Poems on Classical Subjects
During these years, 1869-1878, Browning's outward life maintained its
accustomed ways. In the summer of 1869 he wandered with his son and his
sister, in company with his friends of Italian days, the Storys, in
Scotland, and at Lock Luichart Lodge visited Lady Ashburton.[103] Three
summers, those of 1870, 1872 and 1873 were spent at Saint-Aubin, a wild
"un-Murrayed" village on the coast of Normandy, where Milsand occupied a
little cottage hard by. At night the light-house of Havre shot forth its
beam, and it was with "a thrill" that Browning saw far off the spot
where he had once sojourned with his wife.[104] "I don't think we were
ever quite so thoroughly washed by the sea-air from all quarters as
here," he wrote in August 1870. Every morning, as Mme. Blanc (Th.
Bentzon) tells us, he might be seen "walking along the sands with the
small Greek copy of Homer which was his constant companion. On Sunday he
went with the Milsands ... to a service held in the chapel of the
Chateau Blagny, at Lion-sur-Mer, for the few Protestants of that region.
They were generally accompanied by a young Huguenot peasant, their
neighbour, and Browning with the courtesy he showed to every woman, used
to take a little bag from the hands of the strong Norman girl,
notwithstanding her entreaties." The visit of 1870 was saddened by the
knowledge of what France was suffering during the progress of the war.
He lingered as long as possible for the sake of comradeship with
Milsand, around whose shoulder Browning's arm would often lie as they
walked together on the beach.[105] But communication with England became
daily more and more difficult. Milsand insisted that his friend should
instantly return. It is said by Mme. Blanc that Browning was actually
suspected by the peasants of a neighbouring village of being a Prussian
spy. Not without difficulty he and his sister reached Honfleur, where an
English cattle-boat was found preparing to start at midnight for
Southampton.
Two years later Miss Thackeray was also on the coast of Normandy and at
no great distance. "It was a fine hot summer," she writes, "with
sweetness and completeness everywhere; the cornfields gilt and
far-stretching, the waters blue, the skies arching high and clear, and
the sunsets succeeding each other in most glorious light and beauty."
Some slight misunderstanding on Browning's part, the fruit of
mischief-making gossipry, which caused constraint between him and his
old friend was cleared away by the good offices of Milsand. While Miss
Thackeray sat writing, with shutters closed against the blazing sun,
Browning himself "dressed all in white, with a big white umbrella under
his arm," arrived to take her hand with all his old cordiality. A
meeting of both with the Milsands, then occupying a tiny house in a
village on the outer edges of Luc-sur-mer, soon followed, and before the
sun had fallen that evening they were in Browning's house upon the cliff
at Saint-Aubin. "The sitting-room door opened to the garden and the sea
beyond--fresh-swept bare floor, a table, three straw chairs, one book
upon the table. Mr Browning told us it was the only book he had with
him. The bedrooms were as bare as the sitting-room, but I remember a
little dumb piano standing in a corner, on which he used to practise in
the early morning. I heard Mr Browning declare they were perfectly
satisfied with their little house; that his brains, squeezed as dry as a
sponge, were only ready for fresh air."[106] Perhaps Browning's "only
book" of 1872 contained the dramas of Æschylus, for at Fontainebleau
where he spent some later weeks of the year these were the special
subject of his study. It was at Saint-Aubin in 1872 that he found the
materials for his poem of the following year, and to Miss Thackeray's
drowsy name for the district,
Symbolic of the place and people too,
_White Cotton Night-Cap Country_, the suggestion of Browning's title
_Red Cotton Night-Cap Country_ is due. To her the poem is dedicated.
Browning's interest in those who were rendered homeless and destitute in
France during the Prussian invasion was shown in a practical way in the
spring of 1871. He had for long been averse to the publication of his
poems in magazines and reviews. In 1864 he had gratified his American
admirers by allowing _Gold Hair_ and _Prospice_ to appear in the
_Atlantic Monthly_ previous to their inclusion in _Dramatis Persona._ A
fine sonnet written in 1870, suggested by the tower erected at
Clandeboye by Lord Dufferin in memory of his mother, Helen, Countess of
Gifford, had been inserted in some undistributed copies of a pamphlet,
"Helen's Tower," privately printed twenty years previously; the sonnet
was published at the close of 1883 in the _Pall Mall Gazette_, but was
not given a place by Browning in the collected editions of his Poetical
Works. In general he felt that the miscellaneous contents of a magazine,
surrounding a poem, formed hardly an appropriate setting for such verse
as his. In February 1871, however, he offered to his friend and,
publisher Mr Smith the ballad of _Hervé Riel_ for use in the _Cornhill
Magazine_ of March, venturing for once, as he says, to puff his wares
and call the verses good. His purpose was to send something to the
distressed people of Paris, and one hundred guineas, the sum liberally
fixed by Mr Smith as the price of the poem, were duly forwarded--the
gift of the English poet and his Breton hero. The facts of the story had
been forgotten and were denied at St Malo; the reports of the French
Admiralty were examined and indicated the substantial accuracy of the
poem. On one point Browning erred; it was not a day's holiday to be
spent with his wife "la Belle Aurore" which the Breton sailor petitioned
for as the reward of his service, but a "congé absolu," the holiday of a
life-time. In acknowledging his error to Dr Furnivall, and adding an
explanation of its cause, he dismissed the subject with the word,
"Truth above all things; so treat the matter as you please."[107]
For the purposes of holiday-making the resources of the northern French
coast, with which Browning's ballad of the Croisickese pilot is
associated, were, says Mrs Orr, becoming exhausted. Yet some rest and
refreshment after the heavy tax upon his strength made by a London
season with its various claims were essential to his well-being. His
passion for music would not permit him during his residence in town to
be absent from a single important concert; the extraordinary range of
his acquaintance with the works of great and even of obscure composers
was attested by Halle. In his sonnet of 1884, inscribed in the Album to
Mr Arthur Chappell, _The Founder of the Feast_, a poem not included in
any edition of his works, he recalls these evenings of delight:
Sense has received the utmost Nature grants,
My cup was filled with rapture to the brim,
When, night by night--ah, memory, how it haunts!--
Music was poured by perfect ministrants,
By Halle, Schumann, Piatti, Joachim.
Long since in Florence he had become acquainted with Miss Egerton-Smith,
who loved music like himself, and was now often his companion at public
performances in London. She was wealthy, and with too little confidence
in her power to win the regard of others, she lived apart from the great
world. In 1872 Browning lost the warm-hearted and faithful friend who
had given him such prompt, womanly help in his worst days of grief--Miss
Blagden. Her place in his memory remained her own. Miss Egerton-Smith
might seem to others wanting in strength of feeling and cordiality of
manner. Browning knew the sensitiveness of her nature, which responded
to the touch of affection, and he could not fail to discover her true
self, veiled though it was by a superficial reserve. And as he knew her,
so he wrote of her in the opening of his _La Saisiaz_:
You supposed that few or none had known and loved you in the world:
May be! flower that's full-blown tempts the butterfly, not flower that's furled.
But more learned sense unlocked you, loosed the sheath and let expand
Bud to bell and out-spread flower-shape at the least warm touch of hand
--Maybe throb of heart, beneath which,--quickening farther than it knew,--
Treasure oft was disembosomed, scent all strange and unguessed hue.
Disembosomed, re-embosomed,--must one memory suffice,
Prove I knew an Alpine rose which all beside named Edelweiss?
Miss Egerton-Smith was the companion and house-mate of Browning and his
sister in their various summer wanderings from 1874 to 1877. In the
first of these years the three friends occupied a house facing the sea
at the village of Mers near Tréport. Browning at this time was much
absorbed by his _Aristophanes' Apology_. "Here," writes Mrs Orr, "with
uninterrupted quiet, and in a room devoted to his use, Mr Browning would
work till the afternoon was advanced, and then set off on a long walk
over the cliffs, often in the face of a wind, which, as he wrote of it
at the time, he could lean against as if it were a wall." The following
summers were spent at Villers in Normandy (1875), at the Isle of Arran
(1876), and in the upland country of the Salève, near Geneva. During the
visit to the Salève district, where Browning and his sister with Miss
Egerton-Smith occupied a chalet named La Saisiaz, he was, Mrs Orr tells
us, "unusually depressed and unusually disposed to regard the absence
from home as a banishment." Yet the place seemed lovely to him in its
solitude and its beauty; the prospect of Geneva, with lake and plain
extended below, varying in appearance with the shifting of clouds, was
repose to his sense of sight. He bathed twice each day in the mountain
stream--"a marvel of delicate delight framed in with trees." He read and
rested; and wrote but little or not at all. Suddenly the repose of La
Saisiaz was broken up; the mood of languorous pleasure and drowsy
discontent was at an end. While preparing to join her friend on a
long-intended mountain climb Miss Egerton-Smith, with no forewarning,
died. The shock was for a time overwhelming. When Browning returned to
London the poem _La Saisiaz_, the record of his inquisition into the
mystery of death, of his inward debate concerning a future life, was
written. It was the effort of resilience in his spirit in opposition to
that stroke which deprived him of the friend who was so near and dear.
The grouping of the works produced by Browning from the date of the
publication of _The Ring and the Book_ (1868) to the publication of _La
Saisias_ (1878), which is founded upon the occasions that suggested
them, has only an external and historical interest. The studies in the
Greek drama and the creations to which these gave rise extend at
intervals over the whole decade. _Balaustion's Adventure_ was published
in 1871, _Aristophanes' Apology_ in 1875, the translation of _The
Agamemnon of Æschylus_ in 1877. Two of the volumes of this period,
_Prince Hohenstiel-Schwangau_ (1871) and _Fifine at the Fair_ (1872) are
casuistical monologues, and these, it will be observed, lie side by side
in the chronological order. The first of the pair is concerned with
public and political life, with the conduct and character of a man
engaged in the affairs of state; the second, with a domestic question,
the casuistry of wedded fidelity and infidelity, from which the scope of
the poem extends itself to a wider survey of human existence and its
meanings.[108] Two of the volumes are narrative poems, each tending to a
tragic crisis; _Red Cotton Night-Cap Country_ (1873) is a story
entangled with questions relating to religion; _The Inn Album_ (1875) is
a tragedy of the passion of love. The volume of 1876, _Pacchiarotto with
other Poems_, is the miscellaneous gathering of lyrical and narrative
pieces which had come into being during a period of many years. Finally
in _La Saisiaz_ Browning, writing in his own person, records the
experience of his spirit in confronting the problem of death. But it was
part of his creed that the gladness of life may take hands with its
grief, that the poet who would live mightily must live joyously; and in
the volume which contained his poem of strenuous and virile sorrow he
did not refrain from including a second piece, _The two Poets of
Croisic_, which has in it much matter of honest mirth, and closes with
the declaration that the test of greatness in an artist lies in his
power of converting his more than common sufferings into a more than
common joy.
_Balaustion's Adventure_, dedicated to the Countess Cowper by whom the
transcript from Euripides was suggested, or, as Browning will have it,
prescribed, proved, as the dedication declares, "the most delightful of
May-month amusements" in the spring of 1871. It was the happiest of
thoughts to give the version of Euripides' play that setting which has
for its source a passage at the close of Plutarch's life of Nicias. The
favours bestowed by the Syracusans upon Athenian slaves and fugitives
who could delight them by reciting or singing the verses of Euripides is
not to be marvelled at, says Plutarch, "weying a reporte made of a ship
of the city of Caunus, that on a time being chased thether by pyrates,
thinking to save themselves within their portes, could not at the first
be received, but had repulse: howbeit being demaunded whether they could
sing any of Euripides songes, and aunswering that they could, were
straight suffered to enter, and come in."[109] From this root blossomed
Browning's romance of the Rhodian girl, who saves her country folk and
wins a lover and a husband by her delight in the poetry of one who was
more highly honoured abroad than in his own Athens. Perhaps Browning
felt that an ardent girl would be the best interpreter of the womanly
heroism and the pathos of "that strangest, saddest, sweetest song," of
Euripides. Of all its author's dramas the Alkestis is the most
appropriate to the occasion, for it is the poem of a great deliverance
from death, and here in effect it delivers from death, or worse, the
fugitives from the pirate-bark, "at destruction's very edge," who are
the suppliants to Syracuse. In accepting the task imposed upon him
Browning must have felt that no other play of Euripides could so
entirely have borne out the justice of the characterisation of the poet
by Mrs Browning in the lines which he prefixed to _Balaustions
Adventure_:
Our Euripides the human,
With his droppings of warm tears.
"If the Alkestis is not the masterpiece of the genius of Euripides,"
wrote Paul de Saint-Victor, "it is perhaps the masterpiece of his
heart."[110]
Balaustion herself, not a rose of "the Rosy Isle" but its
wild-pomegranate-flower, since amid the verdure of the tree "you shall
find food, drink, odour all at once," is Hellenic in her bright and
swift intelligence, her enthusiasm for all noble things of the mind, the
grace of every movement of her spirit, her culture and her beauty. The
atmosphere of the poem, which encircles the translation, is singularly
luminous and animating; the narrative of the adventure is rapid yet
always lucid; the verse leaps buoyantly like a wave of the sea.
Balaustion tells her tale to the four Greek girls, her companions, amid
the free things of nature, the overhanging grape vines, the rippling
stream,
Outsmoothing galingale and watermint,
Its mat-floor,
and in presence of the little temple Baccheion, with its sanctities of
religion and of art. By a happy and original device the transcript of
the Alkestis is much more than a translation; it is a translation
rendered into dramatic action--for we see and hear the performers and
they are no longer masked--and this is accompanied with a commentary or
an interpretation. Never was a more graceful apology for the function of
the critic put forward than that of Balaustion:
'Tis the poet speaks:
But if I, too, should try and speak at times,
Leading your love to where my love, perchance,
Climbed earlier, found a nest before you knew--
Why, bear with the poor climber, for love's sake!
Browning has not often played the part of a critic, and the
interpretation of a poet's work by a poet has the double value of
throwing light upon the mind of the original writer and the mind of his
commentator.
The life of mortals and the life of the immortal gods are brought into a
beautiful relation throughout the play. It is pre-eminently human in its
grief and in its joy; yet at every point the divine care, the divine
help surrounds and supports the children of earth, with their transitory
tears and smiles. Apollo has been a herdsman in the service of Admetos;
Herakles, most human of demigods, is the king's friend and guest. The
interest of the play for Browning lay especially in three things--the
pure self-sacrifice of the heroine, devotion embodied in one supreme
deed; and no one can heighten the effect with which Euripides has
rendered this; secondly, the joyous, beneficent strength of Herakles,
and this Browning has felt in a peculiar degree, and by his commentary
has placed it in higher relief; and thirdly, the purification and
elevation through suffering of the character of Admetos; here it would
be rash to assert that Browning has not divined the intention of
Euripides, but certainly he has added something of his own. It has been
maintained that Browning's interpretation of the spiritual significance
of the drama is a beautiful perversion of the purpose of the Greek poet;
that Admetos needs no purification; that in accepting his wife's offer
to be his substitute in dying, the king was no craven but a king who
recognised duty to the state as his highest duty. The general feeling of
readers of the play does not fall in with this ingenious plea. Browning,
as appears from his imagined recast of the theme, which follows the
transcript, had considered and rejected it. If Admetos is to be in some
degree justified, it can only be by bearing in mind that the fact by
which he shall himself escape from death is of Apollo's institution, and
that obedience to the purpose of Apollo rendered self-preservation a
kind of virtue. But Admetos makes no such defence of his action when
replying to the reproaches of his father, and he anticipates that the
verdict of the world will be against him. Browning undoubtedly presses
the case against Admetos far more strongly than does Euripides, who
seems to hold that a man weak in one respect, weak when brought to face
the test of death, may yet be strong in the heroic mastery of grief
which is imposed upon him by the duties of hospitality. Readers of the
Winter's Tale have sometimes wondered whether there could be much
rapture of joy in the heart of the silent Hermione when she received
back her unworthy husband. If Admetos remained at the close of the play
what he is understood by Browning to have been at its opening, reunion
with a self-lover so base could hardly have flushed with gladness the
spirit of Alkestis just escaped from the shades.[111] But Alkestis, who
had proved her own loyalty by deeds, values deeds more than words. When
dying she had put her love into an act, and had refrained from mere
words of wifely tenderness; death put an end to her services to her
husband; she felt towards him as any wife, if Browning's earlier poem be
true, may feel to any husband; but still she could render a service to
her children, and she exacts from Admetos the promise that he will never
place a stepmother over them. His allegiance to this vow is an act, and
it shall be for Alkestis the test of his entire loyalty. And the good
Herakles, who enjoys a glorious jest amazingly, and who by that jest can
benevolently retort upon Admetos for his concealment of Alkestis'
death--for now the position is reversed and the king shall receive her
living, and yet believe her dead--Herakles contrives to put Admetos to
that precise test which is alone sufficient to assure Alkestis of his
fidelity. Words are words; but here is a deed, and Admetos not only
adheres to his pledge, but demonstrates to her that for him to violate
it is impossible. She may well accept him as at length proved to be her
very own.
Browning, who delights to show how good is brought out of evil, or what
appears such to mortal eyes, is not content with this. He must trace
the whole process of the purification of the soul of Admetos, by sorrow
and its cruel yet beneficent reality, and in his commentary he
emphasises each point of development in that process. When his wife lies
at the point of death the sorrow of Admetos is not insincere, but there
was a childishness in it, for he would not confront the fact that the
event was of his own election. Presently she has departed, and he begins
to taste the truth, to distinguish between a sorrow rehearsed in fancy
and endured in fact. In greeting Herakles he rises to a manlier strain,
puts tears away, and accepts the realities of life and death; he will
not add ill to ill, as the sentimentalist does, but will be just to the
rights of earth that remain; he catches some genuine strength from the
magnanimous presence of the hero-god. He renders duty to the dead; is
quieted; and enters more and more into the sternness of his solitary
wayfaring. In dealing with the ignoble wrangle with old Pheres the
critic is hard set; but Balaustion, speaking as interpreter for
Browning, explains that for a little the king lapses back from the
firmer foothold which he had attained. Perhaps it would have been wiser
to admit that Euripides has marred his own work by this grim
tragic-comic encounter of crabbed age and youth. But it is true that one
who has much to give, like Alkestis, gives freely; and one who has
little to give, like Pheres, clutches that little desperately and is
starved not only in possessions but in soul. For Browning the
significance of the scene lies in the idea, which if not just is
ingenious, that the encounter with Pheres has an educational value for
Admetos; he detests his father because he sees in him an image of his
own egoism, and thus he learns more profoundly to hate his baser self.
When the body of Alkestis has been borne away and the king re-enters his
desolate halls the full truth breaks in upon him; nothing can be as it
has been before--"He stared at the impossible mad life"; he has learnt
that life, which yet shall be rightly lived, is a harder thing than
death:
He was beginning to be like his wife.
And those around him felt that having descended in grief so far to the
truth of things, he could not but return to the light an altered and a
better man. Instructed so deeply in the realities of sorrow, Admetos is
at last made worthy to receive the blessed realities of joy with the
words,
When I betray her, though she is no more,
May I die.
The regeneration of Admetos is accomplished. How much in all this
exposition is derived from the play, how much is added to it, may be
left for the consideration of the reader who will compare the original
with the transcript.
If the character of Admetos is somewhat lowered by Browning beneath the
conception of the Greek dramatist, to allow room for its subsequent
elevation, the conception of Herakles is certainly heightened. We shall
not say that Balaustion is the speaker and that Herakles is somewhat of
a woman's hero. Browning himself fully enters into Balaustion's
enthusiasm. And the presence of the strong, joyous helper of men is in
truth an inspiring one. The great voice that goes before him is itself a
_Sursum corda!_--a challenge and a summons to whatever manliness is in
us. And the best of it is that sauntering the pavement or crossing the
ferry we may happen to encounter this face of Herakles:
Out of this face emerge banners and horses--O superb! I see what is coming;
I see the high pioneer-caps--I see the slaves of runners clearing the way,
I hear victorious drums.
This face is a life-boat.
For Walt Whitman too had seen Brother Jonathan Herakles, and indeed the
face of the strong and tender wound-dresser was itself as the face of a
calmer Herakles to many about to die. The speeches of the demigod in
Browning's transcript require an abundant commentary, but it is the
commentary of an irrepressible joy, an outbreak of enthusiasm which will
not be controlled. The glorious Gargantuan creature, in the best sense
Rabelaisian, is uplifted by Browning into a very saint of joyous effort;
no pallid ascetic, indeed, beating his breast with the stone, but a
Christian saint of Luther's school, while at the same time a somewhat
over-boisterous benevolent Paynim giant:
Gladness be with thee, Helper of our world!
I think this is the authentic sign and sea!
Of Godship, that it ever waxes glad,
And more glad, until gladness blossoms, bursts
Into a rage to suffer for mankind,
And recommence at sorrow.
Something of the Herakles ideal appears again and again in other poems
of Browning. His Breton sailor, Hervé Riel, has more than a touch of the
Heraclean frankness of gaiety in arduous effort. His Ivàn Ivànovitch
wields the axe and abolishes a life with the Heraclean joy in
righteousness. And in the last of Browning's poems, not without a
pathetically over-boisterous effort and strain, there is the suggestion
of an ideal conception of himself as a Herakles-Browning; the old man
tries at least to send his great voice before him.
The new Admetos, new Alkestis, imagined by Balaustion at the close of
the poem, are wedded lovers who, like the married in Pompilia's dream of
heaven, "know themselves into one." For them the severance of death has
become an impossible thing; and therefore no place is left for Herakles
in this treatment of the story. It expresses Browning's highest
conception of the union of soul with soul:
Therewith her whole soul entered into his,
He looked the look back, and Alkestis died--
died only to be rejected by Hades, as still living, and with a more
potent life, in her husband's heart and will. Yet the mortal cloud is
round these mortals still; they cannot see things as the gods see. And,
for all their hopes and endeavours, the earth which they would renew and
make as heaven, remains the old incredulous, unconverted earth,--"Such
is the envy Gods still bear mankind." And in such an earth, if not for
them, assuredly for others, Herakles may find great deeds to do.
Balaustion has the unique distinction of being heroine throughout two of
Browning's poems; and of both we may say that the genius of Euripides is
the hero. _Aristophanes' Apology_ is written from first to last with
unflagging energy; the translation of the "Herakles" which it includes
is a masculine and masterly effort to transport the whole sense and
spirit of the original into English verse, and the rendering of the
choral passages into lyric form gives it an advantage over the
transcript of the "Alkestis." Perhaps not a little of the self-defence
of Aristophanes and his statement of the case against Euripides could
have been put as well or better in a critical essay in prose; but the
method of Browning enables him to mingle, in a dramatic fashion, truth
with sophistry, and to make both serve his purpose of presenting not
only the case but the character of the great Greek maker of comedy.
Balaustion is no longer the ardent girl of the days of her first
adventure; she is a wife, with the dignity, the authority of womanhood
and wifehood; she has known the life of Athens with its evil and its
good; she has been the favoured friend of Euripides; she is capable of
confronting his powerful rival in popular favour, and of awing him into
sobriety and becoming manners; with an instinctive avoidance she recoils
from whatever is gross or uncomely; yet she can do honour to the true
light of intellect and genius even though it shines through earth-born
vapours and amid base surroundings.
Athens, "the life and light of the whole world," has sunk under the
power of Sparta, and it can be henceforth no home for Balaustion and her
Euthukles. The bark that bears them is bounding Rhodesward, and the
verse has in it the leap and race of the prow. Balaustion, stricken at
heart, yet feels that this tragedy of Athens brings the tragic
katharsis; the justice of the gods is visible in it; and above man's
wickedness and folly she reaches to "yon blue liberality of heaven." It
seems as if the spirit which might have saved Athens is that of the
loins girt and the lamp lit which was embodied in the strenuous devotion
of Euripides to the highest things; and the spirit which has brought
Athens to its ruin is that expressed with a splendid power through the
work of Aristophanes. But Aristophanes shall plead for himself and leave
nothing unsaid that can serve to vindicate him as a poet and even as a
moralist Thus only can truth in the end stand clear, assured of its
supremacy over falsehood and over half-truth.
Nothing that Browning has written is more vividly imagined than the
encounter of Balaustion with Aristophanes and his crew of revellers on
the night when the tidings of the death of Euripides reached Athens; it
rouses and controls the feelings with the tumult of life and the
sanctity of death, while also imposing itself on the eye as a brilliant
and a solemn picture. The revellers scatter before the presence of
Balaustion, and she and the great traducer of Euripides stand face to
face. Nowhere else has Browning presented this conception of the man of
vast disorderly genius, who sees and approves the better way and
splendidly follows the worse:
Such domineering deity
Hephaistos might have carved to cut the brine
For his gay brother's prow, imbrue that path
Which, purpling, recognised the conqueror.
It is as if male force, with the lust of the eye, the lust of the flesh,
and the pride of life behind it, were met and held in check by the finer
feminine force resting for its support upon the divine laws. But in
truth Aristophanes is half on the side of Balaustion and of Euripides;
he must, indeed, make his stand; he is not one to falter or quail; and
yet when the sudden cloud falls upon his face he knows that it is his
part to make the worse appear the better cause, knowing this all the
more because the justice of Balaustion's regard perceives and recognises
his higher self. Suddenly the Tuphon, "madding the brine with wrath or
monstrous sport," is transformed into something like what the child saw
once from the Rhodian sea-coast (the old romantic poet in Browning is
here young once more):
All at once, large-looming from his wave,
Out leaned, chin hand-propped, pensive on the ledge,
A sea-worn face, sad as mortality,
Divine with yearning after fellowship.
He rose but breast-high. So much god she saw;
So much she sees now, and does reverence.
But in a moment the sea-god is again the sea-monster, with "tail-splash,
frisk of fin"; the majestic Aristophanes relapses into the most
wonderful of mockers.
No passage in the poem is quite so impressive as this through its
strangeness in beauty. But the entry of Sophocles--"an old pale-swathed
majesty,"--at the supper which followed the performance of the play, is
another of those passages to find which _in situ_ is a sufficient reward
for reading many laborious pages that might almost as well have been
thrown into an imaginary conversation in prose:
Then the grey brow sank low, and Sophokles
Re-swathed him, sweeping doorward: mutely passed
'Twixt rows as mute.
The critical study of comedy, its origin, its development, its
function, its decline, is written with admirable vigour, but the case of
Aristophanes can be read elsewhere. It is interesting, however, to note
the argument in support of the thesis that comedy points really to
ideals of humanity which are beyond human attainment; that its mockery
of man's infirmities implies a conception of our nature which in truth
is extra-human; while tragedy on the contrary accepts man as he is, in
his veritable weakness and veritable strength, and wrings its pity and
its terror out of these. It is Aristophanes who thus vindicates
Euripides before the revellers who have assembled in his own honour, and
they accept what seems to them a paradox as his finest stroke of irony.
But he has indeed after the solemn withdrawal of Sophocles looked for a
moment through life and death, and seen in his hour of highest success
his depth of failure. For him, in this testing-time of life, art has
been the means of probation; he has squandered the gifts bestowed upon
him, which should have been concentrated in the special task to which he
was summoned. He should have known--he did in fact know--that the art
which "makes grave" is higher than that which "makes grin"; his own
peculiar duty was to advance his art one step beyond his predecessors;
to create a drama which should bring into harmony the virtue of tragedy
and the virtue of comedy; to discover the poetry which
Makes wise, not grave,--and glad,
Not grinning: whereby laughter joins with tears.
Instead of making this advance he had retrograded; and it remained for a
poet of a far-off future in the far-off Kassiterides--the Tin Isle
which has Stratford at its heart--to accomplish the task on which
Aristophanes would not adventure. One way a brilliant success was
certain for Aristophanes; the other and better way failure was possible;
and he declined to make the venture of faith. It is with this sense of
self-condemnation upon him that he essays his own defence, and it is
against this sense of self-condemnation more than against the genius and
the methods of Euripides that he struggles. When towards the close of
the poem he takes in hand the psalterion, and chants in splendid strains
the story of Thamuris, who aspired and failed, as he himself will never
do, the reader is almost won over to his side. Browning, who felt the
heights and depths of the lyric genius of Aristophanes, would seem to
have resolved that in this song of "Thamuris marching," moving in
ecstasy amid the glories of an autumn morning, he would dramatically
justify his conception of the poet; and never in his youth did Browning
sing with a finer rapture of spirit. But reading what follows, the
record of the subjugation of Athens, when the Athenian people accept the
ruin of their defences as if it were but a fragment of Aristophanic
comedy, we perceive that this song, which breaks off with an uproar of
laughter, is the condemnation as well as the glory of the singer.
The translation of _Agamemnon_, the preface to which is dated "October
1st, 1877," was undertaken at the request or command of Carlyle. The
argument of the preface fails to justify Browning's method. A
translation "literal at every cost save that of absolute violence to our
language" may be highly desirable; it is commonly called a "crib"; and
a crib contrived by one who is not only a scholar but a man of genius
will now and again yield a word or a phrase of felicitous precision. But
that a translation "literal at every cost" should be put into verse is a
wrong both to the original and to the poetry of the language to which
the original is transferred; it assumes a poetic garb which in assuming
it rends to tatters. A translation into verse implies that a certain
beauty of form is part of the writer's aim; it implies that a poem is to
be reproduced as a poem, and not as that bastard product of learned ill
judgment--a glorified crib; and a glorified crib is necessarily a bad
crib. Mrs Orr, who tells us that Browning refused to regard even the
first of Greek writers as models of literary style, had no doubt that
the translation of the _Agamemnon_ was partly made for the pleasure of
exposing the false claims made on their behalf. Such a supposition does
not agree well with Browning's own Preface; but if he had desired to
prove that the _Agamemnon_ can be so rendered as to be barely readable,
he has been singularly successful. From first to last in the genius of
Browning there was an element, showing itself from time to time, of
strange perversity.
FOOTNOTES:
[Footnote 103: Was this a "baffled visit," as described by Mr Henry
James in his "Life of Story" (ii. 197), when the hostess was absent, and
the guests housed in an inn?]
[Footnote 104: Letter quoted by Mrs Orr, p. 288.]
[Footnote 105: The attitude is reproduced in a photograph from which a
woodcut is given in Mme. Blanc's article "A French Friend of Browning."]
[Footnote 106: "Records of Tennyson, Ruskin and Browning," by Annie
Ritchie, pp. 291, 292.]
[Footnote 107: "A Bibliography of the Writings of Robert Browning," by
T.J. Wise, pp. 157, 158.]
[Footnote 108: _Aristophanes' Apology_ is connected with these poems by
its character as a casuistical self-defence of the chief speaker.]
[Footnote 109: North's "Plutarch," 1579, p. 599.]
[Footnote 110: "Les Deux Masques," ii. 281.]
[Footnote 111: A comment of Paul de Saint-Victor on the silence of the
recovered Alkestis deserves to be quoted: "Hercule apprend à Admète
qu'il lui est interdit d'entendre sa voix avant qu'elle soit purifiée de
sa consécration aux Divinités infernales. J'aime mieux voir dans cette
réserve un scrupule religieux du poète laissant à la morte sa dignité
d'Ombre. Alceste a été nitiée aux profonds mystères de la mort; elle a
vu l'invisible, elle a entendu l'ineffable; toute parole sortie de ses
lèvres serait une divulgation sacrilège. Ce silence mystérieux la
spiritualise et la rattache par un dernier lien au monde éternel."]