Certain it is the comedy considered altogether excels everything of a dramatic kind in our language, since the days of Congreve. The fable and its conduct are as is the case with the best plays of the above mentioned poet, not strictly regular and perfect. The dialogue however, distances competitorship, no modern author has been so successful in this grand point of dramatic structure. In the School for Scandal, the wit is not more abundant than natural, it flows easily and creates a double effect from the apparent want of art which accompanies it.
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In fact, the dialogue of this comedy is not only the most brilliant, but the most satirical and sterling of any modern play and may fairly challenge a comparison with that of the beest of the masters of the elder school. The scene in which Charles sells all the old family pictures but his uncle’s who is the purchaser is disguise and that of the discovery of Lady Teazle when the screen falls, are among the happiest and most highly wrought that comedy in its wide and brilliant range can boast.
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Besides the wit and ingenuity of this play, there is a genial spirit of frankness and generosity about it. It professes a faith in the natural goodness as well as habitual depravity of human nature. While it strips off the mask of hypocrisy, it inspires a confidence between man and man. As often as it is acted, it must serve to clear the air of that low, creeping, pestilent fog of cant which threatens to confound every native impulse or honest conviction.
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The beauties of this comedy says a critic are so well known and felt that criticism need not take the trouble of pointing them out in detail. No doubt, the blot has only a scanty interest, there is no profound or ingenious development of character, not one of the personages in the play has any legitimate claim upon our affection or esteem, but the skill with which the materials of the play have been managed is admirable, the situation have very successfully been contrived and been made to appear both natural and striking, a fine feeling of the ridiculous smiles throughout, there is a perpetual play of wit which never tries but which seems like running water kept fresh by its own flow, the details have an almost faultless finish, in short the play satisfies and delights the most fastidious tastes of persons who are refined and simple.
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The defects of this play are due chiefly to the author’s effort to amalgamate two distinct plots. From this cause has emerged that excessive opulence of wit with which the dialogue seems to be overloaded. The dialogue is no doubt from beginning to end a continuous sparkling of polish and point. In fact, all the characters in the play could be given the common designation of wits. Even Trip, the servant is as pointed and shining as the others, and displays his master’s with as he has his birthday clothes, with the gloss on.
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The only personage who shows any moderation in jesting is old Rowely. In short, the entire comedy is a sort of El Dorado of with, where the precious metal is thrown about by all the persons as carelessly as if they had not the least idea of its value. A couple of other defects which have been pointed out by critics may also be noted. Some of the characters, it has been asserted, are useless to these action of the play.
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These characters are the members of the Scandalous College. Sir Benjamin, his uncle, Crabtree, and Mrs. Candour surely contribute a good deal to the animation of the dialogue, but they have hardly anything to do with the advancement of the story. These characters like the accessories in a Greek Drama, are merely a sort of chorus of scandal throughout. It is for this reason that one of the spectators is reported to have said at the end of the opening scene of the play.
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I wish these people would finish talking so that the play may begin. Furthermore, it has been thought strange that the lovers, Charles and Maria, should never be brought in each other’s presence till the last scene. This may perhaps be explained by the fact that Sheridan was not very good at writing love scenes. Some critics have censured the incident of the screen as a contrivance unworthy of the dignity of comedy. This objection shows too much fastidiousness.
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We live in a world where many events of great importance are brought about by trivial accidents. After all it is a world in which the falling of an apple led to the discovery of the laws of gravitation. That being so we should not regard it as a defect that the falling of the screen leads to the discovery of a love-intrigue. However, there is another objection which cannot be easily answered. Joseph, at the commencement of this scene, order his servant to draw the screen before the window because his opposite neighbor is a maiden lady of so curious a temper. Yet afterwards, by placing Lady Teazle between the screen and the window he enables this inquisitive neighbor to indulge her curiosity at leisure.
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We might defend the dramatist by saying that Joseph, with the alternative of exposure of either the husband or the neighbor, chooses the lesser evil, but our defence would surely be weak. The distinctively amusing scenes in The School for Scandal are those in which Lady Sneerwell’s guests assemble to pull their acquaintances to pieces. They are brilliantly clever, but they perhaps best illustrate the charge of coarseness and harshness.
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Crabtree and Mrs. Candour are absolutely brutal, and the whole circle settles down to its work with the ferocity of vultures and wolves. To measure the difference between small art and great art, we should compare the talk of the scandal-mongers here with that scene in Moliere’s Misanthrope in which the circle at Celimene’s house hits off the portraits of their absent friends. In one case we feel almost ashamed to be listening, in the other it is good society still, even though it be good society in a heartless mood.
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And yet there are numerous good reasons why The School for Scandal should have had a great popularity. The very fact that its wit is such as all the world can understand, at the same time that it has point enough to make the spectator think himself a rather clever fellow, the fact, too that it hits the average sense of fair play and does not attempt too fine a discrimination of character its robustness and smoothness of structure and its extreme felicity and finish of style these things sufficiently account for its continued vitality.
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The School for Scandal is essentially a serious comedy for trivial people only just saved from total banality by a brilliant style and its excellent moments of farce. The screen scene is admittedly good theatre, but it theatrically is much too contrived. Sir peter could hardly have failed for instance, to see who the little French milliner behind the screen really was. It is also be very unlikely that Joseph would leave Sir peter and Charles together at a moment of crisis in order to go and meet lady Sneerwell who was waiting downstairs, but Joseph leaves because only then can Sir Peter take Charles into confidence about the French Milliner and only then can Charles throw the screen down.
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The School for Scandal survives then, as a classic of English literature in spite of its plot to which the modern reader may be advised to turn a deaf ear. It survives because of the continuous liveliness of the dialogue. Its supreme moment is not the casuistical episode at the beginning of Act IV when Joseph is insisting on a small slip from chastity as a preservative of a lady’s reputation. In a way indeed this is the most serious moment in the play. But sheridan’s forte is not really comedy but a kind of sublime farce.
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The School for Scandal is ruined by the relentless exposure of melodramatic villainy, but it has one moment that is perhaps almost the funniest in the whole of English literature and it occurs it Act V. Sir Benjamin has been giving details of the fictitious duel between Sir Peter and Charles. It was he says with swords when his uncle Crabtree rushes in and asserts that it was with pistols and then proceeds to describe how a postman was hit by Charles’s bullet. Not one word of Crabtree’s description is true, of course.
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But the circumstaniality. Which even Sir Benjamin concedes, creates the absurdity. This is a parody of the irrelevant complexity of social reality. And throughout the play there are similar intimations of a reckless, almost Falstaffian irreverence of the probable and the familiar, which continue to delight the reader. Sheridan’s three best pieces says Saintsbury are of extraordinary merit. They were all produced between 1775 and 1779 each is a masterpiece of its kind and the kinds are not identical.
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The Rivals is artificial comedy, inclining on one side to farce and in the parts of Falkland and Julia to the sentimental. But it is on its own rather artificial plan, constructed with remarkable skill and tightness and the characters of Sir Anthony Absoulutge, Mrs. Malaprop, Sir Lucius O’Trigge, and Bob Acres with almost all the rest, combine fun with at least theatrical verisimilitude in a very rare way.
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The School for Scandal flies higher but not quite so steadily. Pedants of construction fall more foul of it and even those who do not accept their standards must admit that the characters are less uniformly alive. However, it is no longer artificial comedy with stock personages, but a great comic castigation of manners that is attempted. In the Rivals Sheridan had vied with Vanbrugh and had beaten him, in The School for Scandal he challenges Moliere and is hardly beaten except in a certain universality.
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As for his third masterpiece, The Critic, it is simply a farce in excelsis, designedly extravagant and chaotic but all the more successful. The mock play is admittedly almost the best thing of the kind and the by play of Sneer, Puff, Dangle and the immortal Sir Fretful Plagiary requires none of the illegitimate attraction of identification with real personages to give itzest.
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The School for Scandal is a comic master-piece. The ingredients of the comedy combine into a gilt edged guarantee of success. Charles Surface is the good hearted but reckless hero, and Joseph his elder brother the hypocritical apparent pillar to rectitude. They are rivals for Maria, one wanting her heart and the other desiring her fortune and they become competitors too for the inheritance from their rich uncle, who arrives home from India and puts their respective characters to the test. The upshot is hilarious.
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In the first two of his three great plays- The Rivals, The School for Scandal-Sheridan combines the comedy of manners with s sentimental admixture only partially successful. Constructively both plays are remarkably skillful pieces of work, and of their wit it need only be said that they may challenge equality with Congreve and Vanbrugh with little of their coarseness. The Critic is written on more broadly farcical lines but within its limitation it is rarely delightful piece of extravaganza, displaying a gift of burlesque of the highest order. And with Sheridan, the great age of artificial comedy closes.
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In the first two of his three great plays-The Rivals and The School for Scandal-Sheridan combines the comedy of manners with a sentimental admixture only partially successful. Constructively, both plays are remarkably skilful pieces of work and of their wit it need only be said that they may challenge equality with Congreve and Vanbrugh, with little of their coarseness. The Critic is written on more broadly farcical lines, but within its limitations it is a rarely delightful piece of extravaganza, displaying a gift of burlesque of the highest order. And with Sheridan, the great age of artificial comedy closes.
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In the School for Scandal are to be seen to full advantage the author’s constant flow of true wit, has command of comic situation, his skilful handling of plot and his brilliant handling of stock characters. It is the only play of Sheridan in which there is an obvious moral purpose, for he has put his heart into the exposure of scandal mongering. The beset drawn characters are Sir Peter and Lady Teazle and Joseph Surface.
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Unity says Cazamian, is not the forte of Sheridan’s plays. They combine with skill diverse elements, plots and themes, they are amalgams of successful, sometimes admirable, scenes, rather than organic masterpieces. Sheridan is not a psychologist, but a shrewd and penetrating observer, he is more able to perceive the secret movements of vanity or envy than to construct characters. He knows how to create the ridiculous from the mechanisms which are built in us by the prejudices of the mind and the distortions of judgment but the province of comedy in which he most readily moves is that of situations and verbal virtuosity here at least he moves with astonishing mastery.
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The School for Scandal combines several plots, through the saving virtue of an irresistible gaiety and talent and Sheridan in it has given the English theatre some of its wittiest scenes. Joseph Surface in this play is a Tartuffe of tender emotions and fine maxims. The Rivals says Allardyce Nicoll, is on the whole a somewhat disappointing play. Some scenes in it are so excellent that we notice all the more clearly the weakness in the whole plan.
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Sentimental motives clash with elements taken from the Congreve school; Jonsonian exaggeration conflicts heavily with the play of wit and fancy. About the whole play, too breathes an atmosphere of farce and although there is something of farce in every great comedy this lower strain tends to weaken the general effect of Sheridan’s work. The School for Scandal is a more homogeneous work of art. Nothing truly disturbs the constant glitter of its wit, and the situations are never exaggerated or bizarre, rather do they stand forward as among the most perfect in the English theatre.
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No single scene possibly has won so much fame as the screen episode in Act IV of this play. Again there is a satire of the sentimental strain in the person of Joseph Surface, but this direct satire is subordinated to the expression of free wit that irradiates all the characters. There is no attempt here to catch the subtle delicacy of Goldsmith’s comedies, no effort to seize upon the inner movements of the human heart, no introduction of kindliness or emotion, all is crystal clear and that which furnishes the humour of the play is as in the comedies of Etherege and Congreve not the traits of mankind but their social manners. And with The School for Scandal we reach the culmination of the anti-sentimental movement. This as it were was the last word of the Augustan writers.