"I will have all my beds blown up, not stuffed;
Down is too hard."
But all this patient accumulation of particulars, each costing a mighty effort of memory or analogy, produces no cumulative effect. Certainly, the word "strains," as employed to designate the effusions of poetry, has a peculiar significance as applied to Jonson's verse. No hewer of wood or drawer of water ever earned his daily wages by a more conscientious putting forth of daily labor. Critics—and among the critics Ben is the most clamorous—call upon us to admire and praise the construction of his plays. But his plots, admirable of their kind, are still but elaborate contrivances of the understanding, all distinctly thought out beforehand by the method of logic, not the method of imagination; regular in external form, but animated by no living internal principle; artful, but not artistic; ingenious schemes, not organic growths; and conveying the same kind of pleasure we experience in inspecting other mechanical contrivances. His method is neither the method of nature nor the method of art, but the method of artifice. A drama of Shakespeare may be compared to an oak; a drama by Jonson, to a cunningly fashioned box, made of oak-wood, with some living plants growing in it. Jonson is big; Shakespeare is great.
Still we say, "O rare Ben Jonson!" A large, rude, clumsy, English force, irritable, egotistic, dogmatic, and quarrelsome, but brave, generous, and placable; with no taint of a malignant vice in his boisterous foibles; with a good deal of the bulldog in him, but nothing of the spaniel, and one whose growl was ever worse than his bite;—he, the bricklayer's apprentice, fighting his way to eminence through the roughest obstacles, capable of wrath, but incapable of falsehood, willing to boast, but scorning to creep, still sturdily keeps his hard-won position among the Elizabethan worthies as poet, playwright, scholar, man of letters, man of muscle and brawn; as friend of Beaumont and Fletcher and Chapman and Bacon and Shakespeare; and as ever ready, in all places and at all times, to assert the manhood of Ben by tongue and pen and sword.
UNCHARITABLENESS.
I hold society responsible for a great deal.
I wondered once where all the disconsolate came from,—where all the human wrecks tossed up by the waves of misfortune received their injuries, and what became of those who sailed from port in early youth and were never heard of more. I marvelled, too, that there were so many unhappy bachelors, so many forlorn maids, so many neither wife nor maid; but at all these things I wonder no longer. I have solved the problem I set myself. Society makes them all.
I am not going to analyze society to please any one. I make mine own. Hyacinth, I dare swear, makes his. Why shall I paint it? It is you, it is I, it is both of us, and many more. Can I sketch the figures in a kaleidoscope ere they change? If I could, I might say what society is or was. To-day members of circles marry, or are given in marriage. Disease comes and war decimates; foul tongues asperse, and the unity that was perfect is so no longer. The whole world is society, and I believe there was not so much confusion at the Tower of Babel after all. Men speak in different tongues, but their motives are the same in all climes.
I love or I hate my Celtic friend. The sea rolls between us, but from afar the same sun warms us. If he does a good deed, I shall applaud it; or, if he is mean, shall I not smite him? The world looks on, and puts us all to the test alike. We love or we hate.