sion; but their day had passed and for half a century the Whigs were to rule the country.

The change was by no means an unmixed good. As for the drama, it needed reform undoubtedly; but unfortunately this reform was to be wrought only at the expense of a long probation in which sentimentality was substituted for sentiment, and the would-be pious for the genuinely good. The drama is in its very essence an aristocratic form of literature. It emphasizes not the commonplaces but the crises of life. It is concerned not with the mere details of living but with the grand passions that are the very mainspring of action. It exalts, it idealizes, it glorifies, and its very world is effective and appealing because it is unreal. Not unnaturally it is concerned with heroes and heroines, kings and queens, and it was at its height in England's greatest era of nationality. Any other emphasis, even that of the moralist, in a large way makes for decay.

The high priest of the moral reform was Jeremy Collier, who in 1698 published his Short View of the Immorality and Profaneness of the English Stage. In his successive chapters Cellier treated such topics as the immodesty of the stage, its profaneness, its abuse or misrepresentation of the clergy, and the fact that chief characters in plays were made vicious. He made references to heathen philosophers, orators, and historians that, to say the least, did not always bear directly upon the point at issue; but with abundant opportunity for illustration he pointed out characters and passages in Wycherley, Congreve, and Vanbrugh that it was difficult to defend on any account. Collier's attack was by no means consistently logical, nor did he have a clear conception of the relation of ethics and

aesthetics. With all his shortcomings, however, he was essentially sound, and if his expression was not perfect he at least had the conscience of the age behind him. Several representatives of the stage undertook to reply to him, and Congreve was only one of those who were baffled in the

encounter.

Collier was in a large way effective, though the importance of his publication has within recent years received much discount. As great a man as Dryden substantially admitted more than once the soundness of his main contentions, and the government officially took sides with him. "The censorship of the Master of the Revels began to be exercised more strictly; actors were prosecuted for the use of profane language, and the playhouses were once more presented as nuisances by the grand-jury; the admission of women wearing masks into any of the theatres was prohibited; and Convocation occupied itself with the condition of the stage as a matter of moment to be pressed upon the consideration of the Crown. The comic poets, who had always been more or less aware of their sins, now began with uneasy hilarity to allude in their prologues to the reformation which had come over the spirit of the town." ."1 Not all at once, however, was the license of previous decades abolished. Mrs. Centlivre (1667?-1723) was outstanding among those who continued to cater to vulgarity. For more than a score of years this writer employed a certain talent for play-writing in serving to the public the comedy that it relished; and in such a character as Don Felix in The Wonder! A Woman Keeps a Secret (1714) she afterwards furnished Garrick with one of his most successful rôles. Even Mrs. Centlivre, however, 1 Ward, III, 514-15.

for a while at least showed some inclination to conclude her plays so as to make them seem not to run too violently counter to Collier; and in her latest work she too was in the number of those who showed the influence of the rising tide of sentimentalism.

This writer, however, was mainly a survivor from the past. A much more important figure in the transition was Thomas Southerne (1660-1746). This dramatist had no great genius, but he was not without some genuine pathos, and he had a long, pleasant, and prosperous career. In comedy he was fairly successful, and even more so in the dramatization of popular fiction. The Loyal Brother, or The Persian Prince (1682) was a blank verse tragedy with some prose interspersed; and The Fatal Marriage, or Innocent Adultery (1694) and Oroonoko, or The Royal Slave (1696), both based on the work of Mrs. Behn, were two of Southerne's very popular adaptations. In his later work he exhibited more and more the elements of appeal that characterized the work of Otway.

57. William Congreve.-William Congreve (16701729), famous in his own day and since for his wit and elegance, was born in Leeds. His father was an army officer stationed in Ireland, and he himself was educated at Kilkenny and at Trinity College, Dublin. Going to London ostensibly as a law student, he found ready admission into the best circles, and an unusually attractive personality soon won for him numerous friends in literature and politics. With his five plays that were given to the public, the first in 1693 and the last in 1700, he distanced all rivals in polite comedy. He was overwhelmed with eulogy, and the foremost actors of the day were happy to appear in his productions. He was roughly

handled by Collier, however; and whether for this reason or because his last play did not awaken the usual enthusiasm, or because he preferred to give his time to the life of quality rather than to setting this forth on the stage, he wrote no plays after the turn of the century. In his later years he became blind, but in addition to the returns which he received from his literary work, life was made easy for him by sinecures; Pope dedicated his translation of Homer to him; and he was buried with great pomp in Westminster Abbey.2

In January, 1693, appeared at Drury Lane The Old Bachelor, which Dryden termed the best first play he had ever seen. "From Betterton downwards, all the first actors and actresses of the day were engaged in it; and 'Anne Bracegirdle, the beautiful, the lovable, the discreet, played Congreve's first heroine, as she was to play all the rest." The characters are for the most part conventional, but interest attaches to Captain Bluffe, a cowardly blusterer somewhat after the pattern of Ralph Roister Doister. The Double-Dealer (November, 1693) was far more elegant and polished, but by no means as immediately successful as The Old Bachelor. The plot was rather too complicated. Lady Touchwood is in love with Mellefont, to whom Cynthia, daughter of Sir Paul Plyant, is promised. Maskwell, however, the Double-Dealer, who deceives by telling the truth, knows her secret and determines to use it for the undoing of Mellefont and for his own conquest of Cynthia. He is the typical villain of melodrama

2

* See Thackeray's brilliant characterization in his chapter in English Humourists.

• Archer: Introduction to William Congreve in Masterpieces of the English Drama series, 2-3.

and leads the other characters through a maze of intrigue. Less involved and better knit is Love for Love (1695), the story of a witty young spendthrift, Valentine, who is fortunate in his love with the rich young lady, Angelica, and who has an especially clever servant Jeremy. While Congreve was writing this play "the affairs of the Theatre Royal, then the only playhouse in London, fell into sad disorder, which ended in a split between the patentee managers and their leading actors, headed by Betterton. The seceding players obtained a special license from William III, and constructed a new theatre within the walls of a tennis-court in Lincoln's Inn Fields." At Easter the enterprise was inaugurated with the production of Love for Love, with Betterton as Valentine and Mrs. Bracegirdle as Angelica. The play scored an unexampled success and made Congreve easily the foremost dramatist of the day. In 1697 appeared his sole tragedy, The Mourning Bride. This was an experiment in the later Elizabethan drama, and in the love of Osmyn, a noble prisoner, and Almeria, princess of Granada, has many of the marks of the heroic play. The workmanship is characterized by much artifice and the atmosphere by much gloom. Interestingly enough, however, the drama was very popular and highly regarded in its day. Congreve's last and in some ways his most brilliant comedy, The Way of the World (1700), contains the striking creation Millimant. This is the dramatist's most characteristic production. Interest centers not so much on the story or action as on the dialogue. The general effect of the play when presented, however, was that of clever and sophisticated people talking rapidly in a parlor before some • Archer, Introduction, 4.