FOOTNOTES:

‘Therefore, my friend,Let us despise the torrent of the world,Fortune, I mean, and dam her up with fences,Banks, bulwarks, all the fortresses which virtue,Resolved and manned like ours, can raise against her:That, if she does o’erflow, she may at leastBring but half ruin to our great designs;That being at last ashamed of her own weakness,Like a low-baséd flood, she may retireTo her own bounds, and we with pride o’erlook her.’

Into what Cato’s mouth has Lee put this deliverance of Stoic dignity? Truly, into Cæsar Borgia’s. Machiavelli having been privy to all Borgia’s villainies, is selected to pronounce the moral of the play:

‘No power is safe, nor no religion good,Whose principles of growth are laid in blood.’

A proposition supposed to have been irrefragably established by five acts full of poniards and poisons. This childish want of nature Lee shares with most of the tragic dramatists of the Restoration period. He is mainly glare and gewgaw, and seldom succeeds but in those scenes of passion and frenzy where extravagant declamation seems a natural language. There is little to remark on his dramatic economy, which is that of the French classical drama. His characters are boldly outlined and strongly coloured, but transferred direct from history to the stage, or wholly conventional. His merit is to have been really a poet. ‘There is an infinite fire in his works,’ says Addison, ‘but so involved in smoke that it does not appear in half its lustre.’ The following scene fromMithridatesis a fair example of the mingled beauties and blemishes of his tragic style:

‘Ziph.Farewell, Semandra; O, if my father shouldFall back from virtue, (’tis an impious thought!)Yet I must ask you, could you in my absence,Solicited by power and charming empire,And threaten’d too by death, forget your vows?Could you, I say, abandon poor Ziphares,Who midst of wounds and death would think on you;And whatsoe’er calamity should come,Would keep his love sacred to his Semandra,Like balm, to heal the heaviest misfortune?Sem.Your cruel question tears my very soul:Ah, can you doubt me, Prince? a faith, like mine,The softest passion that e’er woman wept;But as resolv’d as ever man could boast:Alas, why will you then suspect my truth?Yet since it shews the fearfulness of love,’Tis just I should endeavour to convince you:Make bare your sword, my noble father, draw.Arch.What would’st thou now?Sem.I swear upon it, oh,Be witness, Heav’n, and all avenging pow’rs,Of the true love I give the Prince Ziphares:When I in thought forsake my plighted faith,Much less in act, for empire change my love;May this keen sword by my own father’s handBe guided to my heart, rip veins and arteries;And cut my faithless limbs from this hack’d body,To feast the ravenous birds, and beasts of prey.Arch.Now, by my sword, ’twas a good hearty wish;And, if thou play’st him false, this faithful handAs heartily shall make thy wishes good.Ziph.O hear mine too. If e’er I fail in aughtThat love requires in strictest, nicest kind;May I not only be proclaim’d a coward,But be indeed that most detested thing.May I, in this most glorious war I make,Be beaten basely, ev’n by Glabrio’s slaves,And for a punishment lose both these eyes;Yet live and never more behold Semandra. [Trumpets.Arch.Come, no more wishing; hark, the trumpets call.Sem.Preserve him, Gods, preserve his innocence;The noblest image of your perfect selves:Farewell; I’m lost in tears. Where are you, Sir?Arch.He’s gone. Away, my lord, you’ll never part.Ziph.I go; but must turn back for one last look:Remember, O remember, dear Semandra,That on thy virtue all my fortune hangs;Semandra is the business of the war,Semandra makes the fight, draws every sword;Semandra sounds the trumpets; gives the word.So the moon charms her watery world below;Wakes the still seas, and makes ’em ebb and flow.’

Sem.Your cruel question tears my very soul:Ah, can you doubt me, Prince? a faith, like mine,The softest passion that e’er woman wept;But as resolv’d as ever man could boast:Alas, why will you then suspect my truth?Yet since it shews the fearfulness of love,’Tis just I should endeavour to convince you:Make bare your sword, my noble father, draw.

Arch.What would’st thou now?

Sem.I swear upon it, oh,Be witness, Heav’n, and all avenging pow’rs,Of the true love I give the Prince Ziphares:When I in thought forsake my plighted faith,Much less in act, for empire change my love;May this keen sword by my own father’s handBe guided to my heart, rip veins and arteries;And cut my faithless limbs from this hack’d body,To feast the ravenous birds, and beasts of prey.

Arch.Now, by my sword, ’twas a good hearty wish;And, if thou play’st him false, this faithful handAs heartily shall make thy wishes good.

Ziph.O hear mine too. If e’er I fail in aughtThat love requires in strictest, nicest kind;May I not only be proclaim’d a coward,But be indeed that most detested thing.May I, in this most glorious war I make,Be beaten basely, ev’n by Glabrio’s slaves,And for a punishment lose both these eyes;Yet live and never more behold Semandra. [Trumpets.

Arch.Come, no more wishing; hark, the trumpets call.

Sem.Preserve him, Gods, preserve his innocence;The noblest image of your perfect selves:Farewell; I’m lost in tears. Where are you, Sir?

Arch.He’s gone. Away, my lord, you’ll never part.

Ziph.I go; but must turn back for one last look:Remember, O remember, dear Semandra,That on thy virtue all my fortune hangs;Semandra is the business of the war,Semandra makes the fight, draws every sword;Semandra sounds the trumpets; gives the word.So the moon charms her watery world below;Wakes the still seas, and makes ’em ebb and flow.’

John Crowne (1640-1703?).

The remaining dramatists of the Restoration, with the exception of the brilliant group of comic authors near the end of the century, who demand a separate notice, undoubtedly belong to the class of playwrights. The most characteristic playwright of all, taking the term in the sense of a steady competent workman destitute of originality, was perhaps John Crowne. Crowne was the man to supply the playhouses with a regular output of respectable work, and, as he had no other object than to suit his market, we perhaps learn better from him and his like than from writers of genius what the public of the day required. It seems rather extraordinary that such heavy tragedies as Crowne’s should have been marketable in any age; but it must be considered that the tragic stage had to be kept going for the sake of the actors, and that if people would not have Shakespeare they must take what they could get. Indifferent plays, moreover, may make fine spectacles; and Crowne’s Julianas, Reguluses, and Caligulas served the purpose of habitual playgoers, that is, of playgoers from the force of habit, as well as better pieces.[7]The success of Crowne’s comedies is less difficult to understand. Here he really gave the public a fair reflection of itself, and exhibited contemporary manners with truth, if with no great brilliancy. On one occasion he soared higher, and (1685) created a real type in the exquisite coxcomb, Sir Courtly Nice. The rest of the play is partly imitated from the Spanish, but the character of Nice is Crowne’s own. The humour is considerably overdone, but is still a genuine piece of comedy, which culminates at the end, when theinfuriated fop rushes from the stage, vowing to be avenged, ‘as far as my sword and my wit can go.’The English Friar(1689), a satire on the Tartufes of the Roman Catholic persuasion, is also a remarkable piece, the parent of a long line of imitations. InCity Politics(1673), Crowne’s first comedy, the Whig party in the City is held up to obloquy in the transparent disguise of a Neapolitan rabble, and the satire is keen and vivid.The Married Beau(1694) is remarkable as a reversion towards the style of Fletcher and Shirley.Calistois an interesting attempt to revive the ancient masque. The only one of Crowne’s serious dramas entitled to much attention isDarius, where the poetry is frequently fine, but the characters are tame. Not much is known of his life. He appears to have been taken in youth to America, and to have returned by 1665, when he published a romance entitledPandion and Amphigenia. His connection with the stage commenced in 1671 withJuliana, and terminated withCaligulain 1698. He would seem to have been a precise and matter-of-fact man, and is ridiculed by Rochester as ‘Little starch Johnny Crowne with his ironed cravat.’ He was fond of accompanying his plays with long prefaces and dedications, which throw some light on his opinions and private history, and, so far as they go, exhibit his disposition in an advantageous light. From one of them it appears that he suffered in his latter days from ‘a distemper seated in my head.’ His tantalizing gleams of talent as a lyrist have been already mentioned.

Thomas Southern (1660-1746).

Thomas Southern undoubtedly belonged to the genus playwright, and has none of the flashes of poetry which occasionally seem to exalt Crowne to a higher rank. His distinction rather arises from the financial success of his pieces, which was such that he died ‘the richest of all ourpoets, a very few excepted.’ For this, however, he is said to have been indebted not so much to the actual vogue of his pieces as to his assiduity in soliciting tickets. It is to be wished that he had been equally assiduous in collecting facts about Shakespeare, if, as is somewhat doubtfully asserted, his father came from Stratford-on-Avon. He was born at Dublin in 1660, and is said to have been a servitor at Oxford and a student at the Middle Temple. This he forsook for the army, but his service cannot have been of long duration. His first play,The Loyal Brother(1682), was designed to compliment the Duke of York upon the failure of the Exclusion Bill. He was not a very industrious writer, producing only ten plays down to 1726, and of these only two,The Fatal Marriage(1694) andOroonoko(1696), had any considerable reputation even in his own day. Both, however, kept the stage until an advanced period of the nineteenth century. The diction of both pieces, though never rising into poetry, and interlarded with dull scenes intended to be comic, is by no means contemptible; the main strength, however, consists in the situations, which are really powerful, and in the writer’s art in arousing an interest both in his innocent and his mixed characters. Respected as a relic of the past, a decorous church-goer with silver hair, Southern lived far into the eighteenth century, and came sufficiently under its influence to repent of his mingling of tragic and comic action in the same piece; which indeed he had reason to regret, not because he had done it, but because he had not done it better.

Thomas Shadwell (1640-1692).

Thomas Shadwell is remarkable as the leading Whig votary ofbelles lettresafter the death of Marvell, a distinction which secured him the laureateship upon the cashiering of Dryden. To call him poet would be a gross misapplicationof the term, and Dryden’s withering couplet might seem justified if he had nothing but his serious verse to rely upon:

‘With all his bulk, there’s nothing lost in Og,For every inch that is not fool is rogue.’

His title to recollection, however, rests upon things as remote from poetry as possible—his coarsely indecent, but humorous comedies, which are undoubtedly of value as reflecting the manners of the time. Shadwell, in imitation of Ben Jonson, laid himself out to study ‘humours,’ so well defined by Ben himself:

‘When some peculiar qualityDoth so possess a man that it doth drawAll his affects, his spirits, and his powersFrom their complexions all to run one way,This may be truly said to be a humour.’

We have seen the like in Dickens, who, possessing little delicacy of psychological observation, laid himself out to study obvious eccentricities of character, the more grotesque the better, and frequently made the entire man the incarnation of an attribute. This is certainly not very high art, but has recommendations for the stage which it lacks in the novel; it is easy to write, easy to act, and gives genuine entertainment to the crowd of spectators. Shadwell valued himself so much upon his performances in this way as to declare in his preface toThe Virtuosothat he trusted never to have less than four new humours in any comedy. Shadwell’s plays, though poorly written, might still be read for their humour, were it not for their obscenity; his chief merit, however, is to bring the society of his time nearer to us than any other writer. No other records such minute points of manners, or enables us to view the actual daily life of the age with so much clearness. This is especially the case in hisEpsom Wells(1675),Squire of Alsatia(1688), andVolunteers(1692). From Dryden’s satire, which must have had a basis of truth, he would seem to have been just the boisterous corpulentbon vivantwe might expect. ‘If,’ said Rochester, ‘Shadwell would burn all he writes and print all he says, he would have more wit and humour than anybody.’ His friend, Dr. Nicholas Brady, vouches for the openness and friendliness of his temper; and further describes him as ‘a complete gentleman.’ But this was in a funeral sermon. The regard for Otway, imputed to him by Rochester, is creditable to him.

The violent death of Archbishop Abbot’s gamekeeper would have passed unnoticed if the poor man had been shot by anybody but the archbishop himself; and Elkanah Settle (1648-1724) would have slipped away in the crowd of poetasters if Rochester had not taken it into his head to pit him against Dryden. In the sense in which the mysterious W. H. was ‘the only begetter of Shakespeare’s sonnets,’ he may hence claim to be the parent of one of the most scathing pieces of invective in the language. Although, however, Doeg is undoubtedly Settle, Settle is not wholly Doeg. Miserable as his lampoons are, a line here and there is not destitute of piquancy; and if hisEmpress of Morocco(1673) has no literary pretensions, it is important in literary history for having so moved the wrath of Dryden, and in the history of the drama for having been issued with plates which contribute greatly to our knowledge of the internal arrangements of the Restoration Theatre. By a singular irony of fortune, his fate bears some analogy to that of his mighty antagonist. Settle lost caste by changing his politics at the wrong time, as Dryden his religion; but while Dryden bore up against the storm of adversity, Settle sunk into obscurity,and ultimately into the Charter House. Of his twenty plays none butThe Empress of Moroccois now ever mentioned, unless an exception be made in favour ofIbrahim, the Illustrious Bassa(1676), noticeable, as Professor Ward remarks, for being founded upon one of the voluminous French romances of the day.

Some other playwrights would deserve extended notice in a history of the drama, but are only entitled to the barest mention in a general literary survey. Among these are Sir Robert Howard, Dryden’s brother-in-law, and joint-author with him ofThe Indian Queen, the most important of whose plays isThe Committee(printed 1665), a satire on the Commonwealth, described by Sir Roger de Coverley as ‘a good old Church of England comedy:’ John Wilson, Recorder of Londonderry, author of three comedies and a tragedy of more than average merit; Roger Boyle, Earl of Orrery; Sir Charles Sedley, Major Thomas Porter, and John Lacy, all very mediocre as dramatists; Thomas D’Urfey, better known than any of the above, but not by his writings, which are below mediocrity. The ten plays of Edward Ravenscroft procured him no other reputation than that of a plagiarist. Some female dramatists will be mentioned in another place.

Before passing to the opulent comedy of the latter part of the century, two writers remain to be mentioned, one of whom stands alone in the drama of the period, while the other forms the transition to the comedy of Wycherley and Congreve. In describing George Villiers, second Duke of Buckingham, as one standing apart, we refer to the character of his solitary work, and not to his share in it; for, though passing solely under his name, there can be little doubt that it was the production of a junto of wits, of whom he was not the wittiest. Butler, Sprat, and Martin Clifford are named as his coadjutors. Buckingham, who must be credited with a keen sense of the ridiculous, had already resolved to satirize rhyming heroic plays in the person of Sir Robert Howard, when the latter’s retirement diverted the blow to Dryden, whom Butler, as we shall see, did not greatly relish, and against whose device of rhyme, Sprat, as we have seen, had committed himself by anticipation. The play chiefly selected for parody isThe Conquest of Granada, which certainly invited it. Dryden appears as Bayes, in allusion to his laureateship; and, although his perpetual use of ‘egad’ seems derived from the usage by one of hisdramatis personaerather than his own, we cannot doubt that his peculiarities of speech and gesture were mostly copied to the life. Within a week the town were unanimously laughing at what they had been unanimously applauding; and, scurrilous and ill-bred as the mockery ofThe Rehearsalwas, it must be allowed to have been neither uncalled for nor unuseful. The machinery of the piece is sufficiently indicated by its title. Bayes entertains the dissembling Johnson and the unsympathetic Smith with a rehearsal ofThe Two Kings of Brentford, commenting meanwhile and explaining, vaunting beauties and extenuating miscarriages with a verve that still amuses, notwithstanding the far superior treatment of the same theme in Sheridan’sCritic. Some of the scenes are highly farcical; and some of the passages are very fair hits at the bombast and other extravagances of the writers of heroic plays, for Dryden is by no means the sole object of satire:

‘The blackest ink of fate was sure my lot,And when she writ my name, she made a blot.’‘Durst any of the Gods be so uncivil,I’d make that God subscribe himself a Devil.’‘The army’s at the door, and in disguiseDemands a word with both your majesties.’

‘The blackest ink of fate was sure my lot,And when she writ my name, she made a blot.’

‘Durst any of the Gods be so uncivil,I’d make that God subscribe himself a Devil.’

‘The army’s at the door, and in disguiseDemands a word with both your majesties.’

‘Yes, I think, for a dead person, it is a good way enough of making love, for being divested of her terrestrial part, and all that, she is only capable of these little, pretty, amorous designs that are innocent, and yet passionate.’

One of Bayes’s precepts may be commended to the attention of any who may think of reviving rhyming tragedy. It also shows the cramped condition of the theatre in Dryden’s day:

‘Bayes.Gentlemen, I must desire you to remove a little, for I must fill the stage.Smith.Why fill the stage?Bayes.O sir, because your heroic verse never sounds well but when the stage is full.’

‘Bayes.Gentlemen, I must desire you to remove a little, for I must fill the stage.

Smith.Why fill the stage?

Bayes.O sir, because your heroic verse never sounds well but when the stage is full.’

Sir George Etheredge (1634-1691).

Sir George Etheredge is neither an edifying nor an attractive writer of comedy, but his plays are of considerable historical importance as prototypes of the comedy of manners afterwards so brilliantly developed by Congreve. They areLove in a Tub(1664),She Would if She Could(1668), andThe Man of Mode(1676). The last is celebrated for the character of Sir Fopling Flutter, who is said to have been the image of the author, though it is added on the same authority that his intention had been to depict himself in the character of the heartless rake Dorimant, whom others took for Rochester. All the plays suffer from a deficiency of plot, a deficiency of wit, and a superfluity of naughtiness, but cannot be denied to possess a light airy grace, and to have imbibed something of the manner, though little of the humour, of Molière. By his own account the author was lazy, careless, and a gamester. Little, except that ‘he was knighted for marrying a fortune,’ is known of his history until 1685, when, unexpectedly to himself, he was appointed envoy to Ratisbon, anddetails become copious from the accidental preservation of his letter-book, now in the British Museum. The general tone of his correspondence is good-natured and easy; he seems to have made just the kind of ambassador to be expected from an idle man of fashion without diplomatic experience; while he may well have merited his friends’ description of him as ‘gentle George,’ and his repute as easy and generous. The Revolution deprived him of his post; he seems to have refused allegiance to William, and to have died at Paris in 1691.

FOOTNOTES:[7]Crowne himself assigns another reason, which may have had weight in some quarters: ‘I presume your ladyship nauseates comedies. They are so ill-bred, and saucy with quality, and always crammed with our odious sex. At tragedies the house is all lined with beauty, and then a gentleman may endure it,’—a confirmation of the statement that modest women avoided the comic theatre, or went masked.

[7]Crowne himself assigns another reason, which may have had weight in some quarters: ‘I presume your ladyship nauseates comedies. They are so ill-bred, and saucy with quality, and always crammed with our odious sex. At tragedies the house is all lined with beauty, and then a gentleman may endure it,’—a confirmation of the statement that modest women avoided the comic theatre, or went masked.

Etheredge’s comedies serve to introduce one of the most brilliant schools of English comic writing—faulty, in that so far from correcting the manners of its age, it did not even portray them, but eminent above the English comedy of every other period for wit. So great is the family likeness between its chief representatives, that it will be advisable to consider their lives and their writings together. The connecting link among them all is that all were fine gentlemen whose code was the fashionable morality of the day. Any conclusions as to the state of contemporary manners which may be deduced from their writings must be confined to this small, though conspicuous section of English society.

William Wycherley (1640-1715).

William Wycherley was the son of a Shropshire gentleman of good estate. His father, disliking the management of public schools under the Commonwealth, sent the youth to France, where he became a Roman Catholic, but recanted upon his return. He entered at the Temple, and for some years led the life of a gay young man about town. According to his own statement, all his four comedies were written about this period, but Macaulay has shown clearly that they must have, at all events, undergone very considerable revision, and that it is not probable that any butLove in a Woodwere in existence when this wasacted in 1672.The Gentleman Dancing Master,The Country Wife, andThe Plain Dealer, appeared in 1673, 1675, and 1677 respectively; and the last of these was the termination of the author’s brief and brilliant career as a dramatist. It was also the term of his prosperity. A secret marriage with a lady of rank offended the king, by whom Wycherley had been entrusted with the tuition of one of his natural children, and eventually involved him in debt. He was thrown into the Fleet, where he remained several years. At last James II., chancing to witness a representation ofThe Plain Dealer, was led to inquire for the author, and, a piece of munificence towards letters most unusual with him, to pay his debts and grant him a pension of two hundred a year, which, as Wycherley straightway reverted to the Roman Catholic faith, was probably withdrawn by William. He had, however, come into possession of the family estate, and existed for the rest of his life respectably as regarded his means of subsistence, though much the reverse as regards the licentious verses which he went on writing, and published at the age of sixty-four. Macaulay and Mr. Gosse, however, attribute to him a tract in defence of the stage against Jeremy Collier, not devoid of merit; and his later poems enjoyed the advantage of revision by Pope, whose hand, Macaulay thinks, is everywhere discernible. Comedy he never essayed again. He died in 1715, having ten days before his death married a young girl to injure his nephew. This Macaulay considers the worst of his actions; but we do not know that the nephew did not deserve to be injured. A contemporary poet dubs the uncle, “generous Wycherley.”

William Congreve (1670-1729).

William Congreve, a scion of a good Staffordshire family, was born at Bardsey, near Leeds, in 1670. His father, an officer in the army, obtained a command in Ireland,where a branch of the family is still settled, and Congreve received his education at Kilkenny and at Trinity College, Dublin. In 1691 he came to London, and at once found admission to the best literary circles. A novel by him,Incognita, was published anonymously at the beginning of 1692. Later in the year he co-operated in a translation of Juvenal by various hands, and submitted hisOld Bachelorto Dryden, who declared that he had never seen such a first play, and lent his aid in adapting it for the stage. It was produced with great success in January, 1693. In November of the same yearThe Double-Dealerappeared, but, though preferred by the judicious, was less popular with the town. It was published with an elegant preface by the author, and a noble panegyric from Dryden. ‘Perhaps,’ says Mr. Gosse, ‘there is no other example of such full and generous praise of a young colleague by a great old poet.’ Dryden’s notions of architecture, indeed, seem borrowed from the churches of his time, where we not uncommonly see a spire in one style clapped upon a body in another:

‘Fine Doric pillars found your solid base,The fair Corinthian crowns the higher space,Thus all below is strength and all above is grace.’

But the lines in which he adjures Congreve to protect his own memory are an unparalleled blending of pathos and compliment:

‘Be kind to my remains, and O, defend,Against your judgment, your departed friend,Let not the insulting foe my fame pursue,But shade those laurels which descend to you.’

Shortly after the performance ofThe Double Dealer, dissensions broke out between the patentees of the Theatre Royal and theircorps dramatique, and the majority of thelatter seceded to Lincoln’s Inn Fields. Congreve followed them, and, in consideration of receiving a stipulated share of the profits, agreed to write for them a play annually, should his health permit. In pursuance of this agreement,Love for Love, generally considered the best of his comedies, was brought out in April, 1695. It was a signal success; as was Congreve’s solitary tragedy,The Mourning Bride, produced in 1697, which, indeed, is believed to have produced him more than any of his comedies. The last, and, in the opinion of some, the best of these,The Way of the World, appeared in 1700, and its failure disgusted Congreve with the stage. He had always rather affected to condescend to be a dramatist, as Monsieur Jourdain condescended to be a haberdasher; and he was probably hurt at the rough handling he had received from Jeremy Collier, to whoseShort View of the Immorality and Profaneness of the Stagehe had unsuccessfully endeavoured to reply. Collier’s victory, indeed, proved that the licentiousness of the stage was a mere fashion, rather tolerated than approved by the majority of the playgoing public, and Congreve may have felt that his wings would be clipped by the reformation which public opinion was evidently about to demand. Whatever the cause, he was lost to the stage at thirty, and his occasional poetical productions, the most important of which have been already noticed, were far from qualifying him to sit in the seat of Dryden. He enjoyed, nevertheless, supremacy of another kind. Regarded as an extinct volcano, he gave umbrage to no rivals; his urbane and undemonstrative temper kept him out of literary feuds; all agreed to adore so benign and inoffensive a deity, and the general respect of the lettered world fitly culminated in Pope’s dedication of hisHomerto him, the most splendid literary tribute the age could bestow. Sinecure Government places made his circumstances more than easy, but he suffered continually from gout, the effect of free living, and he became blind, or nearly so, in his latter years. His death (1729) was hastened by a carriage accident. He had a splendid funeral in Westminster Abbey, and a monument erected by the Duchess of Marlborough (Marlborough’s daughter, not his widow), whom he had capriciously made his principal legatee.

It is, as Mr. Gosse remarks, difficult to form any very distinct notion of Congreve as a man. We must be content with knowing that he was a fine gentleman before all things, convivial in his habits, witty in conversation, extremely sensitive to criticism, otherwise placid; able to keep on good terms with both Pope and Dennis throughout his life; and that Pope thought him, Garth, and Vanbrugh, ‘the three most honest-hearted real good men of the poetical members of the Kit-cat Club.’

Sir John Vanbrugh (1664-1726).

Sir John Vanbrugh, the next of the quartette of illustrious comic writers, occupies a remarkable position in literature. Few other distinguished architects have gained renown in elegant letters, and these have not attempted the drama. As, however, Angelo is more celebrated for St. Peter’s than for his sonnets, so Vanbrugh is better remembered by Blenheim, which most have beheld, than by his plays, which are never seen on the stage, and yet connoisseurs have found infinitely more to censure in the former. The faults of the plays are those of the author’s age and his school; the faults imputed to his buildings, if they exist, which is a question for architects, are personal to the Fleming, who shared his countryman Rubens’s taste for the massive and substantial, and whose epitaph was couched in the adjuration:

‘Lie heavy on him, earth, for heLaid many a heavy load on thee.’

Though born an English subject, Vanbrugh was of Flemish descent. His first profession was the army. Hisdébutas a dramatist was made in 1697 by two sparkling comedies,The RelapseandThe Provoked Wife, followed byThe False Friend(1702),The Confederacy, andThe Mistake(1705), some imitations of the French, and an unfinished play,A Journey to London, completed by Cibber, and produced in 1728 asThe Provoked Husband. All these plays seem to have been successful; certainly none were in any peril of damnation on the ground apprehended by Orrery:

‘This play, I’m horribly afraid, can’t last;Allow it pretty, ’tis confounded chaste,And contradicts too much the present taste.’

Latterly he became somewhat careless in the composition of his plays, which may be reasonably attributed to the demands made upon him by the laborious profession of architecture, which he took up, apparently without a regular education, about the end of the seventeenth century, and which he may have been the more inclined to pursue on account of the serious loss entailed upon him by his dramatic speculations. Interest or ability made him successful; he was entrusted with no less a task than the erection of Blenheim; and Castle Howard and other celebrated country mansions were built after his designs. He died in 1726. The little known of his personal character is to his credit.

George Farquhar (1678-1707).

George Farquhar was born at Londonderry in 1678, and is believed to have been the son of an Irish clergyman. He forsook Trinity College for the stage, where he made some figure, but renounced his calling out of compunctionfor having accidentally wounded a fellow-actor. Coming to London with ten guineas lent to him by the manager, he achieved renown by his comedy ofLove and a Bottle(1699).The Constant Couple(1701) was even more successful. Other plays followed, and from allusions in one of the principal,The Recruiting Officer(1706), as well as reminiscences and traditions, he is believed to have held a commission in the army. According to tradition, he was induced to sell his commission to pay his debts by the Duke of Ormond’s promise to procure him another, and the disappointment of this expectation so deeply mortified him as to occasion his death. His last and best comedy,The Beaux’ Stratagem, was written on his deathbed. He is a sympathetic figure among the literary men of the day, gallant and witty, nor incapable of serious feeling. According to his own account he was, like Liston and others who have contributed to the mirth of mankind, by nature a melancholy man. ‘As to the mind, which in most men wears as many changes as their body, so in me ’tis generally drest like my person, in black. Melancholy is its everyday apparel, and it has hitherto found few holidays to make it change its clothes.’ He adds: ‘I am seldom troubled by what the world calls airs and caprices; and I think ’tis an idiot’s excuse for a foolish action to say, ’twas my humour. I hate all little malicious tricks of vexing people; and I can’t relish the jest that vexes another in earnest. If ever I do a wilful injury, it must be a very great one. I have so natural a propensity to ease, that I cannot cheerfully fix to any study which bears not a pleasure in the application; which makes me inclinable to poetry above anything else. I have very little estate but what lies under the circumference of my hat; and should I by mischance come to lose my head, I should not be worth a groat; but I ought to thank Providencethat I can by three hours’ study live one-and-twenty with satisfaction to myself, and contribute to the maintenance of more families than some who have thousands a year. I have something in my outward behaviour which gives strangers a worse opinion of me than I deserve; but I am more than recompensed by the opinion of my acquaintance, which is as much above my desert.’

This, which is only part of a much longer character, addressed to a lady, is remarkable as the most detailed self-estimate of any man of letters of the period we possess, until we come to Steele.

Although there are undoubtedly considerable distinctions between the works of these four dramatists, such a fundamental unity nevertheless prevails among them that they may be advantageously considered together. They may be compared to a jewel with four facets, each casting a separate ray, but with little diversity in their cold brilliant glitter. Wit, gaiety, heartlessness, and profligacy are the common notes of them all, save that Congreve has tragic power, and, as well as Farquhar, real feeling. How far they painted, or intended to paint, the manners of their age, is a difficult question. Lamb thought that the world they depict was merely conventional, a Lampsacene Arcadia. Not even the indulgent Leigh Hunt, much less the austere Macaulay, can concur in this judgment, which is assuredly much too absolute. Yet it is indisputable that the manners they portray were not those of a nation that devouredPilgrim’s Progress, brought up children and domestics by theWhole Duty of Man, and deposed a king who meddled with the Church. Were they even the manners of the gay world? To some extent this is true; but there is evidence enough that even fashionable men thought of something else than seducing their neighbours’ wives and daughters; that the slips even of fashionablewomen were by no means inordinately frequent or mere matters of course; and that the standard of personal honour was much higher than would appear from the comedies. We may be assisted to comprehend the real state of the matter by observing the condition of the French literature of fiction at this very moment. Anyone who should form his opinion of French people entirely from their novels could come to no other conclusion than that they were entirely given up to the pursuit of illicit love, and deemed nothing else worthy of the attention of a rational creature. Yet we know that as a matter of fact the French nation does think of very different things; that a ridiculously small corner of actual life is conventionally made to stand for the whole of it; that the novels which profess to depict manners, while accurate in their delineation of certain characters and certain phases, would entirely mislead those whose notions should be solely derived from them. It would be nearer the truth, though still erroneous, to take the reverse view, and maintain that works composed for the sake of amusement are more likely to usher the reader into an ideal world than to weary him with familiar scenes and incidents. So far as this is the case, the English society of the seventeenth century must be acquitted at the expense of the dramatists, who incur the obloquy of missing both the two great ends of comedy, for they neither delineate nor correct it. Possibly the unsatisfactory position which writers of so much wit and sense thus came to occupy may be partly accounted for by the influence of Ben Jonson. We have seen Dryden almost hesitating to avow his preference for Shakespeare to Jonson, we shall see that Butler has no hesitation in asserting the superiority of Jonson to Shakespeare as an obvious thing; nor could it well be otherwise in so essentially prosaic an age. This implies the triumph of thecomedy of types over the comedy of nature. Jonson, like Menander, impersonates particular characteristics, or situations in life; Shakespeare paints human nature as large as it really is. We have seen how the exhibition of these so-called ‘humours’ forms the staple of the comedy of Shadwell. The handling of Congreve and his associates, who had the example of Molière before them, is far superior, but the principle is at bottom the same. A characteristic is incarnated in a personage, and often indicated by his very name. Instead of the names bestowed by fancy, or borrowed from romance, the Benedicts, Rosalinds, Imogens, Mirandas, we have Witwoulds, Maskwells, Millamants, and Gibbets. Each character being thus more or less conventional, thetout ensembleis necessarily conventional too; and to this extent the world of these dramatists may be fairly regarded as ideal; while it is not true that they had any definite purpose of creating such a world, or that it was so dissimilar to actual society as to interfere with the appreciation of the audience. Their works may be compared to the novels of Mr. George Meredith, who would have been a great comic writer if he had lived in the days of Congreve. No one would call Mr. Meredith’s novels unnatural; yet his works will convey but little notion of the English society of the nineteenth century to posterity, who will only need to turn to George Eliot and Anthony Trollope to realize it as no bygone age was ever realized before.

Wycherley has been characterized by Professor Ward as the Timon of his stage, and the description is excellent, if not understood of one animated by moral indignation at its immorality, but of one impelled by temperament to insist upon and exaggerate its most disagreeable features. The two most important of his plays,The Country WifeandThe Plain Dealer, are rather tragi-comedies thancomedies, especially the latter, of which Professor Ward justly observes, ‘Working within the limits of his own horizon, with nothing perceptible to him but a vicious world hateful on account of the palpable grossness of its outward pretences, Wycherley must be allowed to have worked with vigour and effect, and to have produced what is indisputably one of the most powerful dramas of its age.’ Its unpardonable sin is to be to a great extent an adaptation of Molière’sMisanthrope, and to pervert and brutalize whatever is most admirable in that masterpiece.Love in a WoodandThe Gentleman Dancing Masterare comparatively slight performances, but there is great humour in the representation in the latter of the disguised lover helped out of all his scrapes by the self-complacent credulity of the young lady’s father and his own rival, whose business it is to detect him. The delineation of the father as a merchant returned from long residence in Spain, enamoured of Spanish manners, and quoting the language at every second sentence, is one of those which justify Aubrey’s remark that the dramatists of his age would be soon forgotten, because their ephemeral ‘humours’ would have ceased to be intelligible. The character, if still possible in Wycherley’s time, ceased to be so very soon afterwards. It must, however, have been popular if it gave or helped to give the nickname of Don Diego to the Spaniards, which survives to this day in ‘dago,’ the familiar appellation of South Americans in the United States. One characteristic of all Wycherley’s comedies should be mentioned, their length, which confirms the impression that he composed with slowness. ‘When,’ says Hazlitt, ‘he got hold of a good thing, or sometimes even of a bad one, he was determined to make the most of it, and might have said with Dogberry, “Had I the tediousness of a king, I could find it in my heart to bestow it all upon your worships.”’

If Wycherley is the satirist of Restoration comedy, Congreve is its wit; but at the same time he betrays a vein of much deeper feeling than Wycherley, and, notwithstanding the contrary opinion of Hazlitt, his characters appear to us more easily appreciated and more readily remembered. His insight into women in particular is so considerable that it is a real loss that he never attempted to paint a noble one, who would indeed have looked strangely amid the crowd of his heartless, or frivolous, or absurd people, but whom he might have rendered a true dramatic success. BothThe Double DealerandThe Way of the Worldborder upon tragedy, and suggest how much finer things Congreve might have written had the taste of his time allowed of tragedy in prose; or if, by treating ordinary domestic life in a serious spirit, even though in verse, he could have taken the step that was afterwards taken by Lillo. He evidently felt conscious of innate tragic power, and essayed heroic tragedy inThe Mourning Bride, where, hampered by the conventionalities he dared not transgress, he broke down with a romantic plot, romantic characters, and stilted blank verse, all things most repugnant to his genius. Johnson’s praise of a passage in this play as ‘the most poetical paragraph in the whole mass of English poetry,’ and which is actually fine enough to survive such extravagant laudation, is well known. It will be instructive to set it side by side with a still finer passage in a modern tragedy, as examples of the classic and romantic schools of composition. It is the strength and weakness of Congreve that his thoughts are such as would naturally have occurred to any one in the situation of his personages, and that his sole part is to afford them dignified expression; while Beddoes’ thoughts are the thoughts of a poet, and as such might well appear fantastic and overstrained to an average audience:

‘Almeria.It is a fancied noise, for all is hushed.Leonora.It bore the accent of a human voice.Almeria.It was thy fear, or else some transient windWhistling through hollows of this vaulted aisle.We’ll listen.Leonora.Hark!Almeria.No, all is hushed and still as death. ’Tis dreadful.How reverend is the face of this tall pile,Whose ancient pillars rear their marble headsTo bear aloft its arched and ponderous roof,By its own weight made steadfast and immovable,Looking tranquillity! It strikes an aweAnd terror on my aching sight; the tombsAnd monumental caves of death look cold,And shoot a chillness to my trembling heart.Give me thy hand!Oh, speak to me! nay, speak! and let me hearThy voice; my own affrights me with its echoes.’Mourning Bride, act ii., sc. 3.

‘Almeria.It is a fancied noise, for all is hushed.

Leonora.It bore the accent of a human voice.

Almeria.It was thy fear, or else some transient windWhistling through hollows of this vaulted aisle.We’ll listen.

Leonora.Hark!

Almeria.No, all is hushed and still as death. ’Tis dreadful.How reverend is the face of this tall pile,Whose ancient pillars rear their marble headsTo bear aloft its arched and ponderous roof,By its own weight made steadfast and immovable,Looking tranquillity! It strikes an aweAnd terror on my aching sight; the tombsAnd monumental caves of death look cold,And shoot a chillness to my trembling heart.Give me thy hand!Oh, speak to me! nay, speak! and let me hearThy voice; my own affrights me with its echoes.’

Mourning Bride, act ii., sc. 3.

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