John Dryden - Delphi Poets Series

by John Dryden

  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. Both The Double Dealer and The Way of the World border 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 in The 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 wind Whistling 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 heads To bear aloft its arched and ponderous roof, By its own weight made steadfast and immovable, Looking tranquillity! It strikes an awe And terror on my aching sight; the tombs And 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 hear Thy voice; my own affrights me with its echoes.’

  Mourning Bride, act ii., sc. 3.

  ‘Duke. Deceived and disappointed vain desires! Why laugh I not, and ridicule myself? ’Tis still, and cold, and nothing in the air But an old grey twilight, or of eve or morn I know not which, dim as futurity, And sad and hoary as the ghostly past Fills up the space. Hush! not a wind is there, Not a cloud sails over the battlements, Not a bell tolls the hour. Is there an hour? Or is not all gone by which here did hive Of men and their life’s ways? Could I but hear The ticking of a clock, or someone breathing, Or e’en a cricket’s chirping, or the grating Of the old gates amid the marble tombs, I should be sure that this was still the world. Hark! Hark! Doth nothing stir? No light, and still no light, besides this ghost That mocks the dawn, unaltered? Still no sound? No voice of man? No cry of beast? No rustle Of any moving creature? And sure I feel That I remain the same: no more round blood drops Roll joyously along my pulseless veins: The air I seem to breathe is still the same: And the great dreadful thought that now comes o’er me Must remain ever as it is, unchanged. This moment doth endure for evermore; Eternity hath overshadowed time; And I alone am left of all that lived.’

  Death’s Jest Book, act iii., sc. 3.

  The writer of these lines might have been a great tragic poet, if he could have achieved the construction of a coherent plot. Congreve might have been a greater, but for the conventions of an age that required his dramatis personae to be remote by a thousand years or a thousand miles.

  The dazzle of Congreve’s wit has perhaps blinded critics to his more serious powers, and it may be that its brilliancy has been even exaggerated. What is chiefly admirable is perhaps not so much the occasional flashes and strokes, felicitous as they are, as the unflagging verve, energy, and gaiety. His plays are not of the kind that keep the audience in a roar from first to last, but they never cease to stimulate the spirits; the fire does not always blaze, but it never burns low: there is not a dull scene, or a tiresome or useless character. The general tone of good breeding, if it does not purify the pervading atmosphere of profligacy, at any rate prevents it from becoming offensive. In verbal impropriety and double entendre Congreve is even worse than Wycherley, but his plays are far from giving the same impression of a thoroughly obnoxious state of society. It is true that the pursuit of women seems the sole business of the men, and the pursuit of men the business of half the women; but the universal passion is so pleasantly variegated with extraneous humours and oddities that it is far from producing the monotony of a modern French novel. Thus, there is an amourette between Brisk and Lady Froth in The Double Dealer, but the pair are æsthetic as well as amorous, and the blue-stocking is more conspicuous than the unfaithful wife. The scene where Brisk corrects Lady Froth’s poetry, imitated but not servilely copied from one in Les Femmes Savantes, is a good specimen of the humour and sparkle of Congreve’s dialogue:

  ‘Lady Froth. Then you think that episode between Susan, the dairy-maid, and our coachman, is not amiss; you know I may suppose the dairy in town as well as in the country.

  Brisk. Incomparable, let me perish! — But then being an heroic poem, had not you better call him a charioteer? charioteer sounds great; besides, your ladyship’s coachman having a red face, and you comparing him to the sun; and you know the sun is called heaven’s charioteer.

  Lady Froth. Oh, infinitely better! I am extremely beholden to you for the hint; stay, we’ll read over those half a score lines again. [Pulls out a paper.] Let me see here, you know what goes before, — the comparison, you know.

  [Reads.

  For as the sun shines every day, So, of our coachman I may say —

  Brisk. I’m afraid that simile won’t do in wet weather; — because you say the sun shines every day.

  Lady Froth. No, for the sun it won’t, but it will do for the coachman; for you know there’s more occasion for a coach in wet weather.

  Brisk. Right, right, that saves all.

  Lady Froth. Then, I don’t say the sun shines all the day, but that he peeps now and then; yet he does shine all the day too, you know, though we don’t see him.

  Brisk. Right, but the vulgar will never comprehend that.

  Lady Froth. Well, you shall hear. — Let me see.

  [Reads.

  For as the sun shines every day, So, of our coachman I may say, He shows his drunken fiery face, Just as the sun does, more or less.

  Brisk. That’s right, all’s well, all’s well! — More or less.

  Lady Froth. [Reads.]

  And when at night his labour’s done, Then too, like heaven’s charioteer the sun —

  Ay, charioteer does better.

  Into the dairy he descends, And there his whipping and his driving ends; There’s he’s secure from danger of a bilk, His fare is paid him, and he sets in milk.

  For Susan, you know, is Thetis, and so —

  Brisk. Incomparably well and proper, egad! — But I have one exception to make: — don’t you think bilk (I know it’s good rhyme), but don’t you think bilk and fare too like a hackney-coachman?

  Lady Froth. I swear and vow, I am afraid so. — And yet our Jehu was a hackney-coachman when my lord took him.

  Brisk. Was he? I’m answered, if Jehu was a hackney-coachman. — You may put that in the marginal notes though, to prevent criticism. — Only mark it with a small asterism, and say, Jehu was formerly a hackney-coachman.

  Lady Froth. I will; you’d oblige me extremely to write notes to the whole poem.

  Brisk. With all my heart and soul, and proud of the vast ho
nour, let me perish!’

  Congreve excels not only in dialogue, but in painting a character by a single speech. How thoroughly we realize the inward and outward man of old Foresight the omen-monger, from a single passage in Love for Love:

  ‘Nurse. Pray heaven send your worship good luck! marry and amen with all my heart; for you have put on one stocking with the wrong side outward.

  Fore. Ha! hm? faith and troth I’m glad of it. And so I have; that may be good luck in troth, in troth it may, very good luck: nay I have had some omens: I got out of bed backwards too this morning, without premeditation; pretty good that too; but then I stumbled coming down stairs, and met a weasel; bad omens these, some bad, some good, our lives are chequered; mirth and sorrow, want and plenty, night and day, make up our time. But in troth I am pleased at my stocking; very well pleased at my stocking.’

  Or Mr. Bluffe, the miles gloriosus of The Old Bachelor:

  ‘You must know, sir, I was resident in Flanders the last campaign, had a small part there, but no matter for that. Perhaps, sir, there was scarce anything of moment done but an humble servant of yours that shall be nameless, was an eye-witness of — I won’t say had the greatest share in it; though I might say that too, since I name nobody, you know. Well, Mr. Sharper, would you think it? in all this time this rascally gazette writer never so much as once mentioned me — not once, by the wars! — took no more notice than as if Nol. Bluffe had not been in the land of the living!

  Sharper. Strange!

  Bluffe. Ay, ay, no matter. — You see, Mr. Sharper, that after all I am content to retire — live a private person — Scipio and others have done it.’

  Vanbrugh has less individuality than his eminent contemporaries, and has consequently produced less impression than they upon the public mind, has added fewer typical characters to comedy, and stands some steps nigher to oblivion. Yet he is their equal in vis comica, and their superior in stage workmanship. ‘He is no writer at all,’ says Hazlitt, ‘as to mere authorship; but he makes up for it by a prodigious fund of comic invention and ludicrous description, bordering upon caricature. He has none of Congreve’s graceful refinement, and as little of Wycherley’s serious manner and studious insight into the springs of character; but his exhibition of it in dramatic contrast and unlooked-for situations, where the different parties play upon one another’s failings, and into one another’s hands, keeping up the jest like a game of battledore and shuttlecock, and urging it to the utmost verge of breathless extravagance, in the mere eagerness of the fray, is beyond that of any other of our writers.’ In Hazlitt’s opinion, Vanbrugh did not bestow much pains upon the construction of his pieces, and their excellent dramatic effect is mainly to be attributed to his promptness in seizing upon the hints for powerful situations which continually arose as he went along. He has nothing of the passion which sometimes raises Congreve so near to the confines of tragedy, nor has he the airy gaiety of Farquhar; but his animal spirits are abundant and unforced, and his humour has a true Flemish exuberance. His characters are always lively and well discriminated, but the only type he can be said to have created is the model fop, Lord Foppington in The Relapse, and even he is partly borrowed from Etheredge’s Sir Fopling Flutter. He is nevertheless a most perfect portrait, and gives real literary distinction to what would otherwise have been a mere comedy of intrigue. The powerful though disagreeable character of Sir John Brute lends force to The Provoked Wife; and the unfinished Journey to London is grounded on an idea which might have been very fruitful, the country senator who has gone into Parliament as a speculation, but who, upon taking up his residence in London, finds that he loses more by the extravagance of his wife than he can gain by the prostitution of his vote. Vanbrugh’s other plays are mere comedies of intrigue, written without moral or immoral purpose for the sake of amusement, of which they are abundantly prolific for readers not repelled by a disregard of virtue so open and unblushing that, being too gay for cynicism, it almost seems innocence. The scene between Flippanta and her pupil in The Confederacy is an excellent specimen of Vanbrugh’s spirited comedy. It might be headed, Malitia supplet aetatem.

  ‘Flip. Nay, if you can bear it so, you are not to be pitied so much as I thought.

  Cor. Not pitied! Why, is it not a miserable thing for such a young creature as I am should be kept in perpetual solitude, with no other company but a parcel of old fumbling masters, to teach me geography, arithmetic, philosophy, and a thousand useless things? Fine entertainment, indeed, for a young maid at sixteen! Methinks one’s time might be better employed.

  Flip. Those things will improve your wit.

  Cor. Fiddle, faddle! han’t I wit enough already? My mother-in-law has learned none of this trumpery, and is not she as happy as the day is long?

  Flip. Then you envy her I find?

  Cor. And well I may. Does she not do what she has a mind to, in spite of her husband’s teeth?

  Flip. [Aside.] Look you there now! If she has not already conceived that as the supreme blessing of life!

  Cor. I’ll tell you what, Flippanta; if my mother-in-law would but stand by me a little, and encourage me, and let me keep her company, I’d rebel against my father to-morrow, and throw all my books in the fire. Why, he can’t touch a groat of my portion; do you know that, Flippanta!

  Flip. [Aside.] So — I shall spoil her! Pray Heaven the girl don’t debauch me!

  Cor. Look you: in short, he may think what he pleases, he may think himself wise; but thoughts are free, and I may think in my turn. I’m but a girl, ’tis true, and a fool too, if you’ll believe him; but let him know, a foolish girl may make a wise man’s heart ache; so he had as good be quiet. — Now it’s out.

  Flip. Very well, I love to see a young woman have spirit, it’s a sign she’ll come to something.

  Cor. Ah, Flippanta! if you would but encourage me, you’d find me quite another thing. I’m a devilish girl in the bottom; I wish you’d but let me make one amongst you.

  Flip. That never can be till you are married. Come, examine your strength a little. Do you think you durst venture upon a husband?

  Cor. A husband! Why, a — if you would but encourage me. Come, Flippanta, be a true friend now. I’ll give you advice when I have got a little more experience. Do you in your conscience and soul think I am old enough to be married?

  Flip. Old enough! why, you are sixteen, are you not?

  Cor. Sixteen! I am sixteen, two months, and odd days, woman. I keep an exact account.

  Flip. The deuce you are!

  Cor. Why, do you then truly and sincerely think I am old enough?

  Flip. I do, upon my faith, child.

  Cor. Why, then, to deal as fairly with you, Flippanta, as you do with me, I have thought so any time these three years.

  Flip. Now I find you have more wit than ever I thought you had; and to show you what an opinion I have of your discretion, I’ll show you a thing I thought to have thrown in the fire.

  Cor. What is it, for Jupiter’s sake?

  Flip. Something will make your heart chuck within you.

  Cor. My dear Flippanta!

  Flip. What do you think it is?

  Cor. I don’t know, nor I don’t care, but I’m mad to have it.

  Flip. It’s a four-cornered thing.

  Cor. What, like a cardinal’s cap?

  Flip. No, ’tis worth a whole conclave of ‘em. How do you like it?

  [Showing the letter.

  Cor. O Lard, a letter! Is there ever a token in it?

  Flip. Yes, and a precious one too. There’s a handsome young gentleman’s heart.

  Cor. A handsome young gentleman’s heart! [Aside.] Nay, then, it’s time to look grave.

  Flip. There.

  Cor. I shan’t touch it.

  Flip. What’s the matter now?

  Cor. I shan’t receive it.

  Flip. Sure you jest.

  Cor. You’ll find I don’t. I understand myself better than to take letters when I don’t know who they are from.


  Flip. I’m afraid I commended your wit too soon.

  Cor. ’Tis all one, I shan’t touch it, unless I know who it comes from.

  Flip. Heyday, open it and you’ll see.

  Cor. Indeed I shall not.

  Flip. Well — then I must return it where I had it.

  Cor. That won’t serve your turn, madam. My father must have an account of this.

  Flip. Sure you are not in earnest?

  Cor. You’ll find I am.

  Flip. So, here’s fine work! This ’tis to deal with girls before they come to know the distinction of sexes!

  Cor. Confess who you had it from, and perhaps, for this once, I mayn’t tell my father.

  Flip. Why then, since it must out, ’twas the Colonel. But why are you so scrupulous, madam?

  Cor. Because if it had come from anybody else — I would not have given a farthing for it.

  [Snatching it eagerly out of her hand.’

  Farquhar has what Vanbrugh wants — individuality. He seems to identify himself with his favourite characters, the heedless, dissolute, but gentlemanly and good-hearted sparks about town whom he so delights to portray, and hence wins a firmer place in our affections than his wittier and in every way stronger rival, who might have been a comic automaton for any idea of his personality that we are able to form. Whether the inevitable conception of Farquhar is really correct may be doubted; it is not in harmony with the few particulars which we possess of his manners and personal appearance. While reading him, nevertheless, one feels no doubt of the applicability to the author of the character of his Sir Harry Wildair, ‘entertaining to others, and easy to himself, turning all passion into gaiety of humour.’ The plays answer the description of the personage; they are lively, rattling, entertaining, and the humour is certainly much in excess of the passion. Serjeant Kite, in The Recruiting Officer, has become proverbial, otherwise no character has been recognized as an absolute creation, though almost all are natural and unaffected. The Beaux’ Stratagem, his last play, is by common consent his best; it is assuredly admirable, from the truth and variety of the characters, and the pervading atmosphere of adventurous gaiety. The separation between Mr. and Mrs. Sullen is a good specimen of Farquhar’s vis comica: