THE reputation of Jonson has been of the most deadly kind that can be compelled
upon the memory of a great poet. To be universally accepted; to be damned by
the praise that quenches all desire to read the book; to be afflicted by the
imputation of the virtues which excite the least pleasure; and to be read only
by historians and antiquaries—this is the most perfect conspiracy of approval.
For some generations the reputation of Jonson has been carried rather as a liability
than as an asset in the balance-sheet of English literature. No critic has succeeded
in making him appear pleasurable or even interesting. Swinburne's book on Jonson
satisfies no curiosity and stimulates no thought. For the critical study in
the "Men of Letters Series" by Mr. Gregory Smith there is a place;
it satisfies curiosity, it supplies many just observations, it provides valuable
matter on the neglected masques; it only fails to remodel the image of Jonson
which is settled in our minds. Probably the fault lies with several generations
of our poets. It is not that the value of poetry is only its value to living
poets for their own work; but appreciation is akin to creation, and true enjoyment
of poetry is related to the stirring of suggestion, the stimulus that a poet
feels in his enjoyment of other poetry. Jonson has provided no creative stimulus
for a very long time; consequently we must look back as far as Dryden—precisely,
a poetic practitioner who learned from Jonson—before we find a living
criticism of Jonson's work. 1 d4v10vt
Yet there are possibilities for Jonson even now. We have no difficulty in seeing
what brought him to this pass; how, in contrast, not with Shakespeare, but with
Marlowe, Webster, Donne, Beaumont, and Fletcher, he has been paid out with reputation
instead of enjoyment. He is no less a poet than these men, but his poetry is
of the surface. Poetry of the surface cannot be understood without study; for
to deal with the surface of life, as Jonson dealt with it, is to deal so deliberately
that we too must be deliberate, in order to understand. Shakespeare, and smaller
men also, are in the end more difficult, but they offer something at the start
to encourage the student or to satisfy those who want nothing more; they are
suggestive, evocative, a phrase, a voice; they offer poetry in detail as well
as in design. So does Dante offer something, a phrase everywhere (tu se' ombra
ed ombra vedi) even to readers who have no Italian; and Dante and Shakespeare
have poetry of design as well as of detail. But the polished veneer of Jonson
reflects only the lazy reader's fatuity; unconscious does not respond to unconscious;
no swarms of inarticulate feelings are aroused. The immediate appeal of Jonson
is to the mind; his emotional tone is not in the single verse, but in the design
of the whole. But not many people are capable of discovering for themselves
the beauty which is only found after labour; and Jonson's industrious readers
have been those whose interest was historical and curious, and those who have
thought that in discovering the historical and curious interest they had discovered
the artistic value as well. When we say that Jonson requires study, we do not
mean study of his classical scholarship or of seventeenth-century manners. We
mean intelligent saturation in his work as a whole; we mean that in order to
enjoy him at all, we must get to the centre of his work and his temperament,
and that we must see him unbiased by time, as a contemporary. And to see him
as a contemporary does not so much require the power of putting ourselves into
seventeenth-century London as it requires the power of setting Jonson in our
London: a more difficult triumph of divination. 2
It is generally conceded that Jonson failed as a tragic dramatist; and it is
usually agreed that he failed because his genius was for satiric comedy and
because of the weight of pedantic learning with which he burdened his two tragic
failures. The second point marks an obvious error of detail; the first is too
crude a statement to be accepted; to say that he failed because his genius was
unsuited to tragedy is to tell us nothing at all. Jonson did not write a good
tragedy, but we can see no reason why he should not have written one. If two
plays so different as The Tempest and The Silent Woman are both comedies, surely
the category of tragedy could be made wide enough to include something possible
for Jonson to have done. But the classification of tragedy and comedy, while
it may be sufficient to mark the distinction in a dramatic literature of more
rigid form and treatment—it may distinguish Aristophanes from Euripides—is
not adequate to a drama of such variations as the Elizabethans. Tragedy is a
crude classification for plays so different in their tone as Macbeth, The Jew
of Malta, and The Witch of Edmonton; and it does not help us much to say that
The Merchant of Venice and The Alchemist are comedies. Jonson had his own scale,
his own instrument. The merit which Catiline possesses is the same merit that
is exhibited more triumphantly in Volpone; Catiline fails, not because it is
too laboured and conscious, but because it is not conscious enough; because
Jonson in this play was not alert to his own idiom, not clear in his mind as
to what his temperament wanted him to do. In Catiline Jonson conforms, or attempts
to conform, to conventions; not to the conventions of antiquity, which he had
exquisitely under control, but to the conventions of tragico-historical drama
of his time. It is not the Latin erudition that sinks Catiline, but the application
of that erudition to a form which was not the proper vehicle for the mind which
had amassed the erudition. 3
If you look at Catiline—that dreary Pyrrhic victory of tragedy—you
find two passages to be successful: Act ii. scene I, the dialogue of the political
ladies, and the Prologue of Sylla's ghost. These two passages are genial. The
soliloquy of the ghost is a characteristic Jonson success in content and in
versification— Dost thou not feel me, Rome? not yet! is night So heavy
on thee, and my weight so light? Can Sylla's ghost arise within thy walls, Less
threatening than an earthquake, the quick falls Of thee and thine? Shake not
the frighted heads Of thy steep towers, or shrink to their first beds? Or as
their ruin the large Tyber fills, Make that swell up, and drown thy seven proud
hills?...This is the learned, but also the creative, Jonson. Without concerning
himself with the character of Sulla, and in lines of invective, Jonson makes
Sylla's ghost, while the words are spoken, a living and terrible force. The
words fall with as determined beat as if they were the will of the morose Dictator
himself. You may say: merely invective; but mere invective, even if as superior
to the clumsy fisticuffs of Marston and Hall as Jonson's verse is superior to
theirs, would not create a living figure as Jonson has done in this long tirade.
And you may say; rhetoric; but if we are to call it "rhetoric" we
must subject that term to a closer dissection than any to which it is accustomed.
What Jonson has done here is not merely a fine speech. It is the careful, precise
filling in of a strong and simple outline, and at no point does it overflow
the outline; it is far more careful and precise in its obedience to this outline
than are many of the speeches in Tamburlaine. The outline is not Sulla, for
Sulla has nothing to do with it, but "Sylla's ghost." The words may
not be suitable to an historical Sulla, or to anybody in history, but they are
a perfect expression for "Sylla's ghost." You cannot say they are
rhetorical "because people do not talk like that," you cannot call
them "verbiage"; they do not exhibit prolixity or redundancy or the
other vices in the rhetoric books; there is a definite artistic emotion which
demands expression at that length. The words themselves are mostly simple words,
the syntax is natural, the language austere rather than adorned. Turning then
to the induction of The Poetaster, we find another success of the same kind—
Light, I salute thee, but with wounded nerves...Men may not talk in that way,
but the spirit of envy does, and in the words of Jonson envy is a real and living
person. It is not human life that informs envy and Sylla's ghost, but it is
energy of which human life is only another variety. 4
Returning to Catiline, we find that the best scene in the body of the play is
one which cannot be squeezed into a tragic frame, and which appears to belong
to satiric comedy. The scene between Fulvia and Galla and Sempronia is a living
scene in a wilderness of oratory. And as it recalls other scenes—there
is a suggestion of the college of ladies in The Silent Woman—it looks
like a comedy scene. And it appears to be satire. They shall all give and pay
well, that come here, If they will have it; and that, jewels, pearl, Plate,
or round sums to buy these. I'm not taken With a cob-swan or a high-mounting
bull, As foolish Leda and Europa were; But the bright gold, with Danaë.
For such price I would endure a rough, harsh Jupiter, Or ten such thundering
gamesters, and refrain To laugh at 'em, till they are gone, with my much suffering.This
scene is no more comedy than it is tragedy, and the "satire" is merely
a medium for the essential emotion. Jonson's drama is only incidentally satire,
because it is only incidentally a criticism upon the actual world. It is not
satire in the way in which the work of Swift or the work of Molière may
be called satire: that is, it does not find its source in any precise emotional
attitude or precise intellectual criticism of the actual world. It is satire
perhaps as the work of Rabelais is satire; certainly not more so. The important
thing is that if fiction can be divided into creative fiction and critical fiction,
Jonson's is creative. That he was a great critic, our first great critic, does
not affect this assertion. Every creator is also a critic; Jonson was a conscious
critic, but he was also conscious in his creations. Certainly, one sense in
which the term "critical" may be applied to fiction is a sense in
which the term might be used of a method antithetical to Jonson's. It is the
method of Education Sentimentale. The characters of Jonson, of Shakespeare,
perhaps of all the greatest drama, are drawn in positive and simple outlines.
They may be filled in, and by Shakespeare they are filled in, by much detail
or many shifting aspects; but a clear and sharp and simple form remains through
these—though it would be hard to say in what the clarity and sharpness
and simplicity of Hamlet consists. But Frédéric Moreau is not
made in that way. He is constructed partly by negative definition, built up
by a great number of observations. We cannot isolate him from the environment
in which we find him; it may be an environment which is or can be much universalized;
nevertheless it, and the figure in it, consist of very many observed particular
facts, the actual world. Without this world the figure dissolves. The ruling
faculty is a critical perception, a commentary upon experienced feeling and
sensation. If this is true of Flaubert, it is true in a higher degree of Molière
than of Jonson. The broad farcical lines of Molière may seem to be the
same drawing as Jonson's. But Molière—say in Alceste or Monsieur
Jourdain—is criticizing the actual; the reference to the actual world
is more direct. And having a more tenuous reference, the work of Jonson is much
less directly satirical. 5
This leads us to the question of Humours. Largely on the evidence of the two
Humour plays, it is sometimes assumed that Jonson is occupied with types; typical
exaggerations, or exaggerations of type. The Humour definition, the expressed
intention of Jonson, may be satisfactory for these two plays. Every Man in his
Humour is the first mature work of Jonson, and the student of Jonson must study
it; but it is not the play in which Jonson found his genius: it is the last
of his plays to read first. If one reads Volpone, and after that re-reads the
Jew of Malta; then returns to Jonson and reads Bartholomew Fair, The Alchemist,
Epicoene and The Devil is an Ass, and finally Catiline, it is possible to arrive
at a fair opinion of the poet and the dramatist. 6
The Humour, even at the beginning, is not a type, as in Marston's satire, but
a simplified and somewhat distorted individual with a typical mania. In the
later work, the Humour definition quite fails to account for the total effect
produced. The characters of Shakespeare are such as might exist in different
circumstances than those in which Shakespeare sets them. The latter appear to
be those which extract from the characters the most intense and interesting
realization; but that realization has not exhausted their possibilities. Volpone's
life, on the other hand, is bounded by the scene in which it is played; in fact,
the life is the life of the scene and is derivatively the life of Volpone; the
life of the character is inseparable from the life of the drama. This is not
dependence upon a background, or upon a substratum of fact. The emotional effect
is single and simple. Whereas in Shakespeare the effect is due to the way in
which the characters act upon one another, in Jonson it is given by the way
in which the characters fit in with each other. The artistic result of Volpone
is not due to any effect that Volpone, Mosca, Corvino, Corbaccio, Voltore have
upon each other, but simply to their combination into a whole. And these figures
are not personifications of passions; separately, they have not even that reality,
they are constituents. It is a similar indication of Jonson's method that you
can hardly pick out a line of Jonson's and say confidently that it is great
poetry; but there are many extended passages to which you cannot deny that honour.
I will have all my beds blown up, not stuft; Down is too hard; and then, mine
oval room Fill'd with such pictures as Tiberius took From Elephantis, and dull
Aretine But coldly imitated. Then, my glasses Cut in more subtle angles, to
disperse And multiply the figures, as I walk.... 7
Jonson is the legitimate heir of Marlowe. The man who wrote, in Volpone: for
thy love, In varying figures, I would have contended With the blue Proteus,
or the hornèd flood....and See, a carbuncle May put out both the eyes
of our Saint Mark; A diamond would have bought Lollia Paulina, When she came
in like star-light, hid with jewels....is related to Marlowe as a poet; and
if Marlowe is a poet, Jonson is also. And, if Jonson's comedy is a comedy of
humours, then Marlowe's tragedy, a large part of it, is a tragedy of humours.
But Jonson has too exclusively been considered as the typical representative
of a point of view toward comedy. He has suffered from his great reputation
as a critic and theorist, from the effects of his intelligence. We have been
taught to think of him as the man, the dictator (confusedly in our minds with
his later namesake), as the literary politician impressing his views upon a
generation; we are offended by the constant reminder of his scholarship. We
forget the comedy in the humours, and the serious artist in the scholar. Jonson
has suffered in public opinion, as anyone must suffer who is forced to talk
about his art. 8
If you examine the first hundred lines or more of Volpone the verse appears
to be in the manner of Marlowe, more deliberate, more mature, but without Marlowe's
inspiration. It looks like mere "rhetoric," certainly not "deeds
and language such as men do use"! It appears to us, in fact, forced and
flagitious bombast. That it is not "rhetoric," or at least not vicious
rhetoric, we do not know until we are able to review the whole play. For the
consistent maintenance of this manner conveys in the end an effect not of verbosity,
but of bold, even shocking and terrifying directness. We have difficulty in
saying exactly what produces this simple and single effect. It is not in any
ordinary way due to management of intrigue. Jonson employs immense dramatic
constructive skill: it is not so much skill in plot as skill in doing without
a plot. He never manipulates as complicated a plot as that of The Merchant of
Venice; he has in his best plays nothing like the intrigue of Restoration comedy.
In Bartholomew Fair it is hardly a plot at all; the marvel of the play is the
bewildering rapid chaotic action of the fair; it is the fair itself, not anything
that happens to take place in the fair. In Volpone, or The Alchemist, or The
Silent Woman, the plot is enough to keep the players in motion; it is rather
an "action" than a plot. The plot does not hold the play together;
what holds the play together is a unity of inspiration that radiates into plot
and personages alike. 9
We have attempted to make more precise the sense in which it was said that Jonson's
work is "of the surface"; carefully avoiding the word "superficial."
For there is work contemporary with Jonson's which is superficial in a pejorative
sense in which the word cannot be applied to Jonson—the work of Beaumont
and Fletcher. If we look at the work of Jonson's great contemporaries, Shakespeare,
and also Donne and Webster and Tourneur (and sometimes Middleton), have a depth,
a third dimension, as Mr. Gregory Smith rightly calls it, which Jonson's work
has not. Their words have often a network of tentacular roots reaching down
to the deepest terrors and desires. Jonson's most certainly have not; but in
Beaumont and Fletcher we may think that at times we find it. Looking closer,
we discover that the blossoms of Beaumont and Fletcher's imagination draw no
sustenance from the soil, but are cut and slightly withered flowers stuck into
sand. Wilt thou, hereafter, when they talk of me, As thou shalt hear nothing
but infamy, Remember some of these things?... I pray thee, do; for thou shalt
never see me so again. Hair woven in many a curious warp, Able in endless error
to enfold The wandering soul;...Detached from its context, this looks like the
verse of the greater poets; just as lines of Jonson, detached from their context,
look like inflated or empty fustian. But the evocative quality of the verse
of Beaumont and Fletcher depends upon a clever appeal to emotions and associations
which they have not themselves grasped; it is hollow. It is superficial with
a vacuum behind it; the superficies of Jonson is solid. It is what it is; it
does not pretend to be another thing. But it is so very conscious and deliberate
that we must look with eyes alert to the whole before we apprehend the significance
of any part. We cannot call a man's work superficial when it is the creation
of a world; a man cannot be accused of dealing superficially with the world
which he himself has created; the superficies is the world. Jonson's characters
conform to the logic of the emotions of their world. It is a world like Lobatchevsky's;
the worlds created by artists like Jonson are like systems of non-Euclidean
geometry. They are not fancy, because they have a logic of their own; and this
logic illuminates the actual world, because it gives us a new point of view
from which to inspect it. 10
A writer of power and intelligence, Jonson endeavoured to promulgate, as a formula
and programme of reform, what he chose to do himself; and he not unnaturally
laid down in abstract theory what is in reality a personal point of view. And
it is in the end of no value to discuss Jonson's theory and practice unless
we recognize and seize this point of view, which escapes the formula,
and which is what makes his plays worth reading. Jonson behaved as the great
creative mind that he was: he created his own world, a world from which his
followers, as well as the dramatists who were trying to do something wholly
different, are excluded. Remembering this, we turn to Mr. Gregory Smith's objection—that
Jonson's characters lack the third dimension, have no life out of the theatrical
existence in which they appear—and demand an inquest. The objection implies
that the characters are purely the work of intellect, or the result of superficial
observation of a world which is faded or mildewed. It implies that the characters
are lifeless. But if we dig beneath the theory, beneath the observation, beneath
the deliberate drawing and the theatrical and dramatic elaboration, there is
discovered a kind of power, animating Volpone, Busy, Fitzdottrel, the literary
ladies of Epicoene, even Bobadil, which comes from below the intellect, and
for which no theory of humours will account. And it is the same kind of power
which vivifies Trimalchio, and Panurge, and some but not all of the "comic"
characters of Dickens. The fictive life of this kind is not to be circumscribed
by a reference to "comedy" or to "farce"; it is not exactly
the kind of life which informs the characters of Molière or that which
informs those of Marivaux—two writers who were, besides, doing something
quite different the one from the other. But it is something which distinguishes
Barabas from Shylock, Epicure Mammon from Falstaff, Faustus from—if you
will—Macbeth; Marlowe and Jonson from Shakespeare and the Shakespearians,
Webster, and Tourneur. It is not merely Humours: for neither Volpone nor Mosca
is a humour. No theory of humours could account for Jonson's best plays or the
best characters in them. We want to know at what point the comedy of humours
passes into a work of art, and why Jonson is not Brome. 11
The creation of a work of art, we will say the creation of a character in a
drama, consists in the process of transfusion of the personality, or, in a deeper
sense, the life, of the author into the character. This is a very different
matter from the orthodox creation in one's own image. The ways in which the
passions and desires of the creator may be satisfied in the work of art are
complex and devious. In a painter they may take the form of a predilection for
certain colours, tones, or lightings; in a writer the original impulse may be
even more strangely transmuted. Now, we may say with Mr. Gregory Smith that
Falstaff or a score of Shakespeare's characters have a "third dimension"
that Jonson's have not. This will mean, not that Shakespeare's spring from the
feelings or imagination and Jonson's from the intellect or invention; they have
equally an emotional source; but that Shakespeare's represent a more complex
tissue of feelings and desires, as well as a more supple, a more susceptible
temperament. Falstaff is not only the roast Malmesbury ox with the pudding in
his belly; he also "grows old," and, finally, his nose is as sharp
as a pen. He was perhaps the satisfaction of more, and of more complicated feelings;
and perhaps he was, as the great tragic characters must have been, the offspring
of deeper, less apprehensible feelings: deeper, but not necessarily stronger
or more intense, than those of Jonson. It is obvious that the spring of the
difference is not the difference between feeling and thought, or superior insight,
superior perception, on the part of Shakespeare, but his susceptibility to a
greater range of emotion, and emotion deeper and more obscure. But his characters
are no more "alive" than are the characters of Jonson. 12
The world they live in is a larger one. But small worlds—the worlds which
artists create—do not differ only in magnitude; if they are complete worlds,
drawn to scale in every part, they differ in kind also. And Jonson's world has
this scale. His type of personality found its relief in something falling under
the category of burlesque or farce—though when you are dealing with a
unique world, like his, these terms fail to appease the desire for definition.
It is not, at all events, the farce of Molière: the latter is more analytic,
more an intellectual redistribution. It is not defined by the word "satire."
Jonson poses as a satirist. But satire like Jonson's is great in the end not
by hitting off its object, but by creating it; the satire is merely the means
which leads to the asthetic result, the impulse which projects a new world
into a new orbit. In Every Man in his Humour there is a neat, a very neat, comedy
of humours. In discovering and proclaiming in this play the new genre Jonson
was simply recognizing, unconsciously, the route which opened out in the proper
direction for his instincts. His characters are and remain, like Marlowe's,
simplified characters; but the simplification does not consist in the dominance
of a particular humour or monomania. That is a very superficial account of it.
The simplification consists largely in reduction of detail, in the seizing of
aspects relevant to the relief of an emotional impulse which remains the same
for that character, in making the character conform to a particular setting.
This stripping is essential to the art, to which is also essential a flat distortion
in the drawing; it is an art of caricature, of great caricature, like Marlowe's.
It is a great caricature, which is beautiful; and a great humour, which is serious.
The "world" of Jonson is sufficiently large; it is a world of poetic
imagination; it is sombre. He did not get the third dimension, but he was not
trying to get it. 13
If we approach Jonson with less frozen awe of his learning, with a clearer understanding
of his "rhetoric" and its applications, if we grasp the fact that
the knowledge required of the reader is not archaology but knowledge of
Jonson, we can derive not only instruction in non-Euclidean humanity—but
enjoyment. We can even apply him, be aware of him as a part of our literary
inheritance craving further expression. Of all the dramatists of his time, Jonson
is probably the one whom the present age would find the most sympathetic, if
it knew him. There is a brutality, a lack of sentiment, a polished surface,
a handling of large bold designs in brilliant colours, which ought to attract
about three thousand people in London and elsewhere. At least, if we had a contemporary
Shakespeare and a contemporary Jonson, it would be the Jonson who would arouse
the enthusiasm of the intelligentsia! Though he is saturated in literature,
he never sacrifices the theatrical qualities—theatrical in the most favourable
sense—to literature or to the study of character. His work is a titanic
show. But Jonson's masques, an important part of his work, are neglected; our
flaccid culture lets shows and literature fade, but prefers faded literature
to faded shows. There are hundreds of people who have read Comus to ten who
have read the Masque of Blackness. Comus contains fine poetry, and poetry exemplifying
some merits to which Jonson's masque poetry cannot pretend. Nevertheless, Comus
is the death of the masque; it is the transition of a form of art—even
of a form which existed for but a short generation—into "literature,"
literature cast in a form which has lost its application. Even though Comus
was a masque at Ludlow Castle, Jonson had, what Milton came perhaps too late
to have, a sense for living art; his art was applied. The masques can still
be read, and with pleasure, by anyone who will take the trouble—a trouble
which in this part of Jonson is, indeed, a study of antiquities—to imagine
them in action, displayed with the music, costumes, dances, and the scenery
of Inigo Jones. They are additional evidence that Jonson had a fine sense of
form, of the purpose for which a particular form is intended; evidence that
he was a literary artist even more than he was a man of letters. 14