Congreve, WILLIAM, the greatest master of the English comedy of repartee, as distinguished from the humoristic or Jonsonian comedy which it replaced, was born at Bardsey, near Leeds, and baptised on February 10, 1669 (1670). As a schoolboy he was educated at Kilkenny, and as an undergraduate at Trinity College, Dublin. And if this does really make an English gentleman an Irish one, as certain writers learned in 'racial mixings' have generously assumed, Congreve's genius may be taken as another proof that English wit, like English poetry, is the outcome of that mysterious 'Celtic element,' or breath of the 'Celtic Titan' discovered by the late Matthew Arnold. After the completion of his education, Congreve returned to England, and began life in London, where, like Wycherley, and, indeed, like many another man of letters, he entered upon the study of the law—an arid study, as is generally supposed, for a wit, and yet one which (being the study of the practical logic of life) does more than any other, it has been said, to solidify and strengthen the disparate forces of the intellect in whatsoever field those forces may afterwards come to be exercised. Entered at the Middle Temple, but finding, as Leigh Hunt says, that 'having family as well as wit and scholarship,' he could 'make way in life without a profession,' Congreve invaded very early the literary arena where 'family and wit and scholarship' were in those old days of more account than would now seem possible. His first publication was Incognita, or Love and Duty Reconciled, a novel of cross-purposes and disguises, based partly on reminiscences of the method of Shakespeare's fancy-plays, and partly on reminiscences of a very different dramatic method, that of the new prose comedy which, invented by Etheredge, had been very greatly strengthened by Wycherley. When Dr Johnson said of this novel that he 'would rather praise it than read it,' he spoke with his usual sagacity—indeed, he may be said to have marked out a course of criticism which has found high favour among succeeding critics of fiction—a course which is, no doubt, as wise as amiable in regard to nine novels out of any given ten. But whether the tenth, the novel to be read as well as praised, should properly be Rasselas or Incognita seems to depend, now as then, on the temper and the constitution of the praiser. If Rasselas is the more instructive, Incognita is the more amusing. For though to laugh with the author is difficult, to laugh at him is easy enough, and laughter is certainly good. Congreve's novel is rich in 'cultismo' of that highly ornate kind which has at intervals illuminated modern literature from Gongora to Dr Chivers. Such a passage as that in which Congreve talks about his heroine's employing one of Cupid's pen-feathers 'to pick her teeth' would have satisfied even such masters of style as the author of Polyphemus and the author of Eonchs of Ruby.
That a story so full of that silly mock-sentiment then in vogue—stuff which would now make even school-girls laugh—should have been written by the great wit and humorist of Love for Love—that the story should have had a very great success among those same cynical beaux and brazen belles who were in the habit of sitting out She Would if She Could and the Country Wife—would be incredible did we not remember the still more astonishing fact that the love-passion—the passion which Shakespeare and Ford and the rest of the Shakespearians had delineated so powerfully—was, judging from the literature of Congreve's time, wiped out as by a sponge from the English character. It is not enough to say that as soon as the wits of the coffee-houses attempted to touch the love-passion their sense of humour straightway fled: their common sense fled too; they became idiots, positive idiots. As far as date of publication goes, Congreve's novel was followed by his translation of the eleventh satire of Juvenal. This appeared in Dryden's Juvenal and Persius, dated 1693, but actually published in 1692. From Dryden, to whom he had been introduced—it is said by Southerne, Congreve received unvarying kindness—kindness which was answered by unvarying gratitude, or rather by that generosity of recognition among fine spirits—the sublimation of gratitude—which is said to be undreamed of by smaller souls. In January 1693 appeared Congreve's comedy the Old Bachelor, under the auspices of Dryden—'then as now a living and immortal witness to the falsehood of the vulgar charge which taxes the greater among the poets with jealousy or envy, the natural badge and brand of the smallest that would claim a place among their kind.' But if Dryden was free from envy, the disease which, according to the above skilful diagnosis by Mr Swinburne, afflicts poetasters and criticasters alone, not less free from this literary leprosy was Congreve himself. This is what makes him, notwithstanding his rank-worship, so interesting as a personality; this is what also makes the other comic dramatists Etheredge and Vanbrugh interesting, so interesting, that we would fain, if we dared, condone even such sins against the sanctities of art as theirs; they were free from the disease which it seems feeds the lower slopes of Parnassus with poisonous air. No three writers were ever more generally beloved—none were ever beloved more deservedly than these. And even Wycherley—he whose literary sins were the most grievous of all—was, on account of his fine social qualities, called ‘Manly Wycherley.’ That a corrupt court should have spoiled such men as these is, 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 boards. And he and Southerne and Maynwaring, who set about manipulating it, seem to have 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 Wycherley, 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. Congreve’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 produced 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 organised 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 supplied to the nervous system of the true writing man by any other stimulant. Not all the Paradis artificiels summoned up by the genii of Opium, Hashish, 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 last to be banished from the stage. So late as 1842 Macready revived it (modified of course) at Drury Lane, and this was followed by still later revivals, the last of all being a version of the play in three acts, compressed by Mr John Hollingshead at the Gaiety Theatre in November 1871, with Miss Cavendish in Angelica and Miss 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 Congreve’s other plays, outdazzle the sweeter and softer light of the humour. The characterisation 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 features larger in proportion and yet be very like the original. If this exactness of quantity were to be observed 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 dialogue 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 Shakespearean. 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 theatrical 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 theatrically effective. Of course, however, it is cold—cold as those ‘monumental caves of death’ which ‘shot a chillness’ to the ‘trembling hearts’ of Drs Johnson and Blackmore—and nothing could really warm it.
Between the date of the Mourning Bride and that of Congreve’s last comedy, the Way of the World, he was busily occupied, in company with several others, in the famous Jeremy Collier controversy, 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 literature 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 said, 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 Love for Love?
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 filthy French fictions of our own time which, while pandering to 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 the part of the hypocrite—condescended to exploit Aristotle's paradox about comedy being an imitation of bad characters—an imitation with an ethical end; as if such comedy as his had anything to do with ethical ends! Notwithstanding the conventional tags at the end of Congreve's plays—tags which had no serious meaning, and were meant to have none—the 'Seventh Hell' of the Hypocrite could never claim the author of Love for Love until he set about defending that play. Better to leave ill alone, we say.
Congreve's last play, the Way of the World, was produced in 1700. Though quite as full of intellectual brilliance as Love for Love, and evidently written with more care, not to say labour, it lacks the humorous impulse which we have seen in Congreve's masterpiece. The glitter is that of icicles in the sunlight. The wit of the dialogue is not sufficiently held in hand to work out the characters and the plot. In a word, it comes more completely than does any other of Congreve's plays within the scope of the Duke of Buckinghamshire's strictures upon the comedy of repartee:
Another fault, which often does befall,
Is when the wit of some great poet shall
So overflow, that is, be none at all,
That ev'n his fools speak sense, as if posset,
And each by inspiration breaks his jest,
If once the justness of each part be lost,
Well may we laugh, but at the poet's cost.
This play was received with comparative coldness, and Congreve wrote no more for the stage; but he lived till January 1729. Socially his life was one unbroken success. Physical suffering he had, but most of it was the result perhaps of his own youthful indiscretions. Kneller's portrait shows him to have been a handsome man with dark eyes. His career shows him to have been a man of fine genius who, smitten with the English canker of rank-worship, succeeded in half-misprising his endowments and living and dying genteel. He amassed a fortune, and left it not to his greatest friend Mrs Bracegirdle, a woman of genius, of surpassing beauty, and most lovable nature, who had sacrificed everything for him, but to the Duchess of Marlborough, who, after his death, had a waxen statue of him made—a statue which sat at her table in his very clothes, and nodded mechanically over the dinner at Her Grace's smallest joke, even as he had used to nod in the flesh.
See the Comedies, edited by W. E. Heuley (1895); the edition by Knight; the short Life by Gosse (1888); and essays by Hazlitt, Swinburne, and others.