The author of the Trilogy endeavours to purify these ideas, and to reconcile them alike with the doctrine of Justice and with the facts of the world. The reality of the curse is not denied, but the voluntary nature of each stage in its history is asserted, as is the responsibility of the individual criminal for his own act. The temptation, the predisposition, may be extraneous, may be imposed by heaven; the deed is his own.
"The first step he is master not to take;" but, if once it be taken, if the altar of right be once spurned the miserable, desperate impulse is upon him; he goes from sin to sin, there is no help for him, he has passed among the lost.
Such, I believe, is the inner doctrine of Æschylus, struggling to light through language of vague import, and occasional inconsistencies; especially in the relation of this process of evil to the divine will or permission. Nor must we forget his solution of the moral problem, in The Furies. The family guilt and curse are to be closed by an appeal to human justice, which measures the guilt of the individual by the circumstances and motives of his crime, and has power to absolve, as well as to mete out punishment to, an admitted criminal.
Granting, as we must grant, the belief in such an hereditary curse as Æschylus made the subject of his trilogy, it is impossible to conceive a nobler solution of the problem; a nobler "purification by pity and terror," if we may adopt in an extended sense Aristotle's definition of Tragedy.
Perhaps it may not be out of place to say a few words with respect to a charge, often brought against Æschylus, of being a bombastic poet. It is undeniable that in his earlier plays there is a tendency towards inflated language; such prodigies as ἐφεψαλώθη κἀξεβροντήθη σθένος (Prom. l. 362), as ἁλώσιμον παιᾶν᾽ ἐπεξιακχάσας (Seven against Thebes, l. 635), show, at all events, a poetic artist
