Learning and Other Essays

by John Jay Chapman

There is some exaggeration in this picture; but, I think, some truth also. The loss which Shaw and Chesterton share in common is a loss of delicacy. They are crude: they are all edge. They are, indeed, a little vulgar. But this is not the serious objection to them. The serious objection to Shaw and Chesterton is that they have no intellectual independence. They are moving with the show. It will pass, and they with it.

THE COMIC.

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.