Critic: Geoffrey Walton

Source: Ben Jonson and the Cavalier Poets: Authoritative Texts, Criticism, edited by Hugh MacLean, W. W. Norton & Company, 1974, pp. 479-96. Reprinted in Poetry Criticism, Vol. 17

Criticism about: Ben(jamin) Jonson (1572?-1637?), also known as: Ben Jonson, Benjamin Jonson, Ben(jamin) Jonson

Genre(s): Satires; Comedies (Plays); Romantic comedies (Plays); Lyric poetry; Masques; Literary criticism; Speeches; Tragedies

[In the following essay, Walton characterizes Jonson's poetry as a model of civility, exhibiting both its intellectual and moral values.]

It is well known that Pope imitated the opening couplet of Jonson's "Elegie on the Lady Jane Pawlet, Marchion: of Winton":

What gentle ghost, besprent with April deaw,
Hayles me, so solemnly, to yonder Yewgh?

in his own opening couplet of the "Elegy to the Memory of an Unfortunate Lady":

What beck'ning ghost, along the moonlight shade
Invites my steps, and points to yonder glade?

The similarity and the difference between the grand style of Pope and the slightly Spenserian language of Jonson on this occasion are obvious. I have chosen to begin with a reference to this piece of plagiarism, however, because these two poems may be taken to mark, in so far as there are any beginnings and ends in literature, the limits of my study, and because the debt draws pointed attention to the dignified and courteous tone of Jonson's poetry, especially in his occasional verses. Several lines of elegy, which often intersect and blend, run between Jonson's epitaphs and formal eulogies and Pope's poem, which seems to gather up into itself all the various threads, the earlier Metaphysical and philosophic meditation of Donne, the formality of Cowley on Crashaw, the tenderness of Cowley on Hervey, the satire of Dryden in the ode on Anne Killigrew and the elegiac of Milton on the same Lady Jane. Pope inherited a large measure of Metaphysical wit coming from Donne, but the predominant aspect of his genius, the Augustan decorum, can be traced back to Donne's contemporary, Jonson.

Although Jonson's greatness as a poet is generally recognized, very little has been written on his lyric and other nondramatic poems. There is room for a detailed consideration of certain aspects of this work and for some redirection of attention towards poems hitherto neglected. Making a limited approach, I want to try to locate and define as clearly as possible his characteristic tone and civilized quality.

One often finds oneself trying, with a certain sense of frustration, to reconcile Professor C. H. Herford's morose rough diamond "with no native well-spring of verse music" and the kind of seventeenth-century Mallarm� implied by Mr. Ralph Walker. The coarse side of Jonson must not be forgotten. He was rooted in the English life of tavern and workshop in his life and in his art, besides being the friend of Selden and Lord Aubigny. We have to take into account "The Voyage" as well as the "Hymn to Diana," and remember the last line of "A Celebration of Charis." Dr. Leavis places the odes to himself at the central point, as showing us both the independent, forthright working dramatist and the learned Horatian who brought out his plays annotated in folio.

I disagree with Dr. Leavis about the odes. "The racy personal force" and the "weighty and assertive personal assurance" are indeed present. The poems are eminently successful in the sense that they communicate their content without hesitation or vagueness. One can accept and applaud the fiercely contemptuous satire on dullness and ill will, but the final effect, I think, embarrasses still, as it seems to have embarrassed the "Tribe" and as the author in person had earlier embarrassed Drummond of Hawthornden. These odes are too personal and self-regarding. It is not the self-pity of a Shelley that is forced upon us, but self-assertion and unseemly pride:

'Twere simple fury still thyselfe to waste
 On such as have no taste....
'Tis crowne enough to vertue still, her owne
 applause.

This is not redeemed by the finer aspiration of:

Strike that disdaine-full heate
Throughout, to their defeate,
As curious fooles, and envious of thy straine,
May, blushing, sweare no palsey's in thy braine.

Though Cartwright, Randolph and Cleveland approved, one can sympathize with that excellent literary critic, Thomas Carew, when he expostulates:

'Tis true (dear Ben) thy just chastizing hand
Hath fixed upon the sotted Age a brand
To their swolne pride, and empty scribbling due ...
      ... but if thou bind,
By Citie, or by Gavell-kind,
In equall shares thy love on all thy race,
We may distinguish of their sexe and place;
Though one hand form them and though one brain
  strike
Souls into all, they are not all alike.
Why should the follies then of this dull age
Draw from thy Pen such an immodest rage,
As seems to blast thy (else immortall) Bayes,
When thine owne hand proclaims thy ytch of praise?
The wiser world doth greater Thee confesse
Than all men else, than Thyself only lesse.

Along with his mastery of the irregular Donnean couplet, Carew shows here a fineness of feeling and a regard for his poetic father, a polish of tone and an integrity of character, which represent all that was best in the class and way of life from which he came. Carew feels that the great intellectual leader has been ungentlemanly in a very deep sense; that ideal demanded a measure of humility; it was something rooted in the traditional code and which became obliterated in the more superficial, if more formally polite, Augustan age. In an ode on the same theme, not published until the present century, Jonson expresses a proud but far more admirable attitude towards the public:

Yet since the bright and wise
    Minerva deignes
Uppon this humbled earth to cast hir eyes,
   Wee'l rip our ritchest veynes
And once more strike the Eare of tyme with those
 fresh straynes:
    As shall besides delight
    And Cuninge of their grounde
Give cause to some of wonder, some despight;
But unto more despaire to imitate their sounde....

   Cast reverence if not feare
   Throughout their generall brests
And by their taking let it once appeare
Who worthie come, who not, to be witts Pallace guests.

However, the point to be emphasized is that Jonson at his best has a superlatively civilized tone, and it was, in fact, in him that Carew found models for the expression of such a tone in poetry. In Jonson it springs, of course, mainly from his classical culture, that culture which Carew and his class shared in a way corresponding to Jonson's participation in the social activities which produced the manners and the tone of their world. The tone which issues in Jonson's poetry from this double source is best exemplified in the following ode:

    High-spirited friend,
    I send nor Balmes, nor Cor'sives to your wound,
    Your fate hath found
A gentler, and more agile hand, to tend
The Cure of that, which is but corporall,
And doubtful Dayes, (which were nam'd Criticall,)
  Have made their fairest flight,
  And now are out of sight.
Yet doth some wholesome Physick for the mind,
   Wrapt in this paper lie,
Which in the taking if you misapply
                              You are unkind.

   Your covetous hand,
Happy in that faire honour it hath gain'd
   Must now be rayn'd.
True valour doth her owne renowne command
In one full Action; nor have you now more
To doe, then to be husband of that store.
   Thinke but how deare you bought
This same which you have caught,
Such thoughts wil make you more in love with truth.
   'Tis wisdom, and that high
For men to use their fortune reverently,
                               Even in youth.

This is no mere pindaric experiment. To whoever is addressed Jonson is giving extremely intimate personal advice, analysing a situation and a character instead of writing a conventional epithalamium, but his delicate movement and hesitating phrases, using the opportunities of the formal pattern, keep it free of all suggestion of patronage or importunity. There is great strength in the total effect of mature wisdom. Jonson is appealing to an ideal of human dignity and reasonable behaviour held in common with his reader which inspires frankness and at the same time sincere mutual respect. The ultimate basis is again at the old idea of courtesy. This was a quality of the spirit which made it possible to consider serious moral matters in a social context without losing sight of their seriousness or doing anything in what would later be called "bad form." This ode by itself seems to me a refutation of Professor Herford's opinion that Jonson "for all his generous warmth lacked the finer graces of familiarity." It has both.

The wit of Jonson, like that of Donne, manifests itself in many ways. As an intellectual force it has a disciplinary and clarifying rather than a free-ranging and elaborating effect, but the relationship between the two poets is shown in Jonson's admiration for Donne and in the common features of that group of elegies whose authorship has long been in dispute between them. In discussing the more social aspect of Jonson's wit, the tone that he handed on to his "sons," usually in the form of an economy and polish of technique, I think that one can claim that these "finer graces" form one of Jonson's great qualities as a poet. "High-spirited friends ...": and "Fair friend ..." that elegant, but closely reasoned and firmly phrased lyric, equally expressive of his distinctive classical urbanity, together give us the quintessence of Jonson's attitude towards his friends and fellow poets, his patrons and patronesses. It is not the formal decorum of a large polite world--such, in any case, did not yet exist--but one feels it to be, I think, the tone of small circles in which aristocratic and cultivated people knew each other intimately. One can back up these deductions by a short survey of Jonson's occasional and certain other verses and of imitations by his "sons." They have the kind of tone I have just noted, and they describe the life that contributed to produce that tone. Beside these poems much of the social verse, even of Pope, sounds brassy. One knows that life at Whitehall, particularly in the reign of James I, was often disorederly, not to say squalid, and that sports and pastimes on the best ordered country estate were rough and cruel, but the refinement was also there, sometimes in the same people. In the poetry it is preserved for ever.

The epigram, "Inviting a Friend to Supper," is admirable social verse, besides being a document of the Jonson world, an offering of scholarly conversation with simple but good food and wine--Virgil and Tacitus with canary. A long series of epigrams and complimentary verses sketch in the type of men with whom Jonson liked to associate and the qualities that for him made up a civilized life. "An Epistle, answering one that asked to be Sealed of the Tribe of BEN" is unfortunately little more than satire on smart London life and the masques of Inigo Jones. "An Epistle to a Friend, to persuade him to the Warres" with its finely realized opening:

Wake, friend, from forth thy Lethargie: the Drum
Beates brave and loude in Europe and bids come
All that dare rowse...

is again mainly negative, a vigorous and racy denunciation of loose sexual morality and excessive drinking, but the ending sets up a heroic ideal of moral and physical valour, temperate, stoical and devout, the very reverse of the Renaissance braggart:

Goe, quit 'hem all. And take along with thee
Thy true friends wishes, Colby, which shall be
That thine be just, and honest; that thy Deeds
Not wound thy conscience, when thy body bleeds;
That thou dost all things more for truth, then glory
And never but for doing wrong be sory
That by commanding first thyselfe, thou mak'st
Thy person fit for any charge thou tak'st;
That fortune never make thee to complaine,
But what shee gives, thou dar'st give her againe;
That whatsoever face thy fate puts on,
Thou shrinke or start not, but be always one;
That thou thinke nothing great, but what is good,
And from that thought strive to be understood.
So, 'live so dead, thou wilt preserve a fame
Still pretious, with the odour of thy name.
And last, blaspheme not, we did never heare
Man thought the valianter, 'cause he durst sweare....

The two poems to the brilliant young Earl of Newcastle, exalting his horsemanship and his fencing, show a kindred enthusiasm. As Professor Herford remarks, admiration for virility "gives eloquence to his verse." Vincent Corbet stands for graver and gentler virtues:

   His Mind was pure, and neatly kept,
   As were his Nourceries; and swept
So of uncleannesse, or offence,
That never came ill odour thence:
   And add his Actions unto these,
   They were as specious as his Trees.
'Tis true, he could not reprehend,
His very Manners taught to 'mend,
   They were so even, grave, and holy;
   No stubbornnesse so stiffe, nor folly
To licence ever was so light
As twice to trespasse in his sight,
   His looks would so correct it, when
   It chid the vice, yet not the Men.
Much from him I confesse I wonne,
And more, and more, I should have done,
But that I understood him scant.
Now I conceive him by my want....

The poet's self-criticism emphasizes the respectfulness of his attitude and deserves particular notice in this essay. In addressing Selden his verse is less distinguished, but it must be quoted for the attitude to himself shown in:

Though I confesse (as every Muse hath err'd,
and mine not least)...

and for the conception of scholarship and the literary life described:

Stand forth my Object, then, you that have beene
Ever at home: yet, have all Countries seene;
And like a Compasse keeping one foot still
Upon your Center, doe your circle fill
Of generall knowledge; watch'd men, manners too,
Heard what times past have said, seene what ours doe:
Which Grace shall I make love to first? your skill,
Or faith in things? or is't your wealth and will
T'instruct and teach? or your unweary'd paine
Of Gathering? Bountie'in pouring out againe?
What fables have you vext! what truth redeem'd!
Antiquities search'd! Opinions dis-esteem'd!
Impostures branded! and Authorities urg'd! ...

In writing to Drayton, Jonson notes that they have not followed the custom of exchanging verses and continues:

And, though I now begin, 'tis not to rub
Hanch against Hanch, or raise a rhyming Club
About the towne.

"Butter reviewers," said Mr. Nixon to the young Hugh Selwyn Mauberley.

This quotation rounds off my references to Jonson's verses on himself as a writer and his relation to the literary world. One does not take everything in seventeenth-century commendatory verses at its face value. Drayton was no Homer, but it is worth studying what Jonson says--and, more important, does not say--about the lesser figures whom he honours. The most interesting lines in the eulogy of Shakespeare are those calling upon the shades of the Greek tragedians. Jonson's critical acumen here breaks through all his own and the age's prejudices. Sir Henry Savile was somewhat above the Jonson circle and receives a formal epigram, but the ideals admired as embodied in him correspond to those of the epistle to Selden, literary skill joined to integrity of character--a very solemn conception of the philosopher and the gentleman, to recall deliberately Addison's famous phrase:

We need a man that knows the severall graces
  Of historie, and how to apt their places;
Where brevitie, where splendour, and where height,
  Where sweetnesse is requir'd and where weight;
We need a man, can speake of the intents,
  The councells, actions, orders and events
Of state, and censure them we need his pen
   Can write the things, the causes, and the men.
But most we need his faith (and all have you)
   That dares nor write things false, nor hide
 things true.

One sees in these poems the positive moral and intellectual values which are more usually merely implicit in the plays: young Wittipol in the Devil is an Ass emerges as a personality of some solidity and life, but the majestic Cicero is never an adequate dramatic foil to the political gangsters in Catiline. In the poems one can observe, described and felt in the texture of the poetry itself, the cultural ideals that gave Jonson his assurance and intellectual dignity and at the same time his feeling for civilized personal relationships. His tone only fails him when personal bitterness or excessive indignation causes him to lose his bearings and his sense of fellowship in the republic of letters.

Jonson was, however, conscious of a larger community than that meeting at the Devil Tavern with connections at the universities. Some of his finest verse celebrates this social scene and the characters who inhabited it and, in fact, led the nation. Courthope remarks that in this mode "Jonson is unequalled by any English poet, except perhaps Pope at his best." We know from the plays what he thought of the projectors and of other pioneers of nascent capitalism. He held older ideals of social justice and responsibility. He saw the values he believed in embodied in certain noblemen and squires, and in statesmen and lawgivers such as Burleigh and Sir Edward Coke. The greatest document, and also the finest poem, in this connection is, of course, "To Penshurst":

Thou are not, PENSHURST, built for envious show,
     Of touch, or marble, nor canst boast a row
Of polish'd pillars, or a roofe of gold:
     Thou hast no lanthorne, whereof tales are told;
Or stayre, or courts; but stand'st an ancient pile,
     And these grudg'd at, are reverenc'd the while.

It is a medieval house--it happens to have been built about the year of Chaucer's birth. For Jonson a new genius presides over it from:

That taller tree, which of a nut was set,
  At his great birth, where all the Muses met.

It was now the seat of Sir Philip Sidney's brother, and Sidney appears several times in similar poems as the representative of civilization. He brings the culture of Il Cortegiano to bear on the more active traditional idea of the gentleman expressed in, say, Langland's:

Kings and knightes . sholde kepe it by resoun,
Riden and rappe down . the reumes aboute,
And taken transgressores . and tyen hem faste,
Till treuthe had ytermyned . her trespas to ende,
That is the profession appertly . that appendeth for knightes,
And nought to fasten on Fryday . in fyvescore wynter,
But holden with him and with her . that wolden al treuthe,
And never leue hem for loue . ne for lacchying of syluer.
             [Piers Plowman. B., Passus I, 94-101]

Penshurst is surrounded by all the beauty and wealth of nature, but it is much more than a house:

And though thy walls be of the countrey stone,
   They'are rear'd with no mans ruine, no mans
  grone,
There's none, that dwell about them, wish them
  downe....
Where comes no guest, but is allow'd to eate,
   Without his feare, and of thy lords own meate:
Where the same beere, and bread, and self-same wine,
   That is his Lordships, shall be also mine.
And I not faine to sit (as some, this day,
   At great mens tables) and yet dine away.

Jonson sees it is an active centre of a patriarchal community in which duties and responsibilities are as important as rights, and of a way of life in which all classes, including the poet--Jonson intimates that for him and for others such hospitality is becoming a thing of the past--yet live in close personal contact. "To Sir Robert Wroth" describes a very similar scene at Durance with rather more emphasis on the sporting life of the great estate--an aspect less likely to be forgotten [quotes II. 21-58]. The Golden Age is thus naturalized in the hall of an English mansion in a real agricultural setting, and we end with an almost Homeric scene of feasting, in which bounty and humanity have temporarily overthrown the whole social hierarchy. Other contemporary moralists and commentators lamented that this old-fashioned "house-keeping" was dying out. In Selden's Table Talk the account of the Hall is significantly in the past tense:

The Hall was the Place where the great Lord used to eat, (wherefore else were Halls made so big?), where he saw all his Servants and Tenants about him. He eat not in private, except in time of sickness: when he became a thing cooped up, all his greatness was spilled. Nay, the King himself used to eat in the Hall, and his Lords sat with him, and then he understood Men.

Inigo's Jones's Double Cube Room at Wilton, say, would not have lent itself to such a life. It may sound cheap to say that Jonson made the most of two worlds; he certainly wrote at a time when a highly cultivated society still kept in close contact with the community which supported it and still preserved traditions which encouraged it to maintain this kind of give and take, social, economic and cultural.

Nevertheless, despite changing architecture and changing habits of life, the ideal persisted. Jonson initiated an extremely interesting line of what, borrowing a modern analogy, one may call documentary poetry. It deserves a brief exploration. The most obvious imitations of his poems are Carew's "To Saxham" and "To my Friend G. N., from Wrest." No one is going to claim that Carew shared his master's powers of social observation. The first poem is a light and fanciful thing; the other, less well known, which gives a detailed picture of the scene and of the social organization represented there, illustrates a number of points already made [quotes II. 19-24, 31-44, 61-69]. The picture of the wine-press carries us away from the thoroughly English scene; it shows the Cavalier taking his eye off the object in order to classicize. But the mere fact that a man like Carew, derivative as he clearly is, recognized the existence--and the value--of such a scheme of things of the point of writing about it shows that the rather artificial culture of Charles I's court with its extravagant masques and its Italian pictures and Flemish painters had also not lost touch with its roots. Vandyck perhaps overdoes the elegance and refinement in his portrait of Carew and Killigrew, but when William Dobson paints Endymion Porter he shows us a florid country squire with beautiful laces and also dog and gun, leaning on a relief of muses and with a classical bust of a poet in the background; it is a superb and highly revealing work. Similarly Herrick in The Hock-Cart starts on the shores of the Mediterranean and then hurries home [quotes II 1-6, 26-29, 32-39]. As a whole it is, with its colloquial language, a vivid picture of a Devon harvest festival, and Herrick has suggested, in the reference to the plough, the deeper meaning. Lovelace shows us that he was something of a naturalist as well as a chivalrous Kentish squire in those fanciful and moralized descriptions of insects and in "The Falcon" for whom he laments:

Ah Victory, uphap'ly wonne!
Weeping and Red is set the Sun,
Whilst the whole Fields floats in one tear,
And all the Air doth mourning wear:
Close-hooded all thy kindred come
To pay their Vows upon thy Tombe;
The Hobby and the Musket too,
Do march to take their last adieu.

The Lanner and the Lanneret,
The Colours bear as Banneret;
The Goshawk and her Tercel, rous'd
With Tears attend thee as new bows'd,
All these are in their dark array
Led by the various Herald-Jay.

But thy eternal name shall live
Whilst Quills from Ashes fame reprieve,
Whilst open stands Renown's wide dore,
And Wings are left on which to soar:
Doctor Robbin, the Prelate Pye
And the poetick Swan shall dye,
Only to sing thy Elegie.

Whatever personal significance this may have had for Lovelace--it would seem to express a haunting regret for lost causes--its interest for us in the present context lies in his charming blend of the gentleman's knowledge of field sports and heraldry with poetic traditions--one thinks inevitably of the "Parlement of Foules." The idiom of these poems is, as Sir Herbert Grierson has put it, "that of an English gentleman of the best type, natural, simple, occasionally careless, but never diverging into vulgar colloquialism ... or into conventional, tawdry splendour." Several contributors to Jonsonus Virbius make plain the influence of Jonson in favour of "right and natural language." This is a stream of English poetry, the gentleman writing as a gentleman about his position and responsibilities, his interests and pleasures, which, if we omit Byron who is in any case often both vulgar and tawdry, now for better or worse dries up.

Early Stuart governments made several attempts to arrest the decay of the patriarchal household and the drift to London. Sir Richard Fanshawe wrote "An Ode, upon His Majesties Proclamation in the Year 1630. Commanding the Gentry to reside upon their Estates in the Countrey." He sees what Jonson sees, and expresses the anxiety of those who realized how times were changing:

Nor let the Gentry grudge to go
Into those places whence they grew,
But think them blest they may do so
                  Who would pursue.

The smoky glory of the Town,
That may go till his native Earth,
And by the shining Fire sit down
                  Of his own hearth....

The Countrey too ev'n chops for rain:
You that exhale it by your power,
Let the fat drops fall down again
                  In a full shower....

One thus sees embodied in verse of considerable distinction a picture of a social order, its natural setting and its occupations, and a sense of some of the dangers threatening it. The fact that it was written by men of very varying distinction of character and intelligence shows how widely the ideals expressed were held. That they were not always lived up to one may take for granted, though the enthusiasm of the verse seems to be more than merely literary. And as regards cultural standards there must have been, for a small number of houses like Penshurst, Wrest, Wilton, Great Tew or Bolsover, a very large number like that of Mrs. Henry Hastings or of far less individuality and long forgotten. The scheme of knightly prowess, literary and musical interests and public spirit set forth by Peacham in The Compleat Gentleman was not universally followed; he bitterly reproaches those who waste their substance in London, "appearing but as Cuckoes in the Spring, one time in the yeare to the Countrey and their tenants, leaving the care of keeping good houses at Christmas, to the honest Yeomen of the Countrey." However, one finds in this verse evidence of a climate of social opinion and, more important, feelings and habits which, with all their imperfections, were civilized in the narrower artistic sense, and also in the wider sense of having a foundation of social justice. This world provided Jonson with his larger milieu, or rather milieux, for its being made up of small groups is an important feature; he had lived in the house of Lord Aubigny and was a visitor at several others. One does not find this scene in English poetry after the Restoration. Though English noblemen never became, as Fanshawe feared they might, mere court sycophants or men about town, manners in the widest sense changed in the era of the coffee-house. Life became more formally decorous. Pope, in the "Epistle to Boyle," presents an ideal vision comparable to Jonson's:

His Father's Acres who enjoys in peace,
Or makes his Neighbours glad if he increase:
Whose chearful Tenants bless their yearly toil,
Yet to their Lord owe more than to the soil;
Whose ample Lawns are not asham'd to feed
The milky heifer and deserving steed;
Whose rising Forests, not for pride or show,
But future Buildings, future Navies grow:
Let his plantations stretch from down to down,
First shade a Country, and then raise a Town.

But fine as it is, and central to Pope's work, it does not imply so intimate and personal a relationship between the classes as the earlier poetry. The whole domestic layout had altered as ideas changed, and the lord was benevolent from the portico or the church steps rather than from the dais in the hall. Nevertheless one finds the spirit still alive in the age of "Squire Allworthy," of Coke of Norfolk and of Dr. Johnson's Club, and it was the tradition of culture that died first.

It need hardly be said that Jonson used an independent tone towards his patrons--except when he was in extreme financial straits. He had opinions about his rightful place at table in an age when all knew their own degrees and had their rightful places by birth or merit; "my Lord," he says that he said to the Earl of Salisbury, evidently a more remote patron than Sir William Sidney, "you promised I should dine with you, but I do not." "An Epistle to Sir Edward Sacvile, now Earl of Dorset" treats, after Seneca, of the question of patronage and gratitude:

You cannot doubt, but I, who freely know
This Good from you, as freely will it owe;
And though my fortune humble me, to take
The smallest courtesies with thankes, I make
Yet choyce from whom I take them; and would shame
To have such doe me good, I durst not name:
They are the Noblest benefits, and sinke
Deepest in Man, of which when he doth thinke,
The memorie delights him more, from whom
Then what he hath receiv'd. Gifts stinke from some,
They are so long a coming, and so hard;
Where any Deed is fore't, the Grace is mard.

He goes on to analyse the characters of niggardly and ungracious patrons and those who sponge upon them. Jonson thought he knew who deserved his respect and why. In Timber he defines his conception of manners by implication, in the act of defining Courtesy in its euphemistic sense:

Nothing is a courtesie, unless it be meant us; and that friendly, and lovingly. Wee owe no thankes to Rivers, that they carry our boats ... It is true, some man may receive a Courtesie, and not know it; but never any man received it from him, that knew it not.... No: The doing of Courtesies aright, is the mixing of the respects for his owne sake, and for mine. He that doth them meerly for his owne sake, is like one that feeds his Cattell to sell them: he hath his Horse well durst for Smithfield.

Good manners for Jonson were something that, while adorning the upper tiers of the social hierarchy, should yet permeate through it. He expected the same kind of consideration from a patronas he showed towards his "high-spirited friend," and he admired similar qualities in his friends in every sense.

The grace of Jonson's manner comes out in his addresses to noble ladies, especially the Countesses of Rutland, Montgomery, and Bedford, and Lady Mary Wroth. A consideration of them will form a conclusion to this study, for, though he flatters splendidly, he does not cringe. There were certain fixed viewpoints in Jonson's outlook.

He praises his patronesses partly for their beauty and their taste, partly for deeper qualities: He writes to Lady Mary Wroth with full Renaissance exuberance:

Madame, had all antiquities beene lost,
   All historie seal'd up, and fables crost;
That we had left us, nor by time, nor place,
   Least mention of a Nymph, a Muse, a Grace,
But even their names were to be made a-new,
   Who could not but create them all, from you?
He, that but saw you weare the wheaten hat,
   Would call you more than CERES, if not that:
And, durst in shepherds tyre, who would not say:
   You were the bright OENONE, FLORA, or May?
If dancing, all would cry th'Idalian Queene,
   Were leading forth the Graces on the greene:
And, armed for the chase, so bare her brow
   DIANA alone, so hit, and hunted so.

Lady Montgomery is a new Susanna, and in Lady Bedford he bows before qualities of character which belong peculiarly to his own vision [quotes Epigram LXXVI]. This beautifully polished epigram is a suitable vehicle for the presentation of a vision of aristocratic elegance, charm, virtue and intelligence--one notices the emphatic and subtle rhythm of the third quatrain--and the poet's admiration for them. One is reminded of the undirected, and possibly therefore more perfect, "Elegie":

Though Beautie be the Marke of Praise,
   And yours of whom I sing be such
   As not the Word can praise too much,
Yet is't your vertue now I raise,

where the sense of the rarity and fragility of such qualities is delicately realized in the cadence of:

His falling Temples you have rear'd,
    The withered Garlands tane away;
    His Altars kept from the Decay,
That envie wish'd, and Nature fear'd.

The dangers and difficulties besetting his ideals of the lady are magnificently argued out in "Not to know vice at all ..." and "To the World. A farewell for a Gentlewoman, vertuous and noble":

No, I doe know that I was borne
   To age, misfortune, sicknesse, griefe:
But I will beare these, with that scorne,
   As shall not need thy false reliefe.

This is the simple but dignified Stoicism which conditions of the age made both necessary and desirable. Jonson admired it in others and possessed it himself. This moral strength and perception, along with his erudition and conscious art, discoursed on in Timber, and an ever-present sense of the whole gamut of living, combine with the tone of the Jacobean noble household, "curteous, facile, sweet," where in season "freedome doth with degree dispense," to support the brilliance of the famous lyrics. Like his gentle-woman he could say,

Nor for my peace will I goe farre,
   As wandrers doe, that still doe rome,
But make my strengths, such as they are,
   Here in my bosome, and at home.

The end of it all is realized with unerring taste in such things as:

Would'st thou heare, what man can say
  In a little? Reader, stay.
Under-neath this stone doth lye.
   As much beautie, as could dye:
Which in life did harbour give
   To more vertue, then doth live.
If, at all, shee had a fault
    Leave it buryed in this vault.
One name was ELIZABETH,
   Th' other let it sleepe with death:
Fitter, where it dyed, to tell,
    Then that it liv'd at all. Farewell.

I am brought back to my starting point, the "Elegie on the Lady Jane Pawlet," through which the urbanity of Jonson links up directly with that of Pope, Jonson thought "couplets be the bravest sort of verses, especially when they are broken like hexameters," and he has an important place in their development, but, as regards regularity, he broke them with a caesura in varied places, and the following lines from one of his livelier occasional poems are worth remembering:

To hit in angles, and to clash with time:
   As all defence, or offence, were a chime!
I hate such measur'd, give me metall'd fire....

He liked a varied movement in poetry as well as fencing. The "Elegie," like the other poems in couplets, bears this out:

I doe obey you, Beautie! for in death
     You seeme a faire one! O that you had breath,
To give your shade a name! Stay, stay, I feele
      A horrour in mee! all my blood is steele!
Stiffe! starke! My joynts 'gainst one another knock!
      Whose Daughter? ha? Great Savage of the
   Rock? ...

Her Sweetnesse, Softnesse, her faire Courtesie,
     Her wary guardes, her wise simplicitie,
Were like a ring of Vertues, 'bout her set,
     And pietie the Center, where all met.
A reverend State she had, an awful Eye,
     A dazling, yet inviting, Majestie:
What Nature, Fortune, Institution, Fact
     Could summe to a perfection, was her Act!
How did she leave the world? with what contempt?
     Just as she in it liv'd! and so exempt
From all affection! when they urg'd the Cure
     Of her disease, how did her soule assure
Her suffrings, as the body had beene away!
     And to the Torturers (her Doctors) say,
Stick on your Cupping-glasses, feare not, put
     Your hottest Causticks to, burne, lance, or cut:
'Tis but a body which you can torment,
     And I, into the world, all Soule, was sent!
Then comforted her Lord! and blest her Sonne!
     Chear'd her faire Sisters in her race to runne!
With gladness temper'd her sad Parents teares!
     Made her friends joyes to get above their
  feares!
And, in her last act, taught the Standers-by,
     With admiration, and applause to die!
Let angels sing her glories, who can call
     Her spirit home, to her originall!...

It combines a slightly na�ve declamatory manner at the start with Jonson's characteristic blend of urbanity, shrewd observation and simplicity in the description of the Marchioness's personality and an anticipation of the more formal high decorum of the Augustans towards the end; but no Augustan would have written her words to the doctors, overflowing as they are with "enthusiasm." Here in a lady at the top of the social hierarchy one notes the hierarchy of virtues. They correspond fairly to the qualities of men we have already seen portrayed. Together Jonson's lords and ladies form a brilliant, dignified, benevolent and gracious society, "dazling, yet inviting." We can see from the poems, and other evidence corroborates, that there was no impassable gap between the world of the poet's vision and Jacobean and Caroline England. "Eupheme" on the Lady Venetia Digby is usually held up as an example of hyperbole; a passage in a quiet key on the character of the Lady, whether true to life in this particular case or not, shows, with a characteristic note of irony, a picture of deportment which would be appropriate to any of the scenes or characters discussed:

                All Nobilitie,
     (But pride, that schisme of incivilitie)
She had, and it became her! she was fit
     T'have knowne no envy, but by suffring it!
She had a mind as calme, as she was faire;
     Not tost or troubled with light Lady-aire;
But, kept an even gate, as some streight tree
     Mov'd by the wind, so comely moved she.
And by the awfull manage of her Eye
     She swaid all bus'nesse in the Familie!

Jonson himself, as we have seen at the start, was sometimes guilty of "that schisme of incivilities." He probably needed the stimulus of good company to bring out the full refinement of his literary culture. But it is brought out over and over again, and was, and is, a model of its kind. It is impossible finally to separate the qualities presented in the poems from the poet's attitude towards them; social manner and manner are infectious and the one seems to have evoked the other. We should need more biographical information than we possess to take the matter further but I do not think it is base to attribute to Jonson what might be called poetic "party manners."

One cannot sum up an achievement such as Jonson's in a word. I have only touched in passing on his trenchancy and seriousness as a satirist and his strength and delicacy as a lyric poet. I wanted to deal at some length with his tone and accent because, in considering the meaning of wit, I believe that, though it changed from an intellectual to a social spirit as the century wore on, nevertheless a social spirit of a clear and peculiarly noble kind was present in poetry from the start and that this spirit is exemplified particularly in Ben Jonson. His poetry, even more than his plays, links seventeenth-century culture and the polite civilization of the Augustans to the better features of the medieval social order and to the half-religious ideal of Courtesy.

Source: Geoffrey Walton, "The Tone of Ben Jonson's Poetry," in Ben Jonson and the Cavalier Poets: Authoritative Texts, Criticism, edited by Hugh MacLean, W. W. Norton & Company, 1974, pp. 479-96. Reprinted in Poetry Criticism, Vol. 17.