_Massinger_: Thou didst not borrow of Vice her indirect, Crooked, and abject means.
_Shakespeare_: God knows, my son, By what by-paths and indirect crook’d ways I met this crown.
Here, again, Massinger gives the general forensic statement, Shakespeare the particular image. “Indirect crook’d” is forceful in Shakespeare; a mere pleonasm in Massinger. “Crook’d ways” is a metaphor; Massinger’s phrase only the ghost of a metaphor.
_Massinger_: And now, in the evening, When thou shoud'st pass with honour to thy rest, Wilt thou fall like a meteor?
_Shakespeare_: I shall fall Like a bright exhalation in the evening, And no man see me more.
Here the lines of Massinger have their own beauty. Still, a “bright exhalation” appears to the eye and makes us catch our breath in the evening; “meteor” is a dim simile; the word is worn.
_Massinger_: What you deliver to me shall be lock’d up In a strong cabinet, of which you yourself Shall keep the key.
_Shakespeare_: ’Tis in my memory locked, And you yourself shall keep the key of it.
In the preceding passage Massinger had squeezed his simile to death, here he drags it round the city at his heels; and how swift Shakespeare’s figure is! We may add two more passages, not given by our commentator; here the model is Webster. They occur on the same page, an artless confession.
Here he comes, His nose held up; he hath something in the wind,
is hardly comparable to “the Cardinal lifts up his nose like a foul porpoise before a storm,” and when we come upon
as tann’d galley-slaves Pay such as do redeem them from the oar
it is unnecessary to turn up the great lines in the _Duchess of Malfi_. Massinger fancied this galley-slave; for he comes with his oar again in the _Bondman_—
Never did galley-slave shake off his chains, Or looked on his redemption from the oar....
Now these are mature plays; and the _Roman Actor_ (from which we have drawn the two previous extracts) is said to have been the preferred play of its author.
We may conclude directly from these quotations that Massinger’s feeling for language had outstripped his feeling for things; that his eye and his vocabulary were not in close co-operation. One of the greatest distinctions of several of his elder contemporaries—we name Middleton, Webster, Tourneur—is a gift for combining, for fusing into a single phrase, two or more diverse impressions.