Page:Euripides the Rationalist.djvu/99

Rh idol and leader of the deepest and tenderest mysteries, turn round to vilify the innovators who dared to depreciate the accepted deities in comparison with their own inventions. But it is constantly assumed by the comedian, that no confusion was possible between his attitude in this relation and that of such a man as Euripides; it is assumed that his own ridicule was in the popular sense religious, and that of Euripides in the like sense irreligious, the two forms not merely different but antagonistic. Nor is it difficult to appreciate the distinction. In the first place the whole cast of comedy, its extravagance of imagination, was a sufficient safeguard against a severe interpretation of anything which the author might advance by way of helping a jest. The spectator would no more be embarrassed in his religious exercises by having seen a Dionysus take a flogging in competition with a slave upon the toughness of their respective skins, than he would be embarrassed in his politics by having seen the birds conspire to build a city in the air. But this license of imagination would in itself have rendered the comic stage an unsuitable instrument for serious attack upon beliefs transcending common experience. No form of art could be further removed from Aristophanic comedy than the realistic cast of Euripides' tragedy. As he is made to say in the Frogs, doubtless because he did habitually say so in conversation, his whole aim is to put his audience 'among the things which we handle and live with', in the world as it visibly is, and this, as he goes on to note, for the purpose of enabling them to criticize what is said and done there. The departing spectator took with him the pictures presented by the poet as things which could no more be supposed away than the streets through which he went home, and among these realities were the reflexions, grave or gay in form but alike serious in meaning, which were made in the drama, as on convenient occasions they were made in actual society, upon the current theology. But the difference goes even deeper than this. Taken with the proviso, which Aristophanes is careful to repeat, that in practice you will do well to worship according to the wont of your city, parish, and family, it was positively good for Zeus and Apollo to be supposed indulgent as to the way in which they were