Critic: Francis Thompson

Source: A Renegade Poet and Other Essays, The Ball Publishing Co., 1910, pp. 253-66. Reprinted in Literature Criticism from 1400 to 1800, Vol. 6

[Thompson was one of the most important poets of the Catholic Revival in nineteenth-century English literature. Often compared to the seventeenth-century metaphysical poets, especially Richard Crashaw, he is best known for his poem "The Hound of Heaven" (1893), which displays Thompson's characteristic themes of spiritual struggle, redemption, and transcendent love. Like other writers of the fin de siècle period, Thompson wrote poetry and prose noted for rich verbal effects and a devotion to the values of aestheticism. In the following excerpt from an essay indeterminately dated the year of Thompson's death, Thompson discusses Jonson as a prose writer, examining the Discoveries, here called Sylva.]

Asked haphazard to name the poets who were also prose-writers ... few, probably, would think of including Ben Jonson. There is some reason for not thinking of Ben as a prose-writer: he never produced any set and continuous work in prose--not so much as a pamphlet. All he has left us is a collection called Sylva or Timber, corresponding to the memorabilia of what we now call a commonplace-book (apparently because it contains the observations which a man thinks are not commonplace). Yet with relation to the development of English prose, Sylva by no means deserves the neglect which its disconnected character has brought on it; nor yet in its relation to the great dramatist's own character. We English have small relish for apophthegms and prose-brevities in general: not among us would a La Rochefoucauld, a Pascal of the Pensées, a La Bruyère have found applause. Selden, or Coleridge's Table-Talk, the exceedingly witty Characters of Hudibras Butler, and other admirable literature of the kind, go virtually unread. We want expansion and explanation; we like not being asked to complement the author's with by our own. So that Sylva had small chance, were it better than it is.

We know two Ben Jonsons, it may be said--the Ben of the plays, rugged, strong, pedantic, unsympathetic, often heavy, coarse and repellant even in his humor, where he is strongest; and the Ben of those surprisingly contrasting lyrics, all too few; small, delicate, and exquisite. It is as though Vulcan took to working in filigree. Here, in Sylva, is another Ben, who increases our estimation of the man. We have often thought there was a measure of affinity between the two Johnsons--Ben and Sam. Their surnames are the same, save in spelling; both have a Scriptural Christian name; both were large and burly men, of strong, unbeautiful countenance--"a mountain belly and a rocky face" the dramatist ascribed to himself. Both were convivial spirits, with a magnetic tendency to form a personal following; "the tribe of Ben" was paralleled by the tribe of Samuel. Both were men distinguished for learning unusual among the literary men of their time. Both carried it over the verge of pedantry, and at the same time had strong sense. Both were notably combative. Both were mighty talkers, and founded famous literary clubs which made the "Mermaid" and the "Mitre" illustrious among taverns. Both, it seems pretty sure, were overbearing. You can imagine Benjamin as ready to browbeat a man as Samuel. There the parallel ends; Ben was not distinguished for religiosity or benevolence, Ben was never cited as a moralist. But in Sylva, it seems to us, we pick it up again.

There is the strong common-sense, and the uncommon sense, which we find in the Doctor's talk; there is the directness, the straightness to the point. There is, moreover, a robust manliness, an eye which discerns, and a hand which strikes for the pith of any matter, a contained vigor which wastes no stroke. In all these points we find an analogy with the later man; and though they might have been surmised from Ben Jonson's poetry, they appear in a light more favorable, from the absence of violence or coarseness, the compression to which the writer has subjected himself. Even the style is not without analogies to the spoken style of the great conversationalist--so different from his written style. It has nothing of the occasional stateliness, the Latinities, which appeared even in the Doctor's talk. But on the Doctor's vernacular side it has its kinships. It is clean, hardy, well-knit, excellently idiomatic; pithy and well-poised as an English cudgel. Its marked tendency to the use of balance is a further Johnsonian affinity. We would not, however, be understood to say that it is like the style of Johnson's talk. It is individual, and has the ring common to the Elizabethan style. But it has certain qualities which seem to us akin to the spirit of Johnson's talk. One striking feature is its modernity. It is more modern than Shakespeare's prose. There are many sentences which, with the alteration of a word or so, the substitution of a modern for an archaic inflection, would pass for very good and pure modern prose. It is singular that prose so vernacular should have had no successor, and that so wide an interval should have elapsed between him and Dryden.

Yet, if Jonson influenced no follower, it certainly deserves more notice than it has received that, thus early, prose so native, showing so much the mettle of its English pasture, could be written. (pp. 253-58)

Johnson could put a thing with almost--or quite--brutal terseness; but Ben is still more uncompromisingly effective, as in the last sentence of the following quotation:

Many men believe not themselves what they would persuade others, and less do the things which they would impose on others.... Only they set the sign of the Cross over their outer doors, and sacrifice to their guts and their groin in their inner closets.

It has not the sweetness and light of modern culture; it is ursine: but it sticks in the memory. It is interesting, in reading Sylva, to note that Jonson had already formed an opinion on the contest between the Ancients and Moderns, long before it became a burning question in the latter seventeenth, and brought forth Swift's Battle of the Books in the eighteenth century. His opinion shows the clear and balanced good sense characteristic of his judgment throughout the book. If any man might have been looked for to be a bigoted champion of the Ancients, it was Jonson, who marred his own work and would have gone hard to mar that of others by his pedantic insistence on classical authority, and lamented Shakespeare's "little Latin and less Greek." Yet he maintains a clear-sighted attitude of respectful independence. (pp. 258-59)

[His opinion] is (so to speak) all bone and muscle, as a passage of warm yet reasoned defence ought to be. One cannot but smile a little, none the less, at Ben's disclaimer of sects, his "I will have no man addict himself to me": Ben, the focus of disciples and leader in many a literary fracas. Yet, despite his upholding of the just rights of the present against the past, he was not satisfied with the present. It is a strange fact that the complaints of decadence in letters, which we hear now, come to us like an echo from the pages of the Sylva. In one passage he observes:

I cannot but think Nature is so spent and decayed, that she can bring forth nothing worth her former years. She is always the same, like herself, and when she collects her strength, is abler still. Men are decayed, and studies; she is not.

Who could conceive that this last pessimist sentence was written by the friend of Shakespeare, the sharer in the glorious prime of English literature, and one of the great literary periods of the world? Even in his day he evidently felt the paucity of true appreciation.... (pp. 261-63)

Apparently in Jonson's day the lampoon and the scurrilous verse took the place of the society tattle which we now complain of as a bane of the Press; and he speaks bitterly of these things. Nay, if we are to believe him, the contempt which nowadays clings to the name of poet, and which we suppose a consequence of modern degeneracy, was active in his time--the day of the greatest poetic literature England has seen. So little has John Bull really changed his ways! (p. 263)

But one soon gets a suspicion that Ben's picture is to be taken with many grains of salt. For presently his complaints take a personal form, and we begin to conjecture that these passages were largely influenced by recent attacks under which the poet himself was smarting. "But," he concludes indignantly, and not unworthily, "they are rather enemies of my fame than me, these barkers." Still, it is an interesting glimpse into Elizabethan literature as it presented itself to an actor in the scene. Such glimpses, and the knowledge of Ben Jonson as a man of sound and incisive judgment no less than a poet, make the Sylva interesting apart from its manner. And the style, as we have shown, if not actually great, is strong, honest, and native, deserving to be considered in any estimate of our earlier English prose. (pp. 265-66)