Publisher's Synopsis
This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can usually download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1891 edition. Excerpt: ... his preference to the play of Sophocles, on the ground of its deeply tragic arrangement and masterly delineation of character. "Electra." The subject of the Electra is the same as that of the Mourning Women of Eschylus, but in Sophocles play Electra takes the place of Orestes as the chief character. The vengeance exacted by Orestes for his father's murder, which forms the motive of the Mourning Women, is replaced in Sophocles by the rescue of his sister. Thus the stern natural law of the one dramatist is replaced in the other by the moral duty of a noble nature. Sophocles claims all our sympathies for the figure of the suffering heroine. As long as she has confidence in Orestes' final help she meets indignity and insult with a splendid courage, but the news of his death shatters all her hopes. At one time she resolves, in her despair and isolation, "to let her life waste away, and if any of those within is wroth at this, let him slay her straight, for all her wish for life is gone" (1. 809 seq.); at another, she plans herself to do the work of vengeance, and thus nobly save herself or die (1. 973). Then unexpectedly Orestes appears to avenge and rescue. Thus his terrible deed receives a new justification, in that he not only expiates the blood of his murdered father, but also rescues the heroic and suffer S. g. T. M ing Electra from her gaolers, the unsexed mother and the cowardly Egisthus. Hence no Furies dare pursue one who has freed his house and delivered his sister; he is himself, as it were, an Erinys who punishes the deed of blood and the consequent exposure of Electra to scorn and trouble--Electra, who "in the fear and love of Zeus won the foremost place in following his best and greatest laws" (1. 1095). It is said that at a...
