Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 9.djvu/384

 370 F T E in the same play attacked a well-known representative of a very influential though detested element in English society, the &quot; Nabobs &quot; themselves. But there was one species of cracked porcelain or blemished reputation which he was not to try to hold up to contempt with impunity. The rumour of his intention to bring upon the stage, in the character of Lady Kitty Crocodile in The Trip to Calais, the notorious duchess of Kingston, whose trial for bigamy was then (1775) impending, roused his intended victim to the utmost fury ; and the means and influence she had at her disposal enabled her, not only to prevail upon the lord chamberlain to prohibit the performance of the piece (in which, it should be observed, there is no hint as to the charge of bigamy itself), but to hire agents to vilify Foote s char acter iu every way that hatred and malice could suggest. After he had withdrawn the piece, and letters had been exchanged between the duchess and him equally character istic of their respective writers, Foote took his revenge upon the chief of the duchess s instruments, a &quot; Reverend Doctor &quot; Jackson, who belonged to the &quot; reptile &quot; society of the journalists of the day, so admirably satirized by Foote in his comedy of The Bankrupt. This man he gibbeted in the character of Viper in The Cajmchin, under which name the altered Trip to Calais was performed in 1776. But the resources of his enemies were not yet at an end ; and a discharged servant of Foote s was suborned by Jackson to bring a charge and apply for a warrant against him. Though the attempt utterly broke down, and Foote s character was thus completely cleared, his health and spirits had given way in the struggle as to which, though he seems to have had the firm support of the better part of the public, including such men as Burke and Reynolds, the very audiences of his own theatre had been, or had seemed to be, divided in opinion. He thus resolved to withdraw, at least for a time, from the effects of the storm, let his theatre to Colman, and after making his last appearance there in May 1777, set forth in October on a journey to France. But at Dover he fell sick on the day after his arrival there, and after a few hours died (October 21st). His epitaph in St Mary s Church at Dover (written by his faithful treasurer Jewel) records that he had a hand &quot; open as day for melting charity.&quot; His resting-place in Westminster Abbey is without any memorial ; nor indeed is it the actor s usual lot to receive from posterity any recognition which the con temporaries whom he has delighted have denied to him. Foote s chief power as an actor must clearly have lain in his extra ordinary gift of mimicry, which extended, as the best kind of mimicry always does, to the mental and moral, as well as the mere outward and physical peculiarities of the personages whose likeness he assumed. He must have possessed a wonderful flexibility of voice, though his tones are said to have been harsh when his voice was not disguised, and an incomparable readiness for rapidly assum ing characters, both in his entertainments and in his comedies, where he occasionally &quot; doubled &quot; parts. The excellent &quot;patter&quot; of some of his plays, such as The Liar and The Cozeners, must have greatly depended for its effect upon rapidity of delivery. In person lie seems to have been by nature ill-qualified for light comedy parts, being rather short and stout, and coarse-featured ; but the humour with which he overflowed is said to have found full expression in the irresistible sparkle of his eyes. As a dramatic author, although he displays certain distinctive characteristics of indisputable brilliancy, he can only be assigned a subordinate rank. He was himself anxious to limit the definition of comedy to &quot;an exact representation of the peculiar manners of that people among whom it happens to be performed ; a faithful imitation of singular absurdities, particular follies, which are openly produced, as criminals are publicly punished, for the correction of individuals and as an example to the whole community.&quot; This he regarded as the utile, or useful purpose, of comedy ; the duke he conceived to be &quot; the fable, the construction, machinery, conduct, plot, and incidents of the piece.&quot; For part at least of this view (advanced by him in the spirited and scholarly &quot;Letter &quot; in which he replied &quot; to the Reverend Author of the Remarks, Critical and Christian, on The Minor&quot;), he rather loftily appealed to classical uthority. But he failed to point out the relation between the utile and the dulce, and to remember the indispensableness of the latter to the comic drama under its primary aspect as a species of art. His comic genius was particularly happy in discovering and reproducing characters deserving of ridicule ; for &quot;affectation,&quot; he says (in the introduction to The Minor, where he appears in person), &quot; I take to be the true comic object ; &quot; but he failed in putting them to true artistic use. That he not only took his chief characters from real life, but closely modelled them on well-known living men and women, was not in himself an artistic sin, though it may have been a practice of doubtful social expediency, as it certainly involved considerable per sonal risk. Nor was the novelty of this absolute, but rather one of degree and quantity ; other comic dramatists before and after him have done the same thing, though probably no other has ever gone so far in this course, or has pursued it so persistently. The public delighted in his &quot;d d fine originals,&quot; because it recognized them as copies ; and he was himself proud that he had taken them from real persons, instead of their being &quot; vamped from antiquated plays, pilfered from the French farces, or the baseless beings of the poet s brain.&quot; But the real excellence of Foote s comic characters lies in the fact that, besides being incomparably ludicrous types of manners, many of them remain admirable comic types of general human nature. Sir Gregory Gazette, and his imbecile appetite for news ; Lady Pentweazel, and her preposterous vanity in her superannuated charms ; Mr Cadwallader, and his view of the advantages of public schools (where children may &quot;make acquaintances that may here after be useful to them ; for between you and I, as to Avhat they learn there, does not signify twopence &quot;) ; Major Sturgeon and Jerry Sneak ; Sir Thomas Lofty, Sir Luke Limp, Mrs Mechlin, and a score or two of other characters, are excellent comic figures in themselves, whatever their origin ; and many of the vices and weak nesses exposed by Foote s vigorous satire will remain the perennial subjects of comic treatment so long as a stage exists. The real defect of his plays lies iu the abnormal weakness of their construc tion, in the absolute contempt which the great majority of them show for the invention or conduct of a plot, and in the unwarrant able subordination of the interest of the action to the exhibition of particular characters. In a good play, whether it be tragedy or comedy, the characters are developed out of and by means of the action ; but of this there is little trace in Foote. His characters are ready-made, and the action is only incidental to them. With the exception of The Liar (which Foote pretended to have taken from Lope de Vega, but which was really founded on Steele s adap tation of Corneille sXc Menteur), and perhaps of The Bankrupt, there is hardly one of Foote s &quot; comedies &quot; in which the conception and conduct of the action rise above the exigencies of the merest farce. Not that sentimental scenes and even sentimental characters are want ing, that virtue is not occasionally in distress, or fails to vindicate itself triumphantly from the semblance of vice ; but these familiar procedures are as incapable of exciting real interest as the ordinary course of a farcical action is in itself calculated to produce more than the most transitory amusement. In his earlier plays Foote constantly resorts to the most hackneyed device of farce- a disguise which helps on the progress of a slender fable for which nobody cares to a close which everybody foresees. Of course Foote must have been well aware of the defect under which his rapidly manu factured productions laboured ; he knew that if he might sneer at &quot;genteel comedy &quot; as suited to the dramatists of the servants hall, and pronounce the arts of the drama at the great houses to be &quot;directed by the genius of insipidity,&quot; he, like the little theatre where he held sway, was looked upon as &quot;an eccentric, a mere summer fly.&quot; His merits as a comic dramatist are not, however, obscured by his incontestable defects. He was inexhaustible in the devising of comic scenes of genuine farce, in which the humour and wit of the dialogue are on a level with the general excellence of the conception. An oration of &quot;old masters,&quot; an election of a suburban mayor, an examination at the College of Physicians, a newspaper conclave where paragraphs are concocted and reputations massacred all these and other equally happy scenes are brought before the mere reader with unfailing vividness. And everywhere the comic dialogue is instinct with spirit and vigour, and the comic characters are true to themselves with a buoyancy which at once raises them above the level of mere theatrical conventionalism. Foote professed to despise the mere caricaturing of national peculiarities as such, and generally- used dialect as a mere additional colouring ; he was, however, too wide awake to the demands of his public not to treat France and Frenchmen as fair game, and perhaps there is nothing coarser in his plays than this constant appeal to national patriotic prejudice. His satire against those everlasting victims of English comedy and farce, the Englishman in Paris and the Englishman returned from Paris, was doubtless well warranted ; and he was not slow to point out the fact which Englishmen are wont to conceal when they come home from their travels that they are nowhere more addicted to the society of their countrymen than abroad. In general, the purposes of Foote s social satire are excellent, and the abuses against which it is directed are those which it required courage to attack. The tone of his morality is healthy, and his language, though not aiming at refinement, is remarkably free from