Jonson himself speak, and in his preface to ‘Volpone’ tell us in his own noble prose what he thought of the average morality of his contemporary playwrights:—

‘For if men will impartially and not asquint look toward the offices and functions of a poet, they will easily conclude to themselves the impossibility of any man’s being a good poet without first being a good man.  He that is said to be able to inform young men to all good discipline, inflame grown men to all great virtues, keep old men in their best and supreme state, or, as they decline to childhood, recover them to their first strength; that comes forth the interpreter and arbiter of nature, a teacher of things divine no less than human, a master in manners and can alone (or with a few) effect the business of mankind; this, I take him, is no subject for pride and ignorance to exercise their railing rhetoric upon.  But it will here be hastily answered that the writers of these days are other things, that not only their manners but their natures are inverted, and nothing remaining of them of the dignity of poet but the abused name, which every scribe usurps; that now, especially in dramatick, or (as they term it) stage poetry, nothing but ribaldry, profanation, blasphemies, all licence of offence toward God and man is practised.  I dare not deny a great part of this (and I am sorry I dare not), because in some men’s abortive features (and would God they had never seen the light!) it is over true; but that all are bound on his bold adventure for hell, is a most uncharitable thought, and uttered, a more malicious slander.  For every particular I can (and from a most clear conscience) affirm that I have ever trembled to think toward the least profaneness, and have loathed the use of such foul and unwashed . . . [his expression is too strong for quotation] as is now made the food of the scene.’

It is a pity to curtail this splendid passage, both for its lofty ideal of poetry, and for its corroboration of the Puritan complaints against the stage; but a few lines on a still stronger sentence occurs:—

‘The increase of which lust in liberty, together with the present trade of the stage, in all their masculine interludes, what liberal soul doth not abhor?  Where nothing but filth of the mire is uttered, and that with such impropriety of phrase, such plenty of solecisms, such dearth of sense, so bold prolepses, such racked metaphors, with (indecency) able to violate the ear of a Pagan, and blasphemy to turn the blood of a Christian to water.’

So speaks Ben Jonson in 1605, not finding, it seems, play-writing a peaceful trade, or play-poets and play-hearers improving company.  After him we should say no further testimony on this unpleasant matter ought to be necessary.  He may have been morose, fanatical, exaggerative; but his bitter words suggest at least this dilemma.  Either they are true, and the play-house atmosphere (as Prynne says it was) that of Gehenna: or they are untrue, and the mere fruits of spite and envy against more successful poets.  And what does that latter prove, but that the greatest poet of his age (after Shakspeare has gone) was not as much esteemed as some poets whom we know to have been more filthy and more horrible than he? which, indeed, is the main complaint of Jonson himself.  It will be rejoined, of course, that he was an altogether envious man; that he envied Shakspeare, girded at his York and Lancaster plays, at ‘The Winter’s Tale’ and ‘The Tempest,’ in the prologue to ‘Every Man in his Humour’; and, indeed, Jonson’s writings, and those of many other playwrights, leave little doubt that stage rivalry called out the bitterest hatred and the basest vanity; and that, perhaps, Shakspeare’s great soul was giving way to the pettiest passions, when in ‘Hamlet’ he had his fling at the ‘aiery of children, little eyases, that cry out on the top of question, and are most tyrannically clapped for ’t.’  It may be that he was girding in return at Jonson, when he complained that ‘their writer did them wrong to make them complain against their own succession,’ i.e. against themselves, when ‘grown to common players.’  Be that as it may.  Great Shakspeare may have been unjust to only less great Jonson, as Jonson was to Shakspeare: but Jonson certainly is not so in all his charges.  Some of the faults which he attributes to Shakspeare are really faults.

At all events, we know that he was not unjust to the average of his contemporaries, by the evidence of the men’s own plays.  We know that the decadence of the stage of which he complains went on uninterruptedly after his time, and in the very direction which he pointed out.

On this point there can be no doubt; for these hodmen of poetry ‘made a wall in our father’s house, and the bricks are alive to testify unto this day.’  So that we cannot do better than give a few samples thereof, at least samples decent enough for modern readers, and let us begin, not with a hodman, but with Jonson himself.

Now, Ben Jonson is worthy of our love and respect, for he was a very great genius, immaculate or not; ‘Rare Ben,’ with all his faults.  One can never look without affection on the magnificent manhood of that rich free forehead, even though one may sigh over the petulance and pride which brood upon the lip and eyebrow,

‘Dowered with the hate of hate, the scorn of scorn,
The love of love.’

A Michael Angelo who could laugh, which that Italian one, one fancies, never could.  One ought to have, too, a sort of delicacy about saying much against him; for he is dead, and can make, for the time being at least, no rejoinder.  There are dead men whom one is not much ashamed to ‘upset’ after their death, because one would not have been much afraid of doing so when they were alive.  But ‘Rare Ben’ had terrible teeth, and used them too.  A man would have thought twice ere he snapt at him living, and therefore it seems somewhat a cowardly trick to bark securely at his ghost.  Nevertheless it is no unfair question to ask—Do not his own words justify the Puritan complaints?  But if so, why does he rail at the Puritans for making their complaints?  His answer would have been that they railed in ignorance, not merely at low art, as we call it now, but at high art and all art.  Be it so.  Here was their fault, if fault it was in those days.  For to discriminate between high art and low art they must have seen both.  And for Jonson’s wrath to be fair and just he must have shown them both.  Let us see what the pure drama is like which he wishes to substitute for the foul drama of his contemporaries; and, to bring the matter nearer home, let us take one of the plays in which he hits deliberately at the Puritans, namely the ‘Alchemist,’ said to have been first acted in 1610 ‘by the king’s majesty’s servants.’  Look, then, at this well-known play, and take Jonson at his word.  Allow that Ananias and Tribulation Wholesome are, as they very probably are, fair portraits of a class among the sectaries of the day: but bear in mind, too, that if this be allowed, the other characters shall be held as fair portraits also.  Otherwise, all must he held to be caricature; and then the onslaught on the Puritans vanishes into nothing, or worse.  Now in either case, Ananias and Tribulation are the best men in the play.  They palter with their consciences, no doubt: but they have consciences, which no one else in the play has, except poor Surly; and he, be it remembered, comes to shame, is made a laughing-stock, and ‘cheats himself,’ as he complains at last, ‘by that same foolish vice of honesty’: while in all the rest what have we but every form of human baseness?  Lovell, the master, if he is to be considered a negative character as doing no wrong, has, at all events, no more recorded of him than the noble act of marrying by deceit a young widow for the