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. General character of the book. With some ignorance, doubtless, and doubtless also some contempt, of the actual achievements of prose romance, and with that stubborn distrust of the modern tongues for miscellaneous prose purposes, which lasted till far into the seventeenth century, if it did not actually survive into the eighteenth, he still clings to the old mistakes about the identity of poetry and “fiction,” about the supremacy of oratory in prose. We hear nothing about the “new versifying,” though no doubt this would have been fully treated in his handling of Campion and Daniel: but had he had any approval for it, that approval must have been glanced at. His preference for the (stopped) couplet[283] foreshadowed that which, with beneficial effects in some ways, if by no means in all, was to influence the whole of English poetry, with the rarest exceptions, for nearly two centuries. The personal arrogance which, as in Wordsworth’s case, affected all Ben’s judgment of contemporaries, and which is almost too fully reflected in the Drummond Conversations, would probably have made even his more deliberate judgments of these—his judgments “for publication”—inadequate. But it is fair to remember that Ben’s theory (if not entirely his practice, especially in his exquisite lyrics and almost equally exquisite masques) constrained him to be severe to those contemporaries, from Spenser, Shakespeare, and Donne downwards. The mission of the generation may be summed up in the three words, Liberty, Variety, Romance. Jonson’s tastes were for Order, Uniformity, Classicism.
He is thus doubly interesting—interesting as putting both with sounder scholarship and more original wit what men from Ascham to Puttenham, and later, had been trying to say before him, in the sense of adapting classical precepts to English: and far more interesting as adumbrating, beforehand, the creed of Dryden, and Pope, and Samuel Johnson. Many of his individual judgments are as shrewd as they are one-sided; they are always well, and sometimes admirably, expressed, in a 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]
198. The two chief monographs on this are Spingarn, op. cit., in the division appurtenant (pp. 253-310), and Professor F. E. Schelling, Poetic and Verse Criticism of the Reign of Elizabeth, Philadelphia, 1891. Haslewood reprinted most of the texts together in Ancient Critical Essays, 2 vols., London, 1811-15, and Mr Arber the most important separately in his English Reprints. Mr Gregory Smith is now editing, for the Clarendon Press, the fullest collection yet issued.
199. Such as those on the “fair language of France,” and the strictures passed by Margaret of England and Burgundy on the “default in mine English” (History of Troy); on the “right good and fair English” of Lord Rivers (Dicts and Sayings of the Philosophers).
200. There has been some disposition to deny this, and to argue that despite the constant use of the word Rhetoric in the fifteenth century, the teaching of the thing had declined. I do not think there is much evidence of this as regards England; and the long and curious passage of Hawes, to be presently discussed, is strong evidence against it. Rhetoric has no less than eight chapters of the Pastime of Pleasure, as against one apiece for Grammar and Logic.
201. The Pastime of Pleasure, ed. Wright (Percy Society, London, 1845), pp. 27-56.
202. This Fourth River will appear a less startling “novelty” when the illuminating power attributed to the stone is remembered.
203. Wilson has usually been dignified in this way: but some authorities, including the Dict. Nat. Biog., deny him knighthood.
204. It was not actually the first in English, Leonard Coxe having preceded him “about 1524” with an English adaptation, apparently, of Melanchthon. But this is of no critical importance.
205. My copy is of this, which is the fuller.
206. Fol. 82.
207. Fol. 1, verso, at bottom.
208. One may regret “sparple” and “disparple,” which are good and picturesque Englishings of e(s)parpiller. The forms “sparkle” and “disparkle,” which seem to have been commoner, are no loss, as being equivocal.
209. Not that the phrase is of his invention. It seems to have been a catchword of the time, and occurs in Bale (1543), in Peter Ashton’s version of Jovius (1546), &c.
210. Of course Cheke had in his mind the passage of Quintilian concerning Julius Florus (v. supra, i. 313).
211. Ed. Arber, pp. 154-159.
212. This may be found in Arber’s Introduction to the book just cited, p. 5; or in Professor Raleigh’s ed. of Hoby (London, 1900), pp. 12, 13.
213. For these two books Mr Arber’s excellent reprints can hardly be bettered. But for our purposes the Letters are also needed; and these, with other things, will be found in Giles’s edition of the Works, 3 vols. in 4, London, 1864-65.
214. Quid omnes Oxonienses sequuntur plane nescio, sed ante aliquot menses in Aula incidi in quendam illius Academiæ, qui nimium præferendo Lucianum, Plutarchum et Herodianum, Senecam, A. Gellium, et Apuleium utramque linguam in nimis senescentem et effœtam ætatem compingere mihi videbatur—Giles, i. 190. The whole letter (to Sturm) is worth reading.
215. P. 19, ed. Arber. The passage contains a stroke at monasticism.
216. P. 80, ed. Arber.
217. Thought to be his last, and written in Dec. 1568; ed. Giles, ii. 189. The correspondence with Sturm is, as we should expect, particularly literary.
220. There had, of course, been some charming jets of folk-song in ballad, carol, and what not.
221. It is curious that, in this very début of English criticism, the incivility with which critics are constantly and too justly charged makes its appearance. Ascham would seem to have been a good-natured soul enough. Yet he abuses rhyme and its partisans in the true “Père Duchêne” style which some critics still affect. “To follow the Goths in rhyming instead of the Greeks in versifying” is “to eat acorns with swine, when we may eat wheat bread among men.” Rhymers are “a rude multitude,” “rash, ignorant heads,” “wandering blindly in their foul wrong way,” &c.
222. Schoolmaster, ed. cit., p. 73. Ascham actually quotes the Greek and the Latin of Homer and Horace, and declares Watson’s stuff to be made as “naturally” as the one and as “aptly” as the other!
223. Ibid., p. 145.
224. P. 147. The extraordinary confusion of mind of the time is illustrated by Ascham’s sheltering himself behind Quintilian!
225. Not to be confounded with Thomas Watson, the author of the Hecatompathia, who came later, and was an Oxford man.
226. Some authorities have been much too mild towards it. For instance, the late Mr Henry Morley, who says, “Thomas Drant, of course, did not suppose that his rules were sufficient.” This is charitable, but outside, or rather against, the evidence.
227. Certain Notes of Instruction concerning the making of verse or rhyme in English, ed. Arber (with The Steel Glass, &c.), pp. 31-41, London, 1868. Originally in the 4to edition of Gascoigne’s Poems (London, 1575). Mr Spingarn sees indebtedness in it to Ronsard.
228. The observations of Ascham, Wilson, and the others being incidental merely.
229. “If I should undertake to write in praise of a gentlewoman, I would neither praise her crystal eye nor her cherry lip.”
230. Gascoigne does not use this division, or ¯ and ˘ but ´ and ` for long and short, ~ (circumflex) for common, and indented lines (dissyllabic and trisyllabic) for dissyllabic and trisyllabic foot arrangements.
231. “For the haughty obscure verse doth not much delight, and the verse that is too easy is like a tale of a roasted horse.”
232. See Mitford, Harmony of Language, p. 105, who thinks the licence just the other way, and indeed roundly pronounces the pronunciation in one syllable “impossible.” A little later, again, Guest thinks the dis-syllable “uncouth and vulgar.” A most documentary disagreement!
233. See Grosart’s Works of Gabriel Harvey, vol. i. pp. 6-150. Parts will be found in the Globe edition of Spenser, pp. 706-710.
234. I am not responsible for the eccentricities of this form.
235. In order of composition, not of publication.
236. This word, which is certainly a cousin of “balderdash,” is a good example of the slang and jargon so often mixed with their preciousness by the Elizabethans. Nash borrowed it from Harvey to use against him; and the eccentric Stanyhurst even employs it in his Virgil. Stanyhurst’s hexameters, by the way (vide Mr Arber’s Reprint in the English Scholars Library, No. 10, London, 1880), are, thanks partly to their astounding lingo, among the maddest things in English literature; but his prose prefatory matter, equally odd in phrase, has some method in its madness.
237. La Casa’s book of etiquette and behaviour.
238. The further letters to Spenser, which Dr Grosart has borrowed from the Camden Society’s Letter-book of Gabriel Harvey, touch literary matters not seldom, but with no new important deliverances. In the later (1592) Four Letters, the embroidery of railing at the dead Greene and the living Nash has almost entirely hidden the literary canvas.
239. Reprinted by Mr Arber, with its almost immediately subsequent Apology. I wish he had added the Ephemerides of Phialo which accompanied the Apology, and the Plays Confuted of three years later; for these books—very small and very difficult of access—add something to the controversy.
240. Several times reprinted; most recently by the present writer in Elizabethan and Jacobean Pamphlets (London, 1892).
241. Also frequently (indeed oftener) reprinted as by Arber, London, 1868; Shuckburgh, Cambridge, 1891; Cook, Boston (U.S.A.), 1890.
243. Our two chief English-writing authorities, Mr Symonds and Mr Spingarn, are at odds as to Sidney’s indebtedness to the Italians. He quotes them but sparingly—Petrarch, Boccaccio, Landino, among the older writers, Fracastoro and Scaliger alone, I think, of the moderns—and Mr Symonds thought that he owed them little or nothing. Mr Spingarn, on the other hand, represents him as following them all in general, and Minturno in particular. As usual, it is a case of the gold and silver shield. My own reading of the Italian writers of 1530-80 leaves me in no doubt that Sidney knew them, or some of them, pretty well. But his attitude is very different from theirs as a whole, and already significant of some specially English characteristics in criticism.
244. Savonarola, v. sup., p. 20.
245. “I must confess my own barbarousness: I never heard the old song of Percy and Douglas that I found not my heart moved more than with a trumpet.”
246. “As indeed it seemeth Scaliger judgeth.”
247. It may be desirable to note that Sidney’s book, though very well known, as was the wont then, in MS., to all who cared to know, was never printed till 1595, nearly ten years after the author’s death.
248. All three are included in Mr. Arber’s Reprints, where the desirable, or desired, biographical and bibliographical apparatus will be duly found.
249. It is, however, excessive to represent James as a mere copyist of Gascoigne.
250. Who also caught at James’s “tumbling verse” as a convenient stigmatisation for the true English equivalenced liberty.
251. Occleve—no genius, but a true man enough—deserves exception perhaps best.
252. The Germans—in this, as in other matters, more hopelessly to seek in English now than, teste Porson, they were a century ago in Greek—have followed Webbe, as indeed Warton had strangely done; and of course some Englishmen have followed the Germans. Lydgate himself knew better, though some of the shorter poems attributed to him are metrically, as well as in other ways, not contemptible.
254. The whole of the documents in the case will be found, clearly put, in Mr Arber’s Introduction. The first attribution is in Bolton (v. infra) some fifteen years later than the date of the book, and not quite positive (“as the Fame is”). But there is no other claimant who has anything to put in: and the almost diseased aversion of “persons of quality” (Puttenham was possibly a nephew of Sir Thomas Elyot’s, and a Gentleman-Pensioner of the Queen’s) to avowing authorship is well known.
255. Harington, a person of humour, and a typical Englishman, perstringes this as well as other things in his fling at the Art.
256. Here as elsewhere we may note evidences of possible revision in the book. That there was some such revision is certain; for instance, Ben Jonson’s copy (the existence of which is not uninteresting) contains a large cancel of four leaves, not found in other copies known. For this and other points of the same kind, see Mr Arber’s edition.
257. “Reviewing” was as yet in its infancy—a curiously lively one though, with Nash and others coming on. Puttenham seems to have understood its little ways rather well.
258. Reprinted by Haslewood. Whetstone’s Preface to Promos and Cassandra (1578) and A. Fraunce’s Arcadian Rhetoric (1588) are earlier still. The former anticipates Sidney in objecting to the irregularity of English plays: the latter is a strong partisan of classical metres, his practice in which is sufficiently roughly treated by Ben Jonson in his Conversations, v. infra, p. 199.
259. Reprinted (in its critical section) by Mr Arber, English Garner, ii. 94 sq.
260. Bolton’s criticism of his contemporaries is extracted in Warton (iv. 204 sq., ed. Hazlitt). The writer, who is dealing with History, and speaking directly of language, disallows most of Spenser (excepting the Hymns) and all Chaucer, Lydgate, Langland, and Skelton, can “endure” Gascoigne, praises Elizabeth and James (of course), Chapman, Daniel, Drayton, Constable, Southwell, Sackville, Surrey, Wyatt, Raleigh, Donne, and Greville, but gives the palm for “vital, judicious, and practicable” language to Jonson.
261. Ed. Bullen, Works of Dr Thomas Campion, London, 1889.
262. Chalmers’s Poets, iii. 551-560; Grosart’s Works of Samuel Daniel, iv. 29-67.
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.
264. Advancement of Learning, Bk. II. iv.
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 xth and the nth.
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.
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.”
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.
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?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—
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.
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.
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.
272. It may be observed that the shorter aphorisms rise to the top—at least the beginning.
273. “He is upbraidingly called a poet.... The professors, indeed, have made the learning cheap.”
274. It is here that Ben borrows from Petronius not merely the sentiment but the phrase, “umbratical doctor” (see vol. i. p. 244 note).
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.
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.
277. He may have taken this from the Italians.
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).
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).
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.
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.
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.
283. Daniel had frankly defended enjambement.
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.