Learning and Other Essays

by John Jay Chapman

Was it with such arguments as these that Socrates put Aristophanes and Agathon to sleep on the famous morning which Plato chronicles? We cannot tell. Plato has cast the magic of a falling star over the matter and thus leaves it: his humor, his knack, his destiny compelled him to treat subjects in this way. Something passes, and after a light has fallen far off into the sea, we ask “What was it?” Enough for Plato’s purpose that he has placed Comedy where, perhaps, no philosopher before or after him ever had the vision to place it—in the heaven of man’s highest endeavor.

II.

The divine affinities of comedy have thus been established, and we may make some few stray observations on the nature of the comic, not hoping to explain laughter, which must remain forever a spontaneous mystery, but only to point out places where this mystery crosses the other mysteries and refuses to be merged in them, keeping its own course and intensifying the darkness of our ignorance by its corruscations. In the first place the comic is about the most durable vehicle that truth has ever found. It pretends to deal with momentary interests in terms of farce and exaggeration; and yet it leaves an image that strikes deeper and lasts longer than philosophy.

In our search for truth we are continually getting into vehicles that break down or turn into something else, even during our transit. Let us take, for example, the case of Plato’s dialogues. How much we have enjoyed them, how much trusted them! And yet there comes a time when we feel about Plato’s work that it is almost too well lighted and managed, too filled with parlor elegance. He seems more interested in the effects that can be got by manipulating philosophy than in any serious truth. There is something superficial about the pictures of Greek life that you get from Plato. The marble is too white, the philosophers are too considerate of each other’s feelings, Socrates is too clever, everything is a little arranged. Greek life was not quite like that, and the way to convince yourself of this is to read Aristophanes.

In Aristophanes you have the convincing hurly-burly, the sweating, mean, talented, scrambling, laughing life of the Mediterranean—that same life of which you find records in the recent Cretan discoveries, dating from 2500 B. C., or which you may observe in the market-places of Naples to-day. Plato’s dialogues do not give this life. They give a picture of something that never existed, something that sounds like an enchanted picture, a picture of life as it ought to be for the leisure classes, but as it never has been and never can be while the world lasts, even for them.

The ideas which we carry in our minds criticize each other, despite all we can do to keep them apart. They attack and mutilate each other, like the monsters in a drop of muddy water, or the soldiers of Cadmus when the stone of controversy was thrown among them. It is as hard to preserve the entente cordiale between hostile thoughts as between hostile bull-dogs. We have no sooner patted the head of the courtly and affable Socrates given to us by Plato—the perfect scholar and sweet gentleman—than the vulgarian Socrates given to us by Aristophanes—the frowzy all-nighter, the notorious enemy to bathing—flies at the throat of Plato’s darling and leaves him rumpled. So far as manners and customs go, nothing can rival good comic description: it supersedes everything else. You can neither write nor preach it down, nor put it down by law. Hogarth has depicted the England of the early Georges in such a way as to convince us. No mortal vehicle of expression can upset Hogarth.

When we come to pictures of life which belong to a more serious species—to poetry, to history, to religion—we find the same conflicts going on in our minds: one source criticizes another. One belief eats up the next belief as the acid eats the plate. It is not merely the outside of Socrates that Aristophanes has demolished. He has a little damaged the philosophy of Socrates. He undermines Greek thought: he helps and urges us not to take it seriously. He thus becomes an ally of the whole world of later Christian thought. If I were to go to Athens to-morrow, the first man I would seek out would be Aristophanes. He is a modern: he is a man.

We have been speaking of Greek thought and Greek life; yet between that life and ourselves there have intervened some centuries of Christianity, including the Middle Ages, during which Jewish influence pervaded and absorbed other thought. The Hebrew ruled and subdued in philosophy, poetry, and religion. The Hebrew influence is the most powerful influence ever let loose upon the world. Every book written since this Hebrew domination is saturated with Hebrew. It has thus become impossible to see the classics as they were. Between them and us in an atmosphere of mordant, powerful, Hebraic thought, which transmutes and fantastically recolors them. How the classics would have laughed over our conception of them! Virgil was a witch during the Middle Ages and now he is an acolyte, a person over whom the modern sentimental school maunders in tears. The classics would feel toward our notions of them somewhat as a Parisian feels toward a French vaudeville after it has been prepared for the American stage. Christianity is to blame.

I have perhaps spoken as if Christianity has blown over with the Middle Ages; but it has not. The Middle Ages have blown over; but Christianity seems, in some ways, never to have been understood before the nineteenth century. It is upon us, sevenfold strong. Its mysteries supersede the other mysteries; its rod threatens to eat up the rods of the other magicians. These tigers of Christian criticism within us attack the classics. The half-formed objections to Plato which I have mentioned are seriously reinforced by the Hebrew dispensation, which somehow reduces the philosophic speculations of Greece to the status of favors at a cotillion. It is senseless to contrast Christ with Socrates; it is unfair and even absurd to review Greek life and thought by the light of Hebrew life and thought. But to do so is inevitable. We are three parts Hebrew in our nature and we see the Mediterranean culture with Hebrew eyes. The attempts of such persons as Swinburne and Pater to writhe themselves free from the Hebrew domination always betray that profound seriousness which comes from the Jew. These men make a break for freedom—they will be joyous, antique, and irresponsible. Alas, they are sadder than the Puritans and shallower than Columbine.

It has become forever and perpetually impossible for any one to treat Greek thought on a Greek basis: the basis is gone. As I wrote the words a page or two back about “Comedy having been placed by Plato in the heaven of man’s highest endeavor,” I thought to myself, “Perhaps I ought to say highest artistic endeavor.” There spoke the Jew monitor which dogs our classical studies, sniffing at them and hinting that they are trivial. In the eye of that monitor there is no room for the comic in the whole universe: there is no such thing as the comic. The comic is something outside of the Jewish dispensation, a kind of irreducible unreason, a skeptical or satanic element.