all the time
in an unnatural region, where, it is true, a sense of honour and other
good qualities come in for much eloquent praise, but where, above
everything, there is a marked absence of downright wholesome
common-sense? Of course the effect is partly due to the region in which
the old dramatists generally sought for their tragic situations. We are
never quite at home in this fictitious cloudland, where the springs of
action are strange, unaccountable, and altogether different from those
with which we have to do in the workaday world. A great poet, indeed,
weaves a magic mirror out of these dream-like materials, in which he
shows us the great passions, love, and jealousy, and ambition, reflected
upon a gigantic scale. But, in weaker hands, the characters become
eccentric instead of typical: his vision simply distorts instead of
magnifying the fundamental truths of human nature. The liberty which
could be used by Shakespeare becomes dangerous for his successors.
Instead of a legitimate idealisation, we have simply an abandonment of
any basis in reality.

The admission that Massinger is moral must therefore be qualified by the
statement that he is unnatural; or, in other words, that his morality is
morbid. The groundwork of all the virtues, we are sometimes told, is
strength. A strong nature may be wicked, but a weak one cannot attain
any high moral level. The correlative doctrine in literature is, that
the foundation of all excellence, artistic or moral, is a vivid
perception of realities and a masculine grasp of facts. A man who has
that essential quality will not blink the truths which we see
illustrated every day around us. He will not represent vice as so ugly
that it can have no charms, so foolish that it can never be plausible,
or so unlucky that it can never be triumphant. The robust moralist
admits that vice is often pleasant, and that wicked men flourish like a
green bay-tree. He cannot be over-anxious to preach, for he feels that
the intrinsic charm of high qualities can dispense with any artificial
attempts to bolster them up by sham rhetoric, or to slur over the hard
facts of life. He will describe Iago as impartially as Desdemona, and,
having given us the facts, leave us to make what we please of them. It
is the mark of a more sickly type of morality, that it must always be
distorting the plain truth. It becomes sentimental, because it wishes to
believe that what is pleasant must be true. It makes villai