Complete Works of Elizabeth Barrett Browning

by Elizabeth Barrett Browning

  Oh, would ship Argo had not sailed away

  To Cholchos by the rough Symplegades!

  Nor ever had been felled in Pelion’s grove

  The pine, hewn for her side! * *

  So she, my queen

  Medæa, had not touched this fatal shore,

  Soul-struck by love of Jason!

  Apolinarius opens it thus –

  Oh, would the serpent had not glode along

  To Eden’s garden-land, – nor ever had

  The crafty dragon planted in that grove

  A slimy snare! So she, rib-born of man,

  The wretched misled mother of our race,

  Had dared not to dare on beyond worst daring,

  Soul-struck by love of – apples!

  “Let us alone for keeping our countenance” – and at any rate we are bound to ask gravely of Mr. Alford [i]s the Medæa destroyed? – and if not, did the author of the ‘Christus Patiens’ destroy his originals? – and if not, may we not say of Mr. Alford’s charge against that author, “O, would he had not made it!” So far from Apolinarius being guilty of destroying his originals, it was his reverence for them which struggled with the edict of the persecutor, and accomplished this dramatic adventure; – and this adventure, the only remaining specimen of his adventurousness, may help us to the secret of his wonderful fertility and omnirepresentativeness, which is probably this – that the great majority of his works, tragic, comic, lyric, and philosophic, consisted simply of centos. Yet we pray for justice to Apolinarius: we pray for honour to his motives and energies. Without pausing to inquire whether it had been better and wiser to let poetry and literature depart at once before the tyranny of the edict, than to drag them back by the hair into attitudes grotesquely ridiculous – better and wiser for the Greek Christian schools to let them forego altogether the poems of their Euripides, than adapt to the meek sorrows of the tender Virgin-mother, the bold, bad, cruel phrenzy of Medæa, in such verses as these –

  She howls out ancient oaths, invokes the faith

  Of pledged right hands, and calls for witness, God!

  – we pray straightforwardly for justice and honour to the motives and energies of Apolinarius. “Oh, would that” many lived now, as appreciative of the influences of poetry on our schools and country, as impatient of their contraction, as self-devoted in the great work of extending them! There remains of his poetical labours, besides the tragedy, a translation of David’s Psalms into “heroic verse,” which the writer of these remarks has not seen, – and of which those critics, who desire to deal gently with Apolinarius, seem to begin their indulgence by doubting the authenticity.

  It is pleasant to turn shortly round, and find ourselves face to face, not with the author of ‘Christus Patiens,’ but with one antagonistical both to his poetry and his heresy, Gregory Nazianzen. A noble and tender man was this Gregory, and so tender, because so noble; a man to lose no cubit of his stature for being looked at steadfastly, or struck at reproachfully. “You may cast me down,” he said, “from my bishop’s throne, but you cannot banish me from before God’s.” And bishop as he was, his saintly crown stood higher than his tiara, and his loving martyr-smile, the crown of a nature more benign than his fortune, shone up toward both. Son of the bishop of Nazianzen, and holder of the diocese which was his birthplace, previous to his elevation to the level of the storm in the bishopric of Constantinople, little did he care for bishoprics or high places of any kind, – the desire of his soul being for solitude, quietude, and that silent religion, which should “rather be than seem.” But his father’s head bent whitely before him, even in the chamber of his brother’s death, – and Basil, his beloved friend, the “half of his soul,” pressed on him with the weight of love, and Gregory feeling their tears upon his cheeks, did not count his own, but took up the priestly office. Poor Gregory! not merely as a priest, but as a man, he had a sighing life of it. His student days at Athens, where he and Basil read together poems and philosophies and holier things, or talked low and misopogonistically of their fellow student Julian’s bearded boding smile, were his happiest days. He says of himself,

  As many stones

  Were thrown at me, as other men had flowers.

  Nor was persecution the worst evil. For friend after friend, beloved after beloved, passed away from before his face, and the voice which charmed them living, spoke brokenly beside their graves – his funeral orations marked severally the wounds of his heart, – and his genius served, as genius often does, to lay an emphasis on his grief. The passage we shall venture to translate, is rather a cry than a song –

  Where are my wingèd words? Dissolved in air.

  Where is my flower of youth? All withered. Where

  My glory? Vanished! Where the strength I knew

  From comely limbs? Disease hath changed it too,

  And bent them. Where the riches and the lands? –

  GOD HATH THEM! Yea, and sinners’ snatching hands

  Have grudged the rest. Where is my father, mother,

  And where my blessed sister, my sweet brother? –

  Gone to the grave! – There did remain for me

  Alone my fatherland, till destiny,

  Malignly stirring a black tempest, drove

  My foot from that last rest. And now I rove

  Estranged and desolate a foreign shore,

  And drag my mournful life and age all hoar

  Throneless and cityless, and childless save

  This father-care for children, which I have,

  Living from day to day on wandering feet.

  Where shall I cast this body? What will greet

  My sorrows with an end? What gentle ground

  And hospitable grave will wrap me round?

  Who last my dying eye-lids stoop to close –

  Some saint, the Saviour’s friend? or one of those

  Who do not know him? – The air interpose,

  And scatter these words too.

  The return upon the first thought is highly pathetic, – and there is a restlessness of anguish about the whole passage, which consecrates it with the cross of nature. His happy Athenian associations gave a colour, unwashed out by tears, to his mind and works. Half apostolical he was, and half scholastical; and while he mused, on his bishop’s throne, upon the mystic tree of twelve fruits, and the shining of the river of life, he carried, as Milton did, with a gentle and not ungraceful distraction, both hands full of green trailing branches from the banks of the Cephissus, nay, from the very plane-tree which Socrates sate under with Phædrus, when they two talked about beauty to the rising and falling of its leaves. As an orator, he was greater, all must feel if some do not think, than his contemporaries – and the “golden mouth” might confess it meekly. Erasmus compares him to Isocrates, but the unlikeness is obvious – Gregory was not excellent at an artful blowing of the pipes. He spoke grandly, as the wind does, in gusts; and as, in a mighty wind, which combines unequal noises, the creaking of trees and rude swinging of doors, as well as the sublime sovereign rush along the valleys, we gather the idea from his eloquence, less of music than of power. Not that he is cold as the wind is – the metaphor goes no further: Gregory cannot be cold, even by disfavour of his antithetic points. He is various in his oratory, full and rapid in allusion, briefly graphic in metaphor, equally sufficient for indignation or pathos, and gifted peradventure with a keener dagger of sarcasm than should hang in a saint’s girdle. His orations against Julian have all these characteristics, but they are not poetry, and we must pass down lower, and quite over his beautiful letters, to Gregory the poet.

  He wrote thirty thousand verses, among which are several long poems, severally defective in a defect common but not necessary to short occasional poems, and lamentable anywhere, a want of unity and completeness. The excellencies of his prose are transcribed, with whatever faintness, in his poetry – the exaltation, the devotion, the sweetness, the pathos, even to the playing of satirical power about the graver meanings. But although nobl
e thoughts break up the dulness of the groundwork, – although, with the instinct of greater poets, he bares his heart in his poetry, and the heart is worth baring, still monotony of construction without unity of intention is the most wearisome of monotonies, and, except in the case of a few short poems, we find it everywhere in Gregory. The lack of variety is extended to the cadences, and the pauses fall stiffly “come corpo morto cade.” Melodious lines we have often: harmonious passages scarcely ever – the music turning heavily on its own axle, as inadequate to living evolution. The poem on his own life (‘De vitâ suâ’) is, in many places, interesting and affecting, yet faulty with all these faults. The poem on Celibacy, which state is commended by Gregory as becometh a bishop, has occasionally graphic touches, but is dull enough generally to suit the fairest spinster’s view of that melancholy subject. If Hercules could have read it, he must have rested in the middle – from which the reader is entreated to forbear the inference that the poem has not been read through by the writer of the present remarks, seeing that that writer marked the grand concluding moment with a white stone, and laid up the memory of it among the chief triumphs, to say nothing of the fortunate deliverances, vitæ suæ. In Gregory’s elegiac poems, our ears, at least, are better contented, because the sequence of pentameter to hexameter necessarily excludes the various cadence which they yearn for under other circumstances. His anacreontics are sometimes nobly written, with a certain brave recklessness as if the thoughts despised the measure – and we select from this class a specimen of his poetry, both because three of his hymns have already appeared in the Athenæum, and because the anacreontic in question includes to a remarkable extent, the various qualities we have attributed to Gregory, not omitting that play of satirical humour with which he delights to ripple the abundant flow of his thoughts. The writer, though also a translator, feels less misgiving than usual in offering to the reader, in such English as is possible, this spirited and beautiful poem.

  SOUL AND BODY.

  What wilt thou possess or be?

  O my soul, I ask of thee.

  What of great, or what of small,

  Counted precious therewithal?

  Be it only rare, and want it,

  I am ready, soul, to grant it.

  Wilt thou choose to have and hold

  Lydian Gyges’ charm of old,

  So to rule us with a ring,

  Turning round the jewelled thing,

  Hidden by its face concealed,

  And revealed by it’s revealed? –

  Or preferrest Midas’ fate –

  He who died in golden state,

  All things being changed to gold?

  Of a golden hunger dying,

  Through a surfeit of “would I”-ing!

  Wilt have jewels brightly cold?

  Or may fertile acres please?

  Or the sheep of many a fold,

  Camels, oxen, for the wold?

  Nay! – I will not give thee these!

  These to take thou hast not will –

  These to give I have not skill –

  Since I cast earth’s cares abroad,

  That day when I turned to God.

  Wouldst a throne, – a crown sublime,

  Bubble blown upon the time?

  So thou mayest sit to-morrow

  Looking downward in meek sorrow,

  Some one walking by thee scorning,

  Who adored thee yester morning,

  Some malign one? – Wilt be bound

  Fast in marriage? (joy unsound!)

  And be turnèd round and round

  As the time turns? Wilt thou catch it,

  That sweet sickness? and to match it

  Have babies by the hearth, bewildering?

  And if I tell thee the best children

  Are none – what answer?

  Wilt thou thunder

  Thy rhetoricks – move the people under?

  Covetest to sell the laws

  With no justice in thy cause,

  And bear on, or else be borne,

  Before tribunals worthy scorn?

  Wilt thou shake a javelin rather

  Breathing war? or wilt thou gather

  Garlands from the wrestler’s ring?

  Or kill beasts for glorying?

  Covetest the city’s shout,

  And to be in brass struck out?

  Cravest thou that shade of dreaming,

  Passing air of shifting seeming,

  Rushing of a printless arrow,

  Clapping echo of an hand?

  What to those who understand

  Are to-day’s enjoyments narrow,

  Which to-morrow go again, –

  Which are shared with evil men, –

  And of which no man in his dying

  Taketh aught for softer lying?

  What then wouldst thou, if thy mood

  Choose not these? what wilt thou be,

  O my soul? a deity?

  A God before the face of God,

  Standing glorious in his glories,

  Choral in his angels’ chorus?

  Go! upon thy wing arise,

  Plumèd by quick energies,

  Mount in circles up the skies:

  And I will bless thy wingèd passion,

  Help with words thine exaltation,

  And, like a bird of rapid feather,

  Outlaunch thee, Soul, upon the æther.

  But thou, O fleshly nature, say,

  Thou with odours from the clay,

  Since thy presence I must have

  As a lady with a slave,

  What wouldst thou possess or be,

  That thy breath may stay with thee?

  Nay! I owe thee nought beside,

  Though thine hands be open wide.

  Would a table suit thy wishes,

  Fragrant with sweet oils and dishes

  Wrought to subtle niceness? where

  Stringèd music strokes the air,

  And blythe hand-clappings, and the smooth

  Fine postures of the tender youth

  And virgins wheeling through the dance

  With an unveiled countenance, –

  Joys for drinkers, who love shame,

  And the maddening wine-cup’s flame? –

  Wilt thou such, howe’er decried? –

  Take them, – and a rope beside!

  Nay! this boon I give instead,

  Unto friend insatiated, –

  May some rocky house receive thee,

  Self-roofed, to conceal thee chiefly;

  Or if labour there must lurk,

  Be it by a short day’s work!

  And for garment, camel’s hair,

  As the righteous clothèd were,

  Clothe thee! or the bestial skin,

  Adam’s bareness hid within, –

  Or some green thing from the way,

  Leaf of herb, or branch of vine,

  Swelling, purpling as it may,

  Fearless to be drunk for wine!

  Spread a table there beneath thee,

  Which a sweetness shall up-breathe thee,

  And which the dearest earth is giving,

  Simple present to all living!

  When that we have placed thee near it,

  We will feed thee with glad spirit.

  Wilt thou eat? soft, take the bread,

  Oaten cake, if that bested –

  Salt will season all aright,

  And thine own good appetite,

  Which we measure not, nor fetter:

  ‘Tis an uncooked condiment,

  Famine’s self the only better.

  Wilt thou drink? why here doth bubble

  Water from a cup unspent,

  Followed by no tipsy trouble,

  Pleasure sacred from the grape!

  Wilt thou have it in some shape

  More like luxury? we are

  No grudgers of wine-vinegar!

  But if all will not suffice thee,

  And thou covetest to draw

 
In that pitcher with a flaw,

  Brimful pleasures heaven denies thee!

  Go, and seek out, by that sign,

  Other help than this of mine!

  For me, I have not leisure so

  To warm thee, sweet, my household foe,

  Until, like a serpent frozen,

  New-maddened with the heat, thou loosen

  Thy rescued fang within mine heart!

  Wilt have measureless delights

  Of gold-roofed palaces, and sights

  From pictured or from sculptured art,

  With motion near their life; and splendour

  Of bas-relief, with tracery tender,

  And varied and contrasted hues?

  Wilt thou have, as nobles use,

  Broidered robes to flow about thee?

  Jewelled fingers? Need we doubt thee?

  Gauds for which the wise will flout thee?

  I most, who of all beauty, know

  It must be inward, to be so!

  And thus I speak to mortals low,

  Living for the hour, and o’er

  Its shadow, seeing nothing more!

  But for those of nobler bearing,

  Who live more worthily of wearing

  A portion of the heavenly nature –

  To low estate of clayey creature,

  See, I bring the beggar’s meed,

  Nutriment beyond the need!

  O, beholder of the Lord,

  Prove on me the flaming sword!

  Be mine husbandman, to nourish

  Holy plants, that words may flourish

  Of which mine enemy would spoil me,

  Using pleasurehood to foil me!

  Lead me closer to the tree

  Of all life’s eternity;

  Which, as I have pondered, is

  The knowledge of God’s greatnesses:

  Light of One, and shine of Three,

  Unto whom all things that be

  Flow and tend!

  In such a guise,

  Whoever on the earth is wise

  Will speak unto himself, – and who

  Such inner converse would eschew,