y and
Vanbrugh--and for that matter Etherege and Farquhar--are playwrights
producing for the whole theatre. In fact Congreve's plays were only
successful in proportion as they were less literary and 'Congrevean.' His
first comedy was the talk of the town; his last, _The Way of the World_,
that monument of characterisation (of a kind) and fine English, was only
a 'success of esteem.' The reason is not far to seek. Congreve's plays
were too sordid in conception and too unamusing in effect for even the
audiences to which they were produced; they were excellent literature,
but they were bad drama, and they were innately detestable to boot.
Audiences are the same in all strata of time; and it is easy to see that
Wycherley's Horner and Vanbrugh's Sir John and Lady Brute were amusing,
when Lady Wishfort and Sir Sampson Legend and the illustrious and
impossible Maskwell were found 'old, cold, withered, and of intolerable
entrails.' An audience, whatever its epoch, wants action; and still
action, and again and for the last time action; also it wants a point of
departure that shall be something tinctured with humanity, a touch of the
human in the term of everything, and at least a 'sort of a kind of a
strain' of humanity in the progress of events from the one point to the
other. This it gets in Wycherley, brute as he is; with a far larger and
more vigorous comic sense it gets the same in Vanbrugh; it gets it with a
difference in the light-hearted indecencies of Farquhar. From the
magnificent prose of Congreve it is absent. His it was to sublimate all
that was most artificial in an artificial state of society: he was the
consummate artist of a phase that was merely transient, the laureate of a
generation that was only alive for half-an-hour in the course of all the
twenty-four. He is saved from oblivion by sheer strength of style. It
is a bad dramatic style, as we know; it leaves the Witwoulds and the
Plyants as admirable as the Mirabels and Millamants and Angelicas; it
makes no distinction between the Mrs. Foresights and the Sir Sampson
Legends; it presents an exemplar in Lady Wishfort and an exemplar in
Petulant; it is uneasy, self-conscious, intrusive, even offensive, the
very reverse of dramatic; and in Congreve's hands it is irresistible,
for, thanks to Congreve, it has been forced from the stage, and lives as
literature alone.

The Writer.

Congreve was essentially a man of letters; his style is that of a pu