There is, of course, a strong dramatic moment here; but I cannot think the plot by any means an ideal one for classical tragedy.  At any rate the Aristotelian conditions—­the real ones, not the fanciful distortions of sixteenth-seventeenth century criticism—­are very ill satisfied.  There is bloodshed, but there is no tragic bloodshed, as there would have been had Merope actually killed her son.  The arresting and triumphant “grip” of the tragic misfortunes of Oedipus and Orestes, the combination of the course of fate and the [Greek:  hamartia] of the individual, is totally absent.  The wooing of Merope by Polyphontes is not so much preposterous as insignificant, though Voltaire, by a touch of modernism, has rescued it or half-rescued it from this most terrible of limbos.  The right triumphs, no doubt; but who cares whether it does or not?  And Mr Arnold, with the heroic obstinacy of the doctrinaire, has done nothing to help the effect of a scheme in itself sufficiently uninspiring to the modern reader.  When he was at work upon the piece he had “thought and hoped” that it would have what Buddha called “the character of Fixity, that true sign of the law.”  A not unfriendly critic might have pointed out, with gloomy forebodings, that a sign of law is not necessarily a sign of poetry, and that, as a prophet of his own had laid it down, poetry should “transport” not “fix.”  At any rate, it is clear to any one who reads the book that the author was in a mood of deliberate provocation and exaggeration—­not a favourable mood for art.  The quiet grace of Sophocles is perhaps impossible to reproduce in English, but Mr Arnold’s verse is more than quiet, it is positively tame.  The dreary tirades of Polyphontes and Merope, and their snip-snap stichomythia, read equally ill in English.  Mr Swinburne, who has succeeded where Mr Arnold failed, saw by a true intuition that, to equal the effect of the Greek chorus, full English lyric with rhyme and musical sweep was required.  Mr Arnold himself, as might have been expected from his previous experiments in unrhymed Pindarics, has given us strophes and antistrophes most punctiliously equivalent in syllables; but sometimes with hardly any, and never with very much, vesture of poetry about them.  It is absolutely preposterous to suppose that the effect on a Greek ear of a strophe even of Sophocles or Euripides, let alone the great Agamemnonian choruses, was anything like the effect on an English ear of such wooden stuff as this:—­

  “Three brothers roved the field,
  And to two did Destiny
  Give the thrones that they conquer’d,
  But the third, what delays him
  From his unattained crown?”

But Mr Arnold would say “This is your unchaste modern love for passages and patches.  Tell me how I managed this worthy action?” To which the only answer can be, “Sir, the action is rather uninteresting.  Save at one moment you have not raised the interest anywhere, and you have certainly not made the most of it there.”