THE PERSONALITY, AND THE CONTEMPORARY REPUTATION OF BEAUMONT
Our poet's contemporaries saw him, not as one of my scholarly friends, Professor Herford, judging apparently from the crude engraving of 1711,[121] or from that of 1812, sees him, "of heavy and uninteresting features," but as Swinburne saw him, probably in Robinson's engraving of 1840, "handsome and significant in feature and expression alike ... 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";[122] as we see him to-day in the soft and speaking photogravure[123] recently made from the portrait at Knole Park or in the reproduction of 1911[124] of the portrait which belongs to the Rt. Hon. Lewis Harcourt at Nuneham,—a courtly gentleman of noble mien, of countenance dignified, beautiful, and mobile, and of dreamy eyes somewhat saddened as by physical suffering, or by sympathetic pondering on the mystery of life. The original at Knole was already there, in the time of Lionel, seventh Earl of Dorset, 1711, and in default of information to the contrary we may conclude that it has always been in the possession of the Sackville family, and was painted for Beaumont's contemporary, and I have ventured to surmise friend as well as neighbour, Richard, third Earl of Dorset,—who had succeeded to the earldom in 1609—about the year of Philaster. I have already shown that the Sackvilles were connected with the Fletchers by marriage. They were also patrons of Beaumont's friends, Jonson and Drayton. While the third Earl was still living, poor old Ben writes to son, Edward Sackville, a grateful epistle for succouring his necessities. And to the same Edward, as fourth Earl,[125] Drayton dedicated, 1630, the Nimphalls of his Muses Elizium, and to his Countess, Mary, the Divine Poems, published therewith. If, as others have conjectured, the Earl is himself the Dorilus of the Nimphalls, the exquisite Description of Elizium which precedes, may be, after the fashion of the poets and painters of the Renaissance, an idealized picture of Knole Park, where Drayton probably had been received:
A Paradice on earth is found,
Though farre from vulgar sight,
Which, with those pleasures doth abound,
That it Elizium hight,—
of its groves of stately trees, its merle and mavis, its daisies damasking the green, its spreading vines upon the "cleeves," its ripening fruits:
The Poets Paradice this is,
To which but few can come;
The Muses onely bower of blisse,
Their Deare Elizium.
It was the widow of the third Earl, Anne (Clifford), Countess of Dorset and, afterwards, of Pembroke and Montgomery,[126] who erected the monument to Drayton in the Poets' Corner. That Beaumont was acquainted with this family of poets and patrons of art is, therefore, in every way more than probable; and there is a poetic pleasure in the reflection that the family still retains, in the house which Beaumont probably often visited, this noble presentment of the dramatist.
The portrait at Nuneham, which I have mentioned above, is not so life-like as that at Knole: it lacks the shading. But it is for us most expressive: it is that of an older man, spade-bearded, of broader brow, higher cheek-bones, and face falling away toward the chin; of the same magnanimity and grace, but with eyes more almond-shaped and sensitive, and eloquent of illness. It is the likeness of Beaumont approaching the portals of death.
