exactly on the issue which he puts foremost. Balaustion's Adventure involves two propositions about the Euripidean Admetus; first, that he is not exhibited for our admiration, and secondly, that Euripides deserves no censure for not making him admirable. Mr Way contends formally against the first, not, as I think, with success; but his statement implies a hypothetical decision, that if Euripides has not made Admetus admirable, Euripides must be excused, if at all, by some other method than that of Browning. And here I am entirely with Mr Way. 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. Here therefore we will abandon the husband as apparently indefensible, and consider the case offered by Browning on behalf of the other incriminated personage, the semi-divine deliverer.
It is, if I may say so without impertinence, very much to the credit of Browning's poetical and dramatic instinct, that he should have fixed so decisively upon Heracles as the true nodus of the literary problem presented by the Alcestis: and Balaustion's Adventure is a striking proof how instructive may be the criticism of artist by artist, even when it results, as it is not unlikely to do, in a thorough-going recomposition of the subject. Browning, it is needless to say, was no more likely than Goethe to repose complacently in such a theory of Euripides as satisfied the vigorous but narrow and unimaginative mind of Schlegel, and has infected too many who were capable of knowing better. The conclusion at which Balaustion arrives[1] is the assumption from which Browning started, that the Alcestis is the work of a true artist and a man of sense, justifiable as a whole upon ordinary principles, like the work of Sophocles or another. It must have then some general ruling purpose. From the tradi-
- ↑ p. 110, ed. 1889.
