Holds His shield before the just! But for the man whose heart is known If sleeps the vengeance of the sky— Why this idle chant prolong? Still be the dance, and hushed the song!"—(A.) At this point begins the dénouement or disentanglement of the plot, in which Sophocles was thought especially to excel. A messenger arrives from Corinth, bringing what he conceives to be good news. Polybus is dead, and Edipus has been elected by acclamation king of "the city on two seas." Jocasta-who, with a woman's fickleness, is on her way bearing flowers and incense to the altars of the god whom she had just insultedmeets the messenger, and is wild with joy when she hears her own opinion of the falsity of oracles, as she believes, thus undoubtedly confirmed; and she sum mons her husband, who, like her, exults at the tidings. Who need now believe that there is any truth in the Delphic god? Chance rules all; human foresight avails nothing; and oracles do but oppress the mind like a hideous dream. But it is a false joy and a short-lived triumph. Edipus himself is still haunted by a misgiving that the latter part of the prophecy may yet prove true; for Meropa, his reputed mother, is yet alive. Then the messenger, wishing to relieve him from this remaining dread, tells him the whole story of his birth-how he was in reality no son of Polybus, but a foundling exposed on Mount Citharon; how he had been delivered by a shepherd of Laius to the very witness who now tells the tale; and how he in his turn had carried the child to Polybus. There is one question still to be answered-one link still requisite to complete the chain of circumstantial evidence: "Who was the mother, and from whom had the shepherd received the child?" Jocasta, who had at once realised the truth from the story of the Corinthian messenger, and who knows but too well what the answer of the shepherd must be, vainly tries to dissuade her husband from inquiring farther; and then, finding him obstinately bent on discovering the fatal secret of his birth, she can endure her grief no longer, but rushes from the stage in a silent agony of despair. After a short interval of what must have been tor turing suspense to Edipus-an interval occupied by the Chorus in idle guesses as to what nymph or god dess could have nursed this "child of fortune "-the last fatal witness, the aged shepherd who, half a century before, had received the child of Laius from its mother, is led before the king. Forced to give his evidence on pain of death and torture, slowly and reluctantly-for he realises the horrible import of his words he reveals all that he knows. And then Edipus utters a wail of agony (and even across the lapse of years that loud and bitter cry pierces us with terrible reality)— "Woe ! woe! woe! woe! all cometh clear at last.”—(P.) Then he too flies in horror from the stage. Again the Chorus mourn over the vanity of life, and again their lament is like that of the sons of Dan in 'Samson Agonistes' "O mirror of our fickle state, Since man on earth unparalleled ! The rarer thy example stands, By how much from the top of wondrous glory, Their king, who had once proved a tower of defence to his country in her hour of need, is now beset himself by countless sorrows. Would that the sin and death could be forgotten, and those guilty nuptials! True to the principle of the Greek tragic drama, that horrors should not be acted in the presence of the audience, the rest of this miserable story is narrated by messengers. Jocasta, as we have seen, had left the scene suddenly and in ominous silence: she had dashed open the doors of the fatal bridal chamber; and when Edipus had followed her, raging for a sword to slay her who had been the innocent cause of his misfortunes, he finds her, his wife and mother, hanging by a noose from the ceiling, already dead. Then he tears the body down with a wild cry, and wrenching the golden buckle from her dress, he dashes the point into the pupils of his eyes-thus condemning himself to that perpetual darkness with which he had taunted Teiresias. "His feeling," says Bishop Thirlwall, "is not horror of the light and of all the objects it can present to him, but indignation at his own previous blindness. The eyes which have served him so ill, which have seen without discerning what it was most important for him to know, shall be extinguished for ever." Well might the messenger say, at the close of his speech, that in the tragedy which he had just recounted, "Wailing and woe, and death and shame, all forms That man can name of evil, none have failed.”—(P.) All the rivers of the earth could not wash away the pollution which clings to the house and family. The palace-doors are now rolled back, and Edipus comes forward with wild gestures, the gore still streaming from eyes that are "irrecoverably dark amid the blaze of noon." The Chorus, horror-stricken, cannot endure the sight, and hide their faces in their robes. Pity and consolation are out of place in the presence of such misery as his. They can only utter broken exclamations of sorrow and dismay. 66 "What," they ask, "has prompted such an outrage? Why has he thus doomed himself to blindness" "As in the land of darkness, yet in light, To live a life half-dead, a living death" ?* No man's hand has smitten him, replies Edipus, save his own; but he has been fast bound to the wheels of a cruel necessity, and it is Apollo who has prompted such grim handiwork. Corneille gives the spirit of his justification :— "Aux crimes malgrè moi l'ordre du ciel m'attache, -Edipe, Act v. sc. 7. Then he breaks out into passionate self-reproach, as he recalls with remorseful tenderness those old familiar scenes of his youth "All fair outside, all rotten at the core;" the woodlands of Citharon, the court of Polybus, and that " narrow pass where three ways met." No guilt or misery, he declares, can be like his. Let them then drive him forth from the city of his fathers, and let them hide him for ever from the sight of men, and from the light of day. Creon now enters, and, with a nobility alien to his * Samson Agon., L 99. |