SOURCE: Palmer, John. “Critical Preliminaries.” In The Comedy of Manners, pp. 1-29. 1913. Reprint. New York: Russell & Russell, Inc., 1962.

[In the following essay, originally published in 1913, Palmer describes the impact that Jeremy Collier's Short View of the Profaneness and Immorality of the English Stage had on the comedy of manners.]

Who are the comic dramatists of the Restoration? Dryden wrote comedies; Shadwell's Squire of Alsatia was as popular in its day and regarded as of equal importance with The Country Wife; Sir Charles Sedley, Buckingham, and Rochester, have a claim to be included; Aphra Behn, Crowne and Settle could not very well be omitted in an exhaustive study of the comedy of the period; Otway was the author of no fewer than three original comedies; Colley Cibber was a formidable contemporary rival of Vanbrugh and Farquhar. But it is obviously impossible within the limits of a single volume to include every author of a comedy who wrote within a period of fifty years. What shall be our principle of selection?

The Leigh Hunt edition of the comic dramatists is a collected edition of the plays of Wycherley, Congreve, Vanbrugh, and Farquhar. Apparently Macaulay had no fault to find with the selection of these four authors as the principal comic writers of the period. Hazlitt agrees. These are the four undoubtedly great figures in our comic literature between Shakespeare and Sheridan. Further selection is difficult. If we admit Etherege, should we not also admit Shadwell and Mrs. Behn? What are we to do with Dryden? Is not Cibber almost as important as Farquhar?

All hangs upon our intention. If we are aiming merely at the personal distinction of the author, it would clearly be necessary to include Dryden. On the other hand, in a general history of the stage, Cibber is a more interesting historical figure than Dryden; and, if it were here intended to use the comic dramatists as cover for a collection of scandalous anecdotes, Rochester and Sedley would easily defeat the claims of Captain Vanbrugh. But we are here to be concerned with the origin and development of the English Comedy of Manners. To the main course of this development Dryden was as unnecessary as Shadwell, or Mrs. Behn; and, from this point of view, Cibber is less important as a dramatic author than as a critic and an actor. But Sir George Etherege is strictly necessary. He becomes, in fact, historically more important than Wycherley.

To anticipate the theme of this history, the English comedy of manners began with Etherege; rose to perfection in Congreve; declined by easy stages with Vanbrugh and Farquhar; and was finally extinguished in Sheridan and Goldsmith. We have to study its rise in the plays of Etherege, Wycherley and Congreve, and the influences which prepared its declension in Vanbrugh and Farquhar. All that is of permanent importance in this story of the rise and fall of English Comedy may be studied in the lives and plays of these five principal dramatists. It is impossible to omit any one of them; it is unnecessary—except, of course, by way of allusion and illustration—to include their contemporaries.

Perhaps the first and most striking fact as to these five selected authors is that only two of them can be said to belong in any sense to the period of the Restoration. It is one of the astonishing results of their neglect, and of the false perspective in which their contribution to English literature has continually been presented, that even the date of their flourishing is confused in the popularly-educated mind. Every one has by heart the historical commonplaces about the immorality of Restoration life and literature during the reaction which followed the Puritan supremacy. These commonplaces, so brilliantly insisted on by Macaulay, have been loosely accepted for an explanation of the “indecency” of the comic dramatists. Restoration drama is deeply associated in the general mind with Charles II. and Mrs. Gwynn. Unfortunately for Macaulay's generalisation the comic drama of the Restoration neither began nor ended with the moral reaction against the Puritans. For four complete years of the reign of Charles II., at which time we are presumably to imagine that the moral reaction was at its height, the English theatre was the theatre of Charles I. restored. Not until Etherege's Love in a Tub was produced in January, 1664, was the theatre of Charles II. afflicted with the sort of comedy that Macaulay has so solemnly deprecated. We are asked to believe that for four years the comic dramatists of the Restoration successfully refrained from indulging their reactionary impulse to write intentionally lewd and scandalous comedy; and that this same comedy of the reaction continued to develop and reached perfection at a period when its historical explanation was thoroughly exhausted. Congreve's first comedy The Old Bachelor was first produced five years after the Revolution of 1688. To describe Congreve's comedies as the fruit of a reaction against the Puritan severities of Cromwell is absurd. Congreve was nine years old when Charles II. was restored. He had neither personal nor literary connexion with the Court life that included Nell Gwynn and Mrs. Palmer. Macaulay, in fact, has explained the comic dramatists by historical influences with which they were, neither in the beginning nor the end, contemporary. Of the four great dramatists of the Restoration accepted by Macaulay as typical of the group, only Wycherley belonged to the period of the Restoration proper; and the plays of Wycherley were first produced twelve years after the accession of Charles II. Congreve is a dramatist of the Orange period. Vanbrugh and Farquhar were contemporary with Addison, Swift, and Steele.

Midway through the period we are setting out to examine is the year in which Jeremy Collier published his Short View of the Profaneness and Immorality of the English Stage. This was the monstrous blast from which the comic dramatists have to this day not entirely recovered. There is a striking contrast between the attitude of critics and publicists towards the drama of the Restoration before the publication of Collier's Short View and afterwards. Collier set the fashion of applying to the comic dramatists the test of propriety as we understand it to-day. No one whose opinion counted had as yet dreamed of doing so. After Collier, with one or two exceptions, propriety is the final criterion.

Jeremy Collier invented the moral test. The controversy that raged for several years between Jeremy Collier and the dramatic authors must needs be dealt with at the end of this inquiry. But it is impossible even to begin an examination of the period without clearly realising the importance of the revolution in critical opinion in the period which immediately followed the publication of the Short View. In the period that preceded Collier's celebrated pamphlet it is almost impossible to find any sense in the contemporary public of the perilous indecency of the Restoration theatre. Pepys may reasonably be taken as a typical playgoer of the Restoration. Now Pepys was quite conscious, as a citizen of the respectable middle state, of the blemishes upon the life of his time. We read in the Diary (29 January, 1665-6) how he improves the hour with Mr. Evelyn in “excellent discourse till we come to Clapham talking of the vanity and vices of the Court which makes it a most contemptible thing.” Evelyn himself was a monument of the just man suffering the iniquities of his generation. But neither Pepys nor Evelyn, though they deplore the extravagance and vanity of the Court, is distressfully disturbed by the improprieties afterwards discovered by Collier and his successors in the theatre. Evelyn has no particular fault to find with the comedies of Sir George Etherege. Love in a Tub he finds merely a “facetious” comedy in 1664. Pepys criticises the plays he so loved to frequent from almost every other point of view than the moral. Dryden's The Rival Ladies he terms “a very innocent and most pretty witty play,” a criticism which few playgoers of the post-Collier period would endorse. All the evidence agrees as to the blindness of the period to the enormous sinfulness of its theatre. Queen Mary was the avowed patron of Congreve. She commended The Double Dealer; ordered a revival of The Old Bachelor; and Dr. Payne in his funeral elegy praised her for love of play-going and other gentle amusements. One recalls also the surprising eulogy of Bishop Burnet upon the Earl of Rochester: “I do really believe that if God had thought fit to continue him longer in the world, he had been the wonder and delight of all that knew him.”

But Jeremy Collier in 1698 trumpeted a revolution. The force of his delivery was the result partly of his genius for controversy, partly of the ripeness of the time. His contemporaries were just ready to discover that they were better men than their predecessors. Richard Blackmore, in a preface to his Epic of Prince Arthur, had already warned his fellow poets that, if they were not careful to reform, they might come to be regarded in after ages as “the dishonour of the morals and the underminers of the public good.” A few months previous to the publication of Collier's Short View there had appeared the violent pamphlet of Merriton castigating the “morality, debauchery and profaneness” of the theatre and the age. The public was ready for Collier.

The controversy that followed upon the publication of Collier's little book is one of the most amusing and instructive literary controversies in the whole body of English literature; and it will hereafter be very particularly considered. We will for the time being be content to notice that a few years after the appearance of the Short View, Steele in the Tatler, and Addison in the Spectator, were testing the contemporary theatre by standards which would have seemed impertinent to their function as critics in the view of their immediate predecessors. Collier had completely changed the point of view of critics and public alike. The new critics were vigilant moralists. Very speedily London was honeycombed with societies for the reformation of manners. A little later Defoe tells of a Society for London and Westminster, that drew down penalties upon the heads of over 3000 “lewd and scandalous” persons.

The attitude and criticism of Dick Steele is a reasonable measure of the change in public opinion. Steele's commendation is even more significant than his hostility. Writing in the Tatler (16 April, 1709) he says of The Country Wife that Wycherley has “shown the gradual steps to ruin and destruction which persons of condition run into without the help of a good education how to form their conduct.” We can but faintly imagine Wycherley's amazement at finding himself credited with this agreeable intention in writing The Country Wife. Steele's test for the theatre, following Collier, was invariably a moral test—precisely the test which no one before Collier had ever dreamed of applying. “A good play acted before a well-bred audience,” says Steele, “must raise very proper incitements to good behaviour and be the most quick and most prevailing method of giving young people a turn of sense and breeding.” In the Tatler for 26 November, 1709, we further read, “My old friends, Hart and Mohun, the one by his natural and proper force, the other by his great skill and art, never failed to send one home full of such ideas as affected my behaviour, and made me insensibly more courteous and humane to my friends and acquaintances. It is not the business of a good play to make every man a hero; but it certainly gives him a livelier sense of virtue and merit than he had when he entered the theatre.” In June, 1710, Steele tells us how he has discovered the play of a young author wherein he finds “all the reverent offices of life, such as regard to parents, husbands, and honourable lovers, preserved with the utmost care; and at the same time that agreeableness of behaviour, with the intermixture of pleasing passions as arise from innocence and virtue, interspersed in such a manner, as that to be charming and agreeable shall appear the natural consequences of being virtuous.” Here we are in a different world from that of Mr. Horner and Sir Fopling. It is not a comparison between two worlds more virtuous or less that suggests itself. The whole scheme of values is changed. To suggest that Mr. Horner is a wicked man is not to suggest that his conduct might conceivably be improved. The suggestion utterly destroys him. As soon as we attempt to drag him before the expert moral tribunal of Collier and Steele, Mr. Horner turns to simple moonshine. The tribunal is left to pass judgment upon a wraith. Criticism of the Restoration dramatists on the lines suggested by these sentences of Steele is beating the air.

In Spectator 51, Steele writes particularly of Sir George Etherege: “If men of wit who think fit to write for the stage … instead of this pitiful way of giving delight, would turn their thoughts upon raising it from such good natural impulses as are in the audience, but are choked up by vice and luxury, they would not only please but befriend us at the same time. If a man had a mind to be new in his way of writing, might not he who is now represented as a fine gentleman, though he betray the honour and bed of his neighbour and friend, and lies with half the women of the play, and is at last rewarded with her of the best character in it; I say, upon giving the comedy another cast, might not such a one divert the audience quite as well, if at the catastrophe he were found out for a traitor, and met with contempt accordingly?” “Why not have virtuous and moral people for heroes and heroines?” continues Dick Steele. “Such characters would smite and reprove the heart of a man of sense, when he is given up to his pleasures. He would see he has been mistaken all the while, and be convinced that a sound constitution and an innocent mind are the true ingredients for becoming and enjoying life. All men of taste would call a man of wit who should turn his ambition that way a friend and benefactor to his country; but I am at a loss what name they would give him who makes use of his capacity for contrary purposes.” From the writer's point of view this is all so extremely obvious that it scarcely needed to be set down. But it would merely have puzzled Sir George Etherege. As criticism it does not touch the merits of his work. It is irrelevant.

Steele's attitude towards Restoration comedy particularly repays examination. It is representative of the entire century which followed—the attitude from which literary criticism of the English stage has not even yet recovered. More than a century later Hazlitt, Lamb, and Leigh Hunt rescued the seventeenth century dramatists for a brief and brilliant moment from the abyss into which Collier's successors had plunged their reputation. But at this point Macaulay repeated the success of Collier. Scarcely had they risen in polite estimation to the dignity of a collected edition of their four great representatives than they were immediately flung back into disrepute. It is a fascinating chapter in the history of criticism.

In the period of eclipse between Collier and Leigh Hunt, perhaps the two greatest names in English literature are Dean Swift and Dr. Johnson. Swift in 1709, writing of the comic dramatists, is the absolute echo of Steele: “I do not remember that our English poets ever suffered a criminal amour to succeed on the stage till the reign of Charles II. Ever since that time the alderman is made a cuckold, the deluded virgin is debauched, and adultery and fornication are supposed to be committed behind the scenes as part of the action.” This is Macaulay's essay in parvo. Swift knocks his victim on the head with the identical bludgeon.

Dr. Johnson in his memoir of Congreve, dealing with the Collier controversy, falls into line with Swift. “The cause of Congreve,” he writes, “was not tenable: whatever glosses he might use for the defence or palliation of single passages, the general tenour and tendency of his plays must always be condemned. It is acknowledged with universal conviction that the perusal of his works will make no man better; and that their ultimate effect is to represent pleasure in alliance with vice, and to relax those obligations by which life ought to be regulated.” Dr. Johnson, in fact, assumes that Congreve and his contemporaries should have accepted the standards whereby Collier misused them. There is nowhere in his memoir a clear sense that no body of literature can be intelligently approached without a careful reference to its historical origin; or that the moral test of the publicist may conceivably be, in the literal sense of the word, absurd, applied to the creatures of a poet.

In the first half of the nineteenth century some necessary commonplaces of history and criticism were recovered on behalf of the comic dramatists. Leigh Hunt's edition of 1849 is the pinnacle of their reputation. We have not only the excellent memoirs and sound opinions of the Editor himself, but also the essays of Hazlitt and Lamb, printed in extenso as models of criticism. For the first time Jeremy Collier is squarely met. Leigh Hunt does not apologise for the comic dramatists: he retorts upon Collier. Quoting Vanburgh's famous saying as to Collier—that he makes debauches in piety as sinners do in wine—Leigh Hunt continues: “Conceive the horror of Collier at seeing Vanbrugh saying in print that he was really not aware of the indecencies imputed to him, and that he could very well fancy a virtuous woman laying his plays by the side of her Bible. … Collier did not suspect that one profession might have its privileged ‘indecencies’ as well as another, and that a clergyman of those times might be solemnly and furiously vicious—indecent for want of the decorum of charity, and wicked for want of charity itself. Yet we have now lived to see that if the stage at that time was one half licentious, in the other half it was not only innocent of all evil intention, but had a sort of piety in the very gaiety of its trust in nature; while Jeremy Collier, if he was one half of him pious and well-intentioned, was the other half little better than a violent fool.”

Leigh Hunt, in fact, has a very clear suspicion that Collier's was not the final word as to the comic dramatists; and he goes on to plead that they shall at least be viewed in relation to their period. The plea seems to us almost ridiculously obvious to-day; in 1849 it was almost a paradox. “Future ages,” he tells the people of 1849, “will think us perhaps more honest in some things than we suppose we are; but most certainly they will attribute vices, or at least barbarous follies, to us in others of which we have no conception. … Yes; and by the same token many things are done this moment, and thought very little of—nay, reckoned creditable to the wit and knowledge and conventional respectability of the doers—which two hundred years hence will be thought as immoral and ridiculous as we now think the immoralities and absurdities of the days of Charles II. And if these or some of them do not immediately present themselves to every intelligent reader's mind, it only shows how far we are gone in them, and how far we are blinded in their gulf; fortunate still, if we do but know this, that times will improve after us as well as those that have gone before us; and that those will see their own way through error best and cheerfullest who think the best and kindest of whatsoever nature has done.” We shall soon see how cleverly Macaulay has seemed to accept this warning of Leigh Hunt, and how brilliantly he disregarded it.

Hazlitt attacks Collier with an equal zest, and an irony which the amiable Editor was unable to command. Hazlitt seems to have realised more clearly than any critic before or since the precise character of the injustice Collier inflicted upon the comic dramatists, and the mischief he wrought upon the English stage. “We may date the decline of English comedy,” Hazlitt concludes, “from the time of Farquhar. For this several causes might be assigned in the political and moral changes of the times; but among other minor ones, Jeremy Collier, in his view of the English stage, frightened the poets, and did all he could to spoil the stage, by pretending to reform it; that is, by making it an echo of the pulpit; instead of a reflection of the manners of the world. He complains bitterly of the profaneness of the stage; and is for fining the actors for every oath they utter, to put an end to the practice; as if common swearing had been an invention of the poets and stage-players. He cannot endure that the fine gentlemen drink, and the fine ladies intrigue in the scenes of Congreve and Wycherley when things so contrary to law and gospel happened nowhere else. He is vehement against duelling, as a barbarous custom, of which the example is suffered with impunity nowhere but on the stage. He is shocked at the number of fortunes that are irreparably ruined by the vice of gaming on the boards of the theatres. He seems to think that every breach of the ten commandments begins and ends there. He complains that the tame husbands of his time are laughed at on the stage, and that the successful gallants triumph, which was without precedent either in the city or the court. … He forgets, in his over-heated zeal, two things: First, that the stage must be copied from real life, that the manners represented there must exist elsewhere, and ‘denote a foregone conclusion,’ to satisfy common sense; Secondly, that the stage cannot shock common decency, according to the notions that prevail of it in any age or country, because the exhibition is public. If the pulpit, for instance, had banished all vice and imperfection from the world, as our critic would suppose, we should not have seen the offensive reflection of them on the stage, which he resents as an affront to the cloth, and an outrage on religion. On the contrary, with such a sweeping reformation as this theory implies, the office of the preacher, as well as of the player, would be gone; and if common peccadilloes of lying, swearing, intriguing, fighting, drinking, gaming, and other such obnoxious dramatic commonplaces, were once fairly got rid of in reality, neither the comic poet would be able to laugh at them on the stage, nor our good-natured author to consign them to damnation elsewhere.”

Hazlitt here insists upon the necessity for an intelligently historical and critical point of view. Restoration comedy must be judged as an honest reflexion of contemporary manners; it cannot be intelligently approached as a question of morality in vacuo, or as an hortation to be vicious by the devil's advocates. Continually, too, in reading Hazlitt's essay, we are asked to appreciate the folly of an extremely common habit of criticism. The first word of competent criticism is not yet uttered upon a piece of literature, though the last word is exhausted upon its subject and object. To say of the plays of Wycherley that they deal with the intrigues of lecherous young men and incontinent young women is perfectly true in fact; but it is not a critical opinion. In this, as in other regards, we shall return to Hazlitt's essay when in our critical conclusions we discover that the successors of the comic dramatists of the Restoration, even when morally considered, become steadily less palatable as they become steadily less responsive to the vices and follies of the time.

Lamb's essay upon artificial comedy is one of the most delightful and characteristic of his papers. Like Falstaff it is as well known as Paul's, but cannot for that reason be wholly omitted here. Macaulay's treatment of “Mr. Lamb” in this matter of artificial comedy is a classical study of a successfully misdirected effort. Lamb's essay is an inimitably urged plea for giving the Nonconformist conscience a rest. He throws off in brilliant paradox an accepted commonplace of criticism, namely, that the creatures of a play are not necessarily to be weighed according to the strict moral values of life, and that the critic must begin by accepting the conventions and postulates of the poet whose work he contemplates. For Charles Lamb the world of Mr. Horner and Sir Fopling is fairyland. The life into which he enters in their company bears no relation to the life he knows; but he is imaginatively quick to accept the revolution and to delight in the manners and customs of a strange folk. This world of Mr. Horner and Sir Fopling was once the poetic reflexion of a world that actually lived and moved. It is a poetic image that has survived the dead original. “Why,” ask Lamb in effect, “worry about the morality of this original, when we may enjoy the image?” Art and life, though they grow one from another, are different kingdoms. In Wycherley's The Country Wife, you may enjoy the adventures of Mr. Horner, though in the flesh you might steadily refuse to be acquainted.

Some lines of the essay itself are an excellent foil to the blindman vigour with which Macaulay attacked it. “The artificial comedy, or comedy of manners,” says Lamb, “is quite extinct on our stage. Congreve and Farquhar show their heads once in seven years, only to be exploded and put down instantly. The times cannot bear them. Is it for a few wild speeches, an occasional licence of dialogue? I think not altogether. The business of their dramatic characters will not stand the moral test; we screw everything up to that. Idle gallantry in a fiction, a dream, the passing pageant of an evening startles us in the same way as the alarming indications of profligacy in a son or ward in real life should startle a parent or guardian. We have no such middle emotions as dramatic interests left. We see a stage libertine playing his loose pranks of two hours' duration, and of no after consequence, with the severe eyes which inspect real vices with their bearings upon two worlds. … All that neutral ground of character, which stood between vice and virtue, or which in fact was indifferent to neither, where neither properly was called in question; that happy breathing place from the burthen of a perpetual moral questioning—the sanctuary and quiet Alsatia of hunted Casuistry—is broken up and disfranchised, as injurious to the interests of society. The privileges of the place are taken away by law. We dare not dally with images, or names of wrong. We bark like foolish dogs at shadows. We dread infection from the scenic representation of disorder, and fear a painted pustule. In our anxiety that our morality should not take cold, we wrap it up in a great blanket surtout of precaution against breeze and sunshine.”

Note that Lamb has nowhere distinctly said that the dramatic picture of society in the plays of the comic dramatists never had any historical connexion with the life of their time. He merely pleads that as critics we must approach Mr. Horner and Sir Fopling in a different spirit, since these are the creatures of a poet, from that in which the moralist approaches the conduct of their originals. We will grant Macaulay in advance that the comic plays of the Restoration were a reflexion of the morals and manners of the Restoration. But that is no reason why the two should be critically confused.

Let the incomparable Elia describe for us his own delightful sense of escape into a world which Macaulay never really entered. “I confess for myself,” Elia continues, “that (with no great delinquencies to answer for) I am glad for a season to take an airing beyond the diocese of the strict conscience, not to live always in the precincts of the law courts, but, now and then, for a dreamwhile or so, to imagine a world with no meddling restrictions, to get into recesses whither the hunter cannot follow me—

… Secret shades
Of woody Ida's inmost grove,
While yet there was no fear of Jove.

I come back to my cage and my restraint the fresher and more healthy for it. I wear my shackles more contentedly for having respired the breath of an imaginary freedom. I do not know how it is with others, but I feel the better always for the perusal of one of Congreve's—nay, why should I not add even of Wycherley's—comedies. I am the gayer at least for it; and I could never connect those sports of a witty fancy in any shape with any result to be drawn from them to imitation in real life. They are a world of themselves, almost as much as fairyland. The Fainalls and the Mirabells, the Dorimants and the Lady Touchwoods, in their own sphere do not offend my moral sense; in fact, they do not appeal to it at all. They seem engaged in their proper element. They break through no laws or conscientious restraints. They know of none. They have got out of Christendom into the land of—what shall I call it?—of cuckoldry—the Utopia of gallantry, where pleasure is duty, and the manners perfect freedom … We are not to judge them by our images. No reverend institutions are insulted by their proceedings—for they have none among them. No peace of families is isolated—for no family ties exist among them. No purity of the marriage-bed is stained—for none is supposed to have a being. No deep affections are disquieted, no holy wedlock bonds snapped asunder—for affection's depth and wedded faith are not of that soil. There is neither right nor wrong—gratitude or its opposite—claim or duty—paternity or sonship.”

In fact, as Charles Lamb might have concluded, but did not think fit to conclude, here was a perfect reflexion of the genius of early Restoration society. But that historic point, on which Macaulay bases his whole indictment of Lamb, is not really important in the critical argument with which Lamb was concerned. Lamb was brilliantly pleading against the habit of mind in which a whole century of critics and playgoers had approached the artificial comedy. In his own phrase: “We dare not contemplate an Atlantis, a scheme out of which our coxcombical moral sense is for a little transitory ease excluded. We have not that courage to imagine a state of things for which there is neither reward nor punishment. We cling to the painful necessities of shame and blame. We would indict our very dreams.” This essay, at the time of writing, as still to-day, is a perpetual necessary protest against the final reference of the poet's work to the merely sensible standards of contemporary morality. Its necessity was never more clearly shown than in Macaulay upon “Mr. Lamb.”

That Leigh Hunt's edition of the comic dramatists fell to be reviewed by Macaulay is one of the tragedies of literary history. Macaulay's review undid all that the best critical intellect of his time had achieved for the reputation of English comedy. Macaulay talked sense for sensible people; and, since he talked brilliantly as only Macaulay could, and since his wit was sharpened to the enterprise by the vigour of all his accumulated prejudices, political and sentimental, he was easily able, in the view of his contemporaries, to thrust his victims back into disrepute.

Macaulay starts, in the manner of an able advocate, granting points to the enemy with a splendidly affected generosity, that he may at a later stage of the argument fall upon him with all the more crushing effect. Macaulay has a “kindness for Mr. Leigh Hunt,” and he expresses this kindness in a way that must have been extremely gratifying to the friend of Coleridge, Byron, Shelley, Keats—not to mention Hazlitt and “Mr. Lamb.” Macaulay continues: “The plays to which he (Mr. Leigh Hunt), now acts as introducer are, with few exceptions, such as, in the opinion of many very respectable people, ought not to be reprinted. In this opinion we can by no means concur. We cannot wish that any work or class of work which has exercised a great influence on the human mind, and which illustrates the character of an important epoch in letters, politics, and morals should disappear from the world.”

Could anything be more superbly impertinent? Here was a reviewer deliberately sitting down to castigate the impurities of a body of English literature entirely from the standpoint of his personal prejudices as to the correct conduct of contemporary family life, and he artfully begins with a careful demonstration of the “broadness” of his mind, and a discreet difference of opinion with “many very respectable people.” No one knew better than Macaulay that this was the irresistible approach to the hearts of his contemporaries. Nay, is not the attitude always with us? “I am not a narrow-minded person; but I really do draw the line at these comic dramatists.” It is a consecrated formula.

Virtually disclaiming the moral test as final in this opening passage, Macaulay employs it, in summing up, as the touchstone of his critical estimate. He has misunderstood the protest of Charles Lamb and turned his thunder upon the mists. Macaulay should have first distinguished between what was obviously false in Lamb's contention (if Lamb actually intended it, which is not clear, and scarcely relevant), and what was obviously true. If Lamb really intended to suggest that the manners of Restoration comedy had no pattern in Restoration life, he was wrong; and, here, Macaulay's criticism is pertinent and just. The excellence of Restoration comedy is, in fact, directly due to the honest fidelity with which it reflects the spirit of an intensely interesting phase of our social history. But Lamb would certainly have acknowledged that Macaulay, on the historical side, was right; nor would he thereby have lost a jot of his argument. “Mr. Horner,” says Charles Lamb in effect, “is a fairy.” “He is not a fairy,” answers Macaulay, “he is an impudent debauchee. He betrays his friends and seduces his friend's wife. People actually behaved like that in the time of Charles II. Therefore Mr. Horner is an actual live person. We must detest him accordingly.” Lamb might simply have answered: “Every one, seen through the imagination of a poet, is a fairy.” To which Macaulay may be conceived as replying: “That is a hard saying; please put it in terms of common sense.”

The fraudulent character of Macaulay's preliminary concessions appears throughout. He disclaims the moral test as final; but he applies none other. He examines The Country Wife, perhaps the most perfect farce in English dramatic literature; but he never even begins to examine it as a critic. His paragraph as to this play is typical of the whole essay. Note how throughout he deals with the subject-matter of Wycherley's play; not, as a true critic would, with the play itself. “The only thing original about Wycherley,”—Macaulay is writing apropos of Wycherley's indebtedness to Molière—“the only thing which he could furnish from his own mind in inexhaustible abundance, was profligacy. It is curious to observe how everything that he touched, however pure and noble, took in an instant the colour of his own mind. Compare the Ecole des Femmes with The Country Wife. Agnes is a simple and amiable girl, whose heart is indeed full of love, but of love sanctioned by honour, morality and religion. Her natural talents are great. They have been hidden, and, as it might appear, destroyed by an education elaborately bad. But they are called forth into full energy by a virtuous passion. Her lover, while he adores her beauty, is too honest a man to abuse the confiding tenderness of a creature so charming and inexperienced. Wycherley takes this plot into his hands; and forthwith this sweet and graceful courtship becomes a licentious intrigue, of the lowest and least sentimental kind, between an impudent London rake and the idiot wife of a country squire. We will not go into details. In truth, Wycherley's indecency is protected against the critics as a skunk is protected against the hunters. It is safe because it is too filthy to handle, and too noisome to approach.” There is a good deal hereafter to be said as to Macaulay's view of Mr. Horner as an “impudent London rake”; and of Mrs. Pinchwife as “the idiot wife of a country squire.” How it would have puzzled “Mr. Lamb,” and how it must have puzzled Mr. Leigh Hunt for whom “we have a kindness,” to see Macaulay rising to moral solemnity over the doings of Wycherley's puppet-folk. All possibility of rejoinder from either of these accomplished critics—not to mention Hazlitt—would have been extinguished in delighted laughter.

One other point as to Macaulay's critical methods in this essay clamours to be exposed. Just as he first deprecates the finality of the moral test, that he may the more effectively apply it later on; so he begins with an appeal for an historical treatment of the comic dramatists, and ends by falling into the worst blunder possible in a serious historian. He begins by pleading that all bodies of literature must be judged by the moral standards contemporary with their production; he ends by assessing the comic dramatists in every line of his commentary by the standards of 1849. Here again, in the trained manner of the advocate, he is splendidly generous to the object of his attack. “The worst English writings of the seventeenth century,” he handsomely confesses, “are decent compared with much that has been bequeathed to us by Greece and Rome. Plato, we have little doubt, was a much better man than Sir George Etherege. But Plato has written things at which Sir George Etherege would have shuddered. Buckhurst and Sedley, even in those wild orgies at the ‘Cock’ in Bond Street, for which they were pelted by the rabble, and fined by the Court of King's Bench, would never have dared to hold such discourse as passed between Socrates and Phædrus on that fine summer day under the plane-tree, while the fountain warbled at their feet, and the cicadas chirped overhead.” This is admirable in sentiment and expression—a plea that as Plato must be judged at the bar of b.c. 500, so Etherege and Wycherley must be judged at the bar of 1664. When, however, we turn to the judgments of Macaulay we find that Etherege and Wycherley are at the bar of 1849.

“The morality of The Country Wife and The Old Bachelor,” says Macaulay, “is the morality, not, as Mr. Charles Lamb maintains, of an unreal world, but of a world which is a great deal too real. It is the morality, not of a chaotic people, but of low town rakes, and of those ladies whom the newspapers call ‘dashing Cyprians,’ and the question is simply this, whether a man of genius who constantly and systematically endeavours to make this sort of character attractive by uniting it with beauty, race, dignity, spirit, a high social position, popularity, literature, wit, taste, knowledge of the world, brilliant success in every undertaking, does or does not make an ill use of his powers. We own that we are unable to understand how this question can be answered in any way but one.”

Now, the obvious implication of this passage is that the comic dramatists of the seventeenth century deliberately set themselves to corrupt the taste and morality of their generation. Macaulay assumes that they really were capable of better things; that they saw the good and systematically chose the worse. Macaulay is not regarding them as echoes or reflexions of their period. He is not judging them, even from the purely moral point of view, by the standards of their time. He instinctively conceives them as gentlemen of 1850, fully alive to the iniquity of their dealings, and deliberately pandering to the worst instincts of the period in which they lived. He is judging them not on the merits they had, but on the merits he thinks they ought to have had. Macaulay's prejudices, moral and political, are so ungovernably violent that he, one of the greatest of our English chroniclers, instinctively falls into the blunders of a prize-essayist.

Macaulay was writing for the majority. Of the main host of his educated generation that felt the weight of Macaulay's logic, and delighted in the vigour of his thrust, few could catch the more difficult message of Hazlitt and Lamb. Macaulay finally determined in 1849 that, in popular estimation, the inevitable first thought as to the comic dramatists should be of their immorality and offensiveness to contemporary taste. No two writers in the following period had better title to talk of comedy and the comic spirit than Thackeray and, after Thackeray, Meredith. Both these writers go back, almost, to the view of Johnson and Swift.

“Congreve's comic feast,” says Thackeray in his lectures on the English Humorists, “flares with lights, and round the table, emptying their flaming bowls of drink, and exchanging the wildest jests and ribaldry, sit men and women, waited on by rascally valets and attendants as dissolute as their mistresses—perhaps the very worst company in the world. There does not seem to be a pretence of morals. At the head of the table sits Mirabell or Bellmour (dressed in the French fashion and waited on by English imitators of Scapin and Frontin). Their calling is to be irresistible, and to conquer everywhere. Like the heroes of the chivalry story, whose long-winded loves and combats they were sending out of fashion, they are always splendid and triumphant—overcome all dangers, vanquish all enemies, and win the beauty at the end. Fathers, husbands, usurers are the foes these champions contend with. … All this pretty morality you have in the comedies of William Congreve Esquire. They are full of wit. Such manners as he observes, he observes with great humour; but, ah! it's a weary feast, that banquet of wit where no love is. It palls very soon; sad indigestions follow it, and lonely blank headaches in the morning.”

This is the criticism of Steele, Swift, and Johnson in the manner of Thackeray. Nor is Meredith less uncritical. He falls upon Lamb directly. “Elia,” he writes in the Essay on Comedy, “whose humour delighted in floating a galleon paradox and wafting it as far as it would go, bewails the extinction of our artificial comedy, like a poet sighing over the vanished splendour of Cleopatra's Nile barge, and the sedateness of his plea for a cause condemned even in his time to the penitentiary is a novel effect of the ludicrous.” The fan behind which “ladies present in the theatre retired at a signal of decorum,” Meredith elsewhere continues, may be regarded as “the flag and symbol of the society giving us our so-called Comedy of Manners, or Comedy of the Manners of South Sea Islanders under city veneer; and as to comic idea vacuous as the mask without the face behind it.”

Yet Meredith himself has diagnosed the disease of which he is, in these passages, conspicuously a victim. The inflamed Puritan conscience of which, in this matter of the comic dramatists, Jeremy Collier, despite his nonjuring politics, and Lord Macaulay, despite his decorous whiggery, are the champions and historical indices, is the explanation of the reputation in which Congreve, Wycherley, Vanbrugh, and Farquhar are held to-day. To quote the words of Meredith himself, perverting their intention, “our tenacity of natural impressions has caused the word ‘theatre’ … to prod the Puritan nervous system like a Satanic instrument; just as one has known anti-Papists, for whom Smithfield was redolent of a sinister smoke, as though they had a later recollection of the place than the lowing herds. Hereditary puritanism, regarding the stage, is met, to this day, in many families quite undistinguished by arrogant piety. It has subsided altogether as a power in the profession of morality; but it is an error to suppose it extinct, and [here, of course, Meredith separates himself from the contentions of this book] unjust also to forget that it had once good reason to hate, shun, and rebuke our public shows.”

These critical preliminaries will, perhaps, have suggested the necessary gap to be filled in an account of the comic dramatists. First, it is due to their reputation that we view them—as Macaulay professed, but neglected, to do—historically. What sort of men were they in the face of their period? Is their work a true mirror of life as they followed it? Is there anything spiritually of value in the truths that they wrested from the passing of their generation, and moulded imperishably in their art? Second, what is the literary value of those master-pieces of comedy they have left us, viewed, not after the criteria of the publicist, but according to the laws of imagination? Hazlitt and Lamb knew and tested the work for themselves; and left their impressions where we may to-day recapture them. But are we æsthetically, or even morally—for, though it is not the final test by which the works of the imagination are to be viewed, we are not going to shirk the moral issue—justified in accepting Hazlitt and Lamb in the teeth of the giants—Johnson and Swift, Thackeray and Meredith? Have we, as a nation, consistently misjudged the comic dramatists owing to an inflamed “Puritan nervous system,” or is their degradation in the popular mind due to a deeper falsehood in their work than Jeremy Collier was able to discover? In a word, is all that they wrote palpably a lie?—false to the truths that go deeper than the pulpit fashions of this or that particular generation? Was it a legitimate defence, or mere ruffling blasphemy, when Captain Vanbrugh said of his plays that he could fancy a virtuous woman laying them by the side of her prayer-book?

Works Cited

[This is not a complete bibliography; but a list of books and papers quoted in the text, or upon which facts and arguments in the text are based.]

Leigh Hunt. Dramatic Works of Wycherley, Congreve, Vanbrugh and Farquhar (1849). A complete edition of the plays, containing memoirs of the dramatists and the essays of Lamb and Hazlitt.

Macaulay. Leigh Hunt. A review of the Leigh Hunt edition, dealing only with Wycherley and Congreve.

Pepys' Diary. Passim. References are dated in the text.

Evelyn's Diary References are dated in the text.

The Tatler. (Steele). References are dated in the text.

The Spectator. (Addison). References are dated in the text.

Johnson. Life of Congreve.

Blackmore. The Epic of Prince Arthur.

The Collier Pamphlets. (See Chapter VIII.).

Thackeray. The English Humourists.

Meredith. An Essay on Comedy.