‘Disgusting!’
‘But necessary, like many disgusting things.’
‘Why not try the Prometheus?’
‘A magnificent field for stage effect, certainly. What with those ocean nymphs in their winged chariot, and Ocean on his griffin.... But I should hardly think it safe to reintroduce Zeus and Hermes to the people under the somewhat ugly light in which Aeschylus exhibits them.’
‘I forgot that,’ said Hypatia. ‘The Orestean trilogy will be best, after all.’
‘Best? perfect—divine! Ah, that it were to be my fate to go down to posterity as the happy man who once more revived Aeschylus’s masterpieces on a Grecian stage! But—Is there not, begging the pardon of the great tragedian, too much reserve in the Agamemnon for our modern taste? If we could have the bath scene represented on the stage, and an Agamemnon who could be really killed—though I would not insist on that, because a good actor might make it a reason for refusing the part—but still the murder ought to take place in public.’
‘Shocking! an outrage on all the laws of the drama. Does not even the Roman Horace lay down as a rule the—Nec pueros coram populo Medea trucidet?’
‘Fairest and wisest, I am as willing a pupil of the dear old Epicurean as any man living—even to the furnishing of my chamber; of which fact the Empress of Africa may some day assure herself. But we are not now discussing the art of poetry, but the art of reigning; and, after all, while Horace was sitting in his easy-chair, giving his countrymen good advice, a private man, who knew somewhat better than he what the mass admired, was exhibiting forty thousand gladiators at his mother’s funeral.’
‘But the canon has its foundation in the eternal laws of beauty. It has been accepted and observed.’
‘Not by the people for whom it was written. The learned Hypatia has surely not forgotten, that within sixty years after the Ars Poetica was written, Annaeus Seneca, or whosoever wrote that very bad tragedy called the Medea, found it so necessary that she should, in despite of Horace, kill her children before the people, that he actually made her do it!’