Page:Grierson Herbert - First Half of the Seventeenth Century.djvu/118

98 fashion. The idea of an eccentric who shrinks from every noise and yet marries a wife, is derived from Libanius, and expanded with the help of multifarious learning and curious observation into what Mr Swinburne justly calls the "most imperial and elaborate of all farces." And just because it is frankly a farce, and the reader is not called on to look through the play at the object of the satire, has it been so popular. One is left free to enjoy the art—the cleverly invented characters, the cunningly constructed plot, the learned and brilliant dialogue. It is not a faultless art; it is not the art of Shakespeare, or even of Molière; but it none the less arrests and compels our admiration and, in this play certainly, our delighted amusement.

Such as it is, Jonson's art reached its culminating point in The Alchemist. The closely woven plot has no excrescences. The characters, without exception, are impressive and delightful satiric types,—Face, shameless and adroit; Subtle, the virtuous fraud; Dol Common, as vigorous, if not as human, as Doll Tearsheet; the sublime Sir Epicure and the inimitable "We of the separation," Tribulation Wholesome and Ananias. The satire here, too, does not seem to fly so far above reality as in Volpone. Full of learning as it is, the play smacks of actual observation of the knavish life of low London, the life the poet paints again with coarse gusto in Bartholomew Fair. Alchemy and every kind of superstitious trickery abounded. And yet the satire is not ephemeral. Substitute spirit-rapping or palmistry