[In the following essay, originally published in 1931, Sawyer traces the evolution of comedy during the eighteenth century and discusses the societal forces and influences that provoked changes in the genre.]

It has been often attested that one gets close to the real soul of a man or a people through observing what that man or that people finds to laugh at. Without entering into the philosophy of the matter, however, we may at least be sure that the term “comedy” connotes larger possibilities than those of mere entertainment, and as a form of drama, for instance, affords a vehicle for the criticism of life. The purpose of our present discussion is to note the character and performance of a particular type of comedy, the comedy of manners, in England from the time of Sheridan's The School for Scandal to the beginning of the World War in 1914. When we contrast this type in its flourishing in 1700 and in its languishing in 1800 we are confronted with more than the vicissitudes of stage history: we glimpse in reflection significant changes in English society.

For a moment let us call to mind the nature of comedy in general and of the comedy of manners in particular.

Comedy may be said to direct its emphasis upon incident, manners or character, though of course these elements cannot be exclusive of each other. The first entertains by its complications, the second by its exposure of a social scene and the third by its depiction of human nature. The last two, often merged indistinguishably, take us into the realm where true or high comedy prevails. High comedy views man as a social animal in the midst of his fellows, with customs, conventions, and traditions of his own devising, and prods him gently or mockingly, as he stands confounded by that which he has made. It catches him red-handed in folly or stupidity, in inconsistency or errors of taste or of judgment, or in self-pity or sentimentality, and administers the lash on his bare back or thumps him playfully over the head with the blown bladder. According to the extent of his obliquity is the severity of the castigation, whereby the soul is cleansed by laughter as by a fresh, sweet wind.

Furthermore, incongruity being at the heart of the comic, and man, as a bundle of disparities and contradictions, being the supreme incongruity, it follows that the higher types of comedy will concern themselves primarily with people rather than with incident, except as incidents grow out of what the people are. The glory of comedy, as of drama in general, has been its portraiture, based on observation, subject to the transmuting power of the imagination. In the apprehension of such characters the intellect functions more than the emotions. The judgment is stimulated more than sympathy. As Walpole said, “Life is a comedy to him who thinks.” Hence high comedy is for the few, though it may contain surface elements that suffice for the amusement of the many.

It is upon characters, thus responsibly conceived, that the thoughtful Meredithian laughter is directed, by which comedy is lifted above the plane of sensation and amusement and becomes an intellectual experience. One laughs, but, having detachment of mind, he sees his potential self in the object of his laughter; and thereby, as it were, he is laughed at as well as laughing. Thus laughter must be finely tempered, searching, corrective, yet always humane, if it is to rise to the noble pretensions of a spiritual therapeutic and comedy be realized to its highest. If it be tinctured with sentiment, it loses its silvery peal and becomes conscious of itself, breeding self-pity. Only when an individual or a society has become emancipated morally and intellectually can he or it withstand the fusillade of that laughter with remedial effect. Yet high comedy does not purport to be satire. To reflect sincerely the social scene suffices. Satire is rather a matter of mood or flavor as the writer may dispose. Neither is a moral implication necessary to nor conformable to the highest reaches of comedy. What of ethical significance the reader or beholder elects to gather from a play is his own; that which a too zealous author elects to do for him will probably be nobody's. Setting up standards and passing judgment upon the people of a play as their conduct betrays a departure from those standards is a posture the Englishman with his endowment of moral earnestness is prone to assume. But here a danger lurks—the engrossment of the writer may cloud that high disinterestedness which art should display.

The phrase “comedy of manners” refers to a comedy form reflecting the life, thought, and manners of upper-class society, faithful to its traditions and philosophy. It is intellectually and dispassionately conceived, in the nature of a detached commentary, in which the only moral considerations are sincerity and fidelity to the facts of the society represented. The attitude of the playwright is, at least theoretically, unpartisan, although it is difficult for a latent flavor of satire to be kept out entirely. Characters may emerge into complete individuality, but more often universal traits give way to those types into which the world of fashion inclines to reproduce itself. Dialogue is naturally of more than ordinary importance, for the leisure of this world promotes the cultivation of verbal smartness, and this smartness dialogue must display, even if at the expense of naturalness. And lastly, one feels a certain idealization of the whole picture—a heightening of values, a seasoning of effects, an acceleration of tempo.

By the end of the third decade of the eighteenth century the last of that group of talented playwrights who had caught into their comedies of manners the wit, the raillerie and the glamor of the world of fashion had passed from the earthly scene. Commencing with George Etherege and ending with Vanbrugh and Farquhar they had for all time achieved the comedy of high life. Cibber's The Provoked Husband (1728), a reworking of Vanbrugh's A Journey to London, and one of the very last full echoes of the Restoration, still adhered essentially to the traditions of the type, though the protecting cynicism and unmoral nonchalance of that type were beginning to crumble before the rising tides of a moral awakening. A momentum had been created, however, which continued until well past the mid-century, with very appreciable acceleration from the pens of George Colman the elder, particularly in The Jealous Wife (1761) and The Clandestine Marriage (1766), and of Arthur Murphy, e.g., in his The Way To Keep Him (1760) and Know Your Own Mind (1778).

And yet the comedy of manners as a type was becoming ineffectual as the second generation since its apogee arrived. Mr. Nicoll says¹ the phenomenon was due to a degeneration of taste, a complexity of standards and aims, a confusion of sentiment with purely artistic purposes in a play, lapsing into burlesque and farce, whereas the decay of the drama of 1610-1642 was symptomatic of a great age going to seed in its social and moral ideals. Even the comedies of George Colman the elder marked a drift from the manners school, which may be glimpsed in an occasional character, phrase or scene. Satire was gone. Dialogue was no longer paramount, but incident. We are in a world of squires and middle-class folk. The gentry appeared now as decadents in their dotage, to be laughed at or made occasions for preachments on democracy. Melodramatic situations began to appear, as is inevitable when playwrights have lost the art of dialogue. Sensibility was everywhere. Harriot in The Jealous Wife is so shocked and hurt that Charles, the romantic hero, should have been tipsy the night before, that she is blinded to his unmistakable devotion and manly remorse and orders him out of her life with an imperious gesture. (Of course she orders him back later.) How many hundreds of years have elapsed from 1661 to 1761! In Harriot we have entered a new world—the world of Clarissa and Evelina, of Amelia and Lydia Bennet.

Just when it seemed that the English comedy of manners was to die out altogether, Sheridan penned his School for Scandal, which with all the defects that critics have essayed to lay at its door is a brilliant tour de force of comic writing, a gem of artifice and scintillant cleverness. Yet we see it to have sprung from Sheridan and not from his age. Its very remarkable vogue of popularity extending well into the next century was but a tribute to its intrinsic capacity to entertain; it was powerless to stem the tides of popular taste drifting toward the didactic, the sentimental, and the sensational upon the stage.

The quarter century elapsing between The School for Scandal and the close of the century found the London theatres dispensing a liberal fare of comedy, some of which established a faint kinship with comedy of manners; but only faint, because of the impregnation of sentiment and of moral consciousness. Hugh Kelly's School for Wives (1773) presents surface features of the comedy of fashion, but the chief use by the author of the Irish servant, Connolly, is to point some wholesome apothegms against dueling. Though a happy, roistering sort of fellow such as Farquhar knew so well to draw, he can burst into tears when it seems his master is to marry for money, and exclaims, “I am sure nobody's eye ever looks half so well as when it is disfigured by a tear of humanity.” The last lines of the play are worth quoting as showing how a moral can be dragged willy-nilly into a play by the heels.

MISS Walsingham:
The modern critics say that the only business of comedy is to make people laugh.
BELVILLE:
That is degrading the dignity of letters exceedingly, as well as lessening the utility of the stage. A good comedy is a capital effort of genius, and should therefore be directed to the noblest purposes.
MISS Walsingham:
Very true; and unless we learn something while we chuckle, the carpenter who nails a pantomime together will be entitled to more applause than the best comic poet in the kingdom.

Mrs. Hannah Cowley's The Belle's Stratagem (1780) is quite a lively play, full of amusing situations and of neatly turned, satirically flavored dialogue. Mrs. Inchbald in I'll Tell You What (1785) and Everyone Has His Fault (1793)—containing a serious minor plot—espouses the spirit of meliorism unmistakably. Situations in the hard, clear, unemotional manner of the Restoration she shows herself capable of devising, only to turn away from the invitation at the beck of feeling. The temper of her dramatic instinct is exemplified in her typically eighteenth-century attitude toward the comedy of Shakespeare. Frequently his exuberant naturalism offended her sense of decorum. Of the Falstaff of Merry Wives of Windsor she naturally disapproved. Dryden's version of The Tempest she preferred to Shakespeare's. Caliban repulsed her; Ariel was evanescent.² In Everyone Has His Fault and in Wives as They Were and Maids as They Are (1797) characters pursue the follies and vices of fashionable life; intrigue abounds; and yet we strive in vain to succumb to the illusion of old comedy. Libertinism, which abounded as profusely during the Regency as in the days of Charles and of Anne, suffered a timely redemption; gayety was dissolved in a saccharine solution of sentiment. We are conscious of the presence of a thesis just out of sight. Already comedy was turning to domestic scenes and themes. Nicoll justly senses the atmosphere of Dickens fifty years before the Pickwick Papers. Like most of her confreres Mrs. Inchbald borrowed liberally from the French—from Molière or from lesser lights that followed him—but as is normally found in such English practice she failed to catch the élan of the original.

Other references to comedies of the eighties and nineties will but deepen our impression that comedy of manners cannot breathe an air too freighted with the urge to exalt virtue; to weep with apprehension when it is under the cloud and weep with tremors of relief when it at last emerges triumphant. These things were but symptomatic of the moral consciousness of the age of the English doctrinaire novel and of Rousseau's Nouvelle Heloise. A solemn, persevering sense of reform was remote indeed from the light, acid touches of corrective satire that comedies of manners were wont to employ. Thomas Holcroft was caught up in the sweep of humanitarian ideas, in the political and philosophic speculation emanating from the struggle for liberty in France. Even his lighter comedies did not escape a too pronounced intentionalism. Sir Frederick Fashion in Seduction (1787), a not unworthy successor of the long line of fashion-worshipping old rakes throughout the eighteenth century, like Sir Fopling and Lord Foppington, not only does not succeed in his amours but is held up to open repudiation as an object lesson of depravity. Count Villars in The School for Arrogance, Covent Garden (1791), a prosy borrowing from the French, exchanges sensibilities with the nobly born Lucy as if he were not to the manner born. Duplicity (1781), in both briskness of dialogue and in fresh, natural presentation of men and women, is distinctly the nearest to genuine comedy of the three.

Frederick Reynolds in the nineties, connected with the Della Cruscans of sentimental memory, wrote such reasonably actable comedies as The Dramatist (1789) and The Rage (1794), retaining something of the conduct and characterization of the Restoration—but only something. Among the people of the play are “Sirs” and “Lords” and “Ladies,” but the titles are worn with a difference. In The Rage Sir George Gauntlet, the not very convincing rake of the beau monde, is defeated in his designs by Gingham, who represents the honest, outspoken merchant class, proud of its common origins. The folk of fashion are now made stupid, the butts for ridicule. And the way they are drawn, they undoubtedly deserve it. From this time on for decades one finds practically never the world of society represented as sufficient to itself; whether one calls it immoral or unmoral, it had at least been represented in earlier years as superbly unconscious of any obligations or allegiances save to itself. It wore life upon its breast only as a bauble perhaps, but at least it wore the toy exquisitely. But in The Rage the Honorable Mr. Savage is a boor, consorting with touts and gamblers, and his sister is a loud, horsy woman, arrogant, mannish, of atrocious tastes. Mrs. Darnley in Act II, Scene 2 somewhat smugly voices not only herself but Mr. Reynolds and his London public when she remarks, “I find that good breeding is confined to no rank or situation; it consists in good sense and good humour; and I believe we may see as large a share of it under the roof of the cottage as in the splendid mansions of the great.” A very proper note in itself but a discord to the ear of worldly comedy. And characteristically enough, the play ends with protestations of virtuous conduct as the characters see the curtain, like the coming of the final Judgment, descending upon them. Here as elsewhere the surface earmarks of genteel comedy are illusive. The voice is Jacob's voice, but the hands are the hands of Esau.

In much the same general category fell the erstwhile popular comedies of Thomas Morton, such as A Cure for the Heartache (1797) and The School of Reform or How to Rule a Husband (1805). Here, too, the touch of gentility, of breeding in so-called polite society, is gone. Behavior is shoddy and uncouth. Folly and knavery no longer attract because done with a flourish of aplomb. Sinning has ceased to be a fine art. The scene characteristically shifts from town to country. Beaus and roués give way to country squires.³ Our entertainment depends now not so much upon cleverness of language and of plot manipulation as upon strong contrasts, strong flavor, broad humor. With the advent of rural and domestic scenes came a new ardor in life-like imitation of sights and sounds upon the stage. The curtain of The School of Reform went up on such a scene—“Farmyard: house on one side; neat flower-garden on the other; the bells of a team jingling.” Little by little stage effect came to be an absorbing end in itself. The integrity of art was being sacrificed to the temporary and local achievement of actor and scene-painter. Adroit yet honest play construction fell into disuse. Plays we feel to be built arbitrarily from the outside in, not from the inside out. The old comedy with its ingenious involution and evolution and neat correlation of character and plot became a rarity. Furthermore, the plays of Morton illustrate the ever-growing trend toward language of the theatre rather than language of life. This tendency is but another indication of a waning dramatic instinct. Such passages as the following from The School of Reform (by no means exceptional) will illustrate for Morton and for others this indulgence in theatricalism:

FREDERICK:
'Tis true, I think of my birth with grief, but till vice can be proved hereditary, I will not think of it with shame: if virtue be an inmate in this breast, shall I basely scorn the fostering hands that placed it there? … O generous imperial Britain! Look proudly round; and while other nations boast their Pantheons of gods, do thou display thy princely endowments for calamity—thy palaces for poverty. I've talked too long—pray pardon me; but, oh! this heart—this grateful heart—was bursting!

(I: 2)

SIR Hubert Stanley:
But away with care—this is a moment devoted to ecstasy—this is the hour a doating father is to clasp an only child, who, after combating with disease and death, returns triumphant to his arms, in lusty health and manhood.

(I: 3)

Among other comedies of these latter years of the eighteenth century, worthy at least of mention for their partial adherence to the manners genre, were Richard Griffith's Variety (1782), in which the characters hold up rather well the patrician manner, speech, and philosophy; Charles Macklin's Man of the World (1781), a robust and assertive play, devoid of taste and finesse, of a hackneyed plot but popular through its satirically treated Scotch caricature of Sir Pertinax Macsycophant; General Burgoyne's The Heiress, first played in Drury Lane in January, 1786, a near approach to the true spirit of comedy, praised by Walpole for its gentility and, despite its sentimental propensities, an easy and pleasant, if not smart treatment of polite society;⁴ and Edward Jerningham's The Welsh Heiress (1795), a talented play by one who knew the world of fashion at first hand, if he did not entirely know the secret of writing a stage play. One is forced to believe that these, as other comedies of the time, were in large measure given vitality by the talented way in which they were interpreted by the actors of the London theatres.

While these plays were in a measure continuing the manners tradition, the tastes of the day were being subscribed to by the unqualifiedly sentimental and decorous plays of George Colman the younger and of Richard Cumberland, both of whom possessed theatrical sense in considerable degree though but little dramatic power. The Heir at Law (1797) and John Bull (1803) of the former held the boards consistently with their ample effusions of humor and sympathetic treatment of everyday people. The aristocracy when introduced is confirmedly unprincipled or stupid. A romantic atmosphere, obviously foreign to comedy of manners, prevails. But Richard Cumberland is the arch-sentimentalist. If manners engage him, they are those of the lower classes. He is rectitude itself. Reconciliation and moral adjudication stamp themselves deeply on his endings, whatever violence may have been done meanwhile to the facts of life and human nature. Cumberland's words applied to his five-act comedy, A Hint to Husbands (1806), betoken his general practice:

This play has been published, and they, who are pleased to patronize it in their closets, will perceive that I have persisted in making no sacrifice to the ruling fashion of the times, nor studied to contrive any situations which the favorers of farce are likely to be amused with; if it may aspire to any merit, it will be found where I would wish to place it, in the moral.⁵

We see comedy following two divergent courses: irresponsible, hilarious farce or a sentimentalized, morally intentioned comedy that nearly loses touch with laughter. Hear Cumberland again in the same book:

I thereupon looked into society for the purpose of discovering such as were the victims of its national, professional, or religious prejudices; in short, for those suffering characters which stood in need of an advocate, and out of these I meditated to select and form heroes for my future dramas, of which I would study to make such favorable and reconciliatory delineations, as might incline the spectators to look upon them with pity, and receive them into their good opinion and esteem.⁶

It must be confessed that the author of The Jew and The West Indian wrote plays sincerely, according to the light as he saw it; the following decades were to show work less worthily conceived. Already the drift was setting in, as when he says:⁷

I … never disgraced my colors by abandoning the cause of the legitimate Comedy, to whose service I am sworn, and in whose defence I have kept the field for nearly half a century—till at last I have survived all true national taste, and lived to see buffoonery, spectacle and puerility so effectually triumph, that now to be repulsed from the stage is to be recommended to the closet, and to be applauded by the theatre is little else than a passport to the puppet show—I only say what everybody knows to be true.

This last quotation from Cumberland voices in part at least the grievance of all types of legitimate comedy. Certain it is that drama of the theatre and drama as a form of letters had gone divergent ways—always a parlous situation—and in the realm of comedy such a thing as literary standards may be dismissed as negligible. Even a high degree of structural skill and a talent for assemblage and manipulation of material with a maximum of effect was wanting. With occasional scenes of gayety and smartness and with occasional instances of vivid characterization we must rest content. Unity of action and effect were little sought after. Incidents were thrown together unconnectedly and without a sense of proportion. Writers played fast and loose with dramatic probability. Instead of ease and elegance were fustian and strained rhetorical effects; instead of wit and humor were cheap joking and buffoonery. As to the people of the play, they were man-made, not nature-made, and as such became absolute embodiments without shading. Leigh Hunt, a sympathetic playgoer, affirmed that he laughed at the actors in the comedies of Dibdin and Reynolds but could not recall the dialogue.

The comedy of manners that had flourished in the middle-eighteenth century soil of leisurely courtesy and good breeding found itself an anomaly in the new day of vision and revolt incident to and following the French Revolution. Paine and Godwin provoked a philosophy of mankind. Humble life was dignified. With such theories and such controversy the comedy of manners could have little traffic, nor was it amenable to such phrases as “the rights of man” and “the triumph of nature over artificial civilization.” When Cumberland says⁸ that he made a special search for those characters that are usually exhibited upon the stage as butts for ridicule and abuse, that he might, as their advocate, so present them to an audience as to awaken its good opinion and esteem, his humanitarianism at once betrays his affiliations. Moreover, the years of the Napoleonic Wars were years of discipline and denial. Amusements were curtailed. Promenades and masquerades by the beau monde ceased. Ranelagh and Almack's were suffering a sea-change. Bishop Wilberforce inaugurated a society for the reformation of manners. The externals of good breeding gave way before a compelling decorum. Of course all joy was not dead. The regency and monarchy of the fourth George was an epoch of fashion, like that of the first, though with more of glitter and less of politesse and taste. The routs and fêtes and balls of the Duke of Devonshire, the Marquis of Hertford, and the Duchess of St. Albans were almost national events, but somehow there was a pronounced decadence in it all. Beneath the laughter and the music was the ominous muttering of the discontented. We have already hinted at the new fashion to ridicule the aristocrat, to laugh at him rather than with him, to relegate him in a play to a rôle of villainy or senility and to exalt instead the worth and virtue of the true-born, common-bred Englishman. Yet in large measure the aristocrat was treated no worse than he had a right to expect; he was no longer a sympathetic part of the theatrical world as he had been a hundred years before. Indeed, he was vanishing from the drawing-room as he was from the stage. The modern beau, says Blackwood's for June, 1818,⁹ has not the wit and the mischief of his ancestors. He is harmless but not innocent, unprepossessing in his naughtiness, too obvious by far. If he is still a beau, he is most positively no beau ideal.

They would not injure a lady's honor if they could, if it required any trouble;—and they could not if they would, if it required any wit. … Damages have taken the place of duels—horses of mistresses—and boxing of intrigue. Or if they do fight now and then, it is not to defend a woman's honor,—for they would scorn to own a woman who had any; or to prove that they possess it themselves: but merely to show that they have nerves and impudence enough to do without it.

Hence it was quite inevitable that comedies of manners should have all but ceased to exist and that audience and play alike should have become bourgeois and parochial. The possibilities for a sympathetic or at least for a satirical treatment of high life in comic vein were not being realized. Perhaps a Sheridan could have compassed the task, but it would have been another labor of Hercules.

It is interesting to note that The School for Scandal, as the last great comedy of manners down to our time, continued to hold the audiences of a day foreign in spirit to its own, and that by reason of its unmatched brilliance of dialogue and situation. If the public seventy-five years after its advent were unused to and unfriendly toward the derision of affectation and sentimentality on the stage and found Sheridan's deft, complacent handling of the lancet of satire upon the world of the Surfaces and the Teazles not so derogatory as their palates would fancy, yet their continued patronage of the play testified to the power with which the psychology of high life was presented, to their delight in conversation raised to the level of an art, to the inherent capacity of wit and gayety at their best to triumph over sentiment, maudlin and diffuse. Walter Sichel in his work on Sheridan¹⁰ states that The School for Scandal was played in London seventy-three times in the three seasons of 1777-1779 and nearly succeeded in making the American War of Revolution forgotten. Nor in the early seventeen-eighties did it lose its appeal, for according to the Theatrical Register of the Gentleman's Magazine it was performed at Drury Lane eighteen times in 1780, nineteen times in 1781, thirteen in 1782. In the years 1783-1790 it appeared in the neighborhood of fifty times and in the year of 1791 alone, twelve times. All this while it retained its popularity in the provincial theatres, which evaded the Licensing Act of 1737, when necessary, by “changing” the play into a burletta by the introduction of casual music.

During the first seven years of the nineteenth century the Sheridan play appeared in the Theatrical Register twenty-four times, along with continued revival of the most popular comedies of manners, especially those of Colman the elder, Hannah Cowley and Arthur Murphy. From 1808, in which The School for Scandal was listed but once, there seems to be a marked falling off in the presentation of the manners genre of comedy, although revivals appeared at sporadic intervals on past the mid-century mark. Sheridan's comedy, for example, was revived in 1810, 1813, 1818, 1823, 1825, 1837, and 1839 (during this last season it played sixteen times). The next year its stellar brightness was temporarily overshadowed by a comedy of far less magnitude, which had caught the public taste, i.e., the London Assurance of Dion Boucicault, playing sixty-nine times to a modest three by the older comedy. But the eternal gayety of the latter is evidenced by its occasional but persistent and successful revivals up to our own day. That it was repeatedly reprinted in England and upon the Continent and that it was translated into most of the languages of Europe and was reproduced variously on the Continental stage are corroborative evidences beyond the field of this paper. The School for Scandal put fresh lifeblood into the anæmic form of comedy by holding up in frequent revivals an example before the British theatre, but the transfusion of blood was ultimately futile. It was the last of a dramatic dynasty, not the precursor of a new. It was revived much but imitated seldom and in vain. Genest lists in the index to his Some Account of the English Stage twenty titles of plays beginning with “School for” or “School of,” exclusive of The School for Scandal. Of these, fourteen appeared after 1777. The influence here of a very successful play upon the titles of other plays and possibly through the title upon the character of the work itself is to be expected but goes little beyond a verbal echo.

The consensus of critical reaction to the Sheridan play was what we should anticipate from the prevailingly Puritan attitude toward the theatre and the drama. Once again the Gentleman's Magazine affords us evidence. In January, 1778, appeared an article¹¹ deploring its immorality and reminding the theatres of their commanding duty to combat vice and support the cause of virtue. The comedy is “as defective in morality as abundant in wit.” “More dangerous to the manners of society than it can possibly tend to promote its pleasure.” Referring presumably to Joseph Surface the writer remarks that “however odious hypocrisy may be, it is for the interests of virtue that some attention should be paid to appearances,” and further says that Charles is more dangerous to morality than his brother because he is made attractive. He concludes by saying that Sheridan probably wrote the play to assist in destroying a taste for the sentimental comedy of Cumberland, but the latter “has judiciously exerted the whole duty of an author, which is, not only to paint nature, but to paint such parts of it as every good man would wish to see imitated.” The judicial type of criticism with a vengeance! Again in 1799 the reviewer of a satirical poem¹² of passing interest takes occasion to cite The School for Scandal as making gambling, libertinism and debauchery amiable and attractive. Finally, in a critical and biographical article¹³ running in the July and August numbers of 1816 and occasioned by Sheridan's death in July (hence certainly as adulatory as the circumstance would permit) we read that “it is to be lamented that the author did not apply himself with more care to improve the heart and stimulate the public mind to the cultivation of morality,” and that “Mr. Sheridan on this occasion appears in a great measure to have forgotten the legitimate end of dramatic composition and not to have been sufficiently sensible that whatever is intended for the amusement of society at large should also be capable of communicating solid instruction and producing real amendment.”

In such clouding of values one wonders if the insouciance and gaieté de coeur of old comedy could ever return. In the whirligig of time, however, it did. To the mind of Macaulay, well ordered but frequently lacking in perspective and balance, robust but not subtle or adroit, and imbued with the thought of its generation, the comic dramatists of the Restoration were only the profligate spokesmen of a profligate age.¹⁴ To meet their plays on a neutral, amoral ground, effecting the fine gesture of detachment, as Charles Lamb invites, is too exacting for a genius notably partisan and insular. Furthermore, though he commends the comedies of Sheridan (and of Congreve) for their correct and vigorous delineation of human nature, he believes that he has injured the cause of English comedy, for comedy is corrupted by wit. Sheridan's prodigality of wit is especially reprehended. “Flowers and fruits of the intellect abound; but it is the abundance of a jungle, not of a garden, unwholesome, bewildering, unprofitable from its very plenty, rank from its very fragrance.” The eminent Macaulay does not apprehend the character and function of manners comedy when he compares Sheridan to Shakespeare to the detriment of the former. He finds no place for the confessedly artificial, confessedly over-wrought presentment of high life, its series of coruscating pictures drawn together by a plot into a lightly affected unity.

Notes

1. Allardyce Nicoll, History of Early Eighteenth Century Drama, 1700-1750.

2. S. R. Littlewood, Elizabeth Inchbald and Her Circle, p. 112.

3. It is almost symbolic of this shifting emphasis that the wearing of court dress and swords as Parliamentary attire is changed by the innovation of Mr. Fox and that the plebeian umbrella begins to supplant the more patrician cane in the hands of the gentleman pedestrian. Traill and Mann, Social England, V, 600.

4. Lady Emily's words in Act II might be used to describe the play: “A light, airy sketch of genteel manners as they are; with a little endeavor at what they ought to be, rather entertaining than instructive, not without art, but sparing in the use of it.”

5. Memoirs of Richard Cumberland, p. 395.

6. Ibid., p. 142.

7. John Genest, Some Account of the English Stage, VIII, 397.

8. S. T. Williams, Richard Cumberland, His Life and Dramatic Works, pp. 103, 104.

9. Blackwood's, III (1818), 330.

10. Walter Sichel, Sheridan from New and Original Material, I, 580.

11. Gentleman's Magazine, XLVIII (1778), 57, 58.

12. Gentleman's Magazine, LXIX (1799), 682.

13. Ibid., LXXXVI (1816), 178 ff.

14. T. B. Macaulay, “Comic Dramatists of the Restoration,” Edinburgh Review, LXXII (1841), 490-528.

Works Cited

History—Dramatic

Nicoll, Allardyce. A History of Early Eighteenth Century Drama, 1700-1750. Cambridge (Eng.), 1925.

Memoirs and Reminiscences of Actors, Playwrights, Managers, Etc.

Cumberland, Richard. Memoirs of Richard Cumberland. New York, 1806, London, 1807.

Biography and Criticism of Playwrights

Littlewood, S. R. Mrs. Inchbald and Her Circle. London, 1921.

Sichel, Walter. Sheridan from New and Original Material …, 2 v. London, 1909.

Williams, S. T. Richard Cumberland, His Life and Dramatic Works. New Haven, 1917.

Social Background

Traill, H. D. and Mann, J. S. Social England, 6 v. London, New York, 1904.

Bibliography and Reference

[Genest, John.] Some Account of the English Stage, from the Restoration in 1660 to 1830, 10 v. Bath, 1832.