If he is a strong enough man he will
become a leader of the public in his dramatic tastes. Sometimes in
rare instances he will influence the public so decidedly that he
compels the contemporary school of writers to follow him. This has
been the case in all periods. I need not mention Shakespeare, as
everything said about him is a matter of course.
Take the vile dramatic era of Charles II. Wycherley led the brutes,
but Congreve came up and combatted with his brilliant comedies the
vileness of the Restoration school, and Hallam says of him that he
introduced decency to the stage that afterward drove his own comedies
off it. A little after Congreve, the school, so to speak, for we have
nothing but the school, was so stupid that it brought forth no great
writers, and produced weak, sentimental plays. Then came Goldsmith,
who wrote "She Stoops to Conquer" actually as a protest against the
feeble sentimentality I have referred to. Richard Brinsley Sheridan
was made possible by Goldsmith. We went on after that with a school
of old comedies. When we speak of the "old comedies," I am not talking
about Beaumont and Fletcher, nor Wycherley, nor Vanbrugh, nor even
Congreve, but of the comedy of Goldsmith in the third quarter of the
eighteenth century down to Bulwer Lytton's "Money" and Boucicault's
"London Assurance," bringing us to about 1840.
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