complete.  The construction of the play is weak, certainly, but the actors and actresses do a great deal after all.  For that matter, audiences will stand scenes of still wit—but they like to comprehend it; and the characters in The Way of the World, or most of them, represent a society whose attitude and speech are entirely ironical and paradoxical, a society of necessity but a small fraction of any community.  Some sort of study or some special experience is necessary to the enjoyment of such a set.  It is not the case of a few witticisms and paradoxes firing off at intervals, like crackers, from the mouths of one or two actors with whom the audience is taught to laugh as a matter of course: the vein is unbroken.  Now, literalness and common sense are the qualities of the average uninstructed spectator, and The Way of the World was high over the heads of its audience.

To come to details.  The tragedy of Lady Wishfort has often been remarked—the veritable tragedy of a lovesick old woman.  All the grotesque touches, her credulity, her vanity, her admirable dialect (‘as I’m a person!’), but serve to make the tragedy the more pitiable.  Either, therefore, our appreciation of satiric comedy is defective, or Congreve made a mistake.  To regard this poor old soul as mere comedy is to attain to an almost satanic height of contempt: the comedy is more than grim, it is savagely cruel.  To be pitiless, on the other hand, is a satirist’s virtue.  On the whole, we may reasonably say that the tragedy is not too keen in itself, but that it is too obviously indicated.  Witwoud is surely a great character?  The stage is alive with mirth when he is on it.  His entrance in the very first part of the play is delightful.  ‘Afford me your compassion, my dears; pity me, Fainall; Mirabell, pity me. . . . Fainall, how does your lady?  Gad, I say anything in the world to get this fellow out of my head.  I beg pardon that I should ask a man of pleasure, and the town, a question at once so foreign and domestic.  But I talk like an old maid at a marriage, I don’t know what I say.’  But one might quote for ever.  Witwoud, almost as much as Millamant herself, is an eternal type.  His little exclamations, his assurance of sympathy, his terror of the commonplace—surely one knows them well?  His tolerance of any impertinence, lest he should be thought to have misunderstood a jest, is a great distinction.  But Congreve’s gibe in the dedication at the critics, who failed ‘to distinguish betwixt the character of a Witwoud and a Truewit,’ is hardly fair: as Dryden said of Etherege’s Sir Fopling, he is ‘a fool so nicely writ, The ladies might mistake him for a wit.’  Then, Millamant is the ultimate expression of those who, having all the material goods which nature and civilisation can give, live on paradoxes and artifices.  Her insolence is the inoffensive insolence only possible to the well-bred.  ‘O ay, letters,—I had letters,—I am persecuted with letters,—I hate letters,—nobody knows how to write letters; and yet one has ’em, one does not know why,—they serve one to pin up one’s hair.’  ‘Beauty the lover’s gift!—Lord, what is a lover, that it can give?  Why one makes lovers as fast as one pleases, and they live as long as one pleases, and they die as soon as one pleases; and then if one pleases one makes more.’

In parts of its characterisation The Way of the World is extremely bold in observation, extremely careless of literary types and traditions.  Mrs. Fainall, a woman who is the friend, and assists in the intrigues, of a man who has ceased to be her lover, is most unconventionally human.  Of all the inimitable scenes, that in which Millamant and Mirabell make their conditions of marriage is perhaps the most unquestionable triumph.  ‘Let us never visit together, nor go to a play together, but let us be very strange and well-bred’—there is its keynote.  The dialogue is as sure and perfect in diction, in balance of phrases, and in musical effectiveness as can be conceived, and for all its care is absolutely free in its gaiety.  It is the ultimate expression of the joys of the artificial.  As for the prologue, it is an invitation to the dullards to damn the play, and is anything but serenely confident.  The dedication, to ‘Ralph, Earl of Mountague,’ has an interesting fact: it tells us that the comedy was written immediately after staying with him, ‘in your retirement last summer from the town,’ and pays a tribute to the influence of the society the dramatist met there.  ‘Vous y voyez partout,’ said Voltaire of Congreve, ‘le langage des honnêtes gens avec des actions de fripon; ce qui prouve qu’il connaissait bien son monde, et qu’il vivait dans ce qu’on appelle la bonne compagnie.’

The want of dramatic skill which has been alleged against Congreve is simply a question of construction—of the construction of his plays as a whole.  His plots hang fire, are difficult to follow, and are not worth remembering.  But many things besides go to the making of good plays, and few playwrights have had all the theatrical virtues.  Do we not pardon a lack of incident in a novel of character?  In this connexion it is worth while to contrast Congreve with Sheridan, who in the matter of construction was a far abler craftsman.  But is there not in the elder poet enough to turn the scale, even the theatrical scale, ten times over?  Compare the petty indignation, with which the dramatist of The School for Scandal deals with his scandalmongers, and the amused indifference of Congreve towards the cabalists in The Way of the World.  Or take any hero of Congreve’s and contrast him with that glorification of vulgar lavishness and canting generosity, that very barmaid’s hero, Charles Surface.  It is all very well to say that Joseph is the real hero; but Sheridan made it natural for the stupid sentimentality of later days to make him the villain, and Congreve would have made it impossible.  Of wit (of course) there is more in a scene of Congreve than in a play of Sheridan.  Moreover, faulty in construction as his main plots are, in detail his construction is often admirable: as in play of character upon character, in countless opportunities for delightful archness and cruelty in the women, for the display of every comic emotion in the men.  He lived in the playhouse, and his characters, true to life though they be, have about them as it were an ideal essence of the boards.  With Hazlitt, ‘I would rather have seen Mrs. Abington’s Millamant than any Rosalind that ever appeared on the stage.’  A lover and a constant frequenter of the theatre—albeit the plays he sees bore him to death—cannot, in reading Congreve, choose but see the glances and hear the intonations of imaginary players.

VI.

Congreve’s choice of material has been defended at an early stage of these remarks.  There is the further and more interesting question of his point of view, his attitude towards it.  Mr. Henley speaks of his ‘deliberate and unmitigable baseness of morality.’  Differing with deference, I think it may be shown that his attitude is a pose merely, and an artistic and quite innocent pose.  It is the amusing pose of the boyish cynic turned into an artistic convention.  The lines:

‘He alone won’t betray in whom none will confide,
And the nymph may be chaste that has never been tried:’

which conclude the characteristic song in the third act of Love for Love, are typical of his attitude.  Does anybody suppose that an intelligent man of the world meant that sentiment