Mrs. Centlivre

DRYDEN ascribes the profligate comedy of the Restoration to the sojourn in France of the banished English court, while Canon Kingsley traces the immorality of French comedy to the evil influence of English cavalier playwrights. The question is too large for present discussion ; but, if Canon Kingsley be right, it is only poetically just that we should now be indebted to France for nearly all the comedy we have. That, apart from literary form, there has been any substantial gain in exchanging the candid coarseness of our native comedies for the sophistical mixtures of infidelity and forgiveness, of bad morals and good clothes, which now hold the stage, will always seem more than doubtful to those whose conscientious scruples have been resolved by that pleasantest of casuists, Charles Lamb. The reader need have no fear that the familiar arguments are about to be restated. The dry bones which Lamb’s fine critical genius was powerless to vivify are past all quickening. Dead is “ the artificial comedy of the last century ; ” dust, the embroidered suits, the muffs, the periwigs, the clouded canes, of its intriguing heroes. Where are the beaux now ? Of no avail were their dandy weapons against the pen of Collier. They have put up their swords, and skipped away into Hades, where, for all we know, their gallantries to Proserpine are making Pluto ridiculous.

Jeremy Collier’s Short View of the Immorality and Profaneness of the English Stage was published in 1698. Then began that rapid theatrical reformation, one hundred and eighty years of which have been enough to make the English stage, in the phrase of Mr. Matthew Arnold, the most contemptible in Europe. All the authors who attempted to answer Collier were ignominiously routed. From glorious John Dryden down to inglorious John Dennis not one could withstand the furious onset of the Jacobite parson. “ Almost the last of our writers to hold out in the prohibited track,” says Hazlitt, “ was a female adventurer;” and the purpose of this paper is to give some account of a woman “ who seemed to take advantage of the privilege of her sex, and to set at defiance the cynical denunciations of the angry reformist.”

The daughter of a Puritan, Susanna Freeman was born in 1680, probably in Ireland, whither her father had fled at the Restoration. Early motherless, and soon wholly orphaned, she was left to the care of a step-mother. The tender mercies of the step-dame are cruel, and it is not surprising that in her fourteenth year we should meet this pretty runaway, afoot and penniless, on the road to Loudon. A wreary road it was to her young feet, and she had not gone far before she threw herself in tears upon a wayside bank. Neither King Cophetua nor the Lord of Burleigh chanced to pass that way, but Anthony Hammond did. Later, a noted wit and orator, honored by Bolingbroke with the epithet of silver-tongued, and the subject of a bonmot of Chesterfield, who said that he had all the senses but common sense, Hammond was at this time an under-graduate of Cambridge. Whether he deserved Bolingbroke’s compliment or not, his accents would seem to have had an instant effect upon Susanna, whose sorrowing beauty won for her a readier compassion than would perhaps have been accorded to a less attractive sufferer. Be this as it may, she dried her eyes, and after some coy deliberation accepted his protection. Dressed in a suit of boy’s clothes, Susanna accompanied Hammond to Cambridge, where she was introduced into his college as cousin Jack, “ come to see him and the university.” This masquerade, however, could not long deceive the vigilant eyes of the college dons, and Hammond was compelled to restore his companion to her native petticoats.

Though no saint, Anthony was not wanting in generosity; for soon afterwards we find Susanna in London, with money in her purse, and a letter to a gentlewoman of Hammond’s acquaintance. She had at last reached the end of her journey, and the scene whereon the remainder of her life-drama was to be enacted. Anthony Hammond had gone out of her heart into politics, to become member for his university, for Huntingdon, commissioner of the navy, paymaster of the forces in Spain, and also, in due time, the lawful father of a forgotten elegiac poet.

No longer in tears, but smiling, a little ruefully perhaps, Susanna became at once a conspicuous ornament of the play-house, where her beauty, the rather masculine type of which was heightened by a small mole on her left eyelid, attracted many admirers. Chief among these was Sir Stephen Fox’s nephew, who married her. In less than a year he died. Susanna was no laggard in love. Mr. Carrol, an officer of the army, easily consoled her. Eighteen months later he was lying dead in Lincoln’s Inn Fields, the victim of a duel.

Mrs. Carrol is said to have been warmly attached to her rash young husband, whom she sincerely mourned. Either this is true, or, discouraged by repeated failure, she had lost hope of matrimonial settlement, for she seems now to have turned her attention to literature as a means of livelihood. She brought to her new profession a fair ignorance of several modern languages, — her French being of a kind that never was on sea or land, and her Spanish byno means pure Castilian.

Mrs. Carrol’s first play, written in 1700, when she was twenty years old, is a tragedy called The Perjured Husband. A puerile performance, hardly rising to the dignity of bombast, it gives small promise of the excellence its author afterward attained in comedy. Pitiful, indeed, are these clumsy figures, distinguishable only by their name labels, speaking English to which the loftiest buskins could not lend grammar, and calling upon “ all the gods ” with the cheerful impartiality of Greeks or Romans. Emotionless, we behold the injured Placentia, disguised as her own brother, plunging a sword into the breast of Aurelia. Nor is our excitement intemperate when the faithless Bassino bursts in, stabs his wife, and falls by the weapon of Alonzo. Besides all this, there is a comic under-plot, of a seriousness so profound as almost to relieve the humor of the tragedy. The Perjured Husband, tiresome as it was, served to introduce Mrs. Carrol to the literary circles of London.

Mrs. Carrol does not appear to have belonged to the aristocracy of letters. Pope, to be sure, knew her well enough to bestow a vitriolic line upon her in the Dunciad, and she probably enjoyed the acquaintance of Steele and Farquhar. For the rest, her friends were among those illustrious obscure authors whose works, never read, are now seldom mentioned. Rowe, the best known of them, helped her with The Cruel Gift, which was dedicated to Budgell, a writer chiefly noted for going to the bottom of the Thames with his pockets full of stones, leaving behind him the words, “What Cato did and Addison approved cannot be wrong.” Another of her intimates, Nicholas Amhurst, a satirist not too deadly, had been expelled from Oxford for misdemeanor. Sewell, who closes the list, is responsible for a couplet that passes with Mr. Bartlett for a familiar quotation: —

This lofty sentiment, however, has not been more preservative of reputation than the stern maxim of Budgell. No more have his epilogues, written for the plays of our author, to whose sufficient obscurity his own lends a darker tinge.

Such was the environment in which Mrs. Carrol began to write her plays. Comedy was her forte, and tragedy her foible. Except in the instance of The Cruel Gift, which is not enough better than The Perjured Husband to be good, she never returned to tragedy. The Beaux Duel, her first comedy, was rapidly followed by The Stolen Heiress, Love’s Contrivance, The Gamester, and The Basset Table. Love at a Venture, the close resemblance of which to Cibber’s Double Gallant occasioned some controversy between the two authors, happily terminated by the discovery that both knew French equally ill, was produced at Bath in 1706, Mrs. Carrol herself taking a part. Strictly provincial, and of less than a year’s duration, her histrionic career closed with an appearance before the court at Windsor in the modest rôle of Alexander the Great. Judging from the portrait prefixed to her works, Edmund Burke’s copy of which now lies before me, her charms at twenty-six must have been great. At any rate, they were sufficient to make sad havoc in the French heart of Queen Anne’s chief cook, one Joseph Centlivre.

Susanna’s best work was done after her third marriage. In 1709 Mrs. Centlivre gave to the world her first successful. comedy. Decried before its performance as the work of a woman; scorned by the great Wilks, who, at rehearsal, threw his part of Sir George Airy into the pit, and could hardly be brought by the tears of the author to assume it at all; warmly praised in the Tatler, by Steele, The Busy Body was destined to a long stage life. It ran for thirteen nights just after the failure of Congreve’s Way of the World, and the next year was playing at both Drury Lane and the Haymarket, with Pack at one and Dogget at the other in the part of Marplot. This character, — the ancestor of Paul Pry, according to Mr. Ward, — Doran says was stolen from Sir Francis Fane’s Love in the Dark. The ubiquitous Marplot adds none the less to the fun of The Busy Body, in which, however, he seems rather an interjection than a necessity, as his maladroit appearances, while they momentarily embarrass the scene, in no way alter the current of events. For a jeu-ne premier thoroughly conversant with stage business, there could be no better part than Sir George Airy: his dialogue with the veiled Miranda, who asks him to turn his back while she explains her pursuit of him, and then slowly recedes, leaving him in converse with the empty air ; the scene in which, finding her sworn to silence, he puts speeches in her mouth, which she adopts by significant gesture, — all this must have been delightful in the hands of a player like Wilks, whose varied graces enabled him to give to Mrs. Centlivre’s outlines of character that skillful shading without which they would have been as lifeless on the stage as they are in the closet.

Of all Mrs. Centlivre’s plays the one which time has selected is The Wonder, or A Woman Keeps a Secret. The scene of this comedy has led some writers to accuse our author of borrowing from the Spanish. She was certainly none too good for predatory incursions into other literatures, but as not one of her critics has named the original, the charge may properly be dismissed. In the elegance and brilliancy of its dialogue, and in the effectiveness of its situations, no comedy of Mrs. Centlivre’s approaches The Wonder. This is perhaps best shown by the fact that its chief character, so often played by him, was chosen by Garrick for his last appearance on the stage. He had thought of making his farewell in Richard III., but he dreaded the fight and the fall, and on reflection preferred to be remembered associated with the mad gayety of the jealous and choleric Don Felix, rather than with the sombre villainy of the crook-backed king. A comedy seen always takes stronger hold of the imagination than one merely read. The lively recollection of a performance of The Wonder, at which I once assisted, is doubtless the secret of my own predilection for this play. No amount of general description can impart an idea of the stratagems, disguises, games at cross-purpose, mistakes of identity, the endless sword-clashings, knock-downs, heel-trippings, and what not, with which Mrs. Centlivre’s comedies abound. The Wonder is a congeries of misunderstandings.

“ ’T is a perfectly clear plot. The hero and heroine are to be married, and they are at a loss how to get it put off till the fifth act.” Such was the comment of Colonel Caustic, in one of Mackenzie’s Loungers, on beholding a comedy of this school, and a juster criticism could hardly be made. A motive not too strong for a farce, serving as groundwork for the five acts of a comedy, is what necessitates all this bustle and intrigue, this huddling of incident upon incident with impossible conveyance. Given practicable doors enough, a play like this might be extended to fifty acts as easily as to five. In many instances, as has been observed by Sir Walter Scott, there was no way of bringing matters to a close, except by compelling all the persons of the play to renounce their dramatic characters ; that is, for the miser to turn generous, the coquette modest, the gallant virtuous, and so on. No wonder that Fielding, whose comedies never had much vitality, was accustomed superfluously to damn his fifth acts.

Mrs. Centlivre was assuredly an adept in the construction of what may be called the comedy of doors and disguises, but in her handling of the latter she shows little versatility. A door must needs be a door, but why invariably disguise the women in masculine belongings ? Placentia, in her first play ; Isabinda, in Marplot, the sequel to The Busy Body ; Clarinda and Emilia, in The Beaux Duel; Angelica, who, in The Gamester, wins her own portrait set with diamonds from her lover, the only scene in the play not taken from Reguard’s Le Joueur, — all are compelled to assume male attire.

Mrs. Centlivre was not a witty person. Nevertheless, there are better things than farce incidents to be found in these comedies. Sir William Mode’s reprimand of his valet—“ Blister me, if you don’t speak plain English ! I shall have the world think I am such a sloven as to keep an English valet ” — is a good example of our author’s mild satire, aimed at the prevailing affectation of French manners. Her force as a humorist is considerably greater. The scene between Ogle and the sergeant, in The Beaux Duel, would do no discredit to the robust genius of Smollett.

It has not been an unpleasant task, turning the yellow leaves of these old play-books; serenading with Sir William Mode; yawning with some weary valet awaiting his reckless master’s return from the gaming-table ; playing basset with Lady Reveller ; or accompanying Brazen the sharper in his pursuit of the opulent charms of the widow Dowdy, with her patches, her preposterous hoops, and her long-tailed gown. And as for the talk of these “ chaotic people,” not much worse than that of modern burlesque, never so bad as that of opéra bouffe, I have found it hardly more injurious to morals than the dumb villainies of Clown and Pantaloon. Sir Walter Scott says of the comedies of Cibber and Mrs. Centlivre, “This is a species of comedy easily written.” It were folly to differ with so eminent an authority, and yet, after some slight acquaintance with the species, I cannot but lament the pertinacious adherence of contemporary playwrights to the more difficult styles.

The closing years of Mrs. Centlivre’s life were passed in serenity and not without honor. The Wonder was bespoken and witnessed by the royal family, who also made her a handsome present. Prince Eugene gave her a gold snuffbox for the dedication of The Perplexed Lovers. For a short poem inscribed to the Due D’Aumont, the French ambassador, she received another snuffbox, before bestowing which the duke asked her if she had one. “ Yes, one from Prince Eugene.” “ Oh,” said he, “ that was a whig box; now I will give you a tory snuff-box;” and with that he gave her a gold box, set with a picture, itself valued at fifty pistoles. The dedication of Marplot to the Duke of Portland brought her forty guineas ; that of The Cruel Gift, a diamond ring from Budgell. From Lord Halifax she received a repeating watch, and from the Duke of Newcastle a gold medal. All these gifts were graciously conferred. But Secretary Craggs, complimented on his liberality by Mrs. Bracegirdle, to whose hands he entrusted twenty guineas for the dedication of A Gotham Election, remarked that be did not so much consider the merit of the piece as what was becoming in a secretary of state. Nevertheless, the piece was a good one, and affords a picture of an English election in 1715, quite consoling to those of us who mourn the decay of political morality.

Mrs. Centlivre died in 1723, not without a parting scoff from Pope, who somewhere speaks of her as “ the cook’s wife in Buckingham Court.” She was buried iu the church of St. Martin’s-inthe-Fields, where Farquhar also reposes. Little as she is known, the memory of Susanna Centlivre can never wholly perish so long as the phrase “the real Simon Pure,” the name of a Quaker in her Bold Stroke for a Wife, continues in daily use among all English-speaking peoples. As a writer, hers was a thorny pathway. The Turkish view of woman still prevailed, and the managers bold enough to produce her plays found it prudent to conceal the sex of their author.

A sad lot were all these early feminine intruders into the field of letters, — Aphra Behn, Mrs. Manley, Mrs. Pilkington, and the rest. Mrs. Centlivre was the best of them. Almost the first of her sex to adopt literature as a calling, she may well be regarded as an unconscious reformer, the leader of a forlorn hope against that literary fortress which was so long defended by the cruel sneers of its masculine garrison. She fell upon the glacis. But over her body the Amazons have marched on to victory.

H. A. Huntington.