It comes as something of a surprise to find that the niche reserved for
Ben Jonson in the “English Men of Letters” series has only now been
filled. One expected somehow that he would have been among the first of
the great ones to be enshrined; but no, he has had a long time to wait;
and Adam Smith, and Sydney Smith, and Hazlitt, and Fanny Burney have
gone before him into the temple of fame. Now, however, his monument has
at last been made, with Professor Gregory Smith’s qualified version of
“O rare Ben Jonson!” duly and definitively carved upon it.
What is it that makes us, almost as a matter of course, number Ben
Jonson among the great? Why should we expect him to be an early
candidate for immortality, or why, indeed, should he be admitted to the
“English Men of Letters” series at all? These are difficult questions to
answer; for when we come to consider the matter we find ourselves unable
to give any very glowing account of Ben or his greatness. It is hard to
say that one likes his work; one cannot honestly call him a good poet or
a supreme dramatist. And yet, unsympathetic as he is, uninteresting as
he often can be, we still go on respecting and admiring him, because, in
spite of everything, we are conscious, obscurely but certainly, that he
was a great man.
He had little influence on his successors; the comedy of humours died
without any but an abortive issue. Shadwell, the mountain-bellied “Og,
from a treason tavern rolling home,” is not a disciple that any man
would have much pride in claiming. No raking up of literary history will
make Ben Jonson great as a founder of a school or an inspirer of others.
His greatness is a greatness of character. There is something almost
alarming in the spectacle of this formidable figure advancing with
tank-like irresistibility towards the goal he had set himself to attain.
No sirens of romance can seduce him, no shock of opposition unseat him
in his career. He proceeds along the course theoretically mapped out at
the inception of his literary life, never deviating from this narrow way
till the very end—till the time when, in his old age, he wrote that
exquisite pastoral, _The Sad Shepherd_, which is so complete and
absolute a denial of all his lifelong principles. But _The Sad Shepherd_
is a weakness, albeit a triumphant weakness. Ben, as he liked to look
upon himself, as he has again and again revealed himself to us, is the
artist with principles, protesting against the anarchic absence of
principle among the geniuses and charlatans, the poets and ranters of
his age.
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. And though his language differ from the
vulgar somewhat, it shall not fly from all humanity, with the
Tamerlanes and Tamer-Chams of the late age, which had nothing in them
but the scenical strutting and furious vociferation to warrant them to
the ignorant gapers. He knows it is his only art, so to carry it as
none but artificers perceive it. In the meantime, perhaps, he is
called barren, dull, lean, a poor writer, or by what contumelious word
can come in their cheeks, by these men who without labour, judgment,
knowledge, or almost sense, are received or preferred before him.
In these sentences from _Discoveries_ Ben Jonson paints his own
picture—portrait of the artist as a true artificer—setting forth, in its
most general form, and with no distracting details of the humours or the
moral purpose of art, his own theory of the artist’s true function and
nature. Jonson’s theory was no idle speculation, no mere thing of words
and air, but a creed, a principle, a categorical imperative,
conditioning and informing his whole work. Any study of the poet must,
therefore, begin with the formulation of his theory, and must go on, as
Professor Gregory Smith’s excellent essay does indeed proceed, to show
in detail how the theory was applied and worked out in each individual
composition.
A good deal of nonsense has been talked at one time or another about
artistic theories. The artist is told that he should have no theories,
that he should warble native wood-notes wild, that he should “sing,” be
wholly spontaneous, should starve his brain and cultivate his heart and
spleen; that an artistic theory cramps the style, stops up the Helicons
of inspiration, and so on, and so on. The foolish and sentimental
conception of the artist, to which these anti-intellectual doctrines are
a corollary, dates from the time of romanticism and survives among the
foolish and sentimental of to-day. A consciously practised theory of art
has never spoiled a good artist, has never dammed up inspiration, but
rather, and in most cases profitably, canalized it. Even the Romantics
had theories and were wild and emotional on principle.
Theories are above all necessary at moments when old traditions are
breaking up, when all is chaos and in flux. At such moments an artist
formulates his theory and clings to it through thick and thin; clings to
it as the one firm raft of security in the midst of the surrounding
unrest. Thus, when the neo-Classicism, of which Ben was one of the
remote ancestors, was crumbling into the nothingness of _The Loves of
the Plants_ and _The Triumphs of Temper_, Wordsworth found salvation by
the promulgation of a new theory of poetry, which he put into practice
systematically and to the verge of absurdity in _Lyrical Ballads_.
Similarly in the shipwreck of the old tradition of painting we find the
artists of the present day clinging desperately to intellectual formulas
as their only hope in the chaos. The only occasions, in fact, when the
artist can afford entirely to dispense with theory occur in periods when
a well-established tradition reigns supreme and unquestioned. And then
the absence of theory is more apparent than real; for the tradition in
which he is working is a theory, originally formulated by someone else,
which he accepts unconsciously and as though it were the law of Nature
itself.
The beginning of the seventeenth century was not one of these periods of
placidity and calm acceptance. It was a moment of growth and decay
together, of fermentation. The fabulous efflorescence of the Renaissance
had already grown rank. With that extravagance of energy which
characterized them in all things, the Elizabethans had exaggerated the
traditions of their literature into insincerity. All artistic traditions
end, in due course, by being reduced to the absurd; but the Elizabethans
crammed the growth and decline of a century into a few years. One after
another they transfigured and then destroyed every species of art they
touched. Euphuism, Petrarchism, Spenserism, the sonnet, the drama—some
lasted a little longer than others, but they all exploded in the end,
these beautiful iridescent bubbles blown too big by the enthusiasm of
their makers.
But in the midst of this unstable luxuriance voices of protest were to
be heard, reactions against the main romantic current were discernible.
Each in his own way and in his own sphere, Donne and Ben Jonson
protested aganst the exaggerations of the age. At a time when sonneteers
in legions were quibbling about the blackness of their ladies’ eyes or
the golden wires of their hair, when Platonists protested in melodious
chorus that they were not in love with “red and white” but with the
ideal and divine beauty of which peach-blossom complexions were but
inadequate shadows, at a time when love-poetry had become, with rare
exceptions, fantastically unreal, Donne called it back, a little grossly
perhaps, to facts with the dry remark:
Love’s not so pure and abstract as they use
To say, who have no mistress but their muse.
There have been poets who have written more lyrically than Donne, more
fervently about certain amorous emotions, but not one who has formulated
so rational a philosophy of love as a whole, who has seen all the facts
so clearly and judged them so soundly. Donne laid down no literary
theory. His followers took from him all that was relatively
unimportant—the harshness, itself a protest against Spenserian facility,
the conceits, the sensuality tempered by mysticism—but the important and
original quality of Donne’s work, the psychological realism, they could
not, through sheer incapacity, transfer into their own poetry. Donne’s
immediate influence was on the whole bad. Any influence for good he may
have had has been on poets of a much later date.
The other great literary Protestant of the time was the curious subject
of our examination, Ben Jonson. Like Donne he was a realist. He had no
use for claptrap, or rant, or romanticism. His aim was to give his
audiences real facts flavoured with sound morality. He failed to be a
great realist, partly because he lacked the imaginative insight to
perceive more than the most obvious and superficial reality, and partly
because he was so much preoccupied with the sound morality that he was
prepared to sacrifice truth to satire; so that in place of characters he
gives us humours, not minds, but personified moral qualities.
Ben hated romanticism; for, whatever may have been his bodily habits,
however infinite his capacity for drinking sack, he belonged
intellectually to the party of sobriety. In all ages the drunks and the
sobers have confronted one another, each party loud in derision and
condemnation of the defects which it observes in the other. “The
Tamerlanes and Tamer-Chams of the late age” accuse the sober Ben of
being “barren, dull, lean, a poor writer.” Ben retorts that they “have
nothing in them but the scenical strutting and furious vociferation to
warrant them to the ignorant gapers.” At another period it is the
Hernanis and the Rollas who reproach that paragon of dryness, the almost
fiendishly sober Stendhal, with his grocer’s style. Stendhal in his turn
remarks: “En paraissant, vers 1803, le _Génie_ de Chateaubriand m’a
semblé ridicule.” And to-day? We have our sobers and our drunks, our
Hardy and our Belloc, our Santayana and our Chesterton. The distinction
is eternally valid. Our personal sympathies may lie with one or the
other; but it is obvious that we could dispense with neither. Ben, then,
was one of the sobers, protesting with might and main against the
extravagant behaviour of the drunks, an intellectual insisting that
there was no way of arriving at truth except by intellectual processes,
an apotheosis of the Plain Man determined to stand no nonsense about
anything. Ben’s poetical achievement, such as it is, is the achievement
of one who relied on no mysterious inspiration, but on those solid
qualities of sense, perseverance, and sound judgment which any decent
citizen of a decent country may be expected to possess. That he himself
possessed, hidden somewhere in the obscure crypts and recesses of his
mind, other rarer spiritual qualities is proved by the existence of his
additions to _The Spanish Tragedy_—if, indeed, they are his, which there
is no cogent reason to doubt—and his last fragment of a masterpiece,
_The Sad Shepherd_. But these qualities, as Professor Gregory Smith
points out, he seems deliberately to have suppressed; locked them away,
at the bidding of his imperious theory, in the strange dark places from
which, at the beginning and the very end of his career, they emerged. He
might have been a great romantic, one of the sublime inebriates; he
chose rather to be classical and sober. Working solely with the logical
intellect and rejecting as dangerous the aid of those uncontrolled
illogical elements of imagination, he produced work that is in its own
way excellent. It is well-wrought, strong, heavy with learning and what
the Chaucerians would call “high sentence.” The emotional intensity and
brevity excepted, it possesses all the qualities of the French classical
drama. But the quality which characterizes the best Elizabethan and
indeed the best English poetry of all periods, the power of moving in
two worlds at once, it lacks. Jonson, like the French dramatists of the
seventeenth century, moves on a level, directly towards some logical
goal. The road over which his great contemporaries take us is not level;
it is, as it were, tilted and uneven, so that as we proceed along it we
are momently shot off at a tangent from the solid earth of logical
meaning into superior regions where the intellectual laws of gravity
have no control. The mistake of Jonson and the classicists in general
consists in supposing that nothing is of value that is not susceptible
of logical analysis; whereas the truth is that the greatest triumphs of
art take place in a world that is not wholly of the intellect, but lies
somewhere between it and the inenarrable, but, to those who have
penetrated it, supremely real, world of the mystic. In his fear and
dislike of nonsense, Jonson put away from himself not only the
Tamer-Chams and the fustian of the late age, but also most of the beauty
it had created.
With the romantic emotions of his predecessors and contemporaries Jonson
abandoned much of the characteristically Elizabethan form of their
poetry. That extraordinary melodiousness which distinguishes the
Elizabethan lyric is not to be found in any of Ben’s writing. The poems
by which we remember him—“Cynthia,” “Drink to Me Only,” “It is Not
Growing Like a Tree”—are classically well made (though the cavalier
lyrists were to do better in the same style); but it is not for any
musical qualities that we remember them. One can understand Ben’s
critical contempt for those purely formal devices for producing musical
richness in which the Elizabethans delighted.
Eyes, why did you bring unto me these graces,
Grac’d to yield wonder out of her true measure,
Measure of all joyes’ stay to phansie traces
Module of pleasure.
The device is childish in its formality, the words, in their obscurity,
almost devoid of significance. But what matter, since the stanza is a
triumph of sonorous beauty? The Elizabethans devised many ingenuities of
this sort; the minor poets exploited them until they became ridiculous;
the major poets employed them with greater discretion, playing subtle
variations (as in Shakespeare’s sonnets) on the crude theme. When
writers had something to say, their thoughts, poured into these
copiously elaborate forms, were moulded to the grandest, poetical
eloquence. A minor poet, like Lord Brooke, from whose works we have just
quoted a specimen of pure formalism, could produce, in his moments of
inspiration, such magnificent lines as:
The mind of Man is this world’s true dimension,
And knowledge is the measure of the mind;
or these, of the nethermost hell:
A place there is upon no centre placed,
Deepe under depthes, as farre as is the skie
Above the earth; darke, infinitely spaced:
Pluto the king, the kingdome, miserie.
Even into comic poetry the Elizabethans imported the grand manner. The
anonymous author of
Tee-hee, tee-hee! Oh sweet delight
He tickles this age, who can
Call Tullia’s ape a marmosite
And Leda’s goose a swan,
knew the secret of that rich, facile music which all those who wrote in
the grand Elizabethan tradition could produce. Jonson, like Donne,
reacted against the facility and floridity of this technique, but in a
different way. Donne’s protest took the form of a conceited subtlety of
thought combined with a harshness of metre. Jonson’s classical training
inclined him towards clarity, solidity of sense, and economy of form. He
stands, as a lyrist, half-way between the Elizabethans and the cavalier
song-writers; he has broken away from the old tradition, but has not yet
made himself entirely at home in the new. At the best he achieves a
minor perfection of point and neatness. At the worst he falls into that
dryness and dulness with which he knew he could be reproached.
We have seen from the passage concerning the true artificer that Jonson
fully realized the risk he was running. He recurs more than once in
_Discoveries_ to the same theme, “Some men to avoid redundancy run into
that [a “thin, flagging, poor, starved” style]; and while they strive to
have no ill-blood or juice, they lose their good.” The good that Jonson
lost was a great one. And in the same way we see to-day how a fear of
becoming sentimental, or “chocolate-boxy,” drives many of the younger
poets and artists to shrink from treating of the great emotions or the
obvious lavish beauty of the earth. But to eschew a good because the
corruption of it is very bad is surely a sign of weakness and a folly.
Having lost the realm of romantic beauty—lost it deliberately and of set
purpose—Ben Jonson devoted the whole of his immense energy to portraying
and reforming the ugly world of fact. But his reforming satiric
intentions interfered, as we have already shown, with his realistic
intentions, and instead of recreating in his art the actual world of
men, he invented the wholly intellectual and therefore wholly unreal
universe of Humours. It is an odd new world, amusing to look at from the
safe distance that separates stage from stalls; but not a place one
could ever wish to live in—one’s neighbours, fools, knaves, hypocrites,
and bears would make the most pleasing prospect intolerable. And over it
all is diffused the atmosphere of Jonson’s humour. It is a curious kind
of humour, very different from anything that passes under that name
to-day, from the humour of _Punch_, or _A Kiss for Cinderella_. One has
only to read _Volpone_—or, better still, go to see it when it is acted
this year by the Phœnix Society for the revival of old plays—to realize
that Ben’s conception of a joke differed materially from ours. Humour
has never been the same since Rousseau invented humanitarianism.
Syphilis and broken legs were still a great deal more comic in
Smollett’s day than in our own. There is a cruelty, a heartlessness
about much of the older humour which is sometimes shocking, sometimes,
in its less extreme forms, pleasantly astringent and stimulating after
the orgies of quaint pathos and sentimental comedy in which we are
nowadays forced to indulge. There is not a pathetic line in _Volpone_;
all the characters are profoundly unpleasant, and the fun is almost as
grim as fun can be. Its heartlessness is not the brilliant, cynical
heartlessness of the later Restoration comedy, but something ponderous
and vast. It reminds us of one of those enormous, painful jokes which
fate sometimes plays on humanity. There is no alleviation, no purging by
pity and terror. It requires a very hearty sense of humour to digest it.
We have reason to admire our ancestors for their ability to enjoy this
kind of comedy as it should be enjoyed. It would get very little
appreciation from a London audience of to-day.
In the other comedies the fun is not so grim; but there is a certain
hardness and brutality about them all—due, of course, ultimately to the
fact that the characters are not human, but rather marionettes of wood
and metal that collide and belabour one another, like the ferocious
puppets of the Punch and Judy show, without feeling the painfulness of
the proceeding. Shakespeare’s comedy is not heartless, because the
characters are human and sensitive. Our modern sentimentality is a
corruption, a softening of genuine humanity. We need a few more Jonsons
and Congreves, some more plays like _Volpone_, or that inimitable
_Marriage à la Mode_ of Dryden, in which the curtain goes up on a lady
singing the outrageously cynical song that begins:
Why should a foolish marriage vow,
That long ago was made,
Constrain us to each other now
When pleasure is decayed?
Too much heartlessness is intolerable (how soon one turns, revolted,
from the literature of the Restoration!), but a little of it now and
then is bracing, a tonic for relaxed sensibilities. A little ruthless
laughter clears the air as nothing else can do; it is good for us, every
now and then, to see our ideals laughed at, our conception of nobility
caricatured; it is good for solemnity’s nose to be tweaked, it is good
for human pomposity to be made to look mean and ridiculous. It should be
the great social function—as Marinetti has pointed out—of the music
halls, to provide this cruel and unsparing laughter, to make a
buffoonery of all the solemnly accepted grandeurs and nobilities. A good
dose of this mockery, administered twice a year at the equinoxes, should
purge our minds of much waste matter, make nimble our spirits and
brighten the eye to look more clearly and truthfully on the world about
us.
Ben’s reduction of human beings to a series of rather unpleasant Humours
is sound and medicinal. Humours do not, of course, exist in actuality;
they are true only as caricatures are true. There are times when we
wonder whether a caricature is not, after all, truer than a photograph;
there are others when it seems a stupid lie. But at all times a
caricature is disquieting; and it is very good for most of us to be made
uncomfortable.