Page:Grierson Herbert - First Half of the Seventeenth Century.djvu/151

Rh —incest and murder in one, revenge and suicide in another—but well fitted for tragic and poetic handling. Have they been quite adequately handled by Ford? That his plays are not completely successful even Ford's most ardent admirers will admit. The stories are clumsily told; the comic element beneath contempt; all except the principal characters are not only unreal but uninteresting. But what about the central tragic scenes in them? Ford is certainly free from the charge to which Fletcher is liable. There is no levity or callousness in his treatment of things terrible. He is acutely sensitive to the horror and pathos of what he describes. There is no justification, it seems to me, for any adverse judgment on Ford's moral character based on the character of his themes. He is an artist, and handles them with the detached seriousness of the artist. But it is only occasionally that his tragic intensity finds clear and dramatic expression. In Love's Sacrifice (1633), which is full of reminiscences of Othello, the intention is noble and tragic, but the execution very imperfect; and the same is true, it seems to me, of the more celebrated Broken Heart (1633), whose structure is inorganic, beautiful as more than one of the individual scenes is in sentiment and poetry. Only the intense and painful Giovanni and Annabella scenes of 'Tis Pity (1633) appear to me really dramatic, to portray passion agitating the will and evoking a conflict. There is none of the same dramatic interest in The Broken Heart, The Lover's Melancholy (1629), Love's Sacrifice (1633), and The Lady's Trial (1629). The finest scenes in these