had kept Electra and Clytæmestra apart: here we see them freely in the hard unloveliness of their daily wrangles. Above all, in place of the cry of bewilderment that closes the Choëphoroi—"What is the end of all this spilling of blood for blood?"—the Electra closes with an expression of entire satisfaction. It is this spirit that makes the Electra, brilliant as it is, so typically uncharmlng. The explanation may partly lie in some natural taste for severity and dislike of sentiment in Sophocles; it seems certainly also to be connected with his archaism. His language is archaistic through and through; and it seems as if his conceptions were.
All three tragedians have treated the Electra-saga, and treated it in characteristically different ways. The realistic spirit of Euripides's Electra is obvious to every one—the wolfish Pelopidæ, the noble peasant, the harrowing scene of remorse and mutual reproach between the murderers. But the truth is that Æschylus has tried to realise his subject too. He takes the old bloody saga in an earnest and troubled spirit, very different from Homer's, though quite as grand. His Orestes speaks and feels as Æschylus himself would. It is only Sophocles who takes the saga exactly as he finds it. He knows that those ancient chiefs did not trouble about their consciences: they killed in the fine old ruthless way. He does not try to make them real to himself at the cost of making them false to the spirit of the epos. The same objectiveness of treatment appears in another characteristic of Sophocles—the stress he lays on mere physical horror in the Œdipus, on physical pain in the Trachiniæ and the Philoctêtes. It is the spirit of the oldest, most savage epos.[1]
- ↑ Cf. p. 41 on the Niptra*
