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Show Culmsee: 1937] The Classicism of Ben Jonson 69 Bobadills, the hypocritical Rabbi Busys, th offiious Overdos, the rapacious and purchasable Voltores, the voluptuous SIr Epicure Mammons. When this social purpose of Jonson's descends into schoolmasterish ex hortation it is less pleasant, and apparently less classical. In the Staple of N eWS there are portions that are not so much satirical as homiletic in the The Devil is an Ass ends on a note of moral manner of a preaching allegory. admonition that neutralizes what little is left of the powerful satiric idea of showing a devil utterly bewildered and defeated by the superior deviltry of men. Here again it is difficult to generalize about Jonson. Although his f requently avowed purpose is to instruct and better men, and although in a num ber of plays he carries out this purpose as far as his ability Will permit, he reveals in others a human hunger for mere dramatic success. This he occa sionally tries to achieve in the way that Dekker and some others did, by pro viding a light form of entertainment. Personally, I can see nothing in The Case is Altered and The New Inn except a desire to please the crowd by amazing them and making them laugh. Bartholomew Fair ,offers plenty of valid satire-and also plenty of sheer horseplay and superfluous Billingsgate. In the foreword to Sejanus he clearly implies that he has compromised with classical precedent for "popular delight." Indeed, the tragedies, on which Jonson staked much hope of his reputa tion, are in some ways farther from any type of classicism than his comedies. They neglect the unity of time; Catiline departs from the unity of place. Therefore they do not come up to neo-classic standards. And as for the old classic tragedies, Jonson seems to have missed their point or did not have the same purpose. Certainly neither Sejanus nor Catiline arouses and terror pity They are scholarly pictures of a period, but neither possesses the soul of tragedy. In part, this is because Jonson lacked a fusing power necessary to bring all the parts of a drama into a thoroughly satisfying oneness. But I believe the chief reaSon is this: Jonson rarely reveals that he has recognized the true soul of the classics. As Scott-James has said, "he accepts the classic in a deeply critical spirit, seeking to discover in order, not the forms of ancient art the profound spirit which they embodied; not probing the mind of those older poets to discover the nature of their feeling for the beautiful or the true which led them to preserve so austerely certain types of poetry (Scott-James. The Making of Literature, p. 124) Jonson, of course, was not alone in this. I quote again from Scott James: "But the scholars of the Renaissance equipped with so slender a basis of native culture, and amazed at the treasure-trove of' finished clas sical literature which lay before them, could not be expected in the earlier readings to learn more than its simplest and most rudimentary lessons'" (Ibid., p. 168). in adequate .. measure. ' . " .. , ... ' He did not learn from the greatest classics how to achieve what Matthew Arnold in his Preface of 1853 calls "the effect of the one moral impression left by a great action treated as a whole He missed the true spirit of the greatest classics so that generally he lack soundness of basic conception and the unity of moral impression which dommaes all at the end. But his loving contemplation of great models did teach hirn valuable lessons: that "the proper of mankind is man"; that form, the most quickly recognizable element study of classicism is important· that te real man of letters is a conscientious artist, both in' the seriousnss of IS purposes and the diligence of his apprenticeship and his effort through hk " ... ' Thus from the classics Jonson learned the literary lessons of worthy |
