Page:Euripides the Rationalist.djvu/81

Rh chosen to invest the 'Helper' and 'Saviour', has lowered it instead of elevating, until one of the feelings, and not the weakest, which it would inspire in a sensitive spectator, is a feeling of thankfulness that the heroine is veiled?

In the opening sentences of Heracles, and before the subject of the woman is touched, all chance of solemnity is deliberately thrown away. 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. And he reads a lecture on manners!' When in this way the strings of our thoughts, tuned perhaps by the previous meditations of the Chorus to the pitch not indeed of piety but at least of pensiveness, have been slacked again and flattened to the common tone, Heracles introduces the matter which has caused his return. Will his friend take charge of this woman, till he comes back from his adventure in the north? He has picked up some cattle as a prize, and the woman into the bargain. Admetus makes objections, objections which come practically to this, that by obliging Heracles he may possibly incur some annoyance. After all he is not so much altered but that he still thinks first of 'number one'. He even reproduces in this new connexion, by one of those exquisite turns in which Euripides is unsurpassed, his important point that Heracles 'has many other friends in Pherae'. 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