--a society that knows as much about art as can be
taught. People who have been brought up on terms of familiarity with the
arts learn to recognize all those features that a work of art ought to
possess; they know the effects that it ought to produce; but, unless
born with the power of reacting emotionally and directly to what they
see and hear, they cannot understand what a work of art is. Such people
are numerous in these days. Far too intelligent to be duped by
imitations of particular plays, or poems, or pictures, what they require
is imitation art. And that is what they get. In Prof. Reinhardt's
productions there are dramatic pauses and suspensions, effects of light
and sound, combinations of movement and mass, line and colour, which
recall, not particular works, but general ideas based on the study of
hundreds of works, and provoke, in the right kind of spectator,
precisely those trains of thought and feeling that are provoked by real
works of art. True, they express no first-hand emotion, neither does the
real thing to lovers of the "faux bon," but they cause physical
reactions (as when Jocasta's women rush screaming on to the stage)
subtle enough to do duty for aesthetic emotions. It is hard to believe
that these refined stimulants are precisely the same in kind as the
collisions and avalanches of melodrama; but they are.

_OEdipus_ is a good "show." To appreciate it properly we must realize
that it is nothing else. We must compare it with pageants and ballets;
and if, so comparing it, we like it less than some that we have seen at
the Empire and the Alhambra, the generous will attribute our
eccentricity to an overdeveloped moral sense. To be frank, we do not
believe that Prof. Reinhardt or M. Bakst has more to say than the
creators of our best musical ballets. But, while the latter modestly
pretend to nothing more than the flattery of our senses by means of form
and sound and colour, the wizards of "the new art" claim to express the
most profound and subtle emotions. We prefer "1830" to _The Miracle_,
because it is unpretentious and sincere. We prefer _OEdipus_ to the
pantomime because it is prettier and shorter. As works of art they all
seem to us about equal.

II

[Sidenote: _The "Trachiniae" at "The Court."_]

[Sidenote: _Athenaeum July 1911_]

The players of Bedford College are winning for themselves a place of
honour amongst those who help the modern world to understand Greek
drama. The traditional