nce.

To come to details. The tragedy of Lady Wishfort has often been
remarked--the veritable tragedy of a lovesick old woman. All the
grotesque touches, her credulity, her vanity, her admirable dialect ('as
I'm a person!'), but serve to make the tragedy the more pitiable. Either,
therefore, our appreciation of satiric comedy is defective, or Congreve
made a mistake. To regard this poor old soul as mere comedy is to attain
to an almost satanic height of contempt: the comedy is more than grim, it
is savagely cruel. To be pitiless, on the other hand, is a satirist's
virtue. On the whole, we may reasonably say that the tragedy is not too
keen in itself, but that it is too obviously indicated. Witwoud is
surely a great character? The stage is alive with mirth when he is on
it. His entrance in the very first part of the play is delightful.
'Afford me your compassion, my dears; pity me, Fainall; Mirabell, pity
me. . . . Fainall, how does your lady? Gad, I say anything in the world
to get this fellow out of my head. I beg pardon that I should ask a man
of pleasure, and the town, a question at once so foreign and domestic.
But I talk like an old maid at a marriage, I don't know what I say.' But
one might quote for ever. Witwoud, almost as much as Millamant herself,
is an eternal type. His little exclamations, his assurance of sympathy,
his terror of the commonplace--surely one knows them well? His tolerance
of any impertinence, lest he should be thought to have misunderstood a
jest, is a great distinction. But Congreve's gibe in the dedication at
the critics, who failed 'to distinguish betwixt the character of a
Witwoud and a Truewit,' is hardly fair: as Dryden said of Etherege's Sir
Fopling, he is 'a fool so nicely writ, The ladies might mistake him for a
wit.' Then, Millamant is the ultimate expression of those who, having
all the material goods which nature and civilisation can give, live on
paradoxes and artifices. Her insolence is the inoffensive insolence only
possible to the well-bred. 'O ay, letters,--I had letters,--I am
persecuted with letters,--I hate letters,--nobody knows how to write
letters; and yet one has 'em, one does not know why,--they serve one to
pin up one's hair.' 'Beauty the lover's gift!--Lord, what is a lover,
that it can give? Why one makes lovers as fast as one pleases, and they
live as long as one pleases, and they die as soon as one pleases; and
then if one pleases one makes mo