MRS. OLIPHANT'S " SHERIDAN."*
MRS. OLIPHANT holds so high a place among contemporary writers, that we shall not pay her the poor compliment of con- cealing our dissatisfaction with the account of Sheridan which she has written for Mr. John Morley's English Men of Letters. It may be doubted, perhaps, whether any woman's pen could deal quite satisfactorily with such a theme. It is certain that Mrs. Oliphant's has failed to do so. She has under-rated -Sheridan's merits as a man of letters, and given far too much prominence to his failings as a man, and it is passing strange that she, of all persons, should complain of Leigh Hunt's "Biographical and Critical Shetch " of Sheridan for being "entirely unsympathetic." It is easy to moralise on the ob- vious consequences of obvious errors ; but what are we to think of Mrs. Oliphant's irrelevant assumption that if Sheridan "had been free of the vices that palled him to earth, and possessed of the industry and persistency which were not in his nature, he would, with scarcely any doubt, have left both fortune and rank to his descendants." Was ever conclusion more lame and impotent ? Of what earthly importance is it to any one now living that Sheridan did nothing of the kind ? Of none, assuredly ; and the rather idle question as to what would have happened if Sheridan had been somebody else, if worth raising at all, should be raised in this form :—Would he, if 'endowed with all the virtues of a Wilberforce, have conceivably written the three brilliant plays which entitle him to take his place among English men of letters P We venture to think that he would not, and we are far indeed from agreeing with Mrs. Oliphant when she goes on to say that in everything Sheridan did, "he but scrafehed the soil." Opinion for opinion, we rather believe that in The Eivals, and The School for Scandal, and The Critic, Sheridan gave the world the quint- . essence of his dramatic genius, and that he spared no pains to do so. We lay no stress upon the " pot-boilers " which he wrote "upon compulsion," when, as he contemptuously said,
Kotzebue and German sausages were the order of the day "; but we imagine that when he turned from play-writing to politics, be was more or less conscious of being unequal to the task of rivalling his own past brilliant successes. Mrs. Oliphant, with some inconsistency, and with something like ungenerous depreciation of the genius which gained those successes, inclines to the same opinion. If it be correct, ought she not rather to praise Sheridan for prudently abandoning an arena on which no fresh great triumphs were to be won, than to blame him for not "labouring his field like a conscientious workman." He might, indeed, have made Drury Lane pay, had he so laboured, and might have left fortune, if not rank, in this way to his descendants. "Garrick," says Mrs. Oliphant, "had made a great fortune from that theatre, and there was every reason to expect that Sheridan would do still more. But Sheridan, alas ! had none of the qualities that were re- quisite for that achievement." We toss that "alas !" into the Thames, for no true admirer of Sheridan would be willing to barter his unequalled career in Parliament for a succession of plays, rising a little above or sinking a little below mediocrity, and fit only to be bound, and stand unread "on the shelves of every gentleman's library." In one sense, no doubt, Sheridan was an unsuccessful politician. He was not often nor ever long -in office, and with his principles and fidelity to his party, it is not so easy to see, as Mrs. Oliphant supposes, bow he could have won rank for his descendants in Parliament. He made a mistake in putting his trust in the Prince of -Wales; but many excuses may be made for that mistake, and we are not inclined to judge very severely the trick which was played upon the leaders of the Whig party, by himself and his patron, when the latter became Regent. Mrs. Oliphant says of this trick, that
'Sheridan, "to please his Prince, and perhaps to avenge himself, -had broken his allegiance to his party, and henceforward neither they whom he bad thus deserted, nor he for whom be had de- serted them, had any place or occasion for him." She appears to forget that Sheridan's party, after the Prince's defection, if
" defection " be the word, were never in a position to offer place to any one till years after Sheridan's death. And as "the only profit he carried with him out of his prolonged and brilliant political life" was the post of Receiver of the Duchy of Cornwall, conferred upon him by the Prince, we are curious to learn what the value of that appointment was, and also whether Sheridan had to resign it when the Prince flung over the Opposition.
• English Men of Lettsre.—Shrridas. By Mrs. Oliphant. London: Macmillan and Co. 1883.
The best part of Mrs. Oliphant's book is her narrative of the romantic way in which Sheridan wooed and won his first wife. And, indeed, it is only fair to say that the hand which wrote Young Musgrave has lost nothing of its cunning, so far as the art of telling a story is concerned. It is only when the authoress gets on the stilts of criticism, if that be a fair expression, that her graceful and limpid English becomes turgid and turbid. We shall justify these epithets, so far as space will permit, but must insist first on a very obvious gap in this volume, a gap due, if we are not mistaken, to the fact that it is written by a lady. Of no man less than Sheridan could it be said with truth that "he wrote like an angel and talked like poor Poll." His conversation was superb, says Byron ; his wit was proverbial. Yet a great deal of that wit and conversation was tinctured with a jovial coarse- ness which a man might record and a woman might read with- out a blush, but not vice versa. Mrs. Oliphant has instinctively felt that it was not for her to draw such a picture of Sheridan in his palmy days of fun and devilment as Charles Lever could have drawn, had he chosen. Bat her book suffers in consequence, and the reprobate whom she is much too fond of lecturing will leave a very wrong impression on the minds of those who mistake him for a life-like presentment of the real Sheridan. We are not pleading for "unsavoury anecdotes," or anything of the kind ; we are simply contending that Sheridan is a literary dish, so to speak, which should be flavoured with a far more piquant sauce than Mrs. Oliphant has used. Mrs. Oliphant, we think, might wisely as well as generously have varied her up- braidings with some reference to the fact that those failings were shared by two of Sheridan's greatest contemporaries. Pitt's debts at his death were ten times larger than Sheridan's were. For squandered more tha'n Sheridan ever possessed, and but for the munificence of admiring friends would have lacked the means of subsistence before he died. Pitt shortened his life by strong potations far more certainly than can be said of Sheridan, and if Fox did not, it was not for want of trying ; yet in criticising the lives of these celebrities, men are content, for the most part, to lay no undue stress on those failings, and to say with in- difference, if not approval :—
" How few like Fox can speak, like Pitt can think; But all like Fox can game, like Pitt can drink."
Sheridan's thoughts and words are stamped far more indelibly on the language than anything -Which Fox ever spoke or Pitt ever thought. It is no more than fair to claim for him the same indulgence which is readily extended to them. No one supposes that any one of this illustrious trio deserves a niche in English hagiology, and few will deny that the bones of all of them rest worthily in Westminster Abbey.
Mrs. Oliphant, indeed, we regret to find, is among that few, and thinks that it may be permitted now to doubt whether the last mournful honours that were paid to Sheridan were not more than his real services to England deserved. Silence is the only fitting answer to a remark like this ; but it fixes Mrs. Oliphant as incompetent to take the true measure of the orator and dramatist whom she so unwisely depreciates. Yet, after all, if her depreciation were consistent, we should feel compelled to examine it thoroughly. As it is, it would be pure waste of time to engage in so thankless a task. For it would be easy to pick, from the mingled yarn of Mrs. Oliphant's criti- cisms, line after line, and phrase after phrase, which concede all that Sheridan's warmest admirers would claim for him. She speaks, for instance, of his oratorical triumphs as" triumphs as legitimate, as noble, and worthy as ever man won ;" and almost in the same breath speaks of the occasion of those triumphs as "an extraordinary piece of good fortune for Sheridan in a career made up of happy hits and splendid pieces of luck, afford- ing him scope for all his gifts, and for that tendency to clap- trap and inflated diction which is almost always successful with the multitude." Among the above-mentioned "happy hits," we may take it that The School for Scandal is included. Mrs. Oliphant's treatment of this famous comedy is characteristic. She begins by saying, in the turgid and turbid style which we promised to illustrate, that "it blazed forth, a great Jupiter among the minor starlights of the drama, throwing the rival house and all its preparations into the shade." But after lavishing any amount of compliments on the author, for the sparkle of his dialogue, for the ease and polish of his diction, for his fine instinct for that concentration of incident and interest which make a striking dramatic scene," in which nobody has excelled him, and very few indeed reach any- thing like the level of his power ;" after deprecating all corn- parison of "these brilliant studies of society in the eighteenth century" with Shakespeare's " radiant world of imagination" as futile, which indeed it would be,—this "great comedy," this "best modern English comedy," turns out to be no such great thing, after alL And why? Because " Sheridan's view of life," forsooth, "was not a profound one ;" because "Lady Teazle's easy penitence, her husband's pardon, achieved by the elegant turn of her head seen through the open door, and the entry of Charles Surface into all the good things of this life, in recom- pense for an insolent sort of condescending gratitude to his egotistical old uncle, were all he knew on this great subject." This is not criticism, or if it be, we make bold to apply to it the adjective which Garrick applied to Adam Smith's conversation, —it is flabby. There is a time for all things, a time to take a profound view of life, and a time to take a superficial view of life. In plays written, as Sheridan's were, to amuse and delight audiences who required nothing better than to be amused and delighted, profound views of life would be out of place; and as these plays have, after the lapse of more than a century, lost nothing of their attractiveness, we may take it for granted, that if this author's view of life was superficial, his knowledge of human nature was profound. Finally, and we would put this question as an argumentum ad &mines?, to Mrs. Oliphant, is she prepared to contend that in The Merry Wives of Windsor, for instance, Shakespeare has taken a view of life one whit more profound than Sheridan has taken in The School for Scandal?
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