Nabob), and been rewarded by the withdrawal, from among
the pundits who rationalized away Whittington’s Cat, of Horace
Walpole and other eminent members of the body, but had in
the same play attacked a well-known representative of a very
influential though detested element in English society,—the
“Nabobs” themselves. But there was one species of cracked
porcelain which he was not to try to hold up to contempt with
impunity. The rumour of his intention to bring upon the stage,
in the character of Lady Kitty Crocodile in The Trip to Calais,
the notorious duchess of Kingston, whose trial for bigamy was
then (1775) impending, roused his intended victim to the utmost
fury; and the means and influence she had at her disposal
enabled her, not only to prevail upon the lord chamberlain to
prohibit the performance of the piece (in which there is no hint
as to the charge of bigamy itself), but to hire agents to vilify
Foote’s character in every way that hatred and malice could
suggest. After he had withdrawn the piece, and letters had been
exchanged between the duchess and him equally characteristic
of their respective writers, Foote took his revenge upon the
chief of the duchess’s instruments, a “Reverend Doctor”
Jackson, who belonged to the “reptile” society of the journalists
of the day, so admirably satirized by Foote in his comedy of
The Bankrupt. This man he gibbeted in the character of Viper
in The Capuchin, under which name the altered Trip to Calais
was performed in 1776. But the resources of his enemies were
not yet at an end; and a discharged servant of Foote’s was
suborned by Jackson to bring a charge of assault and apply
for a warrant against him. Though the attempt utterly broke
down, and Foote’s character was thus completely cleared, his
health and spirits had given way in the struggle—as to which,
though he seems to have had the firm support of the better part
of the public, including such men as Burke and Reynolds, the
very audiences of his own theatre had been, or had seemed to
be, divided in opinion. He thus resolved to withdraw, at least
for a time, from the effects of the storm, let his theatre to Colman,
and after making his last appearance there in May 1777, set
forth in October on a journey to France. But at Dover he fell
sick on the day after his arrival there, and after a few hours
died (October 21st). His epitaph in St Mary’s church at Dover
(written by his faithful treasurer William Jewell) records that
he had a hand “open as day for melting charity.” His resting-place
in Westminster Abbey is without any memorial.
Foote’s chief power as an actor lay in his extraordinary gift of mimicry, which extended to the mental and moral, as well as the mere outward and physical peculiarities of the personages whose likeness he assumed. He must have possessed a wonderful flexibility of voice, though his tones are said to have been harsh when his voice was not disguised, and an incomparable readiness for rapidly assuming characters, both in his entertainments and in his comedies, where he occasionally “doubled” parts. The excellent “patter” of some of his plays, such as The Liar and The Cozeners, must have greatly depended for its effect upon rapidity of delivery. In person he was rather short and stout, and coarse-featured; but his overflowing humour is said to have found full expression in the irresistible sparkle of his eyes.
As a dramatic author he can only be assigned a subordinate rank. He regarded comedy as “an exact representation of the peculiar manners of that people among whom it happens to be performed; a faithful imitation of singular absurdities, particular follies, which are openly produced, as criminals are publicly punished, for the correction of individuals and as an example to the whole community.” This he regarded as the utile, or useful purpose, of comedy; the dulce he conceived to be “the fable, the construction, machinery, conduct, plot, and incidents of the piece.” For part at least of this view (advanced by him in the spirited and scholarly “Letter” in which he replied, “to the Reverend Author of the ‘Remarks, Critical and Christian,’ on The Minor”), he rather loftily appealed to classical authority. But he overlooked the indispensableness of the dulce to the comic drama under its primary aspect as a species of art. His comic genius was particularly happy in discovering and reproducing characters deserving of ridicule; and the fact that he not only took them from real life, but closely modelled them on well-known living men and women, was not in himself an artistic sin. Nor indeed was the novelty of this process absolute, though probably no other comic dramatist has ever gone so far in this course, or has pursued it so persistently. The public delighted in his “d——d fine originals,” because it recognized them as copies; and he was himself proud that he had taken them from real persons, instead of their being “vamped from antiquated plays, pilfered from the French farces, or the baseless beings of the poet’s brain.” But the real excellence of many of Foote’s comic characters lies in the fact that, besides being incomparably ludicrous types of manners, they remain admirable comic types of general human nature. Sir Gregory Gazette, and his imbecile appetite for news; Lady Pentweazel, and her preposterous vanity in her superannuated charms; Mr Cadwallader, and his view of the advantages of public schools (where children may “make acquaintances that may hereafter be useful to them; for between you and I, as to what they learn there, does not signify twopence”); Major Sturgeon and Jerry Sneak; Sir Thomas Lofty, Sir Luke Limp, Mrs Mechlin, and a score or two of other characters, are excellent comic figures in themselves, whatever their origin; and many of the vices and weaknesses exposed by Foote’s vigorous satire will remain the perennial subject of comic treatment so long as a stage exists. The real defect of his plays lies in the abnormal weakness of their construction, in the absolute contempt which the great majority of them show for the invention or conduct of a plot, and in the unwarrantable subordination of the interest of the action to the exhibition of particular characters. His characters are ready-made, and the action is only incidental to them. With the exception of The Liar (which Foote pretended to have taken from Lope de Vega, but which was really founded on Steele’s adaptation of Corneille’s Le Menteur), and perhaps of The Bankrupt, there is hardly one of Foote’s “comedies” in which the conception and conduct of the action rise above the exigencies of the merest farce. Not that sentimental scenes and even sentimental characters are wanting, but these familiar ingredients are as incapable of exciting real interest as an ordinary farcical action is in itself unable to produce more than transitory amusement. In his earlier plays Foote constantly resorts to the most hackneyed device of farce—a disguise. Of course Foote must have been well aware of the shortcomings of his rapidly manufactured productions; he knew that if he might sneer at “genteel comedy” as suited to the dramatists of the servants’ hall, and pronounce the arts of the drama at the great houses to be “directed by the genius of insipidity,” he, like the little theatre where he held sway, was looked upon as “an eccentric, a mere summer fly.”
At the same time, he was inexhaustible in the devising of comic scenes of genuine farce. An oration of “old masters,” an election of a suburban mayor, an examination at the College of Physicians, a newspaper conclave where paragraphs are concocted and reputations massacred—all these and other equally happy situations are brought before the mere reader with unfailing vividness. And everywhere the comic dialogue is instinct with spirit and vigour, and the comic characters are true to themselves with a buoyancy which at once raises them above the level of mere theatrical conventionalism. Foote professed to despise the mere caricaturing of national peculiarities as such, and generally used dialect as a mere additional colouring; he was, however, too wide awake to the demands of his public not to treat France and Frenchmen as fair game, and coarsely to appeal to national prejudice. His satire against those everlasting victims of English comedy and farce, the Englishman in Paris and the Englishman returned from Paris, was doubtless well warranted; while at the same time he made fun of the fact that Englishmen are nowhere more addicted to the society of their countrymen than abroad. In general, the purposes of Foote’s social satire are excellent, and the abuses against which it is directed are those which it required courage to attack. The tone of his morality is healthy, and his language, though not aiming at refinement, is remarkably free from intentional grossness. He made occasional mistakes; but he was on the right side in the warfare against the pretentiousness of Cant and the effrontery of Vice, the two master evils of the age and the society in which he lived.
The following is a list of Foote’s farces or “comedies” as he calls them, mostly in three, some in two acts, which remain in print. The date of production, and the character originally performed by Foote, are added to the title of each:
The Knights (1748: Hartop, who assumes the character of Sir Penurious Trifle); Taste (1752), in which part of the Diversions is incorporated; The Englishman in Paris (1753: Young Buck); The Englishman returned from Paris (1756: Sir Charles Buck); The Author (1757: Cadwallader); The Minor (1760: Smirk and Mrs Cole); The Liar (1762); The Orators (1762: Lecturer); The Mayor of Garratt (1763: Major Sturgeon and Matthew Mug); The Patron (1764: Sir Thomas Lofty and Sir Peter Peppercorn); The Commissary (1765: Mr Zac. Fungus); The Devil upon Two Sticks (1768: Devil,—alias Dr Hercules Hellebore); The Lame Lover (1770: Sir Luke Limp); The Maid of Bath (1771: Mr Flint); The Nabob (1772: Sir Matthew Mite); The Bankrupt (1773: Sir Robert Riscounter); The Cozeners (1774: Mr Aircastle); The Capuchin, a second version of The Trip to Calais, forbidden by the censor (1776: O’Donovan). His dramatic works were collected in 1763–1768.
Bibliography.—Foote’s biography may be read in W. (“Conversation”) Cooke’s Memoirs of Samuel Foote (3 vols., 1805), which contain, amidst other matter, a large collection of his good things and of anecdotes concerning him, besides two of his previously unpublished occasional pieces (with the Tragedy à la mode, part of the Diversions, in which Foote appeared as Fustian). From this source seems to have been mainly taken the biographical information in the rather grandiloquent essay on Foote prefixed by “Jon Bee”
