MR. GOSSE ON CONGREVE.* A GOOD biography of Congreve has
long been a desideratum. The main facts of his life have, indeed, been recorded for us by Johnson, Leigh Hunt, and Macaulay; but none of these excellent and sympathetic critics seems to have thought it worth while to bring together from every possible source all that relates to the great master of English prose comedy. The truth is, there are few less interesting personalities in our • Life of Waliant Congreve. By Edmund Gosse, X A. London : Walter Scott. New York : T. Whittaker. Toronto : W. J. Gage and Co. 1888. literature than Congreve; his life was singularly commonplace and prosaic, and apart from his writings, there was nothing to distinguish him from the common herd of "gentlemen who led lives of plainness and simplicity," among whom, according to Voltaire, it was his sole ambition to be ranked. It is probably for this reason as much as on account of the scanti- ness of materials, that his former biographers have pre- ferred to dwell on the characteristics of his great comedies rather than on the circumstances of his life, which do not present those striking vicissitudes which give so painful an interest to the narratives of the careers of many of our writers, small as well as great. Though Congreve was not so opulent a man as he has generally been supposed, he does not appear to have ever been in really distressed circumstances, and his literary career was one of almost uniform success. If he did. not always secure the immediate applause of ordinary theatre- goers, his plays never failed to receive the unanimous approval of the best judges; and he was singularly fortunate in obtaining from the first the warm support of so powerful and influential a poet as Dryden. He took leave of the stage on attaining his thirtieth year, and the remainder of his days was spent in lettered ease. His was anything but a fascinating per- sonality, and it might well have been prognosticated of any attempt at a new biography of such an individual, that it must inevitably have proved unentertaining in so far as it related to him as a man and not as a writer. Yet a fresh biography was, as we have said, clearly needed, and one has been recently added to the "Great Writers "series, of which it is only fair to say that it far exceeds our highest expectations, while it justifies none of our misgivings. For the compilation of its materials, many obscure books and pamphlets have been laid under contribution, and though Mr. Gosse has not been able to add much of real importance to what former biographers have told us, he has certainly succeeded in un- earthing a few facts unknown to his predecessors, and eluci- dating some hitherto obscure passages in Congreve's history ; and, in addition to this, he has interwoven with his narrative not a few interesting particulars respecting the authors and actors who were the poet's contemporaries. The man him- self, too, is brought nearer to us than he ever was before ; he is shown to us as an amiable, good-natured, sociable individual, whom we can like, if not love ; the story of his life is told with great clearness, and even with vivacity ; and with this is blended such genial, yet always delicate and discriminating criticism of his writings, that so far from the book being hard reading, there is not really one dull page in it. For ourselves, without wishing to disparage any of the able writers who have furnished the previous volumes of the same series, we must say that we have read none with such unmixed pleasure and complete satisfaction as this little work on Congreve by one who had already written so well about Gray and Shirley. It is a book to be read with delight both by those to whom its subject is as yet hardly more than a name, and by the student with whom Love for Love and The Way of the World are old favourites. It is not, like other volumes of the same series, too much of a narrative and too little of a critique ; the proportion of narrative and critical matter is about equal ; and it is perhaps superfluous to say that Mr. Gosse does not adopt towards his author that flippant and patronising tone by the employment of which certain recent biographers have thought it alone possible to win the respectful attention of the public. Mr. Gosse is no half- hearted advocate of the claims of Congreve to immortality as a dramatist ; he is warm in his appreciation of whatever is of sterling value, and even the coldest reader can hardly fail to catch something of the contagion of his enthusiasm for the resplendent wit and high literary qualities of those comedies in the performance of whose principal characters it was the ambition of actors and actresses to distinguish themselves, in an age less prudish, but also far less eager in its craving after the grossly sensational, and much more literary than ours. Nor does Mr. Gosse content himself with mere repetition or amplification of the praises and censures of previous writers ; his criticism is often fresh and nearly always independent, and he does not hesi- tate to eulogise in glowing terms scenes and characters which have either escaped the notice of his predecessors, or incurred their disapprobation. Thus, Angelica, in Love for Love, who has been deemed by many a somewhat hard-natured and un- impulsive heroine, is Mr. Gosse's favourite rather than Mrs. Millamant, to whom Leigh Hunt and Mr. Meredith have paid. such handsome and, as it seems to us, merited compliments ; Ben the sailor, who, as Dr. Johnson informs us, was regarded as a not very natural, though allowed to be a diverting character —the prevalent opinion, we believe, even now—is thought by Mr. Gosse to have been drawn from the life, a view which we have ourselves formerly expressed in these columns; and even The Mourning Bride seems to Congreve's latest biographer worthy of more respectful treatment than it has received at the hands of its former critics. He is by no means content, as they have been, with landing the famous scene in the temple aisle, and condemning or coldly praising the remainder of the tragedy, but thinks the play, as a whole, little inferior to the tragedies of Otway, and decidedly superior to those of Rowe or any other dramatic poet of the period except Southerne. When one considers how far Rowe, Addison, Southerne, Lee, and Otway himself, as tragic writers, fell below even the two "last great prophets of tautology," Heywood and Shirley, this praise will not, perhaps, be deemed excessive. Mr. Gosse has some remarks on the versification of The Mourning Bride which are well worthy of attention, as they are both sound and original. By comparison of certain lines in the play with some taken from Paradise Lost, he shows clearly that Congreve's blank verse is modelled on Milton's rather than on Shakespeare's ; but we do not know that the wisdom of the preference is to be commended. Milton's verse, with its elaborate harmonies and stately and somewhat cumbrous movement, has not generally been regarded as so well suited for tragic as it is for epic poetry.
To the consideration of the very " minor" poems with which Congreve occasionally amused his long leisure, rather more space is devoted than is, we think, their clue, even in a bio- graphy like the present one. They are, for the most part, equally devoid of wit, reflection, and imagination, and deserve even the strong contempt which has been expressed for them by critics like Johnson and Wordsworth. Whether Johnson's wonder that "a mind so vigorous and fertile in dramatic com- position should on any other occasion discover nothing but impotence and poverty," is altogether reasonable, may, how- ever, be questioned. Of high mental and physical endowments, Congreve was an early and reckless spendthrift of both, and premature decay of mind and body was the melancholy but inevitable result. Mr. Gosse seems to think that he was capable of still higher things than Love for Love and The Way of the World, and that he ought to have been preparing himself for the greatest triumphs at the very moment when he fell back into indolence and languor ; but his poems certainly reveal no traces of his former power. They are decidedly inferior to the few songs which are scattered through his comedies, though these are not of the highest merit. It was doubtless, as Mr. Gosse suggests, from the painful conscious- ness of this intellectual degeneracy that Congreve made that apparently snobbish but really humble request to Voltaire to be considered merely as a gentleman, which has been so often quoted to his discredit. Authors do not even like their earlier works to be praised at the expense of their later ones ; and in Congreve's ears, the Frenchman's necessarily exclusive encomiums on the productions of his long-vanished youth would too probably sound like bitterest irony. It should not, however, be forgotten that Congreve's unequalled wit is said to have been conspicuous in conversation to the last; and it is certainly no less to be wondered at than deplored that no specimens of his brilliant talk have been preserved.
One of the most interesting chapters in the book is that which deals with Collier's famous attack on the wits, and the various replies it elicited, among which that of Congreve, who had been handled with particular severity, was perhaps the least able. Mr. Gosse mentions the " everlasting " Blackmore as a friendly critic of The Mourning Bride in the preface to his King Arthur; but according to Johnson, he was actually, in his preface to Prince Arthur, the forerunner of Collier, teaching his readers "to dislike what Collier incited them to abhor." In his subsequent Satire on Wit, though he admits that Congreve is "wealthy," has "funds of standard sense, and needs no allay," he adds that he often "passes away mixed metal," and he exhorts him for his reputation's sake to take care to" make his payments in sterling." Congreve appears to have had many censurers in his own day besides Blackmore and Collier, and they triumphed in spite of their inferior abilities.
The most formidable of our poet's detractors in more modern times is undoubtedly Thackeray, and Mr. Gosse does well to warn his readers against being too much influenced by-that great writer's brilliant but singularly inadequate and one-sided lecture on the author of The Way of the World. If we did not know that satirists seldom heartily like each other, and that Congreve himself failed to appreciate the wonderful power of his friend Swift's Tale of a Tub, we might be disposed to marvel at Thackeray's expressed contempt for the wittiest comic dramatist in the world. As it is, it is certainly singular, and looks like mere caprice, that he who has described the "delightful, wicked comedies of Wycherley and Shadwell," as forming the favourite early reading of the grave and high- minded hero of his finest novel, should have had no kind word to spare for the far nobler offsprings of Congreve's Comic Muse ; and that the satirist who took an almost malicious pleasure in dwelling upon the queer personal appearance of my Lady Viscountess, who persisted in blooming up to the very midst of winter, and at the sight of whose face„" daubed with white and red up to the eyes, to which the paint gave an unearthly glare," the mob exclaimed, "Lady Jezebel !" and Killigrew was reminded of the death's head put up at the King's feast as a memento mori,—should have done no justice to the somewhat kindred character of Lady Wishfort, in whose face " cracks " were occasionally "discernible in the white varnish," making it "look like an old peeled wall." Thackeray was, in fact, as unfair to Con- greve as he was to Richardson, and his criticisms on either ought not perhaps to be taken too seriously.
We should like to have quoted something from the last chapter of Mr. Gosse's little work, which specially deals with the qualities and limitations of Congreve's genius, but must content ourselves with recommending it to all who are in- terested in its subject as a masterpiece of fine prose, and of sound, comprehensive, and conscientious criticism.
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