Page:Notes and Queries - Series 12 - Volume 1.djvu/465

 12 S. 1. JUNES, 1916.]

NOTES AND QUERIES.

459

whites when hearing a promise or remark that one might doubt, the meaning being, " Are you in earnest ? " "Do you really mean it ? " C. CORNER.

Royal Societies Club.

and New,' privately printed 1889, says this is an exclamation of address, employed very much as " old man " is familiarly used in England when the person addressed is by no means of mature age. Though the | reference to Indian honesty was at first a j sarcastic allusion to the red man's thievish j propensities, now, when used as a form of address, nothing derogatory is implied.
 * J. S. Farmer, in his ' Americanisms, Old

It smacks very much of J. Fenimore Cooper, but I am unable to trace it. Mr. R. H. Thornton does not mention it in bis ' American Glossary,' 2 vols., London, 1912. I have never heard it used in the sense implied by Farmer, but usually as a playful oath to keep a promise.

ARCHIBALD SPARKE.

0n

The Supernatural in Tragedy. By Charles E. Whitmore. (Cambridge, Harvard University Press ; London, Milford, 7s. Qd. net.)

A CRITICAL essay on the uses of the supernatural was meditated by Coleridge for several years, and even promised by him to the readers of ' Bio- graphia Literaria.' His brilliant and erratic mind, alas ! never brought the project to fulfil- ment, and Mr. Whitmore hi this study for the Harvard Doctorate is largely a pioneer. His aim is twofold: to show how the tragedians of Greece, Italy, Fra nee, and England in ancient and modern times have introduced the supernatural, " and, on the basis of this historical study, to discuss the dramatic and aesthetic value of their methods."

We notice here that Germany is omitted, and thus we fail to get any account of the two parts of Goethe's ' Faust,' which would occur to most cultivated readers as important documents on the subject. Mastery, however, of the large field which Mr. Whitmore has taken is a sufficient business, and we are grateful to him for putting before us in historical sequence a multitude of plays, and explaining their merits and defects. But, like another American thesis, on disguise in the drama, which we reviewed ante, p. 99, this one is hampered by its limited point of view. At the end some tentative suggestions are put forth as to a new theory of tragedy to be derived from the supernatural. Such a theory would be more reasonable than one founded on the use of dis- guise ; but frankly we should not expect to learn anything from it. With Aristotle the truly tragic character is a good man failing 5i' afjiapriav rivd. The supernatural merely emphasizes for that man his error. It brings home his sin with a force beyond human means, or it explains it and justifies his suffering when the day for repentance

is past. But conscience may do this without? superhuman intervention. The supernatural is not, as Mr. Whitmore hints, essential in a perfect expression of the tragic spirit in drama ; it is, for instance, absent from ' King Lear.'

A ghost or divine appearance, whether sub- jective or objective, we should naturally take as a personification of Nemesis. Mr. Whitmore begins otherwise by noticing an essay of Laf cadio Hearn which leads us little beyond the old tag : " Primus in orbe decs fecit timor." But, of course, it is generally true that " the supernatural terror. . . . may be defined as the dread of some potentially malevolent power, of incalculable capacity to work evil," and that to work its full effect it must be indefinite and exhibited within a brief compass. It must also fit in with the plot as a constituent force, with an actual influence on the characters,, and here, with the American zeal for classification, Mr. Whitmore makes two classes, the " intrinsic " use of the supernatural and the " decorative." The division is crude, and in some cases leads to unsatisfactory results. The discussion of JEschylus is excellent, but when we come to Sophocles, and still more when we come to Euripides, we feel the defects of Mr. Whitmore's method. We learn that " Sophokles is far more concerned with creating effective theatrical situations than with attaining a due relation of supernatural to plot." We should prefer to say that Sophocles deals with problems more intricate than those of JEschylus, and therefore requiring a more elaborate scrutiny into human character. Philoctetes, for instance, is loyal and guiltless ; yet he is condemned to years of suffering. His is not a character in which K6 He is outside the ^Eschylean formula.

On Euripides we are referred to a German scholar, and Verrall's views are sharply criticized. Mr. Whitmore has a eood word for Athena in the ' Iphigenia in Tauris,' which is, indeed, an essentially romantic piece, with some of the elements of a fairy -tale ; but he demolishes to his own satisfaction much of the reputation of Euripides. Regarding a citation of Lucian used by Mr. Norwood as evidence for his rationalization of the ' Bacchse,' Mr. Whitmore writes : " Lucian has as much bearing on the state of thought in the fifth century B.C. as the editorial page of the New York Sun has on the mental habits of the Elizabethans."

Lucian wrote an approximation to good Attic, and was largely concerned with the figures of' Attic drama. Are we then to suppose that the New York Sun in any part of its esteemed columns approximates to the style of the Eliza- bethans or is daily deep hi Shakespearian characters ? We can hardly treat with patience a writer who says of Euripides : " As a matter of fact, his repute was largely due to his skill in packing moral observations into quotable iambics, and had often little enough to do with any opinion of his ability as a dramatist."

We should be glad to have the name of the ancient Athenian who handed down this " matter of fact,"" and must decline to consider Euripides as merely incompetent. Doubtless his art was contaminated by rhetoric, as was that of Seneca, who is fairly revealed here as a frigid and ineffective purveyor of the supernatural. Yet Seneca had a long influence, and some trace of his rhetoric may yet linger in the Ghost of ' Hamlet,' whose elaborate explanations always give the present writer a-