PREFACE
artistically speaking, quite the same. The main interest of the other plays is to describe how the woman Electra felt and acted with regard to the murder of her mother and step-father; in this play it is to narrate how Agamemnon, the long dead, was awakened to help his children to avenge him. The ghosts in Homer could not speak till they had drunk the blood of sacrifice. Somewhat in the same way the dead Agamemnon here cannot gather his dim senses till the drink-offerings have sunk into his grave. The wine and milk and honey reach his parched lips. He stirs in his sleep, and in that one moment of hesitating consciousness there are crowded upon him all those appeals that have most power to rouse and sting. The first words spoken in prayer at his neglected tomb; the call for vengeance sent, as it were, unknowingly by the murderess; the repeated story of his old wrongs and the outrage done upon his body; above all, the voices of his desolate children crying to him for that which he himself craves. There is no visible apparition from the tomb, as there is, for instance, in the Persae. But as the great litany grows in intensity of longing, the dead seem to draw nearer to the living, and conviction comes to the mourners, one after another, that he who was once King of Kings is in power among them. Where in all literature, except Aeschylus, could one find this union of primitive ghostliness with high intellectual passion? One hand seems to reach out to the African or Polynesian, while the other clasps that of Milton or Goethe.
Another point which the hasty reader might overlook is the psychological treatment of Orestes. At
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