To this it may be added that, from the essentially undramatic bent of Addison’s genius, whenever he contrives a train of incident he manages to make it a little absurd. Dennis has pointed out with considerable humour the consequences of his conscientious adherence to the unity of place, whereby every species of action in the play—love-making, conspiracy, debating, and fighting—is made to take place in the “large hall in the governor’s palace of Utica.” It is strange that Addison’s keen sense of the ridiculous, which inspired so happily his criticisms on the allegorical paintings at Versailles,[56] should not have shown him the incongruities which Dennis discerned; but, in truth, they pervade the atmosphere of the whole play. All the actors—the distracted lovers, the good young man, Juba, and the blundering conspirator, Sempronius—seem to be oppressed with an uneasy consciousness that they have a character to sustain, and are not confident of coming up to what is expected of them. This is especially the case with Portius, a pragmatic young Roman, whose praiseworthy but futile attempts to unite the qualities of Stoical fortitude, romantic passion, and fraternal loyalty, exhibit him in a position of almost comic embarrassment. According to Pope, “the love part was flung in after, to comply with the popular taste;” but the removal of these scenes would make the play so remarkably barren of incident that it is a little difficult to credit the statement.
The deficiencies of Cato as an acting play were, however, more than counterbalanced by the violence of party spirit, which insisted on investing the comparatively tame sentiments assigned to the Roman champions of liberty with a pointed modern application. In 1713 the rage of the contending factions was at its highest point. The Tories were suspected, not without reason, of designs against the Act of Settlement; the Whigs, on the other hand, were still suffering in public opinion from the charge of having, for their own advantage, protracted the war with Louis XIV. Marlborough had been accused in 1711 of receiving bribes while commander-in-chief, and had been dismissed from all his employments. Disappointment, envy, revenge, and no doubt a genuine apprehension for the public safety, inspired the attacks of the Whigs upon their rivals; and when it was known that Addison had in his drawers an unfinished play on so promising a subject as Cato, great pressure was put upon him by his friends to complete it for the stage. Somewhat unwillingly, apparently, he roused himself to the task. So small, indeed, was his inclination for it, that he is said in the first instance to have asked Hughes, afterwards author of the Siege of Damascus, to write a fifth act for him. Hughes undertook to do so, but on returning a few days afterwards with his own performance, he found that Addison had himself finished the play. In spite of the judgment of the critics, Cato was quickly hurried off for rehearsal, doubtless with many fears on the part of the author. His anxieties during this period must have been great. “I was this morning,” writes Swift to Stella on the 6th of April, “at ten, at the rehearsal of Mr. Addison’s play, called Cato, which is to be acted on Friday. There was not half a score of us to see it. We stood on the stage, and it was foolish enough to see the actors prompted every moment, and the poet directing them, and the drab that acts Cato’s daughter (Mrs. Oldfield) out in the midst of a passionate part, and then calling out, ‘What’s next?’”
Mrs. Oldfield not only occasionally forgot the poet’s text, she also criticised it. She seems to have objected to the original draft of a speech of Portius in the second scene of the third act; and Pope, whose advice Addison appears to have frequently asked, suggested the present reading:
“Fixt in astonishment, I gaze upon thee
Like one just blasted by a stroke from heaven
Who pants for breath, and stiffens, yet alive,
In dreadful looks: a monument of wrath.”[57]
Pope also proposed the alteration of the last line in the play from
“And oh, ’twas this that ended Cato’s life,”
to
“And robs the guilty world of Cato’s life;”
and he was generally the cause of many modifications. “I believe,” said he to Spence, “Mr. Addison did not leave a word unchanged that I objected to in his Cato.”[58]
On the 13th of April the play was ready for performance, and contemporary accounts give a vivid picture of the eagerness of the public, the excitement of parties, and the apprehensions of the author. “On our first night of acting it,” says Cibber, in his Apology, speaking of the subsequent representation at Oxford, “our house was, in a manner, invested, and entrance demanded by twelve o’clock at noon; and before one it was not wide enough for many who came too late for their places. The same crowds continued for three days together—an uncommon curiosity in that place; and the death of Cato triumphed over the injuries of Cæsar everywhere.” The prologue—a very fine one—was contributed by Pope; the epilogue—written, according to the execrable taste fashionable after the Restoration, in a comic vein—by Garth. As to the performance itself, a very lively record of the effect it produced remains in Pope’s letter to Trumbull of the 30th April, 1713: