THE BEST PLAYS OF FORD.*

THE present generation of readers, who are never weary of informing us that they have no leisure for the study of the masterpieces of our glorious old literature, with whom a little even of Shakespeare and Milton goes a long way, who cannot get through The Faerie Queene, and who are yet apparently not too busy or impatient to read every new novel, however long, dull, or vapid, will probably think the various plays selected for them with so much care by the editors of the "Mermaid Series " very hard reading indeed for the most part, and wish that they had been rather less than more in number than they are. The true student, however, to whom most modem novels are the hardest of all reading, from that very vacuity of thought which makes them so acceptable to the many, cannot fail sometimes to regret the omission of a favourite drama, though, in the present instance at least, he must own that the plays chosen for popular perusal do contain all the best and most characteristic work of their "The Best Plays of the Old Dramatists :"—John Ford. Edited, with an Intro- duction and Notes, by Havelock Ellie. London: Vizetelly and Co. 1888.

author. He may even go further and say that, if that wholly uninteresting and often disgusting tragedy, Love's Sacrifice, had been excluded, and only 'Tis Pity She's a Whore, The Broken Heart, Perkin Warbeck, and a few passages in the first and third scenes of the first act, and the third scene of the fourth act, of Love's Melancholy given, the real excellences of Ford would have been as adequately represented as his warmest admirers could desire.

The introductory notice of the poet by Mr. Havelock Ellis is interesting and concise, and contains much admirable criti- cism. 'Tie Pity She's a Whore rather than The Broken Heart is regarded as Ford's masterpiece, and his knowledge of the human heart, particularly in women, his most marked characteristic.

Of all our greater dramatists, Ford is perhaps the narrowest

in range, though in his own special sphere he is an almost unrivalled master. He has no wit or humour; his verse, though always sonorous, and often delicately modulated, is naked and unadorned; he has nothing of the charming abandon of his immediate predecessors in dramatic poetry, his best effects being always deliberate, and as we read his pages we never feel the free, fresh, and bracing air of the woodland, the mountain, or the sea blowing upon us as we seem to do when reading most of the plays of Shakespeare or Fletcher. There is, if we may so express it, a sedentary look about all that Ford has written, owing probably to his legal profession ; and that sensation as of issuing from a sick-room into the open air, which Coleridge said he felt when turning from Clarissa Harlow to Tom Jones, is not less experienced when one lays down the volume which contains The Broken Heart and 'Tis Pity She's a Whore, and opens that which contains The Tempest and As You Like It. This is not the only particular in which Ford resembles Richardson; both specially excel in the delineation of female character, and both paint the anguish of disappointed, thwarted, or misplaced affection, with a power and delibera- tion which are almost harrowing. Penthea, too, one of the principal female characters of The Broken Heart, like Clarissa, starves herself to death, though from a somewhat different cause.

With Ford, love is man's as well as woman's whole existence, and it is from the frustration of that only, that life loses every charm, hope springs no longer in the breast, and— "a winding-sheet, a fold of lead, And some untrod-on corner in the earth,"

suggest themselves as remedies to the mind of the sufferer. The melancholy of the lover is the sole melancholy which Ford depicts in his plays ; that of the thinker which springs from baffled aspiration, the sense of isolation from his fellows, the contemplation of the oft-repeated triumphs of the evil over the good principle in the affairs of men, "gilded honour shame- fully misplaced," desert often kept as well as born a beggar, and the infinite vanity of all things, so deeply felt and expressed with such terrible force by poets like Shakespeare, Webster, and Tourneur, seems to have been almost unknown to Ford. This may be partly explained by his high social position, which exempted him from those trials and humiliations to which his less fortunate dramatic brethren were exposed, and his exceptional success as a man of business. Woes which he never felt, and which no imaginative sympathy can ever fully realise, he wisely refrained from attempting to depict; but the anguish of blighted affection, which is common to rich and poor alike, and the " pale despair and cold tranquillity" into which it generally subsides, he had experienced, and he exercised all his power in their delineation. It is from this concentration that his intensity comes ; with more knowledge and personal experience of human suffering in all its phases and varieties he would have gained in breadth, but would pro- bably have- lost in profundity : his narrowness is a part, and even condition, of his strength.

It is, as has often been remarked, in the pathetic that Ford chiefly excels ; yet his greatest effects in this line are always wrought by the simplest means. The sufferer is outwardly calm and passionless, and speaks at first in cold, measured tones, in which it is difficult to detect any feeling whatever, and then suddenly, yet quite naturally and without strain, a few words are added which reveal a very abyss of mortal agony, and produce an impression on the reader as ineffaceable as that which is made by almost any poet that could be named. The words themselves are apparently artless and simple enough, and to many readers might seem even commonplace;

it is chiefly from the accent or intonation that is given to them by their arrangement in the verse that the peculiar impression arises in the mind of the attentive and sympathetic student. As Mr. Havelock Ellis well says :—" He is a master of the brief, mysterious words, so calm in seeming, which well up from the depths of despair. The surface seems calm ; we scarcely suspect that there is anything beneath ; one gasp bubbles up from the drowning heart below, and all is silence." To quote passages in illustration of this is not easy, and they must, if given, lose not a little of their effect by being detached from the context. Something, however, of what is meant may be seen by such utterances as the following of Penthea's, in the third scene of the second act of The Broken Heart, in which she coldly and harshly rebukes Orgilus for venturing to renew his addresses to her after her marriage with Bassanes "Have you aught else to urge

Of new demand ? as for the old, forget it; 'Tie buried in an everlasting silence, And shall be, shall be ever." " I find The constant preservation of thy merit, By thy not daring to attempt my fame With injury of any loose conceit,

Which might give deeper wounds to discontents.

Continue this fair race; then though I cannot Add to thy comfort, yet I shall more often Remember from what fortune I am fall's., And pity mine own ruin."

We may also quote the following from the apparently amicable dialogue between Orgilus and the destroyer of his happiness, Ithocles, in the third scene of the fourth act of the same great play :—

" I en. We'll distinguish

Our fortunes merely in the title ; partners In all respects else but the bed.

ORG. The bed ! Forfend it Jove's own jealousy !—till lastly We slip down in the common earth together, And there our beds are equal ; save some monument To show this was the king, and this the subject."

If further illustration be required, we may refer to the deeply moving inverview between Penthea and Calantha in the third act of the play; the second scene in the fourth act, in which Penthea's wits begin to turn; the dying words of Orgilus ; and lastly, to the language addressed by Giovanni to his sister Annabella, in the great but terrible fifth scene of the final act of that play which has so repellent and cynical a title, and yet by its strange power and beauty of style fascinates the reader in no ordinary degree, and makes him turn to its pages again and again.

Although Ford was by no means unsuccessful in the delineation of male character—his Perkin Warbeck, for example, in his calm heroism, magnanimity, and native dignity, being a portrait worthy of any master, and his Giovanni at least as interesting and impressive as his .AiniabeLla—his female studies are certainly the most original and characteristic. He anatomises and lays bare the hearts of women with the skill of one who has studied them closely and constantly, yet always sympathetically, and he does not shrink from showing them to us in all their strength and all their weakness, their self-restraint and their abandonment, their external calmness and inward perturbation, their apparent indifference or aversion, and their real warmth and depth of affection. " Is it not certain," asks the great modern Spanish novelist, Fernan Caballero, in her lovely and touching story, Las dos Gracias, "that there exists in woman a native dignity which, without being opposed to modesty, keeps it from all weakness and meanness ?" (" d No es cierto que exists en In mujer una dignidad natural, que sin ester refiida con la modestia la aparta de toda debilidad y bajeza ?") This natural dignity, not inconsistent with modesty, is conspicuous in Ford's best female characters, Penthea, Lady Katherine Gordon, and, above all, in Calantha, though it must be owned that it does not preserve one of them, at least—Penthea--from certain weaknesses of conduct, and it seems to be the cause of occasional hypocrisy and inconsistency of action in others of his heroines. We hardly think, as Mr. Havelock Ellie seems to do, that the Bianca of Love's Sacrifice is to be commended for first flouting her lover—only to save her dignity apparently —and then coming to him in his sleep at night, " unclad and alone, in the last abandonment of passion." Such conduct may be natural, and Ford's editor may be right in thinking that such representations prove that Ford knew the hearts of women better than even the very greatest of his fellow-

dramatists ; but we fear most readers will infinitely prefer Cordelia, Miranda, or Imogen, to Bianca, Flavia, or even Cala.ntha. We know that Shelley thought the highest com- mendation he could bestow on a woman was to say that she was like one of Shakespeare's women ; and if there be women more like Ford's than Shakespeare's creations, we can only say that we deeply regret that it should be so.

Of Ford's three masterpieces, the palm must be given to 'Tie Pity She's a Whore for tragic intensity, depth of insight, unity, and consistency ; but The Broken Heart certainly con- tains the greatest number of pathetic and striking scenes and passages, and its main plot is far less objectionable : both plays are deformed by scenes of dull buffoonery, a fault from which Perkin Warbeck is remarkably free. The latter play is thoroughly noble in spirit throughout, and the massive elo- quence and dignity of its longer speeches are worthy even of Massinger. It is one of the very best of our English historical dramas, ranking probably next after those of Shakespeare and Marlowe. All the characters are drawn with a master-hand, and the reader's sympathies are with the hero throughout. The mystery of his identity is well preserved. As we read his noble words to King James when the latter is about to forsake him, or his replies to the insults of King Henry when brought a prisoner before him, we cannot but feel that he is more of a natural monarch of men than his conqueror, and the question of his legal pretensions to the throne becomes a matter of secondary importance. Our sympathy is fully secured by his courageous conduct on the scaffold.