They do not merely play with words; they romp with them,
tickle them, tease them, and somehow the words seem to like it.
I dare say there may be as much fancy and fun in "The Clouds" or "The
Birds," but neither of them seems so rich to me as "The Frogs," nor does
the fun anywhere else climb so high or dwell so long in the region of
humor as here. Lucian makes Greek mythology comic, to be sure, but he
has nothing like the scene in "The Frogs," where Bacchus is terrified
with the strange outcries of a procession celebrating his own mysteries,
and of whose dithyrambic songs it is plain he can make neither head nor
tail. Here is humor of the truest metal, and, so far as we can guess,
the first example of it. Here is the true humorous contrast between the
ideal god and the god with human weaknesses and follies as he had been
degraded in the popular conception. And is it too absurd to be within
the limits even of comic probability? Is it even so absurd as those
hand-mills for grinding out so many prayers a minute which Huc and Gabet
saw in Tartary?
Cervantes was born on October 9, 1547, and died on April 23, 1616, on
the same day as Shakespeare. He is, I think, beyond all question, the
greatest of humorists. Whether he intended it or not,--and I am inclined
to believe he did,--he has typified in Don Quixote, and Sancho Panza his
esquire, the two component parts of the human mind and shapers of human
character--the imagination and understanding.
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