GOLDSMITH AND THE STAGE.

Dominion, Volume 5, Issue 1515, 10 August 1912, Page 9

GOLDSMITH AND THE STAGE.

"Goldsmith's "She Stopps to Conquer" was, it is well known, produced in reaction against tho dominant comedy of his day, and was a reversion to a type which had boon most recently exhibited by Vanbrugh and Gibber. The revorswii was justified by its success, but it is oirinus to remember to what an extent Goldsmith was, in respect of his dramatic opinions, under the sway of the pseudo-classic ideals, and how blind he was to tho significance of the changes that were taking place in the theatre of his day. He set forth his ideas in a paper which in 1773, the year, of his great play ( he contributed to the "Westminster Magazine," and which is reprinted as the twenty-sec-ond in his collection of "Essays." from this it appears that ho was outiroly at one with Aristotle in severely limiting , tragedy to'depicting the 'calamities of the 'great and comedy to delineating I he frailties of "tho lower part of mankind." That tragedy should iind its material in the ordinary ranks of life was inadmissible. There i.s, iudr-«i, a specious argument for keeping tragedy anions tho great on the ground that, events there being upon a greater scale, emotions will 1.0 deeper in proportion, and Goldsmith urges it. "mien tragedy," he says, "exhibits to us some great man fallen from his htight and struggling with want and adversity, we feel his situation in the s:une manner as we suppose lie himself must feel, and our pity is increased in proportion to the height from which hu fell. To this, however, the answer is easy that if a spectator is appealed to by scenes lo which ho has to rise by aji eliort of imagination, much more will he respond when Ihc scenes exhibit life on a piano level with his own. As a, .matter of fact, "trogclio boiH'geoiso" was coming intnexistence, the offspring of which As .melodrama, a form

which, although in our clay fossilised into a shapo the formula of which bcenis to be tho maximum of realism in the scenic effects and the maximum of convention in the characters and construction, is yet, in tho minds of a master, capable of great things. Further, Goldsmith is ali for absolute unity of emotion in tragedy and comedy. No comic element must intrude into the former, no tragic element into the latter. WKy writers should havo thought they were following the classics in maintaining this thesis it is difficult to guess. The revelling Herakles in tho "AlmsHs" of Euripides is a comic character, and scholars suggest that, the terminal play of a tetralogy invariably contained comic passages to relieve the" feelings of spectators who had witnessed a series of threedecker tragedies. Moreover, the play that mingles tho comic with tho tragic is all the truer to life on that account, for life is a Janus one face of which wears tho tragic and tho other the comic mask. Nor would the ca-e bo won for puro comedy even if it could bo proved that it gave more pleasure than the mixed sort, for if tho latter gives pleasure of a different kind it has vindicated it=elf as a separate genre. As a matter of fact, a play that occupies the ground common 'to tragedy and comedy, and while eliminating from tho former its element of terror retains that of pity, and while eliminating from tho latter its element of- farce retains its wit and humour, gives us our modern "drama."

Goldsmith applies the term "sentimental comedy" to the mixed fort, but perhaps that designation is better used in connection with comedies which perpetuated the didactic tradition of Steele. Steele set himself to clear the theatre of tho grossness of tho Restoration manner, and piit upon the stage a type of play which later oh was marked by three characteristics. It was full of moral ssntim;nts and even preachings; Steole himself ruined his adaptation of Moliere's "Menteur" by exhibiting a character in the agonies of remorse. It aimed at a certain "dignity"; some things were' too vulgar for it, so that the bailiffs scene in. "She Stoops to Conquer" had to bo excised as being too "low" for the delicate perceptions of spectators who had no fault to find, .say, with the bedroom scene in Hoadly's "Suspicious Husband." Finally, bv dint of representing men as they ought to be rather than as th'oy are, it came to represent them as they could not .possibly be, and characters weru presented on the stage , in whom passions which in real life carry everything before them were held in check by the most chimeric scruples and the most fastidious "false delicacies."—"Manchester Guardian."