we experience on reading "Philoctetes" or "Hamlet" as
pleasant. They are not unmixedly painful, but surely
not pleasant.

It is not therefore the actual fate of Empedocles
which fails to interest us, but we are unable to feel that
Mr. Arnold's account of him is the true account. In
the absence of authentic material, the artist who hopes
to interest us in his fate must at least make the story
probable as he tells it; consistent in itself, with causes
clearly drawn out proportioned to the effects resulting
from them. And this it cannot be said that Mr. Arnold
has done. Powerful as is much of the language which
he places in the mouth of Empedocles, he has failed
to represent him as in a condition in which suicide
is the natural result. His trials, his disgusts, as far
as he exhibits them, are not more than man may
naturally be supposed able to bear, while of the impulses
of a more definite character there is no trace
at all. But a more grave deficiency still is, that among
all the motives introduced, there is not one to make the
climb of AEtna necessary or intelligible. Empedocles
on AEtna might have been Empedocles in his room
at Catana, and a dagger or a cup of hemlock would
have answered all purposes equally well with a plunge
in the burning crater. If the tradition of Empedocles
is a real story of a thing which really happened, we
may feel sure that some peculiar feeling connected
with the mountain itself, some mystical theory or local
tradition, led such a man as he was to such a means of