A limited précis, however, and a few remarks on special points, cannot do the Discoveries justice. The fragmentary character of the notes that compose it, the pregnant and deliberately “astringed” style in which these notes are written, so that they are themselves the bones, as it were, of a much larger treatise, defy such treatment. Yet it is full of value, as it gives us more than glimpses
“Of what a critic was in Jonson lost,”
or but piecemeal shown. We shall return, in the next chapter, to his relative position; but something should be said here of his intrinsic character.
He does not, as must have been clearly seen, escape the “classical” limitation. General character of the book. With some ignorance, doubtless, and doubtless also some contempt, of the actual achievements of prose romance, and with that stubborn distrust of the modern tongues for miscellaneous prose purposes, which lasted till far into the seventeenth century, if it did not actually survive into the eighteenth, he still clings to the old mistakes about the identity of poetry and “fiction,” about the supremacy of oratory in prose. We hear nothing about the “new versifying,” though no doubt this would have been fully treated in his handling of Campion and Daniel: but had he had any approval for it, that approval must have been glanced at. His preference for the (stopped) couplet[[283]] foreshadowed that which, with beneficial effects in some ways, if by no means in all, was to influence the whole of English poetry, with the rarest exceptions, for nearly two centuries. The personal arrogance which, as in Wordsworth’s case, affected all Ben’s judgment of contemporaries, and which is almost too fully reflected in the Drummond Conversations, would probably have made even his more deliberate judgments of these—his judgments “for publication”—inadequate. But it is fair to remember that Ben’s theory (if not entirely his practice, especially in his exquisite lyrics and almost equally exquisite masques) constrained him to be severe to those contemporaries, from Spenser, Shakespeare, and Donne downwards. The mission of the generation may be summed up in the three words, Liberty, Variety, Romance. Jonson’s tastes were for Order, Uniformity, Classicism.
He is thus doubly interesting—interesting as putting both with sounder scholarship and more original wit what men from Ascham to Puttenham, and later, had been trying to say before him, in the sense of adapting classical precepts to English: and far more interesting as adumbrating, beforehand, the creed of Dryden, and Pope, and Samuel Johnson. Many of his individual judgments are as shrewd as they are one-sided; they are always well, and sometimes admirably, expressed, in a style which unites something of Elizabethan colour, and much of Jacobean weight, with not a little of Augustan simplicity and proportion. He does not head the line of English critics; but he heads, and worthily, that of English critics who have been great both in criticism and in creation.[[284]]
[198]. The two chief monographs on this are Spingarn, op. cit., in the division appurtenant (pp. 253-310), and Professor F. E. Schelling, Poetic and Verse Criticism of the Reign of Elizabeth, Philadelphia, 1891. Haslewood reprinted most of the texts together in Ancient Critical Essays, 2 vols., London, 1811-15, and Mr Arber the most important separately in his English Reprints. Mr Gregory Smith is now editing, for the Clarendon Press, the fullest collection yet issued.
[199]. Such as those on the “fair language of France,” and the strictures passed by Margaret of England and Burgundy on the “default in mine English” (History of Troy); on the “right good and fair English” of Lord Rivers (Dicts and Sayings of the Philosophers).
[200]. There has been some disposition to deny this, and to argue that despite the constant use of the word Rhetoric in the fifteenth century, the teaching of the thing had declined. I do not think there is much evidence of this as regards England; and the long and curious passage of Hawes, to be presently discussed, is strong evidence against it. Rhetoric has no less than eight chapters of the Pastime of Pleasure, as against one apiece for Grammar and Logic.
[201]. The Pastime of Pleasure, ed. Wright (Percy Society, London, 1845), pp. 27-56.