BOOK THE FOURTH.

CHAPTER I.

THE GOOD-NATURED MAN.

1767-1768.

IT was little more than a month before the death of the

1768.

elder Newbery, that Burke read the comedy of the Good- Et. 40. natured Man;* and thus, with mirth and sadness for its ushers, the last division of Goldsmith's life comes in. The bond of old and long-continued service, chequered as its retrospect was with mean and mortifying incidents, could hardly, without some regret, be snapped; nor could the long-attempted trial of the theatre, painful as its outset had been, without some sense of cheerfulness and hope approach its consummation. Newbery died on the 22nd of December, 1767; and the performance of the comedy was now promised for the 28th of the following January.

Unavailingly, for special reasons, had Goldsmith attempted to get it acted before Christmas. Quarrels had broken out among the new proprietary of the theatre, and

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* Richard Cumberland's Memoirs, i. 364. "His first comedy was read and applauded in its manuscript by Edmund Burke, and the circle in which he "then lived." The hint for the title, as I have stated (ante i, 303), occurs in the Life of Nash.

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1768.

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these were made excuses for delay. Colman had properly Et. 40. insisted on his right, as manager, to cast the part of Imogen to Mrs. Yates, rather than to a pretty-faced simpering lady (Mrs. Lessingham) * whom his brother proprietor, Harris, protected;" and the violence of the dispute became so notorious, and threatened such danger to the new management, that the papers describe Garrick "growing taller" on the strength of it. Tall enough he certainly grew, to overlook something of the bitterness of Colman's first desertion of him; and civilities, perhaps arising from a sort of common interest in the issue of the Lessingham dispute, soon after recommenced between the rival managers. Bickerstaff,-a clever and facile Irishman, who, ten years before, had somewhat suddenly thrown up a commission in the Marines, taken to theatrical writing for subsistence, and since obtained repute as the author of Love in a Village and the Maid of the Mill,-was just now pressing Colman with his opera of Lionel and Clarissa; and, in one of his querulous letters, seems to point at this resumption of intercourse with Garrick, whom he had himself offended by beginning to write for Colman. "When I talked with "you last summer," he complains, writing on the 26th January, 1768, "I told you that it would be impossible

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to have my opera ready till after Christmas; and named "about the 20th January. You received this with great "goodness, said you were glad of it, because it would be "the best time of the year for me, and then told

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me that Mr. Goldsmith's play should come out before "Christmas; and this you repeated, and assur'd me of, more than once, in subsequent meetings... The fact is,

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*This lady began life by sharing Derrick's garret. For a curious account of her, see Taylor's Records, i. 5-8.

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"you broke your word with me, in ordering the representation of the Good-natur'd Man in such a manner, "that it must unavoidably interfere with my opera. . . At "the reading, it was said the Good-natur'd Man should appear the Wednesday after; but at the same time it was whispered to me, that it was privately determined not to bring it out till the Saturday fortnight, and that "there was even a promise given to Mr. Kelly that it should "not appear till after his nights were over."*

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If such a promise had been given (and circumstances justify the suspicion), Goldsmith had better reason than has been hitherto supposed, for that dissatisfaction with Colman and difference with Kelly which attended the performance of his comedy. Kelly had been taken up by Garrick, in avowed and not very generous rivalry to himself; it was the town talk, some weeks before either performance took place, that the two comedies, written as they were by men well known to each other and who had lived the same sort of life, were to be pitted against each other; and so broadly were they opposed in character

* MS. penes me.

It is fair at the same time to add that Cooke (who knew both well, and has left us anecdotes about Kelly also printed in the European Magazine) says the difference originated before Kelly's comedy was accepted, and was simply owing to the fact that he had presumed to attempt a comedy at all. "He was at this time "much acquainted with Goldsmith and Bickerstaff, but except their barely "hearing he was engaged that way, he scarcely ever mentioned the subject.. "Goldsmith kept back and was silent; till one day, when asked about Kelly's "writing a comedy, he said, 'He knew nothing at all about it he had heard "there was a man of that name about town who wrote in newspapers, but of his "talents for comedy, or even the work he was engaged in, he could not judge.' "This," adds Cooke, "would be a great drawback on the character of Goldsmith, "if it arose from a general principle; but nothing could be further from the truth. "He was kind, beneficent, and good-natured in the extreme, to all but those whom "he thought his competitors in literary fame; but this was so deeply rooted in "his nature, that nothing could cure it. Poverty had no terrors for him; but "the applauses paid a brother poet made him poor indeed." European Magazine, xxiv. 422.

1768.

Æt. 40.

1768. and style, that the first in the field, supposing it well Et. 40. received, could hardly fail to be a stumbling-block to its successor. Kelly had sounded the depths of sentimentalism. I have mentioned the origin of that school as of much earlier date; nor can it be doubted that it was with Steele the unlucky notion began, of setting comedy to reform the morals, instead of imitating the manners, of the age. Fielding slily glances at this, when he makes Parson Adams declare the Conscious Lovers to be the only play fit for a Christian to see, and as good as a sermon; and in so witty and fine a writer as Steele, so great a mistake is only to be explained by the intolerable grossness into which the theatre had fallen in his day. For often does it happen in such reaction, that good and bad suffer together; and that while one has the sting taken out of it, the other loses energy and manhood. Where a sickly sensibility overspreads both vice and virtue, we are in the right to care as little for the one as for the other; since it is Life that the stage and its actors should present to us, and not anybody's moral or sentimental view of it. A most masterly critic of our time, William Hazlitt, has disposed of Steele's pretensions as a comic dramatist; and poor Hugh Kelly, who has not survived to our time, must be disinterred to have his pretensions judged: yet the stage continues to suffer, even now, from the dregs of the sentimental school, and it would not greatly surprise me to see the comedy with which Kelly's brief career of glory began, again lift up a sickly head amongst us.

It is not an easy matter to describe that comedy. One can hardly disentangle, from the maze of cant and makebelieve in which all the people are involved, what it precisely is they drive at; but the main business seems to be,