The isolated monologues have a special significance, which is almost
implied in their form, but is also distinct from it. Mr. Browning has
made them the vehicle for most of the reasonings and reflections which
make up so large a part of his imaginative life: whether presented in
his own person, or, as is most often the case, in that of his men and
women. As such, they are among those of his works which lend themselves
to a rough kind of classification; and may be called "argumentative."
They divide themselves into two classes: those in which the speaker is
defending a preconceived judgment, and an antagonist is implied; and
those in which he is trying to form a judgment or to accept one: and the
supposed listener, if there be such, is only a confidant. The first kind
of argument or discussion is carried on--apparently--as much for victory
as for truth; and employs the weapons of satire, or the tactics of
special-pleading, as the case demands. The second is an often pathetic
and always single-minded endeavour to get at the truth. Those monologues
in which the human spirit is represented as communing with itself,
contain some of Mr. Browning's noblest dramatic work; but those in which
the militant attitude is more pronounced throw the strongest light on
what I have indicated as his distinctive intellectual quality: the
rejection of all general and dogmatic points of view. His casuistic
utterances are often only a vindication of the personal, and therefore
indefinite quality of human truth; and their apparent trifling with it
is often only the seeking after a larger truth, in which all seeming
contradictions are resolved. It was inevitable, however, that this
mental quality should play into the hands of his dramatic imagination,
and be sometimes carried away by it; so that when he means to tell us
what a given person under given circumstances would be justified in
saying, he sometimes finds himself including in the statement something
which the given person so situated would be only likely to say.
The first of these classes, or groups, which we may distinguish as
SPECIAL PLEADINGS, contains poems very different in length, and in
literary character; and to avoid the appearance of confusion, I shall
reverse the order of their publication, and place the most important
first:--
"Aristophanes' Apology;[32] or The Last Adventure of Balaustion."
(1875.)
"Fifine at the Fair." (1872.)
"Prince Hohenstiel-Schwangau, Saviour of Society." (1871.)
"Bishop Blougram's Apology" (Men and Women). (1855.)
"Mr. Sludge, the Medium." (Dramatis Personæ.) (1864.)
"ARISTOPHANES' APOLOGY" is, as its second title shows, a sequel to
"Balaustion's Adventure" (1871). Both turn on the historical fact that
Euripides was reverenced far more by the non-Athenian Greeks than by the
Athenians; and both contain a transcript from him. But the interest of
"Aristophanes' Apology" is independent of its "Herakles," while that of
"Balaustion's Adventure" is altogether bound up with its Alkestis; and
in so far as the "adventure" places Balaustion herself before us, it
will be best treated as an introduction to her appearance in the later
and more important work.
Balaustion is a Rhodian girl, brought up in a worship for Euripides,
which does not, however, exclude the appreciation of other great Greek
poets. The Peloponnesian War has entered on its second stage. The
Athenian fleet has been defeated at Syracuse. And Rhodes, resenting this
disgrace, has determined to take part against Athens, and join the
Peloponnesian league. But Balaustion will not forsake the mother-city,
the life and light of her whole known world; and she persuades her
kinsmen to migrate with her to it, and, with her, to share its fate.
They accordingly take ship at Kaunus, a Carian sea-port belonging to
Rhodes. But the wind turns them from their course, and when it abates,
they find themselves in strange waters, pursued by a pirate bark. They
fly before it towards what they hope will prove a friendly
shore--Balaustion heartening the rowers by a song from Æschylus, which
was sung at the battle of Salamis--and run straight into the hostile
harbour of Syracuse, where shelter is denied them.
The captain pleads in vain that they are Kaunians, subjects of Rhodes,
and that Rhodes is henceforward on Sparta's side. "Kaunian the ship may
be: but Athenians are on board. All Athens echoed in that song from
Æschylus which has been ringing across the sea. The voyagers may retire
unhurt. But if ten pirate ships were pursuing them, they should not
bring those memories of Salamis to the Athenian captives whom the defeat
of Nicias has left in Syracusan hands." The case is desperate. The
Rhodians turn to go.
Suddenly a voice cries, "Wait. Do they know any verses from Euripides?"
"More than that, they answer, Balaustion can recite a whole play--that
strangest, saddest, sweetest song--the 'Alkestis.' It does honour to
Herakles, their god. Let them place her on the steps of their temple of
Herakles, and she will recite it there." The Rhodians are brought in,
amidst joyous loving laughter, among shouts of "Herakles" and
"Euripides." The recital takes place;[33] it is repeated a second day
and a third; and Balaustion and her kinsmen are dismissed with good
words and wishes, for, as she declares:
"... Greeks are Greeks, and hearts are hearts,
And poetry is power,...." (vol. xi. p. 14.)
The story of Alkestis scarcely needs repeating. Apollo had incurred the
anger of Jupiter by avenging the death of his son Æsculapius on the
Cyclops whose thunder-bolt had slain him; and been condemned to play the
part of a common mortal, and serve Admetus, King of Thessaly, as
herdsman. The kind treatment of Admetus had made him his friend: and
Apollo had deceived the Fate sisters into promising that whenever the
king's life should become their due, they would renounce it on condition
of some other person dying in his stead. When the play opens, the fatal
moment has come. Alkestis, wife of Admetus, has offered herself to save
him; and Admetus, though he does so with a heavy heart, has been weak
enough to accept the sacrifice. Death enters the palace, from which
even Apollo can no longer turn him away.
But just as Alkestis has breathed her last, Herakles appears; and his
great cheery voice is heard on the threshold of the house of mourning,
inquiring if the master be within. Admetus suppresses all signs of
emotion, that he may receive him as hospitality demands; and Herakles,
hearing what has happened from a servant of the house, is moved to
gratitude and pity. He wrestles with Death; conquers him; and brings
back Alkestis into her husband's presence, veiled, and in the guise of a
second companion. Admetus will at first neither touch nor look at her.
He has promised his dying wife to give her no successor; and her memory
is even dearer to him than she herself has been. The god however
reasons, persuades, and insists; and at length, very reluctantly,
Admetus gives his hand to the stranger, whom he is then told to unveil.
Herakles has delayed the recognition, that Alkestis might be enabled to
probe her husband's fidelity, and convince herself that sorrow had made
him worthier of her.
Balaustion half recites the play, half describes it, "as she has seen it
at Kameiros this very year," occasionally compressing an unimportant
scene, but always closely adhering to the original. She knows that she
is open to the reproach of describing more than the masked faces of the
actors could allow her to see; but she meets it in these words:--
"What's poetry except a power that makes?
And, speaking to one sense, inspires the rest,
Pressing them all into its service:" (vol. xi. pp. 17, 18.)
The whole work is a vindication of the power of poetry, as exerted in
itself, and as reproduced in those who have received its fruits (pages
110, 111); and Balaustion herself displays it in this secondary form, by
suggesting a version of the story of Alkestis, more subtly, if less
simply, beautiful than the original. She makes _Love_ the conqueror of
Death. According to her, the music made by Apollo among Admetus's flocks
has tamed every selfish passion in the King's soul; and when the time
comes for his wife to die, he refuses the sacrifice. "Zeus has decreed
that their two lives shall be one; and if they must be severed, he must
go who was the body, not she, who was the soul, of their joint
existence." But Alkestis declares that the reality of that existence
lies not in her but in him, and she bids him look at her once more
before his decision is made. In this look, her soul enters into his;
and, thus subduing him, she expires. But when she reaches the nether
world she is rejected as a deceiver. "The death she brings to it is a
mockery, since it doubles the life she has left behind." Proserpine
sends her back to her husband's side; and the "lost eyes" re-open
beneath his gaze, while it still embraces her.
Apollo smiles sadly at the ingenuousness of mortals, who thus imagine
that the chain of eternal circumstance could snap in one human life; at
their blindness to those seeds of pity and tenderness which the crushed
promise of human happiness sets free. Yet he seems to think they lose
nothing by either. "They do well to value their little hour. They do
well to treasure the warm heart's blood, of which no outpouring could
tinge the paleness or fill the blank of eternity, the power of love
which transforms their earthly homes, their
... hopes and fears, so blind and yet so sweet
With death about them." (p. 115.)
"Balaustion" means wild pomegranate flower; and the girl has been so
called on account of her lyric gifts. She recalls the pomegranate tree,
because its leaves are cooling to the brow, its seed and blossom
grateful to the sense, and because the nightingale is never distant from
it. She will keep the name for life--so she tells her friends--and with
it a better thing which her songs have gained her. One youth came daily
to the temple-steps at Syracuse to hear her. He was at her side at
Athens when she landed. They will be married at this next full moon.
"Alkestis" failed "to get the prize" when its author was competing with
Sophocles. "But Euripides has had his reward: in the sympathies which he
has stirred; in the genius which he has inspired. His crown came direct
from Zeus."
We need not name the poetess whom Mr. Browning quotes at the close of
this poem. The painter so generously eulogized is F. Leighton.
When we meet Balaustion again, in "Aristophanes' Apology," many things
have happened. She has seen her poet in his retirement (this was
mentioned in her "adventure"), kissed his hand, and received from it,
together with other gifts, his tragedy of Herakles. Euripides has died;
Athens has fallen; and Balaustion, with her memories in her heart, and
her husband, Euthykles, by her side, is speeding back towards Rhodes.
She is deeply shocked by the fate of her adoptive city, to which her
fancy pays a tribute of impassioned reverence, too poetic to be given in
any but Mr. Browning's words. Yet she has a growing belief that that
fate was just. Sea and air and the blue expanse of heaven are full of
suggestion of that spirit-life, with its larger struggles or its
universal peace, which is above the world's crowd and noise. And she
determines that sorrow for what is fleeting shall not gnaw at her heart.
But in order to overcome the sorrow, she must loosen it from her. The
tragedy she has witnessed must enact itself once more for Euthykles and
her, he writing as she dictates. It will have for prologue a second
adventure of her own, which he also has witnessed; and this adventure
will constitute the book. It is prefaced in its turn by a backward
glance at the circumstances, (so different from the present) in which
she related the first.
It was the night on which Athens received the news that Euripides was
dead: Euthykles had brought this home to her from the theatre. They were
pondering it gravely, but not sadly, for their poet was now at rest, in
the companionship of Æschylus, safe from the petty spites which had
frothed and fretted about his life. He had lived and worked, to the end,
true to his own standard of right, heedless of the reproach that he was
a man-hater and a recluse, without regard for civic duty, and with no
object but his art. He had left it to Sophocles to play poet and
commander at the same time, and be laughed at for the result. He had
first taken the prize of "Contemplation" in his all but a hundred plays;
then, grasping the one hand offered him which held a heart, had shown at
the court of Archelaus of Macedon whether or not the power of active
usefulness was in him. His last notes of music had also been struck for
that one friend.
Even Athens did him justice now. The reaction had set in; one would have
his statue erected in the theatre; another would have him buried in the
Piræus; etc. etc. Not so Euthykles and Balaustion. His statue was in
their hearts. Their concern was not with his mortal vesture, but with
the liberated soul, which now watched over their world. They would hail
this, they said, in the words of his own song, his "Herakles."
The reading was about to begin, when suddenly there was torch-light--a
burst of comic singing--and a knocking at the door; Bacchus bade them
open; they delayed. Then a name was uttered, of "authoritative" sound,
of "immense significance;" and the door was opened to--Aristophanes. He
was returning from the performance of his "Thesmophoriazusae,"[34] last
year a failure, but this time, thanks to some new and audacious
touches, a brilliant success. His chorus trooped before him--himself no
more sober than was his wont--crowned, triumphant, and drunk; a group of
flute-boys and dancing-girls making up the scene. All these, however,
slunk away before Balaustion's glance, Aristophanes alone confronting
her. And, as she declares, it was "no ignoble presence." For the broad
brow, the flushed cheek, the commanding features, the defiant attitude,
all betokened a mind, wantoning among the lower passions, but yet master
of them.
He addresses Balaustion in a tone of mock deference; banters her on her
poetic name, her dignified mien, and the manner in which she has scared
his chorus and its followers away; "not indeed that that matters, since
the archon's economy and the world's squeamishness will soon abolish it
altogether."[35] Then struck by a passing thought, he stands grave,
silent--another man in short--awaiting what she has to say.
In this sober moment, Balaustion welcomes him to her house. She welcomes
him as the Good Genius: as genius of the kindly, though purifying
humour, which, like summer lighting, illumines, but does not destroy.
She knows and implies that he is not only this. But she greets the
light, no matter to what darkness it be allied. She reverences the god
who forms one half of him, so long as the monster which constitutes the
other, remains out of sight; a poetic myth is made to illustrate this
feeling. The gravity, however, is short-lived. The lower self in
Aristophanes springs up again, and his "apology" begins.
"Aristophanes' APOLOGY" is a defence of comedy, as understood and
practised by himself: that is, as a broad expression of the natural
life, and a broad satire upon those who directly or indirectly condemn
it. It is addressed to Euripides in the person of his disciple. It is at
the same time an attack upon him; and in either capacity it covers a
great deal of ground. For the dispute does not lie simply between comedy
and tragedy--which latter, with the old tragedians, was often only the
naturalism of comedy on a larger scale--but between naturalism and
humanity, as more advanced thinkers understood it; between the old ideas
of human and divine conveyed by tragedy and comedy alike, and the new
ones which Euripides, the friend of Socrates, had imported into them;
and the question at issue involved, therefore, not only art and morals,
but the entire philosophy of life. The "Apology" derives farther
interest and significance from the varied emotions by which it is
inspired. The speaker (as is the case in "Fifine at the Fair") is
answering not only his opponent, but his own conscience. How the
conscience of Aristophanes has been aroused he presently tells: first
struggling a little with the false shame which the experience has left
behind. This is the scene which he describes.
A festive supper had followed the successful play. Jollity was at its
height. The cup was being crowned to Aristophanes as the "Triumphant,"
when a knock came to the door: and there entered no "asker of
questions," no casual passer-by, but the pale, majestic, heavily-draped
figure of Sophocles himself. Slowly, solemnly, and with bent head, he
passed up the hall, between two ranks of spectators as silent as
himself; raised his eyes as he confronted the priest,[36] and announced
to him, that since Euripides was "dead to-day," and as a fitting
spectacle for the god, his chorus would appear at the greater feast,
next month, clothed in black and ungarlanded. Then silently, and amidst
silence, he passed out again.
This, then, was the purport of the important news which was known to
have arrived in port, but which every one had interpreted in his own
way. Euripides was no more! But neither the news nor he who brought it
could create more than a momentary stupor; and the tipsy fun soon
renewed itself, at the expense of the living tragedian and the dead.
Aristophanes alone remained grave. The value of the man whom he had
aspersed and ridiculed stood out before him summed up by the hand of
Death. He recalled the failure which had marked the now hopeless
limitation of his own genius, and those last words addressed to him by
Euripides which brought home its lesson.[37] The archon, "Master of the
Feast," judging that its "glow" was "extinct," had risen to conclude it
by crowning the parting cup. He had crowned it with judicious reserve to
the "Good Genius;" and Strattis (the comic poet) had burst forth in an
eulogium of the Comic Muse which claimed the title of Good Genius for
her--when yielding to this new and over-mastering impulse, he
(Aristophanes) checked the coming applause, and demanded that the Tragic
Muse and her ministrant Euripides should receive the libation instead;
justifying the demand by a noble and pathetic tribute to the memory of
the dead poet, and to the great humanities which only the _tragic_ poet
can represent.
But he found no response. The listeners mistook his seriousness for
satire, and broke out afresh at the excellence of such a joke; and
recovering his presence of mind as quickly as he had lost it, he changed
his tone, thanked those alike who had laughed with him, and who had
wept with the "Lord of Tears;" and desired that the cup be consecrated
to that genius of complex poetry which is tragedy and comedy in one. It
was sacrilege, he declared, to part these two; for to do so was to hack
at the Hermai[38]--to outrage the ideal union of the intellectual and
the sensuous life in man. And from this new vantage-ground he launched
another bolt at Euripides, whose coldness, he asserted, had belied this
union, and made him guilty of a crime inexpiable in the sight of the
gods.
Yet he could not dismiss him from his thoughts. He wanted to go over the
old ground with him, and put himself in the right. Balaustion and her
husband were in a manner representatives of the dead tragedian. That was
why he had come. He was not sure that he expressed, or at the moment
even felt, all that he had just repeated. "Drunk he was with the good
Thasian, and drunk he probably had been." Nevertheless, the impulse he
had thus obeyed sprang perhaps from some real, if hitherto undiscovered
depths in his soul.
Up to this moment his defence has been carried on in a disjointed
manner, and consists rather in defying attack than in resisting it: the
defiant mood being only another aspect of the perturbed condition which
has brought him to Balaustion's door. It finds its natural
starting-point in the coarse treatment of things and persons which his
"Thesmophoriazusae," with its "monkeying" of Euripides,[39] has so
recently displayed. But he reminds Balaustion that the art of comedy is
young. It is only three generations since Susarion gave it birth. (He
explains this more fully later on.) It began when he and his companions
daubed their faces with wine lees, mounted a cart, and drove by night
through the villages: crying from house to house, how this man starved
his labourers, that other kissed his neighbour's wife, and so on. The
first comedian battered with big stones. He, Aristophanes, is at the
stage of the wooden club which he has taken pains to plane smooth, and
inlay with shining studs. The mere polished steel will be for his
successors.
"And is he approaching the age of steel?" Balaustion asks, well knowing
that he is not. "His play failed last year. Was his triumph to-night due
to a gentler tone? Is he teaching mankind that brute blows are not human
fighting, still less the expression of godlike power; and that ignorance
and folly are convicted by their opposites, not by themselves?"
"Not he, indeed," he replies; "he improves on his art: he does not turn
it topsy-turvy. _He_ does not work on abstractions. _His_ power is not
that of the recluse. He wants human beings with their approbation and
their sympathy, and his Athens, to be pleased in her own way. He leaves
the rest to Euripides. Real life is the grist to _his_ mill. It is clear
enough, however, that the times are against him. Every year more
restrictions; Euripides with his priggishness; Socrates with his books
and his moonshine, and his supercilious ways: never resenting his
(Aristophanes') fun, nor seeming even to notice it[40], not
condescending to take exception to any but the 'tragedians;' as if he,
the author of the 'Birds,' was a mere comic poet!" Then follows a tirade
on the variety of his subjects; their depth, their significance, and the
mawkishness and pedantry which they are intended to confute.
"Drunk! yes, he owns that he is." This in answer to a look from
Balaustion, which has rebuked a too hazardous joke--"Drink is the proper
inspiration. How else was he beaten in the 'Clouds,' his masterpiece,
but that his opponent had inspired himself with drink, and he this time
had not?[41] Purity! he has learned what that is worth"--With more in
the same strain. Now, however, that his adventure is told, the tumult of
feeling in some degree subsides, and the more serious aspects of the
apology will come into play.
Balaustion and her husband, seeing the sober mood return, once more
welcome "the glory of Aristophanes" to their house, and bid him on his
side share in their solemnity, and commemorate Euripides with them. This
calls his attention to the portrait of the dead poet; those implements
of his work which were his tokens of friendship to Balaustion; the
papyrus leaf inscribed with the Herakles itself; and he cannot resist a
sneer at this again unsuccessful play. His hostess rebukes him grandly
for completing the long outrage on the living man by this petty attack
on his "supreme calm;" and as supreme calmness means death, he begins
musing on the immunities which death confers, and their injustice. "Give
him only time and he will pulverize his opponents; _he_ will show them
whether this work of his is unintelligible, or that other will not live.
But let them die; and they slink out of his reach with their malice,
stupidity, and ignorance, while survivors croak 'respect the dead' over
the hole in which they are laid. At all events, he retorts on them when
he can--unwisely perhaps, since those he flings mud at are only
immortalized by the process. Euripides knew better than to follow his
example."
Again Balaustion has her answer. "He has volleyed mud at Euripides
himself while pretending to defend the same cause: the cause of art, of
knowledge, of justice, and of truth;" and she makes his cheek burn by
reminding him of what petty and what ignoble witticisms that mud was
made up. At last he begins in real earnest. "Balaustion, he understands,
condemns comedy both in theory and in practice, from the calm and
rational heights to which she, with her tragic friend, has attained.
Here are his arguments in its favour."
"It claims respect as an institution, because as such it is coeval with
liberty--born of the feast of Bacchus, and therefore of the good gifts
of the earth--a mode of telling truth without punishment, and of
chastising without doing harm. It claims respect by its advance from
simple objects to more composite, from plain thumping to more searching
modes of attack. The men who once exposed wrong-doing by shouting it
before the wrong-doer's door, now expose it by representing its various
forms. The comic poets denounce not only the thief, the fool, the miser,
but the advocates of war, the flatterers of the populace, the sophists
who set up Whirligig[42] in the place of Zeus, the thin-blooded
tragedian in league with the sophists, who preaches against the flesh.
Where facts are insufficient he has recourse to fancy, and exaggerates
the wronged truth the more strongly to enforce it (here follows a
characteristic illustration.) To those who call Saperdion the Empousa,
he shows her in a Kimberic robe;[43] in other words, he exposes her
charms more fully than she does it herself, the better to convict those
who malign them."
And here lies his grudge against Euripides. Euripides is one of those
who call Saperdion a monster--who slander the world of sense with its
beauties and its enjoyments, or who contemptuously set it aside. "Born
on the day of Salamis--when heroes walked the earth; and gods were
reverenced and not discussed--when Greeks guarded their home with its
abundant joys, and left barbarian lands to their own starvation--he has
lived to belie every tradition of that triumphant time. He has joined
himself with a band of starved teachers and reformers to cut its very
foundations away. He exalts death over life, misery over happiness; or,
if he admits happiness, it is as an empty name."
"Moreover, he reasons away the gods; for they are, according to him,
only forms of nature. Zeus _is_ the atmosphere. Poseidon _is_ the sea.
Necessity rules the universe. Duty, once the will of the gods, is now a
voice within ourselves bidding us renounce pleasure, and giving us no
inducement to do so."
"He reasons away morality, for he shows there is neither right nor
wrong, neither 'yours' nor 'mine,' nor natural privilege, nor natural
subjection, that may not be argued equally for or against. Why be in
such a hurry to pay one's debt, to attend one's mother, to bring a given
sacrifice?"
"He reasons away social order, for he declares the slave as good as his
master, woman equal to man, and even the people competent to govern
itself. 'Why should not the tanner, the lampseller, or the mealman, who
knows his own business so well, know that of the State too?'"
"He ignores the function of poetry, which is to see beauty, and to
create it: for he places utility above grace, truth above all beauty. He
drags human squalor on to the scene because he recognizes its existence.
The world of the poet's fancy, that world into which he was born, does
not exist for him. He spoils his art as well as his life, carving back
to bull what another had carved into a sphinx."
"How are such proceedings to be dealt with? They appeal to the mob. The
mob is not to be swayed by polished arguments or incidental hints. We
don't scare sparrows with a Zeus' head, though the eagle may recognize
it as his lord's. A big Priapus is the figure required."
"And this," so Aristophanes resumes his defence, "comedy supplies.
Comedy is the fit instrument of popular conviction: and the wilder, the
more effective: since it is the worship of life, of the originative
power of nature; and since that power has lawlessness for its apparent
law. Even Euripides, with his shirkings and his superiority, has been
obliged to pay tribute to the real. He could not shake it off all at
once. He tacked a Satyric play to some five of his fifty trilogies: and
if this was grim enough at first, he threw off the mask in Alkestis,
showing how one could be indecent in a decent way."[44]
For the reasons above given, which he farther expands and illustrates,
Aristophanes chooses the "meaner muse" for his exponent. "And who, after
all, is the worse for it? Does he strangle the enemies of the truth? No.
He simply doses them with comedy, _i.e._ with words. Those who offend in
words he pays back in them, exaggerating a little, but only so as to
emphasize what he means; just as love and hate use each other's terms,
because those proper to themselves have grown unmeaning from constant
use. And what is the ground of difference between Balaustion and
himself? Slender enough, in all probability, as he could show her, if
they were discussing the question for themselves alone. As it is,
Euripides has attacked him in the sight of the mob. His defence is
addressed to it: he uses the arguments it can understand. It does not
follow that they convey a literal statement of his own views. Euripides
is not the only man who is free from superstition. He too on occasion
can show up the gods;" and he describes the manner in which he will do
this in his next play. All that is serious in the Apology is given in
the concluding passage. "Whomever else he is hard upon, he will level
nothing worse than a harmless parody at Sophocles, for he has no grudge
against him:--
'He founds no anti-school, upsets no faith,
But, living, lets live,' (vol. xiii. p. 110.)