A Writer's Diary Read Free

way the
Electra
of Sophocles, which has been dragging on down here, though it's not so fearfully difficult after all. The thing that always impresses me fresh is the superb nature of the story. It seems hardly possible
not
to make a good play of it. This perhaps is the result of having traditional plots which have been made and improved and freed from superfluities by the polish of innumerable actors and authors and critics, till it becomes like a lump of glass worn smooth in the sea. Also, if everyone in the audience knows beforehand what is going to happen, much finer and subtler touches will tell, and words can be spared. At any rate my feeling always is that one can't read too carefully, or attach enough weight to every line and hint; and that the apparent bareness is only on the surface. There does, however, remain the question of reading the wrong emotions into the text. I am generally humiliated to find how much Jebb is able to see; my only doubt is whether he doesn't see too much—as I think one might do with a bad modem English play if one set to work. Finally, the particular charm of Greek remains as strong and as difficult to account for as ever. One feels the immeasurable difference between the text and the translation with the first words. The heroic woman is much the same in Greece and England. She is of the type of Emily Bronte. Clytaemnestra and Electra are clearly mother and daughter, and therefore should have some sympathy, though perhaps sympathy gone wrong breeds the fiercest hate. E. is the type of woman who upholds the family above everything; the father. She has more veneration for tradition than the sons of the house; feels herself born of the father's side and not of the mother's. It's strange to notice how although the conventions are perfectly false and ridiculous, they never appear petty or undignified as our English conventions are constantly made to do. Electra lived a far more hedged in life than the women of the mid-Victorian age, but this has no effect upon her, except in making her harsh and splendid. She could not go out for a walk alone; with us it would be a case of a maid and a hansom cab.

    Tuesday, September 10th
    Though I am not the only person in Sussex who reads Milton, I mean to write down my impressions of
Paradise Lost
while I am about it. Impressions fairly well describes the sort of thing left in my mind. I have left many riddles unread. I have slipped on too easily to taste the full flavour. However I see, and agree to some extent in believing, that this full flavour is the reward of highest scholarship. I am struck by the extreme difference between this poem and any other. It lies, I think, in the sublime aloofness and impersonality of the emotion. I have never read Cowper on the sofa, but I can imagine that the sofa is a degraded substitute for
Paradise Lost.
The substance of Milton is all made of wonderful, beautiful and masterly descriptions of angels' bodies, battles, flights, dwelling places. He deals in horror and immensity and squalor and sublimity but never in the passions of the human heart. Has any great poem ever let in so little light upon one's own joys and sorrows? I get no help in judging life; I scarcely feel that Milton lived or knew men and women; except for the peevish personalities about marriage and the woman's duties. He was the first of the masculinists, but his disparagement rises from his own ill luck and seems even a spiteful last word in his domestic quarrels. But how smooth, strong and elaborate it all is! What poetry? I can conceive that even Shakespeare after this would seem a little troubled, personal, hot and imperfect. I can conceive that this is the essence, of which almost all other poetry is the dilution. The inexpressible fineness of the style, in which shade after shade is perceptible, would alone keep one gazing into it, long after the surface business in progress has been despatched. Deep down one catches still further combinations,