Chapter IV: Part I: Browning's Heroines (3)

[77:2] Having made her Monsignor's niece, observes Mr. Chesterton, "Browning might just as well have made Sebald her long-lost brother, and Luigi a husband to whom she was secretly married."

III

MILDRED TRESHAM

IN "A BLOT IN THE 'SCUTCHEON"

I have said that, to my perception, the most characteristic mark in Browning's portrayal of women is his admiration for dauntlessness and individuality; and this makes explicable to me the failure which I constantly perceive in his dramatic presentment of her whose "innocence" (as the term is conventionally accepted) is her salient quality. The type, immortal and essential, is one which a poet must needs essay to show; and Browning, when he showed it through others, or in his own person hymned it, found words for its delineation which lift the soul as it were to morning skies. But when words are further called upon for its _expression_, when such a woman, in short, has to speak for herself, he rarely makes her do so without a certain consciousness of that especial trait in her--and hence her speech must of necessity ring false, for innocence knows nothing of itself.

So marked is this failure, to my sense, that I cannot refuse the implication which comes along with it: that only theoretically, only as it were by deference to others, did the attribute, in that particular apprehension of it, move him to admiration. I do not, of course, mean anything so inconceivable as that he questioned the loveliness of the "pure in heart"; I mean merely that he questioned the artificial value which has been set upon physical chastity--and that when departure from this was the _circumstance_ through which he had to show the more essential purity, his instinctive scepticism drove him to the forcing of a note which was not really native to his voice. For always (to my sense) when he presents dramatically a girl or woman in the grip of this circumstance, he gives her words, and feelings to express through them, which only the French _mièvre_ can justly describe. He does not, in short, reveal her as she is, but only as others see her--and, among those others, not himself.

In Browning this might seem the stranger because he was so wholly untouched by cynicism; but here we light upon a curious paradox--the fact that the more "worldly" the writer, the better can he (as a general rule and other things being equal) display this type. It may be that such a writer can regard it analytically, can see what are the elements which make it up; it may be that the deeper reverence felt for it by the idealist is precisely that which draws him toward exaggeration--that his fancy, brooding with closed eyes upon the "thing enskied and sainted," thus becomes inclined to mawkishness . . . it _may_ be, I say, but at the bottom of my heart I do not feel that that is the explanation. One with which I am better satisfied emerges from a line of verse already quoted:

"For each man kills the thing he loves";

and the man most apt for such "killing" is precisely he who appraises most shrewdly the thing he kills. As the cool practised libertine is oftenest attracted by the immature girl, so the ardent inexperienced man of any age will be drawn to the older woman; and the psychology of this matter of everyday experience is closely akin to the paradox in artistic creation of which I now speak.

Browning, who saw woman so clearly as a creature with her definite and justified demand upon life, saw, by inevitable consequence, that for woman to "depart from innocence" (again, in the conventional sense of the words) is not her most significant error; and this conviction necessarily reacted upon his presentment of those in whom such purity is the most salient quality--a type of which, as I have said, the poet is bound to attempt the portrayal. Browning's instinctive questioning of the "man-made" value then betrays itself--he exaggerates, he loses grasp, for he is singing in a mode not native to his temperament.

+ + + + +

The character of Mildred in _A Blot in the 'Scutcheon_ is a striking example of this. She is a young girl who has been drawn by her innocent passion into complete surrender to her lover. He, after this surrender, seeks her in marriage from her brother, who stands in the place of both parents to the orphan girl. The brother consents, unknowing; but after his consent, learns from a servant that Mildred has yielded herself to a man--he learns not _whom_. She, accused, makes no denial, gives no name, and to her brother's consternation, proposes thus to marry her suitor, whom Tresham thinks to be in ignorance of her error. Tresham violently repudiates her; then, meeting beneath her window the cloaked lover, attacks him, forces him to reveal himself, learns that he and the accepted suitor are one and the same, and kills him--Mertoun (the lover) making no defence. Tresham goes to Mildred and tells her what he has done; she dies of the hearing, and he, having taken poison after the revelation of Mertoun's identity, dies also.

The defects in this story are so obvious that I need hardly point them out. Most prominent of all is the difficulty of reconciling Earl Mertoun's conduct with that of a rational being. He is all that in Mildred's suitor might be demanded, yet, loving her deeply and so loved by her, he has feared to ask her brother for her hand, because of his reverence for this Earl Tresham.

". . . I was young,
And your surpassing reputation kept me
So far aloof . . ."

Thus he explains himself. He feared to ask for her hand, yet did not fear to seduce her! The thing is so absurd that it vitiates all the play, which indeed but once or twice approaches aught that we can figure to ourselves of reality in any period of history. "Mediæval" is a strange adjective, used by Mrs. Orr to characterise a work of which the date is placed by Browning himself in the eighteenth century.

Mildred is but fourteen: an age at which, with our modern sense of girlhood as, happily, in this land we now know it, we find ourselves unable to apprehend her at all. Instinctively we assign to her at least five years more, since even these would leave her still a child--though not at any moment in the play does she actually so affect us, for Mildred is never a child, never even a young girl. Immature indeed she is, but it is with the immaturity which will not develop, which has nothing to do with length of years. To me, the failure here is absolute; she never comes to life. Every student of Browning knows of the enthusiasm which Dickens expressed for this piece and this character:

"Browning's play has thrown me into a perfect passion of
sorrow. To say that there is anything in its subject save what
is lovely, true, deeply affecting . . . is to say that there is
no light in the sun, and no heat in the blood. . . . I know
nothing that is so affecting, nothing in any book I have ever
read, as Mildred's recurrence to that 'I was so young--I had
no mother.'"

Such ardour well might stir us to agreement, were it not that Dickens chose for its warmest expression the very centre of our disbelief: Mildred's _recurrence_ to that cry. . . . The cry itself--I cannot be alone in thinking--rings false, and the recurrence, therefore, but heaps error upon error. When I imagine an ardent girl in such a situation, almost anything she could have been made to say would to me seem more authentic than this. The first utterance, moreover, occurs before she knows that Tresham has learnt the truth--it occurs, in soliloquy, immediately after an interview with her lover.

"I was so young, I loved him so, I had
No mother, God forgot me, and I fell."

_I fell_ . . . No woman, in any extremity, says that; that is what is said by others of her. And _God forgot me_--is this the thought of one who "loves him so"? . . . The truth is that we have here the very commonplace of the theatre: the wish to have it both ways, to show, yet not to reveal--the "dramatic situation," in short, set out because it _is_ dramatic, not because it is true. We cannot suppose that Browning meant Earl Mertoun for a mere seducer, ravishing from a maiden that which she did not desire to give--yet the words he here puts in Mildred's mouth bear no other interpretation. Either she is capable of passion, or she is not. If she _is_, sorrow for the sorrow that her recklessness may cause to others will indeed put pain and terror in her soul, but she will not, can not, say that "God forgot her": those words are alien to the passionate. If she is _not_, if Mertoun is the mere seducer . . . but the suggestion is absurd. We know that he is like herself, as herself should have been shown us, young love incarnate, rushing to its end mistakenly--wrong, high, and pure. These errors are the errors of quick souls, of souls that, too late realising all, yet feel themselves unstained, and know that not God forgot them, but they this world in which we dwell.

In her interview with Tresham after the servant's revelation, I find the same untruth. He delivers a long rhapsody on brothers' love, saying that it exceeds all other in its unselfishness. Her sole rejoinder--and here she does for one second attain to authenticity--is the question: "What is this for?" He, after some hesitation, tells her what he knows, calls upon her to confess, she standing silent until, at end of the arraignment, he demands the lover's name. Listen to her answer:

". . . Thorold, do you devise
Fit expiation for my guilt, if fit
There be! 'Tis nought to say that I'll endure
And bless you--that my spirit yearns to purge
Her stains off in the fierce renewing fire:
But do not plunge me into other guilt!
Oh, guilt enough . . ."

She of course refuses the name. He tells her to pronounce, then, her own punishment.

Again her answer, in the utter falseness to all truth of its abasement, well-nigh sickens the soul:

"Oh, Thorold, you must never tempt me thus!
To die here in this chamber, by that sword,
Would seem like punishment; so should I glide
Like an arch-cheat, into extremest bliss!"

Comment upon that seems to me simply impossible. This is the woman to whom, but a page or two back, young Mertoun has sung the exquisite song, known to most readers of Browning's lyrics:

"There's a woman like a dewdrop, she's so purer than the purest,
And her noble heart's the noblest, yes, and her sure faith's the
surest" . . .

Already in that hour with her, Mertoun must have learnt that some of those high words were turned to slighter uses when they sang of Mildred Tresham. In that hour he has spoken of the "meeting that appalled us both" (namely, the meeting with her brother, when he was to ask for her hand), saying that it is over and happiness begins, "such as the world contains not." When Mildred answers him with, "This will not be," we could accept, believingly, were only the sense of doom what her reply brought with it. But "this will not be," because they do not "deserve the whole world's best of blisses."

"Sin has surprised us, so will punishment."

And how strange, how sad for a woman is it, to see with what truth and courage Browning can make Mertoun speak! Each word that _he_ says can be brave and clear for all its recognition of their error; no word that _she_ says. . . . Her creator does not understand her; almost, thus, we do feel Mildred to be real, so quick is our resentment of the unrealities heaped on her. Imagining beforehand the moment when she shall receive in presence of them all "the partner of my guilty love" (is not here the theatre in full blast?), the deception she must practise--called by her, in the vein so cruelly assigned her, "this planned piece of deliberate wickedness" . . . imagining all this, she foresees herself unable to pretend, pouring forth "all our woeful story," and pictures them aghast, "as round some cursed fount that should spirt water and spouts blood." . . . "I'll not!" she cries--

". . . 'I'll not affect a grace
That's gone from me--gone once, and gone for ever!'"

"Gone once, and gone for ever." True, when the grace _is_ gone; but surely not from her, in any real sense, had it gone--and would she not, in the deep knowledge of herself which comes with revelation to the world, have felt that passionately? There are accusations of ourselves which indeed arraign ourselves, yet leave us our best pride. To me, not the error which made her prey to penitence was Mildred Tresham's "fall," but those crude cries of shame.

We take refuge in her immaturity, and in the blighting influence of her brother--that prig of prigs, that "monomaniac of family pride and conventional morality,"[90:1] Thorold, Earl Tresham; but not thus can we solace ourselves for Browning's failure. What a girl he might have given us in Mildred, had he listened only to himself! But, not yet in full possession of that self, he set up as an ideal the ideal of others, trying dutifully to see it as they see it, denying dutifully his deepest instinct; and, thus apostate, piled insincerity on insincerity, until at last no truth is anywhere, and we read on with growing alienation as each figure loses all of such reality as it ever had, and even Gwendolen, the "golden creature"--his own dauntless, individual woman, seeing and feeling truly through every fibre of her being--is lost amid the fog, is stifled in the stifling atmosphere, and only at the last, when Mildred and her brother are both dead, can once more say the word which lights us back to truth:

"Ah, Thorold, we can but--remember you!"

It was indeed all _they_ could do; but we, more fortunate, can forget him, imaging to ourselves the Mildred that Browning could have given us--the Mildred of whom her brother is made to say:

"You cannot know the good and tender heart,
Its girl's trust and its woman's constancy,
How pure yet passionate, how calm yet kind,
How grave yet joyous, how reserved yet free
As light where friends are . . ."

There she is, as Browning might have shown her! "Control's not for this lady," Tresham adds--the sign-manual of a Browning woman. As I have said, he can display this lovely type through others, can sing it in his own person, as in the exquisite dewdrop lyric; but once let her speak for herself--he obeys the world and its appraisals, and the truth departs from him; we have the Mildred Tresham of the theatre, of "the partner of my guilty love," of "Oh, Thorold, you must never tempt me thus!" of (in a later scene) "I think I might have urged some little point in my defence to Thorold"; of that last worst unreality of all, when Thorold has told her of his murder of her lover, and she cries:

". . . I--forgive not,
But bless you, Thorold, from my soul of souls!
There! Do not think too much upon the past!
The cloud that's broke was all the same a cloud
While it stood up between my friend and you;
You hurt him 'neath its shadow: but is that
So past retrieve? I have his heart, you know;
I may dispose of it: I give it you!
It loves you as mine loves!"

True, she is to die, and so is to rejoin her lover; but, thus rejoined, will "blots upon the 'scutcheon" seem to them the all-sufficient claim for Thorold's deed--Thorold who dies with these words on his lips:

". . . You hold our 'scutcheon up.
Austin, no blot on it! You see how blood
Must wash one blot away; the first blot came
And the first blood came. To the vain world's eye
All's gules again: no care to the vain world
From whence the red was drawn!"

And on Austin's cry that "no blot shall come!" he answers:

"I said that: yet it did come. Should it come,
Vengeance is God's, not man's. Remember me!"

_Vengeance_: how do they who are met again in the spirit-world regard that word, that "God"?

FOOTNOTES:

[90:1] Berdoe. _Browning Cyclopædia._

IV

BALAUSTION

IN "BALAUSTION'S ADVENTURE" AND "ARISTOPHANES' APOLOGY"

To me, Balaustion is the queen of Browning's women--nay, I am tempted to proclaim her queen of every poet's women. For in her meet all lovelinesses, and to make her dearer still, some are as yet but in germ (what a mother she will be, for example); so that we have, with all the other beauties, the sense of the unfolding rose--"enmisted by the scent it makes," in a phrase of her creator's which, though in the actual context it does not refer to her, yet exquisitely conveys her influence on these two works. "Rosy Balaustion": she is that, as well as "superb, statuesque," in the admiring apostrophes from Aristophanes, during the long, close argument of the _Apology_. In that piece, the Bald Bard himself is made to show her to us; and though it follows, not precedes, the _Adventure_, I shall steal from him at once, presenting in his lyric phrases our queen before we crown her.

He comes to her home in Athens on the night when Balaustion learns that her adored Euripides is dead. She and her husband, Euthukles, are "sitting silent in the house, yet cheerless hardly," musing on the tidings, when suddenly there come torch-light and knocking at the door, and cries and laughter: "Open, open, Bacchos[94:1] bids!"--and, heralded by his chorus and the dancers, flute-boys, all the "banquet-band," there enters, "stands in person, Aristophanes." Balaustion had never seen him till that moment, nor he her:

"Forward he stepped: I rose and fronted him";

and as thus for the first time they meet, he breaks into a pæan of admiration:

"'You, lady? What, the Rhodian? Form and face,
Victory's self upsoaring to receive
The poet? Right they named you . . . some rich name,
Vowel-buds thorned about with consonants,
Fragrant, felicitous, rose-glow enriched
By the Isle's unguent: some diminished end
In _ion_' . . ."

and trying to recall that name "in _ion_," he guesses two or three at random, seizing thus the occasion to express her effect on him:

"'Phibalion, for the mouth split red-fig-wise,
Korakinidion, for the coal-black hair,
Nettarion, Phabion, for the darlingness?'"

But none of these is right; "it was some fruit-flower"; and at last it comes: _Balaustion_, Wild-Pomegranate-Bloom, and he exclaims in ecstasy, "Thanks, Rhodes!"--for her fellow-countrymen had found this name for her, so apt in every way that her real name was forgotten, and as Balaustion she shall live and die.

"Nettarion, Phabion, for the darlingness"; and for all her intellect and ardour, it is greatly _this_ that makes Balaustion queen--the lovely eager sweetness, the tenderness, the "darlingness": Aristophanes guessed almost right!

+ + + + +

How did she win the name of Wild-Pomegranate-Flower? We learn it from herself in the _Adventure_. Let us hear: let us feign ourselves members of the little band of friends, all girls, with their charming, chiming names: "Petalé, Phullis, Charopé, Chrusion"--to whom she cries in the delightful opening:

"About that strangest, saddest, sweetest song
I, when a girl, heard in Kameiros once,
And after, saved my life by? Oh, so glad
To tell you the adventure!"

Part of the adventure is historical. In the second stage of the Peloponnesian War (that famous contention between the Athenians and the inhabitants of Peloponnesus which began on May 7, 431 B.C. and lasted twenty-seven years), the Athenian General, Nikias, had suffered disaster at Syracuse, and had given himself up, with all his army, to the Sicilians. But the assurances of safety which he had received were quickly proved false. He was no sooner in the hands of the enemy than he was shamefully put to death with his naval ally, Demosthenes; and his troops were sent to the quarries, where the plague and the hard labour lessened their numbers and increased their miseries. When this bad news reached Rhodes, the islanders rose in revolt against the supremacy of Athens, and resolved to side with Sparta. Balaustion[96:1] was there, and she passionately protested against this decision, crying to "who would hear, and those who loved me at Kameiros"[96:2]:

". . . No!
Never throw Athens off for Sparta's sake--
Never disloyal to the life and light
Of the whole world worth calling world at all!

* * * * *

To Athens, all of us that have a soul,
Follow me!"

and thus she drew together a little band, "and found a ship at Kaunos," and they turned

"The glad prow westward, soon were out at sea,
Pushing, brave ship with the vermilion cheek,
Proud for our heart's true harbour."

But they were pursued by pirates, and, fleeing from these, drove unawares into the harbour of that very Syracuse where Nikias and Demosthenes had perished, and in whose quarries their countrymen were slaves. The inhabitants refused them admission, for they had heard, as the ship came into harbour, Balaustion singing "that song of ours which saved at Salamis." She had sprung upon the altar by the mast, and carolled it forth to encourage the oarsmen; and now it was vain to tell the Sicilians that these were Rhodians who had cast in their lot with the Spartan League, for the Captain of Syracuse answered:

"Ay, but we heard all Athens in one ode . . .
You bring a boatful of Athenians here";

and Athenians they would not have at Syracuse, "with memories of Salamis" to stir up the slaves in the quarry.

No prayers, no blandishments, availed the Rhodians; they were just about to turn away and face the pirates in despair, when somebody raised a question, and

". . . 'Wait!'
Cried they (and wait we did, you may be sure).
'That song was veritable Aischulos,
Familiar to the mouth of man and boy,
Old glory: how about Euripides?
Might you know any of his verses too?'"

Browning here makes use of the historical fact that Euripides was reverenced far more by foreigners and the non-Athenian Greeks than by the Athenians--for Balaustion, "the Rhodian," had been brought up in his worship, though she knew and loved the other great Greek poets also; and already it was known to our voyagers that the captives in the quarries had found that those who could "teach Euripides to Syracuse" gained indulgence far beyond what any of the others could obtain. Thus, when the question sounded, "Might you know any of his verses too?" the captain of the vessel cried:

"Out with our Sacred Anchor! Here she stands,
Balaustion! Strangers, greet the lyric girl!

* * * * *

Why, fast as snow in Thrace, the voyage through,
Has she been falling thick in flakes of him,

* * * * *

And so, although she has some other name,
We only call her Wild-Pomegranate-Flower,
Balaustion; since, where'er the red bloom burns

* * * * *

You shall find food, drink, odour all at once."

He called upon her to save their little band by singing a strophe. But she could do better than that--she could recite a whole play:

"That strangest, saddest, sweetest song of his,
ALKESTIS!"

Only that very year had it reached "Our Isle o' the Rose"; she had seen it, at Kameiros, played just as it was played at Athens, and had learnt by heart "the perfect piece." Now, quick and subtle for all her enthusiasm, she remembers to tell the Sicilians how, besides "its beauty and the way it makes you weep," it does much honour to their own loved deity:

"Herakles, whom you house i' the city here
Nobly, the Temple wide Greece talks about;
I come a suppliant to your Herakles!
Take me and put me on his temple-steps
To tell you his achievement as I may."

"Then," she continues, in a passage which rings out again in the _Apology_:

"Then, because Greeks are Greeks, and hearts are hearts,
And poetry is power--they all outbroke
In a great joyous laughter with much love:
'Thank Herakles for the good holiday!
Make for the harbour! Row, and let voice ring:
_In we row bringing in Euripides!_'"

So did the Rhodians land at Syracuse. And the whole city, hearing the cry "In we row," which was taken up by the crowd around the harbour-quays, came rushing out to meet them, and Balaustion, standing on the topmost step of the Temple of Herakles, told the play:

"Told it, and, two days more, repeated it,
Until they sent us on our way again
With good words and great wishes."

That was her Adventure. Three things happened in it "for herself": a rich Syracusan brought her a whole talent as a gift, and she left it on the tripod as thank-offering to Herakles; a band of the captives--"whom their lords grew kinder to, Because they called the poet countryman"--sent her a crown of wild-pomegranate-flower; and the third thing . . . Petalé, Phullis, Charopé, Chrusion, hear of this also--of the youth who, all the three days that she spoke the play, was found in the gazing, listening audience; and who, when they sailed away, was found in the ship too, "having a hunger to see Athens"; and when they reached Piræus, once again was found, as Balaustion landed, beside her. February's moon is just a-bud when she tells her comrades of this youth; and when that moon rounds full:

"We are to marry. O Euripides!"

* * * * *

Everyone who speaks of _Balaustion's Adventure_ will quote to you that ringing line, for it sums up the high, ardent girl who, even in the exultation of her love, must call upon the worshipped Master. It is this passion for intellectual beauty which sets Balaustion so apart, which makes her so complete and stimulating. She has a mind as well as a heart and soul; she is priestess as well as goddess--Euthukles will have a wife indeed! Every word she speaks is stamped with the Browning marks of gaiety, courage, trust, and with how many others also: those of high-heartedness, deep-heartedness, the true patriotism that cherishes most closely the soul of its country; and then generosity, pride, ardour--all enhanced by woman's more peculiar gifts of gentleness, modesty, tenderness, insight, gravity . . . for Balaustion is like many women in having, for all her gaiety, more sense of happiness than sense of humour. It often comes to me as debatable if this be not the most attractive of deficiencies! Certainly Balaustion persuades us of its power; for in the _Apology_, her refusal of the Aristophanic Comedy is firm-based upon that imputed lack in women. No man, thus poised, could have convinced us of his reality; while she convinces us not only of her reality, but of her rightness. Again, we must applaud our poet's wisdom in choosing woman for the Bald Bard's accuser; she is as potent in this part as in that of Euripides' interpreter.

But what a girl Balaustion is, as well as what a woman! Let us see her with the little band of friends about her, as in the exquisite revocation (in the _Apology_) of the first adventure's telling:

". . . O that Spring,
That eve I told the earlier[101:1] to my friends!
Where are the four now, with each red-ripe mouth
I wonder, does the streamlet ripple still,
Outsmoothing galingale and watermint?

* * * * *

Under the grape-vines, by the streamlet-side,
Close to Baccheion; till the cool increase,
And other stars steal on the evening star,
And so, we homeward flock i' the dusk, we five!"

Then, in the _Adventure_, comes the translation by Browning of the _Alkestis_ of Euripides, which Balaustion is feigned to have spoken upon the temple steps at Syracuse. With this we have here no business, though so entire is his "lyric girl," so fully and perfectly by him conceived, that not a word of the play but might have been Balaustion's own. This surely is a triumph of art--to imagine such a speaker for such a piece, and to blend them both so utterly that the supreme Greek dramatist and this girl are indivisible. What a woman was demanded for such a feat, and what a poet for both! May we not indeed say now that Browning was our singer? Whom but he would have done this--so crowned, so trusted, us, and so persuaded men that women can be great?

"Its beauty, and the way it makes you weep": yes--and the way it makes you thrill with love for Herakles, never before so god-like, because always before too much the apotheosis of mere physical power. But read of him in the _Alkestis_ of Euripides, and you shall feel him indeed divine--"this grand benevolence." . . . We can hear the voice of Balaustion deepen, quiver, and grow grave with gladdened love, as Herakles is fashioned for us by these two men's noble minds.

+ + + + +

When she had told the "perfect piece" to her girl-friends, a sudden inspiration came to her:

"I think I see how . . .
You, I, or anyone might mould a new
Admetos, new Alkestis";

and saying this, a flood of gratitude for the great gift of poetry comes full tide across her soul:

". . . Ah, that brave
Bounty of poets, the one royal race
That ever was, or will be, in this world!
They give no gift that bounds itself and ends
I' the giving and the taking: theirs so breeds
I' the heart and soul o' the taker, so transmutes
The man who only was a man before,
That he grows god-like in his turn, can give--
He also; share the poet's privilege,
Bring forth new good, new beauty from the old.
. . . So with me:
For I have drunk this poem, quenched my thirst,
Satisfied heart and soul--yet more remains!
Could we too make a poem? Try at least,
Inside the head, what shape the rose-mists take!"

And, trying thus, Balaustion, Feminist, portrays the perfect marriage.

Admetos, in Balaustion's and Browning's _Alkestis_, will not let his wife be sacrificed for him:

"Never, by that true word Apollon spoke!
All the unwise wish is unwished, oh wife!"

and he speaks, as in a vision, of the purpose of Zeus in himself.

"This purpose--that, throughout my earthly life,
Mine should be mingled and made up with thine--
And we two prove one force and play one part
And do one thing. Since death divides the pair,
'Tis well that I depart and thou remain
Who wast to me as spirit is to flesh:
Let the flesh perish, be perceived no more,
So thou, the spirit that informed the flesh,
Bend yet awhile, a very flame above
The rift I drop into the darkness by--
And bid remember, flesh and spirit once
Worked in the world, one body, for man's sake.
Never be that abominable show
Of passive death without a quickening life--
Admetos only, no Alkestis now!"

It is so that the man speaks to and of the woman, in Balaustion's and Browning's _Alkestis_.

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 "Sex-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 bestiality 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 Piræus--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 assisting 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 appetites.
Oh, but he grasped them grandly!"

It was no "ignoble 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 associate!"

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

Now begins the long, close argument between them which constitutes _Aristophanes' Apology_. It is (from him) the defence of comedy as he understands and practises it--broad and coarse when necessary; violent and satiric against those who in any way condemn it. Euripides had been one of these, and Balaustion now stands for him. . . . In the long run, it is the defence of "realism" against "idealism," and, as such, involves a whole philosophy of life. We cannot follow it here; all we may do is to indicate the points at which it reveals, as she speaks in it, the character of Balaustion, and the growing charm which such revelation has for her opponent.

At every turn of his argument, Aristophanes is sure of her comprehension. He knows that he need not adapt himself to a feebler mind: "You understand," he says again and again. At length he comes, in his narration, to the end of their feast that night, and tells how, rising from the banquet interrupted by the entrance of Sophocles with tidings of Euripides dead, he had cried to his friends that they must go and see

"The Rhodian rosy with Euripides! . . .
And here you stand with those warm golden eyes!
Maybe, such eyes must strike conviction, turn
One's nature bottom-upwards, show the base . . .
Anyhow, I have followed happily
The impulse, pledged my genius with effect,
Since, come to see you, I am shown--myself!"

She instantly bids him, as she has honoured him, that he do honour to Euripides. But, seized by perversity, he declares that if she will give him the _Herakles_ tablets (which he has discerned, lying with the other gifts of Euripides), he will prove to her, by this play alone, the "main mistake" of her worshipped Master.

She warmly interrupts, reproving him. Their house _is_ the shrine of that genius, and he has entered it, "fresh from his worst infamy"--yet she has withheld the words she longs to speak, she has inclined, nay yearned, to reverence him:

"So you but suffer that I see the blaze
And not the bolt--the splendid fancy-fling,
Not the cold iron malice, the launched lie."

If he does _this_, if he shows her

"A mere man's hand ignobly clenched against
Yon supreme calmness,"

she will interpose:

"Such as you see me! Silk breaks lightning's blow!"

But Aristophanes, at that word of "calmness," exclaims vehemently. Death is the great unfairness! Once a man dead, the survivors croak, "Respect him." And so one must--it is the formidable claim, "immunity of faultiness from fault's punishment." That is why _he_, Aristophanes, has always attacked the living; he knew how they would hide their heads, once dead! Euripides had chosen the other way; "men pelted him, but got no pellet back"; and it was not magnanimity but arrogance that prompted him to such silence. Those at whom Aristophanes or he should fling mud were by that alone immortalised--and Euripides, "that calm cold sagacity," knew better than to do them such service.

As he speaks thus, Balaustion's "heart burns up within her to her tongue." She exclaims that the baseness of Aristophanes' attack, of his "mud-volleying" at Euripides, consists in the fact that both men had, at bottom, the same ideals; they both extended the limitations of art, both were desirous from their hearts that truth should triumph--yet Aristophanes, thus desiring, poured out his supremacy of power against the very creature who loved all that _he_ loved! And she declares that such shame cuts through all his glory. Comedy is in the dust, laid low by him:

"Balaustion pities Aristophanes!"

Now she has gone too far--she has spoken too boldly.

"Blood burnt the cheek-bone, each black eye flashed fierce:
'But this exceeds our license!'"

--so he exclaims; but then, seizing his native weapon, stops ironically to search out an excuse for her. He finds it soon. She and her husband are but foreigners; they are "uninstructed"; the born and bred Athenian needs must smile at them, if he do not think a frown more fitting for such ignorance. But strangers are privileged: Aristophanes will condone. They want to impose their squeamishness on sturdy health: that is at the bottom of it all. Their Euripides had cried "Death!"--deeming death the better life; he, Aristophanes, cries "Life!" If the Euripideans condescend to happiness at all, they merely "talk, talk, talk about the empty name," while the thing itself lies neglected beneath their noses; they

"think out thoroughly how youth should pass--
Just as if youth stops passing, all the same!"

* * * * *

As he proceeds, in the superb defence of his own methods, he sees Balaustion grow ever more indignant. But he conjures her to wait a moment ere she "looses his doom" on him--and at last, drawing to an end, declares that after all the ground of difference between him and her is slight. In so far as it does exist, however, he claims to have won. Euripides, for whom she stands, is beaten in this contest, yet he, Aristophanes, has not even put forth all his power! If she will not acknowledge final defeat:

"Help him, Balaustion! Use the rosy strength!"

--and he urges her to use it all, to "let the whole rage burst in brave attack."

It is evident how he has been moved, despite his boasting--how eagerly he awaits her use of the rosy strength. . . . But she begins meekly enough. She is a woman, she says, and claims no quality "beside the love of all things lovable"; in _that_, she does claim to stand pre-eminent. But men may use, justifiably, different methods from those which women most admire, and so far and because she is a foreigner, as he reminds her, she may be mistaken in her blame of him. Yet foreigners, strangers, will in the ultimate issue be the judges of this matter, and shall they find Aristophanes any more impeccable than she does? (She now begins to put forth the rosy strength!) What is it that he has done? He did not invent comedy! Has he improved upon it? No, she declares. One of his aims is to discredit war. That was an aim of Euripides also; and has Aristophanes yet written anything like the glorious Song to Peace in the _Cresphontes_?

"Come, for the heart within me dies away,
So long dost thou delay!"

She gives this forth, in the old "Syracusan" manner, and is well aware that he can have no answer for her. Again (she proceeds), Euripides discredited war by showing how it outrages the higher feelings: by what method has Aristophanes discredited it? By the obscene allurements of the _Lysistrata_! . . . Thus she takes him through his works, and finally declares that only in "more audaciously lying" has he improved upon the earlier writers of comedy. He has genius--she gladly grants it; but he has debased his genius. The mob indeed has awarded him the crowns: is such crowning the true guerdon?

"Tell him, my other poet--where thou walk'st
Some rarer world than e'er Ilissos washed!"

But as to the immortality of either, who shall say? And is even _that_ the question? No: the question is--did both men wish to waft the white sail of good and beauty on its way? Assuredly. . . . And so she cries at the last: "Your nature too is kingly"; and this is for her the sole source of ardour--she "trusts truth's inherent kingliness"; and the poets are of all men most royal. She never would have dared approach this poet so:

"But that the other king stands suddenly,
In all the grand investiture of death,
Bowing your knee beside my lowly head
--Equals one moment!
--Now arise and go.
Both have done homage to Euripides!"

But he insists that her defence has been oblique--it has been merely an attack on himself. She must defend her poet more directly, or Aristophanes will do no homage. At once she answers that she will, that she has the best, the only, defence at hand. She will read him the _Herakles_, read it as, at Syracuse, she spoke the _Alkestis_.

"Accordingly I read the perfect piece."

It ends with the lament of the Chorus for the departure of Herakles:

"The greatest of all our friends of yore
We have lost for evermore!"

and when Balaustion has chanted forth that strophe, there falls a long silence, on this night of losing a friend.

Aristophanes breaks it musingly. "'Our best friend'--who has been the best friend to Athens, Euripides or I?" And he answers that it is himself, for he has done what he knew he _could_ do, and thus has charmed "the Violet-Crowned"; while Euripides had challenged failure, and had failed. Euripides, he cries, remembering an instance, has been like Thamyris of Thrace, who was blinded by the Muses for daring to contend with them in song; _he_, Aristophanes, "stands heart-whole, no Thamyris!" He seizes the psalterion--Balaustion must let him use it for once--and sings the song, from Sophocles, of Thamyris marching to his doom.

He gives some verses,[117:1] then breaks off in laughter, having, as he says, "sung content back to himself," since he is _not_ Thamyris, but Aristophanes. . . . They shall both be pleased with his next play; it shall be serious, "no word more of the old fun," for "death defends," and moreover, Balaustion has delivered her admonition so soundly! Thus he departs, in all friendliness:

"Farewell, brave couple! Next year, welcome me!"

It is "next year," and Balaustion and Euthukles are fleeing across the water to Rhodes from Athens. This year has seen the death of Sophocles; and the greatest of all the Aristophanic triumphs in the _Frogs_. It was all _him_, Balaustion says:

"There blazed the glory, there shot black the shame"

--it showed every facet of his genius, and in it Bacchos himself was "duly dragged through the mire," and Euripides, after all the promises, was more vilely treated than ever before.

"So, Aristophanes obtained the prize,
And so Athenai felt she had a friend
Far better than her 'best friend,' lost last year."

But then, what happened? The great battle of Ægos Potamos was fought and lost, and Athens fell into the hands of the Spartans. The conqueror's first words were, "Down with the Piræus! Peace needs no bulwarks." At first the stupefied Athenians had been ready to obey--but when the next decree came forth, "No more democratic government; _we_ shall appoint your oligarchs!" the dreamers were stung awake by horror; they started up a-stare, their hands refused their office.

"Three days they stood, stared--stonier than their walls."

Lysander, the Spartan general, angered by the dumb delay, called a conference, issued decree. Not the Piræus only, but all Athens should be destroyed; every inch of the "mad marble arrogance" should go, and so at last should peace dwell there.

* * * * *

Balaustion stands, recalling this to Euthukles, who writes her words . . . and now, though she does not name it so, she tells the third "supreme adventure" of her life. When that decree had sounded, and the Spartans' shout of acquiescence had died away:

"Then did a man of Phokis rise--O heart! . . .
_Who_ was the man of Phokis rose and flung
A flower i' the way of that fierce foot's advance"

--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 assembled 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 Piræus 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 passing 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 ship she had saved in the first Adventure! The ship 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 anticipate 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: