[96:1] The character of Balaustion is wholly imaginary. [96:2] A town of the island of Rhodes. [101:1] In the _Apology_, she tells "the second supreme adventure": her interview with Aristophanes, and the recital to him of the _Herakles_ of Euripides. [106:1] Euripides died at the Court of Archelaus, King of Macedonia. [117:1] Browning never finished his translation of this splendid song. V POMPILIA IN "THE RING AND THE BOOK" I said, in writing of Balaustion: "Nearly always, for man's homage, woman must in some sort be victim: she must suffer ere he can adore." I should have said that this _has been_ so: for the tendency to-day is to demonstrate rather the power than the weakness of woman. True that in the "victim," that weakness was usually shown to be the very source of that power: through her suffering not only she, but they who stood around and saw the anguish, were made perfect. That this theory of the outcome of suffering is an eternal verity I am not desirous to deny; but I do deplore that, in literature, women should be made so disproportionately its exemplars; and I deplore it not for feminist reasons alone. Once we regard suffering in this light of a supreme uplifting influence, we turn, as it were, our weapons against ourselves--we exclaim that men too suffer in this world and display the highest powers of endurance: why, then, do they so frequently, in their imaginative works, present themselves as makers of women's woes? For women make men suffer often; yet how relatively seldom men show this! Thus, paradoxically enough, we may come to declare that it is to themselves that men are harsh, and to us generous. "Chivalry from women!"--how would that sound as a war-cry? Not all in jest do I so speak, though such recognition of male generosity leaves existent a certain sense of weariness which assails me--and if me, then probably many another--when I find myself reading of the immemorial "victim." It is this which makes Balaustion supreme for my delight. There is a woman with every noble attribute of womanhood at its highest, who suffers at no hands but those of the Great Fates, as one might say--the fates who rule the destiny of nations. . . . We turn now to her direct antithesis in this regard of suffering--we turn to Pompilia, victim first of the mediocre, ignorant, small-souled, then of the very devil of malignant baseness; such a victim, moreover, first and last, for the paltriest of motives--money. And money in no large, imaginative sense, but in the very lowest terms in which it could be at all conceived as a theme for tragedy. A dowry, and a tiny one: _this_ created "that old woe" which "steps on the stage" again for us in _The Ring and the Book_.