This Boyle must have had a singular ear to have preferred Tourneur’s apprentice work to his _Revenger’s Tragedy_, and one must think that he had never glanced at Ford. But though the appraisal be ludicrous, the praise is not undeserved. Mr. Cruickshank has given us an excellent example of Massinger’s syntax—
What though my father Writ man before he was so, and confirm’d it, By numbering that day no part of his life In which he did not service to his country; Was he to be free therefore from the laws And ceremonious form in your decrees? Or else because he did as much as man In those three memorable overthrows, At Granson, Morat, Nancy, where his master, The warlike Charalois, with whose misfortunes I bear his name, lost treasure, men, and life, To be excused from payment of those sums Which (his own patrimony spent) his zeal To serve his country forced him to take up!
It is impossible to deny the masterly construction of this passage; perhaps there is not one living poet who could do the like. It is impossible to deny the originality. The language is pure and correct, free from muddiness or turbidity. Massinger does not confuse metaphors, or heap them one upon another. He is lucid, though not easy. But if Massinger’s age, “without being exactly corrupt, lacks moral fibre,” Massinger’s verse, without being exactly corrupt, suffers from cerebral anæmia. To say that an involved style is necessarily a bad style would be preposterous. But such a style should follow the involutions of a mode of perceiving, registering, and digesting impressions which is also involved. It is to be feared that the feeling of Massinger is simple and overlaid with received ideas. Had Massinger had a nervous system as refined as that of Middleton, Tourneur, Webster, or Ford, his style would be a triumph. But such a nature was not at hand, and Massinger precedes, not another Shakespeare, but Milton.
Massinger is, in fact, at a further remove from Shakespeare than that other precursor of Milton—John Fletcher. Fletcher was above all an opportunist, in his verse, in his momentary effects, never quite a pastiche; in his structure ready to sacrifice everything to the single scene. To Fletcher, because he was more intelligent, less will be forgiven. Fletcher had a cunning guess at feelings, and betrayed them; Massinger was unconscious and innocent. As an artisan of the theatre he is not inferior to Fletcher, and his best tragedies have an honester unity than _Bonduca_. But the unity is superficial. In the _Roman Actor_ the development of parts is out of all proportion to the central theme; in the _Unnatural Combat_, in spite of the deft handling of suspense and the quick shift from climax to a new suspense, the first part of the play is the hatred of Malefort for his son and the second part is his passion for his daughter. It is theatrical skill, not an artistic conscience arranging emotions, that holds the two parts together. In the _Duke of Milan_ the appearance of Sforza at the Court of his conqueror only delays the action, or rather breaks the emotional rhythm. And we have named three of Massinger’s best.