We might almost quit him here with a somewhat similar leave-taking; but for his great reputation some other places shall be handled. Some obiter dicta. At XIV. 11 there are some remarks on the delusive powers of words; at XVI. 4, 5 some on grammar and rhetoric, including a rather interesting observation, not sufficiently expanded or worked out, that “in modern languages it seemeth to me as free to make new measures of verses as of dances”; in XVIII. a handling of strictly oratorical rhetoric, with a digression to these “Colours of Good and Evil” which interested Bacon so much; in XX. another descant on the same art; in XXI. a puff of the Basilikon Doron; in XXXII. observations on the moral influence of books; in XXXV. some general observations on literature; and, just before the close, a well-known and often-quoted eulogy, certainly not undeserved, of the eloquence of the English pulpit for forty years past.
If it were not for the singular want of a clear conception of literary Criticism, which has prevailed so long and so widely, it would hardly be necessary to take, with any seriousness at all, a man who has no more than this to say on the subject.[[265]] The whole of very slight importance. It is most assuredly no slight to Bacon to deny him a place in a regiment where he never had the least ambition to serve. That he was himself a great practitioner of literature, and so, necessarily if indirectly, a critic of it in his own case, is perfectly true; the remarks which have been quoted above on the Ciceronians show that, when he took the trouble, and found the opportunity, he could make them justly and soundly. But his purpose, his interests, his province, his vein, lay far elsewhere. To him, it is pretty clear, literary expression was, in relation to his favourite studies and dreams, but a higher kind of pen-and-ink or printing-press. He distrusted the stability of modern languages, and feared that studies couched in them might some day or other come to be unintelligible and lost to the world. This famous fear explains the nature and the limits of his interest in literature. It was a vehicle or a treasury, a distributing agent or a guard. Its functions and qualities accorded: it was to be clear, not disagreeable, solidly constructed, intelligible to as large a number of readers as possible. The psychological character and morphological definition of poetry interested him philosophically. But in the art and the beauty of poetry and literature generally, for their own sakes, he seems to have taken no more interest than he did in the coloured pattern plots in gardens, which he compared to “tarts.” To a man so minded, as to those more ancient ones of similar mind whom we have discussed in the first volume, Criticism proper could, at the best, be a pastime to be half ashamed of—a “theatre” in which to while away the hours; it could not possibly be a matter of serious as well as enthusiastic study.
Between Bacon and Ben may be best noticed the short Anacrisis or Censure of Poets, Ancient and Modern,[[266]] by Sir William Alexander, Earl of Stirling. Stirling’s Anacrisis. It has received high praise;[[267]] but even those who think by no means ill of Aurora, may find some difficulty in indorsing this. It is simply a sort of “Note,” written, as the author says, to record his impressions during a reading of the poets, which he had undertaken as refreshment after great travail both of body and mind. He thinks Language “but the apparel of poesy,” thereby going even further than those who would assign that position to verse, and suggesting a system of “Inarticulate Poetics,” which he would have been rather put to it to body forth. He only means, however, that he judges in the orthodox Aristotelian way, by “the fable and contexture.” A subsequent comparison of a poem to a garden suggests Vauquelin de la Fresnaye (v. supra, p. 129), whom he may have read. Alexander is a sort of general lover in poetry; he likes this in Virgil, that in Ovid, that other in Horace; defends Lucan against Scaliger, even to the point of blaming the conclusion of the Æneid; finds “no man that doth satisfy him more than that notable Italian, Torquato Tasso”; admits the historical as well as the fictitious poetic subject; but thinks that “the treasures of poetry cannot be better bestowed than upon the apparelling of Truth; and Truth cannot be better apparelled to please young lovers than with the excellences of poetry.” Disrespectful language neither need nor should be used of so slight a thing, which is, and pretends to be, nothing more than a sort of table-book entry by a gentleman of learning as well as quality. But, if it has any “importance” at all, it is surely that of being yet another proof of the rapid diffusion of critical taste and practice, not of stating “theory and methods considerably in advance of the age.” If we could take extensively his protest against those who “would bound the boundless liberty of the poet,” such language might indeed be justified; but the context strictly limits it to the very minor, though then, and for long before and after, commonly debated, question of Fiction v. History in subject.
Save perhaps in one single respect (where the defect was not wholly his fault), Ben Jonson might be described as a critic armed at all points. Ben Jonson: his equipment. His knowledge of literature was extremely wide, being at the same time solid and thorough. While he had an understanding above all things strong and masculine, he was particularly addicted, though in no dilettante fashion, to points of form. His whole energies, and they were little short of Titanic, were given to literature. And, lastly, if he had not the supremest poetic genius, he had such a talent that only the neighbourhood of supremacy dwarfs it. Where he came short was not in a certain hardness of temper and scholasticism of attitude: for these, if kept within bounds, and tempered by that enthusiasm for letters which he possessed, are not bad equipments for the critic. It was rather in the fact that he still came too early for it to be possible for him, except by the help of a miracle, to understand the achievements and value of the vernaculars. By his latest days, indeed,[[268]] the positive performance of these was already very great. Spain has hardly added anything since, and Italy not very much, to her share of European literature; France was already in the first flush of her “classical” period, after a long and glorious earlier history: and what Ben’s own contemporaries in England had done, all men know. But mediæval literature was shut from him, as from all, till far later; he does not seem to have been much drawn to Continental letters, and, perhaps in their case, as certainly in English, he was too near—too much a part of the movement—to get it into firm perspective.
In a sense the critical temper in Jonson is all-pervading. It breaks out side by side with, and sometimes even within, his sweetest lyrics; it interposes what may be called parabases in the most unexpected passages[[269]] of his plays. His Prefaces, &c. The Poetaster is almost as much criticism dramatised as The Frogs. But there are three “places,” or groups of places, which it inspires, not in mere suggestion, but with propriety—the occasional Prefaces, or observations, to and on the plays themselves, the Conversations with Drummond, and, above all, the at last fairly (though not yet sufficiently) known Discoveries or Timber.
To piece together, with any elaboration, the more scattered critical passages would be fitter for a monograph on Jonson than for a History of Criticism. The “Address to the Readers” of Sejanus, which contains a reference to the author’s lost Observations on Horace, his Art of Poetry (not the least of such losses) is a fair specimen of them: the dedication of Volpone to “the most noble and most equal sisters, Oxford and Cambridge,” a better. In both, and in numerous other passages of prose and verse, we find the real and solid, though somewhat partial, knowledge, the strong sense, the methodic scholarship of Ben, side by side with his stately, not Euphuistic, but rather too close-packed style, his not ill-founded, but slightly excessive, self-confidence, and that rough knock-down manner of assertion and characterisation which reappeared in its most unguarded form in the Conversations with Drummond.
The critical utterances of these Conversations are far too interesting to be passed over here, though we cannot discuss them in full. The Drummond Conversations. They tell us that Ben thought all (other) rhymes inferior to couplets, and had written a treatise (which, again, would we had!) both against Campion and Daniel (see ante). His objection to “stanzas and cross rhymes” was that “as the purpose might lead beyond them, they were all forced.” Sidney “made every one speak as well as himself,” and so did not keep “decorum” (cf. Puttenham above). Spenser’s stanzas and matter did not please him. Daniel was no poet. He did not like Drayton’s “long verses,” nor Sylvester’s and Fairfax’s translations. He thought the translations of Homer (Chapman’s) and Virgil (Phaer’s) into “long Alexandrines” (i.e., fourteeners) were but prose: yet elsewhere we hear that he “had some of Chapman by heart.” Harington’s Ariosto was the worst of all translations. Donne was sometimes “profane,” and “for not keeping of accent deserved hanging”; but elsewhere he was “the first poet of the world in some things,” though, “through not being understood, he would perish.”[[270]] Shakespeare “wanted art”: and “Abram Francis (Abraham Fraunce) in his English Hexameters was a fool.” “Bartas was not a poet, but a verser, because he wrote not fiction.” He cursed Petrarch for redacting verses to sonnets, “which were like Procrustes’ bed.” Guarini incurred the same blame as Sir Philip: and Lucan was good in parts only. “The best pieces of Ronsard were his Odes.” Drummond’s own verses “were all good, but smelled too much of the schools.” The “silver” Latins, as we should expect, pleased him best. “To have written Southwell’s ‘Burning Babe,’ he would have been content to destroy many of his.”
These are the chief really critical items, though there are others (putting personal gossip aside) of interest; but it may be added, as a curiosity, that he told Drummond that he himself “writ all first in prose” at Camden’s suggestion, and held that “verses stood all by sense, without colours or accent” (poetic diction or metre), “which yet at other times he denied,” says the reporter, a sentence ever to be remembered in connection with these jottings. Remembering it, there is nothing shocking in any of these observations, nor anything really inconsistent. A true critic never holds the neat, positive, “reduced-to-its-lowest-terms” estimate of authors, in which a criticaster delights. His view is always facetted, conditioned. But he may, in a friendly chat, or a conversation for victory, exaggerate this facet or condition, while altogether suppressing others; and this clearly is what Ben did.
For gloss on the Conversations, for reduction to something like system of the critical remarks scattered through the works, and for the nearest approach we can have to a formal presentment of Ben’s critical views, we must go to the Discoveries.[[271]]
The fact that we find no less than four titles for the book—Timber, Explorata, Discoveries, and Sylva—with others of its peculiarities, is explained by the second fact that Jonson never published it. The Discoveries. It never appeared in print till the folio of 1641, years after its author’s death. The Discoveries are described as being made “upon men and matter as they have flowed out of his daily reading, or had their reflux to his peculiar notions of the times.” They are, in fact, notes unnumbered and unclassified (though batches of more or fewer sometimes run on the same subject), each with its Latin heading, and varying in length from a few lines to that of his friend (and partly master) Bacon’s shorter Essays. The influence of those “silver” Latins whom he loved so much is prominent: large passages are simply translated from Quintilian, and for some time[[272]] the tenor is ethical rather than literary. A note on Perspicuitas—elegantia (p. 7) breaks these, but has nothing noteworthy about it, and Bellum scribentium (p. 10) is only a satiric exclamation on the folly of “writers committed together by the ears for ceremonies, syllables, points,” &c. The longer Nil gratius protervo libro (pp. 11, 12) seems a retort for some personal injury, combined with the old complaint of the decadence and degradation of poetry.[[273]] There is just but rather general stricture in Eloquentia (p. 16) on the difference between the arguments of the study and of the world. “I would no more choose a rhetorician for reigning in a school,” says Ben, “than I would choose a pilot for rowing in a pond.”[[274]] Memoria (p. 18) includes a gird at Euphuism. At last we come to business. Censura de poetis (p. 21), introduced by a fresh fling at Euphuism, in De vere argutis, opens with a tolerably confident note, “Nothing in our age is more preposterous than the running judgments upon poetry and poets,” with much more to the same effect, the whole being pointed by the fling, “If it were a question of the water-rhymer’s[[275]] works against Spenser’s, I doubt not but they would find more suffrages.” The famous passage on Shakespeare follows: and the development of Ben’s view, “would he had blotted a thousand,” leads to a more general disquisition on the differences of wits, which includes the sentence already referred to. “Such [i.e., haphazard and inconsistent] are all the Essayists, even their master Montaigne.” The notes now keep close to literature throughout in substance, though their titles (e.g., Ignorantia animæ), and so forth, may seem wider. A heading, De Claris Oratoribus (p. 26), leads to yet another of the purple passages of the book—that on Bacon, in which is intercalated a curious Scriptorum catalogus, limited, for the most part, though Surrey and Wyatt are mentioned, to prose writers. And then for some time ethics, politics, and other subjects, again have Ben’s chief attention.[[276]]