Jean Cocteau's "Orphee"
628 THE COMMONWEAL November 3, 1926 reactions, lustreless and without inspiration. Instead, JEAN COCTEAU'S...
...Thou art truly poetry...
...Suffice it to say that the characters appear of form...
...It is a long time since a moralist has been conThe public will draw its own conclusion...
...Kammerer claimed that most of his mate- Cocteau obviously joins hands with those playrial had been destroyed during the war and that there wrights who strive to place the invisible world upon was only one specimen in existence...
...628 THE COMMONWEAL November 3, 1926 reactions, lustreless and without inspiration...
...specimens...
...It is evident to all what impor- uses the machinery of this ingenious and often satirical tance attaches to this point, for if a condition acquired play in the mood of a subtle and not very naive moralby the action of environment cannot be inherited, ist...
...Kingsley Noble, of the American Museum of brings the cycle round to a close, and the total effect Natural History, went to Vienna to inspect the famous is rich and suggestive...
...Honesty is always disarming...
...What matter if the fable has been Kammerer, disgusted by the treatment he received in derived from antiquity and transposed into ultraVienna, had become a socialist and was considering modernity...
...Cocteau quired conditions...
...Such claims usually are very modest whose wife, a thoroughly up-to-date and really most indeed...
...that Orpheus is a young literary man modest one...
...And thus Orphee is quite as much a over, the black salamanders of which so much had mystery play as the most definitely mediaeval offerings been made were similarly faked...
...biological world has been torn asunder by a contro- The husband, now suddenly aware of his wife's perversy as to the validity of the experiments by Kam- fections, goes in pursuit, thus bringing the fable round merer, an Austrian, to establish the heredity of ac- to an interesting and satisfying conclusion...
...It was to the been sounded to the bottom...
...For some years the is herself caught in the trap and carried off by death...
...Here again, there is an ex- to turn classicist, as the title made famous by Gluck ample of what is alarmingly prevalent in dissertorial and others seemed to indicate ? literature-a mistaken fancy that heaps of informa- We cannot outline the new version of an ancient tion are a better testimonial to ability than is mastery fable here...
...Had Cocteau decided which to claim kinship...
...Kam- which the light of the Christian world is beautiful and merer claimed that he had produced in a frog a cer- strong, praying: "Lord, we thank Thee for having tain modification in the nature of a pad on the fore- saved Eurydice because, out of love, she slew the leg, and other modifications also which he asserted devil in the form of an angel...
...The portent is excellent...
...At the conclusion Orpheus sits at the table, round what becomes of the specific ideas of Darwin...
...When that was the scene through the medium of visible things...
...sidered appetizingly pleasant...
...His exhibited, it appeared that the pad was not a pad at own epigraph puts the matter clearly: "The amateurs all, but a dark stain on the leg, and that the stain of our time are mistaken in not loving anything but was a species of tattooing and plainly of ink...
...of the young French literary "modernists," few will It would be futile to insist upon the point, were it deny...
...But this is, after all, not discouragrance of the fact until it was discovered by Dr...
...It was said that of Henri Gheon...
...often nothing more than dexterity in swinging a censer Getting rid of improper literary habits is one of the before a professorial throne...
...Jean Cocteau is said to Communistic Academy at Moscow that he wrote his have been disappointed by the fact that his audiences last letter before committing suicide, admitting the merely applauded his drama as an amusing spectacle faking of the animals, but claiming that it was done and ignored, relatively speaking, the import of the without his knowledge and that he was in entire igno- lines and scenes...
...More- the visible...
...Thus a note of the personal Dr...
...Instead, JEAN COCTEAU'S "ORPHEE" one gets an almost endless series of quotations from the works of professorial writers-quotations arranged HAT there was something almost spectacular in with the most careful art of pedantry, and adapted to the conversion of Jean Cocteau, the most brilliant bar the writer from the use of his own intelligence...
...The statement of Coventry Patmore that the acceptance of an important position offered to him Venus might be a quite Christian art-subject has not by the Soviet government in Russia...
...After all, however, we may charitably take in modern raiment and speak the language employed our author at his word and smile approvingly when by the average citizen sufficiently educated to know he says, "My claim, if there is any, for any contribu- that rules of grammar must not be confused with the tion toward the study of English poetry is a very fate of nations...
...Some believed in him...
...It was like turning from the crudities of curnot for the fact that what is called "scholarship" is rent argot to the rich symbolism of ecclesiastical Latin...
...ing...
...Others did having saved me also, because I adored poetry whereas not, and among these was the late Professor Bateson...
...charming creature, is jealous of the Pegasus that, in a very concrete form, gets most of her husband's doA SCIENTIFIC forgery, if one may use the phrase, mestic attention...
...She therefore plots with a strange of first-class importance has recently been exposed by and handy individual for the removal of Pegasus, but an American man of science...
...Noble...
...Nor can another aspect severest tasks of religious discipline...
...And so natof the little volume escape attention: it is not English urally enough, the appearance of Cocteau's most recent of any recognizable variety, but a hodge-podge of de- work, the drama Orphee, was awaited with something jected clauses looking about in vain for something with comparable to bated breath...
...We thank Thee for were hereditary...
Vol. 4 • November 1926 • No. 26
