[In the following essay, originally published in 1875, Ward praises the harrowing intensity of Ford's tragic figures, but contends that the tragic outcome in his plays is often insufficient in that it fails to give spectators catharsis.]

In Ford it needs but little power of judgment to discern an author who by the most striking features of his genius is entitled to an entirely distinct place among our most gifted dramatists. Some of his defects, indeed, he shares with others; but even here he may almost be said to make comparison difficult. Of comic power he is on the whole signally devoid, and the gross under-plots by which he thinks it necessary to disfigure most of his works, and the utter brutality with which he is at the pains of investing the personages who figure in many of them, are unrelieved by any play of wit or humour. His low comedy is upon the whole the most contemptible of any in our pre-Restoration drama—certainly of any that was due to the invention of an author of mark; and his high comedy, or what is intended for it, must, notwithstanding his breeding, be described as deficient in grace and lightness¹. … In but a single one of his dramas has he shown a certain power of comic characterisation; and from this point of view, as well as from others of more importance in his case, it is to be regretted that he should not have returned to, or sooner essayed, the historic drama, where he would have found most of his characters ready to his hand. The experience of this species would at the same time have accustomed him to a self-restraint in choice of subjects, which might have prevented him from lamentable moral and artistic aberrations. As it was, Ford in Perkin Warbeck furnishes the only example of a History fitted in some measure to supply a gap in the Shaksperean series, though not to be brought into comparison with the works of which that series consists.

In the plays more peculiarly characteristic of this author, few readers will refuse to recognise a combination of varied excellences. As to that of form, indeed, Ford is surpassed by few if any of Shakespeare's successors; for his art is always equal to its purpose, and rarely clogged or vitiated by affectation or mannerisms. His versification is distinguished by a fluency arguing no deficiency in strength; his verse is as sweet as Fletcher's, without having the same inclination towards looseness of texture and effeminacy of cadence. Though, for instance, Ford is fond of double-endings to his lines, his verse conveys no impression of excess in this or in any other particular; even ‘love's measure’ keeps the mean to which ‘the smooth licentious poet’ thought it a stranger². … His lyrical gift, as shown above all in The Broken Heart, is very great, although its exercise is not husbanded by him with sufficient care. In the construction of the plays for whose plots he seems to have largely depended on his own invention, he is on the whole hasty and reckless; in his Broken Heart he however shows himself capable of inventing and sustaining an action as perspicuous as it is complicated. The Witch of Edmonton too is excellently constructed in its main plot; but it is of course impossible to say whether the credit is in this instance to be given to Ford.

The strength of Ford's genius lies elsewhere. The intensity of his imagination enables him to reproduce situations of the most harrowing kind, and to reveal, with a vividness and suddenness wholly peculiar to himself, the depths of passion, sorrow, and despair which lie hidden in the hearts of men and women. The dark cloud which overshadowed the creative power of Webster, had settled upon the imagination of Ford; but to him it was given to make audible in the gloom the most secret throbbings of human anguish. That he at times creates these effects by conceptions unutterably shocking to our consciousness of the immutable authority of moral laws, betrays an inherent weakness in his inventive power instead of enhancing our admiration of it. The passion of Juliet is as intense, and the sympathy excited by her fate as irresistible, as are the guilty love of Annabella and the spasm of pity which her catastrophe excites in us; and the horrible nature of the plot is therefore not of the essence of the emotions which the tragedy is intended to call forth. The character of Bianca is a subtle psychological study,—subtle as the analysis of a possible disease. Of the irresistible eloquence of pure tenderness, such as that of Penthea's dying sufferings and Eroclea's devoted affection, Ford is likewise master; yet it is not in these scenes, but in those where the ragings of passion alternate with sudden touches of thrilling sweetness, that his power is altogether exceptional.

Ford was a dramatic poet of true genius; but his imagination moved at the best in a restricted sphere; and few of our great English dramatists have more insidiously contributed to unsettle the true conception of the basis of true tragic effect. The emotions are not purified by creations

                    Sweeten'd in their mixture
But tragical in issue—

so long as the mixture remains unharmonised, and the mind continues to be perturbed by the spectacle of an unsolved conflict³. … A dramatist who falls short of this, the highest end of tragedy, cannot lay claim to its greenest laurels. The tragic power of Ford is therefore as incomplete in its total effect as it is fitful in its individual operations; and

It physics not the sickness of a mind
Broken with griefs,—

nor lends its aid to sustain that health of soul which seeks one of its truest sustenances in perfect art. It excites; it distresses; it astonishes; it entrances; but it fails to purify, and by purifying to elevate and to strengthen. Let those who may esteem these cavils futile turn from Ford to the master-tragedians of all times, and they will acknowledge that Aristotle's definition still remains a sufficient test of the supreme adequacy of a tragic drama.

As to Ford's choice of themes, it condemns itself. There cannot be any question on this head as to the shifting criteria of times, localities and manners. All these a candid use of the comparative method may be trusted to apply; but they cannot reach the root of the matter. ‘It was,’ says Hazlitt, ‘not the least of Shakespear's praise, that he never tampered with unfair subjects. His genius was above it; his taste kept aloof from it.’ Ford's genius, on the contrary, was attracted, as it were irresistibly, by the temptation to brush with wings that should have borne it aloft into the liquid air the fitful flickerings of an unholy flame. In his nature, finely endowed as it was, there must have been something unsound.

Notes

1. A passage in The Fancies Chaste and Noble seems epigrammatically to characterise a favourite dramatic type of which Massinger and Shirley were particularly fond:

                                           Modesty in pages
   Shows not a virtue, boy, when it exceeds
   Good manners.

   (Act iii. sc. 1.)

   But the reference is to greed rather than looseness of talk.

2. 'Tis Pity, &c., act ii. sc. 2. Ford's plays contain a large admixture of prose; but I am not aware that the quality of the prose in itself calls for remark.

3. So that the spectator or reader is no wiser than the fool apostrophised by Ennius (Fr. Phoenix, ap. Ribbeck, Römische Tragödie, p. 192:

   Stultus est qui [non] non cupienda cupiens cupienter cupit.