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other people who lived in another and a lower world. Congreve's very brilliancy had overshot itself.

It is easy now to discount this dramatist who was so popular in his own day. He has not effectiveness of plot, it is true, nor have his strongest creations the broad humanity that the greatest comedy requires. He must be judged, however, not by his shortcomings but by his merits; and these were genuine and positive. To his wit he added grace and precision in diction, and there is considerable truth in Hazlitt's eulogy: "His style is inimitable, nay perfect. It is the highest model of comic dialogue. Every sentence is replete with sense and satire, conveyed in the most polished and pointed terms. Every page presents a shower of brilliant conceits, is a tissue of epigrams in prose, is a new triumph of wit, a new conquest over dullness. . . . There is a peculiar flavor in the very words, which is to be found in hardly any other writer." 5

58. John Vanbrugh.-Sir John Vanbrugh (16641726), after some early training in France and an adventurous experience in the army, became famous as the architect of "Blenheim " and other mansions; and, having filled the offices of comptroller of the royal works and surveyor of the works at Greenwich Hospital, he was knighted by George I. His work in architecture was not above criticism; he seems to have been rather too fond of massive effects, and Swift was one of those who satirized him. One might trace some connection, however, between his work in this field and that as a dramatist, for he excelled in construction. In gaiety, lightness of touch, and ease of

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* Lecture IV, "On Wycherley, Congreve, Vanbrugh, and Farquhar,” in The English Comic Writers.

dialogue he was also distinguished, though the moral tone of his work differed little from that of some of his contemporaries. He hardly ever surpassed his first effort as a comic dramatist, The Relapse, or Virtue in Danger (1696). This play was written as a sequel to Cibber's Love's Last Shift, or The Fool in Fashion, and contains the charming character Lord Foppington. The Provoked Wife (1697) is not without merit, but is hardly as amusing as The Relapse. It is sternly realistic, and contains the gross but strong character, Sir John Brute. The Confederacy (1705) has a plot that turns upon the possession of a necklace, and is marked by its author's usual vivacity, Dick Amlet and his mother and Flippanta, the lady'smaid, being interesting characters. Unfortunately in this play, however, the vices of the court have become those of the common people and are more revolting than ever. Vanbrugh also made some adaptations from the French and Spanish, and left unfinished a comedy, A Journey to London, which Cibber completed as The Provoked Husband.

59. George Farquhar.-George Farquhar (1678-1707)' was born in Londonderry and had some early experience on the Dublin stage; but he gave up this calling after he had accidentally wounded a fellow-actor, and he served for a while in the army. His first play, Love and a Bottle, appeared when he was but twenty and even then showed something of his ability in plotting and characterization and his understanding of the bases of popular appeal. The Recruiting Officer (1706) was intended as a sketch of country manners in Shropshire and of the humours incident to the recruiting system; and with such characters as Captain Plume and Sergeant Kite it enlarged the bounds of comedy. Farquhar's masterpiece, however, is

The Beaux' Stratagem (1707), which has an ingenious but not too improbable plot, and which, hovering as it does on the borderland of comedy and farce, is a forerunner of Goldsmith's She Stoops to Conquer. The scene is partly that of an inn with a rascally landlord Bonniface, and partly the home of Lady Bountiful, " an old, civil, country gentlewoman, that cures all her neighbors of all distempers, and is foolishly fond of her son, Sullen." The chief character is Archer, who is "very arch," and who pretends to be the valet of his friend, Aimwell, the Beau, but who is really interested in carrying on his own adventures. Farquhar has not Vanbrugh's vivacity and lightness of touch, and he still ostensibly writes the comedy of manners; at the same time he has some genuine originality, and his early death was undoubtedly a loss to the drama. With the outdoor atmosphere and the honest fun of The Beaux' Stratagem he was pointing the way to a saner and more wholesome English comedy. "He emerges from the ranks of the Orange and Augustan comedians as the prophet of a new order. For while he introduced no comic principle hitherto unknown, he blended the essentials of character, plot, and situation in juster proportions than any previous writer of realistic comedy, lifting their interest to an equality with that of the dialogue, to which they had been subordinated in the wit-ridden comedy of manners. The result was a form of comedy unsurpassed for naturalness and fidelity to life: the form adopted and perfected by Sheridan and Goldsmith."

60. Colley Cibber.-Colley Cibber (1671-1757), the son of a well-known sculptor, lived a long and prosperous

• Strauss: Introduction to The Recruiting Officer and The Beaux Stratagem, xiii.

life, possessed of imperturbable good humor and ability to meet and to handle without too much seriousness the accidents of fortune. At the age of eighteen he went upon the stage, and in later years he received as much as £50 a night, the highest sum yet paid to an English actor. His first play, Love's Last Shift (1696), incurred the censure of Collier and also the criticism of Congreve, who said that there were in it "a great many things that were like wit, that in reality were not wit;" but it kept possession of the stage for forty years. The Careless Husband (1704) was similarly successful, though some of its characters are mere puppets. "However, Cibber, being a man of the theatre, cared as little for human character as for literature. It was for him to fill the pit and boxes, and he filled them for two generations. In the making of plays he was an expert, and he cared not whose work it was that he adapted. He improved Shakespeare with as light a heart as he improved Mrs. Centlivre." His alteration of Richard III in fact gave to the stage a famous acting version, that for more than half a century was the accepted text. With his usual appreciation of the changes in public taste, he gave aid to the rising tide of sentimentalism, and in later years he rendered service to the stage by pleading the cause of legitimate drama against mere pantomime and spectacle. In 1730 he was appointed poet laureate, in which capacity he failed, for he had not the fire of a genuine poet. When, however, in a new edition of the Dunciad he was elevated by Pope to the chief place recently held by Theobald, although he replied he did not become bitter and was still really impervious to attack. His most

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7 Whibley: "The Restoration Drama, II," in C. H. E. L., VIII,

valuable work in the opinion of modern scholarship is Apology for the Life of Mr. Colley Cibber (1740), one of the most important records of the theatre ever written. It gives such comment upon the comedy of manners and the actors of the age of Queen Anne as is to be found nowhere else. Altogether Cibber was an important figure in his day, and in general he worked for the improvement of the drama.

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61. Richard Steele." If the plays of Colley Cibber mark the transition toward healthier moral standards, the new movement in eighteenth century drama is fairly inaugurated in the work of Richard Steele (1672-1729). To the conscious moral aim of Cibber, Steele added literary art and genius. [He] was, in a sense, the founder of sentimental comedy. Yet it must not be thought that the field of which he took possession had lain hitherto wholly undiscovered. Perhaps the real origin of sentimental comedy should be sought not simply in the moralized comedy of Cibber but in the somewhat sentimentalized tragedy of Otway and Southerne. The rising tide of sentiment invaded the entire drama." 8 It overflowed into other forms of expression; Richardson and Sterne, for instance, cultivated it in the novel. It was one of the most interesting phenomena in the literature of the century.

Steele himself, spurred by Collier's Short View, proceeded to write four plays with a definite moral purpose: The Funeral (1701) acted with success at Drury Lane; The Lying Lover (1703), an excessively pious production; The Tender Husband (1705), perhaps the author's best work in pure comedy; and then, after a period of essaywriting for the Tatler, the Spectator, and the Guardian, 8 Nettleton, 154-55.

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