His mind is "one entire and perfect chrysolite," while Jonson's rather suggests the pudding-stone. The poet in Ben, being thus but a comparatively small portion of Ben, works by effort, rather than efficiency, and leaves the impression of ingenuity rather than inventiveness. But in his tragedies of "Sejanus" and "Catiline," and especially in his three great comedies of "The Fox," "The Alchymist," and "The Silent Woman," the whole man is thrust forward, with his towering individuality, his massive understanding, his wide knowledge of the baser side of life, his relentless scorn of weakness and wickedness, his vivid memory of facts and ideas derived from books. They seem written with his fist. But, though they convey a powerful impression of his collective ability, they do not convey a poetic impression, and hardly an agreeable one. His greatest characters, as might be expected, are not heroes or martyrs, but cheats or dupes. His most magnificent cheat is Volpone, in "The Fox"; his most magnificent dupe is Sir Epicure Mammon, in "The Alchymist"; but in their most gorgeous mental rioting in imaginary objects or sense, the effect is produced by a dogged accumulation of successive images, which are linked by no train of strictly imaginative association, and are not fused into unity of purpose by the fire of passion-penetrated imagination.
Indeed, it is a curious psychological study to watch the laborious process by which Jonson drags his thoughts and fancies from the reluctant and resisting soil of his mind, and then lays them, one after the other, with a deep-drawn breath, on his page. Each is forced into form by main strength, as we sometimes see a pillar of granite wearily drawn through the street by a score of straining oxen. Take, for example, Sir Epicure Mammon's detail of the luxuries he will revel in when his possession of the philosopher's stone shall have given him boundless wealth. The first cup of Canary and the first tug of invention bring up this enormous piece of humor:—
"My flatterers
Shall be the pure and gravest of divines
That I can get for money."
Then another wrench of the mind, and, it is to be feared, another inlet of the liquid, and we have this:—
"My meat shall all come in in Indian shells,
Dishes of agate, set in gold, and studded
With emeralds, sapphires, hyacinths, and rubies."
Glue that on, and now for another tug:—
"My shirts
I 'll have of taffeta-sarsnet, soft and light
As cobwebs; and for all my other raiment,
It shall be such as might provoke the Persian,
Were he to teach the world riot anew."
And then, a little heated, his imagination is stung into action, and this refinement of sensation flashes out:—
"My gloves of fishes' and birds' skins perfumed
With gums of Paradise and Eastern air."
And now we have an extravagance jerked violently out from his logical fancy:—