and by many steps nearer to the real world than his predecessors had
ever done, and the passionate admiration which Menander and Philemon
expressed for him, and their open avowals that he was their great
master, entitle us to consider their dramas as of a middle species,
between tragedy and comedy,--not the tragi-comedy, or thing of
heterogeneous parts, but a complete whole, founded on principles of its
own. Throughout we find the drama of Menander distinguishing itself from
tragedy, but not, as the genuine old comedy, contrasting with, and
opposing, it. Tragedy, indeed, carried the thoughts into the mythologic
world, in order to raise the emotions, the fears, and the hopes, which
convince the inmost heart that their final cause is not to be discovered
in the limits of mere mortal life, and force us into a presentiment,
however dim, of a state in which those struggles of inward free will
with outward necessity, which form the true subject of the tragedian,
shall be reconciled and solved;--the entertainment or new comedy, on the
other hand, remained within the circle of experience. Instead of the
tragic destiny, it introduced the power of chance; even in the few
fragments of Menander and Philemon now remaining to us, we find many
exclamations and reflections concerning chance and fortune, as in the
tragic poets concerning destiny. In tragedy, the moral law, either as
obeyed or violated, above all consequences--its own maintenance or
violation constituting the most important of all consequences--forms the
ground; the new comedy, and our modern comedy in general, (Shakspeare
excepted as before) lies in prudence or imprudence, enlightened or
misled self-love. The whole moral system of the entertainment exactly
like that of fable, consists in rules of prudence, with an exquisite
conciseness, and at the same time an exhaustive fulness of sense. An old
critic said that tragedy was the flight or elevation of life, comedy
(that of Menander) its arrangement or ordonnance.