Pot-Boilers

by Clive Bell

I

"Œdipus" at Covent Garden

Athenæum Jan. 1912

There need be nothing anachronous or archæological about a performance of Œdipus at Covent Garden. There is no reason why the plays of Sophocles should move us less than they moved the Athenians twenty-three hundred years ago, and there is some for supposing that we, who live in the twentieth, are more likely to appreciate them than those who lived in any intervening century. For everywhere to-day is a cry for simplicity and significance, and art more simple and significant than the Attic drama does not exist. In less than ten thousand words Sophocles tells all that can be told about a terrible and complex tragedy. Zola or Meredith in ten times the space would have added nothing. They would only have put flesh on bone and muscle; they would have given us trappings and ornament where Sophocles gives nothing but bare springs and forces.

Yet in this flat, lean, Attic drama all Latin realism and Celtic romance, all details and suggestions, are implicit. It states just those fundamental things of which all the rest are but manifestations or consequences. There is as much psychology in the scene between Œdipus and Jocasta, a matter of some seventy lines, as could be forced into seventy pages by a modern novelist. A change of feeling that it would take Mr. Henry James a chapter to elaborate is indicated by a statement, a question, and a reply. Sophocles could never be satisfied with anything short of the essential: that he stated; the rest he left out.

Though Prof. Gilbert Murray is, as every one knows, a charming and sensitive scholar, he is not the ideal translator of Sophocles. Perhaps the Zolas and Merediths—especially the Merediths—impress him too easily; perhaps he loves too well the literary tradition, the European tradition of five hundred years, to understand that the greatest poetry is rarely poetical:

A Voice, a Voice, that is borne on the Holy Way!

What art thou, O Heavenly One, O Word of the Houses of Gold?

Thebes is bright with thee, and my heart it leapeth; yet is it cold,

And my spirit faints as I pray.

I—ê! I—ê!

What task, O Affrighter of Evil, what task shall thy people essay?

One new as our new-come affliction,

Or an old toil returned with the years?

Unveil thee, thou dread benediction,

Hope's daughter and Fear's.

This is very pretty, but is it Sophocles?—or Swinburne? Still, grace there is, and distinction, in all that Prof. Murray writes—qualities that are not accentuated by the mouthings of the protagonist, Mr. Martin Harvey, the uninspired drone of the chorus, or the intermittent shrieking and bawling of the crowd. In the translation of the Professor the simple profundities of the poet become delicate verse, which in the mouth of the histrion is turned into rhythmless rhetoric.

But, after all, in performances of this sort it is not the play, but the production, that is the thing—though that is less true of this than of any other Reinhardt entertainment we have yet seen. Still, deeds not words: it is by theatrical effects and stage decoration, if by any means, that the message of Sophocles is to be conveyed to the people of London. That both are remarkable cannot be denied. Œdipus is a fine show. It is erudite, striking, and ingenious; but it is not a work of art. What is it, then? To borrow an expressive, though unnecessarily insulting term from our neighbours, it is "Le faux bon."

And what is "Le faux bon"? It is something exceedingly difficult to produce. We do not wish to belittle it; we wish to make plain its nature. If we succeed, we shall show also how choice and rare a thing this Œdipus is. At any rate, it keeps good company. The plays of Mr. Stephen Phillips are classical examples of the "faux bon," and, to remove a suspicion of disparagement, we hasten to add that the plays of M. Rostand and FitzGerald's paraphrase of Omar are examples too. The brilliant and entertaining pictures of Mr. Nicholson and Mr. Orpen serve our purpose even better, so closely do they resemble the first-rate. And now in this, the latest art, the new art of the theatre, come M. Bakst with his Scheherazade, and Prof. Reinhardt with Sumurun and The Miracle, levying contribution on all the others, culling from them all those features that people of taste expect and recognize in a work of art.

For "le faux bon" is produced to meet the demands of a tasteful and cultivated society—a society that knows as much about art as can be taught. People who have been brought up on terms of familiarity with the arts learn to recognize all those features that a work of art ought to possess; they know the effects that it ought to produce; but, unless born with the power of reacting emotionally and directly to what they see and hear, they cannot understand what a work of art is. Such people are numerous in these days. Far too intelligent to be duped by imitations of particular plays, or poems, or pictures, what they require is imitation art. And that is what they get. In Prof. Reinhardt's productions there are dramatic pauses and suspensions, effects of light and sound, combinations of movement and mass, line and colour, which recall, not particular works, but general ideas based on the study of hundreds of works, and provoke, in the right kind of spectator, precisely those trains of thought and feeling that are provoked by real works of art. True, they express no first-hand emotion, neither does the real thing to lovers of the "faux bon," but they cause physical reactions (as when Jocasta's women rush screaming on to the stage) subtle enough to do duty for æsthetic emotions. It is hard to believe that these refined stimulants are precisely the same in kind as the collisions and avalanches of melodrama; but they are.

Œdipus is a good "show." To appreciate it properly we must realize that it is nothing else. We must compare it with pageants and ballets; and if, so comparing it, we like it less than some that we have seen at the Empire and the Alhambra, the generous will attribute our eccentricity to an overdeveloped moral sense. To be frank, we do not believe that Prof. Reinhardt or M. Bakst has more to say than the creators of our best musical ballets. But, while the latter modestly pretend to nothing more than the flattery of our senses by means of form and sound and colour, the wizards of "the new art" claim to express the most profound and subtle emotions. We prefer "1830" to The Miracle, because it is unpretentious and sincere. We prefer Œdipus to the pantomime because it is prettier and shorter. As works of art they all seem to us about equal.