e tyrant submits
sullenly to those he can neither vanquish nor appease.
Mr. Garrod, who played the part of Hyllus, spoke his lines exceedingly
well. Perhaps the chorus was a little too classical--that is to say, too
stiff and lackadaisical; but the phrasing was always pretty and
sometimes unexpected, and the lovely strophe beginning,
[Greek: hon aiola nux enarizomena;]
seemed to gain a new enchantment from the delicately concerted voices.
Scholars will have to bring strong arguments to justify what is an
obvious literary blemish in the distribution of the concluding lines.
Somehow or other, between Hyllus and the chorus, the sombre intensity of
the complaint was allowed to evaporate. The words,
[Greek: ta de nun hestot' oiktra men hemin, aischra]
and
[Greek: kouden touton o ti me Zeus]
should come from the same lips, surely.
O Providence, I will not praise,
Neither for fear, nor joy of gain,
Your blundering and cruel ways.
* * * * *
And all men's miserable days,
And all the ugliness and pain,
O Providence, I will not praise.
THE FLIGHT OF THE DRAGON[14]
[Sidenote: _Athenaeum Oct. 1911_]
No one will be surprised to learn that fourteen hundred years ago the
Chinese laid down six canons of art. Nothing is more natural than that
some great artist, reviewing in old age his life and work, should deduce
from the mass of experience and achievement certain propositions, and
that these, in time, should become rules, to be preached by pedants,
practised by dilettanti, and ignored by every artist worthy of the name.
What does surprise us is that the first of these Chinese canons should
be nothing less than a definition of that which is essential in all
great art. "Rhythmic vitality," Prof. Giles calls it; Mr. Okakura, "the
Life-movement of the Spirit through the Rhythm of things"; Mr. Binyon
suggests "the fusion of the rhythm of the spirit with the movement of
living things."
"At any rate," he says, "what is certainly meant is that the artist
must pierce beneath the mere aspect of the world to seize and
himself to be possessed by that great cosmic rhythm of the spirit
which sets the currents of life in motion. We should say in Europe
that he must seize the universal in the particular."
"The universal in the particular," that is perhaps what the greatest art
expresses. P
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