"What I would infer is this, I think, evident truth; that tragedy is so far from losing its dignity, by being accommodated to the circumstances of the generality of mankind, that it is more truly august in proportion to the extent of its influence, and the numbers that are properly affected by it. As it is more truly great to be the instrument of good to many, who stand in need of our assistance, than to a very small part of that number."[39]
Southerne, Otway, and Rowe had won great success for domestic themes, and their examples were naturally cited in the prologue which introduced "The Merchant." Comedy might also have been summoned to support. After the scourging from Collier it had joined in the general movement at the beginning of the century toward sentiment and moralizing. Sentimental comedy, seeking both pathos and a moral, may be said to begin in England at least as early as Colley Cibber's "Careless Husband" (1704) and Steele's "Tender Husband" (1705). Steele's "Conscious Lovers" (1722) shows the species in full development. More general but not less important encouragements for realism in tragedy came from the realistic tendencies manifest in the literature of the preceding generation, notably in the novels of Defoe, and from the moralistic tendencies everywhere manifest in both fiction and drama. Lillo was one with his time, though out with truth and art, in thinking "the more extensively useful the moral of any tragedy is, the more excellent that piece must be of its kind."[40] The ascendancy of the middle class in letters, their expanding social life, their attachment to a conventional morality and a utilitarian art, and their delight in sentimentality, all help to explain the appearance of "George Barnwell." Lillo was writing for a generation that had "The Fair Penitent" and was waiting for "Pamela."
Lillo's work, however, was none the less that of a pioneer. "The Fatal Curiosity" had a special influence, beginning forty years after its appearance, in the German tragedies of destiny; and "The London Merchant," soon after its publication, became of importance in both France and Germany. In France its welcome was prepared by the growth of a species of sentimental comedy paralleling the English, and it was translated in time (1748) to serve as an example and stimulant to Diderot's plays and theories. Even before the publication of his "Le Fils Naturel"[41] (1757), and "Le Père de Famille"[42] (1758), Lessing's "Miss Sara Sampson" (1755) had appeared directly modeled on "The London Merchant." Through Diderot and Lessing and, a little later, through German translations of Lillo's plays, domestic tragedy continued its leavening work in the German drama. By that time, sentimental comedy and domestic tragedy were returning from France and Germany to influence the English drama.
In England the direct stream of domestic tragedy never flowed high. A one-act play, "Fatal Extravagance," in prose, had appeared in 1721 under the patronage of Aaron Hill, and was revived the year before the success of "Barnwell," and later enlarged into five acts. There were a few successors—"Caelia, or the Perjured Lover" (1732), by Charles Johnson, presenting a Lovelace-like protagonist; "Love the Cause and Cure of Grief" (1743), a three-act play in prose; and Victor's adaptation of "A Woman Killed with Kindness" (1776). Far more important than any of these was Moore's "Gamester" (1753), long a stock play, and almost as influential on the continent as "Barnwell." Like "The Yorkshire Tragedy," it pictures the horrors of gaming. The gamester, his long-suffering wife, a faithful servant, a spirited girl, her lover, the intriguing villain, and his accomplices play a story of far more insistent dramatic power than Lillo's and of no less sentimental and moral conclusiveness. Cumberland's "Mysterious Husband" (1783) is a later and less crude representative of the same species.[43]
Lord Davenant has deceived his wife into marrying him by slandering her lover Dormer. Later he has entrapped Dormer's sister into a pretended marriage and then deserted her. She, supposing her husband dead, marries Lord Davenant's son. On their marriage day, Dormer returns; Lord Davenant is discovered and kills himself.
Though a man and not a woman is the central figure of this social entanglement, we are reminded of the Tanquerays and Ebbsmiths of a later day in its powerful and not unveracious presentation of domestic ruin.
One reason for the failure of Lillo's pioneering to arouse a larger following in tragedy was the possession which comedy had taken of both domestic sentiment and morality. The species of sentimental and tearful comedy, which had already by 1730 appeared in both England and France, soon flourished in both countries. Their vogue was diminished by the success of "She Stoops to Conquer" and "The Rivals," but there was a further development during the last thirty years of the century in the plays of Cumberland, Holcroft, Mrs. Inchbald, and others. A certain amount of low comedy was, after "The Rivals," admitted to be necessary, as Holcroft avows in the preface to "Duplicity," but in such plays as his "Duplicity" and "Road to Ruin," or Cumberland's "The Jew" and "The Wheel of Fortune," suffering abounds, ruin is imminent, there is much weeping, and a salient moral lesson. The suffering usually is confined to loss of fortune or temptation of virtue, and the moral lesson is directed against gaming, or loose living, or marital infidelity upon the part of the husband. The intriguing villain in this kind of play sinks to insignificance, and the moving force is likely to be a humanitarian benefactor who rescues the lost fortune or saves the heroine from the hated marriage. Occasionally this type of serious comedy comes close to tragedy. In Holcroft's "Deserted Daughter" (1795), a revamping of Cumberland's "Fashionable Lover," the father has disowned his daughter by his first marriage, and, through his wicked agent, she has been sent to a house of ill-fame. Not knowing his own daughter, the father, ruined in fortune and conscience, plans to aid a friend to secure her, and himself visits her. The situation is ghastly enough, but all comes out happily. The happy ending was in fact the dram of eale that corrupted the whole substance of this sentimental comedy. The theatrical necessity of a happy ending forbade either tragedy or a serious study of life. It compelled the dramatist to devote a large part of a play to preparing for the reconciliation, to spend much time on youthful love, to maintain a lightness of tone throughout; and it destroyed the possibility of tracing out character and incident to anything like a logical conclusion. The domestic drama, devoted to a serious presentation of social life, had its opportunity in the eighteenth as well as in the twentieth century. It shrank from tragedy; it advanced as far as attacking fashionable excesses, or as dramatizing moral theses, but it never got beyond the lovers who must be united and the everything that must come out well. It resigned itself to sentimentality and false conclusions, and was naturally overwhelmed by the theatrically more captivating sentimentality and falsity of Kotzebue. When "The London Merchant" and "The Gamester" encouraged the vogue of sentimental comedy, they nourished an ingrate which destroyed the legitimate brood of domestic tragedy. In the theatres men took their realism sugared by a sentimentality that sent them home contented. But Lillo's work was not unheeded by the genius who in "Tom Jones" and "Amelia" gave literary greatness to a realistic study of manners and morals. The sentimentalizing and moralizing of the middle classes, which from the time of Southerne had threatened to have their say on the stage, found their spokesman in the author of "Clarissa Harlowe."
In the last third of the century the various social, intellectual, and imaginative changes that make up the beginnings of the Romantic movement had their effect upon tragedy, but only in a partial and secondary fashion. The drama was already losing place to the novel in popularity, and showing signs of becoming a sort of literary by-product. Successful novels were made over into plays, and the various romantic tendencies to medievalism, melancholy, supernaturalism, and naturalism found expression in novel or verse rather than in play. The reawakening interest in the Elizabethan dramatists was represented by a revival of a number of the plays of Massinger and of Beaumont and Fletcher,[44] and imitations of Elizabethan diction became frequent. A more important departure was furnished by the so-called Terrific School of fiction. Medieval stories and scenes, and the various accessories of horror, ghosts, graveyards, dungeons, vaults, and the midnight bell had never been lacking in eighteenth century tragedy, but the novels of Walpole and his successors offered some novelties. Walpole's own unacted "Mysterious Mother" (1768), perhaps the most powerful of the Gothic tragedies, was the pioneer of the movement. Robert Jephson, whose "Braganza" (1775) was heralded as
"His; no French tragedy,—tame, polish'd, dull by rule!
Vigorous he comes, and warm from Shakespeare's school,"
produced in 1781 an adaptation of Walpole's "Castle of Otranto," called "The Count of Narbonne," which, as the epilogue boasts,