Therefore let thy great age be set aside
From this our conference, for it puts me out;
And let me on—’tis but thy hair I dread.[705]
There follows a frigid “statement”—“balance two against two”[706]—of his father’s claim and his mother’s offences, and of his own glorious achievement in purifying social life. The original sinner is Tyndareus himself who begot so vile a daughter! He ends by an appeal to Apollo’s behest, and a pompous comment on the importance of marriage.
The aged Spartan having given his grandson over to justice as irreclaimable, the youth turns to Menelaus, whom he insists on regarding as his real hope, in spite of Menelaus’ plain reluctance and extreme unpopularity in Argos. He is, moreover, unwilling to endure another display: “Let me be; I am reflecting....”[707] At all times he is impatient of subtleties; in the first moments of their meeting he asks his accomplished nephew: “What mean you? Wisdom is shown not by obscurity, but by plain speech.”[708] But now that Orestes has his chance, he refuses to suffer Menelaus’ “reflections,” and with a warning that “a long address is better than a short one, and easier for the auditor to follow”[709] produces a masterpiece of metallic cleverness which presses Seneca himself very hard; perhaps the finest gem is the offer of Hermione as a kind of discount.[710] Before the Assembly he succeeds in combining several insanely tactless insults to the Argives: they are “possessors,” not original citizens, of the land; they were Pelasgians at first, but later “Danaidæ,” descendants of the women who slew their husbands; and he has killed his mother as much for their sake as his father’s.[711] But Euripides’ most frightful satire on “advanced education” is reserved for the nightmare of the close, where the raving Orestes leans down over the battlement to the grief-maddened Menelaus and begins by a lunatic reminiscence of the “Socratic method”: “will you be the questioner or the respondent?”[712]
Prig as he is, Orestes has nevertheless some elements of nobility at the first. He can tell his uncle plainly that his disease is “conscience, which convicts me for a criminal”;[713] he shows real regard for Electra; the splendidly selfless friendship between him and Pylades stirs every one. As the play advances, however, we are lost in the loathing and breathless wonder wherewith we gaze upon the increasing insanity of the wretched prince.[714] Each moment he becomes more vigorous and more lost to sense of right; when Electra suggests the vilest part of the plot—the seizure of Hermione—he breaks forth into a cry like Macbeth’s: “Bring forth men-children only!”[715]
Electra has been the chief definite cause of Orestes’ fall. Amazingly vivid, she fills the whole drama with a thin acrid fume of malice. Her ruling passion is not mere hatred against Clytæmnestra. That bitterness has spread until (saving her tenderness for Orestes) there is nothing in her but a narrow viperishness. When an innocent like Hermione draws near, the fang strikes by instinct. Her intensity of feeling and her years have made her Orestes’ monitor long before he returned home, and it is she to whom Tyndareus points, in searing language, as the more guilty.[716] Another influence has soured her, that lack of husband and children on which Helen, with the brutality so frequent in shallow natures, insists at their first meeting.[717] But Electra has vastly more common-sense than her brother or Pylades, and it is to her that the delightful comment on Helen is given:[718]
Ah, Nature!...
Saw ye how tiny was that tress she cut,
Sparing her beauty? ’Tis the old Helen still!