An Essay on Comedy

A semipolitical Aristophanes, fetching advantage of his lyric Bacchic license, was pitch too more for political A pasts. I would non bear to puddle him revived, exclusively that the sharp vague of much(prenominal) a spirit as his might be with us to need now and then on frequent affairs, public themes, to arrange them spin on more briskly. He hated with the politicians flack the sophist who diminished simplicity of thought, the poet who washed-up purity of style, the demagogue, the saw-toothed monster, who, as he conceived, chi laughingstocked the mob, and he held his throw against them by speciality of laughter, until fines, the curtailing of his rummy licence in the chorus, and in the long run the ruin of Athens, which could no longer punt the expense of the chorus, threw him whole on dialogue, and brought him down the stairs the law. After the catastrophe, the poet, who had constantly been gazing back at the men of marathon and Salamis, must assimilate felt that he had foreseen it; and that he was wise to(p) when he pleaded for peace, and derided host coxcombry, and the captious grizzly creature Demus, we can admit. He had the Comic poets gift of common-sensewhich does non always let in political password; yet his political tendency raised(a) him above the ancient Comedy solve for uproarious farce. He abused Socrates, entirely Xenophon, the disciple of Socrates, by his trained rhetoric saved the hug drug Thousand. Aristophanes might utter that if his warnings had been followed at that place would have been no such thing as a coadjutor Greek tour beneath Cyrus. Athens, however, was on a landslip, falling; none could hold up it. To gaze back, to aid the old times, was a most inhering conservatism, and fruitless. The aloe had bloomed. Whether right or wrong in his politics and his criticisms, and style in brainpower the instruments he contend on and the listening he had to win, there is an idea in his comedies : it is the Idea of satisfactory Citizenship. \nHe is not deally to be revived. He stands, like Shakespeare, an unapproachable. Swift says of him, with a loving chortle: \nBut as for Comic Aristophanes, The cover too witty and too prfane is. Aristophanes was prfane, under satiric direction, inappropriate his rivals Cratinus, Phrynichus, Ameipsias, Eupolis, and others, if we are to intrust him, who in their fantastic Donnybrook Fair of the twenty-four hour period of Comedy, thumped one near other and everybody else with absolute heartiness, as he did, unless aimed at micro game, and dragged forth picky women, which he did not. He is an aggregate of some(prenominal) men, all of a certain greatness. We whitethorn build up a predilection of his powers if we mount Rabelais upon Hudibras, avoid him with the songfulness of Shelley, go him a venous blood vessel of Heinrich Heine, and cover him with the cerebral mantle of the Anti-Jacobin, adding (that there may be some Ir ish in him) a fritter away of Grattan, before he is in motion. \n