The last figure for consideration, and not the least important, is Beaumelle. So general has been the misconception of her character that it calls for a more detailed analysis than has been accorded to the other personages of the drama, or than the place she occupies might appear to warrant. That place, indeed, is not a striking one; she is scarce more than a character of second rank, appearing in but few scenes and speaking not many lines. Yet her part in the story is one of such potentialities that in Rowe’s version of the same theme her analogue becomes the central figure, and even in The Fatal Dowry a failure to understand her has probably been at the bottom of most of the less favorable judgments that have been passed upon the play, while those critics who appraise it higher yet acknowledge her to be its one outstanding defect. “The Fatal Dowry,” says Saintsbury (Hist. Eng. Lit., vol. ii, p. 400) “... is ... injured by the unattractive character of the light-of-love Beaumelle before her repentance (Massinger never could draw a woman).” She is declared by Swinburne to be “too thinly and feebly drawn to attract even the conventional and theatrical sympathy which Fletcher might have excited for a frail and penitent heroine: and the almost farcical insignificance and baseness of her paramour would suffice to degrade his not involuntary victim beneath the level of any serious interest or pity.” If these and similar pronouncements were well founded, the play as a cross-section of life would have the great weakness of being unconvincing at a very vital point. A study of the text, however, will discover Beaumelle to be portrayed, in the brief compass of her appearance, in no wise inadequately, but rather, if anything, somewhat beyond the requirements of her dramatic function—will reveal her, not, indeed, a personage of heroic proportions and qualities, but a young woman of considerable naturalness, plausibility, and realistic convincingness.
The trouble has probably been that the critics of Beaumelle have passed hastily over the very scurrilous prose scene in which she first appears. They have looked on this passage as merely a piece of Fieldian low-comedy, a coarse bit of buffoonery which pretends to no function save that of humor, and can sustain not even this pretense. Nothing can be further from the truth. The passage is a piece of coarse comedy such as Field had an over-fondness for writing; but it is something more; in reality, a proper understanding of the heroine is conditioned upon it.
Beaumelle is a young girl whose mother, we may infer, has long been dead. The cares of the bench have been too great to allow her father time for much personal supervision of her; she has had for associates her two maids, and of these she not unnaturally finds the gay and witty, but thoroughly depraved, Bellapert the more congenial, and adopts her as her mentor and confidant. She is in love, after a fashion—caught, like the impressionable, uncritical girl she is, by the fair exterior of a young magnificent, whose elegant dress and courtly show of devotion quite blind her to his real worthlessness—and there is scant likelihood of her getting the man who has charmed her fancy. Her disposition is high-spirited and wayward, but not deliberately vicious; she has certain hazily defined ideals, mingled with the same romantic mist through which the superfine dandy, Novall, appears in her eyes a very Prince Charming: she “would meet love and marriage both at once”; she desires to preserve her honor. She has ideals, but she doubts their tangibility; she is in an unsettled state of mind, questioning the fundamentals of conduct and social relationships, in much need of good counsel. In that perilous mood she talks with Bellapert—Bellapert, the dearest cabinet of her secrets—Bellapert, the bribed instrument of Novall—and is told by that worldly-wise wench that marriage almost never unites with love, but must be used as a cloak for it; that honor is a foolish fancy; that a husband is a master to be outwitted and despised. The shaft sinks home all too surely; a visit at that very moment by Beaumelle’s lover completes the conquest, when her father interrupts their tete-a-tete—her father, who comes with the anouncement that she must marry a man whom she does not even know! In the scene where the destined bride and groom are brought face to face, she stands throughout in stony silence quite as eloquent as the more famous speechlessness of Charalois at the beginning of the play. She has ever been “handmaid” to her father’s will; she realizes all her hopes and fortunes “have reference to his liking;” and now she obeys, with the bitter thought in her heart that Fate, in denying her her will, has wronged Love itself ([II, ii, 154]); only when Charalois turns to her with a direct question, “Fair Beaumelle, can you love me?” does she utter a word—then from her lips a brief, desperate, “Yes, my lord”—and a moment later ([II, ii, 315]) she is weeping silently. (Her answer was honest in as far as she really did mean to give to the man chosen for her husband her duty with her hand.) Then the voice of the tempter whispers in her ear, she feels its tug at her heart, and with a cry, “Oh, servant!—Virtue strengthen me!” she hurries from the room. That is the situation at the end of the Second Act and first part of the play; an appreciation of its significance makes the connection with what follows less arbitrary and inorganic.
When Beaumelle next appears, in the Third Act, there has been a change. We may imagine that she has had time to ponder those cynical maxims of Bellapert on the natural course of romance. Her union has been unwilling; she does not care for her husband; Novall appeals to her as much as ever: with her eyes open, she deliberately chooses the path of sin—because the enforced marriage which shattered her hopes must needs appear to her the final demonstration of the correctness of her maid’s contention (towards which she was already inclining) that she has been foolishly impractical to dream of the satisfaction of her heart’s wish through wedlock, but that it is by secret amour that love must be, and is wont to be, enjoyed.
It may not be unreasonable to regard the resourcefulness and effrontery which characterize her throughout the Third Act as the result of a sort of mental intoxication, into which she has been lifted by her reckless resolve and the consciousness of danger; at any rate she now shows herself altogether too much for Romont; she finds a shrewdness and an eloquence that carry her triumphant to the consummation of her desire. When discovery ensues, her paramour is slain, and she herself is haled to die, she is overcome—abruptly and, one might say, strangely—with remorse and penitence. But it is not at all by one of those theatrically convenient but psychologically absurd changes of heart so frequent in the drama of that period; nothing, indeed, could be more true to life. Novall Junior, coward and fop that he was, has hitherto always borne himself in lordly fashion before her, even when they were surprised by Romont; but now at last she beholds him stripped to the shivering abjectness of his contemptible soul, that she may observe his baseness. She sees him cowed and beaten and slain, while Charalois (whom she never knew before their marriage nor has tried to understand in the brief period of their wedlock) with his outraged honor and irresistible prowess assumes to her eyes the proportions of a hero; and with her girl’s romanticism[10] of nature, she bows down and worships him. It is somewhat the same note that is struck by Thackeray in the similar situation where Rawdon Crawley, returning home unexpectedly, finds his wife with Lord Steyne and knocks the man down.
It was all done before Rebecca could interpose. She stood there trembling before him. She admired her husband, strong, brave, victorious.
So it was with Beaumelle. Except for one brief cry of “Undone for ever!” she utters no word from the moment of the surprise to the end of the Scene. She hangs back, shrinking, for a moment, when ordered into the coach with the dead body of her partner in guilt. “Come,” says Charalois, in terrible jest, “you have taught me to say, you must and shall.... You are but to keep him company you love—” and she obeys mutely.
Thus, all contriteness, Beaumelle goes to her fate. It should be observed how, even at the last, her tendency to romantic idealization vehemently asserts itself; she looks fondly back ([IV, iv, 53]) to an imagined time, which never really existed, when she was “good” and “a part of” Charalois, made one with him through the virtuous harmony of their minds!—no voice is more unfaltering than her own to pronounce her doom as both righteous and necessary, and she conceives herself to climb, by her ecstatic welcoming of death, into the company of the ancient heroines and martyrs. In its realism of the commonplace and its slightly ironic conception, it is the outline drawing of a character that might have received elaborate portraiture at the hands of Flaubert.
Whether we are to regard this consistent “study in little” as a deliberate piece of work on the part of the authors, must remain a matter of opinion. There is no similar figure elsewhere in the dramatic output of Massinger, nor any quite so minutely conceived within the same number of speech-lines in that of Field, and one could scarce be blamed for believing that a number of hap-hazard, sketchy strokes with which the collaborators dashed off a character whom they deemed of no great importance, all so fell upon the canvas that, by a miracle of chance, they went to form the lineaments of a real woman. The discussion of the probability or possibility of such a hypothesis would carry us very far afield, and would involve the question of the extent to which all genius is unconscious and intuitive. But however that may be, the result of their labors remains the same, there to behold in black and white, and Beaumelle, so far from being a poorly conceived and unsatisfactory wanton who is the chief defect of the play, is a figure of no mean verisimilitude who succeeds after a fashion in linking together the loose-knit dual structure of the drama; to whose main catastrophe she adds her own tragedy, a tragedy neither impressive nor deeply stirring, it is true, for she is a petty spirit from whom great tragedy does not proceed—but tragedy still—the eternal, inevitable tragedy of false romanticism, that has found its culmination in the person of Emma Bovary.
In this study of Beaumelle, The Fatal Dowry has been subjected to a much more intensive examination than it is the custom to bestow upon the dramas of the successors of Shakespeare. The truth is that the plays of the Jacobean period do not, as a rule, admit of such analysis. In most of them, and especially in the plays of Massinger, he who searches and probes them comes presently to a point beyond which critical inquiry is stopped short with a desperate finality; be they ever so strikingly splendid and glittering fair in their poetry and their characterization, these dazzling qualities lie upon the surface, and a few careful perusals exhaust their possibilities and tell us all there is to know of them. But The Fatal Dowry, though less imposing than a number of others, stands almost alone among its contemporaries in sharing with the great creations of Shakespeare the power to open new vistas, to present new aspects, to offer new suggestions, the longer it is studied. Perhaps this is due to the fact that, as has already been said, it is not so much a tragedy of the accepted type as a cross-section of life.