"To ignorants obdurde, where wilful error lies, Nor yet to carping folks, whose malice may deject thee, But to the docile bairns of knowledge I direct thee." I have quoted these royal rhymes from memory, and may not have done them full justice; but I am sure I have given them with enough exactness. But a subject on which I love to talk has led me astray; let us return to Ford. His dramatic power consists mainly in the choice of his plots. His characters, as is often the case with those of retired students, are rather certain turns of mind or eccentricities put into a body, than real men and women. JOHN. He does not carry matters quite so far as some later writers, who go to the expense of a whole human frame for the mere sake of bringing a single humorous phrase upon the stage, the sole use of the legs being to carry about the body, that of the body to sustain the head, and that of the head to utter the said humorous phrase at proper intervals. Friar Bacon's head, or one of those " airy tongues " which Milton borrowed of Marco Polo, would save these gentry a great waste of flesh and bone, if it could be induced to go upon the stage. PHILIP. No; Ford is not quite so spendthrift in human beings as that. Guardians should be appointed for such authors, as for those who cannot take care of their estates. His plots raise him and carry him along with them whither they please, and it is generally only at their culminating points that he shows much strength; and then it is the strength of passion, not of reason. Indeed, I do not know but it should rather be called weakness. He puts his characters in situations where the heart that has a drop of hot blood in it finds it easier to be strong than weak. His heroes show that fitful strength which grows out of intense excitement, rather than healthy muscular action; it does not rise with the difficulty or danger they are in, and, looking down on it, assert calmly the unusurpable sovereignty of the soul, even after the flesh is overcome, but springs forward in an exulting gush of glorious despair to grapple with death and fate. In a truly noble bravery of soul, the interest is wholly the fruit of immortality; here it is the Sodom-apple of mortality. In the one case, we exult to see the infinite overshadow and dwarf the finite; in the other, we cannot restrain a kind of romantic enthusiasm and admiration at seeing the weak clay so gallantly defy the overwhelming power which it well knows must crush it. High genius may be fiery and impetuous, but it can never bully and look big; it does not defy death and futurity; for a doubt of its monarchy over them never overflushed its serene countenance. JOHN. Shakspeare's characters seem to modify his plots as much as they are modified by them in turn. This may be the result of his unapproachable art; for art in him is but the tracing of nature to her primordial laws; is but nature precipitated, as it were, by the infallible test of philosophy. In his plays, as in life, there is a perpetual seesaw of character and circumstance, now one uppermost, now the other. Nature is never afraid to reason in a circle; we must let her assume her premises, and make our deductions logical accordingly. The actors in Shakspeare's dramas are only overcome by so much as they fall below their ideal, and are wanting in some attribute of true manhood. Wherever we go with him, the absence of a virtue always suggests its presence; the want of any nobleness makes us feel its beauty the more keenly. PHILIP. But Ford's heroes are strong only in their imperfections, and it is to these that whatever admiration we yield them is paid. They interest us only so far as they can make us forget our quiet, calm ideal. This is the very stamp of weakness. We should be surprised if we saw them show any natural greatness. They are morbid and unhealthy; for, in truth, what we call greatness and nobleness is but entire health; to those only who are denat uralized themselves does it seem wonderful; to the natural man they are as customary and unconscious as the beating of his heart, or the motion of his lungs, and as necessary. Therefore it is that praise always surprises and humbles true genius; the shadow of earth comes then between them and their starry ideal with a cold and dark eclipse. In Ford's characters, the sublimity, if there be any, is that of a defiant despair. JOHN. The great genius may fail, but it is never thus. In him the spirit often overbalances the body, and sets its ideal too far beyond the actual. Unable to reach that, he seems to do less than many a one of less power; for the performance of any thing lower than what he has marked out for himself carries with it a feeling almost of degradation, that dispirits him. His wings may be too weak to bear him to that infinite height; but, if he fail, he is an angel still, and falls not so low as the proudest pitch of talent. His failures are successful compared with the successes of others. But not to himself do they seem so; though, at his earth-dwindling height, he show like a star to the eyes of the world, what is it to him while he beholds the golden gates of his aspiration, above him still, fast shut and barred immitigably? Yet high genius has that in it which makes that its longings can never wholly be fruitless; its utmost imperfection has some touch of the perfect in it. PHILIP. The slavery of the character to the incident in Ford's plays has often reminded me of that story of the travellers, who lost their way in the mummypits, and who were all forced to pass through the same narrow orifice, which gave ready way to the slender, but through which the stout were obliged to wriggle and squeeze with a desperate forgetfulness of bulk. It may be foolish for a philosopher, but it is wisdom in a dramatist, to follow the example of nature, who always takes care to make large holes for her large cats and small holes for her small ones. Ford, perhaps, more than any of his contemporaries deserves the name of sentimental. He has not the stately gravity and antique majesty of Chapman, the wild imagination or even the tenderness of Webster, the precise sense of Jonson, the homeliness of Heywood, nor the delicate apprehension and silver tongue of Fletcher, but he has more sentiment than all of them put together. The names of his plays show the bent of his mind; "Love's Sacrifice," "The Lover's Melancholy," and "The Broken Heart,” are the names of three of the best; and there is another in which the doctrine of the elective affinities is laid down broadly enough to have shocked even Goethe. His personal appearance seems to have answered well enough to what I have surmised of his character. A contemporary thus graphically describes him : |