Page:Euripides (Mahaffy).djvu/110

104 suggests no difficulties of remorse even in the punishment of Clytemnestra, which Electra demands with repulsive eagerness (v. 1415), Euripides, with far truer feeling, not only makes Electra shudder, and abhor her own participation in the murder, when she perceives it accomplished (Electra, vv. 1181 sqq.), but—and this is perhaps the most remarkable anticipation of modern feeling in all his plays—he makes Orestes, in the intervals of his madness, challenge the holiness of Apollo's command, and add (Orestes, vv. 288 sqq.), "For I think that my father, had I asked him face to face whether I should slay my mother, would have urged me with many prayers by this very beard not to thrust my sword into the throat of her that bore me." Here we recognise a veritable scene in Hamlet. But in a Greek poet of Euripides' age, it is far more remarkable than after fifteen centuries of Christian preaching. This, and the remorse of Clytemnestra, to which I have already alluded, are indeed features in which Euripides has distinctly risen above the narrower standpoint of the purely Periclean poet. But we must return to the drawing of Orestes.

81. The anxious Electra sitting by him in his deep sleep, his waking again in wild anguish, his tenderness to his sister in his calmer moments, afford a splendid scene (Ortstes, vv. 140 sqq.) in an otherwise disagreeable and overwrought play. Far more characteristic and noble is the appearance of the same Orestes in the Tauric Iphigenia, where he is sent with his friend Pylades to the inhospitable Tauri, to carry off the image of Artemis, but where he is seized again by his madness, captured, and brought before his sister for sacrifice. Quite apart from the tragic situation, apart, too, from the pathetic interest in the recognition of brother and sister, there are many delicate touches of character, which make this Orestes the most striking of all Euripides' heroes. If indeed the end of the play had been tragic and not melodramatic, this would have been generally recognised. But the deceitful plan of