[In the essay below, Birdsall explores the contrast of lifestyles between Sir Fopling Flutter's rule-bound world of social pretense and Dormant and Harriet's natural, honest, and self-deterministic world. The critic posits that Sir Fopling's milieu is “a dead world … being exposed by juxtaposition to a living one.”]

Fashion n. A despot whom the wise ridicule and obey.

Reason, v.i. To weigh probabilities in the scales of desire.

—Ambrose Bierce, The Devil's Dictionary

If Etherege's third and last play (1676) is by common consent his best, it is also his most insistently tough-minded and unremittingly open-eyed and honest. The comic challenge which the chief protagonists Dorimant and Harriet hurl at their self-consciously polished, rule-bound world is one which draws its vitality from a full awareness of their own deeper, more demonic natures and from their absolute refusal of all illusions. Knowing and accepting themselves for what they are, they will be free to be themselves; and they will play the game of life with the bravado and the ruthless skill of born gamblers. The gaiety and zest for life of Etherege's earlier protagonists is still theirs, but they suffer fools less gladly, and they both pursue their Hobbesian “power and pleasure and appetite” with aggressive artistry.

In a more than superficial sense the theme of The Man of Mode is, as its title indicates, fashion or “modishness,” and the world in which Dorimant and Harriet move is one of “modes”—both of behavior and dress. A man or woman of “quality” (a term which occurs again and again in the play) acts and dresses by the rules—rules sufficiently solidified so that books of instructions have appeared. Asked by Emilia about “any new Wit come forth, Songs or Novels?” Medley replies: “there is the Art of affectation, written by a late beauty of Quality, teaching you how to draw up your Breasts, stretch up your neck, to throw out your Breech, to play with your Head, to toss up your Nose, to bite your Lips, to turn up your Eyes, to speak in a silly soft tone of a Voice, and use all the Foolish French Words that will infallibly make your person and conversation charming, with a short apologie at the latter end, in the behalf of young Ladies, who notoriously wash, and paint, though they have naturally good Complexions.” The deeper suggestion here is that the “new Wit” is a far cry from the imaginative expansiveness to be expected from “Songs or Novels”; and indeed “rules” and “modishness” become in the play the central metaphor used to define artificiality, effeteness, sterility as these qualities stand opposed to the natural, the robust, the creative possibilities exemplified by Dorimant and Harriet. Again, as in Etherege's earlier comedies, a dead world is being exposed by juxtaposition to a living one.

At the center of the world of artificiality and so-called wit stands that walking rule-book for social and sartorial affectations Sir Fopling Flutter. If Dorimant is “the Prince of all the Devils in the Town” (237), Sir Fopling enjoys an equally supreme status as “the very Cock-fool of all those Fools” (217). Both are “men of Mode,” but with a significant difference that is repeatedly underlined by the dialogue of the play. Being himself made up of “Pantaloon,” “Gloves … well fring'd,” and “Perriwig,” Sir Fopling is never happier than when characterized as a “shape” that “Ladies doat on” (231), and the only fault he can find with Dorimant is in the matter of “Crevats”: “Dorimant, thou art a pretty fellow and wear'st thy cloaths well,” he cries condescendingly, “but I never saw thee have a handsom Crevat. Were they made up like mine, they'd give another Aire to thy face. Prithee let me send my man to dress thee but one day. By Heav'ns an English man cannot tye a Ribbon” (261).

For their part neither Dorimant nor Harriet is indifferent to fashion and neither is lacking in his share of vanity, but both reject impatiently Sir Fopling's brand of artifice. “Varnish'd over with good breeding,” says Harriet, “many a blockhead makes a tolerable show” (220). For her as for Dorimant the morning toilet is a necessary preliminary to the adventure of living, but clothes do not “make the man.” Rather, they must be made to fit him. Thus Dorimant's complaint about his “Shooe” that it “Sits with more wrinkles than there are in an Angry Bullies Forehead” is stoutly denied by the shoemaker (who clearly knows his customer): “'Zbud, as smooth as your Mistresses skin does upon her” (198). But both Dorimant and Harriet firmly refuse to allow themselves to be turned into manikins. “Leave your unnecessary fidling;” Dorimant says testily to Handy, “a Wasp that's buzzing about a Mans Nose at Dinner, is not more troublesome than thou art” (199). And Harriet exclaims to Busy, “How do I daily suffer under thy Officious Fingers!” (219) Both hero and heroine have planted themselves in indignant opposition to the empty modishness of the world in which they live. “That Women should set up for beauty as much in spite of nature, as some men have done for Wit!” deplores Harriet. “That a man's excellency should lie in neatly tying of a Ribbond, or a Crevat!” protests Dorimant.

Clearly the difference between Dorimant and Harriet on the one hand and Sir Fopling on the other has to do in part with style as a manifestation of self. For Dorimant and Harriet style expresses the natural man. For Sir Fopling style replaces nature. Or, to put the matter another way, Dorimant and Harriet control and determine their own modes of dress and behavior according to their own individualities, while every piece of clothing donned by Sir Fopling and every move he makes is dictated by his conception of what polite society demands. Sir Fopling's comicality, in fact, may be regarded as an instance of the Bergsonian “covered” having turned into the “covering.”¹ Hopelessly bound by social rules, he has no real life, no “living suppleness” left. He has acted the part of the “Compleat Gentleman” for so long that no vestige of spontaneity has survived; every motion is made by the book, and the imitation has stifled and obliterated the reality. As Medley says, “He has been, as the sparkish word is, Brisk upon the Ladies already; he was yesterday at my Aunt Townleys, and gave Mrs. Loveit a Catalogue of his good Qualities, under the Character of a Compleat Gentleman, who according to Sir Fopling, ought to dress well, Dance well, Fence well, have a genius for Love Letters, an agreeable voice for a Chamber, be very Amorous, something discreet, but not over Constant” (200, 201).²

Sir Fopling, in short, invariably behaves as the rules say he “ought to,” and in this respect he is clearly identified with that other slave to form and model of rigidity, Lady Woodvil. If she is “a great admirer of the Forms and Civility of the last Age” (193), Sir Fopling is just as irrevocably committed to the forms and rules of the new age. And if she is an egregious social snob in her constant concern for “women of quality,” he is equally snobbish in his desire to parade himself as a “man of Quality” (268)—“in imitation of the people of Quality of France.” “It might be said,” remarks Bergson, in an observation which is peculiarly applicable to both Lady Woodvil and Sir Fopling, “that ceremonies are to the social body what clothing is to the individual body. … For any ceremony, then, to become comic, it is enough that our attention be fixed on the ceremonial element in it, and that we neglect its matter … and think only of its form.”³

Significantly Dorimant has occasion in the course of the action to play the fop in both Lady Woodvil's and Sir Fopling's senses and thus to supply a fully conscious parody of both kinds of empty affectation. For the old lady's benefit he appears as Mr. Courtage—“That foppish admirer of Quality, who flatters the very meat at honourable Tables, and never offers love to a Woman below a Lady-Grandmother!” (244) “You know the Character you are to act, I see!” comments Medley, and not even the guarded Harriet can deny that he delivers a convincing performance: “He fits my Mothers humor so well, a little more and she'l dance a Kissing dance with him anon” (245). But the contrast between a Mr. Courtage and Dorimant himself is later underlined heavily:

HAR.
Lord! how you admire this man!
L. Wood.
What have you to except against him?
HAR.
He's a Fopp.
L. Wood.
He's not a Dorimant, a wild extravagant Fellow of the Times.
HAR.
He's a man made up of forms and common places, suckt out of the remaining Lees of the last age.

(254)

And subsequently the difference between Dorimant and Sir Fopling is made equally plain in the brief and angry exchange between Dorimant and Loveit:

DOR.
Now for a touch of Sir Fopling to begin with. Hey—Page—Give positive order that none of my People stir—Let the Canaile wait as they should do—Since noise and nonsence have such pow'rful charms,
I, that I may successful prove,
Transform my self to what you love.
LOV.
If that would do, you need not change from what you are; you can be vain and lewd enough.
DOR.
But not with so good a grace as Sir Fopling. Hey, Hampshire—Oh—that sound, that sound becomes the mouth of a man of Quality.

(267, 268)

Several years had elapsed between Etherege's second play and his third, and during that period he had, it would seem, recognized the emergence of a fresh challenge for the comic spirit. In effect, Sir Fopling's modishness represents to the younger aristocratic generation a new kind of affectation which was replacing the précieux mode of an earlier time and which had gradually developed to the point where it was, in its own way, equally far removed from the realities of human experience. The trouble with Sir Fopling is that he has taken over a social mode which had originally grown out of the emancipating libertine convictions of Charles II's courtiers and out of the needs of the Hobbesian “natural man,” and he has turned it into a social pretense quite lacking its original life-giving force and hence as empty of meaning as Lady Woodvil's précieux mode. Oscar Wilde remarks in one of his essays that “Costume is a growth, an evolution, and a most important, perhaps the most important, sign of the manners, customs, and mode of life of each century.”⁴ But it is a truism to observe that both manners and costume can easily become hollow externals when the real human needs that originally inspired them are lost or forgotten, and it is then that “a man's excellency” comes to “lie in neatly tying of a Ribbond, or a Crevat.”

In Dorimant's and Harriet's world the mode has spread so far down the social scale as to include even Tom the Shoemaker (significantly a dealer in “costume”), who prefers the word “Tope” to the word “drunk” and who exclaims: “'Zbud, there's never a man i'the Town lives more like a Gentleman, with his Wife, than I do. I never mind her motions, she never inquires into mine; we speak to one another Civilly, hate one another heartily, and because 'tis vulgar to lie and soak together, we have each of us our several Settlebed” (198). Artificiality and sterility have extended even into Tom's world. Yet it is the real function of this entire little scene to emphasize, with a kind of sly comic inversion, that for all their affectations there is no essential difference between a Sir Fopling and a Tom nor, for that matter, between a “vulgar” and illiterate “Molly” and a “woman of quality” like Lady Woodvil or Mrs. Loveit. Thus when simple Molly writes to Dorimant: “I have no money and am very Mallicolly; pray send me a Guynie to see the Operies,” Medley remarks, “Pray let the Whore have a favourable answer, that she may spark it in a Box, and do honour to her profession.” And Dorimant assures him “She shall; and perk up i'the face of quality” (204).

To define Young Bellair and Emilia as the “golden mean” in this modish society, as does Norman Holland, is not only to make use of a term which has no validity in the Etheregean comic world unless as a standard to be rejected, but also to ignore the patent tendency of both characters to sentimentality and to what the play repeatedly defines as “unreasonable” behavior and to overlook their commitment to the courtly tradition of love and honor. Bellair, as measured against the positive standards of daring and defiance established by Etherege, emerges as a conservative nonentity. It is he who warns Harriet against the “Mail” as a rather dangerous place for nice young ladies; and earlier Medley has recognized his own and Dorimant's company as equally dangerous for nice young men like Bellair: “how will you answer this visit to your honourable Mistress?” he demands tauntingly, “'tis not her interest you shou'd keep Company with men of sence, who will be talking reason” (198).

The most Dorimant can say of Bellair is that “He's Handsome, well bred, and by much the most tolerable of all the young men that do not abound in wit,” a judgment reinforced by Medley's subsequent characterization: “Ever well dress'd, always complaisant, and seldom impertinent …” (201, 202). In Lady Townley's gay social groups, he fades rather colorlessly into the background, and although he is not quite so much in love with Emilia as to marry her while there is a serious risk of losing his inheritance (he is “reasonable” enough about money if not about love) and is not above a contrivance with Harriet “to deceive the grave people,” he inspires in Harriet herself nothing more than the lukewarm approbation: “I think I might be brought to endure him” (220). Lacking Dorimant's ruthless aggressiveness, he is also lacking in the vitality, virility, and excitement which contribute to making Dorimant the overwhelmingly dominant figure that he is, and he represents finally only a more subtle foil than Sir Fopling in bringing out the fact of the hero's evident superiority.

Much the same can be said also of the role of Emilia vis-à-vis Harriet, and again it is Medley—serving at once as Dorimant's confidant and as the chorus of the play—who sums her up: “her Carriage is unaffected, her discourse modest, not at all censorious, nor pretending like the Counterfeits of the Age” (202). There is, moreover, a special irony in Dorimant's marking her out as a likely prospect for a future conquest (“I have known many Women make a difficulty of losing a Maidenhead, who have afterwards made none of making a cuckold”), since he is thereby not only underscoring his own skeptical attitude toward every “discreet Maid,” but in the process suggesting that the pedestal on which she stands is more than a little precarious and that she is, in her elemental nature, no more civilized and no less appetitive than a Mrs. Loveit, a Bellinda, or a Molly.

On more than one occasion, in fact, Etherege seems to be pointedly asking us to recognize in Emilia something of the same overrefined preciousness that belongs to Sir Fopling. When, for example, Lady Townley says in talking of Dorimant and Mrs. Loveit: “We heard of a pleasant Serenade he gave her t'other Night,” and Medley describes it as “A Danish Serenade with Kettle Drums, and Trumpets,” Emilia exclaims, “Oh, Barbarous!” and Medley chides, “What, you are of the number of the Ladies whose Ears are grown so delicate since our Operas, you can be charm'd with nothing but Flute doux, and French Hoboys?” (208, 209) And in the next Act Lady Townley feels prompted to tax Emilia with being “a little too delicate” after she has remarked stuffily: “Company is a very good thing, Madam, but I wonder you do not love it a little more Chosen” (228, 229).

Neither exchange by itself may seem to possess much importance, but when placed in juxtaposition with certain of Sir Fopling's scenes, an evolving theme becomes apparent, and it is one which has had its roots in the opening scene of the play. Thus to Sir Fopling's question, “Have you taken notice of the Gallesh I brought over?” Medley replies, “O yes! 't has quite another Air, than th'English makes” and Dorimant adds, “Truly there is a bell-air in Galleshes as well as men.” Whereupon Sir Fopling responds approvingly, “But there are few so delicate to observe it” (230, 231). Dorimant and Medley are, of course, playing with Sir Fopling, and their delicacy is only make-believe. The word “delicate,” however, has at this point already been used twice about Emilia, and Dorimant's choice of the word “bell-air” is certainly suggestive. In the following scene Sir Fopling makes another statement reminiscent of Emilia when he declares, in response to Bellinda's observation about “all the rabble of the Town” gathered in the Mail, “'Tis pity there's not an order made, that none but the Beau Monde should walk here” (240). A few lines later we hear him exclaiming, “there's nothing so barbarous as the names of our English Servants” (242). And finally, in the fourth act, Sir Fopling invades Lady Townley's drawing room with a group of masqueraders whom he describes as “A set of Balladins, whom I pickt out of the best in France and brought over, with a Flutes deux or two” (253).

In effect, then, two life styles are being repeatedly contrasted with each other throughout the play—a contrast variously expressed in terms of the “barberous” versus the “delicate,” the English versus the French, the inclusive versus the exclusive, Dorimant versus Sir Fopling. Sir Fopling, as the embodiment of an effete society which has cut itself off almost wholly from its life-giving roots, defines a mode of life which threatens to overtake Emilia as well. His snobbishness and exclusiveness—“I was well receiv'd in a dozen families, where all the Women of quality us'd to visit” (251)—is set against the “universal taste” which Lady Townley advocates. Her house, representing along with the “Mail” the “green world” of the play, is described as “the general rendevouze, and next to the Play-house is the Common Refuge of all the Young idle people.” It is itself, indeed, a kind of “play-house” and “new world,” and Dorimant, in his role as Mr. Courtage, succinctly defines its difference from the old for the benefit of Lady Woodvil: “All people mingle now a days, Madam. And in publick places Women of Quality have the least respect show'd 'em. … Forms and Ceremonies, the only things that uphold Quality and greatness, are now shamefully laid aside and neglected” (244, 245). And Lady Woodvil goes on to summarize the case more accurately than she knows in lamenting: “Lewdness is the business now, Love was the bus'ness in my Time,” for in the terms of the play love has become an empty word and “lewdness” a vital reality (and precisely the quality in which Sir Fopling and his ilk are deplorably lacking).

In Sir Fopling's world every judgment as to a man's “excellency” is made in terms of modishness. Strolling in the Mail with Mrs. Loveit, Sir Fopling comments upon the “four ill-fashioned Fellows” who have passed singing across their path: “Did you observe, Madam, how their Crevats hung loose an inch from their Neck, and what a frightful Air it gave 'em?” To a man of his refined and “delicate” sensibilities, the smell of such dirty fellows is almost unbearable:

LOV.
Fo! Their Perriwigs are scented with Tobacco so strong—
SIR Fop.
It overcomes our pulvilio—Methinks I smell the Coffeehouse they come from. …
SIR Fop.
I sat near one of 'em at a Play to day, and was almost poison'd with a pair of Cordivant Gloves he wears—
LOV.
Oh! filthy Cordivant, how I hate the smell!

(240, 241)

Sir Fopling's own gloves, of course, are delicately perfumed: “Orangerie! You know the smell, Ladies!” (231) And to an educated nose like his, even a burning candle is “filthy” and scarcely endurable: “How can you breathe in a Room where there's Grease frying!” (252) To such foppery, Dorimant's impatient opposition has been expressed early in the play:

HAND.
Will you use the Essence or Orange Flower Water?
DOR.
I will smell as I do to day, no offence to the Ladies Noses.

(199)

Only in the last act of the play, however, does the full thematic significance of this kind of emphasis become apparent. The act opens with a conversation which offers a clear parallel with the opening scene of Act I. Again it is early morning and again the talk is about “Markets” and “Fruit,” and the earlier conversation between Dorimant and the Orange-woman as well as that already quoted between Sir Fopling and Mrs. Loveit ought to echo in our ears as Bellinda confronts Mrs. Loveit:

BELL.
Do you not wonder, my Dear, what made me abroad so soon?
LOV.
You do not use to be so.
BELL.
The Country Gentlewomen I told you of (Lord! they have the oddest diversions!) would never let me rest till I promis'd to go with them to the Markets this morning to eat Fruit and buy Nosegays.
LOV.
Are they so fond of a filthy Nosegay?
BELL.
They complain of the stinks of the Town, and are never well but when they have their noses in one.
LOV.
There are Essences and sweet waters.
BELL.
O, they cry out upon perfumes they are unwholsome; one of 'em was falling into a fit with the smell of these narolii.
LOV.
Methinks in Complaisance you shou'd have had a Nosegay too.
BELL.
Do you think, my Dear, I could be so loathsome to trick my self up with Carnations and stock-Gillyflowers? I begg'd their pardon and told them I never wore any thing but Orange Flowers and Tuberose. That which made me willing to go was a strange desire I had to eat some fresh Nectaren's.
LOV.
And had you any?
BELL.
The best I ever tasted.

(265, 266)

If any doubt exists as to the sexual implications of “fruit” in the opening scene of the play, it can scarcely survive now. Since Bellinda has just come from her assignation with Dorimant, the double-entendre of her concluding remarks here becomes obvious and is even more insistently underscored a few lines later as Bellinda pretends illness:

PERT.
She has eaten too much fruit, I warrant you.
LOV.
Not unlikely!
PERT.
'Tis that lyes heavy on her Stomach.
LOV.
Have her into my Chamber, give her some Surfeit Water, and let her lye down a little.
PERT.
Come, Madam! I was a strange devourer of Fruit when I was young, so ravenous—

(267)

The special irony of the scene lies in the fact that both women are explicitly denying their identity with the “Country Gentlewomen” and, in effect, their own physical, appetitive natures at the same time that they implicitly acknowledge them. Throughout the play the gap between artificiality and naturalness is expressed in terms of “Orange Flower Water” or “Orangerie” on the one hand and “oranges” (or “peaches” or “Nectarens”) on the other. In the broader context of the play, it is the difference between Sir Fopling and Dorimant, between a suit of clothes and a man, between sterility and fertility.

The Orange-woman is, of course, by profession both a seller of fruit and a bawd, and the peach which she offers to Dorimant (“the best Fruit has come to Town t'year”) has a clear identity with Harriet (“a young Gentlewoman lately come to Town”). Dorimant cynically begins by expressing a disbelief in the “freshness” of both, calling the peach the “nasty refuse of your Shop” (190) and the gentlewoman “some awkward ill fashion'd Country Toad” (191), but the description Medley supplies is enough to make Dorimant's mouth water with anticipation. He first describes her as being “in a hopeful way” (192)—a phrase which the Orange-woman chooses to interpret according to her own earthy lights—and then goes on to lyricize:

MED.
What alteration a Twelve-month may have bred in her I know not, but a year ago she was the beautifullest Creature I ever saw; a fine, easie, clean shape, light brown Hair in abundance; her Features regular, her Complexion clear and lively, large wanton Eyes, but above all a mouth that has made me kiss it a thousand times in imagination, Teeth white and even, and pretty pouting Lips, with a little moisture ever hanging on them that look like the Province Rose fresh on the Bush, 'ere the Morning Sun has quite drawn up the dew.

By the time Medley has concluded his eulogy, he has Dorimant exclaiming: “Flesh and blood cannot hear this, and not long to know her” (193). It is in this connection that Bernard Harris, commenting on Etherege's prose, points out that “his similitudes from the natural life offer a relationship to the human, not a distinction or even a parallel. In The Man of Mode … there is a persistent relationship effected between the forms of life. … The simile is perfectly absorbed and absorbing.”⁵

Sir Fopling's senses, however, have, in contrast to Dorimant's, virtually lost touch with flesh-and-blood, sensuous reality. Not only is his nose offended by natural smells but his ears are offended by harsh sounds. Preferring delicate flute notes to Dorimant's “barbarous” trumpets and kettle drums, he also finds the name John Trott “unsufferable” and changes it to the more euphonious (and pretentious) “Hampshire.” “The world is generally very grossier here, indeed,” he remarks, comparing England to France (231), and Dorimant's vigorous masculinity is continually set off against his preciousness and effeminacy:

MED.
He was Yesterday at the Play, with a pair of Gloves up to his Elbows, and a Periwig more exactly Curl'd then a Ladies head newly dress'd for a Ball.
BELL.
What a pretty lisp he has!
DOR.
Ho, that he affects in imitation of the people of Quality of France.
MED.
His head stands for the most part on one side, and his looks are more languishing than a Ladys when she loll's at stretch in her Coach, or leans her head carelessly against the side of a Box i'the Playhouse.

(200)

In a later scene, when the group gathered at Lady Townley's tries to persuade Sir Fopling to dance, Medley remarks: “Like a woman I find you must be struggl'd with before one brings you to what you desire.” But there is no persuading Sir Fopling, and when he apologizes to Harriet (“Do not think it want of Complaisance, Madam”), she returns, “You are too well bred to want that, Sir Fopling. I believe it want of power.” To which he smugly assents: “By Heav'ns and so it is. I have sat up so Damn'd late and drunk so curs'd hard since I came to this lewd Town, that I am fit for nothing but low dancing now, a Corant, a Boreè, or a Minnuét; but St. André tells me, if I will but be regular in one Month I shall rise agen. Pox on this Debauchery” (253). Sir Fopling, as it proves, can only “endeavor at a caper” and then be content to dance by proxy—throwing out instructions to his “set of Balladins” from his position seated among the ladies. And his “want of power” turns out to include a strong suggestion of sexual impotence when at the end of the play he is all too easily discouraged from continuing his pursuit of Mrs. Loveit: “An intrigue now would be but a temptation to me to throw away that Vigour on one, which I mean shall shortly make my Court to the whole sex in a Ballet” (285).

Even Old Bellair possesses more animal vigor than does Sir Fopling, and indeed it is he who is the true heir to the role of Sir Joslin Jolley of She wou'd if she cou'd. Forever dancing, singing, drinking, and “bepatting” the ladies, he is the high-spirited, irrepressible Dionysian clown at Lady Townley's revels and is always in the forefront of the exuberant country dances, which contrast so sharply in their energetic natural rhythms with the mannered “French air” imposed by Sir Fopling on his own little “equipage.” Like Sir Joslin, Old Bellaire seems to be constantly in motion (“You are very active, Sir,” says Emilia. He views the male-female relationship in coarsely physical terms and acts as good-natured matchmaker at the end of the play. (“Please you, Sir,” he bids the Chaplain, “to Commission a young Couple to go to Bed together a Gods name?”)

Dorimant, for all his refinement and ironic detachment, possesses the masculine vigor which identifies him with Old Bellair's rather primitive spontaneity and virility, but Sir Fopling has lost touch almost completely with such earthy, natural behavior. Even his carelessness is studied: “We should not alwaies be in a set dress, 'tis more en Cavalier to appear now and then in a dissabillée” (261). And he writes his love songs, as he does everything else, by the rules so that the end product sounds like something straight out of the heroic plot of The Comical Revenge—a pretty pastoral with appropriate references to “my wounded heart” and to sighs and languishings. Boasting of having learned singing from Lambert in Paris, he has to acknowledge: “I have his own fault, a weak voice, and care not to sing out of a ruél,” whereupon Dorimant comments: “A ruél is a pretty Cage for a singing Fop, indeed” (262).

Dorimant himself refuses categorically to live like a songbird in a cage. Just as he takes over the form of the pastoral love song and uses it to express what Underwood calls his own “‘satanic’ posture,”⁶ so he takes over the vows and protestations of the précieux mode and uses them to his own aggressive ends. Always the comic artist, adapting every form and rule to his particular needs, he sings and versifies his way through the play with supreme confidence in his own superior knowledge of the ways of the world and of the women in it, and Young Bellair pays him the ultimate tribute by remarking: “all he does and says is so easie, and so natural” (234).

To him as to Harriet the first requirement of the game of life is freedom to follow one's own inclinations, however arbitrary they may be. “We are not Masters of our own affections,” he says to Mrs. Loveit, sounding like an echo of Courtall, “our inclinations daily alter; now we love pleasure, and anon we shall doat on business; human frailty will have it so, and who can help it?” (214) The greatest enemy to the élan vital is restriction of the kind Mrs. Loveit would impose on Dorimant and Lady Woodvil on her daughter, and Dorimant's defiance of Mrs. Loveit in Act I, scene ii, has its counterpart in Harriet's defiance of her mother in Act II, scene i. Harriet too has her own “inclinations,” and she confides to her waiting woman her real objection to marrying Bellair:

HAR.
I think I might be brought to endure him, and that is all a reasonable Woman should expect in a Husband, but there is duty i'the case—and like the Haughty Merab, I
Find much aversion in my stubborn mind,
Which,
Is bred by being promis'd and design'd.

(220)

And a few lines later, when Young Bellair asks: “What generous resolution are you making, Madam?” Harriet retorts, “Only to be disobedient, Sir.”

In terms of the highly civilized world to which Dorimant and Harriet belong, they are both “barberous” (a word which recurs repeatedly in indignant references to Dorimant)—possessed of no illusions about the “native brass” which lies at the bottom of their own natures. Egotistically cognizant of their own value, they shake off impatiently any attempt to reduce them to a civilized formality. Thus, when Busy pleads with Harriet, “Dear Madam! Let me set that Curl in order,” Harriet exclaims, “Let me alone, I will shake 'em all out of order” (219). In short, they are both “sons of the morning”—the time of day when they first appear on stage in all their rebellious individuality—armed for their encounter with the world with the freshness and vigor of free spirits but also with a tough skepticism that will take nothing on faith.

Neither harbors any undue respect for “quality” and both are merciless mockers of both the foppish and the précieux affectations which surround them. When, for example, Dorimant taunts Harriet by making a jeering comment about ladies' eyes (“Women indeed have commonly a method of managing those messengers of Love! now they will look as if they would kill, and anon they will look as if they were dying. They point and rebate their glances, the better to invite us”), she promptly retorts: “I like this variety well enough; but hate the set face that always looks as it would say Come love me. A woman, who at Playes makes the Deux yeux to a whole Audience, and at home cannot forbear 'em to her Monkey” (248). Both hero and heroine can, like their comic predecessors, play a tongue-in-cheek part in the social game and at the same time detach themselves from it either as highly entertained onlookers or as sardonic commentators.

Possessing flexibility of response and a keen eye for the false and the ridiculous in human behavior, they delight in their own superior ability to control the world around them and are consummate Hobbesian “gloriers.” And dissembling represents one of their methods of having their own way with the world and of remaining wild and free in a society bent on reducing its members to a common mold. Toward the end of the play Lady Townley observes that “Men of Mr. Dorimants character, always suffer in the general opinion of the world,” and Medley corroborates her view: “You can make no judgment of a witty man from common fame, considering the prevailing faction, Madam—” (283). The same might be said of the social response to the comic spirit in any age. Representing as they do the rebellious, freewheeling play spirit dedicated to the art of living well on their own terms, the Dorimants of the world will always find people to brand them as “Devil” and “ingrate” with a wholly negative implication.

Sinner and devil are, of course, the names invariably given by a conventional or Christian society to indulgers of the natural instincts, especially sexual, and to indulgers of the truth-speaking instincts as well. But a comic hero such as Dorimant will always in effect contend with Oscar Wilde, “What is termed sin is an essential element of progress”; and he will thus rejoice in and pride himself on his own sinfulness. Medley, in his opening greeting to Dorimant, calls him “my Life, my Joy, my darling-Sin” (191), and Tom the Shoemaker accuses both men of belonging among those “men of quality” who “wou'd ingross the sins o'the Nation” (197). And in a later passage Medley remarks concerning Mrs. Loveit's jealousy of Dorimant: “She cou'd not have pick'd out a Devil upon Earth so proper to Torment her” (208). In fact the language of the play repeatedly associates “that wicked Dorimant, and all the under debauchees of the Town” (246) with both sin and the devil; and Lady Woodvil recognizes Dorimant as an exceedingly dangerous tempter: “Oh! he has a Tongue, they say, would tempt the Angels to a second fall” (237). In short, not only is the comic hero himself a rebel against divine authority, but he has so charming and persuasive a way about him that he threatens to carry some segments of the angelic group along with him.

Closely associated with the devil imagery, moreover, is the religious terminology frequently used by the “devils” themselves as one means of defining their own nature and their irreverent attitude toward both orthodox religion and marriage as a sacred institution. The play opens, for example, with Dorimant complaining of the difficulty of writing a love letter with all passion spent: “It is a Tax upon good nature which I have here been labouring to pay, and have done it, but with as much regret, as ever Fanatick paid the Royal Aid, or Church Duties.” And later, when Bellmour is discussing with Medley and Dorimant the subject of his approaching marriage, we witness the following exchange:

BELL.
You wish me in Heaven, but you believe me on my Journey to Hell.
MED.
You have a good strong Faith, and that may contribute much towards your Salvation. I confess I am but of an untoward constitution, apt to have doubts and scruples, and in Love they are no less distracting than in Religion; were I so near Marriage, I shou'd cry out by Fits as I ride in my Coach, Cuckold, Cuckold, with no less fury than the mad Fanatick does Glory in Bethlem.
BELL.
Because Religion makes some run mad, must I live an Atheist?
MED.
Is it not great indiscretion for a man of Credit, who may have money enough on his Word, to go and deal with Jews; who for little sums make men enter into Bonds, and give Judgments?
BELL.
Preach no more on this Text, I am determin'd, and there is no hope of my Conversion.

(199)

Clearly Medley is quite as capable as Dorimant of doing witty violence to the religious view of marriage, and in his talk about “Faith” and “Salvation,” “doubts and scruples,” as well as his glib mixing of religious and economic metaphors, he is following Dorimant's lead and emphasizing his devilish inclination to regard nothing as sacred.

And Dorimant's dialogues with Mrs. Loveit suggest a similar pattern. Mrs. Loveit belongs wholeheartedly to the world of sacred convention, and it has been argued by more than one critic that Dorimant treats her with such calculating cruelty that in our sympathy with her we lose all admiration for him. But although such may be Bellinda's reaction, it can hardly have been the audience reaction expected or intended by Etherege, and the play can certainly be acted so as to call forth quite a different response. If Sir Fopling's rule-bound modishness is sterile, her uncontrolled passion for dominance is actively destructive, and her relationship with Dorimant is actually very much like Lady Cockwood's with Courtall. She wants to possess him wholly, to make his vows and oaths eternally binding, to deny him all his liberty. In a world of human relationships characterized by power politics, she wants absolute dominance where only a balance of power is tolerable.

Like Lady Cockwood, moreover, she is masculine in her aggressive pursuit of Dorimant and would reduce him to the submissiveness of fools like Sir Fopling who, as she says with satisfaction, “are ever offering us their service, and always waiting on our will” (268). And like Lady Cockwood too, her thirst for power, when frustrated, leads finally to a wholly destructive rage. In her fury she is even more the heroine of melodrama than is Lady Cockwood: “Death! and Eternal darkness! I shall never sleep again. Raging feavours seize the world, and make mankind as restless all as I am” (274). She expresses her destructiveness actively by tearing her fan into shreds and “flinging” chaotically about the stage, while Dorimant remarks with a coolness designed to madden her still further: “I fear this restlessness of the body, Madam, proceeds from an unquietness of the mind” (214).

Yet in the devilish terms of the play and of a Hobbesian world, Dorimant is quite “reasonable” in expecting his freedom once he has discovered his “decay of passion,” and Mrs. Loveit is wholly “unreasonable” in her jealous possessiveness. (Both words appear repeatedly in the dialogue and always with these same implications.) When Emilia reminds him sentimentally of “afflictions in Love,” he retorts, “You Women make 'em, 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's weary!” (228) To be “reasonable” in Etherege's comic world is simply to be realistic about the appetitive and inconstant nature of man and to comport oneself accordingly. Thus when Mrs. Loveit accosts Dorimant with: “Is this the constancy you vow'd?” he replies, “Constancy at my years! 'tis not a Vertue in season, you might as well expect the Fruit the Autumn ripens i'the Spring.” Again “fruit” and naturalness are identified, and the passion-versus-reason exchange continues:

LOV.
Monstrous Principle!
DOR.
Youth has a long Journey to go, Madam; shou'd I have set up my rest at the first Inn I lodg'd at, I shou'd never have arriv'd at the happiness I now enjoy.
LOV.
Dissembler, damn'd Dissembler!
DOR.
I am so, I confess; good nature and good manners corrupt me. I am honest in my inclinations, and wou'd not, wer't not to avoid offence, make a Lady a little in years believe I think her young, wilfully mistake Art for Nature; and seem as fond of a thing I am weary of, as when I doated on't in earnest.
LOV.
False Man!
DOR.
True Woman!
LOV.
Now you begin to show your self!
DOR.
Love gilds us over, and makes us show fine things to one another for a time, but soon the Gold wears off, and then again the native brass appears.
LOV.
Think on your Oaths, your Vows and Protestations, perjur'd Man!
DOR.
I made 'em when I was in love.
LOV.
And therefore ought they not to bind? Oh Impious!
DOR.
What we swear at such a time may be a certain proof of a present passion, but to say truth, in Love there is no security to be given for the future.
LOV.
Horrid and ingrateful, begone, and never see me more!

(216)

Like all his kindred comic protagonists, Dorimant matter-of-factly accepts men for the fallen creatures they are and is quite ready (maddeningly so, in Mrs. Loveit's view) to regard himself as more fallen than most. Thus he blandly accepts her cries of “False” and “Impious” and opposes to such passion his own reasonable and realistic analysis of the human condition. The analysis constitutes a highly effective method of verbal attack, both against Mrs. Loveit herself and against the whole religious-moral-social framework which stands behind her abstractions concerning “Constancy,” “Oaths,” “Vows,” “Protestations.” Beneath their innocently logical exterior, Dorimant's remarks are patent insults—insults compounded by the smugly condescending tone in which he coolly sets forth the truths that explain his outrageous behavior. Each lengthy, deliberate speech is clearly designed to enrage further an already angry woman, and each is a little exercise in logic which arraigns by implication her stupidity. Not only is the subject of the dialogue passion as opposed to reason, but so also is the dialogue itself.

Only a Harriet can finally successfully challenge a Dorimant, because only she can meet him on his own ground of controlled reasonableness. As aware as he of the ridiculous posturings of the human animal, she is as ingenious as he in deceits and contrivances which will allow her to have her own way. When her waiting woman reproaches her with eluding her mother (“the Extravagant'st thing that ever you did in your life”), Harriet rejoins, “Hast thou so little wit to think I spoke what I meant when I over-joy'd her in the Country, with a low Courtsy, and What you please, Madam, I shall ever be obedient?” And poor, baffled Busy can only answer, “Nay, I know not, you have so many fetches” (220). Harriet—like Dorimant although more ingenuously—is overwhelmingly in love with life—with “this dear Town” and with “the dear pleasure of dissembling” (222). Taking nothing for granted, she stubbornly refuses to be taken for granted herself—or to fit docilely into any predetermined mold. “I am sorry my face does not please you as it is,” she says defiantly to Dorimant, “but I shall not be complaisant and change it” (248).

Her hatred of life in the country, which she can “scarce indure … in Landskapes and in Hangings” (222), suggests a hatred of repose equal to Dorimant's own, and she is as exuberant a contriver and prankster as he is. At one point Medley explains to Lady Townley the reason for Mrs. Loveit's rage by remarking: “Dorimant has plaid her some new prank” (225); and later Dorimant reveals to Medley his reason for acting the part of Mr. Courtage with the words: “This is Harriets contrivance” (244). Always a sworn enemy of “gravity,” Harriet has “so many fetches” that even Dorimant has a difficult time keeping pace. When she makes him a mock curtsey, he protests: “That demure curt'sy is not amiss in jest, but do not think in earnest it becomes you,” and in the ensuing dialogue it is clear that for her the curtsey is tantamount to flinging a challenge:

HAR.
Affectation is catching, I find; from your grave bow I got it.
DOR.
Where had you all that scorn, and coldness in your look?
HAR.
From nature, Sir, pardon my want of art:
I have not learnt those softnesses and languishings
Which now in faces are so much in fashion.
DOR.
You need 'em not, you have a sweetness of your own, if you would but calm your frowns and let it settle.
HAR.
My Eyes are wild and wandring like my passions, And cannot yet be ty'd to rules of charming.

(248)

It is Harriet's wit which dominates here, and she is in effect giving Dorimant a taste of his own medicine. She too can appeal to “Nature” and to her “wild and Wandring Passions,” and her witty technique inevitably recalls that which Dorimant himself has used in “handling” Mrs. Loveit. Like Dorimant's words in the earlier scene, hers here are also sweetly reasonable and constitute at once a defense and an attack. While remaining, with her wryly spoken “Sir” and “pardon,” ostensibly within the bounds of good manners, she is actually insulting and defying and making fun of Dorimant. Etherege's most brilliant stroke in the language of the passage, however, has to do with the rhythms he here imparts to Harriet's speeches, for at the very moment when she is impudently apologizing for her “want of art,” she is speaking in blank verse and thus at once parodying such “art” and suggesting the special quality of her own artistic control, organic to her own essentially poetic nature.

Here, as always, Harriet is an indefatigible player (both of roles and of the exciting and even dangerous game of life) and one who delightedly welcomes any challenge. When the respectable young Bellair, escorting her in the Mail a few minutes earlier, has remarked: “Most people prefer High Park to this place,” she has had an instant response ready: “It has the better reputation I confess: but I abominate the dull diversions there, the formal bows, the Affected smiles, the silly by-Words, and amorous Tweers, in passing; here one meets with a little conversation now and then.” And to Bellair's warning: “These conversations have been fatal to some of your Sex, Madam,” she has replied, “It may be so; because some who want temper have been undone by gaming, must others who have it wholly deny themselves the pleasure of Play?” Upon which the always reasonable Dorimant has sounded the familiar note of approbation: “Trust me, it were unreasonable, Madam” (234, 235).

In our softer, more optimistic moods we may all prefer, as so many critics have preferred, a Bellair to a Dorimant, an Emilia to a Harriet, but the comic spirit at its best has no patience with our softer moods, and if the cruelty of Dorimant has often proved a stumbling block to critical appreciation, it has been due to a continuing propensity to regard him as a romantic rather than a comic hero. English comic laughter has always contained a strong vein of cruelty, and no honest study of laughter and comedy has been able to avoid some acknowledgment of the strain. James Sully defines it as an “unfeeling rejoicing at mishap,” to be found “in the laughter of the savage and of the coarser product of civilisation at certain forms of punishment, particularly the administration of a good thrashing to a wife,” but he reluctantly admits that even “‘polite society’ seems to have a relish for this form of amusement.”⁷ The fact is that neither Hobbes, nor Etherege following in his footsteps, was willing to recognize any essential difference between the members of a polite society and those of a primitive or savage one. Presumably man, in either setting, laughed from a feeling of his own superiority in which he “gloried,” and such laughter is, more often than not, something less than kind.

In Dorimant's and Harriet's world, as in Hobbes's, life is a struggle for power. In more universal comic terms, it is a game involving a battle for self-assertion and self-definition from which the comic hero emerges victorious because he possesses superior mental agility and because he never deceives himself. He is always a disruptive force, challenging a complacent world which would repress his vigorous individuality in the name of civilization. Dorimant's philosophy in matters of both friendship and love is a hard-headed one of mutual advantages or pleasure to be reaped. To Medley's observations about his having “grown very intimate” with Bellair, he explains reasonably: “It is our mutual interest to be so; it makes the Women think the better of his Understanding, and judge more favourably of my Reputation; it makes him pass upon some for a man of very good sense, and I upon others for a very civil person” (202). And when Bellinda, at the conclusion of her assignation with Dorimant, sighs, “Were it to do again—” he replies, “We should do it, should we not?” (258)

Like most of his comic ilk, he is a charming cad, reveling in his own powers of conquest, and he delights in a spirited fight like that with Mrs. Loveit and even seeks it out because it offers him additional opportunity to display his own superiority. Thriving on trouble and excitement, he declares with customary self-confidence: “next to the coming to a good understanding with a new Mistress, I love a quarrel with an old one; but the Devils in't, there has been such a calm in my affairs of late, I have not had the pleasure of making a Woman so much as break her Fan, to be sullen, or forswear her self these three days” (195). The full import of such a statement can perhaps best be appreciated by setting it against an observation made by Faure: “Is not repose the death of the world?” he asked. “Had not Rousseau and Napoleon precisely the mission of troubling that repose? In another of the profound and almost impersonal sayings that sometimes fell from his lips, Napoleon observed with a still deeper intuition of his own function in the world: ‘I love power. But it is as an artist that I love it. I love it as a musician loves his violin, to draw out of it sounds and chords and harmonies. I love it as an artist.’”⁸

Dorimant too finds “repose the death of the world” and loves power “as an artist,” and it is precisely because Mrs. Loveit lacks his artistic control that her counterplot against him is foredoomed. Possessing passion without wit, she can only shout “Hell and Furies!” in response to his taunt, “What, dancing the Galloping Nag without a Fiddle?” (214) Much in the manner of Courtall in his struggle with Lady Cockwood, Dorimant is momentarily defeated and has to endure Medley's jibes at his expense, but in the final scene he again gathers all the reins into his own competent hands, and Medley declares: “Dorimant! I pronounce thy reputation clear—and henceforward when I would know any thing of woman, I will consult no other Oracle” (286). In a world of power-hungry, passion-driven people, it takes a clearheaded, self-aware, resilient manipulator like Dorimant to keep his balance. And, as already stated, it takes a woman of Harriet's wit and cunning to counter him effectively.

In her own way she is as proud and egotistical as her opponent, and the game they play is one in which she is on the offensive as often as he is. She is, indeed, as Medley once calls her, the “new Woman” (244). Wholly aware of her own power and possessed of both “wit” and “malice,” she enters the playground attracted by its perils and ready to take on the very “Prince of all the Devils” himself. In fact Lady Woodvil's attitude creates for her recalcitrant daughter sufficient provocation to drive her precipitately into his arms. “Lord,” exclaims the Orange-woman to Dorimant, “how she talks against the wild young men o'the Town; as for your part, she thinks you an arrant Devil; shou'd she see you, on my Conscience she wou'd look if you had not a Cloven foot” (193). Harriet corroborates the statement by explaining to Young Bellair: “She concludes if he does but speak to a Woman she's undone; is on her knees every day to pray Heav'n defend me from him.” But when Bellair asks, “You do not apprehend him so much as she does?” Harriet, who is “wild” and “extravagant” enough in her own right, replies confidently, “I never saw any thing in him that was frightful” (233, 234). And the very fact that Dorimant is a man of “no principles” (226) only serves to increase her interest. Rejecting the safety and security of an arranged marriage, she insists on living dangerously, whatever the chances of being “ruined” and “undone.”

Both Dorimant and Harriet constantly refer to the love game in terms of fighting and gambling. “These young Women apprehend loving, as much as the young men do fighting, at first;” says Dorimant, “but once enter'd, like them too, they all turn Bullies straight” (201). Mrs. Loveit has, in effect, “turned bully,” but Harriet seeks an excitement and adventure in her relationship with Dorimant which is quite opposed to Mrs. Loveit's desire for absolute dominance; and the rules by which she plays the game can be reduced to two: play your cards close to the chest and never trust your opponent even for a minute.

Neither Sir Fopling's rule-bound unimaginativeness nor Bellair's and Emilia's complacency will do for either Dorimant or Harriet. Life is for them a continual conflict, and as spectators we are invited to watch the struggle with a full knowledge of the prevailing tensions. “I love her, and dare not let her know it,” mutters Dorimant in an aside. “I fear sh'as an ascendant o're me and may revenge the wrongs I have done her sex” (249). “I feel … a change within,” says Harriet aside, “but he shall never know it” (235). Their self-control is as complete as their self-awareness, and every witty exchange between them pulsates with the resulting rhythmic energies. Both are artists at the game of life, with a pride in their own imaginative and attractive powers which determines them to challenge each other as a part of their refusal to submit to dull and repressive conventionality. “You were talking of Play, Madam;” remarks Dorimant, “Pray what may be your stint?” “A little harmless discourse in publick walks,” comes Harriet's rejoinder, “or at most an appointment in a Box bare-fac'd at the Play-House; you are for Masks, and private meetings, where Women engage for all they are worth, I hear.” And the battle is on:

DOR.
I have been us'd to deep Play, but I can make one at small Game, when I like my Gamester well.
HAR.
And be so unconcern'd you'l ha' no pleasure in't.
DOR.
Where there is a considerable sum to be won, the hope of drawing people in, makes every trifle considerable.
HAR.
The sordidness of mens natures, I know, makes 'em willing to flatter and comply with the Rich, though they are sure never to be the better for 'em.
DOR.
'Tis in their power to do us good, and we despair not but at some time or other they may be willing.
HAR.
To men who have far'd in this Town like you, 'twould be a great Mortification to live on hope; could you keep a Lent for a Mistriss?
DOR.
In expectation of a happy Easter, and though time be very precious, think forty daies well lost, to gain your favour.
HAR.
Mr. Bellair! let us walk, 'tis time to leave him, men grow dull when they begin to be particular.
DOR.
Y'are mistaken, flattery will not ensue, though I know y'are greedy of the praises of the whole Mail.
HAR.
You do me wrong.
DOR.
I do not; as I follow'd you, I observ'd how you were pleased when the Fops cry'd She's handsome, very handsome, by God she is, and whisper'd aloud your name; the thousand several forms you put your face into; then, to make your self more agreeable, how wantonly you play'd with your head, flung back your locks, and look'd smilingly over your shoulder at 'em.
HAR.
I do not go begging the mens 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. Is not this like you?

(235, 236)

In such a passage, typical of the witty exchanges between the two protagonists, language becomes in Dorimant's case a substitute for a more open aggressiveness and in Harriet's a substitute for that elusive female maneuver involving the “no” which suggests “yes.” Words take on a decidedly dramatic quality, with physical activity on the stage giving way to an activity of mind of such intensity that we feel as if we were watching two skilled fencers with mind instead of hand in control. As Harriet repeatedly alters her tactics by a facile change of metaphors (from gaming to the flattery of the rich and thence to religion), Dorimant adjusts his own with scarcely a pause for breath, and the sexual implications are invariably and forcefully present beneath the polite metaphorical surface, whether the reference be to “deep Play,” to the “power” of the wealthy “to do us Good,” or to the following upon “Lent” of “a happy Easter.” And presumably the use of religious terminology in connection with sex suggests again, as in earlier passages and in earlier plays, a defiant irreverence of attitude toward both Christianity and the religious stance of the précieux mode. At this point, however, Dorimant breaks the unspoken rules by shifting from the impersonal third person to the “particular” second, and Harriet is quite justified in walking off the playground—pausing only to throw back with good measure at the piqued Dorimant the insult which he has resentfully flung and to restore the comic perspective with her pantomime. But we have only to observe the way the evenness of the back-and-forth exchange has been interrupted to know that the rhythmic balance of the game has been broken. Short, sharp sallies have abruptly given way to Dorimant's diffuseness.

Whatever their rivalry on their own playground, however, they are partners on the larger social playground, both “contriving” to “make a little mirth” (276) by turning their world into a vastly entertaining spectacle, both mocking at “gravity” and “Rules” by means of parody, and both glorying none too kindly in their triumphant superiority. “Mr. Dorimant has been your God Almighty long enough,” cries Harriet to Mrs. Loveit, “'tis time to think of another—” (286). Seizing upon the affections of their mannered world, both Harriet and Dorimant turn them into a spirited comedy of which they are at once the authors and the principal actors. And they play with language as they play with life, controlling it with a masterful skill and putting it to use for their own purposes of challenge and aggression.

In the end Harriet has won. Or has she? And Dorimant has won. Or has he? In the last analysis both have won out against the larger world. Mrs. Loveit has been outplotted; Lady Woodvil has been brought around. But on their own playground neither has finally either won or lost, and the game goes on. Superficially, of course, a bargain has been struck: Harriet's money in exchange for Dorimant's promise of marriage. Yet all the important questions remain unanswered, and all the dangers are as threatening as ever. “Do all men break their words thus?” asks Bellinda of Dorimant in the final scene. And he replies, “Th' extravagant words they speak in love; 'tis as unreasonable to expect we should perform all we promise then, as do all we threaten when we are angry—” And, never one to succumb to the “unreasonable,” he adds, “We must meet agen” (283). And to Mrs. Loveit he has testily remarked in the same scene: “I must give up my interest wholly to my Love; had you been a reasonable woman, I might have secur'd 'em both, and been happy—” (282, 283). The exchanges ironically undercut all the “extravagant words” which Dorimant has been speaking to Harriet, and those words thus take on the nature of a dare, which she at once recognizes and proceeds to counter with a dare of her own. Thus when Dorimant declares his delight in the “prospect of such a Heav'n” and promises to “renounce all the joys I have in friendship and in Wine, sacrifice to you all the interest I have in other Women—” Harriet cuts him short with, “Hold—Though I wish you devout, I would not have you turn Fanatick—Could you neglect these a while and make a journey into the Country?” (278, 279) Again she is making insinuatingly irreverent use of religious metaphors as an indication of her distrust of his “Heav'n” references and is thereby rejecting the possibility of sinking into any stultifying orthodoxy of the précieux kind. But in effect she is also asking Dorimant, in terms of her own earlier metaphor, to “keep a Lent for a Mistriss.”

If it is the Country which is to constitute the ultimate testing-ground of their relationship, it is also love, and Etherege significantly seems to ask us to equate one with the other. Both represent, paradoxically, at once the source of life and the threat of repression and sterility. Harriet, who cannot “indure the Country … in Hangings,” rejects with equal vehemence the thought of representing “the whole mystery of making love … in a suit of Hangings,” which has become the subject of one of her last witty rallies with Dorimant:

DOR.
What have we here, the picture of a celebrated Beauty, giving Audience in publick to a declar'd Lover?
HAR.
Play the dying Fop and make the piece compleat, Sir.
DOR.
What think you if the Hint were well improv'd? The whole mystery of making love pleasantly design'd and wrought in a suit of Hangings?
HAR.
'Twere needless to execute fools in Effigie who suffer daily in their own persons.

(277)

The passage suggests that what Harriet finally cannot endure is any pressure to reduce her to a formalized pattern of behavior and thus to turn her into just another docile fool. When Dorimant utters his last declaration to the effect that his “soul has quite given up her liberty,” she at once seems to associate his words with the sterility suggested both by “the dying Fop” and by “the hateful noise of Rooks” in Hampshire (“Hampshire” being incidentally the sound Sir Fopling has found so pleasing); and she declares, “This is more dismal than the Country!” In short, she turns off the threat of such a death by turning it into yet another challenge, and the play ends with both protagonists still in tense and rhythmic comic motion.

Notes

1. Bergson speaks of the source of the comic as “some rigidity or other applied to the mobility of life, in an awkward attempt to follow its lines and counterfeit its suppleness,” and he goes on to say: “It might almost be said that every fashion is laughable in some respect. Only, when we are dealing with the fashion of the day, we are so accustomed to it that the garment seems, in our mind, to form one with the individual wearing it. We do not separate them in imagination. The idea no longer occurs to us to contrast the inert rigidity of the covering with the living suppleness of the object covered: consequently, the comic here remains in a latent condition. It will only succeed in emerging when the natural incompatibility is so deep-seated between the covering and the covered that even an immemorial association fails to cement this union: a case in point is our head and top hat.” “Laughter,” Comedy, ed. Wylie Sypher (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday Anchor Books, 1956), p. 85.

2. In view of Etherege's patent insistence on these differences between Sir Fopling and Dorimant, it is astonishing that so many recent critics have largely denied the existence of any such distinction. Jocelyn Powell has actually reversed the differences, making an observation about Dorimant and his world which can in reality only be justified with specific reference to Sir Fopling: “in the society Etherege portrays manners have become not a means to an end, but an end in themselves … that which was intended to express feeling, now dictates to it, and manners prevent the intercourse they were designed to aid.” She then goes on to suggest quite rightly that the “energy of love and of living is expressed in the communication between human beings,” but denies, in effect, that Dorimant and Harriet manage to express any such “energy,” hamstrung as they are by “the lightness and elegance of fashion.” And the issue becomes further confused when Sir Fopling is seen as the heir to the “lyrical and musical life and energy” of Sir Frederick Frollick and Sir Joslin Jolly—“picking up the realism of the play and turning it into a dance,” and when the example of Dorimant is held up as one in which “form has become a substitute for feeling.” “George Etherege and the Form of Comedy,” Restoration Theatre, Stratford-upon-Avon Studies 6 (London: Edward Arnold, 1965), 66-68.

3. Bergson, “Laughter,” Comedy, p. 89.

4. Oscar Wilde, “The Truth of Masks,” Intentions (New York: Modern Library, n.d.), p. 241.

5. Harris, “The Dialect of those Fanatic Times,” Restoration Theatre, Stratford-upon-Avon Studies 6 (London: Edward Arnold, 1965), 29, 30.

6. Dale Underwood, Etherege and the Seventeenth-Century Comedy of Manners (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1957), p. 88. The song, of which Underwood says that there is a “‘satanic’ posture embedded in the verses' synthetic pastoralisms,” includes the lines:

   The threatning danger to remove
                       She whisper'd in her Ear,
   Ah Phillis, if you would not love,
                       This Shepheard do not hear.

   None ever had so strange an Art
                       His passion to convey
   Into a listning Virgins heart
                       And steal her Soul away.

7. James Sully, An Essay on Laughter: Its Forms, Its Causes, Its Development, and Its Value (New York: Longmans, Green, 1907), p. 97.

8. Quoted in Havelock Ellis, The Dance of Life (Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1923), pp. 11, 12.