Chapter V: Elizabethan Criticism (3)

In the preface of Daniel’s answering _Defence of Rhyme to all the worthy lovers and learned professors_ [_thereof_] _within His Majesty’s dominions_,[262] he says that he wrote it “about a year since,” upon the “great reproach” given by Campion, and some give it the date of 1603 or even 1602; but Dr Grosart’s reprint is dated five years later. [Sidenote: _Daniel and his_ Defence of Rhyme.] The learned gentleman to whom it was specially written was no less a person than William Herbert, Earl of Pembroke, whom some of us (acknowledging that the matter is no matter) do not yet give up as “Mr W. H.” The advocate affects, with fair rhetorical excuse (though of course he must have known that the craze was nearly half a century old, and had at least not been discouraged by his patron’s uncle nearly a generation before), to regard the attack on rhyming as something new, as merely concerned with the “measures” of Campion. Daniel, always a gentleman, deals handsomely with his antagonist, whom he does not name, but describes as “this detractor whose commendable rhymes, albeit now an enemy to rhyme, have given heretofore to the world the best notice of his worth,” and as a man “of fair parts and good reputation.” And having put himself on the best ground, in this way, from the point of view of morals and courtesy, he does the same in matter of argument by refusing to attack Campion’s “numbers” in themselves (“We could,” he says well, “have allowed of his numbers, had he not graced his rhymes”), and by seizing the unassailable position given by custom and nature—“Custom that is before all law; Nature that is above all art.” In fact, not Jonson himself, and certainly none else before Jonson, has comprehended, or at least put, the truth of the matter as Daniel puts it, that arbitrary laws imposed on the poetry of any nation are absurd—that the verse of a language is such as best consorts with the nature of that language. This seems a truism enough perhaps; but it may be very much doubted whether all critics recognise it, and its consequences, even at the present day. And it is certain that we may search other early English critics in vain for a frank recognition of it. With an equally bold and sure foot he strides over the silly stuff about “invention of barbarous ages” and the like. Whatever its origin (and about this he shows a wise carelessness), it is “an excellence added to this work of measure and harmony, far happier than any proportion quantity could ever show.” It “gives to the ear an echo of a delightful report,” and to the memory “a deeper impression of what is delivered.” He is less original (as well as, some may think, less happy) in distinguishing the accent of English from the quantity of the classical tongues; but the classicisers before Campion, if not Campion himself, had made such a mess of quantity, and had played such havoc with accent, that he may well be excused. The universality of rhyme is urged, and once more says Daniel (with that happy audacity in the contemning of vain things which belongs to the born exploders of crazes), “If the barbarian likes it, it is because it sways the affections of the barbarian; if civil nations practise it, it works upon their hearts; if all, then it has a power in nature upon all.” But it will be said, “Ill customs are to be left.” No doubt: but the question is begged. Who made _this_ custom “ill”? Rhyme aims at pleasing—and it pleases. Suffer then the world to enjoy that which it knows and what it likes, for all the tyrannical rules of rhetoric cannot make it otherwise. Why are we to be a mere _servum pecus_, only to imitate the Greeks and Latins? Their way was natural to them: let ours be so to us. “Why should laboursome curiosity still lay affliction on our best delights?” Moreover, to a spirit whom nature hath “fitted for that mystery,” rhyme is no impediment, “but rather giveth wings to mount.” The necessary historical survey follows, with a surprising and very welcome justification of the Middle Ages against both Classics and Renaissance. “Let us,” says this true Daniel come to judgment, “go not further, but look upon the wonderful architecture of the State of England, and see whether they were unlearned times that could give it such a form?” And if politically, why not poetically? Some acute and, in the other sense, rather sharp criticism of Campion’s details follows, with a few apologetic remarks for mixture of masculine and feminine rhymes on his own part: and the whole concludes in an admirable peroration with a great end-note to it. Not easily shall we find, either in Elizabethan times or in any other, a happier combination of solid good sense with eager poetic sentiment, of sound scholarship with wide-glancing intelligence, than in this little tractate of some thirty or forty ordinary pages, which dispelled the delusions of two generations, and made the poetical fortune of England sure.

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Footnote 262:

Chalmers’s _Poets_, iii. 551-560; Grosart’s _Works of Samuel Daniel_,
iv. 29-67.

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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_. [Sidenote: _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 great 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. [Sidenote: _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. [Sidenote: _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. _Papam_ 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. [Sidenote: _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.

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Footnote 263:

It ought to be, but from certain signs perhaps is not, unnecessary to
say that the _De Augmentis_ is itself no mere Latin version of the
_Advancement_, but a large expansion of it. There seems, however, no
necessity here to deal with both.

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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 scientific 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. [Sidenote: _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.”

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Footnote 264:

_Advancement of Learning_, Bk. II. iv.

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We might almost quit him here with a somewhat similar leave-taking; but for his great reputation some other places shall be handled. [Sidenote: _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 of 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] [Sidenote: _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 of 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.

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Footnote 265:

I have more than once said that controversy or polemic in detail with
other writers is forbidden here. But those who wish to see what has
been said for Bacon will find most of the references in Messrs Gayley
and Scott’s invaluable book. The panegyrists—from my honoured friend
and predecessor, Professor Masson, to Mr Worsfold—all rely on the
description of poetry above referred to, as “Feigned History,” with
what follows on its advantages and on poetical justice, &c. All this
seems to me, however admirably expressed, to be obvious and
rudimentary to the _x_th and the _n_th.

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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. [Sidenote: _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 historical 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.

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Footnote 266:

To be most readily found in Rogers’s _Memorials of the Earl of
Stirling_ (vol. ii. pp. 205-210; Edinburgh, 1877), where, however, it
appears merely as one of the Appendices to a book of more or less pure
genealogy, without the slightest editorial information as to date or
_provenance_. It seems to be taken from the 1711 folio of Drummond’s
_Works_: and to have been written in 1634, between Bacon’s death and
Ben’s.

Footnote 267:

From Park, and from Messrs Gayley and Scott. I did not always agree
with my late friend Dr Grosart: but I think he was better advised when
he called it “disappointing.”

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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. [Sidenote: _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 of 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.

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Footnote 268:

It may be well to point out that these days carried him far beyond the
point at which we have stopped for Italian and for French. His
solidarity with the Elizabethans proper, however, makes his inclusion
here imperative: and the fact must be taken into consideration in
judging the relative lengths of this and the preceding chapters.

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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. [Sidenote: _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_.

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Footnote 269:

Take as one of a hundred, and from the less read pieces, that
interesting passage in the masque of _The New World Discovered in the
Moon_, which Gifford has made more interesting by a further discovery
in Theobald’s copy:—

_Chro._ Is he a man’s poet or a woman’s poet, I pray you?

_2nd Her._ Is there any such difference?

_Fact._ Many, as betwixt your man’s tailor and your woman’s tailor.

_1st Her._ How, may we beseech you?

_Fact._ I’ll show you: your man’s poet may break out strong and deep
i' the mouth, ... but your woman’s poet must flow, and stroke the ear,
and as one of them said of himself sweetly—

“Must write a verse as smooth and calm as cream,
In which there is no torrent, nor scarce stream.”

Whereon the injured “Tibbalds”: “_Woman’s Poet, his soft
versification—Mr P——_.”

The Induction to _Every Man out of His Humour_, a very large part of
_Cynthia’s Revels_, with its principal character of Crites, and its
audacious self-praise in the Epilogue, not a little of _The Silent
Woman_, and scores of other places in play and poem, might be added.

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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 losses) 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. [Sidenote: _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 same 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.”

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Footnote 270:

These dicta, thus juxtaposed, should make all argument about
apparently one-sided judgments superfluous. If Drummond had omitted
the first or the last, we should have been utterly wrong in arguing
from the remainder.

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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]

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Footnote 271:

The best separate edition is that of Prof. Schelling of Philadelphia
(Boston, U.S.A., 1892). I give the pp. of this, as well as the Latin
Headings of sections, which will enable any one to trace the passage
in complete editions of the Works such as Cunningham’s Gifford. It is
strange that no one has numbered these sections for convenience of
reference.

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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. [Sidenote: _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 unnumbered 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.” The 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]

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Footnote 272:

It may be observed that the shorter aphorisms rise to the top—at least
the beginning.

Footnote 273:

“He is upbraidingly called a poet.... The professors, indeed, have
made the learning cheap.”

Footnote 274:

It is here that Ben borrows from Petronius not merely the sentiment
but the phrase, “umbratical doctor” (see vol. i. p. 244 note).

Footnote 275:

“Taylor the Water-Poet,” certainly bad enough as a poet—though not as
a man. But the selection of Spenser as the other pole is an invaluable
correction to the sweeping attack in the _Conversations_.

Footnote 276:

Perhaps, indeed, an exception should be made in favour of the section
_De malignitate Studentium_, p. 34, which reiterates the necessity of
“the exact knowledge of all virtues and their contraries” on the part
of the poet.

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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, which 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.

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Footnote 277:

He may have taken this from the Italians.

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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.”

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Footnote 278:

This is one of the most lacrimable of the gaps. Ben must have known
other authorities besides Quintilian well: he even quotes, though only
in part, the great passage of Simylus (vol. i. p. 25 note).

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These _Discoveries_ have to be considered with a little general care before we examine them more particularly. [Sidenote: _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 deliberate 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. [Sidenote: _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. [Sidenote: _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 instance, 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.

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Footnote 279:

I am most anxious not to be thought to reflect on Professor Schelling
in this remark. Dr Schelling’s indagations of Ben’s debts are most
interesting, and always made in the right spirit, while, like a good
farmer and sportsman, he has left plenty for those who come after him
to glean and bag. For instance, the very curious passage, taken
verbatim from the elder Seneca, about the Platonic Apology (cf. vol.
i. p. 237).

Footnote 280:

Yet in re-reading Jonson, just after a pretty elaborate overhauling of
the Italians, I find very little certain indebtedness of detail. Mr
Spingarn seems to me to go too far in tracing, p. 88, “small Latin and
less Greek” to Minturno’s “small Latin and _very_ small Greek,” and
the distinction of _poeta_, _poema_, _poesis_ to Scaliger or Maggi.
Fifty people might have independently thought of the first; and the
second is an application of a “common form” nearly as old as rhetoric.

-----

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. [Sidenote: _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. [Sidenote: _at_ Tamerlane,] It was quite certain that Ben would seriously despise what Shakespeare only laughed at—the confusion, the 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.

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Footnote 281:

P. 27. “The _Tamerlanes_ and _Tamerchams_ of the late age, which had
nothing in them but the scenical strutting and furious vociferation to
warrant them.” It is just worth noting that Jonson thought there was
more than this in Marlowe; and that the early edd. of _Tamburlaine_
are anonymous.

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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_. [Sidenote: _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. [Sidenote: _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 Bacon’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_.

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Footnote 282:

One cannot but remember—with pity or glee, according to mood and
temperament—how the Bacon-Shakespeare-maniacs have actually taken this
in the sense of _poetic_ “numbers.” But in truth their study is not
likely to be much in haughty Rome and its language, or to have led
them either to Petronius and his _omnium nume[ro]rum_, or to Seneca
and his _insolenti Græciæ_.

-----

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.

He does not, as must have been clearly seen, escape the “classical” limitation. [Sidenote: _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.

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Footnote 283:

Daniel had frankly defended _enjambement_.

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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 style 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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Footnote 284:

It seemed unnecessary to enlarge the space given to the men of Eliza
and our James, by including the merer grammarians and pedagogues, from
Mulcaster to that fervid Scot, Mr Hume, who, in 1617, extolled the
“Orthography and Congruity” of his native speech (ed. Wheatley,
E.E.T.S., 1865). Of Mulcaster, however, it deserves to be mentioned
that, not so much in his _Positions_ (1581: ed. Quick, London, 1887),
which have been, as in his _Elementarie_, which should be, reprinted,
he displays a more than Pléiade enthusiasm for the vernacular.
Unluckily this last is not easy of access, even the B.M. copy being a
“Grenville” book, and hedged round with forms and fears.

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INTERCHAPTER IV.

The proper appreciation of the period surveyed in the foregoing Book is of perhaps greater importance than that of any other part of this History. We have seen, in the three preceding Interchapters, what it was that prevented Greek, Roman, and Mediæval criticism respectively from attaining completeness, and how the preventives worked. We saw further, in the last pages of the First Volume, in what condition literature, and at least the possibilities of the criticism of literature, were left at the beginning of the Renaissance. And now we have seen what additions the Renaissance made—not, indeed, in detail, to literature itself, for that belongs to another story than ours, but what additions it made—to the criticism of literature. In mere bulk these additions were very considerable. The extant critical writing of these hundred years (or rather of the last seventy of them), excluding mere rhetorical schoolbooks, probably exceeds, and very largely exceeds, the total of classical and mediæval work on the subject which we possess, even inclusive of schoolbooks. For the very first time Criticism, not as a sort of half accidental and more than half shame-faced extension of Rhetoric, but in and for itself, received a really large share of the intellectual attention of the period.

Moreover, the advantages possessed by Renaissance critics (as we partly also saw in the place referred to) were likewise very great. Men were beginning really to know and really to understand antiquity; they had the whole body of mediæval literature complete, finished, ready for their appreciation; and they or their contemporaries were daily and yearly building up great literatures in all the principal countries of Europe, except Germany, and not wholly despicable literatures there and elsewhere. The excuse of the want of comparison, which had been valid for Greece, less valid but still partly so for Rome, and valid again, though for different reasons, in the Middle Ages, was dwindling and disappearing every day. There was no want of interest in the subject; there was no want of examples, both encouraging and warning, of method.

Nor is it possible to deny that the actual accomplishment of the time was very considerable likewise. When a century finds a certain department of intellectual activity almost uncultivated; when it leaves that subject in a state of active cultivation; and when, further, two following centuries are content to opine almost wholly in the sense to which it has generally inclined,—that century can hardly be said to have wasted its years. Accomplishment—very remarkable and solid accomplishment—it can certainly boast. It must be the business of this Interchapter to examine the nature and (partly at least) the value of that accomplishment, now that we have fully surveyed its items, and frankly admitted a certain general result.

In considering the critical achievement of Italy, the earliest in time, the most abundant in result, the most influential—in fact an abridgment, and no mean abridgment, of that of Europe—we cannot but see at once that there was a certain disadvantage accompanying the inevitableness and the general propriety of this Italian prerogative. No other country had so much learning; but, for this very reason, no other country was so certain rather to over- than to under-value the importance of ancient doctrine. No country had so perfect a literature, though other countries had literatures older, richer, and more vigorous; but this very perfection, while it might seem to provide a fertile field for criticism, had two dangers. The Italians were likely to look down upon, or simply to ignore, other literatures; and, from the failing, though slowly and not conspicuously failing, force of their creative power, they were likely to turn to logomachies and debating-society wrangles. Nay, there was a third peril. No country had so little properly mediæval literature as Italy; and none therefore was more certain to set the fashion of ignoring or slighting that mediæval performance which is so invaluable as a check and balance-redresser. And perhaps we might even add a fourth—that while French and English had got practically beyond the reach of mere dialect-jealousy, Italian had not; and that too much of the abundant interest in literature was throughout turned upon mere grammar and mere linguistics.

Perhaps for these reasons, perhaps for others, perhaps for none assignable except by superfluous guess-work, Italian criticism, active and voluminous as it was, settled very early into certain well-marked limits and channels, and almost wholly confined itself within them, though these channels underwent no infrequent intersection or confluence.

The main texts and patterns of the critics of the Italian Renaissance were three—the _Ars Poetica_ of Horace, the _Poetics_ of Aristotle, and the various Platonic places dealing with poetry. These latter had, as we have seen, begun to affect Italian thought, directly or by transmission through this or that medium, before the close of the fourteenth century; and the maintenance of the Platonic ban, the refutation of it, or the more or less ingenious acceptance and evasion of it, with the help of the Platonic blessing, had been a tolerably familiar exercise from the time of Boccaccio to the time of Savonarola. But Horace and Aristotle gave rules and patterns of much more definiteness. Of the writers of the abundant critical literature which has been partly surveyed, some directly comment these texts; others follow them with more or less selection or combination; many take up separate questions suggested by them; very few, if any, face the subject without some prepossession derived from them.