The Cry: A New Dramatic Fable.

  * * *

  The Cry: A New Dramatic Fable.

  Sarah Fielding

  This page copyright © 2002 Munsey's.

  http://www.munseys.com

  INTRODUCTION.

  PROLOGUE TO Part the First.

  Such is Error and her NUMEROUS TRAIN.

  Such is the force of SIMPLE Truth.

  PART the FIRST.

  SCENE I.

  Portia. Una. The Cry.

  PORTIA.

  SCENE II.

  Portia. Una. The Cry.

  PORTIA.

  SCENE III.

  Portia. Una. The Cry.

  PORTIA.

  SCENE IV.

  Portia. Una. The Cry.

  PORTIA.

  SCENE V.

  Portia. Una. The Cry.

  SCENE VI.

  Portia. Una. The Cry.

  PORTIA.

  SCENE VII.

  Portia. Una. The Cry.

  PORTIA.

  SCENE VIII.

  Portia. Una. The Cry.

  SCENE IX.

  Portia. Una. The Cry.

  PORTIA.

  SCENE X.

  Portia. Una. The Cry.

  SCENE XI.

  Portia. Una. The Cry.

  PROLOGUE TO Part the Second.

  PART the SECOND.

  Vol. 2

  PROLOGUE TO Part the Third.

  PART the THIRD.

  SCENE I.

  Portia. Una. The Cry.

  Portia.

  SCENE II.

  Portia. Una. The Cry.

  PORTIA.

  SCENE III.

  Portia. Una. The Cry.

  PORTIA.

  SCENE IV.

  Portia. Una. The Cry.

  PORTIA.

  SCENE V.

  Portia. Una. The Cry.

  PORTIA.

  SCENE VI.

  Portia. Una. The Cry.

  PORTIA.

  SCENE VII.

  Portia. Una. The Cry.

  PORTIA.

  SCENE VIII.

  Portia. Una. The Cry.

  PORTIA.

  SCENE IX.

  Portia. Una. The Cry.

  PORTIA.

  SCENE X.

  Portia. Una. The Cry.

  PORTIA.

  SCENE XI.

  Portia. Una. The Cry.

  PORTIA.

  SCENE XII.

  Portia. Una. The Cry.

  PORTIA.

  SCENE. XIII.

  Portia. Una. The Cry.

  SCENE XIV.

  Portia. Una. The Cry.

  PORTIA.

  SCENE XV.

  Portia. Una. The Cry.

  PORTIA.

  SCENE. XVI.

  Portia. Una. The Cry.

  PORTIA.

  SCENE XVII.

  Portia. Una. The Cry.

  PORTIA.

  PROLOGUE TO Part the Fourth.

  PART the FOURTH.

  SCENE I.

  Portia. Cylinda. Una. The Cry.

  CYLINDA.

  SCENE. II.

  Portia. Cylinda. Una. The Cry.

  CYLINDA.

  SCENE III.

  Portia. Una. The Cry.

  CYLINDA.

  SCENE IV.

  Portia. Cylinda. Una. The Cry.

  CYLINDA.

  SCENE V.

  Portia. Cylinda. Una. The Cry.

  CYLINDA.

  Vol. 3

  PART the FOURTH.

  SCENE VI.

  Portia. Cylinda. Una. The Cry.

  CYLINDA.

  SCENE VII.

  Portia. Cylinda. Una. The Cry.

  Cylinda.

  SCENE VIII.

  Portia. Cylinda. Una. The Cry.

  CYLINDA.

  SCENE IX.

  Portia. Cylinda. Una. The Cry.

  CYLINDA.

  SCENE X.

  Portia. Cylinda. Una. The Cry.

  CYLINDA.

  The Letter from Eustace to Cylinda.

  The Letter from Eustace's Wife to her own Sister.

  PROLOGUE to Part the Fifth.

  PART the FIFTH.

  SCENE I.

  Portia. Cylinda. Una. The Cry.

  SCENE II.

  Portia. Una. The Cry. Cylinda.

  PORTIA.

  SCENE III.

  Portia. Cylinda. Una. The Cry.

  PORTIA.

  Letter from Ferdinand to Oliver.

  A letter from Alcander to Sebastian.

  The letter from Alcander to Portia.

  SCENE IV.

  Portia. Cylinda. Una. The Cry.

  PORTIA.

  EPILOGUE.

  Also written by Jane Collier

  INTRODUCTION.

  Our address is to the candid reader; to the morose critic we know that all address is vain; to such as are willing to understand, we will endeavour to be perspicuous; and to those who are desirous of being pleased, we shall greatly miss of our aim, if we give no entertainment. Nay, we will venture to affirm, that every reader by his own disposition, in a great measure, contributes to his own entertainment.

  For if a man reads with the desire of gaining information, such an enquiring mind will certainly find matter on which to build some knowledge; if to be pleased and amused be his design, his own good-humour humour will not suffer him to lose his labour; and if to carp and find fault should be his choice, his inclination will not fail of producing proofs enough of his having found an object of his splenetic delight: it not being more certain that an impatient lover, expecting his mistress to the minute of an appointment, will mistake every moving object, nay even every bush, for his approaching fair one, than that an earnest seeker after faults will take in as such every object in his view, in order to gratify his greedy expectations. 'Tis speaking of such kind of readers only that the poet says—

  Critics on life or verse are hard to please;

  Few write to those, and none can live to these.

  And both for the same reason, namely, the warmth with which men embrace the discovery of every new fault. It were well if they stopp'd here, and every minute failing also was not taken in to make up the weight. Such men, instead of endeavouring to keep pace with the imagination of writers of genius, strive rather to cramp and bind them in such chains as must render them insipid.

  Those inimitably beautiful chorus's to Shakespear's Harry the fifth, where he desires his audience to play with their fancies, and to suffer him to bear them on the lofty wings of his own sublime imagination, over the expanded ocean to different countries and distant climates, we should have thought might have warm'd the morosest cynic into a taste of pleasure, and have baffled the ill-humour of the severest critic. And yet we once remember in a conversation, to have heard a gentleman treat these very chorus's, as if he had been examining an evidence in a court of justice; and then gravely (we will not say dully) pronouncing sentence, that they were contrary to all form and order, and only the wild reveries of an unbridled imagination. On such Critics justly may one say with Terence;

  Faciunt næ intelligendo, ut nihil intelligant.

  And between such authors as Shakespear, (if any more there are) and such critics as our before-mention'd gentleman, who would blame any one for acting, as Terence in the same prologue is said to act by some other Authors of confirm'd credit;

  Quorum æmulari exoptat negligentiam,

  Potius quam istorum obscuram diligentiam?

  When a judicious writer sets before his readers entertainment for their imaginations, and desires them to indulge both him and themselves by playing with their fancies, should any man be so perversely sour as to sit in strict judgment; or if on the other hand, where the judgment ought to be employed, sho
uld he give a loose to his own wild imaginations, all time and place must be confused, and every image must be distorted into absurdity.

  With the two principal ends in view, to entertain and to instruct (not to mention another principal view, which hath undoubtedly produced more volumes than either of the former, but, however seriously important to the writer, is too ludicrous to find more than this cursory notice here) various have been the methods taken for those purposes. Ariosto, Spenser, and even Milton, ran into allegory, as there is nothing to which a great and lively imagination is so prone. It is a flight by which the human wit attempts at one and the same time to investigate two objects, and consequently is fitted only to the most exalted genius's. It should therefore be very sparingly practised, lest, whilst the writer plays with his own fancies, and diverts himself by cutting the air with his wide-spread wings, he should soar out of the view of his readers, leaving them in confusion and perplexity to explore his viewless track.

  Those who would attempt the same uncommon flights must, we are very sensible, have the same uncommon genius's; otherwise they would make as ridiculous a figure as those poets mentioned by Horace, who to prove their title to natural genius, went unshaved and slovenly into the public walks, because Democritus had said that a nature was better than art. But with some small portion of real genius, and a warm imagination, an author surely may be permitted a little to expand his wings, and to wander in the aerial fields of fancy, provided the well-known fable of Icarus bears this prudent advice to his ear, that he soar not to such dangerous heights, from whence unplumed he may fall to the ground disgraced, if not disabled from ever rising any more. There is scarcely to be found in any author such an inexhaustible treasure, such an immense fund of knowledge, as in Montaigne; but like a heap of pearls for want of being strung, half their beauties are lost in confusion. His intrinsic worth, by not being stamp'd with some outward image, is not always current with the memory; and to digest such rich matter as is scatter'd about in every chapter, requires a very searching and attentive mind. Yet it is hardly to be doubted but the free manner of writing which he assumed, was most fitted to his own genius, and by chusing any other he might have lost part of the force and energy of his images, which could not have been compensated by regularity and method.

  Essay-writing is perhaps of all others the easiest for the author, and requires little more than what is called a fluency of words, and a vivacity of expression, to avoid dullness: but without such a real foundation of matter, as is to be found in the above-mentioned author, and in some few others of our own nation, whose names are too obvious to need repeating, an essay-writer is very apt, like Dogberry in Shakespear's Much ado about nothing, to think that if he had the tediousness of a king, he would bestow it all upon his readers. 'Tis on this account in all likelihood, that stories and novels have been so much more sought after than meer essays. Yet stories and novels have flowed in such abundance for these last ten years, that we would wish, if possible, to strike a little out of a road already so much beaten. There are two obvious reasons for such a deviation. One is the real excellence of some of those writings, both as to humour, character, moral, and every other proper requisite, which (without an affected humility) we by no means promise fully to equal, much less to surpass; and the other reason is, that we may not be thrown aside as increasing the number of that set of trifling performances, whose names we presume are most of them already devoted to oblivion. For although a decent modesty of not boasting ourselves equal to the best, may not be misbecoming; yet the same modesty would restrain us from imposing on the public what we thought below their consideration.

  "b When an author (writes a gentleman of no less erudition than judgment), poorly anticipates your pardon for a bad performance, by declaring that it was the fruits of a few idle hours; written meerly for private amusement; never revised; publish'd against consent, at the importunity of friends, copies (God knows how) having by stealth gotten abroad; with other stale jargon of equal falshood and inanity; may we not ask such prefacers if what they allege be true, what has the world to do with with them and their crudities?" And may we not farther ask, what can induce a reader to turn one leaf beyond such contemptible prefaces?

  In an epic poem, the proem generally informs you of the poet's intention in his work. He tells you either what he designs to do, or what he intreats some superior power to do for him.

  Arms and the man I sing, &c.

  says Virgil.

  The wrath of Peleus' son, the direful spring

  Of all the Grecian woes, O Goddess sing;

  begins the immortal Homer; whose example is follow'd by our own Milton, in his Paradise Lost, Of man's first disobedience, &c.—

  Sing heav'nly muse.—

  Sometimes the poet not only tells you what is the subject of his song, but he also informs you what is not, as in the beginning of the Paradise Regain'd, I who ere while, &c.—

  Now sing, &c.—

  The same method is observed by Spenser in his � Fairy Queen, and even by Virgil, if the c disputed verses in the beginning of the Æneid may be allowed to be his. But in plain prose, we beg to inform our readers, that our intention in the following pages, is not to amuse them with a number of surprising incidents and adventures, but rather to paint the inward mind.

  Plutarch, in the beginning of his life of Alexander the Great, says, that "neither do the most glorious exploits always furnish us with the clearest discoveries of virtue or vice in men; sometimes a matter of less moment, an expression, or a jest, informs us better of their manners and inclinations than the most famous sieges, the greatest encampments, or the bloodiest battles whatsoever. Therefore, as those who draw by the life, are more exact in the lines and features of the face, from which we may often collect the disposition of the person, than in the other parts of the body: so I shall endeavour, by penetrating into, and describing the secret recesses and images of the soul, to express the lives of men, and leave their more shining actions and atchievements to be treated of by others."

  If the heroine of a romance was to travel through countries, where the castles of giants rise to her view; through gloomy forests, amongst the dens of savage beasts, where at one time she is in danger of being torn and devour'd, at another, retarded in her flight by puzzling mazes, and falls at last into the hands of a cruel giant; the reader's fears will be alarm'd for her safety; his pleasure will arise on seeing her escape from the teeth of a lion, or the paws of a fierce tiger: if he hath conceived any regard for the virtuous sufferer, he will be delighted when she avoids being taken captive, or is rescued by the valour of some faithful knight; and with what joy will he accompany her steps when she finds the right road, and gets safely out of the enchanted dreary forest! —But the puzzling mazes into which we shall throw our heroine, are the perverse interpretations made upon her words; the lions, tigers, and giants, from which we endeavour to rescue her, are the spiteful and malicious tongues of her enemies. In short, the design of the following work is to strip, as much as possible, d Duessa or Falshood, of all her shifts and evasions; to hunt her like a fox through all her doublings and windings; to shew, that, let her imitate Truth ever so much, yet is she but a phantom; and, in a word, to expose her deformity, in hopes to persuade mankind to shun so odious a companion. Nor can this be effected, unless we could awaken the judgment to exert itself, so as to reject all the alluring bribes which the passions, assisted by the imagination, can offer. Unless we could prove that to moderate, and not to inflame the passions, is the only method of attaining happiness; and that it is the interest of man at once to use and to be thankful for his reason, and not absurdly by disuse to weaken its force, and at the same time vainly to boast of its strength.

  Thoroughly to unfold the labyrinths of the human mind, is an arduous task; and notwithstanding the many skilful and penetrating strokes which are to be found in the best authors, there seem yet to remain some intricate and unopen'd recesses in the heart of man. In order to dive into those recesses, and
lay them open to the reader in a striking and intelligible manner, 'tis necessary to assume a certain freedom in writing, not strictly perhaps within the limits prescribed by rules. Yet we desire only to be free, and not licentious. We wish to give our imagination leave to play; but within such bounds as not to grow mad. And if we step into allegory, it shall not be out of sight of our reader. The liberty we desire, is to bring one or more persons before an allegorical assembly, in order for them truly to relate their actions and sentiments throughout their past lives. If it should sometimes be found that our imaginary allegorical phantoms talk exactly the language of this world, let it be remember'd that human nature is the picture we intend to paint. If it should be objected, that our mortal persons confess to their audience, what one mortal is not apt to confess to another, let us plead in our defence, that our audience are meerly allegorical. In short, as the machinery of heathen poetry is at present deny'd, the defect can no otherwise be supply'd to the writer of imagination, but by the good-humour of the reader.

  As we shall constitute an audience to hear the stories of those who shall be brought before them, instead of the common divisions of books and chapters, we beg to be indulged in borrowing from the stage the name of scenes. In which we will not promise that every interruption shall always strictly or visibly require a change of scene, but may be sometimes made only in order to give the same respite as is given to the reader, by the common contrivance of chapters, as aforesaid. But besides the avoiding a worn-out practice, and the plea of variety, which we make for this our method (whose novelty perhaps may give offence rather than pleasure to some sort of critics) we cannot help flattering ourselves, that we shall be the better enabled by these means to give life and action to our history.

  Altho' we have borrow'd from the stage the name of scenes, and generally its dialogue, yet have we kept the privilege of being our own chorus, in order not only to point out the behaviour of our actors, which for want of a real stage representation could sometimes not otherwise be understood; but to express or relate some things which are not proper to be spoken by our principal characters; or, according to the author of Tom Jones, to tell what we cannot prevail on any of our actors to tell our readers for us.