manding it, and that
resignation is comparatively easy when it connotes an absence of active
force. The general lowering of vitality, the want of rigid dramatic
colouring, deprive his martyrs of that background of vigorous reality
against which their virtues would be forcibly revealed. His pathos is
not vivid and penetrating. Truly pathetic power is produced only when we
see that it is a sentiment wrung from a powerful intellect by keen
sympathy with the wrongs of life. We are affected by the tears of a
strong man; but the popular preacher who enjoys weeping produces in us
nothing but contempt. Massinger's heroes and heroines have not, we may
say, backbone enough in them to make us care very deeply for their
sorrows. And they moralise rather too freely. We do not want sermons,
but sympathy, when we are in our deepest grief; and we do not feel that
anyone feels very keenly who can take his sorrows for a text, and preach
in his agony upon the vanity of human wishes or the excellence of
resignation.

Massinger's remarkable flow of genuine eloquence, his real dignity of
sentiment, his sympathy for virtuous motive, entitle him to respect; but
we cannot be blind to the defect which keeps his work below the level of
his greatest contemporaries. It is, in one word, a want of vital force.
His writing is pitched in too low a key. He is not invigorating,
stimulating, capable of fascinating us by the intensity of his
conceptions. His highest range is a dignified melancholy or a certain
chivalrous recognition of the noble side of human nature. The art which
he represents is still a genuine and spontaneous growth instead of an
artificial manufacture. He is not a mere professor of deportment, or
maker of fine phrases. The days of mere affection have not yet arrived;
but, on the other hand, there is an absence of that grand vehemence of
soul which breathes in the spontaneous, if too lawless, vigour of the
older race. There is something hollow under all this stately rhetoric;
there are none of those vivid phrases which reveal minds moved by strong
passions and excited by new aspects of the world. The sails of his verse
are not, in Chapman's phrase, 'filled with a lusty wind,' but moving at
best before a steady breath of romantic sentiment, and sometimes
flapping rather ominously for want of true impulse. High thinking may
still be there, but it is a little self-conscious, and in need of
artificial stimulant. The old strenuous spirit has