Слике страница
PDF
ePub

Gilbert Murray in the English lines that follow :

Back streams the wave on the ever-running river:

Life, life is changed and the laws of it o'ertrod.

Man shall be the slave, the affrighted, the low-liver!

Man hath forgotten God.

And woman, yea, woman, shall be terrible in story:

The tales, too, meseemeth, shall be other than of yore.

For a fear there is that cometh out of Woman and a glory,

And the hard hating voices shall encompass her no more!

The old bards shall cease, and their memory that lingers

Of frail brides and faithless, shall be shrivelled as with fire.

For they loved us not, nor knew us: and our lips were dumb, our fingers

Could wake not the secret of the lyre. Else, else, O God the Singer, I had sung amid their rages

A long tale of Man and his deeds for good and ill.

But the Old World knoweth-'tis the speech of all his ages

Man's wrong and ours: he knoweth and is still.

Did Ibsen of Norway say any more upon this modern subject, in the year A.D. 1878, than Euripides of Greece had already said and sung, in the year B.C. 431,-the first year

of the eighty-seventh Olympiad,

when he submitted his Medea and

won only a third prize in competition with Euphorion, the son of Eschy lus, who carried off the palm, and with Sophocles, who took the second prize? . . Or am I right in thinking that Euripides was inspired with a prescience that may reasonably be regarded as prophetical?

[ocr errors]

IV

The outstanding event of the current theatre-season in New York

[and, of course, "the onlie begetter" of the present commentary] has been the popular triumph of Miss Margaret Anglin's productions, in Carnegie Hall, of the Electra of Sophocles and the Medea of Euripides. This triumph has been truly popular. There are more than three thousand seats in Carnegie Hall; and every seat has been filled at each of the five or six repetitions of these ancient tragedies. The commercial problem -from the moment when the project was initially announced-was not how to attract the public, but how to provide accommodation for the people who besieged the box-office, in long lines, with money in their hands.

Between fifteen and twenty thousand people attended in New York, within the compass of a single month, Miss Anglin's reproductions of these two Athenian tragedies. It is not, by any means, to be inferred that this enormous audience was made up mainly of people who had previously read the writings of Euripides and Sophocles. It is safe to assume that these high and far-off names meant next to nothing to the majority of those attracted to the undertaking by the reputation of her justly popular collaborator, Mr. Miss Anglin or by the reputation of

Walter Damrosch. But Miss An

glin soon convinced the many-headed public that the great Greek poets [to express the matter in a phrase remembered from the Bible] are "not dead but living," and that their message to mankind is instant and immediate, because it is eternal.

V

Why is it that any so-called "modern" play which is "revived" after an interval of only twenty or thirty

years seems always irretrievably "old-fashioned," while any adequate production of a play originally written in the age of Pericles appears always—in the phrase of Robert Browning-"strange and

new."

This question is not difficult to answer. The Greeks-in contemplating any subject for a work of art-sought only and sought always for inklings of eternity. By imagination they removed their topics "out of space, out of time," and regarded them from the point of view of an absolute and undisrupted leisure. They sought, in any subject, not for transitory hintings of the here and now, but always and only for indications of the absolute and undeniable. By deliberate intention, they wrote "not of an age but for all time."

No

Another point to be recalled is that the tragic dramatists of ancient Athens were never tempted to pursue the ignis fatuus of novelty. playwright-in those high and faroff days-was ever expected, or permitted, to invent a story. The Athenian dramatists dealt only with tales that had already been familiar to the public for a thousand years. Their function was-as artists-to extract a new and unexpected truth from the elucidation of an ancient fable, and not to catch the light attention of the public by the sudden flaunting of some flag of novelty. The augustness of Greek criticism may be measured by the fact that the Medea of Euripides took only a third prize in Athens in the year 431 B. C. It was probably too "modern" or too "revolutionary" to satisfy the honourable judges who accorded the first prize to Euphorion, the son of Eschylus.

VI

By virtue of the managerial incen tive of Miss Anglin, our theatre-going public has lately been convinced that Sophocles and Euripides are more alive to-day than Mr. George Broadhurst and Mr. George V. Hobart. Miss Anglin is greatly to be praised for this achievement in the education of the populace. She has done what hundreds and hundreds of scholarly professors have failed to do:-she has sent thousands of unscholarly and normal people back to their libraries, to read [or to reread] the tragic dramatists of ancient Athens and to experience an unexpected joy.

The plays of these great dramatists are so effective that all that is necessary, in the modern theatre, is to leave them alone and to act them as they are: yet this very simple point is usually missed by those who approach the ancient drama from the point of view of archæology. Sophocles and Euripides have been damned for generations by pedagogues who have insisted on counting the quantitative value of every syllable of every line; and, even in the theatre, these immortal plays might almost be reduced to the realm of the utter anæsthetic by an alltoo-sedulous adherence to the foregone conventions of the ancient stage.

Miss Anglin's very first productions of these plays were disclosed, in the summer of 1915, in the Greek Theatre at Berkeley, California. This was an open-air auditorium, constructed in imitation of the ancient theatre of Dionysus in Athens, and ample for the seating of twenty thousand people. Assured, in advance, of the patronage of an enormous audience, Miss Anglin must

have been tempted to turn "scholarly," and to project these ancient dramatists as men long dead, instead of men forever living. This temptatation she resisted, because she is an artist. She discarded the masque and the cothurnus: she removed the chorus from the orchestra to the stage; and, in many other ways, she recomposed these ancient fables according to the more familiar pattern of the theatre of to-day.

In California, Miss Anglin showed her common sense [a most uncommon quality, as the great Descartes has told us] by refusing to produce these ancient plays by sunlight, despite the precedent that has been handed down from ancient history. A modern spectator of a Greek play delivered out of doors is greatly bothered by the modern look of the people in the audience; and the only way to obviate this interruption is to drench and drown the audience in darkness, while an artificial light is focussed on the actors on the stage. This subterfuge necessitates a night performance; and, for this reason, Miss Anglin, in her experimental renderings of the Pericleian dramatists in California, decided wisely to eschew the ancient custom of appearing under the indirigible light of day.

VII

Carnegie Hall is an empty and inhospitable auditorium, resembling neither the Athenian theatre of Dionysus nor any modern theatre of Broadway; and Miss Anglin's artistic director, Mr. Livingston Platt, was

called upon to decorate the stage in a mood that should be suited amply to the height of the occasion. In this endeavour, Mr. Platt succeeded almost perfectly. His set

ting for the Electra of Sophocles was simple, yet magnificent, in architecture. Tall pylons soared beyond the sight; and, before great doorways, many stairs spilled down in cataracts that seemed to gather into an eternal tide. Mr. Fred Ericwho depicted the part of Orestes in this play-reported his impression of this setting in some such words as follow: "When I enter, up or down those stairs, I have to act much better than I have ever acted at any time before. The whole play is plotted out on different levels, which indicate different degrees of dominance. Whenever I stand firmly footed on those stairs and read a speech, I feel at ease: I do not need to strive: the architect has solved the problem for the actor."

On the other hand, the present writer is required to record a disagreement with the decorative project conceived by Mr. Platt for his setting of the Medea of Euripides. The high point in this play is that moment when the Chorus of Corinthian Women swarm up many steps and impotently push against the door that impedes them from preventing the insatiate, insane Medea from murdering her children. The cry of these agonised and helpless children is answered only by the feeble fluttering of thirty helpless hands. The exigencies of this situation demand-obviously-that the door to Medea's house should be cyclopean in ponderosity. After Jason has accomplished his delayed re-entrance, he is required [according to the lines] to order his underlings to break through this mighty door with crow-bars. Yet-in the setting designed by Mr. Platt-this all-important gateway to disaster is represented merely by an open grill-work

that looks incapable of resisting the determined push of fifteen women. The effect of the Medea on the stage -like the effect of The Death of Tintagiles, in which M. Maeterlinck was not ashamed to follow in the footsteps of Euripides-depends largely upon the adamantine solidity

that can be suggested by the setting to the eye; and Mr. Livingston Platt has weakened the climax of the play by designing a central door for the Medea that looks as if it might be pushed open without effort by any ardent crowd composed of fifteen women.

THE TELEPHONE

BY A. CARTER GOODLOE

WHEN from its niche the importunate bell calls clear,
The miracle is wrought without delay.

Speech culled from air wings to the marvelling ear,
Swift, unseen shuttles through aerial way
Weave back and forth, bringing deep woe or cheer—
Strange, tenuous messengers of joy, dismay,
Of pain or crouching care or hope or fear.

Love, when thy summons comes, quick, I obey!
Unclasp the magic instrument and there

Vibrates thy voice across the trembling wires
Breaking my bonds of silence and despair.
Space is annihilate-far though thou art,
I feel thee near me, Love, heart to my heart,
And hope, grown cold, enkindles with new fires!

THE FOOD CRUSADE*

BY THOMAS H. DICKINSON

NEVER in human memory have men been so conscious of their dinners as they are to-day. They prepare for them with forethought and they eat them with conscientious care. Scruples sit at their elbows and duty watches Argus-eyed at every helping.

What is the meaning of this universal concern with food? A few years ago we were willing to admit that under certain circumstances food could be an art. Then we discovered that it is a science. And now the World War has made it into a Crusade. Discussions of the food problem occupy in newspapers and magazines space commensurate with that given to engagements on the battle-field and the wordy battles preliminary to an international understanding. Admonitory fingers point from every sign-board. Whole departments in magazines are devoted to the various interests of cookery and conservation.

One looking in on the busy world of war from some other and quieter zone might suppose that humanity had suddenly turned squirrel, that with consciousness of coming dangers and short supplies it was setting

Edited by Clyde *The World's Food. L. King, being the November, 1917, number of the Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science. Philadelphia.

The Food Problem. By Vernon Kellogg and Alonzo E. Taylor, with a Preface by Herbert Hoover. New York: The Macmillan Company.

Food in Wartime. By Graham Lusk. W. B. Saunders. Philadelphia.

Food Preparedness for the United States. By Charles O'Brien. Boston: Little, Brown and Company.

aside from its present stores the sustenance instinct tells it will be greatly in demand. But the observer would be badly deceived in thus explaining by reference to a primitive instinct а programme which is in fact derived from other and higher forces in human nature.

Twenty years ago Bloch wrote that the future of war lay not in fighting but in famine. In laying

down this dictum he had in mind primarily the dislocation of the factors of production, the violation of the machinery of exchange, the breaking of morale through hunger, and the possibility that considerable numbers of people might be reduced to inefficiency through the lowering of food supplies below the line of vital support. In its general features much that Bloch outlined has been seen to come to pass. With almost uncanny precision the war is following the programme he outlined, with one important exception. And this exception promises to be the vital factor in the case.

For Bloch saw only the negative and destructive side. But war has its constructive features no less than has peace. Bloch failed to see that the very forces he was outlining were developing a new set of social virtues, in which co-operation, imagination, the ability to visualise the other man's case, to put into effective practice a plan based upon an ideal theory, are the fundamental features. The result of the war will be spelled in terms of victory for the party that is able to develop out of

« ПретходнаНастави »