of The Sad Shepherd. For forty years, he said in the prologue, he had feasted the public; at first he could scarce hit its taste, but patience had at last enabled it to identify itself with the working of his pen.
We are so accustomed to think of Ben Jonson presiding, attentive to his own applause, over a circle of youthful followers and admirers, that we are apt to forget the hard struggle which he had passed through before gaining the crown now universally acknowledged to be his. Howell records, in the year before Ben's death, that at a solemn supper at the poet's own house, where the host had almost spoiled the relish of the feast by vilifying others and magnifying himself, "T. Ca." (Thomas Carew) buzzed in the writer's ear "that, though Ben had barrelled up a great deal of knowledge, yet it seemed he had not read the Ethics, which, among other precepts of morality, forbid self-commendation." Self-reliance is but too frequently coupled with self-consciousness, and for good and for evil self-confidence was no doubt the most prominent feature in the character of Ben Jonson. Hence the combativeness which involved him in so many quarrels in his earlier days, and which jarred so harshly upon the gentler nature of Drummond. But his quarrels do not appear to have entered deeply into his soul, or indeed usually to have lasted long.[1] He was too exuberant in his vituperations to be bitter, and too outspoken to be malicious. He loved of all things to be called "honest," and there is every reason to suppose that he deserved the epithet. The old superstition, which may perhaps still linger here and there, hardly needs notice, according to which Jonson was filled with malignant envy of the greatest of his fellow-dramatists, and lost no opportunity of giving expression to it. Those who consider that Shakespeare was beyond the criticism of his contemporaries—as he certainly very frequently is above that of posterity—may find blasphemy in the saying of Jonson that Shakespeare "wanted art." Occasional jesting allusions to particular plays of Shakespeare may be found in Jonson, among which should hardly be included the sneer at Pericles; but these amount to nothing collectively, and to very little individually; and against them have to be set, not only the many pleasant traditions concerning the long intimacy between the pair, but also the noble lines, as noble as they are judicious, dedicated by the survivor to "the star of poets." But if Gifford had rendered no other service to Jonson's fame, he must be allowed to have once for all vindicated him from the cruellest aspersion which has ever been cast upon it. That in general Ben Jonson was a man of strong likes and dislikes, and was wont to manifest the latter as vehemently as the former, it would be idle to deny. He was at least impartial in his censures, dealing them out freely to Puritan poets like Wither and princes of his church like Cardinal Duperron. And, if sensitive to attack, he seems to have been impervious to flattery to judge from the candour with which he condemned the foibles even of so enthusiastic an admirer as Beaumont. The personage that he disliked the most, and abused the most roundly to its face, was unfortunately one with many heads and a tongue to hiss in each,—no other than that "general public" which it was the radical mistake of his life to fancy he could "rail into approbation" before he had effectively secured its goodwill. And upon the whole it may be said that the admiration of the few, rather than the favour of the many, has kept green the fame of the most independent among all the masters of an art which, in more senses than one, must please to live.
Jonson's learning and industry, which were alike exceptional, by no means exhausted themselves in furnishing and elaborating the materials of his dramatic works. His enemies sneered at him as a translator—a title which only a generation earlier would have been esteemed of all literary titles the most honourable. But his classical scholarship shows itself not only in his translations from the Latin poets (the Ars Poetica in particular), in addition to which he appears to have written a version of Barclay's Argenis; it was likewise the basis of his English Grammar, of which nothing but the rough draft remains (the MS. itself having perished in the fire in his library), and in connexion with the subject of which he appears to have pursued other linguistic studies (Howell in 1629 is trying to procure him a Welsh grammar). And its effects are very visible in some of the most pleasing of his non-dramatic poems, which often display that combination of polish and simplicity hardly to be attained to—hardly even to be appreciated—without some measure of classical training.
Exclusively of the few lyrics in Jonson's dramas (which, with the exception of the stately choruses in Catiline, charm, and perhaps may surprise, by their lightness of touch), his non-dramatic works are comprised in the following collections. The book of Epigrams (published in the first folio of 1616) contained, in the poet's own words, the "ripest of his studies." His notion of an epigram was the ancient not the restricted modern one—still less that of the critic (R. C., the author of the Times' Whistle) in whose language, according to Jonson, "witty" was "obscene." On the whole, these epigrams excel more in encomiastic than in satiric touches, while the pathos of one or two epitaphs in the collection is of the truest kind. In the lyrics and epistles contained in the Forest (also in the first folio), Jonson shows greater variety in the poetic styles adopted by him; but the theme of love, which Dryden considered conspicuous by its absence in the author's dramas, is similarly eschewed here. The Underwoods (which were not published collectively till the second and surreptitious folio) are a miscellaneous series, comprising, together with a few religious and a few amatory poems, a large number of epigrams, epitaphs, elegies, and "odes," including both the tributes to Shakespeare and several to royal and other patrons and friends, besides the Execration upon Vulcan, and the characteristic ode addressed, apparently in the earlier part of his career, by the poet to himself. To these pieces in verse should be added the Discoveries—an often highly interesting commonplace-book of aphorisms that occurred to the poet in his daily readings,—self-communings of a more tranquil and perhaps a more sober kind than the outpourings of the Conversations at Hawthornden.
The dramatic works of Ben Jonson fall into three or, if his fragmentary pastoral drama be considered to stand by itself, into four distinct divisions. His tragedies are only two in number—Sejanus his Fall, and Catiline his Conspiracy.[2] Of these the earlier, as is worth noting, was produced at Shakespeare's theatre, in all probability before the first of Shakespeare's Roman dramas, and still contains a considerable admixture of rhyme in the dialogue. Though perhaps less carefully elaborated in diction than its successor, Sejanus is at least equally impressive as a highly-wrought dramatic treatment of a complex historic theme. The character of Tiberius adds an element of curious psychological interest which is wanting in Catiline and his surround-
- ↑ With Inigo Jones, however, in quarrelling with whom, as Howell reminds Jonson, the poet was virtually quarrelling with his bread and butter, he seems to have found it impossible to live permanently at peace; his satirical Expostulation against the architect was published as late as 1635.
- ↑ Of The Fall of Mortimer Johnson left only a few lines behind him; but, as he also left the argument of the play, factious ingenuity contrived to furbish up the relic into a libel against Queen Caroline and Sir Robert Walpole in 1731, and to revive the contrivance by way of an insult to the princess dowager of Wales and Lord Bute in 1762.
