SOPHOCLES IN LONDON
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?