CHAPTER XXII
BEAUMONT'S MENTAL HABIT
From passages in the indubitable metrical manner and rhetorical style of Beaumont we pass to a still further test by which to determine his share in doubtful passages – I mean his stock of ideas. Critics have long been familiar with the determinism of his philosophy of life. His Arethusa in Philaster expresses it in a nutshell:
If destiny (to whom we dare not say,
Why didst thou this?) have not decreed it so,
In lasting leaves (whose smallest characters
Was never altered yet), this match shall break. —
We are ignorant of the 'crosses of our births.' Nature 'loves not to be questioned, why she did this or that, but has her ends, and knows she does well.' "But thou," cries the poet, —
But thou hadst, ere thou knew'st the use of tears,
Sorrow laid up against thou cam'st to years.
'Tis the gods, 'the gods, that make us so.' They would not have their 'dooms withstood, whose holy wisdoms make our passions the way unto their justice.' And 'out of justice we must challenge nothing.' The gods reward, the gods punish: 'I am a man and dare not quarrel with divinity … and you shall see me bear my crosses like a man.' It is the 'will of Heaven'; 'a decreed instant cuts off every life, for which to mourn is to repine.'178
Similarly familiar is Beaumont's recurrent doctrine of the divinity of kings. "In that sacred word," says his Amintor of The Maides Tragedy, —
In that sacred word
'The King,' there lies a terror: what frail man
Dares lift his hand against it? Let the gods
Speak to him when they please; till when let us
Suffer and wait.
And again, to the monarch who has wronged him,
There is
Divinity about you, that strikes dead
My rising passions; as you are my King
I fall before you, and present my sword
To cut mine own flesh, if it be your will.
Of 'the breath of kings' Beaumont's fancy constructs ever new terrors: it is 'like the breath of gods'; it may blow men 'about the world.' But when a king is guilty, though he may boast that his breath 'can still the winds, uncloud the sun, charm down the swelling floods, and stop the floods of heaven,' some honest man is always to be found to say 'No; nor' can thy 'breath smell sweet itself if once the lungs be but corrupted.' Though the gods place kings 'above the rest, to be served, flattered, and adored,' kings may not 'article with the gods' —
On lustful kings
Unlooked-for sudden deaths from Heaven are sent;
But curs'd is he that is their instrument.
Of 'this most perfect creature, this image of his Maker, well-squared man' Beaumont philosophizes much. Again and again he reminds us that 'the only difference betwixt man and beast is reason.' In the moment of guilty passion his Arbaces of A King and No King cries:
"Accursèd man!
Thou bought'st thy reason at too dear a rate,
For thou hast all thy actions bounded in
With curious rules, when every beast is free."
And, in the moment of jealousy, Philaster laments,
Oh, that, like beasts, we could not grieve ourselves
With that we see not!
Beaumont knows of no natural felicity or liberty more to be envied than that of the beast; and of no opprobrium more vile than that which likens man to lustful beast, or 'worse than savage beast.'
He is impressed with the frailty of mankind and the brevity of life: 'Frail man' and 'transitory man' fell readily from his lips who was to die so young. He emphasizes the objective quality of evil: "Good gods, tempt not a frail man!" prays Philaster; and Arbaces struggling against temptation: "What art thou, that dost creep into my breast; And dar'st not see my face?" Once temptation has taken root, it grows insidiously: Panthea "feels a sin growing upon her blood"; and Arbaces moralizes
There is a method in man's wickedness
It grows up by degrees.
It is natural, therefore, that Beaumont should frequently fall back upon 'conscience' and its 'sensibility.' And upon the efficacy of repentance. So Leucippus in Beaumont's portion of Cupid's Revenge, prays the gods to hold him back, – "Lest I add sins to sins, till no repentance will cure me." Arbaces finds repentance. Evadne knows that it is 'the best sacrifice.'
From this consciousness of uneasy greatness and frail mortality the poet seeks refuge in descriptions of pastoral life. His pictures of idyllic beauty and simplicity are too well-known to warrant repetition here: Bellario weaving garlands by the fountain's side; Philaster's rhapsody in the woods; Valerio's "Come, pretty soul, we now are near our home" to Viola in the Coxcombe, and Viola's "what true contented happiness dwells here, More than in cities!" The same conception marks as Beaumont's the shrewdly humorous conversation in prose between the citizens' wives in A King and No King, beginning —
Lord, how fine the fields be! What sweet living 'tis in the country! —
Ay, poor souls, God help 'em, they live as contentedly as one of us.
Through the fourth act of Philaster, and wherever else Beaumont portrays the countryside or country men and women, there blows the fresh breeze of the Charnwood forest in his native Leicestershire.
But his most poetic themes are of the friendship of man for man, and of the 'whiteness' of women's innocence, the unselfishness of their love, their forgivingness, and the reverence due from men who so little understand them. "And were you not my King," protests the blunt Mardonius to his hasty lord, "I should have chose you out to love above the rest." "I have not one friend in the court but thou," says Prince Leucippus; and his devoted follower can only stammer "You know I love you but too well." In that fine summing up of Melantius to Amintor, one seems to hear Beaumont himself:
The name of friend is more than family
Or all the world besides.
With woman's purity his darkest pages are starred. She is 'innocent as morning light,' 'more innocent than sleep,' 'as white as Innocence herself.' 'Armed with innocence' a tender spotless maid 'may walk safe among beasts.' Her 'prayers are pure,' and she is 'fair and virtuous still to ages.'179 His fairest heroines are philosophers of 'the truth of maids and perjuries of men.' "All the men I meet are harsh and rude," says Aspatia,
And have a subtilty in everything
Which love could never know; but we fond women
Harbour the easiest and the smoothest thoughts,
And think all shall go so. It is unjust
That men and women should be match'd together.
His Viola of the Coxcombe continues the contention:
Woman, they say, was only made of man
Methinks 'tis strange they should be so unlike;
It may be, all the best was cut away
To make the woman, and the naught was left
Behind with him.
And the philosophy of Beaumont's love-lorn maidens she sums up in her conclusion:
Scholars affirm the world's upheld by love;
But I believe women maintain all this,
For there's no love in men.
Deserted by her lover, she finds 'how valiant and how 'fraid at once, Love makes a virgin'; and, sought again by him repentant, she epitomizes the hearts of all Bellarios, Arethusas, Pantheas, Uranias:
I will set no penance
To gain the great forgiveness you desire,
But to come hither, and take me and it …
For God's sake, urge your faults no more, but mend!
All the forgiveness I can make you, is
To love you: which I will do, and desire
Nothing but love again; which if I have not,
Yet I will love you still.
All man can do in return for such long-suffering mercy is to revere: "How rude are all men that take the name of civil to ourselves" murmurs the reformed Ricardo; and then —
I do kneel because it is
An action very fit and reverent,
In presence of so pure a creature.
So kneels Arbaces; and so, in spirit, Philaster and Amintor.
Prayer is for Beaumont a very present aid. Of his women especially the 'vows' and 'oblations' are a poetic incense continually ascending. And closely akin to the prayerful innocence of tender maids is the pathos of their 'childhood thrown away.' Even his whimsical Oriana of The Woman-Hater can aver:
The child this present hour brought forth
To see the world has not a soul more pure,
More white, more virgin that I have.
The bitterest experiences of humanity are sprung from misapprehension, – "They have most power to hurt us that we love," – or from jealousy, slander, unwarranted violence, unmerited pain. And for these the only solace is in death. About this truth Beaumont weaves a shroud of unsullied beauty, a poetry that has rarely been surpassed. In nearly all that he has left us the thought recurs; but nowhere better expressed than in those lines, already quoted in full from Philaster, where Bellario "knows what 'tis to die … a lasting sleep; a quiet resting from all jealousy." His Arethusa repeats the theme; but with a wistful incertitude:
I shall have peace in death
Yet tell me this: there will be no slanders,
No jealousy in the other world; no ill there?
"No," replies her unjustly suspicious lover. – And she: – "Show me, then, the way!" No kinder mercy to the tempted, misconceived heir of mortality has been vouchsafed than to 'suffer him to find his quiet grave in peace.' So think Panthea and Arbaces; and so his Urania and Leucippus find. And so the poet closes that rare elegy to his belovèd Countess of Rutland:
I will not hurt the peace which she should have,
By longer looking in her quiet grave.
But still more powerful in its blessing than 'sleep' and the 'peace' of the 'quiet grave,' and more fearful in its bane than the penalties of hell, – one reality persists – the award of 'after-ages.' Bellario would not reveal what she has learned, to make her life 'last ages.' Philaster's highest praise for Arethusa is "Thou art fair and virtuous still to ages." "Kill me," says Amintor to Evadne, —
Kill me; all true lovers, that shall live
In after-ages crossed in their desires,
Shall bless thy memory.
Ricardo of the Coxcombe would have some woman 'grave in paper' their 'matchless virtues to posterities.' Even the mock-romantic Jasper in the Knight (which I am sure is all Beaumont) will try his sweetheart's love 'that the world and memory may sing to after-times her constancy.' As to evil, it meets its punishment both in heredity and in the verdict of generations yet to come. "I see," soliloquizes the usurping King in a passage already quoted from Philaster:
You gods, I see that who unrighteously
Holds wealth or state from others shall be cursed
In that which meaner men are blest withal:
Ages to come shall know no male of him
Left to inherit, and his name shall be
Blotted from earth; if he have any child
It shall be crossly matched.
"Show me the way," cries Arbaces to his supposed mother, and thinking of heredity, "to the inheritance I have by thee, which is a spacious world Of impious acts." And Amintor warns Evadne: "Let it not rise up for thy shame and mine To after-ages… We will adopt us sons; The virtue shall inherit and not blood." "May all ages," prays the lascivious Bacha in Cupid's Revenge, "May all ages," —
That shall succeed curse you as I do! and
If it be possible, I ask it, Heaven,
That your base issues may be ever monstrous,
That must for shame of nature and succession,
Be drowned like dogs!
So, passim, in Beaumont – 'lasting to ages in the memory of this damnèd act'; 'a great example of their justice to all ensuing ages.'
CHAPTER XXIII
THE AUTHORSHIP OF THREE DISPUTED PLAYS
With the tests which have thus been described we are equipped for an examination of the plays written before 1616, which have, in these latter days, been with some show of evidence regarded as the joint-production of the "two wits and friends."180 While attempting to separate the composition of one author from that of the other, we may determine the dramatic peculiarities of each during the course of the partnership, and obtain a fairly definite basis for an historical and literary appreciation of the plays, individually considered.
1. – Of the Foure Playes, or Morall Representations, in One (first published as by Beaumont and Fletcher in the folio of 1647, but without indication of first performance or of acting company), the last two, The Triumph of Death and The Triumph of Time, are, according to the verse tests, undoubtedly Fletcher's and have been assigned to him by all critics. The Triumph of Death is studded with alliterations and with repetitions of the effective word:
Oh I could curse
And crucify myself for childish doting
Upon a face that feeds not with fresh figures
Every fresh hour;
and with triplets:
What new body
And new face must I make me, with new manners;
and with the resonant "all":
Make her all thy heaven,
And all thy joy, for she is all thy happiness;
and with Fletcher's favourite words and his nouns in apposition, rhetorical questions, afterthoughts, verbal enumerations, and turgid exposition. The same may be said of The Triumph of Time. As there is less of the redundant epithet than in The Faithfull Shepheardesse (1609), but more than in Philaster (before July 12, 1610), I am of the opinion that Fletcher's contribution to the Triumphs falls chronologically between those plays. As Fletcher matures he prunes his adjectives.
The rest of these Morall Representations display neither the verse nor the rhetoric of Fletcher. On the basis of verse-tests Boyle assigns them to Beaumont. Macaulay says, "probably," – and adds the Induction. But Oliphant, taking into consideration also the rhetorical and dramatic qualities, gives the Induction and The Triumph of Honour to a third author, Nathaniel Field, and only The Triumph of Love to Beaumont. As to the Induction and The Triumph of Honour I agree with Oliphant. They are full of polysyllabic Latinisms such as Field uses in his Woman is a Weather-cocke (entered for publication November 23, 1611) and Beaumont never uses: 'to participate affairs,' 'torturous engine,' etc.; and they are marked by simpler Fieldian expressions 'wale,' 'gyv'd,' 'blown man,' 'miskill,' 'vane,' 'lubbers,' 'urned,' and a score of others not found anywhere in Beaumont's undoubted writings. A few words, like 'basilisk' and 'loathed' suggest Beaumont, as does the verse; but this may be explained by vogue or imitation. Field was two or three years younger than Beaumont, and had played as a boy actor in one or more of the early Beaumont and Fletcher productions. His Woman is a Weather-cocke and his Amends for Ladies indicate the influence of Beaumont in matters of comic invention, poetic hyperbole, burlesque and pathos, as well as in metrical style. The Honour is a somewhat bombastic, puerile, magic-show written in manifest imitation of Beaumont's verse and rhetoric.
As to The Triumph of Love, I go further than Oliphant. I assign at least half of it, viz., scenes 1, 2, and 6, on the basis of diction, to Field. In scenes 3, 4, and 5, I find some trace of Beaumont's favourite expressions, of his thoughts of destiny and death and woman's tenderness, his poetic spontaneity, his sensational dramatic surprises; but I think these are an echo. The rural scene lacks his exquisite simplicity; and some of the words are not of his vocabulary. One is sorry to strike from the list of Beaumont's creations the pathetic and almost impressive figure of Violante. If it was originally Beaumont's, it is of his earlier work revamped by Field; if it is Field's, it is an echo simulating the voice, but missing the reality, of Beaumont's Aspatia, Bellario, Urania. This criticism holds true of both the Triumphs, Love and Honour.
The commonly accepted date, 1608, for the composition of the Foure Playes in One is derived from Fleay, who mistakenly quotes a reference in the 1619 quarto of The Yorkshire Tragedy to the Foure Playes as if it were of the 1608 quarto where the reference does not appear.181 While Fletcher may have written the first draft of his contribution before the middle of 1610, it is evident from Field's Address To the Reader in the first quarto of the Woman is a Weather-cocke (entered S. R., November 23, 1611), that Field's contribution was made after November 23, 1611. In that Address he makes it plain that this is his first dramatic effort: "I have been vexed with vile plays myself a great while, hearing many; now I thought to be even with some, and they should hear mine too." We have already noticed182 that Field had not written even his Weather-cocke, still less anything in collaboration with Fletcher, at the time of the publication of The Faithfull Shepheardesse (between January and July, 1609); for in his complimentary poem for the quarto of that "Pastorall," Field acknowledges his unknown name and his Muse in swaddling clouts, and timidly confesses his ambition to write something like The Shepheardesse, "including a Morallitie, Sweete and profitable." That Field's contribution to the Foure Playes was not made before the date of the first performance of The Weather-cocke by the Revels' Children at Whitefriars, i. e., January 4, 1610 to Christmas 1610-11 (when its presentation before the King at Whitehall probably took place), further appears from his dedication To Any Woman that hath been no Weather-cocke (quarto, 1611) in which he alludes not to The Triumph of Honour, or of Love, but to Amends for Ladies, as his "next play," then on the stocks, and, he thought, soon to be printed.183 The evidence, external and internal, amply presented by Oliphant, Thorndike, and others, but with a view to conclusions different from mine as to date and authorship, confirms me in the belief that Fletcher's Time and Death, though written at least two years earlier, were not gathered up with Field's Induction, Honour, and Love, into the Foure Playes in One until about 1612; and that the series was performed at Whitefriars by Field's company of the Queen's Revels' Children, shortly after they had first acted Cupid's Revenge at the same theatre.
2. – Of the remaining ten plays in which, according to the historical evidence adduced by various critics, Beaumont could have collaborated, at least two furnish no material that can be of service for the estimation of his qualities. If Love's Cure was written as early as the date of certain references in the story, viz., 1605-1609, it is so overlaid by later alteration that whether, as the textual experts guess, it be Beaumont's revised by Massinger, or Fletcher's revised by Massinger and others, or Massinger and Middleton's, or Beaumont's with the assistance of Fletcher and revised by Massinger, Beaumont for us is indeterminate. Fleay, Oliphant, and others trace him in a few prose scenes, and in two or three of verse.184 But where the rhetorical and dramatic manner occasionally suggest him, or the metre has somewhat of his stamp, words abound that I find in no work of his undisputed composition. The servant, Lazarillo, like him of Beaumont's Woman-Hater, is a glutton, but he does not speak Beaumont's language. The scenes ascribed to Beaumont reek with an excremental and sexual vulgarity to which Beaumont never condescended, unless for brief space, and when absolutely necessary for characterization. And there is little, indeed, that bespeaks Fletcher. Love's Cure was first attributed to Beaumont and Fletcher at a "reviving of the play" after they were both dead; and it was not printed till 1647. It is not unlikely, as G. C. Macaulay holds, that the play was written by Massinger, in or after 1622.
3. – As to that comedy of prostitution, with occasional essays on the special charms of cuckoldry, The Captaine (acted in 1613, maybe as early as 1611, and by the King's Company) there is no convincing external proof of Beaumont's authorship. It is, on the contrary, assigned to Fletcher by one of his younger contemporaries, Hills, whose attributions of such authorship are frequently correct; and its accent throughout is more clearly that of Fletcher than of any other dramatist. The critics are agreed that it is not wholly his, however; and G. C. Macaulay in especial conjectures the presence of Massinger. The verse and prose of a few scenes185 do not preclude the possibility of Beaumont's coöperation; but I find in them no vestige of his faith in sweet innocence; and in only one, – the awful episode (IV, 5), in which the Father seeks his wanton daughter in a house of shame and would kill her, – his imaginative elevation or his dramatic creativity.