Legacy of William Congreve

Congreve’s character was praised in Giles Jacob’s Poetical Register (1719), where he is described as being “so far from being puff’d up with Vanity…that he abounds with Humility and good Nature. He does not shew so much the Poet as the Gentleman.” The last phrase will serve as a comment on the notorious meeting with Voltaire, who in 1726 had come celebrity-seeking in England and wished to extract what he could from the great English writer of comedy. Congreve, failing, fatigued, attacked by gout, and half-blind, did not feel equal to discussing the minutiae of comic writing or a play he had written some 30 years earlier. He told Voltaire that he would be delighted to talk on general subjects, “on the footing of a gentleman” as he phrased it, but not on subjects of which he would be expected to display expert critical knowledge and affect the pundit.

Congreve is the outstanding writer of the English comedy of manners, markedly different in many respects from others of this period of the drama. Taking as its main theme the manners and behaviour of the class to which it was addressed, that is, the antipuritanical theatre audience drawn largely from the court, it dealt with imitators of French customs, conceited wits, and fantastics of all kinds; but its main theme was the sexual life led by a large number of courtiers, with their philosophy of freedom and experimentation. Restoration comedy was always satirical and sometimes cynical. Congreve rises above other dramatists of his time in both the delicacy of his feeling and the perfection of his phrasing.

The latter is strikingly exhibited in the opening speeches of The Old Bachelour, a play that no doubt appealed to the audiences because it handled with a new brilliance themes they were familiar with. Some of the repartee may seem superficial to modern readers, but that was the manner of the time. As Congreve progressed, his speeches became more modulated, more musical, but always sure in their cadence. “Every sentence is replete with sense and satire,” William Hazlitt wrote, “conveyed in the most polished and pointed terms.” As George Meredith stated, “He is at once precise and voluble…in this he is a classic, and is worthy of treading a measure with Molière.” Congreve’s most successful work is his last play, The Way of the World. Here he is doing more than holding up to ridicule the assumptions that governed the society of his time. He could not regard love merely as the gratification of lust, a matter of appetite rather than of feeling, but he was equally averse to “rationalizing” love. Congreve goes deeper than any of his contemporaries, has more feeling for the individual, and is far subtler. He was a sensitive craftsman, and nothing came from his hand that was not thoughtfully conceived and expertly contrived. Though not the equal of Molière, he was the nearest English approach to him.