A Study of Ben Jonson/Discoveries

by Algernon Charles Swinburne

 

III

DISCOVERIES

 

III

DISCOVERIES

 

That chance is the ruler of the world I should be sorry to believe and reluctant to affirm; but it would be difficult for any competent and careful student to maintain that chance is not the ruler of the world of letters. Gray's odes are still, I suppose, familiar to thousands who know nothing of Donne's Anniversaries; and Bacon's Essays are conventionally if not actually familiar to thousands who know nothing of Ben Jonson's Discoveries. And yet it is certain that in fervour of inspiration, in depth and force and glow of thought and emotion and expression, Donne's verses are as far above Gray's as Jonson's notes or observations on men and morals, on principles and on facts, are superior to Bacon's in truth of insight, in breadth of view, in vigour of reflection and in concision of eloquence. The dry curt style of the statesman, docked and trimmed into sentences that are regularly snapped off or snipped down at the close of each deliverance, is as alien and as far from the fresh and vigorous spontaneity of the poet's as is the trimming and hedging morality of the essay on 'simulation and dissimulation' from the spirit and instinct of the man who 'of all things loved to be called honest.' But indeed, from the ethical point of view which looks merely or mainly to character, the comparison is little less than an insult to the Laureate; and from the purely intelligent or æsthetic point of view I should be disposed to say, or at least inclined to think, that the comparison would be hardly less unduly complimentary to the Chancellor.

For at the very opening of these Explorata, or Discoveries, we find ourselves in so high and so pure an atmosphere of feeling and of thought that we cannot but recognize and rejoice in the presence and the influence of one of the noblest, manliest, most honest and most helpful natures that ever dignified and glorified a powerful intelligence and an admirable genius. In the very first note, the condensed or concentrated quintessence of a Baconian essay on Fortune, we find these among other lofty and weighty words; 'Heaven prepares good men with crosses; but no ill can happen to a good man.' 'That which happens to any man, may to every man. But it is in his reason what he accounts it and will make it'

There is perhaps in the structure of this sentence something too much of the Latinist—too strong a flavour of the style of Tacitus in its elaborate if not laborious terseness of expression. But the following could hardly be bettered.

 

No man is so foolish but may give another good counsel sometimes; and no man is so wise but may easily err, if he will take no other's counsel but his own. But very few men are wise by their own counsel, or learned by their own teaching. For he that was only taught by himself had a fool to his master.

 

The mind's ear may find or fancy a silvery ring of serene good sense in the note of that reflection; but the ring of what follows is pure gold.

 

There is a necessity all men should love their country; he that professeth the contrary may be delighted with his words, but his heart is [not] there.

 

The magnificent expansion or paraphrase of this noble thought in the fourth scene of Landor's magnificent tragedy of Count Julian should be familiar to all capable students of English poetry at its purest and proudest height of sublime contemplation. That probably or rather undoubtedly unconscious echo of the sentiment of an older poet and patriot has in it the prolonged reverberation and repercussion of music which we hear in the echoes of thunder or a breaking sea.

Again, how happy in the bitterness of its truth is the next remark: 'Natures that are hardened to evil you shall sooner break than make straight: they are like poles that are crooked and dry: there is no attempting them.' And how grand is this:

 

I cannot think nature is so spent and decayed that she can bring forth nothing worth her former years. She is always the same, like herself; and when she collects her strength,^[1] is abler still. Men are decayed, and studies: she is not.

 

Jonson never wrote a finer verse than that; and very probably he never observed that it was a verse.

The next note is one of special interest to all students of the great writer who has so often been described as a blind worshipper and a servile disciple of classical antiquity.

 

'I know nothing can conduce more to letters,' says the too obsequious observer of Tacitus and of Cicero in the composition of his Roman tragedies, 'than to examine the writings of the ancients, and not to rest on their sole authority, or take all upon trust from them; provided the plagues of judging and pronouncing against them be away; such as are envy, bitterness, precipitation, impudence, and scurril scoffing. For, to all the observations of the ancients, we have our own experience; which if we will use and apply, we have better means to pronounce. It is true they opened the gates, and made the way, that went before us; but as guides, not commanders: Non domini nostri sed duces fuere. Truth lies open to all; it is no man's several. Patet omnibus veritas: nondum est occupata. Multum ex illâ etiam futuris relictum est.'^[2]

 

Time and space would fail me to transcribe all that is worth transcription, to comment on everything that deserves commentary, in this treasure-house of art and wisdom, eloquence and good sense. But the following extract could be passed over by no eye but a mole's or a bat's.

 

I do not desire to be equal with those that went before; but to have my reason examined with theirs, and so much faith to be given them, or me, as those shall evict [in modern English—if the text is not corrupt—'as the comparison or confrontation of theirs with mine shall elicit']. I am neither author nor fautor of any sect. I will have no man addict himself to me; but if I have anything right, defend it as Truth's, not mine, save as it conduceth to a common good. It profits not me to have any man fence or fight for me, to flourish, or take my side. Stand for Truth, and 'tis enough.

 

The haughty vindication of 'arts that respect the mind' as 'nobler than those that serve the body, though we less can be without them' (the latter), is at once amusingly and admirably Jonsonian. Admitting the ignoble fact that without such 'arts' as 'tillage, spinning, weaving, building, &c.,' 'we could scarce sustain life a day,' a proposition which it certainly would seem difficult to dispute, he proceeds in the loftiest tone of professional philosophy: 'But these were the works of every hand; the other of the brain only, and those the most generous and exalted wits and spirits, that cannot rest or acquiesce. The mind of man is still fed with labour: opere pascitur.'

This conscientious and self-conscious pride of intellect finds even a nobler and more memorable expression in the admirable words which instruct or which remind us of the truth that 'it is as great a spite to be praised in the wrong place, and by the wrong person, as can be done to a noble nature.' A sentence worthy to be set beside the fittest motto for all loyal men—'Æqua laus est a laudatis laudari et ab improbis improbari.' Which it would be well that every man worthy to apply it should lay to heart, and act and bear himself accordingly.

It is to be wished that the dramatist and humourist had always or had usually borne in mind the following excellent definition or reflection of the aphoristic philosopher or student: 'A tedious person is one a man would leap a steeple from, gallop down any steep hill to avoid him; forsake his meat, sleep, nature itself, with all her benefits, to shun him.' What then shall we say of the courtiers in Cynthia's Revels and the vapourers in Bartholomew Fair?

'The following is somewhat especially suggestive of a present political application; and would find its appropriate setting in a modern version of the Irish Masque.

 

He is a narrow-minded man that affects a triumph in any glorious study; but to triumph in a lie, and a lie themselves have forged, is frontless. Folly often goes beyond her bounds; but Impudence knows none.

 

From the forty-third to the forty-eighth entry inclusive these disconnected notes should be read as a short continuous essay on envy and calumny For weight, point, and vigour, it would hardly be possible to overpraise it.

In the admirable note on such 'foolish lovers' as 'wish the same to their friends as their enemies would,' merely that they might have occasion to display the constancy of their regard, there is a palpable and preposterous misprint, which reduces to nonsense a remarkably fine passage; 'They make a causeway to their courtesy by injury; as if it were not honester to do nothing than to seek a way to do good by a mischief.' For the obviously right word 'courtesy' the unspeakable editors read 'country'; which let him explain who can.

The two notes on injuries and benefits are observable for their wholesome admixture of common sense with magnanimity.

 

Injuries do not extinguish courtesies: they only suffer them not to appear fair. For a man that doth me an injury after a courtesy takes not away that courtesy, but defaces it: as he that writes other verses upon my verses takes not away the first letters, but hides them.

 

Surely no sentence more high-minded and generous than that was ever written: nor one more sensible and dignified than this:—

 

The doing of courtesies aright is the mixing of the respects for his own sake and for mine. He that doeth them merely for his own sake is like one that feeds his cattle to sell them: he hath his horse well drest for Smithfield.

 

The following touch of mental autobiography is not less interesting than curious. Had Shakespeare but left us the like!

 

I myself could in my youth have repeated all that ever I had made, and so continued till I was past forty: since, it is much decayed in me. Yet I can repeat whole books that I have read, and poems of some selected friends, which I have liked to charge my memory with. It was wont to be faithful to me; but, shaken with age now, and sloth, which weakens the strongest abilities, it may perform somewhat, but cannot promise much. By exercise it is to be made better, and serviceable. Whatsoever I pawned with it while I was young, and a boy, it offers me readily, and without stops: but what I trust to it now, or have done of later years, it lays up more negligently, and oftentimes loses; so that I receive mine own (though frequently called for) as if it were new and borrowed. Nor do I always find presently from it what I seek: but while I am doing another thing, that I laboured for will come; and what I sought with trouble will offer itself when I am quiet. Now in some men [was Shakespeare, we must ask ourselves, one of these?] I have found it as happy as nature, who, whatsoever they read or pen, they can say without book presently; as if they did then write in their mind. And it is more a wonder in such as have a swift style, for their memories are commonly slowest; such as torture their writings, and go into council for every word, must needs fix somewhat, and make it their own at last, though but through their own vexation.

 

I cannot but imagine that Jonson must have witnessed this wonder in the crowning case of Shakespeare; the swiftness of whose 'style' or composition was matter of general note.

The anti-Gallican or anti-democratic view of politics can never be more vividly or happily presented than in these brilliant and incisive words:—

 

Suffrages in Parliament are numbered, not weighed: nor can it be otherwise in those public councils, where nothing is so unequal as the equality: for there, how odd soever men's brains or wisdoms are, their power is always even and the same.

 

But the most cordial hater or scorner of parliaments, whether from the Carlylesque or the Bonapartist point of vantage, must allow that the truth expressed in the two first sentences following is more certain and more precious than the doctrine just cited.

 

Truth is man's proper good, and the only immortal thing was given to our mortality to use. No good Christian or ethnic, if he be honest, can miss it: no statesman or patriot should. For without truth all the actions of mankind are craft, malice, or what you will rather than wisdom. Homer says he hates him worse than hell-mouth that utters one thing with his tongue and keeps another in his breast. Which high expression was grounded on divine reason: for a lying mouth is a stinking pit, and murders with the contagion it venteth. Besides, nothing is lasting that is feigned; it will have another face than it had ere long. As Euripides saith, 'No lie ever grows old.'

 

It would be well if this were so: but the inveterate reputation of Euripides as a dramatic poet is hardly reconcilable with the truth of his glibly optimistic assumption. Nor, had that fluent and facile dealer in flaccid verse and sentimental sophistry spoken truth for once in this instance, should we have had occasion to wonder at the admiration expressed for him by the most subtle and sincere, the most profound and piercing intelligence of our time; nor could that sense of reverential amazement have found spontaneous expression in the following couplet of Hudibrastic doggrel:—

That the huckster of pathos, whose gift was insipid ease,
Finds favour with Browning, must puzzle Euripides.

But Jonson himself, it seems to me, was far less trustworthy as a critic of poetry than as a judge on ethics or a student of character. The tone of supercilious goodwill and friendly condonation which distinguishes his famous note on Shakespeare is unmistakable except by the most wilful perversity of prepossession. His noble metrical tribute to Shakespeare's memory must of course be taken into account when we are disposed to think too hardly of this honest if egotistic eccentricity of error: but it would be foolish to suppose that the most eloquent cordiality of a ceremonial poem could express more of one man's real and critical estimate of another than a deliberate reflection of later date. And it needs the utmost possible exertion of charity, the most generous exercise of justice, to forgive the final phrase of preposterous patronage and considerate condescension—'There was ever more in him to be praised than to be pardoned.' The candid author of Sejanus could on the whole afford to admit so much with respect to the popular author of Hamlet.

In the subsequent essay, divided under ten several heads into ten several notes, on 'the difference of wits,' or the diversity of accomplishments and understandings, there is much worth study for its soundness of judgment, its accuracy of definition, and its felicity of expression, It would be well if educational and professional formalists would bear in mind the truth that 'there is no doctrine will do good, where nature is wanting'; and nothing could be neater, terser, or truer than the definition of those characters 'that are forward and bold; and these will do every little thing easily; I mean, that is hard by and next them, which they will utter unretarded without any shamefastness. These never perform much, but quickly. They are what they are, on the sudden; they show presently, like grain that, scattered on the top of the ground, shoots up, but takes no root; has a yellow blade, but the ear empty. They are wits of good promise at first, but there is an ingenistitium—a wit-stand: they stand still at sixteen, they get no higher.'

As well worth remark and recollection are the succeeding notes on 'others, that labour only to ostentation; and are ever more busy about the colours and surface of a work than in the matter and foundation: for that is hid, the other is seen'; and on those whose style of composition is purposely 'rough and broken—and if it would come gently, they trouble it of purpose. They would not have it run without rubs: as if that style were more strong and manly that struck the ear with a kind of unevenness. These men err not by chance, but knowingly and willingly; they are like men that affect a fashion by themselves, have some singularity in a ruff, cloak, or hat-band; or their beards specially cut to provoke beholders, and set a mark upon themselves. They would be reprehended, while they are looked on. And this vice, one, that is in authority with the rest, loving, delivers over to them to be imitated; so that oft-times the faults which he fell into, the others seek for: this is the danger, when vice becomes a precedent.'

It is difficult to imagine that Jonson was not here thinking of the great writer whom 'he esteemed the first poet in the world in some things,' but upon whom he passed the too sweeping though too plausible sentence 'that Donne, for not being understood, would perish.' Nor can we suppose that he was not alluding to Daniel—the inoffensive object of his implacable satire—when he laid a 'chastising hand' on 'others that have no composition at all, but a kind of tuning and rhyming fall, in what they write. It runs and slides, and only makes a sound. Women's poets they are called, as you have women's tailors,—You may sound these wits and find the depth of them with your middle finger. They are cream-bowl-(or but puddle-) deep.'

An amusing anticipation of the peculiar genius for elaborate mendacity which distinguishes and connects the names of De Quincey and Mérimée will be found in Jonson's words of stern and indignant censure on 'some who, after they have got authority, or, which is less, opinion, by their writings, to have read much, dare presently to feign whole books and authors, and lie safely. For what never was will not easily be found; not by the most curious,' Certainly it was not by the innocent readers whose research into the original authorities for the history of the revolt of the Tartars, or whose interest in the original text of Clara Gazul's plays and the Illyrian ballads of La Guzla, must have given such keen delight to those two frontless and matchless charlatans of genius.

The keen and scornful intelligence of Jonson finds no less admirable expression in the two succeeding notes; of which the first sets a brand on such cunning plagiarists as protest against all reading, and so 'think to divert the sagacity of their readers from themselves, and cool the scent of their own fox-like thefts;' but, as he proceeds to observe, 'the obstinate contemners of all helps and arts are in a 'wretcheder' case than even these His description of such pretenders is too lifelike, and too vivid in its perennial veracity, to be overlooked; 'such as presuming on their own naturals (which perhaps are excellent) dare deride all diligence, and seem to mock at the terms when they understand not the things; thinking that way to get off wittily with their ignorance. These are imitated often by such as are their peers in negligence, though they cannot be in nature; and they utter all they can think with a kind of violence and indisposition; unexamined, without relation to person, place, or any fitness else; and the more wilful and stubborn they are in it, the more learned they are esteemed of the multitude, through their excellent vice of judgment; who think those things the stronger, that have no art; as if to break were better than to open; or to rend asunder, gentler than to loose.'

In the tenth section or subdivision of this irregular and desultory but incisive and masterly essay we find a singular combination of critical insight with personal prejudice—of general truth with particular error, But the better part is excellent alike in reflection and in expression.

 

It cannot but come to pass that these men who commonly seek to do more than enough may sometimes happen on something that is good and great; but very seldom: and when it comes it doth not recompense the rest of their ill.—The true artificer will not run away from nature, as he were afraid of her; or depart from life, and the likeness of truth; but speak to the capacity of his hearers.

 

The rest of the note is valuable as a studious and elaborate expression of Jonson's theory or ideal of dramatic poetry, couched in apt and eloquent phrases of thoughtful and balanced rhetoric; regrettable only for the insulting reference to the first work of a yet greater poet than himself, to whose 'mighty line' he had paid immortal homage in an earlier and a better mood of judgment.

But however prone he may be to error or perversity in particular instances or in personal examples, he is constantly and nobly right in his axiomatic reflections and his general observations. The following passage seems to me a magnificent illustration of this truth.

 

I know no disease of the soul but ignorance; not of the arts and sciences, but of itself: yet relating to those it is a pernicious evil, the darkener of man's life, the disturber of his reason, and the common confounder of truth; with which a man goes groping in the dark, no otherwise than if he were blind. Great understandings are most racked and troubled with it; nay, sometimes they will rather choose to die than not to know the things they study for.^[3] Think then what an evil it is, and what [a] good the contrary.

 

The ensuing note on knowledge has less depth of direct insight, less force of practical reason; but the definition which follows is singularly eloquent and refined, however scholastic and irrational in its casuistic and rhetorical subtlety.

 

Knowledge is the action of the soul, and is perfect without the senses,^[4] as having the seeds of all science and virtue in itself; but not without the service of the senses; by these organs the soul works: she is a perpetual agent, prompt and subtle; but often flexible and erring, entangling herself like a silkworm: but her reason is a weapon with two edges, and cuts through.

 

I am inclined to suspect that we may discern in the next note another fragment of autobiography. For it may be doubted whether 'the boon Delphic god,' so admirably described by his faithful acolyte Marmion as presiding in the form of a human Laureate over the Bacchanalian oracle of Apollo, can ever have been able to say with equal truth of another than himself,

 

I have known a man vehement on both sides, that knew no mean either to intermit his studies or call upon them again. When he hath set himself to writing, he would join night to day, press upon himself without release, not minding it, till he fainted; and when he got off, resolve himself into all sports and looseness again, that it was almost a despair to draw him to his book; but once got to it, he grew stronger and more earnest by the ease. His whole powers were renewed: he would work out of himself what he desired; but with such excess, as his study could not be ruled: he knew not how to dispose his own abilities or husband them, he was of that immoderate power against himself. Nor was he only a strong but an absolute speaker and writer; but his subtlety did not show itself; his judgment thought that a vice: for the ambush hurts more that is hid. He never forced his language, nor went out of the highway of speaking, but for some great necessity, or apparent profit: for he denied figures to be invented for ornament, but for aid: and still thought it an extreme madness to bend or wrest that which ought to be right.

 

If any reader should think such a mixture of critical self-examination and complacent self-glorification impossible to any man of indisputable genius and of general good sense, that reader is not yet 'sealed of the tribe of Ben'; he has not arrived at a due appreciation of the writer's general strength and particular weakness as a critic and a workman, an artist and a thinker.

The note on famous orators is remarkable for its keen discrimination and appreciation of various talents; and the subsequent analysis or definition of Bacon's great gifts as a speaker, which has been often enough quoted to dispense with any fresh citation, is only less fine than the magnificent tribute paid a little further on to the same great man in his days of adversity. It may well be questioned whether there exists a finer example of English prose than the latter famous passage; where sublimity is resolved into pathos, and pathos dilates into sublimity. His idealism of monarchy, however irrational it may seem to us, has a finer side to it than belongs to the blind superstition of such a royalist as Fletcher. Witness this striking and touching interpretation of an old metaphor: Why are prayers said with Orpheus to be the daughters of Jupiter, but that princes are thereby admonished that the petitions of the wretched ought to have more weight with them than the laws themselves?' And the following note gives a better and a kindlier impression of King James I. than anything else—as far as I know—recorded of that singular sovereign.

 

It was a great accumulation to his majesty's deserved praise, that men might openly visit and pity those whom his greatest prisons had at any time received, or his laws condemned.

 

The note on 'the attribute of a prince' is rather Baconian than Jonsonian in its cult of 'prudence' as 'his chief art and safety'; but the peculiar and practical humour of Jonson's observant and studious satire is well exemplified in his strictures on such theological controversialists as 'are like swaggerers in a tavern, that catch that which stands next them, the candlesticks or pots—turn everything into a weapon: ofttimes they fight blindfold, and both beat the air. The one milks a he-goat, the other holds under a sieve. Their arguments are as fluxive as liquor spilt upon a table, which with your finger you may drain as you will.' But the remarks on 'untimely boasting' are especially worth transcription, both for their own real excellence and for the unconscious but inexpressible drollery of such an utterance from the 'capacious mouth' which had so often and so loudly set forth under divers names and figures the claims and the merits of Ben Jonson.

 

Men that talk of their own benefits are not believed to talk of them because they have done them, but to have done them because they might talk of them. That which had been great if another had reported it of them vanisheth and is nothing if he that did it speak of it. For men, when they cannot destroy the deed, will yet be glad to take advantage of the boasting and lessen it.

 

We may hope that these wise and weighty words were not written without some regretful if not repentant reminiscence of sundry occasions on which this rule of conduct had been grossly and grievously transgressed by the writer, to his own inevitable damage and discomfiture.

The note on flattery and flatterers is as exalted in its austerity as trenchant in its scorn. And the following remark 'on human life' is the condensed or distilled essence of a noble satire or a powerful essay.

 

I have considered our whole life is like a play, wherein every man, forgetful of himself, is in travail with expression of another. Nay, we so insist in imitating others, as we cannot (when it is necessary) return to ourselves; like children that imitate the vices of stammerers so long, till at last they become such; and make the habit to another nature, as it is never forgotten.

 

There is a noble enthusiasm for goodness in the phrase which avers that 'good men are the stars, the planets of the ages wherein they live, and illustrate the times.' After an enumeration of scriptural instances, the poet adds this commentary: 'These, sensual men thought mad, because they would not be partakers or practisers of their madness. But they, placed high on the top of all virtue, looked down on the stage of the world, and contemned the play of fortune. For though the most be players, some must be spectators.'

And there is a fine touch of grave and bitter humour in the discovery 'that a feigned familiarity in great ones is a note of certain usurpation on the less. For great and popular men feign themselves to be servants to others, to make those slaves to them. So the fisher provides bait for the trout, roach, dace, &c., that they may be food to him.'

But finer by far and far more memorable than this is the following commentary on the fact that the emperor whose 'voice was worthier a headsman than a head, when he wished the people of Rome had but one neck,' 'found (when he fell) they had many hands.'

 

A tyrant, how great and mighty soever he may seem to cowards and sluggards, is but one creature, one animal.

 

That sentence is worthy of Landor; and those who would reproach Ben Jonson with the extravagance of his monarchical doctrines or theories must admit that such royalism as is compatible with undisguised approval of regicide or tyrannicide might not irrationally be condoned by the sternest and most rigid of republicans.

The next eight notes or entries deal in a somewhat desultory fashion with the subject of government; and display, as might be expected, a very singular combination or confusion of obsolete sophistry and superstition with rational and liberal intelligence. He attacks Machiavelli repeatedly, but there is a distinct streak of what is usually understood as Machiavellism in the remark, for example, that when a prince governs his people 'so as they have still need of his administration (for that is his art) he shall ever make and hold them faithful.' In answer to Machiavelli's principle, of cruelty by proxy, he pleads with great and simple force of eloquence against all principles of cruelty whatever. Many noble passages might be quoted from this pleading; but only a few can here be selected from the third and fourth, the sixth and seventh, of the entries above mentioned; which may on the whole be considered, when all due reservation is made with regard to the monarchical principle or superstition, as composing altogether a concise and masterly essay on the art and the principles of wise and righteous government.

 

Many punishments sometimes and in some cases as much discredit a prince as many funerals a physician. The state of things is secured by clemency: severity represseth a few, but irritates more. The lopping of trees makes the boughs shoot out thicker; and the taking away of some kind of enemies increaseth the number. It is then most gracious in a prince to pardon, when many about him would make him cruel; to think then how much he can save, when others tell him how much he can destroy; not to consider what the impotence of others hath demolished, but what his own greatness can sustain. These are a prince's virtues; and they that give him other counsels are but the hangman's factors.

But princes, by hearkening to cruel counsels, become in time obnoxious to the authors, their flatterers and ministers; and are brought to that, that when they would they dare not change them; they must go on, and defend cruelty with cruelty; they cannot alter the habit. It is then grown necessary they must be as ill as those have made them: and in the end they will grow more hateful to themselves than to their subjects. Whereas, on the contrary, the merciful prince is safe in love, not in fear. He needs no emissaries, spies, intelligencers, to entrap true subjects. He fears no libels, no treasons. His people speak what they think, and talk openly what they do in secret. They have nothing in their breasts that they need a cipher for. He is guarded with his own benefits.

There is nothing with some princes sacred above their majesty; or profane, but what violates their sceptres. But a prince with such a council [qu. counsel?] is like the god Terminus of stone, his own landmark; or (as it is in the fable) a crowned lion. . . . No men hate an evil prince more than they that helped to make him such. And none more boastingly weep his ruin than they that procured and practised it. The same path leads to ruin which did to rule, when men profess a license in government. A good king is a public servant.

A prince without letters is a pilot without eyes. All his government is groping. In sovereignty it is a most happy thing not to be compelled; but so it is the most miserable not to be counselled. And how can he be counselled that cannot see to read the best counsellors, which are books; for they neither flatter us nor hide from us? He may hear, you will say; but how shall he always be sure to hear truth? or be counselled the best things, not the sweetest? They say princes learn no art truly but the art of horsemanship, The reason is, the brave beast is no flatterer. He will throw a prince as soon as his groom. Which is an argument that the good counsellors to princes are the best instruments of a good age. For though the prince himself be of most prompt inclination to all virtue, yet the best pilots have need of mariners, besides sails, anchor, and other tackle.

 

It must be admitted that the royalism of this laureate is sufficiently tempered and allayed with rational or republican good sense to excite in the reader's mind a certain curiosity of conjecture as to the effect which might or which must have been produced on his royal patrons by the publication of opinions so irreconcilable with the tragically comic form of idolatry embodied in the heroes and expressed in the rhapsodies of Beaumont and Fletcher. Amintor and Aëcius, Archas and Aubrey, are figures or types of unnatural heroism or preposterous devotion which are obviously and essentially wellnigh as far from Jonson's ideal of manhood and of duty as from Shakespeare's.

There is a quaint fierce touch of humour in the reflection that 'he which is sole heir to many rich men, having (beside his father's and uncle's) the estates of divers his kindred come to him by accession, must needs be richer than father or grandfather; so they which are left heirs ex asse' (sole heirs) 'of all their ancestor's vices, and by their good husbandry improve the old, and daily purchase new, must needs be wealthier in vice, and have a greater revenue or stock of ill to spend on.' But this is only one in a score of instances which might be quoted to show that if a great English poet and humourist had left nothing behind him but this little book of 'maxims,' as the French call them—notes, observations, or reflections cast in a form more familiar to French than to English writers—he would still hold a place beside or above La Rochefoucauld, and beside if not above Chamfort. And yet, even among his countrymen, it may be feared that the sardonic wit and the cynical wisdom of the brilliant French patrician and the splendid French plebeian are familiar to many who have never cared to investigate the Discoveries of Ben Jonson,

Again we meet the strangely outspoken satirist and malcontent in the person of the court laureate who allowed himself to remark that 'the great thieves of a state are lightly' [usually or naturally] 'the officers of the crown: they hang the less still, play the pikes in the pond, eat whom they list. The net was never spread for the hawk or buzzard that hurt us, but the harmless birds; they are good meat.' But the critic of state consoles himself with a reflection on the precarious tenure of their powers enjoyed by such tenants or delegates of tyranny, and cites against them a well-known witticism of that great practical humourist King Louis XI.

The partially autobiographic or personal note which follows this opens and closes at once nobly and simply.

 

A good man will avoid the spot of any sin, The very aspersion is grievous; which makes him choose his way in his life, as he would in his journey. The ill man rides through all confidently; he is coated and booted for it. The oftener he offends, the more openly; and the fouler, the fitter in fashion. His modesty, like a riding-coat, the more it is worn, is the less cared for. It is good enough for the dirt still, and the ways he travels on.

 

No one will be surprised to find that Ben Jonson's chosen type or example of high-minded innocence, incessantly pursued by malice, delated and defamed, but always triumphant and confident, even when driven to the verge of a precipice, is none other than Ben Jonson. His accusers were 'great ones'; but they 'were driven, for want of crimes, to use invention, which was found slander; or too late (being entered so far) to seek starting-holes for their rashness, which were not given them.' His profession also, as well as his person, was attacked: 'they objected making of verses to me when I could object to most of them their not being able to read them but as worthy of scorn; and strove, after the changeless manner of their estimable kind, to back and bolster up their accusations and objections by falsified and garbled extracts, 'which was an excellent way of malice; as if any man's context might not seem dangerous and offensive, if that which was knit to what went before were defrauded of his beginning; or that things by themselves uttered might not seem subject to calumny, which read entire would appear most free.' So little difference is there, in the composition of the meanest and foolishest among literary parasites and backbiters, between the characteristic developments or the representative products of the seventeenth and the nineteenth century.

 

At last they would object to me my poverty: I confess she is my domestic; sober of diet, simple of habit, frugal, painful, a good counsellor to me, that keeps me from cruelty, pride, or other more delicate impertinences, which are the nurse-children of riches.

 

All 'great and monstrous wickednesses,' avers the Laureate—not perhaps without an implied reference to such hideous instances as the case of Somerset and Overbury,—'are the issue of the wealthy giants and the mighty hunters: whereas no great work, or worthy of praise or memory, but came out of poor cradles. It was the ancient poverty that founded commonweals, built cities, invented arts, made wholesome laws, armed men against vices, rewarded them with their own virtues, and preserved the honour and state of nations, till they betrayed themselves to riches.'

It is hardly too much to say that there are few finer passages than that in Landor; in other words, that there can be few passages as fine in any third writer of English prose.

The fierce and severe attack on worldliness and love of money which follows this noble panegyric on the virtues of poverty should be read as part of the same essay rather than as a separate note or reflection. Indeed, throughout the latter part of the Discoveries, it is obvious that we have before us the fragments, disunited and disjointed, of single and continuous essays on various great subjects, rather than the finished and coherent works which their author would have offered to his readers had he lived long enough in health and strength of spirit and of body to carry out his original design. This sermon against greed of all kinds—avarice, luxury, ambition of state and magnificence of expenditure—is full of lofty wisdom and of memorable eloquence.

 

What a wretchedness is this, to thrust all our riches outward, and be beggars within; to contemplate nothing but the little, vile, and sordid things of the world: not the great, noble, and precious? We serve our avarice; and not content with the good of the earth that is offered us, we search and dig for the evil that is hidden. God offered us those things, and' placed them at hand and near us, that he knew were profitable for us; but the hurtful he laid deep and hid. Yet do we covet only the things whereby we may perish; and bring them forth, when God and nature hath buried them. We covet superfluous things, when it were more honour for us if we could contemn necessary.

 

A little further on, the Laureate who had lavished the wealth of his poetic invention and his scenic ingenuity on the festivities which welcomed the Danish king to the court of his brother-in-law refers in the following terms of sorrowful and sarcastic reminiscence to those splendid and sterile extravagances of meaningless magnificence.

 

Have I not seen the pomp of a whole kingdom, and what a foreign king could bring hither? all^[5] to make himself gazed and wondered at, laid forth as it were to the show—and vanish all away in a day. And shall that which could not fill the expectation of few hours entertain and take up our whole lives? when even it appeared as superfluous to the possessors as to me that was a spectator. The bravery was shown, it was not possessed: while it boasted itself, it perished. It is vile, and a poor thing, to place our happiness on these desires. Say we wanted them all. Famine ends famine.

 

These reflections are uncourtly enough from the hand of a courtly poet; but they are tame and tender if compared with his animadversions on 'vice and deformity,' which 'we may behold—so much the fouler in having all the splendour of riches to gild them, or the false light of honour and power to help them. Yet this is that wherewith the world is taken, and runs mad to gaze on: one and titles, the birdlime of fools.'

No man ever made more generous response to the friendly or generous kindness of others than Ben Jonson: no man had ever less disposition or inclination towards the grudging mood of mind which regrets or the abject mood of mind which resents the acceptance of a benefit. For all that he received of help or support from his wealthier friends or patrons he returned the noblest and most liberal payment in manly and self-respectful gratitude: he did not, like the rival poets of the restored Stuarts, condescend to undertake the deification or glorification of a male or female prostitute of parliament or of court: but it must be admitted that the outpourings of his heart in thanks and praises may seem somewhat excessive even to those who bear in mind that the tribute of his cordial homage was by no means confined to kings and princes, lords and ladies. But that 'he would not flatter Neptune for his trident or Jove for his power to thunder'—that he would not speak well, that he could hardly forbear from speaking evil, of any whom he found or whom he held to be undeserving—is as certain as that no loftier scorn than breathes through the words above transcribed was ever expressed by the most democratic or sarcastic of republicans for the mere attributes of rank and power. This fierce and deep contempt informs with even more vehement eloquence the note which follows.

 

What petty things they are we wonder at! like children, that esteem every trifle, and prefer a fairing before their fathers; what difference is betwixt us and them, but that we are dearer fools, coxcombs at a higher rate?. . .All that we call happiness is mere painting and gilt; and all for money: what a thin membrane of honour that is! and how hath all true reputation fallen, since money began to have any! Yet the great herd, the multitude, that in all other things are divided, in this alone conspire and agree; to love money. They wish for it, they embrace it, they adore it: while yet it is possest with greater stir and torment than it was gotten.

 

The pure and lofty wisdom of the next note is worthy of Epictetus or Aurelius.

 

Some men, what losses soever they have, they make them greater: and if they have none, even all that is not gotten is a loss, Can there be creatures of more wretched condition than these, that continually labour under their own misery and others' envy?^[6] A man should study other things: not to covet, not to fear, not to repent him: to make his base such as no tempest shall shake him: to be secure of all opinion, and pleasing to himself, even for that wherein he displeases others: for the worst opinion, gotten for doing well, should delight us. Wouldst not thou be just but for fame, thou oughtest to be it with infamy; he that would have his virtue published is not the servant of virtue, but glory.

 

In the following satirical observation all students will recognize the creator of Fastidious Brisk—and rather, perhaps, the spirit of Macilente than of Asper.

 

A dejected countenance, and mean clothes, beget often a contempt, but it is with the shallowest creatures; courtiers commonly: look up even with them in a new suit, you get above them straight. Nothing is more short-lived than [? their] pride: it is but while their clothes last: stay but while these are worn out, you cannot wish the thing more wretched or dejected.

 

In the four notes which compose a brief essay on painting (or, as Jonson calls it, picture) the finest passage by far is this wise and noble word of tribute paid to another great art by a great artist in letters:—

 

Whosoever loves not picture is injurious to truth and all the wisdom of poetry. Picture is the invention of heaven, the most ancient, and most akin to nature. It is itself a silent work, and always of one and the same habit: yet it doth so enter and penetrate the inmost affection (being done by an excellent artificer) as sometimes it overcomes the power of speech and oratory.

 

The summary history of 'picture,' or the art of painting, in which Jonson has given us his views on the relation of that art to poetry, geometry, optics, and moral philosophy, bears no less witness to his wide reading and his painstaking attention than to his quaint and dogmatic self-confidence in laying down the law at second hand on subjects of which he seems to have known less than little. But when we pass from criticism of painters to the lower ground of satirical observation—from the heights of a noble art to the depths or levels of ignoble nature, we meet once more the same fierce and earnest critic of life who should certainly be acknowledged as the greatest of all poets by any one—if any one there be—to whom 'criticism of life' seems acceptable or imaginable as a definition of the essence or the end of poetry.

The opening of the satirical essay on parasites which is here divided or split up into two sections by the blundering negligence and the unprincipled incompetence of its editors has the force and the point of a keen and heavy weapon, edged with wit and weighted with indignation. Juvenal has hardly left us a more vivid likeness of the creatures who 'grow suspected of the master, hated of the servants, while they inquire, and reprehend, and compound, and delate business of the house they have nothing to do with.' This note ends with the admirable remark, 'I know not truly which is worse, he that maligns all or that praises all.' An eminent poet and dramatist of our own age, M. Auguste Vacquerie, has said much the same thing in words even more terse, accurate, and forcible than Jonson's:—'Louer tout, c'est une autre façon de dénigrer tout.'

What follows as part of the same note is a letter to a nobleman who had asked Jonson's advice as to the education of his sons, 'and especially to the advancement of their studies.' The kindly and practical wisdom of his counsel is 'not of an age, but for all time': indeed, it is in some points as far ahead of our own age as of the writer's. Though nature 'be proner in some children to some disciplines, yet are they naturally prompt to taste all by degrees, and with change. For change is a kind of refreshing in studies, and infuseth knowledge by way of recreation.' The old Westminster boy, who had paid such loyal homage of gratitude to the 'most reverend head' of his old master, is as emphatic in his preference of public to private education as in his insistence that scholars 'should not be affrighted or deterred in their entry, but drawn on with exercise and emulation.' His illustrious namesake of the succeeding century was hardly more emphatic in his advocacy of the opposite principle. That which Samuel Johnson and Charles Kingsley considered as 'doubtless the best of all punishments' is denounced by Ben Jonson as energetically as by Quintilian: but I trust he would not have preferred to it the execrable modern substitute of torture by transcription—the infernal and idiotic infliction of so many hundred lines to be written out by way of penance.

 

Would we did not spoil our own children, and overthrow their manners ourselves by too much indulgence! To breed them at home is to breed them in a shade; where in a school they have the light and heat of the sun. They are used and accustomed to things and men. When they come forth into the commonwealth, they find nothing new, or to seek. They have made their friendships and aids, some to last their age. They hear what is commanded to others as well as themselves. Much approved, much corrected; all which they bring to their own store and use, and learn as much as they hear. Eloquence would be but a poor thing if we did but converse with singulars—speak man and man together. Therefore I like no private breeding. I would send them where their industry should be daily increased by praise; and that kindled by emulation. It is a good thing to inflame the mind, and though ambition itself be a vice, it is often the cause of great virtue. Give me that wit whom praise excites, glory puts on, or disgrace grieves; he is to be nourished with ambition, pricked forward with honour, checked with reprehension, and never to be suspected of sloth. Though he be given to play, it is a sign of spirit and liveliness, so there be a mean had of their sports and relaxations.

 

If the nineteenth century has said anything on this subject as well worth hearing—as wise, as humane, as reasonable, as full of sympathy and of judgment—as these reflections and animadversions of a scholar living in the first half or quarter of the seventeenth, I have never chanced to meet with it.

The forty-eight notes or entries which complete the sum of Ben Jonson's Discoveries should be considered as composing an essay on style, continuous in aim though desultory in treatment. The cruel, stupid, and insolent neglect of his editors has left it in so disjointed and dislocated a condition that we can only read it as we might read so many stray notes jotted down irregularly at odd moments on the first sheet or scrap of paper which might have fallen under the fatigued and fitful hand of the venerable poet. The very last entry is a repetition of a former remark and a former quotation, tumbled in by some blundering printer's devil with no reference whatever to the sentence preceding it.^[7] As to the punctuation, let one example stand for many, 'Again, whether a man's genius is best able to reach thither, it should more and more contend, lift, and dilate itself.' To rectify this hopeless nonsense does not require the skill of a Bentley or a Porson. It is obvious that Jonson must have written 'whither a man's genius is best able to reach, thither,' &c. But the moles and bats who have hitherto taken charge of this great writer's text could not see even so simple and glaring a fact as this.

It is natural that Jonson should insist with some excess of urgency on the necessity for care and labour in writing.

 

No matter how slow the style be at first, so it be laboured and accurate: seek the best, and be not glad of the froward conceits or first words that offer themselves to us; but judge of what we invent, and order what we approve. Repeat often what we have formerly written; which beside that it helps the consequence, and makes the juncture better, it quickens the heat of imagination, that often cools in the time of setting down, and gives it new strength, as if it grew lustier by the going back. As we see in the contention of leaping, they jump farthest that fetch their race largest; or as in throwing a dart or javelin we force back our arms to make our loose the stronger. Yet, if we have a fair gale of wind, I forbid not the steering out of our sail, so the favour of the gale deceive us not. For all that we invent doth please us in the conception or birth, else we would never set it down.

 

This extract is no exceptional example of the purity, force, and weight of style by which this essay is distinguished even among the works of its author. It is impossible for any commentator to convey more than a most imperfect impression of its rich and various merits.

Great as was Jonson's reliance on the results of training and study, he never forgot that 'arts and precept avail nothing, except nature be beneficial and aiding. And therefore these things are no more written to a dull disposition than rules of husbandry to a barren soil. No precepts will profit a fool; no more than beauty will the blind, or music the deaf. As we should take care that our style in writing be neither dry nor empty, we should look again it be not winding, or wanton with far-fetched descriptions: either is a vice. But that is worse which proceeds out of want than that which riots out of plenty. The remedy of fruitfulness is easy, but no labour will help the contrary.'

Of Spenser, whom he seems to have liked no better than did Landor—in other words, no better than might have been expected of him,—he speaks here, on one point at least, in terms quite opposite to those recorded in Drummond's too sparing and irregular but delightful and invaluable notes. To the Scottish poet he said that 'Spenser's stanzas pleased him not, nor his matter': whereas in this later essay, while still insisting that 'Spenser, in affecting the ancients, writ no language,' he adds, 'yet I would have him read for his matter, but as Virgil read Ennius.' In his preference of Plautus to Terence, it may be observed that Ben Jonson anticipated the verdict of two such very different great men as Jonathan Swift and Victor Hugo.

 

In the Greek poets, as also in Plautus, we shall see the economy and disposition of poems better observed than in Terence, and the latter [that is, in later comic dramatists], who thought the sole grace and virtue of their fable the sticking in of sentences, as ours do the forcing in of jests.

 

The Herculean energy and industry of Jonson might have been expected to make him as intolerant of indolence as he shows himself in the following fine passage:—

 

We should not protect our sloth with the patronage of difficulty. It is a false quarrel [querela, as the marginal title of this note expresses it] against nature, that she helps understanding but in a few, when the most part of mankind are inclined by her thither, if they would take the pains; no less than birds to fly, horses to run, &c.; which if they lose, it is through their own sluggishness, and by that means become her prodigies, not her children.

 

The whole of the section which opens with these noble and fervent words should be most carefully studied by those who would appreciate the peculiar character of Jonson's intelligence and genius. It may be doubted, even by those who would admit that we learn best what we learn earliest, whether 'nature in children is more patient of labour in study, than in age; for the sense of the pain, the labour of the judgment, is absent; they do not measure what they have done. And it is the thought and consideration that affects us, more than the weariness itself.' Plato, we are reminded, went first to Italy and afterwards to Egypt in pursuit of Pythagorean and Osirian mysteries. 'He laboured, so must we.' From the examples of musicians and preachers, whose work requires the service of many faculties at once, this lesson may be drawn:—'if we can express this variety together, why should not divers studies, at divers hours, delight, when the variety is able alone to refresh and repair us? As, when a man is weary of writing, to read; and then again of reading, to write. Wherein, howsoever we do many things, yet are we (in a sort) still fresh to what we begin; we are recreated with change, as the stomach is with meats. . . . It is easier to do many things, and continue, than to do one thing long.'

'A fool may talk,' as Jonson observes a little further on, 'but a wise man speaks'; and to such a man it will scarcely be questioned that we have been listening. But though 'it were a sluggish and base thing to despair' when the attainment of knowledge is possible, yet, 'if a man should prosecute as much as could be said of everything, his work would find no end.'

The next four notes deal more directly with special and practical details and principles of style. If some of the points insisted on seem either obsolete or obvious, there are others which cannot be too often asserted or too strenuously maintained. Silence may be golden on certain occasions; but it is none the less certain that 'speech is the only benefit man hath to express his excellency of mind above other creatures. Words are the people's, yet there is a choice of them to be made'; and the rules laid down for the limitation and regulation of this choice are as sound in principle as brilliant in expression. At every step we find something which might well be quoted in evidence of this.

 

A good man always profits by his endeavour, by his help, yea, when he is absent, nay, when he is dead, by his example and memory. So good authors in their style: a strict and succinct style is that where you can take away nothing without loss, and that loss to be manifest.

 

The grace of metaphor in the following sentence is not more notable than the soundness of its counsel.

 

Some words are to be culled out for ornament and colour, as we gather flowers to strew houses, or make garlands; but they are better when they grow in our style; as in a meadow, where though the mere grass and greenness delight, yet the variety of flowers doth heighten and beautify.

 

No modern student of letters will read this without seeing in it an anticipatory tribute to the incomparable style of Mr. Ruskin.

All the definitions of different styles are good, but this is excellent:—

 

The congruent and harmonious fitting of parts in a sentence hath almost the fastening and force of knitting and connection; as in stones well squared, which will rise strong a great way without mortar.

 

The reader of the following extract will be reminded at its close of an ever-memorable deliverance recorded by Boswell.

 

Periods are beautiful, when they are not too long; for so they have their strength too, as in a pike or javelin. As we must take the care that our words and sense be clear, so, if the obscurity happen through the hearer's or reader's want of understanding, I am not to answer for them, no more than for their not listening or marking; I must neither find them ears nor mind.

 

All must remember how the second great dictator of literary London who bore the name of Johnson expressed the same very rational objection:—'I have found you a reason, sir; I am not bound to find you an understanding.'

The following precept is of perennial value—and of perennial application.

 

We should therefore speak what we can the nearest way, so as we keep our gait, not leap; for too short may as well be not let into the memory, as too long not kept in. Whatsoever loseth the grace and clearness, converts into a riddle: the obscurity is marked, but not the value. That perisheth, and is passed by, like the pearl in the fable. Our style should be like a skein of silk, to be carried and found by the right thread, not ravelled and perplexed: then all is a knot, a heap.

 

Nor is this less weighty or less true:—

 

Language most shows a man. Speak, that I may see thee. It springs out of the most retired and inmost parts of us, and is the image of the parent of it, the mind. No glass renders a man's form or likeness so true as his speech. Nay, it is likened to a man: and as we consider feature and composition in a man, so words in language; in the greatness, aptness, sound, structure, and harmony of it.

 

The seven succeeding notes deal in more detail with various kinds of oratory; 'high and great,' 'grave, sinewy, and strong,' or 'humble and low,' 'plain and pleasing,' or 'vicious' and bombastic, 'fleshy, fat, and corpulent—full of suet and tallow,' or 'bony and sinewy.' These notes are as full of happy and humorous illustration as of sound and sensible criticism; but it is a matter of more interest to consider the observations of such a man as Jonson on such men as Bacon and Aristotle. His reflections on the mediæval worship of a name are not unworthy of modern consideration.

 

Nothing is more ridiculous than to make an author a dictator, as the schools have done Aristotle. The damage is infinite knowledge receives by it: for to many things a man should owe but a temporary relief and suspension of his own judgment, not an absolute resignation of himself, or a perpetual captivity. Let Aristotle and others have their dues; but if we can make farther discoveries of truth and fitness than they, why are we envied? Let us beware, while we strive to add, we do not diminish or deface; we may improve, but not augment. By discrediting falsehood, truth grows in request. We must not go about, like men anguished or perplexed, for vicious affectation of praise; but calmly study the separation of opinions, find the errors have intervened, awake antiquity, call former times into question; but make no parties with the present, nor follow any fierce undertakers; mingle no matter of doubtful credit with the simplicity of truth, but gently stir the mould about the root of the question.

 

The remarks 'on epistolary style' are rich in humour and good sense, as well as curiously illustrative of the singular fashion of the time. 'Sometimes men make baseness of kindness,' observes the writer; and proceeds to illustrate the fact, in a manner which may remind us of Thackeray's, by examples of absurd and verbose adulation, expressed in phrases 'that go a-begging for some meaning, and labour to be delivered of the great burden of nothing.'

A word seems to have dropped out of the following admirable sentence; but the beetle-headed boobies to whose carelessness the charge of Jonson's posthumous writings was committed by the malignity of accident were incapable of noticing the nonsense they had made of it.

 

The next property of epistolary style is perspicuity, and is oftentimes [lost] by affectation of some wit ill angled for, or ostentation of some hidden terms of art. Few words they darken speech, and so do too many; as well too much light hurteth the eyes as too little; and a long bill of chancery confounds the understanding as much as the shortest note; therefore let not your letters be penned like English statutes, and this is obtained.

 

Passing from the subjects of oratory and letter-writing to the subject of poetry, the Laureate at once falls foul of his personal assailants. 'The age is grown so tender of her fame, as she calls all writings aspersions. That is the state word, the phrase of court—Placentia College, which some call Parasites' Place, the Inn of Ignorance.' That is a tolerably harsh phrase for a wearer of courtly laurels to allow himself; but it is gentle and temperate compared with this effusion of divine wrath on the heads of victims now indiscernible and secure from fame or shame.

 

It sufficeth I know what kind of persons I displease; men bred in the declining and decay of virtue, betrothed to their own vices; that have abandoned or prostituted their good names; hungry and ambitious of infamy, invested in all deformity, enthralled to ignorance and malice, of a hidden and concealed malignity, and that hold a concomitancy with all evil.

 

The general and historical notes on poetry which follow are of less interest than they assuredly must have been if Jonson had given us less of Aristotle, Cicero, and Horace, and more of himself. It is therefore less important to know what he thought of Euripides than to know what he thought of Aristotle.

 

But whatsoever nature at any time dictated to the most happy, or long exercise to the most laborious, that the wisdom and learning of Aristotle hath brought into an art; because he understood the causes of things: and what other men did by chance or custom, he doth by reason; and not only found out the way not to err, but the short way we should take not to err.

 

'To judge of poets,' says a later note, 'is only the faculty of poets; and not of all poets, but the best.' It is unlucky that in the note preceding it Ben Jonson should have committed himself to the assertion that Euripides, of all men, 'is sometimes peccant, as he is most times perfect.' The perfection of such shapeless and soulless abortions as the Phoenissae and the Hercules Furens is about as demonstrable as the lack of art which Ben Jonson regretted and condemned in the author of Hamlet and Othello.

It is comically pathetic to find that the failure of Jonson's later comedies had led him to observe, with the judicious Aristotle, that 'the moving of laughter is a fault in comedy, a kind of turpitude that depraves some part of a man's nature without a disease'; and likewise that 'this induced Plato to esteem of Homer as a sacrilegious person, because he presented the gods sometimes laughing.' But this deplorable and degrading instinct of perverse humanity becomes irrepressible and irresistible in the reader who discovers in the author of Bartholomew Fair and The Silent Woman so delicate and sensitive a dislike of plebeian horseplay and farcical scurrility that he cannot at any price abide the insolence and indecency of so vulgar a writer as Aristophanes.

The concluding essay on 'the magnitude and compass of any fable, epic or dramatic,' is of less interest, except to special students, than the animadversions of the writer on more particular subjects of criticism. Constant good sense, occasional felicity of expression, conscientious and logical intensity of application or devotion to every point of the subject handled or attempted, all readers will find, as all readers will expect: and it should be superfluous to repeat that they will find a text so corrupt and so confused as no editor of any but an English classic would venture to publish.

And now it must be evident that if Ben Jonson was the author of Bacon's Essays—as that eminent Irish-American scholar, Dr. Athanasius Dogberry (of New Gotham, U.S.A.), maintains with a fervour not unworthy of Rabbi Zeal-of-the-Land Busy—his genius and his intelligence were by no means at their best when he produced that famous volume, and gave or sold it to his friend the Lord Chancellor. The full and fertile harvest of eloquence and thought, the condensed and compressed wealth of reflection and observation, overflowing on all sides from the narrow garner or treasury of the wonderful little book on which I have not hoped to write anything more than a most imperfect and inadequate commentary, may still be left unreaped and untreasured by the common cry of nominal students or lovers of English literature. But none who have studied it can fail to recognize that its author was in every way worthy to have been the friend of Bacon and of Shakespeare.

 

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1. As in the production of Shakespeare—if his good friend Ben had but known it.
2. The scandalously neglected text reads relicta. Perhaps we should read 'Multa—relicta sunt.'
3. No modern reader of these lofty words can fail to call to mind the sublime pathos and the historic interest of Mr. Browning's glorious poem, A Grammarian's Funeral.
4. It is a pity we are not told how; for to the ordinary intelligence of reasoning mankind it would appear that 'without the senses' not only could knowledge not be perfect, but it could not even exist in the most inchoate or embryonic phase of being.
5. The current text reads 'Also'! My emendation at all events makes sense of a fine passage.
6. That is, the envy they bear towards others: an equivocal, awkward, and affected Latinism. The writer would not—he never would—remember that a phrase or a construction which makes very good Latin may make very bad English.
7. Compare lxxii., Not. 4, and clxxi.

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