How external a way he had of working over old materials, especially in his

earlier work, is well illustrated in "The Parliament of Fowls," which he

opens by relating the dream of Scipio, originally contained in Cicero's

treatise on the "Republic," and preserved by Macrobius. This dream, which

tells how Africanus appears to Scipio, and carries him up among the stars

of the night, shows him Carthage, and prophesies to him of his future

greatness, tells him of the blissful immortal life that is in store for

those who have served their country, points out to him the brilliant

celestial fires, and how insignificant the earth is in comparison with

them, and opens his ears to the wondrous harmony of the spheres--this

dream is as far removed from the main argument of the poem as anything

well could be a contest between three falcons for the hand of a formel.

The bringing together of such diverse elements presents no difficulties to

the childlike stage of literary development that depends upon surface

analogies for the linking together of its thoughts. Just as talking about

his ancestor, the great Scipio Africanus, with the old King Masinissa

caused Scipio to dream of him, so reading about this dream caused Chaucer,

who has to close his book and go to bed for want of a light, to dream of

Scipio Africanus also, who "was come and stood right at his bedis syde."

Africanus then plays the part of conductor to Chaucer in a manner

suggestive not only of his relations to Scipio, but of Virgil's relation

to Dante, and brings him to the great gateway and through it into the

garden of love. The description is of the temple of Venus in Boccaccio's

"La Teseide." There Nature and the "Fowls" are introduced and described,

and at last the point is reached. Nature proclaims that it is St.

Valentine's day, and all the fowls may choose them mates. The royal falcon

is given first choice, and chooses the lovely formel that sits upon

Nature's hand. Two other ardent falcons declare their devotion to the same

fowl, and Nature, when the formel declares that she will serve neither

Venus nor Cupid and asks a respite for a year, decides that the three

shall serve their lady another year--a pretty allegory supposed to refer

to the wooing of Blanche of Lancaster by John of Gaunt.

The main argument of this poem, when it finally is reached by artificially

welding together rich links borrowed from other poets, is one of the few

examples in Chaucer of subject-matter derived direct from a real event,

but the putting of it in an allegorical form at once lays him under

obligations to his poetic predecessors, not only on Anglo-Saxon soil, but

in France and Italy.

His most important contributions as an inventor are, of course, his

descriptions of the Canterbury Pilgrims, which are the pure outcome of a

keen observation of men and women at first hand. So lifelike are they that

in them he has made the England of the fourteenth century live again. But

how small a proportion of the bulk of the "Canterbury Tales" is contained

in these glimpses of English life and manners. It is but the framework

upon which luxuriate vines of fancy transplanted from many another garden,

and even in its place resembling, if not borrowed from, Boccaccio.

The thoroughly human instincts of the poet assert themselves, however, in

the choice of the tales which he puts into the mouths of his pilgrims. He

allows a place to the crudities and even the vulgarities of common stories

as well as to culture-lore. The magic of the East, the love tales of

Italy, the wisdom of philosophers, the common stories of the people, all

give up their wealth to his gentle touch. With a keen sense of propriety

he, with few exceptions, gives each one of his pilgrims a tale suited in

its general tendency to the character of its narrator, and in the critical

chatter of the pilgrims about the tales, reflects not only his own tastes,

but that of the times, the opinions expressed frequently being most

uncomplimentary in their tenor.

In fine, the life of reality and the life of books is spread out before

Chaucer, and his observation of both is keen and interested; and this it

is which makes him much more than the "great translator" that Eustace Les

Champs called him, and settles the nature of the "subtle thing" called

spirit contributed by the individuality of the poet to his subject-matter.

He brings everything within the reach of human sympathy, because his way

of putting a story into his own words is sympathetic. He was a combination

of the story-teller, the scholar, the poet, and the critic. As a scholar

he brings in learned allusions that are entirely extraneous to the action

in hand; as the story-teller, he takes delight in the tales that both the

poet and the people have told; as the poet, his imagination dresses up a

story with a fresh environment, often anachronous, and sometimes he alters

the moral tone of the characters. Cressida is an interesting example of

this. But instead of the characters suggesting by their own action and

speech all the needed moral, Chaucer himself appears ever at hand to

analyze and criticise and moralize, though he does it so delightfully that

one hesitates to call him didactic. The result of all this is that the

external form and the underlying essence of his subject-matter are not

completely fused. We often see a sort of guileless working of the

machinery of art, yet it is true, no doubt, though perhaps not to the

extent insisted on by Morley, that he has something of the Shakespearian

quality which enables him to show men as they really are, "wholly

developed as if from within, not as described from without by an imperfect

and prejudiced observer."

In his great work, Spenser is no less dependent upon sources for his

inspiration, but there is a marked difference in his use of them. Although

his range of observation is much narrower than Chaucer's, hardly extending

at all into the realm of actual human effort, yet he makes an advance in

so far as his powers of redistribution are much greater than Chaucer's.

The various knights of the "Fairy Queen" and their exploits are not

modeled directly upon any previous stories, but they are made up of

incidents similar to those found scattered all through classic lore; and

as his inspirations were drawn in most cases directly from the

fountain-head of story in the Greek writers--instead of as they filtered

through the Latin, Italian, and French, with the inevitable accretions

that result from migrations,--and from the comparatively unalloyed

Arthurian legends, there is a clearer reflection in them of the cosmic

elements that shine through both the Greek and Arthurian originals than is

found in Chaucer.

Although Spenser was certainly unaware of any such modern refinement of

the mythologist as a solar myth, yet the "Fairy Queen" forms a curious and

interesting study on account of the survivals everywhere evident of solar

characteristics in his characters and plots. Indeed it could hardly be

otherwise, considering his intention, and his method of carrying it out,

which he, himself, explains in his quaint letter to Sir Walter

Raleigh--namely, "to fashion a gentleman or noble person in virtuous and

gentle discipline." He goes on:

"I close the history of King Arthur as most fit for the excellency of

his person, being made famous by many men's former works, and also

further from danger and envy of suspicion of present time. In which I

have followed all the antique poets historical; first Homer, who in

the person of Agamemnon and Ulysses hath ensampled a good governor

and a virtuous man, the one in his 'Iliad,' the other in his

'Odyssey'; then Virgil, whose like intention was to do in the person

of AEneas: After him, Ariosto comprised them both in his Orlando, and

lately Tasso dissevered them again, and formed both parts in two

persons, the part which they in Philosophy call Ethice or virtues of a

private man, colored in his Rinaldo, the other, named Politice, in his

Godfieldo. By example of which excellent poets, I labor to portray in

Arthur before he was King, the image of a brave Knight perfected in

the twelve private moral virtues as Aristotle hath devised, the which

is the purpose of these first twelve books."

In the fashioning of his knight he took Arthur, a hero whose life as it

appears in the early romances is inextricably mingled with solar elements,

and has built up his virtues upon other ancient solar heroes. Here are all

the paraphernalia of solar mythology: invincible knights with marvelous

weapons, brazen castles guarded by dragons, marriage with a beautiful

maiden and parting from the bride to engage in new quests, an enchantress

who turns men into animals, even the outcast child; but none of the

incidents appear intact. It is as if there had been a great explosion in

the ancient land of romance and that in the mending up of things the

separate pieces are all recognizable, although all joined together in a

different pattern, while under all is the allegory. A gentle knight is

no longer a solar hero as set forth by Max Mueller or Cox, but Holiness;

his invincible armor is not the all-powerful rays of the sun, but truth;

the enchantress not night casting a spell over mortals, but sensuous

pleasure entangling them.

These two poets, Chaucer and Spenser, are prototypes of two poet types of

two poetical tendencies that have gone on developing side by side in

English literature: Chaucer, democratic, interested supremely in the

personalities of men and women, portraying the real, and Spenser,

aristocratic, interested in imaging forth an ideal of manhood, choosing

his subject-matter from sources that will lend themselves to such a

purpose; Chaucer drawing his lessons out of the real actions of humanity;

Spenser framing his story so that it will illustrate the moral he wishes

to inculcate.

Shakespeare, of course, ranges himself in line with Chaucer. His interest

centered on character, and wherever a story capable of character

development presented itself, that he chose, altered it in outline

comparatively little, and when he did so it was in order to carry forward

the dramatic _motif_ which he infused into his subject. The dramatic

form in which he wrote furnished him a better medium for reaching a

complete welding together of the external and spiritual side of his

subject-matter. Where Chaucer hinted at the possibilities of an artistic

development of character that would cause the events of the story to

appear as the inevitable outcome of the hidden springs of action,

Shakespeare accomplished it, and peopled the world of imagination with

group after group of living, acting characters.

In the nineteenth century Tennyson and Browning have represented, broadly

speaking, these two tendencies. As with Spenser, the classics and the

Arthurian legends have been the sources from which Tennyson has drawn most

largely; but although a philosophical undercurrent is this poet's

spiritual addition to the subject-matter, his method of putting his soul

inside his work is very different from Spenser's. He does not tear the old

myths to pieces and join them together again after a pattern of his own to

fit his allegorical situation, but keeps the events of his stories almost

unchanged, in this particular resembling Chaucer and Shakespeare,

and--except in a few instances, such as Tithonus and Lucretius, where the

classic spirit of the originals is preserved--he infuses in his subject a

vein of philosophy, illustrating those modern tendencies of English

thought of which Tennyson, himself, was the exemplar. Even when inventing

subjects, founded upon the experiences of everyday life, he so manipulates

the story as to make it illustrate some of his favorite moral maxims. His

characters do not act from motives which are the inherent necessities of

their natures, but they act in accordance with Tennyson's preconceived

notions of how they ought to act. He manipulates the elements of character

to suit his own view of development, just as Spenser manipulated the

elements of the story to suit his own allegorical purpose.

Browning is the nineteenth-century heir of Chaucer; but it is doubtful

whether Chaucer would recognize his own offspring, so remarkable has the

development been in those five centuries. With Chaucer's keen interest in

human nature deepened to a profound insight into the very soul of

humanity, and the added wealth of these centuries of human history,

Browning not only had a far wider range of choice in subject-matter, but

he was enabled to instil into it greater intellectual and emotional

complexities.

Rarely has he treated any subject that has already been treated poetically

unless we except the transcripts from the classics soon to be

considered. Wherever he saw an interesting historical personage,

interesting, not on account of his brilliant achievements in the eyes of

the world, but on account of potentialities of character, such a one he

has set before us to reveal himself. There are between twenty and thirty

portraits of this nature in his work, chosen from all sorts and conditions

of men--men who stand for some phase of growth in human thought; and

always in developing a personality he gives the kernel of truth upon which

their peculiar point of view is based. Thus, among the musical poems, Abt

Vogler speaks for the intuitionalist--he who is blessed by a glimpse of

the absolute truth. Charles Avison, on the other hand, is the philosopher

of the relative in music and the arts generally. Among the art poems, Fra

Lippo Lippi is the apostle of beauty in realism, Andrea del Sarto the

attainer of perfection in form. In the religious poems the Jewish

standpoint is illustrated in "Saul" and "Rabbi Ben Ezra," the Christian in

the portrait of John in "The Death in the Desert"; the empirical reasoner

in "Paracelsus."

This is only one of Browning's methods in the choice and use of

subject-matter. The characters and incidents in his stories are

frequently the result of pure invention, but he sets them in an

environment recreated from history, developing their individualities in

harmony with the environment, thus giving at one stroke the spirit of the

time and the individual qualities of special representatives of the time.

Examples of this are: "My Last Duchess," where the Duke is an entirely

imaginary person and the particular incident is invented, but he is made

to act and talk in a way perfectly in keeping with the spirit of the

time--mediaeval Italy. "Hugues of Saxe-Gotha" is another being of

Browning's fancy, who yet represents to perfection the spirit of the old

fugue writers. "Luria," "The Soul's Tragedy," "In a Balcony," all

represent the same method.

Another plan pursued by the poet is either to invent or borrow a

historical personage into whose mouth he puts the defence of some course

of action or ethical standard that may or may not be founded upon the

highest ideals. Sludge, the hero of "Fifine at the Fair," Bishop Blougram,

Hohenstiel-Schwangau, range themselves in this group.

There are comparatively few cases where he has taken a complete story and

developed its spiritual possibilities without much change in external

detail, but how adequate his art was to such ends, "The Ring and the

Book," "Inn Album," "Two Poets of Croisic," "Red Cotton Nightcap Country,"

the historical dramas of "Strafford," and "King Victor and King Charles"

fully prove, including, as they do, some of his finest masterpieces.

History and story have furnished many of the incidents which he has worked

up in his dramatic lyrics and romances like "Clive," "Herve Riel,"

"Donald," etc. There remains, however, a large number of poems containing

some of Browning's loveliest work in which the subject-matter is, as far

as we know, the creation of pure, unadulterated fancy. "A Blot in the

'Scutcheon," "In a Balcony," "Colombe's Birthday," "Childe Roland," "James

Lee's Wife" are some of them. Even in this rapid survey of the field the

fact is patent that Browning's range of subject-matter is infinitely wider

and his method of developing it far more varied than has been that of any

other English poet. He seems the first to have completely shaken himself

free from the trammels of classic or mediaeval literature. There are no

echoes of Arthur and his Knights in his poetry, the shadows of the Greek

gods and goddesses exert no spell--except in the few instances when he

deliberately chose a Greek subject.

The fact that Browning was so free from classical influence in the great

body of his work as compared with the other chief poets of the nineteenth

century gives an especial interest to those poems in which he chose

classical themes for his subjects. There are not more than ten all told,

and one of these is a translation, yet they represent some of his finest

and most original work, for Browning could not touch a classical theme

without infusing into it that grasp and insight peculiar to his own

genius.

His first and most conventionally classical poem is the fragment in "Men

and Women," "Artemis Prologizes," written in 1842. It was to have been the

introduction to a long poem telling of the mad love of Hippolytus for a

nymph of Artemis, after that goddess had brought about his resuscitation.

It has been suggested by Mr. Boynton in an interesting paper that Browning

shows traces of the influence of Landor in his poetry. This fragment

certainly furnishes argument for this opinion, though it has a strength of

diction along with its Greek severity and terseness of style which leads

to the conclusion that the influence came from the fountain head of

Greek poetry itself rather than through the lesser muse of this

nineteenth-century Greek.

The poem is said to have been begun on a sick-bed and when the poet

recovered he had forgotten or lost interest in his plans. This is to be

regretted for if he had continued as he began, the poem would have stood

unique in his work as a true survival of Greek subject wedded with

classical form and style, and would certainly have challenged comparison

with the best work done in this field by Landor or Swinburne, who tell

over the classical stories or even invent new episodes, but, when all is

said, do not write as if they were actually themselves Greeks.

There is no other instance in Browning of such a survival. In his other

poems on Greek subjects it is Browning bringing Greek life to our ken with

wonderful distinctness, but doing it according to his own accustomed

poetical methods, or, as in "Ixion," a Greek story has been used as a

symbol for the inculcating of a philosophy which is largely Browning's

own.

In spite of the fact that he has turned to Greece so seldom for

inspiration, his Greek poems range from such stirring pictures of Greek

life and feeling as one gets in the splendid dramatic idyl

"Pheidippides," based on a historical incident, through the imaginary

"Cleon," in which is found the sublimated essence of Greek philosophical

thought at the time of Christ--thought, weary of law and beauty, longing

for a fresh inspiration, knowing not what, and unable to perceive it in

the new ideal of love being taught by the Christians--to "Aristophanes'

Apology," in which the Athens of his day, with its literary and political

factions, is presented with a force and analysis which place it second

only to "The Ring and the Book."

This poem taken, with Balaustion, gives the reader not only a

comprehensive view of the historical atmosphere of the time but indirectly

shows the poet's own attitude toward the literary war between Euripides

and Aristophanes. So different are Browning's Greek poems from all other

poems upon classical subjects that it will be interesting to dwell upon

the most important of them at greater length than has been deemed

necessary in the case of the more widely known and read of the poems.

"Cleon" links itself with the nineteenth century, because of its dealing

with the problem of immortality, a problem which has been ever present in

the mind of the century. Cleon has, beside that type of synthetic mind

which belongs to a ripe phase of civilization. Though he is a Greek and a

pagan, he stretches hands across the centuries to men of the type of

Morris or Matthew Arnold. He is the latest child of his own time, the heir

of all the ages during which Greece had developed its aesthetic perfection,

discovered the inadequacy of its established religion, come through its

philosophers and poets to a perception of the immortality of the soul, and

sunk again to a skepticism which had no vision of personal immortality at

least, though among the stoics there were some who believed in an

absorption into divine being. Cleon would fain believe in personal

immortality but cannot, and, like Matthew Arnold, believes in facing death

imperturbably.

In "Balaustion's Adventure" a historical tradition is used as the central

episode of the poem, but life and romance are given to it by the creation

of the heroine, Balaustion, a young Greek woman whose fascinating

personality dominates the whole poem. She was a Rhodian, else her freedom

of action and speech might seem too modern, but among the islands of

Greece, at least at the time of Euripides, there still survived that

attitude toward woman which we see reflected in the Homeric epics. Away

from Athens, too, Euripides was a power; hence his defence is put into the

mouth of one not an Athenian. She had saved a shipload of Athenian

sympathizers by reciting Euripides when they were in danger from the

hostile Syracusans.

[Illustration: EURIPIDES]

Besides the romantic touch which is given the story by the creation of the

lyric girl, there is an especial fitness in making the enthusiastic

devotee of this poet a woman, for no one among the ancients has so fully

and sympathetically portrayed woman in all her human possibilities of

goodness and badness as Euripides, yet he has been called a

woman-hater--because some of his men have railed against women--but one

Alkestis is enough to offset any dramatic utterances of his men about

women. The poet's attitude should be looked for in his power of portraying

women of fine traits, not in any opinions expressed by his men.

Furthermore, Browning had before him a model of Balaustion in her

enthusiasm for Euripides, in Mrs. Browning. These circumstances are

certainly sufficient to prove the appropriateness of making a Rhodian girl

the defender of Euripides.

There is nothing more delicious in Browning than Balaustion's relation of

"Alkestis," as she had seen it acted, to her three friends. Her woman's

comment and criticisms combine a Browning's penetration of the fine points

in the play with a girl's idealism. Such a combination of masculine

intellectualism and feminine charm has been known in women of all

centuries. As the translation of the beautiful play of "Alkestis"

proceeds, Balaustion interprets its art and moral, defending her favorite

poet, not with the ponderousness of a grave critic weighing the influences

which may have molded his genius, or calculating the pros and cons of his

style, but with the swift appreciation of a mind and spirit full of the

ardor of sympathy. Moreover, her talk of the play being a recollection of

how it appeared to her as she saw it acted, the mere text is constantly

enlarged upon and made vital with flashing glimpses of the action, as, for

example, in the passage just after the funeral of Alkestis:

"So, to the struggle off strode Herakles,

When silence closed behind the lion-garb,

Back came our dull fact settling in its place,

Though heartiness and passion half-dispersed

The inevitable fate. And presently

In came the mourners from the funeral,

One after one, until we hoped the last

Would be Alkestis, and so end our dream.

Could they have really left Alkestis lone

I' the wayside sepulchre! Home, all save she!

And when Admetos felt that it was so,

By the stand-still: when he lifted head and face

From the two hiding hands and peplos' fold,

And looked forth, knew the palace, knew the hills,

Knew the plains, knew the friendly frequence there,

And no Alkestis any more again,

Why, the whole woe billow-like broke on him."

Again, her criticism of Admetos gives at once the natural feeling of a

girl who could not be satisfied with what seemed to her his selfish

action, and Browning's feeling that Euripides saw its selfishness just as

surely as Balaustion, despite the fact that it was in keeping, as numerous

critics declare, with the customs of the age, and would not by any of his

contemporaries be regarded as selfish on his part:

"So he stood sobbing: nowise insincere,

But somehow child-like, like his children, like

Childishness the world over. What was new

In this announcement that his wife must die?

What particle of pain beyond the pact

He made with his eyes wide open, long ago--

Made and was, if not glad, content to make?

Now that the sorrow, he had called for, came,

He sorrowed to the height: none heard him say,

However, what would seem so pertinent,

'To keep this pact, I find surpass my power;

Rescind it, Moirai! Give me back her life,

And take the life I kept by base exchange!

Or, failing that, here stands your laughing-stock

Fooled by you, worthy just the fate o' the fool

Who makes a pother to escape the best

And gain the worst you wiser Powers allot!'

No, not one word of this; nor did his wife

Despite the sobbing, and the silence soon

To follow, judge so much was in his thought--

Fancy that, should the Moirai acquiesce,

He would relinquish life nor let her die.

The man was like some merchant who in storm,

Throws the freight over to redeem the ship;

No question, saving both were better still,

As it was,--why, he sorrowed, which sufficed.

So, all she seemed to notice in his speech

Was what concerned her children."

Among modern critics who take the conventional ground in regard to Admetos

may be cited Churton Collins, whose opinion is, of course, weighty. He

writes:

"Alcestis would be considered fortunate for having had an opportunity

of displaying so conspicuously the fidelity to a wife's first and

capital duty. Had Admetus prevented such a sacrifice he would have

robbed Alcestis of an honor which every nobly ambitious woman in

Hellas would have coveted. This is so much taken for granted by the

poet that all that he lays stress on in the drama is the virtue

rewarded by the return of Alcestis to life, the virtue characteristic

of Admetus, the virtue of hospitality; to this duty in all the agony

of his sorrow Admetus had been nobly true, and as a reward for what he

had thus earned, the wife who had been equally true to woman's

obligations was restored all-glorified to home and children and mutual

love."

Most readers, however, will find it difficult to put themselves into the

appropriate Greek frame of mind, and will sympathize with Browning's

supposition that after all Euripides had transcended current ideas on the

subject and deliberately intended to convey such an interpretation of the

character of Admetos as Balaustion gives.

Balaustion shows her penetration again in her appreciation of Herakles. He

distinguishes clearly between evil that is inherent in the nature as the

selfishness of Admetos, and evil which is more or less external, growing

out of conditions incident to the time rather than from any real trait of

nature. Herakles' delight in the hospitality accorded him, his drinking

and feasting in the interim of his labors, did not touch the genuine,

large-hearted helpfulness of the demigod, who became sober the moment he

learned there was sorrow in the house and need of his aid.

In her proposed version of the story, Balaustion is surely the romantic

girl, who would have her hero a hero indeed and in every way the equal of

his spouse. Yet if we delve below this romanticism of Balaustion we shall

find the poet's own belief in the almost omniscient power of human love

the basis of the relation between Admetos and Alkestis.

The soul of Alkestis in one look entered into that of Admetos; she died,

but he is entirely guiltless of agreeing to her death. Alkestis herself

had made the pact with Apollo to die for her husband. He, when he learns

it, refuses to accept the sacrifice, and unable to persuade him that his

duty to humanity demands that he accept it, Alkestis asks him to look at

her. Then her soul enters his, but when she goes to Hades and demands to

become a ghost, the Queen of Hades replies:

"Hence, thou deceiver! This is not to die,

If, by the very death which mocks me now,

The life, that's left behind and past my power,

Is formidably doubled--Say, there fight

Two athletes, side by side, each athlete armed

With only half the weapons, and no more,

Adequate to a contest with their foes.

If one of these should fling helm, sword and shield

To fellow--shieldless, swordless, helmless late--

And so leap naked o'er the barrier, leave

A combatant equipped from head to heel,

Yet cry to the other side, 'Receive a friend

Who fights no longer!' 'Back, friend, to the fray!'

Would be the prompt rebuff; I echo it.

Two souls in one were formidable odds:

Admetos must not be himself and thou!

"And so, before the embrace relaxed a whit,

The lost eyes opened, still beneath the look;

And lo, Alkestis was alive again,

And of Admetos' rapture who shall speak?"

How unique a treatment of a classical subject this poem is, is

self-evident. Not content with making a superb translation of the play,

remarkable both for its literalness and for its poetic beauty, the poet

has dared to present that translation indirectly through the mouth of

another speaker, and to incorporate with it a running commentary of

criticism in blank verse. Still more daring was it to make play and

criticism an episode in a dramatic monologue in which we learn not only

the story of the rescue of the shipload of Athenian sympathizers, but the

story of Balaustion's love. Along with all this complexity of interest

there is still room for a lifelike portrayal of Balaustion herself, one of

the loveliest conceptions of womanhood in literature.

To reiterate what I have upon another occasion expressed in regard to her,

she is a girl about whom the fancy loves to cling--she is so joyous, so

brave, and so beautiful, and possessed of so rare a mind scintillating

with wit, wisdom and critical insight, not Browning's own mind either

except in so far as his sympathies were with Euripides. Her ardor for

purity and perfection is perhaps peculiarly feminine. It is quite

different from that of the mind tormented by the problem of evil and

taking refuge in a partisanship of evil as a force which works for good

and without which the world would be a waste of insipidity. Her suggested

version of the Alkestis story converts Admetos into as much of a saint as

Alkestis, and makes an exquisite and soul-stirring romance of their

perfect union, though it must be admitted that it would do away with all

the intensity and dramatic force of the play as it is presented by

Euripides. Like the angels who rejoice more over one sinner returned than

over the ninety and nine that did not go astray, an artist prefers the

contrast and movement of a sinning and regenerated Admetos to an Admetos

more suited from the first to be the consort of Alkestis. This is the

touch, however, which preserves Balaustion's feminine charm and makes her

truly her own self--an ardent soul very far from being simply Browning's

mouthpiece.

"Aristophanes' Apology" is a still more remarkable play in its complexity.

Again, Balaustion is the speaker, and Browning has set himself the task in

this monologue of relating the fall of Athens, of presenting the

personality of Aristophanes, of defending Euripides, a translation of

whose play, "Herakles," is included, and incidentally sketching the

history of Greek comedy, all through the mouth of the one speaker,

Balaustion. Not until one has grasped the law by which the poet has

accomplished this, and has moreover freshly in his mind the facts of Greek

history at the time of Athens' fall, and Greek literature, especially the

plays of Aristophanes and Euripides, can the poem be thoroughly enjoyed.

In the very first line the suggestion of the scene setting is given, and

such suggestions occur from time to time all through the poem. It should

be observed that they are never brought in for themselves alone, but are

always used in connection with some mood of Balaustion's or as imagery in

relation to some thought. While the reader is thus kept conscious of the

background of wind and wave, as Balaustion and her husband voyage toward

Rhodes, it is not until the end of the poem that we learn with a pleasant

surprise that the boat on which they are sailing is the same one saved

once by Balaustion when she recited Euripides' "sweetest, saddest song."

Thus there is a dramatic denouement in connection with the scene setting.

Through the expression of a mood of despair on the part of Balaustion at

the opening of the poem the reader is put in possession not only of the

scene setting but of the occasion of the voyage, which is the overthrow

of Athens. From the mood of despair Balaustion passes to one in which she

describes how she could better have borne to see Athens perish. This

carries her on to a more hopeful frame of mind, in which she can foresee

the spiritual influence of Athens persisting. The peace of mind ensuing

upon this consideration makes it possible for her calmly to survey the

events connected with its downfall, among which the picturesque episode of

the dancing of the flute girls to the demolition of the walls of the

Piraeus is conspicuous. She then sees the vision of the immortal Athens

while Sparta the victorious in arms will die. Then comes a mood in which

she declares it will be better to face the grief than to brood over it,

which leads to her proposing to Euthukles that they treat the fall of

Athens as a tragic theme, as the poet might do, and enact it on the

voyage. Then grief over the recent events takes possession of her again,

and now with the feminine privilege of changing her mind, she thinks it

would be better to rehearse an event which happened to herself a year ago

as a prologue. Speaking of adventures causes her very naturally to drop

into reminiscences about her first adventure, when she recited

Euripides and met the man who was to become her husband.

[Illustration: ARISTOPHANES]

Thus, through this perfectly natural transition from one mood to another,

Balaustion leads up to the real subject-matter of the poem, Aristophanes'

defence of himself, which, however, is preceded by an account of the

effect of the death of Euripides upon the Athenians as witnessed by

Euthukles, his death being the occasion of Aristophanes' call on

Balaustion. What she calls the prologue is really the main theme of the

poem, while all her talk up to this point is truly the prologue. The

actual account of the fall of Athens does not come until the conclusion,

and is related in comparatively few words.

What seems, then, to be the chief theme of the poem with its setting of

wind and wave and bark bears somewhat the same relation to the real theme

as incidental music does to a play. Upon first thoughts it may seem like a

clumsy contrivance for introducing Aristophanes upon the scene, but in the

end it will be perceived, I think, that it serves the artistic purpose of

placing Aristophanes in proper perspective. Balaustion with her

exquisitely human moods and progressive spirit forms the right complement

to the decaying ideals of Aristophanes, and gives him the proper flavor

of antiquity. Instead of seeing him in the broad light of a direct

dramatic presentation we see him indirectly through Balaustion's thoughts

and moods, who, though permitting him to do full justice to himself, yet

surrounds him all the time with the subtle influence of her sympathy for

Euripides.

As the better way to follow the development of the preliminary part of the

poem is by regarding every step as the outcome of a mood on the part of

Balaustion, so the better way of following Aristophanes through what seems

his interminable defence of himself is again by tracing the moods through

which his arguments express themselves.

Aristophanes comes in half drunk to make his call on Balaustion, and his

first mood is one of graciousness toward her whose beauty has impressed

his artistic perceptions, but noticing her dignity and its effect in

routing the chorus, he immediately begins to be on the defensive. The

disappearance of his chorus, however, takes him off on a little excursion

about the moves which are being made by the city to cut down the expense

of dramatic performances by curtailing the chorus. In a spirit of bravado

he declares that he does not care so long as he has his actors left. A

coarse reference causes Balaustion to turn and he changes his mood. He

acknowledges he is drunk and rushes off into a defence of drunkenness in

general for playwrights and for himself, which on this occasion came about

on account of the supper he and his players have attended. He rattles on

about the supper, telling how the merriment increased until something

happened. The thought of this something changes his mood completely.

Balaustion notices it, he reads her expression, and characteristically

explains the change in himself as due to her fixed regard. The reader is

left in suspense as to the something which happened, yet it haunts the

memory, and he feels convinced that some time he is to know what it was.

Now Aristophanes bids Balaustion speak to him without fear. She does so,

conveying in her welcome both her disapproval and her admiration.

Aristophanes, evidently piqued, does not answer, but makes personal

remarks upon the manner of her speech, asking her if she learned tragedy

from _him_--Euripides. This starts him off on dreams of a new comedy in

which women shall act, but he concludes that his mission is to ornament

comedy as he finds it, not invent a new comedy.

This gives Balaustion a chance to ask if in his last play, later than the

one Euthukles had seen, he had smoothed this ancient club of comedy he

speaks of into a more human and less brutal implement of warfare, and was

it a conviction of this new method he might use in comedy which was the

something that happened at the feast. Aristophanes, as usual when he is

cornered, makes no direct reply, but asks if Euthukles saw his last play,

to which Balaustion frankly replies that having seen the first he never

cared to see the following. Aristophanes avows he can show cause why he

wrote them, but glances off in a sarcastic reference to Euripides, whose

art he says belongs to the closet or the cave, not to the world. He

prefers to stick to the old forms of art and make Athens happy in what

coarse way she desires. He then proceeds to enlarge upon what that is.

Then he changes again and asks with various excursions into side issues

(for example: the rise of comedy; how it is now being regarded by the

government, which favors tragedy, giving him another chance for a dig at

Euripides) if he is the man likely to be satisfied to be classed merely a

comic poet since he wrote the "Birds?" Balaustion encourages him a little

here, and, cheered up, he goes on to tell how he gave the people draught

divine in "Wasps" and "Grasshoppers," and how he praised peace by

showing the kind of pleasures one may have when peace reigns--and still at

every opportunity casting slurs at the tragic muse, especially Euripides.

He goes on describing his play until he touches on some of the sarcasms

which make Balaustion wince.

Then he turns about and declares he loathes as much as she does the things

of which he tells, but his attempts at bringing comedy up to a high level

having failed, he is obliged to give the Athenians what they want, a

smartened up version of the "Thesmaphoriazousai," which had failed the

year before. He describes his triumph with this which was being celebrated

at the supper when the something happened which is now at last

described--namely, the entrance of Sophocles, who announces that he

intends to commemorate the death of Euripides by having his chorus clothed

in black and ungarlanded at the performance of his play next month.

This startling scene, being prepared for and not brought in until

Aristophanes has done much talking, seems to throw a sudden flash of

reality into the poem. Ill-natured criticism, Aristophanes shows, follows

on the part of the feasters, though Aristophanes' mood is one of sudden

recognition of the value of Euripides. But when he, sobered for the time

being, proposes a toast to the Tragic Muse, the feasters consider it a

joke. He quickly accepts the situation, and comes off triumphant by

proposing a toast to both muses.

After this Balaustion asks Aristophanes if he will commemorate Euripides

with them. But his sober mood is gone. He looks about the room, sees

things that belong to Euripides, and immediately begins stabbing at him.

Balaustion objects, and upon the theme of respect to the dead he begins

his usual invective against his rivals, but finally ends by giving respect

to Euripides, him whose serenity, he declares, could never with his gibes

be disturbed.

After venting this mood of animosity he begins soberly to discuss the

origin of comedy. He traces its growth to the point where he found it, and

enlarges on the improvements he has made, touching, as always, upon the

criticisms of his opposers, and finally arriving at the chief point of

difference between himself and Euripides, which he enlarges upon at great

length. Here the incidental music breaks in with talk between Balaustion

and Euthukles, in which the former rather tries to excuse herself from

relating her reply to Aristophanes.

However, she does give her reply, which is conducted in a more truly

argumentative fashion than the defence of Aristophanes. She picks up his

points and makes her points against him usually by denying the truth of

what he has said. Her supreme defence is, however, the reading of the play

"Herakles."

Aristophanes, touched but not convinced, finally insists that he is

Athens' best friend. He is no Thamuris to be punished for seeing beyond

human vision. The last characteristic touch is when Aristophanes catches

up the psalterion and sings the lyric of Thamuris. Then he departs, and

Balaustion rehearses the last days of Athens, with Euthukles' part in

delaying the tragedy of the doomed city.

By threading one's way thus through the apology, not from the point of

view of Aristophanes' arguments, but from the point of view of his moods,

one experiences a tremendous sense of the personality of the man.

Repetitions which are not required for the full presentation of his case

take their place as natural to a man who is not only inordinately vain but

is immediately swayed by every suggestion and emotion that comes to him.

Owing to his volatile temperament the argument is varied by now a bit of

vivid description like that of the archon's feast when Sophocles appeared,

now by some merely personal remark to Balaustion.

The criticism in this play, as in that of "Balaustion's Adventure," may be

considered either as representing some phase of contemporary opinion about

Aristophanes or as expressing the opinion of the poet himself.

Balaustion's indignation is especially aroused by the two plays, "The

Lusistrata" and the "Thesmophoriazousai," both of which she finds utterly

detestable. It is interesting to compare with this entirely unfavorable

criticism the feeling of such distinguished classical scholars as Gilbert

Murray and J. A. Symonds. The first Murray describes as a play "full of

daring indecency, it is true, but the curious thing is that Aristophanes,

while professing to ridicule the women, is all through on their side. The

jokes made by the superior sex at the expense of the inferior--to give

them their Roman names--are seldom remarkable either for generosity or

refinement, and it is our author's pleasant humor to accuse everybody of

every vice he can think of at the moment. Yet with the single exception

that he credits women with an inordinate fondness for wine parties--the

equivalent it would seem of afternoon tea--he makes them on the whole

perceptibly more sensible and more sympathetic than his men."

Of the second play Symonds speaks with actual enthusiasm. "It has a

regular plot--an intrigue and a solution--and its persons are not

allegorical but real. Thus it approaches the standard of modern comedy.

But the plot, though gigantic in its scale, and prodigious in its wealth

of wit and satire, is farcical. The artifices by which Euripides endeavors

to win Agathon to undertake his cause, the disguise of Muesilochus in

female attire, the oratory of the old man against the women in the midst

of their assembly, his detection, the momentary suspension of the dramatic

action by his seizure of the supposed baby, his slaughter of the swaddled

wine jar, his apprehension by Cleisthenes, the devices and disguises by

which Euripides endeavors to extricate his father-in-law from the scrape,

and the final _ruse_ by which he eludes the Scythian bowmen, and carries

off Muesilochus in triumph--all these form a series of highly diverting

comic scenes." Again, "There is no passage in Aristophanes more amusing

than the harangue of Muesilochus. The portrait, too, of Agathon in the act

of composition is exquisitely comic. But the crowning sport of the

'Thesmophoriazousai' is in the last scene when Muesilochus adapts the

Palamedes and the Helen of Euripides to his own forlorn condition,

jumbling up the well-known verses of these tragedies with coarse-flavored,

rustical remarks; and when at last Euripides, himself, acts Echo and

Perseus to the Andromeda of his father-in-law, and both together mystify

the policeman by their ludicrous utterance of antiphonal lamentation."

In her welcome of him, Balaustion expresses rather what she thinks he

might be than what she really thinks he is. She welcomes him:

"Good Genius! Glory of the poet, glow

O' the humorist who castigates his kind,

Suave summer-lightning lambency which plays

On stag-horned tree, misshapen crag askew,

Then vanishes with unvindictive smile

After a moment's laying black earth bare.

Splendor of wit that springs a thunder ball--

Satire--to burn and purify the world,

True aim, fair purpose: just wit justly strikes

Injustice,--right, as rightly quells the wrong,

Finds out in knaves', fools', cowards', armory

The tricky tinselled place fire flashes through.

No damage else, sagacious of true ore;

Wit learned in the laurel, leaves each wreath

O'er lyric shell or tragic barbiton,--

Though alien gauds be singed,--undesecrate."

Her attitude here is very like that of criticism in general, except that

she is more or less sarcastic, meaning to imply that such Aristophanes

might be but is not. Symonds, on the other hand, thinks him really what

Balaustion thinks he might be.

"If," he says, "Coleridge was justified in claiming the German word

Lustspiel for the so-called comedies of Shakespeare, we have a far greater

right to appropriate this wide and pregnant title to the plays of

Aristophanes. The brazen mask which crowns his theatre smiles indeed

broadly, serenely, as if its mirth embraced the universe; but its hollow

eye-sockets suggest infinite possibilities of profoundest irony.

Buffoonery carried to the point of paradox, wisdom disguised as insanity,

and gaiety concealing the whole sum of human disappointment, sorrow and

disgust, seem ready to escape from its open but rigid lips, which are

molded to a proud perpetual laughter. It is a laughter which spares

neither God nor man--which climbs Olympus only to drag down the immortals

to its scorn, and trails the pall of august humanity in the mire; but

which, amid its mockery and blasphemy, seems everlastingly asserting, as

by paradox, that reverence of the soul which bends our knees to heaven and

makes us respect our brothers."

One cannot help feeling, in view of these very diverse opinions, that both

are exaggerated. The enthusiasm of Symonds seems almost fanatic. Though no

one of penetration can fail to see the wit and wisdom, and at times, in

such lyrics as those in "The Clouds," the poetic charm of Aristophanes,

the person of fastidious taste, whether a Greek girl of his own day, or a

man of these latter days, must sometimes feel that his buffoonery

oversteps the bounds of true wit, even when it is not shadowed by a

coarseness not to be borne at the present day. When Balaustion asks him

"in plain words,"

"Have you exchanged brute blows, which teach the brute

Man may surpass him in brutality,--

For human fighting, or true god-like force

Which breeds persuasion nor needs fight at all?"

Aristophanes replies that it had not been his intention to turn art's

fabric upside down and invent an entirely new species of comedy. That sort

of thing can be done by one who has turned his back on life, friendly

faces, sympathetic cheer, as Euripides had done in his Salaminian cave.

This may be regarded, on the whole, as a good bit of defence on

Aristophanes' part. It is equivalent to his saying that there was no use

in his trying to be anything for which his genius had not fitted him. This

chimes in, again, with such authoritative criticism as Murray's, who

declares: "The general value of his view of life, and, above all, his

treatment of his opponent's alleged vices, may well be questioned. Yet

admitting that he often opposed what was best in his age, or advocated it

on the lowest grounds, admitting that his slanders are beyond description

and that, as a rule, he only attacks the poor and the leaders of the poor,

nevertheless he does it all with such exhuberant high spirits, such an air

of its all being nonsense together, such insight and swiftness, such

incomparable directness and charm of style, that even if some Archelaus

had handed him over to Euripides to scourge, he would probably have

escaped his well-earned whipping."

Much of Aristophanes' defence consists in slurring at Euripides, against

whom he waxes more and more fierce as he goes on. His plays furnish

numerous illustrations of his rivalry with Euripides, yet curiously

enough, as critics have pointed out, Aristophanes imitates Euripides to a

noteworthy extent, so much so that the dramatist Cratinus invented a word

to describe the style of the two--Euripid-Aristophanize. Judging from his

parodies on Euripides, he must certainly have read and reread his plays

until he knew them practically by heart.

Balaustion, as Browning has portrayed her in this poem, is the lyric girl

developed into splendid womanhood. She has a large heart and a large

brain, as well as imagination and strong ethical fervor. Her intense

feeling at the fall of Athens, which had been the ideal to her of

greatness, and her reverential love for Euripides, her charity toward

Aristophanes the man, if not toward his work, show how deep and

far-reaching her sympathies were. Again, her imagination flashes forth in

her picturesque descriptions of the ruined Athens and her prophetic

picture of the new Athens, of the spirit which will arise in its place, in

her telling portraiture of Aristophanes and his entrance into her house,

as well as in many another passage. Her intellect shines out in her clever

management of the argument with Aristophanes, and her ethical fervor in

her denunciations of the moral depravity of certain of the plays.

As to the question of whether a young Greek woman would be likely to

criticise Aristophanes in this way, opinion certainly differs. History is,

for the most part, silent about women. As Mahaffy says, it is only in the

dramatists and the philosophers that we can get any glimpses of the woman

of the time.

Mahaffy's opinions are worth quoting as an example of the pessimism

growing out of a bias in favor of a particular type of woman which he

idealized in his own mind. He seems utterly incapable of appreciating the

humanness of the women in the Greek dramatists, especially those in

Euripides. "Sadder than the condition of the aged was that of women," he

writes, "at this remarkable period. The days of the noble and

high-principled Penelope, of the refined and intellectual Helen, of the

innocent and spirited Nausikaa, of the gentle and patient Andromache, had

passed away. Men no longer sought and respected the society of the gentler

sex. Would that Euripides had even been familiar, as Homer was, with the

sound of women brawling in the streets! For in these days they were

confined to Asiatic silence and seclusion, while the whole life of the

men, both in business and recreation, was essentially public. Just as the

feverish excitement of political life nowadays prompts men to spend even

their leisure in the clubs, where they meet companions of like passions

and interests with themselves, so the Athenian gentleman only came home

to eat and sleep. His leisure as well as his business kept him in the

market place. His wife and daughters, ignorant of philosophy and politics,

were strangers to his real life, and took no interest in his pursuits.

"The results were fatal to Athenian society. The women, uninstructed,

neglected, and enslaved, soon punished their oppressors with their own

keen and bitter weapons, and with none keener than their vices. For, of

course, all the grace and delicacy of female character disappeared.

Intellectual power in women was distinctly associated with moral

depravity, so that excessive ignorance and stupidity was considered the

only guarantee of virtue. The qualifications for society became

incompatible with the qualifications for home duties, so that the outcasts

from society, as we call them, were not the immoral and the profligate but

the honorable and the virtuous."

Such is the view to be gleaned from history, and in Mahaffy's opinion the

literature of the time tells the same story. He goes on: "When we consult

the literature of the day, we find women treated either with contemptuous

ridicule in comedy, or with still more contemptuous silence in history. In

tragedy or in the social theories of the philosophers alone can we hope

for a glimpse into the average character and position of Athenian women.

Here at least we might have expected that the portraits drawn with such

consummate skill by Homer would have been easily transferred to the

Athenian stage. But to our astonishment we find the higher social feelings

toward women so weak that the Athenian tragic poets seem quite unable to

appreciate, or even to understand, the more delicate features in Homeric

characters. They are painted so coarsely and ignorantly by Euripides that

we should never recognize them but for their names. Base motives and

unseemly wrangling take the place of chivalrous honor and graceful

politeness.

"But the critics of the day complained that Euripides degraded the ideal

character of tragedy by painting human nature as he found it: in fact as

it was, and not as it ought to be. Let us turn, then, to Sophokles, who

painted the most ideal women which the imagination of a refined Athenian

could conceive, and consider his most celebrated characters, his Antigone

and his Elektra. A calm, dispassionate survey will, I think, pronounce

them harsh and masculine. They act rightly, no doubt, and even nobly, but

they do it in the most disagreeable way. Except in their external

circumstances they differ in no respect from men."

Certainly, the opinion expressed of the women of Euripides is tainted by

the feeling that they ought to act like English matrons and their

daughters.

Quite a different impression is given by Symonds, who, in regard to some

of the sentences occurring in Euripides which are uncomplimentary to

women, says: "It is impossible to weigh occasional sententious sarcasms

against such careful studies of heroic virtue in women as the Iphigenia,

the Elektra, the Polyxena, the Alkestis."

But the complete vindication of the fact that Balaustion and Mrs. Browning

and our own women of to-day are on the right side in their appreciation of

Euripides as the great woman's poet of antiquity is found in the opinion

of our contemporary critic, Gilbert Murray, who more than thirty years

after these poems were written writes of the "wonderful women-studies by

which Euripides dazzled and aggrieved his contemporaries. They called him

a hater of women; and Aristophanes makes the women of Athens conspire for

revenge against him. Of course he was really the reverse. He loved and

studied and expressed the women whom the Socratics ignored and Pericles

advised to stay in their rooms. Crime, however, is always more striking

and palpable than virtue. Heroines like Medea, Phaedra, Stheneboia,

Aerope, Clytemnestra, perhaps fill the imagination more than those of the

angelic or devoted type--Alcestis, who died to save her husband, Evadne

and Laodamia, who could not survive theirs, and all the great list of

virgin-martyrs. But the significant fact is that, like Ibsen, Euripides

refuses to idealize any man, and does idealize women. There is one

youth-martyr, Menoikeus in the 'Phaenissae,' but his martyrdom is a

masculine, businesslike performance--he gets rid of his prosaic father by

a pretext about traveling money without that shimmer of loveliness that

hangs over the virgins."

Where then did Euripides find these splendid women of force and character?

It seems quite impossible that he could have evolved them out of his own

inner consciousness. He must have known women who served at least, in

part, as models. Besides, there was undoubtedly a new woman movement in

the air or Plato in his "Republic" would not have suggested a plan for

educating men and women alike. The free women of Athens are known in some

cases to have attained a high degree of culture. Aspasia, who became the

wife of Pericles, is a shining example. There was Sappho, also, with her

school of poetry attended by girls in Lesbos.

Taking all these facts into consideration, it would seem that Browning was

sufficiently justified in drawing such a woman as Balaustion, and that a

woman of her penetrating intellect and ardor of spirit would love

Euripides, and dislike Aristophanes, seems absolutely certain.

Therefore, if the historical attitude is taken toward Balaustion and her

criticism and appreciation, it can be on the whole accepted as reflecting

what would probably be the feeling of an ardent woman-follower of

Euripides in his own day.

But, on the other hand, if the criticism be taken as Browning's own, it is

open to question whether it is partisan rather than entirely broad-minded.

Take the consensus of opinion of modern critics and we find them all

agreed in regard to the genius of Aristophanes, though admitting that his

coarseness must, at times, detract from their enjoyment of him.

There is much truth in Symonds' criticism of the poem. He says of it: "As

a sophist and a rhetorician of poetry, Mr. Browning proves himself

unrivaled, and takes rank with the best writers of historical romances.

Yet students may fairly accuse him of some special pleading in favor of

his friends and against his foes. It is true that Aristophanes did not

bring back again the golden days of Greece; true that his comedy revealed

a corruption latent in Athenian life. But neither was Euripides in any

sense a savior. Impartiality regards them both as equally destructive:

Aristophanes, because he indulged animalism and praised ignorance in an

age which ought to have outgrown both; Euripides, because he criticised

the whole fabric of Greek thought and feeling in an age which had not yet

distinguished between analysis and skepticism.

"What has just been said about Mr. Browning's special pleading indicates

the chief fault to be found with his poem. The point of view is modern.

The situation is strained. Aristophanes becomes the scapegoat of Athenian

sins, while Euripides shines forth a saint as well as a sage. Balaustion,

for her part, beautiful as her conception truly is, takes up a position

which even Plato could not have assumed. Into her mouth Mr. Browning has

put the views of the most searching and most sympathetic modern analyst.

She judges Euripides not as he appeared to his own Greeks, but as he

strikes the warmest of his admirers, who compare his work with that of all

the poets who have ever lived."

It would seem that Mr. Symonds, himself, does some special pleading here.

As we have seen, Euripides, though not a favorite in Athens, did have warm

admirers in his own day; consequently there is nothing out of the way in

portraying one of his contemporaries as an admirer. Furthermore,

Balaustion does not represent him as a savior of his age. She sees only

too clearly that in the narrow sense of convincing his age he has not been

a success. What is her vision of the spiritual Athens which is to arise

but a confession of this fact! Nor is it entirely improbable that she

might be prophetic of a time when Euripides will be recognized as the true

power. Any disciple of a poet ahead of his time perceives these things.

One should be careful in judging of the poem as good modern criticism not

to be entirely guided by the opinions of Balaustion. It should never be

forgotten that it is a dramatic poem in which Aristophanes is allowed to

speak for himself at great length, and whatever can be accepted as good

argument for himself upon his own ground should be set over against the

sweeping strictures of Balaustion. Indeed it may turn out that Browning

has, after all, said for him the most exculpatory word of any critic, for

he has so presented his case as to show that he considers him the outcome

of the undeveloped phase of morals then existing for which he is hardly

responsible because the higher light has not yet broken in upon him. This

is evidenced especially in the strange combination in him of a frank

belief in a life of the senses which goes along with a puritanical

reverence for the gods, and a hatred of anything that falls within his own

definition of vice.

To sum up, if I may again be forgiven for re-expressing an opinion

elsewhere printed, which states as clearly as I am able to do my

conviction of where the play stands as criticism, like all dramatic work,

this poem aims to present the actual spirit of the time in which the

actors moved upon the stage of life, and to reproduce something of their

mental and emotional natures. Any criticism of the poets who figure in the

poem, or of the larger question of the quarrel between tragedy and comedy,

should be deduced indirectly, as implied in the sympathetic presentation

of both sides, not based exclusively upon direct expressions of opinion

on either side. So regarded it would seem that Browning was able to

appreciate the genius of Aristophanes as well as that of Euripides, but

that he considered Aristophanes to have value chiefly in relation to his

age, as the artistic mouthpiece of its long-established usages, while

Euripides had caught the breath of the future, and was the mirror of the

prophetic impulses of his age rather than of its dominant civilization.

It is not improbable that Landor's fascinating portrayal of the brilliant

Aspasia may have had some influence upon Browning's conception of

Balaustion, upon the intellectual side at least. Alcibiades says that many

people think her language as pure and elegant as Pericles, and Pericles

says she was never seen out of temper or forgetful of what argument to

urge first and most forcibly. When all is said, however, it may be that

the "halo irised around" Balaustion's head was due, more than to any one

else, to the influence of the memory of Mrs. Browning, of whom she is made

to say with a sublime disregard of its anachronism:

"I know the poetess who graved in gold,

Among her glories that shall never fade,

This style and title for Euripides,

_The Human with his droppings of warm tears_."

After such a study of Greek life as this, wherein every available incident

in history, every episode in the plays of Aristophanes bearing on the

subject, every contemporary allusion are all woven together with such

consummate skill that the very soul and body of the time is imaged forth,

the classical poems of the other great names of the century seem almost

like child's play. Landor's poems on Greek subjects sound like imitations

in inferior material of antiquity. Arnold's are even duller. Swinburne

tells his Greek tales in an endless flow of rhythmical, musical verse,

which occasionally rises into the realm of having something to say. Morris

tells his at equal length in a manner suggestive of Chaucer without

Chaucer's snap, but where among them all is there such a bit of stinging

life as in "Pheidippedes" or "Echetlos?"

[Illustration: WALTER SAVAGE LANDOR]

Tennyson has, it is true, written some altogether exquisite verse, upon

classical themes, and in every case the poems are not descriptive nor

dramatic, but are dramatic soliloquies, thus approaching in form

Browning's dramatic idyls. One of the most beautiful of these is "Oenone."

There we have a mere tradition enlarged upon and the feelings of Oenone

upon the desertion of Paris expressed with a richness of emotional fervor

in a setting of appropriate nature imagery which carries us back to the

idyls of Theocritus. "Ulysses," again gives the psychology of a wanderer

who has become so habituated to adventures that he is quite incapable of

settling down with Penelope for the remainder of his life. One cannot

quite forgive the poet for calling the ever youthful and beautiful

Penelope, whose hand was sought by so many suitors, and who, although

twenty years had passed, might still be quite young, an "aged wife." It

has always seemed to the writer like a wholly unnecessary stab at a very

beautiful story, and the poem would have been just as effective if

Ulysses' hunger for lands beyond the sun had not been coupled with any

scorn of Penelope, but with a feeling of pain that again Fate must take

him away from her. Aside from this note of bad taste--bad, because it

shadows a picture of faithfulness, cherished as an almost universal

possession of humanity--the poem is fine. There is also, though not Greek,

the remarkable study of Lucretius going mad from the effects of his wife's

love philter, in which the most fascinating glimpses of his philosophy of

atoms are caught amid his maniacal wanderings, and, last, the very

beautiful Demeter and Persephone.

These are as unique in their way as Browning's Greek poems are in theirs,

standing quite apart from such work as Morris', or Swinburne's, not only

because of their haunting music, which even Swinburne cannot equal, but

because of a deeper vein of thought running through them. As far as

thought is concerned, however, all pale in significance the moment they

are placed in juxtaposition with any of Browning's classical productions.

Not the least interesting of Browning's classical poems is "Ixion." In his

treatment of the myth of Ixion he proves himself a true child of the

Greeks, not that he makes any slavish attempt to reproduce a Greek

atmosphere as it existed in the lifetime of Greek poetry, but he exercises

that prerogative which the Greek poets always claimed, of interpreting a

myth to suit their own ends.

It has become a sort of critical axiom to compare Browning's "Ixion" with

the "Prometheus" of literature. This is one of those catching analogies

which lay hold upon the mind, and cannot be shaken off again without

considerable difficulty. Mr. Arthur Symons first spoke of the resemblance;

and almost every other critic with the exception of Mr. Nettleship has

dwelt mainly upon that aspect of the poem which bears out the comparison.

But why, it might very well be asked, did Browning, if he intended to make

another Prometheus, choose Ixion for his theme? And the answer is evident,

because in the story of Ixion he found some quality different from any

which existed in the story of Prometheus, and which was especially suited

to the end he had in view.

The kernel of the myth of Prometheus as developed by AEschylus is proud,

unflinching suffering of punishment, inflicted, not by a god justly angry

for sin against himself, but by a god sternly mindful of his own

prerogatives, whose only right is might, and jealous of any interference

in behalf of the race which he detested--the race of man. Thus Prometheus

stands out as a hero in Greek mythology, a mediator between man and the

blind anger of a god of unconditional power; and Prometheus, with an

equally blind belief in Fate, accepts while he defies the punishment

inflicted by Zeus. He tacitly acknowledges the right of Zeus to punish

him, since he confesses his deeds to be sins, but, nevertheless, he would

do exactly the same thing over again:

"By my choice, my choice

I freely sinned--I will confess my sin--

And helping mortals found mine own despair."

On the other hand, Ixion never appears in classic lore as a hero. He has

been called the "Cain" of Greece, because he was the first, as Pindar

says, "to introduce to mortal men the murder of kin not unaccompanied by

cunning." Zeus appears, however, to have shown more leniency to him for

the crime of killing his father-in-law than he ever did to Prometheus, as

he not only purified him from murder, but invited him to a seat among the

gods. But to quote Pindar again, "he found his prosperity too great to

bear, when with infatuate mind he became enamored of Hera.... Thus his

conceit drave him to an act of enormous folly, but the man soon suffered

his deserts, and received an exquisite torture." Ixion, then, in direct

contrast to Prometheus, stands forth an embodiment of the most detestable

of sins, perpetrated simply for personal ends. To depict such a man as

this in an attitude of defiance, and yet to justify his defiance, is a far

more difficult problem than to justify the already admired heroism of

Prometheus. It is entirely characteristic of Browning that he should

choose perhaps the most unprincipled character in the whole range of Greek

mythology as his hero. He is not content, like Emerson, with simply

telling us that "in the mud and scum of things there alway, alway

something sings"; his aim is ever to bring us face to face with reality,

and to open our ears that we may hear for ourselves this universal song.

In fine, Browning chose Ixion and not another, because he wanted above all

things an unquestioned sinner; and the task he set himself was to show the

use of sin and at the same time exonerate the sinner from the eternal

consequences of his act.

So mystical is the language of the poem that it is extremely difficult to

trace behind it the subtle reasoning. Mr. Nettleship has given by far the

best exposition of the poem, though even he does not seize all its

suggestiveness.

Ixion, the sinner, suffering eternal torment, questions the justice of

such torment. The first very important conclusion to which he comes, and

it is one entirely in accord with science, is that sin is an aberration of

sense, merely the result of external conditions in which the soul of man

has no active part. The soul simply dreams, but once fully awakened, it

would free itself from this bondage of sense if it were allowed to do so.

Ixion argues that it is Zeus that hath made him and not he himself, and if

he has sinned it is through the bodily senses which Zeus has conferred

upon him, and if he were the friendly and all-powerful god which he

claimed himself to be and which Ixion believed he was, why did he allow

these distractions of sense to lead him (Ixion) into sin which could only

be expiated by eternal punishment? Without body there would have been

nothing to obstruct his soul's rush upon the real; and with one touch of

pitying power Zeus might have dispersed "this film-work, eye's and ear's."

It is entirely the fault of Zeus that he had sinned; and having done so

will external torture make him repent any more who has repented already?

This is the old, old problem that has taxed the brains of many a

philosopher and the faith of many a theologian--the reconcilement of the

existence of evil with an omnipotent God. Then follows a comparison

between the actions of Zeus, a god, and of Ixion, the human king; and

Ixion declares could he have known all, as Zeus does, he would have warded

off evil from his subjects, would have seen that they were trained aright

from the first--in fact, would not have allowed evil to exist, or failing

this, could he have seen the heart of the criminals and realized how they

repented he would have given them a chance to retrieve their past. Ixion

now realizes that his human ideal is higher than that of Zeus. He had

imagined him possessed of human qualities, and finds his qualities are

less than human. What must be the inevitable result of arriving at such a

conclusion? It means the dethronement of the god, and either a lapse into

hopeless atheism or the recognition that the conception formed of the god

was that of the human mind at an earlier stage of understanding. This

conception becomes crystallized into an anthropomorphic god; but the mind

of man goes onward on its way to higher heights, and lo! there comes a day

when the god-ideal of the past is lower than the human ideal of the

present. It is such a crisis as this that Ixion has arrived at, and his

faith is equal to the strain. Since Zeus is man's own mind-made god,

Ixion's tortures must be the natural consequences of his sin, and not the

arbitrary punishment of a god; and what is Ixion's sin as Browning has

interpreted the myth?

The sin is that of arrogance. Ixion, a mere man, strives to be on an

equality with gods. In Lucian's dialogue between Hera and Zeus the stress

is laid upon the arrogance of Ixion. Jupiter declares that Ixion shall pay

the "penalty not of his love--for that surely is not so dreadful a

crime--but of his loud boasting." Browning raises the sin into a rarer

atmosphere than that of the Greek or Latin. Zeus and Hera may be taken to

represent the attributes of power and love as conceived by man in

Divinity; and Ixion, symbolic of man, arrogantly supposes that he is

capable of putting himself on an equality with Divinity by conceiving the

entire nature of Divinity, that out of his finite mind he can construct

the absolute god, and this is the sin, or, better, the aberration of

sense, which results in the crystallization of his former inadequate

conceptions into an anthropomorphic god, and causes his own downfall.

Ixion, now fully aroused to the fact that the god he has been defying is

but his own miserable conception of God, realizes that the suffering

caused by this conception of God is the very means through which man

struggles toward higher ideals: through evil he is brought to a

recognition of the good; from his agony is bred the rainbow of hope, which

ever shines above him glorified by the light from a Purity far beyond,

all-unobstructed. Successive conceptions of God must sink; but man,

however misled by them, must finally burst through the obstructions of

sense, freeing his spirit to aspire forever toward the light.

"Ixion," then, is not merely an argument against eternal punishment, nor

a picture of heroic suffering, though he who will may draw these lessons

from it, but it is a tremendous symbol of the spiritual development of

man. Pure in its essence, the spirit learns through the obstructions of

sense to yearn forever for higher attainment, and this constitutes the

especial blessedness of man as contrasted with Zeus. He, like the

Pythagorean Father of Number, is the conditioned one; but man is

privileged through all aeons of time to break through conditions, and thus

Ixion, triumphant, exclaims:

"Where light, where light is, aspiring

Thither I rise, whilst thou--Zeus, keep the godship and sink."

In these poems, as in other phases of his work, Browning runs the gamut of

life, of art, and of thought. He has set a new standard in regard to the

handling of classic material, one which should open the field of classic

lore afresh to future poets. Instead of trying to ape in more or less

ineffectual imitations the style and thought of the great masters of

antiquity, or simply use their mythology as a well-spring of romance to be

clothed in whatever vagaries of style the individual poet might be able to

invent, the aim of the future poet should be to reconstruct the life and

thought of that wonderful civilization. One playwright, at least, has made

a step in the right direction. I refer to Gilbert Murray, whose classical

scholarship has thrown so much light upon the vexed questions of

Browning's attitude toward Euripides, and who, in his "Andromache," has

written a play, not in classical, but in modern form, which seems to bring

us more into touch with the life of Homer's day than even Homer himself.

VII

PROPHETIC VISIONS

The division between centuries, though it be an arbitrary one, does

actually appear to mark fairly definite steps in human development, and

already there are indications that the twentieth century is taking on a

character quite distinct from that of the nineteenth. It looks now as if

it were to be the century of the realization of mankind's wildest dreams

in the past. Air navigation, the elixir of life, perpetual motion, are

some of them. About the first no one can now have much skepticism, for if

airships are not as yet common objects of the everyday sky, they, at

least, occupy a large share of attention in the magazines, while the

aviator, a being who did not exist in the last century, is now the hero of

the hour.

With regard to the second, though no sparkling elixir distilled from some

rare flower, such as that Septimius Felton sought in Hawthorne's tale, has

been discovered, the great scientist Metchnikoff has brought to light a

preserver of youth more in keeping with the science of the day--namely, a

microbe, possessing power to destroy the poison that produces age. Whether

perpetual youth is to lead to immortality in the flesh will probably be a

question for other centuries to discuss, though if Metchnikoff is right

there is no reason why we should not retain our youthfulness all our lives

in this century. Add to this, machinery run by the perpetual energy of

radium--a possibility, if radium can ever be obtained in sufficient

quantities to supply the needed power to keep modern civilization on its

ceaseless "go"--and we may picture to ourselves, before the end of the

twentieth century, youths of ninety starting forth on voyages of thirty

years in radium ships, which, like the fairy watch of the Princess

Rossetta, will never go wrong and will never need to be wound up,

metaphorically speaking. It would almost seem as if some method of

enlarging the earth, or of arranging voyages to the moon and Mars, would

be necessary in order to give the new radium machinery sufficient scope

for its activities. However, at present it seems unlikely that it will

ever be possible to produce more than half an ounce of radium a year. As

it would take a ton to run one ship for thirty years, and the expense

would be something almost incalculable, it is a dream only to be realized

by the inventing of methods by which the feeble radio-activity known to

exist in many other substances can be utilized. These methods have not yet

been invented, but it is a good deal that they have been thought of, for

what man thinks of he generally seems to have the indomitable energy to

accomplish.

How such inventions as these, even if very far from attaining success, may

affect the social and thought ideals of the century it is impossible to

say. The automobile is said to have brought about a change, not altogether

beneficial, to the intellectual and artistic growth of society to-day. It

has taken such powerful possession of the minds of humanity that homes

have been mortgaged, music and books and pictures have been sacrificed, in

order that all the money procurable could be put into the machines and

their running. You hear complaints against the automobile from writers,

musicians, and artists. The only thing that really has a good sale is the

automobile. What effect rushing about so constantly at high speed in the

open air is to have on the brain-power is another interesting problem.

Perhaps it is this growing subjective delight in motion which is causing

the development of an artistic taste dependent upon motion as its chief

element. Motion pictures and dancing appeal to the public with such

insistence that plays will not hold successfully without an almost

exaggerated attention to action and dancing, which, whenever it is at all

possible, make a part of the "show."

The pictures of the new school of painters, the futurists, also reveal the

craze for motion. They try to put into their pictures the successive and

decidedly blurred impressions, from the illustrations I have seen, of

scenes in motion, with a result that is certainly startling and

interesting, but which it is difficult to believe is beautiful. One has a

horrible suspicion that all this emphasis upon motion in art is a running

to seed of the art which appeals to the eye and with a psychological

content derived principally from sensation. Perhaps in some other century,

fatuous humanity will like to listen to operas or to plays in a pitch-dark

theatre. This will represent the going to seed of the art which appeals to

the ear, and a psychological content derived principally from sentiment.

While movement seems to be the keynote of the century thus far, in its

everyday life and in its art manifestation, very interesting developments

are taking place in scientific theories and in philosophy, as well as in

the world of education and sociology.

In relation to Browning and the other chief poets of the nineteenth

century, the only aspects of interest are in the region of thought and

social ideals.

With the exception of Tennyson, no other of the chief poets of the century

need be considered in this connection with Browning, because, as we have

seen in a previous chapter, they reflected on the whole the prevalent

disbelief and doubt of the century which came with the revelations of

science. Many people have regarded Tennyson as the chief prophet of the

century. He seems, however, to the present writer to have held an attitude

which reflected the general tone of religious aspiration in the century,

rather than one which struck a new note indicating the direction in which

future religious aspiration might turn.

The conflict in his mind is between doubt and belief. To doubt he has

often given the most poignant expression, as in his poem called "Despair."

The story is of a man and his wife who have lost all religious faith

through the reading of scientific books:

"Have I crazed myself over their horrible infidel writings? O, yes,

For these are the new dark ages, you see, of the popular press,

When the bat comes out of his cave, and the owls are whooping at noon,

And doubt is the lord of the dunghill, and crows to the sun and the moon,

Till the sun and the moon of our science are both of them turned into

blood.

And hope will have broken her heart, running after a shadow of good;

For their knowing and know-nothing books are scatter'd from hand to

hand--

_We_ have knelt in your know-all chapel, too, looking over the sand."

If the effect of science was bad upon this weak-minded pair, the effect of

religion as it had been taught them was no better. The absolute

hopelessness of a blasted faith in all things reaches its climax in the

following stanzas:

"And the suns of the limitless universe sparkled and shone in the sky,

Flashing with fires as of God, but we knew that their light was a lie--

Bright as with deathless hope--but, however they sparkled and shone,

The dark little worlds running round them were worlds of woe like our

own--

No soul in the heaven above, no soul on the earth below,

A fiery scroll written over with lamentation and woe.

"See, we were nursed in the drear nightfold of your fatalist creed,

And we turn'd to the growing dawn, we had hoped for a dawn indeed,

When the light of a sun that was coming would scatter the ghosts of the

past.

And the cramping creeds that had madden'd the peoples would vanish at

last,

And we broke away from the Christ, our human brother and friend,

For He spoke, or it seemed that He spoke, of a hell without help,

without end.

"Hoped for a dawn, and it came, but the promise had faded away;

We had passed from a cheerless night to the glare of a drearier day;

He is only a cloud and a smoke who was once a pillar of fire,

The guess of a worm in the dust and the shadow of its desire--

Of a worm as it writhes in a world of the weak trodden down by the

strong,

Of a dying worm in a world, all massacre, murder and wrong."

There are many hopeful passages in Tennyson to offset such deep pessimism

as is expressed in this one, which, moreover, being a dramatic utterance

it must be remembered, does not reflect any settled conviction on the

poet's part, though it shows him liable to moods of the most extreme

doubt. In "The Ancient Sage" the agnostic spirit of the century is fully

described, but instead of leading to a mood of despair, the mood is one

of clinging to faith in the face of all doubt. The sage speaking, says:

"Thou canst not prove the Nameless, O my son,

Nor canst thou prove the world thou movest in,

Thou canst not prove that thou art body alone,

Nor canst thou prove that thou art both in one.

Thou canst not prove thou art immortal, no,

Nor yet that thou art mortal--nay, my son,

Thou canst not prove that I who speak with thee,

Are not thyself in converse with thyself,

For nothing worthy proving can be proven,

Nor yet disproven. Wherefore thou be wise,

Cleave ever to the sunnier side of doubt,

And cling to Faith beyond the forms of Faith!

She reels not in the storm of warring words,

She brightens at the clash of 'Yes' and 'No.'

She sees the best that glimmers thro' the worst,

She feels the sun is hid but for a night,

She spies the summer thro' the winter bud,

She tastes the fruit before the blossom falls,

She hears the lark within the songless egg,

She finds the fountain where they wail'd Mirage!"

There is nothing here more reassuring than a statement made by the sage,

based upon no argument, nor revelation, nor intuition--nothing but the

utilitarian doctrine that it will be wiser to cling to Faith beyond Faith!

This is a sample of the sort of assurance in the reality of God and of

immortality which Tennyson was in the habit of giving. In the poem called

"Vastness" he presents with genuine power a pessimistic view of humanity

and civilization in all its various phases--all of no use, neither the

good any more than the bad, "if we all of us end but in being our own

corpse-coffins at last?" The effect of the dismal atmosphere of the poem

as a whole is supposed to be dissipated by the last stanza:

"Peace, let it be! for I loved him, and love him forever: the dead are

not dead but alive."

The conviction here of immortality through personal love is born of the

feeling that his friend whom he has loved must live forever. The note of

"In Memoriam" is sounded again. Tennyson's philosophy, in a nutshell,

seems to be that doubts are not so much overcome as quieted by a

struggling faith in the truths of religion, of which the chief assurance

lies in the thought of personal love. Not as in Browning, that human love,

because of its beauty and ecstasy, is a symbol of divine love, but because

of its wish to be reunited to the one beloved is an earnest of continued

existence. While Tennyson's poetry is saturated with allusions to the

science of the century, it seems to be ever the dark side of the doctrine

of evolution that is dwelt upon by him, while his religion is held to in

spite of the truths of science, not because the truths of science have

given him in any way a new revelation of beauty.

Much more emphasis has been laid upon Tennyson's importance as a prophet

in religious matters than seems to the present writer warranted. He did

not even keep pace with the thought of the century, though his poetry

undoubtedly reflected the liberalized theology of the earlier years of the

second half of the century. As Joseph Jacobs says, "In Memoriam" has been

to the Broad Church Movement what the "Christian Year" has been to the

High Church. But where is the Broad Church now? Tennyson was, on the

whole, adverse to evolution, which has been almost an instinct in English

speculation for the last quarter of a century. So far as he was the voice

of his age in speculative matters, he only represented the thought of the

"sixties."

What vision Tennyson did have came not through intuition or the higher

reason, but through his psychic power of self-hypnotism. In "The Ancient

Sage" is a passage describing the sort of trance into which he could

evidently cause himself to fall:

"For more than once when I

Sat all alone, revolving in myself

The word that is the symbol of myself,

The mortal limit of the self was loosed,

And passed into the Nameless, as a cloud

Melts into Heaven. I touch'd my limbs, the limbs

Were strange, not mine--and yet no shade of doubt,

But utter clearness, and thro' loss of self,

The gain of such large life as match'd with ours

Were sun to spark--unshadowable in words,

Themselves but shadows of a shadow world."

Such trances have been of common occurrence in the religious life of the

world, as Professor James has shown so exhaustively in his great book,

"Varieties of Religious Experience." And in that book, too, it is

maintained, against the scientific conclusions, that such ecstasies

"signify nothing but suggested and imitated hypnoid states, on an

intellectual basis of superstition, and a corporal one of degeneration and

hysteria," that mystical states have an actual value as revelations of the

truth. After passing in review many examples of ecstasy and trance, from

the occasional experiences of the poets to the constant experiences of the

mediaeval mystics and the Hindu Yogis, he finally comes to the interesting

conclusion that:

"This overcoming of all the usual barriers between the individual and

the absolute is the great mystic achievement. In mystic states we

both become one with the Absolute and we become aware of our one-ness.

This is the everlasting and triumphant mystical tradition, hardly

altered by differences of clime or creed. In Hinduism, in

Neoplatonism, in Sufism, in Christian mysticism, in Whitmanism, we

find the same recurring note, so that there is about mystical

utterances an eternal unanimity--which ought to make a critic stop and

think, and which brings it about that the mystical classics have, as

has been said, neither birthday nor native land."

The witness given religion in Tennyson's mystical trances is then his most

valuable contribution to the speculative thought of the century, and in a

sense is prophetic of the twentieth century, because in this century

revelations attained in this way have been given a credence long denied

them except in the case of the uneducated and super-emotional, by a man of

the sound scholarship and good judgment of Professor James.

How fully Browning was a representative of the thought of this time,

combining as he did an intuitional with a scientific outlook has already

been shown. Evolution means for him the progress toward the infinite, and

is full of beauty and promise. The failures in nature and life which fill

Tennyson with despair furnish to Browning's mind a proof of the existence

of the absolute, or a somewhere beyond, where things will be righted.

Observation shows him everywhere in the universe the existence of power

and mystery. The mystery is either that of the incomprehensibleness of

causes, or is emphasized in the existence of evil. The first leads to awe

and wonder, and is a constant spur to mankind to seek further knowledge,

but the poet insists that the knowledge so accumulated is not actual gain,

but only a means to gain in so far as it keeps bringing home to the human

mind the fact of its own inadequacy in the discovery of truth. The

existence of evil leads to the constant effort to overcome it, and to

sympathy and pity, and as the failure of knowledge proves a future of

truth to be won, so the failure of mankind to attain perfection in moral

action proves a future of goodness to be realized. All this may be found

either explicitly or implied in the synthetic philosophy of Herbert

Spencer, whose fundamental principles, despite the fire of criticism to

which he has been subjected from all sides--science, religion,

metaphysics, each of which felt it could not claim him exclusively as its

own, yet resenting his inclusion of the other two--are now, in the first

decade of the twentieth century, receiving the fullest recognition by such

masters of the history of nineteenth-century thought as Theodore Merz and

Emile Boutroux.

People often forget that while Spencer spent his life upon the knowledge

or scientific side of human experience, he frequently asserted that there

was in the human consciousness an intuition of the absolute which was the

only certain knowledge possessed by man. Here again Browning was at one

with Spencer. Discussing the problem of a future life in "La Saisiaz," he

declares that God and the soul are the only facts of which he is

absolutely certain:

"I have questioned and am answered. Question, answer presuppose

Two points: that the thing itself which questions, answers--_is_, it

knows;

As it also knows the thing perceived outside itself--a force

Actual ere its own beginning, operative through its course,

Unaffected by its end--that this thing likewise needs must be;

Call this--God, then, call that--soul, and both--the only facts for me.

Prove them facts? That they o'erpass my power of proving, proves them

such."

To this scientific and metaphysical side Browning adds, as has also

already been pointed out, a mystical side based upon feeling. His

revelations of divinity do not come by means of self-induced trances, as

Tennyson's seem to have come, but through the mystery of feeling. This

mystical state seems to have been his habitual one, if we may judge by its

prominence in his poetry. He occasionally descends to the realm of reason,

as he has in "La Saisiaz," but the true plane of his existence is up among

the exaltations of aspiration and love. His cosmic sense is a sense of God

as Love, and is the quality most characteristic of the man. It is like,

though perhaps not identical with, the mysticism of Whitman, which seems

to have been an habitual state. He writes: "There is, apart from mere

intellect, in the make-up of every superior human identity, a wondrous

something that realizes without argument, frequently without what is

called education (though I think it the goal and apex of all education

deserving the name), an intuition of the absolute balance, in time and

space, of the whole of this multifariousness, this revel of fools, and

incredible make-believe and general unsettledness we call _the world_; a

soul-sight of that divine clue and unseen thread which holds the whole

congeries of things, all history and time, and all events, however

trivial, however momentous, like a leashed dog in the hand of the

hunter."

This mystic mood of Browning's which underlies his whole work--even a work

like "The Ring and the Book," where evil in various forms is rampant and

seems for the time being to conquer--is nowhere more fully, and at the

same time more concisely, expressed than in his poem "Reverie," one of his

last, which ends with a full revelation of this mystical feeling, from

which the less inspired reasoning of "La Saisiaz" is a descent:

"Even as the world its life,

So have I lived my own--

Power seen with Love at strife,

That sure, this dimly shown--

Good rare and evil rife

"Whereof the effect be--faith

That, some far day, were found

Ripeness in things now rathe,

Wrong righted, each chain unbound,

Renewal born out of scathe.

"Why faith--but to lift the load,

To leaven the lump, where lies

Mind prostrate through knowledge owed

To the loveless Power it tries

To withstand, how vain! In flowed

"Ever resistless fact:

No more than the passive clay

Disputes the potter's act,

Could the whelmed mind disobey

Knowledge the cataract.

"But, perfect in every part,

Has the potter's moulded shape,

Leap of man's quickened heart,

Throe of his thought's escape,

Stings of his soul which dart,

"Through the barrier of flesh, till keen

She climbs from the calm and clear,

Through turbidity all between

From the known to the unknown here,

Heaven's 'Shall be' from Earth's 'Has been'?

"Then life is--to wake not sleep,

Rise and not rest, but press

From earth's level where blindly creep

Things perfected more or less,

To the heaven's height, far and steep,

"Where, amid what strifes and storms

May wait the adventurous quest,

Power is Love--transports, transforms,

Who aspired from worst to best,

Sought the soul's world, spurned the worms!

"I have faith such end shall be:

From the first, Power was--I knew.

Life has made clear to me

That, strive but for closer view,

Love were as plain to see.

"When see? When there dawns a day,

If not on the homely earth,

Then yonder, worlds away,

Where the strange and new have birth

And Power comes full in play."

Browning has, far more than Tennyson, put religious speculation upon a

basis where it may stand irrespective of a belief in the revelations of

historical Christianity. For the central doctrine of Christianity he had

so profound a reverence that he recurs to it again and again in his

poetry, and at times his feeling seems to carry him to the verge of

orthodox belief. So near does he come to it that many religious critics

have been convinced that he might be claimed as a Christian in the

orthodox sense of the word.

A more careful reading, however, of such poems as "The Death in the

Desert," and "Christmas Eve and Easter Day," upon which rest principally

the claim of the poet's orthodoxy, will reveal that no certain assertion

of a belief in supernaturalism is made, even though the poems are dramatic

and it might be made without necessarily expressing the feeling of the

poet. What Browning felt was that in historical Christianity the highest

symbol of divine love had been reached. Though he may at times have had

moods in which he would fain have believed true an ideal which held for

him great beauty, his worth for his age was in saving religion, _not_ upon

a basis of faith, but upon the ground of logical arguments deduced from

the failure of knowledge, of his personal intuition of God and his

mystical vision in regard to the nature of God.

So complete a synthesis is this that only in the present century is its

full purport likely to be realized. The thought of the century is showing

everywhere a strong reaction away from materialism and toward religious

thought.

Even in the latest stronghold of science, psychology, as we have already

seen, there is no formula which will explain the existence of

individuality. While the scientists themselves plod on, often quite

unconscious that they are not dealing with ultimates, the thinkers are no

longer satisfied with a philosophy of materialism, and once more it is

being recognized that the province of philosophy is to give us God, the

soul and immortality.

It is especially interesting in this connection to observe that Germany,

the land of destructive biblical criticism, which Browning before the

middle of the century handled with the consummate skill characteristic of

him, by accepting its historical conclusions while conserving the spirit

of Christianity, has now in the person of Professor Rudolf Eucken done an

almost similar thing. Like Browning, he is a strong individualist and

believes that the development of the soul is the one thing of supreme

moment. "There is a spontaneous springing up of the individual spiritual

life," he writes, "only within the soul of the individual. All social and

all historical life that does not unceasingly draw from this source falls

irrecoverably into a state of stagnation and desolation. The individual

can never be reduced to the position of a mere member of society, of a

church, of a state; notwithstanding all external subordination, he must

assert an inner superiority; each spiritual individual is more than the

whole external world."

[Illustration: BROWNING AT 77 (1889)]

He calls his system "activism," which merely seems to be another way of

saying that the soul-life is one of aspiration toward moral ideals and the

will to carry them out. Such a life, he thinks, demands a new world and a

new character in man, and is entirely at variance with nature. "Our whole

life is an indefatigable seeking and pressing forward. In

self-consciousness the framework is given which has to be filled; in it we

have acquired only the basis upon which the superstructure has to be

raised. We have to find experience in life itself to reveal something new,

to develop life, to increase its range and depth. The endeavor to advance

in spirituality, to win through struggle, is the soul of the life of the

individual and the work of universal history." Readers of Browning will

certainly not feel that there is anything new in this.

In so far, however, as he finds the spiritual life at variance with nature

he parts company with Browning, showing himself to be under the influence

of the dualism of the past which regarded matter and spirit as

antagonistic. In Browning's view, matter and spirit are the two aspects of

God, in the one, power being manifested; in the other, love.

It follows naturally from this, that Eucken does not think of evil as a

means by which good is developed. He prefers to regard it as unexplained,

and forever with us to be overcome. Its reduction to a means of realizing

the good leads, he thinks, "to a weakening which threatens to transform

the mighty world-struggle into an artistic arrangement of things and into

an effeminate play, and which takes away that bitterness from evil without

which there is no strenuousness in the struggle and no vitality in life.

Thus it remains true that religion does not so much explain as presuppose

evil." An attempt to explain evil, he says, belongs to speculation rather

than to religion. That he has an inkling of the region to which

speculation might lead him is shown when it is realized, that upon his

explanation, as one critic of him has said, it might be possible to find

"some reconciliation in the fact that this world with its negations had

awakened the spiritual life to its absolute affirmation, which could,

therefore, not be in absolute opposition."

In leaving aside speculation and confining himself to what he considers

the religious aspects of life, he no doubt strengthens himself as a leader

of those whose speculative powers have not yet been developed, or who can

put one side of the mind to sleep and accept with the other half-truths.

The more developed mind, however, will prefer Browning's greater

inclusiveness. To possess a complete view of life, man must live his own

life as a human being struggling to overcome the evil, at the same time

keeping in mind the fact that evil is in a sense the raw material provided

by God, or the Absolute, or whatever name one chooses to give to the

all-powerful and all-loving, from which the active soul of man is to

derive a richness of beauty and harmony of development not otherwise

possible. Eucken's attitude toward Jesus is summed up in a way which

reminds one strongly of the position taken in the comment made at the end

of "The Death in the Desert." He writes: "The position of the believer in

the universal Christian Church is grounded upon a relation to God whose

uniqueness emerges from the essential divinity of Jesus; only on this

supposition can the personality of Christ stand as the unconditional Lord

and Master to whom the ages must do homage. And while the person of Jesus

retains a wonderful majesty apart from dogma, its greatness is confined to

the realm of humanity, and whatever of new and divine life it brings to us

must be potential and capable of realization in us all. We therefore see

no more in this figure the normative and universally valid type of all

human life, but merely an incomparable individuality which cannot be

directly imitated. At any rate the figure of Jesus, thus understood in all

its height and pure humanity, can no longer be an object of faith and

divine honor. All attempts to take shelter in a mediating position are

shattered against a relentless either--or. Between man and God there is no

intermediate form of being for us, for we cannot sink back into the

ancient cult of heroes. If Jesus, therefore, is not God, if Christ is not

the second person in the Trinity, then he is a man; not a man like any

average man among ourselves, but still man. We can therefore honor him as

a leader, a hero, a martyr, but we cannot directly bind ourselves to him

or root ourselves in him; we cannot submit to him unconditionally. Still

less can we make him the centre of a cult. To do so from our point of view

would be nothing else than an intolerable deification of a human being."

The comment at the end of "The Death in the Desert" puts a similar

question, and answers, "Call Christ, then, the illimitable God, Or Lost!"

But the final word which casts a light back upon the previous conclusion

is "But, 'twas Cerinthus that is lost"--the man, in other words, who held

the heresy that the Christ part only resided in Jesus, who was merely

human, and that the divine part was not crucified, having flown away

before. Thus it is implied that neither those who believe Jesus divine,

nor those who believe him human, are lost, but those who try as Cerinthus

did to make a compromise. The same note is struck in "Christmas Eve," and

now Professor Eucken takes an exactly similar ground in regard to any sort

of compromise, coming out boldly, however, as Browning does not in this

poem, though he makes no strong argument against it--in the acceptance of

Christ as human. Browning's own attitude is expressed as clearly as it is

anywhere in his work in the epilogue to "Dramatis Personae," in which the

conclusion is entirely in sympathy with that of Eucken:

"When you see what I tell you--nature dance

About each man of us, retire, advance,

As though the pageant's end were to enhance

"His worth, and--once the life, his product gained--

Roll away elsewhere, keep the strife sustained,

And show thus real, a thing the North but feigned--

"When you acknowledge that one world could do

All the diverse work, old yet ever new,

Divide us, each from other, me from you--

"Why, where's the need of Temple, when the walls

O' the world are that? What use of swells and falls

From Levites' choir, Priests' cries, and trumpet calls?

"That one Face, far from vanish, rather grows,

Or decomposes but to recompose,

Become my universe that feels and knows."

The hold which the philosophy of Eucken seems to have taken upon the minds

of many people all over the world shows that it must have great elements

of strength. That there is a partial resemblance between his thought,

which belongs to the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the

twentieth century, and Browning's is certain, but the fact remains that

the poet made a synthesis of the elements which must go to the forming of

any complete religious conceptions of the future so far in advance of his

own century that even Eucken is in some respects behind it.

Another interesting instance of Browning's presenting a line of reasoning

which resembles very strongly one phase of present-day philosophy is to be

found in "Bishop Blougram's Apology." The worldly Bishop gives voice to

good pragmatic doctrine, which in a nutshell is, "believe in, or rather

follow, that ideal which will be of the most use to you, and if it turns

out not to be successful, then try another one." The poet declares that

Blougram said good things but called them by wrong names. If the ideal is

a high one there is no great danger in such reasoning, but it can very

easily be turned into sophistical arguments for an ideal of living to

thoroughly selfish ends, as Blougram actually did. The poem might almost

be taken as a prophetic criticism of the weak aspects of pragmatism.

The belief in immortality which pervades Browning's work often comes out

in a form suggesting the idea of reincarnation. His future for the human

soul is not a heaven of bliss, but life in other worlds full of activity

and aspiration. This note is struck in "Paracelsus," where life's destiny

is described to be the climbing of pleasure's heights forever the seeking

of a flying point of bliss remote. In his last volume the idea is more

fully brought out in "Rephan." In this it is held that a state of perfect

bliss might grow monotonous, and that a preferable state would be to

aspire, yet never attain, to the object aimed at. The transmigration is

from "Rephan," where all was merged in a neutral Best to Earth, where the

soul which had been stagnating would have an opportunity to strive, not

rest. The most beautiful expression, however, of the idea of a future of

many lives is found in "One Word More":

"So it seems: I stand on my attainment.

This of verse, alone, one life allows me;

Verse and nothing else have I to give you.

Other heights in other lives, God willing:

All the gifts from all the heights, your own, Love!"

Though the theory of reincarnation is so ancient a one, and one entirely

discredited by Christianity, Browning was again expressing an ideal which

was to be revived in our own day. Oriental thought has made it almost a

commonplace of talk. Many people doubtless speak of what they mean to do

in their next incarnation without having the thought very deeply imbedded

in their consciousness, yet the mere fact that one hears the remark so

often proves what a hold the theory has on the imagination of mankind. As

Browning gives it in "One Word More," the successive incarnations take one

on to higher heights--"other lives in other worlds." Thus regarded, it is

the final outcome of evolution and progress, a process to be carried

forward in other worlds than our own, and has no degrading suggestion of a

degenerating, because of sin, into lower forms of existence. The movement

is always upward. Thus it has been effected by the idea that progress is

the law of life, and that evolution means, on the whole, progress.

Again, in the liberality of his social ideals, combined with an intensest

belief in the supremacy of genuine love, he was the forerunner of Ibsen,

who, the world is beginning to discover, was not a subverter of high moral

ideals, as it had thought, but a prophet of the new day, when to be untrue

to the highest ideal of love will be accounted the greatest crime of one

human being against another. From "The Doll's House" to "When We That Are

Dead Awaken" the same lesson is taught. Few people realize that this is

the keynote of Browning's teaching, or would be ready to regard him as a

prophet of an ideal of love which shall come to be seen as the true one

after the science of eugenics, the latest of the exact sciences, has found

itself as powerless as all other sciences have been to touch the reality

of life, because amid all the mysteries of the universe none is greater

than the spiritual mystery of love. Among writers who are to-day

recognizing a part of the truth, at least, is Ellen Key, but neither she

nor Ibsen has insisted in the way that Browning has upon the mystical

source of human love. That Browning is the poet who has given the world

the utmost certainty of God, the soul and immortality, and the most

inspiring ideals of human love, will be more completely recognized in the

future. As time goes on he will emerge above the tumultuous intellectual

life of the present, which, with its enormous increase of knowledge of

phenomena, bringing with it a fairly titanic mastery of the forces of

nature, and its generation of multitudes of ideas upon every conceivable

subject, many of them trite, many of them puerile, and some of them no

doubt of genuine value, obscures for the time being the greatness of any

one voice. A little later, when the winnowing of ideas shall come,

Browning will be recognized as one of the greatest men of his own age or

any age--a man combining knowledge, wisdom, aspiration, and vision to a

marvelous degree. He belongs to the master-order of poets, who write some

things which will pass into the popular knowledge of the day, but whose

serious achievements will be read and studied by the cultured and

scholarly of all time. No students of Greek literature will feel that they

can omit from their reading his Greek poems, no students of sociology will

feel that they can omit from their reading "The Ring and the Book." Lovers

of the drama must ever respond to the beauty of "The Blot in the

'Scutcheon" and "Pippa Passes." Even the student of verse technique will

not be able to leave Browning out of account, and making allowances for

the fact that the individuality of his style sometimes overasserts itself,

he will realize more and more its freshness and its vividness, its power

of suggestion, and its depths of emotional fervor. When the romanticism of

a Keats or a Shelley has completely worked itself out in musical

efflorescence; from which all thought-content has disappeared, there may

grow up a school of poets which shall, without direct imitation, develop

poetry along the lines of vigor and strength in form, and which shall have

for its content a tremendous sense of the worth of humanity and an

unshakable belief in the splendor of its destiny. _Virilists_ might well

be the name of this future school of poets who would hark back to Browning

as their inspiration, and a most pleasant contrast would they be to the

sentimental namby-pambyism which passes muster as poetry in much of the

work of to-day.

In closing this volume which has been inspired by a deep sense of the

abiding greatness of Robert Browning, it has been my desire to put on

record in some way my personal indebtedness to his poetry as an

inspiration not only to high thinking and living, but as a genuine

revelation to me of the rare possibilities in poetic art, for I may almost

say that Browning was my first poet, and through him, strange as it may

seem, I came to an appreciation of all other poets. His poetry,

fortunately for me an early influence in my life, awakened my, until then,

dormant faculty for poetic appreciation. I owe him, therefore, a double

debt of gratitude: Not only has he given me the joy of knowing his own

great work, but through him I have entered the land of all poesie, led as

I truly think by his sympathy with the scientific dispensation into which

I was born. His thought has always seemed so naturally akin to my own

that it has never seemed to me obscure. Finding such thoughts expressed

through the medium of great poetic genius, the beauty of poetic expression

was brought home to me as it never had been before, and hence the poetic

expression of all thought became a deep pleasure to me.

So much interpretation and criticism of Browning has been given to the

world during the last twenty years, that further work in that direction

seems hardly necessary for the present. There will for many a day to come

be those who feel him to be among the greatest poets the world has seen,

and those who find much more to blame in his work than to praise.

I have tried to give a few suggestions in regard to what Robert Browning

actually was in relation to his time. The nineteenth century was so

remarkable a one in the complexity of its growth, both in practical

affairs and in intellectual developments, that it has been possible in the

space of one volume to touch only upon the most important aspects under

each division, and to try to show what measure of influence important

movements had in the molding of the poet's genius.

Though in the nature of the case the treatment could not be exhaustive, I

hope to have opened out a sufficient number of pathways into the

fascinating vistas of the nineteenth century in its relation to Browning

to inspire others to make further excursions for themselves; and, above

all, I hope I may have added at least one stone to the cairn which many,

past and to come, are building to his fame.

THE END

THE COUNTRY LIFE PRESS, GARDEN CITY, N. Y.

FOOTNOTES:

[1] The influence of the "Prometheus Unbound" upon the conception of

Aprile's character was first brought forward by the writer in a paper read

before the Boston Browning Society, March 15, 1910, a typewritten copy of

which was placed in the Browning alcove in the Boston Public Library. In

the "Life of Browning," published the same year and not read by the writer

until recently, Mr. Hall Griffin touches upon the same thought in the

following words: "From some elements in the myth of Prometheus Browning

unmistakably evolved the conception of his Aprile as not only the lover

and the poet but as the potential sculptor, painter, orator, and

musician."

[2] See the author's "Browning's England."

[3] See Introduction to "Ring and Book"--Camberwell Browning.

End of Project Gutenberg's Browning and His Century, by Helen Archibald Clarke