he art he serves or the business he
follows, it matters less for his fame in the future than for his
prosperity in the present whether he retains or discards any vestige of
respect for any other obligation in the world. Francois Villon, compared
with whom all other reckless and disreputable men of genius seem
patterns of austere decency and elevated regularity of life, was as
conscientious and self-respectful an artist as a Virgil or a Tennyson:
he is not a great poet only, but one of the most blameless, the most
perfect, the most faultless among his fellows in the first class of
writers for all time. If not in that class, yet high in the class
immediately beneath it, the world would long since have agreed to enrol
the name of Thomas Dekker, had he not wanted that one gift which next to
genius is the most indispensable for all aspirants to a station among
the masters of creative literature. For he was by nature at once a
singer and a maker: he had the gift of native music and the birthright
of inborn invention. His song was often sweet as honey; his fancy
sometimes as rich and subtle, his imagination as delicate and strong, as
that of the very greatest among dramatists or poets. For gentle grace of
inspiration and vivid force of realism he is eclipsed at his very best
by Shakespeare's self alone. No such combination or alternation of such
admirable powers is discernible in any of his otherwise more splendid or
sublime compeers. And in one gift, the divine gift of tenderness, he
comes nearer to Shakespeare and stands higher above others than in any
other quality of kindred genius.

And with all these gifts, if the vulgar verdict of his own day and of
later days be not less valid than vulgar, he was a failure. There is a
pathetic undertone of patience and resignation not unqualified by manly
though submissive regret, which recurs now and then, or seems to recur,
in the personal accent of his subdued and dignified appeal to the
casual reader, suggestive of a sense that the higher triumphs of art,
the brighter prosperities of achievement, were not reserved for him; and
yet not unsuggestive of a consciousness that, if this be so, it is not
so through want of the primal and essential qualities of a poet. For, as
Lamb says, Dekker "had poetry enough for anything"; at all events, for
anything which can be accomplished by a poet endowed in the highest
degree with the gifts of graceful and melodious fancy, tender and
cordial humo