Alas, for the difference between Boswell the bald and Moore the melodious! The bald prose of Boswell's diaries may have made many of the personages with whom he dealt seem silly, but that was because he himself was silly, and, being aware of this fact, the more discriminating of his readers have no great difficulty in arriving at the truth of any matter with which he deals. He would never have accepted unreservedly such a narrative as that which Moore received from Mrs. Lefanu (née Sheridan), and put into his own language, or as nearly into his own language as he could. But Moore found it “so hard to narrate familiar events eloquently,” he complained. He actually thought that Mrs. Lefanu's narrative erred on the side of plausibility! The mysterious elopement, the still more mysterious marriage, and the superlatively mysterious return of the fugitives and the irate father hand-in-hand, he regarded as events so commonplace as not to be susceptible of lyrical treatment. But the most farcical of the doings of his own Fudge Family were rational in comparison with the familiar events associated with the flight to France of his hero and heroine. The Trip to Scarborough of Sheridan the farce-writer was founded on much more “familiar events” than this extraordinary trip to Lille, as narrated for the benefit of the biographer by Mrs. Lefanu.
What seems to be the truth of the whole matter is simply that Sheridan undertook to be a brother to Elizabeth Linley, and carried out his compact faithfully, without allowing anything to tempt him to depart, as he wrote to Charles, “even in thought from the honour and consistency which engaged [him] at first.” It must be remembered that he was a romantic boy of twenty, and this is just the age at which nearly every boy—especially a boy in love—is a Sir Galahad. As for Miss Linley, one has only to look at her portrait to know what she was. She was not merely innocent, she was innocence itself.
When Mr. Linley appeared at Lille he accepted without reserve the explanation offered to him by his daughter and by Sheridan; and, moreover, he knew that although there was a school for scandal located at Bath, yet so highly was his daughter thought of in all circles, and so greatly was young Sheridan liked, that no voice of calumny would be raised against either of them when they returned with him. And even if it were possible that some whisper, with its illuminating smile above the arch of a painted fan, might be heard in the Assembly Rooms when some one mentioned the name of Miss Linley in connection with that of young Sheridan and with the trip to Lille, he felt convinced that such a whisper would be robbed of its sting when every one knew that the girl and the boy and the father all returned together and on the best terms to Bath.
As the events proved, he had every right to take even so sanguine a view of the limitations of the range of the Pump Room gossips. On the return of the three from Lille no one suggested that Sheridan and Miss Linley should get married. No one except the scoundrel Mathews suggested that Sheridan had acted badly or even unwisely, though undoubtedly he had given grounds for such implications. The little party returned to Bath, and Miss Linley fulfilled her concert and oratorio engagements, went into society as before, and had at her feet more eligible suitors than had ever knelt there. We have it on the authority of Charles Sheridan, the elder brother, that in Bath the feeling was that Richard had acted as a man of honour in taking the girl to the convent at Lille. Writing to their uncle, Mr. Chamberlaine, he expressed surprise that “in this age when the world does not abound in Josephs, most people are (notwithstanding the general tendency of mankind to judge unfavourably) inclined to think that he (Richard) acted with the strictest honour in his late expedition with Miss L., when the circumstances might allow of their being very dubious on this head without incurring the imputation of being censorious.”
This testimony as to what was the opinion in Bath regarding the expedition is extremely valuable, coming as it does from one who was never greatly disposed to take a brotherly or even a friendly view of Richard's conduct at any time—coming as it does also from a man who had been in love with Miss Linley.
At any rate this escapade of young Mr. Sheridan was the most fortunate for him of any in which he ever engaged, and he was a man of many escapades, for it caused Elizabeth Linley to fall in love with him, and never was a man beloved by a sweeter or more faithful woman. To know how beautiful was her nature one has only to look at her face in either of the great portraits of her which are before us to-day. No characteristic of all that is held to be good and gracious and sympathetic—in one word, that is held to be womanly, is absent from her face. No man that ever lived was worthy of such a woman; but if only men who are worthy of such women were beloved by them, mankind would be the losers. She loved Sheridan with the truest devotion—such devotion as might be expected from such a nature as hers—and she died in the act of writing to him the love-letter of a wife to her dearly loved husband.
They did not get married until a year after the date of their flight to the Continent, and then they were described as bachelor and spinster. Neither of them ever gave a hint, even in any of the numerous letters which they exchanged during this period, that they had gone through the ceremony of marriage at that village near Calais. More than once a strained situation would have been relieved had it been possible to make such a suggestion, for now and again each of the lovers grew jealous of the other for a day or two. But neither said, “Pray remember that you are not free to think of marrying any one. We are husband and wife, although we were married in secret.” Neither of them could make such an assertion. It would not have been true. What seems to us to be the truth is that it was Sir Galahad who acted as protector to his sister when Richard Brinsley Sheridan went with Elizabeth Linley to France.