"He has scorned from the first to descend and to dip Peddling and meddling in private affairs: To detect and collect every petty defect Of husband and wife and domestical life; But intrepid and bold, like Alcides of old, When the rest stood aloof, put himself to the proof In his country's behoof." [Footnote: Aristoph. Peace, 751 seq.--Translated by Frere.] His aim, in fact, was deliberately to instruct his countrymen in political and social issues; to attack the abuses of the Assembly, of the Law-courts and the home; to punish demagogues, charlatans, professional politicians; to laugh back into their senses "revolting" sons and wives; to defend the orthodox faith against philosophers and men of science. These are the themes that he embodies in his plots, and these the morals that he enforces when he speaks through the chorus in his own person. And the result is an art-product more strange to the modern mind in its union of poetry with prose, of aesthetic with didactic significance, than even that marvellous creation, the Greek tragedy. Of the character of this comedy the reader may form an idea through the admirable and easily accessible translations of Frere; [Footnote: In Morley's Universal Library.] and we are therefore dispensed from the obligation to attempt, as in the case of tragedy, an account of some particular specimen of the art. Section 8. Summary. And here must conclude our survey of the character of Greek art. The main point which we have endeavoured to make clear has been so often insisted upon, that it is hardly necessary to dwell upon it further. The key to the art of the Greeks, as well as to their ethics, is the identification of the beautiful and the good; and it therefore is as natural in treating of their art to insist on its ethical value as it was to insist on the aesthetic significance of their moral ideal. But, in fact, any insistance on either side of the judgment is misleading. The two points of view had never been dissociated; and art and conduct alike proceeded from the same imperative impulse, to create a harmony or order which was conceived indifferently as beautiful or good. Through and through, the Greek ideal is Unity. To make the individual at one with the State, the real with the ideal, the inner with the outer, art with morals, finally to bring all phases of life under the empire of a single idea, which, with Goethe, we may call, as we will, the good, the beautiful, or the whole--this was the aim, and, to a great extent, the achievement of their genius. And of all the points of view from which we may envisage their brilliant activity none perhaps is more central and more characteristic than this of art, whose essence is the comprehension of the many in the one, and the perfect reflection of the inner in the outer. CHAPTER V CONCLUSION