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humble relation which he would have the Discoveries bear to the Forest and Underwoods of his works.

4. STYLE.

The Discoveries "come in character as in time midway between Hooker and Dryden, and they incline rather to the more than to the less modern form " (Saintsbury, History of Elizabethan Literature, p. 219). Two things explain

this position. Jonson's vocabulary is somewhat more antiquated than that of most of his contemporaries, and the conservatism of increasing years only added to that of constitution. "Words borrowed of antiquity," he writes, "do lend a kind of majesty to style, and are not without their delight sometimes; for they have the authority of years and out of their intermission do win themselves a kind of grace like newness" (61 14-18). A comparison of the vocabulary of Sir Philip Sidney's Defense of Poesie with that of the Discoveries, written nearly sixty years later, will disclose a far larger number of words demanding explanation in the latter. On the other hand, a like comparison between the two works with reference to the structure of sentence and paragraph will exhibit a form and symmetry, a sense of order and proportion, and a consciousness of the demands of literary presentment in the Discoveries for which we may look in vain in the somwhat loosely-strung periods and formless paragraphs of the Defense. This contrast becomes the more startling when we remember that Sidney's work is characterized by a logical sequence and continuity of thought often wanting in the disjointed entries of the Discoveries.

The chief traits of Jonson's prose are force, condensity and/ directness. The first often rises to genuine eloquence and displays in its reserve and union with grace a truly classic dignity. (See the well-known passage on the eloquence of

Bacon, 30 7-21; 17 8-13, 33 6-22 and many others.) Jonson's condensity and directness are pervading, and achieved largely by a prevailing shortness and crispness in the construction of sentence, and an omission of qualifiers and connectives wherever the sense permits.

"Brevity is attained in matter by avoiding idle complements, prefaces, protestations, parentheses, superfluous circuit of figures and digressions: in the composition, by omitting conjunctions ... and such like idle particles, that have no great business in a serious letter but breaking of sentences, as oftentimes a short journey is made long by unnecessary baits" (70 4-12). As an example of the application of these principles, read the passage on Counsel (3 18-44) which Mr. Swinburne describes as possessed of "too strong a flavor of the style of Tacitus in its elaborate if not laborious terseness of expression" (Study of Ben Jonson, p. 131); and notice Jonson's further expression of his theory on this subject: Periods are beautiful when they are not too long " (62 31). Elsewhere he commends a strict and succinct style . . . where you can take away nothing without loss, and that loss to be manifest" (ibid. 19–21).

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Jonson is rarely obscure; and involved or confused constructions are totally foreign to the constitution of a 'mind by nature clear, precise and painful in its attention to detail. Such occasional obscurities as do occur are almost invariably traceable to excessive condensity, as: "In the Greek poets, as also in Plautus, we shall see the economy and disposition of poems better observed than in Terence and the later [Greek poets] who thought" etc. (57 35-585); or to Latin influence as : "Creatures . . . that continually labor under their own misery and other's envy," i.e. the envy which they feel towards others. (47 15, and see 36 7). Other instances of Latinism are, the variation between the infinitive and imperative, 54 25-28; "he denied figures to be invented" 28 35; etc.: a comparison of the passages translated from

Quintilian and Seneca will disclose many other examples. Barring the use of several words in their Latin sense, as : opinion, reputation (63), discipline, learning (73), copy, abundance (26 32), voice, remark, saying (37 17), delicate, chosen (44 22), election, selection (56 18), translations, metaphors (60 25), to concoct, to digest (77 20), and offices, duties or obligations (78 26), many of them common to the age; occasional forms like umbractical (16 25), indagations (28 11), or digladiation (66 35); and the still rarer coining of a word like recession (50 19); Jonson's vocabulary is remarkably English for a scholar of his day.

Jonson considered that “ some words are to be culled out for ornament and color," but they had better grow in our style as in a meadow," etc. (61 31; see also on this topic 62 2, 63 16-32 and 63 33–64 14). His practice is entirely consistent with this, and it would be difficult to find a writer of equal vigor so sparing in the use of figures. In the Discoveries Jonson shows a prevailing preference for simile over metaphor, and elaborated comparisons like that of the world to a play (36 22 seqq.), or even the apt figure of the evil man riding coated and booted through the dirty ways of the world (43 19-24) are rare. (See, however, 65 19 seqq.) He often caps a semi-humorous passage with an implied or expressed comparison that amounts almost to the force of the like trick of Swift or Carlyle; thus counsellors that advise a prince to be cruel are called "hangmen's factors" (39 6), and the depth of certain writers, which you may find "with your middle finger" is "cream-bowl — or but puddle-deep" (25 13).

Again, Jonson rarely indulges in hyperbole ; unless we can grant that term, in a somewhat extended sense, to those passages in which he becomes impassioned through bitterness of feeling (21 16-31 and 43 24 seqq.), or through power and brilliancy of satire and invective: see especially the essay on Parasites (51 10 seqq.). This latter quality is

to be expected of Jonson, whose method in his dramas and in his Conversations, as reported by Drummond, was "to color highly but not falsely," and to present the subject in hand, so to speak, somewhat heightened into an abnormal alto-rilievo by seeing too far on each side.

Jonson has succeeded in avoiding several faults peculiar to his age. He almost totally eschews compound words, and it may be doubted if any of his own coinage can be found in the Discoveries. (An exception must be made in the burlesque word noted above, 25 13.) Moreover, Jonson has kept the vocabulary of poetry as well as the use of poetic figures and measured cadence well apart from his prose; although I believe that Mr. Swinburne has discovered an exception to this last in the fine line on nature at 7 12:

"Men are decayed, and studies: she is not."

Neither excessive balance nor undue antithesis mar the flow of Jonson's style. There are passages, however, in which attention to this particular is apparent; as: "When a virtuous man is raised, it brings gladness to his friends, grief to his enemies, and glory to his posterity. . . . He is grown to active men an example, to the slothful a spur, to the envious a punishment" (42 20-25). The practise of wanton alliteration too is not among his faults, though rare instances occur in which he has fallen into that "species of indefensible Ciceronianism" which delights in playing on the sounds of words (e.g. 46 12, 13 and 69 24).

For a closer consideration of the prose style of Jonson the reader must be referred to the following pages, and especially to the essay on Style (52 26-72 4), in which, while culling much from the writings of Quintilian, Cicero and Horace, Jonson has laid down the rules of his own practise with a remarkable degree of success. "The more I study his writings," says Coleridge, in words as applicable to his prose as to his verse," the more I admire them; and the more my

study of him resembles that of an ancient classic in the minutie of his rhythm, metre, choice of words, forms of connection and so forth, the more numerous have the points of my admiration become" (Notes on Ben Jonson, Works of S. T. Coleridge, American ed. 1884, iv. p. 186). A comparison of the prose of Jonson with the style of his various classical authorities as indicated in the notes, or with the prose of contemporaries such as Selden or Sir Thomas Overbury, would be attended with fruitful results, and might establish beyond the peradventure of a doubt that the conscious cultivation of English prose style began to be practised at least a generation before Abraham Cowley and John Dryden.

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