Aspatia and Bellario. To excite compassion was enough for Fletcher as in the masculine parts of his work it was enough for him to excite wonder, to sustain curiosity, to goad and stimulate by any vivid and violent means the interest of readers or spectators. The single instance of noble pathos, the one scene he has left us which appeals to the higher and purer kind of pity, is the death of the child Hengo in Bonduca—a scene which of itself would have sufficed to enrol his name for ever on the list of our great tragic poets. To him we may probably assign the whole merit of that fiery and high-toned tragedy, with all its spirit and splendour of national and martial passion; the conscious and demonstrative exchange of courtesy between Roman and Briton, which is one of the leading notes of the poem, has in it a touch of overstrained and artificial chivalry characteristic of Fletcher; yet the parts of Caratach and Poenius may be counted among the loftiest and most equal of his creations. But no surer test or better example can be taken of the distinctive quality which denotes the graver genius of either poet than that supplied by a comparison of Beaumont’s Triumph of Love with Fletcher’s Triumph of Death. Each little play, in the brief course of its single act, gives proof of the peculiar touch and special trick of its author’s hand: the deeper and more delicate passion of Beaumont, the rapid and ardent activity of Fletcher, have nowhere found a more noticeable vent for the expression respectively of the most tender and profound simplicity of quiet sweetness, the most buoyant and impatient energy of tragic emotion.
In the wider field of their comic or romantic drama it is yet easier to distinguish the respective work of either hand. The bias of Fletcher was towards mixed comedy; his lightest and wildest humour is usually crossed or tempered by an infusion of romance; like Shakespeare in this one point at least, he has left no single play without some touch on it of serious interest, of poetic eloquence or fancy, however slight and fugitive. Beaumont, evidently under the imperious influence of Ben Jonson’s more rigid theories, seems rather to have bent his genius with the whole force of a resolute will into the form or mould prescribed for comedy by the elder and greater comic poet. The admirable study of the worthy citizen and his wife, who introduce to the stage and escort with their applause The Knight of the Burning Pestle through his adventurous career to its untimely end, has all the force and fulness of Jonson’s humour at its best, with more of freshness and freedom. In pure comedy, varied with broad farce and mock-heroic parody, Beaumont was the earliest as well as the ablest disciple of the master whose mantle was afterwards to be shared among the academic poets of a younger generation, the Randolphs and Cartwrights who sought shelter under the shadow of its voluminous folds. The best example of the school of Jonson to be found outside the ample range of his own work is The Scornful Lady, a comedy whose exceptional success and prolonged popularity must have been due rather to the broad effect of its forcible situations, its wealth and variety of ludicrous incidents, and the strong gross humour of its dialogue, than to any finer quality of style, invention or character. It is the only work of Beaumont and Fletcher which a critic who weighs the meaning of his words can admit to be as coarse as the coarsest work of Ben Jonson. They are prone, indeed, to indulge elsewhere in a wanton and exuberant licence of talk; and Fletcher, at least, is liable to confuse the shades of right and wrong, to deface or efface the boundary lines of good and evil, to stain the ermine of virtue and palliate the nakedness of vice with the same indecorous and incongruous laxity of handling. Often in mere haste to despatch the business of a play, to huddle up a catastrophe or throw out some particular scene into sharp and immediate relief, he will sacrifice all seemliness and consistency of character to the present aim of stage effect, and the instant impression of strong incident or audacious eloquence. His heroines are too apt to utter sentiments worthy of Diana in language unworthy of Doll Tearsheet. But in this play both style and sentiment are throughout on a lower level, the action and emotion are of a baser kind than usual; the precept of Aristotle and the practice of Jonson have been so carefully observed and exaggerated that it might almost be said to offer us in one or two places an imitation not merely of the sorrier but of the sorriest qualities of human nature; and full as it is of spontaneous power and humorous invention, the comedy extolled by the moral Steele (with just so much of reservation as permits him to deprecate the ridicule cast upon the clerical character) is certainly more offensive to artistic law and aesthetic judgment by the general and ingrained coarseness of its tone, than the tragi-comedy denounced by the immoral Dryden as exceeding in licence his own worst work and that of his fellow playwrights; an imputation, be it said in passing, as groundless as the protest pleaded on their behalf is impudent; for though we may hardly agree with the uncompromising panegyrist who commends that play in particular to the approval of “the austere scarlet” (remembering, perhaps, that Aristophanes was the chosen bedfellow of Chrysostom), there is at least no such offence against art or taste in the eccentricity of its situations or the daring of its dialogue. The buoyant and facile grace of Fletcher’s style carries him lightly across quagmires in which a heavier-footed poet, or one of slower tread, would have stuck fast, and come forth bemired to the knees. To Beaumont his stars had given as birthright the gifts of tragic pathos and passion, of tender power and broad strong humour; to Fletcher had been allotted a more fiery and fruitful force of invention, a more aerial ease and swiftness of action, a more various readiness and fulness of bright exuberant speech. The genius of Beaumont was deeper, sweeter, nobler than his elder’s; the genius of Fletcher more brilliant, more supple, more prodigal, and more voluble than his friend’s. Without a taint or a shadow on his fame of such imitative servility as marks and degrades the mere henchman or satellite of a stronger poet, Beaumont may fairly be said to hold of Shakespeare in his tragedy, in his comedy of Jonson; in each case rather as a kinsman than as a client, as an ally than as a follower: but the more special province of Fletcher was a land of his own discovering, where no later colonist has ever had power to settle or to share his reign. With the mixed or romantic comedy of Shakespeare it has nothing in common except the admixture or alternation of graver with lighter interest, of serious with humorous action. Nothing is here of his magic exaltation or charm of fairy empire. The rare and rash adventures of Fletcher on that forbidden track are too sure to end in pitiful and shameful failure. His crown of praise is to have created a wholly new and wholly delightful form of mixed comedy or dramatic romance, dealing merely with the humours and sentiments of men, their passions and their chances; to have woven of all these a web of emotion and event with such gay dexterity, to have blended his colours and combined his effects with such exquisite facility and swift light sureness of touch, that we may return once and again from those heights and depths of poetry to which access was forbidden him, ready as ever to enjoy as of old the fresh incomparable charm, the force and ease and grace of life, which fill and animate the radiant world of his romantic invention. Neither before him nor after do we find, in this his special field of fancy and of work, more than shadows or echoes of his coming or departing genius. Admirable as are his
