“A satire should expose nothing but what is corrigible, and make a due discrimination between those who are, and those who are not the proper objects of it.”
The best modern expression[67] of this idea happens to be an interpretation of a pioneer satirist. And it is distinctly modern in its recognition that while the real object of satire must be an abstraction,—the sin not the sinner—it must, to be artistic, have a concrete embodiment,—the sinner rather than the sin. The Greek dramatist explains:
“Yet spiteless in a sort, considered well,
Since I pursued my warfare till each wound
Went through the mere man, reached the principle
Worth purging from Athenai. Lamachos?
No, I attacked war’s representative;
Kleon? No, flattery of the populace;
Sokrates? No, but that pernicious seed
Of sophists whereby hopeful youth is taught