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When I betray her, though she is no more,
May I die.
 

The regeneration of Admetos is accomplished. How much in all this exposition is derived from the play, how much is added to it, may be left for the consideration of the reader who will compare the original with the transcript.

If the character of Admetos is somewhat lowered by Browning beneath the conception of the Greek dramatist, to allow room for its subsequent elevation, the conception of Herakles is certainly heightened. We shall not say that Balaustion is the speaker and that Herakles is somewhat of a woman's hero. Browning himself fully enters into Balaustion's enthusiasm. And the presence of the strong, joyous helper of men is in truth an inspiring one. The great voice that goes before him is itself a Sursum corda!—a challenge and a summons to whatever manliness is in us. And the best of it is that sauntering the pavement or crossing the ferry we may happen to encounter this face of Herakles:

 
Out of this face emerge banners and horses—O superb! I see what is coming;
I see the high pioneer-caps—I see the slaves of runners clearing the way,
I hear victorious drums.
 
 
This face is a life-boat.
 

For Walt Whitman too had seen Brother Jonathan Herakles, and indeed the face of the strong and tender wound-dresser was itself as the face of a calmer Herakles to many about to die. The speeches of the demigod in Browning's transcript require an abundant commentary, but it is the commentary of an irrepressible joy, an outbreak of enthusiasm which will not be controlled. The glorious Gargantuan creature, in the best sense Rabelaisian, is uplifted by Browning into a very saint of joyous effort; no pallid ascetic, indeed, beating his breast with the stone, but a Christian saint of Luther's school, while at the same time a somewhat over-boisterous benevolent Paynim giant:

 
Gladness be with thee, Helper of our world!
I think this is the authentic sign and sea!
Of Godship, that it ever waxes glad,
And more glad, until gladness blossoms, bursts
Into a rage to suffer for mankind,
And recommence at sorrow.
 

Something of the Herakles ideal appears again and again in other poems of Browning. His Breton sailor, Hervé Riel, has more than a touch of the Heraclean frankness of gaiety in arduous effort. His Ivàn Ivànovitch wields the axe and abolishes a life with the Heraclean joy in righteousness. And in the last of Browning's poems, not without a pathetically over-boisterous effort and strain, there is the suggestion of an ideal conception of himself as a Herakles-Browning; the old man tries at least to send his great voice before him.

The new Admetos, new Alkestis, imagined by Balaustion at the close of the poem, are wedded lovers who, like the married in Pompilia's dream of heaven, "know themselves into one." For them the severance of death has become an impossible thing; and therefore no place is left for Herakles in this treatment of the story. It expresses Browning's highest conception of the union of soul with soul:

 
Therewith her whole soul entered into his,
He looked the look back, and Alkestis died—
 

died only to be rejected by Hades, as still living, and with a more potent life, in her husband's heart and will. Yet the mortal cloud is round these mortals still; they cannot see things as the gods see. And, for all their hopes and endeavours, the earth which they would renew and make as heaven, remains the old incredulous, unconverted earth,—"Such is the envy Gods still bear mankind." And in such an earth, if not for them, assuredly for others, Herakles may find great deeds to do.

Balaustion has the unique distinction of being heroine throughout two of Browning's poems; and of both we may say that the genius of Euripides is the hero. Aristophanes' Apology is written from first to last with unflagging energy; the translation of the "Herakles" which it includes is a masculine and masterly effort to transport the whole sense and spirit of the original into English verse, and the rendering of the choral passages into lyric form gives it an advantage over the transcript of the "Alkestis." Perhaps not a little of the self-defence of Aristophanes and his statement of the case against Euripides could have been put as well or better in a critical essay in prose; but the method of Browning enables him to mingle, in a dramatic fashion, truth with sophistry, and to make both serve his purpose of presenting not only the case but the character of the great Greek maker of comedy. Balaustion is no longer the ardent girl of the days of her first adventure; she is a wife, with the dignity, the authority of womanhood and wifehood; she has known the life of Athens with its evil and its good; she has been the favoured friend of Euripides; she is capable of confronting his powerful rival in popular favour, and of awing him into sobriety and becoming manners; with an instinctive avoidance she recoils from whatever is gross or uncomely; yet she can do honour to the true light of intellect and genius even though it shines through earth-born vapours and amid base surroundings.

Athens, "the life and light of the whole world," has sunk under the power of Sparta, and it can be henceforth no home for Balaustion and her Euthukles. The bark that bears them is bounding Rhodesward, and the verse has in it the leap and race of the prow. Balaustion, stricken at heart, yet feels that this tragedy of Athens brings the tragic katharsis; the justice of the gods is visible in it; and above man's wickedness and folly she reaches to "yon blue liberality of heaven." It seems as if the spirit which might have saved Athens is that of the loins girt and the lamp lit which was embodied in the strenuous devotion of Euripides to the highest things; and the spirit which has brought Athens to its ruin is that expressed with a splendid power through the work of Aristophanes. But Aristophanes shall plead for himself and leave nothing unsaid that can serve to vindicate him as a poet and even as a moralist Thus only can truth in the end stand clear, assured of its supremacy over falsehood and over half-truth.

Nothing that Browning has written is more vividly imagined than the encounter of Balaustion with Aristophanes and his crew of revellers on the night when the tidings of the death of Euripides reached Athens; it rouses and controls the feelings with the tumult of life and the sanctity of death, while also imposing itself on the eye as a brilliant and a solemn picture. The revellers scatter before the presence of Balaustion, and she and the great traducer of Euripides stand face to face. Nowhere else has Browning presented this conception of the man of vast disorderly genius, who sees and approves the better way and splendidly follows the worse:

 
Such domineering deity
Hephaistos might have carved to cut the brine
For his gay brother's prow, imbrue that path
Which, purpling, recognised the conqueror.
 

It is as if male force, with the lust of the eye, the lust of the flesh, and the pride of life behind it, were met and held in check by the finer feminine force resting for its support upon the divine laws. But in truth Aristophanes is half on the side of Balaustion and of Euripides; he must, indeed, make his stand; he is not one to falter or quail; and yet when the sudden cloud falls upon his face he knows that it is his part to make the worse appear the better cause, knowing this all the more because the justice of Balaustion's regard perceives and recognises his higher self. Suddenly the Tuphon, "madding the brine with wrath or monstrous sport," is transformed into something like what the child saw once from the Rhodian sea-coast (the old romantic poet in Browning is here young once more):

 
All at once, large-looming from his wave,
Out leaned, chin hand-propped, pensive on the ledge,
A sea-worn face, sad as mortality,
Divine with yearning after fellowship.
He rose but breast-high. So much god she saw;
So much she sees now, and does reverence.
 

But in a moment the sea-god is again the sea-monster, with "tail-splash, frisk of fin"; the majestic Aristophanes relapses into the most wonderful of mockers.

No passage in the poem is quite so impressive as this through its strangeness in beauty. But the entry of Sophocles—"an old pale-swathed majesty,"—at the supper which followed the performance of the play, is another of those passages to find which in situ is a sufficient reward for reading many laborious pages that might almost as well have been thrown into an imaginary conversation in prose:

 
Then the grey brow sank low, and Sophokles
Re-swathed him, sweeping doorward: mutely passed
'Twixt rows as mute.
 

The critical study of comedy, its origin, its development, its function, its decline, is written with admirable vigour, but the case of Aristophanes can be read elsewhere. It is interesting, however, to note the argument in support of the thesis that comedy points really to ideals of humanity which are beyond human attainment; that its mockery of man's infirmities implies a conception of our nature which in truth is extra-human; while tragedy on the contrary accepts man as he is, in his veritable weakness and veritable strength, and wrings its pity and its terror out of these. It is Aristophanes who thus vindicates Euripides before the revellers who have assembled in his own honour, and they accept what seems to them a paradox as his finest stroke of irony. But he has indeed after the solemn withdrawal of Sophocles looked for a moment through life and death, and seen in his hour of highest success his depth of failure. For him, in this testing-time of life, art has been the means of probation; he has squandered the gifts bestowed upon him, which should have been concentrated in the special task to which he was summoned. He should have known—he did in fact know—that the art which "makes grave" is higher than that which "makes grin"; his own peculiar duty was to advance his art one step beyond his predecessors; to create a drama which should bring into harmony the virtue of tragedy and the virtue of comedy; to discover the poetry which

 
Makes wise, not grave,—and glad,
Not grinning: whereby laughter joins with tears.
 

Instead of making this advance he had retrograded; and it remained for a poet of a far-off future in the far-off Kassiterides—the Tin Isle which has Stratford at its heart—to accomplish the task on which Aristophanes would not adventure. One way a brilliant success was certain for Aristophanes; the other and better way failure was possible; and he declined to make the venture of faith. It is with this sense of self-condemnation upon him that he essays his own defence, and it is against this sense of self-condemnation more than against the genius and the methods of Euripides that he struggles. When towards the close of the poem he takes in hand the psalterion, and chants in splendid strains the story of Thamuris, who aspired and failed, as he himself will never do, the reader is almost won over to his side. Browning, who felt the heights and depths of the lyric genius of Aristophanes, would seem to have resolved that in this song of "Thamuris marching," moving in ecstasy amid the glories of an autumn morning, he would dramatically justify his conception of the poet; and never in his youth did Browning sing with a finer rapture of spirit. But reading what follows, the record of the subjugation of Athens, when the Athenian people accept the ruin of their defences as if it were but a fragment of Aristophanic comedy, we perceive that this song, which breaks off with an uproar of laughter, is the condemnation as well as the glory of the singer.

The translation of Agamemnon, the preface to which is dated "October 1st, 1877," was undertaken at the request or command of Carlyle. The argument of the preface fails to justify Browning's method. A translation "literal at every cost save that of absolute violence to our language" may be highly desirable; it is commonly called a "crib"; and a crib contrived by one who is not only a scholar but a man of genius will now and again yield a word or a phrase of felicitous precision. But that a translation "literal at every cost" should be put into verse is a wrong both to the original and to the poetry of the language to which the original is transferred; it assumes a poetic garb which in assuming it rends to tatters. A translation into verse implies that a certain beauty of form is part of the writer's aim; it implies that a poem is to be reproduced as a poem, and not as that bastard product of learned ill judgment—a glorified crib; and a glorified crib is necessarily a bad crib. Mrs Orr, who tells us that Browning refused to regard even the first of Greek writers as models of literary style, had no doubt that the translation of the Agamemnon was partly made for the pleasure of exposing the false claims made on their behalf. Such a supposition does not agree well with Browning's own Preface; but if he had desired to prove that the Agamemnon can be so rendered as to be barely readable, he has been singularly successful. From first to last in the genius of Browning there was an element, showing itself from time to time, of strange perversity.

Chapter XIV
Problem and Narrative Poems

Prince Hohenstiel-Schwangau, which appeared in December 1871, four months after the publication of Balaustions Adventure, was written by Browning during a visit to friends in Scotland. His interest in modern politics was considerable, but in general it remained remote from his work as a poet. He professed himself a liberal, but he was a liberal who because he was such, claimed the right of independent judgment. He had rejoiced in the enfranchisement of Italy. During the American Civil War he was strongly on the side of the North, as letters to Story, written when his private grief lay heavy upon him, abundantly show. He was at one time a friend of the movement in favour of granting the parliamentary suffrage to women, but late in life his opinion on this question altered. He was as decidedly opposed to the proposals for a separate or subordinate Parliament for Ireland as were his friends Carlyle and Tennyson and Matthew Arnold. After the introduction of the Home Rule Bill he could not bring himself, though requested by a friend, to write words which would have expressed or implied esteem for the statesman who had made that most inopportune experiment in opportunism¹¹² and whose talents he admired. Yet for a certain kind of opportunism—that which conserves rather than destroys—Browning thought that much might fairly be said. To say this with a special reference to the fallen Emperor of France he wrote his Prince Hohenstiel-Schwangau.

Browning's instinctive sympathies are not with the "Saviour of Society," who maintains for temporary reasons a tottering edifice. He naturally applauds the man who builds on sure foundations, or the man who in order to reach those foundations boldly removes the accumulated lumber of the past. But there are times when perhaps the choice lies only between conservation of what is imperfect and the attempt to erect an airy fabric which has no basis upon the solid earth; and Browning on the whole preferred a veritable civitas hominum, however remote from the ideal, to a sham civitas Dei or a real Cloudcuckootown. "It is true, that what is settled by custom, though it be not good, yet at least it is fit; and those things, which have long gone together, are as it were confederate within themselves; whereas new things piece not so well; but though they help by their utility, yet they trouble by their inconformity." These words, of one whose worldly wisdom was more profoundly studied than ever Browning's was, might stand as a motto for the poem. But the pregnant sentence of Bacon which follows these words should be added—"All this is true if time stood still." Browning's pleading is not a merely ingenious defence of the untenable, either with reference to the general thesis or its application to the French Empire. He did not, like his wife, think of the Emperor as if he were a paladin of modern romance; but he honestly believed that he had for a time done genuine service—though not the highest—to France and to the world. "My opinion of the solid good rendered years ago," he wrote in September 1863 to Story, "is unchanged. The subsequent deference to the clerical party in France and support of brigandage is poor work; but it surely is doing little harm to the general good." And to Miss Blagden after the publication of his poem: "I thought badly of him at the beginning of his career, et pour cause; better afterward, on the strength of the promises he made, and gave indications of intending to redeem. I think him very weak in the last miserable year." It seemed to Browning a case in which a veritable apologia was admissible in the interests of truth and justice, and by placing this apologia in the mouth of the Emperor himself certain sophistries were also legitimate that might help to give the whole the dramatic character which the purposes of poetry, as the exposition of a complex human character, required.

The misfortune was that in making choice of such a subject Browning condemned himself to write with his left hand, to fight with one arm pinioned, to exhibit the case on behalf of the "Saviour of Society" with his brain rather than with brain and heart acting together. He was to demonstrate that in the scale of spiritual colours there is a respectable place for drab. This may be undertaken with skill and vigour, but hardly with enthusiastic pleasure. Prince Hohenstiel-Schwangau is an interesting intellectual exercise, and if this constitutes a poem, a poem it is; but the theme is fitter for a prose discussion. Browning's intellectual ability became a snare by which the poet within him was entrapped. The music that he makes here is the music of Master Hugues of Saxe-Gotha:

 
So your fugue broadens and thickens,
Greatens and deepens and lengthens,
Till one exclaims—"But where's music, the dickens!"
 

The mysterious Sphinx who expounds his riddle and dissertates on himself in an imaginary Leicester Square says many things that deserve to be considered; but they are addressed to our understanding in the first instance, and only in a secondary and indirect way reach our feelings and our imagination. The interest of the poem is virtually exhausted in a single reading; to a true work of art we return again and again for renewed delight. We return to Prince Hohenstiel-Schwangau as to a valuable store-house of arguments or practical considerations in defence of a conservative opportunism; but if we have once appropriated these, we do not need the book. There is a spirit of conservation, like that of Edmund Burke, which has in it a wise enthusiasm, we might almost say a wise mysticism. Browning's Prince is not a conservator possessed by this enthusiasm. Something almost pathetic may be felt in his sense that the work allotted to him is work of mere temporary and transitory utility. He has no high inspirations such as support the men who change the face of the world. The Divine Ruler who has given him his special faculties, who has enjoined upon him his special tasks, holds no further communication with him. But he will do the work of a mere man in a man's strength, such as it is; he cannot make new things; he can use the thing he finds; he can for a term of years "do the best with the least change possible"; he can turn to good account what is already half-made; and so, he believes, he can, in a sense, co-operate with God. So long as he was an irresponsible dreamer, a mere voice in the air, it was permitted him to indulge in glorious dreams, to utter shining words. Now that his feet are on the earth, now that his thoughts convert themselves into deeds, he must accept the limitations of earth. The idealists may put forth this programme and that; his business is not with them but with the present needs of the humble mass of his people—"men that have wives and women that have babes," whose first demand is bread; by intelligence and sympathy he will effect "equal sustainment everywhere" throughout society; and when the man of genius who is to alter the world arises, such a man most of all will approve the work of his predecessor, who left him no mere "shine and shade" on which to operate, but the good hard substance of common human life.

All this is admirably put, and it is interesting to find that Browning, who had rejoiced with Herakles doing great deeds and purging the world of monsters, could also honour a poor provisional Atlas whose task of sustaining a poor imperfect globe upon his shoulders is less brilliant but not perhaps less useful. Nor would it be just to overlook the fact that in three or four pages the poet asserts himself as more than the prudent casuist. The splendid image of society as a temple from which winds the long procession of powers and beauties has in it something of the fine mysticism of Edmund Burke.¹¹³ The record of the Prince's early and irresponsible aspirations for a free Italy—

 
Ay, still my fragments wander, music-fraught,
Sighs of the soul, mine once, mine now, and mine
For ever!—
 

with what immediately follows, would have satisfied the ardent spirit of Mrs Browning.¹¹⁴ And the characterisation of the genius of the French nation, whose lust for war and the glory of war Browning censures as "the dry-rot of the race," rises brilliantly out of its somewhat gray surroundings:—

 
The people here,
Earth presses to her heart, nor owns a pride
Above her pride i' the race all flame and air
And aspiration to the boundless Great,
The incommensurably Beautiful—
Whose very faulterings groundward come of flight
Urged by a pinion all too passionate
For heaven and what it holds of gloom and glow:
Bravest of thinkers, bravest of the brave
Doers, exalt in Science, rapturous
In Art, the—more than all—magnetic race
To fascinate their fellows, mould mankind.
 

It is a passage conceived in the same spirit as the great chaunt "O Star of France!" written, at the same date, and with a recognition of both the virtues and the shames of France, by the American poet of Democracy. To these memorable fragments from Prince Hohenstiel-Schwangau one other may be added—that towards the close of the poem which applies the tradition of the succession by murder of the priesthood at the shrine of the Clitumnian god to the succession of men of genius in the priesthood of the world—"The new power slays the old, but handsomely."

In Prince Hohenstiel-Schwangau there is nothing enigmatical. "It is just what I imagine the man might, if he pleased, say for himself," so Browning wrote to Miss Blagden soon after the publication of the volume. Many persons, however, have supposed that in Fifine at the Fair (1872) a riddle rather than a poem was given to the world by the perversity of the writer. When she comes to speak of this work Browning's biographer Mrs Orr is half-apologetic; it is for her "a piece of perplexing cynicism." The origin of the poem was twofold. The external suggestion came from the fact that during one of his visits to Pornic, Browning had seen the original of his Fifine, and she lived in his memory as a subject of intellectual curiosity and imaginative interest. The internal suggestion, as Mrs Orr hints, lay in a certain mood of resentment against himself arising from the fact that the encroachments of the world seemed to estrange in some degree a part of his complex being from entire fidelity to his own past. The world, in fact, seemed to be playing with Browning the part of a Fifine. If this were so, it would be characteristic of Browning that he should face round upon the world and come to an explanation with his adversary. But this could not in a printed volume be done in his own person; he was not one to take the public into his confidence. The discussion should be removed as far as possible from his own circumstances and even his own feelings. It should be a dramatic debate on the subject of fidelity and infidelity, on the bearings of the apparent to the true, on the relation of reality in this our mortal life to illusion. As he studied the subject it assumed new significances and opened up wider issues. An actual Elvire and an actual Fifine may be the starting points, but by-and-by Elvire shall stand for all that is permanent and substantial in thought and feeling, Fifine for all that is transitory and illusive. The question of conjugal fidelity is as much the subject of Fifine at the Fair as the virtue of tar-water is the subject of Berkeley's Siris. The poem is in fact Browning's Siris—a chain of thoughts and feelings, reaching with no break in the chain, from a humble basis to the heights of speculation.

But before all else Fifine at the Fair is a poem. Of all the longer poems which followed The Ring and the Book it is the most sustained and the most diversified in imaginative power. To point out passages of peculiar beauty, passages vivid in feeling, original in thought, would here be out of place; for the brilliance and vigour are unflagging, and what we have to complain of is the lack of some passages of repose. The joy in freedom—freedom accepting some hidden law—of these poor losels and truants from convention, who stroll it and stage it, the gypsy figure of Fifine in page-costume, the procession of imagined beauties—Helen, Cleopatra, the Saint of Pornic Church—the half-emerging, half-undelivered statue by Michelagnolo, the praise of music as nearer to the soul than words, sunset at Saint-Marie, the play of the body in the sea at noontide (with all that it typifies), woman as the rillet leaping to the sea, woman as the dolphin that upbears Orion, the Venetian carnival, which is the carnival of human life, darkness fallen upon the plains, and through the darkness the Druidic stones gleaming—all these are essentially parts of the texture of the poem, yet each has a lustre or a shimmer or grave splendour of its own.

It is strange that any reader should have supposed either the Prologue or the Epilogue to be uttered by the imaginary speaker of the poem. Both shadow forth the personal feelings of Browning; the prologue tells of the gladness he still found both in the world of imagination and the world of reality, over which hovers the spirit that had once been so near his own, the spirit that is near him still, yet moving on a different plane, perhaps wondering at or pitying this life of his, which yet he accepts with cheer and will turn to the best account; the epilogue veils behind its grim humour the desolate feeling that came upon him again and again as a householder in this house of life, for behind the happiness which he strenuously maintained, there lay a great desolation. But the last word of the epilogue—"Love is all and Death is nought" is a word of sustainment wrung out of sorrow. These poems have surely in them no "perplexing cynicism," nor has the poem enclosed between them, when it is seen aright. Browning's idea in the poem he declared in reply to a question of Dr Furnivall, "was to show merely how a Don Juan might justify himself, partly by truth, somewhat by sophistry." No more unhappy misnomer than this "Don Juan" could have been devised for the curious, ingenious, learned experimenter in life, no man of pleasure, in the vulgar sense of the word, but a deliberate explorer of thoughts and things, who argues out his case with so much fine casuistry and often with the justest conceptions of human character and conduct. If we could discover a dividing line between his truth and his sophistry, we might discover also that the poem is no exceptional work of Browning, for which an apology is required, but of a piece with his other writings and in harmony with the body of thought and feeling expressed through them. Now it is certain that as Browning advanced in years he more and more distrusted the results of the intellect in its speculative research; he relied more and more upon the knowledge that comes through or is embodied in love. Love by its very nature implies a relation; what is felt is real for us. But the intellect, which aspires to know things as they are, forever lands us in illusions—illusions needful for our education, and therefore far from unprofitable, to be forever replaced by fresh illusions; and the only truth we thus attain is the conviction that truth there assuredly is, that we must forever reach after it, and must forever grasp its shadow. Theologies, philosophies, scientific theories—these change like the shifting and shredding clouds before our eyes, and are forever succeeded by clouds of another shape and hue. But the knowledge involved in love is veritable and is verified at least for us who love. While in his practice he grew more scientific in research for truth, and less artistic in his desire for beauty, such was the doctrine which Browning upheld.

The speaker in Fifine at the Fair is far more a seeker for knowledge than he is a lover. And he has learnt, and learnt aright, that by illusions the intellect is thrown forward towards what may relatively be termed the truth; through shadows it advances upon reality. When he argues that philosophies and theologies are the fizgigs of the brain, its Fifines the false which lead us onward to Elvire the true, he expresses an idea which Browning has repeatedly expressed in Ferishtah's Fancies and which, certainly, was an idea he had made his own. And if a man approaches the other sex primarily with a view to knowledge, with a view to confirm and to extend his own self-consciousness and to acquire experience of the strength and the weakness of womanhood, it is true that he will be instructed more widely, if not more deeply, by Elvire supplemented by Fifine than by Elvire alone. The sophistry of the speaker in Browning's poem consists chiefly in a juggle between knowledge and love, and in asserting as true of love what Browning held to be, in the profoundest sense, true of knowledge. The poet desires, as Butler in his "Analogy" desired, to take lower ground than his own; but the curious student of man and woman, of love and knowledge—imagination aiding his intellect—is compelled, amid his sophistical jugglings, to work out his problems upon Browning's own lines, and he becomes a witness to Browning's own conclusions. Saul, before the poem closes, is also among the prophets. For him, as for Browning, "God and the soul stand sure." He sees, as Browning sees, man reaching upward through illusions—religious theories, philosophical systems, scientific hypotheses, artistic methods, scholarly attainments—to the Divine. The Pornic fair has become the Venice carnival, and this has grown to the vision of man's life, in which the wanton and coquette named a philosophy or a theology has replaced the gipsy in tricot. The speaker misapplies to love and the truths obtained by love Browning's doctrine concerning knowledge. And yet, even so, he is forced to confess, however inconsistent his action may be with his belief, that the permanent—which is the Divine—can be reached through a single, central point of human love, but not through any vain attempt to manufacture an infinite by piecing together a multitude of detached points: