Robert Browning Part 14

Our Euripides the human, With his droppings of warm tears.

"If the Alkestis is not the masterpiece of the genius of Euripides,"

wrote Paul de Saint-Victor, "it is perhaps the masterpiece of his heart."[110]

Balaustion herself, not a rose of "the Rosy Isle" but its wild-pomegranate-flower, since amid the verdure of the tree "you shall find food, drink, odour all at once," is h.e.l.lenic in her bright and swift intelligence, her enthusiasm for all n.o.ble things of the mind, the grace of every movement of her spirit, her culture and her beauty. The atmosphere of the poem, which encircles the translation, is singularly luminous and animating; the narrative of the adventure is rapid yet always lucid; the verse leaps buoyantly like a wave of the sea.

Balaustion tells her tale to the four Greek girls, her companions, amid the free things of nature, the overhanging grape vines, the rippling stream,

Outsmoothing galingale and watermint, Its mat-floor,

and in presence of the little temple Baccheion, with its sanct.i.ties of religion and of art. By a happy and original device the transcript of the Alkestis is much more than a translation; it is a translation rendered into dramatic action--for we see and hear the performers and they are no longer masked--and this is accompanied with a commentary or an interpretation. Never was a more graceful apology for the function of the critic put forward than that of Balaustion:

'Tis the poet speaks: But if I, too, should try and speak at times, Leading your love to where my love, perchance, Climbed earlier, found a nest before you knew-- Why, bear with the poor climber, for love's sake!

Browning has not often played the part of a critic, and the interpretation of a poet's work by a poet has the double value of throwing light upon the mind of the original writer and the mind of his commentator.

The life of mortals and the life of the immortal G.o.ds are brought into a beautiful relation throughout the play. It is pre-eminently human in its grief and in its joy; yet at every point the divine care, the divine help surrounds and supports the children of earth, with their transitory tears and smiles. Apollo has been a herdsman in the service of Admetos; Herakles, most human of demiG.o.ds, is the king's friend and guest. The interest of the play for Browning lay especially in three things--the pure self-sacrifice of the heroine, devotion embodied in one supreme deed; and no one can heighten the effect with which Euripides has rendered this; secondly, the joyous, beneficent strength of Herakles, and this Browning has felt in a peculiar degree, and by his commentary has placed it in higher relief; and thirdly, the purification and elevation through suffering of the character of Admetos; here it would be rash to a.s.sert that Browning has not divined the intention of Euripides, but certainly he has added something of his own. It has been maintained that Browning's interpretation of the spiritual significance of the drama is a beautiful perversion of the purpose of the Greek poet; that Admetos needs no purification; that in accepting his wife's offer to be his subst.i.tute in dying, the king was no craven but a king who recognised duty to the state as his highest duty. The general feeling of readers of the play does not fall in with this ingenious plea. Browning, as appears from his imagined recast of the theme, which follows the transcript, had considered and rejected it. If Admetos is to be in some degree justified, it can only be by bearing in mind that the fact by which he shall himself escape from death is of Apollo's inst.i.tution, and that obedience to the purpose of Apollo rendered self-preservation a kind of virtue. But Admetos makes no such defence of his action when replying to the reproaches of his father, and he antic.i.p.ates that the verdict of the world will be against him. Browning undoubtedly presses the case against Admetos far more strongly than does Euripides, who seems to hold that a man weak in one respect, weak when brought to face the test of death, may yet be strong in the heroic mastery of grief which is imposed upon him by the duties of hospitality. Readers of the Winter's Tale have sometimes wondered whether there could be much rapture of joy in the heart of the silent Hermione when she received back her unworthy husband. If Admetos remained at the close of the play what he is understood by Browning to have been at its opening, reunion with a self-lover so base could hardly have flushed with gladness the spirit of Alkestis just escaped from the shades.[111] But Alkestis, who had proved her own loyalty by deeds, values deeds more than words. When dying she had put her love into an act, and had refrained from mere words of wifely tenderness; death put an end to her services to her husband; she felt towards him as any wife, if Browning's earlier poem be true, may feel to any husband; but still she could render a service to her children, and she exacts from Admetos the promise that he will never place a stepmother over them. His allegiance to this vow is an act, and it shall be for Alkestis the test of his entire loyalty. And the good Herakles, who enjoys a glorious jest amazingly, and who by that jest can benevolently retort upon Admetos for his concealment of Alkestis'

death--for now the position is reversed and the king shall receive her living, and yet believe her dead--Herakles contrives to put Admetos to that precise test which is alone sufficient to a.s.sure Alkestis of his fidelity. Words are words; but here is a deed, and Admetos not only adheres to his pledge, but demonstrates to her that for him to violate it is impossible. She may well accept him as at length proved to be her very own.

Browning, who delights to show how good is brought out of evil, or what appears such to mortal eyes, is not content with this. He must trace the whole process of the purification of the soul of Admetos, by sorrow and its cruel yet beneficent reality, and in his commentary he emphasises each point of development in that process. When his wife lies at the point of death the sorrow of Admetos is not insincere, but there was a childishness in it, for he would not confront the fact that the event was of his own election. Presently she has departed, and he begins to taste the truth, to distinguish between a sorrow rehea.r.s.ed in fancy and endured in fact. In greeting Herakles he rises to a manlier strain, puts tears away, and accepts the realities of life and death; he will not add ill to ill, as the sentimentalist does, but will be just to the rights of earth that remain; he catches some genuine strength from the magnanimous presence of the hero-G.o.d. He renders duty to the dead; is quieted; and enters more and more into the sternness of his solitary wayfaring. In dealing with the ign.o.ble wrangle with old Pheres the critic is hard set; but Balaustion, speaking as interpreter for Browning, explains that for a little the king lapses back from the firmer foothold which he had attained. Perhaps it would have been wiser to admit that Euripides has marred his own work by this grim tragic-comic encounter of crabbed age and youth. But it is true that one who has much to give, like Alkestis, gives freely; and one who has little to give, like Pheres, clutches that little desperately and is starved not only in possessions but in soul. For Browning the significance of the scene lies in the idea, which if not just is ingenious, that the encounter with Pheres has an educational value for Admetos; he detests his father because he sees in him an image of his own egoism, and thus he learns more profoundly to hate his baser self.

When the body of Alkestis has been borne away and the king re-enters his desolate halls the full truth breaks in upon him; nothing can be as it has been before--"He stared at the impossible mad life"; he has learnt that life, which yet shall be rightly lived, is a harder thing than death:

He was beginning to be like his wife.

And those around him felt that having descended in grief so far to the truth of things, he could not but return to the light an altered and a better man. Instructed so deeply in the realities of sorrow, Admetos is at last made worthy to receive the blessed realities of joy with the words,

When I betray her, though she is no more, May I die.

The regeneration of Admetos is accomplished. How much in all this exposition is derived from the play, how much is added to it, may be left for the consideration of the reader who will compare the original with the transcript.

If the character of Admetos is somewhat lowered by Browning beneath the conception of the Greek dramatist, to allow room for its subsequent elevation, the conception of Herakles is certainly heightened. We shall not say that Balaustion is the speaker and that Herakles is somewhat of a woman's hero. Browning himself fully enters into Balaustion's enthusiasm. And the presence of the strong, joyous helper of men is in truth an inspiring one. The great voice that goes before him is itself a _Sursum corda!_--a challenge and a summons to whatever manliness is in us. And the best of it is that sauntering the pavement or crossing the ferry we may happen to encounter this face of Herakles:

Out of this face emerge banners and horses--O superb! I see what is coming; I see the high pioneer-caps--I see the slaves of runners clearing the way, I hear victorious drums.

This face is a life-boat.

For Walt Whitman too had seen Brother Jonathan Herakles, and indeed the face of the strong and tender wound-dresser was itself as the face of a calmer Herakles to many about to die. The speeches of the demiG.o.d in Browning's transcript require an abundant commentary, but it is the commentary of an irrepressible joy, an outbreak of enthusiasm which will not be controlled. The glorious Gargantuan creature, in the best sense Rabelaisian, is uplifted by Browning into a very saint of joyous effort; no pallid ascetic, indeed, beating his breast with the stone, but a Christian saint of Luther's school, while at the same time a somewhat over-boisterous benevolent Paynim giant:

Gladness be with thee, Helper of our world!

I think this is the authentic sign and sea!

Of G.o.ds.h.i.+p, that it ever waxes glad, And more glad, until gladness blossoms, bursts Into a rage to suffer for mankind, And recommence at sorrow.

Something of the Herakles ideal appears again and again in other poems of Browning. His Breton sailor, Herve Riel, has more than a touch of the Heraclean frankness of gaiety in arduous effort. His Ivan Ivanovitch wields the axe and abolishes a life with the Heraclean joy in righteousness. And in the last of Browning's poems, not without a pathetically over-boisterous effort and strain, there is the suggestion of an ideal conception of himself as a Herakles-Browning; the old man tries at least to send his great voice before him.

The new Admetos, new Alkestis, imagined by Balaustion at the close of the poem, are wedded lovers who, like the married in Pompilia's dream of heaven, "know themselves into one." For them the severance of death has become an impossible thing; and therefore no place is left for Herakles in this treatment of the story. It expresses Browning's highest conception of the union of soul with soul:

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

died only to be rejected by Hades, as still living, and with a more potent life, in her husband's heart and will. Yet the mortal cloud is round these mortals still; they cannot see things as the G.o.ds see. And, for all their hopes and endeavours, the earth which they would renew and make as heaven, remains the old incredulous, unconverted earth,--"Such is the envy G.o.ds still bear mankind." And in such an earth, if not for them, a.s.suredly for others, Herakles may find great deeds to do.

Balaustion has the unique distinction of being heroine throughout two of Browning's poems; and of both we may say that the genius of Euripides is the hero. _Aristophanes' Apology_ is written from first to last with unflagging energy; the translation of the "Herakles" which it includes is a masculine and masterly effort to transport the whole sense and spirit of the original into English verse, and the rendering of the choral pa.s.sages into lyric form gives it an advantage over the transcript of the "Alkestis." Perhaps not a little of the self-defence of Aristophanes and his statement of the case against Euripides could have been put as well or better in a critical essay in prose; but the method of Browning enables him to mingle, in a dramatic fas.h.i.+on, truth with sophistry, and to make both serve his purpose of presenting not only the case but the character of the great Greek maker of comedy.

Balaustion is no longer the ardent girl of the days of her first adventure; she is a wife, with the dignity, the authority of womanhood and wifehood; she has known the life of Athens with its evil and its good; she has been the favoured friend of Euripides; she is capable of confronting his powerful rival in popular favour, and of awing him into sobriety and becoming manners; with an instinctive avoidance she recoils from whatever is gross or uncomely; yet she can do honour to the true light of intellect and genius even though it s.h.i.+nes through earth-born vapours and amid base surroundings.

Athens, "the life and light of the whole world," has sunk under the power of Sparta, and it can be henceforth no home for Balaustion and her Euthukles. The bark that bears them is bounding Rhodesward, and the verse has in it the leap and race of the prow. Balaustion, stricken at heart, yet feels that this tragedy of Athens brings the tragic katharsis; the justice of the G.o.ds is visible in it; and above man's wickedness and folly she reaches to "yon blue liberality of heaven." It seems as if the spirit which might have saved Athens is that of the loins girt and the lamp lit which was embodied in the strenuous devotion of Euripides to the highest things; and the spirit which has brought Athens to its ruin is that expressed with a splendid power through the work of Aristophanes. But Aristophanes shall plead for himself and leave nothing unsaid that can serve to vindicate him as a poet and even as a moralist Thus only can truth in the end stand clear, a.s.sured of its supremacy over falsehood and over half-truth.

Nothing that Browning has written is more vividly imagined than the encounter of Balaustion with Aristophanes and his crew of revellers on the night when the tidings of the death of Euripides reached Athens; it rouses and controls the feelings with the tumult of life and the sanct.i.ty of death, while also imposing itself on the eye as a brilliant and a solemn picture. The revellers scatter before the presence of Balaustion, and she and the great traducer of Euripides stand face to face. Nowhere else has Browning presented this conception of the man of vast disorderly genius, who sees and approves the better way and splendidly follows the worse:

Such domineering deity Hephaistos might have carved to cut the brine For his gay brother's prow, imbrue that path Which, purpling, recognised the conqueror.

It is as if male force, with the l.u.s.t of the eye, the l.u.s.t of the flesh, and the pride of life behind it, were met and held in check by the finer feminine force resting for its support upon the divine laws. But in truth Aristophanes is half on the side of Balaustion and of Euripides; he must, indeed, make his stand; he is not one to falter or quail; and yet when the sudden cloud falls upon his face he knows that it is his part to make the worse appear the better cause, knowing this all the more because the justice of Balaustion's regard perceives and recognises his higher self. Suddenly the Tuphon, "madding the brine with wrath or monstrous sport," is transformed into something like what the child saw once from the Rhodian sea-coast (the old romantic poet in Browning is here young once more):

All at once, large-looming from his wave, Out leaned, chin hand-propped, pensive on the ledge, A sea-worn face, sad as mortality, Divine with yearning after fellows.h.i.+p.

He rose but breast-high. So much G.o.d she saw; So much she sees now, and does reverence.

But in a moment the sea-G.o.d is again the sea-monster, with "tail-splash, frisk of fin"; the majestic Aristophanes relapses into the most wonderful of mockers.

No pa.s.sage in the poem is quite so impressive as this through its strangeness in beauty. But the entry of Sophocles--"an old pale-swathed majesty,"--at the supper which followed the performance of the play, is another of those pa.s.sages to find which _in situ_ is a sufficient reward for reading many laborious pages that might almost as well have been thrown into an imaginary conversation in prose:

Then the grey brow sank low, and Sophokles Re-swathed him, sweeping doorward: mutely pa.s.sed 'Twixt rows as mute.

The critical study of comedy, its origin, its development, its function, its decline, is written with admirable vigour, but the case of Aristophanes can be read elsewhere. It is interesting, however, to note the argument in support of the thesis that comedy points really to ideals of humanity which are beyond human attainment; that its mockery of man's infirmities implies a conception of our nature which in truth is extra-human; while tragedy on the contrary accepts man as he is, in his veritable weakness and veritable strength, and wrings its pity and its terror out of these. It is Aristophanes who thus vindicates Euripides before the revellers who have a.s.sembled in his own honour, and they accept what seems to them a paradox as his finest stroke of irony.

But he has indeed after the solemn withdrawal of Sophocles looked for a moment through life and death, and seen in his hour of highest success his depth of failure. For him, in this testing-time of life, art has been the means of probation; he has squandered the gifts bestowed upon him, which should have been concentrated in the special task to which he was summoned. He should have known--he did in fact know--that the art which "makes grave" is higher than that which "makes grin"; his own peculiar duty was to advance his art one step beyond his predecessors; to create a drama which should bring into harmony the virtue of tragedy and the virtue of comedy; to discover the poetry which

Makes wise, not grave,--and glad, Not grinning: whereby laughter joins with tears.

Instead of making this advance he had retrograded; and it remained for a poet of a far-off future in the far-off Ka.s.siterides--the Tin Isle which has Stratford at its heart--to accomplish the task on which Aristophanes would not adventure. One way a brilliant success was certain for Aristophanes; the other and better way failure was possible; and he declined to make the venture of faith. It is with this sense of self-condemnation upon him that he essays his own defence, and it is against this sense of self-condemnation more than against the genius and the methods of Euripides that he struggles. When towards the close of the poem he takes in hand the psalterion, and chants in splendid strains the story of Thamuris, who aspired and failed, as he himself will never do, the reader is almost won over to his side. Browning, who felt the heights and depths of the lyric genius of Aristophanes, would seem to have resolved that in this song of "Thamuris marching," moving in ecstasy amid the glories of an autumn morning, he would dramatically justify his conception of the poet; and never in his youth did Browning sing with a finer rapture of spirit. But reading what follows, the record of the subjugation of Athens, when the Athenian people accept the ruin of their defences as if it were but a fragment of Aristophanic comedy, we perceive that this song, which breaks off with an uproar of laughter, is the condemnation as well as the glory of the singer.

The translation of _Agamemnon_, the preface to which is dated "October 1st, 1877," was undertaken at the request or command of Carlyle. The argument of the preface fails to justify Browning's method. A translation "literal at every cost save that of absolute violence to our language" may be highly desirable; it is commonly called a "crib"; and a crib contrived by one who is not only a scholar but a man of genius will now and again yield a word or a phrase of felicitous precision. But that a translation "literal at every cost" should be put into verse is a wrong both to the original and to the poetry of the language to which the original is transferred; it a.s.sumes a poetic garb which in a.s.suming it rends to tatters. A translation into verse implies that a certain beauty of form is part of the writer's aim; it implies that a poem is to be reproduced as a poem, and not as that b.a.s.t.a.r.d product of learned ill judgment--a glorified crib; and a glorified crib is necessarily a bad crib. Mrs Orr, who tells us that Browning refused to regard even the first of Greek writers as models of literary style, had no doubt that the translation of the _Agamemnon_ was partly made for the pleasure of exposing the false claims made on their behalf. Such a supposition does not agree well with Browning's own Preface; but if he had desired to prove that the _Agamemnon_ can be so rendered as to be barely readable, he has been singularly successful. From first to last in the genius of Browning there was an element, showing itself from time to time, of strange perversity.

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 103: Was this a "baffled visit," as described by Mr Henry James in his "Life of Story" (ii. 197), when the hostess was absent, and the guests housed in an inn?]

[Footnote 104: Letter quoted by Mrs Orr, p. 288.]

[Footnote 105: The att.i.tude is reproduced in a photograph from which a woodcut is given in Mme. Blanc's article "A French Friend of Browning."]

[Footnote 106: "Records of Tennyson, Ruskin and Browning," by Annie Ritchie, pp. 291, 292.]

[Footnote 107: "A Bibliography of the Writings of Robert Browning," by T.J. Wise, pp. 157, 158.]

[Footnote 108: _Aristophanes' Apology_ is connected with these poems by its character as a casuistical self-defence of the chief speaker.]

[Footnote 109: North's "Plutarch," 1579, p. 599.]

[Footnote 110: "Les Deux Masques," ii. 281.]

[Footnote 111: A comment of Paul de Saint-Victor on the silence of the recovered Alkestis deserves to be quoted: "Hercule apprend a Admete qu'il lui est interdit d'entendre sa voix avant qu'elle soit purifiee de sa consecration aux Divinites infernales. J'aime mieux voir dans cette reserve un scrupule religieux du poete laissant a la morte sa dignite d'Ombre. Alceste a ete nitiee aux profonds mysteres de la mort; elle a vu l'invisible, elle a entendu l'ineffable; toute parole sortie de ses levres serait une divulgation sacrilege. Ce silence mysterieux la spiritualise et la rattache par un dernier lien au monde eternel."]