“Some critics of the last age imagined the character of Morose to
be wholly out of nature. But to vindicate our poet, Mr. Dryden
tells us from tradition, and we may venture to take his word, that
Jonson was really acquainted with a person of this whimsical turn
of mind: and as humour is a personal quality, the poet is
acquitted from the charge of exhibiting a monster, or an
extravagant unnatural _caricatura_.”
If Dryden had not made all additional proof superfluous by his own plays,
this very vindication would evince that he had formed a false and vulgar
conception of the nature and conditions of drama and dramatic personation.
Ben Jonson would himself have rejected such a plea:—
“For he knew, poet never credit gain’d
By writing _truths_, but things, like truths, well feign’d.”
By “truths” he means “facts.” Caricatures are not less so because they are
found existing in real life. Comedy demands characters, and leaves
caricatures to farce. The safest and the truest defence of old Ben would
be to call the _Epicœne_ the best of farces. The defect in Morose, as in
other of Jonson’s _dramatis personæ_, lies in this;—that the accident is
not a prominence growing out of, and nourished by, the character which
still circulates in it; but that the character, such as it is, rises out
of, or, rather, consists in, the accident. Shakespeare’s comic personages
have exquisitely characteristic features; however awry, disproportionate,
and laughable they may be, still, like Bardolph’s nose, they are features.
But Jonson’s are either a man with a huge wen, having a circulation of its
own, and which we might conceive amputated, and the patient thereby losing
all his character; or they are mere wens themselves instead of men,—wens
personified, or with eyes, nose, and mouth cut out, mandrake-fashion.
_Nota bene._—All the above, and much more, will have justly been said, if,
and whenever, the drama of Jonson is brought into comparisons of rivalry
with the Shakespearian. But this should not be. Let its inferiority to the
Shakespearian be at once fairly owned,—but at the same time as the
inferiority of an altogether different _genius_ of the drama. On this
ground, old Ben would still maintain his proud height. He, no less than
Shakespeare stands on the summit of his hill, and looks round him like a
master,—though his be Lattrig and Shakespeare’s Skiddaw.
“The Alchemist.”