Volume 2 / Book 4 — CHAPTER V. ELIZABETHAN CRITICISM. (continued 2)

The contributions of “large-browed Verulam” to criticism have sometimes been spoken of with reverence: and it is not uncommon to find, amid the scanty classics of the subject, which until recently have been recommended to the notice of inquirers, not merely a place, but a place of very high honour, assigned to The Advancement of Learning. Bacon. Actual, unprejudiced, and to some extent expert, reference to the works, however, will not find very much to justify this estimate: and, indeed, a little thought, assisted by very moderate knowledge, would suffice to make it rather surprising that Bacon should give us so much, than disappointing that he should give us little or nothing. A producer of literature who at his best has few superiors, and a user of it for purposes of quotation, who would deserve the name of genius for this use alone if he had no other title thereto—Bacon was yet by no means inclined by his main interests and objects, or by his temperament, either towards 192great exaltation of letters, or towards accurate and painstaking examination of them. Indeed, it is in him—almost first of all men, certainly first of all great modern men—that we find that partisan opposition between literature and science which has constantly developed since. It is true that his favourite method of examination into “forms” might seem tempting as applied to literature; and that it would, incidentally if not directly, have yielded more solid results than his Will-o'-the-wisp chase of the Form of Heat. But this very craze of his may suggest that if he had undertaken literary criticism it would have been on the old road of Kinds and Figures and Qualities, in which we could expect little but glowing rhetorical generalisation from him.

Nor is the nature of such small critical matter as we actually have from him very different. The Essays. The Essays practically give us nothing but the contents of that Of Studies, a piece too well known to need quotation; too much in the early pregnant style of the author to bear compression or analysis; and too general to repay it. For the critic and the man of letters generally it is, in its own phrase, to be not merely tasted, nor even swallowed, but chewed and digested; yet its teachings have nothing more to do with the critical function of “study” than with all others.

The Advancement^[263] at least excuses the greatness thrust upon it in the estimates above referred to, not merely by the apparent necessity that the author should deal with Criticism, but by a certain appearance of his actually doing so. The Advancement of Learning. Comparatively early in the First Book he tackles the attention to style which sprang up at the Renaissance, opening his discussion by the ingenious but slightly unhistorical attribution of it to Martin Luther, who was forced to awake all antiquity, and call former times to his succour, against the Bishop of Rome. Not a few names, for the best part of two centuries before the great cause of Martinus v. 193Papam was launched, from Petrarch and Boccaccio to Erasmus and Reuchlin, will put in evidence before the tribunal of chronology against this singular assertion; and though the Italian Humanists of the fifteenth century might not (at least in thought) care anything for the Pope except as a source of donatives and benefices, it is certain that most of them were as constitutionally disinclined to abet Luther as they were chronologically disabled from in any way abetting him. Bacon’s argument and further survey are, however, better than this beginning. To understand the ancients (he says justly enough) it was necessary to make a careful study of their language. Further, the opposition of thought to the Schoolmen naturally brought about a recoil from the barbarisms of Scholastic style, and the anxiety to win over the general imprinted care and elegance and vigour on preaching and writing. All this, he adds as justly, turned to excess. Its denunciation of mere word-study. Men began to “hunt more after words than matter; more after the choiceness of the phrase and the round and clean composition of the sentence, and the sweet falling of the clauses, and the varying and illustration of their words with tropes and figures, than after the weight of matter, worth of subject, soundness of argument, life of invention, or depth of judgment.” The Ciceronianism of Osorius, Sturm, “Car of Cambridge,” and even Ascham, receives more or less condemnation; and Erasmus is, of course, cited for gibes at it. On this text Bacon proceeds to enlarge in his own stately rhetoric, coolly admitting that it “is a thing not hastily to be condemned, to clothe and adorn the obscurity even of philosophy itself with sensible and plausible elocution.” But he very quickly glides off into his usual denunciations of the schoolmen. Nor have I found anything else in this First Book really germane to our purpose; for one cannot cite as such the desultory observations on patronage of literature (among other branches of learning) which fill a good part of it.

The Second Book is somewhat more fruitful in quantity, if not very much; but the quality remains not very different. The opening “Address to the King” contains, in an interesting first draft (as we may call it), the everlasting grumble of the 194scientific man, that science is not sufficiently endowed, the further grumble at mere book-learning, the cry for the promotion—by putting money in its purse—of research. The Second and Third Chapters contain some plans of books drawn up in Bacon’s warm imaginative way, especially a great series of Histories, with the History of England for their centre. And then we come, in the Fourth Chapter, to Poesy.

But except for Bacon’s majestic style (which, however, by accident or intention, is rather below itself here) there is absolutely nothing novel. Its view of Poetry. The view (which, as we have seen, all the Elizabethan critics adopted, probably from the Italians)—the view is that poetry is just a part of learning licensed in imagination; a fanciful history intended to give satisfaction to the mind of man in things where history is not; something particularly prevalent and useful in barbarous ages; divisible into narrative, representative and allusive; useful now and then, but (as Aristotle would say) not a thing to take very seriously. Yet poetry, a vinum dæmonum at the worst, a mere illusion anyhow, is still, even as such, a refuge from, and remedy for, sorrow and toil. Of its form, as distinguished from its matter, he says,^[264] “Poetry is but a character of style, and belongeth to arts of speech, and is not pertinent for the present.” He attempts no defence of it as of other parts of learning, because “being as a plant that cometh of the lust of the earth without a formal seed, it hath sprung up and spread abroad more than any other kind.” And he turns from it to philosophy, with the more than half-disdainful adieu, “It is not good to stay too long in the theatre.”

We might almost quit him here with a somewhat similar leave-taking; but for his great reputation some other places shall be handled. Some obiter dicta. At XIV. 11 there are some remarks on the delusive powers of words; at XVI. 4, 5 some on grammar and rhetoric, including a rather interesting observation, not sufficiently expanded or worked out, that “in modern languages it seemeth to me as free to make new measures of verses as of dances”; in XVIII. a handling of strictly oratorical rhetoric, with a digression to these “Colours 195of Good and Evil” which interested Bacon so much; in XX. another descant on the same art; in XXI. a puff of the Basilikon Doron; in XXXII. observations on the moral influence of books; in XXXV. some general observations on literature; and, just before the close, a well-known and often-quoted eulogy, certainly not undeserved, of the eloquence of the English pulpit for forty years past.

If it were not for the singular want of a clear conception of literary Criticism, which has prevailed so long and so widely, it would hardly be necessary to take, with any seriousness at all, a man who has no more than this to say on the subject.^[265] The whole of very slight importance. It is most assuredly no slight to Bacon to deny him a place in a regiment where he never had the least ambition to serve. That he was himself a great practitioner of literature, and so, necessarily if indirectly, a critic of it in his own case, is perfectly true; the remarks which have been quoted above on the Ciceronians show that, when he took the trouble, and found the opportunity, he could make them justly and soundly. But his purpose, his interests, his province, his vein, lay far elsewhere. To him, it is pretty clear, literary expression was, in relation to his favourite studies and dreams, but a higher kind of pen-and-ink or printing-press. He distrusted the stability of modern languages, and feared that studies couched in them might some day or other come to be unintelligible and lost to the world. This famous fear explains the nature and the limits of his interest in literature. It was a vehicle or a treasury, a distributing agent or a guard. Its functions and qualities accorded: it was to be clear, not disagreeable, solidly constructed, intelligible to as large a number of readers as possible. The psychological character and morphological definition 196of poetry interested him philosophically. But in the art and the beauty of poetry and literature generally, for their own sakes, he seems to have taken no more interest than he did in the coloured pattern plots in gardens, which he compared to “tarts.” To a man so minded, as to those more ancient ones of similar mind whom we have discussed in the first volume, Criticism proper could, at the best, be a pastime to be half ashamed of—a “theatre” in which to while away the hours; it could not possibly be a matter of serious as well as enthusiastic study.

Between Bacon and Ben may be best noticed the short Anacrisis or Censure of Poets, Ancient and Modern,^[266] by Sir William Alexander, Earl of Stirling. Stirling’s Anacrisis. It has received high praise;^[267] but even those who think by no means ill of Aurora, may find some difficulty in indorsing this. It is simply a sort of “Note,” written, as the author says, to record his impressions during a reading of the poets, which he had undertaken as refreshment after great travail both of body and mind. He thinks Language “but the apparel of poesy,” thereby going even further than those who would assign that position to verse, and suggesting a system of “Inarticulate Poetics,” which he would have been rather put to it to body forth. He only means, however, that he judges in the orthodox Aristotelian way, by “the fable and contexture.” A subsequent comparison of a poem to a garden suggests Vauquelin de la Fresnaye (v. supra, p. 129), whom he may have read. Alexander is a sort of general lover in poetry; he likes this in Virgil, that in Ovid, that other in Horace; defends Lucan against Scaliger, even to the point of blaming the conclusion of the Æneid; finds “no man that doth satisfy him more than that notable Italian, Torquato Tasso”; admits the 197historical as well as the fictitious poetic subject; but thinks that “the treasures of poetry cannot be better bestowed than upon the apparelling of Truth; and Truth cannot be better apparelled to please young lovers than with the excellences of poetry.” Disrespectful language neither need nor should be used of so slight a thing, which is, and pretends to be, nothing more than a sort of table-book entry by a gentleman of learning as well as quality. But, if it has any “importance” at all, it is surely that of being yet another proof of the rapid diffusion of critical taste and practice, not of stating “theory and methods considerably in advance of the age.” If we could take extensively his protest against those who “would bound the boundless liberty of the poet,” such language might indeed be justified; but the context strictly limits it to the very minor, though then, and for long before and after, commonly debated, question of Fiction v. History in subject.

Save perhaps in one single respect (where the defect was not wholly his fault), Ben Jonson might be described as a critic armed at all points. Ben Jonson: his equipment. His knowledge of literature was extremely wide, being at the same time solid and thorough. While he had an understanding above all things strong and masculine, he was particularly addicted, though in no dilettante fashion, to points of form. His whole energies, and they were little short of Titanic, were given to literature. And, lastly, if he had not the supremest poetic genius, he had such a talent that only the neighbourhood of supremacy dwarfs it. Where he came short was not in a certain hardness of temper and scholasticism of attitude: for these, if kept within bounds, and tempered by that enthusiasm for letters which he possessed, are not bad equipments for the critic. It was rather in the fact that he still came too early for it to be possible for him, except by the help of a miracle, to understand the achievements and value of the vernaculars. By his latest days, indeed,^[268] the positive performance 198of these was already very great. Spain has hardly added anything since, and Italy not very much, to her share of European literature; France was already in the first flush of her “classical” period, after a long and glorious earlier history: and what Ben’s own contemporaries in England had done, all men know. But mediæval literature was shut from him, as from all, till far later; he does not seem to have been much drawn to Continental letters, and, perhaps in their case, as certainly in English, he was too near—too much a part of the movement—to get it into firm perspective.

In a sense the critical temper in Jonson is all-pervading. It breaks out side by side with, and sometimes even within, his sweetest lyrics; it interposes what may be called parabases in the most unexpected passages^[269] of his plays. His Prefaces, &c. The Poetaster is almost as much criticism dramatised as The Frogs. But there are three “places,” or groups of places, which it inspires, not in mere suggestion, but with propriety—the occasional Prefaces, or observations, to and on the plays themselves, the Conversations with Drummond, and, above all, the at last fairly (though not yet sufficiently) known Discoveries or Timber.

To piece together, with any elaboration, the more scattered critical passages would be fitter for a monograph on Jonson than for a History of Criticism. The “Address to the Readers” of Sejanus, which contains a reference to the author’s lost Observations on Horace, his Art of Poetry (not the least of such 199losses) is a fair specimen of them: the dedication of Volpone to “the most noble and most equal sisters, Oxford and Cambridge,” a better. In both, and in numerous other passages of prose and verse, we find the real and solid, though somewhat partial, knowledge, the strong sense, the methodic scholarship of Ben, side by side with his stately, not Euphuistic, but rather too close-packed style, his not ill-founded, but slightly excessive, self-confidence, and that rough knock-down manner of assertion and characterisation which reappeared in its most unguarded form in the Conversations with Drummond.

The critical utterances of these Conversations are far too interesting to be passed over here, though we cannot discuss them in full. The Drummond Conversations. They tell us that Ben thought all (other) rhymes inferior to couplets, and had written a treatise (which, again, would we had!) both against Campion and Daniel (see ante). His objection to “stanzas and cross rhymes” was that “as the purpose might lead beyond them, they were all forced.” Sidney “made every one speak as well as himself,” and so did not keep “decorum” (cf. Puttenham above). Spenser’s stanzas and matter did not please him. Daniel was no poet. He did not like Drayton’s “long verses,” nor Sylvester’s and Fairfax’s translations. He thought the translations of Homer (Chapman’s) and Virgil (Phaer’s) into “long Alexandrines” (i.e., fourteeners) were but prose: yet elsewhere we hear that he “had some of Chapman by heart.” Harington’s Ariosto was the worst of all translations. Donne was sometimes “profane,” and “for not keeping of accent deserved hanging”; but elsewhere he was “the first poet of the world in some things,” though, “through not being understood, he would perish.”^[270] Shakespeare “wanted art”: and “Abram Francis (Abraham Fraunce) in his English Hexameters was a fool.” “Bartas was not a poet, but a verser, because he wrote not fiction.” He cursed Petrarch for redacting verses to sonnets, “which were like Procrustes’ bed.” Guarini incurred the 200same blame as Sir Philip: and Lucan was good in parts only. “The best pieces of Ronsard were his Odes.” Drummond’s own verses “were all good, but smelled too much of the schools.” The “silver” Latins, as we should expect, pleased him best. “To have written Southwell’s ‘Burning Babe,’ he would have been content to destroy many of his.”

These are the chief really critical items, though there are others (putting personal gossip aside) of interest; but it may be added, as a curiosity, that he told Drummond that he himself “writ all first in prose” at Camden’s suggestion, and held that “verses stood all by sense, without colours or accent” (poetic diction or metre), “which yet at other times he denied,” says the reporter, a sentence ever to be remembered in connection with these jottings. Remembering it, there is nothing shocking in any of these observations, nor anything really inconsistent. A true critic never holds the neat, positive, “reduced-to-its-lowest-terms” estimate of authors, in which a criticaster delights. His view is always facetted, conditioned. But he may, in a friendly chat, or a conversation for victory, exaggerate this facet or condition, while altogether suppressing others; and this clearly is what Ben did.

For gloss on the Conversations, for reduction to something like system of the critical remarks scattered through the works, and for the nearest approach we can have to a formal presentment of Ben’s critical views, we must go to the Discoveries.^[271]

The fact that we find no less than four titles for the book—Timber, Explorata, Discoveries, and Sylva—with others of its peculiarities, is explained by the second fact that Jonson never published it. The Discoveries. It never appeared in print till the folio of 1641, years after its author’s death. The Discoveries are described as being made “upon men and matter as they have flowed out of his daily reading, or had their reflux to his peculiar notions of the times.” They are, in fact, notes 201unnumbered and unclassified (though batches of more or fewer sometimes run on the same subject), each with its Latin heading, and varying in length from a few lines to that of his friend (and partly master) Bacon’s shorter Essays. The influence of those “silver” Latins whom he loved so much is prominent: large passages are simply translated from Quintilian, and for some time^[272] the tenor is ethical rather than literary. A note on Perspicuitas—elegantia (p. 7) breaks these, but has nothing noteworthy about it, and Bellum scribentium (p. 10) is only a satiric exclamation on the folly of “writers committed together by the ears for ceremonies, syllables, points,” &c. The longer Nil gratius protervo libro (pp. 11, 12) seems a retort for some personal injury, combined with the old complaint of the decadence and degradation of poetry.^[273] There is just but rather general stricture in Eloquentia (p. 16) on the difference between the arguments of the study and of the world. “I would no more choose a rhetorician for reigning in a school,” says Ben, “than I would choose a pilot for rowing in a pond.”^[274] Memoria (p. 18) includes a gird at Euphuism. At last we come to business. Censura de poetis (p. 21), introduced by a fresh fling at Euphuism, in De vere argutis, opens with a tolerably confident note, “Nothing in our age is more preposterous than the running judgments upon poetry and poets,” with much more to the same effect, the whole being pointed by the fling, “If it were a question of the water-rhymer’s^[275] works against Spenser’s, I doubt not but they would find more suffrages.” The famous passage on Shakespeare follows: and the development of Ben’s view, “would he had blotted a thousand,” leads to a more general disquisition on the differences of wits, which includes the sentence already referred to. “Such [i.e., haphazard and inconsistent] are all the Essayists, even their master Montaigne.” 202The notes now keep close to literature throughout in substance, though their titles (e.g., Ignorantia animæ), and so forth, may seem wider. A heading, De Claris Oratoribus (p. 26), leads to yet another of the purple passages of the book—that on Bacon, in which is intercalated a curious Scriptorum catalogus, limited, for the most part, though Surrey and Wyatt are mentioned, to prose writers. And then for some time ethics, politics, and other subjects, again have Ben’s chief attention.^[276]

We return to literature, after some interval (but with a parenthetic glance at the poesis et pictura notion at p. 49), on p. 52, in a curious unheaded letter to an unnamed Lordship on Education, much of which is translated directly from Ben Jonson’s favourite Quintilian; and then directly accost it again with a tractatule De stilo et optimo scribendi genere, p. 54, hardly parting company thereafter. Ben’s prescription is threefold: read the best authors, observe the best speakers, and exercise your own style much. But he is well aware that no “precepts will profit a fool,” and he adapts old advice to English ingeniously, in bidding men read, not only Livy before Sallust, but also Sidney before Donne, and to beware of Chaucer or Gower at first. Here occurs the well-known dictum, that Spenser “in affecting the ancients writ no language; yet I would have him read for his matter.” A fine general head opens with the excellent version of Quintilian, “We should not protect our sloth with the patronage of Difficulty,” and this is followed by some shrewd remarks on diction—the shrewdest being that, after all, the best custom makes, and ever will continue to make, the best speech—with a sharp stroke at Lucretius for “scabrousness,” and at Chaucerisms. Brevity of style, Tacitean and other, is cautiously commended. In the phrase (Oratio imago animi), p. 64, “language most shows a man,” Ben seems to anticipate Buffon, as he later does Wordsworth and Coleridge, by insisting that style is not merely the dress, but the body of thought.^[277] All this discussion, 203which enters into considerable detail, is of the first importance, and it occupies nearly a quarter of the whole book. It is continued, the continuation reaching till the end, by a separate discussion of poetry.

It is interesting, but less so than what comes before. A somewhat acid, though personally guarded, description of the present state of the Art introduces the stock definition of “making,” and its corollary that a poet is not one who writes in measure, but one who feigns—all as we have found it before, but (as we should expect of Ben) in succincter and more scholarly form. Yet the first requisite of the poet is ingenium—goodness of natural wit; the next exercise of his parts—“bringing all to the forge and file” (sculpte, lime, cisèle!); the third Imitation—to which Ben gives a turn (not exactly new, for we have met it from Vida downwards), which is not an improvement, by keeping its modern meaning, and understanding by it the following of the classics. “But that which we especially require in him is an exactness of study and multiplicity of reading.” Yet his liberty is not to be so narrowly circumscribed as some would have it. This leads to some interesting remarks on the ancient critics, which the author had evidently meant to extend: as it is, they break off short.^[278] We turn to the Parts of comedy and tragedy, where Ben is strictly regular—the fable is the imitation of one entire and perfect action, &c. But this also breaks off, after a discussion of fable itself and episode, with an evidently quite disconnected fling at “hobbling poems which run like a brewer’s cart on the stones.”

These Discoveries have to be considered with a little general care before we examine them more particularly. Form of the book. They were, it has been said, never issued by the author himself, and we do not know whether he ever would have issued them in their present form. On the one hand, they are very carefully written, and not mere jottings. In form (though more modern in style) they resemble the earlier essays of that Bacon whom they so magnificently celebrate, in their 204deliberate conciseness and pregnancy. On the other hand, it is almost impossible to doubt that some at least were intended for expansion; it is difficult not to think that there was plenty more stuff of the same kind in the solidly constructed and well-stored treasuries of Ben’s intelligence and erudition. It is most difficult of all not to see that, in some cases, the thoughts are co-ordinated into regular tractates, in others left loose, as if for future treatment of the same kind.

Secondly, we should like to know rather more than we do of the time of their composition. Its date. Some of them—such as the retrospect of Bacon, and to a less degree that of Shakespeare—must be late; there is a strong probability that all date from the period between the fire in Ben’s study, which destroyed so much, and his death—say between 1620 and 1637. But at the same time there is nothing to prevent his having remembered and recopied observations of earlier date.

Thirdly, it is most important that we rightly understand the composition of the book. Mosaic of old and new. It has sometimes been discovered^[279] in these Discoveries, with pride, or surprise, or even scorn, that Ben borrowed in them very largely from the ancients. Of course he did, as well as something, though less, from the Italian critics of the age immediately before his own.^[280] But in neither case could he have hoped for a moment—and in neither is there the slightest reason to suppose that he would have wished if he could have hoped—to disguise his borrowings from a learned age. When a man—such as, for 205instance, Sterne—wishes to steal and escape, he goes to what nobody reads, not to what everybody is reading. And the Latins of the Silver Age, the two Senecas, Petronius, Quintilian, Pliny, were specially favourites with the Jacobean time. In what is going to be said no difference will be made between Ben’s borrowings and his original remarks: nor will the fact of the borrowing be referred to unless there is some special critical reason. Even the literal translations, which are not uncommon, are made his own by the nervous idiosyncrasy of the phrase, and its thorough adjustment to the context and to his own vigorous and massive temperament.

Of real “book-criticism” there are four chief passages, the brief flings at Montaigne and at “Tamerlanes and Tamerchams,” and the longer notices of Shakespeare and Bacon.

The flirt at “all the Essayists, even their master Montaigne,” is especially interesting, because of the high opinion which Jonson elsewhere expresses of Bacon, the chief, if not the first, English Essayist of his time, and because of the fact that not a few of these very Discoveries are “Essays,” if any things ever were. The fling at Montaigne; Nor would it be very easy to make out a clear distinction, in anything but name, between some of Ben’s most favourite ancient writers and these despised persons. It is, however, somewhat easier to understand the reason of the condemnation. Jonson’s classically ordered mind probably disliked the ostentatious desultoriness and incompleteness of the Essay, the refusal, as it were out of mere insolence, to undertake an orderly treatise. Nor is it quite impossible that he failed fully to understand Montaigne, and was to some extent the dupe of that great writer’s fanfaronade of promiscuousness.

The “Tamerlane and Tamercham”^[281] fling is not even at first sight surprising. at Tamerlane, It was quite certain that Ben would seriously despise what Shakespeare only laughed at—the confusion, 206the bombast, the want of order and scheme in the “University Wits”—and it is not probable that he was well enough acquainted with the even now obscure development of the earliest Elizabethan drama to appreciate the enormous improvement which they wrought. Nay, the nearer approach even of such a dull thing as Gorboduc to “the height of Seneca his style,” might have a little bribed him as it bribed Sidney. He is true to his side—to his division of the critical creed—in this also.

The train of thought—censure of the vulgar preference—runs clear from this to the best known passage of the whole, the section De Shakespeare Nostrat. the Shakespeare Passage, It cannot be necessary to quote it, or to point out that Ben’s eulogy, splendid as it is, acquires tenfold force from the fact that it is avowedly given by a man whose general literary theory is different from that of the subject, while the censure accompanying it loses force in exactly the same proportion. What Ben here blames, any ancient critic (perhaps even Longinus) would have blamed too: what Ben praises, it is not certain that any ancient critic, except Longinus, would have seen. Nor is the captious censure of “Cæsar did never wrong but with just cause” the least interesting part of the whole. The paradox is not in our present texts: and there have, of course, not been wanting commentators to accuse Jonson of garbling or of forgetfulness. This is quite commentatorially gratuitous and puerile. It is very like Shakespeare to have written what Ben says: very like Ben to object to the paradox (which, pace tanti viri, is not “ridiculous” at all, but a deliberate and effective hyperbole); very like the players to have changed the text; and most of all like the commentators to make a fuss about the matter.

What may seem the more unstinted eulogy of Bacon is not less interesting. and that on Bacon. For here it is obvious that Ben is speaking with fullest sympathy, and with all but a full acknowledgment of having met an ideal. Except the slight stroke, “when he could spare or pass by a jest,” and the gentle insinuation that Strength, the gift of God, was what 207Bacon’s friends had to implore for him, there is no admixture whatever in the eulogy of “him who hath filled up all numbers,^[282] and performed that in our tongue which may be compared or preferred to insolent Greece or haughty Rome.” Indeed it could not have been—even if Ben Jonson had not been a friend, and, in a way, follower of Bacon—but that he should regard the Chancellor as his chief of literary men. Bacon, unluckily for himself, lacked the “unwedgeable and gnarled” strength of the dramatist, and also was without his poetic fire, just as Ben could never have soared to the vast, if vague, conceptions of Bacon’s materialist-Idealism. But they were both soaked in “literature,” as then understood; they were the two greatest masters of the closely packed style that says twenty things in ten words: and yet both could, on occasion, be almost as rhetorically imaginative as Donne or Greville. It is doubtful whether Bacon’s own scientific scorn for words without matter surpassed Jonson’s more literary contempt of the same phenomenon. Everywhere, or almost everywhere, there was between them the idem velle et idem nolle.

A limited précis, however, and a few remarks on special points, cannot do the Discoveries justice. The fragmentary character of the notes that compose it, the pregnant and deliberately “astringed” style in which these notes are written, so that they are themselves the bones, as it were, of a much larger treatise, defy such treatment. Yet it is full of value, as it gives us more than glimpses

“Of what a critic was in Jonson lost,”

or but piecemeal shown. We shall return, in the next chapter, to his relative position; but something should be said here of his intrinsic character.

208He does not, as must have been clearly seen, escape the “classical” limitation. General character of the book. With some ignorance, doubtless, and doubtless also some contempt, of the actual achievements of prose romance, and with that stubborn distrust of the modern tongues for miscellaneous prose purposes, which lasted till far into the seventeenth century, if it did not actually survive into the eighteenth, he still clings to the old mistakes about the identity of poetry and “fiction,” about the supremacy of oratory in prose. We hear nothing about the “new versifying,” though no doubt this would have been fully treated in his handling of Campion and Daniel: but had he had any approval for it, that approval must have been glanced at. His preference for the (stopped) couplet^[283] foreshadowed that which, with beneficial effects in some ways, if by no means in all, was to influence the whole of English poetry, with the rarest exceptions, for nearly two centuries. The personal arrogance which, as in Wordsworth’s case, affected all Ben’s judgment of contemporaries, and which is almost too fully reflected in the Drummond Conversations, would probably have made even his more deliberate judgments of these—his judgments “for publication”—inadequate. But it is fair to remember that Ben’s theory (if not entirely his practice, especially in his exquisite lyrics and almost equally exquisite masques) constrained him to be severe to those contemporaries, from Spenser, Shakespeare, and Donne downwards. The mission of the generation may be summed up in the three words, Liberty, Variety, Romance. Jonson’s tastes were for Order, Uniformity, Classicism.

He is thus doubly interesting—interesting as putting both with sounder scholarship and more original wit what men from Ascham to Puttenham, and later, had been trying to say before him, in the sense of adapting classical precepts to English: and far more interesting as adumbrating, beforehand, the creed of Dryden, and Pope, and Samuel Johnson. Many of his individual judgments are as shrewd as they are one-sided; they are always well, and sometimes admirably, expressed, in a 209style which unites something of Elizabethan colour, and much of Jacobean weight, with not a little of Augustan simplicity and proportion. He does not head the line of English critics; but he heads, and worthily, that of English critics who have been great both in criticism and in creation.^[284]

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