BOOKS.

THE ALCESTIS OF EURIPIDES-BROWNING.*

MR. Bitowyrrzu has here re-sot afresh—in such a form as gives a certain amount of freedom to his own genius—the Alcestis of Euripides, the story of the wife who obtained the permission of the gods to die herself in the place of her husband, King Admetus, and who was rescued by Hercules from the power of Death after she had already been laid in the tomb. The play opens with the usual Euripidoan prologue, spoken in this case by Apollo, who has served Admetus as herdsman, has learned to love the hospitable house, and who has won for Alces- tis the right to save her husband by dying in his place. As Death enters the palace to seize the substitute, the god meets him, bow in hand, and endeavours to persuade him to leave Alcestis till she reaches the natural term of life; but Death surlily refuses, and Apollo, predicting that what Death will not grant to divine persuasion he shall be compelled to yield, without earning any grati- tude, to the force of the hero Hercules, leaves the palace as Death enters it. Then we have the dying of Alcestis, with the useless lamen- tations of her husband, to which the dying wife listens without re- proach, but without sy mpathy,—as though he had no right to lament the grief he had deliberately chosen, —but with a heart breaking with anxiety and grief for her children, especially her daughter, so soon to be motherless. She asks and obtains a vow that Admetus will not marry again and give the children a jealous stepmother, and blessing them she dies. Hercules, on his way to the achievement of one of his labours, comes to Pherae, to the palace of Admetus, and is pressed by the hospitable king to stay under his roof, and occupy rooms apart from the rest of the house, whore he will not hear or see the signs of mourning,—which he consents to do, under the impression which Admetus, by help of a little verbal fencing, gives him, that the death which has just taken place in his house is not that of his wife or one of his own family, but that of a guest who is no blood-relation. After a scene of bitter mutual reproaches between Admetus and his father Pheres, who is denounced as an unworthy father by Admetus, because at his ripe age he would not sacrifice the few years left of life to avert his sou's death, but rather allowed his daughter-in-law to sacrifice her youth for the same end, Hercules, who has been carousing without any suspicion of the great calamity which has befallen his host, learns the truth from an attendant, and hastens to overtake Death * llarl-0usEioiia Adventure, inciudiny a Transeripi from Euripides. By Robert Browning. London : Smith, Elder, and Po. 1871. and force him to yield back Alcestis. After the return of Admetus heart-broken from the tomb of his wife, Hercules follows him, with a woman concealed under the lion-skin, whom he begs Admetus to shelter and retain for him till be comes again from his next task. Admetus, pleading the unsuitability of a house with no woman at its head for the entertainment of a beautiful woman, and shrinking back from even touching the hand of any woman but his wife, has the truth gradually broken to him by Hercules, towards whom his hospitality had been so great that he even disguised the immensity of his grief in order to deter the hero from turning aside from his door.

Such is the bare outline of the story which Mr. Browning has here partly translated, partly recast and furnished with a new framework,—giving it as it is supposed to be narrated and com- mented on by a young girl of Rhodes, just after the failure of the expedition of Nicias, to LI Sicilian audience, whose thirst for know- ledge of Euripides' later works is such that they pardon even Athenians and the well-wishers of Athens who can bring them any new fragment of the poetry of the third great Athenian dramatist. The form into which Mr. Browning has thus thrown the play enables him to translate, abbreviate, or expand at plea- sure ; and, in point of fact, what with development and what with commentary, the 1,160 linos of Euripides' short play have swelled into not much short of 3,000 of Mr. Browning's blank verse. And though there is of course much that is apparently heterogeneous between the form and substance of the Greek dramatist's concep- tions and those of his keen, abrupt, active-minded modern coin- mentator,—thus, to take one instance only, the sacrifice made by Admetus for the sake of the great ancient virtue of hospitality, which is, we take it, the secret in the old drama of his reward, is passed over with an extremely light hand by Mr. Browning, and made by no means an important link in the action of the play,— yet there is more of appropriateness in Mr. Browning's general conception and recast than one would at the first reading suppose. If we turn to the chapter on Euripides contained iu Otfried Miller's history of Greek literature, we shall see at once how much there is in the style of Euripides to suit Mr. Browning. Muller repeats the remark of Aristotle, that while Sophocles drew large human ideals, Euripides drew men as they were individually known to him, " with all the petty passions and weaknesses of people of his own time," but " with that loquacity and dexterity in the use of words which distinguished the Athenians of his day," and with " that extraordinary fondness for arguing," and with that watchfulness for opportunities of " reason- ing on things human and divine," in which Athens was also great. He remarks also that Euripides displays that minute " atten- tion to the petty circumstances of daily occurrence " which mark a poet at once speculative and realistic in a day which is full of characteristics adapted to excite the poet's discontent. And he describes what Aristophanes called the " spruce Euripideau style" of the dialogue of this dramatist, a style of great terseness, facility, and "energetic adroitness," but still so full of the flavour of the market-place that Aristophanes claimed to think less common-place thoughts than Euripides, though he owned that he strove to express them in the concise Euripidean manner. Once more, Miller observes of Euripides that he gives a great prominence his female characters, and fills his plays with vivid sketches and ingenious remarks on the characters of women. Now of all these characteristics Mr. Browning was evidently aware when he undertook to Browningize a play of Euripides. Ho is himself a realist who prefers to sketch men and women more or less as he has known them, to delineating large ideals. " The loquacity and dexterity " of the Athenians and their "extra- ordinary fondness for arguing" could not exceed the loquacity and dexterity of Mr. Browning's men and women,' or their fondness for presenting their own individual view of life in the best argumen- tative form. The keenness of Mr. Browning's vigilance for small circumstances giving a local colour to a scene is certainly even greater than that of Euripides ; like Euripides, again, his style of dialogue, if not essentially spruce,—it is too care- less and wayward for that, — is extremely keen and adroit, and can be, when he pleases, terse to the last degree, while he is even fonder of the language of the market-place than the poet from whom he adapts and translates, Finally, he is mindful of Euripides' fancy for putting a woman in the front of the battle in this recast of the Alcestis, which lie has put into the mouth of a girl of Rhodes ; and in the selection of Alcestis,—a woman with whose self-sacrifice and whose slight scorn for the man for whom she laid down her life, "modern thought" is thoroughly well disposed to sympathize,—he has got a character which is peculiarly well adapted for his shrewd, sharp touch. On the whole, while to our mind modern rechauffe's of antique subjects are seldom great successes, yet Euripides was, in the keen unsettled sharpness of his moral criticism, so like a modern, and in this particular case treated the old myth with so hesitating a hand, that Mr. Browning has been able to recast it with far less loss to the original, and far lass of jarring effect froth the accessions which his abrupt and irregular genius gives it, than would have been possible with any other Greek dramatist, and perhaps with any other of even this dramatist's plays.

Still Mr. Browning has had hard work with the character of Her- cules, whose demeanour in the Greek play has so much of the gro- tesque in it as to convince many great critics that the play was meant to be half comic,—a view which is sustained by the assertion of an old scholiast that it was the after-piece which succeeded to a -trilogy, taking the place of a satyric drama,—in other words, that it was intended to relieve the tragic interest of the plays which had preceded, and to afford the audience a certain relaxation and amusement. Certainly, the conduct 'of Hercules in making himself thoroughly jolly in the house of death,—even though ho be in a separate suite of apartments, and under the impression that his friend had not lost any member of his own family but was plunged only into a half-conventional mourning,—is extremely difficult to ennoble in any way, and we do not think Mr. Browning has succeeded. Here is his attempt,—whereof the Carlylese touches serve to show the embarrassment :-

"' My hosts hero !"

Oh, the thrill that ran through us !

Never was aught so good and opportune As that great interrupting voice ! For see! Here maundered this dispirited old age Before the palace ; whence a something crept Which told us well enough without a word What was a-doing iuside,—every touch 0' the garland on those temples, tenderest Disposure of each arm along its side, Came putting out what warmth i' the world was loft.

Then, as it happens at a sacrifice

When, drop by drop, some lustral bath is brimmed :

Into the thin and clear and cold, at once They slaughter a whole wino-skin ; Baochos' blood

Sets the white water all a-flame: oven so,

Sudden into the midst of sorrow, loapt

Along with the gay cheer of that great voice,

Hope, joy, salvation : Herakles was here !

Himself o' the threshold, sent his voice on first To herald all that human and divine

I' the weary happy face of him,—half God,

Half man, which made the god-part God the more.

'Hosts mine,' ho broke upon the sorrow with, Inhabitants of this Pharaian soil, Chance I upon Admotos inside here ?'

The irresistible sound wholesome heart 0' the hero,—moro than all the mightiness At labour in the limbs that, for man's sake,

Laboured and meant to labour their lifelong,—

This drove back, dried up sorrow at its source.

How could it bravo the happy weary laugh

Of who had bantered sorrow,—' Sorrow here ?

What have you done to keep your friend from harm ?

Could no one give the life I see ho keeps ?

Or, say there 's sorrow hare past friendly help Why waste a word or lot a tear escape While other sorrows wait you in the world, And want the life of you, though helpless hero ?' Clearly there was no tolling such an one llow, when their monarch tried who loved him more Than he loved them, and found they loved, as he, Each man, himself, and held, no otherwise, That, of all evils in the world, the worst Was—being forced to die, whato'or death gain : How all this selfishness in him and them

Caused certain sorrow which they sung about,—

I think that Horakles, who hold his life

Out on his band, for any man to take— I think his laugh had marred their threnody."

"The weary, happy face of him," "the irresistible, sound, whole- some heart of the hero," " the happy, weary laugh of who had bantered sorrow," and many other touches in this introduction of Hercules, appear to us to show the difficulty Mr. Browning felt in transforming this great saving agency of the Greek legend into the greater saviour of his own thought. In Euripides, Hercules is far more grotesque, more like one of the beneficent giants of fairy legend, than the unselfish genius of loving labour into whom Mr. Browning tries to transform him. And as Mr. Browning has been a tolerably strict though spirited translator in the dialogue parts,—importing his own views only into the interpolated cotn- mentary,—he has found it quite impossible to justify, by the dialogue, his sketch of Hercules as the grand, unconscious, loving saviour of mankind. The advice given by Hercules to the servant who is scandalized at the hero's hilarity in the house of mourning, even as Mr. Browning himself translates it, is anything but in keeping with his own laborious picture :—

" Give ear to me, then ! For all flesh to die,

Is nature's due ; nor is there any one Of mortals with assurance he shall last The coming morrow: for, what:a born of chance Invisibly proceeds the way it will, Not to be learned, no fortune-teller's prize. This, therefore, having hoard and known through me, Gladden thyself ! Drink ! Count the day-by-day Existence thine, and all the other—chance! Ay, and pay homage also to, by far The sweetest of divinities for man, Kupris ! Benignant Goddess will she prove ! But as for aught also, leave and let things be And trust my counsel, if I seem to speak To purpose—as I do, apparently. Wilt not thou, then,—discarding overmuch Mournfulness, do away with this shut door, Come drink along with me, be-garlanded

This faahion? Do so, and,—I well know what,—

From this stern mood, this shrunk-up state of mind, The pit-pat fall o' the flaggon-juice down throat, Soon will dislodge thee from bad harbourage 1 Men being mortal should think mortal-like : Since to your solemn, brow-contracting sort,

All of them,—so I lay down law at least,— Life is not truly life but misery."

In one word, the great fault of Mr. Browning's piece is that his plan has compelled him to follow conscientiously the dialogue in the Alcestis, while his own conception of the play has compelled him to create quite anew the Hercules who is the dens ex machind by which the drama is brought to a happy conclusion. His design, therefore, and the dialogue he renders from Euripides do not agree, and the result is in this respect an awkward piece of patchwork, containing the promise of a grand—the grandest possible—figure, and the actual execution of one sufficiently grotesque and clumsy. The figure of him who should overcome Death has necessarily in Christian minds assumed a grandeur to which the Greek concep- tion was quite alien, and Mr. Browning's piece gives us the mere

preternatural genius of physical energy, with perhaps just a touch of huge, awkward magnanimity, after leading us to expect the impersonation of ardent and self-sacrificing human love.

For the rest, we do not find that there is much in the concep- tion of Euripides that is really inconsistent with the imagina- tive and often grand exposition of Mr. Browning. Nothing, for instance, can be finer, or, as it seems to us, more truly Greek, in conception,—though not in language, which is too rapid, rude, and shadowy for Greek delineation, —than his picture of how Death, entering the palace of Admetus, half shrinks back embarrassed at the vision of Apollo and his bow, dreading to inset, even in the dark valley of his own proper dominion, the lord of light and heaven. Apollo has just noted the approach of Death

"And we observed another Deity,

Half in, half out the portal,—watch and ward,—

Eyeing his follow: formidably fixed, Yet faultering too at who affronted him, As somehow disadvantaged, should they strive.

Like some dread heapy blackness, ruffled wing, Convulsed and cowering head that is all eye, Which proves a ruined eagle who, too blind Swooping in quest o' the quarry, fawn or kid, Descried doop down the chasm 'twixt rock and rook, Has wedged and mortised, into either wall 0' the mountain, the pent earthquake of his power ; So lies, half hurtless yet still terrible, Just when who stalks up, who stands front to front,

But the great lion-guarder of the gorge, Lord of the ground, a stationed glory there!

Yet he too pauses ore ho try the worst 0' the frightful unfamiliar nature, now To the chasm, indeed, but elsewhere known enough, Among the shadows and the silences Above i' the sky : so, each antagonist Silently faced his fellow and forbore."

Again, Mr. Browning's picture of Alcestis as half ignoring, half despising her husband's grief when the moment comes for her self- sacrifice to take effect, is a perfectly just development of that of Euripides ; though it is hardly the most beautiful conception in itself of the nature that would make such a sacrifice. Indeed, you see in the conception of Euripides, the speculative scepticism that so often marks his interpretations of the old legends,—the wish to paint a character so real that it is, as it were, at war with the legend. Mr. Browning's effort to justify ideally this attitude of mind is more ingenious than fascinating ; but it is certainly at once Euripidean and modern. He is speaking of Alcestis just before her death ;- "We grew to see in that severe regard,— Hear in that hard dry pressure to the point, Word slow pursuing word in monotone,— What Death meant when he called her consecrate

"For certainly with eyes unbandaged now Alkestis looked upon the action here, Self-immolation fur Admetoa' sake;

Saw, with a now sense, all her death would do, And which of her survivors had the right, And which the less right, to survive thereby. For, you shall note, she uttered no one word Of love more to her husband, though he wept Plenteously, waxed importunate in prayer— Folly's old fashion when its seed bears fruit. I think she judged that she had bought the ware 0' the seller at its value,—nor praised him Nor blamed herself, but, with indifferent eye, Saw him purse money up, prepare to leave The buyer with a solitary bale—

True purple—but in place of all that coin, Had made a hundred others happy too, If so willed fate or fortune! What remained To give away, should rather go to these Than one with coin to clink and contemplate. Admetos had his share and might depart, The rest was for her children and herself."

Again, the picture of Admetus's somewhat weak and selfish grief is quite Euripidean, though Mr. Browning has interpolated, we think, a greater growth in this character under the influence of calamity than can be found in the original play, whore it is the hospitality of Admetus which is intended to justify his reward,—not any marked accession of truth or dignity to his nature (though of such a growth there is perhaps a trace).

Yet with the one exception of the laborious and, as it seems to us, very unsuccessful effort to make a great character of Hercules, Mr. Browning has certainly given us a fine modern study of the Alcestis, without departing in any great degree from the principal element in the complex conception of Euripides himself, and we need not say that the modern poet has added great richness to his author,— a richness for the most part not out of harmony with the original,— though it adds greatly to the intellectual interest of the study. Henceforth to Hades. I believe, the sword— Its office was to cut the soul at once

From life,—from something in this world which hides Truth, and hides falsehood, and so lots us live Somehow."