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actualities, possibilities and facts of life on the other; has not the differ- 

 ence almost disappeared in this definition, the difference between 

 Plato and Aristophanes great though it be ? Plato and Lowell satirise 

 the incongruity of our actions in the light of our principles; Aris- 

 tophanes the incongruity of our principles in the light of the facts 

 and laws of life; it almost looks as if each humourist had the same 

 incongruity in view only that they started from opposite points of 

 view and chose the opposite of the two targets for their respective 

 shafts; one was mocking our faithless lives, our disloyalty to principle; 

 and the other our high-falutin principles, our disregard of facts and 

 life and common sense. 



But there is nevertheless here a real difference; Lowell is — like 

 my academic friend who hates Lady Charlotte — satirising moral 

 deformities, faithlessness to conscience; Aristophanes — like a true 

 Greek, a true intellectual — is interested rather in the intellect than in 

 morals even when he is scoffing at us, and he is satirising our unbal- 

 anced ambitions, our soaring ideals that are like balloons cut adrift 

 from earth altogether, that take their occupant up to altitudes, the 

 air of which no man can breath ; as that balloonist is a failure, so these 

 idealists are failures. Their hearts are all right, like Miss Phoebe's, 

 but their heads are as silly as hers. Imperfect, impossible ideals 

 are her foible; low life, coarse action is the offence — the sin rather — 

 of the Lady Charlotte; Lowell is satirising sin but Aristophanes 

 philosophy. 



Perhaps I am labouring the point unnecessarily. Why not quote 

 what certain of our own humourists have said ? The bulk of the 

 humour of Mr. Stephen Leacock, if I recollect aright, is at the expense 

 of foolish idealists, of Mr. William Jennings Bryan and Miss J. Adams, 

 not at the expense of Germany, or, if at the expense of Germany, still 

 at the expense of idealist Germany, the Germany of method and 

 system, with six little birds on each tree-branch singing in harmony 

 or unison, not the Germany of brutal violence and cynical hypocrisy. 

 Impossible ideals, not betrayed and denied ideals move Mr. Leacock's 

 intellectual mirth. It is more profitable because more difiîcult to find 

 other contemporary humourists of the opposite school, the school of Plato 

 and Lowell. A critic in New York, after my paper on Lowell, observed 

 that the same reasons which made Lowell interesting, endeared Bernard 

 Shaw to him; Shaw satirizes not the pacifists and cranks, not the 

 Sidney Webbs and Massinghams and Gardiners, not the nation with a 

 capital N, but the great public, the conventionalists, the nation with 

 a small "n." I suppose that is true though it is at first sight rather 

 paradoxical (and all the more Shavian) that it should be so; at first 



