_OEdipus_ is a good "show." To appreciate it properly we must realize that it is nothing else. We must compare it with pageants and ballets; and if, so comparing it, we like it less than some that we have seen at the Empire and the Alhambra, the generous will attribute our eccentricity to an overdeveloped moral sense. To be frank, we do not believe that Prof. Reinhardt or M. Bakst has more to say than the creators of our best musical ballets. But, while the latter modestly pretend to nothing more than the flattery of our senses by means of form and sound and colour, the wizards of "the new art" claim to express the most profound and subtle emotions. We prefer "1830" to _The Miracle_, because it is unpretentious and sincere. We prefer _OEdipus_ to the pantomime because it is prettier and shorter. As works of art they all seem to us about equal. II [Sidenote: _The "Trachiniae" at "The Court."_] [Sidenote: _Athenaeum July 1911_] The players of Bedford College are winning for themselves a place of honour amongst those who help the modern world to understand Greek drama. The traditional opinion that the Athenians were a race of fools with a sense of form, who wrote tedious verse to perfection, has been ousted by a new doctrine, less false, but even more dangerous. A race of scholars arose who assumed, reasonably enough, that plays written by intelligent men for an intelligent public could not be quite so dull as tradition proclaimed; and though to rob the classics of their terrors needed much audacity and some irreverence, the new ideas won ground by sheer force of plausibility. Unfortunately, to the modern scholar an intelligent public meant a public of modern scholars. He peopled the Attic theatre with an audience of cultivated liberals, and by "a good play" meant the sort of play such a public would relish. Whence it followed that the Athenian dramatists must have concerned themselves with those problems which have been so acutely discussed in the plays of Mr. Galsworthy and Mr. Shaw.