jest to jest, thinks it hard he should have debarred her from doubling her jointure on the same easy terms." It does not appear that she would have baulked herself of twenty such. She went by the name of Jackson; and the alleged fellow-swindler, who subsequently married her, called himself Captain Shrimpton. Bethia Shringston was the name of Wycherley's mother. It was through the Captain and Theobald, that the volume of "Posthumous Works," which Pope had had so uneasy a hand in re-touching, came before the public. Wycherley's remains were deposited in the vault of the church in Covent Garden. Pope affirmed to Spence that he died a "Romanist;" and that he had owned that religion in his hearing. When people have not the very best ideas of this world, nor, consequently perhaps, of the next, it is natural enough that fear on some occasions, and doubt on all, should make them willing to abide by the church that claims to itself exclusively the power of solving all doubt, and delivering from all fear.-So Madame de Montausier triumphed at last. The chain of these melancholy events, so closely linked with one another, has hindered us from speaking till now of the curious intercourse that took place, in his latter days, between Wycherley, the oldest wit of the departing age, and Pope, the youngest of the new. Wycherley, in the year 1704, which was the sixty-fourth year of his age, not being the everlasting young-old boy that Chaucer was, nor of the right faith in things poetical, published a bad volume of poems, full of harsh verses and insipid gallantries; and Pope giving the world his Pastorals about the same time, and being then sixteen to Wycherley's sixty-five, the two books appear to have brought the old wit and the new together. Pope, with the reverence natural to a young writer, diligently cultivated his new acquaintance, haunting his lodgings in town, (following him about, as he describes it, like a dog) and trying to entice him to come and see him in Windsor Forest. (Lady W. Montague says he did it for a legacy; but the charge is manifestly nothing but a bit of the spite and malice, to which her ladyship's fine brain too frequently condescended). Wycherley, on the other hand, always promising to go to the Forest, and always complaining of his irresistible itch of writing, wishes to get up a fresh volume of poems, and compliments his new friend, not yet out of his teens, with asking him to correct his verses. A dangerous compliment! Pope entered upon his task with more sincerity than comfort, asking, among other cavalier inquiries, whether he was to turn the "worst pieces" into "very good;" and implying, in that case, that it might be necessary to re-write" them! The old man, unable to deny himself the pleasure of seeing his darling verses trimmed up, yet wincing under the approach of so slashing an instrument, compliments the "great mind" of his critic at the expense of his "little, tender, and crazy body." In short, spleen and impatience break out on both sides in the course of an anxious correspondence, till Pope, with hardly sufficient delicacy of forbearance, testily throws up his office; and though strong expressions of esteem afterwards passed between them through the medium of common friends, the intercourse was never renewed. Of the two, Wycherley appears to us to have been the less in the wrong; but then his experience left him the smaller excuse for not foreseeing the result. From the letters that passed between Pope and Wycherley, and the recollections of him by the former in Spence, we learn something of the habits and appearance of the dramatist. Pope put him in the list of those who had the "nobleman-look." He did not care for the country; was fond of serious and philosophic authors (Montaigne, Rochefoucault, Seneca, and Gracian), in one of whom he used to "read himself asleep o'nights;" and was vain of his handsomeness, the departure of which in old age he could so little endure, that he would sigh over the portrait of him at twenty-eight by Sir Peter Lely, and to the engraving made of it in 1703, (from which the one in the present volume is taken) ordered the motto to be put, “Quantum mutatus ab illo,” (how changed from him!)" which he used to repeat," says Pope, "with a melancholy emphasis." Sir Godfrey Kneller said he would make a very fine head without his wig; but he could not bear the portrait when done, and Sir Godfrey was obliged to add the wig. Alas for a Charles-the-Second old age! Shakspeare speaks of a man who was "incapable of his own distress." Here was a man who was unequal to his own venerableness. He retained however to the last, in spite of the occasional "peevishness" natural to such a decline (unless Pope's own peevishness found it in his associate) the character he had always possessed of good-heartedness and sincerity. His contemporaries have recorded him as being of an intercourse as modest and gentle as his public satire was bold; and they all agreed in giving him, as an epithet of distinction, the name of his hero in the Plain Dealer, "Manly,"—a cognomen, to which perhaps his personal appearance helped to contribute, for Rochester, in his "Session of the Poets," designated him as "brawny Wycherley," though the word was omitted in subsequent editions. Dryden, with his usual good-nature towards young authors, once invited him to join him in writing a comedy; but he modestly declined the offer in a poem of grateful panegyric*. It is difficult to say which was the luckier in the failure of this proposal, Dryden or Wycherley; for the poetical part of Dryden's spirit, especially if he had written in verse, would have borne down the unbelieving prose of a man who had no such poetry in him while, on the other hand, the greater, or at all events purer, dramatic power of Wycherley would not have known what to be at with the unseasonable and arbitrary superfluities of Dryden. Wycherley has justly been considered as the earliest of our comic prcse dramatists, who forsook the fleeting shapes of custom and manners that were brought to their gayest head in Etherege, for the more lasting wit and humour natural to the prevailing qualities of mankind. Etherege was the "dandy" of the prose drama, and Wycherley the first man. Shadwell had glimpses "in his drink;" but he was only a gross and hasty sketcher. Schlegel has missed a general airiness in all our plays of this class, through the whole range of English comedy, and Wycherley is certainly no exception to the defect. He is somewhat heavy as well as "brawny" in his step; and when he moves faster, it is seldom from gaiety. He has "wit at will" also, but then the will to be witty is frequently too obvious, and has too artificial an air of thought and antithesis. His best scenes are those of cross-purposes, mutual exposure, or the contrast of natural with acquired cunning; those, in short, in which reflection and design have much more * "An Epistle to Mr. Dryden, occasioned by his desiring to join with him in writing a Comedy." Posthumous Works, p. 18. to do than animal spirits. His style is pure and unaffected; and clearness and force are his characteristics, in preference to what is either engaging or laughable. We can easily believe him to have been a "slow" writer; not from dulness, but from care and consideration. "Of all our modern wits, none seem to me The truth of the application of this epithet has been controverted, especially by Lord Lansdowne, who knew him, and who implies that he contradicts it from personal knowledge.* But unless the loss of memory, which he suffered in advanced life, had altered his habits of composition, the question might appear to be settled by the interlined state in which Theobald says his manuscripts were left, and which was so excessive, that a stranger could hardly read them. The failure of his faculties, it is true, in this respect was so great, that Pope says he would copy other authors on paper and repeat himself, and forget that he had done either in the course of a few hours. On the other hand, Rochester's triplet has some more lines to it, not so often quoted :— "Shadwell's unfinish'd works do yet impart Great proofs of nature's force, though none of art; But Wycherley earns hard whate'er he gains, He wants no judgment, and he spares no pains." Perhaps Rochester spoke of his younger efforts, and Lansdowne knew him at a time of life when practice had made him quicker. And yet, as Wycherley was not a writer of impulse, there is something of that kind of simple hardness in his style which looks like a slow growth. Congreve's agglomerations of wit have the same appearance of elaboration, though from another cause. Vanbrugh and Farquhar have more spirits, and a readier air accordingly. But we shall touch upon these comparisons, when we have done speaking of all separately. We shall now glance at each play of Wycherley's, in the order of its composition.— The idea of "Love in a Wood, or St. James's Park," (for the Park was the wood,) was evidently suggested by the "Mulberry Garden" of Sir Charles Sedley,—a title suggested by a house of entertainment which stood on the site of Buckingham Palace, and the grounds of which, like the Spring-garden at the opposite corner, were resorted to by the gallants and masked ladies of the time, when they issued forth of a summer's evening like so many gnats, to buzz, sting, and make love. It turns upon a game of hide-and-seek, and other cross-purposes, between some of these "minions of the moon," and is worth little in style or plot; yet we think, upon the whole, it has been undervalued. It is not unamusing. It gives early evidence of that dislike of backbiting and false friendship, which honourably distinguished Wycherley through life; and there are the germs of two characters in it, which have been since developed by Hoadley and Sheridan,—that of Falkland in the "Rivals" (the Valentine of this play) and Ranger in the "Suspicious Husband;" whose name, with a candour that was to be expected from Hoadley's superior nature, was retained by him from the * See the passage in Anderson's British Poets, vol. vii. p. 722. Ranger of Wycherley. Compare, in particular, the immense yet pleasant impudence, and reconciling animal spirits, of the entrance of Hoadley's Ranger into the bedroom of Mrs. Strickland, with its manifest prototype in the second act of "Love in a Wood." The concluding stanza of the song in the first act contains the passage which is said to have been the origin of the writer's acquaintance with the Duchess of Cleveland. Either Wycherley's memory must have failed him as to the early period of some of his compositions, or vanity helped to mislead it,—for he had manifestly gone to the same sources as Molière for the improvement of his plots, when he wrote the "Gentleman Dancing-Master." There is a similar amusing intrigue in it to that of the "Ecole des Femmes," carried on through the medium of an unconscious wittol, who hugs himself upon the fool he is making of the favoured lover; and the author, besides looking back to old English comedy for a Frenchified Englishman, has brought a formalised one from Spain, the favourite store-house of the comedy of the preceding age. The hero of the piece, who is made to personate a dancing-master, and to be always in motion whether he will or no, is very amusing; so is the suspicious old aunt, who sees through his incompetency: but, above all, there is an exquisite truth to nature in the egotistical effrontery of the father, who, after treating the aunt's suspicions with contempt, takes to himself the credit of making the very discovery, which she has all along been trying to beat into his head. The "Plain Dealer,"-with the exquisite addition of the litigious Widow Blackacre, a kind of born female barrister, an original which he had doubtless met with in the courts of law,—is an English version, in its principal characteristics, of the "Misanthrope" of Molière, greatly improved, inasmuch as the hero is less poetically tragic, but equally contrary to nature and to the true spirit of comedy, inasmuch as he is tragical at all; and in one respect it is shockingly below the original; for it is deformed so as no other age but such a one as that of Charles the Second could suppose manhood to be deformed, and yet remain consistent with itself, by the sort of revenge which he permits himself to take on his mistress,-that of a possession of her person under the supposition of his being another man, and while he feels nothing for her disposition but hatred and contempt. Yet in this gusto of desecrated animal passion, fit only for some ferocious sensualist who believed himself as great a rascal as he thought everybody else, the wits of those days saw nothing to deteriorate from a character emphatically christened and thought "Manly,”—a name which it imparted, as an epithet of honour, to the Author himself. As to the rest, the wit put into the mouth of this much-injured Captain of the British navy is as forced, and not seldom as common-place, as the violent and solemn coxcombry of his hatred of all other vices but his own is ridiculous. Indeed all misanthropes, whatever be their pretensions in other respects, nay, in very proportion to their claims upon being thought exceptions to the generality of mankind, are, and must be, so far, nothing but stupid and immodest coxcombs, for daring to set up their supposed knowledge of themselves above the whole virtues of the rest of their fellow-creatures. In what has been charged, however, as unnatural in the characters of the two heroes of Wycherley and Molière, with regard to their believing in the goodness of one select friend and one mistress, this, we confess, appears to us provokingly true to nature; for the same arbitrary will and pleasure that trumps up a man's own virtues to himself, has only to include the first convenient man or woman it meets with in the same spotless category, and for not a jot better reason. The feelings of the public saw better than the court-wits, and instinctively revolted against this play in spite of the exquisite scenes of the scandalmongering fine ladies and gentlemen, the prototypes of those in Congreve and Sheridan. It is said, that the good-natured Duke of Dorset, who tried hard to take his own bilious temperament for a kind of misanthropy, but was too modest and good-hearted to succeed, was the first to reconcile the town to an approval of it. If so, perhaps the Duke's having been in the great sea-fight against Opdam, may serve both to account for the profession assigned to the Author's hero, and to corroborate a guess as to the particular battle that Wycherley himself was in. In the "Country Wife" there are no such scenes and dialogue of continued excellence as those of Olivia and her visitors in the second act of the “ Plain Dealer ;" but the principal female character hits a point of more lasting nature, and is an exquisite meeting of the extremes of simplicity and cunning; so that with some alterations, especially of the impudent project of Horner, which would have been an affront in any other age to a * decent audience, this comedy outlasted the performances of the graver one, and will always be revived whenever such an actress appears as Mrs. Jordan. Those who remember how that delightful woman seemed made for every trusting enjoyment,-how she could unite boisterous animal spirits with a brimful sensibility,-how she would come dancing on the stage at forty, a girl still in spite of her fat,-what a breath and music there was in her voice, and how the people loved it the moment they heard it,-how she would wear a huge buxom pin-afore, divide sobs of sorrow with the comforts of a great slice of bread-and-butter, anticipate a world of delight with rubbed hands and huddling shoulders, -and with what a cramming of all the powers of coaxing into one little syllable she would utter the word "bud," while taking her guardian's cheeks in her hands, as though it sprang out of the fulness of her heart, and formed her lips into the very thing it spoke of,-will sigh to think, that circumstances rarely produce creatures made of such cordial human clay; or that anything could have made a life close in sorrow, which had given to others nothing but happiness. We have found nothing in the Letters of Wycherley, either to Pope or Dennis, worth extracting in this place; but from an extraordinary heap of bad and good in the three hundred and eight "Maxims and Reflections" written by him in his old age, we have selected some not unworthy of "The satire, wit, and strength of Manly Wycherley." (So wrote Dryden of him in one of his own strong lines.) As wit is too hard for power in council, so power is too hard for wit in action. Our hopes, though they never happen, yet are some kind of happiness; as trees, whilst they are still growing, please in the prospect, though they bear no fruit. Believe your friend honest to make him so, if he be not so; since, if you distrust him, you make his falsehood a piece of justice. |