Still there remains another grievance which is not so elementary nor so easily laid to rest; and that is, of course, the plot. Who can remember the plot when the book is shut? Who has not been teased by its intricacies while the book is open? As everybody is agreed something must happen, and it matters very little what happens if it serves to make the characters more real, or more profound, than they would otherwise have been; a plot should put the characters on the rack and show them thus extended. But what are we to say when the plot merely teases and distorts the character, and distracts us from any more profound enjoyment than that of asking who is behind that door, who is behind that mask? To this Congreve the critic gives us no satisfactory answer. Sometimes, as in the preface to The Double Dealer, he prides himself that he has maintained ‘the unities of the drama.’fn6 But a certain doubt declares itself elsewhere. In the dedication to The Way of the World he envies Terence. Terence, he points out, had ‘great advantages to encourage his undertaking for he built most on the foundations of Menander; his plots were generally modelled and his characters ready drawn to his hand.’fn7 Either then, one must conclude, the old weather-worn plots which slip into the mind so smoothly that we scarcely notice them – the legendary, the prehistoric – are the only tolerable ones, or we are forced to suppose that the plot-making genius is so seldom combined with the genius for creating character that we must allow even Shakespeare to fail here – even Shakespeare sometimes lets the plot dictate to the character; suffers the story to drag the character out of its natural orbit. And Congreve, who had not Shakespeare’s miraculous fecundity, who could not cover up the farfetched and the mechanical with the abundance of his imagination and the splendour of his poetry, fails here. The character is squeezed to fit the situation; the machine has set its iron stamp upon live flesh and blood.

  But, now that we have dismissed the questions that hang about an unopened book, let us submit ourselves to the dramatist in action. The dramatist is in action from the very first word on the very first page. There are no preliminaries, no introductions; the curtain rises and they are in the thick of it. Never was any prose so quick. Miraculously pat, on the spot, each speaker caps the last, without fumbling or hesitation; their minds are full charged; it seems as if they had to rein themselves in, bursting with energy as they are, alive and alert to their finger tips. It is we who fumble, make irrelevant observations, notice the chocolate or the cinnamon, the sword or the muslin, until the illusion takes hold of us, and what with the rhythm of the speech and the indescribable air of tension, of high breeding that pervades it, the world of the stage becomes the real world and the other, outside the play, but the husk and cast-off clothing. To attempt to reduce this first impression to words is as futile as to explain a physical sensation – the slap of a wave, the rush of wind, the scent of a bean field. It is conveyed by the curl of a phrase on the ear; by speed; by stillness. It is as impossible to analyse Congreve’s prose as to distinguish the elements – the bark of a dog, the song of a bird, the drone of the branches – which make the summer air. But then, since words have meaning, we notice here a sudden depth beneath the surface, a meaning not grasped but felt, and then come to realise something not merely dazzling in this world, but natural, for all its wit; even familiar, and traditional. It has a coarseness, a humour something like Shakespeare’s; a toppling imagination that heaps image upon image; a lightning swiftness of apprehension that snatches a dozen meanings and compacts them into one. And yet it is not Shakespeare’s world; for just as we think, tossed up on the crest of some wonderful extravagance of humour, to be swept into poetry we come slap against hard common sense, and realise that here is a different combination of elements from the poet’s. There is tragedy – Lady Touchwood and Maskwell in The Double Dealer are not comic figures – but when tragedy and comedy collide it is comedy that wins. Lady Touchwood seizes her dagger; but she drops it. A moment more and it would have been too late. Already she has passed from prose to rant. Already we feel not that the scene is ridiculous, for there is passion there; but that it is unsafe. Congreve has lost his control, his fine balance is upset; he feels the ground tremble beneath him. Mr Brisk’s comment, ‘This is all very surprising, let me perish,’fn8 is the appropriate one. With that he finds his feet and withdraws.

  The world that we have entered, then, in Congreve’s comedies is not the world of the elemental passions. It is an enclosure surrounded with the four walls of a living room. Ladies and gentlemen go through their figures with their tongues to the measure dictated by common sense as precisely as they dance the minuet with their feet. But the image has only a superficial rightness. We have only to compare Congreve’s comedy with Goldsmith’s or with Sheridan’s, let alone with Wilde’s,fn9 to be aware that if, to distinguish him from the Elizabethans, we confine him to a room, not a world, that room is not the drawing room of the eighteenth century, still less is it the drawing room of the nineteenth century. Drays roar on the cobbles beneath; the brawling of street hucksters and tavern rioters comes in at the open windows. There is a coarseness of language, an extravagance of humour, and a freedom of manners which cast us back to the Elizabethans. Yet it is in a drawing room, surrounded by all the fopperies and refinements of the most sophisticated society in the world, that these ladies and gentlemen speak so freely, drink so deeply and smell so strong. It is the contrast, perhaps, that makes us more aware of the coarseness of the Restoration dramatists than of the Elizabethan. A great lady who spits on the floor offends where a fishwife merely amuses. And perhaps it was for this reason that Congreve incurred first the majestic censure of Dr Johnson and then the more supercilious contempt of the Victorians who neglected, Sir Edmund Gosse informs us, either to read him or to act him.fn10 More conscious than we are of the drawing room, they were quicker repelled perhaps by any violation of its decencies.

  But however we may account for the change, to reach The Way of the World through The Old Bachelor, The Double Dealer and Love for Love is to become more and more at loggerheads with Dr Johnson’s dictum:

  It is acknowledged, with universal conviction, that the perusal of his works will make no man better; and that their ultimate effect is to represent pleasure in alliance with vice, and to relax those obligations by which life ought to be regulated.fn11

  On the contrary, to read Congreve’s plays is to be convinced that we may learn from them many lessons much to our advantage both as writers of books and – if the division is possible – as livers of life. We might learn there, to begin with, the discipline of plain speech; to leave nothing lurking in the insidious shades of obscurity that can be said in words. The phrase is always finished; nothing is left to dwindle into darkness, to sound after the words are over. Then, when we have learnt to express ourselves, we may go on to observe the indefatigable hard work of a great writer: how he keeps us entertained because something is always happening, and on the alert because that something is always changing, and by contrasting laughter and seriousness, action and thought, keeps the edge of the emotions always sharp. To ring so many changes and keep up so rapid a speed of movement might well be enough, but in addition each of these characters has its own being, and each differs – the sea-dog from the fop, the old eccentric from the man of the world, the maid from the mistress. He has to enter into each; to leave his private pigeon hole and invest himself with the emotions of another human being, so that speech meets speech at full tilt, each from its own angle.

  A genius for phrase-making helps him. Now he strikes off a picture in a flash: ‘… there he lies with a great beard, like a Russian bear upon a drift of snow.’fn12 Now in a marvellous rush of rapid invention he conveys a whole chapter of guttersnipe life.

  That I took from the washing of old gauze and weaving of dead hair, with a bleak blue nose, over a chafing dish of starv’d embers, and dining behind a traverse rag, in a shop no bigger than a bird cage.fn13

  Then, again, like some miraculous magpie he repeats the naïve words, follows the crude emotions, of a great gawky girl like Miss Prue.fn14 However it is done, to enter into such diverse characters is, the moralists may note, at any rate to forget your own. Undoubtedly it is true that his language is often coarse; but then it is also true that his characters are more alive, quicker to strip off veils, more intolerant of circumlocutions than the ordinary run of people. They are reduced to phrase-making oftener than we could wish, and fine phrases often sound cynical; but then the situations are often so improbable that only fine phrases will cover them, and words, we must remember, were still to Congreve’s generation as delightful as beads to a savage. Without that rapture the audacity of his splendid phrases would have been impossible.

  But if we have to admit that some of the characters are immoral, and some of the opinions cynical, still we must ask how far we can call a character immoral or an opinion cynical if we feel that the author himself was aware of its immorality and intended its cynicism? And, though it is a delicate matter to separate an author from his characters and detach him from their opinions, no one can read Congreve’s comedies without detecting a common atmosphere, a general attitude that holds them together for all their diversity. The stress laid on certain features creates a common likeness as unmistakable as the eyes and nose of a family face. The plays are veined through and through with satire. ‘Therefore I would rail in my writings and be revenged,’ says Valentine in Love for Love.fn15 Congreve’s satire seems sometimes, as Scandal says, to have the whole world for its butt. Yet there is underneath a thinking mind, a mind that doubts and questions. Some hint thrown out in passing calls us back to make us ponder it: for instance, Mellefont’s ‘Ay, My Lord, I shall have the same reason for happiness that your Lordship has, I shall think myself happy.’fn16 Or, again, a sudden phrase like ‘There’s comfort in a hand stretched out to one that’s sinking’fn17 suggests, by its contrast, a sensibility that trembles on the edge of tears. Nothing is stressed; sentiment never broadens into sentimentality; everything passes as quickly as a ray of light and blends as indistinguishably. But if we needs must prove that the creator of Sir Sampson Legendfn18 and old Foresight had not only a prodigious sense of human absurdity and a bitter conviction of its insincerity but as quick a regard for its honesty and decency as any Victorian or Dr Johnson himself, we need only point to his simplicity. After we have run up the scale of absurdity to its sublime heights a single word again and again recalls us to common sense. ‘That my poor father should be so very silly’fn19 is one such comment, immensely effective in its place. Again and again we are brought back to sanity and daylight by the sound of a voice speaking in its natural tones.

  But it is the Valentines, the Mirabells, the Angelicasfn20 and the Millamants who keep us in touch with truth and, by striking a sudden serious note, bring the rest to scale. They have sharpened their emotions upon their wits. They have flouted each other; bargained; taken love and examined it by the light of reason; teased and tested each other almost beyond endurance. But when it comes to the point and she must be serious, the swiftest of all heroines, whose mind and body seem equally winged, so that there is a rush in the air as she passes and we exclaim with Scandal, ‘Gone; why, she was never here, nor anywhere else,’fn21 has a centre of stillness in her heart and enough emotion in her words to furbish out a dozen pages of eloquent disquisition. ‘Why does not the man take me? Would you have me give myself to you over again?’ The words are simple, and yet, after what has already been said, so brimming with meaning that Mirabell’s reply, ‘Ay, over and over again,’fn22 seems to receive into itself more than words can say. And this depth of emotion, we have to reflect, the change and complexity that are implied in it, have been reached in the direct way; that is by making each character speak in his or her own person, without addition from the author or any soliloquy save such as can be spoken on the stage in the presence of an audience. No, whether we read him from the moralist’s angle or from the artist’s, to agree with Dr Johnson is an impossibility. To read the comedies is not to ‘relax those obligations by which life ought to be regulated.’ On the contrary, the more slowly we read him and the more carefully, the more meaning we find, the more beauty we discover.

  Here perhaps, in the reflections that linger when the book is shut and The Way of the World is finished, lies the answer to the old puzzle why at the height of his powers he stopped writing. It is that he had done all that was possible in that kind. The last play held more than any audience could grasp at a single sitting. The bodily presence of actors and actresses must, it would seem, often overpower the words that they had to speak. He had forgotten, or disregarded, his own axiom that ‘the distance of the stage requires the figures represented to be something larger than the life.’ He had written, as he says in the dedication, for ‘the Few,’ and ‘but little of it was prepar’d for that general taste which seems now to be predominant in the palates of our audience.’fn23 He had come to despise his public, and it was time therefore either to write differently or to leave off. But the novel, which offered another outlet, was uncongenial; he was incorrigibly dramatic, as his one attempt at fiction shows.fn24 And poetry, too, was denied him, for though again and again he brings us to the edge of poetry in a phrase like ‘You’re a woman, One to whom Heav’n gave beauty, when it grafted roses on a briar,’fn25 and suggests, as Meredithfn26 does in his novels, the mood of poetry, he was unable to pass beyond human idiosyncrasy to the more general statement of poetry. He must move and laugh and bring us into touch with action instantly.

  Since these two paths then were blocked, what other way was there for a writer of Congreve’s temperament but to make an end? Dangerous as it is to distinguish a writer from his work, we cannot help but recognise a man behind the plays – a man as sensitive to criticism as he was skilled in inflicting it on others; for what is his defiance of the critics but deference to them? A scholar too with all the scholar’s fastidiousness; a man of birth and breeding for whom the vulgar side of fame held little gratification; a man, in short, who might well have said with Valentine, ‘Nay, I am not violently bent upon the trade,’fn27 and sit, handsome and portly and sedate as his portrait shows him, ‘very gravely with his hat over his eyes,’fn28 as the gossips observed him, content to strive no more.

  But indeed he left very little for the gossips to feed upon; no writer of his time and standing passed through the world more privately. Voltaire left a dubious anecdote;fn29 the Duchess of Marlborough, it is said, had an effigy of him set at her table after his death;fn30 his few discreet letters provide an occasional hint: ‘Ease and quiet is what I hunt after’; ‘I feel very sensibly and silently for those whom I love’fn31 – that is all. But there is a fitness in this very absence of relics as though he had consumed whatever was irrelevant to his work and left us to find him there. And there, indeed, we find something beyond himself; beyond the many figures of his fertile and brilliant imagination; beyond Tattle and Ben,fn32 Foresight and Angelica, Maskwell and Lady Wishfort, Mirabell and Mellefont and Millamant. Between them they have created what is not to be confined within the limits of a single character or expressed in any one play – a world where each part depends upon the other, the serene, impersonal and indestructible world of art.

  1938

  Lady Ottoline Morrell

  The remarkable qualities of Ottoline Morrell – her originality, her courage, the personal ascendancy that created so memorable a society – have already been noted in your columns.fn2 Still the desire remains to testify, however imperfectly, to the splendid use she made of those rare gifts of fortune and of character. The great lady who suddenly appeared in the world of artists and writers immediately before the War easily lent herself to caricature. It was impossible not to exclaim in amazement at the strangeness; at the pearls, at the brocades, at the idealisms and exaltations. Again, with what imperious directness, like that of an artist intolerant of the conventional and the humdrum, she singled out the people she admired for qualities that she was often the first to detect and champion, and brought together at Bedford Square and then at Garsington, Prime Ministers and painters, Bishops and freethinkers, the famous and the obscure!fn3 Whether she sat at the head of her table against a background of pale yellow and pomegranate,fn4 or mused at Garsington with her embroidery on her lap and undergraduates at her feet, or held on her way down the Tottenham Court Road like a Renaissance princess listening to inaudible music while the passers by stared, she created her own world. And it was a world in which conflicts and collisions were inevitable; nor did she escape the ridicule of those whom she befriended.

  But beneath this exotic appearance, sometimes so odious to her – ‘Look at my hands!’ she once protested. ‘How ugly they are!’ – there was a complex nature. She boasted, whether fancifully or not, of a French washerwoman among her ancestresses. Certainly there was a raciness in her refinement; a democratic spirit which led her not only to flout the conventions of the world, but to keep her house bravely open during the War to the unpopular and the friendless. It was that inner freedom, that artist’s vision, that led her past the decorated drawing-room with all its trappings to the actual workshop where the painter had his canvas, and the writer his manuscript. The ‘great hostess’ was very humble in the presence of those who could create beauty; and very generous; and very sincere. For beneath the glamour which she created as inevitably as the lily pours out scent, there was a diffident and shrinking spirit. As the years passed this became more and more apparent. Deafness had grown upon her and she was often ill. She accepted such trials with aristocratic, or, it may be, with devout composure. She made no more efforts to gather the many coloured reins into her own hands; to drive her team with reckless courage through a world that, she felt, was destroying all she cherished. Rather she was content to sit back in the corner of her sofa working at her embroidery still, but no longer presiding. There in the evening, alone, even lovelier in her black than in her brocade, she would talk of the people she had known; of some new poem she had liked; of some unknown poet she had met; and of London, whose beauty she loved; and of that English country that was so dear to her – the country round Welbeck; and of the eccentricities of her forebears; of the old Duke who dug the tunnels;fn5 and how she had run through the great rooms as a child discovering pictures; and of the ardours and failures of her life; and of Shelley and Keatsfn6 – until at last, at last, it was time to go from the room which she had made so beautiful.

 

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