CHAPTER III. Ben Jonson. I. The masters of the school, in the school and in their age-Jonson-His mood -Character-Education-First efforts-Struggles-Poverty-Sickness— Death. II. His learning-Classical tastes-Didactic characters-Good management of his plots-Freedom and precision of his style-Vigour of his will and passion. III. His dramas-Catiline and Sejanus-How he was able to depict the personages and the passions of the Roman decadence. IV. His comedies-His reformation and theory of the theatre-His satirical comedies-Volpone-Why these comedies are serious and warlike-How they depict the passions of the Renaissance-His farces-The Silent Woman -Why these comedies are energetic and rude-How they conform with the tastes of the Renaissance. V. Limits of his talent-Wherein he remains beneath Molière-Want of higher philosophy and comic gaiety-His imagination and fancy-The Staple of News and Cynthia's Revels-How he treats the comedy of society, and lyrical comedy-His smaller poems-His masques-Theatrical and picturesque manners of the court-The Sad Shepherd-How Jonson remains a poet to his death. VI. General idea of Shakspeare-The fundamental idea in Shakspeare-Conditions of human reason-Shakspeare's master faculty-Conditions of exact representation. W I. HEN a new civilisation brings a new art to light, there are about a dozen men of talent who express the general idea, surrounding one or two men of genius who express it thoroughly. Guilhem de Castro, Pérès de Montalvan, Tirso de Molina, Ruiz de Alarcon, Augustin Moreto, surrounding Calderon and Lope de Vega; Crayer, Van Oost, Romboust, Van Thulden, Van Dyk, Honthorst, surrounding Rubens; Ford, Marlowe, Massinger, Webster, Beaumont, Fletcher, surrounding Shakspeare and Ben Jonson. The first constitute the chorus, the others are the leaders. They sing the same piece together, and at times the chorus is equal to the solo; but only at times. Thus, in the dramas which I have just referred to, the poet occasionally reaches the summit of his art, hits upon a complete character, a burst of sublime passion; then he falls back, gropes amid qualified successes, rough sketches, feeble imitations, and at last takes refuge in the tricks of his trade. It is not in him, but in great men like Ben Jonson and Shakspeare, that we must look for the attainment of his idea and the fulness of his art. 'Numerous were the wit-combats,' says Fuller, 'betwixt him (Shakspeare) and Ben Jonson, which two I behold like a Spanish great galleon and an English man-of-war. Master Jonson (like the former) was built far higher in learning; solid, but slow in his performances. Shakspeare, with the English man-of-war, lesser in bulk, but lighter in sailing, could turn with all tides, tack about and take advantage of all winds, by the quickness of his wit and invention." Such was Jonson physically and morally, and his portraits do but confirm this just and lively sketch: a vigorous, heavy, and uncouth person; a wide and long face, early marred by scurvy, a square jaw, enormous cheeks; his animal organs as much developed as those of his intellect : the sour aspect of a man in a passion or on the verge of a passion; to which add the body of an athlete, about forty years of age, mountain belly, ungracious gait.' Such was the outside, and the inside is like it. He was a genuine Englishman, big and coarsely framed, energetic, combative, proud, often morose, and prone to strange splenetic imaginations. He related to Drummond that for a whole night he imagined 'that he saw the Carthaginians and the Romans fighting on his great toe." Not that he is melancholic by nature; on the contrary, he loves to escape from himself by a wide and blustering licence of merriment, by copious and varied converse, assisted by good Canary wine, with which he drenches himself, and which ends by becoming a necessity to him. These great phlegmatic butchers' frames require a generous liquor to give them a tone, and to supply the place of the sun which they lack. Expansive moreover, hospitable, even prodigal, with a frank imprudent heartiness,3 making him forget himself wholly before Drummond, his Scotch host, a vigorous and malicious pedant, who has marred his ideas and vilified his character. What we know of his life is in harmony with his person: he suffered much, fought much, dared much. He was studying at Cambridge, when his father-in-law, a bricklayer, recalled him, and set him to the trowel. He ran away, enlisted as a volunteer into the army of the Low Countries, killed and despoiled a man in single combat, in the view of both armies.' You see he was a man of bodily action, and that he exercised his limbs in early life. On his return to England, at the age of nineteen, he went on the stage for his livelihood, and occupied himself also in touching up dramas. Having been provoked, he fought, was seriously wounded, but killed his adversary; after that, he was cast into prison, and found 4 1 Fuller's Worthies, ed. Nuttall, 1840, 3 vols., iii. 284. 2 There is a similar hallucination to be met with in the life of Lord Castlereagh, who afterwards cut his throat. 3 His character lies between those of Fielding and Samuel Johnson. 4 At the age of forty-four he went to Scotland on foot. himself 'nigh the gallows.' A Catholic priest visited and converted him; quitting his prison penniless, at twenty years of age, he married. At last, two years later, he produced his first play. Children came, he must earn them bread; and he was not of the stuff to follow the beaten track to the end, being persuaded that a fine philosophy ought to be introduced into comedy, a special nobleness and dignity, that it was necessary to follow the example of the ancients, to imitate their severity and their accuracy, to be above the theatrical racket and the rude improbabilities in which the common herd delighted. He openly proclaimed his intention in his prefaces, roundly railed at his rivals, proudly set forth on the stage1 his doctrines, his morality, his character. He thus made bitter enemies, who defamed him outrageously and before their audiences, whom he exasperated by the violence of his satires, and against whom he struggled without intermission to the end. More, he constituted himself a judge of the public corruption, rudely attacked the reigning vices, 'fearing no strumpets drugs, nor ruffians. stab." He treated his hearers like schoolboys, and spoke to them always like a censor and a master. If necessary, he ventured further. His companions, Marston and Chapman, had been put in prison for an irreverent phrase in one of their pieces; and the report spreading that their noses and ears were to be slit, Jonson, who had taken part in the piece, voluntarily made himself a prisoner, and obtained their pardon. On his return, amid the feasting and rejoicing, his mother showed him a violent poison which she intended to put into his drink, to save him from the sentence; and 'to show that she was not a coward,' adds Jonson, she had resolved to drink first.' We see that in the matter of vigorous actions he found examples in his own family. Toward the end of his life, money failed him; he was liberal, improvident ; his pockets always had holes in them, as his hand was always open; though he had written a vast quantity, he was obliged to write still in order to live. Paralysis came on, his scurvy was aggravated, dropsy attacked him. He could not leave his room, nor walk without assistance. His last plays did not succeed. In the epilogue to the New Inn he says: 'If you expect more than you had to-night, The maker is sick and sad. All that his faint and falt'ring tongue doth crave, Is, that you not impute it to his brain, That's yet unhurt, altho' set round with pain, His enemies brutally insulted him: 'Thy Pegasus. He had bequeathed his belly unto thee, 1 Parts of Crites and Asper. 2 Every Man out of his Humour, i. Inigo Jones, his colleague, deprived him of the patronage of the court. He was obliged to beg a supply of money from the Lord Treasurer, then from the Earl of Newcastle : His wife and children were dead; he lived alone, forsaken, served by an old woman. Thus almost always, sadly and miserably is dragged out and ends the last act of the human comedy. After so many years, after so many sustained efforts, amid so much glory and genius, we find a poor shattered body, drivelling and suffering, between a servant and a priest. II. It This is the life of a combatant, bravely endured, worthy of the seventeenth century by its crosses and its energy; courage and force abounded throughout. Few writers have laboured more, and more conscientiously; his knowledge was vast, and in this age of great scholars he was one of the best classics of his time, as deep as he was accurate and thorough, having studied the minutest details of ancient life. was not enough for him to have stored himself from the best writers, to have their whole works continually in his mind, to scatter his pages, whether he would or no, with recollections of them. He dug into the orators, critics, scholiasts, grammarians, and compilers of inferior rank; he picked up stray fragments; he took characters, jokes, refinements, from Athenæus, Libanius, Philostratus. He had so well entered into and digested the Greek and Latin ideas, that they were incorporated with his own. They enter into his speech without discord; they spring forth in him as vigorous as at their first birth; he originates even when he remembers. On every subject he had this thirst for knowledge, and this gift of mastering knowledge. He knew alchemy when he wrote the Alchemist. He is familiar with alembics, retorts, receivers, as if he had passed his life seeking after the philosopher's stone. He explains incineration, calcination, imbibition, rectification, reverberation, as well as Agrippa and Paracelsus. If he speaks of cosmetics, he brings out a shopful of them; one might make out of his plays a dictionary of the oaths and costumes of courtiers; he seems to have a specialty in all branches. A still greater proof of his force is, 1 Ben Jonson's Poems, ed. Bell, An Epistle Mendicant, to Richard, Lord Weston, Lord High Treasurer (1631), p. 244. 2 The Devil is an Ass. that his learning in nowise mars his vigour; heavy as is the mass with which he loads himself, he carries it without stooping. This wonderful compound of reading and observation suddenly begins to move, and falls like a mountain on the overwhelmed reader. We must hear Sir Epicure Mammon unfold the vision of splendours and debauchery, in which he means to plunge, when he has learned to make gold. The refined and unchecked impurities of the Roman decadence, the splendid obscenities of Heliogabalus, the gigantic fancies of luxury and lewdness, tables of gold spread with foreign dainties, draughts of dissolved pearls, nature devastated to provide a single dish, the crimes committed by sensuality, against nature, reason, and justice, the delight in defying and outraging law,—all these images pass before the eyes with the dash of a torrent and the force of a great river. Phrase on phrase, event upon event, ideas and facts crowd into the dialogue to paint a situation, to give clearness to a character, produced from this deep memory, directed by this solid logic, launched by this powerful reflection. It is a pleasure to see him advance under the weight of so many observations and recollections, loaded with technical details and learned reminiscences, without deviation or pause, a genuine literary Leviathan, like the war elephants which used to bear towers, men, weapons, machines on their backs, and ran as swiftly under the freight as a nimble steed. In the great dash of this heavy advance, he finds a path which suits him. He has his style. Classical erudition and education made him a classic, and he writes like his Greek models and his Roman masters. The more we study the Latin races and literatures in contrast with the Teutonic, the more fully we become convinced that the proper and distinctive gift of the first is the art of development, that is, of drawing up ideas in connected rank, according to the rules of rhetoric and eloquence, by studied transitions, with regular progress, without shock or discontinuity. Jonson received from his acquaintance with the ancients the habit of decomposing ideas, unfolding them part by part in natural order, making himself understood and believed. From the first thought to the final conclusion, he conducts the reader by a continuous and uniform ascent. The track never fails with him, as with Shakspeare. He does not advance like the rest by sudden intuitions, but by consecutive deductions; we can walk with him without need of bounding, and we are continually kept upon the straight path: antithesis of words unfolds antithesis of thoughts; symmetrical phrases guide the mind through difficult ideas; they are like barriers set on either side of the road to prevent our falling in the ditch. We do not meet on our way extraordinary, sudden, brilliant images, which might dazzle or delay us; we travel on, enlightened by moderate and sustained metaphors. Jonson has all the procedures of Latin art; even, when he wishes it, especially on Latin subjects, he has the last and most erudite, the brilliant concision of Seneca and Lucan, the parallel equipoised, filed off antitheses, |
