The Literary Remains of Samuel Taylor Coleridge Volume I Part 17

And Mulla mine, whose waves I whilom taught to weep.

Ib.

And there is a beautiful pa.s.sage 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.[2] 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.

[Footnote 1: 'Psychomachia'. Ed.]

[Footnote 2: B. 5. 'Legend of Artegall'. Ed.]

LECTURE VII.

BEN JONSON, BEAUMONT AND FLETCHER, AND Ma.s.sINGER.

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 Ma.s.singer, though they too were Shakspeare's contemporaries in the former sense.

BEN JONSON. [1] 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 fas.h.i.+on 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 humour is made the basis upon which the entire character is built up. Ben Jonson's 'dramatis personae' 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 circ.u.mstance is introduced in them which does not play upon, and help to bring out, the dominant humour or humours 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;--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 labour 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 ama.s.sing power in the author, and not of a growth from within. Indeed a large proportion of Ben Jonson's thoughts may be traced to cla.s.sic or obscure modern writers, by those who are learned and curious enough to follow the steps of this robust, surly, and observing dramatist.

[Footnote: 1: From Mr. Green's note. 'Ed.']

Beaumont. Born, 1586.--Died, 1616.

Fletcher. Born, 1576.--Died, 1625.

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 n.o.blest of Shakspeare's plays, Lear, Macbeth, Oth.e.l.lo, &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 'charge d'affaires'

of literature in general,--and who by his edition of Ma.s.singer--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 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 Ma.s.singer! [1]

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 Shakspearian, 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 Ma.s.singer, 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 circ.u.mstances of warmth and soil may be necessary to their full development, yet do not account for the golden hue, the ambrosial flavour, 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 ear,--what could be put together and represented to the eye--these poets took from the ear and eye, unchecked by any intuition of an inward impossibility;-- just as a man might put together a quarter of an orange, a quarter of an apple, and the like of a lemon and a pomegranate, and make it look like one round diverse-coloured fruit. But nature, which works from within by evolution and a.s.similation according to a law, cannot do so, nor could Shakspeare; for he too worked in the spirit of nature, by evolving the germ from within by the imaginative power according to an idea. For as the power of seeing is to light, so is an idea in mind to a law in nature. They are correlatives, which suppose each other.

The plays of Beaumont and Fletcher are mere aggregations without unity; in the Shakspearian drama there is a vitality which grows and evolves itself from within,--a key note which guides and controls the harmonies throughout. What is Lear?--It is storm and tempest--the thunder at first grumbling in the far horizon, then gathering around us, and at length bursting in fury over our heads,--succeeded by a breaking of the clouds for a while, a last flash of lightning, the closing in of night, and the single hope of darkness! And Romeo and Juliet?--It is a spring day, gusty and beautiful in the morn, and closing like an April evening with the song of the nightingale;--whilst Macbeth is deep and earthy,--composed to the subterranean music of a troubled conscience, which converts every thing into the wild and fearful!

Doubtless from mere observation, or from the occasional similarity of the writer's own character, more or less in Beaumont and Fletcher, and other such writers will happen to be in correspondence with nature, and still more in apparent compatibility with it. But yet the false source is always discoverable, first by the gross contradictions to nature in so many other parts, and secondly, by the want of the impression which Shakspeare makes, that the thing said not only might have been said, but that nothing else could be subst.i.tuted, so as to excite the same sense of its exquisite propriety. I have always thought the conduct and expressions of Oth.e.l.lo and Iago in the last scene, when Iago is brought in prisoner, a wonderful instance of Shakspeare's consummate judgment:--

'Oth.' I look down towards his feet;--but that's a fable. If that thou be'st a devil, I cannot kill thee.

'Iago.' I bleed, Sir; but not kill'd.

'Oth.' I am not sorry neither.

Think what a volley of execrations and defiances Beaumont and Fletcher would have poured forth here!

Indeed Ma.s.singer and Ben Jonson are both more perfect in their kind than Beaumont and Fletcher; the former in the story and affecting incidents; the latter in the exhibition of manners and peculiarities, whims in language, and vanities of appearance.

There is, however, a diversity of the most dangerous kind here.

Shakspeare shaped his characters out of the nature within; but we cannot so safely say, out of his own nature as an individual person. No! this latter is itself but a 'natura naturata',--an effect, a product, not a power. It was Shakspeare's prerogative to have the universal, which is potentially in each particular, opened out to him, the 'h.o.m.o generalis', not as an abstraction from observation of a variety of men, but as the substance capable of endless modifications, of which his own personal existence was but one, and to use this one as the eye that beheld the other, and as the tongue that could convey the discovery. There is no greater or more common vice in dramatic writers than to draw out of themselves. How I--alone and in the self-sufficiency of my study, as all men are apt to be proud in their dreams--should like to be talking 'king'! Shakspeare, in composing, had no 'I', but the 'I'

representative. In Beaumont and Fletcher you have descriptions of characters by the poet rather than the characters themselves; we are told, and impressively told, of their being; but we rarely or never feel that they actually are.

Beaumont and Fletcher are the most lyrical of our dramatists. I think their comedies the best part of their works, although there are scenes of very deep tragic interest in some of their plays. I particularly recommend Monsieur Thomas for good pure comic humor.

There is, occasionally, considerable license in their dramas; and this opens a subject much needing vindication and sound exposition, but which is beset with such difficulties for a Lecturer, that I must pa.s.s it by.

Only as far as Shakspeare is concerned, I own, I can with less pain admit a fault in him than beg an excuse for it. I will not, therefore, attempt to palliate the grossness that actually exists in his plays by the customs of his age, or by the far greater coa.r.s.eness of all his contemporaries, excepting Spenser, who is himself not wholly blameless, though nearly so;--for I place Shakspeare's merit on being of no age.

But I would clear away what is, in my judgment, not his, as that scene of the Porter [2] in Macbeth, and many other such pa.s.sages, and abstract what is coa.r.s.e in manners only, and all that which from the frequency of our own vices, we a.s.sociate with his words. If this were truly done, little that could be justly reprehensible would remain. Compare the vile comments, offensive and defensive, on Pope's

l.u.s.t thro' some gentle strainers, &c.

with the worst thing in Shakspeare, or even in Beaumont and Fletcher; and then consider how unfair the attack is on our old dramatists; especially because it is an attack that cannot be properly answered in that presence in which an answer would be most desirable, from the painful nature of one part of the position; but this very pain is almost a demonstration of its falsehood!

[Footnote 1: See Mr. Gifford's introduction to his edition of Ma.s.singer.

Ed.]

[Footnote 2: Act ii. sc. 3.]