BOOKS.

PROFESSOR MURRAY'S " CEDIPTJS THE KING." THE CEdipus .Rex is one of the masterpieces of the stage. No • later tragedy shows finer skill in the development of the plot, and in intensity of dramatic power it is the equal of Othello. Yet no play, perhaps, is more alien from actual life. The whole "atmosphere is one of brooding dread and primeval gloom," while the story, which touches "the last limit of imaginable horror," may well come to us, as Dr. Murray suggests, " from the dark regions of prie-Homeric belief." It is a story which seems almost to defy presentation. Dryden, • Cgdipus, King of Thebes. Translated by Gilbert Murray, LL.D.,, V.B.A.--London : George Allen and Sons. pa. net.]

Corneille, and Voltaire all attempted, and all failed, to deal with it. But Sophocles so handles his terrific theme of parricide and incest, of self-murder and self-mutilation, as to arouse no repugnance, but rather a solemn and compelling awe. He has the classic severity which alone suits it. He conceals nothing, but he exaggerates nothing; he is outspoken, but it is with a grave simplicity ; he never mars a great effect by the impertinence of rhetoric, and, above all, he never vexes us with either comment or criticism of his own. He is content to show us a noble soul borne down and overwhelmed by a power whose action is at once relentless and inscrutable. From its opening word the play casts, as it were, a spell on us. It takes us out of ourselves : we forget Sophocles; we forget all that is around us, and pass into a new world that becomes the only reality. Weird, horrible, and almost beyond accept- ance as the tale is, yet it is told by Sophocles with such fine art, with such natural coherence, such close sequence of cause and effect in the action of the play, that illusion holds us wholly in its grip. The shadow of a mysterious doom hangs

heavy over (Edipus : unseen powers of darkness compass him round about ; but against that sombre setting each human lineament of the man only stands out with more effective clearness. • "My children " are the first two words of the play; a few lines later comes the same address, " children " ; and again a third time, " my piteous sons." That is how (Edipus speaks to his people, when they come to seek his aid against the destroying plague, and how Sophocles, by the simplest of touches, brings us at once into sympathy with him. We hear the human tenderness in his voice and answer to it, while, as we listen to the words- " Stricken, well I know,

Ye all are, stricken sore : yet verily Not one so stricken to the heart as I.

Your grief, it cometh to each man apart For his own loss, none other's ; but this heart For thee and me and all of us doth weep.

Wherefore it is not to one sunk in sleep Ye come with waking. Many tears these days For your sake I have wept, and many ways Have wandered on the beating wings of thought,"

then we feel, too, that we are in the presence not only of a human but of a royal nature. We begin to know and understand Edipus, and later on, when the blind Tireaias denounces him as being himself "the unclean thing" which pollutes Thebes, himself the wretch whom his own lips have cursed, then the very fury and passion with which he turns upon one whom be

accounts— "A schemer, a false beggar-priest, whose eye Is bright for gold and blind for prophecy,"

only make us understand him more. We see, as it were, the elemental forces that have been pent up in that mighty heart, so that when he first learns the fatal secret of his birth we are not deceived by the apparent calm of that harsh discordant

cry— a, TI 'lee apao'cu /3e/3otiArwrai 'Kip! ;

while when, looking his last upon the sun, he passes into the palace slowly uttering those strange lines the very movement of which seems frozen :—

a ems. ve.keuradv crE wpocrOA.AleaLpf gITTI4 Irtoaamts tp' XpliY, OrS orXpF1V disaar, oUs ok net svardis, we wait expectant for the storm which, we know, must break. The ghastly speech, in which an attendant tells us how CEdipus has torn his own eyes out of their sockets appals but does not astonish us. The shame, the despair, the agony of such a soul demanded a deed of horror. " Better have died!" cries the chorus, but IEdipus will not Lear. " Thus," he answers, "are these things done best." He knows no regret ; he has cut himself off for ever "from the cheerful ways of men," and his deliberate sentence is that he has done well. Henceforth he will dwell alone in "the ever-during dark," and so, it may

be,

"Find peace, self-prisoned from a world of pain."

And as he stands there, blind and bleeding, CEdipus is terrible and yet majestic. He is on a level with fate, almost above it; and then, just when. Tragedy seems to have reached its height, Sophocles "purges " our souls with pity, turning terror into tears. Again is heard that thrice-repeated cry—" My children," " children," "my children" (L .rirKPG 1480, TiKra 1493, visva 1501). And as (Edipus lays his sightless hands upon his daughters,-as-he speaks to them, blesses them, comes to the words of parting—then the great heart that had defied fate is vanquished and overcome. maSapin vae-rus 7' ap /LOU are the last words he speaks, and with that cry of human anguish,

"Not these! nay, take not from me these!" he passes from our sight into the unknown.

All attempts, however, to give any brief account of the CEdipus Rex must be idle. Every line in it tells, and to omit anything is to destroy all, but we have endeavoured to put forward some points which may serve to show that it is a great tragedy, and, as such, calls for a great interpreter. But Dr. Murray hardly, we think, attains more than excellence. The dash and brilliancy which make him so admirable a translator of Euripides do not suit what he himself calls "the severe and classic reticence" of Sophocles. He is too fond of weak emphasis, as when he makes CEdipus address the Thebans as " my poor, poor children," or, quite gratuitously, makes him begin a sentence with such words as "'Fore God"

and " How now, assassin ? " or tell how he saw Laius " crash

Back from his car in blood," with three dots after " in blood" to give effect, although there is no mention of blood in the text at all. He is also sometimes careless, as when he makes a " ship "—the Greek has Tlxis—suffer from storms, and then "wither in the fruitless buds of earth," or when he prints the mysterious words, " Which skills not," as a complete sentence, while nothing can justify this rendering of the three striking lines, the text of which has been already quoted :— " Thou Light, never again May I behold thee, I, in the eyes of men Made naked, how from sin my being grec', In sin I wedded and in sin I slew !

Not only is the striking and peculiar form of the second and third lines ignored, while the rendering of re¢aopal is

much exaggerated, but the attribution of "sin" to tEdipus destroys at once the entire interest of the drama. The idea of " sin " essentially involves that of moral guilt, and from moral guilt he is throughout absolutely free. The fact of his freedom is the very thing that makes his fate so tragic, and to put in his lips words which are an open confession of crime is to mar the whole effect of a great and almost stupendous work.