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Title: William Wycherley [Four Plays]
Author: William Wycherley
Contributor: Baron Thomas Babington Macaulay Macaulay
Editor: William C. Ward
Release date: August 25, 2017 [eBook #55426]
Most recently updated: October 23, 2024
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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK WILLIAM
WYCHERLEY [FOUR PLAYS] ***
[THE PLAYS OF]
WILLIAM WYCHERLEY
EDITED, WITH AN INTRODUCTION AND
NOTES
By W. C. Ward
UNEXPURGATED EDITION
LONDON
T. FISHER UNWIN
PATERNOSTER SQUARE
1893
William Wycherley.
From the Picture by Sir Peter Lely.
CONTENTS
PAGE
Introduction. vii
William Wycherley,
[by Thomas Babington Macaulay]. xxiii
Love in a Wood; or, St. James's Park. 1
The Gentleman Dancing-Master. 125
The Country Wife. 243
The Plain Dealer. 363
Notes. 508
As long as men are false and women vain,
Whilst gold continues to be virtue's bane,
In pointed satire Wycherley shall reign.
Evelyn.
INTRODUCTION.
William Wycherley was, before Congreve arose to surpass him, the
most eminent master of that artificial school of Comedy which
commenced with the restoration of Charles II., and which may be
said to have perished, in a blaze as of a funeral pyre, with Sheridan.
Abandoning the beaten paths of English drama, the writers of this
school found, in the various intrigue of the Spanish theatre, in the
verbal vivacity and piquant satire of the French, a new basis for their
productions. Their works, as a class, have been designated the
Comedy of Manners, a title which aptly distinguishes them from the
Comedy of Human Life, set forth by Shakespeare. It is a title,
nevertheless, of limited applicability. The manners portrayed in these
comedies, if drawn from the life, illustrate but one side of human
character, and that side the most superficial. To divert by wit and
ingenuity being the writer's aim, all allusion to the deeper motives of
humanity was rejected as impertinent, or admitted only as an
occasional contrast to the prevailing tone. Thus the artificiality of the
characters is the consequence rather of incompleteness than of
untruth; they are, as it were, but half characters; the dialogue is no
longer, as with Shakespeare, the means of their development, but
the purpose of their creation.
Living in an age of loose manners and corrupt morals, the result, as
has often been pointed out, of the unnatural state of repression
which accompanied the Puritan supremacy, Wycherley cannot be
acquitted of the vices of his time, nor can it be contended that it was
altogether with the object of lashing these vices that he decked
them out with all the allurements of brilliant dialogue and diverting
situations. Yet I venture to assert that, in spite of their
licentiousness, these comedies possess claims to recognition not
lightly to be ignored. Nay, more: that their very indecency, although
the most open, is certainly not the most pernicious form of
immorality known to us in literature. For as the harm of licentious
allusions consists in their appeal to the basest passions of human
nature, so the appeal is stronger as the impression of human
passion is deeper. But these simulacra, these puppet semblances of
humanity, which Wycherley and his contemporaries summon upon
the stage for our diversion, what human passion can we discover in
these to which we should be in danger of unworthily responding? As
we read the plays no sense of reality disturbs us. Transfer the
language they employ, the actions they perform, to the characters in
a play of Shakespeare's, a novel of Richardson's, and our resentment
and detestation are instantly awakened. But the dramatis personæ
of Wycherley or of Congreve are not, as the characters of
Shakespeare and Richardson, men and women whom we feel to be
as real and living as those with whom we daily associate. They
merely simulate humanity so far as is requisite for the proper
enactment of their parts. And herein lies the test: a Cordelia, an
Iago, a Clarissa, a Lovelace, are, to our feelings, real creatures of
flesh and blood, whom we love or hate, as the case may be. The
characters of Wycherley and Congreve, on the contrary, we neither
love nor detest; we are interested not in what they are, but only in
what they say and do. They have no further existence for us than as
they act and speak on the stage before our eyes; touch them, and,
like ghosts in Elysium, they turn to empty air in our grasp.
Another counter-influence to the unwholesomeness of these
comedies is the current of mirth which runs through them, more or
less, from end to end. For laughter may be reckoned in some sort an
antidote to sensuality, at least to sensuality in its vilest and most
insinuating mood. "There is no passion," as Sterne says, "so serious
as lust;" and we may safely conclude that when laughter is
provoked, the wit of expression or the ludicrousness of situation is
more active to our apprehension than the license of sentiment.
It is sometimes urged against the comedies of this school that
Virtue, in them, is brought on the stage only to be derided. But this
charge is manifestly unjust. Virtue, indeed, is an unfrequent guest in
this house of mirth; she finds a refuge in the house of mourning
hard by, in the tragedies of the times. Yet if she chance to cross the
unwonted threshold, it is not to be laughed out of countenance, but
more often to be entertained as an honoured guest. Take, for
instance, the character of Christina, in Wycherley's Love in a Wood,
or even that of Alithea, in The Country Wife; the sentiments of
honour and purity that are set on their lips, or expressed in their
actions, are evidently intended to excite our esteem and admiration.
Nay, it may even be affirmed that if, among these shadowy
creatures, there be any that affect us, beyond the others, with some
sense of an approach to living reality, it is precisely the virtuous
characters from whom such an impression is derived. It is true, on
the other hand, that the sin of adultery, so common to the dramatic
plots of this period, is treated not only without severity, but as a
pleasant jest. To the husbands, in general, small mercy is shown. Yet
what husbands are these—these Pinchwifes, Fondlewifes, et hoc
genus omne? It is less the sanctity of marriage that is attacked, or
held up to ridicule, in their persons, than their own vices, their
jealousy, tyranny, or folly. And, after all, it is by no means in the
crime itself, but in the ingenuity of intrigue, that we are expected to
find diversion; and the utter absence of genuine passion on the part
of these stage criminals renders any appeal to passion in ourselves
out of the question.
It is not with any intention of excusing the license which abounds in
Wycherley's comedies that I have ventured to offer these few
considerations in their behalf. I contend only that their laughing
outrages upon decency, are infinitely less harmful, because more
superficial, than the sentimental lewdness which, arising from a
deeper depravity, instils a more subtle venom; that, condemn it as
we needs must, we may yet stop short of attaching to the immorality
of the dramatists of the Restoration such consequence as to debar
ourselves, for its sake, from enjoying to the full the admirable wit
and ingenuity which constitute the chief merit of their performances.
Wycherley produced but four comedies, which, however, contain
almost all of intrinsic value that remains from his pen. Besides these,
he himself published but one volume, a folio of Miscellany-Poems,
which appeared in 1704, when the author was sixty-four years of
age. Of these pieces nothing favourable can be affirmed even by the
friendliest critic. They form a strange olla podrida of so-called
philosophy and obscenity; they are dull without weight, or lewd
without wit; or if even here and there a good thought occur, the ore
is scarcely of such value as to be worth the pains of separating from
the dross. The book suggests a curious picture of the veteran
dramatist, ever and anon laying aside his favourite Rochefoucauld or
Montaigne to chuckle feebly over the reminiscence of some smutty
story of his youthful days. The versification is, as Macaulay says,
beneath criticism; Wycherley had no spark of poetry in his whole
composition. In fine, we may apply to this volume, without
qualification, Dryden's remarks upon poor Elkanah Settle; "His style
is boisterous and rough-hewn; his rhyme incorrigibly lewd, and his
numbers perpetually harsh and ill-sounding." Yet there is one thing
which redeems the volume from utter contempt, as a testimony, not,
indeed, to the author's talent, but to the constancy and
disinterestedness of his temper. I refer to the brave verses
addressed to his friend the Duke of Buckingham, on the occasion of
that versatile nobleman's disgrace and imprisonment in the Tower.
The key note is struck in the opening lines:
"Your late Disgrace is but the Court's Disgrace,
As its false accusation but your Praise."
These lines, it may be remarked, are intended as a rhymed couplet,
and may serve as one instance out of many of the "incorrigible
lewdness" of Wycherley's rhyme; but, paltry as the verses may be,
the feeling which prompted them was surely deserving of respect.
The pieces in prose and verse, which, "having the misfortune to fall
into the hands of a mercenary, were published in 1728, in 8vo,
under the title of The Posthumous Works of William Wycherley Esq.,"
are on the whole superior to the Miscellany-Poems, yet, excepting
perhaps some of the prose aphorisms which constitute the first part
of the collection, little or nothing is to be found, even here, worth
resuscitating. Such facility or occasional elegance as the verses
possess must be wholly ascribed to the corrections of Pope; but
Pope himself failed in the impracticable attempt to make a silk purse
out of a sow's ear. Some few of the best pieces, as the lines on
Solitude, might possibly pass muster as the worst in a better
volume, while the epistle to Dryden (who had invited Wycherley's
collaboration in the construction of a comedy—an honour which the
younger author gratefully and modestly declined) is interesting
personally, and the strain of elaborate compliment, to which, after
the fashion of the day, Wycherley treated his correspondents, is
here, for once, not wholly misapplied. The Maxims, however, contain
better stuff than the verses, and fully justify Pope's repeated hints to
the author that "the greater part" of his pieces "would make a much
better figure as single maxims and reflections in prose, after the
manner of your favourite Rochefoucauld, than in verse."[1] Although,
for the most part, as trite as moral aphorisms usually are, they are
not without here and there a touch of wit, of terseness, or even of
wisdom. Here, for instance, is a pretty simile:—"False friends, like
the shadow upon a dial, are ever present to the sunshine of our
fortunes, and as soon gone when we begin to be under a cloud."
Here, again, is a touch of characteristic satire:—"Old men give young
men good counsel, not being able longer to give them bad
examples."[2] And for a specimen of his wisdom take the following:
—"The silence of a wise man is more wrong to mankind than the
slanderer's speech."
I have now noticed all that has appeared in print of Wycherley's
authorship beyond his letters to Pope (which possess at least the
merit of occasioning Pope's letters to Wycherley), and a few letters
of earlier date, published by Dennis,[3] which contain, however,
nothing of more consequence than a string of extravagant and
affected encomiums upon his correspondent. Something remains to
be said on the subject of our author's personal character, which I
shall endeavour to set in a juster light than that in which it is
presented by Macaulay, whose vivid scrutiny, like a strong torch-
light, brings out the worse parts into sharp relief, while it leaves the
better in dense obscurity. It is not to be doubted that Wycherley
participated in the fashionable follies and vices of the age in which
he lived. His early intrigue with the Duchess of Cleveland was
notorious. The license of his own writings is a standing witness
against him, and the indecency of some of the verses which he
published in his old age proves that his mind reverted to the scenes
of his youth with feelings other than those of a repentant sinner. Yet
in accepting the evidence of Wycherley's writings we should beware
of over-rating its importance. Dryden's character is well known as
that of a modest and excellent man; yet Dryden occasionally
produced passages abundantly obscene. Libertinism was the fashion
of the age, and although the fashion had somewhat changed when
Wycherley published his Miscellany-Poems, we can feel little surprise
that the productions of an aged and infirm man should be redolent
rather of the days when he was crowned with honours and sated
with success, than of those later years of ill-health and obscurity. In
this man's composition the clay was assuredly mingled with pure
metal. Nothing in the testimony of his contemporaries is so striking
as the tone of affection and esteem which they continually assume
in speaking of him. Dryden writes to John Dennis that he has laid
aside his intention of commenting upon some friend's purpose of
marriage; "for, having had the Honour to see my Dear Friend
Wycherley's Letter to him on that occasion, I find nothing to be
added or amended. But as well as I love Mr. Wycherley, I confess I
love myself so well, that I will not shew how much I am inferior to
him in Wit and Judgment, by undertaking anything after him."[4]
And Dryden's regard was gratefully and cordially reciprocated. In his
first letter to Wycherley Pope refers to the high satisfaction which he
experienced in hearing the old dramatist, at their very first meeting,
"doing justice to his dead friend, Mr. Dryden." Wycherley's own
epistle, in verse, to the great poet I have already mentioned; it is
filled with expressions, sincere if exaggerated, of regard and
admiration; and long after Dryden's death, in an essay[5] which
appeared not until its author had, himself, been years in his grave,
Wycherley writes of "my once good friend, Mr. Dryden, whose
Memory will be honour'd when I have no Remembrance."
His attachment to his friends, indeed, appears to have been a
prominent characteristic of his disposition. Major Pack, in a short
memoir prefixed to the Posthumous Works, declares that "he was as
impatient to hear his Friend calumniated, as some other people
would be to find themselves defamed. I have more than once," he
adds, "been a witness of that honourable Tenderness in his Temper."
His friendship with Pope is one of the best known incidents in his
life. It commenced in 1704, when Wycherley was sixty-four and Pope
but sixteen years of age, and, although at times interrupted,
terminated only with the death of the former in 1715. Their
correspondence displays on both sides the marks of sincere regard.
Wycherley's generous appreciation the young genius repaid with
gratitude and affection, which, however, in the moments even of its
warmest ardour, never degenerated into servility. The last published
letter between them is dated May 2, 1710. It was succeeded by a
period of prolonged estrangement. During the preceding year a
silence of unusual duration on the part of Wycherley had aroused
the anxiety of Pope, who alludes to it, in his correspondence with
their common friend Cromwell, in terms of heart-felt concern.
Wycherley had been dangerously ill, and Cromwell had acquainted
Pope with the news of his recovery.
"You have delivered me," he replies, under date of Oct. 19, 1709,
"from more anxiety than he imagines me capable of on his account,
as I am convinced by his long silence. However the love of some
things rewards itself, as of Virtue, and of Mr. Wycherley. I am
surprised at the danger you tell me he has been in, and must agree
with you that our nation would have lost in him as much wit and
probity, as would have remained (for aught I know) in the rest of it.
My concern for his friendship will excuse me (since I know you
honour him so much, and since you know I love him above all men)
if I vent a part of my uneasiness to you, and tell you that there has
not been wanting one to insinuate malicious untruths of me to Mr.
Wycherley, which, I fear, may have had some effect upon him."
The correspondence was renewed, with all the old kindness, in the
following spring, but was soon again to be interrupted. Pope had, for
some years, been engaged upon the occasional correction and
emendation of Wycherley's worse than mediocre verses, and the
unsparing honesty with which he discharged this delicate office,
however creditable to his character, could not but be at times
unpalatable to the author now seventy years of age, and rendered
peevish by ill-health and loss of memory. His last published letter to
Pope betrays some natural indignation at the wholesale slaughter
which the young poet was making of his halting lines, although, with
the politeness of an old courtier, he thanks him for his freedom,
which he "shall always acknowledge with all sort of gratitude." It is
probable, also, that some enemy of Pope had again possessed the
old man's ear with slanders, to which his shattered memory would
render him the more accessible, and Wycherley again broke off the
correspondence, leaving his friend to wonder how he had displeased
him, as knowing himself "guilty of no offence but of doing sincerely
just what he bid me."
Pope's references to Wycherley, during this new estrangement, show
him to have been deeply hurt. They indicate, however, more of
sorrow than of resentment, and his delight was unfeigned when, in
the autumn of 1711, his friend was once more reconciled to him,
and once more wrote to him and spoke of him in terms of the
warmest affection. Cromwell, from whose correspondence with Pope
we derive our information regarding this second reconciliation
narrates the following pleasant incident.
"Mr. Wycherley came to town on Sunday last, and, kindly surprised
me with a visit on Monday morning. We dined and drank together;
and I saying, 'To our loves,' he replied, 'It is Mr. Pope's health.'" On
these terms we leave them. Their correspondence of this date has
not been made public, nor do we know if malice or
misunderstanding again destroyed the concord thus happily re-
established. Pope's letters to Cromwell, moreover, cease about this
time, and those which he addressed to others contain no further
mention of Wycherley, until in January 1716, he describes to Mr.
Blount the closing scene of the life of "that eminent comic poet, and
our friend."
In after years, speaking of Wycherley, Pope said: "We were pretty
well together to the last: only his memory was so totally bad, that he
did not remember a kindness done to him, even from minute to
minute. He was peevish, too, latterly; so that sometimes we were
out a little, and sometimes in. He never did an unjust thing to me in
his whole life; and I went to see him on his death-bed."[6]
One more of his contemporaries I propose to bring forward as a
witness to our author's character. George Granville, Baron
Lansdowne, to the ordinary qualifications of an accomplished
gentleman added some pretensions, not altogether contemptible, to
the rank of a minor poet. He was the author of a vast number of
elegantly written verses (usually addressed to "Mira"), of a tragedy
(Heroic Love) commended by Dryden, and of an amusing comedy
(Once a Lover and always a Lover) of the school of Wycherley and
Congreve. In the second volume of his collected works is to be found
an epistle in which he remarks, with some minuteness, upon the
character and disposition of his friend Wycherley.
This letter is not dated, but, from internal evidence, must have been
written about the year 1705 or 1706. Lansdowne sets out with
declaring that his partiality to Wycherley as a friend might render
what he says of him suspected, "if his Merit was not so well and so
publickly established as to set him above Flattery. To do him barely
Justice," he continues, "is an Undertaking beyond my Skill." Further
he writes: "As pointed and severe as he is in his Writings, in his
Temper he has all the Softness of the tenderest Disposition; gentle
and inoffensive to every Man in his particular Character; he only
attacks Vice as a publick Enemy, compassionating the Wound he is
under a Necessity to probe." Yet, "in my Friend every Syllable, every
Thought is masculine;" and it was, questionless, from this
particularity that he acquired the sobriquet (alluding, at the same
time, to The Plain Dealer) of Manly Wycherley. Of our Plain Dealer as
a poet Lansdowne candidly confesses—"It is certain he is no Master
of Numbers; but a Diamond is not less a Diamond for not being
polish'd." And then, addressing his correspondent: "Congreve," he
writes, "is your familiar Acquaintance, you may judge of Wycherley
by him: they have the same manly way of Thinking and Writing, the
same Candour, Modesty, Humanity, and Integrity of Manners: It is
impossible not to love them for their own Sakes, abstracted from the
Merit of their Works." In conclusion Lansdowne invites his
correspondent to his lodging, to meet Wycherley, as well as "a young
Poet, newly inspired," whose "Name is Pope," who "is not above
seventeen or eighteen years of age, and promises Miracles," and
whom Wycherley and Walsh "have taken under their Wing."
The foregoing testimonies are, I venture to think, sufficiently explicit.
Johnson, indeed, supposes Wycherley to have been "esteemed
without virtue, and caressed without good-humour," but a statement
so obviously self-contradictory deserves no consideration. One thing
is clear: that Wycherley was both beloved and honoured by men
whose temper and capacity give irrefragable authority to their
judgment, and that judgment, based, as it was upon personal and
intimate acquaintance, it were presumption to dispute.
The present text is that of the first editions, which I have carefully
collated with, and occasionally corrected by, the text of the edition of
1713 (the last published during the author's life), and that of Leigh
Hunt's edition of 1849. I have usually followed the punctuation of
Leigh Hunt, who was the first to punctuate the plays accurately.
Wm. C. Ward.
WILLIAM WYCHERLEY.[7]
William Wycherley was born in 1640. He was the son of a Shropshire
gentleman of old family,[8] and of what was then accounted a good
estate. The property was estimated at £600 a year, a fortune which,
among the fortunes at that time, probably ranked as a fortune of
£2,000 a year would rank in our days.
William was an infant when the civil war broke out; and, while he
was still in his rudiments, a Presbyterian hierarchy and a republican
government were established on the ruins of the ancient church and
throne. Old Mr. Wycherley was attached to the royal cause, and was
not disposed to intrust the education of his heir to the solemn
Puritans who now ruled the universities and the public schools.
Accordingly, the young gentleman was sent at fifteen to France. He
resided some time in the neighbourhood of the Duke of Montausier,
chief of one of the noblest families of Touraine. The Duke's wife, a
daughter of the house of Rambouillet, was a finished specimen of
those talents and accomplishments for which her house was
celebrated. The young foreigner was introduced to the splendid
circle which surrounded the duchess, and there he appears to have
learned some good and some evil. In a few years he returned to this
country a fine gentleman and a Papist. His conversion, it may safely
be affirmed, was the effect not of any strong impression on his
understanding or feelings, but partly of intercourse with an
agreeable society in which the Church of Rome was the fashion, and
partly of that aversion to Calvinistic austerities which was then
almost universal amongst young Englishmen of parts and spirit, and
which, at one time, seemed likely to make one half of them Catholics
and the other half Atheists.
But the Restoration came. The universities were again in loyal
hands, and there was reason to hope that there would be again a
national church fit for a gentleman. Wycherley became a member of
Queen's College, Oxford, and abjured the errors of the Church of
Rome. The somewhat equivocal glory of turning, for a short time, a
good-for-nothing Papist into a very good-for-nothing Protestant is
ascribed to Bishop Barlow.
Wycherley left Oxford without taking a degree, and entered at the
Temple, where he lived gaily for some years, observing the humours
of the town, enjoying its pleasures and picking up just as much law
as was necessary to make the character of a pettifogging attorney or
of a litigious client entertaining in a comedy.
From an early age, he had been in the habit of amusing himself by
writing. Some wretched lines of his on the Restoration are still
extant. Had he devoted himself to the making of verses, he would
have been nearly as far below Tate and Blackmore as Tate and
Blackmore are below Dryden. His only chance for renown would
have been that he might have occupied a niche in a satire between
Flecknoe and Settle. There was, however, another kind of
composition in which his talents and acquirements qualified him to
succeed; and to that he judiciously betook himself.
In his old age he used to say that he wrote Love in a Wood at
nineteen, The Gentleman Dancing-Master at twenty-one, the Plain
Dealer at twenty-five, and The Country Wife at one or two and thirty.
We are incredulous, we own, as to the truth of this story. Nothing
that we know of Wycherley leads us to think him incapable of
sacrificing truth to vanity. And his memory in the decline of his life
played him such strange tricks that we might question the
correctness of his assertion without throwing any imputation on his
veracity. It is certain that none of his plays was acted till 1672,[9]
when he gave Love in a Wood to the public. It seems improbable
that he should resolve, on so important an occasion as that of a first
appearance before the world, to run his chance with a feeble piece,
written before his talents were ripe, before his style was formed,
before he had looked abroad into the world; and this when he had
actually in his desk two highly finished plays, the fruit of his matured
powers. When we look minutely at the pieces themselves, we find in
every part of them reason to suspect the accuracy of Wycherley's
statement. In the first scene of Love in a Wood, to go no further, we
find many passages which he could not have written when he was
nineteen. There is an allusion to gentlemen's periwigs, which first
came into fashion in 1663; an allusion to guineas, which were first
struck in 1663; an allusion to the vests which Charles ordered to be
worn at court in 1666; an allusion to the fire of 1666; and several
allusions to political and ecclesiastical affairs which must be assigned
to times later than the year of the Restoration—to times when the
government and the city were opposed to each other, and when the
Presbyterian ministers had been driven from the parish churches to
the conventicles. But it is needless to dwell on particular
expressions. The whole air and spirit of the piece belong to a period
subsequent to that mentioned by Wycherley. As to The Plain Dealer,
which is said to have been written when he was twenty-five, it
contains one scene unquestionably written after 1675, several which
are later than 1668, and scarcely a line which can have been
composed before the end of 1666.
Whatever may have been the age at which Wycherley composed his
plays, it is certain that he did not bring them before the public till he
was upwards of thirty. In 1672, Love in a Wood was acted with more
success than it deserved, and this event produced a great change in
the fortunes of the author. The Duchess of Cleveland cast her eyes
upon him and was pleased with his appearance. This abandoned
woman, not content with her complaisant husband and her royal
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