William Congreve (1670–1729)

CONGREVE, WILLIAM (1670–1729), dramatist, was born at Bardsey, near Leeds, where he was baptised on 10 Feb. 1669–70—a fact first ascertained by Malone (Life of Dryden, i. 225). He was the son Congreve; his mother's maiden name Browning. His grandfather, Richard Congreve, was a cavalier named for the order of the Royal Oak, whose wife was Anne FitzHerbert. The family had been long settled at Stretton in Staffordshire. Congreve's father was an officer, who soon after the son's birth was appointed to command the garrison at Youghal, where he also became agent for the estates of the Earl of Cork, and ultimately moved to Lismore. Congreve was educated at Kilkenny school, where he was a school-fellow of Swift, his senior by two years. He was entered at Trinity College, Dublin, on 5 April 1685, where, like Swift, he was a pupil of St. George Ashe [q. v.] Swift, who took his B.A. on 13 Feb. 1686, resided at Dublin till the revolution. They were therefore contemporaries at college, and formed an enduring friendship.

Congreve, on leaving Dublin, entered the Middle Temple, but soon deserted Law for literature. His first publication was a poor novel called 'Incognita, or Love and Duty reconciled,' by Cleophil, written 'in the idler hours of a fortnight's time.' His first play, the 'Old Bachelor,' was brought out in January 1692–3. It was written, as he says in the dedication, nearly four years previously, in order (reply to Collier) to 'amuse himself in a slow recovery from a fit of sickness.' Dryden pronounced it to be the best first play he had ever seen; and the players, to whom he had at first read it so badly that they almost rejected it, soon changed their opinion. The manager granted him the 'privilege of the house' for six months before it was acted, a then unprecedented compliment. Its great success prompted him to produce the 'Double Dealer,' first performed in November 1693. This met with some opposition, and some ladies were scandalised. Queen Mary, however, came to see it, and was afterwards present at a new performance of the 'Old Bachelor,' when Congreve wrote a new prologue for the occasion. Dryden had generously welcomed Congreve, who helped him in the translation of Juvenal (1692), and to Congreve Dryden now addressed a famous epistle, in which he declares Congreve to be the equal of Shakespeare, and pathetically bequeaths his memory to the care of the 'dear friend' who is to succeed to his laurels, a bequest acknowledged by Congreve in his preface to Dryden's plays (1718). Dryden also acknowledges (in 1697) Congreve's services in revising the translation of Virgil, in which he was also helped by Addison and Walsh.

Betterton [q. v.] and other players revolted from Drury Lane, and obtained permission to open a new theatre at Lincoln's Inn Fields. It was opened on 30 April 1695, the first performance being Congreve's 'Love for Love.' The brilliant success of this comedy was acknowledged by a share in the house, on condition of Congreve's promise to produce a new play every year. On 12 July 1695 Congreve was appointed by Charles Montagu, afterwards earl of Halifax, 'commissioner for licensing hackney coaches,' a small office, which he held till 13 Oct. 1707. His next production was the 'Mourning Bride,' acted at Lincoln's Inn Fields, 'for thirteen days without interruption,' in 1697. The success saved the company, though the tragedy is generally regarded as an unlucky excursion into an uncongenial field. Johnson always maintained that the description of a cathedral in this play (act ii. sc. 1) was superior to anything in Shakespeare Boswell, 16 Oct. 1769, and Life of Congreve), In the same year Congreve was attacked by Jeremy Collier [q. v.] in a 'View of the Immorality and Profaneness of the English Stage.' He replied in a pamphlet called 'Amendment of Mr. Collier's False and Imperfect Citations' (from his four plays). Although the critical principles laid down by Collier are not such as would be now admitted, he was generally thought to have the best both of the argument and of the wit. Nor can it be doubted that he was attacking a serious evil. Congreve felt the blow. His last play, the 'Way of the World,' was produced, again at Lincoln's Inn Fields, in 1700. Congreve declares in the dedication that he did not expect success, as he had not written to suit the prevailing taste. The play was coolly received, and it is said that Congreve told the audience to their faces that they need not take the trouble to disapprove, as he meant to write no more. The play succeeded better after a time; but Congreve abandoned his career. In 1705 a new theatre was built for the same company by Vanbrugh, and Congrove was for a time Vanbrugh's colleague in the management. He did nothing, however, beyond writing 'a prologue or so, and one or two miserable bits of operas' (Leigh Hunt) (the 'Judgment of Paris,' a masque, and 'Semele, an Opera,' neither performed).

From this time he lived at his ease. In 1710 he published the first collected edition of his works, in three vols, octavo. A promise of Tonson to pay him twenty guineas on publication is m the British Museum (Addit. MS. 28275, f. 12) He was commissioner of wine licenses from December 1705 till December 1714. At the last date he became secretary for Jamaica. According to the 'General Dictionary' Lord Halifax gave him a 'place in the pipe-office,' a 'patent place in the customs of 600 l. a year,' and the Jamaica secretaryship, worth 700 l. a year. He is said to have been latterly in receipt of 1,200 l. a year. Swift, in his verses on 'Dr. Delany and Dr. Carteret,' says that

⁠⁠Congreve spent on writing plays
⁠⁠And one poor office half his days.

But Swift when writing satire did not stick to prosaic accuracy. Congreve, at any rate, was universally flattered and admired. He is always spoken of by contemporaries as a leader of literature, and had the wisdom or the good feeling to keep on terms with rival authors. He never, it is said, hurt anybody's feelings in conversation. Swift, while at Sir W. Temple's in 1693, addressed a remarkable poem to his more prosperous friend, and always speaks of him with special kindliness. Many meetings are noticed in the 'Journal to Stella.' It is odd that Congreve was almost solitary in disliking the 'Tale of a Tub' (Monck Berkeley, Literary Relics, p. 340). Steele dedicated his miscellanies to him, and when assailed by Tickell in 1722 addressed his vindication (prefixed to the 'Drummer') to Congreve as the natural arbiter in a point of literary honour. Pope paid him a higher compliment, by concluding the translation of the 'Iliad' with a dedication to him. Pope was anxious to avoid committing himself to either party, and Congreve's fame was sufficient to make him a worthy representative of national literature. Swift (letter to Pope, 10 Jan. 1721) repeats the famous reply of Harley to Halifax when Congreve was afraid of being turned out by the tories in 1711—

Non obtusa adeo gestamus pectora Pœni,
Nec tam aversus equos Tyrià Sol jungit ab urbe.

Voltaire visited him in his last years, and was disgusted by his affectation of desiring to be regarded as a gentleman instead of an author, a sentiment which is susceptible of more than one explanation (Lettres sur les Anglais). Congreve was a member of the Kit-Cat Club (Spence, Anecdotes, p. 338), and according to Pope and Tonson, he, Garth, and Vanbrugh were the 'three most honest-hearted real good men' of the poetical members (ib. p. 46). Lady Mary W. Montagu addressed a poem to him of rather questionable delicacy.

Congreve was evidently a man of pleasure, and petted in good society. His relations to Mrs. Bracegirdle [q. v.], who always acted his heroines, and spoke a prologue or epilogue in his plays, were ambiguous, but in any case very intimate. He became in later years the special favourite of the second Duchess of Marlborough, and was constantly at her house. He had, according to Swift (to Pope, 13 Feb. 1729), 'squandered away a very good constitution in his younger days.' In 1710, as we learn from the 'Journal to Stella,' he was nearly blind from cataract, and he suffered much from gout. Probably his bad health helped to weaken his literary activity. Like Byron, he seems to have combined epicurean tastes with the 'good old gentlemanly vice,' avarice. An attack of gout in the stomach was nearly fatal in the summer of 1726 (Arbuthnot to Swift, 20 Sept. 1726). He had gone to drink the waters at Bath in the summer of 1728 with the Duchess of Marlborough and Gay. He there received some internal injury from the upsetting of his carriage, and died at his house, in Surrey Street, Strand, on 19 Jan. 1728–9.

The body lay in state in the Jerusalem Chamber and was buried with great pomp in Westminster Abbey. A monument was erected in the abbey by the Duchess of Marlborough, with an inscription of her own writing, and a hideous cenotaph was erected at Stowe by Lord Cobham. It was reported that the duchess afterwards had a figure of ivory or wax made in his likeness, which was placed at her table, addressed as if alive, served with food, and treated for 'an imaginary sore on its leg.' The story, if it has any foundation, would imply partial insanity. Congreve left 10,000 l., the bulk of his fortune, to the duchess, a legacy of 200 l. to Mrs. Bracegirdle, and an annuity of 20 l. to Anne Jellatt, besides a few small sums to his relations. Young says (Spence, p. 376) that the duchess showed him a diamond necklace which she had bought for 7,000 l. from Congrieve's bequest, and remarks that it should have been better if the money had been left to Mrs. Bracegirdle.

Besides his plays, Congreve wrote minor poems, congratulatory and facetious, which Johnson (followed by Leigh Hunt ) declares to be generally 'despicable.' He wrote a letter upon humour in comedy, published in the works of Dennis, to whom it was first addressed, he contributed to the 'Tatler' the character of Lady Elizabeth Hastings (the famous phrase, 'To love her is a liberal education'—attributed to Congreve by Lady Hunt—occurs in No. 49, by Steele). Congreve has been excellently criticised by Hazlitt, 'Lectures on the Comic Writers,' Charles Lamb, 'On the Artificial Comedy of the last Century,' and by Leigh Hunt, in whose essay the others are reprinted. Hazlitt's judgment that Congreve's is 'the highest model of comic dialogue' has been generally accepted, with the occasional deduction that the strain of his perpetual epigrams becomes tiresome. Hunt, a sympathetic and acute critic, admits that Lamb's famous defence of Congreve against the charge of immorality is more ingenious than sound. The characters, instead of being mere creations of fancy, are only too faithful portraits of the men (and women) of the town in his day. Congreve's defects are to be sought not so much in the external blemishes pointed out by Collier as in the absence of real refinement of feeling. His characters, as Voltaire observes, talk like men of fashion, while their actions are those of knaves. Lamb's audacious praise of him for excluding any pretensions to good feeling in his persons might be accepted if it implied (as he urges) a mere 'privation of moral light.' But, although a 'single gush of moral feeling' would, as Lamb says, be felt as a discord, a perpetual gush of cynical sentiment is quite in harmony. His wit is saturnine, and a perpetual exposition of the baser kind of what passes for worldly wisdom. The atmosphere of his plays is asphyxiating. There is consequently an absence of real gaiety from his scenes and of true charm in his characters, while the teasing intricacy of his plots makes it (as Hunt observes) impossible to remember them even though just read and noted for the purpose. It is therefore almost cruel to suggest a comparison between Congreve and Molière, the model of the true comic spirit. The faults are sufficient to account for the neglect of Congreve by modern readers in spite of the exalted eulogies—not too exalted for the purely literary merits of his pointed and and vigorous dialogue—bestowed upon him by the best judges of his own time and by some over-generous critics of the present day.

[Sam Hayman's New Handbook for Youghal (1858), pp. 53, 65; Giles Jacob's Poetical Register (1719). pp. 41-8 (information acknowledged from Congreve); Memoirs by Charles Wilson (pseudonym for one of Curll's scribblers), 1730 (a catchpenny book which includes the early novel, the reply to Collier, and a few letters); Life in General Dictionary, vol. iv., with infomation from Southerne; Monck Berkeley's Literary Relics, 317-89 (letters to Joseph Kealey); Victor Moyle's Works (1727), pp. 227, 231; letters to Moyle; Cibber's Lives, iv. 83-98; Cibber's Apology (1740), 161, 224, 236, 262, 263; Davies's Dramatic Miscellanies, iii. 330-407, Johnson’s Lives of the Posts; Genest’s History of the Stage, vol. ii.; Leigh Hunt's Introduction to Dramatic Works of Congreve, &c., and Macaulay's Review, reprinted in his Essays. Leigh Hunt prints some original letters; Notes and Queries, 2nd ser. ix. 418, 8rd ser. v. 132, xi. 280.]

L. S.

CONGREVE, WILLIAM (1670–1729), English dramatist, the greatest English master of pure comedy, was born at Bardsey near Leeds, where he was baptized on the 10th of February 1670, although the inscription on his monument gives his date of birth as 1672. He was the son of William Congreve, a soldier who was soon after his son’s birth placed in command of the garrison at Youghal. To Ireland, therefore, is due the credit of his education—as a schoolboy at Kilkenny, as an undergraduate at Dublin, where he was a contemporary and friend of Swift. From college he came to London, and was entered as a student of law at the Middle Temple. The first-fruits of his studies appeared under the boyish pseudonym of “Cleophil,” in the form of a novel whose existence is now remembered only through the unabashed avowal of so austere a moralist as Dr Johnson, that he “would rather praise it than read it.” In 1693 Congreve’s real career began, and early enough by the latest computation, with the brilliant appearance and instant success of his first comedy, The Old Bachelor, under the generous auspices of Dryden, then as ever a living and immortal witness to the falsehood of the vulgar charge which taxes the greater among poets with jealousy or envy, the natural badge and brand of the smallest that would claim a place among their kind. The discrowned laureate had never, he said, seen such a first play; and indeed the graceless grace of the dialogue was as yet only to be matched by the last and best work of Etherege, standing as till then it had done alone among the barefaced brutalities of Wycherley and Shadwell. The types of Congreve’s first work were the common conventional properties of stage tradition; but the fine and clear-cut style in which these types were reproduced was his own. The gift of one place and the reversion of another were the solid fruits of his splendid success. Next year a better play from the same hand met with worse fortune on the stage, and with yet higher honour from the first living poet of his nation. The noble verses, as faultless in the expression as reckless in the extravagance of their applause, prefixed by Dryden to The Double Dealer, must naturally have supported the younger poet, if indeed such support can have been required, against the momentary annoyance of assailants whose passing clamour left uninjured and secure the fame of his second comedy; for the following year witnessed the crowning triumph of his art and life, in the appearance of Love for Love (1695). Two years later his ambition rather than his genius adventured on the foreign ground of tragedy, and The Mourning Bride (1697) began such a long career of good fortune as in earlier or later times would have been closed against a far better work. Next year he attempted, without his usual success, a reply to the attack of Jeremy Collier, the nonjuror, “on the immorality and profaneness of the English stage”—an attack for once not discreditable to the assailant, whose honesty and courage were evident enough to approve him incapable alike of the ignominious precaution which might have suppressed his own name, and of the dastardly mendacity which would have stolen the mask of a stranger’s. Against this merit must be set the mistake of confounding in one indiscriminate indictment the levities of a writer like Congreve with the brutalities of a writer like Wycherley—an error which ever since has more or less perverted the judgment of succeeding critics. The general case of comedy was then, however, as untenable by the argument as indefensible by the sarcasm of its most brilliant and comparatively blameless champion. Art itself, more than anything else, had been outraged and degraded by the recent school of the Restoration; and the comic work of Congreve, though different rather in kind than in degree from the bestial and blatant licence of his immediate precursors, was inevitably for a time involved in the sentence passed upon the comic work of men in all ways alike his inferiors. The true and triumphant answer to all possible attacks of honest men or liars, brave men or cowards, was then as ever to be given by the production of work unarraignable alike by fair means or foul, by frank impeachment or furtive imputation. In 1700 Congreve thus replied to Collier with The Way of the World—the unequalled and unapproached masterpiece of English comedy, which may fairly claim a place beside or but just beneath the mightiest work of Molière. On the stage which had recently acclaimed with uncritical applause the author’s more questionable appearance in the field of tragedy, this final and flawless evidence of his incomparable powers met with a rejection then and ever since inexplicable on any ground of conjecture. During the twenty-eight years which remained to him, Congreve produced little beyond a volume of fugitive verses, published ten years after the miscarriage of his masterpiece. His even course of good fortune under Whig and Tory governments alike was counterweighed by the physical infirmities of gout and failing sight. He died, January 19, 1729, in consequence of an injury received on a journey to Bath by the upsetting of his carriage; was buried in Westminster Abbey, after lying in state in the Jerusalem Chamber; and bequeathed the bulk of his fortune to the chief friend of his last years, Henrietta, duchess of Marlborough, daughter of the great duke, rather than to his family, which, according to Johnson, was then in difficulties, or to Mrs Bracegirdle, the actress, with whom he had lived longer on intimate terms than with any other mistress or friend, but who inherited by his will only £200. The one memorable incident of his later life was the visit of Voltaire, whom he astonished and repelled by his rejection of proffered praise and the expression of his wish to be considered merely as any other gentleman of no literary fame. The great master of well-nigh every province in the empire of letters, except the only one in which his host reigned supreme, replied that in that sad case Congreve would not have received his visit.

The fame of the greatest English comic dramatist is founded wholly or mainly on but three of his five plays. His first comedy was little more than a brilliant study after such models as were eclipsed by this earliest effort of their imitator; and tragedy under his hands appears rouged and wrinkled, in the patches and powder of Lady Wishfort. But his three great comedies are more than enough to sustain a reputation as durable as our language. Were it not for these we should have no samples to show of comedy in its purest and highest form. Ben Jonson, who alone attempted to introduce it by way of reform among the mixed work of a time when comedy and tragedy were as inextricably blended on the stage as in actual life, failed to give the requisite ease and the indispensable grace of comic life and movement to the action and passion of his elaborate and magnificent work. Of Congreve’s immediate predecessors, whose aim had been to raise on French foundations a new English fabric of simple and unmixed comedy, Wycherley was of too base metal and Etherege was of metal too light to be weighed against him; and besides theirs no other or finer coin was current than the crude British ore of Shadwell’s brutal and burly talent. Borrowing a metaphor from Landor, we may say that a limb of Molière would have sufficed to make a Congreve, a limb of Congreve would have sufficed to make a Sheridan. The broad and robust humour of Vanbrugh’s admirable comedies gives him a place on the master’s right hand; on the left stands Farquhar, whose bright light genius is to Congreve’s as female is to male, or “as moonlight unto sunlight.” No English writer, on the whole, has so nearly touched the skirts of Molière; but his splendid intelligence is wanting in the deepest and subtlest quality which has won for Molière from the greatest poet of his country and our age the tribute of exact and final definition conveyed in that perfect phrase which salutes at once and denotes him—“ce moqueur pensif comme un apôtre.” Only perhaps in a single part has Congreve half consciously touched a note of almost tragic depth and suggestion; there is something well-nigh akin to the grotesque and piteous figure of Arnolphe himself in the unvenerable old age of Lady Wishfort, set off and relieved as it is, with grace and art worthy of the supreme French master, against the only figure on any stage which need not shun comparison even with that of Célimène.

The Works of William Congreve were published in 1710 (3 vols.). The Dramatic Works of Wycherley, Congreve ... edited by Leigh Hunt (1840), contains a biographical and critical notice of Congreve. See also The Comedies of William Congreve (1895), with an introduction by W. G. S. Street; and The Best Plays of William Congreve (1887, 1903), edited for the Mermaid Series by A. C. Ewald. The Life of William Congreve (1887) by Edmund Gosse, in E. S. Robertson’s Great Writers, contains a bibliography by J. P. Anderson.

(A. C. S.)