Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 24.djvu/749

Rh pigeon or of a shaken prism, were it not that the many- coloured lights rather suggest the miasmatic radiance of a foul ditch shimmering in the sun. It is easy to share Macaulay's indignation at Wycherley's satyr-like defilement of art, and yet, at the same time, to protest against that disparagement of their literary riches which nullifies the value of Macaulay's criticism. And scarcely inferior to Tlie Country Wife is The Plain Dealer, produced in 1677, a play of which Voltaire said, " Je ne connais point de comiklie chez les anciens ni chez les moderns ou il y ait autant d esprit." Strong language, no doubt; but Voltaire lias prevented it from seeming too strong by turning the play into La Prude, and offering us in that a subject for comparison. No one has pointed out the immense influence of this comedy, as regards manipulation of dialogue, upon all our subsequent comedies of repartee, from those of Congreve and Vanbrugh to those of Douglas Jerrold and T. W. Robertson; and, as to characters, he who wants to trace the ancestry of Tony Lumpkin and Mrs Hardcastle has only to turn to Jerry Blackacre and his mother, while Manly (for whom Wycherley's early patron, the duke of Montausier, sat), though he is perhaps overdone, has dominated this kind of stage character ever since. If but few readers know how constantly the blunt sententious utterances of this character are reappearing, not on the stage alone, but in the novel and even in poetry, it is because a play whose motive is monstrous and intolerable can only live in a monstrous and intolerable state of society; it is because Wycherley's genius was followed by Nemesis, who always dogs the footsteps of the defiler of literary art. When Burns said—

" The rank is but the guinea stamp The man's the gowd for a that,"

when Sterne, in Tristram Shandy, said, "Honours, like impressions upon coin, may give an ideal and local value to a bit of base metal, but gold and silver will pass all the world over without any other recommendation than their own weight," what did these writers do but adopt— adopt without improving—Manly's fine saying to Freeman, in the first act: "I weigh the man, not his title; tis not the king's stamp can make the metal better or heavier"? And yet it is in the fourth and fifth acts that the coruscations of Wycherley's comic genius are the most dazzling; also, it is there that the licentiousness is the most astonishing. Not that the worst scenes in this play are really more wicked than the worst scenes in Vanbrugh's Relapse, but they are more seriously imagined. Being less humorous than Vanbrugh's scenes, they are more terribly and earnestly realistic; therefore they seem more wicked. They form indeed a striking instance of the folly of the artist who selects a story which cannot be actualized with out hurting the finer instincts of human nature. When Menander declared that, having selected his plot, he looked upon his comedy as three parts finished, he touched upon a subject which all workers in drama all workers in imagin ative literature of every kind would do well to consider. In all literatures ancient and modern an infinite wealth of material has been wasted upon subjects that are unworthy, or else incapable, of artistic realization; and yet Wycherley's case is, in our literature at least, without a parallel. No doubt it may be right to say, with Aristotle, that comedy is an imitation of bad characters, but this does not mean that in comedy art may imitate bad characters as earnestly as she may imitate good ones, a fact which Thackeray forgot when he made Becky Sharp a murderess, thereby destroying at once what would otherwise have been the finest specimen of the comedy of convention in the world. And perhaps it was because Vanbrugh was conscious of this law of art that he blended comedy with farce. Perhaps he felt that the colossal depravity of intrigue in which the English comedians indulged needs to be not only warmed by a superabundance of humour but softened by the playful mockery of farce before a dramatic circle such as that of the Restoration drama can be really brought within human sympathy. Plutarch's impeach ment of Aristophanes, which affirms that the master of the Old Comedy wrote less for honest men than for men sunk in baseness and debauchery, was no doubt unjust to the Greek poet, one side of whose humour, and one alone, could thus be impeached. But does it not touch all sides of a comedy like Wycherley's a Comedy which strikes at the very root of the social compact upon which civilization is built 1 As to comparing such a Comedy as that of the Restoration with the Comedy of the Elizabethans, Jeremy Collier did but a poor service to the cause he undertook to advocate when he set the occasional coarseness of Shakespeare alongside the wickedness of Congreve and Vanbrugh. And yet, ever since Macaulay's essay, it has been the fashion to speak of Collier's attack as being levelled against the immorality of the "Restoration dramatists." It is nothing of the kind. It is (as was pointed out so long ago as 1699 by Dr Drake in his little-known vigorous reply to Collier) an attack upon the English drama generally, with a special reference to the case of Shakespeare. While dwelling upon that noxious and highly immoral play Hamlet, Collier actually leaves unscathed the author of The Country Wife, but fastens on Congreve and Vanbrugh, whose plays profligate enough in all conscience seem almost decent beside a comedy whose incredible vis motrix is "the modish distemper."

That a stage, indeed, upon which was given with applause A Woman Killed with Kindness (where a wife dies of a broken heart for doing what any one of Wycherley's married women would have gloried in doing) should, in seventy years, have given with applause The Country Wife shows that in historic and social evolution, as in the evolution of organisms, "change" and "progress" are very far from being convertible terms. For the barbarism of the society depicted in these plays was, in the true sense of the word, far deeper and more brutal than any barbarism that has ever existed in these islands within the historic period. If civilization has any meaning at all for the soul of man, the Englishmen of Chaucer's time, the Anglo-Saxons of the Heptarchy, nay, those half-naked heroes, who in the dawn of English history clustered along the southern coast to defend it from the invasion of Cæsar, were far more civilized than that "race gangrenee" the treacherous rakes, mercenary slaves, and brazen strumpets of the court of Charles II., who did their best to substitute for the human passion of love (a passion which was known perhaps even to palæolithic man) the promiscuous intercourse of the beasts of the field. Yet Collier leaves Wycherley unassailed, and classes Vanbrugh and Congreve with Shakespeare!

It was after the success of The Plain Dealer that the turning-point came in Wycherley's career. The great dream of all the men about town in Charles's time, as Wycherley's plays all show, was to many a widow, young and handsome, a peer's daughter if possible, but in any event rich, and spend her money upon wine and women. While talking to a friend in a bookseller's shop at Tunbridge, Wycherley heard The Plain Dealer asked for by a lady who, in the person of the countess of Drogheda, answered all the requirements. An introduction ensued, then love-making, then marriage a secret marriage, for, fearing to lose the king's patronage and the income there from, Wycherley still thought it politic to pass as a bachelor. He had not seen enough of life to learn that in the long run nothing is politic but "straightforwardness." Whether because his countenance wore a pensive and