תמונות בעמוד
PDF
ePub

he has contrived to avoid entirely the foreign tone and color of the original. Margery is as genuine a production of the English soil as Agnès is of the French, and the more decorous finesse is as native to the one as the coarser animalism is to the other. But Margery is a pure child of nature: she is really artless in the midst of all her ruses, and in her heart is almost as innocent as her spouse would have her be. Brought up in the country and kept as strictly as though her jealous old husband had been a grand Turk, the moment she is introduced, though never so slightly, into the atmosphere of London life-and what an atmosphere it was in those days!-sets eyes on a fine gentleman or two, and compares them with the clodhoppers and curmudgeons she has left behind, who have previously been the only specimens of man she has beheld, she is all aglow for the pleasures of the town, and really does not perceive the harm of resorting to any trick or deception against her spouse to gratify her desires. Witness her ingenuousness in the last scene, in which not even the presence of old Pinchwife can restrain her from rushing out of the closet, where Horner has hidden her, when she thinks he is in danger, and to utter her protest against his marrying Alithea. She is unconscious even of the meaning of the marriage tie, for she cries out: "I'll not lose my second husband so. . . . Nay, pray don't quarrel about finding work for the parson, he shall marry me to Mr. Horner. . . . I do love Mr. Horner with all my soul, and nobody shall say me nay; pray, don't you go to make poor Mr. Horner believe to the contrary, 'tis spitefully done of you, I'm sure." And all this is in the presence of her jealous husband. You can not call a creature like this vicious or immoral. She really does not know the meaning of the term; what wrong she does is done in all innocency-or idiocy, if the word be more appropriate.

In 1677, our author gave to the world his last and best work, "The Plain Dealer." In this again he drew on Molière; but, with the exception that both pretend to hate all mankind, it would be difficult to trace any resemblance between the sea-captain Manly and the principal character of "Le Misanthrope." Molière, it is said, drew Alceste from himself, and Wycherley boasted that he was the original of his hero. The difference between the two characters is again precisely that which distinguishes Agnès from Mrs. Pinchwife; the one is purely French, the other purely English. A very suggestive parallel between the stages of civilization attained by the two countries at that period might be drawn from these two plays, and the superior refinement and delicacy of French manners placed beyond dispute. There is nothing gross in the

actions or speech of Alceste, his misanthropy and misogyny are purely theoretical, and a kind, noble heart beats beneath the outward husk of cynicism: but Manly is a brute pure and simple, a savage capable of any horrible atrocity, and he confesses as much in one of his speeches.

"I rather choose to go where honest, downright barbarity is professed, where men devour one another like generous, hungry lions and tigers, not crocodiles; where they think the devil white, of our complexion; and I am already so far an Indian."

And his words and actions prove that this is no exaggerated utterance. When speaking of his false mistress he says: "I'm sure I thought her lips-but I must not think of 'em more—but yet they are such I could still kiss, grow to, and then tear off with my teeth, grind 'em into mammocks, and spit 'em into her cuckold's face." The cannibal, whose vengeance is to eat his enemy, could not go beyond this. When bent upon his disgusting revenge-and that any author should dare to hold up as a model a man capable of such an action, speaks volumes for the brutality of the English character at this period-he addresses Fidelia, whom he believes to be a boy, and who has given him every proof of devoted fidelity, in such language as this: "What, you are my rival, then! And therefore you shall stay and keep the door for me, while I go in for (instead of) you; but when I'm gone, if you dare to stir off from this very board, or breathe the least murmuring accent, I'll cut her throat first; and if you love her you will not venture her life. Nay, then, I'll cut your throat too, and I know you love your own life at least. . . . Not a word more, lest I begin my revenge on her by killing you." Even in his normal state, when neither under the influence of rage nor revenge, he is scarcely less brutal. One of his sailors says to another: "Dost thou remember after we had tugged hard the old leaky long-boat to save his life, when I welcomed him ashore, he gave me a box on the ear, and called me fawning waterdog?" "Dogs, slaves, rascals," are the only epithets he can bestow upon these men, usually accompanied by a kick or a blow. What a picture of the naval service of the time! Even for the friends who fall in with his humor, he has contemptuous terms and brutal snubs, while those who do not suit him he calls to their faces, "Bartholomew Fair buffoons," "chattering baboons," etc. And this brute was held up as the type of a straightforward, blunt, honest Englishman, only because the natural brutality of his nature prompted him to wound the feelings of every person he came near by savage speeches which he called truths-a national trait upon which we have not even yet ceased to glorify our

selves. Verily, I think we are much indebted to the men who introduced foreign manners and modes of thought to displace our native ferocity. The Widow Blackacre is considered to be the offspring, not of Wycherley's brain, but of Racine's La Comtesse in "Les Plaideurs," yet surely a litigious female was not such a novelty that the character might not have occurred to two men without the one copying the other. Be that as it may, however, the widow is an exquisitely humorous creation, and is true, coarse, homely English, without a flavor of foreign adulteration. The originality of her son Jerry can not be disputed, and in that Wycherley was thereafter to have an illustrious imitator, for it can not be doubted that Goldsmith had a memory of this booby when he drew Tony Lumpkin; both are admirably drawn, but I think the palm must be given to the elder dramatist. The base, censorious Olivia, who pretends an aversion to all mankind only to mask her evil passions, is a powerful picture, but not at all like Molière's Celimène, except in her scandalizing propensities. Novel, Oldfox, Freeman, Plausible, are all welldefined portraitures; Fidelia, who in the disguise of a boy follows the man she loves, is a character borrowed from the Elizabethan drama; but it has not improved in Wycherley's hands. Her connivance at his hideous revenge, so revolting to any person possessed of the least delicacy-and how much more would it have been so to a woman who loved him!-nay, even the fact of her being enamored of such a brute, sadly tarnish all that is agreeable in the picture.

"

'The Country Wife" was too strong even for the stomachs of a Restoration audience, even for the vizard-wearers, and brought down a storm of well-deserved censure which the author animadverts upon in a scene between Olivia and Eliza in Act II. of "The Plain Dealer," in which the play is censured by the bad woman and defended by the modest, on the motto of "Honi soit qui mal y pense." But such a defense is quite inadmissible, since nothing is left to the thought of the spectator. In revenge, however, the author has, in the last-named comedy, attacked every section of society with the most savage malignancy. A lord is "a leaden shilling which you bend every way, and debases the stamp he bears, instead of being raised by it." Have you seen," says Manly, "a bishop bowing low to a gaudy atheist; a judge to a doorkeeper; a great lord to a fishmonger, or a scrivener with a jack-chain round his neck; a lawyer to a sergeant-at-arms; a velvet physician to a threadbare chemist; and a supple gentleman-usher to a surly beefeater—and so tread round in a preposterous huddle of ceremony to each other, while they can hardly hold their solemn false counte

[ocr errors]

nances?" An alderman "makes you drunk with lees of sack before dinner to take away your stomach; and there you must call usury and extortion God's blessing, or the honest turning of the penny." A fellow, whose trade is taking false oaths, complains of being “bilked by a reverend divine, that preaches twice on Sunday and prays half an hour still before his dinner." To which the widow replies: "How! a conscientious divine, and not pay people for damning themselves! Sure, then, for all his talking, he does not believe in damnation." As to the female sex, the language used against them is too gross to be quoted, and the dedication of the play to a woman of ill-fame is the crowning insult.

"

Goldsmith was not the only succeeding dramatist who condescended to draw material from this comedy. The scene between Olivia, Novel, and Lord Plausible, originally it can not be doubted suggested by the well-known one in "Le Misanthrope" (5th of Act II.), was largely appropriated by Sheridan in "The School for Scandal." Those who will take the trouble to compare the following specimens with some of the speeches in the scandal-scenes will find an extraordinary resemblance even in the turns of expression, although the younger author is more polished and artificial. A "nauseous old woman at the upper end of a table, it is said, “revives the old Grecian custom of serving in a death's head with their banquets." "She looks like an old coach new painted; affecting an unseemly smugness, while she is ready to drop to pieces." Of her daughter it is said, she is “the very disgrace of good clothes, which she always wears to heighten her deformity, not mend it; for she is still most splendidly, gallantly ugly, and looks like an ill piece of daubing in a rich frame. . . . Then she bestows as unfortunately on her face all the graces in fashion, as the languishing eye, the hanging or pouting lip. But, as the fool is never more provoking than when he aims at wit, the ill-favored of our sex are never more nauseous than when they would be beauties, adding to their natural deformity the artificial ugliness of affectation." Of another lady it is said, "she is as silent in conversation as a country lover, and no better company than a clock, or a weather-glass, for if she sounds, 'tis but once an hour to put you in mind of the time of day, or to tell you 'twill be cold or hot, rain or snow."

Etherege and Wycherley were the true founders of that school of comedy which attained such perfection in the next generation, and which, notwithstanding its licentiousness and artificiality, must ever be considered to have produced our finest models in that department of literature.

Wycherley, however, although he borrowed much from the French, surpassed Etherege in the power of transmuting his stolen goods, which, like gold and silver trinkets thrown into a meltingpot, while losing their original form, retained all their essential qualities; from whatever source derived, he always made his characters thoroughly English, and, if his plots were borrowed, the manners and vices depicted were those of his age and country. Yet, although the founder of the school, Wycherley has little affinity with the good-natured, rattling, pleasant Farquhar, or the highly polished and refined Congreve; Vanbrugh alone approaches him in coarseness. There is a ferocity in Wycherley's satire which can be paralleled only in Swift's writings. Mrs. Flippant is worthy of a place among the Yahoos, and the female bevy of "The Country Wife" would not have found themselves out of place there. The drinking-scene at Horner's lodgings (Act V., Scene 4) is a horrible lampoon upon the entire sex. Lady Fidget says: "Lord, why should you not think that we women make use of our reputation as you men of yours, only to deceive the world with less suspicion? Our virtue is like the statesman's religion, the Quaker's word, the gamester's oath, and the great man's honor; but to cheat those that trust us. . . . Our bashfulness is only the reflection of the men's. We blush when they are shamefaced."

[ocr errors]

A few more facts of our author's life have still to be related. Some little time after the appearance of his last comedy he married, and it was the comedy that brought about that event. One day, while he and a friend were in a bookseller's shop at Tunbridge Wells, the Countess of Drogheda, a young, rich, handsome widow, came into the shop and inquired for "The Plain Dealer." 'Madam," said the friend, one Mr. Fairbeard, pushing Wycherley forward, "since you are for the Plain Dealer, there he is for you." "Yes," added Wycherley, "this lady can bear plain dealing, for she appears to be so accomplished, that what would be compliments addressed to others would be plain dealing addressed to her." "No, truly sir," replied the Countess, not behind in repartee, "I am not without my faults any more than the rest of my sex, and yet I love plain dealing, and am never more fond of it than when it tells me of my faults." "Then, madam," again interposed the friend, "you and the Plain Dealer seem designed by Heaven for each other." Such is the story told by Dennis. This was the commencement of an acquaintance which ended in matrimony. Wycherley, on account of another countess, was desirous that his marriage should be kept secret; but it soon came to the knowledge of the lady whom he most desired to keep in ignorance, and

who soon succeeded in convincing the King that, as the poet had contracted a marriage without taking royalty into his confidence, it was an act of contumacy which must be punished by the withdrawal of the royal favor. The union was a very unhappy one; the lady was of a violent temper and very jealous; she took good care that her husband should not appear at court, for fear he might renew his old liaison, and even when he paid a visit to his favorite Bow Street tavern, which stood opposite his house, he was obliged to sit at the open window in order that his cara sposa might be convinced that there was no lady with him. Not without reason we may well believe were these suspicions. When she died, however, she left him all her fortune. But this proved a curse instead of a blessing to him, for her family disputed the will and got the day, while the unfortunate widower was consigned to prison for the law expenses. In the Fleet he remained seven years. He had offended the King's mistress by his marriage, and the King by his attachment to Buckingham, whose cause, in his evil days, he defended with a boldness and sincerity which shows that he was not undeserving of the epithet of "Manly Wycherley," which his contemporaries bestowed upon him. But Johnson's observation upon the value of the literary patronage of the time, which I have before quoted in my article on Otway,* was well exemplified in his case, namely, that men of wit received no favor from the great but to share their riots; from which they were dismissed again to their own narrow circumstances. And poor Wycherley might have died in the Fleet for all his aristocratic friends would do to help him, had not James II., who had by this time succeeded to the throne, been so struck, at a representation of "The Plain Dealer," by the virtues (!) of Manly, that he there and then resolved to pay off his debts and settle a pension of two hundred a year upon him. It seems strange that Wycherley did not resort to his pen to assist him in his extremity, and that he should have renounced authorship in the very maturity of his powers. But his troubles were only to cease with his life. It would appear that his debts were so considerable that he did not like to own the full amount to Lord Mulgrave, to whom the King had confided the execution of his beneficent intentions, so that what must have been a large sum remained unpaid. And when at his father's death he succeeded to the family estate, being only a tenant for life, he could not mortgage it for sufficient money to clear himself of liabilities. Probably the old ones received some additions after his release from prison.

*"Appletons' Journal," November, 1879.

In his sixty-fourth year he published a volume of erotic poems-why was it not another comedy? In the same year Pope published his "Pastorals," and the simultaneous appearance of the two books in some way brought about an acquaintance between the two authors. The letters that passed between them will be found in Pope's correspondence, but they are not very amusing. By and by the elder poet wrote some more verses--and very bad ones they were—and made the extraordinary proposition that his young friend should correct them. Pope, like a second Gil Blas, accepted the task in all sincerity, and his candid criticisms were received in much the same spirit as were those of the Spanish valet of immortal memory; Wycherley was disgusted at the numerous faults found with his compositions, and the friendship came to an end.

He appears to have retained much of his handsome and distinguished appearance to the last. There is a picture of him at the age of twenty-eight, by Sir Peter Lely, which represents a face of fine animal beauty, well set off by the flowing periwig of the period; many were the regretful glances he would cast upon this pre

sentment of youth, and many were the sighs it evoked, and underneath he had written the Virgilian motto, "Quantum mutatus ab illo !" The old spirit of the Carolian time was still strong within him. He used often to declare that he was resolved to die married, although his first experience of that blessed state rendered him very averse to living in it again. Only eleven days before his death, in the year 1715, in the hope of disinheriting an obnoxious nephew, he espoused a young woman who was supposed to have a fortune of fifteen hundred pounds a year, but who turned out afterward to be an impostor and to be married to another man. Ignorant of this fact, however, upon his death-bed he called her to him, and, having made her promise to grant him the request he was about to make, said with a sly twinkle in his eye: "My dear, it is only this-that you will never marry an old man again." Like Mercutio, a humorist to the last! He was buried in a vault in St. Paul's, Covent Garden. He is said to have changed his religion once more, a little previously, back to the Romish faith.

Temple Bar.

IN

MIRACLES, PRAYER, AND LAW.

N the following remarks I assume the existence of God, all-knowing and all-powerful; and of a spirit in men which is not matter. I do not say that either is demonstrated or can be demonstrated, still less do I presume to define either, but I address only those who already assent to both.

have studied the Book of Nature, and perhaps most decidedly in those who have only turned some of its pages, is that the two revelations are irreconcilable. The immutability of nature's laws is to them a gospel taught by every stone, by every plant, by every animated being. All that they have learned to know of matter rests on the Many, however, of those who give such as- assurance that its properties are absolutely fixed. sent are troubled about the ways of God and the The progress of science, of art, of civilization, of nature of man's relation to him. On the one the human race, depends on the fact that what hand is the Bible, which declares that all things has been found to be true will be always true, on earth as well as in heaven are regulated by that there is an ordered sequence of events which divine will at every moment, which records fre- may be trusted to be invariable, to which we quent miracles, and which bids men ask from must conform our lives if we would be happy, him whatsoever they would, in absolute confi- and which, if we cross it in ignorance or defiance, dence that they shall have their desires. On the will revenge the outrage by inevitable penalties. other hand stands the Book of Nature, as divine Those laws, which some call of matter, may by as that of Revelation, being in fact another rev- others be called laws of God, and the most deelation of God, which tells of an unchanging vout minds find in their fixity only a confirmation sequence of events, of laws incapable of modifi- of their faith in his unchanging promises. But, cation by isolated acts of will-laws which, in- if thus fixed, it seems to many who are devout as deed, if subject to such modification, would fall well as to many who are skeptical, that it beinto disorder. Which of these revelations shall comes impossible to believe that their Author they believe? Or can they be reconciled so that should ever set them aside by what are called both are credible? miracles; still less that he should bid men pray The tendency of recent belief in those who for events which are, in fact, not regulated by

wish or will, but by what has gone before up to the beginning of time. To meet this dilemma there seem to such minds only two courses, either to believe that Scripture is not the word of a God at all, or to give to its language an interpretation which is not the natural sense of the words, and which was certainly not meant or understood by those who first wrote or first heard it.

Yet it is not possible to abandon the conviction that the words and the acts of God can not really be at variance. Before surrendering his words contained in the Scripture, as either spurious or misunderstood, no effort can be too often reiterated to show them to be compatible with what we have learned of his works. I propose to make one more such effort, based on the closest examination of what both really tell, or imply.

Let us first understand accurately what it is we are to deal with, both as facts and as expressed in language. The inquiry is to be limited (with exceptions which will be noted as they occur) to the laws of matter. It will be assumed that matter exists as our ordinary perceptions inform us, but if it shall hereafter be proved to be only a form of motion, or of force, the arguments will still be applicable. By laws, we shall understand what in a different expression we call the properties of matter. The advantage of thus explaining law is that it excludes some other senses of a vague and misleading character, while it includes the sense in which alone law can properly be applied to physical nature. Thus, the law of gravity is the same thing as the property of matter which we call weight, and, if there be any matter or ether which is imponderable, then the law of gravity does not apply to it. So the law of attraction, in its different forms, expresses the property of cohesion, and of capillary ascent, and so on; the law of chemical affinities expresses the property of the combination of one species of matter with another in definite proportions; the laws of sound, light, or electricity, express the properties of vibrations, either of air or of subtiler forms of matter, as they affect our senses. In thus limiting the meaning of law, it is therefore obvious that we embrace all which the materialist can desire to include when he insists that law is permanent and unchangeable.

phorus, the forms of sulphur as modified by heat, and a considerable number of organic compounds, and we can by certain arrangements turn the one into the other. But when we ask what allotropism is, we find that it is itself one of the properties (however obscure to us) of the matter we deal with. Oxygen would not be oxygen, but something else, if it had not the inherent property of becoming ozone under certain conditions. Given these conditions, and there is nothing we can do which will prevent the change occurring. If, as chemists believe, allotropism depends on the different arrangement of the ultimate atoms of matter, then the capacity of assuming two arrangements in its atoms is clearly one of the ultimate properties of that species of matter.

It follows, then, that if a miracle were really a suspension of a physical law, or a change, temporary or permanent, of any property of matter, it would really be an act of creation-the creation of something having different properties from any matter that before existed. If iron were to float on water by suspension of the law of gravity, it would be in fact the creation of something having (at least for the time required) the physical and chemical properties of iron, but with a specific gravity less than water-and therefore something not iron.

But, without creation, man has enormous power over nature. He can, and daily does, overpower her laws, or seemingly make them work as he pleases. Despite the law of gravity, he ascends to the sky in a balloon; he makes water spring up in fountains; he makes vessels, weighing thousands of tons, float on the seas. Despite cohesion, he grinds rocks to powder; despite chemical affinity, he transmutes into myriads of different forms the few elements of which all matter consists; despite the resistless power of the thunderbolt, he tames electricity to be his servant or his harmless toy. With water and fire he molds into shape mighty masses of metal; he shoots, at a sustained speed beyond that of birds, across valleys and through mountain-ranges; he unites seas which continents had separated; there is nothing in the whole earth which he has not subdued, or does not hope to subdue, to his use. There is hardly a physical miracle which he does not feel he can, or may yet, perform.

This, in fact, is the first proposition which we must all accept. No human being can add to or But all this wonderful, this boundless power subtract a single property of any species of mat- over material laws is gained by these laws. He ter. To do so were, indeed, to create. For alters no property of matter, but he uses one matter is an aggregate of properties; each spe- property or another as he needs, and he uses one cies of matter is differentiated only by its proper- property to overpower another. It is by knowties, and could we alter one of these we should ing that gravity is more powerful in the case of really turn it into different matter. It is true air than in the case of hydrogen gas, that he there are what are called allotropic forms, such makes air sustain him as he floats, beneath a bag as oxygen and ozone, the yellow and red phos- of hydrogen, above the earth; it is by knowing

« הקודםהמשך »