Ben Jonson.
I now go back to that friend of Drayton’s—Ben Jonson,[111] whom we saw at the closing of the last chapter going into the tavern of the Mermaid. He goes there, or to other like places, very often. He is a friend no doubt of the landlady; he is a friend, too, of all the housemaids, and talks university chaff to them; a friend, too, of all such male frequenters of the house as will listen to him, and will never dispute him; otherwise he is a slang-whanger and a bear.
He was born, as I have said, some years after Shakespeare, but had roared himself into the front ranks before the people of London were thoroughly satisfied that the actor-author of “Richard III.” was a better man than Ben. Very much of gossip with respect to possible jealousies between Shakespeare and Ben Jonson may be found in the clumsy, bundled-up life of the latter by William Gifford.[112]
Jonson was born probably in the west of London—and born poor; but through the favor of some friends went to Westminster School, near to which his step-father, who was a bricklayer, lived: afterward, through similar favor, he went to Cambridge[113]—not staying very long, because called home to help that step-father at his bricklaying. But he did stay long enough to get a thorough taste for learning, and a thorough grounding in it. So he fretted at the bricks, and ran off and enlisted—serving a while in the Low Countries, where poor Philip Sidney met his death, and coming back, a swaggerer, apt with his sword and his speech, into which he had grafted continentalisms; apt at a quarrel, too, and comes to fight a duel, and to kill his man.[114] For this he went to prison, getting material this way—by hard rubs with the world—for the new work which was ripening in the mind of this actor-author. So, full of all experiences, full of Latin, full of logic, full of history, full of quarrel, full of wine (most whiles) this great, beefy man turned poet. I do not know if you will read—do not think the average reader of to-day will care to study—his dramas. The stories of them are involved, but nicely adjusted as the parts of an intricate machine: you will grow tired, I dare say, of matching part to part; tired of their involutions and evolutions; tired of the puppets in them that keep the machinery going; tired of the passion torn to tatters; tired of the unrest and lack of all repose. Yet there are abounding evidences of wit—of more learning than in Shakespeare, and a great deal drearier; aptnesses of expression, too, which show a keen knowledge of word-meanings and of etymologies; real and deep acquirement manifest, but worn like stiff brocade, or jingling at his pace, like bells upon the heels of a savage. You wonder to find such occasional sense of music with such heavy step—such delicate poise of such gross corporosity.
He helped some hack-writer to put Bacon’s essays into Latin—not that Bacon did not know his Latin; but the great chancellor had not time for the graces of scholastics. Ben wrote an English Grammar, too, which—for its syntax, so far as one may judge from that compend of it which alone remains—is as good as almost any man could invent now. Such learning weighed him down when he put on the buskins, and made the stage tremble with his heaviness. But when he was at play with letters—when he had no plot to contrive and fabricate and foster, and no character to file and finish, and file again, and to fit in with precise order and methodic juxtaposition—when a mad holiday masque—wild as the “Pirates of Penzance”—tempted him to break out into song, his verse is rampant, joyous, exuberant—blithe and dewy as the breath of May-day mornings: See how a little damsel in the dance of his verse sways and pirouettes—
“As if the wind, not she did walk;
Nor pressed a flower, nor bowed a stalk!”
Then, again, in an Epithalamion of his Underwoods, as they were called, there is a fragment of verse, which, in many of its delicious couplets, shows the grace and art of Spenser’s wonderful “Epithalamion,” which we read a little time ago:—He is picturing the bridesmaids strewing the bride’s path with flowers:—
“With what full hands, and in how plenteous showers
Have they bedewed the earth where she doth tread,
As if her airy steps did spring the flowers,
And all the ground were garden, where she led.”
Such verses do not come often into our newspaper corners, from first hands: such verses make one understand the significance of that inscription which came by merest accident to be written on his tomb in Westminster Abbey—“O rare Ben Jonson!”
I do not believe I shall fatigue you—and I know I shall keep you in the way of good things if I give another fragment from one of his festal operettas;—the “Angel” is describing and symbolizing Truth, in the Masque of Hymen:—
“Upon her head she wears a crown of stars,
Thro’ which her orient hair waves to her waist,
By which believing mortals hold her fast,
And in those golden cords are carried even
Till with her breath she blows them up to Heaven.
She wears a robe enchased with eagles’ eyes,
To signify her sight in mysteries;
Upon each shoulder sits a milk-white dove,
And at her feet do witty serpents move;
Her spacious arms do reach from East to west,
And you may see her heart shine thro’ her breast.
Her right hand holds a sun with burning rays
Her left, a curious bunch of golden keys
With which Heaven’s gates she locketh and displays.
A crystal mirror hangeth at her breast,
By which men’s consciences are searched and drest;
On her coach-wheels, Hypocrisy lies racked;
And squint-eyed Slander with Vain glory backed,
Her bright eyes burn to dust, in which shines Fate;
An Angel ushers her triumphant gait,
Whilst with her fingers fans of stars she twists,
And with them beats back Error, clad in mists,
Eternal Unity behind her shines,
That Fire and Water, Earth and Air combines;
Her voice is like a trumpet, loud and shrill,
Which bids all sounds in earth and heaven be still.”
In that line of work Shakespeare never did a better thing than this. Indeed, in those days many, perhaps most, people of learning and culture thought Ben Jonson the better man of the two;—more instructed (as he doubtless was); with a nicer knowledge of the unities; a nicer knowledge of mere conventionalities of all sorts: Shakespeare was a humble, plain Warwickshire man, with no fine tinsel to his wardrobe—had no university training; not so much schooling or science of any sort as Ben Jonson; had come up to London—as would seem—to make his fortune, to get money—to blaze his way: and how he did it!
I suppose a Duchess of Buckingham or any lady of court consequence would have been rather proud of the obeisance of Ben Jonson, after that play of “Every Man in his Humour,” and would have given him a commendatory wave of her fan, much sooner, and more unhesitatingly, than to the Stratford actor, who took the part of Old Knowell in it. Ben believed in conventional laws of speech or of dramatic utterance far more than Shakespeare; he regretted (or perhaps affected to regret when his jealousies were sleeping), that Will Shakespeare did not shape his language and his methods with a severer art;[115] he would—very likely—have lashed him, if he had been under him at school, for his irregularities of form and of speech—irregularities that grew out of Shakespeare’s domination of the language, and his will and his power to make it, in all subtlest phases, the servant, and not the master of his thought.
Do I seem, then, to be favoring the breakage of customs, and of the rules of particular grammarians? Yes, unhesitatingly—if you have the mastery to do it as Shakespeare did it; that is, if you have that finer sense of the forces and delicacies of language which will enable you to wrest its periods out of the ruts of every-day traffic, and set them to sonorous roll over the open ground, which is broad as humanity and limitless as thought. Parrots must be taught to prate, particle by particle; but the Bob-o-Lincoln swings himself into his great flood of song as no master can teach him to sing.
Even now we do not bid final adieu to Ben Jonson; but hope to encounter him again in the next reign (that of James I.) through the whole of which he carried his noisy literary mastership.