Arthur Woollgar Verrall

“ What could be more repugnant to humanity and decency, than to surround with anticipatory emblems the couch of the dying heroine? Or what more offensive to the public, than to parade the street clad in mourning for a benefactress, for whom it was still possible to hope and to pray, and whose death, however it might appear to Admetus and other such devotees, would be thought by at least five persons in ten, as it is by Heracles, not at all necessarily imminent, because it had been predicted by a prophet? ”

“ The spectator would no more be embarrassed in his religious exercises by having seen a Dionysus take a flogging in competition with a slave upon the toughness of their respective skins, than he would be embarrassed in his politics by having seen the birds conspire to build a city in the air. But this license of imagination would in itself have rendered the comic stage an unsuitable instrument for serious attack upon beliefs transcending common experience. No form of art could be further removed from Aristophanic comedy than the realistic cast of Euripides' tragedy. ”

“ What he has given us in his Heracles is a portrait drawn, as it would seem, without flattery and without caricature—a high-born athlete-soldier of Argos, engaged in the service of the 'despot' Eurystheus. All that he does, still excepting his miraculous achievement in the case of Alcestis, fits perfectly together and exhibits the man. The virtues of his breeding, or at least some, of them, he has and retains; he is brave, warm-hearted, sensitive in that sort of honour or pride which dislikes to have made a blunder, to lie under an obligation, or in any way to cut a poor figure. ”

“ How much more simple to begin observance with the present day, to let the corpse lie its fair time in the hall, bewailed with a fair lament, and go forth, when it must, with a fair and proportionate train! And when later he reverts to the same subject, the self-contradiction is stronger still, rises almost to the grotesque, and like much else in the play is distinguished from sheer comedy only by painfulness. ”

“ But that Heracles should be exposed to any just contempt, Heracles the son of the highest god, the minister of life, privileged to wrestle victoriously with the power of darkness and corruption, to bring quick out of the grave a body upon which the mortal change had actually been accomplished, that Heracles should be semi-comic, or comic at all in the least degree—this seemed, as it is, intolerable, a thing as repugnant to the organic laws of art as a centaur or a chimaera to those of nature. ”

“ Nothing is done, nothing conceded, by way of satisfaction to the feeling of awe, or even to the vulgar love of the ghostly and 'eerie' as a means of imaginative pleasure. Excepting a few lines of bald ex officio statement, just sufficient to make the slight perceptible, nothing passes in the long dialogue which would not have been equally appropriate if Alcestis, instead of dying and being buried, had been lost in a mist or had drifted out to sea, and Heracles had been the shepherd who found her or the boatman who picked her up, and had now brought her back to friends who had ceased to hope. ”

“ Pheres is not an admirable old man; he has, as Browning puts it, a truly paternal resemblance to Admetus, he is Admetus aged into cynicism; but he is not a fool. If it be true that in those days, "failing the substitute who shirked his duty", that is to say, Pheres, "Alcestis would be regarded as simply fulfilling hers in yielding her life", how is it that this very Pheres can threaten Admetus with the vengeance of her friends, whose anger must on that hypothesis have been directed altogether against himself? ”

“ At Athens in the age of Euripides the relations of the drama, and of tragedy in particular, to other functions of society were so different from those in our experience, indeed so contrary to our experience, that although the facts are familiar, it is not easy to bear them always effectively in mind. In our own country particularly the theatre is not, rarely has been, and never has been since many generations, of general importance as an organ of public opinion or public instruction. ”

“ The finale of the play consists entirely of a dialogue between Heracles and Admetus, and must depend therefore largely for its effect upon the impression of these two personages which in the course of the piece has been stamped on the mind of the spectator or reader. Admetus is there to figure as a man who for his virtue receives from heaven a miraculous boon, perhaps the most astonishing and affecting which human imagination can conceive. Heracles is to figure as the chosen agent, himself something more than man, by whom the divine purpose is carried into effect. ”

“ The local varieties of cult and legend could stand together on no other supposition. To make a jest for the moment of the almighty father and his offspring was an excellent means to keep men in that flaccid, wavering habit of mind by which Zeus this, Apollo that, and Artemis the other, could be accepted according to the ritual of the place or shrine where the worshipper happened to be. It was another thing to indict these personages in the name of intelligence, and with constant incitements to clarify your thoughts and arrange your propositions. ”

“ I have quoted already the rebuke which he addresses to Admetus, exactly as if nothing of importance had occurred since they parted, upon the subject of his treachery as a host. It is a very proper rebuke, and deserves more attention than it commonly gets. 'But O good gods!'—such must have been the thought of sundry honest auditors, who shared the prejudices but not the acuteness of Aristophanes—'what, in the name of Persephone, is this to the purpose? Here at the man's back is a woman risen from the dead, pulled by his own hands out of the hands of Death. ”

“ For a play of these days, the stage-effect is not only the first thing but almost the last. Our reading body is so scattered, so disparate, so distracted, and it has so many ways of obtaining imaginative amusement without the intervention of the theatre, that even with the help of printed criticism a dramatist would not be well-advised in counting upon any sustained and harmonious impression from the interchange of ideas among the members of his fluctuating audiences. But the audience of Euripides was always assembled. ”

“ And now therefore, if this very Alcestis, who could not possibly rise, has actually risen before the eyes of the Chorus and ours, if the irreversible order of things has in its most impressive manifestation been signally reversed, if in short it has been proved, as all, if they saw such a thing happen, would understand and confess, that the bond of 'Necessity' does not bind, but itself is breakable by superior and, as we say, miraculous power,—what has become of that creed? Was it put forward only that the contrasted sequel might the more conspicuously exhibit its falsity? ”

“ The love of the Athenians for esprit, for wit in the old and proper sense of the word, that is to say, the delicate and subtle manipulation of words and meanings, was their most remarkable gift for good and for evil, the national glory and the national vice. Irony, innuendo, insinuation, the whole class of mental and linguistic faculties which lie on the side of lying, were ingrained in them and in all that they produced. ”

“ Of writers who now have readers or, speaking broadly with reference to the world as a whole, have ever had readers enough to affect the balance, how many are there in whose productions it is an active and indispensable factor that they believed, really, heartily, passionately believed, in the theology of Delphi? I can think of only two, Pindar and Aeschylus. The epic poets, it is true, were no Alexandrians, neither was Sophocles. But it is possible without serious loss, or at least without loss perceived, to read both Homer and Sophocles in a purely Alexandrian spirit ”

“ It so happened that the circumstances of the time supplied to him in perfection the conditions essential for the exercise of this colossal wit, grand and grave solemnities, where it was his accepted part to find language for truths or, to speak more modestly and humanly, for a part of truth, which there and then was admissible only under reserve. To overcome difficulties of expression, to put a thought better and more effectively than your hearers could expect in the given conditions, is the essence of wit. ”

“ When methods of publication, more efficient in the present conditions of life than a play could be though it were performed by order of Parliament at the public expense in every theatre of London, are open to any man whose opinions and style are intrinsically capable of attracting attention; and when religion, orthodox and unorthodox, is propagated without restraint in ways devised by itself for its own ends ”

“ Time in a Greek tragedy is 'ideal', or to speak more plainly, insignificant. Whether the scenes of the story are supposed to pass slowly or rapidly, or by how long an interval one incident is separated from another, are questions which the Greek dramatist never entertained, nor the Greek audience either. ”

“ Without the use of a single plain blasphemy, without giving one single proof of 'impiety' at which an indulgent conformist could not comfortably wink or which a confessed unbeliever could not speciously disallow, the author contrives in scene after scene, each in itself a brilliant piece of portraiture, to impress with accumulating emphasis his own conception of the story, until we arrive at a catastrophe 'too deep' for any emotion except the pure intellectual thrill of thought uniting with thought, just only the joy of understanding. ”

“ The grand difficulty is how and where to give the woman a suitable room in the palace. If he places her within his own protection, may it not be said that the widower consoles himself? If elsewhere, may not the consequences be injurious to the rights of her owner? A charming argument for a man to expound, with antique plainness of speech, in the presence of the noble lady who furnishes the matter of it, and she an Alcestis! The truth is that in this scene, admirable as comedy but comedy pure, Heracles is Heracles still, Admetus still Admetus, the one indelicate and the other selfish ”

“ For more reasons than one it was not in comedy, as comedy was practised at Athens in that age, that the new spirit, the spirit of philosophical criticism, could effectively make itself heard. To our habitual feelings it is somewhat odd to see Aristophanes, while in the very act of exhibiting in postures of farce or harlequinade the patron-god of the sacred theatre, idol and leader of the deepest and tenderest mysteries, turn round to vilify the innovators who dared to depreciate the accepted deities in comparison with their own inventions. ”

“ The first half of our play is at all events coherent within itself. The altercation between Admetus and Pheres is not dragged in 'to please a contentious and law-loving audience'; it was not written because the dramatist saw his way to play the pair smartly against one another, and was blind or indifferent to the effect which his damaged puppets might make when it came to the finale. The reception of Heracles does not stand upon the hollow and artificial plea that it is an occasion for redeeming the character of Admetus, otherwise so unsuitably ignoble, by exhibiting his sublime hospitality. ”

“ Instead of this these 'particular friends' of Admetus, being on this side blind as himself, begin desperately to pray, 'O Zeus, deliver us! O Paean, help us! No hope but in heaven!' and so on. Great indeed must be the relief and thankfulness of the judicious spectator, when after a few minutes of this folly they innocently exclaim. Is not this enough to make a man cut his throat, yes, more than enough to make a man hang himself? ”

“ Down to his very dress the Heracles of Balaustion is not the personage of the Alcestis but of the Madness. It is she, not Euripides, who tells us that, when he goes forth to encounter Death, he picks up his lion-skin and leaves behind his club; she who by other allusions takes care to keep before our eyes these consecrated symbols of beneficent power. ”

“ Nothing is easier than to make such a supposition in words, nothing more difficult than to make it effectively. Now it is a constant experience, fortified by the European literature of twenty centuries at least, that those who speak of Zeus, Apollo, and the like recognize these personages for imaginary types, accepted material of art, in relation to which the question of literal truth or falsehood is idle and irrelevant. ”

“ If in reading Balaustion's Adventure we are able to forget that, according to the legend and according to Euripides, as Mr Way properly reminds us, Admetus was a favourite of the gods, specially chosen to receive the reward of virtue, if his want of what is commonly thought virtue comes at last to seem no drawback but rather an advantage to the total effect, that is because in the joint production of Euripides and Balaustion Admetus becomes a mere foil, and his whole story scarcely more than an opportunity, for displaying the grandeur of the fair collaborator's hero, Heracles. ”

“ It is not merely in single passages or expressions, in particular hits, that we are delighted, although the play bristles with them, and the student at each successive reading may go on finding them as long as he has the inclination. More admirable than any such stroke, more astonishing as an exhibition of intellectual skill, is the adaptation of the whole structure to its purpose, its exquisite poise and delicate preponderation. ”

“ Alcestis, says Heracles, must not yet speak because 'she will not have discharged her ceremonial obligations to the nether gods until the day after to-morrow.' Now obligations of this sort, contracted by the passage from death to life, are so seldom incurred within the limits of our human experience, that they are not much known or thought of. But the contrary passage from life to death is the commonest thing in the world, and no rules more familiar than those which relate to it. ”

“ All the year round the few thousand men and few score women—'one among many, not alien from the muse' [88] —who made Euripides' world, were going in and out of the same narrow streets and markets, gardens and colonnades, courts and quays, sitting-rooms and supper-rooms, crossing and conversing incessantly. ”

“ The slaves who wait upon Heracles are almost ready to rebel because they thus miss the chance of saying a ceremonious farewell to the corpse [34] . But none is more eloquent upon this theme, as indeed none has more cause, than the husband for whom she dies, Admetus himself. In the promise of mourning observances he is inexhaustible; the utmost efforts of imagination seem, as we note with sympathy, insufficient to answer his intentions. No common widower's year of black, he says while still the ears of his wife are open to his assurances [35] , will content his grief. ”

“ Browning, for reasons which will present themselves later, was or conceived himself more free than most readers have felt to express, without abating his respect for the play or the author, the sentiments excited in modern minds by the behaviour of Admetus, not only in the encounter with Pheres but also at the death-bed of Alcestis. To us at least it appears 'childish' (the word is Browning's) in a man, who has deliberately accepted the sacrifice of another life for his own, to spend the moments of parting in beseeching his substitute 'not to abandon him' and 'asking for impossibilities'. ”

“ As it is we are commanded and compelled by Euripides to smile as he smiles himself. But no man could smile, or encourage his audience to smile, over a debate on such a theme and between such interlocutors, if he proposed in real earnest or in earnest imagination to relate how a human being was raised from the dead.
Doubtless there were many in the theatre, yokels, boys, visitors from Acarnania, and the like, who listened to the quips of Apollo without a suspicion that the faith of the poet was not as naïve as their own ”

“ Before we part finally with Balaustion's encomiums upon Heracles, we should perhaps give a separate word to one of her ex parte judgments, which proceeds on an assumption not peculiar to Browning, but mistaken nevertheless and injurious to the play. We are invited by Balaustion more than once to contrast the bravery of Heracles, who 'held his life out in his hand for any man to take', with the cowardice of other persons, the Chorus and the servants, who did not save the much-praised Alcestis by taking her place as victim of the Fates, and thus redeeming the king at less expense. ”

“ The duty preached by the philosophers, and by Euripides as a public teacher known to be in sympathy with philosophers, was the duty of thinking on system, of not adopting, without evidence or investigation, contradictory hypotheses on different days of the month or at different stages of a journey; a duty which, as was seen with ever increasing clearness, would if pursued make it impossible to use at all such conceptions as 'Apollo', or 'Artemis', or 'Demeter', and reduce even 'Zeus' to the position of an inconvenient and misleading name. ”

“ Common free consent is the essence of the matter, and the only estimable part of it. But if there is on one side no consent, or if, which is the same thing, the consent of one party is only secured by the fraud of the other, so that he asks and accepts on a misrepresentation what, not needing it, he would not ask or accept if he knew the truth, the substance of friendship is sacrificed to the mere appearance and form of it. The friendship of Admetus and Heracles is so strong that Admetus cannot possibly allow Heracles to take a meal in another house instead of in his own ”

“ You cannot make a good play, nor anything fit to be called a play, out of incidents which have no moral or necessary connexion, no other connexion in short than that they might succeed one another in the way represented: and you ought not to make a trifle out of a theme so full of tenderness and awe as the death and resurrection of Alcestis. We will consider the scheme for a moment in these two points of view, and will confine our attention for convenience to the scenes numbered fourth and fifth, upon which the objections may be concentrated. ”

“ Comedy dealt mainly with politics, tragedy always directly or indirectly with religion, and with morals as related to religion. When Aristophanes in the Frogs presents the personages of Aeschylus and Euripides, each defending himself as an artist and assailing the other, he assumes as a matter of course that the rivals must be judged as public preachers, as aiming deliberately at the spread of certain opinions and the production of a certain character in their auditors. ”