George
Farquhar
appeared too late to feel the parson’s whip.
Cambridge History of English Literature - 1908 - v08
'
Six years later, in 1697, he produced The Relapse or Virtue in
Danger, and instantly established his reputation. This broad and
lively farce, which at once caught the popular favour, owed its
inspiration to Cibber's Love's Last Shift. The character of Sir
Novelty Fashion in that play made an instant appeal to Vanbrugh's
fancy; he raised the beau to the peerage, with the title of lord
Foppington, and converted Cibber's puppet into a brilliant carica-
ture. It is easy to find fault with the fable of The Relapse. It is
1
## p. 161 (#183) ############################################
Vanbrugh’s The Relapse
161
less a play than two plays spliced into one. Loveless, 'resolved
this once to launch into temptation,' and Berinthia, willing to abet
him, cannot engage our interest. The farce exists for the proper
display of lord Foppington, Sir Tunbelly Clumsey and Miss Hoyden.
Here, indeed, are three caricatures after Vanbrugh's own heart.
What they do matters not. It is what they say that reveals their
eccentricities. - Lord Foppington is the true fop of the period, with
all his qualities exaggerated. His title gives him unfeigned delight.
'Strike me dumb-my Lord-your lordship-. . . Sure whilst I
was a knight, I was a very nauseous fellow. Well 'tis ten thousand
pawnd well given-stap my vitals. ' He has the idle elegance of
his kind. When the tailor tells him that if his pocket had been an
inch lower down, it would not have held his pocket-handkerchief,
'Rat my pocket-handkerchief l’he exclaims, 'Have I not a page to
carry it? ' So he finds his life a perpetual 'raund of delights,' and
believes himself acceptable to all. When Amanda strikes him in
her defence, 'God's curse, madam,' he cries, 'I am a peer of the
realm! ' No better foil could be found for him than Sir Tunbelly,
the ancestor in a direct line of squire Western. That he bears a
close resemblance to nature need not be admitted. That he is an
excellent piece of fooling cannot be denied. He holds siege in his
country house, asks at the approach of a stranger whether the
blunderbuss is primed, and, when he and his servants at last appear
on the scene, they come armed with guns, clubs, pitchforks, and
scythes. ' Miss Hoyden is first cousin to Prue, and shows you in a
phrase her true character. 'It's well I have a husband a coming, ,
or i'cod, I'd marry the baker, I would so. While these immortal
three are on the stage, they excite our whole-hearted mirth. Their
fate cannot touch us, for in ridicule they transcend the scale of
human kind.
The Provok'd Wife, produced in 1697, is, in all respects, a better
play. Sir John Brute is Vanbrugh’s masterpiece. Caricature
though he be, there are many touches of nature about him. He is
the beau inverted, the man of fashion crossed with the churl. And
he is fully conscious of his dignity. "Who do you call a drunken
fellow, you slut you ? ' he asks his wife. 'I'm a man of quality;
the King has made me a knight. He would not give a fig for
a song that is not ‘full of sin and impudence. ' His cry is 'Liberty,
and property, and old England, Huzza l' He stands out in high
relief by the side of lady Brute and Belinda, who speak with the
s, accent of everyday, and who are far nearer to common life than
are the fine ladies of Congreve. His servants rival their masters
11
6
a
6
E. L. VIII.
OH. VÌ.
## p. 162 (#184) ############################################
162
The Restoration Drama
in impudence; and Rasor and Mademoiselle are worthy all the
praise which Hazlitt' has bestowed upon them.
It has been Sir John Vanbrugh’s fate to prove an inspiration
to our English novelists. Sir John Brute has long been a common-
place of fiction, and made a last appearance as Sir Pitt Crawley in
Vanity Fair. Still more vivid as a painting of life than The Pro-
vok'd Wife is the fragment, A Journey to London, left unfinished
at Vanbrugh’s death. There is very little that is dramatic in this
masterly sketch. It is but a picture of manners, of the impact of
the country opon the town. How well are the characters drawn!
Sir Francis Headpiece, a softened Sir Tunbelly; John Moody, his
servant, who'stumps about the streets in his dirty boots, and asks
every man he meets, if he can tell him where he may have a good
lodging for a parliament man'; young Squire Humphrey, the
unlicked cub of the country side-are painted in colours fresh to
the drama. They have taken their place, one and all, in English
fiction, and it is easy to measure the debt which Fielding and
Smollett owed to Vanbrugh's happy fragment.
Like many others of his contemporaries, Vanbrugh did a vast
deal of journeywork. He botched a comedy of Fletcher's; he
translated plays from Boursault, from d'Ancourt, from Molière,
and, through Le Sage, from the Spanish. None of his versions
is memorable, save The Confederacy (1705), englished from
d'Ancourt's Les Bourgeoises à la Mode, and completely trans-
formed in the process. As mere sleight of hand, The Confederacy
claims our admiration. Closely as it follows the original, it is racy
of our soil. As you read it, you think, not of the French original,
but of Middleton and Dekker. It is as though Vanbrugh had
breathed an English soul into a French body. Though he added
but three scenes, though he never strays far, even in word, from
the prose of d’Ancourt, he has handled his material with so deft a
hand that he has made another man's play his own and his
country's. Dick Amlet and Brass are of the true breed; Mrs
Amlet would not have disgraced the earlier age of comedy; and
the quickness of the dialogue, the speed of the action carried
the play for many a year down the current of success.
The last years of Vanbrugh's life were devoted to architecture,
and to its consequent disputes. His first experiment in the art
-Castle Howard – was finished under happy auspices. The
theatre, which he built in the Haymarket, the single failure of a
fortunate life, involved him in disaster, because he forgot that the
1 See Hazlitt's lectures on The English Comic Writers.
## p. 163 (#185) ############################################
Jeremy Collier
163
chief end of a theatre is to transmit what was spoken on the stage
to the audience, and because he did not foresee that the Hay-
market would prove inaccessible to the quality. Blenheim, inter-
rupted though it was by the meanness and temper of the implacable
duchess, was one of the triumphs of his career. Confused in
construction, like The Relapse, it is as vividly effective as the
most brilliant of the author's comedies. A finished artist in neither
medium, he was lifted high above such difficulties as perplex
smaller men, by his courage and good temper. He suffered the
fate of the great Perrault, with whom he may fittingly be com-
pared, from the wits of his time. But detraction never checked
the buoyancy of his spirit, and he died, still untouched by the
years, in 1726.
Twenty-eight years before the death of Vanbrugh-in 1698—
Jeremy Collier had startled the town with his Short View of
the Immorality and Profaneness of the English Stage, and as
Congreve and Vanbrugh are arraigned therein with especial
bitterness, something must here be said of this unforgotten, acrid
controversy. The attack upon literature was not new. Evelyn
had already deplored the license of the stage. In his preface to
Prince Arthur, Sir Richard Blackmore had complained that the
poets used 'all their wit in opposition to religion, and to the
destruction of virtue and good manners in the world. ' The old
question of art and morals had been debated with rare intelligence
by Robert Wolseley in 1685, by way of preface to Valentinian,
and Joseph Wright, in his Country Conversations (1694) bad
protested against the attacks made by the stage upon virtue and
the clergy. Jeremy Collier, then, addressed a public inured to his
argument, which he pressed with a ferocity beyond the reach of
his immediate predecessors. A clergyman and non-juror, Collier
was indicted for absolving Friend and Parkyns at Tyburn, and,
refusing to give himself up, was outlawed. As a critic, if critic he
may be called, Collier was a patient pupil of Thomas Rymer, whose
style, method and paraded erudition he most faithfully mimicked.
He did but apply the 'good sense,' wherewith Rymer demolished
Shakespeare, to the comedies of his time. Indeed, it is not too
much to say that had the Short View of Tragedy not been written,
we never should have seen the Short View of the Immorality and
Profaneness of the English Stage. When Rymer says: 'Should
the Poet have provided such a husband for an only daughter of
any noble Peer in England, the Blackamoor must have changed
1 As to Jeremy Collier's general activity as a historian and essayist, see post, vol. I.
>
11-2
## p. 164 (#186) ############################################
164
The Restoration Drama
6
1
his skin to look our house of Lords in the face,' and roundly de-
clares that there is not a monkey that understands nature better,
not a pig in Barbary that has not a truer taste of things' than
Othello, you see the cupboard from which Jeremy Collier filched
his good things.
Relying upon Rymer, Collier went boldly to the attack. The
playwrights, he asserted, were immodest, profane, and encouragers
of immorality. He made an appeal to universal history, that he
might prove the baser wickedness of Englishmen. As little a
respecter of persons as Rymer, he lets his cudgel fall indis-
criminately upon the backs of great and small. Aristophanes
his own plays,' says he, ‘are sufficient to ruin his authority. For
he discovers himself a downright atheist. ' He shares his master's
contempt of Shakespeare, who, says he, 'is too guilty to make an
evidence: but I think he gains not much by his misbehaviour; he
has commonly Plautus' fate, when there is most smut there is least
sense. ' His comment on Ophelia matches Rymer's demolition of
Desdemona. Having extolled Euripides for seeing to it that
Phaedra's 'frenzy is not lewd,' he proceeds:
Had Shakespeare secur'd this point for his young virgin Ophelia, the play
had been better contrivd. Since he was resolved to drown the lady like a
kitten, he should have set her swimming a little sooner.
There we have the key to his 'criticism. ' Again, he will not
permit the smallest reference to the Bible in a comedy. When
Sir Sampson in Love for Love says, 'your Sampsons were strong
dogs from the beginning,' Collier's comment is characteristic:
'Here you have the sacred history burlesqu’d, and Sampson once
more brought into the House of Dagon to make sport for the
Philistines. ' He is indignant that lord Foppington should confess
that ‘Sunday is a vile day,' though the statement is perfectly con-
sonant with the part. That Valentine, in Love for Love, should
murmur 'I am truth,' fills the non-juror with fury. 'Now a poet,'
says he, 'that had not been smitten with blasphemy would never
have furnished frenzy with inspiration. The thought of The
Relapse drives him to the verge of madness: 'I almost wonder,'
says he, the smoke of it has not darkened the sun, and turned the
air to plague and poison. '
The worst offence of all committed by the dramatists is, in his
eyes, the abuse of the clergy. “They play upon the character and
endeavour not only the men but the business. If he had his way,
he would forbid the introduction of any priest, heathen or Christian,
into literature. The author of Don Sebastian,' says he, 'strikes
1
6
## p. 165 (#187) ############################################
Fallacies of The Short View 165
at the bishops through the sides of the Mufti, and borrows the
name of the Turk to make the Christian ridiculous. ' Then, with
a tedious circumstance, he discusses the priesthood in all climes
and ages, approves Racine, who brings a high priest into Athalie,
but 'does him justice in his station,' and awards the true palm to
Corneille and Molière, who set no priest upon the stage. This is
certainly the right method, and best secures the outworks of piety. '
And, after a priest, he best loves a man of quality. Plautus wins
his approval because his boldest ‘sallies are generally made by
slaves and pandars. He asks indignantly what quarter the stage
gives to quality, and finds it extremely free and familiar. That
Manly in Wycherley's play should call a duke a rascal he con-
fesses is very much plain dealing. What necessity is there, he
“'
demands, 'to kick the coronets about the stage, and to make a
man a lord, only in order to make him a coxcomb? ' Plainly there
is no necessity; but the fact that Collier should put the question
is the best measure of his irrelevance.
It was Collier's supreme error to confuse art with life. He
had but one touchstone for the drama, and that was the habit of
his kind. He laid it down for an axiom that nothing must be
discussed upon the stage which was contrary to the experience
of his own blameless fireside. He assumed that the poet was an
advocate for all the sins which he depicted; that, if he brought
upon the stage a thief or an adulterer, he proudly glorified theft
and adultery. Never once did he attempt to understand the
artist's motive or point of view, to estimate the beauty and value
of words, to make allowance for the changing manners of changed
times. His mind was not subtle enough to perceive that, in
Congreve's words, it is the business of the comic poet to paint
the vices and follies of human kind. ' As he could see no difference
between art and life, so he could not separate satire from the thing
satirised. That lord Foppington is held up to ridicule did not
hinder his condemnation. His famous comment upon Juvenal
convicts him of absurdity. 'He teaches those vices he would cor-
rect, and writes more like a pimp than a poet. . . . Such nauseous
stuff is almost enough to debauch the alphabet, and make the
language scandalous. ' And he does not understand that, if Juvenal
be not justified, then he himself is guilty of the crimes which he
imputes to Congreve and Vanbrugh.
So the worthy non-juror laid about him, fathering vice upon
blameless words, and clipping wiser, better men than himself
to fit his bed of Procrustes. And even if we allowed that there
## p. 166 (#188) ############################################
166
The Restoration Drama
a
was no difference between deed and speech, that a writer who
mentioned a crime had already committed it, that, in fact, every
theatre should be supplied with a gallows, and a judge and jury sit
permanently in the Green Room, it would still be easy to convict
Collier of injustice, especially towards Congreve. Nothing can be
said in a critic's favour who detects profaneness and immodesty in
The Mourning Bride, who condemns the mere use of the words
'martyr' and 'inspiration,' who finds a depth of blasphemy in the
sentence 'my Jehu was a hackney-coachman. ' There can be no
doubt, however, that Collier's pamphlet enjoyed all the success
which scandal could bring it. For a while the town talked and
thought of nothing else. The king issued a solemn proclamation
against vice and profaneness. Congreve and D'Urfey were prose-
cuted by the Middlesex magistrates. Fines were imposed upon
Betterton and Mrs Bracegirdle. Then, alarmed at the publicity
of the pamphlet, the poets began to write in their defence. More
wisely guided, they would have held their tongues. The encounter
could not be closely engaged. Jeremy, having said little to their
purpose, should have been ignored. To demolish his principles
might have been worth while. To oppose him in detail was merely
to incur another violent onslaught.
As they used other weapons, and fought another battle than
Collier, neither Congreve nor Vanbrugh emerged with credit from
the encounter. 'Congreve,' said Cibber, 'seemed too much hurt
to be able to defend himself, and Vanbrugh felt Collier so little
that his wit only laughed at his lashes. ' Vanbrugh, indeed, had
put forth an admirable defence in anticipation, and with an
evident reference to Rabelais.
.
• As for your saints,' he wrote in a preface to The Relapse'(your thorough-
pac'd ones, I mean, with skrew'd faces and wry mouths) I despair of them;
for they are friends to nobody: They love nothing but their altars and them-
selves; they have too much zeal to have any charity; they make debauches in
piety, as sinners do in wine; and are as quarrelsome in their religion, as other
people are in their drink: so I hope nobody will mind what they say. '
That is in the right vein. But it was Farquhar, who, in an ingenious
little work, The Adventures of Covent Garden, justly ascribed to
him by Leigh Hunt, made the wisest comment of all, to the effect
that the best way of answering Mr Collier was not to have replied at all; for
there was so much fire in his book, had not his adversaries thrown in fuel, it
would have fed upon itself, and so gone out in a blaze.
The others flung themselves into the controversy with what spirit
they might. Dryden, worn with the battle of life and letters,
## p. 167 (#189) ############################################
Replies to The Short View
167
looked wearily on the fray. He owned that in many things Collier
had 'taxed him justly,' and added 'if he be my enemy, let him
triumph. ' But he did not plead guilty, as is generally supposed,
without extenuating circumstances and without the stern con-
demnation of his adversary.
'It were not difficult to prove,' said he, 'that in many places he has
perverted my meaning by his glosses; and interpreted my words into
blasphemy and bawdry, of which they are not guilty. Besides that he is too
much given to horseplay in his raillery; and comes to battel, like a dictator
from the plough. I will not say, the Zeal of God's House has eaten him
up; but I am sure it has devoured some part of his good manners and civility'
D'Urfey rushed into the field with a preface to The Campaigners,
like the light horseman that he was, and with a song of The New
Reformation dismissed the non-juror from bis mind:
But let State Revolvers
And Treason Absolvers
Excuse if I sing:
The Scoundrel that chooses
To cry down the Muses,
Would cry down the King.
With far greater solemnity did Dennis, who himself was not
attacked by Collier, defend the Usefulness of the Stage, to the
Happiness of Mankind, to Government, and to Religion. Collier
replied to Congreve with superfluous violence, to Vanbrugh and
Dennis with what seemed to him, no doubt, an amiable restraint.
For years the warfare was carried on in pamphlet and prologue,
and echoes of it may be heard to-day. The high respect in which
Collier has been held remains a puzzle of criticism. Macaulay, for
instance, finds him 'a singularly fair controversialist,' and at the
same time regards Rymer as the worst critic that ever lived, not
perceiving that their method is one and the same; that, if Collier
is in the right of it, so is Rymer. No doubt, the hand of tradition
is strong, but to forget all that has been said in the non-juror's
favour, and to return to his text, is to awaken rudely from a dream.
There seems to the present writer nothing of worth in Collier's
pamphlet, save the forcible handling of the vernacular, which he
owed, as has been said, to Rymer. Not even is his sincerity
obvious. He strains his sarcasm as he strains his argument. His
object was to abolish not to reform the stage, and he should have
begun, not ended, with his Dissuasive from the Playhouse (1703).
And if the respect lavished upon him is surprising, still stranger
is the conviction which prevails of his influence. Scott and Mac-
aulay, Leigh Hunt and Lecky speak with one voice. Yet a brief
a
## p. 168 (#190) ############################################
168
The Restoration Drama
examination of the facts proves that Collier's success was a success
of scandal and no more. The poets bowed their knee not an inch
in obedience to Collier. They replied to him, they abused him,
and they went their way. Congreve's true answer was not his
Amendments but The Way of the World. Vanbrugh showed in
The Confederacy how lightly he had taken his scolding. Farquhar
made his first flight in December, 1698, and nobody can assert that
he clipped the wings of his fancy with Collier's shears. Meanwhile,
the old repertory remained unchanged in the theatres. The pages
of Genest, a much surer guide than tradition or desire, make evi-
dent the complete failure of Collier's attack. Dryden, Shadwell,
Aphra Behn and D'Urfey, Ravenscroft and Wycherley were still
triumphant. In the very year of Collier's supposed triumph, The
Mourning Bride, the peculiar object of his attack, 'brought the
greatest audience they have this winter. ' Congreve, the most
bitterly maligned of all, seized the highest popularity. Love for
Love flourished in the nineteenth century. Don Quixote, which
Collier thought he had left dead on the field, was still played
a quarter of a century after the fray, and The Country Wife long
outlived it. Nor were the alterations, said to have been introduced
into the plays, of a feather's weight. To change Valentine's 'I am
a
truth' into 'I am honest' was to spoil a fine passage, not to recast
the stage; and Vanbrugh's transformation of the drunken clergy-
man, in whose robes Sir John Brute disguised himself, into a
drunken woman, was not made until 1725. The new plays were
of no other fashion than the old. Cibber's Careless Husband
(1704), Charles Shadwell's Fair Quaker of Deal (1710), Gay's
Three Hours after Marriage (1717), the comedies of Mrs Centlivre
and Fielding afford no evidence of a chastened spirit. Sir Richard
Blackmore, who had anticipated Collier, did not conceal his dis-
appointment.
"The stage has become impregnable,' he wrote in 1716, where loose poets,
supported by numbers, power, and interest, in defiance of all rules of decency
and virtue still provide new snares and new temptations to seduce the people,
and corrupt their manners. '
The reformation, in brief, was, as Tom Brown called it, 'a drowsie
reformation, and when it came in fact, it came not from the
admonitions of Jeremy Collier who was remembered only as a
1 Oldmixon, in his History, accurately estimated the effect of Collier's attack.
• Neither the actors nor the poets,' he wrote, “much regarded it. There was a little
awe upon them at first, but it wore off, and this attempt to reform them was the sport
of what wit they had in their plays, prologues, and epilogues. '
9
## p. 169 (#191) ############################################
George Farquhar
169
cat-o'-nine-tails of the stage, or as a proper jest for an epilogue,
but from a change in the manners of the people.
George Farquhar appeared too late to feel the parson’s whip.
He began his career as Congreve was closing his, and he could look
upon
the fierce dispute with an eye of contemptuous impartiality.
That Collier would have spared him there is no reason to believe,
for though in temperament as in art he differed from his contem-
poraries, he claimed the full licence of his time. A man in whom
there was no disguise, he unpacked his heart upon paper. What-
ever he knew and saw, all the manifold experiments of his life, he
put unrestrainedly into his comedies. Ireland, the recruiting
officer, the disbanded soldier, love, the bottle, and the road—these
he handled with the freedom and joyousness of one who knew
them well. In a word, he broke the bonds of tradition, and de-
clared, when he was truly himself, that gallantry was merely one
aim of mankind. Of Congreve it is impossible to deduce anything
from his plays. Like all great artists, he is enwrapped in a cloak
of aristocratic impersonality. " Farquhar, living and breathing
without the shackles of art, reveals himself to us in every scene
of his plays. Humour and high spirits were always his. He was
lighthearted whatever befel him, and, having a natural propensity
to ease, knowing, moreover, that he had very little estate, “but
what lay under the circumference of his hat,' he expected mis-
fortune and faced it without a murmur.
His love of ease made him impatient of study, and this im-
patience is discernible in his works. He knew not how to polish
his dialogue. If it advanced the action of his piece or gave an ad-
ditional touch to character he was content. Though he manifestly
owed something to Thomas Heywood in his sense of the open air
i and his treatment of the countryside; though, like the rest of
his age, he had read Molière, and could borrow a scene of Le
Bourgeois Gentilhomme for his Love and a Bottle, it is not by his
-literary preferences that you judge him. Few comic poets who
keep a place in the history of the stage were less truly men of
letters than he. For the rules of his craft he cared not a jot. He
used, without shame, all the threadbare expedients of the theatre.
There is not one of his plays whose plot is not unravelled by
disguise. Leanthe, Oriana, and Silvia all masquerade as men.
Clincher and Tom Errand in The Constant Couple exchange their
clothes. Even the blameless Angelica, in Sir Harry Wildair, not
content with being a ghost, must don the finery of Beau Banter.
## p. 170 (#192) ############################################
170
The Restoration Drama
6
But we let him trick us as he will. We know that he looks upon
the world with honest eyes, and sees that therein which escaped
the others. And, as for the critics, says he, they may go hang.
He spurns the unities, roundly declaring that the rules of English
comedy don't lie in the compass of Aristotle or his followers, but
in the Pit, Box, and Galleries. '
If you would understand his plays, you must perforce know
something of his life. Born at Londonderry in 1677, he went, in
1694, to Trinity college, Dublin, composed a Pindarick ode at 14,
and, though intended for the church, found his way easily to the
stage. To be an actor was his earliest ambition, and he appeared
at the Smock Alley Theatre in the part of Othello. The discom-
fiture caused him by stage-fright was greatly enhanced by an
accidental wound which he inflicted on a fellow-player, and he
gladly took the advice of Robert Wilks, who remained his lifelong
friend, and who played the chief part in all his plays save one, to
write a comedy. So it was that, in 1698, he came to London with
Love and a Bottle in his pocket, and made an instant conquest
of the theatre. The comedy, which has little to commend it save
a vivid sense of life and movement, is, doubtless, autobiographical.
Farquhar himself must have sat for Roebuck, the young Irishman
freshly arrived in town, and it is easy to believe that the artifice
wherewith Lyrick, the dishevelled poet, escaped his creditors, was
part of Farquhar's own experience. The dramatist, in brief,
whose youth would excuse grosser absurdities than are here
exhibited, displays more energy than skill. His comedy is crude
and filled with crudities, but a bluff sincerity shines through it all,
and it is not surprising that an audience, accustomed to disguises
as the traditional trappings of the stage, should have received it
with favour.
A year later followed The Constant Couple, or a Trip to the
Jubilee, which owed something of its plot to an imitation of
Scarron's City Romance, entitled The Adventures of Covent
Garden, justly ascribed to Farquhar, as has been said, by Leigh
Hunt. This comedy, a clear advance in workmanship, was hailed
as a masterpiece with acclamation. Though it is not free from
artifice, it is far better constructed than Love and a Bottle, and
its hero, Sir Harry Wildair, appeared a beau of a new breed to
a generation sated with Foppingtons. He has honour and courage,
he has lived abroad, and he does not bound his horizon, like Sir
Novelty Fashion, with the creations of his tailor. And Clincher,
the false beau, the discreet Colonel Standard, and lady Lurewell
a
## p. 171 (#193) ############################################
The Recruiting Officer
171
herself, though not quite unknown to comedy, have something in
them of the blood and bone of human kind. In 1701 Sir Harry
Wildair appeared in another play, of which he is the eponymous
hero, and renewed his career of wit and cynicism. Truly “the
gentleman from France,' as Farquhar called his Wildair, enjoyed
the freedom of the British stage, and brought fame if not wealth
to the author of his being.
Thereafter came two failures, and then, in 1705, a piece of good
fortune sent Farquhar on military duty to Shrewsbury. His re-
cruits, as he tells us, were reviewed by his general and his colonel,
and could not fail to pass muster. More than that, he brought
back with him a comedy, The Recruiting Officer, which he dedi-
cated 'to all friends round the Wrekin,' and which, for him, was
the beginning of a new drama. Henceforth he has done with the
town and its gallants for ever. The example of Congreve and
Vanbrugh compels him no more. He takes for his material the
episodes of a broader life, and helps to bridge the chasm which
lies between the comedy of manners and the English novel, upon
whose beginnings he had a profound influence. He has done what
he could to make an end of disguise, though Silờia must perforce
put on the breeches. The most of his characters are natural men
and women, not above nor below the stature of mankind. His
soldiers, as has been pointed out, are no longer milites gloriosi,
pale reflections of Bobadill, but such as himself, whom he paints as
Captain Plume, and his comrades. Costar Pearmain and Thomas
Appletree are true men of the soil. Even Silvia is far remote
from the fine ladies who for twenty years had railed and bantered
on the stage. The common jealousy of her sex,' as Plume says,
which is nothing but their avarice of pleasure, she despises. ' In
brief, Farquhar had at last found his way. He had put a new set
of characters in a new scene. He had added something fresh to
the material of comedy.
A year later was played The Beaux' Stratagem", in construc-
tion as character the masterpiece of its author. Full of the gaiety
and bustle of the road, it depicts the life of taverns and the high-
way. Here are travellers burdened with trunks and bandboxes.
There is Boniface to fleece them, with his gag and his cunning, and
Gibbet to take what Boniface has left. The whole comedy moves
1 In 1704 he had produced, with the aid of Peter Motteux, a farce in three acts
called The Stage-Coach. It was adapted from Les Carrosses d'Orléans, by Jean de la
Chapelle, and its chief interest is that it seems a rough sketch for The Beaux'
Stratagem.
## p. 172 (#194) ############################################
172
The Restoration Drama
in an atmosphere of boisterous merriment. Aimwell and Archer
are beaux drawn from the life, not taken from a comedy, generous,
gallant, and light-hearted. And Cherry and her catechism; is
there not humour there? Throughout the play, Farquhar criticises
life in a humaner fashion than any dramatist since the author
of The English Traveller. He does not possess the artistry of
Congreve; he was, perhaps, a beginning of the sentimental comedy,
of that passion to be both merry and wise which has been the
ruin of our stage; but he looked upon life with the eye not of
Will's coffee-house but of a man, and the result is that The Beaux'
Stratagem is not indelibly marked with the date of its birth.
His muse was happier than his life. An ill-provided pocket
could not keep pace with the joyousness of his heart. A lack of
pence interrupted the course of his harmless pleasures. He took
delight always in fresh scenes and quick impressions; the pictures
of Holland, which he drew in his letters, prove how well he
understood the art of travelling; and, held fast in the bonds of
penury, he was seldom able to escape from Covent Garden. If
misfortune was abroad, it was certain to fall on him. A noble
patron persuaded him to pay his debts by the sale of his com-
mission, promising him another: that other never came. In 1703
he married a lady who pretended to be a fortune, and who, for love
of Farquhar, had concealed her poverty. Here was a plot which
might have served him for a comedy, and which, with him cast for
the chief róle, could have had only a tragic ending. Being Farquhar,
he harboured no resentment for the trick that had been put upon
him, but 'behaved to her with all the delicacy and tenderness of
an indulgent husband. ' Nothing could daunt the brave serenity
of his spirit. If he clung to the gaiety of the beau, he never knew
the beau's cynicism. He has sketched himself in a page which you
may well believe is without flattery, and he confesses himself so
great an epicure that he hates all pleasure that's purchas'd by
excess of pain. ' He, at any rate, did not accept Sir Harry Wildair's
theory of life.
'I would have my passion,' he writes in a passage of evident sincerity, 'if
not led, at least waited on by my reason; and the greatest proof of my
affection that a lady must expect is this: I would run any hazard to make us
both happy, but would not for any transitory pleasure make either of us
miserable.
It was not within his compass to make them both happy. His
friend Wilks, missing him at the theatre, discovered him lodged in
1 For Lessing's debt to Farquhar consult an excellent article by J. G. Robertson in
The Modern Language Review, vol. 11 (1907).
## p. 173 (#195) ############################################
Thomas Shadwell
173
3
a back garret in St Martin's Lane. He advised him to write a play
which should be instantly put upon the stage. 'Write! ' says
Farquhar, 'it is impossible that a man can write common sense
who is heartless, and has not a shilling in his pocket. Wilks gave
him twenty guineas, and, in six weeks, The Beaux' Stratagem, that
marvel of merriment and good-humour, was finished. It hints by
no sign that the author wrote it with a settled sickness upon him,
nor 'that before he finished the second act he perceived the
approaches of death. It was produced on 8 March 1707, and
Farquhar lived just long enough to hear of its triumphant success.
A last note to the friend of his brief life, Wilks, was found among
9
6
his papers:
Dear Bob, I have not anything to leave thee to perpetuate my memory,
but two helpless girls; look upon them sometimes, and think on him who was
to the last moment of his life thine, G. Farquhar.
An epilogue fittingly spoken by a gallant man whose life was in
dire conflict with his theory of living, and whose courage, in suffer-
ing, sustained him to the end.
Whenever this or that battle of literature is engaged, the
leaders are attended by a vast mob of camp-followers, who
without natural talent or obvious ingenuity, hope to share the
spoils of victory. Thus it was that the masters of comedy saw
their works mimicked and the repute of their craft not enhanced
by eager, industrious journeymen. The most of these preserve
their names and no more in the annals of the stage. Now and
again they emerge, for some quality of wit or good nature, from
the rest and, with their half-forgotten works, prompt the curiosity
of the historian. Thomas Shadwell", poet laureate, for instance,
enjoyed a popularity in his own day which is not easily explicable
in ours. Literary skill was not among the gifts of his mind. He
had a trick of invention, and was determined to turn the best models
to account. But when he had invented (or adapted) his puppets,
he handled them so carelessly, that they long since lost their interest
for us. The sense of style, the mastery of language, which might
have tempered their extravagance, were lacking to him, and he
resembled the facile playwrights of to-day in refusing to look upon
the drama as a branch of literature. In his preface to The Sullen
Lovers he proudly professed himself a pupil of Ben Jonson, whose
variety of humours' he attempted to reproduce, and whom, he
* See above, Chapter I.
## p. 174 (#196) ############################################
174
The Restoration Drama
thought, 'all dramatic poets ought to imitate. ' His debt to Ben
Jonson was infinitely less than his debt to Molière. The Sullen
Lovers is based upon Les Fâcheux; Bury Fair, bis masterpiece,
owes its fantastic characters to Les Précieuses Ridicules; and
The Miser is no more than a perversion of L'Avare. Yet so good
a conceit of himself had Shadwell, that he thought he did his
masters no discredit. ''Tis not barrenness of wit or invention that
makes me borrow from the French,' he boasted, 'but laziness. '
To be lazy is a greater sin, in the realm of art, than to be barren.
He patronised Shakespeare as amiably as he patronised Molière.
When he had mangled Timon of Athens, 'I can truly say," he
wrote, “that I have made it a play. Yet with all his shortcomings
'
he held the stage for a quarter of a century. His Epsom Wells
was praised by Saint-Évremond. He had the wit to make Don Juan
the hero of The Libertine, and with The Squire of Alsatia he
scaled the topmost height of his popularity. This last play has
many faults. Its story is incredible. The cant used by the rufflers
of Whitefriars is handled with so little tact, that it seems an ex-
crescence upon the dialogue rather than a part of it. Yet how
much excellent material it contains was revealed by Sir Walter
Scott, who made a free use of it in The Fortunes of Nigel.
Briefly, the vices and virtues of hasty Shadwell have been well
summed up by Rochester in four lines:
"Shadwell's unfinished Works do yet impart
Great Proofs of force of Nature, none of Art,
With just bold Strokes he dashes here and there,
Showing great Mastery with little Care. '
It is this judgment which, together with Dryden's satire, has
preserved the name and fame of Shadwell from oblivion.
Another camp-follower was Thomas D'Urfey, a French Hu-
guenot by descent and a habitant of Grub Street by profession,
who turned his hand to prose or verse, composed songs, elegies,
and panegyrics, wrote tales, tragical and comical, contrived operas
and pantomimes, satirised ministers, cultivated the friendship
of kings, changed his politics as he changed his coat, and left
behind him a vast number of boisterous farces and bombastic
melodramas. A scurrilous fellow in his life and speech, he was
the familiar friend of all, was called “Tom' by high and low, and
for nearly half a century played a part in the life of his time.
Addison remembered 'King Charles the Second leaning on his
shoulder more than once, and humming over a song with him. '
>
## p. 175 (#197) ############################################
Thomas D'Urfey
175
He was important enough to incur Buckingham's disfavour, and
lives undeservedly in the distich:
And sing-song D'Urfey, placed beneath abuses,
Lives by his impudence, and not the Muses.
His more serious plays, mere burlesques of tragedy, are in ‘Ercles'
vein. The Siege of Memphis and The Famous History of the
Rise and Fall of Massaniello may scarcely be matched, for sheer
fustian, in English literature. Thus it is that Genovino, the
Jesuit, apostrophises the friends of Massaniello:
Shout on, ye sons of clamour, louder still,
And fright the Grandees with obstreperous noise,
Whilst I secure in Darling Policies
Am pleased with the success of my Designs
Against this vile ungrateful City Naples.
For two parts, of five acts each, D'Urfey sustains his rant at this
high level, interrupting it, characteristically, with songs. The
fourth act opens with a fisherman's rousing chorus, and the
serious business of the fifth act is pleasantly beguiled by an
encounter, in amabean strains, between two fish-fags. Thus, the
method and temperament of D'Urfey are sufficiently displayed,
and a mere glance at Massaniello will explain why his friends
vastly preferred his songs to his tragedies.
The plays which he dignifies by the name of comedy are, one
and all, the broadest of broad farces. There is no trick of the
time which he does not employ. The thinnest disguises are
sufficient to deceive his simple heroes. His country squires are
guilty of wilder antics than any devised by Vanbrugh. As he
borrowed from his contemporaries, so his poor treasury of wit was
rifled by his successors. Madam Fickle, in the comedy of that
name, gave Farquhar a hint for the lady Lurewell of The
Constant Couple, and the well-deserved misfortunes of Beau
Clincher and Old Smuggler owe something to the disaster which
overtakes Beauford and Brainworm in The Virtuous Wife.
Many years later, in 1709, D'Urfey astonished the town with a
play of a wholly new pattern. It was called The Modern Prophets,
and was described by Steele as a most unanswerable satire against
the late spirit of enthusiasm. ' The writer
'had by long experience observed,' wrote The Tatler, 'that, in company, very
grave discourses had been followed by bawdry; and therefore has turned the
hamour that way with great success, and taken from his audience all manner
of superstition, by the agitations of pretty Mrs Bignell, whom he has with
great subtlety, made a lay-sister, as well as a prophetess. '
## p. 176 (#198) ############################################
176 The Restoration Drama
Of the virtues which should grace a comic poet D'Urfey had none.
He showed not even a passing interest in human character; he
knew no other wit than horseplay. In brief, save in the writing
of songs, he was a man of very slender talent, and it is a high
tribute to his amiable qualities that his memory has been so long
and so clearly preserved.
Colley Cibber was what D'Urfey was not, a born man of the
theatre. An actor by temperament, a comic poet by accident,
he took a perfect measure of the public taste, and he knew his
colleagues as he knew the pit and boxes. He could fit himself
and them with parts nicely suited to the talent of each. The
result is that his plays are no more than delicately poised
machines, which run easily enough upon the stage, but creak
horribly in the study. Congreve's criticism of Cibber's first play,
Love's Last Shift, the justice of which Cibber in his candid
way publicly acknowledged, would serve as a criticism for them
all. 'It has only in it,' said Congreve, “a great many things that
were like wit, that in reality were not wit. ' Even when he declared
that he drew from life, he succeeded in making the portrait lifeless
as stone. Lady Betty Modish, in The Careless Husband, is said to
have owed not a little to Mrs Oldfield's manner of converse.
6
There are many sentiments in this character, the author confesses, that
I may almost say, were originally her own, or only dress'd with a little more
care, than when they negligently fell from her lively humour. '
a
1
1
Yet Lady Betty is essentially a puppet of the stage. As you listen
to her wit, when it encounters the wit of Sir Charles Easy or Lord
Foppington, your mind never flits for a moment to the talk of
human beings. You are reminded, at every page, of that phrase-
book of ironic genius, Swift's Polite Conversation.
However, Cibber, being a man of the theatre, cared as little
for human character as for literature. It was for him to fill the
pit and boxes, and he filled them for two generations. In the
making of plays he was an expert, and he cared not whose work
it was that he adapted. He improved Shakespeare with as light
a heart as he improved Mrs Centlivre. His most important service
to the stage of his time was the invention of a new kind of beau
in Sir Novelty Fashion, who was accepted by Vanbrugh as a type,
and held the stage until he was reincarnated as Lord Dundreary.
Services such as this hardly outlast the author who does them, and
1 As to the relation of Cibber's later plays to sentimental comedy, see the retrospect
infra in vol. x.
!
## p. 177 (#199) ############################################
Colley Cibber
177
Colley Cibber has a claim upon our regard, which all his journey-
work would not merit. He left us in his Apology for his Life an
incomparable record (published in 1740). It is to his talent of
observation, to his good-humour, and to his sense of justice that we
owe the best set of theatrical portraits that ever came down to us.
As much as words can tell, he has told us of Mrs Bracegirdle and
Betterton, of Leigh and Nokes, of Estcourt and Powell, of all the
brilliant actors, who in our golden age of comedy made the repre-
sentation of that comedy possible. And he has done this with never
a jealous word, with never a hinted dislike at a prosperous rival.
Above all, he has drawn an imperishable portrait of himself, a man
protected against insult by a triple brass of confidence, whose vanity
smiled untouched at the fierce assaults of desperate enemies. That
presently he was chosen by Pope to succeed Theobald on the throne
of folly gave him a strange pleasure, and he discovered, I think,
the real reason of Pope's choice. "Right or wrong,' said he, 'a
'
lick at the laureat will always be a sure bait, ad captandum
vulgus, to catch him little readers. ' It was, in effect, the laureate
unworthy of his wreath that the great poet attacked, and the poet's
shaft should have been directed against the court which put Cibber
in a false position. His laureate odes, sunk in the waters of ob-
livion, no longer trouble us. We may even forget the skilful maker
of stage-plays. The historian of the theatre, the apologist, who
has left behind him the best commentary that we have upon the
comedy of manners, will still be entitled to the world's gratitude,
though he wears the bays no longer on his brow.
E. L. VIIT.
CH. VÌ.
12
## p. 178 (#200) ############################################
CHAPTER VII
THE RESTORATION DRAMA
III
TRAGIC POETS
The lesser tragic writers of this period, uninspired as most of
their work seems when judged on its own merits, fall inevitably
to a still lower level by comparison with the amazing literary
powers of their great leader, Dryden. They have all his faults
and only a small and occasional admixture of his strength and
resource. In tragedy, as in other departments of literature, the
genius of Dryden overtops, on a general estimate, the productions
of his lesser contemporaries, and how closely his lead in the drama
was followed may be correctly estimated from the fact that, in
1678, on his abandoning the use of rimed verse in the drama, his
followers also dropped this impossible form, wisely reflecting, no
doubt, that when Dryden was not satisfied as to its success, they
might be sure of its failure. The productions of the lesser
tragedians, however, in which a desire to catch the humour of
the public and to flatter the mood of the hour is the most fre-
quently recurring characteristic, remain most valuable as helping
to furnish a clear idea of the state of the drama and the prevailing
standard of taste.
The drama on the re-opening of the theatres was subjected to
a flood of new influences. Paramount among these was the in-
fluence of the court, to which dramatists and actors alike hastened
to pay the homage of servile flattery. This lack of independence on
the part of the dramatists of the day, coupled with the general
relaxation of morals consequent on the restoration, account, in a
large measure, for the degradation into which tragedy in England
sank. While comedy retained, in its brightest manifestations at
all events, some redeeming wit and humour, tragedy fell to a level
of dulness and lubricity never surpassed before or since.
Six years later, in 1697, he produced The Relapse or Virtue in
Danger, and instantly established his reputation. This broad and
lively farce, which at once caught the popular favour, owed its
inspiration to Cibber's Love's Last Shift. The character of Sir
Novelty Fashion in that play made an instant appeal to Vanbrugh's
fancy; he raised the beau to the peerage, with the title of lord
Foppington, and converted Cibber's puppet into a brilliant carica-
ture. It is easy to find fault with the fable of The Relapse. It is
1
## p. 161 (#183) ############################################
Vanbrugh’s The Relapse
161
less a play than two plays spliced into one. Loveless, 'resolved
this once to launch into temptation,' and Berinthia, willing to abet
him, cannot engage our interest. The farce exists for the proper
display of lord Foppington, Sir Tunbelly Clumsey and Miss Hoyden.
Here, indeed, are three caricatures after Vanbrugh's own heart.
What they do matters not. It is what they say that reveals their
eccentricities. - Lord Foppington is the true fop of the period, with
all his qualities exaggerated. His title gives him unfeigned delight.
'Strike me dumb-my Lord-your lordship-. . . Sure whilst I
was a knight, I was a very nauseous fellow. Well 'tis ten thousand
pawnd well given-stap my vitals. ' He has the idle elegance of
his kind. When the tailor tells him that if his pocket had been an
inch lower down, it would not have held his pocket-handkerchief,
'Rat my pocket-handkerchief l’he exclaims, 'Have I not a page to
carry it? ' So he finds his life a perpetual 'raund of delights,' and
believes himself acceptable to all. When Amanda strikes him in
her defence, 'God's curse, madam,' he cries, 'I am a peer of the
realm! ' No better foil could be found for him than Sir Tunbelly,
the ancestor in a direct line of squire Western. That he bears a
close resemblance to nature need not be admitted. That he is an
excellent piece of fooling cannot be denied. He holds siege in his
country house, asks at the approach of a stranger whether the
blunderbuss is primed, and, when he and his servants at last appear
on the scene, they come armed with guns, clubs, pitchforks, and
scythes. ' Miss Hoyden is first cousin to Prue, and shows you in a
phrase her true character. 'It's well I have a husband a coming, ,
or i'cod, I'd marry the baker, I would so. While these immortal
three are on the stage, they excite our whole-hearted mirth. Their
fate cannot touch us, for in ridicule they transcend the scale of
human kind.
The Provok'd Wife, produced in 1697, is, in all respects, a better
play. Sir John Brute is Vanbrugh’s masterpiece. Caricature
though he be, there are many touches of nature about him. He is
the beau inverted, the man of fashion crossed with the churl. And
he is fully conscious of his dignity. "Who do you call a drunken
fellow, you slut you ? ' he asks his wife. 'I'm a man of quality;
the King has made me a knight. He would not give a fig for
a song that is not ‘full of sin and impudence. ' His cry is 'Liberty,
and property, and old England, Huzza l' He stands out in high
relief by the side of lady Brute and Belinda, who speak with the
s, accent of everyday, and who are far nearer to common life than
are the fine ladies of Congreve. His servants rival their masters
11
6
a
6
E. L. VIII.
OH. VÌ.
## p. 162 (#184) ############################################
162
The Restoration Drama
in impudence; and Rasor and Mademoiselle are worthy all the
praise which Hazlitt' has bestowed upon them.
It has been Sir John Vanbrugh’s fate to prove an inspiration
to our English novelists. Sir John Brute has long been a common-
place of fiction, and made a last appearance as Sir Pitt Crawley in
Vanity Fair. Still more vivid as a painting of life than The Pro-
vok'd Wife is the fragment, A Journey to London, left unfinished
at Vanbrugh’s death. There is very little that is dramatic in this
masterly sketch. It is but a picture of manners, of the impact of
the country opon the town. How well are the characters drawn!
Sir Francis Headpiece, a softened Sir Tunbelly; John Moody, his
servant, who'stumps about the streets in his dirty boots, and asks
every man he meets, if he can tell him where he may have a good
lodging for a parliament man'; young Squire Humphrey, the
unlicked cub of the country side-are painted in colours fresh to
the drama. They have taken their place, one and all, in English
fiction, and it is easy to measure the debt which Fielding and
Smollett owed to Vanbrugh's happy fragment.
Like many others of his contemporaries, Vanbrugh did a vast
deal of journeywork. He botched a comedy of Fletcher's; he
translated plays from Boursault, from d'Ancourt, from Molière,
and, through Le Sage, from the Spanish. None of his versions
is memorable, save The Confederacy (1705), englished from
d'Ancourt's Les Bourgeoises à la Mode, and completely trans-
formed in the process. As mere sleight of hand, The Confederacy
claims our admiration. Closely as it follows the original, it is racy
of our soil. As you read it, you think, not of the French original,
but of Middleton and Dekker. It is as though Vanbrugh had
breathed an English soul into a French body. Though he added
but three scenes, though he never strays far, even in word, from
the prose of d’Ancourt, he has handled his material with so deft a
hand that he has made another man's play his own and his
country's. Dick Amlet and Brass are of the true breed; Mrs
Amlet would not have disgraced the earlier age of comedy; and
the quickness of the dialogue, the speed of the action carried
the play for many a year down the current of success.
The last years of Vanbrugh's life were devoted to architecture,
and to its consequent disputes. His first experiment in the art
-Castle Howard – was finished under happy auspices. The
theatre, which he built in the Haymarket, the single failure of a
fortunate life, involved him in disaster, because he forgot that the
1 See Hazlitt's lectures on The English Comic Writers.
## p. 163 (#185) ############################################
Jeremy Collier
163
chief end of a theatre is to transmit what was spoken on the stage
to the audience, and because he did not foresee that the Hay-
market would prove inaccessible to the quality. Blenheim, inter-
rupted though it was by the meanness and temper of the implacable
duchess, was one of the triumphs of his career. Confused in
construction, like The Relapse, it is as vividly effective as the
most brilliant of the author's comedies. A finished artist in neither
medium, he was lifted high above such difficulties as perplex
smaller men, by his courage and good temper. He suffered the
fate of the great Perrault, with whom he may fittingly be com-
pared, from the wits of his time. But detraction never checked
the buoyancy of his spirit, and he died, still untouched by the
years, in 1726.
Twenty-eight years before the death of Vanbrugh-in 1698—
Jeremy Collier had startled the town with his Short View of
the Immorality and Profaneness of the English Stage, and as
Congreve and Vanbrugh are arraigned therein with especial
bitterness, something must here be said of this unforgotten, acrid
controversy. The attack upon literature was not new. Evelyn
had already deplored the license of the stage. In his preface to
Prince Arthur, Sir Richard Blackmore had complained that the
poets used 'all their wit in opposition to religion, and to the
destruction of virtue and good manners in the world. ' The old
question of art and morals had been debated with rare intelligence
by Robert Wolseley in 1685, by way of preface to Valentinian,
and Joseph Wright, in his Country Conversations (1694) bad
protested against the attacks made by the stage upon virtue and
the clergy. Jeremy Collier, then, addressed a public inured to his
argument, which he pressed with a ferocity beyond the reach of
his immediate predecessors. A clergyman and non-juror, Collier
was indicted for absolving Friend and Parkyns at Tyburn, and,
refusing to give himself up, was outlawed. As a critic, if critic he
may be called, Collier was a patient pupil of Thomas Rymer, whose
style, method and paraded erudition he most faithfully mimicked.
He did but apply the 'good sense,' wherewith Rymer demolished
Shakespeare, to the comedies of his time. Indeed, it is not too
much to say that had the Short View of Tragedy not been written,
we never should have seen the Short View of the Immorality and
Profaneness of the English Stage. When Rymer says: 'Should
the Poet have provided such a husband for an only daughter of
any noble Peer in England, the Blackamoor must have changed
1 As to Jeremy Collier's general activity as a historian and essayist, see post, vol. I.
>
11-2
## p. 164 (#186) ############################################
164
The Restoration Drama
6
1
his skin to look our house of Lords in the face,' and roundly de-
clares that there is not a monkey that understands nature better,
not a pig in Barbary that has not a truer taste of things' than
Othello, you see the cupboard from which Jeremy Collier filched
his good things.
Relying upon Rymer, Collier went boldly to the attack. The
playwrights, he asserted, were immodest, profane, and encouragers
of immorality. He made an appeal to universal history, that he
might prove the baser wickedness of Englishmen. As little a
respecter of persons as Rymer, he lets his cudgel fall indis-
criminately upon the backs of great and small. Aristophanes
his own plays,' says he, ‘are sufficient to ruin his authority. For
he discovers himself a downright atheist. ' He shares his master's
contempt of Shakespeare, who, says he, 'is too guilty to make an
evidence: but I think he gains not much by his misbehaviour; he
has commonly Plautus' fate, when there is most smut there is least
sense. ' His comment on Ophelia matches Rymer's demolition of
Desdemona. Having extolled Euripides for seeing to it that
Phaedra's 'frenzy is not lewd,' he proceeds:
Had Shakespeare secur'd this point for his young virgin Ophelia, the play
had been better contrivd. Since he was resolved to drown the lady like a
kitten, he should have set her swimming a little sooner.
There we have the key to his 'criticism. ' Again, he will not
permit the smallest reference to the Bible in a comedy. When
Sir Sampson in Love for Love says, 'your Sampsons were strong
dogs from the beginning,' Collier's comment is characteristic:
'Here you have the sacred history burlesqu’d, and Sampson once
more brought into the House of Dagon to make sport for the
Philistines. ' He is indignant that lord Foppington should confess
that ‘Sunday is a vile day,' though the statement is perfectly con-
sonant with the part. That Valentine, in Love for Love, should
murmur 'I am truth,' fills the non-juror with fury. 'Now a poet,'
says he, 'that had not been smitten with blasphemy would never
have furnished frenzy with inspiration. The thought of The
Relapse drives him to the verge of madness: 'I almost wonder,'
says he, the smoke of it has not darkened the sun, and turned the
air to plague and poison. '
The worst offence of all committed by the dramatists is, in his
eyes, the abuse of the clergy. “They play upon the character and
endeavour not only the men but the business. If he had his way,
he would forbid the introduction of any priest, heathen or Christian,
into literature. The author of Don Sebastian,' says he, 'strikes
1
6
## p. 165 (#187) ############################################
Fallacies of The Short View 165
at the bishops through the sides of the Mufti, and borrows the
name of the Turk to make the Christian ridiculous. ' Then, with
a tedious circumstance, he discusses the priesthood in all climes
and ages, approves Racine, who brings a high priest into Athalie,
but 'does him justice in his station,' and awards the true palm to
Corneille and Molière, who set no priest upon the stage. This is
certainly the right method, and best secures the outworks of piety. '
And, after a priest, he best loves a man of quality. Plautus wins
his approval because his boldest ‘sallies are generally made by
slaves and pandars. He asks indignantly what quarter the stage
gives to quality, and finds it extremely free and familiar. That
Manly in Wycherley's play should call a duke a rascal he con-
fesses is very much plain dealing. What necessity is there, he
“'
demands, 'to kick the coronets about the stage, and to make a
man a lord, only in order to make him a coxcomb? ' Plainly there
is no necessity; but the fact that Collier should put the question
is the best measure of his irrelevance.
It was Collier's supreme error to confuse art with life. He
had but one touchstone for the drama, and that was the habit of
his kind. He laid it down for an axiom that nothing must be
discussed upon the stage which was contrary to the experience
of his own blameless fireside. He assumed that the poet was an
advocate for all the sins which he depicted; that, if he brought
upon the stage a thief or an adulterer, he proudly glorified theft
and adultery. Never once did he attempt to understand the
artist's motive or point of view, to estimate the beauty and value
of words, to make allowance for the changing manners of changed
times. His mind was not subtle enough to perceive that, in
Congreve's words, it is the business of the comic poet to paint
the vices and follies of human kind. ' As he could see no difference
between art and life, so he could not separate satire from the thing
satirised. That lord Foppington is held up to ridicule did not
hinder his condemnation. His famous comment upon Juvenal
convicts him of absurdity. 'He teaches those vices he would cor-
rect, and writes more like a pimp than a poet. . . . Such nauseous
stuff is almost enough to debauch the alphabet, and make the
language scandalous. ' And he does not understand that, if Juvenal
be not justified, then he himself is guilty of the crimes which he
imputes to Congreve and Vanbrugh.
So the worthy non-juror laid about him, fathering vice upon
blameless words, and clipping wiser, better men than himself
to fit his bed of Procrustes. And even if we allowed that there
## p. 166 (#188) ############################################
166
The Restoration Drama
a
was no difference between deed and speech, that a writer who
mentioned a crime had already committed it, that, in fact, every
theatre should be supplied with a gallows, and a judge and jury sit
permanently in the Green Room, it would still be easy to convict
Collier of injustice, especially towards Congreve. Nothing can be
said in a critic's favour who detects profaneness and immodesty in
The Mourning Bride, who condemns the mere use of the words
'martyr' and 'inspiration,' who finds a depth of blasphemy in the
sentence 'my Jehu was a hackney-coachman. ' There can be no
doubt, however, that Collier's pamphlet enjoyed all the success
which scandal could bring it. For a while the town talked and
thought of nothing else. The king issued a solemn proclamation
against vice and profaneness. Congreve and D'Urfey were prose-
cuted by the Middlesex magistrates. Fines were imposed upon
Betterton and Mrs Bracegirdle. Then, alarmed at the publicity
of the pamphlet, the poets began to write in their defence. More
wisely guided, they would have held their tongues. The encounter
could not be closely engaged. Jeremy, having said little to their
purpose, should have been ignored. To demolish his principles
might have been worth while. To oppose him in detail was merely
to incur another violent onslaught.
As they used other weapons, and fought another battle than
Collier, neither Congreve nor Vanbrugh emerged with credit from
the encounter. 'Congreve,' said Cibber, 'seemed too much hurt
to be able to defend himself, and Vanbrugh felt Collier so little
that his wit only laughed at his lashes. ' Vanbrugh, indeed, had
put forth an admirable defence in anticipation, and with an
evident reference to Rabelais.
.
• As for your saints,' he wrote in a preface to The Relapse'(your thorough-
pac'd ones, I mean, with skrew'd faces and wry mouths) I despair of them;
for they are friends to nobody: They love nothing but their altars and them-
selves; they have too much zeal to have any charity; they make debauches in
piety, as sinners do in wine; and are as quarrelsome in their religion, as other
people are in their drink: so I hope nobody will mind what they say. '
That is in the right vein. But it was Farquhar, who, in an ingenious
little work, The Adventures of Covent Garden, justly ascribed to
him by Leigh Hunt, made the wisest comment of all, to the effect
that the best way of answering Mr Collier was not to have replied at all; for
there was so much fire in his book, had not his adversaries thrown in fuel, it
would have fed upon itself, and so gone out in a blaze.
The others flung themselves into the controversy with what spirit
they might. Dryden, worn with the battle of life and letters,
## p. 167 (#189) ############################################
Replies to The Short View
167
looked wearily on the fray. He owned that in many things Collier
had 'taxed him justly,' and added 'if he be my enemy, let him
triumph. ' But he did not plead guilty, as is generally supposed,
without extenuating circumstances and without the stern con-
demnation of his adversary.
'It were not difficult to prove,' said he, 'that in many places he has
perverted my meaning by his glosses; and interpreted my words into
blasphemy and bawdry, of which they are not guilty. Besides that he is too
much given to horseplay in his raillery; and comes to battel, like a dictator
from the plough. I will not say, the Zeal of God's House has eaten him
up; but I am sure it has devoured some part of his good manners and civility'
D'Urfey rushed into the field with a preface to The Campaigners,
like the light horseman that he was, and with a song of The New
Reformation dismissed the non-juror from bis mind:
But let State Revolvers
And Treason Absolvers
Excuse if I sing:
The Scoundrel that chooses
To cry down the Muses,
Would cry down the King.
With far greater solemnity did Dennis, who himself was not
attacked by Collier, defend the Usefulness of the Stage, to the
Happiness of Mankind, to Government, and to Religion. Collier
replied to Congreve with superfluous violence, to Vanbrugh and
Dennis with what seemed to him, no doubt, an amiable restraint.
For years the warfare was carried on in pamphlet and prologue,
and echoes of it may be heard to-day. The high respect in which
Collier has been held remains a puzzle of criticism. Macaulay, for
instance, finds him 'a singularly fair controversialist,' and at the
same time regards Rymer as the worst critic that ever lived, not
perceiving that their method is one and the same; that, if Collier
is in the right of it, so is Rymer. No doubt, the hand of tradition
is strong, but to forget all that has been said in the non-juror's
favour, and to return to his text, is to awaken rudely from a dream.
There seems to the present writer nothing of worth in Collier's
pamphlet, save the forcible handling of the vernacular, which he
owed, as has been said, to Rymer. Not even is his sincerity
obvious. He strains his sarcasm as he strains his argument. His
object was to abolish not to reform the stage, and he should have
begun, not ended, with his Dissuasive from the Playhouse (1703).
And if the respect lavished upon him is surprising, still stranger
is the conviction which prevails of his influence. Scott and Mac-
aulay, Leigh Hunt and Lecky speak with one voice. Yet a brief
a
## p. 168 (#190) ############################################
168
The Restoration Drama
examination of the facts proves that Collier's success was a success
of scandal and no more. The poets bowed their knee not an inch
in obedience to Collier. They replied to him, they abused him,
and they went their way. Congreve's true answer was not his
Amendments but The Way of the World. Vanbrugh showed in
The Confederacy how lightly he had taken his scolding. Farquhar
made his first flight in December, 1698, and nobody can assert that
he clipped the wings of his fancy with Collier's shears. Meanwhile,
the old repertory remained unchanged in the theatres. The pages
of Genest, a much surer guide than tradition or desire, make evi-
dent the complete failure of Collier's attack. Dryden, Shadwell,
Aphra Behn and D'Urfey, Ravenscroft and Wycherley were still
triumphant. In the very year of Collier's supposed triumph, The
Mourning Bride, the peculiar object of his attack, 'brought the
greatest audience they have this winter. ' Congreve, the most
bitterly maligned of all, seized the highest popularity. Love for
Love flourished in the nineteenth century. Don Quixote, which
Collier thought he had left dead on the field, was still played
a quarter of a century after the fray, and The Country Wife long
outlived it. Nor were the alterations, said to have been introduced
into the plays, of a feather's weight. To change Valentine's 'I am
a
truth' into 'I am honest' was to spoil a fine passage, not to recast
the stage; and Vanbrugh's transformation of the drunken clergy-
man, in whose robes Sir John Brute disguised himself, into a
drunken woman, was not made until 1725. The new plays were
of no other fashion than the old. Cibber's Careless Husband
(1704), Charles Shadwell's Fair Quaker of Deal (1710), Gay's
Three Hours after Marriage (1717), the comedies of Mrs Centlivre
and Fielding afford no evidence of a chastened spirit. Sir Richard
Blackmore, who had anticipated Collier, did not conceal his dis-
appointment.
"The stage has become impregnable,' he wrote in 1716, where loose poets,
supported by numbers, power, and interest, in defiance of all rules of decency
and virtue still provide new snares and new temptations to seduce the people,
and corrupt their manners. '
The reformation, in brief, was, as Tom Brown called it, 'a drowsie
reformation, and when it came in fact, it came not from the
admonitions of Jeremy Collier who was remembered only as a
1 Oldmixon, in his History, accurately estimated the effect of Collier's attack.
• Neither the actors nor the poets,' he wrote, “much regarded it. There was a little
awe upon them at first, but it wore off, and this attempt to reform them was the sport
of what wit they had in their plays, prologues, and epilogues. '
9
## p. 169 (#191) ############################################
George Farquhar
169
cat-o'-nine-tails of the stage, or as a proper jest for an epilogue,
but from a change in the manners of the people.
George Farquhar appeared too late to feel the parson’s whip.
He began his career as Congreve was closing his, and he could look
upon
the fierce dispute with an eye of contemptuous impartiality.
That Collier would have spared him there is no reason to believe,
for though in temperament as in art he differed from his contem-
poraries, he claimed the full licence of his time. A man in whom
there was no disguise, he unpacked his heart upon paper. What-
ever he knew and saw, all the manifold experiments of his life, he
put unrestrainedly into his comedies. Ireland, the recruiting
officer, the disbanded soldier, love, the bottle, and the road—these
he handled with the freedom and joyousness of one who knew
them well. In a word, he broke the bonds of tradition, and de-
clared, when he was truly himself, that gallantry was merely one
aim of mankind. Of Congreve it is impossible to deduce anything
from his plays. Like all great artists, he is enwrapped in a cloak
of aristocratic impersonality. " Farquhar, living and breathing
without the shackles of art, reveals himself to us in every scene
of his plays. Humour and high spirits were always his. He was
lighthearted whatever befel him, and, having a natural propensity
to ease, knowing, moreover, that he had very little estate, “but
what lay under the circumference of his hat,' he expected mis-
fortune and faced it without a murmur.
His love of ease made him impatient of study, and this im-
patience is discernible in his works. He knew not how to polish
his dialogue. If it advanced the action of his piece or gave an ad-
ditional touch to character he was content. Though he manifestly
owed something to Thomas Heywood in his sense of the open air
i and his treatment of the countryside; though, like the rest of
his age, he had read Molière, and could borrow a scene of Le
Bourgeois Gentilhomme for his Love and a Bottle, it is not by his
-literary preferences that you judge him. Few comic poets who
keep a place in the history of the stage were less truly men of
letters than he. For the rules of his craft he cared not a jot. He
used, without shame, all the threadbare expedients of the theatre.
There is not one of his plays whose plot is not unravelled by
disguise. Leanthe, Oriana, and Silvia all masquerade as men.
Clincher and Tom Errand in The Constant Couple exchange their
clothes. Even the blameless Angelica, in Sir Harry Wildair, not
content with being a ghost, must don the finery of Beau Banter.
## p. 170 (#192) ############################################
170
The Restoration Drama
6
But we let him trick us as he will. We know that he looks upon
the world with honest eyes, and sees that therein which escaped
the others. And, as for the critics, says he, they may go hang.
He spurns the unities, roundly declaring that the rules of English
comedy don't lie in the compass of Aristotle or his followers, but
in the Pit, Box, and Galleries. '
If you would understand his plays, you must perforce know
something of his life. Born at Londonderry in 1677, he went, in
1694, to Trinity college, Dublin, composed a Pindarick ode at 14,
and, though intended for the church, found his way easily to the
stage. To be an actor was his earliest ambition, and he appeared
at the Smock Alley Theatre in the part of Othello. The discom-
fiture caused him by stage-fright was greatly enhanced by an
accidental wound which he inflicted on a fellow-player, and he
gladly took the advice of Robert Wilks, who remained his lifelong
friend, and who played the chief part in all his plays save one, to
write a comedy. So it was that, in 1698, he came to London with
Love and a Bottle in his pocket, and made an instant conquest
of the theatre. The comedy, which has little to commend it save
a vivid sense of life and movement, is, doubtless, autobiographical.
Farquhar himself must have sat for Roebuck, the young Irishman
freshly arrived in town, and it is easy to believe that the artifice
wherewith Lyrick, the dishevelled poet, escaped his creditors, was
part of Farquhar's own experience. The dramatist, in brief,
whose youth would excuse grosser absurdities than are here
exhibited, displays more energy than skill. His comedy is crude
and filled with crudities, but a bluff sincerity shines through it all,
and it is not surprising that an audience, accustomed to disguises
as the traditional trappings of the stage, should have received it
with favour.
A year later followed The Constant Couple, or a Trip to the
Jubilee, which owed something of its plot to an imitation of
Scarron's City Romance, entitled The Adventures of Covent
Garden, justly ascribed to Farquhar, as has been said, by Leigh
Hunt. This comedy, a clear advance in workmanship, was hailed
as a masterpiece with acclamation. Though it is not free from
artifice, it is far better constructed than Love and a Bottle, and
its hero, Sir Harry Wildair, appeared a beau of a new breed to
a generation sated with Foppingtons. He has honour and courage,
he has lived abroad, and he does not bound his horizon, like Sir
Novelty Fashion, with the creations of his tailor. And Clincher,
the false beau, the discreet Colonel Standard, and lady Lurewell
a
## p. 171 (#193) ############################################
The Recruiting Officer
171
herself, though not quite unknown to comedy, have something in
them of the blood and bone of human kind. In 1701 Sir Harry
Wildair appeared in another play, of which he is the eponymous
hero, and renewed his career of wit and cynicism. Truly “the
gentleman from France,' as Farquhar called his Wildair, enjoyed
the freedom of the British stage, and brought fame if not wealth
to the author of his being.
Thereafter came two failures, and then, in 1705, a piece of good
fortune sent Farquhar on military duty to Shrewsbury. His re-
cruits, as he tells us, were reviewed by his general and his colonel,
and could not fail to pass muster. More than that, he brought
back with him a comedy, The Recruiting Officer, which he dedi-
cated 'to all friends round the Wrekin,' and which, for him, was
the beginning of a new drama. Henceforth he has done with the
town and its gallants for ever. The example of Congreve and
Vanbrugh compels him no more. He takes for his material the
episodes of a broader life, and helps to bridge the chasm which
lies between the comedy of manners and the English novel, upon
whose beginnings he had a profound influence. He has done what
he could to make an end of disguise, though Silờia must perforce
put on the breeches. The most of his characters are natural men
and women, not above nor below the stature of mankind. His
soldiers, as has been pointed out, are no longer milites gloriosi,
pale reflections of Bobadill, but such as himself, whom he paints as
Captain Plume, and his comrades. Costar Pearmain and Thomas
Appletree are true men of the soil. Even Silvia is far remote
from the fine ladies who for twenty years had railed and bantered
on the stage. The common jealousy of her sex,' as Plume says,
which is nothing but their avarice of pleasure, she despises. ' In
brief, Farquhar had at last found his way. He had put a new set
of characters in a new scene. He had added something fresh to
the material of comedy.
A year later was played The Beaux' Stratagem", in construc-
tion as character the masterpiece of its author. Full of the gaiety
and bustle of the road, it depicts the life of taverns and the high-
way. Here are travellers burdened with trunks and bandboxes.
There is Boniface to fleece them, with his gag and his cunning, and
Gibbet to take what Boniface has left. The whole comedy moves
1 In 1704 he had produced, with the aid of Peter Motteux, a farce in three acts
called The Stage-Coach. It was adapted from Les Carrosses d'Orléans, by Jean de la
Chapelle, and its chief interest is that it seems a rough sketch for The Beaux'
Stratagem.
## p. 172 (#194) ############################################
172
The Restoration Drama
in an atmosphere of boisterous merriment. Aimwell and Archer
are beaux drawn from the life, not taken from a comedy, generous,
gallant, and light-hearted. And Cherry and her catechism; is
there not humour there? Throughout the play, Farquhar criticises
life in a humaner fashion than any dramatist since the author
of The English Traveller. He does not possess the artistry of
Congreve; he was, perhaps, a beginning of the sentimental comedy,
of that passion to be both merry and wise which has been the
ruin of our stage; but he looked upon life with the eye not of
Will's coffee-house but of a man, and the result is that The Beaux'
Stratagem is not indelibly marked with the date of its birth.
His muse was happier than his life. An ill-provided pocket
could not keep pace with the joyousness of his heart. A lack of
pence interrupted the course of his harmless pleasures. He took
delight always in fresh scenes and quick impressions; the pictures
of Holland, which he drew in his letters, prove how well he
understood the art of travelling; and, held fast in the bonds of
penury, he was seldom able to escape from Covent Garden. If
misfortune was abroad, it was certain to fall on him. A noble
patron persuaded him to pay his debts by the sale of his com-
mission, promising him another: that other never came. In 1703
he married a lady who pretended to be a fortune, and who, for love
of Farquhar, had concealed her poverty. Here was a plot which
might have served him for a comedy, and which, with him cast for
the chief róle, could have had only a tragic ending. Being Farquhar,
he harboured no resentment for the trick that had been put upon
him, but 'behaved to her with all the delicacy and tenderness of
an indulgent husband. ' Nothing could daunt the brave serenity
of his spirit. If he clung to the gaiety of the beau, he never knew
the beau's cynicism. He has sketched himself in a page which you
may well believe is without flattery, and he confesses himself so
great an epicure that he hates all pleasure that's purchas'd by
excess of pain. ' He, at any rate, did not accept Sir Harry Wildair's
theory of life.
'I would have my passion,' he writes in a passage of evident sincerity, 'if
not led, at least waited on by my reason; and the greatest proof of my
affection that a lady must expect is this: I would run any hazard to make us
both happy, but would not for any transitory pleasure make either of us
miserable.
It was not within his compass to make them both happy. His
friend Wilks, missing him at the theatre, discovered him lodged in
1 For Lessing's debt to Farquhar consult an excellent article by J. G. Robertson in
The Modern Language Review, vol. 11 (1907).
## p. 173 (#195) ############################################
Thomas Shadwell
173
3
a back garret in St Martin's Lane. He advised him to write a play
which should be instantly put upon the stage. 'Write! ' says
Farquhar, 'it is impossible that a man can write common sense
who is heartless, and has not a shilling in his pocket. Wilks gave
him twenty guineas, and, in six weeks, The Beaux' Stratagem, that
marvel of merriment and good-humour, was finished. It hints by
no sign that the author wrote it with a settled sickness upon him,
nor 'that before he finished the second act he perceived the
approaches of death. It was produced on 8 March 1707, and
Farquhar lived just long enough to hear of its triumphant success.
A last note to the friend of his brief life, Wilks, was found among
9
6
his papers:
Dear Bob, I have not anything to leave thee to perpetuate my memory,
but two helpless girls; look upon them sometimes, and think on him who was
to the last moment of his life thine, G. Farquhar.
An epilogue fittingly spoken by a gallant man whose life was in
dire conflict with his theory of living, and whose courage, in suffer-
ing, sustained him to the end.
Whenever this or that battle of literature is engaged, the
leaders are attended by a vast mob of camp-followers, who
without natural talent or obvious ingenuity, hope to share the
spoils of victory. Thus it was that the masters of comedy saw
their works mimicked and the repute of their craft not enhanced
by eager, industrious journeymen. The most of these preserve
their names and no more in the annals of the stage. Now and
again they emerge, for some quality of wit or good nature, from
the rest and, with their half-forgotten works, prompt the curiosity
of the historian. Thomas Shadwell", poet laureate, for instance,
enjoyed a popularity in his own day which is not easily explicable
in ours. Literary skill was not among the gifts of his mind. He
had a trick of invention, and was determined to turn the best models
to account. But when he had invented (or adapted) his puppets,
he handled them so carelessly, that they long since lost their interest
for us. The sense of style, the mastery of language, which might
have tempered their extravagance, were lacking to him, and he
resembled the facile playwrights of to-day in refusing to look upon
the drama as a branch of literature. In his preface to The Sullen
Lovers he proudly professed himself a pupil of Ben Jonson, whose
variety of humours' he attempted to reproduce, and whom, he
* See above, Chapter I.
## p. 174 (#196) ############################################
174
The Restoration Drama
thought, 'all dramatic poets ought to imitate. ' His debt to Ben
Jonson was infinitely less than his debt to Molière. The Sullen
Lovers is based upon Les Fâcheux; Bury Fair, bis masterpiece,
owes its fantastic characters to Les Précieuses Ridicules; and
The Miser is no more than a perversion of L'Avare. Yet so good
a conceit of himself had Shadwell, that he thought he did his
masters no discredit. ''Tis not barrenness of wit or invention that
makes me borrow from the French,' he boasted, 'but laziness. '
To be lazy is a greater sin, in the realm of art, than to be barren.
He patronised Shakespeare as amiably as he patronised Molière.
When he had mangled Timon of Athens, 'I can truly say," he
wrote, “that I have made it a play. Yet with all his shortcomings
'
he held the stage for a quarter of a century. His Epsom Wells
was praised by Saint-Évremond. He had the wit to make Don Juan
the hero of The Libertine, and with The Squire of Alsatia he
scaled the topmost height of his popularity. This last play has
many faults. Its story is incredible. The cant used by the rufflers
of Whitefriars is handled with so little tact, that it seems an ex-
crescence upon the dialogue rather than a part of it. Yet how
much excellent material it contains was revealed by Sir Walter
Scott, who made a free use of it in The Fortunes of Nigel.
Briefly, the vices and virtues of hasty Shadwell have been well
summed up by Rochester in four lines:
"Shadwell's unfinished Works do yet impart
Great Proofs of force of Nature, none of Art,
With just bold Strokes he dashes here and there,
Showing great Mastery with little Care. '
It is this judgment which, together with Dryden's satire, has
preserved the name and fame of Shadwell from oblivion.
Another camp-follower was Thomas D'Urfey, a French Hu-
guenot by descent and a habitant of Grub Street by profession,
who turned his hand to prose or verse, composed songs, elegies,
and panegyrics, wrote tales, tragical and comical, contrived operas
and pantomimes, satirised ministers, cultivated the friendship
of kings, changed his politics as he changed his coat, and left
behind him a vast number of boisterous farces and bombastic
melodramas. A scurrilous fellow in his life and speech, he was
the familiar friend of all, was called “Tom' by high and low, and
for nearly half a century played a part in the life of his time.
Addison remembered 'King Charles the Second leaning on his
shoulder more than once, and humming over a song with him. '
>
## p. 175 (#197) ############################################
Thomas D'Urfey
175
He was important enough to incur Buckingham's disfavour, and
lives undeservedly in the distich:
And sing-song D'Urfey, placed beneath abuses,
Lives by his impudence, and not the Muses.
His more serious plays, mere burlesques of tragedy, are in ‘Ercles'
vein. The Siege of Memphis and The Famous History of the
Rise and Fall of Massaniello may scarcely be matched, for sheer
fustian, in English literature. Thus it is that Genovino, the
Jesuit, apostrophises the friends of Massaniello:
Shout on, ye sons of clamour, louder still,
And fright the Grandees with obstreperous noise,
Whilst I secure in Darling Policies
Am pleased with the success of my Designs
Against this vile ungrateful City Naples.
For two parts, of five acts each, D'Urfey sustains his rant at this
high level, interrupting it, characteristically, with songs. The
fourth act opens with a fisherman's rousing chorus, and the
serious business of the fifth act is pleasantly beguiled by an
encounter, in amabean strains, between two fish-fags. Thus, the
method and temperament of D'Urfey are sufficiently displayed,
and a mere glance at Massaniello will explain why his friends
vastly preferred his songs to his tragedies.
The plays which he dignifies by the name of comedy are, one
and all, the broadest of broad farces. There is no trick of the
time which he does not employ. The thinnest disguises are
sufficient to deceive his simple heroes. His country squires are
guilty of wilder antics than any devised by Vanbrugh. As he
borrowed from his contemporaries, so his poor treasury of wit was
rifled by his successors. Madam Fickle, in the comedy of that
name, gave Farquhar a hint for the lady Lurewell of The
Constant Couple, and the well-deserved misfortunes of Beau
Clincher and Old Smuggler owe something to the disaster which
overtakes Beauford and Brainworm in The Virtuous Wife.
Many years later, in 1709, D'Urfey astonished the town with a
play of a wholly new pattern. It was called The Modern Prophets,
and was described by Steele as a most unanswerable satire against
the late spirit of enthusiasm. ' The writer
'had by long experience observed,' wrote The Tatler, 'that, in company, very
grave discourses had been followed by bawdry; and therefore has turned the
hamour that way with great success, and taken from his audience all manner
of superstition, by the agitations of pretty Mrs Bignell, whom he has with
great subtlety, made a lay-sister, as well as a prophetess. '
## p. 176 (#198) ############################################
176 The Restoration Drama
Of the virtues which should grace a comic poet D'Urfey had none.
He showed not even a passing interest in human character; he
knew no other wit than horseplay. In brief, save in the writing
of songs, he was a man of very slender talent, and it is a high
tribute to his amiable qualities that his memory has been so long
and so clearly preserved.
Colley Cibber was what D'Urfey was not, a born man of the
theatre. An actor by temperament, a comic poet by accident,
he took a perfect measure of the public taste, and he knew his
colleagues as he knew the pit and boxes. He could fit himself
and them with parts nicely suited to the talent of each. The
result is that his plays are no more than delicately poised
machines, which run easily enough upon the stage, but creak
horribly in the study. Congreve's criticism of Cibber's first play,
Love's Last Shift, the justice of which Cibber in his candid
way publicly acknowledged, would serve as a criticism for them
all. 'It has only in it,' said Congreve, “a great many things that
were like wit, that in reality were not wit. ' Even when he declared
that he drew from life, he succeeded in making the portrait lifeless
as stone. Lady Betty Modish, in The Careless Husband, is said to
have owed not a little to Mrs Oldfield's manner of converse.
6
There are many sentiments in this character, the author confesses, that
I may almost say, were originally her own, or only dress'd with a little more
care, than when they negligently fell from her lively humour. '
a
1
1
Yet Lady Betty is essentially a puppet of the stage. As you listen
to her wit, when it encounters the wit of Sir Charles Easy or Lord
Foppington, your mind never flits for a moment to the talk of
human beings. You are reminded, at every page, of that phrase-
book of ironic genius, Swift's Polite Conversation.
However, Cibber, being a man of the theatre, cared as little
for human character as for literature. It was for him to fill the
pit and boxes, and he filled them for two generations. In the
making of plays he was an expert, and he cared not whose work
it was that he adapted. He improved Shakespeare with as light
a heart as he improved Mrs Centlivre. His most important service
to the stage of his time was the invention of a new kind of beau
in Sir Novelty Fashion, who was accepted by Vanbrugh as a type,
and held the stage until he was reincarnated as Lord Dundreary.
Services such as this hardly outlast the author who does them, and
1 As to the relation of Cibber's later plays to sentimental comedy, see the retrospect
infra in vol. x.
!
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Colley Cibber
177
Colley Cibber has a claim upon our regard, which all his journey-
work would not merit. He left us in his Apology for his Life an
incomparable record (published in 1740). It is to his talent of
observation, to his good-humour, and to his sense of justice that we
owe the best set of theatrical portraits that ever came down to us.
As much as words can tell, he has told us of Mrs Bracegirdle and
Betterton, of Leigh and Nokes, of Estcourt and Powell, of all the
brilliant actors, who in our golden age of comedy made the repre-
sentation of that comedy possible. And he has done this with never
a jealous word, with never a hinted dislike at a prosperous rival.
Above all, he has drawn an imperishable portrait of himself, a man
protected against insult by a triple brass of confidence, whose vanity
smiled untouched at the fierce assaults of desperate enemies. That
presently he was chosen by Pope to succeed Theobald on the throne
of folly gave him a strange pleasure, and he discovered, I think,
the real reason of Pope's choice. "Right or wrong,' said he, 'a
'
lick at the laureat will always be a sure bait, ad captandum
vulgus, to catch him little readers. ' It was, in effect, the laureate
unworthy of his wreath that the great poet attacked, and the poet's
shaft should have been directed against the court which put Cibber
in a false position. His laureate odes, sunk in the waters of ob-
livion, no longer trouble us. We may even forget the skilful maker
of stage-plays. The historian of the theatre, the apologist, who
has left behind him the best commentary that we have upon the
comedy of manners, will still be entitled to the world's gratitude,
though he wears the bays no longer on his brow.
E. L. VIIT.
CH. VÌ.
12
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CHAPTER VII
THE RESTORATION DRAMA
III
TRAGIC POETS
The lesser tragic writers of this period, uninspired as most of
their work seems when judged on its own merits, fall inevitably
to a still lower level by comparison with the amazing literary
powers of their great leader, Dryden. They have all his faults
and only a small and occasional admixture of his strength and
resource. In tragedy, as in other departments of literature, the
genius of Dryden overtops, on a general estimate, the productions
of his lesser contemporaries, and how closely his lead in the drama
was followed may be correctly estimated from the fact that, in
1678, on his abandoning the use of rimed verse in the drama, his
followers also dropped this impossible form, wisely reflecting, no
doubt, that when Dryden was not satisfied as to its success, they
might be sure of its failure. The productions of the lesser
tragedians, however, in which a desire to catch the humour of
the public and to flatter the mood of the hour is the most fre-
quently recurring characteristic, remain most valuable as helping
to furnish a clear idea of the state of the drama and the prevailing
standard of taste.
The drama on the re-opening of the theatres was subjected to
a flood of new influences. Paramount among these was the in-
fluence of the court, to which dramatists and actors alike hastened
to pay the homage of servile flattery. This lack of independence on
the part of the dramatists of the day, coupled with the general
relaxation of morals consequent on the restoration, account, in a
large measure, for the degradation into which tragedy in England
sank. While comedy retained, in its brightest manifestations at
all events, some redeeming wit and humour, tragedy fell to a level
of dulness and lubricity never surpassed before or since.
