Page:Grierson Herbert - First Half of the Seventeenth Century.djvu/144

124 fate. With Beaumont and Fletcher all this is changed. The characters are insubstantial and inconsistent; the most distinctly drawn are the least real. Their heroes, Penius and Caratach and Æcius, are sketched on the old model; but what their creators elaborate with most gusto is not the fierce energy of their conflict with Fate, but the dignified and pathetic eloquence of their resignation. They die to the music of their own virtues, in sentiments so highly strung as to ring false. The best characters in Beaumont and Fletcher's plays are those the very breath of whose life is sentiment. Arethusa and Aspatia, Bellario and Ordella, are charming if ethereal figures. Devoted love and sweet submissiveness flow in golden phrases from their lips. But on the other hand, where energy of will and intensity of passion are most imperatively required, Beaumont and Fletcher appear to me to fall short. Their handling of evil characters and terrible incidents is inferior to that of Webster or Middleton or Ford. Nothing is forbidden to the poet if his treatment be adequate. But he must realise the full significance of what he portrays. Deeds of horror justify their representation by the lurid light which they throw upon the workings of the human heart. Beaumont and Fletcher describe such deeds with a bluntness that is almost levity, or a rhetoric which palls, seldom with any approach to tragic sincerity and power. In Beaumont and Fletcher the sterner notes of the older drama melt into the fluting of love and woe. But how eloquent their pathos is! From no dramatist except Shakespeare could be gathered so many flowers