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 shown in these two tragedians.  The aim of the first is to express a spiritual message, grand thought.  That of the second is to produce a work of flawless beauty, without regard to its spiritual import.  What was to Aeschylus a secondary object; the purely artistic—­was to Sophocles the whole thing.  Aeschylus was capable of wonderful psychological insight.  Clytemnestra’s speech to the Chorus, just before Agamemnon’s return, is a perfect marvel in that way.  But the tremendous movement, the August impersonal atmosphere as

     “.... gorgeous Tragedy
     In sceptered pall comes sweeping by.”