Chapter 25 The Birth of Tragedy Chapter Eleven

birth of tragedy Chapter Eleven The death of Greek tragedy is different from her elder art: she committed suicide because of an insoluble dispute, so it is a tragic sacrifice.The rest of the arts lived out their days and died well.If it is said that a happy death should be to leave behind the prosperous children and grandchildren, and pass away peacefully; then, the end of the art of the elder sisters is such a happy death: they slowly die of old age, and on the day of their death, they still have a healthy body. The children and grandchildren stood in front of them, eagerly raising their heads in a bold gesture.Yet when Greek tragedy died, a great void was felt everywhere.Just as in the days of Tibertus, the Greek boatmen on the desert island heard the mournful cry: "The god Pan is dead!" Similarly, in the last days of tragedy, mournful mourning can be heard all over Greece: " Tragedy is dead! Poetry is dead with it! Go away, go away, your haggard descendants! Go to the underworld, where you can still eat the leftovers of your ancestors and masters!"

After the death of tragedy, however, a new art flourished, which made tragedy its mother and mother.People are surprised to notice that she closely resembles her mother's features, but it is the sad face of her long agony.Euripides experienced the tragic death throes firsthand.This later art is called the new comedy of Attica.Tragedy's degenerate form still remains on it, like a monument to tragedy's most tragic death! From this connection, it is not difficult to understand why the poets of the new comedy have such a passionate admiration for Euripides.Therefore, we are no longer surprised by Philemon's wish: he said that as long as he could visit Euripides in the underworld, he would rather posthumously immediately, if he could know for sure that people still have reason after death.If, however, we simply state, without asking for details, what Euripides had in common with Menander and Philemon, and what inspired them to imitate with such enthusiasm; Suffice it to say: Euripides brings the audience on stage.If you know what the Prometheus tragedies used to shape their heroes before Euclidean, and how far away from their intentions they put the true face of reality on the stage; The tendency to run in the opposite direction will suddenly be realized.Thanks to his power, the characters of everyday life can burst from the audience seats onto the stage; the mirror of the theater, which previously reflected only rough and majestic lines, now shows the bleak truth, or even deliberately reproduces the failure of nature.Odysseus, the quintessential Greek in ancient art, is now, by the new poets, reduced to a figure of the Graculus; centrality.Aristophanes' "Frog" admires Euripides because Euripides' home remedy saved tragic art from the bloated disease of pomp.This feat is manifested above all in his tragic characters.Now, the audience really sees their own face and smells their own cough in Euripides' play, and appreciates the beautiful words of the people in the play.However, not only appreciation, you can also learn the skills of speech from Euripides; when he debated with Aeschylus, he prided himself on being eloquent, observing, arguing, and reaching conclusions.In short, he created conditions for a "new comedy" by reforming everyday language.Because, from now on, it is no longer a secret how to express clichés and sayings properly on the stage.The ordinary burgher, on whom all Euripides' political hopes rest, now has a voice, but formerly it was the god-man in tragedy, and the drunken satyr or transgressor in comedy, who determined the nature of language.Therefore, what Euripides in Aristophanes' play is proud of is that he portrays the most common, familiar, and ordinary life and pursuits, and everyone has the ability to judge them.Now, if all ordinary people can think independently, manage land and property very carefully and conduct litigation, this is all due to him and his brilliant achievements in enlightening the people with wisdom.

Now, the new comedy is facing such a prepared and educated populace, so Euripides seems to be the chorus leader of the new comedy, but this time, the chorus of the audience has yet to be trained.Once the chorus had been trained to sing the tune of Euripides, a kind of rivalry flourished, a new comedy of intrigue and outwitting.Nevertheless Euripides, the choir-master, continued to gain praise; indeed, some even killed themselves in order to learn more from him, not knowing that the tragic poets, like tragedies, were henceforth dead.Since the death of the poet, however, the Greeks also abandoned belief in unworthiness, not only in an ideal past, but also in an ideal future.The famous epitaph "frivolous as an old man" also applies to the aging Hellenistic age.Momentary pleasure, wit, indiscretion, restlessness, were the supreme gods of the age; now the fifth estate, the slave class, is in power, at least in the state of mind; if there is any "Greek optimism" to be had now In other words, it is the optimism of slaves; slaves have no great sense of responsibility, no great vision, and they value the present far more than the past or the future.It was this hypocritical "Greek optimism" which annoyed the thoughtful and formidable minds of the first four hundred years of the Christian age; to them this feminine avoidance of responsibility and difficulty, this cowardly greed Ease is not only despicable, but a particularly anti-Christian state of mind.The influence of this spirit has a long history: the ancient Greek world view that has been passed down for hundreds of years, has always maintained some reddish optimism, as if there has never been a civilization in the sixth century BC, the birth of tragedy, and the worship of the mysteries , the philosophies of Pythagoras and Heraclitus, seem never to have produced the works of art of that great age; we cannot, of course, say that each of these phenomena arose from this old, slavish love of life and pleasure. produced; it is evident that they also have an entirely different view of the world as their basis.

We said above that Euripides brought the audience to the stage and at the same time made the audience capable of judging the drama; One would rush to praise Euripides for his radical tendency to establish the correct relation of the work of art to the spectator, a step further than Sophocles.However, the so-called "audience" is a noun after all; it is not a homogeneous constant.What obligation does the artist have to cater to the power of the crowd, which only wins in numbers?If he feels himself superior in talent and ambition to every spectator, why should he respect the public opinion of the less able masses more than the most talented individual spectators?In fact, no other Greek artist treated his audience with such aloofness and conceit as Euripides; he himself, with sublime obstinacy, denounced his own inclinations openly, while the crowd fell at his feet; It is this tendency by which he wins hearts.Had this genius been in awe of the hell of public opinion, he would have been crushed by failure, already in the middle of his career, to be crushed.From this point of view, it is only a provisional hypothesis that Euripides brought the spectator onto the stage in order to make the spectator actually capable of criticism; Propensity.On the contrary, as is well known, Aeschylus and Sophocles were popular all their lives, and even long after their death; The relationship of the work to the viewer is incorrect.So, what is the powerful force that drove this talented and hard-working poet to abandon the reputation of poetry and the love of the people, and leave this bright future where the sun is everywhere and the sky is cloudless?What strange consideration does he have for the audience, so as to oppose the audience?How could he despise the audience because he respected the audience so much?

Our answer to the riddle just posed is this: Euripides felt himself, as a poet, far superior to the general public, but with only two spectators he fell short.He brings the crowd to the stage, and to these two spectators alone he regards them as competent judges and teachers of his art.Following their guidance and advice, he transferred into the minds of the characters all the emotions, the passions, the world of experience, the inner world of the invisible chorus that sat in the audience at every previous performance.When he was looking for new languages ​​and moods for these characters, he had to make concessions to their demands; when he was repeatedly rejected by the audience, he could only follow their words.He hears the justified verdict on his work, the encouragement that victory is in sight.

One of these two audiences is Euripides himself.Euripides the thinker, not Euripides the poet.We can say that Euripides's very rich critical talent, like Leysen's, constantly breeds, if not produces, an artistic impulse that leads to creation.With such talent and his brilliant and sensitive critical thinking, Euripides sat in the theater and tried to understand the masterpieces of his predecessors, bit by bit, line by line, just like appreciating a faded painting. like oil paintings.Here, then, he experienced some of the features expected by experts who have penetrated the mystery of Aeschylus' tragedy, and he saw something unfathomable in the words of Aeschylus' tragedy. Paradoxically obvious.At the same time behind it is a mysterious profundity, even infinite profundity.Even the most superficial characters often have comet tails, which seem to imply some misty meaning.The same hazy twilight hangs over the tragic structure, especially on the purpose of the chorus.Moreover, how puzzling the answers to moral questions remain!The handling of God's words is also quite problematic, and the distribution of Thai luck or not is so unequal!There was much, even in the language of these old tragedies, that repelled him, at least inexplicably; above all he found the simple relationships to be exaggerated, the similes and pompous expressions of ordinary characters too much. .So, he sat in the theater, thinking uneasily; as an audience, he admitted that he could not understand his old masters.If, however, he thinks that understanding is the chief source of appreciation and creation, then he will ask, and look around, to see if other people think as he does and feel this unfathomable mystery as he does.However, many, even the best of the best.only answered him with a distrustful smile; but no one could explain to him why the masters were always right, despite his doubts and dissents.So, with an extremely painful heart, he found another audience. This audience did not understand tragedy, so they did not respect tragedy.United with this spectator, freed from isolation, he dares to wage a brutal struggle against the works of Aeschylus and Sophocles;—not as a polemicist, but as a tragic poet Identity proposes its own notion of tragedy, rebelling against conventional notions.