Page:Grierson Herbert - First Half of the Seventeenth Century.djvu/120

100 Jonson lavished his most characteristic gifts—the power of weaving a play around a central idea, stores of accurate learning, fancy, and humour; while his experiments in lyrical measures of various kinds are interesting and frequently delightful, if not always altogether successful. The main end of each masque—the flattery of James and his family—is effected in a surprising variety of ways, and some of the masques are more than ingenious pieces of flattery. The Masque of Hymen, for example, is a magnificent piece of symbolic ritual; and some others, such as the Masque of Queens and Pleasure reconciled to Virtue, suggest that, with more space at his disposal and a worthier audience, Jonson might have elaborated a moral idea with some of the dignity and poetry of Comus. But James's courtiers cared more for transformation scenes, music, and dances than for Jonson's learning and morality. The greatest of seventeenth-century masques was an indictment of courtly adulation and sensuality.

The fragment of a pastoral drama which Jonson left behind him in The Sad Shepherd is full of feeling and poetry. For more of such work, regular in structure and not devoid of satire, yet at the same time romantic and poetic, one would be willing to forgo some of the strength and ingenuity which in The Silent Woman and The Alchemist fill us with admiration, yet leave us a little cold and fatigued—

"Non satis est pulchra esse poemata, dulcia sunto."

The very completeness with which Jonson achieved