As for Cibber himself, he declares he was not impudent, and I am disposed to take his own word, for he modestly asserts this, in a remark on Pope’s expression,
| “‘Cibberian forehead,’ |
“by which I find you modestly mean Cibberian impudence, as a sample of the strongest.—Sir, your humble servant—but pray, sir, in your ‘Epistle to Dr. Arbuthnot’ (where, by the way, in your ample description of a great Poet, you slily hook in a whole hat-full of virtues to your own character) have not you this particular line?
| ‘And thought a Lie, in verse or prose, the same—’” |
Cibber laments it is not so, for “any accusation in smooth verse will always sound well, though it is not tied down to have a tittle of truth in it, when the strongest defence in poor humble prose, not having that harmonious advantage, takes nobody by the ear—very hard upon an innocent man! For suppose in prose, now, I were as confidently to insist that you were an honest, good-natured, inoffensive creature, would my barely saying so be any proof of it? No sure. Why then, might it not be supposed an equal truth, that both our assertions were equally false? Yours, when you call me impudent; mine, when I call you modest, &c. While my superiors suffer me occasionally to sit down with them, I hope it will be thought that rather the Papal than the Cibberian forehead ought to be out of countenance.” I give this as a specimen of Cibber’s serious reasonings—they are poor; and they had been so from a greater genius; for ridicule and satire, being only a mere abuse of eloquence, can never be effectually opposed by truisms. Satire must be repelled by satire; and Cibber’s sarcasms obtained what Cibber’s reasonings failed in.
Vain as Cibber has been called, and vain as he affects to be, he has spoken of his own merits as a comic writer,—and he was a very great one,—with a manly moderation, very surprising indeed in a vain man. Pope has sung in his Dunciad, most harmoniously inhuman,
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“How, with less reading than makes felons scape, Less human genius than God gives an ape, Small thanks to France, and none to Rome or Greece, A patch’d, vamp’d, future, old, revived new piece; ’Twixt Plautus, Fletcher, Congreve, and Corneille, Can make a Cibber, Johnson, and Ozell.” |
Blasting as was this criticism, it could not raise the anger of the gay and careless Cibber. Yet what could have put it to a sharper test? Johnson and Ozell are names which have long disappeared from the dramatic annals, and could only have been coupled with Cibber to give an idea of what the satirist meant by “the human genius of an ape.” But listen to the mild, yet the firm tone of Cibber—he talks like injured innocence, and he triumphs over Pope, in all the dignity of truth.—I appeal to Cibber’s posterity!
“And pray, sir, why my name under this scurvy picture? I flatter myself, that if you had not put it there, nobody else would have thought it like me; nor can I easily believe that you yourself do: but perhaps you imagined it would be a laughing ornament to your verse, and had a mind to divert other people’s spleen with it as well as your own. Now let me hold up my head a little, and then we shall see how the features hit me.” He proceeds to relate, how “many of those plays have lived the longer for my meddling with them.” He mentions several, which “had been dead to the stage out of all memory, which have since been in a constant course of acting above these thirty or forty years.” And then he adds: “Do those altered plays at all take from the merit of those more successful pieces, which were entirely my own?—When a man is abused, he has a right to speak even laudable truths of himself, to confront his slanderer. Let me therefore add, that my first Comedy of The Fool in Fashion was as much (though not so valuable) an original, as any work Mr. Pope himself has produced. It is now forty-seven years since its first appearance on the stage, where it has kept its station, to this very day, without ever lying one winter dormant. Nine years after this, I brought on The Careless Husband, with still greater success; and was that too