Now, among the members of that distinguished audience there was a man named Cumberland. He was the author of The West Indian and several other plays, and he was regarded as one of the leaders of the sentimental school, the demise of which was satirised in the prologue to this very play which was being performed. Cumberland was a man who could never see a particle of good in anything that was written by another. It was a standing entertainment with Garrick to “draw him on” by suggesting that some one had written a good scene in a play, or was about to produce an interesting book. In a moment Cumberland was up, protesting against the assumption that the play or the book could be worth anything. So wide a reputation had he for decrying every other author that when Sheridan produced The Critic; or, the Tragedy Rehearsed, his portrait was immediately recognised in Sir Fretful Plagiary.
What must have been the feelings of this man when, from the first, the play, which he had come to wreck, was received by the whole house with uproarious applause? Well, we don't know what he felt like, but we know what he looked like. One of the newspapers described him as “looking glum,” and another contained a rhymed epigram describing him as weeping. Goldsmith entered the theatre by the stage door at the beginning of the fifth act, where Tony Lumpkin and his mother appear close to their own house, and the former pretends that the chaise has broken down on Crackscull Common. He had no sooner got into the “wings” than he heard a hiss. “What's that, sir?” he whispered to Colman, who was beside him. “Psha, sir! what signifies a squib when we have been sitting on a barrel of gunpowder all night?” was the reply. The story is well known; and its accuracy has never been im peached. And the next day it was well known that that solitary hiss came from Cumberland, the opinion that it was due to the malevolence of Macpherson, whose pretensions to the discovery of Ossian were exposed by Johnson, being discredited.
But the effect of Colman's brutality and falsehood into the bargain had not a chance of lasting long. The hiss was received with cries of “Turn him out!” and, with an addition to the tumultuous applause of all the house, Goldsmith must have been made aware in another instant of the fact that he had written the best comedy of the day and that Colman had lied to him. From the first there had been no question of sitting on a barrel of gunpowder. Such applause could never greet the last act of a play the first four acts of which had been doubtful. He must have felt that at last he had conquered—that he had by one more achievement proved to his own satisfaction—and he was hard to satisfy—that those friends of his who had attributed genius to him had not been mistaken; that those who, like Johnson and Percy and Reynolds, had believed in him before he had written the work that made him famous, had not been misled.
The next day all London was talking of She Stoops to Conquer and of Colman. Horace Walpole, who detested Goldsmith, and who found when he went to see the play that it was deplorably vulgar, mentioned in a letter which he wrote to Lady Ossory on the morning after the production that it had “succeeded prodigiously,” and the newspapers were full of epigrams at the expense of the manager. If Colman had had the sense to keep to himself his forebodings of the failure of the piece, he would not have left himself open to these attacks; but, as has been said, he took as much pains to decry the coming production as he usually did to “puff” other pieces. It would seem that every one had for several days been talking about nothing else save the coming failure of Dr. Goldsmith's comedy. Only on this assumption can one now understand the poignancy of the “squibs”—some of them partook largely of the character of his own barrel of gunpowder—levelled against Colman. He must have been quite amazed at the clamour that arose against him; it became too much for his delicate skin, and he fled to Bath to get out of the way of the scurrilous humourists who were making him a target for their pop-guns. But even at Bath he failed to find a refuge. Writing to Mrs. Thrale, Johnson said: “Colman is so distressed with abuse that he has solicited Goldsmith to take him off the rack of the newspapers.”
It was characteristic of Goldsmith that he should do all that was asked of him and that he should make no attempt, either in public or in private, to exult in his triumph over the manager. The only reference which he made to his sufferings while Colman was keeping him on the rack was in a letter which he wrote to his friend Cradock, who had written an epilogue for the play, to explain how it was that this epilogue was not used at the first representation. After saying simply, “The play has met with a success beyond your expectation or mine,” he makes his explanation, and concludes thus: “Such is the history of my stage adventure, and which I have at last done with. I cannot help saying that I am very sick of the stage, and though I believe I shall get three tolerable benefits, yet I shall on the whole be a loser, even in a pecuniary light; my ease and comfort I certainly lost while it was in agitation.”
Goldsmith showed that he bore no grudge against Colman; but the English stage should bear him a grudge for his treatment of one of the few authors of real genius who have contributed to it for the benefit of posterity. If She Stoops to Conquer had been produced when it first came into the manager's hands, Goldsmith would certainly not have written the words just quoted. What would have been the result of his accepting the encouragement of its production it is, of course, impossible to tell; but it is not going too far to assume that the genius which gave the world The Good-Natured Man and She Stoops to Conquer would have been equal to the task of writing a third comedy equal in merit to either of these. Yes, posterity owes Colman a grudge.