Massinger's art was not only less reckless than Fletcher's; it was linked to a serious moral view of human affairs. He always worked under a sense of responsibility both as a dramatic artist and as a preacher of political and personal morality. Neither the heedlessness of Fletcher nor the perversion of Ford is discoverable in his plays. Bad and good are clearly differentiated, despite the improbabilities of the romantic vicissitudes; and poetic justice is administered with decision. Following his venturesome and nimble master, he pursues his pathway gravely, judicially, somewhat heavily. His careful art and sincere morality lack the leaven of dramatic genius. The orator and the rhetorician are always elbowing the dramatist off the scene. His style, never splendid, never excessively figurative, is always contained and clear. At its best in sustained declamation, it often descends to a tone approaching prose and rarely rises to the more stirring or impelling emotions. His abundant inventiveness also fails him in the great crises of passion. Again and again when the heroine is at bay, or the hero within the jaws of ruin, Massinger resorts to oratory. As in "The Maid of Honor," eloquence is the _deus ex machina_ which solves the difficulties of the plot. In consequence, the characterization, though involving subtle and penetrating conceptions of human nature, and often logical and consistent, rarely results in living beings. An exception must be made of some of his men, whose virility and dignity are akin to his own temper and can be made real through his favorite rhetorical means. The women, with few exceptions, of whom Camiola is chief, are, for reverse reasons, bad failures. Chastity cannot be revealed by an oratorical appeal, and the evil women only grow impossible when they add rhetoric to lust. The passing of the greatness of the Elizabethan drama is manifest in Massinger as in his contemporaries. He retains, to be sure, most of the external characteristics of his predecessors; he writes constantly in the light of their achievements; he would restrain Fletcher's theatricality by a more cautious and responsible art. Like Shakespeare he maintains a moral standard despite the exigencies of a romantic plot. But the old fervor as well as the old extravagance of diction have gone; and a careful dramaturgy now finds itself incompetent to meet the requirements of great tragic crises. His tragedies recapitulate what has been done before, without important advance or departure, and without attaining one unforgettable phrase or one moment that electrifies the reader with an undeniable conviction of its dramatic truth.