deliberate forethought, to adapt himself to the taste of the day.1 He plays the blackguard awkwardly and dogmatically; he is impious without enthusiasm, and in measured periods. One of his gallants cries: "Is not love love without a priest and altars? The temples are inanimate, and know not What vows are made in them; the priest stands ready Love alone is marriage." Hippolita says, "I wished the ball might be kept perpetually in our cloister, and that half the handsome nuns in it might be turned to men, for the sake of the other."3 Dryden has no tact or contrivance. In his Spanish Friar, the queen, a good enough woman, tells Torrismond that she is going to have the old dethroned king put to death, in order to marry him, Torrismond, more at her ease. Presently she is informed that the murder is completed. "What hinders now," says she, "but that the holy priest, in secret joins our mutual vows? and then this night, this happy night, is yours and mine."4 Side by side with this sensual tragedy, a comic intrigue, pushed to the most indecent familiarity, exhibits the love of a cavalier for a married woman, who in the end turns out to be his sister. Dryden discovers nothing in this situation to shock him. He has lost the commonest repugnances of natural modesty. Translating any pretty broad play, Amphitryon for instance, he finds it too pure; he strips off all its small delicacies, and enlarges its very improprieties. Thus Jupiter says: "We love to get our mistresses, and purr over them, as cats do over mice, and let them get a little way; and all the pleasure is to pat them back again.”—Mock Astrologer, ii. 1. Wildblood says to his mistress: "I am none of those unreasonable lovers that propose to themselves the loving to eternity. A month is comm.nly my stint." And Jacintha replies: "Or would not a fortnight serve our turn?"-Mock Astrologer, ii. 1. Frequently one would think Dryden was translating Hobbes, by the harshness of his jests. A Spanish Friar, iii. 3. And jumbled up with the plot we keep meeting with political allusions. This is a mark of the time. Torrismond, to excuse himself from marrying the queen, says, "Power which in one age is tyranny is ripen'd in the next to true succession. She's in possession.”—Spanish Friar, iv. 2. 5 Plautus' Amphitryon has been imitated by Dryden and Molière. Sir Walter Scott, in the introduction to Dryden's play, says: "He is, in general, coarse and vulgar, where Molière is witty; and where the Frenchman ventures upon a double meaning, the Englishman always contrives to make it a single one." ."-TR. "For kings and priests are in a manner bound, And he proceeds thereupon boldly to lay bare his own despotism. In reality, his sophisms and his shamelessness serve Dryden as a means of decrying by rebound the arbitrary Divinity of the theologians. He lets Jupiter say: "Fate is what I, By virtue of omnipotence, have made it; Nor yet to men, for what they are is mine.- This open pedantry is changed into open lust as soon as Jupiter sees Alcmena. No detail is omitted: Jupiter speaks his whole mind to her, and before the maids; and next morning, when he is going away, she outdoes him: she hangs on to him, and indulges in the most familiar details. All the noble externals of high gallantry are torn off like a troublesome garment; it is a cynical recklessness in place of aristocratic decency; the scene is written after the example of Charles II. and Castlemaine, not of Louis XIV. and Mme. de Montespan.3 VIII. I pass over several writers: Crowne, author of Sir Courtly Nice; Shadwell, an imitator of Ben Jonson; Mrs. Aphra Behn, who calls herself Astræa, a spy and a courtesan, paid by government and the public. Etherege is the first to set the example of imitative comedy in his Man of Fashion, and to depict only the manners of his age; for the rest he is an open roisterer, and frankly describes his habits: As Jupiter is departing, on the plea of daylight, Alcmena says to him: "But you and I will draw our curtains close, Extinguish daylight, and put out the sun. Come back, my lord. . . . You have not yet laid long enough in bed To warm your widowed side."-Act ii. 2. Compare Plautus' Roman matron and Molière's honest Frenchwoman with this expansive female. [Louis XIV. and Made. de Montespan were not very decent either. See Mémoires de Saint Simon.]—TR. "From hunting whores, and haunting play, And all the night too, you will say." . . Such were his pursuits in London; and further on, in a letter from Ratisbon to Lord Middleton, "He makes grave legs in formal fetters, Converses with fools and writes dull letters;" And gets small consolation out of the German ladies. In this grave mood Etherege undertook the duties of an ambassador. One day, having dined too freely, he fell from the top of a staircase, and broke his neck; a death of no great importance. But the hero of this society was William Wycherley, the coarsest writer who ever polluted the stage. Being sent to France during the Revolution, he there became a Roman Catholic; then on his return abjured; then in the end, as Pope tells us, abjured again. Robbed of their Protestant ballast, these shallow brains ran from dogma to dogma, from superstition to incredulity or indifference, to end in a state of fear. He had learned at M. de Montausier's residence the art of wearing gloves and a peruke, which sufficed in those days to make a gentleman. This merit, and the success of a filthy piece, Love in a Wood, drew upon him the eyes of the Duchess of Cleveland, mistress of the king and of anybody. This woman, who used to have amours with a rope-dancer, picked him up one day in the very midst of the Ring. She put her head out of her carriage-window, and cried to him before all, "Sir, you are a rascal, a villain, the son of a" Touched by this compliment, he accepted her favors, and in consequence obtained those of the king. He lost them, married the Countess of Drogheda, a woman of bad temper, ruined himself, remained seven years in prison, passed the remainder of his life in pecuniary difficulties, regretting his youth, losing his memory, scribbling bad verses, which he got Pope to correct, amidst many twitches of wounded self-esteem, stringing together dull obscenities, dragging his worn out body and enervated brain through the stages of misanthropy and libertinage, playing the miserable part of a toothless roisterer and a whitehaired blackguard. Eleven days before his death he married a young girl, who turned out to be a strumpet. He ended as he 1 Himself a Huguenot, who had become a Roman Catholic, and the husband of Julie d'Angennes, for whom the French poets composed the celebrated Guirlande.-TR, had begun, by stupidity and misconduct, having succeeded neither in becoming happy nor honest, having used his vigorous intelligence and real talent only to his own injury and the injury of others. The reason was, that Wycherley was not an epicurean born His nature, genuinely English, that is to say, energetic and sombre, rebelled against the easy and amiable carelessness which enables one to take life as a pleasure-party. His style is labored, and troublesome to read. His tone is virulent and bitter. He frequently forces his comedy in order to get at spiteful satire. Effort and animosity mark all that he says or puts into the mouths of others. It is Hobbes, not meditative and calm, but active and angry, who sees in man nothing but vice, yet feels himself man to the very core. The only fault he rejects is hypocrisy; the only virtue he preaches is frankness. He wants others to confess their vice, and he begins by confessing his own. "Though I cannot lie like them (the poets), I am as vain as they; I cannot but publicly give your Grace my humble acknowledgments. . . . This is the poet's gratitude, which in plain English is only pride and ambition."1 We find in him no poetry of expression, no glimpse of the ideal, no settled morality which could console, raise, or purify men. He shuts them up in their perversity and uncleanness, and installs himself among them. He shows them the filth of the lowest depths in which he confines them; he expects them to breathe this atmosphere; he plunges them into it, not to disgust them with it as by an accidental fall, but to accustom them to it as if it were their natural element. He tears down the partitions and decorations by which they endeavor to conceal their state, or regulate their disorder. He takes pleasure in making them fight, he delights in the hubbub of their unfettered instincts; he loves the violent changes of the human mass, the confusion of their wicked deeds, the rawness of their bruises. He strips their lusts, sets them forth at full length, and of course feels them himself; and whilst he condemns them as nauseous, he enjoys them. People take what pleasure they can get: the drunkards in the suburbs, if asked how they can relish their miserable liquor, will tell you it makes them drunk as soon as better stuff, and that is the only pleasure they have. 1 The Dramatic Works of Wycherley, Congreve, Vanbrugh, and Farquhar, ed. Leigh Hunt, 1840. Dedication of Love in a Wood to her Grace the Duchess of Cleveland. I can understand that an author may dare much in a novel. It is a psychological study, akin to criticism or history, having almost equal license, because it contributes almost equally to explain the anatomy of the heart. It is quite necessary to expose moral diseases, especially when this is done to add to science, coldly, accurately, and in the fashion of a dissection. Such a book is by its nature abstruse; it must be read in the study, by lamp-light. But transport it to the stage, exaggerate the bedroom liberties, give them additional life by a few disreputable scenes, bestow bodily vigor upon them by the energetic action and words of the actresses; let the eyes and the senses be filled with them, not the eyes of an individual spectator, but of a thousand men and women mingled together in the pit, excited by the interest of the story, by the correctness of the literal imitation, by the glitter of the lights, by the noise of applause, by the contagion of impressions which run like a shudder through fiery and longing minds. That was the spectacle which Wycherley furnished, and which the court appreciated. Is it possible that a public, and a select public, could come and listen to such In Love in a Wood, amidst the complications of nocturnal rendezvous, and violations effected or begun, we meet with a witling, named Dapperwit, who desires to sell his mistress Lucy to a fine gentleman of that age, Ranger. With what minuteness he bepraises her! He knocks at her door; the intended purchaser meantime, growing impatient, is treating him like a slave. The mother comes in, but wishing to sell Lucy herself and for her own advantage, scolds them and packs them off. Next appears an old puritanical usurer and hypocrite, named Gripe, who at first will not bargain: “Mrs. Joyner. You must send for something to entertain her with. . . Upon my life a groat! What will this purchase? Gripe. Two black pots of ale and a cake, at the cellar-Come, the wine has arsenic in't. Mrs. J. A treat of a groat! I will not wag. G. Why don't you go? Here, take more money, and fetch what you will; take here, half-a-crown. Mrs. 7. What will half-a-crown do? G. Take a crown then, an angel, a piece ;-begone! Mrs. J. A treat only will not serve my turn; I must buy the poor wretch there some toys. G. What toys? what? speak quickly. |