“That ’t was his happy fault to do too much;
Who therefore wisely did submit each birth
To knowing Beaumont, ere it did come forth,
And made him the sobriety of his wit.”
And Richard Brome also alludes to the copious ease of Fletcher, whom he
had known:--
“Of Fletcher and his works I speak.
His works! says Momus, nay, his plays you’d say!
Thou hast said right, for that to him was play
Which was to others’ brains a toil.”
The general tradition seems to have been that Beaumont contributed the
artistic judgment, and Fletcher the fine frenzy. There is commonly a
grain of truth in traditions of this kind. In the plays written by
the two poets conjointly, we may find an intellectual entertainment in
assigning this passage to one and that to the other, but we can seldom
say decisively “This is Beaumont’s,” or “That is Fletcher’s,” though we
may find tolerably convincing arguments for it.
We have, it is true, some grounds on which we may safely form a
conclusion as to the individual characteristics of Fletcher, because a
majority of the plays which go under their joint names were written by
him alone after Beaumont’s death. In these I find a higher and graver
poetical quality, and I think a riper grain of sentiment, than in any
of the others. In running my eye along the margin, I observe that by
far the greater number of the isolated phrases I have marked, whether
for poetical force or felicity, but especially for picturesqueness,
and for weight of thought, belong to Fletcher. I should never suspect
Beaumont’s hand in such verses as these from “Bonduca” (a play wholly
Fletcher’s):--
“Ten years of bitter nights and heavy marches,
When many a frozen storm sung through my cuirass,
And made it doubtful whether that or I
Were the more stubborn metal.”
Where I come upon a picturesque passage in the joint plays, I am apt
to think it Fletcher’s: so too where there is a certain exhilaration
and largeness of manner, and an ardor that charges its words with
imagination as they go, or with an enthusiasm that comes very near it
in its effect. Take this from the same play:--
“The gods of Rome fight for ye; loud fame calls ye,
Pitched on the topless Apennine, and blows
To all the underworld, all nations, seas,
And unfrequented deserts where the snow dwells,
Wakens the ruined monuments, and there,
Where nothing but eternal death and sleep is,
Informs again the dead bones with your virtues.”
In short, I am inclined to think Fletcher the more poet of the two.
Where there is pathos or humor, I am in doubt whether it belongs to
him or his partner, for I find these qualities both in the plays they
wrote together and in those which are wholly his. In the expression of
sentiment going far enough to excite a painless æsthetic sympathy, but
stopping short of tragic passion, Beaumont is quite the equal of his
friend. In the art of heightening and enriching such a sentiment by
poetical associations and pictorial accessories, Fletcher seems to me
the superior. Both, as I have said, have the art of being pathetic, and
of conceiving pathetic situations; but neither of them had depth enough
of character for that tragic pathos which is too terrible for tears;
for those passionate convulsions when our human nature, like the sea in
earthquake, is sucked away deep down from its habitual shores, leaving
bare for a moment slimy beds stirring with loathsome life, and weedy
tangles before undreamed of, and instantly hidden again under the rush
of its reaction. Theirs are no sudden revelations, flashes out of the
very tempest itself, and born of its own collisions; but much rather a
melancholy Ovidian grace like that of the Heroic Epistles, conscious of
itself, yet not so conscious as to beget distrust and make us feel as
if we had been cheated of our tenderness. If they ope the sacred source
of sympathetic tears, it is not without due warning and ceremonious
preparation. I do not mean to say that their sentiment is not real,
because it is pensive and not passionate. It is real, but it is never
heart-rending. I say it all in saying that their region is that of
fancy. Fancy and imagination may be of one substance, as the northern
lights and lightning are supposed to be; but the one plays and flickers
in harmless flashes and streamers over the vault of the brain, the
other condenses all its thought-executing fires into a single stab of
flame. And so of their humor. It is playful, intellectual, elaborate,
like that of Charles Lamb when he trifles with it, pleasing itself
with artificial dislocations of thought, and never glancing at those
essential incongruities in the nature of things at sight of which humor
shakes its bells, and mocks that it may not shudder.
Their comedies are amusing, and one of them, “Wit without Money,” is
excellent, with some scenes of joyous fun in it that are very cheering.
The fourth scene of the third act is a masterpiece of fanciful
extravagance. This is probably Fletcher’s. The Rev. W. Cartwright
preferred Fletcher’s wit to Shakespeare’s:--
“Shakespeare to thee was dull: whose best jest lies
I’ th’ ladies’ questions and the fools’ replies.
Nature was all his art; thy vein was free
As his, but without his scurrility.”
Posterity has taken leave to differ with the Rev. W. Cartwright. The
conversations in Fletcher’s comedies are often lively, but the wit
is generally a gentlemanlike banter; that is, what was gentlemanlike
in that day. Real wit keeps; real humor is of the same nature in
Aristophanes and Mark Twain; but nothing grows mouldy so soon as
mere fun, the product of animal spirits. Fletcher had far more of
this than of true humor. Both he and Beaumont were skilled in that
pleasantry which in good society is the agreeable substitute for the
more trenchant article. There is an instance of this in Miramont’s
commendation of Greek in the “Elder Brother:”--
“Though I can speak no Greek, I love the sound on ’t;
It goes so thundering as it conjured devils;
Charles speaks it loftily, and, if thou wert a man,
Or had’st but ever heard of Homer’s Iliads,
Hesiod and the Greek poets, thou would’st run mad,
And hang thyself for joy thou ’dst such a gentleman
To be thy son. O, he has read such things
To me!”
“And do you understand ’em, brother?”
“I tell thee no; that ’s not material; the sound ’s
Sufficient to confirm an honest man.”