[In the following essay, Saintsbury contends that while Ford demonstrated some poetic genius in his plays, nevertheless his characters are artificial and his low-comedy scenes are humorless.]

John Ford, like Fletcher and Beaumont, but unlike almost all others of his class, was a person not compelled by need to write tragedies,—comedies of any comic merit he could never have written, were they his neck verse at Hairibee. His father was a man of good family and position at Ilsington in Devon. His mother was of the well-known west-country house of the Pophams. He was born two years before the Armada, and three years after Massinger. He has no university record, but was a member of the Middle Temple, and takes at least some pains to assure us that he never wrote for money. Nevertheless, for the best part of thirty years he was a playwright, and he is frequently found collaborating with Dekker, the neediest if nearly the most gifted gutter-playwright of the time. Once he worked with Webster in a play (The Murder of the Son upon the Mother) which must have given the fullest possible opportunity to the appetite of both for horrors. Once he, Rowley, and Dekker combined to produce the strange masterpiece (for a masterpiece it is in its own undisciplined way) of the Witch of Edmonton, where the obvious signs of a play hastily cobbled up to meet a popular demand do not obscure the talents of the cobblers. It must be confessed that there is much less of Ford than of Rowley and Dekker in the piece, except perhaps its comparative regularity and the quite unreasonable and unintelligible bloodiness of the murder of Susan. In The Sun's Darling, due to Ford and Dekker, the numerous and charming lyrics are pretty certainly Dekker's; though we could pronounce on this point with more confidence if we had the two lost plays, The Fairy Knight and The Bristowe Merchant, in which the same collaborators are known to have been engaged. The Fancies, Chaste and Noble, and The Lady's Trial which we have, and which are known to be Ford's only, are but third-rate work by common consent, and Love's Sacrifice has excited still stronger opinions of condemnation from persons favourable to Ford. This leaves us practically four plays upon which to base our estimate—'Tis Pity She's a Whore, The Lover's Melancholy, The Broken Heart, and Perkin Warbeck. The last-named I shall take the liberty of dismissing summarily with the same borrowed description as Webster's Appius and Virginia. Hartley Coleridge, perhaps willing to make up if he could for a general distaste for Ford, volunteered the strange judgment that it is the best specimen of the historic drama to be found out of Shakespere; and Hazlitt says nothing savage about it. I shall say nothing more, savage or otherwise. The Lover's Melancholy has been to almost all its critics a kind of lute-case for the very pretty version of Strada's fancy about the nightingale, which Crashaw did better; otherwise it is naught. We are, therefore, left with 'Tis Pity She's a Whore and The Broken Heart. I own that in respect to the first, after repeated readings and very careful weighings of what has been said, I come back to my first opinion—to wit, that the Annabella and Giovanni scenes, with all their perversity, all their availing themselves of what Hazlitt, with his unerring instinct, called “unfair attractions,” are among the very best things of their kind. Of what may be thought unfair in them I shall speak a little later; but allowing for this, the sheer effects of passion—the “All for love and the world well lost,” the shutting out, not instinctively or stupidly, but deliberately, and with full knowledge, of all other considerations except the dictates of desire—have never been so rendered in English except in Romeo and Juliet and Antony and Cleopatra. The comparison of course brings out Ford's weakness, not merely in execution, but in design; not merely in accomplishment, but in the choice of means for accomplishment. Shakespeare had no need of the haut goût of incest, of the unnatural horrors of the heart on the dagger. But Ford had; and he in a way (I do not say fully) justified his use of these means.

The Broken Heart stands far lower. I own that I am with Hazlitt, not Lamb, on the question of the admired death scene of Calantha. In the first place, it is certainly borrowed from Marston's Malcontent; in the second, it is wholly unnatural; in the third, the great and crowning point of it is not, as Lamb seemed to think, Calantha's sentimental inconsistency, but the consistent and noble death of Orgilus. There Ford was at home, and long as it is it must be given:—

Cal. Bloody relator of thy stains in blood,
For that thou hast reported him, whose fortunes
And life by thee are both at once snatch'd from him,
With honourable mention, make thy choice
Of what death likes thee best, there's all our bounty.
But to excuse delays, let me, dear cousin,
Intreat you and these lords see execution
Instant before you part.
Near. Your will commands us.
Org. One suit, just queen, my last: vouchsafe your clemency
That by no common hand I be divided
From this my humble frailty.
Cal. To their wisdoms
Who are to be spectators of thine end
I make the reference: those that are dead
Are dead; had they not now died, of necessity
They must have paid the debt they owed to nature,
One time or other. Use dispatch, my lords;
We'll suddenly prepare our coronation.
                                                                                [Exeunt Cal., Phil., and Chris.
Arm. 'Tis strange, these tragedies should never touch on
Her female pity.
Bass. She has a masculine spirit,
And wherefore should I pule, and, like a girl,
Put finger in the eye? Let's be all toughness
Without distinction betwixt sex and sex.
Near. Now, Orgilus, thy choice?
Org. To bleed to death.
Arm. The executioner?
Org. Myself, no surgeon;
I am well skilled in letting blood. Bind fast
This arm, that so the pipes may from their conduits
Convey a full stream; here's a skilful instrument:
                                                                                                                        [Shows his dagger.
Only I am a beggar to some charity
To speed me in this execution
By lending the other prick to the other arm
When this is bubbling life out.
Bass. I am for you,
It most concerns my art, my care, my credit,
Quick, fillet both his arms.
Org. Gramercy, friendship!
Such courtesies are real which flow cheerfully
Without an expectation of requital.
Reach me a staff in this hand. If a proneness
                                                                                                    [They give him a staff.
Or custom in my nature, from my cradle
Had been inclined to fierce and eager bloodshed,
A coward guilt hid in a coward quaking,
Would have betray'd me to ignoble flight
And vagabond pursuit of dreadful safety:
But look upon my steadiness and scorn not
The sickness of my fortune; which since Bassanes
Was husband to Penthea, had lain bed-rid,
We trifle time in words: thus I show cunning
In opening of a vein too full, too lively.
                                                                                [Pierces the vein with his dagger.
Arm. Desperate courage!
Near. Honourable infamy!
Hem. I tremble at the sight.
Gron. Would I were loose!
Bass. It sparkles like a lusty wine new broach'd;
The vessel must be sound from which it issues,
Grasp hard this other stick—I'll be as nimble—
But prithee look not pale—Have at ye! stretch out
Thine arm with vigour and unshaken virtue.
                                                                                                                                            [Opens the vein.
Good! oh I envy not a rival, fitted
To conquer in extremities: this pastime
Appears majestical; some high-tuned poem
Hereafter shall deliver to posterity
The writer's glory, and his subjects triumph,
How is't man?—droop not yet.
Org. I feel no palsies,
On a pair-royal do I wait in death:
My sovereign as his liegeman; on my mistress
As a devoted servant; and on Ithocles
As if no brave, yet no unworthy enemy:
Nor did I use an engine to entrap
His life out of a slavish fear to combat
Youth, strength, or cunning; but for that I durst not
Engage the goodness of a cause on fortune
By which his name might have outfaced my vengeance.
Oh, Tecnicus, inspired with Phœbus' fire!
I call to mind thy augury, 'twas perfect;
Revenge proves its own executioner
When feeble man is lending to his mother
The dust he was first framed in, thus he totters.
Bass. Life's fountain is dried up.
Org. So falls the standard
Of my prerogative in being a creature,
A mist hangs o'er mine eyes, the sun's bright splendour
Is clouded in an everlasting shadow.
Welcome, thou ice that sit'st about my heart,
No heat can ever thaw thee.
                                                                                                                                                                [Dies.

The perverse absurdity of a man like Orgilus letting Penthea die by the most horrible of deaths must be set aside: his vengeance (the primary absurdity granted), is exactly and wholly in character. But if anything could be decisive against Ford being “of the first order of poets,” even of dramatic poets, it would be the total lack of interest in the characters of Calantha and Ithocles. Fate-disappointed love seems (no doubt from something in his own history) to have had a singular attraction for Lamb; and the glorification, or, as it were, apotheosis of it in Calantha must have appealed to him in one of those curious and illegitimate ways which every critic knows. But the mere introduction of Bassanes would show that Ford is not of the first order of poets. He is a purely contemptible character, neither sublimed by passion of jealousy, nor kept whole by salt of comic exposition; a mischievous poisonous idiot who ought to have had his brains knocked out, and whose brains would assuredly have been knocked out, by any Orgilus of real life. He is absolutely unequal to the place of central personage, and causer of the harms, of a romantic tragedy such as The Broken Heart.

I have said “by any Orgilus of real life,” but Ford has little to do with real life; and it is in this fact that the insufficiency of his claim to rank among the first order of poets lies. He was, it is evident, a man of the greatest talent, even of great genius, who, coming at the end of a long literary movement, exemplified the defects of its decadence. I could compare him, if there was here any space for such a comparison, to Baudelaire or Flaubert with some profit; except that he never had Baudelaire's perfect sense of art, and that he does not seem, like Flaubert, to have laid in, before melancholy marked him for her own, a sufficient stock of living types to save him from the charge of being a mere study-student. There is no Frédéric, no M. Homais, in his repertory. Even Giovanni—even Orgilus, his two masterpieces, are, if not exactly things of shreds and patches, at any rate artificial persons, young men who have known more of books than of life, and who persevere in their eccentric courses with almost more than a half knowledge that they are eccentric. Annabella is incomplete, though there is nothing, except her love, unnatural in her. The strokes which draw her are separate imaginations of a learned draughtsman, not fresh transcripts from the living model. Penthea and Calantha are wholly artificial; a live Penthea would never have thought of such a fantastic martyrdom, unless she had been insane or suffering from greensickness, and a live Calantha would have behaved in a perfectly different fashion, or if she had behaved in the same, would have been quit for her temporary aberration. We see (or at least I think I see) in Ford exactly the signs which are so familiar to us in our own day, and which repeat themselves regularly at the end of all periods of distinct literary creativeness—the signs of excentricité voulue. The author imagines that “all is said” in the ordinary way, and that he must go to the ends of the earth to fetch something extraordinary. If he is strong enough, as Ford was, he fetches it, and it is something extraordinary, and we owe him, with all his extravagance, respect and honour for his labour. But we can never put him on the level of the men who, keeping within ordinary limits, achieve masterpieces there.

Ford—an Elizabethan in the strict sense for nearly twenty years—did not suffer from the decay which, as noted above, set in in regard to versification and language among the men of his own later day. He has not the natural trick of verse and phrase which stamps his greatest contemporaries unmistakably, and even such lesser ones as his collaborator, Dekker, with a hardly mistakable mark; but his verse is nervous, well proportioned, well delivered, and at its best a noble medium. He was by general consent utterly incapable of humour, and his low-comedy scenes are among the most loathsome in the English theatre. His lyrics are not equal to Shakespere's or Fletcher's, Dekker's or Shirley's, but they are better than Massinger's. Although he frequently condescended to the Fletcherian license of the redundant syllable, he never seems to have dropped (as Fletcher did sometimes, or at least allowed his collaborators to drop) floundering into the Serbonian bog of stuff that is neither verse nor prose. He showed indeed (and Mr. Swinburne, with his usual insight, has noticed it, though perhaps he has laid rather too much stress on it) a tendency towards a severe rule-and-line form both of tragic scheme and of tragic versification, which may be taken to correspond in a certain fashion (though Mr. Swinburne does not notice this) to the “correctness” in ordinary poetry of Waller and his followers. Yet he shows no sign of wishing to discard either the admixture of comedy with tragedy (save in The Broken Heart, which is perhaps a crucial instance), or blank verse, or the freedom of the English stage in regard to the unities. In short, Ford was a person distinctly deficient in initiative and planning genius, but endowed with a great executive faculty. He wanted guidance in all the greater lines of his art, and he had it not; the result being that he produced unwholesome and undecided work, only saved by the unmistakable presence of poetical faculty. I do not think that Webster could ever have done anything better than he did: I think that if Ford had been born twenty years earlier he might have been second to Shakespeare, and at any rate the equal of Ben Jonson and of Fletcher. But the flagging genius of the time made its imprint on his own genius, which was of the second order, not the first.