than
one thought at a time. That she, the first criminal, should be honestly
shocked as well as physically horrified by revelation of the real motive
which impelled her accomplice into crime, gives a lurid streak of
tragic humor to the life-like interest of the scene; as the pure
infusion of spontaneous poetry throughout redeems the whole work from
the charge of vulgar subservience to a vulgar taste for the presentation
or the contemplation of criminal horror. Instances of this happy and
natural nobility of instinct abound in the casual expressions which give
grace and animation always, but never any touch of rhetorical
transgression or florid superfluity, to the brief and trenchant
sword-play of the tragic dialogue:

That sigh would fain have utterance: take pity on't,
And lend it a free word; 'las, how it labors
For liberty! I hear the murmur yet
Beat at your bosom.

The wording of this passage is sufficient to attest the presence and
approve the quality of a poet: the manner and the moment of its
introduction would be enough to show the instinctive and inborn insight
of a natural dramatist. As much may be said of the few words which give
us a ghostly glimpse of supernatural terror:

Ha! what art thou that tak'st away the light
Betwixt that star and me! I dread thee not:
'Twas but a mist of conscience.

But the real power and genius of the work cannot be shown by
extracts--not even by such extracts as these. His friend and colleague
Dekker shows to better advantage by the process of selection: hardly one
of his plays leaves so strong and sweet an impression of its general and
complete excellence as of separate scenes or passages of tender and
delicate imagination or emotion beyond the reach of Middleton: but the
tragic unity and completeness of conception which distinguish this
masterpiece will be sought in vain among the less firm and solid figures
of his less serious and profound invention. Had "The Changeling" not
been preserved, we should not have known Middleton: as it is, we are
more than justified in asserting that a critic who denies him a high
place among the poets of England must be not merely ignorant of the
qualities which involve a right or confer a claim to this position, but
incapable of curing his ignorance by any process of study. The rough and
rapid work which absorbed too much of this poet's time and toil seems
almost incongruous with the impression made by the noble and