the sudden acquisition of a fortune and tragedies with the bloodless separation of a pair of lovers; but after all it is not so much what happens in the end that interests us, but how it happens, and any plot is a good plot if it brings on the stage a succession of live interesting characters who have something to say. The only justification for Menander's use of the stock devices of comedy with the improbabilities inherent in them, is the old one which justifies so many improbable plots, including that of Edipus Tyrannus, that by using them the author has created an enduring masterpiece of literature.

Plots and technique must in any literature be taken for granted to some extent. The mechanical side of play-production is always distracting until the playgoer has learned what to expect. The more conventional the background of dramatic art is, the less the spectator will be distracted. Menander could interest his audience in the inner life of his characters partly because there was so little novelty in the externals of his plays. A great artist interprets the drama of existence on the stage by evoking at moments of crisis from the husk which moves and is visible to those about, the utterance of the real man within. Men rarely interpret their own natures in life. On the stage they may transcend ordinary reality. The dramatist may give them a voice and words to interpret the significance of their struggles. This is particularly true in stylised and in poetic drama. Each character in Menander is his own mouthpiece, and so it comes about that in his plays there was presented, not to the eye but to the imagination, a reality that ancient critics found more living than life itself.

A comparison with later writers of comedy will throw into relief the qualities of Menander. To Plautus he is superior not in degree but in kind. The plays of Plautus probably bore about as much relation to the Greek original as a modern musical comedy does to the play from which it is adapted. Plautus is full of life and fun, and it is not disparaging him to point out that his wit, however good, makes no pretence of springing from any deep or delicate conceptions of human nature, as does Menander's humour. Plautus deals with some of the most harrowing facts of life, just as Menander does, love

and jealousy and the plight of slave girls or of unmarried mothers, but in his laughter there is never a hint of tears. Plautus is the clown who, though he may have had one, at least never displayed an aching heart. Joy and sorrow are equally funny when seen through Plautus' eyes. The laughter of Menander is merry enough, but tears are always lurking in the background, and again and again he achieves that triumph of all art, the mingling in one potion of the bitter and the sweet, an enchanted cup fraught with potency to move the reader like nothing else in literature.

Menander is superior to Terence not in kind but in power. Terence gives us the same blend but so diluted that it never intoxicates and exhilarates but mildly. Julius Cæsar observed this long ago and apostrophised Terence as a Menander cut in two. The charm of style was there, but the creative power was absent. Even the greatest admirers of Terence must admit that his characters are blurred. Menander's people are as distinct in memory as people in the street. Each has his own concerns and his own mannerisms. The characters of Terence are more or less palsied. They engage in stirring action with such unconcern that they are at once detected as only people in a play, not real vibrating human beings. Not stirred themselves, they do not stir the reader. Terence's charm lies in his language for one thing. He is a marvellous master of Latin, and for sonority and weight Terence's Latin is superior to Menander's Greek. Doubtless Menander was dramatically right in not trying to compose like Plato; but, though Terence may spoil his drama in order to write sententiously, he must be given credit for doing his sententiousness very well indeed.

Terence, in his adaptations of Menander, introduced technical improvements. His characters never address the audience. Moreover, he sometimes took pains to avoid monologue by introducing a second speaker. His technique is in general more advanced and more selfconscious than that of Menander. In at least one case, however, his improvement results in a really shocking piece of patchwork. No one likes the scene in Terence's 'Eunuchus' where Chærea comes out and describes to a comrade how he had raped an unsuspecting girl.

In

the first place the scene is morally offensive. Neither of the young men seems to feel the least compunction of conscience, and, not only that, they are not even interested. The ravisher is as cool as a cucumber, and the two go off to a banquet as if nothing had happened. Now we know from Plutarch that this is what Menander never did. The violation of the girl was of course in the original play of Menander from which Terence adapted the 'Eunuchus,' but in Menander the young man described the experience in a monologue. Now we may assume that in this monologue he showed himself excited, overwrought and repentant, for, according to Plutarch,* such acts in Menander's plays regularly led to repentance, reform, and marriage. The moral obtuseness thus introduced by Terence is not all. The character who is introduced to replace the monologue by a dialogue has absolutely no business in the play, and his introduction is a most absurd violation of dramatic propriety. Better a monologue than a dialogue with a wholly inorganic character.

Terence's improvements in dramatic technique could only give him a claim to superiority over Menander if he had shown himself capable of doing more than patchwork. Of this there is no evidence. He has, however, another quality besides his style that endears him to his readers, namely his humanity. There is a breadth of sympathy in his treatment of character that is conspicuous by contrast with Plautus. Even in Terence, however, there are curious aberrations of which the piece of moral obtuseness cited from the Eunuchus is an example. It seems at least possible that Terence derived his broad humanity from Menander. He reproduced it exquisitely where he found it in the original, but he lacked the invention to devise scenes of his own in which this quality was incorporated. The spirit of Menander breathes through many scenes of Terence and through the whole play of the Adelphi. Terence appreciated Menander and he wrote Latin superbly. If he did not have Menander's power of creating characters with a life of their own, we can only share Cæsar's regret that this should be so.

With regard to the comparative merits of Greek and

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Latin writers of comedy, there is a passage of Aulus Gellius (II, 23) which would be more instructive if the text were less corrupt. Gellius points out that no matter how good a scene may appear to be when a Latin comedy is read, nevertheless the Greek original is always found, when one turns to it, to be incomparably better. He compares Menander and Cæcilius for one scene to the latter's discredit. Since Cæcilius was usually ranked ahead of Terence, it is clear that the superiority of Menander to Terence would have seemed beyond dispute. The Latin writers are defective in naturalness, in charming byplay and in dramatic consistency. They do not let us see the play of motives before action; the character declares his motives and acts. Hence a well-known wooden effect. Jokes and moral sentiments are introduced without regard to dramatic propriety with the result that the characters seem more concerned about making bright remarks than about living their own lives. The result is that blurring which has been mentioned before and a failure to stir the audience. Nothing could be more perverse in the way of literary criticism than to put Terence ahead of Menander. One might as well prefer Seneca as a dramatist to Eschylus, or as a philosopher to Plato. Whole generations have been guilty of that sort of thing in the past, and they will be again so long as no one rises to insist with authority on the superiority of the best.

The temptation to compare Menander with Shakespeare is irresistible. Shakespeare is great as a poet and as a tragedian. He did not write comedies in the ordinary sense. His so-called comedies are romantic or fanciful histories, when they are not farce. Twelfth Night' is much the best of them. It contains marvellous poetry, excellent sentiment and a rich vein of vigorous comedy. Menander lacks the poetry. His sentiment is more practical and less dreamy than Shakespeare's. His clowning is about as lively and as realistic as Shakespeare's. The quality to be specially noted in Menander's comedy because it is lacking in Shakespeare's is the element of seriousness. Shakespeare is serious enough in tragedy. There his characters have a vitality that is overpowering. In comedy, however, almost anything can happen without disturbing the serenity of

the atmosphere. In Menander there is an intensity of purpose in the characters which often contributes to laughter and always humanises it. The tragi-comedy of Menander can be paralleled in modern writers, in Barrie for instance, but not in Elizabethan writers. There are comic interludes in Shakespeare's tragedy, but they only throw into relief the note of tragedy. The famous knocking at the gate in Macbeth is not laughed at nowadays. One wonders whether it ever was, or was ever meant to be, laughed at. The union of laughter and tears in Menander is a really great achievement.

is.

Molière is farther from Menander than Shakespeare In fact, as a writer of comedy, Molière is as far from Menander as he can be. Molière is intellectual and Menander emotional. Molière's characters are much more abstract. They are not vividly presented as individuals demanding sympathy; they are simplified and analysed for criticism. Harpagon in 'L'Avare' is the embodiment of one passion. He is much too consistent to be human. Molière is a reformer who appeals to the reason. Menander was equally a reformer, but he appealed to the heart. Molière argued for an improvement in the position of women; Menander, though women were less free in his society than in Molière's, proposes no removal of restrictions; he merely sets the example of loving them unashamed and treating them with respect. When Molière is serious, it is his own serious purpose that motivates his characters. They illustrate his own thesis. Menander allows his characters a serious purpose of their own, and a sense of their own importance as men, which confers on them a half-ludicrous dignity that is very touching. Molière dissects his people so skilfully that they appear as specimens ; Menander presents his with the life still in them. Molière is incomparable in his own field, but he hardly competes at all with Menander. With the latter laughter and sympathy go together. Even mean characters are allowed some individuality. For such a character as Tartuffe Molière allows no sympathy. He has not one trait to mark him as human. We laugh at him and detest him, but do not seek to understand him. A cook or a Smicrines may be so treated in Menander to some extent, but the dissection is never quite so complete.