But the chief attraction of Aristophanes is the abounding comic force and verve of his style. It resembles an impetuous torrent, whose swift rush purifies in its flow the grossness and obscenity inseparable from the origin of comedy, and buoys up and sweeps along on the current of fancy and improvisation the chaff and dross of vulgar jests, puns, scurrilous personalities, and cheap "gags," allowing no time for chilling reflections or criticism. Jests which are singly feeble combine to induce a mood of extravagant hilarity when huddled upon us with such "impossible conveyance." This vivida vis animi can hardly be reproduced in a translation, and disappears altogether in an attempt at an abstract enumeration of the poet's inexhaustible devices for comic effect. He himself repeatedly boasts of the fertility of his invention, and claims to have discarded the coarse farce of his predecessors for something more worthy of the refined intelligence of his clever audience. Yet it must be acknowledged that much even of his wit is the mere filth-throwing of a naughty boy; or at best the underbred jocularity of the "funny column," the topical song, or the minstrel show. There are puns on the names of notable personages; a grotesque, fantastic, punning fauna, flora, and geography of Greece; a constant succession of surprises effected by the sudden substitution of low or incongruous terms in proverbs, quotations, and legal or religious formulas; scenes in dialect, scenes of excellent fooling in the vein of Uncle Toby and the Clown, girds at the audience, personalities that for us have lost their point,--about Cleonymus the caster-away of shields, or Euripides's herb-selling mother,--and everywhere unstinted service to the great gods Priapus and Cloacina.
A finer instrument of comic effect is the parody. The countless parodies of the lyric and dramatic literature of Greece are perhaps the most remarkable testimony extant to the intelligence of an Athenian audience. Did they infallibly catch the allusion when Dicæopolis welcomed back to the Athenian fish-market the long-lost Copaic eel in high Æschylean strain,--
"Of fifty nymphs Copaic alderliefest queen,"
and then, his voice breaking with the intolerable pathos of Admetus's farewell to the dying Alcestis, added,
"Yea, even in death
Thou'lt bide with me, embalmed and beet-bestewed"?
Did they recognize the blasphemous Pindaric pun in "Helle's holy straits," for a tight place, and appreciate all the niceties of diction, metre, and dramatic art discriminated in the comparison between Aeschylus and Euripides in the 'Frogs'? At any rate, no Athenian could miss the fun of Dicæopolis (like Hector's baby) "scared at the dazzling plume and nodding crest" of the swashbuckler Lamachus, of Philocleon, clinging to his ass's belly like Odysseus escaping under the ram from the Cyclops's cave; of the baby in the Thesmophoriazusæ seized as a Euripidean hostage, and turning out a wine bottle in swaddling-clothes; of light-foot Iris in the rôle of a saucy, frightened soubrette; of the heaven-defying Æschylean Prometheus hiding under an umbrella from the thunderbolts of Zeus. And they must have felt instinctively what only a laborious erudition reveals to us, the sudden subtle modulations of the colloquial comic verse into mock-heroic travesty of high tragedy or lyric.
Euripides, the chief victim of Aristophanes's genius for parody, was so burlesqued that his best known lines became by-words, and his most ardent admirers, the very Balaustions and Euthukleses, must have grinned when they heard them, like a pair of augurs. If we conceive five or six Shakespearean comedies filled from end to end with ancient Pistols hallooing to "pampered jades of Asia," and Dr. Caiuses chanting of "a thousand vagrom posies," we may form some idea of Aristophanes's handling of the notorious lines--
"The tongue has sworn, the mind remains unsworn."
"Thou lovest life, thy sire loves it too."
"Who knows if life and death be truly one?"
But the charm of Aristophanes does not lie in any of these things singly, but in the combination of ingenious and paradoxical fancy with an inexhaustible flow of apt language by which they are held up and borne out. His personages are ready to make believe anything. Nothing surprises them long. They enter into the spirit of each new conceit, and can always discover fresh analogies to bear it out. The very plots of his plays are realized metaphors or embodied conceits. And the same concrete vividness of imagination is displayed in single scenes and episodes. The Better and the Worse Reason plead the causes of the old and new education in person. Cleon and Brasidas are the pestles with which War proposes to bray Greece in a mortar; the triremes of Athens in council assembled declare that they will rot in the docks sooner than yield their virginity to musty, fusty Hyperbolus. The fair cities of Greece stand about waiting for the recovery of Peace from her Well, with dreadful black eyes, poor things; Armisticia and Harvest-Home tread the stage in the flesh, and Nincompoop and Defraudation are among the gods.