Aristophanes loved Æschylus by that law of affinity which causes
Marivaux to love Racine tragedy and comedy made to understand each
other.
The same distracted and all-powerful breath fills Æschylus and
Aristophanes. They are the two inspired spirits of the antique mask.
Aristophanes, who is not yet judged, adhered to the mysteries, to
Cecropian poetry, to Eleusis, to Dodona, to the Asiatic twilight, to
the profound pensive dream. This dream, whence sprung the art of Egina,
was at the threshold of the Ionian philosophy in Thales as well as
at the threshold of the Italian philosophy in Pythagoras. It was the
sphinx guarding the entrance.
This sphinx has been a muse,--the great pontifical and lascivious
muse of universal rut; and Aristophanes loved it This sphinx breathed
tragedy into Æschylus, and comedy into Aristophanes. It had something
of Cybele. The ancient sacred immodesty is in Aristophanes. At moments
he has Bacchus foaming at the lips. He came from the Dionysia, or from
the Aschosia, or from the great Trieteric Orgy, and he strikes one as a
raving maniac of the mysteries. His wild verse resembles the bassaride
hopping giddily upon bladders filled with air. Aristophanes has the
sacerdotal obscurity. He is for nudity against love. He denounces the
Phedras and Sthenobæas, and he creates Lysistrata.
Let no one be deceived on this point; it was religion, and a cynic was
an austere mind. The gymnosophists were the point of intersection
between lewdness and thought The he-goat, with its philosopher's beard,
belonged to that sect That dark ecstatic and bestial Oriental spirit
lives still in the santon, the dervish, and the fakir. The corybantes
were a kind of Greek fakirs. Aristophanes, like Diogenes, belonged
to that family. Æschylus, by the Oriental bent of his nature, nearly
belonged to it himself, but he retained the tragic chastity.
That mysterious naturalism was the ancient spirit of Greece. It was
called poetry and philosophy. It had under it the group of the seven
sages, one of whom, Periander, was a tyrant. Now, a certain vulgar,
mean spirit appeared with Socrates. It was sagacity clearing and
bottling up wisdom. Reduction of Thales and Pythagoras to the immediate
true. Such was the operation. A sort of filtering, which, purifying
and weakening, allowed the ancient divine doctrine to percolate, drop
by drop, and become human. These simplifications disgust fanaticism;
dogmas object to a process of sifting. To ameliorate a religion is
to lay violent hands on it. Progress offering its services to Faith,
offends it. Faith is an ignorance which professes to know, and which,
in certain cases, knows perhaps more than Science. In the face of
the lofty affirmations of believers, Socrates had an uncomfortably
sly half-smile. There is something of Voltaire in Socrates. Socrates
denounces all the Eleusinian philosophy as unintelligible and
indiscernible; and he said to Euripides that to understand Heraclitus
and the old philosophers, "one required to be a swimmer of Delos,"--in
other words, a swimmer capable of landing on an isle which was always
receding before him. That was impiety and sacrilege for the ancient
Hellenic naturalism. There was no other cause for the antipathy of
Aristophanes toward Socrates.
This antipathy was quite fearful. The poet showed himself a
persecutor; he has lent assistance to the oppressors against the
oppressed, and his comedy has been guilty of crimes. Aristophanes
has remained in the eyes of posterity in the condition of a wicked
genius,--fearful punishment! But there is for him one attenuating
circumstance: he was an ardent admirer of the poet of "Prometheus,"
and to admire him was to defend him. Aristophanes did what he could to
prevent his banishment; and if anything can diminish one's indignation
in reading the "Clouds," implacable on Socrates, it is that one may
see in the background the hand of Aristophanes holding the mantle of
Æschylus going into exile. Æschylus has likewise a comedy, a sister of
the broad farce of Aristophanes. We have spoken of his mirth. It goes
very far in "The Argians." It equals Aristophanes, and outstrips the
Shrove Tuesday of our Carnival. Listen: "He throws at my head a chamber
utensil. The full vase falls on my head, and is broken, odoriferous,
but in a different manner from an urnful of perfume." Who says that?
Æschylus. And in his turn Shakespeare will come and will exclaim
through Falstaff's lips: "Empty the jorden." What can you say? You have
to deal with savages.
One of those savages is Molière: witness from one end to the other the
"Malade Imaginaire." Racine also is in a degree one of them: see "Les
Plaideurs," already mentioned.
The Abbé Camus was a witty bishop,--a rare thing at all times; and what
is more, he was a good man. He would have deserved this reproach of
another bishop: "Bon jusqu'à la bêtise." Perhaps he was good because he
had wit He gave to the poor all the revenue of his bishopric of Belley.
He objected to canonization. It was he who said, "Il n'est chasse que
de vieux chiens et châsse que de vieux saints;" and although he did
not like the new-comers in sanctity, he was a friend of Saint François
de Sales, by whose advice he wrote novels. He relates in one of his
letters that one day François de Sales said to him: "The Church laughs
readily."
Art also laughs readily. Art, which is a temple, has its laughter.
Whence comes this hilarity? All at once, in the midst of
_chefs-d'œuvre_, serious figures, a buffoon stands up and blurts
out,--a _chef-d'œuvre_ also. Sancho Panza jostles Agamemnon. All the
marvels of thought are there; irony comes to complicate and complete
them. Enigma. Behold art, great art, breaking into an excess of gayety.
Its problem, matter, amuses it. It was forming it, now it deforms it.
It was shaping it for beauty, now it delights in extracting from it
ugliness. It seems to forget its responsibility. It does not forget
it, however; for suddenly, behind the grimace, philosophy makes its
appearance,--a philosophy smooth, less sidereal, more terrestrial,
quite as mysterious as the grave philosophy. The unknown which is in
man, and the unknown which is in things, face each other; and it turns
out that in the act of meeting, these two augurs, Nature and Fate,
cannot keep their serious countenance. Poetry, laden with anxieties,
befools--whom? Itself. A mirth, which is not serenity, gushes out from
the incomprehensible. An unknown, lofty, and sinister raillery flashes
its lightning through the human darkness. The shadows piled up around
us play with our soul. Formidable blossoming of the unknown. The jest
proceeds from the abyss.
This alarming mirth in art is called, in olden times, Aristophanes, and
in modern times, Rabelais.
When Pratinas the Dorian had invented the play with satyrs, comedy
making its appearance opposite tragedy, mirth by the side of mourning,
the two styles ready perhaps to unite, it was a matter of scandal.
Agathon, the friend of Euripides, went to Dodona to consult Loxias.
Loxias is Apollo. Loxias means crooked; and Apollo was called The
Crooked, on account of his oracles being always obscure and full of
ambiguous meanings. Agathon inquired from Apollo whether the new
style was not impious, and whether comedy existed by right as well as
tragedy. Loxias answered, "Poetry has two ears."
This answer, which Aristotle declares obscure, seems to us very clear.
It sums up the entire law of art. Two problems, in fact, are presented.
In the full light the first problem,--noisy, tumultuous, stormy,
clamorous, the vast vital causeway, offering every direction to the
ten thousand feet of man; the quarrels, the uproar, the passions with
their _why_; the evil, which undergoes suffering the first, for to be
evil is worse than doing it; sorrows, griefs, tears, cries, rumours.
In the shade, the second one, mute problem, immense silence, with an
inexpressible and terrible meaning. And poetry has two ears,--one which
listens to life, the other which listens to death.