[In the essay below, Wharton investigates “the bizarre blend of satire and sentimentalism which abounds” in Foote's plays.]

Samuel Foote, although little known today, was, during the Age of Garrick, one of the most popular personalities in the theatre. Manager of the Haymarket Theatre, writer of some thirty comedies, and star actor of his own company, he was dubbed “the English Aristophanes” by his contemporaries because of his reckless satirical thrusts at living individuals. In the twentieth century he has been of sufficient interest to inspire one biography, by Percy Fitzgerald, and a scholarly dissertation, by Professor M. M. Belden, as well as the brief notices in the standard histories of the eighteenth-century theatre.

Students of Foote have projected several images of their subject, all of them accurate as far as they go but failing in every instance to give due emphasis to one of the most interesting characteristics of his work. In general, they lead one to see Foote as a wit or a buffoon or, above all, as a highly successful mimic whose raucous satire was chiefly marked by its relevance to living personalities.

Surprisingly they all but overlook the sentimental strain in his comedies, partly no doubt because of the dust stirred up by his production of Piety in Pattens (1773), an uncompromising satire of sentimental comedy, and partly by a natural tendency to stress the most indigenous feature of his plays, their indecent personal abuse. According to Professor Belden, Foote “almost never devotes much time to sentimental characters,”¹ and this view is evidently shared by Professors Bernbaum, Nicoll, and Nettleton in their accounts of the eighteenth century drama.

My first aim, therefore, is to call attention to the substantial vein of sentimentalism that runs through Foote's comedies—to all that oppressive gloom, falseness, and sententiousness by means of which their author, in common with a host of other writers in his time, tried to “weep diversion into virtue.”² Secondly, I wish to illustrate the bizarre blend of satire and sentimentalism which abounds in his plays and to consider some of its possible implications.

At least ten of Foote's comedies are shot through with the stock features of sentimental drama: first, the false and oversimplified characters, the weeping heroines and generous young men, the elderly benefactors and unfeeling monsters—all those one-dimensional figures whom it is so difficult today to imagine any theatre audience taking very seriously; second, the atmosphere of hollow melancholy which the playwright evoked through insistently pathetic speeches and situations and maintained through platitudinous moralizing; third, the artificial denouements characterized by incredible triumphs of virtue and totally unmotivated conversions.

In fact, if one required a brief scene to illustrate all these elements at once, he could scarcely find anything better suited to his purpose than an exchange of dialogue which occurs in Foote's early comedy, The Englishman in Paris (1753).

Here is the scene. The first speaker is the heroine, Lucinda, an orphan whose dying father unaccountably left her the helpless ward of Mr. and Mrs. Subtle, an unscrupulous English couple residing in Paris. The second is Sir John, father of the hero:

LUCINDA:
Sir, you have reason [for your suspicions]; appearances are against me, I confess, but when you have heard my melancholy story, you'll own you have wronged me, and learn to pity her whom now you hate.
SIR John:
Madam, you misemploy your time … ; I am too knowing in the wiles of women, to be softened by a siren tear, or imposed on by an artful tale.
LUCINDA:
But hear me, sir; on my knee I beg it, nay I demand it; you have wronged me, and must do me justice … When you know, sir, that I am the orphan of an honorable and once wealthy family, whom her father, misguided by pernicious politics, brought with him, in her earliest infancy, to France, that dying here, he bequeathed me with the poor remnant of our shattered fortune, to the direction of this rapacious pair; I am sure you will tremble for me.
SIR John:
Go on!
LUCINDA:
But when you know that, plundered of the little fortune left me, I was reluctantly compelled to aid this plot; forced to comply under the penalty of deepest want; without one hospitable roof to shelter me … ; you must, you can't but pity me.
SIR John:
Proceed!
LUCINDA:
To this when you are told, that, previous to your coming, I had determined never to wed your son, at least without your knowledge and consent, I hope your justice then will credit and acquit me.
SIR John:
Madam, your tale is plausible and moving; I hope 'tis true; here come the explainer of this riddle. [Here Sir John demands that Mr. Subtle reveal the name of Lucinda's father.]
MR. Subtle:
'Twas Worthy.
SIR John:
Not the daughter of Sir Gilbert.
MR. Subtle:
You have it.
SIR John:
My poor girl! I indeed have wronged, but will redress you … Dry up your tears, Lucinda; at last you have found a father …
LUCINDA:
Am I then justified?
SIR John:
You are: your father was my first and firmest friend; I mourned his loss; and long have sought for thee in vain, Lucinda.(3)

The overworked tricks of the sentimentalist are so obvious here as to need no commentary: the friendless, wronged, and beseeching heroine; the bended knee, symbolic of the heroine's innocence and humility; the melancholy, interminable explanatory sentences; the stark, unashamed appeal for pity at any price; the redress of evil and its corollary, the reward of patient virtue, brought about by the elderly benefactor who is the sentimental deus ex machina.

Such devices appear in The Englishman Returned from Paris (1756), The Author (1757), The Nabob (1772), A Trip to Calais (1775), and The Capuchin (1776), as well as in the comedies which are discussed below. Since these plays constitute about one-third of Foote's total dramatic writing, it appears that his almost exclusive identification with Aristophanes rests upon a one-sided emphasis and that a balanced view of his writings must take into account their sentimentality as well as their satire.

To me, however, the most striking fact about Foote's work is not that it is thick with the clichés of sentimentalism or that it is filled with personal libels, but that it testifies throughout to its author's divided sensibility, an attribute which Foote shared with abler writers of his time.

Primarily this division was manifested in glaring inconsistencies of judgment which derived from two opposing views of human nature, one providing a rationale for the technique of the satirist, the other for that of the sentimentalist. The Tory satirists of the earlier eighteenth century had shared a view of human nature which most writers by 1750 regarded as old-fashioned.⁴ Swift, Pope, and their circle had seen the root of world-evil in the foolish and wicked heart of man. Spurred by self-interest, man, they felt, too often declined to permit reason to moderate his passions. Blinded by self-love, he evaluated his conduct by appealing to his “private” sense instead of to the “common” sense of mankind.

Competing with this gloomy view of human nature was that of the benevolist who stressed the goodness of human nature and man's capacity for “social” love. According to the benevolist school of ethics, man might well fail to exhibit his essential goodness in action: a predisposition of some kind or a bad environment might dull his “moral sense.” But any evil actions he might commit represented the corruption of his goodness, not its absence. Man had an innate “taste” for right conduct, and this taste might be cultivated and refined whenever it was seen to be imperfect.

In short, for the Tory satirists the central ethical task was to persuade men to allow reason and common sense to restrain clamoring self-love, which was the mainspring of human action. Their weapons of persuasion were castigation, raillery, and rebuke. For the benevolists the task was to arouse man's innate social love. This they attempted to do largely by making direct appeals to man's better nature.

Samuel Foote, a true child of his century, was significantly affected by both views. The world within his comedies is inhabited by both Cupiditas and Benevolus, by inhuman “monsters” depraved beyond redemption, by men and women too good to be true, and by temporarily misguided creatures whose self-love is ready to melt into compassion at the fall of the first tear. And Foote reacts to this world both in the “savage” manner of Swift and the “tender” manner of Cumberland. The older complex of ideas concerning self-interest and the newer one concerning “natural” goodness appear together in his work, and not merely by fits and starts, but in the same play and side by side. In brief, Foote was a sentimental satirist.

His best known play vividly illustrates the point. Primarily The Minor (1760) is a satire on Methodists, particularly on George Whitefield. Here, as in all of his strictures upon Methodists, Foote followed closely the traditional literature of anti-dissent, regarding Methodists as licentious and presumptuous, self-seeking and irrational—just as numerous writers from Burton to Swift had regarded the Puritans. As the eighteenth century progressed, however, many reformers were busily rearranging the Augustan hierarchy of values and were coming to identify virtue almost exclusively with benevolence, and sin with “insensibility.” Foote, taking his stand in both camps, found the Methodists guilty by the standards of both. If he made the canting Methodist, Mrs. Cole, ridiculous in her presumption, he also made her loathsome in her crass inhumanity.

The same duality in technique is visible in Foote's handling of the two “converts” in The Minor. At first glance Richard Wealthy and his son appear to be transformed wholly in accordance with sentimental rather than satiric tenets. The elder, a temporarily harsh and arbitrary father, disowns his daughter because she declines to marry the man he has chosen to be her husband. But after he is made to understand the suffering into which his inflexibility has plunged her, he repents and vows to permit her to choose her own husband. His instincts are fundamentally decent.

Similarly the Minor himself is basically good. Corrupted by his evil companions, he is callously unaffected by the report (which later turns out to have been false) of his father's death and, believing he will soon be in possession of a large inheritance, proceeds to live in foolish extravagance. So degrading is his way of life that he nearly assaults the heroine of the play, the innocent Lucy. When he is confronted by Lucy's tears, however, he suddenly becomes aware of “an honest feeling for afflicted virtue; and, however unfashionable, a spirit that dares afford it protection” (Act III; Works, II, 44).

Yet a closer examination of these conversions reveals the sentimental roots of their transformations to be tainted. What convinces his father of the Minor's essential decency is the report of his humane response to the plight of Lucy. But the Minor's words as the girl kneels before him in sentimental supplication betray the conflicting premises which comprise the most interesting feature of Foote's work. For when the Minor's good nature triumphs over his sensuality, it is prudential class consciousness as much as compassion which impels him. “O, Sir,” wails the heroine, “… If you have any humanity, spare me.” The Minor soliloquizes, “Her style's above the common class: her tears are real” (Act III, Works, II, p. 42).

The ambiguity of his uncle's conversion is even more striking, a classic illustration, in fact, of Foote's inability to choose between the prevailing psychologies of his century. When the Minor proposes that he marry his cousin Lucy (whom he evidently had never met before the Methodist bawd presented her to him), Richard Wealthy, softened by his daughter's suffering, stoutly proclaims, “That must depend on Lucy; her will, not mine, shall now direct her choice.” But then he quickly adds, “What says your father?” The latter joins the young people's hands, the Minor thanks him and his uncle for their understanding, and Lucy isn't allowed a single word throughout the rest of the play. One can scarcely imagine a more muddled mingling of the “soft” and “hard” views of human nature.

Essentially, then, Foote was in the grip of two conflicting ethical systems. On the whole he preferred the older Hobbesian position that self-interest is the prime mover of mankind and the satirist's view that the only hope for fallen man is to sting him into accepting reason as the moderator of his actions. One may suspect that the newer (Shaftesburyean) notions concerning natural goodness, social love, and the moral sense were not so congenial to his temperament and background. What is clear is that he could find room to entertain both sets of hypotheses at the same moment.

At the close of The Englishman in Paris, to cite yet another example, Buck, disturbed by his father's proprietary air toward the heroine, asks, “Pray ha'n't I some merit in finding her? She's mine by the custom of the manor.” Sir John scorns him. “Yours!” he cries, “First study to deserve her; she's mine, sir, I have just redeemed this valuable treasure; and shall not trust it in a spendthrift's hands.” Buck: “What would you have me do, sir?” Sir John: “Disclaim the partners of your riot, polish your manners, reform your pleasures, and before you think of governing others, learn to direct yourself” (Act II; Works, II, 28-29). Foote here recognizes the moral obtuseness of those prudential authors who, accepting the prevailing patriarchal view toward women, rewarded patient virtue with an unloved but wealthy rake.

Yet, interestingly, in this very comedy he reveals an inability to escape thinking in terms of the older, more prudential morality. Almost persuaded to elope with Buck, the heroine of the piece pauses for a moment's reflection. “What am I about!” she soliloquizes. “Contriving in concert with the most profligate couple that ever disgraced human nature, to impose an indigent orphan on the sole representative of a wealthy and honourable family! Is this a character becoming my birth and education? What must be the consequence? Sure detection and contempt, contempt even from him when his passions cool” (Act II; Works, II, 25). Clearly Lucinda wants it both ways. She wants us to know that her creator is not a sentimentalist, and she wants us to know that he is. Foote makes her hesitate to marry Buck because the thought of the unkindness of the project revolts her essentially good instincts; however, he also makes her rather disconcertingly aware of the danger of being caught.

A similar conclusion is apparent in the sequel to this play. In The Englishman Returned from Paris Crab charges all women with being interested in “property and power” (Act I; Works, II, 12). Lucinda thinks that she is an exception and declines to marry the wealthy Buck. Yet her sincerity is never tested: Foote provides her with a titled and presumably rich husband. And despite her professed lack of interest in money she is persuaded to join in a comic conspiracy to relieve Buck of £20,000.

The same confused juxtaposition of the old and the new is evident in Foote's attitude toward family relations. On the whole he recognizes a father as an authority from whose domestic commands there is no appeal. So sacred is the parent that Lucinda in The Englishman Returned from Paris is almost persuaded to take “a wretched chance for life” with the despised Buck out of “reverence” for the memory of his father. She is only prevented by the disclosure of her suitor's viciousness (Act II; Works, II, 30-31). Similarly, when Sir William Wealthy appears in the denouement of The Minor, young George falls to his knees. “My father alive! Thus let me greet the blessing.” (Act III; Works, II, 47).

The more modern view of the parent is presented in The Lame Lover (1770). “I have a father, and can have no will of my own,” says Charlotte Circuit (Act III; Works, I, 45), and presumably Foote wants us to pity her. In The Devil upon Two Sticks (1768), what Sir Thomas Maxwell calls the “natural rights of a parent” are labeled by his indomitable sister the “right to tyrannize,” and the notion that the rights are founded in nature appears to be scorned (Act I; Works, III, 7). Here, for once, Foote appears even to have sympathized with a pair of eloping lovers.⁵

Finally the cleavage in Foote's views may be neatly illustrated—I do not say demonstrated—by two bons mots preserved by his first biographer, William Cooke. Each sounds too contrived and too trite to be trusted. But their very patness and shallowness lend them for the literary historian a significance transcending any question of their literal truthfulness.

According to Cooke, Foote, upon hearing the report of the death of his old crony, Sir Francis Blake Delaval, “burst into a flood of tears, retired to his room, and saw no company for three days.” On the fourth day, the treasurer of the Haymarket Theatre, William Jewel, stopped in and informed Foote that the Knight's head was to be dissected before his burial. Foote, presumably after drying his eyes, exclaimed, “And what will they get there? I'm sure I have known poor Frank these five-and-twenty years, and I never could find anything in it.” On another occasion Foote attended the burial in the family vault of the actor Holland, who was the son of a baker. After the funeral he remarked to a coffee-house acquaintance, “the tears scarce dry upon his cheeks,” that he had just seen the little baker shoved into his family oven.⁶

What is the explanation for this incongruous mixture? The most obvious answer is that Foote had no genuine convictions, that he thought primarily in terms of what would secure an audience at the Haymarket Theatre. Yet the fact that his contemporaries thought of him primarily as a satirist of living persons and found his satire hugely entertaining suggests that he was under no great box-office pressure to introduce the excessively soft and melancholy strains of sentimentalism into his raucous pieces. Hence one might reasonably seek elsewhere for an explanation.

Perhaps it is to be found simply in the intellectual climate of his period, an age in which estimates of man's nature and motivations were dominated by the irreconcilable tenets of Hobbes and Shaftesbury. Though Foote's plays were much discussed during his lifetime, no one appears to have been struck by the obvious cleavage in their basic assumptions. Perhaps audience and dramatist alike suffered from a confusion of values which at this time appears to have afflicted better men. Foote, like many who adopted in a more wholesale fashion the new ethical arguments of the century, failed to think through their implications. In his comedies the failure frequently resulted in an incongruous, graceless juxtaposition of natural goodness and self-interest, a wearisome cant about selflessness blindly yoked with a calculating prudence. Temperamentally Foote belonged to the old satiric school of Dryden, Swift, and Pope. But by the time he began to write, a warmer, less demanding view of humanity had come to permeate society and doubtless he could not choose but be affected by it. In consequence, his comedies frequently display, without harmony, opposing aspects of two systems of thought.

Notes

1. From Genest on writers have either ignored or minimized the sentimental content in Foote's plays. Here are the pertinent references: John Genest, Some Account of the English Stage From the Restoration in 1660 to 1830 (Bath, 1832), V, 171, 376. John Forster, The Life and Times of Oliver Goldsmith (5th edition; London, 1871), II, 333. Allardyce Nicoll, A History of Late Eighteenth Century Drama (Cambridge, England, 1927), pp. 171-175. Henry Nettleton, English Drama of the Restoration and Eighteenth Century, 1642-1780 (New York, 1922), pp. 249-254, 264, 283-284). Ernest Bernbaum, The Drama of Sensibility, A Sketch of English Sentimental Comedy and Domestic Tragedy, (1696-1780) (Boston, 1915), pp. 206, 242-243, 277, M. M. Belden, The Dramatic Works of Samuel Foote in Yale Studies in English (New Haven, 1929), pp. 175-177.

2. The phrase is Aaron Hill's, though Hill was not referring to Foote. Aaron Hill, The Works of the late Hill, Esq. (2nd edition; London, 1754); II, 334.

3. The Works of Samuel Foote, Esq. (New York, 1814), II, 27-28.

4. “Even as they were at work, they were challenged by what seemed a more modern spirit, a more sympathetic and comforting way of looking at human nature” Louis I. Bredvold, “The Gloom of the Tory Satirists,” in James L. Clifford and Louis A. Landa, editors, Pope and His Contemporaries (Oxford, 1949), p. 15).

5. Miss Belden, however, describes the elopement as “a mock sentimental episode in the Polly Honeycomb style”—Dramatic Works of Foote, p. 125.

6. William Cooke, Memoirs of Samuel Foote, Esq. (New York, 1906), I, 168-173, 57.