In malice witty, and with venom fraught, He makes me speak the things I never thought, . ... Finally, in the very latest appearance which Dryden made, in the epilogue to the Pilgrim, he sums up the whole matter in lines which certainly form the best summary of the Collier controversy : Perhaps the Parson stretched a point too far, He tells you that this very moral age Received the first infection from the stage, But sure a banished court, with lewdness fraught, It was easy to scold the poets, but if the race of theatregoers, the courtiers and the class who loved to follow and toady them, had not indicated the sort of pabulum they craved, the poets would never have dared so openly to worship the naked Venus of Whitehall. The century closes in depression of the literary class, and in scathing Puritanical criticism of the poets. But even this dark cloud has its bright side. It does not seem to have been noticed that never in the history of our literature were the leading imaginative writers of the country more united in friendship, more loyal to one another, than during these closing years of the seventeenth century. The aged Dryden and the young Congreve, Wycherley and Southerne, Dennis and Addison and Vanbrugh, men of diverse age and temper, engaged in competition with one another in the most difficult and invidious of professions, are found apparently without 9 130 LIFE OF CONGREVE. mutual suspicion, happily devoted to their business of literature, and expressing for one another an admiration which has all the appearance of a genuine feeling. In 1680, the literary world was torn with envy and jealousy ; in 1715, the elements of discord had broken out again. But Collier's attack seemed, while it lasted, to have the effect of silencing petty discords and of sealing among the poets themselves the bonds of personal affection. A CHAPTER IV. FTER all this storm and stress, a great calm seems to have fallen on Congreve. During the year 1699 we scarcely catch sight of him at all. He was doubtless occupied in strengthening and encouraging the Lincoln's Inn Theatre, to which he seems to have acted in some measure as manager. The play-houses suffered severely from the popular dislike which resulted from Collier's exposure; and both Tom Brown and Wright tell us how wretched business was throughout 1699, and what low tricks had to be employed to tempt people to come to the theatre. On the 18th of February, 1699, Peregrine Bertie, the King's Chamberlain, sent an order to both play-houses, calling the attention of the actors to the profane and indecent expressions often used in plays, and warning them to use such phrases no more, at their peril. In consequence, when Congreve's Double Dealer was revived on the 4th of March, these words were printed on the bills: "Written by Mr. Congreve; with several expressions omitted." In a letter to Mrs. Steward, Dryden notes this circumstance, and says that it is the first time that an author's name has ever been printed in a play-bill, "at least in England." Meanwhile a very strong writer, Farquhar, the last of the great dramatists, made his appearance with Love and a Bottle, and prepared the way for the brief revival of comedy which preceded the final catastrophe. At Lincoln's Inn Fields, at Christmas, 1699, a cast of Henry IV., with Betterton as Falstaff, proved highly popular, and the public began to drop in to the theatres once more. Congreve had undertaken, if his health permitted, to give Betterton's company a play every year, but three full years divided his Mourning Bride from The Way of the World. His health, although he was not yet thirty, was very unsatisfactory. Dryden tells Mrs. Steward, on the 7th of November, 1699, that Congreve is ill of the gout at Barnet Wells. The last and, as many critics have believed, the greatest of his comedies appeared, so far as we are able to discover, in the first week of March, 1700. On the 12th of that month Dryden writes to Mrs. Steward, "Congreve's new play has had but moderate success, though it deserves much better." On the 28th of March, according to the "Post Boy," the book of The Way of the World was published. When this play was acted, Congreve had but just completed his thirtieth year, and it was therefore at a very early age indeed that he voluntarily took leave of "the loathed stage." At the same age Terence had only produced the Andria, and Molière had done nothing. The work of these great masters of comic character was the result of ripened study of life; Congreve, rushing in on the wave of his wonderful intellectual vivacity, fell back into indolence and languor at the very moment when he should have been preparing himself for the greatest triumphs. Dennis, as Giles Jacob relates, said "a very fine and a very kind thing" on occasion of our poet's retirement, namely that "Mr. Congreve quitted the stage early, and that Comedy left it with him." Perhaps Dennis was not unwilling to snub the two swaggering playwrights in regimentals, Capt. Vanbrugh and Capt. Farquhar. But we should have known little or nothing of the cause of Congreve's retirement, if he himself, in his customary petulance at criticism, had not told us enough to throw light on the matter. The real reason was that, at first, The Way of the World was a comparative failure, and the original edition of the play partly explains why. In the preface, addressed to Ralph, Earl of Montague, indeed, the author declares "that it succeeded on the stage was almost beyond my expectation, for but little of it was prepared for that general taste which seems now to be predominant in the palates of our audience." But the whole tone of the dedication belies these words, and shows the poet anxious to defend himself against his born enemies, the critics, by any species of argument that might come to hand. It is possible that he was predisposed to expect failure, for the prologue, which begins Of those few fools, who with ill stars are cursed, is in a fine vein of ill-humour, and contains this fragment of self-description: He [Congreve himself] owns, with toil he wrought the following scenes, But if they're naught, ne'er spare him for his pains; |