OLD SAWS AND 
 MODERN INSTANCES 
 
OLD SAWS AND 
 MODERN INSTANCES 
 
 BY 
 
 W. L. COURTNEY, M.A., LL.D. 
 
 AUTHOR OF 
 
 "THE LITERARY MAN'S BIBLE," "ROSEMARY'S LETTER BOOK," 
 
 /'IN SEARCH OF EGERIA," " UNDINE, A DREAM PLAY," ETC. 
 
 NEW YORK 
 E. P. BUTTON & COMPANY 
 
PRINTED IN GREAT BRITAIN BY 
 
 RICHARD CLAY & SONS, LIMITED, 
 
 BRUNSWICK ST., STAMFORD ST., S.E. 1, 
 
 AND BUNGAY, SUFFOLK. 
 
PREFACE 
 
 A SELF-SUFFICIENT book requires no Preface, still less 
 does it need an apology. It is my misfortune that this 
 book seems to require both. 
 
 First, an apology. I am quite aware that I have altered 
 a well-known phrase in using it as my title; and that it 
 should be " wise " saws and not " old " saws that are 
 conjoined with " modern instances." But while I have 
 few pretentions to wisdom, I can at least advance some 
 claims to age ; and many of the themes with which I deal 
 are sufficiently old to justify their right to a familiar 
 antiquity. 
 
 There is, I fear, much repetition in these pages, and 
 there is certainly some lack of connection and unity. My 
 main desire, however, has been to illustrate modern ques- 
 tions by ancient examples especially in the region of 
 drama. Thus I have made a study of Brieux in close 
 connection with a study of Euripides, and have contrasted 
 and compared Mr. Hardy's Dynasts with the great plays 
 of ^Eschylus. An inquiry into the conditions and limita- 
 tions of Dramatic Realism is perhaps the most substantive 
 of my aims in this book, which also includes some purely 
 historical essays. 
 
 W. L. C. 
 
 London, 
 
 August 1918. 
 
CONTENTS 
 
 PAGE 
 
 PREFACE ........ v 
 
 MR. THOMAS HARDY AND ^SCHYLUS I ... 1 
 
 II ... 17 
 
 ARISTOPHANES, THE PACIFIST I ... .31 
 
 II 45 
 
 DEMOSTHENES AND THE PRINCIPLES OF PATRIOTISM . 60 
 PATRIOTISM AND ORATORY : VENIZELOS AND DEMOSTHENES 73 
 
 SAPPHO AND ASPASIA .89 
 
 A PHILOSOPHIC EMPEROR ...... 109 
 
 THE IDEA OF COMEDY I ...... 122 
 
 !!.... . 140 
 
 REALISTIC DRAMA I 161 
 
 II. . 180 
 
 III ... . 201 
 
 EUGENE BRIEUX, MORALIST . . . . . .218 
 
 " OUR EURIPIDES, THE HUMAN " . . . . . 236 
 
 SIR HERBERT TREE AND THE ENGLISH STAGE . .251 
 INDEX 265 
 
 vii 
 
OLD SAWS AND MODERN 
 INSTANCES 
 
 MR. THOMAS HARDY AND ^SCHYLUS 
 
 THE conjunction of names is not arbitrary or paradoxical. 
 There is a great deal of ^Eschylus in Mr. Thomas Hardy 
 a certain ruggedness, austerity, elevation, a definite 
 philosophical scheme at the back of all his creations and 
 a gift of high-sounding rhetoric and occasional poetry. 
 As a poet, to be sure, Mr. Hardy is manifestly inferior to 
 .^Eschylus, who wrote some lines of unforgettable beauty 
 as well as strength. He is also inferior as a dramatic 
 artist, for JEschylus's Oresteian trilogy and his Prometheus 
 Vinctus are among the greatest achievements of drama, 
 only to be compared with the biggest work of Shakespeare. 
 But Mr. Hardy has his own qualities of distinction and 
 power ; and if he only writes poetry with a conscious effort, 
 as though in answer to Nature's stern imperative " Thou 
 shalt not be a poet " he had boldly and laboriously 
 answered " I will," he has achieved in The Dynasts a 
 grandiose exploit which is destined to live. For he has 
 taken the whole period of the Napoleonic Wars and tried 
 to show how much greater and more successfully borne 
 was the labour of England in defeating the enemy than 
 most chroniclers have been disposed to allow; and in 
 the execution of his task he has shown us animated pictures 
 of Courts and camps, of seascapes and landscapes, of 
 capital cities and country villages, together with portraits 
 of generals and common soldiers, kings and peasants 
 constituting, as it seems to me, a veritable epic of a pro- 
 digious war, rich in artistic colour and imaginative skill, 
 which nevertheless with a certain perversity he has chosen 
 
5?.. i^LD ( .SAWS AND MODERN INSTANCES 
 
 to present in a so-called dramatic form. Actable drama, 
 of course, it is not. It is too cumbrous, too voluminous, 
 too diffuse. Its three parts, nineteen acts and one hundred 
 and thirty scenes, are not constructed as a drama with a 
 single interest and a central unity. It is, as Mr. Hardy 
 himself says, a play " intended for mental performance 
 and not for the stage." And yet we cannot but remember 
 that when Mr. Granville Barker produced selected scenes 
 from it at the Kingsway Theatre, with Mr. Henry Ainley 
 as a kind of Master of Ceremonies and official interpreter, 
 The Dynasts created an atmosphere of its own and produced 
 a dramatic effect, which none of those who were present 
 are likely to forget. It is a great piece of work, and even 
 its " disjecta membra " bear the stamp of a great and 
 creative mind. 
 
 1 
 
 What, however, I desire to examine is not the poetic or 
 dramatic excellence of either J^schylus or Mr. Thomas 
 Hardy. It is their poetic mission, their message to the 
 world. For a poet is not a mere collector of mighty- 
 mouthed harmonies, nor an seolian harp through which the 
 winds of Heaven whistle as they list. He is a bard, a seer, 
 a prophet, who tells us something of an unseen world to 
 which his imagination enables him to ascend and bring 
 down tidings to us dwellers in the prosaic plains. The 
 same thing is, of course, true of a dramatist; indeed, in 
 some senses it is more true. In all drama, it is said, there 
 is divinity sometimes, it must be confessed, a little be- 
 clouded and disguised when we have to deal with mediocre 
 times, but always visible like lightning flashes across a 
 black sky in the great artists. For consider a little. 
 The task of a dramatist is exactly antithetical to that of 
 the priest. The latter' s business is to reconcile men to 
 God. God, Goodness, Justice, Mercy are taken for granted, 
 and we must square our conceptions with these primordial 
 axioms. But a dramatist, with his human interest and 
 preoccupations, starts from the other end, the man's side. 
 He does not take anything for granted except the great 
 broad facts of human nature. Hence, observing how men 
 are hampered and controlled and frustrated by their own 
 passions, or by what we call Destiny, he sees it as his great 
 business to justify God to men. He must show what are 
 
THOMAS HARDY AND ^SCHYLUS 3 
 
 the limiting conditions of human activity, how men are 
 helped or hindered by the laws of Nature. He must 
 interpret the scheme of world-governance to the purblind 
 sons of men. 
 
 Some dramatists are more conscious of this mission : 
 some are almost unconscious of it. Nevertheless, it remains 
 in the background of all their work, as something we, at 
 all events, can appreciate as constituting their rank and 
 value in world-history. Scarcely any dramatist of the first 
 rank has been a less conscious moralist and preacher than 
 Shakespeare. And yet how much we learn from Shake- 
 speare's calm outlook over the world, his dispassionate 
 judgment of men and women, his clear recognition that we 
 weave our own fates, and that for us Destiny is human 
 character ! If he makes his pessimist say 
 
 " As flies to wanton boys are we to the gods. 
 They kill us for their sport," 
 
 he gives to a more manly character the utterance : 
 
 " The fault, dear Brutus, lies not in our stars, 
 But in ourselves that we are underlings." 
 
 Goethe was a more self-conscious artist than Shakespeare, 
 especially in his Faust. Both ^schylus and Thomas 
 Hardy are very anxious to explain to us their view of the 
 way the world is governed. And sometimes a dramatist 
 will insist on inculcating a patent and obvious moral 
 witness Brieux in Les Avaries and Les Trois Filles de 
 M. Dupont and G. B. Shaw in such pieces as Widowers' 
 Houses and Mrs. Warren's Profession. But to be didactic 
 in this urgent and palpable form is to miss something of 
 the artist's serenity and to injure the dramatic effect by a 
 constant uplifting of the schoolmaster's forefinger. We 
 go to the drama to listen and think and be silent : we do 
 not cherish the prospect of being soundly birched. 
 
 2 
 
 ^Eschylus and Thomas Hardy are, as I have said, 
 conscious artists : they feel themselves under a real 
 necessity of accounting for the phantasmagoria of existence 
 in accordance with principles appealing to intelligence. 
 Such a general statement may require some qualification 
 when we come to deal with our contemporary poet, but 
 
4 OLD SAWS AND MODERN INSTANCES 
 
 with the Greek poet it is abundantly justified. No doubt 
 there was something in the condition of the time which 
 seemed to necessitate a reconstruction of man's attitude 
 to the Divine something which necessarily laid upon the 
 shoulders of thoughtful men the burden of explanation. 
 Views about the God or gods were changing, and had to 
 be readjusted to known facts. Human daily experience 
 and rationalised experience, which is science, alike threw 
 doubts on current theology and mythology. A novel 
 interpretation was urgently required to save the old faith, 
 or, if that was impossible, to provide bases for a new faith. 
 In JSschylus's time the Olympian gods were coming or 
 had come into their own, and were replacing the old bar- 
 baric deities mainly earth-deities worshipped with all 
 manner of superstitions by the earlier inhabitants of the 
 land. For, of course, Zeus and Athena, Apollo and Ares 
 and Hephaestus, Artemis and Aphrodite, and the rest were 
 not aboriginal, but were introduced into Greece as the 
 bright creations of an artistic race which had got beyond 
 the stupid worship of stocks and stones. Once established 
 they had to justify themselves, or rather be justified by 
 such artists in marble as Pheidias and such artists in verse 
 as the Attic dramatists. Zeus had, it is true, overthrown 
 Kronos, but he still had to show that he deserved to rule. 
 It was at this point that ^Eschylus took up his burden of 
 interpretation, being a deeply religious man, versed in the 
 Mysteries, as well as acquainted with the teaching of 
 Pythagoras. 1 Sophocles, his successor, was more con- 
 cerned with man idealised man. Euripides frankly gave 
 up the whole business and did not conceal his scorn for the 
 Gods, until late in life he acknowledged the might of the 
 newer deity, Dionysus, in that strange play The Bacchce. 
 But ^Eschylus, as we shall see, was full of his arduous 
 mission, working with an uncertain hand in the Prometheus 
 Vinctus, but with assured mastery in the Agamemnon and 
 the Eumenides. He was a God-intoxicated poet. 
 
 Mr. Hardy's problem is that which weighs upon us all 
 in a modern world to reconcile what Science tells us 
 about the Cosmos w r ith the revelations of Christianity. 
 How in a system of things governed by the unalterable 
 relation of Cause to Effect, antecedent to consequent, 
 can we find room for a Divine Providence ? In a material- 
 
 1 ^Eschylus non poeta solum, sed etiam Pythagoreus : sic enim 
 accepimus. Cic., Tusc. //., 10, 23. 
 
THOMAS HARDY AND .ESCHYLUS 5 
 
 istic universe is there any place for a God, especially a God 
 who is at once omniscient and omnipotent, infinitely just 
 and infinitely benevolent? It is especially in times of 
 some great calamity, the ruin caused by an earthquake 
 or a pestilence, or the world-wide sorrow of a vast war, 
 that we begin to question the Divine government and ask 
 ourselves how the wholesale destruction of youthful life 
 the very promise of the future can be accounted for or 
 harmonised with the notion of an all-powerful God who 
 wills the welfare of mankind. Mr. Hardy, as we know, 
 has been obsessed both in his novels and his long dramatic 
 poem The Dynasts with that great European convulsion, 
 the Napoleonic Wars. Indeed, Wessex and the Napoleonic 
 campaign would be a brief summary of his main interest, 
 his chief preoccupation in his work. If, therefore, he is at 
 pains to explain for us in piece after piece the conclusions 
 he has arrived at, his philosophic estimate of ultimate 
 problems is as pertinent and as important in reference to 
 the present tremendous conflict as it is to that which was 
 waged by our forefathers a century ago. And what is his 
 solution of the problem ? It is a melancholy confession 
 of Nescience and Agnosticism. Like .ZEschylus, he will 
 replace an old conception of Godhead by a new one. The 
 God we have to recognise, however, is not a Person, reason- 
 able, kindly, paternal, but an Immanent Will, an abstract 
 energy which works blindly, mechanically, automatically, 
 without intelligence, moving men on its gigantic chessboard 
 as mere pawns and puppets in a game which it does not 
 understand but which it pursues unceasingly. Events 
 happen not because they have been fore-ordained, but 
 purely arbitrarily. Men act not self-impelled, or because 
 they will to act. They dance like figures on a string to a 
 tune set them by a blind Power. 
 
 Such in general outline is the position taken up by the 
 two poets the one a scientific agnostic of the modern 
 type, the other a philosophic advocate of the gods. Both, 
 confronted by similar problems, accept it as their problem 
 to justify the ways of the God or gods to men, the earlier 
 writer by attempting to reform the current conceptions 
 of the Godhead, the other by frankly denying intelligence, 
 pity, providence to that blind but extremely active force 
 which he calls the Immanent Will. If J^schylus gives 
 consolation to his listeners troubled with the enigma of 
 Evil and suffering in a God-ordained world, Mr. Thomas 
 
6 OLD SAWS AND MODERN INSTANCES 
 
 Hardy cuts the Gordian knot by denying that the world 
 is God-ordained. The first is occupied primarily with an 
 ethical question; the second with a scientific question. 
 What, asks Mr. Hardy, is the ultimate fact about the 
 world ? and he answers that in final analysis it is resolved 
 into Force, Energy, Will. But ^Eschylus's question is 
 different. Is the world, as we know it, constructed and 
 ordered on lines which appeal to human reason ? Yes, he 
 answers. Zeus or the Godhead cares for Justice, Goodness, 
 and Truth. He punishes wrong-doing even to the third 
 generation. Ruin, destruction, death are due to men's 
 sins to their pride, their audacity, their arrogant insolence. 
 
 3 
 
 In JSschylus's time the Olympian gods had, as we have 
 said, come into their own. It must not be imagined that 
 they were primitive deities, for Greece originally worshipped 
 much ruder and barbarous powers, archaic objects of 
 reverence like sacred stones or trees or certain animals. 
 When the Achaeans came down from the north they 
 brought their gods with them and established them on 
 Mount Olympus in Thessaly. Zeus, primarily an air-god, 
 and the rest of his company were never said to have 
 created the world : no, like the men whose highest aspira- 
 tion they represented, they were conquerors, they took 
 possession of the land and made the original inhabitants 
 captives. Behind the bright figures of the Olympians there 
 is always a dark background of something crude and 
 immature and savage, which they had overthrown. The 
 Gods fought the Titans. Zeus gained his ascendancy by 
 killing Kronos, just as a still more primitive deity, Uranus, 
 had been put out of the way by his successor. In this 
 fashion was pictured the change which had come over the 
 land when brute powers, together with bloody rites of 
 sacrifice, were replaced by intelligent, rational agencies, 
 made after the fashion of men, it is true, but of idealised 
 men. To some extent the Hellenic Pantheon was a 
 literary creation, which we attribute to the times of 
 Peisistratus and to the conscious literary work of Homer 
 and Hesiod. But it was equally a creation of sculpture 
 and plastic art, Pheidias and his associates carving in 
 magnificent outlines the objects which the Greeks were 
 bidden to worship. Mythology, based on local legends, 
 
THOMAS HARDY AND JESCHYLUS 7 
 
 formed the divine annals of Heaven and its rulers. If 
 ever a theology was palpably constructed by men and bore 
 obvious traces of its human workmanship, it was the 
 Olympian. It was framed to make the world intelligible, 
 to improve moral conceptions, and to serve as the recognised 
 creed of the Greek state or polis. But being an artificial 
 structure it eventually perished because it was " human, 
 too human." It died of its very humaneness. 1 
 
 ^Eschylus, like the dramatists who succeeded him, 
 ransacked the myths for the subjects of his plays, but being 
 a man of lofty and pious mind he usually tried to lift the 
 s:ories to his own high level. Inevitably, however, he 
 found the details of the myths clashing with his own moral 
 and religious conceptions, and hence it became his task to 
 rationalise, not so much the fables themselves, as the 
 deductions which men were in the habit of drawing from 
 them. His was essentially a lyrical gift, and the choruses 
 of his plays, in which he gave his lyrical capacity full play, 
 became sometimes, not the comments of a sympathetic 
 observer, but philosophical essays touched with emotion. 
 Whether he was a Pythagorean or not, he was assuredly 
 something of a mystic which lends colour to the assertion 
 that he was accused of revealing some of the secrets of the 
 mysteries. But if we are tempted to look upon him as a 
 speculative thinker, let us remember that he was also a 
 soldier. He and his brother fought for Hellas in her 
 struggle with the Persian power, and when men wrote his 
 epitaph in Sicily, where he died, they said not a word 
 about his dramas or his poetry : they recorded the glorious 
 fact that he took up arms against his country's foes. And 
 probably Aristophanes' s intense admiration for him was 
 largely due to the fact that he belonged to the noble troop 
 of MaQa6a)vojud%cu. 
 
 When a thoughtful man of this calibre deals with 
 religious faiths he is little likely to leave them where he 
 found them. Throughout all his plays we find constant 
 evidence that the poetic as well as the philosophic imagina- 
 tion is at work in dealing with Olympian theology; but 
 for our purpose in our desire to discover what he thought 
 about the principal God or Zeus, two dramas are of especial 
 importance, the Prometheus Vinctus and the Agamemnon. 
 Just as the main interest in Isaiah's prophecies is the view 
 he held about Jahveh, so, too, in a dramatist who has 
 1 See Prof. Gilbert Murray's Four Stages of Greek Religion, c. ii. 
 
8 OLD SAWS AND MODERN INSTANCES 
 
 some of the qualities of Isaiah, the main interest is the 
 portraiture and conception of Zeus. 
 
 M.V.; 
 
 The Prometheus is as broad in its conception and as 
 pregnant in its lessons as the Hebraic " Book of Job." It 
 must be remembered that the play which we possess is 
 one of a probable trilogy ; it deals with the Titan enchained. 
 The two other members of the trilogy were called Tht 
 Fire-bearer (IIvocpoQos), and Prometheus Unbound (^v6^svo<;\ 
 Probably the " fire-bearer " was concerned with the thef: 
 of fire from Heaven, and came first. Then followed the 
 play which has been preserved, the Prometheus Vinctus 
 (deofji(hrri<;\ and to that succeeded in its turn the play of 
 release and reconciliation. 1 Viewing the trilogy in its 
 completeness, we see that it is, like Job, a drama of 
 human relations to the divine. Man's free will as against 
 God's omnipotence; man's revolt against the arbitrariness 
 of the Divine Rule; man's justification on the score of 
 equity and reasonableness as against such a theory of 
 dependence as is involved in the doctrine of the potter 
 and his clay such are some of the points involved. 
 Prometheus, the blameless benefactor of the human race 
 (to whom he gave the inestimable boon of fire), victimised 
 and persecuted by the Olympian ruler, bears a colourable 
 resemblance to Job, a just and innocent man, plagued and 
 tormented by the arbitrary will of Heaven in order that his 
 rectitude might be proved to be disinterested. In the long 
 run both Job and Prometheus receive compensation and 
 are restored to their dignities, but only after a wearisome 
 period of physical torture and mental and moral suffering. 
 Or are we altogether wrong in such an analogy, and did 
 JSschylus mean to represent in his hero an arrogant 
 arch-rebel instead of a suffering saint ? Is he a martyr or 
 Milton's Satan? 
 
 Let us look at the data before us in order to answer 
 this question. We will assume that the first play of the 
 trilogy represented the theft of fire. Zeus and the 
 Olympians were involved in a tremendous warfare with the 
 Titans. Prometheus, himself a Titan (whose name means 
 
 1 This is, I think, the natural order. Other theories either place the 
 nup<j>6pos last, or assume that ^Eschylus competed on this occasion with 
 two plays, not three. 
 
THOMAS HARDY AND AESCHYLUS 9 
 
 forethought), sided with Zeus, and demonstrated to him 
 that not force but stratagem and cleverness would win 
 the day. Having thus earned the gratitude of the God by 
 enabling him to win, the Titan, grieved to the soul at 
 seeing the wretched lot of human beings, stole fire in a 
 hollow reed (fire was the prerogative of Hephaestus), and 
 thus bestowed the most precious of all boons, the source 
 of all inventions and a very instrument of civilisation, on 
 the miserable inhabitants of earth. For this act of bene- 
 ficent larceny the Titan is condemned to a severe penalty. 
 Zeus ordains that he shall remain bound in chains on a 
 desolate rock until such time as he bows his head before 
 the sovereignty of the Olympian and confesses his fault. 
 We see him, therefore, at the opening of our play the 
 second of the trilogy fastened by iron rivets to his rock 
 and calling heaven and earth and sea to witness to the 
 injustice of his case. Notice in passing how singular this 
 drama is in its immobility. Drama means action, whereas 
 here there is inaction. Prometheus remains fastened to 
 his rock until the very close, when he and the rock are 
 swallowed up in chaos, and the whole play is, as it were, 
 immobilised with him. 
 
 But we are not left in much doubt as to the due disposal 
 of our sympathies. I will defy any one to read the Prome- 
 theus Vinctus without being sorry for the hero and enthu- 
 siastically espousing his side of the quarrel. The arrange- 
 ments and incidents of the drama make this clear. After 
 Hephaestus has done his sorry work and left Prometheus 
 bound, the Chorus enters. And of whom does the Chorus 
 consist? Of the daughters of Oceanus, sea-maidens, 
 tender, emotional, with words of pity and consolation in 
 their mouths, only too anxious to do the hero a service 
 and in such a hurry to get to him that, as ^Eschylus quaintly 
 says, they had not had time to put on their sandals. The 
 Oceanides are an element of beauty in the rugged, un- 
 friendly scene, appealing not only pictorially to the 
 sympathetic eyes of the spectator, but morally also, inas- 
 much as they loyally brave the final catastrophe rather 
 than desert their friend. Oceanus himself, when he comes 
 on, mounted on his hippogriff, represents caution and 
 prudence, for he recommends the Titan to make his peace 
 with Heaven; but he does not speak as an enemy, but 
 rather in the language of common sense and compromise. 
 The next visitor is the strange figure of 16, whose presence 
 
10 OLD SAWS AND MODERN INSTANCES 
 
 here is very significant. She is Zeus' s enemy, or rather 
 the victim of his despotic will, tormented by a gadfly 
 because she refused her divine lover's embrace, and there- 
 fore naturally attracted to Prometheus as a rebel at heart 
 against tyrannical authority. Even Hephaestus, who 
 might well have considered himself injured by the theft of 
 his special privilege, fire, is sorry for Prometheus; and 
 when towards the close of the drama it is announced that 
 yet more terrible suffering is to befall him for he is to be 
 cast down into Hades and an eagle is to prey on his liver, 
 which is to be perpetually renewed in order that there may 
 be every day a new feast we feel that the poet has with 
 direct intention so portrayed his hero's fate that we are 
 full of compassion for the victim, and of indignation against 
 his tormentor. So far as this play is concerned, the Father 
 of Gods and Men is depicted in lurid colours as an unjust 
 and vindictive bully, using his power ruthlessly in order 
 to injure a helper and ally. 
 
 Yet this cannot represent a permanent mood in ^Eschylus. 
 He was, as we know, devout and pious, sincerely anxious 
 to bring into fruitful and beneficent relation humanity and 
 the Godhead. The solution of the enigma is to be found 
 in the third play of the trilogy, which has for its subject 
 the Deliverance. How is Prometheus delivered ? We 
 have only a few fragments to guide us, but it is not very 
 difficult to reconstruct the piece. We discover that 
 Prometheus is brought out of Hades and has at his side a 
 friend in Heracles a lineal descendant from 16, whose 
 future progeny was foretold by the Titan in the earlier 
 play. The eagle arrives to carry out its dreadful task; 
 Heracles puts an arrow on his bow-string, takes aim, and 
 the eagle falls. The process of reconciliation then proceeds 
 apace. Prometheus was the possessor of a secret affecting 
 the future of Zeus. If the God carried out his intention of 
 marrying Thetis, the child born of such a union was to 
 prove stronger than his father, just as Zeus himself had 
 proved stronger than Kronos. This secret the Titan is 
 now induced to reveal thus adding a new service to that 
 which he had originally rendered to the Olympian monarch. 
 Therefore he earns his pardon, and when a substitute has 
 been found to go down to Hades in his place, he is restored 
 to favour and given a special festival in his honour at 
 Athens. Throughout the play, apparently, Zeus is portrayed 
 as in a kindly mood, ready to let bygones be bygones. 
 
THOMAS HARDY AND ^SCHYLUS 11 
 
 What are we to make of this contrast ? The design of 
 JSschylus is tolerably clear. The Olympian dynasty has 
 to be established, taking the place of the older, more 
 savage Gods, together with their cruel and bloody rites. 
 So Zeus, who has killed Kronos, defeats the Titans. But 
 a young conqueror, who has succeeded by force, is not 
 likely to give up his drastic methods when first he gets 
 the reins into his own hands. He is not sufficiently sure 
 of his position. Against any insurgent or rebel he will 
 act with prompt violence : conspirators, whose ultimate 
 designs are not clear, must be treated as enemies and 
 crushed forthwith. This is the stage of Zeus' s rule when 
 Prometheus steals fire for the sake of mankind. The 
 Olympian King will endure no possible rivals near his 
 throne and at once condemns the friend of men to severe 
 punishment. But after a time Zeus' s methods change. 
 He has gained the security he desired, his reign is estab- 
 lished, and he can therefore afford to be lenient. He is 
 reconciled to Prometheus and forgives him. In this daring 
 fashion ^Eschylus remodels an old myth in order to satisfy 
 the moral sense. From Zeus the young despot he turns 
 our attention to Zeus the more mature ruler of a better 
 organised Empire, and transforms impatient cruelty into 
 reasonable benevolence. The reformed Zeus can now be 
 an object of reverence and receive the worship which is 
 his due. 
 
 Let us not say in a hurry that such a theory is absurd 
 and puerile. I confess that it looks so at first sight just 
 as though the Greek poet were trying his prentice hand at 
 the interpretation of mythology and leading up to a 
 hypothesis not only inadequate in itself, but disrespectful 
 to the Deity. For the idea of growth and development 
 may be held to be disrespectful to the Deity. It assumes 
 that there was something lacking in him at the start, so 
 that he commenced his career somewhat less than a God 
 in order to grow up to the full stature of his Godhead. 
 Zeus, according to the ^Eschylean hypothesis, began with 
 crude views as to the necessity of violent methods in 
 governing the world, and subsequently after much profit- 
 able experience conceived a more excellent way. Is not 
 such an admission derogatory to the Divine Nature ? 
 Can there be degrees of perfection, gradations of omni- 
 potence and omniscience? Curiously enough, however, 
 much the same theory mutatis mutandis is to be found 
 
12 OLD SAWS AND MODERN INSTANCES 
 
 in Thomas Hardy. Through nearly all the numerous acts 
 and scenes of The Dynasts the Immanent Will is described 
 as proceeding on its dreary path blindly, unintelligently, 
 mechanically. Its aim is neither Love nor Light. It has 
 all the stark pitilessness of the Unconscious. At the very 
 end of the drama the Chorus of Pities is allowed to suggest 
 a new theory. Is it not possible that Fate or Will, though 
 it does not possess it originally, may develop Intelligence ? 
 May not Consciousness be evolved out of Unconsciousness, 
 as a civilised ruler, in the case of Zeus, was evolved out of 
 a savage despot ? If such a thing were possible and Mr. 
 Hardy is clearly of the opinion that it is not yet we 
 should have a beneficent revolution, a new efflorescence, 
 " Consciousness the W T ill informing till it fashion all things 
 fair ! " There is, too, another analogy in a speculative 
 theory which has recommended itself to thinkers troubled 
 with the existence of Evil in a Divinely appointed Universe. 
 How can God sanction Evil ? One answer is that He does 
 not sanction Evil that on the contrary He is for ever 
 striving against it, slowly conquering an obstinate material 
 of Unreason and Wickedness and Pain : to which is added 
 the corollary that we can help in the struggle, each in our 
 fashion, by love and self-control and self-sacrifice, extending 
 the borders of goodness and circumscribing more and more 
 the fast-receding continent of 111. The underlying assump- 
 tion here is that though we can ascribe benevolence to the 
 Deity, we cannot ascribe irresistible power. And this 
 being so, we pray that God's reign may develop and His 
 kingdom be gradually established " Thy will be done," 
 the process still unaccomplished, though the end be sure. 
 
 5 
 
 It is time, however, to return from the relatively im- 
 mature speculations of .ZEschylus who being a dramatist 
 was more interested in the psychology of a resisting and 
 suffering Titan than in the economy of Heaven which made 
 him suffer to the wonderful choruses of the Agamemnon. 
 Here we have a series of important affirmations on the 
 character of Divine Government, on the relations of men to 
 God, on human responsibility and the ordinances of Fate. 
 The statements are not very specific nor very consistent; 
 we should hardly expect them to be, as expounded by a 
 mystical poet in lyrical strains. But if we compare them 
 
THOMAS HARDY AND AESCHYLUS 13 
 
 with the odes of Pindar, which are full of such discussions, 
 we discover that in ^Eschylus we have a far stronger and 
 clearer thinker. Agamemnon belonged to the house of 
 Atreus, and it was a doomed house ever since the wrong 
 done by Atreus to his brother Thyestes in serving up to him 
 a horrible repast of his children's flesh. Then came the 
 crime of Agamemnon himself in sacrificing his daughter 
 Iphigeneia in order to get fair winds for his voyage to Troy 
 and other crimes such as a conqueror would commit in 
 sacking a captured city. So Agamemnon is killed on his 
 return home by his wife Clytemnestra and her paramour 
 ^Egisthus ; and a new cry for vengeance is raised on behalf 
 of the murdered King. Orestes, Agamemnon's son, returns 
 from a long exile and puts to death his mother as well as 
 ^Egisthus. How is the dreadful vendetta to end? How 
 can Orestes, the matricide, be rescued from the avenging 
 Furies ? Only by divine interposition and a formal trial 
 before the Areopagus, when Athene, after the votes were 
 equal for punishment and acquittal, gave her casting vote 
 for Orestes, and the plague of deaths is stayed. This in 
 brief outline is the story, raising interesting problems in 
 metaphysics and theology. 
 
 ^Eschylus in the first chorus of the Agamemnon attacks 
 the main problem. What are we to think of Zeus ? Let 
 us begin by conceding that no definition of Zeus is possible. 
 " Zeus, whoever he is," cries the Chorus, " if this name 
 pleases him, by this name will I address him. For I can 
 conjecture no other title save Zeus, if it is right to banish 
 foolish imaginings from the mind." 1 The poet suggests 
 that true worship and reverence must be given to a supreme 
 God, without encumbering ourselves with mythological 
 tales. We lose all the majesty of Godhead if we make a 
 human picture of him and construe him to ourselves as 
 jealous and partial and inclined to numerous amours. 
 That is a man-made God, the work of anthropomorphism. 
 What we want is a more philosophical conception, neces- 
 sarily vague, yet sufficient for our faith and our prayer. 
 Moreover, the Godhead is one one God, not many Gods. 
 And little as we know about him, we know at least that he 
 is a moral force. For he educates man by suffering, teach- 
 ing even the unwilling to be wise by ordaining pain as the 
 punishment for evil-doing. It is the law of his universe 
 that knowledge comes by melancholy experience of sorrow 
 
 Ag., 160 et sqq. 
 
14 OLD SAWS AND MODERN INSTANCES 
 
 and suffering. God's punishment is therefore not vin- 
 dictive : it is educative opening blind eyes to the realities 
 of things. Zeus' s purpose is to make men better. Such 
 is the noble creed, outlined for us in noble language in the 
 first chorus of the Agamemnon. 
 
 The second chorus starts another problem. 1 Is the ruler 
 of Heaven a Providence, as well as a ruler ? Do the Gods 
 care for mortal things ? It is impious to doubt it. To 
 believe that the Gods are such as Epicurus at a later 
 period described them, living in their celestial abodes, 
 unconcerned with human affairs, existing easily because 
 unperturbed with trouble or responsibility, amounts to a 
 disbelief that they are Gods at all. If we refuse to accept 
 an atheistical position of this kind, then the only alternative 
 is to have faith in the wise ordinances of Heaven and to 
 wait for the issue which Providence has decreed. If the 
 mills of God grind slowly, yet they grind exceeding small. 
 Look, for instance, at the career of Paris. Idle, debonair, 
 effeminate, a lover of beauty, he is the favourite of Aphro- 
 dite, and as such wins the love of Helen, the wife of his 
 host, Menelaus, and persuades her to elope with him to 
 Troy. But does such traitorous work prosper ? Menelaus, 
 betrayed and forlorn, can find no joy in Art or Life now that 
 the loved one is gone, but he gets his due revenge. Paris 
 involves his city and himself in utter ruin, and on his 
 conscience lies heavy the doom of all the brave men who 
 perished in his quarrel. Were the Gods regardless of 
 human justice in the death of Paris and the fall of Troy ? 
 
 Having settled this problem to their satisfaction, the 
 Chorus in their third lyrical ode address themselves to an 
 equally important and difficult question. It was said by 
 men of old time that God is jealous. He cannot brook the 
 excessive prosperity of men, and if Polycrates of Samos is 
 born under a lucky star, he must pay compensation for his 
 good fortune, which, even so, may be rejected of Heaven. 
 Is it true that greatness and prosperity inevitably call 
 down wrath from an offended Godhead? Such a view 
 involves a mistaken estimate of divine laws and utterly 
 misconceives the true relation of punishment to wrong- 
 doing. " I alone," says the leader of the Chorus, speaking 
 no doubt the mind of ^Eschylus, " I alone am of a different 
 opinion." 2 It is Sin which is punished, the godless act. 
 The innocent have a fair lot. Observe that the poet tells 
 . Ag., 355-487. 2 Msch., Ag., 750-781. 
 
THOMAS HARDY AND ^SCHYLUS 15 
 
 us especially that his own view is singular, and is not shared 
 by the multitude. But he is sure of his ground. It is not 
 prosperity as such, it is the mental effect of prosperity 
 the arrogance bred in the prosperous and wealthy man 
 which ultimately brings down the wrath from God. The 
 fatal heritage runs thus. Affluence breeds insolence 
 (vfiQit;). Insolence leads to many evil things impiety, 
 hardihood, recklessness and the evil man spurns with his 
 foot the altar of justice. Then comes Nemesis, apportion- 
 ing to each man the lot he deserves, and therefore over- 
 whelming the confident sinner with ruin. And so it 
 happens that wealthy halls in which defiance and pride 
 and boundless conceit reign are not happy. Justice shines 
 in poor men's homes and has no regard for wealth. Gold 
 is wrongly stamped with praise. All this is, the poet 
 thinks, borne out in the history of the Atreidae. 
 
 " But Arrogance, in sin grown grey 
 
 Mid vile men, bears a child at length 
 Like her in name, in lusty strength, 
 Or soon or late, when dawns her day ; 
 
 " Yea, and a brother-fiend, whom none 
 May cope with, impious Hardihood 
 Black curses twain o'er homes that brood, 
 And like their dam each demon son. 
 
 " In smoke-fouled huts doth Justice shine; 
 On virtuous lives she still hath smiled : 
 From gold-tricked halls and hands defiled, 
 She turns her with averted eyne. 
 
 " A guest she is of each pure soul : 
 
 She on the power of wealth looks down, 
 With all its base coin of renown : 
 She guide th all things to their goal." 1 
 
 This is the clearest vindication of the Divine justice 
 which JEschylus gives us, and it represents the most acute 
 point of difference between him and a poet like Mr. Hardy. 
 For with the modern writer, it is precisely the random 
 arbitrariness of the Immanent Will, which in passage after 
 passage he emphasises. If a will is both arbitrary and 
 reckless, it is assuredly unjust in its effects. Of its motives 
 we cannot speak, for, not being conscious motives, they do 
 not enter into the question. Even the word arbitrary 
 connotes a sort of intelligence, and therefore, strictly 
 
 1 Msdiylus in English Verse, Part III., Arthur S. Way, p. 34. 
 
16 OLD SAWS AND MODERN INSTANCES 
 
 speaking, cannot be used of the blind purposeless Will. 
 At all events, there can be no suggestion of a nice adjust- 
 ment of punishment to crime, for neither punishment nor 
 crime has any meaning in an irrational universe in which 
 men are victims of Fate. 
 
 Oddly enough, however, we find in the fourth chorus of 
 the Agamemnon an allusion to Fate which disquiets us. 
 Fate is declared to be greater than Zeus. 1 Now Prome- 
 theus knew that Fate was greater than Zeus, because, as is 
 told in the play, the hero held in his hands a secret decree 
 of Fate which would either doom or save the Olympian God, 
 according as it was obeyed or defied. But if Fate is thus 
 supreme over the Deity, how much more must it be 
 supreme over man ? And in that case what becomes of 
 the whole theory of man's responsibility for his action, 
 in virtue of which we call him a sinner or a saint ? And 
 how can punishment be just in the case of one who is not 
 a free agent? These, of course, are the never-ending 
 problems which every theology must seek to solve. If man 
 is not free, why is he punished ? If he is free, how is his 
 liberty of choice related to Divine predestination and fore- 
 knowledge ? If JEschylus is not wholly consistent in his 
 handling of the question, we can at least say that he is not 
 more inconsistent than the majority of those who have 
 speculated on Fate, Free Will, Fore-knowledge Absolute. 
 And, so far as the Agamemnon is concerned, the poet lays 
 no stress on his doctrine of Fate. It comes in as a casual 
 reflection, unrelated to the main philosophical and religious 
 theory embodied in the choruses of the play. 
 
 1 .ZEsch., Ag., 1025. 
 
MR. THOMAS HARDY AND AESCHYLUS 
 II 
 
 " Let me enjoy the world no less 
 
 Because the all-enacting Might 
 That fashioned forth its loveliness 
 Had other aims than my delight." 
 
 MR. THOMAS HARDY made his reputation by a series of 
 fine novels, such as Far From the Madding Crowd, A Pair 
 of Blue Eyes, The Mayor of Casterbridge, The Trumpet- 
 Major, The Return of the Native, Tess of the Tf Urbewilles, 
 and Jude the Obscure. One at least, let us note in passing, 
 The Trumpet-Major, has a background of war as a matter 
 of fact, the Napoleonic War, which occupies Mr. Hardy 
 in The Dynasts. And all of these novels have certain 
 marked characteristics which are of the greatest significance 
 in estimating the author' s work. There is a love of natural 
 phenomena in all their aspects the storm, the heath, the 
 village ; a tenderness for the humbler workers on the land, 
 as well as the yeoman-farmers; a general distaste for 
 the fine ladies and gentlemen, whom Mr. Hardy cannot 
 sympathise with, and therefore cannot draw; a certain 
 view of women, drawn with great subtlety and insight, 
 which makes them almost a daemonic element in human 
 affairs, and strangely differentiates them from George 
 Meredith' s women ; and a curious tendency to make use of 
 coincidence in working out the plots. Apart, however, 
 from all these points, which are obvious to most readers, 
 there is a general atmosphere surrounding the incidents 
 which we often find difficult to breathe; or we may call 
 it a background, a mise-en-scene in which the stories are 
 set and from which they take a definite colour of sombreness 
 and gloom. Marriages are unhappy, and it is equally 
 unhappy to remain single ; lovers do not meet at the close 
 of their long journey of misunderstanding and separation; 
 the cup of happiness proffered to eager lips is ruthlessly 
 dashed away; the rebel against convention is as much a 
 c 17 
 
18 OLD SAWS AND MODERN INSTANCES 
 
 failure as the man or woman who humbly accepts conven- 
 tion as a guide ; and, worst of all, there is heard now and 
 again an echo of ironical laughter in Heaven. Jude when 
 he accepted the obligations of matrimony is no more 
 successful than when he broke loose from them. Tess is 
 throughout the sport of unkind Fate Fate which, de- 
 scribed as President of the Immortals, only ends his sport 
 with her when, as a murderess, she dies on the scaffold. 
 Bathsheba, in Far from the Madding Crowd, only escapes 
 because of the moral strength and sanity of Gabriel Oak, 
 one of the few vigorous and independent characters in Mr. 
 Hardy's picture gallery. It is impossible to avoid the 
 impression that, in the author's scheme, we are all rats 
 in a trap, doomed to break ourselves against the wires in 
 situations from which there is no escape, victims of a Power 
 which has predestined us from all eternity. In other words, 
 Mr. Hardy's is a fatalistic creed, based on philosophic 
 Nescience, a scientific belief that the Power at the back of 
 things is a blind, purposeless agency, to which we must 
 be careful not to assign human or moral attributes, and 
 which we must be content with Mr. Hardy to call " It," 
 and never " Him." 
 
 Now it is not easy for the ordinary man to understand the 
 mental detachment of the scientific thinker. The attitude 
 of cold curiosity, the exclusion of all other interests except 
 the desire for truth, the rigid employment of analysis, the 
 clear estimation of the relative values of good and bad 
 evidence, the building up of a conclusion based on rigorously 
 sifted data all these things are uncongenial to the average 
 man, and therefore appear to indicate callousness and in- 
 humanity. The majority of us are apt to look upon the 
 world and all that is in it as they affect ourselves, from a 
 purely human point of view. To regard the cosmos of 
 things as it is in itself, abstracted from the way in which 
 human beings feel and think about it, requires an intel- 
 lectual effort based on a definite logical training. How shall 
 we illustrate this contrast? Early astronomers thought 
 that the earth was the centre of the universe, the sun, 
 moon, and stars circling round it. Then came Copernicus, 
 Galileo, and the rest to prove that it was the earth which 
 was in continuous movement, travelling in its orbit round 
 
THOMAS HARDY AND AESCHYLUS 19 
 
 the sun. The change in attitude revolutionised astronomy. 
 In much the same way thought is revolutionised when, 
 instead of looking upon our earth as created to minister 
 to our wants and emotions, we carefully exclude the human 
 factor in studying the constitution of the world. Instead 
 of our inquiries radiating in different directions from the 
 Ego or Self as a centre, we now observe how the nature of 
 things, the various properties and powers of the world, full 
 of their own intrinsic energy, impinge and act upon sentient 
 human beings. The first state of mind might be described 
 as anthropocentric, the second as cosmocentric. 
 
 But of course it is difficult for a poet and impossible for a 
 dramatist to exclude the human factor. However much a 
 student of science may succeed in riveting his attention 
 on the universe of things, and may refuse to consider man 
 otherwise than as a mere item or element in a cosmos 
 arranged for other ends than man's satisfaction, the claims 
 of the human factor are bound to speak through the voice 
 of the poet and to find a potent advocate in the writer of 
 drama. Lyrical and elegiac pieces are the outcome of 
 strong personal feeling ; human emotion rings in the epic ; 
 the strong cry of the suffering soul striving, battling, 
 enduring, dying echoes through and through every 
 passionate tragedy which ever was written. Mr. Hardy, 
 despite his theory, cannot, however much he tries, remain 
 on the cold, abstract level of science. The world may be 
 the scene of blind energies working remorselessly towards 
 a goal we wot not of, but it is the piteous tale of man which 
 is of absorbing interest to us. Listen to this, taken from 
 one of Mr. Hardy' s poems : 
 
 " Or come we of an Automaton 
 Unconscious of our pains ? 
 Or are we live remains 
 Of Godhead dying downwards, brain and eye now gone ? 
 
 " Or is it that some high Plan betides, 
 As yet not understood, 
 Of Evil stormed by Good, 
 We, the forlorn hope, over which Achievement strides ? " 
 
 Here is the problem, envisaged quite plainly, though not 
 explicitly, from the human point of view. It may be 
 Nature which is speaking, but it is, above all, human nature. 
 The various alternatives are set out as so many points on 
 which we desire enlightenment. Are we mere puppets 
 dancing to a tune which the Automaton sets ? Or are we 
 
20 OLD SAWS AND MODERN INSTANCES 
 
 the poor wraiths and ghosts of what was once Godlike, but 
 which has now hopelessly deteriorated ? Or and here 
 sounds the voice of Hope, the last thing left in Pandora's 
 box are we the champions of some mighty project and 
 purpose, for which we must cheerfully give our lives if 
 only those who come after us may win where we failed ? 
 Mr." Hardy gives us no answer to these questions. " Earth' s 
 old glooms and pains are still the same." But what we 
 catch in these lines is the whisper of that divine discontent, 
 which can never get satisfaction from a purely scientific 
 view of the world, craving, as it perpetually does, for more 
 light and a more comfortable assurance. 
 
 2 
 
 There is, in consequence, one reflection which inevitably 
 occurs to the mind. A poet with difficulty acquiesces in a 
 soulless Universe. But what of a dramatist who is con- 
 fronted by the picture of a will-less humanity ? So far as 
 Mr. Hardy accepts the scientific view of man and woman 
 as mere automata or puppets, so far must he find his 
 occupation gone, or severely attenuated, as a writer of 
 drama. For drama is action, human action, and the clash 
 of wills is, as we know, the essence of tragedy. But what 
 is the value of action which is purposeless, and what is 
 the interest of conflicting wills in the absence of independ- 
 ence and responsibility ? In The Dynasts Mr. Hardy paints 
 for us some extremely vivid and dramatic situations. 
 There is, for instance, the death of Nelson on board the 
 Victory, the fatal Russian campaign and the overthrow of 
 Napoleon's hopes, the field of Waterloo with all its wild 
 confusion and desperate charges, besides many a stirring 
 little vignette of lowly lives in which eager personalities 
 are seen with their mingled strength and weakness. But 
 what is the dramatic value of Nelson as a puppet, Welling- 
 ton and Pitt as automata, Napoleon, himself as a pawn in 
 the blind game of chess played by the Immanent Will? 
 Once or twice Napoleon speaks of himself as a mere instru- 
 ment in the hands of Fate, and therefore not responsible 
 for his actions. But it is only by refusing so to regard him 
 that we preserve his significance in the drama. Happily, 
 in reading these scenes or seeing them on the stage, we 
 ignore or forget Mr. Hardy's own views of their meaning. 
 The human actors in the tragedy appeal to us as warm, 
 
THOMAS HARDY AND AESCHYLUS 21 
 
 sentient, passionate beings, to whom their real fate is their 
 character, and who know what they are doing and struggling 
 for. The background of Spirits, sinister and ironic, leaves, 
 and inevitably leaves, us cold. 
 
 As a matter of fact, the invention of a Spirit-world over- 
 looking the play is a concession to our weakness or, I 
 should rather say, to our not unnatural human demand. 
 Science clearly would not sanction such extravagant 
 fancies as Spirits of the Pities or Choruses of the Years. 
 Let us see what the author himself says about them in the 
 preface to The Dynasts. " It was thought proper," he says, 
 " to introduce as supernatural spectators of the terrestrial 
 drama certain impersonated abstractions, or Intelligences, 
 called Spirits. They are intended to be taken by the reader 
 for what they may be worth as contrivances of the fancy 
 merely." He goes on to say that we must not expect from 
 them a systematised philosophy, but he hopes that " their 
 utterances may have enough dramatic plausibility to pro- 
 cure for them, in the words of Coleridge, ' that willing sus- 
 pension of disbelief for the moment which constitutes 
 poetic faith.' ' We may remark in passing that though 
 Mr. Hardy warns us against basing a systematised philo- 
 sophy on what these Spirits say, such philosophy as we 
 can extract is so precisely that which we gather from 
 Mr. Hardy's novels and poems that we need not hesitate to 
 regard it as the author's own. The only difference is that 
 what was hinted before is now put before us in an explicit 
 shape, and that a creed, which might almost be called 
 systematised, takes the place of casual references and 
 allusions. There is no doubt, therefore, that what the 
 ancient Spirit of the Years says is what Mr. Hardy thinks, 
 and that the general scheme adumbrated by these Intelli- 
 gences is the most reasonable solution the poet can give of 
 the mystery of this unintelligible world. 
 
 But why is the Spirit World introduced at all? The 
 answer is curious and significant. The author feels the 
 want of something like the celestial machinery we find in 
 Homer, Virgil, and Milton's Paradise Lost. Divine person- 
 ages are very useful to the writers of epics, because they 
 serve as " ready-made sources or channels of Causation." In 
 other words, they explain how things happen by linking them 
 on to the exercise of conscious Wills. But Mr. Hardy's 
 scheme does not admit conscious volition. Therefore, 
 in a world of Necessity and Automatism, he is driven 
 
22 OLD SAWS AND MODERN INSTANCES 
 
 to devise imaginary shapes which have nothing to do with 
 guiding the world on its course, but which may express 
 human feeling or supply human comment. Considering 
 that the panorama we are invited to survey is inhuman, 
 soulless, and will-less, we must find consolation in inventing 
 volatile agencies which are, at all events, lively, active, and 
 conscious of what they are doing. Indeed, one group- 
 that of the Pities corresponds in some measure, as the 
 author tells us, to the Chorus in a Greek play the spectator 
 idealised and sympathetic. All drama craves for as much 
 humanity as we can put into it, and it is because Mr. Hardy 
 instinctively feels this necessity that his actual practice in 
 The Dynasts is better than his theory. His theory is cold- 
 blooded, but his Chorus of the Pities is warm with human 
 interest and feeling. " Sunt lacrimae rerum " even in a 
 Monistic scheme of the Universe. 
 
 3 
 
 It is time, however, to come to closer grips with Mr. 
 Hardy's supernatural apparatus. The denizens of his 
 Olympus, which he calls the " Overworld," are the Ancient 
 Spirit of the Years, the Spirit of the Pities each with its 
 attendant Chorus the Shade of the Earth, Spirits Sinister 
 and Ironic, with their Choruses, Messengers, and Recording 
 Angels; while as Zeus, or King of this Divine company, 
 the First or Fundamental Energy, is called " It." Most 
 of these have a specific task. It is the business of the 
 Spirit of the Years to explain ; of the Spirit of the Pities 
 to ask questions and complain; of the Spirits Ironic and 
 Sinister to jeer and make satirical remarks. The Shade 
 of the Earth opens the drama with the query, " What of 
 the Immanent Will and Its designs ? " and the Spirit of 
 the Years makes answer : 
 
 " It works unconsciously, as heretofore, 
 Eternal artistries in Circumstance, 
 Whose patterns, wrought by rapt aesthetic rote, 
 Seem in themselves Its single listless aim 
 And not their consequence." 1 
 
 " Why this eternal monotony ? " ask the Pities, and we 
 are given two possible hypotheses. Either the Will is 
 tired with this world and is occupied with other worlds, 
 
 * Dynasts, Fore-scene. 
 
THOMAS HARDY AND AESCHYLUS 23 
 
 or else our world lost the Will's original watchful care owing 
 to the wickedness of early men who contrived to sever us 
 from Heaven. But may not some startling event bring 
 b&ck the old Providence ? No, there is no evidence avail- 
 able to make us think that thoughtful design either is or 
 ever was part of the scheme. On the contrary, the data 
 seem to prove that : 
 
 " Like a knitter drowsed, 
 Whose fingers play in skilled unmindf ulness, 
 The Will has woven with an absent heed 
 Since life first was : and ever will so weave." * 
 
 That is a final verdict, and it is only left for the Pities to 
 urge how much better it would be for mankind and the 
 world if, instead of tyrants like Napoleon, they were guided 
 by merciful and peaceful leaders, " men of deep art in life- 
 development." But that is apparently impossible. " Old 
 laws operate yet," and men's " dynastic and imperial moils 
 shape on accustomed lines." And thus in our melancholy 
 contemporary experience an Amurath an Amurath succeeds, 
 and Napoleon is followed by Kaiser Wilhelm. 
 
 It cannot be denied that this is a dreary prospect, nor 
 that our author is one of the most dispassionate of observers. 
 He often strikes the reader as being only coldly interested 
 in his themes, like his Spirit of the Years, who, when he 
 regards dynastic and imperial ambitions, declares, " I care 
 not how they shape or what they be." Curiosity, perhaps, 
 is his chief characteristic a keen scientific curiosity which 
 accepts the conclusions to which his logic drives him without 
 faltering. His attitude to women is significant in this 
 regard. On the whole, I think it may be said that 
 Mr. Hardy is an apologist for women, but that does not pre- 
 vent him from being cruel in his analysis. He looks upon 
 woman in her humours, moods, and vagaries as being in an 
 especial degree an instrument through which Fate works 
 out its schemes. Fate is, as it were, incarnated in her. 
 Complicated questions of sex are intensely interesting to 
 Mr. Hardy ; the difficulties of the married state are harped 
 upon with almost wearisome iteration in most of his novels. 
 But he draws his pictures without pity; his curiosity is 
 usually frigid, and sometimes almost morbid. To a mind 
 like his, therefore, a huge drama like the struggle of England 
 against Napoleon is not regarded as a battle-royal between 
 
 1 Dynasts, Fore-scene. 
 
24 OLD SAWS AND MODERN INSTANCES 
 
 rival wills and competing ambitions, with various interludes 
 in which strength and weakness, passion and frailty, make 
 their appeal to our sensitive sympathy; but a mechanical 
 game of celestial chess in which the Immanent Will makes 
 its blind moves without prescience or purpose, and human 
 beings are helpless pawns or counters pushed hither and 
 thither as chance which is Fate directs. Look at the 
 stage direction which Mr. Hardy gives us from time to 
 time, as if to remind us of the true inwardness of his 
 drama : 
 
 " The nether sky opens, and Europe is disclosed as a. 
 prone and emaciated figure, the Alps shaping like a back- 
 bone, and the branching mountain-chains like ribs, the 
 peninsular plateau of Spain forming a head. . . , The 
 point of view then sinks downwards through space and 
 draws near to the surface of the perturbed countries, where 
 the peoples, distressed by events which they did not cause, 
 are seen writhing, crawling, heaving, and vibrating in their 
 various cities and nationalities. ... A new and pene- 
 trating light descends on the spectacle, enduing men and 
 things with a seeming transparency, and exhibiting as one 
 organism the anatomy of life and movement in all humanity 
 and vitalised matter included in the display." The Spirit 
 of the Pities, looking at the scene, discerns certain waves 
 " like winds grown visible," twining and serpentining, and 
 retracting threads like gossamers, which bear men's forms 
 on their coils. These, says the Spirit of the Years, are 
 fibrils, veins, will-tissues, nerves, and pulses of the one 
 Immanent Will, " evolving always that it wots not of." 
 Men think their deeds self-done ; they fancy that they are 
 acting in freedom. In reality they are but " atoms of 
 the One, labouring through all, divisible from none." 
 
 4 
 
 We may shiver at so inhuman a creed, but it does not 
 overwhelm us, because as man is always and everywhere 
 better than the tenets he professes to hold, so, too, 
 Mr. Hardy is far more clement than his doctrine of the 
 Immanent Will. The essential disadvantage of an abstract 
 system of purposeless activity, which is to get rid of human 
 volition and, indeed, destroy the reality of human beings 
 themselves, is that no one can believe in it for more than 
 a few minutes together and then only in a severely logical 
 
THOMAS HARDY AND ^SCHYLUS 25 
 
 mood. Daily experience is too strong for us, and ordinary 
 intercourse with our friends seems to give the lie to our 
 scientific theory. For we see men acting under the impres- 
 sion that they are responsible for their acts, and we observe 
 legal punishments inflicted on the assumption that the 
 individual can sin against the light. It is a natural inference 
 that, inasmuch as all life, social and political, is based on 
 the supposition that men are free agents, we cannot be 
 far wrong if we take for granted the existence of real 
 individuals, centres of force and in essence independent. 
 Obviously, then, it requires a strong and sustained effort 
 to believe that all these evidences of life are illusions, and 
 that nothing really moves but a blind and irrational 
 Immanent Will. And if this is the case with the ordinary 
 man, still more must it be so with the dramatist. For he, 
 as we have already said, is specially concerned with human 
 action and with the griefs and joys of self-conscious per- 
 sonalities all of which tumble into nothingness if only 
 the One exists or moves. And here, once more, we may 
 illustrate the point by a reference to .^Eschylus, who was 
 no more consistent with the demands of his lofty theory 
 than other poets and philosophers. We have seen that 
 sometimes he suggests that Fate is higher than Zeus, and 
 if that be so the whole of his creed of a beneficent Providence 
 falls to the ground. There can be no Providence if the 
 God is overruled by a coldly omnipotent Destiny. And in 
 a fragment from an unknown play of his, the Heliades, 
 we have a still more startling theory. " Zeus," he says, 
 " is the aether, the earth, the sky; Zeus is everything 
 that exists, and still greater than these." 1 This is the 
 theory of Pantheism ; and it not only makes human liberty 
 impossible, but it absolutely upsets all that JEschylus has 
 told us elsewhere about a Zeus who is the son of Kronos 
 and the last arrived of the masters of the world. 
 
 5 
 
 It is interesting, as a matter of fact, to observe how here 
 and there in the course of The Dynasts Mr. Hardy gives 
 us indications and suggestions of dissatisfaction with his 
 
 1 Zeus sffriv aiO-fip, Zeus 5e 777, Zeus 8' ovpav6s, 
 Zeus rot TO. irdvTa, x& ri Tw^S' vireprepov. 
 
 A treatise of Philodemus, found at Herculaneum, gives us the title of the 
 play in which these verses are found. 
 
26 OLD SAWS AND MODERN INSTANCES 
 
 scientific doctrine of the One. It is the Chorus and the 
 x^Spirit of the Pities naturally enough which voice the 
 human cry. Surveying the course of action from their 
 privileged standpoint, they see the melancholy tragedy 
 of the war, and cry out with Othello, " The pity of it, the 
 pity of it, lago." Their usual attitude is to disbelieve 
 the grim irony of a Will which knows not what it wills, 
 or, at all events, to hope for some alleviation of the cruel 
 decrees of destiny. 
 
 " This tale of Will 
 
 And Life's impulsion by Incognisance 
 I cannot take." 
 
 they say in Act I., Sc. 6; and later on, in Act V., Sc. 4, 
 they sympathise with what Sophocles put in the mouth 
 of Hyllus (Trachinice, 1266-72), when he arraigned the 
 Gods for their treatment of Hercules. The Chorus adds, 
 a little farther on : 
 
 " Why make life debtor when it did not buy ? " 
 
 In such criticisms the point is the injustice of a system 
 which after creating human life makes it so helpless and 
 so enslaved. In Act L, Sc. 6, the criticism is pushed 
 home by laying stress on human sensitiveness. It was 
 bad enough to ordain that men should be born into slavery, 
 but it is worse when we remember that these hapless 
 creatures are sentient. Surely it must be a flaw in Nature' s 
 handiwork that puppets, driven hither and thither by 
 forces entirely independent of their volition, should also 
 be capable of acute feeling. So in Act IV., Sc. 5, the 
 significant admission is made that " It (the Will) does not 
 quite play the game." If the Will must play with puppets, 
 then by all means let these puppets be merely mechanical 
 toys. To use them as pawns, and yet endow them with a 
 sensitive consciousness, is to act the part of a bully liking 
 to inflict pain. Wretched men, being helpless, are allowed 
 to recognise their helplessness and thus endure a crueller 
 punishment. The slave has all the added misery of 
 knowing that he is a slave. He is in chains and powerless, 
 but not permitted to remain a soulless dupe. That is a 
 strong impeachment of the Immortal Energy, which takes 
 the place of God in Mr. Hardy's system. The only answer 
 is that it knows not what it is doing. 
 
THOMAS HARDY AND AESCHYLUS 27 
 
 But is it true that it knows not what it is doing ? Can- 
 not we detect, now and again, some signs of actual male- 
 volence ? We remember the end of Tess of the D* Urber- 
 villes, where a reference is made to the " President of the 
 Immortals." He is said to have " finished his sport with 
 Tess " when she finally ends her unhappy life on the 
 scaffold, just as though he took a pleasure in tormenting 
 her. And, indeed, throughout the novel we cannot but feel 
 that the poor heroine is hardly allowed a decent chance, 
 and that the author piles suffering on suffering as though to 
 bring home to our consciousness that Tess and the women 
 like her are born under an unlucky star. We revolt from 
 the picture as too heavily charged with gloom; we resent 
 the doom of the heroine as unjust and unnatural. If, 
 however, we take the book at its surface value, we cannot 
 escape the impression that there is something very like 
 malice in the ordinances of Fate. This is what the Spirit 
 of the Pities feels when in The Dynasts it is witnessing the 
 suffering of the poor mad English King (Act VI. , Sc. 4). 
 One might almost think, it seems to suggest, that ironical 
 malice has presided over the creation of the world, that 
 men had been created as a jest and scoffed at when they 
 suffer. But here the answer comes at once, whether we 
 accept it or no. The Will is not conscious; it has no 
 intelligence. It is " unmaliced, unimpassioned, nescient 
 Will," and therefore it is impossible that it should enact 
 the role of an lago. The One escapes criticism because 
 it is an " It " and not a " He." 
 
 6 
 
 But later on we get a veritable cri du cosur. When the 
 unseen watchers observe the unhappy king fall into one 
 of his paroxysms, the more sympathetic among them 
 cannot restrain their anguish. And it takes a significant 
 form. The Spirit of the Pities feels that the sorrow and 
 desolation of the world are unbearable, unless behind the 
 piteous spectacle there is some Being to whom humanity 
 may make appeal. The Universe must have some pre- 
 siding Deity not an unconscious Will, but a conscious 
 Person, warm with love and tenderness. 
 
 " Something within me aches to pray, 
 To some great Heart to take away, 
 This evil day, this evil day ! " 
 
28 OLD SAWS AND MODERN INSTANCES 
 
 The mocking reply comes swift and deadly : 
 
 " Ha, ha. That's good. He'll pray to It ! 
 But where do Its compassions sit, 
 And where abides the heart of It ? " 
 
 Nevertheless, the Spirit is not abashed or deterred : 
 
 " Mock on ! mock on ! Yet I'll go pray 
 To some Great Heart, who haply may 
 Charm mortal miseries away." l 
 
 For the nonce the author of The Dynasts is on the side of 
 the angels. In all his references to the mass of men, " the 
 pale, pathetic peoples," " the pale, panting multitudes," 
 who are the victims of despotic kings and the still more 
 despotic Immanent Will, he shows an unwonted tender- 
 ness, which goes beyond the limits of his scientific creed. 
 In the passage just quoted he seems to be fully conscious 
 that the human cry cannot be altogether ignored, and that 
 it is an ineradicable instinct which has led men of every 
 variety of race and faith to raise beseeching hands to 
 " Our Father which art in Heaven." 
 
 Nor yet at the very end of his drama will he leave us 
 without a gleam of hope. I have before alluded to the 
 passage in which the suggestion is made that Fate or Will 
 may develop Intelligence, as in ^Eschylus Zeus developed 
 from a tyrant to a beneficent God. Most of the cruelty 
 of the world arises out of the dissociation of primeval 
 Energy from conscious intelligence. If the Will were only 
 aware of what it was doing, it might act from design and 
 even grow to be kindly. At all events, this is the aspira- 
 tion of the Spirit of the Pities in a choric song which, 
 probably not without intention, is placed in the closing 
 scene. 
 
 " Nay : shall not its blindness break, 
 Yea, must not its heart awake, 
 
 Promptly tending 
 
 To Its mending 
 In a genial germing purpose, and for loving-kindness' sake ? " 
 
 " But a stirring thrills the air 
 Like to sounds of joyance there 
 
 That the rages 
 
 Of the ages 
 
 Shall be cancelled, and deliverance offered from the darts that were, 
 Consciousness the Will informing, till it fashion all things fair ! " 2 
 
 1 Act VI. Sc. 6. 2 After-scene, Act VII. Sc. 9. 
 
THOMAS HARDY AND AESCHYLUS 29 
 
 1 
 
 What are we to say of The Dynasts as a whole ? From 
 the point of view of drama it is cumbrous and top-heavy; 
 as a study in character-drawing it is exceedingly interesting 
 and suggestive; as a record of events it is very faithful, 
 and keeps close to its authorities. But that, after all, is 
 not what we have been examining in this essay. However 
 rich it may be in eloquent passages of rhetoric, and even in 
 single lines and phrases of real poetry, it will have ulti- 
 mately to be judged as, indeed, Mr. Hardy's shorter 
 poems have to be judged by the philosophy which under- 
 lies the whole structure : the theory of the Universe and 
 of the men and women who have to live in it. It is possible, 
 of course, to cut out of The Dynasts all the supernatural 
 elements, and the action of the personages and the vivid 
 reality of the scenes will, it may be said, remain much the 
 same. But it will then cease to be the piece of work which 
 the author designed and in which he is interested; it will 
 cease to represent Mr. Hardy's own mind. The Immanent 
 Will is not a conception which appears now and again in 
 these volumes; it runs all through them, it animates and 
 explains the whole fabric. What are we to say of it ? 
 
 For myself, I confess I should like to adopt the attitude 
 of Epicurus as expressed in a well-known phrase. He, 
 too, saw what we see to-day, that when the gods disappear 
 as objects of worship, the human mind which is credulous 
 in essence and must worship something offers its incense 
 to Fate or Will or Chance as the supreme arbiter of the 
 world. Epicurus said : "I would rather believe in all 
 the stories of the Gods than in the Fate of the philosophers." 
 He expressed himself sceptically, of course. What he 
 meant was that he saw no reason in the case of two un- 
 certainties why he should exchange one uncertainty for 
 another. If you can have no certainty about the Gods, 
 you can have no greater certainty about your abstract 
 Fate or Will. Why, then, disturb yourself by a trans- 
 ference from a fairly comforting theory to a distinctly 
 uncomfortable one? We must not, however, put our 
 criticism in so ironic and sceptical a form. Perhaps we 
 may put it thus : The world, as many metaphysicians tell 
 us, arises in consciousness. In other words, all that we 
 can know about the world is due to, and arises from, our 
 mental processes of interpretation our perceptions, our 
 
30 OLD SAWS AND MODERN INSTANCES 
 
 logical deductions, and our reasonings. If we like to 
 phrase it so, the human mind creates the universe; for 
 only by mental activity can the universe be interpreted 
 and explained. Does it not then strike us as a curious 
 form of suicide or self-stultification that the mind inter- 
 preting the universe should interpret it as a mindless 
 universe? Why should we, who look before and after, 
 who are gifted with consciousness and endowed with 
 reason, solemnly fashion as the arbiter of our destiny an 
 abstract Energy or Will which has no consciousness, which 
 does not know what it is doing, and which acts absolutely 
 irrationally? Is not this I will not say to exchange 
 one uncertainty for another but to replace God by 
 Mumbo- Jumbo ? 
 
 As a matter of fact, the present attitude of thoughtful 
 men and women is wholly averse from any such mood of 
 pessimism and despair. Its spirit is rather that of Mr. 
 Britling in Mr. Wells' s novel, who at the end of a number 
 of mental changes came to the conclusion that our sons 
 in the passionate ardour of their self-sacrifice are 
 enabling us to find God. Let us also add that Mr. Hardy 
 himself has his sunnier moods. The characters of his 
 drama are something more than puppets; and the Spirit 
 of the Pities is at least as notable a creation as the Spirits 
 Sinister and Ironic. Perhaps, after the convulsion of an 
 appalling war, the wounded heart of man may turn for 
 healing and guidance in all humility and faith to " a 
 Divinity who shapes our ends, rough-hew them how we 
 will " a, God of Goodness and Justice and Mercy. 
 
ARISTOPHANES, THE PACIFIST 
 
 ANCIENT ATHENS AND HER PEACE PARTY 
 
 WHEN Athens, led by her incomparable statesman 
 Pericles, had resolved to make war upon Sparta, her 
 citizens were by no means unanimous in favour of fighting. 
 There existed strong parties within the State which were 
 especially hostile to Pericles, and there was an organised 
 peace faction which sought various occasions to give 
 effect to its views. Moreover, there was a young, energetic 
 and virile writer, Aristophanes, who took every occasion 
 in his power to prove to his fellow-citizens that their State 
 was not developing in the direction of its best and highest 
 ideals, but slowly deteriorating from what it had been 
 a few years previously. The views of Aristophanes himself 
 were those of the Moderate Party in Athens, whose natural 
 leader was Nicias, a party which occupied an intermediate 
 place between the old thorough-going aristocrats whose 
 memories lay in the past, and the ardent leaders of the 
 democracy who were innovators, and, from a Conservative 
 point of view, destructive revolutionaries. The great 
 merit of Pericles himself was that he, owing to his extra- 
 ordinary strength of character, stood to a large extent 
 above these civic factions. He was technically the leader 
 of the democracy, for he saw clearly enough that the only 
 possible line of development for Athens was to give more 
 and more power to the people. But, as Thucydides tells 
 us, in name Athens might have been a democracy, but in 
 reality it was a beneficent despotism wielded by Pericles. 
 Nevertheless, it was Pericles who had commenced the 
 changes which so afflicted Aristophanes' soul, and though 
 the dramatist is never extravagantly violent in his refer- 
 ences to the great statesman, as he is to his successors, 
 Cleon and others, it is impossible not to see how alien in 
 thought and temper were his political theories from those 
 which had been illustrated by the Periclean reforms. 
 
 31 
 
32 OLD SAWS AND MODERN INSTANCES 
 
 Now it is very remarkable that when Athens went to 
 war with her great rival Sparta she should have allowed 
 her brilliant writer of comedies to abuse the existing 
 government, and to inculcate on every occasion the blessings 
 of peace. It says a great deal for the Athenian democracy 
 that they could thus keep their admiration for Aristophanes 
 absolutely separate from their political convictions. Clearly 
 they did not believe in literary censorship, nor, indeed, in 
 any real censorship in political matters. There is no doubt 
 that Aristophanes was indicted by Cleon on a charge of 
 being unpatriotic, and that this charge was thrown out 
 so that it never came for actual trial. 1 It was a scurrilous 
 age, we must remember, an age in which public figures 
 could be satirised on the stage with impunity, even under 
 their own names. This was the licence enjoyed by the 
 older comedy a comedy of men like Eupolis and Cratinus 
 and Aristophanes himself. At a later period, when the 
 democracy was less sure of itself, personalities began to 
 disappear, but in 425 B.C. and even before that date, actors 
 could appear representing some foremost figure of the 
 time with personal characteristics duly made patent to 
 the least observant eye. 
 
 The earliest of Aristophanes' comedies which we possess 
 is The Acharnians, but it was preceded by two others, 
 both remarkable in their way as indicating the line which 
 the poet intended to take. The earliest of all, which 
 Aristophanes did not produce in his own name, was called 
 The Banqueters, and was a social comedy of much the 
 same nature as the subsequent piece called The Clouds. 
 It was an attack on the modern education. A father has 
 two sons, one educated according to the good old-fashioned 
 way of the country, the other brought up at Athens. 
 Naturally enough, when the Athenian-bred man comes 
 back to his father his manners and customs shock the old 
 conservative. He is effeminate in his dress, wearing 
 ringlets a thing which Aristophanes could not endure 
 he has learnt to drink and to revel, above all, he has had 
 a sophistical education which upsets the old notions of 
 right and wrong and replaces them by such ideas as con- 
 vention and expediency. For in the happier age already 
 1 See Aristoph., Ackarn., 377-82. 
 
ARISTOPHANES, THE PACIFIST 33 
 
 gone by the type of Athenian " who had fought at Mara- 
 thon " was a simple creature who loved his farm in the 
 country, worshipped his old gods, thought that the whole 
 object of education was the formation of character, not 
 the development of witty analysis, and believed in the 
 old heroic legends as they were treated by Homer and 
 JEschylus. 
 
 After The Banqueters Aristophanes brought out a piece 
 called The Babylonians, which dealt with a much more 
 daring theme. Here the object of Aristophanes was to 
 protest against the method in which Athens ruled her 
 tributary States. Owing to the valour and energy which 
 she had exhibited in the Persian Wars, Athens was naturally 
 entrusted with the command of the fleet which had to 
 protect the islanders of the ^Egean against foreign bar- 
 barians. First of all the islands contributed actual ships 
 to the Athenian marine; then it was found easier to con- 
 tribute money, and a fixed assessment was made of pay- 
 ments to the common treasury held at Delos. It can 
 easily be seen how Athens, from being one amongst a 
 number of States, prima inter pares, gradually slipped into 
 the position of a paramount State. The tributes from the 
 islanders helped to make her wealthy; she became a 
 sovereign, or rather a despot city, having a great con- 
 federation under her which she soon learnt to tax at her 
 will. Now in Aristophanes' eyes such an evolution was 
 wholly in the wrong direction, and it would seem that in 
 The Babylonians he did not hesitate to say that the exac- 
 tions on tributary States were unjust and excessive, and 
 that in point of fact the Allies, who came over to the great 
 Dionysiac festival at which this comedy was produced, 
 had very reasonable complaints to make against their 
 suzerain. The truth, according to the comic poet, was 
 that Athens, greedy of flattery, listened only to venal 
 and extravagant orators who, praising her to her heart's 
 content, led her along paths fatal to her sense of justice 
 and her older ethical notions. 1 As a mere matter of 
 history, about this time 2 a very distinguished " modern " 
 orator called Gorgias came at the head of an embassy from 
 Leontini and made an extraordinary impression on the 
 Athenian populace by a new kind of oratory, full, as we 
 
 1 Aristoph., Knights, 1111-19, Acharn., 634-5. 
 
 2 B.C. 427. Cf. Thuc., iii., 86. It is curious that Thucydides does not 
 mention Gorgias, but Diodorus does (xii. 53). 
 
 D 
 
34 OLD SAWS AND MODERN INSTANCES 
 
 should say, of purple patches. There is little doubt that 
 Aristophanes had this incident in mind when he complained 
 that the Athenian Demos was so easily seduced by new- 
 fangled eloquence. 
 
 Here, at all events, was a distinct attack made by a 
 daring young poet against one of the most powerful of 
 contemporary statesmen, Cleon. Cleon so understood it, 
 and because the play was exhibited at the great Dionysia 
 when foreigners were present he indicted Aristophanes for 
 an unpatriotic insult to the Demos and the Council. A 
 charge of treason seems to have been preferred, but the 
 Council refused to entertain it, thinking probably that the 
 satire of a comic poet, even though directed against public 
 measures of the State, was an unfit subject for a criminal 
 proceeding. When later on Aristophanes refers to this 
 matter in The Acharnians he refuses to adopt any apolo- 
 getic attitude, and claims that, so far from being an insult, 
 his satire was most beneficial to Athens. There was 
 nothing really unpatriotic in his attitude, he maintains, 
 because, while so far as Athenian public life was con- 
 cerned, he aimed only at what was right and just, so far 
 as his ideals went, he longed for that union of all Greeks, 
 that Pan-Hellenic unity, which was in no small measure 
 attained in the great days of Marathon and Salamis. At 
 the same time he does not hesitate to utter his own likes 
 and dislikes. He loathes the demagogues, the informers, 
 the sophists; he cannot endure the War Party any more 
 than he can tolerate the fashion in which Euripides' plays 
 had lowered the old heroic tragedy to the common levels 
 of every-day life. 
 
 2 
 
 In what has been said we have already anticipated the 
 first Aristophanic comedy which has come down to us 
 The Acharnians. The Banqueters (Aaitafals) was brought 
 out in 427 B.C.; The Babylonians (Btifivk&vux) in 426 
 B.C. The date of The Acharnians (A%aavfj<;) is 425 B.C. 
 From the beginning to end it is a strong plea for Peace. 
 Despite its jesting tone, its raillery, political and social, 
 and an abundance of farcical incidents, it has a very serious 
 undercurrent as, indeed, was usually the case with the 
 comedies of the earlier period when men were allowed to 
 say what they liked and stigmatise as they chose promi- 
 
ARISTOPHANES, THE PACIFIST 35 
 
 nent politicians and the public policy of the State. The 
 war had now been going on for five or six years, and though 
 the possession of sea-power enabled the Athenians to raid 
 the Peloponnesian coasts, Athens herself had been devas- 
 tated by the plague a calamity from which she took long 
 to recover, and which deprived her of her most valuable 
 asset, her statesman Pericles. Moreover, the citizens, 
 cooped up in the city, had been forced to see their land 
 despoiled by invading armies under the command of the 
 Spartan King. Boeotia, too, had been the scene of a great 
 reverse which strengthened the hands of the peace party, 
 and probably gave an opportunity for Nicias and the 
 moderates to make themselves heard as against the 
 democrat Cleon and Lamachus, the soldier, whose business 
 was war. The story of the play is of the simplest. 
 Dicaeopolis, an honest countryman, absolutely tired with 
 the war, determines to make terms with Sparta on his own 
 account, and gets an unfortunate man who had been 
 driven out of the ecclesia because he dared to utter the 
 word " peace," to go over to the enemy and get from him 
 samples of the kind of pacification offered for ten years or 
 twenty or thirty as the case may be. The men of Acharnae 
 are very angry with him, because they want compensation 
 for their destroyed vineyards. But Dicaeopolis is quite 
 unmoved by their fury, and when the samples arrive he 
 is so pleased with the flavour of a Thirty Years' truce 
 that he at once concludes a treaty direct with Sparta for 
 himself and his family. Poor Lamachus is of course left 
 out in the cold : there is no peace for him any more than 
 for the rest of the Athenian citizens. But Dicseopolis 
 enjoys all the blessings which the others lack and holds 
 high festival as the play ends. 
 
 The comedy won a first prize, although it is not one of 
 Aristophanes' best. But the real interest lies not in the 
 action of the play, but in the circumstances in which it 
 was brought out. What would be the public attitude in 
 England if some dramatist were to produce a piece strongly 
 recommending an immediate cessation of hostilities and 
 pacification with Germany? We assuredly should not be 
 so tolerant as the Athenian Demos, nor should we be at all 
 inclined to admit the poet's plea that he was really seeking 
 the good of his country, and was therefore a better patriot 
 than the advocates of war. The censor would not permit 
 such a performance; it would seem like treachery to the 
 
36 OLD SAWS AND MODERN INSTANCES 
 
 Commonwealth. How comes it then that public opinion 
 in Athens allowed in time of war a writer of comedies to 
 pose as what we call a Pacifist ? The answer turns partly 
 on the past history of Athens, partly on the view taken of 
 the social function of comedy. 
 
 Let us take the second point first, because it illustrates 
 a deep divergence of view entirely separating a play enacted 
 at Athens from a play in a modern capital. Every one is 
 aware that there were rude merrymakings connected with 
 the Dionysiac festival, out of which probably both tragedy 
 and comedy evolved. But the point about comedy is 
 that it retained throughout its original free-spoken and 
 somewhat licentious character. Rude banter, merciless 
 criticism, flagrant personalities marked all the older comedy 
 which flourished throughout the greater portion of the 
 Peloponnesian War to about 404 B.C. At the time of the 
 festivals of the great Dionysia and the Lenaea the Athenian 
 populace accepted it as their right to see a joyous, irrespon- 
 sible, and also critical kind of " revue," as we might term 
 it, and since it had many links of connection with their 
 religious worship they were not likely to tolerate much 
 change in its nature or its pretensions. The two charac- 
 teristic notes which distinguish ancient comedy were, first, 
 the extraordinary liberty allowed to the dramatist for 
 ridiculing and criticising institutions of the State and 
 personages of public importance, and, secondly, an unmis- 
 takable serious underplay of thought, the dramatist 
 intending to show himself not only as a critic, but as also 
 a kind of moral reformer pointing out what, in his opinion, 
 were errors, drawbacks, dangers which affected the com- 
 munity at large and required alteration and reform. Thus 
 Athenian comedy was a thoroughly democratic institution, 
 and, indeed, could only have been possible in a thorough- 
 going democracy. The citizens were not at all likely to 
 allow any one to curtail its functions, for it held much the 
 same relation to the life and views of the community at 
 large as modern journalism does to the body politic of 
 modern times. It strikes one nevertheless as somewhat 
 paradoxical that Aristophanes, who disliked the democracy, 
 should use a great instrument of democratic criticism to 
 point out democratic errors. Primarily the object of the 
 poet was to make people laugh; secondarily it was to 
 instruct, to warn, to suggest certain morals. Aristophanes 
 was well equipped for both functions, and hence he was 
 
ARISTOPHANES, THE PACIFIST 37 
 
 allowed a freedom which was all the more remarkable 
 because we know it to have offended leaders of the 
 democracy like Cleon himself. 
 
 But that is not the only ground on which we can exonerate 
 Aristophanes from any charge of unpatriotically recom- 
 mending peace when his own country was at war. Great 
 changes, social and political, had been going on in Athens 
 since the times of Miltiades and Themistocles. As long as 
 there was a common danger due to the possibility of Persian 
 invasions Greece might remain united, but when, owing 
 largely to the success of her naval commanders, the peril 
 of the Mede was removed, Greece relapsed into that fatal 
 division of State against State, together with all the 
 jealousies that naturally arose between communities at 
 imperfect stages of development, which we know from 
 history to be the main reason why the prosperity of Greece 
 herself was so short-lived. Athens gradually increased 
 her power, to the dismay of Sparta, who thought the 
 supremacy should belong to herself, while gradually, too, 
 the transference of political authority from the old aris- 
 tocratic families to merchants who had made their money 
 in trade and commerce, metamorphosed Athens herself 
 from a sort of oligarchy to a frankly democratic status. 
 
 Thus, instead of leaders like Aristides and Cimon, we 
 get Pericles and Ephialtes as a first stage of democratic 
 development, and then the newer kind of demagogues, 
 such as Cleon and Hyperbolus. Of course, there were 
 many conservatives who deplored these changes. Some, 
 like Nicias, felt them to be inevitable, and believed it to 
 be their duty still to offer their services loyally to the State, 
 while others belonging to a Tory division did not hesitate 
 at times to plot with the enemies of Athens, and especially 
 to intrigue against Pericles, whom they held to be mainly 
 responsible for the change. The outbreak of war between 
 Athens and Sparta gave them fresh grounds for their 
 indignation, and if the later years of Pericles' life were 
 embittered by the constantly repeated attacks of his 
 enemies, no small responsibility lay on the shoulders of 
 the old aristocrats who hated alike Pericles, the war, and 
 the Athenian democracy. Now, although Aristophanes 
 did not belong altogether to the intractable section of 
 aristocrats, he certainly had full sympathy with the 
 moderate party headed by Nicias, and seems honestly 
 to have believed that the hands of the clock could be put 
 
38 OLD SAWS AND MODERN INSTANCES 
 
 back, and Greece and Athens restored to the position they 
 occupied at the time of the Persian Wars. He disliked 
 the idea of Athens as a tyrant State, governing depen- 
 dencies with an iron hand. He hated the bitter hostility 
 that had arisen between Athens and Sparta, and thought 
 that they ought to be united in a Pan-Hellenic community. 
 Above all, he loathed the vulgarity of the new democracy, 
 its love of talk, its greed for flattery, its passion for litiga- 
 tion, and the low stamp of public men which it produced. 
 Holding such convictions with intense earnestness Aristo- 
 phanes had also the great advantage of being in a position, 
 as writer of comedies, to inculcate his opinions with the 
 greatest freedom. Doubtless many of his contemporaries, 
 especially those who were wounded by his lampoons, 
 thought him unpatriotic. But the Athenian Demos does 
 not seem to have cared much whether he abused it or not 
 so long as he could make it laugh. Nor, indeed, was it 
 particularly refined in the choice of witticisms it preferred. 
 There is an immense amount of coarseness in the old school 
 of comedy, much of which, no doubt, is to be explained 
 as part of the usual accompaniment of Dionysiac levity. 
 
 3 
 
 Aristophanes' fourth comedy, The Knights (424 B.C.), 
 illustrates still more clearly the boldness of the satirist 
 and the absolute licence claimed for comedy in Athens. 
 It is an attack direct, unsparing and bitter against 
 Cleon in the heyday of his prosperity, and probably 
 because it is a fearless challenge it was produced by the 
 author, unlike the three which had preceded it, under 
 his own name. In order to understand it, however, we 
 must refer to events which had occurred a few months 
 before the play appeared, and which must therefore have 
 been fresh in the memory of the public. They form an 
 oddly interesting story. 
 
 By a curious concatenation of accidents, Athens had 
 won one of her greatest triumphs in the war, and Cleon 
 had attained one of the greatest successes in his career. 
 There was a daring Athenian commander, full of initiative 
 and resource, called Demosthenes, who shared with Nicias 
 the respect of all good citizens. He joined, apparently in 
 an unofficial capacity, an Athenian fleet which was sailing 
 round the Peloponnesian coast on its way to Corey ra. 
 
ARISTOPHANES, THE PACIFIST 39 
 
 Either because he had a quick eye for good defensible 
 positions, or because he had been advised by some friendly 
 Messenians, he fixed upon Pylos, on the western side of 
 the Peloponnese, as a post it might be worth while to 
 fortify. 1 In front of it lay the island Sphacteria, leaving 
 two channels of approach, north and south, to the bay 
 which, in modern times, goes by the name of Navarino. 
 The commanders of the expedition would not listen to 
 Demosthenes, but fortune favoured his scheme. Owing 
 to bad weather the fleet was unable to leave the harbour, 
 and the soldiers amused themselves in the interval by 
 building a rough sort of fort on the mainland. When the 
 weather cleared the rest of the fleet sailed on their way, 
 leaving Demosthenes with five ships to carry on his project 
 as he pleased. The Spartans, meanwhile, had received 
 news of this affront to their mainland and dispatched some 
 of their best troops to eject the daring invader. Demos- 
 thenes promptly sent two of his five ships to recall the 
 fleet, and with the remaining three succeeded in holding 
 his own until the return of the main Athenian squadron, 
 which not only drove the Spartan ships out of the harbour, 
 but also managed to isolate and surround a considerable 
 body of the enemy in the island of Sphacteria. Now the 
 troops imprisoned in the island consisted of the flower of 
 Spartan aristocracy with their attendant Helots, and the 
 peril they were running was so obvious and insistent that 
 the proud Lacedaemonian city felt herself obliged to send 
 envoys to Athens to ask for terms. Thanks to Cleon, 
 always an ardent supporter of the war, the terms were 
 rejected, and impossible counter-conditions demanded, 
 which, as Cleon well knew, were bound to be refused. 
 
 The siege of Sphacteria, however, dragged somewhat, 
 and the Athenians, growing impatient, were inclined to 
 censure Cleon for making them refuse the enemy's offer. 
 But the demagogue was quite undismayed. " If our 
 Generals were only men," he cried, pointing to Nicias, 
 " the affair would have been over long ago. If I were in 
 command, I would promise to bring the Spartans captive 
 to Athens within twenty days." " Then why don't you 
 take command ? " was the quick Athenian retort, and 
 Nicias, making one of the many mistakes in his reputedly 
 blameless life, seconded the request of the Assembly by 
 offering to resign his generalship in Cleon' s favour. Now 
 
 1 Thuc., iv. 3. 
 
40 OLD SAWS AND MODERN INSTANCES 
 
 Cleon was not a fighter, he was only a man of words, and 
 would naturally decline the dangerous office, but feeling 
 that he was fairly trapped he made the best of what 
 seemed a bad business by asking that Demosthenes should 
 be associated with him in the command. It is possible 
 also that he knew what the Athenian Assembly did not 
 know 1 that Demosthenes had already prepared a plan 
 which he was on the point of carrying into execution. 
 
 Everything is fortuitous and strange in this curious 
 story, and not the least of the happy accidents was that 
 a mere chance had deprived the Spartans of their best 
 means of resistance. Sphacteria was a densely wooded 
 island, in which the attack would generally be inferior 
 to the defence. But a party of soldiers had landed in 
 order to cook a meal, and the fire, helped by a strong 
 wind, had spread far and near, until the woods were ablaze 
 and destroyed. Thus Demosthenes saw that his oppor- 
 tunity had "come, and Cleon on his arrival at Pylos found 
 everything ready for the assault. The island being now 
 bared of its trees the Athenian soldiers, mostly consisting, 
 it would seem, of light armed troops, were in a better 
 position to attack the enemy. Yet even so the resistance 
 was desperate. The Spartan hoplites, although gradually 
 driven to the extremity of the island, fought with all their 
 usual courage, and if it had not been for the good advice 
 of a Messenian leader it is doubtful whether even now 
 Demosthenes would have been successful. But the Mes- 
 senian suggested to him that there was a practicable path 
 leading round the rear of the Spartan army, and Demos- 
 thenes, only too glad to avail himself of the chance thus 
 offered, sent round a small division so as to enclose the 
 enemy between two fires. The result was that the Spartans, 
 exhausted by the protracted struggle of the day and en- 
 feebled by lack of food, were forced to surrender after 
 having first consulted with their comrades on the mainland. 
 So after all Cleon' s " insane boast " the epithet is Thucy- 
 dides' own was fulfilled, and the demagogue had the 
 immense satisfaction of returning to Athens within the 
 twenty specified days, bringing his prisoners with him. 
 No event made a greater stir throughout Greece than this 
 victory at Sphacteria, for the tradition was that the Spartan 
 hoplites, like the Old Guard at Waterloo, might die but 
 would never surrender, and the discovery that under 
 1 Thuc., iv. 29. 
 
ARISTOPHANES, THE PACIFIST 41 
 
 severe pressure they could be conquered by the Athenians 
 was an entire reversal of public opinion. Cleon himself 
 received the honours usually accorded to a benefactor of 
 the State, being presented with a golden crown and given 
 the foremost seat at all public spectacles. So far as we 
 are aware, no similar honours were granted to Demos- 
 thenes, although it is clear from Thucydides' narrative 
 that it was his enterprise and forethought which had 
 really secured the victory. 
 
 This striking Athenian triumph took place in the late 
 summer or early autumn of 425 B.C., and in the following 
 February (424) Aristophanes' comedy, The Knights, was 
 produced at the Lenaean festival. Doubtless Cleon, sitting 
 in the foremost seat, was present on the occasion, and it is 
 not unlikely that Demosthenes also was there, although 
 Nicias had taken an early opportunity of leaving Athens 
 with a fleet, being, as was only natural, disgusted with 
 the turn which events had taken. And it was precisely 
 at the moment when Cleon was at the culmination of his 
 glory that Aristophanes delivered his bitterest attack on 
 the successful demagogue. Nothing could be more directly 
 incisive than the satire of the play. The sovereign State 
 of Athens, the all-powerful Demos, is represented as an 
 old man, almost in his dotage, who has surrendered himself 
 and his household affairs into the hands of a slave. He 
 has, as a matter of fact, three slaves, but only one of these 
 is powerful, the one who goes under the title of Paphlagon, 
 and who is in reality Cleon. The other two are actually 
 given their proper names they are Nicias and Demos- 
 thenes, the tried servants of Demos, who find themselves 
 ousted and bullied by the rascally Paphlagonian steward. 
 In all probability the masks which the actors wore were 
 made up into some easily recognisable presentment of the 
 two generals, while Cleon' s mask was more disguised. 
 Aristophanes, however, is not going to allow any one to 
 miss the point of his attack, for he puts into the mouth of 
 a fellow-slave the complaint that Paphlagon had stolen 
 his cake a direct allusion to recent events at Pylos and 
 the transference of the fruits of victory from the real to 
 the pretended victor. Moreover, the Knights, who form 
 the chorus of the play, were known to be hostile to Cleon, 
 and had quite recently made the demagogue disgorge a 
 bribe offered to him by one of the confederate States in 
 order that he might secure some remission in their tribute 
 
42 OLD SAWS AND MODERN INSTANCES 
 
 to Athens. 1 Every point must have told in this vigorous 
 drama. Nicias and Demosthenes, putting their heads 
 together, discover that the only way to get rid of their 
 pestilent fellow-slave is to secure some rival with a louder 
 voice, a larger vocabulary of abuse, and a more abundant 
 set of oracles to produce at critical moments, than Cleon. 
 The last is a curious personal touch which must refer to 
 Cleon' s style of oratory. It was probably his habit to 
 fortify his opinions and judgments by quoting on his side 
 oracular utterances, supposed to support his policy. For- 
 tunately for the two conspirators, a leather-lunged sausage- 
 seller comes on the scene, who is exactly the man they 
 require for their purpose. The sausage-seller defeats 
 Cleon every time, and quickly supplants him in his 
 master's favour. And Demos himself, rescued from his 
 tyrant, at once recovers his youth and regains his normal 
 reasonableness. 
 
 We can imagine the feelings of the real Cleon, who began 
 by being a seller of leather, when he not only saw himself 
 travestied as a Paphlagonian slave, but witnessed his 
 oratorical defeat by a vulgar braggart, seller of black- 
 puddings, who could beat him at his own game. But 
 when we reflect that so daring a play, with so stinging a 
 caricature of a prominent politician, could be enacted 
 amidst the laughter of an Athenian crowd, we are forced, 
 I think, to the conclusion that though Cleon might wield 
 considerable power, he had by no means won either the 
 respect or the affection of his fellow-citizens. In other 
 words, Mitford and Thirlwall are more to be trusted when 
 they follow the views of Thucydides and Aristophanes 
 in dealing with these events, than Grote, who in his zealous 
 defence of democratical principles stretches too many 
 points in favour of the ardent demagogue Cleon. 
 
 4 
 
 Meanwhile the war went on with varying fortunes. 
 Aristophanes, in the year after the production of The 
 Knights, brought out The Clouds (423 B.C.) and The Wasps 
 (422 B.C.). Neither of these is immediately concerned with 
 the course of hostilities. The first is an attack on the 
 modern education prevalent in Athens, and is a continua- 
 tion, therefore, of the main thesis of The Banqueters. 
 1 Aristoph., Acharn., 6. 
 
ARISTOPHANES, THE PACIFIST 43 
 
 Socrates, on whom the attack principally falls, is taken 
 as the type of such different classes of teachers and pro- 
 fessors as the Physical Philosophers like Anaxagoras, for 
 example and the sophistical instructors in rhetoric, such 
 as Protagoras and Prodicus. The portrait which Aristo- 
 phanes draws has little or no resemblance to the historic 
 Socrates, who practically confined his teaching to ethics. 
 The second comedy, The Wasps, satirises the Athenian 
 fondness for litigation, and is therefore an attack on the 
 paid dikasteries or jury-courts. Both plays have their 
 importance, although not in the connection immediately 
 before us. I pass to the comedy entitled, with Aristo- 
 phanes' customary boldness, The Peace, which was actually 
 prophetic, inasmuch as it appeared only a month or so 
 before a treaty for a cessation of hostilities for fifty years 
 was ratified. 
 
 The date of the comedy is 421 B.C., and it was enacted 
 at the Great Dionysia, at which representatives of the 
 Allies were present a circumstance which would make 
 its bold advocacy of peace with Sparta all the more remark- 
 able. Doubtless pacifist tendencies were prevalent at the 
 time. The various States involved were sick of the war. 
 Athens had not succeeded so well as she had hoped after 
 the brilliant coup at Sphacteria : Sparta, despite some 
 excellent victories due to Brasidas, was anxious to recover 
 the well-born prisoners who were being kept as hostages 
 by the rival city. Brasidas was indeed one of the finest 
 generals whom Sparta produced, and his assaults on 
 Athenian possessions in Thrace made in the teeth of 
 Athenian naval supremacy proved how vulnerable was 
 that maritime Empire which had hitherto carried every- 
 thing before it on the sea. It need hardly be said that 
 Cleon, who was sent out to oppose him, was no match 
 for the resourceful Spartan, whom Thucydides, with a 
 touch of Attic scorn for a tongue-tied race, described as 
 " not a bad speaker for a Lacedaemonian." But it so 
 chanced that in some rough and disordered fighting near 
 Amphipolis both Cleon and Brasidas were killed. The 
 death of the two prominent advocates of war, representing 
 the martial party in Athens and Sparta respectively, gave 
 an opportunity for peace negotiations, of which Nicias 
 was quick to avail himself, and the fifty-year truce which 
 followed included a definite alliance between the two 
 combatants. Greece, although, perhaps, a little sceptical 
 
44 OLD SAWS AND MODERN INSTANCES 
 
 of the future, was for the time, at all events, able to breathe 
 again. 
 
 The Peace is certainly not the happiest of Aristophanes' 
 efforts, but at least it put the situation plainly enough 
 before the audience, and carried on the purpose of the 
 earlier comedy, The Acharnians. The hero is Trygaeus, 
 an unhappy Athenian, who determines to scale the heights 
 of heaven on the back of a beetle. Arrived at the celestial 
 heights he discovers the gods engaged in pounding the 
 Greek States in a mortar. He intends to stop this at all 
 hazards, and therefore releases from the well in which 
 she has been imprisoned the Goddess Peace. Thereupon 
 the gods discard their pestle and mortar, and Trygseus, 
 marrying one of Peace's handmaids, brings her with him 
 home. It must have given sincere pleasure to Aristo- 
 phanes to find that the object which he had been pursuing 
 for some years past was now about to be realised, and that 
 his satiric dramas had not failed in their mission. 
 
ARISTOPHANES, THE PACIFIST 
 II 
 
 1 
 
 THE earlier period of Aristophanes' plays ends with the 
 " Peace " of 421 B.C. After that date there is a cessation 
 of activity on the part of the dramatist, an interval of six 
 years; and when Aristophanes once more steps upon the 
 stage his plays exhibit^ a slightly different tendency. The 
 earlier, as we have found, are very combative and satirical, 
 and are animated throughout not only by a dislike of the 
 war party, but also by a bitter hostility against Cleon as 
 leading statesman of Athens. They are, as we should 
 term them, distinctly topical plays. After the peace of 
 Nicias they became by no means so personal or so pug- 
 nacious. For instance, The Birds a comedy which was 
 enacted in Athens in 414 B.C. is in great measure an idyllic 
 piece, as though the satirist deliberately sought to draw 
 the attention of his audience away from the actual circum- 
 stances of the moment to a purely imaginative realm. 
 We are not, of course, aware why Aristophanes was silent 
 for six years. Doubtless he was not inactive, but perhaps 
 he might have thought that, after the conclusion of a 
 covenant between Athens and Sparta, there was a real 
 chance of the spread of those principles which he had 
 himself espoused under the assumption that the moderate 
 party had gained the victory in Athens and that no 
 immediate disturbance of the peace was to be expected. 
 If such were his thoughts, he was completely deceived. 
 But there also might have been other reasons, and not 
 least the changes in the attitude of the public towards 
 productions of comedy. For we know that when, in 
 414 B.C., The Birds was produced, there had come into 
 existence a new law, said to be introduced by a certain 
 Syracosius, prohibiting personal attacks on prominent 
 individuals in the State. His fellow-dramatists, Ameipsias 
 
 45 
 
46 OLD SAWS AND MODERN INSTANCES 
 
 and Phrynichus, seem to have grumbled at the restriction 
 placed on their activity as satirists. Aristophanes chose 
 the wiser part and altered the character of comedy in order 
 to make it more fantastic and less topical, and to give the 
 Athenians a flight of fancy rather than a diatribe on 
 contemporary events. 
 
 Athens was rarely in lack of great men during the 
 Peloponnesian War. She commenced it under the control 
 of one of the greatest of her citizens, Pericles, and though 
 her prestige as a State was decidedly lowered by a man 
 like Cleon, her generals, Nicias and especially Demos- 
 thenes, were efficient and, on the whole, fairly successful. 
 And then, after Cleon' s death, there arose into power one 
 of the greatest characters in Athenian history Alcibiades 
 whose growing reputation fills all the interval from the 
 peace of Nicias to the Sicilian expedition. Alcibiades was 
 a man whose versatile gifts and always juvenile audacity 
 can very easily be misinterpreted, especially if we look only 
 at the character of the influence he exercised over Athens. 
 There is no doubt whatsoever that Athens would have been 
 safer in the hands of a staid and moderate man, less brilliant 
 and less able, but possessed of those qualities of good sense 
 and self-control which would have enabled him to guide 
 his city with reasonable safety- through a period of crisis. 
 For in a certain definite fashion Alcibiades was the ruin 
 of Athens. He led her along paths which were exceedingly 
 dangerous for a city in her circumstances; and he aban- 
 doned her rather than undergo a charge of impiety which, 
 perhaps, he felt himself unable to meet. He became a 
 traitor when he betrayed her to Sparta, and gave advice 
 to the enemy which enabled him to win success after 
 success. Only towards the close of his career did he manage 
 to atone for his delinquencies when, through the latest 
 period of the Peloponnesian War, he did what he could 
 to enable Athens to carry on her desperate struggle with 
 diminished armies against a circle of foes. 
 
 There is one characteristic about prominent Greeks 
 which always strikes one with amazement. They seem to 
 be inspired with the most burning patriotism, but directly 
 anything goes wrong, if they fall out of favour, they do 
 not hesitate to join the ranks of the foes. This had been the 
 case with Themistocles and a good many others of less 
 importance. It was also the case with Alcibiades. One 
 significant exception is furnished by the historian Thucy- 
 
ARISTOPHANES, THE PACIFIST 47 
 
 dides. He had failed to arrest the progress of Brasidas 
 in Thrace and had lost his command. But the only form 
 which his revenge took was to write a most dispassionate 
 account of the whole war, in which he does ample justice 
 to his native city and is proudly silent on the subject of 
 his own disgrace. Most of the Greek statesmen were not 
 formed in this mould. If we give the best interpretation 
 to their conduct we shall have to say that they were so 
 enamoured of their native State that they could not bear 
 for a moment the thought that she was listening to 
 counsels other than their own. From this point of view 
 they would act like discarded lovers, with a bitterness as 
 acute as their original passion. For all practical purposes, 
 however, they have little enough excuse for their perfidy, 
 and we can hardly help judging them as we should all 
 traitors who allow personal feelings to overpower their 
 sense of patriotic duty. 
 
 2 
 
 Alcibiades was a young aristocrat. He had some family 
 connection with Pericles. He was by general consent the 
 most brilliant young Athenian of his day, headstrong, 
 violent, ambitious, lavish in personal expenditure, prodigal 
 in the arts of the demagogue, but with apparently a real 
 sense of the power and dignity of Athens and a genuine 
 desire to see her flourish. But the thought of an Athenian 
 triumph in which he did not share was gall and bitterness 
 to him. For to his eager and wide-ranging intelligence, 
 if Athens was to become the mistress of the Hellenic world 
 he must be the chief man of Athens, an acknowledged 
 despot after the fashion of the older tyrants, whose word 
 was law. His family had some Laconian associations, 
 but when Alcibiades, then quite a young man, made over- 
 tures to Sparta that he should represent her and her interests 
 in Athens, the Spartans very naturally came to the con- 
 clusion that he was too young and too untrustworthy to 
 discharge such important functions. This was an insult 
 which Alcibiades never forgave, and from this moment he 
 took every opportunity of embroiling the relations between 
 the two leading States in Greece. 
 
 Rapidly it was discovered that the peace of Nicias was 
 no peace ; that it only brought at most a temporary cessa- 
 tion from hostilities. Intrigues began and multiplied, 
 
48 OLD SAWS AND MODERN INSTANCES 
 
 in which Argos and the Peloponnese were largely involved, 
 and though Athens and Sparta were nominally allies this 
 did not prevent them from working with no small amount 
 of energy to do each other the utmost injury in their 
 power. And through it all Alcibiades was the leading 
 influence, or perhaps rather the baleful star. In his wide 
 and lofty imagination the time had now come for a new 
 policy, a policy as far removed from the sage restraint 
 imposed by Pericles as its author, Alcibiades, was from the 
 character of his grave and eminent kinsman. The new 
 policy was, indeed, startling in its audacity. Athens was 
 to extend her conquests in the west, Sicily might be sub- 
 dued, Carthage might be attacked, the whole coast-line 
 of the Mediterranean, as far as the Pillars of Hercules, 
 might become an Athenian Sea; and then, possessed of 
 this world dominion, Athens might bring a crushing fleet 
 to surround the whole of the Peloponnese, starve Sparta 
 into submission, and become in deed and in name the 
 Imperial power of the Greek world. 1 Naturally a moderate 
 man like Nicias would have nothing to do with such 
 delirious fancies, and it looked for some time as if the old 
 weapon of ostracism was to be called in to settle the 
 differences between Alcibiades and Nicias, in which case 
 one of them would have been forced to retire from active 
 service for the State. But at the last moment popular 
 criticism was turned upon a comparative nonentity, 
 Hyperbolus. Both parties united their forces against this 
 unpopular specimen of demagogue, and Hyperbolus was 
 driven into exile. In many ways it was an unfortunate 
 decision, for it left the city a prey to contending factions. 
 In the older days Athens would have freed herself by a 
 decisive vote; now she accepted a kind of compromise 
 which by no means cured the evils to be feared from two 
 bitterly opposed parties in the State. 
 
 The chance for which Alcibiades had been looking 
 forward duly arrived. Envoys from Sicily came to implore 
 the help of Athens in aid of Egesta against a rival city, 
 Selinus, which was being helped by Syracuse. By granting 
 the prayer of the enyoys from Egesta, by sending some 
 assistance to them in their need, the Athenians would at 
 once be involved in Sicilian affairs and find admirable 
 chances for pushing their vague and lofty dreams of con- 
 quest. Naturally, therefore, Alcibiades gave strenuous 
 1 Thuc., vi. 15, vi. 90. 
 
ARISTOPHANES, THE PACIFIST 49 
 
 support to these delegates from Sicily and pointed out to 
 his fellow-citizens at home how great would be the advan- 
 tage if Athens, using her maritime power, were to extend 
 her empire westward. That empire had, indeed, become 
 a burden heavy to be borne by the islanders and the allies. 
 The tribute from those who were supposed to be associates, 
 but were in reality dependents, had steadily grown from 
 a contribution of 600 talents to more than double that sum, 
 and there was much ground for complaint as to the methods 
 employed by a city who interpreted her Imperial responsi- 
 bilities in the light of a despotic ambition. There were 
 many in Athens herself who deplored the changes which 
 had come over their position, and amongst them Nicias, 
 of course, urged those principles of moderation which 
 characterised him throughout his career. When his country- 
 men voted that an expedition should be sent out to Sicily, 
 Nicias insisted that the whole discussion should be re- 
 opened on the following day. When even so the decision 
 went against him, he sought to dissuade the Athenians by 
 demanding a far larger force, both of men and ships, than 
 had originally been determined. But the only result of 
 his dilatory policy was that the Athenians granted his 
 requests, and, in accordance with their habitual method 
 of balancing impetuosity by caution, appointed both 
 Alcibiades and Nicias to the command of the expedition. 
 They added a third commander in the person of Lamachus, 
 a brave and vigorous soldier, whose main business was the 
 actual conduct of military operations, and who knew and 
 cared nothing about questions of Imperial pulicy. 
 
 Unfortunately, just before the expedition sailed an 
 unparalleled event occurred in Athens. In a single night 
 the numerous marble Hermae, rectangular statues to 
 Hermes, which could be seen in the market-place and were 
 erected in front of the citizens' houses, and therefore 
 formed one of the most familiar sights in Athens, were 
 broken and mutilated and the streets littered with frag- 
 ments. Such an event was all the more mysterious 
 because it could not have been done by a drunken band 
 of revellers. It must have involved a large body of con- 
 spirators. Great was the indignation which prevailed at 
 this hideous sacrilege, and Alcibiades himself, rightly or 
 wrongly, was considered to be implicated, mainly on the 
 ground of the reckless character of his customary associates, 
 In the general uncertainty every citizen looked at his 
 
50 OLD SAWS AND MODERN INSTANCES 
 
 neighbour with suspicion and dislike. Some sort of revolu- 
 tion was supposed to be imminent, and the absence of 
 definite knowledge only increased the universal terror. It 
 was a very ominous incident to occur just on the eve of 
 a great adventure, and Alcibiades felt it so keenly that 
 he demanded an instantaneous inquiry, proposing himself 
 ready and anxious to meet all charges levelled against him. 
 But the Athenians would not hear of anything which could 
 possibly delay the sailing of their ships. They allowed 
 Alcibiades to start, still holding his office of general, and 
 only required his future attendance when the formal 
 inquiry should be opened. It was in every way an unfor- 
 tunate position, for it could not but place their general 
 under the stigma of an unproved crime, a position which 
 undermined his authority with the allies and caused no 
 little discontent in both army and navy. The results were 
 even more disastrous a few weeks later, for, while the 
 generals were concerting their measures in Sicily itself, 
 the Salaminia, or Sacred Vessel, was sent out from Athens 
 to bring back Alcibiades to meet his accusers. So proud 
 and fiery a character could hardly be expected to undergo 
 the humiliation of a trial in such exceptional circumstances, 
 and Alcibiades, perhaps in collusion with the officers of 
 the Salaminia, escaped on his way back to Athens and 
 took refuge in the Peloponnese. There, in order to wreak 
 his revenge on his faithless native city, he stirred up the 
 Spartans to join in the fighting in Sicily, and, above all, 
 induced them to send out one of their most capable 
 generals, Gylippus, whose arrival changed the whole 
 fortunes of the day. 
 
 3 
 
 Aristophanes' comedy, The Birds, is capable of several 
 interpretations. 1 It is a romance, a flight of fancy, a 
 poetical piece of nonsense : but it may also be an allegory 
 and contain many deep meanings, pertinent to the time 
 (414 B.C.) at which it was produced in Athens. The story 
 is quite fantastic, but it is carried out with a wealth of 
 imaginative detail and adorned with several beautiful 
 lyrics and odes which make it one of the most fascinating 
 
 1 See introduction to Aristophanes' Birds, by Benjamin Bickley Rogers 
 (Bell & Sons), p. xv. Mr. Rogers' edition of Aristophanes (including his 
 translations) are of the utmost value to the student. 
 
ARISTOPHANES, THE PACIFIST 51 
 
 of the author's plays. There are two Athenians, Peis- 
 thetserus and Euelpides, who are disgusted with actual 
 conditions and determine to strike out a new idea. They 
 persuade the birds birds are primeval things, belonging 
 to the early stages of animate life on the globe to build 
 a city half-way between heaven and earth. It is called 
 NetpekoxoKKvyia, " Cloud-cuckoo-town." The plan suc- 
 ceeds so well that the new city becomes a menace to 
 heaven, for it prevents the gods from enjoying the sacrifices 
 which come up to them from below and all the rich savours 
 with which humanity is wont to propitiate Deity. So the 
 gods, deprived of the usual offerings, are forced to send 
 envoys to treat with the birds in order to get rid of the 
 untoward menace to their felicity. Peisthetaerus, the 
 ringleader in the happy enterprise, receives the hand of 
 Basileia, the daughter of Zeus, and all ends well. 
 
 An obvious interpretation makes the play a parable, 
 somehow dealing with Alcibiades and the Sicilian Expedi- 
 tion. Fantastic schemes were no doubt in the air, and the 
 Athenian mind was excited by vast possibilities of empire. 
 But directly we try to apply the allegory it fails us. For 
 if the birds represent the excitable and volatile Athenians, 
 then the gods whom they beleaguer must represent the 
 Spartans, and that does not seem a likely supposition. 
 Moreover, Peisthetaerus and Euelpides do not in any 
 fashion except for their enterprising ardour resemble 
 Alcibiades. Or shall we say that the piece is a protest 
 against superstition and religious fanaticism? We know 
 that the mutilation of the Hermae, with which Alcibiades 
 was supposed to be concerned, produced an almost in- 
 describable commotion and much underground activity 
 on the part of informers and spies. It also was the main 
 cause why Alcibiades was recalled from Sicily and thus 
 indirectly invalidated the chances of success. But it is 
 difficult to see any vital connection between Athenian 
 fanaticism and the story of Aristophanes' play unless we 
 force an unreal analogy between Peisthetaerus, who defies 
 the gods and succeeds, and the ordinary Athenian, who 
 is a prey to mystical terrors. 
 
 Probably there are two different trains of thought 
 recognisable in The Birds. There is undoubtedly a satirical 
 element, for Aristophanes seems to be criticising and laugh* 
 ing at the rash caprices of his countrymen, which were 
 often allowed to override the dictates of law and order. 
 
52 OLD SAWS AND MODERN INSTANCES 
 
 And the play seems, too, to contain or suggest the wistful 
 dreams of the idealist who, instead of turning his thoughts 
 as usual to an Athens of the past, prefers for the nonce to 
 sketch the outlines of a new and wonderful Athens, a 
 city in the clouds which shall be both pure and prosperous. 
 Very likely, however, it only argues dull brains to try to 
 explain an airy exercise of the imagination, a piece of 
 fantasy and romance which defies analysis and is its own 
 best justification. The lyrical motive was always strong 
 in Aristophanes, and the outpouring of song and melody 
 in the chants of the birds lifts the play far above the 
 prosaic level of mere reason or the debates of contemporary 
 politics. 
 
 4 
 
 The interval between the production of The Birds and 
 that of Lysistrata represents the culmination of the great 
 tragedy of the Sicilian Expedition. In the autumn of 
 413 B.C. rumours began to arrive at Athens of the appalling 
 catastrophe that had befallen not only the original expedi- 
 tion under Nicias, but the subsequent one which had been 
 sent out under the command of Demosthenes. The details 
 of the story as they are narrated to us by Thucydides 
 would carry us too far from our subject. In themselves 
 they form a most arresting story, a story in which Fate 
 seems to have decided everything against the luckless 
 Athenians. But, of course, when we look at it more closely 
 the tragedy resolves itself into the failure of individuals, 
 combined, perhaps, with the original impossibility of the 
 whole scheme. In Athens herself probably little was known 
 of the real conditions of Sicily, nor in her confidence in 
 her fleet was there any suspicion that the considerable 
 distance between the actual scene of war and the bases 
 of supply was bound to be prejudicial to chances of victory. 
 Perhaps Alcibiades might have carried the scheme through, 
 but, as we have seen, he had been transformed from an 
 Athenian general into an enemy of his native city, and all 
 his talents, which without doubt made him the most con- 
 spicuous man in the Greek world, were employed to help 
 the cause of Sparta. It was, as we have seen, owing to 
 the advice of Alcibiades that the Lacedaemonians sent 
 Gylippus to Syracuse, who, such is the magnetism of a 
 single great personality, transformed the whole situation. 
 
ARISTOPHANES, THE PACIFIST 53 
 
 When we have to reckon up the faults of individuals, the 
 glaring incompetence of Nicias must be placed on the 
 highest plane ; and it provokes no little wonder that Athens 
 herself refused to mistrust him, declined to recall him when 
 he wanted to be recalled, and persisted in thinking that 
 he was not only a trustworthy, but an energetic com- 
 mander. It was Nicias' fatal inertia which made Athenian 
 success impossible. To this we must add the Athenian 
 general's insane superstition. At the critical moment of 
 his fate he refused to move the expeditionary force out 
 of the great harbour of Syracuse owing to the fears excited 
 by an eclipse. Delay, procrastination, feebleness, these 
 were the chief marks of Nicias' leadership, and all we can 
 say of him is that, at the end, despite illness and despair, 
 he showed the virtues of a courageous man. Unfortun- 
 ately, he involved in his own downfall the ruin of a much 
 more efficient general than he was Demosthenes. Left 
 to his own resources, Demosthenes would at least have 
 been able to carry away in safety the remnants of the 
 expedition, if he had not succeeded in some brilliant attack 
 upon the foe. But, alas ! Nicias' counsels were all against 
 activity and daring, and the melancholy result was that, 
 after the destruction of their fleet, the Athenian armies, 
 trying to escape inland, were overwhelmed and forced to 
 surrender. Both Nicias and Demosthenes were put to 
 death while the Athenian prisoners were sent to work as 
 underground slaves in Syracusan stone-quarries. 
 
 It was the most overwhelming catastrophe which had 
 ever occurred in Greek history. The flower of the Athenian 
 fleet and armies, the most splendid armaments that had 
 ever left an Hellenic harbour, had been annihilated. Political 
 and military leaders alike had perished. The ruin was so 
 complete, so totally unexpected, that at first no one in 
 Athens could believe it. Slowly the truth filtered through- 
 out the population, and Athens woke from her dream of 
 empire to find herself confronted by imminent extinction. 
 The triremes which were left were few and by no means 
 serviceable. Little enough money remained to equip new 
 ones. The allies were everywhere breaking away, rejoicing 
 in the opportunity to break a yoke that had become hateful 
 to them. No city ever had so tremendous a task as Athens 
 
54 OLD SAWS AND MODERN INSTANCES 
 
 saw before her eyes at the opening of 412 B.C. Hopeless 
 and demoralised though they were, the citizens set them- 
 selves to do all that was possible. Surrender was never 
 talked about. As Thucydides tells us, they determined 
 that they would not give in. 1 Two of the measures which 
 they undertook were, first, the creation of a sort of Com- 
 mittee of Public Safety, a Board of ten Probuli, an oli- 
 garchical institution ; and second, the conversion into prac- 
 tical use of a reserve sum in the Acropolis. Happily enough, 
 at the very outset of the war the sum of a thousand talents 
 had been set aside to be used only in the event of an actual 
 attack upon the city by a hostile fleet. If any person 
 suggested a resolution for diverting it to other purposes 
 the penalty was death. But now the moment had clearly 
 arrived when the money had to be forthwith expended; 
 so, at the advice probably of the Probuli, the death penalty 
 was revoked and the thousand talents were to be made 
 available for shipbuilding purposes. It was during the 
 year 412 B.C., the darkest period of the Peloponnesian War 
 darkest, at all events, before the ultimate disaster 
 that Aristophanes was writing the Lysistrata. It was pro- 
 duced at the commencement of the year 411 B.C., and 
 perhaps the most marvellous thing about it was that it 
 was ever produced at all. For Aristophanes appears once 
 more in his character of the pacifist, suggesting the absolute 
 necessity of peace in the Hellenic world. 
 
 In order to appreciate his courage or, perhaps, his 
 hold on Athenian audiences let us attempt to realise the 
 conditions of the time. The democracy was in alarm and 
 despair; there was imminent danger that hostile fleets, 
 now supported by victorious Syracusan triremes, would 
 attack Athens in waters nearer home. The allies were 
 everywhere revolting. The best generals, or, at all events, 
 those whom Athens trusted most, had been killed. There 
 was a general lack of money and of most of the munitions 
 of war. I have already referred to two of the enactments 
 by means of which Athens hoped to be able to provide 
 for her defence. I mention them again because they are 
 both alluded to in the Lysistrata, and, indeed, form part of 
 the plot. The reserve fund of a thousand talents was to 
 be made use of to build fresh triremes, and a body of ten 
 Probuli had been appointed to watch over the immediate 
 necessities of the State. One of these Probuli is brought 
 1 Thuc, viii. 1. 
 
ARISTOPHANES, THE PACIFIST 55 
 
 forward as a State officer in Aristophanes' play. We only 
 know the names of two one was Hagnon, the other was 
 called Sophocles, but whether the latter was or was not the 
 dramatist remains uncertain. It is hardly likely that the 
 Probulos in the play was made up to represent any par- 
 ticular officer, but we observe that both he and Lysistrata 
 are anxious, for different reasons, to get possession of the 
 thousand talents of the Acropolis the former in order to 
 continue the war and the latter in order to bring it to an 
 abrupt conclusion. 
 
 The institution of the ten Probuli was undoubtedly an 
 oligarchical measure. Indeed, one of the anxieties which 
 at this moment was harassing the minds of Athenian 
 democrats was the signs and evidences of an oligarchical 
 reaction. Shortly afterwards the political revolution con- 
 nected with the four hundred took place, giving a sinister 
 significance to the people's fears. But, however hardly 
 bested, the citizens were in no mood for peace. With 
 the energy of despair the State had resolved on supreme 
 sacrifices. It refused to admit the idea that it was con- 
 quered. The general attitude of the people was sullen, 
 savage, despairing, and yet obstinate. With such a temper 
 prevalent it seems hardly credible that Aristophanes should 
 dare to present a farcical play with the satirical thesis 
 that if men could not bring peace to the land, at all events 
 the women could. Peace, urged the dramatist, was the 
 great thing to be desired peace, almost at any price, 
 even the surrender of Pylos, 1 It is, however, Worthy of 
 remark that, though Lysistrata was intended to be farcical, 
 both in its general plot and in the incidents it portrays, 
 there is also a deep-lying seriousness, a grave anxiety as 
 to the future, which reveals itself in the argument between 
 Lysistrata and the chief magistrate. In this respect it 
 strongly contrasts with the next play which Aristophanes 
 produced, the Thesmophoriazusce, when, thanks in no small 
 measure to Alcibiades and a few victories of the Athenian 
 fleet, the general condition of affairs was much improved. 
 
 6 
 
 At the opening of the play Lysistrata, a young Athenian 
 married woman, is standing alone in front of the gateway 
 1 Cf. Lysistrata 1163. The Athenians still held Pylos. Lysist. 104. 
 
56 OLD SAWS AND MODERN INSTANCES 
 
 which led to the Acropolis. She has summoned an 
 Assembly of young married women, not only from Athens, 
 but from Sparta, Bceotia, Corinth, and other hostile States, 
 in order to propound a plan which she thinks will stop the 
 war. Gradually the various deputies come in, especially 
 Lampito from Sparta, who is soon discovered to be very 
 friendly to Lysistrata an allusion probably to the secret 
 sympathy which all along seems to have existed between 
 the Peloponnesian city and Athens. To the assembled 
 deputies Lysistrata propounds her scheme. All these 
 young married women are to refuse to have anything to do 
 with their husbands until the latter make peace and put 
 an end to the horrible war. Of course, some of the women 
 demur to this project, and Lampito herself, though inclined 
 to support Lysistrata, is doubtful whether peace is possible 
 so long as there are those thousand talents stored up in 
 Athene's Temple. Lysistrata reassures her. While she and 
 the younger women are holding the present Assembly, 
 some older women have been told off to seize the Acropolis 
 where the money is kept. There is, in fact, a thoroughly 
 organised revolt, in which the women have taken possession 
 of the chief points of advantage. 
 
 A modern paraphrase of this play was produced in the 
 autumn of 1910 by Miss Gertrude Kingston at the Little 
 Theatre. Mr. Laurence Housman's version was not in 
 any sense a translation from the original Greek, but only 
 an adaptation; but it was very cleverly arranged for the 
 stage, and gave an opportunity for an English audience 
 to get some idea of Aristophanic comedy. Perhaps, there- 
 fore, it is unnecessary to enter into any details of the plot. 
 The chorus, consisting of twenty-four persons, is divided 
 into two portions twelve old men and twelve old women. 
 When they come into the orchestra, representing the 
 supporters respectively of Lysistrata and the Probulos or 
 chief magistrate, they have an amusing altercation, the 
 men trying to set fire to the defences organised by the 
 women and the women retaliating by throwing pails of 
 water over the men. The Probulos himself comes forward 
 at the end of the quarrel and a long debate ensues between 
 him and Lysistrata, the poet, of course, speaking by the 
 mouthpiece of his heroine and describing the reforms which, 
 in his opinion, are necessary in the State. Perhaps be- 
 cause of the exigencies of the time Aristophanes carefully 
 refrains from anything savouring of mere partisanship. 
 
ARISTOPHANES, THE PACIFIST 57 
 
 What he recommends is what would be recommended by 
 any patriot that is to say, the removal of abuses, the 
 suppression of party intrigue, and a union of all loyal 
 citizens in hearty co-operation and goodwill. Then, after 
 the chorus once more have been seen in altercation, an 
 interval of five days is supposed to elapse. By this time 
 the separation of the sexes has become an evil too great 
 to be borne, and there are evident signs that sooner or 
 later one of the two parties must give way. Lysistrata 
 has no little difficulty in preventing some of the young 
 women in her company from being the first to abandon 
 their programme, and a young wife, Myrrhina, has a 
 long interview with her husband apparently permitted 
 by Lysistrata which looks compromising. Nevertheless, 
 though she seems on the point of succumbing, Myrrhina 
 finally escapes back into the Acropolis. But the end has 
 already been reached. Deputies come from Sparta meet- 
 ing deputies also from Athens, and the women have clearly 
 gained the day. Lysistrata, as usual, admonishes both 
 sides, and manages to effect an arrangement which ensures 
 peace, the play ending with the usual festive banquet and 
 general expressions of amity. It is a witty and highly 
 paradoxical play, disfigured by much indecency from our 
 point of view, but in that respect not differing from 
 other Aristophanic comedies. It must have had a 
 curious effect in Athens on the eve of an oligarchical 
 reaction, while the city was strenuously endeavouring, 
 even with her diminished resources, to carry on the 
 war. 
 
 For Lysistrata, as we have seen, was brought out at the 
 time when intrigues were on foot to replace the existing 
 democracy by other forms of government. Peisander was 
 the leader of the revolution, who, shortly after the play 
 had been produced, came to Athens from the camp at 
 Samos in order to organise the oligarchy. Aristophanes, 
 of course, could not have disliked the tendency of the 
 time, for he was never a friend to the democracy and 
 probably thought that any change might be for the better. 
 But his primary desire was for peace peace at any price, 
 peace to be obtained by the women if the men were 
 incapable to secure it. 
 
58 OLD SAWS AND MODERN INSTANCES 
 
 7 
 
 With the Lysistrata, however, the series of peace- 
 comedies comes to a close, and overwhelming external 
 events seem to have closed the advocate's mouth. The 
 Thesmophoriazusce, which only appeared a few months 
 later than Lysistrata, has no politics in it. It is a satire 
 on women and on Aristophanes' old butt, Euripides, but 
 no question is raised touching Athens' policy. Besides, 
 the oligarchical conspirators had begun their reign of 
 terror, and, though the note of the comedy is fairly joyous 
 for Athens had won some victories it was clearly not 
 a time to jest with the authorities. 
 
 Perhaps, however, the most pathetic of all the comedies, 
 if we look at it in connection with the moment at which 
 it was produced, is the well-known and deservedly popular 
 piece called The Frogs. The date was 405 B.C. Athens 
 was entering upon her last agony, making her final efforts 
 to stave off ruin. Eight months later was fought the 
 fatal battle of ^Egospotami. Fifteen months afterwards 
 Lysander captured Athens and the Peloponnesian War 
 was at an end. What could a comic poet do at such a 
 time but attempt to turn away men's minds from the terror 
 of approaching defeat, and with a desperate earnestness 
 work to make them laugh ? It was a vain attempt, prob- 
 ably, but Aristophanes did his best. He made his frogs 
 croak their immortal strain, " Brekekekex Koax, Koax." 
 He showed his fellow-citizens how bereft of true poets was 
 their native city and how necessary it was to feed their 
 minds on the great names of the past. Dionysus goes down 
 to Hades to bring back a poet from the shades. For the 
 vacant throne of tragedy JEschylus and Euripides have an 
 amusing contest, and the victory is decreed to the older 
 dramatist ^Eschylus, who fought for the Greeks against 
 the Persians and who represented that happier time of 
 Hellenic unity to which Aristophanes' thoughts are always 
 fondly turning. Thus the comedy is in reality a literary 
 criticism and nothing else, in which the poet illustrates 
 once more his inveterate dislike of the " modern " dramatist 
 who had brought down tragedy from heaven to earth. 
 Cleon, the demagogue; Socrates, the sophist; Euripides, 
 the realist these represent the permanent hates of 
 Aristophanes. He certainly could hate well and in all 
 probability he was unjust to all three, certainly to the two 
 
ARISTOPHANES, THE PACIFIST 59 
 
 latter and perhaps also to the first. In any general esti- 
 mate, however, of Aristophanes we must not forget that, 
 apart from his strongly-marked satiric tendency, with 
 which I have been principally concerned, he was one of the 
 most indubitable of poets. He sang songs of ethereal 
 beauty, and his " native wood-notes wild " had no little 
 of the unstudied charm and spontaneity of Shakespeare. 
 
DEMOSTHENES AND THE PRINCIPLES OF 
 PATRIOTISM 
 
 IT is one of the strange delusions of " modem " critics, 
 especially if they happen to have a scientific training, that 
 little of real value can be learnt from Greek and Latin 
 classics. The uselessness of Latin and Greek had been the 
 theme of much indignant rhetoric on the ground that the 
 time spent over dead languages might be much more 
 profitably spent over living ones, or, better still, devoted 
 to science. No argument can have weight with those who 
 have made up their minds on the subject on the one side 
 or the other, because the question really turns on a difference 
 of temperament, or, as we used to say, on whether a man 
 is born an Aristotelian or a Platonist. Nevertheless, I 
 have ventured to say that the anti-classical attitude involves 
 a strange delusion, for the simple reason that ancient 
 history and literature are full of " lessons " for the modern 
 reader. Perpetually during the course of the present war 
 we have been reminded of historic examples which seem 
 to illustrate recent events and controversies, and though 
 we are chary now of affirming that history goes in cycles 
 which reproduce, one another, and are more inclined to 
 speak of progress in a rectilinear development, it cannot 
 be denied that modern problems often seem to reproduce 
 ancient ones possibly because human nature remains 
 fundamentally the same. 
 
 The questions, for instance, whether democracies can 
 govern dependencies, whether an aristocracy or a democracy 
 is better fitted for carrying on a prolonged war, whether 
 autocracy or a free commonwealth is the ideal constitution 
 for the human race, whether politicians should control 
 generals or generals govern politicians, whether Imperialism 
 in foreign relations is compatible with free institutions 
 or untrammelled Parliamentary debate at home, whether 
 
 60 
 
PRINCIPLES OF PATRIOTISM 61 
 
 Socialism is or is not a practical polity on these and many 
 other points too numerous to mention the histories of Greece 
 and Rome shed abundant lights. In the present paper I 
 desire to take a concrete case. We talk a great deal about 
 Patriotism what it means, what consequences it involves, 
 how it stands related to the wider feelings of what we call 
 cosmopolitanism or internationalism. I know no better 
 or more illuminating material for a study of this kind than 
 is furnished by the career of Demosthenes, the Athenian 
 patriot, in his struggle with the barbarian power of Macedon 
 and the autocratic efficiency of Philip. From beginning to 
 end of his speeches to the Athenian public he is for ever 
 illustrating the claims, the duties, and the rights of a true 
 lover of his country. 
 
 Three notable figures in Greek history were born at about 
 the same date Philip of Macedon, Demosthenes, and 
 Aristotle. The last-named was chosen by the Macedonian 
 King as tutor for his son Alexander; Philip and Demos- 
 thenes were antagonists during the whole course of their 
 careers. Aristotle represented the scientific and philo- 
 sophical interest in which Greece was once more to show 
 an example to the world. The sphere of politics occupied 
 the other two men during a period of Athenian decline 
 which Demosthenes did his best to prevent and Philip his 
 utmost to promote. After the end of the Peloponnesian 
 War Athens never recovered " the first fine, careless 
 rapture" of her prime. She had her brief moments of 
 revival, and, indeed, as compared with the increasing 
 degeneracy of Sparta she showed a high spirit in organising 
 anew her naval power. She also possessed a few generals 
 of no little brilliancy, such as Timotheus, Chares, Iphi- 
 crates, Diopithes, Phocion, who gained fitful triumphs in 
 circumstances of considerable difficulty. But her increas- 
 ing use of mercenaries instead of native-born soldiers 
 and her passionate desire to keep intact her Theoric Fund 
 so as to provide for her festivals and spectacular exhibitions 
 when the need of the moment was for munitions of war, 
 told their own tale. Athens had lost her energy, her 
 initiative, her spontaneity ; she was, as one of her satirists 
 described her, " an old woman in slippers guzzling her 
 porridge," instead of a Marathon fighter; she had all the 
 
62 OLD SAWS AND MODERN INSTANCES 
 
 lassitude and slackness of one stricken with an incurable 
 and enervating malady. And here we touch the tragedy 
 of Demosthenes' life. Himself a man of unwearied energy, 
 with a patriotic spirit nursed on the heroic examples of the 
 past having Thucydides at his finger-ends and keeping 
 constantly before his eyes the dominating figure of Pericles 
 he was doomed to live in an age which had outworn its 
 older ideals and among a people who could only be galvan- 
 ised by repeated shocks into anything approaching activity. 
 Great men lack some of their greatness when they are 
 deprived of a sympathetic environment. Their " own 
 nobility remains the same and shines the brighter, perhaps, 
 because of its singularity. But they lose the comforting 
 assurance of effectiveness ; they do not see the results of 
 their labours. They feel all the drawbacks of solitariness : 
 they stand alone. The isolation of Demosthenes is one of 
 the pathetic aspects which strike most acutely the student 
 of his age. For the men who should have worked most 
 closely with him, and helped his ambitions by sharing them, 
 did not possess his large vision and could not see as clearly 
 as he could the signs of the times. Isocrates, for instance, 
 " the old man eloquent," and the honest Phocion ought to 
 have stood by him. But their eyes were holden. They 
 were utterly mistaken about the aims and character of 
 Philip. One thinks at times of a modern statesman, the 
 lonely Venizelos, in the midst of a decadent Greece. 
 
 Demosthenes was not a born orator. He laboriously 
 educated himself for his high career in spite of natural 
 disadvantages. Probably he had as a boy some sort of 
 impediment in his speech. His voice was not strong, and 
 we know that his rival ^Eschines derided him for not being 
 athletic or a sportsman. Numerous stories are told of his 
 rigorous self-discipline. He is said to have shut himself 
 up in an underground chamber, having shaved one side of 
 his face to prevent any temptation to come out in the 
 light of day and to ensure close and continuous study. He 
 put pebbles into his mouth and then tried to speak against 
 the roar of incoming waves, he recited while he ran uphill, 
 and, according to report, wrote out with his own hand 
 Thucydides' history eight several times. We know also 
 that he took lessons from Isaeus, an orator of distinction, 
 and there is also a tale that he was an eager listener to 
 Plato. His earlier efforts at oratory were disastrous, and 
 on one occasion after a failure while he was roaming in 
 
PRINCIPLES OF PATRIOTISM 63 
 
 the Piraeus he was encouraged by an actor, who took him 
 in hand and gave him some valuable hints. There seems 
 no question that he was not born great, but rather achieved 
 greatness by persistent industry. His enemies declared 
 that his speeches were wanting in naturalness and smelt 
 of the midnight oil. Indeed, one ancient critic contrasted 
 him with Cicero in this respect, giving to the Roman orator 
 the charm of spontaneity and to the Greek the merit of 
 elaboration and study. However this may be, there is 
 no question which was the greater orator. There is no 
 oration which is quite comparable with the speech of 
 Demosthenes " On the Crown " in the perfection of its 
 style, the sonority of its eloquence, and its graphic mixture 
 of the narrative and the rhetorical manner. It is said 
 that -ZEschines, his antagonist on this occasion, after he 
 had retired from Athens, gave Demosthenes' speech for 
 recitation to his pupils, and when they were loud in their 
 expressions of admiration, remarked : " What would you 
 have said if you had heard the man deliver it himself? " 
 If the Athenian originally spoke with difficulty, he assuredly 
 succeeded in conquering all obstacles. We who only read 
 his words on the printed page feel the charm of his diction 
 and the musical rhythm of his best periods. But his con- 
 temporary audience were aware that they were listening 
 to a man who combined appropriate action with a forceful 
 oratory which carried them off their feet, a man whose 
 nervous energy and eager, inspired face added weight and 
 charm to the noble ethical principles of his political creed. 
 Thucydides no doubt had taught him much, but he owed 
 still more to his own character and temperament. Only 
 Phocion could sometimes get the better of him by his 
 rugged simplicity and directness. " Here comes the man 
 who can split my harangues in two," Demosthenes said when 
 Phocion arose to address the Assembly. It was like the 
 contest between Brutus and Mark Antony only in the 
 reverse order, with Brutus cutting deep into Antony's 
 flamboyant eloquence. 
 
 2 
 
 On the other hand, if Demosthenes was not a born orator, 
 his great adversary, Philip, was a born king and leader of 
 men, and had a native genius for war. No one could have 
 ascended the throne in the midst of more pressing diffi- 
 
64 OLD SAWS AND MODERN INSTANCES 
 
 culties and dangers than the man who succeeded Perdiccas in 
 359 B.C. Macedonia was encircled by foes, and the new ruler 
 was only twenty-three years of age. On the north, the 
 Paeonians, on the west, the Illyrians threatened incursions, 
 and in some cases carried them out with the usual ravaging 
 of territory. Moreover, Philip had to face two pretenders, 
 Pausanias, supported by King Cotys of Thrace, and Argaeus, 
 who was the nominee of Athens. As against the latter city, 
 Philip was at a great disadvantage, because he possessed 
 no maritime towns of importance, while Athens held at 
 this time Pydna, Methone, Potidaea and some other places 
 in Chalcidice as well as towns in the Chersonese. Islands 
 such as Thasos, Lemnos, Imbros were hers, and she was 
 allied with Byzantium. Along all the northern coast of 
 the ^Egean, which has become of such importance in the 
 present war, the influence and power of Athens, based on her 
 fleet, were nearly supreme. Olynthus was the only State 
 in this neighbourhood strong enough to resist her. And 
 yet in twelve months Philip succeeded in transforming the 
 whole situation. He defeated Argaeus and the Athenians : 
 chastised the Paeonians and Illyrians; bribed Cotys to 
 give up the cause of Pausanias ; and then, after professing 
 friendship with the Athenians and deluding them with 
 vague promises, turned his arms against Amphipolis, a 
 town which Athens had always claimed as her own, and 
 which even now the Macedonian King declared he would 
 surrender to her in exchange for Pydna. He was naturally 
 anxious to prevent the possibility of any armed assistance 
 being given to Amphipolis while he was besieging the town. 
 No sooner did it fall than he forgot his promises, changed 
 his mind and kept both Amphipolis and Pydna for himself. 
 His army had already been brought to a state of high mili- 
 tary efficiency. His navy henceforth became an object 
 of close and constant care. Naturally, as against the loose 
 confederation of Athens with her allies, an autocratic despot 
 like Philip possessed great advantages. This is how a 
 little later, in his First Olynthiac oration, Demosthenes 
 refers to this point. " The danger is that this man, with 
 all his cleverness and unscrupulousness making con- 
 cessions here, threatening there may convert and wrest 
 to his use some of our main resources. He has it in his 
 sole power to publish or conceal his designs : he is at one 
 and the same time general, sovereign, paymaster : he 
 accompanies his army everywhere. These are great 
 
PRINCIPLES OF PATRIOTISM 65 
 
 advantages for quick and timely operations in war." * 
 The words have a curiously modern ring. One might 
 almost imagine an Allied statesman in the present war 
 pointing out how the military autocracy of Germany helps 
 the Central Powers in their great campaign. 
 
 It does not appear that the Macedonian menace was very 
 quickly appreciated in Athens. Indeed, Demosthenes him- 
 self, who saw farther than most of his contemporaries, 
 hardly realised at first all that it involved. In the earliest 
 of his speeches to the Assembly as distinct from his private 
 and legal orations he is concerned with another peril, 
 one which perpetually loomed large in the imagination of 
 Hellenes, the peril of the Persian King. The speech, 
 which goes by the name Ueql ra>v ZVJUJUOQICOV (B.C. 354), is 
 a very remarkable example of Demosthenes' statesmanship. 
 As against those who were always preoccupied with the 
 possibility of Persian designs on Greece, largely on the 
 ground that Persia was the hereditary enemy, Demosthenes 
 saw clearly enough that the situation was essentially 
 changed, and that the clouds on the Eastern horizon no 
 longer portended an imminent storm. There was no fear 
 of an attack from this quarter : in point of fact, the Persian 
 monarch had now become a sort of relieving officer for 
 Hellenic pecuniary embarrassment, an ally to whom one 
 or other of the parties Spartan or Athenian appealed 
 for help against their rivals of the moment. It suited 
 Philip at a later stage to pose as Generalissimo of the 
 Greek forces against the old foe who had dared to invade 
 the sacred soil of Hellas, and had been thoroughly well 
 beaten for his pains. But for the present at the time when 
 Demosthenes was speaking the Persian king was practi- 
 cally harmless. It certainly behoved Athens to prepare 
 herself for any contingency : she should remain on the 
 defensive, however, and not attempt any initiative. And 
 from this point Demosthenes goes on to sketch an outline 
 of the reforms on which he insisted in many subsequent 
 harangues the necessity of rearranging contributions to 
 the State service, so that the fleet, above all, should be kept 
 in a position of thorough efficiency. 
 
 At this time Philip of Macedon was a cloud no bigger 
 than a man's hand, and his name does not occur in the 
 speech. The great enemy, as he became afterwards, was 
 reorganising his kingdom, training his Macedonian phalanx, 
 
 1 Dem., 'OA. I. 4. [The references are to Bekker's edition.] 
 P 
 
66 OLD SAWS AND MODERN INSTANCES 
 
 laying the foundation for a navy. Towards Athens he 
 kept the attitude of a friend, and he took care to be repre- 
 sented in the City by orators, who, either through blind- 
 ness or greed, were devoted to his interests. Eubulus was 
 one, so were Demades and ^schines; and even Phocion, 
 though no one could suspect his probity, often played his 
 game. Afterwards, Philip threw off the mask. He dared 
 to threaten Thermopylae, but when he found the pass 
 occupied by Athenian troops he thought it wiser to retire. 
 In Chalcidice and in Thrace he adopted bolder tactics. 
 He took pains to secure the wealthy mines of M. Pangaeus, 
 and after playing with Athens, and deluding her with the 
 idea that he was going to capture Amphipolis on her behalf, 
 openly showed his hand by advancing on the important 
 town of Olynthus, which he subsequently mastered, helped 
 by the treachery of Lasthenes and the supineness of Athens. 
 
 3 
 
 I am not concerned in this paper with the incidents of 
 the orator's life, nor yet with the various steps by which 
 Philip after his victory at Chaeroneia rose to supremacy 
 over the Greek world. I wish rather to indicate the chief 
 features of Demosthenes' policy, and the illustrations he 
 gives of the basic principles of patriotism. Fortunately, 
 for our purpose, there is an inner consistency in his views 
 from the beginning to the sorry ending of his career. Let 
 us remind ourselves that he was a great student of the his- 
 tory of Thucydides and a devoted admirer of Pericles. What 
 was the ideal of Athenian citizenship which the great 
 statesman delineated for his countrymen at the beginning 
 of the Peloponnesian War? It was freedom in the first 
 place, complete liberty under democratic forms. It was 
 culture in the second place, for Athens was the soul of 
 Greece, and her high level of mental attainment was a 
 shining beacon for her age. This culture was alike intellec- 
 tual and aesthetic. " We love beauty, and yet are not soft 
 or enervated." x The Athenians were to be strong, both 
 on land and sea, and yet militarism such as was to be 
 found in Sparta was abhorrent to the civic idea. They 
 were to be soldiers, but not pipe-clay soldiers : they were 
 to cultivate intelligence rather than sell their souls to the 
 
 1 I refer, of course, to Pericles' great speech over the fallen, as reported 
 by Thucydides. II. 35 etfoll. 
 
PRINCIPLES OF PATRIOTISM 67 
 
 drill-sergeant. Above all, they were to love their native 
 State, which was to be for them not a cold abstraction, but 
 a living and adorable entity. Few things are more 
 remarkable than Pericles' language on this point, as 
 narrated by Thucydides. The Athenians were to become 
 enamoured of Athens, to be her lovers, as though she were 
 a mistress who asked of them their deepest devotion. 
 Patriotism in this sense is not another name for civic duty ; 
 it is almost an emotional rhapsody. 
 
 To Demosthenes, studying this Periclean idea, several 
 modifications seemed necessary, mainly because the times 
 had altered, but partly because of certain implicit imperfec- 
 tions. The love of Athens was too exclusive an ardour : 
 it was based on the principle that Athens was super- 
 eminent in Greece and could tolerate no rivals. There was 
 no Panhellenic feeling in it; as a matter of fact, it was 
 consistent with a duel to the death against another Greek 
 State, Sparta. Demosthenes, indeed, thought that Athens 
 deserved supremacy, but she must deserve it because she 
 was the embodiment of a Panhellenic idea, the natural 
 leader of a Greece which willingly allowed herself to be 
 led. Athens after Pericles had become Imperialist, a despot 
 city, ruling her allies and subject- States with a rod of iron. 
 That must no longer be her policy. She ought everywhere 
 to support Greek communities, help them in their struggles, 
 preserve their independence, above all, render assistance 
 by land and sea, if they were menaced by a foreign and 
 barbarian Power, such as Macedon. Patriotism to the city 
 of Cecrops was to be based on a wider patriotism to Hellenes 
 anywhere and everywhere very much as love of Eng- 
 land should mean loyalty to Great Britain and her sister 
 dominions and commonwealths. Against despotisms and 
 tyrannies Athens, as a true democracy, was always to wage 
 war. If Sparta attempted to domineer, as she did from 
 ^Egospotami to Leuctra, she was to be fought down. On 
 the other hand, if Thebes repented of her evil ways, she was 
 to be assisted, despite her long-standing hostility to Athens. 
 
 Illustrations of this Panhellenic attitude can be found 
 throughout the speeches of Demosthenes. I take, for 
 instance, more or less at haphazard, the oration " On the 
 Chersonese," which was delivered B.C. 342. The Athenians 
 had dispatched a body of citizens to receive allotments 
 of land in the Chersonese under the command of Diopithes. 
 Disputes arose with the Cardians, who were at once assisted 
 
68 OLD SAWS AND MODERN INSTANCES 
 
 by Philip. But Diopithes held his own, and even carried 
 the war into Thracian territory. The question arose 
 whether on Philip's remonstrance Diopithes was to be 
 recalled. Demosthenes stoutly supported and defended 
 the Athenian general, who in his view was promoting the 
 interests of Hellas against barbarians, and in especial was 
 protecting the Chersonese. It was much to the advantage 
 of Athens to have a permanent force on the northern coast 
 of the JEgean Sea, so that help might readily be given to 
 any Hellenic State which was being menaced by a Mace- 
 donian force. " Is it urged," said the orator, " that the 
 Byzantines are infatuated and besotted ? Very likely : 
 yet they must be rescued for all that, because it is good for 
 Athens." x They are Greeks, in short, and therefore Athens 
 is their natural protector. Here, too, is another passage 
 to the same effect. " Suppose some god would assure 
 for certainly no mortal would undertake such a guarantee 
 that even though you remained quiet and abandoned 
 everything, Philip would not attack you at the last. Yet, 
 by Zeus and all the gods, it would be a disgraceful act, 
 unworthy of yourselves, of the character of Athens 
 and the deeds of your ancestors, if for the sake of selfish 
 ease you were to abandon the rest of Greece to servitude. 
 For my own part, I would rather die than give such 
 counsel." 2 Athens is the city community which is wedded 
 to freedom, and therefore the duty incumbent on her, as 
 a democracy which can never ally herself with despots, 
 is to help other Greek States to remain free. This, too, 
 is the spirit of the oration " On the liberty of the Rhodians " 
 (351 B.C.). Rhodes, whatever her past sins, must be saved 
 from oligarchs and tyrants. 
 
 4 
 
 But we must get closer to this question of patriotism. 
 Apart from the general allegiance to the Panhellenic idea, 
 there is the duty of the individual to his own State. On 
 what does the obligation of patriotism rest? On two 
 principles, above all. The first is, that a man does not 
 belong to himself, but to the State which feeds, nurtures, 
 protects him, and assures him in the possession of many 
 
 1 Dem., nepl T&V ev Xeppovliffv, 16. I use for the most part C. R. Ken- 
 nedy's admirable translation of Demosthenes' speeches. (G. Bell & Sons.) 
 
 2 Ibid., 50. 
 
PRINCIPLES OF PATRIOTISM 69 
 
 civic privileges. This principle is laid down in the oration 
 " On the Crown " which is a perfect storehouse of maxims 
 and principles applicable both to the conduct of politicians 
 and of individual citizens. Let us observe the bearing of 
 this principle or, rather, from Demosthenes' point of 
 view, this axiom or postulate of citizenship. An indi- 
 vidual citizen does not belong to himself, but to the State. 1 
 It follows, therefore, that he has no rights against the State : 
 if he subsequently earns rights, it is in virtue of his perform- 
 ance of certain duties which because the State so ordains 
 give him privileges. What other consequences can we 
 draw ? Clearly this : that he has no claim to exercise 
 his own judgment, as against the superior demands of the 
 State upon him. He cannot plead " conscience " if he 
 is wanted as a soldier. As he has no right to a personal 
 opinion in moments when his city or his commonwealth 
 is in danger, the " conscientious objector " of whom we 
 hear so much in modern times is ruled out of court. 
 Demosthenes would have no sympathy with him : probably 
 he could not even understand him. Individual opinion 
 is not allowed in questions of Art and Literature, in which 
 authority and expert judgment alone have the right to be 
 heard. How much less can individual opinion be permitted 
 in questions which affect the stability, the continued exist- 
 ence of the State ? Of course, in easy-going times of peace, 
 we only smile at the vagaries of personal opinion. But 
 in a crisis, under actual conditions of war, individualism 
 may be a deadly danger to the best interests of the 
 Commonwealth. 
 
 Let us turn to the second principle of patriotism. If a 
 citizen does not belong to himself, patriotism must involve 
 the obligation of personal service. There is no more con- 
 stant note in the Demosthenic harangues than the necessity 
 for Athenians to shoulder their own burdens. No man 
 must delegate this duty to another : he must undertake 
 it himself. As a matter of fact, Athens after the close of 
 the Peloponnesian War had adopted more and more the 
 
 Eractice of employing mercenaries to fight her battles for 
 er, both on sea and land. Her generals, like Timotheus 
 or Chares, or still more, Charidemus, took with them on 
 their expeditions hardly any Athenians, but large bodies 
 of mercenaries and soldiers of fortune. The result was that 
 when payment was in arrears these men took to plundering 
 
 1 Dem., Uepl TOV 2rf((>dvov, 260. 
 
70 OLD SAWS AND MODERN INSTANCES 
 
 and filibustering, and the Allies of Athens learned to dread 
 the arrival of an Athenian force, because it generally meant 
 that they were despoiled by soldiers who, not having 
 regular pay, lived from hand to mouth on whatever they 
 could, lawfully or unlawfully, annex. Demosthenes, though 
 he points out the practical disadvantages of mercenary 
 forces, takes, as we should expect, the higher standpoint 
 that citizens ought themselves to serve in the navy and the 
 army as a matter of duty. Here is a significant passage 
 in the First Philippic (B.C. 352) : " If you Athenians will 
 only exert yourselves now though you did not before : if 
 every man, where he can and ought to give his service to 
 the State, is ready to give it without excuse : if the wealthy 
 will contribute and the able-bodied will enlist : in a word, 
 if you will become your own masters and cease to think that 
 your neighbour will do everything for you if you do nothing 
 yourself then, if Heaven so will, you shall recover your 
 own, get back what you have frittered away, and mete out 
 punishment to Philip." x Here is another passage from the 
 Second Olynthiac : " You must show yourselves greatly 
 changed, greatly reformed, contributing, serving personally, 
 acting promptly, before any one will pay attention to you." 2 
 Or, once more, at the end of the Third Olynthiac : " How 
 is it that all used to go prosperously and all now goes 
 wrong ? Because anciently the people had the courage to 
 be soldiers and controlled the statesmen. ... Is there such 
 an emergency as the present ? Far better to be a soldier, 
 as you ought, in your country's cause." 3 Every one, 
 according to Demosthenes, owes something to the State. 
 Let him contribute what he can money, if he has it to 
 give : taxes which the State imposes on him, let him pay 
 cheerfully. But the greatest of these is Personal Service. 
 
 5 
 
 Demosthenes rarely allowed himself to utter a single 
 word of pessimism : to despair of the Commonwealth would 
 have seemed to him the rankest treason. But now and 
 again his clear judgment of the signs of the times could not 
 but realise that he was dealing with a decadent Athens 
 which no longer responded to the call of duty. The true- 
 minded patriot was confronted by something more than the 
 
 1 Dem., '*<*., I. 7. 2 Dem., 'OA., II. 13. 3 Dem., 'OA., III. 30, 34. 
 
PRINCIPLES OF PATRIOTISM 71 
 
 growing power of an ambitious despot like Philip. He was 
 faced by lassitude, enervation, apathy on the part of his 
 own countrymen obvious tokens that the heyday of 
 Greek democratic life had passed beyond recall. Perhaps 
 the orator was at times only too conscious that he was 
 fighting a losing battle, but this does not prevent him from 
 doing his utmost to persuade and invigorate his audience, 
 to tell them of their obligations and drive them by every 
 resource of irony, criticism, and abuse, as well as encourage- 
 ment, to fulfil these obligations to the uttermost. " Restat 
 amari aliquid " even in his loftiest exhortations. Though 
 his courage will not admit it, he is the spokesman of a 
 perishing cause. ' Tell me," he says in the First Philippic, 
 " do you like walking about and asking one another, Is 
 there any news ? Why, what news could be more arresting 
 than that a man of Macedon is conquering Athenians and 
 controlling the affairs of Greece ? Is Philip dead ? No, 
 but he is sick. And what does it matter to you ? Should 
 anything befall this man, you will soon create another 
 Philip, if this be your way of conducting business." l That 
 the Athenian character has changed is the burden of a passage 
 in the Second Olynthiac : " This, I confess, surprises me, 
 that formerly, Athenians, you fought with the Lacedae- 
 monians for the rights of Greece : rejecting many oppor- 
 tunities of selfish gain, and desiring to secure the rights of 
 others, you expended your property in contributions, and 
 bore the brunt of the battle. Yet now you are loth to 
 serve, slow to contribute, even in defence of your own 
 possessions, and though you have often saved the other 
 city-states of Greece, both collectively and individually, 
 when you are confronted with your own losses you sit still. 
 This does surprise me." 2 The note of disappointment and 
 regret sounds clearer in a passage in the Third Philippic : 
 " What has caused the mischief? There must be some 
 cause, some good reason, why the Greeks were so eager for 
 liberty then and now are only eager for servitude. There 
 was something, men of Athens, something in the hearts 
 of the people then which there is not now something which 
 overcame the wealth of Persia and maintained the freedom 
 of Greece, and quailed not under any battle by land or sea. 
 It is the loss of this which has ruined all and thrown the 
 affairs of Greece into confusion." 3 In explaining what this 
 
 1 Dem., *iA., I. 10, 11. 2 Dem., 'OA., II. 24. 
 
 3 Dem., *IA., III. 36, 37. 
 
72 OLD SAWS AND MODERN INSTANCES 
 
 " something " is, Demosthenes falls back on " nothing 
 subtle or clever," but on the fact that bribery by the as- 
 pirants for power or the corrupters of Greece was universally 
 scouted and detested in the earlier time : whereas now it 
 is different. A man who gets a bribe is envied : if he con- 
 fesses it, laughter is his only punishment; but if any one 
 denounces the crime, then the reward is public hatred. 
 Of course, Demosthenes is covertly alluding to such tainted 
 patriots as Philocrates, Demades and ^Eschines, who were 
 notoriously in Philip's pay. But the taking of bribes is 
 only the external sign of a deeper-lying malady. It was 
 the low state of public opinion in Athens, the code of morals 
 she accepted, the tarnished ideals of conduct and faith by 
 which she was guided, which revealed the poisoned root 
 of her degeneracy. 
 
PATRIOTISM AND ORATORY: VENIZELOS AND 
 DEMOSTHENES 
 
 1 
 
 MOST of the sphere covered by the operations in the Near 
 East is classic ground for the scholar. We need not go back 
 as far as the Trojan War to stir a long-dormant interest in 
 the Hellespont. In historic times, when Greece was 
 fighting the Persians, when Athens was struggling with 
 Sparta in the Peloponnesian War, and when in the decadence 
 of her powers the City of the Violet Crown was trying to 
 hold her own against the encroachments of Philip of 
 Macedon, the coast-line of the ^Egean Sea, the islands 
 near the mainland of Asia Minor, the Dardanelles, the 
 Sea of Marmora, the Propontis rang with the sounds of 
 strenuous combat both by land and sea. Olynthus, 
 Amphipolis, the river Strymon, the triple promontory of 
 Chalcidice these the scholar knows as well as the modern 
 historical student knows Salonika. Byzantium, too, was 
 then, as now, a prize worth fighting for, and Athens, nervous 
 about her corn-ships coming from the Euxine and utterly 
 unable to feed her population without their aid, was for 
 ever casting anxious eyes towards the Thracian coast and 
 her possessions towards the north-east. The Hellespont 
 itself saw her despairing efforts against her Lacedaemonian 
 enemy the victory of Cynossema, the disastrous defeat 
 of ^Egos Potamos, the baulked strategy of Alcibiades, the 
 triumph of Lysander. Sixty years later we find once 
 more Athenian navies manoeuvring in the same region 
 Chares, Phocion, and others doing what they could to 
 prevent Greeks from becoming captive to the Macedonian 
 tyrant, and Demosthenes urging his countrymen with all 
 his lofty eloquence to shake off their lethargy and remember 
 the glorious deeds of their forefathers. So far as the city of 
 Olynthus was concerned, Philip succeeded in his objects 
 before the Athenians could be stirred up to action; but 
 
 73 
 
74 OLD SAWS AND MODERN INSTANCES 
 
 between the years 343 and 340 B.C. Demosthenes, at the 
 height of his influence, checkmated his enemy and, thanks 
 to the generalship of Phocion, saved both Perinthus and 
 Byzantium from Macedonian hands. Alas 1 two years 
 later the fatal battle of Chaeroneia extinguished the liberties 
 of Greece. 
 
 But not only is the soil steeped in classical memories, 
 which none of us can forget and which make us tender 
 towards the modern inheritors of a great name. The 
 circumstances of the time have thrown up a statesman who 
 seems formed in the ancient mould of an Aristides, a 
 Pericles, a Demosthenes. It is especially the last with 
 whom some comparison may be sustained partly because 
 both Venizelos and Demosthenes had to struggle with a 
 very refractory material. It is one thing to lead a nation's 
 hopes in the spring-time of their vigour : it is another to 
 instil a decadent race with powers alien from their habitual 
 apathy. In this sense Pericles had a task as easy as that 
 of Demosthenes was difficult. The earlier statesman found 
 a people plastic to his purposes, eager, spirited, virile, full 
 of ambition, and proudly conscious of their destiny. But 
 the latter had to flog reluctant and apathetic audiences, 
 only now and again capable of higher moods audiences 
 which were amused by the rhetorical battles of their 
 orators, but very disinclined to go to battle for themselves. 
 They preferred to have mercenaries to fight for them while 
 they enjoyed spectacular displays provided out of the 
 Theoric Fund. They had no keenness, no native energy 
 such springs of action seemed to have been killed by their 
 melancholy experiences after the fatal expedition to Sicily. 
 The result is that while Pericles' great speech is buoyantly 
 alive with untapped sources of strength and a yet un- 
 developed national spirit, Demosthenes' orations, the 
 Olynthiacs, the Philippics, and the rest, exhibit the almost 
 desperate efforts of a man to strike some spark out of dead 
 matter to urge, exhort, goad, upbraid, entreat, or shame 
 passivity into some semblance of life. 
 
 Venizelos has much the same task, for his lot, too, has 
 fallen on unhappy times. To be a Greek citizen in the 
 modern era is to be conscious of great humiliations. He 
 must know that he has a poor reputation in Europe, that 
 the " Graeculus esuriens " tradition still survives. The 
 average Greek appears to be an unstable creature, greedy 
 rather than ambitious, cunning, and not too scrupulous 
 
PATRIOTISM AND ORATORY 75 
 
 in business, and by no means constitutionally brave. He 
 does not remember with any feeling of gratification the 
 war against Turkey in 1897, when his armies ran away, 
 and his country was only saved through the intervention 
 of the Powers. It is true that he fought gallantly and well 
 in the first Balkan War, though probably he had not very 
 obstinate opposition to overpower; and when Bulgaria 
 turned against her quondam allies, in the second Balkan 
 War, Serbia and Greece conducted their campaign with no 
 little success. But the recent history of the Hellenic 
 Kingdom is not altogether a creditable one, and her be- 
 trayal of Serbia in that country's anguish and the record 
 of her dealings with the Entente Powers it was to Great 
 Britain, France, and Russia that she originally owed her 
 independence and her very existence as a kingdom are 
 not episodes on which a patriotic Hellene, remembering 
 his glorious past, would care to dwell. It is, perhaps, all 
 the more surprising that out of a milieu so unpromising a 
 statesman of the calibre of Venizelos should emerge. 
 There has been no one quite like him in the Near East in 
 his grasp of actual and possible conditions and his far- 
 sighted glance into the future certainly no politician in 
 Athens who has a tithe of his ability. The Balkan States 
 did, indeed, produce another man of statesmanlike build 
 in Stambuloff, " the Balkan Bismarck," to whom Bulgaria 
 owes more for her existence as a State than she seems ever 
 likely to acknowledge. But Stambuloff was even less 
 fortunate in his conditions and circumstances than 
 Venizelos. And though he had helped Ferdinand to ascend 
 his throne, he had to suffer to the full from the traditional 
 ingratitude of kings, being murdered with Ferdinand's 
 connivance or at least owing to his studied indifference 
 in circumstances of peculiar cruelty. Venizelos, as we all 
 know, is a native of Crete, and that island, which originally 
 gave Greece no small measure of her culture, and that 
 early civilisation which goes by the name of ^Egean, has 
 given no better present to the mainland in recent times 
 than the personality and influence of one of the most 
 distinguished of her sons. Revolutions in Crete have been 
 a constant feature in modern history, and Venizelos, no 
 doubt, had much revolutionary blood in his veins. But 
 his was not a purely destructive spirit. He bitterly desired 
 the redemption of his native island from the murderous 
 grasp of Turkey; but his thoughts soared beyond the 
 
76 OLD SAWS AND MODERN INSTANCES 
 
 confines of his home to the welfare and glory of Hellas, 
 cribbed, cabined, and confined by Ottoman pressure. 
 
 Two ideas, above all, animated his policy, and when he 
 was called to Athens to direct the action of the State he 
 saw some chance of carrying them into effect. One of 
 these was the independence of Greece, viewed in the 
 largest sense that is, the incorporation within a free 
 Hellenic community of all the scattered elements distributed 
 in Macedonia, the JEgean Isles, and the coastland of Asia 
 Minor, unhampered by the stupid and cruel despotism of 
 the Turk. And to this end he was one of the main agents 
 if not the principal agent of all in the formation of the 
 League of Balkan States, which showed to an astonished 
 Europe the marvellous phantom of a united and con- 
 cordant Balkan Peninsula. It was a grandiose conception 
 only possible to a large-minded and idealistic statesman; 
 but it could not endure, because it was based on the 
 theoretical suppression of scarcely veiled and obstinate 
 rivalries. Nevertheless, it lasted long enough to defeat 
 Turkey to the surprise and indignation of the Germanic 
 Empires, which assumed that the Ottoman Empire would 
 prevail over its loosely associated antagonists. The second 
 idea of Venizelos related to the inner structure of Hellas 
 herself. Greece was to gain the full development of her 
 polity and the firm establishment of her independence by 
 a monarchy, which was to be strictly constitutional, giving 
 scope and liberty to the will of her citizens. Venizelos, 
 as a matter of fact, saved the monarchy when it was in 
 considerable peril from an arrogant military party, and 
 since the King of the Hellenes owed to the statesman his 
 security, the least he could do to show his gratitude was 
 strictly to abide within the limits of constitutionalism. 
 In the recent struggles Venizelos' complaint against his 
 Sovereign is that he has taken matters into his own hands, 
 against the will of the great majority of his subjects, and 
 events seem to confirm this view. To the mind of the 
 Cretan statesman, the manifest destiny of Greece is to join 
 the Entente Powers and to throw over that superstitious 
 reverence for Teutonic militarism which appears to have 
 so deeply impressed some of the Greek generals to say 
 nothing of King Constantine. At the moment of writing l 
 
 1 Recent events have obviously modified and in some respects improved 
 the situation. This essay was written before the departure of King 
 Constantine. 
 
PATRIOTISM AND ORATORY 77 
 
 it looks as if Hellas intended to pin her faith to the 
 patriotic policy of her great leader, Eleutherios Veni- 
 zelos. The only point is and it must be a matter of deep 
 anxiety for all sincere patriots whether it is not already 
 too late. What sort of future Destiny will reserve for Greece, 
 who is so tardy in her resolve and did not freely give her- 
 self when the gift would have been precious, is another 
 matter. 
 
 2 
 
 " Too late " is a constant form of reproach in the mouth 
 of Demosthenes. In the first Philippic he contrasts the 
 prompt punctuality with which all arrangements are made 
 for the Panathenaic and Dionysian festivals and the slack- 
 ness and dilatoriness of the preparations for war. " In the 
 business of war all is irregular, unsettled, indefinite," " all 
 your armaments are after the time." x " The efforts of 
 Athens are as awkward as those of an unskilled boxer, 
 who, when he is struck anywhere, immediately transfers 
 his hands to the spot where the blow has fallen, and never 
 watches to see where the next blow is likely to come." 2 
 Clever makers of war should not follow circumstances, but 
 be in advance of them. Or again, in the third Philippic : 
 " It is disgraceful to exclaim when something has happened, 
 ' Who would have thought it ? We ought to have acted 
 in this way and refrained from acting in that.' It is 
 now too late. Many things could the Olynthians mention 
 now which, if foreseen at the time, would have prevented 
 their destruction." 3 Possibly similar thoughts have passed 
 through the mind of Venizelos as he surveyed the pro- 
 crastinating habit of his countrymen, and the pendulum- 
 like swing with which they have oscillated between the 
 Teutonic and the Entente Powers. To be always behind- 
 hand with their decisions may leave them high and dry, 
 without friends and without claims, when the ultimate issue 
 is reached. 
 
 Both Demosthenes and Venizelos would accept Mazzini's 
 definition of a nationality : " The assertion of the indi- 
 viduality of a human group called by its geographical 
 position, its traditions, and its language to fulfil a special 
 
 1 Dem., *ix., i. 40. a Ibid., 46-7. 
 
 Dem., *A., iii. 81. 
 
78 OLD SAWS AND MODERN INSTANCES 
 
 function in the European work of civilisation." l That is 
 precisely what Demosthenes believed about Athens. She 
 was called by her past glory, her faith in freedom, her 
 present influence to put herself at the head of the Greek 
 race wherever they might be located, at Olynthus, 
 Amphipolis, Byzantium or in the ^Egean Isles, or on the 
 mainland and make head against despotism, militarism, 
 barbarism. Philip of Macedon was a barbarian, and bar- 
 barians must not rule the free commonwealth of Greece. 
 Philip, too, was an autocrat, and republics must have no 
 dealing with autocracies. There is a striking passage in 
 the second Philippic on this point. Demosthenes is quoting 
 from a speech he made to the Messenians on the occasion 
 of one of his embassies to the Peloponnese to form a com- 
 / bination of States against Philip. " In truth, too close 
 connections with despots are not safe for republics. . . . 
 You behold Philip a dispenser of gifts and promises : 
 pray, if you are wise, that you may never know him for a 
 cheat and a deceiver. There are manifold contrivances 
 for the guarding and defending of cities, as ramparts, 
 walls, trenches, and the like : these are all made with hands 
 and involve expense : but there is one common safeguard 
 in the nature of prudent men, which is a good security for 
 all, but especially for democracies against despots. What 
 do I mean ? Mistrust. Keep this, hold to this, preserve 
 this only and you can never be injured. What do ye 
 desire? Freedom. Then see ye not that Philip's very 
 titles are at variance therewith? Every king and despot 
 is a foe to freedom, an antagonist to laws. Will ye not 
 beware lest, seeking deliverance from war, ye find a 
 master?" 2 The words are singularly applicable to the 
 present situation. Greece is not now a republic; she is 
 a constitutional monarchy. But she desires to be free and 
 independent, to hold her own against the patent tyranny 
 of the Ottoman Empire or the insidious devices of a pan- 
 Germanic league. Can we not imagine a Greek patriot 
 of the present day telling his countrymen that they know 
 Germany as " a dispenser of gifts and promises," and 
 praying that they may not know it as "a cheat and a 
 deceiver?" Has not Venizelos bidden Greece beware of 
 the gifts of the Danai and cultivate a wise and prudent 
 mistrust? Above all, is not the warning more than ever 
 
 1 Quoted in Europe in the Nineteenth Century. By E. Lipson. P. 264. 
 (A. & C. Black. 1916.) 2 Dem . t *iA., ii. 23-7. 
 
PATRIOTISM AND ORATORY 79 
 
 necessary in Athens at the present day " lest, seeking 
 deliverance from war, they may find a master ? " An 
 excessive shrinking from war, an excessive devotion to 
 neutrality, may lead to something hardly distinguishable 
 from servitude. 
 
 3 
 
 In a previous article I tried to define what Demosthenes' 
 task was. The main points are abundantly clear, as they 
 are emphasised again and again in the Olynthiacs, the 
 Philippics, the De Chersoneso, and other orations. Athens 
 has the titular right to defend Greece against all bar- 
 barians, and especially against the menace of a grasping 
 and ambitious King of Macedon, whose diplomacy is based 
 on deception, on a prodigal use of bribes, and on the sinister 
 service of spies. Athens must also help the Greek States 
 against their own weaknesses, and especially that love of 
 intestine strife which has already ruined so many hopeful 
 democracies. But, above all, Athens must purge herself 
 from her own manifold shortcomings her want of energy, 
 her love of spectacles, her trust in venal orators, her 
 reliance on mercenaries. She must arm her own citizens, 
 contribute to the equipment of efficient fleets, and rise to 
 the height of her own responsibilities and duties. For 
 patriotism is not only valuable as a material defence against 
 danger : it is an ethical obligation. Indeed, the basing of 
 all political action on morals, the large conception of a free 
 democracy finding its highest spiritual duty in self-develop- 
 ment and the guidance of less advanced States, are favourite 
 tenets with Demosthenes, on which he was never tired of 
 laying stress. 
 
 It is our good fortune to possess in Demosthenes' 
 Oration on the Crown a carefully composed apology, 
 drawn up some time after the actual facts, for the policy 
 pursued by the Athenian statesman. Apology is hardly 
 the right word. It is a proud vindication of statesmanship, 
 of which the speaker has no intention of being ashamed, a 
 string of documentary evidences to prove that what he did 
 was done with the best motives, and sometimes with the 
 happiest results. Ctesiphon had proposed to give a crown 
 to Demosthenes ; ^schines opposed the gift on the ground 
 of illegality for various technical reasons with which we are 
 not concerned. But ^Eschines also took the opportunity 
 
80 OLD SAWS AND MODERN INSTANCES 
 
 of criticising and abusing his great rival, in order to 
 prove that he was not worthy of such an honour, and 
 that gave the defendant, as we may call him, his chance. 
 Weak, so far as the legal arguments were concerned, 
 Demosthenes was strong in defence of his statesmanship; 
 and no better proof could be given that he retained to the 
 full the confidence of his countrymen than the fact that 
 even after the disastrous battle of Chaeroneia he was 
 selected to deliver the funeral oration over the dead 
 warriors. Or, if we need corroborative evidence, it may 
 be found in the issue of the duel between the two orators, 
 ^schines, failing to get the adequate number of votes, 
 went into exile. Demosthenes, securing the verdict for 
 his client, Ctesiphon, won a decisive victory for himself. 
 
 What are the main criticisms which might be levelled 
 at Demosthenes' policy? They are tolerably obvious. 
 The policy, whatever might be said of its intrinsic merits, 
 was ill-timed. To bring about a war between Philip and 
 Athens was ruinous, because circumstances made it very 
 unlikely that the democracy" would have any chance 
 against the despotic monarchy. What might have been 
 possible in the times of Pericles was impossible after the 
 many disasters which had befallen Athens and had killed 
 her energies and ambitions. Moreover, it was not a good 
 policy in itself. It would have been wiser to keep friends 
 with Philip and make use of him in the quarrels which 
 divided the Greek States. Men like Eubulus and Phocion 
 formed a more correct estimate of the needs of the situation. 
 ^Eschines was better advised when he tried to establish 
 friendly relations with Philip's Court. Lastly, and most 
 important of all, Demosthenes' policy was an acknowledged 
 failure. It did not keep back the rising tide of Macedonian 
 power. It did not save Athens from defeat. Such are 
 the main counts in the indictment, and it is interesting to 
 observe how the statesman meets them. He lifts the 
 discussion on to a different and a higher plane. He does 
 not so much argue that he was right as that his policy was 
 inevitable, given the past history and the present reputation 
 of Athens. He does not controvert the facts, but main- 
 tains that, even if they had been known beforehand, his 
 policy, and every true patriot's policy, would have been 
 unaltered. It is true that he denies in one respect the 
 failure. He points to the successes gained from 343 to 
 340 B.C., when the sieges of Perinthus and Byzantium 
 
PATRIOTISM AND ORATORY 81 
 
 were raised and Philip's forces were driven out of the 
 Chersonese. But even if all the efforts ended in failure, 
 that does not prove that they were wrong. Material and 
 tangible success is not the only criterion ; there is a higher 
 standpoint from which strategy and diplomacy are viewed 
 in relation to a nation's ideals and not merely in reference 
 to their immediate results. Besides, the State rewards 
 its officers because they have done the best they could 
 under given conditions. Success lies on the knees of the 
 gods. It is enough for a patriot to do his duty. 
 
 Here is an illustrative passage : " What should the 
 commonwealth have done when she saw Philip establishing 
 an empire and dominion over Greece ? Or what was your 
 statesman to advise or move I, a statesman at Athens, 
 who knew that from the earliest time until the day of my 
 mounting the platform our country had ever striven for 
 precedency and honour and renown, and poured out more 
 blood and treasure for the sake of glory and the general 
 weal than the rest of the Greeks had done for their own 
 special interests ? . . . Hardly any one will venture to say 
 this : that it became a man bred at Pella, then an obscure 
 and inconsiderable place, to possess such inborn mag- 
 nanimity as to aspire to the mastery of Greece and formu- 
 late this ambition in his mind, whilst you who are Athenians, 
 day after day in speeches and dramas reminded of the virtue 
 of your ancestors, should have been so naturally base as 
 of your own free will and accord to surrender to Philip 
 the liberty of Greece. No man will say this ! " 
 
 Or again : " Mark the line of my policy at that crisis; 
 do not rail at the event. The end of all things is what the 
 Deity pleases : it is his line of policy which shows the 
 judgment of the statesman. Do not then impute it as a 
 crime to me that Philip chanced to conquer in battle : 
 that issue depended, not on me, but on God. Prove that 
 I failed to adopt all measures humanly feasible that I 
 failed to carry them out honestly and diligently and with 
 exertions beyond my strength, or that my enterprises 
 themselves were not honourable and worthy of the State 
 and necessary. Show me this and you can accuse me as 
 soon as you like." 2 
 
 Or once more, with a certain note of passion, as though 
 success were nothing and policy everything, Demosthenes 
 utters what he himself calls the paradox that even fore- 
 
 1 Dem., nep t rov <rrt>., 80-3. 2 Ibid., 245. 
 
 G 
 
82 OLD SAWS AND MODERN INSTANCES 
 
 knowledge of the event could not alter, and ought not to 
 alter, what was the right course to pursue. " Never, 
 never can you have done wrong in undertaking the conflict 
 for the freedom and safety of all ! I swear it by your fore- 
 fathers those who fronted the peril at Marathon, those 
 who ranged themselves in battle array at Plataea, those who 
 fought at sea at Salamis and those at Artemisium, and 
 many other brave men who sleep in the public monuments 
 all of whom alike, as being worthy of the same honour, 
 the country buried, not only the successful or the victorious ! 
 And justly so. For the duty of brave men had been done 
 by all : their fortune had been decided by the Deity." x 
 This is the celebrated oath which has been so much praised 
 both in ancient and modern times, by Longinus as much as 
 by Lord Brougham. The choiceness of the phrasing, the 
 spirit of the rhetoric, and the music of the sentences can 
 only be appreciated in the original Greek. 
 
 I must quote another passage, because it succinctly 
 defines the duties of a statesman and constitutes Demos- 
 thenes' justification. 
 
 " I do not deprecate," says the orator, " the severest 
 scrutiny in those things for which a statesman is properly 
 responsible. What are a statesman's functions? To 
 observe things in the beginning : to foresee and foretell 
 them to others. This. I have done. Again : Wherever 
 he finds delay, backwardness, ignorance, jealousies vices 
 inherent and unavoidable in all communities to contract 
 them into the narrowest compass; on the other hand, 
 to promote unanimity and friendship and zeal in the 
 discharge of duty. All this too I have performed; and 
 no one can discover the least neglect on my part." 2 If 
 Philip has conquered, his success is due to his army and 
 his wholesale methods of bribery and corruption. Demos- 
 thenes was not a general, so he could not be responsible 
 for the defeat of Athenian troops, while as for bribes, his 
 record was immaculate. And therefore the statesman is 
 able to utter his well-known boast : " Had there been in 
 each of the Greek cities one such man as I was in my 
 station among you; or, rather, had Thessaly possessed 
 one single man, and Arcadia one, of the same sentiments as 
 myself, none of the Greeks either beyond or within Ther- 
 mopylae would have suffered their present calamities : all 
 would have been free and independent." 3 It was the 
 1 Ibid., 263. 2 Ibid., 306-7. 3 Ibid., 376. 
 
PATRIOTISM AND ORATORY 83 
 
 isolation of Demosthenes which made him so powerless 
 in the various crises with which he was confronted. May 
 we not say that Venizelos' impotence when he has had to 
 stand aside and let matters take their own course has 
 been due to a similar cause? If only there had been 
 another Venizelos at Belgrade or Sofia ! 
 
 4 
 
 There are, indeed, many valuable points urged in the 
 Speech on the Crown which make it a storehouse of maxims 
 and lessons for the statesman and the patriot. Let me 
 enumerate a few. There is the difference between states- 
 men true and false, the distinction between the ov^ovlo<; 
 and the ovxoqpdvTrjs. The one pursues strictly selfish ends ; 
 the other aims at the interests of the State. There is 
 a vivid passage on treachery and its wages; traitors and 
 their inevitable doom in the contempt of mankind and 
 the neglect of those who bought them. There are many 
 references to the higher patriotism, the patriotism of self- 
 sacrifice, the pursuit of large ideals, as evinced in the 
 lofty generosity of Athens towards her rivals and the 
 baseness of Philip. There are the indefeasible claims of a 
 free State and the rights of a freeman in a republic to die 
 free. There are useful hints on the real value of an orator, 
 and the justification of a certain vehemence of speech when 
 the commonwealth's main interests are in jeopardy. I 
 have already alluded to Demosthenes' discussion of the 
 relations between good fortune a purely external thing 
 and the essential merits of a policy, which goes deep into 
 the psychology of a State and its citizens. Success is only 
 a very rough test of virtue in a statesman. He must be 
 judged in the light of his highest aims and his own char- 
 acter. Nor yet is it a fair criticism to compare him with 
 his predecessors and ask if he is as great or as good as they. 
 For the circumstances may be so different as to alter all 
 the values. It is unjust to inquire whether Demosthenes 
 presented as big a figure to history as Pericles, or whether 
 Mr. Lloyd George is as great a War Minister as Pitt. 
 
 All these points and many others are invested with 
 the singularly engaging charm of Demosthenes' oratory. 
 That was no natural gift : it was won by stern labour 
 and a merciless discipline. He had to struggle against 
 many disabilities a weak voice, a not altogether engaging 
 
84 OLD SAWS AND MODERN INSTANCES 
 
 personality, an awkwardness of gesture and delivery. 
 Like St. Paul, his enemies could say that his bodily presence 
 was weak and his speech contemptible. He was laughed at 
 as a water-drinker by Philocrates and ^Eschines, and 
 declared on that account to be a churlish and morose 
 fellow. He tells us so himself at the end of the second 
 Philippic, and there is no doubt that many jokes about his 
 abstemiousness were current at Athens. But by dint of 
 hard work he like Abraham Lincoln, whom in certain 
 points he resembles conquered all his difficulties of 
 speech and manner, and became, with the aid of one or 
 two friendly actors, the most accomplished speaker of his 
 own and other ages. Demosthenes' high claims to elo- 
 quence, acknowledged by every competent critic, rest on 
 certain qualities, of which the chief are naturalness and 
 simplicity. This simplicity is, of course, the last word of 
 art, not the simplicity of poverty or foolishness. When we 
 read the Philippics and the Olynthiacs, and above all the 
 Speech on the Crown, we are conscious that we are in 
 the hands of a master of his craft. When he chooses, the 
 orator knows how to state his case with absolute clarity; 
 and when he indulges in a burst of rhetoric and gives us 
 what we call a purple passage, he realises the effect of 
 contrast by a series of simple sentences, pellucid, straight- 
 forward, and without a trace of involution or emotional 
 verbiage. He is an adept, too, in his narrative style 
 witness the wonderful bit of descriptive prose in the Speech 
 on the Crown on Philip's capture of Elateia. 1 " It was 
 evening, and a messenger came to tell us that Elateia was 
 taken" a plain statement of fact which is worked up 
 into a passage as vivid and illuminating as anything to be 
 found in Thucydides or Gibbon. There is nothing that is 
 tawdry or merely theatrical in Demosthenes; if we want 
 to find that we must look to other contemporary orators 
 to ^Eschines, perhaps, who, though he undoubtedly 
 possessed the grand manner and was an accomplished 
 speaker on the traditional lines, was tempted sometimes 
 to trust to his fine voice and overdo his rhetoric. Demos- 
 thenes was disconcerting, because he used original effects; 
 he could be simply conversational in style and make an 
 appeal by unstudied talk, and then, of a sudden, soar into 
 the empyrean. Even the virulent abuse which we find 
 in many of his speeches, and notably in " the Crown," 
 1 Dem., iiept TOW o-Tcj>., 218. 
 
PATRIOTISM AND ORATORY 85 
 
 and which, without doubt, jars on our sensibilities, probably 
 struck an Athenian audience differently. At all events, 
 it is confined to those whom the orator looked upon as 
 traitors to Hellas. Is he ever high-flown ? Perhaps ; but 
 it is generally for a purpose. And he is always the master 
 of his own rhetoric. He is not " intoxicated with the 
 exuberance of his own verbosity," as Disraeli said of his 
 great rival. He shapes his style to predetermined ends. 
 
 5 
 
 It was suggested just now that there was some resem- 
 blance between Demosthenes and Abraham Lincoln. We 
 must not overstrain such analogies. All the men who 
 work for the redemption or salvation of their countries 
 have certain traits in common, because they appeal to 
 such universal passions as the love of freedom and hatred 
 of slavery. In this sense Mazzini, Cavour, Hampden, 
 Washington, Venizelos, Lincoln join hands with Demos- 
 thenes. But between the last two there were perhaps 
 superficial likenesses. Both Lincoln and Demosthenes 
 in their training in oratory had to contend against a 
 natural awkwardness of gesture, but, nevertheless, be- 
 came accomplished orators. In the early life of both 
 there were struggles and difficulties, steadily overcome 
 by a doggedness of disposition, which deepened as expe- 
 rience grew and mastery was attained, into a splendid 
 tenacity of purpose. Demosthenes' policy was thought 
 out from the beginning and remained consistent with 
 itself; Lincoln never wavered in his resolute champion- 
 ship for the Union. Both were misinterpreted and 
 maligned. Both appealed to the highest instincts of the 
 people with whom they had to deal. And both died a 
 tragic death Lincoln, as we know, succumbing to the 
 pistol of an assassin in a theatre, and Demosthenes taking 
 poison in a temple to avoid falling into the hands of his 
 enemies. 
 
 There is no question that, howeVer differently we may 
 interpret Lincoln's somewhat subtle policy as to Slavery 
 and the Union, he looked at all such matters just as 
 Demosthenes regarded his particular problems from a 
 high ethical standpoint. The Greek orator might say 
 that a man was not born for himself, but for the State, 
 
86 OLD SAWS AND MODERN INSTANCES 
 
 the highest interests of which he was bound to subserve, 
 and that therefore patriotism was not merely a civic, but 
 a moral obligation. And the American statesman's atti- 
 tude towards current controversies was equally coloured 
 by the largest ethical considerations. " To him the 
 national unity of America, with the Constitution which 
 symbolised it, was the subject of pride and of devotion 
 just in so far as it had embodied, and could hereafter more 
 fully embody, certain principles of permanent value to 
 mankind. For the preservation of an America which 
 he could value more, say, than men value the Argentine 
 Republic, he was better prepared than any other man to 
 pay any possible price. But he definitely refused to 
 preserve the Union by what in his estimation would have 
 been the real surrender of the principles which had made 
 Americans a distinct and self-respecting nation." l " Lin- 
 coln's affection for his own country and its institutions is 
 dependent upon a wider cause of human good, and is not a 
 whit the less intense for that." 2 The Declaration of 
 Independence seemed to him to have given liberty, not 
 merely to America, but to the world for all future time. 
 By the inculcation of its principles " the weight would in 
 due time be lifted from the shoulders of all men." 
 
 It is this depth of soul, this profundity of character and 
 temperament, which give to Lincoln's speeches a dis- 
 tinction and also a beauty of their own. They are not works 
 of conscious art, though there is every reason for believing 
 that their author spent much time and labour over a dis- 
 cipline in oratory. They carefully avoid all the well- 
 known expedients of a rhetorician on a platform for 
 instance, they very rarely end with a peroration and yet 
 Lincoln knew how to appeal to an audience, mainly because 
 he understood the people and had a curiously intimate 
 sympathy with the popular mind. They are full of coarse 
 and common expressions " the whole thing is as simple 
 as figuring out the weight of three small hogs " is one of 
 his phrases and still his language can be as austere and 
 stately and graceful as that of any of the practised orators 
 of the world. Here is an example in the First Inaugural 
 in 1861, when Lincoln had just been made President and 
 the burning question was whether there would be war 
 
 1 AbraJmm Lincoln, by Lord Charnwood, pp. 121-2 (Constable). 
 
 2 Ibid., p. 183. 
 
PATRIOTISM AND ORATORY 87 
 
 between North and South. " In your hands, my dis- 
 satisfied fellow-countrymen, and not in mine, is the 
 momentous issue of civil war. . . . We are not enemies, 
 but friends. We must not be enemies. Though passion 
 may have strained, it must not break our bonds of affec- 
 tion. The mystic chords of memory, stretching from every 
 battlefield and patriot grave to every living heart and 
 hearthstone all over this broad land, will yet swell the 
 chorus of Union, when again touched, as they surely will 
 be, by the better angels of our nature." 1 Here we have 
 imagination, grace, a certain amount of conventional 
 sentiment (as in " better angels of our nature "), but also 
 a strain of pathos, a touch of delicacy, a high refinement 
 which are wholly Lincoln's. But Lincoln's masterpiece 
 is his little speech over the fallen on the field of Gettysburg. 
 As this article has been occupied with orators and oratory, 
 it may fitly close with a speech almost perfect of its 
 kind. 
 
 " Fourscore-and-seven years ago our fathers brought 
 forth on this continent a new nation, conceived in liberty 
 and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created 
 equal. Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing 
 whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so 
 dedicated, can long endure. We are met on a great 
 battlefield of that war. We have come to dedicate a 
 portion of that field as a final resting-place for those who 
 here gave their lives that that nation might live. It is 
 altogether fitting and proper that we should do this. 
 But, in a larger sense, we cannot dedicate we cannot 
 consecrate we cannot hallow this ground. The brave 
 men, living and dead, who struggled here have consecrated 
 it far above our poor power to add or to detract. The 
 world will little note nor long remember what we say here, 
 but it can never forget what they did here. It is for us, 
 the living, rather to be dedicated here to the unfinished 
 work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly 
 advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the 
 great task remaining before us that from these honoured 
 dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which 
 they gave the last full measure of devotion : that we here 
 highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain ; 
 that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of 
 
 1 Quoted in Lord Charnwood's Lincoln, p. 206. 
 
88 OLD SAWS AND MODERN INSTANCES 
 
 freedom; and that government of the people, by the 
 people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth." l 
 
 Demosthenes assuredly would not have disowned so 
 beautiful a passage. With some such words as these might 
 he have made his funeral oration over the dead warriors 
 on the field of Chseroneia. 
 
 1 Lord Charnwood's Lincoln, pp. 360-1. 
 
SAPPHO AND ASPASIA 
 
 1 
 
 SAPPHO AND ASPASIA, learned women of Greece, are not 
 legendary, like the Homeric figures, Andromache, Hecuba, 
 Helen, Penelope, and Nausicaa : they are historical. And 
 yet it is exceedingly difficult to be sure of the precise 
 character which they possess, and the influence which 
 they wield. Alike in many respects alike especially in 
 this, that they set an early example of feminine enlighten- 
 ment, of emancipation from prejudice they are also alike 
 in the fact that they were both the victims of contemporary 
 witticisms. It is too little to speak merely of the gibes 
 of the wits. A kind of crusade was entered upon to 
 destroy their character, to deride their pretensions, to 
 throw scorn upon their names. It was especially the 
 Attic comic dramatists, Eupolis, Cratinus, and Aristo- 
 phanes, whose trade was to make fun of great figures of 
 the past; and they assuredly did not spare either Sappho 
 or Aspasia. So that when we read about these women, 
 we are trying to delineate their characters as viewed through 
 a veil of prejudice and contumely. Moreover, their apolo- 
 gists and champions have in a certain fashion added to 
 our perplexity, for they availed themselves of the notori- 
 ous device of asserting that there were, in reality, two, if 
 not more persons bearing the same name. Consequently 
 we find that there is one Sappho who is called " of Mytilene," 
 and another Sappho who is styled " of Eresos," the first 
 being a pattern of virtue, and the second no better than 
 she should be. The same device, also, was practised with 
 regard to Aspasia, although it did not attract quite the 
 same amount of attention. Aspasia, doubtless, was a very 
 ordinary name for ladies who, for whatever reason, might 
 have earned the title of " well-beloved." Thus, though 
 these are real characters, there clings about them a great 
 deal that is legendary. Having earned an unenviable 
 notoriety, the most contradictory assertions became rife 
 among their enemies and their apologists. 
 
 89 
 
90 OLD SAWS AND MODERN INSTANCES 
 
 But though there is this much in common between 
 Sappho and Aspasia, that both of them, like some of the 
 leaders of the Women's Movement in modern times, 
 attracted unfavourable attention from facile wits, the 
 conditions under which they lived were essentially different. 
 In the first case, that of Sappho, we have to deal with the 
 social conditions of the JEolian Greeks, somewhere in the 
 seventh and sixth centuries before Christ. And those con- 
 ditions are in effective contrast with the times of Pericles 
 and the beginnings of Athenian supremacy in the fifth 
 century. We do not quite know how it came about, but 
 it is, nevertheless, clear that the Ionian States, of which 
 Athens was one, took a very different view of women from 
 that entertained by kindred populations, such as the 
 Dorians, and the JEolians, both in Asia Minor and the 
 southern part of Italy, which was called Magna Graecia. 
 The lonians kept their women in rigid seclusion, as the 
 property and toys of their lords and masters ; but in some 
 of the towns on the sea-coasts of Asia Minor belonging 
 either to the ^Eolian or to the Dorian family, women were 
 allowed a very large amount of liberty. Women met in 
 frank, free intercourse with men and with one another. 
 They had their place, not only in social life, but in the 
 pursuit of philosophy and literature. They could express 
 their opinions; they could also express their feelings 
 without any fear or shame. The position of a woman like 
 Sappho, with her friends and associates, or pupils, was 
 only possible under the conditions of a social life in which 
 men and women met as equals. 
 
 At that period there existed in Mytilene and the Isle of 
 Lesbos literary societies under the guidance of one or two 
 distinguished names in poetic literature, and these literary 
 societies opened their ranks equally to men and women, 
 while in some cases they consisted only of women. Thus, 
 for instance, Sappho was the centre of a female literary 
 society, most of the members of which were her pupils 
 her pupils, that is to say, in the technical apparatus of 
 poetic art. We know the names of some of these associates 
 or pupils of Sappho Anactoria, for instance, Gongyla, 
 Eunica, Gyrinna, Atthis, Mnasidica, Damophila, and 
 perhaps Erinna of Telos. The last two obtained a celebrity 
 of their own for their poetic gifts. The Greeks, who were 
 a severely logical race, never made any confusion between 
 the instruments with which genius works and genius or 
 
SAPPHO AND ASPASIA 91 
 
 inspiration itself. They knew, none better, that in a very 
 true and real sense you cannot teach people to be poets. 
 But you can teach them the technical laws which govern 
 poetic composition. In Sappho's school the aim was, 
 doubtless, to teach technique. Two of her pupils blos- 
 somed forth into original creative artists or geniuses of 
 their own, helped, no doubt, by the fact that their teacher 
 had driven them through the mill. To take a parallel 
 case in modern times, it is said that acting cannot be 
 taught. It does not, however, follow that you cannot 
 teach the rudiments or the technique of that art, even 
 though the final inspiration be beyond you. And so, in 
 Lesbos, where they cultivated poetry with all their might, 
 where it was obviously the fashion to write poetry, where 
 poetry was the recognised mode of culture, schools existed 
 to teach and to encourage it; and besides Sappho's school, 
 in all probability there were several others. Gorgo and 
 Andromeda are mentioned in Sappho's poems as her rivals. 
 Very probably they were the heads of other associations 
 of the same kind. 
 
 In considering Sappho, we have to imagine a state of 
 society in which it was not considered improper or indelicate 
 to write frankly and openly about emotions, and feelings, 
 and even passionate states. Sappho's poems contain 
 some instances of this frank speaking, and they have been 
 misinterpreted, because we read into the words some of 
 the associations which belong only to a much later stage 
 of civilisation and life. The whole question of the treat- 
 ment of love by the ancient Greeks forms at once a difficult 
 and interesting chapter for inquiry. It is only necessary 
 here to make one or two distinctions. Compare, for 
 instance, Sappho, with her frank simplicity, and a later 
 poet only a little later Anacreon, with his voluptuous 
 sweetness. There is a world of difference in the treatment. 
 There is a world of difference in the tone. It is not exactly 
 an apt parallel, but it may perhaps serve, to think of the 
 difference between Henry Fielding's outspoken language 
 in Tom Jones and the style and temper of Laurence Sterne, 
 say, in his Sentimental Journey. Again, the early Greeks 
 had nothing whatsoever to do with, and therefore could 
 not understand, what we call the sentimental relations 
 between the sexes. ^Esthetic sentiment in this matter 
 is a plant of later growth. For instance, it was made 
 one of the objections to the new kind of drama initiated 
 
92 OLD SAWS AND MODERN INSTANCES 
 
 by Euripides that he had introduced sentiment into the 
 relations between the two sexes; or, more precisely, that 
 in his psychological analysis of woman he had opened 
 the door to sentimental romance. A love story, as such, 
 was never a dramatic theme for the early writers of drama, 
 that is to say, for JSschylus and Sophocles. The whole 
 of the culture connected with Alexandria after the downfall 
 of the Hellenic State system made a great change in this 
 respect. It was at Alexandria that novels were first 
 invented. And so it became possible for an austere 
 classical poet, like Virgil, to introduce into his epical poem, 
 the jffineid, a sentimental love episode, quite on the modern 
 lines, between ^Eneas, the Trojan chieftain, and Dido, the 
 Queen of Carthage. Points like these must be borne in 
 mind in dealing with the love poems of Sappho. Sappho 
 spoke sometimes with unconventional directness, but to 
 argue from unconventional language to disorderliness of 
 behaviour is to go a great deal beyond what the record 
 warrants. 
 
 We look back on Sappho through the distorted spec- 
 tacles of the Attic comic dramatists, and nothing pleased 
 them better, and apparently nothing pleased better the 
 Athenian audiences than that they should poke their some- 
 what distasteful fun at people whom they did not under- 
 stand, and who had lived their lives under conditions very 
 different from their own. As if it were not enough that 
 the Attic comic dramatists should have had a good deal to 
 say on the subject of Sappho, we have the Latin licentious 
 poet Ovid concocting imaginary epistles to Phaon. 
 
 There is one instance decisive in reference to all this 
 belittlement of greatness. We know what Socrates was 
 to those who loved and understood him. We know how 
 both Plato and Xenophon drew the lineaments of a great 
 moral reformer. Yet how does he appear, even in so com- 
 paratively excellent a satirist as Aristophanes ? An 
 absurd figure of farce, a corrupter of youth, a moral anar- 
 chist such is the picture drawn by the great comic 
 dramatist of Athens. And if the comic dramatist could 
 deal so hardly with a philosopher who takes so high a 
 place in the history of the evolution of ethics, why should 
 we trust him any more when he deals with a figure like 
 that of Sappho, especially since ^Eolian society was one 
 thing, and the Attic society something wholly different 
 in its treatment of the woman question? 
 
SAPPHO AND ASPASIA 93 
 
 what would happen if our dramatists in a modern age 
 were allowed the same licence as was permitted in Athenian 
 times ! Would the picture of Mr. Lloyd George, as drawn 
 by a comic dramatist, represent in any respects the truth ? 
 Or would some of the leading ladies in the feminist move- 
 ment appear as very creditable figures on our stage, if a 
 dramatist were allowed to make all the fun he could of 
 their pretensions and ambitions ? Why should we trust 
 the earlier dramatists any more than we would later repre- 
 sentatives of the craft? But the worst of it is that the 
 early Christian writers accepted and popularised a mis- 
 representation which the Greeks themselves had invented. 
 Naturally, it suited the Christian writer, in his tirades 
 against heathenism, to follow Greek perversions, and paint 
 a Sappho full of corruption, as a terrible example of the 
 depths to which heathenism could descend. We must 
 put aside all these aspersions and innuendoes, and take 
 the poems themselves, if we want to understand Sappho. 
 
 We need not stay long over the actual details of her 
 life. Indeed, it is all very obscure and uncertain, just 
 for the reason already indicated because later times 
 invented so recklessly stories about the poetess. She was 
 said, for instance, to be married to a man who was called 
 Kerkolas ; but the name sounds as if it was an intentional 
 piece of comic chaff. She described herself on one occasion 
 as " the eternal virgin " ; but the phrase might have some 
 spiritual sense, and need not be considered to exclude the 
 theory that she had a daughter, Kleis the name of her 
 mother, according to some, which she then bestowed upon 
 her own child. The date of her birth may be placed at 
 about 620 B.C., and the place, probably Mytilene, the 
 capital of Lesbos. Her father's name is said to have been 
 Scamandronymus, and, according to Ovid, she was left 
 an orphan at the age of six. Other details, more or less 
 interesting, and, alas ! equally uncertain, are concerned 
 with her brothers. One held the position of cup-bearer, 
 a post only conferred on youths belonging to the aristo- 
 cracy of the Island. Another brother, Charaxus, is men- 
 tioned by Herodotus. He was a trader in Lesbian wines, 
 and, having arrived at Naucratis in Egypt, in pursuit of 
 his mercantile occupations, he became so enamoured of a 
 courtesan called Rhodopis, that he ransomed her from 
 slavery. According to some accounts, he actually married 
 her; but the story goes on to say that on his return to 
 
94 OLD SAWS AND MODERN INSTANCES 
 
 Mytilene he was violently upbraided by Sappho, and the 
 quarrel between brother and sister was not easily healed. 
 Of the other brother of Sappho nothing is known. For 
 some reason or other, which we shall never ascertain, 
 Sappho had to leave Lesbos, and journey to Sicily. Her 
 reputed death, which is one of the most uncertain things 
 about her, from the Leucadian Rock, connects her with 
 Acarnania; so, she would certainly appear to be a much- 
 travelled lady. But in reality all the personal anecdotes 
 are to be regarded with great suspicion. Of course, she 
 was supposed to have had many lovers. When we dis- 
 cover that amongst them are Archilochus, who lived quite 
 a century before her, and Hipponax and Anacreon, who 
 were unborn when she died, there is sufficient reason for 
 a good deal of scepticism. The personality of Phaon, 
 supposed to be a lover of Sappho, comes to us from Ovid. 
 But there is no mention of such a name in the fragments 
 of Sappho' s poetry, and probably the name is an invented 
 one, being similar to Phaethon, another name for Adonis, 
 the lover of Aphrodite. Alcseus, who was also a citizen 
 of Mytilene, and, together with Sappho, a great master 
 of lyric poetry, must have spoken to the poetess in terms 
 of love, for we have a fragment rebuking him : " Violet 
 crowned, pure, sweetly-smiling Sappho," says Alcseus, " I 
 fain would speak with thee a word in thine ear, but shame 
 restrains my tongue." And, according to Aristotle in his 
 Rhetoric, Sappho answered, " If thy wishes were fair and 
 noble, and thy tongue designed not what is base, shame 
 would not cloud thine eyes, but thou wouldst freely speak 
 thy just desires." The name Sappho probably means 
 lapis lazuli, just as the name Electra means amber. Per- 
 haps she gave it to herself, or else it was a pet name, just 
 as one of the companions of Sappho was called Gongyla, 
 which means " the round thing," or " a dumpling." 
 
 There are many extraordinary things about Sappho. 
 Unfortunately the fragments of her poetry are very few, 
 and yet, on the strength of them, both ancient and modern 
 times have been equally prepared to hail her as an incom- 
 parable poet. In Greek times she was, of course, " the 
 poetess," just as Homer was " the poet " the one unap- 
 proachable speaker of inspired things, the Tenth Muse, 
 as Plato called her. And when we look closer at this 
 marvel, we shall find still further reasons for astonishment. 
 Lyrical poetry by its very nature lends itself to a certain 
 
SAPPHO AND ASPASIA 95 
 
 extravagance. When we look at it in later times in the 
 dithyrambs of Pindar, we are conscious now and again of 
 a certain pompous artificiality. But the lyrics of Sappho 
 are absolutely un artificial. They have no purple patches, 
 although they make everybody else's purple look grey and 
 ashen-coloured. When critics try to describe the impres- 
 sion which single lines of Sappho, or complete poems, 
 make upon them, they use metaphors derived from fire. 
 " Her phrases are mingled with fire," an ancient critic 
 says. As a matter of fact, fiery is the last word which can 
 be applied to Sappho's poems if we look at their phrasing 
 and their tone. They have a singular restraint of their 
 own. They never run to hyperbole or excessive ornament. 
 They are the essence of refined and cultured simplicity 
 that kind of simplicity so difficult of attainment, that 
 faultless simplicity which is the last word in Art. Despite 
 the simplicity of the phrasing, they are so full of a subdued 
 yet intense brilliance that, put by the side of them, other 
 lines seem to lose their colour. And, like all the true and 
 genuine phrases of genius, they stick in the memory. You 
 cannot forget them. A grave, clear beauty seems to reign 
 over them, and that is why the only real way of judging 
 Sappho is by reading her poetry, and then judging whether 
 she could possibly have been the dissolute libertine that 
 the Attic comic dramatists represented. Of course, the 
 fact is that a later age, with other traditions and modes 
 of thought, and especially with other views of the position 
 of women, was hopelessly incapacitated from understand- 
 ing a personality like that of Sappho. She wrote about 
 love, and as it so happens, the longest fragments we 
 possess are about love. But she wrote on many subjects 
 also, and whatever the subject, her lines possess the same 
 translucent quality. " Now I will sing to my fellow- women 
 delightful songs," she says. " The Muses made me of 
 high price, giving me their own crafts." And they 
 assuredly did not narrow their gifts to only love. She 
 speaks of " My joy in the light of the sun, holding within 
 it all things radiant and fair," and it is quite clear that 
 many of her poems deal with the loveliness of Nature. 
 There is her picture of the orchard in summer, " where 
 on both sides cool water tinkles through apple-boughs, 
 and slumber floats down from rustling leaves." And 
 perhaps the best-known passage of all is the one which 
 describes " the apple that reddens on a top branch, atop 
 
96 OLD SAWS AND MODERN INSTANCES 
 
 of the topmost, and the apple-gatherers forgot it no, 
 did not forget it, but could not reach it." Or, in simpler, 
 more human guise, you catch the note of delicate self- 
 appreciation or self-abasement. " Surely," she sings, " I 
 am not one of those who bear malice in their temper. My 
 heart is innocent." Or there is a wail against ingratitude : 
 " Those harm me most to whom I have done best." Or, 
 again, a little sharp burst of woman's jealousy, " What 
 country girl is this that bewitches your sense ? One that 
 does not even know how to draw her skirts about her 
 ankles." Or the grave reflection, " Mourning befits not 
 the house of the Muses," or the judgment, reported by a 
 later age, " Death is evil, for the Gods have so judged, 
 else they themselves would have died." 
 
 The beautiful invocation to evening ;t Hesper, thou 
 bringest back all those things which the gleaming dawn 
 hath scattered" has been imitated by several modern 
 poets, by Byron, perhaps, worst of all. Or the exquisite 
 phrasing of the poem, " He is most blest of mankind who, 
 sitting opposite thee, sees thee with thy sweet smile, and 
 hears thy sweet voice." Or that divine line on which 
 Swinburne plays so many variations, " Yea, verily I loved 
 thee once, Atthis, once long time ago." The subdued 
 passion is just as remarkable as the exquisite literary 
 form, and that is precisely what so many poets that came 
 after her have recognised and sought to reproduce. But 
 it is a question whether any of them really succeeded. 
 Catullus, perhaps, came nearest ; and, as we know, Catullus 
 did his best to imitate Sappho. Horace, of course, followed 
 Alcaeus, though he reproduced the Sapphic metre. Ovid 
 has some wonderful lines in his Epistle of Sappho to Phaon, 
 lines which redeem the poem from its other aspects of 
 ugliness. There are, perhaps, only two modern English 
 poets who come anywhere near Sappho, or perhaps three, 
 despite the number of those who have tried to imitate her. 
 Byron is bombastic if we put him beside the ^Eolian singer, 
 but Shelley has the true lyrical note, and Keats some of 
 that chiselled loveliness which makes each Sapphic stanza 
 a masterpiece. And then, last of all, and in some ways 
 best of all, we come, not to Rossetti, but to Swinburne- 
 Swinburne, who has said things about Sappho memorable 
 in their ungrudging enthusiasm, but who himself con- 
 fesses that the real Sapphic beauty is beyond him. Listen 
 to Swinburne's " Anactoria " : 
 
SAPPHO AND ASPASIA 97 
 
 " Yea, thou shalt be forgotten like spilt wine, 
 Except these kisses of my lips on thine 
 Brand them with immortality ; but me 
 Men shall not see bright fire nor hear the sea, 
 Nor mix their hearts with music, nor behold 
 Cast forth of heaven with feet of awful gold, 
 And plumeless wings that make the bright air blind 
 Lighning, with thunder for a hound behind, 
 Hunting through fields unfurrowed and unsown 
 But in the light and laughter, in the moan 
 And music, and in grasp of lip and hand, 
 And shudder of water that makes felt on land 
 The immeasurable tremor of all the sea, 
 Memories shall mix and metaphors of me." 
 
 And this, too, may be quoted, where Swinburne amplifies 
 the one line of Sappho already given : 
 
 " I loved thee hark, one tenderer note than all 
 Atthis, of old time once one low long fall 
 Sighing one long low lovely loveless call 
 Dying one pause in song so flamelike fast 
 Atthis, long since in old time overpast 
 One soft first pause and last." 
 
 The Gods are jealous in their gifts to mankind, and they 
 give only a few examples of the utterly best. There has 
 never been another Homer; nor yet has there ever been 
 another Sappho save where certain fragments of her 
 power and chaste grace survive here and there in the 
 beautiful poems of Christina Rossetti. 
 
 There is a legend connected with Sappho about which 
 a word or two may be said, the celebrated leap from the 
 Leucadian Rock, by means of which, according to some, 
 she ended her stormy career. An early death, however, 
 is contradicted by one of the fragments of her poetry, in 
 which she describes herself as growing old (yepaiTSQa). 
 The story, as it has come down to us, is something of this 
 kind. There was a certain boatman of Mytilene, called 
 Phaon, who in his old age had the good luck to row 
 Aphrodite in his boat. When he refused payment for his 
 services, the goddess restored to him both youth and 
 beauty, just as in the kindred legend of Nausicaa the 
 goddess restored to Odysseus the beauty of his prime. 
 Aphrodite gave Phaon a magic ointment, so that every 
 woman who set eyes upon him became enamoured of his 
 charms. And one of the earliest victims was Sappho. 
 Phaon, tired of the gift of eternal youth, and of all the 
 
98 OLD SAWS AND MODERN INSTANCES 
 
 wooing of Lesbian ladies, withdrew to Acarnania, and 
 founded the Temple of Apollo Leucas on a promontory 
 facing the sea. Even in this retreat Phaon was not safe, 
 for the infatuated ladies pursued him, and when he repulsed 
 them each in turn, they threw themselves off the cliff on 
 which the temple was situated, into the sea. Sappho 
 was one of the earliest of these who thus died for the sake 
 of her lover, Phaon. 
 
 Now there are many things to be said about this myth. 
 In the first place, Phaon is only a name for the " Shining 
 One," and perhaps has something to do with Adonis, the 
 beloved of Aphrodite. In the next place, this leap from 
 the Leucadian Rock is a very doubtful matter, for, accord- 
 ing to some, it was purely symbolic, part of a rite in honour 
 of Apollo, in which, in substitute for a human being, a 
 sack of gold, perhaps, was thrown into the sea. The 
 priests of the Temple undoubtedly earned a great deal 
 of money by the visits of pilgrims, who, for whatever 
 reasons, desired intercession with the god. Perhaps origin- 
 ally men and women did take this leap in real earnest; 
 but the priests took particular pains to have boats to 
 pick up the martyrs and restore them safe to land. The 
 leap may have been a supposed remedy against love, or it 
 might have had other meanings. But, as often happens 
 in the history of ceremonial rites, what was originally a 
 deadly sacrifice becomes a mere symbol, either some sub- 
 stitute being found for the intending victim, or else a sum 
 of gold. To say that Sappho threw herself from the 
 Leucadian Rock might be only another way of saying 
 that she was the victim of love. Or if she actually essayed 
 the leap, instead of allowing some one to do it for her, 
 she was probably saved from the consequences of her 
 rashness, and continued her career as a poetess. The 
 whole question is mixed up with the age of Sappho, which 
 is itself a very doubtful point. Born in 620, she may 
 have lived on to nearly 570 or 560 B.C., and if so, she must 
 have been at least fifty years of age a somewhat mature 
 woman to have taken to such desperate courses in conse- 
 quence of a love affair. At all events, there were a 
 number of other people who were supposed to have 
 imitated her in the supposed act of self-immolation, and 
 one of the most celebrated was Artemisia, the daughter 
 of the Queen of Halicarnassus, the lady whose gallant 
 conduct at the battle of Salamis made Xerxes exclaim 
 that the women had behaved like men, and the men like 
 
SAPPHO AND ASPASIA 99 
 
 women. Amazon though she was, she yet was not proof 
 against the insidious advances of a love-passion, and being 
 disdained by a youth of Abydos, she, too, hurled herself 
 from the promontory, to find the release from her suffer- 
 ings in death. Clearly we are in a very mythical realm 
 in dealing with events like these. Doubtless Sappho 
 haunts the cliffs of Acarnania, but she exists solely as a 
 wraith or ghost for kindred poets, for a poet, above all, so 
 delicately sensitive and so quickly receptive as Swinburne. 
 
 2 
 
 When we pass from the times of Sappho to those of 
 Aspasia, we pass from what Thucydides called " the sphere 
 of the mythical " to something like the clear light of history. 
 But even here passion and prejudice have distorted the 
 facts. Once more we see the evil work of the Attic comic 
 dramatists, Eupolis and Cratinus, and especially of Aristo- 
 phanes; for we have, what was wanting in the earlier 
 case, political rivalries to add venom to merely social 
 scandal. Indeed, it is difficult to imagine any great and 
 gifted woman who has struggled against such a mass of 
 existing prejudices as Aspasia. In the first place, she was 
 an alien, and there were strict laws in Athens against 
 aliens, and especially against marriage with aliens. She 
 came from Miletus, the daughter of a certain Axiochus. 
 In the next place, she had very high mental accomplish- 
 ments, and the majority of people are very intolerant of 
 really able and clever women. Then her very existence 
 and her position in an Athenian household contradicted 
 the idea which the Athenians obstinately held of the 
 proper position of women. Having come to Athens, and 
 gained the affection of the great Athenian statesman 
 Pericles, she exercised her influence over him, not more 
 by her beauty than by her acute intelligence. Now 
 Pericles was married to a lady of rank whose name, oddly 
 enough, history has not preserved, by whom he had two 
 sons, Xanthippus and Paralus, and he seems to have lived 
 very unhappily with his wife. He parted from her in 
 consequence, by mutual consent, and attached himself 
 to Aspasia during the rest of his life as closely as was 
 allowed by the law. 
 
 The scandal of her existence in Athens was based 
 especially on the fact that, instead of believing in the 
 
100 OLD SAWS AND MODERN INSTANCES 
 
 seclusion of women, she held reunions, at which both she 
 and her friends moved with absolute freedom, discussing, 
 with all the most learned men of the day, problems of 
 policy, of philosophy, and metaphysics. In that extremely 
 amusing, but decidedly improper, comedy of Aristophanes, 
 called The Lysistrata, one of the revolting ladies describes 
 the ordinary conditions of an Athenian woman. 1 
 
 " What can we women do ? What brilliant scheme 
 Can we, poor souls, accomplish ? We who sit 
 Trimmed and bedizened in our saffron silks, 
 Our cambric robes, and little finical shoes." 
 
 Imagine how Aspasia fluttered the dovecotes of women 
 like these ! Thucydides makes Pericles say, speaking of 
 the proper place of women in a social state, that that 
 woman leads the best life whose name is least commented 
 upon by the public, either for praise or blame. That, no 
 doubt, was the Athenian ideal; but it was exactly the 
 opposite of the ideal which Pericles aimed at in his own 
 house. No one was more talked about than Aspasia, and 
 if she was praised by able men, like Anaxagoras and 
 Pheidias and Socrates, because they found that they could 
 talk to her just as if she had been a man, she was right 
 royally abused, not only by the conventional Athenian 
 matrons, but by men like Aristophanes, who attributed 
 to her an evil influence in upsetting a good old social 
 regime, and involving their native country in war. 
 
 There was a further reason why so much calumny 
 attached to Aspasia' s name. Grave political dissensions 
 entered into the matter, and the enemies of Pericles on 
 political grounds struck at their prominent statesman 
 through Aspasia. Pericles was the head of the Liberal 
 party. Together with Ephialtes, he was the man, above 
 all, who developed the democracy of Athens, bringing 
 about that rule of the Athenian people for and by them- 
 selves, which made the Attic Demos so astonishing a 
 phenomenon of culture and power. But the Conser- 
 vative party, the aristocratic party, were throughout 
 deadly enemies. Cimon had led this party, and he had 
 been exiled. To the everlasting honour of Pericles, his 
 political adversary, Cimon, who was a real patriot, was 
 restored to his country by a decree passed by Pericles 
 himself, and a sort of division of responsibility took place 
 
 1 Taken from the translation of Benjamin Rogers. 
 
SAPPHO AND ASPASIA 101 
 
 between them, Pericles remaining the great executive 
 Minister of the Republic, and Cimon its chief general, or 
 rather admiral, at the head of the Athenian fleets. Cimon 
 died in the wars, and then the aristocratic party for, of 
 course, concord did not reign for long put up against 
 Pericles a certain Thucydides, son of Milesias (not the 
 historian), who fought with all his might on reactionary 
 lines, until the day when it was his turn, too, to meet the 
 doom of exile, Pericles, by the aid of a popular vote, con- 
 solidating his exclusive dominion. " It was in name a 
 Republic," says the Greek historian. " In reality it was 
 a sort of benevolent despotism, worked by one man and 
 one man alone Pericles." But since we have to add to 
 the vindictiveness of an outraged social opinion the bitter- 
 ness also of party conflicts between the advocates of 
 progress and reaction, it is hardly surprising that the 
 domestic menage of Pericles should be the target for 
 unscrupulous attacks. 
 
 This does not exhaust all the various elements in the 
 great conspiracy against Pericles and the democracy of 
 Athens. Social prejudice counted for something; the 
 rivalry of parties counted for a great deal. Some disliked 
 Aspasia because she was an enlightened woman. Many 
 disliked Pericles because he was a democrat. But above 
 and beyond these more or less domestic considerations, 
 there was one power in Greece which had watched with 
 ill-disguised malevolence the steady rise and development 
 of the Athenian Empire. Sparta and the Peloponnese 
 represented a Dorian aristocracy. The lonians, such as 
 were found on both sides of the ^Egean, were not con- 
 genial to the lords of Lacedaemon. And when it was 
 observed that Athens, the great Ionian city, had acquired 
 a great fleet, had established a maritime supremacy, had 
 enrolled a great many of the islanders into a Confederation, 
 of which Athens was the head, although the meeting-place 
 was at Delos, Spartan jealousy could be no longer restrained 
 in view of the success of its hated rival. Unfortunately, 
 it was easy enough for the Spartans to act, for the aristo- 
 cratic and reactionary party in Athens naturally sided 
 with Sparta. They believed in their form of government, 
 which was a curious combination of monarchy and olig- 
 archy, as against the free, democratic institutions of Athens. 
 And despite the glory of sculpture and painting, and the 
 magnificent buildings which made the City of the Violet 
 
102 QLP SAWS AND MODERN INSTANCES 
 
 Crown the most lovely thing in Greece, these old-fashioned 
 inhabitants of Attica espoused the cause of Sparta rather 
 than of Pericles. Pericles, who was a statesman, foresaw 
 some time previously whither matters were likely to extend. 
 He knew that sooner or later what was afterwards known 
 as the great Peloponnesian War, the war between Athens 
 and Sparta, was inevitable. But meanwhile, while every 
 month brought the conflict nearer, he had to sustain the 
 brunt of attacks upon himself, his policy, and his house, 
 directed, not by internal enemies though, doubtless, to 
 some extent engineered and aided by them but by 
 external foes. There is hardly any question that the 
 Spartans had their share in the various petty or great 
 persecutions to which the Athenian statesman was exposed. 
 It was only when each in turn came to nothing, and 
 Pericles still remained the great head, the chief magistrate, 
 the uncrowned King of Athens, that open war took the 
 place of secret and insidious schemes. 
 
 Pericles had surrounded himself and when we say 
 Pericles we mean also Aspasia with all the most brilliant 
 men of the day. Pheidias, the great sculptor, was one of 
 the most prominent of these. Then there was Anaxagoras, 
 the great philosopher. The leading tragedians of Greece 
 naturally belonged to the same distinguished circle, which 
 was further adorned by the striking personality of Socrates, 
 who, when comparatively young, fell, like every other 
 male, under the charm of Aspasia. The first blow which 
 the enemies of Pericles directed against him was aimed 
 at Pheidias. The ostensible charge against him was that 
 he had used for his own personal profit a large amount of 
 the gold and other materials with which the State had 
 entrusted him, for his great statue of Athene. There were 
 also other accusations against him, probably based upon 
 a large amount of current gossip. For it was said that he 
 had been guilty of a sacrilegious act in representing himself, 
 and also carving a portrait of Pericles, in those combats 
 of Amazons which ornamented the goddess's shield. The 
 result was tragic enough, as far as Pheidias was concerned. 
 He was thrown into prison, and died there, either from 
 sickness or from despair, or, as some said, because he was 
 poisoned. No doubt it was also urged by the unscrupulous 
 that Pericles was not disinclined to get rid, in any fashion 
 that was possible, of the man who was his accomplice in 
 thieving the funds of the State. 
 
SAPPHO AND ASPASIA 103 
 
 Encouraged by their success, the enemies of Pericles 
 next proceeded against Anaxagoras. And here they 
 involved Aspasia also, for it was familiar knowledge at 
 Athens that Aspasia had sat at the feet of Anaxagoras 
 in natural philosophy, and had imbibed the dangerous 
 doctrines with which the philosopher's name was associated. 
 The charge of impiety is one of the most subtle and perilous 
 weapons which any party can use in their intestine squab- 
 bles. It may mean so little, and it may mean so much; 
 and always at the background of the charge is that mass of 
 good, honest belief, as well as obstinate prejudice, which 
 constitutes the ordinary instinctive unreasoning faith of 
 the people at large. What precisely Anaxagoras had done 
 did not matter so much as what he was supposed to have 
 done. The philosophical scheme of Anaxagoras was a 
 development of some of the doctrines of the so-called 
 Ionic school, which tried to find an essential principle in 
 the universe to explain its constitution and its growth. 
 The earliest thinkers asked what was the original thing 
 out of which the world developed ? Was it earth ? Was 
 it water ? Was it fire ? And to them succeeded a school 
 which turned not so much to material elements as to 
 mental in the explanation of the universe. Anaxagoras 
 declared outright that all these material bodies of which 
 the universe was composed were to be explained as the 
 work of a central spirit or intelligence, Nous, in virtue of 
 which the earth and stars pursued their appointed way. 
 It is easy to see how a charge of impiety could be trumped 
 up against a man who taught so refined and also so esoteric 
 a doctrine. What is this central Intelligence or Nous, 
 and where does Zeus, the father of gods and men, come 
 in on this showing? And what, too, became of all the 
 favourite figures of the Greek Pantheon Athene, and 
 Apollo, and Ares, and Poseidon ? At any rate, it was not 
 difficult to make out a definite accusation against Anaxa- 
 goras that he had denied the gods of his country, and that, 
 therefore, he was worthy of death ; while those, too, who 
 had listened to him and accepted his subversive doctrines, 
 like Aspasia, must also be held accountable to the law. 
 
 The strange part of the matter is that, whereas the law 
 against impiety was, as a rule, directed against overt acts, 
 it was, in the present instance, owing to the proposal of 
 a man called Diopithes, directed against opinions. Who 
 was especially the accuser of Anaxagoras is not quite clear. 
 
104 OLD SAWS AND MODERN INSTANCES 
 
 It may have been Cleon, or Thucydides the son of Milesias. 
 But the accuser of Aspasia was undoubtedly Hermippus, 
 a comic poet. The two accused persons adopted very 
 different measures of self-defence. Perhaps owing to the 
 advice of Pericles, Anaxagoras quitted Athens secretly, 
 and took refuge abroad; and, according to Plutarch, 
 Pericles accompanied him and bade farewell of him at 
 the boundary of the city. Without doubt the loss of so 
 close a friend as Anaxagoras, coming after the death of 
 Pheidias, struck a heavy blow at the chief statesman of 
 Athens, the more so because he had to devote himself to 
 the defence of Aspasia, menaced by the accusation of 
 Hermippus. The speech which he delivered on the 
 occasion, in strange contrast with anything which could 
 take place in our courts of law, was nothing more or less 
 than an impassioned appeal to the people of Athens to 
 acquit Aspasia, partly on the ground of his own services 
 to the State, and partly on the strength of his confident 
 testimony that she was innocent. And then for the first 
 time Athens saw the portentous and unexpected sight of 
 Pericles in tears. The statesman who was especially 
 celebrated for his self-control, for his Olympian calm and 
 dignity, broke down so utterly, lost so much of his original 
 self-restraint, that his accusers themselves seem to have 
 understood how deeply his feelings were enlisted in the 
 cause of Aspasia. And the judges acquitted her* It was 
 not the only time that Pericles had to face charges of this 
 kind. He, too, was accused of peculation. But, one after 
 another, all these blows directed against him, either by 
 his enemies in Athens or through the machinations of 
 Sparta, met with decisive failure, and at the period when 
 Athens commenced its memorable war against Sparta 
 Pericles' influence and authority knew no bounds. 
 
 It is easy to understand how difficult Aspasia' s position 
 was in Athens; how many different forms of criticism 
 she had to meet if, indeed, criticism be not too gentle 
 a word to describe the attacks, open or surreptitious, of 
 her enemies. There was the social scandal of her position, 
 and then there was the fact that, like Sappho, and, indeed, 
 like Socrates himself, she served as a natural target for 
 the satire and scorn of professional wits. Cratinus, who 
 belonged to the earlier comedy of Athens, has some very 
 bitter words about her. " Daughter of immodesty," he 
 calls her, " a courtesan with the eyes of a dog." But 
 
SAPPHO AND ASPASIA 105 
 
 indeed, for the matter of that, Aristophanes is just as 
 violent in his attacks, only instead of using opprobrious 
 terms, he definitely, in his play called The Acharnians, 
 accuses her of having brought about the Peloponnesian 
 War. In the third place, there was the political opposition 
 the customary attitude of a reactionary party against 
 what seemed to belong to a dangerous Liberal or even 
 Radical movement. And in the last place, there was the 
 constant intrigue of Sparta, very obviously making use 
 of the personality of Aspasia, in order to engineer the 
 crusade against Pericles. It would be wonderful, indeed, 
 if any woman, subject to these diverse forms of continuous 
 criticism, managed to keep her character clear from 
 calumny and insult. 
 
 Thus it is a difficult matter to disentangle the true 
 Aspasia from the various caricatures which were rife at 
 her time and at later times. What precisely did she 
 attempt to do in Athens ? She came as an alien, was the 
 unrecognised wife of Pericles, and the mother of a son 
 who, until a later date, was considered by the law of 
 Athens illegitimate. Starting with these disadvantages, 
 she nevertheless made the house of Pericles the meeting- 
 place for men and women, as we should say, of the higher 
 culture, who discussed, on terms of perfect equality, 
 various topics domestic economy, politics, art, the prin- 
 ciples of morals, physics in the largest sense, and probably 
 religion. Aspasia' s home was a salon, in the best sense 
 of the word. The great artists were there, the great 
 dramatists, the great philosophers. And, so far as we 
 can tell, some of the more emancipated of the matrons of 
 Athens did not hesitate to join this cultured circle, what- 
 ever might be the existing prejudice. This is especially 
 the point which Aspasia' s enemies caught hold of. They 
 declared that she had induced several of the free-born 
 inhabitants of Athens to forget what they owed to their 
 own position and their own homes; and they did not 
 hesitate to suggest that all sorts of unworthy temptations 
 were held out to the ladies who supported Aspasia' s salon. 
 Plutarch gives us a good many details on this point. He 
 declares that the Athenian matrons went with their hus- 
 bands, in order to enjoy the pleasure of a really enlightened 
 causerie, and the orthodox and Conservative elements in 
 Athens were shocked, while the grosser minds suggested 
 the possibility of base reasons. All the women throughout 
 
106 OLD SAWS AND MODERN INSTANCES 
 
 the whole course of history who have tried to emancipate 
 themselves from existing prejudice and lead their own 
 lives who have tried to collect round themselves a com- 
 pany of thoughtful and educated men and women have 
 invariably found that their best intentions are misinter- 
 preted, and the nature of their reunions grievously maligned 
 by the envious, the spiteful, and the unclean. Aspasia 
 was one of the first but she assuredly was not the last 
 to be forced to run through the whole gamut of scorn, 
 satire, and abuse because of her independence, her self- 
 reliance, and her freedom from ordinary prejudice. 
 
 If we ask what were the subjects on which she discoursed, 
 and on which she listened to the words of her friends, we 
 discover from Xenophon's Memorabilia, and from a frag- 
 ment of a Socratic writer, called JSschines, about Aspasia, 
 that the constant object of her solicitude was a study of 
 the rights and duties which marriage creates for man and 
 woman. Clearly enough, she recognised that those who 
 entered into a matrimonial contract ought to do so with 
 absolute freedom on both sides. There ought, in other 
 words, to be allowed to women as much as to men a free 
 choice. With conditions like these marriage becomes a 
 union of two thoughtful human beings, who give each other 
 the best of themselves, and therefore help in a partnership 
 of mutual confidence and respect. Naturally enough, the 
 position of woman in the married state occupied the atten- 
 tion of Aspasia, just because she felt that in Athens the 
 wife was not very much better than a chattel and a slave ; 
 so that, in thus occupying herself with the circumstances 
 of marriage, she was also one of the earliest of those whom 
 we call Feminists, everywhere upholding the cause of 
 woman as an independent social integer, a definite portion 
 of the State economy. In other words, she revived in the 
 fifth century some of the ideas which, consciously or 
 unconsciously, had animated the earlier centuries. What 
 Andromache had been to Hector, what Penelope had been 
 to Ulysses, what Nausicaa had been as a daughter in the 
 Phaeacian Isle, that Aspasia claimed for herself and her 
 sisters in Athens. Meanwhile, her union with Pericles 
 was a very high example, carried out in practice, of those 
 theories which she discussed with her friends in private. 
 And, despite all the controversies of the time and all the 
 oblique references to her fame which we find in contem- 
 porary and later writers, let us remind ourselves that the 
 
SAPPHO AND ASPASIA 107 
 
 Athenians themselves made ample amends to Pericles for 
 whatever ignoble stigma they had thoughtlessly cast upon 
 the partner of his married life. For when the plague had 
 taken away both the sons of Pericles, and the statesman 
 who had toiled so hard for the supremacy of Athens was 
 left without a single representative at home to discharge 
 sacrificial duties to the shades of his ancestors when the 
 family of the Alcmaeonidae had no heir to carry on its fame 
 the Athenians determined to legitimise the youthful 
 Pericles, who was the son of Aspasia. Now it was quite 
 open for Pericles to have adopted some boy in order to 
 keep up the honour of his name. The fact that he did not 
 do anything of the kind, combined with the recognition 
 on the part of his fellow-citizens implied in the act of 
 legitimation of Aspasia' s child, surely proved that in the 
 better judgment of Athens Aspasia' s life had been so pure 
 and noble as to redeem her from all the base charges of 
 ignoble wits. 
 
 Thus in the long run truth prevails, and strength of 
 character will win its legitimate triumphs. Aspasia was 
 a great woman, full of quick natural intelligence, adorned 
 and fortified by a steady, organised system of culture. 
 Socrates, in his laughing fashion, declares that she taught 
 him how to speak, and going even further than this, tries 
 to make out that it was Aspasia, and not Pericles, who 
 wrote the Funeral Oration which was delivered in Athens 
 shortly after the beginning of the war, and reported so 
 fully by Thucydides. This, which we find in the Platonic 
 Dialogue called " Menexenus," is clearly Socrates' joke, 
 and we must not for a moment take it seriously any more 
 than we can take seriously the report that after Pericles' 
 death Aspasia married a common cattle-dealer called 
 Lysicles. So prominent a figure naturally attracted to 
 itself every kind of floating gossip, complimentary or 
 malevolent. For ourselves, one or two things, amongst 
 many that could be cited, are quite sufficient to keep the 
 memory of Aspasia at the high level which her intellect 
 and her virtue deserved. A pretty story tells us that 
 Pericles, every time he left her for his ordinary avocations, 
 and every time he returned, kissed her a fact which must 
 have been sufficiently remarkable to be worth chronicling, 
 and for this reason obviously a very unusual indication 
 of affection. We have said also that when he was defend- 
 ing her before the Athenian judges, Pericles, despite his 
 
108 OLD SAWS AND MODERN INSTANCES 
 
 Olympian calm, burst into a flood of tears. Points like 
 these only illustrate how extraordinary was the devotion 
 which united the first statesman of Greece with the most 
 brilliant woman of her time. But when we find that Athens 
 could give up all its old prejudice, could turn its back on 
 ancestral customs and conventions, and recognise the 
 legitimacy of Pericles' union with an alien ; and when we 
 have to add to that this second fact, that Plato, who did 
 not like Pericles, because he represented a political ideal 
 different from his own, could yet venture to make his 
 great master, Socrates, sit at the feet of Aspasia, in order 
 to learn of her the arts of discussion and oratory, we can 
 hardly be wrong in the conclusion that the Milesian woman, 
 the daughter of Axiochus, Aspasia, the well-beloved of 
 Pericles, stands in the very front rank of the great women 
 who have adorned the pages of ancient and modern history. 
 
A PHILOSOPHIC EMPEROR 
 
 MARCUS AURELIUS ANTONINUS 
 
 1 
 
 THE perennial charm which surrounds the Meditations of 
 Marcus Aurelius is explicable on several grounds. Perhaps 
 in the first place we should put the fact that the author 
 of these thoughts was an Emperor ; that is to say, a man 
 who was every day face to face with all the problems of 
 government, and who had to lead his soldiers against out- 
 landish tribes the Quadi, the Marcomanni, and others. 
 In his busy career of practical industry one would hardly 
 expect such a man to find opportunity or leisure for the 
 kind of diary, in twelve books, which he has bequeathed 
 to us. Another point of interest is that, though he had 
 the inestimable advantage of a father by adoption, Anto- 
 ninus Pius, to whom he pays a remarkable tribute in his 
 opening chapter, he was himself surrounded with figures 
 of the ordinary imperial depravity. His wife, Faustina, 
 had no particularly good character, although probably 
 some of the stories narrated of her by Dion Cassius and 
 others represent nothing more nor less than the scandal 
 of the time. At all events, it is certain that his son, Corn- 
 modus, was a brutal ruffian, and it is difficult for us to 
 understand how so gentle, so cultured, so philosophic a 
 father should have left such few traces of his personality 
 on the upbringing of Commodus. But a third and still 
 more important element in our interest in the writings 
 of the Emperor Marcus Aurelius Antoninus is that he was 
 so near to, and yet so untouched by, Christianity. If 
 we take the series of his thoughts, which he put down, 
 apparently, day by day, as a kind of private commentary 
 to guide his own career, we are struck over and over again 
 by their likeness to and their difference from Christian 
 tenets. The thoughts remind us of the Imitation, especially 
 in their constant enunciation of the necessity for a definite 
 purpose for human beings, some specific goal or object, 
 which is to save men from stupid and idle vacillation. 
 
 109 
 
110 OLD SAWS AND MODERN INSTANCES 
 
 Yet Marcus Aurelius' reflections are not Christian in 
 spirit ; they are Stoic. Together with the writings of the 
 enfranchised slave, Epictetus, they give us the best pos- 
 sible picture of what Stoicism had become in the second 
 century A.D. 
 
 Stoicism was a creed which especially recommended 
 itself to the Romans from the very earliest time of its 
 introduction, because in many ways it corresponded with 
 the stout and intolerant Roman spirit, with its natural 
 love of independence and its valiant endurance of suffering. 
 Stoicism was assuredly not Greek in spirit, but rather the 
 antithesis of the Greek idea. To the best Hellenic writers, 
 ethics that is to say, the private morals of an individual 
 were inextricably bound up with politics, the laws and 
 conditions by which States preserve their integrity. When 
 the Hellenic system was broken up, two forms of philosophy 
 appeared, both in a manner dependent on the new fact 
 that a man was bound to regard himself not as a citizen 
 of a given State, but as a citizen of the world. One w r as 
 the Epicurean philosophy, which taught the calm and 
 dignified pursuit of cultured happiness. The other was 
 the Stoic, which laid stress on the manly virtues of inde- 
 pendence and strength of will. In the breakdown of the 
 old constitutional forms, in the misery and unsettlement 
 of the times, the Stoic philosophers invited men to fall 
 back on their own natural powers and capabilities, to face 
 the problem of life by a resolute assertion that within the 
 four corners of his own consciousness man was free, and 
 the proper master of his fate. Roman Stoicism, of course, 
 took various forms. In the writings of the Emperor 
 Marcus Aurelius these tenets are represented in the gentlest 
 and most appealing way, albeit that they are not divorced 
 from the fundamental principle that a man must find within 
 himself the sources of his own strength. And so we come 
 to what, apparently, has been looked upon as a paradox 
 the picture of an Emperor, with all the weight of a great 
 kingdom on his hands, recommending himself, in aphorism 
 after aphorism, to retire within the citadel of his own 
 soul, and find peace and comfort in the knowledge that 
 reason governed the universe. For that is the keynote 
 of the Emperor's acquiescence. The principal part of a 
 man's individuality is his reason, and the chief principle 
 of the universe is reason also. Whatever happens to a man 
 must be what is best for the whole system of things, and he 
 
A PHILOSOPHIC EMPEROR 111 
 
 must extract what consolation he can from the recognition 
 that he is part of a universal rational order. 
 
 And this is the man who possibly had an unfaithful 
 wife, and certainly had a brutal son, and who, above all, 
 consented to the persecution of Christians. Two persecu- 
 tions, at least, of Christians happened in the reign of 
 Marcus Aurelius Antoninus one in which Polycarp suffered 
 at Smyrna, which may have taken place in A.D. 167, and 
 the other the notorious trials at Lyons in A.D. 177. It is 
 difficult for us, at the first blush, to understand how so 
 gentle and so humane an Emperor could sanction tortures 
 for Christians. Perhaps we shall never quite understand 
 the mystery, for we cannot put ourselves back by any feat 
 of imagination into the second century, and we cannot 
 realise that the religion which has meant so much for a 
 modern world should have been regarded at that time as 
 a pernicious and detestable superstition. Trajan and 
 Hadrian both laid down certain rules, coming practically 
 to this : that if a Christian would recant, he should, of 
 course, be left alone. If he persisted in his errors, he must 
 suffer the penalty for his contumacy. One feature about 
 the Christian communities, which is constantly being 
 asserted by contemporary authorities, is their obstinacy. 
 Mild and humane men like our Emperor were, of course, 
 latitudinarians. They accepted the established paganism. 
 They gladly gave as much liberty as they could to other 
 faiths, so long as these other faiths did not attack the 
 recognised orthodoxy of Rome. And they could not 
 understand why the Christians were so contumacious, why 
 they so strenuously put forward their own faith as that 
 which must, in the long run, conquer paganism, and prove 
 that the Roman deities were either devils or nothing. We 
 now put our finger upon the main reason why the Christians 
 were persecuted. From the Roman standpoint they were 
 a sort of religious anarchists. They would not be content 
 with cultivating their own faith in secret. They were 
 militant and polemical. They wanted to destroy the estab- 
 lished creed. To these considerations we must add the fact 
 that there was a very large amount of ignorance about the 
 exact tenets of Christianity, and that a number of Latin 
 authors saw no difference between them and the Jews, 
 who were always seditious and always troublesome. One 
 thing, at all events, is certain : the ordinary population 
 conceived the most violent hatred of Christians and Jews 
 
112 OLD SAWS AND MODERN INSTANCES 
 
 alike. It was the people who forced the hands of their 
 Governors. They insisted that these seditious sects should 
 suffer the penalty for their supposed crimes. It was in 
 order to stop menacing revolutions that the Governors 
 not only exercised their own authority, but appealed to 
 the Emperor to sanction their legislative acts against the 
 Christians. Of two things, one: Either the Empire 
 must go on, with its established faiths, and in that case 
 Christianity must be put down with all the severity that 
 flows from the odium theologicum ; or else the frank admis- 
 sion must be made that paganism was effete and out-of- 
 date. No one can expect the ordinary Roman Governor, 
 or even an ordinarily enlightened Emperor, to assent at 
 once to the latter alternative. After all, the real excuse 
 of the authorities in this matter is that conventional excuse 
 for harassed authority that the business of the Imperial 
 government must go on. 
 
 2 
 
 The first thing to say about the philosophic system of 
 Marcus Aurelius is that it is not a system at all. There is 
 nothing systematic in the occasional and discursive remarks 
 of the Emperor, except so far as we can fit them into the 
 general framework of thought provided by the Stoical 
 philosophy. The circumstances under which these reflec- 
 tions were composed, the fact that they were occasional 
 notes, written very likely when the Emperor himself was 
 engaged in his campaigns the general nature of a private 
 diary, which is always present to our minds when we read 
 the Meditations of Marcus Aurelius preclude the notion 
 that we have to deal with a formally constructed treatise 
 on themes connected with God, the world, and man. One 
 or two points, however, must be remembered in order to 
 explain the general attitude of the thinker. The Stoics 
 believed in a division of knowledge between dialectic or 
 logic, ethics, and physics. Later on, probably by Cleanthes, 
 each division was subdivided ; and thus we have a classifi- 
 cation yielding physics and theology, ethics and politics, 
 dialectic and rhetoric. There was obviously a gain in 
 clearness by this subdivision, for we now know that, 
 according to the Stoical point of view, physics, in the 
 largest sense of the word, includes theology, or the con- 
 stitution of the universe as a divine system; and that 
 
A PHILOSOPHIC EMPEROR 113 
 
 the proper and legitimate notion of the duties incumbent 
 on a human being involves also his relation to a given state 
 or constitution. Dialectic or logic we may put aside, 
 for it makes but little appearance among the Meditations 
 of Marcus Aurelius. Another point material to our in- 
 quiry is the recognition of the Stoical principle that man 
 ought to live " conformably to Nature." Nature is, of 
 course, an ambiguous term, and may mean either the 
 normal or the original. It may mean the material, or, 
 from a more enlarged standpoint, the material as ordered 
 and arranged by a divine intelligence. When the Stoic 
 teachers recommended men to live conformably to Nature, 
 what they meant was, that man should so guide his life that 
 he, a part of the universe, should move in unison and 
 harmony with the totality of things. They meant, also, 
 something more. They intended to indicate that, man's 
 nature being modelled on the larger nature, the same 
 principle of governance or direction should be used by man 
 in his own concerns, which is acted on by Nature herself 
 on the larger scale. Thus, for instance, man is composed, 
 roughly, of two parts spiritual and material; and the 
 Cosmos, too, is composed of two parts material, which 
 the Greeks called flfoj, and the informing reason or intelli- 
 
 fence, to which they give the name of vovq. Now we 
 now the world as a determined order of antecedents and 
 sequences, of causes and effects, of something settled and 
 arranged by a guiding spirit, which makes for harmony and 
 order. Here is a model, then, for our own careers. The 
 reason should guide ; the physical properties of the human 
 being should obey. But there must be a settled purpose 
 in man's life, some goal to which he directs his efforts, 
 some ideal which he seeks to realise. If in the conduct 
 of his life he obeys the leading principle of reason, then he 
 is acting conformably to Nature, which also, as experi- 
 ence shows us, is arranged on lines of providence and 
 thought. 
 
 So far we move without any difficulty, because we are 
 dealing abstractly with general and easily understood 
 principles. But, as Marcus Aurelius is always keen to tell 
 us, life is not theory but action ; and it is, of course, action, 
 experience, the daily conduct, which are of the greatest 
 importance. One or two simple rules we may take for our 
 help. The first thing to remember is, that man is intended 
 to be social; that is to say, he is one unit in a society 
 i 
 
114 OLD SAWS AND MODERN INSTANCES 
 
 bigger than himself, and he must learn the lessons of 
 unselfishness. He cannot pursue his own good to the 
 exclusion of that of his neighbour. He has hardly any 
 individual rights, apart from those which spring from the 
 social constitution to which he belongs. He must not 
 attempt to divorce himself, by a life of seclusion, from 
 the life of the community at large. As the Scripture re- 
 minds us : " We must bear one another's burdens," " We 
 are members one of another." In such maxims plainly 
 speaks the voice of an Emperor only too conscious that 
 upon him rests the imperial duty of governing his kingdom, 
 of discharging tasks not for his own individual aggrandise- 
 ment, but for the benefit of the whole. Other salutary 
 maxims are of more personal application. We have dis- 
 covered that the guiding principle in human beings is 
 reason, from which it follows that we must not yield to 
 the persuasions of the body. We must not be conquered 
 by the passions, for all these are material. We must be 
 swayed by the spiritual or intellectual elements within 
 us. We must acknowledge the superiority of reason. 
 And the third maxim is, that so far as lies within our power, 
 we must free ourselves from deception and error. The 
 senses are always deceiving us. So, too, are the vague 
 opinions of men. Just as we must not mistake the mere 
 impressions on our senses for truths established by reason, 
 so we must not be led astray by the general estimation 
 which men place on what they call things of importance. 
 If we trusted our senses, for instance, we might suppose 
 that a mere pleasurable gratification, the chance offspring 
 of a momentary temptation, was preferable to the ordered 
 discipline of experience. Or, to put it in our modern way, 
 if we trusted our senses we might think that the sun rose 
 every morning and set every evening, and that the dew 
 came down from above instead of rising from below. We 
 might think, in short, that the sun went round the earth 
 instead of the earth round the sun, and that the stars in 
 the heavens at large were made for the use of the inhabi- 
 tants of our petty world. Intelligence, thought, science, 
 correct vulgar errors. And, in precisely the same fashion, 
 we ought each of us to be able to correct vulgar errors 
 about the objects of human pursuit. What is the good 
 of worrying about wealth, or reputation, or even sickness, 
 or even death itself? Some of these things belong to 
 the class of what Marcus Aurelius calls the indifferent, 
 
A PHILOSOPHIC EMPEROR 115 
 
 adiacpoga. Others are beyond the range of our own 
 power, and must come upon us, whether we will or no. 
 The wise man will not disturb himself about indifferent 
 matters, or the things outside the range of his own control. 
 What he is concerned with is the ordering of his own soul, 
 so that he may win for himself recognised virtuous states 
 courage, justice, temperance and obtain the tranquillity 
 which is the reward of philosophic self-control. Every- 
 where our knowledge is limited by our ignorance. We do 
 not know very much or rather, we know very little 
 about the ultimate constitution of things. It is enough 
 for us to realise that we are in the midst of a world which is 
 not accidental or haphazard, but which evolves or develops, 
 as we should phrase it, according to a settled plan. We 
 are in the hands of reason, of a providence which is intelli- 
 gent, and if we train ourselves properly we shall be masters 
 of our own soul, so as to order our lives rationally and 
 intelligently. Some men will say (so Marcus Aurelius 
 argues in one passage), How do you know there are gods, 
 when you do not see them ? And to this he answers that 
 in the first place you do see them, for the universe at large 
 shows you in the laws of Nature the existence of divine 
 foresight. In the next place, you do not see your own soul ; 
 yet every rational man believes that he has within himself 
 an individuality of his own, and that he can guide his 
 affairs with discretion. Whether God created the universe 
 at any given moment, or whether it has existed from all 
 eternity, are unprofitable questions. We do not wholly 
 understand how the universe of things is kept together 
 whether by a constant assertion of divine power, or by 
 the establishment of " seminal principles," which ever 
 afterwards carry out their own effects. But it really does 
 not matter very much. Everywhere there are gods. If 
 we live, we are surrounded by them, and wherever we go 
 when we die, there, too, will be gods. Death itself is not 
 a formidable thing no more formidable than birth. We 
 were nothing, and we became something. We cease to be 
 something, and become nothing. Everywhere throughout 
 the universe there is change, dispersion of elements, and 
 fresh aggregation of elements. Things fade, and die, 
 and revive. It is the idlest of all stupidities to fret or 
 worry over the way in which the universe has been made. 
 Thus the philosophy of Marcus Aurelius is, above all, that 
 which is suited to harassed men. 
 
116 OLD SAWS AND MODERN INSTANCES 
 
 3 
 
 In his brilliant article on Marcus Aurelius in the Essays 
 in Criticism, Matthew Arnold makes some remarks on the 
 contrast between the Emperor's ethical position and that 
 of Christianity. Such comparisons are not altogether 
 profitable, for the respective principles are not to be com- 
 pared. The primary appeal of the Stoical philosophy is 
 to the head, the brain, the reasoning powers. The Stoic 
 wise man is he who, through sheer strength of intelligence, 
 having discovered all that is of consequence in life, and 
 put aside all that is unessential, dominates himself and his 
 fate, and lives the complete master of his own life. This 
 tenet about the wise man brought the Stoics into a good 
 deal of criticism and ridicule, because such an ideal person 
 has never existed, and never could exist, and, as Horace 
 laughingly remarks, if he had a cold in his head, his ideal 
 dignity would be very largely impaired. But the picture 
 which Marcus Aurelius tries to present is more human, 
 and more sensible. He does not claim such masterful 
 authority for the wise man. In the simplest conceivable 
 fashion he goes through some of the ordinary difficulties 
 of life, and shows how a philosopher, by dint of his reason- 
 ing powers, by going back in every case to first principles, 
 manages to carve out for himself a career not absolutely 
 happy, but at least contented and estimable. Happiness 
 as such was not the object of the Stoic philosophy. Con- 
 tentment, the absence of worry, the power of self-control, 
 complacency, decorum, self-respect these are the things 
 at which the Emperor aims, and which, so far as we know, 
 he attained to a large extent in the course of his life. 
 
 But it is obvious, of course, that this picture of humanity 
 can only be realised on the ground that the ordinary feelings 
 and emotions are either sacrificed or ruthlessly kept under 
 constraint. The primary appeal of Christianity is not so 
 much to the head as to the heart. The first principle of 
 the Christian religion is the power of love; and at once 
 we are conscious that we are in a different domain, with 
 appeals of a very different kind of cogency, and an ideal 
 which, so far from obliterating feeling, purifies and en- 
 nobles it. Neither Christianity nor Stoicism would assert 
 that happiness was the end of life. The Christian relegates 
 it practically to another world. But what we notice is, 
 
A PHILOSOPHIC EMPEROR 117 
 
 that whereas the ideally good man of the Stoic is a slightly 
 inhuman creature, the ideal figure of the Christian is a 
 thoroughly and completely human being, who, believing 
 in self-sacrifice, devotes himself, through sheer love, to the 
 good of his brothers. Of course, for this reason Chris- 
 tianity can powerfully affect the average man, whereas 
 the doctrines of Stoicism are, at the most, for the elect 
 and the thoughtful. 
 
 There is another point which arises out of Matthew 
 Arnold's discussion of the Meditations. He notes in the 
 Roman Emperor a certain wistfulness, as though, when all 
 was said and done, something more were wanted to satisfy 
 the ordinary needs and aspirations of the soul. Every 
 reader of the Meditations will judge for himself whether 
 this criticism is justified or not. For myself, I do not see 
 the wistfulness so much as an occasional uncertainty. 
 For the most part, Marcus Aurelius lays down his opinions 
 before us as though they reconciled him to life. Now and 
 again it is not so. Occasionally he is invaded by a distinct 
 phase of scepticism, as though what had hitherto seemed 
 clear had suddenly become obscure, and he was not quite 
 sure whether the first principles to which he throughout 
 trusted were in every respect trustworthy. A very signifi- 
 cant passage of this kind is to be found at the end of the 
 seventh book, in the last paragraph. The passage itself 
 is somewhat obscure and probably corrupt, but the general 
 meaning is tolerably obvious. The things which make for 
 man's peace are the assurances which we derive from 
 study and experience that the whole constitution of things 
 is governed by reason, that the chains of cause and effect 
 go on in accordance with a settled law, and that whatever 
 the end may be of the whole development, it is not incon- 
 sistent with such reason and intelligence as exist in us. 
 But there is an alternative supposition, and it is one to 
 which, in moments of weakness, vacillation, and doubt, 
 the thinker is sometimes tempted. Perhaps, after all, 
 reason does not guide the universe. Perhaps the whole 
 Cosmos is the result of chance, a fortuitous concourse of 
 atoms, the final end of which no one can foretell. And 
 perhaps men are not rationally directed, but are mere 
 puppets, drawn this way and that automata, whose very 
 consciousness of their fate only makes their automatism 
 the more pathetic. This is not a mood which is in any 
 sense habitual to Marcus Aurelius, but it is discoverable 
 
118 OLD SAWS AND MODERN INSTANCES 
 
 sometimes. The extent of our knowledge is only very 
 small. We do not know how God exists, or how He works, 
 and the aspirations of faith are not always borne out by 
 the operations of thought. Perhaps this is what Matthew 
 Arnold means by " wistfulness " ; but it seems more like 
 that kind of uncertainty which besets any thinker when 
 he gets near ultimate problems. 
 
 On another feature belonging to the Stoical system 
 Marcus Aurelius lays down no precise judgment. The 
 Stoic thought that it was one of the privileges of the wise 
 man that he should be able to take himself out of exist- 
 ence by his own act whenever he found life intolerable. 
 Some of the Stoics thanked God for the eternal law that, 
 though we are only given one way of entering into life> 
 there are many ways of going out of it. Such was Seneca's 
 view ; and one or two Stoics committed suicide for reasons 
 which seemed satisfactory to themselves, but which hardly 
 produced conviction in others. On the whole, it would 
 seem that the Emperor does not encourage suicide. On 
 the contrary, the general trend of his remarks is, to induce 
 a man to wait for the end patiently and with tranquillity. 
 As long as he lives a man can do useful acts. He ought 
 not to abridge his possible usefulness by a hasty departure 
 from the scene of action. Still we find a significant sen- 
 tence which we may, if we like, interpret as a recommenda- 
 tion to suicide : " The house is smoky, and I quit it." 
 But suicide is not quite in conformity with the general 
 notion that a man is part of a social state, that he has 
 his role to play from which it follows that it must be some- 
 thing like a clear dereliction of duty if he takes himself 
 away. Nor yet is Marcus Aurelius quite clear as to what 
 happens to us after death. He cannot assent to the doctrine 
 that the soul, which is part of the Divine, should perish 
 utterly, for no portion of the Divinity can perish. But 
 what form of existence the soul enjoys after human life 
 is a matter which cannot be solved by philosophy, and 
 which, therefore, the philosopher wisely leaves alone. A 
 man need not worry, however. God or the gods will do 
 whatever is best or most consistent with the whole Cosmos 
 of things. In the next world there are gods quite as much 
 as in this. 
 
 After all, that which gives Marcus Aurelius his immor- 
 tality is the fact that the book of his Meditations is one to 
 which we turn again and again in the certain hope of finding 
 
A PHILOSOPHIC EMPEROR 119 
 
 consolation and help. It is a bedside book, if ever there 
 was one a book not to be read through at a stretch, but 
 to be taken up when occasion serves, full of wise and grave 
 maxims, which never lose their pertinence or value. And 
 it is not only because the reflections themselves have such 
 philosophic weight that we take them to our hearts; it is 
 because the author has revealed his own nature in all he 
 has said, and the character of Marcus Aurelius is one which 
 it is good for us to know. In this Emperor, with all his 
 grave responsibilities of empire, we find a temperament of 
 rare sweetness and humility, of tender affectionateness, of 
 unfailing sympathy, of the most strenuous and unwearied 
 effort towards an ideal goal. Other men may do good 
 because they think that good will be done to them. Not 
 so the Emperor. Goodness is never on the look-out for any 
 reward. Take, for instance, this 
 
 (V, 6.) One man, when he has done a service to another, is ready to set 
 it down to his account as a favour conferred. Another is not ready to do 
 this ; but still in his own mind he thinks of the man as his debtor, and he 
 knows what he has done. A third in a manner does not even know what 
 he has done ; but he is like a vine which has produced grapes, and seeks 
 for nothing more after it has once produced its proper fruit. As a horse 
 when he has run, a dog when he has tracked the game, a bee when it has 
 made the honey, so a man when he has done a good act does not call out for 
 others to come and see, but he goes on to another act, as a vine goes on to 
 produce again the grapes in season. Must a man then be one of these, who 
 in a manner act thus without observing it ? Yes. 
 
 Or as mere current maxims to help us through the weary 
 day, read the first section with which the fifth chapter 
 opens 
 
 In the morning when thou risest unwillingly, let this thought be present 
 I am rising to the work of a human being. Why then am I dissatisfied if 
 I am going to do the things for which I exist and for which I was brought 
 into the world ? Or have I been made for this, to lie in the bed-clothes 
 and keep myself warm ? But this is more pleasant Dost thou exist then 
 to take thy pleasure, and not at all for action or exertion ? 
 
 Or again, in the same strain 
 
 (II, 1.) Begin the morning by saying to thyself, I shall meet with the 
 busybody, the ungrateful, arrogant, deceitful, envious, unsocial. All 
 these things happen to them by reason of their ignorance of what is good 
 and evil. But I who have seen the nature of the good that it is beautiful, 
 and of the bad that it is ugly, and the nature of him who does wrong, that 
 it is akin to me, not (only) of the same blood or seed, but that it participates 
 in (the same) intelligence and (the same) portion of the divinity, I can 
 neither be injured by any of them, for no one can fix on me what is ugly, 
 
120 OLD SAWS AND MODERN INSTANCES 
 
 nor can I be angry with my kinsman, nor hate him. For we are made for 
 co-operation, like feet, like hands, like eyelids, like the rows of the upper 
 and lower teeth. To act against one another then is contrary to nature ; 
 and it is acting against one another to be vexed and to turn away. 
 
 Other maxims of a like import may be cited 
 
 (IV, 24.) Occupy thyself with few things, says the philosopher, if thou 
 wouldst be tranquil. But consider if it would not be better to say, Do 
 what is necessary, and whatever the reason of the animal, which is naturally 
 social, requires, and as it requires. For this brings not only the tran- 
 quillity which comes from doing well, but also that which comes from 
 doing few things. For the greatest part of what we say and do being 
 unnecessary, if a man takes this away, he will have more leisure and less 
 uneasiness. Accordingly, on every occasion a man should ask himself, 
 Is this one of the unnecessary things? Now a man should take away 
 not only unnecessary acts, but also unnecessary thoughts, for thus super- 
 fluous acts will not follow after. 
 
 Or this 
 
 (V, 11.) About what am I now employing my own soul? On every 
 occasion I must ask myself this question, and inquire : What have I now 
 in this part of me which they call the ruling principle ? And whose soul 
 have I now ? That of a child, or of a young man, or of a feeble woman, or 
 of a tyrant, or of a domestic animal, or of a wild beast ? 
 
 Or once more 
 
 (V, 16.) Such as are thy habitual thoughts, such also will be the charac- 
 ter of thy mind ; for the soul is dyed by the thoughts. Dye it, then, with 
 a continuous series of such thoughts as these : for instance, that where a 
 man can live, there he can also live well. But he must live in a palace ; 
 well, then, he can also live well in a palace. 
 
 Are you afraid to die? Listen, then, to what the 
 Emperor says 
 
 (X, 36.) Thou wilt consider this, then, when thou art dying, and thou 
 wilt depart more contentedly by reflecting thus : I am going away from 
 such a life in which even my associates, in behalf of whom I have striven 
 so much, prayed, and cared, themselves wish me to depart, hoping per- 
 chance to get some little advantage by it. Why, then, should a man cling 
 to a longer stay here? Do not, however, for this reason go away less 
 kindly disposed to them, but preserving thy own character, and friendly 
 and benevolent and mild, and, on the other hand, not as if thou wast torn 
 away ; but as when a man dies a quiet death, the poor soul is easily separ- 
 ated from the body, such also ought thy departure from men to be, for 
 Nature united thee to them and associated thee. But does she now dis- 
 solve the union ? Well, I am separated as from kinsmen, not, however, 
 dragged resisting, but without compulsion; for this, too, is one of the 
 things according to Nature. 
 
 After all, it is almost inconceivable that if the world be 
 
A PHILOSOPHIC EMPEROR 121 
 
 ruled by Divine Providence, goodness should be destroyed 
 by death. 
 
 (XII, 5.) How can it be that the gods, after having arranged all things 
 well and benevolently for mankind, have overlooked this alone, that some 
 men and very good men, and men who, as we may say, have had most 
 communion with the divinity, and through pious acts and religious ob- 
 servances have been most intimate with the divinity, when they have once 
 died should never exist again, but should be completely extinguished ? 
 
 And the Meditations end on a fine note of philoso- 
 phic dignity, wherein Marcus Aurelius resumes all that he 
 has felt about the shortness of life and the necessity for 
 contentment. 
 
 (XII, 36.) Man, thou hast been a citizen in this great state (the world) : 
 what difference does it make to thee whether for five years (or three ?) for 
 that which is conformable to the laws is just for all. Where is the hard- 
 ship, then, if no tyrant nor yet an unjust judge sends thee away from the 
 state, but Nature who brought thee into it ? the same as if a praetor who 
 has employed an actor dismisses him from the stage " But I have not 
 finished the five acts, but only three of them." Thou sayest well, but in 
 life the three acts are the whole drama; for what shall be a complete 
 drama is determined by him who was once the cause of its composition, 
 and now of its dissolution : but thou art the cause of neither. Depart, 
 then, satisfied, for he also who releases thee is satisfied. 
 
 Such was the gentle and philosophic Emperor, a model 
 for all men in whatever condition of life they may find 
 themselves, giving apt consolation to those who are per- 
 plexed, and always suggesting fine ideals to those who know 
 how to be humble and simple. Simplicity, indeed, is one 
 of the Emperor's chief recommendations, for, as he says, 
 after telling us to be just, temperate, obedient to the gods, 
 we must do all this with simplicity, because " the pride 
 which is proud of its want of pride is the most intolerable 
 of all." 
 
THE IDEA OF COMEDY. I 
 
 1 
 
 SOME years ago I wrote certain essays under the title " The 
 Idea of Tragedy." I want in the present and the succeed- 
 ing paper to say something on the corresponding subject 
 of " The Idea of Comedy," my effort being to disentangle 
 from the variety of different plays which have come under 
 the general head of Comedy the essential idea of this form 
 of dramatic work. And it is by no means an easy thing to 
 do, because the very meaning of the word has changed in 
 different periods of history, and the term has been taken to 
 cover a wide range of theatrical work. There is only one 
 way to proceed in a case like this. We must determine in 
 our own mind what is the highest specimen, the finest 
 flower of the comic spirit, and when this has been settled 
 we shall be able to appreciate the various approaches made 
 to it, and estimate the success or failure, from the point 
 of view of the supreme excellence. Where shall we find 
 the highest examples of the comic spirit ? I do not think 
 there is much doubt that the real writer of comedies, the 
 man who discovered the proper formula of this kind of 
 work, and left imperishable examples of his dramatic skill 
 and aptitude, was Moliere. 
 
 In George Meredith's well-known " Essay on Comedy " 
 an authoritative work which no one would omit consider- 
 ing in this reference the whole idea and stamp of what 
 comedy means is founded on the polite and distinguished 
 plays of Moliere, and also of Congreve, types of that kind 
 of work which is only possible in a highly civilised society 
 of men and women of taste and breeding, met for the 
 exchange of verbal wit and fashionable intrigue. This 
 high comedy is, of course, essentially different from the 
 lower types, descending into the region of farce, which often 
 usurp its name. George Meredith gives us a definition 
 
 122 
 
THE IDEA OF COMEDY 123 
 
 which it will be useful to remember, for its value will be 
 apparent later, when he says that the kind of comedy to 
 which he is referring is that which produces " thoughtful 
 laughter" 
 
 Thoughtful laughter it is a good phrase. We laugh at 
 a farce, we laugh at all kinds of burlesque entertainments, 
 we laugh at pantomimes, we laugh at the grotesque humour 
 of some of the artists in a Revue. But this kind of laughter 
 could not possibly be called thoughtful ; it rather rests on 
 the absence of all thought, and comes more naturally from 
 a vacuous mind. It may be irresistible, but it is not 
 dignified. Thoughtful laughter is a different experience, 
 which does not come to us often. It is an inner experience 
 a sort of internal chuckle which does not display external 
 manifestations. It is the enjoyment of the intellect when 
 situations, or characters, or, sometimes, phrases strike one 
 as happy exhibitions of humour. 
 
 The distinction between comedy and farce is in some cases 
 not easy to make, but as a general rule we can apprehend 
 the fundamental difference between the two in the following 
 fashion. In a farce the situations are the main thing, and 
 they condition character; or, in other words, character 
 is a negligible thing if the situations are amusing. In 
 comedy, on the other hand, the character of the personages 
 conditions, or creates, the situation. The situation does 
 not exist for itself, but in order to illustrate the personages 
 involved. But comedy itself has different types. There 
 is comedy which is a form of burlesque ; comedy which is 
 a department of romance ; comedy whose main subject is 
 the succession of comic incidents; comedy which deals 
 with manners changing manners and fashions of a time 
 and comedy which deals with character. A comedy which 
 is for the most past burlesque extravaganza is exemplified, 
 let us say, in Aristophanes ; romantic comedy is the especial 
 gift of Shakespeare; for comedy of incidents we look 
 naturally to the Italian school, verging on farce; for the 
 comedy of manners let us select our own Restoration 
 dramatists. The comedy of character remains, which we 
 naturally attribute to Moliere. As a matter of fact, 
 Moliere's comedies are typical of their class, because they 
 combine earlier varieties. You have a comedy of manners 
 and also a comedy of incident, but these are made to serve 
 the main purpose, which is to exhibit character. In pieces 
 like Les Femmes Savantes, Le Misanthrope, L'Avare, 
 
124 OLD SAWS AND MODERN INSTANCES 
 
 Tartuffe, and others we have a full and complete exhibition 
 of the comic spirit. 
 
 I have said that it is not easy to disentangle the idea of 
 comedy. Why is it difficult ? The first thing to notice is 
 that comedy has been found difficult by writers. One would 
 be naturally inclined to say that comedy must be easier 
 to write than tragedy. As a matter of fact, history seems 
 to prove that it is more difficult. Almost everywhere 
 tragedy comes first in literature. uEschylus, Sophocles, 
 and Euripides in Greek drama, produced their tragedies, 
 carried to a high level and pinnacle of excellence their 
 tragic plays, before comedy began. Aristophanes is 
 supposed to have turned the attention of the Athenian 
 public to comic themes. That, however, is what is known 
 as the older comedy, succeeded by the middle and the new. 
 The man who discovered the true formula was Menander. 
 He belongs to the new comedy. We ascribe, without 
 much hesitation, to him this honour, because he was so 
 extensively imitated and admired in subsequent timeg. 
 Terence, the Roman dramatist, was his constant imitator. 
 Without Menander, apparently, there would have been no 
 Terence, though there might have been Plautus. Of 
 Menander himself, unfortunately, we know but little. I 
 am not sure that he could have been very much appreciated 
 during his lifetime. He lived between 342 B.C. and 291 
 B.C. He wrote one hundred comedies, and only gained the 
 prize eight times. He had a rival, not only in dramatic 
 art, but also in personal affection towards a lady called 
 Glycera the writer Philemon, who probably was more 
 popular than he was. The story goes, which is repeated 
 for us by Aulus Gellius, that Menander used to ask Phile- 
 mon, " Don't you feel ashamed whenever you gain the 
 victory over me?" Philemon's answer is not recorded. 
 Subsequently Menander became the idol, the superlatively 
 favourite writer of antiquity. Even St. Paul quoted him. 
 In the First Corinthians, fifteenth chapter, verse 33, is found 
 the text, " Evil communications corrupt good manners." 
 This was one of the moral maxims of the dramatist, moral 
 maxims of which he was fond, apparently, such as these : 
 " The property of friends is common," and the much- 
 quoted " Whom the gods love die young." 
 
 Lately we have discovered a little more about Menander, 
 for between the ten years 1897 to 1907 certain papyri 
 were found in various parts of Egypt containing large 
 
THE IDEA OF COMEDY 125 
 
 fragments of Menander's comedies. Even now, however, 
 we do not know much about him, but enough to be pretty 
 sure that he achieved in his day what Moliere achieved many 
 years later the comedy of manners in the first place, and 
 also of character exemplified in manners. Perhaps the slow 
 growth of his frame was to be explained by this very fact 
 which is occupying our attention, namely, that the discovery 
 of the essential idea of comedy is of a late growth. Do we 
 wish for another example of this in our own literature ? 
 There is none better than is furnished by Shakespeare 
 himself. Shakespeare seems to have found no particular 
 difficulty in arriving at the idea of tragedy. Perhaps he 
 found the form all ready for him, in this respect in 
 Christopher Marlowe, for instance; but there was no 
 form ready for him in comedy, and therefore he made 
 a series of different tentative efforts in this direction, 
 not always with success. We find much the same result 
 if we look at the history of dramatic literature in France. 
 Corneille achieved his tragedies before the time when 
 he made some hesitating advances in the direction of 
 comedy, and only after many efforts did Moliere succeed 
 in achieving his splendid representation of manners and 
 morals and character. 
 
 2 
 
 Thus comedy, it would seem, is a late and difficult 
 acquisition. Let us ask ourselves why. One obvious 
 answer is, that comedy deals with everyday life, with which 
 we are all familiar, and about which we all claim to be 
 judges. Tragedy introduces standards which we cannot 
 always verify out of our own experience; therefore, we 
 do not claim to be adequate judges, and the writer of tragedy 
 escapes a censure which is only too ready and waiting for 
 the writer of comedy. If I write a novel of which the scene 
 and the characters are in some fanciful region, there is 
 nothing to curb my invention. But if I write a novel 
 dealing with everyday life then my condemnation is easy 
 in the mouth of those who say that I have betrayed re- 
 markable ignorance of actual facts. We can get another 
 reason for this superior difficulty of comedy in the fact that 
 the best and most perfect specimens of comedy depend on 
 a large amount of contemporary culture and civilisation. 
 
126 OLD SAWS AND MODERN INSTANCES 
 
 Society must be pretty well fixed in its prevalent character- 
 istics before men are in a position to treat it lightly and to 
 allow themselves to laugh at some of its forms. You must 
 be tolerably sure of your religious faith before you can 
 afford to be humorous about it. You must be equally 
 certain of the main principles which underlie both ethical 
 and social structures before you dare to be humorous about 
 them. So, too, a real comedy of manners and character 
 combined can only be the product of a tolerably advanced 
 civilisation which is so convinced of its real stability that it 
 is not shocked by the gay points of witty and cynical humour 
 expended on its satirical illustration. "It is a strange 
 enterprise," said Moliere, " to make honest folk laugh." 
 Why is it strange ? Because it is arbitrary. Comedy is 
 in its essence a purely arbitrary product. If you take life 
 simply and naturally, you will readily discover some of 
 its grave and menacing problems. You will find out the 
 tragic elements in existence without much difficulty, and 
 you will feel your mind depressed with the burden of things, 
 and write, if you have the dramatic gift, studies exhibiting 
 to the full the perplexities, the high emotions, the profound 
 love and equally profound despair which such problems 
 involve. And now look at the procedure of the comedian. 
 He is going to try to make you laugh at the very things 
 which would naturally urge you to tears. He is going to 
 abstract from the panorama of existence certain types of 
 human character which he insists on regarding as occasions 
 for mirth and laughter. Sometimes, it is true, the laughter 
 is nervous enough, so nervous that we suspect that the 
 author is in a hurry to laugh for fear that he should cry. 
 Sometimes his comic spirit is the issue of a really philo- 
 sophic complacency, won after much effort. Life is a 
 terrible tangle, he seems to say; you had better treat it 
 gaily, or otherwise you might go mad. Sometimes, again, 
 being himself of a light disposition, he insists on looking 
 only at the superficial aspect of things. Above all, the 
 comedian has discovered one thing which is of enormous 
 value to men in this vale of tears the real ethical and social 
 value of humour, as a preservative, as a gift of sanity to 
 save us from exaggeration. And therefore the comedian 
 will be neither optimist nor pessimist. He will laugh 
 equally at both creeds. The arbitrary character of comedy 
 is sufficiently shown in the various aphorisms that are used 
 about it. For instance, Horace Walpole's " life is a comedy 
 
THE IDEA OF COMEDY 127 
 
 to those who think, a tragedy to those who feel," or the 
 indubitably sage comment that if your comedian were to 
 extend his play beyond the recognised number of acts it 
 would be the commencement of a tragedy. But he is in 
 a hurry to bring down his curtain, because if we gazed more 
 intently at his pictures we should find our laughter fading 
 away. Why do most comedies end with marriage ? The 
 answer comes pat : Because the sequel is too depressing. 
 And is not Malvolio a really tragic character when Andrew 
 Aguecheek and Maria and Toby Belch have worked their 
 wicked will with him, and consigned him to a dungeon, 
 which assuredly he does not deserve ? Is not Moliere' s 
 Alceste equally tragic ? Comedy is, as it were, the flower 
 that grows on the edge of a precipice, which we gather with 
 a fearful joy; it is the butterfly which alights on the 
 barricades, the bright gleam of sunshine irradiating the 
 dark clouds which seem to menace a coming storm an 
 artificial piece of work representing an arbitrary and 
 artificial point of view. It is at his own peril that the 
 comedian says, like Puck, " Lord, what fools these mortals 
 be ! " because it is an assumption of superiority easy 
 enough for an elf, difficult for any of us who may all be 
 involved in the same condemnation. 
 
 3 
 
 The slow growth of comedy, the actual steps in its history, 
 serve to illustrate its artificial character. We must take 
 note of some of the changes which it underwent before we 
 can understand the form in which it appears in Shakespeare, 
 in Moliere, and in the Restoration dramatists. At its 
 origin as, indeed, one would naturally suppose comedy 
 aimed at a humorous delineation of individuals. In a city 
 like Athens, given over to a good deal of unrestrained mirth, 
 which also after the triumph of the democratic influences 
 under Pericles and Ephialtes was the home of liberty in 
 its widest aspects, Athenian comedy began with a bold 
 and vigorous satire on some of the personages who were 
 actually directing its civic development. When Aristo- 
 phanes laughed at Cleon and the Knights, when he instituted 
 a mock trial between the two tragedians ^Eschylus and 
 Euripides, when he turned the points of his satirical humour 
 against a strange contemporary character like Socrates, 
 
128 OLD SAWS AND MODERN INSTANCES 
 
 it is as though some modern wag, let us say Mr. Bernard 
 Shaw, were to allow himself to represent in laughable 
 guise Mr. Asquith, Mr. Lloyd George, or Lord Haldane. 
 Even in Athens the licence of the dramatists was found 
 intolerable, partly because it destroyed all respect for lead- 
 ing personalities, partly because it was so hideously unjust. 
 No one, for instance, would for a moment imagine that 
 Aristophanes, the prince of these early comic dramatists, 
 gave a faithful presentation of the Athens of his time. He 
 made downright mistakes, where his knowledge was not 
 equal to his satiric talent. Thus, for instance, he presents 
 before us a Socrates engaged in the problems of physical 
 philosophy exactly that department of research with 
 which Socrates had nothing to do. Socrates was a moral 
 philosopher above all. Be that as it may, the earlier form 
 of comedy, which was aimed at individuals, and was, for 
 the most part, burlesque extravaganza, very speedily gave 
 way to other kinds of comedy, technically called Middle 
 and New Comedy, which created comic types to take the 
 place of the earlier subjects of criticism. You will find in 
 the period of middle and new comedy most of those types 
 of character invented, which afterwards play a great part 
 not only in the comedies of Rome, but also in the comedies 
 of modern Italy and Spain. Standing types, such as 
 boastful soldiers, parasites, courtesans, revellers, self-con- 
 ceited cooks, above all cunning slaves, these were the things 
 which helped to amuse the Athenians, specially at a time 
 when the clouds were gathering fast round their beloved city, 
 and there was every reason why their mind should be dis- 
 tracted from the calamities which threatened them on every 
 side. A farce called Gigantomachia was actually being 
 played when the news arrived in Athens of the destruction 
 of the two Sicilian expeditions. 
 
 And so, gradually, a comedy of manners was instituted, 
 not a comedy of manners as it was understood in a later age, 
 but of a conventional kind, dealing with recognised and 
 conventional figures. Over Roman comedy we need not 
 linger, because it was purely derivative. It is true that a 
 distinction was drawn in Roman comedy between that 
 which treated of Greek subjects and imitated Greek 
 originals, and that which professed at all events to have a 
 native character. The first was called Palliata, the second 
 Togata. But, as a matter of fact, both were dependent 
 largely on Greek originals, and the spirit they had intro- 
 
THE IDEA OF COMEDY 129 
 
 duced. Plautus and Terence, of course, were the dis- 
 tinguished dramatists of the time who devoted their talents 
 to comedy. Of Plautus it is probably true to say that he 
 had certain originality and a genuinely national, as well 
 as popular, element. Terence, a finer and more cultivated 
 writer, was almost entirely indebted to Menander, both for 
 plot and treatment. 
 
 We have already observed that most of the types com- 
 monly used by writers of comedy were taken over in modern 
 times, when Italy, above all other countries, was inspired 
 by the spirit of the Renascence. Perhaps the invention of 
 Harlequin was the great addition made by early Italian 
 comedy. But it is to be noticed of Italian comedy as a 
 whole that its most popular form was the so-called 
 " Comedy of Masks," a collection of recognised characters, 
 most of whom wore masks in order to indicate the class 
 and type to which they belonged. So artificial and yet 
 so popular was it, that, though Goldoni strove vigorously 
 for originality of treatment he yet was unable wholly to 
 withstand the influence of tradition in many respects. In 
 Spain, in similar fashion, comedy revolved round certain 
 fixed types of character. The soldier was the great 
 figure in the dramas of Lope de Vega. For the most part 
 these comedies dealt not with common life, but sometimes 
 with episodes in the national annals, sometimes with con- 
 temporary or recent events. But they almost always had 
 for characters the upper classes, the class that wore cloak 
 and sword, from which the comedies themselves " de capa 
 y espada " took their name. 
 
 The sum total of our observations, so far, is that we have 
 a comedy of intrigue, a comedy of fixed characters, to a 
 large extent traditional and conventional, and therefore 
 also, within these limits, a comedy of manners. But a 
 comedy of character in the true sense of the term, a piece 
 which is to reveal the intricacies of some human personage 
 freshly observed and studied, so that we recognise him as 
 belonging to our human brotherhood, for that we look, for 
 the most part, in vain. The problem which is left for the 
 later writers is how, with full recognition of the artifici- 
 ality of the framework, to find room for a real psychological 
 study, and that is a problem which was not perfectly nor 
 fully solved until Moliere came on the scene. 
 
130 OLD SAWS AND MODERN INSTANCES 
 
 4 
 
 Meanwhile, Shakespeare provides us with an extremely 
 interesting chapter. On the whole, it must be said that 
 Shakespeare as a writer of comedies was a good deal inferior 
 to Shakespeare as the author of tragedies. That is to say, 
 the things which matter to us most in Shakespeare, the 
 things by which he lives and in which his astonishing range 
 of poetry, philosophy, and psychology is best illustrated, 
 are seen in pieces like Romeo and Juliet, Hamlet, Macbeth, 
 Othello, and Lear. Nevertheless, his comedies are very 
 interesting, because he is evidently trying to elaborate a 
 formula of his own, and to achieve this, apparently, without 
 any help rendered to him by his predecessors. I have 
 already suggested that the form of tragedy was pretty well 
 fixed by Marlowe and others. But the formula of comedy 
 was by no means fixed. And thus we see Shakespeare 
 groping after different forms, essaying tentative experi- 
 ments not always too successful. 1 He first of all seems to 
 have thought that he ought to invent characters by the 
 aid of his own fantasy or imagination, and to invent his 
 stories also, a matter in which he was certainly not an 
 adept. Love's Labour's Lost, for instance, supposed to be the 
 earliest original piece of Shakespeare, is, in all probability, 
 a story which Shakespeare made out of his own head. His 
 knowledge of human nature was not at that time profound, 
 nor was he perhaps altogether inclined to rely upon it. 
 And the result is a kind of comic opera, superficial and 
 mechanical, just the sort of thing which a clever young 
 man might put together, including certain stage types like 
 the braggart and the pedant and the clown, which he might 
 have taken over from the Italian comedy. Then he be- 
 thinks himself that he might as well serve Plautus as 
 Plautus had served his Greek originals, and in The Comedy 
 of Errors he is merely borrowing from the Mencechmi. If 
 the result attained in the earlier instance was polite comic 
 opera, now the result is pure farce. Then he turns to some- 
 thing which is more or less a comedy of intrigue, in The 
 Two Gentlemen of Verona, not a very plausible piece of work, 
 and not nearly so well constructed as, for instance, The 
 
 1 See Prof. Brander Matthews' Shakespeare as a Playwright (Long- 
 mans), a work of no little value to all students of the craftsmanship of 
 plays. 
 
THE IDEA OF COMEDY 131 
 
 Comedy of Errors. Observe, in passing, that Shakespeare 
 always provides parts for clowns, and the clown of the 
 Elizabethan theatre was descended almost directly from 
 the Vice of the mediaeval stage. Perhaps, as has been 
 suggested, there were two low comedians in Shakespeare's 
 company, for whom parts had to be found. At all events, 
 the clowns run in pairs in these earlier comedies Costard 
 and Dull in Loves Labour's Lost, the two Dromios in The 
 Comedy of Errors, and Launce and Speed in The Two 
 Gentlemen of Verona. I need not mention A Midsummer 
 Night's Dream, because it is more of a masque than a 
 comedy. 
 
 Now what is the great advance we discover when from 
 these dramas we turn to the romantic comedies, to The 
 Merchant of Venice, to Much Ado About Nothing, to As 
 You Like It, and to Twelfth Night ? First of all, it would 
 seem that the dramatist has made the discovery that he 
 need not trouble himself to invent characters, but has only 
 got to open his eyes to the numerous characters that 
 existed in his time. Who can doubt that his wonderful 
 heroines Portia, Beatrice, Rosalind, Viola were studied 
 on the spot, taken from some of the personages who moved 
 in the court, distinguished ladies who, though they allowed 
 themselves a certain amount of freakishness, and even 
 sometimes buffoonery, yet preserved the essential linea- 
 ments of gentlewomen? Nor was there any greater 
 necessity to invent plots. They could be found anywhere, 
 especially amongst the Italians or the French. The rudi- 
 ments might be taken from these sources, but Shakespeare 
 found out that his best talents could be exhibited in the 
 fashion in which he reconstructed these dramas, sometimes 
 taking two sources for one play and welding them together 
 into a more or less successful unity. Lastly, Shakespeare, 
 in his search for a formula for comedy, came to the conclu- 
 sion that if you wanted pleasurable and cultivated romance 
 it had better be exhibited as contrasted with a background 
 of something sinister and menacing, involving elements 
 of serious tragic interest. This is the point which is most 
 significant in Shakespeare's romantic comedies. You have 
 a pair of sparkling lovers, sometimes two, or even three 
 pairs, on whom Shakespeare expends all his pains, and then 
 you have an underplot which serves to show up by force 
 of contrast the brilliance of these happy lovers. They are 
 plucking safety and happiness out of circumstances which 
 
132 OLD SAWS AND MODERN INSTANCES 
 
 in themselves look dangerous. They win in the end 
 because, otherwise, the play would not be comedy at all ; 
 but their victory is all the more conspicuous and significant 
 because at one time they appeared to be threatened with 
 imminent disaster. 1 
 
 And now we see the value of that definition which we 
 have borrowed from George Meredith, that comedy involves 
 thoughtful laughter. We smile at some of the airs and 
 graces which these gay, romantic personages assume ; we 
 smile at the wit combats between Benedick and Beatrice ; 
 we smile at the braggadocio of Bassanio, who thinks it 
 necessary to assure Portia that he is a gentleman. We 
 note also the careless assumption of superiority of Antonio 
 in The Merchant of Venice which, because he is over-confi- 
 dent in his commercial success, puts him into the hands of 
 Shylock. But our very laughter makes us serious and 
 thoughtful when we discover that these happy creations 
 of the dramatist's fancy are playing with edged tools, 
 and in some cases are almost courting disaster. Behind 
 Bassanio and Portia rises the sinister figure of Shylock; 
 underneath the witty badinage of Benedick and Beatrice 
 lies the cruel plot, the wanton misbehaviour of Claudio, 
 and the tragic demand which the heroine makes on the hero 
 at the very crisis of their fate : " Kill Claudio ! " In many 
 of the older philosophies happiness is represented as being 
 a boon of the gods, for which we ultimately have to pay. 
 The gods are jealous ; they do not like human prosperity ; 
 they, apparently, are even made uneasy by human light - 
 heartedness and laughter. So, too, the writer of comedy 
 seems to remind us that smiles are purchased at the cost 
 of tears, and that good luck and prosperity are rare and 
 unusual things, for which some recompense or ransom will, 
 ultimately, be exacted. Shakespeare, as well as Beau- 
 marchais, seems to recommend us to make haste to laugh 
 lest we should begin to cry. 
 
 The Merchant of Venice is especially significant in this 
 respect. Shakespeare has now got his formula, such as 
 it is, that comedy involves two, or it may be more, lovers, 
 who are to be joined together in the end in complete happi- 
 ness. It also involves because true love never did run 
 smooth the intrusion of some elements of danger, or, at 
 all events, difficulty, threatening at times to interfere with 
 the bright elements, but kept for the most part as a back- 
 
 1 Cf. Shakespeare as a Playwright, by Prof. Brander Matthews, chap. viii. 
 
THE IDEA OF COMEDY 133 
 
 ground in the form of a sub-plot. As to the origin of these 
 stories, Shakespeare at this period of his development will 
 take them from anywhere, take two together, interweave 
 them, despite their obvious diversity of feeling, and make 
 of them a single consistent play. For the dramatist has 
 discovered wherein his chief strength lies. It is in so 
 arranging his materials drawn from different sources as to 
 exhibit in full light the main character, or characters, in 
 which he is interested. Invention, which was, perhaps, his 
 earlier method, he has already discovered to be barren in 
 his case. He does not possess much invention, but he is a 
 rare hand at working up materials gained elsewhere. And 
 he has discovered that the business of comedy, quite as 
 much as the business of tragedy, is to educe, in one way or 
 another, a real study of character, albeit that for the pur- 
 pose of romance the characters are more slightly drawn. 
 Still, let us not forget that in this earliest of his romantic 
 comedies, The Merchant of Venice, Shakespeare has drawn 
 a complete portrait of the Jew a portrait so acute, so 
 thorough, so absolutely unlike anything which his contem- 
 poraries could have drawn, that the Jew threatens to usurp 
 the main interests of the play and turn the comedy into a 
 tragedy. 
 
 Let us linger a little over this point, for it is a curious 
 illustration of the way in which a maker of comedies seems 
 to find it necessary to have dark clouds round the horizon, 
 in order that we may better appreciate the sunshine that 
 bathes the forefront of the scene. Let us ask ourselves 
 what was the original intention of Shakespeare. Clearly 
 he wished to put before us the wooing of Bassanio and 
 Portia, repeated over again, as is his wont, in the wooing 
 of Gratiano and Nerissa and that of Lorenzo and Jessica. 
 Portia is the conspicuous figure, from the point of view of 
 the dramatist. Portia appears early in the play, and has 
 the fifth act almost entirely to herself. The other characters, 
 as it were, group themselves round her transcendent charm ; 
 they form a court retinue at Belmont, where she reigns as 
 queen. And Belmont, too, is absolutely the place of 
 romance. It is like those Ruritanian countries with which 
 The Prisoner of Zenda made us acquainted, a country 
 precisely like the Forest of Arden, or Messina, or Illyria, 
 or wherever Shakespeare chose to place the scenes of his 
 comedies. They have no geographical boundaries. They 
 are, if we like to phrase it so, a cloud-cuckooland where 
 
134 OLD SAWS AND MODERN INSTANCES 
 
 marvels happen. We see this in many ways, especially in the 
 fact that Shakespeare is at no pains to make his characters 
 belong to the locality he has chosen. Perhaps he is more 
 successful with Venice, but who, in A Midsummer Night's 
 Dream, thinks for a moment of the neighbourhood of 
 Athens? Who looks upon Bottom as a Greek? How 
 could Dogberry and Verges possibly appear in Sicily ? Or 
 Sir Toby Belch, or Andrew Aguecheek, or the inimitable 
 Maria in Illyria? These come of an English stock, from 
 Warwickshire perhaps, because Shakespeare is no pedant 
 in the matter of his scenery. And just as his Romans are 
 Englishmen, so, too, is the nurse who serves as go-between 
 in Romeo and Juliet constructed on a solidly British basis. 
 The essence of the romantic comedy remains with the 
 lovers in the fairy home of Belmont. But what has 
 happened to the play in later times ? Any actress is proud 
 to assume the part of Portia, but in a modern world she 
 knows perfectly well that her interest is subordinate to that 
 of the actor who plays Shylock. And even with regard to 
 this character we are conscious of a change from an earlier 
 conception. Shakespeare, undoubtedly, meant us to hate 
 and loathe Shylock. He spares no opportunity of holding 
 him up to derision. He wants us to laugh at him as well 
 as to spurn him, for in this matter he is faithfully reproduc- 
 ing the feelings of the time, which regarded the Jew, as 
 money-lender and usurer, with absolute abhorrence. If 
 we want a proof, we need only turn to The Jew of Malta, by 
 Christopher Marlowe. In this we have a sinister figure of 
 rapacity and evil, a man designed to exhibit some of the 
 worst vices of humanity, and called Barabbas as though to 
 suggest at once that he is the born enemy of all followers 
 of Christ. Shakespeare probably started with the same 
 intention as Christopher Marlowe, but what is the curious 
 result ? He is such a born psychologist that he must needs 
 do justice even to Shylock. He cannot help but make 
 him human. He makes us feel how largely his malevolence 
 was due to the most un-Christian conduct of the Christians. 
 He gives him the noble speech which commences " Hath not 
 a Jew eyes ? " involving an appeal to our generous feelings 
 of compassion for one who was at least as much sinned 
 against as sinning, All the waves of calamity beat against 
 this solitary figure. His servant derides him, his daughter 
 runs away from him, he is robbed of the jewels of which he 
 made great store. Finally, he is even robbed of that 
 
THE IDEA OF COMEDY 135 
 
 revenge which, according to his interpretation of the law, 
 was his due. And when he leaves the scene at the end of 
 the trial, bankrupt in hope and prospects, forced to become 
 a Christian, with all the edifice which he had so laboriously 
 built up in ruins around him, he becomes a figure of absolute 
 tragedy, so" tragic, indeed, that Shakespeare is in haste to 
 tack on a fifth act in order to restore the balance of his play. 
 It is doubtful whether Shakespeare ever saw a Jew, for 
 they were not allowed to live in England. Most likely, 
 however, this law was evaded. But the extraordinary 
 thing is the ability with which the dramatist gets hold of 
 the essential features of a characteristic Jew, who uses 
 imagery derived from the Old Testament, insists on the 
 absolute letter of the bond, and shows throughout that 
 intense pride in his race which has kept the Jew a thing 
 apart through centuries alike of prosperity and failure. 
 
 Shakespeare becomes a little more sure in his procedure 
 in each of the ensuing romantic comedies. Clearly he was 
 feeling his way in The Merchant of Venice. He is aware that 
 a mere love-story is not sufficient, not even when the lovers 
 are doubled and trebled. Something more is required to 
 stiffen the plot, and it is probably with some such idea 
 in his head that Shakespeare added the Antonio-Shylock 
 story to the Bassanio-Portia story. What is the result? 
 The background overpowers the foreground, the sinister 
 figure of Shylock dominates the whole play, and what 
 ought to be sub-plot comes to be the main intrigue. He does 
 not make quite the same mistake again. He still believes 
 in the necessity of some mutterings of storm, in order to 
 give due contrast to the sunlight, but he will see to it that 
 the importance of the serious elements does not overpower 
 the lighter intrigue of his lovers. In the next, therefore, 
 of his romantic comedies, Much Ado About Nothing, we 
 still find much the same formula as that which dictated The 
 Merchant of Venice two pairs of lovers at least, and behind 
 them a dark intrigue which threatens to mar their felicity. 
 We have also in Much Ado the same kind of interaction of 
 two plots which we have already observed in The Merchant 
 of Venice. There is the story connected with Beatrice and 
 Benedick and the story connected with Hero and Cl audio. 
 But the menacing figures of evil, Don John and Borachio, 
 are not really very formidable; indeed, such villainy as 
 they are on the stage to express is more than a little arti- 
 ficial, and we are not inclined to take it very seriously. 
 
136 OLD SAWS AND MODERN INSTANCES 
 
 Melodramatic figures like Don John and Borachio are 
 themselves made use of to lead up to the more purely comic 
 factors of the play. The broad comedians, Dogberry and 
 Verges, for instance, justify their existence, because 
 Borachio gets drunk, is apprehended, and gives the whole 
 secret away. 
 
 Meanwhile, more than ever before, Shakespeare expends 
 his whole force over the two characters which stand well 
 in the forefront of the action Beatrice and Benedick. We 
 are to suppose that they Were, more or less unconsciously, 
 attracted to one another, even before the story opens. We 
 observe that they begin to bicker as soon as the curtain 
 goes up, and inasmuch as this bickering is sheer word-play 
 and of no particular use to the action, the audience at once 
 understands that these gay fencers have entered the lists 
 more than once before and know to a nicety the length of 
 each other's weapons. Beatrice is one of the most com- 
 manding figures which Shakespeare ever drew. She is 
 stronger all round than Portia, stronger, I mean, intellec- 
 tually. She has not the winsome grace of Viola, nor the 
 quiet, demure fun and humour of Rosalind. Into Beatrice's 
 composition comes something of the nature of the shrew. 
 We can quite imagine that if she had not been given free 
 play and not been surrounded by all the tender affection of 
 those who knew her and loved her, she might have become 
 Katherine the Curst. Whether in that case Benedick 
 would have been able to manage her, as Petruchio managed 
 Katherine, is a doubtful matter. Like all comedies, the 
 curtain falls on the happiness of the lovers, and we are 
 expressly debarred from wondering what happened after- 
 wards . The married life of Benedick and Beatrice we should 
 not like to be too sure of, although they began their career 
 so gallantly. Shakespeare has now, however, discovered 
 that he is at his best when he is amalgamating different 
 stories, bringing them together with that touch of supreme 
 theatrical genius which is his most distinctive characteristic. 
 The procedure is just the same as in The Merchant of 
 Venice. How are the two widely different stories, of how 
 Portia was wooed and won, and how the wiles of Shylock 
 were defeated, to be amalgamated in one plot ? How, again, 
 was the story which involved the fates of Hero and Claudio 
 to be reconciled and made one with the flashing wit en- 
 counters of " Dear Lady Disdain " and her much-derided 
 and much-loved soldier? In each play The Merchant of 
 
THE IDEA OF COMEDY 137 
 
 Venice and Much Ado we get a sort of critical scene in 
 which this union of diverse elements is consummated. 
 In The Merchant of Venice it is the trial scene, in Much Ado 
 it is the church scene. Very artfully and ingeniously does 
 Shakespeare work to get all the due effect out of his two 
 stories in Much Ado. As we all know, the church scene 
 consists of two superficially contradictory episodes. The 
 repudiation of Hero by Claudio is so bitter and so unpleasant 
 that only a Shakespeare could have tacked on to it without 
 fear that little scene between Beatrice and Benedick. In 
 truth, the marriage ceremony is the device which is to bring 
 the two lovers together. Hero is Beatrice's friend, Claudio 
 is Benedick's friend. Hero has been disgraced publicly; 
 Claudio has shown himself contemptible in the harshness 
 with which he has pursued his vengeance. And out of 
 this imbroglio comes the strange discovery that Beatrice 
 is in love with Benedick, and that Benedick is quite pre- 
 pared to overthrow all his old friendships for the sake of 
 Beatrice's beautiful eyes. Left together, after all the others 
 have gone their respective ways from a desecrated ceremony, 
 the pair of lovers have their brief, poignant talk, and the 
 central moment for which Shakespeare has long been 
 preparing is reached when Beatrice flashes upon Benedick 
 her two words : " Kill Claudio ! " Both she and he knew 
 how much she was asking. It was a supreme test of the 
 love that was greater than mere friendship. Does Benedick 
 like her well enough to renounce all his old associations for 
 her sake? And the answer comes at once. From that 
 moment Benedick is Beatrice's sworn knight, ready to 
 fulfil her lightest, as well as her sternest, behest. 
 
 As to the figures which surround the principal actors in 
 his play, Shakespeare is, as ordinarily happens, supremely 
 careless. He does not even try to be convincing. The 
 plot against Hero is as stupid as it is malicious. It is 
 impossible to believe in Don John's absurd villainy. 
 Nobody cares, however, because Shakespeare looks to it 
 that we should be so much interested in the main incidents 
 that nothing else matters. Fortunately, as we have seen, 
 the villains give an opportunity for the illustration of two 
 characters of downright comedy Dogberry and Verges. 
 What business they had to be in Messina is another question. 
 They are, of course, purely English, drawn from some of 
 those rustic types which our dramatist had before his 
 eyes in his Warwickshire home incomparably stupid and 
 
138 OLD SAWS AND MODERN INSTANCES 
 
 incomparably funny, much better than the two Gobbos of 
 The Merchant of Venice, or the two Dromios of The Comedy 
 of Errors. Nor let us omit, before we leave this play, to 
 notice one feature which connects it with Shakespeare's 
 later work. As distinct from Portia and Bassanio, who 
 remain at the end of the play pretty well what they were 
 at the beginning, 1 we observe a distinct development of 
 character in Benedick and Beatrice. We watch them, as 
 it were, growing before our eyes, out of two witty com- 
 batants becoming two ardent and affectionate friends. 
 Development of character in the course of a play becomes a 
 keynote of Shakespeare's later work, as we see in Hamlet 
 and Othello and Macbeth. 
 
 When Shakespeare, at a later period, after writing 
 Hamlet composed such pieces as All's Well That Ends Well, 
 Measure for Measure, and Troilus and Cressida, he wrote 
 so-called comedies, which cannot possibly be included in 
 any real definition of the comedy spirit. No one pretends 
 to like any of these three plays. They are all full of a kind 
 of bitterness, which is very far removed from the usual 
 Shakespearean tolerance and broad-mindedness. Troilus 
 and Cressida is the strangest piece of all. Some of us are 
 inclined to say that Mr. Bernard Shaw travesties the early 
 heroes and antique forms of heroism in such plays as 
 Ccesar and Cleopatra and Androcles and the Lion. But 
 his irreverence if, indeed, that be the right term is as 
 nothing compared with what Shakespeare did in Troilus 
 and Cressida. Perhaps, because he was angry with his 
 so-called rival poet, the classical Chapman, he set himself 
 to work to belittle all the old Greek heroes, as though he 
 were running a tilt against classical types. Ulysses, Aga- 
 memnon, and the rest cut strange figures in his play. And 
 never was a bitterer thing created than Thersites. 
 
 It must not be supposed that romantic comedy is only 
 to be found in Shakespeare. It runs through all the history 
 of the art, and our modern age affords us many illustrations. 
 It would seem that most dramatic writers, although they 
 try in a truly logical spirit to exhibit the humour of the 
 situations they describe and the humour of the characters 
 which they are illustrating, are tempted now and again to 
 abandon such points of irony and satire as they may deem 
 necessary for their task in order to indulge in some frankly 
 
 1 I am not sure, however, that Bassanio has not gradually learnt a good 
 many lessons about " gentlemanliness." 
 
THE IDEA OF COMEDY 139 
 
 ideal and imaginative production which will be of the 
 essence of romance. It is very rare indeed that you get 
 a man like Mr. Bernard Shaw, who, disbelieving in romance, 
 keeps his comedies free from romantic entanglement. And 
 yet there is Captain Brassbound's Conversion to make us 
 pause. 1 Sir Arthur Pinero gives us a romantic comedy in 
 The Princess and the Butterfly, and Sir James Barrie gives 
 us very little else. How otherwise are we to describe 
 pieces like The Admirable Crichton, Little Mary, What Every 
 Woman Knows, or even The Adored One, except as romantic 
 comedies, in which the circumstances are often ideal and 
 the characters possess ideal excellences? 
 
 It is more important, however, for us to determine in 
 brief and summary fashion why Shakespeare's conception 
 of comedy falls short of the real range and value of the 
 comic spirit. Why does it not amount to comedy as we 
 have learnt to understand it? For one reason above all 
 others. Comedy is, and must be at least, as we judge from 
 having read the best examples a humorous criticism of 
 life. There is no lack of humour in Shakespeare, but there 
 is no criticism of life. You cannot have a criticism of life, 
 and therefore no criticism of contemporary manners, if 
 you insist on putting your chacacters into a purely ideal 
 scene. Belmont is unreal ; so is Messina ; so also is Illyria ; 
 and most of all ideal is the Forest of Arden. We are asked 
 to see play-acting under conditions which do not obtain 
 in the life we know. There is a study of character, it is 
 true, and there are also contrasts of character, but a comedy 
 of character character as educed out of the clash of real 
 living personalities and vital incidents cannot be found 
 in the Shakespearean comedies. They are delightful 
 exercises of wit and fancy, and they please us perhaps just 
 because they are not altogether real. They are artificial in 
 the sense that they are purely fantastic, whereas characters 
 of true comedy are artificial because they are abstracted 
 as types from the actual circumstances of the real world 
 in which the dramatist moves and has his being. The 
 world as pictured by the true writer of comedy is the real 
 world, though heightened and adorned by his comic humour. 
 The characters he portrays are real men and women, 
 albeit that for the purposes of his wit their lineaments 
 are exaggerated. 
 
 1 And shall we add Pygmalion ? 
 
THE IDEA OF COMEDY. II 
 
 COMEDY OF MANNERS HIGH COMEDY, OR COMEDY OF 
 
 CHARACTER 
 
 1 
 
 A WELL-MARKED division of comedy is that which is 
 generally called the Comedy of Manners, of which the best 
 representatives for our purpose are the Restoration 
 dramatists. We need only be concerned with two of these 
 Wycherley and Congreve. A predecessor of Wycher- 
 ley's Etherege and two successors Vanbrugh and 
 Farquhar need not occupy us, because there can be no 
 manner of doubt that the two principal dramatists the 
 one who by his contemporaries was called " manly Wycher- 
 ley," and the other " friendly Congreve, unreproachful 
 man " represented the culmination of the period, and are 
 therefore best fitted for our study. 
 
 Criticism has always been busy over these Restoration 
 dramatists. The one thing which is absolutely certain is 
 that they wrote, not so much a comedy of incidents, or 
 even intrigue, still less that they wrote a comedy of char- 
 acter, but that with conscious art they devoted themselves, 
 and with no small success, to a Comedy of Manners. Per- 
 haps it is unnecessary to say what this involves. It means 
 that both Wycherley and Congreve were occupied with the 
 life of their times, as a pageant, as a show, a panorama 
 which should exhibit the various foibles and fashions of 
 society, which should give a picture, including peccadilloes, 
 failings, sins, as well as occasional merits, and never be 
 concerned with any deeper implications which men of a 
 different order of intellect might find interesting in the 
 condition of society. What does this resolute adherence 
 to a Comedy of Manners signify? It indicates, clearly 
 enough, that the authors did not intend ostensibly to be 
 critics. They may be betrayed into occasional satire and 
 irony, but they are not inspired as a rule by a lofty moral 
 
 140 
 
THE IDEA OF COMEDY 141 
 
 indignation. Indeed, morality as such was not their job. 
 It is quite true that Wycherley sometimes, as in his The 
 Plain Dealer, seems to show a certain moral bitterness of 
 his own, as though he almost hated the characters whom 
 he was portraying. But that is by no means the general 
 attitude. As a rule, if we take any of the plays of these 
 men, Love in a Wood, The Country Wife, The Gentleman 
 Dancing-Master, The Old Bachelor, The Double Dealer, 
 The Way of the World, it is tolerably clear that all that 
 the authors intend to do is to present the gentlemen and 
 ladies of their time with a mirror in which they can see 
 some of their worst follies reflected. Lest the picture 
 should be surcharged with black, the various dramatis 
 personce are shown to possess a witty epigrammatic style ; 
 sometimes it is affected, or false wit, sometimes it is real 
 wit. But anyway there is a superficial brilliance, the sort 
 of brilliance that would belong to a highly civilised social 
 state which cares more for verbal felicity and the clever 
 conduct of an agreeable conversation, the turn of a phrase, 
 the ingenuity of a repartee, than anything else in the world. 
 Thus Mirabell and Mrs. Millamant in The Way of the World 
 are the ripe flower of Restoration comedy, as brilliant in 
 their ways as Benedick and Beatrice in Shakespeare's 
 comedy. 
 
 We have said that criticism has been very much con- 
 cerned with the Restoration dramatists. The most 
 tremendous condemnation was passed by Jeremy Collier, 
 an extremely formidable attack, which probably had a 
 lasting influence on the fortunes of the English stage. 
 For if we ask why Puritanism took up arms against the 
 drama, the answer must inevitably be that the Restoration 
 dramatists outraged the feelings of society, or, at all events, 
 a large and respectable portion of society, and that Jeremy 
 Collier, running atilt against the licence and indecency of 
 the stage, was to a considerable extent justified by the 
 sympathy of honest men. The attitude of critical con- 
 demnation is to be found also in Steele, Addison, Macaulay, 
 Thackeray, and even Meredith. The defence of the 
 Restoration dramatists was undertaken by Leigh Hunt, 
 by Charles Lamb, and Hazlitt. Naturally, too, the 
 dramatists themselves had something to say. Wycherley 
 wrote an answer to Jeremy Collier, and Congreve made 
 some observations in answer to his critics in his essay on 
 " Humour." In quite modern days you will find an 
 
142 OLD SAWS AND MODERN INSTANCES 
 
 extremely clever and ingenious apologist in Mr. John 
 Palmer, who has written a valuable history on The Comedy 
 of Manners* 
 
 Inasmuch as Lamb is perhaps the best of the apologists, 
 it is as well to remind ourselves of what he actually said. 
 Here is a significant passage : 
 
 " I confess for myself," says Elia, " that (with no great 
 delinquencies to answer for) I am glad for a season to take 
 an airing beyond the diocese of the strict conscience, not 
 to live always in the precincts of the law courts, but, now 
 and then, for a dreamwhile or so, to imagine a world with 
 no meddling restrictions, to get into recesses whither the 
 hunter cannot follow me 
 
 .... Secret shades 
 
 Of woody Ida's inmost grove, 
 
 While yet there was no fear of Jove. 
 
 I come back to my cage and my restraint the fresher and 
 more healthy for it. I wear my shackles more contentedly 
 for having respired the breath of an imaginary freedom. 
 I do not know how it is with others, but I feel the better 
 always for the perusal of one of Congreve's nay, why 
 should I not add even of Wycherley's comedies. I am 
 the gayer at least for it, and I could never connect those 
 sports of a witty fancy in any shape with any result to be 
 drawn from them to imitation in real life. They are a 
 world of themselves, almost as much as fairyland. The 
 Fainalls and the Mirabells, the Dorimants and the Lady 
 Touchwoods, in their own sphere do not offend my moral 
 sense ; in fact, they do not appeal to it at all. They seem 
 engaged in their proper element. They break through no 
 laws or conscientious restraints. They know of none. 
 They have got out of Christendom into the land of what 
 shall I call it? of cuckoldry the Utopia of gallantry, 
 where pleasure is duty, and the manners perfect freedom. 
 . . . We are not to judge them by our images. No 
 reverend institutions are insulted by their proceedings 
 for they have none among them. No peace of families is 
 violated for no family ties exist among them. No 
 purity of the marriage-bed is stained for none is supposed 
 to have a being. No deep affections are disquieted, no 
 holy wedlock bonds snapped asunder for affection's 
 
 1 The Comedy of Manners, by John Palmer. (G. Bell & Son.) 
 
THE IDEA OF COMEDY 143 
 
 depth and wedded faith are not of that soil. There is 
 neither right nor wrong gratitude or its opposite claim 
 or duty paternity or sonship." A brilliant defence, 
 truly, to which we shall return presently. 
 
 As happens in most controversies, the attacking and the 
 defending party are not answering one another so much as 
 developing their own respective standpoints. What is it 
 that Jeremy Collier assumes? He takes it for granted 
 that the office of comedy is to do men good, by showing 
 the ruinous character of vice and the saving grace of good- 
 ness. Oddly enough, Wycherley accepted this standpoint. 
 He even went so far as to maintain that a pure woman 
 could keep his comedies side by side with her Bible. But 
 if one begins with the principle that the office of the 
 dramatist is practically that of the moralist, then there 
 can be no reasonable doubt that all these men Etherege, 
 Wycherley, Congreve, Vanbrugh, and Farquhar lament- 
 ably fail in their task. If we talk like ordinary men of the 
 world, and use words in their conventional sense, all these 
 comedies, without exception, are full of indecencies, 
 especially, perhaps, The Country Wife of Wycherley. 
 The men are rakes, and successful rakes; they boast of 
 their conquests ; the women are willing accomplices, they 
 exist to be wooed and won. But, of course, the real 
 question is whether a dramatist, as such, ought ever to be 
 a moralist, or, to bring the matter to a more definite point, 
 whether a writer of a Comedy of Manners is ever concerned, 
 or ever should be concerned, with the moral implications 
 involved in the action of his characters. Clearly, a great 
 painter has every right to paint a distorted and ugly face, 
 if it happens to be true, and a literary man may describe 
 a scene full of ugly things, or depict a period in which the 
 standard of living is deplorably low. And in precisely the 
 same fashion the writer of a comedy may show his per- 
 sonages guided by disreputable motives if he is sincerely 
 trying to give us a veracious tableau of the times. There 
 is one quality, however, that we require, and that is an 
 absolute sincerity. When a man draws what he sees 
 around him with sincerity of this kind, we may dislike the 
 result, we may call him all manner of injurious names for 
 being interested in wrong things, but he may quite well 
 remain an artist, because the moral point of view is never 
 obtrusively before his eyes. In the long run, too, it will be 
 found that sincerity of purpose will not be prejudicial to 
 
144 OLD SAWS AND MODERN INSTANCES 
 
 the higher interests of morality. But the man is not 
 consciously working towards a moral end. What is his 
 aim? It is to express the values of life and character, 
 values not in an ethical, but in an artistic sense. If he is 
 sincere he brings out the inner meaning of it all, and in this 
 roundabout fashion he can actually be said to be working 
 in accordance with the great moral laws which condition 
 the universe. If we apply these considerations to the case 
 before us, we shall probably have to allow that some of 
 these Restoration dramatists were sincere, and are therefore 
 to this extent justified, and that others were not. It is 
 generally conceded that at all events Vanbrugh and 
 Farquhar were not sincere students, but purely imitative, 
 but that Wycherley and Congreve were sincere. The 
 latter tried to draw what they saw before their eyes. We 
 may hate the result perhaps they hated it also. Certainly 
 in The Plain Dealer it looks very much as if Wycherley did. 
 But they accepted the task which they had set before 
 their eyes, and wrote comedies of manners. 
 
 There are two considerations, however, which make one 
 pause before attempting to whitewash these dramatists. 
 In the first place, they one and all affected the extremely 
 disingenuous pose of being fine gentlemen first, and only 
 as a sort of amusement writing the plays by which they 
 lived. When Voltaire came over to visit Congreve he was 
 naturally indignant when he discovered that Congreve 
 wished to be regarded as a gentleman first and as a dramatist 
 afterwards. " If I had come merely to visit you as a 
 gentleman, I would not have taken the trouble : I came 
 to see you as an artist." There is, assuredly, something 
 insincere in the pose of men who profess to belittle the 
 work to which they are devoting their talents. If they 
 write comedies with their tongues in their cheeks, we cannot 
 give them the respect due to those who plenarily acknow- 
 ledge the high office of literature. 
 
 The other consideration is, that we never discover in the 
 work of these men that most gracious quality which so 
 often appears in Moliere, comedy with thoroughly healthy 
 laughter. It is not laughter that comes from these 
 comedies not laughter in Bergson's sense as society's 
 vindication of itself against follies and artificialities it is 
 a snigger or a sneer, a polished irony not always very honest 
 or clean. There are times when we would wish them to 
 be less polished and more vulgar, if only they would 
 
THE IDEA OF COMEDY 145 
 
 consent to have a downright masculine laugh at the 
 hypocrisies of their period. 
 
 2 
 
 As a matter of fact, the only two real antagonists on 
 this question are Charles Lamb and Jeremy Collier, and 
 because the point raised is one which is interesting and 
 important with regard to art in general, and to the art of 
 comedy in particular, it is worth examining it a little more 
 in detail. I have already quoted a paragraph from 
 Charles Lamb's essay on " The Artificial Comedy of the 
 Last Century." His argument is that it is often a positive 
 relief to turn away from the dull things of life to an arti- 
 ficial realm, where current rules and laws do not obtain, 
 and where men and women can do whatever they like 
 without fear of the magistrate or the police constable. 
 Now, it is this sort of pleasure which men like Wycherley 
 and Congreve can give. We do not make the mistake of 
 taking them too seriously. We assume that they are 
 speaking of an artificial condition of society, and therefore 
 their worst characters Mr. Horner, for instance, in 
 Wycherley's Country Wife need not be regarded as of 
 flesh and blood, but more or less as fairies. I may remark, 
 however, in passing that the idea of turning so extremely 
 material a person as Mr. Horner into a fairy certainly 
 appeals to our risible faculties. Indeed, this is the weak 
 point in the whole of Lamb's position. If the men and 
 women who live and move in the comedies of Wycherley 
 and Congreve are to be regarded as fairies, we may dismiss 
 them from the things which matter, even though we may 
 still have to object to their conduct as fairies. They do 
 not matter, I say. Unsubstantial denizens of an un- 
 substantial world, they have to appear in a very different 
 kind of framework from that provided by comedy. What 
 was the criticism that I ventured to offer on the Shake- 
 spearean comedy? It was that, being throughout of a 
 romantic texture, it had little or nothing to do with the 
 actual life of the age in which it was produced. And in 
 the same way Mr. Horner and his worthy associates are, 
 according to Lamb, to be excused because they, too, do 
 not belong to the world as we know it. In other words, 
 Lamb's apology delivers them from censure just in pro- 
 portion as it removes them from the actual condition of 
 L 
 
146 OLD SAWS AND MODERN INSTANCES 
 
 things. But it is surely obvious that if Wycherley and 
 Congreve were not writing about the men and women of 
 their time, with whose characters and principles of life 
 they were intimately acquainted, the whole value of their 
 comedies, as comedies of manners, disappears. Either 
 Mr. Homer was modelled on a real prototype, or he was 
 not. If he was, he was an indecent libertine. If he was 
 not, he may take to himself all the credit of being a denizen 
 of a fairy world, but we are still entitled to add that he 
 lives in a fairy atmosphere which it is a little difficult to 
 breathe. 
 
 Let us turn to the other figure in the controversy. 
 Jeremy Collier produced, in 1698, his Short View of the 
 Profaneness and Immorality of the English Stage, " a book 
 which threw the whole literary world into commotion," 
 as Macaulay remarks. In 1698 the world was different 
 from what it had been under Charles II. The excesses 
 of the Restoration period are to be excused mainly on the 
 ground of an inevitable reaction against a one-sided and 
 extreme austerity. The nation had, however, now re- 
 covered from the effects of Puritan rigour. It had had 
 recent experience of the profaneness and debauchery 
 which accompanied the return of the Stuarts. The pro- 
 fligacy of the Revolution still remained, and maintained 
 its hold in certain parts of society where men of wit 
 and fashion congregated. Above all, the theatres were 
 its chief stronghold. The most brilliant of Congreve' s 
 comedies, The Way of the World, was not produced till 
 1700. Collier's notorious Tract was published two years 
 before. 
 
 The author was a remarkable man, of great independence 
 and originality, not in any sense a bigot as we understand 
 the term. He had an extensive knowledge of books ; he 
 is even said to have possessed grace and vivacity in con- 
 versation, and he undoubtedly wielded a most powerful 
 pen. He was a Tory of the Tories, and so far as his 
 religious opinions were concerned, he belonged to that 
 section of the ecclesiastical world which Macaulay describes 
 as " furthest from Geneva and nearest to Rome." He 
 was constantly in trouble with the authorities. Two 
 men who were intimates of his Sir John Friend and Sir 
 William Parkins were tried and convicted of high treason 
 for planning the murder of King William. Collier did 
 not hesitate to administer spiritual consolation to them, 
 
THE IDEA OF COMEDY 147 
 
 accompanied them to Tyburn, and just before the execution 
 laid his hands on their heads and solemnly absolved them. 
 It is easy to conceive the indescribable scandal which so 
 overt an act inevitably created. Indeed, so furiously did 
 the storm rage that Collier, described as a rebel against 
 his Sovereign Lord the King, found it advisable to withdraw 
 from the kingdom, and was outlawed. Incidents of this 
 kind are sufficient to prove that the author of the famous 
 Tract was a man of great courage as well as independence 
 of mind. Indeed, if we remember that his political 
 sympathies were with the Stuarts, and that the Stuart 
 King had thrown his aegis over profligacy in the court, 
 while decency was associated rather with Conventicles and 
 Dissenters, it will be understood that in publishing his 
 book, girding at the indecency of the stage, Collier was 
 criticising that cavalier party to which by sympathy he 
 belonged. 
 
 The Tract is a spirited attack on the whole of the litera- 
 ture of the time, and more especially on that part of it 
 which was occupied with the stage. The author may or 
 may not have been a Jacobite, but in this work at all events 
 he only remembers that he is a moralist, a Christian, and 
 a citizen in what ought to be a well-ordered commonwealth. 
 Not only does he deliver his trenchant blows at Wycherley, 
 Congreve, and Vanbrugh, but he strikes without fear at 
 the most towering figure of all the great Dryden himself, 
 who, I may mention in passing, never replied to his attack, 
 although every one in England expected him to do so. 
 Of course, Jeremy Collier's book has many faults. It 
 is much too violent ; it tries to prove too much ; it takes 
 for granted that the object of a comedy is to improve 
 public morals. In his anxiety to prove his victims the 
 guiltiest of offenders, he brings into his charge against 
 them things quite trivial, and, indeed, quite innocent. 
 On this point Macaulay makes some undoubtedly just 
 remarks. " He blames Congreve for using the words 
 ' martyr ' and ' inspiration ' in a light sense, just as if 
 an Archbishop might not quite innocently say that a 
 subject was ' inspired ' by claret, or that an Alderman was 
 4 a martyr ' to the gout. Sometimes, again, Collier does 
 not sufficiently distinguish between the dramatist and the 
 persons of the drama. Thus he blames Vanbrugh for 
 putting into Lord Foppington's mouth some contemptuous 
 expression respecting the Church Service, though it is 
 
148 OLD SAWS AND MODERN INSTANCES 
 
 obvious that Vanbrugh could not better express reverence 
 than by making Lord Foppington express contempt." 
 In short, the Tract had many of the demerits which usually 
 attach to violently polemical literature. I have already 
 suggested that its general standpoint completely mistook 
 the nature and purposes of art. Nevertheless, it is quite 
 clear that the honours of the fray, at the end of the seven- 
 teenth century and the beginning of the eighteenth, rested 
 with the ecclesiastic, and not with the dramatist. Collier 
 had a pretty wit of his own. Congreve had remarked of 
 his play, The Old Bachelor, that it was a trifle, to which he 
 attached no value. " I wrote it," he said, " to amuse 
 myself in a slow recovery from a fit of sickness." Collier's 
 repartee was brilliant. " What his disease was," he 
 replied, " I am not to inquire, but it must be a very ill one 
 to be worse than the remedy." Probably in the long run 
 the real, perhaps the only, defence of the post-Restoration 
 drama was that it was adapted to the age and period in 
 which it was produced. The case stands as it does with 
 those Sophists of Greece, of whom Plato remarked that it 
 was not they who were to blame, but the society which 
 produced them. In the same fashion we might say that 
 censure should attach, not to the comic dramatists, but to 
 the public of the day which applauded their efforts. 
 
 3 
 
 1 turn to Moli^re. 1 I have said more than once that 
 Molire represents the ideal writer of comedies, and that 
 perhaps there is no one with the possible exception of 
 Menander in Greek comedy who so perfectly realises the 
 conditions of his task. There are many considerations to 
 be borne in mind in arriving at this conclusion. Let us 
 try to summarise some of them. In the first place, Moliere, 
 like Shakespeare, is a workman who knows his tools. He 
 studies his actors ; he studies his audiences ; he studies the 
 kind of theatre in which he is to represent his plays, and 
 lastly, being himself an actor and an extremely good one, 
 he has a thorough inside and outside experience of what he 
 has to do. We never welcome the idea of a dramatist 
 who composes characters suitable for particular actors and 
 actresses, because we suppose that this is a limitation of 
 
 1 In this matter I obviously follow a logical rather than a chronological 
 order. 
 
THE IDEA OF COMEDY 149 
 
 the free and independent workmanship of the author. 
 Yet it is abundantly clear that most dramatists not only 
 have studied their actors, but are bound to do so. We 
 are pretty certain that Shakespeare did. He had Burbage 
 before his eyes when he composed some of his heroic parts. 
 The comic men of his company also were studied, as was 
 remarked in the preceding essay. And if Hamlet, besides 
 being " the glass of fashion and the mould of form," is 
 described as " fat and scant of breath," the suggestion 
 has been made that the line was written in because Burbage 
 was beginning to put on flesh. 
 
 Now when we get to Moliere we move on much more 
 certain ground, because we know a good deal more about 
 the company of Moliere than we do about the actors who 
 surrounded Shakespeare. 1 First of all, we know that 
 Moliere wrote parts for his wife, Armande Bejart, who was 
 a most competent actress, and who appeared as Elmire, 
 Celimene, Henriette, and other characters. So, too, her 
 elder sister Madeleine Bejart, had parts provided for her 
 to suit her capacity, such as Dorine in Tartuffe. Argan, 
 in the Malade Imaginaire, has a cough : Moliere wrote 
 this part for himself after the time when his cough became 
 troublesome. La Fleche, in the Avare, is lame : the 
 character was written for Moliere's brother-in-law, who was 
 also lame. Tartuffe, we know, has abundance of skin on 
 his bones, and the character was composed for Du Croisy, 
 who was plump and well-favoured. Doubtless, many 
 other indications could be found of the way in which the 
 dramatist availed himself of the existing resources of his 
 company. 
 
 Then, too, Moliere was, in a real sense, the first of the 
 moderns, primarily because he does not write for a mediaeval 
 theatre, as Shakespeare does. In Shakespeare's time, as 
 we are aware, the roof only covered part of the theatre, 
 the lighting was most indifferent, there was practically no 
 scenery, and the apron stage ran down amongst the 
 audience. But Moliere's transformed tennis-court was 
 roofed and lighted, furnished with scenery, and, indeed, 
 so far as it went, belonged much more to the theatre of 
 a modern time. This is one reason why the dramatist 
 began to work out his ideas in comedy. He could anticipate 
 a stage-form practically identical with that used by such 
 
 1 See Moliere, his Life and his Works, by Brander Matthews. (Long- 
 mans. ) 
 
150 OLD SAWS AND MODERN INSTANCES 
 
 late dramatists as Ibsen, for instance. Either he fell 
 back on the old Italian plan of having an outdoor scene, 
 with houses on either side to serve as a meeting-place for 
 the characters, or else he had an interior in which, without 
 change, he could make his story unroll itself in the fortunes 
 and adventures of a single family. Then, too, it is quite 
 clear that Moliere studied his audiences with uncommon 
 care. If he had to please the King and his courtiers he 
 knew he could devise the kind of thing half farce and half 
 ballet which would suit the occasion. But with regard 
 to his own public we get in him a tolerably plain example 
 of how a man of genius can not only educate himself in 
 the performance of his dramatic tasks, but can also educate 
 his audience. 
 
 What, roughly, is the history of the Moliere comedy? 
 Let us remember that he was only fifty-one when he died, 
 and that all except two of his thirty plays were written in 
 the last fourteen years of his life. From 1659 to 1673 he 
 was very fertile, in some years bringing out as many as 
 three pieces; and he not only was stage-manager and 
 general director of his company, but generally took a part 
 himself. During these fourteen years he gave examples 
 of most of the different kinds of comedy to which we have 
 already alluded. He began with a form entirely borrowed 
 from the Italians, the so-called comedy of masks, with 
 stock characters, such as the " wily valet," the " prig," 
 the, " boastful soldier," the " braggart," and the like. 1 
 L'Etourdi is entirely on the lines of a comedy of masks. 
 Moliere was quite well aware that the average audience 
 for whom he had to cater liked its farces in this form. It 
 was fond of seeing amusing situations, whether probable 
 or not did not very much matter, and the personages who 
 had to be subordinated to these situations were for the 
 most part artificial characters both artificial and unreal. 
 We get to a comedy of manners in the Precieuses Ridicules. 
 Then in the Ecole des Femmes, which is a comedy of manners, 
 we get also a comedy of intrigue. In Le Manage Force, 
 which was enacted some time ago by Mr. Granville 
 Barker's company at the St. James's Theatre, Moliere 
 wrote what ought to be described as a comedy ballet, and 
 which still preserves its laughter-provoking qualities, 
 
 1 It is interesting to discover from Dr. Cornford's Origin of Attic Comedy 
 (Arnold) that these stock characters serve as a foundation also for the 
 Aristophanic comedy. 
 
THE IDEA OF COMEDY 151 
 
 quite apart from its association with the ballets in which 
 the King and the Court delighted. And then, leaving out 
 many intermediate steps, we arrive at comedy of character 
 in such pieces as the Misanthrope, the Avare, Tartuffe, and 
 the Femmes Savantes, models of high comedy, plays which, 
 in the early period of his career, he would hardly have 
 dared to produce, because they asked more of the audience 
 than the audience was generally prepared to grant. The 
 audience desired to be amused, and Moliere was bound to 
 amuse them, and, indeed, it is wonderful to observe how 
 he makes us laugh at characters and situations which, 
 directly we begin to analyse them, reveal elements almost 
 of tragedy. Tartuffe remains a comic character, even 
 though we have found occasion to loathe his hypocrisy 
 and pretensions. So, too, we laugh at the miser Harpagon 
 almost as much as we laugh at M. Jourdain in the Bourgeois 
 Gentilhomme. But characters of this kind, whether they 
 represent miser or hypocrite, misanthrope or learned prig, 
 or pretentious doctor, have now, as Moliere is able to draw 
 them, achieved a really solid character for themselves, and 
 the play exists for them and for the exhibition of their 
 characteristics. The incidents of the play are made to 
 reveal and bring out the special traits of the individuals 
 involved. We obtain, therefore, something more than a 
 comedy of intrigue or a comedy of manners, and we have 
 left the comedy of masks a long way behind us. We 
 have got to high comedy, a rare and special product, a 
 comedy of character, of which Moliere alone is able to 
 present us with the highest examples. It is a very delicate 
 fabric which he has been able to construct. A little less 
 analysis of character and we should get down to the 
 comedy of manners ; a little more tension in the conduct 
 of the plot and we should leave the range of comedy 
 altogether and get into something which could hardly be 
 distinguished from tragedy. Moliere knew how to make 
 painful situations amusing, and how to draw characters 
 we instinctively dislike and repudiate in such a fashion 
 that they seem to draw out of us a large amount of interest 
 and, perhaps, even a certain amount of sympathy. 
 
 Now Aristotle saw, clearly enough, with only the Greek 
 plays before him on which to base his conclusion, that in 
 the case of a tragedy the story is at least as important as, 
 if not more important than, the characters. It can never 
 be the same with comedy. With comedy the story is 
 
152 OLD SAWS AND MODERN INSTANCES 
 
 relatively unimportant ; everything turns on the delinea- 
 tion of the men and women whose mutual relations deter- 
 mine the plot. Probably this is due to a certain extent 
 to the fact that comedy originated with a certain fixed set 
 of characters, as we find in the later Greek comedy, and 
 early Italian and Spanish comedy. If you examine many 
 of the plays of Moli^re, you will come to the conclusion that 
 the story is of a somewhat thin and unsubstantial char- 
 acter. In the comedies of Wycherley and Congreve the 
 stories are wholly unimportant; indeed, it is difficult to 
 see with regard to some of them what the story is. So, 
 again, if we take a comedy like that of George Dandin, 
 we end precisely at the point where we began. So also in 
 the Misanthrope, when we have been introduced to the 
 chief characters of the comedy, and studied their peculiar 
 characters, the comedy ends. And it is precisely here 
 that we become aware, I will not say of one of the chief 
 defects, but of the chief danger of high comedy. The 
 principal characters tend to become typical rather than 
 individual. Harpagon, for instance, is the embodiment of 
 avarice itself. He is also because he happens to be 
 drawn by an accomplished artist an individual whom we 
 can recognise. Nevertheless, his main object in the play 
 is to be a type, just as Tartuffe has become absolutely 
 typical of all hypocrites. Moliere, though generally careful 
 to show us the social conditions in the midst of which his 
 plays run their course differing in this respect from Shake- 
 speare, who never gives us a hint of existing social con- 
 ditions except in The Merry Wives of Windsor tells us 
 very little of the principal characters of his best comedies. 
 We ask, for instance, where Alceste came from, or in what 
 social rank he is to be found. We may make a guess, but 
 the dramatist does not help us much. Orgon has practic- 
 ally no name at all, only a sort of character-label. Tartuffe 
 again we should have liked to have known what his 
 early experiences have been, where he came from, had he 
 been unmasked before, or had he been invariably successful 
 in his intrigues? But Moliere does not help us. These 
 great figures of his stand in a sort of isolation, typical of 
 certain vices and failings, existing for their own sake as 
 part of the machinery wherewith your true comedian will 
 mark out for you the kinds of temperament or personality 
 to accept or to avoid. But it is, of course, only of these 
 main characters that this criticism is true. Moliere has 
 
THE IDEA OF COMEDY 153 
 
 known well enough how to surround his most typical by 
 his most individual personages. And as he was always 
 learning by experience, he could go back if expediency 
 so suggested from his highest achievement to a piece like 
 Les Fourberies de Scapin, which is a mere farce. So, too, 
 when he discovered that the Misanthrope was unpopular 
 because it hardly had a story to tell, he was careful to 
 supply the Femmes Savantes with a much more regular 
 plot, so as to win the interest of his public. And if we need 
 any other example of the way in which Moliere was con- 
 stantly educating himself, let it be discovered in his 
 abandonment of tragedy or rather heroic comedy 
 when Don Garde failed to win the popular approval. The 
 people loved Moliere as a humorist, as a comedian of rich 
 and versatile gifts, and though once and again he tried to 
 prove to them that he was capable of other work, they 
 refused to accept it. For the public of Paris Moliere was 
 a comic actor, and nothing else. But he also happened 
 to be a genius who represented some of the highest achieve- 
 ments of French literature. Such a truth probably never 
 occurred to his admirers. Nor need we be surprised at 
 this. Shakespeare, too, was known as a popular play- 
 wright, as a good business man, and as an indifferent 
 actor. His contemporaries would have opened their eyes 
 in wonder if they had been told that he was also a con- 
 summate poet, and the greatest figure in English letters. 
 
 4 
 
 Masterpieces, evidently, are not only difficult to compose, 
 but are very difficult to get published. Moliere wrote 
 three masterpieces at least, of which the most significant 
 is the well-known Tartuffe. The first three acts of Tartuffe 
 belong to the date 1664. They at once fell under the 
 interdict of the authorities, and it was not till 1669, five 
 years afterwards, that the performance of the complete 
 play in five acts was finally authorised. There was an 
 abundance of reasons for this long delay. But, meanwhile, 
 let us see in what respect the play itself represented a 
 certain novelty, whereby Moliere established his position 
 as the greatest comic dramatist of his time, and, perhaps, 
 of all time. Tartuffe is a masterpiece because it represents 
 the culmination of the development of comedy as the more 
 or less light and laughable treatment of themes serious in 
 
154 OLD SAWS AND MODERN INSTANCES 
 
 themselves. Comedy as Meredith taught us creates 
 thoughtful laughter, the laughter that does not end in and 
 with itself, but suggests trains of thought in the mind and 
 leads to certain conclusions. How to treat grave subjects 
 and devise complex characters, and yet retain the comic 
 framework, is Moliere's own secret, and it has been shared 
 by very few among his fellow dramatists. In his case 
 it was the ripe fruit of years of work. Abundance of 
 laughter could be extracted from the valets, who were the 
 heritage to him of the Latin stage ; abundant laughter also 
 from the serving maids, the clever and sharp-tongued 
 soubrettes, who were in especial Moliere's invention; 
 abundant laughter also could be created by the traditional 
 types of character the fool, the braggart, the stupid 
 lover, the empty-headed pedagogue. But now, slowly, 
 dawns before Moliere's mind a larger task. The play 
 ought to arise from the clash of character with character. 
 It ought to follow naturally the relations exhibited 
 between the different personages. The characters them- 
 selves need not be of a conventional type ; though typical, 
 they must be real and human. They must be such char- 
 acters as we are able to meet every day, easily recognised, 
 well marked in their characteristics, and rounded figures, 
 so to speak, complex beings so essentially human that 
 we can laugh at and with them, and even forgive them 
 where they go wrong. Moreover and, perhaps, that is 
 no slight advance the scene must be laid within a single 
 family, whether of bourgeois or of aristocrats, and the 
 plot must be unrolled before our eyes within the four 
 corners of an ordinary sitting-room. No longer are we 
 to have a public square, flanked by the houses in which 
 the principal personages live. It must be just an ordinary 
 interior, the living-room of a family. This is what Moliere 
 did in his Tartuffe, and in his Misanthrope, and in the 
 Femmes Savantes, three high specimens of his dramatic 
 skill. And thereby he created the ideal type of comedy, 
 the comedy, as we say, of character, the comedy which 
 trembles on the edge of tragedy and pathos, like all the 
 real things of life where tears follow hard on laughter. 
 To us, because we live after the event, it may seem 
 an easy achievement. Perhaps Menander may have done 
 something of the same kind in the later Attic comedy. 
 Indeed, without any manner of doubt, so far as we can 
 discover from recently unearthed evidences of his art, 
 
THE IDEA OF COMEDY 155 
 
 this is what Menander did. But for us in a modern world 
 it is the great achievement of Moliere, marking a notable 
 advance on Shakespeare's comedies and illustrating the 
 evolution of comedy from the grotesquely humorous or the 
 fantastically humorous to the humour of real characters, 
 the humour of life itself. And if we want to see why it 
 was a great discovery, we need only observe how the later 
 comedians follow in Moliere' s footsteps. Here precisely 
 is the comedy which Sheridan wrote in The School for 
 Scandal ; here is the comedy of Dumas and Augier. Here, 
 too, is the comedy of Ibsen. 
 
 With regard to the first of the trio which I have men- 
 tioned, Tartuffe, we can easily understand why its appear- 
 ance should so long have been delayed. The story of 
 Tartuffe is well known. There is an ordinary bourgeois 
 family, consisting of Orgon, the father, who has married 
 a second wife, Elmire a charming character and who 
 has a daughter, Mariane, affianced to Valere. We have 
 besides Orgon' s old mother, Madame Pernelle a rather 
 difficult person to get on with and a very outspoken critic 
 in the shape of Dorine, half a maid and half a companion, 
 with a very established position in the family, for she speaks 
 out her opinion on most subjects before she is even asked. 
 Into this family is introduced a character, Tartuffe, an 
 ostentatiously religious man who exercises a wonderful 
 influence on Orgon, and whose appearance is carefully 
 prepared for in the first two acts before he is shown us in 
 the third. Tartuffe is an unctuously religious hypocrite, 
 who, though he never unburdens himself in that kind of 
 soliloquy which Shakespeare employed in explaining to 
 us lago, is abundantly revealed in his true colours by the 
 skilful management of the dramatist. Tartuffe gains a 
 complete ascendancy. Orgon is all for giving him his 
 daughter, Mariane, in marriage ; he even makes him a deed 
 of gift of his possessions. Tartuffe, however, does not want 
 the daughter; he is attracted by the young wife, Elmire, 
 and it is only when Orgon discovers Tartuffe making love 
 to his wife that he realises what a hypocrite he has nursed 
 in the bosom of the family. Then, when he is exposed, 
 Tartuffe becomes truculent, makes much of the deed of 
 gift, and claims Orgon's house. It requires the actual 
 intervention of the King to put matters right, and finally 
 to send Tartuffe about his business. That is the story, and 
 though Moliere makes us laugh at everybody, laugh at 
 
156 OLD SAWS AND MODERN INSTANCES 
 
 Orgon, at Madame Pernelle, at Dorine, and above all at 
 Tartuffe himself, it is easy to see with what serious elements 
 he is dealing. Moliere himself, of course, like most drama- 
 tists, like Shakespeare above all, disliked Puritans and 
 loathed hypocrisy in all its forms. But the court was 
 very religious, and the ecclesiastics of the time could not 
 be expected to welcome such an exposure of religious 
 affectation. Moreover, there is always one difficulty in 
 putting a religious hypocrite on the stage. You have to 
 put in his mouth expressions and sentiments which are 
 precisely those used by the really devout. In his case they 
 are not sincere, but the expressions are the same, and natur- 
 ally give offence when attributed to worthless personages. 
 Moliere was not specially a religious man ; he was trained 
 in the schools of Rabelais and Montaigne. He was not anti- 
 religious, but he probably did not care for professions of 
 piety, and in Tartuffe he revenged himself on those eccle- 
 siastical critics, as well as dramatic critics, who had found 
 fault with his Ecole des Femmes. The King seems always 
 to have been on his side, but he had to proceed with 
 caution, and thus it came about that for five years Moliere' s 
 masterpiece was banned. He had created, however, a 
 character destined to be immortal. Tartuffe lives as the 
 very emblem and type of the sanctimonious, and whenever 
 or wherever the play is performed its essential humanity is 
 recognised. Being something real, and independent of 
 period or race, Tartuffe is an actor-proof part, like Hamlet. 
 About the time when discussions took place as to the 
 possibility of the play being performed, the Italian 
 comedians brought out a piece called Scaramouche Ermite. 
 According to a well-known story, the King is said to have 
 asked Conde why those who were so scandalised by 
 Moliere' s play did not object to this Scaramouche. Conde 
 answered : " The reason is that Scaramouche shows up 
 religion and Heaven, as to which these gentlemen care 
 nothing. Moliere's comedy shows them up, and this they 
 will not permit." 
 
 Perhaps it is unnecessary to say very much about the 
 other two great creations of Moliere, although each has 
 its own special points of interest. The Misanthrope is in 
 many ways a rather puzzling play. The main character, 
 Alceste, whom Moliere insists upon our calling a mis- 
 anthrope though we might very possibly have chosen 
 another title is not especially a comic character. Indeed, 
 
THE IDEA OF COMEDY 157 
 
 he has certain elements which make him ultra-serious. 
 Moliere devised him for his own acting, just as he portrayed 
 Celimene for the acting of his wife, and, inasmuch as 
 Parisian audiences would not stand Moliere in anything 
 but comic parts, it is quite obvious that we are intended to 
 laugh, even though we have to laugh thoughtfully, at 
 Alceste's extravagance. There was always a spice of 
 tragedy in Moliere, a certain strain of melancholy, despite 
 his mirth-provoking qualities. As a matter of fact, how- 
 ever, the figure of a man who loudly protests against the 
 fashionable hypocrisies of the day ; who, although he is in 
 love with Celimene, is continually upbraiding her for her 
 frivolity and worldly character, reminds us of figures like 
 Dr. Stockmann in Ibsen's The Enemy of the People, or even 
 Timon of Athens, as Shakespeare drew him figures 
 cynical, morose, unfriendly, or perhaps we should say, 
 uncompromising men, who refuse to accept the world's 
 legitimate as well as illegitimate compromises. Observe 
 that the somewhat morose traits of Alceste are preserved 
 up to the last. He proposes to Celimene, after one of the 
 usual disputes, that she should prove the reality of her 
 repentance by going to live with him on a desert island. 
 This, naturally, the high-spirited lady refuses to do, and 
 the play ends with the amiable efforts of some of the hero's 
 friends to try to bring about a better reconciliation. There 
 are two other remarks which have to be made about The 
 Misanthrope. One is that, as compared with Tartuffe, 
 Moliere is dealing with the higher levels of society in the 
 later play, and with the bourgeois society in the earlier. 
 Part of his object is to expose the hollow insincerities of 
 the fashionable world in the time of Louis XIV. And so 
 even his most delightful heroine, Celimene, is shown us as 
 being infected, as it were, with some of the evil humours of 
 society, so that she will sacrifice her best friends for a 
 witticism, and give a satirical version of their characters 
 in just the same way as Lady Teazle did later, in Sheridan's 
 comedy, The School for Scandal. The other point to remark 
 is that there is no real story in The Misanthrope. There 
 is very little action, and we remain at the end pretty well 
 in the same position as we were when we began. This is 
 probably the reason why The Misanthrope though all 
 the more intelligent critics hailed it as a masterpiece did 
 not enjoy much success in Parisian representations. 
 Tartuffe was a solidly built comedy, with a story which 
 
158 OLD SAWS AND MODERN INSTANCES 
 
 advanced from the beginning to the end. The Misanthrope 
 consists of a series of episodes, with practically no story. 
 If Parisian audiences found the play dull, there is really 
 something to be said for them. For once Moliere allowed 
 his psychological instincts and his philosophy to over- 
 power his intuitions as a dramatist. Dramas can contain 
 any amount of philosophy and psychology, but they must 
 be subordinate to the story which is to be unfolded before 
 our eyes. Let us once be interested in the action and we 
 can get all the more interest out of the characters, because 
 they are deeply devised. But the reverse of this proposi- 
 tion is not true. If we can imagine Hamlet without the 
 plot of Hamlet, we should get much the same thing as 
 Moliere put before his spectators in The Misanthrope. 
 Here we are at the very secret of all drama, which is one 
 of the most democratic of the arts, and can never be the 
 choice possession of a coterie, however distinguished. In 
 Tartuffe Moliere wrapped his psychology in a powerful 
 story; therefore, at once he gained a popular appeal. 
 In Alceste he left his philosophy, such as it was, naked and 
 unadorned, and therefore failed to please the average 
 playgoer. Perhaps we ought to add that there is a great 
 deal of Moliere himself in the character of Alceste, and 
 perhaps something, too, of his relations with his wife, 
 Armande, in the controversies between Alceste and Celi- 
 mene. Moliere, too, was a jealous man. Moliere felt 
 bitterly the fact that his wife was a worldly woman. But 
 we must not press a consideration of this kind too far. 
 Various suggestions the dramatist can take from his own 
 experience or that of others, but he is, first and foremost, 
 a dramatist, and he must not be identified with any of 
 his creations. 
 
 I have left myself but little space to discuss that which 
 some competent critics have held to be absolutely the best 
 of Moliere's comedies, Les Femmes Savantes. The theme 
 is, perhaps, not so important as either that which meets 
 us in Tartuffe or that which underlies the character of 
 The Misanthrope. But the Femmes Savantes is an ex- 
 ceedingly well-made play, and as the incidents are brisk, 
 the characters interesting, and the dialogue lively and 
 animated, we get a result of comedy at its best humour 
 slightly exaggerated, with a sound and serious lesson at 
 its core. Moliere had touched upon the question of learned 
 ladies before in his Prtcieuses Ridicules. Their affectation 
 
THE IDEA OF COMEDY 159 
 
 and their absurd efforts to purify the language had passed 
 under his satiric pen. But the class of learned ladies did 
 not tend to diminish in Moliere's time, or rather the point 
 which struck the dramatist was not that a learned lady, 
 as such, was a drawback to the State, but that all pre- 
 tenders, whether male or female, were equally obnoxious. 
 At the back of Moliere's mind, and indeed tolerably patent 
 in the general construction of the play, is undoubtedly 
 the idea that women who set up to be learned are destructive 
 of the integrity of that family life of which Moliere was so 
 keen an advocate. Not that his play is in any sense 
 intended to be didactic, but the general form and con- 
 struction and the arrangement of the characters suggest 
 on which side Moliere's own sympathies are to be found. 
 And I believe that women, as a rule, especially the so-called 
 feminists, do not appreciate Moliere. Perhaps they have 
 never forgiven him his Precieuses Ridicules and his 
 Femmes Savantes. 
 
 Les Femmes Savantes is, in truth, an excellent comedy, a 
 comedy in which the plot is determined by the characters 
 of the play, and in which we move throughout on an 
 ascending scale of interest. There is one curious feature 
 about it that, although in this, almost more than in his 
 other plays, Moliere shows his complete independence of 
 other stories and plots for in his highest comedies he is 
 always most original we yet discover one character who 
 is, without any doubt whatsoever, a copy from a living 
 contemporary. Trissotin was certainly a caricature of the 
 Abbe Cotin. Cotin had had a serious quarrel with Menage, 
 in much the same way as in the play Trissotin has a quarrel 
 with Vadius. It is very unlike Moliere thus to vent his 
 spleen against a personage who was well known in Paris, 
 whatever provocation he may have received. Perhaps he 
 did it at the instigation of his friend Boileau. Perhaps 
 what offended him in the Abbe Cotin was an absurd literary 
 affectation which had no real roots in knowledge. To us 
 at the present day it does not matter who the original of 
 Moliere's portrait was, because Trissotin is the type of 
 pedantic prig familiar in all ages, and certainly not without 
 example in our own country and century. Happily, there 
 is no reason to think that Moliere copied living originals 
 for his women. I believe it has been suggested that 
 Philaminte and Belise are intended as caricatures of 
 Madame de Sevigne* and Madame de Lafayette. There is 
 
160 OLD SAWS AND MODERN INSTANCES 
 
 no justification for such a view, for the two women to whom 
 we have referred were really cultured and educated. But 
 what cannot be too often insisted on is that, though it 
 may be of some interest to know how Moliere's play stands 
 related to the personages and events of his tune, all these 
 adventitious sources of interest fall away for us when we 
 recognise that in Les Femmes Savantes, as well as in 
 Tartuffe and The Misanthrope, Moliere has given us the 
 highest type of comedy, cultured, humorous, agreeable, 
 witty, full of good sense, full of worldly wisdom ; above all, 
 a comedy of character, involving personalities as truly 
 living for us as they were for Frenchmen of the seventeenth 
 century. 
 
REALISTIC DRAMA 
 
 THE modern English stage has developed mainly along the 
 lines of realism. At the present moment it would be safe 
 to say that the drama which is most alive, the drama which 
 means most, both as an intellectual and as an artistic 
 product, is that which is classed as Realistic. It is, rela- 
 tively speaking, a modern tendency. At all events, during 
 the first half of the nineteenth century a more artificial, 
 fantastic, and romantic species of drama prevailed, which 
 might, for purposes of comparison, be put under the head 
 of dramatic idealism. 
 
 Let me attempt first of all to define these terms, Idealism 
 and Realism. A dramatist, we will suppose, is asking 
 himself how he shall treat human characters, and he dis- 
 covers that there are at least three possible ways. He 
 can say, in the first place, "I will paint human beings as 
 I think they ought to be." In other words, he is applying, 
 however unconsciously, a sort of ethical test to the men 
 and women whose actions he is about to describe. He 
 believes that it is his duty (in order, we will say, to help 
 ordinary suffering and erring humanity) to paint certain 
 ideals of conduct and behaviour, good and bad alike 
 heroes that are ideal heroes, villains that are ideal villains, 
 heroines that are virtuous and in distress, comic men who, 
 despite a lamentable tendency to idiotic witticisms, have 
 a heart of gold and all the other heterogeneous items in 
 a romantic conception of existence. 
 
 We can imagine, however, a dramatist with a very 
 different ideal before him. He says, " My business as an 
 artist is to paint men as I think they reaTTy'are," not very 
 good, not very bad, average creatures, sometimes with 
 good intentions, often with bad performance, meaning well 
 and doing ill, struggling with various besetting tempta- 
 tions and struggling also perhaps with a heritage derived 
 M 161 
 
162 OLD SAWS AND MODERN INSTANCES 
 
 from earlier generations above all, never heroes and never 
 heroines, nor even thorough-going villains, not beautifully 
 white nor preternaturally black, but (as one might phrase 
 it) of a piebald variety. This species of dramatist works 
 from a scientific point of view. His mode of procedure, 
 and also -such inspiration as he possesses, is mainly experi- 
 mental, based on what he has discovered or thinks he 
 has discovered about humanity and its place in the 
 world. If the first class of dramatist I am trying to 
 describe is radiantly optimistic, the second is generally 
 preternaturally sad, inclined to despair, teaching us that 
 this world is not altogether a comfortable place, and that 
 human beings are not especially agreeable to live with. 
 
 It is conceivable, however, that apart from these two 
 classes of dramatists there yet is room for a third, a man 
 who is neither a preacher nor a pessimist ; not inspired with 
 a moral idea nor yet inspired with a scientific idea, but 
 a sheer artist, inspired by a purely artistic idea. He is 
 aware that all art is an imaginative exercise, and that 
 however he describes his dramatis personce he can only 
 do it from a personal point of view. He is not quite sure 
 that, however scientific may be his "procedure, he can 
 ever paint men and women precisely as they are he can 
 only paint them as they appear to his aesthetic perceptions. 
 He does not desire to draw any moral. He desires, it is 
 true, to be guided by experience ; but he does not give us 
 the dry bones of scientific data. Being an artist he uses 
 his selective capacity both as to his incidents and his 
 characters. The latter he often makes typical rather than 
 individual; but they will represent the inner verity of 
 man, and not the mere external appearance. He has 
 made the discovery, in other words, that you do not get 
 rid of romance by calling yourself an Experimentalist or 
 a Realist. He knows that men turn to art just because 
 they do not want to live perpetually in a sombre, and actual, 
 world. The world of art is something other than the world 
 of reality, and as a dramatic artist he must make allowance 
 for this fact. 
 
 Now here are three different types of dramatist, and, 
 fortunately for our purpose, we can give them names. 
 When drama, as we understand the term, began with the 
 Greeks, that extraordinary race developed most of the types 
 which are discoverable in the work of later men. The 
 earliest dramatist was ^Eschylus, a profoundly moral and 
 
REALISTIC DRAMA 168 
 
 didactic playwright who painted men and women as he 
 thought they ought to be, because he held it to be his 
 business to justify the ways of God to humanity. That is 
 the keynote of his Agamemnon and his Prometheus Vinctus, 
 of most of the work which has come down to us. A great 
 man and a real dramatist, and still more a seer, a prophet, 
 a teacher. The third of the Greek dramatists was 
 Euripides, who tried to draw men and women as he thought 
 they were. I should imagine that he, like many modern 
 men, revolted from the lofty conception of humanity as 
 idealised by ^Eschylus. He had no particular moral 
 lessons to teach, and did not want to justify the ways of 
 God to man. On the contrary, one of his aims was to 
 justify the ways of men to gods, to show how unjust the 
 gods were, how arbitrary, how poverty-stricken in idea. 
 His men, as we see, were real men as viewed by a man of 
 experience, his women to the astonishment of his genera- 
 tion were real women, and his general aspect was more 
 or less pessimistic. It is a poorish sort of world, he seems 
 to say, in which we have got to struggle, and strive, and 
 fail, and yet make the best of it, being content that now and 
 again, although we cannot cure the evils, we can at least 
 help the sufferers with a little ordinary compassion and 
 sympathy. 
 
 I have purposely omitted the second of the dramatists 
 in Greece. Sophocles, as distinct from his compeers, was, 
 as it seems to me, neither a moralist nor a realist, but an 
 artist through and through, impersonal and remote an 
 artist in fibre, whose drama gives us the absolutely Greek 
 point of view, a little idealised here and there no doubt. 
 He will not extenuate, he certainly will not set down any- 
 thing in malice; but he will draw real Greek types, and 
 yet leave room for imagination and fancy, and provide 
 some sustenance for the romantic instincts. 
 
 Here is an exemplification in history of the three kinds 
 of dramatist I have described. A man can paint human 
 beings as he thinks they ought to be, a man can paint 
 them as he thinks they are. The first is what we ordi- 
 narily recognise as an Idealist ; the second is, undoubtedly, 
 a Realist. If modern examples are required, there are 
 many to choose from. Tolstoy, for instance and espe- 
 cially in a play like Resurrection is an Idealist and a 
 preacher. The French dramatist Brieux in nearly the 
 whole of his work is a persistent moralist, believing, as 
 
164 OLD SAWS AND MODERN INSTANCES 
 
 he does, that it is the function of drama to attack the 
 evils of the age, witness Les Trois Filles de M. Dupont, 
 Les Avaries, and his last play, La Femme Seule. In his 
 treatment, however, of these evils he is a sheer realist. 
 Perhaps Mr. George Bernard Shaw might not altogether 
 appreciate the society in which he finds himself, but he 
 undoubtedly is in some aspects an idealist and a preacher. 
 His method may be the method of realism, but he is in- 
 tensely didactic, always running a tilt against the follies 
 and hypocrisies of the age. One need only cite such 
 pieces as The Showing Up of Blanco Posnet, The Doctor's 
 Dilemma, Major Barbara, and for sheer undiluted idealism, 
 Captain Brassbound's Conversion. The realistic school, as 
 such, I shall have further opportunities of portraying. 
 But the third species of dramatist of whom I have spoken, 
 the man who is artist first and throughout, who exercises 
 his faculty of selection, as every artist should, who is never 
 a didactic moralist, any more than he is a photographer, 
 who does not paint, so to speak, the wrinkles and the 
 pimples, but gives you the general meaning of the face 
 the Sophoclean type in short is one for whom there is 
 not as yet a name except the good old name of dramatic 
 artist. Is there, however, no modern example ? Yes, 
 assuredly. There is Shakespeare himself. He is full of 
 romance, he has over and over again the touch of the ideal- 
 ist, and yet no man will tell you more about human nature 
 and more freely give you live, vivid, and freshly-drawn 
 types. He is quite impersonal. He never preaches 
 ostentatiously a moral. He tells you how things happen 
 and lets you draw your own conclusion. His object is 
 to show you how the world reveals itself to an artist a 
 very high and serious artist who, with the intuition of 
 genius, understands and knows. 
 
 Now drama follows the general movements of thought in 
 the world, although it seems to follow them somewhat 
 slowly. This is a point which must be elucidated if drama 
 is to be considered as a serious art, an art in the highest 
 sense of the term, as a part of the human equipment, as much 
 native to man as religion. We can see that up to a given 
 time in the nineteenth century modern drama, though it 
 may have in appearance aimed high, was quite artificial 
 and unreal. Then about the middle and towards the close 
 of the nineteenth century it gradually became imbued 
 with a spirit of realism which, with few exceptions, has 
 
REALISTIC DRAMA 165 
 
 continued up to the present period. And what is the 
 external history of the period thus summarily indicated? 
 We know that the great feature of the nineteenth century, 
 from 1850 onwards, was the extraordinary progress of science 
 and the interpretation of nature. Everywhere it was dis- 
 covered that by keeping close to the sphere of reality, by 
 seeking to understand nature, we were able to make large 
 progress, not only in knowledge, but also in the practical 
 conveniences and utilities of life. If science won successes 
 in the intellectual sphere, they were rapidly adapted to the 
 uses of mankind, and the conquest over nature meant 
 not only definite mental acquisition but a larger material 
 comfort. Thus the keynote of the time was naturalism 
 in thought, and utilitarianism in morals and social life. 
 
 It was little wonder, then, that art should, in its turn, 
 be realistic. The other arts painting, literature, music 
 can carry on their spheres of activity more or less in inde- 
 pendence of the spirit of the Age : although they, too, when 
 we look deeper, are subject in more ways than one to large 
 contemporary influences. But the art of drama a social 
 art must necessarily keep very close to the stages of evolu- 
 tion in social life and ethical thought. This is, of course, 
 the meaning of Shakespeare's famous definition of acting 
 and the actor as giving " the age and body of the time 
 its form and pressure." In the earlier portions of the 
 nineteenth century drama might strive to be poetic, 
 emotional; but when the reign of science began it was 
 bound to lose some of its idealistic character and to accom- 
 modate itself to the prevalent conceptions which were, of 
 course, realistic. In the beginnings of the present century, 
 however, we note, here and there, signs of reaction. Even 
 professors of science are beginning to be discontented with 
 their most magnificent victories. When all nature has 
 yielded up her secrets there still remain the indefeasible 
 claims of the human soul. From materialism, as such, 
 recent years are beginning to proclaim a revolt. 
 
 But, surely, there is no question which is the correct 
 view, at all events to us children of the nineteenth century ? 
 The problem appears to be settled. We are only con- 
 cerned with reality; metaphysical idealism is pure talk 
 and word-spinning. Let us think of all that this scientific 
 movement has accomplished. Man acquired a new and 
 infinitely better knowledge of nature's workings, and thus 
 was able by technical skill, acquired in a practical school, 
 
166 OLD SAWS AND MODERN INSTANCES 
 
 to make all sorts of improvements directly affecting human 
 existence, which in consequence became wonderfully en- 
 riched, accelerated, strengthened. Social problems now 
 became of prominent interest, existing conditions of life 
 had to be improved. The object of man was to secure 
 universal happiness for his fellow-men. Labour was 
 organised, the proper distribution of wealth became one of 
 the tasks incumbent on man; life was to be made more 
 happy. Surely, in view of all that the nineteenth century 
 has done, the older idealistic views are but vague mists 
 destined to disappear before the light of the sun. From 
 this point of view realism can be our only gospel. 
 
 Unfortunately, the matter is not so easy as it seems. 
 Idealism has certainly taken some strange shapes, shapes 
 which we now acknowledge to be of not much value. If, 
 for instance, the idealistic drama of the nineteenth century 
 is represented only, let us say, by Sheridan Knowles's 
 Virginius, or by Bulwer Lytton's The Lady of Lyons and 
 Richelieu, or, for the matter of that, by Victor Hugo's 
 Cromwell, then, indeed, it seems a very unreal, purely arti- 
 ficial, quite valueless thing, totally unconnected with life 
 as we know it, and quite righteously doomed to perish. 
 But Idealism is a much subtler thing than this, intimately 
 connected with the nature of all art. We speak of the 
 triumphs of realism. Well, has the materialism of the nine- 
 teenth century triumphed all along the line? Has the 
 whole life of man become transformed into the material 
 conditions which surround him ? Is a man a mere instru- 
 ment for doing work? Why, this work itself has turned 
 out not to be the gloriously unselfish thing, full of altruistic 
 aims, which was to benefit the whole of humanity. 1 What 
 does work mean to the majority of our contemporaries? 
 It means a bitter struggle for existence, a struggle between 
 individuals, classes, and peoples, and the passions which 
 the struggle has aroused show how every day the field 
 of conflict is becoming wider. Is it so true, we begin to 
 ask ourselves, that mere work absorbs the whole man? 
 Work never develops more than a portion of human faculty ; 
 the more specialised the work, the smaller the portion. 
 If life is no more than contact with environment, it is a 
 singularly bare and poverty-stricken thing. Is it not 
 clear that behind the work are sensitive beings, craving 
 
 1 Written before the War. 
 
REALISTIC DRAMA 167 
 
 for something more than the work can give them, demand- 
 ing from their work some personal compensation, even 
 though the work itself may lose ? Does not the continual 
 striving after some definite material result or success breed 
 a certain weariness and distaste, and afflict us with the 
 shadow of some vaguely recognised pessimism ? What is 
 the cause of this deep-seated uneasiness ? In quite simple 
 language we can give the answer. If work no longer 
 satisfies us, it is because it leaves the soul homeless. If 
 the nineteenth century, which more than any other period 
 enlarged the whole aspect of life and improved human 
 conditions, instead of closing with a proud and jubilant 
 note ended rather with a dissatisfied and querulous wail, 
 there must have been some error in the type of life dominat- 
 ing the whole epoch. What is the error? Realism tried 
 to get rid of the spirit of man, to prove it to be a purely 
 derivative thing. It sought to eliminate the soul, and the 
 soul refuses to be eliminated. The emphatic denial of the 
 soul in its independent activity merely rouses the soul to 
 further life, rouses it to carry on with whomsoever it 
 recognises as its God those immortal dialogues which are 
 the staple of all Mystical literature. And so the twentieth 
 century began with a reaction, and examples are easily 
 furnished. After Utilitarianism, the characteristic philo- 
 sophy of the nineteenth century, arose Pragmatism, which 
 in some of its aspects is the Ultima Thule, the last expres- 
 sion, of the naturalistic practical movement. But Prag- 
 matism would now seem to have spent its force, and men 
 read Bergson. So, too, in Art ; wearied with Realism we 
 turn to Symbolism and Mysticism : and the curiously 
 suggestive, symbolic theatre of Maeterlinck is studied, 
 even in the midst of the triumphs of the school of 
 Ibsen. 
 
 But the question will naturally be asked : Has all this 
 anything to do with drama ? Well, let us take the matter 
 in detail. Modern drama in England has run through three 
 or four distinct phases. There is the kind of drama with 
 which, let us say, Macready had to concern himself, suc- 
 ceeded by a very bad and infertile period in which the chief 
 productions were either adaptations from the French or 
 else burlesque, many of which again had a French ancestry. 
 No touch or breath of reality came across English drama 
 till about 1860, or rather, to be accurate, till November 
 14th, 1865, when a piece entitled Society was played at 
 
168 OLD SAWS AND MODERN INSTANCES 
 
 the Prince of Wales's Theatre, having as its author Tom 
 Robertson. From that time onwards, through various 
 illustrious names, the English drama has steadily advanced 
 in a direction which we usually call naturalism or realism. 
 Concurrently with this movement you will find that adap- 
 tations from Paris began to be rare. The native drama 
 has found its feet. The largest foreign influence is that 
 of Ibsen. None of our writers have been quite the same 
 since they made acquaintance with the Norwegian drama- 
 tist. A different quality has come into their work. 
 
 If such be in outline the history of modern drama, you 
 will now observe that it fits tolerably into the scheme I 
 have propounded. There was a time when every philo- 
 sopher called himself an idealist, and sometimes idealism 
 was exceedingly vague, shadowy, and unprofitable. Then, 
 concurrently with the birth of vigorous and triumphant 
 science, philosophy itself turned to realism. It was the 
 latter half of the nineteenth century which witnessed the 
 slow and hesitating growth on the English stage of dramas 
 of realism. The only question is whether we have not 
 got to the end of the realistic tendency at the present time. 
 Some of our most popular writers, it is true, boast that 
 they have banished romance. But romance always returns. 
 It is like nature which you can expel with a pitchfork, 
 " tamen usque recurret" The lesson which modern realistic 
 drama teaches is singularly hard, barren, unsatisfying. In 
 what mood does the spectator come away from Hindle 
 Wakes, The Eldest Son, The New Sin, Rutherford and Son, 
 and The Younger Generation? Does not the something 
 within him no matter its name, soul or spirit feel 
 starved ? Has life nothing but the sordid struggles which 
 some of these dramatists paint ? Can anything more de- 
 pressing be conceived than the dramas of Mr. Galsworthy 
 Justice, Strife, The Eldest Son? After a tragedy by 
 Shakespeare even after a world-ruin like King Lear 
 I know not how it is, but the spirit is uplifted, alert, 
 passionately believing in the reality of moral ideals. Does 
 any one ever have such a feeling after a modern realistic 
 drama? It is possible, therefore, that a reaction may be 
 slowly organising itself against some of the forms of realism 
 which have invaded our theatre. Perhaps even the war 
 may usher in a better, newer, more fruitful kind of ideal- 
 ism, which assuredly must be built up on experience and 
 veritable data, but which shall find room within its scheme 
 
REALISTIC DRAMA 169 
 
 for unconquerable romance, for imagination, for fancy, 
 for faith, for love in short, for the human soul. 
 
 It was undoubtedly an uninspiring and difficult task 
 which Macready had before him when he attempted to 
 carry out his artistic mission. Macready, without ques- 
 tion, had certain instincts which we should class as modern 
 and realistic, but the material with which he had to deal, 
 and his contemporary authors, defeated most of his efforts. 
 He had, without doubt, his limitations, although no one 
 who has even cursorily perused his recently published 
 Diaries can question the fact that he had, in an almost 
 tragic degree, the temperament of a sensitive and self- 
 castigating artist. Now what was the kind of work by 
 English authors which he found ready to his hand ? I will 
 take only two instances Sheridan Knowles and Lytton 
 Bulwer. James Sheridan Knowles, an Irish schoolmaster, 
 who had also been an actor, whose father was first cousin 
 to Richard Brinsley Sheridan, brought to Macready a 
 tragedy called Virginius, widely proclaimed as a return 
 to truth and to nature as against existing artificialities of 
 the times. Virginius is an admirable example of the 
 ordinary bourgeois drama, a bourgeois drama applied, 
 unfortunately, to Roman tragedy. Every one knows, of 
 course, the story of the soldier Virginius, who killed his 
 daughter rather than she should fall into the hands of 
 Appius. When Shakespeare dealt with Roman plays, he 
 made, it is true, his characters Englishmen, but he made 
 them of heroic mould. Brutus and Julius Caesar, Mark 
 Antony, and the rest, are certainly not commonplace, 
 even though one can hardly describe them as accurately 
 drawn in accordance with their Latin types. But of all 
 the characters of Sheridan Knowles's play, it can safely 
 be said that they are just mediocre, bourgeois, common- 
 place Englishmen and Englishwomen of the times. Vir- 
 ginius, for instance, is an excellent father of the middle 
 class, whom we could imagine going down to his City 
 office every day and returning to the suburbs in the evening. 
 Virginia, the lovely heroine, is a simpering schoolgirl a 
 virtuous idiot. If this is what a return to nature meant, 
 it must be confessed that it is a kind of nature that we 
 do not want perpetuated. 1 Douglas Jerrold was in reality 
 
 1 Cf. Le Theatre Anglais, by A. Filon (chaps. 1 and 2), to whose admirable 
 study of dramatic history I am much indebted. 
 

 
 170 OLD SAWS AND MODERN INSTANCES 
 
 mf+ 
 
 a better dramatist than Sheridan Knowles, and the first 
 act of his Rent Day, which was played in 1832, is a striking 
 piece of work. But Jerrold, though he had undoubtedly 
 considerable originality of his own, had to bow to the public 
 taste of the time. He wrote Black-eyed Susan, perhaps his 
 greatest success, undoubtedly also his worst play. The 
 hero is, of course, that kind of seaman beloved of melo- 
 drama, compact of virtue and noble sentiments ; and the 
 heroine, though she is born from the lower ranks, can 
 express the most exalted sentiments in a flowing and 
 slightly academic style. The whole piece is a mass of 
 unlikelihoods and absurdities : a very characteristic in- 
 stance, as it seems to me, of that somewhat gross and 
 common idealism of the crowd which likes to be transported 
 when it goes into a theatre into another region where 
 goodness is always rewarded, vice always punished, and 
 " the man who lifts his hand against a woman " is repro- 
 bated by the howls of the gallery gods. 
 
 There came a time when Macready, face to face with 
 failure, felt that he must try to retrieve his fortunes in 
 America. He wrote to young Browning. " Make a play 
 for me," he said, " and prevent me from going to America." 
 The play was written. It was Strafford. It had, I think, 
 four representations, but the unhappy Macready was not 
 prevented from going to America. Still, a number of men 
 of intelligence felt it their duty to come to the help of the 
 distressed Macready. John Forster busied himself in the 
 matter with characteristic energy; Leigh Hunt wrote a 
 tragedy. But, above all, Lytton Bulwer composed three 
 pieces, all of which enjoyed a distinguished celebrity at 
 the time, and were played, undoubtedly, to full houses. 
 These three pieces are The Lady of Lyons, Richelieu, and 
 Money, and it would be difficult to say which of them 
 is furthest removed from that kind of reality to which 
 the stage should aspire. We ought to speak, I suppose, 
 with a certain respect of the name of Bulwer, because he 
 was an exceedingly prolific writer, a noted novelist, poet, 
 politician, orator, as well as a dramatist. His novels were 
 enough to make him famous. Every one knows something 
 about The Last Days of Pompeii, or Rienzi, or Ernest 
 Maltravers, or The Caxtons, or Kenelm Chillingly. As a 
 dramatist he represented a sort of amalgam of different 
 authors, without having any very precise characteristics 
 of his own. For instance, he had some touches of Byron, 
 
REALISTIC DRAMA 171 
 
 as much, at all events, as a man of the world ought to have 
 without giving offence to English respectability. He also 
 copied Victor Hugo to a large extent or, shall we say, 
 was inspired by Victor Hugo ? No one would pretend that 
 his poetry was of the highest order, any more than that 
 his historical romances were in any sense true. But he 
 possessed a kind of windy rhetoric which pleased his 
 generation, and he seemed to be a great figure in the annals 
 of his time. The Lady of Lyons is still played, I believe, 
 sometimes in America; it is not so very many years ago 
 since it was played in London by Mr. Coghlan and Mrs. 
 Langtry, and by Mr. Kyrle Belle w and Mrs. Brown-Potter. 
 Of all species of dramatic composition, melodrama, 
 which has to be accepted literally and is adorned with the 
 veneer of literature, is perhaps absolutely the worst. 
 Every one likes melodrama. It has a frank charm, an 
 undeniable glamour. But it must not attempt to be 
 either literal or literary. In The Lady of Lyons we have 
 great purple patches of poetry covering the bare places 
 in an unreal melodramatic plot. None of the characters 
 have any peculiar reality about them they all ring false. 
 Madame Deschapelles comes from the Palais Royal. 
 Pauline, the heroine, can change her character in the course 
 of the play, and pass from haughtiness to humility, from 
 a stupid arrogance to an equally foolish submission, with- 
 out turning a hair. And the worst element in the piece 
 is the hero, Claud Melnotte, who is simply a villain if we 
 take him seriously, certainly a charlatan and a cheat. 
 Being nothing more than a simple peasant, he passes him- 
 self off as a prince, and marries under a false name a well- 
 dowered young lady. And he talks throughout the play 
 as though he were a model of the highest virtue ! The 
 once-famous play Richelieu is in no sense better than The 
 Lady of Lyons. No one for a moment would imagine 
 that Richelieu is any closer to actual history than, let us 
 say, Victor Hugo's Cromwell. It is all false rhetoric, as 
 well as false history. As the French critic M. Filon once 
 said, " It is a sort of plaster Hugo, daubed over with bad 
 Alexander Dumas." And what shall we say of Money, 
 which has had a distinguished stage history and been 
 played by very distinguished actors and actresses ? If 
 any one wants to understand how the native English 
 drama has grown within recent years, how it has come to 
 be something worth talking about, worthy of being put 
 
172 OLD SAWS AND MODERN INSTANCES 
 
 side by side with the dramatic literature of France and 
 Germany, let him take the next opportunity he can find 
 it may be difficult to find an opportunity of seeing Bulwer 
 Lytton's Money. It is all as dull and insincere and unreal 
 as any drama can be; the characters are not related to 
 life as we know it. The piece is full of theatricality in the 
 worst sense of that word. The hero is a prig, the heroine 
 a lady of extraordinary refinements and such abounding 
 conscience that she kills our sympathy in laughter. These 
 were some of the pieces which stood for the English drama 
 in the first half of the nineteenth century. They represent 
 a form of idealism which was bound to be shattered at the 
 first contact with truth. Directly it came to be under- 
 stood that the stage, instead of dealing with imaginative 
 fiction, should attempt, in however humble a fashion, to 
 represent actual life, all such pieces as Virginius, Black-eyed 
 Susan, The Lady of Lyons, Richelieu, Money, were swept 
 into that limbo of oblivion from which there is no return. 
 And the same thing would be true also of the burlesques 
 which Henry James Byron poured forth with so prodigal a 
 hand. Some of Tom Taylor's pieces, such as The Ticket- 
 of -Leave Man and Still Waters Run Deep, still survive; 
 while Dion Boucicault struck out a new and interesting 
 variety of melodrama by his Irish pieces, such as Colleen 
 Bawn, Arrah-na-pogue, and The Shaughraun. But realism, 
 as we understand it, made its first, shy appearance only 
 with Tom Robertson, after 1860. 
 
 In dating the tendency to realism from the first pro- 
 duction of the Robertsonian comedy, I am quite aware 
 that I shall not have the sympathy of many critics. As 
 we look back from our present point of vantage, it no 
 doubt seems obvious that Robertson's plays were anything 
 but realistic, in the sense in which we understand the term, 
 but in many respects extremely artificial. It was in 
 reference to this doubtless that Matthew Arnold said that 
 English drama, floating uneasily between heaven and 
 earth, was " neither idealistic nor realistic, but purely 
 fantastic." But here we must distinguish a little. In 
 tracing the history of any movement, we must carefully 
 keep apart the spirit which animates it from some of its 
 admitted effects and results. It may be true that some of 
 the plays, such as Ours and School, were utterly fantastic 
 in character and in structure. But the thing which 
 Robertson was aiming at, the half-realised scope of his 
 
REALISTIC DRAMA 173 
 
 enterprise, these are the points which ought to interest 
 us. The truth is that we have here, almost for the first 
 time, an effort on the part of modern English drama to 
 achieve some originality of its own. Up to this date, for all 
 practical purposes, the English stage was, as I have said, in 
 entire subservience to the French stage. Adaptations of 
 French plays, dramas, comedies, farces, even melodramas, 
 were recognised to be the legitimate avocation of the 
 dramatic writers in our own country. At all events, 
 Robertson shook off this foreign bondage. He tried to do 
 something that belonged to himself alone, and for that we 
 owe him more gratitude than we sometimes are inclined 
 to acknowledge. 
 
 There is also another consideration. Realism is, of 
 course, as we have seen, a vague term. At all events, we 
 can have a Realism in externals, as well as a Realism in 
 internal spirit. Do not let us despise the former : it may 
 be the beginning of better things. When the Bancrofts 
 commenced their historic enterprise in the Prince of Wales' s 
 Theatre, they at all events gave us Realism in externals. 
 The rooms that we saw on the stage were real rooms pro- 
 perly carpeted and boxed in, a ceiling was provided, 
 together with appropriate furniture, such as could be 
 found in any West-end drawing-room. This, indeed, was 
 part of the crusade which the Bancroft management was 
 undertaking. By making their little theatre a nest of 
 something like luxury, by being careful in the plays they 
 produced to imitate the tone, accent, the manners, the 
 costume of the upper classes and the upper middle classes, 
 these reformers of the theatre were initiating an economic 
 revolution the beginnings of a reconciliation between 
 society and the stage. Earlier in the nineteenth century 
 managers were always complaining that the wealthy 
 classes conld not possibly be tempted to enter the doors of 
 a theatre. But the Bancrofts managed to succeed where 
 others had failed. The price of the stalls was raised to 
 half a guinea, a daring stroke of policy which had its 
 significant results in the fact that these stalls were always 
 full. Society saw something which it really could recog- 
 nise as part of its own daily life, and to its own surprise 
 found itself coming to an obscure street close to the Totten- 
 ham Court Road, where it never had found itself before. 
 This little theatre, in fact, built in a slum, became the 
 rendezvous of aristocracy, and from this time forward it 
 
174 OLD SAWS AND MODERN INSTANCES 
 
 will be found that young men and young women of good 
 position and good birth began to seek a career upon the 
 boards. The style of acting suited them, it was so natural 
 and easy, so devoid of all emotional excess, so quiet, so 
 restrained in a word, so gentlemanly, so ladylike. But 
 because all this, though Realism of a kind, was only a 
 superficial Realism, the drama was not yet considered 
 something in which the intellectual classes could find 
 interest. Society might be reconciled to the stage, but 
 there was still the divorce between the acted drama and 
 the deeper thoughts of students of life. That reconcilia- 
 tion had yet to come. 
 
 Probably there was no more curious or exciting an 
 evening than the premiere of Society, produced on the 
 14th of November, 1865. Society is by no means a good 
 play, nor is it characteristically Robertsonian, except in 
 one point Robertson's knowledge of Bohemian life. 
 Those who were interested in the production of the play 
 were especially afraid of the third act, in which was repre- 
 sented the " Owl's Roost," a more or less faithful tran- 
 script of the manners and habits of Bohemians and their 
 clubs. For would not these same Bohemians resent such 
 a delineation on the stage ? Would they not think that 
 Robertson had been unfaithful to his old friends and his 
 own traditions of good fellowship ? Therefore it was rather 
 an anxious little company which commenced the perform- 
 ance of Society ; and Marie Wilton, as she then was Lady 
 Bancroft as she is now named mainly responsible for the 
 venture, is always supposed to have occupied the final 
 minute before the curtain went up in nailing with her own 
 hands some little piece of stage decoration which had gone 
 awry. But the result exceeded all anticipations. The 
 tender little scenes of lovemaking in a London square, 
 which occupied the second act, seemed pleasantly to sug- 
 gest that romance was still possible under the plane-trees, 
 and in the midst of the fogs of our Metropolis. But it was 
 the much-dreaded third act which made the success of the 
 play, especially the celebrated incident of the five shillings 
 loan. A young man going to some evening social function 
 finds himself devoid of the necessary wherewithal to pay 
 his cab. He asks the first Bohemian friend he meets to 
 lend him five shillings. " My dear fellow, I have not got it ; 
 but I can easily borrow it for you." And then we see a 
 series of attempted borrowings, each man asking his neigh- 
 
REALISTIC DRAMA 175 
 
 bour in a laughable progress of generous inclination and 
 of admitted impecuniosity. At last some one discovers 
 the two necessary half-crowns, and then in inverse order 
 the precious cab fare travels from hand to hand back to 
 the original borrower. It is supposed to have been a real 
 incident, and perhaps was recognised as all the more 
 laughable on that account. There is no doubt that the 
 Bohemians, at all events, were real, for they probably all 
 had prototypes. As to the other characters, however, 
 they were purely fantastic. Lady Ptarmigant takes the 
 arm of old Mr. Chodd without hesitation, although he is 
 what we should now call a " bounder" of the first water. 
 Lord Ptarmigant a character which John Hare rendered 
 illustrious had nothing to say and had only a single trick 
 he dragged his chair with him wherever he went, sat 
 down, fell asleep at once, and most of the company tumbled 
 over his outstretched legs. Marie Wilton (Lady Bancroft) 
 was charming, as she always was, because Robertson 
 amongst other gifts had remarkable skill in devising 
 characters which would just suit her inimitable espieglerie, 
 her sparkling personality. And Mr. Bancroft brought upon 
 the stage a new type of languid Englishman. Sothern, in 
 his " Lord Dundreary," had represented an English aris- 
 tocrat as an absolutely brainless idiot. When the aristocrat 
 appeared on the boards he was generally made into a 
 caricature of fatuous imbecility. But Mr. Bancroft as 
 he was then called put before the eyes of his audience a 
 presentable, as well as a real, specimen of a man of breeding, 
 a little haughty and disdainful, full of absurd airs, but by 
 no means a fool, and always good-hearted. Of course, 
 the most notorious example of his skill was Hawtree in 
 Caste, whose appearance under the humble roof of the 
 Eccles family is so irresistibly comic. He is so entirely a 
 fish out of water, and yet so affably and pleasantly at home 
 a gentleman, in short, who is full of native kindliness. 
 Through all this series of plays, Society, Ours, Caste, School 
 to take the best-known representatives of the Robertson- 
 ian comedy the characters assigned to Bancroft and his 
 wife never varied in general form, although in unessential 
 details they may have varied. But if we look at them as 
 a whole we are bound to confess that these comedies, full 
 of easy grace and pleasantry, admirably written, endowed 
 with a certain freshness of their own, were yet rightly 
 named of " the milk-and-water school " and "the tea- 
 
176 OLD SAWS AND MODERN INSTANCES 
 
 cup-and-saucer type," more than a little fantastic and 
 artificial. 
 
 For some twenty years after the Robertsonian drama 
 had run its course, nothing critical or important in the 
 direction of what we have called Realism is to be noted. 
 Even after Robertson there was an undiminished flow of 
 adaptations from the French. All the leading dramatists 
 were occupied in this curiously ignoble and servile task. 
 It was considered the right thing to do ; at all events, from 
 the managerial standpoint it was considered the safe thing 
 to do. The French dramatists, from Scribe onwards, 
 including Dumas fils, Augier, Sardou, and the rest, were 
 held as the original patentees of a correct kind of drama. 
 They had inherited the tradition of the " piece Men faite" 
 from Scribe, although gradually they were breaking from 
 it. At any rate, they were models and examples, and the 
 English theatres were in haste to borrow from them whole- 
 sale. Remember, for instance, that Mr. Sydney Grundy 
 who ought to have been, and afterwards proved himself 
 to be, an original dramatist was largely occupied with 
 adaptations from the French, and we shall understand how 
 the lesser fry thought it no unworthy task to transplant into 
 alien conditions French drama, which, for the most part, 
 was ill-suited for any such crossing of the Channel. Almost 
 the one exception was the extremely successful adaptation 
 of Sardou' s Dora, under the title Diplomacy, which was 
 not long ago revived with great success in London. 
 It is clear, of course, that in this respect English drama 
 was in leading-strings, arid it was not until a reaction came, 
 not until it was discovered that plays could be written on 
 English subjects, full of English ideas which would bring 
 money into the managerial till, that any change for the 
 better could come about. In this noble duty of establish- 
 ing a modern English stage there are three names especially 
 prominent, although their work was essentially different : 
 the names of Henry Arthur Jones, Sydney Grundy, and 
 Arthur Pinero. If I were dealing with the rise of the 
 modern English drama, I should have to say a good deal 
 both of Grundy and of Arthur Jones. But the subject I 
 am considering is the growth of Realism, a more special 
 point that we must now look at again with, perhaps, an 
 attempt at a clearer elucidation of its object and aims. 
 
 The dramatist whom we call realistic, in the first place, 
 
REALISTIC DRAMA 177 
 
 accepts the conditions of the time in which he works and 
 the country which is the scene of his labours. He begins, 
 that is to say, with the principle that England has its own 
 way of life and action, a way of its own, not by any means 
 the same as that of other nations. That principle, of course, 
 cuts at the root of all foreign adaptation. Most of the 
 French dramas are racy of the French soil. The Parisian 
 drawing-room is not the same as the London drawing- 
 room; the characters move and talk in different fashion. 
 From that we advance to another principle. Each age 
 has its own particular problems. The journalist and 
 historian deal with these day after day. They mark the 
 rise of a certain tendency, the gradual development of a 
 new state of thought and feeling, the influence of novel 
 ideas as they affect the settled conditions of English life. 
 Take only a simple example. There is, and has been, in 
 England a distinct school which we call the school of 
 Puritanism, which has set itself with a remarkable deter- 
 mination, sometimes from the highest motives, but other 
 times apparently through sheer blind prejudice, against 
 art and all its manifestations, including, of course, dramatic 
 art. Now, here is a state of things which you certainly 
 cannot find in Paris and France. It is indigenous with us. 
 As soon as a dramatist begins to think it his proper duty to 
 put on the stage actual conditions of life as it is lived by 
 the men and women around him, he is confronted by the 
 Puritanical objection to many of those features which 
 illustrate the artistic career. The dramatist, we will sup- 
 pose, is not inclined to take the censures of the Puritans 
 lying down; he strikes blow for blow. Thus you get a 
 drama like Henry Arthur Jones's Saints and Sinners (1884) 
 a serious study of provincial life as dominated by narrow 
 evangelicalism and the fury of the zealot. The two church- 
 wardens in the play, who are called by characteristic names, 
 Hoggard and Prabble, represent that kind of religiosity 
 which is only an organised hypocrisy. For if the Puritans 
 charged art and drama with suggested infractions of the 
 moral code, the dramatist retorts by charging the Puri- 
 tans with caring for the letter of the law and forgetting its 
 spirit, with tithing mint and anise and cummin, and over- 
 looking the simple obligations of charity and forgiveness. 
 But we must not be diverted by taking the instance of 
 Mr. Henry Arthur Jones, because he has never been a 
 Realist, and never pretended for a moment that Realism 
 
178 OLD SAWS AND MODERN INSTANCES 
 
 should be an ideal at which the dramatic writer ought to 
 aim. I only refer to the play as an illustration of how 
 the modern English drama, if it is to be vital, must deal 
 with actual conditions of English life. 
 
 The Realist then, as such, advances to a third principle. 
 He has already acknowledged that drama must be English 
 and that it must have as its subject the contemporary 
 problems of its time. But there is something else besides. 
 The characters of his play must not be idealised or exag- 
 gerated, or transformed in any fashion by his imagination 
 or fancy, but must be put before us exactly as psycho- 
 logical analysis reveals them. Men, we discover, work not 
 from a single motive, but from complex motives. Their 
 duties are performed, not always owing to a sense of moral 
 obligation, but often because they happen to coincide 
 with self-interest. Man is three-quarters mean and only 
 one quarter, and very occasionally, noble. Woman is not 
 an angelic figure to be placed on a pedestal and worshipped 
 in a sacred niche with an aureole round her head. Still 
 less is she the purely domestic drudge, but a human crea- 
 ture exactly on the same level as man, acting, as he does, 
 from conflicting motives which she hardly understands, 
 occasionally doing things right, as he does, more often 
 doing things wrong, as he does, with particular temptations 
 of her own which she finds it difficult to resist. 
 
 Now directly we begin to study humanity with the aid 
 of scientific analysis, we have to take stock of these things, 
 to say farewell to the older conceptions of drama which 
 made the hero or heroine prosper in the end because he 
 or she was good, and made the villain suffer in the last act 
 because he was bad. Further, the romantic aspects of 
 life tend, as a consequence of this analysis, to disappear. 
 Romance is certainly not the daily food of human beings, 
 and it is the everyday bread of humanity which we are 
 concerned with. Thus a mortal blow is struck at the 
 romantic drama, say, of Victor Hugo or of Bulwer Lytton, 
 until at last we get, in the case of Mr. George Bernard 
 Shaw, a distinct and determined attack against all romance, 
 as being worthless, even if it exists, and unessential to the 
 dramatist because it does not exist. Watch the single 
 love scene in Mr. Shaw's John Bull's Other Island, and you 
 will see how carefully the author has divested it of any 
 touch of romantic glamour or poetic grace. 
 
 A further consequence of this realistic way of regarding 
 
REALISTIC DRAMA 179 
 
 character is that we learn not to be afraid to call things 
 by their right names. The older dramatist lived in a world 
 of his own, where certain ugly facts were glossed over or 
 forgotten, or, at all events, not emphasised. But the 
 modern realistic playwriter, believing that such reticence 
 is foolish and wrong, will give you the ugly facts with just 
 their ugly names without shame. And from this point 
 of view there is no question that Mr. Shaw's Widowers' 
 Houses, produced in December, 1892, was a very remark- 
 able instance of a modern realistic play, including also a 
 didactic element which is never far absent from the work 
 of Mr. Shaw. Mrs. Warren's Profession is, of course, 
 another illustrative example. 
 
 Reviewing some of the features to which I have called 
 attention, we discover at once that an exceedingly impor- 
 tant and comprehensive influence came from the work of 
 Henrik Ibsen, whose social dramas, produced in London, 
 were received with undisguised hostility from 1890 onwards, 
 but also profoundly altered the conception of drama in 
 the minds of many English dramatists. And a date of 
 no little significance as a prophecy of things to come is the 
 24th of April, 1889, when John Hare opened the new 
 Garrick Theatre with The Profligate, by Pinero. It was a 
 prophecy, I say, of things to come, because The Profligate 
 as a play is in many respects an unripe piece of work, full 
 of immaturity, if we look back to it from the later work 
 of the same author. Nevertheless, it marks in its aims 
 and objects, and also to some extent in its achievement, 
 a very notable advance on anything which had been seen 
 hitherto an advance, I venture to think, in the direction 
 of Realism which was consummated a good deal later, on 
 the 27th of May, 1893, when George Alexander produced 
 The Second Mrs. Tanqueray at the St. James's Theatre. 
 
REALISTIC DRAMA 
 
 II 
 
 IT was suggested at the end of the last paper that the pro- 
 duction of The Profligate at the Garrick Theatre in 1889 
 was a significant event, and, indeed, was prophetic of the 
 much more important occasion the production of The 
 Second Mrs. Tanqueray in May, 1893. I shall be concerned 
 in the present article with the progress of Realism in Drama, 
 and with some of those pieces of Sir Arthur Pinero which 
 were conceived and executed in a realistic vein. Those 
 which are convenient for my purpose in this respect are 
 The Profligate, The Second Mrs. Tanqueray, The Benefit of 
 the Doubt, the Notorious Mrs. Ebbsmith, and Iris. These 
 are all realistic plays in the sense which has been already 
 defined. The dramatist writing about his own country 
 and his own times desires to paint not flattering portraits 
 but veracious likenesses. He does not want to ignore the 
 ordinary conditions, the salient characteristics of the era 
 in which he lives. He believes it to be his business to look 
 steadily at the social fabric, to observe the different ele- 
 ments of which it is composed, to note the peculiar perils 
 which surround and enfeeble its health, and to play the 
 part, not indeed of a reformer, for that would be too 
 didactic an aim for an artist or, at all events, for some 
 artists but of a keen, quick-witted, and occasionally 
 sympathetic observer. And in similar fashion with regard 
 to the personages of this drama, the playwright will seek 
 to draw men and women, not as viewed through the spec- 
 tacles of a fantastic imagination, but in their habit as they 
 live. If he does this with a certain remorselessness, he is 
 a Realist. 
 
 Now it is exactly this remorselessness of his which gets 
 him into trouble with a number of different sections of 
 our world. He is unflinching in his portrayal, and men do 
 not like unflinching portrait-painters. They want the 
 picture touched up by some indulgent and benevolent 
 
 180 
 
REALISTIC DRAMA 181 
 
 philanthropist. The realist refuses to play with what 
 he deems to be the truth. At the time when the younger 
 Dumas was writing extremely interesting though not 
 altogether persuasive prefaces to his plays, and was 
 particularly occupied with some of the destructive activi- 
 ties of modern woman a subject which, as we are aware, 
 attracted him strongly he made some remarks about the 
 things we ought to laugh at and the things we ought not 
 to laugh at. "It is our common habit in France," he 
 wrote, " to laugh at serious things." We may, indeed, 
 extend his observation and say that in England it is often 
 our habit especially in musical comedies to laugh at 
 serious things. But, according to Dumas, the only right 
 attitude is to laugh at things which are not serious, and 
 which have no pretension to be serious. When we are 
 face to face with a grave social danger, it is a very curious 
 sort of wisdom which dismisses such subjects with a laugh. 
 There is, of course, a touch of pedantry in an observation 
 like this, and there was certainly a good deal of pedantry 
 in Dumas' didactic attitude. Nevertheless, there is solid 
 truth beneath, which is very applicable to our modern 
 audiences in England. 
 
 If we go back a certain number of years, to the time, for 
 instance, when The Profligate was produced, or to the time 
 when Ibsen's plays were first represented in our capital, 
 we find that the common attitude of average people was 
 one of shocked resentment. " The problem play " was 
 looked at with open abhorrence, as though it were an 
 accursed thing, revolutionary and immoral. Indeed, 
 every serious effort made by the realist to represent life 
 in plain, undisguised fashion was regarded, and is still 
 regarded in many quarters, as savouring of impiety. 
 Those who adopt such an attitude have certainly one 
 justification. They point out that the playhouse is open 
 to a very mixed public, of very different ages, and that it 
 is wrong, or at all events highly injudicious to put on 
 the stage problem plays which might be an offence to 
 the youthful and immature. There is a further point also, 
 which is somewhat open to controversy, but which is 
 advanced by those who desire to keep serious discussion 
 about life and morals away from the boards. There is 
 all the difference, we are told, between what is read on the 
 printed page and what is enacted before our eyes by living 
 characters. The second is supposed to make a far deeper 
 
182 OLD SAWS AND MODERN INSTANCES 
 
 impression than the first, and therefore the enacted scene, 
 if in any sense it is unpleasant, is likely to do more mischief 
 in proportion to its vivid and lively character. It is diffi- 
 cult to dogmatise on a point like this, because it depends 
 largely upon the individual whether a stronger impression 
 is created by a story or a play. But the other point of 
 objection proceeds on an assumption which no lover of 
 drama can possibly concede. It assumes that a play is a 
 mere entertainment, possessed of no serious dignity in 
 itself, but only a sheer matter of amusement. In other 
 words, it assumes that dramatic art is not art at all, because, 
 directly we think of it, no art, whether painting, or sculp- 
 ture, or literature, can be regulated in accordance with the 
 age or immaturity of the public to whom it is presented. 
 You do not ask your painter to remember that a child may 
 look at his picture, nor do you ask your Hardy s and Mere- 
 diths to remember that their pages may be perused by 
 young and sensitive persons. 
 
 The fact is that a good deal of ambiguity surrounds the 
 use of such words as " the immoral," as applied to stage 
 plays and the theatre. The very same critics who object 
 to the problem play appear to have no objection when 
 similar subjects are treated with easy wit and from a comical 
 standpoint by the writers of musical comedy. What is 
 it which should strictly be called " the immoral " ? Im- 
 morality consists, obviously, in putting people wrong about 
 the relations of virtue and vice. It consists in adorning 
 vice with seductive colours, in hiding the ugliness of the 
 corrupt, in adopting little affectations of worldliness or 
 wit in the effort to screen from the public gaze the real 
 misery of a decadent civilisation. Or, again, when we 
 have to treat with the actual conditions which obtain in 
 this world of ours, it is plainly immoral to ignore the law of 
 cause and effect. To pretend, for instance, that vice has 
 no consequences, that everything can be put right, that 
 plenary forgiveness waits on repentance and remorse, is 
 immoral. It is possible for human creatures to forgive, 
 and in some rare cases it is even possible for them to forget. 
 But Nature never forgives, and no tears can wipe out the 
 social effects of crime. To confuse the public on points like 
 these, to present them with a false theory, is, indeed, an 
 immoral thing. But how can it be called immoral to see 
 some danger ahead and warn people of the enormous 
 importance of avoiding it? How can it be immoral to 
 
REALISTIC DRAMA 183 
 
 observe men and women on the brink of a precipice, and 
 to try to pull them back ? The man who engages on a 
 task like this cannot be called immoral, even though he may 
 have to use very plain and ugly terms in acquitting himself 
 of his disagreeable task. 
 
 This, I take it, is the defence of realism ; its justification 
 in the face of its numerous critics. There may be things 
 to be said on the other side. Sometimes the realist may 
 be like the satirist, and some satirists appear to have a 
 predilection for ugly things. But that hardly touches the 
 main centre of realism as we find it in drama. Its chief 
 quality is to be absolutely fearless and ruthless in the 
 exposure of all that is harmful, rotten, degrading, just as 
 equally it should be its clear duty to set forth all that is 
 helpful, stimulating, salutary. If realists are fonder of 
 the first duty than the second, their excuse is that there 
 is much necessary spade-work to be done in removing the 
 evil before we can even hope to see the good. Besides, it is 
 a melancholy fact that the good is, from the dramatic 
 standpoint, not rarely the uninteresting. The true apology 
 of the realist, however, is to be found in his passionate 
 desire for truth truth at all costs, his equally passionate 
 hatred of all hypocrisy and sham, his zeal to anchor himself 
 on solid facts and to refuse to care whether he gives pain 
 or discomfort to men and women who would rather live 
 in a fool's paradise. The best part of the influence of 
 Ibsen on the modern drama is to be found in his clear 
 promulgation of the necessity for truth. This point we 
 shall have an opportunity of observing presently. 
 
 In April, 1889, when The Profligate was produced, Ibsen's 
 influence on English dramatists had not yet begun. Indeed, 
 clear traces of its influence are only discoverable in 1895, 
 when The Notorious Mrs. Ebbsmith was seen on the boards. 
 But the impulse to veracity, the resolute desire to study 
 human nature, and especially to discover the effects on 
 that human nature of a certain course of conduct more or 
 less deliberately and recklessly pursued these are the 
 signs which prove to us that Pinero's The Profligate was 
 in truth a drama of realism. The real change can hardly 
 be better seen than in the treatment of the principal 
 character. That a human being is to a very large extent 
 a slave of his habits is adequately recognised in the play. 
 In other words, we see the first beginnings of the doctrine 
 of determinism. If a man acts from motives, and if the 
 
184 OLD SAWS AND MODERN INSTANCES 
 
 motives are in their turn automatically suggested by a type 
 of conduct deliberately pursued through several years, 
 then in the case of human action we get as much certainty 
 of sequence between cause and effect as we do in external 
 nature. Given the antecedents, the consequents will 
 follow. Given the motives supplied by the past life, and 
 a man's action is inevitable. Or, to put the matter in a 
 concrete case where its immediate pertinence is easily 
 seen, given a vicious career, then the ordinary and habitual 
 conduct of the man at each successive episode or incident 
 in his life will be vicious. I lay stress on the point because 
 here is the commencement of a scientific psychology quite 
 as much as an illustration of realism on the stage. 
 
 Dunstan Renshaw is a profligate not, observe, merely 
 an ordinary " man of the world," as we call it, but one who 
 has done definite acts which stamp his nature, especially 
 in his relations with Janet Preece. Dunstan Renshaw 
 falls in love with Leslie Brudenell, and in the first moments 
 of emotional excitement and expansion he declares to his 
 friend that the companionship of a pure woman is a revela- 
 tion to him. " She seemed," he tells Murray, " to take me 
 by the hand and to lead me out of darkness into the light." 
 All his high-flown language is perfectly explicable in a man 
 who had, apparently, lived on his nerves and who was 
 capable of intense moments of feeling. But what does not 
 follow what, indeed, is in the highest sense improbable 
 is that any radical change in character can be thus 
 effected. Let us even suppose that such a sudden con- 
 version were possible which is granting a good deal more 
 than the scientific psychologist would allow there is 
 always the terrible past, which is never buried but is always 
 starting into fresh and vivid reality. How can a man like 
 Dunstan Renshaw, merely because he marries a pure 
 woman, wipe out his past ? The past has " overtaken 
 him," he says in one excited utterance. " You know what 
 my existence has been; I am in deadly fear; I dread the 
 visit of a stranger or the sight of strange handwriting, and 
 in my sleep I dream that I am muttering into Leslie's ear 
 the truth against myself." 
 
 Of course, his past sins find him out, as his friend Murray 
 had prophesied. The whole pitiful history of Janet Preece 
 comes to the light, and looks all the uglier because by the 
 use of the long arm of coincidence Leslie's brother Wilfrid 
 has loved Janet. Ah, you say, but the woman can forgive : 
 
REALISTIC DRAMA 185 
 
 Leslie is a good woman ! It is true that she can forgive, 
 but she can hardly forget ; and, even if she did, how does 
 this help Dunstan Renshaw, who finds it impossible to 
 forget ? In other words, the past cannot be obliterated 
 by a stroke of the pen, and it is the intimate and deadly 
 quality of all sins that they leave permanent traces on the 
 man and woman who have committed them. 
 
 " And having tasted stolen honey 
 You can't buy innocence for money." 
 
 We can understand how new a thing in English drama 
 was this ruthless treatment of a grave problem, when we 
 discover that owing to the solicitations of John Hare, the 
 only true, as well as artistic, end of this play was changed. 
 John Hare was guided by the popular prejudice in favour 
 of a happy ending, and he therefore besought the dramatist 
 to soften down the terrible conclusion into something wholly 
 unreal and artificial, which should send the spectators away 
 in a happier frame of mind. Well, it is an old-established 
 prejudice in theatrical audiences to desire happy endings. 
 Even Aristotle recognised the fact. But such exhibitions 
 of human weakness do not alter the stern facts of life; 
 they only proclaim aloud the hopeless divergence between 
 popular art and an art based on psychology and science. 
 There are some problems that cannot be solved by tears or 
 forgiveness. What sort of married life was possible for 
 Dunstan Renshaw and Leslie ? The dramatist cut the 
 Gordian knot by making the hero kill himself, for in no other 
 fashion probably can a dramatist bring home to those who 
 see his plays the dreadful consequence of certain crimes. 
 But if we want to see what is the result of marriages of this 
 kind, we cannot do better than turn to one of the works of 
 the Norwegian dramatist, Ibsen. Ghosts is not a pleasant 
 play, but it conveys a tremendous moral. In the course 
 of the story we discover that Mrs. Alving's husband is a 
 profligate of a type absolutely comparable with Dunstan 
 Renshaw. For various reasons, including social and 
 external decency, she determines to make the best of it 
 and go on living with the man as if he were a sort of saint 
 instead of a blackguard. Conventional morality requires 
 that a wife should go on living with her husband whatever 
 he may be guilty of such is the moral of Pastor Manders. 
 But it is exactly this worship of humbug and pretence which 
 
186 OLD SAWS AND MODERN INSTANCES 
 
 the true moralist reprobates in the severest terms. Ibsen's 
 Ghosts is generally considered as a sort of sequel to Ibsen's 
 Doll's House it is equally a sequel to Pinero's The Profli- 
 gate. Why Nora is justified in running away from her home 
 is because in certain conditions life becomes impossible for 
 a married pair. Why Dunstan Renshaw commits suicide 
 is because certain sins are never forgiven or forgotten. If 
 we choose to disregard these realities the next generation 
 will suffer. " The fathers have eaten sour grapes, and the 
 children's teeth are set on edge." The son of the profligate 
 Councillor Alving ends by being a helpless idiot, crying 
 for the sunshine. 
 
 It does not follow, of course, that The Profligate is in 
 itself a good play, or even a good example of dramatic 
 realism. It is worth while looking at this point for a mo- 
 ment, because it will throw light on our subject from another 
 quarter. What are the obvious defects of The Profligate ? 
 We notice a certain crudeness in the composition and con- 
 struction. If you look at the opening scene of The Second 
 Mrs. Tanqueray you will find one of the most admirable 
 examples that Sir Arthur Pinero has ever given us of 
 what is technically called " exposition." The dinner party 
 given by Aubrey Tanqueray to his friends reveals in the 
 most natural way in the world the story in which we are 
 to be interested, and the clever manner in which Paula is 
 herself introduced at the end of the first act gives us a very 
 necessary sight of the heroine who is to play so fatal a part 
 in Aubrey Tanqueray' s destiny. The Profligate commences 
 with a conversation between Hugh Murray, Renshaw' s 
 friend, and Lord Dangars, which is by no means so happy. 
 Moreover, in carrying out the intrigue there is a decided 
 lack of naturalness, or rather of inevitableness. Every 
 play of the sort must invoke the aid of coincidence, because 
 in presenting a little picture, foreshortened and concen- 
 trated, of a complete and rounded-off story, the playwright 
 must be permitted to use all the expedients which we recog- 
 nise to be of the nature of accidents. But the use of coinci- 
 dence in The Profligate goes beyond all bounds. It is 
 necessary, of course, that Leslie, wife of Dunstan Renshaw, 
 should come face to face with Janet Preece, who has been 
 her husband's victim. But the mechanism which produces 
 this result is decidedly arbitrary, if not far-fetched. Hazard 
 and accident play an overwhelming part. Accident brings 
 Janet to Paddington Station at the same time as Leslie 
 
REALISTIC DRAMA 187 
 
 and her brother; accident decides that Leslie's school 
 friend, Miss Stonehay, should take Janet as a travelling 
 companion; accident, once more, brings the Stonehay 
 family precisely to the environs of Florence, and to the 
 villa in which the Renshaws are living; and finally, there 
 is not so much nature as artifice in the arrangement by 
 which Janet stays with Leslie at the villa instead of going 
 away as she naturally would through feelings of sheer 
 delicacy. There is another side on which The Profligate 
 is open to criticism. The danger of all realistic plays is 
 that they are apt to tumble unaware into melodrama. I 
 mean by melodrama an exaggeration in the drawing of 
 character, the sacrifice of a good deal of probability in 
 order to accentuate the situation, and a noticeable want of 
 connection between the motives and acts of the personages 
 involved. The character of Dunstan Renshaw shows many 
 signs of exaggeration. His raison d'etre in the piece is to 
 represent a profligate and a seducer, and a man who has 
 lived the particular life that he is supposed to have lived, 
 and who, even on the eve of his marriage, indulges in a 
 stupid carouse, is hardly capable of those finer shades of 
 feeling, of remorse and self-chastisement, which he betrays 
 towards the end of the play. So, too, Leslie's evolution 
 is decidedly abrupt from the innocence of the earlier stage 
 to the knowledge of life after one month's tete-a-tete with 
 her husband. 
 
 How different is the masterly treatment which we come 
 across in The Second Mrs. Tanqueray ! We understand the 
 situation from the very beginning. The characters are not 
 exaggerated, and we see them developing before our eyes 
 on lines which we recognise as essentially probable and true. 
 The personality of Aubrey Tanqueray may be a little 
 obscure here and there, but Paula is an admirable creation, 
 whose conduct throughout is what we might have expected 
 of a woman in such circumstances and subject to such 
 temptations; while, as in the case of Greek tragedy, we 
 are dimly aware from the first scene to the last of a Fate 
 hanging over all the characters and dooming them to their 
 eventual ruin. There is, it is true, one coincidence which 
 may strike some observers as strange. It is the accident 
 which brings back Ardale, the accepted lover of Ellean, into 
 the presence of the heroine, with whom he had such close 
 relations in the past. Nevertheless here, as it seems to me, 
 the coincidence is not in any sense surprising or unnatural, 
 
188 OLD SAWS AND MODERN INSTANCES 
 
 given the past circumstances of Paula's life and her numer- 
 ous adventures before she became Mrs. Tanqueray. It is 
 because of its fine theatrical execution, because it gives 
 us living figures whose dispositions and character inevitably 
 work up to the denouement, and because it does not slide 
 over into melodrama, that The Second Mrs. Tanqueray is, 
 so far as I can judge, one of the masterpieces of the modern 
 English stage. 
 
 For what is, or ought to be, the supreme excellence of a 
 play which purports to deal with real events and real charac- 
 ters, true to the country in which they live and explicable 
 on proper psychological grounds? I think the great test 
 is this. Do we look upon the enacted drama as a mere 
 spectacle, or do we find ourselves part of it ? Are we merely 
 sitting as spectators in a theatre divided from the stage by 
 the footlights, living our own lives while the people on the 
 boards live theirs ? Or are we transported in very deed 
 into the enacted scene, as though it were part of the life 
 which for the time we ourselves are leading ? A great play, 
 which greatly deals with supreme issues, has the power to 
 make us forget that we are in a theatre at all, or that 
 there is any distinction between us and the actors. In 
 other words, we live in the play, and do not merely look at 
 it. But how rarely do we undergo an experience like this ! 
 Assuredly, it is impossible in plays of romance ; it is equally 
 impossible in melodramas or farces. But the supreme 
 virtue of a drama of realism is that now and again it has 
 this strange power of transporting us out of ourselves. The 
 audience becomes a part of the play. Every one, perhaps, 
 will have his own instances to give of an experience of this 
 kind : for myself I felt it when I first saw The Second Mrs. 
 Tanqueray, and again, to take quite a modern instance, 
 when I saw Hindle Wakes. 
 
 This seems a fit opportunity for saying something of the 
 predominant influence of Ibsen. I have called it pre- 
 dominant because it seems a mere matter of fact that since 
 the vogue of the Norwegian dramatist most of the play- 
 writers of England have either altered their methods or 
 their style. But it is necessary to look at the matter a 
 little closer, because the influence which a man exerts on 
 the literature of another country is a somewhat intangible 
 thing, and we are only too apt to go wrong as to its range 
 and quality. The main influence of Ibsen has, undoubtedly, 
 
REALISTIC DRAMA 189 
 
 been in the direction of realism, defined in the sense in which 
 I have all along tried to use it. Realism means above all 
 else a devotion to the bare and explicit truth of human life 
 and human character, and the avoidance of all romantic 
 or poetic devices for obscuring the main issues. No sooner 
 had Ibsen begun to compose his social dramas than he 
 found himself immersed in a task evidently congenial to 
 him of tearing down the social conventions, exposing 
 the social hypocrisies which disguise the face of reality and 
 truth. Nearly every one of his social plays is an exposure + 
 of humbug of some sort. Now it is the case of some ship- 
 owner, who recklessly sends a rotten old hulk to sea for 
 reasons purely commercial ; and now it is the more intimate 
 relationship between men and women in the married state, 
 which seems to the dramatist to require careful analysis 
 and elucidation. Or, again, it is the fetish of mundane 
 respectability at which Ibsen will gird. He will show us a 
 Pastor Manders trying to persuade Mrs. Alving to go on 
 living with her profligate husband for the sake of external 
 decency ; or else will paint for us the character of a sincere 
 enthusiast for the truth who wishes to purify a town's 
 water supply, together with all the fatal consequences in 
 his case, the loss of personal prestige, the accusations of 
 treachery, the desertion of all his friends. These are the 
 various themes which Ibsen takes up in The Pillars of 
 Society, in A DoWs House, in Ghosts, and in An Enemy of 
 the People. And then, by a sudden change of outlook, in 
 order to prove that he cares more for truth than for theory, 
 Ibsen writes his strange play The Wild Duck, the whole 
 purport of which is to show that a fanatical devotion to 
 truth may cause just as much injury as the studious and 
 calculated suppression of truth. What is wrong with 
 society is the reign of conventional ethics, supported by 
 such interested apostles of things as they are as clergymen 
 and business men. There are many dark corners which 
 ought to be looked into in this matter. Nevertheless, like 
 everything else, truth is a difficult goddess to worship, 
 and the intoxicated fanatic who devotes himself to her 
 cause will often do her graver harm than even the conven- 
 tional liar. Such seems to be the lesson of The Wild Duck, 
 albeit that it is a play which has always caused a certain 
 searching of heart among the disciples of Ibsen. But 
 the general impulse of striving to attain to the exact and 
 veritable fact remains as one of the chief heritages which 
 
190 OLD SAWS AND MODERN INSTANCES 
 
 Ibsen communicated to the dramatic world, and it is easy 
 to see in this respect how great has been his influence 
 amongst modern playwrights. 
 
 I pass to another point the question of dramatic con- 
 struction. Ibsen is a master of dramatic craftsmanship. 
 He certainly learnt some lessons in the school of Scribe in 
 Paris, but he applied and transformed the piece bien faite 
 in his own fashion, so that, externally at all events, an 
 Ibsen play seems to differ toto ccelo from the ordinary 
 pieces produced on the French stage. In some respects 
 Ibsen has an almost classical severity and restraint of form. 
 His Ghosts is, technically, like a Greek tragedy, so sure 
 is the progression of its incidents, so close is the interaction 
 between cause and effect. A Doll's House might possibly 
 commend itself to Euripides, although, of course, the Greek 
 dramatist would have solved the problem in his usual 
 fashion by introducing some god or goddess to cut the 
 Gordian knot. A method of which Ibsen was especially 
 fond in his plays was what has been called the retrospective 
 method. You start your plot on the very eve of a denoue- 
 ment, as close as you can to the tragic issue. Then you 
 make your characters expound the past in a series of ani- 
 mated dialogues, so that when the conclusion is reached you 
 have become thoroughly acquainted with the personages 
 who bring it about. 1 Ibsen shows a wonderful skill in the 
 fashion in which he makes the personages of the drama 
 reveal their past actions and also themselves, to which we 
 may add the obvious fact that his conversations themselves 
 are conducted with a sense of actuality which makes them 
 extraordinarily vivid. You can read a play by Ibsen with 
 almost as much pleasurable interest as you can witness it 
 on the stage, because there is not only something easy 
 and natural in the sentences put into the mouths of the 
 various characters, but there is also a distinct economy 
 of effect. The sentences themselves have weight and 
 importance because they so clearly lead up to the issue. 
 
 The only thing which interferes with this triumphant 
 actuality is Ibsen's increasing tendency as he grew to his 
 later years to use symbols and images, sometimes of a very 
 vague and elusive character. The symbol of the Wild 
 Duck is comparatively easy, for it very fairly indicates both 
 the character and the fate of the girl heroine, Hedwig. In 
 
 1 Mr. Bernard Shaw uses this method in Mrs. Warren's Profession. 
 
REALISTIC DRAMA 191 
 
 The Lady from the Sea we have advanced a step further in 
 the symbolic direction. After all, the Wild Duck was a 
 mere symbol, subordinate to the plot itself, but in The 
 Lady from the Sea the idea of the play itself is wholly sym- 
 bolic. The problem of married life is not discussed as 
 it had been, for instance, in A Doll's House, but is merged in 
 a sort of allegory suggestive of the romance of love. Plays 
 like Rosmersholm and Hedda Gabler belong to the earlier 
 type, but when we come to The Master Builder and Little 
 Eyolf, and especially to the last, When We Dead Awaken, 
 symbolism is once more in full swing; and, indeed, in 
 When We Dead Awaken it represents, or perhaps disguises, 
 a definite weakening in dramatic power. According to 
 the French critic, M. Filon, however, it is just this symbolism 
 or allegorical element in Ibsen which makes him congenial 
 to Anglo-Saxon and Teutonic tastes, while it renders it 
 much more difficult for Parisian audiences and the Latin 
 races to understand him. There is, undoubtedly, a strong 
 strain of mysticism in all Northern peoples, Teutonic, 
 Scandinavian, and Anglo-Saxon, but in the representations 
 of Ibsen's plays in England I have never been able to 
 detect that Ibsen owes such popularity as he has gained 
 to his mystical elements. As a matter of fact, he never 
 has been popular in the widest sense in England, and cer- 
 tainly the performance of plays like A Master Builder and 
 Little Eyolf has not enabled English spectators to welcome 
 Ibsen as akin to them in essence and spirit. Obviously, 
 too, the symbolic tendency interferes in no slight measure 
 with the realistic tendency which belongs to the best work 
 of Ibsen. Symbolism may be valuable inasmuch as it 
 suggests that realism is by no means the last word in dra- 
 matic art, but it is not a phase in the great Norwegian's 
 work which has lent itself to much successful imitation on 
 the part of his followers and admirers. 
 
 There is another aspect of Ibsen's work, however, which 
 deserves attention, especially as connected with modern 
 movements in social and intellectual life. 1 I refer to the 
 extraordinary prominence which he has given to women in 
 his dramas, and especially to women as representing the 
 individualistic idea as against State action or collectivism. 
 Ibsen, undoubtedly, thought, as most of his social dramas 
 
 1 Cf. Henrik Ibsen. A Critical Study, by R. Ellis Roberts (Martin 
 Seeker), a book of no little value to the student of drama. 
 
192 OLD SAWS AND MODERN INSTANCES 
 
 prove, that all State action, as such, whether exercised 
 through a compact majority or through police or other 
 agencies, is entirely harmful and crippling because it puts 
 chains upon the individual. As against society the indi- 
 vidual is always right. Now, who are the great individual- 
 ists ? Women, undoubtedly, who not only attack problems 
 in their own fashion, but instinctively resist the pressure 
 of laws imposed upon them, as it seems to their intelligence, 
 in an entirely arbitrary manner. Hence the importance of 
 women in Ibsen's plays, and hence, too, the idea, for which, 
 indeed, there is a good deal to be said, that Ibsen was the 
 great feminist writer, doing more for the cause of women 
 both as poet and artist than any thinker had done before 
 him. It is not quite certain, however, whether the Nor- 
 wegian dramatist really liked this identification of his 
 views with those of the ordinary feminist platform. He 
 certainly did not keenly support any women's movements, 
 and, apparently, he was annoyed that his play A Doll's 
 House should have been interpreted as a tract for feminism. 
 But it remains true that to women he assigned all the 
 virtues the possession of which he denied to men. The 
 love of truth, a clear perception of what is reasonable, a fine 
 dose of enthusiasm, immense energy, all these things are 
 attributed to women in his plays, whereas, on the contrary, 
 the men exhibit the mean vices stupidity, selfishness, 
 sometimes cowardice, sometimes also rascality and a reckless 
 greed. There are exceptions, of course. Hedda Gabler is a 
 woman entirely devoid of conscience, while Dr. Stockmann 
 is a fine example of the well-meaning moralist who pursues 
 his love of truth even though society be shattered. So, too, 
 Dr. Wangel is a husband entirely praiseworthy, but I know 
 of hardly any other husband in the Ibsenite drama of whom 
 the same thing can be said. The women, I say, have all the 
 virtues, or, at all events, all the virtues from the point of view 
 of the Norwegian dramatist. Many examples occur. There 
 is Nora, for instance, in A Doll's House, who cannot endure 
 a married life which is not founded on respect for individual 
 duties, as against her husband Torvald, who only desires 
 to hush up scandal. Or there is Rebecca in Rosmersholm, 
 a far finer character than the unhappy Rosmer, much 
 braver and more resolute in her determination to save her 
 soul through love. Or in The Master Builder, while 
 Solness seems only inspired by the single idea that somehow 
 or other he must keep back the advancing tide of the 
 
REALISTIC DRAMA 193 
 
 younger generation, Hilda is inspired by a much more 
 healthy ambition in trying to restore to Solness his earlier 
 dreams. Or, once more, in the last of the Ibsen plays, 
 When We Dead Awaken, it is Irene who has truth and 
 right on her side, as against the egotist Rubek, who only 
 desires to make use of human personalities in the selfish 
 pursuit of art for art's sake. 
 
 As we review these and many other instances we see 
 that to Ibsen woman is not only the born anarchist, but 
 that she is also justified in her anarchical views. The 
 world is poisoned because every one is contented with 
 outworn social and ethical conventions. Women refuse 
 to be blinded by the dust of these antique superstitions; 
 they are on the side of freedom, independence, self-realisa- 
 tion, the only ideals at which human life ought to aim, the 
 only ideals which Ibsen, at all events, chooses to glorify. 
 Of course, Ibsen was very one-sided in views of this kind. 
 The progress of humanity depends on two movements which 
 must go on side by side. One is the impulse towards 
 change; the other is the steady drag towards stability. 
 To prevent a given social state from petrification there must 
 be constant revolts, a continuous series of fresh and lively 
 efforts to strike out new paths. But in order that a social 
 state may exist at all, the newer impulses must be harmon- 
 ised with the older structure. Order is as necessary for 
 the world as progress. Ibsen's ideal of self-realisation, if 
 carried to its logical results, means the destruction of sta- 
 bility for the sake of a few hare-brained individuals. Nor 
 yet is self-realisation to be distinguished in the last resort 
 from a greedy and assertive selfishness. 
 
 In his influence on the world of drama, however, Ibsen's 
 fondness not only for drawing women but for endowing them 
 with energetic qualities has played no small part in the 
 evolution of feminist ideas. In all modern realistic work 
 whether you observe it in the plays of Pinero or of George 
 Bernard Shaw, the woman has attained a prominence and 
 importance far removed from the older dramatic concep- 
 tion of women either as a toy or as a goddess or an idol to 
 be worshipped in a shrine. None of us in this modern 
 generation are likely to forget either Mr. Shaw's Candida 
 or the same dramatist's Ann Whitefield. The first is to 
 me, I confess, a somewhat enigmatic personage. You 
 will remember what Candida, the excellent wife of an excel- 
 lent clergyman, dared to do in the play bearing her name. 
 
194 OLD SAWS AND MODERN INSTANCES 
 
 She knows that she is loved by her clergyman husband; 
 she is also aware that she is the object of a fantastic adora- 
 tion on the part of a young poet, Eugene Marchbanks. 
 She daringly puts lover and husband to the test, and says 
 that whoever is the weaker and needs her most will have 
 her for the future. She plays this cruel game, although 
 she knows that her stupid common -place self-opinionated 
 husband who, by the way, is a very successful clergyman 
 adores her, and that her namby-pamby sentimental 
 febrile lover puts her on a pinnacle as being much too great 
 for her commonplace surroundings. Of course, the drama- 
 tist gets out of his difficulty by explaining to us that the 
 Rev. James Morell was in reality the weaker man who 
 needed Candida most of all, and so all comes right in the 
 end. But whether we are for this reason to forgive the 
 wife, or whether she is acting as all women act in similar 
 circumstances, are questions which the mere man finds it 
 difficult to answer. Mr. Shaw's heroines are not always 
 pleasant people, with the exception, of course, of Lady 
 Cecily Waynflete in Captain Brassbountfs Conversion. 
 Some of them are of the hard huntress type, like Ann White- 
 field in Man and Superman, who runs down her quarry with 
 magnificent persistence and success. Barbara is a subtle 
 conception, subtle and interesting, but her creator does not 
 improve her character as the play proceeds. To compare 
 the women of Mr. Shaw with the women of Ibsen would 
 be an interesting topic, but one for which, unfortunately, 
 I have no space. 
 
 The women of Sir Arthur Pinero are very carefully drawn, 
 and in this perhaps, once again, we can see the influence, 
 consciously or unconsciously, exercised by Ibsen. I have 
 already referred to Leslie Brudenell in The Profligate, and 
 to Paula in The Second Mrs. Tanqueray. I have yet to 
 deal with the heroine of The Benefit of the Doubt, with 
 The Notorious Mrs. Ebbsmith, and with Iris. With regard 
 to Agnes Ebbsmith, interesting character as she undoubt- 
 edly is, there is perhaps less to be said because the play 
 in which she appears is not so carefully wrought, or at all 
 events is not so successful as the others of which mention 
 has been made. Still, the character of Agnes Ebbsmith 
 raises several most curious problems which are worth 
 studying, quite apart from the success or want of success 
 of the play called by her name. There is a strange tragedy 
 about the woman. She is full of independence and spirit, 
 
REALISTIC DRAMA 195 
 
 and without any doubt she wanted to be the companion, 
 friend, and fellow-worker of Lucas Cleeve, with whom she 
 had elected to live. Perhaps Lucas Cleeve himself thought 
 at one time that life was possible both for him and for 
 Agnes on the high platonic plane of companionship and 
 camaraderie. But because Lucas is a half-baked creature, 
 or rather because he is merely the ordinary man, Thomme 
 moyen sensucl, the experiment is a failure. Agnes is forced, 
 deliberately, to appeal to his senses and lower nature in 
 order to fortify his constancy. 
 
 I turn to The Benefit of the Doubt and to Iris. Both the 
 heroines of these plays are, from an ordinary masculine 
 standpoint, neither sincere nor praiseworthy. Yet, on 
 the contrary, thanks to Pinero's art, we are only too 
 ready to forgive them both. We make excuses for them; 
 we say that circumstances were too strong, that their 
 positions were unendurable, that their sins ought to be 
 forgiven. Here is Theo Fraser in The Benefit of the Doubt. 
 She is married to a hard, dour Scotsman, Fraser of Locheen, 
 who will wear kilts at the dinner table, and insists on 
 having his deplorable bagpipes played on every occasion. 
 Well, it is not fair to a sensitive woman, on whose nerves 
 these things act with terrible force. So she flies for refuge 
 to Jack Allingham, and there is a scandal, an action for 
 divorce, and the judge gives her the benefit of the doubt. 
 Now, mark what ensued. Fraser, not being an absolute 
 ass, says that they must go abroad in order to get over the 
 malevolence of spiteful tongues. He wants to hush up 
 scandal like Torvald in A Doll's House. Theo resolutely 
 refuses to do anything of the kind, and says, on the con- 
 trary, that the situation must be faced, and that they must 
 remain in town. She may have been right in principle, 
 but the sequel proves that she was wrong in fact. Upset 
 by her husband's arguments, she goes once more to Jack 
 Allingham in a half -fainting condition; she drinks cham- 
 pagne on an empty stomach, and, not to put too fine a 
 point on it, she gets intoxicated. In this condition she 
 implores Jack Allingham to run away with her. Not a 
 nice woman this, and yet, upon my soul, the dramatist 
 makes us forgive her ! Apparently he forgives her himself, 
 for he lets her fall into the hands of the wife of a worthy 
 bishop, who is going to spread her immaculate reputation 
 over Theo's peccadilloes and gradually restore her in the 
 public credit. I am always wondering why this fine play, 
 
196 OLD SAWS AND MODERN INSTANCES 
 
 The Benefit of the Doubt, has never been revived. I suppose 
 we must wait until the National Theatre is established 
 before we can hope to see it again. The first and second 
 acts are masterpieces. 
 
 But let us continue with Iris. Iris Bellamy, according 
 to her own account, is more sinned against than sinning. 
 She is left a widow at a very early age, with a certain for- 
 tune, which she is to resign if she marries again. Round 
 her are at least three men Croker Harrington (who perhaps 
 does not count, for he is a faithful, dog-like creature); 
 Laurence Trenwith, an impecunious young man, with whom 
 she is sincerely in love ; and the Mephistopheles of the piece, 
 Frederick Maldonado, a hard, wealthy, masterful financier. 
 Now, Iris cannot be straight with any of these. She cannot 
 make up her mind to live in poverty abroad with Laurence 
 Trenwith. Poor Croker hardly enters into her calcula- 
 tions. Suddenly she is herself confronted with poverty, 
 owing to the ill-doings of a rascally attorney ; and this is 
 Maldonado' s chance. He leaves a cheque-book with her, 
 and she makes use of it. He prepares a beautifully fur- 
 nished flat for her, leaving the key with her, and eventually 
 she drifts into accepting it. Then Trenwith returns, and 
 she tells him the whole story, expecting him to forgive her. 
 Immensely hurt at his refusal to have anything to do with 
 her, both hurt and surprised, she is left to Maldonado' s 
 mercy : and because he has discovered the intrigue between 
 Iris and Trenwith, she is finally driven out into the streets. 
 You will say that she is punished, and terribly punished. 
 It is quite true. The point is that we are genuinely sorry 
 for her. And yet could there be a more worthless woman ? 
 Was she wicked, or merely weak ? We really cannot say. 
 Perhaps she was what Paula was originally before she com- 
 menced her career as a courtesan. But the case stands 
 as it does with Sophy Fullgarney in The Gay Lord Quex, 
 whom the hero very justly describes as a cat which scratches 
 the hand that tries to pet it. Yet Sophy Fullgarney 
 becomes in the sequel a quite estimable character, although 
 she is a mean, despicable spy. And Iris, too, lives in our 
 memory, although she is quite non-moral, perhaps even 
 basely immoral. Need I add the instance of Paula Tanque- 
 ray ? Did she ever love Aubrey Tanqueray ? I think not. 
 I think she only cared for comfort, for the satisfaction of 
 living in a proper home, of being respected as a legitimate 
 wife. She betrays her husband at every point. Capricious- 
 
REALISTIC DRAMA 197 
 
 ness is the least of her vices. She asks her disreputable 
 friends to stay with her. Even if she had won the love of 
 her step-daughter, Ellean, it is doubtful if she would have 
 known what to do with it. And yet and yet we are 
 more than a little inclined to forgive Paula Tanqueray, 
 although she had absolutely ruined a good man, and 
 brought positive agony to his daughter. " There is a 
 soul of goodness in things evil " ; that is the dramatist's 
 lesson. Or perhaps it is only an illustration of the 
 famous text, " To know all is to pardon all." Pinero has 
 made us understand his women, and though our judgment 
 and our common sense rebel, we are sympathetically 
 interested in them, and inclined to grant them plenary 
 absolution. 
 
 We have yet to see how the progress of realism in drama 
 has manifested itself among our latest contemporary 
 writers, and especially among such dramatists as Mr. 
 George Bernard Shaw who is in some respects perhaps 
 too fantastic to be called a realist Mr. St. John Hankin, 
 Mr. Granville Barker, Mr. Arnold Bennett, Mr. Galsworthy, 
 and Mr. Stanley Houghton. I hope in a subsequent essay 
 to find an opportunity of dealing with some of the most 
 modern developments. In the present instance it seemed 
 worth while to spend some little time over a period, which 
 means more perhaps to the middle-aged man than it does 
 to the more youthful of our contemporaries, and especially 
 over the work of Sir Arthur Pinero, whom this present age, 
 a little fickle and oblivious of what has been done in the 
 past, has begun somewhat ungratefully to disparage. 
 
 But before I end, I must go back to a point which was 
 alluded to in my first paper, and which indeed is suggested 
 by movements that are going on all round us, both in 
 literary and dramatic art. We have been living under the 
 tyranny of realism for some years past, and in some respects 
 I think the dominion of realistic modes of thought has 
 become an obsession. If I confine myself to what realism 
 means in drama, I should say that its tendency is to lead 
 us straight to pessimism, to that characteristically sombre 
 and gloomy pessimism which has invaded foreign literatures 
 even more than our own, and of which the Russian literature 
 affords us admirable specimens. Why should realism lead 
 to pessimism? The answer is quite simple, and also 
 instructive. The realistic treatment of human character 
 
198 OLD SAWS AND MODERN INSTANCES 
 
 lays stress on the individual, his rights, his claims, his 
 Borrows, his passions, all that he demands of life and all 
 that life seems to deny him. Now, despite the teaching of 
 Ibsen, the individual is not always right as against society, 
 nor does ultimate wisdom reside with the minority as 
 against the majority. The individual by himself is a weak 
 and feeble thing, and the enumeration of his particular 
 grievances distorts the proper perspective of human 
 existence in general and depreciates the average health and 
 sanity of the social state. Reflecting on his personal woes, 
 the individual naturally becomes a pessimist; or, if we 
 may put it in another way, selfishness, a narrow absorbing 
 egotism, is the root of all evil. At all events our realists, 
 both in literature and in drama, exhaust themselves in 
 denouncing the injustice and the hopelessness of human 
 life, because they persist in taking the standpoint of the 
 acutely sensitive individual instead of regarding such 
 
 I matters from an objective or world standpoint. 
 One of the best ways of trying to discover the tendencies 
 of a particular movement amongst ourselves is to see what is 
 happening in foreign literatures. The Russian literature 
 is very apt for this purpose, and, as we are aware, modern 
 Russian literature has been not incorrectly described as 
 " pessimism devoid of humour." I will not take such well- 
 known writers as Tolstoy, Gorky, Dostoieffsky. I will 
 only mention one of the modern novelists, Artzybascheff. 
 A recent novel, entitled At the Utmost Limit, has no 
 other theme than to portray the black night, the utter 
 and irremediable senselessness of all earthly existence, 
 and to suggest suicide as the only panacea for human ill. 
 Nevertheless, what is happening even in Russia, the home 
 of pessimism ? 1 There is a school of younger writers who, 
 in reaction from this state of things, might almost be de- 
 scribed as optimists. Something of the same sort has been 
 happening among ourselves. 
 
 There are only two ways of waking from the nightmare 
 of realism when pushed to its extreme of egotistic mania. 
 One is the way of symbolism, the way of dreams. You may 
 tell yourself that the only means to discover the mystery 
 of the universe, and to reconcile the contradictions and 
 disorders of life, is to shut your eyes to the ordinary world 
 and throw the reins on the neck of imagination and fancy, 
 living in the mystic's paradise, finding an ideal happiness in 
 1 Written before the Russian Revolution. 
 
REALISTIC DRAMA 199 
 
 a world within the four walls of human consciousness. That 
 is what Maeterlinck does in some of his plays. Many hints 
 of the same kind of thing are to be found in Ibsen, who, as 
 his life progressed, grew to be more and more fond of sym- 
 bols. In a certain fashion also the Celtic mode of thought 
 of Yeats and other writers of the Irish school affords 
 another illustration. Mysticism then is one of the modes 
 of reaction, which come easy to some dreaming minds, a 
 mysticism which may be ascetic or may be sensuous, but 
 which is at all events wholly imaginative. I am not sure 
 that it is the more hopeful or the more effective path to lead 
 us out of our swamp of despair. 
 
 There is another way. You may choose not to ignore the 
 evils of life, but you may study them, just as the physician 
 and the surgeon study all the morbid growths of mental 
 and corporeal life. By a close study of the dreadful foe 
 you may in the end master the secret of his destructive 
 power, and, perchance, you may come upon this discovery, 
 that the evils of life do not flow from the nature of things, 
 but from human blindness, from human selfishness, from 
 precisely that lack of cohesion amongst the various members 
 of the human family which alone can raise them to higher 
 levels of culture and happiness. If men were more sensitive 
 to each other's feelings, if they could understand one 
 another better, they would cease to deplore their own suffer- 
 ings and find that life in the larger sense, a corporate life 
 of consenting human individualities, contains within itself 
 potentialities of real happiness. La joie de vivre, which is 
 extinguished by narrow egotism, may burst out afresh in 
 altruistic aims, in the efforts of a community to purge 
 itself of its maladies, in its resolute concerted striving to- 
 wards an exalted goal. Quite elementary and simple things 
 like pity, and affection, and love, supply us with materials, 
 not for wailing and misery, but for a rich contentment and 
 a serene peace. And so from the realism of dreadful facts 
 we get to the idealism of simple emotions, the discovery 
 that man is not by nature depraved, but by nature good 
 and filled with the joy of life, finding in love and human 
 service the satisfaction alike of his heart and his head. 
 Perhaps before that morrow dawns man must needs pass 
 through the valley of the shadow of doubt and despair. 
 But he may win the happy secret at last, and, if I may 
 judge once more from the tendencies of Russian literature, 
 and from the work especially of the young writer Alexis 
 
200 OLD SAWS AND MODERN INSTANCES 
 
 Remizoff, it is thus that we may find the path towards our 
 future deliverance. We shall not be untrue to life; we 
 shall not close our eyes to the existence of evil ; but having 
 once grappled with the malady of pessimistic selfishness we 
 shall discover how the idealism of simple things can, as 
 though by magic, make us healthful and sane. 
 
REALISTIC DRAMA 
 
 III 
 
 WHY do we speak of a " new " school of dramatists ? And 
 in what sense do they exhibit novelty, as compared with 
 their predecessors ? Many of the conditions for the pro- 
 duction of drama are, we know, fixed and constant the 
 conditions, for instance, which are involved in the presenta- 
 tion of a concentrated story or episode, carried out by living 
 personages, moving and talking before us. The dramatist 
 cannot explain to his audience, he can only illustrate ; 
 he reveals character not by description but by action and 
 dialogue : he has only a short time to produce his effect, 
 and therefore he must hit hard and hit early. All these 
 things we know, for they constitute the difference between 
 writing novels and writing plays. But there are other 
 conditions or perhaps we ought to call them traditions 
 or prejudices which are inessential, variable, dependent 
 on mere custom and fashion. If a man ignores such as 
 these, which his precedessor respected and of which very 
 likely he made a fetish, then on this ground he might be 
 called a " new " dramatist. There are, for instance, the 
 prejudice for a happy ending, the use of soliloquies and 
 asides, the necessity for " situations " at the end of each 
 act, the idea that you must not introduce fresh personages 
 in the last act, but gradually allow the course of your story 
 to strip off the unessential characters and leave you 
 towards the close with just the two or three vital characters 
 who matter. These are all temporary and accidental 
 fashions, so to speak, and a play is not necessarily better 
 because it retains them, or worse because it chooses to 
 ignore them. Even Scribe's sedulous care for a piece Men 
 faite has now become an outworn game at all events, 
 with some of the moderns. Dramatic construction, though 
 still considered a counsel of perfection, is not recognised 
 among our contemporaries as absolutely necessary to 
 dramatic salvation. 
 
 But there are much more subtle differences than these 
 
 201 
 
202 OLD SAWS AND MODERN INSTANCES 
 
 between the newer and the older school. It is a question 
 of temper, a question of manner, a question of preferred 
 subjects. The attitude towards the world has changed, 
 the attitude, in especial, towards moral problems and 
 social questions. Those doubters and agnostics who in 
 the 'sixties and 'seventies were sealed of the tribe of 
 Matthew Arnold and Arthur Clough were more than a 
 little sad about their obstinate questionings. Their 
 scepticism was not audacious : it was diffident, humble, 
 melancholy. They were very sorry that they could not 
 agree with the orthodox it was their misfortune, not their 
 fault. They ought to be condoled with, not reprobated. 
 The more modern attitude is not so much daring as in- 
 curious. Why should we bluster and say with John Stuart 
 Mill " and if such a Being condemn me to Hell, to Hell 
 I will go " ? Really there is no reason for any fuss. All 
 the fighting is over and done with. We need not brandish 
 our sceptical steel in the face of opponents whose oppor- 
 tunities for offensive attack are so strictly limited. There- 
 fore the new school neither strives nor cries because it is 
 persuaded that belief or unbelief is mainly a matter of 
 temperament or of ancestry, for which the individual 
 cannot be held responsible. If he is born a religious mystic, 
 he will write poetry like Miss Evelyn Underbill or Mr. 
 Francis Thompson ; and if his nature is to be an agnostic, 
 he will compose poems like Mr. Thomas Hardy. Things 
 are what they are and they will be what they will be. 
 Why should we allow ourselves to be disturbed ? 
 
 One result of this temper or attitude is that all the ethical 
 and social problems which our fathers fondly and foolishly 
 thought to be solved are regarded by their sons as entirely 
 open questions. There are no moral laws of the absolute 
 character which Kant delineated : there are a set of con- 
 ventions, some of them of considerable authority, but many 
 of them merely transitory and more or less accidental, 
 depending on time and place and associations. Did you 
 think that it was wrong for a girl to run away from her 
 home ? On the contrary, it may be a sign of a fine inde- 
 pendence, as in the case of Janet de Mullins in Mr. Hankin's 
 play, The Last of the De Mullins. Did you suppose that 
 when a prodigal returned to his home, he came back in a 
 chastened and repentant state of mind, having sown his 
 tares and very grateful that there was a home to welcome 
 him ? Oh no ! He comes as in The Return of the Prodigal, 
 
REALISTIC DRAMA 203 
 
 also by Mr. Hankin to make what terms he can with his 
 outraged father and secure for himself a further period of 
 indolent wastefulness at the paternal expense. Did you 
 imagine that a woman naturally preferred wedlock to a 
 looser bond of connection, in order, among other things, 
 that her child should be legitimate ? You are wrong. 
 The man she chose for her lover might not suit her for a 
 husband, as in the case of the heroines of Hindle Wakes 
 and Mr. Galsworthy's The Eldest Son. Indeed, when the 
 instinct for maternity is very strong, a woman will not 
 care who may be the father of her child. Let him fulfil 
 his temporary function, and she will fulfil her lasting one. 
 On this point read again Janet's views in the very illus- 
 trative play already referred to, Mr. Hankin' s The Last of 
 the De Mullins. The classic instance is in Maxime For- 
 mont's novel Le Semeur (translated as The Child of Chance) ; 
 but also some suggestion of the same spirit is found in 
 Mr. Bernard Shaw's Man and Superman. I am not con- 
 cerned, of course, to pass any ethical criticism on these 
 things; I merely note them as remarkable signs and 
 evidences of a modern temper. 
 
 And this naturally leads me to consider the kind of 
 subjects with which the new dramatist prefers to deal. 
 The great phenomenon of our time is the Emergence of 
 Woman, and it obviously affords a splendid opportunity for 
 the dramatist. One of the most constant qualities in all 
 dramatic work is the implied antithesis between the human 
 being and some great force, or forces, with which he is in 
 conflict. These forces may be envisaged either as a great 
 impersonal fate or necessity ; or as the heritage of a par- 
 ticular kind of character bequeathed from generation to 
 generation; or, once more, as the great mass of social 
 prejudice and convention, accumulated through many 
 ages. The individual feels himself cribbed, cabined, and 
 confined by these forces which seem to be outside himself 
 or, at all events, outside his own instinctive impulses 
 and the course of the struggle in which he engages to free 
 himself from restraints and live his own life is of the 
 essence of drama. Men have been all along more or less 
 in revolt, and in the struggle have proved themselves either 
 heroes or villains. But it is a more delicate and interesting 
 thing when woman dons her armour and goes into opposi- 
 tion, because her revolt touches, in a very immediate 
 fashion, sacred institutions like home and family. Ibsen 
 
204 OLD SAWS AND MODERN INSTANCES 
 
 was one of the earliest to understand the significance of 
 this woman movement, and because he regarded woman as 
 the born anarchist his plays gave a powerful incentive 
 to feminism and set the example for many dramatists. 
 A characteristic example also is to be found in Sudermann's 
 play Heimat, which we know as Magda. In this the 
 heroine turns her back on her home, and seeks an inde- 
 pendent career outside. On her return she has some very 
 bitter things to say of the conditions which made her home 
 life so intolerable to her, as for that is the assumption 
 they would to any other girl of spirit. Within recent years 
 we have seen, of course, several examples of plays based 
 on this insurgence of womanhood, many of them written 
 by female authors. 
 
 It would, in consequence, hardly be too much to say 
 that the nineteenth-century frame of mind was built up 
 on ideas with which the more modern mood is glaringly 
 at variance. A woman's life, so the older notion ran, 
 should be more or less a secluded life ; her girlhood should 
 be under the tutelage of her father and her mother; her 
 marriage should not so much emancipate her as put her 
 under another guardianship. Having accepted her hus- 
 band, she was bound to make the best of him, whatever 
 his mental or moral deficiencies. For marriage was an 
 institution intended to protect the woman, and keep her 
 in a safe position, free from the soul-harassing competition 
 of ordinary commercial and professional life. One of the 
 drawbacks of this theory was found to be the large pre- 
 dominance of women, and the consequent impossibility 
 of their all finding a home. Hence, when the daughter 
 began to revolt, she was able to plead in self-defence that, 
 although she was apparently educated for matrimony, 
 matrimony was not likely to come in her way. It was not 
 mere wilfulness, therefore, but rather a duty that she 
 should look out for herself and take her own chances in 
 the rough and tumble of things. But when once a revolt 
 begins you never know to what it may lead. As a matter 
 of fact, the revolt of the daughter was mixed up with a 
 much larger revolt of women as such, whether daughter, 
 wife, or mistress. What is the value of laws which enjoin 
 domestic privacy on the female ? Apparently they were 
 made by man for his own convenience, and they have no 
 other sanction except the tyrannical verdict of the male. 
 Thus marriage is one of the institutions first assailed. 
 
REALISTIC DRAMA 205 
 
 Why should a wife go on living with a husband whom she 
 despises? Why should marriage unions last through the 
 whole life ? Why should not the instinct of motherhood 
 be treated quite separately from the usual environment of 
 a legal husband and a recognised home ? Remember that 
 woman is the born anarchist, because in certain senses she 
 is more of an independent individual than the average 
 male. Men are more or less alike : women are often, 
 perhaps always, diverse. And thus all so-called ethical 
 laws, moral ordinances, social conventions, are put into 
 the melting-pot and, as we have seen, women, as treated 
 by the new dramatists, do many strange and unusual 
 things in the pursuit of their ideal freedom. Ibsen, perhaps, 
 started the business; Mr. Granville Barker, Mr. St. John 
 Hankin, Miss Elizabeth Robins, Miss Netta Syrett, and 
 many others, joined in the cry. The worst of it is that 
 sometimes in their hot-headed enthusiasm the apostles of 
 freedom get on a wrong scent. 
 
 Probably many of us have read Miss Elizabeth Robins' 
 so-called novel, to which she gives as a title, Where 
 Are You Going To ? The point of the tract, for it is 
 more of a tract than a story, was to support the agitation 
 against the White Slave traffic, and a lurid tale was 
 told of how two innocent girls living in the country were 
 trapped on their arrival in town and taken to a house of 
 ill-fame. But the story, as one read it, struck one not only 
 as paradoxical, but also as a revival of a somewhat ancient 
 legend. The average observer of life wondered whether 
 such things could be. And it appeared, from an article 
 in The English Review, that so impartial and unprejudiced 
 a writer as Mrs. Billington-Greig set herself to investi- 
 gate the available facts. The result of her exhaustive 
 inquiry is that there is not, and apparently has not been 
 in recent years, a single well-attested case in which a girl 
 has been trapped into the White Slave traffic in this 
 country against her will. Obviously, there are, of course, 
 cases of seduction, and insidious advertisements are some- 
 times published enticing girls abroad ; but the lurid accounts 
 of compulsory detention and outrage appear to be entirely 
 baseless. So, at least, Mrs. Billington-Greig thinks, and 
 to a large extent proves, in her extremely careful study of 
 the whole question. The true reformer must not be in 
 such a violent hurry, or he may do damage to his own 
 cause. 
 
206 OLD SAWS AND MODERN INSTANCES 
 
 Personally, I hardly realised how great was the change 
 that had come over, not only the topics with which the 
 modern dramatist chooses to deal, but also the temper in 
 which he approaches them, until I saw one of the per- 
 formances of the Stage Society in November 1907. It 
 was a performance of Mr. Granville Barker's play, Waste. 
 It is true that it was a " prohibited " piece, but some- 
 times one can understand these matters better when one 
 looks at extreme cases. Here, at all events, was a fine 
 and serious piece of work, full of drama, keenly interested 
 in psychological analysis, with the issues of the story 
 carried out in a most unflinching and remorseless fashion. 
 The very title gave one an indication of the plot. In a 
 modern world there is a great deal of wastefulness. Women 
 are sacrificed, children are sacrificed, above all men of 
 light and leading are sacrificed. The hero is a politician 
 of something more than mere cleverness, for Henry Trebell 
 is a man who has become a considerable personage in the 
 politics of his time, a statesman whom everybody imagines 
 as a possible member of a Ministry of all the talents. 
 Suppose that such a man in a moment of madness, in a 
 moment which he describes as a " drunken fit," com- 
 promises a married woman with fatal effects. Is the whole 
 of his political career to be blasted, not only to his own 
 damage but his country's ? That is one of the most serious 
 and also the most obvious of the problems which Mr. 
 Granville Barker put before us in Waste. Henry Trebell' s 
 special line of work is education, education such as every 
 citizen ought to be able to command for himself and his 
 children, education, not so much secular with all the 
 damaging associations of that term as national, and 
 neither religious nor irreligious. This is the sphere in 
 which Mr. Trebell excels. He has the art of conciliating 
 the High Church party; he has won over Lord Charles 
 Cantelupe, who represents the ecclesiastical interest; he 
 is equally happy, it appears, in his management of the 
 Nonconformists and Dissenters, and he has his own scheme 
 for dealing with ecclesiastical funds. Such a man is a 
 valuable acquisition for any administration in our modern 
 England, and when, after some dallying with the Liberal 
 camp, he transfers his services to the Conservative ranks, 
 the Earl of Horsham, the Tory Prime Minister, determines 
 on the bold stroke of including him in his Cabinet. 
 
 And now we come to more delicate problems, concerned 
 
REALISTIC DRAMA 207 
 
 with the relations between the sexes and the intricacies 
 of a certain kind of masculine character. Henry Trebell 
 is a man who, as his sister (a character, by the way, admir- 
 ably played by Miss Henrietta Watson) describes him, has 
 a certain scorn both of men and of women. It is a dan- 
 gerous thing to look upon human beings of either sex from 
 a standpoint of contempt. The man who does so is only 
 too apt to regard his fellow creatures as puppets, to be 
 used as his fancy dictates. Certainly Henry Trebell 
 treated politicians with an easy negligence, and if he had 
 confined himself to this ingenious and also reprehensible 
 role, he might still have been hailed as the saviour of 
 society. But he was not content with this. He must 
 needs treat women as playthings also, as some bachelors 
 have a temptation to do. And it is just here that the 
 shadow of Nemesis is waiting for him. Mrs. O'Connell is 
 a slight, inconsiderable, vivacious, empty-headed, attractive 
 woman, with no settled principles, idle, vacuous, easily 
 swayed by any masterful spirit whom she encounters. 
 Trebell, who thinks no more about her than he does about 
 others of her sex, engages lightly and thoughtlessly in an 
 intrigue. That is in July; and in the second act, which 
 takes place in October, we find him confronted with the 
 consequences. Truly the results are dreadful enough, 
 for Mrs. O'Connell has been childless hitherto, much to 
 the sorrow of her husband, and she will not face the prospect 
 of the appalling scandal that is hanging over her. In 
 the third act we find that she is already dead, dead under 
 such suspicious circumstances that an inquest is to be held, 
 although we of the audience know well enough that she 
 had put herself into the hands of a worthless doctor, and 
 that Trebell is technically guiltless of her death. But the 
 issue is not only fatal to Mrs. O'Connell, but to the man 
 with whom she had so heedlessly associated herself. In 
 the first place, what is Lord Horsham to do ? He is forming 
 his Cabinet, and his intention was to include Trebell in 
 its ranks. If such a scandal gets known, can his Adminis- 
 tration survive? In an extremely clever conference at 
 Lord Horsham' s house, we find the Prime Minister himself, 
 surrounded by Lord Charles Cantelupe, Mr. Russell Black- 
 borough, George Farrant, and others, debating the matter 
 backwards and forwards. Justin O'Connell, the husband, 
 decides for reasons of his own to hold his tongue. 
 But there are many other considerations involved, and the 
 
208 OLD SAWS AND MODERN INSTANCES 
 
 final decision arrived at by Lord Horsham is to write a 
 letter to Trebell and tell him that in the circumstances his 
 services will be dispensed with. Political failure is thus 
 the first of Trebell' s punishments. It is not the only one. 
 By a strange reaction from his former position of cynicism, 
 he suddenly discovers within himself an immense con- 
 tempt for the woman who could destroy his child, an 
 immense desire to "express himself" (the phrase is not 
 mine, but is put into the mouth of one of the characters) 
 in the offspring which should inherit his genius and his 
 aspirations. This is the most terrible penalty of all, and 
 it is the direct consequence of, or reaction from, his own 
 sceptical scorn of the customary motives which weigh 
 with men, the usual passions which control their hearts. 
 And so in an impressive last act we have the suicide of 
 the hero, the final culmination of a great life greatly thrown 
 away. His country is deprived of all the useful services 
 that he might have rendered. That is one form of waste. 
 And to this we have to add the destruction of human life 
 three lives, man, woman, and child because of a deliberate 
 violation of human and ethical laws. 
 
 It is unnecessary to pass any comment on a play of this 
 kind, except so far as it indicates and illustrates certain 
 well-defined modern tendencies. The main point to 
 observe is the underlying assumption that there is no 
 sphere of human action, no kind of subject with which art 
 cannot claim to deal. It is rather a large assumption 
 because art is not necessarily nature, and least of all is it 
 a mere copy of nature. The business of the artist is to 
 select, whether in painting or writing or fashioning figures 
 out of marble. In each case he enjoys the free exercise 
 of his creative powers, which include discrimination and 
 therefore also rejection. In his play of Waste Mr. Granville 
 Barker interprets this theory in his own fashion. Art may 
 deal with anything it chooses even abortion. Dramatic 
 art may take up any subject, even the most repellent one, 
 so far as it can be shown to concern the interests of 
 humanity. Even if we granted the assumption, which, 
 of course, some people are not prepared to do, we should 
 have to consider a necessary corollary. The artist is to 
 be allowed the privilege of treating any subject he chooses 
 on one very serious condition, namely, that he can lift up 
 his subject into the sphere of art, or, in other words, that 
 his treatment of his subject should be in the best sense of 
 
REALISTIC DRAMA 209 
 
 the word artistic. If art claims every province of human 
 life as its own, it must justify this claim by the manner 
 in which it deals with its theme. The case stands here 
 just as it does with plagiarism a man is permitted to 
 borrow from preceding writers if he can justify his theft, 
 as, for instance, Shakespeare could, by the use to which 
 he puts it. But does Mr. Granville Barker justify his 
 choice of subject by his treatment? Certainly there can 
 be no more important problem than the extent to which 
 a man of public importance is to be condoned, or con- 
 demned, on the score of his private immorality. But Mr. 
 Barker chooses so to paint his hero as to make him un- 
 sympathetic in fact, a very exceptional type of man, 
 with a distinct vein of brutality. Most men who have 
 made fools of themselves with women are still endowed with 
 sufficient chivalry of nature to be sorry for the woman, 
 to have some pity and tenderness towards her, however 
 light and frivolous she may be. Henry Trebell has no 
 such feelings towards Mrs. O'Connell. His scene with her 
 in the second act is absolutely appalling in its coarse 
 brutality, a horrid episode of something which, to the 
 woman, at all events, must appear as the extreme of 
 masculine callousness. One could imagine even a theme 
 like this illustrated in far different fashion, and, possibly, 
 made more powerful because the man was a better specimen 
 of his sex and the woman a more intelligent one of hers. 
 But in this matter Mr. Barker is only too docile a pupil of 
 his master Mr. Bernard Shaw. There must be no romance 
 in the relations between the sexes, no sentimentalism, no 
 generous emotion. Perhaps this was the more accentuated 
 in the actual production of Waste because Mr. Barker 
 himself played the part of the hero, which was originally 
 designed for Mr. Norman McKinnel. In Mr. McKinnel 
 we should have had the brutality of a really strong man. 
 In Mr. Barker's case we had the callousness of a man to 
 whom it never seemed natural to be either brutal or coarse. 
 Mrs. O'Connell was very cleverly played, but the more 
 truly feminine the actress was, the greater grew our indig- 
 nation at the treatment to which Mrs. O'Connell was 
 exposed by Henry Trebell. 
 
 It is strange how the casting of a play can affect its 
 aesthetic values and the balance of its characters. An apt 
 illustration is afforded in the case of Mr. Galsworthy's 
 The Eldest Son. The scene is laid in a country house 
 
210 OLD SAWS AND MODERN INSTANCES 
 
 presided over by a sporting squire of the old school, who 
 possesses a large family of sons and daughters and an 
 admirably devoted wife. Unfortunately, the eldest son 
 enters upon an intrigue with a lady's maid, who is the 
 daughter of the gamekeeper. The usual result follows. 
 The girl has to reveal to the young man that she is expecting 
 to be a mother, and the whole esclandre comes out. What 
 is to be done ? The squire, who is bent on forcing a young 
 under-keeper to make reparation to a village girl whom he 
 has wronged, shrinks from the same problem when it is 
 presented in the form of his heir and his wife's lady's maid. 
 Happily for all concerned, the gamekeeper, who has some 
 family pride, refuses to let his daughter marry her lover 
 on the very proper ground that the match would be un- 
 suitable, and by no means likely to lead to happiness. 
 The whole point of the play clearly is that in the case of 
 obvious mesalliances there is no real " honour " involved 
 in the performance of a contract which is not to the 
 advantage of either party. You cannot compensate a 
 girl's loss of virtue by offering her a marriage more ruinous 
 than the original bad act. Therefore the head-keeper is 
 quite justified in refusing to see that two wrongs make a 
 right. But somehow in the play itself this estimable 
 moral came out very strangely and paradoxically. What 
 we saw before our eyes was a very pretty and charming 
 girl (the part of the lady' s maid was played by Miss Cathleen 
 Nesbitt) who was much too good for her young man, and 
 seemed much more distinguished than all the gentlefolks 
 put together. The eldest son would indeed have been a 
 lucky fellow to get so nice a wife, even if they had both 
 of them to go to Canada ; while by the side of this brilliant 
 young heroine the squire's wife, sons, and daughter un- 
 mistakably paled their ineffectual fires ! The ladies ought, 
 one may suppose, to have exhibited their superior social 
 station," if the dramatist's story was to come out right, 
 whereas it was the servant who won hands down. That 
 is the worst of having a sympathetic part played by a 
 clever actress unless, indeed, one may suspect Mr. Gals- 
 worthy of the cynical suggestion that in matters of 
 " honour " and so forth, the so-called upper classes are 
 inferior to their gamekeepers and ladies' maids. The 
 Eldest Son, however, is not so good a play as Hindle Wakes, 
 with which in a certain fashion it can be compared. For 
 in Hindle Wakes our sympathies are intended to be wholly 
 enlisted on the side of the spirited girl, the mill-hand. 
 
REALISTIC DRAMA 211 
 
 Having enjoyed her week-end " lark," she sees clearly 
 enough that marriage is a very different affair from an 
 episodical amour amongst other reasons because, as one 
 of the characters remarks in one of Mr. Hankin's pieces, 
 " it lasts so long." She therefore does not have to depend 
 on her father to make up her mind for her. She refuses 
 point-blank to have anything further to do with the son 
 of her employer. And seeing the young man and the sort 
 of home-life which he enjoys, we honour her for her decision. 
 Hindle Wakes, moreover, was admirably cast. It was 
 enacted by men and women who knew the kind of life they 
 were depicting, and were therefore able to convey a real 
 thrill of actual vitality to the audience. And Miss Edyth 
 GoodalFs performance as the heroine was a very fine one. 
 No one, however, would select The Eldest Son as a 
 typical play of Mr. Galsworthy. I imagine that most 
 people who desire to get a true appreciation of the drama- 
 tist's position in the modern world would turn rather to 
 pieces like Strife and Justice. Here emerges one of the 
 chief characteristics of Mr. Galsworthy, so far as I am able 
 to observe, a tendency which can only be described as 
 pessimistic. Life does not appear to him to be a pleasant 
 affair, though that very largely may be due to the arrange- 
 ments we make for living it. Modern society is hampered 
 by several outworn conventions, legal enactments, and 
 perhaps also creeds, and the point which strikes the 
 dramatist is the exceeding hardship which is often involved 
 for the individual. Or again. We find ourselves in a 
 critical time with the two forces of capitalism and labour 
 ranged against one another in continuous and deadly 
 combat. Sometimes the victory sways in one direction, 
 sometimes in another. But here again, just because the 
 forces are evenly balanced, it is the individual who suffers 
 most of all perhaps in his domestic relations. And what 
 are we to say of the outcome of the struggle when it remains 
 so uncertain, when the tragedy of conflicting aims and 
 purposes ends, from the point of view of the social ob- 
 server, in a farce of wasted efforts, of hopeless endeavour, 
 of absolute sterility ? That, I take it, is the lesson (the 
 word may be pardoned) of the play called Strife, which 
 closes with a touch of real cynicism, a cynicism which may 
 be detected in The Silver Box, but which comes out very 
 strongly in the later play. The Secretary of the Employers 
 turning, just before the final curtain, to a Trades Union 
 official, says in an excited tone, " Do you know, sir, these 
 
212 OLD SAWS AND MODERN INSTANCES 
 
 terms (of compromise) are the very same we drew up 
 together, you and I, and put to both sides before the fight 
 began? All this all this and and what for?" Har- 
 ness, the Trades Union official, replies in a slow, grim voice, 
 " There's where the fun comes in ! " I can hardly imagine 
 any remark more flippantly cynical, expressive as it is of 
 the whole dreary inutility and hopelessness of a conflict 
 which at the close leaves the two contending parties as 
 they were before the fight began. That is, of course, the 
 peculiarity of a play conceived in the modern fashion, as 
 ending in an impasse or a note of interrogation. But it also 
 explains why such a drama can never be popular in the best 
 sense of the term, and must belong to the intellectual 
 drama of a clique rather than to the nation at large. 
 
 It is worth while to enlarge on this point. Strife was 
 undoubtedly a very fine play, admirably acted by such 
 artists as Mr. Norman McKinnel and Mr. J. Fisher White, 
 and entirely worthy of the reproduction which it sub- 
 sequently enjoyed at the Comedy Theatre. Nevertheless, 
 the attitude of most people who have seen the piece is 
 distinctly cold and negative. They are glad they have 
 seen it once, they have found a real interest in the story, 
 but they rarely want to see it again. It would seem that 
 Strife does not belong to that category of work which enlists 
 on its side all sorts and conditions of men. What is the 
 story .? Briefly, it is a long combat between John Anthony, 
 Chairman of the Trenartha Tin Plate Works, and David 
 Roberts, a representative of the workmen. Each side is 
 presented with absolute neutrality and fairness. John 
 Anthony is a hard, dour capitalist, who has built up his 
 industry with infinite pains. He has come to his own 
 conclusions as to the conditions under which it can be run 
 successfully. No more concessions must be made to the 
 workmen; the more they get, the more they will desire. 
 A stand must be made some time if the capitalist class is 
 to be preserved ; otherwise the proletariat will ride rough- 
 shod over individual property. On the other hand, 
 David Roberts, equally clear-sighted, discovers that the 
 present conditions do not admit of a proper living wage 
 for the labourer. He, too, asseverates that a stand must 
 be made once for all, and he encourages the other members 
 of the workmen's Committee to prolong the strike, even 
 though they see their own kith and kin starving around 
 them. In his own case he has to go through the unutter- 
 able anguish of seeing his wife die -die of starvation caused 
 
REALISTIC DRAMA 213 
 
 by his obstinacy or his firmness, whatever point of view 
 you adopt. But the struggle has other issues besides the 
 death of a woman. Gradually the moderate men on both 
 sides are led to the conclusion a conclusion dear to all 
 Englishmen that there must be a compromise. Some of 
 his friends desert John Anthony; a good many of his 
 fellow-workmen desert David Roberts. And so we arrive 
 at the final scene in which the Chairman of the Tin Plate 
 Works is upset by his own Committee, and the chief 
 spokesman of the employes is betrayed by his friends. 
 It is a fine scene, for the two principal antagonists have a 
 sincere respect for one another. " So they have done us 
 both down, Mr. Anthony?" says Robert; and Anthony 
 replies, " Both broken men, my friend Roberts." The 
 extreme partisans being thus got rid of, the compromise 
 is carried through, and the Secretary discovers, as we have 
 seen, that the actual terms for the cessation of war are 
 identical with those suggested many weeks previously, 
 " A woman dead; and the two best men broken ! " such 
 is the general summary as enunciated by Harness. 
 
 Now if we want to see why such a play cannot un- 
 reservedly appeal to an audience, I am afraid the answer 
 must be that it holds the balance too evenly. The people 
 who throng a theatre have certain peculiarities of their 
 own, amongst which is to be found the idea that they must 
 not be confused as to the side on which their interest and 
 sympathy are to be bestowed. In general terms we express 
 the principle as a dislike of being hoodwinked, an eager 
 wish to " know all about it," a ready determination to 
 take sides if only the spectators are shown which side they 
 ought to take. Of course, this is not a very estimable 
 characteristic of an audience. Doubtless the intellectual 
 thing is to study very carefully what is to be said on both 
 sides. It is not only in the theatre, however, that the 
 democracy shows these qualities or feelings. Is a philo- 
 sophic statesman ever popular? Is it a good character- 
 istic in a leader of a party that he is able so thoroughly to 
 understand the opposite faction as to give their standpoint 
 as clearly as his own ? The career of Mr. Balfour, as 
 compared with that of Mr. Gladstone, is sufficient to prove 
 how important it is for a party leader to ignore all that can 
 be said for his opponents and to advance his own cause 
 with ruthless pertinacity. Much the same thing happens 
 in a theatre. You take, for instance, a play like that of 
 Robert Browning on Strafford, Pym and Strafford are 
 
214 OLD SAWS AND MODERN INSTANCES 
 
 left at the close confronting each other, and each has 
 a very good account to give of himself and of his own 
 aims. It is six to one and half-a-dozen to the other. A 
 thoroughly careful and intellectual balance is preserved. 
 Straff or d was not a successful play, and perhaps one of the 
 chief reasons was the very fact of this intellectual equipoise. 
 A far inferior craftsman, Mr. Wills, writing a play on 
 Charles I, and having at his finger-tips theatrical technique, 
 did not hesitate to blacken the character of Cromwell 
 just in the same proportion as he exalted the character 
 of the Stuart monarch. When Shakespeare had to deal 
 with the struggle between Richard III and Henry Tudor, 
 he did not leave us in any doubt as to the proper direction 
 of our sympathies. The result may have been, probably 
 was, exceedingly unfair to Richard Crookback, whom 
 many subsequent historians have tried to whitewash and 
 with no little success. But Shakespeare had the instinct 
 of the theatre, and he knew that it would be ruinous for 
 his play if he allowed his audience to wonder which was 
 the hero and which was the villain. It is no good pro- 
 testing that this is a popular infirmity which ought to be 
 sternly resisted and corrected. It belongs to the whole 
 attitude of the populace towards politics, religion, and 
 life. You must not keep your audience in the dark as to 
 some necessary fact in the intrigue which is being dissected 
 before their very eyes. Nor yet must you allow your 
 audience to vacillate in its interests and sympathies. 
 There can be no question, if we look back over its past 
 history, that drama is the most democratic of the arts, 
 and that when it was at its best, during the Elizabethan 
 period, it involved an appeal to every class and section 
 of the community. Purely intellectual drama, written 
 for superior persons, may have every merit, but sometimes 
 it perilously resembles the so-called literary play, not meant 
 for popular production but only designed for perusal in 
 an armchair. What would have happened to an Eliza- 
 bethan audience if they had come out of their wooden 
 theatre wondering which of the two, Edmund or Edgar, 
 was right in King Lear, or whether there was not a good 
 deal to be said on behalf of lago in his duel with Othello ? 
 A psychological analysis which proves that there is no 
 such thing as heroes and villains, that we are all more or 
 less alike, that we have no right to judge, may be both 
 philosophic and true. But it does not help the theatre as 
 such, nor yet in the larger sense of the word does it help 
 
REALISTIC DRAMA 215 
 
 theatrical art, because an artist must select, and, by the 
 mere fact of selecting, becomes a partisan. 
 
 We touch a deeper note in Mr. Galsworthy's Justice, 
 or rather we are involved in utter and blank despair. 
 Never was so cruel a play written. Hardly any piece that 
 I am aware of is so drenched in an atmosphere of in- 
 spissated gloom. The author, of course, is anxious to 
 show us what a ghastly thing solitary confinement in prison 
 is, how ruinous it is to the individual, how hopelessly 
 unjust and unfair. He would hardly affirm that it is so 
 in all cases, and therefore we have to understand that it is 
 in his special case -the case of a sensitive, highly strung 
 junior clerk in a solicitor's office. Naturally, therefore, 
 the dramatist is forced to cog his dice because he has taken 
 an exceptional case and has to treat it exceptionally. 
 Not for one moment does Mr. Galsworthy relent in his 
 treatment of the story. Falder, who forges a cheque for 
 a woman's sake, is doomed from the moment of his sin to 
 remorseless punishment. I still remember with a shudder, 
 when the play was performed at the Duke of York's 
 Theatre, the horrible picture of Mr. Dennis Eadie as Falder, 
 pacing backwards and forwards in his cell like a hunted 
 animal, and finally being driven to bang at his door in 
 hopeless impotence. Even when he is at last released, 
 and it looks for a moment as if there might be some chance 
 for him, fate dogs his footsteps and he throws himself 
 down the stone stairs in a vain effort to escape the tyranny 
 of " Justice." One wonders whether such things are 
 going on all round one, and winces at the bare possibility. 
 There is only one figure in the appalling drama which one 
 remembers with a faint sense of gratitude. It is the 
 senior clerk, Cokeson, a simple, kindly, religious man, 
 with a touch of Dickens characterisation about him, who 
 serves to redeem our hopes in humanity. When Zola's 
 L'Assommoir was turned into didactic melodrama and 
 produced in English form under the title of Drink, we 
 thought it a horrible piece, made if anything more horrible 
 by the admirable acting of Mr. Charles Warner as Coupeau. 
 But Justice is far sterner stuff, cruel, relentless, soul- 
 shaking. Such themes should be treated in a pamphlet, 
 unless we are all to become sterile and ineffective pessimists, 
 through sheer despair of our fellow-creatures. 
 
 Cynicism and pessimism these are the " notes " which 
 are never far away from modern realistic drama. If we 
 look at the dramatic works of Mr. St. John Hankin, which 
 
 
216 OLD SAWS AND MODERN INSTANCES 
 
 in themselves require and deserve a careful study, we shall 
 observe that the development of the story is nearly always 
 conceived in a vein of cynicism. Mr. Hankin has many 
 dramatic qualities. He has an admirable sense, for 
 instance, of appropriate dialogue, almost as good as that 
 which Ibsen possesses in some of his most characteristic 
 pieces. The scenes between the elder and younger brother 
 in The Return of the Prodigal are excellently written, with 
 no surplusage, terse, brilliant, and to the point. Never- 
 theless, it is in the vein pf cynicism that Mr. Hankin pur- 
 sues his dramatic themes, and when all is said and done, 
 cynicism is the fume of petty hearts. Take the play to 
 which allusion has just been made, The Return of the 
 Prodigal. What is its main point? It shows us the 
 wastrel, Eustace Jackson, returning to his father's home 
 by means of a conscious artifice in order to provoke 
 sympathy, getting the best of everything by means of the 
 persistent obstinacy of thoroughgoing idleness, and finally 
 obtaining from his father a pension of 250 a year as one 
 of the conditions of leaving him alone. Listen to these 
 sentences : 
 
 Mr. Jackson (grumbling) : " What I can't see is why I 
 should allow you this money. Here's Henry, who's per- 
 fectly satisfactory, and has never caused me a moment's 
 anxiety. I don't give him money. Whereas you, who 
 have never caused me anything else, expect me to keep 
 you for the remainder of your life." 
 
 Such is the father's perfectly reasonable attitude, but 
 the elder son unexpectedly sides with Eustace. 
 
 " Father, I think you had better do as he says. If you 
 gave him a thousand pounds he'd only lose it. Better 
 make him an allowance. Then you can always stop it if 
 he does not behave himself. It is a shameless proposal, 
 as you say, but it's practical." 
 
 So it is on this promise of 250 a year that the bargain 
 is settled which keeps Eustace from want and enables him 
 to continue his career of inefficient passivity. If that is 
 not a cynical denouement, it is difficult to say what is. But 
 there is much the same cynicism in The Charity that began 
 at Home, in The Cassilis Engagement, and in The Last of 
 the De Mullins. Fortunately, there is a good deal besides 
 which we can heartily commend, for in the last-mentioned 
 play Janet de Mullins is really a fine character, though we 
 could have wished that she had not been quite so defiantly 
 impertinent and so cocksure of herself. 
 
REALISTIC DRAMA 217 
 
 The Silver Box, the earliest of Mr. Galsworthy's plays, 
 is in certain respects comparable with Mr. Hankin's The 
 Return of the Prodigal. The particular prodigal in Mr. 
 Galsworthy's play is a young Jack Earth wick, who 
 stumbles into his father's house late at night with a bag 
 and purse which do not belong to him, but are the property 
 of some light-o'-loVe whom he has picked up in the streets. 
 A ne'er-do-well called Jones comes in with him, and when 
 the young man falls to sleep on the sofa, decamps, not only 
 with the purse, but with a silver box conveniently found 
 at his elbow. Jones is the husband of Mrs. Jones, who is 
 charwoman in the Barthwicks' house. Now, without any 
 doubt, the original culprit is young Jack Barthwick, but 
 it is the Joneses, husband and wife, who have to stand the 
 racket and bear all the blame. Mrs. Jones loses her job, 
 although, poor woman, she has nothing to do with the whole 
 affair, and Jones gets one month with hard labour. Once 
 more, notice carefully the conclusion. This is Jones's 
 comment: "Call this justice? What about 'im? 'E 
 got drunk, 'E took the purse, but it's his money got him 
 off," which, parenthetically, is quite true. While Mrs. 
 Jones turns to Barthwick with a humble gesture and with 
 the appealing words, " Oh, Sir ! " the magistrate closes the 
 affair : ' We will now adjourn for lunch." This is the 
 kind of cynicism which, clearly, appeals to Mr. Galsworthy, 
 for in the more intense and vivid form it is to be found 
 both in Strife and in Justice. 
 
 In Mr. Galsworthy's case also, as well as in Mr. Hankin, 
 there are other and sounder elements. Let me not forget 
 that Mr. Galsworthy wrote The Little Dream and The Pigeon. 
 He calls the latter a piece fantasy. It is the most delightful 
 of his plays to read. If it did not come out quite so well 
 on the stage at all events it had but little success when 
 
 E reduced at the Royalty Theatre the cause probably 
 ty in the casting of some of the characters, especially, 
 perhaps, the eccentric Frenchman, Ferrand. But it is a 
 charming piece of work just because it is touched with a 
 tender idealism, the idealism of simple emotions. And 
 perhaps it is not altogether an inept commentary on the 
 modern realistic drama that two most successful plays 
 have been Mr. Arnold Bennett's The Great Adventure and 
 Milestones, which, though they may have the realistic 
 manner, no one would call realistic dramas. 
 
EUGENE BRIEUX, MORALIST 
 
 ONE of the outstanding theatrical successes of the year 
 1917 in London was gained by M. Brieux. Not only was 
 his much-discussed play Les Avaries (Damaged Goods), 
 acted for several months, but his other and far better play, 
 The Three Daughters of M. Dupont, enjoyed an almost 
 equal prosperity. When we consider the kind of enter- 
 tainment prevalent in the Metropolis at most of the theatres, 
 Brieux' s success seems curious and remarkable. There 
 is no question that theatrical managers discovered during 
 the greater part of 1917 that the lighter forms of dramatic 
 work were far more likely to please and attract than any 
 of those pieces which might be called problem plays or 
 even formal romantic comedies. It would be by no means 
 unjust to say that farces, musical comedies, and revues 
 represent three-fourths of the dramatic fare recently 
 offered in London theatres. Naturally there have been 
 exceptions, but the fact that the majority of the spectators 
 are soldiers, returning from the Front to enjoy a brief 
 holiday, necessitated, in the view of those responsible for 
 theatrical production, the cheerful, good-natured, laughable 
 play with no pretension to reality, a frank make-believe, 
 in order to turn gloomy thoughts away from too serious 
 a pre-occupation with the war. To find, therefore, in the 
 midst of frivolous programmes of this kind a play like 
 Brieux' s Damaged Goods, winning not only a modicum of 
 prosperity but actually constituting one of the great suc- 
 cesses, might evoke a certain amount of surprise. While 
 all around consisted of the light flummery of music and 
 dance, or else the stereotyped surprises of American 
 " crook " stories, there was witnessed a piece written by 
 an earnest moralist, very outspoken, quite reckless of the 
 ordinary conventions, and with a daring frankness of tone 
 and language which held the attention of numerous 
 audiences, not only in London itself, but in the provinces. 
 We may, of course, give a different explanation of this 
 seeming paradox. We may assert that the element of 
 prurient curiosity, the idea that something rather tremen- 
 dous, and certainly scandalous, was going to be witnessed 
 on the boards and the discovery that the actual pro- 
 duction of the play involved a striking change of mental 
 
 218 
 
EUGENE BRIEUX, MORALIST 219 
 
 and moral attitude on the part of the licensing authorities 
 had something to do with the financial prosperity of a 
 strong, sincere, and unconventional piece of work. No 
 doubt it is true that some of those who crowded into the 
 St. Martin's Theatre were not animated by the highest 
 and most ethical of motives. Nevertheless, there must 
 have been many who accepted this piece of Brieux, as 
 the author intended it to be accepted, as a fearless study 
 of an exceedingly difficult problem, with the insistent 
 moral that society for its own sake must recognise and 
 take precaution against a hidden evil which was poisoning 
 its very roots. 
 
 In the same way, though in a less degree, The Three 
 Daughters of M. Dupont received a welcome from the 
 thoughtful people who knew that the dramatist was 
 touching large and difficult questions. The play, it is 
 true, is very different from Les Avaries. In the latter 
 case the dramatist presses his moral with unrelenting force. 
 Unless the legislature will do something to check the 
 progress of disease, the whole of human society will suffer. 
 But in the former case the dramatist's touch is more 
 uncertain. Has he any moral ? There is one certainly, 
 which suggests that the natural function of a wife is to be 
 the mother of children, and that if she is denied this privi- 
 lege her position in the household is shorn of its true value 
 and meaning. But there is a cynicism about the close 
 of the play not always to be found in the work of Brieux. 
 There is no question that Julie, the daughter who is un- 
 happily married, accepts her lot with a certain amount 
 of newly learnt philosophy because she sees that it is 
 capable of alleviation. She intends to do as others have 
 done, and if she gets on badly with her husband well, 
 there is a chance with other admirers. The world is too 
 big, the dramatist seems to say, for any given individual 
 to struggle against. Society is too securely founded on 
 its hypocrisies and conventions to be overthrown by any 
 iconoclast, however earnest and sincere. 
 
 In this respect the play is a little like La Foi, in which 
 Brieux' s apparent object is to prove that mankind must 
 have their religious delusions, and that without them life 
 for the majority of mankind would be intolerable. You 
 may destroy the false idols as often as you please, but 
 there always remains the permanent instinct of the human 
 mind to worship something, it hardly cares what; while 
 in the majority of cases if you uproot a faith you find in 
 
220 OLD SAWS AND MODERN INSTANCES 
 
 its successor, or successors, a variety of degrading super- 
 stitions. La Foi was translated under the title False 
 Gods, produced at His Majesty's Theatre, and had a con- 
 siderable run, much to the surprise of those who, perhaps 
 with small superficial knowledge of Brieux, understood 
 that he was a sort of dramatic Don Quixote tilting at 
 windmills. In the play in question we are clearly ex- 
 pected to have every sympathy with the young reformer 
 who wishes to abolish degrading superstitions and prevent 
 the common people from believing in a lie. The scene is 
 laid in Upper Egypt, where every year the sacrifice of a 
 virgin is made to the goddess Isis. A young and earnest 
 rationalist called Satni, engaged to the maiden who has 
 been designated for the sacrifice, inaugurates a great 
 movement amongst the people with a view to abolishing 
 the doctrines which had hitherto been accepted from the 
 priests. Pharaoh gives orders that Satni and his followers 
 should be removed out of the way ; the High Priest has 
 a more subtle method of dealing with him. He takes him 
 to the Temple and shows him how the miracles are worked. 
 The great statue of Isis is made to bend her head to signify 
 her satisfaction with the sacrifices offered to her, and after 
 that miracle has taken place many wonderful cures amongst 
 the populace are reported. Satni, when he sees the 
 wretchedness of the people, their hopes of some allevia- 
 tion in their lot, their instinctive faith in the unseen, him- 
 self draws the lever which moves the statue, having made 
 the pregnant discovery that it is better for the people to 
 have some faith than to have none at all. The truth of a 
 religion, in other words, does not matter so much. What 
 does matter is the satisfaction, consolation, appeasement 
 of the human mind, always craving for something beyond 
 itself. It would seem that Brieux on some earlier occa- 
 sion had been to Lourdes, and having himself watched the 
 touching credulity of the worshippers and their immense 
 elation at the prospect of cures of long-seated ailments, 
 came to a conclusion, which he afterwards put into the 
 mouth of his reformer, Satni. He adopted, in this matter, 
 a position somewhat different from that taken up by Renan 
 in The Priest of Nemi. Renan is quite aware that a good 
 deal of harm can be done by the abolition of old super- 
 stitions, but on the other hand he is convinced that reform 
 will triumph, and that an attitude of mind more in accord- 
 ance with the demands of logic and reason is infinitely 
 preferable to a blind and uncertain faith. It is not quite 
 
EUGENE BRIEUX, MORALIST 221 
 
 certain how far Brieux would go with Renan in his desire 
 for reform. Certainly his play La Foi leaves us with the 
 impression that religion is useful for the common people, 
 a doctrine also held by Voltaire. Humanity needs its 
 crutches, and their value must not be despised. 1 
 
 I believe the first play of Brieux produced in London 
 was Les Bienfaiteurs. That was succeeded by Maternite 
 and Les Hannetons, both done by the Stage Society, and 
 False Gods, which, as already stated, saw the light at His 
 Majesty's Theatre. The Stage Society also produced Les 
 Trois Filles, with Miss Ethel Irving in the cast. It is clear, 
 then, that Brieux has gone some way in the conquest of 
 London. But it is not easy to understand what Mr. 
 Bernard Shaw means in his Preface to " Three Plays of 
 Brieux " when he declares that London found out Brieux 
 before Paris did. According to Mr. Shaw, Paris is " easily 
 the most prejudiced, old-fashioned, obsolete-minded city 
 in the west of Europe." 2 She did not know what a dramatic 
 treasure she had in Brieux until England pointed it out. 
 So far as I can discover this is very far from the truth of 
 the matter. Some of the best critics in Paris, like Lemaitre, 
 Faguet, Rene, Doumic, and even to some extent Sarcey, 
 had given a great deal of praise to Brieux' s early plays, 
 and had very little hesitation in proclaiming him a drama- 
 tist who counts. To single out Brieux from the majority 
 of dramatists of France, as though he were engaged in a 
 work belonging to himself alone, and quite unlike that of 
 others, is a mistake which could only be made by those 
 who are not familiar with the modern products of drama 
 and novel in France. Nearly all the themes developed by 
 Brieux find their echoes in other writers. I need only 
 mention men like Hervieu, Bataille, Bordeaux, Bazin, 
 Margueritte and others to prove that Brieux' s voice was 
 not that of one crying in the wilderness, but that he had 
 many collaborators in the work of criticism and reform. 
 One of Hervieu' s best-known plays, Le Dedale, has almost 
 precisely the same plot as Brieux' s Le Berceau. 
 
 One reason why some French critics have looked as- 
 kance at Brieux is, that they have been offended by his 
 lack of style. A well-known critic once began an article 
 on the novels of Georges Ohnet by asking pardon of 
 his readers because he was not going to deal, as he 
 
 1 Euripides' Bacchce suggests the same moral and awakens the same 
 surprise that a professed rationalist should defend superstition. 
 
 2 Three Plays of Brieux. Preface by Bernard Shaw, p. xxviii. 
 
222 OLD SAWS AND MODERN INSTANCES 
 
 usually did, with literature, but with Ohnet. Nevertheless, 
 Georges Ohnet had a reputation of his own, and he, too, 
 enjoyed a triumph in London when The Ironmaster was 
 produced by the Kendals. Ohnet could write novels 
 which were not strictly literature a phenomenon common 
 enough, by the way, in our own country. But that did 
 not prevent him from becoming a force of some kind, a 
 sentimental and melodramatic force, perhaps, but still by 
 no means devoid of a real influence. Brieux, too, is hardly 
 to be reckoned amongst those who write literature; he 
 has none of the fine reticence, the purged and polished 
 style, the exquisite tact, the punctilious self-control of the 
 literary artist. Nevertheless, he is a dramatist whose 
 plays, through sheer force of strong individuality, have won 
 their place in contemporary drama. It may be interest- 
 ing and worth while to ask why Brieux has obtained so 
 strong a hold on the contemporary world, and why his 
 contributions to the general total of what men and critics 
 think and say represent so valuable and important a body 
 of work. 
 
 Eugene Brieux began writing plays at an early age, but 
 it was not till he was over thirty that the particular quality 
 of his dramatic art was revealed. If we look at the list of 
 pieces produced during the last quarter of a century we 
 shall find that they are nearly all didactic and are aimed 
 at some weakness, wrong, or iniquity of the social system. 1 
 
 1 Brieux's plays are usually divided into three periods, the first including 
 the earlier and less mature pieces, the second period representing the 
 storm and stress of the intolerant reformer, while the third and last period 
 shows the dramatist in a milder, and possibly even in an optimistic mood. 
 
 BRIEUX, BORN 1858. 
 
 First Period. Les Remplagantes . . . 1901 
 M enages ft Artistes 1890 Les Avariis 1901 
 
 Blanchette 
 M. de Riboval 
 La Couvee 
 
 1892 La Petite Amie .... 1902 
 
 _ Maternite 1903 
 
 1893 
 
 UEngrenage . . 1894 Third Period. 
 
 Les Bienfaiteurs . 1896 La Deserteuse .... 
 
 U Evasion 1896 Les Hannetons .... 1906 
 
 La Frangaise .... 1907 
 
 Second Period. Simone 1908 
 
 Les Trois Filles de M. Dupont 1897 Suzette 1909 
 
 Resultatdes Courses . . . 1898 La Foi 1909 
 
 LeBerceau 1898 La Femme Seule .... 1913 
 
 La Robe Rouge .... 1900 Le Bourgeois aux Champs . 1914 
 Twenty-two serious plays and six or eight lighter pieces. I take the 
 list from Brieux and Contemporary French Society (Putnam), a careful and 
 valuable study by W. H. Scheifley, to which I am much indebted. 
 
EUGENE BRIEUX, MORALIST 223 
 
 Euripides, the Greek dramatist, who accepted as his mission 
 the task of revealing to Greek audiences human nature 
 as it is, not as it might be, converted many of his dramas 
 into an appeal against the injustice of the gods of the 
 Greek Pantheon especially Athene, Apollo and Artemis. 
 Brieux does not impeach Providence ; he is not concerned 
 with the rule of the Divine powers, and therefore does not 
 take it as his business, except incidentally and inferentially, 
 to base his criticism on the supposed delinquencies of 
 Heaven. Like Rousseau, he attacks directly the social 
 system. Whatever men and women might or might not 
 be naturally and originally, at all events they are im- 
 prisoned, mainly by their own acts, in an organisation 
 which represses some of their better instincts, exaggerates 
 here and there evil tendencies, and makes them the slaves 
 of institutions radically bad and harmful. A very brief 
 review of some of his plays will prove this point. Elan- 
 chette, produced in 1892, pointed out the evil results of 
 education on girls of the working classes. L'Engrenage, 
 1894, was a tirade against corruption in politics. Les 
 Bienfaiteurs, 1896, pointed out the glaring defects of 
 fashionable charity, the frivolity of those who handled such 
 artificial modes of doing good to fellow-creatures, and the 
 harm produced by allowing selfish individuals to give 
 indiscriminate alms instead of making charity a settled 
 policy. Then came L'Evasion, in 1896, which satirised 
 too submissive a belief in the doctrine of heredity. In 
 this play Brieux was tilting not so much against science 
 itself, as against the way in which it is interpreted in loose 
 talk by those who have not really studied the subject. 
 Human beings can easily torture themselves by a one- 
 sided application of even well-based scientific principles. 
 A year later was produced Les Trois Filles de M. Dupont, 
 to which I have already referred and to which I shall have 
 occasion to return. La Robe Rouge, 1900, revealed the 
 injustices of the law. Les Avartts, which saw the light 
 in 1901, was forbidden by the Censor, on account mainly 
 of its medical details. Later plays included Maternite, La 
 Foi, and a brilliant comedy of arresting power, entitled 
 Les Hannetons. This brief enumeration is sufficient to 
 show with what seriousness of purpose Brieux adopted 
 the role of dramatic and ethical teacher. Mr. Bernard 
 Shaw has stated that " what we want as the basis of our 
 plays and novels is not romance but a really scientific 
 natural history." In many respects the sentence describes 
 
224 OLD SAWS AND MODERN INSTANCES 
 
 the programme of Brieux. In his efforts at didactic 
 moralising he takes up the work of Zola, with equal power 
 and, perhaps, with greater intelligence. As a playwright 
 he may be said to be the disciple of Ibsen, though he is 
 manifestly deficient in that power of construction, and 
 that remorseless analytic psychology which distinguish the 
 great Norwegian dramatist. As an interpreter of life, 
 Brieux is, above all, a critic occupied with the wounds 
 and sores of suffering humanity. He is called a realist 
 because he aims straight at abuses and is not afraid of 
 strong and clear language. With the ordinary artificial- 
 ities of the stage he has nothing to do. He does not believe 
 in the necessity for a happy ending; he does not always 
 believe in the necessity for an ending at all. He will take 
 a chapter of human life, reveal its rottenness, probe its 
 dangers, and define as accurately as he can the effects on 
 the men and women concerned in his study. He is espe- 
 cially concerned with the future welfare of children. 1 
 Romance, however, is far from his intention, for to him 
 romance is largely deception, hypocrisy, a refusal to look 
 straight at the problems of life, an evasion of the main issue. 
 Compare all this with the ordinary attitude. We go to 
 see plays for many reasons ; Brieux practically asks us to 
 accept at his hands only one great mission of the dramatist. 
 Dramatic art is often described as an entertainment, 
 something that is to heighten our spirits, to interest and 
 to amuse us, to make us laugh so that we may be saved 
 from all temptation to tears. Brieux does not indulge us 
 in any of these ways. Romance is as much falsehood and 
 deception to him as it is to Mr. Bernard Shaw, mainly 
 because the romantic play or the romantic drama involves 
 the career of heroes and heroines who are unreal, exag- 
 gerated, one-sided portraits to which little corresponds in 
 our actual experience. But interpretation another of 
 the great objects with which the dramatist is concerned 
 Brieux fully acknowledges as his aim, an interpretation, 
 be it remembered, based not so much on appreciation as 
 on criticism. In order to interpret, the dramatist must 
 analyse human character as well as human institutions. 
 Indeed, it is by the behaviour of the human beings in the 
 play under a given system that the spectator discovers 
 
 1 Eight of his plays deal with the interests of the rising generation. 
 The future of the child, of course, enters largely into the question of 
 divorce. 
 
EUGENE BRIEUX, MORALIST 225 
 
 how deficient and obstructive the prevailing system is. 
 It is open, however, for us to remark that you can get 
 quite as false ideas of human nature by studying defects 
 as you can by exaggerating merits. The vice of all 
 didacticism is that the dramatis personce are invented to 
 subserve a particular ethical purpose. They do not exist 
 in and for themselves; they exist because the exigencies 
 of the dramatic framework require them to be of a par- 
 ticular character. In many of Brieux's plays, and espe- 
 cially, perhaps, in Les Avaries, we fail to become interested 
 in his characters because they are so obviously puppets 
 used to enforce a moral. Les Avaries, however, is an 
 extreme case, and even in this avowed tract, or social 
 manifesto, the character of the doctor, as we saw when 
 the play was recently produced in London, belongs to a 
 powerful human type. He carries out the usual tasks of 
 the " raisonneur " on a high ethical plane, and his image 
 persists in the mind, not merely because he enforces a 
 particular moral, but because as enacted by Mr. Fisher 
 White he was human and true. And sometimes, too, the 
 dramatist forgets the intensely serious procedure of the 
 play, as, for instance, in the third act, where, in the midst 
 of dreary discussions, he introduces the extremely vivid 
 portrait of a courtesan, fresh and original and accurately 
 observed. She also points a moral, it is true. But mean- 
 while she lives. 
 
 To me, I confess, Eugene Brieux is especially interesting, 
 not merely because he reveals some of the defects which 
 inevitably attach to edifying and didactic drama, but 
 because he is subject to influences and impressions coming 
 from various sources which do not always coincide with 
 his didactic aims. As I understand him, he is a man of 
 considerable force of character, largely self-taught, who, 
 as he develops, takes up one subject after another, carries 
 it to an excess, and does not trouble his head as to whether 
 or no the total outcome is so far a consistent whole as to 
 be described under a specific formula. Some critics have 
 pointed out inconsistencies in Brieux. That is inevitable 
 in every moralist, for when he attacks any particular phase 
 of the social order he is so engrossed with his subject that 
 he does not realise how each part of that social order is 
 dependent on the others, and how extremely difficult, if 
 not impossible, is the work of piecemeal reform. I 
 mentioned just now the play which is called JJ Evasion. 
 Q 
 
226 OLD SAWS AND MODERN INSTANCES 
 
 Here our author is protesting against that superstitious 
 reverence with which some of us are apt to surround the 
 dicta of science. The dramatist portrays the character of 
 a doctor, narrow-minded, a victim of his own phrases and 
 hypotheses, who believes so intensely in his doctrine of 
 heredity as to employ it alike in the physical, the social, 
 and the moral sphere. Because certain physical tenden- 
 cies are passed on from father to son, it is assumed that 
 all tendencies are so transmitted. A man who has a 
 drunken father is certainly tempted to be a drunkard, but 
 it does not follow that a tendency to madness or a suicidal 
 tendency is similarly developed. Two young people, one 
 of whom had a father who has committed suicide, while 
 the girl is illegitimate and the daughter of an immoral 
 woman, are in love with one another and are prepared to 
 marry. The doctor intervenes and points out the fatality 
 of this course. The girl, when she has become a wife, will 
 go wrong ; the young man will reveal a certain propensity 
 to destroy himself. But all this the dramatist declares is 
 a superstition of science, and people who cultivate their 
 will and who have faith can conquer the supposed fatality. 
 Such is the main teaching of L? Evasion, but obviously 
 such teaching does not accord with that scientific back- 
 ground which was declared just now to be the character- 
 istic of Brieux's dramaturgy. It might be conceded, of 
 course, that a scientific hypothesis is not necessarily a 
 scientific truth. But the man who is going to reform an 
 unreal romantic and sentimental drama by providing a 
 scientific background is hardly at liberty to diffuse so much 
 scepticism about science. His business, one would sup- 
 pose, would be rather to show what truth exists in the 
 doctrine of atavism and heredity rather than to demon- 
 strate its falsity. 
 
 Or take another instance. In one of his plays, as we 
 have seen, Brieux points out how miserable is the condition 
 of a wife who is not allowed to become a mother owing to 
 the selfishness of her husband. That is part of the lesson 
 of The Three Daughters of M. Dupont. But in another 
 piece, MaternitS, we are shown all the misery caused by a 
 too prolific marriage how deplorable is the case of a 
 mother who is perpetually increasing the number of her 
 children. 1 
 
 1 There was reported a short time ago a case which illustrates this 
 point. Mrs. Moran Tubberclair, of Athlone, has given birth to her twenty- 
 
EUGENE BRIEUX, MORALIST 227 
 
 Of course, inconsistencies of this kind can be defended 
 on the ground suggested by Mr. Bernard Shaw. He affirms 
 that a teacher is always afraid of his extreme disciples, 
 and that for this reason he is careful to suggest the anti- 
 thesis to his doctrines, if only to anticipate the follies of 
 those who are so anxious to press a particular doctrine to 
 an unreal extreme. But inconsistency, even so far as it 
 can be proved against Brieux, only makes him in a sense 
 a more interesting dramatist. He is, so to speak, learning 
 every day; he adds fresh points to those accumulated 
 before ; he is inspired by new motives ; he sees new visions ; 
 and, just as a particular point seizes his attention, he 
 develops it without paying any particular regard to what 
 he himself had advanced in previous work. The general 
 tendency of his dramas is to dethrone romance and to 
 substitute for it something more real and more scientific. 
 Yet every now and then there appears the romantic im- 
 pulse which makes his figures more human, and, as I 
 think, in better correspondence with life as we find it. 
 Many men have sought to abolish romance from dramatic 
 art, but, as I understand it, romance is one of the inde- 
 structible elements of humanity. A man whose business 
 it is to present a complete picture of humanity will 
 never be able to get rid of one of its most constant 
 elements. 
 
 From this point of view The Three Daughters of M. 
 Dupont is a very significant piece of work. The author 
 is here carrying out, not one design, but several, and I 
 am not sure that he makes his whole picture quite plausible 
 or persuasive. M. Dupont, who is not a successful man of 
 business, has three daughters, two, Caroline and Angele, 
 by a first wife, and Julie by a second. Now one of the 
 social injustices which Brieux is going to attack is the 
 necessity of providing a dot for a daughter on pain of not 
 
 second child. Eleven of her children are under fourteen years of age. 
 If we assume that the remaining eleven, the elder group, have much the 
 same intervals between their respective births, we shall conclude that the 
 oldest is about twenty-eight or thirty, and that the unhappy mother, 
 from say eighteen onwards to forty-eight, has been producing a child 
 every thirteen or fourteen months for the last thirty years ! That is the 
 sort of thing which justifies Brieux's Maternite a protest against the 
 condemnation of women to perpetual childbirth. I take the paragraph 
 from The Globe of December 29, 1917. Poor Mrs. Tubberclair was very 
 obviously sacrificed on the altar of excessive fecundity ! 
 
228 OLD SAWS AND MODERN INSTANCES 
 
 getting her a husband. What follows, then, in a small 
 bourgeois household when a daughter can only find a 
 husband if she brings him a certain amount of money ? 
 Well, either the girl does not get married at all, or if she 
 does get married is married unhappily, or altogether goes 
 to the bad. That is to be exemplified in the play before 
 us. Caroline becomes a dtvote, Angele commits an 
 " indiscretion " and is banished from home to win her 
 livelihood in ignoble fashion in Paris; Julie marries 
 Antonin, the son of another bourgeois family, who is 
 attracted by the promise of a dot with Julie, which in 
 reality M. Dupont has no hopes of being able to furnish. 
 Such appears to be the general scheme, but in working it 
 out the author allows himself, I will not say changes of 
 intention, but the influence of other considerations, adding, 
 without doubt, to the general rich significance of the drama 
 but with scant regard for the main contention. Julie 
 marries Antonin, and, as they are complete strangers to 
 one another, they do not find the path of matrimony 
 especially easy or pleasant, There has been deceit and 
 evasion on both sides. Dupont, as has been said, has 
 promised a dot without being able to fulfil his promise. 
 Antonin' s parents have not revealed the fact that Antonin's 
 uncle, from whom large expectations are suggested, is in 
 reality a bankrupt. There is an equal amount of duplicity 
 in the case of the young married pair. Each pretends to 
 the other to be not what he or she is in reality, but some- 
 thing calculated to attract and to please. And when these 
 pretensions are exploded the result is, of course, disillusion 
 and exasperation. Julie and her husband " have it out " 
 with one another. First of all the girl explains how much 
 she has been deceived in matrimony. And then it is the 
 turn of the young husband to point out that her conduct 
 has been quite as mendacious as his own. And at this 
 point we almost expect to find a kind of reconciliation 
 based on these mutual avowals. The great point is, that 
 the pair have begun to understand one another; and 
 understanding might very well lead to tolerance, pardon, 
 and perhaps, in the last resort, to love. In that case we 
 should have comedy of the ordinary type, first, misunder- 
 standing and unhappiness, and then, through many 
 tribulations, peace. 
 
 Hereupon, however, the author bethinks himself of his 
 mission as a moralist. Julie deplores the fact that she has 
 
EUGENE BRIEUX, MORALIST 229 
 
 not been given a child. Antonin assures her that children did 
 not come within the scope of his conjugal ambition, that he 
 had not the slightest intention of founding a family. Then 
 Julie becomes a woman in revolt, a woman who is baulked 
 of her dearest and most natural desire the wife prevented 
 from being a mother. A terrible scene of violence ensues, 
 in which all our sympathies are to be given to the unhappy 
 Julie and we are asked to reprobate the infamous conduct 
 of her husband. So far the lesson obviously is that a 
 marriage conducted on principles of this kind is an out- 
 rage, and the wife in such conditions no better than a 
 mistress. Is this all ? By no means. We now revert 
 once more to the original plan, which was to exemplify 
 by means of the three daughters of M. Dupont the thesis 
 that in a middle-class family each possible career is a fraud 
 and equally ignoble. First of all Caroline is wounded in 
 her devotion. She has allowed herself to become enamoured 
 of a workman belonging to her father. He seemed to her 
 to be a genius, unjustly debarred from making the success 
 he deserved. Surreptitiously she gives this workman a 
 large sum of money left her by her aunt, only to discover 
 that he has a manage of his own and three children. 
 Thereupon, in a fit of passion, she is prepared to sacrifice 
 her religion and, because she has found that men are 
 deceitful, to accuse Heaven of injustice. Julie, in her turn, 
 after her experience of matrimony, is keen for a divorce. 
 Then comes the turn of the sister in Paris, Angele. Angele 
 reasons with both her sisters and points out that her 
 particular solution of her difficulties was as fatal to her 
 peace of mind as were the careers of either Caroline or 
 Julie. And, finally, Madame Dupont is brought in to 
 explain to the daughters, and especially to Julie, that most 
 women are unhappy in matrimony and that the attitude 
 of revolt, however natural, is impossible in existing social 
 conditions. What is the result? It brings back all the 
 characters exactly to the position in which they started, 
 and leads to the cynical conclusion that you had better 
 leave society alone, and that you cannot reform it 
 but must accept such alleviations as may be possible. 
 Julie bethinks her that, though she may have been un- 
 happy in marriage, she may well be less happy out of 
 marriage, and, despite all the nobleness of her senti- 
 ments in the furious scene with her husband, she relapses 
 finally into the conviction that if she does not care for 
 
230 OLD SAWS AND MODERN INSTANCES 
 
 her husband she may adopt a lover for whom she does 
 care. 1 
 
 It is clear that we have passed through a good many 
 different phases in this drama. Either Brieux has been 
 so interested in his creations as to allow them to depart 
 from the original plan traced for them, or else, like the 
 ardent and generous moralist he is, he pursues one path 
 after another without troubling his head about the logical 
 consistency of his scheme. The sentimental comedy sud- 
 denly turns into an Ibsenite drama, full of passionate 
 revolt, and then ends, if .we must not say in a farce, at all 
 events in the cynical suggestion of acquiescence in existing 
 conditions as being on the whole the least likely to upset 
 people. Marriage is an iniquity in certain conditions, but 
 it has its alleviations. Most of the careers for the young 
 women of the middle classes have their disadvantages. 
 We must accept society as it is. To apply ideal principles 
 is to ignore the complexity, the inter-dependence of social 
 conditions. All this, let it be admitted, makes an ex- 
 tremely interesting play, and also, as I venture to think, 
 shows Brieux in a more engaging light than as the severely 
 scientific moralist who cares nothing for his characters so 
 long as they fulfil the task assigned them who only desires 
 to finish his play like a problem in Euclid with the logical 
 ultimatum, Q.E.D. 
 
 I come now to the consideration of that so-called realistic 
 method which is especially illustrated in Brieux' s Les 
 Avariis and in Ibsen's Ghosts. Realism is, of course, an 
 ambiguous word, because it involves one or two assump- 
 tions which are not always verifiable. There is no greater 
 realism in describing details which most people would pass 
 over as either unsavoury or unnecessary, than there is in 
 other forms of dramatic or literary art which do not think 
 it necessary to emphasise the sordid or the unclean. In 
 the one case as in the other the artist is making use of that 
 principle which is his by nature, the principle of selection. 
 He uses the materials which are necessary for his purpose 
 and he disregards the others. An artist painting a picture 
 groups together various elements, not so much copying 
 Nature as adapting Nature to his uses. A dramatist who 
 would be called romantic proceeds in precisely the same 
 fashion, throwing into high relief the figures of his hero 
 
 1 Cf. Jules Lemaltre's Impressions de TMdtre, 10th series, pp. 278 etfoll 
 
EUGENE BRIEUX, MORALIST 231 
 
 and his heroine and emphasising the sentiments and 
 emotions appropriate in such cases. But what we some- 
 times forget is that the so-called realist has a precisely 
 similar method of working. He, too, is occupied with 
 arranging a picture, and in order to bring out his scheme 
 he emphasises certain points and allows others to recede 
 into the background. He uses his characters, not like 
 independent personages, but rather as vehicles for illustrat- 
 ing the purpose or lesson which he has in mind. From 
 this point of view the realist is just as unreal as the romantic 
 dramatist. Or to put the matter otherwise, he has the same 
 justification which the artist claims for himself, selection 
 being of the very essence of the artist's problem. 
 
 We must not, therefore, take it for granted that because 
 Brieux wrote the play which in the English translation is 
 called Damaged Goods, or because Ibsen wrote a play which 
 is called Ghosts, they are necessarily nearer the ultimate 
 truth of things than, let us say, Victor Hugo with his 
 romantic drama. We call it realism when the materials 
 are sordid, and we call it romantic when the materials are 
 sentimental or emotional. But the artist is a free worker ; 
 he can manipulate as he desires. Even the man whom 
 we might call the most thorough-going of realists probably 
 has some dream or ideal which, tarnished as it may be, 
 yet has in his eyes all the value of the beautiful. The 
 artist is always the votary of the Beautiful, however he 
 may construe it. The question of truth hardly enters into 
 these considerations. The dream of the artist is always 
 true of him, and true for all those who see eye to eye with 
 him in his work. 
 
 To me, I confess, the whole question of what we vaguely 
 call realism ought to be envisaged from another standpoint. 
 If we look at the matter historically, knowing as we do 
 that in the history of art progress is made by a series of 
 spiral actions and reactions, we discover that romance 
 pursued up to a certain point produces a feeling of satiety 
 or unreality, and therefore naturally gives place to an 
 opposite theory which calls itself logical and scientific. 
 After Victor Hugo came Zola, Ibsen, and Brieux, just as 
 in an earlier stage of the process of development the remote- 
 ness and frigidity of the classical drama gave place to 
 Victor Hugo's romantic enthusiasm. The important 
 thing, however, to notice is, that the different artistic atti- 
 tudes correspond to different periods in the evolution of 
 
232 OLD SAWS AND MODERN INSTANCES 
 
 a nation or of humanity at large. Nothing is clearer than 
 the fact that what we sometimes call the Victorian out- 
 look, that is to say, the attitude towards men and things 
 congenial to the nineteenth century, is in large measure 
 superseded, and it is interesting and important for us 
 to recognise how the generation which we may call Georgian 
 reacts against its predecessor. It would have been im- 
 possible in the Victorian era to produce for the public plays 
 like Les Avartts and Ghosts. Why ? Because the theory 
 of art was different : the temper of the public was different : 
 the atmosphere was different. The appeal of the nineteenth 
 century was to the heart : that of the twentieth century 
 is to logical processes of the intellect. The office of drama 
 is to popularise, as it were, scientific conceptions, to make 
 use of scientific principles, to illustrate them in some 
 imagined scheme, and thus to convert and metamorphose 
 drama into a tract for the times. 
 
 In pursuit of this purpose there must be no concealment 
 or evasion of the main issues. We must not hesitate to 
 call a spade a spade. We must deal with matters, not 
 particularly savoury, but necessary for purposes of instruc- 
 tion. The ills of humanity must be cured by a ruthless 
 veracity. Young men and maidens must discover the 
 things which are necessary to their salvation. The veil 
 must be torn from all kinds of secret conventions, and 
 the bare truth, wherever that can be ascertained, must 
 be laid before audiences without reserve and without 
 disguise. And if there be some grave and deep-seated 
 malady which is afflicting humanity, the dramatist must 
 not hesitate to probe the evil at its source and eradicate 
 the poison, or, at all events, help to eradicate the poison, 
 by plain and courageous truth-speaking. The romantic 
 aims of art must be left alone for the present. Romance 
 may be an indestructible element of humanity, but no 
 particular emphasis need at present be laid upon it. We 
 are occupied with sterner things. Hence, for a twentieth- 
 century public, the dramatic artists who most nearly 
 correspond to the needs and necessities of the time must 
 be permitted frank speech and a resolute, almost apostolic 
 fervour in elucidating social problems and laying bare 
 social sores. And it is perhaps not altogether fanciful to 
 find in the greater range granted to women in the modern 
 world, an influence in the direction of plain speaking and 
 the exposure of antique shams. Women desire to know 
 
EUGfiNE BRIEUX, MORALIST 233 
 
 the truth, in the fervent hope that the truth will set them 
 free. Men are apt to be more sceptical to echo Pilate's 
 celebrated question. 
 
 But is the drama the proper vehicle for the inculcation 
 of these moral truths, or for the preaching of reforms ? 
 To that question the answer of the modern world is explicit. 
 Every platform is to be welcomed, every means made use 
 of to get hold of the attention of the public, and because 
 the stage is a popular institution and attracts popular 
 audiences, it is to be utilised as fully and as unreservedly 
 as any other mode of appeal. The stage, no doubt, has 
 great advantages in this respect. It is better than the 
 pamphlet, the tract, most kinds of propaganda literature, 
 and other devices of the printed page. Print only appeals 
 to the eye, but actors in movement on a stage appeal not 
 only to the eye but to the ear. Moreover, it is maintained 
 that the stage -appeal to the eye is of a more illustrative 
 quality, more attractive, more persuasive, more seductive, 
 than anything that can be got out of a book. Or shall we 
 utilise the pulpit ? But sermons are not so widely effective 
 in their appeal as plays. They are directed to a smaller 
 audience to begin with, while the audience itself is of a 
 somewhat special kind and by no means representative of 
 the public at large. Thus the modern world seems to have 
 decided that, whatever may be the subjects ripe for dis- 
 cussion, the dramatist has quite as much qualification to 
 deal with them as the politician, the social philosopher, 
 or any one else. And the range of subjects is undoubtedly 
 large. If we take any social structure which has been in 
 existence for a good many years, we shall find a series of 
 defects which become more obvious and patent as time 
 goes on. Certain laws have lost their usefulness or be- 
 come actually oppressive; certain customs, which no 
 doubt had their justification in the past, have developed 
 into veritable curses; power has been arrogated by a few 
 tyrannical hands, as, for instance, the power of the parent 
 over the child, the power of the judge over the criminal, 1 
 the power of money and of the Press over all. 2 When there 
 are so many topics inviting discussion, why should the 
 dramatist confine himself to mainly sexual interests ? Why 
 should the eternal " triangle " between husband, wife, and 
 lover be the sole theme to be witnessed on the boards? 
 
 1 Cf. Galsworthy's play, Justice. 
 2 Cf. Arnold Bennett's play, What the Public Wants. 
 
234 OLD SAWS AND MODERN INSTANCES 
 
 There are all sorts of vital problems dealing with educa- 
 tion, government, public health, population, marriage, 
 divorce, parental duties, religion. There is no lack of 
 interest in these, and the modern world has decided that 
 any and every subject shall be treated frankly and with 
 sincerity. 
 
 That at least is clearly Brieux's view, and he has illus- 
 trated it in his practice. Thus the dramatist becomes in 
 a proper sense a public servant. He cannot, of course, 
 help his own idiosyncrasies. He has his own views, pecu- 
 liar, it may be, to himself, or shared only by a relatively 
 small section of society. His vision may be distorted by 
 all kinds of prejudices. These may be disqualifications for 
 his task, but they do not in the modern judgment affect 
 the urgency of the task itself. It is the business of the 
 dramatist also to see that the special didactic interest does 
 not overpower every other dramatic factor, such as con- 
 struction, analysis of character, artistic appeal. The 
 older theory, that art exists merely for the sake of art, is 
 discredited nowadays. In France, at all events, the view 
 held by the serious dramatist has made numerous con- 
 verts. Art is to have a distinctly moral aim, and Brieux 
 in this is merely reflecting a vast amount of contemporary 
 opinion in his own country as well as in England. 
 
 But there is another side of the question. I have tried 
 to depict Brieux as a man with a distinct theory of 
 dramatic art to which apparently he does not always 
 adhere as a moralist, as an anxious and indefatigable 
 reformer of abuses, and above all as a realist who desires 
 to paint things as he sees them, and not to allow the play 
 of fancy, imagination, or the instinctive love of romance 
 to interfere with the work in hand. What I have not 
 shown is Brieux as an artist, and that for the best possible 
 reason, because it is precisely on the artistic side that 
 Brieux is deficient. He is an artist sometimes in his 
 management of scenes, or in his treatment of character. 
 But that does not interfere with the main contention, that 
 if and where he fails, he fails as an artist. The reason is 
 plain. To him art is an instrument, a means to effect 
 something, and art does not admit of being used in this 
 fashion. It is an end in itself and cannot be subordinated 
 to alien pressures. If Brieux were asked what, in his 
 opinion, was the end of the dramatic art which he prac- 
 tised, he would, if he were consistent with his theory, say 
 
EUGENE BRIEUX, MORALIST 235 
 
 that it subserved ends of morality, that it could be used to 
 enforce a moral, that it could instruct and edify humanity. 
 But as I understand the matter, art can never run patiently 
 under the yoke of something which is not art. Art has 
 nothing specially to do with morality. The highest art is 
 always moral, because it is in accordance with the great 
 laws which govern the world, but that is an inseparable 
 accident, no part of the essence of Art. To the query, 
 ' What is the end of Art?" there is, I think, only one 
 answer. It is delight, in the widest and broadest sense of 
 the term. It exists to make us feel more intensely the 
 fervour, the joy, the exhilaration of life, it makes us see, 
 it purges our eyes from their blindness, it opens to us new 
 realms of beauty and truth. If you look at the practice 
 of great artists, you cannot say off-hand what particular 
 ends they subserve. But you can say of all artists worthy 
 of the name, especially the great dramatic artists, like the 
 Greek tragedians and Shakespeare, that they add to our 
 delight, that they open our eyes, extend our field of vision, 
 and make us understand all the vast and intricate interests 
 of humanity and life. 
 
 Thus the great charge one has to bring against Dra- 
 matic Realism is, that while it is rarely artistic, it is not 
 always real. Art can never be made scientific, and it only 
 commits suicide when it attempts to base itself on a 
 strictly scientific procedure. When one says that Art is 
 re-presentation, one has said all that is necessary. Art is 
 not presentation, that is the work of the photograph. It 
 is re-presentation that is, presentation bathed in the 
 colours of the artist's personality, and suffused with his 
 proper idiosyncrasy. 
 
"OUR EURIPIDES, THE HUMAN" 
 
 EURIPIDES may be said to have founded the school of 
 dramatic realism. He also gives us piquant hints as to 
 the limits of realism as an interpretation of life. His 
 position, his scope, his intention have been the subjects 
 of much controversy ranging from Aristotle's admira- 
 tion, " the most tragic of poets," and Mrs. Browning's 
 tribute to " Our Euripides, the human," down to the scorn 
 of Walter Savage Landor and the vitriolic abuse of Algernon 
 Charles Swinburne. On the whole the ancient world 
 admired him much more than the modern world seems 
 inclined to do. SchlegeFs criticism of him in his Theatre 
 of the Greeks is childish in its petulance and injustice. On 
 the other hand, certain English scholars Dr. Verrall and 
 Professor Gilbert Murray, for instance, to mention only 
 two names are quite prepared to concede to him the 
 very highest honours. 
 
 Let us ask ourselves first What is it precisely that 
 Euripides did ? To that the reply in the broadest and 
 simplest fashion is that he altered the dramatic formula, 
 undermined the axioms and postulates of his predecessors, 
 and challenged the prejudices, religious and ethical, of 
 the more conservative of his fellow-citizens. If ever 
 there was a man determined epater les bourgeois to shock 
 the respectability of the middle class it was Euripides. 
 It was nothing less than a revolution at which he aimed, 
 a revolution of thought about things human and divine. 
 He was a pupil of Anaxagoras, a daring physical philosopher 
 who suffered for his temerity in calling the sun a molten 
 mass of metal : he was a friend of Socrates who had to 
 drink the cup of hemlock for introducing new gods. And 
 he was a silent, uncommunicative, solitary man who 
 loved birds and the sea, loved working in a cave at Salamis, 
 but eschewed the companionship of his fellows; who 
 pondered the deepest problems of life and suggested by 
 means of his dramatic art the gravest doubts about the 
 
 236 
 
4 OUR EURIPIDES, THE HUMAN' 237 
 
 divine denizens of Olympus. Remember, too that this 
 recluse, who was one of the first men to collect a library, 
 only won the first prize five times. And yet he wrote 
 poems so rememberable that Athenian captives in the 
 stone quarries of Syracuse gained their freedom by reciting 
 them to their captors and on their return to Athens sought 
 out the old man to thank him for their recovered liberty. 
 He did not write for the people, but for students; and 
 yet his dramas were so well known that Aristophanes 
 could be sure that his jeering allusions to the Euripidean 
 texts could be appreciated by a popular audience. Two 
 other facts about him may be recalled. He was forced 
 to leave Athens, where his notorious scepticism was bringing 
 him into trouble, and he then wrote in retirement for the 
 Macedonian court of Archelaus a drama on the new cult 
 of Dionysus, apparently full of reverence, which no one 
 has been able thoroughly to understand from that day to 
 this. Was he recanting his early scepticism ? We do 
 not know. 
 
 The most succinct way of explaining what he did is 
 to say, as was said in ancient times, that he drew men 
 and women not as they ought to be, but as they are. 
 Now, whenever a dramatist elects to portray mankind as 
 it is, he creates a revolution and is sure to be called a 
 cynic. Unscientific artists some artists are a generous 
 folk, and they love to adorn the characters they draw 
 with all kinds of trappings and decorative clothes, some- 
 times disguising the real and essential elements in the 
 process. So when our reformer insists on taking off their 
 clothes and exhibits men and women in their nudity, all 
 kinds of unpleasant revelations come to light, and the 
 reformer is styled a morose satirist and eventually, per- 
 haps, a dangerous atheist. So it happened in the times 
 of Euripides, as also it happened in the times of Balzac 
 and Zola and Ibsen. The world as depicted by Dickens 
 is very different from the world as it appeared to Thack- 
 eray. Humanity in the plays of Victor Hugo cuts a very 
 different figure from humanity in the plays of Dumas 
 fils, Augier, Hervieu, and Brieux. And when JSschylus 
 thundered his iambics and his dithyrambs he gave to 
 his heroes and heroines a stature as of the gods; while 
 Euripides was content to garb his dramatis personse with 
 rags so that the bare bones of their humanity might be 
 visible to all spectators. 
 
238 OLD SAWS AND MODERN INSTANCES 
 
 Let us take an example or two. The Oresteian legend is 
 well known how Agamemnon, returning from Troy, was 
 murdered by his wife Clytemnestra, and how Agamemnon's 
 children Orestes and Electra avenged the crime by killing 
 Clytemnestra and her paramour, JSgisthus. Electra is the 
 title of one of Euripides' plays one of the most original 
 in treatment, so original, indeed, that it has been found 
 shocking by various critics. According to the earlier legends 
 Electra was a fine exponent of a blood-feud, a heroic 
 character, a king's daughter. She came of a lineage of 
 heroes, and, indeed, exercised an inspiring influence over 
 her neurotic brother Orestes in the execution of the deed 
 of vengeance against ^Egisthus. Euripides with these 
 facts before him began by introducing a wholly novel 
 fact which he probably invented himself. Because the 
 guilty pair at Argos desired to make themselves safe 
 against popular execration Electra was compelled to be 
 affianced to an ordinary yeoman, so that any children 
 born of her might have a plebeian taint and so be the 
 less likely to foment rebellion. In the play, therefore, 
 Electra is seen clad in shabby clothes working at menial 
 tasks in order to keep up the humble home of her husband, 
 who, on his part, is portrayed as a plain and honest man 
 only too much exercised how to fulfil the onerous respon- 
 sibility of being wedded to a king's daughter. The 
 marriage was, of course, no marriage. That at least we 
 might expect from the natural awe and reverence sur- 
 rounding members of a royal house. But the mise en 
 scene of the play the humble home, the menial tasks, 
 the loyal, anxious peasant husband, all help the dramatist 
 in carrying out his conception on broad and simple lines 
 of human nature. And how is Electra herself portrayed ? 
 You can imagine how a playwright of a sentimental turn 
 might paint the affair. We should have great stress laid 
 upon the indignity of the heroine a proud soul fretting 
 herself in obscurity and relative indigence bearing her 
 burden with no little difficulty and travail of her soul. 
 Touches like these, of course, are to be found in Euripides' 
 play and I may remark in passing that the portraiture 
 of her husband shows Euripides' sympathy with honest 
 yeomen who are upright and loyal, respectful, and punc- 
 tilious, assiduous in attention and yet possessing an 
 innate nobility of their own. But Electra? She is 
 assuredly no heroine as uEschylus and Sophocles painted 
 
6 OUR EURIPIDES, THE HUMAN 5 239 
 
 her. She is just a woman placed in an unfortunate posi- 
 tion, bearing about with her all the marks of a victim of j 
 an unscrupulous tyranny. She is haunted by her past 
 experience, poisoned by it, embittered. Intolerant of 
 poverty, she is getting to middle age, unpopular amongst 
 her fellow-citizens, unkissed, unkind, unmated, as her 
 very name indicates, though faithful to the death, as her 
 brother testifies, never ceasing to remember the debt 
 she owes to her dead father. Observe particularly that 
 she is not made a sympathetic character. She is too 
 hard and intense. Like her mother, Clytemnestra, she 
 is soured by disappointment. Clytemnestra, it is true, 
 seems to be a prey to remorse and anxious to atone. Electra 
 has no weaknesses of that kind ; it is her business to urge 
 on her brother, to fortify his fainting soul and drive him 
 resolutely to the great purpose of revenge. In this aspect, 
 therefore, it is clear that Euripides' play is a protest 
 against classical standards and canons. 1 The dramatist is 
 concerned to analyse character in a real human being, to 
 discover how any woman placed in such circumstances 
 would be likely to feel and act. 
 
 Or, take another instance of Euripides' realism. I am 
 choosing on purpose familiar plays, because they not 
 only illustrate the Euripidean method but deal with well- 
 known stories. Let us, then, glance for a moment at the 
 play called Alcestis, of which the heroine is a noble wife 
 who died for her husband's sake in order that he might 
 enjoy a few more years of his much-desired existence. 
 The ordinary conception of this husband, Admetus, was 
 that of a man who was the friend of the gods, whom 
 Apollo was supposed to befriend and to whom Hercules 
 might appeal as a host capable of regal hospitality. To 
 Admetus, therefore, as the friend of the gods was given 
 the option of avoiding death by procuring the death of 
 one of his kinsfolk. Alcestis filled the breach, and accord- 
 ing to the current Greek conception nobly fulfilled the 
 proper feminine task of subserving masculine ambition. 
 How does Euripides treat this fable ? He does full justice 
 to the character of the wife Alcestis, but he fastens his 
 criticism on that of the husband. What sort of man was 
 Admetus ? The answer for a psychologist is not difficult. 
 
 1 It is possible that Sophocles' Electra was produced after that of 
 Euripides and was intended to be an answer or antidote to a too realistic 
 portrait. 
 
240 OLD SAWS AND MODERN INSTANCES 
 
 Admetus was one of the most thoroughly selfish men 
 who ever lived, and one of the meanest. He allowed his 
 wife to die for him, and he had a bitter controversy with 
 his father, whom he charged with pusillanimity for not 
 offering his life to save his son. Even in the midst of the 
 funeral ceremonies, when Alcestis was being carried out 
 for burial, Admetus had not the frank honesty to reveal 
 to his visitor Hercules how inconvenient was his arrival 
 at the house of mourning. He must keep up his reputa- 
 tion for hospitality. He had such a low notion of friend- 
 ship that he was unable to take Hercules into his confidence. 
 He forwarded with most indecent haste all the necessary 
 preparations for the sepulchre. Not one jot or tittle of 
 the criticisms which might be passed upon this recreant 
 hero is omitted by Euripides. Hercules in single combat 
 with death rescues Alcestis from her fate and brings 
 her back again to her home. We feel how little sym- 
 pathy Euripides has for this happy ending, and the 
 suggestion has been advanced that the dramatist intended 
 to hint that Alcestis never died at all but only went off 
 into a swoon from which she was promptly awakened 
 by Hercules. Be this, however, as it may, the student 
 can have no doubt whatsoever as to the estimate of 
 Admetus' personality. Treated as a real character, not 
 as part of a heroic legend, he stands out in all his petty 
 egotism, a man whom other men ought to despise, gaining 
 at the close a reward which he did not deserve, and blessed 
 with the possession of a wife whose shoe's latchet he was 
 not worthy to unloose. I ought to add that the whole 
 play is somewhat of a stumbling-block to critics just 
 because it has a happy ending and because it exhibits 
 here and there comic elements, like Hercules' drunken- 
 ness, which seem out of place in a tragedy. It may have 
 taken the place of the Satyric play with which the ordinary 
 trilogy of dramas usually ended. Or, indeed, Alcestis 
 may be one of the earliest specimens in dramatic history 
 of what we in modern times would call a comedy, with 
 scenes of comic relief and a denouement of happiness and 
 mutual congratulation for every one concerned. 
 
 A good deal more is involved in this new reading of 
 ancient characters than meets a superficial glance. It 
 may seem to us to matter very little whether Electra was 
 drawn as an ordinary woman or as an antique heroine; 
 or whether the chief stress in the case of Admetus was 
 
'OUR EURIPIDES, THE HUMAN' 241 
 
 laid on his friendship with the gods or on the utter selfish- 
 ness of his conduct. It matters psychologically, of course, 
 for only when the aureole is taken from the brow and the 
 festal garb is exchanged for homespun is the man to be 
 discovered in his human elements, as apart from a glorified 
 puppet or coloured saint in the cathedral window. But 
 in Euripides' case we have indications of a religious, 
 moral, and social revolution actually taking place before 
 his eyes and largely aided by Socrates, Anaxagoras, 
 politicians of the day and thinkers and poets like himself. 
 Aristophanes is always sighing for the good old days and 
 regretting the absence of warriors who fought at Marathon. 
 It is as though Wellington in his later years looked back 
 to the stout men-at-arms who fought that " damned 
 near-run thing " at Waterloo. -<Eschylus belonged in 
 heart and spirit to the Marathon-fighter days, when men 
 reverenced the gods, accepted the old legends as gospel, 
 and were decently respectful to their elders and betters. 
 In Euripides' time, however, a new generation had arisen 
 " which knew not Joseph "dialecticians, sophists, pinch- 
 beck politicians, litigious busybodies, sceptics who doubted 
 about everything, atheists who believed in nothing in 
 fact, the whole crew pictured by Aristophanes as belonging 
 to the new age of unsettlement and chaos. Euripides 
 himself was part of this new age, for he had studied the 
 new philosophy and wrestled in the spirit of the rationalist 
 with moral and religious problems. ^Eschylus was a ^ 
 metaphysician whose task it was to reconcile men with 
 the ways of Heaven. Euripides was an analytic thinker \ 
 who tried in vain to reconcile the ways of Heaven with j 
 doubting and inquiring men. To JSschylus the existence 
 and reality of gods were a postulate, an axiom. To I 
 Euripides the existence of such things as pain and sorrow 
 and evil seemed to preclude the hypothesis of Divine 
 Providence. As a matter of fact Euripides with his 1 * 
 scepticism and ^Eschylus with his faith eventually arrived 
 at much the same conclusion, both accepting in the long 
 run a vague pantheistic creed with Zeus as the primal 
 source of all being. But the method of approach was 
 entirely different in the two cases, the later poet com- 
 mencing with man as his starting-point, and the earlier 
 with the gods as the foundation of his structure. Hence 
 the results also were entirely different, ^Eschylus drawing 
 heroes and heroines, and Euripides painting ordinary 
 
242 OLD SAWS AND MODERN INSTANCES 
 
 men and women. Thus, if Clytemnestra in the Agamem- 
 non is a magnificent figure of evil clothed in purple pomp, 
 Clytemnestra in the Electro, is an unhappy middle-aged 
 woman, anxious to atone for her guilty past. 
 
 But Euripides with his new way of looking at things 
 was confronted by a peculiar difficulty in constructing his 
 plays. The traditional method, the method of ^schylus 
 and Sophocles, was to exhibit the working of the gods 
 in human affairs, showing how sin inevitably brought 
 its punishment according to divine law. Moreover, the 
 dramas themselves as enacted in Athens were produced 
 under the aegis, as it were, of Apollo and Dionysius and 
 Athena, and dedicated in a certain fashion to their glorifi- 
 cation. How, then, was Euripides, with his scanty respect 
 for Olympus and his distaste for superstition, to recom- 
 mend his plays to Athenian audiences, the majority of 
 whom were accustomed to a traditional method and 
 were guided, no doubt, by pardonable prejudices? His 
 plan was an unhappy one, but we may admit that the 
 dilemma was serious. Ancient and modern critics have 
 alike fallen foul of his prologues and his epilogues, because 
 they have little or no connection with his plot, being for 
 the most part formal explanatory matter put into the 
 mouth of a god or a goddess and dramatic devices of the 
 nature of a deus ex machina to bring the play to a con- 
 clusion. The prologue is an index of events, the epilogue 
 is a tag, summarily arresting further action. Both are 
 otiose to the main thesis. What was Euripides to do ? 
 If theatrical custom demanded the introduction of the 
 gods and he had the misfortune not to believe in a Pan- 
 theon of magnified and non-natural beings guilty of every 
 moral depravity, his only resource, as it seemed to him, 
 was to pay lip-service to Apollo and Athena in a prologue, 
 allow these conventional deities to end his play which 
 had got itself into such a tangle that it could only be ended 
 abruptly and throw all his interest and his dramatic 
 skill into the portraiture of character and the represent- 
 ation of actual and real human creatures. In other 
 words, the introduction of the gods was nothing but 
 the word is inevitable nowadays a " camouflage," an 
 elaborate piece of humbug to satisfy uneasy consciences 
 while the more instructed spirits would know how to 
 estimate it at its proper measure. On any other inter- 
 pretation Euripides can only be considered a bad artist 
 
'OUR EURIPIDES, THE HUMAN' 243 
 
 for trying to combine incompatibles and for being so 
 clumsy in construction. 1 If he had a slightly satirical 
 purpose, at all events we may admire his cleverness, even 
 though we may in a savage mood call him a hypocrite. 
 
 Observe, however, that we have already thrown an 
 interesting sidelight on dramatic realism. The drawback 
 of all realism is that it sets the realistic artist at logger- 
 heads with an average audience. The audience have 
 their fixed prejudices and they do not like to be disturbed 
 in their theatrical habits. They come to the theatre 
 expecting the usual thing, and when they receive some- 
 thing else something unpleasantly new and provoca- 
 tive they are only too apt to believe that, having asked 
 for bread, they have been presented with a stone. Some 
 artists sacrifice their principles and allow themselves to 
 bow down in the house of Rimmon. Others attempt a 
 more or less uneasy compromise. Others, again, skilfully 
 conceal their intention, as Euripides did, keeping their 
 purpose up their sleeve, with a sly wink to those in the 
 know. The modern problem is not, of course, the same as 
 that which confronted Euripides, but it is of similar 
 import. The average audience, the conservative and 
 conventional theatre-goers, want a happy ending, as 
 Aristotle long ago observed. They want their heroes and 
 heroines to be obviously good people and their villains to 
 be obviously bad people. They think that tragedy only 
 applies to great persons, to kings and tyrants, or at the 
 very least to dukes and earls. They believe in " situa- 
 tions," and desire a clear-cut ending to the play. And 
 your thorough-going realist disappoints them in every par- 
 ticular. He will not give them happy endings if the plot 
 demands a melancholy conclusion. He will not give them 
 an ending at all, for humanity goes on and life does not 
 admit of such convenient stopping-places. He will not 
 make his characters all white or all black, for there is a 
 soul of goodness in things evil and a seed of potential evil 
 even in the good. Nor will he confine tragedy to courts 
 and baronial halls, but sees tragic elements in cottages 
 and acute drama in the relations of quite humble beings. 
 He will bring down his curtain when he has had his say 
 and will not disturb himself, however much you protest 
 as to the absence of an artistic finish. And so realists are 
 
 1 This is, of course, the view taken by Dr. Verrall in Euripides, the 
 Rationalist. 
 
244 OLD SAWS AND MODERN INSTANCES 
 
 abused until they can train their own audiences. Perhaps 
 Euripides trained his. Ibsen, after much furious alter- 
 cation, undoubtedly succeeded in educating a school. 
 
 Among the various antagonisms in which realism stands 
 towards other schemes or theories of art one of the obvious 
 antithesis is between realism and romance. This has a 
 particular historic significance which is best illustrated 
 from French literature. Victor Hugo, in reaction from 
 the cold classical perfection of Corneille and Racine, 
 introduced romantic drama. When the rage had passed 
 for bombastic heroes and melodramatic situations the 
 time had come for another reaction realistic or natural- 
 istic fiction, as in the novels of Zola; realistic drama, as 
 in the work of Brieux and some of his contemporaries. 
 Thus it became one of the dogmas of the new naturalistic 
 school to eschew romance on the ground of its artificiality 
 and its absurd unreality. But, apart from this historical 
 justification, there is no intimate or essential reason why 
 realism should exclude romance. Romance enters largely 
 into most of the tragedies and comedies of life, and so far 
 as we can see it is an integral part of that human sen- 
 sibility which adds colour to existence while it exposes us 
 to suffering. If you shut out romance at the front door 
 it is very apt to return by the back door, and be the more 
 troublesome the more it is ignored. There is no little 
 romance in Euripides romance and sensitiveness and 
 sentiment and he makes a strong appeal to our capacity 
 for tears. Sunt lacrymce rerum is as much his motto as 
 it is Virgil's. This comes out especially in his treatment 
 of women in his plays. He was much interested in women, 
 a thing which his contemporaries could not understand 
 and which they tried to explain by his unfortunate ex- 
 perience with two wives. They said Aristophanes at 
 least said that he was doing harm to the cause of woman- 
 hood, and that women hated him. But our modern 
 experience enables us to see more clearly. We know how 
 often avowed feminists are accused of doing harm to the 
 very sex they try to defend. Emancipated womanhood 
 is held by conservatives and reactionaries to be a wronged 
 womanhood. But here Euripides is on modern lines. 
 Both he and Plato recognised that Greek society did 
 serious harm to women. An imperfect ideal of woman is 
 a disease of which, perhaps more than anything else, 
 ancient civilisation perished. Let us do honour to the 
 
'OUR EURIPIDES, THE HUMAN' ij45 
 
 Greek philosopher and the Greek dramatist for a perspi- 
 cacity denied to the men of their age even to a man so 
 highly intellectual as Pericles. "EQ%exai njua yvvcuxeiq) 
 ydvei. " Honour comes to the race of women." 1 It 
 preludes a triumph which was only to be realised centuries 
 afterwards. 
 
 The play Medea, from which I have just given a quota- 
 tion, is a veritable tragedy, but the treatment of the 
 heroine is on the lines of romance. It is a very striking 
 piece of work, belonging to Euripides' early years of 
 authorship, and perhaps because of its very originality 
 it only won a third prize. The professed and orthodox 
 moral is that a marriage between a Greek (Jason) and a 
 barbarian princess from Colchis (Medea) is no marriage. 
 But to look for a moral at all in the case of a highly imagi- 
 native and artistic creation like this is a pedantic piece of 
 supererogation. It is as though we took the play of 
 Romeo and Juliet in our hands and solemnly declared that 
 the lesson to be learnt from it was that " violent delights 
 have violent ends." I forget whether Gervinus draws 
 this moral, but he is quite capable of it, and I have little 
 doubt that some of the academic editors of Euripides 
 have duly extricated this gem of wisdom about foreign 
 marriages from the play of Medea. The real interest lies 
 in the wonderfully-drawn portrait of the heroine, while 
 the whole story depicts the fading of a romance, the end 
 of a riotous honeymoon of passion and battle. Jason 
 leads his Argonauts to win the Golden Fleece past the 
 Symplegades or clashing rocks to the shores of Colchis, 
 and though, indeed, he wins the prize of his enterprise 
 his chief conquest is the victory of the Princess Medea. 
 Without her love he would have been powerless; with 
 her aid he surmounts every peril. And she, poor, in- 
 fatuated fool, with all her wild exuberance and barbarous 
 frenzy, escapes with him only to discover that passion 
 yields but a Dead Sea fruit and the end thereof is dust 
 and ashes. Medea is a typical villainess a savage, 
 untamed animal. She is prodigal of her crimes : she 
 deceives her father, poisons the dragon that keeps watch 
 and ward over the treasure, stabs her brother Absyrtus, 
 lures Pelias to his death, kills Creon and his daughter, 
 and murders her children. She did it for love. Never 
 did a woman so resolutely accept the maxim " All for love 
 1 Eurip., Med,, 419. 
 
246 OLD SAWS AND MODERN INSTANCES 
 
 and the world well lost." Euripides takes a character 
 like this and transforms it into a wonderful presentment 
 of a woman scorned. Medea becomes veritably human 
 I was almost going to say sympathetic in the process. 
 She is a Gorgon, a Fury, a Valkyrie, but you cannot for 
 the life of you hate and condemn her. No wonder that 
 the chorus, who ought to detest so fierce a representative 
 of a barbarian race, take her side in the controversy and 
 keep her fatal secrets. We cannot forgive her for mur- 
 dering her children. And yet, and yet when in a mar- 
 vellous bit of stage-craft Euripides depicts her as suddenly 
 bursting into tears over the children she is going to sacri- 
 fice o> agTidaxQvi; elfu nai (popov ntea 1 well, the tears 
 are ready to start to our eyes. In his command of pathos 
 Euripides is irresistible, and probably that is why Aristotle 
 called him the most tragic of poets. Nor is Jason less 
 admirable as a study. We feel that to him, a characteristic 
 Hellene, woman's love is of little account, and that Medea 
 in the midst of a Greek civilisation is frankly a bore. The 
 love of his lifetime was not Medea or any other woman, 
 but his stout ship Argo, a fallen timber from which is 
 said to have ultimately killed him. And Medea goes up 
 in a chariot of fire at the close, taking the bodies of her 
 murdered children with her. She had indeed executed 
 vengeance on all her foes, and in her barbaric fashion 
 vindicated the right of womanhood. 
 
 I could go through many of these plays in similar 
 fashion especially Iphigeneia in Taurica, which again 
 gives us a perfect study of a woman, hardened by exile 
 and " wild with all regret," and as a play is a pure romance, 
 happy ending and all. But something should be said 
 about The Trojan Women, which, it will be remembered, 
 was played some time ago at the Court Theatre, and 
 quite recently produced at Manchester by Mr. Drinkwater, 
 for it throws a sidelight on Euripides' relation to the 
 current politics of his time and illustrates the nature of 
 his humanity. 
 
 Despite all their brilliant culture the Athenians were 
 not a humane people. Human, artistic, civilised, the 
 Athenians were without any doubt, but not humane. Or 
 perhaps they had grown sharp and cruel, as a selfish race 
 inevitably tends to do when it grasps an empire and 
 exploits it solely to its own advantage. At all events, 
 1 Eurip., Med., 903. 
 
'OUR EURIPIDES, THE HUMAN' 247 
 
 during the Peloponnesian War the Athenians committed 
 several cruel acts, which Thucydides notes with his usual 
 judicial coldness the massacre of Melos, for instance, 
 the condemnation of the Mitylenians to a similar fate, the 
 resolution being rescinded next day to say nothing of 
 the habitual ill-treatment of the slaves in the silver mines 
 of Laureion. Xenophon, too, tells us that during the 
 last stages of the war the Athenians cut off the right 
 hands of all the prisoners they took on Spartan vessels 
 so that they might row no more for the enemy. They 
 must have been hard and tyrannical, for the islanders in 
 the ^Egean hated them and took the earliest opportunities 
 of revolting when the crash of the Sicilian disaster came. 
 The Melian affair was peculiarly horrible, for Melos did 
 not belong to the Athenian Confederacy and the popula- 
 tion was Doric rather than Ionic. Yet the island was 
 ruthlessly taken by storm, the women and children sold 
 into captivity, and all the males put to the sword. Even 
 Thucydides was revolted by such a transaction. He does 
 not hesitate to put into the mouth of the Athenian envoys 
 in their arguments with the Melians sentiments which we 
 should now call those of Realpolitik and which we attribute 
 to the military camarilla at Berlin. 
 
 But Thucydides was not the only one to be shocked. 
 The Melian massacre happened in 416 B.C. In the next 
 year, 415, Euripides brought out his Trojan Women, a 
 most moving and pathetic drama which was only placed 
 second, the first prize being won by a certain Xenocles, 
 " whoever he may have been," as Julian scornfully says 
 in his Varia Historia. He paints for us the scene of 
 desolation which followed on the capture of Troy, the 
 women given over as slaves to the Greek chieftains, the 
 little son of Hector, Astyanax, dragged away to be thrown 
 over the battlements, and the savage conqueror, Menelaus, 
 striding on the stage to carry off Helen as his prey. Euri- 
 pides sets before us a close and penetrating study of what 
 happens when a beleaguered town falls into the hands of 
 its foes, a picture of ruin and agony the other side, as 
 it were, of the glory of victory. It is hardly a drama : it 
 is an analytic presentment of a single scene, realistic in 
 detail, and poignantly true. There are four women in 
 the foreground : Hecuba, the mother, Cassandra, the 
 daughter, Andromache, Hector's widow, and Helen, the 
 cause of all the trouble and the curse of Troy. Each of 
 
248 OLD SAWS AND MODERN INSTANCES 
 
 them has her story to tell. They were once queens and 
 princesses; now they are to be the slave -concubines of 
 their captors. Only Helen preserves her triumphant 
 beauty, for she has a touch of the supernatural about her ; 
 she is a wanton, but divine. In the background are all 
 the ruins of what once was Ilium, the coming to and fro 
 of Talthybius, the Greek herald, and the insolent captains, 
 the final crash of towers which marks the end of the story. 
 All the portraits are vividly described and felt, and if 
 Helen is marvellously studied, no less a triumph is Mene- 
 laus, torn between his brutal rage and his no less brutal 
 passion for Paris's paramour. We do not know whether 
 the Athenians took the moral for themselves. But we 
 do know that when their final agony came upon them 
 and Lysander was thundering at their gates, they remem- 
 bered all that they had done to the Melians and other 
 islanders, and trembled to think what would be done to 
 them. Euripides' realism never stood him in better stead 
 than when he, most tragic of the poets, portrayed the 
 tragedy of fallen Troy. 
 
 Let me add a few remarks of a more general character. 
 We have now seen what Dramatic Realism meant for 
 Euripides. He was a realist because he painted men and 
 women not in an artificial or etherealised fashion, but as 
 they are Cromwell, so to speak, with all his warts. How 
 far it is possible for any artist to be so purely objective 
 is a grave question, with which I do not at present deal. 
 The artist, I may observe, cannot help or avoid his own 
 idiosyncrasies he cannot jump off his own shadow. 
 Let that pass for the moment. Euripides is a realist 
 because he will have little or nothing to do with the purple 
 pomps and trappings of tragedy. Tragedy itself can be 
 discovered in humble circumstances in the ordinary 
 relations of human beings to one another. Therefore the 
 gods and goddesses are figured by Euripides in a purely 
 rationalistic way, suggesting that if they commit actions 
 morally objectionable " the less gods they." The ancient 
 myths, too, are very freely handled Electra, for instance, 
 being represented as engaged in menial tasks and as the 
 wife of a common yeoman. On the other hand, Euripides' 
 realism does not exclude a romantic and sentimental 
 treatment. Indeed, he revels in sentiment, and Aristotle 
 suggests that he was too fond of an enervating pathos. 1 
 
 1 Arist., Poet,, 26. \ 
 
'OUR EURIPIDES, THE HUMAN' 249 
 
 Realism, one would be inclined to say, must be made of 
 sterner stuff. 
 
 And now that we have in some measure understood the 
 poet's attitude, let us ask, Was he justified? To that I 
 think our answer must be that artistically he was justified, 
 for every artist has a right to his own attitude and point 
 of view, and we can only judge or condemn him if we find 
 that he is guilty of flagrant inconsistency. But we open 
 a larger question if we ask whether he was justified as a 
 moralist and a philosopher. A heavy responsibility rests 
 on those who deal with the highest subjects of thought and 
 attempt to solve ultimate problems of our life and destiny. 
 One point is clear that it is dangerous to apply a destruc- 
 tive criticism unless room is left for reconstruction on a 
 higher plane. When Plato had shown that current moral 
 notions were misleading and false he led the student to 
 lofty conceptions in his system of Ideas, and especially 
 to the Idea of Good, the apex of his philosophy, equivalent 
 to God. What did Euripides do ? He practically de- 
 stroyed the whole of the legendary framework surrounding 
 and supporting men's ordinary notions of good and evil, 
 and showed them a world void of the Godhead. He 
 laughed at the denizens of Olympus and brought them 
 down from their celestial heights to the dusty thorough- 
 fares where men chatter and bargain, dispute, and quarrel 
 in everyday life. By depreciating heroic myths and 
 heroic characters he did his best to banish a fixed external 
 standard of morality so far as that standard existed for 
 ordinary people. And so Good was analysed into mere 
 convention and custom, while Truth was frittered away into 
 individual opinion. That is why Euripides was held up 
 by Aristophanes and others as a dangerous sophist. 
 
 But we must not leave matters thus, as though this 
 were all. Euripides deserves better at our hands than to 
 be called a sophist. A deeply thoughtful man, he was 
 throughout struggling with the problems of Evil and the 
 possibility of Divine government ; and from time to time 
 gave utterance to his doubts or his surmises in accordance 
 with his prevalent mood. Like all of us in our own smaller 
 degree, he varied in his opinion as different facets of the 
 great mystery presented themselves to his gaze. Let us 
 not forget two things : Euripides was a realist, but he 
 was also a reformer. In the Troades, for instance, he 
 wants to take the tinsel off military glory and to show 
 
250 OLD SAWS AND MODERN INSTANCES 
 
 what an awful thing war is. And if he is a sceptic, he, 
 too, can rise to some mystical faith of Pantheism. For 
 he puts in the mouth of Hecuba also in this play an 
 appeal to the Highest God of all, the Supreme Intelligence, 
 who corresponds to what Anaxagoras called Nous and 
 Plato the Idea of Good. 
 
SIR HERBERT TREE AND THE ENGLISH STAGE 
 
 AN OPEN LETTER TO AN AMERICAN FRIEND 
 
 You ask me to give you some idea of Herbert Tree what 
 principles he stood for in art, what was his contribution 
 to the English stage, what was the basis of his personal 
 popularity. And I find it hard to give you satisfactory 
 answers, for two reasons, one of which has to do with 
 you and the other with myself. Let me take the latter 
 first. I have been a friend of Tree for more than a quarter 
 of a century a rather intimate friend with whom he would 
 discuss matters concerning which he would remain silent 
 with others. He talked freely with me because he thought 
 (and I hope he thought rightly) that I would understand 
 him and sympathise with him. Therefore, now that he is 
 dead, you may be sure that I shall instinctively take his 
 part, and though I may suggest certain lines of criticism, 
 I shall naturally be inclined to laudation rather than cen- 
 sure. I was fond of Tree, and because he had a real affec- 
 tionateness of disposition which sometimes he carefully 
 disguised companionship with him was always easy and 
 pleasant, and to me delightful. 
 
 And now let me turn to your side of the question. I take 
 it that judging Tree entirely from the outside, you have 
 sometimes wondered why on this side of the Atlantic we 
 thought so much of him. You were aware that his first 
 visit to America some years ago was more or less of a failure, 
 and that his idiosyncrasies struck people in that continent 
 more forcibly than his positive qualities. On the occasion 
 of his last visit you were minded to make exceptions and 
 discover differences; you tolerated his Cardinal Wolsey, 
 though the slow delivery of his speeches irritated you; 
 you admired the sumptuous manner in which the play was 
 set on the stage, though sometimes you thought that the 
 frame was too ornate for the picture. When it came to 
 Thackeray, you frankly rebelled. You considered his 
 Colonel Newcome not the ideal of an English gentleman, but 
 the laborious effort of an actor to look like it ; it seemed to 
 you that the pathos was wrong, the humour sometimes 
 
 251 
 
252 OLD SAWS AND MODERN INSTANCES 
 
 misplaced, the sentimentality too much in evidence. You 
 never saw Tree in Dickens, did you ? I ask because in 
 David Copperfield Tree gave two performances, both of 
 them admirable. He was both Dan'l Peggotty and Micaw- 
 ber, and of the two I think the Peggotty was the better. 
 He was also a very vivid and picturesque Fagin. And the 
 moral of my remark is that the pathos of Dickens, the 
 humour of Dickens, the sentimentality of Dickens suited 
 Tree's art better than the similar qualities (which exist in 
 a very different form) in Thackeray. If Tree had been a 
 reader of books he emphatically was not he might have 
 understood Thackeray better. You cannot get at the 
 author of " Vanity Fair " from the outside, or by any in- 
 genious or brilliant a priori methods; you have got to 
 live with him in prolonged intimacy; his books must be 
 at your bedside; his curious, elusive spirit, half-preacher, 
 half-cynic, must be your constant companion. With 
 Dickens it is different. You can have a very good bowing 
 acquaintance with Dickens and do him little or no injustice. 
 His characters have the melodramatic tinge and strike one 
 easily and forcibly. They are not pure creations of the 
 Comic Spirit like some of the characters of Thackeray and 
 Meredith. Farce, sheer, undiluted Farce, enters into 
 them so largely that for stage purposes they suit admirably 
 an actor with a frank liking for caricature. 
 
 And that reminds me that you have not seen I do not 
 think I am wrong Tree's Falstaff or his Malvolio. You 
 have missed a good deal, though perhaps you would have 
 had the uneasy feeling that these, too, bordered on carica- 
 ture. But did not Shakespeare intend them for caricature ? 
 I am thinking for the moment of Falstaff, in the Merry 
 Wives of Windsor, not of the hero of Eastcheap. In the 
 Historical plays Falstaff is far too prodigious a creature 
 to be included in any of our usual categories. He is a world 
 in himself. He has an overpowering humour and a most 
 wistful pathos. He is E very-man, enlisted in a riotous 
 conception of life and working to his doom with a blithe 
 devil-may-care recklessness. Shakespeare never traced 
 on his canvas a more wonderful being, so detestable and 
 so lovable. But Falstaff in the Merry Wives 9 is a carica- 
 ture, and Tree, who accepted him as such, gave a ripe, 
 unctuous performance of an All-fatness, oozing out drink 
 and a maudlin sentimentality at every pore, which was 
 quite irresistible. Malvolio belongs to the same order of 
 humanity, the fatuous egotist, the pedantic megalomaniac. 
 
THE ENGLISH STAGE 253 
 
 Tree was clearly doubtful whether average audiences 
 would understand the conception, for he repeated Malvolio 
 in the servants who formed his retinue and who, in their 
 turn, caricatured the caricature. In the heyday of Mal- 
 volio' s pompous idiocy Tree excelled; when it came to the 
 poor pedant, bullied, imprisoned, and tortured, it was of 
 course another matter. But has any one reconciled the 
 earlier and the later Malvolio ? Henry Ainley, who did 
 so well in the part at the Savoy Theatre, found himself 
 confronted with the same difficulty. 
 
 You will have gathered, of course, that versatility was 
 Tree's chief characteristic, or, as some might say, his 
 besetting sin. Versatile he undoubtedly was ; he tried to 
 show his skill in very different fields of dramatic work. 
 He essayed tragic roles at one time he was very anxious 
 to act King Lear, as a pendant or culmination to his Mac- 
 beth, his Othello, his Hamlet. He was a comedian either 
 with or without a touch of melodrama ; he made his name 
 originally in farce, as those know who saw his Private 
 Secretary. Versatility is undoubtedly a perilous gift; you 
 know how a so-called versatile man is supposed to waste 
 himself and his talents in many channels of activity and 
 to succeed in none. I have said a " so-called versatile 
 man " because no man is really versatile : he only thinks 
 he is, or is idly so reported by others. There is always one 
 thing he does which is better than others, despite his 
 many-sidedness; and if he is wise, he will discover what 
 it is and cultivate it to the best of his ability. Tree liked 
 to be considered many-sided; indeed, he resented any 
 suggestion to the contrary, and for this reason, I suppose, 
 wrote two books, though he ostentatiously declared that 
 he was not a book-reader. His restless and unbounded 
 activity was compelled to show itself in various fields ; I 
 do not think I ever came across any man who was more 
 pertinaciously and assiduously alive. He was " a dragon 
 for work," as they say, and had a greater range of vivid 
 interests literary, political, social, dramatic than most 
 of us can lay claim to. His quick alertness of spirit, his 
 ready apprehension, his humour which at times verged 
 on the macabre made him a most stimulating companion. 
 He always saw objects from the less obvious standpoints 
 and delighted in all that was unconventional and para- 
 doxical. His wit was never mordant, nor was it always 
 very pointed. And his epigrams were for the most part 
 ebullitions of high spirits. 
 
254 OLD SAWS AND MODERN INSTANCES 
 
 But if you ask me in what within his own proper sphere of 
 work, the dramatic, Tree was best, I answer without 
 hesitation. It was, as perhaps you might gather from what 
 has just been said, in the representation of fantastic, 
 eccentric, bizarre characters, characters with a twist in 
 them which made them peculiar and original. Here a long 
 list of successes testifies to the actor's easy mastery. I 
 take some names, just as they occur Svengali in Trilby 
 first and foremost, a fascinating study; the hero and 
 villain in A Mans Shadow ; Izard in Business is Business ; 
 Captain Swift; Montjoye in A Bunch of Violets; the 
 spectacled Russian detective Demetrius in The Red Lamp ; 
 Dr. Stockmann in The Enemy of the People there is so long 
 a list that I should weary you if I gave even a tithe of them. 
 But let me add at least the curiously sympathetic imperson- 
 ation of Caliban, a really remarkable effort of imagination 
 in the sphere of animality, which was in its way quite as 
 illuminating as Browning's Caliban on Setebos. To see Tree 
 make up for his part was a privilege I often enjoyed. There 
 in his dressing-room you saw the artist at work, the creative 
 artist who adds touch after touch to complete the picture, 
 until suddenly the whole conception bursts into significant 
 life. When Tree had thoroughly got inside the skin of a 
 character which often took some time he seemed to 
 partake of a new and alien life. A singular illustration 
 was Zakkuri in the Darling of the Gods, in which by degrees 
 Tree gave us, I do not say a true, but an extraordinarily 
 vivid and convincing, portrait of a Japanese statesman in 
 all his horrible subtlety and coarseness. Another example 
 was Izard in Business is Business. Tree was never a smoker 
 in the true sense of the word, he only smoked for the sake 
 of companionship, taking a modest fourpenny cigar, 
 while he gave his guest Coronas. But in Izard he was 
 perpetually smoking big and black-looking cigars. I 
 asked him how he managed to stand it ; he answered that, 
 as it seemed natural to the character, he found it easy for 
 himself. Off the stage he could not have done it; on the 
 stage it was appropriate and therefore a piece of unconscious 
 mimicry. Svengali smoked, I think, cigarettes or long 
 Vevey fins. The Duke of Guisebery smoked, quite as to 
 the manner born, a pipe a luxury in which Tree, the indi- 
 vidual, not the actor, never indulged. 
 
 You must forgive me for rambling on in this desultory 
 fashion ; I want you to understand how, for those who knew 
 him and liked him, Tree the man, over and above all the 
 
THE ENGLISH STAGE 255 
 
 parts he assumed, gained his great personal ascendancy. 
 It is Tree the man I remember now, and, doubtless, my 
 appreciation of his personality colours all my judgment 
 of his acting. It is Tree the man who figures in my memory 
 and perhaps his shade if such things can vex those who 
 have passed into the land of shadows is inclined to rebuke 
 me for writing about him. For I recall an incident bearing 
 on the point. He asked me one night at supper at the 
 Garrick what I had been writing. I answered that I had 
 been trying to write an obituary of my friend, H. D. Traill. 
 " That must be an odious task," he said; " the more you 
 like a man the less ought you to write about him." I 
 agreed, but remarked that journalism required such heavy 
 sacrifices of feeling and affection; and that, anyway, it 
 was better that an obituary notice should be written by a 
 friend than by a merely critical observer. This is my only 
 defence now in taking up my pen. In many ways I should 
 have preferred to be silent. To say nothing is the only 
 becoming attitude for friendship. But however more 
 congenial it may be to be silent and to remember, there are 
 other considerations which are bound to be operative. 
 " You are always a little cold when you write about me," 
 Tree said to me once. " Is not that natural ? " I replied. 
 " You know the old adage about a cold hand and a warm 
 heart." " It is all very well to dissemble your love. But 
 why did you kick me downstairs ? " Tree quoted gaily. 
 " But of course I understand," he added with his genial 
 smile. As a matter of fact, we never had even the slightest 
 difference in all the twenty -seven years of companionship. 
 With most men he had an open, genial manner which they 
 found very attractive. Even his occasional affectations 
 which no one laughed at more heartily than Tree himself, 
 but which obviously he could not help did not annoy 
 them, because they foundthe amusing. I am not sure 
 however, whether women understood him as well as men 
 any more than the average woman can understand why 
 to some of us Falstaff is as great a creation as Hamlet. 
 
 Yes, I know what you are thinking at this moment. 
 You imagine that I shrink from the main issue and that I 
 am toying with purely subsidiary points just because I find 
 it difficult to solve your main problem. I answer, however, 
 that some things, perhaps subsidiary and unessential as 
 you feel, must be understood first before we are in any 
 position to arrive at a positive conclusion. Let us admit 
 without reserve that Tree as a personality was greater than 
 
256 OLD SAWS AND MODERN INSTANCES 
 
 anything he accomplished; but you must allow me to 
 observe that that in itself is a compliment, and in the case 
 of many artists a very great one. Moreover, it makes no 
 little difference in the result how and in what spirit you 
 approach the consideration of a character. To me the 
 important point is to ask what a man can do, not to worry 
 yourself about what he cannot do. The latter attitude 
 leads to purely barren criticism and an enumeration of 
 unilluminating negatives. The former gives one interesting 
 glimpses of psychology. It is the same with other things 
 besides men. It is true of a piece of mechanism like a 
 bicycle or a motor-car ; it is true also of a dog or a semi- 
 personal being, like a ship. You will never get the best 
 out of such objects, you will never get the best out of ordin- 
 ary human relations, unless the positive occupies you more 
 than the negative, what can be done rather than what 
 cannot. Do not smile at such truisms. So far as I can judge, 
 they are often quite curiously and wantonly disregarded by 
 many men, most women, and a large proportion of critics. 
 Somewhere I think in " The Mirror of the Sea "Mr. 
 Joseph Conrad remarks that certain ship-masters are like 
 Royal Academicians. They are eminently safe, but they 
 never startle you by a fresh audacity of inspiration or a 
 touch of originality. There are actors of a similar kind. 
 They are quite sure of themselves, they can be trusted to 
 do the right thing at the proper moment, they are recognised 
 leaders of the profession who will always give you the same 
 sort of acting, quite good, quite reputable, quite adequate 
 (hateful word !), but devoid of any disturbing brightness of 
 emotion or fancy. No one could charge Tree with belong- 
 ing to this solemn order of artist. He was always unex- 
 pected, daring, original. He often gave one a shock of 
 surprise, welcome or unwelcome. He was good when you 
 anticipated a relative failure; poor, when you could have 
 wagered on his success. His acting was never monotonous, 
 rarely the same from night to night. Like his conversation, 
 it was full of quick turns and unlooked-for spurts of wit. 
 For the same reason, his figure as he moved on the stage 
 was vivid, graphic, picturesque, satisfying the eye, even 
 when occasionally he failed to satisfy the mind. When 
 he was acting Mark Antony in the Forum scene he broke off 
 the famous speech in the middle, came down from the 
 rostrum and finished his speech, standing on a broken 
 pillar. I argued with him about this, suggesting that if 
 Mark Antony was really holding his audience he would never 
 
THE ENGLISH STAGE 257 
 
 have altered his position. Tree answered : " You forget 
 the soon-wearied eye of the spectator : he becomes tired of 
 one situation and demands another. Besides," he added 
 with a whimsical smile, " change is a necessity for my 
 nature." It was indeed. And owing to this he became 
 tired and bored with his part, and sometimes broke off the 
 run of a piece in the midst of a brilliant success. I antici- 
 pate what you will say, my critical friend ! You will 
 remind me that I am describing the qualities of an amateur, 
 not of a professional. I do not shrink from the conclusion. 
 Tree had all the best points of an amateur, and some of 
 his triumphs were gained just for that reason. He was a 
 glorified amateur who dared things which a professional 
 never would have dared, and won a shining victory. He 
 mistrusted all talk about technique. " I have not got 
 technique," he once said; " it is a dull thing. It enslaves 
 the imagination." And when he established his school 
 in Gower Street, in which I was able to render some small 
 help, he retained some doubts, which were afterwards 
 dispelled. " You cannot teach acting," he said. No, but 
 you can prepare the groundwork by means of which the 
 natural aptitude gets its chance. And this he subsequently 
 recognised to be the case. 
 
 What were the positive contributions of Herbert Tree 
 to the English stage ? Here there is some room for dissent 
 and disagreement : I will only put down certain facts in 
 the form in which they appear to me. Remember, in the 
 first place, that he inherited a great tradition from Henry 
 Irving who had set a magnificent example of stage-produc- 
 tion at the Lyceum. Tree was at first content to carry on 
 the tradition on similar lines. He produced plays with 
 extreme care for detail and many appeals to the eye. 
 There was never anything slipshod either in the method of 
 stage representation or in the attention paid to what 
 the diplomats call " imponderabilia." Indeed, it was the 
 care taken over the minutiae which guaranteed the effective- 
 ness of the whole. Thanks in especial to Irving and Tree, 
 London stage-production reached a higher level of complete- 
 ness and finish than was to be seen in foreign capitals. 
 Sarah Bernhardt and other foreign visitors acknowledged 
 that in this respect they did not do things better in France. 
 Gradually Tree bettered the examples of his predecessors. 
 His critics said he over-elaborated his effects; his friends 
 were never tired of welcoming new grades of beauty. I 
 take only two instances out of many which offer themselves 
 
258 OLD SAWS AND MODERN INSTANCES 
 
 in recollection. Probably there never was a more beautiful 
 stage picture than Olivia's pleasaunce in Twelfth Night. 
 We talk of the hanging gardens of Babylon as of something 
 legendary and rare. Here before our eyes were to be seen 
 Olivia's hanging gardens, a dream of exquisite and ap- 
 pealing beauty which seemed to bring out the more clearly 
 by contrast the vulgarity and coarseness of Sir Toby 
 Belch and Sir Andrew Aguecheel^, while it enhanced the 
 delicacy of Viola and Olivia herself. The other example 
 I will take is from the Midsummer Night's Dream. You 
 will recall that though the scene is supposed to be laid in 
 the neighbourhood of Athens, the feeling, the atmosphere 
 of the play belong essentially to Stratford and England. 
 Accordingly, Tree gave us, alternately with some marble 
 seats and olive trees, splendid glimpses of British forests 
 in which the fairies ran wild and Bottom and his companions 
 rehearsed their uncouth theatricals. Anything more restful 
 to the eye than these glades of sylvan beauty I have never 
 seen on any stage. I used to drop into the theatre while 
 the play was going on just to realise once more the solemn 
 delightful effect of the old beeches sheltering the wayward 
 fancies of Oberon, Titania, and Puck, and providing a 
 rehearsal ground for Pyramus and Thisbe. I must also 
 add something about the elaborate scene at the end of the 
 play when the pillars of the Duke' s palace glow with internal 
 light to enable the fairies to carry on their domestic tasks 
 of making everything clean and sweet for the mortals. It 
 was beautiful, but perhaps too elaborate. One missed in 
 this case the note of simplicity, the wise sobriety of an 
 accomplished artist who would not strive "to do better 
 than well " lest he should " confound his skill in covetous- 
 ness." There were charming pictures, too, in the Tempest, 
 little sea-fairies peeping round the edges of the rocks, while 
 Ariel sported in the pools, which one remembers with 
 gratitude. But, indeed, the time would fail me if I were 
 to recount half the wonders which the magician Tree dis- 
 played before our eyes in play after play. You may call 
 him a consummate decorator, if you like, le Tapissier du 
 noire Theatre, as Luxemburg was it not ? was called by 
 reason of his conquest of flags and other costly stuff, 
 le Tapissier de Notre-Dame. But I maintain that he had 
 the eye, the feeling, the touch of an artist. 
 
 It would be a small matter to decorate the outside of 
 the vase if it did not contain within itself rare and exquisite 
 essences. Tree soon realised that decoration in itself could 
 
THE ENGLISH STAGE 259 
 
 only please the groundlings or the dilettantes, and that 
 the main matter of consequence was the spirit in which 
 the whole adventure was attempted. What was the 
 character of the adventure ? It was to give the British 
 stage dignity as well as charm, high seriousness as well as 
 aesthetic adornment. It was for this reason that from time 
 to time he put before his public a clientele, by the way, 
 which was always steadily growing stately performances 
 of Shakespearean plays, incidentally proving that our 
 great English dramatist did not necessarily spell bank- 
 ruptcy, but, judiciously treated, might be made to yield a 
 fair percentage of profit. He varied his programme 
 with lighter fare, as a matter of course : a man who had 
 undertaken the responsibility of so large a theatre as His 
 Majesty's was bound to keep a steady eye on the booking- 
 office and replenish his coffers now and again by popular 
 appeals. Unfortunately, our public is not always spurred 
 and exalted to finer issues ; and though Shakespeare under 
 special conditions can become almost popular, a certain 
 melodramatic blatancy or at least insistence has a more 
 distinct pecuniary appeal. Where theatres are not 
 supported by municipalities or the State, the lessee and 
 manager is forced to " go here and there and make himself 
 a motley to the view " for base considerations of solvency. 
 But Tree did not forget the higher obligations of the position 
 he had attained. As head of the profession he realised his 
 responsibilities. He was full of the idea of the importance 
 of the theatrical art, as a main instrument of culture and 
 as a most necessary element in civic and social life. He did 
 not work merely for his own hand, but upheld the claims 
 of his calling. He instituted a Shakespearean week a 
 most costly undertaking in order to keep alive our 
 indebtedness to the Elizabethan stage. He presided at 
 meetings, made speeches, inaugurated movements, pushed 
 and encouraged various policies, in order to prove that 
 actors were important elements in the community who had 
 their proper functions in the body politic. You know 
 how many speeches Tree made in the United States, not 
 because speaking was easy to him it never was but 
 because he felt it to be his duty to represent British interests 
 and ideals in this appalling universal war. Only a week or 
 two before his death he told me that he often composed the 
 speech he was presently going to deliver while he was 
 declaiming Wolsey's long " farewell to all his greatness " 
 before his audience in Henry VIII. 
 
260 OLD SAWS AND MODERN INSTANCES 
 
 There is no doubt that the career of this well-equipped 
 actor and most competent manager and lessee had a bene- 
 ficial effect on the English stage; for Tree had a great 
 organising ability and admirably quick and valuable 
 intuitions. But you will naturally ask me a question 
 which has long been on the tip of your tongue I am writing 
 to you as though I actually saw and witnessed your im- 
 patience the question as to Tree's attitude towards the 
 future of the dramatic art. Granted that his influence 
 on his contemporary public was all to the good, what about 
 his relation to novel movements and to those efforts which 
 zealous innovators have made to "reform" the drama? 
 The future of the English stage ! Ah, but will you tell 
 me what is the future ? There was a movement some few 
 years back, to which I will return presently. But what is 
 the prospect now ? Looking superficially at existing facts, 
 one might give several replies. Apparently the tendency 
 at the present moment is in the direction of light, frivolous 
 entertainments, only intended to amuse and distract men's 
 minds from the horrible preoccupation with the war. 
 American comedies have had their chance, and succeeded 
 in proportion to the farcical elements they have contained. 
 Revues flourish as much as ever perhaps rather more 
 than they used to. Composite entertainments, musical, 
 droll, heterogeneous, are in vogue, especially if they have 
 enlisted in their company at least one clever woman and 
 one reputedly clever man. Mr. H. B. Irving with admirable 
 boldness tried Hamlet, but it had to be withdrawn for want 
 of support. Serious plays seem to be at a discount, unless, 
 like M. Brieux's plays, Les Avaries, and Les trois filles de 
 M. Dupont, and Ibsen's Ghosts, they make an appeal 
 which is not mainly histrionic. Doubtless some of these 
 phenomena are due to the unreal conditions of the time; 
 they are symptomatic not of currents of artistic or inartistic 
 fashion running below the surface, but of our unrest, our 
 weariness, our irrepressible feeling that, set against the 
 lurid background of ceaseless warfare, no artistic effort 
 matters very much. Meanwhile our theatres are full 
 when they are full of officers and soldiers on leave accom- 
 panied by their sisters or cousins or lovers who only want 
 their military friends to be happy and this is not the kind 
 of theatrical audience which cares for dramatic art or even 
 desires to think at all. Tree brought back from America 
 a piece in which he strongly believed. The Great Lover, I 
 think, was its name. He had every intention of producing 
 
THE ENGLISH STAGE 261 
 
 it forthwith ; but what success it might have secured under 
 present conditions is an unsolved problem. The great 
 success in London is, of course, Chu Chin Chow, a piece 
 beautifully presented and full of elaborate and admirable 
 pictures. But it is hardly a play in the sense in which you 
 and I understand the term. 
 
 Still, you remember that there was a movement going on 
 a few years back, which we associate with Granville Barker 
 and with a competent body of actors Ainley, Nicholson, 
 Leon Quartermaine, Lillah McCarthy, and others. 1 It 
 was an effort in the direction of greater simplicity of stage 
 presentation and the abolition of long waits between scenes 
 and acts. It revealed to us, for instance, that some of 
 Shakespeare's plays could be given in three hours without 
 any cuts and omissions so that we might be seeing the 
 plays more or less as the author intended that we should. 
 Time was gained by making the actors speak faster, without 
 wearisome pauses and unimpressive silences. I don't 
 think I have ever heard an actor speak with such rapidity 
 as Ainley achieved as Laertes in A Winter's Tale. The 
 movement included some elements of mere freakishness, 
 as when Barker gave the fairies in Midsummer Night's 
 Dream gilded faces. But the scenery, though elementary, 
 was to a sufficient degree picturesque, and the acting was 
 persuasively good. A similar method applied to Macbeth 
 or Othello would have been very instructive. Meanwhile 
 Twelfth Night, so treated, had a real effectiveness of its 
 own. And the daring experiment of putting Mr. Hardy's 
 The Dynasts on the boards was, within the limits prescribed, 
 a triumph. 
 
 I do not think that Tree had much sympathy with this 
 movement. He took a great interest in it, of course, just 
 as he did in the Russian Ballet, which he visited as often as 
 he could. But so far as I could make out he preferred older 
 methods. With regard to the Russian Ballet, he once 
 remarked with no little acuteness that it struck him as 
 " the gilded plaything of an effete autocracy " ; and with 
 regard to Granville Barker's productions he seemed to feel 
 though I do not remember a definite statement that 
 they were bizarre, freakish experiments which could only 
 appeal to a section of the public and not to the great mass of 
 theatre-goers. For himself, remember that he had the 
 vast auditorium of His Majesty's resting on his shoulders, 
 
 1 Mr. Martin Harvey tried similar experiments in Taming of the Shrew 
 and Hamlet. 
 
262 OLD SAWS AND MODERN INSTANCES 
 
 and that he was bound to consider the tastes not of sections, 
 but of the public at large. He always insisted on this 
 fact. " I have to find something which will be agreeable 
 to stalls, upper circle, pit, gallery all at once." And 
 directly we think of the many-headed public who keep 
 theatres going, and the difficulty there is in finding a 
 common focus for their ardent, unsophisticated enthusiasm 
 and their uncritical approval, we shall begin to recognise 
 the burden laid on theatrical entrepreneurs and the neces- 
 sary contrast between their point of view and that of 
 irresponsible dramatic critics. 
 
 I do not know if I have satisfied your curiosity in these 
 few remarks of mine. I recognise that yours is a legitimate 
 curiosity from the standpoint of a man like yourself who 
 stands outside our more intimate interests and desires to 
 view a situation in its broad and general features. To you 
 Herbert Tree is an actor and a manager who has done certain 
 large things in a large way, and has either succeeded or 
 failed. To us he is a many-sided personality, in whose 
 case mere histrionic success is only one element in a complex 
 and varied whole. On one point I think you may feel 
 confidence. If you admit that Tree fills a conspicuous 
 space in our admiration and regard, you will also have to 
 accept this as a solid fact even though it may surprise 
 you with which you have to reckon. He has had many 
 admirers and no few devoted friends. He was believed in 
 as a force in our dramatic world, as a man who consistently 
 held a high ideal for our stage, and employed his sympathy, 
 his energy, and his own remarkable powers in a valiant 
 attempt at its realisation. That is a simple fact which 
 cannot be gainsaid; and it must enter into your general 
 estimate on the other side of the Atlantic, as it has already 
 done and will increasingly do into ours on this side. 
 
 A high ideal for the stage ? Perhaps you stop over this 
 phrase and feel some hesitation in adopting it. But if you 
 do, you are up against one of those baffling points in 
 psychology, which affect many other men besides Tree. 
 How much of the ideal must be sacrified in daily practice 
 if anything whatever is to be achieved ? Does the ideal 
 cease to be an ideal if it ever be forgotten ? Can one wor- 
 ship the ideal in secret and deny it in the open light of day ? 
 Is compromise a reputable, even if necessary, policy ? 
 Ah, who shall scrutinise his conscience without many pangs 
 of self-reproach in questions like these ! That Tree pro- 
 duced some unworthy pieces it would be absurd to deny. 
 
THE ENGLISH STAGE 263 
 
 He did, and he knew he did just as he knew also that he 
 must keep up a great theatrical establishment and transact 
 a vast business, for which the possession of funds was obliga- 
 tory. I remember one occasion at a club after the produc- 
 tion of a gaudy melodrama I will not mention its name for 
 fear of getting into trouble with the author when some of 
 us were chaffing I think you call it " chipping " Tree 
 concerning some of its banal effects and its " popular " 
 character. He loved being chaffed, or, at all events, he 
 bore it with unflinching good humour, and riposted gaily 
 on his critics. As a matter of fact, the piece was a pecuni- 
 ary success. But Tree by himself was in a different mood. 
 He knew what he was doing, and was not proud of it. 
 " Compromise, the god of the shiftless," he used to say. 
 
 You remember Henry James's ironical little story, " The 
 Lesson of the Master " ? In that you will find the philo- 
 sophy of the matter. An older novelist preaching to a 
 younger novelist, warns him against being seduced from 
 his high ideals by such encumbrances as a wife and children 
 and the obligation of keeping up a costly and hospitable 
 house. The young writer is duly impressed until he dis- 
 covers that his mentor even after his melancholy experi- 
 ence of what marriage can do to deaden aspiration 
 deliberately marries again, and marries the very girl with 
 whom the young disciple of the master was in love ! How 
 shockingly cynical, one says, and then, after a moment's 
 deliberation, how abominably true ! It is true, my friend, 
 and true of all of us. A little clearer vision and then the 
 clouds come down again. A glimpse of the pure high 
 aether of heaven and then the rain-splashed earth. We do 
 what we must and not always what we can. Let him that 
 is without sin cast the first stone. I, at all events, have no 
 wish either to bombard you with truisms or to cast stones 
 at Tree. His was a fine, courageous, indomitable character ; 
 and over and over again, for his delight and ours, he drew 
 from his intellectual instrument the finest music that 
 nature had hidden in it, and played it as it should be played. 
 Peace be to his ashes he will be much and widely missed. 
 Multis Hie bonis flebilis occidit. 
 
INDEX 
 
 Acharnians, The (Aristophanes), 32, 
 44, 105 
 
 Adonis, 94, 98 
 
 Adored Qye, The (Barrie), 139 
 
 JSgisthus, 13 
 
 jEneid, The (Virgil), 92 
 
 ^Eschines, 62, 63, 84 
 
 ^schylus, 1-16, 58, 92, 124, 162, 241, 
 242 
 
 Agamemnon (^Eschylus), 4, 7, 12-16, 
 163, 238, 242 
 
 Ainley, Henry, 2, 253, 261 
 
 Alcaeus, 94, 96 
 
 Alcestis (Euripides), 239 
 
 Alcibiades, 46-52, 73 
 
 Alexander the Great, 61 
 
 Alexander, Sir George, 179 
 
 All's Well that Ends Well (Shake- 
 speare), 138 
 
 Ameipsias, 45 
 
 Amphipolis, 43, 64, 66 
 
 Anacreon, 91, 94 
 
 Anactoria, 90, 96 
 
 Anaxagoras, 43, 100, 103-4, 236, 241, 
 250 
 
 Androcles and the Lion (Shaw), 138 
 
 Andromache, 89, 106, 247 
 
 Antoninus Pius, 109 
 
 Aphrodite, 4, 94, 97 
 
 Apollo, 4, 98, 103, 242 
 
 Archilochus, 94 
 
 Ares, 4, 103 
 
 Argaeus, 64 
 
 Aristophanes, 7, 31-59, 92, 100, 124, 
 127-8, 237, 241, 244, 249 
 
 Aristotle, 61, 151, 185, 236, 243 
 
 Arnold, Matthew, 116-18, 172, 202 
 
 Arrah-na-pogue (Boucicault), 172 
 
 Artemis, 4 
 
 Artemisia, 98 
 
 Artzybascheff, 198 
 
 Aspasia, 89-108 
 
 Assommoir, L' (Zola) : see Drink 
 
 Astyanax, 247 
 
 As You Like It (Shakespeare), 131 
 
 Athene, 4, 13, 102, 242 
 
 Athenian Empire, 31-59, 61, 65, 67, 
 
 100-2 
 
 Atreus, house of, 13-15, 238 
 Atthis, 90, 96 
 
 Augier, Emile, 155, 176, 237 
 Avaries, Les (Brieux), 3, 164, 218, 
 
 222-32, 260 
 
 Babylonians, The (Aristophanes), 33-4 
 
 Bacchce (Euripides), 221 
 
 Balfour, A. J., 213 
 
 Bancroft, Sir Squire and Lady, 173-5 
 
 Banqueters, The (Aristophanes), 32-4, 
 
 42 
 Barker, GranviUe, 2, 150, 197, 206-9, 
 
 261 
 
 Barrie, Sir J. M., 139 
 Bejart, Armande, 149, 158 
 Benefit of the Doubt, The (Pinero), 180, 
 
 195 
 
 Bennett, Arnold, 197, 217 
 Berceau, Le (Brieux), 221-2 
 Bergson, Henri, 144, 167 
 Bienfaiteurs, Les (Brieux), 221-3 
 Birds, The (Aristophanes), 45, 50-2 
 Black- Eyed Susan (Jerrold), 170, 172 
 Blanchette (Brieux), 222-3 
 Boucicault, Dion, 172 
 Bourgeois aux Champs, Le (Brieux), 
 
 Bourgeois Gentilhomme, Le (Moliere), 
 
 151 
 
 Brasidas, 43, 47, 48 
 Brieux, Eugene, 3, 163, 218-35, 237, 
 
 244, 260 
 
 Browning, Robert, 170, 213 
 Bulwer Lytton : see Lytton 
 Business is Business (Mirbeau), 254 
 Byron, Henry J., 172 
 Byron, Lord, 96, 170 
 
 Caesar and Cleopatra (Shaw), 138 
 Captain Brassbound's Conversion 
 (Shaw), 139, 164, 194 
 
 265 
 
266 
 
 INDEX 
 
 Cassilis Engagement, The (Hankin), 
 
 216 
 
 Caste (Robertson), 175 
 Catullus, 96 
 Chapman, George, 138 
 Charaxus, 93 
 Charity that Begins at Home (Hankin), 
 
 216 
 
 Charles I. (Wills), 214 
 Chu Chin Chow, 261 
 Cimon, 37, 100-1 
 Cleanthes, 112 
 Cleon, 31-46, 58, 104 
 Clouds, The (Aristophanes), 32, 42 
 Clough, Arthur, 202 
 Clytemnestra, 13, 238-9, 242 
 Colleen Bawn, The (Boucicault), 172 
 Collier, Jeremy, 141-8 
 Comedy, ancient, 127 
 
 , French, 148-60 
 
 , idea of, 122-60 
 
 , Italian, 129 
 
 of Manners, 140-8 
 
 of Masks, 129 
 
 , Restoration, 140-8 
 
 , Shakespearean, 130-9 
 
 Comedy of Errors, The (Shakespeare), 
 
 130-1, 138 
 
 Congreve, William, 122, 140-7, 152 
 Corneille, Pierre, 125, 244 
 Cotin, Abbe, 159 
 Cotys (King of Thrace), 64 
 Country Wife, The (Wycherley), 141, 
 
 143, 145 
 
 Couvee, La (Brieux), 222 
 Cratinus, 99, 104 
 Cromwell (Victor Hugo), 166 
 Ctesiphon, 79, 80 
 
 Damaged Goods (Brieux) : see Avaries, 
 
 Les 
 
 Damophila, 90 
 Darling of the Gods, 254 
 David Copperfield, 252 
 Dedale, Le (Hervieu), 221 
 Demosthenes, 38-46, 52-3, 60-88 
 Deserteuse, La (Brieux), 222 
 Dickens, Charles, 252 
 Dionysia, 34-8, 43 
 Dionysus, 4, 34, 58, 237 
 Diplomacy (Sardou), 176 
 Doctor's Dilemma, The (Shaw), 164 
 DolVs House, A (Ibsen), 186-95 
 Don Garde (Moliere), 153 
 Dora (Sardou) : see Diplomacy 
 Drink (Zola), 215 
 Dumas, Alexandre (fils), 155, 171, 181, 
 
 237 
 Dynasts, The (Hardy), 1-29, 261 
 
 Eadie, Denis, 215 
 
 Ecole des Femmes (Moliere), 150, 156 
 
 Eldest Son, The (Galsworthy), 168, 
 
 203, 209 
 
 Electro (Euripides), 238 
 Elia : see Lamb, Charles 
 Elizabethan Theatre, 130, 164, 214 
 Enemy of the People (Ibsen), 157, 189, 
 
 254 
 
 Engrenage, U (Brieux), 222 
 Ephialtes, 37, 100 
 Epictetus, 100 
 Epicurus, 29 
 Erinna of Telos, 90 
 Etherege, Sir George, 140, 143 
 Etourdi, U (Moliere), 150 
 Eucken, R. C. van, 167 
 Eupolis, 32, 89, 99, 100 
 Euripides, 4, 58, 92, 163, 223, 236-50 
 Evasion, U (Brieux), 222-6 
 Evil, problem of, 12 
 
 False Gods (Brieux) : see Foi, La 
 Far from the Madding Crowd (Hardy), 
 
 17, 18 
 
 Fate, Hardy's doctrine of, 29 
 Faustina, 109 
 
 Feminism, 106, 191, 203-5, 244 
 Femmes Savantes, Les (Moliere), 123, 
 
 151-60 
 
 Femme Seule, La (Brieux), 164, 222 
 Filon, Augustin, 171, 191 
 Foi, La (Brieux), 219-23 
 Fourberies de Scapin, Les (Moliere), 
 
 153 
 
 Friend, Sir John, 146 
 Frogs, The (Aristophanes), 58 
 
 Galsworthy, John, 168, 197, 203, 209- 
 
 13, 215-17 
 
 George Dandin (Moliere), 152 
 Ghosts (Ibsen), 185-6, 190, 230-2, 
 
 260 
 
 Gigantomachia (Greek comedy), 128 
 Gladstone, W. E., 213 
 Glycera, 124 
 Goethe, J. W. von, 3 
 Goldoni, Carlo, 129 
 Goodall, Edyth, 211 
 Gorgias (orator), 33 
 Great Adventure, The (Bennett), 217 
 Greek history, ancient, 45-85, 99-108, 
 
 236-50 
 
 , modern, 75 
 
 Grundy, Sydney, 176 
 Gylippus, 50, 52 
 
 Hadrian, 267 
 Hagnon, 55 
 
INDEX 
 
 267 
 
 Hamlet (Shakespeare), 130, 138, 149, 
 
 156, 158, 260 
 Hankin, St. John, 197, 202-3, 205, 
 
 211, 215-16 
 
 Hannetons, Les (Brieux), 221-3 
 Hardy, Thomas, 1-6, 15, 17-30, 202, 
 
 261 
 
 Hare, Sir John, 179, 185 
 Harlequin, 129 
 Hecuba, 89, 247 
 Hedda Gabler (Ibsen), 191-2 
 Heimat (Sudermann), 204 
 Helen of Troy, 14, 89, 247-8 
 Hdiades (^schylus), 25 
 Hellenism : see Pan-hellenism 
 Hephaestus, 4, 9, 10 
 Heracles, 10, 26, 240 
 Hermse, mutilation of, 49 
 HindU Wakes (Houghton), 168, 188, 
 
 203, 210-11 
 
 His Majesty's Theatre, 220, 261 
 Homer, 33, 94 
 Horace, 96, 116 
 Houghton, Stanley, 197, 210 
 Housman, Lawrence, 56 
 Hugo, Victor, 166, 171, 178, 231, 
 
 244 
 
 Hunt, Leigh, 141, 170 
 Hyperbolus, 27, 48 
 
 Ibsen, Henrik, 150, 155, 157 167-8, 
 179, 188-94, 198-9, 203, 205, 231, 
 244 
 
 Idealism, dramatic, 161, 217 
 
 lo (Greek nymph), 9-10 
 
 Iphigeneia in Taurica (Euripides), 246 
 
 Iris (Pinero), 180, 195-6 
 
 Ironmaster, The (Ohnet), 222 
 
 Irving, Ethel, 221 
 
 Irving, Sir Henry, 257 
 
 Irving, H. B., 260 
 
 Isseus, 62 
 
 Isocrates, 62 
 
 James, Henry, 263 
 
 Jerrold, Douglas, 169-70 
 
 Jew of Malta, The (Marlowe), 134 
 
 Job, Book of, 8 
 
 John Bull's Other Island (Shaw), 178 
 
 Jones, Henry Arthur, 176-7 
 
 Justice (Galsworthy), 168, 211, 215-17 
 
 Keats, John, 96 
 Kendal, W. H. and M., 222 
 King Lear (Shakespeare), 130, 214 
 Kingston, Gertrude, 56 
 Kleis (d. of Sappho). 93 
 Knights, The (Aristophanes), 38, 41-2, 
 127 
 
 Knowles, Sheridan, 166, 169-70 
 Kronos, 4, 6, 10-11 
 
 Lacedsemon : see Sparta 
 
 Lady from the Sea, The (Ibsen), 191 
 
 Lady of Lyons, The (Bulwer Lytton), 
 
 170-2 
 
 Lamachus, 49 
 Lamb, Charles, 141-2, 145 
 Last of the De Mullins, The (Hankin), 
 
 202, 216 
 
 Leucadian Rock, 94, 97-8 
 Lincoln, Abraham, 84-7 
 Little Dream, The (Galsworthy), 217 
 Little Eyolf (Ibsen), 191 
 Little Mary (Barrie), 139 
 Love's Labour Lost (Shakespeare), 
 
 130-1 
 Lysistrata, The (Aristophanes), 52, 
 
 54-8, 100 
 
 Lytton, E. R. Bulwer, 166, 169, 170-2, 
 '178 
 
 Macaulay, Lord, 141, 146-7 
 Macbeth (Shakespeare), 130, 138 
 McCarthy, Lillah, 261 
 Macedonian Empire, 61-72 
 McKinnell, Norman, 209, 212 
 Macready, W. C., 167, 169-70 
 Maeterlinck, M., 167, 199 
 Magda (Sudermann) : see Heimat 
 Major Barbara (Shaw), 164 
 Malade Imaginaire, Le (Moliere), 149 
 Man and Superman (Shaw), 144, 203 
 Marcus Aurelius, 109-21 
 Mariage Force, Le (Moliere), 150 
 Marlowe, Christopher, 125, 130, 134 
 Master-Builder, The (Ibsen), 191-2 
 Maternite (Brieux), 221, 222, 226-7 
 Measure for Measure (Shakespeare), 
 
 138 
 
 Medea (Euripides), 245-6 
 Melian massacre (416 B.C.), 247 
 Melodrama, 171 
 
 Menages d Artistes (Brieux), 222 
 Menander, 124-5, 129, 148, 154-5 
 Menelaus, 14, 247-8 
 Mencechmi (Plautus), 130 
 Merchant of Venice (Shakespeare), 
 
 Meredith, George, 17, 122, 132, 154, 
 
 252 
 Merry Wives of Windsor, The (Shake- 
 
 speare), 152, 252 
 Midsummer Night's Dream, A (Shake- 
 
 speare), 131, 134, 258, 261 
 Milestones (Bennett), 217 
 Misanthrope, Le (Moliere), 123, 151-60 
 Moliere, J. B. P., 122-60 
 
268 
 
 INDEX 
 
 Money (Lytton), 170, 172 
 
 M. de Reboval (Brieux), 222 
 
 Mrs. Warren's Profession (Shaw), 3, 
 179 
 
 Much Ado About Nothing (Shake- 
 speare), 131, 135-7 
 
 Murray, Gilbert, 236 
 
 Napoleon Bonaparte, 20-3 
 
 Napoleonic Wars, 1, 5, 17 
 
 Nationality, definition of, 77 
 
 Nausicaa, 89, 97, 106 
 
 Nemesis, Greek conception of, 15 
 
 Nesbitt, Cathleen, 210 
 
 New Sin, The (Macdonald), 168 
 
 Nicias, 31-53 
 
 Notorious Mrs. Ebbsmith, The (Pinero), 
 
 180, 194 
 Nous, Greek conception of, 103, 250 
 
 Oceanus, 9 
 
 Odysseus, 97, 106, 138 
 
 Ohnet, Georges, 221-2 
 
 Old Bachelor, The (Congreve), 141, 
 
 148 
 
 Olympian Gods, 6, 9-11, 241-2 
 Oresteian triology, 1, 7-16, 163, 238 
 Orestes, 13, 238 
 
 Othello (Shakespeare), 26, 130, 138 
 Ours (Robertson), 172, 175 
 Ovid, 92-6 
 
 Pacifism, 43, 51, 54, 57 
 Palliata (Roman comedy), 128 
 Palmer, John, 142 
 Pan-Hellenism, ancient, 34-8, 66-8 
 
 , modern, 76-9 
 
 Pantheon, Greek, 4, 6-12, 103, 241-2 
 
 Paris (Greek hero), 3, 14, 248 
 
 Parkins, Sir William, 146 
 
 Patriotism, principles of, 60-72 
 
 Pausanias, 64 
 
 Peace, The (Aristophanes), 43-5 
 
 Peisander, 57 
 
 Pericles, 31-7, 46-8, 62, 66-7, 99-108, 
 
 245 
 
 Persian Empire (ancient), 65 
 Petite Aime, La (Brieux), 222 
 Phsethon : see Adonis 
 Phaon, 92, 94, 97-8 
 Pheidias, 4, 6, 100, 102 
 Philemon (dramatist), 124 
 Philip of Macedon, 61-83 
 Phocion, 61-6, 73-4, 80 
 Phyrnichus, 46 
 
 Pigeon, The (Galsworthy), 217 
 Pindar, 13, 95 
 Pinero, Sir A. W., 139, 176, 179-88, 
 
 193-7 
 
 Plain Dealer, The (Wycherley), 141, 
 
 144 
 
 Plato, 62, 92, 94, 148, 244, 249-50 
 Plautus, 124, 129, 130 
 Polycarp, 111 
 Precieuses Ridicules, Lea (Moliere), 
 
 150, 158-9 
 Prince of Wales's Theatre, 168, 
 
 173 
 Princess and the Butterfly, The (Pinero), 
 
 139 
 Prisoner of Zenda, The (Anthony 
 
 Hope), 133 
 
 Private Secretary, The (Penley), 253 
 Profligate, The (Pinero), 179-87, 194 
 Prometheus Vinctus (JSschylus), 1-10, 
 
 16, 163 
 
 Quartermaine, Leon, 261 
 
 Realism, dramatic, 160-217 
 
 Remizoff, Alexis, 199 
 
 Remplac antes, Les (Brieux), 222 
 
 Renan, Ernest, 220 
 
 Rent Day, The (Jerrold), 170 
 
 Resultat des Courses (Brieux), 222 
 
 Resurrection (Tolstoi), 163 
 
 Return of the Prodigal, The (Hankin), 
 
 202, 216-17 
 Rhodopis, 93 
 Richelieu (Lytton), 166 
 Robe Rouge, La (Brieux), 222-3 
 Robertson, Tom, 168-76 
 Robins, Elizabeth, 205 
 Rogers, Benjamin B., 50, 100 
 Romanticism, 171, 230-1, 244 
 Romeo and Juliet (Shakespeare), 130, 
 
 134, 245 
 
 Rosmersholm (Ibsen), 191 
 Rossetti, Christina, 97 
 Rutherford and Son (Sowerby), 168 
 
 Saints and Sinners (Jones), 177 
 
 Salaminia, The, 50 
 
 Sappho, 89-99, 104 
 
 Sardou, Victorien, 176 
 
 Scaramouche Ermite, 156 
 
 Schle^el, A. W. von, 236 
 
 School (Robertson), 172, 175 
 
 School for Scandal, The (Sheridan), 
 
 155, 157 
 
 Scribe, A. E., 176, 190, 201 
 Second Mrs. Tanqueray, The (Pinero), 
 
 179-80, 186-8, 194 
 Semeur, Le (Formont), 203 
 Shakespeare, William, 1, 3, 59, 125, 
 
 127, 130-9, 141, 145, 148-9, 155-6, 
 
 164-5, 168-9, 209, 214, 257 
 Shaugraun, The (Boucicault), 172 
 
INDEX 
 
 269 
 
 Shaw, George Bernard, 3, 128, 138-9, 
 
 164, 178-9, 193-4, 197, 209, 221, 
 
 223, 227 
 
 Shelley, Percy Bysshe, 96 
 Sheridan, R. Brinsley, 155, 157, 169, 
 Showing up of Blanco Posnet, The 
 
 (Shaw), 164 
 
 Sicilian Expedition (414 B.C.), 48-55 
 Silver Box, The (Galsworthy), 211, 217 
 Simone (Brieux), 222 
 Society (Robertson), 167, 175 
 Socrates, 43, 58, 92, 100, 108, 127-8, 
 
 236 
 
 Sophocles, 4, 55, 92, 163, 238 
 Sothern, E. A., 175 
 Sparta, 46-8, 61, 67, 101, 104-5 
 Stage Society, 206, 221 
 Stambuloff, Stefan, 75 
 Still Waters Run Deep (Taylor), 172 
 Stoic philosophy, 100 
 Stratford (Browning), 170, 214 
 Strife (Galsworthy), 168, 211-13, 217 
 Sudermann, Hermann, 204 
 Suzette (Brieux), 222 
 Swinburne, A. C., 96, 236 
 Symbolism in drama, 190, 198 
 
 Tartuffe (Moliere), 124, 149-60 
 
 Taylor, Tom, 172 
 
 Terence, 124, 129 
 
 Thackeray, W. M., 141, 252 
 
 Thesmophoriazusce, The (Aristo- 
 phanes), 55, 58 
 
 Thetis, 10 
 
 Three Daughters of M. Dupont 
 (Brieux), 3, 218-19; 222-7 
 
 Thucydides (historian), 31, 40-6, 62-6, 
 84, 99, 107, 247 
 
 Thucydides (s. of Milesias), 101, 104 
 
 Ticket of Leave Man, The (Taylor), 172 
 
 Titans, 6, 11 
 
 Togata (Roman comedy), 128 
 
 Tolstoy, Leo, 163 
 
 Tragedy, Greek, 12-30, 162, 238, 
 245-6 
 
 , idea of, 122 
 
 , modern, 168, 190 
 
 Traill, H. D., 255 
 
 Trajan, 111 
 
 Tree, Sir Herbert, 220, 251-63 
 
 Trilby (Du Maurier), 254 
 
 Trojan Women, The (Euripides). 246-9 
 
 Twelfth Night (Shakespeare), 131, 258, 
 261 
 
 Two Gentlemen of Verona (Shake- 
 speare), 130-1 
 
 Ulysses : see Odysseus 
 Uranus, 6 
 Utilitarianism, 167 
 
 Vanbrugh, Sir John, 140, 144, 147-8 
 Venizelos, Eleatherios, 62, 73-85 
 Virgil, 21, 244 
 
 Virginius (Knowles), 166, 169 
 Voltaire, Arouet de, 144, 221 
 
 Warner, Charles, 215 
 
 Washington, George, 85 
 
 Wasps, The (Aristophanes), 42-3 
 
 Waste (Granville Barker), 206-9 
 
 Watson, Henrietta, 207 
 
 Way of the World, The (Congreve), 
 
 141, 146 
 
 Wells, H. G., 30 
 What Every Woman Knows (Barrie), 
 
 139 
 
 When We Dead Awaken (Ibsen), 191-3 
 White, J. Fisher, 212, 225 
 White Slave Traffic, 205 
 Widowers' Houses (Shaw), 3, 179 
 Wild Duck, The (Ibsen), 189-91 
 Will, Hardy's Immanent, 5, 15, 29 
 Wills, W. G., 214 
 Wilton, Marie : see Bancroft 
 Winter's Tale, A (Shakespeare), 261 
 Wycherley, William, 140-7, 152 
 
 Xenocles, 247 
 Xenophon, 92, 247 
 
 Younger Generation, The (Houghton), 
 168 
 
 Zeus, 4-16, 22-8, 51, 68, 103, 241 
 Zola, Emile, 215, 224, 231, 244 
 
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