I

Considering that he wrote the best-known lyric in the English language, Jonson has had comparatively little attention as a poet. The reason for this is not hard to see. As with his plays, he had a very clear idea of what he wanted to do in poetry and what his principles were, and he remained largely independent of fashions and schools. In consequence his poetry does not quite fit into the usual categories of English literary history, and while its obvious qualities have always gained it respect, it has never been fully in accord with the taste of any period. Jonson yielded to no one in in the high value he placed on poetry, but he saw it as essentially an Art, rather than as the expression of personality or a way of conveying a unique perception of Truth. Skill was the quality most inescapably demanded of the poet. Certainly he had to be born a poet, and equally certainly he needed Inspiration, in some sense of that difficult word, but no man can rely on these alone and think

hee can leape forth suddainely a Poet, by dreaming hee hath been in Parnassus, or, having washed his lipps (as they say) in Helicon. There goes more to his making, then so. For to Nature, Exercise, Imitation, and Studie, Art must be added, to make all these perfect. And, though these challenge to themselves much, in the making up of our Maker, it is Art only can lead him to perfection, and leave him there, as planted by her hand.

[Discoveries, 2488-95]

The position maintained is straightforwardly neo-classical. In order to write well, the first necessity was, as Horace had said, to master the subject; then, to know how other writers had treated it so as to be able to make use of their work. Originality and Inspiration, as the Romantics understood them, do not, or need not, enter into this. There is one poem of Jonson's—'That women are but men's shadows' (Forrest, vii)—which we know was written to order, having been given to him as a 'penance' by the Countess of Pembroke. It is not a very distinguished poem, but it has interest because it shows Jonson carrying out his precepts in practice; having been set his task, he looked for a suitable model to imitate, found it in a lyric by the early sixteenth-century Latinist Barhélemi Aneau, and adapted this to his purpose. This is in miniature the technique he used when he had to fulfill a commission for a masque, such as The Masque of Blackness, and indeed it seems to have been his natural method whenever he set himself to compose anything, large or small.

Mastery of the matter to be conveyed and familiarity with the best models for imitation were as important even in a brief lyric such as 'That women are but men's shadows' as in Tragedy and Comedy. Next after them came the logical disposition of the matter and proper attention to detail. In the preface to The Alchemist Jonson draws a distinction between energetic but careless writing, and proper composition:

… there is a great difference between those, that (to gaine opinion of Copie [that is, copiousness or fertility of imagination]) utter all they can, however unfitly: and those that use election and a meane. For it is only the disease of the unskilfull, to think rude things greater than polish'd: or scatter'd more numerous than compos'd.

The true craftsman-poet must be ready to polish and revise, to 'bring all to the forge and file again', and if necessary to expunge, and this is what lies behind his comment when the players mentioned it as an honour to Shakespeare, 'that in his writing … he never blotted out line'. In rejoining: 'Would he had blotted a thousand' Jonson certainly did not mean that he wished there was less of Shake-speare's writing, but that he felt that Shakespeare managed his genius badly and would have been an even better writer if he had revised more. [Discoveries, 647-68]. In his own way Jonson would have accepted the dictum that poetry must possess all the virtues of good prose, and indeed he told Drummond that

he wrott all his first in prose, for so his master Cambden had learned him.

[Conversations, 377-78]

This sounds like an exaggeration—it is difficult to believe, for example, that all his lyrics can have begun in this way—but it may well be largely true, and there are certainly places where Jonson can in fact be seen to be versifying his own or others' prose.

The next demand that poetry had to meet was for perspicuity and naturalness of diction. Simplicity and directness, however, were not to decline into emptiness and insipidity. Jonson distinguished between what he called 'men's poets' and 'women's poets', the latter being typified for him by Daniel:

Others there are, that have no composition at all; but a kind of tuneing, and riming fall, in what they write. It runs and slides, and onely makes sound. Womens-Poets they are call'd: as you have womens-Taylors.

They write a verse, as smooth, as soft, as creame; In which there is no torrent, nor scarce streame.

You may sound these wits, and find the depth of them, with your middle finger. They are Creame-bowle, or but puddle deepe.

[Discoveries, 710-18]

For this kind of writing Jonson had no patience, but he objected as much to the other extreme of deliberately 'strong' or harsh poetry:

Others, that in composition are nothing, but what is rough and broken: Quae per salebras altaque saxa cadunt. And if it would come gently, they trouble it of purpose. They would not have it run without rubs, as if that stile were more strong and manly, that stroke the eare with a kind of unevennesse.

[Discoveries, 695-700]

This was a 'humour' like affecting a 'singularity' in the cut of one's beard; Jonsoncomplained of it in Donne, a poet whom he otherwise greatly admired (he told Drummond 'that Done for not keeping of accent deserves hanging' and that 'Done himself for not being understood would perish' [Conversations, 648-49; 196]).

In versification, then, Jonson desired what was 'numerous' or harmonious, but not boringly regular. He tried his hand at a number of different meters, even experimenting with the Pindaric Ode, a form little practised by the Elizabethans, and indeed not very well understood by them; Jonson's scholarship gave him an advantage here, though he was not temperamentally suited for such a rhapsodic form, and could only sometimes bring it off. In general he had no taste for wild and irregular beauties: he said of style that it should be

smooth, gentle, and sweet; like a Table, upon which you may runne your finger without rubs, and your nayle cannot find a joynt; not horrid, rough, wrinckled, gaping, or chapt.

[Discoveries, 2068-71]

Perhaps most revealing of all is a remark that Drummond records:

That Southwell was hanged yett so he had written that piece of his ye burning babe he would have been content to destroy many of his.

[Conversations, 180-2]

Southwell was a Catholic martyr, and for a long period of his life Jonson was a member of the Roman Church, but it was probably not so much the religious content of The Burning Babe that he admired as its combination of gravity of subject, fervour of feeling and firm stylistic control. In his own work the same combination of qualities can be found, as in his 'Epigram' on the death of his first son:

The union of smoothness and strength is especially valuable in this poem because it so successfully contains what might easily have become mawkish and sentimental; this is truly 'masculine' poetry.

Jonson defined his ideal diction clearly in Discoveries (in what is actually a paraphrase from Quintilian):

Pure and neate language I love, yet plaine and customary.

He took his stand, that is, with Cheke, Ascham, Sidney and those other humanists who believed in 'dignifying the vernacular' by 'purifying' it, freeing it from obscurity, rusticity, clumsiness and affectation, whether this last took the form of self-conscious archaism or of pedantic importation from ancient or modern languages. English was to be transformed into an expressive and worthy literary language by revealing its true genius, not by divorcing it from the actual speech ofmen, 'upon the which', Jonson says in his unfinished Grammar, 'all precepts are grounded, and to the which they ought to be referred'. 'Custom' or usage was the ultimate sanction, but this did not mean accepting the standards of the vulgar:

Yet when I name Custome, I understand not the vulgar Custome: For that were a precept no lesse dangerous to Language, then life, if wee should speake or live after the manners of the vulgar: But that I call Custome of speech, which is the consent of the Learned; as Custome of life, which is the consent of the good.

[Discoveries, 1938-44]

As always the link between purity in diction and purity in life was a vital one to Jonson, and in neither sphere must the good man be corrupted by evil practices. On the other hand it was wrong to be too precious in diction, or to attempt to astonish by inflated grandness of style:

The true Artificer will not run away from nature, as hee were afraid of her; or depart from life, and the likeness of Truth; but speake to the capacity of his hearers. And though his language differ from the vulgar somewhat; it shall not fly from all humanity, with the Tamerlaines and Tamer-Chams of the late Age, which had nothing in them but the scenicall strutting, and furious vociferation, to warrant them to the ignorant gapers. Hee knowes it is his onely Art, so to carry it, as none but Artificers perceive it.

[Discoveries, 772-8]

Jonson's own vocabulary has been extensively studied, and the statistical evidence supports those who have emphasised the Englishness of his language against the older view expressed by Dryden—'he did a little too much romanise our tongue' [Essays, Vol. I]. The modern reader may well be struck by apparent Latinisms in Jonson, but it must be remembered that many words of Latin origin were common in the Renaissance but have since passed out of currency. Jonson himself is credited with the introduction of only about 100 words from Latin, many of which are now quite domesticated—'candidate', for example, 'connection', 'frugal', 'gesticulate', 'petulant', 'preside', 'reciprocate', and 'terse'. This incidence of borrowing is low for an Elizabethan writer, and, oddly, it is lowest in Jonson's Roman tragedies. As might be expected he borrowed less still from Greek, though here again some of his important loans are now naturalised—'analytic' is one, and so are 'exotic', 'heroine' and 'plastic' (as an adjective). More obvious than his importations are his usages of words derived from Latin or Greek in their original rather than their English meaning, such as his use of'front' to mean 'forehead' or 'frequent' to mean 'crowded' or 'well-attended' ('a frequent Senate'). Many of these senses were common in his day, and, of course, to the educated among his audience, to whom Latin was as familiar as English, they would not have seemed strange.

In his actual vocabulary, then, Jonson may be classified as only moderately Latinate, and certainly well removed from the affected Latinism which he satirised in the characters of Juniper in The Case is Altered and Crispinus in Poetaster. His language is more often given an exotic appearance by his readiness to interrupt normal English word-order. The 'hanging' or misplaced clause is an example of this:

If you had bloud, or vertue in you, gentlemen, you would not suffer such eare-wigs about a husband, or scorpions, to creep between man and wife….

(Epicœne, V.iv.6-8)

If there be never a Servant-monster i'the Fayre, who can helpe it? he sayes; nor a nest of Antiques? …

(Bartholomew Fair, Ind. 127-8)

A similar strangeness may come from a more minor displacement of the expected run of a sentence, as when he notes in Discoveries that 'Men are decay'd, and studies', or refers in the dedication to Volpone to the 'invading interpreters' (or unauthorised commentators on others' work) 'who cunningly, and often, utter their owne virulent malice, under other mens simplest meanings', where we would expect 'often cunningly'. His ellipses also sometimes produce odd effects, as in these lines from the first Prologue to Epicœne (which also contain one of Jonson's characteristic negatives):

Together with Jonson's frequently heavy punctuation, these idiosyncrasies often produce both in prose and verse a broken-up, jerky impression which may at first reading be difficult to follow (though the difficulty often disappears if the passages are heard or read aloud). Sometimes in the plays this can be justified as reproducing the movement of a character's thought or the forms of colloquial speech, but it is not always possible to maintain this. No doubt Jonson was affected by the movement of taste at the end of the sixteenth century away from the polished 'Ciceronian' style towards a rougher, more abrupt and colloquialseeming manner. The older balanced and ornate mode appears in him only in parody, as in Puntarvolo's address to his wife's gentlewoman:

To the perfection of complement (which is the Diall of the thought, and guided by the Sunne of your beauties) are requir'd these three specials: the gnomon, the puntilio's, and the superficies: the superficies, is that we call, place; the puntilio's, circumstance; and the gnomon, ceremony: in either of which, for a stranger to erre, 'tis easy and facile, and such am I.

(Every Man out, II.ii. 19-23)

Jonson wrote in both the stock forms of 'baroque prose', the 'curt,' most familiar to us from Bacon's Essays, and the 'loose' or 'dispersed', of which the extreme example is perhaps Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy; both are well illustrated in Epicœne, mainly by Truewit, who is something of a virtuoso of 'modern' eloquence. But Truewit to some extent parodies himself, and Jonson was aware, as Bacon was, that in the end those who set out to avoid the ornateness of the Ciceronian style might fall as easily as their predecessors into that error 'when men study words and not matter'. In all probability Jonson's experimenting with word-order was not so much a conscious attempt to be fashionable as a wish to give English the more flexible word-order of Latin, and in this sense perhaps he was a 'romaniser'. His ultimate principles were never in doubt: Ί would rather have a plaine down-right wisdome, than a foolish and affected eloquence' [Discoveries, 343-5].

Jonson's borrowings from foreign languages are few, and can usually be accounted for by the need to provide local colour. Volpone, for example, has a number of loans from Italian, and The Devil is an Ass many from Spanish, since in that play there is some incidental satire of the contemporary vogue for Spanish fashions and manners (of which Jonson, born and brought up in Elizabethan England, disapproved). Some of the words he introduced have become established: 'caress' (as a noun) and 'disgust' (as a verb), both from Italian; 'casuist' and 'responsible' from French; 'drill' and 'furlough' from Dutch—remembered perhaps from his days as a soldier. He has none of the excessive dependence on French and Italian which characterised some of his contemporaries, and indeed satirises it in his fops. He is similarly sparing in his use of dialect and archaism; his comment on Spenser is famous: 'in affecting the Ancients [he] writ no language'. [Discoveries, 1806-7] Altogether in the 'enrichment' of English he was conservatives—extremely conservative in comparison with Spenser or Shakespeare—and he was equally conservative in drawing on native resources. All writers of his period show an extraordinary facility in substituting one part of speech for another and in giving new meanings to established words. Jonson is the first recorded authority for over 1,000 such usages, but this is little in comparison with Shakespeare. Nor was he very inventive in coining compound nouns and adjectives, in which Elizabethan English was particularly rich. 'Book-worm' is one of his creations, and so are 'half-witted', 'pig-headed', and 'close-mouthed'. Some of his inventions have failed to survive, and this is perhaps a pity: 'egg-chinned', 'shrewd-bearded' and 'squirrel-limbed' might be useful additions to our vocabulary. Significantly he was most creative in constructing new terms of disparagement or abuse; the speeches of Tucca and Buffone are rich in this respect, and so are those of Face. But in general Jonson's strength lay not so much in the richness or fecundity of his language, as in its perspicuity, preciseness and straightforward vigour….

The stylistic qualities which Jonson desired were those which we would tend to think of as the qualities of good, plain prose, but he looked to see them in poetry as well. The prescriptions he laid down were those for the 'plain' rather than the 'high' or ornate style, and this choice radically limited his range as a poet [W. Trimpi, Ben Jonson's Poems, 1962]. It prescribed the type of poem he wrote, for by the laws of Decorum the plain style was only appropriate to certain 'kinds', in general those that were at once 'familiar' and moral. Jonson's Epigrams, which he called 'the ripest of my studies', fall under this heading. They are not the bitter, sharp, 'snarling' epigrams fashionable at the time he wrote his first Humour plays, although some of them are satirical (Jonson never in fact uses 'satire' to describe any of his poems), nor are they always, or even usually, witty and pointed. The lack of wit was commented on by contemporary critics, and Jonson acknowledged the complaint. His second epigram, however, should have made it plain that he was not offering specimens of the genre so popular at the end of the previous century:

To the 'meere English Censurer' who complains that his poems are not true epigrams of the old-fashioned sort, Jonson retorts (Epigram XVIII) that they are not a new kind but in 'the old way and the true', and he seems to be thinking of the epigrams of Martial, who said that the epigram should constitute a kind of letter. Many of Jonson's epigrams are addressed to his friends, and except in length there is little difference between them and his longer 'Epistles'; even the shorter, more satirical epigrams are often addressed to imaginary recipients. 'Epigram' could also cover epitaph, and in fact the famous 'Epitaph on Salamon Pavy' was printed among them; even this is in a way a letter, since it is addressed to the audience: ' Weepe with me all you that read/This little storie … '. In tone and mood, however, Jonson is nearer Horace than Martial, and he may have been aiming at providing an English equivalent of Horace's sermones—'conversational poems' or, literally, 'talks'.

In Jonson's hand the epigram was a versatile 'instrument', and he added to it the ode, the elegy, the lyric, as well as some other poems not so easily classifiable. He was cut off, however, not only from Heroic poetry—so that the closest he comes to the Epic style is in his tragedies—but, by his own decision, from love poetry as well. In Poetaster he had relegated erotic poetry to a subordinate place in the canon, and we should not therefore expect to find him devoting his talents to it; in fact he seems to have tried to make himself the kind of poet he represents Horace as being in that play. Perhaps there were personal reasons as well, but if so we cannot now discover them: the little humorous poem 'Why I write not of love', which was printed as the first poem in The Forrest tells us nothing. In fact he did write some 'elegies' of love, but they form a very striking contrast to those of Donne, for example. They have little of Donne's wit, of which Jonson did not wholly approve, although he could at times approximate to it; more significantly they are hardly passionate, though sometimes fervent, and reveal little sensuous feeling. On the whole they use the language and manner of erotic verse with some skill, but with a kind of constraint. The group of poems 'To Charis' in The Underwood may perhaps express some real incident in Jonson's own life, but they are marked by a note of self-conscious irony, and the last two are frankly humorous. Moral considerations probably came into play here; it was not the part of the truly good man to celebrate passion or sensuality, and one safeguard was to introduce the pose of one who 'ever cometh last in the dance of love' and does not take it all too seriously. The Elegy No. XLII of The Underwood sets Jonson's usual tone:

Thereafter it turns into a satire on women. Jonson would not have the same reasons for restraint, however, in his religious poetry, where he sounds sincere enough, but equally frigid, and it becomes obvious that the real limitation was stylistic.

The criteria which Jonson imposed on his own style were directed towards clarity and harmony, but they virtually precluded a complex and plastic use of words. This results in what T. S. Eliot called the 'superficiality' of his poetry, noting that his words lack

a network of tentacular roots reaching down to the deepest terrors and desires.

[T. S. Eliot, Selected Essays]

Eliot was writing especially of the poetry in the tragedies, but it is generally true that Jonson's poems provide little for the exegete using the methods of 'close reading'; he lacks the interlocking of connotation and evocation and the buried image-chains for which critics are now trained to look. The first stanza of 'Drink to me only with thine eyes', for example, has a reasonably complex structure of meaning—indeed Professor Empson brought it, perhaps a little forcedly, within the compass of Seven Types of Ambiguity. Eyes can be liquid; they can literally 'brim over' with tears; their gaze can be intoxicating. Kisses, too, are not inappropriate in a cup; we are accustomed to the idea of tasting someone's lips, drinking in beauty, and so on, and 'kisses like wine' has become a cliché. After this, however, the poem dwindles into little more than graceful compliment, although possibly a determined commentator might see in the conceit of the unwithered branch a suggestion not only of the immortality of love but of the mistress as a fertility goddess.

From this point of view Jonson is rather an unrewarding poet, just as he is unrewarding as a poetic playwright, and one disappointed critic has committed himself to the surely damning judgment:

Jonson's imagery … resembles that of a philologist who could also write poetry.

[E. B. Partridge, The Broken Compass, 1958]

Jonson may well, like Joyce and Milton, have had a primarily verbal rather than pictorial imagination, although in any case his insistence on the logical disposition of the matter of a poem (to say nothing of the practice of first writing his poems out in prose) would militate against an unconscious logic of metaphor. The major point, however, is that Jonson's views of the proper use of words drove him towards what we should call a denotatory use of language, in which the 'dictionary meaning' is the most important aspect of the word. In this, as in some other aspects of his thought, Jonson anticipated the doctrines of the later seventeenth century; perhaps it would be truer to say that the movement to 'ennoble' the English language by purifying it, to which he belonged, was that which eventually triumphed over its rivals and emerged as the dominant force in the latter part of the century. In general terms the strength and weakness of Jonson's poetry are very much the strengths and weaknesses of the poetry of Dryden and Pope, although it could not be confused with theirs, and could only in a limited sense be called 'Augustan'. (To Dryden and Pope, Jonson's verse was insufficiently pure and refined, not correctly versified, and altogether lacking in 'politeness'; Jonson for his part would have disapproved, among other things, of Dryden's persistent use of the High Style for inappropriate subjects, and of Pope's devotion to epigram and paradox.)

One significant characteristic of Jonson's verse is that it often draws its strength from objects rather than giving strength to them. A good example is this stanza, from the fourth of the series of poems 'To Charis'—"Her Triumph":

There is no question of the effectiveness of this, but it depends on reminding us of the actual physical qualities of the objects mentioned, and then transferring the sensetraces thus evoked to the idea of the mistress; Jonson does not, through his language, convey the sensual impressions to us, or modify them in any way. The same is true of much of his pastoral poetry, in a lyric such as this (from Pan's Anniversarie):

Apart from the rather subdued conceit of the violets' breathing their last in odour nothing happens to the flowers in the poem; they are not even described, or given any qualities, and the effect of the piece depends on the reader's recalling them to his memory and producing in himself the stock attitude towards them.

This is not to say that Jonson's use of language is never creative. Characteristically, however, he is most forcible when he is dealing with things which in themselves generate emotion, and correspondingly at his most effective when expressing the emotions which are most readily aroused by the actual physical presence of objects. Desire and Aversion are the feelings he can most readily convey, and he habitually does so through reference to physical objects. Volpone thus attempts to convey his feelings for Celia through a catalogue of the riches he will shower on her:

See, here, a rope of pearle; and each, more orient
Then that the brave Egyptian queene carrous'd:
Dissolve, and drinke'hem. See, a carbuncle,
May put out both the eyes of our St. Marke;
A diamant, would have bought Lollia Paulina,
When she came in, like star-light, hid with jewels,
That were the spoiles of provinces; take these,
And weare, and lose'hem …
(III.vii.191-8)

This seems natural in Volpone: we may be more surprised to find the Host in The New Inn celebrating a more 'spiritual' matter—the death of the happy lover—in similar terms:

Not only do sexual desire and Avarice seem closely connected in Jonson's mind; he seems to need the tangible symbols of wealth to convey passionate longing and the desire for possession.

Jonson is still more original in his expression of scorn, hatred or contempt, and is most likely in this mood to create images which stick fast in our minds. Critics usually illustrate his vitality in this respect from some of the famous pieces of description in his comedies—such as Face's description of Subtle's complexion:

Stuck full of black, and melancholique wormes,
Like poulder-coms, shot, at the artillery-yeard …
(Alch. I.i.30-1)

As well as their sonorous and dignified passages in the high style, however, the two tragedies have some sharp imagery of this kind. In Sejanus Jonson twice brilliantly evokes the shiftiness and cunning of the time-serving Roman politicians, once when Sabinus commented to Silius on their lack of pliancy and ambition:

Wee have no shifts of faces, no cleft tongues,
No soft, and glutinous bodies, that can sticke,
Like snailes, on painted walls;
(I.7-9)

and again when Arruntius describes a group of Senators anxiously whispering together:

I, now their heads doe travaile, now they worke;
Their faces runne like shittles, they are weaving
Some curious cobweb to catch flies.
(III.22-4)

In his non-dramatic verse, too, there is no doubt that a new note of vigour and urgency appears when Jonson is on the attack, as for example in the 'Expostulation with Inigo Jones', or the 'Execration upon Vulcan'.

There is a critical fallacy to be avoided here. The modern reader is conditioned to find the violent and the sordid more exciting and therefore more 'real' than the harmonious and beautiful, and to think that what excites him most in a poet must be the produce of what is 'deepest' in that poet's personality. It is tempting to base interpretation of Jonson's own character on the fact that he seems most vital when he expresses desire or repugnance in terms of physical objects; it may be safer to accept the fact that his concept of poetry and his view of language were bound to limit the emotional range of what he wrote. He may have felt himself free to express emotion only when he was confident that this could be justified morally: the dramatic expression of inordinate desire by characters who are clearly held up for disapproval, and the satirical description of real or imaginary opponents of virtue were privileged occasions. We cannot ignore the presence of much fine verse of a generally philosophical or ethical kind among his poems and in his masques; that this moves us less may be partly because the ideas he expresses no longer mean much to us, and because theexpression of them is restricted by his demand for perspicuity and logic.

Jonson's best poems, naturally enough, are in those 'kinds' to which his critical theories were best adapted—the epistle and the lyric. An epistle such as that to Edward Sackville, Earl of Dorset, manages to combine the familiar and the grave in a balance that can properly be called 'masculine', as Jonson understood the term:

If, Sackvile, all that have the power to doe
Great and good turns, as wel could time them too,
And knew their how, and where: we should have, then,
Lesse list of proud, hard, or ingratefull Men.
For benefits are ow'd with the same mind
As they are done, and such returnes they find:
You then, whose will not only, but desire
To succour my necessities, tooke fire,
Not at my prayers, but your sense; which laid
The way to meet, what others would upbraid;
And in the Act did so my blush prevent,
As I did feele it done, as soone as meant:
You cannot doubt, but I, who freely know
This Good from you, as freely will it owe;
And though my fortune humble me, to take
The smallest courtesies with thankes, I make
Yet choyce from whom I take them; and would shame
To have such doe me good, I durst not name:
They are the Noblest benefits, and sinke
Deepest in Man, of which when he doth thinke,
The memorie delights him more, from whom
Then what he hath receiv'd.
(1-22)

The more famous 'To Penshurst' has the same use of objects for the evocative power that resides in them as Jonson's poetry of Desire and Loathing, but here adapted to the creation of a picture of harmonious and civilised rusticity:

The list of fruits in the last few lines is more than a catalogue, for it is modified by the very last phrase, 'that every child may reach'; the fruit is harmless, it is freely bestowed, it is plucked in innocence. The tone established is intensified in the lines immediately following:

This invocation of simple, innocent but ordered and cultivated rural living is far removed from the bustling city life of the comedies, but it echoes the atmosphere of The Sad Shepherd and of some of the masques. 'To Penshurst' and the epigram 'Inviting a friend to supper' (No. CI) are Jonson at his most urbane and 'Roman', and at his closest to the Augustans:

No one would deny that these poems represent a largely conventional pose, or that we may be closer to the 'real' Jonson in the nervous indignant energy of the 'Expostulation with Inigo Jones'. They do represent, however, Jonson as he would have liked to see himself, and (more importantly) successfully writing the kind of poetry he set himself to write.

Jonson's reputation as a lyric poet has suffered much from Swinburne's judgment that he was 'a singer who could not sing'. This may seem an odd description of the poet who wrote the 'Hymn to Diana' from Cynthia's Revels ('Queene, and Huntresse, chaste and faire'), and the less-known Echo's song from the same play:

There are many other lyrics in the masques which could be quoted to refute Swinburne. His judgment requires the elucidation provided by another passage:

The case of Ben Jonson is the great standing examle of a truth which should never be forgotten or overlooked: that no amount of learning, of labour, or of culture will supply the place of natural taste and native judgment….

[Swinburne, A Study of Ben Jonson]

There is no pretending that Jonson's lyrics read like 'the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings'; they are undoubtedly 'artificial'—a term which Jonson would have taken as one of approval, as indicating the proper exercise of the craft of the artificer-poet—and they certainly evince learning and care. But they are not therefore bad, unless one is prepared to dismiss all poetry of this kind as inferior; they are certainly good examples of their 'kind'. The song from Epicœne is a fair representative:

Still to be neat, still to be drest,
As, you were going to a feast;
Still to be pou'dred, still perfum'd:
Lady, it is to be presum'd,
Though arts hid causes are not found,
All is not sweet, all is not sound.

Give me a looke, give me a face,
That make simplicitie a grace;
Robes loosely flowing, haire as free:
Such sweet neglect more taketh me,
Then all th'adulteries of art,
They strike mine eyes, but not my heart.
(I.i.91-102)

This may be in praise of simplicity and artlessness, but it is certainly itself neither simple nor artless; nor does it pretend to be. Instead it offers a civilised and sophisticated attitude that is both cynical and moral—indeed it is a minor attack on the targets of Appearance and Opinion; in expression it is precise, pointed, graceful and musical, but at the same time direct and plain-spoken ('All is not sweet, all is not sound'). These are qualities shared in some degree by all Jonson's lyrics; even in trifles he retained the characteristics of a 'man's poet'—craftsmanship, plain language and sober meaningfulness.

II

When he spoke of the lack of a 'third dimension' to Jonson's poetry Eliot (adapting a judgment of G. G. Smith's) pointed at a quality which is common to all Jonson's work. His poems are very 'self-contained', in the sense that whatever emotion they generate is strictly kept within the bounds of the poem; there is no diffusion or spilling-over of generalised emotional force irrelevant to the meaning of the poem (as there certainly is with Swinburne). This is a quality of which Eliot could approve, but it carries with it the limitation that Jonson's poems rarely, if ever, lead the mind beyond themselves, to explore remoter areas of emotion or thought. If Jonson is never flabbily evocative in his poetry, he is not often imaginatively stimulating. Mutatis mutandis, this is generally true of his writing. Throughout his work Jonson's firm intellectual grasp of the principles of his art and his rigorous discipline in following them were a source of weakness as well as strength. He very often achieved what he wished to accomplish, but he very seldom achieved more. The 'grace beyond the reach of art' is something which Jonson lacked; he is not often free from a sense of effort, and there is very little in his writing which we can believe is the result of some 'happy accident'. It is here that Swinburne's reference to his lack of 'natural taste' has point.

We cannot blame Jonson for being the man he was. We may suspect that if he had dropped his guard a little and relaxed his unvarying control he might have freed himself to write not only differently, but better. But we cannot prove this, and it is plainly unfair to criticise him for not writing as it would have been repugnant to his critical canons to write, or for failing to achieve what he did not want to achieve. On the other hand it is not a final defence of a writer to say that he succeeded in writing as he intended: the reader is perfectly justified in accepting this, but preferring something different. It has been Jonson's fate throughout the years to find his greatest contemporary preferred to him. For a time in the seventeenth century he held his own—indeed, was in the ascendent—but from the time of Dryden's comparison in the Essay of Dramatic Poesie with its final summing-up—'I admire him, but I love Shakespeare'—the verdict has never been in doubt. And, as Coleridge noted, because of our admiration for Shakespeare we undervalue Jonson in comparison with others of his contemporaries as well. Jonson's uniqueness in his period cannot be overstressed: he is the exception to almost any generalisation that can be made about the English drama of his time. Where other Jacobean playwrights are weak he is strong, especially in verisimilitude and constructive skill; but he is also weak where they are strong, most obviously in the vivid imaginative expression of dramatic emotion. Because we admire Shakespeare so highly, we tend to elevate above Jonson those writers, like Webster, who are stronger in these 'Shakespearean' ways; if Shakespeare had never lived, not only would Jonson be unchallenged as the greatest dramatist of his period, but the critical ranking of his contemporaries would be different. We obtain an even fairer view of Jonson if we judge him outside the context altogether of Jacobean English drama and in the perspective of European comedy; he should be compared not with Shakespeare, but with Molière, Goldoni and Holberg, and in this company he will not be disgraced.

In the end, however, Jonson defies any attempt to place him in a 'tradition'. He was an original, sui generis. It was an originality arrived at by conscious thought, not the originality which, like that of a romantic poet, is the product of a unique imaginative vision of the world. It was conditioned, therefore, to produce works of art in a given period and answering certain critical demands, and outside that period, when these demands are no longer made, it seems alien, even monstrous. This quality of monstrosity was noted by Coleridge:

It was not possible, that so bold and robust an intellect as that of Ben Jonson could be devoted to any form of intellectual Power vainly or even with mediocrity of Product. He could not but be a Species of himself: tho' like the Mammoth and Megatherion fitted and destined to live only during a given Period, and then to exist a Skeleton, hard, dry, uncouth perhaps, yet massive and not to be contemplated without that mix-ture of Wonder and Admiration, or more accurately, that middle between both for which we want a term….

[Coleridge on the Seventeenth Century]

Jonson's first drive was to glorify his art, and to justify himself as an artist. In order to do this, he needed to write correctly, and this involved him in deciding what the proper rules were for Comedy, or Tragedy, or Masque, are whatever 'kind' with which he was concerned. He would never take these rules on trust: he was ready to study the works of others, tamquam explorator, to find out how they solved the problems, but the final judgment was always his own. There is in him an element of singularity, and therefore for the reader a need to understand what he was attempting before a judgment can be made. The need for understanding, however, produces its own dangers, as Eliot noted:

… not many people are capable of discovering for themselves the beauty which is only found after labour; and Jonson's industrious readers have been those whose interest was historical and curious, and those who have thought that in discovering the historical and curious interest they had discovered the artistic value as well.

[Selected Essays]

It is inevitable that Jonson should attract the attention of scholars—indeed he set out to do so. It seems that he saw himself as a Crites or Horace writing for an audience of Wellbreds and Truewits, if not of Camdens and Donnes, and that it was in default of these auditors that he had to supply his own choric commentators. Not everything that he put into his work was meant to be understood at first glance, and modern scholars labouring at their tasks may console themselves that Jonson was one author at least who would approve of their efforts. He offers less satisfaction, however, to the interpretive critic. His intentions may not always be obvious, but they are definite, and all his works are perfectly finished specimens of their kind. There is little scope for fresh interpretations, or imaginative reconstruction of what should be in his plays but is not, and in seeing his work through the press with such care he even removed the opportunity for bold textual emendation. From this point of view Jonson is a poor vaulting-horse for a critic's ambition. For the scholar the danger which Eliot saw remains—that the satisfaction of curiosity and the pleasure of acquiring understanding may be mistaken for genuine enjoyment.

Both scholarly investigation and imaginative effort are necessary, however, to enter Jonson's world. It was above all a moral world. There is no need to query the genuiness of Jonson's ethical views. No doubt he desired in theory a moral perfection which in his own life he was incapable of achieving; most people do. He certainly did not find it possible to maintain the calm, moderate Horatian pose which he desired, and he appears often ill-tempered, insensitive and uncharitable. Yet this need not invalidate his attraction towards the ideal, or make him a hypocrite. Again it is true that his attacks on the evils of Society, although they were violently, even brutally, expressed, were not as bold as they purported to be. Had he been a saint—or a revolutionary—he might have said more, and the remedies he proposed are certainly more conventional palliatives than radical specifics. In this he was hampered by the insecurity of his social position, but perhaps still more by the limitations of his own mind. His was a clear, logical and decided morality, but it was neither original nor profound. He saw no reason to challenge, at least publicly, the accepted ethical thought of his day, and he interpreted it rigidly rather than flexibly. No one would go to Jonson for the delicate probing of moral uncertainty or the subtle discrimination of confused motives; his is the world of appetite and energy, not of velleity and doubt. The firmness and clarity of his vision give his work its consistency and strength, but they shut out irony and ambiguity. Despite its apparent elaboration, his was a simple view of life, and he was simply not capable of the complex response to life evinced by greater writers, the kind of complexity we find in Chaucer and Shakespeare.

There is another dimension lacking in his world. We know that he suffered at least to some degree from the religious uncertainties of his age, passing from the English to the Roman church, and back again, and we would presume that he must have spent much thought on matters of faith and doubt. If so, nothing of it appears in his writings. The only religious comment in his comedies is contained in his attacks on the Puritans—and this could as well be motivated by professional interest as by any religious feeling; as a playwright the Puritans were his natural enemies. The religious poems give an impression of sincerity, but they are few and conventional. Perhaps he was restrained by prudential considerations, but it seems that, as a creative writer, at least, anything that might be termed religious was outside his range; he thought in terms of Right and Wrong, rather than Good and Evil (and this is one of the limitations of his tragedies). But if he fails to meet the highest demands we make of a writer, neither illuminating for us the shadowy recesses of the human personality nor enlarging the boundaries of our conception of reality, he was driven by a real desire to teach, to convey an interpretation of human existence, and his convictions seem to have been genuinely held. No one can read his comedies and tragedies without feeling the force of his horror at the manifestations of man's irrational pride and lust for power, or read the masques and poems without a sense of his reverence for the beauty and nobility of Reason and Virtue.

It is not this, however, that makes Jonson a great writer, nor was it all that drove him to write. He was committed, as a serious Renaissance writer, to instruct his public, but he was committed also, both as a popular playwright and a court poet, to entertain. As an entertainer he was sustained by two drives, an urge to record the idiosyncrasies of human character, and a desire to exploit the resources of the English language. As always with Jonson, there are limitations which we have to accept: there are aspects of character beyond his comprehension, and powers in words which he either could not, or would not, unleash. But his greatest work succeeds in spite of these limitations, or even because of them. The Alchemist, Volpone, and Bartholomew Fair could only have been created by a writer of Jonson's great if limited strength; the acceptance of any wider range of human activity or emotionwould have weakened their outline, the play of any greater psychological subtlety would have lessened their impact. Again, the vigour and the fullness of Jonsonian comedy may be the products of a limited sensibility, but they are also the expression of a creative urge as powerful as that of any writer. Jonson's kind of interest in human character was very English. Stripped of its theoretical trappings, the Comedy of Humours is simply based on that response to humanity evinced when any Englishman says of another that 'he is a character'; it is the expression of an instinctive relish for oddity and absurdity. The English have always preferred, unlike other European peoples, to describe character rather than analyse it, and to emphasise individuality rather than to generalise; of this tradition Jonson is a part, and indeed to some degree an originator. He was certainly an intellectual, by almost any definition of the term which can be offered, but abstract concepts were for him secondary to actual experience. Of his love of the English language little further need be said: in his use of it he had a range insufficiently appreciated by the ordinary reader, whose knowledge is confined to his best-known plays, and this points up a flaw in many judgments of Jonson. His work is much more varied than is often realised, although at the same time it has an essential unity. In part this unity comes from Jonson's consistently maintained moral and critical views, in part from a less easily detached and analysable quality of personality. A knowledge of all his works—what Eliot called an 'intelligent saturation' in them—is necessary for a full understanding of any one, and a partial familiarity may be confusing. The Sad Shepherd, for example, is inexplicable without a previous knowledge of The Entertainment of Althorpe and Pan's Anniversarie, and a realisation that Jonson was as interested in rustic life as he was in that of the city; his aims in his non-dramatic poetry can only be understood by reference both to the ideals expounded in Poetaster and to the notes he made in Discoveries. Jonson is not a writer easily summed up on brief acquaintance.

It is the strength of his personality and his personal vision which makes him a living force in our literature. Like Chaucer, though less subtly, he capitalised on his own idiosyncrasies and made himself a character in his own work, and this, together with the unmistakeable stamp he put on all he wrote, has made him a figure more real to most readers than, say, Wordsworth or Tennyson (and it matters little in his context how close to the real man this persona came). It is in some ways an odd and not always attractive personality. Jonson has good claims to be called the first English 'Man of Letters', the first professional writer, that is, wholly dedicated to his craft and relying on his exercise of it to establish his place in Society. This links him with Dryden, Pope and the eighteenth century, yet he retains not only the flavour of his own age but that of even earlier times. Because of his social position, and also by reason of his twin aim to Instruct and Delight, he retains something of the air of the medieval Court poet who, like Skelton or Dunbar, combined the qualities of the learned clerk and the jester or buffoon. Despite the dignity he desired for the poet, Jonson offers himself up at times for the amusement of his patrons, and he, too, has his 'flytings' and his beggings for money.

Again, as Dryden noticed, Jonson was the first Englishman to practise criticism as we understand it. He never published a complete account of his critical views, and what we have is scattered over his plays, prefaces and notebooks, but it is possible without difficulty to distinguish the outlines of a considered theory of literature, and a not ignoble one. In his actual critical observations about others, it is true, he seems to have been sometimes actuated by personal malice. This may be the unjust result of a haphazard preservation of his views—Coleridge thought Drummond to blame for having preserved Jonson's impromptu remarks about his contemporaries, made in confidence and without forethought. Jonson wrote hard things about his rivals, however, as well as saying them. Yet he was not always unjustified. Inspired as he was to justify and ennoble his art, he was right to attack cheap and careless writing, and although he was often ungenerous in not recognising merit in writers he disliked, he was not always wrong in pointing out their faults. Marston was indeed both scurrilous and bombastic; Dekker did lack an artistic conscience; Daniel is often empty and dull, and did not deserve his inflated reputation in his own day, which placed him above Spenser. With some, to him more considerable writers, such as Chapman and Drayton, Jonson's relations were not always cordial, but were tinged with more respect; Chapman in particular he seems to have paid the courtesy of accepting as a rival for the favour of the learned. What is of most significance is that Jonson reserved his highest praise—and it is very generous, though never totally unqualified—for the three greatest writers of his age, Shakespeare, Donne and Bacon. Whatever Jonson's limitations in critical theory or personal feeling, they did not prevent him from recognising what was truly good. Envy expressed in malicious and ill-founded attack on writers was to him the progeny of Ignorance, and the greatest enemy of the Art which he tried to serve. He himself was not envious of the truly great artists that he knew: the same could not be said of all poets.

Drummond noted that Jonson was 'a great lover and praiser of himselfe, a contemner and Scorner of others', but he also jotted down that 'of all stiles he loved most to be named honest' [Conversations]. Honesty is a quality which Jonson frequently holds up for praise. To be 'honest', to him, was not simply to be trustworthy and frank, but to be exactly what one claimed to be—the exact sense in which Iago is not 'honest' (and in which Jonson recorded that Shakespeare was). It implied, therefore, a bluff readiness to speak one's mind, and this can easily appear brusqueness and conceit; but it implied also a readiness to state one's principles and abide by them. There is no doubt that this, as a writer, Jonson did. He was always explicit about his aims and methods, and he tried conscientiously to provide the satisfactions that he promised. In that sense he is one of the most 'honest' writers in our literature. This openness was in some ways a restraint upon him, and there were other, graver limitations in the scope of his creative mind. Yet Dryden's remark is true: 'he managed his strength to more advantage than any who preceded him'.

He set out to write at what appeared to be a great disadvantage, with the need to satisfy a volatile and largely uneducated public in a form which was generally despised. By establishing his own standards and relentlessly observing them, he managed to satisfy both public taste and critical precept—and also, and most importantly, his own artistic conscience. His efforts to please both the 'vulgar' and the 'judicious' were not uniformly successful, but at his best he produced plays which were—and still are—eminently rewarding both on the stage and in the study. It is impossible for us to regret, however much he himself may have done so, that circumstances forced him into the public theatre. If he had found a patron to support him he might have devoted himself exclusively to poetry and criticism, and would perhaps have written only closet drama, constructed according to the moststringent neoclassical rules. The result would no doubt have been interesting to the literary historian, but to no one else. But we cannot be sure that he would have been satisfied with this. Jonson was driven on by something more than a literary theorist's desire for 'correctness' and the moralist's urge to instruct; as F. R. Leavis has said, he

was as robustly interested in men and manners and his own talk as in literatures and the poetic art.

[F. R. Leavis, Revaluation, 1953]

He recognised himself that when his enemies wanted to attack him they did not do so on the grounds that his art was too abstract and intellectual, but because it was too close to real life:

Alas, sir, Horace! hee is a meere spunge; nothing but humours, and observation; he goes up and downe sucking from every societie, and when hee comes home, squeazes himself drie again.

[Poetaster, 4.3.104-107]

Jonson's dedication to Art was not a matter of intellectual conviction only, but was the product of an artist's desire to express his personality through his own vision of the world. Different artists achieve this in different ways; Jonson's chosen way was through stage illusion. It is this impulse that has given us his plays. That they are still alive, and that through them we can experience a world long since dead, is the true measure of his greatness.