My root is earthed, and I a desolate branch
Left scattered in the highway of the world,
touch the high-water mark of his poetic endeavor.
Blemishes, indeed, are not unapparent. The episodic [first Scene of Act V] is a rather stupid piece of pseudo-comedy by Massinger, which serves no function adequate to justify its existence, while it interrupts the thread of the main story at a point where its culminating intensity does not, of right, permit such a diversion. Gifford in commenting upon this Scene makes the amazing pronouncement that it serves “to prove how differently the comic part of this drama would have appeared, if the whole had fortunately fallen into the hands of Massinger.” Surely never was criticism more fatuous.
But the most serious—indeed, the outstanding—defect of the play is the easy readiness of Charalois to break with Romont. The calm, unregretful placidity with which he untwists the long web of friendship with a man who has stood by him through weal and woe, who has courted a prison’s chains for his sake, shocks us, and repels us with its flinty self-sufficiency. It is not that we know him to be wrong and Romont to be right; suppose the high faith of Charalois in Beaumelle to be entirely justified and the charge of Romont to be as groundless as it is wildly delivered and unconvincing, yet there is no excuse for the immediacy with which, on the first revelation of what he himself has demanded to know, the hero rejects, along with the report of his friend, the friend himself, whose aim could have been only his best interest. For the fault lies not in the situation, which is sound, but in its over-hasty development. A little more length to the scene, a few more speeches to either participant in the dialogue, a little longer and more vituperative insistence on the part of Romont in the face of Charalois’ warnings that he has gone far enough, and the quarrel would have been thoroughly realized and developed. As it is, it comes on insufficient provocation; the hero, at the moment when he should excite regret and sympathy because of his blind, mistaken trust in his unworthy wife, excites rather indignation; the later words of Romont with which he justifies his unshaken loyalty to his comrade turn back the mind perforce to that comrade’s lack of loyalty to him, and unwittingly ring out as a judgment upon Charalois:
That friendship’s raised on sand,
Which every sudden gust of discontent,
Or flowing of our passions can change,
As if it ne’er had been:—
The faulty passage, it will be noted upon reference to the analysis of shares in collaboration, is by the hand of Field. Unconvincing precipitancy in the conduct of situations marks his work elsewhere, notably in the Amends for Ladies.