XII. The Georgian Drama.

§ 8. The School for Scandal.

15
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 constructing the best play of which he was capable. 24 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 limitations 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, 25 seen only at one angle, as they come and go
in the act of creating the background or contributing 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.
16
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 graces
which élite 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 so 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 respectability 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 self-centred, 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.
17
Such a theme, in the hands of Cumberland, Holcroft, Mrs. Inchbald, Colman or
Morton would have developed into sentimental 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 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 judgment to making
vice ridiculous. Of all the characters, only Sir Oliver, Rowley and Maria are
colourless, because they are untouched 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 ready-made situations, but control the
plot throughout. 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 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 18

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 drawing-room culture and coffee-
house 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 (October 29, 1779) showed that its author had nothing
fresh to say concerning life.
19
It was now three years since Sheridan had succeeded Garrick as manager of
Drury lane and had been exposed to the paper warfare which, for over half a
century, had been bickering in the narrow theatrical world. 26 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
contemporary 27 personalities, 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 spectators 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 ready 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, 28 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 demimonde of theatrical art.