Nor pressed a flower, nor bow’d a stalk.”
The dialogue in the masques of Ben Jonson is marked by strength and boldness, and the songs are replete with all the luxuriance of the richest fancy. In his dramatic works, and also in his longer poems, there is a compression which produces hardness and severity, but, as Gifford beautifully expresses it, “no sooner has he taken down his lyre, no sooner touched his lighter pieces, than all is changed, as if by magic, and he becomes a new person. His genius awakes at once, his imagination becomes fertile, ardent, versatile, and excursive; his taste pure and elegant; and all his faculties attuned to liveliness and pleasure.”[[218]]
The masque was therefore one of the highest intellectual delights of an intellectual age. Whilst Jonson composed the dialogues, in which “the soundest moral lessons came recommended by the charm of numbers,” the chief artists of the realm were employed in decorative scenery, the construction of which was at its climax in the time of James. Lawes, and other noted composers, set the songs to music; the masque was the courtly recreation of gallant gentlemen, and ladies of honour, striving to exceed one another in their measures and changes, and in their repasts of wit. Notwithstanding the efforts of Inigo Jones, under whose guidance many of the accompaniments were framed to preserve it, and those of Aurelius Townshend, the masque fell again into the pageant and masquerade after the death of James, and, in spite of an effort made by Charles II. to revive it, ceased to exist.
The “Vision of Delight,” one of the most fanciful and beautiful of Jonson’s masques, was performed on Twelfth Night, and the expenses of the representation were defrayed by Buckingham. It was to celebrate his new dignity as a Marquis, to which James had resolved to elevate him, that the following lines, spoken by Delight, seen afar off, with his attendants, Grace, Love, Harmony, Revel, Sport, Laughter, and followed by Wonder, were composed, and sung in a recitative solo:—
“Let us play, and dance, and sing,
Let us now turn every sort
Of the pleasures of the Spring
To the graces of a court.
From air, from cloud, from dreams, from toys,
To sounds, to sense, to love, to joys;