Algernon Charles Swinburne

“ 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 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 ”

“ 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. ”

“ And the particular note of merit observed, the special point of the praise conferred, by the great German poet should be no less sufficient to dispose of the vulgar misconception yet lingering among sciolists and pretenders to criticism, which regards a writer than whom no man was ever born with a finer or a stronger instinct for perfection of excellence in execution as a mere noble savage of letters, a rough self-taught sketcher or scribbler of crude and rude genius, whose unhewn blocks of verse had in them some veins of rare enough metal to be quarried and polished by Shakespeare. ”

“ Fletcher’s a more keen and fervid face, sharper in outline every way, with an air of bright ardour and glad fiery impatience; sanguine and nervous, suiting the complexion and colour of hair; the expression of the eager eyes and lips almost recalling that of a noble hound in act to break the leash it strains at;—two heads as lordly of feature and as expressive of aspect as any gallery of great men can show. ”

“ So much it may here suffice to say of Chapman as an original poet, one who held of no man and acknowledged no master, but throughout the whole generation of our greatest men, from the birth of Marlowe well-nigh to the death of Jonson, held on his own hard and haughty way of austere and sublime ambition, not without kindly and graceful inclination of his high grey head to salute such younger and still nobler compeers as Jonson and Fletcher. ”

“ In 1700 Congreve thus replied to Collier with the crowning work of his genius,—the unequalled and unapproached master-piece of English comedy. The one play in our language which may fairly claim a place beside or but just beneath the mightiest work of Molière is The Way of the World. On the stage which had recently acclaimed with uncritical applause the author's more questionable appearance in the field of tragedy, this final and flawless evidence of his incomparable powers met with a rejection then and ever since inexplicable on any ground of conjecture. ”

“ Each little play, in the brief course of its single act, gives proof of the peculiar touch and special trick of its author’s hand: the deeper and more delicate passion of Beaumont, the rapid and ardent activity of Fletcher, have nowhere found a more noticeable vent for the expression respectively of the most tender and profound simplicity of quiet sweetness, the most buoyant and impatient energy of tragic emotion.
In the wider field of their comic or romantic drama it is yet easier to distinguish the respective work of either hand. ”

“ His rarest jewels of thought and verse detachable from the context lie embedded in the tragedy of Cæsar and Pompey, whence the finest of them were first extracted by the unerring and unequalled critical genius of Charles Lamb. In most of his tragedies the lofty and labouring spirit of Chapman may be said rather to shine fitfully through parts than steadily to pervade the whole; they show nobly altogether as they stand, but even better by help of excerpts and selections. ”

“ In the plays which we know by evidence surer than the most trustworthy tradition to be the common work of Beaumont and Fletcher, there is indeed no trace of such incongruous and incompatible admixture as leaves the greatest example of romantic tragedy—for Cymbeline and the Winter’s Tale, though not guiltless of blood, are in their issues no more tragic than Pericles or the Tempest—a unique instance of glorious imperfection, a hybrid of heavenly aid other than heavenly breed, disproportioned and divine. ”

“ As a playwright, his method was almost crude and rude in the headlong straightforwardness of its energetic simplicity; as an artist in character, his interest was intense but narrow, his power magnificent but confined; as a dramatic poet, the force of his genius is great enough to ensure him an enduring place among the foremost of the followers of Shakespeare. ”

“ Never was any one of them but Shelley so little of a marvellous boy and so suddenly revealed as a marvellous man. Never has any poet suffered so much from the chaotic misarrangement of his poems in every collected edition. The rawest and the rankest rubbish of his fitful spring is bound up in one sheaf with the ripest ears, flung into one basket with the richest fruits, of his sudden and splendid summer. ”

“ The bias of Fletcher was towards mixed comedy; his lightest and wildest humour is usually crossed or tempered by an infusion of romance; like Shakespeare in this one point at least, he has left no single play without some touch on it of serious interest, of poetic eloquence or fancy, however slight and fugitive. Beaumont, evidently under the imperious influence of Ben Jonson’s more rigid theories, seems rather to have bent his genius with the whole force of a resolute will into the form or mould prescribed for comedy by the elder and greater comic poet. ”

“ But in those tragic poems of which the dominant note is the note of Beaumont’s genius a subtler chord of thought is sounded, a deeper key of emotion is touched, than ever was struck by Fletcher. The lighter genius is palpably subordinate to the stronger, and loyally submits itself to the impression of a loftier spirit. It is true that this distinction is never grave enough to produce a discord: it is also true that the plays in which the predominance of Beaumont’s mind and style is generally perceptible make up altogether but a small section of the work that bears their names conjointly ”

“ Now, in every one of the plays common to both, the real difficulty for a critic is not to trace the hand of Beaumont, but to detect the touch of Fletcher. Throughout the better part of every such play, and above all of their two masterpieces, Philaster and The Maid’s Tragedy, it should be clear to the most sluggish or cursory of readers that he has not to do with the author of Valentinian and The Double Marriage. In those admirable tragedies the style is looser, more fluid, more feminine. ”

“ Two or three phrases cancelled, two or three lines erased, would have left us in Lamia one of the most faultless as surely as one of the most glorious jewels in the crown of English poetry. Isabella, feeble and awkward in narrative to a degree almost incredible in a student of Dryden and a pupil of Leigh Hunt, is overcharged with episodical effects of splendid and pathetic expression beyond the reach of either. ”

“ The fiery impulse, the rolling music, the vivid illustration of thought by jets of insuppressible passion, the perpetual sustenance of passion by the implacable persistency of thought, which we recognize as the dominant and distinctive qualities of such poetry as finds vent in the utterances of Hamlet or of Timon, we recognize also in the scarcely less magnificent poetry, the scarcely less fiery sarcasm, with which Tourneur has informed the part of Vindice a harder-headed Hamlet, a saner and more practically savage and serious Timon. ”

“ 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 ”

“ Charles Fitzgeoffrey, whose voluminous and fervent elegy on Sir Francis Drake is indeed of more actual value, historic or poetic, than either or than both of Tourneur's elegiac rhapsodies. The singular power, the singular originality, and the singular limitation of his genius are all equally obvious in The Atheist's Tragedy, a dramatic poem no less crude and puerile and violent in action and evolution than simple and noble and natural in expression and in style. ”

“ This fervent constancy of spirit relieves the lurid gloom and widens the limited range of a tragic imagination which otherwise might be felt as oppressive rather than inspiriting. His grim and trenchant humour is as peculiar in its sardonic passion as his eloquence is original in the strenuous music of its cadences, in the roll of its rhythmic thunder. ”

“ The scene of the king's deposition at Kenilworth is almost as much finer in tragic effect and poetic quality as it is shorter and less elaborate than the corresponding scene in Shakespeare's King Richard II. The terror of the deathscene undoubtedly rises into horror; but this horror is with skilful simplicity of treatment preserved from passing into disgust. In pure poetry, in sublime and splendid imagination, this tragedy is excelled by Doctor Faustus; in dramatic power and positive impression of natural effect it is as certainly the masterpiece of Marlowe. ”

“ The best example of the school of Jonson to be found outside the ample range of his own work is The Scornful Lady, a comedy whose exceptional success and prolonged popularity must have been due rather to the broad effect of its forcible situations, its wealth and variety of ludicrous incidents, and the strong gross humour of its dialogue, than to any finer quality of style, invention or character. It is the only work of Beaumont and Fletcher which a critic who weighs the meaning of his words can admit to be as coarse as the coarsest work of Ben Jonson. ”

“ This tragedy stands out among its compeers as one of the imperishable and ineradicable landmarks of literature. All the great qualities apparent in The White Devil reappear in The Duchess of Malfy, combined with a yet more perfect execution, and utilized with a yet more consummate skill. No poet has ever so long and so successfully sustained at their utmost height and intensity the expressed emotions and the united effects of terror and pity. ”

“ The false Keats, therefore, whom Shelley pitied and Byron despised would have been, had he ever existed, a thing beneath compassion or contempt. That such a man could have had such a genius is almost evidently impossible; and yet more evident is the proof which remains on everlasting record that none was ever further from the chance of decline to such degradation than the real and actual man who made that name immortal. ”