RICHARD STEELE

THE CONSCIOUS LOVERS

RICHARD STEELE, like Farquhar, Goldsmith, and Sheridan, was born in Ireland and like them had that charm which in one manifestation or other is generally associated with the Irish character. Whether he is regarded in his personal relations with Addison and Cibber, and, best of all, with "dear Prue," or in his varied activities as tract-writer, dramatist, essayist, and Member of Parliament, or in his chronic plight as defendant in lawsuits for debt, he always commands our sympathy and wins our love. He is also none the less endeared to us because, while constantly and sincerely working for reform in English manners and morals in literature and life, he fell largely because of good fellowship and improvidence into many of the errors he condemned. His "dear ruler," his creditors, and his own conscience speedily lifted him up to the standard he had in open profession set for himself; today our charity covers a multitude of his sins.

Born in Dublin in 1672 and left an orphan about five years later, Steele was cared for by his uncle, Henry Gascoigne, through whose influence he was admitted to the Charterhouse in 1684. Here began two years later that friendship with Addison which was continued in Oxford and which lasted till the unhappy break only two months before Addison's death. It is characteristic of the two men that the proper and somewhat conventional Addison should obtain both degrees and proceed to a fellowship and that the erratic Steele should leave the university without a degree and enlist in the Duke of Ormond's guards (1694). From now on his life was full and varied. His loyal poem on the death of Queen Mary, The Procession (1695), won him an ensign's commission, and by 1700 he had been promoted to a captaincy. While in the army he furnished his first public record of the difficulty he always found in living up to his religious ideals. The struggle was particularly hard in the midst of his military associates, as was shown when much against his principles he fought a duel. Accordingly, in order to strengthen himself and others in godly living, he wrote The Christian Hero (1701), in which he showed that help comes not from the classical philosophers and heroes, but from Christ and St. Paul, who taught that "the true guide in conduct is conscience" (Routh). Whatever spiritual benefit

Steele may have received from this pamphlet was immediately if not completely balanced by the realization “that from being thought no undelightful companion, he was reckoned a disagreeable fellow."

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Partly, therefore, "to enliven his character" in the eyes of his scoffing fellows and partly to help in the reform of the stage, he wrote his first comedy, The Funeral or Grief à la Mode (1701), which won what Cibber called a more than expected success." It was one of the earliest plays to show the influence for good that the aroused Puritan conscience of England had effected, especially as voiced in the grating tones of Jeremy Collier's Short View of the Profaneness and Immorality of the English Stage (1698). This famous treatise was not so much the cause of the reform as the sign that the people were disgusted with the licentious Restoration comedy. It was a sign, too, which the erring dramatists heeded, so that Colley Cibber justly said that Collier's "calling our Dramatick Writers to this strict Account had a very wholesome Effect upon those who writ after this time. They were now a great deal more upon their Guard; Indecencies were no longer Wit; and by degrees the Fair Sex came again to fill the Boxes on the first Day of a new Comedy without Fear or Censure." Cibber had already, two years before the appearance of Collier's counterblast, shown his practical rather than any distinctly moral sense by trimming his sails to the veering wind when he wrote Love's Last Shift (1696). In this play he reached towards the new without parting company with the old comedy, for he devoted four acts in appealing to the "coarse palates" of the gallants and the fifth in bringing about the very doubtful reformation of the "honest rake." Vanbrugh's sequel, The Relapse (1697), shows with what little seriousness this reformation was taken. Steele, however, was actuated by higher motives and his first play was not marred by pinchbeck morality. He is continuing in the theatre the reform he began in his tract, though, of course, the tone is not so serious. He keeps to the province of the Wycherley and Congreve comedy, that of the domestic relations, but his purpose is entirely different. The blind husband sees the iniquity of his wife, who is duly punished, the victims of her villainy are restored to their rights, and virtue is triumphant. The deceived husband is no longer an object of profane mirth and the sinners are not treated as fine fellows. The comic material, as throughout in Steele's comedies, is supplied by the subordinate characters, who furnish amusing satire such as Steele gave forth abundantly in The Tatler and The Spectator. So we have the ridiculous funeral director and his mutes, who persist in looking cheerful though hired to be dismal; the pettifogging lawyer's clerk, and the raw recruits, fit companions for Falstaff's ragged regiment.

Having succeeded in making, as he said, "Virtue and Vice appear just as they ought to be," Steele proceeded two years later to "write a comedy in the severity [Collier] required." This was The Lying Lover or The Ladies' Friendship (1703). Using Corneille's Le Menteur as a basis, Steele

inserted a scene to convey the lesson he would teach by showing the remorse which follows murder committed in drunkenness. Of this scene he says: "The anguish [Young Bookwit] there expresses and the mutual sorrow between an only child and a tender father in that distress, are, perhaps, an injury to the rules of comedy, but I am sure they are a justice to those of morality." Here is the first unmistakable evidence of the new sentimental comedy, if not in English drama, at any rate in Steele. The straining after the pathetic, as in the remorse of the son and the anguish of the father, is a mark of what was replacing the abhorred wit of the Restoration period. There was, too, much less genuine fun in this play than in the first; certain minor characters are only moderately amusing. We are not surprised to learn that the play, as Steele admits, was "damned for its piety."

In the interval between Steele's second and third plays, Cibber produced The Careless Husband (1704), which shows the progress both in moral reform and in sentimentalism in the drama. The moral tone is finer than in Love's Last Shift, and the reformation is felt to be permanent. The sentimental interest is plainly shown in the pathetic situations, as when the noble wife refuses to listen to evidence of her husband's wrongdoing, and to reproach him for infidelity even upon her own discovery of it, but receives him bitterly repentant of his sins. Steele's last play of this period, The Tender Husband or The Accomplished Fools (1705), violates all dramatic propriety for the sake of the sentimental effect. A man employs his mistress in the disguise of a gallant to test his wife's virtue; the experiment is succeeding all too well for the man's peace of mind when he indignantly bursts from concealment; after a vain attempt at bravado the wife faints, implores forgiveness, and is received into the tender husband's arms. Poetic justice has become gushing sentimentality and a mock is made of genuine morality. Much healthier and more in keeping with dramatic propriety are the comic scenes, which have also a moral purpose after the fashion of Steele's later journalistic satire. They deal with the relations of parents to children and depict the wholly admirable Biddy Tipkin, who, with her head crammed with French romances, will be wooed only by a lover as valiant and fine as Oroondates so that there is no doing anything with her, and the equally amusing Humphry Gubbin, who breaks from his father's tyranny and marries to suit himself. Humphry harks back to Ben in Congreve's Love for Love and looks forward to Goldsmith's Tony Lumpkin; his father is of the same type as Fielding's Squire Western.

The Tender Husband was not a financial success, and Steele had to turn to other occupations to keep the bailiff from the door. Two appointments, one as Gentleman Waiter to Prince George of Denmark at £100 a year (1706), the other as Gazetteer at £300 a year with a tax of £45 (1707), did not furnish enough for one of his mercurial disposition. His first marriage in 1705 and his second to Mistress Mary Scurlock in 1707 brought him a nominally large but not always a collectable

income. The pressure of debt and his inventive genius led to his founding The Tatler, The Spectator, and their successors.

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In these papers Steele reached a greater public than he did in the theatre, and even in the reform of the drama his essays had more weight than his plays. Cibber testified in his Preface to Ximena (1719): 'How often have we known the most excellent audience drawn together at a day's warning, by the influence or warrant of a single Tatler, in a season when our best endeavors without it could not defray the charge of the performance!" It was particularly in his essays on the domestic relations that he was a civilizing force, as he had also tried to be in his plays. His delightful letters to dear Prue," so charming in their naïveté, in their revelation of the man's foibles and failings and above all of his surpassing goodness of heart testify to his perfect sincerity and sympathy. This sympathy at times runs into "lachrymose sensibility" and becomes part of the sentimentality which was already developing in the comedies and which was to find full expression in his last play.

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His journalistic work led him into politics, which influenced The Guardian (1713) and dominated The Englishman (1713). He was elected to Parliament (1713), expelled within a year for seditious articles, and re-elected and knighted in 1715. He was brought again into closer touch with the theatre by being made supervisor of Drury Lane Theatre (1715), a connection which he held with only slight interruptions till his death in retirement in 1729.

There are references to The Conscious Lovers, Steele's last complete play, as early as 1720. The first title announced was The Unfashionable Lovers, or, as others said, The Fine Gentleman. When it was acted on November 7, 1722, Mrs. Oldfield, Mrs. Younger, Booth, Wilks, and Cibber were in the cast; and to its being in every part excellently performed" Steele ascribed its "universal acceptance." It had the unusual run of eighteen consecutive nights and later in the season of eight more. By this time the sentimental comedy was established in popular favor, and Steele's play is a good specimen of the type. The moral note is struck in the Preface: "Nor do I make any difficulty to acknowledge that the whole was writ for the sake of the scene of the Fourth Act, wherein Mr. Bevil evades the quarrel with his friend, and hope it may have some effect upon the Goths and Vandals that frequent the theatre, or a polite audience may supply their absence." The more general moral purpose is expressed in the Prologue, where Welsted entreats the Britons for aid in reforming the theatre:

"Tis yours with breeding to refine the age,

To chasten wit and moralize the stage."

As Routh has well pointed out, we have in this play a brief exposition of all Steele's "best ideas on life and character,"-the sketch of servants under

going the corruption of lackeydom; "satire on marriages of convenience, duelling, and the chicanery of the law; and a glance at the opposition between the hereditary gentry and the rising commercial class"; while in Bevil, Jr., we have the portrayal of the ideal young man. There is no hero in Steele's early comedies quite so admirable as this one. His fine sense of honor which forbids his proposing marriage to his beloved because he has not received his father's approval strikes us as quixotic, especially since he has made no effort to secure this approval. The moral obliquities he resorts to in order to remain obedient to his father and faithful to his beloved betray the inherent weakness of honor based on mere sentimentality. He is so anxious to be upright that he bends over backward. On the other hand, we must admire his stand on the matter of duelling, for it is Steele and not merely Bevil that is speaking. It took more courage then to refuse than to fight a duel. All Bevil's noble conduct is, however, charged with sentimentalism that suggests priggishness. Equally sentimental are his speeches: "This charming vision of Mirza! Such an author consulted in a morning sets the spirit for the vicissitudes of the day better than the glass does a lady's person." And at the end of this noble soliloquy he resolves on his "honest dissimulation" to deceive his father! And what a flood of sentiment is poured forth in the dialogue between him and Indiana in Act II, as when he says: 'If pleasure be worth purchasing, how great a pleasure is it to him, who has a true task of life, to ease an aching heart; to see the human countenance lighted up into smiles of joy, on the receipt of a bit of ore which is superfluous and otherwise useless in a man's own pocket?"

Just as excellent and only less sentimental is the heroine Indiana. She loves but dares not say so; she endures Bevil's silence with the patience of Griselda; his apparent disregard of everything but her physical welfare she accepts with that exalted faith which sees nothing but perfect probity in his conduct. She also submits willingly to be investigated by the potential enemy of her happiness, and almost at his first word breaks into ready tears; she pities herself as "wretched, helpless, friendless," even though Bevil has treated her and her devoted aunt with unexampled kindness; she finally rises to a frenzy of expostulation against Fate which results in her identity being revealed and her woes coming to an end.

The comic business is, as usual, supplied by the minor characters. Tom and Phillis, already faintly sketched in No. 87 of The Guardian, are admirable, and they furnish all that remains of the sparkling dialogue of the Restoration comedy. Cimberton is a sort of high-class booby, who corresponds in his sheer vulgarity to Humphry Gubbin of The Tender Husband. He is so outrageous as to be really comic. One should not condemn him with the tremendous solemnity of John Dennis, if for no other reason than that he furnishes the opportunity for satirizing the prudery of Mrs. Sealand. The parodying of legal jargon in the mouths of Bramble and Target must have given a melancholy joy to Steele, who was all too familiar with