themselves by taking the law into their own hands, and are only saved from failure by the intervention of the gods. Creusa indeed attempts a horrible and treacherous crime, thus exhibiting the latent fury which Euripides so often finds in the recesses of the female heart. But we may well excuse or palliate her offence, when we consider how her long-deferred hopes, now at the moment of expected fulfilment, are dashed to the ground, and her whole moral balance is destroyed by this crowning injustice of the god to whom she had appealed. Both heroines are only heroines of suffering, but they have nevertheless a charm which none but a great artist can convey.
73. Electra.—Very different is the strong but not agreeable portrait or Electra. Her devotion to her brother, in the Orestes, and indeed everywhere, is very touching, and is brought out into splendid relief in the opening of the Orestes, when she sits by her brother, who has at last fallen asleep after fierce paroxysms of insanity. The chorus enter and inquire about him with some importunity, as is the wont of the Greek chorus. Her agitated replies, the gradual awakening and grateful tenderness of Orestes, his return of madness, are all worked in with consummate skill.[1] But these womanly and refined features are balanced by a strong, bitter, outspoken hatred against Clytemnestra (in the Electra), which gives rise to painful scenes of wrangling and altercation. This is no innovation by our poet. The parallel portrait by Sophocles is not different. Her querulous irony, and downright exposure of Clytemnestra's vices, when that queen is decoyed into a visit to her humble home, her ostentation of poverty and disgrace as a protest against her mother—are not inconsistent with the unrelenting hardness which keeps the troubled and wavering Orestes to his purpose, and insists upon the murder, though she is not free from terror when
- ↑ The English render who desires to enjoy this great scene will find an excellent poetical version of it in the first volume of Mr. Symonds' Studies of the Greek Poets, p. 224.
