Page:Grierson Herbert - First Half of the Seventeenth Century.djvu/231

Rh and what he has to say is altogether excellent—the first really valuable notes on style and composition which we have. Beginning with De Stylo, he has a complete essay on what he calls "Eloquentia," which covers prose composition as a whole, especially as supplemented by some notes on epistolary style. Laborious practice and judicious reading are the means of acquiring a good style, which consists, in Swift's phrase, of "proper words in proper places." "Ready writing makes not good writing, but good writing brings on ready writing." Such maxims are an index to Jonson's own practice. We recognise in them the author of the carefully ordered, closely knit, consciously elaborated comedies. He admires in Bacon what it was his own endeavour to attain to; and condemns in Shakespeare a facility he never himself enjoyed.

In many of his critical dogmata, it must be remembered, Jonson is simply reproducing classical and Italian precepts. In his ideal estimate of the poet, the importance he attaches to training (Exercitatio, Imitatio, Lectio) as well as "natural wit," his exaltation of Aristotle ("what other men did by chance or custom, he doth by reason"), his conception of the proper end of comedy, Jonson is the scholar and critic of the Renaissance. But, indeed, the Jonson of the Discoveries is throughout the Jonson of the plays and poems. There is the same high and courageous idealism, passing too readily into arrogant self-assertion, the same learning and industry, the same strength and fulness without charm of style.