A Handbook to the Works of Browning Part 11

"... 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 aesculapius 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 grat.i.tude 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 G.o.d 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 pa.s.sion 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 circ.u.mstance 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 impa.s.sioned 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 const.i.tute the book. It is prefaced in its turn by a backward glance at the circ.u.mstances, (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 aeschylus, 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 Piraeus; 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 ign.o.ble presence." For the broad brow, the flushed cheek, the commanding features, the defiant att.i.tude, all betokened a mind, wantoning among the lower pa.s.sions, 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 pa.s.sing 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 G.o.d who forms one half of him, so long as the monster which const.i.tutes the other, remains out of sight; a poetic myth is made to ill.u.s.trate 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 pa.s.ser-by, but the pale, majestic, heavily-draped figure of Sophocles himself. Slowly, solemnly, and with bent head, he pa.s.sed 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 G.o.d, his chorus would appear at the greater feast, next month, clothed in black and ungarlanded. Then silently, and amidst silence, he pa.s.sed 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 t.i.tle 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 n.o.ble 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 a.s.serted, had belied this union, and made him guilty of a crime inexpiable in the sight of the G.o.ds.

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 coa.r.s.e 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 G.o.dlike 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 ign.o.ble 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 inst.i.tution, 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 ill.u.s.tration.) 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 G.o.ds 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 G.o.ds; 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 G.o.ds, 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 ill.u.s.trates, 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 superst.i.tion. He too on occasion can show up the G.o.ds;" 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 pa.s.sage. "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.)

And all his, Aristophanes', teaching is this:--

'... accept the old, Contest the strange! acknowledge work that's done, Mis...o...b.. men who have still their work to do!' (p. 111.)

He has summed up his case. Euripides must own himself beaten. If Balaustion will not admit the defeat, let her summon her rosy strength, and do her worst against his opponent."

Balaustion pauses for a moment before relating her answer to this challenge: and gives us to understand that, in thus relieving her memory, she is reproducing not only this special experience, but a great deal of what she habitually thinks and feels; thus silencing any sense of the improbable, which so lengthened an argument accurately remembered, might create in the reader's mind.