SAMUEL FOOTE THE HUMOURIST. 205 SAMUEL FOOTE THE HUMOURIST. be noticed in practice. They never extend beyond the fingers; and the prude major allows you to touch even then only down to the second joint. The prude minor gives you the whole of the forefinger. Considerable skill may be shown in performing these, with nice variations, such as extending the left hand, instead of the right, or stretching a new glossy kidsmith; Biographical and Historical Essays (this work glove over the finger you extend. [John Forster, born at Newcastle, 1812; died at Kensington, 1st February, 1876. Biographer, historian, and journalist. His chief works are: The Statesmen of the Commonwealth of England; The Life of Oliver Gold contains the essay on Foote from which we quote); The Grand Remonstrance; The Arrest of the Five Members: Sir John Bliot, a biography; Walter Savage Landor: The Life of Dickens; &c. &c. Washington Irving said that the Life of Goldsmith was "a biography of the poet, gance that leave nothing to be desired." Mr. Forster was some time one of the English Commissioners in Lunacy.j I might go through a list, of the gripe royal, the saw-mill shake, and the shake with malice prepense; but these are only factitious combinations of the three fundamental forms al-executed with a spirit, a feeling, a grace, and an eleready described as the pump-handle, the pendulum, and the tourniquet; as the loving pat, the reach romantic, and the sentimental clasp, may be reduced in their main movements to various combinations and modifications of the cordial grapple, Peter Grievous touch, and the prude major and minor. I should trouble the reader with a few remarks, in conclusion, on the mode of shaking hands, as an indication of characters, but I see a friend coming up the avenue who is addicted to the pump-handle. I dare not tire my wrist by further writing. THE MOTHER'S ALARM. TRANSLATED FROM THE GREEK OF ARCHIAS. With gaudy flowers the cliff was gay, And o'er the brink was bending: One crag his fall suspending! He stretch'd to reach the flowers below- Some start or hasty action Might plunge him headlong in the flood! That thought with horror chill'd her blood: "Twas anguish! 'twas distraction! As none but mothers feel, she felt! He knew the song, which oft to rest M. G. LEWIS. We propose to speak of that forgotten name (Foote); and to show its claims to have been remembered, even though it now be little more than a name. It was once both a terrible and a delightful reality. It expressed a bitterness of sarcasm and ridicule unexampled in England; and a vivacity, intelligence, and gaiety, a ready and unfailing humour, to which a parallel could scarcely be found among the choicest wits of France. It was the name of a man so popular and diffused, that it would be difficult to say to what class of his countrymen he gave the greatest amount of amusement; it was the name of a man also more dreaded, than any since his who laid the princes of Europe under terror-stricken contribution, and to whom the Great Turk himself offered hush-money. "Mr. Foote was a man of wonderful abilities," says Garrick, "and the most entertaining companion I have ever known." "There is hardly a public man in England," says Davies, "who has not entered Mr. Foote's theatre with an aching heart, under the apprehension of seeing himself laughed at.' "Sure if ever one person," says Tate Wilkinson, "possessed the talents of pleasing more than another, Mr. Foote was the man. "Upon my word," writes Horace Walpole, "if Mr. Foote be not checked, we shall have the army itself, on its return from Boston, besieged in the Haymarket." Such and so various were the emotions once inspired by him who has now lost command alike over our fears and our enjoyments; and whose name is not thought even worthy of mention, by lecturers aiming to be popular, among the Humourists and Satirists of the eighteenth century. We have hinted at one reason for such forgetfulness, but that is not all. He who merely shoots a folly as it flies, may have no right to outlive the folly he lays low; but Foote's aim 296 SAMUEL FOOTE THE HUMOURIST. was not so limited. He proposed to instruct, as well as to amuse, his countrymen; he wrote what he believed to be comedies, as well as what he knew to be farces; he laughed freely at what he thought ridiculous in others, but he aspired also to produce what should be admirable and enduring of his own. "My scenes," he said on one occasion, "have been collected from general nature, and are applicable to none but those who, through consciousness, are compelled to a self-application. To that mark, if Comedy directs not her aim, her arrows are shot in the air; for by what touches no man, no man will be amended." This plea has not been admitted, however. Whenever Foote is now named, it is as a satirist of peculiarities, not as an observer of character; it is as a writer whose reputation has perished, with the personalities that alone gave it zest; it is as a comedian who so exclusively addressed himself to the audience of his theatre, that posterity has been obliged to decline having any business or concern with him. brogue, a stoop or a shuffle. If we had absolute faith in any of these judgments, this essay would not have been attempted. A careful examination of Foote's writings has satisfied us that they are not unworthy of a very high place in literature, though not perhaps in all respects the place he would have claimed; and it is worth remark that in defending them he has himself anticipated Mr. Macaulay's illustration. He declines to introduce upon the scene a lady from the north, with the true Newcastle burr in her throat; he recognizes no subject for ridicule in the accidental unhappiness of a national brogue, for which a man is no more to be held accountable than for the colour of his hair: but he sees the true object and occasion for satire where all true satirists have found it, namely, in all kinds of affectation or pretence; in whatever assumes to be what it is not, or strives to be what it cannot become. That he did not uniformly remember this, is with regret to be admitted, seeing the effect it has had upon his reputation; but it is not in his writings that his most marked deviations from it are discoverable. For it is not because real characters are there occasionally introduced, that the verdict is at once to pass against him. Vanbrugh's Miss Jenny was a certain Derbyshire Miss Lowe; Cibber's Lady Grace was Lady Betty Cecil; Farquhar's Justice Balance was a well-known Mr. Beverley; and Molière, who struck the fashions and humours of his age into forms that are immortal, has perpetuated with them the vices and foibles of many a living contemporary. In all these cases, the question still remains whether the individual folly or vice, obtruding itself on the public, may not so far represent a general defect, as to justify public satire for the sake of the warning it more widely conveys. It will not do to confine ridicule exclusively to folly and vice, and to refrain, in case of need, from laying its lash on the knave and the fool. But such reasonable opportunities are extremely rare; and it even more rarely happens that what is thus strictly personal in satire, does not also involve individual injustice and wrong. It is, beyond doubt, no small ground for distrust of its virtues, that the public should be always so eager to welcome it. Smarting from some ridicule poured out at his dinner-table, Boswell complained to Johnson that the host had made fools of his guests, and was met by a sarcasm bitter as Foote's own. “Why, sir, when you go to see Foote, you do not go to see a saint; you go to see a man who will be entertained at your house, and then bring you on a public stage; who will entertain you at his house, for the very purpose of bringing you on a public stage. Sir, he does not make fools of his company; they whom he exposes are fools already; he only brings them into action." The same opinion he expressed more gravely in another conversation, when, admitting Foote's humour, and his singular talent for exhibiting character, he qualified it not as a talent but a vice, such as other men abstain from; and described it to be not comedy, which exhibits the character of a species, but farce, which exhibits individuals. Be this hasty or deliberate, false or true, the imputation conveyed by it follows Foote still, and gathers bulk as it rolls. When Sir Walter Scott speaks of him, it is as an unprincipled satirist, who, while he affected to be the terror of vice and folly, was only anxious to extort forbearance-money from the timid, or to fill his theatre at the indiscriminate expense of friends and enemies, virtuous or vicious, who presented foibles capable of being turned into ridicule. When Mr. Macaulay speaks of him, it is as a man whose mimicry was exquisitely ludicrous, but all caricature; and who could take off only some strange peculiarity, a stam-self? No, no; 'tis quite and clean out of nature. mer or a lisp, a Northumbrian burr or an Irish good sousing satire, now, well-powdered with personal No one has expressed this more happily than Foote himself, when levelling his blow at Churchill, he makes his publisher Mr. Puff object to a poem full of praise: "Why, who the devil will give money to be told that Mr. Such-a-one is a wiser or better man than himA SAMUEL FOOTE THE HUMOURIST. pepper, and seasoned with the spirit of party, that demolishes a conspicuous character, and sinks him below our own level-there, there, we are pleased; there we chuckle and grin, and toss the half-crown on the counter." 297 to speak to him; but, himself feeling rather shy, merely said, "Mr. Foote, your handkerchief is hanging out of your pocket." Whereupon Foote, looking round suspiciously, and hurriedly thrusting the handkerchief back into his pocket, replied, "Thank you, my lord, thank you; you know the company better than I do."-At one of Macklin's absurd Lectures on the Ancients, the lecturer was solemnly laughter from where Foote stood ran through the room, and Macklin, thinking to throw the laugher off his guard, and effectually for that night disarm his ridicule, turned to him with this question, in his most severe and pompous manner: "Well, sir, you seem to be very merry there, but do you know what I am going to say, now?" No, sir," at once replied Foote; "pray, do you?"-One night at his friend Delaval's, when the glass had been circulating freely, one of the party would suddenly have fixed a quarrel upon him for his indulgence of personal satire. Why, what would you have?" exclaimed Foote, good-humouredly putting it aside; "of course I take all my friends off, but I use them no worse than myself, I take myself off." "Gadso!" cried the malcontent, "that I should like to see:" upon which Foote took up his hat and left the room. Unhappily this was his own case not less; for he, too, had to provide pleasure for those who went to chuckle, and grin, and toss their half-crowns at the pay-place of the Haymarket. And it was in serving up the dish for this pur-composing himself to begin, when a buzz of pose, rather than in first preparing it; it was in the powdering and peppering for the table, rather than in the composition and cooking; in a word, it was less by the deliberate intention of the writer than by the ready mimicry and humorous impromptu of the actor, that Foote gave mortal offence to so many of his countrymen, did irreparable wrong very often to the least offending, began himself to pay the penalty in suffering before he died, and is paying the penalty still in character and fame. It is this which explains any difference to be noted between the claims put forth by himself, and the verdict recorded by his contemporaries. The writings would little avail, in themselves, to account for the mixed emotions they inspired. That which gave them terror has of course long departed from them; but by reviving so much of it as description may tamely exhibit, and by connecting with Foote's personal career some idea of the overflowing abundance and extravagance of his humour, it is possible that their laughter and wit may win back some part of the appreciation they have lost, and a fair explanation be supplied not only of the genius of this remarkable man, and of the peculiar influence he exerted while he lived, but of the causes which have intercepted his due possession and ungrudged enjoyment of the "Estate that wits inherit after death." The strength and predominance of Foote's humour lay in its readiness. Whatever the call that might be made upon it, there it was. Other men were humorous as the occasion arose to them, but to him the occasion was never wanting. Others might be foiled or disabled by the lucky stroke of an adversary, but he took only the quicker rebound from what would have laid them prostrate. To put him out, or place him at a disadvantage, was not possible. He was taken one day into White's Club, by a friend who wanted to write a note. Standing in a room among strangers, and men he had no agreement with in politics, he appeared to feel not quite at ease, when Lord Carmarthen, wishing to relieve his embarrassment, went up No one could so promptly overthrow an assailant; so quietly rebuke an avarice or meanness; so effectually "abate and dissolve" any ignorant affectation or pretension. "Why do you attack my weakest part?" he asked, of one who had raised a laugh against what Johnson calls his depeditation: "did I ever say anything about your head?"—Dining when in Paris with Lord Stormont, that thrifty Scotch peer, then ambassador, as usual produced his wine in the smallest of decanters and dispensed it in the smallest of glasses, enlarging all the time on its exquisite growth and enormous age. "It is very little of its age," said Foote, holding up his diminutive glass.-A pompous person who had made a large fortune as a builder was holding forth on the mutability of the world. "Can you account for it, sir?” said he, turning to Foote. "Why, not very clearly, sir," said Foote; "unless we could suppose the world was built by contract."-A stately and silly country squire was regaling a large party with the number of fashionable folk he had visited that morning. "And among the rest," he said, "I called upon my good friend the Earl of Chol-mon-dely, but he was not at home." "That is exceedingly surprising," said Foote. 298 SAMUEL FOOTE THE HUMOURIST. listen to it, and who mercilessly stopped to tax him with inattention even before advancing beyond the first pompous line, "Hear me, Õ Phœbus, and ye Muses nine! pray, pray be attentive, Mr. Foote." "I am," said Foote; "nine and one are ten; go on!" The only men of his day, putting aside Johnson's later fame, who had the least pretension to compare with him in social repute, were Quin for wit and Garrick for powers of conversation. But Quin was restricted to particular walks of humour; and his jokes, though among the most masterly in the language, had undoubtedly a certain strong, morose, surly vein, like the characters he was so great in. Foote's range, on the other hand, was as universal as society and scholarship could make it; and Davies, who was no great friend of his, says it would have been much more unfashionable not to have laughed at Foote's jokes, than even at Quin's. Garrick again, though nothing could be more delightful than the gaiety of his talk, had yet to struggle always with a certain restless misgiving, which made him the sport of men who were much his inferiors. Johnson puts the matter kindly— "What! nor none of his pe-o-ple?"-Being in company where Hugh Kelly was mightily boasting of the power he had as a reviewer of distributing literary reputation to any extent, "Don't be too prodigal of it," Foote quietly interposed, "or you may leave none for yourself."-Conversation turning one day on a lady having married very happily, whose previous life had been of extremely doubtful complexion, some one attributed the unexpected result to her having frankly told her husband, before marriage, all that had happened. "What candour she must have had!" was the general remark upon this. "What honesty!" "Yes," said Foote, "and what an amazing memory!"-The then Duke of Cumberland (the foolish duke, as he was called) came one night into the green-room at the Haymarket Theatre. "Well, Foote," said he, "here I am, ready, as usual, to swallow all your good things.' Really," replied Foote, "your royal highness must have an excellent digestion, for you never bring any up again.' "Why are you for ever humming that air?" he asked a man without a sense of tune in him. "Because it haunts me." "No wonder," said Foote: "you are for ever mur"Garrick, sir, has some delicacy of feeling; it is posdering it.' -A well beneficed old Cornish par-sible to put him out; you may get the better of him: son was holding forth at the dinner-table upon but Foote is the most incompressible fellow that I ever the surprising profits of his living, much to knew; when you have driven him into a corner, and the weariness of everyone present, when, hap- think you are sure of him, he runs through between pening to stretch over the table hands remark- your legs, or jumps over your head, and makes his able for their dirt, Foote struck in with, "Well, doctor, I for one am not at all surprised at your profits, for I see you keep the glebe in your own hands."-One of Mrs. Montagu's bluestocking ladies fastened upon him at one of the routs in Portman Square with her views of Locke on the Understanding, which she protested she admired above all things; only there was one particular word very often repeated which she could not distinctly make out, and that was the word (pronouncing it very long) "ide-a; but I suppose it comes from a Greek derivation." "You are perfectly right, madam," said Foote; "it comes from the word ideaowski. "And pray, sir, what does that mean?" "The feminine of idiot, madam." Much bored by a pompous physician at Bath, who confided to him as a great secret that he had a mind to publish his own poems, but had so many irons in the fire he really did not well know what to do. "Take my advice, doctor," says Foote, "and put your poems where your irons are."-Not less distressed on another occasion by a mercantile man of his acquaintance, who had also not only written a poem, but exacted a promise that he would escape." Could familiar language describe Falstaff better than this, which hits off the character of Foote's humour exactly? It was incompressible. No matter what the truth of any subject might be, or however strong the position of any adversary, he managed to get the laugh on his own side. It was not merely a quickness of fancy, a brilliance of witty resource, a ready and expert audacity of invention; but that there was a fulness and invincibility of courage in the man, call it moral or immoral, which unfailingly warded off humiliation. . . Meanwhile Foote had not been neglecting British fashions and foibles, pretenders, politicians, or players. He has taken his former place at the Bedford, and in his critical and satirical corner is again supreme. All who know him come early in the hope of being admitted of his party at supper, the less fortunate engage boxes near him, and wherever the sound of his voice is heard the table is in a roar. Since last we saw the place some new faces are there. But some familiar ones are gone. Old Macklin, weary of his doubtful suc THE SHEPHERD'S WOOING. 299 lecture, and then, handing up the subjoined sentences, desired that Mr. Macklin would be good enough to read and afterwards repeat them from memory. More amazing nonsense never was written. "So she went into the garden to cut a cabbage-leaf, to make an apple-pie; and at the same time a great she-bear, coming up the street, pops its head into the shop. 'What! no soap?' So he died, and she very imprudently married the barber; and there were present the Picninnies, and the Joblillies, and the Garyulies, and the Grand Panjandrum himself, with the little round button at top; and they all fell to playing the game of catch as catch can, till the gunpowder ran out at the heels of their boots." It is needless to say that the laugh turned against old Macklin, as it has turned against many younger and livelier people since who have read these droll sentences in Harry and Lucy, and who, like Miss Edgeworth's little hero and heroine, after mastering the great she-bear and the no-soap, for want of cesses on the stage, has taken oddly enough to another branch of public employment, having set up a tavern of his own near the Bedford, on the present site of the Tavistock Hotel, where, by the alternation of a three-shilling ordinary with a shilling lecture, at both of which he is presiding deity, he supplies at once the bodily wants and what he conceives to be the mental deficiences of the day. He is to make everybody orators, by teaching them how to speak; and, by way of teaching them also what to speak, presents himself every other night with a discourse on some subject wherein he thinks the popular mind insufficiently informed. His range is unlimited between the literature of the ancients and the manners of the moderns, and with the Ancient Chorus for one lecture, for its successor he will take the Irish Duel; but whatever his subject, the harvest of ridicule for Foote is unfailing. The result is that people go to hear him rather than the lecturer, for, it being part of the plan to invite the audience to offer hints on the subject-knowing who died have never arrived at the matter, and so exhibit their progress in oratory, the witty sallies and questionings of Foote have become at last the leading attraction. "Order!" he cried one night, that being the established mode of intimating your wish to put a question to the lecturer. "Well, sir," said Macklin, "what have you to say upon this subject?" The subject was the prevalence of duelling in Ireland; and the lecturer, who had begun at the earliest period of the Irish history, was now arrived at the reign of Elizabeth. think, sir," said Foote, "this matter might be settled in a few words. What o'clock is it, sir?" Macklin could not possibly see what "I the clock had to do with a dissertation on duelling, but gruffly reported the hour to be half-past nine. "Very well," says Foote, "about this time of the night every gentleman in Ireland that can possibly afford it is in his third bottle of claret, and therefore in a fair way of getting drunk; and from drunkenness proceeds quarrelling, and from quarrelling duelling, and so there's an end of the chapter." The abridgment was so satisfactory to the audience, the hour of the night being considered, that Macklin had to shut up his antiquarian disquisition in great dudgeon. His topic on another evening was the employment of memory in connection with the oratorical art, in the course of which, as he enlarged on the importance of exercising memory as a habit, he took occasion to say that to such perfection he had brought his own he could learn anything by rote on once hearing it. Foote waited till the conclusion of the marriage with the barber, or perhaps, even after proceeding so far, have been tripped up by the Grand Panjandrum with the little round button at top. |