Mellefont alone is not a manifest libertine, while even he does his best to further Careless's designs on Lady Plyant. Jeremy Collier's remarks on Valentine are scarcely exaggerated and may apply to the whole group. "Valentine in Love for Love," he says, "is (if I may so call him) the hero of the play; this spark the poet would pass for a person of virtue, but he speaks too late. 'Tis true he was hearty in his affection for Angelica. Now without question to be in love with a fine lady of thirty thousand pounds is a great virtue! But then, abating this single commendation, Valentine is altogether composed of vice. He is a prodigal debauchee, unnatural and profane, obscene, saucy, and undutiful; and yet this libertine is crowned for the man of merit, has his wishes thrown into his lap, and makes the happy exit."

It is noteworthy that these heroes, while a thousand miles from the smallest pretension to virtue, have not even any conventional standard of honour. I do not remember that the expression "a man of honour," or any equivalent, occurs once in Congreve's plays. No line is drawn at which debauchery and fraud ought to cease. The character of Tattle shows that there is a certain prejudice against the man who brags of his amours; but even this enormity is regarded as a matter for ridicule, not for indignation. The social code of these fine gentlemen contains no provision for "cutting" a man or sending him to Coventry. There is, indeed, no social code, but a state of utter lawlessness. Swords are worn, and are once or twice drawn in the rage of baffled villainy, but never in vindication either of a man's honour or of a woman's. The duel, that overworked device of earlier and later

drama, is practically unknown to Restoration comedy. There is perhaps no completer proof of its moral anarchy than the fact that even those prejudices were in abeyance which involve an appeal to the sword.

Congreve regards life, as I have more than once said above, from a standpoint of complete ethical indifference; and it is in moods of indifference that we relish his comedies. In most of us such moods occur; nor need we be too much ashamed of them. This is, in fact, the sum and substance of Lamb's famous plea. There is a certain refreshment in an imaginary escape, once in a while, from the trammels of duty and decency, and an excursion into a realm in which, as there is no virtue save wit, there is no wickedness save stupidity. That is a good defence of Congreve, regarded retrospectively as a literary phenomenon; it was, or would have been, a very bad defence in days when each of his comedies was an interpretation of life and a social action. It was not, as we have seen, his own defence. He took his stand on the privileges, or rather the essential nature, of satire; to which it might have been replied, and Collier did in effect reply, that the essential nature of satire precludes indifference. Satire seeks, even if it be despairingly, to make the world better; whereas no such dream, assuredly, ever flitted through Congreve's brain. He simply obeyed the convention of his age which declared that the business of comedy was to depict, in more or less extravagant situations, the manners and customs of rogues and fools. How purely habitual, how independent of observation, was this view of life, may be judged from the fact

that The Old Bachelor (like Farquhar's Love and a Bottle a few years later) was written by a raw youth who had never been in London or seen anything of the society he was supposed to depict. Both playwrights afterwards observed, acutely and delicately; but in Congreve's case, at any rate, observation in no way altered the general view of society which he had formed in his mind's eye, before his physical eye had come within two hundred miles of the phenomenon to be recorded.

Whence came the convention of cynicism that dominated Restoration comedy? The general account of the matter is that given by Thackeray: “She was a disreputable, daring, laughing, painted French baggage, that Comic Muse. She came over from the Continent with Charles at the Restoration a wild, dishevelled Laïs, with eyes bright with wit and wine." I think it is high time that this off-hand theory were set down as what it is a libel on France. France no doubt gave a certain tone to the social corruption of the period; but the licence of the stage did not come from France, for the very good reason that it did not exist, in anything like such brutal and brazen forms, on the other side of the Channel. It was the old semi-barbarous coarseness of the Jacobean comedy that broke out afresh with the reopening of the theatres. It becomes, perhaps, in one or two writers-in Otway, and even in Dryden — somewhat nastier than it was apt to be in the Jacobeans. But it distresses us more in the Restoration dramatists, I believe, not because it is really grosser but because the manners of the period were no longer frankly barbarous, but had put on a veneer of civilization.

In the Restoration comedy, the English theatre was really lagging behind the age, and paying for the extraordinary rapidity of its development a century earlier, in the spacious but still semi-mediæval times of great Elizabeth. The traditions of that and the succeeding reign were too firmly established to keep pace with the amelioration of manners which (whatever the surface corruption of the Court) was all the time going on. It has too often been England's fate to rush ahead of other nations for a brief spurt, and then to drop notably behind, and in this case the retardation was peculiarly unfortunate; for it widened and perpetuated the breach between puritanism and the stage which has been such a disastrous factor in English theatrical history. It is because serious and thoughtful people have persistently held aloof from the theatre, that the English drama has for two centuries suffered from an intellectual paralysis, from which it is only now recovering. Congreve, in short, with all his wit and elegance of style, is to be regarded (with Vanbrugh) rather as the last of the ancients than as the first of the moderns. With Steele and Farquhar, as I have tried to show in my introduction to the latter writer,' a new spirit came into comedy the spirit of meliorism, so utterly foreign to Congreve. Farquhar, unfortunately, died early, and Steele devoted most of his energies to carrying out that differentiation between the essay and the drama for which the time was now ripe.

In Congreve the differentiation was still very imperfect. How many of his pages are Spectator essays in dialogue, the action, and even the development of

1 In The Mermaid Series of English dramatists.

individual character, standing absolutely still, while the personages indulge in general discussions of the follies and foibles of the day! When Steele and Addison had once for all established the periodical essay as an instrument of social introspection, it seemed somehow to sap the vitality of comedy. This. was doubtless one of the reasons why the reviving moral health of comedy, in Steele and Farquhar, could not prevent its intellectual decline. Soon a still more formidable competitor came into the field, in the shape of the novel of manners; and its dominion lasted for a century and a half. Save for one or two bright flashes in the late eighteenth century, the English drama may almost be said to have been extinct between the retirement of Congreve and our own day. In Congreve the Elizabethan impulse expired. To-day the late-Victorian impulse is gathering momentum

to what issues, who can say ?

William Archer