Part 25 (2/2)
But huge the eyeb.a.l.l.s rolled back native fire, Imperiously triumphant: nostrils wide Waited their incense; while the pursed mouth's pout Aggressive, while the beak supreme above, While the head, face, nay, pillared throat thrown back, Beard whitening under like a vinous foam, There made a glory, of such insolence-- I thought,--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.
Impudent and majestic: drunk, perhaps, But that's religion; sense too plainly snuffed: Still, sensuality was grown a rite.
We see the man, the natural man, to the life. But as the poem goes on, we company with his intellect and soul, with the struggle of sensualism against his knowledge of a more ideal life; above all, with one, who indulging the appet.i.tes and senses of the natural man, is yet, at a moment, their master. The coa.r.s.e chambers of his nature are laid bare, his sensuous pleasure in the lower forms of human life, his joy in satirising them, his contempt for the good or the ideal life if it throw the sensual man away. Then, we are made to know the power he has to rise above this--without losing it--into the higher imaginative region where, for the time, he feels the genius of Sophocles, Euripides, the moral power of Balaustion, and the beauty of the natural world. Indeed, in that last we find him in his extant plays. Few of the Greeks could write with greater exquisiteness of natural beauty than this wild poet who loved the dunghill. And Browning does not say this, but records in this _Apology_ how when Aristophanes is touched for an instant by Balaustion's reading of the _Herakles_, and seizing the psalterion sings the song of Thamuris marching to his trial with the Muses through a golden autumn morning--it is the glory and loveliness of nature that he sings. This portraiture of the poet is scattered through the whole poem.
It is too minute, too full of detail to dwell on here. It has a thousand touches of life and intimacy. And it is perhaps the finest thing Browning has done in portraiture of character. But then there was a certain sympathy in Browning for Aristophanes. The natural man was never altogether put aside by Browning.
Lastly, there is the fresh presentation of Balaustion, of the matured and experienced woman whom we have known as a happy girl. Euthycles and she are married, and one night, as she is sitting alone, he comes in, bringing the grave news that Euripides is dead, but had proved at the court of Archelaos of Macedonia his usefulness as counsellor to King and State, and his power still to sing--
Clashed thence _Alkaion_, maddened _Pentheus'_ up; Then music sighed itself away, one moan Iphigeneia made by Aulis' strand; With her and music died Euripides.
And Athens, hearing, ceased to mock and cried ”Bury Euripides in Peiraios, bring his body back.” ”Ah,” said Balaustion, ”Death alters the point of view. But our tribute is in our hearts; and more, his soul will now for ever teach and bless the world.
Is not that day come? What if you and I Re-sing the song, inaugurate the fame?
For, like Herakles, in his own _Alkestis_, he now strides away (and this is the true end of the _Alkestis_) to surmount all heights of destiny.”
While she spoke thus, the Chorus of the Comedy, girls, boys, and men, in drunken revel and led by Aristophanes, thundered at the door and claimed admittance. Balaustion is drawn confronting them--tall and superb, like Victory's self; her warm golden eyes flas.h.i.+ng under her black hair, ”earth flesh with sun fire,” statuesque, searching the crowd with her glance. And one and all dissolve before her silent splendour of reproof, all save Aristophanes. She bids him welcome. ”Glory to the Poet,” she cries. ”Light, light, I hail it everywhere; no matter for the murk, that never should have been such orb's a.s.sociate.” Aristophanes changes as he sees her; a new man confronts her.
”So!” he smiled, ”piercing to my thought at once, You see myself? Balaustion's fixed regard Can strip the proper Aristophanes Of what our sophists, in their jargon, style His accidents?”
He confesses her power to meet him in discourse, unfolds his views and plans to her, and having contrasted himself with Euripides, bids her use her thrice-refined refinement, her rosy strength, to match his argument.
She claims no equality with him, the consummate creator; but only, as a woman, the love of all things lovable with which to meet him who has degraded Comedy. She appeals to the high poet in the man, and finally bids him honour the deep humanity in Euripides. To prove it, and to win his accord, she reads the _Herakles_, the last of Euripides.
It is this long night of talk which Balaustion dictates to Euthycles as she is sailing, day after day, from Athens back to Rhodes. The aspect of sea and sky, as they sail, is kept before us, for Balaustion uses its changes as ill.u.s.trations, and the clear descriptions tell, even more fully than before, how quick this woman was to observe natural beauty and to correlate it with humanity. Here is one example. In order to describe a change in the temper of Aristophanes from wild license to momentary gravity, Balaustion seizes on a cloud-incident of the voyage--Euthycles, she cries,
... ”o'er the boat side, quick, what change, Watch--in the water! But a second since, It laughed a ripply spread of sun and sea, Ray fused with wave, to never disunite.
Now, sudden, all the surface hard and black, Lies a quenched light, dead motion: what the cause?
Look up, and lo, the menace of a cloud Has solemnised the sparkling, spoiled the sport!
Just so, some overshadow, some new care Stopped all the mirth and mocking on his face.”
Her feeling for nature is as strong us her feeling for man, and both are woven together.
All her powers have now ripened, and the last touch has been given to them by her ideal sorrow for Athens, the country of her soul, where high intelligence and imagination had created worlds. She leaves it now, ruined and degraded, and the pa.s.sionate outbreak of her patriotic sorrow with which the poem opens lifts the character and imagination of Balaustion into spiritual splendour. Athens, ”hearted in her heart,” has perished ign.o.bly. Not so, she thinks, ought this beauty of the world to have died, its sea-walls razed to the ground to the fluting and singing of harlots; but in some vast overwhelming of natural energies--in the embrace of fire to join the G.o.ds; or in a sundering of the earth, when the Acropolis should have sunken entire and risen in Hades to console the ghosts with beauty; or in the mult.i.tudinous over-swarming of ocean.
This she could have borne, but, thinking of what has been, of the misery and disgrace, ”Oh,” she cries, ”bear me away--wind, wave and bark!” But Browning does not leave Balaustion with only this deep emotion in her heart. He gives her the spiritual pa.s.sion of genius. She is swept beyond her sorrow into that invisible world where the soul lives with the G.o.ds, with the pure Ideas of justice, truth and love; where immortal life awaits the disembodied soul and we shall see Euripides. In these high thoughts she will outlive her sorrow.
Why should despair be? Since, distinct above Man's wickedness and folly, flies the wind And floats the cloud, free transport for our soul Out of its fleshly durance dim and low,-- Since disembodied soul antic.i.p.ates (Thought-borne as now, in rapturous unrestraint) Above all crowding, crystal silentness, Above all noise, a silver solitude:-- Surely, where thought so bears soul, soul in time May permanently bide, ”a.s.sert the wise,”
There live in peace, there work in hope once more-- O nothing doubt, Philemon! Greed and strife, 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!
Heaven, earth and sea, my warrant--in their name, Believe--o'er falsehood, truth is surely sphered, O'er ugliness beams beauty, o'er this world Extends that realm where, ”as the wise a.s.sert,”
Philemon, thou shalt see Euripides Clearer than mortal sense perceived the man!
We understand that she has drunk deep of Socrates, that her spiritual sense reached onward to the Platonic Socrates. In this supersensuous world of thought she is quieted out of the weakness which made her miserable over the fall of Athens; and in the quiet, Browning, who will lift his favourite into perfectness, adds to her spiritual imagination the dignity of that moral judgment which the intellect of genius gathers from the facts of history. In spite of her sorrow, she grasps the truth that there was justice in the doom of Athens. Let justice have its way.
Let the folk die who pulled her glory down. This is her prophetic strain, the strength of the Hebrew in the Greek.
And then the prophet in the woman pa.s.ses, and the poet in her takes the lyre. She sees the splendid sunset. Why should its extravagance of glory run to waste? Let me build out of it a new Athens, quarry out the golden clouds and raise the Acropolis, and the rock-hewn Place of a.s.sembly, whence new orators may thunder over Greece; and the theatre where aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, G.o.dlike still, may contend for the prize. Yet--and there is a further change of thought--yet that may not be. To build that poetic vision is to slip away from reality, and the true use of it. The tragedy is there--irrevocable. Let it sink deep in us till we see Rhodes s.h.i.+ning over the sea. So great, so terrible, so piteous it is, that, dwelt on in the soul and seen in memory, it will do for us what the great tragedians made their tragic themes do for their hearers. It will purify the heart by pity and terror from the baseness and littleness of life. Our small hatreds, jealousies and prides, our petty pa.s.sions will be rebuked, seem nothing in its mighty sorrow.
What else in life seems piteous any more After such pity, or proves terrible Beside such terror;
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