[In the following essay, Dobrée characterizes Etherege's comedies as lighthearted, unsophisticated works intended mainly to delight and amuse Carolinian audiences.]

The air rarefied and pure, danger near, and the spirit full of a gay quickedness: these agree well together.

—Zarathustra.

Seen through the haze of time, Etherege appears as a brilliant butterfly, alighting only upon such things as attract him; a creature without much depth, but of an extraordinary charm and a marvellous surety of touch.

He was professedly no student. ‘The more necessary part of philosophy’, he once wrote to Dryden, ‘is to be learn'd in the wide world more than in the gardens of Epicurus’; and again, to Lord Dover, ‘The life I have led has afforded me little time to turn over books; but I have had leisure sufficient, while I idly rolled about the town, to look into myself’. What he found in himself was that he was infinitely delighted in the delicate surface of things, and that not for the world would he have had anything changed. All was entertaining to ‘gentle George’ or ‘easy Etherege’, to that ‘loose wand'ring Etherege, in wild pleasures tost’, of whom Southern wrote. All, except hard work.

Thus his is a perfectly simple, understandable figure in Restoration court society; he is in tune with it. His friends were Buckingham, Sedley, Rochester, Buckhurst—with the last of whom he ‘carried the two draggle-tailed nymphs one bitter frosty night over the Thames to Lambeth’¹—and, above all, Dryden. He was the intimate of lords and wits, of actors (perhaps he used to spend musical evenings with the Bettertons) and of actresses. It was said he had a daughter by Mrs. Barry. He had friends at the Rose, and there was a lily at the Bar, for he was never absent from a new play, nor behindhand with a pretty woman.

Between his last two comedies he went on some diplomatic mission to Constantinople;

Ovid to Pontus sent for too much wit,
Etherege to Turkey for the want of it,

they said. When he came back he resumed his gay life, rioted at Epsom with Rochester, and wrote his best play. Then he married for money so as to get a knighthood, or got a knighthood so as to marry for money, which it was is not quite clear. In any case he does not appear to have been fortunate:

What then can Etherege urge in his defence,
What reason bring, unless 'tis want of sense.
For all he pleads beside is mere pretence …
Merit with honour joined a crown to life,
But he got honour for to get a wife.
Preposterous knighthood! in the gift severe,
For never was a knighthood bought so dear.

Etherege apparently agreed, for when in the year 1685 he was sent as envoy to Ratisbon, he left Dame Etherege behind. One of his letters to her remains:

I beg your pardon for undertaking to advise you. I am so well satisfied by your last letter of your prudence and judgement that I shall never more commit the same error. I wish there were copies of it in London; it might serve as a pattern for modest wives to write to their husbands. You shall find me so careful hereafter how I offend you, that I will no more subscribe myself your loving since you take it ill, but

Madame,

Your most dutiful husband, G. E.

We see that he liked things to be clear cut.

And if he is perfectly simple to understand, so are his plays. They are pure works of art directed to no end but themselves, meant only, in Dryden's phrase, ‘to give delight’. For Etherege was not animated by any moral stimulus, and his comedies arose from a superabundance of animal energy that only bore fruit in freedom and ease, amid the graces of Carolingian society. He was a hothouse product, and knew it. ‘I must confess’, he once wrote, ‘I am a fop in my heart. I have been so used to affectation, that without the help of the air of the court, what is natural cannot touch me.’ So what was the use of Dryden urging him to ‘scribble faster’ when he was abroad? ‘I wear flannel, sir,’ he wrote to another friend, ‘wherefore, pray, talk to me no more of poetry’, for his comedy was a gesture not very different in impulse from the exquisite tying of his cravat, or the set of his wig; ‘poetry’ to him was essentially an affair of silks and perfumes, of clavichord music and corrants.

His plays then are lyrical, in the sense of being immediate reactions to things seen around him, pondered only as works of art and not as expositions of views. He was a true naïf, ‘too lazy and too careless to be ambitious’, as he wrote to Godolphin. He had no ethic to urge him to produce the laughter of social protection. His laughter, on the contrary, is always that of delight at being very much alive in the best of all possible societies, and is only corrective, here and there, by accident. There was, for instance, no move in the sometimes graceful sex-game he did not enjoy. ‘Next to the coming to a good understanding with a new mistress’, says Dorimant, whom, we may remember, he perhaps designed as a portrait of himself, ‘I love a quarrel with an old one; but the Devil's in it, there has been such a calm in my affairs of late, I have not had the pleasure of making a woman break her fan, to be sullen, or forswear herself these three days.’ Or again, in the words of Courtal, ‘A single intrigue in love is as dull as a single plot in a play, and will tire a lover worse than t'other does an audience’. The motto of life is gaiety at all costs, the first duty the defeat of dulness.

Indeed, there is no lack of plots in his first play; there are no less than four—and a curious mixture they are. There is a romantic Fletcherian plot, that of Lord Beaufort and Graciana, Bruce and Aurelia, written in rhymed couplets; a Middletonian one, with cheats and gamesters, and a great deal of noise and drinking; a number of completely farcical scenes centring about the French valet Dufoy; and finally the Sir Frederick-Widow tale, which, from both the historical and artistic points of view is the most interesting. It set the whole tone of Restoration comedy, and gave out the chief theme, which was never relinquished. At his first trial, with amazing intuition, Etherege had laid his finger upon the most promising material of his time.

The Comical Revenge, or Love in a Tub need not be taken very seriously. It is on the whole a sheer ebullience of high spirits, full of joyous pranks, practical joking, and charming but not very real sentiment, in which the shrewd witty observer of the later plays is almost entirely absent. Yet his alertness for a telling simile, or for bringing all London upon the stage, is apparent in the first act.

LORD Beaufort.
How now, cousin! What, at wars with the women?
SIR Frederick.
I gave a small alarm to their quarters last night, my lord.
LORD Beaufort.
Jenny in tears! What's the occasion, poor girl?
MAID.
I'll tell you, my lord.
SIR Frederick.
Buzz; set not her tongue going again (clapping his hand before her mouth). She has made more noise than half a dozen paper mills! London Bridge at low water is silence to her.

This is clever drawing, but most of this comedy is the purest tomfoolery. The valet, while drugged, is locked in a tub which he has to carry about on his shoulders. ‘Vat are you?’ he cries, as he awakes. ‘Jernie! Vat is dis? Am I Jack in a box’? Begar, who did putté me here?’ Disguise is the order of the day, and there is high-spirited burlesque, as when Sir Frederick dresses up his fiddlers as bailiffs, and Dufoy, released from his tub, thinks his master is in danger. He enters, therefore, ‘with a helmet on his head, and a great sword in his hand, “Vare are de bougres de bailié! Tête-bleu, bougres rogues”’, he cries, and ‘falls upon the fiddlers’.

This is not comedy, but roaring, rollicking farce—that is, the fun depends upon incident. Our author had not found himself; there was small promise in all this of what was to come, little of the ‘sense, judgement, and wit’ for which Rochester was later to praise him. Yet in the Sir Frederick-Widow plot there are portions that treat most deliciously of the duel of the sexes.

SIR F.
Widow, I dare not venture myself in those amorous shades [of the garden]; you have a mind to be talking of love, I perceive, and my heart's too tender to be trusted with such conversation.
WIDOW.
I did not imagine you were so foolishly conceited; is it your wit or your person, sir, that is so taking?

Isn't it delightfully boy and girl? And later:

SIR F.
By those lips,———
WIDOW.
Nay, pray forbear, sir———
SIR F.
Who is conceited now, widow? Could you imagine I was so fond to kiss them?
WIDOW.
You cannot blame me for standing on my guard, so near an enemy. …
SIR F.
Let us join hands then, widow.
WIDOW.
Without the dangerous help of a parson, I do not fear it, sir.

The whole play, even to the romantic scenes, is just a youngster's game. It is tentative, full of action and boisterousness, alive with gaiety indeed, but the method is not perfected.

In She Would if She Could Etherege was much more certain of what he wanted to do. He had begun to see what elements to reject, and in consequence devoted a great deal of space to that delightful quartette, Ariana and Gatty, Courtal and Freeman. The passages where these are involved read like directions for a ballet; it is all a dance; the couples bow, set to partners, perform their evolutions, and bow again; and indeed their value consists in their ability to create this sort of atmosphere. Here is the first meeting of the principal dancers:

COURT.
Fie, fie! put off these scandals to all good faces.
GATTY.
For your reputation's sake we shall keep 'em on. 'Slife, we should be taken for your relations if we durst show our faces with you thus publicly.
ARIANA.
And what a shame that would be to a couple of young gallants. Methinks, you should blush to think on't.
COURT.
These were pretty toys, invented, first, merely for the good of us poor lovers to deceive the jealous, and to blind the malicious; but the proper use is so wickedly perverted, that it makes all honest men hate the fashion mortally.
FREE.
A good face is as seldom covered with a vizard-mask, as a good hat with an oiled case. And yet, on my conscience, you are both handsome.
COURT.
Do but remove 'em a little, to satisfy a foolish scruple.
ARIANA.
This is a just punishment you have brought upon yourselves by that unpardonable sin of talking.
GATTY.
You can only brag now of your acquaintance with a Farendon gown and a piece of black velvet.
COURT.
The truth is, there are some vain fellows whose loose behaviour of late has given great discouragement to the honourable proceedings of all virtuous ladies.
FREE.
But I hope you have more charity than to believe us of the number of the wicked.

And here is another figure:

GATTY.
I suppose your mistress, Mr. Courtal, is always the last woman you are acquainted with.
COURT.
Do not think, madam, I have that false measure of my acquaintance which poets have of their verses, always to think the last best—though I esteem you so in justice to your merit.
GATTY.
Or if you do not love her best, you always love to talk of her most; as a barren coxcomb that wants discourse is ever entertaining company out of the last book he read in.
COURT.
Now you accuse me most unjustly, madam; who the devil that has common sense will go birding with a clack in his cap.?
ARIANA.
Nay, we do not blame you, gentlemen; every one in their way; a huntsman talks of his dogs, a falconer of his hawks, a jockey of his horse, and a gallant of his mistress.
GATTY.
Without the allowance of this vanity, an amour would soon grow as dull as matrimony.

The very words foot it briskly, taking their ease among horsemen's terms. When Courtal and Freeman first sight Ariana and Gatty in the Mulberry Garden, Freeman says, ‘'Sdeath, how fleet they are! Whatsoever faults they have they cannot be broken-winded.’ And Courtal takes it up, ‘Sure, by that little mincing step they should be country fillies that have been breathed a course at park and barley-break.² We shall never reach 'em.’ Sir Joslin Jolley, the young ladies' kinsman, describes Gatty as ‘a clean-limbed wench, and has neither spavin, splinter nor wind-gall’, while Sir Joslin himself is straight from the kennels, and evidently hunts his own hounds. ‘Here they are, boys, i' faith’, is his method of introducing ‘that couple of sly skittish fillies’, his wards, to the young gallants, ‘heuk! Sly girls and madcap, to 'em, to 'em boys, alou!’

Though full of charm and vivacity, the play was not a success when first acted. Pepys wrote that he heard ‘Etheredge, the poet … mightily find fault with the actors, that they were out of humour, and had not their parts perfect, and that Harris (who played Sir Joslin) did do nothing’, and Shadwell supports the view that it was badly acted. But, indeed, it was difficult for the actors to be in humour, for Etherege had fallen between two stools. He had not quite fused the elements of art and life, for side by side with Ariana's fragile world we have the full-blooded boisterousness of Sir Joslin Jolley and Sir Oliver Cockwood. With those boon companions the play could hardly fail to partake of rough and tumble. They are bold, desperate old fellows among women and wine, and Sir Joslin is ever bursting into song which for frankness would not have disgraced our armies in Flanders. The two atmospheres are mutually destructive. Etherege had not yet broken away from the late Elizabethan tradition.

The Cockwoods and Sir Joslin are, for the matter of that, would-be Jonsonian, but they have all the grittiness of Jonsonian characters without their depth. What are we to make of this scene, where Lady Cockwood is in company with the young ladies and their gallants, Sir Joslin, and Sentry, her ‘gentlewoman’?

SIR Oliver
(strutting). Dan, dan, da, ra, dan, & c. Avoid my presence! the very sight of that face makes me more impotent than an eunuch.
LADY Cock.
Dear Sir Oliver (offering to embrace him).
SIR Oliver.
Forbear your conjugal clippings; I will have a wench; thou shalt fetch me a wench, Sentry.
SENTRY.
Can you be so inhuman to my dear lady?
SIR Oliver.
Peace, Envy, or I will have thee executed for petty treason; thy skin flayed off, stuffed and hung up in my hall in the country, as a terror to my whole family.

It is no wonder that after the scene in the Mulberry Garden the actors were a little puzzled; it is too brutal, and the punishment that follows upon Sir Joslin's misdemeanour is humorous fantasy, certainly, but a little crude in idea. His clothes are locked up, with the exception of his ‘penitential suit’, an old-fashioned, worn-out garment in which he dare not stir abroad.

Lady Cockwood, who gives the play its title, is an unpleasant character, not clearly conceived. The ‘noble laziness of the mind’, of which Etherege was so proud, forbade him to deal ably with things he did not like. Since he was no satirist (until he went to Ratisbon), and did not feel impelled to criticize manners—which after all suited him admirably—he could only touch well what he could touch lovingly. And he did not love Lady Cockwood. She was a woman eager for amorous adventure, and equally eager to preserve her ‘honour’; so far good. But Courtal, whom she pursued ferociously, found her ‘the very spirit of impertinence, so foolishly fond and troublesome, that no man above sixteen is able to endure her’. Alas! the poor soul had not got the technique of the Restoration game; she could not pretend to deny.

On the other hand, there is plenty of fun to be got out of her, and Courtal's evasions of her addresses are full of ingenuity. The figure of the man who, as his name implies, was not over selective, pursued by a woman he cannot endure, provides a good case of the Meredithan comic. But the best scene of all, where she is concerned, takes place in an eating-house. She has gone there with Courtal, Freeman, and the two young ladies, leaving Sir Oliver safe at home in his penitential suit. But though he had ‘intended to retire into the pantry and there civilly to divert himself at backgammon with the butler’, Sir Joslin lures him forth with the promise of good wine, and women not so good, to the very place where Lady Cockwood has gone. Her ladyship outmanœuvres her husband, and bursts upon him with all the colours of offended virtue flying bravely. After a counterfeited swoon she breaks out:

Perfidious man; I am too tame and foolish. Were I every day at the plays, the Park and Mulberry Garden, with a kind look secretly to indulge the unlawful passion of some young gallant; or did I associate myself with the gaming madams, and were every afternoon at my Lady Brief's and my Lady Meanwell's at ombre and quebas, pretending ill-luck to borrow money of a friend, and then pretending good luck to excuse the plenty to a husband, my suspicious demeanour had deserved this; but I who out of a scrupulous tenderness to my honour, and to comply with thy base jealousy, have denied myself all those blameless recreations which a virtuous lady might enjoy, to be thus inhumanly reviled in my own person, and thus unreasonably robbed and abused in thine too!

Such admirable prose from a lady so little able to manage her affairs astonishes Courtal. ‘Sure she will take up anon, or crack her mind, or else the devil's in it’, he remarks. And here we see the value of the restraint Etherege had learned; the Elizabethan scene might have romped away with him to the regions of farce, but seeing the danger he pulled it together with some neat phrasing. The jeunes premiers and their partners are calming Lady Cockwood after her outburst against her husband:

ARIA.
How bitterly he weeps! how sadly he sighs!
GATTY.
I daresay he counterfeited his sin, and is real in his repentance.
COURT.
Compose yourself a little, pray Madam; all this was mere raillery, a way of talk, which Sir Oliver, being well bred, has learned among the gay people of the town.
FREE.
If you did but know, Madam, what an odious thing it is to be thought to love a wife in good company, you would easily forgive him.

What charming wit! and how naïvely Etherege seems to believe in the argument himself!

The above may show how Etherege laughed with delight at the entertaining thing life was. Neither it nor his plays were to be taken too seriously. Both were vastly amusing things, and sex comedy like the frolicking of lambs. He rarely makes an appeal to the intellect. Yet there are two or three notes in this play that, wittingly or not, cause that deeper laughter, provoked by man's realization of his own helplessness against his desires, the laughter at the triumph of man's body over his mind Schlegel found at the root of all comedy. Thus when the young ladies are finally engaged, Sir Joslin asks, ‘Is it a match, boys?’ and Courtal replies, ‘if the heart of man be not very deceitful, 'tis very likely it may be so’.

After this play Etherege was silent for eight years, and in the interval two things had happened; he had become less boisterous, his pleasures were becoming those of the intellect rather than those of the healthy animal seeking ‘wild pleasures’ as an outlet for his energies; and at the same time he had begun to weary a little of the game, so that here and there we have a display of sheer bad temper. He was no longer so young as he had been, and perhaps the life led by ‘gentle George’ was beginning to tell on his nerves. But if in his weariness he would have liked solitude, he could not endure dullness. If it can be said he was afflicted by any sort of Weltschmierz, he knew of no method to dissipate it other than a brawl, such as the one which, in the year The Man of Mode appeared, culminated in the death of one of the participators. So, as already in the rough and tumble of his earlier comedies we find a spice of brutality underlying the laughter, in his last play there is now and again a harshness that is in danger of spoiling it. When he writes such a sentence as ‘I have of late lived as chaste as my Lady Etherege’, we get a hint of the state of mind that produced the Dorimant-Mrs. Loveit scenes in The Man of Mode. We may take the first, where Dorimant, determined to break relations with his mistress for the sake of her ‘friend’ Belinda, sets to work:

LOVEIT.
Faithless, inhuman, barbarous man!
DOR.
Good, now, the alarm strikes—
LOVEIT.
Without sense of love, of honour, or of gratitude, tell me—for I will know—what devil, masked she, were you with at the play yesterday?
DOR.
Faith, I resolved as much as you, but the devil was obstinate and would not tell me.
LOVEIT.
False in this as in your vows to me! You do know.
DOR.
The truth is, I did all I could to know.
LOVEIT.
And dare you own it to my face? Hell and furies—(tears her fan in pieces)
DOR.
Spare your fan, madam; you are growing hot, and will want it to cool you.
LOVEIT.
Horror and distraction seize you, sorrow and remorse gnaw your soul, and punish all your perjuries to me (Weeps).
DOR.
So thunder breaks the clouds in twain
And makes a passage for the rain.

This is no longer in comedy vein; it is too cruel. It was no wonder that Belinda, herself the ‘devil, masked she’, declared:

He's given me the proof I desired of his love:
                                        But 'tis a proof of his ill-nature too;
                                        I wish I had not seen him use her so.

But the ill-nature does not stop there, and Dorimant becomes an outrageous bully. He gets Belinda to induce Loveit to walk in the Mall that he may cause her to make a fool of herself with Sir Fopling. Even Belinda protests, ‘You persecute her too much’, but the excuse is that ‘You women make 'em (the afflications in love), who are commonly as unreasonable in that as you are at play; without the advantage be on your side, a man can never quietly give over when he is weary’. This is sex-antagonism with a vengeance; we are down to bedrock here, and thus expressed it is not very laughable. There is too much spite in it.

At the same time Mrs. Loveit is an amazingly natural presentation of a jealous woman, struggling fiercely against her fate. She did not deserve to be told in public by Harriet, her successful rival, a charming coquette full of womanly wisdom, that ‘Mr. Dorimant has been your God Almighty long enough’, and that she must find another lover, or, better still, betake herself to a nunnery! Yet this only harshness in an otherwise admirable comedy may not have appeared a flaw to the audiences of those days. Those scenes may have induced the laughter of common sense which the writer of comedy can rarely escape, but for us they spoil the delight. After all, Etherege could do better on the theme:

It is not, Celia, in our power
To say how long our love will last;
It may be we within this hour
May lose those joys we now do taste;
The blessed, that immortal be,
From change in love are only free.
Then since we lovers mortal are,
Ask not how long our love will last;
But while it does let us take care
Each minute be with pleasure pass'd:
Were it not madness to deny
To live, because we're sure to die?

the perfect expression of Etherege's philosophy of love—and life. For even in this comedy he could keep the sentiment on the lyric level, as when Emilia says, ‘Do not vow—Our love is frail as is our life and full as little in our power; and are you sure you shall outlive this day?’

To turn to Dorimant. He is a marvellous erotic, with ‘more mistresses now depending than the most eminent lawyer in England has causes’. ‘Constancy at my years!’ he cries. ‘You might as well expect the fruit the autumn ripens in the spring.’ He has, moreover, the courage of his philosophy. ‘When love grows diseased the best thing we can do is to put it to a violent death; I cannot endure the torture of a lingering and consumptive passion.’ He is master of all the technique of feminine conquest; he can pique as well as caress and insinuate, and his method of attack on Harriet is blunt. Loving her to the distraction of marriage—though even here he must excuse himself on the plea that it will ‘repair the ruins of my estate’—he attempts the satiric. He tells her:

I observed how you were pleased when the fops cried, She's handsome, very handsome, by God she is, … then to make yourself more agreeable, how wantonly you played with your head, flung back your locks, and look'd smilingly over your shoulder at 'em.

Temerarious man, she was more than a match for him, and retorted with an admirable little sketch of what we cannot but think an odious gallant:

I do not go begging the men's, as you do the ladies' good liking, with a sly softness in your looks and a gentle slowness in your bows as you pass by 'em—as thus, sir—(acts him).

For Etherege was a master of witty description: the fat orange-woman is an ‘overgrown jade with a flasket of guts before her’, or an ‘insignificant brandy-bottle’; Medley, as Amelia tells him, is ‘a living libel, a breathing lampoon’, and he is at times ‘rhetorically drunk’. This is the bright current coin of lively description, but Etherege, with his vivid imagination, can give us wonderful set pieces of brilliant mimicry. Long before we see Sir Fopling Flutter, we know exactly what he looks like:

He was yesterday at the play, with a pair of gloves up to his elbow and a periwig more exactly curled than a lady's head newly dressed for a ball. … His head stands for the most part on one side, and his looks are more languishing than a lady's when she lolls at stretch in her coach, or leans her head carelessly against the side of a box in the playhouse.

He delighted to observe every pose and gesture, each revealing intonation. Here, for instance, are Young Bellair and Harriet instructing one another how to appear charmed by each other's company, so as to deceive their parents about their real sentiments. First Bellair has his lesson from Harriet:

HAR.
Your head a little more on one side, ease yourself on your left leg, and play with your right hand.
BEL.
Thus, is it not?
HAR.
Now set your right leg firm on the ground, adjust your belt, then look about you … Smile, and turn to me again very sparkish.

Then it is her turn to be instructed:

BEL.
Now spread your fan, look down upon it, and tell the sticks with a finger …
HAR.
'Twill not be amiss now to seem a little pleasant.
BEL.
Clap your fan then in both your hands, snatch it to your mouth, smile, and with a lively motion fling your body a little forwards. So—now spread it; fall back on the sudden, … take up! look grave and fall a-fanning of yourself—admirably well acted.

Could anything be written with a surer touch, a greater descriptive acumen?

Occasionally he touches farce in a manner we must admit is Molièresque:

MEDLEY.
Where does she live?
ORANGE-W.
They lodge at my house.
MEDLEY.
Nay, then she's in a hopeful way.
ORANGE-W.
Good Mr. Medley, say your pleasure of me, but take heed how you affront my house. God's my life, in a hopeful way!

Finally, the character of his observation may be seen in Dorimant's remark:

I have known many women make a difficulty of losing a maidenhead, who have afterwards made none of a cuckold.

Or in this letter from Molly:

I have no money, and am very mallicolly, pray send me a guynie to see the operies.

This is life, and its placing makes it art.

The ostensible hero of the play, Sir Fopling Flutter, has little to do with the action. He is the most delicately and sympathetically drawn of all the fops in the great series of coxcombs. He is in himself a delight, presented from pure joy of him, and is not set up merely as a target for the raillery of wiser fools. Unlike Vanbrugh's Lord Foppington, he has no intellectual idea behind his appearance. He exists by his garments and his calèche; there is, as it were, no noumenal Flutter. We have his picture:

LADY Town.
His gloves are well fringed, large and graceful.
SIR Fop.
I was always eminent for being bien ganté.
EMILIA.
He wears nothing but what are originals of the most famous hands in Paris. …
LADY Town.
The suit?
SIR Fop.
Barroy.
EMILIA.
The garniture?
SIR Fop.
Le Gras.
MEDLEY.
The shoes?
SIR Fop.
Piccat.
DORIMANT.
The periwig?
SIR Fop.
Chedreux.
LADY T. Em.
The gloves?
SIR Fop. Orangerie.
You know the smell, ladies.

Moreover, all the people around him enjoy him as much as Etherege himself so evidently did. Life would be the duller without him, and so his existence is justified. He must even be encouraged:

SIR Fop.
An intrigue now would be but a temptation to throw away that vigour on one, which I mean shall shortly make my court to the whole sex in a ballet.
MEDLEY.
Wisely considered, Sir Fopling.
SIR Fop.
No one woman is worth the loss of a cut in a caper.
MEDLEY.
Not when 'tis so universally designed.

It is exquisite. Etherege never oversteps the bounds. Sir Fopling is not for a moment the fatuous ass Vanbrugh's Lord Foppington becomes. Should he say, ‘I cannot passitively tell whether ever I shall speak again or nat’, our attitude would at once become critical. But this one cannot be with Sir Fopling, who so obviously enjoys himself without any affectation whatever. He is not like Sir Courtly Nice in Crowne's comedy, who when challenged declared, ‘It goes against my stomach horribly to fight such a beast. Should his filthy sword but touch me, 'twould make me as sick as a dog.’ Etherege was too good an artist for that kind of exaggeration. He presented, and avoided awakening the critical spirit. Sir Fopling was to him what a rare orchid is to an enthusiastic gardener, a precious specimen, and the finger of satire must not be allowed to touch him. We should be fools to take the trouble to think Sir Fopling a fool, and to weary of him would be to show ourselves ‘a little too delicate’, like Emilia. It is not as an universal abstract that he exists, but as a fantasy. To him, and perhaps to him only, Charles Lamb's remarks are applicable. No disharmonies of flesh and blood disturb this delicate creation: no blast of reality dispels the perfumery, or ruffles the least hair on the inimitable perruque. No acrimony guided the pen that described him, no word of common sense reduced him to a right proportion among ‘les gens graves et sérieux, les vieillards, et les amateurs de vertu’. To attempt to deduce a lesson from him is as fruitful as to seek a symbol in a primrose, a meaning in the contours of a cloud.

But Etherege was writing comedy, and he could not quite escape the presentment of the happy mean, or an indication of the most comfortable way to live. Bellair, ‘always complaisant and seldom impertinent’, is to be our model; but even he errs on the side of sentiment, and does not escape the comic censor:

BEL.
I could find in my heart to resolve not to marry at all.
DOR.
Fie, fie! that would spoil a good jest, and disappoint the well natured town of an occasion of laughing at you.

Indeed, Etherege, from the ‘free’ comedy point of view, was slightly tarnished by experience. ‘When your love's grown strong enough to make you bear being laughed at, I'll give you leave to trouble me with it’, Harriet tells Dorimant. She was in the right of it there, but it has a serious note, and Medley is ever and anon a little tiresome. To him Sir Fopling is ‘a fine-mettled coxcomb, brisk and insipid, pert and dull’, but one would weary of Medley sooner than of Sir Fopling. These, however, are only occasional lapses, and even the most sententious remarks are relieved in a spirit of tomfoolery, or lightened with a happier wisdom. When Harriet says ‘beauty runs as great a risk exposed at Court as wit does on the stage’, she would have pleased Collier, until she added, ‘where the ugly and the foolish all are free to censure’, and the sound truths enunciated by Loveit and Dorimant are only by way of weapons against each other. They would be the last to live by their own precepts.

For some reason Etherege has been much neglected. Leigh Hunt did not include him in his famous edition—it was thus his none too blameless life escaped the misrepresentations of Macaulay—nor does he grace the Mermaid collection. But Mr. Gosse and Mr. Palmer have done much to remedy this, and the former has done him full justice as a delicate painter who loved subtle contrasts in ‘rose-colour and pale grey’, who delighted in grace and movement and agreeable groupings. It is a frivolous world, Strephon bending on one knee to Chloe, who fans the pink blush on her painted cheek, while Momus peeps with a grimace through the curtains behind her. They form an engaging trio, ‘mais ce n'est pas la vie humaine’. Well it is not la vie humaine to us nowadays, but if it was such to Dennis (‘I allow it to be nature’), how much more so must it have been to the Sedleys, the Rochesters, and the Beau Hewitts! Even Langbaine stated it to be ‘as well drawn to the life as any play that has been acted since the restoration of the English stage’. And if Steele said that ‘this whole celebrated piece is a perfect contradiction of good manners, good sense, and common honesty’, we must remember that such a play could never appeal to the ‘good sense’ of the confectioner of the sentimental comedy.

Etherege, if you will, is a minor writer, in his exuberance nearer Mrs. Behn than to Congreve with his depth. But from another point of view he is far above all the other playwrights of his period, for he did something very rare in our literature. He presented life treated purely as an appearance: there was no more meaning in it apart from its immediate reactions than there is in a children's game of dumb-crambo. This sort of comedy, while it is realistic in semblance, and faithfully copies the outward aspects of the time, creates an illusion of life that is far removed from reality. Here is no sense of grappling with circumstance, for man is unencumbered by thoughts or passions. Life is a merry-go-round, and there is no need to examine the machinery or ponder on the design. It is not play for the sake of exercise, but play for its own sake, and the game must not be allowed to become too arduous. Nor is it life seen at a distance, but the forms of those known and liked seen intimately from a shady arbour in an old, sunny garden. Butterflies hover against the wall, and the sound of the viol da gamba floats serenely over the scent-laden atmosphere, while the figures, absorbed in their own youth, bend gracefully to the movements of the bourrée or sarabande. Eheu fugaces! Yes, now and again: but the idle thought passes in the ripples of laughter, and the solemn motto on the sundial is hidden beneath the roses.

Notes

1. An episode of which he reminded Dorset in a letter from Ratisbon. Etherege, Letter-book, Brit. Mus. MS.

2. A game not unlike Prisoner's Base.