VIII. The New Comedy.
The feeling on passing from the Middle to the New Comedy is like the fresh air on coming out of the bar of a public-house. The Middle Comedy is the last decaying branch of the old literature; the romantic New Comedy is one of the earliest and most vigorous offshoots of that new literature which sprang from the genius of Antimachus, and has continued to the present day. In the Middle Comedy, we are still face to face with the women of typical Athens, with the women of Aristophanes, at best with the women of Euripides,—and with the way in which typical Athens treated these women; in the New Comedy this is changed, and woman—the woman that can be loved as wife and mother—steps into her true place as object of, and partner in, the intensest and the purest passions of which humanity is capable.
It will be remembered that the Middle Comedy treatment, of women and love for women, had four main characteristics.
(1) The glorification of the Hetaera and of love for the Hetaera.
(2) The purely sensual nature of the love thus extolled.
(3) The ridicule of all love that was not sensual.
(4) The ridicule of family-life.
The New Comedy flatly contradicts every one of these principles. The love of which it treats is love for a virgin,[267] and the consummation of this love is marriage. Such love is by no means purely sensual; indeed, at times it is almost of a “Platonic” character. And lastly, not only is the sanctity of marriage strictly insisted upon, and the advantages of marriage as a system strongly maintained, but the family relations, anyhow among the younger generation, are often of a very pleasant character.
In fact, while the action of the Middle Comedy is concerned with a love, the consummation of which is a temporary sensual gratification, the action of the New Comedy is supplied by the efforts of its heroes and their adherents, to secure that the love which occupies so much of their thoughts may be made at once legitimate and permanent. It was New Comedy that first introduced on the stage the love of a life, as opposed to the love of an hour. If anyone were to ask what was the chief merit of Menander, the answer would be that he was the first to show the Athenians that “love for ever,” with which every poetaster and novel-reader has now been familiar for so many centuries.