Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 6.djvu/740

704 CUMBERLAND [DRAMATIST. and of Garrick, Foote, and Goldsmith ; but the accuracy of some of the anecdotes concerning the last-named is not beyond suspicion. In general the book exhibits its author as an amiable egotist, careful though not arrogantly so of his own reputation, given to prolixity, and little remarkable for wit, but a good observer of men and manners. The uneasy self-absorption which Sheridan immortalized in the character of Sir Fretful Plagiary in The Critic is apparent enough in this autobiography, but presents itself there in no offensive form. The comparative estimates of the author s own works and the development of their designs are harmless if uninteresting ; the long quotations from unpublished or forgotten productions almost ask to be skipped ; on the other hand the incidental criticisms of actors have been justly praised, for Cumberland was possessed of theatrical instinct, though not of dramatic genius. Lastly, his morality and piety are here at least free from affectation in their expression, though not less effusive than in his comedies themselves. Cumberland was hardly warranted in the conjecture that no English author had yet equalled his list of dramas in point of number; but as the plays, published and unpublished, which he produced have been computed to amount to a number exceeding by four that of the sons of Priam, he must be allowed to have been fairly prolific as a dramatist. About 35 of these are regular plays, to which have to be added 4 operas and a farce ; and about half of the whole list are comedies. Among these again the best-known, upon which the literary reputation of their author virtually rests, belong to what he was pleased to term " legitimate comedy," and to that species of it known as " sentimental." The two terms are in point of fact mutually contradictory ; but this was precisely the proposition Cumberland was at so much pains to disprove, though his most successful works remain among the most striking illustrations of its truth. He asserted, with some show of reason, that in his senti mental comedy he was following in the footsteps of the new comedy of the Greeks ; he was less willing to confess that ho was in truth an imitator of native models ; for he was by no means the creator in our dramatic literature of the species he so assiduously cultivated. The essential characteristic of these plays is the combination of plots of domestic interest with the rhetorical enforcement of moral precepts, and with such comic humour (and it is usually but little) as the author possesses. These comedies are primarily, to borrow Cumberland s own phraseology, designed as " attempts upon the heart;" and British hearts are "hearts that feel." He takes great credit to himself for weaving his plays out of " homely stuff, right British drugget," and for eschewing " the vile refuse of the Gallic stage ; " on the other hand, he borrowed (often perhaps unconsciously) from the sentimental literature of his own country, including Richardson, Fielding, and Sterne. The favourite theme of his plays is virtue in distress or danger, but safe of its reward in the fifth act ; their most constant characters are men of feeling and young ladies who (to quote a retort of Goldsmith upon the sentimental dramatists) are either prudes or coquettes. Cumberland s comic power such as it was lay in the invention of comic characters taken from the " outskirts of the empire," and professedly intended to vindicate from English prejudice the good elements in the Scotch, the Irish, and the colonial character. For th rest, patriotic sentiment (such as became one who in his old age was a major of volunteers) liberally asserts itself by the side of general morality. If Cumber land s dialogue never approaches the brilliancy of Sheridan s, and if his characters have about them that air of unreality which in his Retaliation Goldsmith satirized with so ex quisite a grace, the construction of the plots is as a rule skilful, and the situations are contrived with what Cumberland indisputably possessed a thorough insight into the secrets of theatrical effect. In this respect at all events he was the " Terence of England," that there is hardly one of ^his principal plays in which the audience is not allowed to enjoy that most thrilling of theatrical emotions which is produced by a meeting between parent and child after long years of separation or ignorance of one another s existence. It should be added that, though Cumberland s sentimentality is often wearisome, his morality is generally sound ; that if he was without the genius requisite for elevating the national drama, he did his best to keep it pure and sweet ; and that if he borrowed much, as he undoubtedly did, it was not the vicious attrac tions of other dramatists of which he was the plagiary. After making his debut as a dramatic author with a tragedy, The Banishment of Cicero (of which the plot, though inspired by Middleton, rather strikingly deviates from history), published in 1761 after its rejection by Garrick ; and producing in 1765 a musical drama, The Summer s Tale, which was performed for a few nights and afterwards compressed into an afterpiece, Amelia (1768), Cumberland first essayed sentimental comedy in The Brothers (1769). This comedy has more vigour than some of its author s later works ; its theme is inspired by Tom Jones ; its comic characters are the jolly old tar Captain Ironsides, and the henpecked husband Sir Benjamin Dove, whose progress to self-assertion is perhaps as genuinely comic a notion as Cumberland ever executed, though, as he confesses, not altogether an original one. The epilogue paid a compliment to Garrick, who accordingly interested himself in the production of Cumberland s second and by far most successful comedy, The West-Indian (1771). The hero of this comedy is a young scapegrace fresh from the tropics, " with rum and sugar enough belonging to him to make all the water in the Thames into punch," a libertine with generous instincts, which in the end prevail. The chief comic character is Major O Flaherty, an honest Irish adventurer, in whom Cumberland took no little pride, but who is in truth neither particularly Irish nor particularly humorous. This comedy was received with the utmost favour ; it was afterwards translated into German by Boden, and Goethe acted in it at the Weimar court. The next play of some importance was The Fashionable Lover (1772), a sentimental comedy of the most pronounced type, with an ill-used heroine and a man of feeling exhibiting the very prurience of sentimentality ; " who dreams," he exclaims, " that I am the lewd fool of pity, and thou my pandar, Jarvis, my provider 1 " The comic characters are an honest Scotch steward, whose Scotch is if anything more doubtful than O Flaherty s Irish, and an antiquarian Welsh tutor Doctor Druid, less creditable to the " outskirt of the empire " represented by him. The Choleric Man (1775), founded on the Adelphi of Terence, but not, as the author in his long " dedication " protests, on Shadwell s Squire of Alsatia, is of a similar type, the comic element rather pre dominating, but philanthropy being duly represented by a virtuous lawyer called Manlove. Among subsequent comedies may be mentioned The Natural Son (1785), in which Major O Flaherty, now divested of all humour, makes his reappearance ; The Impostors (1789), a comedy of intrigue noteworthy for the absence of sentiment, but marred in one of the scenes by an indelicacy of feeling which is unlike Cumberland, the heroine, " a pleasant chi d of nature," must have admirably suited Mrs Jordan ; The Box Lobby Challenge (1794), a mere protracted farce, where there is likewise no sentiment, except in Liudamira s novel; The Jew (1794), an essentially serious play creditable to Cumberland s good feeling, and highly effective when the character of Sheva is played as it

was by the great German actor Doring ; The Wheel of