ABSTRACT
The loquacity and dexterity of the Athenians and their ‘extraordinary fondness for arguing’ could not exceed the loquacity and dexterity of Mr. Browning’s ‘men and women’, or their fondness for presenting their own individual view of life in the best argumentative form. The keenness of Mr. Browning’s vigilance for small circumstances giving a local colour to a scene is certainly even greater than that of Euripidcs; like Euripides, again, his style of dialogue, if not essentially spruce,—it is too careless and wayward for that,—is extremely keen and adroit, and can be, when he pleases, terse to the last degree, while he is even fonder of the language of the market-place than the poet from whom he adapts and translates. Finally, he is mindful of Euripides’ fancy for putting a woman in the front of the battle in this recast of the Alcestis, which he has put into the mouth of a girl of Rhodes; and in the selection of Alcestis,—a woman with whose self-sacrifice and whose slight scorn for the man for whom she laid down her life, ‘modern thought’ is thoroughly well disposed to sympathize,—he has got a character which is peculiarly well adapted for his shrewd, sharp touch. On the whole, while to our mind modern réchauffés of antique subjects are seldom great successes, yet Euripides was, in the keen unsettled sharpness of his moral criticism, so like a modern, and in this particular case treated the old myth with so hesitating a hand, that Mr. Browning has been able to recast it with far less loss to the original, and far less of jarring effect from the accessions which his abrupt and irregular genius gives it, than would have been possible with any other Greek dramatist, and perhaps with any other of even this dramatist’s plays.
