I.
In the caverns of our nature lie hid various emotions, like beasts in a lair. They are shy to the voice of question or of curiosity, and they slink and crouch all the more, if we try to lure them out for inspection. But they come gambolling and roaring forth at the call of ingenuous human utterance. Any utterance that has in it no afterthought, but is mere speech that has grown out of a need to speak, lays a spell upon the wild things within us. Before the echo of it has died away they are rampant in the open, ignorant of how they came forth. Let no one then wonder at the difficulties that surround all study of the human emotions,—blushing giants, vanishing Genii that they are.
It is easy for us to-day to see that comedy is in its nature the same sort of thing as tragedy. They arise out of the same need, convey the same truth, depend upon the same talent. The English drama interwove comedy and tragedy in the same play, and Shakespeare’s greatness in one is of a piece with his greatness in the other. Indeed there are scenes in Lear, Shylock, and Henry IV where tragedy and comedy are overlaid—where the same scene is both tragic and comic and we laugh and cry at the same time. But for a Greek to have seen this identity is very remarkable; because Greek tragedy and Greek comedy represented distinct professions and were totally different in their methods of appeal. A Greek tragedy was a drama of fate, based on a familiar bit of religious folk-lore. The plot was known, the interest lay in the treatment. A Greek comedy, however, was a farrago of licentious nonsense, developed in the course of a fantastic narrative-play: it was what we should call a musical extravaganza. Greek comedy is gigantesque buffoonery, interspersed with lyric and choral passages of divine beauty—the whole, following a traditional model as to its arrangement.
With this machinery Aristophanes proceeds to shake the stones of the Greek theatre with inextinguishable laughter. He will do anything to raise a laugh. He introduces Socrates hung up in a basket and declaring that he is flying in the air and speculating about the sun. He makes the god Dionysus—the very god in whose honor the theatre and festival exist—to leap from the stage in a moment of comic terror, and hide himself under the long cloak of his own high-priest, whose chair of state was in the front row of the pit. Is it possible to imagine what sort of a scene in the theatre this climax must have aroused? There has been no laughter since Aristophanes. There is something of the same humor in Rabelais; but Rabelais is a book, and there each man laughs alone over his book, not in company with his whole city or tribe, as in the Greek theatre.
Now what is it they are laughing at? It is sallies of wit, personal hits, local allusions, indecencies, philosophical cracks, everything from refined satire to the bludgeons of abuse—and the whole thing is proceeding in an atmosphere of fun, of wild spirits, of irrepressible devilry. Compared to Aristophanes, Shakespeare is not funny; he lacks size. He is a great and thoughtful person, of superabundant genius and charm, who makes Dutch interiors, drenched in light. But Aristophanes splits the heavens with a jest, and the rays of truth stream down from inaccessible solitudes of speculation. He has no epigram, no cleverness, no derivative humor. He is bald foolery. And yet he conveys mysticism: he conveys divinity. He alone stands still while the whole empyrean of Greek life circles about him.
From what height of suddenly assumed superiority does the race of birds commiserate mankind:
[A]“Come now, ye men, in nature darkling, like to the race of leaves, of little might, figures of clay, shadowy feeble tribes, wingless creatures of a day, miserable mortals, dream-like men, give your attention to us the immortals, the ever-existing, the ethereal, the ageless, who meditate eternal counsels, in order that when you have heard everything from us accurately about sublime things, the nature of birds, and the origin of gods and rivers, of Erebus and Chaos, you may henceforth bid Prodicus from me go weep, when you know them accurately.”
[A] Hickie’s translation.
Into what depth of independent thought did the man dream himself, that such fancies could take hold of him? When Aristophanes has had his say, there is nothing left over: there is no frame nor shell: there is no theatre nor world. Everything is exploded and scattered into sifting, oscillating, shimmering, slowly-sinking fragments of meaning and allusion. If anyone should think that I am going to analyze the intellect of Aristophanes, he is in error. I wish only to make a remark about it; namely, that his power is somehow rooted in personal detachment, in philosophical independence.
It was the genius of Aristophanes which must have suggested to Plato the idea which he throws out in the last paragraph of the Symposium. That great artist, Plato, has left many luminous half-thoughts behind him. He sets each one in a limbo—in a cocoon of its own light—and leaves it in careless-careful fashion, as if it were hardly worth investigation. The rascal! The setting has cost him sleepless nights and much parchment. He has redrawn and arranged it a hundred times. He is unable to fathom the idea, and yet it fascinates him. The setting in which Plato has placed his suggestion about the genius of tragedy and comedy is so very wonderful—both as a picture and as his apology for not carrying the idea further—that I must quote it, if only as an act of piety, and for my own pleasure.
[B]“Agathon arose in order that he might take his place on the couch by Socrates, when suddenly a band of revellers entered, and spoiled the order of the banquet. Someone who was going out having left the door open, they had found their way in, and made themselves at home; great confusion ensued, and everyone was compelled to drink large quantities of wine. Aristodemus said that Eryximachus, Phaedrus and others went away—he himself fell asleep, and as the nights were long, took a good rest: he was awakened toward daybreak by a crowing of cocks, and when he awoke, the others were either asleep or had gone away; there remained only Socrates, Aristophanes, and Agathon, who were drinking out of a large goblet which they passed round, and Socrates was discoursing to them. Aristodemus was only half awake, and he did not hear the beginning of the discourse; the chief thing which he remembered was Socrates compelling the other two to acknowledge that the genius of comedy was the same with that of tragedy, and that the true artist in tragedy was an artist in comedy also. To this they were constrained to assent, being drowsy and not quite following the argument. And first of all Aristophanes dropped off; then, when the day was already dawning, Agathon. Socrates, having laid them to sleep, rose to depart, Aristodemus, as his manner was, following him. At the Lyceum he took a bath, and passed the day as usual. In the evening he retired to rest at his own home.”
[B] Jowett’s translation.
What can Plato have had in mind, that glimmers to us in the dawn as a sort of dim, divine intimation, and is almost immediately drowned by daylight and the market place? I suppose that Plato may have had in mind certain moments in comedy where the self-deluded isolation of some character is so perfectly given as to be almost sublime, and thus to suggest tragedy; or Plato may have had the opposite experience, and may have found himself almost ready to laugh at the fate of Ajax, whose weaknesses of character work out so inevitably, so logically, so beautifully in the tragedy of Sophocles. Perhaps the thought passed through Plato’s mind: “If this were not tragedy, what wonderful comedy it would be! If only the climax were less painful, if the mad Ajax, instead of killing himself should merely be driven to eat grass like an ox for a season, or put on his clothes hind-side-before—in fact, if Ajax’s faults could only be punished quite mildly in the outcome, here would be a comedy indeed!”
The stuff of which tragedy and comedy are made is the same stuff. The foibles of mankind work up more easily into comedy than into tragedy; and this is the chief difference between the two. We readily understand the Nemesis of temperament, the fatality of character, when it is exposed upon a small scale. This is the business of comedy; and we do not here require the labored artifice of gods, mechanical plot, and pointed allegory to make us realize the moral.
But in tragedy we have the large scale to deal with. A tragedy is always the same thing. It is a world of complicated and traditional stage devices for making us realize the helplessness of mankind before destiny. We are told from the start to expect the worst: there is going to be suffering, and the suffering is going to be logical, inevitable, necessary. There is also an implication to be conveyed that this suffering is somehow in accord with the moral constitution of the universe. The aim of the whole thing is to teach us to submit—to fit us for life.
There is profound truth at the bottom of these ideas; for whether you accept this truth in the form of the Christian doctrine of humility, or in the form of the Pagan doctrine of reverence for the gods, there is no question that a human being who is in the state of mind of Lear or of Ajax is in a dangerous state. He is going to be punished: he is going to punish himself. The complexities of human life, however, make this truth very difficult to convey upon the grand scale. It is, in daily existence, obscured by other and more obvious truths. In order to dig it out and present it and make it seem at all probable, every historical device and trapping and sign-post of suggestion—every stage tradition must be used. The aim is so exalted and sombre, and the machinery is so ponderous that laughter is out of the question: it is forbidden. The magnitude of the issues oppress us; and we are told that it would be cruel to the hero and to the actor and to the author for us to laugh. And yet we are always on the verge of laughter, and any inattention to the rubric may bring on a fit of it. If a windlass breaks we really laugh harder than the occasion warrants.
In reading the Book of Job, where the remoteness of the scene and certain absurdities in the plot relieve the strain of tragedy, we laugh inevitably; and the thing that makes us laugh is the very thing that ought to fill us with awe—the rigor of the logic.
Thus much for the sunny side of tragedy. But let us recur to the night side of comedy. Falstaff is a comic figure, is he not? And yet what thoughtful man is there who has not enough of the Puritan in him to see the tragedy of such a character as Falstaff? How must Falstaff have appeared to Bunyan!—every stroke of genius which to us makes for the comic, adding a phosphor-gleam of hell-fire. And Bunyan is right: Falstaff is an awful picture; and had Shakespeare punished him adequately he would appear awful. Let us imagine that Shakespeare had written a play about the old age of Falstaff, picturing his decay of intellect, his destitution, his flickering return to humor which is no longer funny—what could have been more tragic?
Was it with such arguments as these that Socrates put Aristophanes and Agathon to sleep on the famous morning which Plato chronicles? We cannot tell. Plato has cast the magic of a falling star over the matter and thus leaves it: his humor, his knack, his destiny compelled him to treat subjects in this way. Something passes, and after a light has fallen far off into the sea, we ask “What was it?” Enough for Plato’s purpose that he has placed Comedy where, perhaps, no philosopher before or after him ever had the vision to place it—in the heaven of man’s highest endeavor.