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! But her sense of humour cannot sustain her heart long: Heaven’s hatred seize thee! Thou hast wrought the fall Of me, and this my brother, and of Greece. These two women, so pungently contrasted in one brief scene, share, however, one attribute—that nerveless theology which Euripides detested as rotting the moral fibre. Electra muses upon “suffering and disaster sent by Heaven”.[719] Helen attributes her elopement with Paris to the “maddening doom of Heaven,”[720] which has also “destroyed this hapless pair”[721]—her nephew and niece. The latter in her lyric outcry explores[722] all the legends of her line to discover the cause of the present disaster, a method which the chorus, for all their sympathy, indeed complicity,[723] seem to parody by the ludicrous baldness of their reflection that this horror of fiends and bloodshed has fallen upon the house “because Myrtilus fell out of the chariot”![724]