CHAPTER XIII.

THE NEW DRAMA AND THE CORRECT POETS.

1. Contrast between the drama of Elizabeth and that of the Restoration. § 2. Sın GEORGE ETHEREGE. $3. WILLIAM WYCHERLEY: his life and works. The Country Wife and the Plain Dealer. § 4. SIR JOHN VANBRUGH. The Relapse, the Provoked Wife, the Confederacy, and the Provoked Husband. § 5. GEORGE FARQUHAR. The Constant Couple, the Inconstant, the Recruiting Officer, and the Beaux' Stratagem. § 6. WILLIAM CONGREVE: his life. 7. His works. The Old Bachelor. The Double Dealer. Love for Love. The Mourning Bride. § 8. JEREMY COLLIER'S attack of the stage: Congreve's reply. Congreve's Way of the World. §9. THOMAS OTWAY. The Orphan and Venice Preserved. § 10. NATHANIEL LEE. THOMAS SOUTHERNE. Isabella, or the Fatal Marriage, and Oroonoko. JOHN CROWNE. § 11. NICHOLAS ROWE. Jane Shore and the Fair Penitent. 12. MRS. APHRA BEHN, THOMAS SHADWELL, and GEORGE LILLO. Lillo's George Barnwell, the Fatal Curiosity, and Arden of Faversham. § 13. Character of English poetry of this era. Noble poets: EARL of ROSCOMMON. EARL of ROCHESTER. SIR CHARLES SEDLEY. DUKE of BUCKINGHAMSHIRE. EARL of DORSET. § 14. JOHN PHILIPS and JOHN POMFRET.

§ 1. In a previous chapter I have endeavored to sketch the immense revolution in dramatic literature, which is exemplified in the contrast between the age of Elizabeth and that of the Restoration. The theatre of the latter period, representing, as the theatre always must, the prevailing tone of sentiment and of society, is marked by the profound Corruption which distinguishes the reign of Charles II., and which was he natural reaction after the strained morality of the Puritan dominion. The new drama differed from the old not only in its moral tone, but quite as widely in its literary form. The aim of the great writers who are identified with the dawn of our national stage was to delineate nature and passion; and therefore, as nature is multiform, they admitted into their serious plays comic scenes and characters, as they admitted elevated feelings and language into their comedies. But at the Restoration the artificial distinction between tragedy and comedy was strongly marked, and generally maintained with the same severity as upon the stage of France, which had become the chief model of imitation. In the place of the Romantic Drama arose the exaggerated, heroic, and stilte Tragedy on the one hand, and on the other the Comedy of artificial ife, which, drawing its materials not from nature but from society, took for its aim the delineation not of character but of manners, which is indeed the proper object of what is correctly termed comedy in the strictest sense. Wit, therefore, now supplanted Humor; and England produced, during the seventeenth and part of the eighteenth centuries, a constellation of splendid dramatists. Their works are, it is true, now

become almost unknown to the general reader; which is to be attribute to their abominable profligacy; but no one can have any conception of the powers of the English language and the brilliancy of English wit, who has not made acquaintance with these pieces.

§ 2. This class of writers may be said to begin with SIR GEORC B ETHEREGE (1636–1694), who was a man of fashion, and employed as a diplomatist. He died of a fall at Ratisbon, where he was residing as plenipotentiary. His principal work was entitled the Man of Mode or Sir Fopling Flutter, that character being the impersonation of the fashionable coxcomb of the day. Great vivacity of dialogue, combined with striking and unexpected turns of intrigue, form the general peculiarity of all the comedies of this time. Dryden and his once popular rival Shadwell must be regarded as the link connecting the elder drama with the new style; and Etherege is the first who embodied the merits and defects of the latter; though Etherege was destined to be far outstripped both in the wit and gayety and in the immorality of his scenes.

§ 3. A greater writer than Etherege, but exhibiting similar characteristics, was WILLIAM WYCHERLEY (1640-1715), born in 1640, of a good Shropshire family. His father, probably disgusted with the gloomy Puritanism of the reigning manners, sent the future dramatist to be educated in France, where he was brought up in the brilliant household of the Duke of Montausier. Here the young man aban doned his national faith and embraced Catholicism, probably regard. ing the latter as more especially the religion of a gentleman and man of fashion. Returning to England, adorned with all the graces of French courtliness, and remarkable for the beauty of his person, Wycherley, while nominally studying the Law, became a brilliant figure in he gay and profligate society of the day. In his literary career we do not find indications of any great precocity of genius: his first comedy, Love in a Wood, was not acted until he had reached the age of about thirty-two; and the small number of his dramatic works, as well as the style of their composition, seems to prove that he was neither very original in conception, nor capable of producing anything otherwise than by patient labor and careful revision. Love in a Wood was followed, in 1673, the next year, by the Gentleman Dancing-Master, the plot of which was borrowed from Calderon. His two greatest a f most successful comedies are the Country Wife, acted in 1675, and the Plain Dealer, in 1677. Moving in the most brilliant society of his time, Wycherley was engaged in many intrigues, the most celebrated being that with the infamous Duchess of Cleveland, one of the innumerable mistresses of Charles II. His grace and gayety attracted the notice of the king; and he was selected to superintend the education of the young Duke of Richmond, Charles's natural child; but a secret marriage which he contracted with the Countess of Drogheda caused him to lose the favor of the court. His union with the lady, which `commenced in an accidental and even romantic manner, was not such as to secure either his happiness or his interest; and after her death

Wycherley fell into such distress as to have remained several years in confinement for debt. He was at last liberated partly by the assistance of James II.; and on this occasion, probably to gratify the king, he again rejoined the Catholic church, from which he had been temporarily reconverted. The remainder of Wycherley's life is melancholy and ignoble. Having long survived the literary types which were in fashion in his youth, with a broken constitution and an embarrassed fortune, he continued to thirst with vain impotence after sensual pleas· ure and literary glory. With the assistance of Pope, then a mer boy, but who had blazed out upon the world with sudden splendor Wycherley concocted a huge collection of stupid and obscene poems, wl ich fell dead upon the public. The momentary friendship and bitter quarrel of the old man and the young critic form a curious and instructive picture. Wycherley died in 1715, at an advanced age, having, on his very death-bed, married a young girl of sixteen, with the sole purpose of injuring his family, and preventing them from receiving his inheritance.

It is by the Country Wife and the Plain Dealer that posterity will judge the dramatic genius of Wycherley. Both these plays indicate great deficiency of original invention; for the leading idea of the first is evidently borrowed from the École des Femmes of Molière, and that of the second from the same author's Misanthrope. As Macaulay has excellently observed, nothing can more clearly indicate the unspeakable moral corruption of that epoch in our drama, and the degree in which that corruption was exemplified by Wycherley, than to observe the way in which he has modified, while he borrowed, the data of the great French dramatist. The character of Agnès is so managed as never to forfeit our respect, while the corresponding personage, Mrs. Pinchwife, is in the English comedy a union of the most incredible immorality with complete ignorance of the world; while the leading incident of the piece, the stratagem by which Horner blinds the jealousy of the husband, is of a nature which it is absolutely impossible to qualify in decent language. Nevertheless the intrigue of the piece is animated and amusing; the sudden and unexpected turns seem absolutely to take away one's breath; and the dialogue, as is invariably the case in Wycherley's productions, is elaborated to a high degree of liveliness and repartee. In the Plain Dealer is still more painfully appar ent that bluntness of feeling, or rather that total want of sensibility to inoral impressions, which distinguishes the comic drama of the Resto ration, and none of the writers in that drama more signally than Wych, erley. The tone of sentiment in Molière, as in all creators of the highest order, is invariably pure in its general tendency Alceste, in spite of his faults, is a truly respectable, nay, a noble character. Those very faults indeed are but a proof of the nobility of his disposition: "di vino dolce e l' iceto forte," says the Italian adage; and a generous heart, irritated past endurance by the smooth hypocrisy of social life, and bleeding from a thousand stabs inflicted by a cruel coquette, claim our sympathy even in the outbursts of its outraged feeling. But Wych.

erley borrowed Alceste; and in his hands the virtuous and injured hero of Molière has become "a ferocious sensualist, who believes himself to be as great a rascal as he thinks everybody else." "And to make the whole complete," proceeds our admirable critic, "Wycherley does not seem to have been aware that he was not drawing the portrait of an eminently honest man. So depraved was his moral taste, that, while he firmly believed that he was producing a picture of virtue toa exalted for the commerce of this world, he was really delineating the greatest rascal that is to be found, even in his own writings."

§ 4. The second prominent name in this constellation of brilliant comic writers, the stars of which bear a strong general resemblance to each other, is that of SIR JOHN VANBRUGH (1666-1726). He was the son of a rich sugar-baker in London, probably, as his name indicates, of Dutch descent; and was born, it is not quite certain whether in France or England, in 1666. He unquestionably passed some part of his youth in the former country; and he united in his own person the rarely combined talents of architect and dramatist. As an architect he is one of the glories of the English school of the seventeenth century; and to his picturesque imagination we owe many works which, though open to criticism on the score of irregularity and a somewhat meretricious luxuriance of style, will always be admired for their magnificent and princely richness of invention. Among the most remarkable of these are Castle Howard and Blenheim, the latter being the splendid palace constructed at the national expense for the Duke of Marlborough. While engaged in this work Vanbrugh was involved in violent altercations with that malignant old harpy, the Duchess Sarah; and his account of the quarrel is almost as amusing as a scene in one of his own comedies. Vanbrugh was appointed King-at-Arms, and was employed, both in this function and as an architect, in many honorable posts. Thus he was deputed to carry the insignia of the Garter to the Elector of Hanover, and was afterwards knighted by that prince when he became King of England as George I., who also appointed him Comptroller of the Royal Works. He died in 1726, just before the close of that reign.

Vanbrugh's comedies, the production of which commenced in 1697, are the Relapse, the Provoked Wife, Æsop, the Confederacy, and the first sketch of the Provoked Husband, left unfinished, and afterwards completed by Colley Cibber. It still keeps possession of the stage, and is one of the best and most popular comedies in the language. Vanbrugh's prin cipal inerit is inexhaustible liveliness of character and incident. His d'a logue is certainly less elaborate, less intellectual, and less highly în eled han that of Wycherley: but he excels in giving his personages a ready ingenuity in extricating themselves from sudden difficulties; and one great secret of the omic art he possesses to a degree hardly surpassed by Molière himself, viz., the secret depending upon skilful repetition an infallible talisman for exciting comic emotions. His fops, his booby squires, his pert chambermaids and valets, his intriguing ladies, his romps and his blacklegs are all drawn from the life, and delineated

with great vivacity; but there is a good deal of exaggeration in his characters, an exaggeration which we easily pardon in consideration of the amusement they afford us and the consistency with which their personality is maintained-the more easily perhaps, as these types no longer exist in modern society, and we look upon them with the same sort of interest as we do upon the quaint costumes and fantastic attitudes of a collection of old portraits. (In the Relapse Lord Foppington is an admirable impersonation of the pompous and suffocating coxcomb of those days. Sir Tunbelly Clumsy, the dense, brutal, ignorant country squire, a sort of prototype of Fielding's Western, forms an excellent contrast with him, and in Hoyden Vanbrugh has given the first specimen of a class of characters which he drew with peculiar skill, that of a bouncing rebellious girl, full of animal spirits and awaiting only the opportunity to break out of all rule. A variety of the same character is Corinna in the Confederacy, with the difference that Hoyden has been brought up in the country, while Corinna, in spite of her inexperience, is already thoroughly corrupted, and, as she says herself, "a devilish girl at bottom." The most striking character in the Provoked Wife is Sir John Brute, whose drunken, uproarious blackguardism was one of Garrick's best impersonations. The Confederacy is perhaps Vanbrugh's finest comedy in point of plot. The two old usurers and their wives, whose weakness is played upon by Dick Amlet and his confederate sharper Brass, Mrs. Amlet, the marchande de la toilette, the equivocal mother of her graceless scamp, Corinna, and the maid Flippanta― all the dramatis personæ are amusing in the highest degree. We feel indeed that we have got into exceedingly bad company; for all the men are rascals, and the women no better than they should be; but their life and conversation, "pleasant but wrong," are invariably animated and gay: and perhaps the very profligacy of their characters, by forbidding any serious sympathy with their fate, only leaves us freer to follow the surprising incidents of their career. The unfinished scenes of the comedy left by Vanbrugh, and afterwards completed under the title of the Provoked Husband, promised to be elaborated by the author into an excellent work. The journey to London of the country squire, Sir Francis Wronghead, and his inimitable family, is worthy of Smollett himself. The description of the cavalcade, and the interview between the new "Parliament-Man" in search of a place and the minister, are narrated with the richest humor. All the sentimental portions of the piece, the punishment and repentance of Lady Townley, and the contrast between her and her "sober" sisterin-law Lady Grace, were the additions of Colley Cibber, who lived at a time when the moral or sermonizing element was thought esser.ial in comedy. This part of the intrigue, however, had the honor of being the prototype of Sheridan's delightful scenes between Sir Pete and Lady Teazle in the School for Scandal. In brilliancy of dialogue Vanbrugh is inferior to Wycherley; but his high animal spirits, and his extraordinary power of contriving sudden incidents, more than compen. sate for the deficiency. In Vanbrugh perhaps there is more of mind but less of intellect.