Of course we must own, if we contrast the Greek plays with Shakespeare's, that their personages, set beside his living men, are but statues rigid in their beauty.) their beauty.) Agamemnon and Menelaus are indeed natural, without being noble characters. They revile each other very like common men; though there is great beauty in the fraternal love which revives in Menelaus at the sight of a brother's ⚫ anguish. But the generous Achilles is portrayed with infinite spirit. His proud self-reliance and out ward roughness, joined (as they constantly are in real life) with the genuine kindness of innate delicacy of feeling, make him no mere conventional representation of a hero, but a real man, whom we can admire and love. -Clytemnestra is equally well drawn. Her affectionate pride in her daughter's approaching greatness, and her stirring self-importance on the solemn occasion of the first marriage amongst her children, will strike an answering chord in the breast of not a few English matrons now. Even to a wife modelled after Tennyson's Enid (or her great-grandmother Griseldis), Clytemnestra's wrath against her husband in this play must surely seem excusable. Schiller, indeed, blames her answer to her daughter's pathetic entreaty for her father's forgiveness: "Dire the course that he is doomed to run for thy sake." He says that, as the sympathies of the audience are to be throughout in favour of Clytemnestra, Euripides should have shrunk from reminding them of her after dreadful vengeance. Yet I much question whether a Greek audience, familiar with the Clytemnestra of Eschylus and Sophocles, could have ceased for a moment to see in her the future murderess of her husband; any more than we could witness a drama now, representing the innocent early life of Lady Macbeth, and overlook the coming bloodstain on her hands.-But the great

charm of the play is to be found in the character of Iphigenia herself. Its mixture of weakness and strength, of timidity and heroism, forms, as Schiller has well remarked, a charmingly natural picture. Those critics who expect heroes to be always heroic, and kings and queens never to take their crowns off, may account that a fault which is in truth its especial beauty. Her transition from her excessive dread of death to her complete conquest over its fear, is no violent change, but the rapid ripening of a pure and lofty mind beneath the tropical heat of an awful crisis. Nor even at the last is the woman wholly lost in the heroine. "He that dies in an earnest pursuit is like one that is wounded in hot blood, who, for the time, scarce feels the hurt; and therefore a mind fixed and bent upon somewhat that is good doth avert the dolours of death," says Bacon. So the thought of saving her country by her death, fills the young girl's mind, in the concluding scenes, wellnigh to the exclusion of every other. It strengthens her to dismiss the proffered arm on which she would have leant so gladly an hour before. It will hardly let her think of her absent sisters, and it enables her to uphold her fainting mother by a show of resolution greater than she feels. But when she has torn herself from her em brace, and again as she departs with the Chorus, the wailing note of the maiden's mournful farewell to life strikes the ear as an under-tone of unspeakable sadness amidst the heroine's high triumphal song. We have here, what always appears to me a triumph of dramatic skill, a noble character, rendered quite conceivable by the way in which it is presented to us. I feel constrained, therefore, to record my conviction that the distinguished critic, who some time ago informed the public that only two women, Alcestis the faithful wife, and Antigone the faithful daughter, enlist our sympathies in the whole circle

of the Greek drama, and that all the rest are either fools or furies, must have utterly forgotten Iphigenia.

If we wish to seek any further the reason of the unfailing charm of the Iphigenia in Aulis'- if we would ask why Racine's copy of it, in spite of the faults I have ventured to point out, interests us so deeply, the answer is very easy. There is nothing so interesting as self-devotion. Schiller showed that he felt this, by relieving the selfishness of his 'Wallenstein' by Thekla's generous sacrifice. There is a light thrown on the whole of his beautiful Maid of Orleans' by the prologue, in which Joan (in language which recalls Iphigenia's) accepts the lonely destiny allotted to her who is set apart to save her country. Nay, in an earlier tragedy, Schiller has been led astray by the desire of representing an act of self-sacrifice, and has committed the grievous mistake of introducing one for which his story supplies no adequate cause. In 'Don Carlos,' Schiller's young hero Posa throws away his life, vainly hoping to make a diversion in his friend's favour; while it cannot escape the most careless observer that he would have served him better by preserving it. Yet even in this play, who can read the scene in which Posa tells Carlos what he has dared to do for his sake, and remain unmoved? So, too, Calderon's finest tragedy, 'The Constant Prince,' owes its strong hold on our affections to an act of generous self-sacrifice. Its hero, the great Don Fernando, taken captive by the Moors, submits uncomplaining to the cruel lot of a slave, rather than say the single word needed to set him free. that single word would have surrendered the Christian city Ceuta to the followers of the false prophet, and silenced the praises of Christ in its churches. The scene of the prince's death is a beautiful picture of Christian resignation. He lies sinking under the effects of long ill-usage, deserted by all

For

men save by one faithful follower. Yet still "he gives thanks in everything;" and his last prayer for things on earth is for freedom not in life, but in death-that his rescued body may await the resurrection in some Christian church: "Que pues yo os he dado à vos, Tantas iglesias mi Dios, Alguna me habeis de dar." (Since to Thee, Lord of earth and heaven, So many churches I have given, Thou needs must give me one!) The complex nature of modern life has made it increasingly difficult for any single act of self-devotion to produce such wide effects as in ancient days. Christianity, too, has rendered such acts easier, more numerous, and therefore less conspicuous. The self-sacrifice of a Guyon of Marseilles (the physician who dissected the plague-smitten corpse in his lonely chamber, knowing that he could not survive the deed, trusting that through his own death he might win life for others) is nobler than the self-sacrifice of Iphigenia, but not, like it, susceptible of dramatic treatment. The same may be said of deeds like that of the good miner, who leapt from the bucket which was to have raised himself and his young companion out of the way of an explosion, when he found the strength above ground insufficient to lift them both. Preserved as by a miracle, and asked the reason which had prompted him, he answered that he humbly trusted he was himself prepared to die, and that he feared his fellow-workman was not. The heroism which has in spired actions like these in our own times, is purer than that of the most vaunted self-sacrifices of antiquity. For these acts were not done, seeking for human praise; they were done for those of whose welfare ancient Greece and Rome took but small account. But a deed must be not only great in itself, but great in its attendant circumstances and visible consequences, to form a fit subject for a

53.

"My God, my land, my father—these did

move

Me from my bliss of life, that Nature gave; Lowered softly with a threefold cord of love

Down to a silent grave.

54.

And I went mourning, 'No fair Hebrew boy

Shall smile away my maiden blame among

The Hebrew mothers' - emptied of all joy,

Leaving the dance and song.

55.

Leaving the olive gardens far below;
Leaving the promise of my bridal
bower,
The valleys' of grape-loaded vines that

glow

Beneath the battled tower.

58.

tragedy. And this is why poets,
seeking to embody in outward form
that spirit of self-devotion which,
an unconscious prophecy of Christi-
anity in heathen times, has been
strengthened and purged from
earthly alloy by our most holy
faith, have often sought to do so in
some story drawn from antiquity.
Ah! would that Milton, doubly in-
spired as he was by the muse of
Zion and the ancient tragic muse,
had given us, out of the many
sacred subjects which he pondered,
a companion tragedy to his sublime
"Samson Agonistes on the story of
Jephthah's daughter! We should
then possess an English Iphigenia
at once old and new, with odes of
solemn magnificence, setting forth
the love of father and child in all
its sacred strength, and the love of
country as it burned in the breast
of Hampden or of Falkland-in-
stinct, above all, with that full
trust in God, without which self-
sacrifice is only self-destruction.
As it is, the most beautiful lines
on Jephthah's daughter, with which
I am acquainted, are to be found
in that Vision of Fair Women,'
from which I began these observa-
tions. And I remind my readers
of them, as I bid them farewell, Moreover, it is written that my race
because they appear to me to
translate beautifully into the lan-
guage of a purer faith the later
speeches of the 'Iphigenia in Aulis'
of Euripides. So that if the three
stanzas I set out by quoting, reflect
faithfully the spirit of her earlier
pathetic supplications for life, her
later words of high resolve seem
echoed back to us by that Jew-
ish maiden, who died, like her,
to save her father's vow"-who,
having that sure hope which the
Greek heroine could not have, says
with more unfaltering voice than
hers:-

When the next moon was rolled into the
sky,

Strength came to me that equalled my
desire.

How beautiful a thing it was to die
For God and for my sire!

59.

It comforts me in this one thought to

dwell,

That I subdued me to my father's will; Because the kiss he gave me, ere I fell, Sweetens the spirit still.

60.

Hewed Ammon, hip and thigh, from
Aroer

On Arnon unto Minneth. Here her face
Glowed, as I looked at her.

61.

She locked her lips: she left me where I

stood:

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CHRONICLES OF CARLINGFORD: SALEM CHAPEL.

PART VI.-CHAPTER XVIII.

Ir was the very height of day when the travellers arrived in Carlingford. It would be vain to attempt to describe their transit through London in the bustling sunshine of the winter morning after the vigil of that night, and in the frightful suspense and excitement of their minds. Vincent remembered, for years after, certain cheerful street-corners, round which they turned on their way from one station to another, with shudders of recollection, and an intense consciousness of all the life circulating about them, even to the attitudes of the boys that swept the crossings, and their contrast with each other. His mother made dismal attempts now and then to say something; that he was looking pale; that after all he could yet preach, and begin his course on the miracles; that it would be such a comfort to rest when they got home; but at last became inaudible, though he knew by her bending across to him, and the motion of those parched lips with which she still tried to smile, that the widow still continued to make those pathetic little speeches without knowing that she had become speechless in the rising tide of her agony. But at last they reached Carlingford, where everything was at its brightest, all the occupations of life afloat in the streets, and sunshine, lavish though ineffectual, brightening the whole aspect of the town. When they emerged from the railway, Mrs Vincent took her son's arm, and for the last time made some remark with a ghastly smile-but no sound came from her lips. They walked up the sunshiny street together with such silent speed as would have been frightful to look at had anybody known what was in their

hearts. Mrs Pigeon, who was coming along the other side, crossed over on purpose to accost the minister and be introduced to his mother, but was driven frantic by the total blank unconsciousness with which the two swept past her; "taking no more notice than if he had never set eyes on me in his born days!" as she described it afterwards. The door of the house where Vincent lived was opened to them briskly by the little maid in holiday attire; everything wore the most sickening, oppressive brightness within in fresh Saturday cleanliness. Vincent half carried his mother up the steps, and held fast in his own to support her the hand which he had drawn tightly through his arm. "Is there any one here? Has anybody come for me since I left?" he asked, with the sound of his own words ringing shrilly into his ears. Please, sir, Mr Tozer's been," said the girl alertly, with smiling confidence. She could not comprehend the groan with which the young man startled all the clear and sunshiny atmosphere, nor the sudden rustle of the little figure beside him, which moved somehow, swaying with the words as if they were a wind.

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Mother, you are going to faint!" cried Vincent and the little maid flew in terror to call her mistress, and bring a glass of water. when she came back, the mother and son were no longer in the bright hall with its newly cleaned wainscot and whitened floor. When she followed them upstairs with the water, it was the minister who had dropped into the easy-chair with his face hidden on the table, and his mother was standing beside him. Mrs Vincent looked up when the girl came in and said, "Thank you-that will do," looking in her face, and not at what

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