yet attempted to make our own, is that of comic poetry. We have indeed had many and various comic writers of first-rate quality; but although, when they were so minded, Chaucer and Shakespeare and Byron could show themselves to be masters of comedy in verse, we have as yet had no Aristophanes, but have been obliged to content ourselves with the charming trivialities and vulgarities of[Pg 51] a Gilbert. If only Ben Jonson, in addition to stage-craft, Gargantuan comic energy and Titanic eloquence, had been gifted with a particle of that fiery celestial ether, by which alone mortal art can become divine, then indeed perhaps.... But of what use are regrets? The future, not the past, is here our concern. And what a future might there not be for the comic genius who should be so fortunately inspired as to take the popular Farce, or even the theatrical Revue, and by giving it the life and the wings of poetry, so transform it from a poor ephemeral stage-hobby-horse into an immortal cloud-cruising Pegasus, or at least a serviceable Hippogryph! Thus sublimely mounted, what regions of the earth and sky might not such a Bellerophon explore? What monsters and Chimæras might he not torment and slay with the shafts of his lyrical ridicule? All that men and women say or think or do, would lie ready as[Pg 52] fuel for his imagination to kindle at will, all our follies and fashions, vices and virtues, stupidities, cruelties, noble extravagances, religious and metaphysical dreams. If Socrates could afford to be a good-naturedly amused spectator of the Clouds, so might Freud of some Comedy of Dreams by our modern Aristophanes: and if he could not, why, so much the worse for him and his speculations. How wholesome too for our prominent statesmen and demagogues!—But alas, I am forgetting our Lord Chamberlain. We are not yet sufficiently enlightened to tolerate political caricature and Rabelaisian ribaldry upon our stage, and an English Knights or Lysistrata must remain, I fear, for the present a poet’s dream. Nevertheless, under a reasonably intelligent censorship, what Rabelais was for his age, an emancipated imaginative comedy might well be for our own, except that, whereas the Gallic genius has always expressed itself[Pg 53] most naturally and completely in prose, ours would expand more congenially into poetry, which, for all its apparent limitations, should be, at its best, the more universal interpreter of the spirit of man, whether on the plane of tragedy or of comedy.

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There is good reason for hoping that the problem of an adequate stage-performance of 

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