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 any thing 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 {392}estimation
from the extravagance of his praise. Had he contented himself with
saying that it was finer than any thing in the tragedies of Dryden,
Otway, Lee, Rowe, Southern, Hughes, and Addison than any thing, 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 falling 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 {393}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 furtherest 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 Fis 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 {394}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 hail 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 {395}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 was 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 {396}a man as ever lived. We will go further, and
say that, though passionate and often wrongheaded, 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 on 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 {397}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 {398}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. {399}Indeed the spirit
of the book is truly heroic. In order to fairly 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 {400}stood abashed, like the fallen
archangel at the rebuke of Zephon,--
“And felt how awful goodness is, and saw