The Sacred Wood: Essays on Poetry and CriticismEliot, T. S. (Thomas Stearns)
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The Sacred Wood: Essays on Poetry and Criticism
Eliot, T. S. (Thomas Stearns)
Criticism; Literature
The world they live in is a larger one. But small worlds—the worlds
which artists create—do not differ only in magnitude; if they are
complete worlds, drawn to scale in every part, they differ in kind also.
And Jonson’s world has this scale. His type of personality found its
relief in something falling under the category of burlesque or
farce—though when you are dealing with a _unique_ world, like his, these
terms fail to appease the desire for definition. It is not, at all
events, the farce of Molière: the latter is more analytic, more an
intellectual redistribution. It is not defined by the word “satire.”
Jonson poses as a satirist. But satire like Jonson’s is great in the end
not by hitting off its object, but by creating it; the satire is merely
the means which leads to the æsthetic result, the impulse which projects
a new world into a new orbit. In _Every Man in his Humour_ there is a
neat, a very neat, comedy of humours. In discovering and proclaiming in
this play the new genre Jonson was simply recognizing, unconsciously,
the route which opened out in the proper direction for his instincts.
His characters are and remain, like Marlowe’s, simplified characters;
but the simplification does not consist in the dominance of a particular
humour or monomania. That is a very superficial account of it. The
simplification consists largely in reduction of detail, in the seizing
of aspects relevant to the relief of an emotional impulse which remains
the same for that character, in making the character conform to a
particular setting. This stripping is essential to the art, to which is
also essential a flat distortion in the drawing; it is an art of
caricature, of great caricature, like Marlowe’s. It is a great
caricature, which is beautiful; and a great humour, which is serious.
The “world” of Jonson is sufficiently large; it is a world of poetic
imagination; it is sombre. He did not get the third dimension, but he
was not trying to get it.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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