The Writer.
Congreve was essentially a man of letters; his style is that of a pupil not of Molière but of the full, the rich, the excessive, the pedantic Jonson; his Legends, his Wishforts, his Foresights are the lawful heirs—refined and sublimated but still of direct descent—of the Tuccas and the Bobadils and the Epicure Mammons of the great Elizabethan; they are (that is) more literary than theatrical—they are excellent reading, but they have long since fled the stage and vanished into the night of mere scholarship. To compare an author of this type and descent to Shakespeare is a trifle unfair; to compare him to Molière is to misapprehend the differences between pure literature and literature that is also drama. Congreve, as I have said, has disappeared from the boards, and is only tolerable or even intelligible to the true reader; while Shakespeare worked on so imperfect a convention that, though he keeps the stage and is known indeed for the poet of the most popular play ever written—(for that, I take it, Hamlet is)—he is yet the prey of every twopenny
actor, or actor-manager, or actor-manager-editor, who is driven to deal with him. Now, Molière wrote as one that was first of all a great actor; who dealt not so much with what is transient in human life as with what is eternal in human nature; who addressed himself much more to an audience—(Fénelon who found fault with his style is witness to the fact)—than to a circle of readers. And the result is that Molière not only remains better reading than Congreve, but is played at this time in the Rue de Richelieu line for line and word for word as he was played at the Palais-Bourbon over two hundred years ago.