Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 24.djvu/748

706 till 1672, it is exactly this kind of allusion to recent events which any dramatist with an eye to freshness of colour would be certain to weave into his dialogue. It is not that "the whole air and spirit of the piece belong to a period subsequent to that mentioned by Wycherley," but that "the whole air and spirit of the piece" belong to a man, an experienced and hardened young man of the world, and not to a boy who would fain pose as an experienced and hardened young man of the world. The real defence of Wycherley against his foolish impeachment of himself is this, that Love in a Wood, howsoever inferior in structure and in all the artistic economies to The Country Wife and The Plain Dealer, contains scenes which no inexperienced boy could have written- scenes which, not for moral hardness merely, but often for real dramatic ripeness, are almost the strongest to be found amongst his four plays. With regard to dramatic ripeness, indeed, if we were asked to indicate the finest touch in all Wycherley, we should very likely select a speech in the third scene of the third act of this very play, where the vain, foolish, and boastful rake Dapperwit, having taken his friend to see his mistress for the express purpose of advertising his lordship over her, is coolly denied by her and insolently repulsed. "I think," says Dapperwit, "women take inconstancy from me worse than from any man breathing."

Now, does the subsequent development of Wycherley's dramatic genius lead us to believe that, at nineteen, he could have given this touch, worthy of the hand that drew Malvolio 1 Is there anything in his two masterpieces The Country Wife or The Plain Dealer that makes it credible that Wycherley, the boy, could have thus delineated by a single quiet touch vanity as a chain-armour which no shaft can pierce vanity, that is to say, in its perfect development? However, Macaulay (forgetting that, among the myriad vanities of the writing fraternity, this of pre tending to an early development of intellectual powers that ought not to be, even if they could be, developed early is at once the most comic and the most common) is rather too severe upon Wycherley's disingenuousness in regard to the dates of his plays. That the writer of a play far more daring than Etheredge's She Would if She Could and far more brilliant too should at once become the talk of Charles's court was inevitable; equally inevitable was it that the author of the song at the end of the first act, in praise of harlots and their offspring, should touch to its depths the soul of the duchess of Cleveland. Possibly Wycherley intended this famous song as a glorification of Her Grace and her profession, for he seems to have been more delighted than surprised when, as he passed in his coach through Pall Mall, he heard the duchess address him from her coach window as a "rascal," a "villain," and as a son of the very kind of lady his song had lauded. For his answer was perfect in its readiness: "Madam, you have been pleased to bestow a title on me which belongs only to the fortunate." Perceiving that Her Grace received the compliment in the spirit in which it was meant, he lost no time in calling upon her, and was from that moment the recipient of those "favours" to which he alludes with pride in the dedication of the play to her. Voltaire's story (in his Letters on the English Nation) that Her Grace used to go to Wycherley's chambers in the Temple disguised as a country wench, in a straw hat, with pattens on and a basket in her hand, may be apocryphal, very likely it is, for disguise was quite superfluous in the case of the mistress of Charles II. and Jacob Hall, but it at least shows how general was the opinion that, under such patronage as this, Wycherley's fortune as poet and dramatist, "eminent for his quality and politeness," was now made.

Charles, who had determined to bring up his son, the duke of Richmond, like a prince, was desirous of securing for tutor a man so entirely qualified as was Wycherley to impart what was then recognized as the princely education, and it seems pretty clear that, but for the accident, to which we shall have to recur, of his meeting the countess of Drogheda at Bath and secretly marrying her, the educa tion of the young man would actually have been entrusted by his father to Wycherley as a reward for the dramatist's having written Love in a Wood.

Whether Wycherley's experiences as a naval officer, which he alludes to in his lines "On a Sea Fight which the Author was in betwixt the English and the Dutch," occurred before or after the production of Love in a Wood is a point upon which opinions differ, but on the whole we are inclined to agree with Macaulay, against Leigh Hunt, that these experiences took place not only after the production of Love in a Wood but after the production of The Gentleman Dancing Master, in 1G73. We also think, with Macaulay, that he went to sea simply because it was the "polite" thing to do so simply because, as he himself in the epilogue to The Gentleman Dancing Master says, "all gentlemen must pack to sea."

This second comedy is inferior to Love in a Wood, and for the reasons already discussed in connexion with the works of another dramatist (see VANBRUGH). In The Relapse, however, the artistic mistake of blending comedy and farce damages a splendid play, but leaves it a splendid play still. In The Gentleman Dancing Master this mingling of discordant elements destroys a play that would never under any circumstances have been strong, a play nevertheless which abounds in animal spirits, and is luminous here and there with true dramatic points.

It is, however, on his two last comedies The Country Wife and The Plain Dealer that must rest Wycherley's fame as a master of that comedy of repartee which, inaugurated by Etheredge, and afterwards brought to perfection by Congreve and Vanbrugh, supplanted the humoristic comedy of the Elizabethans. The Country Wife, produced in 1675, is so full of wit, ingenuity, animal spirits, and conventional humour that, had it not been for its motive a motive which in any healthy state of society must always be as repulsive to the most lax as to the most moral reader it would probably have survived as long as the acted drama remained a literary form in England. So strong, indeed, is the hand that could draw such a character as Marjory Pinchwife (the undoubted original not only of Congreve's Miss Prue but of Vanbrugh's Hoyden), such a character as Sparkish (the undoubted original of Congreve's Tattle), such a character as Horner (the undoubted original of all those cool impudent rakes with whom our stage has since been familiar), that Wycherley is certainly entitled to a place alongside Congreve and Vanbrugh. And, indeed, if priority of date is to have its fair and full weight, it seems difficult to challenge Prof. Spalding's dictum that Wycherley is "the most vigorous of the set."

In order to do justice to the life and brilliance of The Country Wife we have only to compare it with The Country Girl, afterwards made famous by the acting of Mrs Jordan, that Bowdlerized form of The Country Wife in which Garrick, with an object more praiseworthy than his success, endeavoured to free it of its load of unparalleled licentiousness by disturbing and sweetening the motive, even as Voltaire afterwards (with an object also more praiseworthy than his success) endeavoured to disturb and sweeten the motive of The Plain Dealer in La Prude. While the two Bowdlerized forms of Garrick and Voltaire are as dull as the AEsop of Boursault, the texture of Wycherley's scandalous dialogue would seem to scintillate with the changing hues of shot silk or of the neck of a