Chapter XXXII

HISTORY OF DRAMATIC LITERATURE FROM 1650 TO 1700.

Sect. I.

Racine—Minor French Tragedians—Molière—Regnard, and other Comic Writers.

Italian and Spanish drama. 1. Few tragedies or dramatic works of any kind are now recorded by historians of Italian literature; those of Delfino, afterwards patriarch of Aquileia, which are esteemed among the best, were possibly written before the middle of the century, and were not published till after its termination. The Corradino of Caraccio, in 1694, was also valued at the time.[998] Nor can Spain arrest us longer; the school of Calderon in national comedy extended no doubt beyond the death of Philip IV., in 1665, and many of his own religious pieces are of as late a date; nor were names wholly wanting, which are said to merit remembrance, in the feeble reign of Charles II., but they must be left for such as make a particular study of Spanish literature.[999] We are called to a nobler stage.

Racine’s first tragedies. 2. Corneille belongs in his glory to the earlier period of this century, though his inferior tragedies, more numerous than the better, would fall within the later. Fontenelle, indeed, as a devoted admirer, attributes considerable merit to those which the general voice both of critics and of the public had condemned.[1000] Meantime, another luminary arose on the opposite side of the horizon. The first tragedy of Jean Racine, Les Frères Ennemis, was represented in 1664, when he was twenty-five years of age. It is so far below his great works, as to be scarcely mentioned, yet does not want indications of the genius they were to display. Alexandre, in 1665, raised the young poet to more distinction. It is said that he showed this tragedy to Corneille, who praised his versification, but advised him to avoid a path which he was not fitted to tread. It is acknowledged by the advocates of Racine that the characters are feebly drawn, and that the conqueror of Asia sinks to the level of a hero in one of those romances of gallantry which had vitiated the taste of France.

Andromaque. 3. The glory of Racine commenced with the representation of his Andromaque in 1667, which was not printed till the end of the following year. He was now at once compared with Corneille, and the scales have been oscillating ever since. Criticism, satire, epigrams, were unsparingly launched against the rising poet. But his rival pursued the worst policy by obstinately writing bad tragedies. The public naturally compare the present with the present, and forget the past. When he gave them Pertharite, they were dispensed from looking back to Cinna. It is acknowledged even by Fontenelle that, during the height of Racine’s fame, the world placed him at least on an equality with his predecessor; a decision from which that critic, the relation and friend of Corneille, appeals to what he takes to be the verdict of a later age.

4. The Andromaque was sufficient to show that Racine had more skill in the management of a plot, in the display of emotion, in power over the sympathy of the spectator, at least where the gentler feelings are concerned, in beauty and grace of style, in all except nobleness of character, strength of thought, and impetuosity of language. He took his fable from Euripides, but changed it according to the requisitions of the French theatre and of French manners. Some of these changes are for the better, as the substitution of Astyanax for an unknown Molossus of the Greek tragedian, the supposed son of Andromache by Pyrrhus. “Most of those,” says Racine himself very justly, “who have heard of Andromache, know her only as the widow of Hector and the mother of Astyanax. They cannot reconcile themselves to her loving another husband and another son.” And he has finely improved this happy idea of preserving Astyanax, by making the Greeks, jealous of his name, send an embassy by Orestes to demand his life; at once deepening the interest and developing the plot.

5. The female characters, Andromache and Hermione are drawn with all Racine’s delicate perception of ideal beauty; the one, indeed, prepared for his hand by those great masters in whose school he had disciplined his own gifts of nature, Homer, Euripides, Virgil; the other more original and more full of dramatic effect. It was, as we are told, the fine acting of Mademoiselle de Champmelé in this part, generally reckoned one of the most difficult on the French stage, which secured the success of the play. Racine, after the first representation, threw himself at her feet in a transport of gratitude, which was soon changed to love. It is more easy to censure some of the other characters. Pyrrhus is bold, haughty, passionate, the true son of Achilles, except where he appears as the lover of Andromache. It is inconceivable and truly ridiculous that a Greek of the heroic age, and such a Greek as Pyrrhus is represented by those whose imagination has given him existence, should feel the respectful passion towards his captive which we might reasonably expect in the romances of chivalry, or should express it in the tone of conventional gallantry that suited the court of Versailles. But Orestes is far worse; love-mad, and yet talking in gallant conceits, cold and polite, he discredits the poet, the tragedy, and the son of Agamemnon himself. It is better to kill one’s mother than to utter such trash. In hinting that the previous madness of Orestes was for the sake of Hermione, Racine has presumed too much on the ignorance, and too much on the bad taste, of his audience. But far more injudicious is his fantastic remorse and the supposed vision of the Furies in the last scene. It is astonishing that Racine should have challenged comparison with one of the most celebrated scenes of Euripides in circumstances that deprived him of the possibility of rendering his own effective. For the style of the Andromaque, it abounds with grace and beauty; but there are, to my apprehension, more insipid and feeble lines, and a more effeminate tone, than in his later tragedies.

Britannicus. 6. Britannicus appeared in 1669; and in this admirable play Racine first showed that he did not depend on the tone of gallantry usual among his courtly hearers, nor on the languid sympathies that it excites. Terror and pity, the twin spirits of tragedy, to whom Aristotle has assigned the great moral office of purifying the passions, are called forth in their shadowy forms to sustain the consummate beauties of his diction. His subject was original and happy; with that historic truth which usage required, and that poetical probability which fills up the outline of historic truth without disguising it. What can be more entirely dramatic, what more terrible in the sense that Aristotle means (that is, the spectator’s sympathy with the dangers of the innocent), than the absolute master of the world, like the veiled prophet of Khorasan, throwing off the appearances of virtue, and standing out at once in the maturity of enormous guilt! A presaging gloom, like that which other poets have sought by the hackneyed artifices of superstition, hangs over the scenes of this tragedy, and deepens at its close. We sympathise by turns with the guilty alarms of Agrippina, the virtuous consternation of Burrhus, the virgin modesty of Junia, the unsuspecting ingenuousness of Britannicus. Few tragedies on the French stage, or indeed on any stage, save those of Shakspeare, display so great a variety of contrasted characters. None, indeed, are ineffective, except the confidante of Agrippina; for Narcissus is very far from being the mere confidant of Nero; he is, as in history, his preceptor in crime; and his cold villainy is well contrasted with the fierce passion of the despot. The criticisms of Fontenelle and others on small incidents in the plot, such as the concealment of Nero behind a curtain, that he may hear the dialogue between Junia and Britannicus, which is certainly more fit for comedy, ought not to weigh against such excellence as we find in all the more essential requisites of a tragic drama. Racine had much improved his language since Andromaque; the conventional phraseology about flames and fine eyes, though not wholly relinquished, is less frequent; and if he has not here reached, as he never did, the peculiar impetuosity of Corneille, nor given to his Romans the grandeur of his predecessor’s conception, he is full of lines wherein, as every word is effective, there can hardly be any deficiency of vigour. It is the vigour indeed of Virgil, not of Lucan.

7. In one passage, Racine has, I think, excelled Shakspeare. They have both taken the same idea from Plutarch. The lines of Shakspeare are in Antony and Cleopatra:

These are, to my apprehension, not very forcible, and obscure even to those who know, what many do not, that by “a fear” he meant a common goblin, a supernatural being of a more plebeian rank than a demon or angel. The single verse of Racine is magnificent:

Berenice. 8. Berenice, the next tragedy of Racine, is a surprising proof of what can be done by a great master; but it must be admitted that it wants many of the essential qualities that are required in the drama. It might almost be compared with Timon of Athens, by the absence of fable and movement. For nobleness and delicacy of sentiment, for grace of style, it deserves every praise; but is rather tedious in the closet, and must be far more so on the stage. This is the only tragedy of Racine, unless, perhaps, we except Athalie, in which the story presents an evident moral; but no poet is more uniformly moral in his sentiments. Corneille, to whom the want of dramatic fable was never any great objection, attempted the subject of Berenice about the same time with far inferior success. It required what he could not give, the picture of two hearts struggling against a noble and a blameless love.

Bajazet. 9. It was unfortunate for Racine that he did not more frequently break through the prejudices of the French theatre in favour of classical subjects. A field was open of almost boundless extent, the mediæval history of Europe, and especially of France herself. His predecessor had been too successful in the Cid to leave it doubtful whether an audience would approve such an innovation at the hands of a favoured tragedian. Racine, however, did not venture on a step, which, in the next century, Voltaire turned so much to account, and which made the fortune of some inferior tragedies. But, considering the distance of place equivalent, for the ends of the drama, to that of time, he founded on an event in the Turkish history not more than thirty years before his next tragedy, that of Bajazet. Most part, indeed, of the fable is due to his own invention. Bajazet is reckoned to fall below most of his other tragedies in beauty of style; but the fable is well connected; there is a great deal of movement, and an unintermitting interest is sustained by Bajazet and Atalide, two of the noblest characters that Racine has drawn. Atalide has not the ingenuous simplicity of Junie, but displays a more dramatic flow of sentiment, and not less dignity or tenderness of soul. The character of Roxane is conceived with truth and spirit; nor is the resemblance some have found in it to that of Hermione greater than belongs to forms of the same type. Acomat, the vizir, is more a favourite with the French critics; but in such parts Racine does not rise to the level of Corneille. No poet is less exposed to the imputation of bombastic exaggeration; yet, in the two lines with which Acomat concludes the fourth act, there seems almost an approach to burlesque; and one can hardly say that they would have been out of place in Tom Thumb:

Mithridate. 10. The next tragedy was Mithridate; and in this Racine has been thought to have wrestled against Corneille on his own ground, the display of the unconquerable mind of a hero. We find in the part of Mithridate, a great depth of thought in compressed and energetic language. But, unlike the masculine characters of Corneille, he is not merely sententious. Racine introduces no one for the sake of the speeches he has to utter. In Mithridates he took what history has delivered to us, blending with it no improbable fiction according to the manners of the East. His love for Monime has nothing in it extraordinary, or unlike what we might expect from the king of Pontus; it is a fierce, a jealous, a vindictive love; the necessities of the French language alone, and the usages of the French theatre, could make it appear feeble. His two sons are naturally less effective; but the loveliness of Monime yields to no female character of Racine. There is something not quite satisfactory in the stratagems which Mithridates employs to draw from her a confession of her love for his son. They are not uncongenial to the historic character, but, according to our chivalrous standard of heroism, seem derogatory to the poetical.

Iphigénie. 11. Iphigénie followed in 1674. In this Racine had again to contend with Euripides in one of his most celebrated tragedies. He had even, in the character of Achilles, to contend, not with Homer himself, yet with the Homeric associations familiar to every classical scholar. The love, in fact, of Achilles, and his politeness towards Clytemnestra, are not exempt from a tone of gallantry a little repugnant to our conception of his manners. Yet the Achilles of Homer is neither incapable of love nor of courtesy, so that there is no essential repugnance to his character. That of Iphigenia in Euripides has been censured by Aristotle as inconsistent: her extreme distress at the first prospect of death being followed by an unusual display of courage. Hurd has taken upon him the defence of the Greek tragedian, and observes, after Brumoy, that the Iphigénie of Racine being modelled rather after the comment of Aristotle than the example of Euripides, is so much the worse.[1001] But his apology is too subtle, and requires too long reflection, for the ordinary spectator; and though Shakspeare might have managed the transition of feeling with some of his wonderful knowledge of human nature, it is certainly presented too crudely by Euripides, and much in the style which I have elsewhere observed to be too usual with our old dramatists. The Iphigénie of Racine is not a character, like those of Shakspeare, and of him perhaps alone, which nothing less than intense meditation can develop to the reader, but one which a good actress might compass and a common spectator understand. Racine, like most other tragedians, wrote for the stage; Shakspeare aimed at a point beyond it, and sometimes too much lost sight of what it required.

12. Several critics have censured the part of Eriphile. Yet Fontenelle, prejudiced as he was against Racine, admits that it is necessary for the catastrophe, though he cavils, I think, against her appearance in the earlier part of the play, laying down a rule, by which our own tragedians would not have chosen to be tried, and which seems far too rigid, that the necessity of the secondary characters should be perceived from their first appearance.[1002] The question for Racine was in what manner he should manage the catastrophe. The fabulous truth, the actual sacrifice of Iphigénia, was so revolting to the mind, that even Euripides thought himself obliged to depart from it. But this he effected by a contrivance impossible on the French stage, and which would have changed Racine’s tragedy to a common melodrame. It appears to me that he very happily substituted the character of Eriphile, who, as Fontenelle well says, is the hind of the fable; and whose impetuous and somewhat disorderly passions both furnish a contrast to the ideal nobleness of Iphigénia throughout the tragedy, and reconcile us to her own fate at the close.

Phèdre. 13. Once more, in Phèdre, did the great disciple of Euripides attempt to surpass his master. In both tragedies the character of Phædra herself throws into shade all the others, but with this important difference, that in Euripides her death occurs about the middle of the piece, while she continues in Racine till the conclusion. The French poet has borrowed much from the Greek, more perhaps than in any former drama, but has surely heightened the interest, and produced a more splendid work of genius. I have never read the particular criticism in which Schlegel has endeavoured to elevate the Hippolytus above the Phèdre. Many, even among French critics, have objected to the love of Hippolytus for Aricia, by which Racine has deviated from the mythological tradition. But we are hardly tied to all the circumstance of fable; and the cold young huntsman loses nothing in the eyes of a modern reader by a virtuous attachment. This tragedy is said to be more open to verbal criticism than the Iphigenie; but in poetical beauty I do not know that Racine has ever surpassed it. The description of the death of Hippolytus is perhaps his masterpiece. It is true that, according to the practice of our own stage, long descriptions, especially in elaborate language, are out of use; but it is not, at least, for the advocates of Euripides to blame them.

Esther. 14. The Phèdre was represented in 1677; and after this its illustrious author seemed to renounce the stage. His increasing attachment to the Jansenists made it almost impossible, with any consistency, to promote an amusement they anathematised. But he was induced, after many years, in 1689, by Madame de Maintenon, to write Esther for the purpose of representation by the young ladies whose education she protected at St. Cyr. Esther, though very much praised for beauty of language, is admitted to possess little merit as a drama. Much indeed could not be expected in the circumstances. It was acted at St. Cyr; Louis applauded, and it is said that the Prince de Condé wept. The greatest praise of Esther is that it encouraged its author to write Athalie. |Athalie.| Once more restored to dramatic conceptions, his genius revived from sleep with no loss of the vigour of yesterday. He was even more in Athalie than in Iphigénie and Britannicus. This great work, published in 1691, with a royal prohibition to represent it on any theatre, stands by general consent at the head of all the tragedies of Racine, for the grandeur, simplicity, and interest of the fable, for dramatic terror, for theatrical effect, for clear and judicious management, for bold and forcible, rather than subtle, delineation of character, for sublime sentiment and imagery. It equals, if it does not, as I should incline to think, surpass, all the rest in the perfection of style, and is far more free from every defect, especially from feeble politeness and gallantry, which of course the subject could not admit. It has been said that he gave himself the preference to Phèdre; but it is more extraordinary that not only his enemies, of whom there were many, but the public itself was for some years incapable of discovering the merit of Athalie. Boileau declared it to be a masterpiece, and one can only be astonished that any could have thought differently from Boileau. It doubtless gained much in general esteem when it came to be represented by good actors; for no tragedy in the French language is more peculiarly fitted for the stage.

15. The chorus which he had previously introduced in Esther was a very bold innovation (for the revival of what is forgotten must always be classed as innovation), and it required all the skill of Racine to prevent its appearing in our eyes an impertinent excrescence. But though we do not, perhaps, wholly reconcile ourselves to some, of the songs, which too much suggest, by association, the Italian opera, the chorus of Athalie enhances the interest as well as the splendour of the tragedy. It was indeed more full of action and scenic pomp than any he had written, and probably than any other which up to that time had been represented in France. The part of Athalie predominates, but not so as to eclipse the rest. The high-priest Joad is drawn with a stern zeal admirably dramatic, and without which the idolatrous queen would have trampled down all before her during the conduct of the fable, whatever justice might have ensued at the last. We feel this want of an adequate resistance to triumphant crime in the Rodogune of Corneille. No character appears superfluous or feeble; while the plot has all the simplicity of the Greek stage, it has all the movement and continual excitation of the modern.

Racine’s female characters. 16. The female characters of Racine are of the greatest beauty; they have the ideal grace and harmony of ancient sculpture, and bear somewhat of the same analogy to those of Shakspeare which that art does to painting. Andromache, Monimia, Iphigénie, we may add Junia, have a dignity and faultlessness neither unnatural nor insipid, because they are only the ennobling and purifying of human passions. They are the forms of possible excellence, not from individual models, nor likely perhaps to delight every reader, for the same reason that more eyes are pleased by Titian than by Raphael. But it is a very narrow criticism which excludes either school from our admiration, which disparages Racine out of idolatry of Shakspeare. The latter, it is unnecessary for me to say, stands out of reach of all competition. But it is not on this account that we are to give up an author so admirable as Racine.

Racine compared with Corneille. 17. The chief faults of Racine may partly be ascribed to the influence of national taste, though we must confess that Corneille has avoided them. Though love with him is always tragic and connected with the heroic passions, never appearing singly, as in several of our own dramatists, yet it is sometimes unsuitable to the character, and still more frequently feeble and courtier-like in the expression. In this he complied too much with the times; but we must believe that he did not entirely feel that he was wrong. Corneille had, even while Racine was in his glory, a strenuous band of supporters. Fontenelle, writing in the next century, declares that time has established a decision in which most seem to concur, that the first place is due to the elder poet, the second to the younger; every one making the interval between them a little greater or less according to his taste.[1003] But Voltaire, La Harpe, and in general, I apprehend, the later French critics, have given the preference to Racine. I presume to join my suffrage to theirs. Racine appears to me the superior tragedian; and I must add that I think him next to Shakspeare among all the moderns. The comparison with Euripides is so natural that it can hardly be avoided. Certainly no tragedy of the Greek poet is so skilful or so perfect as Athalie or Britannicus. The tedious scenes during which the action is stagnant, the impertinencies of useless, often perverse morality, the extinction, by bad management, of the sympathy that had been raised in the earlier part of a play, the foolish alternation of repartees in a series of single lines, will never be found in Racine. But, when we look only at the highest excellencies of Euripides, there is, perhaps, a depth of pathos and an intensity of dramatic effect which Racine himself has not attained. The difference between the energy and sweetness of the two languages is so important in the comparison, that I shall give even this preference with some hesitation.

Beauty of his style. 18. The style of Racine is exquisite. Perhaps he is second only to Virgil among all poets. But I will give the praise of this in the words of a native critic. “His expression is always so happy and so natural, that it seems as if no other could have been found; and every word is placed in such a manner that we cannot fancy any other place to have suited it as well. The structure of his style is such that nothing could be displaced, nothing added, nothing retrenched; it is one unalterable whole. Even his incorrectnesses are often but sacrifices required by good taste, nor would anything be more difficult than to write over again a line of Racine. No one has enriched the language with a greater number of turns of phrase; no one is bold with more felicity and discretion, or figurative with more grace and propriety; no one has handled with more command an idiom often rebellious, or with more skill an instrument always difficult; no one has better understood that delicacy of style which must not be mistaken for feebleness, and is, in fact, but that air of ease which conceals from the reader the labour of the work and the artifices of the composition; or better managed the variety of cadences, the resources of rhythm, the association and deduction of ideas. In short, if we consider that his perfection in these respects may be opposed to that of Virgil, and that he spoke a language less flexible, less poetical, and less harmonious, we shall readily believe that Racine is, of all mankind, the one to whom nature has given the greatest talent for versification.”[1004]

Thomas Corneille—his Ariane. 19. Thomas, the younger and far inferior brother of Pierre Corneille, was yet, by the fertility of his pen, by the success of some of his tragedies, and by a certain reputation which two of them have acquired, the next name, but at a vast interval, to Racine. Voltaire says he would have enjoyed a great reputation but for that of his brother—one of those pointed sayings which seem to mean something, but are devoid of meaning. Thomas Corneille is never compared with his brother; and probably his brother has been rather serviceable to his name with posterity than otherwise. He wrote with more purity, according to the French critics, than his brother, and it must be owned that, in his Ariane, he has given to love a tone more passionate and natural than the manly scenes of the older tragedian ever present. This is esteemed his best work, but it depends wholly on the principal character, whose tenderness and injuries excite our sympathy, and from whose lips many lines of great beauty flow. It may be compared with the Berenice of Racine, represented but a short time before; there is enough of resemblance in the fables to provoke comparison. That of Thomas Corneille is more tragic, less destitute of theatrical movement, and consequently better chosen; but such relative praise is of little value, where none can be given, in this respect, to the object of comparison. We feel that the prose romance is the proper sphere for the display of an affection, neither untrue to nature, nor unworthy to move the heart, but wanting the majesty of the tragic muse. An effeminacy uncongenial to tragedy belongs to this play; and the termination, where the heroine faints away instead of dying, is somewhat insipid. The only other tragedy of the younger Corneille that can be mentioned is the Earl of Essex. In this he has taken greater liberties with history than his critics approve; and though love does not so much predominate as in Ariane, it seems to engross, in a style rather too romantic, both the hero and his sovereign.

Manlius of La Fosse. 20. Neither of these tragedies, perhaps, deserves to be put on a level with the Manlius of La Fosse, to which La Harpe accords the preference above all of the seventeenth century after those of Corneille and Racine. It is just to observe what is not denied, that the author has borrowed the greater part of his story from the Venice Preserved of Otway. The French critics maintain that he has far excelled his original. It is possible that we might hesitate to own this superiority; but several blemishes have been removed, and the conduct is perhaps more noble, or at least more fitted to the French stage. But when we take from La Fosse what belongs to another—characters strongly marked, sympathies powerfully contrasted, a development of the plot probable and interesting, what will remain that is purely his own? There will remain a vigorous tone of language, a considerable power of description, and a skill in adapting, we may add with justice, in improving, what he found in a foreign language. We must pass over some other tragedies which have obtained less honour in their native land, those of Duché, Quinault, and Campistron.

Molière. 21. Molière is, perhaps, of all French writers, the one whom his country has most uniformly admired, and in whom her critics are most unwilling to acknowledge faults; though the observations of Schlegel on the defects of Molière, and especially on his large debts to older comedy, are not altogether without foundation. Molière began with L’Etourdi in 1653, and his pieces followed rapidly till his death in 1673. About one half are in verse; I shall select a few without regard to order of time, and first one written in prose, L’Avare.

L’Avare. 22. Plautus first exposed upon the stage the wretchedness of avarice, the punishment of a selfish love of gold, not only in the life of pain it has cost to acquire it, but in the terrors that it brings, in the disordered state of mind, which is haunted, as by some mysterious guilt, by the consciousness of secret wealth. The character of Euclio in the Aulularia is dramatic, and, as far as we know, original; the moral effect requires, perhaps, some touches beyond absolute probability, but it must be confessed that a few passages are over-charged. Molière borrowed L’Avare from this comedy; and I am not at present aware that the subject, though so well adapted for the stage, had been chosen by any intermediate dramatist. He is indebted not merely for the scheme of his play, but for many strokes of humour, to Plautus. But this takes off little from the merit of this excellent comedy. The plot is expanded without incongruous or improbable circumstances; new characters are well combined with that of Harpagon, and his own is at once more diverting and less extravagant than that of Euclio. The penuriousness of the latter, though by no means without example, leaves no room for any other object than the concealed treasure, in which his thoughts are concentred. But Molière had conceived a more complicated action. Harpagon does not absolutely starve the rats; he possesses horses, though he feeds them ill; he has servants, though he grudges them clothes; he even contemplates a marriage supper at his own expense, though he intends to have a bad one. He has evidently been compelled to make some sacrifices to the usages of mankind, and is at once a more common and a more theatrical character than Euclio. In other respects, they are much alike; their avarice has reached that point where it is without pride; the dread of losing their wealth has overpowered the desire of being thought to possess it; and though this is a more natural incident in the manners of Greece than in those of France, yet the concealment of treasure, even in the time of Molière, was sufficiently frequent for dramatic probability. A general tone of selfishness, the usual source and necessary consequence of avarice, conspires with the latter quality to render Harpagon odious; and there wants but a little more poetical justice in the conclusion, which leaves the casket in his possession.

23. Hurd has censured Molière without much justice. “For the picture of the avaricious man, Plautus and Molière have presented us with a fantastic, unpleasing draught of the passion of avarice.” It may be answered to this, that Harpagon’s character is, as has been said above, not so mere a delineation of the passion as that of Euclio. But as a more general vindication of Molière, it should be kept in mind, that every exhibition of a predominant passion within the compass of the five acts of a play must be coloured beyond the truth of nature, or it will not have time to produce its effect. This is one great advantage that romance possesses over the drama.

L’Ecole des Femmes. 24. L’Ecole des Femmes is among the most diverting comedies of Molière. Yet it has, in a remarkable degree, what seems inartificial to our own taste, and contravenes a good general precept of Horace; the action passes almost wholly in recital. But this is so well connected with the development of the plot and characters, and produces such amusing scenes, that no spectator, at least on the French theatre, would be sensible of any languor. Arnolphe is an excellent modification of the type which Molière loved to reproduce; the selfish and morose cynic, whose pretended hatred of the vices of the world springs from an absorbing regard to his own gratification. He has made him as malignant as censorious; he delights in tales of scandal; he is pleased that Horace should be successful in gallantry, because it degrades others. The half-witted and ill-bred child, of whom he becomes the dupe, as well as the two idiot servants, are delineated with equal vivacity. In this comedy we find the spirited versification, full of grace and humour, in which no one has rivalled Molière, and which has never been attempted on the English stage. It was probably its merit which raised a host of petty detractors, on whom the author revenged himself in his admirable piece of satire, La Critique de l’Ecole des Femmes. The affected pedantry of the Hôtel Rambouillet seems to be ridiculed in this retaliation; nothing, in fact, could be more unlike than the style of Molière to their own.

Le Misanthrope. 25. He gave another proof of contempt for the false taste of some Parisian circles in the Misanthrope; though the criticism of Alceste on the wretched sonnet forms but a subordinate portion of that famous comedy. It is generally placed next to Tartuffe among the works of Molière. Alceste is again the cynic, but more honourable and less openly selfish, and with more of a real disdain of vice in his misanthropy. Rousseau, upon this account, and many others after him, have treated the play as a vindication of insincerity against truth, and as making virtue itself ridiculous on the stage. This charge, however, seems uncandid; neither the rudeness of Alceste, nor the misanthropy from which it springs, are to be called virtues; and we may observe that he displays no positively good quality beyond sincerity, unless his ungrounded and improbable love for a coquette is to pass for such. It is true that the politeness of Philinthe, with whom the Misanthrope is contrasted, borders a little too closely upon flattery; but no oblique end is in his view; he flatters to give pleasure; and, if we do not much esteem his character, we are not solicitous for his punishment. The dialogue of the Misanthrope is uniformly of the highest style; the female, and, indeed, all the characters, are excellently conceived and sustained; and if this comedy fails of anything at present, it is through the difference of manners, and, perhaps, in representation, through the want of animated action on the stage.

Les Femmes Savantes. 26. In Les Femmes Savantes, there is a more evident personality in the characters, and a more malicious exposure of absurdity than in the Misanthrope; but the ridicule falling on a less numerous class is not so well calculated to be appreciated by posterity. It is, however, both in reading and representation, a more amusing comedy: in no one instance has Molière delineated such variety of manners, or displayed so much of his inimitable gaiety and power of fascinating the audience with very little plot, by the mere exhibition of human follies. The satire falls deservedly on pretenders to taste and literature, for whom Molière always testifies a bitterness of scorn in which we perceive some resentment of their criticisms. The shorter piece, entitled Les Précieuses Ridicules, is another shaft directed at the literary ladies of Paris. They had provoked a dangerous enemy; but the good taste of the next age might be ascribed in great measure to his unmerciful exposure of affectation and pedantry.

Tartuffe. 27. It was not easy, so late as the age of Molière, for the dramatist to find any untrodden field in the follies and vices of mankind. But one had been reserved for him in Tartuffe—religious hypocrisy. We should have expected the original draft of such a character on the English stage; nor had our old writers been forgetful of their inveterate enemies, the Puritans, who gave such full scope for their satire. But, choosing rather the easy path of ridicule, they fell upon the starch dresses and quaint language of the fanatical party; and where they exhibited these in conjunction with hypocrisy, made the latter more ludicrous than hateful. The Luke of Massinger is deeply and villainously dissembling, but does not wear so conspicuous a garb of religious sanctity as Tartuffe. The comedy of Molière is not only original in this character, but is a new creation in dramatic poetry. It has been doubted by some critics, whether the depth of guilt it exhibits, the serious hatred it inspires, are not beyond the strict province of comedy. But this seems rather a technical cavil. If subjects such as the Tartuffe are not fit for comedy, they are, at least, fit for dramatic representation, and some new phrase must be invented to describe their class.

28. A different kind of objection is still sometimes made to this play, that it brings religion itself into suspicion. And this would, no doubt, have been the case, if the contemporaries of Molière in England had dealt with the subject. But the boundaries between the reality and its false appearances are so well guarded in this comedy, that no reasonable ground of exception can be thought to remain. No better advice can be given to those who take umbrage at the Tartuffe than to read it again. For there may be good reason to suspect that they are themselves among those for whose benefit it was intended; the Tartuffes, happily, may be comparatively few; but, while the Orgons and Pernelles are numerous, they will not want their harvest. Molière did not invent the prototypes of his hypocrite; they were abundant at Paris in his time.

29. The interest of this play continually increases, and the fifth act is almost crowded by a rapidity of events, not so usual on the French stage as our own. Tartuffe himself is a masterpiece of skill. Perhaps, in the cavils of La Bruyère, there may be some justice; but the essayist has forgotten that no character can be rendered entirely effective to an audience without a little exaggeration of its attributes. Nothing can be more happily conceived than the credulity of the honest Orgon, and his more doting mother; it is that which we sometimes witness, incurable except by the evidence of the senses, and fighting every inch of ground against that. In such a subject there was not much opportunity for the comic talent of Molière; yet, in some well known passages, he has enlivened it as far as was possible. The Tartuffe will generally be esteemed the greatest effort of this author’s genius; the Misanthrope, the Femmes Savantes, and the Ecole des Femmes will follow in various order, according to our tastes. These are by far the best of his comedies in verse. Among those in prose we may give the first place to L’Avare, and the next either to Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme, or to George Dandin.

Bourgeois Gentilhomme.—George Dandin. 30. These two plays have the same objects of moral satire; on the one hand, the absurd vanity of plebeians in seeking the alliance or acquaintance of the nobility, on the other, the pride and meanness of the nobility themselves. They are both abundantly diverting; but the sallies of humour are, I think, more frequent in the first three acts of the former. The last two acts are improbable and less amusing. The shorter pieces of Molière border very much upon farce; he permits himself more vulgarity of character, more grossness in language and incident, but his farces are seldom absurd, and never dull.

Character of Molière. 31. The French have claimed for Molière, and few, perhaps, have disputed the pretension, a superiority over all earlier and later writers of comedy. He certainly leaves Plautus, the original model of the school to which he belonged, at a vast distance. The grace and gentlemanly elegance of Terence he has not equalled; but in the more appropriate merits of comedy, just and forcible delineation of character, skilful contrivance of circumstances, and humorous dialogue, we must award him the prize. The Italian and Spanish dramatists are quite unworthy to be named in comparison; and if the French theatre has, in later times, as is certainly the case, produced some excellent comedies, we have, I believe, no reason to contradict the suffrage of the nation itself, that they owe almost as much to what they have caught from this great model, as to the natural genius of their authors. But it is not for us to abandon the rights of Shakspeare. In all things most essential to comedy, we cannot acknowledge his inferiority to Molière. He had far more invention of characters, and an equal vivacity and force in their delineation. His humour was, at least, as abundant and natural, his wit incomparably more brilliant; in fact, Molière hardly exhibits this quality at all. The Merry Wives of Windsor, almost the only pure comedy of Shakspeare, is surely not disadvantageously compared with George Dandin or Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme, or even with L’Ecole des Femmes. For the Tartuffe or the Misanthrope it is vain to seek a proper counterpart in Shakspeare; they belong to a different state of manners. But the powers of Molière are directed with greater skill to their object; none of his energy is wasted; the spectator is not interrupted by the serious scenes of tragi-comedy, nor his attention drawn aside by poetical episodes. Of Shakspeare, we may justly say that he had the greater genius, but, perhaps, of Molière, that he has written the best comedies. We cannot, at least, put any later dramatist in competition with him. Fletcher and Jonson, Wycherley and Congreve, Farquhar and Sheridan, with great excellencies of their own, fall short of his merit as well as his fame. Yet in humorous conception, our admirable play, the Provoked Husband, the best parts of which are due to Vanbrugh, seems to be equal to anything he has left. His spirited and easy versification stands, of course, untouched by any English rivalry; we may have been wise in rejecting verse from our stage, but we have certainly given the French a right to claim all the honour that belongs to it.

Les Plaideurs of Racine. 32. Racine once only attempted comedy. His wit was quick and sarcastic, and in epigram he did not spare his enemies. In his Plaideurs there is more of humour and stage-effect than of wit. The ridicule falls, happily, on the pedantry of lawyers and the folly of suitors; but the technical language is lost, in great measure, upon the audience. This comedy, if it be not rather a farce, is taken from The Wasps of Aristophanes; and that Rabelais of antiquity supplied an extravagance, very improbably introduced into the third act of Les Plaideurs, the trial of the dog. Far from improving the humour, which had been amusingly kept up during the first two acts, this degenerates into nonsense.

Regnard—Le Joueur. 33. Regnard is always placed next to Molière among the comic writers of France in this, and perhaps in any age. The plays, indeed, which entitle him to such a rank, are but few. Of these the best is acknowledged to be Le Joueur. Regnard, taught by his own experience, has here admirably delineated the character of an inveterate gamester; without parade of morality, few comedies are more usefully moral. We have not the struggling virtues of a Charles Surface, which the dramatist may feign that he may reward at the fifth act; Regnard has better painted the selfish ungrateful being, who, though not incapable of love, pawns his mistress’s picture, the instant after she has given it to him, that he may return to the dice-box. Her just abandonment, and his own disgrace, terminate the comedy with a moral dignity which the stage does not always maintain, and which, in the first acts, the spectator does not expect. The other characters seem to me various, spirited, and humorous; the valet of Valére the gamester is one of the best of that numerous class, to whom comedy has owed so much; but the pretended Marquis, though diverting, talks too much like a genuine coxcomb of the world. Molière did this better in Les Précieuses Ridicules. Regnard is in this play full of those gay sallies which cannot be read without laughter; the incidents follow rapidly; there is more movement than in some of the best of Molière’s comedies, and the speeches are not so prolix.

His other plays. 34. Next to Le Joueur, among Regnard’s comedies, it has been usual to place Le Légataire, not by any means inferior to the first in humour and vivacity, but with less force of character, and more of the common tricks of the stage. The moral, instead of being excellent, is of the worst kind, being the success and dramatic reward of a gross fraud, the forgery of a will by the hero of the piece and his servant. This servant is, however, a very comical rogue, and we should not, perhaps, wish to see him sent to the galleys. A similar censure might be passed on the comedy of Regnard, which stands third in reputation: Les Menechmes. The subject, as explained by the title, is old—twin-brothers, whose undistinguishable features are the source of endless confusion; but what neither Plautus nor Shakspeare have thought of, one avails himself of the likeness to receive a large sum of money due to the other, and is thought very generous at the close of the play when he restores a moiety. Of the plays founded on this diverting exaggeration, Regnard’s is perhaps the best; he has more variety of incident than Plautus; and, by leaving out the second pair of twins, the Dromio servants, which renders the Comedy of Errors almost too inextricably confused for the spectator or reader, as well as by making one of the brothers aware of the mistake, and a party in the deception, he has given an unity of plot instead of a series of incoherent blunders.

Quinault. Boursault. 35. The Mère Coquette of Quinault appears a comedy of great merit. Without the fine traits of nature which we find in those of Molière, without the sallies of humour which enliven those of Regnard, with a versification, perhaps, not very forcible, it pleases us by a fable at once novel, as far as I know, and natural, by the interesting characters of the lovers, by the decency and tone of good company, which are never lost in the manners, the incidents, or the language. Boursault, whose tragedies are little esteemed, displayed some originality in Le Mercure Galant. The idea is one which has not unfrequently been imitated on the English as well as French stage, but it is rather adapted to the shorter drama, than to a regular comedy of five acts. The Mercure Galant was a famous magazine of light, periodical amusements such as was then new in France, which had a great sale, and is described in a few lines by one of the characters in this piece.[1005] Boursault places his hero, by the editor’s consent, as a temporary substitute, in the office of this publication, and brings, in a series of detached scenes, a variety of applicants for his notice. A comedy of this kind is like a compound animal; a few chief characters must give unity to the whole, but the effect is produced by the successive personages who pass over the stage, display their humour in a single scene, and disappear. Boursault has been in some instances successful; but such pieces generally owe too much to temporary sources of amusement.

The Mercure Galant was established in 1672 by one Visé; it was intended to fill the same place as a critical record of polite literature, which the Journal des Sçavans did in learning and science.

Dancourt. 36. Dancourt, as Voltaire has said, holds the same rank relatively to Molière in farce, that Regnard does in the higher comedy. He came a little after the former, and when the prejudice that had been created against comedies in prose by the great success of the other kind had begun to subside. The Chevalier à la Mode is the only play of Dancourt that I know; it is much above farce, and, if length be a distinctive criterion, it exceeds most comedies. This would be very slight praise, if we could not add that the reader does not find it one page too long, that the ridicule is poignant and happy, the incidents well contrived, the comic situations amusing, the characters clearly marked. La Harpe, who treats Dancourt with a sort of contempt, does not so much as mention this play. It is a satire on the pretensions of a class then rising, the rich financiers, which long supplied materials, through dramatic caricature, to public malignity and the envy of a less opulent aristocracy.

Brueys. 37. The life of Brueys is rather singular. Born of a noble Huguenot family, he was early devoted to protestant theology, and even presumed to enter the lists against Bossuet. But that champion of the faith was like one of those knights in romance, who first unhorse their rash antagonists, and then make them work as slaves. Brueys was soon converted, and betook himself to write against his former errors. He afterwards became an ecclesiastic. Thus far there is nothing much out of the common course in his history. But, grown weary of living alone, and having some natural turn to comedy, he began, rather late, to write for the stage, with the assistance, or perhaps only under the name, of a certain Palaprat. The plays of Brueys had some success; but he was not in a position to delineate recent manners, and in the only comedy with which I am acquainted, Le Muet, he has borrowed the leading part of his story from Terence. The language seems deficient in vivacity, which, when there is no great naturalness or originality of character, cannot be dispensed with.

Operas of Quinault. 38. The French opera, after some ineffectual attempts by Mazarin to naturalise an Italian company, was successfully established by Lulli in 1672. It is the prerogative of music in the melo-drama, to render poetry its dependent ally; but the airs of Lulli have been forgotten, and the verses of his coadjutor Quinault remain. He is not only the earliest, but, by general consent, the unrivalled poet of French music. Boileau, indeed, treated him with undeserved scorn, but, probably, through dislike of the tone he was obliged to preserve, which in the eyes of so stern a judge, and one so insensible to love, appeared languid and effeminate. Quinault, nevertheless, was not incapable of vigorous and impressive poetry; a lyric grandeur distinguishes some of his songs; he seems to possess great felicity of adorning every subject with appropriate imagery and sentiment; his versification has a smoothness and charm of melody, which has made some say that the lines were already music before they came to the composer’s hands; his fables, whether taken from mythology or modern romance, display invention and skill. Voltaire, La Harpe, Schlegel, and the author of the life of Quinault in the Biographie Universelle, but, most of all, the testimony of the public, have compensated for the severity of Boileau. The Armide is Quinault’s latest, and also his finest opera.

Sect. II.

ON THE ENGLISH DRAMA.

State of the Stage after the Restoration—Tragedies of Dryden, Otway, Southern—Comedies of Congreve and others.

Revival of the English theatre. 38. The troubles of twenty years, and much more the fanatical antipathy to stage-plays which the predominant party affected, silenced the muse of the buskin, and broke the continuity of those works of the elder dramatists, which had given a tone to public sentiment as to the drama from the middle of Elizabeth’s reign. Davenant had, by a sort of connivance, opened a small house for the representation of plays, though not avowedly so called, near the Charter House in 1656. He obtained a patent after the Restoration. By this time another generation had arisen, and the scale of taste was to be adjusted anew. The fondness for the theatre revived with increased avidity; more splendid decoration, actors probably, especially Betterton, of greater powers, and above all, the attraction of female performers, who had never been admitted on the older stage, conspired with the keen appetite that long restraint produced, and with the general gaiety, or rather dissoluteness, of manners. Yet the multitude of places for such amusement was not as great as under the first Stuarts. Two houses only were opened by royal patents, granting them an exclusive privilege, one by what was called the King’s Company, in Drury Lane, another by the Duke of York’s Company, in Lincoln’s Inn Fields. Betterton, who was called the English Roscius, till Garrick claimed that title, was sent to Paris by Charles II., that, taking a view of the French stage, he might better judge of what would contribute to the improvement of our own. It has been said, and probably with truth, that he introduced moveable scenes, instead of the fixed tapestry that had been hung across the stage; but this improvement he could not have borrowed from France. The king not only countenanced the theatre by his patronage, but by so much personal notice of the chief actors, and so much interest in all the affairs of the theatre as elevated their condition.

Change of public taste. 39. An actor of great talents is the best friend of the great dramatists; his own genius demands theirs for its support and display; and a fine performer would as soon waste the powers of his hand on feeble music, as a man like Betterton or Garrick represent what is insipid or in bad taste. We know that the former, and some of his contemporaries, were celebrated in the great parts of our early stage, in those of Shakspeare and Fletcher. But the change of public taste is sometimes irresistible by those who, as, in Johnson’s antithesis, they “live to please, must please to live.” Neither tragedy nor comedy was maintained at its proper level; and as the world is apt to demand novelty on the stage, the general tone of dramatic representation in this period, whatever credit it may have done to the performers, reflects little, in comparison with our golden age, upon those who wrote for them.

Its causes. 40. It is observed by Scott, that the French theatre, which was now thought to be in perfection, guided the criticism of Charles’s court, and afforded the pattern of those tragedies which continued in fashion for twenty years after the Restoration, and which were called rhyming or heroic plays. Though there is a general justice in this remark, I am not aware that the inflated tone of these plays is imitated from any French tragedy; certainly, there was a nobler model in the best works of Corneille. But Scott is more right in deriving the unnatural and pedantic dialogue which prevailed through these performances from the romances of Scudery and Calprenède. These were, about the era of the Restoration, almost as popular among the indolent gentry as in France; and it was to be expected that a style would gain ground in tragedy, which is not so widely removed from what tragedy requires, but that an ordinary audience would fail to perceive the difference. There is but a narrow line between the sublime and the tumid; the man of business or of pleasure who frequents the theatre must have accustomed himself to make such large allowances, to put himself into a slate of mind so totally different from his every-day habits, that a little extraordinary deviation from nature, far from shocking him, will rather show like a further advance towards excellence. Hotspur and Almanzor, Richard and Aurungzebe, seem cast in the same mould; beings who can never occur in the common walks of life, but whom the tragedian has, by a tacit convention with the audience, acquired a right of feigning like his ghosts and witches.

Heroic tragedies of Dryden. 41. The first tragedies of Dryden were what was called heroic, and written in rhyme; an innovation which, of course, must be ascribed to the influence of the French theatre. They have occasionally much vigour of sentiment and much beautiful poetry, with a versification sweet even to lusciousness. The “Conquest of Grenada” is, on account of its extravagance, the most celebrated of the plays; but it is inferior to the “Indian Emperor,” from which it would be easy to select passages of perfect elegance. It is singular that although the rhythm of dramatic verse is commonly permitted to be the most lax of any, Dryden has in this play availed himself of none of his wonted privileges. He regularly closes the sense with the couplet, and falls into a smoothness of cadence which, though exquisitely mellifluous, is perhaps too uniform. In the Conquest of Grenada the versification is rather more broken.

His later tragedies. 42. Dryden may probably have been fond of this species of tragedy on account of his own facility in rhyming, and his habit of condensing his sense. Rhyme, indeed, can only be rejected in our language from the tragic scene, because blank verse affords wider scope for the emotions it ought to excite; but for the tumid rhapsodies which the personages of his heroic plays utter there can be no excuse. He adhered to this tone, however, till the change in public taste, and especially the ridicule thrown on his own plays by the Rehearsal, drove him to adopt a very different, though not altogether faultless style of tragedy. His principal works of this latter class are All for Love, in 1678, the Spanish Friar, commonly referred to 1682, and Don Sebastian, in 1690. Upon these the dramatic fame of Dryden is built; while the rants of Almanzor and Maximin are never mentioned but in ridicule. The chief excellence of the first appears to consist in the beauty of the language, that of the second in the interest of the story, and that of the third in the highly finished character of Dorax. Dorax is the best of Dryden’s tragic characters, and perhaps the only one in which he has applied his great knowledge of the human mind to actual delineation. It is highly dramatic, because formed of those complex passions which may readily lead either to virtue or to vice, and which the poet can manage so as to surprise the spectator without transgressing consistency. The Zanga of Young, a part of some theatrical effect, has been compounded of this character and of that of Iago. |Don Sebastian.| But Don Sebastian is as imperfect as all plays must be in which a single personage is thrown forward in too strong relief for the rest. The language is full of that rant which characterised Dryden’s earlier tragedies, and to which a natural predilection seems, after some interval, to have brought him back. Sebastian himself may seem to have been intended as a contrast to Muley Moloch; but if the author had any rule to distinguish the blustering of the hero from that of the tyrant, he has not left the use of it in his reader’s hands. The plot of this tragedy is ill conducted, especially in the fifth act. Perhaps the delicacy of the present age may have been too fastidious in excluding altogether from the drama this class of stories; because they may often excite great interest, give scope to impassioned poetry, and are admirably calculated for the αναγνωρισις, or discovery, which is so much dwelt upon by the critics; nor can the story of Œdipus, which has furnished one of the finest and most artful tragedies ever written, be well thought an improper subject even for representation. But they require, of all others, to be dexterously managed; they may make the main distress of a tragedy, but not an episode in it. Our feelings revolt at seeing, as in Don Sebastian, an incestuous passion brought forward as the make-weight of a plot, to eke out a fifth act, and to dispose of those characters whose fortune the main story has not quite wound up.

Spanish Friar. 43. The Spanish Friar has been praised for what Johnson calls the “happy coincidence and coalition of the two plots.” It is difficult to understand what can be meant by a compliment which seems either ironical or ignorant. Nothing can be more remote from the truth. The artifice of combining two distinct stories on the stage is, we may suppose, either to interweave the incidents of one into those of the other, or at least so to connect some characters with each intrigue, as to make the spectator fancy them less distinct than they are. Thus, in the Merchant of Venice, the courtship of Bassanio and Portia is happily connected with the main plot of Antonio and Shylock by two circumstances; it is to set Bassanio forward in his suit that the fatal bond is first given; and it is by Portia’s address that its forfeiture is explained away. The same play affords an instance of another kind of underplot, that of Lorenzo and Jessica, which is more episodical, and might perhaps be removed without any material loss to the fable; though even this serves to account for, we do not say to palliate, the vindictive exasperation of the Jew. But to which of these do the comic scenes in the Spanish Friar bear most resemblance? Certainly to the latter. They consist entirely of an intrigue which Lorenzo, a young officer, carries on with a rich usurer’s wife; but there is not, even by accident, any relation between his adventures and the love and murder which go forward in the palace. The Spanish Friar, so far as it is a comedy, is reckoned the best performance of Dryden in that line. Father Dominic is very amusing, and has been copied very freely by succeeding dramatists, especially in the Duenna. But Dryden has no great abundance of wit in this or any of his comedies. His jests are practical, and he seems to have written more for the eye than the ear. It may be noted as a proof of this, that his stage directions are unusually full. In point of diction, the Spanish Friar in its tragic scenes, and All for Love, are certainly the best plays of Dryden. They are the least infected with his great fault, bombast, and should indeed be read over and over by those who would learn the true tone of English tragedy. In dignity, in animation, in striking images and figures, there are few or none that excel them; the power indeed of impressing sympathy, or commanding tears, was seldom placed by nature within the reach of Dryden.

Otway. 44. The Orphan of Otway, and his Venice Preserved, will generally be reckoned the best tragedies of this period. They have both a deep pathos, springing from the intense and unmerited distress of women; both, especially the latter, have a dramatic eloquence, rapid and flowing, with less of turgid extravagance than we find in Otway’s contemporaries, and sometimes with very graceful poetry. The story of the Orphan is domestic, and evidently borrowed from some French novel, though I do not at present remember where I have read it; it was once popular on the stage, and gave scope for good acting, but is unpleasing to the delicacy of our own age. Venice Preserved is more frequently represented than any tragedy after those of Shakspeare; the plot is highly dramatic in conception and conduct; even what seems, when we read it, a defect, the shifting of our wishes, or perhaps rather of our ill-wishes, between two parties, the senate and the conspirators, who are redeemed by no virtue, does not, as is shown by experience, interfere with the spectator’s interest. Pierre indeed is one of those villains for whom it is easy to excite the sympathy of the half-principled and the inconsiderate. But the great attraction is in the character of Belvidera; and when that part is represented by such as we remember to have seen, no tragedy is honoured by such a tribute, not of tears alone, but of more agony than many would seek to endure. The versification of Otway, like that of most in this period, runs almost to an excess into the line of eleven syllables, sometimes also into the sdrucciolo form, or twelve syllables with a dactylic close. These give a considerable animation to tragic verse.

Southern. 45. Southern’s Fatal Discovery, latterly represented by the name of Isabella, is almost as familiar to the lovers of our theatre as Venice Preserved itself; and, for the same reason, that whenever an actress of great tragic powers arises, the part of Isabella is as fitted to exhibit them as that of Belvidera. The choice and conduct of the story are, however, Southern’s chief merits; for there is little vigour in the language, though it is natural and free from the usual faults of his age. A similar character may be given to his other tragedy, Oroonoko, in which Southern deserves the praise of having, first of any English writer, denounced the traffic in slaves, and the cruelties of their West Indian bondage. The moral feeling is high in this tragedy; and it has sometimes been acted with a certain success; but the execution is not that of a superior dramatist. |Lee.| Of Lee nothing need be said, but that he is, in spite of his proverbial extravagance, a man of poetical mind and some dramatic skill. But he has violated historic truth in Theodosius without gaining much by invention. |Congreve.| The Mourning Bride of Congreve is written in prolix declamation, with no power over the passions. Johnson is well known to have praised a few lines in this tragedy as among the finest descriptions in the language; while others, by a sort of contrariety, have spoken of them as worth nothing. Truth is in its usual middle path; many better passages may be found, but they are well written and impressive.[1006]

Comedies of Chas. II.’s reign. 46. In the early English comedy, we find a large intermixture of obscenity in the lower characters, nor always confined to them, with no infrequent scenes of licentious incident and language. But these are invariably so brought forward as to manifest the dramatist’s scorn of vice, and to excite no other sentiment in a spectator of even an ordinary degree of moral purity. In the plays that appeared after the Restoration, and that from the beginning, a different tone was assumed. Vice was in her full career on the stage, unchecked by reproof, unshamed by contrast, and, for the most part, unpunished by mortification at the close. Nor are these less coarse in expression, or less impudent in their delineation of low debauchery, than those of the preceding period. It may be observed, on the contrary, that they rarely exhibit the manners of truly polished life, according to any notions we can frame of them, and are, in this respect, much below those of Fletcher, Massinger, and Shirley. It might not be easy, perhaps, to find a scene in any comedy of Charles II.’s reign where one character has the behaviour of a gentleman, in the sense we attach to the word. Yet the authors of these were themselves in the world, and sometimes men of family and considerable station. The cause must be found in the state of society itself, debased as well as corrupted, partly by the example of the court, partly by the practice of living in taverns, which became much more inveterate after the Restoration than before. The contrast with the manners of Paris, as far as the stage is their mirror, does not tell to our advantage. These plays, as it may be expected, do not aim at the higher glories of comic writing; they display no knowledge of nature, nor often rise to any other conception of character than is gained by a caricature of some known class, or, perhaps, of some remarkable individual. Nor do they in general deserve much credit as comedies of intrigue; the plot is seldom invented with much care for its development; and if scenes follow one another in a series of diverting incidents, if the entanglements are such as produce laughter, above all, if the personages keep up a well-sustained battle of repartee, the purpose is sufficiently answered. It is in this that they often excel; some of them have considerable humour in the representation of character, though this may not be very original, and a good deal of wit in their dialogue.

Wycherley. 47. Wycherley is remembered for two comedies, the Plain Dealer, and the Country Wife, the latter represented with some change, in modern times, under the name of the Country Girl. The former has been frequently said to be taken from the Misanthrope of Molière; but this, like many current assertions, seems to have little, if any, foundation. Manly, the Plain Dealer, is, like Alceste, a speaker of truth; but the idea is, at least, one which it was easy to conceive without plagiarism, and there is not the slightest resemblance in any circumstance or scene of the two comedies. We cannot say the same of the Country Wife; it was evidently suggested by L’Ecole des Femmes; the character of Arnolphe has been copied; but even here, the whole conduct of the piece of Wycherley is his own. It is more artificial than that of Molière, wherein too much passes in description; the part of Agnes is rendered still more poignant; and among the comedies of Charles’s reign, I am not sure that it is surpassed by any.

Improvement after the Revolution. 48. Shadwell and Etherege, and the famous Afra Behn, have endeavoured to make the stage as grossly immoral as their talents permitted; but the two former are not destitute of humour. At the death of Charles it had reached the lowest point; after the Revolution it became not much more a school of virtue, but rather a better one of polished manners than before; and certainly drew to its service some men of comic genius, whose names are now not only very familiar to our ears, as the boasts of our theatre, but whose works have not all ceased to enliven its walls.

Congreve. 49. Congreve, by the Old Bachelor, written, as some have said, at twenty-one years of age, but, in fact, not quite so soon, and represented in 1693, placed himself at once in a rank which he has always retained. Though not, I think, the first, he is undeniably among the first names. The Old Bachelor was quickly followed by the Double Dealer, and that by Love for Love, in which he reached the summit of his reputation. The last of his four comedies, the Way of the World, is said to have been coldly received; for which it is hard to assign any substantial cause, unless it be some want of sequence in the plot. The peculiar excellence of Congreve is his wit, incessantly sparkling from the lips of almost every character, but, on this account, it is accompanied by want of nature and simplicity. Nature, indeed, and simplicity do not belong, as proper attributes, to that comedy which, itself the creature of an artificial society, has for its proper business to exaggerate the affectation and hollowness of the world. A critical code, which should require the comedy of polite life to be natural, would make it intolerable. But there are limits of deviation from likeness which even caricature must not transgress; and the type of truth should always regulate the playful aberrations of an inventive pencil. The manners of Congreve’s comedies are not, to us, at least, like those of reality; I am not sure that we have any cause to suppose that they much better represent the times in which they appeared. His characters, with an exception or two, are heartless and vicious; which, on being attacked by Collier, he justified, probably by an afterthought, on the authority of Aristotle’s definition of comedy; that it is μιμησις φανλοτερων, an imitation of what is the worst in human nature.[1007] But it must be acknowledged that, more than any preceding writer among us, he kept up the tone of a gentleman; his men of the world are profligate, but not coarse; he rarely, like Shadwell, or even Dryden, caters for the populace of the theatre by such indecencies as they must understand; he gave, in fact, a tone of refinement to the public taste, which it never lost, and which, in its progression, has banished his own comedies from the stage.

Love for Love. 50. Love for Love is generally reputed the best of these. Congreve has never any great success in the conception or management of his plot; but in this comedy there is least to censure; several of the characters are exceedingly humorous; the incidents are numerous and not complex; the wit is often admirable. Angelica and Miss Prue, Ben and Tattle, have been repeatedly imitated; but they have, I think, a considerable degree of dramatic originality in themselves. Johnson has observed that Ben the sailor is not reckoned over natural, but he is very diverting. Possibly he may be quite as natural a portrait of a mere sailor, as that to which we have become used in modern comedy.

His other comedies. 51. The Way of the World I should, perhaps, incline to place next to this; the coquetry of Millamant, not without some touches of delicacy, and affection, the impertinent coxcombry of Petulant and Witwood, the mixture of wit and ridiculous vanity in Lady Wishfort, are amusing to the reader. Congreve has here made more use than, as far as I remember, had been common in England, of the all-important soubrette, on whom so much depends in French comedy. The manners of France happily enabled her dramatists to improve what they had borrowed with signal success from the ancient stage, the witty and artful servant, faithful to his master while he deceives every one besides, by adding this female attendant, not less versed in every artifice, nor less quick in repartee. Mincing and Foible, in this play of Congreve, are good specimens of the class; but, speaking with some hesitation, I do not think they will be found, at least, not so naturally drawn, in the comedies of Charles’s time. Many would, perhaps, not without cause, prefer the Old Bachelor; which abounds with wit, but seems rather deficient in originality of character and circumstance. The Double Dealer is entitled to the same praise of wit, and some of the characters, though rather exaggerated, are amusing; but the plot is so entangled towards the conclusion, that I have found it difficult, even in reading, to comprehend it.

Farquhar. Vanbrugh. 52. Congreve is not superior to Farquhar and Vanbrugh, if we might compare the whole of their works. Never has he equalled in vivacity, in originality of contrivance, or in clear and rapid development of intrigue, the Beau’s Stratagem of the one, and much less the admirable delineation of the Wronghead family in the Provoked Husband of the other. But these were of the eighteenth century. Farquhar’s Trip to the Jubilee, though once a popular comedy, is not distinguished by more than an easy flow of wit, and perhaps a little novelty in some of the characters; it is indeed written in much superior language to the plays anterior to the Revolution. But the Relapse, and the Provoked Wife of Vanbrugh have attained a considerable reputation. In the former, the character of Amanda is interesting; especially in the momentary wavering, and quick recovery of her virtue. This is the first homage that the theatre had paid, since the Restoration, to female chastity; and notwithstanding the vicious tone of the other characters, in which Vanbrugh has gone as great lengths as any of his contemporaries, we perceive the beginnings of a reaction in public spirit, which gradually reformed and elevated the moral standard of the stage.[1008] The Provoked Wife, though it cannot be said to give any proofs of this sort of improvement, has some merit as a comedy; it is witty and animated, as Vanbrugh usually was; the character of Sir John Brute may not have been too great a caricature of real manners, such as survived from the debased reign of Charles; and the endeavour to expose the grossness of the older generation was itself an evidence that a better polish had been given to social life.