or, if there be a mediating Power, the minister representing this presides. At the first session the president takes his seat and delivers a speech welcoming the delegates and sketching the objects of the meeting; the bureau of the congress (secretary, assistant secretaries, and archivist) is then elected on the nomination of the president, and its members are introduced to the assembly. Finally the president impresses on all present the obligation of keeping the proceedings secret, and adjourns the session for a day or two, in order that the ministers may have an opportunity of making each others’ acquaintance and talking matters over in private. Serious business begins with the second session.
The discussions are governed by carefully defined rules. Thus every proposition must be presented in writing, and all decisions to be binding on all must be unanimous. The secretary keeps the minutes (procès-verbal) of each session, which are signed by all present and read at the next meeting. This protocol—as it has been called since the congress of Vienna—takes the form of a bald, but very exact résumé of important points discussed, ending with a record of the conclusions and resolutions arrived at. If there be no such results, opinions are recorded. If any plenipotentiary dissent from the general opinion, such dissent must be recorded in the protocol. Sometimes short signed memoranda, known as a vote or opinion, are attached to the protocol, stating the reasons that have governed the Powers in question in agreeing to a given conclusion. Individual Powers may express their dissent in two ways: either by placing such dissent on record, as Lord Stewart did at Laibach, or by withdrawing altogether from the sessions of the congress, as Spain did at Vienna and Great Britain at Verona. Though the Final Act of Vienna was issued as the act of all the Powers, the subsequent formal adhesion of Spain was considered necessary to complete the “European” character of that treaty; the action of Great Britain at Verona prevented the intervention in Spain from having the sanction of the concert. At Vienna in 1814, owing to the vast range of the questions to be settled, the work of the congress was distributed among committees; but at Paris (1856) and Berlin (1878) all matters were discussed and settled in full session. The conclusions arrived at after the discussion of the various subjects before the congress are usually embodied in separate conventions, duly signed by the Powers who are a party to them. Finally, these separate conventions are brought together in an inclusive treaty, signed by all the plenipotentiaries present, known as the Final Act.
See P. Pradier-Fodéré, Cours de droit diplomatique (2 vols., 2nd ed., Paris, 1899). (W. A. P.)
CONGREVE, RICHARD (1818–1899), English Positivist, was
born at Leamington on the 4th of September 1818, and was
educated at Rugby under Dr Arnold, who is said to have expressed
a higher opinion of him than of any other pupil. After taking
first-class honours at Oxford and gaining a fellowship at Wadham
College, he spent some time as a master at Rugby, but returned
to Oxford as a tutor. Soon after the revolution of 1848 he visited
Paris, where he made the acquaintance of Barthélemy St Hilaire
and Auguste Comte. He was so attracted by the Positive
philosophy that he resigned his fellowship in 1855, and devoted
the remainder of his life to the propagation of the Positive
philosophy. He took a leading part in the work carried on in
Chapel Street, Lamb’s Conduit Street. In 1878 he declined to
admit the authority of Pierre Laffitte, Comte’s official successor,
and the result was a split in the ranks of English Positivism,
Frederic Harrison, Dr J. H. Bridges and Professor E. Beesly
forming a separate society at Newton Hall, Fetter Lane. Congreve
translated several of Comte’s works, and in 1874 published
a large volume of essays, in which he advocated Comte’s view
that it was the duty of Great Britain to renounce her foreign
possessions. He was a man of high character, courtly manners and great intellectual capacity. He died at Hampstead on the 5th of July 1899.
Publications.—Roman Empire of the West (1855); annotated edition of Aristotle’s Politics (1855; 2nd ed., 1874); Catechism of the Positive Religion, translated from the French of A. Comte (1858; 3rd ed., 1891); Elizabeth of England (1862); Essays, political, social, and religious (1874; 2nd series, 1892); Historical Lectures (collected in one volume, 1902).
CONGREVE, WILLIAM (1670–1729), English dramatist, the greatest English master of pure comedy, was born at Bardsey near Leeds, where he was baptized on the 10th of February 1670, although the inscription on his monument gives his date of birth as 1672. He was the son of William Congreve, a soldier who was soon after his son’s birth placed in command of the garrison at Youghal. To Ireland, therefore, is due the credit of his education—as a schoolboy at Kilkenny, as an undergraduate at Dublin, where he was a contemporary and friend of Swift. From college he came to London, and was entered as a student of law at the Middle Temple. The first-fruits of his studies appeared under the boyish pseudonym of “Cleophil,” in the form of a novel whose existence is now remembered only through the unabashed avowal of so austere a moralist as Dr Johnson, that he “would rather praise it than read it.” In 1693 Congreve’s real career began, and early enough by the latest computation, with the brilliant appearance and instant success of his first comedy, The Old Bachelor, under the generous auspices of Dryden, then as ever a living and immortal witness to the falsehood of the vulgar charge which taxes the greater among poets with jealousy or envy, the natural badge and brand of the smallest that would claim a place among their kind. The discrowned laureate had never, he said, seen such a first play; and indeed the graceless grace of the dialogue was as yet only to be matched by the last and best work of Etherege, standing as till then it had done alone among the barefaced brutalities of Wycherley and Shadwell. The types of Congreve’s first work were the common conventional properties of stage tradition; but the fine and clear-cut style in which these types were reproduced was his own. The gift of one place and the reversion of another were the solid fruits of his splendid success. Next year a better play from the same hand met with worse fortune on the stage, and with yet higher honour from the first living poet of his nation. The noble verses, as faultless in the expression as reckless in the extravagance of their applause, prefixed by Dryden to The Double Dealer, must naturally have supported the younger poet, if indeed such support can have been required, against the momentary annoyance of assailants whose passing clamour left uninjured and secure the fame of his second comedy; for the following year witnessed the crowning triumph of his art and life, in the appearance of Love for Love (1695). Two years later his ambition rather than his genius adventured on the foreign ground of tragedy, and The Mourning Bride (1697) began such a long career of good fortune as in earlier or later times would have been closed against a far better work. Next year he attempted, without his usual success, a reply to the attack of Jeremy Collier, the nonjuror, “on the immorality and profaneness of the English stage”—an attack for once not discreditable to the assailant, whose honesty and courage were evident enough to approve him incapable alike of the ignominious precaution which might have suppressed his own name, and of the dastardly mendacity which would have stolen the mask of a stranger’s. Against this merit must be set the mistake of confounding in one indiscriminate indictment the levities of a writer like Congreve with the brutalities of a writer like Wycherley—an error which ever since has more or less perverted the judgment of succeeding critics. The general case of comedy was then, however, as untenable by the argument as indefensible by the sarcasm of its most brilliant and comparatively blameless champion. Art itself, more than anything else, had been outraged and degraded by the recent school of the Restoration; and the comic work of Congreve, though different rather in kind than in degree from the bestial and blatant licence 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
