Nay, Aristullos, — once your volley spent
On the male-Kirké and her swinish crew, —
Platon , — so others call the youth we love, —
Sends your performance to the curious king —
“Do you desire to know Athenai’s knack
At turning seriousness to pleasantry?
Read this! One Aristullos means myself.
The author is indeed a merry grig!”
Nay, it would seem as if yourself were bent
On laying down the law “Tell lies I must —
Aforethought and of purpose, no mistake!”
When forth yourself step, tell us from the stage
“Here you behold the King of Comedy —
Me, who, the first, have purged my every piece
From each and all my predecessors’ filth,
Abjured those satyr-adjuncts sewn to bid
The boys laugh, satyr-jokes whereof not one
Least sample but would make my hair turn grey
Beyond a twelvemonth’s ravage! I renounce
Mountebank-claptrap, such as firework-fizz
And torchflare, or else nuts and barleycorns
Scattered among the crowd, to scramble for
And stop their mouths with; no such stuff shames me!
Who, — what’s more serious, — know both when to strike
And when to stay my hand: once dead, my foe,
Why, done, my fighting! I attack a corpse?
I spare the corpse-like even! punish age?
I pity from my soul that sad effete
Toothless old mumbler called Kratinos! once
My rival, — now, alack, the dotard slinks
Ragged and hungry to what hole’s his home;
Ay, slinks thro’ byways where no passenger
Flings him a bone to pick. You formerly
Adored the Muses’ darling: dotard now,
Why, he may starve! O mob most mutable!”
So you harangued in person; while, — to point
Precisely out, these were but lies you launched, —
Prompt, a play followed primed with satyr-frisks,
No spice spared of the stomach-turning stew,
Full-fraught with torch-display, and barley-throw,
And Kleon, dead enough, bedaubed afresh;
While daft Kratinos — home to hole trudged he,
Wrung dry his wit to the last vinous dregs,
Decanted them to “Bottle,” — beat, next year, —
“Bottle” and dregs — your best of “Clouds” and dew!
Where, Comic King, may keenest eye detect
Improvement on your predecessors’ work
Except in lying more audaciously?
Why — genius! That’s the grandeur, that’s the gold —
That’s you — superlatively true to touch —
Gold, leaf or lump — gold, anyhow the mass
Takes manufacture and proves Pallas’ casque
Or, at your choice, simply a cask to keep
Corruption from decay. Your rivals’ hoard
May ooze forth, lacking such preservative:
Yours cannot — gold plays guardian far too well!
Genius, I call you : dross, your rivals share;
Ay, share and share alike, too! says the world,
However you pretend supremacy
In aught beside that gold, your very own.
Satire? “Kratinos for our satirist!”
The world cries. Elegance? “Who elegant
As Eupolis?” resounds as noisily.
Artistic fancy? Choros-creatures quaint?
Magnes invented “Birds” and “Frogs” enough,
Archippos punned, Hegemon parodied,
To heart’s content, before you stepped on stage.
Moral invective? Eupolis exposed
“That prating beggar, he who stole the cup,”
Before your “Clouds” rained grime on Sokrates;
Nay, what beat “Clouds” but “Konnos,” muck for mud?
Courage? How long before, well-masked, you poured
Abuse on Eukrates and Lusikles,
Did Telekleides and Hermippos pelt
Their Perikles and Kumon? standing forth,
Bareheaded, not safe crouched behind a name, —
Philonides or else Kallistratos,
Put forth, when danger threatened, — mask for face,
To bear the brunt, — if blame fell, take the blame, —
If praise . . . why, frank laughed Aristophanes
“They write such rare stuff? No, I promise you!”
Rather, I see all true improvements, made
Or making, go against you — tooth and nail
Contended with; ‘t is still Moruchides,
‘T is Euthumenes, Surakosios, nay,
Argurrhios and Kinesias, — common sense
And public shame, these only cleanse your stye!
Coerced, prohibited, — you grin and bear,
And, soon as may be, hug to heart again
The banished nastiness too dear to drop!
Krates could teach and practise festive song
Yet scorn scurrility; as gay and good,
Pherekrates could follow. Who loosed hold,
Must let fall rose-wreath, stoop to muck once more?
Did your particular self advance in aught,
Task the sad genius — steady slave the while —
To further — say, the patriotic aim?
No, there’s deterioration manifest
Year by year, play by play! survey them all,
From that boy’s-triumph when “Acharnes” dawned,
To “Thesmophoriazousai,” — this man’s-shame!
There, truly, patriot zeal so prominent
Allowed friends’ plea perhaps: the baser stuff
Was but the nobler spirit’s vehicle.
Who would imprison, unvolatilize
A violet’s perfume, blends with fatty oils
Essence too fugitive in flower alone;
So, calling unguent — violet, call the play —
Obscenity impregnated with “Peace”!
But here’s the boy grown bald, and here’s the play
With twenty years’ experience: where’s one spice
Of odour in the hog’s-lard? what pretends
To aught except a grease-pot’s quality?
Friend, sophist-hating! know, — worst sophistry
Is when man’s own soul plays its own self false,
Reasons a vice into a virtue, pleads
“I detail sin to shame its author” — not
“I shame Ariphrades for sin’s display”!
“I show Opora to commend Sweet Home” —
Not “I show Bacchis for the striplings’ sake!”
Yet all the same — O genius and O gold —
Had genius ne’er diverted gold from use
Worthy the temple, to do copper’s work
And coat a swine’s trough — which abundantly
Might furnish Phoibos’ tripod, Pallas’ throne!
Had you, I dream, discarding all the base,
The brutish, spurned alone convention’s watch
And ward against invading decency
Disguised as license, law in lawlessness,
And so, re-ordinating outworn rule,
Made Comedy and Tragedy combine,
Prove some new Both-yet-neither, all one bard,
Euripides with Aristophanes
Coöperant! this, reproducing Now
As that gave Then existence: Life to-day,
This, as that other — Life dead long ago!
The mob decrees such feat no crown, perchance,
But — why call crowning the reward of quest?
Tell him, my other poet, — where thou walk’st
Some rarer world than e’er Ilissos washed!
But dream goes idly in the air. To earth!
Earth’s q
uestion just amounts to — which succeeds,
Which fails of two life-long antagonists?
Suppose my charges all mistake! assume
Your end, despite ambiguous means, the best —
The only! you and he, a patriot-pair,
Have striven alike for one result — say, Peace!
You spoke your best straight to the arbiters —
Our people: have you made them end this war
By dint of laughter and abuse and lies
And postures of Oporia? Sadly — No!
This war, despite your twenty-five years’ work,
May yet endure until Athenai falls,
And freedom falls with her. So much for you!
Now, the antagonist Euripides —
Has he succeeded better? Who shall say?
He spoke quite o’er the heads of Kleon’s crowd
To a dim future, and if there he fail,
Why, you are fellows in adversity.
But that’s unlike the fate of wise words launched
By music on their voyage. Hail, Depart,
Arrive, Glad Welcome! Not my single wish —
Yours also wafts the white sail on its way,
Your nature too is kingly. All beside
I call pretension — no true potentate,
Whatever intermediary be crowned,
Zeus or Poseidon, where the vulgar sky
Lacks not Triballos to complete the group.
I recognize, — behind such phantom-crew, —
Necessity, Creation, Poet’s Power,
Else never had I dared approach, appeal
To poetry, power, Aristophanes!
But I trust truth’s inherent kingliness,
Trust who, by reason of much truth, shall reign
More or less royally — may prayer but push
His sway past limit, purge the false from true!
Nor, even so, had boldness nerved my tongue
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!
Silence pursued the words: till he broke out —
“Scarce so! This constitutes, I may believe,
Sufficient homage done by who defames
Your poet’s foe, since you account me such;
But homage-proper, — pay it by defence
Of him, direct defence and not oblique,
Not by mere mild admonishment of me!
Defence? The best, the only! I replied.
A story goes — When Sophokles, last year,
Cited before tribunal by his son
(A poet — to complete the parallel)
Was certified unsound of intellect,
And claimed as only fit for tutelage,
Since old and doating and incompetent
To carry on this world’s work, — the defence
Consisted just in his reciting (calm
As the verse bore, which sets our heart a-swell
And voice a-heaving too tempestuously)
That choros-chant “The station of the steed,
Stranger! thou comest to, — Kolonos white!”
Then he looked round and all revolt was dead.
You know the one adventure of my life —
What made Euripides Balaustion’s friend.
When I last saw him, as he bade farewell,
“I sang another ‘Herakles,’“ smiled he;
“It gained no prize: your love be prize I gain!
Take it — the tablets also where I traced
The story first with stulos pendent still —
Nay, the psalterion may complete the gift,
So, should you croon the ode bewailing Age,
Yourself shall modulate — same notes, same strings —
With the old friend who loved Balaustion once.”
There they lie! When you broke our solitude,
We were about to honour him once more
By reading the consummate Tragedy.
Night is advanced; I have small mind to sleep;
May I go on, and read, — so make defence,
So test true godship? You affirm, not I,
— Beating the god, affords such test: I hold
That when rash hands but touch divinity,
The chains drop off, the prison-walls dispart,
And — fire — he fronts mad Pentheus! Dare we try?
Accordingly I read the perfect piece.
THE INN ALBUM
CONTENTS
I
II
III
IV
V
VI
VII
VIII
THE INN ABLUM
I
“That oblong book’s the Album; hand it here!
Exactly! page on page of gratitude
For breakfast, dinner, supper, and the view!
I praise these poets: they leave margin-space;
Each stanza seems to gather skirts around,
And primly, trimly, keep the foot’s confine,
Modest and maidlike; lubber prose o’er-sprawls
And straddling stops the path from left to right.
Since I want space to do my cipher-work,
Which poem spares a corner? What comes first?
‘Hail, calm acclivity, salubrious spot!’
(Open the window, we burn daylight, boy!)
Or see — succincter beauty, brief and bold —
‘If a fellow can dine On rumpsteaks and port wine,
He needs not despair Of dining well here — ’
‘Here!’ I myself could find a better rhyme!
That bard’s a Browning; he neglects the form:
But ah, the sense, ye gods, the weighty sense!
Still, I prefer this classic. Ay, throw wide!
I’ll quench the bits of candle yet unburnt.
A minute’s fresh air, then to cipher-work!
Three little columns hold the whole account:
Ecarté, after which Blind Hookey, then
Cutting-the-Pack, five hundred pounds the cut.
‘Tis easy reckoning: I have lost, I think.”
Two personages occupy this room
Shabby-genteel, that’s parlor to the inn
Perched on a view-commanding eminence;
— — — — -Inn which may be a veritable house
Where somebody once lived and pleased good taste
Till tourists found his coign of vantage out,
And fingered blunt the individual mark
And vulgarized things comfortably smooth.
On a sprig-pattern-papered wall there brays
Complaint to sky Sir Edwin’s dripping stag;
His couchant coast-guard creature corresponds;
They face the Huguenot and Light o’ the World.
Grim o’er the mirror on the mantlepiece,
Varnished and coffined, Salmo ferox glares
— Possibly at the List of Wines which, framed
And glazed, hangs somewhat prominent on peg.
So much describes the stuffy little room —
Vulgar flat smooth respectability:
Not so the burst of landscape surging in,
Sunrise and all, as he who of the pair
Is, plain enough, the younger personage
Draws sharp the shrieking curtain, sends aloft
The sash, spreads wide and fastens back to wall
Shutter and shutter, shows you England’s best.
He leans into a living glory-bath
Of air and light where seems to float and move
The wooded watered country, hill and dale
And steel-bright thread of stream, a-smoke with mist,
A-sparkle with May morning, diamond drift
O’ the sun-touched dew. Except the red-roofed patch
/> Of half a dozen dwellings that, crept close
For hill-side shelter, make the village-clump
This inn is perched above to dominate —
Except such sign of human neighborhood,
(And this surmised rather than sensible)
There’s nothing to disturb absolute peace,
The reign of English nature — which mean art
And civilized existence. Wildness’ self
Is just the cultured triumph. Presently
Deep solitude, be sure, reveals a Place
That knows the right way to defend itself:
Silence hems round a burning spot of life.
Now, where a Place burns, must a village brood,
And where a village broods, an inn should boast —
Close and convenient: here you have them both.
This inn, the Something-arms — the family’s —
(Don’t trouble Guillim; heralds leave our half!)
Is dear to lovers of the picturesque,
And epics have been planned here; but who plan
Take holy orders and find work to do.
Painters are more productive, stop a week,
Declare the prospect quite a Corot, — ay,
For tender sentiment, — themselves incline
Rather to handsweep large and liberal;
Then go, but not without success achieved
— Haply some pencil-drawing, oak or beech,
Ferns at the base and ivies up the bole,
On this a slug, on that a butterfly.
Nay, he who hooked the salmo pendent here,
Also exhibited, this same May-month,
‘Foxgloves: a study’ — so inspires the scene,
The air, which now the younger personage
Inflates him with till lungs o’erfraught are fain
Sigh forth a satisfaction might bestir
Even those tufts of tree-tops to the South
I’ the distance where the green dies off to grey,
Which, easy of conjecture, front the Place;
He eyes them, elbows wide, each hand to cheek.
His fellow, the much older — either say
A youngish-old man or man oldish-young —
Sits at the table: wicks are noisome-deep
In wax, to detriment of plated ware;
Above — piled, strewn — is store of playing-cards,
Counters and all that’s proper for a game.
He sets down, rubs out figures in the book, 100
Adds and subtracts, puts back here, carries there.
Until the summed-up satisfaction stands
Apparent, and he pauses o’er the work:
Soothes what of brain was busy under brow.
By passage of the hard palm, curing so
Wrinkle and crowfoot for a second’s space;
Then lays down book and laughs out. No mistake.
Such the sum-total — ask Colenso else!
Robert Browning - Delphi Poets Series Page 185