16 LITERATURE AND DRAMA 



on the stage spoken with beauty and with power and in the 

 whirl of emotion which the audience felt they hailed the birth 

 of a new art. 



Mr. Browning lets Cassandra quit the scene using these 

 words : 



But I will go even in the household wailing 

 My fate and Agamemnon's. Life suffice me ! 

 Ah, strangers ! 



I cry not ' ah ' as bird at bush through terror 

 Idly ! To me, the dead, bear witness this much : 

 When, for me woman, there shall die a woman, 

 And, for a man ill-wived, a man shall perish ! 

 This hospitality I ask as dying. 



CHOROS. 

 O sufferer, thee thy foretold fate I pity. 



KASSANDRA. 



Yet once for all, to speak a speech, I fain am : 

 No dirge, mine for myself ! The sun I pray to, 

 Fronting his last light ! to my own avengers 

 That from my hateful slayers they exact too 

 Pay for the dead slave easy-managed hand's work \ 



A poet should have felt what Cassandra felt, and put such 

 words into her mouth as would have enabled an actress to show 

 those feelings and carry her audience with her. This is what 

 ^Eschylus did. Mr. Browning has preferred to give us a mosaic 

 copy where every beautiful tint in the original is represented by 

 half a dozen coarse broken bits ill patched together. He is 

 faithful to word arrangement and etymology, false to art and 

 feeling. He is clearly right in giving the next four lines to the 

 chorus, who maunder about the frail state of mortals in a style 

 which Cassandra at this supreme moment could never adopt. 



Mr. Symonds, whose description of the ' Agamemnon ' is 

 very beautiful, mentions as especially dramatic the moment of 

 suspense which follows, filled by this moralising of the old men 

 and ended by the cry of the king as he is murdered. There is 

 no doubt that the audience has been by this time roused into 

 intense excitement, and that the cry adds to the feeling, but 



