“What has just been said about Mr. Browning’s special pleading indicates the chief fault to be found with his poem. The point of view is modern. The situation is strained. Aristophanes becomes the scapegoat of Athenian sins, while Euripides shines forth a saint as well as a sage. Balaustion, for her part, beautiful as her conception truly is, takes up a position which even Plato could not have assumed. Into her mouth Mr. Browning has put the views of the most searching and most sympathetic modern analyst. She judges Euripides not as he appeared to his own Greeks, but as he strikes the warmest of his admirers, who compare his work with that of all the poets who have ever lived.”
It would seem that Mr. Symonds, himself, does some special pleading here. As we have seen, Euripides, though not a favorite in Athens, did have warm admirers in his own day; consequently there is nothing out of the way in portraying one of his contemporaries as an admirer. Furthermore, Balaustion does not represent him as a savior of his age. She sees only too clearly that in the narrow sense of convincing his age he has not been a success. What is her vision of the spiritual Athens which is to arise but a confession of this fact! Nor is it entirely improbable that she might be prophetic of a time when Euripides will be recognized as the true power. Any disciple of a poet ahead of his time perceives these things. One should be careful in judging of the poem as good modern criticism not to be entirely guided by the opinions of Balaustion. It should never be forgotten that it is a dramatic poem in which Aristophanes is allowed to speak for himself at great length, and whatever can be accepted as good argument for himself upon his own ground should be set over against the sweeping strictures of Balaustion. Indeed it may turn out that Browning has, after all, said for him the most exculpatory word of any critic, for he has so presented his case as to show that he considers him the outcome of the undeveloped phase of morals then existing for which he is hardly responsible because the higher light has not yet broken in upon him. This is evidenced especially in the strange combination in him of a frank belief in a life of the senses which goes along with a puritanical reverence for the gods, and a hatred of anything that falls within his own definition of vice.
To sum up, if I may again be forgiven for re-expressing an opinion elsewhere printed, which states as clearly as I am able to do my conviction of where the play stands as criticism, like all dramatic work, this poem aims to present the actual spirit of the time in which the actors moved upon the stage of life, and to reproduce something of their mental and emotional natures. Any criticism of the poets who figure in the poem, or of the larger question of the quarrel between tragedy and comedy, should be deduced indirectly, as implied in the sympathetic presentation of both sides, not based exclusively upon direct expressions of opinion on either side. So regarded it would seem that Browning was able to appreciate the genius of Aristophanes as well as that of Euripides, but that he considered Aristophanes to have value chiefly in relation to his age, as the artistic mouthpiece of its long-established usages, while Euripides had caught the breath of the future, and was the mirror of the prophetic impulses of his age rather than of its dominant civilization.
It is not improbable that Landor’s fascinating portrayal of the brilliant Aspasia may have had some influence upon Browning’s conception of Balaustion, upon the intellectual side at least. Alcibiades says that many people think her language as pure and elegant as Pericles, and Pericles says she was never seen out of temper or forgetful of what argument to urge first and most forcibly. When all is said, however, it may be that the “halo irised around” Balaustion’s head was due, more than to any one else, to the influence of the memory of Mrs. Browning, of whom she is made to say with a sublime disregard of its anachronism:
“I know the poetess who graved in gold,
Among her glories that shall never fade,
This style and title for Euripides,
The Human with his droppings of warm tears.”
After such a study of Greek life as this, wherein every available incident in history, every episode in the plays of Aristophanes bearing on the subject, every contemporary allusion are all woven together with such consummate skill that the very soul and body of the time is imaged forth, the classical poems of the other great names of the century seem almost like child’s play. Landor’s poems on Greek subjects sound like imitations in inferior material of antiquity. Arnold’s are even duller. Swinburne tells his Greek tales in an endless flow of rhythmical, musical verse, which occasionally rises into the realm of having something to say. Morris tells his at equal length in a manner suggestive of Chaucer without Chaucer’s snap, but where among them all is there such a bit of stinging life as in “Pheidippedes” or “Echetlos?”
Walter Savage Landor
Tennyson has, it is true, written some altogether exquisite verse, upon classical themes, and in every case the poems are not descriptive nor dramatic, but are dramatic soliloquies, thus approaching in form Browning’s dramatic idyls. One of the most beautiful of these is “Œnone.” There we have a mere tradition enlarged upon and the feelings of Œnone upon the desertion of Paris expressed with a richness of emotional fervor in a setting of appropriate nature imagery which carries us back to the idyls of Theocritus. “Ulysses,” again gives the psychology of a wanderer who has become so habituated to adventures that he is quite incapable of settling down with Penelope for the remainder of his life. One cannot quite forgive the poet for calling the ever youthful and beautiful Penelope, whose hand was sought by so many suitors, and who, although twenty years had passed, might still be quite young, an “aged wife.” It has always seemed to the writer like a wholly unnecessary stab at a very beautiful story, and the poem would have been just as effective if Ulysses’ hunger for lands beyond the sun had not been coupled with any scorn of Penelope, but with a feeling of pain that again Fate must take him away from her. Aside from this note of bad taste—bad, because it shadows a picture of faithfulness, cherished as an almost universal possession of humanity—the poem is fine. There is also, though not Greek, the remarkable study of Lucretius going mad from the effects of his wife’s love philter, in which the most fascinating glimpses of his philosophy of atoms are caught amid his maniacal wanderings, and, last, the very beautiful Demeter and Persephone.
These are as unique in their way as Browning’s Greek poems are in theirs, standing quite apart from such work as Morris’, or Swinburne’s, not only because of their haunting music, which even Swinburne cannot equal, but because of a deeper vein of thought running through them. As far as thought is concerned, however, all pale in significance the moment they are placed in juxtaposition with any of Browning’s classical productions.