"I know, too, a great Kaunian painter, strong
As Hercules, though rosy with a robe
Of Grace that softens down the sinewy strength:
And he has made a picture of it all.
There lies Alcestis dead, beneath the sun
She longed to look her last upon, beside
The sea, which somehow tempts the life in us
To come trip over its white waste of waves,
And try escape from earth, and fleet as free.
Behind the body I suppose there bends
Old Pheres in his hoary impotence;
And women-wailers, in a corner crouch
—Four, beautiful as you four,—yes, indeed!
Close, each to other, agonising all,
As fastened, in fear's rhythmic sympathy,
To two contending opposite. There strains
The might o' the hero 'gainst his more than match,
—Death, dreadful not in thew and bone, but like
The envenomed substance that exudes some dew,
Whereby the merely honest flesh and blood
Will fester up and run to ruin straight,
Ere they can close with, clasp and overcome,
The poisonous impalpability
That simulates a form beneath the flow
Of those grey garments; I pronounce that piece
Worthy to set up in our Poikilé!"
Leighton had taken the lines from Euripides as his text:—
"There slept a silent palace in the sun,
With plains adjacent and Thessalian peace."
"....Yea, I will go and lie in wait for Death, the king of souls departed, with the dusky robes, and methinks I shall find him hard by the grave drinking the sacrificial wine. And if I can seize him by this ambush, springing from my lair, and throw my arms in circle round him, none shall snatch his panting body from my grasp till he give back the woman to me."
"HERACLES STRUGGLING WITH DEATH FOR THE BODY OF ALCESTIS." 1871
By permission of the Fine Art Society, the owners of the Copyright[ToList]
This work made a landmark in Leighton's career. "Dante at Verona" had combined a complicated design of many figures with a dramatic feeling; "Cimabue's Madonna" and the "Syracusan Bride" had proved Leighton's "great power of rich arrangement," to quote D.G. Rossetti's words respecting "Cimabue's Madonna"; but in the "Heracles Wrestling with Death" there was felt to be a more profound tragedy; indeed, the objective treatment had in this instance ceded to one more subjective, in so far that the subject had appealed to him through a personal experience, though the feeling was, as in nearly all Leighton's greatest works, veiled in a classic garb. In a letter to his mother, dated November 13, 1864, he wrote:—
November 13, 1864.
I returned so suddenly on account of a grave and terrible anxiety, now quite removed, about my dear friend Mrs. Sartoris.