Algernon Charles Swinburne and Margaret Bryant

“ 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 ”

“ 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 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 ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Nor even in Fletcher’s Ordella, worthy as the part is throughout even of the precious and exquisite praise of Lamb, is there any such cunning touch of tenderness or delicate perfume of pathos as in the parts of Bellario and Aspatia. These have in them a bitter sweetness, a subtle pungency of mortal sorrow and tears of divine delight, beyond the reach of Fletcher. His highest studies of female character have dignity, energy, devotion of the heroic type; but they never touch us to the quick, never waken in us any finer and more profound sense than that of applause and admiration. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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 ”

“ But the son of Judge Beaumont was no fitter for success at the bar than the son of Bishop Fletcher for distinction in the church: it is equally difficult to imagine either poet invested with either gown. Two years later appeared the poem of Salmacis and Hermaphroditus, generally attributed to Beaumont, a voluptuous and voluminous expansion of the Ovidian legend, not on the whole discreditable to a lad of eighteen, fresh from the popular love-poems of Marlowe and Shakespeare, which it naturally exceeds in long-winded and fantastic diffusion of episodes and conceits. ”

“ 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 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 recognise as the dominant and distinctive qualities of such poetry as finds vent in the utterances of Hamlet or of Timon, we recognise 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 main body of the play, comprising both the great scenes which throw out into full and final relief the character of either heroine for perfect good or evil, bears throughout the unmistakable image and superscription of Fletcher; yet there are parts which for gravity and steady strength of style, for reserve and temperance of effect, would seem to suggest the collaboration of a calmer and more patient hand; and these more equable and less passionate parts of the poem recall rather the touch of Massinger than of Beaumont. ”

“ 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 ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ They are prone, indeed, to indulge elsewhere in a wanton and exuberant licence of talk; and Fletcher, at least, is liable to confuse the shades of right and wrong, to deface or efface the boundary lines of good and evil, to stain the ermine of virtue and palliate the nakedness of vice with the same indecorous and incongruous laxity of handling. ”

“ Often in mere haste to despatch the business of a play, to huddle up a catastrophe or throw out some particular scene into sharp and immediate relief, he will sacrifice all 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 ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ The admirable study of the worthy citizen and his wife, who introduce to the stage and escort with their applause The Knight of the Burning Pestle through his adventurous career to its untimely end, has all the force and fulness of Jonson’s humour at its best, with more of freshness and freedom. ”

“ It may suffice here to observe that the contributions of Fletcher to the majestic temple of tragedy left incomplete by Shakespeare show the lesser workman almost equally at his best and at him worst, at his weakest and at his strongest. ”

“ A student of physiognomy will not fail to mark the points of likeness and of difference between the faces of the two friends; both models of noble manhood, handsome and significant in feature and expression alike;—Beaumont’s the statelier and serener of the two, with clear thoughtful eyes, full arched brows, and strong aquiline nose, with a little cleft at the tip ”