Chapter 8

Aristophanes loved Æschylus by that law of affinity which causes Marivaux to love Racine tragedy and comedy made to understand each other.

The same distracted and all-powerful breath fills Æschylus and Aristophanes. They are the two inspired spirits of the antique mask.

Aristophanes, who is not yet judged, adhered to the mysteries, to Cecropian poetry, to Eleusis, to Dodona, to the Asiatic twilight, to the profound pensive dream. This dream, whence sprung the art of Egina, was at the threshold of the Ionian philosophy in Thales as well as at the threshold of the Italian philosophy in Pythagoras. It was the sphinx guarding the entrance.

This sphinx has been a muse, —the great pontifical and lascivious muse of universal rut; and Aristophanes loved it This sphinx breathed tragedy into Æschylus, and comedy into Aristophanes. It had something of Cybele. The ancient sacred immodesty is in Aristophanes. At moments he has Bacchus foaming at the lips. He came from the Dionysia, or from the Aschosia, or from the great Trieteric Orgy, and he strikes one as a raving maniac of the mysteries. His wild verse resembles the bassaride hopping giddily upon bladders filled with air. Aristophanes has the sacerdotal obscurity. He is for nudity against love. He denounces the Phedras and Sthenobæas, and he creates Lysistrata.

Let no one be deceived on this point; it was religion, and a cynic was an austere mind. The gymnosophists were the point of intersection between lewdness and thought The he-goat, with its philosopher’s beard, belonged to that sect That dark ecstatic and bestial Oriental spirit lives still in the santon, the dervish, and the fakir. The corybantes were a kind of Greek fakirs. Aristophanes, like Diogenes, belonged to that family. Æschylus, by the Oriental bent of his nature, nearly belonged to it himself, but he retained the tragic chastity.

That mysterious naturalism was the ancient spirit of Greece. It was called poetry and philosophy. It had under it the group of the seven sages, one of whom, Periander, was a tyrant. Now, a certain vulgar, mean spirit appeared with Socrates. It was sagacity clearing and bottling up wisdom. Reduction of Thales and Pythagoras to the immediate true. Such was the operation. A sort of filtering, which, purifying and weakening, allowed the ancient divine doctrine to percolate, drop by drop, and become human. These simplifications disgust fanaticism; dogmas object to a process of sifting. To ameliorate a religion is to lay violent hands on it. Progress offering its services to Faith, offends it. Faith is an ignorance which professes to know, and which, in certain cases, knows perhaps more than Science. In the face of the lofty affirmations of believers, Socrates had an uncomfortably sly half-smile. There is something of Voltaire in Socrates. Socrates denounces all the Eleusinian philosophy as unintelligible and indiscernible; and he said to Euripides that to understand Heraclitus and the old philosophers, “one required to be a swimmer of Delos,”—in other words, a swimmer capable of landing on an isle which was always receding before him. That was impiety and sacrilege for the ancient Hellenic naturalism. There was no other cause for the antipathy of Aristophanes toward Socrates.