God make my brooding soul a rift
Through which a meaning gleams.
The Tragedy of Pompey the Great, unlike any Shaw play or even The Tragedy of Nan, is not good reading; its short sentences, tragic with import, are mere outlines. But they drive incarnate reality into one’s soul.
What was the tragedy of Pompey? Well, it began hundreds of years before he was born; he was the accidental embodiment of it. He had earned security and peace. He had aided Caesar in conquering Gaul. “Caesar would never have been anybody if Pompey hadn’t backed him.” But that tyrant’s lust for power provoked a civil war, and the end was “a blind, turbulent heaving towards freedom.” Pompey’s dream of freedom—his conviction that power was in too few hands—cost him his life. To him Rome was inwardly “a great democratic power struggling with obsolete laws.” He declared that “Rome must be settled. The crowd must have more power.” But Pompey’s dream was shallow and human, even if great, for, regarding the “thought of the world” as of transcendent importance, he asks, “For what else are we fighting but to control the thought of the world? What else matters?”
History seems to try to repeat itself. Lentulus, fearing that they were losing Rome, said to Pompey, “You have done nothing.” The reply—“Wait”—has a modern sound. Pompey was preparing to fight Caesar, but public opinion, voiced by Metellus, excitedly demanded, “but at once. Give him no time to win recruits by success. Give them no time here. The rabble don’t hesitate. They don’t understand a man who hesitates.”
That too might have been said by a modern American newspaper, affecting to speak for the crowd.
Philip, beloved of the maiden Antistia, is fanatically true to his master, whom he would follow “To the desert. To the night without stars. To the wastes of the seas. To the two-forked flame.” To him this blind devotion meant more than Antistia’s love. “We shall have to put off our marriage,” he said to her, and she, speaking from the deep heart of the mother, unachieved, answered:
Why, thus it is. We put off and put off till youth’s gone, and strength’s gone, and beauty’s gone. Till we two dry sticks mumble by the fire together, wondering what there was in life, when the sap ran.... When you kiss the dry old hag, Philip, you’ll remember these arms that lay wide on the bed, waiting, empty. Years. You’ll remember this beauty. All this beauty. That would have borne you sons but for your master.
Whatever the fate of Pompey, Antistia’s was the supreme tragedy.
DeWitt C. Wing.