But White, while warning us against regarding the dramatist as either “a mere moralist or a mere jester,” judges by record:[29]
“If Aristophanes was working for reform, as a long line of learned interpreters of the poet have maintained, the result was lamentably disappointing; he succeeded in effecting not a single change. He wings the shafts of his incomparable wit at all the popular leaders of the day—Cleon, Hyperbolus, Peisander, Cleophon, Agyrrhius, in succession, and is reluctant to unstring his bow even when they are dead. But he drove no one of them from power.”
Yet after due deduction has been made, Satire has left to it an asset of considerable net value; an influence that may be subjective if not objective, general if not specific, and artistic if not rampantly ethical. As an instrument of self criticism, whereby a man may be saved from making a solemn pompous fool of himself, as an antitoxin to vanity, a solvent of sentimentality, a betrayer of hypocrisy, satire may find all the mission it needs to be respectable; and if it can also acquire a degree of grace and comeliness, it may be listed among the muses.
Now this spirit of humorous criticism, sprung from innate prejudice, nurtured by penetrating observation, enlisted at least nominally under the banner of righteousness, and out for conquest, obviously must have something to conquer;—whether he is a soldier fighting an enemy alien, or a roving knight, bound to offer combat on chivalric grounds, though aware in his candid heart that the surpassing loveliness of his lady is a claim gallantly to be maintained rather than an incontrovertible fact. In either case, whether he uses archery or artillery, he must have a target; and a student of his tactics must understand what it is, even better perhaps than he does himself.
Taken individually, the objects of satiric attack are legion, being no fewer than all such victims of human displeasure as may suitably come in for jesting rebuke. Our only chance for any sort of synthesis is to see first if these individuals may be grouped into classes, and next, if these classes may be generalized under some principle, discovered to be under some supreme command.
The grouping is indeed easily discernible. Political parties stand out, social strata, various professions and institutions and movements. But to look upon these as ridiculed for themselves is to be satisfied with a superficial view. The fault is not in themselves but in their stars that they are underlings. What are these evil stars that seem in their courses to fight against them?
The terms oftenest on the lips of satirists and historians of satire are Vice and Folly. But these fine large entities are taken at their face value and given a conventional interpretation. We are not enlightened as to what vice and folly are, and can define them only as those things which seem vicious and foolish to their several opponents. They also are among the baffling subjectivities.
Juvenal’s conclusion that it is hard not to write satire, from the premise that the number of fools is infinite, is said by Herford to be “the fundamental axiom of all satire.” But as a matter of fact, it was Horace who took the fool for his province, while his sterner successor rather specialized on the knave. From then on there has been as little endeavor to disentangle the two strands as to define them.
One of the earliest English satirists[30] emphasised the knavery; and another[31] includes that and folly in the same indictment. Dryden,[32] inclined to the serious Juvenalian type, discriminates between positive and negative attitudes, but not between the two stock objects.
Speaking of the narrowed use of the word satire in French and English, he adds,