No More Learning

An apparently trivial change in the
arrangement of the theatre drew the drama further from literature.
To give actors more space and to obviate interruptions, spectators
were removed from the stage in 17624, and, as the loss of these
seats would have fallen heavily on the recipient of a benefit, the
auditorium was lengthened. Thus, although the 'apron' still pro-
jected a few feet into the auditorium, the business of the play
had no longer the advantage of taking place among onlookers.
Before 1765, Drury lane was chiefly illuminated by chandeliers,
though candle-footlights had already been introduced. Garrick,
on returning from his continental tour, engaged the services of
Barthélémon, whose violin won success for many worthless pieces,
and ordered Parisian scenery and lamp-footlights from Jean
Monnet The concentration of light threw into relief the
9
6
1 1693—1756.
2 •I spoke so familiar Sir, and so little in the hoity-toity tone of the tragedy of
that day, that the manager told me that I had better go to grass for another year or
two. ' Macklin, alluding to Rich, who had dismissed him from Lincoln's Inn fields.
See Kirkman, J. , Memoirs of the Life of Charles Macklin (1799).
8 Noverre, in Lettres sur les Arts, testifies to Garrick's skill in pantomime. Walpole,
in describing Glover's Boadicea, gives conclusive evidence of the importance of acting
when he says . Then there is a scene between Lord Sussex and Lord Cathcart, two
captives, which is most incredibly absurd : but yet the parts are so well acted, the
dresses so fine, and two or three scenes pleasing enough, that it is worth seeing. ' To
George Montagu, 6 December 1753.
4 See Knight, Joseph, David Garrick (1894), pp. 183 f.
5 19 September 1763–27 April 1765.
6 Connected, at different times, with the Opéra-Comique and the Théâtre de la
Foire. Garrick also ordered costumes from M. Boquet, dessinateur d'habits à l'opéra.
See Jullien, A. , L'Histoire du Costume au Théâtre (1880).


## p. 259 (#281) ############################################

XII] Eighteenth Century England 259
performer's face and enabled his looks and movements to express
what had formerly needed monologues and asides. When the
proscenium, which had been introduced at the restoration, and
footlights had completely separated the player from his audience,
the performance became spectacular. Actors were now like figures
in a picture, and the dramatist learnt that one of his first tasks
was to manoeuvre them into poses and situations. Experience
eventually taught authors how to preserve dramatic fitness amid
these altered requirements ; but, for several generations, the conse-
quence was a misuse of asides, parentheses, sudden entrances,
mistaken identities and other stage effects of like nature.
Despite these temptations, authors and actors might have
succeeded, as at Hamburg and Weimar, in producing art without
sacrificing literature, if it had not been for the public. Georgian
audiences were no longer representative of the nation. The puritan
prejudice against the theatre, revived in the Bible society aboli-
tionists and the low church evangelical party, and many thoughtful
men, such as the Wesleys, John Newton, Cowper, Wilberforce
and Zachary Macaulay, abstained on principle from an institution
which preached a fictitious code of honour and was considered
the favourite resort of the irreligious. Many more stayed away
because the habits of eighteenth century England were essentially
domestic. It was an age of household furniture, tea-drinking and
sensibility. Men and women spent evenings at home discussing
ethics, writing long, intimate letters or testing each other's gift
of sentimental conversation. When the inevitable reaction came,
it led people from the playhouse towards nature and the open
air.
If the drama had few charms for more thoughtful and sober-
minded citizens, it irresistibly attracted the beau monde. Lovers
of social display, who were gratified by the ‘jubilee-masquerade'
at Ranelagh and by the Richmond fireworks, had begun to look for
the same kind of excitement in the theatre. As performances
were generally restricted to two or three houses, theatregoers
enjoyed that sense of exclusiveness and monopoly which is dear
to leaders of society. Soon, it became a social distinction to meet
and be seen at these assemblies, till Hannah More admits that
one of the chief pleasures was 'the show of the Spectators:. '
1 Walpole, letters to H. Mann, 3 and 17 May 1749.
. With the exception of a few unauthorised attempts (quickly suppressed) to open
theatres, dramatists and actors were confined, during this period, to Drury lane and
Covent garden in the season and to the Hay in the summer months.
3 Preface to Tragedies.
17-2


## p. 260 (#282) ############################################

260 The Georgian Drama [ch.
People went early to get seats when it was known that the
Gunnings would be among the audience, and, in the sixties, the
popularity of the royal family could be gauged by the warmth
of their reception at the theatre. Besides, the enterprise of the
great actor-managers made these entertainments one of the
principal town topics which people of fashion could not afford to
ignore. Not to have judged Garrick, Macklin, Foote, Lewis,
Mrs Siddons or Kemble in their latest róle, not to have sat as
arbiter over the contending merits of Drury lane and Covent
garden”, was a mark of provincialism. While the leisured classes
bestowed their patronage, they also imposed their prejudices and
traditions. The desire to cultivate selfrespect and courtesy, which
is noticeable so far back as the revolution, had gradually grown,
during the eighteenth century, into a meticulous observance of
outward forms. Every man of breeding was expected to be a
drawingroom diplomatist, who could win his way by his personality
and conversation. Together with the cult of social conformity,
there had gradually developed such a horror of vulgarity that any
display of natural feelings was considered ungentlemanly. Lord
Chesterfield reminds his son that to laugh aloud was bad manners,
and that to quote an oldfashioned proverb was to betray familiarity
with coachmen. The nineteenth century horror of indelicacy
or coarseness now begins to appear. Johnson reproved Hannah
More for reading Tom Jones, some of the bluestockings rejected
Tristram Shandy, Bowdler expurgated Shakespeare and Gibbon.
A class dominated by such ideals might excel in many provinces
of literature, from oratory to letter-writing; but, when the glamour
of social distinction drew them to the theatre, their taste proved
too artificial for the appreciation of real tragedy and comedy. Good
acting always won their favour; but, even Shakespeare had partially
to be rewritten for them by Thompson, Garrick and Kemble.
The older school still preferred comedies full of the humorous
vagaries and witty conversations of their own rather trivial lives,
or tragedies which flattered their sense of literary propriety by
observing the unities, amidst arid rhetoric and blank verse. By
the second half of the century, a more serious and emotional
atmosphere began to predominate in high society. This newer
phase is something more than a continuation of the ideals reflected
1 Walpole to H. Mann, 23 March 1752.
? E. g. , in 1750, Barry and Mrs Cibber played in Romeo and Juliet at Covent garden
and Garrick and Miss Bellamy at Drury lane. In 1760, Miss Brent played Polly in
The Beggars' Opera at Covent garden and Mrs Vincent played in the same piece at
Drury lane. Goldsmith, in The British Magazine, discussed their rival merits.


## p. 261 (#283) ############################################

a swoon.
XI] Characteristics of the Audiences 261
in Steele's sentimental comedies. People did not abate one jot
of their respect for gentility; but they were anxious to take
themselves and the theatre more seriously. They rigidly observed
their father's and grandfather's cult of selfpossession ; but they
also affected strong and sensitive passions. Their ideal was to
repress powerful emotions beneath a refined, or even mincing,
manner, till the breaking point was reached in floods of tears or in
As contact with the hard and varied realities of life was
still considered to such a degree illbred that even the bailiff's scene
in The Good-Natur'd Man was censured, people had to look to
domestic incidents for pathos and passion. A look, a gesture, or a
silence was, for them, charged with sentiment. They waxed tearful
or melancholy over the spectacle of a woman preserving her
inbred elegance under persecution and insult. They loved to
contemplate the tenderness of paternal or filial instinct, and
dramatists were wont to introduce sudden recognitions between a
parent and a long-lost child, in order to give an emotional turn to
their plays. Their dramatic ideas centred in the morality of the
drawingroom or the domestic circle. Even wickedness (except
when the exigencies of the plot required a melodramatic villain)
was a temporary lodger in a conscience-stricken breast; even
humour was appreciated only when a rugged but domesticated
character, such as a Scottish servant, almost travestied virtue by
an uncouth exterior.
Such was the class which gave the theatre its tone. But the
spectators who packed Drury lane and Covent garden were not
entirely composed of sentimentalists. The Mohawks, whom
Swift feared and Steele censured, had their descendants under
George III. Bullies in the pit, like footmen in the gallery, seemed
to have followed occupants of the boxes in matters of dramatic
taste; but they still regarded actors as lawful victims of their arro-
gance and insolence. On one occasion, they demanded that Moody
should beg their pardon on his knees for some imagined disrespect,
and such was their tyranny that, when Sheridan put Macbeth on
the stage, he feared a riot because Mrs Siddons omitted the candle
which their favourite Mrs Pritchard always carried in the sleep-
walking scene. The wouldbe playwright had other discouragements
to face besides dependence on an oversensitive, narrowminded and
intolerant public. Before the end of the century, plays sometimes
enjoyed a run of from twenty to sixty nights, and, as there were
not more than two theatres open at the same time, the un-
known author had often to suffer humiliations and to descend


## p. 262 (#284) ############################################

262 The Georgian Drama [CH.
to intrigues before his work could be accepted! Yet, neither
the generation of Walpole nor that of Burke lacked students of
human nature possessed of creative genius, who, like Goldsmith
and Sheridan, might possibly have surmounted all these difficulties
if a more direct path to the heart of the nation had not already
been found.
The drama's decline was the novel's opportunity. Ever since
the days of Lyly and Greene, prose fiction had become a possible
rival of the theatre; but the Elizabethan public was too gregarious,
and had inherited too deep a love of spectacle, to care to see life
through the unsociable medium of a book. After the revolution,
the influence of the theatre waned; but the middle class was
making its first acquaintance with culture, and, like all beginners,
required its lessons in a dogmatic, unequivocal form, such as
essays, satires and treatises. It was not till the middle of the
century that people seemed to have mastered the principles of
social ethics and began to enquire how those ideas applied to the
complex tangle of character and destiny. No doubt, the drama,
under favourable conditions, could have satisfied this curiosity.
Figaro is as effective as Roderick Random, and Minna von
Barnhelm shows what the stage could have made of The History
of Amelia. But the novel was better adapted to the speculations
of the time. The drama deals with crises in the lives of its chief
characters and, thus, is suited to an age of action or of transition,
when people are interested in the clash between old traditions and
new ideas. In the novel, life is treated like a piece of complex
machinery, to be pulled to pieces, carefully examined and then
patiently put together again. Thus, the novel is best adapted to
a generation which has already made up its mind about the frame-
work of society, and is now puzzling over the accidents of birth
and temperament which prevent many individuals from fitting
into the scheme. But, though tragedy and comedy decayed, the
theatre did not. During the last forty years of the eighteenth
century, a long succession of talented actors, from Macklin and
Foote to Kemble and Quick, revealed fresh sources of emotion
and raised their calling to an honourable profession. And, if few
Georgian plays can rank as literature, they yet provide an illu-
minating commentary on public sentiment and theatrical art.
In the sixties, amid musical entertainments such as Bicker-
staff's Padlock, which ran for fifty-three nights, adaptations from
1 See bibliography, under Theatrical Pamphlets.


## p. 263 (#285) ############################################

XII]
False Delicacy
Cumberland
263
Metastasio and from Voltaire and some fustian tragedies full of
duels and suicides, a taste for sentimental, or, as it was then called,
genteel, comedy prevailed. Even Goldsmith's The Good-Natur'd
Man (1767) did not bring back the public taste to 'nature and
humour in whatever walks of life they were most conspicuous. '
At Drury lane, Kelly, a few days previously, had produced False
Delicacy, which condensed into a clear-cut situation the doubts
and heart searchings of the fashionable world. Lady Betty
Lambton refuses the hand of her beloved Lord Winworth out of a
false sense of delicacy and then finds herself pledged to further
his courtship with Miss Marchmont Miss Marchmont is secretly
in love with Sidney, but feels bound to encourage Winworth’s
advances, because she is under many obligations to his seconder
Lady Betty. Of course, there is an underplot, with two comic
characters (Cecil and Mrs Harley); but the true spirit of the
comedy is found in the scene where Lady Lambton and Miss
Marchmont are at last induced to strip off the veneer of gentility
and disclose their real sentiments. Other plays followed the
same tone, such as Mrs Griffiths's School for Rakes (1769), in
which Lord Eustace, after abandoning the compromised Harriet
Mountfort for a marriage of convenience, is brought back by
Frampton's influence to a sense of duty; or Kelly's School for
Wives (1773), in which the farcical spectacle of a man who loves
his handsome wife, and yet pays court to all other women 'of
his circle, is tempered by scenes of domestic emotion. But the
dramatist who most conspicuously made his mark in this decade
is Richard Cumberland.
Cumberland was the pioneer of the later sentimental comedy.
He differed from his contemporaries in untying domestic tangles
by drastic and, sometimes, almost tragic action; and, thus,
he pointed the way to melodrama. Other dramatists of the
sixties and seventies had failed to strike this vein because they
confined the interest of the play to the correct and decorous
society in which the chief characters moved. Cumberland saw
that the leaven must come from without, and exposed the deca-
dence of artificial civilisation by confronting it with the vigorous
and earnest lives which men were leading away from London and
county society. In The Brothers (1769), the scene opens on a
bleak coast lashed by a furious storm ; a privateer is wrecked,
1 Hoole's Cyrus (1768), and Timanthes (1770).
* Madame Celisia’s Almida (1771).
3 See ante, vol. x, chap. IX.
q


## p. 264 (#286) ############################################

264 The Georgian Drama [CH.
whose crew of sturdy, if theatrical, pirates includes young
Belfield, who has been driven from his estate and sweetheart, and
Violetta, who has been forsaken by her husband. Both are
wronged by Belfield the elder who, now possessed of the neigh-
bouring manorhouse, is grinding the tenants and courting Sophia,
his brother's betrothed. The sudden arrival of the dispossessed
heir and of the abandoned wife, the frustration of the villain's
designs, the reunion of the lovers after mutual misunderstandings,
the contrast between the sea-rover, with his hardy companions,
and the decadent gentry who have gathered round the manor
hall', supply the humour and sentiment which were then in
fashion. It is undeniable that the characters do not really live,
while the idea of a cadet turned Bohemian through a kinsman's
criminal selfishness must have been familiar to readers of Fielding
and Smollett. Yet, The Brothers is noteworthy. Belfield the
elder is a villain in his actions more than in his nature, and
the good side of his character is gradually evolved as the play
proceeds; his final humiliation has none of the bitterness of
revenge ; and, all through the play, one feels something of the
health and freedom of the sea. The Brothers was produced in
December 1769 at Covent garden. In January 1771, Garrick
brought out at Drury lane The West Indian, in which the imagined
freedom and sincerity of the plantations come into contact with
city life. Stockwell, a prosperous business man and a member of
parliament, has summoned his illegitimate son from the West Indies
to London ; but, before declaring his relationship, decides to
watch his character in the disguise of a friend. The son, under
the name Belcour, arrives among an outworn and artificial
circle, composed of the penurious captain Dudley, lodging with his
son and daughter at the house of the Fulmers (the husband a
decayed literary man, the wife a procuress), and of Lady Rusport,
his sister, an avaricious puritan, who refuses money to her brother
and tries to thwart young Charles Dudley's courtship of her step-
daughter Charlotte. The intercourse between Stockwell and the son
whom he may not own gives free play to the sentimentality which
the age enjoyed? ; but the chief interest of the play centres in Louisa,
captain Dudley's daughter. The West Indian sees her in the street,
follows her home to the house of the Fulmers with tropical ardour
and begins an irregular courtship which brings out the emotional
elements of the play—the villainy of the Fulmers, who tell Belcour
1 E. g. , Sir Benjamin and Lady Dove, act 11, sc. 4; act in, sc. 3.
2 Act 111, sc. 1.
2


## p. 265 (#287) ############################################

X11]
Cumberland
265
that Miss Dudley is only a mistress and fleece him ; the sacredness
of women's honour; young Dudley's jealousy for his sister's good
name, leading to a challenge; and the gradual development of
Belcour's character, impulsive and licentious on the surface, but
showing itself full of courage and chivalry as the plot thickens.
Cumberland was now rapidly making a name and a fortune. Late
in the same year, he adapted Timon of Athens for the modern
stage, by shortening the first four acts and rewriting the fifth, and,
early in the next year? , Garrick produced The Fashionable Lover,
a purely domestic drama, reminiscent of Clarissa, of which the
principal figure is the elegant and rather mournful Augusta Aubrey.
Left to the care of a dishonest speculator, she is compromised by a
nobleman, courted by an ardent and honourable lover and, finally,
restored to happiness and affluence by the unexpected arrival of
her father from abroad.
Early in the seventies, public taste changed and became old-
fashioned. Cradock's Zobeide (1771) was copied from an un-
finished play by Voltaire; the anonymous A Hour before Marriage
(1772) was modelled on Molière's Mariage Forcé. O'Brien,
indeed, kept to sentimental comedy by producing The Duel (1772),
founded on Sedaine's Le Philosophe sans le Savoir; but, in the
same year, Mason composed Elfrida, with a Greek chorus.
Kenrick's Duellist (1773) was founded on the character of colonel
Bath in Amelia ; Colman the elder borrowed from Plautus and
Terence to produce Man of Business, and Cumberland drew
inspiration from Adelphi to write Choleric Man, both in 1774.
General Burgoyne, who, in age and associations, belonged to the
old school, now felt himself drawn to the theatre and produced
The Maid of the Oaks (1774), in which the irate parent of classical
comedy storms because his son marries without his consent, and
the witty and fashionable Lady Bab fools Dupely by disguising
herself in a fête champêtre. But the two authors who most
profited by, and influenced, this reversion to humour and episode
were Goldsmith and Sheridan.
She Stoops to Conquer (1773)2 is not original in plot, but the
characters are drawn from life, and, touched, as it is, by Gold-
smith's indescribable charm, the play became a revelation. It
reminded London how much instruction as well as amusement
1 20 January 1772.
See ante, vol. x, chap. IX.


## p. 266 (#288) ############################################

266 The Georgian Drama [ch.
might still be found in oldfashioned situations despite their
dramatic licence, provided only the morals and manners of the
characters would conform to the new standard. Sheridan, mean-
while, had achieved his romantic marriage and, being faced by
the problem of supporting a wife, decided to devote his literary
gifts to the now profitable business of playwriting. Like Gold-
smith, he reverted to classical comedy and chose, as the basis
of his plot, the marriage conflict between parent and child
which had come down from Terence through Italian and French
theatres? . A father and an aunt arrange a suitable marriage for
their respective son and niece, while the young people have
already chosen for themselves. Out of this hackneyed situation
he extracted the equally hackneyed humours of mistaken identity
and of domestic discord, but with a dramatic sense which borders on
genius. Miss Lydia Languish and captain Absolute are the young
pair destined for each other. Unknown to their elders, they are
already mutually in love; but, as Lydia has fallen a victim to the
craze for sentimentality, the wealthy captain pretends to be the
penniless ensign Beverley, so that their union may be to her,
unquestionably, a marriage of love. This attempt at a double
impersonation brings about some brilliant complications. Familiar
figures in domestic and social life are thrown off their guard and
betrayed, with admirable felicity, into weaknesses and absurdities
generally hidden from the public eye, and the enjoyment of the
spectators is all the more complete because the characters are
working for the same end and frustrate their several efforts
through misunderstandings.
The Rivals (1775) is a comedy of incident, the excellence of
which is partly to be found in the action. Its characterisation
is, in essence, conventional and shows less knowledge of human
nature than does Goldsmith's work. Captain Absolute the generous,
impulsive youth, Sir Anthony the testy, headstrong father, Fag and
Lucy the menials who minister to their employers' intrigues, are as
old as Latin comedy; Bob Acres, the blustering coward, is akin to
Sir Andrew Aguecheek and had trod the stage in Jonson's learned
sock; Sir Lucius O'Trigger is related to Cumberland's O'Flaherty;
Mrs Malaprop has a long pedigree, including Dogberry, Lady Froth,
Mrs Slipslop and Tabitha Bramble. Yet, apart from the actual
business on the stage, these characters are irresistibly effective.
As in the case of Goldsmith, Sheridan's importance is found in
1 For the sources and text of The Rivals, see works by Rae, W. F. , and Adams,
J. Q. , quoted in bibliography.


## p. 267 (#289) ############################################

XII]
The Rivals
267
the new wine which he poured into old bottles. The Georgian
public expected in their plays a certain piquancy which should
remind them of their social or domestic life. But, whereas authors
of the sentimental school flavoured their work with emotions
pertaining to woman's affairs, Sheridan perceived that there was
another element of good breeding, quite different but equally
modern. The expansion of the British empire had called into
existence a virile and energetic governing class of soldiers and
politicians. This aristocracy felt, as deeply as any ‘jessamy' or
‘macaroni,' the humanising influence of polite learning and domestic
refinement, yet with a difference. As society set a value on delicate
attentions, sympathetic and discerning compliments, subtle turns
of phrase and gracefulness of manner, these arts were cultivated
as an accomplishment in order to maintain social supremacy. The
class in question, did not, like sentimentalists, affect strong passions
beneath a veneer of politeness, but, rather, a superb serenity which
rose superior to all emotion. Drawingroom diplomacy had often
appeared in letters and memoirs ; but Sheridan was the first writer
to make it the essence of a play. Despite the conventionality of the
character-drawing and of some of the situations, The Rivals has
an atmosphere which satisfies this ideal. As each figure moves
and speaks on the stage, the reader is conscious of a coterie whose
shibboleth was distinction—a coterie whose conversation regarded
the most commonplace topics as worthy of its wit, which abhorred
eccentricity and smiled at all those who, like Fag, Sir Anthony,
Faulkland, Mrs Malaprop and Bob Acres, fell short of the rule of
easy selfpossession.
After some initial difficulties, The Rivals proved a complete
success and Sheridan was launched on his career as a dramatist.
The opportunities of quick returns which the theatre now offered
had their full influence even on an author of his literary taste and
dramatic sense. His next production, St Patrick's Day, is a
trifle composed with no other object than to make money by
amusing the public. The Duenna (1775) is an adaptation of old
material to suit the fashion for operas. We meet again the stage
old man ; his name is Don Jerome, instead of Sir Antony, but his
he is just as obstinate, irascible and wellbred. Then, we have
the victim of ignorance and selfcomplacency, this time a Jew and
not a garrulous and affected old woman, but his end is dramatic-
ally the same as Mrs Malaprop's. Comic situations, as in The
Rivals, arise out of mistaken identities, which are admissible
only in the makebelieve of a musical farce. The plot was taken
a


## p. 268 (#290) ############################################

268 The Georgian Drama [CH.
from Wycherley's The Country Wife, and, though the dialogue
has much of Sheridan's brilliant phrase-making and whimsical
humour, the chief literary merit of the play must be sought in
the lyrics, with their vigorous directness and touch of classical
culture.
While Sheridan was making money, he was also perfecting his
art. He showed how much of stagecraft he had learnt when,
in 1777, he adapted Vanbrugh's The Relapse to the taste of the
Georgian public and brought it out as A Trip to Scarborough.
No more striking illustration of Sheridan's manner could be found,
and its failure on the boards is merely another of those mysteries
familiar to all who study the annals of the stage. Vanbrugh's
play has a double plot. On the one hand, there is a sort of
picaresque adventure, in which a needy gallant, by impersonating
his elder brother in a love-suit, accomplishes his revenge on an
inimitable coxcomb and wins a wife and a fortune to boot. On
the other hand, there is a complicated intrigue. Loveless, the re-
formed libertine and now the virtuous husband of Amanda, finds
that his wife has, unwittingly, invited to the house one of his
former paramours, now a blithe widow, named Berinthia. Of
course, Loveless relapses, and Berinthia encourages another of her
admirers, named Worthy, to make love to Amanda, in order that
the wife may not be inclined to spy on her husband. In the end,
Loveless accomplishes his desire with Berinthia ; but her seducer is
rejected with horror by Amanda. Sheridan showed his mastery
of
construction by unifying the action. He made the first act a more
artistic exposition of the plot and economised both characters and
scenes by arranging that everything accessory should be narrated
instead of acted. Above all, he altered the motives and
actions of the characters to suit the more refined perceptions of
his own time. Berinthia is no longer a common adventuress,
nor does she urge Townley (the Worthy of The Relapse) to court
Amanda. She tempts Loveless in order to punish Townley for
transferring his attentions from herself to her friend. The guilty
couple are not exposed, but are shamed out of their design in a
situation of considerable tact and dramatic skill, which Sheridan
used again in The School for Scandal. Their assignation in a
moonlit garden is disturbed. They take cover and are forced to
overhear Amanda, against whom they are in league, scornfully
rejecting Townley. As Berinthia and Loveless emerge from their
concealment, she remarks ‘Don't you think we steal forth two
contemptible creatures? ' Even in the other part of the play, the


## p. 269 (#291) ############################################

XII]
The School
School for Scandal
269
burlesque business of Miss Hoyden's courtship, a new turn is
given to the farcical stage character Lord Foppington. The final
speech which Sheridan puts into his mouth reveals his true nature
and shows a man arrogant and illbred, but of native shrewdness,
and too discerning to marry a woman in whose eyes he had been
made to appear ridiculous.
Sheridan had acquired elsewhere the matured judgment and
dramatic sense which these two ephemeral productions display.
While supporting his household and keeping his name before the
public, he had slowly and laboriously perfected his powers by con-
structing the best play of which he was capable? The School for
Scandal, which finally appeared on 8 May 1777, is the last great
English comedy and typifies not only the excellence but the limita-
tions of the Georgian theatre. To begin with, it is significant
that Sheridan, in the choice of his dramatis personae, was content
to use familiar types. Sir Peter Teazle is the traditional stage old
man who had already reappeared in The Rivals and The Duenna;
Charles Surface is the traditional young man, just as generous and
impulsive as captain Absolute, only more exposed to temptation.
As in Sheridan's earlier work, we have the professed poseur. This
time, he is neither a country squire who apes bravery, nor an old
woman who affects the phraseology of culture, nor yet a Hebrew
opportunist, overconfident in his own cleverness, but a character
who overreaches himself in the attempt to make a good impression,
already familiar to those acquainted with Murphy's Know your
own Mind. The other personages, except Lady Teazle, are not
studies of character, but occasional figures, vaguely suggestive of
the restoration comedy or of Molière”, seen only at one angle, as
they come and go in the act of creating the background or con-
tributing to a situation. Even Sir Oliver, despite his common
sense, his pardonable vanity at finding his own picture rather than
another's spared in the portrait scene, and despite his humanity,
nurtured in a life of enterprise, is hardly more than 'an angel
entertained unawares' in an eighteenth century garb.
But, if The School for Scandal does not tell us anything that is
new or profound about human nature, it is a brilliant exposition
of that other superimposed character which an idle, overcivilised
society develops. It has already been shown how Sheridan, in
writing The Rivals, used a farcical plot to portray the peculiar
1 On the genesis of the play, see Shakespeare to Shaw, Armstrong, C. F. (1913),
p. 158.
* E. g. , Wycherley's The Plain Dealer; Molière’s Le Misanthrope.


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270
[CH.
The Georgian Drama
graces which dite society admired and the peculiar ineptitudes
which it despised. In The School for Scandal, he went further; he
put on the stage, in his own pregnant way, the psychology of the
overtrained world of fashion. In the first place, as conversation was
a fine art in a community of drawingroom idlers, Sheridan endowed
his personages with a flow of picturesque epigram, of which the
studied felicity surpasses all other dialogues, including that of
his own previous works. Besides this, he perceived that the
intellectually unemployed turn social intercourse into a competitive
struggle ; and, when he came to portray the underlying stratum
of jealousy and intrigue, he brought to his task a touch of
modern sentimentality from which few Georgians could escape
Behind his view of London art and artifice, there lurked the
popular ideal of simple manners, and, thanks to this background
of thought, he was able to show how the vices of the polite world
overgrow natural instincts. Since ideas which are to succeed on
the stage must be concrete, he made extravagance and scandal
examples of decadence, and then worked out a crisis in the
lives of characters brought under their influence. Charles
Surface is the centre of a circle demoralised by extravagance
till a chance episode reveals the generosity of its nature. Lady
Sneerwell typifies the irreclaimable scandalmonger; she finds
80 many opportunities of retaliating on the world which first
slandered her that habit is now second nature. Joseph Surface,
at heart, is no worse than the character whose desire for re-
spectability exceeds his powers of compassing it; he, too, is
gradually fascinated by a brilliant and corrupt society, till an
unexpected event shows that he has sinned beyond forgiveness.
Sir Peter is the Cato of the piece, good at heart, if selfcentred,
but soured by contact with many backbiters and rendered ridiculous
by the vagaries of his young wife, herself Sheridan's best creation
an example of how youth and inexperience may be blinded to
the follies of fashionable life till the eyes are reopened by a
sudden crisis.
Such a theme, in the hands of Cumberland, Holcroft, Mrs
Inchbald, Colman or Morton would have developed into senti-
mental drama. The Teazle ménage would have provided comic
relief; Maria, a defenceless ward in their household, slandered by
the scandal club and distressed by Joseph's insidious attentions,
would have become the pathetic heroine of the piece. Sir Oliver,
probably her father in disguise, would have appeared in the fifth
act to rescue her from persecution and to restore her to her


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XII]
The School for Scandal
271
faithful Charles, who had plunged into dissipation because she was
too modest to requite his love. That Sheridan was quite capable
of so lachrymose a treatment is proved by his Ode to Scandal; but,
in his comedy, he confined himself, with admirable skill and judg-
ment, to making vice ridiculous. Of all the characters, only Sir
Oliver, Rowley and Maria are colourless, because they are un-
touched by London frivolity. Each of the others exemplifies some
vice or weakness with that consistent exaggeration which provokes
laughter, because, on the stage, it seems true to life. Even more
notable is Sheridan's classical sense of form and the skill with
which he constructed his plot. The characters do not fall, by
accident, into readymade situations, but control the plot through-
out. It was part of Charles's nature to sell his family portraits
and of Lady Teazle's to accept the invitation to visit Joseph. The
weakness of English comedy had always been a division of interest
a
between plot and underplot, and Sheridan's earlier work was by
no means free from this defect. But, though The School for
Scandal deals with the crisis of not less than four lives, their
destinies cross one another in the culminating point. It is this
intersection of interests which gives an almost unparalleled
dramatic effect to the two great scenes. In the portrait scene,
Joseph and the Teazles are present only by implication ; in the
screen scene, all four meet at what the spectators realise at once
as one of the important moments of their lives.
Yet, The School for Scandal is not one of the world's best
comedies: it lacks inspiration. As has been shown, the English
theatre had become the mirror of metropolitan wit and gentility.
Its public expected polite distraction and were ready to laugh,
to weep or to be amused ; but their drawingroom culture and
coffeehouse experiences denied them interest in the puzzles and
anomalies of human nature, out of which the greatest comedies
are made. Hence, those who wrote for the stage were almost
forced to revive the traditional situations and characters of old
comedy, or, failing that, to give their colourless plays some topical
or temporary interest. Goldsmith and Sheridan succeeded well
with this dead material, because the one enlivened it with humour
and the other with wit. Even in The School for Scandal, the
lack of true insight is not hard to detect; and, two years and a
half later, The Critic (29 October 1779) showed that its author
had nothing fresh to say concerning life.
It was now three years since Sheridan had succeeded Garrick
as manager of Drury lane and had been exposed to the paper


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272
[CH.
The Georgian Drama
>
warfare which, for over half a century, had been bickering in
the narrow theatrical world? . It is not surprising that, in an
atmosphere of lampoons and acrid criticisms, he should turn his
gift of dramatic caricature against his foes. Just as Buckingham
had ridiculed actors in The Rehearsal, Sheridan produced on
the stage a satire against the poetasters and intriguing critics who
ranged themselves on the side of sentimental drama. He no
longer attempted to create characters whose actions should clash
and interweave, till a situation revealed each in his true light.
He did, indeed, begin by depicting the world of theatrical vanity
and self-interest. We have a glimpse of a married couple whose
home life is poisoned by stage-mania; two crusted literary aspirants,
full of that civilised malignity which Sheridan knew well how to
portray, and, above all, Puff, the advertising adventurer, a true
stage freak, devoid of reality, whose newly-written play the other
characters adjourn to see rehearsed. The dialogue is as sparkling
as ever, and the characters, whether or no they are based on
contemporarypersonalities, have just that touch of humorsome
exaggeration of which Sheridan was master. But the second act,
instead of developing a plot, changes into a parody. Puff's tragedy,
The Spanish Armada, is a pseudo-historical drama, and the spec-
tators are entertained with a caricature of stage-managership and
dramatic effect. A parody cannot rank as literature save when,
besides a certain felicity of expression, the reader is able to
recognise, not only the peculiarities, but the essence and spirit of
what is being travestied; and it cannot be denied that the brilliant
inanities, for which this burlesque has been often praised? , are
founded on the real practices of Georgian tragedy. Nor is the
more personal satire of the first act relinquished. Besides a
travesty of pedantic devices, such as exposition, peripety, climax,
conversion and stichomythia, Dangle, Sneer and Puff discuss the
performance, and their comments are an admirable caricature on
the demi-monde of theatrical art.
2
When Sheridan produced The Critic, he was attacking a cause
which had already won the day. Sentimental drama had been
patronised by the most cultured circle in polite society. Since 1750,
Mrs Montagu's salon had been teaching London that ladies could
i See bibliography, under Theatrical Pamphlets.
2 E. g. , Sir Fretful Plagiary is generally recognised to be a caricature of Richard
Cumberland.
3 See Sichel, Life of Sheridan, vol. 1, pp. 602 f.


## p. 273 (#295) ############################################

XII]
Hannah More
273
1
cultivate their intellect, without sacrificing their social charm, and
a series of talented bluestockings! were portraying drawingroom
culture in novels and plays. Mrs Cowley was already known to
the public; but the theatre did not feel the full influence of the
movement till Hannah More’s Percy packed Covent garden at a time
when The School for Scandal was the attraction of Drury lane.
Hannah More was a woman of strong character, masculine intellect
and passions, which, thwarted in life, were almost bound to find
expression in literature. She had already composed The Inflexible
Captive, a classical drama inspired by Addison's Cato and Havard's
Regulus, but showing a complete ignorance of the stage, in which
the sentimental passions of son, daughter and lover are called into
play by the captive Regulus's return to Rome. Through five acts,
the hero resists the claims of state and family with dignified and
aphoristic declamation, and even the authoress herself admitted
that the play was defective in action. Three years later, Hannah
More had come into contact with the leading humorists, courtiers
and actors of London ; and nothing proves more vividly the fasci-
nation of the Georgian theatre than that she should have chosen
this as a mouthpiece for her ideas. Percy is a manifesto, and
attempts to show how the ethics of refined society may be studied
through the ensanguined colours of tragedy. Hannah More trans-
lated into rather intense drama the discussions which interested her
own day : what duty a woman owes to her father, her husband and
her own good name; how a lover should act towards a woman in
distress and towards his own heart; the obligation of a husband
to win his wife's affection and his right to guard her fidelity,
though it cost both of them their lives; the regard for decorum
which a person of quality 'should observe, even in moments of high
emotion. Such ideas had become too subtle for the conventional
setting of a Roman tragedy? , and Mason's Caractacus, despite the
beauty of Mrs Hartley (as Evelina), had failed only the year before.
Hannah More was well in touch with the growing taste for romanti-
cism and was original enough to fill her problem play with the
chivalry and architecture of the Middle Age. Percy is based on a
a
3
i See post, chap. xv.
2 Cf. Walpole, on a similar occasion : ‘The Siege of Aquileia, of which you ask,
pleased less than Mr Home's other plays. In my own opinion Douglas far exceeds
both the other. Mr Home seems to have a beautiful talent for painting genuine
nature and the manners of his country. There was so little of nature in the manners
of both Greeks and Romans, that I do not wonder at his success being less brilliant
when he tried those subjects. ' To Sir D. Dalrymple, 4 April 1760.
3 See ante, vol. x, chap. X.
E. L, XL.
18
CH. XII.


## p. 274 (#296) ############################################

274
The Georgian Drama [CH.
twelfth century story of Eudes de Faiel, which Belloy (the author
of Le Siège de Calais) had already dramatised; but the horrible
episode of Raoul de Coucy's heart was, of course, omitted. The
action takes place among oldfashioned English heroes and shows
how Elwina, betrothed to Percy from her childhood, has wed earl
Raby at her father's behest, but cannot return his love. Just as the
earl's suspicions are being aroused at this coldness, Percy returns
with glory from the crusades and hastens to his lady, not knowing
that she is married. The spectators watch the sentimental lover as
he is gradually trapped by the jealous husband, while the heroine
is torn between duty to her marriage vow and her unconquerable
passion for the suitor of her youth. In the end, Elwina goes mad
and drinks poison, while Raby slays Percy, and then, learning that
his wife was chaste, kills himself. Artificial and insipid as the play
now seems, its combination of emotion, action and theory was
considered a revelation. Besides the most ample recognition in
London, the drama was acted in Vienna, and the authoress was
elected a member of the Paris and Rouen academies.
Percy shows what havoc a virtuous man may work, if he is
passion's slave. In 1779, Hannah More produced The Fatal False-
hood, to prove how love, in a unscrupulous heart, may lead to even
more appalling crimes. After this effort, she abandoned the
theatre and devoted her pen to the propagation of religion.
Never was there an atmosphere less genial to the tragic muse.
A few attempts were made at classical imitations, such as Delap's
Royal Suppliants (1781), founded on Euripides's Heraclidae and
Philodamus (1782), by Dr Bentley's son, based on a passage in
Cicero's In Verrem. There were some Shakespearean revivals,
such as Kemble's alterations of Coriolanus and The Tempest, both
in 1789, and some genuine attempts at medieval tragedy, in
Hannah More's manner, of which the best were Jephson's Count
of Narbonne (1781) and Joanna Baillie's De Montfort (1800).
These efforts, which read like academic exercises, were the more
coldly received, because the age could see its own thoughts and
manners reflected, almost every night, in an endless succession of
new comedies.
Few comedies of this group attracted so much attention as Mrs
Hannah Cowley's. In 1776, she had produced the rather sentimental
The Runaway, in which Emily,a fugitive from a distasteful marriage,
a
takes refuge in the Hargraves's house and is unscrupulously lured
away from this retreat because her charms bid fair to seduce


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XII]
Mrs Cowley
The Heiress
275
young Hargrave from his promised marriage with a wealthy old
maid. Early in the eighties, Mrs Cowley changed to the comedy
of humour and episode. In The Belle's Stratagem (1780), Laetitia
Hardy, to be sure of winning the affections of her betrothed, first
disgusts him by pretending to be a hoyden and then, while disguised
at a masquerade, conquers his heart by her real charms. In A Bold
Stroke for a Husband (1783), Olivia is plagued by her father's desire
to see her married ; so, she adopts the expedient of scandalising
all suitors, till Don Julio appears and she captures him by a
series of complicated deceptions. Both compositions are akin to
the classical school in that they give a laughable and optimistic
turn to the domestic difficulties of youth ; but neither, in the true
spirit of old comedy, creates humour out of the clash or eccentricity
of character.
tu
The most remarkable playwright of this decade is general
Burgoyne. The author of The Maid of the Oaks, on returning
from America, had resumed his former avocation, and, after
writing an opera in 1780, produced, in 1786, The Heiress, which
won a fortune and was preferred by some critics to The School
for Scandal. The play, which was partly founded on Diderot's
Père de Famille and on Mrs Lennox's The Sisters (1679), has the
unusual merit of combining the features of a comedy of manners
with those of a comedy of pathos. In the first half, differences of
breeding and caste are sketched with the precision of genuine
comedy. The native grace and suavity of hereditary gentry are
skilfully portrayed, especially in the scene where Clifford woos the
charming Lady Emily, his friend Lord Gayville's sister, over a game
of chess" ; while the affectations of the vulgar rich are satirised in
the scenes where old Alscrip suffers the inconveniences of fashion
and his daughter expatiates insufferably on her imagined conquests
in the polite world. The two households afford a pleasing study in
social contrasts, which reach their climax when Lady Emily and
Miss Alscrip are brought together; and the scene shifts naturally
from one side to the other, since Lord Gayville is to marry Miss
Alscrip for her money. The pathetic interest centres in Miss Alton.
Lord Gayville falls in love with Miss Alton in the streets, does not
know who she is, traces her to her obscure lodging, like Belcour
in The West Indian, and presses his courtship so eagerly that, to
escape persecution, she enters service as Miss Alscrip's companion.
It is easy to foresee what humiliations her selfrespect will suffer
1 Act 11, sc. 1.
18-2


## p. 276 (#298) ############################################

276 The Georgian Drama [CH.
among these purseproud plebeians, until she is unexpectedly
discovered to be Clifford's long-lost sister, and the detection of a
flaw in a will transfers the Alscrip fortune to her hands. Though
infinitely inferior to Sheridan's masterpiece in construction and
brilliance of dialogue, The Heiress exercised a stronger influence.
It demonstrated how effectively characters could be contrasted by
grouping them in two opposing parties; it introduced a new type
of snob, not only in the person of old Alscrip but in the two
cleverly conceived stage characters, Mr and Mrs Blandish, who
ingratiate themselves into both circles by abject flattery; it showed
what use could be made of the odious female as a foil to the
virtues of the heroine whom she scorns, and it made popular an
atmosphere of legal chicanery, forged wills and incriminating
documents, which, henceforth, was taken over by many subsequent
plays. Though Burgoyne found many imitators of his technique,
The Heiress is one of the last productions of the eighteenth century
that reflected new lights on human nature, thus retaining the
spirit of comedy.
Yet another change was now coming over the British theatre.
The ideas of Condorcet, William Godwin and Tom Paine' were in
the air, and, when the public went to the playhouse, if they did
not wish to be amused by operas and pantomimes, they were anxious
to see these new enthusiasms on the stage. Themes were now
looked for such as the rights of man, the dignity of humble life,
the triumph of nature over artificial civilisation, the poetry of
the country and other tenets of the growing romantic movement.
Had these notions really stirred all classes, the conflict between
old and new might, conceivably, have inspired a new and vigorous
series of comedies. But the theatregoing public never thought of
questioning the established order of the eighteenth century. These
new ideas were, for them, an abstract speculation, quite distinct
from their own traditions and conventionalities. Plays which now
found favour necessarily ceased to be comedies and became either
dramatised pamphlets or daydreams of the world set right. A
public of this sort offered easy opportunities to any sentimentalist
familiar with the stage ; and, during the last twenty years of the
century, Holcroft, Mrs Inchbald, Colman the younger and Morton
made reputations by adapting to the technique of the theatre the
unsubstantial Utopias of everyday life.
1 L'Esquisse d'un tableau historique des progrès de l'esprit humain (1793 ? ); Enquiry
concerning Political Justice (1791); The Rights of Man (1791); see Brailsford, H. N. ,
Shelley, Godwin and their Circle (1913).


## p. 277 (#299) ############################################

XI]
Holcroft
277
>
Holcroft, a dauntless fellow worker with Godwin and Paine,
had begun, as early as 1778', to turn to account his talent for
letters and his experience as prompter and strolling player ;
but it was not till 1792 that he produced, at Covent garden, The
Road to Ruin. The play shows how even business men, such as
the banker Mr Dornton and his head clerk Mr Sulky, conceal
human hearts beneath their dry exteriors, and that even spend-
thrifts, such as Dornton's son Harry, have a generous sense of
duty despite their recklessness. When Harry's extravagance, at
last, causes a run on his father's bank, the youth resolves to save
the house by espousing the wealthy Mrs Warren, though really in
love with her daughter. One half of the action takes place in the
luxurious mansion of the odious widow, satirising her vicious circle,
especially Goldfinch, the brainless man of fashion, with his endless
tag 'that's your sort,' who is eager for the widow's wealth in order
to defray his debts. In the end, the bank is saved by the staunch
loyalty of Sulky; Harry, sobered by his experience, is free to
marry the girl of his choice, and Mrs Warren is disinherited
by the discovery of a new will. The Road to Ruin is Holcroft's
least inartistic success; but The Deserted Daughter is a more
striking indication of the tendency of the theatre. Taking a hint
from Cumberland's The Brothers, he attempted to show how bad
men may become good. Mordent neglects his dutiful wife, hates
the world, plunges into debt and consorts with two dishonest
lawyers, Item and Grime, who rob him. All this misery is due to
the consciousness that he has a natural daughter, Joanna, whom
he is afraid to own publicly. The play shows how Mordent passes
from bad to worse, till he is on the brink of moral and financial
ruin. But, just at the climax, Grime and Item are detected by
means of an intercepted document; Joanna is married to the
generous and wealthy young Cheveril; her relationship with
Mordent is then made public ; and the father, now relieved of his
secret, is reconciled to his wife. The Deserted Daughter abounds
in plagiarisms and artificialities. Mrs Sarsnet is the shadow of
Mrs Malaprop; Joanna's physiognomical intuitions are copied
from Clarissa. Item's despair at the loss of the telltale document
is taken from L'Avare or Aulularia ; Donald, the faithful Scottish
servant, who talks unintelligible English, is the one attempt at
humour. Yet, the play manages, in a melodramatic form, to portray
the doctrines of the Godwin circle. Cumberland had shown, more
1 Crisis at Drury lane. His first comedy was Duplicity, at Covent garden, in 1781.
See, also, post, chap. XIII,
a


## p. 278 (#300) ############################################

278 The Georgian Drama [ch.
than twenty years earlier, how far demoralisation is due to the
burden of an overgrown society. Holcroft goes further; he
champions the new belief in the perfectibility of man, and pictures
how the soul springs up erect the moment that the burden is
removed. Thus, in spite of its literary demerits, The Deserted
Daughter is worth remembering, especially as Mrs Inchbald and
Colman the younger had, also, chosen this doctrine as the theme
of their most important work.
Elizabeth Sampson had been attracted to London by the
glamour of the theatre, and, in London, she married the actor
Inchbald. After she had spent several years in touring, The Mogul
Tale was accepted for the stage, in 1784, and she established her
reputation with I'll tell you What, at the Hay (the old Haymarket
theatre), in 1785. The play is a model of construction, and, though
the characters are hardly more than stage figures, the plot com-
bines the humour of classical comedy with the moralising of the
newer school. Mrs Inch bald never fulfilled the promise of this early
work; but she understood the taste of the theatrical public and, in
her next play, Such Things Are (1787), showed how successfully she
could condense fashionable ideas into dramatic situations. At this
time, John Howard's agitation for prison reform was a common topic
of discussion, and harmonised well with popular faith in human
goodness; but polite audiences at Covent garden would hardly have
tolerated so inelegant a subject as gaol-life, if Mrs Inchbald had
not also flattered the growing romantic taste for unreality by placing
the scene in Sumatra.