treating them are likely soon to lose their appeal. They give us many examples of comic wit that has to be explained by an elaborate series of notes and grows wearisome long before it grows clear. It is also suggested that our feeling as to what is comic changes. For example, we no longer find deformity amusing, as the Elizabethans did. These statements are true, and yet it is also true that Aristophanes can still be enjoyed with full-bodied satisfaction, and that the pleasure he gives us is no wise the late and reluctant laughter of those who laugh because they must. This asks an explanation.

After all the answer is not difficult. Comedy may, it is true, be written about violations of evanescent social forms; it may have as its character mere figures of caricature. If it does it pays the penalty and has a day as brief as the fashions it satirizes. But it may be written in a very different way. When Aristophanes presents Cleon, no Athenian could fail to see and recognize the portrait even in the play in which Cleon is not given his own name. His dress, his speech, the particular acts mentioned, all are the characteristics of Cleon. But though these things were actually done by Cleon they are also the mark of the low type politician whenever and wherever he may be. We constantly see in him our own favorite abomination; he lives for us in our own local boss or office seeker.

He will no doubt live as long as man keeps the characteristics that make him human.

And what is true of Cleon is true in equal measure of many other characters large and small in these comedies. They are commonly true in the larger more internal sense, true to the common profound traits of men, but they are also often true in the minute, photographic way in which many of the characters of Dickens are true to life, by having some little trick or oddity of action or speech which is their own, though in every other way they are wholly indistinguishable. There is perhaps no character in Aristophanes that so completely epitomizes what we call the comic spirit of human life as Falstaff does, for he is not the soldier or the nobleman, or the jester, but man.

What is true of the characters is also true of themes of Aristophanes. Peace, politics, the character of women and their places in life, education, religion, these are matters about which man has long been concerned. They are quite as eternal, apparently, as the themes of tragedy. Both at their best raise the same issues, ask the same questions of human life, though in a different spirit. It is partly because its themes are still living and vital, not caricatures or burlesques of passing fashions or follies, that the comedies of Aristophanes are modern, are in Lowell's phrase (used in regard to Greek literature as a whole) "rammed with

life.' "We often speak of books as having died; the expression is commonly misleading. What we mean is that they have never really lived. A great work of art at the moment of its creation becomes a part of the enduring order of the universe; it goes to its apparently appointed place and one cannot conceive that it has not always been.

Macaulay, in his review of the Memoirs of Barére, said, "We now propose to do him, by the blessing of God, full and signal justice." This essay has no such ambitious, or malevolent, intention; it has we hope, shown that the greatest writer of comedy is also one of the greatest of the moderns.

THE NATURAL HISTORY OF THE BIOGRAPH

IC DRAMA

It is highly probable that the earliest biographic drama was autobiographic, and was not a drama but a story in which the teller took the leading role and reënacted the killing of the boar or the defeat of an enemy for the edification of those who, very literally, no doubt, had kept the home fires burning against his return. Having offered this brief oblation to the high gods of anthropology let us skip a few million years and consider the earliest real drama that is known to us, that of Aeschylus and his immediate successors. At first glance the very titles of their plays, Agamemnon, Ajax, Antigone, Electra, would suggest that they were biographic, that they told more or less completely the life, or suggested the character of some man or woman. But we know that they were not biographic in the way that Drinkwater's Cromwell or Lincoln is biographic.

We remember that these heroes and heroines, were not men and women who had lived on earth. Whether the outlines of their lives had been invented by some primeval poet or had vaguely come into existence through the unconscious contributions of many minds,

it is clear that by the time Aeschylus and Sophocles were ready to give them a literary immortality they were defined in the popular mind as having lived, if they had lived at all, and skepticism on this point was common, a merely legendary life in ages long gone by. But though they were of a shadowy past the main events of their lives had been settled with reasonable clearness, and these events had served to define their characters. We may say then that the work of the dramatist was primarily to put into action before us a personality the main events of whose life were known and whose character was reasonably clear. This is not said to belittle the task or to disparage the accomplishment. But the very statement of the case. makes it clear that between the task of Aeschylus or Sophocles in presenting Agamemnon or Ajax dramatically and the task of Drinkwater in presenting Cromwell or Lincoln there is an element of likeness. There is in each case a series of commonly accepted events, there is the outline of a character generally, if somewhat vaguely, known. There is also a group of characters closely connected in the public mind with the hero. There is also, probably, a certain fairly well marked emotional attitude toward the characters, which the dramatist has to consider.

It is probable, however, that there are two marked and most important differences. The Greek dramatists