Section 7. Comedy.
Even more remarkable than the tragedy of the Greeks, in its rendering of a didactic intention under the forms of a free and spontaneous art, is the older comedy known to us through the works of Aristophanes. As the former dealt with the general conceptions, religious and ethical, that underlay the Greek view of life, using as its medium of exposition the ancient national myths, so the latter dealt with the particular phases of contemporary life, employing the machinery of a free burlesque. The achievement of Aristophanes, in fact, is more astonishing, in a sense, than that of Aeschylus. Starting with what is always, prima facie, the prose of everyday life, its acrid controversies, its vulgar and tedious types, and even its particular individuals—for Aristophanes does not hesitate to introduce his contemporaries in person on the stage—he fits to this gross and heavy stuff the wings of imagination, scatters from it the clinging mists of banality and spite and speeds it forth through the lucid heaven of art amid peals of musical laughter and snatches of lyric song. For Aristophanes was a poet as well as a comedian, and his genius is displayed not only in the construction of his fantastic plots, not only in the inexhaustible profusion of his humane and genial wit, but in bursts of pure poetry as melodious and inspired as ever sprang from the lips of the lyrists of Greece or of the world. The basis of the comic as of the tragic art of the Greeks was song and dance; and the chorus, the original element of the play, still retains in the works of Aristophanes a place important enough to make it clear that in comedy, too, a prominent aspect of the art must have been the aesthetic appeal to the ear and the eye. In general structure, in fact, comedy and tragedy were alike; aesthetically the motives were similar, only they were set in a different key.
But while primarily Aristophanes, like the tragedians, was a great artist, he was also, like them, a great interpreter of life. His dramas are satires as well as poems, and he was and expressed himself supremely conscious of having a "mission" to fulfil. "He has scorned from the first," he makes the chorus sing of himself in the "Peace":
"He has scorned from the first to descend and to dip
Peddling and meddling in private affairs:
To detect and collect every petty defect
Of husband and wife and domestical life;
But intrepid and bold, like Alcides of old,
When the rest stood aloof, put himself to the proof
In his country's behoof."
[Footnote: Aristoph. Peace, 751 seq.—Translated by Frere.]
His aim, in fact, was deliberately to instruct his countrymen in political and social issues; to attack the abuses of the Assembly, of the Law-courts and the home; to punish demagogues, charlatans, professional politicians; to laugh back into their senses "revolting" sons and wives; to defend the orthodox faith against philosophers and men of science. These are the themes that he embodies in his plots, and these the morals that he enforces when he speaks through the chorus in his own person. And the result is an art-product more strange to the modern mind in its union of poetry with prose, of aesthetic with didactic significance, than even that marvellous creation, the Greek tragedy. Of the character of this comedy the reader may form an idea through the admirable and easily accessible translations of Frere; [Footnote: In Morley's Universal Library.] and we are therefore dispensed from the obligation to attempt, as in the case of tragedy, an account of some particular specimen of the art.