William Congreve descended from a family in Staffordshire, of so great
antiquity that it claims a place among the few that extend their line
beyond the Norman conquest; and was the son of William Congreve, second
son of Richard Congreve, of Congreve and Stratton. He visited, once, at
least, the residence of his ancestors; and, I believe, more places than
one are still shown, in groves and gardens, where he is related to have
written his Old Bachelor.
Neither the time nor place of his birth are certainly known: if the
inscription upon his monument be true, he was born in 1672[15]. For the
place; it was said by himself, that he owed his nativity to England, and
by every body else that he was born in Ireland. Southern mentioned him
with sharp censure, as a man that meanly disowned his native country.
The biographers assign his nativity to Bardsa, near Leeds, in Yorkshire,
from the account given by himself, as they suppose, to Jacob.
To doubt whether a man of eminence has told the truth about his own
birth, is, in appearance, to be very deficient in candour; yet nobody
can live long without knowing that falsehoods of convenience or vanity,
falsehoods from which no evil immediately visible ensues, except the
general degradation of human testimony, are very lightly uttered, and
once uttered are sullenly supported. Boileau, who desired to be thought
a rigorous and steady moralist, having told a petty lie to Lewis the
fourteenth, continued it afterwards by false dates; thinking himself
obliged, _in honour_, says his admirer, to maintain what, when he said
it, was so well received.
Wherever Congreve was born, he was educated first at Kilkenny, and
afterwards at Dublin, his father having some military employment that
stationed him in Ireland: but, after having passed through the usual
preparatory studies, as may be reasonably supposed, with great celerity
and success, his father thought it proper to assign him a profession, by
which something might be gotten; and, about the time of the revolution,
sent him, at the age of sixteen, to study law in the Middle Temple,
where he lived for several years, but with very little attention to
statutes or reports.
His disposition to become an author appeared very early, as he very
early felt that force of imagination, and possessed that copiousness of
sentiment, by which intellectual pleasure can be given. His first
performance was a novel, called Incognita, or Love and Duty reconciled:
it is praised by the biographers, who quote some part of the preface,
that is indeed, for such a time of life, uncommonly judicious. I would
rather praise it than read it.
His first dramatick labour was the Old Bachelor; of which he says, in
his defence against Collier, "that comedy was written, as several know,
some years before it was acted. When I wrote it, I had little thoughts
of the stage; but did it, to amuse myself in a slow recovery from a fit
of sickness. Afterwards, through my indiscretion, it was seen, and in
some little time more it was acted; and I, through the remainder of my
indiscretion, suffered myself to be drawn into the prosecution of a
difficult and thankless study, and to be involved in a perpetual war
with knaves and fools."
There seems to be a strange affectation in authors of appearing to have
done every thing by chance. The Old Bachelor was written for amusement,
in the languor of convalescence. Yet it is apparently composed with
great elaborateness of dialogue, and incessant ambition of wit. The age
of the writer considered, it is, indeed, a very wonderful performance;
for, whenever written, it was acted, 1693, when he was not more than
twenty-one years old; and was then recommended by Mr. Dryden, Mr.
Southern, and Mr. Maynwaring. Dryden said, that he, never had seen such
a first play; but they found it deficient in some things requisite to
the success of its exhibition, and by their greater experience fitted it
for the stage.
Southern used to relate of one comedy, probably of this, that, when
Congreve read it to the players, he pronounced it so wretchedly that
they had almost rejected it; but they were afterwards so well persuaded
of its excellence, that, for half a year before it was acted, the
manager allowed its author the privilege of the house.
Few plays have ever been so beneficial to the writer; for it procured
him the patronage of Halifax, who immediately made him one of the
commissioners for licensing coaches, and soon after gave him a place in
the pipe-office, and another in the customs, of six hundred pounds a
year. Congreve's conversation must surely have been, at least, equally
pleasing with his writings.
Such a comedy, written at such an age, requires some consideration. As
the lighter species of dramatick poetry professes the imitation of
common life, of real manners, and daily incidents, it apparently
presupposes a familiar knowledge of many characters, and exact
observation of the passing world; the difficulty, therefore, is to
conceive how this knowledge can be obtained by a boy.
But if the Old Bachelor be more nearly examined, it will be found to be
one of those comedies which may be made by a mind vigorous and acute,
and furnished with comick characters by the perusal of other poets,
without much actual commerce with mankind. The dialogue is one constant
reciprocation of conceits, or clash of wit, in which nothing flows
necessarily from the occasion, or is dictated by nature. The characters,
both of men and women, are either fictitious and artificial, as those of
Heartwell, and the ladies; or easy and common, as Wittol, a tam idiot;
Bluff, a swaggering coward; and Fondlewife, a jealous puritan; and the
catastrophe arises from a mistake not very probably produced, by
marrying a woman in a mask.
Yet this gay comedy, when all these deductions are made, will still
remain the work of very powerful and fertile faculties; the dialogue is
quick and sparkling, the incidents such as seize the attention, and the
wit so exuberant, that it "o'er-informs its tenement."
Next year he gave another specimen of his abilities in the Double
Dealer, which was not received with equal kindness. He writes to his
patron, the lord Halifax, a dedication, in which he endeavours to
reconcile the reader to that which found few friends among the audience.
These apologies are always useless: "de gustibus non est disputandum;"
men may be convinced, but they cannot be pleased, against their will.
But, though taste is obstinate, it is very variable; and time often
prevails when arguments have failed.
Queen Mary conferred upon both those plays the honour of her presence;
and when she died, soon after, Congreve testified his gratitude by a
despicable effusion of elegiack pastoral; a composition in which all is
unnatural, and yet nothing is new.
In another year, 1695, his prolifick pen produced Love for Love; a
comedy of nearer alliance to life, and exhibiting more real manners than
either of the former. The character of Foresight was then common. Dryden
calculated nativities; both Cromwell and king William had their lucky
days; and Shaftesbury himself, though he had no religion, was said to
regard predictions. The Sailor is not accounted very natural, but he is
very pleasant.
With this play was opened the new theatre, under the direction of
Betterton the tragedian; where he exhibited, two years afterwards, 1697,
the Mourning Bride, a tragedy, so written as to show him sufficiently
qualified for either kind of dramatick poetry.
In this play, of which, when he afterwards revised it, he reduced the
versification to greater regularity, there is more bustle than
sentiment; the plot is busy and intricate, and the events take hold on
the attention; but, except a very few passages, we are rather amused
with noise, and perplexed with stratagem, than entertained with any true
delineation of natural characters. This, however, was received with more
benevolence than any other of his works, and still continues to be acted
and applauded.
But whatever objections may be made, either to his comick or tragick
excellence, they are lost, at once, in the blaze of admiration, when it
is remembered that he had produced these four plays before he had passed
his twenty-fifth year; before other men, even such as are some time to
shine in eminence, have passed their probation of literature, or presume
to hope for any other notice than such as is bestowed on diligence and
inquiry. Among all the efforts of early genius which literary history
records, I doubt whether any one can be produced that more surpasses the
common limits of nature than the plays of Congreve.
About this time began the long-continued controversy between Collier and
the poets. In the reign of Charles the first the puritans had raised a
violent clamour against the drama, which they considered as an
entertainment not lawful to christians, an opinion held by them in
common with the church of Rome; and Prynne published Histriomastix, a
huge volume, in which stageplays were censured. The outrages and crimes
of the puritans brought afterwards their whole system of doctrine into
disrepute, and from the restoration the poets and the players were left
at quiet; for to have molested them would have had the appearance of
tendency to puritanical malignity.
This danger, however, was worn away by time; and Collier, a fierce and
implacable nonjuror, knew that an attack upon the theatre would never
make him suspected for a puritan; he, therefore, 1698, published a short
View of the Immorality and Profaneness of the English Stage, I believe
with no other motive than religious zeal and honest indignation. He was
formed for a controvertist; with sufficient learning; with diction
vehement and pointed, though often vulgar and incorrect; with
unconquerable pertinacity; with wit, in the highest degree, keen and
sarcastick; and with all those powers exalted and invigorated by just
confidence in his cause.
Thus qualified, and thus incited, he walked out to battle, and assailed,
at once, most of the living writers, from Dryden to d'Urfey. His onset
was violent: those passages, which while they stood single had passed
with little notice, when they were accumulated and exposed together,
excited horrour; the wise and the pious caught the alarm; and the nation
wondered why it had so long suffered irreligion and licentiousness to be
openly taught at the publick charge.
Nothing now remained for the poets but to resist or fly. Dryden's
conscience, or his prudence, angry as he was, withheld him from the
conflict; Congreve and Vanbrugh attempted answers. Congreve, a very
young man, elated with success, and impatient of censure, assumed an air
of confidence and security. His chief artifice of controversy is to
retort upon his adversary his own words: he is very angry, and, hoping
to conquer Collier with his own weapons, allows himself in the use of
every term of contumely and contempt; but he has the sword without the
arm of Scanderbeg; he has his antagonist's coarseness, but not his
strength. Collier replied; for contest was his delight: he was not to be
frighted from his purpose or his prey.
The cause of Congreve was not tenable: whatever glosses he might use for
the defence or palliation of single passages, the general tenour and
tendency of his plays must always be condemned. It is acknowledged, with
universal conviction, that the perusal of his works will make no man
better; and that their ultimate effect is to represent pleasure in
alliance with vice, and to relax those obligations by which life ought
to be regulated.
The stage found other advocates, and the dispute was protracted through
ten years; but, at last, comedy grew more modest, and Collier lived to
see the reward of his labour in the reformation of the theatre.
Of the powers by which this important victory was achieved, a quotation
from Love for Love, and the remark upon it, may afford a specimen:
_Sir Samps_. "Sampson's a very good name; for your Sampsons were strong
dogs from the beginning."
_Angel_. "Have a care---If you remember, the strongest Sampson of your
name pull'd an old house over his head at last."
"Here you have the sacred history burlesqued; and Sampson once more
brought into the house of Dagon, to make sport for the Philistines!"
Congreve's last play was the Way of the World; which, though as he hints
in his dedication it was written with great labour and much thought, was
received with so little favour, that, being in a high degree offended
and disgusted, he resolved to commit his quiet and his fame no more to
the caprices of an audience.
From this time his life ceased to be publick; he lived for himself and
for his friends; and, among his friends, was able to name every man of
his time whom wit and elegance had raised to reputation. It may be,
therefore, reasonably supposed that his manners were polite, and his
conversation pleasing.
He seems not to have taken much pleasure in writing, as he contributed
nothing to the Spectator, and only one paper to the Tatler, though
published by men with whom he might be supposed willing to associate;
and though he lived many years after the publication of his
Miscellaneous Poems, yet he added nothing to them, but lived on in
literary indolence; engaged in no controversy, contending with no rival,
neither soliciting flattery by publick commendations, nor provoking
enmity by malignant criticism, but passing his time among the great and
splendid, in the placid enjoyment of his fame and fortune.
Having owed his fortune to Halifax, he continued always of his patron's
party, but, as it seems, without violence or acrimony; and his firmness
was naturally esteemed, as his abilities were reverenced. His security,
therefore, was never violated; and when, upon the extrusion of the
whigs, some intercession was used lest Congreve should be displaced, the
earl of Oxford made this answer:
"Non obtusa adeo gestamus pectora Poeni,
Nec tam aversus equos Tyria sol jungit ab urbe."
He that was thus honoured by the adverse party might naturally expect
to be advanced when his friends returned to power; and he was,
accordingly, made secretary for the island of Jamaica[16], a place, I
suppose, without trust or care, but which, with his post in the customs,
is said to have afforded him twelve hundred pounds a year.
His honours were yet far greater than his profits. Every writer
mentioned him with respect; and, among other testimonies to his merit,
Steele made him the patron of his Miscellany, and Pope inscribed to him
his translation of the Iliad.
But he treated the muses with ingratitude; for, having long conversed
familiarly with the great, he wished to be considered rather as a man of
fashion than of wit; and, when he received a visit from Voltaire,
disgusted him by the despicable foppery of desiring to be considered not
as an author but a gentleman; to which the Frenchman replied, "that if
he had been only a gentleman, he should not have come to visit him."
In his retirement he may be supposed to have applied himself to books;
for he discovers more literature than the poets have commonly attained.
But his studies were, in his latter days, obstructed by cataracts in his
eyes, which, at last, terminated in blindness. This melancholy state was
aggravated by the gout, for which he sought relief by a journey to Bath;
but, being overturned in his chariot, complained from that time of a
pain in his side, and died, at his house in Surrey-street, in the
Strand, Jan. 29[17], 1728-9. Having lain in state in the
Jerusalem-chamber, he was buried in Westminster Abbey, where a monument
is erected to his memory by Henrietta, duchess of Marlborough, to whom,
for reasons either not known or not mentioned, he bequeathed a legacy of
about ten thousand pounds; the accumulation of attentive parsimony,
which, though to her superfluous and useless, might have given great
assistance to the ancient family from which he descended, at that time,
by the imprudence of his relation, reduced to difficulties and distress.
* * * * *
Congreve has merit of the highest kind; he is an original writer, who
borrowed neither the models of his plot nor the manner of his dialogue.
Of his plays I cannot speak distinctly; for, since I inspected them many
years have passed; but what remains upon my memory is, that his
characters are commonly fictitious and artificial, with very little of
nature, and not much of life. He formed a peculiar idea of comick
excellence, which he supposed to consist in gay remarks and unexpected
answers; but that which he endeavoured, he seldom failed of performing.
His scenes exhibit not much of humour, imagery, or passion; his
personages are a kind of intellectual gladiators; every sentence is to
ward or strike; the contest of smartness is never intermitted; his wit
is a meteor playing to and fro with alternate coruscations. His comedies
have, therefore, in some degree, the operation of tragedies; they
surprise rather than divert, and raise admiration oftener than
merriment. But they are the works of a mind replete with images, and
quick in combination.
Of his miscellaneous poetry, I cannot say any thing very favourable. The
powers of Congreve seem to desert him when he leaves the stage, as
Antæus was no longer strong than when he could touch the ground. It
cannot be observed without wonder, that a mind so vigorous and fertile
in dramatick compositions should, on any other occasion, discover
nothing but impotence and poverty. He has, in these little pieces,
neither elevation of fancy, selection of language, nor skill in
versification: yet, if I were required to select from the whole mass of
English poetry the most poetical paragraph, I know not what I could
prefer to an exclamation in the Mourning Bride: