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 n owhere more perceptible. This 
 general if not universal i nfirmity is pne w hich 
 
 never seems to have occurre d 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 mo s^ 
 s erious and the mo st irremedia ble. 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 A lchemist, 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 decide dly, 
 greas y wit or humour of some among its onrf^ tp^'^t^ 
 j;>opii1arJyncal parts must adrnire_andcannot but 
 enjoy the rare a nd 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 
 
 y ear is a monument of learning and labour such as 
 n o other poet could have dreamed of 
 
 The — ~~ 
 
 Masque of lavishing on a cere monial 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. 
 But jhe writer's fan ry v^^'^ ^^ ^ ^^"^ f'bh when it- 
 co uld 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 A lbion ; which contains { 
 the most famous and elo quent panegyric on the ar^ 
 of cookery that ever anti cipated the p^ r donrs^n f 
 Thackeray and the enthusiasm of Di:|n->as. 
 The passage is a really superb example of Triumph 
 
 for the Re- 
 
 tragl COmiC or mo ck-heroir hlanl^ vprc;p^ J turn of 
 
 and in the closing lyrics of the m asque 
 there is no lack of graceful fancy a nd harmonious 
 elegance. For the next year's masque of ^^a^s 
 Aj:^niversc^^ not quite 
 
 so much can reasonably be said. It J A a typical 
 
 and a flagrant incil-anrpj^f the pnpt'<; prn- 
 
 Fan's 
 
 verbial and incurable tendency to overdo Anni- 
 everyth ing : 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 sati re. 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 an y of t he masque s 
 have in themjyrics^o f smo o ther and clearer flo w ; 
 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 S hrovet ide^^ the King's 
 yidi^ViQ.Chloridia. A f ew good verses, f aint 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 
 
 b eautiful 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 isstin Tingen ious and effect ive 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 ma sQU^ ^^ t^^'g yf-^y^ JA£!^'*L-v.^^!^^^£!^^£-^'^ 
 
 Welbecky is a thi ng 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 fin dthe 
 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_t he introduc ti_on_ ~of 
 parody or burlesque, was a form of art or artifi cial 
 fashi on in which incongruity w a5^ a. merit ; th^ 
 grosser the bu rle sque, the broader the paro dy, 
 the greater was the success and the more effective 
 _was the result : but in a dramatic attempt oL 
 highe r 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- 
 posit ion. 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 ' e pigr am ' 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 repu blican go od^ sense to exci te 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 epistola ry 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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