bear. The rupture of the link between dull
people, consisting in the fraternal agreement that something is too
clever for them, and a shot beyond them, is not to be thought of lightly;
for, slender though the link may seem, it is equivalent to a cement
forming a concrete of dense cohesion, very desirable in the estimation of
the statesman.

A political Aristophanes, taking advantage of his lyrical Bacchic
licence, was found too much for political Athens. I would not ask to have
him revived, but that the sharp light of such a spirit as his might be
with us to strike now and then on public affairs, public themes, to make
them spin along more briskly.

He hated with the politician's fervour the sophist who corrupted
simplicity of thought, the poet who destroyed purity of style, the
demagogue, 'the saw-toothed monster,' who, as he conceived, chicaned the
mob, and he held his own against them by strength of laughter, until
fines, the curtailing of his Comic licence in the chorus, and ultimately
the ruin of Athens, which could no longer support the expense of the
chorus, threw him altogether on dialogue, and brought him under the law.
After the catastrophe, the poet, who had ever been gazing back at the men
of Marathon and Salamis, must have felt that he had foreseen it; and that
he was wise when he pleaded for peace, and derided military coxcombry,
and the captious old creature Demus, we can admit. He had the Comic
poet's gift of common-sense--which does not always include political
intelligence; yet his political tendency raised him above the Old Comedy
turn for uproarious farce. He abused Socrates, but Xenophon, the disciple
of Socrates, by his trained rhetoric saved the Ten Thousand. Aristophanes
might say that if his warnings had been followed there would have been no
such thing as a mercenary Greek expedition under Cyrus. Athens, however,
was on a landslip, falling; none could arrest it. To gaze back, to uphold
the old times, was a most natural conservatism, and fruitless. The aloe
had bloomed. Whether right or wrong in his politics and his criticisms,
and bearing in mind the instruments he played on and the audience he had
to win, there is an idea in his comedies: it is the Idea of Good
Citizenship.

He is not likely to be revived. He stands, like Shakespeare, an
unapproachable. Swift says of him, with a loving chuckle:

'But as for Comic Aristophanes, The dog too witty and too profane is.'

Aristophanes was 'prof