FOOTNOTES:

"Out with our Sacred Anchor! Here she stands,Balaustion! Strangers, greet the lyric girl!* * * * *Why, fast as snow in Thrace, the voyage through,Has she been falling thick in flakes of him,* * * * *And so, although she has some other name,We only call her Wild-Pomegranate-Flower,Balaustion; since, where'er the red bloom burns* * * * *You shall find food, drink, odour all at once."

"Out with our Sacred Anchor! Here she stands,Balaustion! Strangers, greet the lyric girl!

* * * * *

Why, fast as snow in Thrace, the voyage through,Has she been falling thick in flakes of him,

* * * * *

And so, although she has some other name,We only call her Wild-Pomegranate-Flower,Balaustion; since, where'er the red bloom burns

* * * * *

You shall find food, drink, odour all at once."

He called upon her to save their little band by singing a strophe. But she could do better than that—she could recite a whole play:

"That strangest, saddest, sweetest song of his,Alkestis!"

Only that very year had it reached "Our Isle o' the Rose"; she had seen it, at Kameiros, played just as it was played at Athens, and had learnt by heart "the perfect piece." Now, quick and subtle for all her enthusiasm, she remembers to tell the Sicilians how, besides "its beauty and the way it makes you weep," it does much honour to their own loved deity:

"Herakles, whom you house i' the city hereNobly, the Temple wide Greece talks about;I come a suppliant to your Herakles!Take me and put me on his temple-stepsTo tell you his achievement as I may."

"Then," she continues, in a passage which rings out again in theApology:

"Then, because Greeks are Greeks, and hearts are hearts,And poetry is power—they all outbrokeIn a great joyous laughter with much love:'Thank Herakles for the good holiday!Make for the harbour! Row, and let voice ring:In we row bringing in Euripides!'"

So did the Rhodians land at Syracuse. And the whole city, hearing the cry "In we row," which was taken up by the crowd around the harbour-quays, came rushing out to meet them, and Balaustion, standing on the topmost step of the Temple of Herakles, told the play:

"Told it, and, two days more, repeated it,Until they sent us on our way againWith good words and great wishes."

That was her Adventure. Three things happened in it "for herself": a rich Syracusan brought her a whole talent as a gift, and she left it on the tripod as thank-offering to Herakles; a band of the captives—"whom their lords grew kinder to, Because they called the poet countryman"—sent her a crownof wild-pomegranate-flower; and the third thing . . . Petalé, Phullis, Charopé, Chrusion, hear of this also—of the youth who, all the three days that she spoke the play, was found in the gazing, listening audience; and who, when they sailed away, was found in the ship too, "having a hunger to see Athens"; and when they reached Piræus, once again was found, as Balaustion landed, beside her. February's moon is just a-bud when she tells her comrades of this youth; and when that moon rounds full:

"We are to marry. O Euripides!"* * * * *

"We are to marry. O Euripides!"

* * * * *

Everyone who speaks ofBalaustion's Adventurewill quote to you that ringing line, for it sums up the high, ardent girl who, even in the exultation of her love, must call upon the worshipped Master. It is this passion for intellectual beauty which sets Balaustion so apart, which makes her so complete and stimulating. She has a mind as well as a heart and soul; she is priestess as well as goddess—Euthukles will have a wife indeed! Every word she speaks is stamped with the Browning marks of gaiety, courage, trust, and with how many others also: those of high-heartedness, deep-heartedness, the true patriotism that cherishes most closely the soul of its country; and then generosity, pride, ardour—all enhanced by woman's more peculiar gifts of gentleness, modesty, tenderness, insight,gravity . . . for Balaustion is like many women in having, for all her gaiety, more sense of happiness than sense of humour. It often comes to me as debatable if this be not the most attractive of deficiencies! Certainly Balaustion persuades us of its power; for in theApology, her refusal of the Aristophanic Comedy is firm-based upon that imputed lack in women. No man, thus poised, could have convinced us of his reality; while she convinces us not only of her reality, but of her rightness. Again, we must applaud our poet's wisdom in choosing woman for the Bald Bard's accuser; she is as potent in this part as in that of Euripides' interpreter.

But what a girl Balaustion is, as well as what a woman! Let us see her with the little band of friends about her, as in the exquisite revocation (in theApology) of the first adventure's telling:

". . . O that Spring,That eve I told the earlier[101:1]to my friends!Where are the four now, with each red-ripe mouthI wonder, does the streamlet ripple still,Outsmoothing galingale and watermint?* * * * *Under the grape-vines, by the streamlet-side,Close to Baccheion; till the cool increase,And other stars steal on the evening star,And so, we homeward flock i' the dusk, we five!"

". . . O that Spring,That eve I told the earlier[101:1]to my friends!Where are the four now, with each red-ripe mouthI wonder, does the streamlet ripple still,Outsmoothing galingale and watermint?

* * * * *

Under the grape-vines, by the streamlet-side,Close to Baccheion; till the cool increase,And other stars steal on the evening star,And so, we homeward flock i' the dusk, we five!"

Then, in theAdventure, comes the translation by Browning of theAlkestisof Euripides, which Balaustion is feigned to have spoken upon the temple steps at Syracuse. With this we have here no business, though so entire is his "lyric girl," so fully and perfectly by him conceived, that not a word of the play but might have been Balaustion's own. This surely is a triumph of art—to imagine such a speaker for such a piece, and to blend them both so utterly that the supreme Greek dramatist and this girl are indivisible. What a woman was demanded for such a feat, and what a poet for both! May we not indeed say now that Browning was our singer? Whom but he would have done this—so crowned, so trusted, us, and so persuaded men that women can be great?

"Its beauty, and the way it makes you weep": yes—and the way it makes you thrill with love for Herakles, never before so god-like, because always before too much the apotheosis of mere physical power. But read of him in theAlkestisof Euripides, and you shall feel him indeed divine—"this grand benevolence." . . . We can hear the voice of Balaustion deepen, quiver, and grow grave with gladdened love, as Herakles is fashioned for us by these two men's noble minds.

When she had told the "perfect piece" to her girl-friends, a sudden inspiration came to her:

"I think I see how . . .You, I, or anyone might mould a newAdmetos, new Alkestis";

and saying this, a flood of gratitude for the great gift of poetry comes full tide across her soul:

". . . Ah, that braveBounty of poets, the one royal raceThat ever was, or will be, in this world!They give no gift that bounds itself and endsI' the giving and the taking: theirs so breedsI' the heart and soul o' the taker, so transmutesThe man who only was a man before,That he grows god-like in his turn, can give—He also; share the poet's privilege,Bring forth new good, new beauty from the old.. . . So with me:For I have drunk this poem, quenched my thirst,Satisfied heart and soul—yet more remains!Could we too make a poem? Try at least,Inside the head, what shape the rose-mists take!"

And, trying thus, Balaustion, Feminist, portrays the perfect marriage.

Admetos, in Balaustion's and Browning'sAlkestis, will not let his wife be sacrificed for him:

"Never, by that true word Apollon spoke!All the unwise wish is unwished, oh wife!"

and he speaks, as in a vision, of the purpose of Zeus in himself.

"This purpose—that, throughout my earthly life,Mine should be mingled and made up with thine—And we two prove one force and play one partAnd do one thing. Since death divides the pair,'Tis well that I depart and thou remainWho wast to me as spirit is to flesh:Let the flesh perish, be perceived no more,So thou, the spirit that informed the flesh,Bend yet awhile, a very flame aboveThe rift I drop into the darkness by—And bid remember, flesh and spirit onceWorked in the world, one body, for man's sake.Never be that abominable showOf passive death without a quickening life—Admetos only, no Alkestis now!"

It is so that the man speaks to and of the woman, in Balaustion's and Browning'sAlkestis.

And the woman, answering, declares that the reality of their joint existence lies not in her, but in him:

". . . 'What! thou soundest in my soulTo depths below the deepest, reachest goodBy evil, that makes evil good again,And so allottest to me that I live,And not die—letting die, not thee alone,But all true life that lived in both of us?Look at me once ere thou decree the lot!'* * * * *Therewith her whole soul entered into his,He looked the look back, and Alkestis died."

* * * * *

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

But when she reaches the nether world—"the downward-dwelling people"—she is rejected as adeceiver: "This is not to die," says the Queen of Hades, for her death is a mockery, since it doubles the life of him she has left behind:

"'Two souls in one were formidable odds:Admetos must not be himself and thou!'* * * * *And so, before the embrace relaxed a whit,The lost eyes opened, still beneath the look;And lo, Alkestis was alive again."

"'Two souls in one were formidable odds:Admetos must not be himself and thou!'

* * * * *

And so, before the embrace relaxed a whit,The lost eyes opened, still beneath the look;And lo, Alkestis was alive again."

How do our little squabbles—the "Sex-War"—look to us after this?

When next we meet with Balaustion, inAristophanes' Apology, she is married to her Euthukles, and they are once more speeding across the waters—this time back to Rhodes, from Athens which has fallen.

Many things have happened in the meantime, and Balaustion, leaving her adoptive city, with "not sorrow but despair, not memory but the present and its pang" in her deep heart, feels that if she deliberately invites the scene, if she embodies in words the tragedy of Athens, she may free herself from anguish. Euthukles shall write it down for her, and they will go back to the night they heard Euripides was dead: "One year ago, Athenai still herself." Together she and Euthukles had mused, together glorified their poet. Euthukles had met the audience flocking homeward from the theatre, where Aristophanes had that night won the prizewhich Euripides had so seldom won. They had stopped him to hear news of the other poet's death: "Balaustion's husband, the right man to ask"—but he had refused them all satisfaction, and scornfully rated them for the crown but now awarded. "Appraise no poetry," he had cried: "price cuttlefish!"

Balaustion had seen, since she had come to live in Athens, but one work of Aristophanes, theLysistrata; and now, in breathless reminiscent anger, recalls the experience. It had so appalled her, "that bestiality so beyond all brute-beast imagining," that she would never see again a play by him who in the crowned achievement of this evening had drawn himself as Virtue laughingly reproving Vice, and Vice . . . Euripides! Such a piece it was which had "gained the prize that day we heard the death."

Yet, musing on that death, her wrath had fallen from her.

"I thought, 'How thoroughly death alters things!Where is the wrong now, done our dead and great?'"

Euthukles, divining her thought, told her that the mob had repented when they learnt the news. He had heard them cry: "Honour him!" and "A statue in the theatre!" and "Bring his body back,[106:1]bury him in Piræus—Thucydides shall make his epitaph!"

But she was not moved to sympathy with the general cry.

"Our tribute should not be the same, my friend.Statue? Within our hearts he stood, he stands!"

and, for his mere mortal body:

"Why, let it fade, mix with the elementsThere where it, falling, freed Euripides!"

Sheknew, that night, a better way to hail his soul's new freedom. This, by

"Singing, we two, its own song back againUp to that face from which flowed beauty—faceNow abler to see triumph and take loveThan when it glorified Athenai once."

Yes: they two would read togetherHerakles, the play of which Euripides himself had given her the tablets, in commemoration of the Adventure at Syracuse. After that, on her first arrival in Athens, she had gone to see him, "held the sacred hand of him, and laid it to my lips"; she had told him "how Alkestis helped," and he, on bidding her farewell, had given her these tablets, with the stylos pendant from them still, and given her, too, his own psalterion, that she might, to its assisting music, "croon the ode bewailing age."

All was prepared for the reading, when (as we earlier learnt) there came the torch-light and the knocking at their door, and Aristophanes, fresh from his triumph, entered with the banquet-band, to hail the "house, friendly to Euripides."

He knew, declared Aristophanes, that the Rhodian hated him most of mortals, but he would not blench. The others blenched—no word could they utter, nor one laugh laugh. . . . So he drove them out, and stood alone confronting

"Statuesque Balaustion pedestalledOn much disapprobation and mistake."

He babbled on for a while, defiantly and incoherently, and at length she turned in dumb rebuke, which he at once understood.

"True, lady, I am tolerably drunk";

for it was the triumph-night, and merriment had reigned at the banquet, reigned and increased

"'Till something happened' . . .Here he strangely paused";

but soon went on to tell the way in which the news had reached them there. . . . While Aristophanes spoke, Balaustion searched his face; and now (recalling, on the way to Rhodes, that hour to Euthukles), she likens the change which she then saw in it to that made by a black cloud suddenly sailing over a stretch of sparkling sea—such a change as they are in this very moment beholding.

"Just so, some overshadow, some new careStopped all the mirth and mocking on his face,And left there only such a dark surmise—No wonder if the revel disappeared,So did his face shed silence every side!I recognised a new man fronting me."

At once he perceived her insight, and answered it: "So you see myself? Your fixed regard can strip me of my 'accidents,' as the sophists say?" But neither should this disconcert him:

"Thank your eyes' searching; undisguised I stand:The merest female child may question me.Spare not, speak bold, Balaustion!"

She, searching thus his face, had learnt already that "what she had disbelieved most proved most true." Drunk though he was,

"There was a mind here, mind a-wantoningAt ease of undisputed masteryOver the body's brood, those appetites.Oh, but he grasped them grandly!"

It was no "ignoble presence": the broad bald brow, the flushed cheek, great imperious fiery eyes, wide nostrils, full aggressive mouth, all the pillared head:

"These made a glory, of such insolence—I thought—such domineering deity . . .Impudent and majestic . . ."

Instantly on her speaking face the involuntary homage had shown; and it was to this that Aristophanes, keen of sight as she, had confidently addressed himself when he told her to speak boldly. And in the very spirit of her face she did speak:

"Bold speech be—welcome to this honoured hearth,Good Genius!"

Here sounds the essential note of generous natures. Proved mistaken, their instant impulse is to rejoice in defeat, if defeat means victory for the better thing. Thus, as Balaustion speaks, her ardour grows with every word. He is greater than she had supposed, and so she must even rhapsodise—she must crowd praise on praise, until she ends with the exultant cry:

"O light, light, light, I hail light everywhere!No matter for the murk that was—perchanceThat will be—certes, never should have beenSuch orb's associate!"

Mark that Aristophanes has not yetsaidanything to justify her change of attitude: the seeing of him is enough to draw from her this recantation—for she trusts her own quick insight, and so, henceforth trusts him.

Now begins the long, close argument between them which constitutesAristophanes' Apology. It is (from him) the defence of comedy as he understands and practises it—broad and coarse when necessary; violent and satiric against those who in any way condemn it. Euripides had been one of these, and Balaustion now stands for him. . . . In the long run, it is the defence of "realism" against "idealism," and, as such, involves a whole philosophy of life. We cannot follow it here; all we may do is to indicate the points at which it reveals, as she speaks in it, the character of Balaustion, andthe growing charm which such revelation has for her opponent.

At every turn of his argument, Aristophanes is sure of her comprehension. He knows that he need not adapt himself to a feebler mind: "You understand," he says again and again. At length he comes, in his narration, to the end of their feast that night, and tells how, rising from the banquet interrupted by the entrance of Sophocles with tidings of Euripides dead, he had cried to his friends that they must go and see

"The Rhodian rosy with Euripides! . . .And here you stand with those warm golden eyes!Maybe, such eyes must strike conviction, turnOne's nature bottom-upwards, show the base . . .Anyhow, I have followed happilyThe impulse, pledged my genius with effect,Since, come to see you, I am shown—myself!"

She instantly bids him, as she has honoured him, that he do honour to Euripides. But, seized by perversity, he declares that if she will give him theHeraklestablets (which he has discerned, lying with the other gifts of Euripides), he will prove to her, by this play alone, the "main mistake" of her worshipped Master.

She warmly interrupts, reproving him. Their houseisthe shrine of that genius, and he has entered it, "fresh from his worst infamy"—yet she has withheld the words she longs to speak, she has inclined, nay yearned, to reverence him:

"So you but suffer that I see the blazeAnd not the bolt—the splendid fancy-fling,Not the cold iron malice, the launched lie."

If he doesthis, if he shows her

"A mere man's hand ignobly clenched againstYon supreme calmness,"

she will interpose:

"Such as you see me! Silk breaks lightning's blow!"

But Aristophanes, at that word of "calmness," exclaims vehemently. Death is the great unfairness! Once a man dead, the survivors croak, "Respect him." And so one must—it is the formidable claim, "immunity of faultiness from fault's punishment." That is whyhe, Aristophanes, has always attacked the living; he knew how they would hide their heads, once dead! Euripides had chosen the other way; "men pelted him, but got no pellet back"; and it was not magnanimity but arrogance that prompted him to such silence. Those at whom Aristophanes or he should fling mud were by that alone immortalised—and Euripides, "that calm cold sagacity," knew better than to do them such service.

As he speaks thus, Balaustion's "heart burns up within her to her tongue." She exclaims that the baseness of Aristophanes' attack, of his "mud-volleying" at Euripides, consists in the fact that both men had, at bottom, the same ideals; theyboth extended the limitations of art, both were desirous from their hearts that truth should triumph—yet Aristophanes, thus desiring, poured out his supremacy of power against the very creature who loved all thatheloved! And she declares that such shame cuts through all his glory. Comedy is in the dust, laid low by him:

"Balaustion pities Aristophanes!"

Now she has gone too far—she has spoken too boldly.

"Blood burnt the cheek-bone, each black eye flashed fierce:'But this exceeds our license!'"

—so he exclaims; but then, seizing his native weapon, stops ironically to search out an excuse for her. He finds it soon. She and her husband are but foreigners; they are "uninstructed"; the born and bred Athenian needs must smile at them, if he do not think a frown more fitting for such ignorance. But strangers are privileged: Aristophanes will condone. They want to impose their squeamishness on sturdy health: that is at the bottom of it all. Their Euripides had cried "Death!"—deeming death the better life; he, Aristophanes, cries "Life!" If the Euripideans condescend to happiness at all, they merely "talk, talk, talk about the empty name," while the thing itself lies neglected beneath their noses; they

"think out thoroughly how youth should pass—Just as if youth stops passing, all the same!"* * * * *

"think out thoroughly how youth should pass—Just as if youth stops passing, all the same!"

* * * * *

As he proceeds, in the superb defence of his own methods, he sees Balaustion grow ever more indignant. But he conjures her to wait a moment ere she "looses his doom" on him—and at last, drawing to an end, declares that after all the ground of difference between him and her is slight. In so far as it does exist, however, he claims to have won. Euripides, for whom she stands, is beaten in this contest, yet he, Aristophanes, has not even put forth all his power! If she will not acknowledge final defeat:

"Help him, Balaustion! Use the rosy strength!"

—and he urges her to use it all, to "let the whole rage burst in brave attack."

It is evident how he has been moved, despite his boasting—how eagerly he awaits her use of the rosy strength. . . . But she begins meekly enough. She is a woman, she says, and claims no quality "beside the love of all things lovable"; inthat, she does claim to stand pre-eminent. But men may use, justifiably, different methods from those which women most admire, and so far and because she is a foreigner, as he reminds her, she may be mistaken in her blame of him. Yet foreigners, strangers, will in the ultimate issue be the judges of this matter, and shall they find Aristophanesany more impeccable than she does? (She now begins to put forth the rosy strength!) What is it that he has done? He did not invent comedy! Has he improved upon it? No, she declares. One of his aims is to discredit war. That was an aim of Euripides also; and has Aristophanes yet written anything like the glorious Song to Peace in theCresphontes?

"Come, for the heart within me dies away,So long dost thou delay!"

She gives this forth, in the old "Syracusan" manner, and is well aware that he can have no answer for her. Again (she proceeds), Euripides discredited war by showing how it outrages the higher feelings: by what method has Aristophanes discredited it? By the obscene allurements of theLysistrata! . . . Thus she takes him through his works, and finally declares that only in "more audaciously lying" has he improved upon the earlier writers of comedy. He has genius—she gladly grants it; but he has debased his genius. The mob indeed has awarded him the crowns: is such crowning the true guerdon?

"Tell him, my other poet—where thou walk'stSome rarer world than e'er Ilissos washed!"

But as to the immortality of either, who shall say? And is eventhatthe question? No: the question is—did both men wish to waft the white sail ofgood and beauty on its way? Assuredly. . . . And so she cries at the last: "Your nature too is kingly"; and this is for her the sole source of ardour—she "trusts truth's inherent kingliness"; and the poets are of all men most royal. She never would have dared approach this poet so:

"But that the other king stands suddenly,In all the grand investiture of death,Bowing your knee beside my lowly head—Equals one moment!—Now arise and go.Both have done homage to Euripides!"

But he insists that her defence has been oblique—it has been merely an attack on himself. She must defend her poet more directly, or Aristophanes will do no homage. At once she answers that she will, that she has the best, the only, defence at hand. She will read him theHerakles, read it as, at Syracuse, she spoke theAlkestis.

"Accordingly I read the perfect piece."

It ends with the lament of the Chorus for the departure of Herakles:

"The greatest of all our friends of yoreWe have lost for evermore!"

and when Balaustion has chanted forth that strophe, there falls a long silence, on this night of losing a friend.

Aristophanes breaks it musingly. "'Our best friend'—who has been the best friend to Athens, Euripides or I?" And he answers that it is himself, for he has done what he knew hecoulddo, and thus has charmed "the Violet-Crowned"; while Euripides had challenged failure, and had failed. Euripides, he cries, remembering an instance, has been like Thamyris of Thrace, who was blinded by the Muses for daring to contend with them in song;he, Aristophanes, "stands heart-whole, no Thamyris!" He seizes the psalterion—Balaustion must let him use it for once—and sings the song, from Sophocles, of Thamyris marching to his doom.

He gives some verses,[117:1]then breaks off in laughter, having, as he says, "sung content back to himself," since he isnotThamyris, but Aristophanes. . . . They shall both be pleased with his next play; it shall be serious, "no word more of the old fun," for "death defends," and moreover, Balaustion has delivered her admonition so soundly! Thus he departs, in all friendliness:

"Farewell, brave couple! Next year, welcome me!"

It is "next year," and Balaustion and Euthukles are fleeing across the water to Rhodes from Athens. This year has seen the death of Sophocles; and thegreatest of all the Aristophanic triumphs in theFrogs. It was allhim, Balaustion says:

"There blazed the glory, there shot black the shame"

—it showed every facet of his genius, and in it Bacchos himself was "duly dragged through the mire," and Euripides, after all the promises, was more vilely treated than ever before.

"So, Aristophanes obtained the prize,And so Athenai felt she had a friendFar better than her 'best friend,' lost last year."

But then, what happened? The great battle of Ægos Potamos was fought and lost, and Athens fell into the hands of the Spartans. The conqueror's first words were, "Down with the Piræus! Peace needs no bulwarks." At first the stupefied Athenians had been ready to obey—but when the next decree came forth, "No more democratic government;weshall appoint your oligarchs!" the dreamers were stung awake by horror; they started up a-stare, their hands refused their office.

"Three days they stood, stared—stonier than their walls."

Lysander, the Spartan general, angered by the dumb delay, called a conference, issued decree. Not the Piræus only, but all Athens should be destroyed; every inch of the "mad marble arrogance" should go, and so at last should peace dwell there.

Balaustion stands, recalling this to Euthukles, who writes her words . . . and now, though she does not name it so, she tells the third "supreme adventure" of her life. When that decree had sounded, and the Spartans' shout of acquiescence had died away:

"Then did a man of Phokis rise—O heart! . . .Whowas the man of Phokis rose and flungA flower i' the way of that fierce foot's advance"

—the "choric flower" of theElektra, full in the face of the foe?

"You flung that choric flower, my Euthukles!"

—and, gazing down on him from her proud rosy height, while he sits gazing up at her, she chants again the words she spoke to her girl-friends at the Baccheion:

"So, because Greeks are Greeks, and hearts are hearts,And poetry is power, and EuthuklesHad faith therein to, full-face, fling the same—Sudden, the ice-thaw! The assembled foe,Heaving and swaying with strange friendliness,Cried 'Reverence Elektra!'—cried. . . 'Let standAthenai'! . . ."

—and Athens was saved through Euripides,

"Through Euthukles, through—more than ever—me,Balaustion, me, who, Wild-Pomegranate-Flower,Felt my fruit triumph, and fade proudly so!"* * * * *

"Through Euthukles, through—more than ever—me,Balaustion, me, who, Wild-Pomegranate-Flower,Felt my fruit triumph, and fade proudly so!"

* * * * *

But next day, Sparta woke from the spell. Harsh Lysander decreed that though Athens might be saved, the Piræus should not. Comedy should destroy the Long Walls: the flute-girls should lead off in the dance, should time the strokes of spade and pickaxe, till the pride of the Violet-Crowned lay in the dust. "Done that day!" mourns Balaustion:

"The very day Euripides was born."

Buttheywould not see the passing of Athenai; they would go, fleeing the sights and sounds,

"And press to other earth, new heaven, by seaThat somehow ever prompts to 'scape despair"

—and wonderfully, at the harbour-side they found that old grey mariner, whose ship she had saved in the first Adventure! The ship was still weather-wise: it should

"'Convey Balaustion back to Rhodes, for sakeOf her and her Euripides!' laughed he,"

—and they embarked. It should be Rhodes indeed: to Rhodes they now are sailing.

Euripides lies buried in the little valley "laughed and moaned about by streams,"

"Boiling and freezing, like the love and hateWhich helped or harmed him through his earthly course.They mix in Arethusa by his grave."

But, just as she had known, this revocationhasconsoled her. Now she will be able to forget. Never again will her eyes behold Athenai, nor inimagination see "the ghastly mirth that mocked her overthrow"; but she and Euthukles are exiles from the dead, not from the living, Athens:

"That's in the cloud there, with the new-born star!"

There is no despair, there can be none; for does not the soul anticipate its heaven here on earth:

"Above all crowding, crystal silentness,Above all noise, a silver solitude . . .Hatred and cark and care, what place have theyIn yon blue liberality of heaven?How the sea helps! How rose-smit earth will riseBreast-high thence, some bright morning, and be Rhodes!"

They are entering Rhodes now, and every wave and wind seems singing out the same:

"All in one chorus—what the master-wordThey take up? Hark! 'There are no gods, no gods!Glory toGod—who saves Euripides!'"

. . . There she is, Wild-Pomegranate-Flower, Balaustion—and Triumphant Woman. What other man has given us this?—and even Browning only here. Nearly always, for man's homage, woman must in some sort be victim: she must suffer ere he can adore. But Balaustion triumphs, and we hail her—and we hail her poet too, who dared to make her great not only in her love, but in her own deep-hearted, ardent self.

"This mortal shall put on individuality." Of all men Browning most wished women to do that.

[94:1]I follow Browning's spellings throughout.

[96:1]The character of Balaustion is wholly imaginary.

[96:2]A town of the island of Rhodes.

[101:1]In theApology, she tells "the second supreme adventure": her interview with Aristophanes, and the recital to him of theHeraklesof Euripides.

[106:1]Euripides died at the Court of Archelaus, King of Macedonia.

[117:1]Browning never finished his translation of this splendid song.

I said, in writing of Balaustion: "Nearly always, for man's homage, woman must in some sort be victim: she must suffer ere he can adore."

I should have said that thishas beenso: for the tendency to-day is to demonstrate rather the power than the weakness of woman. True that in the "victim," that weakness was usually shown to be the very source of that power: through her suffering not only she, but they who stood around and saw the anguish, were made perfect. That this theory of the outcome of suffering is an eternal verity I am not desirous to deny; but I do deplore that, in literature, women should be made so disproportionately its exemplars; and I deplore it not for feminist reasons alone. Once we regard suffering in this light of a supreme uplifting influence, we turn, as it were, our weapons against ourselves—we exclaim that men too suffer in this world and display the highest powers of endurance: why, then, do they so frequently, in their imaginative works, present themselves as makers of women's woes?For women make men suffer often; yet how relatively seldom men show this! Thus, paradoxically enough, we may come to declare that it is to themselves that men are harsh, and to us generous. "Chivalry from women!"—how would that sound as a war-cry?

Not all in jest do I so speak, though such recognition of male generosity leaves existent a certain sense of weariness which assails me—and if me, then probably many another—when I find myself reading of the immemorial "victim." It is this which makes Balaustion supreme for my delight. There is a woman with every noble attribute of womanhood at its highest, who suffers at no hands but those of the Great Fates, as one might say—the fates who rule the destiny of nations. . . . We turn now to her direct antithesis in this regard of suffering—we turn to Pompilia, victim first of the mediocre, ignorant, small-souled, then of the very devil of malignant baseness; such a victim, moreover, first and last, for the paltriest of motives—money. And money in no large, imaginative sense, but in the very lowest terms in which it could be at all conceived as a theme for tragedy. A dowry, and a tiny one:thiscreated "that old woe" which "steps on the stage" again for us inThe Ring and the Book.

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