love to encounter not only familiar
characters but familiar jokes. Like Goldsmith's Diggory, we can never
help laughing at the story of "ould Grouse in the gunroom." The best
order of dramatic wit does not become stale, but rather grows upon us.
We relish it at least as much at the tenth repetition as at the first.
But while these considerations may partly account for the pleasure we
take in seeing the play as a whole, they do not explain why the Screen
Scene in particular should interest and excite us. Another source of
pleasure, as before indicated, may be renewed recognition of the
ingenuity with which the scene is pieced together. However familiar we
may be with it, short of actually knowing it by heart, we do not recall
the details of its dovetailing, and it is a delight to realize afresh
the neatness of the manipulation by which the tension is heightened from
speech to speech and from incident to incident. If it be objected that
this is a pleasure which the critic alone is capable of experiencing, I
venture to disagree. The most unsophisticated playgoer feels the effect
of neat workmanship, though he may not be able to put his satisfaction
into words. It is evident, however, that the mere intellectual
recognition of fine workmanship is not sufficient to account for the
emotions with which we witness the Screen Scene. A similar, though, of
course, not quite identical, effect is produced by scenes of the utmost
simplicity, in which there is no room for delicacy of dovetailing or
neatness of manipulation.

Where, then, are we to seek for the fundamental constituent in dramatic
interest, as distinct from mere curiosity? Perhaps Mrs. Oliphant's
glaring error may put us on the track of the truth. Mrs. Oliphant
thought that Sheridan would have shown higher art had he kept the
audience, as well as Sir Peter and Charles, ignorant of Lady Teazle's
presence behind the screen. But this, as we saw, is precisely the
reverse of the truth: the whole interest of the scene arises from our
knowledge of Lady Teazle's presence. Had Sheridan fallen into Mrs.
Oliphant's mistake, the little shock of surprise which the first-night
audience would have felt when the screen was thrown down would have been
no compensation at all for the comparative tameness and pointlessness of
the preceding passages. Thus we see that the greater part of our
pleasure arises precisely from the fact that we know what Sir Peter and
Charles do not know, or, in ot