"With an armed and resolved hand,
I'll strip the ragged follies of the time
Naked as at their birth... and with a whip of steel,
Print wounding lashes in their iron ribs.
I fear no mood stampt in a private brow,
When I am pleas'd t' unmask a public vice.
I fear no strumpet's drugs, nor ruffian's stab,
Should I detect their hateful luxuries;"[525]
above all, a scorn of base compliance, an open disdain for
"Those jaded wits
That run a broken pace for common hire,"[526]
an enthusiasm, or deep love of
"A happy muse,
Borne on the wings of her immortal thought,
That kicks at earth with a disdainful heel,
And beats at heaven gates with her bright hoofs."[527]
Such are the energies which he brought to the drama and to comedy; they were great enough to insure him a high and separate position.
[SECTION III.—The Dramas Catiline and Sejanus]
For whatever Jonson undertakes, whatever be his faults, haughtiness, rough-handling, predilection for morality and the past, antiquarian and censorious instincts, he is never little or dull. It signifies nothing that in his latinized tragedies, "Sejanus, Catiline," he is fettered by the worship of the old worn models of the Roman decadence; nothing that he plays the scholar, manufactures Ciceronian harangues, hauls in choruses imitated from Seneca, holds forth in the style of Lucan and the rhetors of the empire; he more than once attains a genuine accent; through his pedantry, heaviness, literary adoration of the ancients, nature forces its way; he lights, at his first attempt, on the crudities, horrors, gigantic lewdness, shameless depravity of imperial Rome; he takes in hand and sets in motion the lusts and ferocities, the passions of courtesans and princesses, the daring of assassins and of great men, which produced Messalina, Agrippina, Catiline, Tiberius.[528] In the Rome which he places before us we go boldly and straight to the end; justice and pity oppose no barriers. Amid these customs of victors and slaves, human nature is upset, corruption and villainy are held as proofs of insight and energy. Observe how, in "Sejanus," assassination is plotted and carried out with marvellous coolness. Livia discusses with Sejanus the methods of poisoning her husband, in a clear style, without circumlocution, as if the subject were how to gain a lawsuit or to serve up a dinner. There are no equivocations, no hesitation, no remorse in the Rome of Tiberius. Glory and virtue consist in power; scruples are for base minds; the mark of a lofty heart is to desire all and to dare all. Macro says rightly:
"Men's fortune there is virtue; reason their will;
Their license, law; and their observance, skill.
Occasion is their foil; conscience, their stain;
Profit, their lustre; and what else is, vain."[529]