Chapter 22 eleven

Greek tragedy died differently from all its elder arts: it committed suicide, tragically, by an unresolvable conflict, while all the other arts lived to the end of their lives.If it is said that leaving good offspring and saying goodbye to life without struggle is in line with the natural state of luck, then the ending of the older generation art shows us this natural state of luck.They are slowly dying, and before their extinguished eyes, there already stands a more beautiful successor, eager to hold up his head and chest in a brave gesture.On the contrary, with the death of Greek tragedy came a great void, deeply felt everywhere; just as the Greek boatmen in Tiberius' day heard the mournful cry beside an isolated island: "The great god Pan is dead!" A lament echoed in the Greek world: "Tragedy is dead! Poetry is gone with tragedy forever! Go away, take your withered and weak children and grandchildren! Go away to the underworld, where they can still kill their ancestors." Feast on the master's leftovers!"

However, at this time, after all, there was a new art flourishing. She revered tragedy as a concubine and mistress, but found with horror that although she had her mother's appearance, it was her mother's long-term death struggle. The sadness revealed in.It was Euripides who experienced this dying throes of tragedy; and that later art became known as the new comedy of Attica.In her, the metamorphosis of tragedy lives on, as a monument to tragic death so difficult and violent. In connection with this, the passionate admiration embraced by the poets of the new comedy for Euripides is understandable.So it is not too strange that Philemon wished that he would hang himself immediately if he knew that after death he would still be sane so that he could visit Euripides in the underworld.But to cut a long story short, without going into what exactly Euripides had in common with Menander and Philemon, and what gave them such an exciting demonstration, it is enough to point out that Euripides takes the audience on up the stage.Whoever knows with what material the Promethean tragedies before Euripides fashioned their heroes, and how far the intention of bringing to the stage a faithful mask of reality, would have wondered at Euripides. Stanley's divergent tendencies are well known.Thanks to Euripides, worldly people crowded onto the stage from the audience hall, and the mirrors that once showed only great and brave faces now showed scrupulous fidelity, and even deliberately reproduced the failures of nature.Odysseus, the quintessential Greek in ancient art, now degenerates into the role of Graeculus in the new poets, and from then on occupies the center of dramatic interest as the good and clever house slave.In Aristophanes, Euripides takes credit for freeing tragic art from the pompous potbelly of style with his home-made potion, and this is first felt in his tragic protagonist.Now, what the audience sees and hears on Euripides' stage is actually their own incarnation, and they are smug that this incarnation can speak so well.Not only is he complacent, but he can also learn to speak from Euripides. He was proud of being able to speak well in the competition with Aeschylus.Now the people have learned from him to observe, to confer, and to draw conclusions with skill, and with the most tactful sophistry.By this reformation of the public language he made possible the new comedy in general.For, henceforth, it is no longer a secret how and with what maxims worldly life can be seen on the stage.The mediocrity of the bourgeois, the source of all Euripides' political hope, now speaks freely, whereas before it was the demigod in tragedy, the drunken satyr or demiman in comedy, which determined the character of language.Euripides in Aristophanes prides himself on depicting ordinary, well-known, everyday life that everyone is capable of judging.If the people now philosophize, manage lands, property, and litigate with a shrewdness never before seen, it is to his credit, and the result of the wisdom he has imparted to the people.

Euripides was now the chorus teacher of the new comedy, which was now open to a public so formed and enlightened; but this time the chorus of the audience had yet to be trained.Once they had learned to sing to the tune of Euripides, the new comedy, the chess variant of the drama, which was won by a game of wits, finally rose.However, Euripides, the chorus teacher, is still praised, and people even prefer to be buried in order to continue to learn from him, but the tragic poet has died like tragedy.However, due to the death of the tragic poet, the Greeks gave up their belief in immortality, neither in the ideal past nor in the ideal future. The famous epitaph "as careless and eccentric as an old man" applies equally well to the aging Hellenistic age.Muddling along, gagging, careless, moody, is their supreme god.The fifth estate, the slave estate, is now at least spiritually in power.If it is possible to speak of "Greek joy" in general, it is only the joy of slaves. Slaves have no sense of responsibility for great things, no longing for great things, and no sense of giving to the past and the future more than the present. High respect. This expression of "Greek optimism" so exasperated the deep and terrible natures of the first four centuries of Christian society, that this effeminate fear of serious horrors, this cowardice of comfort Self-sufficiency is not only despicable, but especially a truly anti-Christian state of mind.Influenced by this state of mind, the views of Greek antiquity, handed down through the centuries, have indomitably retained their pinkish optimism—as if never had the sixth century B.C. and its tragic birth, its Mystery, its Pythagoreans and Heraclitus, even as if there had never been a work of art of that great age.As far as these phenomena are concerned, after all, they cannot be explained from such an old and slavish living interest and optimistic soil. They obviously have a completely different worldview as the basis of their existence.

We have asserted that Euripides brought the audience to the stage also in order to make the audience for the first time truly capable of judging the drama.This creates a misconception that earlier tragic art arose out of a situation out of touch with the audience.One would also praise Euripides' radical tendency to establish an adaptive relationship between artwork and public as a step ahead of Sophocles."Public" is, however, nothing but empty words, absolutely without equal and self-sufficient value.Why should the artist be obliged to pander to a force whose strength is manifested only in numbers?When he feels that he is superior to anyone in the audience in talent and ambition, how can he feel more respect in the face of the public opinion of all those less able than himself than for the relatively most talented audience? ?In fact, no Greek artist treated his spectators more arrogantly than Euripides; This tends to conquer the masses.If the genius is too timid before the public noise, he will be crushed by failure long before the prime of his career.In this light, it is expedient to say that Euripides brought the audience on stage in order to make them truly judgmental, and we must seek a deeper understanding of his intentions.On the contrary, everyone knows that Aeschylus and Sophocles were deeply loved by the people throughout their lives and even after their death. Therefore, among the ancestors of Euripides, there is absolutely no talk of works of art and public relations. disconnect between.What was it that so powerfully drove this gifted artist, eager to incessantly create, away from the path illuminated by the sun of the great poet's fame and the clear sky of the love of the people?What kind of strange affection for the audience led him to disobey the audience?How can he despise his public by valuing it too much?

The solution to the riddle is this: Euripides felt that he was much better as a poet than the crowd, but not as good as his two audiences.He brings the crowd to the stage, and honors the two spectators as the only qualified judges and masters of his entire art.Following their orders and advice, he transferred into the minds of his protagonists the whole world of sensations, passions, and experiences that hitherto has been placed in the auditorium at every festival performance as an invisible chorus inside.He concedes to their demands as he searches for new vocabulary and new tones for these new characters, too.When he was repeatedly condemned by public opinion, only from their voices did he hear the effective verdict on his creation, as if he heard the encouragement to win.

One of these two audiences is Euripides himself, Euripides as thinker rather than poet.It can be said of him that his critical faculties are extraordinarily fertile, as in Lessing, if not generating a secondary productive artistic impulse, then perpetuating it.With this talent, with all the brilliance and quickness of his critical thought, Euripides sat in the theater and tried to reacquaint himself with the masterpieces of his great predecessors, line by line, as well as faded paintings.At this moment, he encountered what is not surprising to those who have penetrated the mystery of Aeschylus' tragedy: he found in the lines something incomparable, a deceptive clarity and at the same time a mystery. depth, even the infinity of the background.The most obvious characters always have a comet tail, which seems to mean something vague and hazy.The same intricacies hang over the structure of the play, and especially over the meaning of the chorus.And how unreliable the solution of the ethical problem seemed to him!How problematic is the treatment of mythology!How unevenly is the distribution of happiness and unhappiness!Even in the language of early tragedy much seemed to him unseemly, or at least elusive, especially as he found mere relations too pompous, and simple characters too warm and exaggerated.He sat in the theater, wrestling with anxiety, and then he, the audience, admitted to himself that he did not understand his great predecessor.But since he saw understanding as the true root of all creativity and creativity, he had to look around and ask if there was anyone who thought as he did and admitted that he didn't understand.Yet many, as well as the best, only smiled at him suspiciously; and no one could explain to him why, despite his doubts and objections, the masters were right after all.In this excruciating situation, he finds another audience who does not understand tragedy and therefore does not respect it.Allying himself with this audience freed him from his isolation and gave him the courage to wage a terrible struggle against the works of Aeschylus and Sophocles—not in polemics, but as a dramatic poet, with his tragic ideas against traditional tragedy concept.