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Balaustion's Adventure: Browning's Greek Parable

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 December 2020

Clyde De L. Ryals
Clyde De L. Ryals*
Affiliation:
Duke University, Durham, North Carolina
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Extract

Because The Ring and the Book is such a towering imaginative achievement, readers and critics alike have slighted those poems which Browning wrote and published soon after 1868. This is especially true of Balaustion's Adventure (1871), the poet's next work after The Ringand the Book. Largely given over to a retelling of Euripides' Alkestis, it has perplexed most critics, many of them wondering whether it should be considered as anything more than a mere transla tion. Browning himself made few claims for it. In the dedication to the Countess Cowper he re ferred to it as a task that “proved the most delightful of May-month amusements,”1 and to Isabella Blagden he spoke of it as “my little new Poem,—done in a month,—and I think a pretty thing in its way.”2 Calling it “Exhaustion's Impos ture,” Rossetti found “the structure of the work beyond all conception perverse” and the Euripidean Alkestis “interlarded with Browningian analysis to an extent beyond all reason or relation to things by any possibility Greek in any way.”3 Swinburne, discovering “fine things in it,” thought that “the pathos of the subject is too simple and downright for Browning's analytic method.”4 Later commentators have likewise been worried by the question of its faithfulness to the Greek spirit.6 The purpose of this essay is to suggest that such a consideration is largely irrelevant to an estimation of the poem which both William Clyde DeVane and Robert Langbaum claim belongs with the works of Browning's best period.6

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 88 , Issue 5 , October 1973 , pp. 1040 - 1048
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1973

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References

1 All citations of Browning's published works are from the Florentine Edition, The Complete Works of Robert Browning, ed. Charlotte Porter and Helen A. Clarke (New York: Crowell, 1910). I have followed Browning's transliterations of Greek names throughout this paper.

2 Dearest Isa: Robert Browning's Letters to Isabella Blagden, ed. Edward C. McAleer (Austin: Univ. of Texas Press, 1951), p. 362.

3 Letters of Dante Gabriel Rossetti, ed. Oswald Doughty and J. R. Wahl (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1967), in, 981.

4 The Swinburne Letters, ed. Cecil Y. Lang (New Haven, Conn.: Yale Univ. Press, 1959), II, 155–56.

5 See Thurman L. Hood, “Browning's Ancient Classical Sources,” Harvard Studies in Classical Philology, 33 (1922), 79–81; Edmund D. Cressman, “The Classical Poems of Robert Browning,” CJ, 23 (1927), 198–207; Robert Spindler, Robert Browning unddie Antike (Leipzig: B. Tauchnitz, 1930), ii, 59–77; Douglas Bush, Mythology and the Romantic Tradition (1937; rpt. New York: Norton, 1963), pp. 366–75; William C. DeVane, “Browning and the Spirit of Greece,” in Nineteenth-Century Studies, ed. H. Davis, W. C. DeVane, and R. C. Bald (Ithaca, ?. Y.: Cornell Univ. Press, 1940), pp. 183–84.

6 William Clyde DeVane, A Browning Handbook (New York: Appleton-Century, 1955), p. 157; Robert Langbaum, “Browning and the Question of Myth,” PMLA, 81 (1966), 582–83.

7 The analogies between Browning's own time and his second Balaustion poem, Aristophanes' Apology, have been remarked in Donald Smalley's “A Parleying with Aristophanes,” PMLA, 52 (1940), 823–38.

8 The most complete study of Browning's views on the Incarnation, William Whitla's The Central Truth (Toronto : Univ. of Toronto Press, 1963), is mute on Balaustion's Adventure.

9 See Beryl Stone, “Browning and Incarnation,” M.A. Thesis Toronto 1957, p.iii.

10 The Works of John Ruskin, ed. ?. T. Cook and Alexander Wedderburn (London: Allen, 1909), xxxiii, xxxiii.

11 For the best account of Browning's views on the religious controversies of the 1860's see William O. Raymond, The Infinite Moment (Toronto: Univ. of Toronto Press, 1963), pp. 19–51.

12 Robert Browning and Julia Wedgwood. . . Their Letters, ed. Richard Curie (New York: Murray and Cape, 1937), p. 144.

13 See Sutherland Orr, Life and Letters of Robert Browning, rev. F. G. Kenyon (London: Smith, Elder, 1908), p. 250.

14 A number of commentators have misinterpreted 11. 343–47 as an interruption of the narrative by Browning himself. Even DeVane believes that it is the author speaking here (Handbook, p. 354). A careful reading will show, however, that the lines are spoken by Balaustion.

15 R. G. Moulton, in a paper presented to the London Browning Society, 26 June 1891. Quoted by Edward Berdoe, The Browning Cyclopaedia (London: Allen, 1912), p. 58.