to hear in the circumstances, but also of all attempt to pourtray or suggest that kind of instinctive emotion which any mortal creatures, as such, might be expected to feel at the return of a fellow-mortal from the dead. 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. It is true, and it is not the least remarkable feature of the case, that scarcely anything at all is allowed to pass, when the queen's identity has been revealed; but even in the earlier and longer part of the scene, while she is yet unrecognized, the incongruity of treatment is sufficiently apparent. What it would be like to encounter a living man fresh from a wrestle with Death, and bringing with him as prize of the contest a human being restored to earthly state after body and soul had passed through the mortal crisis, none of us, I suppose, are qualified by experience to judge. But this is certain, that not one man in ten thousand would shape such a scene in imagination after the fashion chosen by Euripides. Certainly we should not suppose, and for reasons presently to be noticed the audience at an Athenian drama would be even less likely to suppose, that the victor and the rescued could walk in like any two people from the street, and without suggesting by appearance, tone, or otherwise the suspicion of anything transcending the habits of everyday life. We have already remarked[1] the striking contrast between this entrance as it appears in the original, and as it appears when modified by the fine but unwarranted interpolations of Browning, and the almost laughable difficulty, which he has betrayed as it were involuntarily, of adjusting the demand of his feelings to the obstinate refusal of the poet. That 'shrouded something, live and womanlike', which Balaustion saw leaning 'under the great guard' of Heracles'
- ↑ See p. 39.
