Mr Holcroft may be considered from this time as a public character; for the remainder of his life in a great measure received its colour from his conduct on this occasion, and from the opinion and feelings of the public with respect to him. These were of course much divided. That he had been accused of high-treason,was sufficient to draw forth the hatred, execrations, and unqualified abuse of one party; that he was an object of the open and rankling animosity of this party, was in like manner the cause of the favour he received from the violent and vulgar of the opposite party. But there was a third class of persons, inferior in number, as they necessarily would be, of whom Mr Holcroft might perhaps be considered as the head, namely, those, who being detached either by inclination or situation, from the violence of either party, admired him for the firmness and honesty of his behaviour, and for the bold but benevolent tendency of his principles. His principles, indeed, were of such a kind, that they could not but strike and win upon the admiration of young and ingenuous minds, of those whose hearts are warm, and their imaginations strong and active, and whose generous and aspiring impulses seem almost to demonstrate the efficacy of disinterested and enlightened motives over the human mind, till it is hardened, depressed, distorted from its original direction, and bowed down under the yoke of example and prejudice. In this view of the subject, indeed, we should be tempted to assert, that men do not become what by nature they are meant to be, but what society makes them. The generous feelings, and higher propensities of the soul are, as it were, shrunk up, seared, violently wrenched, and amputated, to fit us for our intercourse with the world, something in the manner that beggars maim and mutilate their children, to make them fit for their future situation in life.
That love of truth and virtue which seems at all times natural to liberal minded youth, was at this time carried to a pitch of enthusiasm, as well by the extraordinary events that had taken place, as by the romantic prospects of ideal excellence which were pictured in the writings of philosophers and poets. A new world was opening to the astonished sight. Scenes, lovely as hope can paint, dawned on the imagination: visions of unsullied bliss lulled the senses, and hid the darkness of surrounding objects, rising in bright succession and endless gradations, like the steps of that ladder which was once set up on the earth, and whose top reached to heaven. Nothing was too mighty for this new-begotten hope: and the path that led to human happiness seemed as plain—as the pictures in the Pilgrim’s Progress leading to Paradise. Imagination was unable to keep pace with the gigantic strides of reason, and the strongest faith fell short of the supposed reality. This anticipation of what men were to become, could not but have an influence on what they were. The standard of morality was raised high: and this circumstance must excite an ardent emulation in the minds of many persons to set an example of true and disinterested virtue, unshackled by the prejudicesor interests of those around them. The curb of prudence was taken off; nor was it thought that a zeal for what was right could be carried to an excess. There is no doubt that this system would be taken advantage of by the selfish and hypocritical to further their own views at the expense of others: but it is equally certain that it would add new force to the practice of virtue in the liberal and well-disposed mind.
Kind feelings and generous actions there always have been, and there always will be, while the intercourse of mankind shall endure: but the hope, that such feelings and such actions might become universal, rose and set with the French revolution. That light seems to have been extinguished for ever in this respect. The French revolution was the only match that ever took place between philosophy and experience: and waking from the trance of theory to the sense of reality, we hear the words,truth,reason,virtue,liberty, with the same indifference or contempt, that the cynic who has married a jilt or a termagant, listens to the rhapsodies of lovers.[14]
The ‘Narrative of Facts,’ was shortly after followed by the ‘Letter to Mr Windham,’ in consequence of the expression ‘acquitted felon,’ applied by him to the persons lately tried. This letter is written in the spirit of a philosopher addressing a philosopher. It is certainly one of the best productions of the day. It is temperate, firm, acute, and forcible. Of the spirit in which it is written, equally remote from insipid affectation, or vulgar abuse, the introductory paragraph may be given as an example. It is as follows.
‘Sir, The members of the House of Commons have arrogated to themselves many customs and privileges; which they consider, some as rights to indulge in parliamentary invective, and others, as limitations to those rights. Personalities affecting members of that house, are contrary to order; but men, unprotected by the sanctified walls of St. Stephen’s chapel, may be the objects of assertions, which, if made any where else, would subject the authors of them to such correction as the law affords; or as honour, half idiot, half demon, demands. For my own part, I should never attempt to unsheath the sword of the law, much less the sword of the assassin: at least, if it were possible to oblige me to the former, the case must indeed be extreme. Under such defence as the law affords, I have been, and may again be obliged to shield myself against false charges; for I have no better public protection. But that a man of keen sensibility, and quick apprehension, whose distinctions and discriminations are frequentlyso fine drawn, and so shaded, that like colours in the rainbow, their mingled differences cannot be discerned; that a man who labours to be so cautious in his logic, should so often be hurried into the spleen of a cynic, the rashness of a boy, and the petulance of a child, is something extraordinary. There may be many such characters, but they are seldom so situated, as to obtrude themselves so frequently and forcibly as you have done into public notice. However, when they do, they are well worthy the attention of the politician and the philosopher, the man of business and the man of science. My purpose in this address, is not to write a libel, or to display my talents for satire. It has a more worthy purpose. It is to warn you and the nation against the effervescence of your passions. The intemperance of public men is tremendously awful at all times; but when it plunges millions into all the miseries of war, it rises into inexpressible horror. It is strange, that from real benevolence of intention, mischiefs which fable ascribes to fiends, should be the result. Yet this apparent paradox has of late been too repeatedly, and too carefully proved. You, Sir, and that extraordinary man, Mr Burke, whose kind, but erroneous heart, whose splendid, but ill-employed talents, have led you astray, are among the examples.’
It was not my intention to have troubled the reader with any farther remarks on the subject of the trial; but there is one passage in Mr Holcroft’s letter, which exposes the sophistry and the injustice of the phrase, which is the subject of it, in so clear and masterly a manner, that I cannot forbear quoting it.
‘Figure to yourself, Sir, the first on the list of these acquitted felons, Hardy. What were his views? What his incitements? A man of no learning, excellent in his morals, simple in his manners, and whether they were wise or foolish, highly virtuous in his intentions. Do you imagine he meant to make himself prime minister? Were these the marks of a prime minister? Had he the daring spirit, the deep plans, and the towering genius of a Cromwell? No one will affirm things so extravagant. He was a good and an active man in his endeavour to procure a parliamentary reform. This he thought, and I think, would have been the greatest of public blessings. For this he was tried, and declaredNOT GUILTY. The whole country rang with the verdict, and the affections of the people were divided between joy at his deliverance and their own, and the contemplation of an innocent man, who had so long been in danger of the most dreadful and barbarous death, the merciless law decrees. Compare such a man to an “acquitted felon,” who has escaped by the means you have enumerated: a man, who so far from exciting the benevolent wishes of a whole people, keeps all who ever heard his name in astate of dread, lest he should meet them on the highway, or break into their houses by night, and murder them in their sleep. Some such action, perhaps many such, he has already committed. At last he is taken; and knowing no better mode, they hope by his death to be freed from their fears. They are disappointed: a flaw in the indictment, a misnomer, or some technical blunder is committed: he is set free, and they are again subject to his depredations, and to all their former terrors. Will you affirm, Sir, that there are any common qualities, any kindred sympathies, any moral resemblance, between such a man and Thomas Hardy?—Whatever the feelings of the people of England were before these trials, be assured they cannot now endure a repetition of such odious falsehoods. You could not be then ignorant of the public sentiment, and in your burning haste to do right, you could not be guilty of this intolerable wrong, were your imagination less heated, and your intercourse with different ranks of people more general. You may perhaps now and then hear a dissentient voice: but you usually mix with men, who, like the parrot educated on-board a man-of-war, can only repeat the same outrages, and the same insults. You hear nothing else, and nothing else can you say. Would, Sir, you would keep better company!’
The very just distinction which Mr Holcroft draws between the errors of such men as Pitt and Dundas, who were actuated almost entirely by interest and ambition, and those of men, like Burke or Windham,[15]who were actuated almost entirely by imagination, system, and reasoning, shews that the letter-writer himself was not a vulgar politician; joining in the common cry of a party.
CHAPTER V
‘Love’s Frailties’ came out in the beginning of 1794, at Covent-Garden. This play met with indifferent success, of which the principal cause was a supposed allusion to political subjects in some passages. One of these in particular excited the most violent resentment: ‘A sentence in itself so true,’ says Mr Holcroft, ‘as to have been repeated under a thousand different modes; and under a variety of forms and phraseology, to have been proverbial in all countries.’ This obnoxious passage was the one, in which Craig Campbell, when insulted by a fashionable coxcomb, who asks what profession he was bred to, says that ‘he was bred to the most useless, and often the most worthless, of all professions, that of a gentleman.’ In this comedy, the author has more pointedly than in any other, set up the claims of worth and virtue, against the arrogant assumptions of wealth and rank. That virtue alone confers true dignity, has however been the common-place theme of teachers of morality and religion, in all ages. But such at this time, was the irritation of party feeling, that to exhibit the force of this trite maxim on the stage, seems to have been regarded as an innovation on common sense, and as big with the seeds of social disorganisation.
‘The Deserted Daughter,’ ‘The Man of Ten Thousand,’ ‘The Force of Ridicule,’ and ‘Knave or Not,’ successively appeared in 1795, 1796, 1797, and 1798. The three last of these appeared at Drury-Lane. ‘The Deserted Daughter,’ and ‘He’s much to Blame,’ were acted at Covent-Garden.
Of all these ‘The Deserted Daughter’ was received with the greatest applause, and it is perhaps the best of Mr Holcroft’s serious comedies. The characters of Mordent, of Lady Ann, and particularly of the faithful old servant, Donald, are drawn with great force and feeling. The character of Mordent is that of a philosopher, moralizing on the passions and vices of other men, and hurried away by his own. He has abandoned, or refused to own a daughter, the offspring of a former clandestine marriage, in order to avoid the sneers of the world, and the contempt of the rich and powerful connexions of his second wife. He maintains and brings her up as a natural daughter, but without seeing or acknowledging her. This the girl, who has a high spiritand quick sensibility, resents as an unmerited punishment; and determines either to be suffered to cast herself at her father’s feet, and for once receive his blessing, or to throw herself on the mercy of strangers. In consequence of this, she is decoyed into a house of ill fame, by one of the hoary priestesses of vice, under pretence of affording her employment at her needle; and here she is in danger of falling into the hands of one of Mordent’s profligate friends, who is himself accessary to the plot for carrying her off, at the moment that, by the indefatigable zeal of Donald, who had traced her to this abode of infamy, she is discovered to be his daughter. The scenes which follow this discovery are highly interesting; and through the whole of the character of Mordent, the conflict between a sense of duty, pride, and dissipation, is pourtrayed with strong touches of truth and nature. Cheveril is a lively, amusing character, and represents with a good deal of risible effect, one of those careless, good-natured young fellows, who would be thought ‘sad wicked dogs,’ but cannot prevail on themselves to do any harm.
Dorington, ‘The Man of Ten Thousand,’ may be considered as a benevolent Timon. After living in the most splendid and profuse hospitality, he suddenly loses his immense wealth, and with it his friends; but he does not at the same time lose either his senses or his philosophy. He preserves in the midst of the most mortifying reverses, the same calm dignity, and evenness of mind. Great as this effort of heroism is, it is managed in such a manner as not to appear unnatural or extravagant. Olivia, his mistress, is by no means so interesting a character. She is the blemish of the piece. Her notions of virtue are too fastidious by half, and she exacts conformity to her standard of perfection, with a dogmatical severity, which would scarcely sit well on a Stoic. Neither is her behaviour explained to Dorington in so satisfactory a manner as it ought to have been. The subordinate characters of Herbert and Annabel are described with extreme tenderness and simplicity. They exhibit an amiable picture of those qualities which often spring directly from a guileless heart, without the artificial refinements of sentiment or reason. Hairbrain is a character of the same school, and must have had a very good effect in the hands of Bannister, who played it. Kemble and Miss Farren were the representatives of Dorington and Olivia.
‘Knave or Not,’ as well as ‘The Man of Ten Thousand,’ was brought out at Drury-Lane. Its success was not very flattering. The advertisement prefixed by the author to the published play, will explain some of the reasons of this, as well as describe the most striking features of the play itself.
‘The unrelenting opposition, which the productions of the authorof the present comedy have experienced for several years, is well known to those who pay attention to our public amusements. It is not for him to pronounce how far this opposition has been merited by inability. Since the appearance of the Road to Ruin, his comedy of the Deserted Daughter only has escaped: and that, as he imagines, because it was not known on the first night of its performance, by whom it was written. Love’s Frailties, The Man of Ten Thousand, and Knave or Not, have sustained increasing marks of hostility: so that the efforts made to afford rational amusement to the public, emolument to the author, and improvement to morals, have been rendered feeble, and almost ineffectual. In the last instance, one mistake appears to have pervaded the majority of the spectators. It was imagined that the author himself was as unqualified a libeller of mankind as Monrose: in which character the writer’s individual sentiments were supposed to have been incorporated. Those who have read his other works cannot surely attribute to him any such indiscriminate misanthropy. The accusation that has been most generally made against him is, that he thinks men capable of gradations of virtue, which others affirm they can never attain. Persons, who have made the human mind their study, have discovered that guilty men exert the whole force of their faculties to justify their own course of action to themselves. To this principle the writer was strictly attentive in pourtraying the character of Monrose. His design was to draw a man of genius, misled by his passions, reasoning on his actions, systematising them, condemning them in principle, but justifying them in practice, and heating his imagination by contemplating the crimes of others; that he might still retain that respect for himself, of which the strongest minds, even in the last stages of vice, are so tenacious. How far that spirit of faction, commotion, and anarchy, of which the author has long been, and is still, so vehemently accused, is to be traced in the present comedy, may now be seen. Sincerely desirous of giving no offence, the passages which were most disapproved, or to speak more accurately, reprobated, on the first night, have since been omitted in representation; but they are printed between inverted commas, that the cool judgment may decide whether the author could have been so insane as actually to intend to inflame the spectators, and increase a spirit of enmity between men of different sentiments: whom could he reconcile, he would account it the most heart-consoling action of his life.
‘Before the comedy appeared, all parties were anxious that no sentence or word should be spoken, which could be liable to misrepresentation. Some few passages, therefore, are committed to the press, which never were spoken on the stage; particularly the passage,where Monrose inquires into his qualifications for being a lord. A few years ago, this would have been common-place satire; and it is a subject of no little regret, that at present local and temporary applications are so liable to be made where none are intended.’
The jealousy which was thus manifested of sentiments, either of liberty or public virtue, was perhaps as inconsiderate as it was unjust. When the tragedy of Cato was first played, at a time when party zeal ran high, the Whigs applauded all the strong passages in the play, as a satire on the Tories; and the Tories were as loud in their applause as the Whigs, to shew that the satire was unfelt. But the ‘horrors’ of the French Revolution were, it seems, to become a Medusa’s shield to screen every species of existing vice or folly from the glance even of ridicule, and to render them invulnerable and incorrigible. To stickle obstinately for the abuses to which any system is liable is tacitly to identify the system with the abuse.
In the characters of Susan and Jonas in this play, Mr Holcroft has been guilty of that common vice among the authors of the present day, of trusting less to the characters themselves, than to the persons who were to act them. They are well adapted to shew the powers of acting in Mrs. Jordan, and Bannister, who might probably make them amusing or interesting; but they certainly stand in need of this foreign aid to produce such an effect.
‘He’s much to Blame’ was acted at Covent-Garden in 1798, with great and deserved success. It is a truly elegant comedy. The characters, particularly that of Sir George Versatile, are amusing and original; and the situations, which arise in the progress of the story, give birth to some of the most natural and delicate strokes of passion. The scene at the masquerade, where Maria is discovered by Sir George, is perhaps the most striking; the unaffected and artless expression of her feelings produces an effect which is irresistible. The easiness of Sir George’s temper, and the facility with which he accommodates himself to other people’s humours, without any design or hypocrisy, are admirably described. The passions are less strongly moved in this comedy than in the Deserted Daughter, but they are moved with less effort, and with more pleasure to the reader. Neither has it any thing like the same bustle and broad effect as the Road to Ruin: but in ease, lightness, and a certain graceful simplicity, neither sinking into insipidity on the one hand, nor ‘o’erstepping the modesty of nature’ on the other, it is superior to almost every other modern production. It is the finest specimen Mr Holcroft has left of his powers for writing what is commonly understood bygenteel comedy.
The comedy of ‘He’s much to Blame’ was offered to the theatrein the name of a friend; an artifice to which the author, notwithstanding his dislike to every species of insincerity, was obliged to resort more than once.
He informs us in a short advertisement that he was indebted for some hints in this play toLe Complaisant, a French Comedy, and the Clavigo of Goethe.
‘The Inquisitor,’ brought out soon after at the Haymarket, and ‘The Old Clothesman,’ an afterpiece, at Covent-Garden, were unsuccessful.