Frere.
Style of Aristophanes.—In weighing the merits of Aristophanes, it must be remembered that many of his peculiar beauties cannot be translated, and that we lose his local hits from our inability to see things from an Athenian standpoint. He is often indelicate in his allusions; he is as ready with town slang and the cant of the shop as with the most elegant phrase. But Attic salt seasons the whole, and none ever handled the versatile Greek tongue more deftly. In his command of language, he is equalled only by Plato, who felt the comic poet’s power when he said that in the soul of Aristophanes the Graces sought an imperishable shrine. Amid all his humor and buffoonery sparkles genius of the highest order. His aim seems to have been to elevate his art. Some of the improvements he claimed to have introduced, are thus set forth in an address which he puts into the mouth of the leader of the chorus in his “Peace:”—
“It was he that indignantly swept from the stage the paltry ignoble device
Of a Hercules needy and seedy and greedy, a vagabond sturdy and stout,
Now baking his bread, now swindling instead, now beaten and battered about.
And freedom he gave to the lacrimose slave who was wont with a howl to rush in,
And all for the sake of a joke which they make on the wounds which disfigure his skin.
Such vulgar contemptible lumber at once he bade from the drama depart,
And then, like an edifice stately and grand, he raised and ennobled the art.”
Thorold Rogers.