from the man of the world, the maid from the mistress. He has to enter into each; to leave his private pigeon-hole and invest himself with the emotions of another human being, so that speech meets speech at full tilt, each from its own angle.
A genius for phrase-making helps him. Now he strikes off a picture in a flash: “…there he lies with a great beard, like a Russian bear upon a drift of snow.” Now in a marvellous rush of rapid invention he conveys a whole chapter of guttersnipe life.
That I took from the washing of old gauze and weaving of dead hair, with a bleak blue nose, over a chafing dish of starv’d embers, and dining behind a traverse rag, in a shop no bigger than a bird cage.
Then, again, like some miraculous magpie he repeats the naive words, follows the crude emotions, of a great gawky girl like Miss Prue. However it is done, to enter into such diverse characters is, the moralists may note, at any rate to forget your own. Undoubtedly it is true that his language is often coarse; but then it is also true that his characters are more alive, quicker to strip off veils, more intolerant of circumlocutions than the ordinary run of people. They are reduced to phrase-making oftener than we could wish, and fine phrases often sound cynical; but then the situations are often so improbable that only fine phrases will cover them, and words, we must remember, were still to Congreve’s generation as delightful as beads to a savage. Without that rapture the audacity of his splendid phrases would have been impossible.
But if we have to admit that some of the characters are immoral, and some of the opinions cynical, still we must ask how far we can call a character immoral or an opinion cynical if we feel that the author himself was aware of its immorality and intended its cynicism? And, though it is a delicate matter to separate an author from his characters and detach him from their opinions, no one can read Congreve’s comedies without detecting a common atmosphere, a general attitude that holds them together for all their diversity. The stress laid on certain features creates a common likeness as unmistakable as the eyes and nose of a family face. The plays are veined through and through with satire. “Therefore I would rail in my writings and be revenged,” says Valentine in Love for Love. Congreve’s satire seems sometimes, as Scandal says, to have the whole world for its butt. Yet there is underneath a thinking mind, a mind that doubts and questions. Some hint thrown out in passing calls us back to make us ponder it: for instance, Mellefont’s “Ay, My Lord, I shall have the same reason for happiness that your Lordship has, I shall think myself happy.” Or, again, a sudden phrase like “There’s comfort in a hand stretched out to one that’s sinking” suggests, by its contrast, a sensibility that trembles on the edge of tears. Nothing is stressed; sentiment never broadens into sentimentality; everything passes as quickly as a ray of light and blends as indistinguishably. But if we needs must prove that the creator of Sir Sampson Legend and old Foresight had not only a prodigious sense of human absurdity and a bitter conviction of its insincerity but as quick a regard for its honesty and decency as any Victorian or Dr. Johnson himself, we need only point to his simplicity. After we have run up the scale of absurdity to its sublime heights a single word again and again recalls us to common sense. “That my poor father should be so very silly” is one such comment, immensely effective in its place. Again and again we are brought back to sanity and daylight by the sound of a voice speaking in its natural tones.
But it is the Valentines, the Mirabells, the Angelicas, and the Millamants who keep us in touch with truth and, by striking a sudden serious note, bring the rest to scale. They have sharpened their emotions upon their wits. They have flouted each other; bargained; taken love and examined it by the light of reason; teased and tested each other almost beyond endurance. But when it comes to the point and she must be serious, the swiftest of all heroines, whose mind and body seem equally winged, so that there is a rush in the air as she passes and we exclaim with Scandal. “Gone; why, she was never here, nor anywhere else,” has a centre of stillness in her heart and enough emotion in her words to furbish out a dozen pages of eloquent disquisition. “Why does not the man take me? Would you have me give myself to you over again?” The words are simple, and yet, after what has already been said, so brimming with meaning that Mirabell’s reply, “Ay, over and over again,” seems to receive into itself more than words, can say. And this depth of emotion, we have to reflect, the change and complexity that are implied in it, have been reached in the direct way; that is by making each character speak in his or her own person, without addition from the author or any soliloquy save such as can be spoken on the stage in the presence of an audience. No, whether we read him from the moralist’s angle or from the artist’s, to agree with Dr. Johnson is an impossibility. To read the comedies is not to “relax those obligations by which life ought to be regulated.” On the contrary, the more slowly we read him and the more carefully, the more meaning we find, the more beauty we discover.
Here perhaps, in the reflections that linger when the book is shut and The Way of the World is finished, lies the answer to the old puzzle why at the height of his powers he stopped writing. It is that he had done all that was possible in that kind. The last play held more than any audience could grasp at a single sitting. The bodily presence of actors and actresses must, it would seem, often overpower the words that they had to speak. He had forgotten, or disregarded, his own axiom that “the distance of the stage requires the figures represented to be something larger than the life.” He had written, as he says in the dedication, for “the Few,” and “but little of it was prepar’d for that general taste which seems now to be predominant in the palates of our audience.” He had come to despise his public, and it was time therefore either to write differently or to leave off. But the novel, which offered another outlet, was uncongenial; he was incorrigibly dramatic, as his one attempt at fiction shows. And poetry, too, was denied him, for though again and again he brings us to the edge of poetry in a phrase like “You’re a woman, One to whom Heav’n gave beauty, when it grafted roses on a briar,” and suggests, as. Meredith does in his novels, the mood of poetry, he was unable to pass beyond human idiosyncrasy to the more general statement of poetry. He must move and laugh and bring us into touch with action instantly.
Since these two paths then were blocked, what other way was there for a writer of Congreve’s temperament but to make an end? Dangerous as it is to distinguish a writer from his work, we cannot help but recognise a man behind the plays—a man as sensitive to criticism as he was skilled in inflicting it on others; for what is his defiance of the critics but deference to them? A scholar too with all the scholar’s fastidiousness; a man of birth and breeding for whom the vulgar side of fame held little gratification; a man, in short, who might well have said with Valentine, “Nay, I am not violently bent upon the trade,” and sit, handsome and portly and sedate as his portrait shows him, “very gravely with his hat over his eyes,” as the gossips observed him, content to strive no more.
But indeed he left very little for the gossips to feed upon; no writer of his time and standing passed through the world more privately. Voltaire left a dubious anecdote; the Duchess of Marlborough, it is said, had an effigy of him set at her table after his death; his few discreet letters provide an occasional hint: “Ease and quiet is what I hunt after”; “I feel very sensibly and silently for those whom I love”—that is all. But there is a fitness in this very absence of relics as though he had consumed whatever was irrelevant to his work and left us to find him there. And there, indeed, we find something beyond himself; beyond the many figures of his fertile and brilliant imagination; beyond Tattle and Ben, Foresight and Angelica, Maskwell and Lady Wishfort, Mirabell and Mellefont and Millamant. Between them they have created what is not to be confined within the limits of a single character or expressed in any one play—a world where each part depends upon the other, the serene, impersonal, and indestructible world of art.
[Times Literary Supplement, Sep 25, 1937]
Sterne’s Ghost.
That men have ghosts; that ghosts revisit the places where life ran quickest;
