"Alas for mortals!—what their power and pride?
A little shadow sweeps it from the earth!
And if they suffer—why, the fatal hour
Comes o'er the record like a moistened sponge,
And blots it out; methinks this latter lot
Affects me deepest—Well! 'tis pitiful!" [27]
Scarcely has the prophetess withdrawn than we hear behind the scene the groans of the murdered king, the palace behind is opened, and Clytemnestra is standing, stern and lofty, by the dead body of her lord. The critics have dwelt too much on the character of Clytemnestra—it is that of Cassandra which is the masterpiece of the tragedy.
XI. The story, which is spread throughout three plays (forming a complete trilogy), continues in the opening of the Choephori, with Orestes mourning over his father's tomb. If Clytemnestra has furnished would-be critics with a comparison with Lady Macbeth, for no other reason than that one murdered her husband, and the other persuaded her husband to murder somebody else, so Orestes may with more justice be called the Hamlet of the Greeks; but though the character itself of Orestes is not so complex and profound as that of Hamlet, nor the play so full of philosophical beauties as the modern tragedy, yet it has passages equally pathetic, and more sternly and terribly sublime. The vague horror which in the commencement of the play prepares us for the catastrophe by the dream of Clytemnestra—how a serpent lay in swaddling-clothes like an infant, and she placed it in her breast, and it drew blood; the brief and solemn answer of Orestes—
"Man's visions never come to him in vain;"
the manner in which the avenging parricide interrupts the dream, so that (as in Macbeth) the prediction inspires the deed that it foretells; the dauntless resolution of Clytemnestra, when she hears, in the dark sayings of her servant, that "the dead are slaying the living" (i. e., that through the sword of Orestes Agamemnon is avenged on Aegisthus), calls for a weapon, royal to the last, wishing only to
"Know which shall be the victor or the vanquished—
Since that the crisis of the present horror;"
the sudden change from fierce to tender as Orestes bursts in, and, thinking only of her guilty lover, she shrieks forth,
"Ah! thou art then no more, beloved Aegisthus;"
the advance of the threatening son, the soft apostrophe of the mother as she bares her bosom—
"Hold! and revere this breast on which so oft
Thy young cheek nestled—cradle of thy sleep,
And fountain of thy being;"