The Age of Dryden Part 9

CHAPTER VI.

THE LATER COMEDY OF THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY.

Etheredge's comedies serve to introduce one of the most brilliant schools of English comic writing--faulty, in that so far from correcting the manners of its age, it did not even portray them, but eminent above the English comedy of every other period for wit. So great is the family likeness between its chief representatives, that it will be advisable to consider their lives and their writings together. The connecting link among them all is that all were fine gentlemen whose code was the fas.h.i.+onable morality of the day. Any conclusions as to the state of contemporary manners which may be deduced from their writings must be confined to this small, though conspicuous section of English society.

[Sidenote: William Wycherley (1640-1715).]

William Wycherley was the son of a Shrops.h.i.+re gentleman of good estate.

His father, disliking the management of public schools under the Commonwealth, sent the youth to France, where he became a Roman Catholic, but recanted upon his return. He entered at the Temple, and for some years led the life of a gay young man about town. According to his own statement, all his four comedies were written about this period, but Macaulay has shown clearly that they must have, at all events, undergone very considerable revision, and that it is not probable that any but _Love in a Wood_ were in existence when this was acted in 1672.

_The Gentleman Dancing Master_, _The Country Wife_, and _The Plain Dealer_, appeared in 1673, 1675, and 1677 respectively; and the last of these was the termination of the author's brief and brilliant career as a dramatist. It was also the term of his prosperity. A secret marriage with a lady of rank offended the king, by whom Wycherley had been entrusted with the tuition of one of his natural children, and eventually involved him in debt. He was thrown into the Fleet, where he remained several years. At last James II., chancing to witness a representation of _The Plain Dealer_, was led to inquire for the author, and, a piece of munificence towards letters most unusual with him, to pay his debts and grant him a pension of two hundred a year, which, as Wycherley straightway reverted to the Roman Catholic faith, was probably withdrawn by William. He had, however, come into possession of the family estate, and existed for the rest of his life respectably as regarded his means of subsistence, though much the reverse as regards the licentious verses which he went on writing, and published at the age of sixty-four. Macaulay and Mr. Gosse, however, attribute to him a tract in defence of the stage against Jeremy Collier, not devoid of merit; and his later poems enjoyed the advantage of revision by Pope, whose hand, Macaulay thinks, is everywhere discernible. Comedy he never essayed again. He died in 1715, having ten days before his death married a young girl to injure his nephew. This Macaulay considers the worst of his actions; but we do not know that the nephew did not deserve to be injured. A contemporary poet dubs the uncle, "generous Wycherley."

[Sidenote: William Congreve (1670-1729).]

William Congreve, a scion of a good Staffords.h.i.+re family, was born at Bardsey, near Leeds, in 1670. His father, an officer in the army, obtained a command in Ireland, where a branch of the family is still settled, and Congreve received his education at Kilkenny and at Trinity College, Dublin. In 1691 he came to London, and at once found admission to the best literary circles. A novel by him, _Incognita_, was published anonymously at the beginning of 1692. Later in the year he co-operated in a translation of Juvenal by various hands, and submitted his _Old Bachelor_ to Dryden, who declared that he had never seen such a first play, and lent his aid in adapting it for the stage. It was produced with great success in January, 1693. In November of the same year _The Double-Dealer_ appeared, but, though preferred by the judicious, was less popular with the town. It was published with an elegant preface by the author, and a n.o.ble panegyric from Dryden. 'Perhaps,' says Mr.

Gosse, 'there is no other example of such full and generous praise of a young colleague by a great old poet.' Dryden's notions of architecture, indeed, seem borrowed from the churches of his time, where we not uncommonly see a spire in one style clapped upon a body in another:

'Fine Doric pillars found your solid base, The fair Corinthian crowns the higher s.p.a.ce, Thus all below is strength and all above is grace.'

But the lines in which he adjures Congreve to protect his own memory are an unparalleled blending of pathos and compliment:

'Be kind to my remains, and O, defend, Against your judgment, your departed friend, Let not the insulting foe my fame pursue, But shade those laurels which descend to you.'

Shortly after the performance of _The Double Dealer_, dissensions broke out between the patentees of the Theatre Royal and their _corps dramatique_, and the majority of the latter seceded to Lincoln's Inn Fields. Congreve followed them, and, in consideration of receiving a stipulated share of the profits, agreed to write for them a play annually, should his health permit. In pursuance of this agreement, _Love for Love_, generally considered the best of his comedies, was brought out in April, 1695. It was a signal success; as was Congreve's solitary tragedy, _The Mourning Bride_, produced in 1697, which, indeed, is believed to have produced him more than any of his comedies. The last, and, in the opinion of some, the best of these, _The Way of the World_, appeared in 1700, and its failure disgusted Congreve with the stage. He had always rather affected to condescend to be a dramatist, as Monsieur Jourdain condescended to be a haberdasher; and he was probably hurt at the rough handling he had received from Jeremy Collier, to whose _Short View of the Immorality and Profaneness of the Stage_ he had unsuccessfully endeavoured to reply. Collier's victory, indeed, proved that the licentiousness of the stage was a mere fas.h.i.+on, rather tolerated than approved by the majority of the playgoing public, and Congreve may have felt that his wings would be clipped by the reformation which public opinion was evidently about to demand. Whatever the cause, he was lost to the stage at thirty, and his occasional poetical productions, the most important of which have been already noticed, were far from qualifying him to sit in the seat of Dryden. He enjoyed, nevertheless, supremacy of another kind. Regarded as an extinct volcano, he gave umbrage to no rivals; his urbane and undemonstrative temper kept him out of literary feuds; all agreed to adore so benign and inoffensive a deity, and the general respect of the lettered world fitly culminated in Pope's dedication of his _Homer_ to him, the most splendid literary tribute the age could bestow. Sinecure Government places made his circ.u.mstances more than easy, but he suffered continually from gout, the effect of free living, and he became blind, or nearly so, in his latter years. His death (1729) was hastened by a carriage accident.

He had a splendid funeral in Westminster Abbey, and a monument erected by the d.u.c.h.ess of Marlborough (Marlborough's daughter, not his widow), whom he had capriciously made his princ.i.p.al legatee.

It is, as Mr. Gosse remarks, difficult to form any very distinct notion of Congreve as a man. We must be content with knowing that he was a fine gentleman before all things, convivial in his habits, witty in conversation, extremely sensitive to criticism, otherwise placid; able to keep on good terms with both Pope and Dennis throughout his life; and that Pope thought him, Garth, and Vanbrugh, 'the three most honest-hearted real good men of the poetical members of the Kit-cat Club.'

[Sidenote: Sir John Vanbrugh (1664-1726).]

Sir John Vanbrugh, the next of the quartette of ill.u.s.trious comic writers, occupies a remarkable position in literature. Few other distinguished architects have gained renown in elegant letters, and these have not attempted the drama. As, however, Angelo is more celebrated for St. Peter's than for his sonnets, so Vanbrugh is better remembered by Blenheim, which most have beheld, than by his plays, which are never seen on the stage, and yet connoisseurs have found infinitely more to censure in the former. The faults of the plays are those of the author's age and his school; the faults imputed to his buildings, if they exist, which is a question for architects, are personal to the Fleming, who shared his countryman Rubens's taste for the ma.s.sive and substantial, and whose epitaph was couched in the adjuration:

'Lie heavy on him, earth, for he Laid many a heavy load on thee.'

Though born an English subject, Vanbrugh was of Flemish descent. His first profession was the army. His _debut_ as a dramatist was made in 1697 by two sparkling comedies, _The Relapse_ and _The Provoked Wife_, followed by _The False Friend_ (1702), _The Confederacy_, and _The Mistake_ (1705), some imitations of the French, and an unfinished play, _A Journey to London_, completed by Cibber, and produced in 1728 as _The Provoked Husband_. All these plays seem to have been successful; certainly none were in any peril of d.a.m.nation on the ground apprehended by Orrery:

'This play, I'm horribly afraid, can't last; Allow it pretty, 'tis confounded chaste, And contradicts too much the present taste.'

Latterly he became somewhat careless in the composition of his plays, which may be reasonably attributed to the demands made upon him by the laborious profession of architecture, which he took up, apparently without a regular education, about the end of the seventeenth century, and which he may have been the more inclined to pursue on account of the serious loss entailed upon him by his dramatic speculations. Interest or ability made him successful; he was entrusted with no less a task than the erection of Blenheim; and Castle Howard and other celebrated country mansions were built after his designs. He died in 1726. The little known of his personal character is to his credit.

[Sidenote: George Farquhar (1678-1707).]

George Farquhar was born at Londonderry in 1678, and is believed to have been the son of an Irish clergyman. He forsook Trinity College for the stage, where he made some figure, but renounced his calling out of compunction for having accidentally wounded a fellow-actor. Coming to London with ten guineas lent to him by the manager, he achieved renown by his comedy of _Love and a Bottle_ (1699). _The Constant Couple_ (1701) was even more successful. Other plays followed, and from allusions in one of the princ.i.p.al, _The Recruiting Officer_ (1706), as well as reminiscences and traditions, he is believed to have held a commission in the army. According to tradition, he was induced to sell his commission to pay his debts by the Duke of Ormond's promise to procure him another, and the disappointment of this expectation so deeply mortified him as to occasion his death. His last and best comedy, _The Beaux' Stratagem_, was written on his deathbed. He is a sympathetic figure among the literary men of the day, gallant and witty, nor incapable of serious feeling. According to his own account he was, like Liston and others who have contributed to the mirth of mankind, by nature a melancholy man. 'As to the mind, which in most men wears as many changes as their body, so in me 'tis generally drest like my person, in black. Melancholy is its everyday apparel, and it has. .h.i.therto found few holidays to make it change its clothes.' He adds: 'I am seldom troubled by what the world calls airs and caprices; and I think 'tis an idiot's excuse for a foolish action to say, 'twas my humour. I hate all little malicious tricks of vexing people; and I can't relish the jest that vexes another in earnest. If ever I do a wilful injury, it must be a very great one. I have so natural a propensity to ease, that I cannot cheerfully fix to any study which bears not a pleasure in the application; which makes me inclinable to poetry above anything else. I have very little estate but what lies under the circ.u.mference of my hat; and should I by mischance come to lose my head, I should not be worth a groat; but I ought to thank Providence that I can by three hours' study live one-and-twenty with satisfaction to myself, and contribute to the maintenance of more families than some who have thousands a year. I have something in my outward behaviour which gives strangers a worse opinion of me than I deserve; but I am more than recompensed by the opinion of my acquaintance, which is as much above my desert.'

This, which is only part of a much longer character, addressed to a lady, is remarkable as the most detailed self-estimate of any man of letters of the period we possess, until we come to Steele.

Although there are undoubtedly considerable distinctions between the works of these four dramatists, such a fundamental unity nevertheless prevails among them that they may be advantageously considered together.

They may be compared to a jewel with four facets, each casting a separate ray, but with little diversity in their cold brilliant glitter.

Wit, gaiety, heartlessness, and profligacy are the common notes of them all, save that Congreve has tragic power, and, as well as Farquhar, real feeling. How far they painted, or intended to paint, the manners of their age, is a difficult question. Lamb thought that the world they depict was merely conventional, a Lampsacene Arcadia. Not even the indulgent Leigh Hunt, much less the austere Macaulay, can concur in this judgment, which is a.s.suredly much too absolute. Yet it is indisputable that the manners they portray were not those of a nation that devoured _Pilgrim's Progress_, brought up children and domestics by the _Whole Duty of Man_, and deposed a king who meddled with the Church. Were they even the manners of the gay world? To some extent this is true; but there is evidence enough that even fas.h.i.+onable men thought of something else than seducing their neighbours' wives and daughters; that the slips even of fas.h.i.+onable women were by no means inordinately frequent or mere matters of course; and that the standard of personal honour was much higher than would appear from the comedies. We may be a.s.sisted to comprehend the real state of the matter by observing the condition of the French literature of fiction at this very moment. Anyone who should form his opinion of French people entirely from their novels could come to no other conclusion than that they were entirely given up to the pursuit of illicit love, and deemed nothing else worthy of the attention of a rational creature. Yet we know that as a matter of fact the French nation does think of very different things; that a ridiculously small corner of actual life is conventionally made to stand for the whole of it; that the novels which profess to depict manners, while accurate in their delineation of certain characters and certain phases, would entirely mislead those whose notions should be solely derived from them.

It would be nearer the truth, though still erroneous, to take the reverse view, and maintain that works composed for the sake of amus.e.m.e.nt are more likely to usher the reader into an ideal world than to weary him with familiar scenes and incidents. So far as this is the case, the English society of the seventeenth century must be acquitted at the expense of the dramatists, who incur the obloquy of missing both the two great ends of comedy, for they neither delineate nor correct it.

Possibly the unsatisfactory position which writers of so much wit and sense thus came to occupy may be partly accounted for by the influence of Ben Jonson. We have seen Dryden almost hesitating to avow his preference for Shakespeare to Jonson, we shall see that Butler has no hesitation in a.s.serting the superiority of Jonson to Shakespeare as an obvious thing; nor could it well be otherwise in so essentially prosaic an age. This implies the triumph of the comedy of types over the comedy of nature. Jonson, like Menander, impersonates particular characteristics, or situations in life; Shakespeare paints human nature as large as it really is. We have seen how the exhibition of these so-called 'humours' forms the staple of the comedy of Shadwell. The handling of Congreve and his a.s.sociates, who had the example of Moliere before them, is far superior, but the principle is at bottom the same. A characteristic is incarnated in a personage, and often indicated by his very name. Instead of the names bestowed by fancy, or borrowed from romance, the Benedicts, Rosalinds, Imogens, Mirandas, we have Witwoulds, Maskwells, Millamants, and Gibbets. Each character being thus more or less conventional, the _tout ensemble_ is necessarily conventional too; and to this extent the world of these dramatists may be fairly regarded as ideal; while it is not true that they had any definite purpose of creating such a world, or that it was so dissimilar to actual society as to interfere with the appreciation of the audience. Their works may be compared to the novels of Mr. George Meredith, who would have been a great comic writer if he had lived in the days of Congreve. No one would call Mr. Meredith's novels unnatural; yet his works will convey but little notion of the English society of the nineteenth century to posterity, who will only need to turn to George Eliot and Anthony Trollope to realize it as no bygone age was ever realized before.

Wycherley has been characterized by Professor Ward as the Timon of his stage, and the description is excellent, if not understood of one animated by moral indignation at its immorality, but of one impelled by temperament to insist upon and exaggerate its most disagreeable features. The two most important of his plays, _The Country Wife_ and _The Plain Dealer_, are rather tragi-comedies than comedies, especially the latter, of which Professor Ward justly observes, 'Working within the limits of his own horizon, with nothing perceptible to him but a vicious world hateful on account of the palpable grossness of its outward pretences, Wycherley must be allowed to have worked with vigour and effect, and to have produced what is indisputably one of the most powerful dramas of its age.' Its unpardonable sin is to be to a great extent an adaptation of Moliere's _Misanthrope_, and to pervert and brutalize whatever is most admirable in that masterpiece. _Love in a Wood_ and _The Gentleman Dancing Master_ are comparatively slight performances, but there is great humour in the representation in the latter of the disguised lover helped out of all his sc.r.a.pes by the self-complacent credulity of the young lady's father and his own rival, whose business it is to detect him. The delineation of the father as a merchant returned from long residence in Spain, enamoured of Spanish manners, and quoting the language at every second sentence, is one of those which justify Aubrey's remark that the dramatists of his age would be soon forgotten, because their ephemeral 'humours' would have ceased to be intelligible. The character, if still possible in Wycherley's time, ceased to be so very soon afterwards. It must, however, have been popular if it gave or helped to give the nickname of Don Diego to the Spaniards, which survives to this day in 'dago,' the familiar appellation of South Americans in the United States. One characteristic of all Wycherley's comedies should be mentioned, their length, which confirms the impression that he composed with slowness. 'When,' says Hazlitt, 'he got hold of a good thing, or sometimes even of a bad one, he was determined to make the most of it, and might have said with Dogberry, "Had I the tediousness of a king, I could find it in my heart to bestow it all upon your wors.h.i.+ps."'

If Wycherley is the satirist of Restoration comedy, Congreve is its wit; but at the same time he betrays a vein of much deeper feeling than Wycherley, and, notwithstanding the contrary opinion of Hazlitt, his characters appear to us more easily appreciated and more readily remembered. His insight into women in particular is so considerable that it is a real loss that he never attempted to paint a n.o.ble one, who would indeed have looked strangely amid the crowd of his heartless, or frivolous, or absurd people, but whom he might have rendered a true dramatic success. Both _The Double Dealer_ and _The Way of the World_ border upon tragedy, and suggest how much finer things Congreve might have written had the taste of his time allowed of tragedy in prose; or if, by treating ordinary domestic life in a serious spirit, even though in verse, he could have taken the step that was afterwards taken by Lillo. He evidently felt conscious of innate tragic power, and essayed heroic tragedy in _The Mourning Bride_, where, hampered by the conventionalities he dared not transgress, he broke down with a romantic plot, romantic characters, and stilted blank verse, all things most repugnant to his genius. Johnson's praise of a pa.s.sage in this play as 'the most poetical paragraph in the whole ma.s.s of English poetry,' and which is actually fine enough to survive such extravagant laudation, is well known. It will be instructive to set it side by side with a still finer pa.s.sage in a modern tragedy, as examples of the cla.s.sic and romantic schools of composition. It is the strength and weakness of Congreve that his thoughts are such as would naturally have occurred to any one in the situation of his personages, and that his sole part is to afford them dignified expression; while Beddoes' thoughts are the thoughts of a poet, and as such might well appear fantastic and overstrained to an average audience:

'_Almeria._ It is a fancied noise, for all is hushed.

_Leonora._ It bore the accent of a human voice.

_Almeria._ It was thy fear, or else some transient wind Whistling through hollows of this vaulted aisle.

We'll listen.

_Leonora._ Hark!

_Almeria._ No, all is hushed and still as death. 'Tis dreadful.

How reverend is the face of this tall pile, Whose ancient pillars rear their marble heads To bear aloft its arched and ponderous roof, By its own weight made steadfast and immovable, Looking tranquillity! It strikes an awe And terror on my aching sight; the tombs And monumental caves of death look cold, And shoot a chillness to my trembling heart.

Give me thy hand!

Oh, speak to me! nay, speak! and let me hear Thy voice; my own affrights me with its echoes.'

_Mourning Bride_, act ii., sc. 3.

'_Duke._ Deceived and disappointed vain desires!

Why laugh I not, and ridicule myself?

'Tis still, and cold, and nothing in the air But an old grey twilight, or of eve or morn I know not which, dim as futurity, And sad and h.o.a.ry as the ghostly past Fills up the s.p.a.ce. Hus.h.!.+ not a wind is there, Not a cloud sails over the battlements, Not a bell tolls the hour. Is there an hour?

Or is not all gone by which here did hive Of men and their life's ways? Could I but hear The ticking of a clock, or someone breathing, Or e'en a cricket's chirping, or the grating Of the old gates amid the marble tombs, I should be sure that this was still the world.

Hark! Hark! Doth nothing stir?

No light, and still no light, besides this ghost That mocks the dawn, unaltered? Still no sound?

No voice of man? No cry of beast? No rustle Of any moving creature? And sure I feel That I remain the same: no more round blood drops Roll joyously along my pulseless veins: The air I seem to breathe is still the same: And the great dreadful thought that now comes o'er me Must remain ever as it is, unchanged.

This moment doth endure for evermore; Eternity hath overshadowed time; And I alone am left of all that lived.'

_Death's Jest Book_, act iii., sc. 3.

The writer of these lines might have been a great tragic poet, if he could have achieved the construction of a coherent plot. Congreve might have been a greater, but for the conventions of an age that required his _dramatis personae_ to be remote by a thousand years or a thousand miles.

The dazzle of Congreve's wit has perhaps blinded critics to his more serious powers, and it may be that its brilliancy has been even exaggerated. What is chiefly admirable is perhaps not so much the occasional flashes and strokes, felicitous as they are, as the unflagging verve, energy, and gaiety. His plays are not of the kind that keep the audience in a roar from first to last, but they never cease to stimulate the spirits; the fire does not always blaze, but it never burns low: there is not a dull scene, or a tiresome or useless character. The general tone of good breeding, if it does not purify the pervading atmosphere of profligacy, at any rate prevents it from becoming offensive. In verbal impropriety and _double entendre_ Congreve is even worse than Wycherley, but his plays are far from giving the same impression of a thoroughly obnoxious state of society. It is true that the pursuit of women seems the sole business of the men, and the pursuit of men the business of half the women; but the universal pa.s.sion is so pleasantly variegated with extraneous humours and oddities that it is far from producing the monotony of a modern French novel. Thus, there is an amourette between Brisk and Lady Froth in _The Double Dealer_, but the pair are aesthetic as well as amorous, and the blue-stocking is more conspicuous than the unfaithful wife. The scene where Brisk corrects Lady Froth's poetry, imitated but not servilely copied from one in _Les Femmes Savantes_, is a good specimen of the humour and sparkle of Congreve's dialogue:

'_Lady Froth._ Then you think that episode between Susan, the dairy-maid, and our coachman, is not amiss; you know I may suppose the dairy in town as well as in the country.

_Brisk._ Incomparable, let me peris.h.!.+--But then being an heroic poem, had not you better call him a charioteer? charioteer sounds great; besides, your ladys.h.i.+p's coachman having a red face, and you comparing him to the sun; and you know the sun is called heaven's charioteer.

_Lady Froth._ Oh, infinitely better! I am extremely beholden to you for the hint; stay, we'll read over those half a score lines again. [_Pulls out a paper._] Let me see here, you know what goes before,--the comparison, you know.

[_Reads._