Download File

1 3 o SOPHOCLES IN LONDON
to what they see and hear, they cannot
understand what a work of art is. Such
people are numerous in these days. Far too
intelligent to be duped by imitations of
particular plays, or poems, or pictures, what
is they require imitation art. And that is
what they get. In Prof. Reinhardt's productions
there are dramatic pauses and suspensions,
effects of light and sound, combinations
of movement and mass, line and colour,
which recall, not particular works, but general
ideas based on the study of hundreds of
works, and provoke, in the right kind of
spectator, precisely those trains of thought
and feeling that are provoked by real works of
art. True, they express no first-hand emotion,
neither does the real thing to lovers of the
" faux bon," but they cause physical reactions
(as when Jocasta's women rush screaming on
to the stage) subtle enough to do duty for
aesthetic emotions. It is hard to believe that
these refined stimulants are precisely the same
in kind as the collisions and avalanches of
melodrama ; but they are.
(Edipus is a good " show." To appreciate it
properly we must realize that it is nothing
else. We must compare it with pageants and
ballets ; and if, so comparing it, we like it less
than some that we have seen at the Empire
and the Alhambra, the generous will attribute