elements destroys a play that would never in any circumstances have been strong—a play nevertheless which abounds in animal spirits, and is luminous here and there with true dramatic points.
It is, however, on his two last comedies—The Country Wife and The Plain Dealer—that must rest Wycherley's fame as a master of that comedy of repartee which, inaugurated by Etheredge, and afterwards brought to perfection by Congreve and Vanbrugh, supplanted the humoristic comedy of the Elizabethans. The Country Wife, produced in 1672 or 1673 and published in 1675, is so full of wit, ingenuity, animal spirits and conventional humour that, had it not been for its motive—a motive which in any healthy state of society must always be as repulsive to the most lax as to the most moral reader—it would probably have survived as long as the acted drama remained a literary form in England. So strong, indeed, is the hand that could draw such a character as Majory Pinchwife (the undoubted original not only of Congreve's Miss Prue but of Vanbrugh's Hoyden), such a character as Sparkish (the undoubted original of Congreve's Tattle), such a character as Horner (the undoubted original of all those cool impudent rakes with whom our stage has since been familiar), that Wycherley is certainly entitled to a place alongside Congreve and Vanbrugh. And, indeed, if priority of date is to have its fair and full weight, it seems difficult to challenge Professor Spalding's dictum that Wycherley is “the most vigorous of the set.”
In order to do justice to the life and brilliance of The Country Wife we have only to compare it with The Country Girl, afterwards made famous by the acting of Mrs Jordan, that Bowdlerized form of The Country Wife in which Garrick, with an object more praiseworthy than his success, endeavoured to free it of its load of unparalleled licentiousness by disturbing and sweetening the motive—even as Voltaire afterwards (with an object also more praiseworthy than his success) endeavoured to disturb and sweeten the motive of The Plain Dealer in La Prude. While the two Bowdlerized forms of Garrick and Voltaire are as dull as the Æsop of Boursault, the texture of Wycherley's scandalous dialogue would seem to scintillate with the changing hues of shot silk or of the neck of a 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 The Country Wife is The Plain Dealer, produced probably early in 1674 and published three years later,—a play of which Voltaire said, “Je ne connais point de comedie chez les anciens ni chez les moderns où il y ait autant d'esprit.” This comedy had an immense influence, as regards manipulation of dialogue, upon all subsequent English comedies of repartee, and 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 knid 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 confiscations 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 without 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 imaginative 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 impeachment 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? 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 matrix 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 Caesar, were far more civilized than that “race gangrenée”—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
