The Browning Cyclopædia: A Guide to the Study of the Works of Robert Browning

Aprile. The Italian poet who sought to love, as Paracelsus sought to know. He represents the Renaissance spirit in its emotional aspect, as Paracelsus represents the spirit of the Reformation in its passion for knowledge. As Mr. Browning says, they were the “two halves of a dissevered world.” (Paracelsus.)

Arcades Ambo. (Asolando, 1889.) If a man runs away in battle when the balls begin to fly, we call him a coward. He may excuse himself by the argument that man must at all risks shun death. This is the excuse made by the vivisector: he is often a kind and amiable man in every other relation of life than in that aspect of his profession which demands, as he holds, the torture of living animals for the advancement of the healing art. Health of the body must be preserved at all costs; the moral health is of little or no consequence in comparison with that of the body; above all we must not die, death is the one thing to be avoided, hide therefore from the darts of the King of Terrors behind the whole creation of lower animals. Mr. Browning says this is cowardice exactly parallel with that of the soldier who runs away in battle; the principle being that at all costs life is the one thing to be preserved. The Anti-Vivisectionist principles of Mr. Browning were very pronounced. He was for many years associated with Miss F. P. Cobbe in her efforts to suppress the practice of torturing animals for scientific purposes, and was a Vice-President of the Victoria Street Society for the Protection of Animals from Vivisection at the time of his death. See my Browning’s Message to his Time (chapter on “Browning and Vivisection”).

Aristophanes, the celebrated comic poet of Athens, was born probably about the year 448 B.C. His first comedy was brought out in 427 B.C. Plato in his Symposium gives Aristophanes a position at the side of Socrates. The festivals of Dionysus greatly promoted the production of tragedies, comedies and satiric dramas. The greater Dionysia were held in the city of Athens in the month of March, and were connected with the natural feeling of joy at the approach of summer. These Bacchanalian festivals were scenes of gross licentiousness, and the coarseness which pervades much of the work of the great Greek comedian was due to the fact that the popular taste demanded grossness of allusion on occasions like these. The Athenian dramatist of the old school was entirely unrestrained. He could satirise even the Eleusinian mysteries, could deal abundantly in personalities, burlesque the most sacred subjects, and ridicule the most prominent persons in the republic. Professor Jebb, in his article on Aristophanes in the Encyclopedia Britannica, says: “It is neither in the denunciation nor in the mockery that he is most individual. His truest and highest faculty is revealed by those wonderful bits of lyric writing in which he soars above everything that can move to laughter or tears, and makes the clear air thrill with the notes of a song as free, as musical and as wild as that of the nightingale invoked by his own chorus in the Birds. The speech of Dikaios Logos in the Clouds, the praises of country life in the Peace, the serenade in the Eccleziazusæ, the songs of the Spartan and Athenian maidens in the Lysistrata; above all, perhaps, the chorus in the Frogs, the beautiful chant of the Initiated, – these passages, and such as these, are the true glories of Aristophanes. They are the strains, not of an artist, but of one who warbles for pure gladness of heart in some place made bright by the presence of a god. Nothing else in Greek poetry has quite this wild sweetness of the woods. Of modern poets Shakespeare alone, perhaps, has it in combination with a like richness and fertility of fancy.” Fifty-four comedies were ascribed to Aristophanes. We possess only eleven: these deal with Athenian life during a period of thirty-six years. The political satires of the poet, therefore, cannot be understood without a knowledge of Athenian history, and an acquaintance with its life during the period in which the poet wrote. “Aristophanes was a natural conservative,” says Professor Jebb; “his ideal was the Athens of the Persian wars. He detested the vulgarity and the violence of mob-rule; he clove to the old worship of the gods; he regarded the new ideas of education as a tissue of imposture and impiety. As a mocker he is incomparable for the union of subtlety with wit of the comic imagination. As a poet he is immortal.” The momentous period in the history of Greece during which Aristophanes began to write, forms the groundwork, more or less, of so many of his comedies, that it is impossible to understand them, far less to appreciate their point, without some acquaintance with its leading events. All men’s thoughts were occupied by the great contest for supremacy between the rival states of Athens and Sparta, known as the Peloponnesian War. It is not necessary here to enter into details; but the position of the Athenians during the earlier years of the struggle must be briefly described. Their strength lay chiefly in their fleet; in the other arms of war they were confessedly no match for Sparta and her confederate allies. The heavy-armed Spartan infantry, like the black Spanish bands of the fifteenth century, was almost irresistible in the field. Year after year the invaders marched through the Isthmus into Attica, or were landed in strong detachments on different points of the coast, while the powerful Bœotian cavalry swept all the champaign, burning the towns and villages, cutting down the crops, destroying vines and olive-groves, – carrying this work of devastation almost up to the very walls of Athens. For no serious attempt was made to resist these periodical invasions. The strategy of the Athenians was much the same as it had been when the Persian hosts swept down upon them fifty years before. Again they withdrew themselves and all their movable property within the city walls, and allowed the invaders to overrun the country with impunity. Their flocks and herds were removed into the islands on the coasts, where, so long as Athens was mistress of the sea, they would be in comparative safety. It was a heavy demand upon their patriotism; but, as before, they submitted to it, trusting that the trial would be but brief, and nerved to it by the stirring words of their great leader Pericles. The ruinous sacrifice, and even the personal suffering, involved in this forced migration of a rural population into a city wholly inadequate to accommodate them, may easily be imagined, even if it had not been forcibly described by the great historian of those times. Some carried with them the timber framework of their homes, and set it up in such vacant spaces as they could find. Others built for themselves little “chambers on the wall,” or occupied the outer courts of the temples, or were content with booths and tents set up under the Long Walls, which connected the city with the harbour of Piræus. Some – if our comic satirist is to be trusted – were even fain to sleep in tubs and hen-coops. Provisions grew dear and scarce. Pestilence broke out in the overcrowded city; and in the second and third years of the war the great plague carried off, out of their comparatively small population, about 10,000 of all ranks. But it needed a pressure of calamity far greater than the present to keep a good citizen of Athens away from the theatre. If the times were gloomy, so much the more need of a little honest diversion. The comic drama was to the Athenians what a free press is to modern commonwealths. It is probable that Aristophanes was himself earnestly opposed to the continuance of the war, and spoke his own sentiments on this point by the mouth of his characters; but the prevalent disgust at the hardships of this long-continued siege – for such it practically was – would in any case be a tempting subject for the professed writer of burlesques; and the caricature of a leading politician, if cleverly drawn, is always a success for the author. The Thesmophoriazusæ is a comedy about the fair sex, whose whole point – like that also of the comedy of the Frogs– lies in a satire upon Euripides. Aristophanes never wearied of holding this poet up to ridicule. Why this was so is not to be discovered: it may have been that the conservative principles of Aristophanes were offended by some new-fashioned ideas of his brother poet. The Thesmophoria was a festival of women only, in honour of Ceres and Proserpine. Euripides was reputed to be a woman-hater: in one of his tragedies he says,

“O thou most vile! thou —woman!– for what wordThat lips could frame, could carry more reproach?”

He can hardly, however, have been a woman-hater who created the beautiful characters of Iphigenia and Alcestis. In this comedy the Athenian ladies have resolved to punish Euripides, and the poet is in dismay in consequence, and takes measures to defend himself. He offers terms of peace to the offended fair sex, and promises never to abuse them in future.

Aristophanes’ Apology; including a Transcript from Euripides, being the last adventure of Balaustion. London, 1875. – As Aristophanes’ Apology is the last adventure of Balaustion, it is necessary to read Balaustion’s Adventure (q. v.) before commencing this poem. Balaustion has married Euthukles, the young man whom she met at Syracuse. She has met the great poet Euripides, paid her homage to his genius, and has received from his own hands his tragedy of Hercules. The poet is dead, and Athens fallen. She returns to the city after its capture by the Spartans, but she can no longer remain therein. Athens will live in her heart, but never again can she behold the place where ghastly mirth mocked its overthrow and death and hell celebrated their triumph. She has left the doomed city, now that it is no longer the free Athens of happier times, and has set sail with her husband for Rhodes. The glory of the material Athens has departed. But Athens will live as a glorious spiritual entity —

“That shall be better and more beautiful,And too august for Sparté’s foot to spurn!”

She and Euthukles are exiles from the dead Athens, not the living: “That’s in the cloud there, with the new-born star!” As they voyage, for her consolation she will record her recollections of her Euripides in Athens, and she bids her husband set down her words as she speaks. She must “speak to the infinite intelligence, sing to the everlasting sympathy.” There are dead things that are triumphant still; the walls of intellectual construction can never be overthrown; there are air-castles more real and permanent than the work of men’s hands. She will tell of Euripides and his undying work. She recalls the night when Athens was still herself, when they heard the news that Euripides was dead – “gone with his Attic ivy home to feast.” Dead and triumphant still! She reflected how the Athenian multitude had ever reproached him: “All thine aim thine art, the idle poet only.” It was not enough in those times that thought should be “the soul of art.” The Greek world demanded activity as well as contemplation. The poet must leave his study to command troops, forsake the world of ideas for that of action, otherwise he was a “hater of his kind.” The world is content with you if you do nothing for it; if you do aught you must do all. But when Euripides was at rest, censorious tongues ceased to wag, and the next thing to do was to build a monument for him! But for the hearts of Balaustion and her husband no statue is required: he stood within their hearts. The pure-souled woman says, “What better monument can be than the poem he gave me? Let him speak to me now in his own words; have out the Herakles and re-sing the song; hear him tell of the last labour of the god, worst of all the twelve.” And lovingly and reverently the precious gift of the poet was taken from its shrine and opened for the reading. Suddenly torchlight, knocking at the door, a cry “Open, open! Bacchos bids!” and a sound of revelry and the drunken voices of girl dancers and players, led by Aristophanes, the comic poet of Greece. A splendid presence, “all his head one brow,” drunk, but in him sensuality had become a rite. Mind was here, passions, but grasped by the strong hand of intellect. Balaustion rose and greeted him. “Hail house,” he said, “friendly to Euripides!” and he spoke flatteringly, but in a slightly mocking tone, as men who are sensual defer to spiritual women whom they rather affect to pity while they admire. Balaustion loves genius; to her mind it is the noblest gift of heaven: she can bow to Aristophanes though he is drunk. (Greek intoxication was doubtless a very different thing from Saxon!) The comic poet had just achieved a great triumph: his comedy had been crowned. The “Women’s Festival” (the Thesmophoriazusæ as it was called in Greek) was a play in which the fair sex had the chief part. It was written against Euripides’ dislike of women, for which the women who are celebrating the great feast of Ceres and Proserpine (the Thesmophoria) drag him to justice. And so, with all his chorus troop, he comes to the home of Balaustion, as representing the Euripides whom he disliked and satirised, to celebrate his success. The presence of Balaustion has stripped the proper Aristophanes of his “accidents,” and under her searching gaze he stands undisguised to be questioned. She puts him on his defence, and hence the “Apology.” He recognises the divine in her, and she in him. The discussion, therefore, will be on the principles underlying the works of Euripides, the man of advance, the pioneer of the newer and better age to come, and those of the conservative apologist of prescription, Aristophanes the aristocrat. He defends his first Thesmophoriazusæ, which failed; his Grasshopper, which followed and failed also. There was reason why he wrote both: he painted the world as it was, mankind as they lived and walked, not human nature as seen though the medium of the student’s closet. “Old wine’s the wine; new poetry drinks raw.” The friend of Socrates might weave his fancies, but flesh and blood like that of Aristophanes needs stronger meat. “Curds and whey” might suit Euripides, the Apologist must have marrowy wine. The author of the Alkestis, which Balaustion raved about, was but a prig: he wrote of wicked kings. Aristophanes came nearer home, and attacked infamous abuses of the time, and scourged too with tougher thong than leek-and-onion plait. He wrote The Birds, The Clouds, and The Wasps. The poison-drama of Euripides has mortified the flesh of the men of Athens, so nothing but warfare can purge it. The play that failed last year he has rearranged; he added men to match the women there already, and had a hit at a new-fangled plan by which women should rule affairs. It succeeded, and so they all flocked merrily to feast, and merrily they supped till something happened, – he will confess its influence upon him. Towards the end of the feast there was a sudden knock: in came an old pale-swathed majesty, who addressed the priest, “Since Euripides is dead to-day, my choros, at the Greater Feast next month, shall, clothed in black, appear ungarlanded!” Sophocles (for it was he) mutely passed outwards and left them stupefied. Soon they found their tongues and began to make satiric comment, but Aristophanes swore that at the moment death to him seemed life and life seemed death. The play of which he had made a laughingstock had meaning he had never seen till now. The question who was the greater poet, once so large, now became so small. He remembers his last discussion with the dead poet, two years since, when he said, “Aristophanes, you know what kind’s the nobler – what makes grave or what makes grin!” He pointed out why his Ploutos failed: he had tried, alas! but with force which had been spent on base things, to paint the life of Man. The strength demanded for the race had been wasted ere the race began. Such thoughts as these, long to relate, but floating through the mind as solemn convictions are wont to do, occupied him till the Archon, the Feast-Master, divining what was passing in his mind, thought best to close the feast. He gave “To the good genius, then!” as a parting cup. Young Strattis cried, “Ay, the Comic Muse”; but Aristophanes, stopping the applause, said, “Stay! the Tragic Muse” (in honour of the dead Tragic Poet), and then he told of all the work of the man who had gone from them. But he had mocked at him so often that his audience would not believe him to be serious now, and burst into laughter, exclaiming, “The unrivalled one! He turns the Tragic on its Comic side!” He felt that he was growing ridiculous, and had to repair matters; so he thanked them for laughing with him, and also those who wept rather with the Lord of Tears, and bade the priest – president alike over the Tragic and Comic function of the god, —

“Help with libation to the blended twain!”

praising complex poetry operant for body as for soul, able to move to laughter and to tears, supreme in heaven and earth. The soul should not be unbodied; he would defend man’s double nature. But, even as he spoke, he turned to the memory of “Cold Euripides,” and declared that he would not abate attack if he were to encounter him again, because of his principle – “Raise soul, sink sense, Evirate Hermes!” And so, as they left the feast, he asked his friends to accompany him to Balaustion’s home, to the lady and her husband who, passionate admirers of Euripides, had not been present on his triumph-day. When they heard the night’s news, neither, he knew, would sleep, but watch; by right of his crown of triumph he would pay them a visit. Balaustion said, “Commemorate, as we, Euripides!” “What?” cried the comic poet, “profane the temple of your deity! – for deity he was, though as for himself he only figured on men’s drinking mugs. And then, as his glance fell on the table, he saw the Herakles which the Tragic Poet had given to Balaustion. “Give me the sheet,” he asks. She interrupted, “You enter fresh from your worst infamy, last instance of a long outrage – throw off hate’s celestiality, show me a mere man’s hand ignobly clenched against the supreme calmness of the dead poet.” Scarcely noticing her, he said, “Dead and therefore safe; only after death begins immunity of faultiness from punishment. Hear Art’s defence. Comedy is coeval with the birth of freedom, its growth matches the greatness of the Republic. He found the Comic Art a club, a means of inflicting punishment without downright slaying: was he to thrash only the crass fool and the clownish knave, or strike at malpractice that affects the State? His was not the game to change the customs of Athens, lead age or youth astray, play the demagogue at the Assembly or the sophist at the Debating Club, or (worst and widest mischief) preach innovation from the theatre, bring contempt on oaths, and adorn licentiousness. And so he new-tipped with steel his cudgel, he had demagogues in coat-of-mail and cased about with impudence to chastise; he was spiteless, for his attack went through the mere man to reach the principle worth purging from Athens. He did not attack Lamachos, but war’s representative; not Cleon, but flattery of the populace; not Socrates, but the pernicious seed of sophistry, whereby youth was perverted to chop logic and worship whirligig. His first feud with Euripides was when he maintained that we should enjoy life as we find it instead of magnifying our miseries. Euripides would talk about the empty name, while the thing’s self lay neglected beneath his nose. Aristophanes represented the whole Republic, – gods, heroes, priests, legislators, poets – all these would have been in the dust, pummelled into insignificance, had Euripides had his way. To him heroes were no more, hardly so much, as men. Men were ragged, sick, lame, halt, and blind, their speech but street terms; and so, having drawn sky earthwards, he must next lift earth to sky. Women, once mere puppets, must match the male in thinking, saying, doing. The very slave he recognised as man’s mate. There are no gods. Man has no master, owns neither right nor wrong, does what he likes, himself his sole law. As there are no gods, there is only “Necessity” above us. No longer to Euripides is there one plain positive enunciation, incontestable, of what is good, right, decent here on earth. And so Euripides triumphed, though he rarely gained a prize. And Aristophanes, wielding the comic weapon, closed with the enemy in good honest hate, called Euripides one name and fifty epithets. He hates “sneaks whose art is mere desertion of a trust.” And so he doses each culprit with comedy, doctors the word-monger with words. Socrates he nicknames chief quack, necromancer; Euripides – well, he acknowledges every word is false if you look at it too close, but at a distance all is indubitable truth behind the lies. Aristophanes declares the essence of his teaching to be, Accept the old, contest the strange, misdoubt every man whose work is yet to do, acknowledge the work already done. Religion, laws, are old – that is, so much achieved and victorious truth, wrung from adverse circumstance by heroic men who beat the world and left their work in evidence. It was Euripides who caused the fight, and Aristophanes has beaten him; if, however, Balaustion can adduce anything to contravene this, let her say on.” Balaustion replies that she is but a mere mouse confronting the forest monarch, a woman with no quality, but the love of all things lovable. How should she dare deny the results he says his songs are pregnant with? She is a foreigner too. Many perhaps view things too severely, as dwellers in some distant isles, – the Cassiterides, for example, – ignorant and lonely, who seeing some statue of Phidias or picture of Teuxis, might feebly judge that hair and hands and fashion of garb, not being like their own, must needs be wrong. So her criticism of art may be equally in fault as theirs, nevertheless she will proceed if she may. “Comedy, you say, is prescription and a rite; it rose with Attic liberty, and will fall with freedom; but your games, Olympian, Pythian and the others, the gods gave you these; and Comedy, did it come so late that your grandsires can remember its beginning? And you were first to change buffoonery for wit, and filth for cleanly sense. You advocate peace, support religion, lash irreverence, yet rebuke superstition with a laugh. Innovation and all change you attack: with you the oldest always is the best; litigation, mob rule and mob favourites you attack; you are hard on sophists and poets who assist them: snobs, scamps, and gluttons you do not spare, – all these noble aims originated with you! Yet Euripides in Cresphontes sang Peace before you! Play after play of his troops tumultuously to confute your boast. No virtue but he praised, no vice but he condemned ere you were boy! As for your love of peace, you did not show your audience that war was wrong, but Lamachos absurd, not that democracy was blind, but Cleon a sham, not superstition vile but Nicias crazy. You gave the concrete for the abstract, you pretended to be earnest while you were only indifferent. You tickled the mob with the idea that peace meant plenty of good things to eat, while in camp the fare is hard and stinted. Peace gives your audience flute girls and gaiety. War freezes the campaigners in the snow. And so, with all the rest you advocate; do not go to law: beware of the Wasps! but as for curing love of lawsuits, you exhibit cheating, brawling, fighting, cursing as capital fun! And when the writer of the new school attacks the vile abuses of the day, straightway to conserve the good old way, you say the rascal cannot read or write, is extravagant, gets somebody to help his sluggish mind, and lets him court his wife; his uncle deals in crockery, and himself – a stranger! And so the poet-rival is chased out of court. And this is Comedy, our sacred song, censor of vice and virtue’s safeguard! You are indignant with sophistry, and say there is but a single side to man and thing; but the sophists at least wish their pupils to believe what they teach, and to practise what they believe; can you wish that? Assume I am mistaken: have you made them end the war? Has your antagonist Euripides succeeded better? He spoke to a dim future, and I trust truth’s inherent kingliness. ‘Arise and go: both have done honour to Euripides!’” But Aristophanes demands direct defence, and not oblique by admonishment of himself. Balaustion tells him that last year Sophocles was declared by his son to be of unsound mind, and for defence his father just recited a chorus chant of his last play. The one adventure of her life that made Euripides her friend was the story of Hercules and Alcestis. When she met the author last, he said, “I sang another Hercules; it gained no prize, but take it – your love the prize! And so the papyrus, with the pendent style, and the psalterion besides, he gave her: by this should she remember the friend who loved Balaustion once. May I read it as defence? I read.” [The Herakles, or Raging Hercules of Euripides, is translated literally by Mr. Browning on the principles which he laid down in the preface to the Agamemnon. In Potter’s Translation of the Tragedies of Euripides we have the following from the introduction to the play: “The first scenes of this tragedy are very affecting; Euripides knew the way to the heart, and as often as his subject leads him to it, he never fails to excite the tenderest pity. We are relieved from this distress by the unexpected appearance of Hercules, who is here drawn in his private character as the most amiable of men: the pious son, the affectionate husband, and the tender father win our esteem as much as the unconquered hero raises our admiration. Here the feeling reader will perhaps wish that the drama had ended, for the next scenes are dreadful indeed, and it must be confessed that the poet has done his subject terrible justice, but without any of that absurd extravagance which, in Seneca becomes un tintamarre horrible qui se passe dans le tête de ce Héros devenu fou. From the violent agitation into which we are thrown by these deeds of honour, we are suffered by degrees to subside into the tenderest grief, in which we are prepared before to sympathise with the unhappy Hercules by that esteem which his amiable disposition had raised in us; and this perhaps is the most affecting scene of sorrow that ever was produced in any theatre. Upon the whole, though this tragedy may not be deemed the most agreeable by the generality of readers, on account of the too dreadful effects of the madness of Hercules, yet the various turns of fortune are finely managed, the scenes of distress highly wrought, and the passions of pity, terror and grief strongly touched. The scene is at Thebes before the palace of Hercules. The persons of the Drama – Amphitryon, Megara, Lycus, Hercules, Iris, Lyssa (the goddess of madness), Theseus, Messenger; Chorus of aged Thebans.”] They were silent after the reading for a long time. “Our best friend – lost, our best friend!” mused Aristophanes, “and who is our best friend?” He then instances in reply a famous Greek game, known as kottabos, played in various ways, but the latest with a sphere pierced with holes. When the orb is set rolling, and wine is adroitly thrown a figure suspended in a certain position can be struck by the fluid; but its only chance of being so hit is when it fronts just that one outlet. So with Euripides: he gets his knowledge merely from one single aperture – that of the High and Right; till he fronts this he writes no play. When the hole and his head happen to correspond, in drops the knowledge that Aristophanes can make respond to every opening – Low, Wrong, Weak; all the apertures bring him knowledge; he gets his wine at every turn; why not? Evil and Little are just as natural as Good and Great, and he demands to know them, and not one phase of life alone. So that he is the “best friend of man.” No doubt, if in one man the High and Low could be reconciled, in tragi-comic verse he would be superior to both when born in the Tin Islands (as he eventually was in the person of Shakespeare). He will sing them a song of Thamyris, the Thracian bard, who boasted that he could rival the Muses, and was punished by them by being deprived of sight and voice and the power of playing the lute. Before he had finished the song, however, he laughed, “Tell the rest who may!” He had not tried to match the muse and sing for gods; he sang for men, and of the things of common life. He bids this couple farewell till the following year, and departs. In a year many things had happened. Aristophanes had produced his play, The Frogs. It had been rapturously applauded, and the author had been crowned; he is now the people’s “best friend.” He had satirised Euripides more vindictively than before; he had satirised even the gods and the Eleusinian Mysteries; and, in the midst of the “frog merriment,” Lysander, the Spartan, had captured Athens, and his first word to the people was, “Pull down your long walls: the place needs none!” He gave them three days to wreck their proud bulwarks, and the people stood stupefied, stonier than their walls. The time expired, and when Lysander saw they had done nothing, he ordered all Athens to be levelled in the dust. Then stood forth Euthukles, Balaustion’s husband, and “flung that choice flower,” a snatch of a tragedy of Euripides, the Electra; then —