On the other hand we read on every page of Fletcher's independent contribution to English drama what, perhaps, was not the man himself, but his dramaturgic pose--still for the world the essence of the Fletcher who ruled it from the stage:[261] we read his "shallowness of moral nature," his acquiescence in the ethical apathy and cynicism of the time; his indelicacy; his indifference to, if not irreverence for, the dramatic proprieties,--his subservience to popular taste and favour in an age when "the theatre had ceased to be the expression of patriotism and of the national life and had become the amusement of the idle gentleman and of such members of the lower classes as were not kept away by the Puritan disapproval of the stage." We witness with amusement but with self-reproach his presentation of characters superficial, and superficially refracting the evanescent vanities and heartless vices of Jacobean London, as if representative of actual and general life; his play of emotions feigned or sentimental; his violent contrasts, unnatural conversions, impossible revolutions of fortune; we discern the absence of subtle intuition, the failure to effect profound and lasting impression, the "lack of seriousness and of spiritual poise." We note, in the heroic-romantic dramas, improbability and extravagance; and, in the tragedies, such as _Valentinian_, a total disregard of the unity of interest,--just that muddling of motives of which the editor of _The Nation_ has written,--and therefore the failure to realize unity of effect. There has been no moral sequence: the suspense has been distracted by the variety of emotions stirred. After the hours of strain to which the spectator has imaginatively subjected himself, the relief--what Aristotle calls the catharsis--is not forthcoming: because the intellect has not been clarified but fuddled; the will has not been braced; the feelings appropriate to tragedy--of pity and of fear--have not enjoyed an unthwarted, undiverted outflow. The faculties have been tantalized by manifold, deceptive, agonies of thirst. They should have been centred in one yearning, conducted to one clear spring of medicament, and purged by waters of truth, justice, and sympathy. From Fletcher's _Valentinian_ and _Bonduca_ despite the poetry and the onrush of the dramatic action there proceeds no calm, "all passion spent"; no beauty that is peace. And of the tragicomedies, _The Loyall Subject_ and _A Wife for a Month_, this verdict may be even more readily pronounced.