Assuming, then, that we are all familiar with the Screen Scene, and assuming that we, nevertheless, take pleasure in seeing it reasonably well acted,[6] let us try to discover of what elements that pleasure is composed.  It is, no doubt, somewhat complex.  For one thing, we have pleasure in meeting old friends.  Sir Peter, Lady Teazle, Charles, even Joseph, are agreeable creatures who have all sorts of pleasant associations for us.  Again, we 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 other words, that we have a clear vision of all the circumstances, relations, and implications of a certain