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This courteous squire. Fortune will give us more
Upon our next adventure."

And how a determined imagination can cast a glamour over the trivialities of life is shown by the aspect in which the barber presents himself to Ralph and the excited host

"Not far from hence, near to a craggy cliff,
At the north end of this distracted town,
There doth stand a lowly house
Ruggedly builded, and in it a cave

In which an ugly giant now doth won (dwell)
Ycleped Barbarossa: in his hand

He shakes a naked lance of purest steel,

With sleeves turn'd up: and him before he wears
A motley garment to preserve his clothes
From blood of those knights which he massacres
And ladies' gent; without the door doth hang
A copper bason, on a prickant spear;

At which no sooner gentle knight can knock
But the shrill sound fierce Barbarossa hears,
And rushing forth brings in the errant knight,
And sets him down in an enchanted chair;
Then with an engine which he hath prepared
With forty teeth, he claws his courtly crown;
Next makes him wink, and underneath his chin
He plants a brazen piece, of mighty bore,
And knocks his bullets round about his cheeks;
Whilst with his fingers and an instrument
With which he snaps his hair off, he doth fill

The wretch's ears with a most hideous noise."

And not only have Beaumont and Fletcher in the play parodied the heroic ardour and valour of chivalrous novels and dramas, -Ralph's first speech is a parody on a passage in Shakspere's Henry IV., Act i. Scene 1, his last a parody on the opening speech of the ghost of Andrea in the Spanish Tragedy, but they have carried their impartiality to an heroic extent and have parodied themselves. Luce, who believes in Jasper through everything, is hardly distinguishable from many of the heroines of their other plays, who sacrifice everything to love; devoting themselves, without reward or hope, even when they have ceased to believe in those they love. The gift of humour would be a dangerous one to men like Beaumont and Fletcher, sceptical as they naturally were concerning the deeper feelings and meanings of life. Happily the age did not call for that cynical laughter which plays over everything and which finds nothing sacred. This was the spirit of the stage after the

Restoration, but before there was still some memory left of the serious and deep feelings of the best Elizabethan time Parodies and the jeer of scepticism amused, but the age had belief still in the reality of some of its emotions, and it required that its dramatists should be "reverent in the right place."

It was Beaumont and Fletcher's perfect agreement with their age that explains their popularity. It was the public which gave them the mould within which they readily worked and shaped their genius. Their capacity in supplying an insatiable public with new plots is remarkable. The sources of their plots were Italian novels, Spanish novels and plays; the acquaintance of which they made through translations, probably getting to know the Spanish drama only through the novels from which its plots were drawn. The resemblance that has been observed between Beaumont and Fletcher and Lope de Vega, came thus from no personal literary intercourse: the resemblance is sufficiently explained by noticing the similarity of the national life of both Spain and England at that time, and the similar position of Lope de Vega and Beaumont and Fletcher, all being artists, whose sole aim, beyond the desire to write, was to please the public taste.

The plots of many of Beaumont and Fletcher's plays are quite outside the pale, as far as modern standards are concerned, but their power of effectively telling a story, of dramatising an episode in order to give adequate effect to the most important incidents, cannot be over praised. Mr. Craik says: "In the conduct of a story for the mere purposes of the stage,—for keeping the attention of an audience awake, and their expectation suspended throughout the whole course of the action,—they excel Shakspere; who, aiming at higher things, and producing his more glowing pictures by fewer strokes, is careless about the mere excitement of curiosity, whereas they are tempted to linger as long as possible over every scene, both for that end, and because their proper method of evolving character and passion is by such delay and repetition of touch upon touch."

Within a limited range their power of characterisation is good, but it is of the same crude sort as Ben Jonson's, the study of types of human nature, all more or less exaggerated in certain directions. These types occur again and again in Beaumont and Fletcher's plays, the blunt old soldier, the patient devoted woman, etc. Indeed, characterisation of the higher sort was as impossible to Beaumont and Fletcher as it was to Jonson. Their genius was devoid of those finer perceptions and higher

sensibilities which alone can give real deep insight into human nature, and make possible the conception and treatment of the higher and finer sorts of character. Ben Jonson failed in characterisation because his colossal egoism was an insurmountable obstacle to a sympathetic comprehension of his fellow beings in theory he understood and sympathised with the best and noblest aspects of human nature. Beaumont and Fletcher had a thorough and spontaneous sense of human fellowship, but it was fellowship with only the lower aspects of human nature: even in theory they were incapable of sympathy and understanding with the nobler aims and qualities of humanity. "Undoubtedly," as Mr. Craik says, "taking them all in all, they have left us the richest and most magnificent drama we possess after that of Shakspere; the most instinct and alive both with the true dramatic spirit and with that of general poetic beauty and power, the most brilliantly lighted up with wit and humour:" and yet we cannot help feeling that their art, perfect as it is in its way, throws no new light on the world, makes no suggestions, opens out no new vistas, such as the greatest genius, by virtue of its wide comprehension and deep insight, unconsciously does. The work of Beaumont and Fletcher is essentially the successful work of the second-rate artist; that their fame in their own day was so great, overpowering that of Shakspere, was because they were the children of this world; and the children of this world are naturally always more popular and successful in their generation than the children of light.

CHAPTER XII.

THE DECLINE OF THE DRAMA.

CHAPMAN, George, b. 1557 or 1559, d. 1634; HEYWOOD, Thomas, 15701650; MIDDLETON, Thomas, b. 1570, d. 1627; MARSTON, John, b. 1585, d. 163-; DEKKER, Thomas, b. 1570, d. 1640; WEBSTER, John, b. d. 1650; MASSINGER, Philip, b. 1584, d. 1639; FORD, John, b. 1586, d. 1640; TOURNEUR, Cyril; SHIRLEY, James, 1596-1666.

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If we take the best work of Shakspere as marking the culminating point of Elizabethan dramatic art, the decline of the drama may be said to include the work of both Ben Jonson and Beaumont and Fletcher. Without doubt, the work of these artists shows the bad effects necessarily produced on dramatic art by the degeneration of the national life. Great and unmistakable influence on the personalities and works of these authors was exercised by the narrowness of the interests of the great collective life, by the growing division of the nation into two sections—the ascetic, thoughtful, moral, and puritan section, who despised art as the silly play of life, and called theatres the "devil's chapels ;" and the unthinking, pleasure-loving, artistic cavalier section, eager for life and art, but whose energy was controlled by no serious interests, by no consciousness of great responsibilities, political or religious. In Ben Jonson we see the reactionist, a great highminded spirit, of high standards, shocked with the immorality of his time, longing to be its teacher; showing the bad effects of his divorce from his age in the pompous-pedantic tone, the consciousness with which he enunciates sentiments, whose morality he knows will strike unpleasantly a popular audience; in the brutal coarseness of some of his plays, when contemporary manners are represented at their worst in order to point a moral. And in Beaumont and Fletcher the fatal division between national life and the life of art is still further shown. They have lost all standard of morality; everything is measured by the standard of

the picturesque; the life with which they deal is but the limited one of the court and of the fashionable world; the study of character is but the study of manners and of exaggerated types; everywhere is visible that want of self-control which comes when life has no serious aims or interests to serve as its discipline. Beaumont and Fletcher have the vigorous, eager Elizabethan individuality; but it is demoralised by the absence of those checks which, in the early part of the Renaissance, had kept its vitality within bounds; with them passion is often mere vehemence, enthusiasm; and the desire for liberty mere wantonness. But Ben Jonson and Beaumont and Fletcher stand out from among the artists of their time, because they possess each a little share of that great genius which can give vigour and life to whatever it touches.

Under the school, therefore, of "Decline of the Drama" we must include all those lesser spirits who exhibit strikingly all the characteristics of a declining art-of an art that has no firm root in national life, and yet that shows no tendency to seek for itself an artificial life on its own conditions,—to become a literary drama pure and simple, like that of the German Romanticists under Tieck. Such a drama is represented by men such as Chapman, Ford, and Webster-men of sufficient ability to claim a high rank among dramatists; and by the very able but decidedly secondrate work of Heywood, Massinger, Middleton, Dekker, Marston, and Shirley. Some of these men wrote for the City, some for the Court; but as the City imitated almost entirely the ways and manners of the Court, there is no difference in the spirit of the plays produced for these different audiences, although their subjects were sometimes different. Both the Court and that part of the City which favoured art and followed Court standards, were, very early in the reign of James I., separated by a hard and fast line from the puritanic body of the nation. Although the seeds of the Puritan movement lay deep down in the feeling of the nation, James I., by his theory of divine right, by his proposition of " no bishop, no king," was the first to make the division of the people into two distinct parties, obvious and serious. might still be some men, artistic in temperament and of deep moral sensibilities, who, like Milton, could unite in their youth the artistic enjoying life of the Cavalier with the thoughtful scholarly life of the Puritan; but sooner or later, so wide was the breach made by James I., every practical man interested in the life of action must make a decided choice, must throw in his lot either with one or the other party. To a wide nature

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