A History of the French Novel. Volume 1. From the Beginning to 1800

CHAPTER VII

THE THIRD DRAMATIC PERIOD

I have chosen, to fill the third division of our dramatic chapters, seven chief writers of distinguished individuality, reserving a certain fringe of anonymous plays and of less famous personalities for the fourth and last. The seven exceptional persons are Beaumont and Fletcher, Webster, Middleton, Heywood, Tourneur, and Day. It would be perhaps lost labour to attempt to make out a severe definition, shutting these off on the one hand from their predecessors, on the other from those that followed them. We must be satisfied in such cases with an approach to exactness, and it is certain that while most of the men just named had made some appearance in the latest years of Elizabeth, and while one or two of them lasted into the earliest years of Charles, they all represent, in their period of flourishing and in the character of their work, the Jacobean age. In some of them, as in Middleton and Day, the Elizabethan type prevails; in others, as in Fletcher, a distinctly new flavour – a flavour not perceptible in Shakespere, much less in Marlowe – appears. But in none of them is that other flavour of pronounced decadence, which appears in the work of men so great as Massinger and Ford, at all perceptible. We are still in the creative period, and in some of the work to be now noticed we are in a comparatively unformed stage of it. It has been said, and not unjustly said, that the work of Beaumont and Fletcher belongs, when looked at on one side, not to the days of Elizabeth at all, but to the later seventeenth century; and this is true to the extent that the post-Restoration dramatists copied Fletcher and followed Fletcher very much more than Shakespere. But not only dates but other characteristics refer the work of Beaumont and Fletcher to a distinctly earlier period than the work of their, in some sense, successors Massinger and Ford.

It will have been observed that I cleave to the old-fashioned nomenclature, and speak of "Beaumont and Fletcher." Until very recently, when two new editions have made their appearance, there was for a time a certain tendency to bring Fletcher into greater prominence than his partner, but at the same time and on the whole to depreciate both. I am in all things but ill-disposed to admit innovation without the clearest and most cogent proofs; and although the comparatively short life of Beaumont makes it impossible that he should have taken part in some of the fifty-two plays traditionally assigned to the partnership (we may perhaps add Mr. Bullen's remarkable discovery of Sir John Barneveldt, in which Massinger probably took Beaumont's place), I see no reason to dispute the well-established theory that Beaumont contributed at least criticism, and probably original work, to a large number of these plays; and that his influence probably survived himself in conditioning his partner's work. And I am also disposed to think that the plays attributed to the pair have scarcely had fair measure in comparison with the work of their contemporaries, which was so long neglected. Beaumont and Fletcher kept the stage – kept it constantly and triumphantly – till almost, if not quite, within living memory; while since the seventeenth century, and since its earlier part, I believe that very few plays of Dekker's or Middleton's, of Webster's or of Ford's, have been presented to an English audience. This of itself constituted at the great revival of interest in Elizabethan literature something of a prejudice in favour of les oubliés et les dédaignés, and this prejudice has naturally grown stronger since all alike have been banished from the stage. The Copper Captain and the Humorous Lieutenant, Bessus and Monsieur Thomas, are no longer on the boards to plead for their authors. The comparative depreciation of Lamb and others is still on the shelves to support their rivals.

Although we still know but little about either Beaumont or Fletcher personally, they differ from most of their great contemporaries by having come of "kenned folk," and by having to all appearance, industrious as they were, had no inducement to write for money. Francis Beaumont was born at Gracedieu, in Leicestershire in 1584. He was the son of a chief-justice; his family had for generations been eminent, chiefly in the law; his brother, Sir John Beaumont, was not only a poet of some merit, but a man of position, and Francis himself, two years before his death in 1616, married a Kentish heiress. He was educated at Broadgates Hall (now Pembroke College), Oxford, and seems to have made acquaintance with John Fletcher soon after quitting the University. Fletcher was five years older than his friend, and of a clerical family, his father being Bishop of London, and his uncle, Giles Fletcher (the author of Licia), a dignitary of the Church. The younger Giles Fletcher and his brother Phineas were thus cousins of the dramatist. Fletcher was a Cambridge man, having been educated at Benet College (at present and indeed originally known as Corpus Christi). Little else is known of him except that he died of the plague in 1625, nine years after Beaumont's death, as he had been born five years before him. These two men, however, one of whom was but thirty and the other not fifty when he died, have left by far the largest collection of printed plays attributed to any English author. A good deal of dispute has been indulged in as to their probable shares, – the most likely opinion being that Fletcher was the creator and Beaumont (whose abilities in criticism were recognised by such a judge as Ben Jonson) the critical and revising spirit. About a third of the whole number have been supposed to represent Beaumont's influence more or less directly. These include the two finest, The Maid's Tragedy and Philaster; while as to the third play, which may be put on the same level, The Two Noble Kinsmen, early assertion, confirmed by a constant catena of the best critical authority, maintains that Beaumont's place was taken by no less a collaborator than Shakespere. Fletcher, as has been said, wrote in conjunction with Massinger (we know this for certain from Sir Aston Cokain), and with Rowley and others, while Shirley seems to have finished some of his plays. Some modern criticism has manifested a desire to apply the always uncertain and usually unprofitable tests of separation to the great mass of his work. With this we need not busy ourselves. The received collection has quite sufficient idiosyncrasy of its own as a whole to make it superfluous for any one, except as a matter of amusement, to try to split it up.

Its characteristics are, as has been said, sufficiently marked, both in defects and in merits. The comparative depreciation which has come upon Beaumont and Fletcher naturally fixes on the defects. There is in the work of the pair, and especially in Fletcher's work when he wrought alone, a certain loose fluency, an ungirt and relaxed air, which contrasts very strongly with the strenuous ways of the elder playwrights. This exhibits itself not in plotting or playwork proper, but in style and in versification (the redundant syllable predominating, and every now and then the verse slipping away altogether into the strange medley between verse and prose, which we shall find so frequent in the next and last period), and also in the characters. We quit indeed the monstrous types of cruelty, of lust, of revenge, in which many of the Elizabethans proper and of Fletcher's own contemporaries delighted. But at the same time we find a decidedly lowered standard of general morality – a distinct approach towards the fay ce que voudras of the Restoration. We are also nearer to the region of the commonplace. Nowhere appears that attempt to grapple with the impossible, that wrestle with the hardest problems, which Marlowe began, and which he taught to some at least of his followers. And lastly – despite innumerable touches of tender and not a few of heroic poetry – the actual poetical value of the dramas at their best is below that of the best work of the preceding time, and of such contemporaries as Webster and Dekker. Beaumont and Fletcher constantly delight, but they do not very often transport, and even when they do, it is with a less strange rapture than that which communicates itself to the reader of Shakespere passim, and to the readers of many of Shakespere's fellows here and there.

This, I think, is a fair allowance. But, when it is made, a goodly capital whereon to draw still remains to our poets. In the first place, no sound criticism can possibly overlook the astonishing volume and variety of their work. No doubt they did not often (if they ever did) invent their fables. But they have never failed to treat them in such a way as to make them original, and this of itself shows a wonderful faculty of invention and constitutes an inexhaustible source of pleasure. This pleasure is all the more pleasurable because the matter is always presented in a thoroughly workmanlike form. The shapelessness, the incoherence, the necessity for endless annotation and patching together, which mar so many even of the finest Elizabethan plays, have no place in Beaumont and Fletcher. Their dramatic construction is almost narrative in its clear and easy flow, in its absence of puzzles and piecings. Again, their stories are always interesting, and their characters (especially the lighter ones) always more or less attractive. It used to be fashionable to praise their "young men," probably because of the agreeable contrast which they present with the brutality of the Restoration hero; but their girls are more to my fancy. They were not straightlaced, and have left some sufficiently ugly and (let it be added) not too natural types of sheer impudence, such as the Megra of Philaster. Nor could they ever attain to the romantic perfection of Imogen in one kind, of Rosalind in another, of Juliet in a third. But for portraits of pleasant English girls not too squeamish, not at all afraid of love-making, quite convinced of the hackneyed assertion of the mythologists that jests and jokes go in the train of Venus, but true-hearted, affectionate, and of a sound, if not a very nice morality, commend me to Fletcher's Dorotheas, and Marys, and Celias. Add to this the excellence of their comedy (there is little better comedy of its kind anywhere than that of A King and no King, of the Humorous Lieutenant, of Rule a Wife and have a Wife), their generally high standard of dialogue verse, their charming songs, and it will be seen that if they have not the daemonic virtue of a few great dramatic poets, they have at any rate very good, solid, pleasant, and plentiful substitutes for it.

It is no light matter to criticise more than fifty plays in not many times fifty lines; yet something must be said about some of them at any rate. The play which usually opens the series, The Maid's Tragedy, is perhaps the finest of all on the purely tragic side, though its plot is a little improbable, and to modern notions not very agreeable. Hazlitt disliked it much; and though this is chiefly to be accounted for by the monarchical tone of it, it is certainly faulty in parts. It shows, in the first place, the authors' greatest dramatic weakness – a weakness common indeed to all their tribe except Shakespere – the representation of sudden and quite insufficiently motived moral revolutions; and, secondly, another fault of theirs in the representation of helpless and rather nerveless virtue punished without fault of its own indeed, but also without any effort. The Aspatia of The Maid's Tragedy and the Bellario of Philaster, pathetic as they are, are also slightly irritating. Still the pathos is great, and the quarrel or threatened quarrel of the friends Amintor and Melantius, the horrible trial put upon Amintor by his sovereign and the abandoned Evadne, as well as the whole part of Evadne herself when she has once been (rather improbably) converted, are excellent. A passage of some length from the latter part of the play may supply as well as another the sufficient requirement of an illustrative extract: —

Evad. "O my lord!Amin. How now?Evad. My much abused Lord! (Kneels.)Amin. This cannot be.Evad. I do not kneel to live, I dare not hope it;The wrongs I did are greater: look upon meThough I appear with all my faults.Amin. Stand up.This is a new way to beget more sorrow.Heav'n knows, I have too many; do not mock me;Though I am tame and bred up with my wrongsWhich are my foster-brothers, I may leapLike a hand-wolf into my natural wildnessAnd do an outrage: pray thee, do not mock me.Evad. My whole life is so leprous, it infectsAll my repentance: I would buy your pardonThough at the highest set, even with my life:That slight contrition, that's no sacrificeFor what I have committed.Amin. Sure I dazzle.There cannot be a Faith in that foul womanThat knows no God more mighty than her mischiefs:Thou dost still worse, still number on thy faultsTo press my poor heart thus. Can I believeThere's any seed of virtue in that womanLeft to shoot up, that dares go on in sinKnown, and so known as thine is? O Evadne!'Would, there were any safety in thy sex,That I might put a thousand sorrows off,And credit thy repentance! But I must not;Thou'st brought me to that dull calamity,To that strange misbelief of all the worldAnd all things that are in it; that, I fearI shall fall like a tree, and find my grave,Only remembering that I grieve.Evad. My lord,Give me your griefs: you are an innocent,A soul as white as Heav'n. Let not my sinsPerish your noble youth: I do not fall hereTo shadows by dissembling with my tears(As, all say, women can) or to make lessWhat my hot will hath done, which Heav'n and youKnows to be tougher than the hand of timeCan cut from man's remembrance; no, I do not;I do appear the same, the same EvadneDrest in the shames I liv'd in; the same monster:But these are names of honour, to what I am;I do present myself the foulest creatureMost pois'nous, dang'rous, and despis'd of men,Lerna e'er bred, or Nilus: I am hell,Till you, my dear lord, shoot your light into meThe beams of your forgiveness: I am soul-sick;And wither with the fear of one condemn'd,Till I have got your pardon.Amin. Rise, Evadne.Those heavenly Powers, that put this good into thee,Grant a continuance of it: I forgive thee;Make thyself worthy of it, and take heed,Take heed, Evadne, this be serious;Mock not the Pow'rs above, that can and dareGive thee a great example of their justiceTo all ensuing eyes, if that thou playestWith thy repentance, the best sacrifice.Evad. I have done nothing good to win belief,My life hath been so faithless; all the creaturesMade for Heav'n's honours, have their ends, and good ones,All but the cozening crocodiles, false women;They reign here like those plagues, those killing sores,Men pray against; and when they die, like talesIll told, and unbeliev'd they pass awayAnd go to dust forgotten: But, my lord,Those short days I shall number to my rest,(As many must not see me) shall, though late(Though in my evening, yet perceive a will,)Since I can do no good, because a woman,Reach constantly at something that is near it;I will redeem one minute of my age,Or, like another Niobe, I'll weepTill I am water.Amin. I am now dissolv'd.My frozen soul melts: may each sin thou hastFind a new mercy! rise, I am at peace:Hadst thou been thus, thus excellently good,Before that devil king tempted thy frailty,Sure, thou hadst made a star. Give me thy hand;From this time I will know thee, and as farAs honour gives me leave, be thy Amintor.When we meet next, I will salute thee fairlyAnd pray the gods to give thee happy days.My charity shall go along with theeThough my embraces must be far from thee.I should ha' kill'd thee, but this sweet repentanceLocks up my vengeance, for which thus I kiss thee,The last kiss we must take."

The beautiful play of Philaster has already been glanced at; it is sufficient to add that its detached passages are deservedly the most famous of all. The insufficiency of the reasons of Philaster's jealousy may be considered by different persons as affecting to a different extent the merit of the piece. In these two pieces tragedy, or at least tragi-comedy, has the upper hand; it is in the next pair as usually arranged (for the chronological order of these plays is hitherto unsolved) that Fletcher's singular vis comica appears. A King and no King has a very serious plot; and the loves of Arbaces and Panthea are most lofty, insolent, and passionate. But the comedy of Bessus and his two swordsmen, which is fresh and vivid even after Bobadil and Parolles (I do not say Falstaff, because I hold it a vulgar error to consider Falstaff as really a coward at all), is perhaps more generally interesting. As for The Scornful Lady it is comedy pure and simple, and very excellent comedy too. The callousness of the younger Loveless – an ugly forerunner of Restoration manners – injures it a little, and the instantaneous and quite unreasonable conversion of the usurer Morecraft a little more. But the humours of the Lady herself (a most Molièresque personage), and those of Roger and Abigail, with many minor touches, more than redeem it. The plays which follow48 are all comical and mostly farcical. The situations, rather than the expressions of The Custom of the Country, bring it under the ban of a rather unfair condemnation of Dryden's, pronounced when he was quite unsuccessfully trying to free the drama of himself and his contemporaries from Collier's damning charges. But there are many lively traits in it. The Elder Brother is one of those many variations on cedant arma togæ which men of letters have always been somewhat prone to overvalue; but the excellent comedy of The Spanish Curate is not impaired by the fact that Dryden chose to adapt it after his own fashion in The Spanish Friar. In Wit Without Money, though it is as usual amusing, the stage preference for a "roaring boy," a senseless crack-brained spendthrift, appears perhaps a little too strongly. The Beggar's Bush is interesting because of its early indications of cant language, connecting it with Brome's Jovial Crew, and with Dekker's thieves' Latin pamphlets. But the faults and the merits of Fletcher have scarcely found better expression anywhere than in The Humorous Lieutenant. Celia is his masterpiece in the delineation of the type of girl outlined above, and awkward as her double courtship by Demetrius and his father Antigonus is, one somehow forgives it, despite the nauseous crew of go-betweens of both sexes whom Fletcher here as elsewhere seems to take a pleasure in introducing. As for the Lieutenant he is quite charming; and even the ultra-farcical episode of his falling in love with the king owing to a philtre is well carried off. Then follows the delightful pastoral of The Faithful Shepherdess, which ranks with Jonson's Sad Shepherd and with Comus, as the three chiefs of its style in English. The Loyal Subject falls a little behind, as also does The Mad Lover; but Rule a Wife and have a Wife again rises to the first class. Inferior to Shakespere in the power of transcending without travestying human affairs, to Jonson in sharply presented humours, to Congreve and Sheridan in rattling fire of dialogue, our authors have no superior in half-farcical, half-pathetic comedy of a certain kind, and they have perhaps nowhere shown their power better than in the picture of the Copper Captain and his Wife. The flagrant absurdity of The Laws of Candy (which put the penalty of death on ingratitude, and apparently fix no criterion of what ingratitude is, except the decision of the person who thinks himself ungratefully treated), spoils a play which is not worse written than the rest. But in The False One, based on Egyptian history just after Pompey's death, and Valentinian, which follows with a little poetical license the crimes and punishment of that Emperor, a return is made to pure tragedy – in both cases with great success. The magnificent passage which Hazlitt singled out from The False One is perhaps the author's or authors' highest attempt in tragic declamation, and may be considered to have stopped not far short of the highest tragic poetry.

"'Oh thou conqueror,Thou glory of the world once, now the pity:Thou awe of nations, wherefore didst thou fall thus?What poor fate followed thee, and plucked thee onTo trust thy sacred life to an Egyptian?The life and light of Rome to a blind stranger,That honourable war ne'er taught a noblenessNor worthy circumstance show'd what a man was?That never heard thy name sung but in banquetsAnd loose lascivious pleasures? to a boyThat had no faith to comprehend thy greatnessNo study of thy life to know thy goodness?..Egyptians, dare you think your high pyramidesBuilt to out-dure the sun, as you suppose,Where your unworthy kings lie rak'd in ashes,Are monuments fit for him! No, brood of Nilus,Nothing can cover his high fame but heaven;No pyramid set off his memories,But the eternal substance of his greatness,To which I leave him.'"

The chief fault of Valentinian is that the character of Maximus is very indistinctly drawn, and that of Eudoxia nearly unintelligible. These two pure tragedies are contrasted with two comedies, The Little French Lawyer and Monsieur Thomas, which deserve high praise. The fabliau-motive of the first is happily contrasted with the character of Lamira and the friendship of Clerimont and Dinant; while no play has so many of Fletcher's agreeable young women as Monsieur Thomas. The Bloody Brother, which its title speaks as sufficiently tragical, comes between two excellent comedies, The Chances and The Wild Goose Chase, which might serve as well as any others for samples of the whole work on its comic side. In The Chances the portrait of the hare-brained Don John is the chief thing; in The Wild Goose Chase, as in Monsieur Thomas, a whole bevy of lively characters, male and female, dispute the reader's attention and divide his preference. A Wife for a Month sounds comic, but is not a little alloyed with tragedy; and despite the pathos of its central situation, is marred by some of Fletcher's ugliest characters – the characters which Shakespere in Pandarus and the nurse in Romeo and Juliet took care to touch with his lightest finger. The Lover's Progress, a doubtful tragedy, and The Pilgrim, a good comedy (revived at the end of the century, as was The Prophetess with certain help from Dryden), do not require any special notice. Between these two last comes The Captain, a comedy neither of the best nor yet of the worst. The tragi-comic Queen of Corinth is a little heavy; but in Bonduca we have one of the very best of the author's tragedies, the scenes with Caratach and his nephew, the boy Hengo, being full of touches not wholly unworthy of Shakespere. The Knight of the Burning Pestle (where Fletcher, forsaking his usual fantastic grounds of a France that is scarcely French, and an Italy that is extremely un-Italian, comes to simple pictures of London middle-class life, such as those of Jonson or Middleton) is a very happy piece of work indeed, despite the difficulty of working out its double presentment of burlesque knight-errantry and straightforward comedy of manners. In Love's Pilgrimage, with a Spanish subject and something of a Spanish style, there is not enough central interest, and the fortunes by land and sea of The Double Marriage do not make it one of Fletcher's most interesting plays. But The Maid in the Mill and The Martial Maid are good farce, which almost deserves the name of comedy; and The Knight of Malta is a romantic drama of merit. In Women Pleased the humours of avarice and hungry servility are ingeniously treated, and one of the starveling Penurio's speeches is among the best-known passages of all the plays, while the anti-Puritan satire of Hope-on-High Bomby is also noteworthy. The next four plays are less noticeable, and indeed for two volumes, of the edition referred to, we come to fewer plays that are specially good. The Night Walker; or, The Little Thief, though not very probable in its incidents, has a great deal of lively business, and is particularly noteworthy as supplying proof of the singular popularity of bell-ringing with all classes of the population in the seventeenth century, – a popularity which probably protected many old bells in the mania for church desecration. Not much can be said for The Woman's Prize, or, The Tamer Tamed, an avowed sequel, and so to speak, antidote to The Taming of the Shrew, which chiefly proves that it is wise to let Shakespere alone. The authors have drawn to some extent on the Lysistrata to aid them, but have fallen as far short of the fun as of the indecency of that memorable play. With The Island Princess we return to a fair, though not more than a fair level of romantic tragi-comedy, but The Noble Gentleman is the worst play ever attributed (even falsely) to authors of genius. The subject is perfectly uninteresting, the characters are all fools or knaves, and the means adopted to gull the hero through successive promotions to rank, and successive deprivations of them (the genuineness of neither of which he takes the least trouble to ascertain), are preposterous. The Coronation is much better, and The Sea Voyage, with a kind of Amazon story grafted upon a hint of The Tempest, is a capital play of its kind. Better still, despite a certain looseness both of plot and moral, is The Coxcomb, where the heroine Viola is a very touching figure. The extravagant absurdity of the traveller Antonio is made more probable than is sometimes the case with our authors, and the situations of the whole join neatly, and pass trippingly. Wit at Several Weapons deserves a somewhat similar description, and so does The Fair Maid of the Inn; while Cupid's Revenge, though it shocked the editors of 1750 as a pagan kind of play, has a fine tragical zest, and is quite true to classical belief in its delineation of the ruthlessness of the offended Deity. Undoubtedly, however, the last volume of this edition supplies the most interesting material of any except the first. Here is The Two Noble Kinsmen, a play founded on the story of Palamon and Arcite, and containing what I think irrefragable proofs of Shakespere's writing and versification, though I am unable to discern anything very Shakesperian either in plot or character. Then comes the fine, though horrible tragedy of Thierry and Theodoret, in which the misdeeds of Queen Brunehault find chroniclers who are neither squeamish nor feeble. The beautiful part of Ordella in this play, though somewhat sentimental and improbable (as is always the case with Fletcher's very virtuous characters) ranks at the head of its kind, and is much superior to that of Aspatia in The Maid's Tragedy. The Woman Hater, said to be Fletcher's earliest play, has a character of rare comic, or at least farcical virtue in the smell-feast Lazarillo with his Odyssey in chase of the Umbrana's head (a delicacy which is perpetually escaping him); and The Nice Valour contains, in Chamont and his brother, the most successful attempts of the English stage at the delineation of the point of honour gone mad. Not so much, perhaps, can be said for An Honest Man's Fortune, which, with a mask and a clumsy, though in part beautiful, piece entitled Four Plays in One, makes up the tale. But whosoever has gone through that tale will, if he has any taste for the subject, admit that such a total of work, so varied in character, and so full of excellences in all its variety, has not been set to the credit of any name or names in English literature, if we except only Shakespere. Of the highest and most terrible graces, as of the sweetest and most poetical, Beaumont and Fletcher may have little to set beside the masterpieces of some other men; for accomplished, varied, and fertile production, they need not fear any competition.