Page:House of Atreus 2nd ed (1889).djvu/14

x remains to us this solitary specimen: of the Satyric Drama, the Cyclops of Euripides, familiar to English readers by Shelley's translation.

It may be added, to explain the apparent difficulty of listening continuously to three dramas, each in itself a perfect whole, that, in the first place, a whole day of leisure, and not the few last hours, between work or play, and sleep, of an exhausted audience, was devoted to the Theatre; and secondly, that the whole length of the three plays combined which form this Trilogy is rather less than that of Hamlet. I do not say that they would not necessarily take longer to act than Hamlet: but merely that the intellectual strain, to an appreciative audience, would not necessarily be greater. Change of interest, not mere rest, is the essential relaxation of the mind, and this, which Shakespeare provides, e.g., by the soliloquies of Hamlet, the Greek dramatists and preeminently Æschylus provided by the Choric Odes, or chants inserted between the several episodes of the play. Of such Odes, this Trilogy, and especially the Agamemnon, presents to us the noblest surviving specimens. They may be regarded as the poet's profoundest musings on the moral and religious and historical problems suggested by the mythical tale which forms the groundwork of his drama.

Of the grandeur, the preternatural effect, of these musings, while the imminent doom is preparing, no words of explanation or translation can give an adequate account. If it is lawful to adopt words written for a very different purpose by a poet in whom survives more of the spirit of Æschylus than in any other modern—one might say of these choric odes, "They are as a pause, a breathing-space, a curtain behind which God, the great scene-shifter, prepares the last and supreme act of the mighty drama. Listen, how, in the deep shadow behind, a dull and heavy sound is waxing! Listen, what footstep is that which passes to