For his gay brother's prow, imbrue that path
Which, purpling, recognized the conqueror.
Impudent and majestic: drunk, perhaps,
But that's religion; sense too plainly snuffed:
Still, sensuality was grown a rite."
He, too, has just heard of Euripides' death, and an impulse, part sympathy, part mockery, has brought him to the "house friendly to Euripides." The revellers retire abashed before Balaustion; he alone remains. From the extraordinary and only too natural gabble and garbage of his opening words, he quickly passes to a more or less serious explanation and defence of his conduct toward the dead poet; to an exposition, in fact, of his aims and doings as a writer of comedy. When his "apology" is ended, Balaustion replies, censuring him pretty severely, making adroit use of the licence of a "stranger" and a woman, and defending Euripides against him. For a further (and the best) defence, she reads the whole of the Herakles, which Browning here translates. Aristophanes, naturally, is not convinced; impressed he must have been, to have borne so long a reading without demur: he flings them a snatch of song, finding in his impromptu a hint for a new play, the Frogs, and is gone. And now, a year after, as the couple return to Rhodes from a disgraced and dismantled Athens, Balaustion dictates to Euthukles her recollection of the "adventure," for the double purpose of putting the past events on record, and of eluding the urgency of the present sorrow.
It will thus be seen that the book consists of two distinct parts. There is, first, the apology of Aristophanes, second, the translation of the play of Euripides. Herakles, or, as it is more generally known, Hercules Furens, is rendered completely and consecutively, in blank verse and varied choric measures. It is not, as was the case with Alkestis worked into the body of the poem; not welded, but inserted. We have thus, while losing the commentary, the advantage of a detached transcript, with a lyrical rendering of the lyrical parts of the play. These are given with a constant vigour and closeness, often with a rare beauty (as in the famous "Ode bewailing Age," and that other on the labours of Herakles). Precisely the same characteristics that we have found in the translation of the Alkestis are here again to be found, and all that I said on the former, considered apart from its setting, may be applied to the latter. We have the same literalness (again with a few apparent exceptions), the same insistence on the root-meaning of words, the same graphic force and vivifying touch, the same general clearness and charm.
The original part of the book is of far closer texture and more remarkable order than "the amber which embalms Alkestis" the first adventure of Balaustion; but it has less human emotion, less general appeal. It is nothing less than a resuscitation of the old controversy between Aristophanes and Euripides; a resuscitation, not only of the controversy, but of the combatants. "Local colour" is laid on with an unsparing hand, though it cannot be said that the atmosphere is really Greek. There is hardly a line, there is never a page, without an allusion to some recondite thing: Athenian customs, Greek names, the plays of Euripides, above all, the plays of Aristophanes. "Every line of the poem," it has been truly said, "shows Mr. Browning as soaked and steeped in the comedies as was Bunyan in his Bible." The result is a vast, shapeless thing, splendidly and grotesquely alive, but alive with the obscure and tangled life of the jungle.
Browning's attitude towards the controversy, the side he takes as champion of Euripides, is distinctly shown, not merely in Balaustion's statement and defence, but in the whole conduct of the piece. Aristophanes, though on his own defence, is set in a decidedly unfavourable light; and no one, judging from Browning's work, can doubt as to his opinion of the relative qualities of the two great poets. It is possible even to say there is a partiality in the presentment. But it must be remembered on the other hand that Browning is not concerned simply with the question of art, but with the whole bearings, artistic and ethical, of the contest; and it must be remembered that the aim of Comedy is intrinsically lower and more limited than that of Tragedy, that it is destructive, disintegrating, negative, concerned with smaller issues and more temporary questions; and that Euripides may reasonably be held a better teacher, a keener, above all a more helpful, reader of the riddle of life, than his mighty assailant. This is how Aristophanes has been described, by one who should know:—
"He is an aggregate of many men, all of a certain greatness. We may build up a conception of his powers if we mount Rabelais upon Hudibras, lift him with the songfulness of Shelley, give him a vein of Heinrich Heine, and cover him with the mantle of the Anti-Jacobin, adding (that there may be some Irish in him) a dash of Grattan, before he is in motion."[[50]]