No More Learning

pp. 214 ff. ). In the
result Sophocles is not only more "classical" than Euripides; he is more
primitive by far than Aeschylus.

For Aeschylus, though steeped in the glory of the world of legend, would
not lightly accept its judgment upon religious and moral questions, and
above all would not, in that region, play at make-believe. He would not
elude the horror of this story by simply not mentioning it, like Homer, or
by pretending that an evil act was a good one, like Sophocles. He faces
the horror; realises it; and tries to surmount it on the sweep of a great
wave of religious emotion. The mother-murder, even if done by a god's
command, is a sin; a sin to be expiated by unfathomable suffering. Yet,
since the god cannot have commanded evil, it is a duty also. It is a sin
that _must_ be committed.

Euripides, here as often, represents intellectually the thought of
Aeschylus carried a step further. He faced the problem just as Aeschylus
did, and as Sophocles did not. But the solution offered by Aeschylus did
not satisfy him. It cannot, in its actual details, satisfy any one. To him
the mother-murder--like most acts of revenge, but more than most--was a
sin and a horror.
Therefore it should not have been committed; and the god
who enjoined it _did_ command evil, as he had done in a hundred other
cases! He is no god of light; he is only a demon of old superstition,
acting, among other influences, upon a sore-beset man, and driving him
towards a miscalled duty, the horror of which, when done, will unseat his
reason.

But another problem interests Euripides even more than this. What kind of
man was it--above all, what kind of woman can it have been, who would do
this deed of mother-murder, not in sudden fury but deliberately, as an act
of "justice," after many years? A "sympathetic" hero and heroine are out
of the question; and Euripides does not deal in stage villains. He seeks
real people. And few attentive readers of this play can doubt that he has
found them.

The son is an exile, bred in the desperate hopes and wild schemes of
exile; he is a prince without a kingdom, always dreaming of his wrongs and
his restoration; and driven by the old savage doctrine, which an oracle
has confirmed, of the duty and manliness of revenge. He is, as was shown
by his later history, a man subject to overpowering impulses and to fits
of will-less brooding. Lastly, he is very young, and is swept away by his
sister's intenser nature.

That sister is the central figure of the tragedy. A woman shattered in
childhood by the shock of an experience too terrible for a girl to bear; a
poisoned and a haunted woman, eating her heart in ceaseless broodings of
hate and love, alike unsatisfied--hate against her mother and stepfather,
love for her dead father and her brother in exile; a woman who has known
luxury and state, and cares much for them; who is intolerant of poverty,
and who feels her youth passing away. And meantime there is her name, on
which all legend, if I am not mistaken, insists; she is _A-lektra_, "the
Unmated. "

There is, perhaps, no woman's character in the range of Greek tragedy so
profoundly studied. Not Aeschylus' Clytemnestra, not Phaedra nor Medea.
One's thoughts can only wander towards two great heroines of "lost" plays,
Althaea in the _Meleager_, and Stheneboea in the _Bellerophon_.