Alcestis | Page 4

has made a thrilling answer about eternal sorrow,
and the silencing of lyre and lute, and the statue who shall be his only
bride, Alcestis earnestly calls the attention of witnesses to the fact that
he has sworn not to marry again. She is not an artist like Admetus.
There is poetry in her, because poetry comes unconsciously out of deep
feeling, but there is no artistic eloquence. Her love, too, is quite
different from his. To him, his love for his wife and children is a
beautiful thing, a subject to speak and sing about as well as an emotion
to feel. But her love is hardly conscious. She does not talk about it at all.
She is merely wrapped up in the welfare of certain people, first her
husband and then he children. To a modern romantic reader her
insistence that her husband shall not marry again seems hardly delicate.
But she does not think about romance or delicacy. To her any neglect to
ensure due protection for the children would be as unnatural as to
refuse to die for her husband. Indeed, Professor J.L. Myres has
suggested that care for the children's future is the guiding motive of her
whole conduct. There was first the danger of their being left fatherless,
a dire calamity in the heroic age. She could meet that danger by dying

herself. Then followed the danger of a stepmother. She meets that by
making Admetus swear never to marry. In the long run, I fancy, the
effect of gracious loveliness which Alcestis certainly makes is not so
much due to any words of her own as to what the Handmaid and the
Serving Man say about her. In the final scene she is silent; necessarily
and rightly silent, for all tradition knows that those new-risen from the
dead must not speak. It will need a long rite de passage before she can
freely commune with this world again. It is a strange and daring scene
between the three of them; the humbled and broken-hearted husband;
the triumphant Heracles, kindly and wise, yet still touched by the
mocking and blustrous atmosphere from which he sprang; and the
silent woman who has seen the other side of the grave. It was always
her way to know things but not to speak of them.
The other characters fall easily into their niches. We have only to
remember the old Satyric tradition and to look at them in the light of
their historical development. Heracles indeed, half-way on his road
from the roaring reveller of the Satyr-play to the suffering and erring
deliverer of tragedy, is a little foreign to our notions, but quite
intelligible and strangely attractive. The same historical method seems
to me to solve most of the difficulties which have been felt about
Admetus's hospitality. Heracles arrives at the castle just at the moment
when Alcestis is lying dead in her room; Admetus conceals the death
from him and insists on his coming in and enjoying himself. What are
we to think of this behaviour? Is it magnificent hospitality, or is it gross
want of tact? The answer, I think, is indicated above.
In the uncritical and boisterous atmosphere of the Satyr-play it was
natural hospitality, not especially laudable or surprising. From the
analogy of similar stories I suspect that Admetus originally did not
know his guest, and received not so much the reward of exceptional
virtue as the blessing naturally due to those who entertain angels
unawares. If we insist on asking whether Euripides himself, in real life
or in a play of his own free invention, would have considered
Admetus's conduct to Heracles entirely praiseworthy, the answer will
certainly be No, but it will have little bearing on the play. In the
Alcestis, as it stands, the famous act of hospitality is a datum of the
story. Its claims are admitted on the strength of the tradition. It was the
act for which Admetus was specially and marvellously rewarded;

therefore, obviously, it was an act of exceptional merit and piety. Yet
the admission is made with a smile, and more than one suggestion is
allowed to float across the scene that in real life such conduct would be
hardly wise.
Heracles, who rose to tragic rank from a very homely cycle of myth,
was apt to bring other homely characters with him. He was a great
killer not only of malefactors but of "kêres" or bogeys, such as "Old
Age" and "Ague" and the sort of "Death" that we find in this play.
Thanatos is not a god, not at all a King of Terrors. One may compare
him with the dancing skeleton who is called Death in mediaeval
writings. When such a figure appears on the tragic stage one asks at
once what