MANY years after the production of She Stoops to Conquer Cumberland published in his Memoirs what purported to be a circumstantial account of the performance and of the incidents connected with it. He endeavoured to make out that the success of the piece was solely due to himself and to his organisation of a claque to pull it out of the fire to which it was doomed by reason of its badness. A more impudent piece of mendacity than Cumberland's narrative could scarcely be imagined. He pretended that he was the leading spirit at the dinner preceding the performance—that he was one of the author's staunch friends, Johnson and Reynolds and Steevens played parts quite subsidiary to his own in this transaction, and when it came to the actual saving of the piece, the triumph was due to what he called "our manœuvres "; these being the working of the full machinery of the professional claquer—the posting of a number of loudvoiced men in various parts of the house, who were to take from him the signal when to cheer. Owing to his forethought and the perfection of his organisation, the attempts of those who meant to wreck the piece were frustrated, and thus, through the extreme good nature of Cumberland, She Stoops to Conquer was allowed to proceed to its close.

This whole narrative is an impudent fabrication, the more impudent by reason of the air of a large-hearted and tolerant patronage of Goldsmith which pervades it. Everybody knew what was the character of Richard Cumberland. It was an agony to him to hear a good word said about any one but himself, and yet he would try to make the readers of his Memoirs believe that he put himself to all this trouble

on behalf of the author who was his most imminent and pronounced rival, and of the play which ridiculed him and the sentimentalists with whom he had banded himself! This would be rather too much to expect from Mr. Cumberland. Everybody knew that he wished to ingratiate himself with Colman, in view of future productions, and it was with this object he went to the theatre prepared to hiss-" willing to wound and yet afraid to strike," in the face of the success made by the play from the first. Only that one hiss did he venture upon; the disapprobation with which it was noticed made him. shrink into his box, and content himself by "looking glum." Several newspapers referred to the disappointment on his face, and, as we have already mentioned, many squibs appeared upon the aspect of himself and Kelly. One of them was as follows: At Dr. Goldsmith's merry play

All the spectators laugh they say ;
The assertion, sir, I must deny,
For Cumberland and Kelly cry.

But at the very outset of his narrative Cumberland showed himself unworthy of confidence, for among the little company of the author's staunch friends who supported him at the dinner he includes FitzHerbert, who had committed suicide the previous year.

It does not need any one to go to a large amount of trouble to account for the success of She Stoops to Conquer. It succeeded because it contained all the elements of success. It required no saving by the exertions of Cumberland, or of Johnson or of young Northcote, Sir Joshua Reynolds's pupil, who was in the gallery and " laughing exceedingly"; or of. the Honourable Miss Nugent, who must have exploded when she heard in the dialogue the reference made to the trick which she had once played with the author's wig. It is ludicrous to notice Cumberland's attitude, suggesting that the stage actually owed the existence of the play to his extraordinary benevolence. As if a piece that has been played thousands of times and that is still played with success, contained such distinct elements of failure as necessitated his heroic act of self-sacrifice to save it!

She Stoops to Conquer succeeded, not because of the part it played in the faction of the stage of the day, or in the fashion

of the hour, but because it was a true comedy of character and of action, and, above all, of nature. There is in it the substance of three distinct comedies; and the fact that one of the best scenes that it contains-that of the discovery by Mrs. Hardcastle of the loss of the jewels-has no bearing upon the fortunes of the hero or heroine, shows how prodigal the author was of his material. This is a comedy within a comedy. And then, quite apart from the actual foundation of the piece, which is, of course, the practical joke played upon the two gentlemen by Tony Lumpkin, there is the comedy of the character of Young Marlow-overwhelmed when he was to face a lady of fashion but on the easiest terms with a barmaid. In the operation of this humourous trait there is certainly the groundwork for a whole " plot." Incident is the soul of comedy, and She Stoops to Conquer is crowded with incident. And if incident is its soul, assuredly situation is its backbone, and on this assumption Goldsmith's play is fully vertebrate. There is an unusual but very effective situation developed, or in course of development, in every scene; and, best of all, the imagination of an audience is stimulated in every scene to anticipate what is coming; and yet what does come, comes with such a series of little surprises that one's attention, which is grasped at the outset, is never allowed to be diverted from the main course of the play. The comedy marches ahead from the first: it never marks time. The dialogue is ever to the point. Every phrase but adds to the impression one gains of the naturalness of the characters.

It seems to have been the fashion in Goldsmith's day to call every comedy that moved with rapidity-there were very few that could be so described-a farce. The exact scientific frontier of farce, eighteenth century or twentieth century, has never been accurately delimitated. She Stoops to Conquer was originally thought by Johnson and a good many other people to be too farcical to be termed a comedy. But the chances are that the most fastidious of playwriters would prefer having his piece succeed on account of its farcical elements than fail by reason of its leaning too much the other way, whether the signpost to the other way is labelled "true comedy" or not. The truth is that the people who pay to

go to a theatre care nothing for such labels. They would it just as soon be amused by a farce as by a comedy. They do ht not feel ashamed of their laughter at the close of a scene COTE when they are assured that it was a farcical scene and not a scene of true comedy. A good number of critics in Goldsmith's day, as well as in our own, resemble the good woman in Sheridan's St. Patrick's Day; or, The Scheming Lieutenant, who implored her husband not to submit to the disgrace of up being cured by some one who is not a regular practitioner. With such people the designation of a play is everything. If this play of Goldsmith's is, after all, a farce, all that can be said is that it was a great pity that Garrick and Colman did not get some of their dreary comedy-writers to turn their nt: attention to farce of the type of She Stoops to Conquer.

It is unnecessary in this place to do more than call attention to a faculty of Goldsmith's which we think has been overlooked by all his biographers; this is his extraordinary technical skill as a playwriter. From time to time we have heard a great deal-chiefly from authorities connected with the theatre-of the absolute necessity that exists for any one who hopes to write a play to serve an apprenticeship to the stage in order to master the amazing difficulties of its technicalities. We are assured that unless one has lived in that mystic region vaguely referred to as "behind the scenes," one cannot expect to be anything but a bungler. But here we find a comedy in which every scene is built up both as regards the dialogue and the situations in such a way as to produce effects of the most valuable sort, looked at from the standpoint of the theatre only. Almost every scene in the play is a good stage scene, and the technical knowledge displayed on such matters as "climax" and "letting the audience into the secret" cannot be denied. What actor could wish for a more effective entrance than is given to Tony Lumpkin in the first act? He is being fully discussed by his mother and stepfather. They are getting more emphatic every moment in their references to him, and the interest of the audience is increasing in proportion. The dialogue is becoming crisper and more curt. "We must not snub the poor boy now, for I believe we shan't have him long among us. Anybody that looks in his face may see he's consumptive,'

says the mother. "Aye, if growing too fat be one of the symptoms," growls her husband. "He coughs sometimes." "Yes, when his liquor goes the wrong way." "I'm actually afraid of his lungs.' "And truly so am I; for he sometimes whoops like a speaking-trumpet (Tony Lumpkin holloos behind the scenes), aye, there he goes a very consumptive figure, truly." And then Tony bounces in, and we know that, whatever may be the fate of the other characters, Tony Lumpkin is a success.

And when the game of cross-purposes begins-surely the most finished and the most natural ever put on the stageone cannot but admire the adroitness with which it is managed. It was Goldsmith's way to bring in something of his own experience, whether he was writing an essay, a romance, or a play, so we are not surprised that, fresh from General Oglethorpe's description, done in wine on his dinner-table, he should make Mr. Hardcastle talk of Prince Eugene and Marlborough's wars and the Siege of Belgrade. But for genuine stagecraft nothing could surpass the management of the scene where, after Tony has taken the jewels, he suggests to his mother that she should pretend to Constance that she has mislaid them and call him as a witness, and then she discovers that what she meant to be a fiction is a fact. The moment she leaves the room to fetch her garnets we begin to laugh. To show a trickster tricked is the height of diversion. But the author goes further, and shows the tricksters of the trickster defeated by the simplest misunderstanding, and that not once but twice. The game of cross-purposes is maintained by a succession of the liveliest incidents, every one linked on to the other and f not one in the least degree strained or unnatural. The play might have been written by some one who had served an apprenticeship to the craft of the stage, only that such a training does not always account for dialogue with the flavour of good literature about it.

One might sum up the piece by saying that, unless in the hands of so consummate a master of the art of the stage, such a plot as is made the groundwork of She Stoops to Conquer, would never run a chance of being accepted by even the least critical audience. Let any one write a synopsis of it, and one will soon see how artificially it reads. But we watch with