He is forever playing phrasal variations upon the words 'piece,' and 'little.' The former is a mannerism of the day, already availed of by Shakespeare in Lear, 'O ruined piece of nature,' and frequently in Antony and Cleopatra, and later repeated in the Tempest and Winter's Tale. So with Beaumont, Arethusa is a 'poor piece of earth'; 'every maid in love will have a piece' of Philaster; Oriana is a 'precious piece of sly damnation,' 'that pleasing piece of frailty we call woman.' Or the word is used literally for 'limb':—'I'll love those pieces you have cut away.'—Beaumont, I may say in passing, delights in cutting bodies 'into motes,' and sending 'limbs through the land.'—'Little' he affects, making it pathetic and even more diminutive in conjunction with 'that': Euphrasia would 'keep that little piece I hold of life.' 'It is my fate,' proclaims Amintor,
To bear and bow beneath a thousand griefs
To keep that little credit with the world;
and so, 'that little passion,' 'that little training,' 'these little wounds,' ad libitum. Somewhat akin is the poet's use of 'kind': 'a kind of love in her to me'; 'a kind of healthful joy.' His heroines good and bad are given to introspection: they have 'acquaintance' with themselves. 'After you were gone,' says Bellario, 'I grew acquainted with my heart'; and Bacha in Cupid's Revenge in a scene undoubtedly of Beaumont's verse 'loathes' herself and is 'become another woman; one, methinks, with whom I want acquaintance.'
While Beaumont makes occasional use of simile, his figures of poetry, or tropes, are generally of the more creative kind,—metaphor, personification, metonymy,—and these are very often heightened into that figure of logical artifice known as hyperbole. His comparisons deal in a striking degree with elemental phenomena: hills, caves, stones, rocks, seas, winds, flames, thunder, cold, ice, snow; or they are reminiscential of country life. In each play some hero declaims of 'the only difference betwixt man and beast, my reason'; and inevitably enlarges upon the 'nature unconfined' of beasts, and illustrates by custom and passion of ram, goat, heifer, or bull—especially bull. When the bull of the pasture does not suffice, the bull of Phalaris charges in. But Beaumont prefers nature: his images are sweet with April and violets and dew and morning-light, or fields of standing corn 'moved with a stiff gale'—their heads bowing 'all one way.' From the manufacture of books he borrows two metaphors, 'printing' and 'blotting,' and plies them with effective variety: Philaster 'prints' wounds upon Bellario; Bellario 'printed' her 'thoughts in lawn'; Amintor will 'print a thousand wounds' upon Evadne's flesh; and Nature wronged Panthea 'To print continual conquest on her cheeks And make no man worthy for her to take.' With similar frequency recur 'blotted from earth,' 'blotted from memory,' 'this third kiss blots it out.'
The younger poet personifies abstractions as frequently as Fletcher, but in a more poetic way. He vitalizes grief and guilt and memory with figurative verbs—'shoot,' 'grow,' 'cut.' 'I feel a grief shoot suddenly through all my veins' cries Amintor; and again 'Thine eyes shoot guilt into me.' 'I feel a sin growing upon my blood' shudders Arbaces. Philaster will 'cut off falsehood while it springs'; Amintor welcomes the hand that should 'cut' him from his sorrows; and Evadne confesses that her sin is 'tougher than the hand of Time can cut from man's remembrance.' Similar metaphorical constructions abound, such as 'pluck me back from my entrance into mirth,' in one of Leucippus' speeches in Beaumont's part of Cupid's Revenge; and in a speech of Melantius 'I did a deed that plucked five years from time' in The Maides Tragedy. Personified grief and sorrow are frequently in the plural with Beaumont:—'Nothing but a multitude of walking griefs.' It is a mistake to suppose, as some do, that passages written in Beaumont's metrical style are not by him if they abound in personification. Hunger, black Despair, Pride, Wantonness, figure in his verse in The Woman-Hater; Chance, Death, and Fortune in The Knight; Death, Victory, and Friendship, in The Maides Tragedy; Destiny, Falsehood, Mortality, Nature in Philaster; and so on.
No dramatist since the day of Kyd and Marlowe has more frequent or violent resort to hyperbole. His heroes call on 'seas to quench the fires' they 'feel,' and 'snows to quench their rising flames'; they will 'drink off seas' and 'yet have unquenched fires left' in their breasts; they 'wade through seas of sins'; they 'set hills on hills' and 'scale them all, and from the utmost top fall' on the necks of foes, 'like thunder from a cloud'; or they 'discourse to all the underworld the worth' of those they love. 'From his iron den' they'll 'waken Death, and hurl him' on lascivious kings. Arethusa's heart is 'mines of adamant to all the world beside,' but to her lover 'a lasting mine of joy'; her breath 'sweet as Arabian winds when fruits are ripe'; her breasts 'two liquid ivory balls.' Evadne will sooner 'find out the beds of snakes,' and 'with her youthful blood warm their cold flesh 'than accede to Amintor's desires. 'The least word' that Panthea speaks 'is worth a life.' 'The child, this present hour brought forth to see the world, has not a soul more pure' than Oriana's. In one of Beaumont's verse-scenes of The Coxcombe, Ricardo, reinstated in his Viola's esteem, would have some woman 'take an everlasting pen' into her hand, 'and grave in paper more lasting than the marble monuments' the matchless virtues of women to posterities. And as for Bellario's worth to Philaster,—
'T is not the treasure of all Kings in one,
The wealth of Tagus, nor the rocks of pearl
That pave the court of Neptune, can weigh down
That virtue.
Echoes not of Kyd and Marlowe only, but of Shakespeare from Romeo to Hamlet and Macbeth, reverberate in the magniloquent hyperbole of Beaumont.
Beaumont has more ejaculations than Fletcher, but fewer optatives. He is chary of rhetorical questions, and his exclamations run by preference into some figured hyperbole. He appeals less frequently than Fletcher to 'all the gods,' but very often to 'the gods,' 'good gods,' 'ye gods,' 'some god.' He refers, in conformity with his deterministic view of life, with particular preference to the 'just gods,' the 'powers that must be just,' the 'powers above,' 'ye better powers,' 'Heaven and the powers divine,' 'you heavenly powers,' the 'powers that rule us'; and all these he uses in attestation. An oath distinctive of him is 'By my vexed soul!' In his hyperboles, Hell and devils play their part; but not in oath so frequently as with Fletcher.
3. Lines of Inevitable Poetry.