Page:The Theatre of the Greeks, a Treatise on the History and Exhibition of the Greek Drama, with Various Supplements.djvu/176

 158 COMrAKISON OF THE THREE PLAYS. But what especially characterizes the tragedy of Sophocles, is the heavenly serenity amid a subject so terrific, the pure breath of life and youth which floats through the whole. The radiant god Apollo, who enjoined the deed, seems to shed his influence over it; even the day-break at the opening of the play is significant. The grave and the world of shades are kept afar off" in the distance ; what in ^schylus is eff'ected by the soul of the murdered monarch, proceeds here from the heart of the living Electra, which is gifted with equal energy for indignant hatred and for love. Remark- able is the avoidance of every gloomy foreboding in the very first speech of Orestes, where he says, he feels no concern at being thought to be dead, so long as he knows himself to be alive in sound health and strength. Nor is he visited either before or after the deed by misgivings and compunctions of conscience ; so that all that con- cerns his purpose and act is more sternly sustained in Sophocles than in ^schylus ; the terrific stroke of theatrical effect in the person of ^gisthus, and the reserving this person to await an ignominious execution at the end of the play, is even more austere than any thing in u3^]schylus' play. The most striking emblem of the relation the two poets bear to each other is afforded by Clytsemnestra's dreams : both are equally apt, significant, ominous ; ^schylus' is grander but horrible to the senses ; that of Sophocles, terrible and majestically beautiful withal. Euripides' play is a singular instance of poetical or rather uupoetical obliquity ; to expose all its absurdities and contradictions would be an endless undertaking. Why, for instance, does Orestes badger his sister by keeping up his incognito so long ? How easy the poet makes his labour, when, if any thing stands in his way, he just shoves it aside without further ceremony — as here the peasant, of whom, after he has sent up the old keeper, nobody knows where he is all this while ! The fact is, partly Euri- pides wanted to be novel, partly he thought it too improbable that Orestes and Pylades should despatch the king and his wife in the midst of their capital city ; to avoid this he has involved himself in still grosser improbabilities. If there be in the play any relish whatever of the tragic vein, it is not his own, it belongs to the fable, to his predecessors, and to tradition. Through his views it has ceased at least to be a tragedy ; he has laboured every way to lower it down to the level of a '^family-picture," as the modern phrase is. The effect attempted in Electra's indigence is sad claptrap : he betrays the knack of his craft in her complacent ostentation of her own misery. In all the preparatives to the deed there is utter levity of mind and want of inward conviction : it is a gratuitous torturing of one's feelings that ^gisthus with his expressions of goodnatured hospitality, and Clytsemnestra with her kindly compassion towards her daughter, are set in an amiable point of view, just to touch us in their behalf : the deed is no sooner accomplished but it is obliterated by a most despicable repentance, a repentance which is no moral feeling at all, but a mere animal revulsion. Of tha calumniations of the Delphian oracle I shall say nothing. As the whole play is annihilated thereby, I cannot see for what end Euripides wrote it at all, except it were that a comfortable match might be got up for Electra, and that the old peasant might make his fortune as a reward for his continency. I could only wish Pylades were married out of hand, and the peasant fingered a specified sum of money told out to him upon the spot in hard cash : in that case all would end to the audience's satis- faction like a common comedy. Not to be unjust however, I must add the remark, that the Electra is perhaps of all Euripides' extant plays the very vilest. Was it rage for novelty that led him here into such vagaries ? No doubt it was a pity that in this subject two such predecessors had forestalled him. But what forced him to measure himself with them, and to write an Electra at all ?