JONSON AND DECKER.
Ben Jonson appears to have carried his military spirit into the literary republic—his gross convivialities, with anecdotes of the prevalent taste in that age for drinking-bouts—his “Poetaster” a sort of Dunciad, besides a personal attack on the frequenters of the theatres, with anecdotes—his Apologetical Dialogue, which was not allowed to be repeated—characters of Decker and of Marston—Decker’s Satiromastix, a parody on Jonson’s “Poetaster”—Ben exhibited under the character of “Horace Junior”—specimens of that literary satire; its dignified remonstrance, and the honourable applause bestowed on the great bard—some foibles in the literary habits of Ben, alluded to by Decker—Jonson’s noble reply to his detractors and rivals.
This quarrel is a splendid instance how genius of the first order, lavishing its satirical powers on a number of contemporaries, may discover, among the crowd, some individual who may return with a right aim the weapon he has himself used, and who will not want for encouragement to attack the common assailant: the greater genius is thus mortified by a victory conceded to the inferior, which he himself had taught the meaner one to obtain over him.
Jonson, in his earliest productions, “Every Man in his Humour,” and “Every Man out of his Humour,” usurped that dictatorship, in the Literary Republic, which he so sturdily and invariably maintained, though long and hardily disputed. No bard has more courageously foretold that posterity would be interested in his labours; and often with very dignified feelings he casts this declaration into the teeth of his adversaries: but a bitter contempt for his brothers and his contemporaries was not less vehement than his affections for those who crowded under his wing. To his “sons” and his admirers he was warmly attached, and no poet has left behind him, in MS., so many testimonies of personal fondness, in the inscriptions and addresses, in the copies of his works which he presented to friends: of these I have seen more than one fervent and impressive.
Drummond of Hawthornden, who perhaps carelessly and imperfectly minuted down the heads of their literary conference 475 on the chief authors of the age, exposes the severity of criticism which Ben exercised on some spirits as noble as his own. The genius of Jonson was rough, hardy, and invincible, of which the frequent excess degenerated into ferocity; and by some traditional tales, this ferocity was still inflamed by large potations: for Drummond informs us, “Drink was the element in which he lived.”[388] Old Ben had given, on two 476 occasions, some remarkable proofs of his personal intrepidity. When a soldier, in the face of both armies, he had fought single-handed with his antagonist, had slain him, and carried off his arms as trophies. Another time he killed his man in a duel. Jonson appears to have carried the same military spirit into the Literary Republic.
Such a genius would become more tyrannical by success, and naturally provoked opposition, from the proneness of mankind to mortify usurped greatness, when they can securely do it. The man who hissed the poet’s play had no idea that he might himself become one of the dramatic personages. Ben then produced his “Poetaster,” which has been called the Dunciad 477 of those times; but it is a Dunciad without notes. The personages themselves are now only known by their general resemblance to nature, with the exception of two characters, those of Crispinus and Demetrius.[389]
In “The Poetaster,” Ben, with flames too long smothered, burst over the heads of all rivals and detractors. His enemies seem to have been among all classes; personages recognised 478 on the scene as soon as viewed; poetical, military, legal, and histrionic. It raised a host in arms. Jonson wrote an apologetical epilogue, breathing a firm spirit, worthy of himself; but its dignity was too haughty to be endured by contemporaries, whom genius must soothe by equality. This apologetical dialogue was never allowed to be repeated; now we may do it with pleasure. Writings, like pictures, require a particular light and distance to be correctly judged and inspected, without any personal inconvenience.
One of the dramatic personages in this epilogue inquires
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I never saw the play breed all this tumult. What was there in it could so deeply offend, And stir so many hornets? |
The author replies:
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——————I never writ that piece More innocent, or empty of offence; Some salt it had, but neither tooth nor gall. ——————Why, they say you tax’d The law and lawyers, captains, and the players, By their particular names. ——————It is not so: I used no names. My books have still been taught To spare the persons, and to speak the vices. |
And he proceeds to tell us, that to obviate this accusation he had placed his scenes in the age of Augustus.
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To show that Virgil, Horace, and the rest Of those great master-spirits, did not want Detractors then, or practisers against them: And by this line, although no parallel, I hoped at last they would sit down and blush. |
But instead of their “sitting down and blushing,” we find—
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That they fly buzzing round about my nostrils; And, like so many screaming grasshoppers Held by the wings, fill every ear with noise. |
Names were certainly not necessary to portraits, where every day the originals were standing by their side. This 479 is the studied pleading of a poet, who knows he is concealing the truth.
There is a passage in the play itself where Jonson gives the true cause of “the tumult” raised against him. Picturing himself under the character of his favourite Horace, he makes the enemies of Horace thus describe him, still, however, preserving the high tone of poetical superiority.
“Alas, sir, Horace is a mere sponge. Nothing but humours and observations he goes up and down sucking from every society, and when he comes home squeezes himself dry again. He will pen all he knows. He will sooner lose his best friend than his least jest. What he once drops upon paper against a man, lives eternally to upbraid him.”
Such is the true picture of a town-wit’s life! The age of Augustus was much less present to Jonson than his own; and Ovid, Tibullus, and Horace were not the personages he cared so much about, as “that society in which,” it was said, “he went up and down sucking in and squeezing himself dry:” the formal lawyers, who were cold to his genius; the sharking captains, who would not draw to save their own swords, and would cheat “their friend, or their friend’s friend,” while they would bully down Ben’s genius; and the little sycophant histrionic, “the twopenny[390] tear-mouth, copper-laced scoundrel, stiff-toe, who used to travel with pumps full of gravel after a blind jade and a hamper, and stalk upon boards and barrel-heads to an old crackt trumpet;” and who all now made a party with some rival of Jonson.
All these personages will account for “the tumult” which excites the innocent astonishment of our author. These only resisted him by “filling every ear with noise.” But one of the “screaming grasshoppers held by the wings,” boldly turned on the holder with a scorpion’s bite; and Decker, who had been lashed in “The Poetaster,” produced his “Satiromastix, or the untrussing of the humorous Poet.” Decker was a subordinate author, indeed; but, what must have been very galling to Jonson, who was the aggressor, indignation proved such an inspirer, that Decker seemed to have caught some portion of Jonson’s own genius, who had the art of making even Decker popular; while he discovered that his own laurel-wreath had been dexterously changed by the “Satiromastix” into a garland of “stinging nettles.”
In “The Poetaster,” Crispinus is the picture of one of those impertinent fellows who resolve to become poets, having an equal aptitude to become anything that is in fashionable request. When Hermogenes, the finest singer in Rome, refused to sing, Crispinus gladly seizes the occasion, and whispers the lady near him—“Entreat the ladies to entreat me to sing, I beseech you.” This character is marked by a ludicrous peculiarity which, turning on an individual characteristic, must have assisted the audience in the true application. Probably Decker had some remarkable head of hair,[391] and that his locks hung not like “the curls of Hyperion;” for the jeweller’s wife admiring among the company the persons of Ovid, Tibullus, &c., Crispinus acquaints her that they were poets, and, since she admires them, promises to become a poet himself. The simple lady further inquires, “if, when he is a poet, his looks will change? and particularly if his hair will change, and be like those gentlemen’s?” “A man,” observes Crispinus, “may be a poet, and yet not change his hair.” “Well!” exclaims the simple jeweller’s wife, “we shall see your cunning; yet if you can change your hair, I pray do it.”
In two elaborate scenes, poor Decker stands for a full-length. Resolved to be a poet, he haunts the company of Horace: he meets him in the street, and discovers all the variety of his nothingness: he is a student, a stoic, an architect: everything by turns, “and nothing long.” Horace impatiently attempts to escape from him, but Crispinus foils him at all points. This affectionate admirer is even willing to go over the world with him. He proposes an ingenious project, if Horace will introduce him to Mæcenas. Crispinus offers to become “his assistant,” assuring him that “he would be content with the next place, not envying thy reputation with thy patron;” and he thinks that Horace and himself “would soon lift out of favour Virgil, Varius, and the best of them, and enjoy them wholly to ourselves.” The restlessness of Horace to extricate himself from this “Hydra of Discourse,” the passing friends whom he calls on to assist him, and the glue-like pertinacity of Crispinus, are richly coloured.
A ludicrous and exquisitely satirical scene occurs at the trial 481 of Crispinus and his colleagues. Jonson has here introduced an invention, which a more recent satirist so happily applied to our modern Lexiphanes, Dr. Johnson, for his immeasurable polysyllables. Horace is allowed by Augustus to make Crispinus swallow a certain pill; the light vomit discharges a great quantity of hard matter, to clear
| His brain and stomach of their tumorous heats. |
These consist of certain affectations in style, and adulteration of words, which offended the Horatian taste: “the basin” is called quickly for and Crispinus gets rid easily of some, but others were of more difficult passage:—
But all was not yet over: “Prorumpt” made a terrible rumbling, as if his spirit was to have gone with it; and there were others which required all the kind assistance of the Horatian “light vomit.” This satirical scene closes with some literary admonitions from the grave Virgil, who details to Crispinus the wholesome diet to be observed after his surfeits, which have filled
| His blood and brain thus full of crudities. |
Virgil’s counsels to the vicious neologist, who debases the purity of English diction by affecting new words or phrases, may too frequently be applied.
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You must not hunt for wild outlandish terms To stuff out a peculiar dialect; But let your matter run before your words. And if at any time you chance to meet Some Gallo-Belgick phrase, you shall not straight Rack your poor verse to give it entertainment, But let it pass; and do not think yourself Much damnified, if you do leave it out When not the sense could well receive it. |
Virgil adds something which breathes all the haughty spirit of Ben: he commands Crispinus:
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——————Henceforth, learn To bear yourself more humbly, nor to swell Or breathe your insolent and idle spite On him whose laughter can your worst affright: |
and dismisses him
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To some dark place, removed from company; He will talk idly else after his physic. |
“The Satiromastix” may be considered as a parody on “The Poetaster.” Jonson, with classical taste, had raised his scene in the court of Augustus: Decker, with great unhappiness, places it in that of William Rufus. The interest of the piece arises from the dexterity with which Decker has accommodated those very characters which Jonson has satirised in his “Poetaster.” This gratified those who came every day to the theatre, delighted to take this mimetic revenge on the arch bard.
In Decker’s prefatory address “To the World,” he observes, “Horace haled his Poetasters to the bar;[392] the Poetasters untrussed Horace: Horace made himself believe that his Burgonian wit[393] might desperately challenge all comers, and that none durst take up the foils against him.” But Decker is the Earl Rivers! He had been blamed for the personal attacks on Jonson; for “whipping his fortunes and condition of life; where the more noble reprehension had been of his mind’s deformity:” but for this he retorts on Ben. Some censured Decker for barrenness of invention, in bringing on those characters in his own play whom Jonson had stigmatised; but “it was not improper,” he says, “to set the same dog upon Horace, whom Horace had set to worry others.” Decker warmly concludes with defying the Jonsonians.
“Let that mad dog Detraction bite till his teeth be worn to the stumps; Envy, feed thy snakes so fat with poison till they burst; World, let all thy adders shoot out their Hydra-headed forked stings! I thank thee, thou true Venusian Horace, for these good words thou givest me. Populus me sibilat, at mihi plaudo.”
The whole address is spirited. Decker was a very popular 483 writer, whose numerous tracts exhibit to posterity a more detailed narrative of the manners of the town in the Elizabethan age than is elsewhere to be found.
In Decker’s Satiromastix, Horace junior is first exhibited in his study, rehearsing to himself an ode: suddenly the Pindaric rapture is interrupted by the want of a rhyme; this is satirically applied to an unlucky line of Ben’s own. One of his “sons,” Asinius Bubo, who is blindly worshipping his great idol, or “his Ningle,” as he calls him, amid his admiration of Horace, perpetually breaks out into digressive accounts of what sort of a man his friends take him to be. For one, Horace in wrath prepares an epigram: and for Crispinus and Fannius, brother bards, who threaten “they’ll bring your life and death on the stage, as a bricklayer in a play,” he says, “I can bring a prepared troop of gallants, who, for my sake, shall distaste every unsalted line in their fly-blown comedies.” “Ay,” replies Asinius, “and all men of my rank!” Crispinus, Horace calls “a light voluptuous reveller,” and Fannius “the slightest cobweb-lawn piece of a poet.” Both enter, and Horace receives them with all friendship.
The scene is here conducted not without skill. Horace complains that
To the querulous satirist, Crispinus replies with dignified gravity—
At this the galled Horace winces. Crispinus continues, that it is in vain Horace swears, that
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———————He puts on The office of an executioner, Only to strike off the swoln head of sin, Where’er you find it standing. Say you swear, And make damnation, parcel of your oath, That when your lashing jests make all men bleed, Yet you whip none—court, city, country, friends, Foes, all must smart alike.— |
Fannius, too, joins, and shows Ben the absurd oaths he takes, when he swears to all parties, that he does not mean them. How, then, of five hundred and four, five hundred
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Should all point with their fingers in one instant, At one and the same man? |
Horace is awkwardly placed between these two friendly remonstrants, to whom he promises perpetual love.
Captain Tucca, a dramatic personage in Jonson’s Poetaster, and a copy of his own Bobadil, whose original the poet had found at “Powles,” the fashionable lounge of that day, is here continued with the same spirit; and as that character permitted from the extravagance of its ribaldry, it is now made the vehicle for those more personal retorts, exhibiting the secret history of Ben, which perhaps twitted the great bard more than the keenest wit, or the most solemn admonition which Decker could ever attain. Jonson had cruelly touched on Decker being out at elbows, and made himself too merry with the histrionic tribe: he, who was himself a poet, and had been a Thespian! The blustering captain thus attacks the great wit:—“Do’st stare, my Saracen’s head at Newgate? I’ll march through thy Dunkirk guts, for shooting jests at me.” He insists that as Horace, “that sly knave, whose shoulders were once seen lapp’d in a player’s old cast cloak,” and who had reflected on Crispinus’s satin doublet being ravelled out; that he should wear one of Crispinus’s 485 “old cast sattin suits,” and that Fannius should write a couple of scenes for his own “strong garlic comedies,” and Horace should swear that they were his own—he would easily bear “the guilt of conscience.” “Thy Muse is but a hagler, and wears clothes upon best be trust (a humorous Deckerian phrase)—thou’rt great in somebody’s books for this!” Did it become Jonson to gibe at the histrionic tribe, who is himself accused of “treading the stage, as if he were treading mortar.”[394] He once put up—“a supplication to be a poor journeyman player, and hadst been still so, but that thou couldst not set a good face upon’t. Thou hast forget how thou ambled’st in leather-pilch, by a play-waggon in the highway; and took’st mad Jeronimo’s part, to get service among the mimics,” &c.
Ben’s person was, indeed, not gracious in the playfulness of love or fancy. A female, here, thus delineates Ben:—
“That same Horace has the most ungodly face, by my fan; it looks for all the world like a rotten russet-apple, when ’tis bruised. It’s better than a spoonful of cinnamon-water next my heart, for me to hear him speak; he sounds it so i’ th’ nose, and talks and rants like the poor fellows under Ludgate—to see his face make faces, when he reads his songs and sonnets.”
Again, we have Ben’s face compared with that of his favourite, Horace’s—“You staring Leviathan! look on the sweet visage of Horace; look, parboil’d face, look—he has not his face punchtfull of eyelet-holes, like the cover of a warming-pan.”
Joseph Warton has oddly remarked that most of our poets were handsome men. Jonson, however, was not poetical on that score; though his bust is said to resemble Menander’s.
Such are some of the personalities with which Decker recriminated.
Horace is thrown into many ludicrous situations. He is told that “admonition is good meat.” Various persons bring forward their accusations; and Horace replies that they envy him,
| Because I hold more worthy company. |
The greatness of Ben’s genius is by no means denied by 486 his rivals; and Decker makes Fannius reply, with noble feelings, and in an elevated strain of poetry:—
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Good Horace, no! my cheeks do blush for thine, As often as thou speakst so; where one true And nobly virtuous spirit, for thy best part Loves thee, I wish one, ten; even from my heart! I make account, I put up as deep share In any good man’s love, which thy worth earns, As thou thyself; we envy not to see Thy friends with bays to crown thy poesy. No, here the gall lies;—We, that know what stuff Thy very heart is made of, know the stalk On which thy learning grows, and can give life To thy, once dying, baseness; yet must we Dance anticke on your paper—. But were thy warp’d soul put in a new mould, I’d wear thee as a jewel set in gold. |
To which one adds, that “jewels, master Horace, must be hanged, you know.” This “Whip of Men,” with Asinius his admirer, are brought to court, transformed into satyrs, and bound together: “not lawrefied, but nettle-fied;” crowned with a wreath of nettles.
| With stinging-nettles crown his stinging wit. |
Horace is called on to swear, after Asinius had sworn to give up his “Ningle.”
“Now, master Horace, you must be a more horrible swearer; for your oath must be, like your wits, of many colours; and like a broker’s book, of many parcels.”
Horace offers to swear till his hairs stand up on end, to be rid of this sting. “Oh, this sting!” alluding to the nettles. “’Tis not your sting of conscience, is it?” asks one. In the inventory of his oaths, there is poignant satire, with strong humour; and it probably exhibits some foibles in the literary habits of our bard.
He swears “Not to hang himself, even if he thought any man could write plays as well as himself; not to bombast out a new play with the old linings of jests stolen from the Temple’s Revels; not to sit in a gallery, when your comedies have entered their actions, and there make vile and bad faces at every line, to make men have an eye to you, and to make players afraid; not to venture on the stage, when your play is ended, and exchange courtesies and compliments with gallants to make all the house rise and cry—‘That’s Horace 487 that’s he that pens and purges humours.’ When you bid all your friends to the marriage of a poor couple, that is to say, your Wits and Necessities—alias, a poet’s Whitsun-ale—you shall swear that, within three days after, you shall not abroad, in bookbinders’ shops, brag that your viceroys, or tributary-kings, have done homage to you, or paid quarterage. Moreover, when a knight gives you his passport to travel in and out to his company, and gives you money for God’s sake—you will swear not to make scald and wry-mouthed jests upon his knighthood. When your plays are misliked at court, you shall not cry Mew! like a puss-cat, and say, you are glad you write out of the courtier’s element; and in brief, when you sup in taverns, amongst your betters, you shall swear not to dip your manners in too much sauce; nor, at table, to fling epigrams or play-speeches about you.”
The king observes, that
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——————————He whose pen Draws both corrupt and clear blood from all men Careless what vein he pricks; let him not rave When his own sides are struck; blows, blows do crave. |
Such were the bitter apples which Jonson, still in his youth, plucked from the tree of his broad satire, that branched over all ranks in society. That even his intrepidity and hardiness felt the incessant attacks he had raised about him, appears from the close of the Apologetical Epilogueto “The Poetaster;” where, though he replies with all the consciousness of genius, and all its haughtiness, he closes with a determination to give over the composition of comedies! This, however, like all the vows of a poet, was soon broken; and his masterpieces were subsequently produced.
His Friend tells him that he is accused that “all his writing is mere railing;” which Jonson nobly compares to “the salt in the old comedy;” that they say, that he is slow, and “scarce brings forth a play a year.”
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Author. ——————’Tis true, I would they could not say that I did that. |
He is angry that their
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——————Base and beggarly conceits Should carry it, by the multitude of voices, Against the most abstracted work, opposed To the stufft nostrils of the drunken rout.— |
And then exclaims with admirable enthusiasm—
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O this would make a learn’d and liberal soul To rive his stained quill up to the back, And damn his long-watch’d labours to the fire; Things, that were born, when none but the still night, And the dumb candle, saw his pinching throes. |
And again, alluding to these mimics—
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This ’tis that strikes me silent, seals my lips, And apts me rather to sleep out my time, Than I would waste it in contemned strifes With these vile Ibides, these unclean birds, That make their mouths their clysters, and still purge From their hot entrails.[395] But I leave the monsters To their own fate. And since the Comic Muse Hath proved so ominous to me, I will try If Tragedy have a more kind aspect. Leave me! There’s something come into my thought That must and shall be sung, high and aloof, Safe from the wolf’s black jaw, and the dull ass’s hoof. Friend. I reverence these raptures, and obey them. |
Such was the noble strain in which Jonson replied to his detractors in the town and to his rivals about him. Yet this poem, composed with all the dignity and force of the bard, was not suffered to be repeated. It was stopped by authority. But Jonson, in preserving it in his works, sends it “TO POSTERITY, that it may make a difference between their manners that provoked me then, and mine that neglected them ever.”