1904] Gilbert Murray's Hip poly tus 101 



added to the effect. Even the few professionals were sobered into a 

 kind of good taste. With the exception of Theseus and a nurse 

 nobody was vulgar, and the messenger (Granville Barker), who recites 

 the catastrophe, was admirable. Everybody enunciated well, a thing 

 more necessary in verse than prose, and the chaunting chorus seemed 

 to me in its place. The slow movement for the first act is an artistic 

 preparation for the rest, and throughout it is the piece that enthralls, no 

 cleverness of the actors. Compared with Shakespeare the superiority 

 lies in the workmanship quite as much as in the tragic atmosphere. 

 The piece has an ordered sequence no play of Shakespeare's possesses. 

 There are none of Shakespeare's vulgarities, his appeals to the gallery, 

 his wearisome Elizabethan jokes. The rhymed verse, too, I find more 

 effective than blank verse, at any rate than the very best, and a vast 

 amount of Shakespeare's is mere wind. The climax of Hippolytus 

 is tremendous, the catastrophe the most powerful thing in dramatic 

 literature. At the end of it we were all moved to tears, and I got 

 up and did what I never did before in a theatre, shouted for the 

 author, whether for Euripides or Gilbert Murray I hardly knew. 

 Nobody cared to call for the actors, this I consider the most complete 

 feature of the triumph. Percy and Madeline were there with Doro- 

 thy, also Carlisle, sitting almost next to me, and his son-in-law 

 Roberts, and Mackail, and his wife. 'Murray with his family in a 

 stage box, and a full house behind us. When it was over I went to 

 tea in Belgrave Square. 



"31^ May. — To Cambridge on a visit to Browne, whom I found 

 with Sheykh Hassan Towfik, the recently installed Arabic tutor. With 

 Sheykh Hasson I had a long talk in Browne's rooms at Pembroke, and 

 found him a most interesting man, who had already gained much 

 influence with such of the undergraduates as were studying Arabic 

 for employment in Egypt. (His sudden death a few days afterwards 

 was a great misfortune.) Then on to Babraham where I dined and 

 slept. 



" 6th Jane. — Lunched with George and Sibell, he very full of the 

 Montem at Eaton, to which he had gone on Saturday, an honoured 

 guest with George Curzon. The pair are to be given Doctor's degrees 

 at Oxford. ' I like honours and dignities,' said George. He talked, 

 too, with enthusiasm about Rodin and Paris, from which he had just 

 returned. 



" yth June. — I have it from the same source from which I originally 

 heard it, that Eldon Gorst is certainly to succeed Cromer at Cairo in 

 two years' time. I wrote to Mohammed Abdu to tell him this, and of 

 the probability of a new regime being started at Cairo. 



'15th June. — Dined with George Wyndham, and among others 

 Dunraven, a pleasant party, with much talk about Ireland. Both 



