If eighteenth-century comedy, as a whole, is not brilliantly written, it is for lack of talent in the playwrights, not for lack of desire or intention. Goldsmith, like Farquhar and Steele, vaguely realized the superiority of humour to wit; but he died too early to exercise much influence on his successors. In Sheridan the convention of wit reasserted itself triumphantly, and the scene in which Lady Teazle, Mrs. Candour, and the rest of the scandalous college sit in a semicircle and cap malicious similes, came to be regarded as an unapproachable model of comedy dialogue. The convention maintained itself firmly down to the days of Money and London Assurance, the dullness of the intervening period being due, not to any change of theory, but to sheer impotence of practice. T.W. Robertson, as above mentioned, attempted a return to nature, with occasional and very partial success; but wit, with a dash of fanciful sentiment, reasserted itself in James Albery; while in H.J. Byron it degenerated into mere punning and verbal horse-play. I should not be surprised if the historian of the future were to find in the plays of Mr. Henry Arthur Jones the first marked symptoms of a reaction--of a tendency to reject extrinsic and fanciful ornament in dialogue, and to rely for its effect upon its vivid appropriateness to character and situation. In the early plays of Sir Arthur Pinero there is a great deal of extrinsic ornament; especially of that metaphor-hunting which was one of the characteristic forms of euphuism. Take this, for example, from The Profligate. Dunstan Renshaw has expressed to Hugh Murray the opinion that "marriages of contentment are the reward of husbands who have taken the precaution to sow their wild oats rather thickly"; whereupon the Scotch solicitor replies--
HUGH MURRAY: Contentment! Renshaw, do you imagine that there is no
autumn in the life of a profligate? Do you think there is no moment
when the accursed crop begins to rear its millions of heads above
ground; when the rich man would give his wealth to be able to tread
them back into the earth which rejects the foul load? To-day you
have robbed some honest man of a sweet companion!
DUNSTAN RENSHAW: Look here, Mr. Murray--!
HUGH MURRAY: To-morrow, next week, next month, you may be happy--but
what of the time when those wild oats thrust their ears through the