Complete Works of William Congreve

by William Congreve

  But he treated the muses with ingratitude; for, having long conversed familiarly with the great, he wished to be considered rather as a man of fashion than of wit; and, when he received a visit from Voltaire, disgusted him by the despicable foppery of desiring to be considered not as an author but a gentleman; to which the Frenchman replied, “that if he had been only a gentleman, he should not have come to visit him.”

  In his retirement he may be supposed to have applied himself to books; for he discovers more literature than the poets have commonly attained. But his studies were, in his latter days, obstructed by cataracts in his eyes, which, at last, terminated in blindness. This melancholy state was aggravated by the gout, for which he sought relief by a journey to Bath; but, being overturned in his chariot, complained from that time of a pain in his side, and died, at his house in Surrey-street, in the Strand, Jan. 29, 1728-9. Having lain in state in the Jerusalem-chamber, he was buried in Westminster Abbey, where a monument is erected to his memory by Henrietta, duchess of Marlborough, to whom, for reasons either not known or not mentioned, he bequeathed a legacy of about ten thousand pounds; the accumulation of attentive parsimony, which, though to her superfluous and useless, might have given great assistance to the ancient family from which he descended, at that time, by the imprudence of his relation, reduced to difficulties and distress.

  Congreve has merit of the highest kind; he is an original writer, who borrowed neither the models of his plot nor the manner of his dialogue. Of his plays I cannot speak distinctly; for, since I inspected them many years have passed; but what remains upon my memory is, that his characters are commonly fictitious and artificial, with very little of nature, and not much of life. He formed a peculiar idea of comick excellence, which he supposed to consist in gay remarks and unexpected answers; but that which he endeavoured, he seldom failed of performing. His scenes exhibit not much of humour, imagery, or passion; his personages are a kind of intellectual gladiators; every sentence is to ward or strike; the contest of smartness is never intermitted; his wit is a meteor playing to and fro with alternate coruscations. His comedies have, therefore, in some degree, the operation of tragedies; they surprise rather than divert, and raise admiration oftener than merriment. But they are the works of a mind replete with images, and quick in combination.

  Of his miscellaneous poetry, I cannot say any thing very favourable. The powers of Congreve seem to desert him when he leaves the stage, as Antæus was no longer strong than when he could touch the ground. It cannot be observed without wonder, that a mind so vigorous and fertile in dramatick compositions should, on any other occasion, discover nothing but impotence and poverty. He has, in these little pieces, neither elevation of fancy, selection of language, nor skill in versification: yet, if I were required to select from the whole mass of English poetry the most poetical paragraph, I know not what I could prefer to an exclamation in the Mourning Bride:

  ALMERIA.

  It was a fancy’d noise; for all is hush’d.

  LEONORA.

  It bore the accent of a human voice.

  ALMERIA.32

  It was thy fear, or else some transient wind

  Whistling thro’ hollows of this vaulted isle:

  We’ll listen —

  LEONORA.

  Hark!

  ALMERIA.

  No, all is hush’d 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 arch’d and ponderous roof,

  By its own weight made stedfast and immoveable,

  Looking tranquillity! It strikes an awe

  And terror on my aching sight; the tombs

  And monumental caves of death look cold,

  And shoot a chilness to my trembling heart.

  Give me thy hand, and let me hear thy voice;

  Nay, quickly speak to me, and let me hear

  Thy voice — my own affrights me with its echoes.

  He who reads these lines enjoys, for a moment, the powers of a poet; he feels what he remembers to have felt before, but he feels it with great increase of sensibility; he recognises a familiar image, but meets it again amplified and expanded, embellished with beauty, and enlarged with majesty.

  Yet could the author, who appears here to have enjoyed the confidence of nature, lament the death of queen Mary in lines like these:

  The rocks are cleft, and new-descending rills

  Furrow the brows of all th’ impending hills.

  The water-gods to floods their rivulets turn,

  And each, with streaming eyes, supplies his wanting urn.

  The fauns forsake the woods, the nymphs the grove,

  And round the plain in sad distractions rove:

  In prickly brakes their tender limbs they tear,

  And leave on thorns their locks of golden hair.

  With their sharp nails, themselves the satyrs wound,

  And tug their shaggy beards, and bite with grief the ground.

  Lo Pan himself, beneath a blasted oak,

  33 Dejected lies, his pipe in pieces broke.

  See Pales weeping too, in wild despair,

  And to the piercing winds her bosom bare.

  And see yon fading myrtle, where appears

  The queen of love, all bath’d in flowing tears;

  See how she wrings her hands, and beats her breast,

  And tears her useless girdle from her waist!

  Hear the sad murmurs of her sighing doves!

  For grief they sigh, forgetful of their loves.

  And, many years after, he gave no proof that time had improved his wisdom or his wit; for, on the death of the marquis of Blandford, this was his song:

  And now the winds, which had so long been still.

  Began the swelling air with sighs to fill:

  The water-nymphs, who motionless remain’d,

  Like images of ice, while she complain’d,

  Now loos’d their streams; as when descending rains

  Roll the steep torrents headlong o’er the plains.

  The prone creation, who so long had gaz’d,

  Charm’d with her cries, and at her griefs amaz’d,

  Began to roar and howl with horrid yell,

  Dismal to hear and terrible to tell!

  Nothing but groans and sighs were heard around,

  And echo multiplied each mournful sound.

  In both these funeral poems, when he has yelled out many syllables of senseless dolour, he dismisses his reader with senseless consolation: from the grave of Pastora rises a light that forms a star; and where Amaryllis wept for Amyntas, from every tear sprung up a violet.

  But William is his hero, and of William he will sing:

  The hov’ring winds on downy wings shall wait around,

  And catch, and waft to foreign lands, the flying sound.

  It cannot but be proper to show what they shall have to catch and carry:

  ’Twas now, when flow’ry lawns the prospect made,

  And flowing brooks beneath a forest shade,

  A lowing heifer, loveliest of the herd,

  34 Stood feeding by; while two fierce bulls prepar’d

  Their armed heads for fight, by fate of war to prove

  The victor worthy of the fair one’s love.

  Unthought presage of what met next my view;

  For soon the shady scene withdrew.

  And now, for woods, and fields, and springing flowers,

  Behold a town arise, bulwark’d with walls and lofty towers;

  Two rival armies all the plain o’erspread,

  Each in battalia rang’d, and shining arms array’d;

  With eager eyes beholding both from far

  Namur, the prize and mistress of the war.

  The Birth of the Muse is a miserable fiction. One good line it has, which was borrowed from Dryden. The concluding verses are these:

  This said, no more remain’d. Th’
ethereal host

  Again impatient crowd the crystal coast.

  The father now, within his spacious hands,

  Encompass’d all the mingled mass of seas and lands;

  And, having heav’d aloft the pond’rous sphere,

  He launch’d the world to float in ambient air.

  Of his irregular poems, that to Mrs. Arabella Hunt seems to be the best; his ode for St. Cecilia’s Day, however, has some lines which Pope had in his mind when he wrote his own.

  His imitations of Horace are feebly paraphrastical, and the additions which he makes are of little value. He sometimes retains what were more properly omitted, as when he talks of vervain and gums to propitiate Venus.

  Of his translations, the satire of Juvenal was written very early, and may, therefore, be forgiven, though it have not the massiness and vigour of the original. In all his versions strength and sprightliness are wanting: his hymn to Venus, from Homer, is, perhaps, the best. His lines are weakened with expletives, and his rhymes are frequently imperfect.

  His petty poems are seldom worth the cost of criticism: sometimes the thoughts are false, and sometimes common. In his verses on lady Gethin, the latter part is in imitation of Dryden’s ode on Mrs. Killigrew; and Doris, that has been so lavishly flattered by Steele, has, indeed, some lively stanzas, but the expression might be mended; and the most striking part of the character had been already shown in Love for Love. His Art of Pleasing is founded on a vulgar, but, perhaps, impracticable principle, and the staleness of the sense is not concealed by any novelty of illustration or elegance of diction.

  This tissue of poetry, from which he seems to have hoped a lasting name, is totally neglected, and known only as it is appended to his plays.

  While comedy, or while tragedy, is regarded, his plays are likely to be read; but, except what relates to the stage, I know not that he has ever written a stanza that is sung, or a couplet that is quoted. The general character of his Miscellanies is, that they show little wit, and little virtue.

  Yet to him it must be confessed, that we are indebted for the correction of a national errour, and for the cure of our Pindarick madness. He first taught the English writers that Pindar’s odes were regular; and though certainly he had not the fire requisite for the higher species of lyrick poetry, he has shown us, that enthusiasm has its rules, and that, in mere confusion, there is neither grace nor greatness.

  Introduction to William Congreve by G. S. Street

  I.

  Before repeating such known facts of Congreve’s life as seem agreeable to the present occasion, and before attempting (with the courage of one’s office) to indicate with truth what manner of man he was, and what are the varying qualities of his four comedies, it seems well to discuss and have done with two questions, obviously pertinent indeed, but of a wider scope than the works of any one writer.

  The first is a stupid question, which may be happily dismissed with brief ceremony. Grossness of language — the phrase is an assumption — is a matter of time and place, a relative matter altogether. There is a thing, and a generation finds a name for it. The delicacy which prompts a later generation to reject that name is by no means necessarily a result of stricter habits, is far more often due to the flatness which comes of untiring repetition and to the greater piquancy of litotes. I am told that there are, or were, people in America who reject the word ‘leg’ as a gross word, but they must have found a synonym. So there is not a word in Congreve for which there is not some equivalent expression in contemporary writing. He says this or that: your modern writers say so-and-so. One man may even think the monosyllables in better taste than the periphrases. Another may sacrifice to his intolerance thereof such enjoyment as he was capable of taking from the greatest triumphs of diction or observation: he is free to choose. It may be granted that to one unfamiliar with the English of two centuries since the grossness of Congreve’s language may seem excessive — like splashes of colour occurring too frequently in the arrangement of a wall. But that is merely a result of novelty: given time and habit, a more artistic perspective will be achieved.

  The second question is more complex. Since Jeremy Collier let off his Short View of the Immorality and Profaneness of the English Stage, there has never lacked a critic to chastise or to deplore — the more effective and irritating course — not simply the coarseness but, the immorality of our old comedies, their attitude towards and their peculiar interests in life. Without affirming that we are now come to the Golden Age of criticism, one may rejoice that modern methods have taught quite humble critics to discriminate between issues, and to deal with such a matter as this with some mental detachment. The great primal fallacy comes from a habit of expecting everything in everything. Just as in a picture it is not enough for some people that it is well drawn and well painted, but they demand an interesting story, a fine sentiment, a great thought: so since our national glory is understood to be the happy home, the happy home must be triumphant everywhere, even in satiric comedy. The best expression of this fallacy is in Thackeray. Concluding a most eloquent, and a somewhat patronising examination of Congreve, ‘Ah!’ he exclaims, ‘it’s a weary feast, that banquet of wit where no love is.’ The answer is plain: comedy of manners is comedy of manners, and satire is satire; introduce ‘love’ — an appeal, one supposes, to sympathy with strictly legitimate and common affection and a glorification of the happy home — and the rules of your art compel you to satirise affection and to make the happy home ridiculous: a truly deplorable work, which the incriminated dramatists were discreet enough for the most part to avoid. The remark brings us to the first of the half-truths, which cause the complexity of the subject. The dramatists whose withers the well-intentioned and disastrous Collier wrung seem to have thought their best answer was to pose as people with a mission — certainly Congreve so posed — to reform the world with an exhibition of its follies. An amusing answer, no doubt, of which the absurdity is obvious! It does, however, contain a half-truth. The idea of The Way of the World’s reforming adulterers — observe the quotation from Horace on the title-page — is a little delicious; yet the exhibition in a ludicrous light of the thing satirised is surely an end of satiric comedy? The right of the matter is indicated in a sentence which occurs in the dedication of The Double-Dealer far more wisely than in Congreve’s answer to Collier: ‘I should be very glad of an opportunity to make my compliment to those ladies who are offended: but they can no more expect it in a comedy, than to be tickled by a surgeon, when he’s letting ’em blood.’ Something more than a half-truth is in Charles Lamb’s theory, that the old comedy ‘has no reference whatever to the world that is’: that it is ‘the Utopia of Gallantry’ merely. Literally, historically, the theory is a fantasy. What the Restoration dramatists did not borrow from France was inspired directly by the court of Charles the Second, and nobody conversant with the memoirs of that court can have any difficulty in matching the fiction with reality. I imagine that Congreve in part accepted a tradition of the stage, but I am also perfectly well assured that he depicted what he saw. How far the virtues we should associate with the Charles the Second spirit may atone for its vices is a question which would take us far into moral philosophy. It is enough to remark that those vices are the exclusive possession of no period: so long as society is constituted in anything like its present order, there must be a section of it for which those vices are the main interest in life. But Charles Lamb’s gay and engaging defiance of the kill-joys of his day has this value: it is most certainly just to say that, in appreciating satiric comedy, ‘our coxcombical moral sense’ must be ‘for a little transitory ease excluded.’

  For one may apprehend the whole truth to be somewhat thus. Satiric comedy, or comedy of manners, is the art of making ludicrous in dramatic form some phase of life. The writers of our old comedy thought that certain vices — gambling, adultery, and the like — formed a phase of life which for divers reasons, essential and accidental, lent itself best to their purpose. They may, or may n
ot, have thought they were doing society a service: their real justification is that, as artists, they had to take for their art that material they could use best. They used it according to their lights: Wycherley with a coarse and heavy hand, so that it became nauseous; Etherege with a light touch and a gay perception; Congreve with an instinct of good-breeding, with a sure and extensive observation, and with an incomparable style. But all were justified in choosing for their material just what they chose. They sinned artistically, now here, now there; but to complain of this old comedy as a whole, that vice in it is crammed too closely, is to forget that a play is a picture, not a photograph, of life — is life arranged and coloured — and that comedy of manners is composed of foibles or vices condensed and relieved by one another. In so far as they overdid this work, the comic writers were artistically at fault, and Jeremy Collier was a good critic; but when he and his successors go beyond the artistic objection, one takes leave to say, they misapprehend the thing criticised. To complain that ‘love’ and common morality have no place in satiric comedy is either to contemplate ridicule of them or to ask comedy to be other than satiric. We know what happened when the dramatists gave way: there followed, Hazlitt says, ‘those do-me-good, lack-a-daisical, whining, make-believe comedies in the next age, which are enough to set one to sleep, and where the author tries in vain to be merry and wise in the same breath.’ These in place of ‘the court, the gala day of wit and pleasure, of gallantry, and Charles the Second!’ And all because people would not keep their functions distinct, and remember that at a comedy they were in a court of art and not in a court of law! The old comedy is dead, and its spirit gone from the stage: I have but endeavoured to show that no harm need come to our phylacteries, if a flame start from its ashes in the printed book.

  II.

  William Congreve was born at Bardsey, near Leeds, and was baptized on 10th February 1669 . The Congreves were a Staffordshire family, of an antiquity of four hundred years at the date of the poet’s birth. Richard, his grandfather, was a redoubtable Cavalier, and William, his father, an officer in the army. The latter was given a command at Youghal, while his son was still an infant, and becoming shortly afterwards agent to Lord Cork, removed to Lismore. So it chanced that the poet had his schooling at Kilkenny (with Swift), and proceeded to Trinity College, Dublin, in 1685, rejoining Swift, and like his friend becoming a pupil of St. George Ashe, the mathematician. In 1688 he left Dublin, remained with his people in Staffordshire for some two years, entered himself at the Temple, and came upon the town with The Old Bachelor in January 1692. The Double-Dealer was produced in November 1693. In 1694 a storm in the theatre led to a secession of Betterton and other renowned players from Drury Lane: with the result that a new playhouse was opened in Lincoln’s Inn Fields, on 30th April 1695, with Love for Love. In the same year Congreve was appointed ‘Commissioner for Licensing Hackney Coaches.’ The Mourning Bride was produced in 1697, and was followed, oddly enough, by the controversy, or rather ‘row,’ with Jeremy Collier. In March 1700 came The Way of the World. The poet was made Commissioner of Wine-Licences in 1705, and in 1714 with his Jamaica secretaryship and his places in the Customs and the delightful ‘Pipe-Office,’ he had an income of twelve hundred pounds a year. He died at his house in Surrey Street, Strand, on 19th January 1728 .