her in woman's soft mould, giving her those lengths of silky hair, those hands too delicately dimpled, and those arms too white, too weak, the while they left the man's heart in her, to mar their masterpiece—
That I should perish,
Who else had won renown among my peers,
A man, with men—perchance a god with you,
Had you but better sex'd me, you blind Gods!
Her pathetic recal of the days when Iphigenia nestled in her bosom, comes in with similar effect to Lady Macbeth's[1] remembrance of her father, so like the sleeping Duncan. The description of the sacrifice in Aulis by the Chorus is vivid and forcible, though it reads like an expansion of the terse stanzas by Tennyson,[2] with which the Quarterly Review saw fit to make merry, twenty years since. Of Mr. Meredith's choruses in general we should be glad to quote one or two specimens; but strophes and antistrophes take op such a deal of room, and we have so little to spare, that we must content ourselves with commending them to the attention of the reader, whether learned in Greek plays or not—if the former, he will appreciate something of the English playwright's plastic art and sympathetic genius—if the latter, he (or, being by hypothesis "no scholard" in the Greek, she) has an opportunity of forming a more lively notion of what the Greek chorus was like, and in a style vastly more readable, enjoyable, and rememberable, than in a vast majority of similar adaptations. Mr. Meredith is possibly a little too fond of dealing with connubial difficulties. Leaving "Clytemnestra," the most powerful thing in the volume is "The Wife's Tragedy"—but its power is of the same objectionable cast as that which marks Kotzebue's Menschenhass und Reue ("The Stranger" of our stage), and its finale is pitched in the same (may we call it falsetto?) key. "Good Night in the Porch" is free from any such exception, and is an affecting transcript of household love, in saint and manner not without affinity to "Bertha in the Lane" by Mrs. Browning, whom indeed our young poet has clearly studied, and admired to the point of imitation,—that gifted lady's husband, and the poet-laureate being also, repeatedly and emphatically, among the models after whom he has formed himself, though with a sufficient accompaniment of independence, and original character, to warrant the belief that, in
- ↑ The Thane's wife must have been often in our poet's eye, while working out his ideal of the wife of the Grecian generalissimo. At times there is an almost plagiarism, however unconscious, from the very language of Shakspeare. The famous "If we should fail,"—"We fail!" &c., may seem to have suggested the point in the following, where Clytemnestra is striving to determine the indeterminate nature of her feebler accomplice:
Clyt.His lips comprest—his eye dilates—he is saved!
O, when strong natures into frailer ones
Have struck deep root, if one exalt not both,
Both most drag down and perish!
Ægisth. If we should live—
Clyt.And we shall live.
Ægisth.Yet … yet—
Clyt. What! shrinking still?
I'll do the deed, &c. - ↑ "A Dream of Fair Women."
