aldermen have withdrawn their chandlerly pension for verjuice
and mustard, £33, 6s. 8d.” After being in 1628 arrested by mistake
on the utterly false charge of having written certain verses in
approval of the assassination of Buckingham, he was soon allowed
to return to Westminster, where it would appear from a letter of
his “son and contiguous neighbour,” James Howell, he was living
in 1629, and about this time narrowly escaped another conflagration.
In the same year (1629) he once more essayed the stage
with the comedy of The New Inn, which was actually, and on its
own merits not unjustly, damned on the first performance. It
was printed in 1631, “as it was never acted but most negligently
played”; and Jonson defended himself against his critics in his
spirited Ode to Himself. The epilogue to The New Inn having
dwelt not without dignity upon the neglect which the poet had
experienced at the hands of “king and queen,” King Charles
immediately sent the unlucky author a gift of £100, and in
response to a further appeal increased his standing salary to
the same sum, with the addition of an annual tierce of canary—the
poet-laureate’s customary royal gift, though this designation
of an office, of which Jonson discharged some of what became
the ordinary functions, is not mentioned in the warrant dated
the 26th of March 1630. In 1634, by the king’s desire, Jonson’s
salary as chronologer to the city was again paid. To his later
years belong the comedies, The Magnetic Lady (1632) and The Tale
of a Tub (1633), both printed in 1640, and some masques, none of
which met with great success. The patronage of liberal-minded
men, such as the earl, afterwards duke, of Newcastle—by whom
he must have been commissioned to write his last two masques
Love’s Welcome at Welbeck (1633) and Love’s Welcome at Bolsover
(1634)—and Viscount Falkland, was not wanting, and his was
hardly an instance in which the fickleness of time and taste could
have allowed a literary veteran to end his career in neglect. He
was the acknowledged chief of the English world of letters, both at
the festive meetings where he ruled the roast among the younger
authors whose pride it was to be “sealed of the tribe of Ben,” and
by the avowal of grave writers, old or young, not one of whom
would have ventured to dispute his titular pre-eminence. Nor
was he to the last unconscious of the claims upon him which his
position brought with it. When, nearly two years after he had
lost his surviving son, death came upon the sick old man on the
6th of August 1637, he left behind him an unfinished work of
great beauty, the pastoral drama of The Sad Shepherd (printed in
1641). For forty years, he said in the prologue, he had feasted
the public; at first he could scarce hit its taste, but patience had
at last enabled it to identify itself with the working of his pen.
We are so accustomed to think of Ben Jonson presiding, attentive to his own applause, over a circle of younger followers and admirers that we are apt to forget the hard struggle which he had passed through before gaining the crown now universally acknowledged to be his. Howell records, in the year before Ben’s death, that a solemn supper at the poet’s own house, where the host had almost spoiled the relish of the feast by vilifying others and magnifying himself, “T. Ca.” (Thomas Carew) buzzed in the writer’s ear “that, though Ben had barrelled up a great deal of knowledge, yet it seemed he had not read the Ethics, which, among other precepts of morality, forbid self-commendation.” Self-reliance is but too frequently coupled with self-consciousness, and for good and for evil self-confidence was no doubt the most prominent feature in the character of Ben Jonson. Hence the combativeness which involved him in so many quarrels in his earlier days, and which jarred so harshly upon the less militant and in some respects more pedantic nature of Drummond. But his quarrels do not appear to have entered deeply into his soul, or indeed usually to have lasted long.[1] He was too exuberant in his vituperations to be bitter, and too outspoken to be malicious. He loved of all things to be called “honest,” and there is every reason to suppose that he deserved the epithet. The old superstition that Jonson was filled with malignant envy of the greatest of his fellow-dramatists, and lost no opportunity of giving expression to it, hardly needs notice. Those who consider that Shakespeare was beyond criticism may find blasphemy in the saying of Jonson that Shakespeare “wanted art.” Occasional jesting allusions to particular plays of Shakespeare may be found in Jonson, among which should hardly be included the sneer at “mouldy” Pericles in his Ode to Himself. But these amount to nothing collectively, and to very little individually; and against them have to be set, not only the many pleasant traditions concerning the long intimacy between the pair, but also the lines, prefixed to the first Shakespeare folio, as noble as they are judicious, dedicated by the survivor to “the star of poets,” and the adaptation, clearly sympathetic notwithstanding all its buts, de Shakespeare nostrat. in the Discoveries. But if Gifford had rendered no other service to Jonson’s fame he must be allowed to have once for all vindicated it from the cruellest aspersion which has ever been cast upon it. That in general Ben Jonson was a man of strong likes and dislikes, and was wont to manifest the latter as vehemently as the former, it would be idle to deny. He was at least impartial in his censures, dealing them out freely to Puritan poets like Wither and (supposing him not to have exaggerated his free-spokenness) to princes of his church like Cardinal du Perron. And, if sensitive to attack, he seems to have been impervious to flattery—to judge from the candour with which he condemned the foibles even of so enthusiastic an admirer as Beaumont. The personage that he disliked the most, and openly abused in the roundest terms, was unfortunately one with many heads and a tongue to hiss in each—no other than that “general public” which it was the fundamental mistake of his life to fancy he could “rail into approbation” before he had effectively secured its goodwill. And upon the whole it may be said that the admiration of the few, rather than the favour of the many, has kept green the fame of the most independent among all the masters of an art which, in more senses than one, must please to live.
Jonson’s learning and industry, which were alike exceptional, by no means exhausted themselves in furnishing and elaborating the materials of his dramatic works. His enemies sneered at him as a translator—a title which the preceding generation was inclined to esteem the most honourable in literature. But his classical scholarship shows itself in other directions besides his translations from the Latin poets (the Ars poetica in particular), in addition to which he appears to have written a version of Barclay’s Argenis; it was likewise the basis of his English Grammar, of which nothing but the rough draft remains (the MS. itself having perished in the fire in his library), and in connexion with the subject of which he appears to have pursued other linguistic studies (Howell in 1629 was trying to procure him a Welsh grammar). And its effects are very visible in some of the most pleasing of his non-dramatic poems, which often display that combination of polish and simplicity hardly to be reached—or even to be appreciated—without some measure of classical training.
Exclusively of the few lyrics in Jonson’s dramas (which, with the exception of the stately choruses in Catiline, charm, and perhaps may surprise, by their lightness of touch), his non-dramatic works are comprised in the following collections. The book of Epigrams (published in the first folio of 1616) contained, in the poet’s own words, the “ripest of his studies.” His notion of an epigram was the ancient, not the restricted modern one—still less that of the critic (R. C., the author of The Times’ Whistle) in whose language, according to Jonson, “witty” was “obscene.” On the whole, these epigrams excel more in encomiastic than in satiric touches, while the pathos of one or two epitaphs in the collection is of the truest kind. In the lyrics and epistles contained in the Forest (also in the first folio), Jonson shows greater variety in the poetic styles adopted by him; but the subject of love, which Dryden considered conspicuous by its absence in the author’s dramas, is similarly eschewed here. The Underwoods (not published collectively till the second and surreptitious folio) are a miscellaneous series, comprising, together with a few religious and a few amatory poems, a large number of epigrams,
- ↑ With Inigo Jones, however, in quarrelling with whom, as Howell reminds Jonson, the poet was virtually quarrelling with his bread and butter, he seems to have found it impossible to live permanently at peace; his satirical Expostulation against the architect was published as late as 1635. Chapman’s satire against his old associate, perhaps due to this quarrel, was left unfinished and unpublished.
