All was silent, and Don Mario for his part took it to be all Conjuration; he was coming forward to present Hippolito to them, when Aurelian spying his Friend, started from his Knees and ran to embrace him — My dear Hippolito (said he) what happy chance has brought you hither, just at my Necessity? Hippolito pointed to Don Mario and Leonora, and told him upon what terms he came. Don Mario was ready to run mad, hearing him called Hippolito, and went again to examine his Daughter. While she was informing him of the truth, the Marquess’s Servants returned with the melancholy News that his Daughter was no where to be found. While the Marquess and Don Fabritio were wondering at, and lamenting the Misfortune of her loss, Hippolito came towards Don Fabio and interceded for his Son, since the Lady perhaps had withdrawn her self out of an Aversion to the Match. Don Fabio, though very much incens’d, yet forgot not the Respect due to Hippolito’s Quality; and by his perswasion spoke to Aurelian, though with a stern Look and angry Voice, and asked him where he had disposed the cause of his Disobedience, if he were worthy to see her or no; Aurelian made answer, That he desired no more than for him to see her; and he did not doubt a Consequence of his Approbation and Forgiveness — Well (said Don Fabio) you are very conceited of your own Discretion, let us see this Rarety. While Aurelian was gone in for Incognita, the Marquess of Viterbo and Don Fabritio were taking their leaves in great disorder for their loss and disappointment; but Don Fabio entreated their stay a moment longer till the return of his Son. Aurelian led Incognita into the Room veil’d, who seeing some Company there which he had not told her of, would have gone back again. But Don Fabio came bluntly forwards, and ere she was aware, lifted up her Veil and beheld the Fair Incognita, differing nothing from Juliana, but in her Name. This discovery was so extreamly surprizing and welcome, that either Joy or Amazement had tied up the Tongues of the whole Company. Aurelian here was most at a loss, for he knew not of his Happiness; and that which all along prevented Juliana’s confessing her self to him, was her knowing Hippolito (for whom she took him) to be Aurelian’s Friend, and she feared if he had known her, that he would never have consented to have deprived him of her. Juliana was the first that spoke, falling upon her Knees to her Father, who was not enough himself to take her up. Don Fabio ran to her, and awakened the Marquess, who then embraced her, but could not yet speak. Fabritio and Leonora strove who should first take her in their Arms; for Aurelian he was out of his wits for Joy, and Juliana was not much behind him, to see how happily their Loves and Duties were reconciled. Don Fabio embraced his Son and forgave him. The Marquess and Fabritio gave Juliana into his hands, he received the Blessing upon his Knees; all were over-joy’d, and Don Mario not a little proud at the discovery of his Son-in-Law, whom Aurelian did not fail to set forth with all the ardent Zeal and Eloquence of Friendship. Juliana and Leonora had pleasant Discourse about their unknown and mistaken Rivalship, and it was the Subject of a great deal of Mirth to hear Juliana relate the several Contrivances which she had to avoid Aurelian for the sake of Hippolito.
Having diverted themselves with many Remarks upon the pleasing surprize, they all thought it proper to attend upon the Great Duke that Morning at the Palace, and to acquaint him with the Novelty of what had pass’d; while, by the way, the two Young Couple entertained the Company with the Relation of several Particulars of their Three Days Adventures.
The Biographies
William Congreve by Godfrey Kneller, 1709
Congreve by Samuel Johnson
From ‘The Lives of the Most Eminent English Poets’
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. 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 ap
parently 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 pas
sing 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 Pœni,
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, 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.
Complete Works of William Congreve Page 77
