The Electra of Euripides Part 1

The Electra of Euripides.

by Euripides.

Introduction

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 cla.s.sicism, 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 cla.s.sicist, 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. p. xli.); and this archaism, in its turn, seems to me best explained as a conscious reaction against Euripides' searching and unconventional treatment of the same subject (cf. Wilamowitz in _Hermes_, xviii. pp. 214 ff.). In the result Sophocles is not only more "cla.s.sical" 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 G.o.d's command, is a sin; a sin to be expiated by unfathomable suffering. Yet, since the G.o.d 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 G.o.d who enjoined it _did_ command evil, as he had done in a hundred other cases! He is no G.o.d of light; he is only a demon of old superst.i.tion, 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 pa.s.sing 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_.

G.M.

[Footnote 1: Most of this introduction is reprinted, by the kind permission of the Editors, from an article in the _Independent Review_ vol. i. No. 4.]

ELECTRA

CHARACTERS IN THE PLAY

CLYTEMNESTRA, _Queen of Argos and Mycenae; widow of Agamemnon_.

ELECTRA, _daughter of Agamemnon and Clytemnestra_.

ORESTES, _son of Agamemnon and Clytemnestra, now in banishment_.

A PEASANT, _husband of Electra_.

AN OLD MAN, _formerly servant to Agamemnon_.

PYLADES, _son of Strophios, King of Phocis; friend to Orestes_.

AEGISTHUS, _usurping King of Argos and Mycenae, now husband of Clytemnestra_.

The Heroes CASTOR and POLYDEUCES.

CHORUS of Argive Women, with their LEADER.

FOLLOWERS of ORESTES; HANDMAIDS of CLYTEMNESTRA.

_The Scene is laid in the mountains of Argos. The play was first produced between the years_ 414 _and_ 412 B.C.

ELECTRA

_The scene represents a hut on a desolate mountain side; the river Inachus is visible in the distance. The time is the dusk of early dawn, before sunrise. The_ PEASANT _is discovered in front of the hut_.

PEASANT.

Old gleam on the face of the world, I give thee hail, River of Argos land, where sail on sail The long ships met, a thousand, near and far, When Agamemnon walked the seas in war; Who smote King Priam in the dust, and burned The storied streets of Ilion, and returned Above all conquerors, heaping tower and fane Of Argos high with spoils of Eastern slain.

So in far lands he prospered; and at home His own wife trapped and slew him. 'Twas the doom Aegisthus wrought, son of his father's foe.

Gone is that King, and the old spear laid low That Tantalus wielded when the world was young.

Aegisthus hath his queen, and reigns among His people. And the children here alone, Orestes and Electra, buds unblown Of man and womanhood, when forth to Troy He shook his sail and left them--lo, the boy Orestes, ere Aegisthus' hand could fall, Was stolen from Argos--borne by one old thrall, Who served his father's boyhood, over seas Far off, and laid upon King Strophios' knees In Phocis, for the old king's sake. But here The maid Electra waited, year by year, Alone, till the warm days of womanhood Drew nigh and suitors came of gentle blood In h.e.l.las. Then Aegisthus was in fear Lest she be wed in some great house, and bear A son to avenge her father. Close he wrought Her prison in his house, and gave her not To any wooer. Then, since even this Was full of peril, and the secret kiss Of some bold prince might find her yet, and rend Her prison walls, Aegisthus at the end Would slay her. Then her mother, she so wild Aforetime, pled with him and saved her child.

Her heart had still an answer for her lord Murdered, but if the child's blood spoke, what word Could meet the hate thereof? After that day Aegisthus thus decreed: whoso should slay The old king's wandering son, should win rich meed Of gold; and for Electra, she must wed With me, not base of blood--in that I stand True Mycenaean--but in gold and land Most poor, which maketh highest birth as naught.

So from a powerless husband shall be wrought A powerless peril. Had some man of might Possessed her, he had called perchance to light Her father's blood, and unknown vengeances Risen on Aegisthus yet.

Aye, mine she is: But never yet these arms--the Cyprian knows My truth!--have clasped her body, and she goes A virgin still. Myself would hold it shame To abase this daughter of a royal name.

I am too lowly to love violence. Yea, Orestes too doth move me, far away, Mine unknown brother! Will he ever now Come back and see his sister bowed so low?

Doth any deem me fool, to hold a fair Maid in my room and seek no joy, but spare Her maidenhood? If any such there be, Let him but look within. The fool is he In gentle things, weighing the more and less Of love by his own heart's untenderness.

[_As he ceases_ ELECTRA _comes out of the hut. She is in mourning garb, and carries a large pitcher on her head. She speaks without observing the_ PEASANT'S _presence_.

ELECTRA.

Dark shepherdess of many a golden star, Dost see me, Mother Night? And how this jar Hath worn my earth-bowed head, as forth and fro For water to the hillward springs I go?

Not for mere stress of need, but purpose set, That never day nor night G.o.d may forget Aegisthus' sin: aye, and perchance a cry Cast forth to the waste shining of the sky May find my father's ear.... The woman bred Of Tyndareus, my mother--on her head Be curses!--from my house hath outcast me; She hath borne children to our enemy; She hath made me naught, she hath made Orestes naught....