December 2nd, 1932 1
In my previous lecture I was concerned with the Elizabethan critical mind expressing itself before the greater part of the great literature of the age had been written. Between them and Dryden occurs one great critical mind, that of a great poet whose critical writing appears to belong to quite the end of the period. If I treated Ben Jonson’s opinions with complete respect, I should condemn myself for speaking or writing at all; for he says roundly, “to judge of poets is only the faculty of poets; and not of all poets, but the best.” 2 Nevertheless, though I am not a good enough poet to judge of Jonson, I have already tried to do so, and cannot now make matters worse. Between Sidney and Campion in the latter part of the sixteenth century, and Jonson writing towards the end of his life, the greatest period of English poetry is comprehended; and the maturing of the English mind in this time is well seen by reading the treatises of Sidney and his contemporaries, and then the Discoveriesof Jonson. He called his Discoveriesalso Timber, and it is timber with much undergrowth and dead wood in it, but also living trees. In some places, Jonson does but express in a more adult style the same commonplaces. About poetry:
The study of it (if we will trust Aristotle) offers to mankind a certain rule, and pattern of living well, and happily; disposing us to all civil offices of society. If we will believe Tully, it nourisheth, and instructeth, our youth; delights our age; adorns our prosperity; comforts our adversity; entertains us at home; keeps us company abroad, travails with us; watches, divides the time of our earnest, and sports; shares in our country recesses, and recreations; insomuch as the wisest and best learned have thought her the absolute mistress of manners, and nearest of kin to virtue. [90-91]
This list of the merits of poetry, with its conditional references to Aristotle and Tully, has the quaintness of a generation near to Montaigne, and is no more convincing than a patent medicine circular; and it has some of the heavy sententiousness of Francis Bacon. 3 Secondary to the serious advantages to be derived from poetry, comes the assurance that poetry gives pleasure, or, as he says, guides us by the hand of action, with a ravishing delight, and incredible sweetness. The questions implied are, as I said towards the end of my last lecture, among those fundamental to criticism: Jonson has put them in a riper style than that of the critics who wrote in his youth, but he has not advanced the enquiry. The authority of antiquity, and the assent of our prejudices, are enough. It is rather in his practical criticism – I mean here not so much his criticism of individual writers, but his advice to the practitioner – that Jonson has made progress. He requires in the poet, first, “a goodness of natural wit” [91]. “To this perfection of nature in our poet, we require exercise of those parts, and frequent” [92]. His third requisite in a poet pleases me especially: “The third requisite in our poet, or maker, is Imitation, to be able to convert the substances, or riches of another poet, to his own use” [93]. When we come to a passage beginning “In writing there is to be regarded the Invention, and the Fashion” [82] we may, if we have already read some later critics, expect more than we get. For so far as I understand him Jonson means nothing more than that before you write you must have something to write about; which is a manifest truth frequently ignored both by those who are trying to learn to write and by some of those who endeavour to teach writing. But when we compare such passages as these from Jonson with the passage which I quoted from Dryden in my first lecture, we feel that in Dryden we meet for the...
