attention, and the wit so exuberant that it 'o'er-informs its tenement '.' Next year he gave another specimen of his abilities in The 12 Double Dealer, which was not received with equal kindness. He writes to his patron the lord Halifax a dedication 3, in which he endeavours to reconcile the reader to that which found few friends among the audience. These apologies are always useless, 'de gustibus non est disputandum'; men may be convinced, but they cannot be pleased, against their will. But though taste is obstinate it is very variable, and time often prevails when arguments have failed. Queen Mary conferred upon both those plays the honour of 13 her presence, and when she died soon after Congreve testified his gratitude by a despicable effusion of elegiack pastoral'; ''A fiery soul, which, working out its way, Fretted the pigmy body to decay, And o'er-informed the tenement of clay.' DRYDEN, Absalom and Achitophel, 1. 156. 2 Dryden wrote of it on Dec. 12 [1693] It is much censured by the greater part of the Town, and is defended only by the best judges, who, you know, are commonly the fewest; yet it gets ground daily, and has already been acted eight times.' Works, xviii. 189. See also ib. xi. 55 for Dryden's Epistle to my dear Friend Mr. Congreve on his Comedy called The Double Dealer. 'It was revised by John Kemble and acted at Drury Lane.' Biog. Dram. ii. 172. 3 This dedication he softened in a later edition. For its original violence see Swift's Works, xiv. 38 n. Swift, in his lines To Mr. Congreve (ib. p. 35), 'caught the tone of his friend.' will is justly pronounced by Dryden to be above the reach of human abilities.' The Rambler, No. 93. Johnson said of Foote :- Having no good opinion of the fellow I was resolved not to be pleased; and it is very difficult to please a man against his will.' Boswell's Johnson, iii. 69. 'It is seldom anything practically convinces a man that does not please him first.' SOUTH, Sermons, 1823, i. 166. S Congreve wrote A Prologue to Queen Mary, upon Her Majesty's coming to see The Old Bachelor after having seen The Double Dealer. Eng. Poets, xxxiv. 209. The night she saw The Double Dealer Cibber replaced one of the actors. Congreve so highly praised him that his salary was raised from fifteen to twenty shillings a week. Cibber's Apology, p. 109. Davies, the old actor, says of one of the scenes :-'A father talking obscenely to his daughter is something monstrous.' Dram. Misc. iii. 340. There are but four ladies in this play, and three of the biggest of them are whores.' COLLIER, A Short View, p. 12. 6 The Mourning Muse of Alexis, Eng. Poets, xxxiv. 131. Feb. 4 [1694-5]. Mr. Congreve received a gratuity of £100 from His Majesty for an accurate poem which he wrote on the death of the Queen.' 14 a composition in which all is unnatural, and yet nothing is new 1. In another year (1695) his prolifick pen produced Love for Love, a comedy of nearer alliance to life, and exhibiting more real manners than either of the former. The character of Foresight was then common. Dryden calculated nativities; both Cromwell and king William had their lucky days3; and Shaftesbury himself, though he had no religion, was said to regard predictions *. The Sailor is not accounted very natural, but he is very pleasant 5. 15 With this play was opened the New Theatre, under the direction of Betterton the tragedian'; where he exhibited two years afterwards (1697) The Mourning Bride, a tragedy, so written as to shew him sufficiently qualified for either kind of dramatick poetry.. 16 In this play, of which, when he afterwards revised it, he reduced the versification to greater regularity, there is more bustle' than See Ath. Oxon. i. Preface, p. 120. I Ante, MILTON, 181. Ante, DRYDEN, 191. In the first scene Foresight exclaims :'Sure the moon is in all her fortitudes,' and adds:-'I was born, Sir, when the Crab was ascending, and all my affairs go backward.' Works, i. 188. 3 'Cromwell expired upon the third day of September, 1658, a day he thought always very propitious to him, and on which he had twice triumphed for two of his greatest victories [Dunbar and Worcester].' CLARENDON, Hist. vii. 292. Swift, in his notes on Clarendon, twice calls Sept. 3 'Cromwell's lucky day.' Works, xii. 172-3. His first parliament was fixed to meet on Sept. 3, 1654, by the Instrument of Government, drawn up, not by himself, but by his supporters. It was,' Mr. C. H. Firth writes to me,' the people about Cromwell who had the superstition. I know no evidence that he shared it.' Burnet (Hist. ii. 424), relating William's invasion of England, says: -'The next day [Nov. 4], being the day in which the Prince was both born and married, he fancied, if he could land that day, it would look auspicious to the army.' 'He was as to religion a deist at best; he had the dotage of astrology in him to a high degree; he told me that a Dutch doctor had from the stars foretold him the whole series of his life.' Ib. i. 103. Dryden says to him in The Medal, 1. 263: Religion thou hast none.’ 5 For Lamb on the pleasant sailor' see Essays of Elia, ed. Ainger, p. 192. Macready brought out the play, 'adapted for representation,' in 18423. Macready's Reminiscences, ii. 208. "The chief actors, being oppressed by the patentees of Drury Lane, 'procured from King William a license for Mr. Congreve, Mr. Betterton and others to set up the New Theatre in Lincoln's Inn Fields, and, the house being fitted up from a Tennis Court, they opened it on April 30, 1695, with Love for Love? Roscius Anglicanus, p. 58. 'It ran on with such extraordinary success that they had seldom occasion to act any other play until the end of the season.' CIBBER, Apology, p. 116. Leigh Hunt wrote in 1840:-'It is always liked when players can be got for it.' Wycherley, &c., p. 88. Johnson says in his last note on 7 2 sentiment; the plot is busy and intricate' and the events take hold on the attention, but, except a very few passages, we are rather amused with noise and perplexed with stratagem than entertained with any true delineation of natural characters 3. This, however, was received with more benevolence than any other of his works, and still continues to be acted and applauded 5. But whatever objections may be made either to his comick or 17 tragick excellence they are lost at once in the blaze of admiration, when it is remembered that he had produced these four plays before he had passed his twenty-fifth year; before other men, even such as are some time to shine in eminence, have passed their probation of literature, or presume to hope for any other notice than such as is bestowed on diligence and inquiry. Among all the efforts of early genius which literary history records, I doubt whether any one can be produced that more surpasses the common limits of nature than the plays of Congreve. About this time began the long-continued controversy between 18 Collier and the poets'. In the reign of Charles the First the Puritans had raised a violent clamour against the drama3, which spear awakened at the call of Garrick.' Dryden's Works, i. 312n. Davies, after noticing some gross passages in the third act, continues:-'The talking obscenely in tragedy is peculiar to the English dramatists.' Dram. Misc. iii. 372. 'It continued acting uninterrupted thirteen days together.' Roscius Anglicanus, p. 59. 5 It was acted by John Kemble, of whom it was said: He looks majestically in Oswyn, and reminds the audience of the lines:"tall pile, Whose ancient pillars rear their marble heads, 19 they considered as an entertainment not lawful to Christians, an opinion held by them in common with the church of Rome'; and Prynne published Histrio-mastix, a huge volume, in which stage-plays were censured. The outrages and crimes of the Puritans brought afterwards their whole system of doctrine into disrepute, and from the Restoration the poets and the players were left at quiet; for to have molested them would have had the appearance of tendency to puritanical malignity 3. This danger, however, was worn away by time, and Collier, a fierce and implacable Nonjuror, knew that an attack upon the theatre would never make him suspected for a Puritan; he therefore (1698) published A short View of the Immorality and Profaneness of the English Stage, I believe with no other motive than religious zeal and honest indignation 5. He was formed for the stage as inconsistent with Christianity. Collier, in his Defence of a Short View, p. 87, quotes it (p. 89) where Gosson says of the stage :'We call that a slaughter-house where brute beasts are killed, and hold that a pastime, which is the very butchery of Christian souls.' Collier quotes a Pastoral Letter of the Bishop of Arras, written in 1695, against the stage, the Councils of the Primitive Church and the Fathers. A Short View, pp. 245-76. The intolerance of the Church of Pour jamais sous la tombe eût BOILEAU, Épître vii. 19, Euvres, 2 Histrio-mastix. The Player's Scourge was published in 1633. For the savage punishment it brought on Prynne see Gardiner's Hist. vii. 333. ... 3 Dr. South (no Puritan), speaking of 'the provoking of a lustful, incontinent person by filthy discourse, and that which equals and exceeds them all, the incentives of the stage,' continues:-'Now with great variety of such kind of traders for hell as these has the nation of late years abounded.' Sermons, 1823, ii. 36. 'As the stage now is,' said Tillotson, 'plays are intolerable, and not fit to be permitted in a civilized, much less in a Christian country.' Sermons, 1757, xi. 110. 'I never knew,' said Johnson, 'a Nonjuror who could reason.' When Collier was objected to him, he replied:-'He fought without a rival, and therefore could not claim the victory.' Boswell's Johnson, iv. 286. 5 For the attacks of Leigh Hunt and Hazlitt on Collier see Hunt's Wycherley, &c., pp. 81, 100, and for Macaulay's defence see his Essays, iii. 257. 'Hunt,' Macaulay wrote, 'is scandalously unjust to Jeremy Collier. I think Jeremy one of the greatest public benefactors in our history. Macvey Napier Corres. p. 331. For Blackmore's earlier attack on the stage see post, BLACKMORE, 15. Collier, in his condemnation of music, was not surpassed by George Fox. It is almost as dangerous as gunpowder.' A Short View, p. 279. a controvertist: with sufficient learning; with diction vehement and pointed, though often vulgar and incorrect'; with unconquerable pertinacity; with wit in the highest degree keen and sarcastick3; and with all those powers exalted and invigorated by just confidence in his cause. Thus qualified and thus incited he walked out to battle, and 20 assailed at once most of the living writers, from Dryden to Durfey *. His onset was violent: those passages, which while they stood single had passed with little notice, when they were accumulated and exposed together, excited horror; the wise and the pious caught the alarm, and the nation wondered why it had so long suffered irreligion and licentiousness to be openly taught at the publick charge 3. 36 'What a spite have these men to the God that made them! How do they rebel upon his bounty, and attack him with his own reason! These giants in wickedness, how would they ravage with a stature proportionable! They that can swagger in impotence, and blaspheme upon a mole-hill, what would they do if they had strength to their good will!' Ib. p. 85. Addison, in one of his pleasantest papers (The Guardian, No. 67), advocated a benefit for him. 'I myself,' he writes, 'remember King Charles II leaning on Tom D'Urfey's shoulder more than once, and humming over a song with him. It is certain that monarch was not a little supported by Joy to Great Caesar, which gave the Whigs such a blow as they were not able to recover that whole reign.' See also Pope's Works (Elwin and Courthope), iv. 416, for Pope's Prologue designed for Mr. D'Urfey's Last Play. Collier gives a whole section to him, ending by applying to him an imitation of Boileau (L'Art Poétique, iii. 426): 'Let him begone, and on two tressels Some Smithfield stage, where he A Short View, p. 208. 5 Swift wrote in 1709:-'I do not remember that our English poets ever suffered a criminal amour to succeed on the stage till the reign of Charles II. Ever since that time the alderman is made a cuckold, the deluded virgin is debauched, and adultery and fornication are supposed to be committed behind the scenes as part of the action.' Works, viii. 96. See also ib. i. 361 n., for a tradition that reached Scott through Kemble of obscene talk between a lady of rank in a box at the theatre and Congreve, who was placed at some little distance. Addison wrote in 1712:-'It is one of the most unaccountable things in our age, that the lewdness of our theatre should be so much complained of, so well exposed, and so little redressed.' The Spectator, No. 446. See also ante, ADDISON, 123 n. Lady Cowper who, in 1715, with the Princess of Wales, saw The Wanton Wife, recorded:-'It certainly is not more obscene than all comedies are.' Diary, p. 46. See also Pope's Works (Elwin and Courthope), ix. 350. |