"Sudden into the midst of sorrow leapt,
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."
The heroic helpfulness of Herakles is no doubt the chief thing for Browning in the story. The large gladness of spirit with which he confronts the meticulous and perfunctory mourning of the stricken household reflected his own habitual temper with peculiar vividness. But it is clear that the Euripidean story contained an element which Browning could not assimilate—Admetos' acceptance of Alkestis' sacrifice. To the Greek the action seemed quite in order; the persons who really incurred his reproof were Admetos' parents, who in spite of their advanced years refused to anticipate their approaching death in their son's favour. Browning cannot away with an Admetos who, from sheer reluctance to die, allowed his wife to suffer death in his place; and he characteristically suggests a version of the story in which its issues are determined from first to last, and on both sides, by self-sacrificing love. Admetos is now the large-minded king who grieves to be called away before [his] work for his people is done. Alkestis seeks, with Apollo's leave, to take his place, so that her lord may live and carry out the purposes of his soul,—
"Nor let Zeus lose the monarch meant in thee."
But Admetos will not allow this; for Alkestis is as spirit to his flesh, and his life without her would be but a passive death. To which "pile of truth on truth" she rejoins by adding the "one truth more," that his refusal of her sacrifice would be in effect a surrender of the supreme duty laid upon him of reigning a righteous king,—that this life-purpose of his is above joy and sorrow, and the death which she will undergo for his and its sake, her highest good as it is his. And in effect, her death, instead of paralysing him, redoubles the vigour of his soul, so that Alkestis, living on in a mind made better by her presence, has not in the old tragic sense died at all, and finds her claim to enter Hades rudely rejected by "the pensive queen o' the twilight," for whom death meant just to die, and wanders back accordingly to live once more by Admetos' side. Such the story became when the Greek dread of death was replaced by Browning's spiritual conception of a death glorified by love. The pathos and tragic forces of it were inevitably enfeebled; no Herakles was needed to pluck this Alkestis from the death she sought, and the rejection of her claim to die is perilously near to Lucianic burlesque. But, simply as poetry, the joyous sun-like [radiance] of the mighty spoiler of death is not unworthily replaced by the twilight queen, whose eyes
"lingered still
Straying among the flowers of Sicily,"
absorbed in the far memory of the life that Herakles asserted and enforced,—until, at Alkestis' summons, she
"broke through humanity
Into the orbed omniscience of a god."
From his idealised Admetos Browning passed with hardly a pause to attempt the more difficult feat of idealising a living sovereign. Admetos was ennobled by presenting him as a political idealist; the French Emperor, whose career had closed at Sedan, was in some degree qualified for a parallel operation by the obscurity which still invested the inmost nature of that well-meaning adventurer. Browning had watched Louis Napoleon's career with mixed feelings; he had resented the coup d'état, and still more the annexation of Savoy and Nice after the war of 1859. But he had never shared the bitter animus which prevailed at home. He was equally far, no doubt, from sharing the exalted hero-worship which inspired his wife's Poems before Congress. The creator of The Italian in England, of Luigi, and Bluphocks, could not but recognise the signal services of Napoleon to the cause of Italian freedom, however sharply he condemned the hard terms on which Italy had been compelled to purchase it. "It was a great action; but he has taken eighteenpence [for] it—which is a pity";[57] it was on the lines of this epigram, already quoted, that eleven years later he still interpreted the fallen emperor, and that he now completed, as it would seem, the abandoned poem of 1860. He saw in him a man of generous impulses doubled with a borné politician, a ruler of genuine Liberal and even democratic proclivities, which the timid calculations of a second-rate opportunist reduced to a contemptible travesty of Liberalism. The shifting standpoints of such a man are reproduced with superfluous fidelity in his supposed Defence, which seems designed to be as elusive and impalpable as the character it reflects. How unlike the brilliant and precise realism of Blougram, sixteen years before! The upcurling cloud-rings from Hohenstiel's cigar seem to symbolise something unsubstantial and evasive in the whole fabric. The assumptions we are invited to form give way one after another. Leicester Square proves the "Residenz," the "bud-mouthed arbitress" a shadowy memory, the discourse to a friendly and flattered hearer a midnight meditation. And there is a like fluctuation of mood. Now he is formally justifying his past, now musing, half wistfully, half ironically, over all that he might have been and was not. At the outset we see him complacently enough intrenched within a strong position, that of the consistent opportunist, who made the best of what he found, not a creator but a conservator, "one who keeps the world safe." But he has ardent ideas and aspirations. [The] freedom of Italy has kindled his imagination, and in the grandest passage of the poem he broods over his frustrate but deathless dream:—
"Ay, still my fragments wander, music-fraught,
Sighs of the soul, mine once, mine now, and mine
For ever! Crumbled arch, crushed aqueduct,
Alive with tremors in the shaggy growth
Of wild-wood, crevice-sown, that triumphs there,
Imparting exultation to the hills."
[57] Letters of E.B.B., ii. 385.