That is the truth Browning makes this woman have the insight to reveal.  Gladness of soul, becoming at one with sorrow and death and rising out of them the conqueror, but always rejoicing, in itself, in the joy of the universe and of God, is the root-heroic quality.

Then there is the crux of the play—­Alkestis is to die for Admetos, and does it.  What of the conduct of Admetos?  What does Balaustion, the woman, think of that?  She thinks Admetos is a poor creature for having allowed it.  When Alkestis is brought dying on the stage, and Admetos follows, mourning over her, Balaustion despises him, and she traces in the speech of Alkestis, which only relates to her children’s fate and takes no notice of her husband’s protestations, that she has judged her husband, that love is gone in sad contempt, that all Admetos has given her is now paid for, that her death is a business transaction which has set her free to think no more about him, only of her children.  For, what seems most pertinent for him to say, if he loved, “Take, O Fates, your promise back, and take my life, not hers,” he does not say.  That is not really the thought of Euripides.

Then, and this is subtly but not quite justly wrought into Euripides by Balaustion, she traces through the play the slow awakening of the soul of Admetos to the low-hearted thing he had done.  He comes out of the house, having disposed all things duteously and fittingly round the dead, and Balaustion sees in his grave quietude that the truth is dawning on him; when suddenly Pheres, his father, who had refused to die for him, comes to lay his offering on the bier.  This, Balaustion thinks, plucks Admetos back out of unselfish thought into that lower atmosphere in which he only sees his own advantage in the death of Alkestis; and in which he now bitterly reproaches his father because he did not die to save Alkestis.  And the reproach is the more bitter because—­and this Balaustion, with her subtle morality, suggests—­an undernote of conscience causes him to see his own baser self, now prominent in his acceptance of Alkestis’ sacrifice, finished and hardened in the temper of his father—­young Admetos in old Pheres.  He sees with dread and pain what he may become when old.  This hatred of himself in his father is, Balaustion thinks, the source of his extreme violence with his father.  She, with the Greek sense of what was due to nature, seeks to excuse this unfitting scene.  Euripides has gone too far for her.  She thinks that, if Sophocles had to do with the matter, he would have made the Chorus explain the man.

But the unnatural strife would not have been explained by Sophocles as Balaustion explains it.  That fine ethical twist of hers—­“that Admetos hates himself in his father,” is too modern for a Greek.  It has the casuistical subtlety which the over-developed conscience of the Christian Church encouraged.  It is intellectual, too, rather than real, metaphysical more than moral, Browning rather