Amenities of Literature Part 51

To every people who had not a.s.sociated with the general night-stillness of a castle the movement of a mouse, this description would appear ludicrously puerile; while, with us, the familiar idiom is most happily appropriate to the speaker; but this natural language no foreigner can acquire by study or reflection; we imbibe our idioms as we did the milk of the nurse's breast.

In _Julius Caesar_, when Voltaire translates Caesar's reply to Metellus, who would fall at his feet to supplicate for the repeal of his brother's banishment, the Caeesar of Shakespeare uses metaphorical expressions. He would not yield to

"That which melteth fools; I mean sweet words, Low-crooked curt'sies, and base _spaniel-fawning_.

If thou dost bend, and pray, and fawn for him, _I'd spurn thee like a cur out of my way_."

This natural style was doubtless "trop familier" for the polished Frenchman, and his version is malicious, and he delights to detail every motion of a spaniel, even to the licking of the feet of his master!--

"_Les airs d'un chien couchant_ peuvent toucher un sot; Flatte, prie a genoux, et _leche-moi les pieds_-- Va, je te _rosserai_ comme un chien."

_Rosser_ can only be translated by so mean a phrase as "a sound beating;" while to spurn is no ign.o.ble action, and is used rather in a poetical than familiar style.

THE "HUMOURS" OF JONSON.

JONSON studied "THE HUMOURS," and not the pa.s.sions. What were these "humours"? The bard himself does not distinguish them from "manners"--

Their MANNERS, now call'd HUMOURS, feed the stage.

The ambiguity of the term has confounded it with humour itself; they are, however, so far distinct, that a "humour," that is, some absorbing singularity in a character, may not necessarily be very humorous--it may be only absurd.

When this term "humours" became popular, it sunk into a mystification.

Every one suddenly had his "humour." It served on all occasions as an argument which closed all discussion. The impertinent insisted on the privilege of his "humour." "The idiot" who chose to be "apish," declared that a lock of hair fantastically hung, or the dancing feather in his cap, were his "humour." A moral quality, or an affection of the mind, was thus indiscriminately applied to things themselves, when they were objects of affectation or whim. The phrase was tossed about till it bore no certain meaning. Such indeed is the fate of all fashionable cant--ephemera which, left to themselves, die away with their season.

The ludicrous incongruity of applying these physical qualities to moral acts, and apologizing for their caprices by their "humours," was too exquisitely ludicrous not to be seized on as the property of our comic satirists. Shakespeare and Jonson have given perpetuity to this term of the vocabulary in vogue, and Jonson has dignified it by transferring it to his comic art. Shakespeare has personified these "humours" in that whimsical, blunt, grotesque Corporal Nym, the pith of whose reason and the chorus of whose tune are his "humours;" admirably contrasting with that other "humourist," his companion, ranting the f.a.g-ends of tragedies "in Cambyses' vein." Jonson, more elaborate, according to his custom, could not quit his subject till he had developed the whole system in two comedies of "Every Man IN" and "Every Man OUT of his HUMOUR."

The vague term was least comprehended when most in use. Asper, the censor of the times,[1] desires Mitis, who had used it, "to answer what was meant:" Mitis, a neutralized man, "who never acts, and has therefore no character," can only reply, "Answer what?" The term was too plain or too obscure for that simple soul to attach any idea to a word current with all the world.

The philosopher then offers

To give these ignorant well-spoken days Some taste of their abuse of this word HUMOUR.

This rejoices his friend Cordatus:

Oh, do not let your purpose fall, good Asper; It cannot but arrive most acceptable, Chiefly to such as have the happiness Daily to see how _the poor innocent word Is rack'd and tortured_.

It is then that Asper, or rather Jonson, plunges into a dissertation on "the elements," which, according to the ancient philosophy, compound the fragile body of man, with the four "humours," or moistures.[2]

Had not this strange phrase been something more than a modish coinage, it had not endured so long and spread so wide. Other temporary phrases of this nature were equally in vogue, nor have they escaped the vigilant causticity of Jonson. Such were "the vapourers," and "the jeerers;" but these had not substance in them to live, and Jonson only cast on them a side-glance. "The humours" were derived from a more elevated source than the airy nothingness of fashionable cant.

How "the humours" came into vogue may I think be discovered. A work long famous, and of which multiplied editions, in all the languages of Europe, were everywhere spread, deeply engaged public attention; this work was _Huarte's Examen de Ingenios_, translated into English as "The Examination of Men's Wits." It was long imagined that the Spaniard had drawn aside the veil from nature herself, revealing among her varieties those of the human character. The secret, "to what profession a man will be most apt," must have taken in a wide circle of inquirers. In the fifth chapter, we learn that "the differences of men's wits depend on the hot, the moist, and the dry;" the system is carried on through "the elements" and "the humours." The natural philosophy is of the schools, but the author's anatomy of the brain amounted to a demonstration of the phenomenon, as it seemed to him. He, however, had struck out some hardy novelties and some mendacious ill.u.s.trations. The system was long prevalent, and every one now conceived himself to be the pa.s.sive agent of his predominant temperament or "humour," and looked for that page which was to discover to him his own genius. This work in its day made as great a sensation as the "Esprit" of Helvetius at a later time; and in effect resembled the phrenology of our day, and was as ludicrously applied. The first English version--for there are several--appeared in 1594, and we find that, four years after, "the humours" were so rife that they served to plot a whole comedy, as well as to furnish an abundance of what they called "epigrams," or short satires of the reigning mode.

Jonson's intense observation was microscopical when turned to the minute evolutions of society, while his diversified learning at all times bore him into a n.o.bler sphere of comprehension. This taste for reality, and this fulness of knowledge on whatever theme he chose, had a reciprocal action, and the one could not go without the other. Our poet doggedly set to "a humour" through its slightest anomalies, and in the pride of his comic art expanded his prototype. Yet this was but half the labour which he loved; his mind was stored with the most burdensome knowledge; and to the scholar the various erudition which he had so diligently acquired threw a more permanent light over those transient scenes which the painter of manners had so carefully copied.

The pertinacity of Jonson in heaping such minute particularities of "a humour," has invariably turned his great dramatic personages into complete personifications of some single propensity or mode of action; and thus the individual is changed into an abstract being. The pa.s.sion itself is wholly there, but this man of one volition is thrown out of the common brotherhood of man; an individual so artificially constructed as to include a whole species. Our poet, if we may decide by the system which he pursued, seems to have considered his prodigious dramatic characters as the conduit-pipes to convey the abundant waters which he had gathered into his deep cisterns.

It is surely evident that such elaborate dramatic personages were not extemporary creations thrown off in the heat of the pen. Our poet professed to instruct as much as to delight; and it was in the severity of thought and the austerity of his genius that his n.o.bler conceptions arose. His studious habits have been amply ascertained. When he singled out "a humour," to possess himself of every trait of the anomalous dispositions he contemplated, he must gradually have acc.u.mulated, as they occurred, the particulars whence to form the aggregate; and like Swift, in his "Advice to Servants," in his provident diligence he must have jotted down a ma.s.s such as we see so curiously unfolded in "the character of the persons," prefixed to "Every Man in his Humour," a singular dramatic sketch. To this ma.s.s, with due labour and shaping, he gave the baptism of an expressive name, and conceived that a name would necessarily become a person. If he worked in this manner, as I believe he did, and "the characters" we have just seen confirm the suggestion, it sufficiently explains the s.p.a.ce he required to contain his mighty and unmixed character--the several made into one; and which we so frequently observe he was always reluctant to quit, while a stroke in his jottings remained untold. His cup indeed often runs over, and sometimes the dregs hang on our lips. We have had perhaps too many of these jottings.

But if Jonson has been accused of having servilely given portraits--and we have just seen in what an extraordinary way they are portraits--his learning has also been alleged as something more objectionable in the dramatic art; and we have often heard something of the pedantry of Jonson.

In that elaborate personage Sir Epicure Mammon, we have not only the alchemist and the epicurean to answer that characterizing name, but we are not to be set free without enduring the obscure babble of "the projection" and "the projectors"--which a.s.suredly cost some patient sweat of that curious brain--and further being initiated into the gastronomic mysteries of the kitchens of the ancients. Volpone, and "the gentleman who loves not noise," his other masterpieces, like Sir Epicure Mammon, are of the same colossal character. In "The Fox" and "The Fly,"

the richest veins of antiquity are melted down into his own copious invention; nor had the ancients themselves a picture so perfect, or a scene so living, of those legacy-hunters, though that vice was almost a profession with them. If true learning in the art of the drama be peccant, our poet is a very saintly sinner; and Jonson indeed was, as Cleaveland has hailed his manes,

The wonder of a learned age.

The fate of Jonson has inflicted its penalties on his very excellences.

Some modern critics, whose delicacy of taste in its natural feebleness could not strain itself to the vigour of Jonson, have strangely failed to penetrate into the depths of that mighty mind; and some modern poets have delivered their sad evidence, that for them the Coryphaeus of our elder dramatists has become unintelligible. Of all our dramatists, Jonson, the Juvenal of our drama, alone professed to study the "humour"

or manners of the age; but manners vanish with their generation; and ere the century closes even actors cannot be procured to personate characters of which they view no prototype. They remain as the triumphs of art and genius, for those who are studious of this rare combination; but they were the creatures of "the age," and not for "all time," as Jonson himself energetically and prophetically has said of Shakespeare.[3]

Shadwell, who has left us nearly twenty comedies, and "the G.o.d of whose idolatry" was Jonson, in his copious prefaces, and prologues and epilogues, overflows with his egotistical admiration of "the humours."

In his preface to _The Sullen Lovers_, he says that we are not to expect the intrigue of comedy, plot and business, lest he should "let fall the humour." And in _The Humourist_, he says, "Mr. Jonson was very unjustly taxed for personating particular men," in the writing of his humours; "but it will ever be the fate of them that write the humours of the town." We have more of this in the dedication of _The Virtuoso_, where we are told that "four of the humours are entirely new." We have his definition of these "humours" in the epilogue to _The Humourists_, and which is neatly expressed.

A Humour is the bias of the mind, By which, with violence, 'tis one way inclined; It makes our action lean on one side still; And, in all changes, that way bends the will.

It is singular that as Jonson has been somewhat censured for drawing so elaborately these artificial men and their humours, Shadwell should have adopted the notion, and made it the staple of his comic invention.

When men were more insulated, and society was less monotonous than at the present day, those whom we now call humourists, without however any allusion to the system of the humours, and whom we now rarely meet with, allowed their peculiar tastes and fancies to be more prominent in their habits, so as to make them more observable, and more the subject of ridicule than we find them in the present level decorum of society.

FOOTNOTES:

[1] In the Introduction to _Every Man Out of his Humour_.

[2] See Nares' "Glossary" for an account of these Humours in their philosophical sense.

[3] "He was not of an age, but for all time."--_Jonson._

DRAYTON.

"THE POLY-OLBION" of DRAYTON is a stupendous work, "a strange Herculean toil," as the poet himself has said, and it was the elaborate production of many years. The patriotic bard fell a victim to its infelicitous but glorious conception; and posterity may discover a grandeur in this labour of love, which was unfelt by his contemporaries.

The "Poly-olbion" is a chorographical description of England and Wales; an amalgamation of antiquarianism, of topography, and of history; materials not the most ductile for the creations of poetry. This poem is said to have the accuracy of a road-book; and the poet has contributed some notices, which add to the topographic stores of CAMDEN; for this has our poet extorted an alms of commendation from such a n.i.g.g.ardly antiquary as Bishop Nicholson, who confesses that this work affords "a much truer account of this kingdom than could be well expected from the pen of a poet."

The grand theme of this poet was his fatherland! The muse of Drayton pa.s.ses by every town and tower; each tells some tale of ancient glory, or of some "worthy" who must never die. The local a.s.sociations of legends and customs are animated by the personifications of mountains and rivers; and often, in some favourite scenery, he breaks forth with all the emotion of a true poet. The imaginative critic has described the excursions of our muse with responsive sympathy. "He has not," says Lamb, "left a rivulet so narrow that it may be stepped over without honourable mention, and has a.s.sociated hills and streams with life and pa.s.sion beyond the dreams of old mythology." But the journey is long, and the conveyance may be tedious; the reader, accustomed to the decasyllabic or heroic verse, soon finds himself breathless among the protracted and monotonous Alexandrines, unless he should relieve his ear from the inc.u.mbrance, by resting on the caesura, and thus divide those extended lines by the alternate grace of a ballad-stanza. The artificial machinery of Drayton's personifications of mountains and rivers, though these may be often allowed the poet, yet they seem more particularly ludicrous, as they are crowded together on the maps prefixed to each county, where this arbitrary mythology, masculine and feminine, are to be seen standing by the heads of rivers, or at the entrances of towns.

This extraordinary poem remains without a parallel in the poetical annals of any people; and it may excite our curiosity to learn its origin. The genealogy of poetry is often suspicious; but I think we may derive the birth of the "Poly-olbion" from LELAND's magnificent view of his designed work on "Britain," and that hint expanded by the "Britannia" of CAMDEN, who inherited the mighty industry, without the poetical spirit of LELAND: DRAYTON embraced both.

It is a nice question to decide how far history may be admitted into poetry; like "Addison's Campaign," the poem may end in a rhymed gazette.

And in any other work of invention, a fiction, by too free an infusion of historical matter, can only produce that monster called "the Romance of History," a nonsensical contradiction in terms, for neither can be both; or that other seductive and dangerous a.s.sociation of real persons and fict.i.tious incidents, the historical romance! It is remarkable that DRAYTON censures DANIEL, his brother poet, for being _too historical_ in his "Civil Wars," and thus transgressing the boundaries of history and poetry, of truth and invention. Of these just boundaries, however, he himself had no clear notion. Drayton in his "Baron's Wars" sunk into a grave chronicler; and in the "Poly-olbion," we see his muse treading a labyrinth of geography, of history, and of topography!

The author of the "Poly-olbion" may truly be considered as the inventor of a cla.s.s of poems peculiar to our country, and which, when I was young, were popular or fashionable. These are loco-descriptive poems.

Such were Denham's "Cooper's Hill,"[1] and its numerous and, some, happy imitations. In these local descriptions some favoured spot in the landscape opens to the poet not only the charm of its natural appearance, but in the prospect lie scenes of the past. Imagination, like a telescope fixed on the spot, brings nearer to his eyes those a.s.sociations which combine emotion with description; and the contracted spot, whence the bard scattered the hues of his fancy, is aggrandized by n.o.ble truths.