Of passive death without a quickening life,
Admetos only, no Alkestis now!'
Mr. Browning, in quoting the verse from Mrs. Browning, sufficiently indicates the spirit in which he would read the Alkestis; but clear it is that he might have chosen from the earlier poets passages far less likely to give rise to the contradiction which we have spoken of, and which cannot but be more or less felt in this instance. In Euripides, we see the first fatal symptoms of the skepticism and materialism which finally overtook the Greek stage. There is a good deal of casuistry in his expedients, which often the stage-play (of which Mr. Browning has decisively got rid) helped him to conceal. The old honest belief in the myths was beginning to fade and weaken, and had already become pretty much a thing for the theatre. Mr. Browning has aimed at idealising Euripides—at elevating him, as it were, to the point at which Greek myth will reflect the rising lights of modern ideas. But it is inevitable that scholars should feel that there is a lack of solid foundation for the rendering. To those who choose to receive Mr. Browning's Alkestis implicitly, it can only be a thing of beauty and of noblest meaning. So far as it is Greek, it gives the earlier rather than the later conception; but it has wrapped the Greek ideal in a new atmosphere of spiritual truth. If Mr. Browning had chosen the Alkestis of Euripides for the sole purpose of proving his wonderful dramatic capability, and his power of involving himself in a theme and so transforming it, he could not have found a better, that is to say, a more difficult, subject. In Greece the husband existed for the State, the wife for the husband, and the conjugal relation was little relieved by sentiment. Euripides celebrates the mere triumph of this Greek wifely duty—no more; but how exquisitely does Mr. Browning make Balaustion play chorus, so as occasionally to give opportunity for the infusion of his own transcendentalism. Sometimes, however, Mr. Browning shows fine capacity for catching the Greek grace and unconscious sensuousness of conception. Nothing could be more faithful than this:—
'For thee, Alkestis, Queen!
Many a time those haunters of the Muse
Shall sing thee to the seven-stringed mountain shell,
And glorify in hymns that need no harp,
At Sparta when the cycle comes about,
And that Karneian month wherein the moon