s part, what they hate--the abnormal and distinguished. He was a man
of action who mistrusted common sense, a good fellow on the side of
cranks: the race has never been common and is now almost extinct.

FOOTNOTE:

[13] "Letters of Edward John Trelawny." Edited, with a brief
Introduction and Notes, by H. Buxton Forman. (Frowde.)

SOPHOCLES IN LONDON

I

[Sidenote: _"OEdipus" at Covent Garden_]

[Sidenote: _Athenaeum Jan. 1912_]

There need be nothing anachronous or archaeological about a performance
of _OEdipus_ 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 OEdipus
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 hea