(9th performance August 3). Foote was a famous plagiary, and on him must rest the imputation of the borrowing. These three characters remain Goldsmith's most original contribution to the gallery of the stage.

More interesting than the pursuit of literary sources is it to discover that two episodes of She Stoops to Conquer are based on incidents in the author's own life. These are the mistaking of a private house for an inn, which is an essential factor of the plot, and is based on a youthful experience of Goldsmith's while still in his native Ireland; the other is an allusion to the tying of Mr. Hardcastle's wig to a chair, a trick that had been played on Goldsmith while he was writing the play. Both these incidents are told in some detail in Forster's Life of Goldsmith.

Goldsmith as a Playwright. The merits of Goldsmith as a playwright lie close to the surface, and are easily discernible by a sympathetic reader. They are made more manifest when one studies, as we have done, the conditions under which the average drama of his day was written. In the larger matters of structure and design, hardly an adverse criticism can be made of these plays. The development of the story is steady, unforced, and transparent from beginning to end. One of Goldsmith's greatest gifts was clearness of perception and expression. Whatever his opinion may have been of language as an obscurer of thought, his own practice was to make language richly expressive. His peculiar theories of vis comica precluded the treatment in his plays of those tenderer and more humane characteristics that we find in his essays and

poems. He who limits his reading to Goldsmith's plays sees only half the man. But within the limits of the plays, Goldsmith was rigorously consistent with his foreordained principles. His art of the stage was something more than a return from stage types to nature; it depended upon an exaggeration of nature for the purposes of the ludicrous. From these principles grew all those characteristics for which Goldsmith's plays were early condemned. They led naturally to farce and to a straining of the verities. So the scene of the bailiffs and Croaker's letter scene in The Good-Natured Man must be judged merely as they make the audience merry; and Tony's journey down Featherbed Lane, forty miles away to his father's back yard, can be considered true only in Farce, the fact that such an event is said to have happened not serving in the least to make it veracious.

Though far ahead of the comedy of his time, Goldsmith's comedy does not reach the glories of the comedy of the Restoration age. Only once again, and that with the diminished lustre of a Sheridan, did English comedy show anything of the brilliancy, wit, epigram, and marvelous balance of the "poets of the last age." While Goldsmith's second play gained in incident, and therefore, from the modern point of view, in acting quality, it lost greatly in polish, repartee, and that real gentility that marked the prime of English as well as of French comedy. In short, had Goldsmith lived a century earlier, The Good-Natured Man would have been hailed as a better play than its successor. As it occurred, The Good-Natured Man, which was the more decorous, was lost amid the inanity of a sentimental

drama it was not vigorous enough successfully to combat. She Stoops to Conquer, more lusty with forces of laughter, effectively demolished the old comedy, and assumed an abiding place on the English stage.

To the student of drama it seems strange that there did not proceed from these plays of Goldsmith a new school of dramatists to do for drama what the romanticists were to do for poetry. For here certainly were the clear insight, the honest judgment, the sympathy with nature, the constructive imagination, that are essential to great literary movements. But Goldsmith was not the father of a school. It was his lot to stand as one of the last figures in an outgoing era, rather than as a prophet of the new age. In his verse there were keen, unmotived strains of a new romantic uplift Yet he accepted without question the formulas of the of Johnson. In drama he was an isolated reformer whose task was destined never to be completed. And so it chances that the dramatic movement of which he was a part must be considered as the last flowering of a literary epoch which was even then coming to a close. Not since the death of Congreve had the promise for comedy been brighter than in 1773. But Goldsmith died before he could write another play, and Sheridan, after writing two comedies, went to pieces, and he had no successor.

age

THE GOOD-NATURED MAN

PREFACE

1

WHEN I undertook to write a comedy, I confess I was strongly prepossessed in favor of the poets of the last age,1 and strove to imitate them. The term, genteel comedy, was then unknown amongst us, and little more was desired by an audience, than nature and humor, in whatever walks of life they were most conspicuous. The author of the following scenes never imagined that more would be expected of him, and therefore to delineate character has been his principal. aim. Those who know anything of composition, are sensible that, in pursuing humor, it will sometimes lead us into the recesses of the mean; I was even tempted to look for it in the master of a sponging-house; but in deference to the public taste, grown of late, perhaps, too delicate, the scene of the bailiffs was retrenched in the representation. In deference also to the judgment of a few friends, who think in a particular way, the scene is here restored. The author submits it to the reader in his closet; and hopes that too much refinement will not banish humor and character from ours, as it has already done from the French theatre. Indeed, the French comedy is now become so very elevated and sentimental, that it has not only banished humor and Molière from the stage, but it has banished all spectators too.

2

Upon the whole, the author returns his thanks to the public for the favorable reception which the Good-Natured Man has met with; and to Mr. Colman in particular, for his kindness to it. It may not also be improper to assure any, who shall hereafter write for the theatre, that merit, or supposed merit, will ever be a sufficient passport to his protection.

1 poets of the last age: In Letter xl of The Citizen of the World Goldsmith states the grounds of his preference for the "poeta of the last age." Here "poets " includes "dramatists."

2 sponging-house: A victualing house where prisoners for debt were kept pending settlement.

to Mr. Colman ... for his kindness: Here Goldsmith can hardly be sincere, as it is well known he felt little gratitude to Colman.