Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition/Sir John Vanbrugh

VANBRUGH, (1666–1726), dramatist and architect, was the son of a wealthy sugar-baker in Cheshire and grandson of a Protestant refugee of Ghent. From a passage in one of his letters to Tonson it might be supposed that he was born in the Bastille, though in what year is uncertain, probably in 1666. He was educated in France, but what he learnt there, whether architecture or merely that art of good-fellowship which he found to be the true Aladdin's lamp of social life, is a question that will be variously answered by those who, like Sir Joshua Reynolds, admire Blenheim and Castle Howard, and those who, like the wits of Vanbrugh's time, scoff at them. This, however, is certain, that after his return from the Continent to England what he did was, not to pursue architecture, but to work, with a gusto and a success that are humorous and exhilarating, the &ldquo;Aladdin's lamp&rdquo; above mentioned. His first step towards becoming a power in society was, of course, to enter the army. Perhaps, however, had he begun life in any other way his advance would have been just as rapid. For, strong as are social conditions, character is stronger still, and Vanbrugh's equipment &mdash; wit, tempered by good humour, a genuine feeling of comradeship, an exceedingly fine presence (according to Noble's description), and a winsome face (according to Kneller's portrait) &mdash; would, under any circumstances, have been irresistible. One of the points of difference between the dialogue in Vanbrugh's comedies and the dialogue in the comedies of Congreve is this: we feel that the characters in the Relapse and the Confederacy talk as Vanbrugh must have talked; we feel that the characters in the Old Bachelor and the Way of the World talk, not as Congreve talked, but as Congreve wrote. We feel that, while such dazzling sword-play as Congreve's would in society have chilled, even as it illumined the air, talk so hearty, good-humoured, frank, and daring as that we get in Vanbrugh's plays would have made the fortune of any man of fashion, made it as certainly at a Roman supper party in the time of Augustus as at a London drinking-bout in the days of

Queen Anne. It is no wonder then that he was a favourite, no wonder that the two best haters of the time, Swift and Pope, tried in vain to hate the &ldquo;man of wit and honour,&rdquo; Yanbrugh. During the martial period of his life, Vanbrugh wrote the first sketches of the Relapse and the Provoked Wife. These he showed to Sir Thomas Skipworth, one of the shareholders of Drury Lane, and with fortunate results.

In 1695 he was offered &mdash; whether through the court interest which he had secured or whether because he really had acquired a knowledge of architecture in France is not known &mdash; the post of secretary to the commission for endowing Greenwich Hospital. He accepted the post, and by way of fulfilling his functions as an architect turned his attention to the amours of &ldquo;Lord Foppington.&rdquo; His Relapse or Virtue in Danger, a sequel to Colley Cibber's Love's Last Shift, was produced at Drury Lane in 1697. When a comic dramatist of the school of Wycherley confesses that the fine gentleman of his play, &ldquo;drinking his mistresses' health in Nantes brandy from six in the morning to the time he waddled on upon the stage in the evening, had toasted himself up to such a pitch of vigour&rdquo; that something too outrageous even for such an audience seemed imminent, we may assume that he has enjoyed a satisfactory first night. The success was so triumphant that Montague, afterwards Lord Halifax, asked at once for the Provoked Wife for the theatre in Lincoln's Inn Fields, and &mdash; Skipworth waiving, for the advantage of Vanbrugh, his own claim upon the play &mdash; it was produced at that theatre in the following year. All that could be said in answer to those who condemned it on account of its unblushing libertinism was that Sir John Brute is sufficiently brutal to drive any woman into rebellion, and that since the glorious days of the Restoration a wife's rebellion and a wife's adultery were synonymous terms. The play was a complete triumph.

And now, having succeeded as a man of fashion, as an architectural commissioner, and as a comic dramatist of the school of Wycherley, Vanbrugh turned his attention to morals. Though Æsop &mdash; produced at Drury Lane in the .same year as the Provoked Wife &mdash; was an adaptation of Boursault's dramatic sermon on the same subject, it was an improvement on the French play. As usual with Vanbrugh, who never did things by halves, he surpassed the Frenchman on that very point where the Frenchman had been pronounced unsurpassable. Just as in the Relapse, when he aspired to be merry, his merriment had entirely surpassed that of Cibber's play, of which his own was meant to be a sequel, and just as afterwards, when in Castle Howard and Blenheim he aspired to rival in massiveness the &ldquo;thick rotundity of the earth,&rdquo; he laid on her a structure only a &ldquo;few tons lighter than herself,&rdquo; so now, when he aspired to surpass the Frenchman in gravity, he achieved a kind of dulness compared with which the owl-like dulness of Boursault was as the wit of Voltaire. In a word, the humour of the piece lies in the fact that it was written by the author of the Relapse and the Provoked Wife. The play ran during a week only. Vanbrugh, accepting the failure with his usual good-temper, seems then to have turned his attention completely to architecture; for the adaptation in 1700 of the Pilgrim of Beaumont and Fletcher, and the production in 1702 of A False Friend, could hardly have engaged his serious efforts at all, so perfunctory are they and so inferior to all that he had done before.

Castle Howard in Yorkshire, which he had built for the earl of Carlisle, was a great success so far as pleasing his patron went, who as a reward gave him yet another opening in life by presenting him, &mdash; the most ignorant man perhaps in England of heraldry, judging from the fun he

made of the appointment, &mdash; with the tabard of Clarencieux king-at-arms. But, if the dangerous moment in every man's life is when he has just scored a brilliant success, it is especially so with genial glowing natures like Vanbrugh's. It seems to have been the success of Castle Howard that caused him to entertain the rash project of building a theatre, from his own design, for the acting of his own plays. The joyous courage with which, having persuaded thirty people in the fashionable world to aid him in finding the money, and Congreve to aid him in finding the plays, he began to build in perfect unconsciousness of the danger before him is the only passage in his life which may be called pathetic, save of course his struggle with the &ldquo;wicked woman of Marlborough.&rdquo; No doubt any architect who builds a theatre is always in danger of letting his ideas run riot in the wide field of experiment, but he who builds a theatre for his own plays seems doomed by the malice aforethought of fate. The magnitude of Vanbrugh's architectural ideas grew as the work went on, and with the ideas the structure grew till a theatre meant for the delicate bijouterie work of polite comedy seemed growing to the proportions of the Roman Colosseum. Whether Congreve endeavoured to put a check upon his friend's architectural and authorial fervour does not appear. But it must be remembered that not only Vanbrugh's plays but his own were to be acted there, and that, although Congreve was a man of great sagacity, no man, not even he who pretended to set his gentility above his genius, is sagacious when confronted by the surpassing excellence of his own poems and plays.

When at length the time came to test the acoustics of the pile, it was found to be sadly defective. What changes were made to rectify the errors of structure does not appear. The theatre was opened to the public with an Italian opera, which was followed by three of Molière's comedies, and these by the Confederacy, Vanbrugh's masterpiece on the whole, though perhaps its finest scenes are not equal to the finest scenes in the Relapse.

Vanbrugh at last withdrew from the disastrous speculation; Congreve had already withdrawn. But a man to whom fortune had been so kind as she had been to Vanbrugh could hardly be depressed by any of her passing frowns. Queen Anne at once sent him abroad on an important state errand, and afterwards he was commissioned to build Blenheim. Upon the merits and demerits of this famous &ldquo;hollowed quarry&rdquo; there has been much conflict of opinion. As to the sarcasms by Swift, Walpole, Evans, and the rest, they are as nothing when set against Sir Joshua Reynolds's defence of Vanbrugh and his style. For in England the general sense for architecture seems to be even rarer than the general sense for poetry and painting. The truth is that Vanbrugh imported largely into architecture what in all the plastic arts should be allowed to fructify but sparsely, namely, literary ideas, and even these literary ideas of his seem to lack that fusion which we see in the works of the great masters. Hence, impressive as are the parts, they do not form an impressive whole. Blenheim, however, was a source of great sorrow to the kindly dramatist. Though Parliament had voted for the building of it, no provision had been made for the supplies. The queen while she lived paid them, and then Vanbrugh was left to the meanness of the duke of Marlborough and afterwards to the insolence of the &ldquo;wicked woman,&rdquo; who did her best to embitter his life. Besides Castle Howard and Blenheim, he built many other country mansions, such as Grimsthorpe and Duncombe Hall in Yorkshire, Eastbury in Dorsetshire, Seaton-Delaval in Northumberland, King's Weston near Bristol, Oulton Hall in Cheshire, &amp;c.

About the end of 1710 Vanbrugh married Henrietta

Maria, daughter of Colonel Yarborough of Haslington, and four years afterwards, at the accession of George I., he was knighted. He afterwards wrote again for the stage, and the unfinished fragment left at his death, which took place on 26th March 1726 at his house in Scotland Yard, London, shows that his powers remained to the last as fine as ever.