[In the essay which follows, Belden argues that, compared to the works of his contemporaries, many of Foote's works were a departure from the typical theatrical fare of the day.]

In his own day Foote was extravagantly praised. The Dramatic Censor¹ declared that his ‘peculiarity of genius, strength of judgment, knowledge of life, selection of characters, application of satire, vivacity of sentiment, and terseness of dialogue, place him distinct from any other writer, past and present.’ For the Minor particularly extreme claims were made, as, for example, this: ‘It cannot be deemed an error of judgment, or partial favour, to pronounce this comedy, one of the most entertaining, original, and useful pieces, now in possession of the stage.’² One of the foremost dramatists of the period, Richard Cumberland, went so far as to say, ‘I cannot recollect that scene in any play, or comic passage in any author, whose language I am master of, that I think comparable with that of Mrs. Cole in the first instance, and also with that of Smirk the auctioneer, in the second act.’³

Such views would not now be maintained by any one. Even when first written Foote's comedies were used at the two winter theatres chiefly as afterpieces. At his own theatre this, of course, was not so, for there his work usually filled the entire programme—ordinarily two or three plays with their respective prologues and epilogues. But the Haymarket was a summer theatre only, where serious drama was unwelcome.

Foote was in many ways an opportunist. He took what the moment offered, in subject, in character, in incident, even in suggestions for treatment. Final revisions of his work were frequently almost dictated by the public. There was a curious lack of sureness in his literary sense: he recognized easily the germ of popular appeal in a character or an incident, but he seemed to need the public's verdict before he could put the material into entirely satisfactory form. With him a first performance was often a failure. It was by no means uncommon for him to acknowledge failure in the public press and promise changes, as, for instance, in the original production of Taste. The use of the puppets in Tragedy à la Mode was unsuccessful at first, but later ‘with Performers, accoutred ridiculously pompous, and in fierce whiskered high tragedy,’ according to Wilkinson, ‘the effect those dumb actors had … received unbounded applause.’⁴ The Primitive Puppet Show was so unsatisfactory on its initial night that a huge crowd which had assembled with great expectations dispersed in extreme disorder. Notice was then published to the effect that the play was ‘deferred for a few Days, in order to lengthen the Performance by producing fresh Materials.’⁵ The Cat Duets in the Knights had to be withdrawn. The The Orators was improved week by week as it was being acted. On the first production of Dr. Last in his Chariot ‘the murmurs of pit and galleries arose to such a pitch as to prevent the conclusion of the last act,’ and Foote had to come forward and explain that it was Molière and the man who had written the larger part of the adaptation that they disliked—not himself. He altered it before the next performance and then it was received ‘with general satisfaction.’⁶ The Lame Lover was another play that Foote altered soon after its first production. Finally, his masterpiece, the Minor, tremendously advertised, failed before a crowded house at its opening night in Dublin. He changed it materially before it had its great run the following summer at the Haymarket.

In studying the characteristics of the plays, the first thing, perhaps, that one notices is the recurrence of various elements that have been the common property of writers of comedy from time immemorial. Such are certain permanent comic types of character; the stupid son of admiring parents,⁷ the wicked step-mother,⁸ the childish wife who develops an unexpected adaptability to the ways of the world,⁹ the vain middle-aged woman who fails to see the speciousness of flattery upon her vanished beauty,¹⁰ the blue-stocking,¹¹ the shrewish wife,¹² the hen-pecked husband,¹³ the miser,¹⁴ the loquacious story-teller,¹⁵ the incompetent follower of the arts,¹⁶ the man who is consumed with eagerness for political news,¹⁷ the fop.¹⁸ Though the famous Mrs. Malaprop had not yet arisen to give a name to the style which she perhaps inherited from Dogberry, she has some predecessors here who use what she would doubtless have thought a very ‘nice derangement of epitaphs.’ Heel-Tap, who promises to speak at the Garratt hustings ‘briefly with all the loquacity possible,’ and Last, who is ready with his ‘launcelot’ to open a large ‘artifice’ in one of the ‘juglers’ of his patient, are among the best of these.

Then, there are certain stock situations. There is the training of a boorish fellow for entrance into society,—Buck in the Englishman in Paris, Zack Fungus in the Commissary, Sir Matthew Mite in the Nabob. Tim's unwilling suit of Miss Sukey Trifle, a motive used again in the Cozeners, has numerous parallels in English comedy. The same is true of the screen scenes in the Author, the Lame Lover, and the Patron. Disguises are common, the disguised person often appearing as a German baron or a French marquis—Papillon, Cape, Sir William Wealthy, Puff, and the language master in the Englishman in Paris. Other disguises are of the black girl in the Cozeners, of Mrs. Fleece'em while fleecing the silk mercer, of Hartop, and Jenkins, and of Kitty at the end of the Liar. Another type of mistaken identity is in the scene of the silk mercer at the doctor's office. High life below stairs is portrayed in the scene of the two servants in the Nabob and of Betty and her fellow-servant in the Lame Lover. There is also the well-intentioned relative returning incognito after a long absence to make discoveries about his son, ward, or nephew, a situation that was particularly popular with the Sentimentalists, but used also in the Comedy of Manners by Sheridan and Goldsmith. In the main lines of the action the Author and the Minor, which depend upon this motive, are identical: a supposedly deceased parent in each case inquires into his son's affairs while in disguise and finds him worthy of his patrimony.

In plot construction Foote is weak. The Diversions, his first work, shows no attempt at a unified story, and this is equally true of the Orators, which came about midway. In the first act of the Devil upon Two Sticks considerable space is devoted to an elaborate characterization of the heroine's father and aunt; and after the scene is over, these two persons are never again heard of in the entire comedy. What one of the reviewers said of the Lame Lover is equally true of the Maid of Bath, ‘The Drama leaves all the parties as it found them, for as it contains no plot, there can be no catastrophe.’¹⁹

Almost none of Foote's plots would be seriously injured by the omission of certain events or the addition of others. It was, indeed, his habit to add new scenes as something of interest came to him from the daily press or the gossip of his club. Such for example, was the incident of Mrs. Rudd and the silk mercer, which he introduced into the Cozeners in order to bring up to date the character originally intended for Mrs. Grieve. Wilkinson writes of more than one such scene. ‘He was then preparing his Mayor of Garratt,’ he says, ‘in which he had wrote a part, he informed me, that was in fact abstracted from the piece, and that he could do with or without it. … The part was entitled Peter Primmer and was intended as a stroke of satire levelled at Mr. Sheridan, senr.’²⁰ The scene of Mrs. O'Shocnesy, which Wilkinson was to have acted in the Author, is another instance. A report of the Devil upon Two Sticks speaks of ‘some temporary alterations which were received with the highest approbation.’ One of these was a dialogue ‘in which the chicane of the law is very sarcastically depicted; and the definition of a flaw is finely hit off, as introduced in a particular trial a short time since, by which a certain veteran gamester escaped from punishment, after being convicted of perjury.²¹

The catastrophe is often mechanical. In the Englishman in Paris it is the sudden finding of Lucinda in the nick of time by her father's friend, who should have known where she was; in the Nabob, the uncle's payment of his brother's debts in order that his niece need not marry her rich and unwelcome suitor; in the Bankrupt, unexpected news from Holland which saves the hero from the impending crash.

But if Foote's comedies are lacking in well-rounded plots, his treatment, on the other hand, is highly dramatic. There are few makeshift explanatory scenes; asides are extremely rare; speeches are never directed to the audience, but strictly to the characters. The conversation is individualized and natural, as well as sparkling with irony. Forster states the opinion that, ‘as examples of mere comic dialogue they [the plays] are perfect. Within a more limited range they have not much less than the wit, and they have more than the character, of Congreve. His people are not to be mistaken when you have once made their acquaintance; for they retain always so perfectly the trick of talk by which you knew them first, that perhaps no dramatic writings might be read aloud so easily without repetition of the speakers' names.’²² How admirably the characters are differentiated in even the first of Foote's real comedies, the Knights, Miss Penelope Trifle, the stiff old maid, and the simple-minded Suke, no less than Tim and the two knights. If Tim seems too infantile for his thirty-two years, he is no more so, at any rate, than such other morons as Tony Hardcastle, and Holcroft's Sophia in the Road to Ruin. As burlesque surely nothing could be more chaste in a literary sense than Mother Cole's Methodist jargon—Foote saw the effectiveness of setting it forth in its pristine quality without exaggeration: one may hear it to-day in America as well as in England.

Foote depended from first to last upon the piquancy of his personalities, which the lazy public continued to regard as ‘highly entertaining.’ An early review of the Maid of Bath expressed a common sentiment: ‘We have been interested without plot, surprized without incident, instructed without moral, and diverted without character.’²³ But character portrayal Foote did definitely claim. He boasted to Boswell²⁴ that he had given sixteen new characters to English comedy. And if the boast, like most boasts, was extreme, it was true that the whimsical men and women who galloped in their aimless fashion across his stage did captivate the imagination of those who looked upon them. Apreece and Long and Whitefield were for years popularly known by the names they had borne in Foote's characterizations; Mrs. Cole was often used as a generic term.

Foote's view of comedy was that of a thorough-going realist. ‘Comedy,’ he says, ‘I define to be 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.’ He even thought that, ‘a comedy's being local or temporary is so far from being a moral or critical fault, that it constitutes its chiefest merit.’²⁵ He resented the use of the term farce for his plays on the ground that their realism raised even the slenderest of them into the realm of legitimate comedy. ‘No unnatural assemblages, no creatures of the fancy, can procure the protection of the comic muse; men and things must appear as they are,’²⁶ says this English Aristophanes, somewhat forgetful of certain assemblages of Birds in Cloud-Cuckoo-Land. His theory thus shows the same vagueness as his practice regarding the significance of the universal. Applying his statements to a particular case, one is tempted to ask whether his staring and head-wagging in the rôle of Cadwallader was ‘openly produced for the correction’ of Mr. Apreece, who alone in London had those particular mannerisms. And whether it was a needed ‘example to the whole community’ of that city lest they should fall into errors, to which manifestly none had shown a tendency since otherwise Apreece would not have been so easily picked out as the prototype. It may be retorted that this was subsidiary, that the real satire in Cadwallader was upon his deification of pedigree and of authorship, permanent human foibles. If so, Foote failed to secure the emphasis intended: the memory people carried away from that performance was of a burlesque of a certain individual whom they could name, whose wife they could name, whose house they could find. And what was true of Apreece in the Author was true of the outstanding character in nearly every one of the plays. The faults of Foote's work are in some measure due to this interpretation of the privileges of realism.

Whatever his purpose, his effect as far as the ordinary spectator was concerned was to lose the universal in the particular. For this he has paid a heavy price: oblivion. Already in the lifetime of his old associate Wilkinson his fate was lowering. ‘Elizabeth Canning, Mary Squires the gipsey, and Miss Blandy,’ wrote the latter, referring to the popular allusions in an early play, ‘were such universal topics in 1752, that you would have supposed it the business of mankind, to talk only of them; yet now, in 1790, ask a young man of twenty-five or thirty a question relative to these extraordinary personages, and he will be puzzled to answer.’²⁷ If the satire in his most famous work, the Minor, had been directed primarily against religious hypocrisy rather than against Whitefield, that comedy might have endured; as it is, it is forgotten. While Foote still lived, his plays were assigned by the foremost critic of the age to the very class out of which their author thought their realism raised them. ‘Foote has a great deal of humour,’ said Boswell to Johnson.

JOHNSON:
Yes, Sir.
BOSWELL:
He has a singular talent of exhibiting character.
JOHNSON:
Sir, it is not a talent; it is a vice; it is what others abstain from. It is not comedy, which exhibits the character of a species, as that of a miser gathered from many misers; it is a farce, which exhibits individuals.(28)

This means that the value of Foote's work is not so much that proper to literature as to history. Contemporaries recognized that he drew an accurate picture of the vices and follies of their generation, and later students of the period have not failed to point out, as Baker states it, that, ‘to those who would form a perfect conception of the manners of a hundred years ago, his works are invaluable; there is not a folly, a vice, a sham of the time, which they do not expose.’²⁹ The following statement made in 1808 in an article on one of Foote's plays sums up the matter fairly: ‘The dramatic writer, who descends to personalities, and depicts the individual instead of the species, will, if he possess genius, be extravagantly applauded by his contemporaries, and proportionably neglected by posterity. Thus it has fared with Foote.’³⁰

Foote's dramas came forth from the period of Sentimentalism; but with all their notable contemporaneousness, they were not of it. While his fellows traced their literary pedigree to Steele, Lillo, and Moore, his own line went back to Fielding and Gay. He had small affinity with playwrights of the tender strain. He was not, indeed—what the Sentimentalists flattered themselves on being—‘genteel’: he was ‘low,’ as Goldsmith was.

There are, of course, exceptions. A few of his heroines are pathetic and moral and insipid, perfectly good associates for the delicate young ladies of the period. Lucinda was rather this sort on her first acquaintance with Buck in Paris, though she has picked up some spirit by the time he returns in the sequel; and there are Lucy in the Minor, Juliet in the Patron, and Lydia in the Bankrupt. But what are they when one thinks of Mrs. Match'em, Mrs. Mechlin, Mrs. Fleece'em, Mrs. Cole, Mrs. Sneak, and Lady Kitty Crocodile? These are Foote's memorable women. In fact, he almost never devotes much attention to sentimental characters.

A few of his plots, too, show traces of the prevailing style in sentiment. A specific teaching, for example, is found in the moral reflections of the Englishman Returned from Paris. Buck's guardian, finding his tutor a worthless intriguer and pander to his pupil's weaknesses, soliloquizes:

But can it be strange, whilst the parent negligently accepts a superficial recommendation to so important a trust, that the person whose wants, perhaps, more than his abilities make desirous of it, should consider the youth as a kind of property, and not study what to make him, but what to make of him; and thus prudently lay a foundation for his future sordid hopes, by a criminal compliance with the lad's present prevailing passions?

The closing words of this comedy are in the most approved style of Sentimental Drama, which always takes care that the moral shall be apparent in the final speech:

But, before we close the scene, receive, young man, this last advice from the old friend of your father: as it is your happiness to be born a Briton, let it be your boast also; know, that the blessings of liberty are your birth-right, which, while you preserve, other nations may envy or fear, but can never conquer or contemn you. Believe, that French fashions are as ill-suited to the genius, as their politics are pernicious to the peace of your native land.

The Nabob also concludes with a moral aphorism of general application. But for the most part, when Foote's plays conclude in didactic strain, they at least stick to the case in hand. And some, like the Lame Lover and the Mayor of Garratt, flaunt themselves at the very curtain unregenerate as Etherege or Wycherley.

If Foote is less eager than the Sentimentalists to inculcate ethical notions, he is, on the other hand, less easily satisfied with shallow and formal adjustments of moral situations. The Englishman Returned from Paris is an instance. The climactic situation in this play comes ultimately from Mrs. Centlivre's Artifice, where the identical device is used by the heroine, Louise, in retribution for precisely the same dishonorable proposals that Buck makes to Lucinda. The obligation is plainly indicated in the substantial reproduction of certain speeches. Louise, however, marries her faithless Ned, owing to the priest's arriving before he has time to repent of his repentance; and Mrs. Centlivre is as well pleased as Richardson is when he has rewarded his ‘virtuous serving-maid’ with the worthless hand of Mr. B. If Foote's reader feels at times critical of his taste and his morals, let him remember that in all his many stories he never indulges in such prudential casuistry.

Foote occasionally uses a Sentimental situation as the basis of a plot, as, for example, in the Minor (Sir George's rescue of Lucy); but the play as a whole does not bear the characteristics of the type. His nearest approach to the Sentimental Drama, the Bankrupt, has been described, and the probable reason given for its taking this form, which was not originally intended. The fact has also been mentioned that the very season in which the Bankrupt appeared, Foote made an attack upon the type in his Piety in Pattens.

The pendulum had now begun to swing away from Sentimental Drama and Foote's criticism was part of a general movement. In 1768 Kelly with his False Delicacy had easily overshadowed Goldsmith's Good-natured Man; in 1771 nothing could equal the success of Cumberland's West Indian. Sentimentality could go no further. The year of Foote's Nabob Goldsmith published his second brilliant attack on the Comédie Larmoyante in an Essay on the Theatre, or, a Comparison between Laughing and Sentimental Comedy, and was soon to offer his second example of a comedy that was not pathetic. She Stoops to Conquer was reluctantly produced by Colman at Covent Garden in March, 1773.³¹ It was the month before this that Foote produced his Piety in Pattens.

If Cradock was right in saying that Goldsmith was to have been satirized in this farce, it is only another instance of the inconsistency between Foote's avowed interest in a general principle and his actual pursuit of personal burlesque, for at this very moment Goldsmith's Kate Hardcastle and her half-brother were getting ready to play their knavish tricks at Covent Garden and show London what it was to laugh without a tear in the eye. It surely would have confused issues to introduce into a satire on Sentimentalism any critical treatment—even a merely personal one—of the most outstanding opponent of Sentimentalism, specially at the moment when his opposition was most conspicuous.

Goldsmith's influence upon Sentimental Comedy is better remembered than Foote's because he was a greater dramatist; but it was not in reality more significant. Davies asserted that ‘Piety in Pattens was a charm as powerful in demolishing that species of comedy which the French term larmoyante, as the Rehearsal was in banishing the rants and bombast of Dryden and other writers.’³² Ernest Bernbaum makes the statement in his recent study of Sentimental Drama that Foote ‘had a larger comprehension of the nature of the genre than any of its other antagonists since Vanbrugh. Most of the attacks upon it,’ he continues, ‘both before Foote's time and thereafter, were directed against its sententious style and serious tone. Foote struck deeper, and made ridiculous the sentimental desire to idealize common life.’³³

The play of Foote's which has been called his ‘nearest approach to legitimate comedy,’³⁴ the Mayor of Garratt, was thus classified, no doubt, on account of its utter lack of any of the elements of Sentimental Drama; for that type, certainly, is as far removed from pure comedy as any type there is. The intrigue in the Mayor of Garratt, as stated in a previous chapter, is quite in the Restoration spirit. Sneak and Bruin with their respective wives have been easily recognized as descendants of Bisket and Fribble with their respective wives in Epsom Wells, and the scene where Sneak peeps through the key-hole of the summer-house in Act 2 was doubtless suggested by a scene in the same play.

Though Foote did not have the mournful view of comedy, he claimed a purpose as serious as that of the Sentimentalists. While repudiating the standards of those dramatists who held that ‘laughter's a distorted passion’ and therefore ‘chose with pity to chastise delight,’³⁵ he nevertheless maintained that his province was that of a reformer. He too would chastise; only he would do it by means of satire, which he regarded as the real differentia of comedy, whose province is to deal not with the woes, but with the follies of men. Ridicule, he said, is often the only antidote for folly. But his excessive indulgence in personal burlesque casts doubt upon his sincerity. A dramatic critic wrote in 1770 that he ‘studiously, and in the most agreeable manner, impresses moral inferences upon such of his audience as chuse to think.’³⁶ But many others agree with Doran that, ‘he did not care for the suppression of vice, but if he who attempted to suppress it had a foible, or a strongly marked characteristic, Foote laid hold of him, and made him look like a fool or a rascal, in the eyes of a too willing audience.’

In the introduction to the Minor Foote speaks of resorting to the Comic Muse to deal with ‘a madness that argument can never cure’ in the hope that the ‘archness and severity of her smile may redress an evil, that the laws cannot reach, or reason reclaim.’ This ‘madness’ is what in the language of the time was termed ‘enthusiasm,’ by which was meant specifically the religious ardor of the Methodists, and Foote at no point dissociates it from cant. It is no great marvel that hosts of prosaic men misunderstood the intensely emotional, mystic soul of Whitefield, that they failed to differentiate his burning zeal from the cant of certain hypocrites who found it convenient to pretend to his faith. But Foote presumed to teach. And yet he did not turn his satire upon those phases of Methodism that were really open to just criticism; he spent his excellent powers upon a personal pasquinade that was as false as it was cruel. He had attended Whitefield's meetings, had noticed the cast in his eye, had caught his trick of phrase and a superficial notion of his doctrines. Thus equipped he produced the characters of Dr. Squintum and Mrs. Cole. The inference is natural that his motive was not wholly reformatory. Could it be that he even knowingly misrepresented Whitefield, merely because Whitefield had indulged in that cheap pun—that ‘the Devil would make a football of him’? That Foote could stoop to this sort of revenge is well known. But it can scarcely explain the Minor.

In his Letter to the Reverend Author of the Remarks Critical and Christian on the Minor is this significant statement: ‘I shall not enter into a dispute with you upon the principles delivered at the Tabernacle. Your forms are above my comprehension; and, indeed, I believe, your own. When we want an explanation of regeneration, the new birth, and that strange kind of spiritual commerce, which you pretend to carry on with superior invisible agents, you refer us to feelings which, as we never experienced, we can never understand.’ He saw only the ugly externals of Methodism—and they were, doubtless, ugly enough—he failed utterly to see its soul, because he had no insight into spiritual verities. In replying to the Remarks Critical and Christian he apparently made no effort to penetrate the doctrines that he undertook to refute. Justification by faith, the new birth, and the mystical communion of the soul with its God are treated in the Minor as doctrines peculiar to Whitefield and the Methodists, and this is not corrected in the Letter.

Boswell once remarked to Johnson that Foote was an infidel. Johnson replied:

‘I do not know, Sir, that the fellow is an infidel; but if he be an infidel, he is an infidel as a dog is an infidel; that is to say, he has never thought upon the subject.’ Boswell. ‘I suppose, Sir, he has thought superficially, and seized the first notions which occurred to his mind.’ Johnson. Why then, Sir, still he is like a dog, that snatches the piece next him.’³⁷

His preaching was not only shallow; it was often in direct opposition to his practice. He had said in his introduction to the Minor that he regarded affectation as ‘the true comic object,’ and that it was not the business of comedy to touch upon anything in the nature of an “accidental unhappiness.’ This was quoted by critics of the play; and driven to defend himself, he made the following statement:

Your next remark, I think, was upon the cruelty and indecency of producing your friend at the Theatre, on the score only of a mere natural infirmity; an inconsiderable weakness in the optic nerve; which, instead of retaining the eyes in the reciprocal direction they are generally placed in, lets them loose to run rambling about the head. This criticism you sustain by an observation of my own, that provincial dialects are not the proper objects of comedy; and if not dialects, surely much less natural infirmities.—Granted.

But if men, with these infirmities, will attempt things, which those very infirmities have rendered incapable of properly executing, it is their own fault if the source that should acquire them compassion degenerates into a fountain of ridicule. My Lord Lanesborouh's gout would have hardly found a place in Mr. Pope's page, if it had not hobbled a minuet at court; nor should Dr. Squintum have shown the whites of his eyes at the Haymarket, if he had confined his circumspection to the tap-room of the Bell, at Gloucester; or, after his admission to the ministry, modestly submitted to the decent duties of a country cure. But if, in despight of art and nature, not content with depreciating every individual of his own order; with a countenance not only inexpressive, but ludicrous; a dialect not only provincial, but barbarous; a deportment not only awkward, but savage; he will produce himself to the whole public, and there deliver doctrines equally heretical and absurd, in a language at once inelegant and ungrammatical, he must expect to have his pretensions to oratory derided, his sincerity suspected, and the truth of his mission denied.³⁸

On this principle, if one may be pardoned for resorting to the argumentum ad hominem, Foote himself ought to have retired from the stage in 1766, when he suffered his accident. Instead, he began his managership of the Haymarket and acted steadily for the next ten years. His lameness was extremely obvious and he knew it.³⁹

If one is to find fault with Foote for inconsistencies, indeed, there is plenty of material. In the introduction to the Minor he represents himself as declining to deal in national characteristics—dialect he ‘cannot think either a subject of satire or of humour’; yet he had been very ready to let the audience clap Tim's Cornish speech in the Knights and was thereafter to make great fun with Johnny Macpherson in the Devil upon Two Sticks and Lady Catherine Coldstream in the Maid of Bath and La Jeunesse in the Trip to Calais, not to mention others. He also represents himself as refusing point blank to burlesque the actors, and from principle—that from the author of the Diversions of the Morning! And when asked if he will not treat his audience with a modern amour or a state intrigue, he replies, ‘And so amuse the public ear at the expense of private peace. You must excuse me.’ Shades of Langford, Macklin, Apreece, Sheridan, Faulkner, Newcastle, Dodington, Garrick, Wilkinson, Brocklesby, Long, Elizabeth Chudleigh, Jackson—what next!

Or take the Bankrupt. That play criticises the newspapers for the publishing of personal scandal. The strictures were doubtless justified. But so also was a certain journalist's retort. ‘Surely,’ said he, ‘an attack upon the Press, in favour of private characters, did not belong to Mr. Foote—to Mr. Foote, who has alone attacked more characters, and with greater severity, than all the Presses in the nation. Does Mr. Foote, who in the very Prologue, which introduces the Bankrupt takes off private characters, give us immediately a lecture upon attacking private characters?’⁴⁰

There is no doubt that his sharp pen had a tremendous power in his day. ‘That by the death of Foote, the public lost a great check on notorious vice and fashionable irregularity,’ wrote Davies, ‘no man will deny. Peter Aretine, who, by his satires, raised contributions on all the princes of Europe, nay, bragged of receiving hush-money from the emperor of the Turks, was not more dreaded than Foote.’⁴¹ But the question is: To what end was this power exerted? Davies' use of the term hush-money is unpleasantly suggestive. It is too strong, but Foote's biography makes it clear, I think, that he did often regard his power of writing and acting as a weapon ready to be whipped out against any personal foe of his own. Thus he attempted to frighten Rich out of allowing Wilkinson to produce one of his plays at Covent Garden; thus he would have paid off a score against Dr. Johnson with his Orators; thus he intended to wreak his jealousy on Garrick in Drugger's Jubilee. It was currently believed that the Trip to Calais was an attempt at blackmail, a false supposition probably; but the supposition that its sequel, the Capuchin, was brought out for revenge is not false. His threat, too, of burlesquing the Duchess of Kingston in a performance of Steele's Lady Brumpton if the prohibition on Lady Kitty Crocodile was not removed, has an unpleasant inference.

Writers on Whitefield speak of Foote as a ‘tool’ of Whitefield's enemies, who ‘employed’ him to write the Minor. But this, I think, there is no reason to believe. What he did with Whitefield is just what he did with George Faulkner and many another man or woman who was well enough known to raise a laugh when mimicked in public.

The impression Foote has left upon students of the drama is thus expressed by Thomas Wright: ‘He was in all respects the great theatrical caricaturist of the age. The personality of the satire was the grand characteristic of Foote's performances, and one which rendered them dangerous to society and certainly not to be approved. An affront to the actor was at any time enough to cause the offender to be dragged before the world; and matter in itself of the most libellous description was published without danger, under the fictitious name of a character, the resemblance of which to the original was sufficiently evident to the town. From such tribunals, neither elevation in society nor respectability of character is a protection.’⁴²

In concluding our study of the characteristics of the plays, there remains for consideration the matter of Foote's literary obligations. Historians of the drama have a somewhat unfair habit of speaking as though he were peculiarly given to literary robbery. For example, Doran says of the Patron that, ‘as in all his pieces, with much original wit, there was rank, though judicious plagiarism.’⁴³ Now Foote's own preface to the play frankly states that it is ‘founded on a story of M. Marmontel's.’ Although he does not name the story, plagiarism seems scarcely a fair term for the candid dramatization of a prose narrative with the name of the original author attached. Except in two cases, Foote's use of sources can be shown, I think, to be in keeping with the general practice among writers. Those two cases are the Englishman Returned from Paris, and the Minor. His culpability is unfortunately clear enough in regard to the former. With the latter it is a trifle less clear.

The Minor was first put upon the boards in 1760. On April 20 of the following year a play by Joseph Reed was thus announced in the Public Advertiser:

The latter End of this Week a new Farce will be exhibited at Drury-Lane called The Register Office, written, it is said, by an ingenious Gentleman in the City, in which Mr. Foote is to perform a Character.

The action was slight: Maria, Harwood's housekeeper, who has left his employ in order to escape his advances, is followed to London and found by him through the agency of an employment bureau. The two acts consist mainly of scenes between Gulwell, the swindling proprietor of the bureau, and his customers. One of the customers is Mrs. Snarewell, who enters complaining of her ‘rhumatise’ precisely as Mrs. Cole does, and mixing her infamous schemes with talk of Mr. Watchlight.

The dear Man was so fervent in his Prayers, and so earnest in his Ejaculations, that I received great Comfort and Consolation. … Oh! he's a most Heavenly Creature! He said such comfortable, moving Things!—But what success had the Advertisement?⁴⁴

The resemblance to the Minor is strong in the character of Mrs. Snarewell, her statements about Mr. Watchlight, her use of the employment agency, her talk of her health, of her conversion, of her business, even in her language. ‘Well, I must be going,’ she says,

I have promised Mr. Watchlight to be at the tabernacle, to return Thanks for my Recovery—He will preach a Thanksgiving Sermon, and Sing an occasional Hymn of his own Composing after the Discourse.

With this compare the following from the Minor:

She bade me say, she just stopt in her way to the tabernacle; after the exhortation, she says, she'll call again.

and Mrs. Cole's speech,

To-morrow I hope to suit you—We are to have, at the tabernacle, an occasional hymn, with a thanksgiving sermon for my recovery.

Reed published the play immediately and in the preface he said,

As there is a palpable Similarity between the Character of Mrs. Cole in the Minor, and Mrs. Snarewell in the foregoing Performance; it may not be unnecessary to declare, that the Register-Office was put into Mr. Foote's Hands in August 1758 on his promise of playing it at one of the Patent-Theatres in the ensuing Season.

It is curious that he says nothing of other likenesses, for if Foote appropriated the character of Mrs. Snarewell from him, he must also have taken that of Mr. Watchlight, and the use of the register-office as a decoy for the heroine. The author of an Additional Scene to the Comedy of the Minor, published three months before the Register-Office was acted, made this positive statement:

Mr. Reed put, some time ago, a farce into Mr. F … 's hands, … in order to procure his opinion of it, and his interest in bringing it upon the stage. This farce, instead of being returned to Mr. Reed, or shewn to the manager, was detained by Mr. F … to serve his own purpose, and from whence he not only stole the hint of the bawd, but purloin'd also several speeches almost entire.

While the indications are certainly against Foote, the case does not seem entirely proved, for before either of these statements was made the Minor was well known to all who would be likely to see or read the Register-Office. Reed's play might therefore need some excuse for being. As usual, Foote fared better than his rival. Mrs. Snarewell was not allowed to be acted,⁴⁵ though Mrs. Cole had been on the same stage only five days previous speaking almost the identical speeches and in no way less offensive.

John Adolphus says in his Memoirs of John Bannister⁴⁶ that while everybody knows that Foote's Cadwallader ‘consecrated to permanent ridicule … a worthy Welsh baronet, … it is not so well known that the idea of the robustious husband and his very silly wife is derived from Dryden's unsuccessful and long-forgotten comedy of “Limberham.”’ It seems to me very unlikely that Limberham furnished any hints for the Author; on the other hand, Dryden's Mrs. Saintly in this play may well have been the source for Mrs. Cole in the Minor. However, if Foote did depend on Reed for Mrs. Cole, her relation to Mrs. Saintly would be fairly remote.

Other dependence of Foote's on Restoration comedy may be noted here. Shadwell's Epsom Wells is the source of a scene in the Mayor of Garratt; Vanbrugh's Confederacy of one in the Cozeners—the scene between Col. Gorget and Mrs. Aircastle. Mrs. Aircastle has many prototypes, the most notable of whom is Margery Pinchwife in Wycherley's Country Wife. There are also manifest obligations to Jonson's Alchemist in the Cozeners.

Foote's sources in French comedy are considerable. He used Le Sage, Corneille, d'Ancourt, and particularly Molière. In the Commissary, for instance, the idea of the various ‘masters’ and the lessons in fencing and elocution come from Molière's Bourgeois Gentilhomme, while the old widow in search of a young husband, the character and business of Mrs. Mechlin, the child of the music-master, and the circumstance of sending the infant in a bass viol come from d'Ancourt's Femme d'Intrigue.

In the prologue to the Liar Foote fathered that play on Lope de Vega. He complained that he was said to copy individuals to the neglect of manners and that whatever character he painted, ‘the true original’ was quickly proclaimed. But says he,

… in the following group let no one dare To claim a limb, nay, not a single hair: What gallant Briton can be such a sot To own the child a Spaniard has begot?

This apparently frank acknowledgment has been taken as an attempt to cover some real disingenuousness⁴⁷; and it is true that if he was actually acquainted with the Spanish play that he means to have us believe his source, he made an odd mistake in ascribing it to the same wrong author that Pièrre Corneille had ascribed it to when he adapted it for the French theatre. The play he must have had in mind is la Verdad Sospechosa by Don Juan Ruiz de Alarcón. Since he never hits upon a variant that recalls this play, he must have known it only through the medium of Corneille's Menteur, to which he owes obvious debts. Inasmuch as he was working on an edition of translations of ‘all the best French comedies’⁴⁸ at the time he wrote the Liar, of course he knew Corneille. It is possible that he was also acquainted with an anonymous translation of le Menteur entitled the Mistaken Beauty, or the Lyar, a Comedy acted by their Majesties Servants at the Royal Theatre, London, 1685, which is the apparent source of Steele's Lying Lover. In any case he had recourse to Steele. His plot is closer to Corneille than to Steele, but a few passages common to Foote and Steele and not found in Corneille establish an acquaintance on his part with Steele's play, though it is evident that it was not his main source. Some writers have gone so far as to speak of the Liar as ‘an adaptation’ of the Lying Lover.⁴⁹ This greatly exaggerates Foote's indebtedness, since all the main elements of plot and character that originate with Steele are omitted by him.

Although it was over half a century since the Lying Lover had been written, it is possible that Foote may not have cared to revive the memory of it in connection with the Liar. But he was scarcely so self-distrustful as to be unaware that his own was distinctly the better of the two plays. His treatment is more rapid, more interesting, and more true to nature. Steele has spoiled a comic story with sentimental drivel. In fact, Foote has nothing to lose by comparison with either of his sources, and somewhat to gain. The conclusion in le Menteur is mechanical, depending on an ill motivated change of the hero's mind as to the girl he wishes to marry. Foote's device in the scene with Kitty produces a perfectly natural relinquishment of Miss Grantam and the psychological error of making him immediately prefer Miss Godfrey is avoided. Foote has added not a little to Corneille's plot—the character and history of Papillon as well as the scene with Kitty—but nothing that drags like Steele's long sentiments. Again he evinces his disagreement with the comédie larmoyante: while Steele presented his teaching through diatribes on duelling and the melodramatic incident of Lovemore's supposed death, Foote returned to the method of pure satire used by Corneille.

These are Foote's appropriations from other writers. There is another side to the matter—others' appropriations from him. A reviewer of the Nabob prophesied in 1772⁵⁰: ‘Few of his pieces will be amusing to posterity; because his principal characters are supported by his own powers; but they will be plundered of their richness by the hungry wits of future times.’ In the case of the play under review the prophecy was fulfilled by Joanna Baillie in her Election. The Nabob apparently suggested the following items: the class feeling between the two brothers, the love affair between the cousins, the buying up of the creditor's claims by the gentleman's rich enemy, the rich tradesman's offer of buying an East India post for the gentleman's son, the paying of the gentleman's debts by the brother, the use of the election.

Murphy, who lent to Foote, seems also to have borrowed from him. The character of Mrs. Bromley in his Know Your Own Mind is strikingly like Lady Kitty Crocodile, both in her pretended grief and in her treatment of the young woman who is her protégée. Know Your Own Mind was first produced February 22, 1777, at Covent Garden. Murphy said that he had had the play by him even longer than Horace requires; but if this were, indeed, the case, one feels that he profited by the delay and wrote it over with help from Foote's Trip to Calais, which though never acted, was well known at this time.

Take the Patron. John Tobin's School for Authors was no sooner on the stage than its ‘strong resemblance’ to this comedy of Foote's was recognized.⁵¹ There are close parallels in the character of the connoisseur, his niece, her lover, the boy's assuming responsibility for the uncle's play, and some of the scenes. Though it is not impossible, it is unlikely that the author worked directly from Marmontel, since Foote's dramatization was well known and accessible. The School for Authors, it may be added, is inferior to the Patron in interest, in motivation, and in style.

Thomas Holcroft used Foote's material in two plays. The Deserted Daughter, a story of a girl who has been cast out by her father and is rescued from an evil woman by her father's ward, who marries her, must be based on the Minor. In the Road to Ruin the vacillating character of the elder Dornton seems like an elaboration of that of Sir Robert Riscounter in Foote's Bankrupt, and the cruel step-mother, with the fact, though not the manner, of her exposure may have been suggested by Lady Riscounter. A similar plot motive is found in the bankruptcy that is forestalled in the nick of time.

A more important writer who read Foote to his own advantage was Goldsmith, though he took but little. Lofty in the Good-natured Man may have got his name from Foote's Patron and his character from Sir Luke Limp in the Lame Lover.

The hungriest of these ‘hungry wits’ was Richard Brinsley Sheridan, who was perhaps only taking back his own from the man who had used his family in five farces. Father Paul in the Duenna reminds one of Foote's priest in the Capuchin. There are several striking comparisons between the Knights and the Rivals,—with Miss Penelope Trifle and Sukey compare Mrs. Malaprop and Lydia Languish, and with the elder woman's conversation with Sir Gregory in the one play compare that with Sir Anthony in the other. Both the character and the circumstances of Charles Surface in the School for Scandal are closely modelled on those of Sir George Wealthy in the Minor. Little Premium and Little Moses recall Little Transfer; the return of Sir Oliver in disguise recalls both that of Sir William Wealthy in the Minor and that of Governor Cape in the Author; the way the boy measures up to his elder's hopes is similar in all three plays.

Of other obligations owed by and to Foote it is not necessary to speak, for the most important of them have been treated in earlier chapters. On this sort of literary commerce, I like Foote's own reply to the criticism upon a certain author who borrowed from Terence, ‘Well, and what then? Why do we take such Pains to create an Intimacy with the obsolete Gentry, if they don't help us out now and then at a dead Lift?’⁵²

To ‘the obsolete gentry’ Foote himself now belongs. And none of his numerous comedies holds a place of importance in enduring literature. What then, is his significance for the modern reader?

‘Supposing Wilkes for leading man in a country constantly plunging into war under some plumed Lamachus,’ says George Meredith,⁵³ ‘with enemies periodically firing the land up to the gates of London, and a Samuel Foote, of prodigious genius, attacking him with ridicule, I think it gives a notion of the conflict engaged in by Aristophanes.’ By Aristophanes, but not by Foote. For such work he had not the large view, the noble purpose, the philosophy of life. The name which the flattery of his friends gave him—the English Aristophanes—was due to wholly superficial likenesses. He resembled the Greek in his humor, which was broad, easy, reckless; in his biting satire; and especially in the audacity with which he ridiculed vice and hypocrisy in the persons of certain individuals, whom he presented with unrivalled vividness. But he had not the great imagination of Aristophanes, that wonderful power to transport real persons into an ideal world, and to generalize the particulars taken from reality. Above all, he has not one touch of the great gift of poetry which makes the Greek comedy survive the changes of taste that have affected some of its once most popular elements.

Foote, I think, would be content with posterity if it would write of him as he once wrote of Molière: ‘There can't be a stronger proof of the peculiar merit of Moliere than the testimony of his contemporary writers; one of whom assures us, that fifteen days representation of his Femmes Scavantes put an entire stop to female pedantry at Paris. One advantage too attended the performances of this author, that the original of the principal character in almost every piece was thoroughly known to the audience. George Dandin and the Cocu Imaginaire were two remarkable tradesmen in Paris. The duke de Montaunfiere was acknowledged the Misanthrope, and Oronte, known for the duke de St. Aignan; the first president sat for Tartuffe and Monsieur Rohant for the Bourgeois Gentilhomme, whilst Menage and the Abbe Cossin, in the characters of Vadius and Tripotin, heightened the public relish for the Femmes Scavantes. From the fidelity with which these well-known originals were copied, we must allow Moliere a plenary possession of that first great comic requisite, character.’⁵⁴ With the substitution of other names, this is what Foote would have said of himself.

Posterity, however, places him neither with Aristophanes nor with Molière. If he challenges attention, it is for his own extraordinary qualities. It is true that his plays are not great works of art; but they have a value in preserving intensely the color of eighteenth century life. Through them and through his biography we get a vivid sense of its fashions, its foibles, its problems; of early Methodism, of the theatrical circles of London during the entire period of the great Garrick's managership, of many interesting men and women. Above all, there is Foote's own captivating personality. If he had astounding faults, he had also astounding merits. Whatever the odds, he was never baffled. His daring, his originality, and his ability to succeed were superb.

Notes

1. 2. 472.

2. Ibid. 1. 351.

3. Introd. to Cooke's British Drama, vol. 9.

4. Wandering Patentee 1. 285.

5. Pub. Ad., Feb. 17, 1773.

6. Town and Country 1¹. 825 f.

7. Caleb (Taste), Tim (Knights), Toby Aircastle (Cozeners).

8. Lady Riscounter (Bankrupt).

9. Becky (Author).

10. Mrs. Pentweazle (Taste).

11. Mrs. Maxwell (Devil).

12. Mrs. Sneak (Mayor of Garratt).

13. Jerry Sneak.

14. Flint (Maid of Bath), Sir Penurious Trifle (Knights).

15. Sir Penurious; Aircastle (Cozeners).

16. Lord Dupe (Taste), Sir Matthew Mite (Nabob), Cadwallader (Author).

17. Sir Gregory Gazette (Knights), Squib (Devil).

18. Buck (Englishman Returned from Paris).

19. Gent. Mag. 40. 379.

20. Mem. 3. 150 f.

21. Town and Country 1¹. 241 ff.

22. Hist. and Biog. Essays 2. 359.

23. London Mag. 40. 360.

24. Boswell 2. 110, n.

25. Letter to the Reverend Author of the Remarks Critical and Christian on the Minor.

26. Dedication of Taste.

27. Mem. 1. 27.

28. Boswell 2. 109.

29. Eng. Actors 1. 256.

30. Monthly Mirror N. S. 3. 316.

31. Foote acted in this play at the Haymarket the same summer (G. H. Nettleton, English Drama of the Restoration and Eighteenth Century, p. 284).

32. Garrick 2. 145.

33. The Drama of Sensibility, p. 242 f.

34. Chambers' Edinburgh Journal 7. 230.

35. See epilogue to Steele's Lying Lover.

36. Dramatic Censor 2. 472 f.

37. Boswell 2. 109 f.

38. A Letter to the Reverend Author, etc.

39. Wilkinson tells in his Wandering Patentee (p. 280 ff.) how an audience hissed his performance of one of Foote's parts because they missed the limp which they had become accustomed to, though the character was not lame (Major Sturgeon in the Mayor of Garratt).

40. Whitehall Eve. Post July 22-4, 1773.

41. Garrick 2. 268.

42. Quoted W. C. Russell, Representative Actors, p. 135.

43. Annals 3. 379.

44. Cf. quotation, p. 82 above.

45. Genest 4. 612.

46. 1. 67.

47. Genest 4. 649; Dorothy Canfield Fisher, Corneille and Racine in England, p. 124.

48. See full title of Foote's Comic Theatre.

49. E.g. Brander Matthews, Actors and Actresses of Great Britain and the United States 1. 144.

50. London Mag. 41. 310.

51. Monthly Mirror 4. 383 f. and n.

52. Essay on Comedy.

53. Essay on Comedy.

54. Introduction to Foote's Comic Theatre.