ENGLISH COMEDY IN THE PARCHMENT LIBRARY.*
" IF it were done, when 'tis done, then 'twere well it were done quickly," would seem to be the feeling of the present day as to- most reading, especially when making acquaintance with the writers of past times ; and hence, we suppose, the demand for all the volumes of extracts, selections, abridgments, and epitomes with which we are now inundated. It seems a pity that such a charming edition de luxe as the Parchment Library should sacrifice even one of its volumes to a mere string of extracts from English comedies, especially as some of the plays from which only single scenes are given are quite readable throughout ; and though it is a popular theory that the study of extracts incites to the study of the complete work, we do not observe this to be generally the case, except with those readers who need no such incitement. Mr. Crawford in his brilliant and thoughtful preface sketches briefly the prosperous and un- prosperous periods of English Comedy, tries to account for the- way in which it has sometimes fluctuated from very good to un- speakably bad in a comparatively short time, upholds modern comedy resolutely, and endeavours to draw a rather rigid defini- tion in order to justify the selections he has made in his volume.- Rigid definitions are seldom quite satisfactory, and we hardly see that his will explain either what he admits or rejects as comedy. He carefully distinguishes comedy proper from farce or satire, and the distinction is a good and necessary one ; but certainly some of the scenes admitted border upon farce, to say the least ; and, on the other hand,. it requires a very keen sense of the ludicrous to find much amusement in the West Indian, or indeed in anything else that Cumberland ever wrote. Is the present generation of English men and women really content to know Falstaff and Prince Hal through the medium of one scene from Henry IV ? We trust not, and that the dialogue with which the volume opens is only given as a tribute to Shakespeare's genius ; but is there not more tendency to farce in this extract than there would have been in a well-chosen one from Much Ado About' Nothing, or As You Like It ? to say nothing of Malvolio's finding the letter in Twelfth Night ? The Critic is, of course,. excluded from selections of comedy as being avowedly a: farce, though it is difficult to see that the introductory scene of the• Dangles and their friends is more farcical than what Mr.. Crawford gives us from Love's Last Shift ; and where the Iat- • English Comic Dramatists. Edited by Oswald Crawford. London c Kogan._ Paul, Trench, and 0o. constant is admitted, why should the Heir-at-Law be left out P It is infinitely more amusing, and scarcely more of a farce. Vanbrugh and Congreve are, to our thinking, far and away the best of the Restoration dramatists, and both are very amusing ; but it is a curious proof how unknown Vanbrugh must have been on our stage a hundred years ago, that Sheridan borrowed not only name and plot, but entire sentences and even conver- sations from his Relapse for the Trip to Scarborough, and made no acknowledgment whatever of his debt, unless by a vague and passing allusion in the prologue. He did something of the same sort when he took the idea for the Critic from the Duke of Buckingham's Rehearsal ; but it was only the idea, and there he certainly improved upon his original, which he did. not do in the Trip to Scarborough. The Lord Foppington of Vanbrugh is, as Mr. Crawfurd truly says, only too clever for his part ; we cannot despise him as much as we are meant to do, and his famous remark upon reading, which so delighted Charles Lamb, deserves to be immortal :—" To mind the inside of a book, is to divert one's self with the forced product of another man's brain. Now, I think a man of quality and breeding may be much better diverted with the natural sprouts of his own." But Vanbrugh's tendency was always to make his fine ladies and gentlemen "too clever by half " ; for instance, Lady Arabella, in the Journey to London, is quite as charming as Lady Teazle in the School for Scandal, and with much more brains. Clarinda's prosy good- sense makes her an admirable foil to her brilliant cousin, although she certainly does not enlist our sympathies much ; indeed, her conversation is very dull, but, apparently, no comedy was formerly considered complete without some trite morality or heavy sentiment. Mr. Crawfurd tells us that Vanbrugh's plays are meant for acting, not reading, but it is difficult to find more entertaining reading anywhere among English plays, except in Congreve.
Ben Jonson's comedies have, no doubt, genius, but have never seemed to us very amusing; the types of character chosen are oftener repulsive than not, and the humour so broad that it verges upon caricature ; on the stage, Every Man in h•is Humour would surely have hung fire, in spite of Bobadill's talk. Every reader of old plays knows Beau- mont and Fletcher, at least by name ; it is curious that comparatively few readers of old poetry know Beaumont as a poet, and yet his poetry is immeasurably superior to any- thing in his comedies, and deserves to immortalise him. Fletcher's poems are much more generally familiar than Beau- mont's, and the tragedies composed by the two are also fine, but little read. Mr. Crawfurd ascribes much of their failure in comedy to the bad taste of the day in which they wrote, but we question whether any influences could have produced a really good comedy from Beaumont and Fletcher, though there are gleams of the comic in A King and No King. The four great comic dramatists of the Restoration are naturally often classed together, but Wycherley is distinctly the lowest of the quartet; his coarseness is redeemed by very little true comic feeling, and his fine ladies and gentlemen talk like footmen and chamber- maids. Vanbrugh we have already mentioned, and Colley Cibber wrote his own life so well, that it is curious he could not write plays better; we have always classed his She Would and She Would Not with Tobin's Honeymoon, as two plays some- thing similar in character and plot, both once popular, both known even to the present day, and both very dull reading. But Congreve shines high above the other three. Whether acted or read, his comedies are always delightful ; and there is the indefinable ring in them that reveals their author as an educated gentleman, as well as a very clever playwright. Ex- ception may be taken both to the morality and to the plots of his plays ; the former is, as Mr. Crawfurd truly says, " on the wrong side of tolerable," and the plots are certainly elaborate, and not often effective, but every one of his characters stand out from the play as individuals ; it is impossible to mistake or confuse them, and they are all so amusing. If people ever really talked in real drawing-rooms as they do in Congreve's stage ones, would that we had lived in his day ! It must have been the golden age of kettledrums, for no Parisian lady holding her salon ever surpassed Millamant in grace and brilliancy; while the best scene in Les Femmes Savantes does not beat Brisk criticising Lady Froth's verses. Of course, many good plays will not bear having isolated scenes extracted from them ; and Mr. Crawford only quotes from two of Congreve's, but they are quite two of his best, and the selections are very happy. Farquhar, scenes from whose plays follow immediately on Congreve's, has by na means so bad a name for morality as the other Restoration playwrights ; and yet, to our thinking, he deserves it at least as much as some of them. He is not revoltingly coarse, as Wycherley is, and his plots can be quoted ; but in both The In- constant and The Beaux' Stratagem he seems to go on the two principles that everything is fair in love, and that a reformed rake makes the best husband, two views of life which, perhaps, do more harm than more openly-avowed and repellent im- morality. Both these plays are amusing, but the whole tone is distinctly a low one ; The Recruiting Officer is better in this respect.
The popularity in its day of the Beggar's Opera, from which Mr. Crawfurd next gives a scene, has always been to us very surprising, unless we attribute it to the irre- sistible catchingness of Gay's ballads, and to the origin- ality of the whole play. Otherwise, it is a coarse and re- pulsive farce, for we own that we should not have admitted it among true comedies. Perhaps, however, it prepares us all the more to appreciate the quotations from Goldsmith and Sheridan which follow, and against which all we can say is,— why are there not more of them ? A selection from the Rivals might surely have been inserted, in place of the dull one from Cumberland's West Indian, and a little more of the Good- natured Man would not have been amiss, for excellent as it is, this comedy seems never to have attained the celebrity of She Stoops to Conquer, perhaps from its less attractive name. There are several scenes, too, from Sheridan's Duenna which_ would have borne selection, but no doubt it is less important in a book of this kind to give passages from well-known modern plays than to quote from those that are less easily attainable by ordinary readers. The taste for reading plays is certainly less universal than that for reading novels, partly, perhaps, because no Wagner has yet arisen among dramatists who can make a play fill three volumes ; but those who feel the want of sub- stance in most novels of the day, might do worse than fall back on the intellectual repast of which Mr. Crawford offers them mouthfuls.
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