Firm Doric pillars found your solid base:
The fair Corinthian crowns the higher space;
Thus all below is strength, and all above is grace.
. . . . .
We cannot envy you, because we love.
. . . . .
Time, place, and action may with pains be wrought,
But Genius must be born, and never can be taught.
This is your portion, this your native store;
Heav’n, that but once was prodigal before.
To Shakespeare gave as much; she could not give him more.

The tribute is indubitably sincere; in point of Congreve’s wit and diction it is as indubitably true.

Love for Love was the most popular of Congreve’s comedies: it held the stage so long that Hazlitt could say, ‘it still acts and is still acted well.’  Being wise after the event, one may give some obvious reasons.  It is more human than any other of his plays, and at the same time more farcical.  By ‘more human’ it is not meant that the characters are truer to life than those in The Way of the World, but that they are truer to average life, and therefore more easily recognisable by the average spectator.  Tattle, for instance, is so gross a fool, that any fool in the pit could see his folly; Witwoud might deceive all but the elect.  No familiarity—direct or indirect—with a particular mode of life and speech is necessary to the appreciation of Love for Love.  Sir Sampson Legend is your unmistakable heavy father, cross-grained and bullying.  Valentine is no ironical, fine gentleman like Mirabell, but a young rake from Cambridge, all debts and high spirits.  Scandal is a plain railer at things, especially women; Ben Legend a sea-dog who cannot speak without a nautical metaphor; Jeremy an idealised comic servant; and Foresight grotesque farce.  Angelica is a shrewd but hearty ‘English girl,’ and Miss Prue a veritable country Miss; while Mrs. Frail and Mrs. Foresight are broadly skittish matrons.  There is nothing in the play to strain the attention or to puzzle the intellect, and it is full of laughter: no wonder it was a success.  It is, intellectually, on an altogether different plane from The Way of the World, on a slightly lower one than The Double-Dealer.  But in its own way it is irresistibly funny, and by reason of its diction it is never for a moment other than distinguished.

I imagine the bodkin scene will always take the palm in it for mere mirth.  Delightful sisters!

I suppose you would not go alone to the World’s End?

The World’s End!  What, do you mean to banter me?

Poor innocent!  You don’t know that there’s a place called the World’s End?

I’ll swear you can keep your countenance purely; you’d make an admirable player. . . .  But look you here, now—where did you lose this gold bodkin?—Oh, sister, sister!

My bodkin?

Nay, ’tis yours; look at it.

Well, if you go to that, where did you find this bodkin?  Oh, sister, sister!—sister every way.

Broad, popular comedy, it is admirable; but it is not especially Congrevean.  Tattle’s love-lesson to Miss Prue and his boasting of his duchesses are in the same broad vein.  Valentine’s mad scene is more remarkable, in that Congreve gives rein to his fancy, and that his diction is at its very best.  ‘Hark’ee, I have a secret to tell you.  Endymion and the Moon shall meet us upon Mount Latmos, and will be married in the dead of night.  But say not a word.  Hymen shall put his torch into a dark lanthorn, that it may be secret, and Juno shall give her peacock poppy-water, that he may fold his ogling tail, and Argus’s hundred eyes be shut, ha?  Nobody shall know, but Jeremy.’

TATTLE.  Do you know me, Valentine?

VALENTINE.  You?  Who are you?  No, I hope not.

TATTLE.  I am Jack Tattle, your friend.

VALENTINE.  My friend, what to do?  I am no married man, and thou canst not lie with my wife.  I am very poor, and thou canst not borrow money of me.  Then, what employment have I for a friend?

ANGELICA.  Do you know me, Valentine?

VALENTINE.  Oh, very well.

ANGELICA.  Who am I?

VALENTINE.  You’re a woman, one to whom Heaven gave beauty when it grafted roses on a briar.  You are the reflection of Heaven in a pond, and he that leaps at you is sunk.  You are all white, a sheet of lovely, spotless paper, when you first are born; but you are to be scrawled and blotted by every goose’s quill.  I know you; for I loved a woman, and loved her so long, that I found out a strange thing: I found out what a woman was good for.

Imagine Betterton, the greatest actor of his time, delivering that last speech, with its incomparable rhythm!  I like to think that he gave the spectators an idea that Valentine’s self-sacrifice for Angelica was nothing but a bold device, a calculated effect; otherwise the sacrifice is an excrescence in this comedy, which, popular and broad though it be, is cynical in Congreve’s manner throughout.  One is consoled, however, by the pleasant fate of the ingenious Mr. Tattle and the intriguing Mrs. Frail, who are left tied for life against their will.  The trick, by the way, of a tricked marriage is constant in Congreve, and reveals his poverty of construction.  He can devise you comic situations unflaggingly, but when he approaches the end of a play his deus ex machinâ is invariably this flattest and most battered old deity in fairyland.

The dedication to Lord Dorset contains nothing of interest beyond the confession that the play is too long, and the information that part of it was omitted in the playing.  A line in the prologue, ‘We grieve One falling Adam and one tempted Eve,’ is explained by Colley Cibber to refer to Mrs. Mountford, who, having cast her lot with Betterton and migrated to Lincoln’s Inn Fields, threw up her part on a question of cash, and to Williams, an actor who ‘loved his bottle better than his business,’ who deserted at the same time.  It serves to show the interest the town took in the players, that the fact was referred to on the stage.  The lady’s part was taken by Mrs. Ayliff; Mrs. Leigh played the nurse—a very poor part after Lady Plyant; Dogget’s success as Ben Legend has been noted.  Mrs. Bracegirdle’s Angelica was doubtless ravishing: a ‘virtuous young woman,’ as our ancestors phrased it, but quite relieved from insipidity.

It would need a greater presumption than the writer is gifted withal to add his contribution to the praises critics have lavished on The Way of the World.  It is better to quote Mr. Swinburne.  ‘In 1700 Congreve replied to Collier with the crowning work of his genius—the unequalled and unapproached masterpiece of English comedy.  The one play in our language which may fairly claim a place beside, or but just beneath, the mightiest work of Molière, is The Way of the World.’  But he continues: ‘On the stage, which had recently acclaimed with uncritical applause the author’s more questionable appearance in the field of tragedy,’—The Mourning Bride,—‘this final and flawless evidence of his incomparable powers met with a rejection then and ever since inexplicable on any ground of conjecture.’  There the critics are not unanimous.  Mr. Gosse, for instance, has his explanation: that the spectators must have fidgeted, and wished ‘that the actors and actresses would be doing something.’  Very like, indeed: the spectators, then as now, would no doubt have preferred ‘knock-about farce.’  But, I venture to think, the explanation is not