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were five from tin- disease which it seems feeds the 

 lower slopes of Piiniassiis with IMIISOHOIIS air. No 

 three writers were ever more generally beloved 

 none were ever l>eloved more desen edly than those. 

 An. I even Wyeheiley -lie whose literary sins were 

 the most grievous of all was, on account of his fine 

 social qualities, .-.tiled Manly \Vycherley.' That 

 a corni|>t i-.. in i should have spoiled such men as 

 the-.,- i-, among all the heavy impeachments of the 

 Restoration, the heaviest. 



Congreve's freedom from the fussy egotism of 

 the literator served him in good stead in regard 

 to the Old Bachelor. Dryden, while declaring that 

 he 'never saw such a first play in his life,' hinted 

 at the same time that a great deal of skilful 

 manipulation was required before it could be safely 

 placed upon the l>oanl>. And he and Southerne 

 and Maynwaring, who set about manipulating it, 

 seem to nave had from Congreve carte blanche to do 

 with it as they liked. The brilliant success of the 

 Old Bachelor - a play whose merits were of entirely 

 a literary kind is evidence of the enormous change 

 that has come over play-goers since those days. 

 Congreve's second comedy, the Double Dealer, which 

 appeared in the November of 1693, was more firmly 

 knit, and in every way stronger than the Old 

 Bachelor, but the satire on the morals of the time 

 especially on the meanness and heartless treachery 

 in sexual relations which had become the fashion of 

 the court, was administered in too serious a temper 

 to please an audience composed largely of the very 

 people satirised. The empty-headed beaux and 

 callous women who went to the theatre went there 

 to be amused, not to be sermonised. But besides 

 this repellent quality, the play suffered from a want 

 of dramatic illusion greater in a certain sense than 

 even the Old Bachelor had displayed. An audience 

 can scarcely be interested in the doings of a villain 

 who every few minutes comes to the footlights in 

 order to assure them what a consummate villain he 

 is, and on what admirable psychological principles 

 his creator has fashioned him, nor yet in a hero 

 who lets a villain do what he will in order that the 

 dramatist's plot may be conveniently worked out. 

 In stage-craft Congreve was always weaker than 

 Vanbrugh and Wyelierley, but the weakness made 

 itself specially conspicuous here. 



It was to this play that was prefixed Dryden's 

 famous verses 'To my dear friend, Mr Congreve,' 

 verses whose generosity passes into pathos. Con- 

 greve's next publication was the Mourning Muse 

 of Alexis, a poetic dialogue upon the subject of 

 Queen Mary's death, as full of artificial conceits as 

 his novel. Love for Love, the finest prose comedy 

 in the English language, finished in 1694, was pro- 

 duced at the 'theatre in Little Lincolns Inn Fields' 

 in 1695. It has an abandonment of humour, an 

 irresistible rush of sparkling merriment, such as 

 Congreve's previous plays had not promised. In 

 judging of its qualities we must not forget that 

 in comedy as in tragedy in prose as in verse 

 nothing is really informed by artistic vitality 

 which lacks the rhythmic rush born of creative 

 enjoyment. To him who is really and truly organ- 

 ised to write, whether in verse or in prose, there is 

 always in the genuine exercise of his faculty a sense 

 of sport as delightful as it is deep, an exhilaration 

 that cannot be simulated and that cannot be sup- 

 plied to the nervous system of the true writing man 

 by any other stimulant. Not all the Paradix arti- 

 ficiels summoned up by the genii of Opium, Hash- 

 ish, or Alcohol, can compete with the true paradise 

 which the Genius of the Inkhorn throws open to the 

 born literator when the impulse is really upon him. 

 And as surely as the hilarity of artistic creation is 

 seen in Aristophanes, in Lucian, in Rabelais, in 

 Shakespeare, in Swift, in Dickens, is it seen in 

 Congreve's Love for Love. No wonder then that of 



all his plays it was the lat*t to be banished from the 

 stage. So late as 1842 Macready revived it ( modi- 

 fied of course) at Drury Lane, and this was followed 

 by ntill later revivals, the last of all being a version 

 of the play in three acts, compressed by Mr .John 

 llollingshead at the (iaiety Theatre in November 

 1H71, with Miss Cavendish in Angelica and Mis 

 Farren in Prue. In Love for Love culminated the 

 prose comedy of England. Abundant and brilliant 

 as is the wit, the coruscations do not, as in Con- 

 greve's other plays, outdazzle the sweeter and 

 softer light of the humour. The characterisa- 

 tion is true, true under the conditions which, 

 as he himself admirably said in his letter to 

 Dennis, the comedian must always work under. 

 'The distance of the stage,' says he, 'requires the 

 figure represented to be something better than the 

 life ; and, sure, a picture may have feature-- larger 

 in proportion and yet be very like the original. If 

 this exactness of quantity were to be otwerved in 

 wit, as some would have it in humour, what would 

 become of those characters that are designed for 

 men of wit ? I believe, if a poet should steal a dia- 

 logue of any length from the extempore discourse 

 of the two wittiest men upon earth, he would find 

 the scene but coldly received by the town.' 



Some of the characterisation, such as that of 

 Angelica, is really beautiful, while some, like that 

 of Sir Sampson Legend, in its genial breadth passes 

 from the comedy of artifice into absolute comedy, 

 and is almost Shakespearian. In 1697 Congreve's 

 one tragedy, the Mourning Bride, appeared. The 

 honours it received in the 18th century were as 

 excessive as the contempt it met with in the next. 

 No doubt it is full of improbabilities, but it shows 

 a considerable power of invention of melodramatic 

 if not of tragic incident. The purely theatric and 

 scenic qualities of the second act are of a most 

 original, if not of high order, and with the scenic 

 appliances of our own day might be made theatric- 

 ally effective. Of course, however, it is cold 

 cold as those ' monumental caves of death ' which 

 ' shot a dullness ' to the ' trembling hearts ' of Drs 

 Johnson and Blackmore and nothing could really 

 warm it. 



Between the date of the Mourning Brute and 

 that of Congreve's last comedv, the Way of the 

 World, he was busily occupied, in company with 

 several others, in the famous Jeremy Collier con- 

 troversy, defending the morality of the new stage. 

 The great mistake of Congreve's life was this 

 of defending his plays on moral grounds. To 'let 

 well alone ' is wise : to let ill alone is perhaps wiser 

 still. Of all sins, that of producing harmful litera- 

 ture is the blackest. It is the peculiar glory of 

 letters that stronger than king or kaiser is he who 

 writes strongly. It is so to-day : it was so when 

 the warrior kings of Nineveh went out to reap 

 glory i.e., to slay and flay in order to furnish 

 the scribe with subjects in order that the scribe 

 should, in bas-relief and cuneiform character. 

 record their doings. Hence, in the truest and 

 deepest sense, to write is, as Bishop Butler has -aid, 

 to act ; and if, as he declares, ' endeavouring to force 

 upon our minds a practical sense of virtue, or to 

 beget in others that practical sense of it which a 

 man really has himself, is a virtuous act,' what, 

 on the other hand, was the act of him who wrote 

 certain scenes in the Double Dealer and Loi'e for 

 Lore ? 



And yet even this new stage was not without 

 one saving grace till Congreve defended it ; it had 

 a frankness in sin : that was something at least. 

 Its place was not alongside those filtny French 

 fictions of our own time which, while pandering 

 t<> the bestial side of man, set up an impudent 

 pretence of doing so for the good of his soul. But 

 Congreve in his lame defence condescended to 



