Born, at Bardsey, near Leeds, Jan. [?] 1670. Soon after his birth, family removed to Lismore. Educated at Kilkenny School. To Trinity Coll., Dublin, 5 April 1685; M.A., 1696. Entered Middle Temple, but soon abandoned law. Play, “The Old Batchelor,” produced, Jan. 1693; “The Double Dealer,” Nov. 1693; “Love for Love,” 30 April 1695; “The Mourning Bride,” 1697; “The Way of the World,” 1700. Commissioner for Licensing Hackney Coaches, July 1695 to Oct. 1707. Abandoned playwriting. Joined Vanburgh in theatrical management for short time in 1705. Commissioner of Wine Licenses, Dec. 1705 to Dec. 1714. Appointed Secretary for Jamaica, Dec. 1714. Member of Kit-Cat Club. Intimacy with Duchess of Marlborough in later years of life. Died, in London, 19 Jan. 1729. Buried in Westminster Abbey. Works: “The Mourning Muse of Alexis,” 1659; “The Old Batchelor,” [1693]; “The Double Dealer,” [1694]; “A Pindarique Ode, humbly offer’d to the King,” 1695; “Love for Love,” [1695]; “Amendments upon Mr. Collier’s false and imperfect Citations” (anon.), 1698; “The Birth of the Muse,” 1698; “The Mourning Bride,” 1697 (2nd edn. same year); “Incognita” (anon.), 1700; “The Way of the World,” 1700; “The Judgment of Paris,” 1701; “A Pindarique Ode, humbly offer’d to the Queen,” 1706; “Works” (3 vol.), 1710; “A Letter to … Viscount Cobham,” 1729. He translated: Book III. of Ovid’s “Art of Love,” 1709; Ovid’s “Metamorphoses” (with Dryden, Addison, etc.), 1717; La Fontaine’s “Tales and Novels” (with other translators), 1762; and assisted Dryden in revision of translation of Virgil, 1697. He edited: Dryden’s “Dramatick Works,” 1717. Collected Works: 1731, etc.

Personal

  I have a multitude of affairs, having just come to town after nine weeks’ absence. I am growing fat, but you know I was born with somewhat of a round belly…. Think of me as I am, nothing extenuate. My service to Robin, who would laugh to see me puzzled to buckle my shoe, but I’ll fetch it down again.

  Be pleased to direct your eyes toward the pair of beaux in the next chariot…. He on the right is a near favourite of the Muses; he has touched the drama with truer art than any of his contemporaries, comes nearer nature and the ancients, unless in his last performance, which indeed met with most applause, however least deserving. But he seemed to know what he did, descending from himself to write to the Many, whereas before he wrote to the Few. I find a wonderful deal of good sense in that gentleman; he has wit without the pride and affectation that generally accompanies, and always corrupts it. His Myra is as celebrated as Ovid’s Corinna, and as well known. How happy is he in the favour of that lovely lady! She, too, deserves applause, besides her beauty, for her gratitude and sensibility to so deserving an admirer. There are few women, who, when they once give in to the sweets of an irregular passion, care to confine themselves to him that first endeared it to them, but not so the charming Myra.

  I was to-day to see Mr. Congreve, who is almost blind with cataracts growing on his eyes; and his case is, that he must wait two or three years, until the cataracts are riper, and till he is quite blind, and then he must have them couched; and besides he is never rid of the gout, yet he looks young and fresh, and is as cheerful as ever. He is younger by three years or more than I, and I am twenty years younger than he. He gave me a pain in the great toe, by mentioning the gout. I find such suspicions frequently, but they go off again.

  The uncommon praise of a man of wit, always to please, and never to offend. No one, after a joyful evening, can reflect upon an expression of Mr. Congreve’s that dwells upon him with pain.

  Instead of endeavouring to raise a vain monument to myself,… let me leave behind me a memorial of my friendship with one of the most valuable of men, as well as finest writers of my age and country. One who has tried, and knows by his own experience, how hard an undertaking it is to do justice to Homer, and one who I’m sure sincerely rejoices with me at the period of my labours. To him, therefore, having brought this long work to a conclusion, I desire to dedicate it, and have the honour and satisfaction of placing together in this manner, the names of Mr. Congreve and of

  Mr. William Congreve died Jan. the 19th, 1728, aged fifty-six, and was buried near this place; to whose most valuable memory this monument is set up by Henrietta, Duchess of Marlborough, as a mark how deeply she remembers the happiness and honour she enjoyed in the sincere friendship of so worthy and honest a man, whose virtue, candour, and wit gained him the love and esteem of the present age, and whose writings will be the admiration of the future.

  Mr. Congreve had one defect, which was, his entertaining too mean an idea of his first profession, (that of a writer) tho’ ’twas to this he owed his fame and fortune. He spoke of his works as of trifles that were beneath him; and hinted to me, in our first conversation, that I should visit him upon no other foot than that of a gentleman, who led a life of plainness and simplicity. I answered, that had he been so unfortunate as to be a mere gentleman I should never have come to see him; and I was very much disgusted at so unseasonable a piece of vanity.

  I never knew anybody that had so much wit as Congreve.

  His place in the custom-house, and his office of secretary in Jamaica, are said to have brought him in upwards of 1200 l. a year; and he was so far an œconomist, as to raise from thence a competent estate. No man of his learning ever pass’d thro’ life with more ease, or less envy; and as in the dawn of his reputation he was very dear to the greatest wits of his time, so during his whole life he preserved the utmost respect of, and received continual marks of esteem from, men of genius and letters, without ever being involved in any of their quarrels, or drawing upon himself the least mark of distaste, or even dissatisfaction. The greatest part of the last twenty years of his life were spent in ease and retirement, and he gave himself no trouble about reputation.

  Congreve was very intimate for years with Mrs. Bracegirdle, and lived in the same street, his house very near hers; until his acquaintance with the young Duchess of Marlborough. He then quitted that house. The duchess showed me a diamond necklace (which Lady Di. used afterwards to wear) that cost seven thousand pounds, and was purchased with the money Congreve left her. How much better would it have been to have given it to poor Mrs. Bracegirdle.

  Congreve was “the fashion,” and could do almost anything. That he was an abandoned and dissolute rake was a matter of course. To be so was one of the main accomplishments of a fine gentleman of the period; and the women could not endure a man who lay under horrid suspicion of being virtuous. He had the run of the green rooms, and what they were, and are, and always will be, every man about them knows, and everybody not about them may guess. He raked until he got blind; now with Mrs. Bracegirdle, now with Nan Jallett, now with Madame Berenger, now with Madame Marlborough. His middle age was cursed by the memorials of his excesses.

  Among his friends was able to name every man of his time whom wit and elegance had raised to reputation. It may be therefore reasonably supposed that his manners were polite and his conversation pleasing…. His studies were in his latter days obstructed by cataracts in his eyes, which at last terminated in blindness.

  The charms of his conversation must have been very powerful, since nothing could console Henrietta, Duchess of Marlborough, for the loss of his company, so much as an automaton, or small statue of ivory, made exactly to resemble him, which every day was brought to table. A glass was put in the hand of the statue, which was supposed to bow to her grace and to nod in approbation of what she spoke to it.

  Congreve has the solid reputation of never having forgotten any one who did him a service.

  The body lay in state in the Jerusalem Chamber and was buried with great pomp in Westminster Abbey. A monument was erected in the abbey by the Duchess of Marlborough, with an inscription of her own writing, and a hideous cenotaph was erected at Stowe by Lord Cobham. It was reported that the duchess afterwards had a figure of ivory or wax made in his likeness, which was placed at her table, addressed as if alive, served with food, and treated for “an imaginary sore on its leg.” The story, if it has any foundation, would imply partial insanity.

  No defence can serve for our poet’s abandonment of Mrs. Bracegirdle with the paltry legacy, and nothing can extenuate the mortal comedy of his end as bon viveur when the Duchess of Marlborough, whom he had made his heir, placed his waxen effigy at her table, so contrived as to nod when she spoke to it, wrapped its feet in cloths, and had a physician to attend upon it and render a daily diagnosis. With the seven thousand pounds remaining from the legacy, after this pleasant whim was satisfied, the young Duchess bought a diamond necklace. Mrs. Bracegirdle, the favorite of his early years, the woman for whom he had written the best of his characters and who shares his theatrical fame, was poor, but she shielded Congreve’s memory by her silence, while the Duchess blazoned his infatuation by her diamonds. This was a death scene for a comic dramatist to observe.

  Congreve was within less than two months of sixty at the time of his death. The inscription on his monument in this same abbey declares him to have been then only fifty-six years old. The memorial in this case was set up by his intimate friend, Henrietta, Duchess of Marlborough, to whom he had bequeathed the bulk of his fortune.

The Old Bachelor, 1693

  Mr. Congreve was of the Middle Temple, his first performance was an Novel, call’d incognita, then he began his Play the old Batchelor, haveing little Acquaintance withe the traders in that way, his Cozens recommended him to a friend of theirs, who was very usefull to him in the whole course of his play, he engag’d Mr. Dryden in its favour, who upon reading it sayd he never saw such a first play in his life, but the Author not being acquainted with the stage or the town, it would be pity to have it miscarry for want of a little Assistance: the stuff was rich indeed, it wanted only the fashionable cutt of the town. To help that Mr. Dryden, Mr. Manwayring, and Mr. Southern red it with great care, and Mr. Dryden putt it in the order it was playd, Mr. Southerne obtaind of Mr. Thos: Davenant who then governd the Playhouse, that Mr. Congreve should have the privilege of the Playhouse half a year before his play was playd, wh. I never knew allowd any one before: it was playd with great success that play made him many friends.

  The age of the writer considered, it is indeed a very wonderful performance; for, whenever written, it was acted (1693) when he was not more than twenty-one [four] years old.

  Was written, it should seem, when the author was under age, and a very extraordinary work of precocity it is. He started at once into a full knowledge of the world of artificial life: at eighteen his appreciation of his mother’s sex was precisely that of a worn-out roué of fifty.

  The writing here is already excellent, and distinguished, especially by its lightness, from anything that had preceded it in the post-Restoration drama. The majority of the leading characters, however, contain nothing quite original; it would be easy to find in Molière or elsewhere prototypes or analogues of Heartwell, who sets up for a misogynist but is in reality a victim to female wiles, of the blustering coward, Captain Bluffe, and of the demure but deep Mrs. Fondlewife. Yet these in company with a number of other personages furnish an abundant variety, and the action is both brisk and diverting. Morally, both the plots of which the play is composed are objectionable; but the dramatic life in this comedy is unmistakable, and more than any other quality justified a success so rarely achieved by the work of a novice hand.

  The success of “The Old Bachelor” was the most rousing event in our literary history between the Revolution and the accession of Anne. Seldom has a new luminary appeared so vast and so splendid as its orb first slipped above the horizon…. We read “The Old Bachelor” with interest, and return to it with pleasure, but to the critic its main attraction is that it marks the transition between the imitation of Wycherley and Congreve’s complete confidence in his own powers.

The Double Dealer, 1694

  But there is one thing at which I am more concerned than all the false criticism that are made upon me; and that is, some of the ladies are offended. I am heartily sorry for it; for I declare, I would rather disoblige all the critics in the world than one of the fair sex. They are concerned that I have represented some women vicious and affected. How can I help it? It is the business of a comic poet to paint the vices and follies of human kind…. I should be very glad of an opportunity to make my compliments to those ladies who are offended. But they can no more expect it in a comedy, than to be tickled by a surgeon when he is letting their blood.

  Congreve’s “Double Dealer” is much censured by the greater part of the town, and is defended only by the best judges, who, you know, are commonly the fewest. Yet it gains ground daily, and has already been acted eight times. The women think he has exposed their witchery too much, and the gentlemen are offended with him for the discovery of their follies and the way of their intrigue under the notions of friendship to their ladies’ husbands. My verses, which you will find before it, were written before the play was acted; but I neither altered them, nor do I alter my opinion of the play.

  Some of the characters, though rather exaggerated, are amusing: but the plot is so entangled towards the conclusion, that I have found it difficult, even in reading, to comprehend it.

  The “Double Dealer,” with the solemn reciprocities of Lord and Lady Froth, and the capital character of Lady Plyant, “insolent to her husband, and easy to every pretender,” is far superior to the “Old Bachelor.” Congreve excels in mixtures of impudence, hypocrisy, and self-delusion. The whole of the fifth scene of the second act, between Lady Plyant and Mellefont, is exquisite for the grossness of the overtures made under pretence of a delicacy in alarm. But it is no wonder a comedy did not succeed that has so black a villain in it as Maskwell, and an aunt who has a regularly installed gallant in her nephew. Sir Paul Plyant also says things to his daughter, which no decent person could bear with patience between father and child. The writer’s object might have been a good one; but it is of doubtful and perilous use to attempt to do good by effrontery.

  Notwithstanding certain repulsive features in the action, this is undoubtedly one of the best comedies in our dramatic literature.

Love for Love, 1695

  This play is as full of character, incident, and stage-effect, as almost any of those of his contemporaries, and fuller of wit than any of his own, except perhaps the “Way of the World.” It still acts, and is still acted well. The effect of it is prodigious on the well-informed spectator. In particular, Munden’s Foresight, if it is not just the thing, is a wonderfully rich and powerful piece of comic acting. His look is planet-struck; his dress and appearance like one of the signs of the Zodiac taken down. Nothing can be more bewildered; and it only wants a little more helplessness, a little more of the doating, querulous garrulity of age, to be all that one conceives of the superannuated, star-gazing original.

  Congreve has never any great success in the conception or management of his plot; but in this comedy there is least to censure: several of the characters are exceedingly humorous; the incidents are numerous and not complex; the wit is often admirable. Angelica and Miss Prue, Ben and Tattle, have been repeatedly imitated; but they have, I think, a considerable degree of dramatic originality in themselves.

  The most amusing of all Congreve’s plays, and the characters the least unpleasant. There are no revolting scoundrels: and the lovers really have some love. Jeremy is most improbably witty, for a servant; even though he once “waited on a gentleman at Cambridge.” Miss Prue is not so naturally cunning as Wycherley’s Country Wife, nor such a hearty bouncer as Vanbrugh’s Hoyden; but she is a very good variety of that genus.

  The comedy of “Love for Love” has been commonly accounted Congreve’s masterpiece, and perhaps with justice. It is not quite so uniformly brilliant in style as “The Way of the World,” but it has the advantage of possessing a much wholesomer relation to humanity than that play, which is almost undiluted satire, and a more theatrical arrangement of scenes. In “Love for Love” the qualities which had shown themselves in “The Old Bachelor” and “The Double Dealer” recur, but in a much stronger degree. The sentiments are more unexpected, the language is more picturesque, the characters have more activity of mind and vitality of nature. All that was merely pink has deepened into scarlet; even what is disagreeable,—the crudity of allusion and the indecency of phrase,—have increased. The style in all its parts and qualities has become more vivid. We are looking through the same telescope as before, but the sight is better adjusted, the outlines are more definite, and the colours more intense. So wonderfully felicitous is the phraseology that we cannot doubt that if Congreve could only have kept himself unspotted from the sins of the age, dozens of tags would have passed, like bits of Shakespeare, Pope, and Gray, into habitual parlance. In spite of its errors against decency, “Love for Love” survived on the stage for more than a century, long after the remainder of Restoration and Orange drama was well-nigh extinct.

The Mourning Bride, 1697

  The incidents succeed one another too rapidly. The play is too full of business. It is difficult for the mind to follow and comprehend the whole series of events; and, what is the greatest fault of all, the catastrophe, which ought always to be plain and simple, is brought about in a manner too artificial and intricate.

  Written in prolix declamation, with no power over the passions.

  The “Mourning Bride” is not uninteresting in its story, nor so bad in its poetry as one might expect from the want of faith and passion natural to a town-wit of that age…. If the tragedy were revived now, the audience would laugh at the inflated sentences and unconscious prose. The revival of old English literature, and the tone of our best modern poets, have accustomed them to a higher and truer spirit. Yet some of the language of Almeria, as where, for instance, she again meets with Osmyn, is natural and affecting; and it is pleasing to catch a man of the world at these evidences of sympathy with what is serious. Nor are sensible and striking passages wanting.

  In general, being unequaled to really sustained flights of passion, the author has to take refuge in rant, and Lee himself could hardly have surpassed some of his attempts of this description. In brief, we may agree with Lessing, that Congreve’s solitary attempt in tragic poetry proves this field to have lain outside the natural range of his talents; or, if we prefer to put it so, we may assent to the opinion of Swift’s quidnunc (rather than to that of Swift himself), that tragic composition “quite lost” so essentially comic a genius.

  It has been the habit to quote “The Mourning Bride” as the very type of bad declamatory tragedy. No doubt Dr. Johnson did it harm by that extravagant eulogy in which he selected one fragment as unsurpassed in the poetry of all time. But if we compare it, not with those tragedies of the age of Elizabeth, studded with occasional naïve felicities, which it is just now the fashion to admire with some extravagance, but with what England and even France produced from 1650 to the revival of romantic taste, “The Mourning Bride” will probably take a place close after what is best in Otway and Racine. It will bear comparison, as I would venture to assert, with Southerne’s “Fatal Marriage” or with Crébillon’s “Rhadamiste et Zénobie,” and will not be pronounced inferior to these excellent and famous tragedies in dramatic interest, or genuine grandeur of sentiment, or beauty of language. It has done what no other of these special rivals has done, outside the theatre of Racine, it has contributed to the everyday fashion of its country several well-worn lines. But it is not every one who says that “Music has charms to soothe a savage breast” or that “Hell knows no fury like a woman scorn’d,” who would be able to tell where the familiar sentiment first occurs.

The Way of the World, 1700

  The “Way of the World” was the author’s last and most carefully finished performance. It is an essence almost too fine; and the sense of pleasure evaporates in an aspiration after something that seems too exquisite ever to have been realised. After inhaling the spirit of Congreve’s wit, and tasting “love’s thrice reputed nectar” in his works, the head grows giddy in turning from the highest point of rapture to the ordinary business of life; and we can with difficulty recall the truant Fancy to those objects which we are fain to take up with here, for better, for worse.

  The great art of Congreve is especially shown in this, that he has entirely excluded from his scenes,—some little generosities in the part of Angelica perhaps excepted,—not only anything like a faultless character, but any pretensions to goodness or good feelings whatsoever. Whether he did this designedly, or instinctively, the effect is as happy, as the design (if design) was bold. I used to wonder at the strange power which his “Way of the World” in particular possesses of interesting you all along in the pursuits of characters, for whom you absolutely care nothing—for you neither hate nor love his personages—and I think it is owing to this very indifference for any, that you endure the whole. He has spread a privation of moral light, I will call it, rather than by the ugly name of palpable darkness over his creations; and his shadows flit before you without distinction or preference. Had he introduced a good character, a single gush of moral feeling, a revulsion of the judgment to actual life and actual duties, the impertinent Goshen would have only lighted to the discovery of deformities, which now are none, because we think them none.

  The coquetry of Millamant, not without some touches of delicacy and affection, the impertinent coxcombry of Petulant and Witwood, the mixture of wit and ridiculous vanity in Lady Wishfort, are amusing to the reader. Congreve has here made more use than, as far as I remember, had been common in England, of the all-important soubrette, on whom so much depends in French comedy.

  The “Way of the World” is an admirable comedy, it must be confessed, especially for the sovereign airs and graces of Millamant; yet it is tiresome in its very ingenuity, for its maze of wit and intrigue; and it has no heart, therefore wants the very soul of pleasure.

  I do not think it too much to say in its praise, that it comprises the most quintessentialised combination of qualities requisite to compound an artificially legitimate comedy to be found in the whole range of our dramatic literature. I do not say, the comedy of primitive and natural life; but the comedy of the furbelows and flounces; of powder and essences; of paint and enamelling; of high-heels, hoops, and all hideous artificialities, concealments, intrigues, plots, and subterfuges. In reading the play, one’s faculities are retained in a perpetual suspension of pleasure at the unabating and highly sustained succession of flights of wit, gaily tinctured imageries, flashing repartees, and skilfully contrasted characters on the scene.

  “The Way of the World” impresses the modern reader as a bitter satire, though the author was true to himself in the elegance of his handling. If the character of Lady Wishfort is almost too offensive for comedy, Witwould is as diverting as he is original—a man afflicted by a perfect cacoëthes of feeble repartee—“I cannot help it, madam,” he says, “though it is against myself.” And in Millamont and Mirabell he has excelled the brilliancy of all his previous raillery of social types and their deviations from sense and law, giving the place of distinction to the lady.

  The comic work of Congreve, though different rather in kind than in degree from the bestial and blatant license of his immediate precursors, was inevitably for a time involved in the sentence passed upon the comic work of men in all ways alike his inferiors. The true and triumphant answer to all possible attacks of honest men or liars, brave men or cowards, was then as ever to be given by the production of work unarraignable alike by fair means or foul, by frank impeachment or furtive imputation. In 1700 Congreve thus replied to Collier with the crowning work of his genius,—the unequalled and unapproached master-piece of English comedy. The one play in our language which may fairly claim a place beside or but just beneath the mightiest work of Molière is “The Way of the World.”

  Successive critics, seeing, what we must all acknowledge, the incomparable splendour of the dialogue in “The Way of the World,” have not ceased to marvel at the caprice which should render dubious the success of such a masterpiece on its first appearance. But perhaps a closer examination of the play may help us to unravel the apparent mystery. On certain sides, all the praise which has been lavished on the play from Steele and Voltaire down to Mr. Swinburne and Mr. George Meredith is thoroughly deserved. “The Way of the World” is the best-written, the most dazzling, the most intellectually accomplished of all English comedies, perhaps of all the comedies of the world. But it has the defects of the very qualities which make it so brilliant. A perfect comedy does not sparkle so much, is not so exquisitely written, because it needs to advance, to develop. To “The Way of the World” may be applied that very dubious compliment paid by Mrs. Browning to Landor’s “Pentameron” that, “were it not for the necessity of getting through a book, some of the pages are too delicious to turn over.”

General

  The late Mr. Congreve raised the glory of Comedy to a greater height than any English writer before or since his time. He wrote only a few plays, but they are all excellent in their kind. The laws of the drama are strictly observed in them; they abound with characters all which are shadowed with the utmost delicacy, and we do not meet with so much as one low, or coarse jest.

  Among all the efforts of early genius which literary history records, I doubt whether anyone can be produced that more surpasses the common limits of nature than the plays of Congreve…. Congreve has merit of the highest kind, he is an original writer, who borrowed neither the models of his plot, nor the manner of his dialogue. Of his plays I cannot speak distinctly; for since I inspected them years have passed; but what remains upon my memory is, that his characters are commonly fictitious and artificial, with very little of nature and not much of life…. Of his miscellaneous poetry, I cannot say anything very favourable. The powers of Congreve seem to desert him when he leaves the stage.

  The poetry of Mr. Congreve was as much disliked, as his plays were admired; and his odes on the death of Queen Mary, and the Marquis of Blanford, are such wailings, or mere whining numbers, as too often disfigure these memorials of the illustrious dead. Yet he received 1000£. for the former from William III. more through respect for the memory of his royal consort than his love of poetry, and still less from its merits.

  The comedies of Congreve contain probably more wit than was ever before embodied upon the stage; each word was a jest, and yet so characteristic, that the repartee of the servant is distinguished from that of the master; the jest of the coxcomb from that of the humorist or fine gentleman of the piece. Had not Sheridan lived in our own time, we could not have conceived the possibility of rivaling the comedies of Congreve.

  Congreve is the most distinct from the others, and the most easily defined, both from what he possessed, and from what he wanted. He had by far the most wit and elegance, with less of other things, of humour, character, incident, &c. His style is inimitable, nay perfect. It is the highest model of comic dialogue. Every sentence is replete with sense and satire, conveyed in the most polished and pointed terms. Every page presents a shower of brilliant conceits, is a tissue of epigrams in prose, is a new triumph of wit, a new conquest over dulness. The fire of artful raillery is nowhere else so well kept up…. Sheridan will not bear a comparison with him in the regular antithetical construction of his sentences, and in the mechanical artifices of his style, though so much later, and though style in general has been so much studied, and in the mechanical part so much improved since then.

  If Congreve can dazzle by his brilliant dialogue, and his smart repartee, he does not shrink from putting the most splendid wit into the mouths of his fools, and exhibiting characters who are sunk in the depths of disaster, full of sprightliness and merriment. Shakspeare makes us forget the Author; Congreve makes us think of no one else. We rise from the scenes of the first, overwhelmed with the sorrows of Hamlet, or of Othello, or of Lear. We close the pages of the second, charmed with the wit, the sprightliness, and the vivacity of Congreve. I have chosen Congreve as the champion and exemplar of the second School, because he is, in many particulars, the most eminent Scholar which it has produced. Wit was its grand distinguishing feature, and Congreve was one of the wittiest writers that, perhaps, any age or nation has given birth to. But the Dramatist has to paint character, and he who has only one colour in which to dip his pencil, Wit, cannot produce a true, a natural, or even a permanently pleasing picture. We may gaze upon the Sun till we see nothing but darkling motes; and so Congreve’s scenes fatigue us by their very brilliancy. All his characters are like himself, witty.

  They are too cold to be mischievous: they keep the brain in too incessant inaction to allow the passions to kindle. For those who search into the powers of intellect, the combinations of thought which may be produced by volition, the plays of Congreve may form a profitable study. But their time is fled—on the stage they will be received no more; and of the devotees of light reading such as could read them without disgust would probably peruse them with little pleasure.

  Congreve’s merit as a poet lies wholly in his dramas. His pieces in all other walks are affected and laboured. His comedies alone constitute that claim upon the admiration of his countrymen, which is never likely to be disputed. The school of comedy he may be said to have formed, has no foundation in actual life, but derives its charm exclusively from the perfection of an artificial style. His comedies are wanting in traits of real nature, in simplicity, in individual character subsisting by its intrinsic force, and in broad effects; but they exhibit, in a higher state of excellence than can be found anywhere else, a perpetual vein of wit, which glows in such incessant flashes over the surface, that we cannot, if we could, penetrate beneath to examine the slight matériel it conceals. With Congreve every thing is artificial—his fops, sharpers, coquettes, libertines; they are all drawn in excess, to afford a wider scope to the play of the brilliant dialogue.

  Congreve is the most distinct from the others, and the most easily defined, both from what he possessed, and from what he wanted. He had by far the most wit and elegance, with less of other things, of humour, character, incident, &c. His style is inimitable, nay perfect. It is the highest model of comic dialogue. Every sentence is replete with sense and satire, conveyed in the most polished and pointed terms. Every page presents a shower of brilliant conceits, is a tissue of epigrams in prose, is a new triumph of wit, a new conquest over dullness.

  We believe that no English writer, except Lord Byron, has, at so early an age, stood so high in the estimation of his contemporaries…. There can be no stronger illustration of the estimation in which Congreve was held, than the fact that Pope’s Iliad, a work which appeared with more splendid auspices than any other in our language, was dedicated to him. There was not a duke in the kingdom who would not have been proud of such a compliment.

  The patient glitter of Congreve.

  Whose comedies, the admiration of their own age, for their fertility of fantastically gay dialogue, bright conceits, and witty repartees, are still read for their abundance of lively imagery and play of language, the “reciprocation of conceits and the clash of wit,”—although the personages of his scene, and all that they do and think, are wholly remote from the truth, the feeling, and the manners of real life. These productions, so remarkable in their way, were written before Congreve’s twenty-fifth year; and his first and most brilliant comedy (“The Old Bachelor”) was acted when he was yet a minor. His talent, thus early ripe, did not afterwards expand or refine itself into the nobler power of teaching “the morals of the heart,” nor even into the delightful gift of embodying the passing scenes of real life in graphic and durable pictures. But his writings afford a memorable proof how soon the graces and brilliant effects of mere intellect can be acquired, while those works of genius which require the co-operation and the knowledge of man’s moral nature are of a slower and later growth.

  I cannot pretend to quote scenes from the splendid Congreve’s play—which are undeniably bright, witty, and daring,—any more than I could ask you to hear the dialogue of a witty bargeman and a brilliant fish-woman exchanging compliments at Billingsgate; but some of his verses,—they were amongst the most famous lyrics of the time, and pronounced equal to Horace by his contemporaries,—may give an idea of his power, of his grace, of his daring manner, his magnificence in compliment, and his polished sarcasm. He writes as if he was so accustomed to conquer, that he has a poor opinion of his victims. Nothing is new except their faces, says he; “every woman is the same.” He says this in his first comedy, which he wrote languidly in illness, when he was an “excellent young man.” Richelieu at eighty could have hardly said a more excellent thing.

  To my remembrance Congreve is but a horrible nightmare, and may the fates forbid I should be forced to go through his plays again.

  His comedies are steeped in vice.

  The comedy of Congreve has not much character, still less humor, and no nature at all; but blazes and crackles with wit and repartee, for the most part of an unusually pure and brilliant species,—not quaint, forced, and awkward, like what we find in some other attempts, in our dramatic literature and elsewhere, at the same kind of display, but apparently as easy and spontaneous as it is pointed, polished, and exact. His plots are also constructed with much artifice.

  The fame of Congreve, notwithstanding the predictions of even such a judge as Dryden, has been evanescent, though the wit remains as bright as ever, but it is a wit aimless and objectless, and which ends in itself. The brilliancy dazzled his contemporaries and prevented them seeing clearly, as in the case of Swift with St. John, whose fame in a different field was very much of the same order. The whole merit of Congreve lay in his dialogue. His plots are obscure and intricate to a degree, his characters uninteresting, except as brilliant talkers, but there the wit blazed and sparkled with a continuous brightness that has never been surpassed, and rarely equalled.

  Congreve was the key-stone to the arch of this conventional and artificial school of the comic drama. He was the flowery capital to its Corinthian column—the capstone and ornamented apex to the whole structure. In mind, constitution, habits, and manners Congreve was essentially the hollow fine gentleman. He carried his gentility into his genius, and it became the mainspring, the life-staff of his intellectual, as of his social existence.

  Congreve is far above the others in talent and success; his comedies are sparkling with wit and eloquence, and they are particularly attractive for his diction, which possesses a certain artistic repose.

  Congreve is indisputably one of the very wittiest of English writers. No doubt, even when this praise has been unreservedly accorded to a comic dramatist—for it is as such alone that Congreve can be held to have really excelled—the highest praise has not been given…. It should at the same time not be overlooked that Congreve’s grace and ease of style, as distinguished from its brilliancy and wittiness, contribute to the charm of his prose and make it enjoyable like that of only the very best of contemporary English writers; and that, though these qualities are not always separable from, they should not in consequence be confounded with, one another. In brilliancy of wit he is the superior of all his predecessors and contemporaries of the post-Restoration period, among whom Dryden and perhaps Vanbrugh alone approached him, and Sheridan is his only successor. In ease of dialogue he far surpasses Wycherley; Vanbrugh, and still more Farquhar, lack the element of grace which he possesses; while Etheredge and the rest—even Dryden—fall short of him in polish as writers of comic prose. Congreve is therefore to be regarded as an artist of rare as well as genuine gifts—the more so that he understood how to conceal his art.

  Congreve’s muse was about as bad as any muse that ever misbehaved herself—and I think, as little amusing.

  The poetical remains of Congreve, especially when considered in connection with those remarkable dramatic works which achieved for him so swift and splendid a reputation, have but a slender claim to vitality. His brilliant and audacious Muse seems to have required the glitter of the foot-lights and the artificial atmosphere of the stage as conditions of success; in the study he is, as a rule, either trivial or frigidly conventional.

  It is not the least of Lord Macaulay’s offences against art that he should have contributed the temporary weight of his influence as a critic to the support of so ignorant and absurd a tradition of criticism as that which classes the great writer here mentioned with the brutal if “brawny” Wycherley—a classification almost to be paralleled with that which in the days of our fathers saw fit to couple together the names of Balzac and of Sue. Any competent critic will always recognise in “The Way of the World” one of the glories, in “The Country Wife” one of the disgraces, of dramatic and of English literature. The stains discernible on the masterpiece of Congreve are trivial and conventional; the mere conception of the other man’s work displays a mind so prurient and leprous, uncovers such an unfathomable and unimaginable beastliness of imagination, that in the present age at least he would probably have figured as a virtuous journalist and professional rebuker of poetic vice or artistic aberration.

  What makes Congreve hold so high a place among comic dramatists is not so much that naturalness which is the distinguishing characteristic of his school, nor his insight, nor his breadth; it is his style that gives him his pre-eminence, that “subtle turn and heightening” which makes the sentences of his dialogue shine like well-faceted precious stones. The polish and elaboration he gives would be excessive were his wit less hard and pure and bright. Congreve has numerous obvious drawbacks, his outlook is not a broad one upon human nature, but upon “the town” only—his sympathies are narrow, his morality on the wrong side of tolerable. A more technical objection to him as a playwright is that there is too much ingenuity, too much complexity, and too little true art in his plots; they do not move us, and they hardly interest us. Nevertheless, there are qualifications in Congreve for a great, almost the greatest, place in our literature as a comic dramatist besides this one of consummate wit and consummate style. One of these is his marvellous faculty of characterization. Mirabell, the fine gentleman lover, is not the mere “walking gentleman” of most playwrights, but manly, lover-like, ready-spoken, and most witty on occasion. Lady Wishfort, Mincing, Foible, Lord Froth, the coxcomb, and that most entertaining of sots and country louts, Sir Wilfull Witwould, are all personages with the stamp of humanity upon them, and Millamant is by common consent the most delightful of fine ladies that the world has ever known. Congreve’s supremacy in the domain of comedy is to a great extent due to this, that he was an accomplished fine gentleman in the first place, and an accomplished littérateur in the second.

  French authors are his masters, and experience supplies the colors of his portraits, which display both the innate baseness of primitive instincts, and the refined corruption of worldly habits.

  Congreve’s defects are to be sought not so much in the external blemishes pointed out by Collier as in the absence of real refinement of feeling. His characters, as Voltaire observes, talk like men of fashion, while their actions are those of knaves. Lamb’s audacious praise of him for excluding any pretensions to good feeling in his persons might be accepted if it implied (as he urges) amere “privation of moral light.” But, although a “single gush of cynical sentiment is quite in harmony,” his wit is saturnine, and a perpetual exposition of the baser kind of what passes for worldly wisdom. The atmosphere of his plays is asphyxiating. There is consequently an absence of real gaiety from his scenes and of true charm in his characters, while the teasing intricacy of his plots makes it (as Hunt observes) impossible to remember them even though just read and noted for the purpose. It is therefore almost cruel to suggest a comparison between Congreve and Molière, the model of the true comic spirit. The faults are sufficient to account for the neglect of Congreve by modern readers in spite of the exalted eulogies not too exalted for the purely literary merits of his pointed and vigorous dialogue—bestowed upon him by the best judges of his own time and by some over-generous critics of the present day.

  Congreve’s literary influence, although it must be acknowledged that the next age in poetry remembered him only to improve upon him, was far from insignificant, and he little deserved the contempt he has sometimes received. Nevertheless, the impression one has of him is of a genius which made only an imperfect expression of itself; of a man with more mind than his few comedies could hold, with tastes, culture, curiosity, a naturally fertile nature richly developed, but leaving no memorial of itself equal to its value.

  Nothing was too good for Mr. Congreve; he had patronage and great gifts; it seemed always to be raining roses on his head. The work he did was not great work, but it was exquisitely done; though, it must be said, there was no preserving savor in it but the art of it. The talk in his comedies, by its pliancy, grace, neat turns, swiftness of repartee, compares with the talk in most comedies as goldsmith’s work compares with the heavy forgings of a blacksmith. It matches exquisitely part to part, and runs as delicately as a hair-spring on jewelled pinions.

  Congreve was essentially a man of letters; his style is that of a pupil not of Molière but of the full, the rich, the excessive, the pedantic Jonson; his Legends, his Wishforts, his Foresights, are the lawful heirs—refined and sublimated but still of direct descent—of the Tuccas and the Bobadils and the Epicure Mammons of the great Elizabethan; they are (that is) more literary than theatrical—they are excellent reading, but they have long since fled the stage and vanished into the night of mere scholarship.

  Was the first to teach the English writer how to impart somewhat of that point and balance to the prose epigram in which he may approach, though the genius of our language forbids him to rival, the French.

  Whatever the cause, he was lost to the stage at thirty, and his occasional poetical productions, the most important of which have been already noticed, were far from qualifying him to sit in the seat of Dryden. He enjoyed, nevertheless, supremacy of another kind. Regarded as an extinct volcano, he gave umbrage to no rivals; his urbane and undemonstrative temper kept him out of literary feuds; all agreed to adore so benign and inoffensive a deity, and the general respect of the lettered world fitly culminated in Pope’s dedication of his Homer to him, the most splendid literary tribute the age could bestow.

  Whose well-bred ease is almost as remarkable as his brilliant wit.

  No one, perhaps, in any country, has written prose for the stage with so assiduous a solicitude for style. Congreve balances, polishes, sharpens his sentences till they seem like a set of instruments prepared for an electrical experiment; the current is his unequalled wit, and it flashes and leaps without intermission from the first scene to the last. The result is one of singular artificiality; and almost from the outset—from the moment, at all events, that Congreve’s manner ceased to dazzle with its novelty—something was felt, even by his contemporaries, to be wanting. The something, no doubt, was humanity, sympathy, nature.

  Where Congreve excels all his English rivals is in his literary force, and a succinctness of style peculiar to him. He had correct judgment, a correct ear, readiness of illustration within a narrow range, in snap shots of the obvious at the obvious, and copious language. He hits the mean of a fine style and a natural in dialogue. He is at once precise and voluble. If you have ever thought upon style you will acknowledge it to be a signal accomplishment. In this he is a classic, and is worthy of treading a measure with Molière….

  Probability and strict stage construction are still as much to seek here as elsewhere, and no one of the characters is a whole live personage like those of Shakespeare in the drama before, and those of Fielding in the novel later. But, on the other hand, there is hardly one who, as a personage of artificial comedy, is not a triumph, from Sir Sampson Legend, the testy father, through his sons Valentine (spendthrift and rake, but a better fellow than most of them) and Ben, the simple sailor, who was now becoming a stock stage figure; through the sisters Foresight and Frail, whose simultaneous discovery of each other’s slips is one of the capital moments of English comic literature; and the foolish astronomer, Foresight; and Tattle, the frivolous beau; and Jeremy, the impossibly witty servant; and Angelica, giving us the contemporary notion of a heroine who is neither heartless nor a fool; and Prue, the hoyden. All these are, for purely theatrical flesh and blood, perfect triumphs in their kind, and they move throughout in a perfect star-shower of verbal fireworks.

  As pictures of manners Congreve’s comedies are valuable, since they undoubtedly give a lively presentation of the fashionable society of his day…. Congreve is a much more important figure in the history of the theatre than in the history of the drama.