Page:The thirty-six dramatic situations (1921).djvu/91

 TWENTY-SIXTH SITUATION 89 And, in some prediction -- doubtless that of Tiresias, young at the time and not yet deprived of sight - there dawns the destiny of the two great families of tragedy par excellence, the Labdaeides and the Atrides, beginning in these crimes and running through all Greek legend. The tribadic or sapphic branch has not been used upon the stage; Mourey alone has attempted it, but in vain in his "Lawn Tennis." The objection which might be urged against it (and which probably explains why the drama, in the ages of its liberty, has made no use of it) is that this vice has not the horrible grandeur of its con- gener. Weak and colorless, the last evil habit of worn- out or unattractive women, it does not offer to the tragic poet that madness, brutal and preposterous, but springing from wild youth and strength, which we find in the crim- inal passion of the heroic ages. Seventh: Bestiality, or passion for a creature outside the human species. Classed in general as a vice, it is of no use theatrically. Nevertheless, in E - - A Woman Enamored of a Bull: - "The Cre- tans" of Euripides seems to have revealed the emotions, after all conceivable, of this "Ultima Thule" of sexual per- version. Better than anywhere else, evidently, the illogi- cal and mysterious character of the life of the senses, the perversion of a normal instinct, and the feeling of fatalism which its victims communicate, could here be presented in sad and awful nudity. Eighth: The Abuse of Minor Children borrows some- thing from each of the seven preceding varieties. That LCh a subject so modern, so English may in skilful hands become must pathetic, is readily apparent to those of us who rvad, a few years ago, the "Pall Mall Gazette."