R. C. Trevelyan and His Edwardian Sisyphus

R. C. TREVELYAN AND HIS EDWARDIAN SISYPHUS* ROBERT CALVERLEY TREVELYAN (1871-1951) was one of a group of four English poets-all close friends-who wrote mythological verse plays over the first four decades of this century. The experimental dramas of Trevelyan and his companions-To Sturge Moore, R. Laurence Binyon, and Gordon Bottomley-received scant attention in their own time and they are all but completely neglected today. Many of the plays were never performed at all; others enjoyed only short professional runs, or were given by amateurs or verse reciters to meagre audiences-·frequently in the provinces. Perhaps the principal reason for the neglect suffered by these verse dramatists is that their experiments impress today just as they impressed the majority of contemporaries -as both anachronistic and esoteric, at a quaint remove from the compelling urban problems which were concerning prose playwrights and novelists. Indeed, the general tendency of all EdwardianGeorgian verse drama was escapist: the attempt was to wed tragic materials (either mythological, folk, or contemporary rustic) to idyllic and aesthetic ideals which were essentially late-Victorian. And the atmosphere was that of a lost cause: solemn and stifling. R. C. Trevelyan, however, in the first of three "operatic fables" written before and during World War 1,1 can be said to have lifted at least a corner of this shroud. He let in the light and air of comic invention, of urbane wit, of pardody and irony-and he looked out past the demise of nineteenth-century idyllic heroes, to the birth of that irreverent and poignant bastard, the· tragi-comic anti-hero of this century. Trevelyan's Edwardian Sisyphus, absurdly idealistic, both anticipates and contradicts the Sisyphus of Albert Camus. The paradox is in the myth itself, and both Camus and Trevelyan had the humility not to attempt to resolve the paradox by idealizing the condition of their hero beyond the limits of his human frailty; the human fabric is stretched to the breaking point-by the irony of laughter in Trevelyan, by the irony of pain in Camus-and yet remains intact. • The unpublished letters quoted in this paper are from The Thomas Sturge Moore Papers, University of London Library, Senate House, London, W.C. 1; and from the R. C. Trevelyan Papers, now in the custody of Julian Trevelyan. and deposited in the vaults of Drummonds Bank, Trafalgar Sq., London. I am indebted to Mr. Trevelyan (R. C!s son and a well-known graphic artist) for permission to use this material from his father's correspondence. 1 Sisyphus (1908); The New Parsifal (1914); The Pterodamozels (1916). 346 1970 TREVELYAN'S SISYPHUS 347 Camus' Sisyphus exists in a Hell which is this world. He is the Sisyphus who has begun his punishment for impiety towards the gods, but he is of indomitable courage-·so tough that the miserable rock becomes the symbol of his defiance; indeed, the rock nearly be.. comes Sisyphus himself. And yet it is Sisyphus who triumphs, for all the absurdity of his predicament, by proving himself again and again to be stronger than the rock. Camus describes his hero as he strains behind his burden to reach the summit, "his face screwed up, the cheek tight against the stone, the shoulder bracing the claycovered mass, the foot wedging it, the fresh start with arms outstretched , the wholly human security of two earth-clotted hands."2 At length the summit is reached, and Sisyphus stands there and watches his rock hurtle down to the plain again. He begins his descent, and Camus comments: It is during that return, that pause, that Sisyphus interests me. A face that toils so close to stones is already stone itself! I see that man going back down with a heavy yet measured step towards the torment of which he will never know the end. That hour like a breathing-space which returns as surely as his suffering , that is the hour of consciousness. At each of those moments when he leaves the heights and gradually sinks towards the lairs of tbegods, he is superior to his fate. He is stronger than his rock.3 This elemental reduction, to a status just above mineral, lacks...