_CATO._
It is a peculiarity in Addison's life that Fortune, as if conspiring with
the happiness of his genius, constantly furnished him with favourable
opportunities for the exercise of his powers. The pension granted him by
Halifax enabled him, while he was yet a young man, to add to his knowledge
of classical literature an intimate acquaintance with the languages and
governments of the chief European states. When his fortunes were at the
lowest ebb on his return from his travels, his introduction to Godolphin
by Halifax, the consequence of which was _The Campaign_, procured him at
once celebrity and advancement. The appearance of the _Tatler_, though due
entirely to the invention of Steele, prepared the way for development of
the genius that prevailed in the _Spectator_. But the climax of Addison's
good fortune was certainly the successful production of _Cato_, a play
which, on its own merits, might have been read with interest by the
scholars of the time, but which could scarcely have succeeded on the stage
if it had not been appropriated and made part of our national life by the
violence of political passion.
Addison had not the genius of a dramatist. The grace, the irony, the
fastidious refinement which give him such an unrivalled capacity in
describing and criticising the humours of men as a _spectator_ did not
qualify him for imaginative sympathy with their actions and passions. But,
like most men of ability in that period, his thoughts were drawn towards
the stage, and even in Dryden's lifetime he had sent him a play in
manuscript, asking him to use his interest to obtain its performance. The
old poet returned it, we are told, "with many commendations, but with an
expression of his opinion that on the stage it would not meet with its
deserved success." Addison, nevertheless, persevered in his attempts, and
during his travels he wrote four acts of the tragedy of _Cato_, the design
of which, according to Tickell, he had formed while he was at Oxford,
though he certainly borrowed many incidents in the play from a tragedy on
the same subject which he saw performed at Venice.[52] It is
characteristic, however, of the undramatic mood in which he executed his
task that the last act was not written till shortly before the performance
of the play, many years later. As early as 1703 the drama was shown to
Cibber by Steele, who said that "whatever spirit Mr. Addison had shown in
his writing it, he doubted that he would ever have courage enough to let
his _Cato_ stand the censure of an English audience; that it had only been
the amusement of his leisure hours in Italy, and was never intended for
the stage." He seems to have remained of the same opinion on the very eve
of the performance of the play. "When Mr. Addison," says Pope, as reported
by Spence, "had finished his _Cato_ he brought it to me, desired to have
my sincere opinion of it, and left it with me for three or four days. I
gave him my opinion of it sincerely, which was, 'that I thought he had
better not act it, and that he would get reputation enough by only
printing it.' This I said as thinking the lines well written, but the
piece not theatrical enough. Some time after Mr. Addison said 'that his
own opinion was the same with mine, but that some particular friends of
his, whom he could not disoblige, insisted on its being acted.'"[53]
Undoubtedly, Pope was right in principle, and anybody who reads the
thirty-ninth paper in the _Spectator_ may see not only that Addison was
out of sympathy with the traditions of the English stage, but that his
whole turn of thought disqualified him from comprehending the motives of
dramatic composition. "The modern drama," says he, "excels that of Greece
and Rome in the intricacy and disposition of the fable--but, what a
Christian writer would be ashamed to own, falls infinitely short of it in
the moral part of the performance." And the entire drift of the criticism
that follows relates to the thought, the sentiment, and the expression of
the modern drama, rather than to the really essential question, the nature
of the action. It is false criticism to say that the greatest dramas of
Shakespeare fail in morality as compared with those of the Greek
tragedians. That the manner in which the moral is conveyed is different in
each case is of course true, since the subjects of Greek tragedy were
selected from Greek mythology, and were treated by Æschylus and Sophocles,
at all events, in a religious spirit, whereas the plays of Shakespeare are
only indirectly Christian, and produce their effect by an appeal to the
individual conscience. None the less is it the case that _Macbeth_,
_Hamlet_, and _Lear_ have for modern audiences a far deeper moral meaning
than the _Agamemnon_ or the _Oedipus Tyrannus_. The tragic motive in Greek
tragedy is the impotence of man in the face of moral law or necessity; in
Shakespeare's tragedies it is the corruption of the will, some sin of the
individual against the law of God, which brings its own punishment. There
was nothing in this principle of which a Christian dramatist need have
been ashamed; and as regards Shakespeare, at any rate, it is evident that
Addison's criticism is unjust.
It is, however, by no means undeserved in its application to the class of
plays which grew up after the Restoration. Under that _régime_ the moral
spirit of the Shakesperian drama entirely disappears. The king, whose
temper was averse to tragedy, and whose taste had been formed on French
models, desired to see every play end happily. "I am going to end a
piece," writes Roger, Earl of Orrery, to a friend, "in the French style,
because I have heard the King declare that he preferred their manner to
our own." The greatest tragedies of the Elizabethan age were transformed
to suit this new fashion; even King Lear obtained a happy deliverance from
his sufferings in satisfaction of the requirements of an effeminate Court.
Addison very wittily ridicules this false taste in the fortieth number of
the _Spectator_. He is not less felicitous in his remarks on the
sentiments and the style of the Caroline drama, though he does not
sufficiently discriminate his censure, which he bestows equally on the
dramatists of the Restoration and on Shakespeare. Two main characteristics
appear in all the productions of the former epoch--the monarchical spirit
and the fashion of gallantry. The names of the plays speak for themselves:
on the one hand, _The Indian Emperor_, _Aurengzebe_, _The Indian Queen_,
_The Conquest of Granada_, _The Fate of Hannibal_; on the other, _Secret
Love_, _Tyrannic Love_, _Love and Vengeance_, _The Rival Queens_,
_Theodosius, or the Power of Love_, and numberless others of the same
kind. In the one set of dramas the poet sought to arouse the passion of
pity by exhibiting the downfall of persons of high estate; in the other
he appealed to the sentiment of romantic passion. Such were the fruits of
that taste for French romance which was encouraged by Charles II., and
which sought to disguise the absence of genuine emotion by the turgid
bombast of its sentiment and the epigrammatic declamation of its rhymed
verse.
At the same time, the taste of the nation having been once turned into
French channels, a remedy for these defects was naturally sought for from
French sources; and just as the school of Racine and Boileau set its face
against the extravagances of the romantic coteries, so Addison and his
English followers, adopting the principles of the French classicists,
applied them to the reformation of the English theatre. Hence arose a
great revival of respect for the poetical doctrines of Aristotle, regard
for the unities of time and place, attention to the proprieties of
sentiment and diction--in a word, for all those characteristics of style
afterwards summed up in the phrase "correctness."
This habit of thought, useful as an antidote to extravagance, was not
fertile as a motive of dramatic production. Addison worked with strict and
conscious attention to his critical principles: the consequence is that
his _Cato_, though superficially "correct," is a passionless and
mechanical play. He had combated with reason the "ridiculous doctrine in
modern criticism, that writers of tragedy are obliged to an equal
distribution of rewards and punishments, and an impartial execution of
poetical justice."[54] But his reasoning led him on to deny that the idea
of justice is an essential element in tragedy. "We find," says he, "that
good and evil happen alike to all men on this side the grave; and, as the
principal design of tragedy is to raise commiseration and terror in the
minds of the audience, we shall defeat this great end if we always make
virtue and innocence happy and successful.... The ancient writers of
tragedy treated men in their plays as they are dealt with in the world, by
making virtue sometimes happy and sometimes miserable, as they found it in
the fable which they made choice of, or as it might affect their audience
in the most agreeable manner."[55] But it is certain that the fable which
the two greatest of the Greek tragedians "made choice of" was always of a
religious nature, and that the idea of Justice was never absent from it;
it is also certain that Retribution is a vital element in all the
tragedies of Shakespeare. The notion that the essence of tragedy consists
in the spectacle of a good man struggling with adversity is a conception
derived through the French from the Roman Stoics; it is not found in the
works of the greatest tragic poets.
This, however, was Addison's central motive, and this is what Pope, in his
famous Prologue, assigns to him as his chief praise:
"Our author shuns by vulgar springs to move
The hero's glory or the virgin's love;
In pitying love we but our weakness show,
And wild ambition well deserves its woe.
Here tears shall flow from a more generous cause,
Such tears as patriots shed for dying laws:
He bids your breasts with ancient ardour rise,
And calls forth Roman drops from British eyes.
Virtue confessed in human shape he draws--
What Plato thought, and godlike Cato was:
No common object to your sight displays,
But what with pleasure heav'n itself surveys;
A brave man struggling in the storms of fate,
And greatly falling with a falling state."
A falling state offers a tragic spectacle to the thought and the reason,
but not one that can be represented on the stage so as to move the
passions of the spectators. The character of Cato, as exhibited by
Addison, is an abstraction, round which a number of other lay figures are
skilfully grouped for the delivery of lofty and appropriate sentiments.
Juba, the virtuous young prince of Numidia, the admirer of Cato's virtue,
Portius and Marcus, Cato's virtuous sons, and Marcia, his virtuous
daughter, are all equally admirable and equally lifeless. Johnson's
criticism of the play leaves little to be said:
"About things," he observes, "on which the public thinks long it
commonly attains to think right; and of _Cato_ it has not been
unjustly determined that it is rather a poem in dialogue than a drama,
rather a succession of just sentiments in elegant language than a
representation of natural affections, or of any state probable or
possible in human life. Nothing here 'excites or assuages emotion;'
here is 'no magical power of raising fantastic terror or wild
anxiety.' The events are expected without solicitude, and are
remembered without joy or sorrow. Of the agents we have no care; we
consider not what they are doing or what they are suffering; we wish
only to know what they have to say. Cato is a being above our
solicitude; a man of whom the gods take care, and whom we leave to
their care with heedless confidence. To the rest neither gods nor men
can have much attention, for there is not one among them that strongly
attracts either affection or esteem. But they are made the vehicles of
such sentiments and such expressions that there is scarcely a scene in
the play which the reader does not wish to impress upon his memory."
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:
"Cato was not so much the wonder of Rome in his days as he is of
Britain in ours; and though all the foolish industry possible had been
used to make it thought a party play, yet what the author said of
another may the most properly be applied to him on this occasion:
'Envy itself is dumb, in wonder lost,
And factions strive who shall applaud him most!'[59]
The numerous and violent claps of the Whig party on the one side of
the theatre were echoed back by the Tories on the other, while the
author sweated behind the scenes with concern to find their applause
proceeding more from the hand than the head. This was the case, too,
with the Prologue-writer, who was clapped into a staunch Whig at the
end of every two lines. I believe you have heard that, after all the
applauses of the opposite faction, my Lord Bolingbroke sent for Booth,
who played Cato, into the box, between one of the acts, and presented
him with fifty guineas, in acknowledgment, as he expressed it, for
defending the cause of liberty so well against a perpetual dictator.
The Whigs are unwilling to be distanced this way, and therefore design
a present to the same Cato very speedily; in the meantime they are
getting ready as good a sentence as the former on their side; so
betwixt them it is probable that Cato (as Dr. Garth expressed it) may
have something to live upon after he dies."
The Queen herself partook, or feigned to partake, of the general
enthusiasm, and expressed a wish that the play should be dedicated to her.
This honour had, however, been already designed by the poet for the
Duchess of Marlborough, so that, finding himself unable under the
circumstances to fulfil his intentions, he decided to leave the play
without any dedication. _Cato_ ran for the then unprecedented period of
thirty-five nights. Addison appears to have behaved with great liberality
to the actors, and, at Oxford, to have handed over to them all the profits
of the first night's performance; while they in return, Cibber tells us,
thought themselves "obliged to spare no pains in the proper decorations"
of the piece.
The fame of _Cato_ spread from England to the Continent. It was twice
translated into Italian, twice into French, and once into Latin; a French
and a German imitation of it were also published. Voltaire, to whom
Shakespeare appeared no better than an inspired barbarian, praises it in
the highest terms. "_The first English writer who composed a regular
tragedy_ and infused a spirit of elegance through every part of it was,"
says he, "the illustrious Mr. Addison. His _Cato_ is a masterpiece, both
with regard to the diction and the harmony and beauty of the numbers. The
character of Cato is, in my opinion, greatly superior to that of Cornelia
in the _Pompey_ of Corneille, for Cato is great without anything of
fustian, and Cornelia, who besides is not a necessary character, tends
sometimes to bombast." Even he, however, could not put up with the
love-scenes:
"Addison l'a déjà tenté;
C'étoit le poëte des sâges,
Mais il étoit trop concerté,
Et dans son Caton si vanté
Les deux filles en vérité,
Sont d'insipides personages.
Imitez du grand Addison
Seulement ce qu'il a de bon."
There were, of course, not wanting voices of detraction. A graduate of
Oxford attacked _Cato_ in a pamphlet entitled _Mr. Addison turned Tory_,
in which the party spirit of the play was censured. Dr. Sewell, a
well-known physician of the day--afterwards satirised by Pope as "Sanguine
Sewell"--undertook Addison's defence, and showed that he owed his success
to the poetical, and not to the political, merits of his drama. A much
more formidable critic appeared in John Dennis, a specimen of whose
criticism on _Cato_ is preserved in Johnson's _Life_, and who, it must be
owned, went a great deal nearer the mark in his judgment than did
Voltaire. Dennis had many of the qualities of a good critic. Though his
judgment was often overborne by his passion, he generally contrived to
fasten on the weak points of the works which he criticised, and he at once
detected the undramatic character of _Cato_. His ridicule of the
absurdities arising out of Addison's rigid observance of the unity of
place is extremely humorous and quite unanswerable. But, as usual, he
spoiled his case by the violence and want of discrimination in his
censure, which betrayed too plainly the personal feelings of the writer.
It is said that Dennis was offended with Addison for not having adequately
exhibited his talents in the _Spectator_ when mention was made of his
works; and he certainly did complain in a published letter that Addison
had chosen to quote a couplet from his translation of Boileau in
preference to another from a poem on the battle of Ramilies, which he
himself thought better of. But the fact seems to have been overlooked that
Dennis had other grounds for resentment. In the 40th number of the
_Spectator_ the writer speaks of "a ridiculous doctrine of modern
criticism, that they (tragic writers) are obliged to an equal distribution
of rewards and punishments, and an impartial execution of poetical
justice." This was a plain stroke at Dennis, who was a well-known advocate
of the doctrine; and a considerable portion of the critic's gall was
therefore expended on Addison's violation of the supposed rule in _Cato_.
Looking at _Cato_ from Voltaire's point of view--which was Addison's
own--and having regard to the spirit of elegance infused through every
part of it, there is much to admire in the play. It is full of pointed
sentences, such as--
"'Tis not in mortals to command success,
But we'll do more, Sempronius, we'll deserve it."
It has also many fine descriptive passages, the best of which, perhaps,
occurs in the dialogue between Syphax and Juba respecting civilised and
barbarian virtues:
"Believe me, prince, there's not an African
That traverses our vast Numidian deserts
In quest of prey, and lives upon his bow,
But better practises these boasted virtues.
Coarse are his meals, the fortune of the chase;
Amidst the running streams he slakes his thirst,
Toils all the day, and at th' approach of night
On the first friendly bank he throws him down,
Or rests his head upon a rock till morn--
Then rises fresh, pursues his wonted game,
And if the following day he chance to find
A new repast, or an untasted spring,
Blesses his stars, and thinks it luxury."
But in all those parts of the poem where action and not ornament is
demanded, we seem to perceive the work of a poet who was constantly
thinking of what his characters ought to say in the situation, rather than
of one who was actually living with them in the situation itself. Take
Sempronius' speech to Syphax, describing the horrors of the conspirator's
position:
"Remember, Syphax, we must work in haste:
Oh think what anxious moments pass between
The birth of plots and their last fatal period.
Oh! 'tis a dreadful interval of time,
Filled up with horror all, and big with death!
Destruction hangs on every word we speak,
On every thought, till the concluding stroke
Determines all, and closes our design."
Compare with this the language of real tragedy, the soliloquy of Brutus in
_Julius Cæsar_, on which Addison apparently meant to improve:
"Since Cassius first did whet me against Cæsar
I have not slept.
Between the acting of a dreadful thing
And the first motion, all the interim is
Like a phantasma, or a hideous dream:
The genius and the mortal instruments
Are then in council; and the state of man,
Like to a little kingdom, suffers then
The nature of an insurrection."
These two passages are good examples of the French and English ideals of
dramatic diction, though the lines from _Cato_ are more figurative than is
usual in that play. Addison deliberately aimed at this French manner. "I
must observe," says he, "that when our thoughts are great and just they
are often obscured by the sounding phrases, hard metaphors, and forced
expressions in which they are clothed. Shakespeare is often very faulty in
this particular."[60] Certainly he is; but who does not see that, in spite
of his metaphoric style, the speech of Brutus just quoted is far simpler
and more natural than the elegant "correctness" of Sempronius.