common with the Mænads who rent in sunder the living limbs of Orpheus. We seem to hear about her the beat and clash of *the terrible timbrels, the music that Æschylus set to verse, the music that made mad, the upper notes of the psalm shrill and strong as a sea-wind, the "bull-voiced" bellowing under-song of those dread choristers from somewhere out of sight, the tempest of tambourines giving back thunder to the thunder,[1] the fury of Givine lust that thickened with human blood the hill-streams of Cithæron.
It is no vain vaunt of the modern master's that he has given us in another guise one of these Æschylean women, a monstrous goddess, whose tone of voice "gave a sort of Promethean grandeur to her furious and amorous words," who had in her the tragic and Titanic passion of the women of the Eleusinian feasts "seeking the satyrs under the stars." And with all this fierce excess of imaginative colour and tragic intonation, the woman is modern and possible; she might be now alive, and maybe. Some of her words have the light of an apocalypse, the tone of a truth indubitable henceforth and sensible to all. "You were not born with that horrible laugh on your face, were you? no? It must be a penal mutilation. I do hope you have committed some crime.—No one has touched me, I give myself up to you as pure as burning fire, I see you do not believe me, but if you only knew how little I care!—Despise me, you that people despise. Degradation below degradation, what a pleasure! the double flower of ignominy! I am gathering it. Trample me underfoot. You will like me all the better. I know
- ↑ Æsch. Fr. 54 Ήδωνοὶ,
