Down is too hard; and then, mine oval room
Fill’d with such pictures as Tiberius took
From Elephantis, and dull Aretine
But coldly imitated. Then, my glasses
Cut in more subtle angles, to disperse
And multiply the figures, as I walk....
Jonson is the legitimate heir of Marlowe. The man who wrote, in
_Volpone_:
for thy love,
In varying figures, I would have contended
With the blue Proteus, or the hornèd flood....
and
See, a carbuncle
May put out both the eyes of our Saint Mark;
A diamond would have bought Lollia Paulina,
When she came in like star-light, hid with jewels....
is related to Marlowe as a poet; and if Marlowe is a poet, Jonson is
also. And, if Jonson’s comedy is a comedy of humours, then Marlowe’s
tragedy, a large part of it, is a tragedy of humours. But Jonson has too
exclusively been considered as the typical representative of a point of
view toward comedy. He has suffered from his great reputation as a
critic and theorist, from the effects of his intelligence. We have been
taught to think of him as the man, the dictator (confusedly in our minds
with his later namesake), as the literary politician impressing his
views upon a generation; we are offended by the constant reminder of his
scholarship. We forget the comedy in the humours, and the serious artist
in the scholar. Jonson has suffered in public opinion, as anyone must
suffer who is forced to talk about his art.
If you examine the first hundred lines or more of _Volpone_ the verse
appears to be in the manner of Marlowe, more deliberate, more mature,
but without Marlowe’s inspiration. It looks like mere “rhetoric,”
certainly not “deeds and language such as men do use”! It appears to us,
in fact, forced and flagitious bombast. That it is not “rhetoric,” or at
least not vicious rhetoric, we do not know until we are able to review
the whole play. For the consistent maintenance of this manner conveys in
the end an effect not of verbosity, but of bold, even shocking and
terrifying directness. We have difficulty in saying exactly what
produces this simple and single effect. It is not in any ordinary way
due to management of intrigue. Jonson employs immense dramatic
constructive skill: it is not so much skill in plot as skill in doing
without a plot. He never manipulates as complicated a plot as that of
_The Merchant of Venice_; he has in his best plays nothing like the
intrigue of Restoration comedy. In _Bartholomew Fair_ it is hardly a
plot at all; the marvel of the play is the bewildering rapid chaotic
action of the fair; it is the fair itself, not anything that happens to
take place in the fair. In _Volpone_, or _The Alchemist_, or _The Silent
Woman_, the plot is enough to keep the players in motion; it is rather
an “action” than a plot. The plot does not hold the play together; what
holds the play together is a unity of inspiration that radiates into
plot and personages alike.
We have attempted to make more precise the sense in which it was said
that Jonson’s work is “of the surface”; carefully avoiding the word
“superficial.” For there is work contemporary with Jonson’s which is
superficial in a pejorative sense in which the word cannot be applied to
Jonson—the work of Beaumont and Fletcher. If we look at the work of
Jonson’s great contemporaries, Shakespeare, and also Donne and Webster
and Tourneur (and sometimes Middleton), have a depth, a third dimension,
as Mr. Gregory Smith rightly calls it, which Jonson’s work has not.
Their words have often a network of tentacular roots reaching down to
the deepest terrors and desires. Jonson’s most certainly have not; but
in Beaumont and Fletcher we may think that at times we find it. Looking
closer, we discover that the blossoms of Beaumont and Fletcher’s
imagination draw no sustenance from the soil, but are cut and slightly
withered flowers stuck into sand.
Wilt thou, hereafter, when they talk of me,
As thou shalt hear nothing but infamy,
Remember some of these things?...
I pray thee, do; for thou shalt never see me so again.
Hair woven in many a curious warp,
Able in endless error to enfold
The wandering soul;...
Detached from its context, this looks like the verse of the greater
poets; just as lines of Jonson, detached from their context, look like
inflated or empty fustian. But the evocative quality of the verse of
Beaumont and Fletcher depends upon a clever appeal to emotions and
associations which they have not themselves grasped; it is hollow. It is
superficial with a vacuum behind it; the superficies of Jonson is solid.
It is what it is; it does not pretend to be another thing. But it is so
very conscious and deliberate that we must look with eyes alert to the
whole before we apprehend the significance of any part. We cannot call a
man’s work superficial when it is the creation of a world; a man cannot
be accused of dealing superficially with the world which he himself has
created; the superficies _is_ the world. Jonson’s characters conform to
the logic of the emotions of their world. It is a world like
Lobatchevsky’s; the worlds created by artists like Jonson are like
systems of non-Euclidean geometry. They are not fancy, because they have
a logic of their own; and this logic illuminates the actual world,
because it gives us a new point of view from which to inspect it.
A writer of power and intelligence, Jonson endeavoured to promulgate, as
a formula and programme of reform, what he chose to do himself; and he
not unnaturally laid down in abstract theory what is in reality a
personal point of view. And it is in the end of no value to discuss
Jonson’s theory and practice unless we recognize and seize this point of
view, which escapes the formulæ, and which is what makes his plays worth
reading. Jonson behaved as the great creative mind that he was: he
created his own world, a world from which his followers, as well as the
dramatists who were trying to do something wholly different, are
excluded. Remembering this, we turn to Mr. Gregory Smith’s
objection—that Jonson’s characters lack the third dimension, have no
life out of the theatrical existence in which they appear—and demand an
inquest. The objection implies that the characters are purely the work
of intellect, or the result of superficial observation of a world which
is faded or mildewed. It implies that the characters are lifeless. But
if we dig beneath the theory, beneath the observation, beneath the
deliberate drawing and the theatrical and dramatic elaboration, there is
discovered a kind of power, animating Volpone, Busy, Fitzdottrel, the
literary ladies of _Epicœne_, even Bobadil, which comes from below the
intellect, and for which no theory of humours will account. And it is
the same kind of power which vivifies Trimalchio, and Panurge, and some
but not all of the “comic” characters of Dickens. The fictive life of
this kind is not to be circumscribed by a reference to “comedy” or to
“farce”; it is not exactly the kind of life which informs the characters
of Molière or that which informs those of Marivaux—two writers who were,
besides, doing something quite different the one from the other. But it
is something which distinguishes Barabas from Shylock, Epicure Mammon
from Falstaff, Faustus from—if you will—Macbeth; Marlowe and Jonson from
Shakespeare and the Shakespearians, Webster, and Tourneur. It is not
merely Humours: for neither Volpone nor Mosca is a humour. No theory of
humours could account for Jonson’s best plays or the best characters in
them. We want to know at what point the comedy of humours passes into a
work of art, and why Jonson is not Brome.
The creation of a work of art, we will say the creation of a character
in a drama, consists in the process of transfusion of the personality,
or, in a deeper sense, the life, of the author into the character. This
is a very different matter from the orthodox creation in one’s own
image. The ways in which the passions and desires of the creator may be
satisfied in the work of art are complex and devious. In a painter they
may take the form of a predilection for certain colours, tones, or
lightings; in a writer the original impulse may be even more strangely
transmuted. Now, we may say with Mr. Gregory Smith that Falstaff or a
score of Shakespeare’s characters have a “third dimension” that Jonson’s
have not. This will mean, not that Shakespeare’s spring from the
feelings or imagination and Jonson’s from the intellect or invention;
they have equally an emotional source; but that Shakespeare’s represent
a more complex tissue of feelings and desires, as well as a more supple,
a more susceptible temperament. Falstaff is not only the roast
Malmesbury ox with the pudding in his belly; he also “grows old,” and,
finally, his nose is as sharp as a pen. He was perhaps the
_satisfaction_ of more, and of more complicated feelings; and perhaps he
was, as the great tragic characters must have been, the offspring of
deeper, less apprehensible feelings: deeper, but not necessarily
stronger or more intense, than those of Jonson. It is obvious that the
spring of the difference is not the difference between feeling and
thought, or superior insight, superior perception, on the part of
Shakespeare, but his susceptibility to a greater range of emotion, and
emotion deeper and more obscure. But his characters are no more “alive”
than are the characters of Jonson.
The world they live in is a larger one. But small worlds—the worlds
which artists create—do not differ only in magnitude; if they are
complete worlds, drawn to scale in every part, they differ in kind also.
And Jonson’s world has this scale. His type of personality found its
relief in something falling under the category of burlesque or
farce—though when you are dealing with a _unique_ world, like his, these
terms fail to appease the desire for definition. It is not, at all
events, the farce of Molière: the latter is more analytic, more an
intellectual redistribution. It is not defined by the word “satire.”
Jonson poses as a satirist. But satire like Jonson’s is great in the end
not by hitting off its object, but by creating it; the satire is merely
the means which leads to the æsthetic result, the impulse which projects
a new world into a new orbit. In _Every Man in his Humour_ there is a
neat, a very neat, comedy of humours. In discovering and proclaiming in
this play the new genre Jonson was simply recognizing, unconsciously,
the route which opened out in the proper direction for his instincts.
His characters are and remain, like Marlowe’s, simplified characters;
but the simplification does not consist in the dominance of a particular
humour or monomania. That is a very superficial account of it. The
simplification consists largely in reduction of detail, in the seizing
of aspects relevant to the relief of an emotional impulse which remains
the same for that character, in making the character conform to a
particular setting. This stripping is essential to the art, to which is
also essential a flat distortion in the drawing; it is an art of
caricature, of great caricature, like Marlowe’s. It is a great
caricature, which is beautiful; and a great humour, which is serious.
The “world” of Jonson is sufficiently large; it is a world of poetic
imagination; it is sombre. He did not get the third dimension, but he
was not trying to get it.
If we approach Jonson with less frozen awe of his learning, with a
clearer understanding of his “rhetoric” and its applications, if we
grasp the fact that the knowledge required of the reader is not
archæology but knowledge of Jonson, we can derive not only instruction
in non Euclidean humanity—but enjoyment. We can even apply him, be aware
of him as a part of our literary inheritance craving further expression.
Of all the dramatists of his time, Jonson is probably the one whom the
present age would find the most sympathetic, if it knew him. There is a
brutality, a lack of sentiment, a polished surface, a handling of large
bold designs in brilliant colours, which ought to attract about three
thousand people in London and elsewhere. At least, if we had a
contemporary Shakespeare and a contemporary Jonson, it would be the
Jonson who would arouse the enthusiasm of the intelligentsia! Though he
is saturated in literature, he never sacrifices the theatrical
qualities—theatrical in the most favourable sense—to literature or to
the study of character. His work is a titanic show. But Jonson’s
masques, an important part of his work, are neglected; our flaccid
culture lets shows and literature fade, but prefers faded literature to
faded shows. There are hundreds of people who have read _Comus_ to ten
who have read the _Masque of Blackness_. _Comus_ contains fine poetry,
and poetry exemplifying some merits to which Jonson’s masque poetry
cannot pretend. Nevertheless, _Comus_ is the death of the masque; it is
the transition of a form of art—even of a form which existed for but a
short generation—into “literature,” literature cast in a form which has
lost its application. Even though _Comus_ was a masque at Ludlow Castle,
Jonson had, what Milton came perhaps too late to have, a sense for
living art; his art was applied. The masques can still be read, and with
pleasure, by anyone who will take the trouble—a trouble which in this
part of Jonson is, indeed, a study of antiquities—to imagine them in
action, displayed with the music, costume, dances, and the scenery of
Inigo Jones. They are additional evidence that Jonson had a fine sense
of form, of the purpose for which a particular form is intended;
evidence that he was a literary artist even more than he was a man of
letters.
Philip Massinger
I
Massinger has been more fortunately and more fairly judged than several
of his greater contemporaries. Three critics have done their best by
him: the notes of Coleridge exemplify Coleridge’s fragmentary and fine
perceptions; the essay of Leslie Stephen is a piece of formidable
destructive analysis; and the essay of Swinburne is Swinburne’s
criticism at its best. None of these, probably, has put Massinger
finally and irrefutably into a place.
English criticism is inclined to argue or persuade rather than to state;
and, instead of forcing the subject to expose himself, these critics
have left in their work an undissolved residuum of their own good taste,
which, however impeccable, is something that requires our faith. The
principles which animate this taste remain unexplained. Mr.
Cruickshank’s book is a work of scholarship; and the advantage of good
scholarship is that it presents us with evidence which is an invitation
to the critical faculty of the reader: it bestows a method, rather than
a judgment.
It is difficult—it is perhaps the supreme difficulty of criticism—to
make the facts generalize themselves; but Mr. Cruickshank at least
presents us with facts which are capable of generalization. This is a
service of value; and it is therefore wholly a compliment to the author
to say that his appendices are as valuable as the essay itself.
The sort of labour to which Mr. Cruickshank has devoted himself is one
that professed critics ought more willingly to undertake. It is an
important part of criticism, more important than any mere expression of
opinion. To understand Elizabethan drama it is necessary to study a
dozen playwrights at once, to dissect with all care the complex growth,
to ponder collaboration to the utmost line. Reading Shakespeare and
several of his contemporaries is pleasure enough, perhaps all the
pleasure possible, for most. But if we wish to consummate and refine
this pleasure by understanding it, to distil the last drop of it, to
press and press the essence of each author, to apply exact measurement
to our own sensations, then we must compare; and we cannot compare
without parcelling the threads of authorship and influence. We must
employ Mr. Cruickshank’s method to examine Mr. Cruickshank’s judgments;
and perhaps the most important judgment to which he has committed
himself is this:—
Massinger, in his grasp of stagecraft, his flexible metre, his
desire in the sphere of ethics to exploit both vice and virtue, is
typical of an age which had much culture, but which, without being
exactly corrupt, lacked moral fibre.
Here, in fact, is our text: to elucidate this sentence would be to
account for Massinger. We begin vaguely with good taste, by a
recognition that Massinger is inferior: can we trace this inferiority,
dissolve it, and have left any element of merit?
We turn first to the parallel quotations from Massinger and Shakespeare
collocated by Mr. Cruickshank to make manifest Massinger’s indebtedness.
One of the surest of tests is the way in which a poet borrows. Immature
poets imitate; mature poets steal; bad poets deface what they take, and
good poets make it into something better, or at least something
different. The good poet welds his theft into a whole of feeling which
is unique, utterly different from that from which it was torn; the bad
poet throws it into something which has no cohesion. A good poet will
usually borrow from authors remote in time, or alien in language, or
diverse in interest. Chapman borrowed from Seneca; Shakespeare and
Webster from Montaigne. The two great followers of Shakespeare, Webster
and Tourneur, in their mature work do not borrow from him; he is too
close to them to be of use to them in this way. Massinger, as Mr.
Cruickshank shows, borrows from Shakespeare a good deal. Let us profit
by some of the quotations with which he has provided us—
_Massinger_: Can I call back yesterday, with all their aids
That bow unto my sceptre? or restore
My mind to that tranquillity and peace
It then enjoyed?
_Shakespeare_: Not poppy, nor mandragora,
Nor all the drowsy syrops of the world
Shall ever medecine thee to that sweet sleep
Which thou owedst yesterday.
Massinger’s is a general rhetorical question, the language just and
pure, but colourless. Shakespeare’s has particular significance; and the
adjective “drowsy” and the verb “medecine” infuse a precise vigour. This
is, on Massinger’s part, an echo rather than an imitation or a
plagiarism—the basest, because least conscious form of borrowing.
“Drowsy syrop” is a condensation of meaning frequent in Shakespeare, but
rare in Massinger.
_Massinger_: Thou didst not borrow of Vice her indirect,
Crooked, and abject means.
_Shakespeare_: God knows, my son,
By what by-paths and indirect crook’d ways
I met this crown.
Here, again, Massinger gives the general forensic statement, Shakespeare
the particular image. “Indirect crook’d” is forceful in Shakespeare; a
mere pleonasm in Massinger. “Crook’d ways” is a metaphor; Massinger’s
phrase only the ghost of a metaphor.
_Massinger_: And now, in the evening,
When thou shoud'st pass with honour to thy rest,
Wilt thou fall like a meteor?
_Shakespeare_: I shall fall
Like a bright exhalation in the evening,
And no man see me more.
Here the lines of Massinger have their own beauty. Still, a “bright
exhalation” appears to the eye and makes us catch our breath in the
evening; “meteor” is a dim simile; the word is worn.
_Massinger_: What you deliver to me shall be lock’d up
In a strong cabinet, of which you yourself
Shall keep the key.
_Shakespeare_: ’Tis in my memory locked,
And you yourself shall keep the key of it.
In the preceding passage Massinger had squeezed his simile to death,
here he drags it round the city at his heels; and how swift
Shakespeare’s figure is! We may add two more passages, not given by our
commentator; here the model is Webster. They occur on the same page, an
artless confession.
Here he comes,
His nose held up; he hath something in the wind,
is hardly comparable to “the Cardinal lifts up his nose like a foul
porpoise before a storm,” and when we come upon
as tann’d galley-slaves
Pay such as do redeem them from the oar
it is unnecessary to turn up the great lines in the _Duchess of Malfi_.
Massinger fancied this galley-slave; for he comes with his oar again in
the _Bondman_—
Never did galley-slave shake off his chains,
Or looked on his redemption from the oar....
Now these are mature plays; and the _Roman Actor_ (from which we have
drawn the two previous extracts) is said to have been the preferred play
of its author.
We may conclude directly from these quotations that Massinger’s feeling
for language had outstripped his feeling for things; that his eye and
his vocabulary were not in close co-operation. One of the greatest
distinctions of several of his elder contemporaries—we name Middleton,
Webster, Tourneur—is a gift for combining, for fusing into a single
phrase, two or more diverse impressions.
... in her strong toil of grace
of Shakespeare is such a fusion; the metaphor identifies itself with
what suggests it; the resultant is one and is unique—
Does the silk worm _expend_ her _yellow labours_?...
Why does yon fellow _falsify highways_
And lays his life between the judge’s lips
To _refine_ such a one? keeps horse and men
To _beat their valours_ for her?
Let the common sewer take it from distinction....
Lust and forgetfulness have been amongst us....
These lines of Tourneur and of Middleton exhibit that perpetual slight
alteration of language, words perpetually juxtaposed in new and sudden
combinations, meanings perpetually _eingeschachtelt_ into meanings,
which evidences a very high development of the senses, a development of
the English language which we have perhaps never equalled. And, indeed,
with the end of Chapman, Middleton, Webster, Tourneur, Donne we end a
period when the intellect was immediately at the tips of the senses.
Sensation became word and the word was sensation. The next period is the
period of Milton (though still with a Marvell in it); and this period is
initiated by Massinger.
It is not that the word becomes less exact. Massinger is, in a wholly
eulogistic sense, choice and correct. And the decay of the senses is not
inconsistent with a greater sophistication of language. But every vital
development in language is a development of feeling as well. The verse
of Shakespeare and the major Shakespearian dramatists is an innovation
of this kind, a true mutation of species. The verse practised by
Massinger is a different verse from that of his predecessors; but it is
not a development based on, or resulting from, a new way of feeling. On
the contrary, it seems to lead us away from feeling altogether.
We mean that Massinger must be placed as much at the beginning of one
period as at the end of another. A certain Boyle, quoted by Mr.
Cruickshank, says that Milton’s blank verse owes much to the study of
Massinger’s.
In the indefinable touches which make up the music of a verse [says
Boyle], in the artistic distribution of pauses, and in the unerring
choice and grouping of just those words which strike the ear as the
perfection of harmony, there are, if we leave Cyril Tourneur’s
_Atheist’s Tragedy_ out of the question, only two masters in the
drama, Shakespeare in his latest period and Massinger.
This Boyle must have had a singular ear to have preferred Tourneur’s
apprentice work to his _Revenger’s Tragedy_, and one must think that he
had never glanced at Ford. But though the appraisal be ludicrous, the
praise is not undeserved. Mr. Cruickshank has given us an excellent
example of Massinger’s syntax—
What though my father
Writ man before he was so, and confirm’d it,
By numbering that day no part of his life
In which he did not service to his country;
Was he to be free therefore from the laws
And ceremonious form in your decrees?
Or else because he did as much as man
In those three memorable overthrows,
At Granson, Morat, Nancy, where his master,
The warlike Charalois, with whose misfortunes
I bear his name, lost treasure, men, and life,
To be excused from payment of those sums
Which (his own patrimony spent) his zeal
To serve his country forced him to take up!