IN "BALAUSTION'S ADVENTURE" AND "ARISTOPHANES' APOLOGY"
To me, Balaustion is the queen of Browning's women—nay, I am tempted to proclaim her queen of every poet's women. For in her meet all lovelinesses, and to make her dearer still, some are as yet but in germ (what a mother she will be, for example); so that we have, with all the other beauties, the sense of the unfolding rose—"enmisted by the scent it makes," in a phrase of her creator's which, though in the actual context it does not refer to her, yet exquisitely conveys her influence on these two works. "Rosy Balaustion": she is that, as well as "superb, statuesque," in the admiring apostrophes from Aristophanes, during the long, close argument of the Apology. In that piece, the Bald Bard himself is made to show her to us; and though it follows, not precedes, the Adventure, I shall steal from him at once, presenting in his lyric phrases our queen before we crown her.
He comes to her home in Athens on the night when Balaustion learns that her adored Euripides is dead. She and her husband, Euthukles, are "sitting silent in the house, yet cheerless hardly," musing on the tidings, when suddenly there come torch-light and knocking at the door, and cries and laughter: "Open, open, Bacchos[94:1] bids!"—and, heralded by his chorus and the dancers, flute-boys, all the "banquet-band," there enters, "stands in person, Aristophanes." Balaustion had never seen him till that moment, nor he her:
"Forward he stepped: I rose and fronted him";
and as thus for the first time they meet, he breaks into a pæan of admiration:
"'You, lady? What, the Rhodian? Form and face,
Victory's self upsoaring to receive
The poet? Right they named you . . . some rich name,
Vowel-buds thorned about with consonants,
Fragrant, felicitous, rose-glow enriched
By the Isle's unguent: some diminished end
In ion' . . ."
and trying to recall that name "in ion," he guesses two or three at random, seizing thus the occasion to express her effect on him:
"'Phibalion, for the mouth split red-fig-wise,
Korakinidion, for the coal-black hair,
Nettarion, Phabion, for the darlingness?'"
But none of these is right; "it was some fruit-flower"; and at last it comes: Balaustion, Wild-Pomegranate-Bloom, and he exclaims in ecstasy, "Thanks, Rhodes!"—for her fellow-countrymen had found this name for her, so apt in every way that her real name was forgotten, and as Balaustion she shall live and die.
"Nettarion, Phabion, for the darlingness"; and for all her intellect and ardour, it is greatly this that makes Balaustion queen—the lovely eager sweetness, the tenderness, the "darlingness": Aristophanes guessed almost right!