The World's Greatest Books [Volumes 1-15, 17-20]

Ben Jonson was a genuine Englishman, big and coarsely framed, combative, proud, often morose, prone to strain splenitic imaginations. His knowledge was vast. In an age of great scholars he is one of the best classics of his time. Other poets for the most part are visionaries; Jonson is all but a logician. Whatever he undertakes, whatever be his faults, haughtiness, rough-handling, predilection for morality and the past, he is never little or commonplace. Nearly all his work consists of comedies, not sentimental and fanciful as Shakespeare's, but satirical, written to represent and correct follies and vices. Even when he grew old his imagination remained abundant and fresh. He is the brother of Shakespeare.

Shakespeare

Only this great age could have cradled such a child as Shakespeare. What soul! What extent of action, and what sovereignty of an unique faculty! What diverse creations, and what persistence of the same impress! Look now. Do you not see the poet behind the crowd of his creations? They have all shown somewhat of him. Ready, impetuous, impassioned, delicate, his genius is pure imagination, touched more vividly and by slighter things than ours. Hence, his style, blooming with exuberant images, loaded with exaggerated metaphors. An extraordinary species of mind, all-powerful, excessive, equally master of the sublime and the base, the most creative that ever engaged in the exact copy of the details of actual existence, in the dazzling caprice of fancy, in the profound complications of superhuman passions; a nature inspired, superior to reason, extreme in joy and pain, abrupt of gait, stormy and impetuous in its transports!

Shakespeare images with copiousness and excess; he spreads metaphors profusely over all he writes; it is a series of painting which is unfolded in his mind, picture on picture, image on image, he is forever copying the strange and splendid visions which are heaped up within him. Such an imagination must needs be vehement. Every metaphor is a convulsion. Shakespeare's style is a compound of curious impressions. He never sees things tranquilly. Like a fiery and powerful horse, he bounds but cannot run. He flies, we creep. He is obscure and original beyond all the poets of his or any other age—the most immoderate of all violaters of language, the most marvellous of all creators of souls. The critic is lost in Shakespeare as in an immense town. He can only describe a few monuments and entreat the reader to imagine the city.

The Christian Renaissance

Following the pagan came the Christian Renaissance born of the Reformation, a new birth in harmony with the genius of the Germanic peoples. It must be admitted that the Reformation entered England by a side door. It was established when Henry VIII. permitted the English Bible to be published. England had her book. Hence have sprung much of the English language and half of the English manners; to this day the country is Biblical. After the Bible the book most widely-read in England is the Pilgrim's Progress by John Bunyan. It is a manual of devotion for the use of simple folk. In it we hear a man of the people speaking to the people, who would render intelligible to all the terrible doctrine of damnation and salvation. Allegory is natural to Bunyan. He employs it from necessity. He only grasps truth when it is made simple by images. His work is allegorical, that it may be intelligible. Bunyan is a poet because he is a child. He has the freedom, the tone, the ease, the clearness of Homer; he is as close to Homer as an Anabaptist tinker could be to a heroic singer. He and Milton survived as the two last poets of the Reformation, oppressed and insulted, but their work continues without noise, for the ideal they raised was, after all, that which the time suggested and the race demanded.