ll imagine how the quiet, stately genius of Racine would have
conceived and ordered it; with the sincere passion, held under restraint
by as sincere a dignity, which characterised his exalted style.

Balaustion treats it with an equal moral force, and also with that
modern moral touch which Racine would have given it; which, while it
removed the subject at certain points from the Greek morality, would yet
have exalted it into a more spiritual world than even the best of the
Greeks conceived. The commentary of Balaustion is her own treatment of
the subject. It professes to explain Euripides: it is in reality a fresh
conception of the characters and their motives, especially of the
character of Herakles. Her view of the character of Alkestis, especially
in her death, is not, I think, the view which Euripides took. Her
condemnation of Admetos is unmodified by those other sides of the
question which Euripides suggests. The position Balaustion takes up with
regard to self-sacrifice is far more subtle, with its half-Christian
touches, than the Greek simplicity would have conceived. Finally, she
feels so strongly that the subject has not been adequately conceived
that, at the end, she recreates it for herself. Even at the beginning
she rebuilds the Euripidean matter. When Apollo and Death meet,
Balaustion conceives the meeting for herself. She images the divine
Apollo as somewhat daunted, and images the dread meeting of these two
with modern, not Greek imagination. It is like the meeting, she thinks,
of a ruined eagle, caught as he swooped in a gorge, half heedless, yet
terrific, with a lion, the haunter of the gorge, the lord of the ground,
who pauses, ere he try the worst with the frightful, unfamiliar
creature, known in the shadows and silences of the sky but not known
here. It is the first example we have of Balaustion's imaginative power
working for itself. There is another, farther on, where she stays her
recitation to describe Death's rush in on Alkestis when the dialogue
between him and Apollo is over--

And, in the fire-flash of the appalling sword,
The uprush and the outburst, the onslaught
Of Death's portentous passage through the door,
Apollon stood a pitying moment-space:
I caught one last gold gaze upon the night,
Nearing the world now: and the God was gone,
And mortals left to deal with misery.

So she speaks, as if she saw more than Euripides, as if to her the
invisible were visi