A commonplace of literary history is that it was Steele who purged English comedy of its vileness and was the first to write sentimental comedy. This, as we have seen, is not true; for though The Conscious Lovers is probably the best of its type, it merely lays more stress upon the pathetic element and carries forward another step the sort of thing that Cibber had done in such comedies as The Careless Husband and The Lady’s Last Stake, which are as truly sentimental comedies as this, and which possess the pathetic interest, but in a less marked degree. In Steele’s other plays, The Funeral (1701), The Lying Lover (1705), The Tender Husband (1705), Steele, except in the matter of the purity of the language, does not show as fully developed examples of the type as does Cibber in his work of the same period and earlier.
Steele’s first play to be acted, The Funeral, lacks sentimental quality; it is merely a comedy which, when compared to the Restoration type, has a higher moral tone. Steele had no higher motive, he tells us, in writing this play than the purpose of reinstating himself in the opinion of his fellow soldiers who had ostracized him as a moral prig after the appearance of The Christian Hero (1701). In his preface he mentions two themes as those around which the comedy is written, namely, the practices of undertakers and “legal villanies.” Lady Brumpton, who had bigamously married Lord Brumpton, is discredited by being ejected from Lord Brumpton’s household, but there is no suggestion that she is in any way reformed, and in the rest of the action none of the other elements of sentimental comedy are prominent.
The Lying Lover goes a little further and reforms the hero at the end, as is done in the comedies of Cibber. But even this similarity is only superficial, for the hero is not really vicious, being guilty only of some entertaining lying, and the reformation is brought about, not by approved sentimental feminine means, but by the fact that the hero finds himself in prison. But even though the hero is humiliated by temporary imprisonment, his delinquencies are so diverting that the reader is entirely in sympathy with him. Our sympathy for him, indeed, is so great that it is a distinct disappointment that the lady is given to the honest and jealous lover instead of to him. Steele lays no claim to originality in the reform, “compunction and remorse” of his hero, for in his preface he says that such things had been “frequently applauded on the stage.” Nor is the versifying of the elevated portions of the play a new thing; it is found both earlier and later than sentimental comedy and is not a distinctive mark of that type.
The Tender Husband was indebted to Cibber’s Careless Husband, which had recently appeared, but is not to be compared to it in its sentimental qualities. In both plays, however, we have the reconciliation of an estranged husband and wife. In Cibber it is the husband who is the offender, and he is recalled from his vices by the patient fidelity of his wife; a reformation based on sentiment. In The Tender Husband, the wife is reformed from extravagance in her expenditure of time and money on trivialities, and from failure in her duty to her husband, but the reformation is brought about by a mere trick that the husband plays upon the wife rather than by the interaction of personality on personality. Steele shows nothing of the serious grasp of the situation that Cibber shows in his play on the same theme, The Provoked Husband. Steele’s handling is distinctly less artistic and distinctly less sentimental than in either of Cibber’s plays. This is seen also in Steele’s light treatment of the wife’s equivocal action toward Fainlove, whom she mistakenly supposes to be a man, and toward whom she makes questionable advances. Not only in regard to such situations as this, but in the attitude toward actual breaches of morality, Steele shows a lower standard than Cibber. In both The Careless Husband and The Tender Husband the hero keeps a mistress, but while Cibber brings the illicit amour to an end with the disgrace of the mistress and a distinct moral, Steele not only shows none of this disapproval but provides the mistress with a husband of means and gives her a good dowry.
Seventeen years later, though according to Genest[91] the play had been written some years before it was acted, Steele produced his fully developed comedy of the sentimental type, The Conscious Lovers. It is entirely different from the preceding plays, for instead of containing a lively intrigue with clever satire and wit, such as we have in The Lying Lover, the tone throughout is fixed by the pathetic and didactic elements. Steele rightly felt that he was doing something new, and took credit to himself in the prologue:
“But the bold sage—the poet of tonight—
By new and desperate rules resolved to write.
* * * * *
’Tis yours with breeding to refine the age,
To chasten wit, and moralise the stage.”