according to the rules of thetoric and eloquence, by studied transitions, with regular progress, without shock or bounds. Jonson received from his ac quaintance with the ancients the habit of decomposing ideas, unfolding the bit by bit in natural order, making him. self understood and believed. From the first thought to the final conclusion, he ccnducts the reader by a continuous and uniform ascent. The track never fails with him as with Shakspeare. He does not advance like the rest by abrupt intuitions, but by consecutive deductions; we can walk with him without need of bounding, and we are continually kept upon the straight path: antithesis of words unfolds antithesis of thoughts; symmetrical phrases guide the mind through difficult ideas; they are like barriers set on either side of the road to prevent our falling into the ditch. We do not meet on our way extraordinary, sudden, gorgeous images, which might dazzle or delay us; we travel on, enlightened by moderate and sustained metaphors. Jonson has all the methods of Latin art; even, when he wishes it, especially on Latin subjects, he has the last and most erudite, the brilliant conciseness of Seneca and Lucan, the squared, equipoised, filed off antithesis, the mos: happy and studied artifices of oratori cal architecture.* Other poets are nearly visionaries; Jonson is almost a logician. of cosmetics, he brings out a shopful | drawing up ideas in continuous rows, of them; we might make out of his plays a dictionary of the oaths and costumes of courtiers; he seems to have a specialty in all branches. A still greater proof of his force is, that his learning in nowise mars his vigor; Leavy as is the mass with which he loads himself, he carries it without stooping. This wonderful mass of reading and observation suddenly begins to move, and falls like a mountain on the overwhelmed reader. We must hear Sir Epicure Mammon unfold the vision of splendors and debauchery, in which he means to plunge, when he has learned to make gold. The refined and unchecked impurities of the Roman decadence, the splendid obscenities of Heliogabalus, the gigantic fancies of luxury and lewdness, tables of gold spread with foreign dainties, draughts of dissolved pearls, nature devastated to provide a single dish, the many crimes committed by sensuality against nature, reason, and justice, the delight in defying and outraging law,-all these images pass before the eyes with the dash of a torrent and the force of a great river. Phrase follows phrase without intermission, ideas and facts crowd into the dialogue to paint a situation, to give clearness to a character, produced from this deep memory, directed by this solid logic, launched by this powerful reflection. It is a pleasure, to see him advance weighted with so many observations and recollections, loaded with technical details and learned reminiscences, without de.viation or pause, a genuine literary Leviathan, like the war elephants which used to bear towers, men, weapons, machines, on their backs, and ran as swiftly with their freight as a nimble steed In the great dash of this heavy attempt, he finds a path which suits him. He has his style. Classical erudition and education made him a classic, and he writes like his Greek models and his Roman masters. The more we study the Latin races and literatures in contrast with the Teutonic, the more fully we become convinced that the proper and distinctive gift of the first is the art of development, that is, of * The Devil is an Ass. Hence his talent, his successes, and his faults: if he has a better style and better plots than the others, he is not, like them, a creator of souls. He is toc much of a theorist, too preoccupied by rules. His argumentative habits spoi. him when he seeks to shape and motion complete and living men. No one is capable f fashioning these unless he possesses, like Shakspeare he imagin ation of a seer. The human being is so complex that the logician who perceives his different elements in suc cession can hardly study them all, much less gather them all in one flash, so as to produce the dramatic response or action in which they are concentrated and which should manifest them. To discover such actions ard responses, *Sejanus, Catilina, assim we need a kind of inspiration and fever. | record exactly all the desires of speech Then the mind works as in a dream. all the necessities of silence, and to reThe characters move within the poet, cord nothing else. Now he picks out almost involuntarily : he waits for them a ridicule, an affectation, a species of to speak, he remains motionless, hear- folly, from the manners of the dandies ing their voices, wholly wrapt in con- and the courtiers; a mode of swearing, templation, in order that he may not an extravagant style, a habit of gesticu. disturb the inner drama which they are lating, or any other oddity contracted about to act in his soul. That is his by vanity or fashion. The hero whom artifice to let them alone. He is he covers with these eccentricities, is qite astonished at their discourse; as overloaded by them. He disappears he observes them, he forgets that it is beneath his enormous trappings; he he who invents them. Their mood, drags them about with him everywhere character, education, disposition of he cannot get rid of them for an in mind, situation, attitude, and actions, stant. We no longer see the man form within him so well-connected a under the dress; he is like a mannikin, whole, and so readily unite into pal- oppressed under a cloak, too heavy for pable and solid beings, that he dares him. Sometimes, doubtless, his habits not attribute to his reflection or reason- of geometrical construction produce ing a creation so vast and speedy. personages almost life-like. Bobadil, Beings are organized in him as in na- the grave boaster; Captain Tucca, the ture, that is, of themselves, and by a begging bully, inventive buffoon, ridicforce which the combinations of his art ulous talker; Amorphus the traveller, could not replace.* Jonson has noth- a pedantic doctor of good manners, ing wherewith to replace it but these laden with eccentric phrases, create as combinations of art. He chooses a much illusion as we can wish; but it is general idea-cunning, folly, severity-because they are flitting comicalities and makes a person out of it. This and low characters. It is not necessary person is called Crites, Asper, Sordido | for a poet to study such creatures; it is Deliro, Pecunia, Subtil, and the trans-enough that he discovers in them three parent name indicates the logical pro- or four leading features; it is of little cess which produced it. The poet took consequence if they always present an abstract quality, and putting to themselves with the same attitudes, gether all the actions to which it may they produce laughter, like the Countgive rise, trots it out on the stage in a ess d'Escarbagnas or any of the Fâcheux man's dress. His characters, like those in Molière; we want nothing else of of la Bruyère and Theophrastus, were them. On the contrary, the others hammered out of solid deductions. weary and repel us. They are stage. Now it is a vice selected from the cata- masks, not living figures. Having aclogue of moral philosophy, sensuality quired a fixed expression, they persist thirsting for gold: this perverse double to the end of the piece in their unvaryinclination becomes a personage, Sir ing grimace or their eternal frown. A Epicure Mammon; before the alche man is not an abstract passion. He mist, before the famulus, before his stamps the vices and virtues which he friend, before his mistress, in public or possesses with his individual mark. alone, all his words denote a greed of These vices and virtues receive, on pleasu and of gold, and they express entering into him, a bent and form nothing more.t Now it is a mania which they have not in others. No one gathered from the old sophists, a is unmixed sensuality. Take a thoubabbling with horror of noise; this sand sensualists, and you will find a Corm of mental pathology becomes a thousand different modes of sensuality; personage, Morose; the poet has the for there are a thousand paths, a thouait of a doctor who has undertaken to sand circumstances and degrees, in * Alfred de Musset, preface to La Coupe et sensuality. If Jonson wanted to make Sir Epicure Mammon a real being, he should have given him the kind of dis position, the species of education, the manner of imagination, which produce les Lèvres. Plato: Ion. † Compare Sir Epicure Mammon with Baron Hulot from Balzac's Cousine Bette. Balzac, who is learned like Jonson, creates real beings like Shakspeare. sensuality. When we wish to construct | a man, we must dig down to the foundations of mankind; that is, we must define to ourselves the structure of his bodily machine, and the primitive gait of his mind. Jonson has not dug sufficiently deep, and his constructions are incomplete; he has built on the surface, and he has built but a single story. He was not acquainted with the whole man, and he ignored man's basis; he put on the stage and gave a representation of moral treatises, fragments of history, scraps of satire; he did not stamp new beings on the imagination of mankind. He possesses all other gifts, and in particular the classical; first of all, the talent for composition. For the first time we see a connected, well-contrived plot, a complete intrigue, with its beginning, middle, and end; subordinate actions well arranged, well combined; an interest which grows and never flags; a leading truth which all the events tend to demonstrate; a ruling idea which all the characters unite to illustrate; in short, an art like that which Molière and Racine were about to apply and teach. He does not, iike Shakspeare, take a novel from Greene, a chronicle from Holinshed, a life from Plutarch, such as they are, to cut them into scenes irrespective of likelihood, indifferent as to order and unity, caring only to set up men, at times wandering into poetic reveries, at need finishing up the piece abruptly with a recognition or a butchery. He governs himself and his characters; he wills and he knows all that they do, and all that he does. But beyond his habits of Latin regularity, he possesses the great faculty of his age and race,-the sentiment of nature and existence, the exact knowledge of precise detail, the power in frankly and boldly handling frank passions. This gift is not wanting in ay writer of the time; they do not fear words that are true, shocking, and striking details of the bedchamber or medical study; the prudery of moderr. England and the refinement of monarchical France veil not the nudity of their figures, or dim the coloring of their pictures. They live freely, amply, amidst living thing;; they see the ins and outs of lust raging without any feeling of shame, hypocrisy, or pallia tion; and they exhibit it as they see it, Jonson as boldly as the rest, occasionally more boldly than the rest, strength. ened as he is by the vigor and rugged. ness of his athletic temperament, by the extraordinary exactness and abundance of his observations and his knowledge Add also his moral loftiness, his as perity, his powerful chiding wrath, exas perated and bitter against vice, his wil strengthened by pride and by con science: "With an armed and resolved hand, I'll strip the ragged follies of the time Naked as at their birth. . and with a whis of steel, Print wounding lashes in their iron ribs. I fear no mood stampt in a private brow, When I am pleas'd t' unmask a public vice. I fear no strumpet's drugs, nor ruffian's stab, Should I detect their hateful luxuries;"> above all, a scorn of base compliance, an open disdain for That run a broken pace for common hire,”— "Those jaded wits an enthusiasm, or deep love of "A happy muse, Borne on the wings of her immortal thought, That kicks at earth with a disdainful heel, And beats at heaven gates with her bright hoofs." + Such are the energies which he brought to the drama and to comedy; they were great enough to ensure him a higk and separate position. III. For whatever Jonson undertakes, whatever be his faults, haughtiness, rough-handling, predilection for mo rality and the past, antiquarian and censorious instincts, he is never Ettle or dull. It signifies nothing that in his Latinized tragedies, Sejanus, Catiline, he is fettered by the worship of the old worn models of the Roman decadence; nothing that he plays the scholar, manu factures Ciceronian harangues, hauls ir choruses imitated from Seneca, holds forth in the style of Lucan and the rhetors of the empire; he more than once attains a genuine accent; through his pedantry, heaviness, literary adora tion of the ancients, nature forces its *Every Man out of hi Tumour Prologue ↑ Poetaster, i. 1. + Ibid. way; he lights, at his first attempt, on Their license, law; and their observance, Occasion is their foil; conscience, their stain; Profit, their lustre ; and what else is, vain."+ Sejanus addresses Livia thus: 66 Royal lady, Quickness, and will, to apprehend the means These are the loves of the wolf and How do I look to-day? Hath giv❜n some little taint unto the ceruse, you. ""Tis now well, lady, you shovid To smooth the skin. A lady cannot be In tive, As you have his: who, to endear him more L. E. When will you take some physic, L. Wher. I shall, Eudemus: but let Drusus' drug E. Were Lygdus made, that's done. This change came timely, lady, for your He ends by congratulating her on her approaching change of husbands; Drusus was injuring her complexion; Seja nus is far preferable; a physiologica! and practical conclusion. The Roman apothecary kept on the same shelf his medicine-chest, his chest of cosmetics and his box of poisons.† After this we find one after another all the scenes of Roman life unfolded the bargain of murder, the comedy o justice, the shamelessness of flattery, the anguish and vacillation of the senate. When Sejanus wishes to buy a conscience, he questions, jokes, plays round the offer he is abou. to make, throws it out as if in pleasantry, 30 as to be able to withdraw it, if need be; then, when the intelligent iook of the Eudemus. Excellent clear, believe it. rascal, whom he is trafficking with, This same fucus Was well laid on. *See the second Act of Catiline. The Fall of Sejanus, iii. last Scene. shows that he is understood: Ibid. † See Catiline, Act ii.; a very fine scene, ne less plain spoken and animated on the dissipa tion of the higher ranks in Rome. "Protest not, Thy looks are vows to me... "Cæsar, Guard His meekness, Jove, his piety, his care, "Propounds to this grave senate, the bestow- Upon the mar. he loves, honour'd Sejanus, Here are his letters, sigued with his signet. "Senators. Read, read them, open, publicly read them. Cotta. Cæsar hath honour'd his own great ness much In thinking of this act. Trio. And the lord As worthy it, on whom it is directed! Sanquinius. Rome did never boast the That could give envy bounds, but his: Se- 1st Sen. Honour'd and noble ! Tiberius' letter is read. First, long obscure and vague phrases, mingled with indirect protestations and accusations, foreboding something and revealing nothing. Suddenly comes an insinuation against Sejanus. The fathers are alarmed, but the next line reassures them. A word or two further on, the same insinuation is repeated with "Some there be greater exactness. Then the herald cites the accused; Varro, the consul, pronounces the in' dictment; Afer hurls upon them his bloodthirsty eloquence: the senators get excited; we see laid bare, as in that would interpret this his public Facitus and Juvenal, the depths of and Roman servility, hypocrisy, insensi- severity to be particular ambition; bility, the venomous craft of Tiberius. he doth but remove his own lets: althat, under a pretext of service to us, At last, after so many others, the turn of Sejanus comes. leging the strengths he hath made to The fathers anxously assemble in the temple of Apollo; his faction in court and senate, by the himself, by the prætorian soldiers, by for some days past Tiberius has seemed offices he holds himself, and confers to be trying to contradict himself; one day he appoints the friends of his fa- on others, his popularity and dependvorite to high places, and the next day ents, his urging (and almost driving) sets his enemies in eminent positions. us to this our unwilling retirement, and The senators mark the face of Sejanus, lastly, his aspiring to be our son-inlaw." and know not what to anticipate; strange!" Their eager eyes are fixer Sejanus is troubled, then after a monent's cringing is more arrogant than on the letter, on Sejanus, who per ever. The plots are confused, the spires and grows pale; their thoughts umors contradictory. Macro alone is o the confidence of Tiberius, and oldiers are seen drawn up at the orch of the temple, ready to enter at slightest commotion. The formula oi convocation is read, and the council marks the names of those who do not respond to the summons; then Reguius addresses them, and announces that Cæsar The Fall of Sejanus, 1. ↑ Ibid. iii. ↑ Ibid. iv. attentive The fathers rise: "This is senators words of the letter fall one by one, Ibid.▾ |
