Massinger was, in fact, as a comic writer, fortunate in the moment at which he wrote. His comedy is transitional; but it happens to be one of those transitions which contain some merit not anticipated by predecessors or refined upon by later writers. The comedy of Jonson is nearer to caricature; that of Middleton a more photographic delineation of low life. Massinger is nearer to Restoration comedy, and more like his contemporary, Shirley, in assuming a certain social level, certain distinctions of class, as a postulate of his comedy. This resemblance to later comedy is also the important point of difference between Massinger and earlier comedy. But Massinger’s comedy differs just as widely from the comedy of manners proper; he is closer to that in his romantic drama—in _A Very Woman_—than in _A New Way to Pay Old Debts_; in his comedy his interest is not in the follies of love-making or the absurdities of social pretence, but in the unmasking of villainy. Just as the Old Comedy of Molière differs in principle from the New Comedy of Marivaux, so the Old Comedy of Massinger differs from the New Comedy of his contemporary Shirley. And as in France, so in England, the more farcical comedy was the more serious. Massinger’s great comic rogues, Sir Giles Overreach and Luke Frugal, are members of the large English family which includes Barabas and Sir Epicure Mammon, and from which Sir Tunbelly Clumsy claims descent. What distinguishes Massinger from Marlowe and Jonson is in the main an inferiority. The greatest comic characters of these two dramatists are slight work in comparison with Shakespeare’s best—Falstaff has a third dimension and Epicure Mammon has only two. But this slightness is part of the nature of the art which Jonson practised, a smaller art than Shakespeare’s. The inferiority of Massinger to Jonson is an inferiority, not of one type of art to another, but within Jonson’s type. It is a simple deficiency. Marlowe’s and Jonson’s comedies were a view of life; they were, as great literature is, the transformation of a personality into a personal work of art, their lifetime’s work, long or short. Massinger is not simply a smaller personality: his personality hardly exists. He did not, out of his own personality, build a world of art, as Shakespeare and Marlowe and Jonson built. In the fine pages which Remy de Gourmont devotes to Flaubert in his _Problème du Style_, the great critic declares: La vie est un dépouillement. Le but de l’activité propre de l’homme est de nettoyer sa personnalité, de la laver de toutes les souillures qu’y déposa l’éducation, de la dégager de toutes les empreintes qu’y laissèrent nos admirations adolescentes; and again: Flaubert incorporait toute sa sensibilité à ses œuvres.... Hors de ses livres, où il se transvasait goutte à goutte, jusqu’à la lie, Flaubert est fort peu intéressant....