The School for Scandal, Richard Brinsley Sheridan [i am reading a book .TXT] 📗

suggestion of the fall of the screen in the dropping of the rug in Molly Seagrim’s room, discovering the philosopher Square. Now, Sheridan had a marvellous power of assimilation. He extended a ready welcome to all floating seeds of thought; and in his fertile brain they would speedily spring up, bringing forth the best they could. But to evolve from the petty discomfiture of Square the almost unequalled effect of the screen-scene⁠—to see in the one the germs of the other⁠—were a task worthy even of Sheridan’s quick eye. The indebtedness to Molière is even less than to Fielding. We may put on one side Sheridan’s ignorance of French⁠—for in Colley Cibber’s Non-Juror, or in Bickerstaff’s Hypocrite, he could find Molière’s Tartuffe; and the scandal-loving Celimene of the Misanthrope, he might trace in Wycherley’s Plain-Dealer. If Sheridan had borrowed from Molière he was only following in the footsteps of his father, whose sole play, Captain O’Blunder, is based on Monsieur de Pourceaugnac. But Sheridan’s indebtedness to Molière is barely visible. It is almost as slight, indeed, as the borrowing from the School for Scandal of which Madame de Girardin was guilty for her fine comedy, Lady Tartuffe. In any case, Sheridan’s indebtedness is less to the Misanthrope than to Tartuffe⁠—and even here there is little resemblance beyond the generic likeness of all hypocrites. This resemblance, such as it is, the French adapters of the School for Scandal chose to emphasize by calling their version the Tartuffe des Moeurs.

Although Sheridan was in general original in incident, he unhesitatingly made use of any happy phrases or effective locutions which struck his fancy in the course of his readings. He willingly distilled the perfume from a predecessor’s flower; and it was with pleasure that he cut and set the gem which an earlier writer may have brought to light. Witty himself, he could boldly conquer and annex the wit of others, sure to increase its value by his orderly government. This can perhaps be justified on the ground that the rich can borrow with impunity; or, deeming wit his patrimony, Sheridan may have felt that, taking it, he was but come into his own again; as Molière said, “I take my own where I find it.” In the preface to the Rivals, however, Sheridan has chosen to meet the charge of plagiarism. “Faded ideas,” he said, “float in the fancy like half-forgotten dreams, and the imagination in its fullest enjoyments becomes suspicious of its offspring, and doubts whether it has created or adopted.” It is a curious coincidence that this very passage is quoted by Burgoyne to explain his accidental adoption, in the Heiress, of an image of Ariosto’s and Rousseau’s, which Byron did not scruple to use again in his monody on Sheridan himself:⁠—

“Sighing that Nature formed but one such man,
And broke the die in moulding Sheridan.”

In the School for Scandal the construction, the ordering of the scenes, the development of the elaborate plot, is much better than in the comedies of any of Sheridan’s contemporaries. A play in those days need not reveal a complete and self-contained plot. Great laxity of episode was not only permitted, but almost praised; and that Sheridan, with a subject which lent itself so readily to digression, should have limited himself as he did, shows his exact appreciation of the source of dramatic effect. But it must be confessed that the construction of the School for Scandal when measured by our modern standards, seems a little loose⁠—a little diffuse, perhaps. It shows the welding of the two distinct plots. There can hardly be seen in it the ruling of a dominant idea, subordinating all the parts to the effect of the whole. But, although the two original motives have been united mechanically, although they have not flowed and fused together in the hot spurt of homogeneous inspiration, the joining has been so carefully concealed, and the whole structure has been overlaid with so much wit, that few people after seeing the play would care to complain. The wit is ceaseless; and wit like Sheridan’s would cover sins of construction far greater than those of the School for Scandal. It is “steeped in the very brine of conceit, and sparkles like salt in the fire.”

In his conception of character Sheridan was a wit rather than a humorist. He created character by a distinctly intellectual process; he did not bring it forth out of the depths, as it were, of his own being. His humour⁠—fine and dry as it was⁠—was the humour of the wit. He had little or none of the rich and juicy, nay, almost oily humour of Falstaff, for instance. His wit was the wit of common-sense, like Jerrold’s or Sydney Smith’s; it was not wit informed with imagination, like Shakespeare’s wit. But this is only to say again that Sheridan was not one of the few worldwide and all-embracing geniuses. He was one of those almost equally few who in their own line, limited though it may be, are unsurpassed. It has been said that poets⁠—among whom dramatists are entitled to stand⁠—may be divided into three classes: those who can say one thing in one way⁠—these are the great majority; those who can say one thing in many ways⁠—even these are not so many as they would be reckoned generally; and those who can say many things in many ways⁠—these are the chosen few, the scant half-dozen who hold the higher peak of Parnassus. In the front rank of the second class stood Sheridan. The one thing he had was wit⁠—and of this in all its forms he was master. His wit in general had a metallic smartness and a crystalline coldness; it rarely lifts us from the real to the ideal; and yet the whole comedy is in one sense, at least, idealized; it bears, in fact, the resemblance to real life that a well-cut