Page:Grierson Herbert - First Half of the Seventeenth Century.djvu/122

102 less perfect comedies, whose range of satire was wider, including courtiers, citizens, lawyers, soldiers, and not exempting individuals. For there was probably more in the famous quarrel of the players than a merely personal matter. The friend to whom The Poetaster was dedicated had to undertake for the poet's innocence before "the greatest justice of the Kingdom," and for a time Jonson laid comedy aside. He probably realised that it was unsafe for a player to constitute himself the censor of all classes from courtiers to actors. When he took up comedy again, though he had perfected his constructive art, he either, as in Volpone, elaborated his satire on pedantic and unreal lines, or, as in The Alchemist, flew at comparatively small game. Only in the Puritans did he find antagonists worthy of his steel whom it was safe to attack, and his satire of them is so trenchant, if, as satire must be, one-sided, that one wishes he had been free to deal faithfully with other classes, and not compelled to waste his powers on pedantic abstractions or on alchemists, "jeerers," news-vendors, and projectors—pigmies whom at the distance of three centuries we can hardly descry. Jonson's touch was too heavy for a task which was within Molière's range and was Addison's proper function—the satire of affectations and minor follies. But had satire been as free for Jonson as it was for Aristophanes or Juvenal, he surely would have been a great and stern censor of the great vices and corruptions of society. As it is, "rare Ben Jonson" is his appropriate epitaph, for there is nothing in the world quite like one of his