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 Rh It was in the drawing of female character that Vanbrugh excelled. Berinthia, in The Relapse whom the heroine of the play admits to be "much handsomer" than herself, is one of the most deliciously-drawn women in modern drama or fiction. Then there is Lady Brute, the provoked wife, and her maiden friend: their conversation is loose, it is true, and the wife does not teach the unmarried woman very good lessons; yet there is a freedom in their sprightliness from all such obtrusive filth as Wycherley's. Do not understand me as recommending to you the works of Vanbrugh; but I do not think he has done, or can do, much harm. At least he was a gentleman, and a man not without deep and true feeling—stunted by adverse circumstances. And this penetrates all his writings—a quiet leaven leavening the whole lump.

Of Otway, Shadwell, Aphra Behn and several others of inferior talent, who follow in the wake of Wycherley and Congreve, I have not space to speak. If obscenity, with wit as an ally, produced a result so little to be admired, obscenity and dulness combined must be indeed contemptible. Let the Dunciad bear these smaller fry to their own Lethean stream. There may be something to be said for Champagne; but we do not want gooseberry-wine.

IV.

I now come to a very important section of our subject—to that large majority of the English novelists of the eighteenth century who were, in a greater or less degree, disciples of the school of Pantagruel. The tendency of some of De Foe's fictions is very questionable; but his aim was always virtuous and his free descriptions are to be attributed to the inferior delicacy of the times: we must not, I think, include him in our list; and, in any case, his Robinson Crusoe—so sweet, so simple, so pure—should cover a multitude of sins.

I consider this part of our subject especially important because the writers whom it includes have obtained a more extended acceptation—their works being more generally