And easy path leading to vicious pleasures,
And ending in a precipice deep as hell,
To scale the rugged cliffs on whose firm top
Virtue and Honour, crown'd with wreaths of stars,
Did sit triumphant.[132]
But there is another characteristic of Massinger's style and that perhaps more obvious still; it is full of courtliness and grace. A perusal of The City Madam, where the subject is the absurdity of the ladies of the Mansion House who ape the manners of the West End, suggests the question whether Massinger was ever attached to the Court. We do not know. He must, at any rate, have moved amongst refined and educated people. Napoléon said that Corneille's plays ought to be performed to an audience of ambassadors and ministers of state;[133] in the same way, in reading Massinger, we feel that we are moving freely in the palaces of the great. There is comparatively little here of dialect[134] or low life; we are at once taken up [pg 044] into high life with all its virtues and its faults. The kings and courtiers behave and express themselves as we should expect them to do; the politeness and the compliments which we hear on every side have the merit of being entirely natural. And if there is little to remind us of Dickens, there is still less to recall Thackeray. There is no air of snobbishness; such is the dexterity of our author that we do not feel like Jeames Yellowplush, that we are awkward menials watching the doings of the titled and the great. Not only do the characters move with an inborn grace which is free from self-analysis and self-contempt, but they take the audience up into their company; and as the gallants of that era used sometimes to sit upon the stage, close among the actors,[135] so in reading Massinger we feel that we are unconsciously present at the scenes he portrays.
This is as much as to say that the stage of those days responded to a real and living need in the minds of the audience; there was nothing exotic or artificial about it, as there seems to have been about our plays ever since the Puritans turned things upside down. It will be said [pg 045] that this enchanted atmosphere belongs to all the greater playwrights of the age alike. And this is true; it is one of the secrets of their abiding charm. Brander Matthews, in dealing with the unreality of Massinger's atmosphere, says that “some of Shakspere's most delightful plays, The Merchant of Venice for one, and Much Ado for another, are charming to us now only because we are quite willing to make believe with the poet” (op. cit., p. 311). And so, when Leslie Stephen asks if we are “invigorated” by the perusal of Massinger's plays,[136] I reply to that apostle of common sense that I am not only charmed and delighted, but invigorated. And why? Because I am admitted to a world of heroism and romance.
But may we not put the matter more broadly still? When we read the Cavalier lyrics of Suckling, Herrick, and Lovelace, when we think of Falkland, when we stand before the portraits of Vandyck, do we not feel that modern England was in danger until lately of losing something? There is an aroma there of chivalry which had almost faded from our ken. And yet there is an element in our shy and dumb English nature to which this atmosphere is congenial, however overgrown with money-making our minds had seemed to be. Nor, as the student of history knows well, had the Puritans in the Civil War the monopoly of religion and duty. Indeed, the Civil War was a true tragedy, because both sides had right, both fought and bled for what they believed to be [pg 046] the truth. To-day, in spite of our many domestic discords, no party spirit discounts the gallant deeds of which we have read daily, and of which of necessity only a fraction has been publicly rewarded. Perhaps the flame of romance will breathe once more in our midst, now the War is over, purified by suffering, and quickened by the memory of those serene yet manly spirits whom we have lost on the battlefield, whose departure in the dayspring of life seems, as it were, to have extinguished so many stars in the vault of heaven. They put aside the calls of culture and pleasure, and the natural ambition to do something in the world before they were abolished by death. They have willingly given for their country all that they had; they have given themselves. If we remember their devotion with gratitude it may purify us from the commonplace, the vulgar, and the selfish. They, at any rate, can address the power of evil, which for the moment seemed to triumph, in the words of Dorothea:
What is this life to me? Not worth, a thought:
Or, if it be esteem'd, 'tis that I lose it