No More Learning

REGIUS PROFESSOR OF GREEK IN THE UNIVERSITY OF OXFORD


FORTY-SECOND THOUSAND


LONDON: GEORGE ALLEN & UNWIN LTD
RUSKIN HOUSE, 40 MUSEUM STREET, W. C. 1


_First Edition, November_ 1905
_Reprinted, November_ 1906
" _February_ 1908
" _March_ 1910
" _December_ 1910
" _February_ 1913
" _April_ 1914
" _June_ 1916
" _November_ 1919
" _April_ 1921
" _January_ 1923
" _May_ 1925
" _August_ 1927
" _January_ 1929

_(All rights reserved)_


PERFORMED AT
THE COURT THEATRE, LONDON
IN 1907

_Printed in Great Britain by
Unwin Brothers Ltd. , Woking_




Introduction[1]


The _Electra_ of Euripides has the distinction of being, perhaps, the best
abused, and, one might add, not the best understood, of ancient tragedies.
"A singular monument of poetical, or rather unpoetical perversity;" "the
very worst of all his pieces;" are, for instance, the phrases applied to
it by Schlegel. Considering that he judged it by the standards of
conventional classicism, he could scarcely have arrived at any different
conclusion. For it is essentially, and perhaps consciously, a protest
against those standards. So, indeed, is the tragedy of _The Trojan Women_;
but on very different lines. The _Electra_ has none of the imaginative
splendour, the vastness, the intense poetry, of that wonderful work. It is
a close-knit, powerful, well-constructed play, as realistic as the tragic
conventions will allow, intellectual and rebellious. Its _psychology_
reminds one of Browning, or even of Ibsen.

To a fifth-century Greek all history came in the form of legend; and no
less than three extant tragedies, Aeschylus' _Libation-Bearers_ (456
B. C. ), Euripides' _Electra_ (413 B. C.
), and Sophocles' _Electra_ (date
unknown: but perhaps the latest of the three) are based on the particular
piece of legend or history now before us. It narrates how the son and
daughter of the murdered king, Agamemnon, slew, in due course of revenge,
and by Apollo's express command, their guilty mother and her paramour.

Homer had long since told the story, as he tells so many, simply and
grandly, without moral questioning and without intensity. The atmosphere
is heroic. It is all a blood-feud between chieftains, in which Orestes,
after seven years, succeeds in slaying his foe Aegisthus, who had killed
his father. He probably killed his mother also; but we are not directly
told so. His sister may have helped him, and he may possibly have gone mad
afterwards; but these painful issues are kept determinedly in the shade.

Somewhat surprisingly, Sophocles, although by his time Electra and
Clytemnestra had become leading figures in the story and the mother-murder
its essential climax, preserves a very similar atmosphere. His tragedy is
enthusiastically praised by Schlegel for "the celestial purity, the fresh
breath of life and youth, that is diffused over so dreadful a subject. "
"Everything dark and ominous is avoided. Orestes enjoys the fulness of
health and strength. He is beset neither with doubts nor stings of
conscience. " Especially laudable is the "austerity" with which Aegisthus
is driven into the house to receive, according to Schlegel, a specially
ignominious death!

This combination of matricide and good spirits, however satisfactory to
the determined classicist, will probably strike most intelligent readers
as a little curious, and even, if one may use the word at all in
connection with so powerful a play, undramatic. It becomes intelligible as
soon as we observe that Sophocles was deliberately seeking what he
regarded as an archaic or "Homeric" style (cf. Jebb, Introd.