CONGREVE'S PLAYS.*
TRE complete plays of William Congreve, comprised in a single volume recently added to the excellent " Mermaid " series, will doubtless be warmly welcomed by all who have for rapid and sparkling dialogue, brilliant repartee, trenchant satire, caustic wit, shrewd observation, and prose of the most exquisite literary finish, a relish only less keen than that which is given by the most exalted poetry. The lowness of morals of Congreve's comic personages, who are either brazen and unprincipled young gallants, unsentimental coquettes, doating old men, faithless wives, or prurient elderly women, may, indeed, easily blind even good judges to the high merits of the comedies, and has undoubtedly contributed in no small degree to that complete banishment from the stage which they have so long suffered. Yet it should not be forgotten that they were composed in an age of extreme, almost unparalleled licentious- ness—the inevitable consequence of the unnatural restraints of Puritan morality—when common speech, even in the highest circles, was such as would now make a strong man wince, and when plays which did not reproduce that speech with more or less fidelity would scarcely have been tolerated, much less popular. It is no small praise of Congreve to say that his language, even while expressing those indelicate ideas with which, as he well knew, the people whose favour he courted would most sympathise, is seldom absolutely coarse, is never brutal or vulgar, and often has the polish and refine- ment which distinguish only the utterances of the born gentle- man. This is higher commendation than can justly be given to any of his immediate predecessors in prose comedy, who not only fall far below him in wit and literary grace and ability, but lack altogether his elegance of expression and finish of style. Licentious as Congreve's comedies must be admitted to be when compared with those written in the latter half of the last century and the earlier half of the present one, it will scarcely be disputed by any one who glances at the pages of Wycherley- with whose name Congreve's has often been injuriously coupled—that the improvement in manners of subsequent writers for the stage was due to the better example set by Congreve himself, as well as to the able and vigorous protest of Jeremy Collier, to whom Macaulay has done no more than justice, and whose fearlessness and honesty even Dryden was compelled to respect.
The present volume has a short preface by Mr. Ewald,
• The Complete Plays of William Cotgrere. Edited by Alexander C. Ewald. With Portrait. "Mermaid Scrim" London i Vizetelly and Co. followed by Macaulay's account of Congreve's career in his essay on " The Comic Dramatists of the Restoration," upon which, well known as it is, Mr. Ewald justly observes that it would be difficult to improve ; and a portrait of Congreve, from Sir Godfrey Kneller's well-known picture, forms an admirable frontispiece to the volume. There are adequate notes to the few obscure passages in the plays, and there is prefixed, besides, to each play a short account of the circumstances under which it was produced and the reception accorded to it on its first appearance on the London stage, together with brief extracts from the verdicts of the most eminent modern critics who have commented on the plays. To the complete enjoyment of the latter by all classes of readers, it would seem that nothing more can be wanting; and he must be hard indeed to please whom Congreve himself wholly fails to entertain. For the wit even of Sheridan is by no means so unfailing as Congreve's; his literary ability is conspicuously inferior; nor can The School for Scandal, admirable as it is in many respects, be allowed to be a worthy rival to The Way of the World, which is, on the whole, the most masterly product of Congreve's genius, and the greatest comedy of its kind which our literature has to boast. In racy and robust humour and masculine English sense, Ben Jonson's best comedies, The Fox and The Alchemist, are, of course, decidedly superior ; and Congreve has no pretension to the poetry and freshness of Shakespeare and his contemporaries in their finest comedies ; but in pure, unadulterated wit he is certainly without a peer. One may refuse, perhaps, to care very much for any of his characters—even the best of them hardly excite that intensity of sympathetic interest which one feels for the creations of other dramatists— but the airy wit, perpetual animation, and easy flow of their dialogue have an unfailing charm for those who know how to prize these high and rare qualities, conspicuous, alas ! only by their absence in what is facetiously called the comic drama of the present day. Much, of course, may be urged with justice against the moral character of Congreve's plays. Generous and noble sentiments, unselfish and warm attachments, and honourable ideas and actions, are not in general to be looked for from the personages of his drama, to whom any serious- ness of purpose or loftiness of aim seems essentially alien and wholly out of keeping with their surroundings. Their life is as remote from Nature as can well be imagined. Yet even Congreve, in spite of his general artificiality, makes us feel at times that a human heart beats under all disguises, and some of his personages are as living and real as those of any dramatist or novelist that could be named. In the delineation of female character especially, he often displays the truest insight ; and Millamant, the charming heroine of The Way of the World, is a veritable woman at whose every word a keen thrill of delight is experienced by the susceptible reader, and whose vivacity, exuberance of animal spirits, wit, discernment, and beauty, create for her in his mind a strong and peculiar interest amounting almost to fondness, and make him feel that she is worthy of a higher destiny than to move among the somewhat sordid and frivolous beings to whose society she is condemned. Mirabell, who wins her hand, is as unscrupulous and impudent a gallant as any who figure in Congreve's comedies, and is certainly unworthy of her, his highest qualifications being his attractiveness of person, ready address, and the strong sense he undoubtedly displays when occasion requires. A more diffident and respectful lover would, however, in all probability have been rejected by Millamant, who, after all, is no goddess, but a true woman of the world, and keenest in appreciation of all that is most prized by the world. One can easily believe that a lover of another kind than Mirabell—one of a poetic temperament, a Leopardi, for example—would have fared little better at the hands of Millamant than did the unhappiest of Italian poets at the hands of the beautiful and brilliant woman of the world whom he has celebrated in his poem of " Aspatia." It is bard to suppose that Mirabell would remain constant to Millamant after their marriage; his nature is represented as fickle, and the infidelity of both husband and wife is the common theme of all Congreve's comedies. Adultery, indeed, would seem to have been not the exception, but the rule, in his day, if we are . to accept his plays as faithful mirrors of the morals of the age, which probably they were intended to be, in spite of Charles Lamb's avowed belief to the contrary. That the state of society represented by Congreve had no existence but in
his own imagination, or, as Lamb puts it, was purely ideal, is scarcely credible, and is belied, indeed, by all that we know from historical sources of the morals of the age in which Congreve lived. His own standard of morality, very likely, was no higher than that which he has himself set up in his plays, in which the laws of retributive justice are scarcely ever observed, and profligacy and vice, at the close of the piece, usually receive the guerdon which is withheld from virtue, to whom it rightly belongs. Yet Congreve's aim in this may merely have been to expose, not to approve, the way of the world, with which certainly no author was ever more con- versant than himself.
If Millamant may justly be regarded as the most pleasing of all Congreve's female characters, Valentine, in Love for Love, a comedy which, inferior though it be to The Way of the World in wit, variety, and succinctness of style, surpasses it in comic breadth, rapidity of dramatic movement, and interest of plot, is as certainly the noblest of Congreve's male characters. Scapegrace and spendthrift as he is, his generous and faithful passion for Angelica, for whose sake he shows himself ready to sacrifice all his own worldly interests, gives him a hold on our regard and esteem which none of Congreve's other male characters—certainly not Mirabell—can claim for a moment to share. It is perhaps worthy of remark that some of our author's weightiest and shrewdest utterances are put into the month of Valentine when he affects to be mad, the more effectually to . dupe his selfish and foolish old father, Sir Sampson, and secure the pity and sympathy of Angelica, who has hitherto slighted his advances. Congreve would here seem to have followed the example of Shakespeare, from whom he does not elsewhere take a hint, who makes his fools and madmen utter truths to which sane and sober men dare not give a voice. The most interesting among the subordinate characters of this play is the sailor Ben, whose uncouth frankness and honesty are in striking contrast with the smooth hypocrisy of the people of fashion among whom he is suddenly thrown. In him, no doubt, the tar's virtues and foibles are alike ludicrously exaggerated; but there is real originality in the conception of his character, and his sea-slang is irresistibly amusing, and so genuine that even Smollett and Marryat could but copy, not improve upon it, for their own representative sea worthies. The whole range of our dramatic literature may be vainly explored for any single scene more truly comic than that in which Ben, in his own rude, frank fashion, courts the squeamish and silly Miss Prue, whose heart is already given to the " fair-weather spark " who has just made a heartless attempt on her chastity.
We have left ourselves no space for more than a bare mention of Congreve's single effort in tragedy, The Mourning Bride. It has no claim, however, to detain us, for its intrinsic merits are not great, the utterances of its personages are dis- tinguished rather by false sentiment than by true passion, its atmosphere is wholly unhealthy, and the tragedy itself is artificial in another and far graver sense than the comedies are. Its opening line, however, " Music has charms to soothe a savage breast," enjoys the distinction of having been quoted, or rather misquoted, oftener than any single line in any other drama, and the scene in the temple-aisle in the second act, despite the occasional stiffness of the language, is really a noble and impressive one, and worthy of Macaulay's, though not of Dr. Johnson's, praise.
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