JACOBEAN DRAMA

309 measurement with them by comparison, and we are tempted to repeat that unjust trope of Landor's in which he calls the other Jacobean dramatists mushrooms growing round the foot of the Oak of Arden. They had, indeed, noble flashes of the creative light, but Shakespeare walks in the soft and steady glow of it. As he proceeds, without an effort, life results; his central qualities are ceaseless growth. In him, too, characteristics are found fully formed which the rest of the world had at that time barely conceived. His liberality, his tender respect for women, his absence from prejudice, his sympathy for every peculiarity of human emotion-these are miraculous, but the vigour of his imagination explains the marvel. He sympathised because he comprehended, and he comprehended because of the boundless range of his capacity. The quality in which Shakespeare is unique among the poets of the world, and that which alone explains the breadth, the unparalleled vivacity and coherency of the vast world of his imagination, is what Coleridge calls his "omnipresent creativeness," his power of observing everything, of forgetting nothing, and of combining and reissuing impressions in complex and infinite variety. In this godlike gift not the most brilliant of his great contemporaries approached him.

The misfortune of the Jacobean dramatists who were not Shakespeare lay in their contentedness with the results of their very remarkable personal energy. Their love of extravagance betrayed them into shapelessness, their rebellious scorn of discipline into anarchy. But perhaps their most serious fault was one inherent in the system of dramatic composition which they had adopted. They fell away from the examination of sane and normal types of humanity, in which they suspected the presence of the hated academic spirit, and they devoted all their attention to the "humours" of violent exceptions and odd varieties of humanity. As the fire of passion sank, they endeavoured to stir its embers by a more and more bombastic and grotesque insistence on these "humours," losing at last, in their preposterous pursuit of farce, all touch with the delicate spirit of truth. In their confusion of plot, in their far-fetched imagery, in their jumble of circumstance and event, in their fantastic and unearthly caprices, in their violently contrasted outbreaks of vituperance and amorousness, we feel the minor Jacobean dramatists to present to us, with all the air of those who offer divine gifts, a medley of what is good and bad, of what is wholesome and stimulating, with what is decaying and distasteful.

The general criticism of the nineteenth century was indulgent to the faults and enthusiastic about the merits of the Jacobean dramatists. It was observed by Charles Lamb, Hazlitt and Leigh Hunt that for a hundred and fifty years the beauties of the contemporaries of Shakespeare had been unduly slighted; these critics set themselves to show in what manner those great men felt, "what sort of loves and enmities theirs were, how their griefs were tempered, and their full-swoln joys abated." No form of literature is more effectively presented by quotation than the drama of these Jacobean poets, and Charles Lamb, in 1808, dazzled all sensitive readers by the richness of the anthology he gathered from the English dramatists who lived about the

Ben Jonson

time of Shakespeare. Since the age of Lamb, the tone of criticism has been increasingly eulogistic, until in the lips of Mr. Swinburne it reached, in prose and verse, the proportions of a pæan. It can hardly be questioned that the critics of whom Mr. Swinburne is at once the most learned and the most inspired, who approach the minor writers of the age of James I. with such epithets as "unflawed" (Marston), "sweetest of all thy time save one" (Dekker), "a full-blown flower in heaven" (John Day), and who occupy themselves exclusively with the fugitive beauties and felicitous occasional audacities of their favourites, are unsafe guides for those who, in humdrum fashion, read the works of the authors so lauded, not in picturesque quotation, but steadily through as dramas representative of human life on a possible public stage. From Charles Lamb downwards, our fanatics of the Jacobean drama have brought with them half the qualities they have attributed; they have seen too much on the one hand, and too little on the other. These powerful and romantic poets are no longer in need of being urged upon ignorant or unwilling admirers. They are rather in danger of suffering from excess of praise and from a neglect of those errors of proportion and discretion which prevent them from claiming a place in the very highest rank of literary accomplishment. In a brief survey of non-Shakespearean drama from 1600 onwards, we ought not to blind ourselves to the fact that the highest point had already been reached, and that a decline was imminent.

With the turn of the century a reaction against pure imagination began to make itself felt in England, and this movement found a perfect expositor in BEN JONSON. Born seven years later than Shakespeare, he worked, like his fellows, in Henslowe's manufactory of romantic drama, until, in consequence of running a rapier through a man, the fierce poetic bricklayer was forced to take up for a while the position of an Ishmael. The immediate result was the production of a comedy, Every Man in his Humour, in which a new thing was started in drama, the study of what Jonson called "recent humours or manners of men that went along with the times." In other words, in the midst of that luxurious romanticism which had culminated in Shakespeare, Ben Jonson set out to be what we now call a “realist” or a “naturalist." In doing this, he went back as rigidly as he could to the methods of Plautus, and fixed his grave and consecrated eyes" on an academic scheme by which poetry was no longer to be a mere entertainment but a form of lofty mental gymnastic. Jonson called his solid and truculent pictures of the age "comic satires," and his intellectual arrogance combining with his contempt for those who differed from him, soon called down upon his proud and rugged head all the hostility of Parnassus. About the year 1600 Jonson's pugnaciousness had roused against him an opposition in which, perhaps, Shakespeare alone forbore to take a part. But Jonson was a formidable antagonist, and when he fought with a brother poet, he had a trick, in a double sense, of taking his pistol from him and beating him too.

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A persistent rumour, constantly refutea, will have it that Shakespeare was one of those whom Jonson hated. The most outspoken of misanthropes did

not, we may be sure, call another man "star of poets" and "soul of the age without meaning what he said; but there may have been a sense in which,

while loving Shakespeare and admiring his work, Jonson disapproved of its tendency. It could hardly be otherwise. He delighted in an iron style, hammered and twisted; he must have thought that Shakespeare's "excellent phantasy, brave notions, and gentle expressions" had a flow too liquid and facile. Jonson, with his Latin paraphrases, his stiff academic procession of ideas, could but dislike the flights and frenzies of his far less learned but brisker and airier companion. And Jonson, be it remembered, had the age on his side. To see Julius Cæsar on the boards might be more amusing, but surely no seriously minded Jacobean could admit that it was so instructive as a performance of Sejanus or of Catiline, which gave a chapter of good sound Roman history, without lyric flowers or ornaments of style, in hard blank verse. Even the ponderous comedies of Ben Jonson were put forth by him, and were accepted by his contemporaries, as very serious contributions to the highest culture. What other men called "plays" were "works" to Jonson, as the old joke had it.

Solid and of lasting value as are the productions of Jonson, the decline begins to be observed in them. Even if we confine our attention to his two noblest plays the Fox and the Alchemist-we cannot but admit that here, in the very heyday and glory of the English Renaissance, a fatal element is introduced. Charm, ecstasy, the free play of the emotions, the development of individual character-these are no longer the sole solicitude of the poet, who begins to dogmatise and educate, to prefer types to persons and logic to passion. It is no wonder that Ben Jonson was so great a favourite with the writers of the Restoration, for he was their natural parent. With all their rules and unities, with all their stickling for pseud-Aristotelian correctness, they were the intellectual descendants of that poet who, as Dryden said, "was willing to give place to the classics in all things." For the next fifty years English poetry was divided between loyalty to Spenser and attraction to Ben Jonson, and every year the influence of the former dwindled while that of the latter increased.

In temperament Jonson differed wholly from the other leaders of Jacobean drama. They, without exception, were romantic; he by native bias, purely classical. It is not difficult to perceive that the essential quality of his mind had far more in common with Corneille and with Dryden than with Shakespeare. He was so full of intelligence that he was able to adopt, and to cultivate with some degree of zest, the outward forms of romanticism, but his heart was always with the Latins, and his favourite works, though not indeed his best, were his stiff and solid Roman tragedies. He brought labour to the construction of his poetry, and he found himself surrounded by facile pens, to whom he seemed, or fancied that he seemed, "barren, dull, lean, a poor writer." He did not admire much of the florid ornament in which they delighted, and which we also have been taught to admire. He grew to hate the kind of drama which Marlowe had inaugurated. No doubt, sitting in the Apollo room of the Old Devil Tavern, with his faithful Cartwright, Brome and Randolph round him, he would truculently point to the inscription above the chimney,