Aristophanes
WHEN I learned, last season, that the attention of the school[A] this year would be in a good degree given to the dramatists of ancient Greece, I was seized with a desire to speak of one of these, to whom I owe a debt of gratitude. This is the great Aristophanes, the first, and the most illustrious, of comic writers for the stage,—first and best, at least, of those known to Western literature.
[A] Read before the Concord School of Philosophy.
In the chance talk of people of culture, one hears of him all one's life long, as exceedingly amusing. From my brothers in college, I learned the "Frog Chorus" before I knew even a letter of the Greek alphabet. Many a decade after this, I walked in the theatre of Bacchus at Athens, and seeing the beauty of the marble seats, still ranged in perfect order, and feeling the glory and dignity of the whole surrounding, I seemed to guess that the comedies represented there were not desired to amuse idle clowns nor to provoke vulgar laughter.
At the foot of the Acropolis, with the Parthenon in sight and the colossal statue of Minerva towering above the glittering temples, the poet and his audience surely had need to bethink themselves of the wisdom which lies in laughter, of the ethics of the humorous,—a topic well worth the consideration of students of philosophy. The ethics of the humorous, the laughter of the gods! "He that sitteth in the heavens shall laugh them to scorn." Did not even the gentle Christ intend satire when, after recognizing the zeal with which an ox or an ass would be drawn out of a pit on the sacred day, he asked: "And shall not this woman, whom Satan hath bound, lo! these eighteen years, be loosed from her infirmity on the sabbath day?"
When a Greek tragedy is performed before us, we are amazed at its force, its coherence, and its simplicity. What profound study and quick sense of the heroic in nature must have characterized the man who, across the great gulf of centuries, can so sweep our heart-strings, and draw from them such responsive music! Our praise of these great works almost sounds conceited. It would be more fitting for us to sit in silence and bewail our own smallness. Comedy, too, has her grandeur; and when she walks the stage in robe and buskins, she, too, is to receive the highest crown, and her lessons are to be laid to heart.