SHE STOOPS TO CONQUER
| The Times.] | [October 15, 1817. |
Covent-Garden Theatre.
Goldsmith’s comedy of She Stoops to Conquer was played at this theatre last night: its reception was highly favourable. It bears the stamp of the author’s genius, which was an indefinable mixture of the original and imitative. His plot, characters, and incidents, are all new, and yet they are all old, with little variation or disguise—that is, the writer sedulously avoided common-place, and sought for singularity, but found it rather in the unhackneyed and out-of-the-way inventions of those who had gone before him than in his own stores. His Vicar of Wakefield, which abounds more than any of his works in delightful and original traits, is still very much borrowed from Fielding’s Joseph Andrews. Again, the characters and adventures of Tony Lumpkin and his mother in the present comedy are a counterpart, even to the incident of the theft of the jewels, of those of the Widow Blackacre and her booby son in Wycherley’s Plain Dealer. The change of character and the rustic disguise of Miss Hardcastle, by which she gains her lover, are also a faint imitation of Letitia Hardy in The Belle’s Stratagem. This sort of plagiarism, which gives us a repetition of what are comparatively new and eccentric pictures of human life, is much to be preferred to the dull routine of trite, vapid, every-day common-places: but it is also more dangerous, as the stealing of pictures or family plate, where the goods are immediately identified, is surer of detection than the stealing of bank-notes or the current coin of the realm. Johnson’s sarcasm against some writer that ‘his singularity was not his excellence,’ cannot be applied to Goldsmith’s works in general: but we do not know whether it might not in severity be applied to She Stoops to Conquer. The incidents and characters are, some of them, exceedingly amusing; but it is a little at the expense of probability and bienseance. Tony Lumpkin is certainly a very essential, and unquestionably comic personage; and his absurdities or his humours were very effectually portrayed by Liston. His impenetrability and unconscious confusion of mind and face in reading and spelling out the letter was admirable. Charles Kemble’s bashful scene with his mistress was irresistibly ludicrous, and excellently well played: but still it did not quite overcome our incredulity as to the existence of such a character in such circumstances. It is a highly amusing caricature, a ridiculous fancy, but no more. One of the finest and most delicate touches of real acting we ever witnessed was in the transition of this modest gentleman’s manner to the easy and agreeable tone of familiarity with the supposed chambermaid, which was not total and abrupt, but exactly such in kind and degree as such a character of natural reserve and constitutional timidity would undergo from the change of circumstances. Miss Brunton’s Miss Hardcastle was a very correct and agreeable piece of acting. Mrs. Davenport’s Mrs. Hardcastle was like her acting in all such characters, as good as it could possibly be.