Page:Grierson Herbert - First Half of the Seventeenth Century.djvu/149

Rh enlists for him a respect that the bluntness of Fletcher's moral sympathy often forfeits, is the sincere and earnest moral purpose running through his works. He is the most interestingly didactic of the dramatists. Jonson is didactic, because the critics prescribe the inculcation of virtue to the dramatists. But Massinger has a sensitive and eager sympathy with virtue and nobility of character, which breathes through his somewhat hectic characters and scenes of eloquent argument and declamation. He is often strangely licentious in the language he puts into the mouths of all his characters. So in varying degrees is every one of the dramatists, and Beaumont and Fletcher cultivated indecency. But in Massinger this licentiousness has the awkwardness and exaggeration of one who has no interest in, or sympathy with, what he thinks it necessary to introduce. Moreover, he is not saved from awkward exaggeration by a sense of humour. He has little humour and no wit. His lighter comic scenes are inexpressibly tedious, and even disgusting. But, like another and greater sentimentalist, he had the power of grim caricature. Sir Giles Overreach in A New Way to Pay Old Debts (1633), and Luke Frugal in The City Madam (1632), are almost sublime studies in the manner of Dickens—villains not intelligible but impressive. How strong the didactic impulse was in Massinger is seen if the first of these plays be compared with its original, Middleton's A Trick to catch the Old One. What the latter treats in a spirit of pure and reckless gaiety, Massinger converts into