Page:A study of Ben Jonson (IA studyofbenjonson00swinrich).pdf/39

of intellectual omission, it is perhaps the most serious and the most irremediable. It is want of sympathy; a lack of cordial interest, not in his own work or in his own genius,—no one will assert that Jonson was deficient on that score,—but in the individual persons, the men and women represented on the stage. He took so much interest in the creations that he had none left for the creatures of his intellect or art. This fault is not more obvious in the works of his disciples Cartwright and Randolph than in the works of their master. The whole interest is concentrated on the intellectual composition and the intellectual development of the characters and the scheme. Love and hatred, sympathy and antipathy, are superseded and supplanted by pure scientific curiosity: the clear glow of serious or humorous emotion is replaced by the dry light of analytical investigation. Si vis me flere—the proverb is something musty. Neither can we laugh heartily or long where all chance of sympathy or cordiality is absolutely inconceivable. The loving laughter which salutes the names of Dogberry and Touchstone, Mrs. Quickly and Falstaff, is never evoked by the most gorgeous opulence of humour, the most glorious audacity of intrigue, which dazzles and delights our under-