VBEAUMONT AND FLETCHER

Thenames of Beaumont and Fletcher are as inseparably linked together as those of Castor and Pollux. They are the double stars of our poetical firmament, and their beams are so indissolubly mingled that it is in vain to attempt any division of them that shall assign to each his rightful share. So long as they worked in partnership, Jasper Mayne says truly that they are

“both so knitThat no man knows where to divide their wit,Much less their praise.”

“both so knit

That no man knows where to divide their wit,

Much less their praise.”

William Cartwright says ofFletcher:—

“That ’t was his happy fault to do too much;Who therefore wisely did submit each birthTo knowing Beaumont, ere it did come forth,And made him the sobriety of his wit.”

“That ’t was his happy fault to do too much;

Who therefore wisely did submit each birth

To knowing Beaumont, ere it did come forth,

And made him the sobriety of his wit.”

And Richard Brome also alludes to the copious ease of Fletcher, whom he hadknown:—

“Of Fletcher and his works I speak.His works! says Momus, nay, his plays you’d say!Thou hast said right, for that to him was playWhich was to others’ brains a toil.”

“Of Fletcher and his works I speak.

His works! says Momus, nay, his plays you’d say!

Thou hast said right, for that to him was play

Which was to others’ brains a toil.”

The general tradition seems to have been that Beaumont contributed the artistic judgment, and Fletcher the fine frenzy. There is commonly a grain of truth in traditions of this kind. In theplays written by the two poets conjointly, we may find an intellectual entertainment in assigning this passage to one and that to the other, but we can seldom say decisively “This is Beaumont’s,” or “That is Fletcher’s,” though we may find tolerably convincing arguments for it.

We have, it is true, some grounds on which we may safely form a conclusion as to the individual characteristics of Fletcher, because a majority of the plays which go under their joint names were written by him alone after Beaumont’s death. In these I find a higher and graver poetical quality, and I think a riper grain of sentiment, than in any of the others. In running my eye along the margin, I observe that by far the greater number of the isolated phrases I have marked, whether for poetical force or felicity, but especially for picturesqueness, and for weight of thought, belong to Fletcher. I should never suspect Beaumont’s hand in such verses as these from “Bonduca” (a play whollyFletcher’s):—

“Ten years of bitter nights and heavy marches,When many a frozen storm sung through my cuirass,And made it doubtful whether that or IWere the more stubborn metal.”

“Ten years of bitter nights and heavy marches,

When many a frozen storm sung through my cuirass,

And made it doubtful whether that or I

Were the more stubborn metal.”

Where I come upon a picturesque passage in the joint plays, I am apt to think it Fletcher’s: so too where there is a certain exhilaration and largeness of manner, and an ardor that charges its words with imagination as they go, or with an enthusiasm that comes very near it in its effect. Take this from the sameplay:—

“The gods of Rome fight for ye; loud fame calls ye,Pitched on the topless Apennine, and blowsTo all the underworld, all nations, seas,And unfrequented deserts where the snow dwells,Wakens the ruined monuments, and there,Where nothing but eternal death and sleep is,Informs again the dead bones with your virtues.”

“The gods of Rome fight for ye; loud fame calls ye,

Pitched on the topless Apennine, and blows

To all the underworld, all nations, seas,

And unfrequented deserts where the snow dwells,

Wakens the ruined monuments, and there,

Where nothing but eternal death and sleep is,

Informs again the dead bones with your virtues.”

In short, I am inclined to think Fletcher the more poet of the two. Where there is pathos or humor, I am in doubt whether it belongs to him or his partner, for I find these qualities both in the plays they wrote together and in those which are wholly his. In the expression of sentiment going far enough to excite a painless æsthetic sympathy, but stopping short of tragic passion, Beaumont is quite the equal of his friend. In the art of heightening and enriching such a sentiment by poetical associations and pictorial accessories, Fletcher seems to me the superior. Both, as I have said, have the art of being pathetic, and of conceiving pathetic situations; but neither of them had depth enough of character for that tragic pathos which is too terrible for tears; for those passionate convulsions when our human nature, like the sea in earthquake, is sucked away deep down from its habitual shores, leaving bare for a moment slimy beds stirring with loathsome life, and weedy tangles before undreamed of, and instantly hidden again under the rush of its reaction. Theirs are no sudden revelations, flashes out of the very tempest itself, and born of its own collisions; but much rather a melancholy Ovidian grace like that of the Heroic Epistles, conscious of itself, yetnot so conscious as to beget distrust and make us feel as if we had been cheated of our tenderness. If they ope the sacred source of sympathetic tears, it is not without due warning and ceremonious preparation. I do not mean to say that their sentiment is not real, because it is pensive and not passionate. It is real, but it is never heart-rending. I say it all in saying that their region is that of fancy. Fancy and imagination may be of one substance, as the northern lights and lightning are supposed to be; but the one plays and flickers in harmless flashes and streamers over the vault of the brain, the other condenses all its thought-executing fires into a single stab of flame. And so of their humor. It is playful, intellectual, elaborate, like that of Charles Lamb when he trifles with it, pleasing itself with artificial dislocations of thought, and never glancing at those essential incongruities in the nature of things at sight of which humor shakes its bells, and mocks that it may not shudder.

Their comedies are amusing, and one of them, “Wit without Money,” is excellent, with some scenes of joyous fun in it that are very cheering. The fourth scene of the third act is a masterpiece of fanciful extravagance. This is probably Fletcher’s. The Rev. W. Cartwright preferred Fletcher’s wit toShakespeare’s:—

“Shakespeare to thee was dull: whose best jest liesI’ th’ ladies’ questions and the fools’ replies.Nature was all his art; thy vein was freeAs his, but without his scurrility.”

“Shakespeare to thee was dull: whose best jest lies

I’ th’ ladies’ questions and the fools’ replies.

Nature was all his art; thy vein was free

As his, but without his scurrility.”

Posterity has taken leave to differ with the Rev. W. Cartwright. The conversations in Fletcher’s comedies are often lively, but the wit is generally a gentlemanlike banter; that is, what was gentlemanlike in that day. Real wit keeps; real humor is of the same nature in Aristophanes and Mark Twain; but nothing grows mouldy so soon as mere fun, the product of animal spirits. Fletcher had far more of this than of true humor. Both he and Beaumont were skilled in that pleasantry which in good society is the agreeable substitute for the more trenchant article. There is an instance of this in Miramont’s commendation of Greek in the “ElderBrother:”—

“Though I can speak no Greek, I love the sound on ’t;It goes so thundering as it conjured devils;Charles speaks it loftily, and, if thou wert a man,Or had’st but ever heard of Homer’s Iliads,Hesiod and the Greek poets, thou would’st run mad,And hang thyself for joy thou ’dst such a gentlemanTo be thy son. O, he has read such thingsTo me!”“And do you understand ’em, brother?”“I tell thee no; that ’s not material; the sound ’sSufficient to confirm an honest man.”

“Though I can speak no Greek, I love the sound on ’t;

It goes so thundering as it conjured devils;

Charles speaks it loftily, and, if thou wert a man,

Or had’st but ever heard of Homer’s Iliads,

Hesiod and the Greek poets, thou would’st run mad,

And hang thyself for joy thou ’dst such a gentleman

To be thy son. O, he has read such things

To me!”

“And do you understand ’em, brother?”“I tell thee no; that ’s not material; the sound ’sSufficient to confirm an honest man.”

“And do you understand ’em, brother?”

“I tell thee no; that ’s not material; the sound ’s

Sufficient to confirm an honest man.”

The speech of Lucio in the “Woman-hater” has a smack of Molière init:—

“Secretary, fetch the gown I used to read petitions in, and the standish I answer French letters with.”

Many of the comedies are impersonations of what were then called humors, like the “Little French Lawyer;” and some, like the “Knight of the Burning Pestle,” mere farces. Nearly all have the merit of being lively and amusing, which,to one who has read many comedies, is saying a great deal.

In what I said just now I did not mean that Fletcher does not sometimes show an almost tragic power, as he constantly does tragic sensibility. There are glimpses of it in “Thierry and Theodoret,” and in the death-scene of the little Hengo in “Bonduca.” Perhaps I should rather say that he can conceive a situation with some true elements of tragedy, though not of the deepest tragedy, in it; but when he comes to work it out, and make it visible to us in words, he seems to feel himself more at home with the pity than the terror of it. His pathos (and this is true of Beaumont also) is mixed with a sweetness that grows cloying. And it is always the author who is speaking, and whom we hear. At best he rises only to a simulated passion, and that leads inevitably to declamation. There is no pang in it, but rather the hazy softness of remembered sorrow. Lear on the heath, at parley with the elements, makes all our pettier griefs contemptible, and the sublime pathos of that scene abides with us almost like a consolation. It is not Shakespeare who speaks, but Sorrowherself:—

“I tax not you, you elements, with unkindness;I never gave you kingdom, called you children;You owe me no subscription: then let fallYour horrible pleasure; here I stand, your slave,A poor, infirm, weak, and despis’d old man:—But yet I call you servile ministers,That have with two pernicious daughters join’dYour high-engender’d battles ’gainst a headSo old and white as this.”

“I tax not you, you elements, with unkindness;

I never gave you kingdom, called you children;

You owe me no subscription: then let fall

Your horrible pleasure; here I stand, your slave,

A poor, infirm, weak, and despis’d old man:—

But yet I call you servile ministers,

That have with two pernicious daughters join’d

Your high-engender’d battles ’gainst a head

So old and white as this.”

What confidence of simplicity is this! We call it Greek, but it is nature, and cosmopolitan as she. That white head and Priam’s—the one feebly defiant, the other bent humbly over the murderous hand of Achilles—are our sufficing epitomes of desolate old age. There is no third. Generally pity for ourselves mingles insensibly with our pity for others, but here—what are we in the awful presence of these unexampled woes? The sorrows of Beaumont and Fletcher’s personages have almost as much charm as sadness in them, and we think of the poet more than of the sufferer. Yet his emotion is genuine, and we feel it to be so even while we feel also that it leaves his mind free to think about it, and the dainty expression he will give to it. Beaumont and Fletcher appeal to this self-pity of which I just spoke by having the air of saying, “How wouldyoufeel in a situation like this?” I am not now speaking of their poetical quality. That is constant and unfailing, especially in Fletcher. In judging them as poets, the question would be, notwhatthey said, buthowthey said it.

How early the two poets came to London is uncertain. They had already made Ben Jonson’s acquaintance in 1607. Their first joint play, “Philaster, or Love lies a-bleeding,” was produced in 1608. I suppose this play is more generally known than any other of theirs, and the characteristic passages have a charm that is perhaps never found less mixed with baser matter in any other of the plays which make up the collectionknown as the Works of Beaumont and Fletcher, and they bear the supreme test of being read over again many times without loss of freshness. Philaster is son and heir to a King of Sicily, but robbed of his rights by the King of Calabria. This King has a daughter, Arethusa, secretly in love with Philaster, as he with her, but destined by her father to marry Pharamond, a Spanish Prince. Euphrasia, daughter of Dion, an honest courtier, is also in love with Philaster, and has entered his service disguised as a page, under the name of Bellario. Arethusa makes her love known to Philaster, who, in order that they may have readier means of communicating with each other, transfers Bellario to her. Thyra, a very odious lady of the court, spreads a report that Arethusa and her handsome page have been too intimate. Philaster believes this slander, and this leads to many complications. Arethusa dismisses Bellario. Philaster refuses to take him back. They all meet in a convenient forest, where Philaster is about to kill Arethusa at her own earnest entreaty, when he is prevented by a clown who is passing. The King, finding his daughter wounded, is furious, and orders instant search for the assassin. Bellario insists that he is the criminal. He and Philaster are put under arrest; the Princess asks to be their jailer. The people rise in insurrection, and rescue him. It then turns out that he and Arethusa have been quietly married. Of course the play turns out with the discovery of Bellario’s sex and the King’s consent to everything.

I have said that it is hazardous to attempt dividing the work of Beaumont and Fletcher where they worked together. Both, of course, are to blame for what is the great blot on the play,—Philaster’s ready belief, I might well say eager belief, in the guilt of the Princess. One of his speeches is positively monstrous in infamous suggestion. Coleridge says: “Beaumont and Fletcher always write as if virtue or goodness were a sort of talisman or strange something that might be lost without the least fault on the part of the owner. In short, their chaste ladies value their chastity as a material thing, not as an act or state of being; and this mere thing being imaginary, no wonder that all their women are represented with the minds of strumpets, except a few irrational humorists.... Hence the frightful contrast between their women (even those who are meant to be virtuous) and Shakespeare’s.” There is some truth in this, but it is extravagant. Beaumont and Fletcher have drawn pure women. Both Bellario and Arethusa are so. So is Aspatia. They had coarse and even animal notions of women, it is true, but we must, in judging what they meant their women to be, never forget that coarseness of phrase is not always coarseness of thought. Women were allowed then to talk about things and to use words now forbidden outside the slums. Decency changes its terms, though not its nature, from one age to another. This is a partial excuse for Beaumont and Fletcher, but they sin against that decorum of the intellect and conscience which is the same in all ages. In“Women Pleased” Claudio disguises himself, and makes love to his married sister Isabella in order to test her chastity.

The question as to the authorship of “The Two Noble Kinsmen” has an interest perhaps even greater than that concerning the shares of Beaumont and Fletcher respectively in the plays they wrote together, because in this case a part is attributed to Shakespeare. “The Two Noble Kinsmen” was first published in 1634, and ascribed on the title-page to “the memorable worthies of their time, Mr. John F. and Mr. W. S.” That Fletcher’s name should have been put first is not surprising, if we remember his great popularity. He seems for a time to have been more fashionable than Shakespeare, especially with the young bloods fresh from the University and of the Inns of Court. They appear to have thought that he knew the world, in their limited understanding of the word, better than his great predecessor. The priority of name on the title-page, if not due to this, probably indicated that the greater part of the play was from the hand of Fletcher. Opinion has been divided, with a leaning on the part of the weightier judges towards giving a greater or less share to Shakespeare. I think the verdict must be the Scottish one of “not proven.” On the one hand, the play could not have been written earlier than 1608, and it seems extremely improbable that Shakespeare, then at the height of his fame, and in all the splendid maturity of his powers and of his mastery over them, should have become thejunior partner of a younger man. Nor can he be supposed to have made the work over and adapted it to the stage, for he appears to have abandoned that kind of work long before. But we cannot suppose the play to be so early as 1608, for the parts admitted on all hands to be Fletcher’s are in his maturer manner. Yet there are some passages which seem to be above his reach, and might lead us to suppose Fletcher to have deliberately imitated Shakespeare’s manner; but that he never does, though indebted to him for many suggestions. There is one speech in the play which is certainly very like Shakespeare’s in the way it grows, and beginning with a series of noble images, deepens into philosophic thought at the close. And yet I am not altogether convinced, for Fletcher could heighten his style when he thought fit, and when the subject fully inspired him.

Beaumont and Fletcher undoubtedly owed a part of their immediate renown to the fact that they were looked upon as gentlemen and scholars. Not that they put on airs of gentility, as their disciple Ford was fond of doing a little later, and as Horace Walpole, Byron, and even Landor did. They frankly gave their address in Grub Street, so far as we know. But they certainly seem to have been set up, as being artists and men of the world, not perhaps as rivals of Shakespeare, but in favorable comparison with one who was supposed to owe everything to nature. I believe that Pope, in the preface to his edition of Shakespeare, was the first to express doubts about the wisdomof accepting too literally what Ben Jonson says of his “little Latin and less Greek.” However that may be, and I am inclined to think Shakespeare had more learning even, not to say knowledge, than is commonly allowed him, it is singular that the man whose works show him to have meditated deeply on whatever interests human thought, should have been supposed never to have given his mind to the processes of his own craft. But this comparison of him with Beaumont and Fletcher suggests one remark of some interest, namely, that not only are his works by far more cleanly in thought and phrase than those of any of his important contemporaries, except Marlowe, not only are his men more manly and his women more womanly than theirs, but that his types also of gentlemen and ladies are altogether beyond any they seem to have been capable of conceiving.

Of the later dramatists, I think Beaumont and Fletcher rank next to Shakespeare in the amount of pleasure they give, though not in the quality of it, and in fanciful charm of expression. In spite of all their coarseness, there is a delicacy, a sensibility, an air of romance, and above all a grace, in their best work that make them forever attractive to the young, and to all those who have learned to grow old amiably. Imagination, as Shakespeare teaches us to know it, we can hardly allow them, but they are the absolute lords of some of the fairest provinces in the domain of fancy. Their poetry is genuine, spontaneous, and at first hand. As I turn over the leaves of anedition which I read forty-five years ago, and see, by the passages underscored, how much I enjoyed, and remember with whom, so many happy memories revive, so many vanished faces lean over the volume with me, that I am prone to suspect myself of yielding to an enchantment that is not in the book itself. But no, I read Beaumont and Fletcher through again last autumn, and the eleven volumes of Dyce’s edition show even more pencil marks than the two of Darley had gathered in repeated readings. The delight they give, the gayety they inspire, are all their own. Perhaps one cause of this is their lavishness, their lightsome ease, their happy confidence in resources that never failed them. Their minds work without that reluctant break which pains us in most of the later dramatists. They had that pleasure in writing which gives pleasure in reading, and deserve our gratitude because they promote cheerfulness, or, even when gravest, a pensive melancholy that, if it does not play with sadness, never takes it too seriously.

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