‘The Deserted Daughter,’ ‘The Man of Ten Thousand,’ ‘The Force of Ridicule,’ and ‘Knave or Not,’ successively appeared in 1795, 1796, 1797, and 1798. The three last of these appeared at Drury-Lane. ‘The Deserted Daughter,’ and ‘He’s much to Blame,’ were acted at Covent-Garden.
Of all these ‘The Deserted Daughter’ was received with the greatest applause, and it is perhaps the best of Mr Holcroft’s serious comedies. The characters of Mordent, of Lady Ann, and particularly of the faithful old servant, Donald, are drawn with great force and feeling. The character of Mordent is that of a philosopher, moralizing on the passions and vices of other men, and hurried away by his own. He has abandoned, or refused to own a daughter, the offspring of a former clandestine marriage, in order to avoid the sneers of the world, and the contempt of the rich and powerful connexions of his second wife. He maintains and brings her up as a natural daughter, but without seeing or acknowledging her. This the girl, who has a high spirit and quick sensibility, resents as an unmerited punishment; and determines either to be suffered to cast herself at her father’s feet, and for once receive his blessing, or to throw herself on the mercy of strangers. In consequence of this, she is decoyed into a house of ill fame, by one of the hoary priestesses of vice, under pretence of affording her employment at her needle; and here she is in danger of falling into the hands of one of Mordent’s profligate friends, who is himself accessary to the plot for carrying her off, at the moment that, by the indefatigable zeal of Donald, who had traced her to this abode of infamy, she is discovered to be his daughter. The scenes which follow this discovery are highly interesting; and through the whole of the character of Mordent, the conflict between a sense of duty, pride, and dissipation, is pourtrayed with strong touches of truth and nature. Cheveril is a lively, amusing character, and represents with a good deal of risible effect, one of those careless, good-natured young fellows, who would be thought ‘sad wicked dogs,’ but cannot prevail on themselves to do any harm.
Dorington, ‘The Man of Ten Thousand,’ may be considered as a benevolent Timon. After living in the most splendid and profuse hospitality, he suddenly loses his immense wealth, and with it his friends; but he does not at the same time lose either his senses or his philosophy. He preserves in the midst of the most mortifying reverses, the same calm dignity, and evenness of mind. Great as this effort of heroism is, it is managed in such a manner as not to appear unnatural or extravagant. Olivia, his mistress, is by no means so interesting a character. She is the blemish of the piece. Her notions of virtue are too fastidious by half, and she exacts conformity to her standard of perfection, with a dogmatical severity, which would scarcely sit well on a Stoic. Neither is her behaviour explained to Dorington in so satisfactory a manner as it ought to have been. The subordinate characters of Herbert and Annabel are described with extreme tenderness and simplicity. They exhibit an amiable picture of those qualities which often spring directly from a guileless heart, without the artificial refinements of sentiment or reason. Hairbrain is a character of the same school, and must have had a very good effect in the hands of Bannister, who played it. Kemble and Miss Farren were the representatives of Dorington and Olivia.
‘Knave or Not,’ as well as ‘The Man of Ten Thousand,’ was brought out at Drury-Lane. Its success was not very flattering. The advertisement prefixed by the author to the published play, will explain some of the reasons of this, as well as describe the most striking features of the play itself.
‘The unrelenting opposition, which the productions of the author of the present comedy have experienced for several years, is well known to those who pay attention to our public amusements. It is not for him to pronounce how far this opposition has been merited by inability. Since the appearance of the Road to Ruin, his comedy of the Deserted Daughter only has escaped: and that, as he imagines, because it was not known on the first night of its performance, by whom it was written. Love’s Frailties, The Man of Ten Thousand, and Knave or Not, have sustained increasing marks of hostility: so that the efforts made to afford rational amusement to the public, emolument to the author, and improvement to morals, have been rendered feeble, and almost ineffectual. In the last instance, one mistake appears to have pervaded the majority of the spectators. It was imagined that the author himself was as unqualified a libeller of mankind as Monrose: in which character the writer’s individual sentiments were supposed to have been incorporated. Those who have read his other works cannot surely attribute to him any such indiscriminate misanthropy. The accusation that has been most generally made against him is, that he thinks men capable of gradations of virtue, which others affirm they can never attain. Persons, who have made the human mind their study, have discovered that guilty men exert the whole force of their faculties to justify their own course of action to themselves. To this principle the writer was strictly attentive in pourtraying the character of Monrose. His design was to draw a man of genius, misled by his passions, reasoning on his actions, systematising them, condemning them in principle, but justifying them in practice, and heating his imagination by contemplating the crimes of others; that he might still retain that respect for himself, of which the strongest minds, even in the last stages of vice, are so tenacious. How far that spirit of faction, commotion, and anarchy, of which the author has long been, and is still, so vehemently accused, is to be traced in the present comedy, may now be seen. Sincerely desirous of giving no offence, the passages which were most disapproved, or to speak more accurately, reprobated, on the first night, have since been omitted in representation; but they are printed between inverted commas, that the cool judgment may decide whether the author could have been so insane as actually to intend to inflame the spectators, and increase a spirit of enmity between men of different sentiments: whom could he reconcile, he would account it the most heart-consoling action of his life.
‘Before the comedy appeared, all parties were anxious that no sentence or word should be spoken, which could be liable to misrepresentation. Some few passages, therefore, are committed to the press, which never were spoken on the stage; particularly the passage, where Monrose inquires into his qualifications for being a lord. A few years ago, this would have been common-place satire; and it is a subject of no little regret, that at present local and temporary applications are so liable to be made where none are intended.’
The jealousy which was thus manifested of sentiments, either of liberty or public virtue, was perhaps as inconsiderate as it was unjust. When the tragedy of Cato was first played, at a time when party zeal ran high, the Whigs applauded all the strong passages in the play, as a satire on the Tories; and the Tories were as loud in their applause as the Whigs, to shew that the satire was unfelt. But the ‘horrors’ of the French Revolution were, it seems, to become a Medusa’s shield to screen every species of existing vice or folly from the glance even of ridicule, and to render them invulnerable and incorrigible. To stickle obstinately for the abuses to which any system is liable is tacitly to identify the system with the abuse.
In the characters of Susan and Jonas in this play, Mr Holcroft has been guilty of that common vice among the authors of the present day, of trusting less to the characters themselves, than to the persons who were to act them. They are well adapted to shew the powers of acting in Mrs. Jordan, and Bannister, who might probably make them amusing or interesting; but they certainly stand in need of this foreign aid to produce such an effect.
‘He’s much to Blame’ was acted at Covent-Garden in 1798, with great and deserved success. It is a truly elegant comedy. The characters, particularly that of Sir George Versatile, are amusing and original; and the situations, which arise in the progress of the story, give birth to some of the most natural and delicate strokes of passion. The scene at the masquerade, where Maria is discovered by Sir George, is perhaps the most striking; the unaffected and artless expression of her feelings produces an effect which is irresistible. The easiness of Sir George’s temper, and the facility with which he accommodates himself to other people’s humours, without any design or hypocrisy, are admirably described. The passions are less strongly moved in this comedy than in the Deserted Daughter, but they are moved with less effort, and with more pleasure to the reader. Neither has it any thing like the same bustle and broad effect as the Road to Ruin: but in ease, lightness, and a certain graceful simplicity, neither sinking into insipidity on the one hand, nor ‘o’erstepping the modesty of nature’ on the other, it is superior to almost every other modern production. It is the finest specimen Mr Holcroft has left of his powers for writing what is commonly understood by genteel comedy.
The comedy of ‘He’s much to Blame’ was offered to the theatre in the name of a friend; an artifice to which the author, notwithstanding his dislike to every species of insincerity, was obliged to resort more than once.