Chapter IX: Front Matter (9)

I have observed in a former Lecture, that the most spirited æra of our comic drama was that which reflected the conversation, tone, and manners of the profligate, but witty age of Charles II. With the graver and more business-like turn which the Revolution probably gave to our minds, comedy stooped from her bolder and more fantastic flights; and the ferocious attack made by the nonjuring divine, Jeremy Collier, on the immorality and profaneness of the plays then chiefly in vogue, nearly frightened those unwarrantable liberties of wit and humour from the stage, which were no longer countenanced at court nor copied in the city. Almost the last of our writers who ventured to hold out in the prohibited track, was a female adventurer, Mrs. Centlivre, who seemed to take advantage of the privilege of her sex, and to set at defiance the cynical denunciations of the angry puritanical reformist. Her plays have a provoking spirit and volatile salt in them, which still preserves them from decay. Congreve is said to have been jealous of their success at the time, and that it was one cause which drove him in disgust from the stage. If so, it was without any good reason: for these plays have great and intrinsic merit in them, which entitled them to their popularity (and it is only spurious and undeserved popularity which should excite a feeling of jealousy in any well-regulated mind): and besides, their merit was of a kind entirely different from his own. The Wonder and the Busy Body are properly comedies of intrigue. Their interest depends chiefly on the intricate involution and artful _denouement_ of the plot, which has a strong tincture of mischief in it, and the wit is seasoned by the archness of the humour and sly allusion to the most delicate points. They are plays evidently written by a very clever woman, but still by a woman: for I hold, in spite of any fanciful theories to the contrary, that there is a distinction discernible in the minds of women as well as in their faces. The Wonder is one of the best of our acting plays. The passion of jealousy in Don Felix is managed in such a way as to give as little offence as possible to the audience, for every appearance combines to excite and confirm his worst suspicions, while we, who are in the secret, laugh at his groundless uneasiness and apprehensions. The ambiguity of the heroine’s situation, which is like a continued practical _equivoque_, gives rise to a quick succession of causeless alarms, subtle excuses, and the most hair-breadth ‘scapes. The scene near the end, in which Don Felix, pretending to be drunk, forces his way out of Don Manuel’s house, who wants to keep him a prisoner, by producing his marriage-contract in the shape of a pocket-pistol, with the terrors and confusion into which the old gentleman is thrown by this sort of _argumentum ad hominem_, is one of the richest treats the stage affords, and calls forth incessant peals of laughter and applause. Besides the two principal characters (Violante and Don Felix) Lissardo and Flippanta come in very well to carry on the under-plot; and the airs and graces of an amorous waiting-maid and conceited man-servant, each copying after their master and mistress, were never hit off with more natural volubility or affected _nonchalance_ than in this enviable couple. Lissardo’s playing off the diamond ring before the eyes of his mortified Dulcinea, and aping his master’s absent manner while repeating—‘Roast me these Violantes,’ as well as the jealous quarrel of the two waiting-maids, which threatens to end in some very extraordinary discoveries, are among the most amusing traits in this comedy. Colonel Breton, the lover of Clara, is a spirited and enterprising soldier of fortune; and his servant Gibby’s undaunted, incorrigible blundering, with a dash of nationality in it, tells in a very edifying way.—The Busy Body is inferior, in the interest of the story and characters, to the Wonder; but it is full of bustle and gaiety from beginning to end. The plot never stands still; the situations succeed one another like the changes of machinery in a pantomime. The nice dove-tailing of the incidents, and cross-reading in the situations, supplies the place of any great force of wit or sentiment. The time for the entrance of each person on the stage is the moment when they are least wanted, and when their arrival makes either themselves or somebody else look as foolish as possible. The laughableness of this comedy, as well as of the Wonder, depends on a brilliant series of mistimed exits and entrances. Marplot is the whimsical hero of the piece, and a standing memorial of unmeaning vivacity and assiduous impertinence.

The comedies of Steele were the first that were written expressly with a view not to imitate the manners, but to reform the morals of the age. The author seems to be all the time on his good behaviour, as if writing a comedy was no very creditable employment, and as if the ultimate object of his ambition was a dedication to the queen. Nothing can be better meant, or more inefficient. It is almost a misnomer to call them comedies; they are rather homilies in dialogue, in which a number of very pretty ladies and gentlemen discuss the fashionable topics of gaming, of duelling, of seduction, of scandal, &c. with a sickly sensibility, that shews as little hearty aversion to vice, as sincere attachment to virtue. By not meeting the question fairly on the ground of common experience, by slubbering over the objections, and varnishing over the answers, the whole distinction between virtue and vice (as it appears in evidence in the comic drama) is reduced to verbal professions, and a mechanical, infantine goodness. The sting is, indeed, taken out of what is bad; but what is good, at the same time, loses its manhood and nobility of nature by this enervating process. I am unwilling to believe that the only difference between right and wrong is mere cant, or _make-believe_; and I imagine, that the advantage which the moral drama possesses over mere theoretical precept or general declamation is this, that by being left free to imitate nature as it is, and not being referred to an ideal standard, it is its own voucher for the truth of the inferences it draws, for its warnings, or its examples; that it brings out the higher, as well as lower principles of action, in the most striking and convincing points of view; satisfies us that virtue is not a mere shadow; clothes it with passion, imagination, reality, and, if I may so say, translates morality from the language of theory into that of practice. But Steele, by introducing the artificial mechanism of morals on the stage, and making his characters act, not from individual motives and existing circumstances, the truth of which every one must feel, but from vague topics and general rules, the truth of which is the very thing to be proved in detail, has lost that fine ‘vantage ground which the stage lends to virtue; takes away from it its best grace, the grace of sincerity; and, instead of making it a test of truth, has made it an echo of the doctrine of the schools—and ‘the one cries _Mum_, while t’other cries _Budget_!’ The comic writer, in my judgment, then, ought to open the volume of nature and the world for his living materials, and not take them out of his ethical common-place book; for in this way, neither will throw any additional light upon the other. In all things there is a division of labour; and I am as little for introducing the tone of the pulpit or reading-desk on the stage, as for introducing plays and interludes in church-time, according to the good old popish practice. It was a part, indeed, of Steele’s plan, ‘by the politeness of his style and the genteelness of his expressions,’[26] to bring about a reconciliation between things which he thought had hitherto been kept too far asunder, to wed the graces to the virtues, and blend pleasure with profit. And in this design he succeeded admirably in his Tatler, and some other works; but in his comedies he has failed. He has confounded, instead of harmonising—has taken away its gravity from wisdom, and its charm from gaiety. It is not that in his plays we find ‘some soul of goodness in things evil;’ but they have no soul either of good or bad. His Funeral is as trite, as tedious, and full of formal grimace, as a procession of mutes and undertakers. The characters are made either affectedly good and forbearing, with ‘all the milk of human kindness;’ or purposely bad and disgusting, for the others to exercise their squeamish charities upon them. The Conscious Lovers is the best; but that is far from good, with the exception of the scene between Mr. Thomas and Phillis, who are fellow-servants, and commence lovers from being set to clean the window together. We are here once more in the company of our old friend, Isaac Bickerstaff, Esq. Indiana is as listless, and as insipid, as a drooping figure on an Indian screen; and Mr. Myrtle and Mr. Bevil only just disturb the still life of the scene. I am sorry that in this censure I should have Parson Adams against me; who thought the Conscious Lovers the only play fit for a Christian to see, and as good as a sermon. For myself, I would rather have read, or heard him read, one of his own manuscript sermons: and if the volume which he left behind him in his saddlebags was to be had in print, for love or money, I would at any time walk ten miles on foot only to get a sight of it.

Addison’s Drummer, or the Haunted House, is a pleasant farce enough; but adds nothing to our idea of the author of the Spectator.

Pope’s joint after-piece, called ‘An Hour after Marriage,’ was not a successful attempt. He brought into it ‘an alligator stuff’d,’ which disconcerted the ladies, and gave just offence to the critics. Pope was too fastidious for a farce-writer; and yet the most fastidious people, when they step out of their regular routine, are apt to become the grossest. The smallest offences against probability or decorum are, to their habitual scrupulousness, as unpardonable as the greatest. This was the rock on which Pope probably split. The affair was, however, hushed up; and he wreaked his discreet vengeance at leisure on the ‘odious endeavours,’ and more odious success of Colley Cibber in the line in which he had failed.

Gay’s ‘What-d’ye-call-it,’ is not one of his happiest things. His ‘Polly’ is a complete failure, which, indeed, is the common fate of second parts. If the original Polly, in the Beggar’s Opera, had not had more winning ways with her, she would hardly have had so many Countesses for representatives as she has had, from her first appearance up to the present moment.

Fielding was a comic writer, as well as a novelist; but his comedies are very inferior to his novels: they are particularly deficient both in plot and character. The only excellence which they have is that of the style, which is the only thing in which his novels are deficient. The only dramatic pieces of Fielding that retain possession of the stage are, the Mock Doctor (a tolerable translation from Moliere’s _Médecin malgré lui_), and his Tom Thumb, a very admirable piece of burlesque. The absurdities and bathos of some of our celebrated tragic writers could hardly be credited, but for the notes at the bottom of this preposterous medley of bombast, containing his authorities and the parallel passages. Dryden, Lee, and Shadwell, make no very shining figure there. Mr. Liston makes a better figure in the text. His Lord Grizzle is prodigious. What a name, and what a person! It has been said of this ingenious actor, that ‘he is very great in Liston;’ but he is even greater in Lord Grizzle. What a wig is that he wears! How flighty, flaunting, and fantastical! Not ‘like those hanging locks of young Apollo,’ nor like the serpent-hair of the Furies of Æschylus; but as troublous, though not as tragical as the one—as imposing, though less classical than the other. ‘_Que terribles sont ces cheveux gris_,’ might be applied to Lord Grizzle’s most valiant and magnanimous curls. This sapient courtier’s ‘fell of hair does at a dismal treatise rouse and stir as if life were in’t.’ His wits seem flying away with the disorder of his flowing locks, and to sit as loosely on our hero’s head as the caul of his peruke. What a significant vacancy in his open eyes and mouth! what a listlessness in his limbs! what an abstraction of all thought or purpose! With what an headlong impulse of enthusiasm he throws himself across the stage when he is going to be married, crying, ‘Hey for Doctor’s Commons,’ as if the genius of folly had taken whole-length possession of his person! And then his dancing is equal to the discovery of a sixth sense—which is certainly very different from _common sense_! If this extraordinary personage cuts a great figure in his life, he is no less wonderful in his death and burial. ‘From the sublime to the ridiculous there is but one step;’ and this character would almost seem to prove, that there is but one step from the ridiculous to the sublime.—Lubin Log, however inimitable in itself, is itself an imitation of something existing elsewhere; but the Lord Grizzle of this truly original actor, is a pure invention of his own. His Caper, in the Widow’s Choice, can alone dispute the palm with it in incoherence and volatility; for that, too, ‘is high fantastical,’ almost as full of emptiness, in as grand a gusto of insipidity, as profoundly absurd, as elaborately nonsensical! Why does not Mr. Liston play in some of Moliere’s farces? I heartily wish that the author of Love, Law, and Physic, would launch him on the London boards in Monsieur Jourdain, or Monsieur Pourceaugnac. The genius of Liston and Moliere together—

‘——Must bid a gay defiance to mischance.’

Mr. Liston is an actor hardly belonging to the present age. Had he lived, unfortunately for us, in the time of Colley Cibber, we should have seen what a splendid niche he would have given him in his Apology.

Cibber is the hero of the Dunciad; but it cannot be said of him, that he was ‘by merit raised to that bad eminence.’ He was pert, not dull; a coxcomb, not a blockhead; vain, but not malicious. Pope’s unqualified abuse of him was mere spleen; and the most obvious provocation to it seems to have been an excess of flippant vivacity in the constitution of Cibber. That Cibber’s Birth-day Odes were dull, is true; but this was not peculiar to him. It is an objection which may be made equally to Shadwell’s, to Whitehead’s, to Warton’s, to Pye’s, and to all others, except those which of late years have _not_ been written! In his Apology for his own Life, Cibber is a most amusing biographer: happy in his own good opinion, the best of all others; teeming with animal spirits, and uniting the self-sufficiency of youth with the garrulity of age. His account of his waiting as a page behind the chair of the old Duchess of Marlborough, at the time of the Revolution, who was then in the bloom of youth and beauty, which seems to have called up in him the secret homage of ‘distant, enthusiastic, respectful love,’ fifty years after, and the compliment he pays to her (then in her old age), ‘a great grandmother without grey hairs,’ is as delightful as any thing in fiction or romance; and is the evident origin of Mr. Burke’s celebrated apostrophe to the Queen of France. Nor is the political confession of faith which he makes on this occasion, without a suitable mixture of vanity and sincerity: the vanity we may ascribe to the player, the sincerity to the politician. The self-complacency with which he talks of his own success both as a player and a writer, is not greater than the candour and cordiality with which he does heaped justice to the merits of his theatrical contemporaries and predecessors. He brings down the history of the stage, either by the help of observation or tradition, from the time of Shakspeare to his own; and quite dazzles the reader with a constellation of male and female, of tragic and comic, of past and present excellence. He gives portraits at full length of Kynaston, of Betterton, of Booth, of Estcourt, of Penkethman and Dogget, of Mohun and Wilks, of Nokes and Sandford, of Mrs. Montford, of Mrs. Oldfield, of Mrs. Barry and Mrs. Bracegirdle, and of others of equal note; with delectable criticisms on their several performances, and anecdotes of their private lives, with scarcely a single particle of jealousy or ill-nature, or any other motive than to expatiate in the delight of talking of the ornaments of his art, and a wish to share his pleasure with the reader. I wish I could quote some of these theatrical sketches; but the time presses. The latter part of his work is less entertaining when he becomes Manager, and gives us an exact statement of his squabbles with the Lord Chamberlain, and the expense of his ground-rent, his repairs, his scenery, and his dresses.—In his plays, his personal character perhaps predominates too much over the inventiveness of his Muse; but so far from being dull, he is every where light, fluttering, and airy. His pleasure in himself made him desirous to please; but his fault was, that he was too soon satisfied with what he did, that his indolence or want of thought led him to indulge in the vein that flowed from him with most ease, and that his vanity did not allow him to distinguish between what he did best and worst. His Careless Husband is a very elegant piece of agreeable, thoughtless writing; and the incident of Lady Easy throwing her handkerchief over her husband, whom she finds asleep in a chair by the side of her waiting-woman, was an admirable contrivance, taken, as he informs us, from real life. His Double Gallant, which has been lately revived, though it cannot rank in the first, may take its place in the second or third class of comedies. It abounds in character, bustle, and stage-effect. It belongs to what may be called the composite style; and very happily mixes up the comedy of intrigue, such as we see it in Mrs. Centlivre’s Spanish plots, with a tolerable share of the wit and spirit of Congreve and Vanbrugh. As there is a good deal of wit, there is a spice of wickedness in this play, which was a privilege of the good old style of comedy, not altogether abandoned in Cibber’s time. The luscious vein of the dialogue is stopped short in many of the scenes of the revived play, though not before we perceive its object—

‘——In hidden mazes running,
With wanton haste and giddy cunning.’

These imperfect hints of double meanings, however, pass off without any marks of reprobation; for unless they are insisted on, or made pretty broad, the audience, from being accustomed to the cautious purity of the modern drama, are not very expert in decyphering the equivocal allusion, for which they are not on the look-out. To what is this increased nicety owing? Was it that vice, from being formerly less common (though more fashionable) was less catching than at present? The first inference is by no means in our favour: for though I think that the grossness of manners prevailing in our fashionable comedies was a direct transcript of the manners of the court at the time, or in the period immediately preceding, yet the same grossness of expression and allusion existed long before, as in the plays of Shakspeare and Ben Jonson, when there was not this grossness of manners, and it has of late years been gradually refining away. There is a certain grossness or freedom of expression, which may arise as often from unsuspecting simplicity as from avowed profligacy. Whatever may be our progress either in virtue or vice since the age of Charles II. certain it is, that our manners are not mended since the time of Elizabeth and Charles I. Is it, then, that vice was formerly a thing more to be wondered at than imitated; that behind the rigid barriers of religion and morality it might be exposed freely, without the danger of any serious practical consequences—whereas now that the safeguards of wholesome authority and prejudice are removed, we seem afraid to trust our eyes or ears with a single situation or expression of a loose tendency, as if the mere mention of licentiousness implied a conscious approbation of it, and the extreme delicacy of our moral sense would be debauched by the bare suggestion of the possibility of vice? But I shall not take upon me to answer this question. The characters in the Double Gallant are well kept up: At-All and Lady Dainty are the two most prominent characters in this comedy, and those into which Cibber has put most of his own nature and genius. They are the essence of active impertinence and fashionable frivolity. Cibber, in short, though his name has been handed down to us as a bye-word of impudent pretension and impenetrable dulness by the classical pen of his accomplished rival, who, unfortunately, did not admit of any merit beyond the narrow circle of wit and friendship in which he himself moved, was a gentleman and a scholar of the old school; a man of wit and pleasantry in conversation, a diverting mimic, an excellent actor, an admirable dramatic critic, and one of the best comic writers of his age. His works, instead of being a _caput mortuum_ of literature, had a great deal of the spirit, with a little too much of the froth. His Nonjuror was taken from Moliere’s Tartuffe, and has been altered to the Hypocrite. Love’s Last Shift appears to have been his own favourite; and he received the compliments of Sir John Vanbrugh and old Mr. Southern upon it:—the latter said to him, ‘Young man, your play is a good one; and it will succeed, if you do not spoil it by your acting.’ His plays did not always take equally. It is ludicrous to hear him complaining of the ill success of one of them, Love in a Riddle, a pastoral comedy, ‘of a nice morality,’ and well spoken sentiments, which he wrote in opposition to the Beggar’s Opera, at the time when its worthless and vulgar rival was carrying every thing triumphantly before it. Cibber brings this, with much pathetic _naïveté_, as an instance of the lamentable want of taste in the town!

The Suspicious Husband by Hoadley, the Jealous Wife by Colman, and the Clandestine Marriage by Colman and Garrick, are excellent plays of the middle style of comedy; which are formed rather by judgment and selection, than by any original vein of genius; and have all the parts of a good comedy in degree, without having any one prominent, or to excess. The character of Ranger, in the Suspicious Husband, is only a variation of those of Farquhar, of the same class as his Sir Harry Wildair and others, without equal spirit. A great deal of the story of the Jealous Wife is borrowed from Fielding; but so faintly, that the resemblance is hardly discernible till you are apprised of it. The Jealous Wife herself is, however, a dramatic _chef-d’œuvre_, and worthy of being acted as often, and better than it is. Sir Harry Beagle is a true fox-hunting English squire. The Clandestine Marriage is nearly without a fault; and has some lighter theatrical graces, which I suspect Garrick threw into it. _Canton_ is, I should think, his; though this classification of him among the ornamental parts of the play may seem whimsical. Garrick’s genius does not appear to have been equal to the construction of a solid drama; but he could retouch and embellish with great gaiety and knowledge of the technicalities of his art. Garrick not only produced joint-pieces and after-pieces, but often set off the plays of his friends and contemporaries with the garnish, the _sauce piquant_, of prologues and epilogues, at which he had an admirable knack.—The elder Colman’s translation of Terence, I may here add, has always been considered, by good judges, as an equal proof of the author’s knowledge of the Latin language, and taste in his own.

Bickerstaff’s plays and comic operas are continually acted: they come under the class of mediocrity, generally speaking. Their popularity seems to be chiefly owing to the unaffected ease and want of pretension with which they are written, with a certain humorous _naïveté_ in the lower characters, and an exquisite adaptation of the music to the songs. His Love in a Village is one of the most delightful comic operas on the stage. It is truly pastoral; and the sense of music hovers over the very scene like the breath of morning. In his alteration of the Tartuffe he has spoiled the Hypocrite, but he has added Maw-worm.

Mrs. Cowley’s comedy of the Belles’ Stratagem, Who’s the Dupe, and others, are of the second or third class: they are rather _refaccimentos_ of the characters, incidents, and materials of former writers, got up with considerable liveliness and ingenuity, than original compositions, with marked qualities of their own.

Goldsmith’s Good-natured Man is inferior to She Stoops to Conquer; and even this last play, with all its shifting vivacity, is rather a sportive and whimsical effusion of the author’s fancy, a delightful and delicately managed caricature, than a genuine comedy.

Murphy’s plays of All in the Wrong and Know Your Own Mind, are admirably written; with sense, spirit, and conception of character: but without any great effect of the humorous, or that truth of feeling which distinguishes the boundary between the absurdities of natural character and the gratuitous fictions of the poet’s pen. The heroes of these two plays, Millamour and Sir Benjamin Constant, are too ridiculous in their caprices to be tolerated, except in farce; and yet their follies are so flimsy, so motiveless, and fine-spun, as not to be intelligible, or to have any effect in their only proper sphere. Both his principal pieces are said to have suffered by their similarity, first, to Colman’s Jealous Wife, and next to the School for Scandal, though in both cases he had the undoubted priority. It is hard that the fate of plagiarism should attend upon originality: yet it is clear that the elements of the School for Scandal are not sparingly scattered in Murphy’s comedy of Know your own Mind, which appeared before the latter play, only to be eclipsed by it. This brings me to speak of Sheridan.

Mr. Sheridan has been justly called ‘a dramatic star of the first magnitude:’ and, indeed, among the comic writers of the last century, he ‘shines like Hesperus among the lesser lights.’ He has left four several dramas behind him, all different or of different kinds, and all excellent in their way;—the School for Scandal, the Rivals, the Duenna, and the Critic. The attraction of this last piece is, however, less in the mock-tragedy rehearsed, than in the dialogue of the comic scenes, and in the character of Sir Fretful Plagiary, which is supposed to have been intended for Cumberland. If some of the characters in the School for Scandal were contained in Murphy’s comedy of Know your own Mind (and certainly some of Dashwoud’s detached speeches and satirical sketches are written with quite as firm and masterly a hand as any of those given to the members of the scandalous club, Mrs. Candour or Lady Sneerwell), yet they were buried in it for want of grouping and relief, like the colours of a well-drawn picture sunk in the canvass. Sheridan brought them out, and exhibited them in all their glory. If that gem, the character of Joseph Surface, was Murphy’s, the splendid and more valuable setting was Sheridan’s. He took Murphy’s Malvil from his lurking-place in the closet, and ‘dragged the struggling monster into day’ upon the stage. That is, he gave interest, life, and action, or, in other words, its dramatic being, to the mere conception and written specimens of a character. This is the merit of Sheridan’s comedies, that every thing in them _tells_; there is no labour in vain. His Comic Muse does not go about prying into obscure corners, or collecting idle curiosities, but shews her laughing face, and points to her rich treasure—the follies of mankind. She is garlanded and crowned with roses and vine-leaves. Her eyes sparkle with delight, and her heart runs over with good-natured malice. Her step is firm and light, and her ornaments consummate! The School for Scandal is, if not the most original, perhaps the most finished and faultless comedy which we have. When it is acted, you hear people all around you exclaiming, ‘Surely it is impossible for any thing to be cleverer.’ The scene in which Charles sells all the old family pictures but his uncle’s, who is the purchaser in disguise, and that of the discovery of Lady Teazle when the screen falls, are among the happiest and most highly wrought that comedy, in its wide and brilliant range, can boast. Besides the wit and ingenuity of this play, there is a genial spirit of frankness and generosity about it, that relieves the heart as well as clears the lungs. It professes a faith in the natural goodness, as well as habitual depravity of human nature. While it strips off the mask of hypocrisy, it inspires a confidence between man and man. As often as it is acted, it must serve to clear the air of that low, creeping, pestilent fog of cant and mysticism, which threatens to confound every native impulse, or honest conviction, in the nauseous belief of a perpetual lie, and the laudable profession of systematic hypocrisy.—The character of Lady Teazle is not well made out by the author; nor has it been well represented on the stage since the time of Miss Farren.—The Rivals is a play of even more action and incident, but of less wit and satire than the School for Scandal. It is as good as a novel in the reading, and has the broadest and most palpable effect on the stage. If Joseph Surface and Charles have a smack of Tom Jones and Blifil in their moral constitution, Sir Anthony Absolute and Mrs. Malaprop remind us of honest Matthew Bramble and his sister Tabitha, in their tempers and dialect. Acres is a distant descendant of Sir Andrew Ague-cheek. It must be confessed of this author, as Falstaff says of some one, that ‘he had damnable iteration in him!’ The Duenna is a perfect work of art. It has the utmost sweetness and point. The plot, the characters, the dialogue, are all complete in themselves, and they are all his own; and the songs are the best that ever were written, except those in the Beggar’s Opera. They have a joyous spirit of intoxication in them, and a strain of the most melting tenderness. Compare the softness of that beginning,

‘Had I heart for falsehood framed,’

with the spirited defiance to Fortune in the lines,

‘Half thy malice youth could bear,
And the rest a bumper drown.’

It would have been too much for the author of these elegant and classic productions not to have had some drawbacks on his felicity and fame. But even the applause of nations and the favour of princes cannot always be enjoyed with impunity.—Sheridan was not only an excellent dramatic writer, but a first-rate parliamentary speaker. His characteristics as an orator were manly, unperverted good sense, and keen irony. Wit, which has been thought a two-edged weapon, was by him always employed on the same side of the question—I think, on the right one. His set and more laboured speeches, as that on the Begum’s affairs, were proportionably abortive and unimpressive: but no one was equal to him in replying, on the spur of the moment, to pompous absurdity, and unravelling the web of flimsy sophistry. He was the last accomplished debater of the House of Commons.—His character will, however, soon be drawn by one who has all the ability, and every inclination to do him justice; who knows how to bestow praise and to deserve it; by one who is himself an ornament of private and of public life; a satirist, beloved by his friends; a wit and a patriot to-boot; a poet, and an honest man.

Macklin’s Man of the World has one powerfully written character, that of Sir Pertinax Macsycophant, but it required Cooke’s acting to make it thoroughly effectual.

Mr. Holcroft, in his Road to Ruin, set the example of that style of comedy, in which the _slang_ phrases of jockey-noblemen and the humours of the four-in-hand club are blended with the romantic sentiments of distressed damsels and philosophic waiting-maids, and in which he has been imitated by the most successful of our living writers, unless we make a separate class for the school of Cumberland, who was almost entirely devoted to the _comédie larmoyante_, and who, passing from the light, volatile spirit of his West-Indian to the mawkish sensibility of the Wheel of Fortune, linked the Muse of English comedy to the genius of German tragedy, where she has since remained, like Christabel fallen asleep in the Witch’s arms, and where I shall leave her, as I have not the poet’s privilege to break the spell.

There are two other writers whom I have omitted to mention, but not forgotten: they are our two immortal farce-writers, the authors of the Mayor of Garratt and the Agreeable Surprise. If Foote has been called our English Aristophanes, O’Keeffe might well be called our English Moliere. The scale of the modern writer was smaller, but the spirit is the same. In light, careless laughter, and pleasant exaggerations of the humorous, we have had no one equal to him. There is no labour or contrivance in his scenes, but the drollery of his subject seems to strike irresistibly upon his fancy, and run away with his discretion as it does with ours. His Cowslip and Lingo are Touchstone and Audrey revived. He is himself a Modern Antique. His fancy has all the quaintness and extravagance of the old writers, with the ease and lightness which the moderns arrogate to themselves. All his pieces are delightful, but the Agreeable Surprise is the most so. There are in this some of the most felicitous blunders in situation and character that can be conceived; and in Lingo’s superb replication, ‘A scholar! I was a master of scholars,’ he has hit the height of the ridiculous. Foote had more dry, sarcastic humour, and more knowledge of the world. His farces are bitter satires, more or less personal, as it happened. Mother Cole, in the Minor, and Mr. Smirk the Auctioneer, in Taste, with their coadjutors, are rich cut-and-come-again, ‘pleasant, though wrong.’ But the Mayor of Garratt is his _magnum opus_ in this line. Some comedies are long farces: this farce is a comedy in little. It is also one of the best acted farces that we have. The acting of Dowton and Russell, in Major Sturgeon and Jerry Sneak, cannot be too much praised: Foote himself would have been satisfied with it. The strut, the bluster, the hollow swaggering, and turkey-cock swell of the Major; and Jerry’s meekness, meanness, folly, good-nature, and hen-pecked air, are assuredly done to the life. The latter character is even better than the former, which is saying a bold word. Dowton’s art is only an imitation of art, of an affected or assumed character; but in Russell’s Jerry you see the very soul of nature, in a fellow that is ‘pigeon-livered and lacks gall,’ laid open and anatomized. You can see that his heart is no bigger than a pin, and his head as soft as a pippin. His whole aspect is chilled and frightened, as if he had been dipped in a pond; and yet he looks as if he would like to be snug and comfortable, if he durst. He smiles as if he would be friends with you upon any terms; and the tears come in his eyes because you will not let him. The tones of his voice are prophetic as the cuckoo’s under-song. His words are made of water-gruel. The scene in which he tries to make a confidant of the Major is great; and his song of ‘Robinson Crusoe’ as melancholy as the island itself. The reconciliation-scene with his wife, and his exclamation over her, ‘to think that I should make my Molly _veep_!’ are pathetic, if the last stage of human infirmity is so. This farce appears to me to be both moral and entertaining; yet it does not take. It is considered as an unjust satire on the city, and the country at large; and there is a very frequent repetition of the word ‘nonsense’ in the house, during the performance. Mr. Dowton was even hissed, either from the upper boxes or gallery, in his speech recounting the marching of his corps ‘from Brentford to Ealing, and from Ealing to Acton;’ and several persons in the pit, who thought the whole _low_, were for going out. This shows well for the progress of civilization. I suppose the manners described in the Mayor of Garratt have, in the last forty years, become obsolete, and the characters ideal: we have no longer either hen-pecked or brutal husbands, or domineering wives; the Miss Molly Jollops no longer wed Jerry Sneaks, or admire the brave Major Sturgeons on the other side of Temple-bar; all our soldiers have become heroes, and our magistrates respectable, and the farce of life is o’er.

One more name, and I have done. It is that of Peter Pindar. The historian of Sir Joseph Banks and the Emperor of Morocco, of the Pilgrims and the Peas, of the Royal Academy, and of Mr. Whitbread’s brewing-vat, the bard in whom the nation and the king delighted, is old and blind, but still merry and wise:—remembering how he has made the world laugh in his time, and not repenting of the mirth he has given; with an involuntary smile lighted up at the mad pranks of his Muse, and the lucky hits of his pen—‘faint picture of those flashes of his spirit, that were wont to set the table in a roar;’ like his own Expiring Taper, bright and fitful to the last; tagging a rhyme or conning his own epitaph; and waiting for the last summons, GRATEFUL and CONTENTED![27]

I have thus gone through the history of that part of our literature, which I had proposed to myself to treat of. I have only to add, by way of explanation, that in some few parts I had anticipated myself in fugitive or periodical publications; and I thought it better to repeat what I had already stated to the best of my ability, than alter it for the worse. These parts bear, however, a very small proportion to the whole; and I have used such diligence and care as I could, in adding to them whatever appeared necessary to complete the general view of the subject, or make it (as far as lay in my power) interesting to others.

End of LECTURES ON THE ENGLISH COMIC WRITERS

A VIEW OF THE ENGLISH STAGE
OR
A SERIES OF DRAMATIC CRITICISMS

BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE

Published in one 8vo volume in 1818 with the following title-page: ‘A View of the English Stage; or, a Series of Dramatic Criticisms. By William Hazlitt. “For I am nothing if not critical.” London: Printed for Robert Stodart, 81, Strand; Anderson and Chase, 40, West Smithfield; and Bell and Bradfute, Edinburgh. 1818.’ The volume was printed by B. M’Millan, Bow Street, Covent Garden. The work was re-issued in 1821 with a fresh half-title, ‘Dramatic Criticisms,’ and a fresh title-page bearing the imprint: ‘London: John Warren, Old Bond-Street, MDCCCXXI.’ Selections from the volume have been made and published along with other dramatic criticisms of Hazlitt’s, but the entire work has never been republished. See the notes at the end of this volume for particulars as to these volumes of selections. It is sufficient to state here that the so-called ‘second edition,’ published by the author’s son in 1851 under the title of ‘Criticisms and Dramatic Essays, of the English Stage,’ contains only a selection from the essays published in _A View of the English Stage_. The present edition is reprinted from that of 1818, with the addition of a Table of Contents. For the sake of convenience the name of the journal from which the essay is taken and the date of the journal are printed at the beginning of each essay. Hazlitt himself gave the dates (very inaccurately), but not the names of the journals. In some cases he gave the name of the theatre at the head of an essay.

CONTENTS

PAGE
Preface 173
Mr. Kean’s Shylock 179
Mr. Kean’s Richard 180
Mr. Kean’s Hamlet 185
Mr. Kean’s Othello 189
Mr. Kean’s Iago 190
Antony and Cleopatra 190
Artaxerxes 192
The Beggar’s Opera 193
Richard Coeur de Lion 195
Didone Abandonnata 196
Miss O’Neill’s Juliet 198
Mr. Kean’s Richard 200
Mr. Kean’s Macbeth 204
Mr. Kean’s Romeo 208
Mr. Kean’s Iago 211
Mr. Kean’s Iago (_concluded_) 215
Mr. Kean’s Richard II. 221
The Unknown Guest 224
Mr. Kean’s Zanga 227
Mr. Bannister’s Farewell 229
Comus 230
Mr. Kean’s Leon 233
The Tempest 234
My Wife! What Wife? 237
Mr. Harley’s Fidget 239
Living in London 242
The King’s Proxy 243
The Maid and the Magpie 244
The Hypocrite 245
Mr. Edwards’s Richard III. 247
Lovers’ Vows 249
The School for Scandal 250
Mrs. Alsop’s Rosalind 252
John Du Bart 253
The Beggar’s Opera 254
Miss O’Neill’s Elwina 256
Where to find a Friend 258
Miss O’Neill’s Belvidera 261
The Merchant of Bruges 264
Smiles and Tears 266
George Barnwell 268
A New Way to Pay Old Debts 272
The Busy Body 270
The Midsummer Night’s Dream 274
Love for Love 278
The Anglade Family 279
Measure for Measure 281
Mr. Kean’s Sir Giles Overreach 284
The Recruiting Officer 285
The Fair Penitent 287
The Duke of Milan 289
Miss O’Neill’s Lady Teazle 291
Mr. Kean 292
Mr. Kean’s Shylock 294
The Oratorios 296
Richard III. 298
Romeo and Juliet 300
Mr. Kemble’s Sir Giles Overreach 302
Bertram 304
Adelaide, or the Emigrants 308
Every Man in his Humour 310
Mrs. Siddons 312
New English Opera House 314
The Jealous Wife 316
The Man of the World 318
Miss Merry’s Mandane 320
Exit by Mistake 321
The Italian Opera 324
Old Customs 327
My Landlady’s Night-Gown 328
Castle of Andalusia 329
Two Words 330
The Wonder 332
The Distressed Mother 334
Miss Boyle’s Rosalind 336
Mr. Macready’s Othello 338
Theatrical Debuts 341
Mr. Kemble’s Cato 342
The Iron Chest 342
Mr. Kemble’s King John 345
Coriolanus 347
The Man of the World 350
Jane Shore 352
The Humorous Lieutenant 353
Two New Ballets 353
Mr. Booth’s Duke of Gloster 354
Mr. Booth’s Iago 354
Mr. Booth’s Richard 357
Double Gallant 359
Don Juan 362
The Conquest of Taranto 366
The Touch-Stone 368
The Libertine 370
Barbarossa 372
Mrs. Siddons’s Lady Macbeth 373
Mr. Maywood’s Shylock 374
Mr. Kemble’s Retirement 374