change the Comedy of Politics into the Comedy of Manners. “This is poor stuff,” said an old aristocrat of this school, “poor stuff indeed, after what I remember in my younger days. Why can’t the man leave Euripides alone, especially now he is dead, and won’t bother us with any more of his[Pg 12] plays? There are plenty of scoundrel politicians who might to much more purpose come in for a few strokes of the lash. But he daren’t touch the fellows. Ah! it was not always so. I remember the play he brought out eighteen years ago. The ‘Knights’ he called it. That was something like a Comedy! Cleon was at the very height of his power, for he had just made that lucky stroke at Pylos[6]. But Aristophanes did not spare him one bit for that. He could not get any one to take the part; he could not even get a mask made to imitate the great man’s face. So he took the part himself, and smeared his face with the lees of wine. Cleon was there in the Magistrates’ seats. I think we all looked at him as much as we looked at the stage. Whenever there was a hard hit—and, by Bacchus, how hard the hits were!—all the theatre turned to see how he bore it. He laughed at first. Then we saw him turn red and pale—I was close by him and I heard him grind his teeth. Good heavens! what a rage he was in! Well, that is the sort of a play I like to see, not this splitting words, and picking verses to pieces, just as some schoolmaster might do.” [Pg 12] But, in spite of these criticisms, the greater part of the audience were highly delighted with what they had seen and heard. The comic business, with its broad and laughable effects, pleased them, and they were flattered by being treated as judges of literary questions. And the curious thing was that they were not unfit to be judges of such matters. There never was such a well-educated and keen-witted audience in the world. They knew it, and they[Pg 13] dearly liked to be treated accordingly. The judges only echoed the popular voice when at the end of the festival they bestowed the first prize upon Aristophanes. [Pg 13] One criticism, strange to say, no one ever thought of making—and yet, to us, it seems the first, the most obvious of all criticisms, and that is that the play was horribly profane. This cowardly, drunken, sensual Bacchus—and he is ten times worse in the original than I have ventured to make him here—this despicable wretch was one of the gods whom every one in the audience was supposed to worship. The festival which was the occasion of the theatrical exhibition was held in his honor,
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