Dryden, the
omnipotent
dispenser of reputations, had no doubt of
its merit.
its merit.
Cambridge History of English Literature - 1908 - v08
Though she
observed the nice laws of mine and thine with little more
punctiliousness than did her male contemporaries, it is not to
be denied that Mrs Behn is inventive in situations if not in
whole plots, ingenious in keeping her figures in almost incessant
action and in maintaining an interminable flow of vivacious
dialogue? Her most popular play was The Rover, or The
Banished Cavaliers, which took the fancy of the town in 1677,
and to which she wrote a second part in 1681. In both of these
plays, the central figure is a swashbuckling sea captain ashore,
the victim of every pretty face and the hero of a string of
questionable adventures. The scene of the first part, Naples in
carnival time, must have lent itself to brilliant and varied stage
setting. The Rover is taken entire from two unacted comedies
of Thomas Killigrew, entitled Thomaso the Wanderer, which, it
may be suspected, contain not a little matter autobiographical,
though, otherwise, as frankly 'borrowed' from English playwrights
of the past as Mrs Behn herself 'borrowed' from Killigrew? .
Mrs Behn's next comedy, The Dutch Lover, 1673, is a favour-
able specimen of the conventional comedy of cloak and sword,
the scene, as in the second part of The Rover, being Madrid.
The Dutch Lover is said to be 'founded on a Spanish romance
written by the ingenious Don Francisco de las Coveras styled
Don Fenisex! Another class of Mrs Behn's comedies are those
of her own contemporary town life, most of them lifted bodily
from earlier English plays and made coarse in the process. For
example, The Debauchee, 1677, is based on A Madd Couple well
1 Siegel puts it that Mrs Behn began with serious, romantic dramas, such as The
Young King and The Forced Marriage, and her one (? ) tragedy, The Moor's Revenge,
but went over to comedy in The Rover, first acted anonymously, in deference to the
loose tastes of the time. See • Aphra Bebn's Gedichte und Prosawerke,' in Anglia,
vol. xxv, pp. 98—101.
? See Baker, D, E. , Biographia Dramatica, ed. 1812, vol. II, p. 232, where some
of these borrowed decorations' of Killigrew are referred to their originals in Carew,
Fletcher and Jonson. Both of Killigrew's plays are said to have been written in
Madrid.
3 Langbaine, 1691, p. 19; and see Hazlitt, Collections and Notes, 1867–76, p. 104.
There is, of course, no such Spanish author as Coveras. '
.
## p. 142 (#164) ############################################
142
The Restoration Drama
matcht by Richard Brome; The Town Fop, of the same date, on
Wilkins's Miseries of Inforst Mariage. The most character-
istic comedy of this group is The City Heiress, 1682, in which
Mrs Behn has broadened even the humour of Middleton's A Mad
World, My Masters, unquestionably her source, and combined it
with suggestions from The Guardian of Massinger. Nothing
could be more unfortunate than the criticism that finds for
Aphra Behn a model in Jonson? That lady's art was predatory,
and she took any author's property as her own, painting with
realistic, if conventional, brush the fops, the roués, the maids and
misses of Etherege and Sedley in their eternal embroilment
of questionable amorous intrigue. In The Roundheads, 1682,
Mrs Behn conveyed Tatham's plot of The Rump entire to her
comedy and thickened the whole with the addition of one of her
favourite situations. In one of her latest plays, The Widow
Ranter, not published until 1690, after her death, Mrs Behn
treated a historical event of recent occurrence in the colony of
Virginia--the rebellion, as it was called, of Nathaniel Bacon-
and produced a result, with all its absurdities, of no small
originality. Mrs Behn was a very gifted woman, compelled to
write for bread in an age in which literature, and especially
comedy, catered habitually to the lowest and most depraved of
human inclinations. Her success depended on her ability to write
like a man. On the score of morality, she is again and again more
daring and risquée than any of her male competitors in the art
of playmaking, and she is as frivolous and as abandoned in
speech as the worst of them all. But, as has been well said, it
remains difficult for us to believe that a woman whose literary
talents commended her to the friendship and association of Dryden
could have been degraded in her personal life.
William Wycherley was born in 1640 of a substantial Shrop-
shire family. He was educated, at first, in France, where he
frequented good society ; but, with the coming back of the king,
entered at Queen's college, Oxford, which, however, he left with-
out a degrees. Later, at the Inner Temple, Wycherley led the
gay and frivolous life of a man about town and made those
observations of the conversation and manners of his time that
1 Gosse in the Dictionary of National Biography, vol. iv, p. 130.
• Siegel, u. s. p. 104, finds three of Mrs Behn's comedies especially written
'in service of the royal cause. ' These are The City Heiress, in which a puritan-
minded usurer is ridiculed, The Rump and The False Count. All these plays
appeared in 1682. This was the time of the Popish plot; and Dryden's Absalom and
Achitophel had been published in November 1681.
3 Ile was much noticed by the celebrated Duchess of Montausier (Julia de Ram.
bouillet),' Ward, vol. 111, p. 461 note.
## p. 143 (#165) ############################################
William Wycherley
143
he, later, reproduced successfully in his plays. When a very
old man, Wycherley told Pope that he had written his first
comedy, Love in a Wood, when he was but nineteen, that is, in
1659—60. This seems an error, as all the evidence points to the
first performance of this play in 1671, and to its inspiration in
the earlier work of Etherege and Sedley. Indeed, the dramatic
activity of Wycherley was comprised within a period of less than
five years, as The Plain Dealer, the fourth and last of his
comedies, was on the stage not later than the spring of 1674.
It was the success of Love in a Wood, added to a handsome
person, that brought Wycherley to the notice and favour of the
king's mistress, the duchess of Cleveland. To her, he dedicated
his comedy on its publication, and, by her, he was drawn into the
shameless circle which she ruled. But neither wealth nor honours
accrued to Wycherley from this intimacy. And, some years later,
meeting lady Drogheda, a young widow of fortune, Wycherley
married her, losing thereby the favour of the king and a post of
tutor to one of the royal children. His wife proved imperious,
jealous and ill-tempered and, when she died, years later, left the
unfortunate poet very little besides an expensive lawsuit. It was
not until James had come to the throne that the author of The
Plain Dealer was remembered, his debts paid and a pension of
£200 a year settled upon him. Wycherley outlived all the com-
panions of his youth and middle age, dying in December 1715.
His strange literary friendship with Pope, who was nearly fifty
years his junior, and his later halting and abortive verses, may be
passed by here. It is not to be denied that Wycherley was much
esteemed by his friends, among whom, it must be remembered,
were Dryden, Pope and Dennis. The old roué was credited with
fairness of spirit and an outspoken contempt of deceit, qualities
of his own ‘plain dealer,' as well as with a 'tenderness of temper'
and a tendency to do justice to others for which we should not
be altogether disposed to look in his own Manly.
Love in a Wood, or St James's Park, Wycherley's earliest
venture in comedy, was suggested in subject, as in title, by the
recent success of Sedley's Mulberry Garden, which it parallels
in its scenes in the park, as The Mulberry Garden parallels
Etherege's earlier The Comical Revenge. To draw up serious
indictments of plagiarism in cases such as these is a sheer waste
of ingenuity? The novelty of a locality admirably fitted for
1 See, however, the treatment of this topic by Klette, J. , William Wycherley's Leben
und dramatische Werke, Münster, 1883.
## p. 144 (#166) ############################################
144
The Restoration Drama
1
a
the masquing and intrigue that delighted the age was a sufficient
inspiration for all three comedies. The construction of Love in
a Wood is somewhat better than that of Etherege's plays; it is,
however, not nearly so well written as any one of them, although
the dialogue is direct, witty and idiomatic and, doubtless, closer
to the colloquial speech of the day than Etherege's brilliant
repartees. The characters, while presenting nothing beyond the
usual 'young gentlemen of the town,' the coxcomb, the usurer, the
matchmaker, the affected widow, are well defined and drawn with
strokes as vigorous and, at times, as coarse as are their actions and
their language. The Gentleman Dancing-master was first staged
towards the close of the year 1671, and we are surprised to hear
that 'it was not much liked, and was acted only six times' This
really diverting comedy presents a marked improvement in the
way of simplicity and unity on Wycherley's previous effort. The
Frenchified gull, the Englishman turned Spaniard, and the device
of a foolish suitor employed by a clever maiden to further her
flirtation with his rival-all are time honoured properties of the
earlier stage. The incident, too, on which the whole plot turns,
that of a lover forced, under fear of discovery, to pretend himself
a dancing-master, is borrowed from Calderon's comedy, El Maestro
de Danzar, which, in turn, goes back to Lope de Vega. But there
remains much that is inventive and original in the English comedy,
and the dialogue has developed in wit, and especially in a certain
quality of daring and suggestive innuendo and double meaning of
which this dramatist is peculiarly master.
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.
## p. 145 (#167) ############################################
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
## p. 146 (#168) ############################################
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
## p. 148 (#170) ############################################
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
## p. 150 (#172) ############################################
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
## p. 152 (#174) ############################################
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:
## p. 153 (#175) ############################################
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
## p. 155 (#177) ############################################
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
## p. 156 (#178) ############################################
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.
.
## p. 157 (#179) ############################################
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.
observed the nice laws of mine and thine with little more
punctiliousness than did her male contemporaries, it is not to
be denied that Mrs Behn is inventive in situations if not in
whole plots, ingenious in keeping her figures in almost incessant
action and in maintaining an interminable flow of vivacious
dialogue? Her most popular play was The Rover, or The
Banished Cavaliers, which took the fancy of the town in 1677,
and to which she wrote a second part in 1681. In both of these
plays, the central figure is a swashbuckling sea captain ashore,
the victim of every pretty face and the hero of a string of
questionable adventures. The scene of the first part, Naples in
carnival time, must have lent itself to brilliant and varied stage
setting. The Rover is taken entire from two unacted comedies
of Thomas Killigrew, entitled Thomaso the Wanderer, which, it
may be suspected, contain not a little matter autobiographical,
though, otherwise, as frankly 'borrowed' from English playwrights
of the past as Mrs Behn herself 'borrowed' from Killigrew? .
Mrs Behn's next comedy, The Dutch Lover, 1673, is a favour-
able specimen of the conventional comedy of cloak and sword,
the scene, as in the second part of The Rover, being Madrid.
The Dutch Lover is said to be 'founded on a Spanish romance
written by the ingenious Don Francisco de las Coveras styled
Don Fenisex! Another class of Mrs Behn's comedies are those
of her own contemporary town life, most of them lifted bodily
from earlier English plays and made coarse in the process. For
example, The Debauchee, 1677, is based on A Madd Couple well
1 Siegel puts it that Mrs Behn began with serious, romantic dramas, such as The
Young King and The Forced Marriage, and her one (? ) tragedy, The Moor's Revenge,
but went over to comedy in The Rover, first acted anonymously, in deference to the
loose tastes of the time. See • Aphra Bebn's Gedichte und Prosawerke,' in Anglia,
vol. xxv, pp. 98—101.
? See Baker, D, E. , Biographia Dramatica, ed. 1812, vol. II, p. 232, where some
of these borrowed decorations' of Killigrew are referred to their originals in Carew,
Fletcher and Jonson. Both of Killigrew's plays are said to have been written in
Madrid.
3 Langbaine, 1691, p. 19; and see Hazlitt, Collections and Notes, 1867–76, p. 104.
There is, of course, no such Spanish author as Coveras. '
.
## p. 142 (#164) ############################################
142
The Restoration Drama
matcht by Richard Brome; The Town Fop, of the same date, on
Wilkins's Miseries of Inforst Mariage. The most character-
istic comedy of this group is The City Heiress, 1682, in which
Mrs Behn has broadened even the humour of Middleton's A Mad
World, My Masters, unquestionably her source, and combined it
with suggestions from The Guardian of Massinger. Nothing
could be more unfortunate than the criticism that finds for
Aphra Behn a model in Jonson? That lady's art was predatory,
and she took any author's property as her own, painting with
realistic, if conventional, brush the fops, the roués, the maids and
misses of Etherege and Sedley in their eternal embroilment
of questionable amorous intrigue. In The Roundheads, 1682,
Mrs Behn conveyed Tatham's plot of The Rump entire to her
comedy and thickened the whole with the addition of one of her
favourite situations. In one of her latest plays, The Widow
Ranter, not published until 1690, after her death, Mrs Behn
treated a historical event of recent occurrence in the colony of
Virginia--the rebellion, as it was called, of Nathaniel Bacon-
and produced a result, with all its absurdities, of no small
originality. Mrs Behn was a very gifted woman, compelled to
write for bread in an age in which literature, and especially
comedy, catered habitually to the lowest and most depraved of
human inclinations. Her success depended on her ability to write
like a man. On the score of morality, she is again and again more
daring and risquée than any of her male competitors in the art
of playmaking, and she is as frivolous and as abandoned in
speech as the worst of them all. But, as has been well said, it
remains difficult for us to believe that a woman whose literary
talents commended her to the friendship and association of Dryden
could have been degraded in her personal life.
William Wycherley was born in 1640 of a substantial Shrop-
shire family. He was educated, at first, in France, where he
frequented good society ; but, with the coming back of the king,
entered at Queen's college, Oxford, which, however, he left with-
out a degrees. Later, at the Inner Temple, Wycherley led the
gay and frivolous life of a man about town and made those
observations of the conversation and manners of his time that
1 Gosse in the Dictionary of National Biography, vol. iv, p. 130.
• Siegel, u. s. p. 104, finds three of Mrs Behn's comedies especially written
'in service of the royal cause. ' These are The City Heiress, in which a puritan-
minded usurer is ridiculed, The Rump and The False Count. All these plays
appeared in 1682. This was the time of the Popish plot; and Dryden's Absalom and
Achitophel had been published in November 1681.
3 Ile was much noticed by the celebrated Duchess of Montausier (Julia de Ram.
bouillet),' Ward, vol. 111, p. 461 note.
## p. 143 (#165) ############################################
William Wycherley
143
he, later, reproduced successfully in his plays. When a very
old man, Wycherley told Pope that he had written his first
comedy, Love in a Wood, when he was but nineteen, that is, in
1659—60. This seems an error, as all the evidence points to the
first performance of this play in 1671, and to its inspiration in
the earlier work of Etherege and Sedley. Indeed, the dramatic
activity of Wycherley was comprised within a period of less than
five years, as The Plain Dealer, the fourth and last of his
comedies, was on the stage not later than the spring of 1674.
It was the success of Love in a Wood, added to a handsome
person, that brought Wycherley to the notice and favour of the
king's mistress, the duchess of Cleveland. To her, he dedicated
his comedy on its publication, and, by her, he was drawn into the
shameless circle which she ruled. But neither wealth nor honours
accrued to Wycherley from this intimacy. And, some years later,
meeting lady Drogheda, a young widow of fortune, Wycherley
married her, losing thereby the favour of the king and a post of
tutor to one of the royal children. His wife proved imperious,
jealous and ill-tempered and, when she died, years later, left the
unfortunate poet very little besides an expensive lawsuit. It was
not until James had come to the throne that the author of The
Plain Dealer was remembered, his debts paid and a pension of
£200 a year settled upon him. Wycherley outlived all the com-
panions of his youth and middle age, dying in December 1715.
His strange literary friendship with Pope, who was nearly fifty
years his junior, and his later halting and abortive verses, may be
passed by here. It is not to be denied that Wycherley was much
esteemed by his friends, among whom, it must be remembered,
were Dryden, Pope and Dennis. The old roué was credited with
fairness of spirit and an outspoken contempt of deceit, qualities
of his own ‘plain dealer,' as well as with a 'tenderness of temper'
and a tendency to do justice to others for which we should not
be altogether disposed to look in his own Manly.
Love in a Wood, or St James's Park, Wycherley's earliest
venture in comedy, was suggested in subject, as in title, by the
recent success of Sedley's Mulberry Garden, which it parallels
in its scenes in the park, as The Mulberry Garden parallels
Etherege's earlier The Comical Revenge. To draw up serious
indictments of plagiarism in cases such as these is a sheer waste
of ingenuity? The novelty of a locality admirably fitted for
1 See, however, the treatment of this topic by Klette, J. , William Wycherley's Leben
und dramatische Werke, Münster, 1883.
## p. 144 (#166) ############################################
144
The Restoration Drama
1
a
the masquing and intrigue that delighted the age was a sufficient
inspiration for all three comedies. The construction of Love in
a Wood is somewhat better than that of Etherege's plays; it is,
however, not nearly so well written as any one of them, although
the dialogue is direct, witty and idiomatic and, doubtless, closer
to the colloquial speech of the day than Etherege's brilliant
repartees. The characters, while presenting nothing beyond the
usual 'young gentlemen of the town,' the coxcomb, the usurer, the
matchmaker, the affected widow, are well defined and drawn with
strokes as vigorous and, at times, as coarse as are their actions and
their language. The Gentleman Dancing-master was first staged
towards the close of the year 1671, and we are surprised to hear
that 'it was not much liked, and was acted only six times' This
really diverting comedy presents a marked improvement in the
way of simplicity and unity on Wycherley's previous effort. The
Frenchified gull, the Englishman turned Spaniard, and the device
of a foolish suitor employed by a clever maiden to further her
flirtation with his rival-all are time honoured properties of the
earlier stage. The incident, too, on which the whole plot turns,
that of a lover forced, under fear of discovery, to pretend himself
a dancing-master, is borrowed from Calderon's comedy, El Maestro
de Danzar, which, in turn, goes back to Lope de Vega. But there
remains much that is inventive and original in the English comedy,
and the dialogue has developed in wit, and especially in a certain
quality of daring and suggestive innuendo and double meaning of
which this dramatist is peculiarly master.
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.
## p. 145 (#167) ############################################
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
## p. 146 (#168) ############################################
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
## p. 148 (#170) ############################################
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
## p. 150 (#172) ############################################
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
## p. 152 (#174) ############################################
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:
## p. 153 (#175) ############################################
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
## p. 155 (#177) ############################################
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
## p. 156 (#178) ############################################
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.
.
## p. 157 (#179) ############################################
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.
