FOOTNOTES:

FOOTNOTES:[157]In the King's speech, 89-121.[158]For particulars, see Chapter XXV, § 7, below.[159]As given in theCamb. Engl. Classics.[160]G. C. Macaulay,Francis Beaumont, p. 45.[161]Act I, Sc. 1,Camb. Engl. Classics, II, p. 286.[162]CraneMS.(1625).[163]Cambridge, II, p. 290.[164]Ibid., p. 292.[165]Ibid., p. 323.[166]Ibid., p. 346.[167]Loyall Subject, III, 1, end.[168]Hum. Lieut., Cambridge, II, p. 290.[169]John in II, 3,Camb., IV, p. 202.[170]I, 3,Camb., III, p. 84.[171]Camb., III, p. 170.[172]Ibid., p. 172.[173]Engl. Studien, XIV, 65.[174]Variorum, B. and F., Vol. II, 1905.[175]Variorum, B. and F., Vol. II, 1905.[176]New York, Nov. 14, 1912.

[157]In the King's speech, 89-121.

[158]For particulars, see Chapter XXV, § 7, below.

[159]As given in theCamb. Engl. Classics.

[160]G. C. Macaulay,Francis Beaumont, p. 45.

[161]Act I, Sc. 1,Camb. Engl. Classics, II, p. 286.

[162]CraneMS.(1625).

[163]Cambridge, II, p. 290.

[164]Ibid., p. 292.

[165]Ibid., p. 323.

[166]Ibid., p. 346.

[167]Loyall Subject, III, 1, end.

[168]Hum. Lieut., Cambridge, II, p. 290.

[169]John in II, 3,Camb., IV, p. 202.

[170]I, 3,Camb., III, p. 84.

[171]Camb., III, p. 170.

[172]Ibid., p. 172.

[173]Engl. Studien, XIV, 65.

[174]Variorum, B. and F., Vol. II, 1905.

[175]Variorum, B. and F., Vol. II, 1905.

[176]New York, Nov. 14, 1912.

FLETCHER'S MENTAL HABIT

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 comedyThe Faithfull Shepheardessemight 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 Shepheardessestrikes 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 oroutlook when he is purveying for the public. His tragedies, for instanceValentinianandBonduca(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 asA 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.

Like the tragicomic plays, Fletcher's lighter comediesThe Chances,The Mad Lover,The Wild-Goose Chase,Women Pleased, escape a moral catastrophe by walking round the issue. The heroes are amorous gallants, irresponsible adventurers, adroit scapegraces, devil-may-care rapier-tongued egoists and opportunists. The heroines are "not made for cloisters"; when they are not already as conscienceless as the heroes in performance or desire, they are airy lasses, resourceful in love, seeming-virtuous but suspiciously well-informed of the tarnished side of the shield,—always witty. Fletchercanportray the innocence and constancy of woman; but he rarely takes the pains. "To be as many creatures as a woman" is for him a comfortable jibe. The charm of romantic character and subtly thickening complication did not much attract him.

He sets over in contrast the violent, insane, tragic, or pathetic with the ludicrous or grotesque; he indulges a careless, loose-jointed, adventitious humour. That he could, on occasion, avail himself of the laughter of burlesque is abundantly proved by the utterances of his Valentine inWit Without Money, the devices of the inimitable Maria inThe Tamer Tamed, and of theHumorous Lieutenant. But for that comic irony of issues by which the wilful or pretentious or deluded,—foes or fools of convention and born prey of ridicule,—are satisfactorily readjusted to society, he prefers to substitute hilarity, ribaldry, the clash of wits, the battledore and shuttlecock of trick, intrigue, of shifting group and kaleidoscopic situation. The idiosyncrasies of the crowd delight him; but the more actual,the more boisterous and bestial. His populace feeds upon "opinions, errors, dreams."

His facile verse and limpid dialogue flash with fancy. The gaiety of gilded youth ripples down the page; but the more clever, the more irrelevant the swirling jest,—and, to say the least, the more indelicate. Life is a bagatelle; its most strenuous interest—love; and love is volatile as it is sudden. The attitude of sex toward sex is as obvious to the level-headed animal, who is cynic in brain and hedonist in blood, as its significance is supreme: it is that of the man-or-woman hunt; the outcome, a jocosity, more or less,—whether of fornication or cuckoldry, or of tame, old-fashioned, matrimonial monochrome.

These characteristics of the Fletcherian habit mark all the author's independent plays fromThe Faithfull Shepheardesseof 1607 or 1608 toRule a Wifeof 1624. The man himself, I think, was better than the dramaturgic artist catering to the public market. For his personal, nay noble, ideals, let the reader turn to the poem appended toThe Honest Mans Fortune, and judge. The characteristics sketched above are of the maker of a mimic world. Since I have elsewhere discussed them in full,[177]and the marvellous success that the dramaturge achieved in Shakespeare's Globe, this brief enumeration must suffice. Fletcher's mental habit affords an additional criterion for the determination of authorship in the unquestioned Beaumont-Fletcher plays, and in the analysis of plays in which the collaboration of the poets has been conjectured but not so fully attested.

FOOTNOTES:[177]The Fellows and Followers of Shakespeare(Part Two) inRepresentative English Comedies, Vol. III.

[177]The Fellows and Followers of Shakespeare(Part Two) inRepresentative English Comedies, Vol. III.

BEAUMONT'S DICTION

From a consideration of Beaumont's work in his poems, in hisMaskeandWoman-Hater, and such portions of the three unquestioned Beaumont-Fletcher plays as are marked by his idiosyncrasies of versification, we may arrive at conclusions concerning his diction, rhetorical and poetic.

1. Rhetorical Peculiarities in General.

Beaumont's frequent use in prose of the enclitics 'do' and 'did' has been observed by students of his style. The same peculiarity marks his verse, and occasionally enables the reader to determine the authorship of passages where the metrical tests are inconclusive. His rhetoric is sometimes of the repetitive order, but, as Oliphant has indicated, rather for ends of word-play and irony than for mere expansion as with Fletcher. Such, for instance, is the ironical repetition of a speaker's words by his interlocutor. I note also a tendency to purely dramatic quotation, not common in Fletcher's writing,—e. g., inThe Woman-Hater: "Lisping cry 'Good Sir!' and he's thine own"; or "Every one that does not know, cries 'What nobleman is that?'"—and inA King and No King"That hand was never wont to draw a sword, Butit cried 'Dead' to something." This test alone, if we had not others of rhetoric and metre, would go far to deciding the respective contributions of our authors to the personality of Captain Bessus in the latter play. The Bessus of the first three acts, undoubtedly Beaumont's, is resonant with such cries and conversational citations; the Bessus of the last two, in a rôle almost as extensive, uses the device but once. Beaumont sometimes indulges in enumerative sentences; but the enumerations are generally in prose and (it will be recalled that he was a member of the Inner Temple) of a mock-legal character, not mere redundancies of detail such as we find in Fletcher. Among other peculiarities of expression is his frequent employment of 'ha' as an interrogative interjection.

2. Stock Words, Phrases, and Figures.

Beaumont is especially fond of the following words and phrasal variations:—The 'basilisk' with his 'deaddoing eye,' 'venom,' 'infect,' 'infection' and 'infectious,' 'corrupt,' 'leprosy,' 'vild,' 'crosses' (for 'misfortunes'), 'crossed' and 'crossly matched,' 'perplex,' 'distracted,' 'starts' (for 'surprises' and 'fitful changes'), 'miseries,' 'griefs,' 'garlands,' 'cut,' 'shoot,' 'dissemble,' 'loathed,' 'salve' (as noun and verb), 'acquaint' and 'acquaintance,' to 'article,' 'pull,' 'piece,' 'frail' and 'frailty,' 'mortal' and 'mortality,' 'fate' and 'destiny,' to 'blot' from earth or memory, 'after-ages,' 'instruments' (for 'servants'). Of his repeated use of 'hills,' 'caves,' 'mines,' 'seas,' 'thunder,' 'beast,' 'bull,' we shallhave further exemplification when we consider his figures of speech.

He is forever playing phrasal variations upon the words 'piece,' and 'little.' The former is a mannerism of the day, already availed of by Shakespeare inLear, 'O ruined piece of nature,' and frequently inAntony and Cleopatra, and later repeated in theTempestandWinter's Tale. So with Beaumont, Arethusa is a 'poor piece of earth'; 'every maid in love will have a piece' of Philaster; Oriana is a 'precious piece of sly damnation,' 'that pleasing piece of frailty we call woman.' Or the word is used literally for 'limb':—'I'll love those pieces you have cut away.'—Beaumont, I may say in passing, delights in cutting bodies 'into motes,' and sending 'limbs through the land.'—'Little' he affects, making it pathetic and even more diminutive in conjunction with 'that': Euphrasia would 'keep that little piece I hold of life.' 'It is my fate,' proclaims Amintor,

To bear and bow beneath a thousand griefsTo keep that little credit with the world;

and so, 'that little passion,' 'that little training,' 'these little wounds,'ad libitum. Somewhat akin is the poet's use of 'kind': 'a kind of love in her to me'; 'a kind of healthful joy.' His heroines good and bad are given to introspection: they have 'acquaintance' with themselves. 'After you were gone,' says Bellario, 'I grew acquainted with my heart'; and Bacha inCupid's Revengein a scene undoubtedly of Beaumont's verse 'loathes' herself and is 'becomeanother woman; one, methinks, with whom I want acquaintance.'

While Beaumont makes occasional use of simile, his figures of poetry, or tropes, are generally of the more creative kind,—metaphor, personification, metonymy,—and these are very often heightened into that figure of logical artifice known as hyperbole. His comparisons deal in a striking degree with elemental phenomena: hills, caves, stones, rocks, seas, winds, flames, thunder, cold, ice, snow; or they are reminiscential of country life. In each play some hero declaims of 'the only difference betwixt man and beast, my reason'; and inevitably enlarges upon the 'nature unconfined' of beasts, and illustrates by custom and passion of ram, goat, heifer, or bull—especially bull. When the bull of the pasture does not suffice, the bull of Phalaris charges in. But Beaumont prefers nature: his images are sweet with April and violets and dew and morning-light, or fields of standing corn 'moved with a stiff gale'—their heads bowing 'all one way.' From the manufacture of books he borrows two metaphors, 'printing' and 'blotting,' and plies them with effective variety: Philaster 'prints' wounds upon Bellario; Bellario 'printed' her 'thoughts in lawn'; Amintor will 'print a thousand wounds' upon Evadne's flesh; and Nature wronged Panthea 'To print continual conquest on her cheeks And make no man worthy for her to take.' With similar frequency recur 'blotted from earth,' 'blotted from memory,' 'this third kiss blots it out.'

The younger poet personifies abstractions as frequently as Fletcher, but in a more poetic way. Hevitalizes grief and guilt and memory with figurative verbs—'shoot,' 'grow,' 'cut.' 'I feel a grief shoot suddenly through all my veins' cries Amintor; and again 'Thine eyes shoot guilt into me.' 'I feel a sin growing upon my blood' shudders Arbaces. Philaster will 'cut off falsehood while it springs'; Amintor welcomes the hand that should 'cut' him from his sorrows; and Evadne confesses that her sin is 'tougher than the hand of Time can cut from man's remembrance.' Similar metaphorical constructions abound, such as 'pluck me back from my entrance into mirth,' in one of Leucippus' speeches in Beaumont's part ofCupid's Revenge; and in a speech of Melantius 'I did a deed that plucked five years from time' inThe Maides Tragedy. Personified grief and sorrow are frequently in the plural with Beaumont:—'Nothing but a multitude of walking griefs.' It is a mistake to suppose, as some do, that passages written in Beaumont's metrical style are not by him if they abound in personification. Hunger, black Despair, Pride, Wantonness, figure in his verse inThe Woman-Hater; Chance, Death, and Fortune inThe Knight; Death, Victory, and Friendship, inThe Maides Tragedy; Destiny, Falsehood, Mortality, Nature inPhilaster; and so on.

No dramatist since the day of Kyd and Marlowe has more frequent or violent resort to hyperbole. His heroes call on 'seas to quench the fires' they 'feel,' and 'snows to quench their rising flames'; they will 'drink off seas' and 'yet have unquenched fires left' in their breasts; they 'wade through seas of sins'; they 'set hills on hills' and 'scale them all, andfrom the utmost top fall' on the necks of foes, 'like thunder from a cloud'; or they 'discourse to all the underworld the worth' of those they love. 'From his iron den' they'll 'waken Death, and hurl him' on lascivious kings. Arethusa's heart is 'mines of adamant to all the world beside,' but to her lover 'a lasting mine of joy'; her breath 'sweet as Arabian winds when fruits are ripe'; her breasts 'two liquid ivory balls.' Evadne will sooner 'find out the beds of snakes,' and 'with her youthful blood warm their cold flesh 'than accede to Amintor's desires. 'The least word' that Panthea speaks 'is worth a life.' 'The child, this present hour brought forth to see the world, has not a soul more pure' than Oriana's. In one of Beaumont's verse-scenes ofThe Coxcombe, Ricardo, reinstated in his Viola's esteem, would have some woman 'take an everlasting pen' into her hand, 'and grave in paper more lasting than the marble monuments' the matchless virtues of women to posterities. And as for Bellario's worth to Philaster,—

'T is not the treasure of all Kings in one,The wealth of Tagus, nor the rocks of pearlThat pave the court of Neptune, can weigh downThat virtue.

Echoes not of Kyd and Marlowe only, but of Shakespeare fromRomeotoHamletandMacbeth, reverberate in the magniloquent hyperbole of Beaumont.

Beaumont has more ejaculations than Fletcher, but fewer optatives. He is chary of rhetorical questions, and his exclamations run by preference into some figuredhyperbole. He appeals less frequently than Fletcher to 'all the gods,' but very often to 'the gods,' 'good gods,' 'ye gods,' 'some god.' He refers, in conformity with his deterministic view of life, with particular preference to the 'just gods,' the 'powers that must be just,' the 'powers above,' 'ye better powers,' 'Heaven and the powers divine,' 'you heavenly powers,' the 'powers that rule us'; and all these he uses in attestation. An oath distinctive of him is 'By my vexed soul!' In his hyperboles, Hell and devils play their part; but not in oath so frequently as with Fletcher.

3. Lines of Inevitable Poetry.

Similarly noticeable is Beaumont's faculty for 'simple poetic phrasing.' The elevated passion, the sudden glory,—and the large utterance of brief sentence and single verse, have been remarked by critics from his contemporary, John Earle, who wrote in commendation:

Such strength, such sweetness couched in every line,Such life of fancy, such high choice of brain,

down to G. C. Macaulay, Herford, and Alden of the present day. No reader, even the most cursory, can fail to be impressed by the completeness of that one line (in his lament for Elizabeth Sidney),

Sorrow can make a verse without a Muse,—

by the 'unassuming beauty' of Viola's loneliness (in his subplot ofThe Coxcombe),

All things have cast me from 'em but the earth.The evening comes, and every little flowerDroops now as well as I;—

by the sublimity of those few words to the repentant lover,

All the forgiveness I can make you is to love you;—

by the superb simplicity of Bellario's scorn of life, inPhilaster,

'T is but a piece of childhood thrown away,

and the finality of her definition of death (which, as if in premonition of his too sudden fate, is characteristic of Beaumont),—

'T is less than to be born; a lasting sleep;A quiet resting from all jealousy,A thing we all pursue; I know, besides,It is but giving over of a gameThat must be lost;—

by the pathetic irony of Aspatia's farewell to love inThe Maides Tragedy,

So with my prayers I leave you, and must trySome yet-unpractis'd way to grieve and die;

and the heroism (inCupid's Revenge, the final scene, undoubtedly of Beaumont's verse) of Urania's confession to Leucippus,

I would not let you know till I was dying;For you could not love me, my mother was so naught;

by Panthea's cry of horror, inA King and No King,

I feel a sin growing upon my blood;

and by those flashes of incomparable verity that intensify the gloom ofThe Maides Tragedy: Amintor's

Those have most power to hurt us, that we love;We lay our sleeping lives within their arms;

and after Evadne's death,

My soul grows weary of her house, and IAll over am a trouble to myself;—

by the wounded Aspatia's

I shall sure live, Amintor, I am well;A kind of healthful joy wanders within me;

and her parting whisper,

Give me thy hand; mine eyes grope up and down,And cannot find thee.

This is Nature sobbing into verse: the unadorned poetry of the human heartbreak. Where other than in Shakespeare do we find among the Jacobean poets such verse?

That a style of this kind should be rich in apothegm is not surprising. Instances rare in wisdom and phrasal conciseness are to be encountered on every other page of Beaumont.

It may, in short, be said of this dramatist's rhetorical and poetic diction, that, while the vocabulary may not be more varied, it is more intimate, musical, and reverberant than Fletcher's; that the periods, thoughsometimes appropriately syncopated and parenthetically broken, as in dramatic conversation, are, in rhapsodical and descriptive passages, both complex and balanced of structure,—pregnant of ideas labouring for expression rather than enumerative; that they echo Shakespeare's grandeur of phrase, with its involution, crowding of illustration and fresh insistent thought, in a degree utterly foreign to the rhetoric of Fletcher; and that his brief sentences are marked by a direct and final resplendence and simplicity.

In the larger movements of composition the purely poetic quality predominates over the narrative, dramatic or conversational. This characteristic is especially noticeable in declamatory speeches and soliloquies; sometimes idyllic as in Philaster's description of Bellario,—"I found him sitting by a fountain's side,"—or in the well-known "Oh that I had been nourished in these woods with milk of goats and acorns"; often operatic, as in Aspatia's farewells to Amintor and to love; always lyrical, imaginatively surcharged. Beaumont's figures of rhetoric when not hyperbolic, are picturesquely natural; his poetic tropes are creative, vitalizing. His speakers are self-revelatory: expressive of temperament, emotion, reflection. Their utterances are frequently descriptive, picturesquely loitering, rather than, by way of dialogue, framed to further the action alone. And yet, when they will, their conversation is spontaneous, fragmentary, and abrupt, intensifying the dramatic situation; not simply, as with Fletcher, by giving opportunity for stage-business, but by differencing the motive that underlies the action.

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 inPhilasterexpresses 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 charactersWas 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 darenot 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 ofThe Maides Tragedy,—

In that sacred word'The King,' there lies a terror: what frail manDares lift his hand against it? Let the godsSpeak to him when they please; till when let usSuffer and wait.

And again, to the monarch who has wronged him,

There isDivinity about you, that strikes deadMy rising passions; as you are my KingI fall before you, and present my swordTo 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 kingsUnlooked-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 ofA King and No Kingcries:

"Accursèd man!Thou bought'st thy reason at too dear a rate,For thou hast all thy actions bounded inWith curious rules, when every beast is free."

And, in the moment of jealousy, Philaster laments,

Oh, that, like beasts, we could not grieve ourselvesWith 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 wickednessIt 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 ofCupid'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 theCoxcombe, 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 inA 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.

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 ofPhilaster, 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 familyOr 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 everythingWhich love could never know; but we fond womenHarbour the easiest and the smoothest thoughts,And think all shall go so. It is unjustThat men and women should be match'd together.

His Viola of theCoxcombecontinues the contention:

Woman, they say, was only made of manMethinks 'tis strange they should be so unlike;It may be, all the best was cut awayTo make the woman, and the naught was leftBehind 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 penanceTo 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, isTo love you: which I will do, and desireNothing 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 isAn 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 ofThe Woman-Hatercan aver:

The child this present hour brought forthTo 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 fromPhilaster, 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 deathYet 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 liveIn after-ages crossed in their desires,Shall bless thy memory.

Ricardo of theCoxcombewould have some woman 'grave in paper' their 'matchless virtues to posterities.' Even the mock-romantic Jasper in theKnight(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 fromPhilaster:

You gods, I see that who unrighteouslyHolds wealth or state from others shall be cursedIn that which meaner men are blest withal:Ages to come shall know no male of himLeft to inherit, and his name shall beBlotted from earth; if he have any childIt 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 inCupid's Revenge, "May all ages,"—

That shall succeed curse you as I do! andIf 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.'

FOOTNOTES:[178]Elegy on the Countess of Rutland.[179]I cannot understand how so careful a scholar as Professor Schelling (Engl. Lit. during Lifetime of Shakesp., 207) can attribute to him, from the hopelessly uncritical collection of Blaiklock, the poem entitledThe Indifferent, and argue therefrom his "cynicism" concerning the constancy of woman.

[178]Elegy on the Countess of Rutland.

[179]I cannot understand how so careful a scholar as Professor Schelling (Engl. Lit. during Lifetime of Shakesp., 207) can attribute to him, from the hopelessly uncritical collection of Blaiklock, the poem entitledThe Indifferent, and argue therefrom his "cynicism" concerning the constancy of woman.

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 theFoure 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 DeathandThe Triumph of Time, are, according to the verse tests, undoubtedly Fletcher's and have been assigned to him by all critics.The Triumph of Deathis studded with alliterations and with repetitions of the effective word:

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