- erous indignation, like the wind on the traveller's back, the
beating makes it hug its cloaking sins the tighter. Wrong runs no danger from such chastisement. * * * Satire is harmless as a moral weapon. It is an old-fashioned fowling piece, fit for a man of wit, intelligence, and a certain limited imagination. It runs no risk of having no quarry; the world to it is one vast covert of lawful game. It goes a-travelling with wit, because both are in search of the unworthy."
Two comments on Aristophanes illustrate the pro and
con of satiric accomplishment. Cope, in the Preface to his
translation, remarks:
"He felt it his duty to do all he could to counteract the increasing
influence of Euripides upon the rising generation, and
knowing the power of ridicule, he employs this weapon constantly
and mercilessly; but he is careful not to injure his own
cause by exaggerated caricature, which might have created
sympathy for the object of his censure."
But White, while warning us against regarding the dramatist
as either "a mere moralist or a mere jester," judges by
record:[1]
"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,
- ↑ Introduction to Croiset's Aristophanes and the Political Parties at Athens.
