Whenever the name of the poet Ford comes back to us, it comes back splendid with the light of another man's genius. The fiery panegyric of Charles Lamb is as an aureole behind it. That high-pitched note of critical and spiritual enthusiasm exalts even to disturbance our own sense of admiration; possibly, too, even to some after injustice of reaction in the rebound of mind. Certainly, on the one hand, we see that the spirit of the critic has been kindled to excess by contact and apprehension of the poet's; as certainly, on the other hand, we see the necessary excellence of that which could so affect and so attach the spirit of another man, and of such another man as Lamb. And the pure excess of admiration for things indeed admirable, of delight in things indeed delightful, is itself also a delightful and admirable thing when expressed to such purpose by such men.
And this poet is doubtless a man worthy of note and admiring remembrance. He stands apart among his fellows, without master or follower; he has learnt little from Shakespeare or Marlowe, Jonson or Fletcher. The other dramatists of the great age fall naturally into classes; thus, to take two of the greatest, Webster and Decker both hold of Shakespeare; "The Duchess of Malfi" has a savour of his tragedies, "Old Fortunatus" of his romantic plays; not indeed so much by force of imitation as of affinity. These two poets were as gulfs or estuaries of the sea which is Shakespeare. In Decker's best work we feel an air of the "Winter's Tale" or "Midsummer Night's Dream;" in Webster's, of "Lear" and "Othello." Something of the April sweetness, the dew and breath of morning, which invests the pastoral and fairy world of the master, gives to the one pupil's work a not infrequent touch of delicate life and passionate grace; from the other we catch the echoes of his oceanic harmonies of terror and pity, the refractions of that lightning which strikes into sudden sight the very depths of action and suffering, the motive forces of utter love and hate. But the poetry of Ford is no branch or arm of that illimitable sea; it might rather be likened to a mountain lake shut in by solitary highlands, without visible outlet or inlet, seen fitlier by starlight than by sunlight; much such an one as the Lac de Gaube above Cauterets, steel-blue and sombre, with a strange attraction for the swimmer in its cold smooth reticence and breathless calm. For nothing is more noticeable in this poet than the passionless reason and equable tone of style with which in his greatest works he treats of the deepest and most fiery passions, the quiet eye with which he searches out the darkest issues of emotion, the quiet hand with which he notes them down. At all times his verse is even and regular, accurate and composed; never specially flexible or melodious, always admirable for precision, vigour, and purity.
The fame of Ford hangs mainly upon two great tragedies, which happily are strong enough in structure to support a durable reputation. Two others among his plays are indeed excellent, and worthy a long life of honour; but among the mighty throng of poets then at work a leading place could hardly have been granted to the author only of "The Lover's Melancholy" and "Perkin Warbeck." To the author of "'Tis Pity She's a Whore" and "The Broken Heart" it cannot be refused.
It is somewhat unfortunate that the very title of Ford's masterpiece should sound so strangely in the ears of a generation "whose ears are the chastest part about them." For of these great twin tragedies the first-born is on the whole the greater. The subtleties and varieties of individual character do not usually lie well within the reach of Ford's handling; but in the part of Giovanni we find more of this power than elsewhere. Here the poet has put forth all his strength; the figure of his protagonist stands out complete and clear. There is more ease and life in it than in his other sculptures; though here as always Ford is rather a sculptor of character than a painter. But the completeness, the consistency of design is here all the worthier of remark, that we too often find this the most needful quality for a dramatist wanting in him as in other great writers of his time.
Giovanni is the student struck blind and mad by passion; in the uttermost depths of unimaginable crime he reflects, argues, reasons concerning the devils that possess him. In the only other tragedy of the time based on incestuous love, Massinger's "Unnatural Combat," the criminal is old and hardened, a soul steeped and tempered in sin, a man of blood and iron from his youth upwards; but upon Giovanni his own crime falls like a curse, sudden as lightning; he stands before us as one plague-stricken in the prime of spiritual health, helpless under the lash of love as Canace or Myrrha, Phædra or Pasiphae. The curious interfusion of reason with passion makes him seem but the more powerless to resist, the more hopeless of recovery. His sister is perhaps less finely drawn, though her ebbs and flows of passion are given with great force, and her alternate possession by desire and terror, repentance and defiance, if we are sometimes startled by the rough rapidity of the change, does not in effect impair the unity of character, obscure the clearness of outline. She yields more readily than her brother to the curse of Venus, with a passionate pliancy which prepares us for her subsequent prostration of mind at the feet of her confessor, and again for the revival of a fearless and shameless spirit under the stroke of her husband's violence. Nothing can be finer than the touches which bring out the likeness and unlikeness of the two; her fluctuation and his steadfastness, her ultimate repentance and his final impenitence. The sin once committed, there is no more wavering or flinching possible to him, who has fought so hard against the dæmoniac possession; while she who resigned body and soul to the tempter almost at a word remains liable to the influences of religion and remorse. Of all the magnificent scenes which embody their terrible story the last is (as it should be) the most noble; it is indeed the finest scene in Ford. Even the catastrophe of "The Broken Heart,"—that "transcendent scene," as Lamb justly called it—though more overpoweringly effective in poetic mechanism and material conception, is less profoundly and subtly impressive. In Ford's best work we are usually conscious of a studious arrangement of emotion and expression, a steady inductive process of feeling as of thought, answering to the orderly measure of the verse. That swift and fiery glance which flashes at once from all depths to all heights of the human spirit, that intuition of an indefinable and infallible instinct which at a touch makes dark things clear and brings distant things close, is not a gift of his; perhaps Webster alone of English poets can be said to share it in some measure with Shakespeare. Bosola and Flamineo, Vittoria Corombona and the Duchess of Malfi, even Romelio and Leonora in that disjointed and chaotic play "The Devil's Law-case," good characters and bad alike, all have this mark upon them of their maker's swift and subtle genius; this sudden surprise of the soul in its remoter hiding-places at its most secret work. In a few words that startle as with a blow and lighten as with a flame, the naked natural spirit is revealed, bare to the roots of life. And this power Ford also has shown here at least; witness the passionate subtlety and truth of this passage, the deepest and keenest of his writing, as when taken with the context it will assuredly appear:—
"Annabella.Be not deceived, my brother;
This banquet is an harbinger of death
To you and me; assure yourself it is,
And be prepared to welcome it.
Giovanni.Well, then:
The schoolmen teach that all this globe of earth
Shall be consumed to ashes in a minute.
Ann.So I have read too,
Gio.But 'twere somewhat strange
To see the waters burn; could I believe
This might be true, I could believe as well
There might be hell or heaven.
Ann.That's most certain.
Gio.A dream, a dream! else in this other world
We should know one another.
Ann.So we shall.
Gio.Have you heard so?"
All the horror of this wonderful scene is tempered into beauty by the grace and glow of tenderness which so suffuses it as to verify the vaunt of Giovanni—
"If ever after-times should hear
Of our fast-knit affections, though perhaps
The laws of conscience and of civil use
May justly blame us, yet when they but know
Our loves, that love will wipe away that rigour
Which would in other incests be abhorred.
Give me your hand; how sweetly life doth run
In these well-coloured veins! how constantly
These palms do promise health! but I could chide
With nature for this cunning flattery—
Kiss me again—forgive me."
The soft and fervent colour of Ford's style, the smooth and finished measure of his verse, never fail him throughout the nobler parts of this tragedy; but here as elsewhere we sometimes find, instead of these, a certain hardness of tone peculiar to him, The ferocious nakedness of reciprocal invective in the scene where Soranzo discovers the pregnancy of Annabella has no parallel in the works of his great compeers. M. Taine has translated the opening passages of that scene in the division of his history of English literature which treats of our great dramatists. He has done full justice to the force and audacity of Ford's realism, which indeed he seems to rate higher than the depth and pathos, the sweet and subtle imagination, of other poets, if not than the more tender and gracious passages of Ford himself. He has dwelt, it appears to me, with especial care and favour upon three men of high genius, in all of whom this quality or this defect is conspicuous, of hardness too often deepening into brutality. A better and keener estimate of Ford, of Dryden, and of Swift can hardly be found than M. Taine's. Their vigorous and positive genius has an evident attraction for his critical spirit, which enjoys and understands the tangible and definable forces of mind, handles the hard outline, relishes the rough savour of the actual side of things with which strength of intellect rather than strength of imagination has to deal. As with Swift and Dryden among their fellows, so with Ford among his, the first great quality that strikes a student is the force of grasp, the precision of design, the positive and resolute touch with which all things are set down. A dramatic poet of Ford's high quality cannot of course be wanting in beauty and tenderness, in delicacy and elevation, unknown to men whose mightiest gift was that of noble satire, though the genius so applied were as deep and wide and keen, the spirit so put to service as swift and strong and splendid, as that of the two great men just mentioned. Not only the lovely lines above cited, but the very names of Calantha and Penthea, bear witness at once in our memory to the grace and charm of their poet's work at its best. The excess of tragic effect in his scenes, his delight in "fierce extremes" and volcanic eruptions of character and event, have in the eyes of some critics obscured the milder side of his genius. They are not without excuse. No one who has studied Ford throughout with the care he demands and deserves can fail to feel the want of that sweet and spontaneous fluency which belongs to the men of Shakespeare's school—that birdlike note of passionate music which vibrates in their verse to every breath of joy or sorrow. There is something too much now and then of rule and line, something indeed of hard limitation and apparent rigidity of method. I say this merely by comparison; set against the dramatists of any later school, he will appear as natural and instinctive a singer as any bird of the Shakespearian choir. But of pure imagination, of absolute poetry as distinguished from intellectual force and dramatic ability, no writer of his age except Massinger has less. Yet they are both poets of a high class, dramatists of all but the highest. They both impress us with a belief in their painstaking method of work, in the care and conscience with which their scenes were wrought out. Neither Ford nor Massinger could have ventured to indulge in the slippery style and shambling license which we pardon in Decker for the sake of his lyric note and the childlike delicacy of his pathos, his tenderness of colour and his passionate fancy; nor could they have dared the risk of letting their plays drift loose and shift for themselves at large, making the best that might be made of such rough and unhewn plots as Cyril Tourneur's, Middleton's, or Chapman's—sustained and quickened by the unquenchable and burning fire, the bitter ardour and angry beauty of Tourneur's verse, the grace and force of Middleton's fluent and exuberant invention, the weight of thought and grave resonance of Chapman's gnomic lines. They could not afford to let their work run wild; they were bound not to write after the erratic fashion of their time. All the work of Massinger, all the serious work of Ford, is the work of an artist who respects alike himself, his art, and the reader or spectator who may come to study it. There is scarcely another dramatic poet of their time for whom as much can be said. On the other hand, there is scarcely another dramatic poet of their time who had not more than they had of those "raptures" which "were all air and fire," of "that fine madness which rightly should possess a poet's brain." The just and noble eulogy of Drayton, though appropriate above all to the father of English tragedy, is applicable also more or less to the successors of Marlowe, as well as to the master of the "mighty line" himself. To Ford it is less appropriate; to Massinger it is not applicable at all. This is said out of no disrespect or ingratitude to that admirable dramatist, whose graver and lighter studies are alike full of interest and liberal of enjoyment; but the highest touch of imagination, the supreme rapture and 'passion of poetry, he has not felt, and therefore he cannot make us feel.
The story of Giovanni and Annabella was probably based either on fact or tradition; it may perhaps yet be unearthed in some Italian collection of tales after the manner of Cinthio and Bandello (with the tale of incest in Rosset's 'Histoires Tragiques" it has little in common); but in spite of Ford's own assertion I am inclined to conjecture that the story sculptured with such noble skill and care in the scenes of "The Broken Heart" was "all made out of the carver's brain." In no other play of Ford's are the subordinate figures so studiously finished. In the preceding play all the minor characters are mere outlines of ruffian or imbecile; here the poet has evidently striven to give fullness of form to all his conceptions, and fullness of life to all his forms. Ithocles, Orgilus, Bassanes, are as thoroughly wrought out as he could leave them; and in effect the triumphant and splendid ambition of the first, the sullen and subtle persistence of the second, the impure insanity and shameful agony of the third, are well relieved against each other, especially in those scenes where the brilliant youth of the hero is set side by side with the sombre youth of the man he has injured even to death. But here again the whole weight of the action hangs upon the two chief characters; Calantha and Penthea stand out alone clear in our memory for years after their story has been read. In no play or poem are two types of character more skilfully contrasted; and no poet ever showed a more singular daring than Ford in killing both heroines by the same death of moral agony. Penthea, the weaker and more womanish of the two, dies slowly dissolves into death with tears and cries of loud and resentful grief; Calantha drops dead at the goal of suffering without a word, stabbed to the heart with a sudden silent sorrow. Of all last scenes on any stage, the last scene of this play is the most overwhelming in its unity of outward effect and inward impression. Other tragic poems have closed as grandly, with as much or more of moral and poetic force; none, I think, with such solemn power of spectacular and spiritual effect combined. As a mere stage show it is so greatly conceived and so triumphantly wrought out, that even with less intense and delicate expression, with less elaborate and stately passion in the measure and movement of the words, it would stamp itself on the memory as a durable thing to admire; deep-based as it is on solemn and calm emotion, built up with choice and majestic verse, this great scene deserves even the extreme eulogy of its greatest critic.
The tragic genius of Ford takes a softer tone and more tender colour in "The Broken Heart" than in any of his other plays; except now and then in the part of Bassanes, there are no traces of the ferocity and brutality which mark in the tragedy preceding it such characters as Soranzo, Vasques, and Grimaldi. But here too there is something of Ford's severity, a certain rigid and elaborate precision of work, unlike the sweet seeming instinctiveness, the noble facility of manner and apparent impulse of gracious or majestic speech, which imbues and informs the very highest dramatic style; the quality which Marlowe and Shakespeare bequeathed to their successors, which kept fresh the verse of Beaumont and Fletcher despite its overmuch easiness and exuberance of mannerism, which gave life to the roughest outlines of Webster, Decker, Tourneur, which even Marston and Chapman, with all their faults of crudity and pedantry, showed when they had to rise to the height of any great and tragic argument. The same rigidity is noticeable to some extent in the characters: the marble majesty of Calantha is indeed noble and proper, and gives force and edge to the lofty passion of the catastrophe; but in Penthea too there is something over hard and severe; we find a vein of harshness and bitterness in her angry grief which Shakespeare or indeed Webster would have tempered and sweetened. In the faultless and most exquisite scene where she commits to the princess her legacies of "three poor jewels," this bitterness disappears, and the sentiment is as delicate and just as the expression; while the gracious gentleness of Calantha gives a fresh charm of warmth and sympathy to her stately presence and office in the story. The quality of pity here made manifest in her brings her own after suffering within reach of our pity. Again, in the previous interview of Ithocles with Penthea, and above all in her delirious dying talk, there is real and noble pathos, though hardly of the most subtle and heart-piercing kind; and in the parts of Ithocles and Orgilus there is a height and dignity which ennoble alike the slayer and the slain. None could give this quality better than Ford: this, the most complete and equal of his works, is full of it throughout.
From the "high-tuned poem," as he justly calls it, which he had here put forth in evidence of his higher and purer part of power, the fall, or collapse rather, in his next work was singular enough. I trust that I shall not be liable to any charge of Puritan prudery though I avow that this play of "Love's Sacrifice" is to me intolerable. In the literal and genuine sense of the word, it is utterly indecent, unseemly and unfit for handling. The conception is essentially foul because it is essentially false; and in the sight of art nothing is so foul as falsehood. The incestuous indulgence of Giovanni and Annabella is not improper for tragic treatment; the obscene abstinence of Fernando and Bianca is wholly improper. There is a coarseness of moral fibre in the whole work which is almost without parallel among our old poets. More than enough has been said of their verbal and spiritual license; but nowhere else, as far as I know, shall we find within the large limits of our early drama such a figure as Ford's Bianca set up for admiration as a pure and noble type of woman. For once, to my own wonder and regret, I find myself at one with the venomous moralist Gifford on a question of morals, when he observes of "that most innocent lady" that "she is, in fact, a gross and profligate adulteress, and her ridiculous reservations, while they mark her lubricity, only enhance her shame." The worst is, that we get no moment of relief throughout from the obtrusion of the very vilest elements that go to make up nature and deform it. No height or grandeur of evil is here to glorify, no aspiration or tenderness of afterthought is here to allay, the imbecile baseness, the paltry villainies and idiocies, of the "treacherous, lecherous, kindless" reptiles that crawl in and out before our loathing eyes. The language of course is in the main elaborate, pure, and forcible; the verse often admirable for its stately strength; but beyond this we can find nothing to plead in extenuation of uncleanness and absurdity. The only apparent aim of the quasi-comic interludes is to prove the possibility of producing something even more hateful than the tragic parts. The indecency of Ford's farcical underplots is an offence above all things to art. How it may seem from the preacher's point of view is no present concern of ours; perhaps he might find it by comparison harmless and powerless, as assuredly it can attract or allure the intellect or the senses of no creature above the level of apes and swine; but in the artist's eyes it is insufferable and damnable. Without spirit, without humour, without grace, it encumbers the scene as with dried and congealed filth. In the face of much exquisite work of painter and sculptor, poet and humourist, which is anything but conventionally decent, we cannot allow that art must needs "lean to virtue's side," and lend her voice or hand to swell the verdict or prop the pulpit of judge or moralist; but two things she cannot away with; by the very law of her life, by the very condition of her being, she is bound to reject whatever is brutal, whatever is prurient; Swift cannot bend her to the worship of Cloacina, Moore cannot teach her the lisp and leer of his toad-faced Cupids. Great men may sin by mad violence and brutality, like that fierce world-satirist who stood out with lacerated heart against all bitterest infliction and "envious wrath of man or God," a Titan blasted by the fires but not beaten by the strokes of heaven; but small men only can teach their tongues the tittering accent of a vicious valet, the wriggling prurience of such lackey's literature as is handed round on a salver to the patrons of drawing-room rhymesters and ante-chamber witlings. Ford was a poet, and a poet of high mark; he could not therefore, even in a meaner age, have learnt the whimper or the smirk of sentimental or jocose prurience; he could never have submitted to ignoble handling the sweet or bitter emotions and passions of sense or spirit; all torture and all rapture of the flesh or of the soul he would always have treated with the frank and serious freedom of the artist, never with the 'bragging and simpering petulance of the social poetaster and parasitic plagiarist; but the other inadmissible thing he has too often admitted within the precinct of his work. The dull brutality of his lame and laborious farce is a fault quite unlike the faults of his fellows; his cold and dry manner makes his buffoonery at once rancid and insipid; while the "bluff beastliness" of Jonson's plebeian part, the overflowing and boyish wantonness of Fletcher, the foul-mouthed fidelity of Decker's transcripts from the low life of his period, even the rank breadth of Marston's shameless satire, may admit of excuse in the sight of art, the pointless and spiritless license of Ford's attempts at comedy can be neither honourably excused nor reasonably explained. Of Shakespeare alone we can be sure that no touch is wrong, no tone too broad, no colour too high for the noble and necessary purposes of his art; but of his followers, if excuse be needed for their errors and excesses, the most may plead in palliation either the height of spirits and buoyancy of blood, or the passion of a fierce sincerity, or the force and flavour of strong comic genius, or the relief given by contrast to the high pure beauty of the main work; all alike may plead the freedom of the time, the freshness of young life and energy of the dawn, working as they did when the art was new-born, too strong a child of earth and heaven and too joyous to keep always a guard on its ways and words, to walk always within bounds and speak always within compass. But Ford is no poetic priest or spiritual witness against evil, whose lips have been touched with the live coal of sacred satire, and set on fire of angry prophecy; the wrath and scorn of Jonson, the rage of Tourneur and the bitterness of Marston, find in him no echo of response; and of the bright sweet flow and force of life which feed as from a springing fountain the joyful genius of Beaumont and Fletcher, of the gladness and grace of that wild light Muse who sings "as if she would never grow old," whether her song be of men's joy or sorrow, he has nothing to show in excuse of worse faults than theirs; with him
"The heyday in the blood is tame, it's humble,
And waits upon the judgment."
Massinger has been accused of the same dull and deliberate license of speech; but Massinger, though poor in verbal wit, had a strong and grave humour, an occasional breadth and warmth of comic invention, which redeems his defects or offences. Hartley Coleridge, in his notice of the two poets, says that Massinger would have been the dullest of all bad jokers, had not Ford contrived to be still duller. But Massinger, if not buoyant and brilliant as Fletcher, or rich with the spiritual wealth and strong with the gigantic thews of Jonson, has his own place of honour in pure as well as mixed comedy; Belgarde, Justice Greedy, Borachia, and others, are worthy to stand, in their lower line of humour, below the higher level of such studies as Overreach and Luke; whereas, if Ford's lighter characters are ever inoffensive for a moment, it is all that can be said of them, and more than could be hoped. The strength and intensity of his genius require a tragic soil to flourish in, an air of tragedy to breathe; its lightning is keenest where the night of emotion and event is darkest in which it moves and works. In romantic drama or mixed comedy it shines still at times with a lambent grace and temperance of light; but outside the limit of serious thought and feeling it is quenched at once, and leaves but an unsavoury fume behind. Even in those higher latitudes the moral air is not always of the clearest; the sanctity of Giovanni's confessor, for example, has something of the compliant quality of Bianca's virtue; it sits so loosely and easily on him that, fresh from the confession of Annabella's incest, he assists in plighting her hand to Soranzo, and passing off on the bridegroom as immaculate a woman whom he knows to be with child by her brother; and this immediately after that most noble scene in which the terror and splendour of his rebuke has bowed to the very dust before him the fair face and the ruined soul of his penitent. After this we cannot quite agree with Macaulay that Ford has in this play "assigned a highly creditable part to the friar;" but certainly he has the most creditable part there is to play; and as certainly he was designed on the whole for a type of sincere and holy charity. The jarring and startling effect of such moral discords weakens the poet's hold on the reader by the shock they give to his faith and sympathy. Beaumont and Fletcher have sinned heavily in the same way; and the result is that several of their virtuous characters are more really and more justly offensive to the natural sense, more unsavoury to the spiritual taste, than any wantonness of words or extravagance of action can make their representative figures of vice.
In the gallery of Ford's work, as in the gallery of Webster's, there is one which seems designed as a sample of regular and classic form, a sedate study after a given model. Ford's "Perkin Warbeck" holds the same place on his stage as "Appius and Virginia" does on Webster's. In both plays there is a perfect unity of action, a perfect straightforwardness of design; all is clear, orderly, direct to the point; there is no outgrowth or overgrowth of fancy, there are no byways of poetry to divert the single progress of the story. By the side of "The Duchess of Malfi" or "The Broken Heart" they look rigid and bare. Both are noble works; Webster's has of course the more ardour and vehemence of power, Ford's has perhaps the more completeness of stage effect and careful composition. The firmness and fidelity of hand with which his leading characters are drawn could only be shown by a dissection of the whole play scene by scene. The simple and lofty purity of conception, the exact and delicate accuracy of execution, are alike unimpaired by any slip or flaw of judgment or of feeling. The heroic sincerity of Warbeck, his high courtesy and constancy, his frank gratitude and chivalrous confidence, give worthy proof of Ford's ability to design a figure of stainless and exalted presence; the sad strong faith of his wife, the pure and daring devotion of the lover who has lost her, the petulant and pathetic pride of her father, all melted at last into stately sympathy and approval of her truth in extremity of trial; and, more than all these, the noble mutual recognition and regard of Warbeck and Dalyell in the time of final test; are qualities which raise this drama to the highest place among its compeers for moral tone and effect. The two kings are faithful and forcible studies; the smooth resolute equanimity and self-reliant craft of the first Tudor sets off the shallow chivalry and passionate unstable energy of the man of Flodden. The insolent violence of constraint put upon Huntley in the disposal of his daughter's hand is of a piece with the almost brutal tone of contempt assumed towards Warbeck, when he begins to weary of supporting the weaker cause for the mere sake of magnanimous display and irritable self-assertion. His ultimate dismissal of the star-crossed pretender is "perfect Stuart" in its bland abnegation of faith and the lofty courtliness of manner with which engagements are flung over and pledges waved aside; whether intentionally or not, Ford has touched off to the life the family habit of repudiation, the hereditary faculty of finding the most honourable way to do the most dishonourable things. Nor is the other type of royalty less excellently real and vivid; the mixture of warmth and ceremony in Katherine's reception by Henry throws into fresh and final relief the implacable placidity of infliction with which he marks her husband for utmost ignominy of suffering.
Of imaginative beauty and poetic passion this play has nothing; but for noble and equable design of character it stands at the head of Ford's works. There is no clearer example in our literature of the truth of the axiom repeated by Mr. Arnold from the teaching of the supreme Greek masters, that "all depends upon the subject." There are perhaps more beautiful lines in "Love's Sacrifice" than in "Perkin Warbeck;" yet the former play is utterly abortive and repulsive, a monument of discomfiture and discredit, as the latter of noble aim and noble success. It is the one high sample of historic drama produced between the age of Shakespeare and our own; the one intervening link—a link of solid and durable metal—which connects the first and the latest labours in that line of English poetry; the one triumphant attempt to sustain and transmit the tradition of that great tragic school founded by Marlowe, perfected by Shakespeare, revived by the author of "Philip van Artevelde." The central figure of Ford's work is not indeed equal in stature of spirit and strength of handling to the central figure of Sir Henry Taylor's; there is a broader power, a larger truth, in the character of Artevelde than in the character of Warbeck; but the high qualities of interest based on firm and noble grounds, of just sentiment and vital dignity, of weight, force, and exaltation of thought, shown rather in dramatic expansion and development of lofty character by lofty method than in scenes and passages detachable from the context as samples of reflection and expression—these are in great measure common to both poets. Ford, again, has the more tender and skilful hand at drawing a woman; his heroines make by far the warmer and sharper impression on us; this on the whole is generally his strongest point, as it is perhaps the other's weakest; while, though we may not think his female studies up to the mark of his male portraits, there is certainly no English dramatist since Shakespeare who can be matched as a student of men, comparable for strong apprehension and large heroic grasp of masculine character, with the painter of Comnenus, of Artevelde, and of Dunstan.
The three romantic comedies of Ford have the same qualities and shortcomings in common; they are studious and often elegant in style, sometimes impressive or at least effective in incident, generally inadequate to the chance of excellence offered by the subject; not so much through careless laxity and incoherence—for the sign of labour and finish is visible upon each; they have evidently been wrought up to the height and fullness of his design—as through a want cf constructive power and mastery of his own conceptions. "The Lover's Melancholy" is the best of the three, as having the best things in it; two of these are exquisite; the well-known episode of the lute-player and nightingale, and the reunion of Palador and Eroclea. There are touches of power and tenderness in the part of Meleander, and the courtship of Parthenophil by Thamasta is gracefully and skilfully managed, without violence or offence. The winding-up of a story ill and feebly conducted through the earlier parts of the play is far more dexterous and harmonious than its development; and this is about all that need be said of it. Between the two beautiful versions of Strada's pretty fable by Ford and Crashaw there will always be a diversity of judgment among readers; some must naturally prefer the tender fluency and limpid sweetness of Ford, others the dazzling intricacy and affluence in refinements, the supple and cunning implication, the choiceness and subtlety of Crashaw.
Something better than Ford has left us might have been made of "The Fancies Chaste and Noble" and "The Lady's Trial." In the former play the character of Flavia is admirably conceived; there were excellent possibilities of interest ang pathos in her part, and her first interview with the husband who had sold and discarded her under cover of a lie gives promise that some: thing will come of these chances; but in effect they come to nothing; the tragic effect of the position is evaded, the force of the conception diluted, the outlines of character slurred and effaced. Again, we are led to look for more than we get from the scenes of Castamela's mock temptation and seeming peril, from her grave and confident dignity in face of trial, and the spirit with which she assumes a lifelike mask of haughty and corrupt levity to punish the reckless weakness of a brother who has wantonly exposed her to apparent danger; but all ends in futile surprise and flat insufficiency. Livio and Romanello, the brothers of the heroines, are figures too dull and feeble to rouse any stronger feeling than a dull and feeble curiosity to see how they will slip or slink out of situations which might have been full of spirit and interest. The remaining characters are colourless and formless. Of the brutal and brainless interludes of farce I have no more to say than has been said above. With more force and harmony of character the finest occasion in the play might have been put to admirable use; when Livio, in hopes to rescue his sister from shame, offers her hand to the suitor whom he formerly rejected, and finds her in turn refused by Romanello on suspicion of dishonour incurred through her brother's baseness. The presence and intercession of Romanello's own sister, herself newly and nobly vindicated in his eyes and reconciled to his love, should have added to the living interest of the scene; but between curtailed plot and truncated underplot all such possible interest has long since been stifled.
The same waste or misuse of good material has marred the promise of a better play in "The Lady's Trial." This should have been an excellent example of romantic or serious comedy; had Ford been content thoroughly to work out the characters of Auria, his wife, and her kinsman, he must have given us again a study of high and delicate moral beauty, a group worthy to stand beside the noble triad of Warbeck, Katherine, and Dalyell; but as it is, shackled perhaps by a fear of repeating himself, he has missed or thrown away this chance also. The one scene in which the spotless and hopeless chivalry of Malfato's love for his kinswoman is brought into action comes too late in the play and too suddenly to make its effect. There are two or three passages of admirable energy and pathos in the part of Auria; but the upshot of all is again ineffective; the evolution of the main story is clogged and trammelled by the utterly useless and pointless episode of Adurni's cast mistress, her senseless schemes of love and revenge, her equivocal reformation and preposterous remarriage. All this encumbrance of rubbish has absolutely no excuse, no aim or reason of any kind; it serves merely to hamper the development and distort the progress of the play, leaving no room or time for the action to expand naturally and move smoothly forward to a consistent end. The underplot of Hippolita's attempted revenge on the lover who has discarded her is neither beautiful nor necessary to the main action of "'Tis Pity She's a Whore;" but it is skilfully wrought in, and so far serviceable that it effectually cuts off Soranzo's chance of arousing such interest or sympathy as might divert the reader's mind from the central figures of Giovanni and Annabella; in this case the discarded adulteress and her cast-off husband are mere worthless impediments which subserve no end whatever.
Of the two plays which bear conjointly the names of Ford and Decker, "The Sun's Darling" is evidently, as Gifford calls it, a "piece of patchwork" hastily stitched up for some momentary purpose; I suspect that the two poets did not work together on it, but that our present text is merely a recast by Ford of an earlier masque by Decker; probably, as Mr. Collier has suggested, his lost play of ""Phaëton," for which we might be glad to exchange the "loop'd and window'd nakedness" of this ragged version. In those parts which are plainly remnants of Decker's handiwork there are some scattered lines of great sweetness, such as these of lament for the dead spring:—
"How cool wert thou in anger! in thy diet
How temperate and yet sumptuous! thou wouldst not waste
The weight of a sad violet in excess,
Yet still thy board had dishes numberless;
Dumb beasts even lovèd thee; once a young lark
Sat on thy hand, and gazing on thine eyes
Mounted and sang, thinking them moving skies."
For the latter scenes, as Gifford observes, it is clear that Ford is in the main responsible; the intrusion in the fifth act of political satire and adulation is singularly perverse and infelicitous. In the opening scene, also, between Raybright and the Priest of the Sun, I recognise the moral tone and metrical regulation of Ford's verse. Whatever the original may have been—and it was probably but a thin and hasty piece of work—it has doubtless suffered from the incongruous matter loosely sewn on to it; and the masque as it stands is too lax and incoherent in structure to be worth much as a sample of its slight kind, or to show if there was anything of more significance or value in the first conception.
"The Witch of Edmonton" is a play of rare beauty and importance both on poetical and social grounds. It is perhaps the first protest of the stage against the horrors and brutalities of vulgar superstition; a protest all the more precious for the absolute faith in witchcraft and devilry which goes hand in hand with compassion for the instruments as well as the victims of magic. Dr. Theodorus Plönnies himself had not a heartier belief in the sorceries of Sidonia von Bork than the poets appear to have in the misdeeds of Mother Sawyer; while neither Meinhold nor any modern writer has shown a nobler abhorrence of the genuinely hellish follies and cruelties which brought forth in natural and regular order fresh crops of witches to torture and burn. Even Victor Hugo could hardly show a more tender and more bitter pity for the sordid: and grovelling agonies of outcast old age and reprobate misery, than that which fills and fires the speech of the wretched hag from the first scene where she appears gathering sticks to warm herself, starved, beaten, lamed and bent double with blows, pitiable and terrible in her fierce abjection, to the last moment when she is led to execution through the roar of the rabble. In all this part of the play I trace the hand of Decker; his intimate and familiar science of wretchedness, his great and gentle spirit of compassion for the poor and suffering with whom his own lot in life was so often cast, in prison and out. The two chief soliloquies of Mother Sawyer, her first and last invocations of the familiar, are noble samples of his passionate dramatic power; their style has a fiery impulse and rapidity quite unlike the usual manner of his colleague. Gifford was probably right in assigning to Ford the whole of the first act; there is no more admirable exposition of a play on the English stage; the perfect skill and the straightforward power with which the plan of the story is opened and the interest of the reader fixed are made the more evident by the direct simplicity of method and means used. Ford, therefore, must have the credit of first bringing forward two of the main characters in the domestic tragedy which makes up the better part of this composite play; and the introduction of Frank and Winnifrede gives ominous and instant promise of the terror and pathos of their after story. The part of Susan is one of Decker's most beautiful and delicate studies; in three short scenes he has given an image so perfect in its simple sweetness as hardly to be overmatched outside the gallery of Shakespeare's women. The tender freshness of his pathos, its plain frank qualities of grace and strength, never showed themselves with purer or more powerful effect than here; the after scene where Frank's guilt is discovered has the same force and vivid beauty. The interview of Frank with the disguised Winnifrede in this scene may be compared by the student of dramatic style with the parting of the same characters at the close; the one has all the poignant simplicity of Decker, the other all the majestic energy of Ford. The rough buffoonery and horseplay of the clown and the familiar we may probably set down to Decker's account; there is not much humour or meaning in it, but it is livelier and less offensive than most of Ford's attempts in that line. The want of connection between the two subjects of the play, Mother Sawyer's witchcraft and Frank Thorney's bigamy, is a defect common to many plays of the time, noble sketches of rough and rapid workmanship; but in this case the tenuity of the connecting link is such that despite the momentary intervention of her familiar the witch is able with perfect truth to disclaim all complicity with the murderer. Such a communion of guilt might easily have been managed, and the tragic structure of the poem would have been complete in harmony of interest.
No words need here be wasted on any verse of Ford's outside the range of his dramatic work; and of his two pamphlets in prose the first is an ephemeral and official piece of compliment, somewhat too dull and stiff in style to be a truly graceful offering "in honour of all fair ladies." The second "handful of discourse" has rather more worth and dignity of moral eloquence. The examples chosen from his own age for praise or blame add some historical interest to his axioms and arguments; the sketch of Raleigh, unhappily imperfect as it is, seems from the fragment left us to have given a vigorous and discerning estimate of "a man known and well deserving to be known." The reader of this treatise will remark, with such comic or tragic reflections as he may find appropriate, the passage in which Ford—having discussed and dismissed as inadequate such minor epithets of eulogy as "the Peaceable," "the Learned," and even "the Great"—finally and emphatically bestows on the yet living majesty of England the surname for all time of James the Good. The poet is so emphatic in his disclaimer of "servility or insinuation" that we might imagine him writing with an eye to the reversion of Jonson's laurel.
"Ford was of the first order of poets:" such is the verdict of his earliest and greatest critic. To differ from Lamb on a matter of judgment relating to any great name of the English drama is always hazardous; it is a risk never to be lightly run, never to be incurred without grave reluctance; and to undervalue so noble a poet as Ford, a very early and close favourite of my own studies, must be even further from my wish than to depreciate the value of such a verdict in his favour. Yet perhaps it would be more accurate to say merely that his good qualities are also great qualities—that whenever his work is good it is greatly good—than to say that he was altogether one of the few greatest among great men who stand in that very first order of poets. Thus much assuredly we may admit with all confidence and gladness of gratitude; that the merits he has are merits of the first order. What these merits are no student of his poetry can fail to see. As to their kind there can be no dispute; as to the relative height of rank to which they suffice of themselves to raise a poet, there may be. They are not outward or superficial qualities; a somewhat more liberal sprinkling of these would have relieved and brightened the sombre beauties of his work. His power as a poet is simply a moral power; fancy he has none, and imagination only strong to deal with tragic sentiment and situation; strong to dive and keen to peer into depths of emotion and recesses of endurance "dove il sol tace," not swift or light of wing, not vast or etherial of flight, not lustrous or various of plumage; but piercing and intense of sight, steady and sure of stroke, solemn and profound of strain. He gains strength with the strength of his subject; he wants deep water to swim well. The moral nature with which he is fittest to deal must be large enough to dare or to bear things beyond all common measure; resolute for any deed or any doom. Within the usual scope of action or the ordinary limit of suffering the energy of his spirit has hardly free play. In the hard cast and sombre loneliness of this energy he resembles Byron on one side—the outer side rather than the inner faculty; though there is in both the same fixity and insistence of purpose, the same solitary and brooding weight of will, the same lurid force and singleness of mind. In light, imagination, musical instinct, and all qualities of poetry pure and simple, both are alike below the higher order of poets; in the verse of neither is there that instant and sensible melody which comes only of a secret and sovereign harmony of the whole nature, and which comes of it inevitably and unmistakeably.
We often see the names of Webster and Ford bracketed as equal and parallel examples of the same kind or school of poets; to me these two great men seem to belong to wholly different orders; I should no more venture to set Ford by the side of Webster than Byron by the side of Shelley. If not altogether as great in degree, the difference is assuredly the same in kind. On this as on all grounds we must keenly regret the loss of the one play known to us by name in which the diverse forces of these poets were united in the treatment of a subject unsurpassable for terror and tragic suggestion. To trace the points of likeness and unlikeness, to distinguish the lineaments of either man's genius, to note their various handling of an actual and recent tragedy so fearfully fertile of dramatic possibilities, of dark and splendid studies, for a spirit of strength to support them; to measure by the terrible capacities of the workmen the terrible capabilities of their material; to divide in our minds feature from feature, comparing line with line and tone with tone; this would have been a study of greater profit and delight to the student of their art than the comparison we had lately occasion to make between Ford and Decker. For, though dissimilar in kind as well as in degree, there are points of resemblance between Webster and Ford, especially in bias of mind and aim of contemplation, in choice of matter and sympathy of interest, which may well bring them together in our thoughts and set them by themselves apart; so that we can conceive of them working together on a poem which when complete should show no signs of incongruity, nothing inharmonious or incoherent; as we certainly could not conceive of Shelley and Byron. For the rest, though there may be some community of poetic powers and poetic deficiencies between Byron and Ford, neither has any of the other's highest quality; the emotion shot through with satire, the ardour inwoven with humour, which heighten and sharpen each other in the keenest and loftiest work of Byron, were as unknown to Ford as the truth of deep human passion, the fire that labours without open rage or fury of flame at the heart's root and centre of life itself, the ravage of spiritual waste and agony of travail consuming and exhausting the very nature of the soul, which find shape and speech in the tragic verse of Ford, were beyond the dramatic reach of Byron. Of all men of genius Ford was probably the worst jester and Byron the worst playwright that ever lived. The living spirit of wit, its poetic and imaginative power, the force and ease of its action, the variety of thought and form into which it enters to fill them with life, never had a medium of expression comparable to the verse of Byron; in this, the compound and complex product of serious and humorous energy, rather than in power of any simple kind, lay the depth and width of his genius. Ford's dominion was limited to one simple form of power, the knowledge and mastery of passion properly so called, the science of that spiritual state in which the soul suffers force from some dominant thought or feeling: The pain and labour of such imperious possession, the strife and violence of a nature divided against itself, the strong anguish and the strong delight of extremities, gave the only fit field for his work and the only fruitful pasture for his thought. His imperative and earnest genius stamped and burnt itself into the figures and events of his plays: his mark is set ineffaceably on characters and circumstances, the sign-manual of his peculiar empire. Now, of passion proper Byron has nothing; the one radical emotion in him, deep as life and strong as death, is that noble ardour of rage and scorn which lifts his satire into sublimity; otherwise his passion is skin-deep; all his love-making, from the first desire to the final satiety, may be summed up in that famous axiom of Chamfort which Alfred de Musset, his female page or attendant dwarf, prefixed as a label to one of his decoctions of watered Byronism. Whatever he may have known of passion, he could put into verse of a genuine kind nothing beyond the range of the greater cynic's memorable definition; if he tries to go further or deeper, his verse rings hollow, his hold grows feeble, his colouring false and his tone inflated. Facit indignatto versum, and admirably too; the strength and splendour of his wrath give to his denunciations of tyranny a stronger and sincerer life than we find in his invocations to patriotism; in him Apollo was incarnate only as the dragon-slayer: he might stand so in sculpture with King George for Python, his arrow still quivering in the royal carrion. Of all divine labours that was the one which fell to his share of work; of all the god his master's gifts that was the one allotted him. But for positive passion, for that absolute fusion of the whole nature in one fire of sense and spirit which only the great dramatic students and masters of man can give or comprehend, we must go to poets of another kind. These have flesh and blood, muscle and nerve enough in all conscience; but passion with them means something beyond "l'échange de deux fantaisies et le contact de deux épidermes;" they want all that and more as fuel for their fires; they deal neither with soulless bodies nor with bodiless souls. Among them Ford must always hold a place of high honour. Two at least, yet perhaps only two, of his great fellow tragedians—for Shakespeare is of no fellowship—were certainly, in my judgment, poets of higher race and rarer quality. These two were Marlowe and Webster. The founder of our tragedy has in his best verse all the light and music and colour proper to the dawn of so divine a day as opened with his sunrise; and in Webster there is so much of the godhead which put on perfect humanity in Shakespeare alone, that it would scarcely be more rational to couple for comparison "The Broken Heart" with "The Duchess of Malfi" than "The Duchess of Malfi" with "King Lear." In one point Ford is excelled by others also of his age. As a lyric poet he is not quite of the highest class in that great lyrical school. Not that his few lyrics are unworthy the praise they have before now received; the best of them, such as the noble dirge which signals with its majesty of music the consummation of Calantha's agony, have an august beauty and dignity of their own. The verse has a marble stateliness and solidity; the grave and even measure carries weight and sufficiency with it; but the pure lyric note is not in this poet. He has no such outbreaks of birdlike or godlike song as Shakespeare's—
"Roses, their sharp spines being gone—"
or Fletcher's—
"Hear, ye ladies that despise—"
or Webster's—
"Hark, now everything is still—"
or Decker's—
"Art thou poor, yet hast thou golden slumbers?"
After any of these the lyric verse of Ford strikes us as verse ruled out in hard and rigid lines; yet is it excellent in its kind, and contemporary dramatists of high rank and repute have never come near its excellence; witness Massinger, the worst song-writer of them all.
Upon the whole then we find ample reason to assign high rank in the highest school of tragedy to this poet. Decker, with all his sweetness of natural passion, his tenderness of moral music and freshness of pathetic power, has left no work of such tragic strength and scope, such firmness of line and clearness of composition, such general height and equality of poetic worth, as the two masterpieces of Ford. Had Marston oftener written at his best, he might have matched Ford on his own ground of energetic intensity and might of moral grasp, while excelling him in the depth and delicacy of keen rare touches or flashes of subtle nature, such as his famous epithet of "the shuddering morn," and other fine thoughts of colour and strokes of pensive passion; but Marston almost always wrote very much below his best. The character of Andrugio in "Antonio and Mellida" is magnificent; but this grand figure is unequally sustained by the others; and superb as the part is throughout, one part can no more make a play than one swallow can make a summer; not though that part were Hamlet. Set among mean and discordant figures, without support or relief, the part of Hamlet, the greatest single work of man, would not of itself suffice to make a play. The noble thought and the noble verse of Marston are never fitly framed and chased; lying imbedded as his best work does in meaner matter, it cannot hold its own when set beside the work of men who could cut as well as unearth a jewel. The pure simplicity of Heywood, his homely and lively fertility of invention, his honest pathos and gentleness of feeling, give a real charm to his sweet and clear flow of plain verse, but not weight and force enough to support the fame of a tragic poet of the first rank. Middleton had more facility and freedom of hand, less height and concentration of mind, than Ford; Massinger had far more fluency, regularity, and variety of interest, but far less tragic depth and directness of force. Chapman's plays, overweighted with thoughtful and majestic eloquence, sink down and break short under the splendid burden, or wander into empty lands and among rocky places of barren declamation; as a tragic artist he must give place to lesser men. With a far more genuinely dramatic gift, the fiery spirit of Cyril Tourneur lived and laboured in such a tempest that his work, so to speak, is blown out of all shape; the burning blast of his genius rages without intermission at such stormy speed along such wild wastes of tragedy that we have hardly time to note the fresh beauty of a rare oasis here and there; but for keenness and mastery of passionate expression in sublime and sonorous verse he can hardly be overmatched: while for single lines of that intense and terrible beauty which makes incision in the memory, there is none, after Shakespeare, to compare with him but Webster; the grandest verses of Marston or Chapman, both great in their use of deep and ardent words to give life and form to moral passion, have less of cautery in their stroke. Against his tragedies as against theirs the charge of excess and violence may be fairly brought, and the brand of such epithets as "spasmodic" and "horrible" may be set on their choice and composition of incidents; though the pure and strong limpidity of Tourneur's style is never broken into the turbid froth and turgid whirlpools of tortuous rant which here and there convulse and deface the vigorous currents of Chapman's and Marston's. But the application of any such stigmatic phrase to the work of Webster is absurd. If it be true that his tragedies exemplify the old distinction of horrible from terrible, it must be as superb instances of terrible beauty undeformed by horrible detail. There is no such scene or incident in his two great plays as the blinding of Gloster in "King Lear;" nothing from which the physical sense recoils with such a shudder of instant sickness; nothing defensible only on the ground that where all scenes are terrible to the utmost limit that art can endure, one scene among them may be for once allowed to be simply horrible. Defensible or not, the license was claimed and the experiment made by Shakespeare, and not by Webster. Nor, again, are any of the lesser poet's characters so liable to the charge of monstrous or abnormal excess as the figures of Goneril and Regan; the wickedness of his worst villain never goes beyond the mark of Edmund's. To vindicate the comparative moderation of Webster's mora] painting is not to impugn in any least degree the rectitude of Shakespeare's; but it is absurd for those who see no excess of horror in the incidents or of criminality in the characters of the master poet to impeach the greatest of his disciples for the exercise of much less liberty in his handling of criminal and terrible matter. Simplicity and purity mark the most tragic scenes and figures of Webster, not less than sublimity and sweetness. Nothing on a first study of "The Duchess of Malfi" makes deeper impression on a capable student than this negative quality of noble abstinence, the utter and most admirable absence of any chaotic or spasmodic element, the chastity of a controlling instinct which rejects as impossible all hollow extravagance and inflation, "even in the very torrent, tempest, and (as I may say) the whirlwind of passion." For one instance, if the comparison is to be made, we cannot but see that the curse of the Duchess on her brothers is less intemperate in the excess and exaltation of its rage than the curse of Lear on his daughters; which of course is as it should be, but is not what the general verdict of critics on Webster's art and style would have led us to expect. The note of extravagance is far more real and far more patent in the tragic genius of Beaumont and Fletcher. Of their comic power there is here no more question than of Jonson's or Massinger's or any other's; we are concerned merely to examine by comparison the rank among tragic poets of a poet who was nothing if not tragic. In this field, then, we find "those suns of glory, those two lights of men," the Dioscuri of our "heaven of invention," to be swifter and gracefuller runners than Ford, but neither surer of foot nor stronger of hand. Their genius has more of flame and light, less of fire and intensity; more of air and ease, less of force and concentration; more of beautiful and graceful qualities, less of positive and severe capacity; there is more of a charm about it, and less of a spell. With all its great and affluent beauties, 'The Maid's Tragedy" leaves a less absolute and inevitable mark upon the mind of a student than "The Broken Heart." No poet is less forgetable than Ford; none fastens (as it were) the fangs of his genius and his will more deeply in your memory. You cannot shake hands with him and pass by; you can not fall in with him and out again at pleasure; if he touch you once he takes you, and what he takes he keeps his hold of; his work becomes part of your thought and parcel of your spiritual furniture for ever; he signs himself upon you as with a seal of deliberate and decisive power. His force is never the force of accident; the casual divinity of beauty which falls as though direct from heaven upon stray lines and phrases of some poets falls never by any such heavenly chance on his; his strength of impulse is matched by his strength of will; he never works more by instinct than by resolution; he knows what he would have and what he will do, and gains his end and does his work with full conscience of purpose and insistence of design. By the might of a great will seconded by the force of a great hand he won the place he holds against all odds of rivalry in a race of rival giants. In that gallery of monumental men and mighty memories, among or above the fellows of his godlike craft, the high figure of Ford stands steadily erect; his name is ineffaceable from the scroll of our great writers; it is one of the loftier landmarks of English poetry.