A Handbook to the Works of Browning Part 12

Her tone is at first deprecating. "It is not for her, a mere mouse, to argue on a footing of equality with a forest monarch like himself. It is not for her to criticize the means by which his genius may attain its ends. She does not forget that the poet-cla.s.s is that essentially which labours in the cause of human good. She does not forget that she is a woman, who may recoil from methods which a man is justified in employing. Lastly, she is a foreigner, and as such may blame many things simply because she does not understand them. She may yet have to learn that the tree stands firm at root, though its boughs dip and dance before the wind. She may yet have to learn that those who witness his plays have been previously braced to receive the good and reject the evil in them, like the freshly-bathed hand which pa.s.ses unhurt through flame. She may judge falsely from what she sees."

"But," she continues,[45] "let us imagine a remote future, and a far-away place--say the Ca.s.siterides[46]--and men and women, lonely and ignorant--strangers in very deed--but with feelings similar to our own.

Let us suppose that some work of Zeuxis or Pheidias has been transported to their sh.o.r.es, and that they are compelled to acknowledge its excellence from its own point of view--its colouring true to nature, though not to their own type--its unveiled forms decorous, though not conforming to their own standard of decorum. Might they not still, and justly, tax it on its own ground with some flaw or incongruity, which proved the artist to have been human? And may not a stranger, judging you in the same way, recognize in you one part of peccant humanity, poet 'three parts divine' though you be?"

"You declare comedy to be a prescriptive rite, coeval in its birth with liberty. But the great days of Greek national life had been reached when comedy began. You declare also that you have refined on the early practice, and imported poetry into it. Comedy is therefore, as you defend it, not only a new invention, but your own. And, finally, you declare your practice of it inspired by a fixed purpose. You must stand or fall by the degree in which this purpose has been attained."

"You would, by means of comedy, discredit war. Do you stand alone in this endeavour?" And she quotes a beautiful pa.s.sage from 'Cresphontes,'

a play written by Euripides for the same end. "And how, respectively, have you sought your end? Euripides, by appealing to the n.o.bler feelings which are outraged by war; you, by expatiating on the animal enjoyments which accompany peace. The 'Lysistrata' is your equivalent for 'Cresphontes.' Do you imagine that its obscene allurements will promote the cause of peace? Not till heroes have become mean voluptuaries, and Cleonymos,[47] whom you yourself have derided, becomes their type."

"You would discredit vice and error, hypocrisy, sophistry and untruth.

You expose the one in all its seductions, and the other in grotesque exaggerations, which are themselves a lie; showing yourself the worst of sophists--one who plays false to his own soul."

"You would improve on former methods of comedy. You have returned to its lowest form. For you profess to strike at folly, not at him who commits it: yet your tactics are precisely to belabour every act or opinion of which you disapprove, in the form of some one man. You pride yourself, in fact, on giving personal blows, instead of general and theoretical admonitions; and even here you seem incapable of hitting fair; you libel where you cannot honestly convict, and do not care how ign.o.ble or how irrelevant the libel may be. Does the poet deserve criticism as such?

Does he write bad verse, does he inculcate foul deeds? The cry is, 'he cannot read or write;' 'he is extravagant in buying fish;' 'he allows someone to help him with his verse, and make love to his wife in return;' 'his uncle deals in crockery;' 'his mother sold herbs' (one of his pet taunts against Euripides); 'he is a housebreaker, a footpad, or, worst of all, a stranger;'"--a term of contempt which, as Balaustion reminds him has been repeatedly bestowed upon himself.

"What have you done," she continues, "beyond devoting the gold of your genius to work, which dross, in the person of a dozen predecessors or contemporaries, has produced as well. Pun and parody, satire and invective, quaintness of fancy, and elegance, have each had its representative as successful as you. Your life-work, until this moment, has been the record of a genius increasingly untrue to its better self.

Such satire as yours, however well intended, could advance no honest cause. Its exaggerations make it useless for either praise or blame. Its uselessness is proved by the result: your jokes have recoiled upon yourself. The statues still stand which your mud has stained; the lightning flash of truth can alone destroy them. War still continues, in spite of the seductions with which you have invested peace. Such improvements as are in progress take an opposite direction to that which you prescribe. Public sense and decency are only bent on cleansing your sty."

And now her tone changes. "Has Euripides succeeded any better? None can say; for he spoke to a dim future above and beyond the crowd. If he fail, you two will be fellows in adversity; and, meanwhile, I am convinced that your wish unites with his to waft the white sail on its way.[48] Your nature, too, is kingly." She concludes with a tribute to the "Poet's Power," which is one with creative law, above and behind all potencies of heaven and earth; and to that inherent royalty of truth, in which alone she could venture to approach one so great as he. He too, as poet, must reign by truth, if he a.s.sert his proper sway.

"Nor, even so, had boldness nerved my tongue, But that the other king stands suddenly In all the grand invest.i.ture of death, Bowing your knee beside my lowly head-- Equals one moment!" (vol. xiii. p. 144.)

Then she bids him "arise and go." Both have done homage to Euripides.

"Not so," he replies; "their discussion is not at an end. She has defended Euripides obliquely by attacking himself. Let her do it in a more direct fas.h.i.+on." This leads up to what seems to her the best defence possible: that reading of the "Herakles" which the entrance of Aristophanes had suspended. Its closing lines set Aristophanes musing.

The chorus has said:

"The greatest of all our friends of yore, We have lost for evermore!" (p. 231.)

"Who," he asks, "has been Athens' best friend? He who attracted her by the charm of his art, or he who repelled her by its severity?" He answers this by describing the relative positions of himself and Euripides in an image suggested by the popular game of Cottabos.[49]

"The one was fixed within his 'globe;' the other adapted himself to its rotations. Euripides received his views of life through a single aperture, the one channel of 'High' and 'Right.' Aristophanes has welcomed also the opposite impressions of 'Low' and 'Wrong,' and reproduced all in their turn. Some poet of the future, born perhaps in those Ca.s.siterides, may defy the mechanics of the case, and place himself in such a position as to see high and low at once--be Tragic and Comic at the same time. But he meanwhile has been Athens' best friend--her wisest also--since he has not challenged failure by attempting what he could not perform. He has not risked the fate of Thamyris, who was punished for having striven with the higher powers, as if his vision had been equal to their own."[50] And he recites a fragment of song, which Mr. Browning unfortunately has not completed, describing the fiery rapture in which that poet marched, all unconscious, to his doom. Some laughing promise and prophecy ensues, and Aristophanes departs, in the 'rose-streaked morning grey,' bidding the couple farewell till the coming year.

That year has come and gone. Sophocles has died: and Aristophanes has attained his final triumph in the "Frogs"--a play flas.h.i.+ng with every variety of his genius--as softly musical in the mystics' chorus as croaking in that of the frogs--in which Bacchus himself is ridiculed, and Euripides is more coa.r.s.ely handled than ever. And once more the voice of Euripides has interposed between the Athenians and their doom.[51] When aegos Potamos had been fought, and Athens was in Spartan hands, Euthykles flung the "choric flower" of the "Electra" in the face of the foe, and

"... because Greeks are Greeks, though Sparte's brood, And hearts are hearts, though in Lusandros' breast, And poetry is power,...." (p. 253.)

the city itself was spared. But when tragedy ceased, comedy was allowed its work, and it danced away the Piraean bulwarks, which were demolished, by Lysander's command, to the sound of the flute.

And now Euthykles and Balaustion are nearing Rhodes. Their master lies buried in the land to which they have bidden farewell; but the winds and waves of their island home bear witness to his immortality: for theirs seems the voice of nature, re-echoing the cry, "There are no G.o.ds, no G.o.ds!" his prophetic, if unconscious, tribute to the One G.o.d, "who saves" him.

Balaustion has no genuine historic personality. She is simply what Mr.

Browning's purpose required: a large-souled woman, who could be supposed to echo his appreciation of these two opposite forms of genius, and express his judgments upon them. But the Euripides she depicts is entirely constructed from his works; while her portrait of Aristophanes shows him not only as his works reflect, but as contemporary criticism represented him; he is one of the most vivid of Mr. Browning's characters. The two transcripts from Euripides seem enough to prove that that poet was far more human than Aristophanes professed to think; but the belief of Aristophanes in the practical asceticism of his rival was in some degree justified by popular opinion, if not in itself just; and we can understand his feeling at once rebuked and irritated by a contempt for the natural life which carried with it so much religious and social change. Aristophanes was a believer in the value of conservative ideas, though not himself a slave to them. He was also a great poet, though often very false to his poetic self. Such a man might easily fancy that one like Euripides was untrue to the poetry, because untrue to the joyousness of existence; and that he shook even the foundations of morality by reasoning away the religious conceptions which were bound up with natural joys. The impression we receive from Aristophanes' Apology is that he is defending something which he believes to be true, though conscious of defending it by sophistical arguments, and of having enforced it by very doubtful deeds; and we also feel that from his point of view, and saving his apparent inconsistencies, Mr. Browning is in sympathy with him. At the same time, Balaustion's rejoinder is unanswerable, as it is meant to be; and the double monologue distinguishes itself from others of the same group, by being not only more dramatic and more emotional, but also more conclusive; it is the only one of them in which the question raised is not, in some degree, left open.

The poem bristles with local allusions and ill.u.s.trations which puzzle the non-cla.s.sical reader. I add an explanatory index to some names of things and persons which have not occurred in my brief outline of it.

Vol. xiii. p. 4. _Kore._ (Virgin.) Name given to Persephonee. In Latin, Proserpina.

P. 6. _Dikast_ and _Heliast._ Dicast=Judge, Heliast=Juryman, in Athens.

P. 7. 1. _Kordax-step._ 2. _Propulaia._ (Propylaia.) 1. An indecent dance. 2. Gateway of the Acropolis. 3. _Pnux._ (Pnyx.) 4. _Bema._ 3.

Place for the Popular a.s.sembly. 4. Place whence speeches were made.

P. 8 _Makaria._ Heroine in a play of Euripides, who killed herself for her country's sake.

P. 10. 1. _Milesian smart-place._ 2. _Phrunikos._ (Phrynicus.) 1. The painful remembrance of the capture of Miletus. 2. A dramatic poet, who made this capture the subject of a tragedy, "which, when performed (493), so painfully wrung the feelings of the Athenian audience that they burst into tears in the theatre, and the poet was condemned to pay a fine of 1,000 drachmai, as having recalled to them their own misfortunes."[52] He is derided by Aristophanes in the "Frogs" for his method of introducing his characters.

P. 12. _Amphitheos, Deity, and Dung._ A character in the Acharnians of Aristophanes--"not a G.o.d, and yet immortal."

P. 14. 1. _Diaulos._ 2. _Stade._ 1. A double line of the Race-course. 2.

The _Stadium_, on reaching which, the runner went back again.

P. 16. _City of Gapers._ Nickname of Athens, from the curiosity of its inhabitants.

P. 17. _Koppa-marked._ Race-horses of the best breed were marked with the old letter Koppa.

P. 18. _Comic Platon._ The comic writer of that name: author of plays and poems, _not_ THE Plato.

P. 21. _Salabaccho._ Name of a courtesan.

P. 30. _Cheek-band._ Band worn by trumpeters to support the cheeks.

_Cuckoo-apple._ Fruit so-called=fool-making food. _Threttanelo_, _Neblaretai_. Imitative sounds: 1. Of a harp-string. 2. Of any joyous cry. _Three-days' salt-fish slice._ Allowance of a soldier on an expedition. (It was supposed that at the end of this time he could forage for himself.)

P. 31. _Goat's breakfast and other abuse._ Indecent allusions, to be fancied, not explained.

P. 32. _Sham Amba.s.sadors._ Characters in the Acharnians. _Kudathenian._ Famous Athenian. _Pandionid._ Descendant of Pandion, King of Athens.

_Goat-Song._ Tragoedia--Tradegy. It was called goat-song because a goat-skin, probably filled with wine, was once given as a prize for it.

The expression occurs in Sh.e.l.ley.

P. 33. _Willow-Wicker Flask._ Nickname of the poet it is applied to, a toper.

P. 36. _Lyric Sh.e.l.l or Tragic Barbiton._ Lesser and larger lyre.

P. 38. _Sousarion._ Susarion of Megara, inventor of Attic comedy.

_Chionides._ His successor.

P. 39. _Little-in-the-Fields._ The Dionysian Feast; a lesser one than the City Dionysia.

P. 40. _Ameipsias._ A comic poet, contemporary with Aristophanes, whose two best plays he beat.

P. 42. _Iostephanos._ "Violet-crowned," name of Athens. _Kleophon._ A demagogue of bad character, attacked by Aristophanes as profligate, and an enemy of peace. _Kleonumos._ A similar character; also a big fellow, and great coward.

P. 43. _Telekleides._ Old comic poet, on the same side as Aristophanes.

_Mullos and Euetes._ Comic poets who revived the art of comedy in Athens after Susarion.

P. 44. _Morucheides._ Son of Morychus--like his father, a comic poet and a glutton. _Sourakosios._ Another comic poet.

P. 46. _Trilophos._ Wearer of three crests on his helmet.

P. 47. _Ruppapai._ Word used by the crew in rowing--hence, the crew itself.