discovered the soul of Aristophanes. To the grocers and statesmen of
Queen Victoria it seemed otherwise. Their taste was a good deal nicer
than that of Plato, or of Shakespeare for that matter, or of Dante,
Rabelais, Catullus, Voltaire,[10] Gibbon or Balzac, to say nothing of
St. Chrysostom (who could not sleep without an Aristophanes under his
pillow) or the author of "The Song of Solomon." They did not like
vulgarity and they put a stop to it: also in that age _Punch_ and the
_Times_ flourished. What is decent or indecent, vulgar or refined, is,
of course, a matter of taste; and each age has a taste of its own. The
taste of Athens in her prime, or of Rome in hers, of Italy in the days
of Dante or of Raphael, of the court of Elizabeth, or of
eighteenth-century France was not the taste of Victorian England. And
the strange thing is that, though not only in the arts, but in all the
delicacies of life--in personal relations, in sentiment and wit--the
great poets, artists and critics are admitted to have been more subtle
and fastidious than most curates or tradesmen, in the matter of morals
the curates and tradesmen are allowed to know better. In this one
respect their sensibilities are to be preferred; in all others they
modestly confess themselves inferior to the greatest minds of the ages.
Things that seemed beautiful or interesting or amusing to Shakespeare or
Plato, to Chaucer or Aristophanes, they know, for certain, to be evil.
And since they are evil they are not to be mentioned; discussion of them
even--since they are quite sure that they are evil--is a crime. Now the
prevention of crime is a duty of the state; so very few of the world's
great masterpieces could have been published for the first time in
modern England; and it has been impossible for Mr. Bickley Rogers to
give us even a translation of the _Lysistrata_.
Were Aristophanes alive and publishing now, not only would his plays be
vetoed by the Censor for indelicacy, and boycotted by the libraries, he
would be in personal danger on another account; for a judge of the High
Court could surely be found to sentence the author of _The Birds_ to six
months' hard labour for blasphemy. Mr. Rogers, therefore, who made this
translation, not in the Athens of Plato, but in the London of
Podsnap--in 1878, to be exact--is not much to be blamed for having
allowed it to bear the mark of its age. Nevertheless, though pardonable,
his compromise is deplorable, since it robs this translation of
precisely that quality which gives to most of the others their high
importance. For Mr. Rogers is one of those who during the last
five-and-twenty years have been busy awakening us to a new sense of the
possibilities of life. His share in that task has been to express and
restate, in a form appreciable by the modern mind, some of the
adventures and discoveries of the Hellenic genius. He is one of those
scholars who, consciously or unconsciously, have joined hands with the
boldest spirits of the age, and, by showing what the Greeks thought and
felt, have revealed to us new worlds of thought and feeling. Now, to
write like the sociologists, the subject of the _Lysistrata_ is the
fundamental nature and necessity of the interdependence of the sexes.
But what Aristophanes thought and felt about the matter is just what we
shall not find in this translation. For instance, the scene between
Cinesias and Myrrhina is essential to a perfect understanding of the
play, but the latter part of it (ll. 905-60) is not so much as
paraphrased here. And so the spirit languishes; it could flourish only
in the body created for it by the poet, and that body has been
mutilated.
This version, then, fails to bring out the profound, comic conception
that gives unity and significance to the original; nevertheless, it has
something more than such literary interest as may be supposed to belong
to any work by Mr. Rogers. The comic poet offers matter worthy the
consideration of politicians and political controversialists, and this
the translator has rendered fearlessly and well. For the _Lysistrata_ is
a political play, and cannot be discussed profitably apart from its
political ideas and arguments. It can no more be treated as pure
literature than the poetry of Keats can be treated as anything else.
Frankly "pacificist," and to some extent "feminist," hostile, at any
rate, to arrogant virility, it sounds in its ideas and arguments oddly
familiar to modern ears; and, in the interest of those ears, it may be
worth pausing a moment to consider the circumstances in which it was
produced.
Some eighteen months earlier--towards the end of 413 B.C.--had come news
of the most stunning disaster that was to befall Athens till the final
catastrophe at Aegospotami. The greatest armament ever assembled by a
Greek state had been annihilated, literally, before Syracuse: the city,
itself, was in danger. For that not the less was Aristophanes permitted
to produce in the state theatre at the public cost his fiercely
anti-militarist and anti-imperialist play. Was it the best, or one of
the two or three best, comedies of the year? That was what the Athenians
wanted to know. If it was, of course it ought to be presented.
During this long and horrible war (it lasted twenty-eight years), power,
as was to be expected, slipped into the hands of vile and violent
demagogues, of men who by rhetoric and intrigue induced the people more
than once to reject on fair occasions reasonable terms, who in 420,
guided by Alcibiades, contrived by an infamous stratagem to upset the
Peace of Nicias, and by a combination of evil motives--private interest,
public vanity, vindictiveness, greed, and sentimentality--prolonged the
war until it ended in the ruin of the city and the irreparable
debasement of ancient civilization. These men, as may be supposed, were
the butts of our poet's bitterest satire and most furious invective. Yet
even they, though incessantly attacked and exposed, never succeeded in
prohibiting, and perhaps never wished to prohibit, the performance of
his plays.
It has been said that Athens attempted to impose her civilization on the
Hellenic world and became barbarous in the attempt. There is, of course,
much truth in this. To wage war successfully a state must make itself to
some extent barbarous; and the Peloponnesian War ended the progressive
phase of Greek culture. The state conquered by Rome was something
unrecognizably inferior to the state that Pericles so recklessly
jeopardized; and it is interesting to note that the conquest of Greece
by Rome did far more for the spread of Greek civilization and culture
than any of those projects of aggrandizement and expansion so artfully
devised by Athenian imperialists. No reader of Thucydides can doubt that
as the struggle intensified Athenian civility diminished: yet, when we
remember that even in the throes of war the right of the individual to
live and speak freely was not lost, that, on the contrary, during the
war, came forth some of the finest and freest criticism with which the
world has ever been blest, we shall incline to suspect that even in her
decline Athens was decidedly more civilized than most states at their
apogee.
[Greek: ho de anexetastos bios ou biotos], said Socrates--a life
unsifted is a life unspent. Because the Athenians really believed this,
because they saw dimly that good states of mind, not wealth nor comfort
nor power nor prestige--which are but means--but states of mind, which
alone are good in themselves, are the proper end of existence, they
refused to sacrifice individual liberty to any god of efficiency. It was
to the mind of the individual they looked for absolute good: the state
was but a means. Therefore at Athens, after twenty years of stultifying
war, the right of the individual to free expression and self-development
was scrupulously respected. In this truly liberal atmosphere vivid and
original characters grew and flourished, thought and felt, and of their
thoughts and feelings have left such record as still charms and
tantalizes less fortunate generations. This belief in personal liberty,
this respect for the individual mind as the sole source of truth and
beauty, made possible Athens, a small short-lived state in the distant
past, an ideal towards which the best minds are ever looking back, the
glory and grand achievement of the Western world.[11]
Our enthusiasm for that Athenian spirit, which respected art and gave
free rein to criticism even at the most desperate moment of the city's
history, has carried us a little, but only a little, away from the
matter in hand--the political ideas of the _Lysistrata_. Political
wisdom, like human folly, seems to obey a law known to men of science as
"the Conservation of Energy"--quantity and quality are permanent, form
alone changes. It is the Aristophanic method that differs so greatly
from that of most modern satirists. For Aristophanes does not confine
himself to driving the blade of his wit into the rotten parts of a bad
case; he does not score intellectual points only. His method is more
fundamental. A clever controversialist can always find joints in the
harness of his foe. When Mr. Shaw meets Mr. Belloc in public controversy
it is hard to say which makes the greater number of hits. Even harder is
it to say that the cause of truth has been much advanced. One may hold,
fairly enough, that both sides have been made ludicrous; but it is
still fairer to admit that neither has been utterly discredited. If
Aristophanes never succeeded in ruining a party, at least he succeeded
in discrediting some pestilent opinions. This he did, not so much by a
brisk display of intellectual handiness, as by showing that a pompous
superstructure was baseless. He makes us feel a position to be absurd,
instead of merely thinking certain things in it silly.
The superior, sneering official has not escaped shrewd knocks from the
wits of every age. There is a type of mind which, under every form of
government, pushes to the front by sheer lack of virtue. Wherever life
has become sufficiently mechanical to support a bureaucracy, there will
the Poloniuses and Shallows gather, and, wherever there is an official
caste, there will be satirists or torture-chambers.[12] Yet, though the
self-complacent magistrate has been the butt of the ages, Aristophanes
and Shakespeare, and perhaps Flaubert, have alone revealed his essential
nullity, because they alone have looked for something essential beneath
the accidental. Nothing could be simpler than the character of Polonius;
nothing could be more subtle. A rap here, a stab there, and the soul of
a minister is exposed. We have come to see, we scarcely know how, that,
if he ever had one, he has lost it. Some idea of the simplicity and
subtlety of the Aristophanic method may be gathered from the following
scene, but to illustrate the extravagance and beauty of the form, or the
profundity of the conception, no quotation can suffice. Lysistrata has
unfolded her famous scheme for stopping the war: there is to be a
sympathetic strike; the women of all the combatant states, principals
and allies, are to withhold their services until the war has been
stopped:
LYSISTRATA [_ending a speech_]. Then shall the people revere us and
honour us,
givers of Joy, and givers of Peace.
MAGISTRATE. Tell us the mode and the means of your doing it.
LYS. First we will stop the disorderly crew,
Soldiers in arms promenading and marketing.
STRATYLLIS [_leader of the chorus of women_]. Yea, by divine
Aphrodite, 'tis true.
LYS. Now in the market you see them like Corybants, jangling
about with their armour of mail.
Fiercely they stalk in the midst of the crockery,
sternly parade by the cabbage and kail.
MAG. Right, for a soldier should always be soldierly!
LYS. Troth, 'tis a mighty ridiculous jest,
Watching them haggle for shrimps in the market-place,
grimly accoutred with shield and with crest.
* * * * *
STRAT. Comes, like a Tereus, a Thracian irregular,
shaking his dart and his target to boot;
Off runs a shopgirl, appalled at the sight of him,
down he sits soldierly, gobbles her fruit.
MAG. You, I presume, could adroitly and gingerly settle this
intricate, tangled concern:
You in a trice could relieve our perplexities.
LYS. Certainly.
MAG. How? permit me to learn.
LYS. Just as a woman, with nimble dexterity,
thus with her hands disentangles a skein.
* * * * *
MAG. Wonderful, marvellous feats, not a doubt of it,
you with your skeins and your spindles can show;
Fools! do you really expect to unravel a
terrible war like a bundle of tow?
LYS. Ah, if you only could manage your politics
just in the way that we deal with a fleece!
* * * * *
MAG. Heard any ever the like of their impudence,
these who have nothing to do with the war,
Preaching of bobbins, and beatings, and washing-tubs?
LYS. _Nothing to do with it_, wretch that you are?
The women conclude that one who talks thus is no better than a dead
man; and when he sets out on some trusty platitude concerning women's
sphere and the married state with
Truly whoever is able to wed--
Lysistrata takes him up sharply with
Truly, old fellow,'tis time you were dead.
Accordingly they prepare with sacrificial pigs, funeral cakes, fillets
and chaplets to give the walking corpse a decent burial. The magistrate
stumps off, taking Heaven to witness he never was so insulted in his
life, which, as Lysistrata observes, amounts to nothing more than
grumbling because they have not laid him out.
Twenty-three centuries are gone since Aristophanes wrote the
_Lysistrata_, but the safe official who dismisses with a traditional
sneer or a smile the notion that any can manage, save those who have
been trained to mismanage, is still with us. Perhaps he has outlived the
class whose prejudices and limitations he formerly expressed; but in the
days of Aristophanes such a class existed, and it is represented here by
the chorus of old gentlemen. In those days the men were not the only
fools. Aristophanes had no intention of making out that they were. He
was a better artist than party man. He was a comic poet who revealed
the essential comedy of all things. The chorus of women, Lysistrata
herself, and the other leading ladies, all have their foibles and
absurdities; only the chorus of men, who are so keenly alive to them,
seem never to guess that there are smuts on the pot. To seek in this age
and country a companion for these old fellows would be to insult our
Western civilization. Let us invent a purely fantastic character; one
who could not sleep at night for fear of Prussians and Social Democrats,
who clamoured daily for a dozen Dreadnoughts, conscription, and the head
of Mr. Keir Hardie on a charger, and yet spent his leisure warning
readers of the daily papers against the danger of admitting to any share
of power a sex notorious for its panic-fearfulness, intolerance, and
lack of humour; such a one would indeed merit admission to the [Greek:
choros geronton], would be a proper fellow to take his stand [Greek:
hexes Aristogeitoni], beside the brave Aristogiton, and [Greek: pataxai
tesde graos ten gnathon], beat down this "monstrous regiment of women."
Aristophanes was a staunch Conservative, but he disliked a stupid
argument wherever he found it. He cared intensely about politics, but he
could not easily forget that he was an artist. Neither the men nor the
women are tied up and peppered with the small shot of his wit; they are
allowed to betray themselves. The art consists in selecting from the
mass of their opinions and sentiments what is most significant, and
making the magistrate, who speaks for the party, deliver himself of
judicious commonplaces. The chorus of wiseacres, the bar-parlour
politicians, whom chance or misfortune has led to favour one side rather
than the other, are less cautious without being less platitudinous.
Their talk is all of "inevitable war" and "stripping for the fray,"
"vindicating rights," "tyranny" and "traitors," "spoliation,"
"innovation," and "striking good blows for the cause"; at least it was
twenty-three hundred years ago.
_Men Chorus._
This is not a time for slumber;
now let all be bold and free,
Strip to meet the great occasion,
vindicate our rights with me.
I can smell a deep, surprising
Tide of Revolution rising,
Odour as of folk devising
Hippias's tyranny.
And I feel a dire misgiving,
Lest some false Laconians, meeting
in the house of Cleisthenes,
Have inspired these wretched women
all our wealth and pay to seize.
Pay from whence I get my living.
Gods! to hear these shallow wenches
taking citizens to task,
Prattling of a brassy buckler,
jabbering of a martial casque!
Gods! to think that they have ventured
with Laconian men to deal,
Men of just the faith and honour
that a ravening wolf might feel!
Plots they're hatching, plots contriving,
plots of rampant Tyranny;
But o'er US they shan't be Tyrants,
no, for on my guard I'll be,
And I'll dress my sword in myrtle,
and with firm and dauntless hand,
Here beside Aristogeiton
resolutely take my stand,
Marketing in arms beside him.
This the time and this the place
When my patriot arm must deal a
--blow upon that woman's face.
One is tempted to quote Mr. Rogers indefinitely; indeed, there are a
score of good things to which we would gladly call attention. Having
warned readers that this version is not a translation in the sense that
the versions of _The Frogs_ and _The Birds_ are, we can, with a clear
conscience, urge all to read it who care for good literature or are
interested in political ideas. They will not be disappointed; only, we
would suggest to those whose Greek has grown a little rusty that a
literal translation in French or German would be a suitable companion
for the English paraphrase. Without it, they will hardly understand what
provoked Plato's splendid compliment and would bring down upon the
author, were he alive, the rigours of our English law.
FOOTNOTES:
[9] "The Lysistrata of Aristophanes, acted at Athens in the year B.C.
411." The Greek Text Revised, with a Translation into Corresponding
Metres, Introduction, and Commentary, by Benjamin Bickley Rogers. (Bell
and Sons.)
[10] Voltaire, by the way, was no admirer of Aristophanes. "Ce poete
comique," said he, "qui n'est ni comique ni poete, n'aurait pas ete
admis parmi nous a donner ses farces a la foire Saint-Laurent." But that
was not because he was indecent, but because to Voltaire, who said much
the same of Shakespeare, he seemed extravagantly incorrect.
[11] Of course this panegyric needs qualification. What panegyric does
not? The Athenians condemned Socrates. Yes ... yes. But, as a statement
of the general belief and, what is more, the practice of Athens, these
rather excited paragraphs may stand.
[12] _Note_: 1918. Though assuredly our satirists hide their light under
a bushel, the tiny flickers do not escape the eyes of our officials. Let
them beware. In 415, after the mutilation of the Hermae, there was a
panic at Athens and a reign of terror instigated by some of the
demagogues. Torture, though contrary to the laws of Athens and to all
Athenian sentiment, was proposed. The proposal was accepted; but when
the moment for execution came the _ecclesia_--the mass meeting of
citizens, that is to say--refused to allow it. Now Pericles would never
have proposed such a thing; neither would Mr. Asquith: but suppose in
these days some more popular and less responsible leader were to back
the project, I wonder whether the English people would decline to follow
him.
TRELAWNY'S LETTERS[13]
[Sidenote: _Athenaeum Jan. 1911_]
Any one who has read Trelawny's recollections of Shelley and Byron must
know that their author was something much more considerable than a
friend of the great. Any one who, lured by that enchanting book, has
gone on to the "Adventures of a Younger Son" may be pardoned for
supposing, if we are really to take it for autobiography, that its
author was a stupendous liar. Just what he was--the man who wrote those
enthralling memoirs and that excellent romance--may now be pretty well
made out from this collection of old and new letters put together by Mr.
Buxton Forman.
"Vigour and directness," "transparent honesty and complete
fearlessness," are the qualities that impress this able editor as he
reads the letters of the man who, in his opinion, "was less tainted with
the sordid commercialism and ever-increasing snobbery of that century
[the nineteenth] than almost any man one could name as having lived
through so large a part of it." We agree heartily; but, of course, there
is more to be said--for instance, that Trelawny sometimes reminds us of
an extraordinarily intelligent schoolboy, at others of a rather morbid
minor poet. Only, the vitality of few schoolboys amounts almost to
genius, and minor poets are not always blest with feelings fundamentally
sound. Most of his vices were the defects of good qualities. A powerful
imagination may be fairly held accountable for his habit of romancing,
and a brave vocabulary for some of his exaggeration. His vanity and
violence--as childish as his love of mystery, and often as childishly
displayed--were forms in which his high spirits and passionate nature
expressed themselves. Art, in the shape of a bad education, aggravated
his faults; but his honesty and imagination, his generosity and
childlike capacity for admiration and affection were from nature alone.
He was a schoolboy who never grew up; cultivating his cabbages at
Worthing in 1875, he is essentially the same shrewd, passionate,
romantic scapegrace who deserted his ship in Bombay harbour soon after
the battle of Trafalgar, and burnt Shelley's body on the foreshore at
Via Reggio.
Like all boys, Trelawny was exceedingly impressionable, and at the
beginning of this book we find him under the influence of the learned
ladies of Pisa. Left to himself, he wrote with point and vigour prose as
rich in colour and spirit as it is poor in grammar and spelling. His
letter to the _Literary Gazette_, published in this volume, is a good
example of his narrative style. But even his style could be perverted:
"I must give you the consolation of knowing--that you have
inflicted on me indiscribable tortures--that your letter has
inflicted an incurable wound which is festering and inflaming my
blood--and my pride and passion, warring against my ungovernable
love, has in vain essayed to hide my wounded feelings--by silently
submitting to my evil destiny."
So he wrote to Claire Clairmont in December 1822; but under the language
of the minor romantic throbs the lusty passion of a man.
Shelley's influence was great; with him Trelawny was always natural and
always at his best; but Shelley was a wizard who drew the pure metal
from every ore. With Byron it was different. Trelawny was almost as vain
as "the Pilgrim of Eternity," as sensitive, and, when hurt, as
vindictive. He was jealous of Byron's success with women--they were two
of a trade--and especially of his relations with Claire. When Byron
posed Trelawny posed, and when the one sulked the other sulked; but was
any man except Shelley big enough to brook his lordship's moods? That
Byron valued Trelawny is certain; he invited him to Greece because he
knew his worth. Once arrived, Byron had the wit to perceive that
Mavrocordato, albeit the meanest of masters, was the best and most
serviceable to be had at the moment. Trelawny, as was to be expected,
fell under the spell of Odysseus, at that time in more or less open
revolt against the provisional government, but an adventurer of fierce
and reckless spirit, in manner and appearance a romantic outlaw, a man
after his own heart. Henceforth Byron is reckoned at best a dupe, and at
worst a sluggish poltroon; while Trelawny, it is said, imitated his hero
so loyally that "he ate, dressed, and even spat in his manner." When the
poet died Trelawny spoke with characteristic feeling:
"With all his faults I loved him truly.... If it gave me pain
witnessing his frailties, he only wanted a little excitement to
awaken and put forth _virtues_ that redeemed them all."
But the iron had entered into his soul, old sores rankled, he could not
forgive; to the last he was willing to pay back his rival in his own
coin--sneers and abuse.