Page:Essays and Addresses.djvu/155

 dialogue in which the Knights deplore the dotage of Demus, and Demus tells them that, while he seems to doze, he always has one eye open (vv. 1111–1150).

When a change of Ministry occurs in England, no one would undertake to say exactly what share in that result is attributable to journalistic repetition and suggestion—to the cumulative impression wrought on the public mind, through weeks, months, and years, by the Conservative or the Liberal press. And he would be a bold man who presumed to say how little or how much the Old Comedy may have to do with the phenomena of oligarchic reaction in the latter part of the Peloponnesian War, or with the stimulation of all those sentiments which have their record in the death of Socrates. The confused travesty of Socrates in the Clouds corresponds, in its general features, with the confused prepossessions of which he was afterwards the victim. In this case, as in others. Comedy was not the origin, but the organ, of a popular opinion. It did not create the prepossessions; but it strengthened them by the simple process of reflecting them in an exaggerated form. Briefly, Aristophanic Comedy had many of the characteristics of vehement party journalism, but was directed either against persons, on the one hand, or against general principles and tendencies, on the other—not against measures. Its most obvious strength lay in brilliant originality of form; but its political and social effect depended essentially on its representative value. It was the great