Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 3.djvu/489

Rh tragedies already mentioned, rich in splendid eloquence and strong in large grasp of character as is the Roman history of The False One, full of interest and vigour as is the better part of Rollo Duke of Normandy, and sublime in the loveliness of passion as is the one scene of perfect beauty and terror which crowns this latter tragedy, Fletcher may claim a yet higher and more special station among his great dramatic peers by right of his comic and romantic than by right of his tragic and historic plays. Even in these he is more a romantic than a tragic poet. The quality of his genius, never sombre or subtle or profound, bears him always towards fresh air and sunshine. His natural work is in a midday world of fearless boyish laughter and hardly bitter tears. There is always more of rainbow than of storm in his skies; their darkest shadow is but a tragic twilight. What with him is the noon of night would seem as sunshine on the stage of Ford or Webster. There is but one passage in all these noble plays which lifts us beyond a sense of the stage, which raises our admiration out of speech into silence, tempers and transfigures our emotion with a touch of awe. And this we owe to the genius of Beaumont, exalted for an instant to the very tone and manner of Shakespeare’s tragedy, when Amintor stands between the dead and the dying woman whom he has unwittingly slain with hand and tongue. The first few lines that drop from his stricken lips are probably the only verses of Beaumont or Fletcher which might pass for Shakespeare’s even with a good judge of style—

But in Fletcher’s tragedy, however we may be thrilled and kindled with high contagious excitement, we are never awed into dumb delight or dread, never pierced with any sense of terror or pity too deep or even deep enough for tears. Even his Brunhalts and Martias can hardly persuade us to forget for the moment that “they do but jest, poison in jest.” A critic bitten with the love of classification might divide those plays of Fletcher usually ranked together as comedies into three kinds: the first he would class under the head of pure comedy, the next of heroic or romantic drama, the third of mixed comedy and romance; in this, the last and most delightful division of the poet’s work the special qualities of the two former kinds being equally blended and delicately harmonized. The most perfect and triumphant examples of this class are The Spanish Curate, Monsieur Thomas, The Custom of the Country, and The Elder Brother. Next to these and not too far below them, we may put The Little French Lawyer (a play which in its broad conception of a single eccentric humour suggests the collaboration of Beaumont and the influence of Jonson, but in style and execution throughout is perfect Fletcher), The Humorous Lieutenant (on which an almost identical verdict might be passed), Women Pleased, Beggars’ Bush, and perhaps we might add The Fair Maid of the Inn; in most if not in all of which the balance of exultant and living humour with serious poetic interest of a noble and various kind is held with even hand and the skill of a natural master. In pure comedy Rule a Wife and have a Wife is the acknowledged and consummate masterpiece of Fletcher. Next to it we might class, for comic spirit and force of character, Wit without Money, The Wildgoose Chase, The Chances, and The Noble Gentleman, a broad poetic farce to whose overflowing fun and masterdom of extravagance no critic has ever done justice but Leigh Hunt, who has ventured, not without reason, to match its joyous and preposterous audacities of superlative and sovereign foolery with the more sharp-edged satire and practical merriment of King and No King, where the keen prosaic humour of Bessus and his swordsmen is as typical of the comic style in which Beaumont had been trained up under Ben Jonson as the high interest and graduated action of the serious part of the play are characteristic of his more earnest genius. Among the purely romantic plays of Fletcher, or those in which the comic effect is throughout subordinate to the romantic, The Knight of Malta seems most worthy of the highest place for the noble beauty and exaltation of spirit which informs it with a lofty life, for its chivalrous union of heroic passion and Catholic devotion. This poem is the fairest and the first example of those sweet fantastic paintings in rose-colour and azure of visionary chivalry and ideal holiness, by dint of which the romance of more recent days has sought to cast the glamour of a mirage over the darkest and deadliest “ages of faith.” The pure and fervent eloquence of the style is in perfect keeping with the high romantic interest of character and story. In the same class we may rank among the best samples of Fletcher’s workmanship The Pilgrim, The Loyal Subject, A Wife for a Month, Love’s Pilgrimage, and The Lover’s Progress,—rich all of them in exquisite writing, in varied incident, in brilliant effects and graceful and passionate interludes. In The Coxcomb, and The Honest Man’s Fortune—two plays which, on the whole, can hardly be counted among the best of their class—there are tones of homelier emotion, touches of a simpler and more pathetic interest than usual; and here, as in the two admirable first scenes between Leucippus and Bacha, which relieve and redeem from contempt the tragic burlesque of Cupid’s Revenge, the note of Beaumont’s manner is at once discernible.

Even the most rapid revision of the work done by these great twin poets must impress every capable student with a sense of the homage due to this living witness of their large and liberal genius. The loss of their names from the roll of English poetry would be only less than the loss of the few greatest inscribed on it. Nothing could supply the want of their tragic, their comic or romantic drama; no larger or more fiery planet can ever arise to supplant or to eclipse the twin lights of our zodiac. Whatever their faults of shortcoming or excess, there is in their very names or the mere thought of their common work a kind of special and personal attraction for all true lovers of high dramatic poetry. There is the glory and grace of youth in all they have left us; if there be also somewhat too much of its graceless as well as its gracious qualities, yet there hangs about their memory as it were a music of the morning, a breath and savour of bright early manhood, a joyous and vigorous air of free life and fruitful labour, which might charm asleep for ever all thought or blame of all mortal infirmity or folly, or any stain of earth that may have soiled in passing the feet of creatures half human and half divine while yet they dwelt among men. For good or for evil, they are above all things poets of youth; we cannot conceive of them grown grey in the dignity of years, venerable with the authority of long life, and weighted with the wisdom of experience. In the Olympian circle of the gods and giants of our race who on earth were their contemporaries and corrivals, they seem to move among the graver presences and figures of sedater fame like the two spoilt boys of heaven, lightest of foot and heart and head of all the brood of deity. Shakespeare may have smiled as Jonson may have nodded approval of their bright swift work, neither of these great elders grudging his praise to the special charm which won for it a preference during one generation at least even over their own loftier and weightier verse; and indeed the advance in natural ease, in truth and grace of dialogue, is alike manifest whether we turn to such of their comic characters as Valentine and Don John, Rutilio and Monsieur Thomas, from the Truewit of Jonson or even from the Mercutio of Shakespeare; the one too stiff with classic starch, the