n so undiluted a
form, runs through most of Massinger's plays. He is throughout a
sentimentalist and a rhetorician. He is not, like the greatest men,
dominated by thoughts and emotions which force him to give them external
embodiment in life-like symbols. He is rather a man of much real feeling
and extraordinary facility of utterance, who finds in his stories
convenient occasions for indulging in elaborate didactic utterances upon
moral topics. It is probably this comparative weakness of the higher
imaginative faculty which makes Lamb speak of him rather disparagingly.
He is too self-conscious and too anxious to enforce downright moral
sentiments to satisfy a critic by whom spontaneous force and direct
insight were rightly regarded as the highest poetic qualities. A single
touch in Shakespeare, or even in Webster or Ford, often reveals more
depth of feeling than a whole scene of Massinger's facile and often
deliberately forensic eloquence. His temperament is indicated by the
peculiarities of his style. It is, as Coleridge says, poetry
differentiated by the smallest possible degree from prose. The greatest
artists of blank verse have so complete a mastery of their language that
it is felt as a fibre which runs through and everywhere strengthens the
harmony, and is yet in complete subordination to the sentiment. With a
writer of the second order, such as Fletcher, the metre becomes more
prominent, and at times produces a kind of monotonous sing-song, which
begins to remind us unpleasantly of the still more artificial tone
characteristic of the rhymed tragedies of the next generation. Massinger
diverges in the opposite direction. The metre is felt enough and only
just enough to give a more stately step to rather florid prose. It is
one of his marks that a line frequently ends by some insignificant 'of'
or 'from,' so as to exclude the briefest possible pause in reading.
Thus, to take an example pretty much at random, the following instance
might be easily read without observing that it was blank verse at all:--

'Your brave achievements in the war, and what you did for me, unspoken,
because I would not force the sweetness of your modesty to a blush, are
written here; and that there might be nothing wanting to sum up my
numerous engagements (never in my hopes to be cancelled), the great
duke, our mortal enemy, when my father's country lay open to his fury
and the spoil of the victorious army, and I brought into his power, hat