FLETCHER'S MENTAL HABIT
From the study of Fletcher's unaided plays we arrive at a still further
criterion for the determination of his share in the joint-plays,--his
stock of ideas concerning life, his view of the spectacle, and his
emotional attitude. His early pastoral comedy _The Faithfull
Shepheardesse_ might be dismissed from consideration as a
conventionalized literary treatment of conditions remote from actual
experience, were it not that other dramatic exponents of shepherds and
shepherdesses--Jonson, for instance, and Milton--have succeeded in
imbuing the pastoral species with qualities distinctly vital; the
former, with rustic reality and genuine tenderness; the latter, with
profound moral significance. _The Faithfull Shepheardesse_, on the other
hand, with all its beauty of artistic form is devoid of reality, pathos,
and sublimity. The author has no ideas worthy of the name and, in spite
of his singing praises of chastity, he has his hand to his mouth where
between fyttes there blossoms a superb smile. He has in art no depth of
conviction; consequently, no philosophy of life to offer. _The Faithfull
Shepheardesse_ strikes the intellectual keynote of all Fletcher's
unaided work. He is a playwright of marvellous skill, a lyrist of facile
verse and fancy, but a poet of indifference--of no ethical insight or
outlook when he is purveying for the public. His tragedies, for instance
_Valentinian_ and _Bonduca_ (the two scenes of the latter that may not
be his are negligible), abound in sudden fatal passions and noble
diction. They involve moral conduct, to be sure, patriotism, loyalty,
chivalry, military prowess, insane lust and vengeance, but they lack
deep-seated and deliberate motive of action, and they fail of that
inevitability of spiritual conflict which is requisite to a tragic
effect. The heroes of these, and of his tragicomedies and romantic
dramas, such as _A Wife for a Month_, _The Loyall Subject_, _The
Humorous Lieutenant_, _The Pilgrim_, _The Island Princesse_, may be
fearless and blameless, but their courage and virtue are of habit rather
than of moral exigency. Their loyalty is frequently unreasonable and
absurdly exaggerated. One or two of his virtuous heroines are at once
charming and real; but as a rule with Fletcher--the more virtuous, the
more nebulous. His villains have no redeeming touch of humanity: their
doom moves us not; nor does their sleight-of-hand repentance convince
us. The atmosphere is histrionic. There is scorn of Fate and Fortune,
much talk of death and the grave: and we "go out like tedious tales
forgotten"; or we don't,--just as may suit the stage hangings, the
brilliance of the footlights, and the sentimental uptake. There is, in
short, in his unassisted serious dramas little real pathos; little of
the grandeur and sudden imaginative splendour which, we shall see,
characterized Beaumont; none of Beaumont's earnestness and philosophical
spontaneity and profundity.
Like the tragicomic plays, Fletcher's lighter comedies _The Chances_,
_The Mad Lover_, _The Wild-Goose Chase_, _Women Pleased_, escape a moral
catastrophe by walking round the issue. The heroes are amorous gallants,
irresponsible adventurers, adroit scapegraces, devil-may-care
rapier-tongued egoists and opportunists. The heroines are "not made for
cloisters"; when they are not already as conscienceless as the heroes in
performance or desire, they are airy lasses, resourceful in love,
seeming-virtuous but suspiciously well-informed of the tarnished side of
the shield,--always witty. Fletcher _can_ portray the innocence and
constancy of woman; but he rarely takes the pains. "To be as many
creatures as a woman" is for him a comfortable jibe. The charm of
romantic character and subtly thickening complication did not much
attract him.
He sets over in contrast the violent, insane, tragic, or pathetic with
the ludicrous or grotesque; he indulges a careless, loose-jointed,
adventitious humour. That he could, on occasion, avail himself of the
laughter of burlesque is abundantly proved by the utterances of his
Valentine in _Wit Without Money_, the devices of the inimitable Maria in
_The Tamer Tamed_, and of the _Humorous Lieutenant_. But for that comic
irony of issues by which the wilful or pretentious or deluded,--foes or
fools of convention and born prey of ridicule,--are satisfactorily
readjusted to society, he prefers to substitute hilarity, ribaldry, the
clash of wits, the battledore and shuttlecock of trick, intrigue, of
shifting group and kaleidoscopic situation. The idiosyncrasies of the
crowd delight him; but the more actual, the more boisterous and
bestial. His populace feeds upon "opinions, errors, dreams."
His facile verse and limpid dialogue flash with fancy. The gaiety of
gilded youth ripples down the page; but the more clever, the more
irrelevant the swirling jest,--and, to say the least, the more
indelicate. Life is a bagatelle; its most strenuous interest--love; and
love is volatile as it is sudden. The attitude of sex toward sex is as
obvious to the level-headed animal, who is cynic in brain and hedonist
in blood, as its significance is supreme: it is that of the man-or-woman
hunt; the outcome, a jocosity, more or less,--whether of fornication or
cuckoldry, or of tame, old-fashioned, matrimonial monochrome.
These characteristics of the Fletcherian habit mark all the author's
independent plays from _The Faithfull Shepheardesse_ of 1607 or 1608 to
_Rule a Wife_ of 1624. The man himself, I think, was better than the
dramaturgic artist catering to the public market. For his personal, nay
noble, ideals, let the reader turn to the poem appended to _The Honest
Mans Fortune_, and judge. The characteristics sketched above are of the
maker of a mimic world. Since I have elsewhere discussed them in
full,[177] and the marvellous success that the dramaturge achieved in
Shakespeare's Globe, this brief enumeration must suffice. Fletcher's
mental habit affords an additional criterion for the determination of
authorship in the unquestioned Beaumont-Fletcher plays, and in the
analysis of plays in which the collaboration of the poets has been
conjectured but not so fully attested.
FOOTNOTES:
[177] _The Fellows and Followers of Shakespeare_ (Part Two) in
_Representative English Comedies_, Vol. III.