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

X

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 indignatio 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-"

"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