[In the following excerpts from a work originally published in 1924, Dobrée provides background on Restoration society and describes differences between the comedy of manners and the earlier comedy of humours.]

THE FRAMEWORK

Let us first examine briefly the soil in which this comedy grew.

The most hasty student of history regards the quarter-century succeeding the Restoration as one of unbridled licence, in which everybody from the king downwards was corruptible. He learns that morality was in abeyance, or at least submerged under a flood of not altogether joyous wickedness, and that ‘polite’ society was engaged in consciously living to the top of its bent, determined to extract what pleasure it could out of life. But this, of course, was not true of the whole community; it never could be, because always, somewhere beneath the surface, the normal life continues, quiet and self-possessed. Even about the court such men as Evelyn could exist, such women as Dorothy Osborne and the one who became Margaret Godolphin. But the lurid picture is at least superficially true of the society with which we have to do, that is, the society which patronized the theatre; amid the galaxy of wit and fashion all was at sixes and sevens, in politics, religion, and social convention.

We need not concern ourselves with the political and religious outlooks, for these are reflected in the state of society, and it is the last which interests us as students of the comedy of the period. Here we find that the elegance of court life, ‘which for its politeness and pomp astonished Grammont, accustomed though he was to the magnificence of the French court’, scarcely covered the complete absence of any standard of sexual morality. Charles, indeed, set the fashion, Pepys reporting of Mrs. Stewart that the king ‘gets into corners, and will be with her half an hour together, kissing her to the observation of all the world’. Courtiers took the hint in a manner familiar to the most superficial student of memoirs of the period, so that ‘the names of Buckingham and Rochester, of Etherege, Killigrew, and Sedley’, as Bishop Wilberforce once wrote, ‘still maintain a bad pre-eminence in the annals of English vice’. Yet the interesting thing is that these men were not only wild gallants, but have a certain place in English literature. Buckingham wrote, or at least assisted in writing, The Rehearsal, and adapted Fletcher's The Chances; Rochester, a strong and subtle mind, made poems that certainly outshine those of ‘The mob of gentlemen who wrote with ease’; Killigrew was the author of several comedies, while Sedley adapted Terence, wrote an original play, and some charming poems, one of which begins with the immortal couplet:

Love still has something of the sea
From whence his mother rose.

These reviled rakes, then, were men of taste and of cultivated refinement. Buckhurst, afterward Lord Dorset, was a great patron of poets, and wrote the famous ballad ‘To all you ladies now at land’. And in those days it did not seem absurd that Buckingham and Rochester should each, on dying, gain the solemn praises of Bishop Burnet.

It is idle to insist upon the licence of the times. If we read Hamilton's Memoirs of Grammont, an ‘exquisite picture of manners’, as Gibbon called it, we can get a clear notion of the general attitude. Court ladies went about masked; duchesses disguised themselves as flower sellers to visit their lovers in the early morning. Miss Jennings (sister of the famous Duchess of Marlborough) and Miss Price arrayed themselves as orange women to visit Rochester, who was masquerading as an astrologer so as to catch some city lady. Miss Hobart and Miss Temple exchanged dresses and paraded masked in The Mall to befool the same extraordinary peer; and these were all court ladies. Bishop Burnet tells of the court masquerades, and how even the king and queen attended masked balls incogniti, ‘and danced there with wild frolic’. Nor was this the most. Although poisoning never attained the vogue it did in France at this period, Sir John Denham's wife was supposed to have been poisoned ‘by the hand of the Countess of Rochester with chocolate’. Whether this was true or not, the fact that it could be recorded by Aubrey is sufficient indication of the morality of the time, while Burnet was strongly inclined to believe that Charles II died by the same foul means. When the actor Mountford was murdered, little pains were taken to bring the murderer to trial, and his noble accomplice, Lord Mohun, was acquitted.

To us it seems a fantastic world, brutal and stupid, for all its merriment and grace; did not Rochester, Buckhurst, and others break up the astronomical balls in Whitehall for fun? Its pleasures seem to smack somewhat of effort, and these men and women to express only a part of mankind in contrast to the wholeness of the Elizabethans. That is the obvious aspect. Yet can it have been just that? What really underlay this behaviour that seems to us so extraordinary? For at bottom, men do not deliberately live this troubled life, existing from day to day. Certainly people were determined to enjoy their newly regained luxury and security, and besides, nobody could foretell what the morrow would bring: at any moment the king, in spite of a contrary determination, might once more have to go upon his travels, for ‘everybody, nowadays’, Pepys wrote, ‘reflect upon Oliver and commend him, what brave things he did, and made all the neighbours fear him’. It was, maybe, preferable to have a Cromwell at Whitehall than to see the Dutch at Sheerness. But there was something deeper than this; and what we find, if we analyse the social behaviour of the time, is a great curiosity and a desire to experiment.

For it was an age of inquiry and curiosity: in it criticism became active for the first time. It had, indeed, existed before, but it had never had much effect. Now, however, writers were beginning to inquire how plays should be constructed, and what was meant by good English; they became conscious of what they were doing, too conscious perhaps. Not only do we find men like Dryden at one end of the period and Dennis at the other busying themselves with such questions, but also a host of virtuoso aristocrats. And just as literary curiosity was general, so was the scientific, and it was at this time the Royal Society was founded. If political experiment was at an end (it had assumed fantastic shapes), political curiosity was not, as witness the wide diffusion of the writings of Hobbes, Harrington, and Algernon Sidney.

This curiosity extended itself to everyday life; men and women were experimenting in social things; they were trying to rationalize human relationships. They found that, for them at least, affection and sexual desire were quite separate, and they tried to organize society on that basis. Love, in which the two feelings are imaginatively fused, scarcely existed for them. And since they accepted man as a licentious animal, it meant, of course, that if life was to be easy, the pursuit of a mistress must be an acknowledged amusement. You could, they believed, preserve your affection for your wife and be sure of hers for you, even if she had liaisons with other men. It was absurd to make a fuss about a thing that mattered so little. What then became of jealousy? It was ridiculous. Chesterfield, for instance, made jealous by the Duke of York's attentions to his wife, which had, indeed, been set in motion by her brother, sent her to the country and took as his confidant Hamilton, himself Lady Chesterfield's lover. The unfortunate husband obtained little sympathy. ‘All over England a man who was so ill-bred as to be jealous of his wife was regarded with amazement; in the town, indeed, it was an unheard-of thing for a man to resort to those violent means to prevent that which jealousy both fears and deserves. However, people made what excuses they dared for poor Chesterfield, without laying themselves open to public opprobrium, laying the blame on his bad education. Every mother prayed God fervently that her children should never set foot in Italy if it meant they would bring back the ugly habit of restricting the liberty of their wives.’ Thus it comes that throughout Restoration comedy husbands are such ‘filthy, odious beasts’ that it is hardly polite to mention them.

There is exaggeration here, one will say. Yes, and it was just this exaggeration that lent itself to the comic writers. Moreover, it was because the experiment did not, after all, make for social comfort that those who attempted it became the butts of the comic stage. For most men still disliked being cuckolded, the wittol was still an object of scorn. As a result of the conditions the jealous man became still more jealous, and fell into ‘excess’. Had the experiment succeeded, there might have been no good Restoration comedy. Luckily such does exist, good serious comedy, concerning itself with something very important, in fact, eternal, for this question is never settled. Thus its bawdry is not merely jesting—though some of it undoubtedly is—but an attempt to be frank and honest. In this society of an experimental temper, seeking to see itself clearly, anything might be, and was said.

Restoration comedy, then, expressed, not licentiousness, but a deep curiosity, and a desire to try new ways of living. But since this question of ‘impurity’ has been so much a matter of controversy, it may be treated separately.

ITS IMPURITY

‘I could never connect these sports of a witty fancy’, Lamb wrote in his famous essay upon this comedy, ‘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. … They break through no laws of 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. It is altogether a speculative scene of things, which has no reference whatever to the world that is.’

But that this is untrue, even his admiring contemporaries had to admit. ‘Perhaps’, Leigh Hunt commented, ‘he thought that he could even play his readers a child's trick, and persuade them that Congreve's fine ladies and gentlemen were doing nothing but “making as if”. Most assuredly he was mistaken.’ Lamb's trick, indeed, was innocent enough; he was trying to persuade his readers to become Congreve's also, in spite of their prudish horror. For Leigh Hunt was right; and Macaulay, though his moral judgement was irrelevant, was not wrong in his facts: ‘A hundred little tricks are employed to make the fictitious world appear like the actual world.’ And Hazlitt in a brilliant passage showed that although this comedy might have no reference whatever to the world that is, it was very like a society that had been; ‘we are almost transported to another world, and escape from this dull age. …’

Lamb's delightful argument does of course contain a useful truth; we must not confuse moral and aesthetic values. But it would not be of great importance at the present day in connexion with Restoration comedy were it not that many critics accept his dicta blindly; it is constantly assumed that to appreciate Restoration comedy we must accept Elia's attitude. Yet if we read this comedy in Lamb's spirit, we shall certainly find it very refreshing, but we shall miss seeing what it really was.

It is admittedly tiresome, but it seems unavoidable, to have to approach this work through Collier and Swift, Johnson, Macaulay, and Taine, and excuse its ‘impurity’. For ‘impurity’ was its most important subject. How could it avoid dealing with sex when the distinguishing characteristic of Restoration comedy down to Congreve is that it is concerned with the attempt to rationalize sexual relationships? It is this that makes it different from any other comedy that has ever been written; but if we regard it as creating a wholly fantastic world we shall not see this. It said in effect, ‘Here is life lived upon certain assumptions; see what it becomes.’ It also dealt, as no other comedy has ever done, with a subject that arose directly out of this, namely, sex-antagonism, a consequence of the experimental freedom allowed to women, which gave matter for some of its most brilliant scenes.

‘Sex in Congreve’, Mr. Palmer says, ‘is a battle of the wits. It is not a battlefield of the emotions’; but this was so in real life as well as in the plays of Congreve. ‘When sex laws remain rigid …’, writes Mr. Heape [Sex Antagonism, by W. Heape, F.R.S.] ‘while society becomes more and more complicated and the life led by its members more purely artificial, the probability of the growth of drastic sex-antagonism is vastly increased, becomes indeed, a certainty.’ But although men recognized with Hobbes that in the political world liberty and security are incompatible, and that a compromise has to be made, they did not see the necessity of applying the maxim in the social world. Men may not want the bonds of marriage, but once married they want to keep their wives to themselves. Women may be inconstant, but they want to be secure. Thus ‘virtue’ retains its social prestige. This was perfectly understood in those days, and was exquisitely phrased by Ariana speaking to Courtal (Etherege, She Would if She Could, v. i): ‘I know you would think it as great a scandal to be thought to have an inclination for marriage, as we should be believed willing to take our freedom without it.’ Indeed, a woman's virtue was of great importance, unless she was one of the king's mistresses. Says Lady Fidget to Horner (Wycherley, The Country Wife, iv. iii): ‘But first, my dear sir, you must promise to have a care of my dear honour’, because (v. iv) ‘Our reputation! Lord, why should you not think that we women make use of our reputation, as you men of yours, only to deceive the world with less suspicion?’

But if sex did indeed become a battle of the wits rather than a question of the emotions, it must not be assumed that the figures represented on the stage were any less flesh and blood than their human types. Certainly, and here is the importance for us, the audiences did not regard the actors as puppets playing at a life of their own, but as men living an existence which they were almost invited to share [As is made quite clear by the Epilogue to Marriage à la Mode].

But let us repeat that the object of the bawdry in these plays was not to tickle the desires of the audience. The motto of Restoration comedy was not ‘Thrive, lechery, thrive’, nor its subject the successful pursuit of the town coquette by the town gallant, though this provided many scenes. Its great joke was not ‘and swearing she would not consent, consented’. It had a profounder philosophy. Its joke, indeed, is rather a grim one; it is more accurate to say that it is

How nature doth compel us to lament
Our most persisted deeds,

for having consented, she regretted; he, having instituted liberty, repented of it.

But apart from these considerations, and apart from Lamb, does not the whole question of impurity, and any attempt to justify it, seem a little absurd? For even if we abhor the idea of sexual looseness in real life, this does not preclude the possibility of turning the common facts of life into art. No one objects to ‘adultery being part of the action’ in Agamemnon, The Rape of Lucrece, or Anna Karenina. And just as in these works something definite is made of the theme, so in our period the writers of comedy who were also artists, crystallized sex excitement into a comic appearance. Therefore the only questions arising are these: If we are disgusted at the ‘impurities’ which are the material of much of this comedy, are they handled with sufficient skill to make us indifferent to the subject-matter? Or is there, in spite of much that disgusts us, enough beauty and intelligence to overbalance our revulsion in favour of delight? Or can we simply accept the life of the time, and without associating it with ourselves, derive interest and pleasure from the observation and understanding of men whose outlook on life died with their erring bodies some two centuries ago? Surely this seems the reasonable attitude. Indeed, condemnation at this distance, emotion at two hundred years, itself provides a target for the comic imps.

ITS REALISM

The question of realism, however, is one that claims our interest from other points of view; the obvious one, for instance, of structure, of how the men of that period set about writing comedy.

But a more important point is that of purpose. If comedy wishes to be immediately critical, two courses are open to it; either it can be fantastic, as with Aristophanes, or it must be realistic. Hence, in the latter case, the title of the Comedy of Manners. If it wishes to be critical in the larger sphere, it need not be realistic, and then it becomes the Comedy of Humours. And once more, where Restoration comedy is concerned, Lamb has queered the pitch. No one until his day doubted its realism; but nowadays it seems hard for a critic boldly to affirm it, for fear of being charged with not having read Elia. Its immediately critical intent made truth to external nature a necessity.

Evidently the way to clear up the question is to refer to the facts themselves, to see if the manners as we know them corresponded with what was put upon the stage. And indeed, a superficial reading of these plays, combined with a very small acquaintance with the period, will convince us that this comedy came as close to real life as possible, not only in its setting, as Macaulay insisted, but in the actual personalities and events. Naturally, the more inventive the artist the less can his models be found in real life, but the figures of Wycherley and Congreve are not so far removed from those of Shadwell and Vanbrugh that they seem to belong to a different world. This is not to say, of course, that comedy did not exaggerate; but its artificiality is only the artifice necessary to that concentration of life upon the stage wherein the art of the drama partly consists.

At once, with Etherege, we find portraiture, and from the first the characters in The Man of Mode were matter for controversy. Who, it was asked, was Medley supposed to represent? Was it Sir Charles Sedley? Was it perhaps Rochester? St. Evremond on his part declared Dorimant to be Rochester, while Dean Lockier said that ‘Sir George Etherege was … exactly his own Sir Fopling Flutter, and yet he designed Dorimant, the genteel rake of wit, for his own picture’. Sir Fopling, however, was probably Beau Hewitt, ‘the most notorious fop of the day’. Thus at that time it was not considered impossible to connect that sport of a witty fancy with a personage in real life. The example set by Etherege was followed by his successors. It is not, of course, fair to take such deliberate satires as Bayes in Buckingham's Rehearsal, or Antonio in the comical scenes of Venice Preserved, which were shafts too obviously directed at Dryden and Shaftesbury, respectively. Yet when Vanbrugh created Lord Foppington, he did not merely adapt Sir Fopling Flutter and ennoble Sir Novelty Fashion, but largely took as his model the famous Beau Fielding and copied him faithfully, even to the duel scene in which the hero received so harmless a scratch. Shadwell's Sir Positive At-All was supposed to be a caricature of one of the Howards.

Or again, we may regard certain things as fantastic inventions, as, for instance, Lord Nonsuch and others in Dryden's Wild Gallant believing themselves with child. Yet with reference to this Genest quotes a story of a ‘Dr. Pelling, Chaplain to Charles II, who having studied himself into the disorder of mind called the hyp … between the age of forty and fifty imagined himself to be pregnant’.

The same is true as regards scenes; wherever they could, the comic writers of this period took what they were able from the life they saw around them. Dryden would never have considered it a compliment to learn what Lamb may have told him in Hades, and he wrote with pride of his son's Husband his own Cuckold that ‘the circumstances really happened in Rome’. Cibber took his handkerchief scene in The Careless Husband from real life, and, according to Dennis, the story on which Shadwell's Squire of Alsatia ‘was built was a true fact’ [The main idea, however, is from the Adelphoe of Terence]. Mock marriages also, so frequent in these comedies, as, for instance, in The Country Wife, had their part in reality, and were not devices invented for stage purposes. It is on record that the Earl of Oxford carried out a sham ceremony with a famous actress of impregnable virtue, probably Mrs. Marshall, who upon appealing to the king got no further redress than some monetary compensation.

The bargaining scene in The Way of the World has always been considered the height of artificial comedy. Mirabell lays down as a condition of marriage with Millamant that at the tea-table ‘you exceed not in your province; but restrain yourself to native and simple tea-table drinks, as tea, chocolate and coffee. … I banish all foreign forces, all auxiliaries to the tea-table, as orange brandy, all aniseed, cinnamon, citron and Barbadoes waters.’ Such an ‘odious proviso’ may seem extravagant to us, yet in a foot-note to the Mermaid edition we read, ‘With those beverages there was always a mixture of alcohol. The poets and satirists were very severe upon the “tasting” of fine ladies’, in illustration of which a short passage is quoted. And in Genest we find that in her room at court Miss Hobart ‘had a cupboard stocked with comfits and all kinds of liqueurs’.

To quote again from Genest upon another topic. ‘The character of Foresight (Love for Love) is now become obsolete … but in 1695 there could not be a more fair subject for ridicule, as persons of the first ability were guilty of that folly (astrology); Dryden, in a letter to his sons in Rome written at this time, says: “Towards the latter end of September Charles will begin to recover his perfect health, according to his nativity, which casting it myself I am sure is true, and all things hitherto have happened according to the time that I predicted them.” The famous Lord Shaftesbury, though as to religion a Deist, had in him the dotage of astrology to a high degree—he said to Burnet that a Dutch doctor had from the stars foretold him the whole series of his life.’ That the superstition was popular enough we may gather from Rochester's prank as an astrologer; and how far it was accepted may be gauged from the fact that the compiler of a medical book of the period named himself ‘Physician and Astrologer’. The theme of the mock astrologer was used as early as Wilson's The Cheats (1662), or, indeed, as Massinger's City Madam; and as late as Farquhar's Recruiting Officer (1706).

The point need not be laboured. Enough has been quoted to show that the general life of the time, its movement, its amusements, its general conceptions, were mirrored upon the stage. ‘No one’, as Mr. Street writes, ‘conversant with the memoirs of the court can have any difficulty in matching the fiction with its reality.’ And while it is true that this comedy, written moreover for the most part by men who had at least the aloofness necessary to art, need make no appeal to our passions, not to connect them ‘in any shape with the result to be drawn from their imitation in real life’, is an error which can only be excused by the enthusiasm of a great artist who wished at all costs to save exquisite work from the oblivion to which an ignorant Grundyism would have consigned it. At the present day we can afford to be frank.

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THE COMEDY OF MANNERS

ITS RELATION TO THE COMEDY OF HUMOURS

The line of demarcation between the comedy of manners and the comedy of humours is none too clear. It consists partly in a difference in stagecraft rather than a difference of outlook, in a greater vivacity of rendering rather than a variation in profundity. Restoration comedy was much lighter in the handling of personalities, altogether more deft, than the comedy of humours. The moral did not have to be driven home with bludgeon blows, and the temper of a man could be appreciated without depicting the excesses of a Volpone or the madness of a Sir Giles Overreach.

It attacked the unsocial from another angle. Whereas the comedy of humours searched out and displayed the hidden recesses of human passions and desires, the comedy of manners showed that these passions and desires were by no means confined in hidden recesses, but might be encountered daily. Morose, set in an almost imaginary town, became Manly who was supposed to walk about the London everybody knew. The audience, instead of being asked to recognize something of themselves in the characters they saw upon the stage, were invited to laugh at their acquaintance. Finally, the comedy of humours was only more profound in that it appealed to some supposedly absolute standard of morality, while the comedy of manners took for its norm that of the honnête homme of the time.

This is not to say that Restoration comedy was less in earnest than the Elizabethan. In presenting characters familiar to every one, the exquisite in his Chedreux wig, the would-be wit, or the gay lady of fashion, it did not merely seek to amuse, and attract audiences by showing them fashionable life lived up to the hilt. It tried just as profoundly to reveal mankind and consider the effect of passions, but it dealt with everything more intellectually, more urbanely, more cynically perhaps. It was gayer, and did not take its wisdom with so desperate a seriousness; it was entirely without the metaphysical element. But if there was not so much furor poeticus, there was just as much considered criticism. For why were the figures put upon the stage if not for crushing ridicule? The dialogue was admittedly pointed, but at what? Wit cannot exist in the air; it is necessarily critical, or even satirical: it must be referred to something, and this something was what the comic writers of the period were pleased to call ‘acquired follies’. Sir Fopling Flutter is the main figure of The Man of Mode because, in the words of Dorimant, ‘he is a person of great acquired follies’. In the same manner Congreve, in The Way of the World, strove ‘to design some characters which should appear ridiculous not so much through a natural folly … as through an affected wit’.

How ‘acquired follies’ were to be recognized apart from the inborn is a question which does not seem to have occurred to many writers of that period. There is no immediately visible difference between an affectation and a vice, and Congreve's Scandal was right when he said there was ‘no effectual difference between continued affectation and reality’; for although in the ‘Letter concerning Humour’ Congreve defined the difference with great lucidity, the ‘humour’ being ineradicable, the ‘folly’ artificial, he gave no test by which the one could be distinguished from the other at a glance. Shadwell, who definitely hoped to continue the Jonsonian tradition, and was convinced that he wrote the comedy of humours, declared that he despised the ‘farce-fools’ whose humour was nothing more than extravagant dress, and that he aimed at the ‘artificial folly of those who are not coxcombs by nature, but with great art and industry make themselves so’, in fact the Jonsonian ‘sporting’ with ‘follies not with crimes’. Vanbrugh has a passage to the same effect in The Relapse, where Loveless tells Amanda to ‘pity those whom nature abuses, but never those who abuse nature’. But after all, the spring which moves people to abuse nature has been planted in them by nature herself.

In reality Congreve and Shadwell based their theory upon the induction to Every Man Out of His Humour.

… Whatsoe'er hath fluxure and humidity,
As wanting power to contain itself,
Is humour. So in every human body,
The choler, melancholy, phlegm and blood,
By reason that they flow continually
In some one part, and are not continent,
Receive the name of Humours. Now thus far
It may, by metaphor, apply itself
Unto the general disposition;
As when some one peculiar quality
Doth so possess a man, that it doth draw
All his affects, his spirits, and his powers,
In their confluctions, all to run one way,
This may be truly said to be a humour.
But that a rook, by wearing a pied feather,
The cable hat-band, or the three-piled ruff,
A yard of shoe-tie, or the Switzer's knot
On his French garters, should affect a humour!
O, it is more than most ridiculous.

And let us remember here that Jonson also intended to ‘strip the ragged follies of the time’.

Restoration comedy as often as not dealt with what Jonson himself would have called humours. Congreve's Captain Bluffe is only Bobadill's grandson, Witwoud is lineally sprung from Sir John Daw, while Sir Amorous Lafoole has a hundred descendants. The only difference is that after 1660 there was on the whole a greater variety, a brisker mingling, we might say a lighter hand. Yet Jonson himself could be light enough, as witness this passage from Every Man in His Humour (III. i):

MATTHEW.
Oh! it's your only fine humour, sir. Your true melancholy breeds your perfect fine wit, sir. I am melancholy myself, divers times, sir; and then do I no more but take pen and paper, presently, and overflow you half a score or a dozen of sonnets at a sitting. …
STEPHEN.
Truly, sir, and I love such things out of measure. …
MATTHEW.
Why, I pray you, sir, make use of my study; it's at your service.
STEPHEN.
I thank you, sir, I shall be so bold, I warrant you. Have you a stool there, to be melancholy upon?

Has it not got the very ring of a Restoration comedy? As an isolated passage one might easily guess it to belong to the later period.

In truth, Restoration writers themselves saw no vast unlikeness between the Jonsonian form and their own, and in the great majority of cases never got the difference in atmosphere clear. In the same way Massinger probably did not realize that A City Madam was in this matter something quite different from A New Way to Pay Old Debts. Only gradually do we see, not merely in each individual writer, but progressively throughout the period, steps being made towards a different method. Continually the humours blunder in upon the manners and spoil them; the heavy touch shatters the delicate effects. For if the actual point of divergence cannot be indicated, there is at the extremes an evident difference between the two forms of comedy. The method of the ‘humour’ comedy was akin to that of the moralities, that is, to clothe some abstract quality in the garb of a man, invest it with such realistic trappings as to make it appear passably like a human being, and set it amongst its fellows, the whole relieved often, as was Jonson's way, against a background taken from real life. It tried to be critical, not of its own time but of humanity. It began with an attempted universality, leaving its immediate application to chance, or the spectator's conscience. The comedy of manners applied an inverse method. It was immediately critical, and in so far as it aimed at universality, as any art worthy of the name must do, it aimed at it through the individual. The comedy of humours never attempted to paint the full man, moved by inconsistencies, urged by conflicting passions, whereas, in the main, the comedy of manners did; and the passions were by no means all on the superficial level of frills and sword knots, repartee, and bawdy talk that is often taken for granted as the characteristic note of Restoration work.

The comedy of manners, then, was no exception to any other critical comedy, and no class was spared by the Restoration wits, who, not content with the ‘acquired follies’ of their friends, flung their satirical net, not only over the eastern portions of London, but over the country seats that entrenched the savage Sir Tunbelly Clumseys, and where maidens found pleasure in inhaling the fragrance of those ‘filthy nosegays’. Thus it was the immediate as opposed to the enduring critical intent that developed the comedy of manners out of the comedy of humours. Both, in the hands of artists, became works of art whose didactic message we can, if we wish, ignore.

WIT

There is another point which distinguished the comedy of manners from that of humours, namely, the verbal pyrotechnics. These are at once its glory and its bane; the former because wit made for clarity of expression, the latter because the standard changes. By the quality of its wit Restoration comedy is immediately ‘dated’; nor was it always of the highest kind. Much, indeed, is on the level of Swift's Polite Conversation. ‘A penny for your thought.’ ‘It is not worth a farthing, for I was thinking of you’, is no worse than much Restoration fencing. And even where it is good of its kind it often becomes tedious, the perpetual search for a simile very wearisome. The stiffness of manner we have sometimes to complain of in Wycherley is due, as Pope said, to ‘his being always studying for antitheses’. Let us take a passage from the best of his plays, The Country Wife (I, i). Harcourt, Horner, and Dorilant are speaking of Sparkish:—

HORN.
… he's one of those nauseous offerers at wit, who, like the worst fiddlers, run themselves into all companies.
HAR.
One that, by being in the company of men of sense, would pass for one.
HORN.
And may so to the short-sighted world; as a false jewel among true ones is not discerned at a distance. His company is as troublesome to us as a cuckold's when you have a mind to his wife's.
HAR.
No, the rogue will not let us enjoy one another, but ravishes our conversation; though he signifies no more to't than Sir Martin Mar-all's gaping, and awkward thrumming on the lute, does to his man's voice and music.
DOR.
And to pass for a wit in town shows himself a fool every night to us, that are guilty of the plot.
HORN.
Such wits as he are, to a company of reasonable men, like rooks to the gamesters; who only fill a room at the table, but are so far from contributing to the play, that they only serve to spoil the fancy of those that do.
DOR.
Nay, they are used like rooks too, snubbed, checked, and abused; yet the rogues will hang on.
HORN.
A pox on 'em, and all that force nature, and would be still what she forbids 'em! Affectation is her greatest monster.
HAR.
Most men are the contraries to that they would seem. Your bully, you see, is a coward with a long sword; the little humbly-fawning physician, with his ebony cane, is he that destroys men.
DOR.
The usurer, a poor rogue, possessed of mouldy bonds and mortgages; and we they call spendthrifts, are only wealthy, who lay out his money upon daily new purchases or pleasure.
HORN.
Ay, your arrantest cheat is your trustee or executor; your jealous man the greatest cuckold; your churchman the greatest atheist; and your noisy pert rogue of wit the greatest fop, dullest ass, and worst company, as you shall see; for here he comes.

But again, this epigrammatic talk was part of the fashionable life of the day, and was constantly used by such men as Sir Charles Sedley, who, Etherege wrote from Ratisbon, would sometimes speak more wit at supper than was to be heard in any play. [Shadwell paid him the same compliment in the dedication of A True Widow.] That this was also the gallant's own opinion we learn from Pepys, who one day heard Sir Charles in the pit distract the delighted audience's attention from the dulness of the piece. Its failures, of course, provided comedy with much amusing material; and when Etherege, Wycherley, or Congreve show a would-be wit straining after a simile the concentrated effect of ridicule is highly diverting.

It is this persistent attempt to be witty that makes many people regard Restoration comedy as tedious, undramatic stuff, during the acting of which persons come upon the stage merely to fire off epigrams at one another. But this continual definition was only a part of the desire of the men of that period to see themselves clearly; it was part of their curiosity, of their attempt to rationalize. It was also to some extent a desire to polish the surface of life; we must remember that the Restoration age foreshadowed the Augustan. No Dryden, no Pope. We may now and again find the method tiresome, but it has its interest, and even its beauty.

As an example of this type of criticism we may take Mr. Archer's suggestion that the weakness of Restoration comedy lies in the fact that it was written for a coterie, its talk ‘essentially coterie talk, keyed up to the pitch of a particular and narrow set’. Comedy, he maintains, became the ‘introspection of the coterie’. This is true, but is it relevant to our judgement of these comedies as works of art? For the point is not whether they may have been written for a coterie, but how great were the minds that used the ideas and talk of the ‘particular and narrow set’ as material for art. The distance between the subject and the created thing cannot be measured. If Etherege did not see beyond the life of his companions, Wycherley assuredly did. If Vanbrugh took life as he found it, it is certain that Congreve was far from doing so. The essential point is to penetrate the attitude towards life, any life, brought by the writers to the making of their works of art.