As sleeps the water-serpent half surmised:
Not brought up to the surface at a bound,
By one touch of the idly-probing spear.
The vivid, coloured, Miltonic image, though not found in the scene as spoken, fits the words like a glove, and properly compensates for the loss of appropriate action. But when the reciter comes to Heracles, and wherever she has him in view, her invention soars regardless. Without a hint from Euripides, and even against his command, masses of mythology and theology, scenery and portraiture, are rolled in; motives are imputed, facts bluffed, and the whole business of exposition carried on with the fascinating iniquity of a feminine partizan.
Immediately upon his entrance[1], and before he has said anything but "Pheraean friends", Balaustion stops the action to assure us that in his tone, bearing, and appearance you perceived 'the friend of man', 'the Helper', 'the God', as her style is:
Himself, o' the threshold, sent his voice on first
To herald all that human and divine
I' the weary happy face of him,—half God
Half man, which made the god-part God the more.
And as soon as he has asked whether Admetus is within, she stops again to point out
all the mightiness
At labour in the limbs that for man's sake
Laboured and meant to labour their life long.
In both places her worship flows over the page, and many other eloquent pages are given to repeating and re-enforcing this first impression; so that as long as we keep to the Adventure, it scarcely matters what exactly is said or done in the brief scenes by a personage so stupendous. Like Pindar's Hiero, 'whatsoever he lets drop, falls great because from him'. But if the enchanted reader seeks Euripides, for the pleasure of seeing how his making has made all this, he finds with dismay that it is pure Balaustion, every word of it; the 'God' and 'the half-God', the 'great voice', 'weary happy face', 'happy weary laugh', 'love of men', 'many grandnesses', 'arm which had slain the
- ↑ p. 49.
