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1 32
SOPHOCLES IN LONDON
rob the classics of their terrors needed much
audacity and some irreverence, the new ideas
won ground by sheer force of
plausibility.
Unfortunately, to the modern scholar an
intelligent public meant a public of modern
scholars. He peopled the Attic theatre with
an audience of cultivated liberals, and
" "
by
a good play meant the sort of play such a
public would relish. Whence it followed that
the Athenian dramatists must have concerned
themselves with those problems which have
been so acutely discussed in the plays of
Mr. Galsworthy and Mr. Shaw.
As a fact, Athenian tragedy is never, or
hardly ever, concerned with intellectual matters
of any sort ;
its business is to express emotion,
and this it has done in the most perfect
literary form ever devised by man. The
great merit of Miss E. B. Abraham's performance
is that she plays the part of Deianeira
neither as if that lady were a relic of the most
insipid period of classical sculpture, nor yet
as though she were cousin-german to Hedda
Gabler. When she errs, she errs on the side
of modernity ; and that is as it should be.
Certainly she puts too much " psychology "
into the character of the fond, gentle lady,
whose simple humanity at pathetic odds with
Fate wins sympathy from the audience without
effort or emphasis ; while a hankering after