Chapter 9

Wink and shut their apprehension upFrom common-sense of what men were and are,Who would not know what men must be—

will need to "hurry amain" from the mask of moral anarchy which the great comedian displays. With these remarks I may finally dismiss what has to be said about the chief disability under which Aristophanes labors as a poet.[115]

For the enjoyment of Aristophanic fun a sort of Southern childishness and swiftness of gleeful apprehension is required. It does not shine so much in its pure wit as in its overflowing humor and in the inexhaustible fertility of ludicrous devices by which laughter is excited. The ascent of Trugaios to heaven upon the dung-beetle's back, and the hauling of Peace from her well in theEirene, or the wine-skin dressed up like a baby in theThesmophoriazusæ, may be mentioned as instances of this broad but somewhat peculiar drollery. Burlesquing the gods was always a capital resource of the comic poets. If we in the nineteenth century can find any amusement whatever in Byron's or Burnand's travesties of Olympus, how exquisitely absurd to an Athenian mob must have been the figures of Prometheus under an umbrella, Herakles the glutton, Hermes and Æacus the household slaves, Bacchus the young fop, and Iris the soubrette. The puns of Aristophanes, for the most part, are very bad, but the parodies are excellent. Then the surprises (παρὰ προδοκίαν), both of language and of incident, with which his comedies abound, the broad and genial caricatures which are so largely traced and carried out in detail with such force, the brilliant descriptions of familiar things seen from odd or unexpected points of view, and, lastly, the enormous quantity of mirth-producing matter which the poet squanders with the prodigality of conscious omnipotence, all contribute to heighten the comic effect of Aristophanes. Perhaps the most intelligible piece of fun, in the modern sense of the word, is the last scene in theThesmophoriazusæ, which owes its effect to parody and caricature more than to allusions which are hard to seize. A great deal of the fun of Aristophanes must have depended upon local and personal peculiarities which we cannot understand: the constant references to the effeminate Cleisthenes, the skinflint Pauson, miserly Patrocles, cowardly Cleonymus, Execestides the alien, Agyrrhius the upstart, make us yawn because we cannot catch the exact point of the jests against them. Indeed, as Schlegel has said, "we may boldly affirm that, notwithstanding all the explanations which have come down to us—notwithstanding the accumulation of learning which has been spent upon it, one half of the wit of Aristophanes is altogether lost to the moderns."

Having dismissed these preliminary considerations, we may now ask what has caused the comedy of Aristophanes to triumph over the obstacles to its acceptance. Why have his plays been transmitted to posterity when those of Eupolis and Cratinus have perished, and when only scattered lines from the eight hundred comedies of the middle period read by Athenæus have survived destruction? No one has asked of Aristophanes the question which the Alexandrian critic put to Menander: "Oh, Nature and Menander, which of you copied the other?" Yet Menander is scarcely more to us than the memory of departed greatness,[116]or at best an echo sounding somewhat faintly from the Roman theatre, while Aristophanes survives among the most highly cherished monuments of antiquity. The answer to this question is, no doubt, that Aristophanes was more worth preservation than his predecessors or successors. It is wiser to have confidence in the ultimate good taste and conservative instinct of humanity than to accept Bacon's half-ironical, half-irritable saying, that the stream of time lets every solid substance sink, and carries down the froth and scum upon its surface. As far, at least, as it is possible to form a judgment, we may be pretty certain that in the province of the highest art and of the deepest thought we possess the greater portion of those works which the ancients themselves prized highly; indeed, we may conjecture that had the great libraries of Alexandria and Byzantium been transmitted to us entire, the pure metal would not very greatly have exceeded in bulk what we now possess, but would have been buried beneath masses of inferior matter from which centuries would have scarcely sufficed to disengage it. Aristophanes was preserved in his integrity, we need not doubt, because he shone forth as apoettranscendent for his splendor even among the most brilliant of Attic playwrights. Cratinus may have equalled or surpassed him in keen satire: Eupolis may have rivalled him in exquisite artistic structure; but Aristophanes must have eclipsed them, not merely by uniting their qualities successfully, but also by the exhibition of some diviner quality, some higher spiritual afflatus. If we analyze his art, we find that he combines the breadth of humor, which I have already sought to characterize, with the utmost versatility and force of intellect, with the power of grasping his subjects under all their bearings, with extraordinary depth of masculine good sense, with inexhaustible argumentative resources, and with a marvellous hold on personalities. Yet all these qualities, essential to a comic poet who pretended also to be the public censor of politics and morals, would not have sufficed to immortalize him had he not been essentially a poet—a poet in what we are apt to call the modern sense of the word—a poet, that is to say, endowed with original intuitions into nature, and with the faculty of presenting to our minds the most varied thoughts and feelings in language uniformly beautiful, as the creatures of an exuberant and self-swayed fancy. Aristophanes is a poet as Shelley or Ariosto or Shakespeare is a poet, far more than as Sophocles or Pindar or Lucretius is a poet. In spite of his profound art, we seem to hear him uttering "his native wood-notes wild." The subordination of the fancy to the fixed aims of the reason, which characterizes classical poetry, is not at first sight striking in Aristophanes; but he splendidly exhibits the wealth, luxuriance, variety, and subtlety of the fancy working with the reason, and sometimes superseding it, which we recognize in the greatest modern poets. If we seek to define the peculiar qualities of his poetic power, we are led to results not easily expressed, because all general critical conclusions are barren and devoid of force when worded, but which may perhaps be stated and accepted as the text for future illustration.

The poetry of Aristophanes is always swift and splendid. We watch its brilliant course as we might watch the flight of a strong, rapid bird, whose plumage glitters by moments in the light of the sun; for, to insist upon the metaphor, the dazzling radiance of his fancy only shines at intervals, capriciously, with fitful flashes, coruscating suddenly and dying out again. It is as if the neck alone and a portion of the feathers of the soaring bird were flecked with gold and crimson grain, so that a turn of the body or a fluttering of the pinions is enough to bring the partial splendor into light or cast it into shadow. Aristophanes passes by abrupt transitions from the coarsest or most simply witty dialogue to passages of pure and plaintive song; he quits his fiercest satire for refreshing strains of lark-like heaven-aspiring melody. These, again, he interrupts with sudden ruthlessness, breaking the melody in the middle of a bar, and dropping the unfinished stanza. He seems shy of giving his poetic impulse free rein, and prefers to tantalize[117]us with imperfect specimens of what he might achieve; so that his splendor is like that of northern streamers in its lambency, though swift and piercing as forked lightnings in its intensity. Even his most impassioned and sustained flights of imagination are broken by digressions into satire, fantastic merriment, or parody, by which the more dull-witted Athenians must have been sorely puzzled in their inability to decide on the serious or playful purpose of the poet. Perhaps the most splendid passages of true poetry in Aristophanes are the choruses of the initiated in theFrogs, the Chorus of the Clouds before they appear upon the stage, the invitation to the nightingale, and the parabasis of the Birds, the speech of Dikaios Logos in theClouds, some of the praises of rustic life in thePeace, the serenade (notwithstanding its coarse satire) in theEcclesiazusæ, and the songs of Spartan and Athenian maidens in theLysistrata. The charm of these marvellous lyrical episodes consists in their perfect simplicity and freedom. They seem to be poured forth as "profuse strains of unpremeditated art" from the fulness of the poet's soul. Their language is elastic, changeful, finely tempered, fitting the delicate thought like a veil of woven air. It has no Pindaric involution, no Æschylean pompousness, no studied Sophoclean subtlety, no Euripideanconcetti. It is always bright and Attic, sparkling like the many-twinkling laughter of the breezy sea, or like the light of morning upon rain-washed olive-branches. But this poetry is never very deep or passionate. It cannot stir us with the intensity of Sappho, with the fire and madness of the highest inspiration. Indeed, the conditions of comedy precluded Aristophanes,even had he desired it, which we have no reason to suspect, from attempting the more august movements of lyric poetry. The peculiar glories of his style are its untutored beauties, the improvised perfection and unerring exactitude of natural expression, for which it is unparalleled by that of any other Greek poet. In her most delightful moments the muse of Aristophanes suggests an almost plaintive pathos, as if behind the comic mask there were a thinking, feeling human soul, as if the very uproar of the Bacchic merriment implied some after-thought of sadness.

A detailed examination of the structure of the comedies would be the best illustration of these remarks. At present it will be enough to bring forward two examples of the tender melodies which may at times be overheard in pauses of the wild Aristophanic symphony. The first of these is the well-known Welcome to the Nightingale, sung by the Chorus before their parabasis:

ὦ φίλη, ὦ ξουθή, ὦφίλτατον ὀρνέων,πάντων ξύννομε τῶν ἐμῶνὕμνων ξύντροφ' ἀηδοῖ·ἦλθες, ἦλθες, ὤφθης,ἡδὺν φθόγγον ἐμοὶ φέρουσ'?ἀλλ' ὦ καλλιβόαν κρέκουσ'αὐλὸν φθέγμασιν ἠρινοῖς,ἄρχου τῶν ἀναπαίστων.

With what a fluent caressing fulness one word succeeds another here! How each expresses love and joy! Remember, too, that all the birds are singing together, and that the wild throat of their playfellow, the nightingale, is ready to return the welcome with its throbbing song of May-time and young summer. Take another poetic touch, brief and unobtrusive, yet painting a perfect picture with few strokes, and transfusing it with the spirit of the scene imagined:

ἀλλ' ἀναμνησθέντες, ὦνδρες,τῆς διαίτης τῆς παλαιᾶς,ἣν παρεῖχ' αὕτη ποθ' ἡμῖν,τῶν τε παλασίων ἐκείνων,τῶν τε σύκων, τῶν τε μύρτων,τῆς τρυγός τε τῆς γλυκείας,τῆς ἰωνιᾶς τε τῆς πρὸς τῷ φρέατι,τῶν τε ἐλαῶν, ὧν ποθοῦμεν—

"The violet-bed beside the well, and the olives which we long to see again." Trugaios is reminding his fellow-villagers of the pleasures of peace and of their country life. Those who from their recollection of Southern scenery can summon up the picture, who know how cool and shady are those wells, mirroring maidenhair in their black depth; how fragrant and dewy are the beds of tangled violets; how dreamy are the olive-trees, aerial, mistlike, robed with light, will understand the peculiar πόθος of these lines.

But we must not dwell too much upon the glimpses of pathetic poetry in Aristophanes, which, after all, are but few and far between, mere swallow-flights of song, when compared with the serious business of his art. It is well known that the old comedy of the Athenians performed the function of a public censorship. Starting from the primitive comic song, in which a rude Fescennine license of what we now call "chaffing" was allowed, and tempering its rustic jocularity with the caustic bitterness of Archilochian satire, comedy became an instrument for holding up to public ridicule all things of general interest. Persons and institutions, nay, the gods themselves, are freely laughed at. Bacchus seems to have enjoyed the jokes even when directed against himself: καὶ ὁ θεὸς ἴσως χαίρει φιλόγελώς τις ὤν are the words of Lucian. So no one else had a right to resent the poet's merriment when the presiding god of the festival approved of sarcasms against his deity, and trod his own stage as a cowardly, effeminate young profligate. This being the more serious aim of comedy, it followed that Aristophanes always had some satiric, and in so far didactic, purpose underlying his extravagant caricatures. What that purpose was is too well known to need more than passing mention. From his earliest appearance under the name of Callistratus, to the last of his victories, Aristophanes maintained his character as an Athenian Conservative. He came forward uniformly as a panegyrist of the old policy of Athens, and a vehement antagonist of the new direction taken by his nation subsequently to the Persian war. This one theme he varied according to circumstances and convenience. In the first of his plays—theDaitaleis—he attacked the profligacy and immodesty of the rising generation, who neglectedtheir Homer for the lessons of the sophists, and engaged in legal quarrels. TheAcharnians, thePeace, and theLysistrataare devoted to impressing on the Athenians the advantages of peace, and inducing them to lay aside their enmity against Sparta. In theKnights, the demagogues are attacked through the person of Cleon, with a violence of concentrated passion that surpasses the most savage onslaughts of Archilochus. TheCloudsandWaspsexhibit different pictures of the insane passion for litigation and the dishonest arts of rhetoric which prevailed at Athens, fostered partly by the influence of sophists who professed to teach a profitable method of public speaking, and partly by the flattery of the demagogues. TheBirdsis a fantastic satire upon the Athenian habit of building castles in the air, and indulging in extravagant dreams of conquest. In theEcclesiazusæAristophanes seems bent on ridiculing the visionary Utopias of political theorists like Plato, and also on caricaturing the social license which prevailed in Athens, where everything, as he complains, had been tried, except for women to appear in public like the men. In theThesmophoriazusæand theFrogswe exchange politics for literature; but in his treatment of the latter subject, Aristophanes exhibits the same conservative spirit. His hostility against Euripides, which is almost as bitter as his hatred of Cleon, is founded upon the sophistical nature of his art. Indeed, the demagogues, the sophists, and Euripides were looked upon by him as three forms of the same poison which was corrupting the old ἦθος of his nation. We have now indicated the serious intention of all the plays of Aristophanes except thePlutus, which is an ethical allegory conceived under a different inspiration from that which gave the impulse to his other creative acts. Yet it must not be forgotten that the subject-matter of these plays is often varied: in theAcharnians, for example, we have a specimen of literary criticism, while theLysistratais aimed as much at the follies of women as intended to set forth the advantages of peace. We must also remember that it was the poet's purpose to keep his serious ground-plan concealed. His comedy had to be the direct antithesis to Greek tragedy. If it taught, it was to teach by paradox. In this respect, Aristophanes realized a very high ideal. Preach as he may be doing in reality, and underneath his merriment there is hardly a passage in all his plays, if we except the pleadings of Dikaios Logos in theClouds, and the personal portions of the Parabases, in which we catch him revealing his own earnestness. Every ordinary point of view is so consistently ignored, and all the common relations of things are so thoroughly reversed, that the topsy-turvy chaos which a play of Aristophanes presents is quite harmonious. It is, in fact, madness methodized and with a sober meaning. Perhaps we ought to seek in this consideration the key to those problems which have occupied historians when dealing with the Aristophanic criticism of Socrates. How, it is always asked, could Aristophanes have been so consciously unjust to the great moralist of Athens? If we keep in sight the intentional absurdity of everything in one of the Aristophanic comedies, we may perhaps understand how it was possible for the poet to travesty the friend with whom he conversed familiarly at supper-parties. That Plato understood the ridicule of his great master from some such point of view as this is clear from his express recommendation of theCloudsto Dionysius, from the portrait which he draws of Aristophanes in theSymposium, and from the eulogistic epigram (if that is genuine) which he composed upon him. It is curious as a parallel that Agathon should have been even more ignobly caricatured than Socrates at the beginning of theThesmophoriazusæ; yet we know from his own lips, as well as from the dialogue of Plato, that Aristophanes was a friend of the tragic poet, for he elsewhere calls him

ἀγαθὸς ποιητὴς καὶ ποθεινὸς τοῖς φίλοις.

The lash applied to Socrates and Agathon is scarcely less stinging than that applied to Cleon and Euripides. Yet the fact remains that Aristophanes was the friend of Agathon and a member of the Socratic circle. Much of the obscurity attending the interpretation of theCloudsarises from our having lost the finernuancesof Athenian feeling respecting the persons satirized in the old comedy.Wedo not, for example, understand Cratinus when he joins the name of Euripides with that of his great satirist in one epithet descriptive of the quibbling style of the day—εὐριπιδαριστοφανίζειν.[118]But to return from this digression, we may observe that it was only in a democracy that an institution unsparing of friend and foe, like the old comedy, in which persons were openly exposed to censure and the solemn acts of the government were called in question, could be tolerated. Accordingly we find that the early development of comedy, after the date of Susarion, was checked by the accession of Pisistratus to power, and that the old comedy itself perished with the extinction of Athenian liberty. It is only a democracy that likes to criticise itself, that takes pride in its indifference to ridicule, and in its readiness to acknowledge its own errors. In this respect, we English are very democratic: we abuse ourselves and expose our own follies more than any other nation; the press and the platform do for us, in a barren, unæsthetic fashion, what Aristophanes did for the Athenian public.

Perhaps we may now be able to see that a middle course must be followed between the extremes of regarding Aristophanes as an indecent parasite pandering to the worst inclinations of the Athenian rabble, and of looking upon him as a profound philosopher and sober patriot. The former view is maintained by Grote, who, though he is somewhat hampered by his pronounced championship of all the democratic institutions of Athens, among which the comedy of Aristophanes must needs be reckoned, yet clearly thinks that the poet was a meddling monkey, full indeed of genius, but injurious to the order of the State and to the peace of private persons. The latter has been advocated by the German scholars Ranke, Bergk, and Meineke, against whom Grote has directed an able and conclusive argument in the notes to his eighth volume. Truly, it is absurd to pretend that Aristophanes was the prudent and far-seeing moralist described by his German admirers. To imagine him thus would be to falsify the whole purpose of the Athenian comic drama, and to test its large extravagance by the narrow standard of modern morality. We might as well fancy that Alexander was an unselfish worker in the service of humanity as bring ourselves to see in Aristophanes the sage of uniformly staid sobriety. Not to mention that such a notion is at total variance with the only authentic portrait we possess of him, in theSymposiumof Plato, every line of his comedies cries out against so pedantic and priggish a calumny. For it is a calumny thus to misrepresent the high-spirited muse of Aristophanes, with her dishevelled hair and Coan robe of flimsiest gauze, and wild eyes swimming in the mists of wine. She never pretends to be better than a priestess of the midnight Bacchus and Corinthian Aphrodite, though she believes sincerely in the inspiration of these deities. To see in her a Vestal or a Diotima, to set the owl of Pallas on her shoulder, and to strap the ægis round her panting breasts is a piece of elaborate stupidity and painful impertinence which it remained for German pedagogues to perpetrate. Yet it is equally wrong to think of Aristophanes merely as a pernicious calumniator, who killed Socrates, and put an ineffectual spoke in the wheel of progress. Granted that he was more of a Merry-Andrew than a moralist, more of a γελωτοποιὸς than a μετεωρολέσχης, we must surely be blind if we fail to recognize the deep undernote of good sense and wisdom which gives eternal value to his jests—worse than blind if we do not honor him for valiant and unflinching service in the cause which he had recognized as right. Nor are the enemies of Aristophanes less insensible to his real merits as an artist than his ponderous German friends. What are we to think of the imaginative faculties of a man who, after gazing upon the divine splendors of the genius of Aristophanes, after tracking the erratic flight of thismost radiant poet, "with his singing robes about him," can descend to earth and wish that he had never existed, or shake his head and measure him by the moral standards of Quarterly Reviews and British respectability? Alas, that from the modern world should have evanesced all appreciation of art that is not obviously useful, palpably didactic! If we would rightly estimate Aristophanic comedy, we must be prepared to accept it in the classical spirit, and separating ourselves from either sect of the Pharisees, refuse to picture its great poets to ourselves, on the one hand as patriotseximia morum gravitate, or on the other as foul slanderers and irreverent buffoons. Far beyond and outside the plane of either standing-ground are they. The old comedy of Athens is a work of art so tempered and so balanced that he who would appreciate it must submit, for a moment at least, to forego his modern advantages of improved morality and public decency and purer taste and parliamentary courtesy, and to become—if he can bend his moral back to that obliquity—a "merry Greek."

It is now clear that Aristophanic comedy is in the history of art unique—the product of peculiar and unrepeated circumstances. The essential differences between it and modern comedy are manifold. Modern comedy partakes of the tragic spirit; it has a serious purpose, acknowledged by the poet; a lesson is generally taught in its catastrophe; it is fond of poetical justice. Aristophanic comedy, as we have seen, whatever may be its purpose, is always ludicrous to the spectators and to itself.Tartuffe,A New Way to Pay Old Debts, andVolponeare tragedies without bloodshed: you only laugh at them incidentally. TheClouds, theKnights, and theFrogsexcite inevitable laughter. Nor is this difference manifest only in the matter and spirit of the two comedies: it expresses itself externally in their several forms. The plays of Aristophanes, upon the stage, must have been likeour pantomimes, or rather, like our operas. If we wish to form a tolerable notion of the appearance of an Aristophanic comedy, we cannot do better than keep in mind theFlauto Magicoof Mozart. Had Mozart received a good translation of theBirdsinstead of the wretched libretto of theZauberflöte, what a really magic drama he might have produced! Even as it is, with the miserable materials he had to work upon, the master musician has given us an Aristophanic specimen of the ludicrous passing by abrupt but delicate transitions to the serious, of parody and irony playing in and out at hide-and-seek, of pathos lurking beneath merriment, and of madness leaping by a bound into the regions of pure reason. And this he has achieved by the all-subduing witchery of music—by melodies which solve the stiffest contradictions, by the ebb and flow of measured sound rocking upon its surface the most varied thoughts and feelings of the soul of man. In theZauberflötewe are never surprised by any change, however sudden—by any incident, however whimsical. After first lamenting over the stupidity of the libretto, and then resigning ourselves to the caprices of the fairy story, we are delighted to follow the wanderings of music through her labyrinth of quaint and contradictory absurdities. Just so, we fancy, must have been the case with Aristophanes. Peisthetærus and Euelpides were not more discordant than Papageno; the Birds had their language as Astrifiammante has hers; nor were the deeper tones of Aristophanic meaning more out of place than the bass notes of Sarastro, and the choruses of his attendant priests. Music, which has harmonized the small and trivial contradictions of theZauberflöte, harmonized the vast and profound contradictions of Aristophanic comedy. It was the melodramatic setting of such plays as theBirdsand theCloudswhich caused their Weltvernichtungsidee to blossom forth melodiously into the magic tree, with all its blossoms and nightingales and merry apes, to which I have so often referred.

With this parallel between theBirdsand an opera like theZauberflötein our minds, we may place ourselves among the thirty thousand Athenian spectators assembled in the theatre about the end of March, 414 B.C. We must remember that the great expedition had recently gone forth to Sicily. It was only in the preceding year that the Salaminian galley had been sent for Alcibiades, who had escaped to Sparta, where he was now engaged in stirring up evil for his countrymen. But as yet no disaster had befallen the army of invasion. Gylippus had not arrived. Lamachus was still alive. Every vessel brought news to the Athenians of the speed with which their forces were carrying on the work of circumvallation, and of the despondency of the Syracusans. The spectators of the plays of Aristophanes and Ameipsias were nearly the same persons who had listened to the honeyed eloquence of Alcibiades persuading them to undertake the expedition, and promising them not merely the supremacy of Hellas, but the empire of the Mediterranean and the subjugation of Carthage. Alcibiades, indeed, had turned a traitor to his country; but the charm of his oratory and the spirit he had roused remained. Each father in the audience might fairly hope that his son would share in raising Athens to her height of splendor: not a man but felt puffed up with insolent prosperity. The only warning voice which spoke while Athens trembled on the very razor-edge of fortune was that of Aristophanes—but with how sweet and delicate a satire, with sarcasms that had the sound of flattery, with prognostications of failure that wore the shape of realized ambitions, with musical banter and multitudinous jests that seemed to apologize for folly rather than to censure it! There is no doubt but that Aristophanes intended in theBirdsto ridicule the ambition of the Athenians and their inveterate gullibility. Peisthetærus and Euelpides represent in comic caricature the projectors, agitators, schemers, flatterers, who, led by Alcibiades, had imposed upon the excitable vanity of the nation. Cloud-cuckootown is any castle in the air or South Sea bubble which might take the fancy of the Athenian mob. But it is also more especially the project of Western dominion connected with their scheme of Sicilian conquest. Aristophanes has treated his theme so poetically and largely that the interests of theBirdsis not, like that of theWaspsor theKnights, almost wholly confined to the Athens of his day. It transcends those limitations of place and time, and is the everlasting allegory of foolish schemes and flimsy ambition. A modern dramatist—Ben Jonson or Molière, for instance, perhaps even Shakespeare—could hardly have refrained from ending the allegory with some piece of poetical justice. We should have seen Peisthetærus disgraced and Cloud-cuckootown resolved into "such stuff as dreams are made of." But this is not the art of Aristophanes. He brings Peisthetærus to a successful catastrophe, and ends his comedy with marriage songs of triumph. Yet none the less pointed is the satire. The unreality of the vision is carefully maintained, and Peisthetærus walking home with Basileia for his bride, like some new sun-eclipsing star, seems to wink and strut and shrug his shoulders, conscious of the Titanic sham.

To analyze in detail a work of art so well known to all students as theBirdswould be needless. It is enough to notice in passing that it is quite unique of its kind, combining, as it does, such airy fancies as we find in theMidsummer-Night's Dreamwith the peculiar pungency of Aristophanic satire, untainted by the obscenity which forms an integral part of theEcclesiazusæorLysistrata. Most exquisite is the art with which Aristophanes has collected all the facts of ornithology, all the legends and folklore connected with birds, so as to create a fanciful birdland and atmosphere of true bird life for his imaginary beings. Not less wonderful is the imagination with which he has conceived the whole universe from the bird's point of view, his sympathy with the nightingale, the drollery of his running footman Trochilus, the pompous gravity of his King Epops, and so on through the whole of his wingeddramatis personæ. The triumph of his art is the Parabasis, in which the birds pour forth melodious compassion for the transitory earth-born creatures of an hour. Poor men, with their little groping lives! The epithets of pity which the happier birds invent to describe man are woven, as it were, of gossamer and dew, symbols of fragility. Then the music changes as the vision of winged Eros, up-soaring from the primeval windegg, bursts upon the fancy of the Chorus. Again it subsides into still more delicate irony, when the just reign of the birds on earth and over heaven is prophesied; and the whole concludes with semichorus answering to semichorus in antiphonal strains of woodland poetry and satire—the sweet notes of the flute responded to by shouts of Bacchic laughter.

We have seen in dealing with theBirdshow Aristophanes converted the whole world into a transcendental birdland, and filled his play with airy shapes and frail imaginings. This power of alchemizing and transmuting everything he touches into the substance of his thought of the moment is no less remarkable in the comedy of theClouds. And here we are able to mark the peculiar nature of his allegory more clearly than in the choruses of theBirds, with greater accuracy to distinguish the play of pure poetry alternating with satire, to trace the glittering thread of fancy drawn athwart the more fantastic arabesque of comic caricature. In theCloudsAristophanes ridicules the rising school of teachers who professed to train the youth of Athens in the arts of public speaking and successful litigation. He aims at the tribe of sophists, who substituted logical discussion for the old æsthetic education of the Greeks, and who sought to replace mythological religion by meteorological explanations of natural phenomena. The pedantry of this dialectic in its boyhood offended the artistic sense of a conservative like Aristophanes: the priggishness of upstart science had the air to him of insolent irreligion. Besides he saw that this new philosophy, while it undermined the ἦθος of his nation, was capable of lending itself to ignoble ends—that its possessors sought to make money, that their disciples were eager to acquire mere technical proficiency, in order to cut a fine figure in public and to gain their selfish purposes. The sophists professed two chief subjects: τὰ μετέωρα, or the science of natural phenomena; and rhetoric, or the art of conquering by argument. Aristophanes, in theClouds, satirizes both under the form of allegory by bringing upon the stage his Chorus of Clouds, who, in their changeful shapes—heaven-obscuring, appearing variously to various eyes, coming into being from the nothing of the air, and passing away again by imperceptible dissolution, usurping upon the functions of Zeus in the thunder and the rain, hurrying hither and thither at the will of no divine force, but impelled by the newly discovered abstraction Vortex—are the very forms and symbols of the airy, misty Proteus of verbal falseness and intangible irreligion which had begun to possess the Athenians. In order to understand the force of this allegory, we must remember the part which the clouds played in the still vital mythology of the Greeks. It was by a cloud that Hera in her divine scorn had deluded the impious desires of Ixion, who, embracing hollow shapes of vapor, begat Centaurs. The rebellious giants who sought to climb Olympus were forms of mist and tempest invading the serenity of highest heaven: this Strepsiades indicates when he quotes the words πλοκάμους θ' ἑκατογκεφάλα Τυφῶ as referring to the clouds. It was in cloudy vision that gods appeared to mortals or escaped their sight; in cloud that the Homeric heroes were snatched from death by their Olympian patrons; in clouds that Æolus dwelt and Danaë was prisoned. The Harpies were wind-tossed films of frothy cloud; the Sirens daughters of foam and mist. Everything that deceived and concealed, that shifted and eluded, that stole away "the enchanted gazer's mind," all Maya or delusion, all fascination and unrealizable desire, was symbolized by clouds. Nor was it without meaning that the clouds ascended from Ocean, from the wily parent of wave and storm, the inscrutable hoarder of secrets locked within the caverns of the murmuring deep, who might never be taken in any one clear form, who loved to cozen and betray, whose anger was swift and fretful against such as caught him in their toils. The clouds were his daughters, and so was Aphrodite—beautiful, deceitful, soul-subduing—these his offspring of the air, this his child of the foam—these pouring glamour on the eyes of men, this folding their hearts in snares. Without being fanciful, we might follow this analysis through a hundred labyrinths, all tending to show how exquisite to the apprehension of a Greek steeped in mythological associations must have been the allegory of the clouds. We might, moreover, have pointed out the care of Aristophanes to maintain this mythological propriety. Even in the Parabasis, for instance, where the Chorus comes forward in its human character as the representative of the poet, there occurs a semi-choric strain of great beauty, hymning the elemental deities of Sun, Air, Ocean, and all-covering Heaven, who are the parents and especial patrons of the clouds; for the Sun begets them from the fountains of the Sea, the Air receives and gives them shape as they drift through her yielding realm, and the great Zeus of the sky compels them to his service, stores them with his thunder, and makes a palace for them in his adamantine home, and wreathes their dances round his footstool of the firmament. But it is enough to have pointed out the main features of the allegory. The scope which it afforded for the display of splendid poetry was of course immense. From the first moment of the appearance of the Chorus to the end we never lose sight of their cloudy splendor, and, as in the case of theBirds, every thought, playful or imaginative, which can be conceived relating to the world of clouds, is pressed by Aristophanes into his service.

Early in the play the fount of poetry which they suggest springs pure and clear from the flinty rock of previous satire. Socrates, who has just been displayed to us as the insignificant anatomizer of fleas and gnats, rises suddenly to this height in his invocation:

"O Sovereign King, immeasurable Air, who keepest the earth balanced, and blazing Ether, and sublime goddesses, ye Clouds of lightning and of thunder, arise, appear, dread queens, in mid-air to your Thinker!"

It is only in the last word, notice, that the comic smile breaks out.

"Come, then, ye reverend Clouds, honor this neophyte with your dread beauty! whether upon Olympus's holy snow-swept peaks ye sit, or in the gardens of father Ocean weave the dance with nymphs, or in golden pitchers draw the waters of Nile, or in Mæotis bide, or onthe white eyries of Mimas: listen, receive our sacrifice, be gracious to our rites."

With what radiance of imagination the haunts of the clouds are here enumerated! Sometimes we see them floating in virginal processions above unfooted snows, sometimes enthroned like queens in solemn silence on aerial watch-towers, sometimes dissolved in dew far down among the Oceanides, or brooding, filmy vapors, on the face of broad untroubled lakes.

Aristophanes, it may be said in passing, never dwells upon the more tempestuous functions of the clouds as stormy and angry powers: that would be to violate his allegory, which must always show them deceitfully beautiful, spreading illusion over earth and sky.

In answer to the invitation of Socrates, the Clouds are heard behind the stage chanting a choric hymn;[119]and here it must be remarked that the poet has revealed subtle instinct, for before exhibiting his Chorus, arrayed in veils of filmy gauze, to the people, by which he might have risked the possibility of exciting ludicrous instead of solemn ideas, he enlists the imagination of the audience by a sublime strain of preparatory music, vocally realizing the splendor of the coming Clouds before they strike the eyes of the spectators.

It is to the repeated roll of distant thunder that they sing their untranslatable entrance hymn. Behold them rising, silent domes and pinnacles and towers, from the burnished mirror of the noonday sea: how the sunlight flashes on their pearly slopes and fills their deeply cloven valleys: how dewy bright and glistening they are! Then watch them scale the vault of heaven, quitting the horizon with its mists, marching in tranquil state across the spaces of blue ether, gliding to their thrones among the mountain pines! There they repose, and at their feet is heard the clamor of the streams, the deep rebounding boom of sea waves; but they are seated in serenity, and below them lies the champaign with its fruits of holy earth, and on their broad immortal marble fronts the unwearied light of the sun-god plays. From their girdles to their sandals falls the robe of mist that wrapped them round, and on the watch-towers of the world they sit, bare in their beauty, godlike forms.

Such is the vision which this inimitable Chorus evokes. Its truth has been felt by all who have seen the rising of summer clouds from the waters of the Mediterranean. Indeed, this Chorus belongs to the highest order of poetry. Not only does it furnish an example of the freshness which is peculiar to Aristophanes, but it is in the deepest sense an intuition into the inmost life of nature. We hear in it the voice of a true seer or interpreter, who knows by choice of words and rhythms how to convey his own impressions to our mind. Even Shelley, when he wrote hisCloud, had grasped perhaps the secret of the pomp and splendor of cloudland less firmly than Aristophanes has done, though his images are piled so multitudinously, and every thought or fancy that a cloud suggests is whirled, as it were, in the drift of brilliant and radiant shapes. Aristophanes has this advantage—that something of the mythopœic power still survived in Greece, and that he shared the sculptural genius ofhis race. Moreover, his audience were prepared by their religious associations to conceive of his Clouds as living creatures, and he was writing for the stage, where the poetry of personification is made easy by direct appeal to the eyesight.

In theCloudsas it has been transmitted to us, Aristophanes employs another and more direct form of allegory. He brings upon the stage the δίκαιος λόγος in controversy with the ἄδικος λόγος—the former representing the old conservative education of Athens; the other the new theories and modes of life which were beginning to spring up. It has been conjectured that δίκαιος λόγος wore the mask of Aristophanes himself, and ἄδικος λόγος that of Thrasymachus the sophist. If this conjecture hits the truth, it is curious that the vulgar logician whom Socrates handles so severely in Plato'sRepublicshould have been chosen as the ideal of his doctrine and influence—the special pleader of the Phrontisterion. The contest between these two impersonations of modesty and impudence, of manliness and effeminacy, offers a unique example in Greek comic literature of what was common on our own stage about three centuries ago. The Just and Unjust Logoi dispute and wrangle for the favor of Pheidippides precisely like the abstractions inHycke ScornerorLusty Juventus. Of course this kind of allegory is much coarser and affords less scope for poetical treatment than the exquisite mythus of theClouds. The Logoi are but masks or hollow automata, from behind which the poet utters his arguments: there is no illusion of the senses, no enchantment of the fancy in their presentation. Yet the speech of Dikaios Logos forms one of the purest and most beautiful passages that Aristophanes has written, in its simple and affectionate picture of oldAthenian life. The poet, we fear, was very far behind his age: he looked back to the good times when the sailor only knew enough to sing out "Ahoy!" and call for biscuit: he wanted the Athenian lads to have broad backs and sluggish tongues: he was dead to the advantages of dialectic and Socratic definition: he kept trying to bring back the days of Marathon, when nothing could avert the coming days of Syracuse and Ægospotami and Chæronea. We who read the history of Athens by the light of our Grote, we who are rolling our waves towards the rising instead of the setting sun, know now how very perverse and un-advanced the poet was. Yet, for all that, can we fail to be charmed with the picture that he draws of Greek boyhood in the good old times, and to contrast it favorably with the acknowledged impudence and profligacy of Critias and Agathon and Alcibiades—the friends and pupils of Socrates? "In that blissful time," says Dikaios Logos, "when I flourished, and modesty and temperance were practised, a boy's voice was never heard; but he would set off at daybreak, in snow or sunshine, with his comrades to the school of the harper, where he learned the ballads of our forefathers in praise of Pallas; and from the harper he would run to the training-ground and exercise himself with the decorum befitting virtuous youth." The rules for the behavior of boys which Aristophanes here enunciates provoke a modern smile; for the morality of Athens obliged lads to observe the same sort of propriety which we expect from girls. But for all his modesty, the youth of those days was not a milksop. He did indeed shun the public baths and the agora, repel the advances of profligate persons, respect his parents, avoid Hetairai, and form in his breast an image of Aidos; yet he frequented the wrestling-ground, and grew fair in form and color with generous exercises, not "sicklied o'er with the pale cast of thought," nor bent and jaded by the restless wrangling of the law courts; but among the sacred olive-trees of the Academy he ran races with his comrade, "crowned with white reeds, smelling of bindweed and careless hours and leaf-shedding poplar, rejoicing in the prime of spring, when the plane-tree whispers to the elm." In these last lines we touch the very core of Greek aristocratic conservatism—that imperious demand for leisure, for σχολὴ τῶν ἀναγκαίων, of which Aristotle speaks as an essential in the life of free men; that contempt of all serious time-consuming business which we find in Plato; that respect for the beauty of the body, and that dislike of every occupation that tended to degrade its form or spoil the freshness of its color; that sympathy with nature in her graceful moods; that well-bred nonchalance; that love of the gymnasium with its poplar sacred to Herakles, the god of endurance, and its plane-tree of swift Hermes—in a word, those accumulated æsthetical prejudices which marked the race pre-eminent for its artistic faculty, the caste of rich and idle citizens supported by a nation of slaves, the unique and never-again-to-be-imitated people, who once and for all upon this earth of ours attained perfection, realized the ideal towards which we vainly strive.

With the last lines of this speech in our memory, we may turn to the dialogues of Plato, whose Phædrus and Charmides and Lysis are true children and disciples of Dikaios Logos; or to the Autolycus of Xenophon'sSymposium, whose breast is as smooth, and skin as bright, and shoulders as broad, and tongue as short, as even Aristophanes could wish; or we may set before us some statue like the Apoxyomenos of Lysippus, or the Discobolos of Myron, and feel that we have gathered, in fancy at least,the flower of the perfection of the pride of Hellas.

Much of the allegory of Aristophanes consists of metaphors taken literally and expressed by appropriate symbolism to the audience. Thus, Trugaios actually drags the goddess Peace, with her attendants Opora and Theoria, from the well, the Chorus, while they help him, singing "Yoho!" like sailors at a capstan. In the same comedy, War and Havoc are exhibited with a gigantic mortar, in which they bray the States of Greece. Socrates suspended in his basket is a metaphorical allegory of this sort, his posture being peculiarly expressive of star-gazing and abstract speculation at a time when the objects of such contemplations were called τὰ μετέωρα. Of the same kind is the balance in which the lines of Æschylus and Euripides are weighed. Any poet might use the metaphor (weighed in the balance and found wanting); but it is a stretch of metaphorical license to exhibit an actual pair of scales upon the stage. Many of the figurative actions of the Hebrew prophets were practical appeals to the imagination, similar to these allegories of Aristophanes. Indeed, such dramatic metaphors may be reckoned among the most powerful instruments in the hands of a great master. Had Dante conceived a mask upon the politics of Italy, we doubt not but that he would have employed some energetic symbols of this sort; and, in passing, it may be said that no artist has appeared in modern times so capable of constructing an allegorical drama in the style of Aristophanes as Dante. The symbolism of theWaspsis somewhat different from that with which we have been dealing. In this play the Chorus were armed, no doubt, with lance-like stings; but there was no attempt on the poet's part, as in the case of theCloudsandBirds, to maintain the illusion of their being wasps. They talk and act like old men; their waspishness is merely metaphorical, and the allegory ends in an appeal to the eyesight. ThePlutus, on the other hand, presents an example of allegory in the strictly modern sense. It is a Greek anticipation of our moralities, of such a play as might be founded on a portion of thePilgrim's Progress. Wealth and Poverty appear upon the stage, and speak appropriately. Avarice and Prodigality are satirized. The use and abuse of riches are contrasted in a series of incidents framed with expressly moral purpose. The whole play is singularly un-Aristophanic. We have here no "Weltvernichtungsidee"—no nightingales or climbing apes to speak of. For this very reason it has been copied in modern times (its inner nature rendering it capable of adaptation to our tastes) by Ben Jonson in theStaple of News, and by Goethe in the second part ofFaust.

One word must be devoted to theThesmophoriazusæ. In the history of dramatic literature, the chief interest of the play is that it differs from the other works of Aristophanes in its structure. It has a regular plot—an intrigue and a solution—and its persons are not allegorical, but real. Thus it approaches the standard of modern comedy. But the plot, though gigantic in its scale, and prodigious in its wealth of wit and satire, is farcical. The artifices by which Euripides endeavors to win Agathon to undertake his cause, the disguise of Mnesilochus in female attire, the oratory of the old man against the women in the midst of their assembly, his detection, the momentary suspension of the dramatic action by his seizure of the supposed baby, his slaughter of the swaddled wine-jar, his apprehension by Cleisthenes, the devices and disguises by which Euripides (in parody of his own tragic scenes) endeavors to extricate his father-in-law from the scrape, and the final ruse by which he eludes the Scythian bowmen, and carries off Mnesilochus in triumph—all these form a series of highly diverting comic scenes. There is no passage in Aristophanes more amusing than the harangue of Mnesilochus. The other women have abused Euripides for slandering their sex in his tragedies. Mnesilochus, the humorous and coarse old rustic, gets up in his flimsy female gear, and eloquently reminds them of the truths which Euripidesmighthave divulged. One crime after another is glibly and facetiously recorded, until the little heap of calumnies uttered by Euripides disappears beneath the mountain of confessions piled up by the supposed matron. The portrait, too, of Agathon in the act of composition is exquisitely comic. By comparing it with that drawn by Plato in theBanquet, we may to some extent estimate the amount of truth in Aristophanic caricature. The meaningless melodious style—the stream of honeyed words,[120]summa delumbe saliva—with which Agathon and his Chorus greet our ears is scarcely more a parody of his poetry than the speech on love is of his prose. Agathon is discovered lying on a sofa, arrayed in female garments and smelling of cosmetics; when asked why thus attired, he lisps a languid answer that he is composing a tragedy about women, and wants to be in character:

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