Born, in London, Jan. 1664; baptized, 24 Jan. Probably spent some time in Paris in youth; afterwards served in Army. Play, “The Relapse,” performed at Drury Lane, Dec. 1696; “Æsop,” Drury Lane, Jan. 1697; “The Provok’d Wife,” Lincoln’s Inn Fields, May 1697; “The False Friend,” Drury Lane, Jan. 1702. Practised as an architect. Built Castle Howard, Blenheim, and other important houses. Appointed Controller of Royal Works, 1702. Play, “Squire Trelooby” (written with Congreve and Walsh), produced at Lincoln’s Inn Fields, 30 March 1704; “The Country House,” 1705. Built a theatre in the Haymarket. His play, “The Confederacy,” produced there, 30 Oct. 1705; “The Mistake,” 27 Dec. 1705. Clarencieux King-at-Arms, 1705–26. To Hanover, on embassy to convey Order of Garter to the Elector, May 1706. Knighted, 19 Sept. 1714. Surveyor of Gardens and Waters, 1715. Surveyor of Works, Greenwich Hospital, 1716. Member of Kit-Kat Club. Married Henrietta Maria Yarburgh, 14 Jan. 1719. Died, in London, 26 March 1726. Buried in St. Stephen’s, Walbrook. Works: “The Relapse” (anon.), 1697 (afterwards known, in Sheridan’s adaptation, as “A Trip to Scarborough”); “The Provok’d Wife” (anon.), 1697; “Æsop,” 1697; “A Short Vindication of ‘The Relapse’ and ‘The Provok’d Wife’” (anon.), 1698; “The Pilgrim” (adapted from Dryden; anon.), 1700; “The False Friend” (anon.), 1702; “The Confederacy” (anon.), 1705; “The Mistake” (anon.), 1706; “The Country House” (trans. from the French of Carton D’Ancourt), 1715. Posthumous: “The Provok’d Husband” (completed by Cibber from Vanbrugh’s “A Journey to London”), 1728; “The Cornish Squire” (trans. from Molière), 1734. Collected Works: in 2 vols., ed. by W. C. Ward, 1893.
| Under this stone, reader, survey | |
| Dead Sir John Vanbrugh’s house of clay: | |
| Lie heavy on him, Earth, for he | |
| Laid many a heavy load on thee. |
A silly fellow, who is the architect at Woodstock.
The only architect in the world who could have built such a house, and the only friend in the world capable of contriving to lay the debt upon one to whom he was so highly obliged.
The Relapse, 1697
The character of Amanda is interesting, especially in the momentary wavering and quick recovery of her virtue. This is the first homage that the theatre had paid, since the Restoration, to female chastity; and notwithstanding the vicious tone of the other characters, in which Vanbrugh has gone as great lengths as any of his contemporaries, we perceive the beginnings of a re-action in public spirit, which gradually reformed and elevated the moral standard of the stage.
We know of no better comic writing in the world than the earlier scenes of Lord Foppington in the “Relapse.”
Of Vanbrugh’s ten or eleven plays, that which has longest kept the stage is the “Relapse,” still acted, in its altered form, by Sheridan, as the “Trip to Scarborough.” The piece was produced at the Theatre de l’Odeon, in Paris, in the spring of 1862, as a posthumous comedy of Voltaire’s! It was called the “Comte de Boursoufle,” and had a “run.” The story ran with it that Voltaire had composed it in his younger days for private representation, that it had been more than once played in the houses of his noble friends, under various titles, that he had then locked it up, and that the manuscript had only recently been discovered by the lucky individual who persuaded the manager of the Odeon to produce it on his stage? The bait took. All the French theatrical world in the capital flocked to the Faubourg St. Germain to witness a new play by Voltaire. Critics examined the plot, philosophized on its humor, applauded its absurdities, enjoyed its wit, and congratulated themselves on the circumstances that the Voltairean wit especially was as enjoyable then as in the preceding century! Of the authorship they had no doubt whatever; for, said they, if Voltaire did not write this piece, who could have written it? The reply was given at once from this country; but when the mystification was exposed, the French critics gave no sign of awarding honor where honor was due, and probably this translation of the “Relapse” may figure in future French editions as an undoubted work of Voltaire.
“The Relapse” is a delightful play to read; its spirit is sustained without effort to the end; and although the characters are somewhat farcical, yet are they more so than many an anomaly we all and each of us meet in every day life? Lord Foppington, for instance, is a delicious coxcomb; but that man must be deaf, blind and insensible, who cannot in his own experience verify a Lord Foppington in absurdity, conceit, and stolid selfishness. This character is perhaps a reflex of the Sir Fopling Flutter of Etheredge; more so however in the externals than in the inner structure of the specimen.
“The Relapse” must, I think, be pronounced Vanbrugh’s best comedy. Lord Foppington is a humorous conception, and the whole dialogue is animated and to the point. One sees where Sheridan got his style. There are more brains, if less sparkle, in Vanbrugh’s repartees than in Sheridan’s.
The play remained a prime favourite with the public throughout the eighteenth century, and has passed through several transformations. A three-act farce, called “The Man of Quality,” was carved out of it by Lee and given at Covent Garden in 1776; and in the following year Sheridan, reflecting that it was “a pity to exclude the productions of our best writers for want of a little wholesome pruning,” recast it as “A Trip to Scarborough.” The original play was seen at the Olympic in 1846, and at the Strand as late as 1850. A version by Mr. John Hollingshead, also called “The Man of Quality,” was produced at the Gaiety on 7 May 1870 with Miss Nellie Farren as Miss Hoyden, a part in which Mrs. Jordan had excelled; and another, called “Miss Tomboy,” by Mr. Robert Buchanan, at the Vaudeville on 20 March 1890.
The Provoked Wife, 1697
In 1725 we were called upon, in a manner that could not be resisted, to revive the “Provoked Wife,” a comedy which, while we found our account in keeping the stage clear of those loose libertines it had formerly too justly been charged with, we had laid aside for some years. The author, sir John Vanbrugh, who was conscious of what it had too much of, was prevailed upon to substitute a new written scene in the place of one in the fourth act, where the wantonness of his wit and humour had (originally) made a rake talk like a rake, in the borrowed habit of a clergyman; to avoid which offence, he clapt the same debauchee into the undress of a woman of quality. Now the character and profession of a fine lady not being so indelibly sacred as that of a churchman, whatever follies be exposed in the petticoat, kept him at least clear of his former profaneness, and were now innocently ridiculous to the spectator.
Has some merit as a comedy; it is witty and animated, as Vanbrugh usually was; the character of Sir John Brute may not have been too great a caricature of real manners, such as survived from the debased reign of Charles; and the endeavor to expose the grossness of the older generation was itself an evidence, that a better polish had been given to social life.
The characters in this play, especially that of sir John Brute, are drawn with consummate skill, and the dialogue is easy, brilliant, and natural: but the plot is more licentious in its conduct and situations than any contemporary production with which we are acquainted, and absolutely demoralising in the principle of domestic retaliation it attempts to justify. A surly and unfeeling husband is here retorted upon by his wife, who sacrifices her own honour by way of taking revenge upon him for his ill-treatment of her: and this mode of avenging herself is admitted by the catastrophe to be perfectly reasonable and correct.
“The Provoked Wife,” to my own feelings and taste, is a nauseous production. Sir John Brute, the chief person, is a monster-curiosity, and fit only for a museum. There are anomalies in the world, it is true, and Sir John Brute is one: he is an awful hog. His wife is an natural character, and tells her own tale clearly and well. The other characters, Belinda (her niece), Constant, Heartfree, and Lady Fanciful, are little better than common stock from the dramatic warehouse. The play is considerably licentious, and yet the spirit of its moral is less revolting, from the tone of unselfishness and an unconsciously developed tone of justice towards the party against whom the question is always begged, a frankness and liberality of sentiment that one may look for in vain in the heartless and passionless intrigueries of Congreve.
A licentious comedy in which Betterton created, with great success, the role of Sir John Brute, and which was later to be revived by Garrick so that he might delight his admirers in the same character. It was a scandalous piece, yet it had so much genuine humor that Garrick ventured to add it to his repertoire, with some of the original grossness left out.
The Confederacy, 1705
A more hopeless crew of unprincipled riff-raff surely never were assembled in any single list of dramatis personæ. Not one individual has the least claim upon our respect, nor is it looked for or required; not one even upon our interest, beyond the amusement of watching their escapes from their rascally slip-shod contrivances; and, really, these are sustained with considerable humour.
The dialogue is distinguished by the author’s usual vivacity. Dick Amlet and his mother make a choice pair, and Flippanta the lady’s-maid is a fine specimen of the effrontery of her kind. The morality of this comedy is on Vanbrugh’s usual level, which may be described as about the lowest to which English comedy has ever sunk; and the rascally Dick is made perfectly happy at the close.
Architecture
| For building famed, and justly reckon’d | |
| At court, Vitruvius the Second: | |
| No wonder, since wise authors shew, | |
| That best foundations must be low: | |
| And now the duke has wisely ta’en him | |
| To be his architect at Blenheim. | |
| But, raillery for once apart, | |
| If this rule holds in every art; | |
| Or if his grace were no more skill’d in | |
| The art of battering walls than building, | |
| We might expect to see next year | |
| A mouse-trap man chief engineer. |
Belongs only to this work in a light that is by no means advantageous to him. He wants all the merit of his writings to protect him from the censure due to his designs. What Pope said of his comedies is much more applicable to his buildings—
| “How Van wants grace!”— |
“We staid two nights in Woodstock; but there was an order to the servants, under her grace’s own hand, not to let me enter Blenheim! and lest that should not mortify me enough, she having somehow learned that my wife was of the company, sent an express the night before we came there, with orders that if she came with the Castle Howard ladies, the servants should not suffer her to see either house, gardens, or even to enter the park: so she was forced to sit all day long and keep me company at the inn!” This was a coup-de-théatre in this joint comedy of Atossa and Vanbrugh! The architect of Blenheim, lifting his eyes towards his own massive grandeur, exiled to a dull inn, and imprisoned with one who required rather to be consoled, than capable of consoling the enraged architect.
Vanbrugh’s attempt, therefore, seems to have been an effort of genius: and if we can keep the imagination apart from the five orders, we must allow that he has created a magnificent whole; which is invested with an air of grandeur seldom seen in a more regular style of building. Its very defects, except a few that are too glaring to be overlooked, give it an appearance of something beyond common; and as it is surrounded with great objects, the eye is struck with the whole, and takes the parts upon trust. What made Vanbrugh ridiculous, was his applying to small houses a style of architecture which could not possibly succeed but in a large one.
There is, however, no doubt but that Vanburgh was justly accused by the Duchess of extravagance in many instances, and of exceeding his commission in others. She even taxed him with building one entire court at Blenheim without the Duke’s knowledge. She detected his bad taste and grasping spirit, and despised his mismanagement,—of which latter the best proof was, that when, upon the death of the Duke, the whole charge of the building fell into her hands, she completed it in the manner, and at the reduced expense, which has been described. That “wicked woman of Marlborough,” as Sir John Vanbrugh termed the Duchess, had perhaps no greater error in his eyes than the penetration with which she discovered his narrow pretensions, his inadequacy, and wanton waste, not to say peculation.
Sir John Vanbrugh’s merits as an architect—his fire, his daring, his picturesqueness, his solidity and grandeur—have been recognised and very handsomely acknowledged by the best judges of art. Sir Joshua Reynolds’s judgment of him, though often quoted, may be quoted once again:—“In the buildings of Vanbrugh, who was a poet as well as an architect, there is a greater display of imagination than we shall find perhaps in any other; and this is the ground of the effect we feel in many of his works, notwithstanding the faults with which many of them are charged.” It was the peculiarity of Vanbrugh’s genius that he was a poet even more than a builder, and designed a palace as he designed a play—in masses, with so much unity of thought in the stone construction as he would have studied in his action and dialogue, the whole relieved and enlivened by artistic contrasts and surprises. No man, probably, not a slave of rules, will deny to Blenheim and to Castle Howard a certain splendour and originality not to be seen in the works of common men. Seen from the bridge, or from the grassy upland above the bridge, what secular edifice in England will compare in force, solidity, and cheeriness, with the front of Blenheim? Is it not wonderfully bright, and bold, and various, striking in the detail and in the mass? Does it not gloriously cap and adorn the voluptuous site on which it stands? Does not the work, too, thoroughly embody the idea out of which it grew—the memorial of a nation’s gratitude and of a hero’s deeds?
The year 1702 presents our author in a new character. Of his architectural studies we know absolutely nothing, unless we may accept Swift’s account, who pretends that Vanbrugh acquired the rudiments of the art by watching children building houses of cards or clay. But this was probably ironical. However he came by his skill, in 1702 he stepped into sudden fame as the architect of Castle Howard.
The verdict of Vanbrugh’s literary rivals as to the architectural merit of Blenheim was wholly unfavourable. In the minds of less prejudiced critics there has been great divergence of opinion; but it must be conceded that Vanbrugh hardly rose to his opportunities. The general plan of a grand central edifice, connected by colonnades with two projecting quadrangular wings, and of the approaches (including the “Titanic bridge”), is admirable in its way. The sky-line is broken in a picturesque fashion, and the light and shade are balanced and contrasted in a manner which envoked the enthusiastic eulogy of Sir Joshua Reynolds, Uvedale Price, Allan Cunningham, and other connoisseurs of scenic effect. On the other hand, the ornament, when not positively uncouth, is unmeaning and there is a sensible coarseness in matters of detail throughout the work. Voltaire remarked upon Blenheim that if the rooms were as wide as the walls were thick, the château would be convenient enough. The last thing that Vanbrugh had in his mind was personal comfort for his clients.
General
Sir John Vanbrugh has writ several comedies which are more humourous than those of Mr. Wycherley, but not so ingenious. Sir John was a man of pleasure, and likewise a poet and an architect. The general opinion is, that he is as sprightly in his writings as he is heavy in his buildings.
| How Van wants grace, who never wanted wit! |
Though to write much in a little time is no excuse for writing ill, yet sir John Vanbrugh’s pen is not to be a little admired for its spirit, ease, and readiness, in producing plays so fast upon the neck of one another; for notwithstanding this quick despatch, there is a clear and lively simplicity in his wit, that neither wants the ornament of learning, nor has the least smell of the lamp in it. As the face of a fine woman, with only her locks loose about her, may be then in its greatest beauty, such were his productions only adorned by nature. There is something so catching to the ear, so easy to the memory in all he wrote, that it has been observed by all the actors of my time, that the style of no author whatsoever gave their memory less trouble than that of sir John Vanbrugh; which I myself, who have been charged with several of his strongest characters, can confirm by a pleasing experience. And indeed his wit and humour were so little laboured, that his most entertaining scenes seemed to be no more than his common conversation committed to paper. Here I confess my judgment at a loss, whether in this I give him more or less than his due praise.
Sir John Vanbrugh, it is said, had great facility in writing, and is not a little to be admired for the spirit, ease, and readiness, with which he produced his plays. Notwithstanding his extraordinary expedition, there is a clear and lively simplicity in his wit, that is equally distant from the pedantry of learning, and the lowness of scurrility. As the face of a fine lady, with her hair undressed, may appear in the morning in its brightest glow of beauty; such were the productions of Vanbrugh, adorned with only the negligent graces of nature.
Sir John Vanburgh has spirit, wit, and ease; but he is, to the last degree, gross and indelicate. He is one of the most immoral of all our comedians. His “Provoked Wife” is full of such indecent sentiments and allusions, as ought to explode it out of all reputable society. His “Relapse” is equally censurable; and these are his only two considerable pieces.
He is no writer at all, as to mere authorship; but he makes up for it by a prodigious fund of comic invention and ludicrous description, bordering somewhat on caricature. Though he did not borrow from him, he was much more like Moliere in genius than Wycherley was, who professedly imitated him. He has none of Congreve’s graceful refinement, and as little of Wycherley’s serious manner and studied insight into the springs of character; but his exhibition of it in dramatic contrast and unlooked-for situations, where the different parties play upon one another’s failings, and into one another’s hands, keeping up the jest like a game of battledore and shuttlecock, and urging it to the utmost verge of breathless extravagance, in the mere eagerness of the fray, is beyond that of any other of our writers…. He has more nature than art; what he does best, he does because he cannot help it. He has a masterly eye to the advantages which certain accidental situations of character present to him on the spot, and executes the most difficult and rapid theatrical movements at a moment’s warning.
Is as appalling a Satirist as Swift. His pictures of human nature are hideously like; they are true to the very wrinkle. Swift said that he hated the Ourang Outang, because it was so like us; and so we may say of Vanbrugh’s delineations of character. All the vices of humanity are treasured up in them; yet they are not natural delineations. They are the bad parts of human nature picked out and separated from those redeeming qualities, which scarcely the vilest of mankind are not without.
No man who has been satirized by Swift, and praised by Reynolds, could have much chance of being forgotten; but the fame of him who was at once the author of “The Relapse” and “The Provoked Wife,” and the architect of Castle Howard and Blenheim, stands independent of even such subsidiaries.
The wit of Vanbrugh flows rather than flashes; but in its copious stream may vie in its own way with the dazzling fire-shower of Congreve’s; and his characters have much more of real flesh and blood in their composition, coarse and vicious as almost all the more powerfully drawn among them are.
Less brilliant than Congreve, and altogether his inferior both as a dramatist and as a wit, Sir John Vanbrugh is in my opinion unsurpassed by any of our post-Restoration writers of comedy in the vivacity, gaiety, and ease of his prose dialogue. Moreover, he enriched the comic stage by one supremely ludicrous character which, except in so far as Etheredge’s Sir Fopling Flutter may have a claim to its parentage, may fairly be called new, viz. the admirable Lord Foppington of “The Relapse;” and he invented some others which are almost equally extravagant and almost equally true to life. He borrowed with skill while he constructed with ease, and must altogether be allowed to be one of the most entertaining dramatists of his age. His morality might be averred to sink below that of Congreve—could it be said to sink at all; for such is the levity of this author that it is difficult to weigh even his sins in any very serious balance. The utter frivolity of the later Stuart comedy has no more signal representative than Vanbrugh, though, as it happened, he was very far from being a mere man of pleasure.
Of the four great Restoration playwrights, Vanbrugh had most of the “trick of the stage.” Like Wycherley, he has the rare and great merit that he wrote to be acted, not to be read. He is less cynical than Wycherley, more civilized and human in his satire, and far less gross. He lacks the wit and style of Congreve, but has greater natural flow and natural ease: the players are said to have found his pieces particularly easy to get by heart, and this would seem to be a proof that he spoke the language natural to his day. Vanbrugh goes further afield for his plots than his contemporaries, and brings more than mere fine ladies and gentlemen on to the stage.
This very clear and original writer had, indeed, erred by an extraordinary licence, and owes to his coarseness the obscurity into which his plays have fallen…. Where Congreve is volatile and sparkling, Vanbrugh does not attempt to compete with him, but reserves himself for carefully studied effects, for passages where every touch is marked by the precision and weight of the author’s style. He is perhaps more like Molière than any other English dramatist; he is like him in the abundance of his stage-knowledge, and in the skill he shows in rapid and entertaining changes of situation. At the same time he is English to a fault, saturated with the brutality of the fox-hunting squire of the period. This very coarseness of fibre, added to Vanbrugh’s great sincerity as a writer, gives his best scenes a wonderful air of reality.
As for Sir John Vanbrugh, his two well-known plays, “The Relapse” and “The Provok’d Wife,” are most excellent reading, Jeremy Collier notwithstanding. They must be read with the easy tolerance, the amused benignity, the scornful philosophy of a Christian of the Dr. Johnson type. You must not probe your laughter deep; you must forget for awhile your probationary state, and remember that, after all, the thing is but a play. Sir John has a great deal of wit of that genuine kind which is free from modishness. He reads freshly. He also has ideas.
Vanbrugh’s scenes stand on nothing but their biting and extravagant sarcasm. As Congreve’s characters are indiscriminately witty, so Vanbrugh’s are universally and wearisomely cynical, and at the expense of themselves and all society.
His comedies are more natural than either Congreve’s or Wycherley’s.
