Browning and His Century

by Helen A. Clarke

Not the least interesting of Browning’s classical poems is “Ixion.” In his treatment of the myth of Ixion he proves himself a true child of the Greeks, not that he makes any slavish attempt to reproduce a Greek atmosphere as it existed in the lifetime of Greek poetry, but he exercises that prerogative which the Greek poets always claimed, of interpreting a myth to suit their own ends.

It has become a sort of critical axiom to compare Browning’s “Ixion” with the “Prometheus” of literature. This is one of those catching analogies which lay hold upon the mind, and cannot be shaken off again without considerable difficulty. Mr. Arthur Symons first spoke of the resemblance; and almost every other critic with the exception of Mr. Nettleship has dwelt mainly upon that aspect of the poem which bears out the comparison. But why, it might very well be asked, did Browning, if he intended to make another Prometheus, choose Ixion for his theme? And the answer is evident, because in the story of Ixion he found some quality different from any which existed in the story of Prometheus, and which was especially suited to the end he had in view.

The kernel of the myth of Prometheus as developed by Æschylus is proud, unflinching suffering of punishment, inflicted, not by a god justly angry for sin against himself, but by a god sternly mindful of his own prerogatives, whose only right is might, and jealous of any interference in behalf of the race which he detested—the race of man. Thus Prometheus stands out as a hero in Greek mythology, a mediator between man and the blind anger of a god of unconditional power; and Prometheus, with an equally blind belief in Fate, accepts while he defies the punishment inflicted by Zeus. He tacitly acknowledges the right of Zeus to punish him, since he confesses his deeds to be sins, but, nevertheless, he would do exactly the same thing over again:

“By my choice, my choice
I freely sinned—I will confess my sin—
And helping mortals found mine own despair.”

On the other hand, Ixion never appears in classic lore as a hero. He has been called the “Cain” of Greece, because he was the first, as Pindar says, “to introduce to mortal men the murder of kin not unaccompanied by cunning.” Zeus appears, however, to have shown more leniency to him for the crime of killing his father-in-law than he ever did to Prometheus, as he not only purified him from murder, but invited him to a seat among the gods. But to quote Pindar again, “he found his prosperity too great to bear, when with infatuate mind he became enamored of Hera.... Thus his conceit drave him to an act of enormous folly, but the man soon suffered his deserts, and received an exquisite torture.” Ixion, then, in direct contrast to Prometheus, stands forth an embodiment of the most detestable of sins, perpetrated simply for personal ends. To depict such a man as this in an attitude of defiance, and yet to justify his defiance, is a far more difficult problem than to justify the already admired heroism of Prometheus. It is entirely characteristic of Browning that he should choose perhaps the most unprincipled character in the whole range of Greek mythology as his hero. He is not content, like Emerson, with simply telling us that “in the mud and scum of things there alway, alway something sings”; his aim is ever to bring us face to face with reality, and to open our ears that we may hear for ourselves this universal song. In fine, Browning chose Ixion and not another, because he wanted above all things an unquestioned sinner; and the task he set himself was to show the use of sin and at the same time exonerate the sinner from the eternal consequences of his act.

So mystical is the language of the poem that it is extremely difficult to trace behind it the subtle reasoning. Mr. Nettleship has given by far the best exposition of the poem, though even he does not seize all its suggestiveness.

Ixion, the sinner, suffering eternal torment, questions the justice of such torment. The first very important conclusion to which he comes, and it is one entirely in accord with science, is that sin is an aberration of sense, merely the result of external conditions in which the soul of man has no active part. The soul simply dreams, but once fully awakened, it would free itself from this bondage of sense if it were allowed to do so. Ixion argues that it is Zeus that hath made him and not he himself, and if he has sinned it is through the bodily senses which Zeus has conferred upon him, and if he were the friendly and all-powerful god which he claimed himself to be and which Ixion believed he was, why did he allow these distractions of sense to lead him (Ixion) into sin which could only be expiated by eternal punishment? Without body there would have been nothing to obstruct his soul’s rush upon the real; and with one touch of pitying power Zeus might have dispersed “this film-work, eye’s and ear’s.” It is entirely the fault of Zeus that he had sinned; and having done so will external torture make him repent any more who has repented already? This is the old, old problem that has taxed the brains of many a philosopher and the faith of many a theologian—the reconcilement of the existence of evil with an omnipotent God. Then follows a comparison between the actions of Zeus, a god, and of Ixion, the human king; and Ixion declares could he have known all, as Zeus does, he would have warded off evil from his subjects, would have seen that they were trained aright from the first—in fact, would not have allowed evil to exist, or failing this, could he have seen the heart of the criminals and realized how they repented he would have given them a chance to retrieve their past. Ixion now realizes that his human ideal is higher than that of Zeus. He had imagined him possessed of human qualities, and finds his qualities are less than human. What must be the inevitable result of arriving at such a conclusion? It means the dethronement of the god, and either a lapse into hopeless atheism or the recognition that the conception formed of the god was that of the human mind at an earlier stage of understanding. This conception becomes crystallized into an anthropomorphic god; but the mind of man goes onward on its way to higher heights, and lo! there comes a day when the god-ideal of the past is lower than the human ideal of the present. It is such a crisis as this that Ixion has arrived at, and his faith is equal to the strain. Since Zeus is man’s own mind-made god, Ixion’s tortures must be the natural consequences of his sin, and not the arbitrary punishment of a god; and what is Ixion’s sin as Browning has interpreted the myth?

The sin is that of arrogance. Ixion, a mere man, strives to be on an equality with gods. In Lucian’s dialogue between Hera and Zeus the stress is laid upon the arrogance of Ixion. Jupiter declares that Ixion shall pay the “penalty not of his love—for that surely is not so dreadful a crime—but of his loud boasting.” Browning raises the sin into a rarer atmosphere than that of the Greek or Latin. Zeus and Hera may be taken to represent the attributes of power and love as conceived by man in Divinity; and Ixion, symbolic of man, arrogantly supposes that he is capable of putting himself on an equality with Divinity by conceiving the entire nature of Divinity, that out of his finite mind he can construct the absolute god, and this is the sin, or, better, the aberration of sense, which results in the crystallization of his former inadequate conceptions into an anthropomorphic god, and causes his own downfall. Ixion, now fully aroused to the fact that the god he has been defying is but his own miserable conception of God, realizes that the suffering caused by this conception of God is the very means through which man struggles toward higher ideals: through evil he is brought to a recognition of the good; from his agony is bred the rainbow of hope, which ever shines above him glorified by the light from a Purity far beyond, all-unobstructed. Successive conceptions of God must sink; but man, however misled by them, must finally burst through the obstructions of sense, freeing his spirit to aspire forever toward the light.

“Ixion,” then, is not merely an argument against eternal punishment, nor a picture of heroic suffering, though he who will may draw these lessons from it, but it is a tremendous symbol of the spiritual development of man. Pure in its essence, the spirit learns through the obstructions of sense to yearn forever for higher attainment, and this constitutes the especial blessedness of man as contrasted with Zeus. He, like the Pythagorean Father of Number, is the conditioned one; but man is privileged through all æons of time to break through conditions, and thus Ixion, triumphant, exclaims:

“Where light, where light is, aspiring
Thither I rise, whilst thou—Zeus, keep the godship and sink.”