RESTORATION COMEDY

17th CENTURY DRAMATISTS WHITEWASHED.

ARTS AND MORALITY.

So fascinating, apparently, to those who indulge in it, is the modern practice of whitewashing characters whose name and doings have been bywords of reproach that we cannot be surprised if the world's list of heroes shows a constant tendency to expand as the period in which they lived recedes into the background. Every one is familiar with the arguments in favor of the sincerity of Pontius Pilate, and even of Judas Iscariot. Others, like Nero and Caligula, once execrated as void of any decent attribute, by means of the pertinacious efforts of their apologists, have almost been set up again in popular esteem. To come nearer to the present, Mary Queen of Scots and Henry VII, have had their lives repaired and varnished, and as though the objects for our veneration were not sufficient in number we have had heroes constructed for us out of such unpromising subjects as Robespierre and his equally bloodthirsty associates. In some instances, the result has been an entire success; in others the final verdict still remains doubtful; whilst in other cases; again, the effort to secure revision has been a complete failure. More than one competent critic has attempted to correct the brilliant inaccuracies of Macaulay, and place Warren Hastings in a more favorable light. Such, however, is the effect of that historian's dazzling style that the labors of Lyall, Fitzjames Stephen, and Trotter been mostly fruitless. And now we have John Palmer, in a work entitled "The Comedy of Manners; a History of 1684-1720" (London Bell & Sons, from George Robertson & Co., Proprietary) taking the same historian to task, for his rough handling of the '' comic dramatists of the restoration Etheredge, Wycherley, Congreve and the rest. Let us recall briefly what Macaulay said of them:—

"This part of our literature is a disgrace to our language and our national character. it is clever, indeed, and very entertaining; but it is, in the most emphatic sense of the words, 'earthly, sensual, devilish.' Its indecency, though frequently such as is condemned not less by the rules of good taste than by those of morality, is not in our opinion so disgraceful a habit as its singularly inhuman spirit. We have here Belial, not as when he inspired Ovid and Ariosto, 'graceful and humane,' but with the iron eye and cruel sneer of Mephistopheles. We find ourselves in a world, in which the ladies are very profligate, impudent and unfeeling, and in which the men are too bad for any place but Pandemonium or Norfolk Island. We are surrounded with foreheads of orange, hearts like the nether millstone, and tongues set on fire of hell. We will take a characteristic offence of the dramatists of the Restoration—the proneness to make light of the seduction of married women. They invariably represent adultery, we do not say as a peccadillo, we do not say as an error which the violence of passion may excuse, but as the calling of a fine gentleman, as a grace without which his character would be imperfect. It is as essential to his breeding, and to his place in society, that he should make love to the wives of his neighbors as that he should know French, or have a sword at his side. In all this there is no passion, and scarcely anything which can be called preference. The hero intrigues just as he wears a wig, because if he did not he would be a queer fellow, a city prig, perhaps a Puritan. All the agreeable qualities are always given to the gallant. All the contempt and aversion are the portion of the unfortunate husband. Take Wycherby, and compare Horner with Pinchwife. Take Vanbrugh, and compare Constant with Sir John Brute. Take Farquhar, and compare Archer with Squire Sullen. Take Congreve, and compare Bellmour with Fondlewife, Careless with Sir Paul Plyant, or Scandal with Foresight. In all these cases, and in many more, the dramatist evidently does his best to make the person who commits the injury graceful, sensible, and spirited, and the person who suffers it a fool, or a tyrant, or both."

In all this there is a large measure of truth. Mr, Palmer does not deny it. But on grounds that will commend themselves to thoughtful minds, he holds that the spirit in which the dramatists of the Restoration wrote their comedies is entirely misconceived by the historian. Their aim was not to elevate debauchery or make game of chastity. It was merely to show how witty they could be. The marriages they exhibited on the stage were them selves comic. The husbands they portrayed were the victims as such not of outraged justice, but of a righteous Nemesis invoked by their own tyranny, meanness, or other vice. They made no claim to paint real life, and even Macaulay appears to have a glimpse of this truth when he speaks of the "singularly inhuman spirit of their works." Lamb saw the truth more clearly when he described the region of the Restoration comedy as a "Cloud-cuckoo-land," where the values are not human, values, but those of fairyland. No women in this world ever acted as the women of Wycherley are depicted as doing; and no man, whatever his disposition, could possibly have acted as did Mr. Horner, because no man has ever found the wives of a dozen of his friends rushing madly after him, either one at a time, or, as in Horner's case, together. In the world of reality (as, indeed, in the play) it is the gay Lothario, and not his fair partner, who is the pursuer; and long and arduous and painful the pursuit often is. His warfare is not against chastity, but against the feebleness, often amounting to total absence of the sexual appetite in the mass of the other sex. The indifference may be overcome by pecuniary inducement, or by flattery, or other allurement; but at would certainly be proof against the crude, bestial overtures of a Horner or a Careless. To predicate morality or immorality of either would be, in the phrase of Lamb, as absurd as to arraign a sleeper for his dreams. "They belong to the region of pure comedy, where no cold moral reigns. When we are among them we are among a chaotic people." Or, as Mr. Palmer contends:—

It is the first law of the cloud-cuckoo land of "The Country Wife" that the act of sex has no more suggestion of the indecently amorous than tumbling upstairs or losing one's hat in a gale. We are in an atmosphere where passion cannot breathe. Mr. Horner goes after his friend's wife precisely as boys go after their neighbor's apples. Either you have accepted this convention and without further thought of the proprieties enter with zest into the collection of Mr. Horner's china, or the comedy is worse than nonsense.

To see the subject in its due perspective we must bear in mind the relations long existing between the bourgeoisie and the stage-players. Long before the Restoration the latter, were in bad odor with respectability generally. In 1584 the Oxford University authorities forbade the presence of "common players" or the introduction of "common plays' into the University. The City of London had only just before successfully agitated for the suppression of plays on Sundays, and had subsequently pulled down five playhouses. The dramatists of the Restoration had their revenge in making the dull and cowardly citizens those at least possessed of wives fair enough to attract the attention of gallants —the butt of their ridicule. There is also a further point to be remembered. It was in the period of Charles II., and his successors that the actress first became prominent:—

She was of no class and of no caste; at least, if she ranked with any she ranked with the lowest. There was still in the air a bitter prejudice against the theatre and the performers, and to me Congreve's desire to be taken for a "gentleman" is full of the snobbery that association with a class one despises inevitably breeds. Now, if you despise an art and its practitioners, art will have its revenge; and by its refusal to give the theatre its proper place among the arts (however lowly that place may be) England reaped its reward. The despised, declassed, vagabond actors; and actresses set the tone of the theatre; and no one is so sensitive to that tone as the dramatist. There is hardly a single English dramatist from Shakespeare to Shaw whose work has not suffered from the fact that he has stooped to the tricks of the stage. The tricks differ from one age to the other—but they force the playwright to do what he might not otherwise. During the seventeenth century the stock trick in comedy was indecency—the actors insisted on being supplied, and Congreve and the rest had not the strength to refuse. What one dislikes in Restoration comedy is little more than a "gag," a piece of unpleasant business that a sounder stage has rendered intolerable.

The plays of the comic dramatists of the Restoration cannot, therefore, be taken as a faithful reflex of the manners of their time. Yet exception must be made for one detail which, however unpleasant, is worth mentioning for its illustration of one of the differences between our own time and theirs:—

In Etherege, in Shakespeare, sexual disease is a comic topic of the jester. Here we are faced with nothing less than, a social revolution. Really it is a revolution in medical science. In the seventeenth century people neither knew nor worried about disease; it was not a social but a personal matter. Dufoy, in "Love in a Tub," is for his contemporaries a legitimate object of merriment, His affliction is a personal misfortune, analogous to the physical misfortane of a drunkard one of the stock figures of simple farce. To-day the scenes in which the plight of Dufoy is for comic purposes exploited, are wholly disgusting. The point of view has completely changed. We are so fully awake to the consequences in our midst of a tragic scourge that it is entirely impossible to recover the light-hearted, irresponsible, attitude of Etherege and his contemporaries. It is a revolution, due to an increase of knowledge and a clearer appreciation of consequences. Sexual disease can never more be matter for jesting; for we have lost touch with the mental attitude that made it possible. To credit the comic dramatists with the modern view, and thereafter to find them playing with a subject from which today we instinctively shrink, is to see them, quite unjustly, as the malignant devils of Macaulay.

On the grounds already mentioned, that the dramatists were trying to air their wit, more particularly at the expense of the bourgeoisie, and were not claiming for their characters that, they were more than lay figures, Mr. Palmer defends them against, not only Macaulay, but Jeremy Collier, a fine exponent of dauntless fanaticism, whose "Short View of the Profaneness and Immorality of the English Stage" made an immense stir when it appeared, and was answered by Congreve himself. Collier founded his indictment of his dramatic contemporaries on the assumption that "the business of plays is to recommend virtue and discountenance vice." Their plays were "objectionable in the following particulars— "their smuttiness of expression; their profaneness and lewd application of Scripture; their making the top characters libertines, and giving them success their debauchery." Congreve accepted Collier's argument, but disputed its application. He contended that the moral little couplets with which, he and his contemporaries had interspersed their plays compensated for anything questionable:—
The true answer to Collier would have been that, art is not primarily concerned with morality. The impulse of the artist is not the impulse of the moralist to improve the world; it is the impulse of an artist to express it. But just as the beauty which a worker in marble and bronze aims at expressing is conditioned by his material, so is the poet's work conditioned by the period in which he lives, the moral laws which his moods and characters unconsciously obey. He does not aim at enforcing or weakening the moral code; but in the result be necessarily does so. Without being a Manichee one may reasonably see in the history of mankind an angel of darkness in conflict with an angel of light, and without circumscribing the sphere of the artist one may assert that the highest art has invariably expressed the highest morality. The great artists are those who have contributed most to the morality of the Commonwealth. Morality is an accident of the artist's accomplishment, not the intention. It is required of the artist that he should sincerely live, for his art alone. The other things are therefore added into him. Responding to a genuine inspiration the will leave the moral result of his endeavors to look after itself, Congreve, though not one of the great artists of the world was within his limits sincere. The same may be said of some of his contemporaries, not excluding Wycherley. With the exception of the tea-drinking scene between Mr. Horner and the Fidgets, "The Counter Wife" answers the severest test of imaginative sincerity; and in the proportion as it does so, it equally satisfies the severest test of morality.

 The Advertiser 28 February 1914,