THE FUNNY MAN OF REACTION
Needless to say, the Bolshevik sentiments of Euripides were not
proclaimed before the altar of Dionysus without protest on the part of
the orthodox. There rose up another dramatist, this time a comedian, to
champion the ancient and honorable traditions of Athens. Aristophanes
was his name, and he was one of the world’s great masters of the comic
line. He had infinite verve and wit and imagination; you can read him
today and laugh out loud--even while his reactionary ideas make you
cross.
The point to be got clear is that right or wrong, this poet is
altogether a propagandist; a political campaigner, full of the most
bitter fury against his enemies, attacking them by name, lampooning
them, ridiculing them, not scrupling even to tell vicious falsehoods
about them. He wrote his plays to advocate this thesis or that thesis;
he arranged his incidents to exhibit this or that aspect of the thesis;
he chose his characters, either to voice his own convictions, or to make
the opposite convictions absurd. Not merely do his characters make long
speeches in which they set forth the poet’s ideas; at any time in the
course of the action the poet will wave these characters one side, and
step out in the form of the chorus and say what he thinks, arguing and
pleading with the audience, scolding at them, denouncing his enemies,
explaining his previous actions, discussing his present play--even going
so far as to explain to the audience why they should award the prize to
Aristophanes and not to somebody else! I doubt if there has ever been a
bolder propagandist using the stage; I doubt if the propertied classes
and the partisans of tradition ever had a more vigorous defender; and
this, don’t fail to note, in a world dramatist, a “classic” of history’s
greatest “art for art’s sake” period!
The amazing modernness of Aristophanes is what strikes us most. There is
hardly a single one of our present-day contentious questions he does not
discuss at length. He has the malicious wit of the New York “Sun” in the
days of Dana; he has the fun of Stephen Leacock, whose comical tales
ridicule every new and sensible idea the human mind can conceive. Again,
one thinks of the verses of Wallace Irwin--except that Aristophanes
sincerely held his convictions, whereas Mr. Irwin’s wit appears to be
directed by his newest publisher.
Aristophanes was a gentleman, in the English sense of the word, and
wrote for other gentlemen. Just as in England during the late war we
observed the manufacturers of beer and munitions rising to power and
turning the aristocracy out of their castles, so during the
Peloponnesian war Aristophanes saw his cultured class dispossessed by
newly rich traders. There is a scene in the “Knights” in which he
denounces them; they are “mongers,” a whole succession of
“mongers”--topical allusions which the audience received with roars of
laughter. First came a rope-monger to govern the state, and then a
mutton-monger; now there was a leather-monger--Cleon, ruler of the city,
who sat in the audience and heard himself abused. Athens could go only
one stage lower, said Aristophanes, and he produced an offal-monger, and
recited to this person a list of his vices, which proved him fit to take
charge of public affairs.
As to Cleon, the poet objected that his political manners were rude; and
in order to set him a good example, described him as “a whale that
keeps a public house and has a voice like a pig on fire!” This was in
war-time--and imagine what would have happened to a playwright who
produced a play in Washington, D. C., in the year 1918, describing the
President of the United States in similar language!
Again, Aristophanes produced a play denouncing his city for its shabby
treatment of its tributary states. He produced this play while
ambassadors from those states were in the audience, attending a council
of the empire. For this Cleon had the poet prosecuted and fined; so in
his next production Aristophanes comes back, proposing that the people
shall kick out a number of rascals, including
All statesmen retrenching the fees and the salaries
Of theatrical bards, in revenge for the railleries,
And jests, and lampoons, of this holy solemnity,
Profanely pursuing their personal enmity,
For having been flouted, and scoff’d, and scorn’d--
All such are admonish’d and heartily warn’d!
Aristophanes loathed Euripides for having turned the ancestral heroes
into weak mortals, with sentiments and whinings about their rights and
wrongs. He dragged the poet down into hell, and there beat him with all
the weapons he could lay hold of. He took the poet’s play of feminism,
the “Lysistrata,” and turned it to farce by that most modern of devices,
a strike of mothers! A play in which the women of Athens refuse to
co-habit with their husbands until the husbands have ended the war with
Sparta!
Also Aristophanes loathed Socrates, because that philosopher taught the
youths of Athens to think for themselves. To this the poet attributed
the corruption of Alcibiades, the young aristocrat who had been a pupil
of Socrates, and had sold out his country to the Persian king. He wrote
a play called “The Clouds,” in which he represented Socrates as a
cunning trickster, teaching men how to advocate any cause for money. He
portrayed the philosopher sitting in a hanging basket in front of his
house, performing absurdities with his pupils. It is exactly the tone of
a “Saturday Evening Post” editorial, jeering at “parlor pinks,” and
college professors who teach their pupils “mugwumpery.” The time came
when the mob voted death to Socrates; and this was the great triumph of
the funny man of reaction.
But alas, the death of one free-thinker did not suffice to bring the
citizens of Athens back to the simple life of their ancestors. They
continued to make money and enjoy themselves, and to hire soldiers to do
their fighting. Their dramatists developed the so-called “social
comedy”--that is, pictures of the fashions and follies of the leisure
class, without any propaganda. It is an invariable rule that the absence
of propaganda in the art of a people means that this people is in
process of intellectual and moral decay. So now a strong man came down
out of the north and took charge of Greece, and Greek literature moved
into the Alexandrine period.
The center of this new culture was the city of Alexandria, in Egypt. The
poets now took pride in their technical skill, and wrote delicate and
charming portrayals of the delights of love. A horde of learned scholars
busied themselves with criticism and interpretation of the works of the
past, and composed long epic poems dealing with grammar and rhetoric and
similar subjects. This too was “propaganda”; but you note that it was
propaganda of a secondary and imitative sort, it was not produced by men
who were doing great deeds, and creating new forms of life. Alexandria
was a cosmopolitan center, ruled by a despot, the home of some wealthy
and cultured gentlemen, who supported painters and sculptors and poets
and musicians and actors to while away their boredom, and to serve as
their press-agents and trumpeters. But the art of classical Greece was
the work of free men, citizens of a state ruled by a larger proportion
of its inhabitants than had ever before held authority in civilized
times. That meant throughout the community the joy and thrill of
intellectual adventure, it meant a great leap of achievement for the
whole group. Such invariably is the origin of art which we now regard as
“classical”--and which we use to hold the minds of new generations in
chain to tradition and conformity!