Part 9

To me Massinger is one of the most interesting as well as one of the most delightful of the old dramatists, not so much for his passion or power, though at times he reaches both, as for the love he shows for those things that are lovely and of good report in human nature, for his sympathy with what is generous and high-minded and honorable, and for his equable flow of a good every-day kind of poetry with few rapids or cataracts, but singularly soothing and companionable. The Latin adjective for gentleman, _generosus_, fits him aptly. His plots are generally excellent; his versification masterly, with skilful breaks and pauses, capable of every needful variety of emotion; and his dialogue easy, natural, and sprightly, subsiding in the proper places to a refreshing conversational tone. This graceful art was one seldom learned by any of those who may be fairly put in comparison with him. Even when it has put on the sock, their blank verse cannot forget the stride and strut it had caught of the cothurnus. Massinger never mouths or rants, because he seems never to have written merely to fill up an empty space. He is therefore never bombastic, for bombast gets its metaphorical name from its original physical use as padding. Indeed, there are very few empty spaces in his works. His plays are interesting alike from their story and the way it is told. I doubt if there are so many salient short passages, striking images, or pregnant sayings to be found in his works as may be found in those of very inferior men. But we feel always that we are in the company of a serious and thoughtful man, if not in that of a great thinker. Great thinkers, indeed, are seldom so entertaining as he. If he does not tax the mind of his reader, nor call out all its forces with profound problems of psychology, he is infinitely suggestive of not unprofitable reflection, and of agreeable nor altogether purposeless meditation. His is “a world whose course is equable,” where “calm pleasures abide,” if no “majestic pains.” I never could understand Lamb’s putting Middleton and Rowley above him, unless, perhaps, because he was less at home on the humbler levels of humanity, less genial than they, or, at least, than Rowley. But there were no proper æsthetic grounds of comparison, if I am right in thinking, as I do, that he differed from them in kind, and that his kind was the higher.

In quoting from Wordsworth’s “Laodamia” just now, I stopped short of the word “pure,” and said only that Massinger’s world was “equable.” I did this because in some of his lower characters there is a coarseness, nay, a foulness, of thought and sometimes of phrase for which I find it hard to account. There is nothing in it that could possibly corrupt the imagination, for it is altogether repulsive. In this case, as in Chapman’s, I should say that it indicated more ignorance of what is debasingly called Life than knowledge of it. With all this he gives frequent evidence of a higher conception of love than was then common. The region in which his mind seems most naturally to dwell is one of honor, courage, devotion, and ethereal sentiment.

I cannot help asking myself, did such a world ever exist? Perhaps not; yet one is inclined to say that it is such a world as might exist, and, if possible, ought to exist. It is a world of noble purpose not always inadequately fulfilled; a world whose terms are easily accepted by the intellect as well as by the imagination. By this I mean that there is nothing violently improbable in it. Some men, and, I believe, more women, live habitually in such a world when they commune with their own minds. It is a world which we visit in thought as we go abroad to renew and invigorate the ideal part of us. The canopy of its heaven is wide enough to stretch over Boston also. I heard, the other day, the story of a Boston merchant which convinces me of it. The late Mr. Samuel Appleton was anxious about a ship of his which was overdue, and was not insured. Every day added to his anxiety, till at last he began to be more troubled about that than about his ship. “Is it possible,” he said to himself, “that I am getting to love money for itself, and not for its noble uses?” He added together the value of the ship and the estimated profit on her cargo, found it to be $40,000, and at once devoted that amount to charities in which he was interested. This kind of thing _may_ happen, and sometimes _does_ happen, in the actual world; it _always_ happens in the world where Massinger lays his scene. That is the difference, and it is by reason of this difference that I like to be there. I move more freely and breathe more inspiring air among those encouraging possibilities. As I just said, we find no difficulty in reconciling ourselves with its conditions. We find no difficulty even where there is an absolute disengagement from all responsibility to the matter-of-fact, as in the “Arabian Nights,” which I read through again a few years ago with as much pleasure as when a boy, perhaps with more. For it appears to me that it is the business of all imaginative literature to offer us a sanctuary from the world of the newspapers, in which we have to live, whether we will or no. As in looking at a picture we must place ourselves at the proper distance to harmonize all its particulars into an effective whole, I am not sure that life is not seen in a truer perspective when it is seen in the fairer prospect of an ideal remoteness. Perhaps we must always go a little way back in order to get into the land of romance, as Scott and Hawthorne did. And yet it is within us too. An unskilful story-teller always raises our suspicion by putting a foot-note to any improbable occurrence, to say “This is a fact,” and the so-called realist raises doubts in my mind when he assures me that he, and he alone, gives me the facts of life. Too often all I can say is, if these are the facts, I don’t want them. The police reports give me more than I care for every day. But are they the facts? I had much rather believe them to be the accidental and transitory phenomena of our existence here. The real and abiding facts are those that are recognized as such by the soul when it is in that upper chamber of our being which is farthest removed from the senses, and commerces with its truer self. I very much prefer “King Lear” to Balzac’s bourgeois version of it in “Le Père Goriot,” as I do the _naïveté_ of Miranda to that of Voltaire’s Ingénu, and, when I look about me in the Fortunate Islands of the poet, would fain exclaim with her:

“O! wonder! How many goodly creatures are there here! How beauteous mankind is! O, brave new world, That has such people in ’t!”

Those old poets had a very lordly contempt for probability when improbability would serve their purpose better. But Massinger taxes our credulity less than most of them, for his improbabilities are never moral; that is, are never impossibilities. I do not recall any of those sudden conversions in his works from baseness to loftiness of mind, and from vice to virtue, which trip up all our expectations so startlingly in many an old play. As to what may be called material improbabilities, we should remember that two hundred and fifty years ago many things were possible, with great advantage to complication of plot, which are no longer so. The hand of an absolute prince could give a very sudden impulse to the wheel of Fortune, whether to lift a minion from the dust or hurl him back again; men might be taken by Barbary corsairs and sold for slaves, or turn Turks, as occasion required. The world was fuller of chances and changes than now, and the boundaries of the possible, if not of the probable, far wider. Massinger was discreet in the use of these privileges, and does not abuse them, as his contemporaries and predecessors so often do. His is a possible world, though it be in some ways the best of all possible worlds. He puts no strain upon our imaginations.

As a poet he is inferior to many others, and this follows inevitably from the admission we feel bound to make that good sense and good feeling are his leading qualities--yet ready to forget their sobriety in the exhilaration of romantic feeling. When Nature makes a poet, she seems willing to sacrifice all other considerations. Yet this very good sense of Massinger’s has made him excellent as a dramatist. His “New Way to pay Old Debts” is a very effective play, though in the reading far less interesting and pleasing than most of the others. Yet there are power and passion in it, even if the power be somewhat melodramatic, and the passion of an ignoble type. In one respect he was truly a poet--his conceptions of character were ideal; but his diction, though full of dignity and never commonplace, lacks the charm of the inspired and inspiring word, the relief of the picturesque image that comes so naturally to the help of Fletcher. Where he is most fanciful, indeed, the influence of Fletcher is only too apparent both in his thought and diction. I should praise him chiefly for the atmosphere of magnanimity which invests his finer scenes, and which it is wholesome to breathe. In Massinger’s plays people behave generously, as if that were the natural thing to do, and give us a comfortable feeling that the world is not so bad a place, after all, and that perhaps Schopenhauer was right in enduring for seventy-two years a life that wasn’t worth living. He impresses one as a manly kind of person, and the amount of man in a poet, though it may not add to his purely poetical quality, adds much, I think, to our pleasure in reading his works.

* * * * *

I have left myself little space in which to speak of Ford, but it will suffice. In reading him again after a long interval, with elements of wider comparison, and provided with more trustworthy tests, I find that the greater part of what I once took on trust as precious is really paste and pinchbeck. His plays seem to me now to be chiefly remarkable for that filigree-work of sentiment which we call sentimentality. The word “alchemy” once had a double meaning. It was used to signify both the process by which lead could be transmuted into gold, and the alloy of baser metal by which gold could be adulterated without losing so much of its specious semblance as to be readily detected. The ring of the true metal can be partially imitated, and for a while its glow, but the counterfeit grows duller as the genuine grows brighter with wear. The greater poets have found out the ennobling secret, the lesser ones the trick of falsification. Ford seems to me to have been a master in it. He abounds especially in mock pathos. I remember when he thoroughly imposed on me. A youth, unacquainted with grief and its incommunicable reserve, sees nothing unnatural or indecent in those expansive sorrows precious only because they can be confided to the first comer, and finds a pleasing titillation in the fresh-water tears with which they cool his eyelids. But having once come to know the jealous secretiveness of real sorrow, we resent these conspiracies to waylay our sympathy,--conspiracies of the opera plotted at the top of the lungs. It is joy that is wont to over-flow, but grief shrinks back to its sources. I suspect the anguish that confides its loss to the town-crier. Even in that single play of Ford’s which comes nearest to the true pathetic, “The Broken Heart,” there is too much apparent artifice, and Charles Lamb’s comment on its closing scene is worth more than all Ford ever wrote. But a critic must look at it _minus_ Charles Lamb. We may read as much of ourselves into a great poet as we will; we shall never cancel our debt to him. In the interests of true literature we should not honor fraudulent drafts upon our imagination.

Ford has an air of saying something without ever saying it that is peculiarly distressing to a man who values his time. His diction is hackneyed and commonplace, and has seldom the charm of unexpected felicity, so much a matter of course with the elder poets. Especially does his want of imagination show itself in his metaphors. The strong direct thrust of phrase which we cannot parry, sometimes because of very artlessness, is never his.

Compare, for example, this passage with one of similar content from Shakespeare:--

“Keep in, Bright angel, that severer breath to cool The heat of cruelty which sways the temple Of your too stony breast; you cannot urge One reason to rebuke my trembling plea Which I have not, with many nights’ expense, Examined; but, oh Madam, still I find No physic strong to cure a tortured mind But freedom from the torture it sustains.”

Now hear Shakespeare:--

“Canst thou not minister to a mind diseased, Pluck from the memory a rooted sorrow, Raze out the written troubles of the brain, And, with some sweet oblivious antidote, Cleanse the stuff’d bosom of the perilous stuff Which weighs upon the heart?”

Ford lingers-out his heart-breaks too much. He recalls to my mind a speech of Calianax in Beaumont and Fletcher’s “Maid’s Tragedy:” “You have all fine new tricks to grieve. But I ne’er knew any but direct crying.” One is tempted to prefer the peremptory way in which the old ballad-mongers dealt with such matters:--

“She turned her face unto the wa’, And there her very heart it brak.”

I cannot bid you farewell without thanking you for the patience with which you have followed me to the end. I may have seemed sometimes to be talking to you of things that would weigh but as thistle-down in the great business-scales of life. But I have an old opinion, strengthening with years, that it is as important to keep the soul alive as the body: nay, that it is the life of the soul which gives all its value to that of the body. Poetry is a criticism of life only in the sense that it furnishes us with the standard of a more ideal felicity, of calmer pleasures and more majestic pains. I am glad to see that what the understanding would stigmatize as useless is coming back into books written for children, which at one time threatened to become more and more drearily practical and didactic. The fairies are permitted once more to imprint their rings on the tender sward of the child’s fancy, and it is the child’s fancy that often lives obscurely on to minister solace to the lonelier and less sociable mind of the man. Our nature resents the closing up of the windows on its emotional and imaginative side, and revenges itself as it can. I have observed that many who deny the inspiration of Scripture hasten to redress their balance by giving a reverent credit to the revelations of inspired tables and camp-stools. In a last analysis it may be said that it is to the sense of Wonder that all literature of the Fancy and of the Imagination appeals. I am told that this sense is the survival in us of some savage ancestor of the age of flint. If so, I am thankful to him for his longevity, or his transmitted nature, whichever it may be. But I have my own suspicion sometimes that the true age of flint is before, and not behind us, an age hardening itself more and more to those subtle influences which ransom our lives from the captivity of the actual, from that dungeon whose warder is the Giant Despair. Yet I am consoled by thinking that the siege of Troy will be remembered when those of Vicksburg and Paris are forgotten. One of the old dramatists, Thomas Heywood, has, without meaning it, set down for us the uses of the poets:--

“They cover us with counsel to defend us From storms without; they polish us within With learning, knowledge, arts, and disciplines; All that is nought and vicious they sweep from us Like dust and cobwebs; our rooms concealed Hang with the costliest hangings ’bout the walls, Emblems and beauteous symbols pictured round.”

Transcriber’s Notes

Punctuation, hyphenation, and spelling were made consistent when a predominant preference was found in the original book; otherwise they were not changed.

Simple typographical errors were corrected; unbalanced quotation marks were remedied when the change was obvious, and otherwise left unbalanced.

Contractions using ’t, such as “’t is” were printed with a space separating the “’t” from the preceding or following word. Today, we omit the space (“’tis”), but since all of them were printed with the space in the original book, the space has been retained here.