Among the great dramatic poets of the Shakespearean
age there are several who would still have a claim
to enduring remembrance as poets, even had they
never written a line for the theatre: there are two
only who would hold a high rank among the masters
of English prose. For Nash was not a poet or a
dramatist who wandered occasionally into prose by
way of change or diversion: he was a master of prose
who strayed now and then into lyric or dramatic
verse. Heywood, Middleton, and Ford have left us
more or less curious and valuable works in prose:
essays and pamphlets or chronicles and compilations:
but these are works of historic interest rather than
literary merit; or, if this be too strong and sweeping
an expression, they are works of less intrinsic than
empirical value. But if all his plays were lost to us,
the author of Ben Jonson's Explorata, or Discoveries,
would yet retain a seat among English prose-writers
beside the author of Bacon's Essays: the author of
The Gull's Horn-book and The Bachelor's Banquet
would still stand high in the foremost rank of English
humorists.
The book of epigrams published by Jonson in the
collected edition of his select works up to the date
of the year 1616 is by no means an attractive introduction
or an alluring prelude to the voluminous
collection of miscellanies which in all modern editions
it precedes. 'It is to be lamented,' in Gifford's
opinion, 'on many accounts,' that the author has
not left us 'a further selection.' It is in my opinion
to be deplored that he should have left us so large
a selection-if that be the proper term-as he has
seen fit to bequeath to a naturally and happily limited
set of readers.
'Sunt bona, sunt quaedam mediocria,
sunt mala plura':
and the worst are so bad, so foul
if not so dull, so stupid if not so filthy, that the student
stands aghast with astonishment at the self-deceiving
capacity of a writer who could prefix to such a collection the
vaunt that his book was 'not covetous of
least self-fame'-'much less 'prone to indulgence
in 'beastly phrase.' No man can ever have been
less amenable than Sir Walter Scott to the infamous
charge of Puritanism or prudery; and it is he who
has left on record his opinion that 'surely that coarseness of
taste which tainted Ben Jonson's powerful
mind is proved from his writings. Many authors
of that age are indecent, but Jonson is filthy and
gross in his pleasantry, and indulges himself in using
the language of scavengers and nightmen.' I will
only add that the evidence of this is flagrant in certain
pages which I never forced myself to read through
till I had undertaken to give a full and fair account-
to the best of my ability-of Ben Jonson's complete
works. How far poetry may be permitted to go in
the line of sensual pleasure or sexual emotion may
be debatable between the disciples of Ariosto and
the disciples of Milton; but all English readers, I
trust, will agree with me that coprology should be
left to Frenchmen. Among them-that is, of course,
among the baser sort of them-that unsavoury science
will seemingly never lack disciples of the most nauseous,
the most abject, the most deliberate bestiality. It is
nothing less than lamentable that so great an English
writer as Ben Jonson should ever have taken the
plunge of a Parisian diver into the cesspool: but it
is as necessary to register as it is natural to deplore
the detestable fact that he did so. The collection of
his epigrams which bears only too noisome witness
to this fact is nevertheless by no means devoid of
valuable and admirable components. The sixty-fifth,
a palinode or recantation of some previous panegyric,
is very spirited and vigorous; and the verses of
panegyric which precede and follow it are wanting
neither in force nor in point. The poem 'on Lucy
Countess of Bedford,' for which Gifford seems hardly
able to find words adequate to his admiration, would
be worthy of very high praise if the texture of its
expression and versification were unstiffened and undisfigured by
the clumsy license of awkward inversions. The New Cry,
a brief and brilliant satire on
political gossips of the gobemouche order, has one
couplet worthy of Dryden himself, descriptive of such
pretenders to statecraft as
talk reserved, locked up, and full of fear,
Nay, ask you how the day goes, in your ear;
Keep a Star-chamber sentence close twelve days,
And whisper what a proclamation says.
The epitaph on little Salathiel Pavy, who had acted
under his own name in the induction to Cynthia's
Revels, is as deservedly famous as any minor work of
Jonson's; for sweetness and simplicity it has few
if any equals among his lyrical attempts.
Of the fifteen lyric or elegiac poems which compose
The Forest, there is none that is not worthy of all
but the highest praise; there is none that is worthy
of the highest. To come so near so often and yet
never to touch the goal of lyric triumph has never
been the fortune and the misfortune of any other
poet. Vigour of thought, purity of phrase, condensed
and polished rhetoric, refined and appropriate eloquence,
studious and serious felicity of expression,
finished and fortunate elaboration of verse, might
have been considered as qualities sufficient to secure
a triumph for the poet in whose work all these excellent
attributes are united and displayed; and we cannot
wonder that younger men who had come within the
circle of his personal influence should have thought
that the combination of them all must ensure to their
possessor a place above all his possible compeers.
But among the humblest and most devout of these
prostrate enthusiasts was one who had but to lay an
idle and reckless hand on the instrument which hardly
would answer the touch of his master's at all, and the
very note of lyric poetry as it should be-as it was in
the beginning, as it is, and as it will be for ever-
responded on the instant to the instinctive intelligence
of his touch. As we turn from Gray to Collins, as
we turn from Wordsworth to Coleridge, as we turn
from Byron to Shelley, so do we turn from Jonson to
Herrick; and so do we recognise the lyric poet as
distinguished from the writer who may or may not
have every gift but one in higher development of
excellence and in fuller perfection of power, but who
is utterly and absolutely transcended and shone down
by his probably unconscious competitor on the proper
and peculiar ground of pure and simple poetry.
But the special peculiarity of the case now before
us is that it was so much the greater man who was
distanced and eclipsed; and this not merely by a
minor poet, but by a humble admirer and a studious
disciple of his own. Herrick, as a writer of elegies,
epithalamiums, panegyrical or complimentary verses,
is as plainly and as openly an imitator of his model as
ever was the merest parasite of any leading poet, from
the days of Chaucer and his satellites to the days of
Tennyson and his. No Lydgate or Lytton was ever
more obsequious in his discipleship; but for all his
loving and loyal protestations of passionate humility
and of ardent reverence, we see at every turn, at every
step, at every change of note, that what the master
could not do the pupil can. When Chapman set sail
after Marlowe, he went floundering and lurching in
the wake of a vessel that went straight and smooth
before the fullest and the fairest wind of song; but
when Herrick follows Jonson the manner of movement
or the method of progression is reversed. Macaulay,
in a well-known passage, has spoken of Ben Jonson's
'rugged rhymes'; but rugged is not exactly the most
appropriate epithet. Donne is rugged: Jonson is
stiff. And if ruggedness of verse is a damaging
blemish, stiffness of verse is a destructive infirmity.
Ruggedness is curable; witness Donne's Anniversaries:
stiffness is incurable; witness Jonson's Underwoods.
In these, as in the preceding series called The
Forest, there is so lavish a display of such various
powers as cannot but excite the admiration they
demand and deserve. They have every quality, their
author would undoubtedly have maintained, that a
student of poetry ought to expect and to applaud.
What they want is that magic without which the very
best verse is as far beneath the very best prose as the
verse which has it is above all prose that ever was or
ever can be written. And there never was a generation
of Englishmen in which this magic was a gift so common
as it was in Jonson's. We have but to open either of
the priceless volumes which we owe to the exquisite
taste and the untiring devotion of Mr. Bullen, and we
shall come upon scores after scores of 'lyrics from
Elizabethan song-books' as far beyond comparison
with the very best of Jonson's as Shakespeare is
beyond comparison with Shirley, as Milton is beyond
comparison with Glover, or as Coleridge is beyond
comparison with Southey. There is exceptional ease
of movement, exceptional grace of expression, in the
lyric which evoked from Gifford the 'free' avowal,
'if it be not the most beautiful song in the language,
I know not, for my part, where it is to be found.'
Who on earth, then or now, would ever have supposed
that the worthy Gifford did? But any one who does
know anything more of the matter than the satirist
and reviewer whose own amatory verses were 'lazy
as Scheldt and cold as Don' will acknowledge that
it would be difficult to enumerate the names of poets
contemporary with Jonson, from Frank Davison to
Robin Herrick, who have left us songs at least as
beautiful as that beginning-'Oh do not wanton with
those eyes, Lest I be sick with seeing.' And in 'the
admirable Epode,' as Gifford calls it, which concludes
Ben Jonson's contributions to Love's Martyr, though
there is remarkable energy of expression, the irregularity and
inequality of style are at least as conspicuous
as the occasional vigour and the casual felicity of
phrase. But if all were as good as the best passages
this early poem of Jonson's would undoubtedly be
very good indeed. Take for instance the description
or definition of true love:-
That is an essence far more gentle, fine,
Pure, perfect, nay divine;
It is a golden chain let down from heaven,
Whose links are bright and even,
That falls like sleep on lovers.
Again:-
0, who is he that in this peace enjoys
The elixir of all joys,
(A form more fresh than are the Eden bowers
And lasting as her flowers;
Richer than time, and as time's virtue rare,
Sober as saddest care,
A fixed thought, an eye untaught to glance;)
Who, blest with such high chance,
Would at suggestion of a steep desire
Cast himself from the spire
Of all his happiness?
And few of Jonson's many moral or gnomic passages
are finer than the following:-
He that for love of goodness hateth ill
Is more crown-worthy still
Than he which for sin's penalty forbears
His heart sins, though he fears.
This metre, though very liable to the danger of
monotony, is to my ear very pleasant; but that of
the much admired and doubtless admirable address
to Sir Robert Wroth is much less so. This poem is
as good and sufficient an example of the author's
ability and inability as could be found in the whole
range of his elegiac or lyric works. It has excellent
and evident qualities of style; energy and purity,
clearness and sufficiency, simplicity and polish; but
it is wanting in charm. Grace, attraction, fascination,
the typical and essential properties of verse, it has
not. Were Jonson to be placed among the gods of
song, we should have to say of him what Æschylus says
of Death-
[GREEK]
The spirit of persuasive enchantment, the goddess
of entrancing inspiration, kept aloof from him alone
of all his peers or rivals. To men far weaker, to poets
not worthy to be named with him on the score of
creative power, she gave the gift which from him was
all but utterly withheld. And therefore it is that his
place is not beside Shakespeare, Milton, or Shelley,
but merely above Dryden, Byron, and Crabbe. The
verses on Penshurst are among his best, wanting
neither in grace of form nor stateliness of sound, if
too surely wanting in the indefinable quality of distinction
or inspiration: and the farewell to the world
has a savour of George Herbert's style about it which
suggests that the sacred poet must have been a sometime
student of the secular. Beaumont, again, must
have taken as a model of his lighter lyric style the
bright and ringing verses on the proposition 'that
women are but men's shadows.' The opening couplet
of the striking address 'to Heaven' has been, it seems
to me, misunderstood by Gifford; the meaning is not -
'Can I not think of God without its making me
melancholy?' but 'Can I not think of God without
its being imputed or set down by others to a fit of
dejection?' The few sacred poems which open the
posthumous collection of his miscellaneous verse are
far inferior to the best of Herrick's Noble Numbers;
although the second of the three must probably have
served the minor poet as an occasional model.
The Celebration of Charis in ten lyric pieces would
be a graceful example of Jonson's lighter and brighter
inspiration if the ten were reduced to eight. His
anapaests are actually worse than Shelley's: which
hope would fain have assumed and charity would fain
have believed to be impossible. 'We will take our
plan from the new world of man, and our work shall
be called the Pro-me-the-an'-even the hideous and
excruciating cacophony of that horrible sentence is
not so utterly inconceivable as verse, is not so fearfully
and wonderfully immetrical as this: 'And from her
arched brows such a grace sheds itself through the face.'
The wheeziest of barrel-organs, the most broken-winded
of bagpipes, grinds or snorts out sweeter
melody than that. But the heptasyllabic verses among
which this monstrous abortion rears its amorphous
head are better than might have been expected; not,
as Gifford says of one example, 'above all praise,' but
creditable at their best and tolerable at their worst.
The miscellaneous verses collected under the pretty
and appropriate name of Underwoods comprise more
than a few of Ben Jonson's happiest and most finished
examples of lyric, elegiac, and gnomic or didactic
poetry; and likewise not a little of such rigid and
frigid work as makes us regret the too strenuous and
habitual application of so devoted a literary craftsman
to his professional round of labour. The fifth of these
poems, A Nymph's Passion, is not only pretty and
ingenious, but in the structure of its peculiar stanza
may remind a modern reader of some among the
many metrical experiments or inventions of a more
exquisite and spontaneous lyric poet, Miss Christina
Rossetti. The verses 'on a lover's dust, made sand
for an hour-glass,' just come short of excellence in
their fantastic way; those on his picture are something
more than smooth and neat; those against jealousy
are exceptionally sweet and spontaneous, again recalling
the manner of the poetess just mentioned; with a
touch of something like Shelley's-
I wish the sun should shine
On all men's fruits and flowers, as well as mine-
and also of something like George Herbert's at his
best. The Dream is one of Jonson's most happily
inspired and most happily expressed fancies; the
close of it is for once not less than charming.
Of the various elegies and epistles included in this
collection it need only be said that there is much
thoughtful and powerful writing in most if not in all
of them, with occasional phrases or couplets of rare
felicity, and here and there a noble note of enthusiasm
or a masterly touch of satire. In the epistle to Sir
Edward Sackvile the sketch of the 'infants of the
sword' who 'give thanks by stealth' and in whispers
for benefits which they are ready to disown with
imprecations in public is worthy of the hand which
drew Bobadil and Tucca. The sonnet to Lady Mary
Wroth, good in itself, is characteristic in its preference
of the orthodox Italian structure to the English or
Shakespearean form. The four very powerful and
remarkable elegies on a lovers' quarrel and separation
I should be inclined to attribute rather to Donne than
to Jonson; their earnest passion, their quaint frankness,
their verbal violence, their eccentric ardour of
expression, at once unabashed and vehement, spontaneous
and ingenious, are all of them typical characteristics
of the future dean in the secular and
irregular days of his hot poetic youth. The fourth
and final poem of the little series is especially impressive
and attractive. The turn of the sentences and the
cadence of the verse are no less significant of the
authorship than is a noble couplet in the poem
immediately preceding them-which would at once
be recognised by a competent reader as Jonson's:-
So may the fruitful vine my temples steep,
And fame wake for me when I yield to sleep!
The 'epistle answering to one that asked to be sealed
of the tribe of Ben' is better in spirit than in
execution; manful, straightforward, and upright.
The 'epigram' or rather satire 'on the Court Pucelle'
goes beyond even the license assumed by Pope in the
virulent ferocity of its personal attack on a woman.
This may be explained, or at least illustrated, by the
fact that Ben Jonson's views regarding womanhood
in general were radically cynical though externally
chivalrous: a charge which can be brought against
no other poet or dramatist of his age. He could pay
more splendid compliments than any of them to this
or that particular woman; the deathless epitaph on
'Sydney's sister, Pembroke's mother,' is but the
crowning flower of a garland, the central jewel of a
set; but no man has said coarser (I had wellnigh
written, viler) things against the sex to which these
exceptionally honoured patronesses belonged. This
characteristic is not more significant than the corresponding
evidence given by comparison of his readiness
to congratulate and commend other poets and poeticules
for work not always worthy of his notice, and
at the same time to indulge in such sweeping denunciation
of all contemporary poetry as would not have
misbecome the utterance of incarnate envy-in other
words, as might have fallen from the lips of Byron.
See, for one most flagrant and glaring example of
what might seem the very lunacy of malignity, a
passage in what Coleridge has justly called 'his
splendid dedication of The Fox.'
Here he talks of
raising 'the despised head of poetry again, and
stripping her out of those rotten and base rags wherewith
the times have adulterated her form.' It is difficult to
resist a temptation to emulate Ben Jonson's own
utmost vehemence of language when we remember
that this sentence is dated the 11th of February, 1607.
Nine years before the death of Shakespeare the greatest
writer of all time, the most wonderful human creature
of all ages, was in the very zenith of his powers and
his glory. And this was a contemporary poet's view
of the condition of contemporary poetry. He was
not more unlucky as a courtier and a prophet when he
proclaimed the triumphant security of the English
government as twice ensured by the birth of the future
King James II.
The memorial ode on the death of Sir Henry
Morison has thoughtful and powerful touches in it,
as well as one stanza so far above the rest that it gains
by a process which would impair its effect if the
poem were on the whole even a tolerably good one.
The famous lines on 'the plant and flower of light'
can be far better enjoyed when cut away from the
context. The opening is as eccentrically execrable
as the epode of the solitary strophe which redeems
from all but unqualified execration a poem in which
Gifford finds 'the very soul of Pindar'-whose
reputation would in that case be the most inexplicable
of riddles. Far purer in style and far more equable
in metre is the 'ode gratulatory' to Lord Weston;
and the 'epithalamion' on the marriage of that
nobleman's son, though not without inequalities,
crudities, and platitudes, is on the whole a fine and
dignified example of ceremonial poetry. Another of
the laureate's best effusions of official verse is the short
ode which bids his 'gentle Muse' rouse herself to
celebrate the king's birthday, 'though now our green
conceits be grey,' with good wishes which have a
tragic ring in the modern reader's ear. A more unequal
poem than the elegy on the Marchioness of
Winchester is hardly to be found anywhere; but the
finest passages are noble indeed. The elegiac poems
on the famous demi-mondaine Venetia Stanley, who
made a comparatively respectable end as Lady Digby,
are equally startling and amusing in their attribution
to that heroine of a character which would justify the
beatification if not the canonisation of its immaculate
possessor. The first of these is chiefly remarkable
for a singular Scotticism-'where Seraphim take tent
of ordering all'; the fragment of the second, as an
early attempt-I know not whether it be the earliest-
to introduce the terza rima into English verse. There
are one or two fine stanzas in the fourth, and the
Apotheosis of this singular saint has a few good couplets;
it contains, however, probably the most horrible and
barbarous instance of inversion which the violated
language can display:-
in her hand With boughs of palm, a crowned victrice stand.
Such indefinable enormities as this cannot but
incline us to think that this great scholar, this laurelled
invader and conqueror of every field and every province of
classic learning, was intus et in cute
an irreclaimable and incurable barbarian. And assuredly
this impression will be neither removed nor modified
when we come to examine his translations from Latin
poetry. If the report is to be believed which attributes
to Ben Jonson the avowal of an opinion that above
all things he excelled in translation, it must be admitted
that for once the foolish theory which represents
men of genius as incapable of recognising what is or
is not their best work or their most distinguishing
faculty is justified and exemplified after a fashion so
memorable that the exception must be invoked to
prove the rule. For a worse translator than Ben
Jonson never committed a double outrage on two
languages at once. I should be reluctant to quote
examples of this lamentable truth, if it were not
necessary to vindicate his contemporaries from such
an imputation as is conveyed in the general belief
that his method of translation is merely the method
of his age. The fact is that it is as exceptionally
abominable as his genius, when working on its own
proper and original lines, is exceptionally admirable.
I am no great lover of Horace, but I cannot pretend
to think that the words
Si torrere jecur qaeris idoneum
are adequately rendered by the words
If a fit liver thou dost seek to toast.
Fate and fire did a double injury, if not a double
injustice, to Ben Jonson, when his commentary on
Horace's Art of Poetry was consumed and his translation
of the text preserved. The commentary in
which Donne was represented under the name of
Criticus must have been one of the most interesting
and valuable of Jonson's prose works: the translation
is one of those miracles of incompetence, incongruity,
and insensibility which must be seen to be believed.
It may be admitted that there is a very happy instance
of exact and pointed rendering from the ninth and
tenth lines of the original in the eleventh and twelfth
lines of the translation.
Pictoribus atque poetis
Quidlibet audendi semper fuit aequa potestas.
Scimus.
Pope himself could not have rendered this well-known
passage more neatly, more smoothly, more perfectly
and more happily than thus:-
But equal power to painter and to poet
Of daring all hath still been given: we know it.
And in the seventh line following we come upon
this indescribable horror-an abomination of which
Abraham Fraunce or Gabriel Harvey would by
charitable readers have been considered incapable
as perhaps indeed they were:-
A scarlet piece or two stitch'd in; when or
Diana's grove or altar,
D'ring circles of swift waters, etc., etc.
'The bellman writes better verses,' said Mr. Osbaldistone,
when he threw poor Frank's away. Walt
Whitman writes no worse, a modern critic will reflect
on reading these.
The version of one of Martial's gracefullest epigrams
flows more pleasantly than usual till it ends with a
horrible jolt, thus:-
He that but living half his days dies such,
Makes his life longer than 'twas given him, much.
And Echo answers-Much! Gifford, however, waxes
ecstatic over these eight lines. 'It is the most beautiful of
all the versions of this elegant poem,' and, if
we may believe him, 'clearly and fully expresses the
whole of its meaning.' Witness the second line:-
Thou worthy in eternal flower to fare.
That is no more English than it is Latin-no more
accurate than it is intelligible. The original is as
simple as it is lovely:-
Liber in aeternâ vivere digne rosâ.
It would be worse than superfluous to look among
his other versions from Horace for further evidence
of Ben Jonson's incomparable incompetence as a
translator. But as this has been hitherto very insufficiently
insisted on-his reputation as a poet and
a scholar standing apparently between the evidence
of this fact and the recognition of it-I will give one
crowning example from The Poetaster. This is what
Virgil is represented as reading to Augustus-and
Augustus as hearing without a shriek of agony and
horror:-
Meanwhile the skies 'gan thunder, and in tail
Of that fell pouring storms of sleet and hail.
'In tail of that'! Proh
Deuûm atque hominum fidem!
And it is Virgil-Virgil, of all men and all poets-
to whom his traducer has the assurance to attribute
this inexpressible atrocity of outrage!
The case of Ben Jonson is the great standing
example of a truth which should never be forgotten
or overlooked; that no amount of learning, of labour,
or of culture will supply the place of natural taste and
native judgment-will avail in any slightest degree
to confer the critical faculty upon a man to whom
nature has denied it. Just judgment of others, just
judgment of himself, was all but impossible to this
great writer, this consummate and indefatigable scholar,
this generous and enthusiastic friend. The noble
infirmity of excess in benevolence is indisputably no
less obvious in three great writers of our own century;
great, each of them, like Ben Jonson, in prose as well
as in verse: one of them greater than he, one of them
equal, and one of them hardly to be accounted equal
with him. Victor Hugo, Walter Savage Landor, and
Théophile Gautier were doubtless as exuberant in
generosity-the English poet was perhaps as indiscriminate
in enthusiasm of patronage or of sympathy-as
even the promiscuous panegyrist of Shakespeare,
of Fletcher, of Chapman, of Drayton, of Browne, of
Brome, and of May; and moreover of one Stephens,
of one Rutter, of one Wright, of one Warre, and of
one Filmer. Of these last five names, that of the
worthy Master Joseph Rutter-Ben's 'dear son, and
right learned friend'-is the only one which signifies
to me the existence of an author not utterly unknown.
His spiritual father or theatrical sponsor is most
copious and most cordial in his commendation of
the good man's pastoral drama; he has not mentioned
its one crowning excellence-the quality for
which, having tried it every night for upwards of six
weeks running, I can confidently and conscientiously
recommend it. Chloral is not only more dangerous
but very much less certain as a soporific: the sleeplessness
which could resist the influence of Mr. Rutter's
verse can be curable only by dissolution; the eyes
which can keep open through the perusal of six
consecutive pages must never hope to find rest but
in the grave.
The many ceremonial or occasional poems addressed
to friends and patrons of various ranks and
characters, from the king and queen to a Mr. Burges
and a Mr. Squib, are of equally various interest, now
graver and now lighter, to a careful student of Ben
Jonson as a poet and a man. Nor, when due account
is taken of the time and its conventional habits of
speech, does it seem to me that any of them can be
justly charged with servility or flattery, or, as the
writer might have said, with 'assentation.' But these
effusions or improvisations are of no more serious
importance than the exquisitely neat and terse composition
of the 'Leges Convivales,' or the admirable
good sense and industry, the admirable perspicacity
and perspicuity, which will be recognised no less in
the Latin than in the English part of his English
Grammar. It is interesting to observe an anticipation
of Landor's principle with respect to questions of
orthography, in the preference given to the Latin
form of spelling for words of Latin derivation, while
admitting that this increase of accuracy would bring
the written word no nearer to the sound uttered in
speaking. The passage is worth transcription as an
example of delicately scrupulous accuracy and subtly
conscientious refinement in explanation:-
Alii haec haud inconsultô scribunt abil, stabil, fabul; tanquam
a fontibus habilis, stabilis, fabula: verius, sed nequicquam
proficiunt. Nam consideratiùs auscultanti nec i nec u est,
sed tinnitus quidam, vocalis naturam habens, quae naturaliter
his liquidis inest.
A point on which I am sorry to rest uncertain
whether Landor would have felt as much sympathy
with Jonson's view as I feel myself is the regret expressed
by the elder poet for the loss of the Saxon
characters that distinguished the two different sounds
now both alike expressed, and expressed with equal
inaccuracy, by the two letters th. 'And in this,'
says Jonson-as it seems to me, most reasonably-
'consists the greatest difficulty of our alphabet and
true writing.'
The text of the grammar, both Latin and English,
requires careful revision and correction; but indeed
as much must be said of the text of Jonson's works
in general. Gifford did very much for it, but he left
not a little to be done. And the arrangement adopted
in Colonel Cunningham's beautiful and serviceable
edition of 1875 is the most extraordinary-at least,
I hope and believe so-on record. All the misreadings
of the edition of 1816 are retained in the
text, where they stand not merely uncorrected but
unremarked; so that the bewildered student must refer
at random, on the even chance of disappointment,
to an appendix in which he may find them irregularly
registered, with some occasional comment on the
previous editor's negligence and caprice: a method,
to put it as mildly as possible, somewhat provocative
of strong language on the part of a studious and
belated reader-language for which it cannot rationally
be imagined that it is he who will be registered
by the recording angel as culpably responsible. What
is wanted in the case of so great an English classic
is of course nothing less than this: a careful and
complete edition of all his extant writings, with all
the various readings of the various editions published
during his lifetime. This is the very least that should
be exacted; and this is less than has yet been supplied.
Edition after edition of Shakespeare is put forth under
the auspices of scholars or of dunces without a full
and plain enumeration of the exact differences of
text-the corrections, suppressions, alterations, and
modifications-which distinguish the text of the
quartos from the too frequently garbled and mangled,
the sometimes transfigured and glorified text of the
folio. And consequently not one devoted student in
a thousand has a chance of knowing what he has a
right to know of the gradations and variations in
expression, the development and the self-discipline
in display, of the most transcendent intelligence that
ever illuminated humanity. And in the case of
Shakespeare's most loyal comrade and panegyrist-
though sometimes, it may be, his rather captious
rival and critic-the neglect of his professed devotees
and editorial interpreters has been scarcely less scandalous
and altogether as incomprehensible. In every
edition which makes any pretence to completeness, or
to satisfaction of a serious student's indispensable
requisites and inevitable demands, the first text of
Every Man in his Humour should of course be given
in full. Snatches and scraps of it are given in the
notes to the edition of 1816-; the first act is reprinted
-the first act alone-in the appendix to the first
volume of the edition of 1875. What would be said
by Hellenists or Latinists if such contemptuous indolence,
such insolence of neglect, were displayed by
the editor of a Greek or Latin poet-assuming that
his edition had been meant for other than fourth-
form or fifth-form service? Compare the devotion of
their very best editors to Shakespeare and to Jonson
with the devotion of Mr. Ellis to Catullus and Mr.
Munro to Lucretius. It is a shame that Englishmen
should not be forthcoming who would think it worth
while to expend as much labour, and would be competent
to bring that labour to as good an end, in the
service of their own immortal countrymen, as is
expended and as is attained by classical scholars in
the service of alien and not more adorable gods. And
on one point-a point indeed of more significance
than importance-the capricious impertinence of such
editors as do condescend to undertake any part of
such a task is so inexplicable except on one supposition
that we are tempted to embrace, or at least to
accept, the assumption that the editor (for instance)
of Ben Jonson considers the author of The Silent
Woman, Bartholomew Fair, and certain metrical emetics
classified under the head of Epigrams, as a writer fit to
be placed in the hands of schoolgirls. And even then
it is difficult to imagine why we come upon certain
rows of asterisks in the record of his conversations
with Drummond, and in the anonymous interlude
written-as Gifford supposes- 'for the christening
of a son of the Earl of Newcastle, to whom the
king or the prince stood godfather.' Even if Jonson
had taken-as on such an occasion it wouId be strange
if he had taken-the utmost license of his friends
Aristophanes and Rabelais, this would be no reason
for treating the reader like a schoolboy or a Dauphin.
What a man of genius has written for a public occasion
is public property thenceforward and for ever: and
the pretense of a man like Giffard to draw the line
and determine the limit of publicity is inexpressibly
preposterous.
The little interude, however broad and even coarse
in its realistic pleasantry, is a quaint and spirited
piece of work; but there are other matters in Colonel
Cunningham's appendix which have no right, demonstrable or imaginable,
to the place they occupy. It
is incredible, it is inconceivable, that Jonson should
ever have written such a line as this by way of a
Latin verse:
Macte: tuo scriptores lectoresque labore (!!!).
'Les chassepots partiraient d'eux-mêmes'-
birch
would make itself into spontaneous rods for the
schoolboy who could perpetate so horrible an atrocity.
The repusive and ridiculous rubbish which has ignorantly
and absurdly been taken for 'a fragment of
one of the last quaternions of Eupheme'
is part, I
am sorry to say, of an elegy by Francis Beaumont
on one Lady Markham. It is an intolerable scandal
that the public should he content to endure such
an outrage as the intrusion of another man's abominable
absurdities into the text of such a writer as Ben
Jonson. This effusion of his young friend's, which
must surely have been meant as a joke and a very
bad, not to say a very brutal one-is probably the most
hideous nonsense ever written on the desecrated subject
of death and decay. A smaller but a serious
example of negligence and incompetence is patent
in the text of the ten lines contributed by Jonson
to the Annalia Dubrensia- that most pleasant and
curious athletic anthology, the reissue of which is
one of the wellnigh countless obligations conferred
on students of the period by the devoted industry,
energy, and ability of Dr. Grosart. He, of course,
could not fail to see that the first of these lines was
corrupt. 'I cannot bring my Muse to dropp Vies'
is obviously neither sense nor metre. It is rather
with diffidence than with confidence that I would
suggest the reading double in place of the palpably
corrupt word drop: but from Gifford's explanation
of the gambling term vie I should infer that this
reading, which certainly rectifies the metre, might
also restore the sense. Another obvious error is to
be noted in the doggrel lines on Lady Ogle, which
afford a curious and compact example of Ben Jonson's
very worst vices of style and metre. Still, as Ben
was not in the habit of writing flat nonsense, we ought
evidently to read 'in the sight of Angels,' not, as
absurdly printed in the edition of 1875 (ix. 326),
'in the Light'; especially as the next verse ends with
that word. The commendatory verses on Cynthia's
Revenge which reappear at page 346 of the same
volume had appeared on page 332 of the volume
immediately preceding. Such editorial derelictions
and delinquencies are enough to inoculate the most
patient reader's humour with the acerbity of Gifford's
or Carlyle's. Again, this appendix gives only one or
two fragments of the famous additional scenes to
The Spanish Tragedy, while the finest and most important
passages are omitted and ignored. For one
thing, however, we have reason to be grateful to the
compiler who has inserted for the first time among
Ben Jonson's works the fine and flowing stanzas
described by their author as an allegoric ode. This
poem, which in form is Horatian, has no single stanza
so beautiful or so noble as the famous third strophe
of the Pindaric ode to Sir Lucius Cary on the death
of Sir Henry Morison; but its general superiority
in purity of style and fluidity of metre is as remark
able as the choice and use of proper names with such
a dexterous felicity as to emulate while it recalls the
majestic and magnificent instincts of Marlowe and
of Milton.
If the fame of Ben Jonson were in any degree
dependent on his minor or miscellaneous works in
verse, it would be difficult to assign him a place
above the third or fourth rank of writers belonging
to the age of Shakespeare. His station in the first
class of such writers, and therefore in the front rank
of English authors, is secured mainly by the excellence
of his four masterpieces in comedy; The Fox and
The Alchemist, The Staple of News and Every Man in
his Humour: but a single leaf of his Discoveries is
worth all his lyrics, tragedies, elegies, and epigrams
together. That golden little book of noble thoughts
and subtle observations is the one only province of
his vast and varied empire which yet remains for us
to examine; and in none other will there be found
more ample and more memorable evidence how truly
great a man demands our homage-'on this side idolatry'-
for the imperishable memory of Ben Jonson.