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029 - Ben Jonson · Reviews

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  Speaker 1: Section twenty eight of reviews by Oscar Wilde. This is
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  Speaker 1: a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain.
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  Speaker 1: For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox dot org.
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  Speaker 1: Recording by Corey Samuel, Reviews by Oscar Wilde, edited by
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  Speaker 1: Robert Ross, Section twenty eight Ben Johnson, Palmal Gazette, September twentieth,
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  Speaker 1: eighteen eighty six. In selecting mister John Addington Simmonds to
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  Speaker 1: write the life of Ben Johnson for his series of
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  Speaker 1: English Worthies, mister Lang no doubt exercised a wise judgment.
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  Speaker 1: Mister Simmonds, like the author of Volpan, is a scholar
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  Speaker 1: and a man of letters. His book on Shakespeare's predecessors
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  Speaker 1: showed a marvelous knowledge of the Elizabethan period, and he
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  Speaker 1: is a recognized authority on the Italian Renaissance. The last
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  Speaker 1: is not the least of his qualifications. Without a full
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  Speaker 1: appreciation of the meaning of the humanistic movement, it is
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  Speaker 1: impossible to understand the great struggle between the classical form
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  Speaker 1: and the romantic spirit, which is the chief critical characteristic
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  Speaker 1: of the Golden Age of the English drama, an age
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  Speaker 1: when Shakespeare found his chief adversary, not among his contemporaries,
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  Speaker 1: but in Seneca, and when Johnson armed himself with Aristotle
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  Speaker 1: to win the suffrages of a London audience. Mister Symonds's
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  Speaker 1: book consequently will be opened with interest. It does not,
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  Speaker 1: of course, contain much that is new about Johnson's life,
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  Speaker 1: But the facts of Johnson's life are already well known,
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  Speaker 1: and in books of this kind what is true is
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  Speaker 1: of more importance than what is new, Appreciation more valuable
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  Speaker 1: than discovery. Scotchman, however, will no doubt be interested to
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  Speaker 1: find that mister Symonds has succeeded in identifying Johnson's crest
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  Speaker 1: with that of the Johnstons of Annandale. And the story
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  Speaker 1: of the way the literary types and escaped from hanging
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  Speaker 1: by proving that he could read, is graphically told. On
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  Speaker 1: the whole we have a vivid picture of the man
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  Speaker 1: as he lived. Where picturesqueness is required, mister Symonds is
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  Speaker 1: always good. The usual comparison with doctor Johnson is of
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  Speaker 1: course brought out. Few of rare Bend's biographers spare us that,
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  Speaker 1: and the point is possibly a natural one to make.
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  Speaker 1: But when mister Symonds calls upon us to notice that
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  Speaker 1: both men made a journey to Scotland, and that each
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  Speaker 1: found in a scotchman his biographer. The parallel loses all value.
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  Speaker 1: There is an M in Monmouth and an M in Macedon,
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  Speaker 1: and Drummond of Hawthorndon and Boswell of Orchinleck were both
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  Speaker 1: born the other side of the tweed. But from such
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  Speaker 1: analogies nothing is to be learned. There is no surer
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  Speaker 1: way of destroying a similarity than to strain it. As
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  Speaker 1: for mister symonds estimate of Johnson's genius, it is in
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  Speaker 1: many points quite excellent. He ranks him with the giants
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  Speaker 1: rather than with the gods, with those who compel our
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  Speaker 1: admiration by their untiring energy and huge strength of intellectual muscle,
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  Speaker 1: not with those who share the divine gifts of creative
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  Speaker 1: imagination and inevitable instinct. Here he is right. Pellion more
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  Speaker 1: than Parnassus was Johnson's home. His art has too much
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  Speaker 1: effort about it, too much definite intention. His style lacks
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  Speaker 1: the charm of chance. Mister Symonds is right also in
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  Speaker 1: the stress he lays on the extraordinary combination in Johnson's
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  Speaker 1: work of the most concentrated realism with encyclopedic erudition. In
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  Speaker 1: Johnson's comedies, London slang and learned scholarship go hand in hand.
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  Speaker 1: Literature was as living a thing to him as life itself.
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  Speaker 1: He used his classical law not merely to give form
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  Speaker 1: to his verse, but to give flesh and blood to
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  Speaker 1: the persons of his plays. He could build up a
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  Speaker 1: breathing creature out of quotations. He made the poets of
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  Speaker 1: Greece and Rome terribly modern and introduced them to the
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  Speaker 1: oddest company. His very culture is an element in his coarseness.
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  Speaker 1: There are moments when one is tempted to liken him
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  Speaker 1: to a beast that has fed off books. We cannot, however,
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  Speaker 1: agree with mister Symonds when he says that Johnson rarely
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  Speaker 1: touched more than the outside of character, that his men
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  Speaker 1: and women are the incarnations of abstract properties rather than
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  Speaker 1: living human beings, that they are in fact mere masqueraders
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  Speaker 1: and mechanical puppets. Eloquence is a beautiful thing, but rhetoric
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  Speaker 1: ruins many a critic, and mister Symonds is essentially rhetorical when,
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  Speaker 1: for instance, he tells us that Johnson made masks while
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  Speaker 1: Decca and Heyward created souls. We feel that he is
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  Speaker 1: asking us to accept a crude judgment for the sake
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  Speaker 1: of a smart antithesis. It is of course true that
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  Speaker 1: we do not find in John's the same growth of
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  Speaker 1: character that we find in Shakespeare. And we may admit
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  Speaker 1: that most of the characters in Johnson's plays are, so
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  Speaker 1: to speak, ready made. But a ready made character is
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  Speaker 1: not necessarily either mechanical or wooden. Two epithets mister Symonds
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  Speaker 1: uses constantly in his criticism. We cannot tell and Shakespeare
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  Speaker 1: himself does not tell us why Iago is evil, why
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  Speaker 1: Reagan and Goneril have hard hearts, or why Sir Andrew
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  Speaker 1: egg Cheek is a fool. It is sufficient that they
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  Speaker 1: are what they are, and that nature gives warrant for
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  Speaker 1: their existence. If a character in a play is life like,
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  Speaker 1: if we recognize it as true to nature, we have
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  Speaker 1: no right to insist on the author explaining its genesis
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  Speaker 1: to us. We must accept it as it is, and
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  Speaker 1: in the hands of a good dramatist, mere presentation can
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  Speaker 1: take the place of analysis, and indeed is often a
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  Speaker 1: more dramatic method because a more direct one. And Johnson's
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  Speaker 1: characters are true to nature, they are in no sense abstractions.
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  Speaker 1: They are types. Captain Bobadil and Captain Tucker, Sir John
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  Speaker 1: daw and Sir Amorice La fool, Volpont and Moscer Subtle
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  Speaker 1: and Sir Epicure, Mammon, Missus Purecraft and the Rabbi Busy
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  Speaker 1: are all creatures of flesh and blood, none the less
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  Speaker 1: life like. Because they are labeled in this point, mister
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  Speaker 1: Symonds seems to us unjust towards Johnson. We think also
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  Speaker 1: that a special chapter might have been devoted to Johnson
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  Speaker 1: as a literary critic. The creative activity of the English
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  Speaker 1: Renaissance is so great that its achievements in the sphere
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  Speaker 1: of criticism are often overlooked by the student. Then, for
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  Speaker 1: the first time was language treated as an art. The
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  Speaker 1: laws of expression and composition were investigated and formulaized. The
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  Speaker 1: importance of words was recognized. Romanticism, Realism, and Classicism fought
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  Speaker 1: their first battles. The dramatists are full of literary and
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  Speaker 1: art criticisms and amuse the public with slashing articles on
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  Speaker 1: one another in the form of plays. Mister Symonds of
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  Speaker 1: Corps deals with Johnson in his capacity as a critic,
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  Speaker 1: and always with just appreciation, but the whole subject is
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  Speaker 1: one that deserves fuller and more special treatment. Some small inaccuracies, too,
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  Speaker 1: should be corrected in the second edition. Dryden, for instance,
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  Speaker 1: was not Johnson's successor on the laureate's throne, as mister
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  Speaker 1: Symonds eloquently puts it, for Sir William Davenant came between them.
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  Speaker 1: And when one remembers the predominance of ryme in Shakespeare's
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  Speaker 1: early plays, it is too much to say that after
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  Speaker 1: the production of the first part of Tamberlane, blank verse
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  Speaker 1: became the regular dramatic meter of the public stage. Shakespeare
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  Speaker 1: did not accept blank verse at once as a gift
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  Speaker 1: from Marlowe's hand, but himself arrived at it after a
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  Speaker 1: long course of experiments in rhyme. Indeed, some of mister
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  Speaker 1: symonds remarks on marlow are very curious To say of
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  Speaker 1: his edward the second for instance, that it is not
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  Speaker 1: at all inferior to the work of Shakespeare's younger age
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  Speaker 1: is very niggardly, an inadequate praise, and comes strangely from
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  Speaker 1: one who has elsewhere written with such appreciation of Marlow's
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  Speaker 1: great genius. While to call Marlowe Johnson's master is to
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  Speaker 1: make for him an impossible claim in comedy, Marlowe has
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  Speaker 1: nothing whatever to teach Johnson. In tragedy, Johnson sought for
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  Speaker 1: the classical, not the Romantic form. As for mister Symonds's style,
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  Speaker 1: it is, as usual, very fluent, very picturesque, and very
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  Speaker 1: full of color here and there. However, it is really irritating.
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  Speaker 1: Such a sentence, as the Tavern had the defects of
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  Speaker 1: its quality, is an awkward gallicism. And when mister Symonds,
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  Speaker 1: after genially comparing Johnson's blank verse to the front of Whitehall,
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  Speaker 1: a comparison by the way that would have enraged the
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  Speaker 1: poet beyond measure, proceeds to play a fantastic aria on
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  Speaker 1: the same string and tells us that Messenger reminds us
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  Speaker 1: of the intricacies of Sansovino, Shakespeare of Gothic isles or
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  Speaker 1: Heaven's Cathedral, Ford of glittering Corinthian colonnades, Webster of vaulted crypts,
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  Speaker 1: Marlowe of masoned clouds, and Marston, in his better moments
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  Speaker 1: of the fragmentary vigor of a Roman ruin. One begins
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  Speaker 1: to regret that any one ever thought of the unity
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  Speaker 1: of the arts similes such as these obscure. They do
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  Speaker 1: not illumine. To say that Ford is like a glittering
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  Speaker 1: Corinthian colonnade adds nothing to our knowledge of either Ford
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  Speaker 1: or Greek architecture. Mister Symonds has written some charming poetry,
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  Speaker 1: but his prose, unfortunately, is always poetical prose, never the
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  Speaker 1: prose of a poet. Still, the volume is worth reading,
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  Speaker 1: although decidedly mister Symonds to use one of his own
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  Speaker 1: phrases as the defects of his quality. English Worthy Edited
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  Speaker 1: by Andrew Lang ben Jonson, by John Addington Symonds, Longman's
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  Speaker 1: Greened Company, end of section twenty eight ben Jonson