In a late work, professing to be the Memoirs of Mr. Sheridan, there are some wise doubts expressed as to his being really the author of the School for Scandal, to which, except for the purpose of exposing absurdity, I should not have thought it worth while to allude. It is an old trick of Detraction,—and one, of which it never tires,—to father the works of eminent writers upon others; or, at least, while it kindly leaves an author the credit of his worst performances, to find some one in the background to ease him of the fame of his best. When this sort of charge is brought against a cotemporary, the motive is intelligible; but, such an abstract pleasure have some persons in merely unsettling the crowns of Fame, that a worthy German has written an elaborate book to prove, that the Iliad was written, not by that particular Homer the world supposes, but by some other Homer! Indeed, if mankind were to be influenced by those Qui tam critics, who have, from time to time, in the course of the history of literature, exhibited informations of plagiarism against great authors, the property of fame would pass from its present holders into the hands of persons with whom the world is but little acquainted. Aristotle must refund to one Ocellus Lucanus —Virgil must make a cessio bonorum in favor of Pisander—the Metamorphoses of Ovid must be credited to the account of Parthenius of Nicaea, and (to come to a modern instance) Mr. Sheridan must, according to his biographer, Dr. Watkins, surrender the glory of having written the School for Scandal to a certain anonymous young lady, who died of a consumption in Thames Street!
To pass, however, to less hardy assailants of the originality of this comedy,—it is said that the characters of Joseph and Charles were suggested by those of Blifil and Tom Jones; that the incident of the arrival of Sir Oliver from India is copied from that of the return of Warner in Sidney Biddulph; and that the hint of the famous scandal scene at Lady Sneerwell's is borrowed from a comedy of Moliere.
Mr. Sheridan, it is true, like all men of genius, had, in addition to the resources of his own wit, a quick apprehension of what suited his purpose in the wit of others, and a power of enriching whatever he adopted from them with such new grace, as gave him a sort of claim of paternity over it, and made it all his own. "C'est mon bien," said Moliere, when accused of borrowing, "et je le reprens partout ou je le trouve;" and next, indeed, to creation, the re-production, in a new and more perfect form, of materials already existing, or the full development of thoughts that had but half blown in the hands of others, are the noblest miracles for which we look to the hand of genius. It is not my intention therefore to defend Mr. Sheridan from this kind of plagiarism, of which he was guilty in common with the rest of his fellow-descendants from Prometheus, who all steal the spark wherever they can find it. But the instances, just alleged, of his obligations to others, are too questionable and trivial to be taken into any serious account. Contrasts of character, such as Charles and Joseph exhibit, are as common as the lights and shadows of a landscape, and belong neither to Fielding nor Sheridan, but to nature. It is in the manner of transferring them to the canvas that the whole difference between the master and the copyist lies; and Charles and Joseph would, no doubt, have been what they are, if Tom Jones had never existed. With respect to the hint supposed to be taken from the novel of his mother, he at least had a right to consider any aid from that quarter as "son bien"—talent being the only patrimony to which he had succeeded. But the use made of the return of a relation in the play is wholly different from that to which the same incident is applied in the novel. Besides, in those golden times of Indian delinquency, the arrival of a wealthy relative from the East was no very unobvious ingredient in a story.
The imitation of Moliere (if, as I take for granted, the Misanthrope be the play, in which the origin of the famous scandal scene is said to be found) is equally faint and remote, and, except in the common point of scandal, untraceable. Nothing, indeed, can be more unlike than the manner in which the two scenes are managed. Celimene, in Moliere, bears the whole frais of the conversation; and this female La Bruyere's tedious and solitary dissections of character would be as little borne on the English stage, as the quick and dazzling movement of so many lancets of wit as operate in the School for Scandal would be tolerated on that of the French.
It is frequently said that Mr. Sheridan was a good deal indebted to Wycherley; and he himself gave, in some degree, a color to the charge, by the suspicious impatience which he betrayed whenever any allusion was made to it. He went so far, indeed, it is said, as to deny having ever read a line of Wycherley (though of Vanbrugh's dialogue he always spoke with the warmest admiration);—and this assertion, as well as some others equally remarkable, such as, that he never saw Garrick on the stage, that he never had seen a play throughout in his life, however strange and startling they may appear, are, at least, too curious and characteristic not to be put upon record. His acquaintance with Wycherley was possibly but at second-hand, and confined, perhaps, to Garrick's alteration of the Country Wife, in which the incident, already mentioned as having been borrowed for the Duenna, is preserved. There is, however, a scene in the Plain Dealer (Act II.), where Nevil and Olivia attack the characters of the persons with whom Nevil had dined, of which it is difficult to believe that Mr. Sheridan was ignorant: as it seems to contain much of that Hyle, or First Matter, out of which his own more perfect creations were formed.
In Congreve's Double Dealer, too, (Act III. Scene 10) there is much which may, at least, have mixed itself with the recollections of Sheridan, and influenced the course of his fancy—it being often found that the images with which the memory is furnished, like those pictures hung up before the eyes of pregnant women at Sparta, produce insensibly a likeness to themselves in the offspring which the imagination brings forth. The admirable drollery in Congreve about Lady Froth's verses on her coachman—
"For as the sun shines every day,
So of our coachman I may say"—
is by no means unlikely to have suggested the doggerel of Sir Benjamin Backbite; and the scandalous conversation in this scene, though far inferior in delicacy and ingenuity to that of Sheridan, has somewhat, as the reader will see, of a parental resemblance to it:—
"Lord Froth. Hee, hee, my dear; have you done? Won't you join with us? We were laughing at my lady Whifler and Mr. Sneer.
"Lady F. Ay, my dear, were you? Oh, filthy Mr. Sneer! he is a nauseous figure, a most fulsamick fop. He spent two days together in going about Covent Garden to suit the lining of his coach with his complexion.