From the study of Fletcher's unaided plays we arrive at a still further criterion for the determination of his share in the joint-plays,--his stock of ideas concerning life, his view of the spectacle, and his emotional attitude. His early pastoral comedy _The Faithfull Shepheardesse_ might be dismissed from consideration as a conventionalized literary treatment of conditions remote from actual experience, were it not that other dramatic exponents of shepherds and shepherdesses--Jonson, for instance, and Milton--have succeeded in imbuing the pastoral species with qualities distinctly vital; the former, with rustic reality and genuine tenderness; the latter, with profound moral significance. _The Faithfull Shepheardesse_, on the other hand, with all its beauty of artistic form is devoid of reality, pathos, and sublimity. The author has no ideas worthy of the name and, in spite of his singing praises of chastity, he has his hand to his mouth where between fyttes there blossoms a superb smile. He has in art no depth of conviction; consequently, no philosophy of life to offer. _The Faithfull Shepheardesse_ strikes the intellectual keynote of all Fletcher's unaided work. He is a playwright of marvellous skill, a lyrist of facile verse and fancy, but a poet of indifference--of no ethical insight or outlook when he is purveying for the public. His tragedies, for instance _Valentinian_ and _Bonduca_ (the two scenes of the latter that may not be his are negligible), abound in sudden fatal passions and noble diction. They involve moral conduct, to be sure, patriotism, loyalty, chivalry, military prowess, insane lust and vengeance, but they lack deep-seated and deliberate motive of action, and they fail of that inevitability of spiritual conflict which is requisite to a tragic effect. The heroes of these, and of his tragicomedies and romantic dramas, such as _A Wife for a Month_, _The Loyall Subject_, _The Humorous Lieutenant_, _The Pilgrim_, _The Island Princesse_, may be fearless and blameless, but their courage and virtue are of habit rather than of moral exigency. Their loyalty is frequently unreasonable and absurdly exaggerated. One or two of his virtuous heroines are at once charming and real; but as a rule with Fletcher--the more virtuous, the more nebulous. His villains have no redeeming touch of humanity: their doom moves us not; nor does their sleight-of-hand repentance convince us. The atmosphere is histrionic. There is scorn of Fate and Fortune, much talk of death and the grave: and we "go out like tedious tales forgotten"; or we don't,--just as may suit the stage hangings, the brilliance of the footlights, and the sentimental uptake. There is, in short, in his unassisted serious dramas little real pathos; little of the grandeur and sudden imaginative splendour which, we shall see, characterized Beaumont; none of Beaumont's earnestness and philosophical spontaneity and profundity.