The Pepys Club, which draws its life from so fertile a source, may well flourish and multiply its members. The portraits reproduced here, in particular a page of Mr Pepys’s ‘individual features’, are of themselves sufficient to make this volume of memorable interest. And yet there is one contribution which we would rather have left unread. It consists only of a little Latin, a few signs, two or three letters of the alphabet, such as any oculist in Harley-street will write you out upon half a sheet of note-paper for a couple of guineas. But to Samuel Pepys it would have meant a pair of spectacles, and what that pair of spectacles upon that pair of eyes might have seen and recorded it is tantalizing to consider. Instead of giving up his Diary upon May 31st, 1669, he might with this prescription have continued it for another thirty years. It is some relief to be told that the prescription is beyond the skill of contemporary oculists; but this is dashed by Mr Power’s statement that had Pepys chanced to sit upon the ‘tube spectacall’ of paper which his oculist provided so that he must read through a slit, he would then have found his eye strain removed; his acute mind would have set itself to determine the cause; he would have pasted slips of black paper on each side of his glasses, and the Diary might have been continued to the end of his life; whilst the paper he would certainly have read upon the subject before the Royal Society would have added still greater lustre to his name, and might have revolutionized the laws of dioptrics.
But our regret is not purely selfish. How reluctant Pepys was to close his Diary the melancholy last paragraph bears witness. He had written until the act of writing ‘undid’ his eyes, for the things he wished to write were not always fit to be written in long-hand, and to cease to write ‘was almost as much as to see myself go into my grave’. And yet this was a writing which no one, during his life at any rate, was to be allowed to read. Not only from the last sentence, but from every sentence, it is easy to see what lure it was that drew him to his Diary. It was not a confessional, still less a mere record of things useful to remember, but the storehouse of his most private self, the echo of life’s sweetest sounds, without which life itself would become thinner and more prosaic. When he went upstairs to his chamber it was to perform no mechanical exercise, but to hold intercourse with the secret companion who lives in everybody, whose presence is so real, whose comment is so valuable, whose faults and trespasses and vanities are so lovable that to lose him is ‘almost to go into my grave’. For this other Pepys, this spirit of the man whom men respected, he wrote his Diary, and it is for this reason that for centuries to come men will delight in reading it.
Sheridan.
At first sight there may seem some incongruity between one’s idea of Sheridan and the size of Mr Sichel’s volumes. Nine people out of ten, if asked to give you their impression of Sheridan, would tell you that he wrote three standard plays, was famous for his debts, his wit, and his speech at the trial of Warren Hastings; they would add that he had played a distinguished but not a commanding part as a statesman, and flitted through the society of the Georgian era, a brilliant but slightly intoxicated insect, with gorgeous wings but an erratic flight. The important aspect of two stout volumes, numbering some 1,100 pages between them, seems strangely at variance with such a figure. How completely Mr Sichel corrects the popular view we shall attempt to show; but let us insist at once that the heaviness of the volumes is true in a literal sense only, and that, after reading from cover to cover, the importance of his subject seems to demand an even fuller treatment than it was possible to bestow. We should like more about the Linleys, more of Sheridan’s own letters, and more of Mrs Tickell and her sister.
If only to enlighten the reader as to the extreme interest and complexity of his task, and to point out its true nature, it is best to read the ‘Overture’ first, in which Mr Sichel seeks to ‘psychologize a temperament and a time’. At first (let us own) the clash of contrasts, urged with unusual sharpness and precision, blinds our eyes to the form which they would reveal; simplicity and extravagance, generosity and meanness, rash confidence and moderation, passion and coldness - how are we to compose them all into one human shape? But later, when we begin to understand, it appears that the clue to Sheridan’s baffling career must be sought among these contradictory fragments. For, looked at from the outside, the inconsistencies of his life fill us with a sense of dissatisfaction. Before he was thirty he had written three plays that are classics in our literature; then, once in Parliament, he turned to reform and finance and gave up writing altogether; ‘the Muses of Love and Satire beckoned to him from Parnassus, and to the last he persisted in declaring that they, and not politics, were his true vocation’; yet ‘his heart stayed in the Assembly of the nation, and to the last, like Congreve, he slighted his theatrical triumphs’; his married life, which began with two duels on his wife’s behalf, and ended in an agony of grief as she lay dying in his arms, would present a perfect example of devotion were it not that he had been unfaithful while she lived, and married again, a girl of twenty, three years after her death; finally, his political career is as incomprehensible as the rest, for, with gifts as orator and statesman that made him famous over Europe, he never held high office; with a character of singular independence he acted ‘equivocally’, and with a record of devotion to his Prince he lost his favour completely, and died, without a seat, dishonoured and in debt. Nothing tends to make us lose interest in a character so much as the suspicion that there is something monstrous about it, and the achievement of Mr Sichel’s biography is that it restores Sheridan to human size and brings him to life again.
The first gift that makes itself felt is the gift that is always present and at work, but is yet the hardest to recapture - the gift of charm. There has been nothing like it since the days of Orpheus,’ wrote Byron; it made the boys at Harrow love him; Sumner, the headmaster, overlooked his mischief because of it; it drew the bailiffs in later days to stand behind his chair; as for his sister, she confessed that she ‘admired -I almost adored him’. In early days his face expressed only the finer part, of him; ‘its half heaviness was lit up by the comedy of his smile, the audacity of his air’, and the brilliance of those eyes that were to outshine the rest of him, and to ‘look up at the coffin lid as brightly as ever’ when the mouth and chin had grown coarse as a Satyr’s. There are only two letters from Sheridan at Harrow; and they are both about dress. In one he complains that his clothes are so shabby that he ‘is almost ashamed to wear them on Sunday’; in the other he is anxious to have the proper mourning sent him on his mother’s death. Most schoolboys are conventional, but in addition to conforming to its laws, Sheridan liked the world to know that he grieved. A year or two later, when we come to Miss Linley and the famous elopement and the duels, the romance of Sheridan’s nature blossoms out, with curious qualifications. He discovered that the beautiful Miss Linley, who sang like an angel, was tormented by a man called Mathews, who was married; she had flirted with him as a child and he now pressed her dishonourably. Sheridan became her knight; he snatched her away to France without her parents’ knowledge, and placed her in a convent. It is probable that they went through ‘some form of marriage’ near Calais. Mathews, meanwhile, proclaimed his rival a liar and a scoundrel in the Bath Chronicle, and Sheridan vowed that he ‘would never sleep in England till he had thanked him as he deserved’. He left Miss Linley in her father’s hands, fought with Mathews twice, and obliged him to fly the country. It is a tale no doubt that might be matched by others of that age, but in the romantic arrangement of the plot, in the delicate respect with which he treated his charge, and in the extravagance of the vow which constrained him to spend the night out of bed at Canterbury and to reach his rival starved for want of sleep, there are signs of something out of the ordinary. Nor was his behaviour ordinary in the months of separation that followed. In his letters and his lyrics he luxuriated - for the passion that finds words has pleasure about it - in the shades of his emotion.
But love also started his brain into activity. Not only did he w
ork at mathematics, make an abstract of the history of England, and comment upon Blackstone, but he thought about the principles upon which the world is run. It seemed to him that ‘all the nobler feelings of man’, which he began to perceive in himself, were blunted by civilization, and sighed for the early days when the ties of friendship and of love ‘could with some safety be formed at the first instigation of our hearts’. Now and perhaps throughout his life he believed that one’s emotions are supreme, and that one should rate the obstacles that thwart them as tokens of bondage. He was fond of dreaming about the enchanted world of the Arcadia and of the Faëry Queen, liking rather to dwell upon ‘the characters of life as I would wish that they were than as they are’, and persuading himself that his wish was really a desire to pierce beneath the corruptions of society to the true face of man beneath. Perhaps he felt that a world so simplified would be easier to live in than ours - but can one believe in it? He wished to replace all Fielding and Smollett with knights and ladies, but he did not believe in them either. The true romantic makes his past out of an intense joy in the present; it is the best of what he sees, caught up and set beyond the reach of change; Sheridan’s vague rapture with the glamour of life was only sufficient to make him discontented, sentimental, and chivalrous. The strange admixture is shown in his behaviour when he was asked to allow his wife - for they had married with the consent of her father, but to the rage of his - to sing publicly for money. He refused to agree, although they were very poor and large sums were offered. It was said that the sight of George III ogling her decided him, and Johnson declared, “He resolved wisely and nobly, to be sure.” But later, when he was struggling for a position in London drawing-rooms he allowed her to advertise concerts ‘to the Nobility and Gentry’ at which she was to sing without taking money. He gained a reputation for chivalry, for it implied that he cared for his wife’s honour more than for gold, and spurned a friendship that was bought; but then he valued the favour of the great very highly, and if it is true that he never cared for money, he seldom paid his debts.
Sheridan would do anything to make the world think well of him; he would wear intense mourning; he would keep a fine establishment; he would faint if people wished it; he could anticipate the popular desires, and exaggerate them brilliantly. The actor’s blood in him, which rises on applause like a ship on the waves, was responsible for the touch of melodrama; but the finer perceptions of artists were his too, and these, trained to discover emotions beneath small talk and domesticity, threw him off his balance in the uproar of the world. There is certainly a strange discrepancy between Sheridan in private and Sheridan in public - between his written words and his spoken. The three famous plays were written before he took to public life, and represent more of him than tradition or the imperfect reports of his speeches can now preserve. They show what Sheridan thought when there was no public to send the blood to his head. The way in which he takes the word ‘honour’ in The Rivals and makes it the jewel of a frightened country bumpkin and the sport of his shrewd serving-man assures us that he fought his own duels with a full sense of their absurdity. ‘Odds blades! David,’ cries Acres, ‘no gentleman will ever risk the loss of his honour!’ ‘I say, then,’ answers David, ‘it would be but civil in honour never to risk the loss of a gentleman. Look’ee, master, this honour seems to me to be a marvellous false friend: ay truly, a very courtier-like servant,’ and so on, until honour and the valiant man of honour are laughed out of court together.
Then again we have some reason to believe that Sheridan was an unthinking sentimentalist, and so slipshod in his morality that he acted upon no reasoned view, but used the current conventions. If that were so, he would have been the last to see the humour of Charles Surface in The School for Scandal. The good qualities of this character are lovable only because we know them to be slightly ridiculous; we are meant to think it a weak but endearing trait in him that he refuses to sell his uncle’s picture. ‘No, hang it; I’ll not part with poor Noll; the old fellow has been very good to me, and, egad, I’ll keep his picture while I’ve a room to put it in.’ And Sheridan satirizes his own system of generosity by adding to Charles’s offer of a hundred pounds to poor Stanley, ‘If you don’t make haste, we shall have some one call that has a better right to the money.’ These are details, but they keep us in mind of the acutely sensible side of Sheridan’s temperament. He laughs at the vapours of his age - at old women sending out for novels from the library, at bombastic Irishmen, picking quarrels for the glory of it, at romantic young ladies sighing for the joys of ‘sentimental elopements - ladder of ropes! - conscious moon - four horses - Scotch parson... paragraphs in the newspapers’. The pity is that his Irish gift of hyperbole made it so easy for him to heap one absurdity on another, to accumulate superlatives and smother everything in laughter. Mrs Malaprop would be more to the point if she could stay her tongue from deranging epitaphs; and the play scene in The Critic suffers from the same voluble buffoonery - but that it has such a rapture of fun in it that we can never cease to laugh.
The wind whistles - the moon rises - see,
They have kill’d my squirrel in his cage!
Is this a grasshopper? - Ha! no! it is my
Whiskerandos - you shall not keep him —
I know you have him in your pocket —
An oyster may be cross d in love! - Who says
A whale’s a bird? —
His humour makes one remember that he liked practical jokes. It is absolutely free from coarseness. The most profound humour is not fit reading for a girls’ school, because innocence is supposed to ignore half the facts of life, and however we may define humour, it is the most honest of the gifts.
Among other reasons for the morality of the stage in Sheridan’s day may be found the reason that it lacked vigour of every kind. Sheridan, the first of the playwrights, was prevented, partly by the fact that his audience would not like it, and partly by an innate prudery of his own - a touch of that sentimentality which led him to prefer unreal characters to real ones - from giving a candid account of his life. He took some thought of appearances, even in the study. His own view of the stage may be gathered in the first act of The Critic. Having regard to the limitations of an audience which could not brook Vanbrugh and Congreve, one should not ‘dramatize the penal laws’ or make the stage the school of morality, but find the proper sphere for the comic muse in ‘the follies and foibles of society’. That was Sheridan’s natural province, in spite of a fitful longing, to write a romantic Italian tragedy. If we grant that he had not the power which moves us so keenly in Congreve of showing how witty people love, and lacked the coarse vigour which still keeps The Rehearsal alive, we are conscious that he has another power of his own; Sir Henry Irving found it in his ‘play of human nature’; Mr Sichel speaks of his sympathy - ‘a sympathy that Congreve lacked’. It is that surely that gives his comedy its peculiar glow. It does not spring from insight, or from any unusual profundity. It lies rather in his power to get on with ordinary people - to come into a room full of men and women who know him for the cleverest man of his time, and to set them at once at their ease. Other dramatists would treat such a character as Charles Surface with condescension, for a blockhead, or with uneasy respect, because of his courage and muscle; but Sheridan liked him heartily; he was his ‘ideal of a good fellow’. This humanity - it was part of his charm as a man - still warms his writing; and it has another quality which also appeals to us. He reminds us sometimes of our modern dramatists in his power to. see accepted conventions in a fresh light. He tests the current view of honour; he derides the education that was given to women; he was for reforming the conventions of the stage. His interest in ideas was only a faint forecast of our own obsession; and he was too true an artist to make any character the slave of a theory. A great fastidiousness was one of the many gifts that were half-failings, and the more he wrote the less possible it became to make the drama an instrument of reform. The School tor Scandal was polished and polished again; �
�after nineteen years he had been unable to satisfy himself’ with his style. The excessive care was fatal; it helped to dry up his vein before he had fully explored it, and his last comedy Affectation has dwindled to a few careful sentences, very neatly written in a small copybook.
An acute sense of comedy does not seem compatible with a reformer’s zeal; and, when the success of his plays and the charm of his wife brought him into touch with the rulers of the country, the chance of acting among them proved irresistible. His success with the great ladies who came to his wife’s drawing-room showed him what kind of power might be his - he might lead human beings. From the first, too, he had had the political instinct - a sense of distress among the people and a desire to make their lives better by improving the laws of the land. ‘Government for the people, through the people, and by the people’ was the creed with which he started his career under the guidance of Fox. A boyish essay shows how natural it was to him to think of man as a free being oppressed by the laws. ‘... all laws at present are Tyranny... All Liberty consists in the Probability of not being oppressed. What assurance have we that we shall not be taxed at eight shillings in the pound? No more than the colonies have.’ One of the first causes that attracted him was the cause of the American colonies, and he urged passionately their right to independence. He resolved to ‘sacrifice every other object’ to politics, and to ‘force myself into business, punctuality, and information’.
Complete Works of Virginia Woolf Page 500
