Browning and His Century Part 16

"If," he says, "Coleridge was justified in claiming the German word l.u.s.tspiel for the so-called comedies of Shakespeare, we have a far greater right to appropriate this wide and pregnant t.i.tle to the plays of Aristophanes. The brazen mask which crowns his theatre smiles indeed broadly, serenely, as if its mirth embraced the universe; but its hollow eye-sockets suggest infinite possibilities of profoundest irony.

Buffoonery carried to the point of paradox, wisdom disguised as insanity, and gaiety concealing the whole sum of human disappointment, sorrow and disgust, seem ready to escape from its open but rigid lips, which are molded to a proud perpetual laughter. It is a laughter which spares neither G.o.d nor man--which climbs Olympus only to drag down the immortals to its scorn, and trails the pall of august humanity in the mire; but which, amid its mockery and blasphemy, seems everlastingly a.s.serting, as by paradox, that reverence of the soul which bends our knees to heaven and makes us respect our brothers."

One cannot help feeling, in view of these very diverse opinions, that both are exaggerated. The enthusiasm of Symonds seems almost fanatic. Though no one of penetration can fail to see the wit and wisdom, and at times, in such lyrics as those in "The Clouds," the poetic charm of Aristophanes, the person of fastidious taste, whether a Greek girl of his own day, or a man of these latter days, must sometimes feel that his buffoonery oversteps the bounds of true wit, even when it is not shadowed by a coa.r.s.eness not to be borne at the present day. When Balaustion asks him "in plain words,"

"Have you exchanged brute blows, which teach the brute Man may surpa.s.s him in brutality,-- For human fighting, or true G.o.d-like force Which breeds persuasion nor needs fight at all?"

Aristophanes replies that it had not been his intention to turn art's fabric upside down and invent an entirely new species of comedy. That sort of thing can be done by one who has turned his back on life, friendly faces, sympathetic cheer, as Euripides had done in his Salaminian cave.

This may be regarded, on the whole, as a good bit of defence on Aristophanes' part. It is equivalent to his saying that there was no use in his trying to be anything for which his genius had not fitted him. This chimes in, again, with such authoritative criticism as Murray's, who declares: "The general value of his view of life, and, above all, his treatment of his opponent's alleged vices, may well be questioned. Yet admitting that he often opposed what was best in his age, or advocated it on the lowest grounds, admitting that his slanders are beyond description and that, as a rule, he only attacks the poor and the leaders of the poor, nevertheless he does it all with such exhuberant high spirits, such an air of its all being nonsense together, such insight and swiftness, such incomparable directness and charm of style, that even if some Archelaus had handed him over to Euripides to scourge, he would probably have escaped his well-earned whipping."

Much of Aristophanes' defence consists in slurring at Euripides, against whom he waxes more and more fierce as he goes on. His plays furnish numerous ill.u.s.trations of his rivalry with Euripides, yet curiously enough, as critics have pointed out, Aristophanes imitates Euripides to a noteworthy extent, so much so that the dramatist Cratinus invented a word to describe the style of the two--Euripid-Aristophanize. Judging from his parodies on Euripides, he must certainly have read and reread his plays until he knew them practically by heart.

Balaustion, as Browning has portrayed her in this poem, is the lyric girl developed into splendid womanhood. She has a large heart and a large brain, as well as imagination and strong ethical fervor. Her intense feeling at the fall of Athens, which had been the ideal to her of greatness, and her reverential love for Euripides, her charity toward Aristophanes the man, if not toward his work, show how deep and far-reaching her sympathies were. Again, her imagination flashes forth in her picturesque descriptions of the ruined Athens and her prophetic picture of the new Athens, of the spirit which will arise in its place, in her telling portraiture of Aristophanes and his entrance into her house, as well as in many another pa.s.sage. Her intellect shines out in her clever management of the argument with Aristophanes, and her ethical fervor in her denunciations of the moral depravity of certain of the plays.

As to the question of whether a young Greek woman would be likely to criticise Aristophanes in this way, opinion certainly differs. History is, for the most part, silent about women. As Mahaffy says, it is only in the dramatists and the philosophers that we can get any glimpses of the woman of the time.

Mahaffy's opinions are worth quoting as an example of the pessimism growing out of a bias in favor of a particular type of woman which he idealized in his own mind. He seems utterly incapable of appreciating the humanness of the women in the Greek dramatists, especially those in Euripides. "Sadder than the condition of the aged was that of women," he writes, "at this remarkable period. The days of the n.o.ble and high-principled Penelope, of the refined and intellectual Helen, of the innocent and spirited Nausikaa, of the gentle and patient Andromache, had pa.s.sed away. Men no longer sought and respected the society of the gentler s.e.x. Would that Euripides had even been familiar, as Homer was, with the sound of women brawling in the streets! For in these days they were confined to Asiatic silence and seclusion, while the whole life of the men, both in business and recreation, was essentially public. Just as the feverish excitement of political life nowadays prompts men to spend even their leisure in the clubs, where they meet companions of like pa.s.sions and interests with themselves, so the Athenian gentleman only came home to eat and sleep. His leisure as well as his business kept him in the market place. His wife and daughters, ignorant of philosophy and politics, were strangers to his real life, and took no interest in his pursuits.

"The results were fatal to Athenian society. The women, uninstructed, neglected, and enslaved, soon punished their oppressors with their own keen and bitter weapons, and with none keener than their vices. For, of course, all the grace and delicacy of female character disappeared.

Intellectual power in women was distinctly a.s.sociated with moral depravity, so that excessive ignorance and stupidity was considered the only guarantee of virtue. The qualifications for society became incompatible with the qualifications for home duties, so that the outcasts from society, as we call them, were not the immoral and the profligate but the honorable and the virtuous."

Such is the view to be gleaned from history, and in Mahaffy's opinion the literature of the time tells the same story. He goes on: "When we consult the literature of the day, we find women treated either with contemptuous ridicule in comedy, or with still more contemptuous silence in history. In tragedy or in the social theories of the philosophers alone can we hope for a glimpse into the average character and position of Athenian women.

Here at least we might have expected that the portraits drawn with such consummate skill by Homer would have been easily transferred to the Athenian stage. But to our astonishment we find the higher social feelings toward women so weak that the Athenian tragic poets seem quite unable to appreciate, or even to understand, the more delicate features in Homeric characters. They are painted so coa.r.s.ely and ignorantly by Euripides that we should never recognize them but for their names. Base motives and unseemly wrangling take the place of chivalrous honor and graceful politeness.

"But the critics of the day complained that Euripides degraded the ideal character of tragedy by painting human nature as he found it: in fact as it was, and not as it ought to be. Let us turn, then, to Sophokles, who painted the most ideal women which the imagination of a refined Athenian could conceive, and consider his most celebrated characters, his Antigone and his Elektra. A calm, dispa.s.sionate survey will, I think, p.r.o.nounce them harsh and masculine. They act rightly, no doubt, and even n.o.bly, but they do it in the most disagreeable way. Except in their external circ.u.mstances they differ in no respect from men."

Certainly, the opinion expressed of the women of Euripides is tainted by the feeling that they ought to act like English matrons and their daughters.

Quite a different impression is given by Symonds, who, in regard to some of the sentences occurring in Euripides which are uncomplimentary to women, says: "It is impossible to weigh occasional sententious sarcasms against such careful studies of heroic virtue in women as the Iphigenia, the Elektra, the Polyxena, the Alkestis."

But the complete vindication of the fact that Balaustion and Mrs. Browning and our own women of to-day are on the right side in their appreciation of Euripides as the great woman's poet of antiquity is found in the opinion of our contemporary critic, Gilbert Murray, who more than thirty years after these poems were written writes of the "wonderful women-studies by which Euripides dazzled and aggrieved his contemporaries. They called him a hater of women; and Aristophanes makes the women of Athens conspire for revenge against him. Of course he was really the reverse. He loved and studied and expressed the women whom the Socratics ignored and Pericles advised to stay in their rooms. Crime, however, is always more striking and palpable than virtue. Heroines like Medea, Phaedra, Stheneboia, Aerope, Clytemnestra, perhaps fill the imagination more than those of the angelic or devoted type--Alcestis, who died to save her husband, Evadne and Laodamia, who could not survive theirs, and all the great list of virgin-martyrs. But the significant fact is that, like Ibsen, Euripides refuses to idealize any man, and does idealize women. There is one youth-martyr, Menoikeus in the 'Phaenissae,' but his martyrdom is a masculine, businesslike performance--he gets rid of his prosaic father by a pretext about traveling money without that shimmer of loveliness that hangs over the virgins."

Where then did Euripides find these splendid women of force and character?

It seems quite impossible that he could have evolved them out of his own inner consciousness. He must have known women who served at least, in part, as models. Besides, there was undoubtedly a new woman movement in the air or Plato in his "Republic" would not have suggested a plan for educating men and women alike. The free women of Athens are known in some cases to have attained a high degree of culture. Aspasia, who became the wife of Pericles, is a shining example. There was Sappho, also, with her school of poetry attended by girls in Lesbos.

Taking all these facts into consideration, it would seem that Browning was sufficiently justified in drawing such a woman as Balaustion, and that a woman of her penetrating intellect and ardor of spirit would love Euripides, and dislike Aristophanes, seems absolutely certain.

Therefore, if the historical att.i.tude is taken toward Balaustion and her criticism and appreciation, it can be on the whole accepted as reflecting what would probably be the feeling of an ardent woman-follower of Euripides in his own day.

But, on the other hand, if the criticism be taken as Browning's own, it is open to question whether it is partisan rather than entirely broad-minded.

Take the consensus of opinion of modern critics and we find them all agreed in regard to the genius of Aristophanes, though admitting that his coa.r.s.eness must, at times, detract from their enjoyment of him.

There is much truth in Symonds' criticism of the poem. He says of it: "As a sophist and a rhetorician of poetry, Mr. Browning proves himself unrivaled, and takes rank with the best writers of historical romances.

Yet students may fairly accuse him of some special pleading in favor of his friends and against his foes. It is true that Aristophanes did not bring back again the golden days of Greece; true that his comedy revealed a corruption latent in Athenian life. But neither was Euripides in any sense a savior. Impartiality regards them both as equally destructive: Aristophanes, because he indulged animalism and praised ignorance in an age which ought to have outgrown both; Euripides, because he criticised the whole fabric of Greek thought and feeling in an age which had not yet distinguished between a.n.a.lysis and skepticism.

"What has just been said about Mr. Browning's special pleading indicates the chief fault to be found with his poem. The point of view is modern.

The situation is strained. Aristophanes becomes the scapegoat of Athenian sins, while Euripides shines forth a saint as well as a sage. Balaustion, for her part, beautiful as her conception truly is, takes up a position which even Plato could not have a.s.sumed. Into her mouth Mr. Browning has put the views of the most searching and most sympathetic modern a.n.a.lyst.

She judges Euripides not as he appeared to his own Greeks, but as he strikes the warmest of his admirers, who compare his work with that of all the poets who have ever lived."

It would seem that Mr. Symonds, himself, does some special pleading here.

As we have seen, Euripides, though not a favorite in Athens, did have warm admirers in his own day; consequently there is nothing out of the way in portraying one of his contemporaries as an admirer. Furthermore, Balaustion does not represent him as a savior of his age. She sees only too clearly that in the narrow sense of convincing his age he has not been a success. What is her vision of the spiritual Athens which is to arise but a confession of this fact! Nor is it entirely improbable that she might be prophetic of a time when Euripides will be recognized as the true power. Any disciple of a poet ahead of his time perceives these things.

One should be careful in judging of the poem as good modern criticism not to be entirely guided by the opinions of Balaustion. It should never be forgotten that it is a dramatic poem in which Aristophanes is allowed to speak for himself at great length, and whatever can be accepted as good argument for himself upon his own ground should be set over against the sweeping strictures of Balaustion. Indeed it may turn out that Browning has, after all, said for him the most exculpatory word of any critic, for he has so presented his case as to show that he considers him the outcome of the undeveloped phase of morals then existing for which he is hardly responsible because the higher light has not yet broken in upon him. This is evidenced especially in the strange combination in him of a frank belief in a life of the senses which goes along with a puritanical reverence for the G.o.ds, and a hatred of anything that falls within his own definition of vice.

To sum up, if I may again be forgiven for re-expressing an opinion elsewhere printed, which states as clearly as I am able to do my conviction of where the play stands as criticism, like all dramatic work, this poem aims to present the actual spirit of the time in which the actors moved upon the stage of life, and to reproduce something of their mental and emotional natures. Any criticism of the poets who figure in the poem, or of the larger question of the quarrel between tragedy and comedy, should be deduced indirectly, as implied in the sympathetic presentation of both sides, not based exclusively upon direct expressions of opinion on either side. So regarded it would seem that Browning was able to appreciate the genius of Aristophanes as well as that of Euripides, but that he considered Aristophanes to have value chiefly in relation to his age, as the artistic mouthpiece of its long-established usages, while Euripides had caught the breath of the future, and was the mirror of the prophetic impulses of his age rather than of its dominant civilization.

It is not improbable that Landor's fascinating portrayal of the brilliant Aspasia may have had some influence upon Browning's conception of Balaustion, upon the intellectual side at least. Alcibiades says that many people think her language as pure and elegant as Pericles, and Pericles says she was never seen out of temper or forgetful of what argument to urge first and most forcibly. When all is said, however, it may be that the "halo irised around" Balaustion's head was due, more than to any one else, to the influence of the memory of Mrs. Browning, of whom she is made to say with a sublime disregard of its anachronism:

"I know the poetess who graved in gold, Among her glories that shall never fade, This style and t.i.tle for Euripides, _The Human with his droppings of warm tears_."

After such a study of Greek life as this, wherein every available incident in history, every episode in the plays of Aristophanes bearing on the subject, every contemporary allusion are all woven together with such consummate skill that the very soul and body of the time is imaged forth, the cla.s.sical poems of the other great names of the century seem almost like child's play. Landor's poems on Greek subjects sound like imitations in inferior material of antiquity. Arnold's are even duller. Swinburne tells his Greek tales in an endless flow of rhythmical, musical verse, which occasionally rises into the realm of having something to say. Morris tells his at equal length in a manner suggestive of Chaucer without Chaucer's snap, but where among them all is there such a bit of stinging life as in "Pheidippedes" or "Echetlos?"

[Ill.u.s.tration: WALTER SAVAGE LANDOR]

Tennyson has, it is true, written some altogether exquisite verse, upon cla.s.sical themes, and in every case the poems are not descriptive nor dramatic, but are dramatic soliloquies, thus approaching in form Browning's dramatic idyls. One of the most beautiful of these is "Oenone."

There we have a mere tradition enlarged upon and the feelings of Oenone upon the desertion of Paris expressed with a richness of emotional fervor in a setting of appropriate nature imagery which carries us back to the idyls of Theocritus. "Ulysses," again gives the psychology of a wanderer who has become so habituated to adventures that he is quite incapable of settling down with Penelope for the remainder of his life. One cannot quite forgive the poet for calling the ever youthful and beautiful Penelope, whose hand was sought by so many suitors, and who, although twenty years had pa.s.sed, might still be quite young, an "aged wife." It has always seemed to the writer like a wholly unnecessary stab at a very beautiful story, and the poem would have been just as effective if Ulysses' hunger for lands beyond the sun had not been coupled with any scorn of Penelope, but with a feeling of pain that again Fate must take him away from her. Aside from this note of bad taste--bad, because it shadows a picture of faithfulness, cherished as an almost universal possession of humanity--the poem is fine. There is also, though not Greek, the remarkable study of Lucretius going mad from the effects of his wife's love philter, in which the most fascinating glimpses of his philosophy of atoms are caught amid his maniacal wanderings, and, last, the very beautiful Demeter and Persephone.

These are as unique in their way as Browning's Greek poems are in theirs, standing quite apart from such work as Morris', or Swinburne's, not only because of their haunting music, which even Swinburne cannot equal, but because of a deeper vein of thought running through them. As far as thought is concerned, however, all pale in significance the moment they are placed in juxtaposition with any of Browning's cla.s.sical productions.

Not the least interesting of Browning's cla.s.sical poems is "Ixion." In his treatment of the myth of Ixion he proves himself a true child of the Greeks, not that he makes any slavish attempt to reproduce a Greek atmosphere as it existed in the lifetime of Greek poetry, but he exercises that prerogative which the Greek poets always claimed, of interpreting a myth to suit their own ends.

It has become a sort of critical axiom to compare Browning's "Ixion" with the "Prometheus" of literature. This is one of those catching a.n.a.logies which lay hold upon the mind, and cannot be shaken off again without considerable difficulty. Mr. Arthur Symons first spoke of the resemblance; and almost every other critic with the exception of Mr. Nettleship has dwelt mainly upon that aspect of the poem which bears out the comparison.

But why, it might very well be asked, did Browning, if he intended to make another Prometheus, choose Ixion for his theme? And the answer is evident, because in the story of Ixion he found some quality different from any which existed in the story of Prometheus, and which was especially suited to the end he had in view.

The kernel of the myth of Prometheus as developed by aeschylus is proud, unflinching suffering of punishment, inflicted, not by a G.o.d justly angry for sin against himself, but by a G.o.d sternly mindful of his own prerogatives, whose only right is might, and jealous of any interference in behalf of the race which he detested--the race of man. Thus Prometheus stands out as a hero in Greek mythology, a mediator between man and the blind anger of a G.o.d of unconditional power; and Prometheus, with an equally blind belief in Fate, accepts while he defies the punishment inflicted by Zeus. He tacitly acknowledges the right of Zeus to punish him, since he confesses his deeds to be sins, but, nevertheless, he would do exactly the same thing over again:

"By my choice, my choice I freely sinned--I will confess my sin-- And helping mortals found mine own despair."

On the other hand, Ixion never appears in cla.s.sic lore as a hero. He has been called the "Cain" of Greece, because he was the first, as Pindar says, "to introduce to mortal men the murder of kin not unaccompanied by cunning." Zeus appears, however, to have shown more leniency to him for the crime of killing his father-in-law than he ever did to Prometheus, as he not only purified him from murder, but invited him to a seat among the G.o.ds. But to quote Pindar again, "he found his prosperity too great to bear, when with infatuate mind he became enamored of Hera.... Thus his conceit drave him to an act of enormous folly, but the man soon suffered his deserts, and received an exquisite torture." Ixion, then, in direct contrast to Prometheus, stands forth an embodiment of the most detestable of sins, perpetrated simply for personal ends. To depict such a man as this in an att.i.tude of defiance, and yet to justify his defiance, is a far more difficult problem than to justify the already admired heroism of Prometheus. It is entirely characteristic of Browning that he should choose perhaps the most unprincipled character in the whole range of Greek mythology as his hero. He is not content, like Emerson, with simply telling us that "in the mud and sc.u.m of things there alway, alway something sings"; his aim is ever to bring us face to face with reality, and to open our ears that we may hear for ourselves this universal song.

In fine, Browning chose Ixion and not another, because he wanted above all things an unquestioned sinner; and the task he set himself was to show the use of sin and at the same time exonerate the sinner from the eternal consequences of his act.

So mystical is the language of the poem that it is extremely difficult to trace behind it the subtle reasoning. Mr. Nettleship has given by far the best exposition of the poem, though even he does not seize all its suggestiveness.

Ixion, the sinner, suffering eternal torment, questions the justice of such torment. The first very important conclusion to which he comes, and it is one entirely in accord with science, is that sin is an aberration of sense, merely the result of external conditions in which the soul of man has no active part. The soul simply dreams, but once fully awakened, it would free itself from this bondage of sense if it were allowed to do so.

Ixion argues that it is Zeus that hath made him and not he himself, and if he has sinned it is through the bodily senses which Zeus has conferred upon him, and if he were the friendly and all-powerful G.o.d which he claimed himself to be and which Ixion believed he was, why did he allow these distractions of sense to lead him (Ixion) into sin which could only be expiated by eternal punishment? Without body there would have been nothing to obstruct his soul's rush upon the real; and with one touch of pitying power Zeus might have dispersed "this film-work, eye's and ear's."

It is entirely the fault of Zeus that he had sinned; and having done so will external torture make him repent any more who has repented already?

This is the old, old problem that has taxed the brains of many a philosopher and the faith of many a theologian--the reconcilement of the existence of evil with an omnipotent G.o.d. Then follows a comparison between the actions of Zeus, a G.o.d, and of Ixion, the human king; and Ixion declares could he have known all, as Zeus does, he would have warded off evil from his subjects, would have seen that they were trained aright from the first--in fact, would not have allowed evil to exist, or failing this, could he have seen the heart of the criminals and realized how they repented he would have given them a chance to retrieve their past. Ixion now realizes that his human ideal is higher than that of Zeus. He had imagined him possessed of human qualities, and finds his qualities are less than human. What must be the inevitable result of arriving at such a conclusion? It means the dethronement of the G.o.d, and either a lapse into hopeless atheism or the recognition that the conception formed of the G.o.d was that of the human mind at an earlier stage of understanding. This conception becomes crystallized into an anthropomorphic G.o.d; but the mind of man goes onward on its way to higher heights, and lo! there comes a day when the G.o.d-ideal of the past is lower than the human ideal of the present. It is such a crisis as this that Ixion has arrived at, and his faith is equal to the strain. Since Zeus is man's own mind-made G.o.d, Ixion's tortures must be the natural consequences of his sin, and not the arbitrary punishment of a G.o.d; and what is Ixion's sin as Browning has interpreted the myth?

The sin is that of arrogance. Ixion, a mere man, strives to be on an equality with G.o.ds. In Lucian's dialogue between Hera and Zeus the stress is laid upon the arrogance of Ixion. Jupiter declares that Ixion shall pay the "penalty not of his love--for that surely is not so dreadful a crime--but of his loud boasting." Browning raises the sin into a rarer atmosphere than that of the Greek or Latin. Zeus and Hera may be taken to represent the attributes of power and love as conceived by man in Divinity; and Ixion, symbolic of man, arrogantly supposes that he is capable of putting himself on an equality with Divinity by conceiving the entire nature of Divinity, that out of his finite mind he can construct the absolute G.o.d, and this is the sin, or, better, the aberration of sense, which results in the crystallization of his former inadequate conceptions into an anthropomorphic G.o.d, and causes his own downfall.

Ixion, now fully aroused to the fact that the G.o.d he has been defying is but his own miserable conception of G.o.d, realizes that the suffering caused by this conception of G.o.d is the very means through which man struggles toward higher ideals: through evil he is brought to a recognition of the good; from his agony is bred the rainbow of hope, which ever shines above him glorified by the light from a Purity far beyond, all-un.o.bstructed. Successive conceptions of G.o.d must sink; but man, however misled by them, must finally burst through the obstructions of sense, freeing his spirit to aspire forever toward the light.

"Ixion," then, is not merely an argument against eternal punishment, nor a picture of heroic suffering, though he who will may draw these lessons from it, but it is a tremendous symbol of the spiritual development of man. Pure in its essence, the spirit learns through the obstructions of sense to yearn forever for higher attainment, and this const.i.tutes the especial blessedness of man as contrasted with Zeus. He, like the Pythagorean Father of Number, is the conditioned one; but man is privileged through all aeons of time to break through conditions, and thus Ixion, triumphant, exclaims:

"Where light, where light is, aspiring Thither I rise, whilst thou--Zeus, keep the G.o.dship and sink."

In these poems, as in other phases of his work, Browning runs the gamut of life, of art, and of thought. He has set a new standard in regard to the handling of cla.s.sic material, one which should open the field of cla.s.sic lore afresh to future poets. Instead of trying to ape in more or less ineffectual imitations the style and thought of the great masters of antiquity, or simply use their mythology as a well-spring of romance to be clothed in whatever vagaries of style the individual poet might be able to invent, the aim of the future poet should be to reconstruct the life and thought of that wonderful civilization. One playwright, at least, has made a step in the right direction. I refer to Gilbert Murray, whose cla.s.sical scholarship has thrown so much light upon the vexed questions of Browning's att.i.tude toward Euripides, and who, in his "Andromache," has written a play, not in cla.s.sical, but in modern form, which seems to bring us more into touch with the life of Homer's day than even Homer himself.