Browning and His Century

by Helen A. Clarke

Such is the view to be gleaned from history, and in Mahaffy’s opinion the literature of the time tells the same story. He goes on: “When we consult the literature of the day, we find women treated either with contemptuous ridicule in comedy, or with still more contemptuous silence in history. In tragedy or in the social theories of the philosophers alone can we hope for a glimpse into the average character and position of Athenian women. Here at least we might have expected that the portraits drawn with such consummate skill by Homer would have been easily transferred to the Athenian stage. But to our astonishment we find the higher social feelings toward women so weak that the Athenian tragic poets seem quite unable to appreciate, or even to understand, the more delicate features in Homeric characters. They are painted so coarsely and ignorantly by Euripides that we should never recognize them but for their names. Base motives and unseemly wrangling take the place of chivalrous honor and graceful politeness.

“But the critics of the day complained that Euripides degraded the ideal character of tragedy by painting human nature as he found it: in fact as it was, and not as it ought to be. Let us turn, then, to Sophokles, who painted the most ideal women which the imagination of a refined Athenian could conceive, and consider his most celebrated characters, his Antigone and his Elektra. A calm, dispassionate survey will, I think, pronounce them harsh and masculine. They act rightly, no doubt, and even nobly, but they do it in the most disagreeable way. Except in their external circumstances they differ in no respect from men.”

Certainly, the opinion expressed of the women of Euripides is tainted by the feeling that they ought to act like English matrons and their daughters.

Quite a different impression is given by Symonds, who, in regard to some of the sentences occurring in Euripides which are uncomplimentary to women, says: “It is impossible to weigh occasional sententious sarcasms against such careful studies of heroic virtue in women as the Iphigenia, the Elektra, the Polyxena, the Alkestis.”

But the complete vindication of the fact that Balaustion and Mrs. Browning and our own women of to-day are on the right side in their appreciation of Euripides as the great woman’s poet of antiquity is found in the opinion of our contemporary critic, Gilbert Murray, who more than thirty years after these poems were written writes of the “wonderful women-studies by which Euripides dazzled and aggrieved his contemporaries. They called him a hater of women; and Aristophanes makes the women of Athens conspire for revenge against him. Of course he was really the reverse. He loved and studied and expressed the women whom the Socratics ignored and Pericles advised to stay in their rooms. Crime, however, is always more striking and palpable than virtue. Heroines like Medea, Phaedra, Stheneboia, Aërope, Clytemnestra, perhaps fill the imagination more than those of the angelic or devoted type—Alcestis, who died to save her husband, Evadne and Laodamia, who could not survive theirs, and all the great list of virgin-martyrs. But the significant fact is that, like Ibsen, Euripides refuses to idealize any man, and does idealize women. There is one youth-martyr, Menoikeus in the ‘Phænissae,’ but his martyrdom is a masculine, businesslike performance—he gets rid of his prosaic father by a pretext about traveling money without that shimmer of loveliness that hangs over the virgins.”

Where then did Euripides find these splendid women of force and character? It seems quite impossible that he could have evolved them out of his own inner consciousness. He must have known women who served at least, in part, as models. Besides, there was undoubtedly a new woman movement in the air or Plato in his “Republic” would not have suggested a plan for educating men and women alike. The free women of Athens are known in some cases to have attained a high degree of culture. Aspasia, who became the wife of Pericles, is a shining example. There was Sappho, also, with her school of poetry attended by girls in Lesbos.

Taking all these facts into consideration, it would seem that Browning was sufficiently justified in drawing such a woman as Balaustion, and that a woman of her penetrating intellect and ardor of spirit would love Euripides, and dislike Aristophanes, seems absolutely certain.

Therefore, if the historical attitude is taken toward Balaustion and her criticism and appreciation, it can be on the whole accepted as reflecting what would probably be the feeling of an ardent woman-follower of Euripides in his own day.

But, on the other hand, if the criticism be taken as Browning’s own, it is open to question whether it is partisan rather than entirely broad-minded. Take the consensus of opinion of modern critics and we find them all agreed in regard to the genius of Aristophanes, though admitting that his coarseness must, at times, detract from their enjoyment of him.

There is much truth in Symonds’ criticism of the poem. He says of it: “As a sophist and a rhetorician of poetry, Mr. Browning proves himself unrivaled, and takes rank with the best writers of historical romances. Yet students may fairly accuse him of some special pleading in favor of his friends and against his foes. It is true that Aristophanes did not bring back again the golden days of Greece; true that his comedy revealed a corruption latent in Athenian life. But neither was Euripides in any sense a savior. Impartiality regards them both as equally destructive: Aristophanes, because he indulged animalism and praised ignorance in an age which ought to have outgrown both; Euripides, because he criticised the whole fabric of Greek thought and feeling in an age which had not yet distinguished between analysis and skepticism.