Page:Euripides (Mahaffy).djvu/100

94 remains one of his early plays, the exquisite Alcestis, in which he has given us a quite different, and yet not less perfect example of this noblest phase °of human virtue.

In this play the heroine voluntarily resigns her life under no pressure of misfortune, with no lofty patriotic enthusiasm, but simply to save the life of her husband, for whom Apollo has obtained the permission of an exchange. She has everything to lose; she is the queen of a prosperous people, a happy wife, a fond mother, young and beloved of all; and yet these things she resigns—not from a passionate love of her husband, not from an apprehension of her lot as a widow or her children as orphans (to which she only once, and in passing, alludes, vv. 287–288)—but simply from an instinct of unselfishness, and perhaps of duty. It is indeed with consummate art that Euripides, in this far subtler than any of his imitators, has made her husband a somewhat weak and selfish, though otherwise amiable and hospitable, person. In this way the sacrifice of Alcestis becomes strictly an act of pure unselfishness, and as such has not been paralleled in the annals of the stage. The account of her last hours, her calmness and gentleness to her household, her outbreak of tears in her bridal chamber and over her children, her anxiety for their future—need no comment to show their womanly dignity and tenderness. When she is led out by her husband on the stage, her feverish weakness passes into lyrical visions of the nether world, of the gloomy Charon and his boat, of the dark visage of Hades. She faints for a moment, and then with returning consciousness becomes calm again, and speaks her parting instructions and wishes to her husband. Her last words are a farewell to her children.

68. Thus we find that if Euripides drew in his Medea