Page:The Theatre of the Greeks, a Treatise on the History and Exhibition of the Greek Drama, with Various Supplements.djvu/95

 ORIGIN OF COMEDY. 77 sentation. The object of popular dislike was not merely called a coward, a villain, a rogue, or a fool, but he was exhibited on the stage doing everything contemptible and suffering everything ludi- crous. This systematic personality, the lafjb^oKrj ISea'^ of the old popular farce, would not have sufficed to obtain for Comedy an adequate share of attention from the refined and accomplished democracy, which established itself at Athens during the admi- nistration of Pericles. It was necessary that the comic poet who would gain a hearing in the theatre at Athens should borrow from Tragedy many of its most striking peculiarities — its choral dances, its masked actors, its metrical forms, its elaborate scenery and machines, and above all that chastened elegance of the Attic dialect, which the fastidiousness of an Athenian citizen required and ex- acted from the poets and orators. The comedy became a regular drama, recalling indeed a recollection of the old phallic comus by an extravagant obscenity of language and costume, but often pre- senting an elegance in the dialogues and a poetic refinement in the melic portions, which would have borne a comparison with the best efforts of the contemporary tragic muse. Upon this stock the mighty genius of Aristophanes grafted his own Pantagruelism, which has in every age, since the days of its reproducer Eabelais, found in some European country, and in some form or other, a more or less adequate representative, — Cervantes, Qaevedo, Butler, Swift, Sterne, Voltaire, Jean Paul, Carlyle, and South ey. By Pantagruelism we mean— in accordance with the definition which we have elsewhere given of the term^ — an assumption of Bacchanalian buffoonery as a cloak to cover some serious purpose. Babelais, who invented the word to express a certain literary deve- lopment of the character sustained by the court-fools in the middle ages, must have been quite conscious that he was reproducing, as far as his age allowed, not only the spirit but even the outward machinery of the Old Comedy. At any rate he adopts the disguise of low buffoonery for the express purpose of attacking some form of prevalent cant and imposture; and this was consistently the ob- ject of Aristophanes. Whether he professedly takes Aristophanes as his model, and as the lamp to light him on the way^ may 1 Aristot. Poet. 5. 2 In the Quarterly Review, No, CLXI. pp. 137 sqq. ^ We have shown in the paper on Pantagruelism already cited, that the reference to Aristophanes and Cleanthes as the lanterns of honour (Rabelais, v. c. 33) is derived