on; the climax is of
course, the mother-murder, and Orestes falls into madness after
it. In the _Electra_ this element is practically ignored.
Electra has no qualms; Orestes shows no signs of madness; the
climax is formed not by the culminating horror, the matricide,
but by the hardest bit of work, the slaying of Aegisthos!
Aeschylus has kept Electra and Clytemnestra apart; here we see
them freely in the hard unloveliness of their daily wrangles.
Above all, in place of the cry of bewilderment that closes the
_Choephori_--'What is the end of all this spilling of blood for
blood?'--the _Electra_ closes with an expression of entire
satisfaction... Aeschylus takes the old bloody saga in an earnest
and troubled spirit, very different from Homer's, but quite as
grand. His Orestes speaks and feels as Aechylus himself would...
Sophocles... takes the saga exactly as he finds it. He knows
that those ancient chiefs did not trouble about their consciences;
they killed in the fine old ruthless way. He does not try to
make them real to himself at the cost of making them false
to the spirit of the epos...

"The various bits of criticism ascribed to him--'I draw men as
they ought to be drawn; Euripides draws them as they are';
'Aeschylus did the right thing, but without knowing it'--all
imply the academic standpoint... Even his exquisite diction,
which is such a marked advance on the stiff magnificence of his
predecessor, betrays the lesser man in the greater artist.
Aeschylus's superhuman speech seems like natural superhuman
speech. It is just the language that Prometheus would talk, that
an ideal Agamemnon or Atossa might talk in the great moments.
But neither Prometheus nor Oedipus nor Electra, nor anyone but an
Attic poet of the highest culture, would talk as Sophocles makes
them. It is this which has established Sophocles as the perfect
model, not only for Aristotle, but in general for critics and
grammarians; while the poets have been left to admire Aeschylus,
who 'wrote in a state of intoxication,' and Euripedes, who broke
himself against the bars of life and poetry."

You must, of course, always allow for a personal equation in the
viewpoint of any critic: you must here weight the "natural
superhuman diction" against the "stiff magnificence" Professor
Murray attributes to Aeschylus; and get a wise and general view
of your own. What I want you to see clearly is, the descent of
the influx from plane to plane, as show