As it has already been said, the strongest feature of the play is its characterization. Almost every figure is, if not an individual, at least a type so vitalized as to appear to take on life. One or two touches, to be sure, of conventional Massingerian habits of thought still cling about them; even the noblest cannot entirely forget to consider how their conduct will pose them before the eyes of the world and posterity. But apart from such slight occasional lapses, they may truthfully be said to speak and move quite in the manner of real men and women.
The hero, Charalois, is drawn as of a gentle, meditative, temperate, and self-possessed disposition, in strong and effective contrast to his friend. Though his military exploits are spoken of with admiration, and Romont testifies that he can “pursue a foe like lightning,” he betrays a certain readiness to yield to discouragement scarce to be expected in the son of the great general. In consequence of these facts, he has been described by some (notably Cunningham, in his Edition of Gifford, Introduction, p. xiii;—cf. also Phelan, p. 61; and Beck, pp. 22–3) as “a Hamlet whose mind has not yet been sicklied o’er by the pale cast of thought,” and his long silence at the opening of Act I is compared to that of the Danish Prince on his first appearance. But, in reality, excess of pride is the chief reason of Charalois’ backwardness on this occasion, and thereafter he acts promptly and efficiently always. The same over-sensitive pride continues to manifest itself throughout the play—when he is confronted with Rochfort’s generosity; when he finds ([III, i, 365] ff.) that it is he who is the object of the jests of Novall Junior and his satellites (though scarce a breath earlier he has chided Romont for noticing the yapping of such petty curs); and in the viscissitudes
of the catastrophe and its consequences. A harmonious twin-birth with his pride, at once proceeding from it, bound up with it, and on occasion over-weighing its scruples, is an extreme punctiliousness at every turn to the dictates of that peculiarly Spanish imperative, “the point of honor,”—a consideration so prominent throughout the play as to have convinced many critics that the source of the story, although still undiscovered, must have been Spanish. These two traits—pride and an adherence to “the point of honor,” are almost invariably the mainsprings of Charalois’ conduct. His pride holds him back from supplicating in behalf of his father the clemency of the unworthy ministers of the law, till he is persuaded by Romont that honor not only permits but requires that he do so; he feels that honor demands that he sacrifice himself to secure his father’s burial, and he does it; that honor demands that he put away his friend in loyalty to his wife, and he does it; that honor demands that he slay the adulteress—and he does it; he even consents to lay bare the details of his ignominious wrong before the eyes of men, because he is brought to believe that “the point of honor” calls for a justification of his course and the holding of it up as an example to the world. It is a striking and consistent portrait—how unlike the usual conventionally noble hero of romantic drama!
Romont, however, is the finest figure of the play. He draws to himself rather more than his share of interest and sympathy, to the detriment of the protagonist. Of a type common enough on the stage of that day—the bluff, loyal soldier-friend of the hero—he is yet so thoroughly individualized that we can discuss him and calculate what he will do in given situations, even as with a character of Shakespeare’s. The portrait suffers from no jarring inconsistencies; almost his every utterance is absolutely in part, and adds its touch to round out our conception of him. His negligence of his personal appearance, his quick temper, his impulsiveness, his violence, his lack of restraint, his fierce, uncompromising honesty, his devotion to the “grave General dead” and his unshaken fidelity to the living son, his flashes of unexpected tenderness, his homage for the reverend virtue of Rochfort—a sort of child-like awe for what he knows is finer if not of truer metal than his own rough spirit, his ill-disguised scorn for Novall Junior and his creatures, “those dogs in doublets,” his lack of tact which unfits him for effective service in the delicate task of preserving Beaumelle’s honor, and dooms his story to Charalois to disbelief and resentment, his prompt, fearless decisiveness of action, the tumultuous flood of nervous and at times eloquent speech which pours from his lips when he is aroused, yet dies in his throat when he is lashed by a woman’s tongue—a flood of speech which is most torrential when the situation is most doubtful or hopeless of good issue, but which gives place to a self-possessed terseness when he is quite sure of his ground:—all go to give detail and reality to a character at once amazingly alive and irresistibly attractive. “Romont is one of the noblest of all Massinger’s men,” says Swinburne, “and Shakespeare has hardly drawn noble men more nobly than Massinger.” To find a parallel creation who can over-match him in vigor of presentation and theatrical efficiency, we must go back to the Melantius of Beaumont and Fletcher. These two characters represent the ultimate elaborations of the stock figure of the faithful friend and blunt soldier; Melantius is the supreme romantic, Romont the supreme realistic, development of the type.
Yet though Romont is the most compelling of the dramatis personae, into none does Massinger enter more thoroughly than the noble figure of Rochfort. Utter devotion to virtue, to which he had paid a life-long fidelity, is the key-note of the nature of the aged Premier President, and accordingly in him the deep-seated ethical seriousness of the “stage-poet” found a congenial expression. A statelier dignity is wont to echo in his lines than in the utterance of any other character; they breathe an exalted calm, a graciousness, a grave courtesy, as though the very spirit of their speaker had entered them.
An inability to judge the character of others was his great weakness—a weakness which he himself realized, for he called upon Beaumont to confirm the one strikingly sure, true appraisement which he exhibited, his admiration for Charalois. Characteristically, this weakness seems to have taken the form of a too-generous estimate of his fellows. This caused him to bestow his vacated office upon the harsh and unjust Novall, and to be blind to the disposition of his daughter, and the danger that lay in her intimacy with Novall Junior. But if his kindly nature saw the better side of even that contemptible young man, he at least understood him well enough not to take him at all seriously as a suitor for Beaumelle’s hand.
Of the Novalls, father and son, there is a much briefer presentation. Yet even so, in the case of old Novall we have as masterly a sketch as in Romont a detailed study. His every word is eloquent of his stern, not to say mean, nature—curt and severe towards others, all prejudice where he himself is concerned, inexorably malevolent against those who incur his animosity. Yet it never enters his head to seek the satisfaction of his hate in any way save through the law; for example, he does not seize upon, or even think seriously of, Pontalier’s proffer of private vengeance; the law is his sphere—he will abuse it to his advantage, if he can, but he will not go outside of it. He is, in other words, the Official Bureaucrat par excellence, and his enmity against the martial house of the Charaloises and the rigor with which he is said to “cross every deserved soldier and scholar,” and, on the other hand, the detestation in which Romont holds him, are manifestations of the feud of type against type. It has been suggested that the especial fervor with which he is devoted to execration argues a prototype in actual life, and that in him is to be recognized Sir Edward Coke, notorious for the savage vindictiveness of his conduct towards Sir Walter Raleigh.
Novall Junior, the cowardly, foppish, and unscrupulous gallant, though a flimsy personality, affords once or twice, in the Fieldian prose, rather good humor: e. g.—
Nay, o’ my soul, ’tis so; what fouler object in the world, than to see a young, fair, handsome beauty unhandsomely dighted, and incongruently accoutred? or a hopeful chevalier unmethodically appointed in the external ornaments of nature? For, even as the index tells us the contents of stories, and directs to the particular chapters, even so does the outward habit and superficial order of garments (in man or woman) give us a taste of the spirit, and demonstratively point (as it were a manual note from the margin) all the internal quality and habiliment of the soul; and there cannot be a more evident, palpable, gross manifestation of poor, degenerate, dunghilly blood and breeding, than a rude, unpolished, disordered, and slovenly outside. ([IV, i, 48–60].)
Of the remaining characters, only two call for especial notice. The three Creditors are a blemish upon the otherwise striking verisimilitude of the play; they are impossible, inhuman monsters of greed and relentlessness, who serve as vehicles for a kind of grotesque comedy. A personal rancour on the part of the authors may have been responsible for this presentation, as it is probable that they themselves had had none-too-pleasant experiences with money-lenders. Pontalier, however, is very well conceived and skillfully executed. Occupying a relation to Novall Junior quite similar to that of Romont to Charalois, he is yet differentiated from his parallel, while at the same time he is kept free from any taint of the despicableness and fawning servility which are chiefly prominent in the parasites of the vicious and feather-brained young lord. There is something really pathetic about this brave, honorable soldier, committed to the defense of an unworthy benefactor, ranged on the side of wrong against right, by his very best qualities: his noble sense of gratitude, his loyalty, his devotion to what he conceives to be his duty. It will be observed that he never joins with the rest of the group about Novall Junior in their jibes against Charalois and Romont.