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MISS COLERIDGE 47
a shrinking fastidiousness excluded from her
world much of the raw material from which
great art is made. Stray reflections on Greek
life and thought, though in themselves trivial,
are interesting for what they betray of a state
of mind familiar and always slightly distressing
to people who take art seriously. She
was a fair scholar Miss Sichel tells us ; cer-
tainly she studied under an excellent master
the author of " lonica " ; yet she could say
of the " Bacchaj " "
: The Hallelujah Lasses
get drunk on the wine of the spirit, not the
wine of the grape " ;
and of the " Medea " :
"
Medea is thoroughly fin de siecle ; says
she would rather go into battle three times
than have a baby once, pitches
into men like
anything. But there's too much Whitechapel
about her. How are you to be seriously
interested in a woman who has murdered her
mother and boiled
"
the ?
play begins
her father-in-law before
What is this but the shy jauntiness, the
elaborate understatement, of something small
in the presence of something great ? That
uneasy titter, caught from time to time as
one turns Miss Coleridge's pages, we seem to
have heard before in the Arena chapel or at
the end of a Bach fugue.
It is the comment
of
sophisticated refinement that can neither