LEIGH HUNT

(January 1841) _The Dramatic Works of WYCHERLEY, CONGREVE, VANBRUGH, and

FARQUHAR, with Biographical and Critical Notices. By LEIGH HUNT. 8vo.

London: 1840._

|WE have a kindness for Mr. Leigh Hunt. We form our judgment of him,

indeed, only from events of universal notoriety, from his own works, and

from the works of other writers, who have generally abused him in the

most rancorous manner. But, unless we are greatly mistaken, he is a

very clever, a very honest, and a very good-natured man. We can clearly

discern, together with many merits, many faults both in his writings and

in his conduct. But we really think that there is hardly a man living

whose merits have been so grudgingly allowed, and whose faults have been

so cruelly expiated.

In some respects Mr. Leigh Hunt is excellently qualified for the task

which he has now undertaken. His style, in spite of its mannerism, nay,

partly by reason of its mannerism, is well-suited for light, garrulous,

desultory ana, half critical, half biographical. We do not always agree

with his literary judgments; but we find in him what is very rare in our

time, the power of justly appreciating and heartily enjoying good things

of very different kinds. He can adore Shakspeare and Spenser without

denying poetical genius to the author of Alexander’s Feast, or fine

observation, rich fancy and exquisite humour to him who imagined Will

Honeycomb and Sir Roger de Coverley. He has paid particular attention to

the history of the English drama, from the age of Elizabeth down to our

own time, and has every right to be heard with respect on that subject.

The plays to which he now acts as introducer are, with few exceptions,

such as, in the opinion of many very respectable people, ought not to

be reprinted. In this opinion we can by no means concur. We cannot wish

that any work or class of works which has exercised a great influence

on the human mind, and which illustrates the character of an important

epoch in letters, politics, and morals, should disappear from the world.

If we err in this matter, we err with the gravest men and bodies of men

in the empire, and especially with the Church of England, and with

the great schools of learning which are connected with her. The whole

liberal education of our countrymen is conducted on the principle, that

no book which is valuable, either by reason of the excellence of its

style, or by reason of the light which it throws on the history, polity,

and manners of nations, should be withheld from the student on account

of its impurity. The Athenian Comedies, in which there are scarcely a

hundred lines together without some passage of which Rochester would

have been ashamed, have been reprinted at the Pitt Press, and the

Clarendon Press, under the direction of Syndics, and delegates appointed

by the Universities, and have been illustrated with notes by reverend,

very reverend, and right reverend commentators. Every year the most

distinguished young men in the kingdom are examined by bishops and

professors of divinity in such works as the Lysistrata of Aristophanes

and the Sixth Satire of Juvenal. There is certainly something a little

ludicrous in the idea of a conclave of venerable fathers of the Church

praising and rewarding a lad on account of his intimate acquaintance

with writings compared with which the loosest tale in Prior is modest.

But, for our own part, we have no doubt that the greatest societies

which direct the education of the English gentry have herein judged

wisely. It is unquestionable that an extensive acquaintance with ancient

literature enlarges and enriches the mind. It is unquestionable that a

man whose mind has been thus enlarged and enriched is likely to be far

more useful to the State and to the Church than one who is unskilled

or little skilled, in classical learning. On the other hand, we find it

difficult to believe that, in a world so full of temptation as this,

any gentleman whose life would have been virtuous if he had not read

Aristophanes and Juvenal will be made vicious by reading them. A man

who, exposed to all the influences of such a state of society as that in

which we live, is yet afraid of exposing himself to the influences of

a few Greek or Latin verses, acts, we think, much like the felon who

begged the sheriffs to let him have an umbrella held over his head from

the door of Newgate to the gallows, because it was a drizzling morning,

and he was apt to take cold.

The virtue which the world wants is a healthful virtue, not a

valetudinarian virtue, a virtue which can expose itself to the risks

inseparable from all spirited exertion, not a virtue which keeps out of

the common air for fear of infection, and eschews the common food as

too stimulating. It would be indeed absurd to attempt to keep men from

acquiring those qualifications which fit them to play their part in life

with honour to themselves and advantage to their country, for the sake

of preserving a delicacy which cannot be preserved, a delicacy which a

walk from Westminster to the Temple is sufficient to destroy.

But we should be justly chargeable with gross inconsistency if, while we

defend the policy which invites the youth of our country to study such

writers as Theocritus and Catullus, we were to set up a cry against a

new edition of the Country Wife or the Wife of the World. The immoral

English writers of the seventeenth century are indeed much less

excusable than those of Greece and Rome. But the worst English writings

of the seventeenth century are decent, compared with much that has been

bequeathed to us by Greece and Rome. Plato, we have little doubt, was a

much better man than Sir George Etherege. But Plato has written things

at which Sir George Etherege would have shuddered. Buckhurst and Sedley,

even in those wild orgies at the Cock in Bow Street for which they were

pelted by the rabble and fined by the Court of King’s Bench, would

never have dared to hold such discourse as passed between Socrates

and Phaedrus on that fine summer day under the plane-tree, while the

fountain warbled at their feet, and the cicadas chirped overhead. If

it be, as we think it is, desirable that an English gentleman should

be well informed touching the government and the manners of little

commonwealths which both in place and time are far removed from us,

whose independence has been more than two thousand years extinguished,

whose language has not been spoken for ages, and whose ancient

magnificence is attested only by a few broken columns and friezes, much

more must it be desirable that he should be intimately acquainted with

the history of the public mind of his own country, and with the causes,

the nature, and the extent of those revolutions of opinion and feeling

which, during the last two centuries, have alternately raised and

depressed the standard of our national morality. And knowledge of this

sort is to be very sparingly gleaned from Parliamentary debates, from

State papers, and from the works of grave historians. It must either not

be acquired at all, or it must be acquired by the perusal of the

light literature which has at various periods been fashionable. We are

therefore by no means disposed to condemn this publication, though

we certainly cannot recommend the handsome volume before us as an

appropriate Christmas present for young ladies.

We have said that we think the present publication perfectly

justifiable. But we can by no means agree with Mr. Leigh Hunt, who seems

to hold that there is little or no ground for the charge of immorality

so often brought against the literature of the Restoration. We do not

blame him for not bringing to the judgment-seat the merciless rigour

of Lord Angelo; but we really think that such flagitious and impudent

offenders as those who are now at the bar deserved at least the gentle

rebuke of Escalus. Mr. Leigh Hunt treats the whole matter a little

too much in the easy style of Lucio; and perhaps his exceeding lenity

disposes us to be somewhat too severe.

And yet it is not easy to be too severe. For in truth this part of our

literature is a disgrace to our language and our national character.

It is clever, indeed, and very entertaining; but it is, in the

most emphatic sense of the words, “earthly, sensual, devilish.” Its

indecency, though perpetually such as is condemned not less by the rules

of good taste than by those of morality, is not, in our opinion, so

disgraceful a fault as its singularly inhuman spirit. We have here

Belial, not as when he inspired Ovid and Ariosto, “graceful and humane,”

but with the iron eye and cruel sneer of Mephistopheles. We find

ourselves in a world, in which the ladies are like very profligate,

impudent and unfeeling men, and in which the men are too bad for any

place but Pandaemonium or Norfolk Island. We are surrounded by foreheads

of bronze, hearts like the nether millstone, and tongues set on fire of

hell.

Dryden defended or excused his own offences and those of his

contemporaries by pleading the example of the earlier English

dramatists; and Mr. Leigh Hunt seems to think there is force in the

plea. We altogether differ from this opinion. The crime charged is not

mere coarseness of expression. The terms which are delicate in one age

become gross in the next. The diction of the English version of the

Pentateuch is sometimes such as Addison would not have ventured to

imitate; and Addison, the standard of moral purity in his own age,

used many phrases which are now proscribed. Whether a thing shall be

designated by a plain noun-substantive or by a circumlocution is mere

matter of fashion. Morality is not at all interested in the question.

But morality is deeply interested in this, that what is immoral shall

not be presented to the imagination of the young and susceptible in

constant connection with what is attractive. For every person who has

observed the operation of the law of association in his own mind and in

the minds of others knows that whatever is constantly presented to the

imagination in connection with what is attractive will itself become

attractive. There is undoubtedly a great deal of indelicate writing in

Fletcher and Massinger, and more than might be wished even in Ben Jonson

and Shakspeare, who are comparatively pure. But it is impossible to

trace in their plays any systematic attempt to associate vice with those

things which men value most and desire most, and virtue with every thing

ridiculous and degrading. And such a systematic attempt we find in the

whole dramatic literature of the generation which followed the return

of Charles the Second. We will take, as an instance of what we mean, a

single subject of the highest importance to the happiness of mankind,

conjugal fidelity. We can at present hardly call to mind a single

English play, written before the civil war, in which the character of

a seducer of married women is represented in a favourable light. We

remember many plays in which such persons are baffled, exposed, covered

with derision, and insulted by triumphant husbands. Such is the fate of

Falstaff, with all his wit and knowledge of the world. Such is the fate

of Brisac in Fletcher’s Elder Brother, and of Ricardo and Ubaldo

in Massinger’s Picture. Sometimes, as in the Fatal Dowry and Love’s

Cruelty, the outraged honour of families is repaired by a bloody

revenge. If now and then the lover is represented as an accomplished

man, and the husband as a person of weak or odious character, this only

makes the triumph of female virtue the more signal, as in Johnson’s

Celia and Mrs. Fitzdottrel, and in Fletcher’s Maria. In general we will

venture to say that the dramatists of the age of Elizabeth and James the

First either treat the breach Of the marriage-vow as a serious crime,

or, if they treat it as matter for laughter, turn the laugh against the

gallant.

On the contrary, during the forty years which followed the Restoration,

the whole body of the dramatists invariably represent adultery, we do

not say as a peccadillo, we do not say as an error which the violence of

passion may excuse, but as the calling of a fine gentleman, as a grace

without which his character would be imperfect. It is as essential to

his breeding and to his place in society that he should make love to the

wives of his neighbours as that he should know French, or that he should

have a sword at his side. In all this there is no passion, and scarcely

anything that can be called preference. The hero intrigues just as he

wears a wig; because, if he did not, he would be a queer fellow, a city

prig, perhaps a Puritan. All the agreeable qualities are always given

to the gallant. All the contempt and aversion are the portion of the

unfortunate husband. Take Dryden for example; and compare Woodall with

Brainsick, or Lorenzo with Gomez. Take Wycherley; and compare Horner

with Pinchwife. Take Vanbrugh; and compare Constant with Sir John Brute.

Take Farquhar; and compare Archer with Squire Sullen. Take Congreve;

and compare Bellmour with Fondlewife, Careless with Sir Paul Plyant, or

Scandal with Foresight. In all these cases, and in many more which might

be named, the dramatist evidently does his best to make the person who

commits the injury graceful, sensible, and spirited, and the person who

suffers it a fool, or a tyrant, or both.

Mr. Charles Lamb, indeed, attempted to set up a defence for this way of

writing. The dramatists of the latter part of the seventeenth century

are not, according to him, to be tried by the standard of morality which

exists, and ought to exist in real life. Their world is a conventional

world. Their heroes and heroines belong, not to England, not to

Christendom, but to an Utopia of gallantry, to a Fairyland, where the

Bible and Burn’s justice are unknown, where a prank which on this earth

would be rewarded with the pillory is merely matter for a peal of elvish

laughter. A real Homer, a real Careless, would, it is admitted, be

exceedingly bad men. But to predicate morality or immorality of the

Horner of Wycherley and the Careless of Congreve is as absurd as it

would be to arraign a sleeper for his dreams. “They belong to the

regions of pure comedy, where no cold moral reigns. When we are among

them we are among a chaotic people. We are not to judge them by our

usages. No reverend institutions are insulted by their proceedings,

for they have none among them. No peace of families is violated, for

no family ties exist among them. There is neither right nor wrong,

gratitude or its opposite, claim or duty, paternity or sonship.”

This is, we believe, a fair summary of Mr. Lamb’s doctrine. We are sure

that we do not wish to represent him unfairly. For we admire his genius;

we love the kind nature which appears in all his writings; and we

cherish his memory as much as if we had known him personally. But we

must plainly say that his argument, though ingenious, is altogether

sophistical.

Of course we perfectly understand that it is possible for a writer to

create a conventional world in which things forbidden by the Decalogue

and the Statute Book shall be lawful, and yet that the exhibition may

be harmless, or even edifying. For example, we suppose that the most

austere critics would not accuse Fenelon of impiety and immorality on

account of his Telemachus and his Dialogues of the Dead. In Telemachus

and the Dialogues of the Dead we have a false religion, and consequently

a morality which is in some points incorrect. We have a right and

a wrong differing from the right and the wrong of real life. It is

represented as the first duty of men to pay honour to Jove and Minerva.

Philocles, who employs his leisure in making graven images of these

deities, is extolled for his piety in a way which contrasts singularly

with the expressions of Isaiah on the same subject. The dead are judged

by Minos, and rewarded with lasting happiness for actions which Fenelon

would have been the first to pronounce splendid sins. The same may be

said of Mr. Southey’s Mahommedan and Hindoo heroes and heroines. In

Thalaba, to speak in derogation of the Arabian impostor is blasphemy:

to drink wine is a crime: to perform ablutions and to pay honour to

the holy cities are works of merit. In the Curse of Kehama, Kailyal is

commended for her devotion to the statue of Mariataly, the goddess of

the poor. But certainly no person will accuse Mr. Southey of having

promoted or intended to promote either Islamism or Brahminism.

It is easy to see why the conventional worlds of Fenelon and Mr. Southey

are unobjectionable. In the first place, they are utterly unlike the

real world in which we live. The state of society, the laws even of the

physical world, are so different from those with which we are familiar,

that we cannot be shocked at finding the morality also very different.

But in truth the morality of these conventional worlds differs from the

morality of the real world only in points where there is no danger

that the real world will ever go wrong. The generosity and docility

of Telemachus, the fortitude, the modesty, the filial tenderness of

Kailyal, are virtues of all ages and nations. And there was very little

danger that the Dauphin would worship Minerva, or that an English damsel

would dance, with a bucket on her head, before the statue of Mariataly.

The case is widely different with what Mr. Charles Lamb calls the

conventional world of Wycherley and Congreve. Here the garb, the

manners, the topics of conversation are those of the real town and of

the passing day. The hero is in all superficial accomplishments exactly

the fine gentleman whom every youth in the pit would gladly resemble.

The heroine is the fine lady whom every youth in the pit would gladly

marry. The scene is laid in some place which is as well known to the

audience as their own houses, in St. James’s Park, Park, or Hyde Park,

or Westminster Hall. The lawyer bustles about with his bag, between the

Common Pleas and the Exchequer. The Peer calls for his carriage to go

to the House of Lords on a private bill. A hundred little touches are

employed to make the fictitious world appear like the actual world. And

the immorality is of a sort which never can be out of date, and which

all the force of religion, law, and public opinion united can but

imperfectly restrain.

In the name of art, as well as in the name of virtue, we protest against

the principle that the world of pure comedy is one into which no moral

enters. If comedy be an imitation, under whatever conventions, of real

life, how is it possible that it can have no reference to the great

rule which directs life, and to feelings which are called forth by

every incident of life? If what Mr. Charles Lamb says were correct, the

inference would be that these dramatists did not in the least understand

the very first principles of their craft. Pure landscape-painting into

which no light or shade enters, pure portrait-painting into which no

expression enters, are phrases less at variance with sound criticism

than pure comedy into which no moral enters.

But it is not the fact that the world of these dramatists is a world

into which no moral enters. Morality constantly enters into that world,

a sound morality, and an unsound morality; the sound morality to be

insulted, derided, associated with everything mean and hateful; the

unsound morality to be set off to every advantage, and inculcated by

all methods, direct and indirect. It is not the fact that none of

the inhabitants of this conventional world feel reverence for sacred

institutions and family ties. Fondlewife, Pinchwife, every person in

short of narrow understanding and disgusting manners, expresses that

reverence strongly. The heroes and heroines, too, have a moral code of

their own, an exceedingly bad one, but not, as Mr. Charles Lamb seems to

think, a code existing only in the imagination of dramatists. It is, on

the contrary, a code actually received and obeyed by great numbers of

people. We need not go to Utopia or Fairyland to find them. They

are near at hand. Every night some of them cheat at the hells in the

Quadrant, and others pace the Piazza in Covent Garden. Without flying to

Nephelococcygia or to the Court of Queen Mab, we can meet with sharpers,

bullies, hard-hearted impudent debauchees, and women worthy of such

paramours. The morality of the Country Wife and the Old Bachelor is the

morality, not, as Mr. Charles Lamb maintains, of an unreal world, but

of a world which is a great deal too real. It is the morality, not of

a chaotic people, but of low town-rakes, and of those ladies whom the

newspapers call “dashing Cyprians.”

And the question is simply this, whether a man of genius who constantly

and systematically endeavours to make this sort of character attractive,

by uniting it with beauty, grace, dignity, spirit, a high social

position, popularity, literature, wit, taste, knowledge of the world,

brilliant success in every undertaking, does or does not make an ill use

of his powers. We own that we are unable to understand how this question

can be answered in any way but one.

It must, indeed, be acknowledged, in justice to the writers of whom

we have spoken thus severely, that they were to a great extent the

creatures of their age, And if it be asked why that age encouraged

immorality which no other age would have tolerated, we have no

hesitation in answering that this, great depravation of the national

taste was the effect of the prevalence of Puritanism under the

Commonwealth.

To punish public outrages on morals and religion is unquestionably

within the competence of rulers. But when a government, not content with

requiring decency, requires sanctity, it oversteps the bounds which mark

its proper functions. And it may be laid down as a universal rule that

a government which attempts more than it ought will perform less. A

lawgiver who, in order to protect distressed borrowers, limits the rate

of interest, either makes it impossible for the objects of his care

to borrow at all, or places them at the mercy of the worst class of

usurers. A lawgiver who, from tenderness for labouring men, fixes the

hours of their work and the amount of their wages, is certain to make

them far more wretched than he found them. And so a government which,

not content with repressing scandalous excesses, demands from its

subjects fervent and austere piety, will soon discover that, while

attempting to render an impossible service to the cause of virtue, it

has in truth only promoted vice.

For what are the means by which a government can effect its ends? Two

only, reward and punishment; powerful means, indeed, for influencing the

exterior act, but altogether impotent for the purpose of touching the

heart. A public functionary who is told that he will be promoted if he

is a devout Catholic, and turned out of his place if he is not, will

probably go to mass every morning, exclude meat from his table on

Fridays, shrive himself regularly, and perhaps let his superiors know

that he wears a hair shirt next his skin. Under a Puritan government, a

person who is apprised that piety is essential to thriving in the world

will be strict in the observance of the Sunday, or, as he will call it,

Sabbath, and will avoid a theatre as if it were plague-stricken. Such

a show of religion as this the hope of gain and the fear of loss will

produce, at a week’s notice, in any abundance which a government may

require. But under this show, sensuality, ambition, avarice, and hatred

retain unimpaired power, and the seeming convert has only added to

the vices of a man of the world all the still darker vices which are

engendered by the constant practice of dissimulation. The truth cannot

be long concealed. The public discovers that the grave persons who are

proposed to it as patterns are more utterly destitute of moral principle

and of moral sensibility than avowed libertines. It sees that these

Pharisees are farther removed from real goodness than publicans and

harlots. And, as usual, it rushes to the extreme opposite to that which

it quits. It considers a high religious profession as a sure mark of

meanness and depravity. On the very first day on which the restraint of

fear is taken away, and on which men can venture to say what they

think, a frightful peal of blasphemy and ribaldry proclaims that the

short-sighted policy which aimed at making a nation of saints has made a

nation of scoffers.

It was thus in France about the beginning of the eighteenth century.

Lewis the Fourteenth in his old age became religious: he determined

that his subjects should be religious too: he shrugged his shoulders and

knitted his brows if he observed at his levee or near his dinner-table

any gentleman who neglected the duties enjoined by the Church, and

rewarded piety with blue ribands, invitations to Marli, governments,

pensions, and regiments. Forthwith Versailles became, in everything

but dress, a convent. The pulpits and confessionals were surrounded by

swords and embroidery. The Marshals of France were much in prayer; and

there was hardly one among the Dukes and Peers who did not carry good

little books in his pocket, fast during Lent, and communicate at Easter.

Madame de Maintenon, who had a great share in the blessed work, boasted

that devotion had become quite the fashion. A fashion indeed it was; and

like a fashion it passed away. No sooner had the old king been carried

to St. Denis than the whole Court unmasked. Every man hastened to

indemnify himself, by the excess of licentiousness and impudence, for

years of mortification. The same persons who, a few months before, with

meek voices and demure looks, had consulted divines about the state

of their souls, now surrounded the midnight table where, amidst the

bounding of champagne corks, a drunken prince, enthroned between Dubois

and Madame de Parabere, hiccoughed out atheistical arguments and obscene

jests. The early part of the reign of Lewis the Fourteenth had been a

time of licence; but the most dissolute men of that generation would

have blushed at the orgies of the Regency.

It was the same with our fathers in the time of the Great Civil War. We

are by no means unmindful of the great debt which mankind owes to the

Puritans of that time, the deliverers of England, the founders of

the American Commonwealths. But in the day of their power, those men

committed one great fault, which left deep and lasting traces in the

national character and manners. They mistook the end and overrated the

force of government. They determined, not merely to protect religion

and public morals from insult, an object for which the civil sword, in

discreet hands, may be beneficially employed, but to make the people

committed to their rule truly devout. Yet, if they had only reflected

on events which they had themselves witnessed and in which they had

themselves borne a great part, they would have seen what was likely to

be the result of their enterprise. They had lived under a government

which, during a long course of years, did all that could be done, by

lavish bounty and by rigorous punishment, to enforce conformity to the

doctrine and discipline of the Church of England. No person suspected of

hostility to that Church had the smallest chance of obtaining favour at

the Court of Charles. Avowed dissent was punished by imprisonment, by

ignominious exposure, by cruel mutilations, and by ruinous fines. And

the event had been that the Church had fallen, and had, in its fall,

dragged down with it a monarchy which had stood six hundred years.

The Puritan might have learned, if from nothing else, yet from his own

recent victory, that governments which attempt things beyond their reach

are likely not merely to fail, but to produce an effect directly the

opposite of that which they contemplate as desirable.

All this was overlooked. The saints were to inherit the earth. The

theatres were closed. The fine arts were placed under absurd restraints.

Vices which had never before been even misdemeanours were made capital

felonies. It was solemnly resolved by Parliament “that no person

shall be employed but such as the House shall be satisfied of his

real godliness.” The pious assembly had a Bible lying on the table for

reference. If they had consulted it they might have learned that the

wheat and the tares grow together inseparably, and must either be spared

together or rooted up together. To know whether a man was really godly

was impossible. But it was easy to know whether he had a plain dress,

lank hair, no starch in his linen, no gay furniture in his house;

whether he talked through his nose, and showed the whites of his

eyes; whether he named his children Assurance, Tribulation,

Mahershalal-hash-baz; whether he avoided Spring Garden when in town,

and abstained from hunting and hawking when in the country; whether

he expounded hard scriptures to his troop of dragoons, and talked in

a committee of ways and means about seeking the Lord. These were tests

which could easily be applied. The misfortune was that they were tests

which proved nothing. Such as they were, they were employed by the

dominant party. And the consequence was that a crowd of impostors, in

every walk of life, began to mimic and to caricature what were then

regarded as the outward signs of sanctity. The nation was not duped. The

restraints of that gloomy time were such as would have been impatiently

borne, if imposed by men who were universally believed to be saints.

Those restraints became altogether insupportable when they were known to

be kept up for the profit of hypocrites. It is quite certain that, even

if the royal family had never returned, even if Richard Cromwell or

Henry Cromwell had been at the head of the administration, there would

have been a great relaxation of manners. Before the Restoration many

signs indicated that a period of licence was at hand. The Restoration

crushed for a time the Puritan party, and placed supreme power in the

hands of a libertine. The political counter-revolution assisted the

moral counter-revolution, and was in turn assisted by it. A period of

wild and desperate dissoluteness followed. Even in remote manor-houses

and hamlets the change was in some degree felt; but in London the

outbreak of debauchery was appalling; and in London the places

most deeply infected were the Palace, the quarters inhabited by the

aristocracy, and the Inns of Court. It was on the support of these parts

of the town that the playhouses depended. The character of the drama

became conformed to the character of its patrons. The comic poet was the

mouthpiece of the most deeply corrupted part of a corrupted society. And

in the plays before us we find, distilled and condensed, the essential

spirit of the fashionable world during the anti-Puritan reaction.

The Puritan had affected formality; the comic poet laughed at decorum.

The Puritan had frowned at innocent diversions; the comic poet took

under his patronage the most flagitious excesses. The Puritan had

canted; the comic poet blasphemed. The Puritan had made an affair of

gallantry felony without benefit of clergy; the comic poet represented

it as an honourable distinction. The Puritan spoke with disdain of the

low standard of popular morality; his life was regulated by a far more

rigid code; his virtue was sustained by motives unknown to men of the

world. Unhappily it had been amply proved in many cases, and might well

be suspected in many more, that these high pretensions were unfounded.

Accordingly, the fashionable circles, and the comic poets who were the

spokesmen of those circles, took up the notion that all professions of

piety and integrity were to be construed by the rule of contrary; that

it might well be doubted whether there was such a thing as virtue in the

world; but that, at all events, a person who affected to be better than

his neighbours was sure to be a knave.

In the old drama there had been much that was reprehensible. But whoever

compares even the least decorous plays of Fletcher with those contained

in the volume before us will see how much the profligacy which follows

a period of overstrained austerity goes beyond the profligacy which

precedes such a period. The nation resembled the demoniac in the New

Testament. The Puritans boasted that the unclean spirit was cast out.

The house was empty, swept, and garnished; and for a time the expelled

tenant wandered through dry places seeking rest and finding none. But

the force of the exorcism was spent. The fiend returned to his abode;

and returned not alone. He took to him seven other spirits more wicked

than himself. They entered in, and dwelt together: and the second

possession was worse than the first.

We will now, as far as our limits will permit, pass in review the

writers to whom Mr. Leigh Hunt has introduced us. Of the four, Wycherley

stands, we think, last in literary merit, but first in order of time,

and first, beyond all doubt, in immorality.

WILLIAM WYCHERLEY was born in 1640. He was the son of a Shropshire

gentleman of old family, and of what was then accounted a good estate:

The properly was estimated at six hundred a year, a fortune which, among

the fortunes at that time, probably ranked as a fortune of two thousand

a year would rank in our days.

William was an infant when the civil war broke out; and, while he

was still in his rudiments, a Presbyterian hierarchy and a republican

government were established on the ruins of the ancient Church and

throne. Old Mr. Wycherley was attached to the royal cause, and was not

disposed to intrust the education of his heir to the solemn Puritans

who now ruled the universities and public schools. Accordingly the young

gentleman was sent at fifteen to France. He resided some time in the

neighbourhood of the Duke of Montausier, chief of one of the noblest

families of Touraine. The Duke’s wife, a daughter of the house

of Rambouillet, was a finished specimen of those talents and

accomplishments for which her race was celebrated. The young foreigner

was introduced to the splendid circle which surrounded the Duchess, and

there he appears to have learned some good and some evil. In a few

years he returned to his country a fine gentleman and a Papist. His

conversion, it may safely be affirmed, was the effect not of any strong

impression on his understanding, or feelings, but partly of intercourse

with an agreeable society in which the Church of Rome was the fashion,

and partly of that aversion to Calvinistic austerities which was then

almost universal among young Englishmen of parts and spirit, and which,

at one time, seemed likely to make one half of them Catholics, and the

other half Atheists.

But the Restoration came. The universities were again in loyal hands;

and there was reason to hope that there would be again a national Church

fit for a gentleman. Wycherley became a member of Queen’s College,

Oxford, and abjured the errors of the Church of Rome. The somewhat

equivocal glory of turning, for a short time, a good-for-nothing Papist

into a good-for-nothing Protestant is ascribed to Bishop Barlow.

Wycherley left Oxford without taking a degree, and entered at the

Temple, where he lived gaily for some years, observing the humours of

the town, enjoying its pleasures, and picking up just as much law as

was necessary to make the character of a pettifogging attorney or of a

litigious client entertaining in a comedy.

From an early age he had been in the habit of amusing himself by

writing. Some wretched lines of his on the Restoration are still extant.

Had he devoted himself to the making of verses, he would have been

nearly as far below Tate and Blackmore as Tate and Blackmore are below

Dryden. His only chance for renown would have been that he might have

occupied a niche in a satire, between Flecknoe and Settle. There

was, however, another kind of composition in which his talents and

acquirements qualified him to succeed; and to that he judiciousily

betook himself.

In his old age he used to say that he wrote Love in a Wood at nineteen,

the Gentleman Dancing-Master at twenty-one, the Plain Dealer at

twenty-five, and the Country Wife at one or two and thirty. We are

incredulous, we own, as to the truth of this story. Nothing that we know

of Wycherley leads us to think him incapable of sacrificing truth

to vanity. And his memory in the decline of his life played him such

strange tricks that we might question the correctness of his assertion

without throwing any imputation on his veracity. It is certain that none

of his plays was acted till 1672, when he gave Love in a Wood to the

public. It seems improbable that he should resolve, on so important

an occasion as that of a first appearance before the world, to run his

chance with a feeble piece, written before his talents were ripe, before

his style was formed, before he had looked abroad into the world; and

this when he had actually in his desk two highly-finished plays,

the fruit of his matured powers. When we look minutely at the pieces

themselves, we find in every part of them reason to suspect the accuracy

of Wycherley’s statement. In the first scene of Love in a Wood, to go no

further, we find many passages which he could not have written when he

was nineteen. There is an allusion to gentlemen’s periwigs, which first

came into fashion in 1663; an allusion to guineas, which were first

struck in 1663; an allusion to the vests which Charles ordered to be

worn at Court in 1666; an allusion to the fire of 1666; and several

political allusions which must be assigned to times later than the

year of the Restoration, to times when the Government and the city were

opposed to each other, and when the Presbyterian ministers had been

driven from the parish churches to the conventicles. But it is needless

to dwell on particular expressions. The whole air and spirit of the

piece belong to a period subsequent to that mentioned by Wycherley.

As to the Plain Dealer, which is said to have been written when he was

twenty-five, it contains one scene unquestionably written after 1675,

several which are later than 1668, and scarcely a line which can have

been composed before the end of 1666.

Whatever may have been the age at which Wycherley composed his plays,

it is certain that he did not bring them before the public till he was

upwards of thirty. In 1672, Love in a Wood was acted with more success

than it deserved, and this event produced a great change in the fortunes

of the author. The Duchess of Cleveland cast her eyes upon him, and was

pleased with his appearance. This abandoned woman, not content with her

complaisant husband and her royal keeper, lavished her fondness on a

crowd of paramours of all ranks, from dukes to rope-dancers. In the

time of the commonwealth she commenced her career of gallantry, and

terminated it under Anne, by marrying, when a great-grandmother, that

worthless fop, Beau Fielding. It is not strange that she should

have regarded Wycherley with favour. His figure was commanding, his

countenance strikingly handsome, his look and deportment full of grace

and dignity. He had, as Pope said long after, “the true nobleman look,”

the look which seems to indicate superiority, and a not unbecoming

consciousness of superiority. His hair indeed, as he says in one of his

poems, was prematurely grey. But in that age of periwigs this misfortune

was of little importance. The Duchess admired him, and proceeded to make

love to him, after the fashion of the coarse-minded and shameless circle

to which she belonged. In the Ring, when the crowd of beauties and fine

gentlemen was thickest, she put her head out of her coach-window, and

bawled to him, “Sir, you are a rascal; you are a villain”; and, if

she is not belied, she added another phrase of abuse which we will

not quote, but of which we may say that it might most justly have been

applied to her own children. Wycherley called on her Grace the next

day, and with great humility begged to know in what way he had been so

unfortunate as to disoblige her. Thus began an intimacy from which the

poet probably expected wealth and honours. Nor were such expectations

unreasonable. A handsome young fellow about the Court, known by the name

of Jack Churchill, was, about the same time, so lucky as to become the

object of a short-lived fancy of the Duchess. She had presented him with

five thousand pounds, the price, in all probability, of some title or

pardon. The prudent youth had lent the money on high interest and on

landed security; and this judicious investment was the beginning of the

most splendid private fortune in Europe. Wycherley was not so lucky. The

partiality with which the great lady regarded him was indeed the talk of

the whole town; and sixty years later old men who remembered those

days told Voltaire that she often stole from the Court to her lover’s

chambers in the Temple, disguised like a country girl, with a straw hat

on her head, pattens on her feet, and a basket in her hand. The poet was

indeed too happy and proud to be discreet. He dedicated to the Duchess

the play which had led to their acquaintance, and in the dedication

expressed himself in terms which could not but confirm the reports which

had gone abroad. But at Whitehall such an affair was regarded in no

serious light. The lady was not afraid to bring Wycherley to Court, and

to introduce him to a splendid society, with which, as far as appears,

he had never before mixed. The easy King, who allowed to his mistresses

the same liberty which he claimed for himself, was pleased with the

conversation and manners of his new rival. So high did Wycherley stand

in the royal favour that once, when he was confined by a fever to his

lodgings in Bow Street, Charles, who, with all his faults, was certainly

a man of social and affable disposition, called on him, sat by his bed,

advised him to try change of air, and gave him a handsome sum of money

to defray the expense of the journey. Buckingham, then Master of the

Horse, and one of that infamous ministry known by the name of the Cabal,

had been one of the Duchess’s innumerable paramours. He at first showed

some symptoms of jealousy, but he soon, after his fashion, veered round

from anger to fondness, and gave Wycherley a commission in his own

regiment and a place in the royal household.

It would be unjust to Wycherley’s memory not to mention here the only

good action, as far as we know, of his whole life. He is said to have

made great exertions to obtain the patronage of Buckingham for the

illustrious author of Hudibras, who was now sinking into an obscure

grave, neglected by a nation proud of his genius, and by a Court which

he had served too well. His Grace consented to see poor Butler; and

an appointment was made. But unhappily two pretty women passed by; the

volatile Duke ran after them; the opportunity was lost, and could never

be regained.

The second Dutch war, the most disgraceful war in the whole history of

England, was now raging. It was not in that age considered as by any

means necessary that a naval officer should receive a professional

education. Young men of rank, who were hardly able to keep their feet in

a breeze, served on board the King’s ships, sometimes with commissions,

and sometimes as volunteers. Mulgrave, Dorset, Rochester, and many

others, left the playhouses in the Mall for hammocks and salt pork,

and, ignorant as they were of the rudiments of naval service, showed, at

least, on the day of battle, the courage which is seldom wanting in an

English gentleman. All good judges of maritime affairs complained that,

under this system, the ships were grossly mismanaged, and that the

tarpaulins contracted the vices, without acquiring the graces, of the

Court. But on this subject, as on every other where the interests or

whims of favourites were concerned, the Government of Charles was deaf

to all remonstrances. Wycherley did not choose to be out of the fashion.

He embarked, was present at a battle, and celebrated it, on his return,

in a copy of verses too bad for the bellman.

[Mr. Leigh Hunt supposes that the battle at which Wycherley was present

was that which the Duke of York gained over Opdam, in 1665. We believe

that it was one of the battles between Rupert and De Ruyter, in 1673.

The point is of no importance; and there cannot be said to be

much evidence either way. We offer, however, to Mr. Leigh Hunt’s

consideration three arguments, of no great weight certainly, yet such as

ought, we think, to prevail in the absence of better. First, it is

not very likely that a young Templar, quite unknown in the world,--and

Wycherley was such in 1665,--should have quitted his chambers to go to

sea. On the other hand, it would be in the regular course of things,

that, when a courtier and an equerry, he should offer his services.

Secondly, his verses appear to have been written after a drawn battle,

like those of 1673, and not after a complete victory, like that of 1665.

Thirdly, in the epilogue to the Gentleman Dancing-Master, written in

1673, he says that “all gentlemen must pack to sea”; an expression which

makes it probable that he did not himself mean to stay behind.]

About the same time, he brought on the stage his second piece, the

Gentleman Dancing-Master. The biographers say nothing, as far as we

remember, about the fate of this play. There is, however, reason to

believe that, though certainly far superior to Love in a Wood, it was

not equally successful. It was first tried at the west end of the

town, and, as the poet confessed, “would scarce do there.” It was then

performed in Salisbury Court, but, as it should seem, with no better

event. For, in the prologue to the Country Wife, Wycherley described

himself as “the late so baffled scribbler.”

In 1675, the Country Wife was performed with brilliant success, which,

in a literary point of view, was not wholly unmerited. For, though one

of the most profligate and heartless of human compositions, it is

the elaborate production of a mind, not indeed rich, original, or

imaginative, but ingenious, observant, quick to seize hints, and patient

of the toil of polishing.

The Plain Dealer, equally immoral and equally well written, appeared in

1677. At first this piece pleased the people less than the critics; but

after a time its unquestionable merits and the zealous support of

Lord Dorset, whose influence in literary and fashionable society was

unbounded, established it in the public favour.

The fortune of Wycherley was now in the zenith, and began to decline.

A long life was still before him. But it was destined to be filled

with nothing but shame and wretchedness, domestic dissensions, literary

failures, and pecuniary embarrassments.

The King, who was looking about for an accomplished man to conduct the

education of his natural son, the young Duke of Richmond, at length

fixed on Wycherley. The poet, exulting in his good luck, went down to

amuse himself at Tunbridge Wells, looked into a bookseller’s shop on the

Pantiles, and, to his great delight, heard a handsome woman ask for the

Plain Dealer, which had just been published. He made acquaintance with

the lady, who proved to be the Countess of Drogheda, a gay young widow,

with an ample jointure. She was charmed with his person and his wit,

and, after a short flirtation, agreed to become his wife. Wycherley

seems to have been apprehensive that this connection might not suit well

with the King’s plans respecting the Duke of Richmond. He accordingly

prevailed on the lady to consent to a private marriage. All came

out. Charles thought the conduct of Wycherley both disrespectful and

disingenuous. Other causes probably assisted to alienate the sovereign

from the subject who had lately been so highly favoured. Buckingham

was now in opposition, and had been committed to the Tower; not, as

Mr. Leigh Hunt supposes, on a charge of treason, but by an order of

the House of Lords for some expressions which he had used in debate.

Wycherley wrote some bad lines in praise of his imprisoned patron,

which, if they came to the knowledge of the King, would certainly have

made his majesty very angry. The favour of the Court was completely

withdrawn from the poet. An amiable woman with a large fortune might

indeed have been an ample compensation for the loss. But Lady Drogheda

was ill-tempered, imperious, and extravagantly jealous. She had herself

been a maid of honour at Whitehall. She well knew in what estimation

conjugal fidelity was held among the fine gentlemen there, and watched

her town husband as assiduously as Mr. Pinchwife watched his country

wife. The unfortunate wit was, indeed, allowed to meet his friends at a

tavern opposite to his own house. But on such occasions the windows were

always open, in order that her Ladyship, who was posted on the other

side of the street, might be satisfied that no woman was of the party.

The death of Lady Drogheda released the poet from this distress; but

a series of disasters, in rapid succession, broke down his health, his

spirits, and his fortune. His wife meant to leave him a good property,

and left him only a lawsuit. His father could not or would not assist

him. Wycherley was at length thrown into the Fleet, and languished there

during seven years, utterly forgotten, as it should seem, by the gay

and lively circle of which he had been a distinguished ornament. In

the extremity of his distress he implored the publisher who had been

enriched by the sale of his works, to lend him twenty pounds, and was

refused. His comedies, however, still kept possession of the stage,

and drew great audiences, which troubled themselves little about

the situation of the author. At length James the Second, who had now

succeeded to the throne, happened to go to the theatre on an evening

when the Plain Dealer was acted. He was pleased by the performance, and

touched by the fate of the writer, whom he probably remembered as one

of the gayest and handsomest of his brother’s courtiers. The King

determined to pay Wycherley’s debts, and to settle on the unfortunate

poet a pension of two hundred pounds a year. This munificence on the

part of a prince who was little in the habit of rewarding literary

merit, and whose whole soul was devoted to the interests of his Church,

raises in us a surmise which Mr. Leigh Hunt will, we fear, pronounce

very uncharitable. We cannot help suspecting that it was at this time

that Wycherley returned to the communion of the Church of Rome. That he

did return to the communion of the Church of Rome is certain. The date

of his reconversion, as far as we know, has never been mentioned by

any biographer. We believe that, if we place it at this time, we do no

injustice to the character either of Wycherley or James.

Not long after, old Mr. Wycherley died; and his son, now past the middle

of life, came to the family estate. Still, however, he was not at his

ease. His embarrassments were great: his property was strictly tied up;

and he was on very bad terms with the heir-at-law. He appears to have

led, during a long course of years, that most wretched life, the life

of a vicious old boy about town. Expensive tastes with little money, and

licentious appetites with declining vigour, were the just penance for

his early irregularities. A severe illness had produced a singular

effect on his intellect. His memory played him pranks stranger than

almost any that are to be found in the history of that strange faculty.

It seemed to be at once preternaturally strong and preternaturally weak.

If a book was read to him before he went to bed, he would wake the next

morning with his mind full of the thoughts and expressions which he had

heard over night; and he would write them down, without in the least

suspecting that they were not his own. In his verses the same ideas, and

even the same words, came over and over again several times in a short

composition. His fine person bore the marks of age, sickness, and

sorrow; and he mourned for his departed beauty with an effeminate

regret. He could not look without a sigh at the portrait which Lely

had painted of him when he was only twenty-eight, and often murmured,

Quantum mutatus ab illo. He was still nervously anxious about his

literary reputation, and, not content with the fame which he still

possessed as a dramatist, was determined to be renowned as a satirist

and an amatory poet. In 1704, after twenty-seven years of silence, he

again appeared as an author. He put forth a large folio of miscellaneous

verses, which, we believe, has never been reprinted. Some of these

pieces had probably circulated through the town in manuscript. For,

before the volume appeared, the critics at the coffee-houses very

confidently predicted that it would be utterly worthless, and were in

consequence bitterly reviled by the poet in an ill-written, foolish,

and egotistical preface. The book amply vindicated the most unfavourable

prophecies that had been hazarded. The style and versification are

beneath criticism; the morals are those of Rochester. For Rochester,

indeed, there was some excuse. When his offences against decorum were

committed, he was a very young man, misled by a prevailing fashion.

Wycherley was sixty-four. He had long outlived the times when

libertinism was regarded as essential to the character of a wit and a

gentleman. Most of the rising poets, Addison, for example, John Philips

and Rowe, were studious of decency. We can hardly conceive any thing

more miserable than the figure which the ribald old man makes in the

midst of so many sober and well-conducted youths.

In the very year in which this bulky volume of obscene doggerel was

published, Wycherley formed an acquaintance of a very singular kind.

A little, pale, crooked, sickly, bright-eyed urchin, just turned of

sixteen, had written some copies of verses in which discerning judges

could detect the promise of future eminence. There was, indeed, as yet

nothing very striking or original in the conceptions of the young poet.

But he was already skilled in the art of metrical composition. His

diction and his music were not those of the great old masters; but that

which his ablest contemporaries were labouring to do, he already

did best. His style was not richly poetical; but it was always neat,

compact, and pointed. His verse wanted variety of pause, of swell, and

of cadence, but never grated harshly on the ear, or disappointed it by a

feeble close. The youth was already free of the company of wits, and was

greatly elated at being introduced to the author of the Plain Dealer and

the Country Wife.

It is curious to trace the history of the intercourse which took place

between Wycherley and Pope, between the representative of the age that

was going out, and the representative of the age that was coming in,

between the friend of Rochester and Buckingham, and the friend of

Lyttelton and Mansfield. At first the boy was enchanted by the kindness

and condescension of so eminent a writer, haunted his door, and followed

him about like a spaniel from coffee-house to coffee-house. Letters full

of affection, humility, and fulsome flattery were interchanged between

the friends, But the first ardour of affection could not last. Pope,

though at no time scrupulously delicate in his writings or fastidious as

to the morals of his associates, was shocked by the indecency of a

rake who, at seventy, was still the representative of the monstrous

profligacy of the Restoration. As the youth grew older, as his mind

expanded and his fame rose, he appreciated both himself and Wycherley

more correctly. He felt a just contempt for the old gentleman’s verses,

and was at no great pains to conceal his opinion. Wycherley, on the

other hand, though blinded by self-love to the imperfections of what

he called his poetry, could not but see that there was an immense

difference between his young companion’s rhymes and his own. He was

divided between two feelings. He wished to have the assistance of

so skilful a hand to polish his lines; and yet he shrank from the

humiliation of being beholden for literary assistance to a lad who might

have been his grandson. Pope was willing to give assistance, but was

by no means disposed to give assistance and flattery too. He took the

trouble to retouch whole reams of feeble stumbling verses, and inserted

many vigorous lines which the least skilful reader will distinguish in

an instant. But he thought that by these services he acquired a right to

express himself in terms which would not, under ordinary circumstances,

become one who was addressing a man of four times his age. In one letter

he tells Wycherley that “the worst pieces are such as, to render them

very good, would require almost the entire new writing of them.” In

another, he gives the following account of his corrections: “Though the

whole be as short again as at first, there is not one thought omitted

but what is a repetition of something in your first volume, or in this

very paper; and the versification throughout is, I believe, such as

nobody can be shocked at. The repeated permission you gave me of dealing

freely with you, will, I hope, excuse what I have done; for, if I had

not spared you when I thought severity would do you a kindness, I

have not mangled you where I thought there was no absolute need of

amputation.” Wycherley continued to return thanks for all this

hacking and hewing, which was, indeed, of inestimable service to

his compositions. But at last his thanks began to sound very like

reproaches. In private, he is said to have described Pope as a person

who could not cut out a suit, but who had some skill in turning

old coats. In his letters to Pope, while he acknowledged that the

versification of the poems had been greatly improved, he spoke of

the whole art of versification with scorn, and sneered at those who

preferred sound to sense. Pope revenged himself for this outbreak of

spleen by return of post. He had in his hands a volume of Wycherley’s

rhymes, and he wrote to say that this volume was so full of faults that

he could not correct it without completely defacing the manuscript. “I

am,” he said, “equally afraid of sparing you, and of offending you by

too impudent a correction.” This was more than flesh and blood could

bear. Wycherley reclaimed his papers, in a letter in which resentment

shows itself plainly through the thin disguise of civility. Pope, glad

to be rid of a troublesome and inglorious task, sent back the deposit,

and, by way of a parting courtesy, advised the old man to turn his

poetry into prose, and assured him that the public would like his

thoughts much better without his versification, Thus ended this

memorable correspondence.

Wycherley lived some years after the termination of the strange

friendship which we have described. The last scene of his life

was, perhaps, the most scandalous. Ten days before his death, at

seventy-five, he married a young girl, merely in order to injure his

nephew, an act which proves that neither years, nor adversity, nor what

he called his philosophy, nor either of the religions which he had at

different times professed, had taught him the rudiments of morality.

He died in December 1715, and lies in the vault under the church of St.

Paul in Covent Garden.

His bride soon after married a Captain Shrimpton, who thus became

possessed of a large collection of manuscripts. These were sold to a

bookseller. They were so full of erasures and interlineations that no

printer could decipher them. It was necessary to call in the aid of a

professed critic; and Theobald, the editor of Shakspeare, and the hero

of the first Dunciad, was employed to ascertain the true reading. In

this way a volume of miscellanies in verse and prose was got up for the

market. The collection derives all its value from the traces of Pope’s

hand, which are everywhere discernible.

Of the moral character of Wycherley it can hardly be necessary for us to

say more. His fame as a writer rests wholly on his comedies, and chiefly

on the last two. Even as a comic writer, he was neither of the best

school, nor highest in his school. He was in truth a worse Congreve. His

chief merit, like Congreve’s, lies in the style of his dialogue, but the

wit which lights up the Plain Dealer and the Country Wife is pale and

flickering, when compared with the gorgeous blaze which dazzles us

almost to blindness in Love for Love and the Way of the World. Like

Congreve, and, indeed, even more than Congreve, Wycherley is ready to

sacrifice dramatic propriety to the liveliness of his dialogue. The poet

speaks out of the mouths of all his dunces and coxcombs, and makes them

describe themselves with a good sense and acuteness which puts them on

a level with the wits and heroes. We will give two instances, the first

which occur to us, from the Country Wife. There are in the world fools

who find the society of old friends insipid, and who are always running

after new companions. Such a character is a fair subject for comedy. But

nothing can be more absurd than to introduce a man of this sort saying

to his comrade, “I can deny you nothing: for though I have known thee

a great while, never go if I do not love thee as well as a new

acquaintance.” That town-wits, again, have always been rather a

heartless class, is true. But none of them, we will answer for it, ever

said to a young lady to whom he was making love, “We wits rail and make

love often, but to show our parts: as we have no affections, so we have

no malice.”

Wycherley’s plays are said to have been the produce of long and patient

labour. The epithet of “slow” was early given to him by Rochester,

and was frequently repeated. In truth his mind, unless we are greatly

mistaken, was naturally a very meagre soil, and was forced only by great

labour and outlay to bear fruit which, after all, was not of the highest

flavour. He has scarcely more claim to originality than Terence. It is

not too much to say that there is hardly anything of the least value

in his plays of which the hint is not to be found elsewhere. The best

scenes in the Gentleman Dancing-Master were suggested by Calderon’s

Maestro de Danzar, not by any means one of the happiest comedies of the

great Castilian poet. The Country Wife is borrowed from the Ecole des

Maris and the Ecole des Femmes. The groundwork of the Plain Dealer

is taken from the Misanthrope of Moliere. One whole scene is almost

translated from the Critique de l’Ecole des Femmes. Fidelia is

Shakspeare’s Viola stolen, and marred in the stealing; and the Widow

Blackacre, beyond comparison Wycherley’s best comic character, is the

Countess in Racine’s Plaideurs, talking the jargon of English instead of

that of French chicane.

The only thing original about Wycherley, the only thing which he could

furnish from his own mind in inexhaustible abundance, was profligacy. It

is curious to observe how everything that he touched, however pure and

noble, took in an instant the colour of his own mind. Compare the Ecole

des Femmes with the Country Wife. Agnes is a simple and amiable girl,

whose heart is indeed full of love, but of love sanctioned by honour,

morality, and religion. Her natural talents are great. They have been

hidden, and, as it might appear, destroyed by an education elaborately

bad. But they are called forth into full energy by a virtuous passion.

Her lover, while he adores her beauty, is too honest a man to abuse

the confiding tenderness of a creature so charming and inexperienced.

Wycherley takes this plot into his hands; and forthwith this sweet and

graceful courtship becomes a licentious intrigue of the lowest and least

sentimental kind, between an impudent London rake and the idiot wife

of a country squire. We will not go into details. In truth, Wycherley’s

indecency is protected against the critics as a skunk is protected

against the hunters. It is safe, because it is too filthy to handle and

too noisome even to approach.

It is the same with the Plain Dealer. How careful has Shakspeare been

in Twelfth Night to preserve the dignity and delicacy of Viola under

her disguise! Even when wearing a page’s doublet and hose, she is never

mixed up with any transaction which the most fastidious mind could

regard as leaving a stain on her. She is employed by the Duke on an

embassy of love to Olivia, but on an embassy of the most honourable

kind. Wycherley borrows Viola; and Viola forthwith becomes a pandar of

the basest sort. But the character of Manly is the best illustration of

our meaning. Moliere exhibited in his misanthrope a pure and noble mind,

which had been sorely vexed by the sight of perfidy and malevolence,

disguised under the forms of politeness. As every extreme naturally

generates its contrary, Alceste adopts a standard of good and evil

directly opposed to that of the society which surrounds him. Courtesy

seems to him a vice; and those stern virtues which are neglected by the

fops and coquettes of Paris become too exclusively the objects of his

veneration. He is often to blame; he is often ridiculous; but he is

always a good man; and the feeling which he inspires is regret that a

person so estimable should be so unamiable. Wycherley borrowed Alceste,

and turned him,--we quote the words of so lenient a critic as Mr. Leigh

Hunt,--into “a ferocious sensualist, who believed himself as great a

rascal as he thought everybody else.” The surliness of Moliere’s hero is

copied and caricatured. But the most nauseous libertinism and the most

dastardly fraud are substituted for the purity and integrity of the

original. And, to make the whole complete, Wycherley does not seem to

have been aware that he was not drawing the portrait of an eminently

honest man. So depraved was his moral taste that, while he firmly

believed that he was producing a picture of virtue too exalted for the

commerce of this world, he was really delineating the greatest rascal

that is to be found, even in his own writings.

We pass a very severe censure on Wycherley, when we say that it is a

relief to turn from him to Congreve. Congreve’s writings, indeed, are

by no means pure; nor was he, as far as we are able to judge, a

warm-hearted or high-minded man. Yet, in coming to him, we feel that the

worst is over, that we are one remove further from the Restoration, that

we are past the Nadir of national taste and morality.

WILLIAM CONGREVE was born in 1670, at Bardsey, in the neighbourhood of

Leeds. His father, a younger son of a very ancient Staffordshire family,

had distinguished himself among the cavaliers in the civil war, was

set down after the Restoration for the Order of the Royal Oak, and

subsequently settled in Ireland, under the patronage of the Earl of

Burlington.

Congreve passed his childhood and youth in Ireland. He was sent to

school at Kilkenny, and thence went to the University of Dublin. His

learning does great honour to his instructors. From his writings it

appears, not only that he was well acquainted with Latin literature, but

that his knowledge of the Greek poets was such as was not, in his time,

common even in a college.

When he had completed his academical studies, he was sent to London

to study the law, and was entered of the Middle Temple. He troubled

himself, however, very little about pleading or conveyancing, and gave

himself up to literature and society. Two kinds of ambition early took

possession of his mind, and often pulled it in opposite directions.

He was conscious of great fertility of thought and power of ingenious

combination. His lively conversation, his polished manners, and his

highly respectable connections, had obtained for him ready access to the

best company. He longed to be a great writer. He longed to be a man of

fashion. Either object was within his reach. But could he secure both?

Was there not something vulgar in letters, something inconsistent with

the easy apathetic graces of a man of the mode? Was it aristocratical to

be confounded with creatures who lived in the cock lofts of Grub Street,

to bargain with publishers, to hurry printers’ devils and be hurried

by them, to squabble with managers, to be applauded or hissed by pit,

boxes, and galleries? Could he forego the renown of being the first wit

of his age? Could he attain that renown without sullying what he valued

quite as much, his character for gentility? The history of his life is

the history of a conflict between these two impulses. In his youth the

desire of literary fame had the mastery; but soon the meaner ambition

overpowered the higher, and obtained supreme dominion over his mind.

His first work, a novel of no great value, he published under the

assumed name of Cleophil. His second was the Old Bachelor, acted in

1693, a play inferior indeed to his other comedies, but, in its own

line, inferior to them alone. The plot is equally destitute of interest

and of probability. The characters are either not distinguishable, or

are distinguished only by peculiarities of the most glaring kind. But

the dialogue is resplendent with wit and eloquence, which indeed are so

abundant that the fool comes in for an ample share, and yet preserves a

certain colloquial air, a certain indescribable ease of which Wycherley

had given no example, and which Sheridan in vain attempted to imitate.

The author, divided between pride and shame, pride at having written a

good play, and shame at having done an ungentlemanlike thing, pretended

that he had merely scribbled a few scenes for his own amusement, and

affected to yield unwillingly to the importunities of those who pressed

him to try his fortune on the stage. The Old Bachelor was seen in

manuscript by Dryden, one of whose best qualities was a hearty and

generous admiration for the talents of others. He declared that he had

never read such a first play, and lent his services to bring it into a

form fit for representation. Nothing was wanted to the success of the

piece. It was so cast as to bring into play all the comic talent, and

to exhibit on the boards in one view all the beauty, which Drury Lane

Theatre, then the only theatre in London, could assemble. The result

was a complete triumph; and the author was gratified with rewards more

substantial than the applauses of the pit. Montagu, then a Lord of the

Treasury, immediately gave him a place, and, in a short time, added the

reversion of another place of much greater value, which, however, did

not become vacant till many years had elapsed.

In 1694, Congreve brought out the Double Dealer, a comedy in which

all the powers which had produced the Old Bachelor showed themselves,

matured by time and improved by exercise. But the audience was shocked

by the characters of Maskwell and Lady Touchwood. And, indeed, there is

something strangely revolting in the way in which a group that seems to

belong to the House of Laius or of Pelops is introduced into the

midst of the Brisks, Froths, Carelesses, and Plyants. The play was

unfavourably received. Yet, if the praise of distinguished men could

compensate an author for the disapprobation of the multitude, Congreve

had no reason to repine. Dryden, in one of the most ingenious,

magnificent, and pathetic pieces that he ever wrote, extolled the

author of the Double Dealer in terms which now appear extravagantly

hyperbolical. Till Congreve came forth,--so ran this exquisite

flattery,--the superiority of the poets who preceded the civil wars was

acknowledged.=

```“Theirs was the giant race before the flood.”=

Since the return of the Royal House, much art and ability had been

exerted, but the old masters had been still unrivalled.=

```“Our builders were with want of genius curst,

```The second temple was not like the first.”=

At length a writer had arisen who, just emerging from boyhood, had

surpassed the authors of the Knight of the Burning Pestle and of the

Silent Woman, and who had only one rival left to contend with.=

``“Heaven, that but once was prodigal before,

``To Shakspeare gave as much, she could not give him more.”=

Some lines near the end of the poem are singularly graceful and

touching, and sank deep into the heart of Congreve.=

```“Already am I worn with cares and age,

```And just abandoning the ungrateful stage

```But you, whom every Muse and Grace adorn,

```Whom I foresee to better fortune born,

```Be kind to my remains; and oh, defend

```Against your judgment your departed friend.

```Let not the insulting foe my fame pursue,

```But guard those laurels which descend to you.”=

The crowd, as usual, gradually came over to the opinion of the men

of note; and the Double Dealer was before long quite as much admired,

though perhaps never so much liked, as the Old Bachelor.

In 1695 appeared Love for Love, superior both in wit and in scenic

effect to either of the preceding plays. It was performed at a new

theatre which Betterton and some other actors, disgusted by the

treatment which they had received in Drury Lane, had just opened in a

tennis-court near Lincoln’s Inn. Scarcely any comedy within the memory

of the oldest man had been equally successful. The actors were so elated

that they gave Congreve a share in their theatre; and he promised in

return to furnish them with a play every year, if his health would

permit. Two years passed, however, before he produced the Mourning

Bride, a play which, paltry as it is when compared, we do not say, with

Lear or Macbeth, but with the best dramas of Massinger and Ford, stands

very high among the tragedies of the age in which it was written. To

find anything so good we must go twelve years back to Venice Preserved,

or six years forward to the Fair Penitent. The noble passage which

Johnson, both in writing and in conversation, extolled above any other

in the English drama, has suffered greatly in the public estimation from

the extravagance of his praise. Had he contented himself with saying

that it was finer than anything in the tragedies of Dryden, Otway, Lee,

Rowe, Southern, Hughes, and Addison, than anything, in short, that had

been written for the stage since the days of Charles the First, he would

not have been in the wrong.

The success of the Mourning Bride was even greater than that of Love

for Love. Congreve was now allowed to be the first tragic as well as

the first comic dramatist of his time; and all this at twenty-seven.

We believe that no English writer except Lord Byron has, at so early an

age, stood so high in the estimation of his contemporaries.

At this time took place an event which deserves, in our opinion, a very

different sort of notice from that which has been bestowed on it by Mr.

Leigh Hunt. The nation had now nearly recovered from the demoralising

effect of the Puritan austerity. The gloomy follies of the reign of the

Saints were but faintly remembered. The evils produced by profaneness

and debauchery were recent and glaring. The Court, since the Revolution,

had ceased to patronise licentiousness. Mary was strictly pious; and the

vices of the cold, stern, and silent William, were not obtruded on the

public eye. Discountenanced by the Government, and failing in the favour

of the people, the profligacy of the Restoration still maintained its

ground in some parts of society. Its strongholds were the places where

men of wit and fashion congregated, and above all, the theatres. At this

conjuncture arose a great reformer whom, widely as we differ from him in

many important points, we can never mention without respect.

JEREMY COLLIER was a clergyman of the Church of England, bred at

Cambridge. His talents and attainments were such as might have been

expected to raise him to the highest honours of his profession. He had

an extensive knowledge of books; yet he had mingled much with polite

society, and is said not to have wanted either grace or vivacity in

conversation.

There were few branches of literature to which he had not paid some

attention. But ecclesiastical antiquity was his favourite study. In

religious opinions he belonged to that section of the Church of England

which lies furthest from Geneva and nearest to Rome. His notions

touching Episcopal government, holy orders, the efficacy of the

sacraments, the authority of the Fathers, the guilt of schism, the

importance of vestments, ceremonies, and solemn days, differed little

from those which are now held by Dr. Pusey and Mr. Newman. Towards the

close of his life, indeed, Collier took some steps which brought him

still nearer to Popery, mixed water with the wine in the Eucharist, made

the sign of the cross in confirmation, employed oil in the visitation

of the sick, and offered up prayers for the dead. His politics were of

a piece with his divinity. He was a Tory of the highest sort, such as

in the cant of his age was called a Tantivy. Not even the persecution

of the bishops and the spoliation of the universities could shake

his steady loyalty. While the Convention was sitting, he wrote with

vehemence in defence of the fugitive king, and was in consequence

arrested. But his dauntless spirit was not to be so tamed. He refused to

take the oaths, renounced all his preferments, and, in a succession of

pamphlets written with much violence and with some ability, attempted

to excite the nation against its new masters. In 1692, he was again

arrested on suspicion of having been concerned in a treasonable plot. So

unbending were his principles that his friends could hardly persuade him

to let them bail him; and he afterwards expressed his remorse for having

been induced thus to acknowledge, by implication, the authority of an

usurping government. He was soon in trouble again. Sir John Friend

and Sir William Parkins, were tried and convicted of high treason for

planning the murder of King William. Collier administered spiritual

consolation to them, attended them to Tyburn, and, just before they were

turned off, laid his hands on their heads, and by the authority which

he derived from Christ, solemnly absolved them. This scene gave

indescribable scandal. Tories joined with Whigs in blaming the conduct

of the daring priest. Some acts, it was said, which fall under the

definition of treason are such that a good man may, in troubled times,

be led into them even by his virtues. It may be necessary for the

protection of society to punish such a man. But even in punishing him

we consider him as legally rather than morally guilty, and hope that his

honest error, though it cannot be pardoned here, will not be counted to

him for sin hereafter. But such was not the case of Collier’s penitents.

They were concerned in a plot for waylaying and butchering, in an hour

of security, one who, whether he were or were not their king, was at

all events their fellow-creature. Whether the Jacobite theory about the

rights of governments and the duties of subjects were or were not well

founded, assassination must always be considered as a great crime. It is

condemned even by the maxims of worldly honour and morality. Much more

must it be an object of abhorrence to the pure Spouse of Christ. The

Church cannot surely, without the saddest and most mournful forebodings,

see one of her children who has been guilty of this great wickedness

pass into eternity without any sign of repentance. That these traitors

had given any sign of repentance was not alleged. It might be that they

had privately declared their contrition; and, if so, the minister of

religion might be justified in privately assuring them of the Divine

forgiveness. But a public remission ought to have been preceded by a

public atonement. The regret of these men, if expressed at all, had been

expressed in secret. The hands of Collier had been laid on them in the

presence of thousands. The inference which his enemies drew from his

conduct was that he did not consider the conspiracy against the life of

William as sinful. But this inference he very vehemently, and, we doubt

not, very sincerely denied.

The storm raged. The bishops put forth a solemn censure Of the

absolution. The Attorney-General brought the matter before the Court of

King’s Bench. Collier had now made up his mind not to give bail for

his appearance before any court which derived its authority from the

usurper. He accordingly absconded and was outlawed. He survived these

events about thirty years. The prosecution was not pressed; and he

was soon suffered to resume his literary pursuits in quiet. At a later

period, many attempts were made to shake his perverse integrity by

offers of wealth and dignity, but in vain. When he died towards the end

of the reign of George the First, he still under the ban of the law.

We shall not be suspected of regarding either the politics or the

theology of Collier with partiality; but we believe him to have been as

honest and courageous a man as ever lived. We will go further, and say

that, though passionate and often wrong-headed, he was a singularly

fair controversialist, candid, generous, too high-spirited to take mean

advantages even in the most exciting disputes, and pure from all taint

of personal malevolence. It must also be admitted that his opinions on

ecclesiastical and political affairs, though in themselves absurd and

pernicious, eminently qualified him to be the reformer of our lighter

literature. The libertinism of the press and of the stage was, as we

have said, the effect of a reaction against the Puritan strictness.

Profligacy was, like the oak-leaf of the twenty-ninth of May, the

badge of a cavalier and a High Churchman. Decency was associated with

conventicles and calves’ heads. Grave prelates were too much disposed

to wink at the excesses of a body of zealous and able allies who covered

Roundheads and Presbyterians with ridicule. If a Whig raised his voice

against the impiety and licentiousness of the fashionable writers, his

mouth was instantly stopped by the retort: You are one of those who

groan at a light quotation from Scripture, and raise estates out of the

plunder of the Church, who shudder at a double entendre, and chop off

the heads of kings. A Baxter, a Burnet, even a Tillotson, would have

done little to purify our literature. But when a man fanatical in the

cause of episcopacy and actually under outlawry for his attachment to

hereditary right, came forward as the champion of decency, the battle

was already half won.

In 1698, Collier published his Short View of the Profaneness and

Immorality of the English Stage, a book which threw the whole literary

world into commotion, but which is now much less read than it deserves.

The faults of the work, indeed, are neither few nor small. The

dissertations on the Greek and Latin drama do not at all help the

argument, and, whatever may have been thought of them by the generation

which fancied that Christ Church had refuted Bentley, are such as, in

the present day, a scholar of very humble pretensions may venture to

pronounce boyish, or rather babyish. The censures are not sufficiently

discriminating. The authors whom Collier accused had been guilty of

such gross sins against decency that he was certain to weaken instead of

strengthening his case, by introducing into his charge against them any

matter about which there could be the smallest dispute. He was, however,

so injudicious as to place among the outrageous offences which he justly

arraigned, some things which are really quite innocent, and some slight

instances of levity which, though not perhaps strictly correct, could

easily be paralleled from the works of writers who had rendered great

services to morality and religion. Thus he blames Congreve, the number

and gravity of whose real transgressions made it quite unnecessary to

tax him with any that were not real, for using the words “martyr” and

“inspiration” in a light sense; as if an archbishop might not say that

a speech was inspired by claret or that an alderman was a martyr to

the gout. Sometimes, again, Collier does not sufficiently distinguish

between the dramatist and the persons of the drama. Thus he blames

Vanbrugh for putting into Lord Foppington’s mouth some contemptuous

expressions respecting the Church service; though it is obvious

that Vanbrugh could not better express reverence than by making Lord

Foppington express contempt. There is also throughout the Short View too

strong a display of professional feeling. Collier is not content with

claiming for his order an immunity from indiscriminate scurrility; he

will not allow that, in any case, any word or act of a divine can be a

proper subject for ridicule. Nor does he confine this benefit of clergy

to the ministers of the Established Church. He extends the privilege

to Catholic priests, and, what in him is more surprising, to Dissenting

preachers. This, however, is a mere trifle. Imaums, Brahmins, priests

of Jupiter, priests of Baal, are all to be held sacred. Dryden is blamed

for making the Mufti in Don Sebastian talk nonsense. Lee is called to

a severe account for his incivility to Tiresias. But the most curious

passage is that in which Collier resents some uncivil reflections

thrown by Cassandra, in Dryden’s Cleomenes, on the calf Apis and his

hierophants. The words “grass-eating, foddered god,” words which really

are much in the style of several passages in the Old Testament, give as

much offence to this Christian divine as they could have given to the

priests of Memphis.

But, when all deductions have been made, great merit must be allowed to

this work. There is hardly any book of that time from which it would be

possible to select specimens of writing so excellent and so various. To

compare Collier with Pascal would indeed be absurd. Yet we hardly

know where, except in the Provincial Letters, we can find mirth so

harmoniously and becomingly blended with solemnity as in the Short View,

In truth, all the modes of ridicule, from broad fun to polished and

antithetical sarcasm, were at Collier’s command. On the other hand, he

was complete master of the rhetoric of honest indignation. We scarcely

know any volume which contains so many bursts of that peculiar eloquence

which comes from the heart and goes to the heart. Indeed the spirit

of the book is truly heroic. In order fairly to appreciate it, we must

remember the situation in which the writer stood. He was under the frown

of power. His name was already a mark for the invectives of one half of

the writers of the age, when, in the cause of good taste, good sense,

and good morals, he gave battle to the other half. Strong as his

political prejudices were, he seems on this occasion to have entirely

laid them aside. He has forgotten that he is a Jacobite, and remembers

only that he is a citizen and a Christian. Some of his sharpest censures

are directed against poetry which had been hailed with delight by

the Tory party, and had inflicted a deep wound on the Whigs. It is

inspiriting to see how gallantly the solitary outlaw advances to

attack enemies, formidable separately, and, it might have been thought,

irresistible when combined, distributes his swashing blows right and

left among Wycherley, Congreve, and Vanbrugh, treads the wretched

D’Urfey down in the dirt beneath his feet, and strikes with all his

strength full at the towering crest of Dryden.

The effect produced by the Short View was immense. The nation was on

the side of Collier. But it could not be doubted that, in the great host

which he had defied, some champion would be found to lift the gauntlet.

The general belief was that Dryden would take the field; and all the

wits anticipated a sharp contest between two well-paired combatants. The

great poet had been singled out in the most marked manner. It was

well known that he was deeply hurt, that much smaller provocations

had formerly roused him to violent resentment, and that there was no

literary weapon, offensive or defensive, of which he was not master. But

his conscience smote him; he stood abashed, like the fallen archangel at

the rebuke of Zephon:=

```“And felt how awful goodness is, and saw

```Virtue in her shape how lovely; saw and pined

```His loss.”=

At a later period he mentioned the Short View in the preface to his

Fables. He complained, with some asperity, of the harshness with which

he had been treated, and urged some matters in mitigation. But, on the

whole, he frankly acknowledged that he had been justly reproved. “If,”

said he, “Mr. Collier be my enemy, let him triumph. If he be my friend,

as I have given him no personal occasion to be otherwise, he will be

glad of my repentance.”

It would have been wise in Congreve to follow his master’s example.

He was precisely in that situation in which it is madness to attempt a

vindication; for his guilt was so clear, that no address or eloquence

could obtain an acquittal. On the other hand, there were in his case

many extenuating circumstances which, if he had acknowledged his error

and promised amendment, would have procured his pardon. The most rigid

censor could not but make great allowances for the faults into which

so young a man had been seduced by evil example, by the luxuriance of a

vigorous fancy, and by the inebriating effect of popular applause. The

esteem, as well as the admiration, of the public was still within his

reach. He might easily have effaced all memory of his transgressions,

and have shared with Addison the glory of showing that the most

brilliant wit may be the ally of virtue. But, in any case, prudence

should have restrained him from encountering Collier. The nonjuror was

a man thoroughly fitted by nature, education, and habit, for polemical

dispute. Congreve’s mind, though a mind of no common fertility and

vigour, was of a different class. No man understood so well the art

of polishing epigrams and repartees into the clearest effulgence, and

setting them neatly in easy and familiar dialogue. In this sort of

jewellery he attained to a mastery unprecedented and inimitable. But

he was altogether rude in the art of controversy; and he had a cause to

defend which scarcely any art could have rendered victorious.

The event was such as might have been foreseen. Congreve’s answer was a

complete failure. He was angry, obscure, and dull. Even the Green Room

and Will’s Coffee-House were compelled to acknowledge that in wit, as

well as in argument, the parson had a decided advantage over the poet.

Not only was Congreve unable to make any show of a case where he was in

the wrong; but he succeeded in putting himself completely in the wrong

where he was in the right. Collier had taxed him with profaneness for

calling a clergyman Mr. Prig, and for introducing a coachman named Jehu,

in allusion to the King of Israel, who was known at a distance by his

furious driving. Had there been nothing worse in the Old Bachelor

and Double Dealer, Congreve might pass for as pure a writer as Cowper

himself, who, in poems revised by so austere a censor as John Newton,

calls a fox-hunting squire Nimrod, and gives to a chaplain the

disrespectful name of Smug. Congreve might with good effect have

appealed to the public whether it might not be fairly presumed that,

when such frivolous charges were made, there were no very serious

charges to make. Instead of doing this, he pretended that he meant no

allusion to the Bible by the name of Jehu, and no reflection by the name

of Prig. Strange, that a man of such parts should, in order to defend

himself against imputations which nobody could regard as important, tell

untruths which it was certain that nobody would believe!

One of the pleas which Congreve set up for himself and his brethren was

that, though they might be guilty of a little levity here and there,

they were careful to inculcate a moral, packed close into two or three

lines, at the end of every play. Had the fact been as he stated it, the

defence would be worth very little. For no man acquainted with human

nature could think that a sententious couplet would undo all the

mischief that five profligate acts had done. But it would have been wise

in Congreve to have looked again at his own comedies before he used this

argument. Collier did so; and found that the moral of the Old

Bachelor, the grave apophthegm which is to be a set-off against all the

libertinism of the piece is contained in the following triplet:=

```“What rugged ways attend the noon of life!

```Our sun declines, and with what anxious strife,

```What pain, we tug that galling load--a wife.”=

“Love for Love,” says Collier, “may have a somewhat better farewell,

but it would do a man little service should he remember it to his dying

day”:=

```“The miracle to-day is, that we find

```A lover true, not that a woman’s kind.”=

Collier’s reply was severe and triumphant. One of his repartees we will

quote, not as a favourable specimen of his manner, but because it was

called forth by Congreve’s characteristic affectation. The poet spoke

of the Old Bachelor as a trifle to which he attached no value, and which

had become public by a sort of accident, “I wrote it,” he said, “to

amuse myself in a slow recovery from a fit of sickness.” “What his

disease was,” replied Collier, “I am not to inquire, but it must be a

very ill one to be worse than the remedy.”

All that Congreve gained by coming forward on this occasion, was that

he completely deprived himself of the excuse which he might with justice

have pleaded for his early offences. “Why,” asked Collier, “should the

man laugh at the mischief of the boy, and make the disorders of his

nonage his own, by an after approbation?”

Congreve was not Collier’s only opponent. Vanbrugh, Dennis, and Settle

took the field. And from a passage in a contemporary satire, we are

inclined to think that among the answers to the Short View was one

written, or supposed to be written, by Wycherley. The victory remained

with Collier. A great and rapid reform in almost all the departments of

our lighter literature was the effect of his labours. A new race of wits

and poets arose, who generally treated with reverence the great ties

which bind society together, and whose very indecencies were decent when

compared with those of the school which flourished during the last forty

years of the seventeenth century.

This controversy probably prevented Congreve from fulfilling the

engagements into which he had entered with the actors. It was not till

1700 that he produced the Way of the World, the most deeply meditated

and the most brilliantly written of all his works. It wants, perhaps,

the constant movement, the effervescence of animal spirits, which we

find in love for Love. But the hysterical rants of Lady Wishfort, the

meeting of Witwould and his brother, the country knight’s courtship

and his subsequent revel, and, above all, the chase and surrender of

Millamant, are superior to anything that is to be found in the whole

range of English comedy from the civil war downwards. It is quite

inexplicable to us that this play should have failed on the stage. Yet

so it was; and the author, already sore with the wounds which Collier

had inflicted, was galled past endurance by this new stroke. He resolved

never again to expose himself to the rudeness of a tasteless audience,

and took leave of the theatre for ever.

He lived twenty-eight years longer, without adding to the high literary

reputation which he had attained. He read much while he retained his

eyesight, and now and then wrote a short essay, or put an idle tale into

verse; but he appears never to have planned any considerable work. The

miscellaneous pieces which he published in 1710 are of little value, and

have long been forgotten.

The stock of fame which he had acquired by his comedies was sufficient,

assisted by the graces of his manner and conversation, to secure for him

a high place in the estimation of the world. During the winter, he lived

among the most distinguished and agreeable people in London. His summers

were passed at the splendid country-seats of ministers and peers.

Literary envy and political faction, which in that age respected nothing

else, respected his repose. He professed to be one of the party of which

his patron Montagu, now Lord Halifax, was the head. But he had civil

words and small good offices for men of every shade of opinion. And men

of every shade of opinion spoke well of him in return.

His means were for a long time scanty. The place which he had in

possession barely enabled him to live with comfort. And, when the Tories

came into power, some thought that he would lose even this moderate

provision. But Harley, who was by no means disposed to adopt the

exterminating policy of the October club, and who, with all his faults

of understanding and temper, had a sincere kindness for men of genius,

reassured the anxious poet by quoting very gracefully and happily the

lines of Virgil,=

```“Non obtusa adeo gestamus pectora Poeni,

```Nec tam aversus equos Tyria Sol jungit ab urbe.”=

The indulgence with which Congreve was treated by the Tories was not

purchased by any concession on his part which could justly offend the

Whigs. It was his rare good fortune to share the triumph of his friends

without having shared their proscription. When the House of Hanover came

to the throne, he partook largely of the prosperity of those with whom

he was connected. The reversion to which he had been nominated twenty

years before fell in. He was made secretary to the island of Jamaica;

and his whole income amounted to twelve hundred a year, a fortune

which, for a single man, was in that age not only easy but splendid. He

continued, however, to practise the frugality which he had learned when

he could scarce spare, as Swift tells us, a shilling to pay the chairman

who carried him to Lord Halifax’s. Though he had nobody to save for, he

laid up at least as much as he spent.

The infirmities of age came early upon him. His habits had been

intemperate; he suffered much from gout; and, when confined to his

chamber, he had no longer the solace of literature. Blindness, the most

cruel misfortune that can befall the lonely student, made his books

useless to him. He was thrown on society for all his amusement; and in

society his good breeding and vivacity made him always welcome.

By the rising men of letters he was considered not as a rival, but as

a classic. He had left their arena; he never measured his strength with

them; and he was always loud in applause of their exertions. They

could, therefore, entertain no jealousy of him and thought no more of

detracting from his fame than of carping at the great men who had been

lying a hundred years in Poets’ Corner. Even the inmates of Grub Street,

even the heroes of the Dunciad, were for once just to living merit.

There can be no stronger illustration of the estimation in which

Congreve was held than the fact that the English Iliad, a work which

appeared with more splendid auspices than any other in our language, was

dedicated to him. There was not a duke in the kingdom who would not have

been proud of such a compliment. Dr. Johnson expresses great admiration

for the independence of spirit which Pope showed on this occasion. “He

passed over peers and statesmen to inscribe his Iliad to Congreve, with

a magnanimity of which the praise had been complete, had his friend’s

virtue been equal to his wit. Why he was chosen for so great an honour,

it is not now possible to know.” It is certainly impossible to know; yet

we think it is possible to guess. The translation of the Iliad had been

zealously befriended by men of all political opinions. The poet who, at

an early age, had been raised to affluence by the emulous liberality of

Whigs and Tories, could not with propriety inscribe to a chief of either

party a work which had been munificently patronised by both. It was

necessary to find some person who was at once eminent and neutral. It

was therefore necessary to pass over peers and statesmen. Congreve had

a high name in letters. He had a high name in aristocratic circles. He

lived on terms of civility with men of all parties. By a courtesy paid

to him, neither the Ministers nor the leaders of the Opposition could be

offended.

The singular affectation which had from the first been characteristic of

Congreve grew stronger and stronger as he advanced in life. At last it

became disagreeable to him to hear his own comedies praised. Voltaire,

whose soul was burned up by the raging desire for literary renown, was

half puzzled and half disgusted by what he saw, during his visit to

England, of this extraordinary whim. Congreve disclaimed the character

of a poet, declared that his plays were trifles produced in an idle

hour, and begged that Voltaire would consider him merely as a gentleman.

“If you had been merely a gentleman,” said Voltaire, “I should not have

come to see you.”

Congreve was not a man of warm affections. Domestic ties he had none;

and in the temporary connections which he formed with a succession of

beauties from the green-room his heart does not appear to have been

interested. Of all his attachments that to Mrs. Bracegirdle lasted the

longest and was the most celebrated. This charming actress, who was,

during many years, the idol of all London, whose face caused the fatal

broil in which Mountfort fell, and for which Lord Mohun was tried by

the Peers, and to whom the Earl of Scarsdale was said to have

made honourable addresses, had conducted herself, in very trying

circumstances, with extraordinary discretion. Congreve at length became

her confidential friend. They constantly rode out together and dined

together. Some people said that she was his mistress, and others that

she would soon be his wife. He was at last drawn away from her by the

influence of a wealthier and haughtier beauty. Henrietta, daughter of

the great Marlborough, and Countess of Godolphin, had, on her father’s

death, succeeded to his dukedom, and to the greater part of his

immense property. Her husband was an insignificant man, of whom Lord

Chesterfield said that he came to the House of Peers only to sleep, and

that he might as well sleep on the right as on the left of the woolsack.

Between the Duchess and Congreve sprang up a most eccentric friendship.

He had a seat every day at her table, and assisted in the direction of

her concerts. That malignant old beldame, the Dowager Duchess Sarah, who

had quarrelled with her daughter as she had quarrelled with every body

else, affected to suspect that there was something wrong. But the world

in general appears to have thought that a great lady might, without any

imputation on her character, pay marked attention to a man of eminent

genius who was near sixty years old, who was still older in appearance

and in constitution, who was confined to his chair by gout, and who was

unable to read from blindness.

In the summer of 1728, Congreve was ordered to try the Bath waters.

During his excursion he was overturned in his chariot, and received some

severe internal injury from which he never recovered. He came back to

London in a dangerous state, complained constantly of a pain in his

side, and continued to sink, till in the following January he expired.

He left ten thousand pounds, saved out of the emoluments of his

lucrative places. Johnson says that this money ought to have gone to the

Congreve family, which was then in great distress. Doctor Young and Mr.

Leigh Hunt, two gentlemen who seldom agree with each other, but with

whom, on this occasion, we are happy to agree, think that it ought to

have gone to Mrs. Bracegirdle. Congreve bequeathed two hundred pounds

to Mrs. Bracegirdle, and an equal sum to a certain Mrs. Jellat; but the

bulk of his accumulations went to the Duchess of Marlborough, in whose

immense wealth such a legacy was as a drop in the bucket. It might have

raised the fallen fortunes of a Staffordshire squire; it might have

enabled a retired actress to enjoy every comfort, and, in her sense,

every luxury: but it was hardly sufficient to defray the Duchess’s

establishment for three months.

The great lady buried her friend with a pomp seldom seen at the

funerals of poets. The corpse lay in state under the ancient roof of the

Jerusalem Chamber, and was interred in Westminster Abbey. The pall was

borne by the Duke of Bridgewater, Lord Cobham, the Earl of Wilmington,

who had been Speaker, and was afterwards First Lord of the Treasury, and

other men of high consideration. Her Grace laid out her friend’s bequest

in a superb diamond necklace, which she wore in honour of him, and,

if report is to be believed, showed her regard in ways much more

extraordinary. It is said that a statue of him in ivory, which moved by

clockwork, was placed daily at her table, and that she had a wax doll

made in imitation of him, and that the feet of the doll were regularly

blistered and anointed by the doctors, as poor Congreve’s feet had been

when he suffered from the gout. A monument was erected to the poet in

Westminster Abbey, with an inscription written by the Duchess; and Lord

Cobham, honoured him with a cenotaph, which seems to us, though that is

a bold word, the ugliest and most absurd of the buildings at Stowe.

We have said that Wycherley was a worse Congreve. There was, indeed, a

remarkable analogy between the writings and lives of these two men. Both

were gentlemen liberally educated. Both led town lives, and knew human

nature only as it appears between Hyde Park and the Tower. Both were

men of wit. Neither had much imagination. Both at an early age produced

lively and profligate comedies. Both retired from the field while still

in early manhood, and owed to their youthful achievements in literature

whatever consideration they enjoyed in later life. Both, after they had

ceased to write for the stage, published volumes of miscellanies which

did little credit either to their talents or to their morals. Both,

during their declining years, hung loose upon society; and both, in

their last moments, made eccentric and unjustifiable dispositions of

their estates.

But in every point Congreve maintained his superiority to Wycherley.

Wycherley had wit; but the wit of Congreve far outshines that of every

comic writer, except Sheridan, who has within the last two centuries.

Congreve had not, in, a large measure, the poetical faculty; but

compared with Wycherley he might be called a great poet. Wycherley

had some knowledge of books; but Congreve was a man of real learning.

Congreve’s offences against decorum, though highly culpable, were not so

gross as those of Wycherley; nor did Congreve, like Wycherley, exhibit

to the world the deplorable spectacle of a licentious dotage. Congreve

died in the enjoyment of high consideration; Wycherley forgotten or

despised. Congreve’s will was absurd and capricious; but Wycherley’s

last actions appear to have been prompted by obdurate malignity.

Here, at least for the present, we must stop. Vanbrugh and Farquhar are

not men to be hastily dismissed, and we have not left ourselves space to

do them justice.