Browning's Heroines Part 15

--the "choric flower" of the _Elektra_, full in the face of the foe?

"You flung that choric flower, my Euthukles!"

--and, gazing down on him from her proud rosy height, while he sits gazing up at her, she chants again the words she spoke to her girl-friends at the Baccheion:

"So, because Greeks are Greeks, and hearts are hearts, And poetry is power, and Euthukles Had faith therein to, full-face, fling the same-- Sudden, the ice-thaw! The a.s.sembled foe, Heaving and swaying with strange friendliness, Cried 'Reverence Elektra!'--cried . . . 'Let stand Athenai'! . . ."

--and Athens was saved through Euripides,

"Through Euthukles, through--more than ever--me, Balaustion, me, who, Wild-Pomegranate-Flower, Felt my fruit triumph, and fade proudly so!"

But next day, Sparta woke from the spell. Harsh Lysander decreed that though Athens might be saved, the Piraeus should not. Comedy should destroy the Long Walls: the flute-girls should lead off in the dance, should time the strokes of spade and pickaxe, till the pride of the Violet-Crowned lay in the dust. "Done that day!" mourns Balaustion:

"The very day Euripides was born."

But _they_ would not see the pa.s.sing of Athenai; they would go, fleeing the sights and sounds,

"And press to other earth, new heaven, by sea That somehow ever prompts to 'scape despair"

--and wonderfully, at the harbour-side they found that old grey mariner, whose s.h.i.+p she had saved in the first Adventure! The s.h.i.+p was still weather-wise: it should

"'Convey Balaustion back to Rhodes, for sake Of her and her Euripides!' laughed he,"

--and they embarked. It should be Rhodes indeed: to Rhodes they now are sailing.

Euripides lies buried in the little valley "laughed and moaned about by streams,"

"Boiling and freezing, like the love and hate Which helped or harmed him through his earthly course.

They mix in Arethusa by his grave."

But, just as she had known, this revocation _has_ consoled her. Now she will be able to forget. Never again will her eyes behold Athenai, nor in imagination see "the ghastly mirth that mocked her overthrow"; but she and Euthukles are exiles from the dead, not from the living, Athens:

"That's in the cloud there, with the new-born star!"

There is no despair, there can be none; for does not the soul antic.i.p.ate its heaven here on earth:

"Above all crowding, crystal silentness, Above all noise, a silver solitude . . .

Hatred and cark and care, what place have they In yon blue liberality of heaven?

How the sea helps! How rose-smit earth will rise Breast-high thence, some bright morning, and be Rhodes!"

They are entering Rhodes now, and every wave and wind seems singing out the same:

"All in one chorus--what the master-word They take up? Hark! 'There are no G.o.ds, no G.o.ds!

Glory to G.o.d--who saves Euripides!'"

. . . There she is, Wild-Pomegranate-Flower, Balaustion--and Triumphant Woman. What other man has given us this?--and even Browning only here.

Nearly always, for man's homage, woman must in some sort be victim: she must suffer ere he can adore. But Balaustion triumphs, and we hail her--and we hail her poet too, who dared to make her great not only in her love, but in her own deep-hearted, ardent self.

"This mortal shall put on individuality." Of all men Browning most wished women to do that.

FOOTNOTES:

[94:1] I follow Browning's spellings throughout.

[96:1] The character of Balaustion is wholly imaginary.

[96:2] A town of the island of Rhodes.

[101:1] In the _Apology_, she tells "the second supreme adventure": her interview with Aristophanes, and the recital to him of the _Herakles_ of Euripides.

[106:1] Euripides died at the Court of Archelaus, King of Macedonia.

[117:1] Browning never finished his translation of this splendid song.

V

POMPILIA

IN "THE RING AND THE BOOK"

I said, in writing of Balaustion: "Nearly always, for man's homage, woman must in some sort be victim: she must suffer ere he can adore."

I should have said that this _has been_ so: for the tendency to-day is to demonstrate rather the power than the weakness of woman. True that in the "victim," that weakness was usually shown to be the very source of that power: through her suffering not only she, but they who stood around and saw the anguish, were made perfect. That this theory of the outcome of suffering is an eternal verity I am not desirous to deny; but I do deplore that, in literature, women should be made so disproportionately its exemplars; and I deplore it not for feminist reasons alone. Once we regard suffering in this light of a supreme uplifting influence, we turn, as it were, our weapons against ourselves--we exclaim that men too suffer in this world and display the highest powers of endurance: why, then, do they so frequently, in their imaginative works, present themselves as makers of women's woes? For women make men suffer often; yet how relatively seldom men show this!

Thus, paradoxically enough, we may come to declare that it is to themselves that men are harsh, and to us generous. "Chivalry from women!"--how would that sound as a war-cry?

Not all in jest do I so speak, though such recognition of male generosity leaves existent a certain sense of weariness which a.s.sails me--and if me, then probably many another--when I find myself reading of the immemorial "victim." It is this which makes Balaustion supreme for my delight. There is a woman with every n.o.ble attribute of womanhood at its highest, who suffers at no hands but those of the Great Fates, as one might say--the fates who rule the destiny of nations. . . . We turn now to her direct ant.i.thesis in this regard of suffering--we turn to Pompilia, victim first of the mediocre, ignorant, small-souled, then of the very devil of malignant baseness; such a victim, moreover, first and last, for the paltriest of motives--money. And money in no large, imaginative sense, but in the very lowest terms in which it could be at all conceived as a theme for tragedy. A dowry, and a tiny one: _this_ created "that old woe" which "steps on the stage" again for us in _The Ring and the Book_.

"Another day that finds her living yet, Little Pompilia, with the patient brow And lamentable smile on those poor lips, And, under the white hospital-array, A flower-like body, to frighten at a bruise You'd think, yet now, stabbed through and through again, Alive i' the ruins. 'Tis a miracle.

It seems that when her husband struck her first, She prayed Madonna just that she might live So long as to confess and be absolved; And whether it was that, all her sad life long Never before successful in a prayer, This prayer rose with authority too dread-- Or whether because earth was h.e.l.l to her, By compensation when the blackness broke, She got one glimpse of quiet and the cool blue, To show her for a moment such things were,"

--the prayer was granted her.

So, musing on the murder of the Countess Franceschini by her husband; and her four days' survival of her wounds, does one half of Rome express itself--"The Other Half" in contrast to the earliest commentator on the crime: "Half-Rome." This Other-Half is wholly sympathetic to the seventeen-yeared child who lies in the hospital-ward at St. Anna's. "Why was she made to learn what Guido Franceschini's heart could hold?"

demands the imagined spokesman; and, summing up, he exclaims:

"Who did it shall account to Christ-- Having no pity on the harmless life And gentle face and girlish form he found, And thus flings back. Go practise if you please With men and women. Leave a child alone For Christ's particular love's sake!"

Then, burning with pity and indignation, he proceeds to tell the story of Pompilia as he sees it, feels it--and as Browning, in the issue, makes us see and feel it too.

In _The Ring and the Book_, Browning tells us this story--this "pure crude fact" (for fact it actually is)--_ten times over_, through nine different persons, Guido Franceschini, the husband, speaking twice.

Stated thus baldly, the plan may sound almost absurd, and the prospect of reading the work appear a tedious one; but once begin it, and neither impression survives for a moment. Each telling is at once the same and new--for in each the speaker's point of view is altered. We get, first of all, Browning's own summary of the "pure crude fact"; then the appearance of that fact to: