Page:Grierson Herbert - First Half of the Seventeenth Century.djvu/127

Rh not such a master of vigorous coarse comedy as Middleton. He is on the side of decency and honesty. His citizens' wives in Northward Ho and Westward Ho vindicate their honour and put to shame their jealous husbands. A careless, kindly gaiety is the best feature of Dekker's comic scenes, which are too often tedious fooling. Such as it is, his humour is nowhere seen to better advantage than in The Shoemaker's Holiday, a sunny picture of young love and kindly genial London craftsmen such as Dickens himself might have drawn.

Side by side with this stratum of popular comedy lie, often quite incongruously, scenes of romance and tragedy which reveal a rare and sweet, if not strong or sustained, poetic and dramatic gift. There are touches of exquisite poetry in Old Fortunatus, though the treatment as a whole of a poetic theme is lamentably inadequate. But Dekker's dramatic power attained its highest level in those scenes of The Honest Whore which portray Bellafront, her father Orlando Friscobaldo, and her betrayer and later spendthrift husband Matheo. These are written with singular vigour and beauty. There are flaws, such as the rhetorical combats between Bellafront and her converter, Hippolito. It is characteristic of Dekker to repeat a device he has once found successful. The characters, moreover, show no marked development. But, on the whole, these scenes deserve the eloquent commendation bestowed on them by Hazlitt. They are like a drawing in which the lines are very few but intensely significant. "It is as if there were some