To give these ignorant well-spoken days
Some taste of their abuse of this word HUMOUR.
This rejoices his friend Cordatus:
Oh, do not let your purpose fall, good Asper;
It cannot but arrive most acceptable,
Chiefly to such as have the happiness
Daily to see how _the poor innocent word
Is rack'd and tortured_.
It is then that Asper, or rather Jonson, plunges into a dissertation on
"the elements," which, according to the ancient philosophy, compound the
fragile body of man, with the four "humours," or moistures.[2]
Had not this strange phrase been something more than a modish coinage,
it had not endured so long and spread so wide. Other temporary phrases
of this nature were equally in vogue, nor have they escaped the vigilant
causticity of Jonson. Such were "the vapourers," and "the jeerers;" but
these had not substance in them to live, and Jonson only cast on them a
side-glance. "The humours" were derived from a more elevated source than
the airy nothingness of fashionable cant.
How "the humours" came into vogue may I think be discovered. A work long
famous, and of which multiplied editions, in all the languages of
Europe, were everywhere spread, deeply engaged public attention; this
work was _Huarte's Examen de Ingenios_, translated into English as "The
Examination of Men's Wits." It was long imagined that the Spaniard had
drawn aside the veil from nature herself, revealing among her varieties
those of the human character. The secret, "to what profession a man
will be most apt," must have taken in a wide circle of inquirers. In the
fifth chapter, we learn that "the differences of men's wits depend on
the hot, the moist, and the dry;" the system is carried on through "the
elements" and "the humours." The natural philosophy is of the schools,
but the author's anatomy of the brain amounted to a demonstration of the
phenomenon, as it seemed to him. He, however, had struck out some hardy
novelties and some mendacious illustrations. The system was long
prevalent, and every one now conceived himself to be the passive agent
of his predominant temperament or "humour," and looked for that page
which was to discover to him his own genius. This work in its day made
as great a sensation as the "Esprit" of Helvetius at a later time; and
in effect resembled the phrenology of our day, and was as ludicrously
applied. The first English version--for there are several--appeared in
1594, and we find that, four years after, "the humours" were so rife
that they served to plot a whole comedy, as well as to furnish an
abundance of what they called "epigrams," or short satires of the
reigning mode.
Jonson's intense observation was microscopical when turned to the minute
evolutions of society, while his diversified learning at all times bore
him into a nobler sphere of comprehension. This taste for reality, and
this fulness of knowledge on whatever theme he chose, had a reciprocal
action, and the one could not go without the other. Our poet doggedly
set to "a humour" through its slightest anomalies, and in the pride of
his comic art expanded his prototype. Yet this was but half the labour
which he loved; his mind was stored with the most burdensome knowledge;
and to the scholar the various erudition which he had so diligently
acquired threw a more permanent light over those transient scenes which
the painter of manners had so carefully copied.
The pertinacity of Jonson in heaping such minute particularities of "a
humour," has invariably turned his great dramatic personages into
complete personifications of some single propensity or mode of action;
and thus the individual is changed into an abstract being. The passion
itself is wholly there, but this man of one volition is thrown out of
the common brotherhood of man; an individual so artificially constructed
as to include a whole species. Our poet, if we may decide by the system
which he pursued, seems to have considered his prodigious dramatic
characters as the conduit-pipes to convey the abundant waters which he
had gathered into his deep cisterns.
It is surely evident that such elaborate dramatic personages were not
extemporary creations thrown off in the heat of the pen. Our poet
professed to instruct as much as to delight; and it was in the severity
of thought and the austerity of his genius that his nobler conceptions
arose. His studious habits have been amply ascertained. When he singled
out "a humour," to possess himself of every trait of the anomalous
dispositions he contemplated, he must gradually have accumulated, as
they occurred, the particulars whence to form the aggregate; and like
Swift, in his "Advice to Servants," in his provident diligence he must
have jotted down a mass such as we see so curiously unfolded in "the
character of the persons," prefixed to "Every Man in his Humour," a
singular dramatic sketch. To this mass, with due labour and shaping, he
gave the baptism of an expressive name, and conceived that a name would
necessarily become a person. If he worked in this manner, as I believe
he did, and "the characters" we have just seen confirm the suggestion,
it sufficiently explains the space he required to contain his mighty and
unmixed character--the several made into one; and which we so frequently
observe he was always reluctant to quit, while a stroke in his jottings
remained untold. His cup indeed often runs over, and sometimes the dregs
hang on our lips. We have had perhaps too many of these jottings.
But if Jonson has been accused of having servilely given portraits--and
we have just seen in what an extraordinary way they are portraits--his
learning has also been alleged as something more objectionable in the
dramatic art; and we have often heard something of the pedantry of
Jonson.
In that elaborate personage Sir Epicure Mammon, we have not only the
alchemist and the epicurean to answer that characterizing name, but we
are not to be set free without enduring the obscure babble of "the
projection" and "the projectors"--which assuredly cost some patient
sweat of that curious brain--and further being initiated into the
gastronomic mysteries of the kitchens of the ancients. Volpone, and "the
gentleman who loves not noise," his other masterpieces, like Sir Epicure
Mammon, are of the same colossal character. In "The Fox" and "The Fly,"
the richest veins of antiquity are melted down into his own copious
invention; nor had the ancients themselves a picture so perfect, or a
scene so living, of those legacy-hunters, though that vice was almost a
profession with them. If true learning in the art of the drama be
peccant, our poet is a very saintly sinner; and Jonson indeed was, as
Cleaveland has hailed his manes,
The wonder of a learned age.
The fate of Jonson has inflicted its penalties on his very excellences.
Some modern critics, whose delicacy of taste in its natural feebleness
could not strain itself to the vigour of Jonson, have strangely failed
to penetrate into the depths of that mighty mind; and some modern poets
have delivered their sad evidence, that for them the Coryphaeus of our
elder dramatists has become unintelligible. Of all our dramatists,
Jonson, the Juvenal of our drama, alone professed to study the "humour"
or manners of the age; but manners vanish with their generation; and ere
the century closes even actors cannot be procured to personate
characters of which they view no prototype. They remain as the triumphs
of art and genius, for those who are studious of this rare combination;
but they were the creatures of "the age," and not for "all time," as
Jonson himself energetically and prophetically has said of
Shakespeare.[3]
Shadwell, who has left us nearly twenty comedies, and "the god of whose
idolatry" was Jonson, in his copious prefaces, and prologues and
epilogues, overflows with his egotistical admiration of "the humours."
In his preface to _The Sullen Lovers_, he says that we are not to expect
the intrigue of comedy, plot and business, lest he should "let fall the
humour." And in _The Humourist_, he says, "Mr. Jonson was very unjustly
taxed for personating particular men," in the writing of his humours;
"but it will ever be the fate of them that write the humours of the
town." We have more of this in the dedication of _The Virtuoso_, where
we are told that "four of the humours are entirely new." We have his
definition of these "humours" in the epilogue to _The Humourists_, and
which is neatly expressed.
A Humour is the bias of the mind,
By which, with violence, 'tis one way inclined;
It makes our action lean on one side still;
And, in all changes, that way bends the will.
It is singular that as Jonson has been somewhat censured for drawing so
elaborately these artificial men and their humours, Shadwell should have
adopted the notion, and made it the staple of his comic invention.
When men were more insulated, and society was less monotonous than at
the present day, those whom we now call humourists, without however any
allusion to the system of the humours, and whom we now rarely meet with,
allowed their peculiar tastes and fancies to be more prominent in their
habits, so as to make them more observable, and more the subject of
ridicule than we find them in the present level decorum of society.