The heroines are sketched with natural grace and spirit: it is the
more to be regretted that their bearing in the last act should have less
of delicacy or modesty than of ingenious audacity in contrivances for
striking and daring stage effect; a fault as grave in aesthetics as in
ethics, and one rather to have been expected from Fletcher than from
Heywood. But the general grace and the occasional pathos of the writing
may fairly be set against the gravest fault that can justly be found
with so characteristic and so charming a work of Heywood's genius at its
happiest and brightest as "A Challenge for Beauty."
The line of demarcation between realism and romance is sometimes as
difficult to determine in the work of Heywood as in the character of his
time: the genius of England, the spirit of Englishmen, in the age of
Shakespeare, had so much of the practical in its romance and so much of
the romantic in its practice that the beautiful dramatic poem in which
the English heroes Manhurst and Montferrers play their parts so nobly
beside their noble Spanish compeers in chivalry ought perhaps to have
been classed rather among the studies of contemporary life on which
their author's fame must principally and finally depend than among those
which have been defined as belonging to the romantic division of his
work.
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