THE TRAGEDIANS.*
Tine humanities have really become human in these days, and you may read a learned book on the Classics now and hardly know that it is learned. For the new English Scholarship conceals its learning ; it appeals to ordinary men, and does not use a language which only experts can understand. Yet the new scholarship is not therefore cheap and easy. To write * good book in the Murray tradition a man must have uncommon gifts. He must have that fine type of learning which knows things, but knows also the proportions of things, and is therefore saved from pedantry ; he must have imagination, too, and enthusiasm and a freshness of outlook such as scholars seldom keep for long. Books by such men are rare, because such men are rare. Yet one at least has appeared of late. Professor Gilbert Norwood has essayed (as successfully as boldly) to Sine to scholars and simpler men alike an account of all Greek Tragedy. In a single volume he covers the whole ground—literary and dramatic criticism, archaeology, even prosody. He has done a great service, for while an amateur can learn from his book all that he need ever know of the tragedians, the most expert of experts will find in the critical chapters new ideas fd • 0Z5 saddis Sty Osbert liorrood. London: accesses and ea Ills. new interpretations which will always interest, and occasionally provoke him. The provocations will catch the attention first, of course. No man can write anything worth reading on Euripides and hope that anyone else will entirely agree with him, but Professor Norwood's wholesale acceptance of Verrall's views is provocative beyond necessity. Indeed, it is a challenge to all sane criticism. Verrall was the noblest of men and the most brilliant of teachers, and he has done more than any other single critic to illuminate Euripides ; but his imagination so far outran his judgment that two-thirds of his actual conclusions are just fantastic. Let us thank God for men like Verrall, who galvanized the scholarship of a whole generation ; let us thank God for the fire that was in them and for the light that they have sited ; but do not let us follow them blindly and dethrone our own reason to make way for theirs. It is true that on Euripides agreement is impossible, but it is really rather serious that Professor Norwood accepts Verrall's view of the Agamemnon, for the very clumsiness of Aeschylus' dramatic machinery (which made Verrall think that Aeschylus was as ingenious as he was himself but pretended not to be) is just what gives the clue to the proper understanding of Greek Tragedy. Aeschylus will never pleasa people who expect from him the technique of Mr. Bernard Shaw or even of Menander. Drama was a new art in 458 B.C., and a new art owes its birth to genius, but its technique to experience. No theories are needed to explain away bad drawing in Fra Angelico, or stiffness in an early statue ; and no theories are needed to explain. the " difficulties " in the Agamem- non. Indeed, the Agamemnon was much more easily appre- ciated and understood before Verrall wrote of it, and Professor Norwood helps us not at all by giving his theories a new publicity. Controversy apart, however, both Aeschylus and Euripides are treated fully, wisely, and sympathetically in this book. All that is needful is said, and much is suggested that is fresh and valuable.
But, after all, itis Sophocles who matters most, for the appre- ciation of Sophocles is the supreme reward and the final test of scholarship. Of all Greek literary artists he is the most artistic and the most Greek. Aeschylus has not quite reconciled poetry and drama. Poetical passages full of tremendous imaginative splendour occur side by side with dramatic passages full of naif argument or uncouth passion, and sometimes his imagination has so overtopped the expressive power of words that the strange, strained structure of his speech crashes to the depths. Euripides is too restless to work within the legitimate boundaries of his art, and indeed he has passed out of the old art altogether. For Euripides is the first of the moderns and not the last of the ancients. He is trying to create a now art, yet he is compelled to use the conventions of the old; and in spite of a few glorious lyrics and an occasional line wherein common speech is raised to a superhuman power, he is as provoking, puzzling and perverse as Mr. Galsworthy would no doubt seem if he were compelled to write all he wrote in the style of Paradise Lost. But Sophocles has mastered his medium as Aeschylus never did, and he does not ask it, as Euripides does, to express what it never can express. If Plato is the master of Attic prose, Sophocles is the master of Attic verse. The supremacy of his lyrics has never been in dispute, but throughout all his work he is the truest poet of the three. His language has the simplicity of great art and the orderly passionateness of great Greek art ; his verses have the same kind of beauty as the sculptures of the Parthenon. His characters, too, are more human than those of Aeschylus and more true than those of Euripides. They are not the vast, vague forms of the old Epic nor the rebellious neurotics of the problem play ; they are natural and normal human beings suffering or acting greatly but humanly. Electra, Antigone, Neoptolemus—Aeschylus could not create men and women like there, and Euripides would not ; he preferred his Admetus and his Medea.
The Greek poets ever excelled in seeing the universal in the individual, and that is why the whole world has loved to look on humanity through their eyes. In this kind of god-like vision Sophocles is again supreme. Professor Norwood is right when ho says that the address of Oedipus to Theseus in the Color/tuft " is less the speech of one man than the voice of Life itself." No figure could be more fiercely individual than the self-torturing Oedipus of the Tyrannua and the Coloneus, but Sophocles sees in him, too, the type of all struggling humanity that through suffering finds peace at the last. By the end of the Coloneus life stands justified and all the broken area are Joined. Sophocles himself was then close to death, and when Oedipus passes from sight amid the thunder, one of the prated achievements of the Greek mind is completed, and Sophocles' work is over with his life. Of the lines which crown that work Professor Norwood says " Noblest of all is the account of Oedipus' last moments, a passage which in breathless loveliness, pathos and religious profundity in beyond telling flawless and without peer." Those are words that might well apply to the artistic achievement of Sophocles as a whole, and they show that Professor Norwood has the three most needful qualifications for a writer on the Tragedians—he loves Sophocles, he under- stands Sophocles, he can explain Sophocles.
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