Complete Works of Elizabeth Barrett Browning

by Elizabeth Barrett Browning

  Their place in literature, which we have to do with to-day, may be found, perhaps, by a like moderation. That place is not, it has been admitted, of the highest; and that it is not of the lowest the proof will presently be attempted. There is a mid-air kingdom of the birds called Nephelococcygia, of which Aristophanes tells us something; and we might stand there a moment so as to measure the local adaptitude, putting up the Promethean umbrella to hide us from the “Gods,” if it were not for the “men and columns” lower down. But as it is, the very suggestion, if persisted in, would sink all the ecclesiastical antiquity it is desirable to find favour for, to all eternity, in the estimation of the kindest reader. No! the mid-air kingdom of the birds will not serve the wished for purpose even illustratively, and by grace of the nightingale. “May the sweet saints pardon us” for wronging them by an approach to such a sense, which, if attained and determined, would have consigned them so certainly to what St. Augustine called – when he was moderate too – “mitissima damnatio,” a very mild species of damnation.

  It would be, in fact, a rank injustice to the beauty we are here to recognize, to place these writers in the rank of mediocrities, supposing the harsh sense. They may be called mediocrities as poets among poets, but not so as no poets at all. Some of them may sing before gods and men, and in front of any column, from Trajan’s to that projected one in Trafalgar Square, to which is promised the miraculous distinction of making the National Gallery sink lower than we see it now. They may, as a body, sing exultingly, holding the relation of column to gallery, in front of the whole “corpus” of Latin ecclesiastical poetry, and claim the world’s ear and the poet’s palm. That the modern Latin poets have been more read by scholars, and are better known by reputation to the general reader, is unhappily true: but the truth involves no good reason why it should be so, nor much marvel that it is so. Besides the greater accessibility of Latin literature, the vicissitude of life is extended to posthumous fame, and Time, who is Justice to the poet, is sometimes too busy in pulverizing bones to give the due weight to memories. The modern Latin poets, “elegant,” – which is the critic’s word to spend upon them, – elegant as they are occasionally, polished and accurate as they are comparatively, stand cold and lifeless, with statue-eyes, near these good, fervid, faulty Greeks of ours – and we do not care to look again. Our Greeks do, in their degree, claim their ancestral advantage, not the mere advantage of language, – nay, least the advantage of language – a comparative elegance and accuracy of expression being ceded to the Latins – but that higher distinction inherent in brain and breast, of vivid thought and quick sensibility. What if we swap for a moment the Tertullians and Prudentiuses, and touch, by a permitted anachronism, with one hand VIDA, with the other GREGORY NAZIANZEN, what then? What though the Italian poet be smooth as the Italian Canova – working like him out of stone – smooth and cold, disdaining to ruffle his dactyls with the beating of his pulses – what then? Would we change for him our sensitive Gregory, with all his defects in the glorious “scientia metrica”? We would not – perhaps we should not, even if those defects were not attributable, as Mr. Boyd, in the preface to his work on the Fathers, most justly intimates, to the changes incident to a declining language.

  It is, too, as religious poets, that we are called upon to estimate these neglected Greeks – as religious poets, of whom the universal church and the world’s literature would gladly embrace more names than can be counted to either. For it is strange, that although Wilhelm Meister’s uplooking and downlooking aspects, the reverence to things above and things below, the religious all-clasping spirit, be, and must be, in degree and measure, the grand necessity of every true poet’s soul, of religious poets, strictly so called, the earth is very bare. Religious “parcel- poets” we have, indeed, more than enough; writers of hymns, translators of scripture into prose, or of prose generally into rhymes, of whose heart-devotion a higher faculty were worthy. Also there have been poets, not a few, singing as if earth were still Eden; and poets, many, singing as if in the first hour of exile, when the echo of the curse was louder than the whisper of the promise. But the right “genius of Christianism” has done little up to this moment, even for Chateaubriand. We want the touch of Christ’s hand upon our literature, as it touched other dead things – we want the sense of the saturation of Christ’s blood upon the souls of our poets, that it may cry through them in answer to the ceaseless wail of the Sphinx of our humanity, expounding agony into renovation. Something of this has been perceived in art when its glory was at the fullest. Something of a yearning after this may be seen among the Greek Christian poets, something which would have been much with a stronger faculty. It will not harm us in any case, as lovers of literature and honest judges, if we breathe away, or peradventure besom away, the thick dust which lies upon their heavy folios, and besom away, or peradventure breathe away, the inward intellectual dust which must be confessed to lie thickly, too, upon the heavy poems, and make our way softly and meekly into the heart of such hidden beauties (hidden and scattered) as our good luck, or good patience, or, to speak more reverently, the intrinsic goodness of the Fathers of Christian Poetry, shall permit us to discover. May gentle readers favour the endeavour, with “gentle airs,” if any! readers not too proud to sleep, were it only for Homer’s sake; nor too passionate, at their worst displeasure, to do worse than growl in their sleeves, after the manner of “most delicate monsters.” It is not intended to crush this forbearing class with folios, nor even with a folio; only to set down briefly in their sight what shall appear to the writer the characteristics of each poet, and to illustrate the opinion by the translation of a few detached passages, or, in certain possible cases, of short entire poems. And so much has been premised, simply that too much be not expected.

  It has the look of an incongruity, to begin an account of the Greek Christian poets with a Jew; and Ezekiel is a Jew in his very name, and a “poet of the Jews” by profession. Moreover he is wrapt in such a mystery of chronology that nobody can be quite sure of his not having lived before the Christian era – and one whole whisper establishes him as a unit of the famous seventy or seventy-two, under Ptolemy Philadelphus. Let us waive the chronology in favour of the mystery. He is brought out into light by Clemens Alexandrinus; and being associated with Greek poets, and a writer himself of Greek verses, we may receive him in virtue of the τοτοτοτοτοτοτοτοτοτοτιγξ, with little fear, in his case, of implying an injustice in that middle bird-locality of Nephelococcygia. The reader must beware of confounding him with the prophet; and the circumstance of the latter’s inspiration is sufficiently distinguishing. Our Greek Ezekiel is, indeed, whatever his chronology may be, no vatis in the ancient sense. A Greek tragedy, (and some fragments of a tragedy are all that we hold of him,) by a Jew, and on a Jewish subject, “The Exodus from Egypt,” may startle the most serene of us into curiosity – with which curiosity begins and ends the only strong feeling we can bring to bear upon the work; since, if the execution of it is somewhat curious too, there is a gentle collateral dulness which effectually secures us from feverish excitement. Moses prologizes after the worst manner of Euripides (worse than the worst), compendiously relating his adventures among the bulrushes and in Pharaoh’s household, concluded by his slaying an Egyptian, because nobody was looking. So saith the poet. Then follows an interview between the Israelite and Zipporah, and her companions, wherein he puts to her certain geographical questions, and she (as far as we can make out through fragmentary cracks) rather brusquely proposes their mutual marriage: on which subject he does not venture an opinion; but we find him next confiding his dreams in a family fashion to her father, who considers them satisfactory. Here occurs a broad crack down the tragedy – and we are suddenly called to the revelation from the bush by an extraordinarily ordinary dialogue between Diety and Moses. It is a surprising specimen of the kind of composition adverted to some lines ago, as the translation of Scripture into prose; and the sublime simplicity of the scriptural narrative
being thus done (away) into Greek for a certain time, the following reciprocation, – to which our old moralities can scarcely do more, or less, than furnish a parallel – prays for an English – exposure. The Divine Being is supposed to address Moses: –

  But what is this thou holdest in thine hand? –

  Let thy reply be sudden.

  Moses. ‘Tis my rod –

  I chasten with it quadrupeds and men.

  Voice from the Bush. Cast it upon the ground – and straight recoil;

  For it shall be, to move thy wonderment,

  A terrible serpent.

  Moses. It is cast. But THOU,

  Be gracious to me, Lord. How terrible!

  How monstrous! Oh, be pitiful to me!

  I shudder to behold it, my limbs shake.

  The reader is already consoled for the destiny which mutilated the tragedy, without requiring the last words of the analysis. Happily characteristic of the “meekest of men,” is Moses’s naïve admission of the uses of his rod – to beat men and animals withal – of course “when nobody is looking.”

  Clemens Alexandrinus, to whom we owe whatever gratitude is due for our fragmentary Ezekiel, was originally an Athenian philosopher, afterwards a converted Christian, a Presbyter of the Church at Alexandria, and preceptor of the famous Origen. Clemens flourished at the close of the second century. As a prose writer – and we have no prose writings of his, except such as were produced subsequently to his conversion – he is learned and various. His ‘Pedagogue’ is a wanderer, to universal intents and purposes, – and his ‘Tapestry,’ if the ‘Stromata’ may be called so, embroidered in all cross-stitches of philosophy, with not much scruple as to the shading of colours. In the midst of all is something, ycleped a dithyrambic ode, addressed to the Saviour, composite of fantastic epithets in the mode of the old litanies, and almost as bald of merit as the Jew-Greek drama, though Clemens himself (worthier in worthier places) be the poet. Here is the opening, which is less fanciful than what follows it: –

  Curb for wild horses,

  Wing for bird-courses

  Never yet flown!

  Helm, safe for weak ones,

  Shepherd, bespeak once,

  The young lambs thine own.

  Rouse up the youth,

  Shepherd and feeder,

  So let them bless thee,

  Praise and confess thee, –

  Pure words on pure mouth, –

  Christ, the child-leader!

  O, the saints’ Lord,

  All-dominant word!

  Holding, by Christdom,

  God’s highest wisdom!

  Column in place

  When sorrows seize us, –

  Endless in grace

  Unto man’s race,

  Saving one, Jesus!

  Pastor and ploughman,

  Helm, curb, together, –

  Pinion that now can,

  (Heavenly of feather)

  Raise and release us!

  Fisher who catcheth

  Those whom he watcheth....

  It goes on; but we need not do so. “By the pricking of our thumbs,” we know that the reader has had enough of it. We shall resume our story of the Greek poets another week.

  PART II.

  PASSING rapidly into the fourth century, we would offer our earliest homage to Gregory Nazianzen,

  “That name must ever be to us a friend,”

  when the two Apolinarii cross our path and intercept the “all hail.” Apolinarius the grammarian, formerly of Alexandria, held the office of presbyter in the church of Laodicæa, and his son Apolinarius, an accomplished rhetorician, that of reader, an ancient ecclesiastical office, in the same church. This younger Apolinarius was a man of indomptable energies and most practical inferences; and when the edict of Julian forbade to the Christians the study of Grecian letters, he, assisted perhaps by his father’s hope and hand, stood strong in the gap, not in the attitude of supplication, not with the gesture of consolation, but in power and sufficiency to fill up the void and baffle the tyrant. Both father and son were in the work, by some testimony; the younger Apolinarius standing out, by all, as the chief worker, and only one in any extensive sense. “Does Julian deny us Homer?” said the brave man in his armed soul – “I am Homer!” and straightway he turned the whole Biblical history, down to Saul’s accession, into Homeric hexameters, – dividing the work, so as to clench the identity of first and second Homers, into twenty-four books, each superscribed by a letter of the alphabet, and the whole acceptable, according to the expression of Sozomen, αυτι της Όμηρου ποιησεως, in the place of Homer’s poetry. “Does Julian deny us Euripides?” said Apolinarius again – “I am Euripides!” and up he sprang, – as good a Euripides (who can doubt it?) as he ever was a Homer. “Does Julian forbid us Menander? – Pindar? – Plato? – I am Menander! – I am Pindar! – I am Plato!” And comedies, lyrics, philosophics, flowed fast at the word; and the gospels and epistles adapted themselves naturally to the rules of Socratic disputation. A brave man, forsooth, was our Apolinarius of Laodicæa, and literally a man of men – for, observe, says Sozomen, with a venerable innocence, at which the gravest may smile gravely, – as at a doublet worn awry at the council of Nice, – that the old authors did each man his own work, whereas this Apolinarius did every man’s work in addition to his own – and so admirably, – intimates the ecclesiastical critic, – that if it were not for the common prejudice in favour of antiquity, no ancient could be missed in the all-comprehensive representativeness of the Laodicæan writer. So excellent was his ability, to “outbrave the stars in several kinds of light,” besides the Cæsar! Whether Julian, naturally mortified to witness this germination of illustrious heads under the very iron of his searing, vowed vengeance against the Hydra-spirit, by the sacred memory of the animation of his own beard, we do not exactly know. To embitter the wrong, Apolinarius sent him a treatise upon truth – a confutation of the pagan doctrine, apart from the scriptural argument – the Emperor’s notice of which is both worthy of his Cæsarship, and a good model-notice for all sorts of critical dignities. Ανεγνων εγνων κατεγνων, is the Greek of it; so that, turning from the letter to catch something of the point, we may write it down – “I have perused, I have mused, I have abused” – which provoked as imperious a retort – “Thou mayest have perused, but thou hast not mused – for hadst thou mused, thou wouldst not have abused.” Brave Laodicæan!

  Apolinarius’s laudable double of Greek literature has perished, the reader will be concerned to hear, from the face of the earth, being, like other luses, or marvels, or monsters, brief of days. One only tragedy remains, with which the memory of Gregory Nazianzen has been right tragically affronted, and which Gregory, – ει τις αισΘησις, as he said of Constantius, – would cast off with the scorn and anger befitting an Apolinarian heresy. For Apolinarius, besides being an epoist, dramatist, lyrist, philosopher, and rhetorician, was, we are sorry to add, in the eternal bustle of his soul, a heretic, – possibly for the advantage of something additional to do. He not only intruded into the churches hymns which were not authorized, being his own composition – so that reverend brows grew dark to hear women with musical voices sing them softly to the turning of their distaff, – but he fell into the heresy of denying a human soul to the perfect MAN, and of leaving the Divinity in bare combination with the Adamic dust. No wonder that a head so beset with many thoughts and individualities should at last turn round! – that eyes rolling in fifty fine phrenzies of twenty-five fine poets should at last turn blind! – that a determination to rival all geniuses should be followed by a disposition more baleful in its exercise, to understand “all mysteries”! Nothing can be plainer than the step after step, whereby, through excess of vain glory and morbid mental activity, Apolinarius, the vice poet of Greece, subsided into Apolinarius the chief heretic of Christendom.

  To go back sighingly to the tragedy, where we shall have to sigh again – the only tragedy left to us o
f all the tragic works of Apolinarius (but we do not sigh for that!) – let no voice evermore attribute it to Gregory Nazianzen. How could Mr. Alford do so, however hesitatingly, in his “Chapters,” attaching to it, without the hesitation, a charge upon the writer, whether Gregory or another man, that he, whoever he was, had of his own free will and choice, destroyed the old Greek originals out of which his tragedy was constructed, and left it a monument of their sacrifice as of the blood on his barbarian hand? The charge passes, not only before a breath, but before its own breath. The tragedy is, in fact, a specimen of centoism, which is the adaptation of the phraseology of one work to the construction of another; and we have only to glance at it to perceive the Medæa of Euripides, dislocated into the CHRISTUS PATIENS. Instead of the ancient opening –