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.
Some Prose Writers.
You must not believe, because I have kept mainly by poetic writers in these later days of Queen Elizabeth, that there were no men who wrote prose—none who wrote travels, histories, letters of advice; none who wrote stupid, dull, goodish books; alas, there were plenty of them; there always are.
But there were some to be remembered too: there was William Camden—to whom I have briefly alluded already—and of whom, when you read good histories of this and preceding reigns, you will find frequent mention. He was a learned man, and a kind man, excellent antiquarian, and taught Ben Jonson at Westminster School. There was Stow,[116] who wrote a Survey of London, which he knew from top to bottom. He was born in the centre of it, and as a boy used to fetch milk from a farm at the Minories, to his home in Cornhill, where his father was a tailor. His fulness, his truthfulness, his simplicities, and his quaintness have made his chief book—on London—a much-prized one.
Again there was Hakluyt,[117] who was a church official over in Bristol, and who compiled Voyages of English seamen which are in every well-appointed library. Dr. Robertson says in his History, “England is more indebted [to Hakluyt] for its American possessions than to any man of that age.” Of so much worth is it to be a good geographer! The “Hakluyt Society” of England will be his enduring monument.
There was also living in those last days of the sixteenth century a strange, conceited, curious travelling man, Thomas Coryat[118] by name, who went on foot through Europe, and published (in 1611) what he called—with rare and unwitting pertinence—Coryat’s Crudities. He affixed to them complimentary mention of himself—whimseys by the poets, even by so great a man as Ben Jonson—a budget of queer, half-flattering, half-ironical rigmarole, which (having plenty of money) he had procured to be written in his favor; and so ushered his book into the world as something worth large notice. He would have made a capital showman. He had some training at Oxford, and won his way by an inflexible persistence into familiarity with men of rank, who made a butt of him. With a certain gift for language he learned Arabic in some one of his long journeyings, was said to have knowledge of Persian, and made an oration in that speech to the Great Mogul—with nothing but language in it. His Crudities are rarely read; but some letters and fragments relating to later travels of his, appear in Purchas’ Pilgrims. He lays hold upon peculiarities and littlenesses of life in his work which more sensible men would overlook, and which give a certain quaint piquancy to what he told; and we listen, as one might listen to barbers or dressmakers who had just come back from Paris, and would tell us things about cravats and hair-oil and street sights that we could learn no otherwheres. Coryat says:—