No More Learning

The Country Wife was, doubtless, on the stage before the end
of the year 1673. It is one of the coarsest plays in the English
language, nor can it be said that this quality is referable to either
of the comedies of Molière, L'École des Femmes and L'École des
Maris, which furnished hints to the English playwright. And
yet, despite the idea on which the whole action turns, The
Country Wife is not only skilfully planned and exceedingly well
written, but it is not devoid of the gravity of true satire. Indeed,
it is in this play, the dramatis personae of which include not a
single truly virtuous personage, that we perceive Wycherley to
have passed beyond the careless art of Etherege, which contents
itself with merely picturing the age in its wantonness and folly,
and to have entered the more sombre regions of satire, in which
these things are referred for contrast and reprobation (even if
unconsciously) to the normal standards of men of decent life.
i Genest, vol. I, p. 137.


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The Plain Dealer
145
But, not until we reach The Plain Dealer, Wycherley's last
and best comedy, do we recognise that this savage blasphemer
in the halls of beauty and of art is, after all, at heart a
moralist, indignantly flagellating vice as well as gloating over her
deformities. The Plain Dealer was first acted, with acclamation
and success, in 1674, and printed three years later. While certain
scenes of it were suggested by Molière's famous Le Misanthrope,
Wycherley's masterpiece cannot but be regarded as an admirably
bold, effective and original piece of dramatic satire. Here, the
satirist is no less plainspoken than in The Country Wife, but, in
the faithful Fidelia (perilous reincarnation of the Viola of a cleaner
age), in the clearsighted running commentary of Eliza and in the
integrity of Freeman, the author has set before us his own rough
but honest standard of life and conduct, by means of which we
may judge the justice and effect of his satiric strokes. Manly,
'the plain dealer,' is a brute; but it is the wickedness and
hypocrisy of the age that has made him such. An infatuation
for straightforward conduct and plain dealing has made him blind
to the real qualities of men and women; and, while he sees
through superficial pretence and affectation, he is like a child in
the hands of those who humour his whims. The Plain Dealer
seems unpleasantly true to life. But for the normal restoration
taint it might have approached tragedy in the completeness of
Fidelia's passionate devotion and in the gravity of Manly’s dis-
illusionment. As it is, The Plain Dealer is a notable work,
compactly written, carefully planned and effectively executed,
and, in its honest purpose to castigate vice, not unworthy of the
ideals of Ben Jonson himself. The man who thus mercilessly
| exposed the vice, social chicanery and hypocrisy of his age, who
thus laughed to scorn its follies and petty subterfuges, was no
mere wanton. In the tonic of Wycherley's Plain Dealer, English
comedy recovered momentarily a sense of the actual relations of
contemporary social conditions to better standards. But it was
easier to follow Etherege than Wycherley. The frivolous always
shun the ferule of the moralist; and, hence, the artificial comedy'
continued its primrose path, until called to account by the
trumpeted warnings of Jeremy Collier and the honest endeavours
of Steele to redeem the fallen stage, which had now, like a broken
but unrepentant profligate, been brought to a reckoning with
the past.
E. L. VIII,
CH, V.
10


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CHAPTER VI
THE RESTORATION DRAMA
II
CONGREVE, VANBRUGH, FARQUHAR, ETC.
WILLIAM CONGREVE, a spoilt child of life and literature, was
born in 1670 at Bardsey, near Leeds. He came of an ancient
family, long settled in Staffordshire; and it was due to the accident
of his father's commanding the garrison at Youghal that he sat
upon the same bench with Swift at Kilkenny school and finished
his studies at Trinity college, Dublin. In 1691, he was admitted to
the Middle Temple, deserted law for literature, like many another,
composed a story called Incognita, or Love and Duty Reconciled,
in which Aurelian, the son of a Florentine nobleman, plays an
austere part, and of which Dr Johnson rightly said that he would
rather praise than read it,' and then, in 1693, came upon the town
with The Old Bachelor.
It was Congreve's signal good fortune to appear at the right
moment. The theatre then enjoyed a larger licence and a loftier
repute than ever before. The town asked no other favour of its
comic writers than to be amused, and the interpreters of comedy
rose to the full height of their opportunity. “No stage,' said
Cibber with perfect truth, 'at any one period, could show thirteen
actors, standing all in equal light of excellence, in their profes-
sion’; and it was these actors who came loyally to Congreve's aid.
The incomparable Betterton, the acclaimed master of them all,
and the enchanting Mrs Bracegirdle portrayed the two chief
characters. The poet's colleagues endorsed the approval of the
pit. Dryden, then in the plenitude of his power, generously
hailed the rising star. He declared that he had never seen such
a first play, and gave the young author the practical benefit of
his advice. Congreve, after his wont, set no great value upon his
achievement. “When I wrote it,' said he, in his reply to Collier,


## p. 147 (#169) ############################################

The Old Bachelor
147
'I had little thoughts of the stage; but did it, to amuse myself, in
a slow recovery from a fit of sickness. If it amused its author, it
amused, also, its spectators. Its success was triumphant, and the
fortunate Congreve became famous in a day.
In his preface to the published play, Congreve pleaded in
extenuation an ignorance of the town and stage. No plea was
necessary; and, if his ignorance of the town were confessed, the
stage had left him no lessons to learn. With him, indeed, the
craft of the stage was instinctive. From the very first he trans-
lated whatever he saw and heard in terms of the theatre. The
comedy, which beguiled 'a slow recovery,' displays all the technical
adroitness of an old hand. The dialogue is polished to an even
surface; the play of wit flashes like sunlight upon water; of the
writing no more need be said than that it is Congreve's own. For
the rest, The Old Bachelor wears upon it every sign of youth and
inexperience. Neither of the two stories which are interlaced,
none too closely, in its plot is fresh or original. Though none of
Congreve's contemporaries could have written the play, any one
of them might have devised its fable. In other words, Congreve
is playing supremely well the tune of the time. Heartfree and
Silvia are but counters of artificial comedy. The marriage of
the lady in the mask, which unties the knot of the play, is no
better than an accepted convention of the stage. Bluffe, Sharper,
and Wittol, who conduct the underplot, are stock characters of
a still older fashion. They might have stepped out from Ben
Jonson's comedy of humours. When Bluffe says: 'Sir, I honour
you; I understand you love fighting, I reverence a man that loves
;
fighting, sir, I kiss your hilts,' you recognise the authentic accent
of Bobadill. Even Fondlewife, that kind of mongrel zealot' owes
less to life than to Zeal-of-the-land Busy. In the scene where
Lucy, Silvia's maid, altercates with Setter, the pimp, the language
is marked by all the bombast of youth, which Congreve presently
laid aside. Says Setter: "Thou art some forsaken Abigail we
.
have dallied with heretofore, and art come to tickle thy imagina-
tion with remembrance of iniquity past. ' And Lucy replies: 'No,
thou pitiful flatterer of thy master's imperfections! thou maukin,
made up of the shreds and parings of his superfluous fopperies! '
This is the language neither of life nor of comedy, and it was doubt-
less acceptable to the audience by its mere expectedness.
But if we put aside the youthful extravagance of some passages
and the too frequent reliance upon familiar types, we may discern
in The Old Bachelor the true germs of Congreve's comedy. Not
10_2


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148
The Restoration Drama
j
merely is the style already his own; his purpose and sense of
character are evident on every page. Belinda, an affected lady,
who 'never speaks well of Bellmour herself, nor suffers anybody
else to rail at him,' might be a first, rough outline of Millamant.
And Bellmour sketches, in a single speech, the whole philosophy
of the poet: ‘Come, come,' says he, leave business to idlers, and
wisdom to fools: they have need of 'em: wit be my faculty, and
pleasure my occupation, and let father Time shake his glass. '
Henceforth, wit was Congreve's faculty, pleasure his occupation;
and he succeeded so well that time still shakes his glass at him
in vain.
In the same year (1693), The Double-Dealer was played at Drury
lane, and Congreve's reputation, great already, was vastly enhanced.
In character, style and construction, The Double-Dealer is far
above its predecessor. The one fault commonly imputed to it is
that it has too grave a motive for a comedy of manners. Lady
Touchwood is in love with Millefont, to whom Cynthia is promised.
Maskwell, lady Touchwood's gallant, knows her secret, and attempts
to use it for Millefont's discomfiture and his own conquest of
Cynthia. Such is the simple story, told with a simplicity of
purpose in which Congreve himself took a proper pride.
“The mechanical part of it,' said he, in the dedication addressed to Charles
Montague, 'is regular. . . . I designed the moral first, and to that moral I
invented the fable, and do not know that I have borrowed one part of it any-
where. I made the plot as strong as I could, because it is single, because I
would avoid confusion, and was resolved to preserve the three unities of the
drama. '
That he succeeded in his design none will deny. The Double-
Dealer is sternly classical in construction, and moves, from the
rise of the curtain in the first act to the fall of the curtain in the
fifth, to a settled end and with a settled purpose. The machinery
of the play is still conventional. A wrong letter given to Sir
Paul by lady Plyant, the villain surprised from behind a screen
--these are the keys which unlock the plot. We might forget
their simple artifice, were it not for the conscious villainy of
Maskwell. That surpasses pretence and belief. Maskwell, indeed,
is the familiar villain of melodrama. He is the ancestor in a direct
line of Blifil and Joseph Surface, 'a sedate, a thinking villain,' as
lady Touchwood calls him, 'whose black blood runs temperately
bad. ' The violence of his scenes with this lady exceeds the proper
limit of comedy, and his discovery by lord Touchwood verges upon
the tragic:
a


## p. 149 (#171) ############################################

The Double-Dealer
149
6
“Astonishment, he exclaims, 'binds up my rage! Villainy upon villainy!
Heavens what a long track of dark deceit has this discovered! I am con-
founded when I look back, and want a clue to guide me through the various
mazes of unheard-of treachery. My wife! damnation! my hell! '
But there is no anticlimax. Congreve, with characteristic restraint,
permits Maskwell after his unmasking to say no word.
Indeed, were it not for Maskwell's inveterate habit of soliloquy,
he might trick us almost as easily as he tricks Millefont.
'Why let me see,' he murmurs, “I have the same force, the same words and
accents, when I speak what I do think, and when I speak what I do not think
-the very same- -and dear dissimulation is the only art not to be known from
nature. '
And, again, 'I will deceive 'em all and yet secure myself: 'twas a
lucky thought! Well, this double-dealing is a jewel. ' Here Con-
greve resolutely parts company with nature, and relies upon an
artifice of the stage, an artifice which he defends with considerable
ingenuity. 'A man in a soliloquy,' he argues, “is only thinking,
and thinking such matter as were inexcusable folly in him to
speak. In other words,
because we are concealed spectators of the plot in agitation, and the poet
finds it necessary to let us know the whole mystery of his contrivance, he is
willing to inform us of this person's thoughts; and to that end is forced to
make use of the expedient of speech, no other better way yet being invented
for the communication of thought.
That is as good a defence of soliloquy as may be made, and, em-
ployed by Congreve, soliloquy had this advantage: it gave the
author an opportunity, which he was quick to seize, of Sophoclean
irony. None of the personages of the drama, except lady Touch-
wood, knows what is evident to the audience, that Maskwell is a
villain. When Millefont says, 'Maskwell, welcome! thy presence
is a view of land appearing to my ship-wrecked hopes,' the sense of
irony is complete, and Congreve plays upon this note with the
highest skill.
But it is not for its fable or for its Sophoclean irony that
The Double-Dealer is chiefly admirable. Rather, we wonder today,
as the town wondered then, at its well drawn characters and its
scenes of brilliant comedy. Lord and lady Froth, who might have
been inspired by the duke and duchess of Newcastle, are master-
pieces of witty invention. The scene is never dull when her
ladyship, a true précieuse, counters the gallantry and bel air of Mr
Brisk, the most highly finished of coxcombs, with her coquettish
pedantry. And is not Sir Paul Plyant, a kind of Fondlewife in a


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150
The Restoration Drama
higher sphere, an excellent creature? And is not the vanity of
his lady touched with a light and vivid hand? When she accepts
Millefont's addresses to Cynthia as an assault upon her own
honour, bidding him 'not to hope, and not to despair neither,'
the true spirit of comedy breathes upon us. That the play was
illreceived, until it won the approval of the queen, is surprising.
Dryden, the omnipotent dispenser of reputations, had no doubt of
its merit. He wrote such a set of commendatory verses as might
have put a seal upon the highest fame. He pictured himself as
worn with cares and age, “unprofitably kept at Heaven's expense,'
and living 'a rent-charge on his providence. ' He implored Con-
greve to be kind to his remains, to defend his departed friend,
and 'to shade those laurels, which descend to him. ' Meanwhile,
he lavished the most generous praises upon him whom he looked
upon as his inevitable successor:
In easy dialogue is Fletcher's praise;
He moved the mind, but had not power to raise.
Great Jonson did by strength of judgment please ;
Yet doubling Fletcher's force, he wants his ease.
In differing talents both adorned their age;
One for the study, t'other for the stage.
But both to Congreve justly shall submit,
One matched in judgment, both o'ermatched in wit.
This is your portion, this your native store;
Heaven, that but once was prodigal before,
To Shakespeare gave as much; she could not give him more.
This, of course, is the hyperbole of friendship. Congreve was
supreme in his own realm; it was not for him to match his
prowess against greater monarchs.
With all good faith, Dryden adjured Congreve to maintain
his post: 'that's all the fame you need. ' In Love for Love,
his next comedy, Congreve did far more than maintain his post.
He travelled one stage further towards the final triumph of The
Way of the World. In 1695, Betterton and the best of his
colleagues, having a just quarrel with the patentees of Drury
lane, and being empowered by the king's licence to act in a
separate theatre for themselves, opened the famous house in
Lincoln's inn fields with Love for Love. The success of the play
was without precedent and well merited. At each step, Congreve
approached nearer to life as to the summit of his art. It is true
that the pure comedy of Love for Love is intricated with a farce,
in which Prue and Young Ben play their parts. It is true, also,
that the hoyden's nurse had been a convention upon the stage ever
.


## p. 151 (#173) ############################################

Love for Love
151
since the performance of Romeo and Juliet. But she affords a
relief to the brilliant flash of Congreve's wit, and, as for the sailor,
if he be not 'accounted very natural,' he is 'very pleasant,' as
Dr Johnson observed long ago. For the rest, it may be said that
at last Congreve has entered into his kingdom. In every scene, be
shows himself a perfect master of his craft. The exposition of the
plot is perfect. Jeremy, although he speaks with Congreve's voice,
is the best servant in the whole range of comedy. You will search
in vain for a truer picture of a curmudgeon than Sir Sampson
Legend, compact of humour and ill nature, whose 'blunt vivacity,'
as Cibber calls it, was marvellously portrayed by Underhill.
Foresight, that 'peevish and positive' old fellow, with an absurd
pretence to understand palmistry, astrology, physiognomy, dreams
and omens, was familiar to all frequenters of the theatre in those
days of occult and half understood superstitions. When the two
meet to discuss the marriage of Ben and Angelica, they vaunt
their excellence in alternate strains.
‘But I tell you,' brags Foresight, 'I have travelled, and travelled in the
celestial spheres, know the signs and the planets, and their houses . . . know
whether life shall be long or short, happy or unhappy, whether diseases are
ourable or incurable. If journeys shall be prosperous, undertakings success-
ful; or goods stolen recovered, I know-
Sir Sampson's riposte is magnificent:
'I know, thus be interrupts, 'the length of the Emperor of China's foot;
have kissed the great Mogul's slipper, and rid a hunting upon an elephant
with the Cham of Tartary. -Body o' me, I have made a cuckold of a king,
and the present Majesty of Bantam is the issue of these loins,'
a valiant boast, the repartee to which,—thou modern Mandeville!
Ferdinand Mendez Pinto was but a type of thee, thou liar of the
first magnitude! '-seems singularly ineffective.
But it was upon Valentine, the lover of Angelica, that Congreve
lavished all the resources of his art. There is a nobility of phrase
and thought in Valentine's encounters with his father, Sir Sampson,
which may be called Shakespearean in no mere spirit of adulation.
In these passages, Congreve rises to a height of eloquent argument,
which gives a tragic force to his work.
"Why, sirrah,' asks Sir Sampson, 'mayn't I do what I please ? are you not
my slave ? did I not beget you ? and might not I have chosen whether I
would have begot you or not? 'Oons, who are you? whence come you? . . .
Come, uncase, strip, and go naked out of the world, as you came into 't. ' 'My
clothes are soon put off,' replies Valentine; 'but you must also divest me of
reason, thought, passions, inclinations, affections, appetites, senses, and the
huge train of attendants that you begot along with me. '
6


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152
The Restoration Drama
Still better, as diction or invention, are the speeches of the mad
Valentine, who speaks with the very voice of Hamlet.
Alas, poor man! his eyes are shrunk, and his hands shrivelled; his legs
dwindled, and his back bowed, pray, pray for a metamorphosis. Change
thy shape, and shake off age; get thee Medea's kittle and be boiled anew;
come forth with labouring callous hands, a chine of steel, and Atlas shoulders.
But all is not on this high plane. Ben and Prue, Tattle and
Scandal carry us away to the lower slopes of farce, and when
Mrs Frail meets her sister, Mrs Foresight, it is a contest always of
gaiety. No scene in Congreve's plays is touched with a lighter
hand than that in which Mrs Foresight asks Mrs Frail where
she lost her gold bodkin: 'O Sister, Sister! ' And Mrs Frail
demands in answer, ‘if you go to that where did you find this
bodkin? O Sister, Sister! Sister every way. '
After the triumph of Love for Love at the theatre in Lincoln's
inn fields, Congreve agreed to give the managers a new play
every year, if his health permitted, in exchange for a 'full share. '
In 1697, he produced, not another comedy, but The Mourning
Bride, a rash experiment in the later Elizabethan drama. To a
modern ear The Mourning Bride is sad fustian. The action, such
as it is, is enwrapped in impenetrable gloom. Prisons and burial-
vaults are its sombre background. The artifice-disguise-upon
which its plot turns is borrowed from comedy, with the simple
difference that the wrong man is not married but murdered.
In other words, Manuel, king of Granada, personates Alphonso
for jealousy of Zara:
There with his bombast, and his robe arrayed,
And laid along as he now lies supine,
I shall convict her to her face of falsehood.
-
Were it not that Manuel is decapitated by his favourite, we might
be assisting at captain Bluffe's marriage with the masked Lucy.
But the taste of the time hailed it as a masterpiece. It was heard
with enthusiasm, and held the stage for many years. Stranger
still is it that Dr Johnson pronounced the description of the temple
in the second act 'the finest poetical passage he had ever read. '
It is idle to discuss the vagaries of criticism, though few will be
found now to mistake the pompous platitude of Congreve for
poetry. For the rest, the play opens with one of the oftenest
quoted lines in English-Music hath charms to soothe a savage
breast'; its third act concludes on a famous tag, the sense of
which is borrowed from Cibber:


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The Way of the World
153
Heaven has no rage, like love to hatred turned,
Nor hell a fury, like a woman scorned ;
and its production was but an interlude in the career of
Congreve.
Three years later, in 1700, Congreve's masterpiece, The Way of
the World, was played at the theatre in Lincoln's inn fields. That
it was a failure on the stage is not remarkable. It was written to
- please its author's fastidious taste not to chime with the humour
of the age. It was, in brief, a new invention in English literature.
It is deformed neither by realism nor by farce. The comic spirit
breathes freely through its ample spaces. "That it succeeded on
the stage,' says Congreve, 'was almost beyond my expectation. '
There is no hint of grossness in the characters. They are not of
the common sort, 'rather objects of charity than contempt,' which
were then popular on the stage. In brief, it was Congreve's
purpose
to design some characters, which should appear ridiculous, not so much
through a natural folly (which is incorrigible, and therefore not proper to the
stage) as through an affected wit, a wit, which at the same time that it is
affected is also false.
And so,
he set upon
the boards a set of men and women of quick
brains and cynical humours, who talked with the brilliance and
rapidity wherewith the finished swordsman fences. They are not
at the pains to do much. What Congreve calls the fable is of small
account. It is difficult to put faith in the document which un-
ravels the tangle and counteracts the villainy of Fainall. The trick
played upon lady Wishfort, that most desperate of all creatures,
a lady fighting an unequal battle with time, does no more than
interrupt the raillery, which, with a vivid characterisation, is the
play's excuse. The cabal nights, on which they come together,
and sit like a coroner's inquest on the murdered reputations of
the week, and of which Sheridan's imitation fell far below the
original, demonstrate at once what manner of men and women are
the persons of the drama. Witwoud, indeed, is the very triumph
of coxcombry, with Petulant for his engaging foil. He never
opens his lips without an epigram, and in his extravagant chatter
climbs to the topmost height of folly. 'Fainall,' says he, how's
your lady. . . I beg pardon that I should ask a man of pleasure and
the town, a question at once so foreign and domestic. ' And again:
'A wit should be no more sincere than a woman constant; one
argues a decay of parts, as t'other of beauty. How light, and
cynical, and wellbred it all is, in spite of its purposed affectation!


## p. 154 (#176) ############################################

154
The Restoration Drama
>
And the other characters, Mrs Marwood and the Fainalls, though
the deeper seriousness of intrigue inspires them, are drawn with
a perfect surety of skill and knowledge.
But Mrs Millamant and Mirabell overtop them all. The warfare
of their wits and hearts is the very essence of the drama. George
Meredith has said with justice that the play might be called 'The
Conquest of a Town Coquette'; and, when the enchanting Millamant
and her lover are on the stage, our interest in the others fades to
nothingness. By a happy stroke, Millamant does not appear until
the second scene of the second act, but Mirabell has discoursed of
her qualities, and you are all expectancy. And nobly does the
love-sick Mirabell hail her approach. 'Here she comes, i'faith,
full sail, with her fan spread and her streamers out, and a shoal of
fools for tenders; ha, no, I cry her mercy! ' It is impossible to
think of anything save the apparition of Dalila, in Samson
Agonistes,
That so bedeckt, ornate, and gay,
Comes this way sailing
Like a stately Ship
Of Tarsus, bound for th’Isles
Of Javan or Gadier
With all her bravery on and tackle trim,
Sails filli'd, and streamers waving.
And Mrs Millamant reveals herself at once as a woman of fashion,
sated with life. Instantly she strikes the note of nonchalance in
her famous comment upon letters. "Nobody knows how to write
letters and yet one has 'em, one does not know why. They serve
one to pin up one's hair. ' Then, she and Mirabell fall bravely to
the encounter. 'Nay, 'tis true,' says he, you are no longer hand-
some when you've lost your lover; your beauty dies upon the
instant; for beauty is the lover's gift. ' 'Lord, what is a lover, that
it can give,' asks Millamant. "Why, one makes lovers as fast as
one pleases, and they live as long as one pleases, and they die
as soon as one pleases; and then, if one pleases, one makes more. '
Whenever Millamant is upon the stage, Congreve is at his best.
The speeches which he puts in her mouth are all delicately
turned and finely edged. She is a personage by and of herself.
She comes before you visibly and audibly. She is no profile,
painted upon paper, and fitted with tags. Her creator has made
her in three dimensions; and, as she always differs from those
about her, so she is always consistent with herself. Mirabell
knows her when he says that 'her true vanity is in her power of
pleasing. ' She is, indeed, a kind of Beatrice, who strives with a
6


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The Comedy of Manners
155
-
willing Benedick. But, though she loves her Mirabell, yet will she
not submit. When he, lacking humour as a lover would in the
circumstances, complains that 'a man may as soon make a friend
by his wit, or a fortune by his honesty, as win a woman by plain-
dealing and sincerity,' how deftly she turns his gravity aside!
'Sententious Mirabell! ' And it is to Mrs Fainall, not to her lover,
that at last she acknowledges, well, if Mirabell should not make
a good husband, I am a lost thing-for I find I love him
violently. '
But, before the end, there is many a battle to be fought. In
her contest with Mrs Marwood, the spurned beauty, she hides her
passion behind a veil of malicious merriment. 'I detest him, hate
him, madam,' declares Mrs Marwood. 'O madam, why so do I,'
answers the defiant Millamant, and yet the creature loves me,
ha! ha! ha! how can one forbear laughing to think of it. ' Nor
will she dwindle into marriage without an exaction at every step.
She'll be solicited to the very last, nay, and afterwards. It is not
for her to endure 'the saucy looks of an assured man. And so she
makes terms with Mirabell, and he, in turn, offers conditions of
matrimony, in a scene which for phrase and diction Congreve
himself has never surpassed. Even at the last, she will yield only
with an impertinence. "Why does not the man take me ? would you
have me give myself to you over and over again ? ' And Mirabell
replies, 'Ay, and over and over again. ' Thus, they share the
victory; and, as you lay down the play, in which incense has been
offered to the muse of comedy, you feel that The Way of the
World, for all its malice, all its irony, all its merriment, is as
austere as tragedy, as rarefied as thought itself.
Congreve, then, carried to its highest perfection what is known
as the artificial comedy or comedy of manners. He regarded
himself as the legitimate heir of Terence and Menander, and
claimed with perfect justice to paint the world in which he lived.
Something, of course, he owed to his predecessors, and to the noble
traditions of the English stage. Shakespeare, as has been hinted,
was ever an example to him, and at the beginning of his career he
worked under the domination of Ben Jonson. Of those nearer to
his own time, he was most deeply indebted to the lighthearted
Etherege. But, being himself a true master of comedy, he took
for his material the life about him, a life which still reflected the
gaiety of king Charles's court. The thirty years which had passed
since the restoration, when Congreve began to write, had not
availed to darken 'the gala day of wit and pleasure. ' A passage,
6


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156
The Restoration Drama
in which he describes the composition of The Way of the World,
reveals in a flash his aim and ambition.
'If it has happened,' he writes in a dedication addressed to Ralph earl
Montague, 'in any part of this comedy, that I have gained a turn of style or
expression more correct, or at least more corrigible, than in those that I have
formerly written, I must with equal pride and gratitude ascribe it to the honour
of your Lordship's admitting me into your conversation, and that of a society
where everybody else was so well worthy of you, in your retirement last
summer from the town. '
a
a
When due allowance is made for the terms of a dedication, in
which accuracy is asked of no man, it is easy to believe that, in lord
Montague's country house, he found that wit and sparkle of life
which he transferred to his scene, 'as upon a canvas of Watteau'
a Watteau, whose gaiety and elegance are tempered by malice.
But the life which he painted was not the life of common day.
It was a life of pleasure and gallantry, which had a code and speech
of its own. No man ever selected from the vast world of experience
what served his purpose more rigorously than Congreve. He
never cared for seeing things that forced him to entertain low
thoughts of his nature. 'I don't know how it is with others,' said
he, “but I confess freely to you, I could never look long upon a
monkey, without mortifying reflections. Nor was he one who saw
life whole. His sympathy was for 'persons of quality,' and he lived
in a world situate on the confines of cynicism and merriment.
Had he ever descended to realism his comedies might have been
open to reproach. But the scene, in which his Plyants and Froths,
his Mirabells and Millefonts, his Millamants and Angelicas, his
Brisks and Tattles, play their parts, is, like their names, fantastic
enough half to justify the famous paradox of Charles Lamb. Even
while we admit that Congreve painted what he chose to see, we
may yet acknowledge that the persons of his drama ‘have got out
of Christendom into the land of—what shall I call it ? -of cuckoldry
-the Utopia of gallantry, whose pleasure is duty, and the manners
perfect freedom? '
It is in the interpretation of this gallantry that Congreve
displayed his true genius. He was, above and before all, a man
of letters. It was not enough for him, as for most of his con-
temporaries, to devise an ingenious situation or to excite the
laughter of the pit by the voice of boisterous fun. He had a
natural love and respect for the English tongue. He cared
supremely for the making of his sentences. His nice scholarship
· See Lamb's essay on the Artificial Comedy of the Last Century.
.


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Congreve's Comic Art
157
had taught him the burden of association which time had laid
upon this word or that. He used the language of his own day like
a master, because he was anchored securely to a knowledge of the
past. In point and concision, his style is still unmatched in the
literature of England. There is never in his writing a word too
much, or an epithet that is superfluous. He disdains the stale
artifices wherewith the journeyman ties his poor sentences
together. As a stern castigator of prose, he goes far beyond the
example of his master, Molière. And this sternly chastened prose,
with its haunting memories of Shakespeare and Jonson, its flashing
irony, and its quick allusiveness, is a clear mirror of Congreve's
mind. The poet's phrase is penetrated and informed by the wit
.
and raillery of the poet's thought.
In nothing does Congreve prove his art more abundantly
than in the rhythm and cadence of his speech. His language
appeals always to the ear rather than to the eye. So fine a
master of comic diction was he, that, in every line he wrote, you
may mark the rise and fall of the actor's voice. His words, in
brief, were written to be spoken; he sternly excludes whatever
is harsh or tasteless; and we in our studies may still charm our
ears with the exquisite poise of his lines, because the accent still
falls where he meant that it should fall, the stage effect may still be
recovered in the printed page. He arranges his vowels with the
same care which a musician gives to the arrangement of his notes.
He avoids the clashing of uncongenial consonants, as a maker of
harmonies refrains from discord. Open Love for Love or The Way
of the World, where you will, and you will find passages which, by
the precision wherewith they fit the voice, would give you pleasure,
were they deprived of meaning.
Congreve was thirty when he gave The Way of the World
to the theatre. He wrote no more for the stage? The history of
letters shows no other instance of defection so great as this.
Several reasons for his sudden abandonment of letters have been
suggested—the cold reception of The Way of the World, or the
blundering attack of Jeremy Collier. The reasons are insufficient.
The natural aristocracy of Congreve's mind makes light of such
1 We cannot reckon in his work the share he had in Squire Trelooby. Here
for the sake of completeness is his account of the matter, given in a letter to Joseph
Keatly on 20 May 1704: "The translation you speak of is not altogether mine ; for
Vanbrugh and Walsh had a part in it. Each did an act of a French farce. Mine, and
I believe theirs, was done in two mornings ; so there can be no great matter in it. It
was a compliment made to the people of quality at their subscription music, without
any design to have it acted or printed further. '


## p. 158 (#180) ############################################

158
The Restoration Drama
rebuffs as these. “A better reason is not far to seek. In depicting
society Congreve had fallen in love with it. He turned willingly
from art to life, for which his character and his studies alike fitted
him. He was by temperament what himself would have called a
man of quality. He might have sat for the portrait of Valentine
or Mirabell. He lavished in talk his incomparable gifts as an
intellectual gladiator, choosing only a quieter field for their dis-
play. The generosity of his friends placed him above and beyond
the irking of want or debt. Soon after the production of Love
for Love he was appointed commissioner for the licensing for.
hackney coaches, an office which he held until 1707. Com-
missioner of wine licences from 1705 to 1714, secretary for
Jamaica from 1714 onwards, he enjoyed also a place in the Paper
office, and lived in comfortable affluence upon £1200 a year.
Taking but a modest interest in politics, he kept aloof from the
strife of parties, and neither side was urgent to strip him of his
emoluments. When-in 1711-he feared to be deprived of his
commissionership of wine licences, Swift waited upon ‘my Lord-
Treasurer,' successfully pleaded the cause of Congreve, and was
able to reassure his friend. 'So I have made a worthy man easy,'
a
he writes, “and that is a good day's work. ' Few of his contem-
poraries had more or more closely attached friends. - Halifax
accepted his dedication and guarded his interests. Of Dryden's
generous sympathy towards him something has already been said.
It was to him that Steele dedicated his Miscellanies, and that
Pope addressed the famous epilogue of his Iliad, which does equal
honour to himself and to Congreve.
Such were some of Congreve's intimates, nor did his wealth of
friendship proceed from mere complacency. He was not every
man's friend because he was no man's enemy. The social graces
were active in him. His talk must have been an easy echo of his
comedies. Swift, the sternest of judges, ‘dined with him and
Estcourt' on one occasion, 'and laughed till six. Though long
before his death he was acclaimed the greatest man of letters in
his time, though he lived in an atmosphere of grandeur, his kindly
services were always at the disposition of others. “On another
visit he gave me a Tatler,' says Swift, 'as blind as he is, for
little Harrison. The courage and gaiety of his heart were un-
diminished by gout or by that fiercest scourge of a scholar, the
loss of his eyesight. As the passage of the years separated him
further from the triumphs of the stage, the writer was lost in the
man of the world. 'He is so far from being puff'd up with vanity,'
>
6


## p. 159 (#181) ############################################

Congreve's Friends
159
wrote Giles Jacob, that he abounds with humility and good nature.
He does not show so much the poet as the gentleman. It was
this worldly front, which he showed to Voltaire in 1726, and which
shocked the French philosopher, avid of literary fame. Congreve,
in conversation, dismissed his masterpieces as trifles, and received
Voltaire on the foot of a gentleman, who lived very plainly.
Voltaire replied that, had Congreve had the misfortune to be a
mere gentleman, he would not have visited him. Both men spoke
justly. But Voltaire did not sufficiently appreciate the natural
reticence of the Englishman, who, without the slightest vanity, was
still unwilling to discuss the masterpieces, which lay a quarter of
a century behind him.
Thus, he lived a discreet, well ordered life, visiting the country
houses of his friends, gossiping at Will's, seeking such solace as
Bath or Tunbridge Wells might afford him. Of Mrs Bracegirdle,
the enchantress, whose genius embellished his plays, he remained
unto the end the friend and neighbour. To the duchess of Marl-
borough, the wife of Francis Godolphin, he was bound in the bonds
of a close attachment. When he died in 1729 he left £200 to the
actress, and to the duchess £10,000, a sum which might, as Johnson
says, “have given great assistance to the ancient family, from which
he was descended. For this disposal of his wealth Congreve has
been rated by Macaulay in his best Orbilian manner. At this
distance of time and with our imperfect knowledge of his motives,
it seems rash to condemn the poet, whose generosity was rewarded
after her own guise by the duchess of Marlborough. Davies tells
us that she had
an automaton, or small statue of ivory, made exactly to resemble him, which
every day was brought to table. A glass was put in the hand of this statue,
which was supposed to bow to her Grace, and to nod in approbation of what
she spoke to it.
This is the mere frippery of fame. Posterity, content, like Voltaire,
to forget the gentleman, remembers the poet, who used the English
tongue with perfect mastery, and who, alone of his race and time,
was fit to tread a measure in wit and raillery with Molière
himself.
It would be difficult to find a more obvious contrast to Con-
greve than Sir John Vanbrugh. In the sense that Congreve was
a man of letters Vanbrugh was not a man of letters at all. He
was wholly unconscious of the diction, which for Congreve was a
chief end of comedy. Cibber spoke the truth when he said that the


## p. 160 (#182) ############################################

160
The Restoration Drama
best scenes of Vanbrugh's plays 'seem'd to be no more than his
common conversation committed to paper. ' 'In other words, Van-
brugh wrote as he talked, without reflection and with great good
humour. But, if the gift of artistic expression were denied him, he
lacked not compensations. He was a man of a bluff temper and
.
a
vigorous understanding, who easily communicated to his works
the energy and humour of his mind. Like many another of foreign
descent, he was more English than the English, he engrossed in his
own temperament the good and evil qualities of John Bull. Thus
it was that he delighted in farce, not of situation but of character,
and he separated himself from the other writers of comedy by a
vivid talent of caricature. He overcharged the eccentricity of his
personages with so bold a hand as to anticipate the excesses of
Gillray in another art. In brief, he was a highly competent gentle-
man, who found no enterprise too difficult for his courage and
intelligence. He was a man of affairs, a soldier, a herald, an
,
architect; and, no doubt, following the fashion, he sat himself down
to write a comedy with the same easy carelessness wherewith he
undertook to build a palace. Few men known to history were
more of a piece than he. In his life, as in his works, he was a
simple, sturdy, natural Englishman, devoid alike of affectation and
concealment. Pope ranked him among the three 'most honest-
hearted real good men’ of the Kitcat club, and his dignity wrung
from Swift, not apt for apology, a public regret that he had once
satirised 'a man of wit and humour. '
His grandfather, a merchant of Ghent, had found an asylum in
London from the persecutions of the duke of Alva, had followed
his craft with success, and had left two sons, the younger of whom,
Giles, was the father of the dramatist. Nothing is known of Sir
John's youth and training. In 1691, when he was twenty-seven
years of age, he was clapt up in the Bastille as a suspected spy,
meditated a comedy within its comfortable walls, and, as Voltaire
owns with surprise, was never guilty of 'a single satirical stroke
against the country, in which he had been so injuriously treated. '
Six years later, in 1697, he produced The Relapse or Virtue in
Danger, and instantly established his reputation. This broad and
lively farce, which at once caught the popular favour, owed its
inspiration to Cibber's Love's Last Shift. The character of Sir
Novelty Fashion in that play made an instant appeal to Vanbrugh's
fancy; he raised the beau to the peerage, with the title of lord
Foppington, and converted Cibber's puppet into a brilliant carica-
ture. It is easy to find fault with the fable of The Relapse. It is
1


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Vanbrugh’s The Relapse
161
less a play than two plays spliced into one. Loveless, 'resolved
this once to launch into temptation,' and Berinthia, willing to abet
him, cannot engage our interest. The farce exists for the proper
display of lord Foppington, Sir Tunbelly Clumsey and Miss Hoyden.
Here, indeed, are three caricatures after Vanbrugh's own heart.
What they do matters not. It is what they say that reveals their
eccentricities. - Lord Foppington is the true fop of the period, with
all his qualities exaggerated. His title gives him unfeigned delight.