implication of
every work of art--'Would you like to live with it?'--is here, as in most
other cases, irrelevant. One is reminded that there is more in life than
intrigues and cynical comments on them. And one is inclined to put the
questions in answer: 'Does a man who really feels the sorrowful things of
life, its futile endeavours and piteous separations, find relief in
seeing his emotions mimicked on the stage in a 'wholesome' play of
sentiment with a happy ending? Is he not rather comforted by the
distractions of cheerful frivolity, of conventional denial of his pains?'
The demand is as inartistic and irrelevant as the criticism which
suggested it, but it returns a sufficient reply. It does not touch the
'catharsis' of tragedy, which is another matter. For the rest,
Congreve's attitude, cynicism apart, is an attitude of irony and
superiority over common emotions, the attitude, artificial and
inoffensive, of the society he depicts in his greatest play. He enjoys
the humours of his puppets, he is never angry with them. It is the
attitude of an artist in expounding human nature, of an expert in
observation of life: an attitude attainable but by very few, and disliked
as a rule by the rest, who want to clap or to hiss--who can laugh but who
cannot smile.

VII.

When Congreve left the stage, said Dennis the critic, 'comedy left it
with him.' Vanburgh and Farquhar were left to expound comedy of manners,
the one with a vigorous gusto, the other with a romantic gaiety. The
peculiar perfume of _The Way of the World_ was given to neither, yet they
wrote comedy of manners. But if Congreve left colleagues, he left no
sons, and most certainly, one may say, that when those colleagues died,
English comedy took to her bed. 'The Comic Muse, long sick, is now a-
dying,' wrote Garrick in his prologue to _She Stoops to Conquer_, and she
had not to apologise, like Charles the Second, for the unconscionable
time she was about it. It is a little crude to attribute her demise to
Jeremy Collier and his _Short View_--a block painted to look like a
thunderbolt. It is not a matter of decency, of alteration or improvement
in manners. A comedy might be wholly Congrevean without a coarse word
from beginning to end. It is a matter of the exclusion (not the
stultification), the suspension of moral prepossessions, the absence of
sympathetic sentimentalism, the habit of shirking nothing and smiling at
all things. These qualiti