Part 38

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 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--

"This earth of mine doth tremble," &c.

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 other too full of mere verbal catches and forced conceits, to persuade us that either can in any age have fairly represented the light free talk and facile humour of its youth. In another field than this Beaumont and Fletcher hold as high and secure a station of their own as any poet of their race. In perfect workmanship of lyrical jewellery, in perfect bloom and flower of song-writing, they equal all compeers whom they do not excel; the blossoms of their growth in this kind may be matched for colour and fragrance against Shakespeare's, and for morning freshness and natural purity of form exceed the finest grafts of Jonson. _The Faithful Shepherdess_ alone might speak for Fletcher on this score, being as it is simply a lyric poem in semi-dramatic shape, to be judged only as such, and as such almost faultless; but in no wise to be classed for praise or blame among the

## acting plays of its author, whose one serious error in the matter was

the submission of his Dryad to the critical verdict of an audience too probably in great part composed of clowns and satyrs far unlike the loving and sweet-tongued sylvan of his lovely fancy. And whether we assign to him or to Beaumont the divine song of melancholy (_moestius lacrymis Simonideis_), perfect in form as Catullus and profound in sentiment as Shelley, which Milton himself could but echo and expand, could not heighten or deepen its exquisite intensity of thought and word alike, there will remain witness enough for the younger brother of a lyric power as pure and rare as his elder's.

The excess of influence and popularity over that of other poets usually ascribed to the work of Beaumont and Fletcher for some half century or so after their own time has perhaps been somewhat overstated by tradition. Whatever may have been for a season the fashion of the stage, it is certain that Shakespeare can show two editions for one against them in folio; four in all from 1623 to 1685, while they have but their two of 1647 and 1679. Nor does one see how it can accurately or even plausibly be said that they were in any exact sense the founders of a school either in comedy or in tragedy. Massinger, for some years their survivor, and in some points akin to them as a workman, cannot properly be counted as their disciple; and no leading poet of the time had so much in common with them as he. At first sight, indeed, his choice of romantic subject and treatment of foreign stories, gathered from the fertile tale-tellers of the south, and ranging in date from Boccaccio to Cervantes, may seem to mark him out as a member of the same school; but the deepest and most distinctive qualities of his genius set it far apart from theirs; though undoubtedly not so far that any discrepancy or discord should impair the excellence or injure the keeping of works in which he took part with Fletcher. Yet, placed beside theirs, the tone of his thought and speech seems by comparison severe as well as sober, and sad as well as severe. Their extravagant and boyish insanity of prostrate royalism is not more alien from his half pensive and half angry undertone of political protest than his usually careful and complete structure of story from their frequently lax and slovenly incoherence of character or plot, than his well composed and proportioned metre from their lighter and looser melodies, than the bitter insistence and elaborate acrimony of his judicial satire on hypocrisy or oppression from the gaiety or facility of mood which suffers them in the shifting of a scene to redeem their worst characters by some juggler's trick of conversion at the last moment allowed them to wind up a play with universal reconciliation and an act of oblivion on all hands. They could hardly have drawn with such steady skill and explicit finish an Overreach or a Luke; but the strenuous and able work of Massinger at its highest point of success has no breath in it of their brighter and more immediate inspiration. Shirley, on the other hand, may certainly be classed as a pupil who copied their style in water-colour; his best tragedy and his best comedy, _The Traitor_ and _The Lady of Pleasure_, might pass muster undetected among the plays of Fletcher, and might fairly claim to take rank above the lowest class of these. In the finest work of Middleton we recognize an almost exact reproduction of Fletcher's metrical effects,--a reverberation of that flowing music, a reiteration of those feminine final notes. In his later tragi-comedies, throughout his masterpiece of _Women beware Women_, and in the noble scenes which make up the tragic or serious parts of _The Changeling_ or _The Spanish Gipsy_,--wherever, in a word, we find the admirable but unequal genius of this poet at its best--we find a likeness wholly wanting in his earlier and ruder work, which undoubtedly suggests the influence of Fletcher. Other instances of imitation, other examples of discipleship, might perhaps be found among lesser men of the next generation; but the mass of succeeding playwrights began in a very short time to lower the style and debase the scheme of dramatic poetry; and especially to loosen the last ties of harmony, to deface the very form and feature of tragic verse. In Shirley, the last and least of those in whom the lineal blood of the old masters was yet discernible, we find side by side with the fine ancestral indications of legitimate descent exactly such marks of decadence rather than degeneracy as we might have anticipated in the latest heir of a long line which began with the rise of Marlowe, "sun of the morning," in the highest heaven of our song, to prepare a pathway for the sun. After Shakespeare there was yet room for Beaumont and Fletcher; but after these and the other constellations had set, whose lights filled up the measure of that diviner zodiac through which he moved, there was but room in heaven for the pallid moonrise of Shirley; and before this last reflex from a sunken sun was itself eclipsed, the glory had passed away from English drama, to alight upon that summit of epic song, whence Milton held communion with darkness and the stars. (A. C. S.)

BIBLIOGRAPHICAL APPENDIX

The chief collected editions of the plays of Beaumont and Fletcher are: _Comedies and Tragedies written by Francis Beaumont and John Fletcher Gentlemen_, printed by Humphrey Moseley in folio in 1647 as containing plays "never printed before"; _Fifty Comedies and Tragedies written, etc._ (fol. 1679); _Works_ ... (11 vols. 1843-1846), edited by Alexander Dyce, which superseded earlier editions by L. Theobald, G. Colman and H. Weber, and presented a modernized text; a second two-volume edition by Dyce in 1852; _The Works of Francis Beaumont and John Fletcher_ (15 vols. 1905, &c.) edited by Arnold Glover and A.R. Waller in the "Cambridge English Classics" from the text of the 2nd folio, and giving variant readings from all separate issues of the plays previous to that edition; and _Works_ ... (12 vols. 1904, &c.), under the general editorship of A.H. Bullen, the text of which is founded on Dyce but with many variant readings, the last volume containing memoirs and excursuses by the editor.

The foundation of all critical work on Beaumont and Fletcher is to be found in Dyce. Discrimination between the work of the two dramatists and their collaborators has been the object of a series of studies for the establishment of metrical and other tests. Fletcher's verse is recognizable by the frequency of an extra syllable, often an accented one, at the end of a line, the use of stopped lines, and the frequency of trisyllabic feet. He thus obtained an adaptable instrument enabling him to dispense with prose even in comic scenes. The pioneer work in these matters was done by F.G. Fleay in a paper read before the New Shakspere Society in 1874 on "Metrical Tests as applied to Fletcher, Beaumont and Massinger." His theories were further developed in the article "Fletcher" in his _Biog. Chron. of the Eng. Drama_. Further investigations were published by R. Boyle in _Englische Studien_ (vols. v.-x., Heilbronn, 1882-1887), and in the New Shakspere Society _Transactions_ (1880-1886), by Benno Leonhardt in _Anglia_ (Halle, vols. xix. _seq._), and by E.H. Oliphant in _Englische Studien_ (vols. xiv. _seq._). Mr Oliphant restores to Beaumont much which other critics had been inclined to deny him. On the sources of the plays see E. Koppel in _Munchener Beitrage zur roman. u. eng. Phil._ (Erlangen and Leipzig, 1895). Consult further articles by A.H. Bullen and R. Boyle respectively on Fletcher and Massinger in the _Dict. of Nat. Biog._; G.C. Macaulay, _Francis Beaumont, a Critical Study_ (1883); and Dr A.W. Ward's chapter on "Beaumont and Fletcher" in vol. ii. of his _Hist. of Eng. Dram. Lit._ (new ed. 1899).

A list of the plays attributed to Beaumont and Fletcher, with some details, is added, with the premiss that beyond the main lines of criticism laid down in Mr Swinburne's article above it is often difficult to dogmatize on authorship. Even in cases where the play was produced long after Beaumont had ceased to write for the stage there can be no certainty that we are not dealing with a piece which is an adaptation of an earlier play by a later hand.

_The Joint Works of Beaumont and Fletcher.--The Scornful Lady_ (acted c. 1609, pr. 1616) is a farcical comedy of domestic life, in which Oliphant finds traces of alteration by a third and perhaps a fourth hand. _Philaster or Love Lies a-Bleeding_ is assigned by Macaulay to Beaumont practically in its entirety, while Fleay attributes only three scenes to Fletcher. It was probably acted c. 1609, and was printed 1620; it was revised (1695) by Elkanah Settle and (1763) by the younger Colman, probably owing its long popularity to the touching character of Bellario. Beaumont's share also predominated in _The Maid's Tragedy_ (acted c. 1609, pr. 1619), in _A King and No King_ (acted at court December 26, 1611, and perhaps earlier, pr. 1619), while _The Knight of the Burning Pestle_ (c. 1610, pr. 1613), burlesquing the heroic and romantic play of which Heywood's _Four Prentices_ is an example, might perhaps be transferred entire to Beaumont's account. In _Cupid's Revenge_ (acted at court January 1612, and perhaps at Whitefriars in 1610, pr. 1615), founded on Sidney's _Arcadia_, the two dramatists appear to have had a third collaborator in Massinger and perhaps a fourth in Nathaniel Field.

The _Coxcomb_ (acted c. 1610, and by the Children of the Queen's Revels in 1612, pr. 1647) seems to have undergone later revision by Massinger. Fletcher's collaboration with other dramatists had begun during his connexion with Beaumont, who apparently ceased to write for the stage two or three years before his death.

_Works Assigned to Beaumont's Sole Authorship.--The Woman-Hater_ (pr. 1607, as "lately acted by the children of Paul's") was assigned formerly to Fletcher. The _Masque of the Inner Temple and Gray's Inn_ was presented at Whitehall on the 26th of February 1612, on the marriage of the Prince and Princess Palatine. Of _Four Plays, or Moral Representations, in One_ (acted 1608, pr. 1647), the _Induction_, with _The Triumph of Honour_ and _The Triumph of Love_, both founded on tales from the _Decameron_, are by Beaumont.