The Browning Cyclopædia: A Guide to the Study of the Works of Robert Browning. Edward Berdoe

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СКАЧАТЬ them are not to be cajoled into interfering with the laws of life and the inevitable decrees of which the Fates are but the ministers. At last they agree to lengthen the life of Admetus if any mortal can be found to forgo the fulfilment of his own life on his account. Apollo protests that the king’s subjects will strive with one another for the glory of dying that their king may survive. First in all Pheræ will his father offer himself as his son’s substitute. “Bah!” says Clotho. “Then his mother,” suggests Apollo; “or, spurning the exchange, the king may choose to die.” With the jeers of the three the scene closes. Mr. Browning’s lovely poem Balaustion’s Adventure should be read next after this, as the Prologue to the Parleyings has little or no relation to the rest of the volume.

      Notes. —Parnassus, a mountain of Greece, sacred to the Muses and Apollo and Bacchus. Dire ones, the Fates, Clotho, Lachesis and Atropos. Admetus, the husband of Alcestis, whose wife died to save his life. The Fates, the Destinies, the goddesses supposed to preside over human life: Clotho, who spins the thread of life; Lachesis, who determines the length of the thread; Atropos, who cuts it off. Woe-purfled, embroidered with woe. Weal-prankt, decked out with prosperity. Moirai, the Parcæ, the Fates. Zeus, Jupiter, the Supreme Being. Eld, old age. Sweet Trine, the Three, the Trinity of Fates. Bacchus, the Wine-God. Semele’s Son: Semele was the daughter of Cadmus and Harmonia; when Zeus appeared to her in his Divine splendour she was consumed by the flames and gave birth to Bacchus, whom Zeus saved from the fire and hid in his thigh. Bacchus, when made a god, raised her to heaven under the name of Thyone. Swound, a swoon. Cummers, gossips, female acquaintances. Collyrium, eye-wash. Pheræ, a town in Thessaly, where King Pheres reigned, who was the father of Admetus.

      Apparent Failure. (Dramatis Personæ, 1864.) Mr. Ruskin has laboured hard to save St. Mark’s, Venice, from the destroying hand of the restorer. Mr. Browning wrote this poem to save from complete destruction a much less important, though a celebrated building, the Paris Morgue, the deadhouse wherein are exposed the bodies of persons found dead, that they may be claimed by their friends. The Doric little Morgue is close to Notre Dame, on the banks of the Seine, and is one of the sights of Paris – repulsive as it is – which everybody makes a point of seeing. The poet entered the building and saw behind the great screen of glass three bodies exposed for identification on the copper couch fronting him. They were three men who had killed themselves, and the poet mentally questions them why they abhorred their lives so much. You “poor boy” wanted to be an emperor, forsooth; you “old one” were a red socialist, and this next one fell a prey to misdirected love. The three deadly sins of Pride, Covetousness, and Lust had each its victim. And before them stands the poet of optimism, not staggered in his doctrine even by this sad sight. Not for a moment does his faith fail that “what God blessed once can never prove accurst.” His optimism in this poem is at high-water mark; where some weak-kneed believers in humanity would have found a breaking link in the chain, Mr. Browning sees but “apparent failure,” and declines to believe the doom of these poor wrecks of souls to be final.

      Apparitions. (Introduction to The Two Poets of Croisic, 1878.) This exquisite poem is a tribute to the charm exercised by a human face, from which looks out God’s own smile, gladdening a cold and scowling prospect as a burst of May soon dispels the lingering chills of winter.

      Appearances. (Pacchiarotto, with other Poems, 1876.) Metaphysicians would explain this poem by an essay on the association of ideas; strong as imagination is, it can never exceed experience which has come to us through sight. Feelings are associated with one another according as they have been operant in more or less frequent succession. Reasoning may associate ideas, but for force and permanence our actual sight, and contact are the wonder-workers in this department of soul-life. Nothing can beautify the place where we have in the past suffered some great mental distress or wrong; so no place can ever be unbeautiful where the true lover wins his life’s prize. When the upholsterer’s art does more for a room than the memory of a first love, that love is not of the eternal sort our poet sings.

      Aprile. The Italian poet who sought to love, as Paracelsus sought to know. He represents the Renaissance spirit in its emotional aspect, as Paracelsus represents the spirit of the Reformation in its passion for knowledge. As Mr. Browning says, they were the “two halves of a dissevered world.” (Paracelsus.)

      Arcades Ambo. (Asolando, 1889.) If a man runs away in battle when the balls begin to fly, we call him a coward. He may excuse himself by the argument that man must at all risks shun death. This is the excuse made by the vivisector: he is often a kind and amiable man in every other relation of life than in that aspect of his profession which demands, as he holds, the torture of living animals for the advancement of the healing art. Health of the body must be preserved at all costs; the moral health is of little or no consequence in comparison with that of the body; above all we must not die, death is the one thing to be avoided, hide therefore from the darts of the King of Terrors behind the whole creation of lower animals. Mr. Browning says this is cowardice exactly parallel with that of the soldier who runs away in battle; the principle being that at all costs life is the one thing to be preserved. The Anti-Vivisectionist principles of Mr. Browning were very pronounced. He was for many years associated with Miss F. P. Cobbe in her efforts to suppress the practice of torturing animals for scientific purposes, and was a Vice-President of the Victoria Street Society for the Protection of Animals from Vivisection at the time of his death. See my Browning’s Message to his Time (chapter on “Browning and Vivisection”).

      Aristophanes, the celebrated comic poet of Athens, was born probably about the year 448 B.C. His first comedy was brought out in 427 B.C. Plato in his Symposium gives Aristophanes a position at the side of Socrates. The festivals of Dionysus greatly promoted the production of tragedies, comedies and satiric dramas. The greater Dionysia were held in the city of Athens in the month of March, and were connected with the natural feeling of joy at the approach of summer. These Bacchanalian festivals were scenes of gross licentiousness, and the coarseness which pervades much of the work of the great Greek comedian was due to the fact that the popular taste demanded grossness of allusion on occasions like these. The Athenian dramatist of the old school was entirely unrestrained. He could satirise even the Eleusinian mysteries, could deal abundantly in personalities, burlesque the most sacred subjects, and ridicule the most prominent persons in the republic. Professor Jebb, in his article on Aristophanes in the Encyclopedia Britannica, says: “It is neither in the denunciation nor in the mockery that he is most individual. His truest and highest faculty is revealed by those wonderful bits of lyric writing in which he soars above everything that can move to laughter or tears, and makes the clear air thrill with the notes of a song as free, as musical and as wild as that of the nightingale invoked by his own chorus in the Birds. The speech of Dikaios Logos in the Clouds, the praises of country life in the Peace, the serenade in the Eccleziazusæ, the songs of the Spartan and Athenian maidens in the Lysistrata; above all, perhaps, the chorus in the Frogs, the beautiful chant of the Initiated, – these passages, and such as these, are the true glories of Aristophanes. They are the strains, not of an artist, but of one who warbles for pure gladness of heart in some place made bright by the presence of a god. Nothing else in Greek poetry has quite this wild sweetness of the woods. Of modern poets Shakespeare alone, perhaps, has it in combination with a like richness and fertility of fancy.” Fifty-four comedies were ascribed to Aristophanes. We possess only eleven: these deal with Athenian life during a period of thirty-six years. The political satires of the poet, therefore, cannot be understood without a knowledge of Athenian history, and an acquaintance with its life during the period in which the poet wrote. “Aristophanes was a natural conservative,” says Professor Jebb; “his ideal was the Athens of the Persian wars. He detested the vulgarity and the violence of mob-rule; he clove to the old worship of the gods; he regarded the new ideas of education as a tissue of imposture and impiety. As a mocker he is incomparable for the union of subtlety with wit of the comic imagination. As a poet he is immortal.” The momentous period in the history of Greece during which Aristophanes began to write, СКАЧАТЬ