Shakespeare had fallen. Garrick, whose métier it was, as Mrs. Parsons has said, to fake, not emulate Shakespeare," corrected" Romeo and Juliet, made a pantomime of The Midsummer-Night's Dream, introduced topical songs into A Winter's Tale, and ended with Hamlet with alterations.

In lighter amusement, the eighteenth century had seen the introduction of opera and of farce, both from France. The success of Gay's Beggar's Opera (1728) has perhaps never been duplicated. It was followed by a flood of operas of all kinds. Indeed, so popular did spectacular and lyrical effects become that no play, serious or comic, was complete without songs. Samuel Foote (1720-77) and David Garrick (1716-79) were the most successful authors of that comedy of incident and character now known as farce. The plays of the former, The Minor, The Lyar, The Devil upon Two Sticks, are almost devoid of plot, but are astonishingly keen studies of eccentric character. The sentimental drama introduced by Steele was continued by Mrs. Centlivre, and found renewed expression in the plays of Moore, Murphy, Whitehead, Hugh Kelly (False Delicacy), and Richard Cumberland. It was to combat this last school that Goldsmith essayed a combination of the farce of his contemporary, Samuel Foote, with the comedy of Farquhar and Congreve.

Sentimental Comedy. Sentimental comedy may best be understood by following the campaign against it. Goldsmith has commonly been given credit for this campaign. It is true that as the strongest figure in the movement he deserves the highest honors for its suc

cess, yet many voices had been raised against sentimental comedy before Goldsmith's. Both Steele and Fielding had recognized the undramatic character of such plays in the phrases quoted in the last section. "Ours is all sentiment, blank-verse and virtue," wrote Colley Cibber in the Epilogue to Eugenia (1752). And Garrick had more than once jocosely referred to the theatre as a church (Prologues to Barbarossa and False Delicacy). Again, in A Peep Behind the Curtain (1767) Garrick discusses the "pap and lop-lolly" of our present writers, and makes Sir Macaroni Virtu "A playhouse in England is to me as dull as a church and fit only to sleep in." Samuel Foote's plays had always been as far as possible from the sentimental order. On February 15, 1773, before the production of She Stoops to Conquer, Foote had brought out at the Haymarket The Handsome Housemaid, or Piety in Pattens," how a maiden of low degree, by the mere effects of morality and virtue, raised herself to riches and honors." This was a burlesque entertainment especially directed against sentimental drama, and hailed later as a "keen satire on the drowsy spirit of our modern comedies."

say,

Goldsmith's Theories of Dramatic Art. In spite of the fact that isolated pens had been turned against the follies of the sentimental school of playwriting, it was not until Goldsmith formulated the attack through his criticism and followed it up in his plays that anything was accomplished. Goldsmith's written principles of dramatic construction may be found in occasional references to the drama in his The Present

State of Polite Learning and The Vicar of Wakefield, in the essay on The Strolling Player in The Citizen of the World, in A Comparison between Laughing and Sentimental Comedy, contributed to the "Westminster Magazine" in 1772, in the Preface to The Good-Natured Man, and in the Dedication to She Stoops to Conquer. Goldsmith's bent was not toward tragedy, and in comedy was all away from the comic types of the times and toward the writers of the age of Farquhar and Congreve. Discarding the well-known theatrical types of his contemporaries, he quite consistently went to nature for his models of men and women. All Goldsmith added to nature was the piquant sauce of his own jesting spirit. To "exaggerate the features of folly to render it more thoroughly ridiculous,” was his principle of comic satire. In this he was more like Farquhar than like Congreve or Steele, having little of Congreve's brilliancy, and nothing of the latter author's finely tempered humor.

Of course, Goldsmith's practice of his principles aroused immediately accusations of vulgarity and irreverence. Against these charges Goldsmith had long before prepared his answer. "Does the poet paint the absurdities of the vulgar, then he is low: does he exaggerate the features of folly to render it more thoroughly ridiculous, he is then very low," he writes in The Present State of Polite Learning. And in his dedication to Johnson he contends, "The greatest wit may be found in a character, without impairing the most unaffected piety." Again, he ridicules the "good, instructive, moral sermons," the modern tragedies, and defends his position by saying, "All the

other comic writers of antiquity aim only at rendering folly or vice ridiculous, but never exalt their characters into buskin'd pomp or make what Voltaire humorously calls a tradesman's tragedy" (A Comparison between Laughing and Sentimental Comedy). Against the latter remark Cumberland, the last of the sentimentalists, came forth with a strong rejoinder prefacing his next comedy, The Choleric Man (1775).

The Good-Natured Man. This play was written in the years 1766-67. First offered to Garrick, the allpowerful manager of Drury Lane, it was by him held until the patience of the author was exhausted. Angered by the suggestion that he should modify the play in some essential respects, particularly in the treatment of the character of Lofty, Goldsmith withdrew the manuscript and offered it to George Colman, who had lately become one of the patentees of Covent Garden Theatre. The piece was accepted by Colman, and the date of production was finally set at January 29, 1768. Whatever chances of success a new form of play possessed were discounted by the lack of sympathy of the majority of the actors, and especially by the appearance in Garrick's Drury Lane Theatre, six nights before Goldsmith's play, of an unmixed sentimental comedy by Hugh Kelly entitled False Delicacy. This play was received with great applause, and became one of the most popular plays of a decade. When The Good-Natured Man finally appeared it was unable to compete with its sentimental rival, and its success was merely nominal. The work of Shuter as Croaker, and Woodward as Lofty, was highly sat

isfactory, but the play was withdrawn after nine nights. Goldsmith, however, made some £500 out of the stage production and the sale of the copyright.

She Stoops to Conquer. Like experiences accompanied the production of Goldsmith's second play. Finished in 1771, this piece remained in the hands of Colman until the needy author was forced to humble remonstrance. Finally, by the influence of Johnson, who practically compelled the acceptance of the play, a day was set for its production. Meanwhile sentimental comedy had received setbacks in the failure of Kelly's second play, A Word to the Wise (1770), and in the increasing ridicule of the writers of prologues and critiques. Though Colman and his actors were again despondent, She Stoops to Conquer won an unqualified success on its first production, March 15, 1773. It remains to this day one of the most popular stock comedies on the English stage.

Contemporary Opinions of the Plays. Posterity has had no discordant voice in the chorus of approbation given to Goldsmith's two comedies. And the first has been almost as highly favored as the second. While She Stoops to Conquer excels in wit and farcical incident, the earlier play, but little behind in originality in characterization, is even better in epigram and sparkle of lines. In short, the first is less "low' than the second. Nor were contemporary judgments entirely unfavorable toward these plays. Walpole, who had never forgiven Goldsmith for his scarcely veiled attack on his father, Sir Robert Walpole, in The