Welsh Journals

years ago was the one bright spot in very deadly Paris season there were huge crowds waiting for hours outside the Cornedie KncS before the doors opened, and at the end of the piece the distinguished actor was called to the footlights five times amid the most wild applause. Euripides is in far closer touch with the modern mind than his rital Sophocles. For his plots, it is true he went back to the tenth century B.C., but the ideas discussed in his plays are still fresh in the twentieth century A.D. The wrongs of women wildly groping in helpless rebellion, religious doubt in all its phases, the injustice of accepted deity the hideous mockery of a civilization that has still room for the horrors of war, all are there as presented to an Athenian audience in the guise of old myths that were probably as incomprehensible to them as they are to us. In his introductory chapters Professor Murray discusses the fifth century Athenian peasant and the intellectual renaissance represented by the much-maligned sophists," who fought for light and knowledge and freedom and the development of all man's powers. If we prefer blinkers and custom, subordination and the rod. we shall think them dangerous and shallow creatures (pp. 50, 51) he also investigates our sources for the poet life we see how most of the so-called Lives" are nothing but the vapourings of diligent but somewhat thickheaded Greek pedants, who gravely incorporated in their biographies bits of current gossip and coarse jests taken from comic Athenian dramatists of the reactionary party, resulting in an absurd travesty as like reality as would be a life-history of any prominent statesman culled from the cartoons and jokes of the comic papers and the election tirades of his most virulent opponents. Besides a fascinating discussion of the plays in their ancient setting and modem import, there are two chapters on the essential framework of those elements that are so puzzling to a modern audience, especially the prologue and the chorus. There is also a timely exposure of a long-lived misconception regarding the del ex machina in Euripides. We are all familiar with this God from the machine," who cuts the knot at the end of a play, though perhaps we do not at once recognize him in the rich uncle from America, who saves the hero from bankruptcy and pulls the ropes that ring the wedding chimes. But there is an historical as well as an economic reason for the appearance of the divine being at the end of a Greek play he belongs to the religious service in which the Greek drama originated. The theory which takes the Deus as a device-and a very unskilful one-for somehow finishing a story that has got into a hopeless tangle never in a single case holds good-not even in the Orestes And there are some plays, like the Iphigenia in Tauris in which, so far from the god coming to clear up a tangled plot the plot has to be diverted at the last moment so as to provide an excuse for the god's arrival (p. 223). Thus it is that even in a popular hand- book the author was compelled to discuss the origins of Greek Tragedy; again and again we are flung back on the religious dance which gave it birth thus and thus alone can its anomalies be explained: for a fuller treatment we may refer to Miss Harrison's Ancient Ritual and Art. It were idle to attempt any summary of a book so full of good things- the defence of the Rhesus, p. 71. We had marked several pieces for quotation, but must content ourselves with just one passage which it would be well for many to ponder over who so lightly condemn the most progressive political and religious movements of our time. In every contest that goes on between Intelligence and Stupidity, between Enlightenment and Obscurantism, the powers of the dark have this immense advantage they never understand their opponents, and consequently represent them as always wrong, always wicked, whereas the intelligent party generally makes an effort to understand the stupid and to sympathize with anything that is good or fine in their attitude. Many of our Greek histories still speak as if the great spiritual effort which created fifth century Hellenism was a mas. of foolish chatter and in- tellectual trickery and personal self-indulgence (P. 48). Those already acquainted with Professor Murray's earlier work will dose the book with the reply made by his servants to Pwyll Prince of Dyved in the old Mabinogi "Arglwyd, heb wy. ny bu zystal dy wybot,-ni bu well dy dosparth eyroet nor vlwydyn honn. Professor Murray has here surpassed himself. University College, Bangor. T. HUDSON-WILLIAMS. "The Life of Francis Thompson," by Everard Meynell. Burns & Oates. 15s. net. Pp. 351. On opening a new life one ought to ask oneself very sternly wither it is justified. The fact that a man has been a great poet or painter or musician is, alone, no justification for our curiosity whatsoever; the only excuse for a life is that the fife itself is worthy of record that without it we should be losing some valuable part of the mans message, or at least that for its lack we should fail to understand the message that he has left us. t is on this last plea that a justification of this book can rightly rely. Mr Meynell has succeeded in clearing up much in Thompson's message that was formerly obscure. It is a strange book. Facts are rightly treated as of symbolic value only, and even then are surprisingly rare. We only know the broadest outlines of his life; our curiosity on unessential points is never satisfied. Anyone reading this book in the hopes of finding either sensational or sociological details of the life of a man completely destitute, anyone wishing to burrow into the morbid pathology of an opium taker will be disappointed. It is no book for keeping Toms." On the other hand it is no unthinking panegyric. Rather is it an honest attempt to tell us of the impression that this lonely man and immortal poet made on the family of his adoption. By letters from Thompson and from Thompson friends, by quotations from his poems and the reviews that they received, by memories and intuitions of the author and his family, he attempts to convey the impression of the man's personality. And if the outline remains a little hazy, we know that so it was in life. His comings and goings were mysterious; the facts of life were to him its greatest unreality. He would if he wished go to bed at 6 a.m and breakfast at 6 p.m. He was always with the best intentions liable to be late for an appointment by many hours. He had no sense of time, no sense of things. And withal he was almost childishly simple. Those who have imagined that with his fall into the extremes of poverty went that other fall, so common to he poets of the nineties, into the pits of debauchery, have gravely and libellously erred. During the many years of friendship, and almost daily companionship," wrote Alice Meynell in the Dublin Review, January 1908, it was evident to solicitous eyes that he was one of the most innocent of men." That base suggestion, we may hope, has received its death blow with the publication of this book. But its chief value is undoubtedly the light it throws on the workings of the poet's mind. We realise how naturally he dealt in the riches of the old ecclesiastical symbolism. and how lovingly he knew the bounty of God in nature. We see more dearly than ever that his similarity to the schocl of Crashaw and Donne was not imitative but temperamental. His style that at first sight seems often wilfully complex and strained is now understood as the necessary embodiment of his manner of thought. It is his word incarnate. And finally we see the struggles and renunciations, the tortuous borings of mind within itself, the brooding and dark nights of the soul that flowered at last in the transcendent mysticism of The Hound of Heaven.