Hegel, in his doctrine of the Versöhnung, or reconciliation of opposite passions in a contemplation which is above them and includes them, seems to have aimed at the same law as Aristotle.
[111] In the Greek drama the notion of fate was primarily theological: the hero was conducted to his end by gods. In Shakespeare Fate is psychological; Hamlet's own character is his destiny. In Goethe, Victor Hugo, and George Eliot the conception of Fate has passed into the region of positivism: the laws of blood, society, and race rule individuals in the Elective Affinities, Les Misérables, the Spanish Gypsy. The modern analogue for Greek hereditary destiny, traceable to some original transgression and tainting all the action of a doomed family, is to be found in madness, which has as yet been tragically treated by no dramatist of the first rank.
[112] Character in a Greek play is never so minutely anatomized as in a modern work of fiction. We do not actually see the secret workings of the mainsprings of personality. We judge a hero of Sophocles by his actions and by his relations to other men and women more than by his soliloquies or by scenes specially constructed to expose his qualities. In this respect Greek tragedy again resembles Greek sculpture. As in their sculpture the Greek artists felt the muscular structure of the human frame with exquisite sensibility, while they did not obtrude it upon the spectator, so in their tragedy the poets preferred to exhibit the results rather than to lay bare the process of mental and emotional activity. The modern tragedian shifts his ground somewhat, but he chooses an equally legitimate province of poetry when he discloses the inmost labyrinths in the character of a Hamlet or a Faust.
[113] This seems to have been the gist of one of the grudges of Aristophanes against Euripides, as I have indicated above, p. [47], note. He made the love of Sthenobœa, the vengeance of Medea, too interesting.
CHAPTER XVIII.
ARISTOPHANES.
Heine's Critique on Aristophanes.—Aristophanes as a Poet of the Fancy.—The Nature of his Comic Grossness.—Greek Comedy in its Relation to the Worship of Dionysus.—Greek Acceptance of the Animal Conditions of Humanity.—His Burlesque, Parody, Southern Sense of Fun.—Aristophanes and Menander.—His Greatness as a Poet.—Glimpses of Pathos.—His Conservatism and Serious Aim.—Socrates, Agathon, Euripides.—German Critics of Aristophanes.—Ancient and Modern Comedy.—The Birds.—The Clouds.—Greek Youth and Education.—The Allegories of Aristophanes.—The Thesmophoriazusæ.—Aristophanes and Plato.
"A deep idea of world-destruction (Weltvernichtungsidee[114]) lies at the root of every Aristophanic comedy, and, like a fantastically ironical magic tree, springs up in it with blooming ornament of thoughts, with singing nightingales, and climbing, chattering apes." This is a sentence translated from the German of Heinrich Heine, who, of all poets, was the one best fitted to appreciate the depth of Aristophanes, to pierce beneath his smiling comic mask, and to read the underlying Weltvernichtungsidee with what he calls its "jubilee of death and fireworks of annihilation." Perhaps, as is common with German writers of imagination, Heine pushes his point too far, and insists with too much force upon the "jubilee of death," "the fireworks of annihilation."