atisfied the curiosity of their
time, and expressed its surface ideas and longings. This accounts for
their great popularity, which in their day eclipsed even Shakespeare's,
as it accounts also for their shortcomings. They skimmed over the
surface of passion, they saw the pathos and the pity of it but not the
terror; they lacked Shakespeare's profound insight into the well-springs
of human action, and sacrificed truth of life to stage effect. They
shared with him one grave fault which is indeed the besetting sin of
dramatists, resulting in part from the necessarily curt and outline
action of the drama, in part from the love of audiences for strong
emotional effects; namely, the abrupt and unexplained moral revolutions
of their characters. Effects are too often produced without apparent
causes; a novelist has space to fill in the blanks. The sudden
contrition of the usurper in 'As You Like It' is a familiar instance;
Beaumont and Fletcher have plenty as bad. Probably there was more of
this in real life during the Middle Ages, when most people still had
much barbaric instability of feeling and were liable to sudden
revulsions of purpose, than in our more equable society. On the other
hand, virtue often suffers needlessly and acquiescingly.

In their speech they indulged in much license, Fletcher especially; he
was prone to confuse right and wrong. The strenuousness of the earlier
Elizabethan age was passing away, and the relaxing morality of Jacobean
society was making its way into literature, culminating in the entire
disintegration of the time of Charles II., which it is very shallow to
lay entirely to the Puritans. There would have been a time of great
laxity had Cromwell or the Puritan ascendancy never existed. Beaumont
and Fletcher, in their eagerness to please, took no thought of the
after-effects of their plays; morality did not enter into their scheme
of life. Yet they were not immoral, but merely unmoral. They lacked the
high seriousness that gives its permanent value to Shakespeare's tragic
work. They wrote not to embody the everlasting truths of life, as he
did; not because they were oppressed with the weight of a new message
striving for utterance; not because they were aflame with the passion
for the unattainable, as Marlowe; not to lash with the stings of bitter
mockery the follies and vices of their fellow-men, as Ben Jonson; not
primarily to make us shudder at the terrible tragedies enacted by
corrupted he