Page:History of the Literature of Ancient Greece (Müller) 2ed.djvu/414

392 392 HISTORY OF THE race, this tendency of the mind is always conversant about bare realities, ■while the opposite one has, with free creative energy, set up for itself a peculiar domain of the imagination. Real life has always furnished superabundant materials for comic poetry ; and if the poet in working up these materials has often made use of figures which do not actually exist, these are always intended to represent actual appearances, circum- stances, men, and classes of men : the base and the perverted are not invented ; the invention consists in bringing them to light in their true form. A chief instrument of comic representation is Wit, which maybe defined to be, — a startling detection and display of the perverted and deformed, when the base and the ridiculous are suddenly illuminated by the flash of genius. Wit cannot lay hold of that which is really sacred, sublime, and beautiful : in a certain sense, it invariably degrades what it handles ; but it cannot perform this office unless it takes up a higher and safer ground from which to hurl its darts. Even the commonest sort of wit, which is directed against the petty follies and mistakes of social life, must have for its basis a consciousness of the possession of that discreet reserve and elegant refinement which constitute good manners. The more concealed the perversity, the more it assumes the garb of the right and the excellent ; so much the more comic is it when suddenly seen through and detected, just because it is thus brought most abruptly into contrast with the true and the good. We must now break off these general considerations, which do not properly belong to the problem we have to solve, and are only designed to call attention to the cognate and corresponding features of tragic and comic poetry. If we return to history, we meet with the comic element even in epic poetry, partly in connexion with the heroic epos, where, as might be expected, it makes its appearance only in certain passages,* and partly cultivated in a separate form, as in the Mar- gites. Lyric poetry had produced in the iambics of Archilochus master- pieces of passionate invective and derision, the form and matter of which had the greatest influence on dramatic comedy. It was not, however, till this dramatic comedy appeared, that wit and ridicule attained to that greatness of form, that unconstrained freedom, and, if we may so say, that inspired energy in the representation of the common and contempt- ible which every friend of antiquity identifies with the name of Aris- tophanes. At that happy epoch, when the full strength of the national above, chap. V. § 8. The Odyssey has more elements of the satyric drama (as in the story of Polyphemus) than of the comedy proper. Satyric poetry brings rude, unintellectual, half-bestial humanity into contact with the tragical ; it places by the lofty forms of the heroes not human perverseness, but the want of real humanity, Avhereas comedy is conversant about the deterioration of civilized humanity. With regard to Hesiod's comic vein, see above chap. XI. $ 3. ; and for the Margites, the same chap. § 4.
 * As in the episode of Thersites and the comic scene with Agamemnon,