Browning's Heroines Part 13

And the woman, answering, declares that the reality of their joint existence lies not in her, but in him:

". . . 'What! thou soundest in my soul To depths below the deepest, reachest good By evil, that makes evil good again, And so allottest to me that I live, And not die--letting die, not thee alone, But all true life that lived in both of us?

Look at me once ere thou decree the lot!'

Therewith her whole soul entered into his, He looked the look back, and Alkestis died."

But when she reaches the nether world--"the downward-dwelling people"--she is rejected as a deceiver: "This is not to die," says the Queen of Hades, for her death is a mockery, since it doubles the life of him she has left behind:

"'Two souls in one were formidable odds: Admetos must not be himself and thou!'

And so, before the embrace relaxed a whit, The lost eyes opened, still beneath the look; And lo, Alkestis was alive again."

How do our little squabbles--the "s.e.x-War"--look to us after this?

When next we meet with Balaustion, in _Aristophanes' Apology_, she is married to her Euthukles, and they are once more speeding across the waters--this time back to Rhodes, from Athens which has fallen.

Many things have happened in the meantime, and Balaustion, leaving her adoptive city, with "not sorrow but despair, not memory but the present and its pang" in her deep heart, feels that if she deliberately invites the scene, if she embodies in words the tragedy of Athens, she may free herself from anguish. Euthukles shall write it down for her, and they will go back to the night they heard Euripides was dead: "One year ago, Athenai still herself." Together she and Euthukles had mused, together glorified their poet. Euthukles had met the audience flocking homeward from the theatre, where Aristophanes had that night won the prize which Euripides had so seldom won. They had stopped him to hear news of the other poet's death: "Balaustion's husband, the right man to ask"--but he had refused them all satisfaction, and scornfully rated them for the crown but now awarded. "Appraise no poetry," he had cried: "price cuttlefish!"

Balaustion had seen, since she had come to live in Athens, but one work of Aristophanes, the _Lysistrata_; and now, in breathless reminiscent anger, recalls the experience. It had so appalled her, "that b.e.s.t.i.a.lity so beyond all brute-beast imagining," that she would never see again a play by him who in the crowned achievement of this evening had drawn himself as Virtue laughingly reproving Vice, and Vice . . . Euripides!

Such a piece it was which had "gained the prize that day we heard the death."

Yet, musing on that death, her wrath had fallen from her.

"I thought, 'How thoroughly death alters things!

Where is the wrong now, done our dead and great?'"

Euthukles, divining her thought, told her that the mob had repented when they learnt the news. He had heard them cry: "Honour him!" and "A statue in the theatre!" and "Bring his body back,[106:1] bury him in Piraeus--Thucydides shall make his epitaph!"

But she was not moved to sympathy with the general cry.

"Our tribute should not be the same, my friend.

Statue? Within our hearts he stood, he stands!"

and, for his mere mortal body:

"Why, let it fade, mix with the elements There where it, falling, freed Euripides!"

_She_ knew, that night, a better way to hail his soul's new freedom.

This, by

"Singing, we two, its own song back again Up to that face from which flowed beauty--face Now abler to see triumph and take love Than when it glorified Athenai once."

Yes: they two would read together _Herakles_, the play of which Euripides himself had given her the tablets, in commemoration of the Adventure at Syracuse. After that, on her first arrival in Athens, she had gone to see him, "held the sacred hand of him, and laid it to my lips"; she had told him "how Alkestis helped," and he, on bidding her farewell, had given her these tablets, with the stylos pendant from them still, and given her, too, his own psalterion, that she might, to its a.s.sisting music, "croon the ode bewailing age."

All was prepared for the reading, when (as we earlier learnt) there came the torch-light and the knocking at their door, and Aristophanes, fresh from his triumph, entered with the banquet-band, to hail the "house, friendly to Euripides."

He knew, declared Aristophanes, that the Rhodian hated him most of mortals, but he would not blench. The others blenched--no word could they utter, nor one laugh laugh. . . . So he drove them out, and stood alone confronting

"Statuesque Balaustion pedestalled On much disapprobation and mistake."

He babbled on for a while, defiantly and incoherently, and at length she turned in dumb rebuke, which he at once understood.

"True, lady, I am tolerably drunk";

for it was the triumph-night, and merriment had reigned at the banquet, reigned and increased

"'Till something happened' . . .

Here he strangely paused";

but soon went on to tell the way in which the news had reached them there. . . . While Aristophanes spoke, Balaustion searched his face; and now (recalling, on the way to Rhodes, that hour to Euthukles), she likens the change which she then saw in it to that made by a black cloud suddenly sailing over a stretch of sparkling sea--such a change as they are in this very moment beholding.

"Just so, some overshadow, some new care Stopped all the mirth and mocking on his face, And left there only such a dark surmise-- No wonder if the revel disappeared, So did his face shed silence every side!

I recognised a new man fronting me."

At once he perceived her insight, and answered it: "So you see myself?

Your fixed regard can strip me of my 'accidents,' as the sophists say?"

But neither should this disconcert him:

"Thank your eyes' searching; undisguised I stand: The merest female child may question me.

Spare not, speak bold, Balaustion!"

She, searching thus his face, had learnt already that "what she had disbelieved most proved most true." Drunk though he was,

"There was a mind here, mind a-wantoning At ease of undisputed mastery Over the body's brood, those appet.i.tes.

Oh, but he grasped them grandly!"

It was no "ign.o.ble presence": the broad bald brow, the flushed cheek, great imperious fiery eyes, wide nostrils, full aggressive mouth, all the pillared head:

"These made a glory, of such insolence-- I thought--such domineering deity . . .

Impudent and majestic . . ."

Instantly on her speaking face the involuntary homage had shown; and it was to this that Aristophanes, keen of sight as she, had confidently addressed himself when he told her to speak boldly. And in the very spirit of her face she did speak:

"Bold speech be--welcome to this honoured hearth, Good Genius!"

Here sounds the essential note of generous natures. Proved mistaken, their instant impulse is to rejoice in defeat, if defeat means victory for the better thing. Thus, as Balaustion speaks, her ardour grows with every word. He is greater than she had supposed, and so she must even rhapsodise--she must crowd praise on praise, until she ends with the exultant cry:

"O light, light, light, I hail light everywhere!

No matter for the murk that was--perchance That will be--certes, never should have been Such orb's a.s.sociate!"

Mark that Aristophanes has not yet _said_ anything to justify her change of att.i.tude: the seeing of him is enough to draw from her this recantation--for she trusts her own quick insight, and so, henceforth trusts him.