Francis Beaumont: Dramatist / A Portrait, with Some Account of His Circle, Elizabethan and Jacobean, / And of His Association with John Fletcher

by Charles Mills Gayley

CHAPTER XXII

BEAUMONT'S MENTAL HABIT

From passages in the indubitable metrical manner and rhetorical style of Beaumont we pass to a still further test by which to determine his share in doubtful passages—I mean his stock of ideas. Critics have long been familiar with the determinism of his philosophy of life. His Arethusa in Philaster expresses it in a nutshell:

If destiny (to whom we dare not say,
Why didst thou this?) have not decreed it so,
In lasting leaves (whose smallest characters
Was never altered yet), this match shall break.—

We are ignorant of the 'crosses of our births.' Nature 'loves not to be questioned, why she did this or that, but has her ends, and knows she does well.' "But thou," cries the poet,—

But thou hadst, ere thou knew'st the use of tears,
Sorrow laid up against thou cam'st to years.

'Tis the gods, 'the gods, that make us so.' They would not have their 'dooms withstood, whose holy wisdoms make our passions the way unto their justice.' And 'out of justice we must challenge nothing.' The gods reward, the gods punish: 'I am a man and dare not quarrel with divinity ... and you shall see me bear my crosses like a man.' It is the 'will of Heaven'; 'a decreed instant cuts off every life, for which to mourn is to repine.'[178]

Similarly familiar is Beaumont's recurrent doctrine of the divinity of kings. "In that sacred word," says his Amintor of The Maides Tragedy,—

In that sacred word
'The King,' there lies a terror: what frail man
Dares lift his hand against it? Let the gods
Speak to him when they please; till when let us
Suffer and wait.

And again, to the monarch who has wronged him,

There is
Divinity about you, that strikes dead
My rising passions; as you are my King
I fall before you, and present my sword
To cut mine own flesh, if it be your will.

Of 'the breath of kings' Beaumont's fancy constructs ever new terrors: it is 'like the breath of gods'; it may blow men 'about the world.' But when a king is guilty, though he may boast that his breath 'can still the winds, uncloud the sun, charm down the swelling floods, and stop the floods of heaven,' some honest man is always to be found to say 'No; nor' can thy 'breath smell sweet itself if once the lungs be but corrupted.' Though the gods place kings 'above the rest, to be served, flattered, and adored,' kings may not 'article with the gods'—

On lustful kings
Unlooked-for sudden deaths from Heaven are sent;
But curs'd is he that is their instrument.

Of 'this most perfect creature, this image of his Maker, well-squared man' Beaumont philosophizes much. Again and again he reminds us that 'the only difference betwixt man and beast is reason.' In the moment of guilty passion his Arbaces of A King and No King cries:

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

And, in the moment of jealousy, Philaster laments,

Oh, that, like beasts, we could not grieve ourselves
With that we see not!

Beaumont knows of no natural felicity or liberty more to be envied than that of the beast; and of no opprobrium more vile than that which likens man to lustful beast, or 'worse than savage beast.'

He is impressed with the frailty of mankind and the brevity of life: 'Frail man' and 'transitory man' fell readily from his lips who was to die so young. He emphasizes the objective quality of evil: "Good gods, tempt not a frail man!" prays Philaster; and Arbaces struggling against temptation: "What art thou, that dost creep into my breast; And dar'st not see my face?" Once temptation has taken root, it grows insidiously: Panthea "feels a sin growing upon her blood"; and Arbaces moralizes

There is a method in man's wickedness
It grows up by degrees.

It is natural, therefore, that Beaumont should frequently fall back upon 'conscience' and its 'sensibility.' And upon the efficacy of repentance. So Leucippus in Beaumont's portion of Cupid's Revenge, prays the gods to hold him back,—"Lest I add sins to sins, till no repentance will cure me." Arbaces finds repentance. Evadne knows that it is 'the best sacrifice.'

From this consciousness of uneasy greatness and frail mortality the poet seeks refuge in descriptions of pastoral life. His pictures of idyllic beauty and simplicity are too well-known to warrant repetition here: Bellario weaving garlands by the fountain's side; Philaster's rhapsody in the woods; Valerio's "Come, pretty soul, we now are near our home" to Viola in the Coxcombe, and Viola's "what true contented happiness dwells here, More than in cities!" The same conception marks as Beaumont's the shrewdly humorous conversation in prose between the citizens' wives in A King and No King, beginning—

Lord, how fine the fields be! What sweet living 'tis in the country!—

Ay, poor souls, God help 'em, they live as contentedly as one of us.

Through the fourth act of Philaster, and wherever else Beaumont portrays the countryside or country men and women, there blows the fresh breeze of the Charnwood forest in his native Leicestershire.

But his most poetic themes are of the friendship of man for man, and of the 'whiteness' of women's innocence, the unselfishness of their love, their forgivingness, and the reverence due from men who so little understand them. "And were you not my King," protests the blunt Mardonius to his hasty lord, "I should have chose you out to love above the rest." "I have not one friend in the court but thou," says Prince Leucippus; and his devoted follower can only stammer "You know I love you but too well." In that fine summing up of Melantius to Amintor, one seems to hear Beaumont himself:

The name of friend is more than family
Or all the world besides.

With woman's purity his darkest pages are starred. She is 'innocent as morning light,' 'more innocent than sleep,' 'as white as Innocence herself.' 'Armed with innocence' a tender spotless maid 'may walk safe among beasts.' Her 'prayers are pure,' and she is 'fair and virtuous still to ages.'[179] His fairest heroines are philosophers of 'the truth of maids and perjuries of men.' "All the men I meet are harsh and rude," says Aspatia,

And have a subtilty in everything
Which love could never know; but we fond women
Harbour the easiest and the smoothest thoughts,
And think all shall go so. It is unjust
That men and women should be match'd together.

His Viola of the Coxcombe continues the contention:

Woman, they say, was only made of man
Methinks 'tis strange they should be so unlike;
It may be, all the best was cut away
To make the woman, and the naught was left
Behind with him.

And the philosophy of Beaumont's love-lorn maidens she sums up in her conclusion:

Scholars affirm the world's upheld by love;
But I believe women maintain all this,
For there's no love in men.

Deserted by her lover, she finds 'how valiant and how 'fraid at once, Love makes a virgin'; and, sought again by him repentant, she epitomizes the hearts of all Bellarios, Arethusas, Pantheas, Uranias:

I will set no penance
To gain the great forgiveness you desire,
But to come hither, and take me and it ...
For God's sake, urge your faults no more, but mend!
All the forgiveness I can make you, is
To love you: which I will do, and desire
Nothing but love again; which if I have not,
Yet I will love you still.

All man can do in return for such long-suffering mercy is to revere: "How rude are all men that take the name of civil to ourselves" murmurs the reformed Ricardo; and then—

I do kneel because it is
An action very fit and reverent,
In presence of so pure a creature.

So kneels Arbaces; and so, in spirit, Philaster and Amintor.

Prayer is for Beaumont a very present aid. Of his women especially the 'vows' and 'oblations' are a poetic incense continually ascending. And closely akin to the prayerful innocence of tender maids is the pathos of their 'childhood thrown away.' Even his whimsical Oriana of The Woman-Hater can aver:

The child this present hour brought forth
To see the world has not a soul more pure,
More white, more virgin that I have.

The bitterest experiences of humanity are sprung from misapprehension,—"They have most power to hurt us that we love,"—or from jealousy, slander, unwarranted violence, unmerited pain. And for these the only solace is in death. About this truth Beaumont weaves a shroud of unsullied beauty, a poetry that has rarely been surpassed. In nearly all that he has left us the thought recurs; but nowhere better expressed than in those lines, already quoted in full from Philaster, where Bellario "knows what 'tis to die ... a lasting sleep; a quiet resting from all jealousy." His Arethusa repeats the theme; but with a wistful incertitude:

I shall have peace in death
Yet tell me this: there will be no slanders,
No jealousy in the other world; no ill there?

"No," replies her unjustly suspicious lover.—And she:—"Show me, then, the way!" No kinder mercy to the tempted, misconceived heir of mortality has been vouchsafed than to 'suffer him to find his quiet grave in peace.' So think Panthea and Arbaces; and so his Urania and Leucippus find. And so the poet closes that rare elegy to his belovèd Countess of Rutland:

I will not hurt the peace which she should have,
By longer looking in her quiet grave.

But still more powerful in its blessing than 'sleep' and the 'peace' of the 'quiet grave,' and more fearful in its bane than the penalties of hell,—one reality persists—the award of 'after-ages.' Bellario would not reveal what she has learned, to make her life 'last ages.' Philaster's highest praise for Arethusa is "Thou art fair and virtuous still to ages." "Kill me," says Amintor to Evadne,—

Kill me; all true lovers, that shall live
In after-ages crossed in their desires,
Shall bless thy memory.

Ricardo of the Coxcombe would have some woman 'grave in paper' their 'matchless virtues to posterities.' Even the mock-romantic Jasper in the Knight (which I am sure is all Beaumont) will try his sweetheart's love 'that the world and memory may sing to after-times her constancy.' As to evil, it meets its punishment both in heredity and in the verdict of generations yet to come. "I see," soliloquizes the usurping King in a passage already quoted from Philaster:

You gods, I see that who unrighteously
Holds wealth or state from others shall be cursed
In that which meaner men are blest withal:
Ages to come shall know no male of him
Left to inherit, and his name shall be
Blotted from earth; if he have any child
It shall be crossly matched.

"Show me the way," cries Arbaces to his supposed mother, and thinking of heredity, "to the inheritance I have by thee, which is a spacious world Of impious acts." And Amintor warns Evadne: "Let it not rise up for thy shame and mine To after-ages.... We will adopt us sons; The virtue shall inherit and not blood." "May all ages," prays the lascivious Bacha in Cupid's Revenge, "May all ages,"—

That shall succeed curse you as I do! and
If it be possible, I ask it, Heaven,
That your base issues may be ever monstrous,
That must for shame of nature and succession,
Be drowned like dogs!

So, passim, in Beaumont—'lasting to ages in the memory of this damnèd act'; 'a great example of their justice to all ensuing ages.'