[1] His father John (d. 1460), the 6th baron, great chamberlain and
constable of England, was the first person advanced to the dignity of
a viscount in England.
BEAUMONT, CHRISTOPHE DE (1703-1781), French ecclesiastic and archbishop
of Paris, was a cadet of the Les Adrets and Saint-Quentin branch of the
illustrious Dauphine family of Beaumont. He became bishop of Bayonne in
1741, then archbishop of Vienne in 1743, and in 1746, at the age of
forty-three, archbishop of Paris. Beaumont is noted for his struggle
with the Jansenists. To force them to accept the bull _Unigenitus_ which
condemned their doctrines, he ordered the priests of his diocese to
refuse absolution to those who would not recognize the bull, and to deny
funeral rites to those who had confessed to a Jansenist priest. While
other bishops sent Beaumont their adhesion to his crusade, the parlement
of Paris threatened to confiscate his temporalities. The king forbade
the parlement to interfere in these spiritual questions, and upon its
proving obdurate it was exiled (September 18, 1753). The "royal
chamber," which was substituted, having failed to carry on the
administration of justice properly, the king was obliged to recall the
parlement, and the archbishop was sent into honourable exile (August
1754). An effort was made to induce him to resign the active duties of
his see to a coadjutor, but in spite of the most tempting
offers--including a cardinal's hat--he refused. On the contrary, to his
polemic against the Jansenists he added an attack on the _philosophes_,
and issued a formal mandatory letter condemning Rousseau's _Emile_.
Rousseau replied in his masterly _Lettre a M. de Beaumont_ (1762), in
which he insists that freedom of discussion in religious matters is
essentially more religious than the attempt to impose belief by force.
De Beaumont's _Mandements, lettres et instructions pastorales_ were
published in two volumes in 1780, the year before his death.
BEAUMONT, SIR JOHN (1583-1627), English poet, second son of the judge,
Sir Francis Beaumont, was born at Grace-Dieu in Leicestershire in 1583.
The deaths of his father (in 1598) and of his elder brother, Sir Henry
Beaumont (in 1605), made the poet early the head of this brilliant
family; the dramatist, Francis Beaumont, being a younger brother. John
went to Oxford in February 1597, and entered as a gentleman commoner in
Broadgates Hall, the present Pembroke College. He was admitted to the
Inner Temple in 1600, but on the death of Henry he no doubt went down to
Grace-Dieu to manage the family estates. He began to write verse early,
and in 1602, at the age of nineteen, he published anonymously his
_Metamorphosis of Tabacco_, written in very smooth couplets, in which he
addressed Drayton as his "loving friend." He lived in Leicestershire for
many years as a bachelor, being one "who never felt Love's dreadful
arrow." But in process of time he became a tardy victim, and married a
lady of the Fortescue family, who bore him four stout sons, the eldest
of whom, another John, was accounted one of the most athletic men of his
time. "He could leap 16 ft. at one leap, and would commonly, at a
stand-leap, jump over a high long table in the hall, light on a settle
beyond the table, and raise himself straight up." This magnificent young
man was not without literary taste; he edited his father's posthumous
poems, and wrote an enthusiastic elegy on him; he was killed in 1644 at
the siege of Gloucester. Another of Sir John Beaumont's sons, Gervaise,
died in childhood, and the incidents of his death are recorded in one of
his father's most touching poems. Sir John Beaumont concentrated his
powers on a poem in eight books, entitled _The Crown of Thorns_, which
was greatly admired in MS. by the earl of Southampton and others, but
which is lost. After long retirement, Beaumont was persuaded by the duke
of Buckingham to move in larger circles; he attended court and in 1626
was made a baronet. This honour he did not long survive, for he died on
the 19th of April 1627, and was buried in Westminster Abbey ten days
later. The new Sir John, the strong man, published in 1629 a volume
entitled _Bosworth Field; with a taste of the variety of other Poems
left by Sir John Beaumont_. No more "tastes" were ever vouchsafed, so
that it is by this volume and by the juvenile _Metamorphosis of Tobacco_
that Beaumont's reputation has to stand. Of late years, the
peculiarities of John Beaumont's prosody have drawn attention to his
work. He wrote the heroic couplet, which was his favourite measure, with
almost unprecedented evenness. Bosworth Field, the scene of the battle
of which Beaumont's principal poem gives a vaguely epical narrative, lay
close to the poet's house of Grace-Dieu. He writes on all occasions with
a smoothness which was very remarkable in the first quarter of the 17th
century, and which marks him, with Edmund Waller and George Sandys, as
one of the pioneers of the classic reformation of English verse.
The poems of Sir John Beaumont were included in A. Chalmers's _English
Poets_, vol. vi. (1810). An edition, with "memorial introduction" and
notes, was included (1869) in Dr A.B. Grosart's _Fuller Worthies'
Library_; and the _Metamorphosis of Tobacco_ was included in J.P.
Collier's _Illustrations of Early English Popular Literature_, vol. i.
(1863). (E. G.)
BEAUMONT and FLETCHER, English dramatists[1] The names of FRANCIS
BEAUMONT (1584-1616) and JOHN FLETCHER (1579-1625) are inseparably
connected in the history of the English drama. John Fletcher was born in
December 1579 at Rye in Sussex, and baptized on the 20th of the same
month. Richard Fletcher, his father, afterwards queen's chaplain, dean
of Peterborough, and bishop successively of Bristol, Worcester and
London, was then minister of the parish in which the son was born who
was to make their name immortal. That son was just turned of seven when
the dean distinguished and disgraced himself as the spiritual tormentor
of the last moments on earth of Mary Stuart. When not quite twelve he
was admitted pensioner of Bene't College, Cambridge, and two years later
was made one of the Bible-clerks: of this college Bishop Fletcher had
been president twenty years earlier, and six months before his son's
admission had received from its authorities a first letter of thanks for
various benefactions, to be followed next year by a second. Four years
later than this, when John Fletcher wanted five or six months of his
seventeenth year, the bishop died suddenly of over much tobacco and the
displeasure of Queen Elizabeth at his second marriage--this time, it
appears, with a lady of such character as figures something too
frequently on the stage of his illustrious son. He left eight children
by his first marriage in such distress that their uncle, Dr Giles
Fletcher, author of a treatise on the Russian commonwealth which is
still held in some repute, was obliged to draw up a petition to the
queen on their behalf, which was supported by the intercession of Essex,
but with what result is uncertain.
From this date we know nothing of the fortunes of John Fletcher, till
the needy orphan boy of seventeen reappears as the brilliant and
triumphant poet whose name is linked for all time with the yet more
glorious name of Francis Beaumont, third and youngest son of Sir Francis
Beaumont of Grace-Dieu, one of the justices of the common pleas--born,
according to general report, in 1586, but, according to more than one
apparently irrefragable document, actually born two years earlier. The
first record of his existence is the entry of his name, together with
those of his elder brothers Henry and John, as a gentleman-commoner of
Broadgates Hall, Oxford, now supplanted by Pembroke College. But most
lovers of his fame will care rather to remember the admirable lines of
Wordsworth on the "eager child" who played among the rocks and woodlands
of Grace-Dieu; though it may be doubted whether even the boy's first
verses were of the peaceful and pastoral character attributed to them by
the great laureate of the lakes. That passionate and fiery genius which
was so soon and for so short a time to "shake the buskined stage" with
heroic and tragic notes of passion and of sorrow, of scorn and rage, and
slighted love and jealousy, must surely have sought vent from the first
in fancies of a more ardent and ambitious kind; and it would be a
likelier conjecture that when Frank Beaumont (as we know on more
authorities than one that he was always called by his contemporaries,
even in the full flush of his adult fame--"never more than Frank," says
Heywood) went to college at the ripe age of twelve, he had already
committed a tragedy or two in emulation of _Tamburlaine_, _Andronicus_
or _Jeronymo_. The date of his admission was the 4th of February 1597;
on the 22nd of April of the following year his father died; and on the
3rd of November 1600, having left Oxford without taking his degree, the
boy of fifteen was entered a member of the Inner Temple, his two
brothers standing sponsors on the grave occasion. But the son of Judge
Beaumont was no fitter for success at the bar than the son of Bishop
Fletcher for distinction in the church: it is equally difficult to
imagine either poet invested with either gown. Two years later appeared
the poem of _Salmacis and Hermaphroditus_, generally attributed to
Beaumont, a voluptuous and voluminous expansion of the Ovidian legend,
not on the whole discreditable to a lad of eighteen, fresh from the
popular love-poems of Marlowe and Shakespeare, which it naturally
exceeds in long-winded and fantastic diffusion of episodes and conceits.
At twenty-three Beaumont prefixed to the magnificent masterpiece of Ben
Jonson some noticeable verses in honour of his "dear friend" the author;
and in the same year (1607) appeared the anonymous comedy of _The Woman
Hater_, usually assigned to Fletcher alone; but being as it is in the
main a crude and puerile imitation of Jonson's manner, and certainly
more like a man's work at twenty-two than at twenty-eight, internal
evidence would seem to justify, or at least to excuse those critics who
in the teeth of high authority and tradition would transfer from
Fletcher to Beaumont the principal responsibility for this first play
that can be traced to the hand of either. As Fletcher also prefixed to
the first edition of _Volpone_ a copy of commendatory verses, we may
presume that their common admiration for a common friend was among the
earliest and strongest influences which drew together the two great
poets whose names were thenceforward to be for ever indivisible. During
the dim eleven years between the death of his father and the dawn of his
fame, we cannot but imagine that the career of Fletcher had been
unprosperous as well as obscure. From seventeen to twenty-eight his
youth may presumably have been spent in such painful struggles for
success, if not for sustenance, as were never known to his younger
colleague, who, as we have seen, was entered at Oxford a few months
after Fletcher must in all likelihood have left Cambridge to try his
luck in London: a venture most probably resolved on as soon as the youth
had found his family reduced by the father's death to such ruinous
straits that any smoother course can hardly have been open to him.
Entering college at the same age as Fletcher had entered six years
earlier, Beaumont had before him a brighter and briefer line of life
than his elder. But whatever may have been their respective situations
when, either by happy chance or, as Dyce suggests, by the good offices
of Jonson, they were first brought together, their intimacy soon became
so much closer than that of ordinary brothers that the household which
they shared as bachelors was conducted on such thoroughly communistic
principles as might have satisfied the most trenchant theorist who ever
proclaimed as the cardinal point of his doctrine, a complete and
absolute community of bed and board, with all goods thereto
appertaining. But in the year following that in which the two younger
poets had united in homage to Jonson, they had entered into a
partnership of more importance than this in "the same clothes and cloak,
etc.," with other necessaries of life specified by Aubrey.
In 1608, if we may trust the reckoning which seems trust-worthiest, the
twin stars of our stage rose visibly together for the first time. The
loveliest, though not the loftiest, of tragic plays that we owe to the
comrades or the successors of Shakespeare, _Philaster_, has generally
been regarded as the first-born issue of their common genius. The noble
tragedy of _Thierry and Theodoret_ has sometimes been dated earlier and
assigned to Fletcher alone; but we can be sure neither of the early date
nor the single authorship. The main body of the play, comprising both
the great scenes which throw out into full and final relief the
character of either heroine for perfect good or evil, bears throughout
the unmistakable image and superscription of Fletcher; yet there are
parts which for gravity and steady strength of style, for reserve and
temperance of effect, would seem to suggest the collaboration of a
calmer and more patient hand; and these more equable and less passionate
parts of the poem recall rather the touch of Massinger than of Beaumont.
In the second act, for example, the regular structure of the verse, the
even scheme of the action, the exaggerated braggardism which makes of
the hero a mere puppet or mouthpiece of his own self-will, are all
qualities which, for better or for worse, remind us of the strength or
the weakness of a poet with whom we know that Fletcher, before or after
his alliance with Beaumont, did now and then work in common. Even the
Arbaces of Beaumont, though somewhat too highly coloured, does not
"write himself down an ass," like Thierry on his first entrance, after
the too frequent fashion of Massinger's braggarts and tyrants; does not
proclaim at starting or display with mere wantonness of exposure his
more unlovely qualities in the naked nature of their deformity. Compare
also the second with the first scene of the fourth act. In style and
metre this second scene is as good an example of Massinger as the first
is of Fletcher at his best. Observe especially in the elaborate
narrative of the pretended self-immolation of Ordella these distinctive
notes of the peculiar style of Massinger; the excess of parenthetic
sentences, no less than five in a space of twenty lines; the classical
common-place of allusion to Athens, Rome and Sparta in one superfluous
breath; the pure and vigorous but somewhat level and prosaic order of
language, with the use of certain cheap and easy phrases familiar to
Massinger as catchwords; the flat and feeble terminations by means of
which the final syllable of one verse runs on into the next without more
pause or rhythm than in a passage of prose; the general dignity and
gravity of sustained and measured expression. These are the very points
in which the style of Massinger differs from that of Fletcher; whose
lightest and loosest verses do not overlap each other without sensible
distinction between the end of one line and the beginning of the next;
who is often too fluent and facile to be choice or forcible in his
diction, but seldom if ever prosaic or conventional in phrase or
allusion, and by no means habitually given to weave thoughts within
thoughts, knit sentence into sentence, and hang whole paragraphs
together by the help of loops and brackets. From these indications we
might infer that this poem belongs altogether to a period later than the
death of Beaumont; though even during his friend's life it appears that
Fletcher was once at least allied with Massinger and two lesser
dramatists in the composition of a play, probably the _Honest Man's
Fortune_, of which the accounts are to be found in Henslowe's papers.
Hardly eight years of toil and triumph of joyous and glorious life were
spared by destiny to the younger poet between the date assigned to the
first radiant revelation of his genius in _Philaster_ and the date which
marks the end of all his labours. On the 6th of March 1616 Francis
Beaumont died--according to Jonson and tradition, "ere he was thirty
years of age," but this we have seen to be inconsistent with the
registry of his entrance at Oxford. If we may trust the elegiac evidence
of friends, he died of his own genius and fiery overwork of brain; yet
from the magnificent and masculine beauty of his portrait one should
certainly never have guessed that any strain of spirit or stress of
invention could have worn out so long before its time so fair and royal
a temple for so bright and affluent a soul. A student of physiognomy
will not fail to mark the points of likeness and of difference between
the faces of the two friends; both models of noble manhood, handsome and
significant in feature and expression alike;--Beaumont's the statelier
and serener of the two, with clear thoughtful eyes, full arched brows,
and strong aquiline nose, with a little cleft at the tip; a grave and
beautiful mouth, with full and finely curved lips; the form of face a
long pure oval, and the imperial head with its "fair large front" and
clustering hair set firm and carried high with an aspect at once of
quiet command and kingly observation: Fletcher's a more keen and fervid
face, sharper in outline every way, with an air of bright ardour and
glad fiery impatience; sanguine and nervous, suiting the complexion and
colour of hair; the expression of the eager eyes and lips almost
recalling that of a noble hound in act to break the leash it strains
at;--two heads as lordly of feature and as expressive of aspect as any
gallery of great men can show. That spring of 1616, we may note in
passing, was the darkest that ever dawned upon England or the world;
for, just forty-eight days afterwards, it witnessed, on the 23rd of
April, the removal from earth of the mightiest genius that ever dwelt
among men. Scarcely more than a month and a half divided the death-days
of Beaumont and of Shakespeare. Some three years earlier by Dyce's
estimate, when about the age of twenty-nine, Beaumont had married
Ursula, daughter and co-heiress to Henry Isley of Sundridge in Kent, by
whom he left two daughters, one of them posthumous. Fletcher survived
his friend just nine years and five months; he died "in the great
plague, 1625," and was buried on the 29th of August in St Saviour's,
Southwark; not, as we might have wished, beside his younger fellow in
fame, who but three days after his untimely death had added another
deathless memory to the graves of our great men in Westminster Abbey,
which he had sung in such noble verse. Dying when just four months short
of forty-six, Fletcher had thus, as well as we can now calculate,
altogether some fourteen years and six months more of life than the poet
who divides with him the imperial inheritance of their common glory.
The perfect union in genius and in friendship which has made one name of
the two names of these great twin brothers in song is a thing so
admirable and so delightful to remember, that it would seem ungracious
and unkindly to claim for either a precedence which we may be sure he
would have been eager to disclaim. But if a distinction must be made
between the Dioscuri of English poetry, we must admit that Beaumont was
the twin of heavenlier birth. Only as Pollux was on one side a demigod
of diviner blood than Castor can it be said that on any side Beaumont
was a poet of higher and purer genius than Fletcher; but so much must be
allowed by all who have eyes and ears to discern in the fabric of their
common work a distinction without a difference. Few things are stranger
than the avowal of so great and exquisite a critic as Coleridge, that he
could trace no faintest line of demarcation between the plays which we
owe mainly to Beaumont and the plays which we owe solely to Fletcher. To
others this line has always appeared in almost every case unmistakable.
Were it as hard and broad as the line which marks off, for example,
Shakespeare's part from Fletcher's in _The Two Noble Kinsmen_, the
harmony would of course be lost which now informs every work of their
common genius, and each play of their writing would be such another
piece of magnificent patchwork as that last gigantic heir of
Shakespeare's invention, the posthumous birth of his parting Muse which
was suckled at the breast of Fletcher's as a child of godlike blood
might be reared on the milk of a mortal mother--or in this case, we
might sometimes be tempted to say, of a she-goat who left in the veins
of the heaven-born suckling somewhat too much of his nurse Amalthaea.
That question however belongs in any case more properly to the study of
Shakespeare than to the present subject in hand. It may suffice here to
observe that the contributions of Fletcher to the majestic temple of
tragedy left incomplete by Shakespeare show the lesser workman almost
equally at his best and at him worst, at his weakest and at his
strongest. In the plays which we know by evidence surer than the most
trustworthy tradition to be the common work of Beaumont and Fletcher,
there is indeed no trace of such incongruous and incompatible admixture
as leaves the greatest example of romantic tragedy--for _Cymbeline_ and
the _Winter's Tale_, though not guiltless of blood, are in their issues
no more tragic than _Pericles_ or the _Tempest_--a unique instance of
glorious imperfection, a hybrid of heavenly aid other than heavenly
breed, disproportioned and divine. But throughout these noblest of the
works inscribed generally with the names of both dramatists we trace on
every other page the touch of a surer hand, we hear at every other turn
the note of a deeper voice, than we can ever recognize in the work of
Fletcher alone. Although the beloved friend of Jonson, and in the field
of comedy his loving and studious disciple, yet in that tragic field
where his freshest bays were gathered Beaumont was the worthiest and the
closest follower of Shakespeare. In the external but essential matter of
expression by rhythm and metre he approves himself always a student of
Shakespeare's second manner, of the style in which the graver or tragic
part of his historical or romantic plays is mostly written; doubtless,
the most perfect model that can be studied by any poet who, like
Beaumont, is great enough to be in no danger of sinking to the rank of a
mere copyist, but while studious of the perfection set before him is yet
conscious of his own personal and proper quality of genius, and enters
the presence of the master not as a servant but as a son. The general
style of his tragic or romantic verse is as simple and severe in its
purity of note and regularity of outline as that of Fletcher's is by
comparison lax, effusive, exuberant. The matchless fluency and rapidity
with which the elder brother pours forth the stream of his smooth swift
verse gave probably the first occasion for that foolish rumour which has
not yet fallen duly silent, but still murmurs here and there its
suggestion that the main office of Beaumont was to correct and contain
within bounds the overflowing invention of his colleague. The poet who
while yet a youth had earned by his unaided mastery of hand such a crown
as was bestowed by the noble love and the loving "envy" of Ben Jonson
was, according to this tradition, a mere precocious pedagogue, fit only
to revise and restrain the too liberal effusions of his elder in genius
as in years. Now, in every one of the plays common to both, the real
difficulty for a critic is not to trace the hand of Beaumont, but to
detect the touch of Fletcher. Throughout the better part of every such
play, and above all of their two masterpieces, _Philaster_ and _The
Maid's Tragedy_, it should be clear to the most sluggish or cursory of
readers that he has not to do with the author of _Valentinian_ and _The
Double Marriage_. In those admirable tragedies the style is looser, more
fluid, more feminine. From the first scene to the last we are swept as
it were along the race of a running river, always at full flow of light
and buoyant melody, with no dark reaches or perilous eddies, no stagnant
pools or sterile sandbanks; its bright course only varied by sudden
rapids or a stronger ripple here and there, but in rough places or
smooth still stirred and sparkling with summer wind and sun. But in
those tragic poems of which the dominant note is the note of Beaumont's
genius a subtler chord of thought is sounded, a deeper key of emotion is
touched, than ever was struck by Fletcher. The lighter genius is
palpably subordinate to the stronger, and loyally submits itself to the
impression of a loftier spirit. It is true that this distinction is
never grave enough to produce a discord: it is also true that the plays
in which the predominance of Beaumont's mind and style is generally
perceptible make up altogether but a small section of the work that
bears their names conjointly; but it is no less true that within this
section the most precious part of that work is comprised. Outside it we
shall find no figures so firmly drawn, no such clearness of outline, no
such cunning of hands as we recognize in the three great studies of
Bellario, Evadne and Aspatia. In his male characters, as for instance in
the parts of Philaster and Arbaces, Beaumont also is apt to show
something of that exaggeration or inconsistency for which his colleague
is perhaps more frequently and more heavily to blame; but in these there
is not a jarring note, not a touch misplaced; unless, indeed, a rigid
criticism may condemn as unfeminine and incongruous with the gentle
beauty of her pathetic patience the device by which Aspatia procures
herself the death desired at the hand of Amintor. This is noted as a
fault by Dyce; but may well be forgiven for the sake of the magnificent
scene which follows, and the highest tragic effect ever attained on the
stage of either poet. That this as well as the greater part of those
other scenes which are the glory of the poem is due to Beaumont might
readily be shown at length by the process of comparison. The noble scene
of regicide, which it was found expedient to cancel during the earlier
years of the Restoration, may indeed be the work of Fletcher; but the
part of Evadne must undoubtedly be in the main assigned to the more
potent hand of his fellow. There is a fine harmony of character between
her naked audacity in the second act and her fierce repentance in the
fourth, which is not unworthy a disciple of the tragic school of
Shakespeare; Fletcher is less observant of the due balance, less heedful
of the nice proportions of good and evil in a faulty and fiery nature,
compounded of perverse instinct and passionate reaction. From him we
might have had a figure as admirable for vigour of handling, but hardly
in such perfect keeping as this of Beaumont's Evadne, the
murderess-Magdalen, whose penitence is of one crimson colour with her
sin. Nor even in Fletcher's Ordella, worthy as the part is throughout
even of the precious and exquisite praise of Lamb, is there any such
cunning touch of tenderness or delicate perfume of pathos as in the
parts of Bellario and Aspatia. These have in them a bitter sweetness, a
subtle pungency of mortal sorrow and tears of divine delight, beyond the
reach of Fletcher. His highest studies of female character have dignity,
energy, devotion of the heroic type; but they never touch us to the
quick, never waken in us any finer and more profound sense than that of
applause and admiration. There is a modest pathos now and then in his
pictures of feminine submission and slighted or outraged love; but this
submission he is apt to make too servile, this love too dog-like in its
abject devotion to retain that tender reverence which so many
generations of readers have paid to the sweet memories of Aspatia and
Bellario. To excite compassion was enough for Fletcher as in the
masculine parts of his work it was enough for him to excite wonder, to
sustain curiosity, to goad and stimulate by any vivid and violent means
the interest of readers or spectators. The single instance of noble
pathos, the one scene he has left us which appeals to the higher and
purer kind of pity, is the death of the child Hengo in _Bonduca_--a
scene which of itself would have sufficed to enrol his name for ever on
the list of our great tragic poets. To him we may probably assign the
whole merit of that fiery and high-toned tragedy, with all its spirit
and splendour of national and martial passion; the conscious and
demonstrative exchange of courtesy between Roman and Briton, which is
one of the leading notes of the poem, has in it a touch of overstrained
and artificial chivalry characteristic of Fletcher; yet the parts of
Caratach and Poenius may be counted among the loftiest and most equal of
his creations. But no surer test or better example can be taken of the
distinctive quality which denotes the graver genius of either poet than
that supplied by a comparison of Beaumont's _Triumph of Love_ with
Fletcher's _Triumph of Death_. Each little play, in the brief course of
its single act, gives proof of the peculiar touch and special trick of
its author's hand: the deeper and more delicate passion of Beaumont, the
rapid and ardent activity of Fletcher, have nowhere found a more
noticeable vent for the expression respectively of the most tender and
profound simplicity of quiet sweetness, the most buoyant and impatient
energy of tragic emotion.
In the wider field of their comic or romantic drama it is yet easier to
distinguish the respective work of either hand. The bias of Fletcher was
towards mixed comedy; his lightest and wildest humour is usually crossed
or tempered by an infusion of romance; like Shakespeare in this one
point at least, he has left no single play without some touch on it of
serious interest, of poetic eloquence or fancy, however slight and
fugitive. Beaumont, evidently under the imperious influence of Ben
Jonson's more rigid theories, seems rather to have bent his genius with
the whole force of a resolute will into the form or mould prescribed for
comedy by the elder and greater comic poet. The admirable study of the
worthy citizen and his wife, who introduce to the stage and escort with
their applause _The Knight of the Burning Pestle_ through his
adventurous career to its untimely end, has all the force and fulness of
Jonson's humour at its best, with more of freshness and freedom. In pure
comedy, varied with broad farce and mock-heroic parody, Beaumont was the
earliest as well as the ablest disciple of the master whose mantle was
afterwards to be shared among the academic poets of a younger
generation, the Randolphs and Cartwrights who sought shelter under the
shadow of its voluminous folds. The best example of the school of Jonson
to be found outside the ample range of his own work is _The Scornful
Lady_, a comedy whose exceptional success and prolonged popularity must
have been due rather to the broad effect of its forcible situations, its
wealth and variety of ludicrous incidents, and the strong gross humour
of its dialogue, than to any finer quality of style, invention or
character. It is the only work of Beaumont and Fletcher which a critic
who weighs the meaning of his words can admit to be as coarse as the
coarsest work of Ben Jonson. They are prone, indeed, to indulge
elsewhere in a wanton and exuberant licence of talk; and Fletcher, at
least, is liable to confuse the shades of right and wrong, to deface or
efface the boundary lines of good and evil, to stain the ermine of
virtue and palliate the nakedness of vice with the same indecorous and
incongruous laxity of handling. Often in mere haste to despatch the
business of a play, to huddle up a catastrophe or throw out some
particular scene into sharp and immediate relief, he will sacrifice all
seemliness and consistency of character to the present aim of stage
effect, and the instant impression of strong incident or audacious
eloquence. His heroines are too apt to utter sentiments worthy of Diana
in language unworthy of Doll Tearsheet. But in this play both style and
sentiment are throughout on a lower level, the action and emotion are of
a baser kind than usual; the precept of Aristotle and the practice of
Jonson have been so carefully observed and exaggerated that it might
almost be said to offer us in one or two places an imitation not merely
of the sorrier but of the sorriest qualities of human nature; and full
as it is of spontaneous power and humorous invention, the comedy
extolled by the moral Steele (with just so much of reservation as
permits him to deprecate the ridicule cast upon the clerical character)
is certainly more offensive to artistic law and aesthetic judgment by
the general and ingrained coarseness of its tone, than the tragi-comedy
denounced by the immoral Dryden as exceeding in licence his own worst
work and that of his fellow playwrights; an imputation, be it said in
passing, as groundless as the protest pleaded on their behalf is
impudent; for though we may hardly agree with the uncompromising
panegyrist who commends that play in particular to the approval of "the
austere scarlet" (remembering, perhaps, that Aristophanes was the chosen
bedfellow of Chrysostom), there is at least no such offence against art
or taste in the eccentricity of its situations or the daring of its
dialogue. The buoyant and facile grace of Fletcher's style carries him
lightly across quagmires in which a heavier-footed poet, or one of
slower tread, would have stuck fast, and come forth bemired to the
knees. To Beaumont his stars had given as birthright the gifts of tragic
pathos and passion, of tender power and broad strong humour; to Fletcher
had been allotted a more fiery and fruitful force of invention, a more
aerial ease and swiftness of action, a more various readiness and
fulness of bright exuberant speech. The genius of Beaumont was deeper,
sweeter, nobler than his elder's; the genius of Fletcher more brilliant,
more supple, more prodigal, and more voluble than his friend's. Without
a taint or a shadow on his fame of such imitative servility as marks and
degrades the mere henchman or satellite of a stronger poet, Beaumont may
fairly be said to hold of Shakespeare in his tragedy, in his comedy of
Jonson; in each case rather as a kinsman than as a client, as an ally
than as a follower: but the more special province of Fletcher was a land
of his own discovering, where no later colonist has ever had power to
settle or to share his reign. With the mixed or romantic comedy of
Shakespeare it has nothing in common except the admixture or alternation
of graver with lighter interest, of serious with humorous action.
Nothing is here of his magic exaltation or charm of fairy empire. The
rare and rash adventures of Fletcher on that forbidden track are too
sure to end in pitiful and shameful failure. His crown of praise is to
have created a wholly new and wholly delightful form of mixed comedy or
dramatic romance, dealing merely with the humours and sentiments of men,
their passions and their chances; to have woven of all these a web of
emotion and event with such gay dexterity, to have blended his colours
and combined his effects with such exquisite facility and swift light
sureness of touch, that we may return once and again from those heights
and depths of poetry to which access was forbidden him, ready as ever to
enjoy as of old the fresh incomparable charm, the force and ease and
grace of life, which fill and animate the radiant world of his romantic
invention. Neither before him nor after do we find, in this his special
field of fancy and of work, more than shadows or echoes of his coming or
departing genius. Admirable as are his tragedies already mentioned, rich
in splendid eloquence and strong in large grasp of character as is the
Roman history of _The False One_, full of interest and vigour as is the
better part of _Rollo Duke of Normandy_, and sublime in the loveliness
of passion as is the one scene of perfect beauty and terror which crowns
this latter tragedy, Fletcher may claim a yet higher and more special
station among his great dramatic peers by right of his comic and
romantic than by right of his tragic and historic plays. Even in these
he is more a romantic than a tragic poet. The quality of his genius,
never sombre or subtle or profound, bears him always towards fresh air
and sunshine. His natural work is in a midday world of fearless boyish
laughter and hardly bitter tears. There is always more of rainbow than
of storm in his skies; their darkest shadow is but a tragic twilight.
What with him is the noon of night would seem as sunshine on the stage
of Ford or Webster. There is but one passage in all these noble plays
which lifts us beyond a sense of the stage, which raises our admiration
out of speech into silence, tempers and transfigures our emotion with a
touch of awe. And this we owe to the genius of Beaumont, exalted for an
instant to the very tone and manner of Shakespeare's tragedy, when
Amintor stands between the dead and the dying woman whom he has
unwittingly slain with hand and tongue. The first few lines that drop
from his stricken lips are probably the only verses of Beaumont or
Fletcher which might pass for Shakespeare's even with a good judge of
style--
"This earth of mine doth tremble," &c.
But in Fletcher's tragedy, however we may be thrilled and kindled with
high contagious excitement, we are never awed into dumb delight or
dread, never pierced with any sense of terror or pity too deep or even
deep enough for tears. Even his Brunhalts and Martias can hardly
persuade us to forget for the moment that "they do but jest, poison in
jest." A critic bitten with the love of classification might divide
those plays of Fletcher usually ranked together as comedies into three
kinds: the first he would class under the head of pure comedy, the next
of heroic or romantic drama, the third of mixed comedy and romance; in
this, the last and most delightful division of the poet's work the
special qualities of the two former kinds being equally blended and
delicately harmonized. The most perfect and triumphant examples of this
class are _The Spanish Curate, Monsieur Thomas, The Custom of the
Country_, and _The Elder Brother_. Next to these and not too far below
them, we may put _The Little French Lawyer_ (a play which in its broad
conception of a single eccentric humour suggests the collaboration of
Beaumont and the influence of Jonson, but in style and execution
throughout is perfect Fletcher), _The Humorous Lieutenant_ (on which an
almost identical verdict might be passed), _Women Pleased, Beggars'
Bush_, and perhaps we might add _The Fair Maid of the Inn_; in most if
not in all of which the balance of exultant and living humour with
serious poetic interest of a noble and various kind is held with even
hand and the skill of a natural master. In pure comedy _Rule a Wife and
have a Wife_ is the acknowledged and consummate masterpiece of Fletcher.
Next to it we might class, for comic spirit and force of character, _Wit
without Money, The Wildgoose Chase, The Chances_, and _The Noble
Gentleman_, a broad poetic farce to whose overflowing fun and masterdom
of extravagance no critic has ever done justice but Leigh Hunt, who has
ventured, not without reason, to match its joyous and preposterous
audacities of superlative and sovereign foolery with the more
sharp-edged satire and practical merriment of _King and No King_, where
the keen prosaic humour of Bessus and his swordsmen is as typical of the
comic style in which Beaumont had been trained up under Ben Jonson as
the high interest and graduated action of the serious part of the play
are characteristic of his more earnest genius. Among the purely romantic
plays of Fletcher, or those in which the comic effect is throughout
subordinate to the romantic, _The Knight of Malta_ seems most worthy of
the highest place for the noble beauty and exaltation of spirit which
informs it with a lofty life, for its chivalrous union of heroic passion
and Catholic devotion. This poem is the fairest and the first example of
those sweet fantastic paintings in rose-colour and azure of visionary
chivalry and ideal holiness, by dint of which the romance of more recent
days has sought to cast the glamour of a mirage over the darkest and
deadliest "ages of faith." The pure and fervent eloquence of the style
is in perfect keeping with the high romantic interest of character and
story. In the same class we may rank among the best samples of
Fletcher's workmanship _The Pilgrim, The Loyal Subject, A Wife for a
Month, Love's Pilgrimage_, and _The Lover's Progress_,--rich all of them
in exquisite writing, in varied incident, in brilliant effects and
graceful and passionate interludes. In _The Coxcomb_, and _The Honest
Man's Fortune_--two plays which, on the whole, can hardly be counted
among the best of their class--there are tones of homelier emotion,
touches of a simpler and more pathetic interest than usual; and here, as
in the two admirable first scenes between Leucippus and Bacha, which
relieve and redeem from contempt the tragic burlesque of _Cupid's
Revenge_, the note of Beaumont's manner is at once discernible.
Even the most rapid revision of the work done by these great twin poets
must impress every capable student with a sense of the homage due to
this living witness of their large and liberal genius. The loss of their
names from the roll of English poetry would be only less than the loss
of the few greatest inscribed on it. Nothing could supply the want of
their tragic, their comic or romantic drama; no larger or more fiery
planet can ever arise to supplant or to eclipse the twin lights of our
zodiac. Whatever their faults of shortcoming or excess, there is in
their very names or the mere thought of their common work a kind of
special and personal attraction for all true lovers of high dramatic
poetry. There is the glory and grace of youth in all they have left us;
if there be also somewhat too much of its graceless as well as its
gracious qualities, yet there hangs about their memory as it were a
music of the morning, a breath and savour of bright early manhood, a
joyous and vigorous air of free life and fruitful labour, which might
charm asleep for ever all thought or blame of all mortal infirmity or
folly, or any stain of earth that may have soiled in passing the feet of
creatures half human and half divine while yet they dwelt among men. For
good or for evil, they are above all things poets of youth; we cannot
conceive of them grown grey in the dignity of years, venerable with the
authority of long life, and weighted with the wisdom of experience. In
the Olympian circle of the gods and giants of our race who on earth were
their contemporaries and corrivals, they seem to move among the graver
presences and figures of sedater fame like the two spoilt boys of
heaven, lightest of foot and heart and head of all the brood of deity.
Shakespeare may have smiled as Jonson may have nodded approval of their
bright swift work, neither of these great elders grudging his praise to
the special charm which won for it a preference during one generation at
least even over their own loftier and weightier verse; and indeed the
advance in natural ease, in truth and grace of dialogue, is alike
manifest whether we turn to such of their comic characters as Valentine
and Don John, Rutilio and Monsieur Thomas, from the Truewit of Jonson or
even from the Mercutio of Shakespeare; the one too stiff with classic
starch, the other too full of mere verbal catches and forced conceits,
to persuade us that either can in any age have fairly represented the
light free talk and facile humour of its youth. In another field than
this Beaumont and Fletcher hold as high and secure a station of their
own as any poet of their race. In perfect workmanship of lyrical
jewellery, in perfect bloom and flower of song-writing, they equal all
compeers whom they do not excel; the blossoms of their growth in this
kind may be matched for colour and fragrance against Shakespeare's, and
for morning freshness and natural purity of form exceed the finest
grafts of Jonson. _The Faithful Shepherdess_ alone might speak for
Fletcher on this score, being as it is simply a lyric poem in
semi-dramatic shape, to be judged only as such, and as such almost
faultless; but in no wise to be classed for praise or blame among the
acting plays of its author, whose one serious error in the matter was
the submission of his Dryad to the critical verdict of an audience too
probably in great part composed of clowns and satyrs far unlike the
loving and sweet-tongued sylvan of his lovely fancy. And whether we
assign to him or to Beaumont the divine song of melancholy (_moestius
lacrymis Simonideis_), perfect in form as Catullus and profound in
sentiment as Shelley, which Milton himself could but echo and expand,
could not heighten or deepen its exquisite intensity of thought and word
alike, there will remain witness enough for the younger brother of a
lyric power as pure and rare as his elder's.
The excess of influence and popularity over that of other poets usually
ascribed to the work of Beaumont and Fletcher for some half century or
so after their own time has perhaps been somewhat overstated by
tradition. Whatever may have been for a season the fashion of the stage,
it is certain that Shakespeare can show two editions for one against
them in folio; four in all from 1623 to 1685, while they have but their
two of 1647 and 1679. Nor does one see how it can accurately or even
plausibly be said that they were in any exact sense the founders of a
school either in comedy or in tragedy. Massinger, for some years their
survivor, and in some points akin to them as a workman, cannot properly
be counted as their disciple; and no leading poet of the time had so
much in common with them as he. At first sight, indeed, his choice of
romantic subject and treatment of foreign stories, gathered from the
fertile tale-tellers of the south, and ranging in date from Boccaccio to
Cervantes, may seem to mark him out as a member of the same school; but
the deepest and most distinctive qualities of his genius set it far
apart from theirs; though undoubtedly not so far that any discrepancy or
discord should impair the excellence or injure the keeping of works in
which he took part with Fletcher. Yet, placed beside theirs, the tone of
his thought and speech seems by comparison severe as well as sober, and
sad as well as severe. Their extravagant and boyish insanity of
prostrate royalism is not more alien from his half pensive and half
angry undertone of political protest than his usually careful and
complete structure of story from their frequently lax and slovenly
incoherence of character or plot, than his well composed and
proportioned metre from their lighter and looser melodies, than the
bitter insistence and elaborate acrimony of his judicial satire on
hypocrisy or oppression from the gaiety or facility of mood which
suffers them in the shifting of a scene to redeem their worst characters
by some juggler's trick of conversion at the last moment allowed them to
wind up a play with universal reconciliation and an act of oblivion on
all hands. They could hardly have drawn with such steady skill and
explicit finish an Overreach or a Luke; but the strenuous and able work
of Massinger at its highest point of success has no breath in it of
their brighter and more immediate inspiration. Shirley, on the other
hand, may certainly be classed as a pupil who copied their style in
water-colour; his best tragedy and his best comedy, _The Traitor_ and
_The Lady of Pleasure_, might pass muster undetected among the plays of
Fletcher, and might fairly claim to take rank above the lowest class of
these. In the finest work of Middleton we recognize an almost exact
reproduction of Fletcher's metrical effects,--a reverberation of that
flowing music, a reiteration of those feminine final notes. In his later
tragi-comedies, throughout his masterpiece of _Women beware Women_, and
in the noble scenes which make up the tragic or serious parts of _The
Changeling_ or _The Spanish Gipsy_,--wherever, in a word, we find the
admirable but unequal genius of this poet at its best--we find a
likeness wholly wanting in his earlier and ruder work, which undoubtedly
suggests the influence of Fletcher. Other instances of imitation, other
examples of discipleship, might perhaps be found among lesser men of the
next generation; but the mass of succeeding playwrights began in a very
short time to lower the style and debase the scheme of dramatic poetry;
and especially to loosen the last ties of harmony, to deface the very
form and feature of tragic verse. In Shirley, the last and least of
those in whom the lineal blood of the old masters was yet discernible,
we find side by side with the fine ancestral indications of legitimate
descent exactly such marks of decadence rather than degeneracy as we
might have anticipated in the latest heir of a long line which began
with the rise of Marlowe, "sun of the morning," in the highest heaven of
our song, to prepare a pathway for the sun. After Shakespeare there was
yet room for Beaumont and Fletcher; but after these and the other
constellations had set, whose lights filled up the measure of that
diviner zodiac through which he moved, there was but room in heaven for
the pallid moonrise of Shirley; and before this last reflex from a
sunken sun was itself eclipsed, the glory had passed away from English
drama, to alight upon that summit of epic song, whence Milton held
communion with darkness and the stars. (A. C. S.)