theatres were closed. The fine arts were placed under absurd restraints.
Vices which had never before been even misdemeanors 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, and
Maher-shalal-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 license 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 honorable 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 neighbors 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 property 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 entrust 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
neighborhood 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 gayly for some years, observing the humors 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 judiciously 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 favor. 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 gray. 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 honors. 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 favor 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 a 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 of the King's ships, sometimes with
commissions, and sometimes as volunteers. Mulgrave, Dorset, Rochester,
and many others, left the playhouses and 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 favorites 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.[3]
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 favor.
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 favored. 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 favor 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 honor 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 vigor, 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 overnight; 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 unfavorable
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 anything 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 laboring 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.