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'T is less than to be born; a lasting sleep; A quiet resting from all jealousy, A thing we all pursue; I know, besides, It is but giving over of a game That must be lost;--

by the pathetic irony of Aspatia's farewell to love in _The Maides Tragedy_,

So with my prayers I leave you, and must try Some yet-unpractis'd way to grieve and die;

and the heroism (in _Cupid's Revenge_, the final scene, undoubtedly of Beaumont's verse) of Urania's confession to Leucippus,

I would not let you know till I was dying; For you could not love me, my mother was so naught;

by Panthea's cry of horror, in _A King and No King_,

I feel a sin growing upon my blood;

and by those flashes of incomparable verity that intensify the gloom of _The Maides Tragedy_: Amintor's

Those have most power to hurt us, that we love; We lay our sleeping lives within their arms;

and after Evadne's death,

My soul grows weary of her house, and I All over am a trouble to myself;--

by the wounded Aspatia's

I shall sure live, Amintor, I am well; A kind of healthful joy wanders within me;

and her parting whisper,

Give me thy hand; mine eyes grope up and down, And cannot find thee.

This is Nature sobbing into verse: the unadorned poetry of the human heartbreak. Where other than in Shakespeare do we find among the Jacobean poets such verse?

That a style of this kind should be rich in apothegm is not surprising.

Instances rare in wisdom and phrasal conciseness are to be encountered on every other page of Beaumont.

It may, in short, be said of this dramatist's rhetorical and poetic diction, that, while the vocabulary may not be more varied, it is more intimate, musical, and reverberant than Fletcher's; that the periods, though sometimes appropriately syncopated and parenthetically broken, as in dramatic conversation, are, in rhapsodical and descriptive passages, both complex and balanced of structure,--pregnant of ideas labouring for expression rather than enumerative; that they echo Shakespeare's grandeur of phrase, with its involution, crowding of illustration and fresh insistent thought, in a degree utterly foreign to the rhetoric of Fletcher; and that his brief sentences are marked by a direct and final resplendence and simplicity.

In the larger movements of composition the purely poetic quality predominates over the narrative, dramatic or conversational. This characteristic is especially noticeable in declamatory speeches and soliloquies; sometimes idyllic as in Philaster's description of Bellario,--"I found him sitting by a fountain's side,"--or in the well-known "Oh that I had been nourished in these woods with milk of goats and acorns"; often operatic, as in Aspatia's farewells to Amintor and to love; always lyrical, imaginatively surcharged. Beaumont's figures of rhetoric when not hyperbolic, are picturesquely natural; his poetic tropes are creative, vitalizing. His speakers are self-revelatory: expressive of temperament, emotion, reflection. Their utterances are frequently descriptive, picturesquely loitering, rather than, by way of dialogue, framed to further the action alone. And yet, when they will, their conversation is spontaneous, fragmentary, and abrupt, intensifying the dramatic situation; not simply, as with Fletcher, by giving opportunity for stage-business, but by differencing the motive that underlies the action.

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:

"Accursed 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.

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