We return to literature, after some interval (but with a parenthetic glance at the poesis et pictura notion at p. 49), on p. 52, in a curious unheaded letter to an unnamed Lordship on Education, much of which is translated directly from Ben Jonson’s favourite Quintilian; and then directly accost it again with a tractatule De stilo et optimo scribendi genere, p. 54, hardly parting company thereafter. Ben’s prescription is threefold: read the best authors, observe the best speakers, and exercise your own style much. But he is well aware that no “precepts will profit a fool,” and he adapts old advice to English ingeniously, in bidding men read, not only Livy before Sallust, but also Sidney before Donne, and to beware of Chaucer or Gower at first. Here occurs the well-known dictum, that Spenser “in affecting the ancients writ no language; yet I would have him read for his matter.” A fine general head opens with the excellent version of Quintilian, “We should not protect our sloth with the patronage of Difficulty,” and this is followed by some shrewd remarks on diction—the shrewdest being that, after all, the best custom makes, and ever will continue to make, the best speech—with a sharp stroke at Lucretius for “scabrousness,” and at Chaucerisms. Brevity of style, Tacitean and other, is cautiously commended. In the phrase (Oratio imago animi), p. 64, “language most shows a man,” Ben seems to anticipate Buffon, as he later does Wordsworth and Coleridge, by insisting that style is not merely the dress, but the body of thought.[[277]] All this discussion, which enters into considerable detail, is of the first importance, and it occupies nearly a quarter of the whole book. It is continued, the continuation reaching till the end, by a separate discussion of poetry.
It is interesting, but less so than what comes before. A somewhat acid, though personally guarded, description of the present state of the Art introduces the stock definition of “making,” and its corollary that a poet is not one who writes in measure, but one who feigns—all as we have found it before, but (as we should expect of Ben) in succincter and more scholarly form. Yet the first requisite of the poet is ingenium—goodness of natural wit; the next exercise of his parts—“bringing all to the forge and file” (sculpte, lime, cisèle!); the third Imitation—to which Ben gives a turn (not exactly new, for we have met it from Vida downwards), which is not an improvement, by keeping its modern meaning, and understanding by it the following of the classics. “But that which we especially require in him is an exactness of study and multiplicity of reading.” Yet his liberty is not to be so narrowly circumscribed as some would have it. This leads to some interesting remarks on the ancient critics, which the author had evidently meant to extend: as it is, they break off short.[[278]] We turn to the Parts of comedy and tragedy, where Ben is strictly regular—the fable is the imitation of one entire and perfect action, &c. But this also breaks off, after a discussion of fable itself and episode, with an evidently quite disconnected fling at “hobbling poems which run like a brewer’s cart on the stones.”
These Discoveries have to be considered with a little general care before we examine them more particularly. Form of the book. They were, it has been said, never issued by the author himself, and we do not know whether he ever would have issued them in their present form. On the one hand, they are very carefully written, and not mere jottings. In form (though more modern in style) they resemble the earlier essays of that Bacon whom they so magnificently celebrate, in their deliberate conciseness and pregnancy. On the other hand, it is almost impossible to doubt that some at least were intended for expansion; it is difficult not to think that there was plenty more stuff of the same kind in the solidly constructed and well-stored treasuries of Ben’s intelligence and erudition. It is most difficult of all not to see that, in some cases, the thoughts are co-ordinated into regular tractates, in others left loose, as if for future treatment of the same kind.
Secondly, we should like to know rather more than we do of the time of their composition. Its date. Some of them—such as the retrospect of Bacon, and to a less degree that of Shakespeare—must be late; there is a strong probability that all date from the period between the fire in Ben’s study, which destroyed so much, and his death—say between 1620 and 1637. But at the same time there is nothing to prevent his having remembered and recopied observations of earlier date.
Thirdly, it is most important that we rightly understand the composition of the book. Mosaic of old and new. It has sometimes been discovered[[279]] in these Discoveries, with pride, or surprise, or even scorn, that Ben borrowed in them very largely from the ancients. Of course he did, as well as something, though less, from the Italian critics of the age immediately before his own.[[280]] But in neither case could he have hoped for a moment—and in neither is there the slightest reason to suppose that he would have wished if he could have hoped—to disguise his borrowings from a learned age. When a man—such as, for instance, Sterne—wishes to steal and escape, he goes to what nobody reads, not to what everybody is reading. And the Latins of the Silver Age, the two Senecas, Petronius, Quintilian, Pliny, were specially favourites with the Jacobean time. In what is going to be said no difference will be made between Ben’s borrowings and his original remarks: nor will the fact of the borrowing be referred to unless there is some special critical reason. Even the literal translations, which are not uncommon, are made his own by the nervous idiosyncrasy of the phrase, and its thorough adjustment to the context and to his own vigorous and massive temperament.
Of real “book-criticism” there are four chief passages, the brief flings at Montaigne and at “Tamerlanes and Tamerchams,” and the longer notices of Shakespeare and Bacon.
The flirt at “all the Essayists, even their master Montaigne,” is especially interesting, because of the high opinion which Jonson elsewhere expresses of Bacon, the chief, if not the first, English Essayist of his time, and because of the fact that not a few of these very Discoveries are “Essays,” if any things ever were. The fling at Montaigne; Nor would it be very easy to make out a clear distinction, in anything but name, between some of Ben’s most favourite ancient writers and these despised persons. It is, however, somewhat easier to understand the reason of the condemnation. Jonson’s classically ordered mind probably disliked the ostentatious desultoriness and incompleteness of the Essay, the refusal, as it were out of mere insolence, to undertake an orderly treatise. Nor is it quite impossible that he failed fully to understand Montaigne, and was to some extent the dupe of that great writer’s fanfaronade of promiscuousness.
The “Tamerlane and Tamercham”[[281]] fling is not even at first sight surprising. at Tamerlane, It was quite certain that Ben would seriously despise what Shakespeare only laughed at—the confusion, the bombast, the want of order and scheme in the “University Wits”—and it is not probable that he was well enough acquainted with the even now obscure development of the earliest Elizabethan drama to appreciate the enormous improvement which they wrought. Nay, the nearer approach even of such a dull thing as Gorboduc to “the height of Seneca his style,” might have a little bribed him as it bribed Sidney. He is true to his side—to his division of the critical creed—in this also.
The train of thought—censure of the vulgar preference—runs clear from this to the best known passage of the whole, the section De Shakespeare Nostrat. the Shakespeare Passage, It cannot be necessary to quote it, or to point out that Ben’s eulogy, splendid as it is, acquires tenfold force from the fact that it is avowedly given by a man whose general literary theory is different from that of the subject, while the censure accompanying it loses force in exactly the same proportion. What Ben here blames, any ancient critic (perhaps even Longinus) would have blamed too: what Ben praises, it is not certain that any ancient critic, except Longinus, would have seen. Nor is the captious censure of “Cæsar did never wrong but with just cause” the least interesting part of the whole. The paradox is not in our present texts: and there have, of course, not been wanting commentators to accuse Jonson of garbling or of forgetfulness. This is quite commentatorially gratuitous and puerile. It is very like Shakespeare to have written what Ben says: very like Ben to object to the paradox (which, pace tanti viri, is not “ridiculous” at all, but a deliberate and effective hyperbole); very like the players to have changed the text; and most of all like the commentators to make a fuss about the matter.
What may seem the more unstinted eulogy of Bacon is not less interesting. and that on Bacon. For here it is obvious that Ben is speaking with fullest sympathy, and with all but a full acknowledgment of having met an ideal. Except the slight stroke, “when he could spare or pass by a jest,” and the gentle insinuation that Strength, the gift of God, was what Bacon’s friends had to implore for him, there is no admixture whatever in the eulogy of “him who hath filled up all numbers,[[282]] and performed that in our tongue which may be compared or preferred to insolent Greece or haughty Rome.” Indeed it could not have been—even if Ben Jonson had not been a friend, and, in a way, follower of Bacon—but that he should regard the Chancellor as his chief of literary men. Bacon, unluckily for himself, lacked the “unwedgeable and gnarled” strength of the dramatist, and also was without his poetic fire, just as Ben could never have soared to the vast, if vague, conceptions of Bacon’s materialist-Idealism. But they were both soaked in “literature,” as then understood; they were the two greatest masters of the closely packed style that says twenty things in ten words: and yet both could, on occasion, be almost as rhetorically imaginative as Donne or Greville. It is doubtful whether Bacon’s own scientific scorn for words without matter surpassed Jonson’s more literary contempt of the same phenomenon. Everywhere, or almost everywhere, there was between them the idem velle et idem nolle.