No More Learning

* Ibid. p. 85.


## p. 136 (#158) ############################################

136
The Restoration Drama
But it was well that, before these general French influences
had made themselves felt, a new dramatist, also schooled in France,
began in his productions to give expression to the contemporary
ideal of polite society and to adapt to the changed conditions of
the moment the most persistent form of drama, the comedy of
manners. Of the earlier life of Sir George Etherege, we know
next to nothing. It has been inferred from an allusion by Dryden,
that Etherege was born in 1634 and, by means of other inferences,
that he came of an old Oxfordshire family? . It seems unlikely that
Etherege was ever a student at either university; but his easy
conversancy with French and the ways of the French capital point
to a long sojourn in Paris. The first work of Etherege was The
Comical Revenge, or Love in a Tub. It was published in 1664
and may have been produced for the first time late in the previous
year. This comedy was an immediate success and Etherege found
himself, in a night, famous. Thus introduced to the wits and the
fops of the town, Etherege took his place in the select and dis-
solute circle of Rochester, Dorset and Sedley. On one occasion,
at Epsom, after tossing in a blanket certain fiddlers who refused
to play, Rochester, Etherege and other boon companions so
‘skirmished the watch' that they left one of their number thrust
through with a pike and were fain to abscond. Etherege married
a fortune, it is not certain when, and, apparently for no better
reason, was knighted. On the death of Rochester, he was, for
some time, the protector' of the beautiful and talented actress,
Mrs Barry? Ever indolent and procrastinating, Etherege allowed
four years to elapse before his next venture into comedy. She
Would if she could, 1668, is a better play than The Comical
Revenge, and such was the popular expectation of it, when pro-
duced, that, as Pepys tells us, though he and his wife were there
by two o'clock, there were one thousand people put back that
could not have room in the pit. ' Unhappily, success was partially
defeated, because, adds Pepys, “the actors. . . were out of humour
and had not their parts perfect' Etherege now doubled his
former period of indolence and silence, and, eight years later, in
1676, doubtless stung by a deserved rebuke in Rochester's Session
of the Poets, produced his last and best comedy, The Man of
Mode, or Sir Fopling Flutter. Of the later years of Etherege,
1 Dryden to Etheredge, The Works of Sir George Etheredge, ed. Verity, 1888, p. 403.
* The particulars of these passages in the life of Etherege will be found in Meindl's
study of the poet, Wiener Beiträge, vol. xiv, 1901, pp. 66—73.
3 Pepys's Diary, ed. Wheatley, vol. VII, p. 307.


## p. 137 (#159) ############################################

Sir George Etherege
137
4
we know much, owing to the existence of one of his Letterbooks,
kept by his secretary at Ratisbon, where he was English resident
from 1685 to a time early in 1689. From certain allusions,
Etherege has been supposed to have held similar posts else-
where, in Sweden and, possibly, in Turkey. But, of this, there is
no proof. The particulars of his life in an uncongenial diplomatic
exile need not concern us. His correspondence, which included
letters to and from Dryden, is full of life and gossip about the
wits of his time, all of it expressed with the gaiety, candour and
foppish wit of which Etherege, in his plays, is the acknowledged
master. Etherege is supposed to have died, about 1690, at Paris.
Handsome, witty, brave, profligate though he was, and, perhaps, as
has been charitably suggested, having but a weak head for wine,
the story that 'Sir George Etheredge died by falling down stairs
in a drunken fit,' rests solely 'on the authority of a friend of the
family,' repeated by Oldys? .
Different opinions have been broached as to the place of
Etherege in the history of restoration drama, although no two
much at variance can be held by those familiar with the spirit,
gaiety and brilliancy of the prose dialogue of his comedies, The
discovery of more than one copy of an edition of The Comical
Revengeg dating 1664, has brought Etherege's claim to the intro-
duction of rimed couplets as a regular dramatic metre on the
restoration stage into direct competition with that of Orrery.
Although Etherege abandoned this innovation in his other two
comedies, wisely writing them in prose, in which he is at his best,
this fashion of distinguishing more serious and elevated scenes and
passages of a comedy by couching them in heroic couplets was
continued by certain of his fellows. But the authority of the
writer who has urged the above-mentioned claim on behalf of
Etherege, further invites us to assume that he 'loitered long enough
in Paris' after the first rush of the royalists homewards for Molière
to be revealed to him,' and that, with a new idea thus formed 'of
what comedy ought to be; he returned to England and founded
English comedy as it was successively understood by Congreve,
Goldsmith and Sheridan: Now, indubitably, Etherege had none
of his happy, conscienceless art from Jonson. With the making up
1 Works of Etheredge, ed. Verity, A. , introduction, p. xxvii.
? See Gosse, E. , 'Sir George Etheredge,' in Seventeenth Century Studies, ed. 1897,
p. 265, where the relations of Etherege, in this respect, to Dryden's The Rival-Ladies
and D'Avenant's Siege of Rhodes are discussed. As to Orrery's claim, see ante, chap. 1,
p. 18 and note 2.
3 Note, more especially, Sedley's Mulberry Garden. • Gosse, u. s. pp. 266, 267.


## p. 138 (#160) ############################################

138
The Restoration Drama
of his personages out of changes on a single humour, strained and
contorted, Etherege discarded any pretensions to the knitting
together of a plot. He also discarded literary as well as dramatic
constructiveness, and it is not impossible that Molière pointed
him the way to a freedom from rule which Etherege pressed to
licence. But the merit of Etherege seems to lie less in his
eschewing the moribund fashion of Jonson's humours, than in a
certain natural genius whereby he was able to put upon the stage
a picture, very little heightened, of the roistering, reckless idle-
ness and licentiousness that actually characterised the brilliant,
graceless fops whose society he frequented. "The man of quality,
who can fight at need with spirit and verve, but whose customary
occupation is the pursuit of pleasure without dignity and without
reflection'—this is Etherege's theme; it is his very self, re-
curring in Sir Frederick Frollicke, in Courtall and Freedom, 'two
honest gentlemen of the town,' in She Would if she could and
in the masterly circle of fops—Dorimant, Medley, Bellair and
Sir Fopling Flutter-each one of them equally 'the man of mode. '
'Nature, you know,' says Etherege of himself, 'intended me for
an idle fellow, and gave me passion and qualities fit for that
blessed calling ; but fortune has made a changeling of me and
necessity forces me to set up for a fop of business? ' As to the
women of Etherege, they are fashionable, extravagant, witty as
the men and as bold in their intrigues and amours; there is no
maiden's blush among them. They are such, in a word, as the
restoration rakes and roués knew them.
Attention has been called to Ethereğe's graphic touches of
scene, costume and place in the gay little west-end that knew
him. He is at home in Mulberry garden, a place of public resort
and entertainment, with bordered alleys and adjacent arbours in
which to eat syllabub and to carry on 'hazardous flirtations' like
those of Mistress Ariana and Mistress Gatty, two naughty run-
aways from chaperonage; or, again, in the shop of Mrs Trinket
in the New Exchange, a species of Arcade, whither ladies go
a-shopping for a few fashionable toys to keep 'em in countenance
at a play or in the Park,' and where gallants 'scent their eyebrows
and periwigs with a little essence of oranges or jessamine,' as did
Courtall while waiting for lady Cockwood But the superlative
quality of Etherege as a writer of comedy is the ease and natural-
ness of his prose dialogue, which, almost uniformly witty and, at
1 Letterbook under date 8 March 1688, quoted by Gosse, Seventeenth Century
Studies, ed. 1897, p. 296.


## p. 139 (#161) ############################################

Sir Charles Sedley
139
times, really brilliant, is seldom overdone and unsuited to his
personages, as is not infrequently the case with Congreve. The
very frivolity of Etherege disarms criticism. Who would break
a butterfly on the wheel ? For the time, English men and
women in good society had lapsed into an excess of gallantry,
enjoying their orgy with incorrigible frankness and abandon, and
avowing their enjoyment with incorrigible flippancy and shame-
lessness. In Etherege, comedy, for the moment, touched nature
once more, for such was nature in the society of the restoration.
Congreve is remote and studied in comparison, for he wrote of
these things when in actual life they had come to be mitigated by
a measurable return of public manners to healthier conditions ;
while, as to Sheridan, equally a disciple of Etherege, his comedies
in fact only perpetuated a picture of life that had long since ceased
to be much more than a brilliant tradition of the stage.
The closest immediate follower of Etherege in comedy is
Sir Charles Sedley, whose earliest comedy, The Mulberry Garden,
1668, is based, in part, on Molière's L'École des Maris and is
written in that mixture of prose and heroic couplets which
Etherege introduced in his Comical Revenge. An intimate in
the chosen circle of the king, Sedley was as famous for his wit
as he was notorious for the profligacy of his life. Nevertheless,
he appears to have been a capable man of affairs and, as a writer,
gained a deserved reputation alike for the clearness and ease of
his prose and for a certain poetic gift, more appreciable in his
occasional lyrics than in the serious parts of his dramas. The
Mulberry Garden, no bad comedy in its lighter scenes, is bettered
in Bellamira, or the Mistress, 1687, which, though founded on
the Eunuchus of Terence, presents a lively, if coarsely realistic,
picture of the reckless pursuit of pleasure of Sedley's day. The
Grumbler, printed in 1702, is little more than an adaptation of
Le Grondeur of Brueys and Palaprat. Sedley's tragedies call for
no more than the barest mention. His Antony and Cleopatra,
1667, reprinted as Beauty the Conqueror, is among the feeblest
as it is the latest, of heroic plays written in couplets. His Tyrant
King of Crete, 1702, is merely a revision of Henry Killigrew's
Pallantus and Eudora, little amended in the process.
With examples such as these among writers who pretended
to gentle manners and birth, and with Dryden descending to the
dramatic stews, it is not surprising to find lesser writers and
1 On this topic, see Genest, u. 8. vol. », p. 158, and Lissner, M. , in Anglia, vol.
XXVII, pp. 180—3.


## p. 140 (#162) ############################################

140
The Restoration Drama
stage hacks throwing decency to the winds and substituting sheer
scurrility for wit, and brutality for force of passion. John Lacy
(who died in 1681) is a familiar example of the popular actor
turned playwright. Out of a couple of the comedies of Molière,
butchered in the process, he compounded The Dumb Lady, or
The Furrier made Physician, 1669; in Sarony the Scot, or The
Taming of the Shrew, 1667, Grumio is raised to the chief part in
that much abused comedy of Shakespeare; while, in Sir Hercules
Buffoon, 1684, a more original effort, even the braggart and the fool,
immemorial stock figures of comedy, suffer degradation. The best
comedy of Lacy is The Old Troop (before 1665), in which he tells,
with rude and broad native humour, experiences of his own when
soldiering in the royalist army in civil war times, and, incidentally,
maligns and abuses fallen puritanism. Even more popular in his
day was Edward Ravenscroft, the author of a dozen plays extend-
ing over a career of nearly twenty-five years. Ravenscroft pillaged
the previous drama at large and Molière in particular, taking his
earliest comedy and greatest success, Mamamouchi, or the Citizen
Turned Gentleman, 1671, from Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme and
Monsieur de Pourceaugnac. In his palmy days, Ravenscroft
dared to measure his wit with Dryden? But his one conspicuous
quality was his success in boisterous farce. It was this and its
scandalous satirical nature that secured to his London Cuckolds,
first acted in 1682, an annual revival on the stage on lord mayor's
day for nearly a century? His other plays, among them an altera-
tion of Titus Andronicus, call for no mention here
It is assuredly a matter for comment that the first woman to
write professionally for the English stage should have begun her
career at a moment when the morality of English drama was at
its lowest ebb. Aphra or Aphara Behn was born at Wye in 1640,
the daughter of John Johnson, a barber. With a relative, whom
she called her father, who had been nominated lieutenant-governor
of Surinam, she went to reside there; and, on his death, remained
with his family, marrying a Dutch merchant named Behn about
1658. With her husband, she returned to London and, apparently,
lived in some wealth and position until 1666, in which year
her husband died. Having made the acquaintance of the king
>
See the original prologues to Mamamouchi, and The Careless Lovers, and, likewise,
the prologues to Dryden's Marriage-a-la-Mode and The Assignation.
See The Tatler, no. 8.
3 For a list of comedies by minor writers, printed within the first two decades
following the restoration, see the bibliography to this chapter.


## p. 141 (#163) ############################################

Mrs Aphra Behn
141
in the time of her prosperity, she was sent to Antwerp as a spy ;
but, finding her services unrecognised and unpaid, she turned,
about 1670, to letters for a livelihood. Mrs Behn's novels, in
which she is a true forerunner of Defoe, do not concern us here
nor her interesting anticipation of some of the ideas of Rousseau
in the most famous of her stories, Oronooko. Between 1671 and
1689, the year of her death, Mrs Behn wrote assiduously for the
stage, turning out no less than fifteen dramas. 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


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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:
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## 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
.


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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. '
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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.