s. 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 cl