MEMOIRS. CONVERSY>.TIONS AND DIARIES
533
motives behind this form of historical writing are felt to
be
un–
wholesome.
Drummond's
Conversations with Ben Jonson
are a very queer
moment in our literature. Still, surpassingly strange as these con–
versations are, they are extremely "English." They are brief--one
doesn't go too far in laboring to preserve even what such a man as
Ben Jonson said; people will think you have nothing else to do.
Their "manliness" and "objectivity" are great; nothing feminine nor
gushingly interested like Boswell is involved because Drummond
and Jonson did not even like each other! Drummond thought Jonson
"a great lover and praiser of himself, a contemner and scorner of
others," and was not disqualified as a disinterested recorder by even
so much as a high opinion of Jonson's literary work since he believed
this man "excelleth only in a translation." Jonson, as a guest, could
not proceed without hesitation to name what he thought of Drum–
mond and so confined himself to the mild grumble that his host's
verses "smelled too much of the Schools." It is not hard to imagine
what Jonson truly thought of Drummond when we read what he
had to say these evenings about absent contemporaries: Donne, for
not keeping the accent, deserved hanging, Daniel was jealous of him
[Jonson]; Drayton feared him; Beaumont "loved too much himself
and his own verses"; Raleigh employed the best wits in England to
write his history; Sir Philip Sidney had pimples; of
his
own wife,
well, "five years he had not bedded with her." Even if we did not
know Jonson to be a great and lovable genius, a profound and
generous critic elsewhere, we could say at least that his remarks
have a quality dear to us,
honesty.
Jonson is aware, with
his
violent
outspokenness, of a kind of need to remind the listener of
this
trait;
he says, "of all the styles he loved most to be named honest." Having
thus enlisted our certainty that he is no flatterer, he then, complex
being, falls into a terrible error: he says that of his honesty he "hath
one hundred letters so naming him." Mter this we are immediately
led back to a bit of sympathy for the irritated Drummond. A gentle–
man must right things in such unmanageable cases. These conversa–
tions are altogether weird.
The nearest thing in English to the Goncourts is De Quincey–
his extraordinary impressions of the Lake Poets, which could hardly
be excelled for style, brilliance of observation, skill in narration,
