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SOPHOCLES IN LONDON
I
THERE need be nothing anachronous or
archaeological about a performance of (Edipus
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.
flesh on bone and
They would only have put
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
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