Would Joanna Baillie’s _Plays on the Passions_ have been so shunned by
later generations and then so forgotten, if the writers of Literary
Histories had remembered to mention the ‘Comedies on the Passions’ as
well as the ‘Tragedies’? For every tragedy Joanna Baillie, whose plan of
dramatic labours was drawn up with a singular completeness, wrote also a
comedy; and one at least of these sprightlier plays is so buoyant, so
busy, so apt in speech, and so pleasant, within the limits of
eighteenth-century wit, that a modern manager might surely do worse than
try his luck with it.
If any man should desire to possess the full intention of Joanna Baillie
in her undertaking, in her dealing with the Passions, he may have it in
a great many pages of most explicit introduction, with her own decisions
on all such controversies as those touching the individual and the type,
in tragedy. Joanna Baillie had thought out all such matters. But her few
readers are, perhaps, content to take as read this treatise, with its
good sense and its very small charm. She knows well what she is about,
this at any rate is certain: and when she addresses herself with a most
simple sense of responsibility to the tragic presentation of Hatred,
Remorse, Jealousy, and Fear, her good faith and gravity, and the
admirable manner in which she puts the murderer to school, nearly quiet
the reader’s natural resentment and inclination to revolt.
With average good will and a fair readerly spirit, you may take these
resolute tragedies, with their enormous _parti pris_, as works of no
despicable art. Joanna Baillie would by no means permit you to slight
her art. She has a passage in which she disclaims the crude intention of
setting up the image of a single passion as the whole nature of a man.
If there were no conflict, she says, there would be no force, for the
passion would have nothing to compel, to break or bend, within the
passionate heart. But neither will she allow the units of humankind to
puzzle us on the tragic stage with their asymmetry of nature. Her
jealous man has other impulses for jealousy to grapple with, but they
serve his jealousy so. She will not endure, as she tells us,
eccentricity.
Add to this manner of planning an eighteenth-century blank verse of the
second order, and you have the drama which seemed Shakespearian to many.
It is not too much to say that any other drama—Antiquity and Shakespeare
apart—would have had grave reason to be proud of Joanna Baillie. Her
plays seem to be built up and locked together soundly; they close with a
conventional but not obtrusive dignity. Knowing the Passion that has
been the theme, you are apt to turn to the final speech over the hero’s
long-vexed body, the comment that proclaims an impartial sentence in
tragic peace, and you find no weaknesses; the silence follows upon no
manifest failure. Vivacity among the smaller characters, and some of the
strength of the ages (being the strength of tradition) in the greater,
leave her tragedies in no mean place; leave them there too literally,
for few are the readers to put them to any test or question. In their
day they and the ‘metaphysical preface’, as Mrs. Thrale calls it, were
the occasion of some sayings hard to our ears. ‘A masculine performance’
is the expected opinion, duly expressed, but we are not so well prepared
for Sir Walter Scott’s reply to Lockhart: ‘If you wish to speak of a
real poet, Joanna Baillie is now the highest genius of our country.’
It is the comedy following the tragedy of ‘Basil’ that takes my fancy.
Love seems to be the passion in hand, and Joanna Baillie makes such
pretty eighteenth-century sport of her theme (her hero keeping the fine
sensibilities, expressed with impassioned elegance, of Steele’s
_Conscious Lovers_) that it is not easy to realize that she passed the
middle of the nineteenth century, albeit in extreme old age. Of the
preceding tragedy I will say merely that one may detect in it a fancy of
Antiquity, as the eighteenth century dressed it, which is wonderfully
pleasing: a little boy, Mirando, vexes the capricious heroine by naming
her lovers; he creeps into her arms and begins to trouble her free
heart, making guesses for sugar-plums. The reader likes to think that by
a candid allegory, fit for Sir Joshua Reynolds’s painting of a
gold-headed boy and a brown-eyed maid, Miss Joanna Baillie had given the
name of Mirando to none other than Love himself, Cupid the bee.
But to the comedy. It is called ‘The Trial’, and turns upon the device,
since repeated, perhaps, more than once, of shuffling a couple of
heroines, so that she who is the heiress may disguise herself in the
dresses of her penniless cousin, and receive impertinences, suffer
neglect, and also test the true heart proffered in intention to her as a
girl without wealth. It is the exceeding sweetness of the two good girls
bent upon their frolic (which is also a romp) that makes the charm of
this happy play. They exchange names upon the wildest impulse consistent
with their Georgian manners. They are audacious and decorous; confess
their quest, which is for a ‘sensible lover’; busy themselves therein,
make inquiries, hide behind screens, plot together the exposure of the
fortune-hunter, acknowledge the full value of their own beauty, and this
with a propriety all of its own time.
Agnes has the better wit as well as the gold, but the lesser beauty. She
it is who lays the plot, and persuades the uncle, when he would fall out
with her and her cousin, to second their game. He would not, he avers,
make a holiday mummery for their pleasure, and his wig is too old for a
ball. ‘Nay, don’t lay the fault upon the wig, good sir, for it is as
youthful and as sly, and as saucy-looking as the best head of hair in
the county. As for your old wig, indeed, there was so much
curmudgeon-like austerity about it that young people fled before it, as,
I daresay, the birds do now.’ As for the unlucky ‘fops’—the fops whom
Joanna Baillie brings forward and overthrows in incredible effigy, after
the fashion of the other satirists—Agnes, or, rather, her cousin
Mariane, is troubled by many. Each one is mimicked in the dressing-room
dialogues of these two enterprising rogues, and the appropriate
humiliation is prepared for each with all precision. ‘Such a man must be
laughed at, not scorned; contempt must be his portion.’ Mariane falls
in: ‘He shall have it then. And as for his admirer and imitator ... any
kind of bad treatment, I suppose, that happens to come into my head will
be good enough for him.’ This last is pretty wit. So is this gipsy’s
reply to her uncle’s reproof in regard to her dealings with yet another:
‘He would not let me have time to give a civil denial, but ran on
planning settlements.... I could just get in my word with a flat refusal
as he was about to provide for our descendants to the third
generation.... He is only angry that he can’t take the law of me for
laughing at him.’
Even when you hear of the ‘genteel young man, with dark grey eyes, and a
sensible countenance’, and are at once aware that it is indeed _he_,
this charming Agnes is hard to capture. As he walks backwards before her
with a play of homage (for he too can be light) she mocks him with her
dance, and dances him up the stage and out at the door. And if there
were any living actress who had the eighteenth-century propriety it
would be pretty to see her do it. The eighteenth-century baggages! They
called their admirers by their surnames _tout court_, and their breeding
was admirable.
Hardly less pleasant is the comedy on ‘Hatred’, in which a candidate for
a parliamentary election hears good news about his detested rival: ‘Art
thou sure that they laughed at him? In his own inn and over his own
liquor? Ha, ha! ungrateful merry varlets!’
She, who had this humour, to be called ‘the highest genius in our
country’, and to be so taken up with ‘the passions of human kind’! One
of the eulogists of her tragic power calls her ‘undeviating’; yet she
deviated delightfully.