A study of Ben Jonson

r.^

A Study of Ben Jonson

printed by

spottiswocm: and co., new-street square

LONDON

A STUDY OF

BEN JONSON

BY

ALGERNON CHARLES SWINBURNE

^esEl/A:*^-.^

LONDON

CHATTO & WINDUS, PICCADILLY

1889

^..

"X

y^d ^/^

CONTENTS

PAGE

I. COMEDIES, TRAGEDIES, AND MASQUES . i

II. MISCELLANEOUS WORKS .... 91

in. DISCOVERIES 127

t^isu

I

COMEDIES, TRAGEDIES

AND

MASQUES

fs

I

COMEDIES, TRAGEDIES, AND
MASQUES

If poets may be divided into two exhaustive but
not exclusive classes, — the gods of harmony and
creation, the giants of energy and invention, — the
supremacy of Shakespeare among the gods of
English verse is not more unquestionable than the
supremacy of Jonson among its giants^ Shake-
speare himself stands no higher above Milton and
Shelley than Jonson above Dryden and Byron.
Beside the towering figure of this Enceladus the
stature of Dryden seems but that of an ordinary
man, the stature of Byron — who indeed can only
be classed among giants by a somewhat licentious
or audacious use of metaphor — seems little higher ^
than a dwarfs. Not even the ardour of his most
fanatical worshippers, from the date of Cartwright -
and Randolph to the date of Gilchrist and Gifford, ")
could exaggerate the actual greatness of his various
and marvellous energies. No giant ever came so

B 2

4 A Stttdy of Ben Jonson

near to the ranks of the gods : were it possible for
one not born a god to become divine by dint of
ambition and devotion, this glory would have
crowned the Titanic labours of Ben Jonson.' There
is something heroic and magnificent in his lifelong
dedication of all his gifts and all his powers to the
service of the art he had elected as the business of
all his life and the aim of all his aspiration. And
the result also was magnificent : the flowers of his
growing have every quality but one which belongs
to the rarest and finest among flowers : they have
colour, form, variety, fertility, vigour : the one
thing they want is fragrance^ Once or twice only
in all his indefatigable career of toil and triumph
did he achieve what was easily and habitually
accomplished by men otherwise unworthy to be
named in the same day with him ; by men who
would have avowed themselves unworthy to un-
loose the latchets of his shoes. That singing
power which answers in verse to the odour of a
blossom, to the colouring of a picture, to the flavour
of a fruit, — that quality without which they may
be good, commendable, admirable, but cannot be
delightful, — was not, it should seem, a natural gift
of this great writer's : hardly now and then could
his industry attain to it by some exceptional touch

Comedies, Tragedies, and Masques 5

of inspiration or of luck. It is ' above all strange-
ness ' that a man labouring under this habitual dis-
qualification should have been competent to re-
cognize with accurate and delicate discernment an
occasion on which he had for once risen above his
usual capacity — a shot by which he had actually
hit the white : but the lyrical verses which Ben
Jonson quoted to Drummond as his best have
exactly the quality which lyrical verse ought to
have and which their author's lyrical verse almost
invariably misses ; the note of apparently spon-
taneous, inevitable, irrepressible and impeccable
music. They might have been written by Cole-
ridge or Shelley3 But Ben, as a rule, — a rule
which is proved by the exception — was one of the
singers who could not sing ; though, like Dryden,
he could intone most admirably ; which is more —
and much more — than can truthfully be said for
Byron. He, however, as well as Dryden, has one
example of lyrical success to show for himself,
as exceptional and as unmistakable as Jonson's.
The incantation in (Edipus, brief as it is, and the
first four stanzas of the incantation in Manfred,
imitative as they are, reveal a momentary sense of
music, a momentary command of the instrument
employed, no less singular and no less absolute.

6 A Stitdy of Ben Jonson

But Jonson, at all points the greatest and most
genuine poet of the three, has achieved such a
success more than once ; has nearly achieved it,
or has achieved a success only less absolute than
this, more than a few times in the course of his
'works. And it should be remembered always that
poetry in any other sense than the sense of inven-
^ tion or divination, creation by dint of recollection
and by force of reproduction, was by no means
the aim and end of his ambition. , The grace, the
charm, the magic of poetry was to him always a
/ secondary if not always an inconsiderable quality
K in comparison with the weight of matter, the
^^^ solidity of meaning, the significance and purpose
kof the thing suggested or presented. The famous
men whose names may most naturally and most
rationally be coupled with the more illustrious
name of Ben Jonson came short of the triumph
which might have been theirs in consequence of
their worst faults or defects — of the weaker and
baser elements in their moral nature ; because
they preferred self-interest in the one case and
self-indulgence in the other to the noble toil and
the noble pleasure of doing their best for their
art's sake and their duty's, to the ultimate satis-
faction of their conscience ; a guide as sure and a

y

Comedies^ Tragedies^ and Masques 7

monitor as exacting in aesthetic matters — or, to
use a Latin rather than a Greek word, in matters
of pure inteUigence — as in questions of ethics or -^^trv*^

^x^orality. But with Ben Jonson conscience was . ^/^
the first and last consideration : the conscience of (
power which undoubtedly made him arrogant and ,
exacting made him even more severe in self-exac-
tion, more resolute in self-discipline, more inexor- \ W
able in self-devotion to the elected labour of his k^c^lJI
life. From others he exacted much ; but less '^^^^_^
than he exacted from himself And it is to this \
noble uprightness of mind, to this lofty loyalty
in labour, that the gravest vices and the most / t^""
serious defects of his work may indisputably
be traced. Reversing the famous axiom of
Goldsmith's professional art-critic, we may say\
of Jonson's work in almost every instance that the
picture would have been better if the artist had
taken less pains^ For in some cases at least he
writes better as soon as he allows himself to write

. with ease — or at all events without elaborate osten-
tation of effort and demonstrative prodigality of
toil. The unequalled breadth and depth of his
reading could not but enrich as well as encumber
his writings : those who could wish he had been
less learned may be reminded how much we should

U-

8 A Study of Ben Jonson

certainly lose — how much of solid and precious
metal — for the mere chance of a possible gain in
spontaneity and ease ; in qualities of lyrical or
dramatic excellence which it is doubtful whether he
had received from nature in any degree comparable
with those to which his learning gave a fresh im-
pulse and a double force of energetic life. And
when his work is at its worst, when his faults are
most flagrant, when his tediousness is most unen-
durable, it is not his learning that is to blame, for
his learning is not even apparent. The obtrusion
and accumulation of details and references, allu-
sions and citations, which encumber the text and
the margin of his first Roman tragedy with such a
ponderous mass of illustrative superfluity, may un-
doubtedly be set down, if not to the discredit, at
least to the disadvantage of the poet whose resolute
caprice had impelled him to be author and com-
mentator, dramatist and scholiast, at once: but
however tedious a languid or a cursory reader
may find this part of Jonson's work, he must,
if not abnormally perverse in stupidity, admit
that it is far less wearisome, less vexatious, less
deplorable and insufferable, than the interminable
deserts of dreary dialogue in which the affectations,
pretentions, or idiocies of the period are subjected

The Case .is Altered g

to the indefatigable and the lamentable industry of
a caricaturist or a photographer.

There is nothing accidental in the work of Ben
Jonson : no casual inspiration, no fortuitous im-
pulse, ever guides or misguides his genius aright

y or astray. And this crowning and damning defect
^ of a tedious and intolerable realism was even ex-
ceptionally wilful and premeditated. There is little
if anything of it in the earliest comedy admitted
into the magnificent edition which was compiled
and published by himself in the year of the
death of Shakespeare. And the humours of a
still earlier comedy attributed to his hand, ^y^^ ^^^^
and printed apparently without his sane- " Altered.
tion just seven years before, are not worked out
with such wearisome patience nor exhibited with
such scientific persistency as afterwarijs distin-

/ guished the anatomical lecturer on vice and folly
whose ideal of comic art was a combination of sar-
■ casm and sermon in alternately epigrammatic and
declamatory /dialogue. I am by no means disposed
to question the authenticity of this play,.an excellent
example of rDjoantic comedy dashed with farce
and flavoured with_poetry : but, as far as I am
aware, no notice .has yet been taken of a noticeable
coincidence between the manner or the circum-

)<

lo A Study of Ben Jonson

stances of its publication and that of a spurious
play which had nine years previously been attri-
buted to Shakespeare. Some copies only of The
Case is Altered \>Q-d>x on the title-page the name of
Jonson, as some copies only of Sir John Oldcastle
bear on the title-page the narne of Shakespeare.
In the earlier case, there can of course be no
reasonable doubt that Shakespeare on his side, or
the four actual authors of the gallimaufry on theirs,
or perhaps all five together in the common though
diverse, interest of their respective credits, must
have interfered to put a stop to the piratical profits
of a lying and thieving publisher by compelling
him to cancel the impudently mendacious title-
page which imputed to Shakespeare the authorship
of a play announced in its very prologue as the
work of. a writer or writers whose intention was to
counteract the false impression given by Shake-
speare's caricature, and to represent Prince Hal's old
lad of the qastle in his proper character of hero and
martyr. In the later case, there can be little if any
doubt that Jonson, then at the height 'of his fame
and influence, must have taken, measures to pre-
clude the circulation under his name of a play which
he would not or could not honestly acknowledge.
So far, then, as external evidence goes, there is no

The Case is Altered 1 1

ground whatever for a decision as to whether TJie
Case is Altered may be wholly or partially or not , _
at all assignable to the hand of Jonson. My own
conviction is that he certainly had a hand in it, and
was not improbably its sole author : but that on
the other hand it may not impossibly be one of the
compound works on which he was engaged as a
dramatic apprentice with other and less energetic
playwrights in the, dim back workshop of the slave-
dealer and slave-driver- whose diary records the
grinding toil and the scanty wages of his lean and
laborious bondsmen. Justice, at least since the
days of Gifford, has generally been done to the
bright and pleasant quality of this equally romantic
and classical comedy ; in which the passionate
humour of the miser is handled with more fresh-
ness- and freedom than we find in most of Jonson's
later studies, while the figure of his putative
daughter has more of grace and interest than he
usually vouchsafed to be at the pains of bestowing
on his official heroines. It is to be regretted, it
is even to be deplored, that the influence of Plautus^^/^
on the style and the method of Jonsort was not \
more permanent and more profound. Had he been
but content to follow his first impulse, to work
after his earliest model — had he happily preferred

12 A Study of Ben Jonson

those ' Plautinos et numeros et sales ' for which his
courtly friend Horace expressed so courtierly a
contempt to the heavier numbers and the more
laborious humours which he set himself to elaborate
and to cultivate instead, we might not have had to
applaud a more wonderful and admirable result, we
should unquestionably have enjoyed a harvest more
spontaneous and more gracious, more generous
and more delightful. Something of the charm of
Fletcher, his sweet straightforward fluency and
instinctive lightness of touch, would have tempered
the severity and solidity of his deliberate satire and
his heavy-handed realism.

And the noble work of comic art which followed

on this first attempt gave even fuller evidence in

its earlier than its later form of the author's

capacity for poetic as well as realistic success.

^The defence of poetry which appears only in the

first edition of Every Man in his Humour

EveryMan

in his is worth all Sidney's and all Shelley's

Humour. .

treatises thrown together. A stern and
austere devotion to the principle which prohibits
all indulgence in poetry, precludes all exuberance
of expression, and immolates on the altar of
accuracy all eloquence, all passion, and all inspira-
tion incompatible with direct and prosaic reproduc-

Every Man in his Humour 13

tion of probable or plausible dialogue, induced its
author to cancel this noble and majestic rhapsody ;
and in so doing gave fair and full forewarning of
the danger which was to beset this too rigid and
conscientious artist through the whole of his mag-
nificent career. But in all other points the process ^
of transformation to which its author saw fit to
subject this comedy was unquestionably a process
of improvement. Transplanted from the imaginary
or fantastic Italy in which at first they lived and
moved and had their being to the actual and
immediate atmosphere of contemporary London,
the characters gain even more in lifelike and
interesting veracity or verisimilitude than in familiar
attraction and homely association. Not only do
we feel that we know them better, but we perceive
that they are actually more real and cognisable
creatures than they were under their former
conditions of dramatic existence. But it must be
with regret as well as with wonder that we find
ourselves constrained to recognize the indisputable
truth that this first acknowledged work of so great
a writer is as certainly his best as it certainly is ^cXa^^
not his greatest. Never again did his genius, his^'
industry, his conscience and his taste unite in the
trium.phant presentation of a work so faultless, so

14 A Stndy of Ben Jonson

satisfactory, so absolute in achievement and so free
frpm blemish or defect. The only three others
among all his plays which are not unworthy to be
ranked beside it are in many ways more wonderful,
more splendid, more incomparable with any other
product of human intelligence or genius : but
neither The Fox, The Alchemist, nor The Staple of
News, is altogether so blameless and flawless a
piece of work ; so free from anything that might
as well or better be dispensed with, so simply and
thoroughly compact and complete in workmanship
and in result. Moliere himself has no character
more exquisitely and spontaneously successful in
presentation and evolution than the immortal and
inimitable Bobadil : and even Bobadil is not un-
worthily surrounded and supported by the many
other graver or lighter characters of this magnifi-
cent and perfect comedy.

It is difficult to attempt an estimate of the next
endeavours or enterprises of Ben Jonson withojut
incurring either the risk of impatient and uncritical
injustice, if rein be given to the natural irritation
and vexation of a disappointed and bewildered
reader, or the no less imminent risk of one-sided
and one-eyed partiality, if the superb literary
quality, the elaborate intellectual excellence, of

Every Man out of his Humour

these undramatic if not inartistic satires in dialpgu^
be duly taken into account. From their authors
point of view, they are worthy of all the applau^t\C?c
he claimed for them ; and to say this is to say
much ; but if the author's point of view was
radically wrong, was fundamentally unsound, we
can but be divided between condemnation and
applause, admiration and regret. No student of
our glorious language, no lover of our glorious
literature, can leave these miscalled comedies un-
read without foregoing an experience which he
should be reluctant to forego : but no reader who
has any sense or any conception of comic art or of
dramatic harmony will be surprised to find that the
author's experience of their reception on the stage
should have driven him by steady gradations of
fury and consecutive degrees of arrogance into a
state of mind and a style of work which must
have seemed even to his well-wishers most un-
promising for his future and final triumph. Little
if anything can be added to the excellent critical
remarks of Gifford on Every Man out of his
Humour, Cynthia's Revels, and Poetaster, or his
Arraignment. The first of these magnificent mis-
takes would be enough to ensure immortality to
the genius of the poet capable of so superb and

1 6 A Study of Ben Joiison

elaborate an error. The fervour and intensity of
the verse which expresses his loftier mood of
Every intolerant indignation, the studious and
ofTir^ implacable versatility of scorn v^rhich ani-
Humojir. j-Qa.tes the expression of his disgust at the
viler or crueller examples of social villainy then open
to his contemptuous or furious observation, though
they certainly cannot suffice to make a play, suffice
to make a living and imperishable work of the
dramatic satire which passes so rapidly from one
phase to another of folly, fraud, or vice. And if it
were not an inadmissible theory that the action or
the structure of a play might be utterly disjointed
and dislocated in order to ensure the complete
presentation or development, the alternate exhibi-
tion or exposure, of each figure in the revolving
gallery of a satirical series, we could hardly fear
that our admiration of the component parts which
fail to compose a coherent or harmonious work of
art could possibly carry us too far into extrava-
gance of applause. The noble rage which inspires
the overture is not more absolute or perfect than
the majestic structure of the verse : and the best
comic or realistic scenes of the ensuing play are
worthy to be compared — though it may not be
altogether to their advantage — with the similar

Every Man out of his HttmoMv 1 7

work of the greatest succeeding artists in narrative
or dramatic satire. Too much of the studious
humour, too much of the versatile and laborious
realism, displayed in the conduct and evolution of
this satirical drama, may have been lavished and
misused in the reproduction of ephemeral affecta-
tions and accidental forms of folly : but whenever
the dramatic satirist, on purpose or by accident,
strikes home to some deeper and more durable sub-
ject of satire, we feel the presence and the power
of a poet and a thinker whose genius was not born
to deal merely with ephemeral or casual matters.
The small patrician fop and his smaller plebeian
ape, though even now not undiverting figures, are
inevitably less diverting to us, as they must have
been even to the next generation from Jonson's,.
than to the audience for whom they were created :
but the humour of the scene in which the highly
intelligent and intellectual lady, who regards her-
self as the pattern at once of social culture and
of personal refinement, is duped and disgraced by
an equally simple and ingenious trick played off
on her overweening and contemptuous vanity,
might have been applauded by Shakespeare or
by Vanbrugh, approved by Congreve or Moliere.
Here, among too many sketches of a kind which

C

18 A Study of Ben Jonson

can lay claim to no merit beyond that of an
unlovely photograph, we find a really humorous
conception embodied in a really amusing type of
vanity and folly ; and are all the more astonished
to find a writer capable of such excellence and
such error as every competent reader must recog-
nize in the conception and execution of this rather
admirable than delightful play. For Moliere him-

/ self could hardly have improved on the scene in
which a lady who is confident of her intuitive
capacity to distinguish a gentleman from a pre-
tender with no claim to that title is confronted
with a vulgar clown, whose introducers have
assured her that he is a high-bred gentleman mas-
querading for a wager under that repulsive likeness.
She wonders that they can have imagined her so
obtuse, so ignorant, so insensible to the difference
between gentleman and clown : she finds that he
plays his part as a boor very badly and trans-
parently ; and on discovering that he is in fact the
boor she would not recognize, is driven to vanish

I in a passion of disgust. This is good comedy :
but we can hardly say as much for the scene in
which a speculator who has been trading on the
starvation or destitution of his neighbours and
tenants is driven to hang himself in despair at the

Cynthia s Revels 19

tidings of a better market for the poor, is cut down
by the hands of peasants who have not recognized
him, and on hearing their loudly expressed regrets
for this act of inadvertent philanthropy becomes
at once a beneficent and penitent philanthropist.
Extravagant and exceptional as is this instance
of Jonson's capacity for dramatic error — for the
sacrifice at once of comic art and of common sense
on the altar of moral or satirical purpose, it is but
an extreme example of the result to which his
theory must have carried his genius, gagged and
handcuffed and drugged and blindfolded, had not
his genius been too strong even for the force and
the persistence of his theory. No reader and no
spectator of his next comedy can have been inclined
to believe or encouraged in believing
that it was. The famous final verse of the ^£^fuf'
epilogue to CyntJiia's Revels can hardly
sound otherwise to modern ears than as an expres-
sion of blusteringdiffidence — of blatant self-distrust.
That any audience should have sat out the five
undramatic acts of this ' dramatic satire ' is as in-
conceivable as that any reader, however exasperated
and exhausted by its voluminous perversities,
should fail to do justice to its literary merits ; to
the vigour and purity of its English, to the mas-

c 2

20 A Study of Ben Jons on

culine refinement and the classic straightforward-
ness of its general style. There is an exquisite
song in it, and there are passages — nay, there are
scenes — of excellent prose : but the intolerable
elaboration of pretentious dullness and ostentatious
ineptitude for which the author claims not merely
the tolerance or the condonation which gratitude
or charity might accord to the misuse or abuse of
genius, but the acclamation due to its exercise and
the applause demanded by its triumph — the heavy-
headed perversity which ignores all the duties and
reclaims all the privileges of a dramatic poet — the
Cyclopean ponderosity of perseverance which
hammers through scene after scene at the task of
ridicule by anatomy of tedious and preposterous
futilities — all these too conscientious outrages
offered to the very principle of comedy, of poetry,
or of drama, make us wonder that we have no re-
cord of a retort from the exhausted audience — if
haply there were any auditors left — to the dogged
defiance of the epilogue : —

By God 'tis good, and if you like 't you may.

— By God 'tis bad, and worse than tongue can say.

For the most noticeable point in this studiously
wayward and laboriously erratic design is that the
principle of composition is as conspicuous by its

Cynthia s Revels 2 1

absence as the breath of inspiration : that the
artist, the scholar, the disciple, the student of classic
models, is as indiscoverable as the spontaneous
humourist or poet. The wildest, the roughest, the
crudest offspring of literary impulse working
blindly on the passionate elements of excitable
Ignorance was never more formless, more m-
coherent, more defective in structure, than this
voluminous abortion of deliberate intelligence and
conscientious culture.

There is a curious monotony in the variety —
if there be not rather a curious variety in the
monotony — of character and of style which makes
it even more difficult to resume the study of
Cynthia's Revels when once broken off than even
to read through its burdensome and bulky five
acts at a sitting ; but the reader who lays siege
to it with a sufficient supply of patience will find
that the latter is the surer if not the only way to
appreciate the genuine literary value of its better -^^^^^
portions. Most of the figures presented are less
than sketches and little more than outlines of
inexpert and intolerant caricature : but the ' half-
saved ' or (as Carlyle has it) ' insalvable ' coxcomb
and parasite Asotus, who puts himself under the
tuition of Amorphus and the patronage of Anaides,

VftA^-v

2 2 A Study of Ben Jonsoii

is a creature with something of real comic life in
him. By what process of induction or deduction
the wisdom of critical interpreters should have
discerned in the figure of his patron, a fashionable
ruffler and ruffian, the likeness of Thomas Dekker,.
a humble, hard-working, and highly-gifted hack
of letters, may be explicable by those who can
explain how the character of Hedon, a courtly and
voluptuous coxcomb, can have been designed to
cast ridicule on John Marston, a rude and rough-
hewn man of genius, the fellow-craftsman of Ben
Jonson as satirist and as playwright But such
absurdities of misapplication and misconstruction,
once set afloat on the Lethean waters of stagnating
tradition, will float for ever by grace of the very
rottenness which prevents them from sinking.
Ignorance assumes and idleness repeats what
sciolism ends by accepting as a truth no less
indisputable than undisputed. To any rational
and careful student it must be obvious that until
the publication of Jonson's Poetaster we cannot
trace, I do not say with any certainty of evidence,,
but with any plausibility of conjecture, the identity
of the principal persons attacked or derided by
the satirist. And to identify the originals of such
figures as Clove and Orange in Every Man out of

Poetaster

his Hmnour can hardly, as Carlyle might nave '-^z.
expressed it, be matter of serious interest to any ^'^-^
son of Adam. But the famous polemical comedy
which appeared a year later than the appearance
of Cynthids Revels bore evidence about it,

Poetaster.

unmistakable by reader or spectator, alike
to the general design of the poet and to the par-
ticular direction of his personalities. Jonson of
course asserted and of course believed that he
had undergone gross and incessant provocation
for years past from the ' petulant ' onslaughts of ^
Marston and Dekker : but what were his grounds
for this assertion and this belief we have no means
whatever of deciding — we have no ground what-
ever for conjecture. What we cannot but perceive \
is the possibly more important fact that indigna- /
tion and ingenuity, pugnacity and self-esteem,
combined to produce and succeeded in producing
an incomparably better comedy than the author's
last and a considerably better composition than
the author's penultimate attempt. Even the
* apologetical dialogue ' appended for the benefit
of the reader, fierce and arrogant as it seems to us
in its bellicose ambition and its quarrelsome self-
assertion, is less violent and overweening in its
tone than the furious eloquence of the prelude to

24 ^ Study of Bert Jonso7i

Every Man out of his Humour. The purity of
passion, the sincerity of emotion, which inspires
and inflames that singular and splendid substitute
for an ordinary prologue, never found again an
expression so fervent and so full in the many and
various appeals of its author to his audience, im-
mediate or imaginary, against the malevolence of
enemies or of critics. But in this Augustan satire
his rage and scorn are tempered and adapted to
something of dramatic purpose ; their expression
is more coherent, if not less truculent, — their effect
is more harmonious, if not more genuine, — than in
the two preceding plays.

There is much in the work of Ben Jonson
which may seem strange and perplexing to the
most devout and rapturous admirer of his genius :
there is nothing so singular, so quaint, so in-
explicable, as his selection of Horace for a sponsor
or a patron saint. The affinity between Virgil and
Tennyson, between Shelley and Lucretius, is patent
and palpable : but when Jonson assumes the mask
of Horace we can only wonder what would have
been the sensation on Olympus if Pluto had sud-
denly proposed to play the part of Cupid, or if
Vulcan had obligingly offered to run on the
errands of Mercury. This eccentricity of egoism

Poetaster 25

is only less remarkable than the mixture of care
and recklessness in the composition of a play
which presents us at its opening with an apparent
hero in the person, not of Horace, but of Ovid ;
and after following his fortunes through four-fifths
of the action, drops him into exile at the close of
the fourth act, and proceeds with the business of
the fifth as though no such figure had ever taken
part in the conduct of the play. Shakespeare,
who in Jonson's opinion ' wanted art,' assuredly j^jr -buv^
never showed himself so insensible to the natural
rules of art as his censor has shown himself here.
Apart from the incoherence of construction which
was perhaps inevitable in such a complication of
serious with satirical design, there is more of
artistic merit in this composite work of art than
in any play produced by its author since the
memorable date of Every Man in his Humour.
The character of Captain Pantilius Tuccaff which
seems to have brought down on its creator such
a boiling shower-bath or torrent of professional
indignation from quarters in which his own dis-
tinguished service as a soldier and a representative
champion of English military hardihood would
seem to have been unaccountably if not scan-
dalously forgotten, is beyond comparison the

26 A Study of Ben Jonson

brightest and the best of his inventions since the
date of the creation of Bobadil. But the decrease
in humanity of humour, in cordial and genial
sympathy or tolerance of imagination, which
marks the advance of his genius towards its
culmination of scenical and satirical success in
The Alchemist must be obvious at this stage of his
work to those who will compare the delightful
cowardice and the inoffensive pretention of Bobadil
with the blatant vulgarity and the flagrant ras-
cality of Tucca.

In the memorable year which brought into
England her first king of Scottish birth, and made
inevitable the future conflict between the revolu-
tionary principle of monarchy by divine right and
the conservative principle of self-government by
deputy for the commonweal of England, the first
great writer who thought fit to throw in his lot
with the advocates of the royalist revolution pro-
duced on the boards a tragedy of which
Sejanus. ^ ^ - ^ •

the moral, despite his conscious or uncon-
scious efforts to disguise or to distort it, is as
thoroughly republican and as tragically satirical
of despotism as is that of Shakespeare's Julius
Ccesar. It would be well for the fame of Jonson
if the parallel could be carried further: but,

Sejanus 27

although Sejanus his Fall may not have received
on its appearance the credit or the homage due
to the serious and solid merit of its composition
and its execution, it must be granted that the
author has once more fallen into the excusable
but nevertheless unpardonable error of the too
studious and industrious Martha. He was careful
and troubled about many things absolutely super-
fluous and supererogatory ; matters of no value
or concern whatever for the purpose or the import

> of a dramatic poem : but the one thing needful, the \

> very condition of poetic life and dramatic interest,
he utterly and persistently overlooked. Tiberius, the ,

^ central character of the action — for the eponymous
hero or protagonist of the play is but a crude study
of covetous and lecherous ambition, — has not life
enough in the presentation of him to inform the
part with interest. No praise — of the sort which
is due to such labours — can be too high for the
strenuous and fervid conscience which inspires
every line of the laborious delineation : the re-
corded words of the tyrant are wrought into the
text, his traditional characteristics are welded into
the action, with a patient and earnest fidelity
which demands applause no less than recognition i
but when we turn from this elaborate statue —

y

28 A Study of Ben Jo7ison

from this exquisitely articulated skeleton — to the
living figure of Octavius or of Antony, we feel
and understand more than ever that Shakespeare
*hath chosen the good part, which shall not be
taken away from him.'
^ Coleridge has very justly animadverted on ' the

anachronic mixture ' of Anglican or Caledonian
royalism with the conservatism of an old Roman
republican in the character of Arruntius : but we
may trace something of the same incongruous
combination in the character of a poet who was
at once the sturdiest in aggressive eagerness of
self-assertion, and the most copious in courtly

« «?e^. effusion of panegyric, among all the distinguished

writers of his day. The power of his verse and

the purity of his English are nowhere more re-

» . , markable than in his two Roman tragedies: on

^'r***^ the other hand, his great fault or defect as a
dramatist is nowhere more perceptible. This
general if not universal infirmity is pne which

never seems to have occurred to him_, careful and
studious though he was always of his own powers
and performances, as anything of a fault at all.
It is one indeed which no writer afflicted with it
could reasonably be expected to recognize or
to repair. Of all purely negative faults, all sins

Sejanus 29

of intellectual omission, it is perhaps the mos^
serious and the most irremediable. It is want of ^s
gympathy ; a lack of cordial interest, not in his zi re? »^^
own work or in his own genius, — no one will assert
that Jonson was deficient on that score, — but in the
individual persons, the men and women represented
on the stage. He took so much interest in the
creations that he had none left for the creatures of
his intellect or art. This fault is not more obvious
in the works of his disciples Cartwright ^nd
Randolph than in the works of their master. The
whole interest is concentrated on the intellectual
composition and the intellectual development t)f
the characters and the scheme. Love and hatred,
sympathy and antipathy, are superseded and sup- ^
planted by pure scientific curiosity : the clear glow
of serious or humorous emotion is replaced by
the dry light of analytical investigation. Si vis vie
flere — the proverb is something musty. Neither
can we laugh heartily or long where all chance of
sympathy or cordiality is absolutely inconceivable.
The loving laughter which salutes the names of
Dogberry and Touchstone, Mrs. Quickly and
Falstaff, is never evoked by the most gorgeous
opulence of humour, the most glorious audacity
of intrigue, which dazzles and delights our under-

30 A Study of Ben Jonson

standing in the parts of Sir Epicure Mammon,
Rabbi Zeal-of-the-Land Busy, Morose and Fit^
dottrel and Mosca : even Bobadil, the most
' comically attractive of all cowards and braggarts
on record, has no such hold on our regard as many
a knave and many a fool of Shakespeare's comic
progeny. The triumph of ' Don Face ' over his
confederates, though we may not be so virtuous as
to grudge it him, puts something of a strain upon
our conscience if it is heartily to be applauded
and enjoyed. One figure, indeed, among all the
multitude of Jonson's invention, is so magnificent
in the spiritual stature of his wickedness, in the
still dilating verge and expanding proportion of his
energies, that admiration in this single case may
possibly if not properly overflow into something
of intellectual if not moral sympathy. The genius
and the courage of Volpone, his sublimity of cynic
scorn and his intensity of contemptuous enjoy-
ment,— his limitless capacity for pleasure and his
dauntless contemplation of his crimes, — make of
this superb sinner a figure which we can hardly
realize without some sense of imperious fascination.
His views of humanity are those of Swift and
of Carlyle : but in him their fruit is not bitterness
of sorrow and anger, but rapture of satisfaction

Sejanus 3 1

rand of scorn. His English kinsman, Sir Epicure \
Mammon, for all his wealth of sensual imagination
and voluptuous eloquence, for all his living play of
humour and glowing force of faith, is essentially
but a poor creature when set beside the great
Venetian. Had the study of Tiberius been in-
formed and vivified by something of the same
fervour, the tragedy of Sejanus might have had
in it some heat of more than merely literary life.
But this lesser excellence, the merit of vigorous
and vigilant devotion or application to a high and
serious object of literary labour, is apparent in
every scene of the tragedy. That the subject is
one absolutely devoid of all but historical and
literary interest — that not one of these scenes can
excite for one instant the least touch, the least
phantom, the least shadow of pity or terror —
would apparently have seemed to its author no
argument against its claim to greatness as a tragic
poem. But if it could be admitted, as it will never
be by any unperverted judgment, that this eternal
canon of tragic art, the law which defines terror
and pity as its only proper objects, the alpha and
omega of its aim and its design, may ever be
disregarded or ignored, we should likewise have to
admit that Jonson had in this instance achieved

32 A Study of Ben Jonson

a success as notable as we must otherwise consider
his failure. For the accusation of weakness in
moral design, of feeble or unnatural treatment
of character, cannot with any show of justice be
brought against him. Coleridge, whose judgment
on a question of ethics will scarcely be allowed
to carry as much weight as his authority on matters
of imagination, objects with some vehemence to
the incredible inconsistency of Sejanus in appealing
for a sign to the divinity whose altar he proceeds
to overthrow, whose power he proceeds to defy,
on the appearance of an unfavourable presage.
This doubtless is not the conduct of a strong
man or a rational thinker : but the great minister
of Tiberius is never for an instant throughout the
whole course of the action represented as a man
of any genuine strength or any solid intelligence.
He is shown to us as merely a cunning, daring,
unscrupulous and imperious upstart, whose greed
and craft, impudence and audacity, intoxicate
while they incite and undermine while they uplift
him.

The year which witnessed the appearance of
Sejanus on the stage — acclaimed by Chapman at
greater length if not with greater fervour than
by any other of Jonson's friends or satellites —

If "^^^ ■ -

Masques II i\\ 3Y/.0

witnessed also the first appearance of its a^lior in /y, '^
a character which undoubtedly gave free play<j:d'^'^
some of his most remarkable abilities, but which
unquestionably diverted and distorted and absorbed
his genius as a dramatist and his talent as

r r 1 . , Part of

a poet after a fashion which no capable King
student can contemplate without admira- Entertain-
tion or consider without regret. The few ^^^^'^^*
readers whose patient energy and conscientious
curiosity may have led them to traverse — a pil-
grimage more painful than Dante's or than Bun-
yan's — the entire record of the ' Entertainment *
which escorted and delayed, at so many successive
stations, the progress through London and West-
minster of the long-suffering son of Mary Queen
of Scots, will probably agree that of the two poetic
dialogues or eclogues contributed by Jonson to the
metrical part of the ceremony, the dialogue of the
Genius and the Flamen is better than that of the
Genius and Thamesis ; more smooth, more vigor-
ous, and more original. The subsequent prophecy
of Electra is at all points unlike the prophecies of
a Cassandra : there is something doubly tragic in
the irony of chance which put into the mouth of
Agamemnon's daughter a prophecy of good fortune
to the royal house of Stuart on its first entrance

D

34 ^ Study of Ben Jonson

into the capital and ascension to the throne of
England. The subsequent Panegyre is justly
A Pane- praised by Gifford for its manly and dig-
^^^^' nified style of official compliment — court-

liness untainted by servility : but the style is rather
that of fine prose, sedately and sedulously measured
and modulated, than_ that of even ceremonial
poetry.

In the same energetic year of his literary life
the Laureate produced one of his . best

The Satyr. . / ,. . , .

mmor works — ihe Satyr, a little -lyric
drama so bright and light and sweet in fancy and
in finish of execution that we cannot grudge the
expenditure of time and genius on so slight a sub-
The ject. The Penates, which appeared in

the following year, gave evidence again
of the strong and lively fancy which was to be
but too often exercised in the same field of in-
genious and pliant invention. The metre is well
conceived and gracefully arranged, worthy indeed
of nobler words than those which it clothes with
light and pleasant melody. The octosyllabics, it
will be observed by metrical students, are certainly
good, but decidedly not faultless : the burlesque
part sustained by Pan is equally dexterous and
brilliant in execution.

The Fox

35

In 1605 the singular and magnificent coalition
of powers which served to build up the composite
crenius of Tonson displayed in a single ^^ ,^
masterpiece the consummate and crown- or The Fox.
ing result of its marvellous energies. No other ^
of even his very greatest works is at once so
admirable and so enjoyable. The construction or

\composition of The Alchemist is perhaps more won- ^"
derful in the perfection and combination of cumu-
lative detail, in triumphant simplicity of process and
impeccable felicity of result : but there is in Volpone
a touch of something like imagination, a savour of
something like romance, which gives a higher tone

'Ho the style and a deeper interest to the action. The
chief agents are indeed what Mr. Carlyle would
have called * unspeakably unexemplary mortals ' : '
but the serious fervour and passionate intensity
of their resolute and resourceful wickedness give
somewhat of a lurid and distorted dignity to the
display of their doings and sufferings, which is
wanting to the less gigantic and heroic villainies of
Subtle, Dol, and Face. The absolutely unqualified
and unrelieved rascality of every agent in the later -V"^
comedy — unless an exception should be made in
favour of the unfortunate though enterprising
Surly — is another note of inferiority ; a mark of

M D 2

36 A Study of Ben Jons on

comparative baseness in the dramatic metal. In
Volpone the tone of villainy and the tone of virtue
are alike higher. Celia is a harmless lady, if 'a too
submissive consort ; Bonario is an honourable
gentleman, if too dutiful a son. The Puritan' and
shopkeeping scoundrels who are swindled by Face
and plundered by Lovewit are viler if less villainous
figures than the rapacious victims of Volpone.
^ As to the respective rank or comparative ex-

cellence of these two triumphant and transcendent
masterpieces, the critic who should take upon him-
self to pass sentence or pronounce judgment would
in my opinion display more audacity than discre-
tion. The steadfast and imperturbable skill of
hand which has woven so many threads of incident,
\J so many shades of character, so many changes of
/ intrigue, into so perfect and superb a pattern of in-
comparable art as dazzles and delights the reader
^ of The Alchemist is unquestionably unique — above
comparison with any later or earlier example of
kindred genius in the whole range of comedy, if
not in the whole world of fiction. The manifold
harmony of inventive combination and imaginative
contrast — the multitudinous unity of various and
concordant effects — the complexity and the
simplicity of action and impression, which hardly

The Fox and The Alchemist t^j

allow the reader's mind to hesitate between enjoy-
ment and astonishment, laughter and wonder,
admiration and diversion — all the distinctive |
qualities which the alchemic cunning of the poet ^
has fused together in the crucible of dramatic satire
for the production of a flawless work of art, have
given us the most perfect model of imaginative ' .
realism and satirical comedy that the world has / .
ever seen ; the most wonderful work of its kind
that can ever be run upon the same lines. Nor is
it possible to resist a certain sense of immoral
sympathy and humorous congratulation, more keen
than any Scapin or Mascarille can awake in the
mind of a virtuous reader, when Face dismisses
Surly with a promise to bring him word to his
lodging if he can hear of ' that Face ' whom Surly
has sworn to mark for his if ever he meets him.
From the date of Plautus to the date of Sheridan it
would surely be difficult to find in any comedy a
touch of glorious impudence which might reasonably
be set against this. And the whole part is so full
of brilliant and effective and harmonious touches or
strokes of character or of humour that even this
crowning instance of serene inspiration in the line
of superhuman audacity seems merely right and
simply natural.

o

8 A Study of Ben Jonson

/>

And yet, even while possessed and overmastered
by the sense of the incomparable energy, the
impeccable skill, and the indefatigable craftsman-
ship, which combined and conspired together to
produce this aesthetically blameless masterpiece
the reader whose instinct requires something more
than merely intellectual or aesthetic satisfaction

/- must recognize even here the quality which distin-
guishes the genius of Ben Jonson from that of the

) very greatest inaaginative humourists — Aristo-
phanes or Rabelais, Shakespeare or Sterne, Van-
brugh or Dickens, Congreve or Thackeray. Each
of these was evidently capable of falling in love
with his own fancy — of rejoicing in his own
imaginative humour as a swimmer in the waves he
plays with : but this buoyant and passionate rapture
was controlled by an instinctive sense which forbade
them to strike out too far or follow the tide too
long. However quaint or queer, however typical
or exceptional, the figure presented may be —
Olivia's or Tristram Shandy's uncle Toby, Sir John
Brute or Mr. Peggotty, Lady Wishfort or Lady
Kew, — we recognize and accept them as lifelike and
actual intimates whose acquaintance has been made
for life. Sir Sampson Legend might undoubtedly
find himself as much out of place in the drawing-

The Fox and The Alchemist 39

room of the Countess Dowager of Kew as did Sir
Wilful Witwoud, on a memorable occasion, in the
saloon of his aunt Lady Wishfort : Captain Toby
Shandy could hardly have been expected to
tolerate the Rabelaisian effervescences of Sir Toby
Belch : and Vanbrugh's typical ruffians of rank
have little apparently in common with Dickens's
representative heroes of the poor. But in all these
immortal figures there is the lifeblood of eternal
life which can only be infused by the sympathetic
faith of the creator in his creature — the breath
which animates every word, even if the word be
not the very best word that might have been found,
with the vital impulse of infallible imagination. ^
But it is difficult to believe that Ben Jonson can
have believed, even with some half sympathetic and
half sardonic belief, in all the leading figures of his
invention. Scorn and indignation are but too often ^
the motives or the mainsprings of his comic art ;
andl^en dramatic poetry can exist on the sterile \
and fiery diet of scorn and indignation, we may
hope to find life sustained in happiness and health
on a diet of aperients and emeticsTl The one great
modern master of analytic art is somewhat humaner
than Jonson in the application of his scientific
method to the purpose of dramatic satire. The

40 A Study of Ben Jonson

study of Sludge is finer and subtler by far than the
study of Subtle ; though undoubtedly it is, in con-
sequence of that very perfection and sublimation
of exhaustive analysis, less available for any but a
monodramatic purpose. No excuse, no^plea, no
pretext beyond the fact of esurience and the sense
^Cof ability, is suggested for the villainy of Subtle,
Dol, and Face. But if we were to see what might
possibly be said in extenuation of their rogueries,
to hear what might possibly be pleaded in explana-
tion or condonation of their lives, the comedy
would fall through and go to pieces : the dramatic
effect would collapse and be dissolved. And to
this great, single, aesthetic end of art the consum-
mate and conscientious artist who created these
immortal figures was content to subdue or to
sacrifice all other and subordinate considerations.
Coleridge, as no reader will probably need to be
reminded, ' thought the CEdipus Tyrannus, The
Alchemist^ and Torn Jones, the three most perfect
plots ever planned.' With the warmest admiration
and appreciation of Fielding's noble and immortal
masterpiece, I cannot think it at all worthy of com-
parison, for blameless ingenuity of composition and
absolute impeccability of design, with the greatest
of tragic and the greatest of comic triumphs in

The Fox and The Alchemist

construction ever accomplished by the most con-
summate and the most conscientious among ancient
and modern artists. And when we remember that
this perfection of triumphant art is exhibited, not
on the scale of an ordinary comedy, whether classic
',or romantic, comprising a few definite types and a
few impressive situations, but on a scale of invention
so vast and so, various as to comprise in the course
of a single play as many characters and as many in-
cidents, all perfectly adjusted and naturally developed
out of each other, as would amply suffice for the
entire dmmatic furniture, for the entire poetic equip-
ment, of a great dramatic poet, we feel that Gifford's ^
expression, a ' prodigy of human intellect,' is equally
applicable to The Fox and to The Alchemist, and is
not a whit too strong a term for either. Nor can I
admit, as I cannot discern, the blemish or imper-
fection which others have alleged that they descjy
in the composition of Volpone — the unlikelihood of
the device by which retribution is brought down in
the fifth act on the criminals who were left at the
close of the fourth act in impregnable security and
triumph. So far from regarding the comic Nemesis
or rather Ate which infatuates and impels Volpone
to his doom as a sacrifice of art to morality, an
immolation of probability and consistency on the

/

42 A Study of Be7i Jons on

altar of poetic justice, I admire as a master-stroke
of character the haughty audacity of caprice which
produces or evolves his ruin out of his own hardi-
hood and insolence of exulting and daring enjoy-
ment. For there is something throughout of the
lion as well as of the fox in this original and in-
comparable figure. I know not where to find a
third instance of catastrophe comparable with that
of either The Fox or The Alchemist in the whole
range of the highest comedy ; whether for com-
pleteness, for propriety, for interest, for ingenious
felicity of event or for perfect combination and
exposition of all the leading characters at once
in supreme simplicity, unity, and fullness of cul-
minating effect.
^' And only in the author's two great farces shall
we find so vast a range and variety of characters.
The foolish and famous couplet of doggrel rhyme
which brackets The Silent Woman with The Fox
and The Alchemist is liable to prejudice the reader
against a work which if compared with those
marvellous masterpieces must needs seem to lose
its natural rights to notice, to forfeit its actual
claim on our rational admiration. Its proper place
is not with these, but beside its fellow example
of exuberant, elaborate, and deliberately farcical

Farces 43

realism — Bartholomew Fair. And the two are not
less wonderful in their own way, less triumphant
on their own lines, than those two crownings
examples of comedy. Farcical in construction and V
in action, they belong to the province of the higher
form of art by virtue of their leading characters.
Morose indeed, as a victimized monomaniac, is
rather a figure of farce than of comedy : Captain '
Otter and his termagant are characters of comedy
rather broad than high : but the collegiate ladies^
in their matchless mixture of pretention and pro-
fligacy, hypocrisy and pedantry, recall rather the
comedies than the farces of Moliere by the elaborate
and vivid precision of portraiture which presents
them in such perfect finish, with such vigour and
veracity of effect. Again, if Bartholomew Fair is ^
mere farce in many of its minor characters and in
some of its grosser episodes and details, the im- '
mortal figure of Rabbi Busy belongs to the highest
order of comedy. In that absolute and complete '
incarnation of Puritanism full justice is done to the
merits while full justice is done upon the demerits
of the barbarian sect from whose inherited and
infectious tyranny this nation is as yet but im-
perfectly delivered. Brother Zeal-of-the-Land is
no vulgar impostor, no mere religious quacksalver-

44 A Shidy of Ben Jo7ison

of such a kind as supplies the common food for
satire, the common fuel of ridicule : he is a hypocrite
of the earnest kind, an Ironside among civilians ;
and the very abstinence of his creator from Hudi-
brastic misrepresentation and caricature makes
the satire more thoroughly effective than all that
Butler's exuberance of wit and prodigality of
intellect could accomplish. The snuffling glutton
who begins by exciting our laughter ends by
displaying a comic perversity of stoicism in the
stocks which is at least more respectable if not less
laughable than the complacency of Justice Overdo,
the fatuity of poor Cokes, the humble jocosity of a
Littlewit, or the intemperate devotion of a Waspe*.
Hypocrisy streaked with sincerity, greed with across
of earnestness and craft with a dash of fortitude,
combine to make of the Rabbi at once the funniest,
the fairest, and the faithfullest study ever taken
of a less despicable than detestable type of fanatic.
Not only was the genius of Jonson too great,
but his character was too radically noble for a realist
or naturalist of the meaner sort. It is only in the
minor parts of his gigantic work, only in its insig-
nificant or superfluous components or details, that
we find a tedious insistence on wearisome or
offensive topics of inartistic satire or ineffectual

Masques 45

display. Nor is it upon the ignoble sides of
character that this great satiric dramatist prefers to
concentrate his attention. As even in the most
terrible masterpieces of Balzac, it is not the wicked-
ness of the vicious or criminal agents, it is their
energy of intellect, their dauntless versatility of
daring, their invincible fertility of resource, for
which our interest is claimed or by which our
admiration is aroused. In Face as in Subtle, in
Volpone as in Mosca, the qualities which delight
us are virtues misapplied : it is not their cunning,
their avarice, or their lust, it is their courage, their
genius, and their wit in which we take no ignoble
or irrational pleasure. And indeed it would be
strange and incongruous if a great satirist who was
also a great poet had erred so grossly as not to
aim at this result, or had fallen so grievously short
of his aim as not to vindicate the dignity of his
design. The same year in which the stage first
echoed the majestic accents of Volpone's opening
speech was distinguished by the appearance of
the Masque of Blackness : a work eminent
even among its author's in splendour of Masqzie of

Blackness.

fancy, invention, and flowing eloquence.

The

Its companion or counterpart, the Masque Masque of
of Beauty, a poem even more notable ^^"^■^'

y^

46 A Study of Ben Jonson

for these qualities than its precursor, did not appear
till three years later. Its brilliant and picturesque
variations on the previous theme afford a perfect
example of poetic as distinct from prosaic in-
genuity.

Between the dates of these two masques, which
were first printed and published together, three
other entertainments had employed the energetic
genius of the Laureate on the double task of
scenical invention and literary decoration. The
first occasion was that famous visit of King
Christian and his hard-drinking Danes which is
patriotically supposed to have done so much harm
to the proverbially sober and abstemious nation
whose temperance is so vividly depicted by the

enthusiastic cordiality of las^o. The Enter-
Entertain- ■' °

ment of tainmcnt of Tzvo Kings at Theobalds opens

Two

Kings at well, with two vigorous and sonorous

Theobalds.

couplets of welcome : but the Latin verses
are hardly worthy of Gifford's too fervid commenda-
tion. The mock marriage of the boyish Earl of
Essex and the girl afterwards known to ill
fame as Countess of Somerset gave occa-
sion of which Jonson availed himself to the full
for massive display of antiquarian magnificence
and indefatigable prodigality of inexhaustible

Hymenaei.

Masques 47

detail. The epithalamium of these quasi-nuptials
is fine — when it is not coarse (v/e cannot away, for
instance, with the comparison, in serious poetry, of
kisses to — cockles !) : but the exuberant enthusiasm
of Gifford for ' this chaste and beautiful gem ' is
liable to provoke in the reader's mind a comparison '
' with the divine original ' : and among the very
few poets who could sustain a comparison with
Catullus no man capable of learning the merest
rudiments of poetry will affirm that Ben Jonson
can be ranked. His verses are smooth and strong, I
* well-torned and true-filed ' : but the matchless
magic, the impeccable inspiration, the grace, the
music, the simple and spontaneous perfection of the
Latin poem, he could pretend neither to rival nor
to reproduce. ' What was my part,' says Jonson o, s •
in a note, ' the faults here, as well as the virtues, ^
must speak.' These are the concluding words of
a most generous and cordial tribute to the merits
of the mechanist or stage-carpenter, the musician,
and the dancing-master — Inigo Jones, Alfonso
Ferrabosco, and Thomas Giles — who were em-
ployed on the composition of this magnificent if
ill-omened pageant : and they may very reasonably
be applied to the two translations from Catullus
which the poet— certainly no prophet on this

48 A Study of Ben Jonson

particular occasion — thought fit to introduce into
the ceremonial verse of the masques held on the
first and second nights of these star-crossed
festivities. The faults and the virtues, the vigour
of phrase and the accuracy of rendering, the stiff-
ness of expression and the slowness of movement,
are unmistakably characteristic of the workman.
But in the second night's masque it must be noted
that the original verse is distinctly better than
the translated stanzas : the dispute of Truth and
Opinion is a singularly spirited and vigorous
example of amoebaean allegory. In the next year's
. Entertainment of the king and queen at

Entertain- ^ ^

ment of Thcobalds, then ceded by its owner to the

King

James and king, the happy simplicity of invention

Queen . - ., , ,

Anne at and arrangement is worthily seconded or

Theobalds. ^ 1 1 - 1 j j* •/' 1

supported by the grave and dignified music
of the elegiac verse which welcomes the coming
and speeds the parting master. Next year The
Masque of Beauty and the masque at Lord
Haddington's marriage, each containing some of
Jonson's finest and most flowing verse, bore equal
witness to the energy and to the elasticity of his
genius for apt and varied invention. The amoebaean
stanzas in the later of these two masques have
more freedom of movement and spontaneity of

Masques 49

music than will perhaps be found in any other
poem of equal length from the same indefatigable
hand. The fourth of these stanzas is Masque at
j simply magnificent : the loveliness of the '^^'i^f^'^'
next is impaired by that anatomical par- Marriage.
ticularity which too Often defaces the serious
verse of Jonson with grotesque if not gross
deformity of detail. No other poet, except pos-
sibly one of his spiritual sons, too surely ' sealed
of the tribe of Ben,' would have introduced
' liver ' and ' lights ' into a sweet and graceful
effusion of lyric ' fancy, good alike in form and
sound ; a commendation not always nor indeed
very frequently deserved by the verse of its author.
The variations in the burden of ' Hymen's war *
are singularly delicate and happy.

The next was a memorable year in the
literary life of Ben Jonson : it witnessed the ap-
pearance both of the magnificent Masque

TJie

of Queens and of the famous comedy or Masque of
farce of The Silent Woman. The mar-
vellously vivid and dexterous application of mar-
vellous learning and labour which distinguishes
'' the most splendid of all masques as one of the
typically splendid monuments or trophies of Eng-
lish literature has apparently eclipsed, in the

E

50 A Shtdy of Ben Jons on

appreciation of the general student, that equally
admirable fervour of commanding fancy which
informs the whole design and gives life to every
detail. The interlude of the witches is so royally
lavish in its wealth and variety of fertile and lively
horror that on a first reading the student may
probably do less than justice to the lofty and
temperate eloquence of the noble verse and the
noble prose which follow.

Of The Silent Woman it is not easy to say
anything new and true. Its merits are salient
The Silent ^^^ superb : the combination of parts
Woman. ^^^ ^^ accumulation of incidents are
so skilfully arranged and so powerfully designed
that the result is in its own way incomparable
— or comparable only with other works of the
master's hand while yet in the fullness of its
cunning and the freshness of its strength. But a
play of this kind must inevitably challenge a com-
parison, in the judgment of modern readers, be-
tween its author and Moliere : and Jonson can
hardly, on the whole, sustain that most perilous
comparison. It is true that there is matter enough
in Jonson's play to have furnished forth two or
three of Moliere's : and that on that ground — on the
score of industrious intellis^ence and laborious versa-

The Silent Woman 51

tility of humour — The Silent Woman is as superior
to the Misanthrope and the Bourgeois Gentilhomme
as to Tzvelfth Night and Much Ado about Nothing.
But even when most dazzled by the splendour of
studied wit and the felicity of deliberate humour

. which may even yet explain the extraordinary
popularity or reputation of this most imperial and
elaborate of all farces, we feel that the author
could no more have rivalled the author of Twelfth
Night than he could have rivalled the author of
Othello. The Nemesis of the satirist is upon him :
he cannot be simply at ease : he cannot be happy
In his work without some undertone of sarcasm,
some afterthought of allusion, aimed at matters
which Moliere would have reserved for a slighter
style of satire, and which Shakespeare would
scarcely have condescended to recognise as possible

r'objects of even momentary attention. His wit is
wonderful — admirable, laughable, laudable — it is
not in the fullest and the deepest sense delightful.
It is (radically cruel, contemptuous, intolerant ;

\ the sneer of the superior person — Dauphine or
Clerimont — is always ready to pass into a snarl :
there is something in this great classic writer of

I the bull-baiting or bear-baiting brutality of his
age. We put down The Fox or The Alchemist

\^ E 2

^ A Stttdy of Ben Jonson

with a sense of wondering admiration, hardly
affected by the impression of some occasional
superfluity or excess : we lay aside TJie Silent
Woinaii, not indeed without grateful recollection
of much cordial enjoyment, but with distinct if
reluctant conviction that the generous table at
which we have been so prodigally entertained was
more than a little crowded and overloaded with
multifarious if savoury encumbrance of dishes.
And if, as was Gifford's opinion, Shakespeare took
a hint from the mock duellists in this comedy for
the mock duellists in Twelfth Night, how wonder-
fully has he improved on his model ! The broad
rude humour of Jonson's practical joke is boyishly
brutal in the horseplay of its violence : the sweet
bright fun of Shakespeare's is in perfect keeping with
the purer air of the sunnier climate it thrives in.
The divine good-nature, the godlike good-humour
of Shakespeare can never be quite perfectly appre-
ciated till we compare his playfulness or his merri-
ment with other men's. Even that of Aristophanes
seems to smack of the barbarian beside it.

I cannot but fear that to thorough-going
Jonsonians my remarks on the great comedy in
which Dryden found the highest perfection of
dramatic art on record may seem inadequate if

Masques 53

not inappreciative. But to do • it anything like
justice would take up more space than I can spare :
it would indeed, like most of Jonson's other suc-
cessful plays, demand a separate study of some
length and elaboration. The high comedy of the
collegiate ladies, the low comedy of Captain and
Mrs. Otter, the braggart knights and the Latinist
barber, are all as masterly as the versions of Ovid's
elegiacs into prose dialogue are tedious in their I
ingenuity and profitless in their skill. As to the---^
chief character — who must evidently have been a
native of Ecclefechan— he is as superior to the
malade imaginaire, or to any of the Sganarelles oi
Moliere, as is Moliere himself to Jonson in light-
ness of spontaneous movement and easy grace
of inspiration. And this is perhaps the only play"'
of Jonson's which will keep the reader or spectator
for whole scenes together in an inward riot or an
open passion of subdued or unrepressed laughter. /

The speeches at Prince Henry's ^^^^
Barriers, written by the Laureate for ^Aj,^^.^^^^^
the occasion of the heir apparent's in- Henrfs

Barriers.

vestiture as Prince of Wales, are notice-
able for their fine and dexterous fusion of legend
with history in eloquent and weighty verse. But
the Masque of Oberon, presented the day before

54 A Study of Ben J orison

the tournament in which the prince bore himself

so gallantly as to excite ' the great wonder of the

_ beholders,' is" memorable for a Aiality far

The ^ ... .

Masque of higher than this : it is unsurpassed if not

Oberon.

unequalled by any other work of its author
for brightness and lightness and grace of fancy, for
lyric movement and happy simplicity of expression.
Such work, however, was but the byplay
in which the genius of this indefatigable poet
found its natural relaxation during the year
rpj^^ which gave to the world for all time a

Alchemist, gjf^ gQ munificent as that of The Alche-
mist. This J unequalled play,' as it was called
by contemporary admirers, was not miscalled by
their enthusiasm ; it i§ in some respects un-
paralleled among all the existing masterpieces
of comedy. No student worthy of the name
who may agree with me in preferring TJie Fox
to TJie Alchemist will wish to enforce his pre-
ference upon others. Such perfection _g£Dlot,
with such multiplicity of characters — such in
genuity of incident, with such harmony of construc-
tion— can be matched, we may surely venture to
say, nowhere in the whole vast range of comic inven-
tion— nowhere in the whole wide world of dramatic
fiction. If the interest is less poignant than in

OF

The Alchemist 55

Volpone, the fun less continuous than in The Silent
Woman, the action_ less siniple and spontaneous
than tha/of Every Man in his Humour, the vein of
comedy is even richer than in any of these other
Easterpieces. The great Sir Epicure is enough in
"himself to immortalize the glory of the great artist
who conceived and achieved a design so fresh, so ^-
daring, so colossal in its humour as that of this
magnificent character. And there are at least
nine others in the play as perfect in drawing, as
vivIH in outline, as living in every limb and every
feature, as even his whose poetic stature overtops
"Siem all. The deathless three confederates,
Kastrill and Surly, Dapper and Drugger, the too
perennial Puritans whose villainous whine of ^
purity and hypocrisy has its living echoes even
now— not a figure among them could have been
carved or coloured by any other hand.

Nor is the list even yet complete of Jonson's
poetic work during this truly wonderful year
of his literary life. At Christmas he produced
* the Queen's Majesty's masque ' of Love Lwe freed

J T^ 11 r*.^i from Ipio-

freed from fgnorance and toUy ; a little ^^„^^ ^„^
dramatic poem composed in his lightest ^'^^y-
and softest vein of fancy, brilliant and melodious
throughout. The mighty and majestic Poet Lau-

56 A Sttidy of Ben Jonson

reate would hardly, I fear, have accepted with be-
nignity the tribute of a compliment to the effect that
his use of the sweet and simple heptasyllabic metre
was worthy of Richard Barnfield or George Wither :
but it is certain that in purity and fluency of music
his verse can seldom be compared, as here it justly
may, with the clear flutelike notes of Cynthia and
The ShepJierd's Hunting. An absurd misprint in the
last line but three has afflicted all Jonson's editors
with unaccountable perplexity. ' Then, then, angry
music sound,' sings the chorus at the close of a
song in honour of * gentle Love and Beauty.' It is
inconceivable that no one should yet have dis-
covered the obvious solution of so slight but unfor-
tunate an error in the type as the substitution of
* angry ' for ' airy.'

The tragedy of Catiline his Conspiracy gave evi-
dence in the following year that the author of
Sejanus could do better, but could not do

Catiline.

much better, on the same rigid lines of
rhetorical and studious work which he had followed
in the earlier play. Fine as is the opening of this
too laborious tragedy, the stately verse has less of
dramatic movement than of such as might be proper
— if such a thing could be — for epic satire cast into
the form of dialogue. Catiline is so mere a monster

Catiline 57

•of ravenous malignity and irrational atrocity that
he simply impresses us as an irresponsible though
criminal lunatic : and there Is something so pre-
posterous, so abnormal, in the conduct and
language of all concerned in his conspiracy, that
nothing attributed to them seems either rationally
credible or logically incredible. Coleridge, in his
notes on the first act of this play, expresses his con-
viction that one passage must surely have fallen
into the wrong place — such action at such a
moment being impossible for any human creature.
But the whole atmosphere Is unreal, the whole
action^unnatural : no one thing said or done is less
unlike the truth of life than any other : the writing
is immeasurably better than the style of the rant-
ing tragedian Seneca, but the treatment of
character Is hardly more serious as a study of
humanity than his. In fact, what we find here is
exactly what we find in the least successful of Jon-
son's comedies : a study, not of humanity, but of
humours. The bloody humour of Cethegus, the
braggart humour of Curlus, the sluggish humour of
Lentulus, the swaggering humour of Catiline him-
self— a hufifcap hero as ever mouthed and strutted
out his hour on the stage — all these alike fall under
the famous definition of his favourite phrase which

58 A Study of Ben fonson

the poet had given twelve years before in the
induction to the second of his acknowledged
comedies. And a tragedy of humours is hardly
less than a monster in nature — or rather in that art
which ' itself is nature.' Otherwise the second act
must be pronounced excellent : the humours of the
rival harlots, the masculine ambition of Sempronia,
the caprices and cajoleries of Fulvia, are drawn
with Jonson's most self-conscious care and skill.
But the part of Cicero is burden enough to stifle
any play : and some even of the finest passages,
such as the much-praised description of the dying
Catiline, fine though they be, are not good in the
stricter sense of the word ; the rhetorical sub-
limity of their diction comes most perilously near
the verge of bombast. Altogether, the play is
another magnificent mistake : and each time we
open or close it we find it more difficult to
believe that the additions made by its author
some ten years before to TJie Spanish Tragedy can
possibly have been those printed in the later
issues of that famous play.^ Their subtle and

* No student will need to be reminded of what is apparently-
unknown to some writers who have thought fit to offer an opinion
on this subject — that different additions were made at different
dates, and by different hands, to certain popular plays of the time.
The original Faustus of Marlowe was altered and re-altered, at least

Masques 63

had been acclaimed by the poet with such
superfluous munificence of congratulation and of
augury as might have made him hesitate, or at
least might make us wish that he had seen fit to
hesitate, before undertaking the celebration of the
bride's remarriage — even had it not been made
infamously memorable by association with matters
less familiar to England at any time than to Rome
under Pope Alexander VI. or to Paris under
Queen Catherine de' Medici. But from the literary
point of view, as distinguished from the ethical or
the historical, we have less reason to regret than
to rejoice in so graceful an example of the poet's
abilities as a writer of bright, facile, ingenious
and exquisite prose. The Irish Masque, j^j^^ r • ^
presented four days later, may doubtless ^^^^^l^^-
have been written with no sarcastic intention ;
but if there was really no such under-current
of suggestion or intimation designed or ima-
gined by the writer, we can only find a still
keener savour of satire, a still clearer indication of
insight, in the characteristic representation of a
province whose typical champions fall to wrangling
and exchange of reciprocal insults over the display
of their ruffianly devotion : while there is not
merely a tone of official rebuke or courtly compli-

64 A Shidy of Ben Jonson

ment, but a note of genuine good feeling and
serious good sense, in the fine solid blank verse
delivered by ' a civil gentleman of the nation.'
On Twelfth Night the comic masque of
Vindiclted Mercury Vindicated from the Alchemists
^Aiche'' gave evidence that the creator of Subtle
mists. ^^^ ^Q^ exhausted his arsenal of ridicule,
but had yet some shafts of satire left for the
professors of Subtle's art or mystery. The humour
here is somewhat elaborate, though unquestionably
spirited and ingenious.

The next year's is again a blank record ; but
the year 1616, though to us more mournfully
memorable for the timeless death of Shakespeare,
is also for the student of Ben Jonson a date of
exceptional importance and interest. The pro-
duction of two masques and a comedy in verse,
with the publication of the magnificent first edition
of his collected plays and poems, must have kept
his name more continuously if not more vividly
before the world than in any preceding year of his
yy^^ literary life. The masque of The Golden

Golden j^^^ Restored, presented on New Year's
Restored. Night and again on Twelfth Night, is
equally ingenious and equally spirited in its happy
simplicity of construction and in the vigorous

The Devil is an Ass 65

fluency of its versification ; which is generally-
smooth, and in the lyrical dialogue from after the
first dance to the close may fairly be called sweet ;
an epithet very seldom applicable to the solid
and polished verse of Jonson. And if The Devil
is an Ass cannot be ranked among the crown-
ing masterpieces of its author, it is not The Devil
because the play shows any sign of ^
decadence in literary power or in humorous inven-
tion : the writing is admirable, the wealth of
comic matter is only too copious, the characters
are as firm in outline and as rich in colour as any
but the most triumphant examples of his satirical
or sympathetic skill in finished delineation and
demarcation of humours. On the other hand, it
is of all Ben Jonson's comedies since the date of
Cynthia's Revels the most obsolete in subject of
satire, the most temporary in its allusions and
applications : the want of fusion or even connection
(except of the most mechanical or casual kind)
between the various parts of its structure and the
alternate topics of its ridicule makes the action
more difficult to follow than that of many more
complicated plots : and, finally, the admixture of
serious sentiment and noble emotion is not sa

F

66 A Study of Ben Jons on

skilfully managed as to evade the imputation of
incongruity. Nevertheless, there are touches in
the dialogue between Lady Tailbush and Lady
Eitherside in the first scene of the fourth act which
are worthy of Moliere himself, and suggestive of
the method and the genius to which we owe the
immortal enjoyment derived from the society of
Cathos and Madelon — I should say, Polixene and
Aminte, of Celimene and Arsinoe, and of Phila-
minte and Belise. The third scene of the same
act is so nobly written that the reader may feel
half inclined to condone or to forget the previous
humiliation of the too compliant heroine — her ser-
vile and undignified submission to the infamous
imbecility of her husband — in admiration of the
noble and natural eloquence with which the poet
has here endowed her. But this husband, comical
as are the scenes in which he develops and dilates
from the part of a dupe to the part of an impostor,
is a figure almost too loathsome to be ludicrous —
or at least, however ludicrous, to be fit for the
leading part in a comedy of ethics as well as of
manners. And the prodigality of elaboration
lavished on such a multitude of subordinate cha-
racters, at the expense of all continuous interest
and to the sacrifice of all dramatic harmony, may

Masques 67

tempt the reader to apostrophize the poet in his
own words : —

You are so covetous still to embrace
More than you can, that you lose all.

Yet a word of parting praise must be given to
Satan : a small part as far as extent goes, but a
splendid example of high comic imagination after
the order of Aristophanes, admirably relieved by
the low comedy of the asinine Pug and the voluble
doggrel of the antiquated Vico^.

Not till nine years after the appearance of this
play, in which the genius of the author may be
said — in familiar phraseology — to have fallen be-
tween two stools, carrying either too much sug-
gestion of human interest for a half allegorical
satire, or not enough to give actual interest to the
process of the satirical allegory, did Ben Jonson
produce on the stage a masterpiece of comedy in
which this danger was avoided, this difficulty over-
come, with absolute and triumphant facility of
execution. In the meantime, however, he had pro-
duced nine masques — or ten, counting that which
appeared in the same year with his last

The

great work of comic art. The Masque Masque of
of Christmas^ which belongs to the same
year as the two works last mentioned, is a com-

F 2

68 A Study of Ben Jonson

fortablc little piece of genial comic realism ; plea-
sant, quaint, and homely: the good-humoured
humour of little Robin Cupid and his honest old
mother ' Venus, a deaf tirewoman,' is more agree-
able than many more studious and elaborate
examples of the author's fidelity as a painter or
photographer of humble life. Next year, in the
Lovers masquc of Lovers made Men, called by
made Men. Qjffoj.^ The Masque of Lethe, he gave full
play toJiiaJightejL-g^nius ^and Jyric humour : it
is a work of exceptionally simple, natural, and
graceful fancy. In the following year he brought
The Vision out the much-admired Vision of DeligJit ;
ofDehgit. ^ ^^^^^^ ^^.j^ example of his capacities

and incapacities. The fanciful, smooth, and flow-
ing verse of its graver parts would be worthy of
Fletcher, were it not that the music is less fresh
and pure in melody, and that among the finest
and sweetest passages there are interspersed such
lamentably flat and stiff couplets as would have
been impossible to any other poet of equal rank.
If justice has not been done in modern times to Ben
Jonson as one of the greatest of dramatists and
humourists, much more than justice has been done
to him as a lyric poet. The famous song of Night in
this masque opens and closes most beautifully and

Masqtces 69

most sweetly : but two out of the eleven lines which
compose it, the fifth and the sixth, are positively
and intolerably bad. The barbarous and pedantic ,
license of inversion which disfigures his best lyrics
with such verses as these — ' Create of airy forms a
stream,' ' But might I of Jove's nectar sup ' — is not
a fault of the age but a vice of the poet. Marlowe
and Lyly, Shakespeare and Webster, Fletcher and
Dekker, could write songs as free from this blemish
as Tennyson's or Shelley's. There is no surer test
of the born lyric poet than the presence or absence
of an instinctive sense which assures him when and
how and where to use or to abstain from inversion.
And in Jonson it was utterly wanting. '

The next year's masque. Pleasure Reconciled to )
Virtue^ would be very graceful in composition if it^
were not rather awkward in construction.

Pleasure

The verses in praise of dancing are very Reconciled

to Virtue.

pretty, sedate, and polished : and the bur-
lesque part (spoken by ' Messer Gastcr ' in person)
has more than usual of Rabelaisian freedom and
energy. The antimasque afterwards prefixed to it,
For the Honour of Wales, is somewhat

For the

ponderous in its jocularity, but has genuine Honour of

Wales.

touches of humour and serious notes of
character in Its 'tedious and brief display of the

/

70 A Study of Ben Jonson

poet's incomparable industry and devotion to the A
study of dialects and details : and the close is
noble and simple in its patriotic or provincial
eloquence. But in the year 1620 the comic genius .
of Jonson shone out once more in all the splendour
of its strength. The only masque of that

News from

the New year, News from the New World dis-

World dis- j • j t,^

covered in covered in tke Moon, IS worthy of a prose
Aristophanes : in other words, it is a satire
such as Aristophanes might have written, if thai^
greater poet had ever condescended to write prose.
Here for once the generous words of Jonson's noble
panegyric on Shakespeare may justly be applied to
himself : in his own immortal phrase, the humour of
this little comedy is ' not of an age, but for all time.'
At the very opening we find ourselves on but too
familiar ground, and feel that the poet must have
shot himself forward by sheer inspiration into our
own enlightened age, when we hear * a printer of
news ' avowing the notable fact that ' I do hearken
after them, wherever they be, at any rates ; Til give
anything for a good copy now, be it true or false,
so it be news.' Are not these, the reader must ask
himself, the accents of some gutter gaolbird — some
dunghill gazetteer of this very present day ? Or
is the avowal too honest in its impudence for such

Masques 7 1

lips as these ? After this, the anticipation of some-
thing Hke railways (' coaches ' that ' go only with
wind ') — if not also of something like balloons
(' a castle in the air that runs upon wheels, with a
winged lanthorn ') — seems but a commonplace ex-
ample of prophetic instinct.

The longest of Ben Jonson's masques was ex-
panded to its present bulk by the additions made
at each successive representation before the king ;
to whose not over delicate or fastidious taste this
Masque /9^^_^>^g_ Mp.tamnrphnsp.d Qip^ip.s
would seem to have given incomparable if of the

Metamor-

not inexhaustible delight. And even those phosed
readers who may least enjoy the decidedly,
greasy wit or humour of some among its onrf^ tp^'^t^
j;>opii1arJyncal parts must adrnire_andcannot but
enjoy the rare and even refined loveliness of others.
The fortune most unfortunately told of his future
life and death to the future King Charles I. is told
in the very best lyric verse that the poet could
command : a strain of quite exceptional sweetness,
simplicity, and purity of music : to which, as we
read it now, the record of history seems to play a
most tragically ironical accompaniment, in a minor
key of subdued and sardonic presage. And besides
these graver and lovelier interludes of poetry which

72 A Shtdy of Ben Jonson

relieve the somewhat obtrusive realism of the
broader comic parts, this masque has other claims
on our notice and remembrance ; the ingenuity
and dexterity, the richness of resource and the
pliability of humour, which inform and animate all
its lyric prophecies or compliments.

The masque which appparpH in fhp fnl]pwincr

year is a monument of learning and labour such as
no other poet could have dreamed of

The — ~~

Masque of lavishing on a ceremonial or official piece
qf_work, and which can only be appre-
ciated by careful reading and thorough study of the
copious notes and references appended to the text.
Butjhe writer's fanry v^^'^ ^^ ^ ^^"^ f'bh when it-
could devise nothing better than is to be found in
this Masque of A ugurs : the humour is coarse and
clumsy, the verses are flat and stiff. In the next
year's Twelfth-Night masque, Twie vindicated to
himself and to his honours^ the vigorous

Time vin-
dicated to and vicious personalitie>s of the attack on
himself

and to his George Wither give some life to the part
in which the author of Abuses Stj^ipt
and Whipt is brought in under the name of
Chronomastix to make mirth for the groundlings
of the Court. The feeble and facile fluency of his
pedestrian Muse in the least fortunate hours of her

Masques 73

too voluble and voluminous improvisation is not
unfairly caricatured ; but the Laureate's male-
volence is something too obvious in his ridicule
of the ' soft ambling verse ' whose ' rapture ' at its
highest has the quality denied by nature to
Tonson's — the divine sfift of melodious and f

passionate^im£licity. A better and happier use
for his yet unimpaired faculty of humour was found
in the following year's masque of Neptun£s
Triumph for the Return of Albion ; which contains {
the most famous and eloquent panegyric on the ar^
of cookery that ever anticipated the p^rdonrs^nf
Thackeray and the enthusiasm of Di:|n->as.
The passage is a really superb example of Triumph

for the Re-

traglCOmiC or mock-heroir hlanl^ vprc;p^ J turn of

and in the closing lyrics of the masque
there is no lack of graceful fancy and harmonious
elegance. For the next year's masque of ^^a^s
Aj:^niversc^^ not quite

so much can reasonably be said. It JA a typical

and a flagrant incil-anrpj^f the pnpt'<; prn-

Fan's

verbial and incurable tendency to overdo Anni-
everything : there is but artificial smooth-
ness in the verse, and but clownish ingenuity in
the prose of it.

But the year 1625 is memorable to the students

>A\

74 A Study of Ben Jonson

and admirers of Ben Jonson for the appearance of
a work worth almost all his masques together ; a
work in which the author of TJie Fox and The
Alchemist once more reasserted his claim to a
seat which no other poet and no other dramatist
could dispute. The last complete and finished
masterpiece of his genius is the splendid comedy of
The Staple The Staple of Neivs. This, rather than
of eivs. jy^^ Silent Woman, is the play which
should be considered as the third — or perhaps we
should say the fourth — of the crowning works
which represent the consummate and incomparable
powers of its author. 'Nojnan can know anything
worth knowing of Ben Jonson who has not studied
.and digested the text of Every Man in his Humour y
The Fox, The Alchemist, and The Staple of News :
but any man who has may be said to know him
well. To a cursory or an incompetent reader it
may appear at first sight that the damning fault of
The Devil is an Ass is also the fault of this latex-
comedy : that we have here again an infelicitous
and an incongruous combination of realistic satire
with Aristophanic allegory, and that the harmony
of the different parts, the unity of the composite
action, which a pupil of Aristophanes should at
/ east have striven to attain — or, if he could not, at

RFF

The Staple of News v 75

least to imitate and to respect — can here BS- cbi4^/^
sidered as conspicuous only by their absence.
But no careful and candid critic will retain such an
impression after due study has been given to the
third poetic comedy which reveals to us the genius
of Jonson, not merely as a realistic artist in prose
or a master of magnificent farce, but as a great
comic poet. The scheme of his last preceding
comedy had been vitiated by a want of coherence
between the actual and the allegorical, the fantastic
and the literal point of view ; and the result was
confusion without fusion of parts : here, on the
other hand, we have fusion without confusion
between the dramatic allegory suggested by Aris-
tophanes, the admirably fresh and living presenta-
tion of the three Pennyboys, and the prophetic
satire of the newsmarket or Stock Exchange of
journalism. The competent reader will be divided
between surprise at the possibility and delight in
the perfection of the success achieved by a poet
who has actually endowed with sufficiency of comic
life and humorous reality a whole group of symbolic
personifications ; from the magnificent Infanta
herself, Aurelia Clara Pecunia, most gracious and
generous yet most sensitive and discreet of imperial
C^amsels, even down to little ' blushet ' Rose Wax

"j^ A Study of Beii Jonson

the chambermaid. Her young suitor is at least as
good a picture of a generous light-headed prodigal
as ever was shown on any stage : as much of a
man as Charles Surface, and very much more of a
gentleman. The miserly uncle, though very well
drawn, is less exceptionally well drawn : but
Pennyboy Canter, the disguised father, is equally
delightful from the moment of his entrance with
an extempore carol of salutation on his lips to
those in which he appears to rescue the misused
Infanta from the neglectful favourite of her choice,
and reappears at the close of the play to rescue his
son, redeem his brother, and scatter the community
of jeerers : to whose humour Gifford is somewhat
less than just when he compares it with 'the
vapouring in BartJioloineiv Fair^ : for it is neither
coarse nor tedious, and takes up but very little
space ; and that not unamusingly. As for the
r great scene of the Staple, it is one of the most

^ I masterly in ancient or modern comedy of the
typical or satirical kind. The central ' Office '
here opened, to the great offence (it should seem)
of ' most of the spectators ' — a fact which, as
Gifford justly remarks, ' argues very little for the
good sense of the audience,' — may be regarded by

/ a modern student as representing the narrow little

The Staple of News jj

nest in which was laid the modest Httle egg of
modern journalism — that bird of many notes and
many feathers, now so like an eagle and now so
like a vulture : now soaring as a falcon or sailing
as a pigeon over continents and battle-fields, now
grovelling and groping as a dunghill kite, with its
beak in a very middenstead of falsehood and of
filth. The vast range of Ben Jonson's interest and
observation is here as manifest as the wide scope
and infinite variety of his humour. Science and
warfare, Spinola and Galileo, come alike within
reach of its notice, and serve alike for the material
of its merriment. The invention of torpedos is
anticipated by two centuries and a half; while in
the assiduity of the newsmongers who traffic in
eavesdropping detail we acknowledge a resem-
blance to that estimable race of tradesmen known to
Parisian accuracy as interwieveurs. And the lunacy
of apocalyptic interpreters or prophets is gibbeted
side by side with the fanatical ignorance of
missionary enthusiasm, with impostures of pro-
fessional quackery and speculations in personal
libel. Certainly, if ever Ben deserved the prophetic
title of Vates, it was in this last magnificent work '
of his maturest genius. Never had his style or his
verse been riper or richer, more vigorous or more

78 A Study of Ben Jonson

pure. And even the interludes in which we hear
the commentary and gather the verdict of * these
ridiculous gossips ' (as their creator calls them)
' who tattle between the acts ' are incomparably
superior to his earlier efforts or excursions in the
same field of humorous invention. The intrusive
commentators on Every Man out of his Hzinioicr,
for instance, are mere nullities — the awkward and
abortive issue of unconscious uneasiness and
inartistic egoism. But Expectation, Mirth, Tattle,
and Censure, are genuine and living sketches of
natural and amusing figures : and their dialogues,
for appropriate and spirited simplicity, are worthy
of comparison with even those of a similar nature
which we owe not more to the genius than to the
assailants of Moliere.

In 1625 Ben Jonson had brought out his last
great comedy : m 1626 he brought out the l^t^
of his finer sort of masques. ^ Thg.
Masque of little so-called Masque , of Ozvls, which

Owls.

precedes it in the table of contents, i§

The

Fortunate (as Gifford points out) no masque at all :

^^^^^"^^ their ^ it is a quaint,, effusion of ^doggrel^ dashed

^,4^ ^«^^«. with wit and streaked with satire. But in

The FortuncUeJsk^^ humimr^

and the verse are _J^ like PYrpHenfTj the jest on

The New Inn

79

Plato's ideas would have delighted Landor, and
the wish of Merefool to ' see a Brahman or a
Gymnosophist ' is worthy of a modern believer in
esoteric Buddhism. Jew if any of the masques
have in themjyrics^of smoother and clearer flow ;
and the constructionjs no less g-raceful than in-

^enious. The next reappearance of the poet, after
a silence during three years of broken or breaking
health, was so memorably unfortunate in its issue
that the name and the fate of a play which was
only too naturally and deservedly hooted off the
stage are probably familiar to many who know
nothing of the masterpiece which had last preceded
it. Ever since Lamb gathered some excerpts from
the more high-toned and elaborate passages The New
of TJie New Inn, or The Light Heart, ^^'
and commended in them * the poetical fancy and
elegance of mind of the supposed rugged old bard,'
it has been the fashion to do justice if not some-
thing more than justice to the literary qualities of
this play ; which no doubt contains much vigorous
and some graceful writing, and may now and then
amuse a tolerant reader by its accumulating and
culminating absurdities of action and catastrophe,
character and event. But that the work shows
portentous signs of mental decay, or at all events

8o A Study of Ben Jonson

of temporary collapse in judgment and in sense,
can be questioned by no sane reader of so much as
the argument. To rank any preceding play of
Jonson's among those dismissed by Dryden as his
* dotages ' would be to attribute to Dryden a verdict
displaying the veriest imbecility of impudence : but
to The New Inn that rough and somewhat brutal
phrase is on the whole but too plausibly applicable.
At the beginning of the next year Jonson came
forward in his official capacity as court poet or
l^^^s laureate, and produced ' the _ Queen's

Triujnph

ihroligh Masque,' Love' s Txiimif^.MmmgkJZaUi-
Cailipohs. pqH^^ and against Shrovetide^^ the King's
yidi^ViQ.Chloridia. A few good verses, faint echoes
nf^ former sojTgj^redeem the first n£ thpgp fmm thp
condemnation of compassion or contempt : and
there is still some evidence in its composition of
conscientious energy and of capacity not yet re-
duced from the stage of decadence to the stage of
collapse But the hymn which begins fairly enough
with imitation of an earlier and nobler strain of
verse at once subsides into commonplace, and closes
in doggrel which would have disgraced a Sylvester
or a Quarles. It is impossibku-to read

Chloridia.

Chloridia-^^^Ca&oX a regretful reflection -on-
the lapse of time which prevented it from being _a

The Magnetic Lady 8i

beautiful and typical instance of the author's lyric
power : but, however inferior it maybe to what he
would have made of so beautiful a subject in the
freshness and fullness of his inventive and fanciful
genius, it isstinTingenious and effective after a
fashion ;; and the first song is so genuinely grace-
ful and simple as to remind us of Wordsworth in
his more pedestrian but not uninspired moods or
measures of lyrical or elegiac verse.

The higher genius of Ben Jonson as a comic
poet was yet once more to show itself in one
brilliant flash of parting splendour before its ap-
proaching sunset. No other of his works would
seem to have met with such all but uni-

The

versal neglect as The Magnetic Lady ; I do Magnetic

1 1 . Lady.

not remember to have ever seen it quoted
or referred to, except once by Dryden, who in his
Essay of Dramatic Poesy cites from it an example
of narrative substituted for action, ' where one
comes out from dinner, and relates the quarrels and
disorders of it, to save the undecent appearance of
them on the stage, and to abbreviate the story.'
And yet any competent spectator of its opening
scenes must have felt a keen satisfaction at the
apparent revival of the comic power and renewal
of the dramatic instinct so lamentably enfeebled

G

82 A Stttdy of Ben Jonson

and eclipsed on the last occasion of a new play
from the same hand. The first act is full of
( brilliant satirical description and humorous analysis
of humoursTjthe commentator Compass, to whom
we owe these masterly summaries of character, is
an excellent counterpart of that ' reasonable man '
who so constantly reappears on the stage of
Moliere to correct with his ridicule or control* by
his influence the extravagant or erratic tendencies
of his associates. Very few examples of Jonspn's
grave and deliberate humour are finer than the
ironical counsel given by Compass to the courtly
fop whom he dissuades from challenging the
soldier who has insulted him, on the ground that
the soldier

has killed so many
As it is ten to one his turn is next :
You never fought with any, less, slew any;
And therefore have the [fairer] hopes before you.

The rest of the speech, with all that follows to the
close of the scene, is no less ripe and rich in
sedate and ingenious irony. There is no less ad-
mirable humour in the previous discourse of the
usurer in praise of wealth — especially as being the
only real test of a man's character : —

For, be he rich, he straight with evidence knows
Whether he have any compassion

A Tale of a Tub 83

Or inclination unto virtue, or no :
Where the poor knave erroneously believes
If he were rich he would build churches, or
Do such mad things.

Most of the characters are naturally and vigorously-
drawn in outline or in profile : Dame Polish is a
figure well worthy the cordial and lavish commenda-
tion of Gifford : and the action is not only original
and ingenious, but during the first four acts at any
rate harmonious and amusing. The fifth act seems
to me somewhat weaker ; but the interludes are
full of spirit, good humour, and good sense.

A Tale of a 71?/^, which appeared in the follow-
ing year, is a singular sample of farce elaborated 1
and exalted into comedy. This rustic ^ Tale of
study, though ' not liked ' by the king "" '^''^''
and queen when acted before them at court, has
very real merits in a homely way. ' The list of
characters looks unpromising, and reminds us to
regret that the old poet could not be induced
to profit by Feltham's very just and reasonable
animadversions on ' all your jests so nominal ' ;
which deface this play no less than The New Inn,
and repel the most tolerant reader by their formal
and laborious puerility. But the action opens
brightly and briskly : the dispute about ' Zin
Valentine ' is only less good in its way than one /

G z

84 A Study of Ben Jonson

of George Eliot's exquisite minor touches — Mr.
Dempster's derivation of the word Presbyterian
from one Jack Presbyter of historic infamy : the
young squire's careful and testy ' man and
governor' is no unworthy younger brother of
Numps in BartJiolomezv Fair: and the rustic
heroine, a figure sketched with rough realistic
humour, is hardly less than delightful when she
remarks, after witnessing the arrest of her intended
bridegroom on a charge of highway robbery, ' He
might have married one first, and have been
hanged after, if he had had a mind to 't ; ' a re-
flection worthy of Congreve or Vanbrugh, Miss
Hoyden or Miss Prue. But Jonson had never
laid to heart the wisdom expressed in the admir-
able proverb — ' Qui trop embrasse mal etreint ' ;
the simple subject of the play and the homely
motive of the action are overlaid and overloaded
by the multiplicity of minor characters and epi-
sodical superfluities, and the upshot of all the
poet's really ingenious contrivances is pointless as
well as farcical and flat as well as trivial. But
there is certainly no sign of dotage in any work
of Ben Jonson's produced before or after the
lamentable date of TJie New Inn. The author
apologizes for the homely and rustic quality of his

Masques 85

uncourtly play ; but if it be a failure, it is not
on account of its plebeian humility, but through
the writer's want of any real sympathy with
his characters, any hearty relish of his subject :
because throughout the whole conduct of a
complicated intrigue he shows himself ungenially
observant and contemptuously studious of his
models : because the qualities most needed for
such work, transparent lucidity and straightfor- 1
ward simplicity of exposition, are not to be found
in these last comedies : because, for instance, as
much attention is needed to appreciate the in-
genious process of ' humours reconciled ' in The
Magnetic Lady^ or to follow the no^less ingenious
evolution of boorish rivalries and clownish in-
trigues in the play just noticed, as to follow the
action and appreciate the design of TJie Fox or

The Alchemist. ^^^

The masQU^ ^^ t^^'g yf-^y^ JA£!^'*L-v.^^!^^^£!^^£-^'^

Welbecky is a thing of very slight pretentions,
but not unsuccessful or undiverting after

_ V. Love's

its homely fashion.^ Un the next year's Welcome

atWelbeck.

companion masque. Love's VVelcqim^at

'-— v.- '^--' ^ ^ Love's

Bolsover^ the verse, thougJi,not wanting m Welcome

. , 1111 1 atBolsover.

grace or ease,, is less remarkable than the_

rough personal satire qnjnigojijiies ; who, it may

86 A SttLciy of Ben J on son

be observed, is as ready with a quotation from
Chaucer as Goody Polish in TJie Magnetic Lady
or Lovel in The Nezu Inn.

Of this great dramatist's other than dramatic
work in poetry or in prose this is not the place
to speak : and his two posthumous fragments of
dramatic poetry, interesting and characteristic as
they are, can hardly affect for the better or for
the worse our estimate of his powers. Had
Mortimer Mortimer his Fall been completed, we
his Fall, should undoubtedly have had a third
i example of rhetorical drama, careful, conscientious,
energetic, impassive and impressive ; worthy to stand
beside the author's two Roman tragedies : and Mor-
timer might have confronted and outfaced Sejanus
and Catiline in sonorous audacity of rhythmic self-
assertion and triumphant ostentation of magnificent
The Sad vacuity. In j^>^g^>S'^jSJ£M££;<^ we findthe
Shepherd, ^^^j^^ ^^^ ^j^^ merits of his best and his

worst masques so blended and confounded thatjve
cannot but perceive the injurious effect on the
Laureate's genius or instinct of intelligence pro-
duced by the habit of conventional invention
which the writing of verse to order and the^
arrangement of effects for a pageant had now
made inevitable and incurable. _ A masque ia-

The Sad Shepherd ^j

eluding an antimasque, in which the serious part
is relieved and set offby_the introducti_on_ ~of
parody or burlesque, was a form of art or artificial
fashion in which incongruity wa5^ a. merit ; th^
grosser the burlesque, the broader the parody,
the greater was the success and the more effective
_was the result : but in a dramatic attempt oL
higher pretention than such as might be looked
for in the literary groundwork or raw material for
a pageant, this intnision of inrongninTi^j-nntragl-
is a pure barbarism — a positive solecism in com-
position. The collocation of such names and such
figures as those of ^glamour and Earine with
such others as Much and Maudlin, Scathlock and
Scarlet, is no whit less preposterous or less ridi-
culous, less inartistic or less irritating, than the
conjunction in Dekker's Satiromastix of Peter
Flash and Sir Quintilian, Sir Adam Prickshaft
and Sir Vaughan ap Rees, with Crispinus and
Demetrius, Asinius and Horace : and the offence
is graver, more inexcusable and more inexplicable,
in a work of pure fancy or imagination, than in a
work of poetic invention crossed and chequered
with controversial satire. Yet Gififord, who can
hardly find words or occasions sufficient to express
his sense of Dekker's * inconceivable folly,' or his

88 A Study of Be7i Joiison

contempt for ' a plot that can scarcely be equalled
in absurdity by the worst of the plays which
Dekker was ever employed to "dress/" has not a
syllable of reprehension for the portentous incon-
gruities of this mature and elaborate poem. On
the other hand, even Gifford's editorial enthusiasm
could not overestimate the ingenious excellence of
construction, the masterly harmony of composition,
which every reader of the argument must have
observed with such admiration as can but intensify
his regret that scarcely half of the projected poem
has come down to us. \^No work of Ben Jonson's
is more amusing and agreeable to read, as none is
more nobly graceful in expression or more ex-
cellent in simplicity of style.

The immense influence of this great writer on
his own generation is not more evident or more
memorable than is the refraction or reverberation
of that influence on the next. This ' sovereign
sway and masterdom,' this overpowering prepon-
derance of reputation, could not but be and could
not but pass away. No giant had ever the divine
versatility of a Shakespeare : but of all the giant
brood none ever showed so much diversity of
power as Jonson. In no single work has he dis-
played such masterly variety of style as has Byron

A Study of Ben Jonson 89

in his two great poems, Don Juan and TJie Vision
of Judgment : the results of his attempts at mixture
or fusion of poetry with farce will stand exposed
in all their deformity and discrepancy if we set
them beside the triumphant results of Shake-
speare's. That faultless felicity of divine caprice
which haAnonizes into such absolute congruity
all the outwardly incompatible elements of such
works as Twelfth Night and The Tempest, the
Winter^ s Tale and A Midsummer Nighfs Dream,
is perhaps of all Shakespeare's incomparable gifts
the one most utterly beyond reach of other poets.
But when we consider the various faculties and
powers of Jonson's genius and intelligence, when
we examine severally the divers forces and capa-
cities enjoyed and exercised by this giant work-
man in the performance of his work, we are
amazed into admiration only less in its degree
than we feel for the greatest among poets. It is
not admiration of the same kind : there is less in
it of love and worship than we give to the gods of
song; but it is with deep reverence and with
glowing gratitude that we salute in this Titan of
the English stage ' il maestro di color che sanno.'

II

MISCELLANEOUS WORKS

II

MISCELLANEOUS WORKS

Among the great dramatic poets of the Shake
spearean age there are several who would still
have a claim to enduring remembrance as poets,
even had they never written a line for the theatre :
there are two only who would hold a high rank
among the masters of English prose. For Nash
was not a poet or a dramatist who wandered
occasionally into prose by way of change or
diversion : he was a master of prose who strayed
now and then into lyric or dramatic verse. Hey-
wood, Middleton, and Ford have left us more or
less curious and valuable works in prose ; essays
and pamphlets or chronicles and compilations :
but these are works of historic interest rather than
literary merit ; or, if this be too strong and
sweeping an expression, they are works of less
intrinsic than empirical value. But if all his plays
were lost to us, the author of Ben Jonson's

/

94 ^ Study of Ben Joiison

Explorata, or Discoveries^ would yet retain a seat
among English prose-writers beside the author of
Bacon's Essays : the author of The Guilds Horn-
book and The Bachelof^s Banquet would still stand
high in the foremost rank of English humourists.

The book of epigrams published by Jonson

in the collected edition of his select works up

to the date of the year 1616 is by no

Erpigrams.

means an attractive introduction or an
alluring prelude to the voluminous collection of
miscellanies which in all modern editions it pre-
cedes. * It is to be lamented,' in Gifford's opinion,
*on many accounts,' that the author has not left
us ' a further selection.' It is in my opinion to be
deplored that he should have left us so large a
selection — if that be the proper term — as he has
seen fit to bequeath to a naturally and happily
limited set of readers. \ ' Sunt bona, sunt quaedam
tnediocria, sunt mala plura ' : and the worst are so
bad, so foul if not so dull, so stupid if not so filthy,
that the student stands aghast with astonishment
at the self-deceiving capacity of a writer who
could prefix to such a collection the vaunt that
his book was ' not covetous of least self-fame ' —
' much less ' prone to indulgence in ' beastly
phrase.' J No man can ever have been less

Epigrams 95

amenable than Sir Walter Scott to the infamous
charge of Puritanism or prudery; and it is he
who has left on record his opinion that 'surely
that coarseness of taste which tainted Ben Jonson's
powerful mind is proved from his writings. Many
authors of that age are indecent, but Jonson is
filthy and gross in his pleasantry, and indulges
himself in using the language of scavengers and
nightmen.' I will only add that the evidence of
this is flagrant in certain pages which I never
forced myself to read through till I had undertaken
to give a full and fair account — to the best of my
ability — of Ben Jonson's complete works. How
far poetry may be permitted to go in the line of
sensual pleasure or sexual emotion may be de-
batable between the disciples of Ariosto and the
disciples of Milton ; but all English readers, I
trust, will agree with me that coprology should be
left to Frenchmen. Among them — that is, of
course, among the baser sort of them — that un-
savoury science will seemingly never lack disciples
of the most nauseous, the most abject, the most
deliberate bestiality. It is nothing less than
lamentable that so great an English writer as
Ben Jonson should ever have taken the plunge of
a Parisian diver into the cesspool : but it is as

96 A Study of Ben Jons on

necessary to register as it is natural to deplore the
detestable fact that he did so. The collection of
his epigrams which bears only too noisome witness
to this fact is nevertheless by no means devoid
of valuable and admirable components. The
sixty-fifth, a palinode or recantation of some pre-
vious panegyric, is very spirited and vigorous ;
and the verses of panegyric which precede and
follow it are wanting neither in force nor in point
The poem ' on Lucy Countess of Bedford/ for
which Gifford seems hardly able to find words
adequate to his admiration, would be worthy of
very high praise if the texture of its expression
and versification were unstiffened and undisfigured
by the clumsy license of awkward inversions.
The New Cry, a brief and brilliant satire on
political gossips of the gobeviouche order, has one
couplet worthy of Dryden himself, descriptive of
such pretenders to statecraft as

talk reserved, locked up, and full of fear,
Nay, ask you how the day goes, in your ear ;
Keep a Star-chamber sentence close twelve days,
And whisper what a Proclamation says.

The epitaph on little Salathiel Pavy, who had
acted under his own name in the induction to
Cynthia's Revels, is as deservedly famous as any

The Forest 97

minor work of Jonson's ; for sweetness and sim-
plicity it has few if any equals among his lyrical
attempts. _

•*^^jf the fifteen lyric or elegiac poems which
compose The Forest^ there is none that is not
worthy of all but the highest praise ; 77^^
there is none that is worthy of the highestT^^''^"^^"
To come so near so often and -y^fnever to
touch the goal of lyric triumph has never been
the fortune and the misfortune of any other poet.
Vigour of thought, purity of phrase, condensed
and polished rhetoric, refined and appropriate elo-
quence, studious and serious felicity of expression,
finished and fortunate elaboration of verse, might
have been considered as qualities sufficient to
secure a triumph for the poet in whose work all
these excellent attributes are united and displayed ;
and we cannot wonder that younger men who had
come within the circle of his personal influence
should have thought that the combination of them
all must ensure to their possessor a place above
all his possible compeers. But among the humblest
and most devout of these prostrate enthusiasts was
one who had but to lay an idle and reckless hand
on the instrument which hardly would answer the
touch of his master's at all, and the very note of

H

98 A Shtdy of Ben Jonson

lyric poetry as it should be — as it was in the
beginning, as it is, and as it will be for ever —
responded on the instant to the instinctive intelli-
gence of his touch. As we turn from Gray to
Collins, as we turn from Wordsworth to Coleridge,
as we turn from Byron to Shelley, so do we turn
from Jonson to Herrick ; and so do we recognize
the lyric poet as distinguished from the writer who
may or may not have every gift but one in higher
development of excellence and in fuller perfection
of power, but who is utterly and absolutely tran-
scended and shone down by his probably uncon-
^ scious competitor on the proper and peculiar ground
'; of pure and simple poetry.

But the special peculiarity of the case now
before us is that it was so much the greater man
who was distanced and eclipsed ; and this not
merely by a minor poet, but by a humble admirer
and a studious disciple of his own. Herrick, as a
writer of elegies, epithalamiums, panegyrical or
complimentary verses, is as plainly and as openly
an imitator of his model as ever was the merest
parasite of any leading poet, from the days of
Chaucer and his satellites to the days of Tennyson
and his. No Lydgate or Lytton was ever more
obsequious in his disclpleship ; but for all his

Underwoods 99

loving and loyal protestations of passionate humility
and of ardent reverence, we see at every turn, at
every step, at every change of note, that what the
master could not do the pupil can. When Chapman
set sail after Marlowe, he went floundering and
lurching in the wake of a vessel that went straight
and smooth before the fullest and the fairest wind
of song ; but when Herrick follows Jonson the
manner of movement or the method of progression
is reversed. Macaulay, in a well-known passage,
has spoken of Ben Jonson's ' rugged rhymes ' ;
but rugged is not exactly the most appropriate
epithet. Donne is rugged : Jonson is stiff. And
if ruggedness of verse is a damaging blemish,
stiffness of verse is a destructive infirmity. Rug-
gedness is curable ; witness Donne's A nnzversanes :
stiffness is incurable ; witness Jonson's Underwoods.
In these, as in the preceding series called jjnder-
The Forest^ there is so lavish a display "'^'^^^^^
of such various powers as cannot but excite the
admiration they demand and deserve. They have
every quality, their author would undoubtedly
have maintained, that a student of poetry ought
to expect and to applaud. What they want is
that magic without which the very best verse is
as far beneath the very best prose as the verse

H 2

lOO A Study of Ben Jonson

'\

which has it is above all prose that ever was or
ever can be written. And there never was a
generation of Englishmen in which this magic was
a gift so common as it was in Jonson's. We have
but to open either of the priceless volumes which
we owe to the exquisite taste and the untiring
devotion of Mr. Bullen, and we shall come upon
scores after scores of ' lyrics from Elizabethan song-
books ' as far beyond comparison with the very best
of Jonson's as Shakespeare is beyond comparison
with Shirley, as Milton is beyond comparison with
Glover, or as Coleridge is beyond comparison with
Southey. There is exceptional ease of movement,
exceptional grace of expression, in the lyric which
evoked from Gifford the ' free ' avowal, ' if it be
not the most beautiful song in the language, I know
not, for my part, where it is to be found.' Who on
earth, then or now, would ever have supposed that
the worthy Gifford did ? But any one who does
know anything more of the matter than the satirist
and reviewer whose own amatory verses were
' lazy as Scheldt and cold as Don ' will acknow-
ledge that it would be difficult to enumerate the
names of poets contemporary with Jonson, from
Frank Davison to Robin Herrick, who have left
us songs at least as beautiful as that beginning —
!* Oh do not wanton with those eyes, Lest I be sick

Underwoods

lOI

^Yith^seeil^g.' And in 'the admirable Epode/ as
Gifford calls it, which concludes Ben Jonson's
contributions to Love's Martyr, though there is
remarkable energy of expression, the irregularity
and inequality of style are at least as conspicuous
as the occasional vigour and the casual felicity of
phrase. But if all were as good as the best pas-
sages this early poem of Jonson's would un-
doubtedly be very good indeed. Take for instance
the description or definition of true love :

That is an essence far more gentle, fine, ' «

Pure, perfect, nay divine ;
It is a golden chain let down from heaven.

Whose links are bright and even,
That falls like sleep on lovers.

Asrain

O, who is he that in this peace enjoys

The elixir of all joys,
(A form more fresh than are the Eden bowers

And lasting as her flowers ;
Richer than time, and as time's virtue rare.

Sober as saddest care,
A fixed thought, an eye untaught to glance ;)

Who, blest with such high chance,
Would at suggestion of a steep desire

Cast himself from the spire
Of all his happiness ?

^ In the original edition, ' most gentile and fine ' : a curious
Italianism which must have seemed questionable or unallowable to
the author's maturer taste.

/

I02 A Study of Ben Jonson

And few of Jonson's many moral or gnomic
passages are finer than the following :

He that for love of goodness hateth ill

Is more crown-worthy still
Than he which for sin's penalty forbears

His heart sins, though he fears.

This metre, though very liable to the danger of
monotony, is to my ear very pleasant ; but that of
the much admired and doubtless admirable address
to Sir Robert Wroth is much less so.' This poem
is as good and sufficient an example of the author's
ability and inability as could be found in the
whole range of his elegiac or lyric works. It has
excellent and evident qualities of style ; energy
and purity, clearness and sufficiency, simplicity
and polish ; but it is wanting in charm. Grace,
attraction, fascination, the typical and essential
properties of verse, it has not. Were Jonson to be
placed among the gods of song, we should have to
say of him what ^schylus says of Death —

fxovou Se YleiGw 5ai/j.6pcov airoaTarel.

The spirit of persuasive enchantment, the
goddess of entrancing inspiration, kept aloof from
him alone of all his peers or rivals. To men far
weaker, to poets not worthy to be named with him

Underwoods 103

on the score of creative power, she gave the gift
which from him was all but utterly withheld. And
therefore it is that his place is not beside Shake-
speare, Milton, or Shelley, but merely above
Dryden, Byron, and Crabbe. The verses on
Penshurst are among his best, wanting neither in
grace of form nor statelirfess of sound, if too surely
wanting in the indefinable quality of distinction or
inspiration : and the farewell to the world has a
•savour of George Herbert's style about it which
suggests that the sacred poet must have been a
sometime student of the secular. Beaumont,
again, must have taken as a model of his lighter
lyric style the bright and ringing verses on the
proposition ' that women are but men's shadows.'
The opening couplet of the striking address 'to
Heaven ' has been, it seems to me, misunderstood
by Gifford ; the meaning is not — ' Can I not think
of God without its making me melancholy ? ' but
* Can I not think of God without its being imputed
or set down by others to a fit of dejection ? ' The
few sacred poems which open the posthumous
collection of his miscellaneous verse are far inferior
to the best of Herrick's Noble Numbers ; although
the second of the three must probably have served
the minor poet as an occasional model.

I04 A Study of Ben Jonson

J^ . '^ The Celebration of Chan's m ten lyric pieces
would be a graceful example of Jonson's lighter
and brighter inspiration if the ten were reduced
to eight. His anapaests are actually worse than
Shelley's : which hope would fain have assumed
and charity would fain have believed to be im-
possible. ' We will take our plan from the new
world of man, and our work shall be called the
Pro-me-the-an ' — even the hideous and excruciating
cacophony of that horrible sentence is not so
utterly inconceivable as verse, is not so fearfully
and wonderfully immetrical as this : ' And from
her arched brows such a grace sheds itself through
the face.' The wheeziest of barrel-organs, the
most broken-winded of bagpipes, grinds or snorts
out sweeter melody than that. But the hepta-
syllabic verses among which this monstrous abor-
tion rears its amorphous head are better than
might have been expected ; not, as Gifford says
of one example, ' above all praise,' but creditable

V at their best and tolerable at their worst.

The miscellaneous verses collected under the

pretty and appropriate name of Underzvoods com-

• prise more than a few of Ben Jonson's happiest

and most finished examples of lyric, elegiac, and

gnomic or didactic poetry ; and likewise not a

Underwoods 105

1
little of such rigid and frigidjwork as makes us

regret the too strenuous and habitua.1 application
of so devoted a literary craftsman to his profes-
sional round of labour. The fifth of these poems,
A Nymph's Passion, is not only pretty and in-
genious, but in the structure of its peculiar stanza
may remind a modern reader of some among the
many metrical experiments or inventions of a
more exquisite and spontaneous lyric poet. Miss
Christina Rossetti. The verses ' on a lover's dust,
made sand for an hour-glass,' just come short of
excellence in their fantastic way ; those on his
picture are something more than smooth and
neat ; those against jealousy are exceptionally
sweet and spontaneous, again recalling the manner
of the poetess just mentioned ; with a touch of
something like Shelley's —

I wish the sun should shine ^ *^t

On all men's fruits and flowers, as well as imnir^' ^

and also of something like George Herber6^;Si^
his best. The Dream is one of Jonson's most
happily inspired and most happily expressed
fancies ; the close of it is for once not less than
charming.

Of the various elegies and epistles included in

^

io6 A Study of Ben Jonson

this collection it need only be said that there is
much thoughtful and powerful writing in most if
not in all of them, with occasional phrases or
couplets of rare felicity, and here and there a
noble note of enthusiasm or a masterly touch of
satire. In the epistle to Sir Edward Sackvile the
sketch of the ' infants of the sword ' who * give
thanks by stealth' and in whispers for benefits
which they are ready to disown with imprecations
in public is worthy of the hand which drew
Bobadil and Tucca. The sonnet to Lady Mary
Wroth, good in itself, is characteristic in its
preference of the orthodox Italian structure to
the English or Shakespearean form. The four
very powerful and remarkable elegies on a lover's
quarrel and separation I should be inclined to
attribute rather to Donne than to Jonson ; their
earnest passion, their quaint frankness, their verbal
violence, their eccentric ardour of expression, at
once unabashed and vehement, spontaneous and
ingenious, are all of them typical characteristics
of the future dean in the secular and irregular
days of his hot poetic youth. The fourth and
final poem of the little series is especially im-
pressive and attractive. The turn of the sentences
and the cadence of the verse are no less significant

Unde rwoods 107

of the authorship than is a noble couplet in the
poem immediately preceding them — which would
at once be recognized by a competent reader as
Jonson's :

So may the fruitful vine my temples steep,
And fame wake for me when I yield to sleep !

The ' epistle answering to one that asked to be
sealed of the tribe of Ben ' is better in spirit than
in execution; manful, straightforward, and upright.
The ' epigram ' or rather satire ' on the Court
Pucelle ' goes beyond even the license assumed
by Pope in the virulent ferocity of its personal
attack on a woman. This may be explained, or
at least- illustrated, by the fact that Ben Jonson's
views regarding womanhood in general were
radically cynical though externally chivalrous : |
a charge which can be brought against no other
poet or dramatist of his age. He could pay more
splendid compliments than any of them to this or
that particular woman ; the deathless epitaph on
' Sydney's sister, Pembroke's mother,' is but the
crowning flower of a garland, the central jewel of
a set ; but no man has said coarser (I had well-
nigh written, viler) things against the sex to which
these exceptionally honoured patronesses belonged./^
This characteristic is not more sicrnificant than the

io8 A Shtdy of Ben Jonson

corresponding evidence given by comparison of
his readiness to congratulate and commend other
poets and poeticules for work not ahvays worthy
of his notice, and at the same time to indulge in
such sweeping denunciation of all contemporary
poetry as would not have misbecome the utterance
of incarnate envy — in other words, as might have
fallen from the lips of Byron. See, for one most
flagrant and glaring example of what might seem
the very lunacy of malignity, a passage in what
Coleridge has justly called ' his splendid dedication
of The Fox! Here he talks of raising ' the
despised head of poetry again, and stripping her
out of those rotten and base rags zuherezvith the
thnes have adulterated her form! It is difficult to
resist a temptation to emulate Ben Jonson's own
utmost vehemence of language when we remember
that this sentence is dated the nth of February,
1607. Nine years before the death of Shakespeare
the greatest writer of all time, the most wonderful
human creature of all ages, was in the very zenith
of his powers and his glory. And this was a
contemporary poet's view of the condition of con-
temporary poetry. He was not more unlucky as
a courtier and a prophet when he proclaimed the
triumphant security of the English government

Underwoods 109

as twice ensured by the birth of the future King-
James II.

The memorial ode on the death of Sir Henry
Morison has thoughtful and powerful touches in it, j
as well as one stanza so far above the rest that it '
gains by a process which would impair its effect if
the poem were on the whole even a tolerably good
one. The famous lines on ' the plant and flower of
light ' can be far better enjoyed when cut away
from the context The opening is as eccentrically i
execrable as the epode of the solitary strophe
which redeems from all but unqualified execration
a poem in which Gifford finds ' the very soul of
Pindar ' — whose reputation would in that case be
the most inexplicable of riddles. Far purer in
style and far more equable in metre is the 'ode
gratulatory ' to Lord Weston ; and the ' epitha-
lamion ' on the marriage of that nobleman's son,
though not without inequalities, crudities, and
platitudes, is on the whole a fine and dignified
example of ceremonial poetry. Another of the
laureate's best effusions of official verse is the short
ode which bids his ' gentle Muse ' rouse herself to
celebrate the king's birthday, 'though now our
green conceits be grey,' with good wishes which
have a tragic ring in the modern reader's ear. A

no A SttLdy of Ben Jonson

more unequal poem than the elegy on the
Marchioness of Winchester is hardly to be found
anywhere ; but the finest passages are noble indeed.
The elegiac poems on the famous demi-mondaine
Venetia Stanley, who made a comparatively respect-
able end as Lady DIgby, are equally startling and
amusing in their attribution to that heroine of a
character which would justify the beatification if
not the canonization of its immaculate possessor.
The first of these is chiefly remarkable for a
singular Scotticism — ' where Seraphim take tent of
ordering all ' ; the fragment of the second, as an
early attempt — I know not whether it be the
earliest — to introduce the terza rima into English %
verse. There are one or two fine stanzas in the
fourth, and the Apotheosis of this singular saint has
a few good couplets ; it contains, however, probably
the most horrible and barbarous instance of inver-
sion which the violated language can display :

i7t her hajid
Willi boughs of palm, a crowned victrice stand.

/ Such indefinable enormities as this cannot but
incline us to think that this great scholar, this
laurelled invader and conqueror of every field and
every province of classic learning, was intus et in

Translations 1 1 1

cute an irreclaimable and incurable barbarian. And
assuredly this impression will be neither removed
nor modified when we come to examine his trans-
lations from Latin poetry. If the report is to
be believed which attributes to Ben Jonson the
avowal of an opinion that above all things Transla-
he excelled in translation, it must be ^^°^^'
admitted that for once the foolish theory which
represents men of genius as incapable of recognizing
what is or is not their best work or their most
distinguishing faculty is justified and exemplified
after a fashion so memorable that the exception
must be invoked to prove the rule. For [a worse
translator than Ben Jonson never committed a
double outrage on two languages at once.; I should
be reluctant to quote examples of this lamentable
truth, if it were not necessary to vindicate his con-
temporaries from such an imputation as is conveyed
in the general belief that his method of translation
is merely the method of his age. The fact is that
it is as exceptionally abominable as his genius,
when working on its own proper and original lines,
is exceptionally admirable. I am no great lover of
Horace, but I cannot pretend to think that the
words

Si torrere jecur quseris idoneun?

112 A Study of Ben Jonson

are adequately rendered by the words

If a fit liver thou dost seek to toast.

Fate and fire did a double injury, if not a
double injustice, to Ben Jonson, when his com-
mentary on Horace's Art of Poetry was consumed
and his translation of the text preserved. The
commentary in which Donne was represented under
the name of Criticus must have been one of the
most interesting and valuable of Jonson's prose
works : the translation is one of those miracles of
incompetence, incongruity, and insensibility, which
must be seen to be believed. It may be admitted
that there is a very happy instance of exact and
pointed rendering from the ninth and tenth lines of
the original in the eleventh and twelfth lines of the
translation.

Pictoribus atque poetis
Quidlibet audendi semper fuit aequa potestas.
Scimus.

Pope himself could not have rendered this well-
known passage more neatly, more smoothly, more
perfectly and more happily than thus —

But equal power to painter and to poet

Of daring all hath still been given : we know it.

And in the seventh line following we come upon
this indescribable horror — an abomination of which

■ Translations 113

Abraham Fraunce or Gabriel Harvey would by
charitable readers have been considered incapable :
as perhaps indeed they were.

A scarlet piece or two stitch'd in ; when or
Diana's grove or altar, with the bor-
DVino- circles of swift waters, &c., &c.

The bellman writes better verses/ said Mr.
Osbaldistone, when he threw poor Frank's away.
Walt Whitman writes no worse, a modern critic
will reflect on reading these.

The version of one of Martial's gracefullest
epigrams flows more pleasantly than usual till it
ends with a horrible jolt, thus : —

He that but living half his days dies such,
Makes his life longer than 'twas given him, much.

And Echo answers — Much ! Gifford, however,
waxes ecstatic over these eight lines. ' It is the
most beautiful of all the versions of this elegant
poem,' and, if we may believe him, ' clearly and
fully expresses the whole of its meaning.' Witness
the second line —

Thou worthy in eternal flower to fare.

That is no more English than it is Latin — no
more accurate than it is intelligible. The original
is as simple as it is lovely : —

Liber in seterna vivere digne rosa.

I

114 -^ SttLciy of Ben Jonson

It would be worse than superfluous to look
among his other versions from Horace for further
evidence of Ben Jonson's incomparable incom-
petence as a translator. But as this has been
hitherto very insufficiently insisted on, — his reputa-
tion as a poet and a scholar standing apparently
between the evidence of this fact and the recogni-
tion of it, — I will give one crowning example from
TJie Poetaster. This is what Virgil is represented
as reading to Augustus — and Augustus as hearing
without a shriek of agony and horror.

Meanwhile the skies 'gan thunder, and in tail ^
Of that fell pouring storms of sleet and hail.

* In tail of that ' ! Proh Detlm atque hominum

fidem I And it is Virgil — Virgil, of all men and

all poets — to whom his traducer has the assurance

to attribute this inexpressible atrocity of outrage !

^ \ The case of Ben Jonson is the great standing

example of a truth which should never be forgotten

or overlooked ; that no amount of learning, of

! labour, or of culture will supply the place of natural

11 I taste and native judgment — will avail in any

slightest degree to confer the criticaLfaculty upon

/ i a man to whom nature has denied it. Just judg-

^ Compare ^n. iv. i6o.

Commendatory Verses 115

ment of others, just judgment of himself, was all
but impossible to this great writer, this consummate

\and indefatigable scholar, this generous and enthu-
siastic friend. The noble infirmity of excess in
benevolence is indisputably no less obvious in three
great writers of our own century ; great, each of
them, like Ben Jonson, in prose as well as in verse :
one of them greater than he, one of them equal,
and one of them hardly to be accounted equal with
him. Victor Hugo, Walter Savage Landor, and
Theophile Gautier, were doubtless as exuberant
in generosity — the English poet was perhaps as
indiscriminate in enthusiasm of patronage or of
sympathy — as even the promiscuous panegyrist of
Shakespeare, of Fletcher, of Chapman, of Drayton,
of Browne, of Brome, and of May ; and moreover
of one Stephens, of one Rutter, of one Wright, of
one Warre, and of one Filmer. Of these last five
names, that of the worthy Master Joseph Rutter —
Ben's ' dear son, and right learned friend ' — is the
only one which signifies to me the existence of an
author not utterly unknown. His spiritual father
or theatrical sponsor is most copious and most
cordial in his commendations of the good man's
pastoral drama ; he has not mentioned its one
crowning excellence ■ - the quality for which, having

1 1 6 A Study of Ben Jonson

tried it every night for upwards of six weeks
running, I can confidently and conscientiously
recommend it. Chloral is not only more dangerous
but very much less certain as a soporific : the
sleeplessness which could resist the influence of Mr.
Rutter's verse can be curable only by dissolution ;
the eyes which can keep open through the perusal
of six consecutive pages must never hope to find
rest but in the grave.

The many ceremonial or occasional poems
addressed to friends and patrons of various ranks
and characters, from the king and queen to a Mr.
Burges and a Mr. Squib, are of equally various
interest, now graver and now lighter, to a careful
student of Ben Jonson as a poet and a man. Nor,
when due account is taken of the time and its con-
ventional habits of speech, does it seem to me that
any of them can be justly charged with servility or
flattery, or, as the writer might have said, with
'assentation.' But these effusions or improvisa-
tions are of no more serious importance than the
J ^ exquisitely neat and terse composition of

Convivales. ^^ < Leges Convivales,' or the admirable
good sense and industry, the admirable perspica-
city and perspicuity, which will be recognized no
less in the Latin than in the English part of his

English Grammar 117

English Grammar. It is interesting to observe an
anticipation of Landor's principle with respect to
questions of orthography, in the preference Eddish
given to the Latin form of spelling for Grammar,
words of Latin derivation, while admitting that this
increase of accuracy would bring the written word
no nearer to the sound uttered in speaking. The
passage is worth transcription as an example of
delicately scrupulous accuracy and subtly con-
scientious refinement in explanation.

Alii h£ec baud inconsulto scribunt abil^ stabil, fabul ;
tanquam a fontibus habilis, stabilis, fabiila : veriiis, sad
nequicquam proficiunt. Nam consideratius auscultanti
nee / nee u est, sad tinnitus quidam, vocalis naturam
habans, quae naturaliter his liquidis inast.

A point on which I am sorry to rest uncertain
whether Landor would have felt as much sympathy
with Jonson's view as I feel myself is the regret
expressed by the elder poet for the loss of the
Saxon characters that distinguished the two dif-
ferent sounds now both alike expressed, and ex-
pressed with equal inaccuracy, by the two letters
th. ' And in this,' says Jonson — as it seems to me,
most reasonably, ' consists the greatest difficulty of
our alphabet and true writing.'

The text of the grammar, both Latin and

1 1 8 A Study of Ben Jonson

English, requires careful revision and correction ;
but indeed as much must be said of the text of
Jonson's works in general. Gifford did very much
for it, but he left not a little to be done. And the
arrangement adopted in Colonel Cunningham's
beautiful and serviceable edition of 1875 is the
most extraordinary — at least, I hope and believe
so — on record. All the misreadings of the edition
of 1 8 16 are retained in the text, where they stand
not merely uncorrected but unremarked ; so that
the bewildered student must refer at random, on
the even chance of disappointment, to an appendix
in which he may find them irregularly registered,
with some occasional comment on the previous
editor's negligence and caprice : a method, to put
it as mildly as possible, somewhat provocative of
strong language on the part of a studious and
belated reader — language for which it cannot
rationally be imagined that it is he who will be
registered by the recording angel as culpably re-
sponsible. What is wanted in the case of so great
an English classic is of course nothing less than
this : a careful and complete edition of all his
extant writings, with all the various readings of the
various editions published during his lifetime. This
is the very least that should be exacted ; and this

Miscellanies 119

is less than has yet been supplied. Edition after
edition of Shakespeare is put forth under the
auspices of scholars or of dunces without a full and
plain enumeration of the exact differences of text
— the corrections, suppressions, alterations, and
modifications — which distinguish the text of the
quartos from the too frequently garbled and
mangled, the sometimes transfigured and glorified
text of the folio. And consequently not one de-
voted student in a thousand has a chance of
knowing what he has a right to know of the
gradations and variations in expression, the deve-
lopment and the self-discipline in display, of the
most transcendent intelligence that ever illuminated
humanity. And in the case of Shakespeare's most
loyal comrade and panegyrist — though sometimes,
it may be, his rather captious rival and critic — the
neglect of his professed devotees and editorial
interpreters has been scarcely less scandalous and
altogether as incomprehensible. In every edition
which makes any pretence to completeness, or to
satisfaction of a serious student's indispensable
requisites and inevitable demands, the first text of
Every Man in his Humour should of course be
given in full. Snatches and scraps of it are given
in the notes to the edition of 1816 ; the first act is

I20 '^ A Study of Ben Jonso7i

reprinted — the first act alone — in the appendix to
the first volume of the edition of 1875. What
would be said by Hellenists or Latinists if such
contemptuous indolence, such insolence of neglect,
were displayed by the editor of a Greek or Latin
poet — assuming that his edition had been meant
for other than fourth-form or fifth-form service ?
Compare the devotion of their very best editors to
Shakespeare and to Jonson with the devotion of
Mr. Ellis to Catullus and Mr. Munro to Lucretius.
It is a shame that Englishmen should not be
forthcoming who would think it worth while to
expend as much labour, and would be competent
to bring that labour to as good an end, in the
service of their own immortal countrymen, as is
expended and as is attained by classical scholars
in the service of alien and not more adorable gods.
And on one point — a point indeed of more signifi-
cance than importance — the capricious impertinence
of such editors as do condescend to undertake any
part of such a task is so inexplicable except on
one supposition that we are tempted to embrace,
or at least to accept, the assumption that the editor
(for instance) of Ben Jonson considers the author
of The Silent Woman, Bartholornew Fair, and
certain metrical emetics classified under the head

f^f%"

Miscellanies l( -^ta.t ^'fi'>\

\-^ '%'\
of Epigrmns^ as a writer fit to be placed iK"^^!^. ^'^^

hands of schoolgirls. And even then it is difficult- .^2-— -i

to imagine why we come upon certain rows of

asterisks in the record of his conversations with

Drummond, and in the anonymous interlude written

— as Gifford supposes — ' for the christening of a

son of the Earl of Newcastle, to whom the king or

the prince stood godfather.' Even if Jonson had

taken — as on such an occasion it would be strange

if he had taken — the utmost license of his friends

Aristophanes and Rabelais, this would be no reason

for treating the reader like a schoolboy or a

Dauphin. What a man of genius has written for

a public occasion is public property thenceforward

and for ever : and the pretence of a man like

Gifford to draw the line and determine the limit of

publicity is inexpressibly preposterous.

The little interlude, however broad and even

coarse in its realistic pleasantry, is a quaint and

spirited piece of work ; but there are other matters

in Colonel Cunningham's appendix which have no

right, demonstrable or imaginable, to the place

they occupy. It is incredible, it is inconceivable,

that Jonson should ever have written such a line as

this by way of a Latin verse :

Macte : tuo scriptores lectoresque labore (!!!)

122 A Study of Ben Jonson

' Les chassepots partiraient d'eux-memes ' — birch
would make itself into spontaneous rods for the
schoolboy who could perpetrate so horrible an
atrocity. The repulsive and ridiculous rubbish
which has ignorantly and absurdly been taken for
'a fragment of one of the lost quaternions of
EupJieme ' is part, I am sorry to say, of an elegy
by Francis Beaumont on one Lady Markham. It
is an intolerable scandal that the public should be
content to endure such an outrage as the intrusion
of another man's abominable absurdities into the
text of such a writer as Ben Jonson. This effusion
of his young friend's, which must surely have been
meant as a joke — and a very bad, not to say a very
brutal one, is probably the most hideous nonsense
ever written on the desecrated subject of death
and decay. A smaller but a serious example of
negligence and incompetence is patent in the text
of the ten lines contributed by Jonson to the
Annalia Dubrensia — that most pleasant and curious
athletic anthology, the reissue of which is one of
the wellnigh countless obligations conferred on
students of the period by the devoted industry,
energy, and ability of Dr. Grosart. He, of course,
could not fail to see that the first of these lines
was corrupt. * I cannot bring my Muse to dropp

Miscellmiies 123

Vies ' is obviously neither sense nor metre. It is
rather with diffidence than with confidence that I
would suggest the reading double in place of the
palpably corrupt word drop: but from Gifford's
explanation of the gambling term vie I should
infer that this reading, which certainly rectifies the
metre, might also restore the sense. Another
obvious error is to be noted in the doggrel lines on
Lady Ogle, which afford a curious and compact
example of Ben Jonson's very worst vices of style
and metre. Still, as Ben was not in the habit of
writing flat nonsense, we ought evidently to read
' in the sight of Angels,' not, as absurdly printed
in the edition of 1875 (ix. 326), 'in the Light';
especially as the next verse ends with that word.
The commendatory verses on Cynthids Revenge
which reappear at page 346 of the same volume
had appeared on page 332 of the volume im-
mediately preceding. Such editorial derelictions
and delinquencies are enough to inoculate the most
patient reader's humour with the acerbity of
Gifford's or Carlyle's. Again, this appendix gives
only one or two fragments of the famous addi-
tional scenes to The Spanish Tragedy, while the
finest and most important passages are omitted
and ignored. For one thing, however, we have

124 ^ Stttdy of Ben Jonson

reason to be grateful to the compiler who has
inserted for the first time among Ben Jonson's
works the fine and flowing stanzas described by their

[ author as an allegoric ode. This poem, which in
form is Horatian, has no single stanza so beailtiful
or so noble as the famous third strophe of the
Pindaric ode to Sir Lucius Gary on the death of
Sir Henry Morison ; but its general superiority in
purity of style and fluidity of metre is as remark-
able as the choice and use of proper names with
such a dexterous felicity as to emulate while it
recalls the majestic and magnificent instincts of
Marlowe and of Milton.

If the fame of Ben Jonson were in any degree

/ dependent on his minor or miscellaneous works in
verse, it would be difficult to assign him a place
above the third or fourth rank of writers belonging
to the age of Shakespeare. His station in the
first class of such writers, and therefore in the
front rank of English authors, is secured mainly by
the excellence of his four masterpieces in comedy ;
U The Fox and The Alchemist^ The Staple of News
and Every Man in his Humour : but a single leaf
of his Discoveries is worth all his lyrics, tragedies,
elegies, and epigrams together. That golden little
book of noble thoughts and subtle observations is

Miscellanies 1 2 5

the one only province of his vast and varied
empire which yet remains for us to examine ; and
in none other will there be found more ample and
more memorable evidence how truly great a man
demands our homage — ' on this side idolatry ' —
for the imperishable memory of Ben Jonson.

Ill

DISCOVERIES

Ill
DISCOVERIES

That chance is the ruler of the world I should be
sorry to believe and reluctant to affirm ; but it
would be difficult for any competent and careful
student to maintain that chance is not the ruler of
the world of letters. Gray's odes are still, I sup-
pose, familiar to thousands who know nothing of
Donne's Ajiniversaries ; and Bacon's Essays are
conventionally if not actually familiar to thousands
who know nothing of Ben Jonson's Discoveries,
And yet it is certain that in fervour of inspiration^
in depth and force and glow of thought and
emotion and expression, Donne's verses are as
far above Gray's as Jonson's notes or observations
on men and morals, on principles and on facts, are
superior to Bacon's in truth of insight, in breadth
of view, in vigour of reflection and in concision of
eloquence. The dry curt style of the statesman,
docked and trimmed into sentences that are

K

1 30 A Stttdy of Ben Jonson

regularly snapped off or snipped down at the
close of each deliverance, is as alien and as far

; from the fresh and vigorous spontaneity of the
poet's as is the trimming and hedging morality of
.the essay on ' simulation and dissimulation ' from
the spirit and instinct of the man who 'of all
things loved to be called honest' But indeed,
from the ethical point of view which looks merely
or mainly to character, the comparison is little less
than an insult to the Laureate ; and from the
purely intelligent or aesthetic point of view I
should be disposed to say, or at least inclined to
think, that the comparison would be hardly less
unduly complimentary to the Chancellor.

^ For at the very opening of these Explorata^ or
Discoveries^ we find ourselves in so high and so
pure an atmosphere of feeling and of thought that
we cannot but recognize and rejoice in the pre-
sence and the infliuence of one of the noblest,
manliest, most honest and most helpful natures
that ever dignified and glorified a powerful intelli-
gence and an admirable genius. In the very first
note, the condensed or concentrated quintessence
of a Baconian essay on Fortune, we find these
among other lofty and weighty words : ' Heaven
prepares good men with crosses ; but no ill can

Discoveries 131

happen to a good man.' ' That which happens to
any man, may to every man. But it is in his
reason what he accounts it and will make it.'

There is perhaps in the structure of this
sentence something too much of the Latinist —
too strong a flavour of the style of Tacitus in its
elaborate if not laborious terseness of expression.
But the following could hardly be bettered.

No man is so foolish but may give another good
counsel sometimes ; and no man is so wise but may easily
err, if he will take no other's counsel but his own. But
very few men are wise by their own counsel, or learned
by their own teaching. For he that was only taught by /

himself had a fool to his master. -- '

The mind's ear may find or fancy a silvery ring / *
of serene good sense in the note of that reflection ; 1/
but the ring of what follows is pure gold.

There is a necessity all men should love their country ; ^^^
he that professeth the contrary may be delighted with his ^^^c
words, but his heart is Tnot] there. v'i*

The magnificent expansion or paraphrase of
this noble thought in the fourth scene of Landor's
magnificent tragedy of Count Julian should be
familiar to all capable students of English poetry
at its purest and proudest height of sublime con-
templation. That probably or rather undoubtedly

132 A Stttdy of Ben Jonson

unconscious echo of the sentiment of an^older poet
and patriot has in it the prolonged reverberation
and repercussion of music which we hear in the
echoes of thunder or a breaking sea.

Again, how happy in the bitterness of its truth
is the next remark : ' Natures that are hardened to
evil you shall sooner break than make straight :
they are like poles that are crooked and dry :
there is no attempting them.' And how grand is
this:

I cannot think nature is so spent and decayed that
she can bring forth nothing worth her former years. She
is always the same, like herself ; and when she collects
her strength,^ is abler still. Men are decayed^ and studies:
she is not.

Jonson never wrote a finer verse than that ;
and very probably he never observed that it was a
verse.

The next note is one of special interest to all
students of the great writer who has so often been
described as a blind worshipper and a servile
disciple of classical antiquity.

- ' I know nothing can conduce more to letters,' says
the too obsequious observer of Tacitus and of Cicero in

1 As in the production of Shakespeare — if his good friend Ben
had but known it.

Discoveries

133

tbejcomposition of his Roman tragedies, ' than to examine
the writings of the ancients, and not to rest on their sole
authority, or take all upon trust from them ; provided the
plagues of judging and pronouncing against them be away;
such as are envy, bitterness, precipitation, impudence,
and scurril scoffing. For, to all the observations of the
ancients, we have our own experience ; which if we will
use and apply, we have better means to pronounce. It
is true they opened the gates, and made the way, that
went before us ; but as guides, not commanders : Non
domini nostri sed duces fiiere. Truth lies open to all ; it
is no man's several. Patet ornnibus Veritas: nondum est
oclcupata. Multum ex ilia etiam futuris relictum est.''^

Time and space would fail me to transcribe all
that is u^orth transcription, to comment on every-
thing that deserves commentary, in this treasure-
house of art and wisdom, eloquence and good
sense. But the following extract could be passed
over by no eye but a mole's or a bat's.

I do not desire to be equal with those that went
before ; but to have my reason examined with theirs, and
so much faith to be given them, or me, as those shall
evict [in modern English — if the text is not corrupt — 'as
the comparison or confrontation of theirs with mine shall
elicit ']. I am neither author nor fautor of any sect. I
will have no man addict himself to me ; but if I have

* The scandalously neglected text reads relicta. Perhaps we
should read ' Multa — relicta sunt, '

134 ^ Study of Ben Jonson

anything right, defend it as Truth's, not mine, save as it
conduceth to a common good. It profits not me to have
any man fence or fight for me, to flourish, or take my
side. Stand for Truth, and 'tis enough.

The haughty vindication of ' arts that respect
the mind ' as ' nobler than those that serve the
body, though we less can be without them ' (the
latter), is at once amusingly and admirably
Jonsonian. Admitting the ignoble fact that with-
out such ' arts ' as ' tillage, spinning, weaving,
building, &c.,' ' we could scarce sustain life a
day,' a proposition which it certainly would seem
difficult to dispute, he proceeds in the loftiest tone
of professional philosophy: 'But these, were the
works of every hand ; the other of the brain only,
and those the most generous and exalted wits and
spirits, that cannot rest or acquiesce. The mind of
man is still fed with labour : opei^e pascitur!

This conscientious and self-conscious pride of
intellect finds even a nobler and more memorable
expression in the admirable words which instruct
or which remind us of the truth that ' it is as great
a spite to be praised in the wrong place, and by the
wrong person, as can be done to a noble nature.'
A sentence worthy to be set beside the fittest
motto for all loyal men — ' ^Equa laus est a laudatis

Discoveries 135

laudari et ab improbis improbari.' Which it
would be well that every man worthy to apply it
should lay to heart, and act and bear himself
accordingly.

It is to be wished that the dramatist and
humourist had always or had usually borne in mind
the following excellent definition or reflection of
the aphoristic ■ philosopher or student : 'A tedious
person is one a man would leap a steeple from,
gallop down any steep hill to avoid him ; forsake
his meat, sleep, nature itself, with all her benefits,
to shun him.' What then shall we say of the
courtiers in Cynthia's Revels and the vapourers in
Bartholomezv Fair ?

The following is somewhat especially sugges-
tive of a present political application ; and would
find its appropriate setting in a modern version of
the Irish Masque.

He is a narrow-minded man that affects a triumph in
any glorious study ; but to triumph in a lie, and a lie
themselves have forged, is frontless. Folly often goes
beyond her bounds ; but Impudence knows none.

From the forty-third to the forty-eighth entry
inclusive these disconnected notes should be readJ;
as a short continuous essay on envy and calumnyl/

^

136 A Study of Ben Jonson

For weight, point, and vigour, it would hardly be
possible to overpraise it

In the admirable note on such ' foolish lovers '
as ' wish the same to their friends as their enemies
would,' merely that they might have occasion to
display the constancy of their regard, there is a
palpable and preposterous misprint, which reduces
to nonsense a remarkably fine passage : ' They make
a causeway to their courtesy by injury ; as if it
were not honester to do nothing than to seek a
way to do good by a mischief For the obviously
right word ' courtesy ' the unspeakable editors read
' country ' ; which let him explain who can.

The two notes on injuries and benefits are
observable for their wholesome admixture of
common sense with magnanimity.

Injuries do not extinguish courtesies : they only suffer
them not to appear fair. For a man that doth me an
injury after a courtesy takes not away that courtesy, but
defaces it : as he that writes other verses upon my verses
takes not away the first letters, but hides them.

Surely no sentence more high-minded and
generous than that was ever written : nor one more
sensible and dignified than this : —

The doing of courtesies aright is the mixing of the

Discoveries ^^vi^i'x ^

respects for his own sake and for mine. He that doet^-v.
them merely for his own sake is Hke one that feeds his
cattle to sell them : he hath his horse well drest for
Smithfield.

The following touch of mental autobiography
is not less interesting than curious. Had Shake-
speare but left us the like !

I myself could in my youth have repeated all that
ever I had made, and so continued till I was past forty :
since, it is much decayed in me. Yet I can repeat whole
books that I have read, and poems of some selected
friends, which I have liked to charge my memory with.
It was wont to be faithful to me \ but, shaken with age
now, and sloth, which weakens the strongest abilities, it
may perform somewhat, but cannot promise much. By
exercise it is to be made better, and serviceable. What-
soever I pawned with it while I was young, and a boy, it
offers me readily, and without stops : but what I trust to
it now, or have done of later years, it lays up more negli-
gently, and oftentimes loses ; so that I receive mine own
(though frequently called for) as if it were new and bor-
rowed. Nor do I always find presently from it what I
seek : but while I am doing another thing, that I laboured
for will come ; and what I sought with trouble will offer
itself when I am quiet. Now in some men [was Shake-
speare, we must ask ourselves, one of these?] I have
found it as happy as nature, who, whatsoever they read
or pen, they can say without book presently; as if
they did then write in their mind. And it is more a

138 A Shtdy of Ben Joiison

wonder in such as have a swift style, for their memories
are commonly slowest ; such as torture their writings, and
go into council for every word, must needs fix somewhat,
and make it their own at last, though but through their
own vexation.

I cannot but imagine that Jonson must have
witnessed this wonder in the crowning case of
Shakespeare ; the swiftness of whose ' style ' or
composition was matter of general note.

The anti-Gallican or anti-democratic view of
politics can never be more vividly or happily
presented than in these brilliant and incisive
words : —

^ Suffrages in Parliament are numbered, not weighed :

f" nor can it be otherwise in those public councils, where

nothing is so unequal as the equality : for there, how odd

soever men's brains or wisdoms are, their power is always

even and the same.

But the most cordial hater or scorner of par-
liaments, whether from the Carlylesque or the
Bonapartist point of vantage, must allow that the
truth expressed in the two first sentences follow-
ing is more certain and more precious than the
doctrine just cited.

Truth is man's proper good, and the only immortal
thing was given to our mortality to use. No good

Discoveries 139

Christian or ethnic, if he be honest, can miss it: no
statesman or patriot should| For without truth all the
actions of mankind are craft, malice, or what you will
rather than wisdom. Homer says he hates him worse
than hell-mouth that utters one thing with his tongue and
keeps another in his breast. Which high expression was
grounded on divine reason : for a lying mouth is a stink-
ing pit, and murders with the contagion it venteth.
Besides, nothing is lasting that is feigned ; it will have
another face than it had ere long. As Euripides saith,
'No lie ever grows old.'

. —
It would be well if this were so : but the in-
veterate reputation of Euripides as a dramatic
poet is hardly reconcilable with the truth of
his glibly optimistic assumption. Nor, had that J

fluent and facile dealer in flaccid verse and senti= iJ^AnP
mental sophistry spoken truth for once in this
instance, should we have had occasion to wonder
at the admiration expressed for him by the most
subtle and sincere, the most profound and piercing
intelligence of our time ; nor could that sense of
reverential amazement have found spontaneous
expression in the following couplet of Hudibrastic
doggrel : — "^

That the huckster of pathos, whose gift was insipid ease,
Finds favour with Browning, must puzzle Euripides.

But Jonson himself, it seems to me, was far . /-

140 A Study of Ben Jonson

less trustworthy as a critic of poetry than as a
judge on ethics or a student of character. The
tone of supercilious goodwill and friendly con-
donation which distinguishes his famous note on
Shakespeare is unmistakable except by the most
wilful perversity of prepossession. His noble
metrical tribute to Shakespeare's memory must
of course be taken into account when we are dis-
posed to think too hardly of this honest if egotistic
eccentricity of error : but it would be foolish to
suppose that the most eloquent cordiality of a
ceremonial poem could express more of one man's
real and critical estimate of another than a delibe-
rate reflection of later date. And it needs the
utmost possible exertion of charity, the most
generous exercise of justice, to forgive the final
phrase of preposterous patronage and considerate
condescension — 'There was ever more in him
to be praised than to be pardoned.' The candid
author of Sejanus could on the whole afford to
admit so much with respect to the popular author
oi Hamlet.

In the subsequent essay, divided under ten
several heads into ten several notes, on ' the
difference of wits,' or the diversity of accomplish-
ments and understandings, there is much worth

Discoveries 141

study for its soundness of judgment, its accuracy
of definition, and its felicity of expression, It
would be well if educational and professional for-
malists would bear in mind the truth that ' there
is no doctrine will do good, where nature is want-
ing ' ; and nothing could be neater, terser, or truer
than the definition of those characters ' that are
forward and bold ; and these will do every little
thing easily ; I mean, that is hard by and next
them, which they will utter unretarded without
any shamefastness. These never perform much,
but quickly. They are what they are, on the
sudden ; they show presently, like grain that,
scattered on the top of the ground, shoots up, but
takes no root; has a yellow blade, but the ear
empty. They are wits of good promise at first,
but there is an ingenistitium — a wit-stand : they
stand still at sixteen, they get no higher.'

As well worth remark and recollection are the
succeeding notes on 'others, that labour only to
ostentation ; and are ever more busy about the
colours and surface of a work than in the matter
and foundation : for that is hid, the other is seen ' ;
and on those whose style of composition is pur-
posely ' rough and broken— and if it would come
gently, they trouble it of purpose. They would

142 A Stttdy of Be7i Jonson

not have it run without rubs : as if that style were
more strong and manly that struck the ear with
a kind of unevenness. These men err not by
chance, but knowingly and willingly ; they are
like men that affect a fashion by themselves, have
some singularity in a ruff, cloak, or hat-band ; or
their beards specially cut to provoke beholders,
and set a mark upon themselves. They would be
reprehended, while they are looked on. And this
vice, one, that is in authority with the rest, loving,
delivers over to them to be imitated ; so that oft-
times the faults which he fell into, the others seek
for : this is the danger, when vice becomes a pre-
cedent' /

It is difficult to imagine that Jonson was not
here thinking of the great writer whom 'he es-
teemed the first poet in the .world in some things,'
but upon whom he passed the too sweeping
though too plausible sentence 'that Donne, for
not being understood, would perish.' Nor can we
suppose that he was not alluding to Daniel — the
inoffensive object of his implacable satire — when
he laid a ' chastising hand ' on ' others that have
no composition at all, but a kind of tuning and
rhyming fall, in what they write. It runs and
/ slides, and only makes a sound. Women's poets

Discoveries 143

they are called, as you have women's tailors. —
You may sound these wits and find the depth of
them with your middle finger. They are cream-
bowl- (or but puddle-) deep.'

An amusing anticipation of the peculiar genius
for elaborate mendacity which distinguishes and
connects the names of De Ouincey and Merimee
will be found in Jonson's words of stern and indig-
nant censure on ' some who, after they have got
authority, or, which is less, opinion, by their
writings, to have read much, dare presently to feign
whole books and authors, and lie safely. For what
never was will not easily be found; not by the
most curious.' Certainly it was not by the innocent
readers whose research into the original authorities
for the history of the revolt of the Tartars, or
whose interest in the original text of Clara
Gazul's plays and the Illyrian ballads of La
Guzlay must have given such keen delight to
those two frontless and matchless charlatans of
genius.

The keen and scornful intelligence of Jonson
finds no less admirable expression in the two
succeeding notes ; of which the first sets a brand
on such cunning plagiarists as protest against all
reading, and so ' think to divert the sagacity of

144 -^ Study of Ben Jonson

their readers from themselves, and cool the scent of
their own fox-like thefts ; ' but, as he proceeds to
observe, ' the obstinate contemners of all helps and
arts are in a ' wretcheder ' case than even these.
His description of such pretenders is too lifelike,
and too vivid in its perennial veracity, to be over-
looked ; ' such as presuming on their own naturals
(which perhaps are excellent) dare deride all dili-
gence, and seem to mock at the terms when they
understand not the things ; thinking that way to
get off wittily with their ignorance. These are
imitated often by such as are their peers in negli-
gence, though they cannot be in nature ; and they
utter all they can think with a kind of violence and
indisposition ; unexamined, without relation to
person, place, or any fitness else ; and the more
wilful and stubborn they are in it, the more learned
they are esteemed of the multitude, through their
excellent vice of judgment ; who think those things
the stronger, that have no art ; as if to break were
better than to open ; or to rend asunder, gentler
than to loose.'

In the tenth section or subdivision of this
irregular and desultory but incisive and masterly
essay we find a singular combination of critical
insight with personal prejudice — of general truth

Discoveries 145

with particular error. But the better part is excel-
lent alike in reflection and in expression.

It cannot but come to pass that these men who com-
monly seek to do more than enough may sometimes
happen on something that is good and great \ but very
seldom : and when it comes it doth not recompense the
rest of their ill. — The true artificer will not run away
from nature, as he were afraid of her ; or depart from life,
and the likeness of truth ; but speak to the capacity of
his hearers.

The rest of the note is valuable as a studious
and elaborate expression of Jonson's theory or
ideal of dramatic poetry, couched in apt and
eloquent phrases of thoughtful and balanced rhe-
toric ; regrettable only for the insulting reference
to the first work of a yet greater poet than himself,
to whose ' mighty line ' he had paid immortal
homage in an earlier and a better mood of judg-
ment.

But however prone he may be to error or
perversity in particular instances or in personal
examples, he is constantly and nobly right in his
axiomatic reflections and his general observations.
The following passage seems to me a magnificent
illustration of this truth.

I know no disease of the soul but ignorance ; not of

L

\

146 A Study of Ben Jons on

the arts and sciences, but of itself : yet relating to those
it is a pernicious evil, the darkener of man's life, the dis-
turber of his reason, and the common confounder of truth ;
with which a man goes groping in the dark, no otherwise
than if he were blind. Great understandings are most
racked and troubled with it ; nay, sometimes they will
rather choose to die than not to know the things they
study for. ^ Think then what an evil it is, and what [a]
good the contrary.

The ensuing note on knowledge has less depth
of direct insight, less force of practical reason ; but
the definition which follows is singularly eloquent
and refined, however scholastic and irrational in
its casuistic and rhetorical subtlety.

Knowledge is the action of, the soul, and is perfect
without the senses, ^ as having the seeds of all science
and virtue in itself ; but not without the service of the
senses ; by these organs the soul works : she is a per-
petual agent, prompt and subtle ; but often flexible and
erring, entangling herself like a silkworm : but her reason
is a weapon with two edges, and cuts through.

I am inclined to suspect that we may discern in

* No modern reader of these lofty words can fail to call to mind
the sublime pathos and the historic interest of Mr. Browning's
j glorious poem, A Grammarian^s Funeral. ■_^

2 It is a pity we are not told how ; for to the ordinary intelli-
gence of reasoning mankind it would appear that * without the
senses ' not only could knowledge not be perfect, but it could not
even exist in the most inchoate or embryonic phase of being.

Discoveries 147

the next note another fragment of autobiography.
For it may be doubted whether ' the boon Delphic
god/ so admirably described by his faithful acolyte
Marmion as presiding in the form of a human
Laureate over the Bacchanalian oracle of Apollo,
can ever have been able to say with equal truth of
another than himself,

I have known a man vehement on both sides, that
knew no mean either to intermit his studies or call upon
them again. When he hath set himself to writing, he ^
would join night to day, press upon himself without re- - '"

lease, not minding it, till he fainted ; and when he got J"
off, resolve himself into all sports and looseness again,
that it was almost a despair to draw him to his book ; but
once got to it, he grew stronger and more earnest by the
ease. His whole powers were renewed : he would work
out of himself what he desired ; but with such excess, as
^^is study could not be ruled : he knew not how to dispose
his own abilities or husband them, he was of that im-
moderate power against himself Nor was he only a
strong but an absolute speaker and writer \ but his subtlety
did not show itself; his judgment thought that a vice :
for the ambush hurts more that is hid. He never forced
his language, nor went out of the highway of speaking,
but for some great necessity, or apparent profit : for he
denied figures to be invented for ornament, but for aid :
and still thought it an extreme madness to bend or wrest
that which ought to be right.

L2 ♦

.y

T48 A Study of Ben Jons on

If any reader should think such a mixture of
critical self-examination and complacent self-glori-
fication impossible to any man of indisputable
genius and of general good sense, that reader is
not yet ' sealed of the tribe of Ben ' ; he has not
arrived at a due appreciation of the writer's general
strength and particular weakness as a critic and a
workman, an artist and a thinker.

The note on famous orators is remarkable for
its keen discrimination and appreciation of various
talents ; and the subsequent analysis or definition
^of Bacon's great gifts as a speaker, which has been
often enough quoted to dispense with any fresh
citation, is only less fine than the magnificent
tribute paid a little further on to the same great
man in his days of adversity. It may well be
questioned whether there exists a finer example
of English prose than the latter famous passage ;
where sublimity is resolved into pathos, and pathos
dilates into sublimity. His idealism of monarchy,
however irrational it may seem to us, has a finer
side to it than belongs to the blind superstition of
such a royalist as Fletcher. Witness this striking
and touching interpretation of an old metaphor :
Why are prayers said with Orpheus to be the
daughters of Jupiter, but that princes are thereby

Discoveries 149

admonished that the petitions of the wretched
ought to have more weight with them than the
laws themselves ? ' And the following note gives a
better and a kindlier impression of King James I.
than anything else — as far as I know — recorded
of that singular sovereign.

It was a great accumulation to his majesty's deserved
praise, that men might openly visit and pity those whom
his greatest prisons had at any time received, or his laws
condemned.

The note on * the attribute of a prince ' is rather
Baconian than Jonsonian in its cult of * prudence '
as ' his chief art and safety ' ; but the peculiar and
practical humour of Jonson's observant and studious
satire is well exemplified in his strictures on such
theological controversialists as * are like swaggerers
in a tavern, that catch that which stands next
them, the candlesticks or pots — turn everything
into a weapon : ofttimes they fight blindfold, and
both beat the air. The one milks a he-goat, the
other holds under a sieve. Their arguments are as
fluxive as liquor spilt upon a table, which with
your finger you may drain as you will' But the
remarks on ' untimely boasting ' are especially
worth transcription, both for their own real ex-
cellence and for the unconscious but inexpressible

t

150 A Study of Ben Jojison

drollery of such an utterance from the ' capacious
mouth ' which had so often and so loudly set forth
under divers names and figures the claims and the
merits of Ben Jonson.

Men that talk of their own benefits are not believed
to talk of them because they have done them, but to have
^one them because they might talk of them. That which
ad been great if another had reported it of them vanisheth
nd is nothing if he that did it speak of it. For men,
when they cannot destroy the deed, will yet be glad to
take advantage of the boasting and lessen it.

We may hope that these wise and weighty
words were not written without some regretful if
not repentant reminiscence of sundry occasions on
\ \ which this rule of conduct had been grossly and
grievously transgressed by the writer, to his own
inevitable damage and discomfiture.

The note on flattery and flatterers is as exalted
in its austerity as trenchant in its scorn. And the
following remark ' on human life ' is the condensed
or distilled essence of a noble satire or a powerful
essay.

I have considered our whole life is Hke a play, where-
f in every man, forgetful of himself, is in travail with ex-
pression of another. Nay, we so. insist in imitating others,
as we cannot (when it is necessary) return to ourselves ;

Discoveries 151

like children that imitate the vices of stammerers so long,
till at last they become such; and make the habit to
another nature, as it is n.ever forgotten.

There is a noble enthusiasm for goodness in the
phrase which avers that ' good men are the stars,
the planets of the ages wherein they live, and
illustrate the times.' After an enumeration of
scriptural instances, the poet adds this commentary :
* These, sensual men thought mad, because they
would not be partakers or practisers of their mad-
ness. But they, placed high on the top of all
virtue, looked down on the stage of the world, and
contemned the play of fortune. For though the
most be players, some must be spectators.'

And there is a fine touch of grave and bitter
humour in the discovery ' that a feigned familiarity
in great ones is a note of certain usurpation on the
less. For great and popular men feign themselves
to be servants to others, to make those slaves to
them. So the fisher provides bait for the trout,
roach, dace, &c., that they may be food to
him.'

But finer by far and far more memorable than
this is the following commentary on the fact that
the emperor whose ' voice was worthier a headsman
than a head, when he wished the people of Rome

152 A Study of Ben Jonson

had but one neck,' ' found (when he fell) they had
many hands.'

A tyrant, how great and mighty soever he may seem
/ to cowards and sluggards, is but one creature, one animal.

That sentence is worthy of Landor ; and those
who would reproach Ben Jonson with the extra-
vagance of his monarchical doctrines or theories
must admit that such royalism as is compatible
with undisguised approval of regicide or tyrannicide
might not irrationally be condoned by the sternest
and most rigid of republicans.
^ The next eight notes or entries deal in a some-
what desultory fashion with the subject of govern-
ment ; and display, as might be expected, a very
singular combination or confusion of obsolete
sophistry and superstition with rational and liberal
intelligence. He attacks Machiavelli repeatedly,
but there is a distinct streak of what is usually
understood as Machiavellism in the remark, for
example, that when a prince governs his people
* so as they have still need of his administration
(for that is his art) he shall ever make and hold
them faithful.' In answer to Machiavelli's principle
of cruelty by proxy, he pleads with great and
■simple force of eloquence against all principles of

■^
i

Discoveries 153

cruelty whatever. Many noble passages might be
quoted from this pleading ; but only a few can
here be selected from the third and fourth, the
sixth and seventh, of the entries above mentioned ;
which may on the whole be considered, when
all due reservation is made with regard to the
monarchical principle or superstition, as composing
altogether a concise and masterly essay on the art
and the principles of wise and righteoy^ |?Bfem>-
ment.

Many punishments sometimes and in some^sefs^^
much discredit a prince as many funerals a physicians;^
The state of things is secured by clemency : severity re-
presseth a few, but irritates more. The lopping of trees
makes the boughs shoot out thicker ; and the taking away
of some kind of enemies increaseth the number. It is
then most gracious in a prince to pardon, when many
about him would make him cruel; to think then how-
much he can save, when others tell him how much he
can destroy ; not to consider what the impotence of others
hath demolished, but what his own greatness can sustain.
These are a prince's virtues : and they that give him other
counsels are but the hangman's factors.

But princes, by hearkening to cruel counsels, become
in time obnoxious to the authors, their flatterers and
ministers ; and are brought to that, that when they would
they dare not change them ; they must go on, and defend
cruelty with cruelty ; they cannot alter the habit. It is

154 ^ Stttdy of Ben Jonson

then grown necessary they must be as ill as those have
made them : and in the end they will grow more hateful
to themselves than to their subjects. Whereas, on the
contrary, the merciful prince is safe in love, not in fear.
He needs no emissaries, spies, intelligencers, to entrap
true subjects- He fears no libels, no treasons. His
people speak what they think, and talk openly what they
do in secret. They have nothing in their breasts that
they need a cipher for. He is guarded with his own
benefits.

There is nothing with some princes sacred above their
majesty; or profane, but what violates their sceptres.
But a prince with such a council [qu. counsel ?] is like the
god Terminus of stone, his own landmark ; or (as it is in
the fable) a crowned Hon. ... No men hate an evil
prince more than they that helped to make him such.
And none more boastingly weep his ruin than they that
procured and practised it. The same path leads to ruin
which did to rule, when men profess a license in govern-
ment. A good king is a public servant.

A prince without letters is a pilot without eyes. All
his government is groping. In sovereignty it is a most
happy thing not to be compelled \ but so it is the most
miserable not to be counselled. And how can he be
counselled that cannot see to read the best counsellors,
which are books ; for they neither flatter us nor hide from
us ? He may hear, you will say ; but how shall he always
be sure to hear truth ? or be counselled the best things,
not the sweetest ? They say princes learn no art truly
but the art of horsemanship. The reason is, the brave

Discoveries 155

beast is no flatterer. He will throw a prince as soon as
his groom. Which is an argument that the good coun-
sellors to princes are the best instruments of a good age.
For though the prince himself be of most prompt in-
clination to all virtue, yet the best pilots have need of
mariners, besides sails, anchor, and other tackle.

It must be admitted that the royalism of this
laureate is sufficiently tempered and allayed with
rational or republican good^ sense to excite in the 1/ /1y<
reader's mind a certain curiosity of conjecture as
to the effect which might or which must have been
produced on his royal patrons by the publication
of opinions so irreconcilable with the tragically
comic form of idolatry embodied in the heroes
and expressed in the rhapsodies of Beaumont
and Fletcher. Amintor and Aecius, Archas and
Aubrey, are figures or types of unnatural heroism
or preposterous devotion which are obviously and
essentially wellnigh as far from Jonson's ideal of
manhood and of duty as from Shakespeare's.

There is a quaint fierce touch of humour in the
reflection that ' he which is sole heir to many rich
men, having (beside his father's and uncle's) the
estates of divers his kindred come to him by acces-
sion, must needs be richer than father or grand-
father : so they which are left heirs ex asse ' (sole

156 A Stttdy of Ben Jonson

heirs) ' of all their ancestor's vices, and by their
good husbandry improve the old, and daily pur-
chase new, must needs be wealthier in vice, and
have a greater revenue or stock of ill to spend on.'
But this is only one in a score of instances which
might be quoted to show that if a great English
poet and humourist had left nothing behind him
but this little book of 'maxims,' as the French
call them — notes, observations, or reflections cast
in a form more familiar to French than to English
writers — he would still hold a place beside or
above La Rochefoucauld, and beside if not above
Chamfort. And yet, even among his countiymen,
it may be feared that the sardonic wit and the
cynical wisdom of the brilliant French patrician
and the splendid French plebeian are familiar to
many who have never cared to investigate the
Discoveries of Ben Jonson.

Again we meet the strangely outspoken satirist
and malcontent in the person of the court laureate
who allowed himself to remark that 'the great
thieves of a state are lightly ' [usually or naturally]
' the officers of the crown : they hang the less still,
play the pikes in the pond, eat whom they list.
The net was never spread for the hawk or buzzard
that hurt us, but the harmless birds ; they are good

Discoveries

157

meat.' But the critic of state consoles himself with
a reflection on the precarious tenure of their powers
enjoyed by such tenants or delegates of tyranny,
and cites against them a well-known witticism of
that great practical humourist King Louis XI.

The partially autobiographic or personal note
which follows this opens and closes at once nobly
and simply.

A good man will avoid the spot of any sin. The very
aspersion is grievous ; which makes him choose his way
in his life, as he would in his journey. The ill man rides
through all confidently ; he is coated and booted for it.
The oftener he offends, the more openly ; and the fouler,
the fitter in fashion. His modesty, like a riding-coat, the
more it is worn, is the less cared for. It is good enough
for the dirt still, and the ways he travels on.

No one will be surprised to find that Ben
Jonson's chosen type or example of high-minded
innocence, Incessantly pursued by malice, delated
and defamed, but always triumphant and confident,
even when driven to the verge of a precipice. Is
none other than Ben Jonson. His accusers were
' great ones ' ; but they '• were driven, for want of
crimes, to use invention, which was found slander ;
or too late (being entered so far) to seek startlng-j
holes for their rashness, which were not given them.'

158 A Study of Be7i Jonson

His profession also, as well as his person, was
attacked : ' they objected making of verses to me
when I could object to most of them their not
being able to read them but as worthy of scorn ;
and strove, after the changeless manner of their
estimable kind, to back and bolster up their accu-
sations and objections by falsified and garbled ex-
tracts, * which was an excellent way of malice ; as
if any man's context might not seem dangerous and
offensive, if that which was knit to what went before
were defrauded of his beginning ; or that things by
themselves uttered might not seem subject to
calumny, which read entire would appear most free/
So little difference is there, in the composition of
the meanest and foolishest among literary parasites
and backbiters, between the characteristic develop-
ments or the representative products of the seven-
teenth and the nineteenth century.

At last they would object to me my poverty : I con-
fess she is my domestic ; sober of diet, simple of habit,
frugal, painful, a good counsellor to me, that keeps me
from cruelty, pride, or other more delicate impertinences,
which are the nurse-children of riches.

All ' great and m.onstrous wickednesses,' avers
the Laureate — not perhaps without an implied
reference to such hideous instances as the case of

Discoveries

159

Somerset and Overbury, — ' are the issue of the [
wealthy giants and the mighty hunters : whereas ^ .
no great work, or worthy of praise or memory,
but came out of poor cradles. It was the ancient
poverty that founded commonweals, built cities,
invented arts, made wholesome laws, armed men
against vices, rewarded them with their own virtues,
and preserved the honour and state of nations, till
they betrayed themselves to riches.'

It is hardly too much to say that there are few
finer passages than that in Landor ; in other words,
that there can be few passages as fine in any third
writer of English prose.

The fierce and severe attack on worldliness and / ]
love of money which follows this noble panegyric '
on the virtues of poverty should be read as part of
the same essay rather than as a separate note or
reflection. Indeed, throughout the latter part of
the Discoveries, it is obvious that we have before
us the fragments, disunited and disjointed, of single
and continuous essays on various great subjects,
rather than the finished and coherent works) which
their author would have offered to his readers had
he lived long enough in health and strength of spirit
and of body to carry out his original design. This
sermon against greed of all kinds — avarice, luxury,

1 6o A Study of Ben Jonson

ambition of state and magnificence of expenditure
— is full of lofty wisdom and of memorable
eloquence.

What a wretchedness is this, to thrust all our riches
outward, and be beggars within \ to contemplate nothing
but the little, vile, and sordid things of the world : not
the great, noble, and precious ? We serve our avarice ;
and not content with the good of the earth that is offered
us, we search and dig for the evil that is hidden. God
offered us those things, and" placed them at hand and
near us, that he knew were profitable for us; but the
hurtful he laid deep and hid. Yet do we covet only the
things whereby we may perish ; and bring them forth,
when God and nature hath buried them. We covet super-
fluous things, when it were more honour for us if we could
contemn necessary.

A little further on, the Laureate who had lavished
the wealth of his poetic invention and his scenic
ingenuity on the festivities which welcomed the
Danish king to the court of his brother-in-law
refers in the following terms of sorrowful and
sarcastic reminiscence to those splendid and sterile
extravagances of meaningless magnificence.

Have I not seen the pomp of a whole kingdom, and
what a foreign king could bring hither? alP to make

1 The current text reads * Also ' ! My emendation at all events
makes sense of a fine passage.

Discoveries 1 6 1

himself gazed and wondered at, laid forth as it were to
the show — and vanish all away in a day. And shall that
which could not fill the expectation of few hours enter-
tain and take up our whole lives ? when even it appeared
as superfluous to the possessors as to me that was a
spectator. The bravery was shown, it was not possessed :
while it boasted itself, it perished. It is vile, and a poor
thing, to place our happiness on these desires. Say we
wanted them all. Famine ends famine.

These reflections are uncourtly enough from
the hand of a courtly poet ; but they are tame and
tender if compared with his animadversions on * vice
and deformity,' which ' we may behold — so much
the fouler in having all the splendour of riches to
gild them, or the false light of honour and power
to help them. Yet this is that wherewith the world
is taken, and runs mad to gaze on : clothes and
titles, the birdlime of fools.'

No man ever made more generous response to
the friendly or generous kindness of others than
Ben Jonson : no man had ever less disposition or
inclination towards the grudging mood of mind
which regrets or the abject mood of mind which
resents the acceptance of a benefit. For all that
he received of help or support from his wealthier
friends or patrons he returned the noblest and
most liberal payment in manly and self-respectful

M

1 62 A Study of Ben Jons on

gratitude : he did not, like the rival poets of the
restored Stuarts, condescend to undertake the
deification or glorification of a male or female
prostitute of parliament or of court : but it must
be admitted that the outpourings of his heart in
thanks and praises may seem somewhat excessive
even to those who bear in mind that the tribute of
his cordial homage was by no means confined to
kings and princes, lords and ladies. But that ' he
[would not flatter Neptune for his trident or Jove
for his power to thunder ' — that he would not
speak well, that he could hardly forbear from
speaking evil, of any whom he found or whom he
held to be undeserving — is as certain as that no
loftier scorn than breathes through the words above
transcribed was ever expressed by the most demo-
cratic or sarcastic of republicans for the mere attri-
butes of rank and power. This fierce and deep
contempt informs with even more vehement
eloquence the note which follows.

What petty things they are we wonder at ! like chil-
dren, that esteem every trifle, and prefer a fairing before
their fathers ; what difference is betwixt us and them, but
that we are dearer fools, coxcombs at a higher rate ? . . .
All that we call happiness is mere painting and gilt ; and
all for money : what a thin membrane of honour that is !
and how hath all true reputation fallen, since money

Discoveries 163

began to have any ! Yet the great herd, the multitude,
that in all other things are divided, in this alone conspire
and agree ; to love money. They wish for it, they em-
brace it, they adore it : while yet it is possest with greater
stir and torment than it was gotten.

The pure and lofty wisdom of the next note is
worthy of Epictetus or Aurelius.

Some men, what losses soever they have, they make
them greater : and if they have none, even all that is not
gotten is a loss. Can there be creatures of more wretched
condition than these, that continually labour under their
own misery and others' envy ? ^ A man should study
other things : not to covet, not to fear, not to repent him :
to make his base such as no tempest shall shake him : to
be secure of all opinion, and pleasing to himself, even
for that wherein he displeases others : for the worst
opinion, gotten for doing well, should delight us. Wouldst
not thou be just but for fame, thou oughtest to be it with
infamy : he that would have his virtue published is not
the servant of virtue, but glory.

In the following satirical observation all students
will recognize the creator of Fastidious Brisk — and
rather, perhaps, the spirit of Macilente than of
Asper.

A dejected countenance, and mean clothes, beget

' That is, the envy they bear towards others : an equivocal,
awkward, and affected Latinism. The writer would not — he never
would — remember that a phrase or a construction which makes very
good Latin may make very bad English.

M 2

164 ^ Stitdy of Ben Jonson

often a contempt, but it is with the shallowest creatures ;
courtiers commonly : look up even with them in a new
suit, you get above them straight. Nothing is more
short-lived than [? their] pride : it is but while their
clothes last : stay but while these are worn out, you can-
not wish the thing more wretched or dejected.

In the four notes which compose a brief essay
on painting (or, as Jonson calls it, picture) the
finest passage by far is this wise and noble word of
tribute paid to another great art by a great artist
in letters : —

Whosoever loves not picture is injurious to truth and
all the wisdom of poetry. Picture is the invention of
heaven, the most ancient, and most akin to nature. It is
itself a silent work, and always of one and the same
habit : yet it doth so enter and penetrate the inmost
affection (being done by an excellent artificer) as some-
times it overcomes the power of speech and oratory.

The summary history of ' picture,' or the art of
painting, in which Jonson has given us his views on^
the relation of that art to poetry, geometry, optics,
and moral philosophy, bears no less witness to his
wide reading and his painstaking attention than to
his quaint and dogmatic self-confidence in laying
down the law at second hand on subjects of which he
seems to have known less than little. But when v^e
pass from criticism of painters to the lower ground

Discoveries 165

of satirical observation — ^from the heights of a noble
art to the depths or levels of ignoble nature, we meet
once more the same fierce and earnest critic of life /
who should certainly be acknowledged as the greatest
of all poets by any one — if any one there be —
to whom ' criticism of life ' seems acceptable or
imaginable as a definition of the essence or the
end of poetry.

The opening of the satirical essay on parasites
which is here divided or split up into two sections
by the blundering negligence and the unprincipled
incompetence of its editors has the force and the
point of a keen and heavy weapon, edged with wit
and weighted with indignation. Juvenal has hardly
left us a more vivid likeness of the creatures who
'■ grow suspected of the master, hated of the servants,
while they inquire, and reprehend; and compound,
and delate business of the house they have nothing
to do with.' This note ends with the admirable
remark, ' I know not truly which is worse, he that [
maligns all or that praises all.' An eminent poet
and dramatist of our own age, M. Auguste Vac-
querie, has said much the same thing in words
even more terse, accurate, and forcible than
Jonson's : — * Louer tout, c'est une autre facon de
denigrer tout'

1 66 A Study of Ben Jonson

What follows as part of the same note is a
letter to a nobleman who had asked Jonson's
advice as to the education of his sons, ' and
especially to the advancement of their studies.'
The kindly and practical wisdom of his counsel is
'■ not of an age, but for all time ' : indeed, it is in
some points as far ahead of our own age as of
the writer's. Though nature ' be proner in some
children to some disciplines, yet are they naturally
prompt to taste all by degrees, and with change.
For change is a kind of refreshing in studies, and
infuseth knowledge by way of recreation.' The
old Westminster boy, who had paid such loyal
■homage of gratitude to the ' most reverend head '
of his old master, is as emphatic in his preference of
public to private education as in his insistence that
scholars ' should not be affrighted or deterred in
their entry, but drawn on with exercise and emula-
tion.' His illustrious namesake of the succeeding
century was hardly more emphatic in his advocacy
of the opposite principle. That which Samuel
Johnson and Charles Kingsley considered as
' doubtless the best of all punishments ' is
denounced by Ben Jonson as energetically as by
Quintilian : but I trust he would not have preferred
to it the execrable modern substitute of torture by

Discoveries 167

transcription — the infernal and idiotic infliction of
so many hundred lines to be written out by way_of
penance. fih^^^'^'

!' <v> ' </. \

Would we did not spoil our own children, and OYerV'. .. '^-p^
throw their manners ourselves by too much indulgencf^^'-'^.y '^
To breed them at home is to breed them in a shade^W^// ^'^
where in a school they have the light and heat of the sun.
They are used and accustomed to things and men. When
they come forth into the commonwealth, they find nothing
new, or to seek. They have made their friendships and
aids, some to last their age. They hear what is com-
manded to others as well as themselves. Much approved,
much corrected ; all which they bring to their own store
and use, and learn as much as they hear. Eloquence
would be but a poor thing if we did but converse with
singulars — speak man and man together. Therefore I
like no private breeding. I would send them where their
industry should be daily increased by praise ; and that
kindled by emulation. It is a good thing to inflame the
mind, and though ambition itself be a vice, it is often the
cause of great virtue. Give me that wit whom praise
excites, glory puts on, or disgrace grieves ; he is to be
nourished with ambition, pricked forward with honour,
checked with reprehension, and never to be suspected of
sloth. Though he be given to play, it is a sign of spirit
and liveliness, so there be a mean had of their sports and
relaxations.

If the nineteenth century has said anything on
this subject as well worth hearing — as wise, as

)
1 68 A Study of Ben Jons on

humane, as reasonable, as full of sympathy and of
judgment — as these reflections and animadversions
of a scholar living in the first half or quarter of the
seventeenth, I have never chanced to meet with it
/ { ^The forty-eight notes or entries Avhich complete
the sum of Ben Jonson's Discoveries should be
considered as composing an essay on style, con-
I tinuous in aim though desultory in treatment^ The
cruel, stupid, and insolent neglect of his editors has
left it in so disjointed and dislocated a condition
that we can only read it as we might read so many
stray notes jotted down irregularly at odd moments
on the first sheet or scrap of paper which might
have fallen under the fatigued and fitful hand of the
venerable poet. The very last entry is a repetition
of a former remark and a former quotation,
tumbled in by some blundering printer's devil with
no reference whatever to the sentence preceding
it.^ As to the punctuation, let one example stand
for many. ' Again, whether a man's genius is best
able to reach thither, it should more and more con-
tend, lift, and dilate itself To rectify this hope-
less nonsense does not require the skill of a Bentley
or a Porson. It is obvious that Jonson must have
written ^ whither a man's genius is best able to

* Compare Ixxii., Not. 4, and clxxi.

Discoveries 1 69

reach, thither/ &c. But the moles and bats who
have hitherto taken charge of this great writer's
text could not see even so simple and glaring a fact
as this.

It is natural that Jonson should insist with
some excess of urgency on the necessity for care
and labour in writing.

No matter how slow the style be at first, so it be ;
laboured and accurate : seek the best, and be not glad of '
the froWard conceits or first words that offer themselves ^
to us j but judge of what we invent, and order what we
approve. Repeat often what we have formerly written ;
which beside that it helps the consequence, and makes
the juncture better, it quickens the heat of imagination,
that often cools in the time of setting down, and gives it
new strength, as if it grew lustier by the going back. As
we see in the contention of leaping, they jump farthest
that fetch their race largest ; or as in throwing a dart or
javelin we force back our arms to make our loose the
stronger. Yet, if we have a fair gale of wind, I forbid
not the steering out of our sail, so the favour of the gale
deceive us not. For all that we invent doth please us in
the conception or birth, else we would never set it down.

This extract is no exceptional example of the
purity, force, and weight of style by which this
essay is distinguished even among the works of its
author. It is impossible for any commentator to

170 A Study of Ben Jons on

convey more than a most imperfect impression of
its rich and various merits.

Great as was Jonson's reliance on the results of

/ ^ training and study, he never forgot that ' arts and
precept avail nothing, except nature be beneficial
and aiding. And therefore these things are no
more written to a dull disposition than rules of
husbandry to a barren soil. No precepts will
profit a fool ; no more than beauty will the
blind, or music the deaf^ , As we, should take care
that our style in writing be neither dry nor empty,
we should look again it be not winding, or wanton
with far-fetched descriptions : either is a vice. But
that is worse which proceeds out of want than
that which riots out of plenty. The remedy of
fruitfulness is easy, but no labour will help the
contrary.'

Of Spenser, whom he seems to have liked no

j^ better than did Landor — in other words, no better
than might have been expected of him, — he
speaks here, on one point at least, in terms quite
opposite to those recorded in Drummond's too
sparing and irregular but delightful and in-
valuable notes. To the Scottish poet he said
that * Spenser's stanzas pleased him not, nor his
matter ' : whereas in this later essay, while still

Discoveries 171

insisting that * Spenser, in affecting the ancients,
writ no language,' he adds, ' yet I would have him
read for his matter, but as Virgil read Ennius.'
In his preference of Plautus to Terence, it may be
observed that Ben Jonson anticipated the verdict
of two such very different great men as Jonathan
Swift and Victor Hugo.

In the Greek poets, as also in Plautus, we shall see
the economy and disposition of poems better observed
than in Terence, and the latter [that is, in later comic
dramatists], who thought the sole grace and virtue of
their fable the sticking in of sentences, as ours do the
forcing in of jests.

The Herculean energy and industry of Jonson
might have been expected to make him as
intolerant of indolence as he shows himself in the
following fine passage : —

We should not protect our sloth with the patronage
of difficulty. It is a false quarrel [(Querela, as the mar-
ginal titl^ of this note expresses it] against nature, that
she helps understanding but in a fe^, when the most part
of mankind are inclined by her thither, if they would
take the pains ; no less than birds to fly, horses to run,
&c. ; which if they lose, it is through their own sluggish-
ness, and by that means become her prodigies, not her
children.

172 A Study of Ben Jons on

The whole of the section which opens with
these noble and fervent words should be most
carefully studied by those who would appreciate
the peculiar character of Jonson's intelligence and
genius. It may be doubted, even by those who
would admit that we learn best what we learn
earliest, whether ' nature in children is more
patient of labour in study, than in age ; for the
sense of the pain, the labour of the judgment, is
absent ; they do not measure what they have done.
And it is the thought and consideration that
affects us, more than the weariness itself.' Plato,
we are reminded, went first to Italy and afterwards
to Egypt in pursuit of Pythagorean and Osirian
mysteries. ' He laboured, so must we.' From the
examples of musicians and preachers, whose work
requires the service of many faculties at once, this
lesson may be drawn : — * if we can express this
variety together, why should not divers studies, at
divers hours, delight, when the variety is able
alone to refresh and repair us ? As, when a man
is weary of writing, to read ; and then again of
reading, to write. Wherein, howsoever we do
many things, yet are we (in a sort) still fresh to
what we begin ; we are recreated with change, as
the stomach is with meats. ... It is easier to do

Discoveries 173

many things, and continue, than to do one thing-
long.'

' A fool may talk,' as Jonson observes a little
further on, ' but a wise man speaks ' : and to such
a man it will scarcely be questioned that we have
been listening. But though 'it were a sluggish
and base thing to despair ' when the attainment of
knowledge is possible, yet, ' if a man should prose-
cute as much as could be said of everything, his
work would find no end.'

The next four notes deal more directly with
special and practical details and principles of style.
If some of the points insisted on seem either
obsolete or obvious, there are others which cannot
be too often asserted or too strenuously main-
tained. Silence may be golden on certain occa-
sions ; but it is none the less certain that ' speech
is the only benefit man hath to express his ex-
cellency of mind above other creatures. Words
are the people's, yet there is a choice of them to
be made ' ; and the rules laid down for the limita-
tion and regulation of this choice are as sound in
principle as brilliant in expression. At every step
we find something which might well be quoted in
evidence of this.

A good man always profits^ by his endeavour, by his

174 ^ Study of Ben Jonson

help, yea, when he is absent, nay, when he is dead, by
his example and memory. So good authors in their style :

\a strict and succinct style is that where you can take
away nothing without loss, and that loss to be manifest.

The grace of metaphor in the following sen-
tence is not more notable than the soundness of
its counsel.

Some words are to be culled out for ornament and
/' colour, as w^e gather flowers to strew houses, or make

garlands ; but they are better when they grow in our style ;

as in a meadow, where though the mere grass and green-
I ness delight, yet the variety of flowers doth heighten and

beautify.

No modern student of letters will read this
without seeing in it an anticipatory tribute to the
incomparable style of Mr. Ruskin.

All the definitions of different styles are good,
I but this is excellent : —

The congruent and harmonious fitting of parts in a
sentence hath almost the fastening and force of knitting
and connection ; as in stones well squared, which will
rise strong a great way without mortar.

The reader of the following extract will be
reminded at its close of an ever-memorable de-
liverance recorded by Boswell.

Periods are beautiful, when they are not too long ; for

Discoveries

175

SO they have their strength too, as in a pike or javeHn.
As we must take the care that our words and sense be
clear, so, if the obscurity happen through the hearer's or
reader's want of understanding, I am not to answer for
them, no more than for their not listening or marking ;
I must neither find them ears nor mind.

All must remember how the second ereat

o

dictator of literary London who bore the name of
Johnson expressed the same very rational objec-
tion : — ' I have found you a reason, sir ; I am not
bound to find you an understanding.'

The following precept is of perennial value —
and of perennial application.

We should therefore speak what we can the nearest
way, so as we keep our gait, not leap ; for too short may
as well be not let into the memory, as too long not kept
in. Whatsoever loseth the grace and clearness, converts
into a riddle : the obscurity is marked, but not the value.
That perisheth, and is passed by, like the pearl in the
fable. Our style should be like a skein of silk, to be
carried and found by the right thread, not ravelled and
perplexed : then all is a knot, a heap.

Nor is this less weighty or less true : —

Language most shows a man. Speak, that I may see
thee. It springs out of the most retired and inmost parts of
us, and is the image of the parent of it, the mind. No glass
renders a man's form or likeness so true as his speech.

V

176 A Shtdy of Ben Jons on

Nay, it is likened to a man : and as we consider feature
and composition in a man, so words in language ; in the
greatness, aptness, sound, structure, and harmony of it.

The seven succeeding notes deal in more detail
with various kinds of oratory; 'high and great,' j
' grave, sinewy, and strong,' or ' humble and low,'"^/ ^
' plain and pleasing,' or ' vicious ' and bombastic,H ) b
'fleshy, fat, and corpulent— full of suet and tallow,' '^'^
or ' bony and sinewy.' These notes are as full ofH
happy and humorous illustration as of sound and
sensible criticism ; but it is a matter of more
interest to consider the observations of such a man
as Jonson on such men as Bacon and Aristotle.
His reflections on the mediaeval worship of a
name are not unworthy of modern consideration.

Nothing is more ridiculous than to make an author
a dictator, as the schools have done Aristotle. The
damage is infinite knowledge receives by it : for to many
things a man should owe but a temporary relief and sus-
pension of his own judgment, not an absolute resignation
of himself, or a perpetual captivity. Let Aristode and
others have their dues ; but if we can make farther dis-
coveries of truth and fitness than they, why are we envied ?
Let us beware, while we strive to add, we do not diminish
or deface ; we may improve, but not augment. By dis-
crediting falsehood, truth grows in request. We must
not go about, like men anguished or perplexed, for vicious

Discoveries 177

affectation of praise ; but calmly study the separation of
opinions, find the errors have intervened, awake antiquity,
call former times into question ; but make no parties
with the present, nor follow any fierce undertakers ;
mingle no matter of doubtful credit with the simplicity
of truth, but gently stir the mould about the root of the
question.

The remarks ' on epistolary stylej are rich in
humour and good sense, as well as curiously illus-
trative of the singular fashion of the time.
' Sometimes men make baseness of kindness/
observes the writer ; and proceeds to illustrate
the fact, in a manner which may remind us of
Thackeray's, by examples of absurd and verbose
adulation, expressed in phrases ' that go a-begging
for some meaning, and labour to be delivered of
the great burden of nothing.'

A word seems to have dropped out of the
following admirable sentence ; but the beetle-
headed boobies to whose carelessness the charge
of Jonson's posthumous writings was committed
by the malignity of accident were incapable of
noticing the nonsense they had made of it

The next property of epistolary style is perspicuity,
and is oftentimes [lost] by affectation of some wit ill
angled for, or ostentation of some hidden terms of art.
Few words they darken speech, and so do too many ; as

N

^y

178 A Study of Ben Jo7iso7i

well too much light hurteth the eyes as too little ; and a
long bill of chancery confounds the understanding as
much as the shortest note ; therefore let not your letters
be penned like English statutes, and this is obtained.

Passing from the subjects of oratory and letter-
writing to the subject of poetry, the Laureate at
once falls foul of his personal assailants. 'The
age is grown so tender of her fame, as she calls
all writings aspersions. That is the state word,
the phrase of court — Placentia College, which some
call Parasites' Place, the Inn of Ignorance.' That
is a tolerably harsh phrase for a wearer of courtly
laurels to allow himself; but it is gentle and
temperate compared with this effusion of divine
wrath on the heads of victims now indiscernible
and secure from fame or shame.

A It sufficeth I know what kind of persons I displease \
: men bred in the declining and decay of virtue, betrothed
J to their own vices ; that have abandoned or prostituted
their good names ; hungry and ambitious of infamy,
invested in all deformity, enthralled to ignorance and
malice, of a hidden and concealed malignity, and that
hold a concomitancy with all evil.

The general and historical notes on poetry
which follow are of less interest than they
assuredly must have been if Jonson had given us

Discoveries 179

less of Aristotle, Cicero, and Horace, and more
of himself It is therefore less important to know
what he thought of Euripides than to know what
he thought of Aristotle,

But whatsoever nature at any time dictated to the
most happy, or long exercise to the most laborious, that
the wisdom and learning of Aristotle hath brought into
an art ; because he understood the causes of things : and
what other men did by chance or custom, he doth by
reason ; and not only found out the way not to err, but
the short way we should take not to err.

' To judge of poets,' says a later note, ' is only
the faculty of poets ; and not of all poets, but the
best' It is unlucky that in the note preceding it
Ben Jonson should have committed himself to the
assertion that Euripides, of all men, ' is sometimes
peccant, as he is most times perfect.' The perfec-
tion of such shapeless and soulless abortions as
the Pliceitissae and the Hercules Furens is about as
demonstrable as the lack of art which Ben Jonson
regretted and condemned in the author of Hafulet
and Othello.

It is comically pathetic to find that the failure
\of Jonson's later comedies had led him to observe,
with the judicious Aristotle, that ' the moving of
laughter is a fault in comedy, a kind of turpitude

V

1 80 A Study of Ben Jonson

that depraves some part of a man's nature without
a disease ' : and likewise that ' this induced Plato
to esteem of Homer as a sacrilegious person,
because he presented the gods sometimes laugh-
ing.' But this deplorable and degrading instinct of
perverse humanity becomes irrepressible and irre-.
sistible in the reader who discovers in the authol:
of Bartholomew Fair and TJie Silent Woman so
delicate and sensitive a dislike of plebeian horseplay
and farcical scurrility that he cannot at any price
abide the insolence and indecency of so vulgar a
writer as Aristophanes.

The concluding essay on ' the magnitude and
compass of any fable, epic or dramatic,' is of less
interest, except to special students, than the
animadversions of the writer on more particular
subjects of criticism. Constant good sense, occa-
sional felicity of expression, conscientious and
logical intensity of application or devotion to every
point of the subject handled or attempted, all
readers will find, as all readers will expect : and
it should be superfluous to repeat that they will
find a text so corrupt and so confused as no editor
of any but an English classic would venture to
publish.

And now it must be evident that if Ben

Discoveries 1 8 1

Jonson was the author of Bacon's Essays — as that
eminent Irish-American scholar, Dr. Athanasius
Dogberry (of New Gotham, U.S.A.), maintains with
a fervour not unworthy of Rabbi Zeal-of-the-Land
Busy — his genius and his intelligence were by no
means at their best when he produced that famous
volume, and gave or sold it to his friend the Lord
Chancellor. r"The full and fertile harvest of
eloquence anothought, the condensed and com-
pressed wealth of reflection and observation, over-
flowing on all sides from the narrow garner or
treasury of the wonderful little book on which I
have not hoped to write anything more than a
most imperfect and inadequate commentary, may
still be left unreaped and untreasured by the
common cry of nominal students or lovers of
English literature. But none who have studied it
can fail to recognize that its author was in every
way worthy to have been the friend of Bacon and f
of Shakespeare.

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