No More Learning

Each of the others exemplifies some
vice or weakness with that consistent exaggeration which provokes
laughter, because, on the stage, it seems true to life. Even more
notable is Sheridan's classical sense of form and the skill with
which he constructed his plot. The characters do not fall, by
accident, into readymade situations, but control the plot through-
out. It was part of Charles's nature to sell his family portraits
and of Lady Teazle's to accept the invitation to visit Joseph. The
weakness of English comedy had always been a division of interest
a
between plot and underplot, and Sheridan's earlier work was by
no means free from this defect. But, though The School for
Scandal deals with the crisis of not less than four lives, their
destinies cross one another in the culminating point. It is this
intersection of interests which gives an almost unparalleled
dramatic effect to the two great scenes. In the portrait scene,
Joseph and the Teazles are present only by implication ; in the
screen scene, all four meet at what the spectators realise at once
as one of the important moments of their lives.
Yet, The School for Scandal is not one of the world's best
comedies: it lacks inspiration. As has been shown, the English
theatre had become the mirror of metropolitan wit and gentility.
Its public expected polite distraction and were ready to laugh,
to weep or to be amused ; but their drawingroom culture and
coffeehouse experiences denied them interest in the puzzles and
anomalies of human nature, out of which the greatest comedies
are made. Hence, those who wrote for the stage were almost
forced to revive the traditional situations and characters of old
comedy, or, failing that, to give their colourless plays some topical
or temporary interest. Goldsmith and Sheridan succeeded well
with this dead material, because the one enlivened it with humour
and the other with wit. Even in The School for Scandal, the
lack of true insight is not hard to detect; and, two years and a
half later, The Critic (29 October 1779) showed that its author
had nothing fresh to say concerning life.
It was now three years since Sheridan had succeeded Garrick
as manager of Drury lane and had been exposed to the paper


## p. 272 (#294) ############################################

272
[CH.
The Georgian Drama
>
warfare which, for over half a century, had been bickering in
the narrow theatrical world? . It is not surprising that, in an
atmosphere of lampoons and acrid criticisms, he should turn his
gift of dramatic caricature against his foes. Just as Buckingham
had ridiculed actors in The Rehearsal, Sheridan produced on
the stage a satire against the poetasters and intriguing critics who
ranged themselves on the side of sentimental drama. He no
longer attempted to create characters whose actions should clash
and interweave, till a situation revealed each in his true light.
He did, indeed, begin by depicting the world of theatrical vanity
and self-interest. We have a glimpse of a married couple whose
home life is poisoned by stage-mania; two crusted literary aspirants,
full of that civilised malignity which Sheridan knew well how to
portray, and, above all, Puff, the advertising adventurer, a true
stage freak, devoid of reality, whose newly-written play the other
characters adjourn to see rehearsed. The dialogue is as sparkling
as ever, and the characters, whether or no they are based on
contemporarypersonalities, have just that touch of humorsome
exaggeration of which Sheridan was master. But the second act,
instead of developing a plot, changes into a parody. Puff's tragedy,
The Spanish Armada, is a pseudo-historical drama, and the spec-
tators are entertained with a caricature of stage-managership and
dramatic effect. A parody cannot rank as literature save when,
besides a certain felicity of expression, the reader is able to
recognise, not only the peculiarities, but the essence and spirit of
what is being travestied; and it cannot be denied that the brilliant
inanities, for which this burlesque has been often praised? , are
founded on the real practices of Georgian tragedy. Nor is the
more personal satire of the first act relinquished. Besides a
travesty of pedantic devices, such as exposition, peripety, climax,
conversion and stichomythia, Dangle, Sneer and Puff discuss the
performance, and their comments are an admirable caricature on
the demi-monde of theatrical art.
2
When Sheridan produced The Critic, he was attacking a cause
which had already won the day. Sentimental drama had been
patronised by the most cultured circle in polite society. Since 1750,
Mrs Montagu's salon had been teaching London that ladies could
i See bibliography, under Theatrical Pamphlets.
2 E. g. , Sir Fretful Plagiary is generally recognised to be a caricature of Richard
Cumberland.
3 See Sichel, Life of Sheridan, vol. 1, pp. 602 f.


## p. 273 (#295) ############################################

XII]
Hannah More
273
1
cultivate their intellect, without sacrificing their social charm, and
a series of talented bluestockings! were portraying drawingroom
culture in novels and plays. Mrs Cowley was already known to
the public; but the theatre did not feel the full influence of the
movement till Hannah More’s Percy packed Covent garden at a time
when The School for Scandal was the attraction of Drury lane.
Hannah More was a woman of strong character, masculine intellect
and passions, which, thwarted in life, were almost bound to find
expression in literature. She had already composed The Inflexible
Captive, a classical drama inspired by Addison's Cato and Havard's
Regulus, but showing a complete ignorance of the stage, in which
the sentimental passions of son, daughter and lover are called into
play by the captive Regulus's return to Rome. Through five acts,
the hero resists the claims of state and family with dignified and
aphoristic declamation, and even the authoress herself admitted
that the play was defective in action. Three years later, Hannah
More had come into contact with the leading humorists, courtiers
and actors of London ; and nothing proves more vividly the fasci-
nation of the Georgian theatre than that she should have chosen
this as a mouthpiece for her ideas. Percy is a manifesto, and
attempts to show how the ethics of refined society may be studied
through the ensanguined colours of tragedy. Hannah More trans-
lated into rather intense drama the discussions which interested her
own day : what duty a woman owes to her father, her husband and
her own good name; how a lover should act towards a woman in
distress and towards his own heart; the obligation of a husband
to win his wife's affection and his right to guard her fidelity,
though it cost both of them their lives; the regard for decorum
which a person of quality 'should observe, even in moments of high
emotion. Such ideas had become too subtle for the conventional
setting of a Roman tragedy? , and Mason's Caractacus, despite the
beauty of Mrs Hartley (as Evelina), had failed only the year before.
Hannah More was well in touch with the growing taste for romanti-
cism and was original enough to fill her problem play with the
chivalry and architecture of the Middle Age. Percy is based on a
a
3
i See post, chap. xv.
2 Cf. Walpole, on a similar occasion : ‘The Siege of Aquileia, of which you ask,
pleased less than Mr Home's other plays. In my own opinion Douglas far exceeds
both the other. Mr Home seems to have a beautiful talent for painting genuine
nature and the manners of his country. There was so little of nature in the manners
of both Greeks and Romans, that I do not wonder at his success being less brilliant
when he tried those subjects. ' To Sir D. Dalrymple, 4 April 1760.
3 See ante, vol. x, chap. X.
E. L, XL.
18
CH. XII.


## p. 274 (#296) ############################################

274
The Georgian Drama [CH.
twelfth century story of Eudes de Faiel, which Belloy (the author
of Le Siège de Calais) had already dramatised; but the horrible
episode of Raoul de Coucy's heart was, of course, omitted. The
action takes place among oldfashioned English heroes and shows
how Elwina, betrothed to Percy from her childhood, has wed earl
Raby at her father's behest, but cannot return his love. Just as the
earl's suspicions are being aroused at this coldness, Percy returns
with glory from the crusades and hastens to his lady, not knowing
that she is married. The spectators watch the sentimental lover as
he is gradually trapped by the jealous husband, while the heroine
is torn between duty to her marriage vow and her unconquerable
passion for the suitor of her youth. In the end, Elwina goes mad
and drinks poison, while Raby slays Percy, and then, learning that
his wife was chaste, kills himself. Artificial and insipid as the play
now seems, its combination of emotion, action and theory was
considered a revelation. Besides the most ample recognition in
London, the drama was acted in Vienna, and the authoress was
elected a member of the Paris and Rouen academies.
Percy shows what havoc a virtuous man may work, if he is
passion's slave. In 1779, Hannah More produced The Fatal False-
hood, to prove how love, in a unscrupulous heart, may lead to even
more appalling crimes. After this effort, she abandoned the
theatre and devoted her pen to the propagation of religion.
Never was there an atmosphere less genial to the tragic muse.
A few attempts were made at classical imitations, such as Delap's
Royal Suppliants (1781), founded on Euripides's Heraclidae and
Philodamus (1782), by Dr Bentley's son, based on a passage in
Cicero's In Verrem. There were some Shakespearean revivals,
such as Kemble's alterations of Coriolanus and The Tempest, both
in 1789, and some genuine attempts at medieval tragedy, in
Hannah More's manner, of which the best were Jephson's Count
of Narbonne (1781) and Joanna Baillie's De Montfort (1800).
These efforts, which read like academic exercises, were the more
coldly received, because the age could see its own thoughts and
manners reflected, almost every night, in an endless succession of
new comedies.
Few comedies of this group attracted so much attention as Mrs
Hannah Cowley's. In 1776, she had produced the rather sentimental
The Runaway, in which Emily,a fugitive from a distasteful marriage,
a
takes refuge in the Hargraves's house and is unscrupulously lured
away from this retreat because her charms bid fair to seduce


## p. 275 (#297) ############################################

XII]
Mrs Cowley
The Heiress
275
young Hargrave from his promised marriage with a wealthy old
maid. Early in the eighties, Mrs Cowley changed to the comedy
of humour and episode. In The Belle's Stratagem (1780), Laetitia
Hardy, to be sure of winning the affections of her betrothed, first
disgusts him by pretending to be a hoyden and then, while disguised
at a masquerade, conquers his heart by her real charms. In A Bold
Stroke for a Husband (1783), Olivia is plagued by her father's desire
to see her married ; so, she adopts the expedient of scandalising
all suitors, till Don Julio appears and she captures him by a
series of complicated deceptions. Both compositions are akin to
the classical school in that they give a laughable and optimistic
turn to the domestic difficulties of youth ; but neither, in the true
spirit of old comedy, creates humour out of the clash or eccentricity
of character.
tu
The most remarkable playwright of this decade is general
Burgoyne. The author of The Maid of the Oaks, on returning
from America, had resumed his former avocation, and, after
writing an opera in 1780, produced, in 1786, The Heiress, which
won a fortune and was preferred by some critics to The School
for Scandal. The play, which was partly founded on Diderot's
Père de Famille and on Mrs Lennox's The Sisters (1679), has the
unusual merit of combining the features of a comedy of manners
with those of a comedy of pathos. In the first half, differences of
breeding and caste are sketched with the precision of genuine
comedy. The native grace and suavity of hereditary gentry are
skilfully portrayed, especially in the scene where Clifford woos the
charming Lady Emily, his friend Lord Gayville's sister, over a game
of chess" ; while the affectations of the vulgar rich are satirised in
the scenes where old Alscrip suffers the inconveniences of fashion
and his daughter expatiates insufferably on her imagined conquests
in the polite world. The two households afford a pleasing study in
social contrasts, which reach their climax when Lady Emily and
Miss Alscrip are brought together; and the scene shifts naturally
from one side to the other, since Lord Gayville is to marry Miss
Alscrip for her money. The pathetic interest centres in Miss Alton.
Lord Gayville falls in love with Miss Alton in the streets, does not
know who she is, traces her to her obscure lodging, like Belcour
in The West Indian, and presses his courtship so eagerly that, to
escape persecution, she enters service as Miss Alscrip's companion.
It is easy to foresee what humiliations her selfrespect will suffer
1 Act 11, sc. 1.
18-2


## p. 276 (#298) ############################################

276 The Georgian Drama [CH.
among these purseproud plebeians, until she is unexpectedly
discovered to be Clifford's long-lost sister, and the detection of a
flaw in a will transfers the Alscrip fortune to her hands. Though
infinitely inferior to Sheridan's masterpiece in construction and
brilliance of dialogue, The Heiress exercised a stronger influence.
It demonstrated how effectively characters could be contrasted by
grouping them in two opposing parties; it introduced a new type
of snob, not only in the person of old Alscrip but in the two
cleverly conceived stage characters, Mr and Mrs Blandish, who
ingratiate themselves into both circles by abject flattery; it showed
what use could be made of the odious female as a foil to the
virtues of the heroine whom she scorns, and it made popular an
atmosphere of legal chicanery, forged wills and incriminating
documents, which, henceforth, was taken over by many subsequent
plays. Though Burgoyne found many imitators of his technique,
The Heiress is one of the last productions of the eighteenth century
that reflected new lights on human nature, thus retaining the
spirit of comedy.
Yet another change was now coming over the British theatre.
The ideas of Condorcet, William Godwin and Tom Paine' were in
the air, and, when the public went to the playhouse, if they did
not wish to be amused by operas and pantomimes, they were anxious
to see these new enthusiasms on the stage. Themes were now
looked for such as the rights of man, the dignity of humble life,
the triumph of nature over artificial civilisation, the poetry of
the country and other tenets of the growing romantic movement.
Had these notions really stirred all classes, the conflict between
old and new might, conceivably, have inspired a new and vigorous
series of comedies. But the theatregoing public never thought of
questioning the established order of the eighteenth century. These
new ideas were, for them, an abstract speculation, quite distinct
from their own traditions and conventionalities. Plays which now
found favour necessarily ceased to be comedies and became either
dramatised pamphlets or daydreams of the world set right. A
public of this sort offered easy opportunities to any sentimentalist
familiar with the stage ; and, during the last twenty years of the
century, Holcroft, Mrs Inchbald, Colman the younger and Morton
made reputations by adapting to the technique of the theatre the
unsubstantial Utopias of everyday life.
1 L'Esquisse d'un tableau historique des progrès de l'esprit humain (1793 ? ); Enquiry
concerning Political Justice (1791); The Rights of Man (1791); see Brailsford, H. N. ,
Shelley, Godwin and their Circle (1913).


## p. 277 (#299) ############################################

XI]
Holcroft
277
>
Holcroft, a dauntless fellow worker with Godwin and Paine,
had begun, as early as 1778', to turn to account his talent for
letters and his experience as prompter and strolling player ;
but it was not till 1792 that he produced, at Covent garden, The
Road to Ruin. The play shows how even business men, such as
the banker Mr Dornton and his head clerk Mr Sulky, conceal
human hearts beneath their dry exteriors, and that even spend-
thrifts, such as Dornton's son Harry, have a generous sense of
duty despite their recklessness. When Harry's extravagance, at
last, causes a run on his father's bank, the youth resolves to save
the house by espousing the wealthy Mrs Warren, though really in
love with her daughter. One half of the action takes place in the
luxurious mansion of the odious widow, satirising her vicious circle,
especially Goldfinch, the brainless man of fashion, with his endless
tag 'that's your sort,' who is eager for the widow's wealth in order
to defray his debts. In the end, the bank is saved by the staunch
loyalty of Sulky; Harry, sobered by his experience, is free to
marry the girl of his choice, and Mrs Warren is disinherited
by the discovery of a new will. The Road to Ruin is Holcroft's
least inartistic success; but The Deserted Daughter is a more
striking indication of the tendency of the theatre. Taking a hint
from Cumberland's The Brothers, he attempted to show how bad
men may become good. Mordent neglects his dutiful wife, hates
the world, plunges into debt and consorts with two dishonest
lawyers, Item and Grime, who rob him. All this misery is due to
the consciousness that he has a natural daughter, Joanna, whom
he is afraid to own publicly. The play shows how Mordent passes
from bad to worse, till he is on the brink of moral and financial
ruin. But, just at the climax, Grime and Item are detected by
means of an intercepted document; Joanna is married to the
generous and wealthy young Cheveril; her relationship with
Mordent is then made public ; and the father, now relieved of his
secret, is reconciled to his wife. The Deserted Daughter abounds
in plagiarisms and artificialities. Mrs Sarsnet is the shadow of
Mrs Malaprop; Joanna's physiognomical intuitions are copied
from Clarissa. Item's despair at the loss of the telltale document
is taken from L'Avare or Aulularia ; Donald, the faithful Scottish
servant, who talks unintelligible English, is the one attempt at
humour. Yet, the play manages, in a melodramatic form, to portray
the doctrines of the Godwin circle. Cumberland had shown, more
1 Crisis at Drury lane. His first comedy was Duplicity, at Covent garden, in 1781.
See, also, post, chap. XIII,
a


## p. 278 (#300) ############################################

278 The Georgian Drama [ch.
than twenty years earlier, how far demoralisation is due to the
burden of an overgrown society. Holcroft goes further; he
champions the new belief in the perfectibility of man, and pictures
how the soul springs up erect the moment that the burden is
removed. Thus, in spite of its literary demerits, The Deserted
Daughter is worth remembering, especially as Mrs Inchbald and
Colman the younger had, also, chosen this doctrine as the theme
of their most important work.
Elizabeth Sampson had been attracted to London by the
glamour of the theatre, and, in London, she married the actor
Inchbald. After she had spent several years in touring, The Mogul
Tale was accepted for the stage, in 1784, and she established her
reputation with I'll tell you What, at the Hay (the old Haymarket
theatre), in 1785. The play is a model of construction, and, though
the characters are hardly more than stage figures, the plot com-
bines the humour of classical comedy with the moralising of the
newer school. Mrs Inch bald never fulfilled the promise of this early
work; but she understood the taste of the theatrical public and, in
her next play, Such Things Are (1787), showed how successfully she
could condense fashionable ideas into dramatic situations. At this
time, John Howard's agitation for prison reform was a common topic
of discussion, and harmonised well with popular faith in human
goodness; but polite audiences at Covent garden would hardly have
tolerated so inelegant a subject as gaol-life, if Mrs Inchbald had
not also flattered the growing romantic taste for unreality by placing
the scene in Sumatra. The central character, Haswell, as the
good Samaritan among the sultan's prisoners, rouses the nobler
sentiments latent within them, and discovers devotion and heroism
in the deepest dungeons. The usual contrast to these grim scenes
is provided by the English inhabitants of the island, especially by
Sir Luke Tremor, who is always quarrelling with his wife, and by
Twineall, whose attempts at social success are a satire on Lord
Chesterfield's principles! . To put the seal on the sentimentality of
the play, the sultan, in the end, proves to be a Christian, and one
of the prisoners is discovered to be the wife whom he lost fifteen
years before. Mrs Inchbald had a distinct gift for portraying the
psychology of marriage, and, though so intricate and elusive a
theme is best suited to the more leisurely treatment of the novel,
she endeavoured, again and again, to compress fine-spun material
i Chesterfield's Letters had already been satirised with such success in The Cozeners
at the Hay, in 1774, that two editions of the play appeared after Foote's death in 1778.


## p. 279 (#301) ############################################

XII] Mrs Inchbald Colman the Younger 279
into one or other of her comedies. Wives as they Were (1797), a
study of a pleasure-loving girl in high society, whose nobler qualities
are gradually developed by the influence of her father in disguise,
though quite as successful as her other comedies", is a wholly
inadequate treatment of its theme when compared with the
powerful novel' into which it was afterwards elaborated. The most
typical of her domestic plays, Every one has his Fault (1793),
exhibits a series of ill-assorted or ill-judged marriages, from the
case of Lady Eleanor and Irwin, founded on Amelia, down to that
of the Placids, who quarrel incessantly, like the Dove ménage in
The Brothers. While showing how domestic unhappiness embitters
or even depraves each character, Mrs Inchbald rises to legitimate
comedy, and almost reaches a tragic note in the scene where Irwin
waylays and robs Lord Norland, his unforgiving father-in-law. But,
the public expected a happy issue out of all these afflictions ; so,
Mrs Inch bald invents a number of incidents which have not any
logical connection with either the plot or the characters, but which
brought tears into the eyes of her sentimental generation? It
is worth noticing that the growing desire for glimpses of a less
conventional and prosaic life influenced even Mrs Inchbald. In
To Marry or not to Marry, Sir Oswin's plans to wed the
beautiful but mysterious Hester, of unknown origin, are deranged
by the appearance of his mortal foe, the exile Lavensforth. The
fugitive, attended by his faithful black servant, is lurking in the
neighbourhood, bent on murder. Yet, when it transpires that
the two enemies are father and lover of the same girl, the vendetta
evaporates in a drawingroom reconciliation.
George Colman, son of the dramatist and theatre-manager of
the same name, displayed more ingenuity in giving a romantic
atmosphere to his conventional ideas. He had already produced
two musical comedies at the Hayt before, in 1787, he made his name
at that theatre with Inkle and Yarico. Inkle, the respectable,
citybred youth, is conveying his betrothed Narcissa back to her
father, the wealthy governor of Barbadoes. On the voyage, he
and his comic attendant Trudge are accidentally left on an island
where they are saved from cannibals by two native women, with
1 It had a run of twenty-four nights.
A Simple Story, see post, chap. XIII of the present volume.
3 E. g. , act v, sc. 1: Norland, while still unreconciled to his daughter, has adopted
her lost son. The small boy appears on the stage and intuitively recognises his
mother.
* Two to One (1784) and Turk and no Turk (1785).


## p. 280 (#302) ############################################

280 The Georgian Drama [CH.
تا
whom they severally fall in love. Eventually, they reach Barbadoes,
accompanied by their savage preservers. Inkle is now faced with
the alternative of losing his profitable match with Narcissa or of
abandoning the faithful Yarico, and, to guide him in this ethical
problem, he has only the maxims of Threadneedle street? Thus,
the play teaches that a sound commercial training, which commands
respect in London town, may lamentably fail its adept in the
larger and more varied world outside, and, in the last two acts,
Inkle is amply humiliated because of his signal ingratitude to his
benefactress. To inculcate this lesson, Colman had worked one of
Sizele's Addison's Spectators? into a pleasing opera, not without touches
? ,
of romantic imagination. Yarico's appeal to Inkle
Come, come, let's go. I always feared these cities. Let's fly and seek the
woods; and there we'll wander hand in hand together. No care shall vex us
then. We'll let the day glide by in idleness; and you shall sit in the shade
and watch the sunbeams playing on the brook, while I sing the song that
pleases you
almost suggests Paul et Virginie, and must have sounded like
music from a strange world to an English eighteenth century
audience. Most of Colman's operas develop even more fanciful
situations, though he softened their improbability by placing his
scenes in wild and romantic periods such as the wars of the Roses",
the Hundred Years' war“, and the Moorish wars in Spain, or in an
old English mansion of the time of Charles 18. In every case, the
chief characters have the sentimental gentility which spectators
admired and they are attended by servants whose uncouth manners
and doglike fidelity do duty for humour. Such poverty of inspiration
became only too apparent when Colman discarded picturesque
settings and produced plays of modern life. The Heir at Law
(1797) presents, indeed, in Pangloss, the stage pedant, compounded
of servility, avarice and scholasticism, a character worthy of old
comedy, and John Bull, in Job Thornberry, a sentimental type
which, nevertheless, still lives. Colman's other attempts at comedy
are not worth disinterring.
Steelc!
Thomas Morton, who was first known to the public by
Columbus (1792), copied from Marmontel's Les Incas, and who first
achieved success with The Way to get Married (1796)”, modelled
1 Act II, sc. 3.
2 Taken by Addisod from Ligon's History of Barbadoes.
3 Battle of Hexham (1789).
Surrender of Calais (1791).
• The Mountaineers (1793). The plot is borrowed from Don Quixote.
6 The Iron Chest (1796). (Same theme as the novel Caleb Williams. )
7 It had a run of forty-one nights.


## p. 281 (#303) ############################################

XII]
Morton
The Dramatist
281
his plays on the accepted type. But, amid all the eighteenth
century sentiment and stage claptrap of incriminating documents,
mistaken identities and sudden recognitions, he has flashes of
whimsicality which carry the reader forward to early Victorian
humour. In The Way to get Married, Tangent first meets Julia
(his destined bride) when, in a fit of high spirits, he has girded
himself with an apron and jumped behind the counter, to serve
Alspice's customers. When Miss Sapless's will is read, her dis-
appointed relatives learn that Caustic is appointed trustee of
the fortune to be bestowed on any young woman about to be
married who may please this misogynist. Dick Dashall is not an
aristocratic debauchee but a city speculator, who takes his first
clerk out hunting and arranges his business deals 'when the hounds
are at fault? '! In A Cure for the Heartache (1797), the two
Rapids, father and son, engaged in the tailoring business, rouse
genuine laughter by their erratic attempts to play the gentle-
In Speed the Plough dame Ashfield's frequent allusions to
Mrs Grundy? have made that name proverbial. Even in The
School of Reform (1805), Lord Avondale's sordid accomplice Tyke
combines, with his innate felony, eccentricity and dry humour.
man.
Holcroft, Mrs Inchbald, Colman the younger and Morton by no
means monopolised the attention of playgoers. They had to com-
pete with innumerable farces, pantomimes and burlettas from the
pens of Reynolds, O'Keeffe, Dibdin, Vaughan, Macnally, Cobb,
Hoare and with many French and German adaptations, especially
from Kotzebue. In 1789, Reynolds, to some extent, reverted to
the examples of the classical school in The Dramatist. The plot
is extravagantly impossible ; but the minor characters are well
conceived. Lord Scratch, the newly-made peer, intoxicated by his
unaccustomed position ; Ennui, who entertains the audience by
boring the other characters and, incidentally, satirises the man of
fashion by imitating his ways and, above all, Vapid, the dramatist,
who disconcerts the company by his unforeseen and inopportune
inspirations, all belong to legitimate comedy. O'Keeffe achieved
the same quality of merit with Wild Oats (1761). The play shows
how young Harry Thunder, in a passing fit of recklessness, runs
away from Portsmouth academy and joins a company of strolling
players. We might have expected an interesting picture of the
vagrant actor's life; but the prejudices of the public confined the
chief action to genteel society. Only the character of Rover, the
1 Act 11, sc. 2.
See, especially, act in, sc. 3.
al
2


## p. 282 (#304) ############################################

282 The Georgian Drama [CH.
irrepressible and impecunious comedian, is conceived in the true
comic spirit. Cumberland, who had really been the first to in-
fluence the closing phase of this period of dramatic history,
continued unceasingly to supply the theatre. His prolific industry
produced nothing more noteworthy than The Jew (1794), a re-
habilitation of that nation, in which Sheva, after a display of
Hebrew frugality, suddenly shows Christian loving-kindness, and
saves Sir Stephen Bertram's family from disunion by an unexpected
act of generosity.
Bad as all these playwrights are, it is surprising that their
work was no poorer. Throughout the period, the men who wrote
for the theatre were gradually finding themselves enslaved to the
demoralising exigencies of stage-carpentry and scenic display.
This influence, at once the effect and the cause of dramatic
decadence, began to appear as early as 1656 in The Siege of
Rhodes, and, when Jeremy Collier shamed the theatre out of its
chief source of amusement, managers availed themselves of 'foreign
monsters, such as French dancers and posture-makers, in order to
retain the patronage of the old school. Henceforth, the stage
never recovered its inspired simplicity. By the second half of the
eighteenth century, spectacles were one of the chief attractions of
the theatre. In 1761, Walpole describes how Garrick exhibited
the coronation with a real bonfire and a real mob, while Rich was
about to surpass this display by introducing a dinner for the
knights of the Bath and for the barons of the Cinque ports? In
1772, the English Roscius was represented on the title-page of a
pamphlet treading on the works of Shakespeare, with the subjoined
motto :
Behold the Muses Roscins sue in vain,
Tailors and carpenters usurp the reigna;
and, in 1776, Colman, at the request of Sheridan, produced New
Brooms, an ironical commendation of the opera's popularity. In
1789, stagemanagership was so far an attraction in itself that the
same Colman was content to portray, not the manners of his age,
but Hogarth's print of the Enraged Musician, under the title Ut
Pictura Poesis. In 1791, Cymon, though an execrable play, was
revived and had a run of thirty or forty nights, because the piece
concluded with a pageant of a hundred knights and a repre-
sentation of a tournay. In 1794, Macbeth was staged with a lake
more!
1 Letter to the Countess of Ailesbury 10 Oct. 1761. LP. Toynbee's ed. , vol. v,
>
p. 133.
2 The Theatres. A poetical dissection. By Sir Nicholas Nipclose, Baronet.


## p. 283 (#305) ############################################

XII]
Realism and the Drama
283
of real water. By the end of the century, the theatre-going public
had so far lost the dramatic sense that the audiences of Bristol
and Bath clamoured for the contemptible witches' dance which
Kemble had suppressed in his rendering of Macbeth, and London
society made a fashionable entertainment out of Monk' Lewis's
pantomimic melodramas? and a little boy's: ludicrous appearance
in great tragic rôles.
Such attractions as these had definitely degraded the scope
and province of the theatre. It has already been shown how
many tendencies hastened the perversion of the stage ; how the
thoughtful and studious turned to the novel; how the unpre-
tentious developed a domestic culture of their own; and how the
lovers of variety and magnificence were left to encourage in the
theatre that brilliance and sense of social distinction which have
ever since been one of its attractions. It remains to point out how
deeply realistic scenery vitiated the very spirit of dramatic repre-
sentation. A play is a contrivance for revealing what goes on in
the mind, first by means of mannerisms and costumes, which are
mannerisms to be looked at, and then by words and actions. But,
as the characters of a great play move and speak on the stage, the
spectator follows these indications with something more than im-
personal interest. He is vaguely conscious of his own world of
thought and activity behind the characters, and, all through the
performance, his sympathy or imagination transforms the players
into parables of his philosophy of life“. Even ludicrous types, such
as Bobadill or Lord Foppington, in some sort embody his own sense
of comedy; even the great tragedies of destiny, such as Oedipus
or Lear, in some way symbolise his unrealised daydreams of life
and death. It is in this way that players are the abstract and
brief chronicle of the time. Hence, elaborate scenery need not
hamper the true purpose of the drama, provided only that the
decorations preserve an atmosphere of unreality and leave the
imagination free to interpret the acting. But, as soon as the spirit
of make-believe is killed by realistic staging, the spectator loses
1 1802.
2 See bibliography.
3 W. H. W. Betty's meteoric career began at the age of twelve, at Belfast and
Dublin, in 1803. By 1804, he was established in popular favour at Covent garden and
Drury lane. In 1805, he appeared at both theatres alternately, acting, amongst other
parts, Romeo, Hamlet, Macbeth and Richard the Third. His last appearance as a
boy actor was at Bath in 1808. See bibliography, under Theatrical Pamphlets.
• Cf. Goethe, Shakespeare als Theaterdichter (1826), Genau genommen, so ist nichts
theatralisch, als was für die Augen zugleich symbolisch ist: eine wichtige Handlung,
die auf eine noch wichtigere deutet.


## p. 284 (#306) ############################################

284 The Georgian Drama [CH. XII
touch with himself. He no longer enjoys the play as a wonderful
and impossible crystallisation of his sentiments, nor can he give the
characters the peculiar, imaginative setting which makes them a
part of his mind. His attention is diverted by painted canvas and
welldrilled 'supers,' or, at best, he is forced to leave his own world
outside and to enter into the lives and environment of the dramatis
personae. Innovations of costume rendered this disillusion more
complete. In the days of Quin, the characters appeared in a
conventional dress, incongruous to us because unfamiliar, which
raised the actors above the limitations of actual existence and
made them denizens of the suggestive stage-world. But, when
Garrick played Macbeth in a scarlet and gold military uniform and
dressed Hotspur in a laced frock and Ramillies wig, he was intro-
ducing realism, which destroyed the universality of the characters? ;
so that, after two generations of the new tradition, neither Lamb
nor Hazlitt. could endure to see Shakespeare acted; and Goethe,
at a time when the picture stage had firm hold of Germany,
regarded Shakespeare more as a poet to be read in seclusion than
as a dramatist to be appreciated in the theatre. Nevertheless,
it must not be forgotten that the genius of actors and the
enterprise of managers have still kept alive the attention of
scholars and poets, and this educated interest will one day succeed
in effecting the reunion of literature with stagecraft. But, in the
meanwhile, authors, from the Georgian period onwards, have found
that the drama of universal appeal misses fire amid realistic
accessories, and they have endeavoured to give their audiences
glimpses into the bypaths and artificialities of life, thus usurping
the functions of the novel.
1 Cf. Goethe, Shakespeare als Dichter überhaupt (n. d. ), Niemand hat das materielle
Kostüm mehr verachtet als er; er kennt recht gut das innere Menschenkostüm und
hier gleichen sich alle.
2 I. e. , Regeln filr Schauspieler (1803), S 83, Das Theater ist als ein figurloses Tableau
anzusehen, worin der Schauspieler die Staffage macht.


## p. 285 (#307) ############################################

CHAPTER XIII
THE GROWTH OF THE LATER NOVEL
The contents of the present chapter may seem at first sight,
and that not merely to ill-informed persons, like those of a badly
assorted omnibus-box. Indeed, unless the reader has at once fallen
into the right point of view, the more he knows the more likely he
is to see wrong. Amory, he may say, was born well within the
seventeenth century. Peacock died when only the last third of
the nineteenth had yet to run. Here are two centuries, or nearly
so, to be covered in one chapter. Moreover, the characteristics of
the various novelists to be noticed do not admit, at least in some
cases, of any obvious classification of a serious and scientific kind.
What has John Buncle to do with Belinda, or St Leon with
Gryll Grange?
It is not necessary to be very careful in order to answer these
questions. In the first place, the remarkable longevity and the
peculiar circumstances of the oldest and the youngest members of
the group render mere chronology singularly deceptive. It appears
to be true that the author of John Buncle was born (though the
exact year is not certain) not more than two or three years after
the revolution of 1688: and it is certain that Peacock died in 1866.
But Amory did not publish (though he may have written them
earlier) his Memoirs of Several Ladies till he was nearly sixty-
five, or John Buncle till he was nearly seventy, while Gryll Grange,
though it appeared only six years before its author's death and has
a wonderful absence of glaring Rip-van-Winkleism, is, in general
conception, identical with its author's work of forty years earlier.
And so we at once reduce the almost two hundred years of the
first calculation to a modest sixty or seventy at most.
But there is a good deal more than this. Not only do the
authors here dealt with represent the work of a manageable and
definite, if immature, stage in the history of the English novel,
but they also, by the very absence of their contemporaries Scott
and Jane Austen, represent a transition, of the highest historical


## p. 286 (#308) ############################################

286 The Growth of the Later Novel [ch.
a
interest, between the great 'quadrilateral of the mid-eighteenth
century novel and the immense development of the kind which Scott
and Jane Austen themselves were to usher in for the nineteenth
century. Some of them, but by no means all, are, in a way, failures.
All, or almost all, represent experiment, sometimes in partly
mistaken kinds, like the terror novel of Mrs Radcliffe and Lewis,
sometimes in ‘sports' of individual and somewhat eccentric talent
or genius, like the humour romances of Peacock. But, except in
the latter case, and even there, perhaps, to some small extent, they
all give evidence that the novel has not yet found its main way or
ways—that it is, if not exactly in the wilderness, scarcely at home
in the promised land. Hardly a single one of our company, with
the possible exception of Maria Edgeworth, can be said to be
purely normal: and even her normality was sorely interfered
with by her father's eccentricities, by circumstances of this and
that kind and, not least, perhaps, by an absence both of critical
supervision and of creative audacity in herself.
Although John Buncle, by name at least, has a certain notoriety;
although it was made the subject, by a great critic, of a criticism
quite as debatable as, and only less debated than, Lamb's on Thomas
Heywood; although it has been several times reprinted and has,
at any rate, pleased some good wits mightily, it appears to be still
very little known. And, as to its more than eccentric author scarcely
any facts seem to be accessible except that he knew, or said he
knew, Swift, that he was an Irishman and that, in his later years,
at any rate, he lived in London. It is customary to call Amory
mad; but, after repeated reading of his chief book and a fair
study of his other work, the present writer has not been able to
discover signs of anything more than the extremest eccentricity.
He was, indeed, compact of 'crazes,' in the milder and more usual
meaning of that word; and he indulged them without stint and
without mercy. A passionate unitarian, or, as he preferred to call
it, a Christian-Deist'; an eager student of several humane subjects,
especially Roman antiquities, and of some sciences, especially those
connected with medicine; by no means a bad critic of literature,
who almost literally anticipates Macaulay in his estimate of Rymer;
devoted to “the ladies,' always in a strictly, though rather oddly,
virtuous way; almost equally devoted to good food and good drink;
a most imaginative describer of, and wanderer in, picturesque
scenery-he composes his books by means of a succession of
‘screeds, devoted helter-skelter to all these subjects, and to a
great many more.


## p. 287 (#309) ############################################

XII]
Amory
287
6
This method, or contempt of method, Amory applies, in his two
books, with the most extravagant faithfulness. In the case of the
earlier, indeed, Memoirs of Several Ladies, it is applied in such
a fashion that all but the most exceptionally equipped readers
had very much better begin with the second, John Buncle itself.
There is here enough of amusing matter, and of positive, though
most eccentric, quality befitting a novel, to induce one to go back to
the Memoirs: it is more than probable that a first introduction to
the Memoirs might effectually prevent the reader from going on to
the rest of the work, or from ever taking up anything else written
by its author. Amory's announced, and, probably, quite serious,
intention was to give biographies of eighteen ladies, as well as of
the beautiful Isyphena and Judith the charming Hebrew, with
'occasional accounts' of others. He has
He has actually devoted a stout
volume of more than five hundred pages almost wholly to one
person, Mrs Marinda Benlow or Bruce, or, rather, to Mrs Marinda
and all the other subjects described or adumbrated above, including
a voyage to the Hebrides, continual raids on the destructive
theology of Athanasius,' a long introduction to ‘Mrs Monkhouse
of Paterdale'[sic] ‘on the banks of the river Glenkroden’ [sic] and
a large postscript of an even more miscellaneous character. The
French phrase about a book 'letting itself be read' is sufficiently
familiar: it is scarcely extravagant to say that these Memoirs
absolutely refuse to submit themselves to reading, except in the
fashion of the most dogged taskwork.
In John Buncle itself, Amory shows himself able to talk, or
write, a little more like a man, if not of this, yet of his own
eccentric, world. The hero becomes less nebulous: in fact, he is,
at least, of the world of Dickens, when he sits down in the highest
state of contentment, and, in fact, of positive carol, to a pound
of steak, a quart of peas, another (or several others) of strong ale
and divers cuts of fine bread. There has to be more and swifter
handling to enable him to get through his allowance of more than
half-a-dozen wives, all ravishingly beautiful; all strictly virtuous and
rigidly Christian-Deist; most of them learned in arts and sciences,
sacred and profane, and capable, sometimes, at least, of painting
at the same time' pictures of Arcadia and of the crucifixion.
They are generally discovered in some wild district of the north of
England, where the hero, after perilous adventures, comes upon
a perfectly civilised mansion, usually on the shore of a lake;
introduces himself; is warmly received by both fathers and
daughters (it is noteworthy that mothers rarely appear); argues on


## p. 288 (#310) ############################################

288
[CH.
The Growth of the Later Novel
points human and divine; marries; soon buries his wife; and
proceeds to console himself, after an interval more or less short, in
circumstances slightly varied in detail but generically identical.
And yet, though it is impossible to give any true description of
it which shall not make it seem preposterous, the book is not a
mere sandwich of dulness and extravagance. There is no doubt
that the quality which recommended it to Hazlitt, and made him
compare it to Rabelais, is his own favourite "gusto. ' One might
almost think that Amory had set himself to oppose, by anticipation,
not merely the school of 'sensibility' which was becoming fashion-
able in his own time, but the developments, nearly a century
later, which produced Jacopo Ortis and Obermann. Buncle has
his sorrows, and, despite his facility of selfconsolation, neither
mood appears to be in the least insincere, still less hypocritical.
But, sorrow is not his business in life, nor, despite his passion
for argument, introspection of any kind. It is his business to
enjoy; and he appears to enjoy everything, the peas and the anti-
quarian enquiries, the theological discussions and the beautiful
young ladies who join in them, the hairbreadth escapes and the
lovely prospects, nay, even the company of a scoundrel with some
character, like Curll. Hazlitt was perfectly right in selecting
the passage describing Buncle's visits with his friends the Dublin
'bloods' (some of them, apparently, greater scoundrels than Curll
himself) to an alehouse on the seashore. This display of mood is
one of the most remarkable things of its kind, and the wonder of
it is not lessened when we remember that it was published, if not
written, by a man of seventy. That there is, practically, nothing-
either real or factitious-of the sense of regret for the past is less
surprising than that the gusto is itself not factitious in the least-
that it is perfectly fresh, spontaneous and, as it were, the utterance
of a fullblooded undergraduate. In none of the four great con-
temporary novelists is there this absolute spontaneity-not even
in Fielding; and Amory ought to have due credit for it.
With the final remark that this development of the eccentric
novel, towards the close of the first great harvest of the novel
itself, is, as a historical fact, worthy of no little attention, we may
pass to another single figure, and single book, also, in a way,
eccentric, but towering far above Amory in genius, and standing
alone ; later than the great novelists of 1740—70; earlier than
the abundant novel-produce of the revolutionary period; exactly
contemporary with no one of much mark in the novel except


## p. 289 (#311) ############################################

X11]
Beckford
289
Miss Burney, and as different from her as the most ingenious
imagination could devise—to Beckford and Vathek.
It cannot be denied that a great part of Beckford's celebrity
is derived from, and has been always maintained by, sources
which appeal to the more vulgar kinds of human interest. His
wealth, which, even at the present day, would be reckoned great, and
which, for his time, was immense and almost incredible; his lavish
and fantastic expenditure of it; his pose as a misanthropic, or, at
least, recluse, voluptuary; his eccentricities of all sorts; his dis-
tinguished connections; and even his long life—were powerful
attractions of this kind to the vulgar. But there is no doubt that
his literary powers were great: and not much doubt that, though
his circumstances, possibly, circumscribed the exercise of them,
they helped, to some extent, to produce the colour and character
of his best work. It is a curious fact, but one attested by not
a few instances, that men of narrow, or only moderately affluent,
circumstances do not deal happily with imaginations of unbounded
luxury. Fonthill and the means which created or supported it
enabled Beckford to enlarge things still further and satisfactorily
for the purposes of Samarah and Istakar.
Had he not written the unique romance which begins in one of
these places and ends in (or below) the other, Beckford would
still have had claims by no means insignificant to a position in
literature, although his other work in the way of fiction' is not great,
his various travels, the bibliography of which is rather complicated,
are of quality high above the average', and his early skit in art
criticism (A History of Extraordinary Painters) is extremely
clever. Nevertheless, for all but anecdotic or very minute literary
history, Beckford is Vathek.
This tale itself is not free from a certain overlay of deliberate
eccentricity. As we read it in English, it is not Beckford's own
work (though finally revised by him), but that of a certain
Samuel Henley, surreptitiously published and translated from the
French, which, Beckford said (if he said it)”, he had written in
1 Modern Novel Writing or the Elegant Enthusiast (1796), a satire not quite 'brought
off'; and Azemia (1797), under the pseudonym •Jenks. '
? The earlier parts appeared first in 1783 as Dreams, Waking Thoughts and
Incidents, and display a rather juvenile coxcombry and jauntiness, no doubt due to the
imitation of Sterne, but blended with much really fanciful writing. He suppressed
most of the copies, and castigated the book severely when he reprinted it, ofty years
later, with Letters from Portugal (1834), which are of very great merit.
3 His interlocutor and reporter, Cyrus Reading, labours under something of the
same doubt as to his security' which attached to Bardolph. But large and trustworthy
additions have recently been made to our knowledge of Beckford and his work by Lewis
d
B. L. I.
CH. XIII,
19


## p. 290 (#312) ############################################

290 The Growth of the Later Novel [CH.
three days and two nights, thereby bringing on severe illness.
Other reports say that he took something like a year over it.
The matter, which will remind some readers of incidents in the
life of Balzac, is of little real importance. And, perhaps, it is not
too 'spoilsport' to observe that three days and two nights means
about sixty-four hours and that Vathek does not extend beyond
about eighty or ninety at most of pages like the present. Any-
body who could write it at all, and had thought the lines of it
out beforehand, could write three or four pages of it in an hour,
have from thirty to forty left for food, sleep and the resting of
his wrist—the strength of which latter would be the chief part of
the wonder.
Whether, however, Vathek had been written in three days, or
three weeks, or three months, or three years, its literary value
would be affected not one jot. It is an Arabian tale of the
familiar kind into which Anthony Hamilton and Voltaire had
infused western sarcasm.
The hero, grandson of Haroun, exagge-
rates the, by no means small, defects of his ancestor's character,
and has very few of his merits, if any. He is what is now called
a megalomaniac in everything: and, after a course of compara-
tively harmless luxury, devotes himself, partly under the influence
of his sorceress mother, Carathis, to the direct service of Eblis.
Crime now follows crime; and, though, in his journey towards the
haunted ruins of Istakar (the site of the purgatory of Solomon and
the inferno of Eblis himself), he conceives an at least human and
natural passion for the beautiful Nouronihar, she is as much
intoxicated by the prospect of supernatural power as he is himself.
They are at last introduced, by a subordinate fiend, to the famous
hall of Eblis, where, after a short interval, they meet with their
due reward—the eternal torture of a burning heart—as they
wander amid riches, splendours, opportunities of knowledge and
all the other treacherous and bootless gifts of hell.
It is hardly possible to praise this conclusion too highly: it is
almost Milton in arabesque, and, though Beckford has given him-
self insufficient space to develop the character of Nouronihar
(Vathek himself, it must be confessed, has very little), there are
hints and outlines which are almost Shakespearean. What
opinion may be formed of the matter which leads up to this con-
clusion will depend almost entirely upon temperament.
in parts, been called, but, to some judgments, never is, dull: it
It has,
Melville, who has, also, at last rescued, from something like oblivion in the Hamilton
archives, the Episodes to be dealt with below.


## p. 291 (#313) ############################################

X11]
Vathek and its Episodes
291
is certainly, in parts, grotesque, extravagant and even nasty.
But Beckford could plead sufficient local colour' for it, and
a contrast, again almost Shakespearean, between the flickering
farce atrocities of the beginning and the sombre magnificence
of the end. Beckford's claims, in fact, rest on the half-score or
even half-dozen pages towards the end: but these pages are hard
to parallel in the later literature of prose fiction.
There are, however, some points not directly touching the
literary merit of Vathek, which can hardly be left quite unhandled
even in the small space available here. It has been said that the
tale was written in French and handed over by its author to
Samuel Henley to translate. The translation, even with Beckford's
own revision, is not impeccable, and sometimes fails strangely
in idiom It is, however, better to read the book in the transla-
tion than in the original, which brings out too forcibly the
resemblance to Hamilton and Voltaire: and eighteenth century
French is not equal to the hall of Eblis. The circumstances of
the actual publication are strange and not entirely compre-
hensible. That Henley, after much shilly-shallying on Beckford's
part, should have ‘forced the card' and published it without
the author's permission, is not very surprising; but why he
gave it out as 'translated from the Arabic' has never been
satisfactorily explained. Beckford, for once reasonably enraged,
published the French as soon as he could; but he did not include
the Episodes which are referred to at the end, and which are
congruous enough in The Arabian Nights fashion. He showed
them, later, to some men of letters, including Rogers; but he never
published them, and it is only recently that they have appeared,
edited in French by Lewis Melville, and very well translated into
English by Sir Frank Marzials. It would have been a pity if
they had perished or remained unknown: but they can hardly
be said to add to the greatness of Vathek, though they are
not unworthy of their intended shrine. The first is a sort of
doublet of the main story, a weaker Vathek, prince Alasi, being
here actually made worse by a more malignant Nouronihar, princess
Firouzkab. The heroine of the second is a peri of some charm,
but her husband, Barkiarokh, is a repulsive and uninteresting
1 The strangest of these errors is one which the present writer has never seen
noticed. After the malodorous and murderous sacrifice to Eblis, when Vathek and his
mother carouse, the French has the very ordinary phrase that Carathis faisait raison à
the various toasts of her son. “Do right’or do reason' is actually English in the same
sense of pledging and counterpledging; but Henley writes: failed not to supply a
reason for every bumper,' which, if not quite nonsense, is quite wrong sense.
1
19-2


## p. 292 (#314) ############################################

292 The Growth of the Later Novel [CH.
scoundrel. By far the most striking is the last, the loves of the
brother and sister prince Kalilah and princess Zulkais, which
Beckford has left unfinished: whether from actual change of mind
and taste or from one of his innumerable caprices and indolences,
it is difficult to say.