In what I said just now I did not mean that Fletcher does not sometimes show an almost tragic power, as he constantly does tragic sensibility. There are glimpses of it in “Thierry and Theodoret,” and in the death-scene of the little Hengo in “Bonduca.” Perhaps I should rather say that he can conceive a situation with some true elements of tragedy, though not of the deepest tragedy, in it; but when he comes to work it out, and make it visible to us in words, he seems to feel himself more at home with the pity than the terror of it. His pathos (and this is true of Beaumont also) is mixed with a sweetness that grows cloying. And it is always the author who is speaking, and whom we hear. At best he rises only to a simulated passion, and that leads inevitably to declamation. There is no pang in it, but rather the hazy softness of remembered sorrow. Lear on the heath, at parley with the elements, makes all our pettier griefs contemptible, and the sublime pathos of that scene abides with us almost like a consolation. It is not Shakespeare who speaks, but Sorrow herself:—
“I tax not you, you elements, with unkindness;
I never gave you kingdom, called you children;
You owe me no subscription: then let fall
Your horrible pleasure; here I stand, your slave,
A poor, infirm, weak, and despis’d old man:—
But yet I call you servile ministers,
That have with two pernicious daughters join’d
Your high-engender’d battles ’gainst a head
So old and white as this.”