Part 13

During the following year this speculative man, who married on nothing but his brain, and had no capital, no wealthy friends, in short nothing whatever, suddenly appears in the most mysterious manner as a capitalist, and lays down his £10,000 in the coolest and quietest manner. And for what? For a share in the purchase of Garrick's moiety of the patent of Drury Lane. The whole property was worth £70,000; Garrick sold his half for £35,000, of which old Mr. Linley contributed £10,000, Dr. Ford £15,000, and penniless Sheridan the balance. Where he got the money nobody knew, and apparently nobody asked. It was paid, and he entered at once on the business of proprietor of that old house, where so many a Roscius has strutted and declaimed with more or less fame; so many a Walking gentleman done his five shillings' worth of polite comedy, so many a tinsel king degraded the 'legitimate drama,' in the most illegitimate manner, and whose glories were extinguished with the reign of Macready, when we were boys, nous autres.

The first piece he contributed to this stage was 'A Trip to Scarborough,' Which was only a species of 'family edition of Vanbrugh's play, 'The Relapse;' but in 1777 he reached the acme of his fame, in 'The School for Scandal.'

But alack and alas for these sensual days, when it is too much trouble to think, and people go to the play, if they go at all, to feast their eyes and ears, not their minds; can any sensible person believe that if 'The School for Scandal,' teeming as it does with wit, satire, and character, finer and truer than in any play produced since the days of Ben Jonson, Massinger, and Marlowe, were set on the boards of the Haymarket at this day, as a new piece by an author of no very high celebrity, it would draw away a single admirer from the flummery in Oxford Street, the squeaking at Covent Garden, or the broad, exaggerated farce at the Adelphi or Olympic? No: it may still have its place on the London stage when well acted, but it owes that to its ancient celebrity, and it can never compete with the tinsel and tailoring which alone can make even Shakspeare go down with a modern audience.

In those days of Garrick, on the other hand, those glorious days of true histrionic art, high and low were not ashamed to throng Drury Lane and Covent Garden, and make the appearance of a new play the great event of the season. Hundreds were turned away from the doors, when 'The School for Scandal' was acted, and those who were fortunate enough to get in made the piece the subject of conversation in society for many a night, passing keen comment on every scene, every line, every word almost, and using their minds as we now use our eyes.

This brilliant play, the earliest idea of which was derived from its author's experience of the gossip of that kettle of scandal and backbiting, Bath, where, if no other commandment were ever broken, the constant breach of the ninth would suffice to put it on a level with certain condemned cities we have somewhere read of, won for Sheridan a reputation of which he at once felt the value, and made his purchase of a share in the property of Old Drury for the time being, a successful speculation. It produced a result which his good heart perhaps valued even more than the guineas which now flowed in; it induced his father, who had long been at war with him, to seek a reconciliation, and the elder Sheridan actually became manager of the theatre of which his son was part proprietor.

Old Tom Sheridan had always been a proud man, and when once he was offended, was hard to bring round again. His quarrel with Johnson was an instance of this. In 1762 the Doctor, hearing they had given Sheridan a pension of two hundred a year, exclaimed, 'What have they given him a pension? then it is time for me to give up mine.' A 'kind friend' took care to repeat the peevish exclamation, without adding what Johnson had said immediately afterwards, 'However, I am glad that they have given Mr. Sheridan a pension, for he is a very good man.' The actor was disgusted; and though Boswell interfered, declined to be reconciled. On one occasion he even rushed from a house at which he was to dine, when he heard that the great Samuel had been invited. The Doctor had little opinion of Sheridan's declamation. 'Besides, sir,' said he, 'what influence can Mr. Sheridan have upon the language of this great country by his narrow exertions. Sir, it is burning a farthing candle at Dover to show light at Calais.' Still, when Garrick attacked his rival, Johnson nobly defended him. 'No sir,' he said, 'there is to be sure, in Sheridan, something to reprehend, and everything to laugh at; but, sir, he is not a bad man. No, sir, were mankind to be divided into good and bad, he would stand considerably within the ranks of the good.'

However, the greatest bully of his age (and the kindest-hearted man) thought very differently of the son. Richard Brinsley had written a prologue to Savage's play of 'Sir Thomas Overbury'--

'Ill-fated Savage, at whose birth was giv'n No parent but the Muse, no friend but Heav'n;'

and in this had paid an elegant compliment to the great lexicographer, winding up with these lines:--

'So pleads the tale that gives to future times The son's misfortunes and the parent's crimes; There shall his fame, if own'd to-night, survive, Fix'd by the hand that bids our language live--

referring at once to Johnson's life of his friend Savage and to his great Dictionary. It was Savage, every one remembers, with whom Johnson in his days of starvation was wont to walk the streets all night, neither of them being able to pay for a lodging, and with whom, walking one night round and round St. James's Square, he kept up his own and his companion's spirits by inveighing against the minister and declaring that they would 'stand by their country.'

Doubtless the Doctor felt as much pleasure at the meed awarded to his old companion in misery as at the high compliment to himself. Anyhow he pronounced that Sheridan 'had written the two best comedies of his age,' and therefore proposed him as a member of the Literary Club.

This celebrated gathering of wit and whimsicality, founded by Johnson himself in conjunction with Sir J. Reynolds, was the Helicon of London Letters, and the temple which the greatest talker of his age had built for himself, and in which he took care to be duly worshipped. It met at the Turk's Head in Gerrard Street, Soho, every Friday; and from seven in the evening to almost any hour of night was the scene of such talk, mainly on literature and learning, as has never been heard since in this country. It consisted at this period of twenty-six members, and there is scarcely one among them whose name is not known to-day as well as any in the history of our literature. Besides the high priests, Reynolds and Johnson, there came Edmund Burke, Fox, Sheridan, and many another of less note, to represent the senate: Goldsmith, Gibbon, Adam Smith, Malone, Dr. Burney, Percy, Nugent, Sir William Jones, three Irish bishops, and a host of others, crowded in from the ranks of learning and literature. Garrick and George Colman found here an indulgent audience; and the light portion of the company comprised such men as Topham Beauclerk, Bennet Langton, Vesey, and a dozen of lords and baronets. In short, they were picked men, and if their conversation was not always witty, it was because they had all wit and frightened one another.

Among them the bullying Doctor rolled in majestic grumpiness; scolded, dogmatized, contradicted, pished and pshawed; and made himself generally disagreeable; yet, hail the omen, Intellect! such was the force, such the fame of his mind, that the more he snorted, the more they adored him--the more he bullied, the more humbly they knocked under. He was quite 'His Majesty' at the Turk's Head, and the courtiers waited for his coming with anxiety, and talked of him till he came in the same manner as the lacqueys in the anteroom of a crowned monarch. Boswell, who, by the way, was also a member--of course he was, or how should we have had the great man's conversations handed down to us?--was sure to keep them up to the proper mark of adulation if they ever flagged in it, and was as servile in his admiration in the Doctor's absence as when he was there to call him a fool for his pains.

Thus, on one occasion while 'King Johnson' tarried, the courtiers were discussing his journey to the Hebrides and his coming away 'willing to believe the second sight.' Some of them smiled at this, but Bozzy was down on them with more than usual servility. 'He is only willing to believe,' he exclaimed. 'I do believe. The evidence is enough for me, though not for his great mind. What will not fill a quart bottle will fill a pint bottle. I am filled with belief.'--'Are you?' said Colman, slily; 'then cork it up.'

As a specimen of Johnson's pride in his own club, which always remained extremely exclusive, we have what he said of Garrick, who, before he was elected, carelessly told Reynolds he liked the club, and thought 'he would be of them.'

'He'll be of us!' roared the Doctor indignantly, on hearing of this. 'How does he know we will permit him? The first duke in England has no right to hold such language!'

It can easily be imagined that when 'His Majesty' expressed his approval of Richard Brinsley, then a young man of eight-and-twenty, there was no one who ventured to blackball him, and so Sheridan was duly elected.

The fame of 'The School for Scandal' was a substantial one for Richard Brinsley, and in the following year he extended his speculation by buying the other moiety of Drury Lane. This theatre, which took its name from the old Cockpit Theatre in Drury Lane, where Killigrew acted in the days of Charles II. is famous for the number of times it has been rebuilt. The first house had been destroyed in 1674; and the one in which Garrick acted was built by Sir Christopher Wren and opened with a prologue by Dryden. In 1793 this was rebuilt. In 1809 it was burnt to the ground; and on its re-opening the Committee advertised a prize for a prologue, which was supposed to be tried for by all the poets and poetasters then in England. Sheridan adding afterwards a condition that he wanted an address without a Phoenix in it. Horace Smith and his brother seized the opportunity to parody the style of the most celebrated in their delightful 'Rejected Addresses.' Drury Lane has always been grand in its prologue, for besides Dryden and Byron, it could boast of Sam. Johnson, who wrote the address when Garrick opened the theatre in 1747. No theatre ever had more great names connected with its history.

It was in 1778, after the purchase of the other moiety of this property, that Sheridan set on its boards 'The Critic.' Though this was denounced as itself as complete a plagiarism as any Sir Fretful Plagiary could make, and though undoubtedly the idea of it was borrowed, its wit, so truly Sheridanian, and its complete characters, enhanced its author's fame, in spite of the disappointment of those who expected higher things from the writer of 'The School for Scandal.' Whether Sheridan would have gone on improving, had he remained true to the drama, 'The Critic' leaves us in doubt. But he was a man of higher ambition. Step by step, unexpectedly, and apparently unprepared, he had taken by storm the out-works of the citadel he was determined to capture, and he seems to have cared little to garrison these minor fortresses. He had carried off from among a dozen suitors a wife of such beauty that Walpole thus writes of her in 1773:--

'I was at the ball last night, and have only been at the opera, where I was infinitely struck with the Carrara, who is the prettiest creature upon earth. Mrs. Hartley I find still handsomer, and Miss Linley is to be the superlative degree. The king admires the last, and ogles her as much as he dares in so holy a place as an oratorio, and at so devout a service as Alexander's Feast'

Yet Sheridan did not prize his lovely wife as he should have done, when he had once obtained her. Again he had struck boldly into the drama, and in four years had achieved that fame as a play-writer to which even Johnson could testify so handsomely. He now quitted this, and with the same innate power--the same consciousness of success--the same readiness of genius--took a higher, far more brilliant flight than ever. Yet had he garrisoned the forts he captured, he would have been a better, happier, and more prosperous man. Had he been true to the Maid of Bath, his character would not have degenerated as it did. Had he kept up his connection with the drama, he would not have lost so largely by his speculation in Drury Lane. His genius became his temptation, and he hurried on to triumph and to fall.

Public praise is a syren which the young sailor through life cannot resist. Political life is a fine aim, even when its seeker starts without a shred of real patriotism to conceal his personal ambition. No young man of any character can think, without a thrill of rapture, on the glory of having his name--now obscure--written in capitals on the page of his country's history. A true patriot cares nothing for fame; a really great man is content to die nameless, if his acts may but survive him. Sheridan was not really great, and it may be doubted if he had any sincerity in his political views. But the period favoured the rise of young men of genius. In former reigns a man could have little hope of political influence without being first a courtier; but by this time liberalism had made giant strides. The leaven of revolutionary ideas, which had leavened the whole lump in France, was still working quietly and less passionately in this country, and being less repressed, displayed itself in the last quarter of the eighteenth century in the form of a strong and brilliant opposition. It was to this that the young men of ambition attached themselves, rallying under the standard of Charles James Fox, since it was there only that their talents were sufficient to recommend them.

To this party, Sheridan, laughing in his sleeve at the extravagance of their demands--so that when they clamoured for a 'parliament once a year, or oftener if need be,' he pronounced himself an 'Oftener-if-need-be' man--was introduced, when his fame as a literary man had brought him into contact with some of its hangers on. Fox, after his first interview with him, affirmed that he had always thought Hare and Charles Townsend the wittiest men he had ever met, but that Sheridan surpassed them both; and Sheridan was equally pleased with 'the Man of the People.'

The first step to this political position was to become a member of a certain club, where its leaders gambled away their money, and drank away their minds--to wit, Brookes'. Pretty boys, indeed, were these great Whig patriots when turned loose in these precincts. The tables were for stakes of twenty or fifty guineas, but soon ran up to hundreds. What did it matter to Charles James Fox, to the Man of the People, whether he lost five, seven, or ten thousand of a night, when the one-half came out of his father's, the other out of Hebrew, pockets--the sleek, thick-lipped owners of which thronged his Jerusalem chamber, as he called his back sitting-room, only too glad to 'oblige' him to any amount? The rage for gaming at this pandemonium may be understood from a rule of the club, which it was found necessary to make to interdict it in the eating-room, but to which was added the truly British exception, which allowed two members of Parliament in those days, or two 'gentlemen' of any kind, to toss up for what they had ordered.

This charming resort of the dissipated was originally established in Pall Mall in 1764, and the manager was that same Almack who afterwards opened a lady's club in the rooms now called Willis's, in King Street, St. James's; who also owned the famous Thatched House, and whom Gilly Williams described as having a 'Scotch face, in a bag-wig,' waiting on the ladies at supper. In 1778 Brookes--a wine-merchant and money-lender, whom Tickell, in his famous 'Epistle from the Hon. Charles Fox, partridge-shooting, to the Hon. John Townsend, cruising,' describes in these lines;--

'And know I've bought the best champagne from Brookes, From liberal Brookes, whose speculative skill Is hasty credit, and a distant bill: Who, nurs'd in clubs, disdains a vulgar trade: Exults to trust, and blushes to be paid--'

built and opened the present club-house in St. James's Street, and thither the members of Almack's migrated. Brookes' speculative skill, however, did not make him a rich man, and the 'gentlemen' he dealt with were perhaps too gentlemanly to pay him. He died poor in 1782. Almack's at first consisted of twenty-seven members, one of whom was C.J. Fox. Gibbon, the historian, was actually a member of it, and says that in spite of the rage for play, he found the society there rational and entertaining. Sir Joshua Reynolds wanted to be a member of it too. 'You see,' says Topham Beauclerk thereupon, 'what noble ambition will make a man attempt. That den is not yet opened,' &c.