A History of English Literature

spoke. He spoke for six hours in the trial of Warren Hastings. Oratory led to office,

and he then divided his public career, as a leader of the Whig Opposition, between

speaking at elabor ate length and running the Drury Lane theatre, which had to be

rebuilt twice.But his neglect of detail brought him debt rather than advancement.

Four Lords carried his coffin, but laid it near Garrick rather than, as he had wished,

next to Fox.

The three plays of his youth show that he understood the theatre better than

anyone since the decline of Restoration drama. Restoration formulations underlie

his plays, which were most unlike the sentimental dramas then on London’s large

public stages.His masterpiece,The School for Scandal, concerns two brothers,

Charles and Joseph Surface (theatre names in the style of Fielding: Charles II liked

women,Joseph rejected the advances of Potiphar’s wife). Charles seems a rake, but

is good at heart; Joseph speaks of sentiment and morality. His friend old Sir Peter

Teazle has a young Lady Teazle and a younger ward, Maria. In the end Charles gets

Maria, whom Joseph stalks while trying to seduce Lady Teazle. All is revealed when

Charles pulls down a screen in Joseph’s rooms, exposing Lady Teazle, who has over-

heard her husband’s concern for her (see illustration above). She exposes the

hypocrisy of her would-be seducer. Bath is the School of the title: scandal, whether

real or invented, is better than the affectation of virtue. It is wonderfully clever and

masterly – yet, compared with Congreve, or with Jane Austen, broad and formulaic.

Christopher Smart

Sheridan’s abandonment of a reworked tradition is a sign of the break-up of the

Augustan consensus. William Cowper (1731–1800), the representative poet of the

later period, wrote poems of radically different kinds, as had Gray and Christopher

Smart (1722–1771).

Stylistically, Smart’s poems are either Augustan – dexterous and decorous,

whether witty or religious – or (after his mental breakdown) biblical. Modern

222 6 · AUGUSTAN LITERATURE: TO 1790

The screen scene from Sheridan’s A School for Scandal

1776, showing Frances Abington, Thomas King,
John Palmer and William Smith.