From 'Agamemnon' To 'Faust'

The Agamemnonof Aeschylus was performed in Greek at the Stadium yesterday afternoon (June 19, 1906). This was the third of three, an open rehearsal on June 14, and a first public performance last Saturday (June 16) to audiences numbering in all 10,000 persons.

As invited guests came poets, painters, sculptors, dramatists, composers, actors, novelists, classical scholars, university and college presidents, jurists, clergymen, editors, journalists, statesmen, soldiers, and bankers. It is pronounced to have been a gathering of eminence such as has been rarely equalled on this continent.

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This review is written as of the second public performance, yesterday's, which went superbly on a radiant afternoon, one of June's rarest days. Last Saturday's was marred by a thin but persistently drizzling rain.

It was marred by more than rain. At a slackening, when the performance was due to start, a gentleman in contemporary street clothes, presumably Mr. John Ellerton Lodge, who composed the excellent music of the drama for men's voices to the accompaniment of woodwind instruments, came out from Agamemnon's palace doors carrying a pan of incense to lay on the altar where it might now be lighted with some hope that it would smoke. His foot slipped on the rain-greased altar step and went right through the marble, a canvas flap of which went on fluttering in the breeze until Intermission. His act had great success, but was not repeated.

Two other anachronisms are regretfully recorded. The Department of Classics countenanced the erection of hermae in the palace portico, these being busts from the Praxitelean Hermes and the Apollo Belvedere, a trifling discrepancy of centuries from the Homeric period. The other was the costume of Cassandra's charioteer, Mr. John Weare, class of 1907. Having been chosen for his brawn and skill to manage the span of affectionate but spirited Arabian horses, this charioteer, who also drives an automobile, chose in turn to wear his driver's license, a white celluloid button, usually worn on coat lapel, pinned to his fillet at midpoint of his forehead where, as it glanced and gleamed in the sunlight, the spurious interpolation was doubtless supposed by the audience to be some antique jewel of fabulous value.

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The Agamemnon is first of three plays, the Oresteia ("about Orestes"), which form the only trilogy that has survived to us from Greek drama. Beginning in a hopeless hereditary blood feud, it ends in an orderly court of law. From Force to Persuasion, this trilogy has been declared to be one of the supreme achievements of man in his thus-far residence on this planet. Although approached by Sophocles, Euripides, and Shakespeare, the Agamemnon, even considered alone; has never been surpassed.

Its action is on such a grand scale as to be visually intelligible from only the briefest of briefings of its plot; though the three audiences, open rehearsal and two formal performances, were aided by libretti, Professor W.W. Goodwin's translation into English prose, the Greek text on opposite page. Many of the audience were repeaters, saw all three representations, and were finally able to follow the speeches almost line by line. Your reviewer had an unfair advantage--the great good luck to have studied the text in Sidgwick's edition under the instruction of Professor Herbert Weir Smyth, one of the living authorities, if not the foremost, on the dramas of Aeschylus. More than one Grecian who has been thoroughly immersed in a study of the Agamemnon has later testified that it was a major experience of his life.

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Is it complained that Aeschylus stops his show four times early in its first act to insert a choric ode? It is likewise complained that the external action of Wagner's Tristan und Isolde all but stops in the second act, and does stop in the third. Yet if one understands what is going on in Wagner's orchestra, Tristanfrom beginning to end is a blaze of emotional excitement; and if one understands what is going on in the orchestra ("dancing-place" of the Chorus) in the Agamemnon, the blaze of intellectual excitement is almost unbearable... As if Beethoven, a poet of comparable dimensions, had written three, or four, expository cadenzas stating the thematic content of the whole work in the first movement of a violin or pianoforte concerto.

It had to be done. For a proper understanding of the Oresteia not one strophe of those choric odes can be left out. From the plot action alone, the audience might suppose itself to be watching a rather unpleasant melodrama. The poet is intent that we know what profound issues are at stake. These odes are further remarkable in that they presuppose an Athenian audience able to grasp their content at a first hearing. If, not what would have been the point of composing them?

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Let due respect be paid the players. Mr. Herbert Strathmore Wyndham Gittens's clear and beautifully modulated English voice is admirable for the part of Klytemnestra, and it was skillfully pitched. Mr. Paul Elmer More, literary editor of The Nation, permitted himself to write ecstatically in the New York Evening Post (June 18) that Mr. Wyndham-Gittens's "face and eyes would be a fortune to any tragedy queen on the stage." Be that as it may, his eyes and face during those speeches of sinister irony which lead to the murder of the King were not such as one would yearn to meet at dusk in an obscure alley. Mr. Marc Clapp grasped the rusticity of the Watchman's Prologue, heavily freighted with forebodings; Mr. Doane Gardiner, as Herald, a track athlete in private life, entered running at a plausibly pelting long-distance pace, yet with breath enough to deliver quite stunningly and with graphic gestures the dreadful Messenger's Speech of the fleet storm-wrecked on it homeward voyage. Mr. Perley Noyes's Agamemnon was a king out of the Iliad, quite as intended by Aeschylus, and Mr. Alfred Longfellow Benshimol's Aegisthos, a brilliant, sparkling daredevil, jubilantly and dangerously off his guard.

It had been expected that Mr. Trumbull Stickney, our gifted scholar and poet, who had initiated the performance, would play a leading role, and he had planned to vanish over week-ends during the winter "to the bleakest and loneliest sea beach in New England" (Chappaquiddick off Martha's Vineyard?) to walk its sands while memorizing the whole play. Death took this gracious person, and he is grievously missed. The part of Choregos, which is probably the heaviest in the drama, was then assumed by Mr. Frank Hewitt Birch, who started from scratch without one word of Greek, sang Mr. Lodge's ingenious music most movingly, especially his lament for the King, and, at expiry of the final performance, fainted back stage. "Cold water on my face and a shot of whiskey in my gullet knocked me to my feet so I could take my bows with the rest of the cast."

That cast, as well as everyone connected with the performance, did have ovation after ovation. Anyone might have thought we had beaten Yale.

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Mr. George Riddle--is it by direct interposition of Divine Providence, or, more likely, of Pallas Athene?--the distinguished actor who first made his reputation as Oedipus Rex, which he played in the Greek of Sophocles at Sanders Theatre in 1881, a nationally notable event, and now retired from the stage, is living in Cambridge. He coached the student players. They have confided to me in strict confidence, which I never would dream of violating, that while members of the Department of Classics were anxiously consulting about the correct syllabic "quantities" of verse readings (after the manner of their so pronounced devotion to methods of Teutonic scholarship), Mr. Riddle was anxiously consulting with these players how to send chills up the spines of the audience. They settled for the chills.

So did we. Has the scene of Cassandra's clairvoyance and departure to death ever been equalled? If so, where? Ophelia's mad scene is, by comparison, that of a namby-pamby nitwit. To the great credit of Mr. Arunah Brady be it said that he was able to convey much of its pity and terror. This scene has everything. She is not mad; on the contrary, she is the one person sane. Seeress, she can see the crimes already wreaked under that roof, and foresee the two about to follow, the murder of Agamemnon and of herself. Her speeches begin with little more than unintelligible bird-like cries of mantic possession, but gradually clarify to explicit prophecy, yet all opaque to the listeners ... The Queen reappears to order her indoors. Cassandra stands still, rapt and benumbed, in her chariot where she has been left when the King, quiting his, has walked into his palace on that fatal Purple Carpet, very symbol of mortals trampling on that which belongs to the gods only. "I can't stand here wrangling with a slave," says Klytemnestra, and goes back into the palace where she has more urgent work in hand.

Cassandra's farewell to the Sun-a characteristically Aeschylean touch of grandeur, like Prometheus's appeal to the elements--was delivered while half kneeling on the Earth. It concludes with that heart-piercing line, "It is not myself, but the life of man I pity." So saying, this Cassandra, pulling her mantle over her face, rushes with outspread arms to the palace doors, blindly throws them open, and disappears without another sound. But Agamemnon's death cries are heard.

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Does this greatest of tragic dramas, grand though it is, sound to us as being of merely antiquarian interest? A brochure, first printed in England in 1901, republished in New York in 1903, is now fairly well known to have been written by Mr. G. Lowes Dickinson, the distinguished Hellenist, and Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge. Purporting to be Letters From a Chinese Official,on its seventeenth page is this:

"The competition for markets bids fair to be a more fruitful cause of war than was ever in the past the ambition of princes or the bigotry of priests. The peoples of Europe fling themselves, like hungry beasts of prey, on every yet unexploited quarter of the world... But always while they divide the spoil, they watch one another with a jealous eye; and sooner or later, when there is nothing left to divide, they will fall upon one another. That is the real meaning of your armaments; you must devour or be devoured. And it is precisely these trade relations which it was thought would knit you in the bonds of peace, while, by making every one of you cut-throat rivals of the others, have brought you within reasonable distance of a general war of extermination."

Are not we modern nations, on a planet already in train to be unified by speed of communication and travel, by science and the arts, still living in a state of primitive hereditary blood feud? Are not our independent national sovereignties already obsolete? Are we not sick from centuries of mutual slaughter, heedless of our Cassandras, and only to be rescued from pursuing Furies by refuge in an orderly court of law where the wisdom of Pallas Athene can cast the deciding vote? Is the Oresteia of Aeschylus mere antiquarianism? Would that it were!

(This review, written fifty-seven years after the performance, is in part to ask whether a university which in 1906 could magnificently produce the Agamemnon in Greek in the Stadium cannot now in the Loeb Theatre, annually at Easter, stage performances in English of Goethe's Faust.)

Ed. note: The CRIMSON'S 1906 crystal ball told us that Mr. Price would be graduated magna cum laude the following year; would later write, among many other books, "The Dialogues of Alfred North Whitehead" and serve for many years as a member of the Overseers' Committee to visit the Department of Philosophy; and would in 1964 complete fifty years as editorialist for the Boston Globe and fifty-seven years as a Boston journalist.