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 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 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
vigor, 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
jewelry 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 favorable 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 labors. 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 forever.
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 chairmen
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 honor,
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 patronized 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 honorable
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 everybody
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. Dr. 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.