_Balaustion's Adventure: including a Transcript from Euripides._ By
ROBERT BROWNING. Smith, Elder, and Co.
Mr. Browning's pastimes are characteristic enough. This new poem he
calls a May-month amusement, in the very graceful dedication in which
he explains its origin; but still we have the personal qualities as
predominant as elsewhere. The Countess Cowper, it appears, urged him
to give a version of a play of Euripides, 'of that strangest, sweetest
song of his, Alkestis;' and Mr. Browning gallantly set himself to the
task. But well may he say, in a slightly different sense from what he
meant it, though truly in no disparagement of his own originality,
'_Euripides might fear little; out I, also, have an interest in the
performance_; and what wonder if I beg you to suffer that it make, in
another and far easier sense, its nearest possible approach to those
Greek qualities of goodness and beauty, by laying itself gratefully at
your feet?' Had it not been for the skill with which Mr. Browning
invents dramatic expedients to aid him in relieving and toning down
the contrast which would inevitably have been felt between the direct
and sunny simplicity of the Greek, and his own wayward, imperative
many-moodedness--to coin a phrase--something of the grotesque would
assuredly have mingled itself with this performance. But, though the
clear wine has been poured into a coloured glass, ornamented with
design all too florid, it is presented to us by so sweet a hand that
we often forget the contrast in the singular grace of the maidenly
face and figure. Balaustion--wild pomegranate flower--has in her
something of the Greek; but she has also an ineffable touch of our
modern time. Her image comes as that of a reconciling spirit between
Mr. Browning and the old Greek poet, in such a manner, as suffices to
divert the mind from a too exclusive devotion to particular points.
The necessity that rests on Mr. Browning to first of all create a
series of media through which any circumstance or event may be seen,
comes out most strongly here, where the subject-matter seemed least of
all to admit of it. The triumph of Mr. Browning's genius lies in this,
that in some sort he justifies his own injustice to those Greek
qualities of unvarying clearness and grace of outline. Goethe, in his
'Helena,' celebrated in significant style the marriage of the Greek
and Gothic spirit, and he even condescended under allegorical figure
to point at individual poets. Had he lived to read 'Balaustion's
Adventure,' he would have found in it a valuable instance. Mr.
Browning is Greek in the fresh simplicity of his feeling; but Gothic
in the necessity he is ever under to see his thoughts reduplicated in
the shade and sunshine of many different moods or minds. Hence the
lyrical spirit and the peculiarly dramatic form of his work; and so it
is in this 'Adventure.'
The girlish simplicity of Balaustion, the Rhodian maiden who recites
the play, and her capacity for pure unalloyed devotion--for she twice
saves her friends by her patriotism and love of poetry--justify, in
part at least, what appear to be inconsistencies in Mr. Browning's
rendering; such, for example, as the lofty idealisation of the
character of Admetos. It is just such as a fresh enthusiastic girl
would, out of her own maidenly conception, impose on a hero of her
own, thrown into such tragic circumstances of those of Alkestis. Thus,
even where we are most induced to criticise, the figure of the teller
comes in to warn us; but after all, the modern poet, by virtue of his
dramatic medium, has reached a truer conception than that of
Euripides, or has illumined his conception by letting full upon it the
freer lights of earlier time. But clearly, the transcript from
Euripides, in the hands of Mr. Browning, undergoes a strange
transformation. It is not alone that lines here and there vary very
much from the original, and that expressions are amplified or departed
from; it is that on the old Greek thought a wholly modern conception
of love, and of life and death, is superimposed, and a dim doctrine of
spiritual compensation interwoven with it, which is quite alien to
Greek feeling. Something, however, may be said for the fact that we
have here really a reminiscence of a former telling, in which,
naturally, much of the halo that rests on the past, simply because it
has 'orbed into the perfect star,' would unconsciously well up round
the recollection, and colour the incident. All this, of course, shows
Mr. Browning's supreme art in dramatic expedient; but some of the
expressions of Herakles and not a few utterances of Admetos, are
almost too distinctly spiritualistic to pass muster in the connection
in which we find them. For example, this:--
'Since death divides the pair,
'Tis well that I depart and thou remain
Who wast to me as spirit is to flesh:
Let the flesh perish, be perceived no more,
So thou, the spirit that informed the flesh,
Read yet awhile, a very flame above
The rift I drop into the darkness by,--
And bid remember, flesh and spirit once
Worked in the world, one body, for man's sake.
Never be that abominable show
Of passive death without a quickening life,
Admetos only, no Alkestis now!'
Mr. Browning, in quoting the verse from Mrs. Browning, sufficiently
indicates the spirit in which he would read the Alkestis; but clear it
is that he might have chosen from the earlier poets passages far less
likely to give rise to the contradiction which we have spoken of, and
which cannot but be more or less felt in this instance. In Euripides,
we see the first fatal symptoms of the skepticism and materialism
which finally overtook the Greek stage. There is a good deal of
casuistry in his expedients, which often the stage-play (of which Mr.
Browning has decisively got rid) helped him to conceal. The old honest
belief in the myths was beginning to fade and weaken, and had already
become pretty much a thing for the theatre. Mr. Browning has aimed at
idealising Euripides--at elevating him, as it were, to the point at
which Greek myth will reflect the rising lights of modern ideas. But
it is inevitable that scholars should feel that there is a lack of
solid foundation for the rendering. To those who choose to receive Mr.
Browning's Alkestis implicitly, it can only be a thing of beauty and
of noblest meaning. So far as it is Greek, it gives the earlier rather
than the later conception; but it has wrapped the Greek ideal in a new
atmosphere of spiritual truth. If Mr. Browning had chosen the Alkestis
of Euripides for the sole purpose of proving his wonderful dramatic
capability, and his power of involving himself in a theme and so
transforming it, he could not have found a better, that is to say, a
more difficult, subject. In Greece the husband existed for the State,
the wife for the husband, and the conjugal relation was little
relieved by sentiment. Euripides celebrates the mere triumph of this
Greek wifely duty--no more; but how exquisitely does Mr. Browning make
Balaustion play chorus, so as occasionally to give opportunity for the
infusion of his own transcendentalism. Sometimes, however, Mr.
Browning shows fine capacity for catching the Greek grace and
unconscious sensuousness of conception. Nothing could be more faithful
than this:--
'For thee, Alkestis, Queen!
Many a time those haunters of the Muse
Shall sing thee to the seven-stringed mountain shell,
And glorify in hymns that need no harp,
At Sparta when the cycle comes about,
And that Karneian month wherein the moon
Rises and never sets the whole night through:
So too at splendid and magnificent
Athenai. Such the spread of thy renown,
And such the lay that, dying, thou hast left,
Singer and sayer.'
We take it for granted that our readers, either directly or
indirectly, have got some notion of what we may call the machinery of
the poem. When the Rhodians revolt because of the disastrous failure
of the Nikian expedition against Syracuse, Balaustion urges her
friends not to throw off their allegiance, but--
'Rather go die at Athens, lie outstretched
For feet to trample on, before the gate
Of Diomedes or the Hippadai,
Before the temples and among the tombs,
Than tolerate the grim felicity
Of harsh Lakonia.'
She urges them to go to Athens, and they set sail. When they are blown
out of their course she encourages them to new effort by singing
poems; and when they are cast on the Syracusan coast, she wins the
suffrages even of the Syracusans by her recitations. She tells her
friends, just when she is about to be happily wedded, of this her
early adventure, and recites the 'whole main of a play from first to
last,' which was associated in her mind with such strange, glad
memories.
And this is Mr. Browning's way of reproducing Euripides to us. Nothing
could be more characteristic than this performance. It is full of
dramatic subtleties; yet ever and anon the pure naturalness and
simplicity of Greek life break through upon us with subduing force
from the strange relief of contrast. One of our poets, in a very
clever _jeu d'esprit_, spoke of Mr. Browning as 'thinking in Greek.'
This poem proves, in a certain respect, how true was the
characterization. But if Mr. Browning thinks in Greek, then it is most
often to the low, sad undertone of modern doubt, question, and
perplexity. The sunshine that is cast over this whole adventure is
what most entitles it to be called Greek, though there is far too much
suggestion of shadow, in the shape of perilous speculation, in the
background.
_Faust; a Tragedy._ By JOHN WOLFGANG VON GOETHE. Translated in the
original metres by BAYARD TAYLOR. Strahan and Co.
All translators of first-class poetry have a difficult series of
problems to solve; but we are disposed to think a version of 'Faust'
in the original metres is about the most arduous task a man could set
himself. We would almost rather attempt 'The Birds' of Aristophanes.
Mr. Taylor, hitherto known as one of the choicest writers of that
variety of English prose which has developed itself across the
Atlantic--a variety which is what gardeners call a 'sport'--is not
quite up to the great work he has undertaken. He is not a sufficiently
subtle metrist to echo the delicate melodies which lurk in Goethe's
simplest forms of rhythm; nor does he always faithfully reflect
Goethe's ideas--which, though twisted into recondite form, are usually
simple reproductions of archaic axioms. It is the highest compliment
you can pay Goethe, to say that there is nothing new in him. He
iterated ancient truths in forms that suited his own era. He was like
a mighty tree, bearing fresh foliage every year, but always the same
old oak that cast cool shadows on the lawns of Eden. Nothing can be
more certain than that absolutely new ideas must be false ideas; but
it is equally certain that a man of great genius does infinite good by
thinking out old ideas afresh, and presenting them in a form that
suits his generation. There is not much in 'Faust' that there is not
in 'Job' (which some authorities deem the oldest poem in existence),
and there is much in 'Job' which there is not in 'Faust.' But 'Faust'
was a necessity of the age, for all that. And even Bailey's 'Festus,'
a very crude and washed-out variation of the theme, did good in its
time.
The deficiencies we have indicated in Mr. Taylor's work are more
visible in the second part of 'Faust' than in the first. In both they
are painfully observable. Take Gretchen's song, 'The King in Thule:'
we select the first, second, and fifth stanzas:--
'There was a king in Thule
Was faithful till the grave,
To whom his mistress dying
A golden goblet gave.
'Nought was to him more precious;
He drained it at every bout;
His eyes with tears ran over
As oft as he drank out.
* * * * *
'Then stood the old carouser,
And drank the last life-glow,
And hurled the hallowed goblet
Into the tide below.'
Herewith we venture to compare the same stanzas, in a boyish
translation of our own, made when we had a vision of translating
'Faust':--
'There was a king in Thule, the ancient sea beside;
His love a goblet gave him upon the day she died.
'At festival and banquet he loved that cup of gold,
For many a dream it brought him of the sweet days of old.
* * * * *
'The aged king arises; a mighty draught drinks he,
Then hurls the golden-goblet away into the sea.'
Some of Mr. Taylor's expressions in the few lines we have cited are
unpoetic, and some are unintelligible; for example, what is to be
understood by the old king's drinking 'his last life-glow?' Rhyme is
of course answerable for the barbarism.
Now let us take the first four lines of 'The Prologue in Heaven'--the
song of Raphael, the Archangel. Thus Mr. Taylor:--
'The sun-orb sings in emulation,
'Mid brother spheres, his ancient round--
His path predestined through creation,
He ends with step of thunder-sound.'
This is awkward and unpoetic. The sun 'singing a round' makes one
think of
'Three blind mice--
See how they run!'