Presents her harp still to his fingers.”
In the Dublin class-rooms two of the comic dramatists of the Restoration obtained their scholarship. The intellectual splendour of William Congreve did not more indisputably place him at the head of that coterie of letters than his learning and culture made him the most courted gentleman of the period—“the splendid Phœbus Apollo of the Mall.” “His learning,” says Macaulay, “does great honour to his instructors. From his writings, it appears not only that he was well acquainted with Latin literature, but that his knowledge of the Greek poets was such as was not in his time common, even in a College.” For those who feel with Charles Lamb, when he says, speaking of the comedy of the last century—“I confess, for myself, I am glad for a season to take an airing beyond the diocese of the strict conscience,” Congreve must always remain prince of wits. He is as absolute master of his domain as Shakespeare of his. We do not now rank him, as Dryden and Johnson did, with the world’s master-mind—
“ ... Heaven, that but once was prodigal before,
To Shakespeare gave as much, she could not give him more;”
but we cannot refuse him an absolute supremacy in the narrower sphere of his genius, Congreve’s laurels were all reaped at the age of thirty. The “Old Bachelor” was produced when the author was but twenty-three, and that most perfect of English comedies of manners, “Love for Love,” when he was twenty-five. No such dialogue, for brilliancy, subtlety, intellectual finish, and flavour, was ever before heard. We who read cannot feel surprised that its sparkle should have dazzled the critics into the language of exaggerated panegyric. The “Mourning Bride” was the only essay in tragedy made by the man who, in Voltaire’s words, “raised the glory of comedy to a greater height than any English writer before or since.” Such a genius as Congreve could not fail absolutely, and though most of us know it only in its first line—
“Music hath charms to soothe the savage breast;”
or perhaps by the passage which Johnson overpraised as “the most poetical passage from the whole mass of English poetry,” beginning—
“How reverend is the face of this tall pile,”—
the “Mourning Bride” is a tour de force in dramatic art.
