CHAP. XI.

The popularity which attended a successful dramatic author in preceding times.—Causes of this, and of the decay of that popularity.—The celebrity of Cumberland from the performance of the WEST INDIAN.-Obtains him the society of JOHNSON, BURKE, GOLDSMITH, REYNOLDS, &c.-His character of JOHNSON.-An adumbration of him in the OBSERVER.-Comparison between him and BURKE in the poem of RETROSPECTION. JOHNSON a better Greek Scholar than is insinuated by Cumberland.—Observations upon simplicity of style.

THE production of a successful play, fifty years ago, was an event not commonly beheld, and its value was not cheapened in the eyes of men by its frequency. A dramatic writer came forth, with all the attractions which novelty and merit could give him; and if he succeeded, he succeeded with a degree of popularity which is now denied to all literary enterprise, for in no department can a candidate exert himself in which competitors are not hourly contending with him for supremacy. A play-writer is now the most familiar of human objects; he that can produce nothing else, can produce a something which, by the help of

scenery, grimace, and a cant phrase or two, shall run nine nights, then to recede from public notice, to make way for some other thing just as excellent and just as brief in its existence. The demand for novelty is incessant, and incessantly is it supplied; but, as voracious eaters are commonly observed to be not very nice or fastidious in their food, so those whose appetites for what is new are stronger than their relish of what is good, and it naturally results that their providers will furnish them with the cheapest commodities, The frequency of modern dramas, indeed, produces an effect something like the familiar exhibitions of the person of Hal, and the profound observations of life that are contained in the reproof which Shakspeare has put into his father's mouth, will aptly apply to the surfeited and over-gorged stage of the present day :

"They began

To loathe the taste of sweetness, whereof a little

More than a little is by much too much.

So when we had occasion to be seen,

He was but as the cuckoo is in June,

Heard, not regarded; seen, but with such eyes,

As, sick and blunted with community

Afford no extraordinary gaze,

Such as is bent on sun-like majesty

When it shines seldom in admiring eyes."

If the difficulty of success, however, was increased to the dramatic writers of foriner times, their renown, when successful, was in proportion to the obstructions by which its acquisition was

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intercepted. No mode of literary labour was so certainly calculated to secure that idol, popularity, to which all men sacrifice who have any anxiety for the "last infirmity of noble minds," or who wish to secure power by the appearance of possessing it already. The conceptions of the author were aided by those of the actor; his wit and humour acquired fresh lustre and fresh powers of exciting mirth, by the assistance of gesture, look, and voice; scenic splendour concurred to increase the general delusion, and that which in the closet was found to have but little dominion over the gay or serious feelings of the reader, made him smile or weep without resistance, when he sat in the theatre as a spectator.

This command over the passions, in which sometimes more belonged to the actor than to the author, was ascribed chiefly to the genius of the latter, and every man was eager to behold, to court, and to celebrate him whose pen had produced such extraordinary effects. His happiest passages were repeated from mouth to mouth; his flashes of wit were told at every table; his felicity of execution was related with applause; and hardly any company could assemble where some rumours of his glory and success would not be heard. His name resounded in every house; and he could scarcely appear abroad without hearing something that reminded him of his dramatic celebrity.

These were the rewards of those who, in former

times, trod in the steps of Shakspeare, Ford, Massinger, Shirley, Beaumont and Fletcher, and Jonson. They were a race of men not common enough to be despised. They wrote with leisure, for one good play was held to be sufficient for one season; they had few competitors, for there was no demand for novelties beyond what a few able writers could supply; and every man who could connect together some twenty scenes of conversation, divided afterwards into five acts, and call the speakers, characters, was not then a dramatic writer, nor was there any easy avenue to a public trial of his skill.

As, therefore, the field of exertion was reserved for a few candidates, and as those few but seldom exacted the applauses of their judges, their appearance came to be a rarity, and their success a thing to be talked of. Dryden, indeed, in the period to which I allude, was an exception to this abstinence; but the list of dramas produced by Congreve, Otway, Rowe, Southerne, Steele, and others, sufficiently testifies the truth of my assertions, and sufficiently accounts for that sort of popularity which once belonged to a successful dramatist.

I know, indeed, but of one path, in modern times, that will certainly lead either to equal renown or to equal reward: and that is the path of calumny. A convicted libeller, (especially a political one) is sure to make his fortune, and to raise his name; for while he triumphantly enters the

prison, which is the legal reward of his actions, some knave or fool proposes a subscription to relieve his sufferings, and that is his political reward. His name is, for a time, in the mouths of the vulgar, and his pockets are filled by the donations of the crafty, the weak, and the credulous. The time of his liberation arrives; he walks forth from his dungeon a stranger to the face of day; infests society for awhile with repetitions of his calumnies and abuse, till insulted law again consigns him to his cell, and another subscription buys him again his "dirty and dependent bread."

Crimine ab uno disce omnes

Though the infrequency of dramatic productions was something less in Cumberland's time than in that which preceded it, there was still, however, enough of novelty in the event to excite much public attention, and to procure much popularity for the successful writer; and Cumberland himself says, that after the acting of the West Indian, he was the Master Betty of his day, a mode of comparison for which he was indebted to a public fatuity as extraordinary as ever disgraced the taste of any nation.

One consequence of this popularity was, that he was admitted to the society of men of eminence for rank and talent, and among his associates we find the names of Burke, Reynolds, Johnson, Garrick, Goldsmith, Foote, and Jenyns. With these