By permission of Mr. Lewis Harcourt.
THE BEAUMONT
OF THE
NUNEHAM PORTRAIT
Of the personality of Beaumont we have already had glimpses through the window of his non-dramatic poems. His letter to Ben Jonson has revealed him chafing in enforced exile from London, amusedly tolerant of the "standing family-jests" of country gentlemen, tired of "water mixed with claret-lees," "with one draught" of which "man's invention fades," and yearning for the Mermaid wine of poetic converse, "nimble, and full of subtle flame." Other verses to Jonson and to Fletcher express his scorn of "the wild applause of common people," his confidence in sympathetic genius and Time as the only arbiters of literary worth. In still other poems, lyric, epistolary, and elegiac, we have savoured the tang of his humour,—unsophisticated, somewhat ammoniac; and from them have caught his habit of emotional utterance, frank and sincere, whether in admiration, love, or indignation. We have grown acquainted with his reverence for womanly purity; with his religion of suffering, his recognition of mortal pathos, irony, futility, and yet of inscrutable purpose and control, and of the countervailing serenity that awaits us in the grave. An amusing side-light is thrown upon his character by Jonson who told Drummond of Hawthornden, that "Francis Beaumont loved too much himself and his own verses." We are glad to know that a man of Jonson's well-attested self-esteem encountered in Beaumont an arrogance and a consciousness of poetic superiority; that even this "great lover and praiser of himself, contemner and scorner of others," for whom Spenser's stanzas were not pleasing, nor his matter, and "Shakespeare wanted art,"—that even this great brow-beater of his contemporaries in literature, recognized in our poet a self-esteem which even he could not bully out of him. But we must not be harsh in our judgment of Drummond's Ben Jonson, for though he "was given rather to lose a friend than a jest and was jealous of every word and action of those about him," this is not the Ben who some seven years earlier had written "How I do love thee, Beaumont, and thy Muse"; this is Ben as Drummond saw him in 1619—Ben talking "especially after drink which is one of the elements in which he liveth." That Beaumont's affection and geniality of intercourse were reciprocated not only by Jonson, but by others, we learn from lines written to, or of, him by men of worth.
His judgment as a critic was recognized by his contemporaries, as well as the poetic brilliance of the dramas which he was creating under their eyes. His language, too, was praised for its distinction while he was yet living. In the manuscript outline of the Hypercritica, which appears to have been filled in at various times between 1602 and 1616, Bolton says: "the books out of which wee gather the most warrantable English are not many to my remembrance.... But among the cheife, or rather the cheife, are in my opinion these: Sir Thomas Moore's works; ... George Chapman's first seaven books of Iliades; Samuell Danyell; Michael Drayton his Heroicall Epistles of England; Marlowe his excellent fragment of Hero and Leander; Shakespeare, Mr. Francis Beamont, and innumerable other writers for the stage,—and [they] presse tenderly to be used in this Argument; Southwell, Parsons, and some few other of that sort." In the final version of the Hypercritica, prepared between 1616 and 1618,[127] Bolton omits the later dramatists altogether;[128] but that is not to be construed by way of discrimination against Shakespeare and Beaumont. There is no doubt that Bolton knew the Beaumonts personally, and appreciated their worth, and as early as 1610;—for to his Elements of Armories of that year, he prefixes a "Letter to the Author, from the learned young gentleman, I. B., of Grace-Dieu in the County of Leicestershire, Esquier,"[129] who highly compliments the invention, judicial method, and taste displayed in the Elements, and returns the manuscript with promise of his patronage.
Further information of the esteem in which Francis was held, is afforded by the eulogies, direct or indirect, written soon after his death by those who were near enough to him in years to have known him, or to assess his worth untrammeled by the critical consensus of a generation that knew him not. The tender tributes of his brother and of his contemporary, Dr. Corbet, successively Bishop of Oxford, and of Norwich, have already been quoted. A so-called "sonnet," signed I. F., included in an Harleian manuscript between two poems undoubtedly by Fletcher, may not have been intended for the dead poet; but I agree with Dyce, who first printed it,[130] that it seems "very like Fletcher's epicede on his beloved associate":—
Come, sorrow, come! bring all thy cries,
All thy laments, and all thy weeping eyes!
Burn out, you living monuments of woe!
Sad sullen griefs, now rise and overflow!
Virtue is dead;
O cruel fate!
All youth is fled;
All our laments too late.
Oh, noble youth, to thy ne'er-dying name,
Oh, happy youth, to thy still-growing fame,
To thy long peace in earth, this sacred knell
Our last loves ring—farewell, farewell, farewell!
Go, happy soul, to thy eternal birth!
And press his body lightly, gentle Earth!
What the young readers of contemporary poetry at the universities thought of him is nowhere better expressed than in the lines written immediately after the poet's death by the fifteen- or sixteen-year-old John Earle;—he who was later Fellow of Merton; and in turn Bishop of Worcester, and of Salisbury. The ardent lad is gazing in person or imagination on the new-filled tomb in the Poets' Corner, when he writes: