real hero; but
Sheridan made it natural for the stupid sentimentality of later days to
make him the villain, and Congreve would have made it impossible. Of wit
(of course) there is more in a scene of Congreve than in a play of
Sheridan. Moreover, faulty in construction as his main plots are, in
detail his construction is often admirable: as in play of character upon
character, in countless opportunities for delightful archness and cruelty
in the women, for the display of every comic emotion in the men. He
lived in the playhouse, and his characters, true to life though they be,
have about them as it were an ideal essence of the boards. With Hazlitt,
'I would rather have seen Mrs. Abington's Millamant than any Rosalind
that ever appeared on the stage.' A lover and a constant frequenter of
the theatre--albeit the plays he sees bore him to death--cannot, in
reading Congreve, choose but see the glances and hear the intonations of
imaginary players.

VI.

Congreve's choice of material has been defended at an early stage of
these remarks. There is the further and more interesting question of his
point of view, his attitude towards it. Mr. Henley speaks of his
'deliberate and unmitigable baseness of morality.' Differing with
deference, I think it may be shown that his attitude is a pose merely,
and an artistic and quite innocent pose. It is the amusing pose of the
boyish cynic turned into an artistic convention. The lines:

'He alone won't betray in whom none will confide,
And the nymph may be chaste that has never been tried:'

which conclude the characteristic song in the third act of _Love for
Love_, are typical of his attitude. Does anybody suppose that an
intelligent man of the world meant that sentiment in all seriousness?

'Nothing's new besides our faces,
Every woman is the same'--

those lines (in his first play), which seemed so shocking to Thackeray,
what more do they express than the green cynicism of youth? When Mr.
Leslie Stephen speaks of his 'gush of cynical sentiment,' he speaks
unsympathetically, but the phrase, to be an enemy's, is just. It is
cynical sentiment, and the hostility comes from taking it seriously. I
think it the most artistic attitude for a writer of gay, satiric
comedies, and that its very excess should prevent its being taken for
more than a convention. We are not called upon to see satiric comedies
all day long, and the question, everlastingly asked by