“If,” he says, “Coleridge was justified in claiming the German word Lustspiel for the so-called comedies of Shakespeare, we have a far greater right to appropriate this wide and pregnant title to the plays of Aristophanes. The brazen mask which crowns his theatre smiles indeed broadly, serenely, as if its mirth embraced the universe; but its hollow eye-sockets suggest infinite possibilities of profoundest irony. Buffoonery carried to the point of paradox, wisdom disguised as insanity, and gaiety concealing the whole sum of human disappointment, sorrow and disgust, seem ready to escape from its open but rigid lips, which are molded to a proud perpetual laughter. It is a laughter which spares neither God nor man—which climbs Olympus only to drag down the immortals to its scorn, and trails the pall of august humanity in the mire; but which, amid its mockery and blasphemy, seems everlastingly asserting, as by paradox, that reverence of the soul which bends our knees to heaven and makes us respect our brothers.”
One cannot help feeling, in view of these very diverse opinions, that both are exaggerated. The enthusiasm of Symonds seems almost fanatic. Though no one of penetration can fail to see the wit and wisdom, and at times, in such lyrics as those in “The Clouds,” the poetic charm of Aristophanes, the person of fastidious taste, whether a Greek girl of his own day, or a man of these latter days, must sometimes feel that his buffoonery oversteps the bounds of true wit, even when it is not shadowed by a coarseness not to be borne at the present day. When Balaustion asks him “in plain words,”
“Have you exchanged brute blows, which teach the brute
Man may surpass him in brutality,—
For human fighting, or true god-like force
Which breeds persuasion nor needs fight at all?”
Aristophanes replies that it had not been his intention to turn art’s fabric upside down and invent an entirely new species of comedy. That sort of thing can be done by one who has turned his back on life, friendly faces, sympathetic cheer, as Euripides had done in his Salaminian cave.
This may be regarded, on the whole, as a good bit of defence on Aristophanes’ part. It is equivalent to his saying that there was no use in his trying to be anything for which his genius had not fitted him. This chimes in, again, with such authoritative criticism as Murray’s, who declares: “The general value of his view of life, and, above all, his treatment of his opponent’s alleged vices, may well be questioned. Yet admitting that he often opposed what was best in his age, or advocated it on the lowest grounds, admitting that his slanders are beyond description and that, as a rule, he only attacks the poor and the leaders of the poor, nevertheless he does it all with such exhuberant high spirits, such an air of its all being nonsense together, such insight and swiftness, such incomparable directness and charm of style, that even if some Archelaus had handed him over to Euripides to scourge, he would probably have escaped his well-earned whipping.”
Much of Aristophanes’ defence consists in slurring at Euripides, against whom he waxes more and more fierce as he goes on. His plays furnish numerous illustrations of his rivalry with Euripides, yet curiously enough, as critics have pointed out, Aristophanes imitates Euripides to a noteworthy extent, so much so that the dramatist Cratinus invented a word to describe the style of the two—Euripid-Aristophanize. Judging from his parodies on Euripides, he must certainly have read and reread his plays until he knew them practically by heart.
Balaustion, as Browning has portrayed her in this poem, is the lyric girl developed into splendid womanhood. She has a large heart and a large brain, as well as imagination and strong ethical fervor. Her intense feeling at the fall of Athens, which had been the ideal to her of greatness, and her reverential love for Euripides, her charity toward Aristophanes the man, if not toward his work, show how deep and far-reaching her sympathies were. Again, her imagination flashes forth in her picturesque descriptions of the ruined Athens and her prophetic picture of the new Athens, of the spirit which will arise in its place, in her telling portraiture of Aristophanes and his entrance into her house, as well as in many another passage. Her intellect shines out in her clever management of the argument with Aristophanes, and her ethical fervor in her denunciations of the moral depravity of certain of the plays.
As to the question of whether a young Greek woman would be likely to criticise Aristophanes in this way, opinion certainly differs. History is, for the most part, silent about women. As Mahaffy says, it is only in the dramatists and the philosophers that we can get any glimpses of the woman of the time.
Mahaffy’s opinions are worth quoting as an example of the pessimism growing out of a bias in favor of a particular type of woman which he idealized in his own mind. He seems utterly incapable of appreciating the humanness of the women in the Greek dramatists, especially those in Euripides. “Sadder than the condition of the aged was that of women,” he writes, “at this remarkable period. The days of the noble and high-principled Penelope, of the refined and intellectual Helen, of the innocent and spirited Nausikaa, of the gentle and patient Andromache, had passed away. Men no longer sought and respected the society of the gentler sex. Would that Euripides had even been familiar, as Homer was, with the sound of women brawling in the streets! For in these days they were confined to Asiatic silence and seclusion, while the whole life of the men, both in business and recreation, was essentially public. Just as the feverish excitement of political life nowadays prompts men to spend even their leisure in the clubs, where they meet companions of like passions and interests with themselves, so the Athenian gentleman only came home to eat and sleep. His leisure as well as his business kept him in the market place. His wife and daughters, ignorant of philosophy and politics, were strangers to his real life, and took no interest in his pursuits.
“The results were fatal to Athenian society. The women, uninstructed, neglected, and enslaved, soon punished their oppressors with their own keen and bitter weapons, and with none keener than their vices. For, of course, all the grace and delicacy of female character disappeared. Intellectual power in women was distinctly associated with moral depravity, so that excessive ignorance and stupidity was considered the only guarantee of virtue. The qualifications for society became incompatible with the qualifications for home duties, so that the outcasts from society, as we call them, were not the immoral and the profligate but the honorable and the virtuous.”