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Who does not recall Swinburne's scornful comment: Stoop, Chaucer, stoop; Keats, Shelley, Burns bow down. And who did not share the feeling of Mark Pattison at the pitiful anti-climax? "There certainly is something about Tennyson," he said, "that you find in very few poets; in saying what he says in the best words in which it can be said, he is quite Sophoclean. But this business of the peerage!
In 'Hedda Gabler' as in the 'Enemy of the People' Ibsen gives up the Sophoclean form which was exactly appropriate for the theme of 'Ghosts. With admirable artistic instinct the playwright returns to the framework of the "well-made play" or at least to that modification of the Scribe formula which Augier and Dumas fils had devised for their own use. The action has not happened before the curtain rises on the first act; it takes place in the play itself, in front of the spectators, just as it does in the 'Demi-monde. The exposition is contained in the first act, clearly and completely; the characters are all set in motion before us, Hedda and her husband, Mrs. Elvsted and Eilert, and the sinister figure of Inspector Brack in the background. This first act, even to its note of interrogation hung in the air at the end, might have been constructed by Augier, just as the scene in the second act between Hedda and Brack recalls the manner of the younger Dumas, even in its lightness and its wit. Yet we may doubt whether any of the modern French playwrights could have lent the same curt significance to this commonplace interview between a married demi-vierge and an homme-
Pater, as usual, hits the mark with an infallible hand when he speaks of that overhanging Sophoclean tragedy which darkened Lamb's earlier days and never quite left him. It is, of course, this, the sense of one living always on the edge of a precipice, that gives such piquancy and charm to Elia's mania for "little things."
He could not put from him the compliments not ostensibly directed at him, but he could and did take up the criticisms of the Sophoclean drama, point by point, and refute them in the interest of literature, with a masterly elimination of himself and his own part in it.
From a modern point of view the crime is adequately accounted for by the character of Don Cesar; but if the story was to be given a Sophoclean coloring it was necessary that the horrors appear as the necessary evolution of ineluctable fate.
Shakespeare has been sometimes taxed with the barbarism of profuseness and exaggeration. But this is to measure him by a Sophoclean scale. The simplicity of the antique tragedy is by no means that of expression, but is of form merely.
The three advance to the palace which Orestes enters to dispatch his mother, Electra bidding him smite with double force, wishing only that Aegisthus were with her mother. The end of Aegisthus himself is contrived with Sophoclean art. He comes in hurriedly to find the two strangers who have proof of Orestes' death.
To the tragedy of Verdun, these men were the chorus; there was something Sophoclean in this group of older men alone in the silence and ruin of the beleaguered city. A stove filled with wood from the wrecked houses gave out a comfortable heat, and in an alley-way, under cover, stood a two-wheeled hose cart, and an old-fashioned seesaw fire pump.
But, after all, the Ptolemies could not do otherwise. You can only have Sophoclean dramas in a Sophoclean age; and theirs was no more of one than ours is, and so the drama died a natural death; and when that happens to man or thing, you may weep over it if you will, but you must, after all, bury it, and get something else in its place except, of course, the worship of the gods.
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