Chapter 13

P. 10. 1. _Milesian smart-place._ 2. _Phrunikos._ (Phrynicus.) 1. The painful remembrance of the capture of Miletus. 2. A dramatic poet, who made this capture the subject of a tragedy, "which, when performed (493), so painfully wrung the feelings of the Athenian audience that they burst into tears in the theatre, and the poet was condemned to pay a fine of 1,000 drachmai, as having recalled to them their own misfortunes."[52] He is derided by Aristophanes in the "Frogs" for his method of introducing his characters.

P. 12. _Amphitheos, Deity, and Dung._ A character in the Acharnians of Aristophanes--"not a god, and yet immortal."

P. 14. 1. _Diaulos._ 2. _Stade._ 1. A double line of the Race-course. 2. The _Stadium_, on reaching which, the runner went back again.

P. 16. _City of Gapers._ Nickname of Athens, from the curiosity of its inhabitants.

P. 17. _Koppa-marked._ Race-horses of the best breed were marked with the old letter Koppa.

P. 18. _Comic Platon._ The comic writer of that name: author of plays and poems, _not_ THE Plato.

P. 21. _Salabaccho._ Name of a courtesan.

P. 30. _Cheek-band._ Band worn by trumpeters to support the cheeks. _Cuckoo-apple._ Fruit so-called=fool-making food. _Threttanelo_, _Neblaretai_. Imitative sounds: 1. Of a harp-string. 2. Of any joyous cry. _Three-days' salt-fish slice._ Allowance of a soldier on an expedition. (It was supposed that at the end of this time he could forage for himself.)

P. 31. _Goat's breakfast and other abuse._ Indecent allusions, to be fancied, not explained.

P. 32. _Sham Ambassadors._ Characters in the Acharnians. _Kudathenian._ Famous Athenian. _Pandionid._ Descendant of Pandion, King of Athens. _Goat-Song._ Tragoedia--Tradegy. It was called goat-song because a goat-skin, probably filled with wine, was once given as a prize for it. The expression occurs in Shelley.

P. 33. _Willow-Wicker Flask._ Nickname of the poet it is applied to, a toper.

P. 36. _Lyric Shell or Tragic Barbiton._ Lesser and larger lyre.

P. 38. _Sousarion._ Susarion of Megara, inventor of Attic comedy. _Chionides._ His successor.

P. 39. _Little-in-the-Fields._ The Dionysian Feast; a lesser one than the City Dionysia.

P. 40. _Ameipsias._ A comic poet, contemporary with Aristophanes, whose two best plays he beat.

P. 42. _Iostephanos._ "Violet-crowned," name of Athens. _Kleophon._ A demagogue of bad character, attacked by Aristophanes as profligate, and an enemy of peace. _Kleonumos._ A similar character; also a big fellow, and great coward.

P. 43. _Telekleides._ Old comic poet, on the same side as Aristophanes. _Mullos and Euetes._ Comic poets who revived the art of comedy in Athens after Susarion.

P. 44. _Morucheides._ Son of Morychus--like his father, a comic poet and a glutton. _Sourakosios._ Another comic poet.

P. 46. _Trilophos._ Wearer of three crests on his helmet.

P. 47. _Ruppapai._ Word used by the crew in rowing--hence, the crew itself.

P. 49. _Free dinner in the Prutaneion._ (Prytaneion.) Such was accorded to certain privileged persons. _Ariphrades._ A man of infamous character, singer to the harp: persistently attacked by Aristophanes. _Karkinos._ Comic actor: had famous dancing sons.

P. 50. _Exomis._ A woman's garment. _Parachoregema._ Subordinate chorus, which sings in the absence of the principal one. _Aristullos._ Bad character satirized by Aristophanes, and used in one of his plays as a travesty of Plato. This incident, and Plato's amused indifference, are mentioned at p. 137 of the Apology.

P. 51. _Murrhine_, _Akalantis_. Female names in the Thesmophoriazusae. _New Kalligeneia._ Name given to Ceres, meaning, "bearer of lovely children." _The Toxotes._ A Syrian archer in the "Thesmophoriazusae." _The Great King's Eye._ Mock name given to an ambassador from Persia in the Acharnians. _Kompolakuthes._ Bully-boaster: with a play on the name of Lamachus.

P. 52. _Silphion._ A plant used as a relish. _Kleon-Clapper._ Corrector of Kleon.

P. 54. _Trugaios._ Epithet of Bacchus, "vintager;" here name of a person in the comedy of "Peace." _Story of Simonides._ Simonides, the lyric poet, sang an ode to his patron, Scopas, at a feast; and as he had introduced into it the praises of Castor and Pollux, Scopas declared that he would only pay his own half-share of the ode, and the Demi-gods might pay the remainder. Presently it was announced to Simonides that two youths desired to see him outside the palace; on going there he found nobody, but meanwhile the palace fell in, killing his patron. Thus was he _paid_.

P. 58. _Maketis._ Capital of Macedonia.

P. 60. _Lamachos._ General who fell at the siege of Syracuse; satirized by Aristophanes as a brave, but boastful man.

P. 67. _Sophroniskos' Son._ Socrates.

P. 74. _Kephisophon._ Actor, and friend of Euripides; enviously reported to help him in writing his plays.

P. 79. _Palaistra._ A wrestling-school, or place of exercise.

P. 82. _San._ Letter distinguishing race-horses. _Thearion's Meal-Tub Politics._ Politics of Thearion the baker. _Pisthetarios._ Character in the "Birds," alias "Mr. Persuasive." _Strephsiades._ Character in the "Clouds."

P. 83. _Rocky ones._ Epithet given to the Athenians.

P. 85. _Promachos._ Champion.

P. 86. _The Boulé._ State Council. _Prodikos._ Prodicus. A Sophist, satirized in the "Birds" and "Clouds."

P. 87. _Choes._ Festival at Athens. "The Pitchers."

P. 89. _Plataian help._ The Platæans sent a thousand well appointed warriors to help at Marathon. The term stands for _timely_ help.

P. 94. _Plethron square._ 100 feet square.

P. 98. _Palaistra tool._ Tool used at the Palaistra, or wrestling school: in this case the strigil.

P. 99. _Phales._ _Iacchos._ Two epithets of Bacchus--the former indecent.

P. 112. _Kinesias._ According to Aristophanes, a bad profligate lyric poet, notable for his leanness.

P. 113. _Rattei._ Like "Neblaretai," an imitative or gibberish word expressing joyous excitement. _Aristonumos._ _Sannurion._ Two comic poets, the latter ridiculed by Aristophanes for his leanness.

P. 124. _Parabasis._ Movement of the chorus, wherein the Coryphoeus came forward and spoke in the poet's name.

P. 128. _Skiadeion._ Sunshade. Parasol.

P. 129. _Theoria._ _Opora._ Characters in the Eirené or "Peace:" the first personifying games, spectacles, sights; the second, plenty, fruitful autumn, and so on.

P. 133. _Philokleon._ Lover of Kleon. (Cleon.) _Bdelukleon._ Reviler of Kleon.

P. 135. _Logeion._ Front of the stage occupied by the actors.

P. 137. _Kukloboros-roaring._ Roaring like the torrent Cycloborus (in Attica).

P. 140. _Konnos._ The play by Ameipsias which beat the "Clouds." _Euthumenes._ One who refused the pay of the comic writers, while he tripled that of those who attended at the Assembly. _Argurrhios._ As before. _Kinesias._ As before.

P. 144. _Triballos._ A supposed _country_ and clownish god.

P. 172. _Propula._ (Propyla.) Gateway to the Acropolis.

P. 248. _Elaphebolion month._ The "Stag-striking" month.

P. 249. _Bakis prophecy._ Foolish prophecies attributed to one Bacis, rife at that time; a collective name for all such.

P. 255. _Kommos._ General weeping--by the chorus and an actor.

"FIFINE AT THE FAIR."

"Fifine at the Fair" is a defence of inconstancy, or of the right of experiment in love; and is addressed by a husband to his wife, whose supposed and very natural comments the monologue reflects. The speaker's implied name of Don Juan sufficiently tells us what we are meant to think of his arguments; and they also convict themselves by landing him in an act of immorality, which brings its own punishment. This character is nevertheless a standing puzzle to Mr. Browning's readers, because that which he condemns in it, and that which he does not, are not to be distinguished from each other. It is impossible to see where Mr. Browning ends and where Don Juan begins. The reasoning is scarcely ever that of a heartless or profligate person, though it very often betrays an unconsciously selfish one. It treats love as an education still more than as a pleasure; and if it lowers the standard of love, or defends too free an indulgence in it, it does so by asserting what is true for imaginative persons, though not for the commonplace: that whatever stirs even a sensuous admiration appeals also to the artistic, the moral, and even the religious nature. Its obvious sophistries are mixed up with the profoundest truths, and the speaker's tone has often the tenderness of one who, with all his inconstancy, has loved deeply and long. We can only solve the problem by referring to the circumstances in which the idea of the poem arose.

Mr. Browning was, with his family, at Pornic many years ago, and there saw the gipsy who is the original of Fifine. His fancy was evidently sent roaming, by her audacity, her strength--the contrast which she presented to the more spiritual types of womanhood; and this contrast eventually found expression in a poetic theory of life, in which these opposite types and their corresponding modes of attraction became the necessary complement of each other. As he laid down the theory, Mr. Browning would be speaking in his own person. But he would turn into someone else in the act of working it out--for it insensibly carried with it a plea for yielding to those opposite attractions, not only successively, but at the same time; and a modified Don Juan would grow up under his pen, thinking in some degree his thoughts, using in some degree his language, and only standing out as a distinctive character at the end of the poem. The higher type of womanhood must appear in the story, at the same time as the lower which is represented by Fifine; and Mr. Browning would instinctively clothe it in the form which first suggested or emphasized the contrast. He would soon, however, feel that the vision was desecrated by the part it was called upon to play. He would disguise or ward it off when possible: now addressing Elvire by her husband's mouth, in the terms of an ideal companionship, now again reducing her to the level of an every-day injured wife; and when the dramatic Don Juan was about to throw off the mask, the flickering wifely personality would be extinguished altogether, and the unfaithful husband left face to face with the mere phantom of conscience which, in one sense, Elvire is always felt to be. This is what actually occurs; and only from this point of view can we account for the perpetual encroaching of the imaginary on the real, the real on the imaginary, which characterizes the work.

A fanciful prologue, "Amphibian," strikes its key-note. The writer imagines himself floating on the sea, pleasantly conscious of his bodily existence, yet feeling unfettered by it. A strange beautiful butterfly floats past him in the air; her radiant wings can be only those of a soul; and it strikes him that while the waves are his property, and the air is hers, hers is true freedom, his only the mimicry of it. He sees little to regret in this, since imagination is as good as reality; and Heaven itself can only be made up of such things as poets dream. Yet he knows that his swimming seems but a foolish compromise between the flight to which he cannot attain, and the more grovelling mode of being which he has no real wish to renounce; and he wonders whether she, the already released, who is upborne by those sunlit wings, does not look down with pity and wonder upon him. So also will Elvire, though less dispassionately, watch the intellectual vagaries of her Don Juan, which embrace the heavens, but are always centred in earth. This prologue is preceded by a quotation from Molière's "Don Juan," in which Elvire satirically prescribes to her lover the kind of self-defence--or something not unlike it--which Mr. Browning's hero will adopt.

Don Juan invites his wife to walk with him through the fair: and as he points out its sights to her, he expatiates on the pleasures of vagrancy, and declares that the red pennon waving on the top of the principal booth sends an answering thrill of restlessness through his own frame. He then passes to a glowing eulogium on the charms of the dark-skinned rope-dancer, Fifine, who forms part of the itinerant show.

Elvire gives tokens of perturbation, and her husband frankly owns that as far as Fifine is concerned, he cannot defend his taste: he can scarcely account for it. "Beautiful she is, in her feminine grace and strength, set forth by her boyish dress; but with probably no more feeling than a sprite, and no more conscience than a flower. It is likely enough that her antecedents have been execrable, and that her life is in harmony with them." Still, he does not wish it supposed that he admires a body without a soul: and he tries to convince himself that Fifine, after all, is not quite without one. "There is no grain of sand on the sea-shore which may not, once in a century, be the first to flash back the rising sun; there can be no human spirit which does not in the course of its existence greet the Divine light with one answering ray."

But no heavenly spark can be detected in Fifine; and he is reduced to seeking a virtue for her, a justification for himself, in that very fact. If she has no virtue, she also pretends to none. If she gives nothing to society, she asks nothing of it. His fancy raises up a procession of such women as the world has crowned: a Helen, a Cleopatra, some Christian saint; he bids Elvire see herself as part of it--as the true Helen, who, according to the legend, never quitted Greece, contemplated her own phantom within the walls of Troy--and be satisfied that she is "best" of all. "All alike are wanting in one grace which Fifine possesses: that of self-effacement. Helen and Cleopatra demand unquestioning homage for their own mental as well as bodily charms; the saint demands it for the principle she sets forth. His love demands that he shall see into her heart; his wife that he shall believe the impossible as regards her own powers of devotion. Fifine says,'You come to look at my outside, my foreign face and figure my outlandish limbs. Pay for the sight if it has pleased you, and give me credit for nothing beyond what you see.' So simply honest an appeal must touch his heart."

Don Juan well knows what his wife thinks of all this, and he says it for her. "Fifine attracts him for no such out of the way reason. Her charm is that she is something new, and something which does not belong to him. He is the soul of inconstancy; and if he had the sun for his own, he would hanker after other light, were it that of a tallow-candle or a squib." But he assures her that this reasoning is unsound, and his amusing himself with a lower thing does not prove that he has become indifferent to the higher. He shows this by reminding her of a picture of Raphael's, which he was mad to possess; which now that he possesses it, he often neglects for a picture-book of Doré's; but which, if threatened with destruction, he would save at the sacrifice of a million Dorés, perhaps of his own life. And now he turns back to her phantom self, as present in his own mind; describes it in terms of exquisite grace and purity; and declares hers the one face which fits into his heart, and makes whole what would be half without it.

Elvire is conciliated; but her husband will not leave well alone. He has established her full claim to his admiration: but he is going to prove that so far as her physical charms are concerned, she owes it to his very attachment: "for those charms are not attested by her looking-glass. He discovers them by the eye of love--in other words--by the artist soul within him."

All beauty, Don Juan farther explains, is in the imagination of him who feels it, be he lover or artist; be the beauty he descries the attribute of a living face, of a portrait, or of some special arrangement of sound. The feeling is inspired by its outward objects, but it cannot be retraced to them. It is a fancy created by fact, as flame by fuel; no more identical with it. The fancy is not on that account a delusion. It is the vision of ideal truth: the recognition by an inner sense of that which does not exist for the outer. That is why hearts choose each other by help of the face, and why they choose so diversely. The eye of love, which again is the eye of art, reads soul into the features, however incomplete their expression of it may be. It reconstructs the ideal type which nature has failed to carry out.

He illustrates this by means of three faces roughly sketched in the sand. At first sight they are grotesque and unmeaning. Yet a few more strokes of the broken pipe which is serving him as a pencil, will give to two of these a predominating expression; convert the third into a likeness of Elvire.

"These completing touches represent the artist's action upon life. By this method Don Juan has been enabled on a former occasion, to complete a work of high art. A block of marble had come into his possession, half shaped by the hand of Michael Angelo.

"... One hand,--the Master's,--smoothed and scraped That mass, he hammered on and hewed at, till he hurled Life out of death, and left a challenge: for the world, Death still,--...." (vol. xi. p. 260.)

Not death to him: for as he gazed on the rough-hewn block, a form emerged upon his mental sight--a form which he interpreted as that of the goddess Eidotheé.[53] And as his soul received it from that of the dead master, his hand carried it out."

Mr. Browning's whole theory of artistic perception is contained in the foregoing lines; but he proceeds to enforce it in another way. "The life thus evoked from death, the beauty from ugliness, is the gain of each special soul--its permanent conquest over matter. The mode of effecting this is the special secret of every soul; and this Don Juan defines as its chemic secret, the law of its affinities, the law of its actions and reactions. Where one, he says, lights force, another draws forth pity; where one finds food for self-indulgence, another acquires strength for self-sacrifice. One blows life's ashes into rose-coloured flame, another into less heavenly hues. Love will have reached its height when the secret of each soul has become the knowledge of all; and the many-coloured rays of individual experience are fused in the white light of universal truth."

Here again Don Juan imagines a retort. Elvire makes short work of his poetic theories, and declares that this professed interest in souls is a mere pretext for the gratification of sense. "Whom in heaven's name is he trying to take in?" He entreats music to take his part. "It alone can pierce the mists of falsehood which intervene between the soul and truth. And now, as they stroll homewards in the light of the setting sun, all things seem charged with those deeper harmonies--with those vital truths of existence which words are powerless to convey. Elvire, however, has no soul for music, and her husband must have recourse to words."

The case between them may, he thinks, be stated in this question, "How do we rise from falseness into truth?" "We do so after the fashion of the swimmer who brings his nostrils to the level of the upper air, but leaves the rest of his body under water--by the act of self-immersion in the very element from which we wish to escape. Truth is to the aspiring soul as the upper air to the swimmer: the breath of life. But if the swimmer attempts to free his head and arms, he goes under more completely than before. If the soul strives to escape from the grosser atmosphere into the higher, she shares the same fate. Her truthward yearnings plunge her only deeper into falsehood. Body and soul must alike surrender themselves to an element in which they cannot breathe, for this element can alone sustain them. But through the act of plunging we float up again, with a deeper disgust at the briny taste we have brought back; with a deeper faith in the life above, and a deeper confidence in ourselves, whom the coarser element has proved unable to submerge."

"Suppose again, that as we paddle with our hands under water, we grasp at something which seems a soul. The piece of falsity slips through our fingers, but by the mechanical reaction just described, it sends us upwards into the realm of truth. This is precisely what Fifine has done. Of the earth earthy as she is, she has driven you and me into the realms of abstract truth. We have thus no right to despise her" This discourse is interrupted by a contemptuous allusion to a passage in "Childe Harold," (fourth canto), in which the human intelligence is challenged to humble itself before the ocean.

Elvire is still dissatisfied. The suspicious fact remains, that whatever experience her husband desires to gain, it is always a woman who must supply it. This he frankly admits; and he gives his reason. "Women lend themselves to experiment; men do not. Men are egotists, and absorb whatever comes in their way. Women, whether Fifines or Elvires, allow themselves to be absorbed. You master men only by reducing yourself to their level. You captivate women by showing yourself at your best. Their power of hero-worship is illustrated by the act of the dolphin, 'True woman creature,' which bore the ship-wrecked Arion to the Corinthian coast. Men are not only wanting in true love: their best powers are called forth by hate. They resemble the vine, first 'stung' into 'fertility' by the browsing goat, which nibbled away its tendrils, and gained the 'indignant wine' by the process. In their feminine characteristics Elvire stands far higher than Fifine; but Fifine is for that very reason more useful as a means of education; for Elvire may be trusted implicitly; Fifine teaches one to take care of himself. They are to each other as the strong ship and the little rotten bark." This comparison is suggested by a boatman whom they lately saw adventurously pushing his way through shoal and sandbank because he would not wait for the tide.

Don Juan begs leave to speak one word more in defence of Fifine and her masquerading tribe; it will recall his early eulogium on her frankness. "All men are actors: but these alone do not deceive. All you are expected to applaud in them is the excellence of the avowed sham."

Don Juan has thus developed his theory that soul is attainable through flesh, truth through falsehood, the real through what only seems; and, as he thinks, justified the conclusion that a man's spiritual life is advanced by every experience, moral or immoral, which comes in his way. He now relates a dream by which, as he says, those abstract reflections have been in part inspired; in reality, it continues, and in some degree refutes them. The dream came to him this morning when he had played himself to sleep with Schumann's Carnival; having chosen this piece because his brain was burdened with many thoughts and fancies which, better than any other, it would enable him to work off; and as he tells this, he enlarges on the faculty of music to register, as well as express, every passing emotion of the human soul. He notes also the constant recurrence of the same old themes, and the caprice of taste which strives as constantly to convert them into something new.

The dream carries him to Venice, and he awakes, in fancy, on some pinnacle above St. Mark's Square, overlooking the Carnival. Here his power of artistic divination--alias of human sympathy, is called into play; for the men and women below him all wear the semblance of some human deformity, of some animal type, or of some grotesque embodiment of human feeling or passion. He throws himself into their midst, and these monstrosities disappear. The human asserts itself; the brute-like becomes softened away; what imperfection remains creates pity rather than disgust. He finds that by shifting his point of view, he can see even necessary qualities in what otherwise struck him as faults.