so many points of contact with Browning himself, and appeals in his defence to so many root-ideas of Browning’s own, that the reader hesitates between the poet to whom Browning’s imagination allied him, and the poet whom his taste preferred.  His Aristophanes is, like himself, the poetry of “Life,” a broad and generous realist, who like Lippo Lippi draws all existence into his art; an enemy of all asceticisms and abstractions, who drives his meaning home through vivid concrete example and drastic phrase, rather than by enunciating the impressive moral commonplaces of tragic poetry.[59] Aristophanes, too, had been abused for his “unintelligible” poetry,—­“mere psychologic puzzling,"[60]—­by a “chattering” public which preferred the lilt of nursery rhymes.  The magnificent portrait of Aristophanes is conceived in the very spirit of the riotous exuberance of intellect and senses—­

                 “Mind a-wantoning
      At ease of undisputed mastery
      Over the body’s brood”—­

which was so congenial to the realist in Browning; “the clear baldness—­all his head one brow”—­and the surging flame of red from cheek to temple; the huge eyeballs rolling back native fire, imperiously triumphant, the “pursed mouth’s pout aggressive,” and “the beak supreme above,” “beard whitening under like a vinous foam.”

[Footnote 59:  Arist.  Ap., p. 698.]

[Footnote 60:  Ib., p. 688.]

Balaustion is herself the first to recognise the divinity shrouded in this half satyr-like form:  in some of the finest verses of the poem she compares him to the sea-god, whom as a child she had once seen peer

     “large-looming from his wave,

* * * * *

      A sea-worn face, sad as mortality,
      Divine with yearning after fellowship,”

while below the surface all was “tail splash, frisk of fin.”  And when Balaustion has recited her poet’s masterpiece of tragic pathos, Aristophanes lays aside the satirist a moment and attests his affinity to the divine poets by the noble song of Thamyris.  The “transcript from Euripides” itself is quite secondary in interest to this vivid and powerful dramatic framework.  Far from being a vital element in the action, like the recital of the Alkestis, the reading of the Hercules Furens is an almost gratuitous diversion in the midst of the talk; and the tameness of a literal (often awkwardly literal) translation is rarely broken by those inrushes of alien genius which are the glory of Browning’s Alkestis.  Yet the very self-restraint sprang probably from Browning’s deep sensibility to the pathos of the story.  “Large tears,” as Mrs Orr has told us, fell from his eyes, and emotion choked his voice, when he first read it aloud to her.