Francis Beaumont: Dramatist: A Portrait, with Some Account of His Circle, Elizabethan and Jacobean,; And of His Association with John Fletcher — John Stuart Mill — John Shaqi
Francis Beaumont: Dramatist: A Portrait, with Some Account of His Circle, Elizabethan and Jacobean,; And of His Association with John Fletcher
John Stuart Mill · en
emotion is touched, than ever was struck by Fletcher. The lighter genius
is palpably subordinate to the stronger, and loyally submits itself to
the impression of a loftier spirit. It is true that this distinction is
never grave enough to produce a discord; it is also true that the plays
in which the predominance of Beaumont's mind and style is generally
perceptible make up altogether but a small section of the work that
bears their names conjointly; but it is no less true that within this
section the most precious part of that work is comprised."
The essay in which this noble estimate of Beaumont occurs remains indeed
"the classical modern criticism of Beaumont and Fletcher," and although
recent research has resulted in "variety of opinion concerning the
precise authorship of some of the plays commonly attributed to those
writers" its value is substantially unaffected. The figure as revealed
in glorious proportions to the penetrative imagination and the sympathy
of poetic kinship, remains, but by the patient processes of scientific
research the outlines have been more sharply defined and the very
lineaments of Beaumont's countenance and of Fletcher's, too, brought, I
think, distinctly before us. Though Swinburne attributes, almost aright,
to Beaumont alone one play, _The Woman-Hater_, and ascribes to him the
predominance in, and the better portions of _Philaster_ and _The Maid's
Tragedy_, and the high interest and graduated action of the serious part
of _A King and No King_, and also justly associates him with Fletcher in
the composition of _The Scornful Lady_, and gives him alone "the
admirable study of the worthy citizen and his wife who introduced to the
stage and escort with their applause _The Knight of the Burning
Pestle_," and implies his predominance in that play, he does not
enumerate for us the acts and scenes and parts of scenes which are
Beaumont's or Fletcher's, or Beaumont's revised by Fletcher, in any of
these plays; and consequently he points us to no specific lines of
poetic inspiration, no movements distinctively conceived by either
dramatist and shaped by his dramatic pressure, no touchstone by which
the average reader may verify for himself that "to Beaumont his stars
had given as birthright the gifts of tragic pathos and passion, of
tender power and broad strong humour," and that "to Fletcher had been
allotted a more fiery and fruitful force of invention, a more aerial
ease and swiftness of action, a more various readiness and fullness of
bright exuberant speech." Though he is right in discerning in the
homelier emotion and pathetic interest of _The Coxcombe_, and of
_Cupid's Revenge_ the note of Beaumont's manner, he couples with the
former _The Honest Man's Fortune_ in which it is more than doubtful
whether Beaumont had any share. To speak of Arbaces in _A King and No
King_ as Beaumont's, is mainly right, but not wholly, and to assign to
him the keen prosaic humour of Bessus and his swordsmen, is to assign