My astonished mind informed me I had seen.
He lay in his armour, as if that had been
His coffin; and the weeping sea (like one
Whose milder temper doth lament the death
Of him whom in his rage he slew) runs up
The shore, embraces him, kisses his cheek;
Goes back again, and forces up the sands
To bury him; and every time it parts,
Sheds tears upon him; till at last (as if
It could no longer endure to see the man
Whom it had slain, yet loath to leave him) with
A kind of unresolved unwilling pace,
Winding her waves one in another (like

A man that folds his arms, or wrings his hands
For grief), ebbed from the body, and descends
As if it would sink down into the earth,
And hide itself for shame of such a deed."

IX. JOHN FORD (1586-1640?).

Whoever wishes to fully understand Ford's genius should read Mr Swinburne's paper in the 'Fortnightly Review' of July 1871. All other criticisms must appear faint and colourless after that masterpiece of searching criticism and noble language. It is still, however, open to consider Ford more especially as a dramatist. In what follows, my endeavour has been to trace the influence of Ford's character on the structure of his plays.

Little is known of Ford's life. Two doggerel lines that have come down in a contemporary satire on the poets of the time are rather expressive of what seems to have been the character of the

man:

Deep in a dump John Ford alone was got,
With folded arms and melancholy hat.'

""

He seems to have been a proud, reserved, austere kind of man, of few and warm attachments, with but slender gifts in the way of ebullient spirits or social flow. He was a barrister, with a respectable ancestry to look back to; and though he wrote several plays, and did not disdain to work in conjunction with such a professional playwright as Dekker, he was nervously anxious lest it should be supposed that he made his living by play-writing. In his first Prologue he spoke contemptuously of such as made poetry a trade, and he took more than one opportunity of protesting that his plays were the fruits of leisure, the issue of less serious hours. Some of his plays he dedicated to noblemen, but he was careful to assure them that it was not his habit to court greatness, and that his dedication was a simple offering of respect without mercenary motive. His first play, "The Lover's Melancholy," he dedicated to his friends in Gray's Inn, avowing that he desired

not to please the many, but to obtain the free opinion of his equals in condition.

Ford had good reason for making this independent stand. Although Shakespeare had made his living chiefly by poetry, and had been not very scrupulous in using the fancies and inventions of others, there were many traders in play-writing with whom it was not so reputable to be classed. The servility of begging dedications, too, had become quite loathsome. At the same time, the haughty reserved disposition out of which this independence came was not favourable to dramatic excellence. A play written to please the few is not likely to be a good play. The dramatist must be above the narrowness of sympathy that this implies. And this ungeniality produces failure where, on first consideration, a nineteenth-century reader would least expect it. Such a reader, on hearing of an Elizabethan playwright anxious to please the few, would expect to find him abstaining from the indecency that makes so many of these plays unfit for family reading. But it is quite the other way. Ford's low-comedy scenes are very coarse and very dull. To be sure, the gentlemen of Gray's Inn, the few for whom Ford wrote, were not particular on this point. But this was not the main cause of the offensiveness of Ford's attempts at humour. The main cause was his want of sympathy with his low-comedy puppets. He makes them express themselves as if he disliked them and wished to make them odious and contemptible: their coarseness is unprovoked, gratuitous, with very little of wit or humour to redeem it. Fletcher's Megra and other creations of that type are quite as gross as Ford's Putana; but the dramatist enters into their obscene humour, and in some degree takes away the attention from its obscenity by the cleverness of its intrusions, the comical irrepressibility of its chuckle. Ford had not sufficient freedom of high spirits to enter into the humour of his Putanas and Berghettos, and there is a cynicism, a harshness, an offensive exaggeration, in his representation of the frankness of their language.

Now

But the haughty reserve and want of heartiness in Ford's nature told against his plays in a much more serious respect. He would not seem to have looked at his plays from the point of view of his audience, or to have exerted himself to stir their interest or to keep it from flagging. There is a certain haughtiness of touch even in his language; sometimes a repudiation of emphasis, as if he did not care to be impressive on a slight occasion; sometimes a wilful abstruseness, as if it mattered nothing though his words were misunderstood. This alone is often the cause of considerable reaches of dull dialogue-dull, that is to say, for the purposes of the stage. In his first play, also, "The Lover's Melancholy," three acts pass before any very strong interest is excited in the

personages or the action. The main issues presented to us arewhat is the cause of the Prince of Cyprus's melancholy, and whether he will recover from it. It is hinted that this melancholy may have dangerous consequences-that discontent is muttering at home, and that enemies are gathering on the borders of the kingdom, presuming on the inactivity of the prince; but these consequences, instead of being powerfully represented, so as to throw the interest of a mixed audience keenly on the prince's dejection and indifference to affairs of state, are only dimly and faintly mentioned, in such a way that no ordinary hearer would perceive their importance. In the underplot we are never agitated by any fear of an untoward issue. We never have any serious apprehension that the haughty Thaumasta will eventually reject Menaphon, or that the noble and prosperous Amethus will falter in his love to Cleophila. And the story of the Prince Palador and his mistress Eroclea, with its picture of the forlorn Eroclea, and its finely wrought presentation of their reunion, is not by itself, without further development, enough for a drama: it is better suited for a descriptive epic.

It is only in his two great tragedies, the "Broken Heart" and "Tis Pity she's a Whore," that Ford's power is unmistakably shown. In them he has to deal, from the first scene, with men under the full sway of intelligible passion; and in the presence of passion his haughtiness, his reserve, his indifference, vanishes, and he enters earnestly into the work of interpretation. The second of these two plays, in spite of the harsh, affected, and offensive levity of the title, is Ford's masterpiece, the play that justifies Mr Swinburne's eloquent panegyric, and will always be most in the critic's mind in all attempts to fix Ford's place among the dramatists. In the "Broken Heart," notwithstanding its many powerful and touching passages, there is somewhat too much of learned delineation of character: the noble heroism of strength and impetuosity in Ithocles and Calantha is too obtrusively balanced against the tamer heroism of determined endurance in the other pair of lovers, Orgilus and Penthea. All the persons of the drama have names expressive of their leading qualities; and at the close, our wonder at the strangeness of the lunatic jealousy of Bassanes, the pitiless, dogged, irreconcilable revengefulness of Orgilus, the bitter constancy of Penthea in starving herself to death, seriously obstructs the nobler emotions of horror and pity. Even the closing scene, in which the heroic Calantha hears of the death of her father and her lover, and gives no sign of sorrow till the duties of her high state have been performed, when her overstrained heart-strings break, and she falls dead on the body of her slain lover, is more likely to stun and amaze all but the select few, than to come home powerfully to their sympathies. But there are

no such scholarly obstructions to the terrible tragedy of fate-driven love between Brother and Sister. In it passion is supreme from the first scene to the last.

A man can never wholly hide a ruling tendency in his nature; and even Ford's great tragedies are not without traces of his harshness and severity. There is something very unsatisfactory in the characters of Bassanes and Vasques: it frets and vexes us at the end to see such base deformities stand by and triumph at the fall of nobler natures. We may think them unworthy of the sword of poetic justice-we may reason them out of the sphere of guilt in the tragedy; but their triumph disconcerts us.

X. PHILIP MASSINGER (1584-1640).

Massinger had less original force than any of the other great dramatists. He was eminently a cultivated dramatist, a man of broad, liberal, adaptive mind, fluent and versatile, with just conceptions of dramatic effect, and the power of giving copious expression to his conceptions without straining or dislocating effort. Yet he was much too strong and vigorous to be a mere imitator. His nature was not such as to fight against the influence of his great predecessors: his mind opened itself genially to their work, and absorbed their materials and their methods; but he did not simply reproduce them-they decomposed, so to speak, in his mind, and lay there ready to be laid hold of and embodied in new organisms. So far he resembled Shakespeare, in that he had good sense enough not to harass himself in straining after little novelties his judgment was broad and manly. But he was far from resembling Shakespeare in swiftness and originality of imagination: his muse was comparatively tame and even-paced. The common remark that his diction is singularly free from archaisms shows us one aspect of the soundness of his taste, and bears testimony, at the same time, to his want of eccentricity and original force. He was the Gray of his generation-greater than Gray, inasmuch as his generation was greater than Gray's-a man of large, open, fertile, and versatile mind.

His personal career is obscure. His father was "a servant" in the family of the Herberts of Pembroke, as we know from the dedication of his "Bondman," and "spent many years in the service of that honourable house;" but whether the service was menial, or such as might be rendered by a gentleman, there is no means of ascertaining. At any rate, Massinger's position was not such as to prevent him from going to Oxford in 1602, or from being in a debtor's prison about 1614, and under the necessity of joining with two others in begging an advance of £5 from Henslowe to procure his release. From the almost desperate

mendicancy of his dedications, which are the extreme opposites of Ford's, one would judge him to have lived in wretched poverty and the entry of his death in the register of St Saviour's -"buried Philip Massinger, a stranger"—gives us no ground for hoping against the most natural inference.

The probability is that Massinger began to write for the stage about 1606, if not a year or two earlier, going up from the university as Marlowe and Thomas Nash had done some twenty years before, in search of literary fame and the mysteries of London life. He did not, however, begin to publish till much later, his first printed play being "The Virgin Martyr," which appeared in 1622, and in which he had the assistance of Dekker. Only twelve of his plays were published during his lifetime, out of the thirty-seven which he is known to have written. Perhaps we have the less reason to regret this, because the plays published in his lifetime are decidedly superior to those published after his death. He himself saw in print, besides "The Virgin Martyr,”— "The Duke of Milan," 1623; "The Bondman,' 1624; "The Roman Actor," 1629; "The Picture," 1630; "The Fatal Dowry," 1632; "The Maid of Honour," 1632; "A New Way to Pay Old Debts," 1633; and "The Great Duke of Florence," 1636. After all, it may be that Mr Warburton's cook, who is said to have covered his pies and lighted his fires with some twelve of Massinger's plays, may have done both the world and the poet a service.

Gifford entertained the notion that Massinger must have turned Roman Catholic when he was at Oxford. The notion is based upon the use that Massinger makes of a Roman Catholic legend in "The Virgin Martyr," and the fair character that he gives to a Jesuit priest in "The Renegado." One wants proof more relative: this only proves that Massinger was able to treat Roman Catholics with dramatic impartiality.1 Coleridge's notion about Massinger's democratic leanings is equally questionable. Massinger, indeed, makes one of his characters sigh for the happy times when lords were styled fathers of families. He makes another say that princes do well to cherish goodness where they find it, for—

"They being men and not gods, Contarino,
They can give wealth and titles, but not virtues.

He makes Timoleon administer a sharp rebuke to the men of Syracuse for corruption prevailing in high places, and rate them soundly for preferring golden dross to liberty.

In the same play ("The Bondman"), he takes an evident pleasure in representing the indignities put upon high-fed madams by their insurgent slaves: and in "The City Madam" he ridicules 1 But see article on Massinger in 'Encyclopædia Britannica.'