Chapter XIV: Book THE SIXTH (4)

The reading was about to begin, when suddenly there was torch-light--a burst of comic singing--and a knocking at the door; Bacchus bade them open; they delayed. Then a name was uttered, of "authoritative" sound, of "immense significance;" and the door was opened to--Aristophanes. He was returning from the performance of his "Thesmophoriazusae,"[34] last year a failure, but this time, thanks to some new and audacious touches, a brilliant success. His chorus trooped before him--himself no more sober than was his wont--crowned, triumphant, and drunk; a group of flute-boys and dancing-girls making up the scene. All these, however, slunk away before Balaustion's glance, Aristophanes alone confronting her. And, as she declares, it was "no ignoble presence." For the broad brow, the flushed cheek, the commanding features, the defiant attitude, all betokened a mind, wantoning among the lower passions, but yet master of them.

He addresses Balaustion in a tone of mock deference; banters her on her poetic name, her dignified mien, and the manner in which she has scared his chorus and its followers away; "not indeed that that matters, since the archon's economy and the world's squeamishness will soon abolish it altogether."[35] Then struck by a passing thought, he stands grave, silent--another man in short--awaiting what she has to say.

In this sober moment, Balaustion welcomes him to her house. She welcomes him as the Good Genius: as genius of the kindly, though purifying humour, which, like summer lighting, illumines, but does not destroy. She knows and implies that he is not only this. But she greets the light, no matter to what darkness it be allied. She reverences the god who forms one half of him, so long as the monster which constitutes the other, remains out of sight; a poetic myth is made to illustrate this feeling. The gravity, however, is short-lived. The lower self in Aristophanes springs up again, and his "apology" begins.

"Aristophanes' APOLOGY" is a defence of comedy, as understood and practised by himself: that is, as a broad expression of the natural life, and a broad satire upon those who directly or indirectly condemn it. It is addressed to Euripides in the person of his disciple. It is at the same time an attack upon him; and in either capacity it covers a great deal of ground. For the dispute does not lie simply between comedy and tragedy--which latter, with the old tragedians, was often only the naturalism of comedy on a larger scale--but between naturalism and humanity, as more advanced thinkers understood it; between the old ideas of human and divine conveyed by tragedy and comedy alike, and the new ones which Euripides, the friend of Socrates, had imported into them; and the question at issue involved, therefore, not only art and morals, but the entire philosophy of life. The "Apology" derives farther interest and significance from the varied emotions by which it is inspired. The speaker (as is the case in "Fifine at the Fair") is answering not only his opponent, but his own conscience. How the conscience of Aristophanes has been aroused he presently tells: first struggling a little with the false shame which the experience has left behind. This is the scene which he describes.

A festive supper had followed the successful play. Jollity was at its height. The cup was being crowned to Aristophanes as the "Triumphant," when a knock came to the door: and there entered no "asker of questions," no casual passer-by, but the pale, majestic, heavily-draped figure of Sophocles himself. Slowly, solemnly, and with bent head, he passed up the hall, between two ranks of spectators as silent as himself; raised his eyes as he confronted the priest,[36] and announced to him, that since Euripides was "dead to-day," and as a fitting spectacle for the god, his chorus would appear at the greater feast, next month, clothed in black and ungarlanded. Then silently, and amidst silence, he passed out again.

This, then, was the purport of the important news which was known to have arrived in port, but which every one had interpreted in his own way. Euripides was no more! But neither the news nor he who brought it could create more than a momentary stupor; and the tipsy fun soon renewed itself, at the expense of the living tragedian and the dead. Aristophanes alone remained grave. The value of the man whom he had aspersed and ridiculed stood out before him summed up by the hand of Death. He recalled the failure which had marked the now hopeless limitation of his own genius, and those last words addressed to him by Euripides which brought home its lesson.[37] The archon, "Master of the Feast," judging that its "glow" was "extinct," had risen to conclude it by crowning the parting cup. He had crowned it with judicious reserve to the "Good Genius;" and Strattis (the comic poet) had burst forth in an eulogium of the Comic Muse which claimed the title of Good Genius for her--when yielding to this new and over-mastering impulse, he (Aristophanes) checked the coming applause, and demanded that the Tragic Muse and her ministrant Euripides should receive the libation instead; justifying the demand by a noble and pathetic tribute to the memory of the dead poet, and to the great humanities which only the _tragic_ poet can represent.

But he found no response. The listeners mistook his seriousness for satire, and broke out afresh at the excellence of such a joke; and recovering his presence of mind as quickly as he had lost it, he changed his tone, thanked those alike who had laughed with him, and who had wept with the "Lord of Tears;" and desired that the cup be consecrated to that genius of complex poetry which is tragedy and comedy in one. It was sacrilege, he declared, to part these two; for to do so was to hack at the Hermai[38]--to outrage the ideal union of the intellectual and the sensuous life in man. And from this new vantage-ground he launched another bolt at Euripides, whose coldness, he asserted, had belied this union, and made him guilty of a crime inexpiable in the sight of the gods.

Yet he could not dismiss him from his thoughts. He wanted to go over the old ground with him, and put himself in the right. Balaustion and her husband were in a manner representatives of the dead tragedian. That was why he had come. He was not sure that he expressed, or at the moment even felt, all that he had just repeated. "Drunk he was with the good Thasian, and drunk he probably had been." Nevertheless, the impulse he had thus obeyed sprang perhaps from some real, if hitherto undiscovered depths in his soul.

Up to this moment his defence has been carried on in a disjointed manner, and consists rather in defying attack than in resisting it: the defiant mood being only another aspect of the perturbed condition which has brought him to Balaustion's door. It finds its natural starting-point in the coarse treatment of things and persons which his "Thesmophoriazusae," with its "monkeying" of Euripides,[39] has so recently displayed. But he reminds Balaustion that the art of comedy is young. It is only three generations since Susarion gave it birth. (He explains this more fully later on.) It began when he and his companions daubed their faces with wine lees, mounted a cart, and drove by night through the villages: crying from house to house, how this man starved his labourers, that other kissed his neighbour's wife, and so on. The first comedian battered with big stones. He, Aristophanes, is at the stage of the wooden club which he has taken pains to plane smooth, and inlay with shining studs. The mere polished steel will be for his successors.

"And is he approaching the age of steel?" Balaustion asks, well knowing that he is not. "His play failed last year. Was his triumph to-night due to a gentler tone? Is he teaching mankind that brute blows are not human fighting, still less the expression of godlike power; and that ignorance and folly are convicted by their opposites, not by themselves?"

"Not he, indeed," he replies; "he improves on his art: he does not turn it topsy-turvy. _He_ does not work on abstractions. _His_ power is not that of the recluse. He wants human beings with their approbation and their sympathy, and his Athens, to be pleased in her own way. He leaves the rest to Euripides. Real life is the grist to _his_ mill. It is clear enough, however, that the times are against him. Every year more restrictions; Euripides with his priggishness; Socrates with his books and his moonshine, and his supercilious ways: never resenting his (Aristophanes') fun, nor seeming even to notice it[40], not condescending to take exception to any but the 'tragedians;' as if he, the author of the 'Birds,' was a mere comic poet!" Then follows a tirade on the variety of his subjects; their depth, their significance, and the mawkishness and pedantry which they are intended to confute.

"Drunk! yes, he owns that he is." This in answer to a look from Balaustion, which has rebuked a too hazardous joke--"Drink is the proper inspiration. How else was he beaten in the 'Clouds,' his masterpiece, but that his opponent had inspired himself with drink, and he this time had not?[41] Purity! he has learned what that is worth"--With more in the same strain. Now, however, that his adventure is told, the tumult of feeling in some degree subsides, and the more serious aspects of the apology will come into play.

Balaustion and her husband, seeing the sober mood return, once more welcome "the glory of Aristophanes" to their house, and bid him on his side share in their solemnity, and commemorate Euripides with them. This calls his attention to the portrait of the dead poet; those implements of his work which were his tokens of friendship to Balaustion; the papyrus leaf inscribed with the Herakles itself; and he cannot resist a sneer at this again unsuccessful play. His hostess rebukes him grandly for completing the long outrage on the living man by this petty attack on his "supreme calm;" and as supreme calmness means death, he begins musing on the immunities which death confers, and their injustice. "Give him only time and he will pulverize his opponents; _he_ will show them whether this work of his is unintelligible, or that other will not live. But let them die; and they slink out of his reach with their malice, stupidity, and ignorance, while survivors croak 'respect the dead' over the hole in which they are laid. At all events, he retorts on them when he can--unwisely perhaps, since those he flings mud at are only immortalized by the process. Euripides knew better than to follow his example."

Again Balaustion has her answer. "He has volleyed mud at Euripides himself while pretending to defend the same cause: the cause of art, of knowledge, of justice, and of truth;" and she makes his cheek burn by reminding him of what petty and what ignoble witticisms that mud was made up. At last he begins in real earnest. "Balaustion, he understands, condemns comedy both in theory and in practice, from the calm and rational heights to which she, with her tragic friend, has attained. Here are his arguments in its favour."

"It claims respect as an institution, because as such it is coeval with liberty--born of the feast of Bacchus, and therefore of the good gifts of the earth--a mode of telling truth without punishment, and of chastising without doing harm. It claims respect by its advance from simple objects to more composite, from plain thumping to more searching modes of attack. The men who once exposed wrong-doing by shouting it before the wrong-doer's door, now expose it by representing its various forms. The comic poets denounce not only the thief, the fool, the miser, but the advocates of war, the flatterers of the populace, the sophists who set up Whirligig[42] in the place of Zeus, the thin-blooded tragedian in league with the sophists, who preaches against the flesh. Where facts are insufficient he has recourse to fancy, and exaggerates the wronged truth the more strongly to enforce it (here follows a characteristic illustration.) To those who call Saperdion the Empousa, he shows her in a Kimberic robe;[43] in other words, he exposes her charms more fully than she does it herself, the better to convict those who malign them."

And here lies his grudge against Euripides. Euripides is one of those who call Saperdion a monster--who slander the world of sense with its beauties and its enjoyments, or who contemptuously set it aside. "Born on the day of Salamis--when heroes walked the earth; and gods were reverenced and not discussed--when Greeks guarded their home with its abundant joys, and left barbarian lands to their own starvation--he has lived to belie every tradition of that triumphant time. He has joined himself with a band of starved teachers and reformers to cut its very foundations away. He exalts death over life, misery over happiness; or, if he admits happiness, it is as an empty name."

"Moreover, he reasons away the gods; for they are, according to him, only forms of nature. Zeus _is_ the atmosphere. Poseidon _is_ the sea. Necessity rules the universe. Duty, once the will of the gods, is now a voice within ourselves bidding us renounce pleasure, and giving us no inducement to do so."

"He reasons away morality, for he shows there is neither right nor wrong, neither 'yours' nor 'mine,' nor natural privilege, nor natural subjection, that may not be argued equally for or against. Why be in such a hurry to pay one's debt, to attend one's mother, to bring a given sacrifice?"

"He reasons away social order, for he declares the slave as good as his master, woman equal to man, and even the people competent to govern itself. 'Why should not the tanner, the lampseller, or the mealman, who knows his own business so well, know that of the State too?'"

"He ignores the function of poetry, which is to see beauty, and to create it: for he places utility above grace, truth above all beauty. He drags human squalor on to the scene because he recognizes its existence. The world of the poet's fancy, that world into which he was born, does not exist for him. He spoils his art as well as his life, carving back to bull what another had carved into a sphinx."

"How are such proceedings to be dealt with? They appeal to the mob. The mob is not to be swayed by polished arguments or incidental hints. We don't scare sparrows with a Zeus' head, though the eagle may recognize it as his lord's. A big Priapus is the figure required."

"And this," so Aristophanes resumes his defence, "comedy supplies. Comedy is the fit instrument of popular conviction: and the wilder, the more effective: since it is the worship of life, of the originative power of nature; and since that power has lawlessness for its apparent law. Even Euripides, with his shirkings and his superiority, has been obliged to pay tribute to the real. He could not shake it off all at once. He tacked a Satyric play to some five of his fifty trilogies: and if this was grim enough at first, he threw off the mask in Alkestis, showing how one could be indecent in a decent way."[44]

For the reasons above given, which he farther expands and illustrates, Aristophanes chooses the "meaner muse" for his exponent. "And who, after all, is the worse for it? Does he strangle the enemies of the truth? No. He simply doses them with comedy, _i.e._ with words. Those who offend in words he pays back in them, exaggerating a little, but only so as to emphasize what he means; just as love and hate use each other's terms, because those proper to themselves have grown unmeaning from constant use. And what is the ground of difference between Balaustion and himself? Slender enough, in all probability, as he could show her, if they were discussing the question for themselves alone. As it is, Euripides has attacked him in the sight of the mob. His defence is addressed to it: he uses the arguments it can understand. It does not follow that they convey a literal statement of his own views. Euripides is not the only man who is free from superstition. He too on occasion can show up the gods;" and he describes the manner in which he will do this in his next play. All that is serious in the Apology is given in the concluding passage. "Whomever else he is hard upon, he will level nothing worse than a harmless parody at Sophocles, for he has no grudge against him:--

'He founds no anti-school, upsets no faith,
But, living, lets live,' (vol. xiii. p. 110.)

And all his, Aristophanes', teaching is this:--

'... accept the old,
Contest the strange! acknowledge work that's done,
Misdoubt men who have still their work to do!' (p. 111.)

He has summed up his case. Euripides must own himself beaten. If Balaustion will not admit the defeat, let her summon her rosy strength, and do her worst against his opponent."

Balaustion pauses for a moment before relating her answer to this challenge: and gives us to understand that, in thus relieving her memory, she is reproducing not only this special experience, but a great deal of what she habitually thinks and feels; thus silencing any sense of the improbable, which so lengthened an argument accurately remembered, might create in the reader's mind.

Her tone is at first deprecating. "It is not for her, a mere mouse, to argue on a footing of equality with a forest monarch like himself. It is not for her to criticize the means by which his genius may attain its ends. She does not forget that the poet-class is that essentially which labours in the cause of human good. She does not forget that she is a woman, who may recoil from methods which a man is justified in employing. Lastly, she is a foreigner, and as such may blame many things simply because she does not understand them. She may yet have to learn that the tree stands firm at root, though its boughs dip and dance before the wind. She may yet have to learn that those who witness his plays have been previously braced to receive the good and reject the evil in them, like the freshly-bathed hand which passes unhurt through flame. She may judge falsely from what she sees."

"But," she continues,[45] "let us imagine a remote future, and a far-away place--say the Cassiterides[46]--and men and women, lonely and ignorant--strangers in very deed--but with feelings similar to our own. Let us suppose that some work of Zeuxis or Pheidias has been transported to their shores, and that they are compelled to acknowledge its excellence from its own point of view--its colouring true to nature, though not to their own type--its unveiled forms decorous, though not conforming to their own standard of decorum. Might they not still, and justly, tax it on its own ground with some flaw or incongruity, which proved the artist to have been human? And may not a stranger, judging you in the same way, recognize in you one part of peccant humanity, poet 'three parts divine' though you be?"

"You declare comedy to be a prescriptive rite, coeval in its birth with liberty. But the great days of Greek national life had been reached when comedy began. You declare also that you have refined on the early practice, and imported poetry into it. Comedy is therefore, as you defend it, not only a new invention, but your own. And, finally, you declare your practice of it inspired by a fixed purpose. You must stand or fall by the degree in which this purpose has been attained."

"You would, by means of comedy, discredit war. Do you stand alone in this endeavour?" And she quotes a beautiful passage from 'Cresphontes,' a play written by Euripides for the same end. "And how, respectively, have you sought your end? Euripides, by appealing to the nobler feelings which are outraged by war; you, by expatiating on the animal enjoyments which accompany peace. The 'Lysistrata' is your equivalent for 'Cresphontes.' Do you imagine that its obscene allurements will promote the cause of peace? Not till heroes have become mean voluptuaries, and Cleonymos,[47] whom you yourself have derided, becomes their type."

"You would discredit vice and error, hypocrisy, sophistry and untruth. You expose the one in all its seductions, and the other in grotesque exaggerations, which are themselves a lie; showing yourself the worst of sophists--one who plays false to his own soul."

"You would improve on former methods of comedy. You have returned to its lowest form. For you profess to strike at folly, not at him who commits it: yet your tactics are precisely to belabour every act or opinion of which you disapprove, in the form of some one man. You pride yourself, in fact, on giving personal blows, instead of general and theoretical admonitions; and even here you seem incapable of hitting fair; you libel where you cannot honestly convict, and do not care how ignoble or how irrelevant the libel may be. Does the poet deserve criticism as such? Does he write bad verse, does he inculcate foul deeds? The cry is, 'he cannot read or write;' 'he is extravagant in buying fish;' 'he allows someone to help him with his verse, and make love to his wife in return;' 'his uncle deals in crockery;' 'his mother sold herbs' (one of his pet taunts against Euripides); 'he is a housebreaker, a footpad, or, worst of all, a stranger;'"--a term of contempt which, as Balaustion reminds him has been repeatedly bestowed upon himself.

"What have you done," she continues, "beyond devoting the gold of your genius to work, which dross, in the person of a dozen predecessors or contemporaries, has produced as well. Pun and parody, satire and invective, quaintness of fancy, and elegance, have each had its representative as successful as you. Your life-work, until this moment, has been the record of a genius increasingly untrue to its better self. Such satire as yours, however well intended, could advance no honest cause. Its exaggerations make it useless for either praise or blame. Its uselessness is proved by the result: your jokes have recoiled upon yourself. The statues still stand which your mud has stained; the lightning flash of truth can alone destroy them. War still continues, in spite of the seductions with which you have invested peace. Such improvements as are in progress take an opposite direction to that which you prescribe. Public sense and decency are only bent on cleansing your sty."

And now her tone changes. "Has Euripides succeeded any better? None can say; for he spoke to a dim future above and beyond the crowd. If he fail, you two will be fellows in adversity; and, meanwhile, I am convinced that your wish unites with his to waft the white sail on its way.[48] Your nature, too, is kingly." She concludes with a tribute to the "Poet's Power," which is one with creative law, above and behind all potencies of heaven and earth; and to that inherent royalty of truth, in which alone she could venture to approach one so great as he. He too, as poet, must reign by truth, if he assert his proper sway.

"Nor, even so, had boldness nerved my tongue,
But that the other king stands suddenly
In all the grand investiture of death,
Bowing your knee beside my lowly head--
Equals one moment!" (vol. xiii. p. 144.)

Then she bids him "arise and go." Both have done homage to Euripides.

"Not so," he replies; "their discussion is not at an end. She has defended Euripides obliquely by attacking himself. Let her do it in a more direct fashion." This leads up to what seems to her the best defence possible: that reading of the "Herakles" which the entrance of Aristophanes had suspended. Its closing lines set Aristophanes musing. The chorus has said:

"The greatest of all our friends of yore,
We have lost for evermore!" (p. 231.)

"Who," he asks, "has been Athens' best friend? He who attracted her by the charm of his art, or he who repelled her by its severity?" He answers this by describing the relative positions of himself and Euripides in an image suggested by the popular game of Cottabos.[49] "The one was fixed within his 'globe;' the other adapted himself to its rotations. Euripides received his views of life through a single aperture, the one channel of 'High' and 'Right.' Aristophanes has welcomed also the opposite impressions of 'Low' and 'Wrong,' and reproduced all in their turn. Some poet of the future, born perhaps in those Cassiterides, may defy the mechanics of the case, and place himself in such a position as to see high and low at once--be Tragic and Comic at the same time. But he meanwhile has been Athens' best friend--her wisest also--since he has not challenged failure by attempting what he could not perform. He has not risked the fate of Thamyris, who was punished for having striven with the higher powers, as if his vision had been equal to their own."[50] And he recites a fragment of song, which Mr. Browning unfortunately has not completed, describing the fiery rapture in which that poet marched, all unconscious, to his doom. Some laughing promise and prophecy ensues, and Aristophanes departs, in the 'rose-streaked morning grey,' bidding the couple farewell till the coming year.

That year has come and gone. Sophocles has died: and Aristophanes has attained his final triumph in the "Frogs"--a play flashing with every variety of his genius--as softly musical in the mystics' chorus as croaking in that of the frogs--in which Bacchus himself is ridiculed, and Euripides is more coarsely handled than ever. And once more the voice of Euripides has interposed between the Athenians and their doom.[51] When Ægos Potamos had been fought, and Athens was in Spartan hands, Euthykles flung the "choric flower" of the "Electra" in the face of the foe, and

"... because Greeks are Greeks, though Sparté's brood,
And hearts are hearts, though in Lusandros' breast,
And poetry is power,...." (p. 253.)

the city itself was spared. But when tragedy ceased, comedy was allowed its work, and it danced away the Piræan bulwarks, which were demolished, by Lysander's command, to the sound of the flute.

And now Euthykles and Balaustion are nearing Rhodes. Their master lies buried in the land to which they have bidden farewell; but the winds and waves of their island home bear witness to his immortality: for theirs seems the voice of nature, re-echoing the cry, "There are no gods, no gods!" his prophetic, if unconscious, tribute to the One God, "who saves" him.

Balaustion has no genuine historic personality. She is simply what Mr. Browning's purpose required: a large-souled woman, who could be supposed to echo his appreciation of these two opposite forms of genius, and express his judgments upon them. But the Euripides she depicts is entirely constructed from his works; while her portrait of Aristophanes shows him not only as his works reflect, but as contemporary criticism represented him; he is one of the most vivid of Mr. Browning's characters. The two transcripts from Euripides seem enough to prove that that poet was far more human than Aristophanes professed to think; but the belief of Aristophanes in the practical asceticism of his rival was in some degree justified by popular opinion, if not in itself just; and we can understand his feeling at once rebuked and irritated by a contempt for the natural life which carried with it so much religious and social change. Aristophanes was a believer in the value of conservative ideas, though not himself a slave to them. He was also a great poet, though often very false to his poetic self. Such a man might easily fancy that one like Euripides was untrue to the poetry, because untrue to the joyousness of existence; and that he shook even the foundations of morality by reasoning away the religious conceptions which were bound up with natural joys. The impression we receive from Aristophanes' Apology is that he is defending something which he believes to be true, though conscious of defending it by sophistical arguments, and of having enforced it by very doubtful deeds; and we also feel that from his point of view, and saving his apparent inconsistencies, Mr. Browning is in sympathy with him. At the same time, Balaustion's rejoinder is unanswerable, as it is meant to be; and the double monologue distinguishes itself from others of the same group, by being not only more dramatic and more emotional, but also more conclusive; it is the only one of them in which the question raised is not, in some degree, left open.

The poem bristles with local allusions and illustrations which puzzle the non-classical reader. I add an explanatory index to some names of things and persons which have not occurred in my brief outline of it.

Vol. xiii. p. 4. _Koré._ (Virgin.) Name given to Persephoneé. In Latin, Proserpina.

P. 6. _Dikast_ and _Heliast._ Dicast=Judge, Heliast=Juryman, in Athens.

P. 7. 1. _Kordax-step._ 2. _Propulaia._ (Propylaia.) 1. An indecent dance. 2. Gateway of the Acropolis. 3. _Pnux._ (Pnyx.) 4. _Bema._ 3. Place for the Popular Assembly. 4. Place whence speeches were made.

P. 8 _Makaria._ Heroine in a play of Euripides, who killed herself for her country's sake.

P. 10. 1. _Milesian smart-place._ 2. _Phrunikos._ (Phrynicus.) 1. The painful remembrance of the capture of Miletus. 2. A dramatic poet, who made this capture the subject of a tragedy, "which, when performed (493), so painfully wrung the feelings of the Athenian audience that they burst into tears in the theatre, and the poet was condemned to pay a fine of 1,000 drachmai, as having recalled to them their own misfortunes."[52] He is derided by Aristophanes in the "Frogs" for his method of introducing his characters.

P. 12. _Amphitheos, Deity, and Dung._ A character in the Acharnians of Aristophanes--"not a god, and yet immortal."

P. 14. 1. _Diaulos._ 2. _Stade._ 1. A double line of the Race-course. 2. The _Stadium_, on reaching which, the runner went back again.

P. 16. _City of Gapers._ Nickname of Athens, from the curiosity of its inhabitants.

P. 17. _Koppa-marked._ Race-horses of the best breed were marked with the old letter Koppa.

P. 18. _Comic Platon._ The comic writer of that name: author of plays and poems, _not_ THE Plato.

P. 21. _Salabaccho._ Name of a courtesan.

P. 30. _Cheek-band._ Band worn by trumpeters to support the cheeks. _Cuckoo-apple._ Fruit so-called=fool-making food. _Threttanelo_, _Neblaretai_. Imitative sounds: 1. Of a harp-string. 2. Of any joyous cry. _Three-days' salt-fish slice._ Allowance of a soldier on an expedition. (It was supposed that at the end of this time he could forage for himself.)

P. 31. _Goat's breakfast and other abuse._ Indecent allusions, to be fancied, not explained.

P. 32. _Sham Ambassadors._ Characters in the Acharnians. _Kudathenian._ Famous Athenian. _Pandionid._ Descendant of Pandion, King of Athens. _Goat-Song._ Tragoedia--Tradegy. It was called goat-song because a goat-skin, probably filled with wine, was once given as a prize for it. The expression occurs in Shelley.

P. 33. _Willow-Wicker Flask._ Nickname of the poet it is applied to, a toper.

P. 36. _Lyric Shell or Tragic Barbiton._ Lesser and larger lyre.

P. 38. _Sousarion._ Susarion of Megara, inventor of Attic comedy. _Chionides._ His successor.

P. 39. _Little-in-the-Fields._ The Dionysian Feast; a lesser one than the City Dionysia.

P. 40. _Ameipsias._ A comic poet, contemporary with Aristophanes, whose two best plays he beat.

P. 42. _Iostephanos._ "Violet-crowned," name of Athens. _Kleophon._ A demagogue of bad character, attacked by Aristophanes as profligate, and an enemy of peace. _Kleonumos._ A similar character; also a big fellow, and great coward.

P. 43. _Telekleides._ Old comic poet, on the same side as Aristophanes. _Mullos and Euetes._ Comic poets who revived the art of comedy in Athens after Susarion.

P. 44. _Morucheides._ Son of Morychus--like his father, a comic poet and a glutton. _Sourakosios._ Another comic poet.

P. 46. _Trilophos._ Wearer of three crests on his helmet.

P. 47. _Ruppapai._ Word used by the crew in rowing--hence, the crew itself.

P. 49. _Free dinner in the Prutaneion._ (Prytaneion.) Such was accorded to certain privileged persons. _Ariphrades._ A man of infamous character, singer to the harp: persistently attacked by Aristophanes. _Karkinos._ Comic actor: had famous dancing sons.

P. 50. _Exomis._ A woman's garment. _Parachoregema._ Subordinate chorus, which sings in the absence of the principal one. _Aristullos._ Bad character satirized by Aristophanes, and used in one of his plays as a travesty of Plato. This incident, and Plato's amused indifference, are mentioned at p. 137 of the Apology.

P. 51. _Murrhine_, _Akalantis_. Female names in the Thesmophoriazusae. _New Kalligeneia._ Name given to Ceres, meaning, "bearer of lovely children." _The Toxotes._ A Syrian archer in the "Thesmophoriazusae." _The Great King's Eye._ Mock name given to an ambassador from Persia in the Acharnians. _Kompolakuthes._ Bully-boaster: with a play on the name of Lamachus.

P. 52. _Silphion._ A plant used as a relish. _Kleon-Clapper._ Corrector of Kleon.

P. 54. _Trugaios._ Epithet of Bacchus, "vintager;" here name of a person in the comedy of "Peace." _Story of Simonides._ Simonides, the lyric poet, sang an ode to his patron, Scopas, at a feast; and as he had introduced into it the praises of Castor and Pollux, Scopas declared that he would only pay his own half-share of the ode, and the Demi-gods might pay the remainder. Presently it was announced to Simonides that two youths desired to see him outside the palace; on going there he found nobody, but meanwhile the palace fell in, killing his patron. Thus was he _paid_.

P. 58. _Maketis._ Capital of Macedonia.

P. 60. _Lamachos._ General who fell at the siege of Syracuse; satirized by Aristophanes as a brave, but boastful man.

P. 67. _Sophroniskos' Son._ Socrates.

P. 74. _Kephisophon._ Actor, and friend of Euripides; enviously reported to help him in writing his plays.

P. 79. _Palaistra._ A wrestling-school, or place of exercise.

P. 82. _San._ Letter distinguishing race-horses. _Thearion's Meal-Tub Politics._ Politics of Thearion the baker. _Pisthetarios._ Character in the "Birds," alias "Mr. Persuasive." _Strephsiades._ Character in the "Clouds."

P. 83. _Rocky ones._ Epithet given to the Athenians.

P. 85. _Promachos._ Champion.

P. 86. _The Boulé._ State Council. _Prodikos._ Prodicus. A Sophist, satirized in the "Birds" and "Clouds."

P. 87. _Choes._ Festival at Athens. "The Pitchers."

P. 89. _Plataian help._ The Platæans sent a thousand well appointed warriors to help at Marathon. The term stands for _timely_ help.

P. 94. _Plethron square._ 100 feet square.

P. 98. _Palaistra tool._ Tool used at the Palaistra, or wrestling school: in this case the strigil.

P. 99. _Phales._ _Iacchos._ Two epithets of Bacchus--the former indecent.

P. 112. _Kinesias._ According to Aristophanes, a bad profligate lyric poet, notable for his leanness.

P. 113. _Rattei._ Like "Neblaretai," an imitative or gibberish word expressing joyous excitement. _Aristonumos._ _Sannurion._ Two comic poets, the latter ridiculed by Aristophanes for his leanness.

P. 124. _Parabasis._ Movement of the chorus, wherein the Coryphoeus came forward and spoke in the poet's name.

P. 128. _Skiadeion._ Sunshade. Parasol.

P. 129. _Theoria._ _Opora._ Characters in the Eirené or "Peace:" the first personifying games, spectacles, sights; the second, plenty, fruitful autumn, and so on.

P. 133. _Philokleon._ Lover of Kleon. (Cleon.) _Bdelukleon._ Reviler of Kleon.

P. 135. _Logeion._ Front of the stage occupied by the actors.

P. 137. _Kukloboros-roaring._ Roaring like the torrent Cycloborus (in Attica).

P. 140. _Konnos._ The play by Ameipsias which beat the "Clouds." _Euthumenes._ One who refused the pay of the comic writers, while he tripled that of those who attended at the Assembly. _Argurrhios._ As before. _Kinesias._ As before.

P. 144. _Triballos._ A supposed _country_ and clownish god.

P. 172. _Propula._ (Propyla.) Gateway to the Acropolis.

P. 248. _Elaphebolion month._ The "Stag-striking" month.

P. 249. _Bakis prophecy._ Foolish prophecies attributed to one Bacis, rife at that time; a collective name for all such.

P. 255. _Kommos._ General weeping--by the chorus and an actor.

"FIFINE AT THE FAIR."

"Fifine at the Fair" is a defence of inconstancy, or of the right of experiment in love; and is addressed by a husband to his wife, whose supposed and very natural comments the monologue reflects. The speaker's implied name of Don Juan sufficiently tells us what we are meant to think of his arguments; and they also convict themselves by landing him in an act of immorality, which brings its own punishment. This character is nevertheless a standing puzzle to Mr. Browning's readers, because that which he condemns in it, and that which he does not, are not to be distinguished from each other. It is impossible to see where Mr. Browning ends and where Don Juan begins. The reasoning is scarcely ever that of a heartless or profligate person, though it very often betrays an unconsciously selfish one. It treats love as an education still more than as a pleasure; and if it lowers the standard of love, or defends too free an indulgence in it, it does so by asserting what is true for imaginative persons, though not for the commonplace: that whatever stirs even a sensuous admiration appeals also to the artistic, the moral, and even the religious nature. Its obvious sophistries are mixed up with the profoundest truths, and the speaker's tone has often the tenderness of one who, with all his inconstancy, has loved deeply and long. We can only solve the problem by referring to the circumstances in which the idea of the poem arose.

Mr. Browning was, with his family, at Pornic many years ago, and there saw the gipsy who is the original of Fifine. His fancy was evidently sent roaming, by her audacity, her strength--the contrast which she presented to the more spiritual types of womanhood; and this contrast eventually found expression in a poetic theory of life, in which these opposite types and their corresponding modes of attraction became the necessary complement of each other. As he laid down the theory, Mr. Browning would be speaking in his own person. But he would turn into someone else in the act of working it out--for it insensibly carried with it a plea for yielding to those opposite attractions, not only successively, but at the same time; and a modified Don Juan would grow up under his pen, thinking in some degree his thoughts, using in some degree his language, and only standing out as a distinctive character at the end of the poem. The higher type of womanhood must appear in the story, at the same time as the lower which is represented by Fifine; and Mr. Browning would instinctively clothe it in the form which first suggested or emphasized the contrast. He would soon, however, feel that the vision was desecrated by the part it was called upon to play. He would disguise or ward it off when possible: now addressing Elvire by her husband's mouth, in the terms of an ideal companionship, now again reducing her to the level of an every-day injured wife; and when the dramatic Don Juan was about to throw off the mask, the flickering wifely personality would be extinguished altogether, and the unfaithful husband left face to face with the mere phantom of conscience which, in one sense, Elvire is always felt to be. This is what actually occurs; and only from this point of view can we account for the perpetual encroaching of the imaginary on the real, the real on the imaginary, which characterizes the work.

A fanciful prologue, "Amphibian," strikes its key-note. The writer imagines himself floating on the sea, pleasantly conscious of his bodily existence, yet feeling unfettered by it. A strange beautiful butterfly floats past him in the air; her radiant wings can be only those of a soul; and it strikes him that while the waves are his property, and the air is hers, hers is true freedom, his only the mimicry of it. He sees little to regret in this, since imagination is as good as reality; and Heaven itself can only be made up of such things as poets dream. Yet he knows that his swimming seems but a foolish compromise between the flight to which he cannot attain, and the more grovelling mode of being which he has no real wish to renounce; and he wonders whether she, the already released, who is upborne by those sunlit wings, does not look down with pity and wonder upon him. So also will Elvire, though less dispassionately, watch the intellectual vagaries of her Don Juan, which embrace the heavens, but are always centred in earth. This prologue is preceded by a quotation from Molière's "Don Juan," in which Elvire satirically prescribes to her lover the kind of self-defence--or something not unlike it--which Mr. Browning's hero will adopt.

Don Juan invites his wife to walk with him through the fair: and as he points out its sights to her, he expatiates on the pleasures of vagrancy, and declares that the red pennon waving on the top of the principal booth sends an answering thrill of restlessness through his own frame. He then passes to a glowing eulogium on the charms of the dark-skinned rope-dancer, Fifine, who forms part of the itinerant show.

Elvire gives tokens of perturbation, and her husband frankly owns that as far as Fifine is concerned, he cannot defend his taste: he can scarcely account for it. "Beautiful she is, in her feminine grace and strength, set forth by her boyish dress; but with probably no more feeling than a sprite, and no more conscience than a flower. It is likely enough that her antecedents have been execrable, and that her life is in harmony with them." Still, he does not wish it supposed that he admires a body without a soul: and he tries to convince himself that Fifine, after all, is not quite without one. "There is no grain of sand on the sea-shore which may not, once in a century, be the first to flash back the rising sun; there can be no human spirit which does not in the course of its existence greet the Divine light with one answering ray."

But no heavenly spark can be detected in Fifine; and he is reduced to seeking a virtue for her, a justification for himself, in that very fact. If she has no virtue, she also pretends to none. If she gives nothing to society, she asks nothing of it. His fancy raises up a procession of such women as the world has crowned: a Helen, a Cleopatra, some Christian saint; he bids Elvire see herself as part of it--as the true Helen, who, according to the legend, never quitted Greece, contemplated her own phantom within the walls of Troy--and be satisfied that she is "best" of all. "All alike are wanting in one grace which Fifine possesses: that of self-effacement. Helen and Cleopatra demand unquestioning homage for their own mental as well as bodily charms; the saint demands it for the principle she sets forth. His love demands that he shall see into her heart; his wife that he shall believe the impossible as regards her own powers of devotion. Fifine says,'You come to look at my outside, my foreign face and figure my outlandish limbs. Pay for the sight if it has pleased you, and give me credit for nothing beyond what you see.' So simply honest an appeal must touch his heart."

Don Juan well knows what his wife thinks of all this, and he says it for her. "Fifine attracts him for no such out of the way reason. Her charm is that she is something new, and something which does not belong to him. He is the soul of inconstancy; and if he had the sun for his own, he would hanker after other light, were it that of a tallow-candle or a squib." But he assures her that this reasoning is unsound, and his amusing himself with a lower thing does not prove that he has become indifferent to the higher. He shows this by reminding her of a picture of Raphael's, which he was mad to possess; which now that he possesses it, he often neglects for a picture-book of Doré's; but which, if threatened with destruction, he would save at the sacrifice of a million Dorés, perhaps of his own life. And now he turns back to her phantom self, as present in his own mind; describes it in terms of exquisite grace and purity; and declares hers the one face which fits into his heart, and makes whole what would be half without it.

Elvire is conciliated; but her husband will not leave well alone. He has established her full claim to his admiration: but he is going to prove that so far as her physical charms are concerned, she owes it to his very attachment: "for those charms are not attested by her looking-glass. He discovers them by the eye of love--in other words--by the artist soul within him."

All beauty, Don Juan farther explains, is in the imagination of him who feels it, be he lover or artist; be the beauty he descries the attribute of a living face, of a portrait, or of some special arrangement of sound. The feeling is inspired by its outward objects, but it cannot be retraced to them. It is a fancy created by fact, as flame by fuel; no more identical with it. The fancy is not on that account a delusion. It is the vision of ideal truth: the recognition by an inner sense of that which does not exist for the outer. That is why hearts choose each other by help of the face, and why they choose so diversely. The eye of love, which again is the eye of art, reads soul into the features, however incomplete their expression of it may be. It reconstructs the ideal type which nature has failed to carry out.

He illustrates this by means of three faces roughly sketched in the sand. At first sight they are grotesque and unmeaning. Yet a few more strokes of the broken pipe which is serving him as a pencil, will give to two of these a predominating expression; convert the third into a likeness of Elvire.

"These completing touches represent the artist's action upon life. By this method Don Juan has been enabled on a former occasion, to complete a work of high art. A block of marble had come into his possession, half shaped by the hand of Michael Angelo.

"... One hand,--the Master's,--smoothed and scraped
That mass, he hammered on and hewed at, till he hurled
Life out of death, and left a challenge: for the world,
Death still,--...." (vol. xi. p. 260.)

Not death to him: for as he gazed on the rough-hewn block, a form emerged upon his mental sight--a form which he interpreted as that of the goddess Eidotheé.[53] And as his soul received it from that of the dead master, his hand carried it out."

Mr. Browning's whole theory of artistic perception is contained in the foregoing lines; but he proceeds to enforce it in another way. "The life thus evoked from death, the beauty from ugliness, is the gain of each special soul--its permanent conquest over matter. The mode of effecting this is the special secret of every soul; and this Don Juan defines as its chemic secret, the law of its affinities, the law of its actions and reactions. Where one, he says, lights force, another draws forth pity; where one finds food for self-indulgence, another acquires strength for self-sacrifice. One blows life's ashes into rose-coloured flame, another into less heavenly hues. Love will have reached its height when the secret of each soul has become the knowledge of all; and the many-coloured rays of individual experience are fused in the white light of universal truth."

Here again Don Juan imagines a retort. Elvire makes short work of his poetic theories, and declares that this professed interest in souls is a mere pretext for the gratification of sense. "Whom in heaven's name is he trying to take in?" He entreats music to take his part. "It alone can pierce the mists of falsehood which intervene between the soul and truth. And now, as they stroll homewards in the light of the setting sun, all things seem charged with those deeper harmonies--with those vital truths of existence which words are powerless to convey. Elvire, however, has no soul for music, and her husband must have recourse to words."

The case between them may, he thinks, be stated in this question, "How do we rise from falseness into truth?" "We do so after the fashion of the swimmer who brings his nostrils to the level of the upper air, but leaves the rest of his body under water--by the act of self-immersion in the very element from which we wish to escape. Truth is to the aspiring soul as the upper air to the swimmer: the breath of life. But if the swimmer attempts to free his head and arms, he goes under more completely than before. If the soul strives to escape from the grosser atmosphere into the higher, she shares the same fate. Her truthward yearnings plunge her only deeper into falsehood. Body and soul must alike surrender themselves to an element in which they cannot breathe, for this element can alone sustain them. But through the act of plunging we float up again, with a deeper disgust at the briny taste we have brought back; with a deeper faith in the life above, and a deeper confidence in ourselves, whom the coarser element has proved unable to submerge."

"Suppose again, that as we paddle with our hands under water, we grasp at something which seems a soul. The piece of falsity slips through our fingers, but by the mechanical reaction just described, it sends us upwards into the realm of truth. This is precisely what Fifine has done. Of the earth earthy as she is, she has driven you and me into the realms of abstract truth. We have thus no right to despise her" This discourse is interrupted by a contemptuous allusion to a passage in "Childe Harold," (fourth canto), in which the human intelligence is challenged to humble itself before the ocean.

Elvire is still dissatisfied. The suspicious fact remains, that whatever experience her husband desires to gain, it is always a woman who must supply it. This he frankly admits; and he gives his reason. "Women lend themselves to experiment; men do not. Men are egotists, and absorb whatever comes in their way. Women, whether Fifines or Elvires, allow themselves to be absorbed. You master men only by reducing yourself to their level. You captivate women by showing yourself at your best. Their power of hero-worship is illustrated by the act of the dolphin, 'True woman creature,' which bore the ship-wrecked Arion to the Corinthian coast. Men are not only wanting in true love: their best powers are called forth by hate. They resemble the vine, first 'stung' into 'fertility' by the browsing goat, which nibbled away its tendrils, and gained the 'indignant wine' by the process. In their feminine characteristics Elvire stands far higher than Fifine; but Fifine is for that very reason more useful as a means of education; for Elvire may be trusted implicitly; Fifine teaches one to take care of himself. They are to each other as the strong ship and the little rotten bark." This comparison is suggested by a boatman whom they lately saw adventurously pushing his way through shoal and sandbank because he would not wait for the tide.

Don Juan begs leave to speak one word more in defence of Fifine and her masquerading tribe; it will recall his early eulogium on her frankness. "All men are actors: but these alone do not deceive. All you are expected to applaud in them is the excellence of the avowed sham."

Don Juan has thus developed his theory that soul is attainable through flesh, truth through falsehood, the real through what only seems; and, as he thinks, justified the conclusion that a man's spiritual life is advanced by every experience, moral or immoral, which comes in his way. He now relates a dream by which, as he says, those abstract reflections have been in part inspired; in reality, it continues, and in some degree refutes them. The dream came to him this morning when he had played himself to sleep with Schumann's Carnival; having chosen this piece because his brain was burdened with many thoughts and fancies which, better than any other, it would enable him to work off; and as he tells this, he enlarges on the faculty of music to register, as well as express, every passing emotion of the human soul. He notes also the constant recurrence of the same old themes, and the caprice of taste which strives as constantly to convert them into something new.