No More Learning

. . . As for the characters, that of
Alcestis must be acknowledged to be pre-eminently beautiful. One could
almost imagine that Euripides had not yet conceived that bad opinion of
the sex which so many of the subsequent dramas exhibit. . . . But the rest
are hardly well-drawn, or, at least, pleasingly portrayed. " "The poet
might perhaps, had he pleased, have exhibited Admetus in a more amiable
point of view. "

This criticism is not very trenchant, but its weakness is due, I think,
more to timidity of statement than to lack of perception. Paley does see
that a character may be "well-drawn" without necessarily being "pleasing";
and even that he may be eminently pleasing as a part of the play while
very displeasing in himself. He sees that Euripides may have had his own
reasons for not making Admetus an ideal husband. It seems odd that such
points should need mentioning; but Greek drama has always suffered from a
school of critics who approach a play with a greater equipment of
aesthetic theory than of dramatic perception. This is the characteristic
defect of classicism.
One mark of the school is to demand from dramatists
heroes and heroines which shall satisfy its own ideals; and, though there
was in the New Comedy a mask known to Pollux as "The Entirely-good Young
Man" ([Greek: panchraestos neaniskos]), such a character is fortunately
unknown to classical Greek drama.

The influence of this "classicist" tradition has led to a timid and
unsatisfying treatment of the _Alcestis_, in which many of the most
striking and unconventional features of the whole composition were either
ignored or smoothed away. As a natural result, various lively-minded
readers proceeded to overemphasize these particular features, and were
carried into eccentricity or paradox. Alfred Schone, for instance, fixing
his attention on just those points which the conventional critic passed
over, decides simply that the _Alcestis_ is a parody, and finds it
very funny. (_Die Alkestis von Euripides_, Kiel, 1895. )

I will not dwell on other criticisms of this type. There are those who
have taken the play for a criticism of contemporary politics or the
current law of inheritance. Above all there is the late Dr. Verrall's
famous essay in _Euripides the Rationalist_, explaining it as a
psychological criticism of a supposed Delphic miracle, and arguing that
Alcestis in the play does not rise from the dead at all. She had never
really died; she only had a sort of nervous catalepsy induced by all the
"suggestion" of death by which she was surrounded. Now Dr. Verrall's work,
as always, stands apart. Even if wrong, it has its own excellence, its
special insight and its extraordinary awakening power. But in general the
effect of reading many criticisms on the _Alcestis_ is to make a
scholar realize that, for all the seeming simplicity of the play,
competent Grecians have been strangely bewildered by it, and that after
all there is no great reason to suppose that he himself is more sensible
than his neighbours.

This is depressing. None the less I cannot really believe that, if we make
patient use of our available knowledge, the _Alcestis_ presents any
startling enigma.