ב 20 66 produced in those circumstances the life-size "Christ" that is the principal feature of the exhibition of his recent work which began last week at the Leicester galleries. His critics would have been his executioners. For his 'Christ," standing upright in the wrappings of the grave-a pitiably shrunken body, with its meagreness emphasized by two monstrously large hands, the left pointing to the nail wound in the right conforms to no previously accepted standard in the representation of the Son of God. People with a liking for one or the other traditional face of Christ will probably recoil from these Semitic features, in which there is no majesty and very little common human intelligence; while others may recall with surprise, possibly flavored with repulsion, that they have seen something very like Mr. Epstein's work among the effigies, the mummified bodies, of savage rulers of the preChristian period in the gloomy corridors of the British Museum. There is, in fact, something intensely eastern, intensely local in point of time, and supremely non-universal in this figure; and it is not unfair to say that the treatment of the lower limbs, the withered legs, formless beneath sepulchral cerements, conveys a strong suggestion of a dead past and of the corruption of death itself. 'But whatever Mr. Epstein's conception may or may not remind one of, and however grossly materialistic it may appear to those accustomed to a suaver, more idealistic conception, one cannot well charge him with irreverence. He is no more irreverent than the savage who fashions an idol out of wood or clay, and invests it with every carnal attribute that appeals to his own nature, in the attempt to embody an ideal. In some respects, indeed, Mr. Epstein's art seems to us to be as as a archaic as that of any savage, and this in spite of the ultra-modernity of his technique. Those disproportionate hands, for instance, are just the kind of device that an archaic artist would have resorted to, to call attention to the "story." He is, or appears savage does-frankly materialistic. His clever fingers bring to lifelike reproduction every trait, every detail of the material human body. He sees it whole and he sees it in part; instinctively he can, in sculpture, relate the parts one to another, until one almost expects the bronze to quicken to actual life. His "Christ" is the poor workingman of Judæa, and he has made Him that and nothing else. He has rendered Christ, but not the idea of Christ.' HARDY'S, The Dynasts, has been given at Oxford with great success. The following review of the performance by the poet Robert Nichols, appeared in the New Witness: 'It was uncommonly fitting that the first postbellum performance by the Oxford University Dramatic Society should be devoted to extracts from that great democratic epical drama, The Dynasts, the crowning masterpiece of the supreme tragic poet of our age, Thomas Hardy. The undertaking of such an enterprise was ambitious, but no more ambitious than the occasion demanded. The Athenians celebrated the defeat of Persian militarism by a Dionysian festival performance of Eschylus's Persa. Oxford, mindful of how many of her sons had fallen in like battle against the Prussians, not unconscious of the prodigious influence of the mind of the supreme Greek dramatist upon that of his latter disciple, determined to follow the example of the immortal city whose light she guards. Nor was this determination that of a few rare spirits. The stream of those who desired to become ticket holders, which thronged the theatre for several days before the opening performance, testified to the fact that the spectacle was to be one in which young Oxford might be said most earnestly to wish to participate, if only in the capacity of aud ence. "The performance was to be, it was felt, no mere entertainment but almost, I dare hazard, a rite. In this reenactment of episode from one of the most exalted periods of our history, Oxford was to pay a tribute, not only to the greatest of living writers of the English tongue, but also to the memory of that multitude of anonymous young men who had added to that mighty history pages even more poignant and certainly no less exalted. The drama, in which much the same version was used as had obtained in London during the war, opened on the Dorset Downs, and throughout its course we enjoyed what I might call a triple enactment of history. England as she was at home; the warfare of her sons abroad at sea off Trafalgar, on the Peninsula, in Belgium; and as she appeared to the eyes of the Eternal Historian in the shape of the choragus and his two ministrant spirits, Strophe and Antistrophe. 'And what a history it is! How skillfully has the poet presented his pageant of human strife! The spectator receives an impression of life's continuity and complexity not, I think, achieved since Shakespeare, he who knew so admirably to make circulate about his mightiest figures those of the quotidian pygmies, among whom Destiny, herself present in the heroic march of the decasyllabic rhythm and the cataclysms of symphonic nature, has compelled them to wear out their terrific being and whose very crotchets and fleshly limitations provide but the inch measure wherewith we mete their magnificence and heroic stature. 'It is not for me to record individual performances since Mr. Hardy has expressed himself as very well satisfied. I should, however, like to mention with what smooth dignity Mr. Harris spoke the paragraphs of the Reader. His was a difficult task, and he carried it out with admirable adresse, largely due to his extreme appreciation of the subtleties or prose rhythm and the flexibility of a voice remarkable for the quiet beauty of its tone. The Nelson of Mr. Colbourne excelled, in my opinion, that of the actor in the London production, and that is saying much. I found the Wellington of Mr. Sich most memorable: in fact, I have hardly ever beheld such skillful characterization on the stage; the slight asperity he lent to the Duke's diction, and the quick modulations of his voice, if not natural to Mr. Sich's daily speech, was a display of sheer virtuosity I have not seen equaled on this side of the Atlantic. Mr. Barton's Napoleon was not sufficiently masterful at the start, but he finished admirably. It was unfortunate that in the after scene of the Emperor's abdication the rostrum was not in better hands, for the Constant of Mr. Easton was a model of what acting in a minor part to gain a big effect for the principal should be. This is a pity, for this scene of Napoleon's sycophants departure, one out of Oriental disdain for a man he considers a coward, and the other from cupidity and perverse self-respect, is one of splendid irony. 'Mr. Denis Mackail provided an ingenious, if somewhat overbare, stage setting to the drama. At the close of the performance the name of the author who had, however, withdrawn, was greeted with the heartiest acclamation. Thus ended a noble evening, worthy of the great poet, the history We statu ord of Hardy! Nels to z TH the1 ndbe and ble i The! ct.l he has recorded, and the history which so many of the performers and the audience have helped to make. It is to be hoped that the society will see its way to giving, let us say, at least one matinee of their performance of this drama on the London stage.' A GOOD parody is a joy forever, and three students of the Bedford College for Women, Miss Joyce Lowe, Miss Elfrida Spencer, and Miss Muriel Waterhouse, have just written and produced one of the best. They have dared to mimic Greek tragedy itself, even to rag the great Gilbert Murray. The play concerns Dithiradne, daughter of King Kalkinides. She is betrothed to Elfricles, but her happiness is seriously impaired at the very beginning of the play by the disappearance of her favorite cat. Old Mooresias, a blind seer, arrives with his boy attendant, and, being rudely received by Elfricles, prophesies disaster and destruction. A messenger hurries on, as soon as Old Mooresias departs, and relates the horrible murder of the cat which he has seen 'all uncatted' in a gorge outside the city. Dithiradne falls into a paroxysm of grief, taking down her abundant dark hair and carefully handing each successive hairpin to a member of the chorus. The murderer is cursed, root and branch, with all his house, and as he happens to have been Egertonides, a stranger supplicating free hospitality, who is really the lost son of Kalkinides, the curse actually involves all the chief characters. Thus the device of 'irony' in the Greek sense is introduced with comical consequences, for the cursers have cursed themselves, and only one of the dwellers in Olympus can relieve them from their doom. Athena appears at the top of a curtain in answer to a final, unanimous prayer and suggests several ways of procuring relief, which are reected on the score of the trouble and expense involved. Lastly she proposes to send Herakles to bring back the cat, which is detained on the hither side of Styx, not being provided with the obol to pay Charon for its passage across. This proposal is joyously accepted, and all ends happily. Was there ever an age more fantastic than our own. Were the arts ever in like deliquescence? In the plastic arts, Vorticism; in literature Dadaism. What is the world coming to? In a volume of poems recently issued by M. Tristan Tzara, head of the FrancoSwiss Dadaist school, is to be found the following poem: pélamide a e ou o youyouyou i e ou o youyouyou drrrrrdrrrrdrrrrgrrrrgrrrrrgrrrrrrrr morceaux de durée verte voltigent dans ma chambre a o u ith io u ath a o u ith o u a ith les vers luisants parmi nous parmi nos entrailles et nos directions mais le capitaine étudie les indications de la boussole et la concentration des couleurs devient folle cigogne litophanie il y a ma mémoire et l'ocarina dans la pharmacie sériciculture horizontale des bâtiments pélagoscopiques la folle du village couve des bouffons pour la cour royale l'hôpital devient canal et le canal devient violon sur le violon il y a un navire et sur le bâbord la reine est parmi les émigrants pour mexico It is useless to attempt to refute these men. Fleecy clouds are driving high; Ho, for windy weather! Haul the boats up high and dry; When 't is windy weather. Soon the beach will screech and groan With the billows overthrown. Ho, for windy weather! How the billows boom and roar! Ho! Ho! Ho! Ho! [The New Witness] DIONYSIA BY WILFRED CHILDE In the rich wine-land ruddy with the fall, Where churches stand with slender towers on fire With fretted carven work of strange desire Above the steep towns, clustered high over all, Bacchus revisiting the land of the gods, Deserting Hellas and her vales of love To scan these new strange regions where the dove Was said to reign, after strange periods Out of the golden west to some de mesne Where dancers trampled the vats and loth to leave Sprang nude amid the throng, who, mouths agape, Watched him beneath red feet tread out the grape. [The London Mercury] TO E. G. BY AUSTIN DOBSON Were I to pause and hesitate And, when the power to do is done, THE LIVING AGE E PLURIBUS UNUM "These publications of the day should from time to time be winnowed, the wheat carefully preserved, and the chaff thrown away.' • Made up of every creature's best.' 'Various, that the mind Of desultory man, studious of change And pleased with novelty may be indulged.' EIGHTH SERIES, VOLUME XVII FROM THE BEGINNING, VOL. CCCV APRIL, MAY, JUNE 1920 UVING AGE BOSTON THE LIVING AGE COMPANY Copyright, 1920, by The Living Age Co. |