If the character of Admetos is somewhat lowered by Browning beneath the conception of the Greek dramatist, to allow room for its subsequent elevation, the conception of Herakles is certainly heightened. We shall not say that Balaustion is the speaker and that Herakles is somewhat of a woman's hero. Browning himself fully enters into Balaustion's enthusiasm. And the presence of the strong, joyous helper of men is in truth an inspiring one. The great voice that goes before him is itself a Sursum corda!—a challenge and a summons to whatever manliness is in us. And the best of it is that sauntering the pavement or crossing the ferry we may happen to encounter this face of Herakles:
Out of this face emerge banners and horses—O superb! I see what is coming;
I see the high pioneer-caps—I see the slaves of runners clearing the way,
I hear victorious drums.
This face is a life-boat.
For Walt Whitman too had seen Brother Jonathan Herakles, and indeed the face of the strong and tender wound-dresser was itself as the face of a calmer Herakles to many about to die. The speeches of the demigod in Browning's transcript require an abundant commentary, but it is the commentary of an irrepressible joy, an outbreak of enthusiasm which will not be controlled. The glorious Gargantuan creature, in the best sense Rabelaisian, is uplifted by Browning into a very saint of joyous effort; no pallid ascetic, indeed, beating his breast with the stone, but a Christian saint of Luther's school, while at the same time a somewhat over-boisterous benevolent Paynim giant:
Gladness be with thee, Helper of our world!
I think this is the authentic sign and sea!
Of Godship, that it ever waxes glad,
And more glad, until gladness blossoms, bursts
Into a rage to suffer for mankind,
And recommence at sorrow.
Something of the Herakles ideal appears again and again in other poems of Browning. His Breton sailor, Hervé Riel, has more than a touch of the Heraclean frankness of gaiety in arduous effort. His Ivàn Ivànovitch wields the axe and abolishes a life with the Heraclean joy in righteousness. And in the last of Browning's poems, not without a pathetically over-boisterous effort and strain, there is the suggestion of an ideal conception of himself as a Herakles-Browning; the old man tries at least to send his great voice before him.
The new Admetos, new Alkestis, imagined by Balaustion at the close of the poem, are wedded lovers who, like the married in Pompilia's dream of heaven, "know themselves into one." For them the severance of death has become an impossible thing; and therefore no place is left for Herakles in this treatment of the story. It expresses Browning's highest conception of the union of soul with soul:
Therewith her whole soul entered into his,
He looked the look back, and Alkestis died—
died only to be rejected by Hades, as still living, and with a more potent life, in her husband's heart and will. Yet the mortal cloud is round these mortals still; they cannot see things as the gods see. And, for all their hopes and endeavours, the earth which they would renew and make as heaven, remains the old incredulous, unconverted earth,—"Such is the envy Gods still bear mankind." And in such an earth, if not for them, assuredly for others, Herakles may find great deeds to do.
Balaustion has the unique distinction of being heroine throughout two of Browning's poems; and of both we may say that the genius of Euripides is the hero. Aristophanes' Apology is written from first to last with unflagging energy; the translation of the "Herakles" which it includes is a masculine and masterly effort to transport the whole sense and spirit of the original into English verse, and the rendering of the choral passages into lyric form gives it an advantage over the transcript of the "Alkestis." Perhaps not a little of the self-defence of Aristophanes and his statement of the case against Euripides could have been put as well or better in a critical essay in prose; but the method of Browning enables him to mingle, in a dramatic fashion, truth with sophistry, and to make both serve his purpose of presenting not only the case but the character of the great Greek maker of comedy. Balaustion is no longer the ardent girl of the days of her first adventure; she is a wife, with the dignity, the authority of womanhood and wifehood; she has known the life of Athens with its evil and its good; she has been the favoured friend of Euripides; she is capable of confronting his powerful rival in popular favour, and of awing him into sobriety and becoming manners; with an instinctive avoidance she recoils from whatever is gross or uncomely; yet she can do honour to the true light of intellect and genius even though it shines through earth-born vapours and amid base surroundings.