Their comedies are amusing, and one of them, “Wit without Money,” is excellent, with some scenes of joyous fun in it that are very cheering. The fourth scene of the third act is a masterpiece of fanciful extravagance. This is probably Fletcher’s. The Rev. W. Cartwright preferred Fletcher’s wit to Shakespeare’s:—
“Shakespeare to thee was dull: whose best jest lies
I’ th’ ladies’ questions and the fools’ replies.
Nature was all his art; thy vein was free
As his, but without his scurrility.”
Posterity has taken leave to differ with the Rev. W. Cartwright. The conversations in Fletcher’s comedies are often lively, but the wit is generally a gentlemanlike banter; that is, what was gentlemanlike in that day. Real wit keeps; real humor is of the same nature in Aristophanes and Mark Twain; but nothing grows mouldy so soon as mere fun, the product of animal spirits. Fletcher had far more of this than of true humor. Both he and Beaumont were skilled in that pleasantry which in good society is the agreeable substitute for the more trenchant article. There is an instance of this in Miramont’s commendation of Greek in the “Elder Brother:”—
“Though I can speak no Greek, I love the sound on ’t;
It goes so thundering as it conjured devils;
Charles speaks it loftily, and, if thou wert a man,
Or had’st but ever heard of Homer’s Iliads,