have merely an historical interest, and it would have ceased spiritually
at 4O4 B.C.

But Panurge is as fantastic and fascinating a character now as he was
3OO years ago, Lysistrata and her girls as freshly bodied as any girl
kissed to-day. Therefore the serious part of the play is that which
deals with them, the frivolous part that in which Rogers detects gravity
and earnestness.

Aristophanes is the lord of all who take life as a gay adventure, who
defy all efforts to turn life into a social, economic, or moral
abstraction. Is it therefore just that the critics who, by some dark
instinct, unerringly pick out the exact opposite of any creator's real
virtues as his chief characteristics, should praise him as an idealistic
reformer? An "ideal" state of society was the last thing Aristophanes
desired. He wished, certainly, to eliminate inhumanities and baseness;
but only that there might be free play for laughter, for individual
happiness.

Consequently the critics lay the emphasis on the effort to cleanse
society, not the method of laughter. Aristophanes wished to destroy
Cleon because that demagogue failed to realize the poet's conception of
dignified government and tended to upset the stability of Hellas. But it
was the stability of life, the vindication of all individual freedoms,
in which he was ultimately interested.

JACK LINDSAY.


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