No truth of excellence was ever seen But bore the venom of the vulgar’s spleen,
—even the violences of this great and haughty spirit must pale beside the more desperate violences of the dramatist who commended his play to the public in the famous line,
By God, ’tis good, and if you like’t, you may.
This stormy passion of arrogant independence disturbs the serenity of atmosphere necessary for creative art. A greater than Jonson donned the suppliant’s robes, like Coriolanus, and with the inscrutable honeyed smile about his lips begged for the “most sweet voices” of the journeymen and gallants who thronged the Globe Theatre. Only once does the wail of anguish escape him—
Alas! ’tis true, I have gone here and there, And made myself a motley to the view, Gored mine own thoughts, sold cheap what is most dear.
Thence comes it that my name receives a brand, And almost thence my nature is subdued To what it works in, like the dyer’s hand, Pity me then, and wish I were renewed.
Modern vulgarity, speaking through the mouths of Shakesperian commentators, is wont to interpret these lines as a protest against the contempt wherewith Elizabethan society regarded the professions of playwright and actor. We are asked to conceive that Shakespeare humbly desires the pity of his bosom friend because he is not put on the same level of social estimation with a brocaded gull or a prosperous stupid goldsmith of the Cheap. No, it is a cry, from the depth of his nature, for forgiveness because he has sacrificed a little on the altar of popularity. Jonson would have boasted that he never made this sacrifice. But he lost the calm of his temper and the clearness of his singing voice, he degraded his magnanimity by allowing it to engage in street-brawls, and he endangered the sanctuary of the inviolable soul.
At least these great artists of the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries are agreed upon one thing, that the public, even in its most gracious mood, makes an ill task-master for the man of letters. It is worth the pains to ask why, and to attempt to show how much of an author’s literary quality is involved in his attitude towards his audience. Such an inquiry will take us, it is true, into bad company, and exhibit the vicious, the fatuous, and the frivolous posturing to an admiring crowd. But style is a property of all written and printed matter, so that to track it to its causes and origins is a task wherein literary criticism may profit by the humbler aid of anthropological research.