Page:Grierson Herbert - First Half of the Seventeenth Century.djvu/112

92 in every line, in the coarsest outbursts and the most sustained speeches, the labour of a perhaps too conscientious artist, and the defective harmony inevitable in verse superinduced upon what has been originally drafted in prose.

The result of Jonson's definitely formed and resolutely pursued purpose was at first apparently—as is usual in such cases—an outburst of hostility, which his arrogant temper did little to allay, or rather much to provoke. Every Man in his Humour is a comparatively genial play. The less satirically drawn characters are not unamiable—the young men who collect and exhibit "humourists," their old-school father, merry Cob, and genial Justice Clements. The fools themselves evoke nothing stronger than laughter and contempt. But apparently the hostility awakened by the new departure, and by the combative tone of the Prologue, irritated the poet's own scornful humour, with the result of intensifying his arrogance and hardening his style. Every Man out of his Humour (1599) was hurled at the head of its audience furnished with an induction and running comment, to teach them the proper end of comedy—what to admire, and why. Probability, the easy elaboration and interest of the story, are all lost sight of. Everything is subordinated to the vivid and detailed presentation of a set of characters quite too feeble and lacking in interest to justify the storm of hatred and scorn with which they are overwhelmed. In Cynthia's Revels (1600), directed generally against the affectations of court life and speech, but including, it