Page:History of the Literature of Ancient Greece (Müller) 2ed.djvu/413

391 391 SECOND PERIOD OF GREEK LITERATURE (Continued.) CHAPTER XXVII. § 1. The comic element in Greek poetry due to the worship of Bacchus. § 2, Also connected with the Comus at the lesser Dionysia : Phallic songs. § 3. Begin- nings of dramatic comedy at Megara : Susarion, Chionides, &c. § 4. The per- fectors of the old Attic comedy. § 5. The structure of comedy. What it has in common with tragedy. § 6. Peculiar arrangement of the chorus ; Parabasis. § 7. Dances, metres, and style. § I. Having followed one species of the drama, Tragedy, through its rise, progress, and decay, up to the time when it almost ceases to he poetry, we must return once more to its origin, in order to consider how it came to pass that the other species, Comedy, though it sprang from the same causes, and was matured hy the same vivifying influences, nevertheless acquired so dissimilar a form. The opposition between tragedy and comedy did not make its first appearance along with these different species of the drama : it is as old as poetry itself. By the side of the noble and the great, the common and the base always appear in the guise of folly, and thus make the opposed qualities more conspicuous. Nay more, in the same proportion as the mind nurtured and cultivated within itself its conceptions of the perfect order, beauty, and power, reigning in the universe and exhi- biting themselves in the life of man, so much the more capable and competent would it become to comprehend the weak and perverted in their whole nature and manner, and to penetrate to their very heart and centre. In themselves the base and the perverted are certainly no proper subject for poetry : when, however, they are received among the conceptions of a mind teeming with thoughts of the great and the beautiful, they obtain a place in the world of the beautiful and become poetic. In consequence of the conditional and limited existence of our