Page:Grierson Herbert - First Half of the Seventeenth Century.djvu/390

370 inchoate piece when set beside the shining workmanship of Polyeucte. But the Elizabethans had moments of dramatic insight that seem to me beyond the range of Corneille; and the wild, natural beauties of their poetry have, at any rate for an English reader, a charm that his great and admirable eloquence lacks.

The artistic freedom and variety of the English dramatists are not more striking on a broad survey than is the fundamental soundness of their morality. They are certainly not squeamish, whether in comedy or tragedy, though there is nothing in English to equal the coarseness of Dutch, the cynicism of French farce. There are doubtless signs of decadence, in Fletcher and some of his followers, which forecast the tone of the Restoration plays. Not all are equally sound. Middleton is somewhat brutal, Fletcher callously indecent, and Ford is attracted by the morbid. But taking a broad view; allowing for the demands of a popular audience in the way of amusement; remembering the general tone of plays like Dekker's The Honest Whore, Webster's Vittoria Corrombona and Duchess of Malfi, even of Tourneur's tragedies, of Massinger's plays despite a needless indecency of language, and of comedies which might easily have been only cynical like Northward Ho and Westward Ho,—it is impossible not to admit that the complete freedom the dramatists enjoyed, limited by the general exclusion of political subjects and occasional edicts against strong language, only illustrates the fundamental soundness of their morality, their reverence for virtue in men and women.