Page:The Dial (Volume 75).djvu/477

Rh of his time, had to sacrifice its peculiar force, which had lain in its thoroughgoing cynicism. is really little more than a domesticated version of Wycherley's, with the difference that in Joseph Surface is the hero instead of the villain. As it is, he remains about the most amusing thing in the later comedy and expounds his subversive point of view with far more wit and persuasiveness than quite accords with the vindication of a latter-day morality. In Wycherley, the rustic Mrs Pinchwife drops like ripe fruit for the city gallant, as Lady Teazle should have done, too, if Sheridan had carried out his comic logic.

Congreve and Wycherley were the supreme glorification of Joseph Surface's point of view, except that with them Joseph Surface was not under the necessity of becoming a hypocrite as well ad a cynic: he is frankly out to seduce an attractive woman or to induce a rich one to marry him. And this, expressed with far greater intensity and with far more literary brilliance than Sheridan was ever able to muster, is what gives the comedy of the Restoration its unique importance. There is in English drama no other equally complete rendering of this comic point of view: even Maugham and Oscar Wilde have had to compromise with the domestic virtues. But in Congreve and in Wycherley all the conventional values are inverted: it is the holiday of the worldly and it has all the exhilaration of a holiday. What could be more gratifying and more cheerful than these husbands and wives who are never faithful, these young men whose intentions are never honourable, these coquettes who never want to marry? What could be more bracing than this contact with a world where the most primitive of human instincts are subjected in their nakedness to the scrutiny of the subtlest and most civilized intelligence, where there is no intermediary of the spirit to bridge the gulf between the mind and the body, where there is no obscurement by romantic emotion either savage or sentimental?

New York has now become sufficiently corrupt to enjoy these remarkable comedies. The Phoenix Society in London has recently revived Congreve's. Why may we not do the same? Sheridan has become very tiresome and was never quite first-rate at best.