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THE LYSISTRATA 107
ludicrous ; but it is still fairer to admit that
neither has been utterly discredited. If Aris-
tophanes 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 torturechambers.
1
Yet, though the self-complacent
magistrate has been the butt of the ages,
1 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.