I am glad to see, from Mr. Malcolm Salaman's introduction to the printed play, that, even in those days of our hot youth, my own aesthetic principles were less truculent.
This image is sometimes suggested by an act-ending which leaves a marked situation obviously unresolved. The curtain should never be dropped at such a point as to leave the characters in a physical or mental attitude which cannot last for more than a moment, and must certainly be followed, then and there, by important developments. In other words, a situation ought not to be cut short at the very height of its tension, but only when it has reached a point of--at any rate momentary--relaxation.
If this runs counter to the latest biological orthodoxy, I am sorry. Habits are at any rate transmissible by imitation, if not otherwise.
Chapter XIX.
So, too, with the style of Congreve. It is much, and justly, admired; but who does not feel more than a touch of mannerism in such a passage as this?--
MILLAMANT: "... Let us never visit together, nor go to a play
together; but let us be very strange and well-bred: let us be as
strange as if we had been married a great while; and as well-bred as
if we were not married at all."
MIRABELL: "Have you any more conditions to offer? Hitherto your
demands are pretty reasonable."
MILLAMANT: "Trifles!--as liberty to pay and receive visits to and
from whom I please; to write and receive letters, without
interrogatories or wry faces on your part; to wear what I please;
and choose conversation with regard only to my own taste; to have no
obligation upon me to converse with wits that I don't like because
they are your acquaintances; or to be intimate with fools because
they may be your relatives.... These articles subscribed, if I
continue to endure you a little longer, I may by degrees dwindle
into a wife."
This is very pretty prose, granted; but it is the prose of literature, not of life.