CHAPTER IV.
ALCESTIS.—MEDEA.
"She came forth in her bridal robes arrayed,
And 'midst the graceful statues, round the hall
Shedding the calm of their celestial mien,
Stood, pale, yet proudly beautiful, as they:
Flowers in her bosom, and the star-like gleam
Of jewels trembling from her braided hair,
And death upon her brow."
Partly on account of its being the fourth play in the order of representation, as well as from a supposed comic vein in the character of Hercules, the "Alcestis" has been considered as a satiric after-piece, or at least a substitute for that appendage to the tragic trilogy. But no reader of this domestic play, whether in the original or translation, will find mirth or satirical banter in it. The happy ending may entitle it to be regarded as a comedy in the modern sense of the term, although until the very last scene it draws so deeply on one main element of tragedy, pity. At most, the "Alcestis" is what the French term comédie larmoyante. No one of the extant dramas of Euripides, as a whole, is so pathetic. The reader feels now, as the spectators doubtless felt at its representation, that it is not because of the rank of the sufferers we sympathise with them. It is not Admetus the king, but Admetus the husband, whom we commiserate: that she is a queen adds nothing to our admiration of the tender and self-devoting Alcestis. Among the faults found with this drama is one that sounds strangely to modern ears. It wrought, say the objectors, upon the feelings of spectators by an exhibition of woe beneath the dignity of the sufferers, who are therefore degraded by the pity excited on their behalf. This seems "hedging kings" with a most preposterous "divinity,"—setting them apart from common humanity by making them void of human affections. If to touch an audience through the medium of household sorrows were a blot in Greek tragedy, it will scarcely be accounted a blemish by modern readers.
The story of the "Alcestis" is founded upon some legend or tradition of northern Greece, probably brought thither from the East. The Fates have marked Admetus, king of Pheræ, in Thessaly, for death. Apollo has prevailed upon the grim sisters to grant him a reprieve on one condition—that he finds a substitute. In the first instance he applies to his father and mother, aged people, but they decline being vicariously sacrificed. His wife Alcestis alone will give her life for his ransom. Apollo does Admetus this good turn because he has himself, when condemned by Jupiter to serve in a mortal's house, been kindly treated by the Pheræan king. When the play opens, the doom of Alcestis is at hand. She is sick unto death; and Death himself, an impersonation similar to that of Madness in the "Mad Hercules," is at the palace gate awaiting his prey. The grisly fiend, suspecting that Apollo intends a second time to defraud him of his dues by interposing for Alcestis as he had done for Admetus, is in no gracious mood; but the god assures him that his interest with the Fates is exhausted. The following scenes are occupied with the parting of the victim from her husband, her children, and her household, and a faithful servant describes the profound grief of them all. In the midst of tears and wailings, and just after death has claimed his own, an unlooked-for guest arrives. Hercules, most stalwart of mortals, but not yet a demigod, enters. He is on his road to Thessaly, sent on one more perilous errand by his enemy Eurystheus. He is struck by the signs of general woe in the household. He proposes to pass on to another friend of his in Pheræ, but Admetus will not hear of what he regards a breach of hospitable duties, and gives orders to a servant to take Hercules to a distant chamber, and there set meat and drink before him. The guest, much perplexed by all he sees, but foiled in his inquiries, and led to suppose that some female relative of Admetus is dead, goes to his dinner, prepared to enjoy it, although, under the circumstances, it must be a solitary meal. Unaware of the real state of things, he greatly scandalises his attendant by his appetite, and still more by breaking out into snatches of convivial songs. "Of all the gormandising and unfeeling ruffians I ever met with," says the slave in waiting, "this fellow is the worst. He eats like a half-famished wolf, drinks in proportion, calls for more than is set before him, and sings, or rather howls, his ribald songs out of all tune,—
"'While we o' the household mourned our mistress—mourned,
That is to say, in silence—never showed
The eyes, which we kept wetting, to the guest—
For there Admetus was imperative.
And so, here am I helping to make at home
A guest, some fellow ripe for wickedness,
Robber or pirate, while she goes her way
Out of her house.
·······
Never yet
Received I worse guest than this present one.'"—(B.)
"Nor content with being voracious and dainty, he drinks till the wine fires his brain."
Hercules marks the rueful visage of his attendant, and thinking that Admetus has bidden him be as cheerful as usual, the family affliction being only a slight one, rates him roundly for his woe-begone looks:
"Hercules. Why look'st so solemn and so thought-absorbed?
To guests, a servant should not sour-faced be,
But do the honours with a mind urbane.
Whilst thou, contrariwise, beholding here
Arrive thy master's comrade, hast for him
A churlish visage, all one beetle-brow—
Having regard to grief that's out of door!
Come hither, and so get to grow more wise.
Things mortal—know'st the nature that they have?
No, I imagine! whence could knowledge spring?
Give ear to me then! For all flesh to die
Is nature's due; nor is there any one
Of mortals with assurance he shall last
The coming morrow."—(B.)
And so on the old but ever-appropriate text, "Thou knowest that to die is common;" and the oft-renewed question, "Why seems it then particular to thee?" Hercules proceeds moralising—"philosophising even in his drink," as an old scholiast remarks. The pith, indeed, of Hercules's counsel is "Drink, man, and put a garland on thy head."
When, however, the attendant says—
"Ah! thou know'st nought o' the woe within these walls:"
the guest's curiosity is aroused. Can Admetus have deceived me? is it, then, not a distant kinswoman whom they are burying? have I been turning a house of mourning into a house of feasting? Tell me, good fellow, what has really chanced. The servant replies:
"Thou cam'st not at a fit reception-time:
With sorrow here beforehand; and thou seest
Shorn hair, black robes.
Hercules. But who is it that's dead?
Some child gone? or the agèd sire, perhaps?
Servant. Admetus' wife, then, she has perished, guest.
Hercules. How say'st? and did ye house me all the same?
Servant. Ay: for he had thee in that reverence,
He dared not turn thee from the door away.
Hercules. O hapless, and bereft of what a mate!
All of us now are dead, not she alone;
Where is he gone to bury her? where am I
To go and find her?
Servant. By the road that leads
Straight to Larissa, thou wilt see the tomb
Out of the suburb, a carved sepulchre."—(B.)
But as soon as Hercules extracts from the servant the real cause of the family grief, all levity departs from him. He is almost wroth with his friend for such overstrained delicacy, and hurries out to render him such "yeoman's service" as no one except the strongest of mankind can perform. Alcestis has been laid in her grave; the mourners have all come back to the palace; and Death, easy in his mind as to Apollo, and secure, as he deems himself, from interruption, is making ready for a ghoulish feast on her corpse. But he has reckoned without the guest. He finds himself in the dilemma of foregoing his prey or being strangled, and he permits his irresistible antagonist to restore the self-devoted wife to the arms of her disconsolate and even more astonished husband.[1]
With the instinct of a great artist, Euripides centralises the interest of the action in Alcestis alone; and in order to show how perfect the sacrifice is, he endows the victim with every noble, tender, and loving quality of woman. She stands as far apart from and above the other characters in the play as Una does in the first book of the 'Faery Queen.' For the Greek stage she is what Portia and Cordelia are for the English. If less heroic than Antigone or Electra, she is more human; the strength which opposition to harsh laws or thirst for "great revenge" lent to them, to her is supplied by the might of wifely love. Possibly it was this sublime tenderness that kept the memory of Alcestis green through ages in which the manuscripts of Euripidean dramas were lying among the rolls of Byzantine libraries, or the dust and worms of the monasteries of the West. Chaucer, in his 'Court of Love,' calls her the "Quenè's floure;" and in his 'Legende of Good Women' she is "under Venus lady and quene:"—
"And from afer came walking in the Mede
The God of Love, and in his hand a quene,
And she was clad in real[2] habit grene:
A fret of golde she haddè next her heer,
And upon that a white corowne she here
With flourès smale.'
With equally happy art—indeed, after Shakespeare's manner with his female personages—we are not formally told of her goodness; but we know from those around her that the loving wife is also a loving mother, a kind and liberal mistress. Even the sorrow of the Chorus is significant: it is composed not of susceptible women, but of ancient men—past the age in which the affections are active, and when the lengthening shadows on the dial often render the old less sensible of others' woe. And this tribute from the elders of the neighbourhood completes the circle of grief on the removal of Alcestis from all she had loved—from the cheering sunlight, the lucid streams, the green pastures, which from the palace windows had so often gladdened her eyes.
Next to Alcestis in interest is her deliverer. Without Hercules the play would, like "The Trojan Women," have been too "infected with grief." Almost from the moment of his entrance a ray of hope begins to streak the gloom, and this an Athenian spectator would feel more immediately than an English reader. The theatrical as well as the legendary Hercules, if not a comic, was at least a cheery, personage. On his right arm victory rested. He was no stranger to the Pheræans. His deeds were sung at festivals, and told by the hearth in winter. The very armour he wore was a trophy: the lion's skin he had won in fight with a king of beasts: with his club he had slain the wild boar who had gored other mighty hunters: he had wrestled with and prevailed over the giants of the earth: he was as generous and genial as he was valiant and strong: none but the proud and cruel fear him: he has ever kind words for women and children: his presence, when he is off duty, is a holiday: he may sing out of tune, yet his laugh is music to the ear.
The other dramatis personæ are kept, perhaps purposely, in the background. Admetus makes almost as poor a figure in this play as Jason does in the "Medea." Self-preservation is the leading feature in his character. He loves Alcestis much, but he loves himself more. He cannot look his situation in the face. For some time he has known his wife's promise to die for him, but, until the hour of its fulfilment is striking, he is too weak to realise the import of her pledge. He lays flattering unction on his soul—perhaps somewhat in this wise: "My wife, as well as myself, must one day die: perchance the Fates may not be in haste for either of us—may even, with Apollo to friend us, renew the bond." When the inexorable missive comes for her, he is indeed deeply cast down: yet even then there is not a spark of manliness in him. Provided the Fates got one victim, they might not have been particular as to which of the twain was "nominated in the bond." But no—for him there is a saving clause in it, and he will not forego the benefit of it. He will do everything but the one thing it is in his power to do, to prove his conjugal affection. There shall be no more mirth or feasting in his dominions; the sound of tabret and harp shall never more be heard in his dwelling; black shall be his only wear; no second wife shall occupy the room of his first; had he the lute of Orpheus, he would go down to Pluto's gloomy realm, and bring her to upper air. He "doth profess too much:" he lacks the heroic spirit that dwelt in Polyxena, Macaria, and Iphigenia. Some excuse for one so weak as Admetus may perhaps be found in the view of death, or life after death, taken by the Greeks generally. Even their Elysian fields were inhabited by melancholy spectres. For with them, to die either was to be annihilated or to pass a monotonous existence without fear but also without hope. In the one case Wordsworth's lines are applicable to them as well as to "Lucy:"—
"No motion has she now, no force:
She neither hears nor sees;
Rolled round in earth's diurnal course,
With rocks and stones and trees."
They held with Claudio that
"The weariest and most loathèd worldly life
That age, ache, penury, and imprisonment
Can lay on nature, is a paradise
To what we fear of death."[3]
Or they would say with the great Achilles in the Shades, when Ulysses congratulated him on being so honoured among dead heroes:—
"Renowned Ulysses, think not death a theme
Of consolation: I had rather live,
The servile hind for hire, and eat the bread
Of some man scantily himself sustained,
Than sovereign empire hold o'er all the Shades."[4]
There may be an approach to comedy in the scene between Admetus and his father Pheres. The son asks his grey-haired sire, who brings gifts to the funeral, "if he is not ashamed of himself for cumbering the ground so long? Why did he not, an old fellow and a useless, take the place of poor Alcestis?" Pheres replies, and with some shov of reason, "If you were so fond of your late wife as you pretend to be, why did you not go when you were summoned? for remember it was not I but you on whom the citation of the Fates was originally served. For my part, I had a great regard for my daughter-in-law—she was a most exemplary young woman; but as for taking her place, I crave to be excused. I am an old man, it is true; still I am remarkably well for my years: and as for cumbering the ground, I hope to do so a little while longer. You may have been a tender husband and a faithful, and I daresay will be a good father, and not vex the two poor orphans with a stepmother—at least, just at present: but I must say your language to myself is very uncivil, not to say unfilial." The timid or selfish nature of Admetus is reflected in that of his sire: it is easy to conceive the son another Pheres, when years shall have grizzled his beard.
The reluctance of Admetus, in the final scene, to take Alcestis back again, when "brought to him from the grave," has been regarded as a comic situation; but it is by no means certain either that Euripides intended it for one, or that the spectators so interpreted it. The revived wife is a mute person, and her still disconsolate husband, who has so lately sworn never again to marry, believes for a few minutes that Hercules has indelicately, though with the best intentions, brought him a new partner. The real drift of this incident depends very much on the view of the deliverer taken commonly by an Athenian audience. Setting aside the use made of Hercules by the comic poets, we may inquire how painters represented him. He is delineated on vases either as doing valiant deeds with his club or by his fatal arrows, or as indulging himself with the wine-cup. In one instance his weapons have been stolen from him by the God of Love, and he himself is running after a girl who has carried off his pitcher. The tragedians also do not treat him with much ceremony in their dramas: he was only a Bœotian hero, and so they took liberties with him.
This choral song, the last in the play, comes immediately before the reappearance of Hercules with the rescued Alcestis:—
"I too have been borne along
Through the airy realms of song.
Searched I have historic page,
Yet ne'er found in any age
Power that with thine can vie,
Masterless Necessity.
Thee nor Orpheus' mystic scrolls
Graved by him on Thracian pine,
Thee nor Phœbus' art controls,
Æsculapian art divine.
Of the Powers thou alone
Altar hast not, image, throne:
Sacrifices wilt thou none.—
Pains too sharp for mortal state
Lay not on me, mighty Fate.
Jove doth aye thy hests fulfil,
His to work and thine to will.
Hardest iron delved from mine
Thou canst break and bend and twine:
Harsh in purpose, heart of stone,
Mercy is to thee unknown.
Thee, Admetus, in the bands
Of her stern unyielding hands
Hath she taken; but resign
Thy life to her—it is not thine
By thy weeping to restore
Those who look on light no more.
Even the bright sons of heaven
To dimness and to death are given.
She was loved when she was here;
And in death we hold her dear:
Let not her hallowed tomb be past
As where the common dead are cast;
Let her have honour with the blest
Who dwell above; her place of rest
When the traveller passeth by,
Let him say, 'Within doth lie
She who dared for love to die.
Thou who now in bliss dost dwell,
Hail, blest soul, and speed us well!'"[5]
MEDEA.
To combine in the same chapter Alcestis with Medea, may appear like yoking the lamb with the lion; and so it would be, were the Colchian princess the mere fury for which she is often taken. But Euripides had too deeply studied human character not to be aware that in nature there are no monsters—none at least lit for the ends of dramatic poetry; and accordingly his Medea, though deeply wronged, is yet a woman who loved not wisely but too well. Even Lady Macbeth, though far more criminal than the heroine of this tragedy, since she had no wrongs to avenge, but sins for ambition's sake alone, is not entirely devoid of human feeling. With similar truth, both of art and observation, the Greek poet gives Medea a woman's heart even in the moments when she is meditating on her fell purpose.
Aristotle's judgment that Euripides, although he does not manage everything for the best in his plots or his representations of life, is the most pathetic of dramatic poets, is especially true of this tragedy. The hold that it has in every age retained upon spectators as well as readers, is a proof of the subject being chosen well. It was translated or adapted by Roman dramatists; it was revived in the early days of the modern theatre in Europe; it is still, wedded to immortal music, attractive; and no one who has seen the part of Medea performed by Pasta or Grisi will question its effect on an audience.
On the stage Medea appears under some disadvantage. The worse elements of her nature are there active; the better appear only now and then. She is placed in the situation described by Shakespeare:—
"Between the acting of a dreadful thing
And the first motion, all the interim is
Like a phantasma or a hideous dream:
The genius, and the mortal instruments
Are then in council; and the state of man,
Like to a little kingdom, suffers then
The nature of an insurrection."
—"Julius Cæsar."
This is the condition of Medea from her first appearance on the scene to the last; the "little kingdom" of her being is rent in twain by her injuries, her threatened banishment, her helplessness among strangers and foes, her jealousy, her contempt for the mean-spirited Jason, her contempt even for herself. That she, the wise, the potent enchantress, should have been caught by his superficial beauty, and not read from the first his real character—are all elements of the insurrection in her nature. We behold only the deeply-wronged wife and mother—we do not realise her as she was a few years earlier, before the spoiler came to Colchis, a timid, trusting, and loving maiden, who set her life on one cast. Her picture, as drawn by an epic poet from whom Virgil found much to borrow, may put before us Medea as she was before the ship Argo—"built in the eclipse and rigged with curses dark"—passed between the blue Symplegades, and first broke the silence of the Hellespontic sea. She is thus described after her first interview with Jason:—
"And thus Medea slowly seemed to part,
Love's cares still brooding in her troubled heart;
And imaged still before her wondering eyes,
His living, breathing self appears to rise—
His very garb: and thus he spake, thus sate,
Thus, ah, too soon! he glided from the gate.
Sure ne'er her loving eyes beheld his peer,
And still his honied words are melting on her ear."
A little further on we have this description of her:—
"She said, she rose;
Her maiden chamber's solitary floor
With trembling steps she trod: she reached the door,
Fain to her sister's neighbouring bower to haste;
And yet the threshold hardly had she passed,
Sudden her failing feet are checked by shame,
And long she lingered there, then back she came.
Oft as desire would drive her forth again,
So oft does maiden bashfulness restrain.
Thrice she essayed to go, thrice stopped, then prone
In anguish on her couch behold her thrown."[6]
Such was Medea a few years only—if there be such a thing as dramatic time—before the tragedy begins. Her children are very young. Jason and herself appear to have not been long at Corinth, and so she must be regarded as still in the bloom of her youth and beauty, and not a hot-tempered lady of uncertain age. The desertion of her by her husband has accordingly the less excuse.
There is no prologue to this play, for the opening speech of the nurse—nurses on the Greek stage perform very similar functions to those of the indispensable confidantes of the classic drama of France—cannot be considered as such. This old servant does not go much into family history; indeed, a barbaric woman—for such Medea is—was supposed by the pedigree-loving Greeks to have no ancestors worth mentioning. She merely lets the audience know the very critical position of affairs between Jason and his wife. The nurse perceives that nothing but evil can come out of this second marriage—is sure that Medea is plotting some terrible revenge—and tells an old servant of Jason's her own terrors and her mistress's sad condition. He, on his part, brings her news. Medea must quit Corinth on that very day, and take, her two sons with her; their father has consented to their banishment, and Creon, king of Corinth, cannot rest until the Colchian witch is over the border. The fears of the nurse harp on the children. She bids them go into the house, and begs Jason's servant,—
"To the utmost, keep them by themselves,
Nor bring them near their sorrow-frenzied mother.
For late I saw her with the roused bull's glare
View them as though she'd at them, and I trow
That she'll not bate her wrath till it have swooped
Upon some prey,"[7]
Her just fears are confirmed by the exclamations of her mistress, speaking from within:—
"Ah me! ah me!
I have endured, sad woman, endured
A burden for great laments. Cursed sons
Of a loathed mother, die, ye and your sire,
And let all our house wane away."
The nurse remains on the stage when the Chorus of Corinthian women enter and comment on the "wild and whirling words" they have overheard:—
"I heard the voice, nay, heard the shriek
Of the hapless Colchian dame.
Is she not calmed? Old matron, speak;
For through the double portals came
A voice of wail and woe."
The nurse tells them that Medea "in no way is calmed," and again from within is heard the plaint of the unhappy and indignant princess:—
"Woe! woe!
Oh lightning from heaven, dart through my head!
For what is my gain to live any more?"
The Chorus express their sympathy, but the assurance they give that "Zeus will judge on her side" is not satisfactory to her perturbed spirit. Yielding to the wish of these sympathising friends, Medea at length comes forth from the inner chamber, and, considering her circumstances, makes a more temperate address to the Chorus than, after hearing her exclamations behind the scenes, they might have expected. She expatiates on the hardship of being a woman, and, after some remarks on the few prizes and many blanks in the lottery of marriage, she begs them to befriend her so far at least as to keep her counsel if she communicates her purpose at any time to them. This they promise to do, and tell her that, so far as regards her husband, she has good right to avenge herself on him—a sentiment that, if the Athenian ladies were permitted to applaud in the theatre, was probably greeted with much clapping of hands.
King Creon now comes on to tell Medea officially what the old servant has already intimated to the nurse. "Thou sullen-browed woman," he says,
"Medea, I command that from this realm
Thou go an exile, taking thy two sons;
And linger not, for mine is the decree,
Nor will I enter in my house again
Till I have driven thee past the land's last bounds."
This decision of Creon cuts up, root and branch, all Medea's projects for revenging herself on Jason, his father-in-law, and his new wife. "Now," she says,
"My enemies crowd on all sail,
And there is now no haven from despair."
She speaks softly to the king, even kneels to him, to turn away his wrath. But Creon is too much in dread of her devices to revoke his sentence of banishment. All he will concede is for her and her sons to depart to-morrow instead of to-day. That morrow, Medea may have said to herself, you shall never see. She has gained time for compassing her revenge.
In her next speech she lets the Chorus into her secret so far as to make them sure there will be bloody work in the palace before the sun sets. "Fool that he is!" she says; "he has left me now only one thing to find—a city of refuge, a host who will shelter me after I have done the deed, since in this day three of my foes shall perish by dagger or by drug,—
"The father and the girl and he my husband.
······
For never, by my Queen, whom I revere
Beyond all else, and chose unto my aid,
By Hecatè, who dwells on my hearth's shrine,
Shall any wring my heart and still be glad."
A noble and appropriate chorus follows this magnificent speech of Medea's. There is room only for the first strophe, in which the women hail the good time coming:—
"The hallowed rivers backward stream
Against their founts: right crooks awry
With all things else: man's every scheme
Is treachery.
Even with gods faith finds no place.
But fame turns too; our life shall have renown:
Honour shall come to woman's race,
And envious fame no more weigh women down."
Jason now enters: he comes with the intention of remonstrating with Medea about her indiscreet demeanour towards Creon and the royal house; tells her that, but for her abominable temper and rash tongue, she might have remained on good terms with himself and all in Corinth: she has to thank herself alone for the decree of banishment. For his part, he has done all in his power to avert her doom; and even now, though she is for ever calling him "the worst of men," he will not let her go forth penniless; she shall have a handsome provision for herself and children, for, he adds,—
"Many hardships
Do wait on exile, and, though thou dost hate me,
I am not able to desire thy harm."
Unless Euripides meant to represent Jason as a fool, as well as base and ungrateful, he could hardly have devised for him a less discreet or a more irritating speech than this. Medea now turns from red heat to white; recapitulates Jason's obligations to herself, the services she has done him, the crimes she has committed for him, and casts to the winds all his shallow, hypocritical pretences of having done his best for her and their sons. We imagine that no one will feel any pity for Jason, or deny that he richly deserved the words that, like "iron sleet of arrowy shower," fall, in this scene, upon his head,—terrible, yet just, as the fulminations hurled against Austria's Duke by Lady Constance in "King John:"—
"Thou slave, thou wretch, thou coward,
Thou little valiant, great in villany!
Thou ever strong upon the stronger side!
Thou fortune's champion—thou art perjured too,
And sooth'st up greatness. Thou cold-blooded slave!"
Jason keeps up, like Joseph Surface, his fair speeches to the last, and this connubial dialogue closes characteristically on either side:—
"Jason. Then do I call the gods to witness this,
How I desire to serve thee and thy sons;
Yet thou'lt not like good gifts, but wantonly
Dost spurn thy friends, therefore shalt mourn the more.
Medea. Begone, for longing after thy new bride
Seizes thee, so much tarrying from her home:
Take her, for it is like—yea, and possessed
By a god I will declare it—thou dost wed
With such a wedding as thou'lt wish undone."
After a brief but very beautiful song, in which the Chorus celebrates the power and deprecates the wrath of Venus, and deplores the exile's lot, the real Deus ex machinâ of this tragedy presents himself—not hovering in the air, nor gorgeous in apparel, nor a god or the son of a god, but a rather commonplace, prosy gentleman, Ægeus, king of Athens, on his way home from Delphi. Of him no more need be said than that, by promising by his gods to shelter Medea, and yield her up to none, he removes the one difficulty in her way which still perplexed her. Now at last she is armed at all points—she has an assured home and protector, time to strike down every foe, weapons they cannot guard against, and means to escape if pursued.
Her wronged children shall be the instrument of her vengeance. As to Jason himself, she has changed her purpose; he shall not have the privilege of dying, for she can make life to him more wretched than many deaths. She summons him again to her presence; pretends to regret her late hot words; will even conciliate his new wife with such gifts as none but kings' daughters can bestow. Her conditions are, that if the robe and crown be accepted by Glaucè, the children shall not quit the realm. Jason, thinking that Medea is now in her right mind, assents to both proposals, and goes out to prepare his new wife for the presents. The Chorus, who are in the secret, apprise the audience that these gauds are far deadlier than were Bellerophon's letters:—
"By the grace and the perfect gleaming won,
She will place the gold-wrought crown on her head;
She will robe herself in the robe: and anon
She will deck her a bride among the dead."
The gifts are envenomed. Glaucè and Creon, wrapt in a sheet of phosphoric flame, expire in torments. Jason is a widowed bridegroom; all Corinth is aroused to take vengeance on the barbaric sorceress. Surely this must be the end of the tragedy. No; "bad begins, but worse remains behind." One more blow remains to be dealt. Jason is wifeless, he shall be childless too, before Medea speeds in her dragon-borne car—the chariot of the Sun, her grandsire—to hospitable Athens.
Never, perhaps, has a more terrible scene been exhibited on any stage than this final one of Medea. To it may be applied the words spoken of another spectacle of "woe and wonder:"—
"This quarry cries on havock! O, proud death!
What feast is toward in thine eternal cell,
That thou so many princes, at a shot,
So bloodily hast struck."
—"Hamlet."
Jason, who has been witnessing the charred remains of Glaucè and Creon, rushes on the stage to arrest their murderess. He cries frantically:—
"Hath she gone away in flight?
For now must she or hide beneath the earth,
Or lift herself with wings into wide air,
Not to pay forfeit to the royal house."
But "one woe doth tread upon another's heels." "Seeks she to kill me too?" he demands of the Chorus. "Nay," they reply, "you know not the worst:"—
"The boys have perished by their mother's hand:
Open these gates, thou'lt see thy murdered sons.
Jason. Undo the bolt on the instant, servants there;
Loose the clamps, that I may see my grief and bane,
May see them dead, and guerdon her with death."
He sees them dead, indeed, but may "not kiss the dear lips of his boys;" "may not touch his children's soft flesh." Medea hovers over the palace, taunts him with her wrongs, mocks at his new-born love for the children he had consented to banish, and triumphs alike over her living and her dead foes:—
"'Twas not for thee, having spurned my love,
To lead a merry life, flouting at me,
Nor for the princess; neither was it his
Who gave her thee to wed, Creon, unscathed
To cast me out of his realm. And now,
If it so like thee, call me lioness,
And Scylla, dweller on Tursenian plains;
For as right bade me, have I clutched thy heart."
The story of Medea, unconnected as it is with any workings of destiny or fatal necessity—such as humbled the pride of Theban and Argive Houses—has been taxed with a want of proper tragical grandeur, as if a picture of human passion were less fit for the drama than one of the strife between Fate and Free-will.
- ↑ Never has rationalising of old-world stories made a bolder stride than in the case of this play. Late Greek writers ascribe the decease of Alcestis to her having nursed her husband through a fever. She takes it herself, and is laid out for dead, when a physician, sharper-sighted than the rest of the faculty at the time, discovers that the vital spark is not extinct, and cheats death of his foe by remedies unluckily not mentioned for the benefit of posterity.
- ↑ Royal.
- ↑ "Measure for Measure."
- ↑ Odyssey, xi. (Cowper.)
- ↑ Partly translated by the late Dean Alford. Gray, in his fine ode, "Daughter of Jove, relentless power," had this choral song before him, as well as the verses of Horace which he proposed to imitate.
- ↑ Dean Milman's 'Translations from Valerius Flaccus.'
- ↑ All the translations are taken from Mrs Augusta Webster's version, poetical as well as "literal," of the "Medea."