ontemporaries of Cicero. Is the
Englishman prepared to draw the same conclusion in both cases? I think
not. The American, of course, will draw it cheerfully; but I must
then ask him whether, since a modern negro has a greater "command over
Nature" than Washington had, we are also to accept the conclusion,
involved in his former one, that humanity has progressed from Washington
to the fin de siecle negro.

Finally, I would point out that if life is crowned by its success and
devotion in industrial organization and ingenuity, we had better worship
the ant and the bee (as moralists urge us to do in our childhood), and
humble ourselves before the arrogance of the birds of Aristophanes.

My reason then for ignoring the popular conception of Progress in Caesar
and Cleopatra is that there is no reason to suppose that any Progress
has taken place since their time. But even if I shared the popular
delusion, I do not see that I could have made any essential difference
in the play. I can only imitate humanity as I know it. Nobody knows
whether Shakespeare thought that ancient Athenian joiners, weavers, or
bellows menders were any different from Elizabethan ones; but it is
quite certain that one could not have made them so, unless, indeed, he
had played the literary man and made Quince say, not "Is all our company
here?" but "Bottom: was not that Socrates that passed us at the Piraeus
with Glaucon and Polemarchus on his way to the house of Kephalus." And
so on.

CLEOPATRA

Cleopatra was only sixteen when Caesar went to Egypt; but in Egypt
sixteen is a riper age than it is in England. The childishness I have
ascribed to her, as far as it is childishness of character and not lack
of experience, is not a matter of years. It may be observed in our own
climate at the present day in many women of fifty. It is a mistake to
suppose that the difference between wisdom and folly has anything to do
with the difference between physical age and physical youth. Some women
are younger at seventy than most women at seventeen.

It must be borne in mind, too, that Cleopatra was a queen, and was
therefore not the typical Greek-cultured, educated Egyptian lady of
her time. To represent her by any such type would be as absurd as to
represent George IV by a type founded on the attainments of Sir Isaac
Newton. It is true that an ordinarily well educated Alexandrian girl of
her time would no more have believed bogey stories about the Romans than
the