1

The unity of the play lies in the cumulative touches by which these figures are realised for us, and by which we are lifted naturally to the heroic self-restraint of Calantha. Into Love's Sacrifice, the history of the ardent and reckless Bianca, Ford has put his subtlest work, marred though it is by the feeble and foolish sentiment of the conclusion. The story of the youth who falls in love with his friend's wife, and when he has aroused in her stronger nature a passion far deeper than his own, shrinks back realising his falsehood, is true to nature and wrought with Ford's finest art and insight. But we can only smile when we hear these lovers — "Hid in a rock of fire,

Guarded by ministers of flaming hell "—

celebrated as miracles of chastity and truth. In so complete a moral collapse as this (unless we choose to regard it as intentional irony), as well as in the occasional touches of forced material horror with which he startles us, Ford shows that he was the child of a society tainted by the affectation of purity, and a court that had ceased to be national and robust-both soon to vanish like a fantastic dream. In Perkin Warbeck he laid aside his characteristic defects, and also his characteristic merits, to achieve a distinct dramatic success. It is the least interesting of his plays for those who care for the peculiar qualities which mark Ford's genius, but it certainly ranks among our best

historical dramas.

Ford's interest in psychological problems may be detected in his impartial, even sympathetic, treatment of Warbeck; but for the most part this play is an exception to every generalisation that may be arrived at concerning his work. It is of a masculine temperature, with few flaws, and of fine. characterisation throughout. These five plays embody whatever is best in Ford's work.

Of his remaining plays, The Lady's Trial contains most that is beautiful in language and character; The Fancies Chaste and Noble has a little that is characteristic, set in a weak and absurd story; The Sun's Darling, a "moral masque," of which Dekker wrote the larger and happier part, exhibits Ford's most level and frigid manner. The Witch of Edmonton, a noble and more human work of art than any of these, was written in conjunction with Dekker and Rowley. It contains a few touches that are unmistakably Ford's, together with much that, without being very characteristic, has been plausibly assigned to him; on the whole, it is one of those plays, not uncommon at that time, in which two or more writers united to produce something that was unlike their individual work, and often superior to anything they produced singly. Ford's early work in prose and verse may be neglected.

1 The Witch of Edmonton is included with Dekker's plays in the Mermaid Series.

The burden of a passionate and heavy-laden heart-that is the centre of every picture that

Ford presents to us; lavishes all his care. filled in with a rapid and careless hand. His superior persons are generally uninteresting. As to his comic figures, it is for once impossible to go beyond the dictum of Gifford : they area despicable set of buffoons." He is reckless of consistency in action or time, indifferent generally to dramatic effect, but when the mysteries of the heart are in question he elaborates his art to the highest point. The conflict between the world's opinion and the heart's desire he paints and repaints, not as a moralist browbeating the cynical or conventional world, but as an artist, presenting problems which he does not undertake to solve save by the rough methods of the tragic stage. It is the grief deeper than language that he strives to express. He seeks in his own words to

on the painting of it he

The rest of the canvas is

Sigh out a lamentable tale of things

Done long ago, and ill done; and when sighs

Are wearied, piece up what remains behind

With weeping eyes, and hearts that bleed to death."

He is a master of the brief mysterious words, so calm in seeming, which well up from the depths of despair. He concentrates the revelation of a soul's agony into a sob or a sigh. 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. He is rich in those words and lines of sweet and subtle music

"Parthenophil is lost, and I would see him;
For he is like to something I remember,

A great while since, a long, long time ago."

When we think of Ford we think of Giovanni and Annabella, passionate children who had given the world for love; of the childish sophistry with which they justified themselves, and of their last marvellous dialogue through which pierced a vague sense of guilt—a lurid shadow cast from the world they had contemned. We think of that Bianca (she that "owned the poor style of Duchess") who had thrown such scorn on her lover that he vowed never to speak to her again of unlawful love, and who comes to him in his sleep the night after, unclad and alone, in the last abandonment of passion. We think of Flavia in The Fancies Chaste and Noble, coldly dismissing her first husband with the one sign of tenderness as she turns at length to her new husband::

"Beshrew 't, the brim of your hat Struck in mine eye."

We think of Calantha, still gracious and calm. in the festive dance, as the leaden messages of awful death are shot at slow intervals in her ear, -her father, her friend, her lover, still gracious and calm until her duties are ended.

"When one news straight came huddling on another,

Of death! and death! and death! still I danced forward;
But it struck home, and here, and in an instant.

They are the silent griefs which cut the heart-strings;
Let me die smiling."

Ford is the most modern of the tribe to whom he belonged. When Shelley in his last days began a new drama, of which only fragments remain, he reproduced with added sweetness the tones and cadences of Ford's verse; and the writers to-day who seek, and in vain, to revive our ancient drama on its old lines, instinctively ally themselves with Ford. When we enumerate his great qualities we are enumerating the qualities which make him an ineffectual dramatist. Notwithstanding the ungrudging admiration of his relatives, legal friends, and fellow dramatists, and the "generally well received" report of the outside public, he could at no time have been a really popular playwright; and with the exception of Perkin Warbeck his plays have probably never been represented in more recent times. He was a sensitive observer who had meditated deeply on the springs of human action, especially in women. Of none of his fellows, even the greatest of them, can we say this. They have left us pictures of women which are incomparably more tender, or picturesque, or tragic than the searching, deliberate art of Ford could compass. But they looked nearly all from the outside, and were satisfied