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Photograph by Charlotte Fairchild. GENERAL STAGE-SETTING FOR THE "ELECTRA" OF SOPHOCLES, DESIGNED BY LIVINGSTON PLATT. THIS PICTURE SHOWS THE ARCHITECTURAL ASPECT OF THE ENTIRE STAGE AND THE SCULPTURAL GROUPING OF THE CHORUS. AFTER A COLLOQUY WITH THE CHORUS, MISS ANGLIN, AS ELECTRA, IS RETIRING TO THE SLAVES' QUARTERS OF HER FATHER'S PALACE

THE ATHENIAN DRAMA AND THE AMERICAN

I

AUDIENCE

BY CLAYTON HAMILTON

BEFORE the invention of printing, there were few books in the world; but all of these were worth reading. So long as every extra copy of a literary work had to be written out by hand on parchment, a certain care was exercised lest this lengthy labour should be wasted over words that were ephemeral. The Romans, Greeks, and Hebrews were human like ourselves, and liable to human error; they must have uttered, every day, the usual amount of trash, and this trash must have been passed about, from mouth to mouth, among the masses; but the ancients did not write it down. They allowed their

trivial words to die,-unknell'd, uncoffin'd, and unknown; and they recorded in their libraries only those more memorable words that were luminous with intimations of immortality.

The library of Alexandria was burned; Herculaneum was buried beneath an overwhelming flood of lava; and comparatively little now remains to us of ancient literature. But what remains is not "ancient," in the narrow sense; and nearly all of it is really "literature," that is to say [in the noble phrase of Emerson] a record of "man thinking" and expressing his thoughts in unwitherable words. The invention of print

ing, and the enactment of that modern law which compels everybody, willy-nilly, to go to school and learn to read, has led to a widespread circulation of recorded utterances; but how many of these documents are "literature"? And those of us who ply the pen so busily in these days of rapid printing might profitably pause, every now and then, to ask ourselves whether we have ever written a single sentence that deserves to be engraved on granite and preserved from the erosion of innumerable future centuries. How much of our contemporary writing will be accepted finally as "literature," in the leisure of all time?

The ancients felt a more reverent respect for books and authors than we entertain to-day; but they had more reason for this feeling. They were not poisoned by a state of things that accords a million readers every morning to the hirelings of Mr. William Randolph Hearst, and reduces John Milton to what-in the profane vocabulary of our friends, the French-is eloquently called "the name of a name." The ancients saw things in perspective and proportion. They never pretended -not even on the eve of a popular election that "all men are created equal": they announced, instead, that certain men were nobler than their fellows and were worthy, by inherent right, of being listened to attentively. The Greeks gave prizes for literary prowess; and, when a man had won a public prize for authorship, he was erected to the aristocracy and considered as a leading citizen.

The ancients regarded their greatest authors as divine, and spread abroad the legend that these supermen had spoken to mankind with the

authentic voice of God. The He

brews accepted Isaiah not only as a poet but also as poet but also as a prophet, and claimed that he wrote better than he knew. The Romans believed that Virgil was not merely a perfect artist, but also an unconscious mouthpiece for the deity of deities; and, after the slow passage of a thousand years, the greatest composition of the greatest man that ever lived was immediately called, not by himself, but by his readers, The Divine Comedy. There was no real reason- -on the other hand-why this title should not have been selected by Dante himself; since he has told us more than once, with the serenity of perfect confidence, that the things he had to say were suggested not by his own mind, but by the irresistible and overwhelming inspiration of all the things that are.

We are living now in an age of infidelity, when it is popular to laugh at high and far-off images of holy things; but we have no reason to dismiss as merely credulous the belief of our forefathers that their greatest poets were inspired from above. Without departing from the region of the intellect, it would be easy enough to prove that Dante is indeed, in a certain sense, "divine"; and there is also a reasonable motive for accepting several of the Hebrew writings, which have been gathered helter-skelter after many accidents of time into the canonical fold of the Old Testament, as authentic utterances of some power that is greater than ourselves.

The Romans held a "superstition" to repeat a word that has grown current in our present period of cynicism-that Virgil was so wise that he had hidden away an answer to every imaginable human problem

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Photograph by Charlotte Fairchild. CLIMAX OF THE "ELECTRA" OF SOPHOCLES. ORESTES CHALLENGES EGISTHOS TO MORTAL COMBAT; THE OTHER CHARACTERS ARE ELECTRA AND PYLADES. THIS PICTURE SHOWS HOW WELL THE STAGE-SETTING, DESIGNED BY LIVINGSTON PLATT, IS ADAPTED TO MOMENTS OF RAPID AND EXCITING ACTION. GREAT ADVANTAGE IS DERIVED FROM PLAYING THE SCENE ON SEVERAL DIF FERENT LEVELS

in some passage of his Eneid; and common men in need of guidance were advised to open his heroic poem blindfold, to place a finger on an accidental passage, and to read this passage as a mystical, oracular response to their imaginative inquisition.

This pagan incantation is not yet out-moded. It is still possible to trust the ancient writers for an answer to our modern questionings. And, in these times of trouble, we may profitably turn to the tragic poets of the period of Pericles.

II

For these, indeed, are times that try men's souls; and hundreds of millions of living men and women are troubled by an instant and tremendous problem of eternal justice. Let us state this problem very simply. We, who are civilised, have taught ourselves, through twenty centuries of Christianity, to believe that a war of aggression is a crime. We believe that this German war, launched deliberately after forty years of preparation, is the greatest crime of history. Yet the armies that sacked Serbia and butchered Belgium seem stronger now than when they were unleashed four years ago. The victims of the Lusitania, still unavenged, are visiting the bottom of the monstrous world; and ruined Rheims lifts up her splintered towers to a heaven that seems not to see. The aggressors have annexed great tracts of territory; they have extracted millions of dollars of tribute from their helpless neighbours; they have ruined Russia; and there seems to be no reason for refusing to admit that-thus far-they have won the war. Why then do we fight on?

And why shall we continue to

We

fight on-for twenty years if need be—against a foe apparently victorious? Not because of any facts or figures; but solely by virtue of our faith in what Matthew Arnold called "that eternal not-ourselves that makes for righteousness." have a feeling that the members of the Potsdam gang, and all their followers in Germany and out of it, shall not finally escape the consequences of their crimes: for otherwise there is no God,-a thing unthinkable..

But, since so eminent a statesman as Lord Landsdowne has become faint-hearted and has begun to talk of bartering with the burglar for a portion of his swag,—since even our own President, in a now regretted moment of "diplomatic" aberration, spoke once of a peace without punishment, let us become again like little children, and re-adopt the ancient incantation, and turn to Sophocles for an answer to the moral problem that is bothering the world.

Let us turn, by choice, to his Electra; because, in that play, the ancient fiction parallels our modern facts.

Heroic Agamemnon has been foully murdered by his wicked wife, Clytemnestra, and by her lustful paramour, Ægisthos. His only son, Orestes, has escaped to a far country; but many years have lapsed away, and nobody now knows whether he is dead or living. Meanwhile Ægisthos sits easily upon the throne he has usurped and luxuriates in the caresses of his partner in crime. Two daughters of the ancient stock remain in the house of Agamemnon. The one, Electra, reveres her father's memory; and, for this reverence, she is relegated to the quarters of the slaves and doomed to dress in rags.

The other—a fluffy and light-minded girl, Chrysothemis may be regarded as the very pattern of a pacifist. She admits that her mother is a murderess, and that her step-father is a traitor, an adulterer, and an usurper; but she has discovered that the quickest way to her own comfort is to forget their crimes and to accept the largesse of their hospitality. Her philosophy is quite as simple as that of Nikolai Lenine: -to the victor belongs the spoils; and Chrysothemis is not impeded, by any twinge of conscience, from being spoiled. But lone Electra looms, and anguishes, and waits, hoping without hope, against a future day of final judgment. Even the Chorus argues with Electra, and asks her why-in default of the longed-for reappearance of Orestes-she continues to rebel against a pair of criminals whose power is apparently impregnable. And then Electra answers, in these lines:

For if the dead, as dust and nothing found,
Shall lie there in his woe,
And they shall fail to pay
The penalty of blood,

Then should all fear of Gods from earth decay,

And all men's worship prove a thing of naught.

In other words, the murderers cannot ultimately go unpunished for their crimes for else there is no God,

-a thing unthinkable. . . . This reductio ad absurdam-which may serve to send us back, with hearts uplifted, to our task of building ships and raising armies-was enunciated by the apostolic Sophocles more than three and twenty centuries ago. And these linesnot paraphrased, as in the foregoing quotation, by the pedestrian Professor Plumptre, but eloquent in the

original Greek-might well be flung back by our President in answer to the next appeal for peace from Chancellor von Hertling. Sophocles

-in the inspired phrase of William Blake "saw eternity in an hour," and told us, in the tiny compass of less than fifty words, "all we need to know" about the most tremendous moral problem of the present time. The theme of the Electra is not-as

certain students have surmised-the

satisfaction of so primitive a passion as the lust for blood: it is, instead, the vindication of a necessary faith in "that eternal not-ourselves that makes for righteousness."

III

Another topic that demands the immediate attention of that emphatically modern person who is colloquially called "the man in the street" is the subject of the new enfranchisement of women after many centuries of servitude. Precisely forty years ago, Henrik Ibsen wrote, in the course of his preparatory notes for A Doll's House:-"There are. two kinds of spiritual law, two kinds of conscience, one in man, and another, altogether different, in woman. They do not understand each other; but in practical life the woman is judged by man's law, as though she were not a woman but a man. . . A woman cannot be herself in the society of the present day, which is an exclusively masculine society, with laws framed by men and with a judicial system that judges feminine conduct from a masculine point of view."

Two thousand three hundred and fifty years ago, Euripides of Athens expressed himself upon this self-same subject, in a Chorus of Women that has been translated by Professor

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