chivalry in all his characters, but more especially in his women. The Greeks, except, perhaps, in Homer, seem to have had no way of making their women interesting, but by unsexing them, as in the instances of the tragic Medea, Electra, &c. Contrast such characters with Spenser's Una, who exhibits no prominent feature, has no particularization, but produces the same feeling that a statue does, when contemplated at a distance : From her fayre head her fillet she undight, Did never mortal eye behold such heavenly grace. B. i. c. 3, st. 4. 6. In Spenser we see the brightest and purest form of that nationality which was so common a characteristic of our elder poets. There is nothing unamiable, nothing contemptuous of others, in it. To glorify their country-to elevate England into a queen, an empress of the heart-this was their passion and object; and how dear and important an object it was or may be, let Spain, in the recollection of her Cid, declare! There is a great magic in national names. What a damper to all interest is a list of native East Indian merchants! Unknown names are non-conductors; they stop all sympathy. No one of our poets has touched this string more exquisitely than Spenser; especially in his chronicle of the British Kings (B. ii. c. 10), and the marriage of the Thames with the Medway (B. iv. c. 11), in both which passages the mere names constitute half the pleasure we receive. To the same feeling we must in particular attribute Spenser's sweet reference to Ireland :— Ne thence the Irishe rivers absent were; Sith no lesse famous than the rest they be, &c. Ib. And Mulla mine, whose waves I whilom taught to weep. Ib. And there is a beautiful passage of the same sort in the Colin Clout's Come Home Again:— "One day,”. quoth he, “I sat, as was my trade, Under the foot of Mole," &c. Lastly, the great and prevailing character of Spenser's mind is fancy under the conditions of imagination, as an ever-present but not always active power. He has an imaginative fancy, but he has not imagination, in kind or degree, as Shakspeare and Milton have; the boldest effort of his powers in this way is the character of Talus.* Add to this a feminine tenderness and almost maidenly purity of feeling, and above all, a deep moral earnestness which produces a believing sympathy and acquiescence in the reader, and you have a tolerably adequate view of Spenser's intellectual being. LECTURE VII. BEN JONSON, BEAUMONT AND FLETCHER, AND MASSINGER A CONTEMPORARY is rather an ambiguous term, when applied to authors. It may simply mean that one man lived and wrote while another was yet alive, however deeply the former may have been indebted to the latter as his model. There have been instances in the literary world that might remind a botanist of a singular sort of parasite plant, which rises above ground, independent and unsupported, an apparent original; but trace its roots, and you will find the fibres all terminating in the root of another plant at an unsuspected distance, which, perhaps, from want of sun and genial soil, and the loss of sap, has scarcely been able to peep above the ground.-Or the word may mean those whose compositions were contemporaneous in such a sense as to preclude all likelihood of the one having borrowed from the other. In the latter sense, I should call Ben Jonson a contemporary of Shakspeare, though he long survived him; while I should prefer the phrase of immediate successors for Beaumont and Fletcher, and Massinger, though they too were Shakspeare's contemporaries in the former sense. * B. 5. Legend of Artegall.Ed. BEN JONSON.* Born, 1574.--Died, 1637. BEN JONSON is original; he is, indeed, the only one of the great dramatists of that day who was not either directly produced, or very greatly modified, by Shakspeare. In truth, he differs from our great master in every thing-in form and in substance-and betrays no tokens of his proximity. He is not original in the same way as Shakspeare is original; but after a fashion of his own, Ben Jonson is most truly original. The characters in his plays are, in the strictest sense of the term, abstractions. Some very prominent feature is taken from the whole man, and that single feature or humor is made the basis upon which the entire character is built up. Ben Jonson's dramatis persona are almost as fixed as the masks of the ancient actors; you know from the first scene-sometimes from the list of names—exactly what every one of them is to be. He was a very accurately observing man; but he cared only to observe what was external or open to, and likely to impress, the senses. He individualizes, not so much, if at all, by the exhibition of moral or intellectual differences, as by the varieties and contrasts of manners, modes of speech and tricks of temper; as in such characters as Puntarvolo, Bobadill, &c. I believe there is not one whim or affectation in common life noted in any memoir of that age which may not be found drawn and framed in some corner or other of Ben Jonson's dramas; and they have this merit, in common with Hogarth's prints, that not a single circumstance is introduced in them which does not play upon, and help to bring out, the dominant humor or humors of the piece. Indeed I ought very particularly to call your attention to the extraordinary skill shown by Ben Jonson in contriving situations for the display of his characters. In fact, his care and anxiety in this matter led him to do what scarcely any of the dramatists of that age did—that is, invent his plots. It is not a first perusal that suffices for the full perception of the elaborate artifice of the plots of the Alchemist and the Silent Woman ; *From Mr. Green's note.-Ed. + "In Jonson's comic inventions," says Schlegel, "a spirit of observation is manifested more than fancy."—Vol. iv. p. 93. that of the former is absolute perfection for a necessary entanglement, and an unexpected, yet natural, evolution Ben Jonson exhibits a sterling English diction, and he has with great skill contrived varieties of construction; but his style is rarely sweet or harmonious, in consequence of his labor at point and strength being so evident. In all his works, in verse or prose, there is an extraordinary opulence of thought; but it is the produce of an amassing power in the author, and not of a growth from within. Indeed a large proportion of Ben Jonson's thoughts may be traced to classic or obscure modern writers, by those who are learned and curious enough to follow the steps of this robust, surly, and observing dramatist. BEAUMONT. Born, 1586.*-Died, 1615-16. Mr. Weber, to whose taste, industry, and appropriate erudition, we owe, I will not say the best (for that would be saying little), but a good, edition of Beaumont and Fletcher, has complimented the Philaster, which he himself describes as inferior to the Maid's Tragedy by the same writers, as but little below the noblest of Shakspeare's plays, Lear, Macbeth, Othello, &c., and consequently implying the equality, at least, of the Maid's Tragedy;—and an eminent living critic,-who in the manly wit, strong sterling sense, and robust style of his original works, had presented the best possible credentials of office, as chargé d'affaires of literature in general,—and who by his edition of Massinger-a work in which there was more for an editor to do, and in which more was actually well done, than in any similar work within my knowledge has proved an especial right of authority in the appreciation of dramatic poetry, and hath potentially a double voice with the public in his own right and in that of the critical synod, where, as princeps senatus, he possesses it by his prerogative,—— has affirmed that Shakspeare's superiority to his contemporaries. * Mr. Dyce thinks that "Beaumont's birth ought to be fixed at a somewhat earlier date," because, in the Funeral Certificate on the decease of his father, dated 22d April, 1598, he is said to be of the age of thirteen years or more; and because "at the age of twelve, 4th February, 1596-7," according to Wood's Ath. Oxon," he was admitted a gentleman-commoner of Broadgates Hall." rests on his superior wit alone, while in all the other, and, as I should deem, higher excellencies of the drama, character, pathos, depth of thought, &c. he is equalled by Beaumont and Fletcher, Ben Jonson, and Massinger!* Of wit I am engaged to treat in another Lecture. It is a genus of many species; and at present I shall only say, that the species which is predominant in Shakspeare, is so completely Shaksperian, and in its essence so interwoven with all his other characteristic excellencies, that I am equally incapable of comprehending, both how it can be detached from his other powers, and how, being disparate in kind from the wit of contemporary dramatists, it can be compared with theirs in degree. And again -the detachment and the practicability of the comparison being granted—I should, I confess, be rather inclined to concede the contrary ;—and in the most common species of wit, and in the ordinary application of the term, to yield this particular palm to Beaumont and Fletcher, whom here and hereafter I take as one poet with two names-leaving undivided what a rare love and still rarer congeniality have united. At least, I have never been able to distinguish the presence of Fletcher during the life of Beaumont, nor the absence of Beaumont during the survival of Fletcher. But waiving, or rather deferring this question, I protest against the remainder of the position in toto. And indeed, whilst I can never, I trust, show myself blind to the various merits of Jonson, Beaumont and Fletcher, and Massinger, or insensible to the greatness of the merits which they possess in common, or to the specific excellencies which give to each of the three a worth of his own-I confess, that one main object of this Lecture was to prove that Shakspeare's eminence is his own, and not that of his age; even as the pine-apple, the melon, and the gourd may grow on the same bed;-yea, the same circumstances of warmth and soil may be necessary to their full development, yet do not account for the golden hue, the ambrosial flavor, the perfect shape of the pine-apple, or the tufted crown on its head. Would that those, who seek to twist it off, could but promise us in this instance to make it the germ of an equal successor ! What had a grammatical and logical consistency for the earwhat could be put together and represented to the eye-these * See Mr. Gifford's introduction to his edition of Massinger.-Ed. |