But meantime another person appears on the stage; Cadmus enters,
followed by attendants bearing on a bier the torn limbs of Pentheus,
which lying wildly scattered through the tangled wood, have been with
difficulty collected and now decently put together and covered over.
In the little that still remains before the end of the play, destiny
now hurrying things rapidly forward, and strong emotions, hopes and
forebodings being now closely packed, Euripides has before him an
artistic problem of enormous difficulty. Perhaps this very haste and
close-packing of the matter, which keeps the mind from dwelling
overmuch on detail, relieves its real extravagance, and those who
read it carefully will think that the pathos of Euripides has been
equal to the occasion. In a few profoundly designed touches he
depicts the perplexity of Cadmus, in whose house a god had become an
inmate, only to destroy it--the regret of the old man for the one
male child to whom that house had looked up as the pillar whereby
aged people might feel secure; the piteous craziness of Agave; the
unconscious irony with which she caresses the florid, youthful head
of her son; the delicate breaking of the thing to her reviving
intelligence, as Cadmus, though he can but wish that she might live
on for ever in her visionary enjoyment, [80] prepares the way, by
playing on that other horrible legend of the Theban house, the
tearing of Actaeon to death--he too destroyed by a god.
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