Achilles, Prometheus, Clytemnestra, Dido[7]—­what modern poem presents personages as interesting, even to us moderns, as these personages of an “exhausted past”?  We have the domestic epic dealing with the details of modern life, which pass daily under our eyes; we have poems representing modern personages in contact with the problems of modern life, moral, intellectual, and social; these works have been produced by poets the most distinguished of their nation and time; yet I fearlessly assert that Hermann and Dorothea, Childe Harold, Jocelyn, the Excursion,[8] leave the reader cold in comparison with the effect produced upon him by the latter books of the Iliad, by the Oresteia, or by the episode of Dido.  And why is this?  Simply because in the three last-named cases the action is greater, the personages nobler, the situations more intense:  and this is the true basis of the interest in a poetical work, and this alone.

It may be urged, however, that past actions may be interesting in themselves, but that they are not to be adopted by the modern poet, because it is impossible for him to have them clearly present to his own mind, and he cannot therefore feel them deeply, nor represent them forcibly.  But this is not necessarily the case.  The externals of a past action, indeed, he cannot know with the precision of a contemporary; but his business is with its essentials.  The outward man of Oedipus[9] or of Macbeth, the houses in which they lived, the ceremonies of their courts, he cannot accurately figure to himself; but neither do they essentially 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 consideration; 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:[10] 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