The Way of the World:

Genre and Comic Pattern

Neoclassical critics were in no doubt about it: comedy was an absolutely

separate kind of writing from tragedy. Not only were the two separate,

but they were to be located in a hierarchy of literary genres, which had

epic and tragedy at the top and farce and lampoon at the bottom. Where

epic did heroic conflict and noble love, farce did knockabout confusion

and compulsive sex; where the tragic figure fell from a great height, the

fool of farce fell headfirst into what the horse had deposited. Comedy

came somewhere in the middle of the rankings. And for the Neoclassical

critic these rankings would never change. This is because the critic,

voicing a belief which became a general assumption, thought of the

hierarchy of literary genres as being rooted in nature. It was given; it was

natural.

In fact, for most educated men and women – in the eighteenth century

at least – it correlated with the social order itself. In ‘An Essay on

Theatre’ (1773), Oliver Goldsmith writes:

If we apply to authorities, all the great masters in the dramatic art

have but one opinion. Their rule is, that as tragedy displays the
calamities of the great, so comedy should excite our laughter by
ridiculously exhibiting the follies of the lower part of mankind.
Boileau, one of the best modern critics, asserts that comedy will not
admit of tragic distress: –
Le comique, ennemi des soupirs et des pleurs,
N’admet point dans ses vers de tragiques douleurs

1
 [Comedy, the foe of sighs and tears/Prevents all tragic sorrows
from its lines]
Nor is this rule without the strongest foundation in nature, as the
distresses of the mean by no means affect us so strongly as the
calamities of the great. When tragedy exhibits to us some great man
fallen from his height and struggling with want and adversity, we
feel his situation in the same manner as we suppose he himself must
feel, and our pity is increased in proportion to the height from which
he fell. On the contrary, we do not so strongly sympathize with one
born in humbler circumstances, and encountering accidental distress
[…]. The one has our pity, the other our contempt. Distress,
therefore, is the proper object of tragedy, since the great excite our
pity by their fall; but not equally so of comedy, since the actors
employed in it are originally so mean that they sink but little by their
fall. (490-1)

The appeal is to authority, rules and nature, a harmonious triad, and the

social hierarchy is assumed to be no less natural than the generic one.

One should note, too, that the authorities Goldsmith cites, Boileau (1636-

1711) and later Voltaire (1694-1778), are both French, for it was from

France that the restored court of Charles II brought the vogue for

Neoclassicism. It was, as Walter Jackson Bate has noted, quite the fastest

‘transition’ in English literary history: ‘There is no other instance, after

the invention of printing, where you find a settled group of literary

premises and aims imported almost bodily, adopted with such dispatch,

and then transformed into orthodoxy, or near-orthodoxy, for so long a

time’ (16-17). There had indeed been an important line of Neoclassical

criticism in Britain for a hundred years or more, but suddenly, in 1660, it

became dominant. And it became dominant because court literature

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supervened in national culture. Britain became more French, in its High

Culture if nowhere else.

As for the passage itself, the nakedness with which social assumptions

are revealed is extraordinary. (This has the extra virtue of enabling us to

register how different the age of Neoclassicism is from ours – and not just

in its aesthetics.) The ‘foundation’ of the law of genre is ‘in nature’, ‘as

the distresses of the mean [the poor] by no means affect us so strongly as

the calamities of the great. […] The one has our pity, the other our

contempt’. Voltaire’s sneer at the mongrelization, ‘tradesmen’s tragedy’

(491), sums it up. The sneer sounds out of the heart of a system best

described as one of caste rather than of class. Art here is ruled by a

system of fitness called decorum: the noble (in the sense of social rank)

are to be represented in the genre which admits elevated language,

dignified behaviour and noble sentiments. The lower orders belong in the

medium of the everyday, with its indignities of outcome, its accidents of

event and its vulgarities of expression.

Actually, if you look at its context, the passage of Boileau from which

Goldsmith quotes carefully distinguishes between not two but three layers

of theatrical genre: the tragic at the top, the farcical at the bottom and the

comic in the middle. For Boileau the social focus correlates roughly with

that tripartite hierarchy: tragedy shows rulers and nobility; comedy shows

gentry and the middling sort, servants included; farce shows primarily the

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vulgar. The reason for Goldsmith’s exclusive preoccupation with the

distinctions between tragedy and comedy is one that will be made clear in

my lecture on The School for Scandal. Our focus this week is on a

comedy which concerns itself not with the lower orders but with the

gentry and the lower aristocracy. Thus it is entirely locatable within

Boileau’s three-level scheme. Its focus is relatively narrow, and more or

less exclusive. I qualify this statement because I have in mind as

comparisons the plays we have been reading in the previous weeks.

Shakespeare’s The Two Gentlemen of Verona and Aphra Behn’s The

Rover are at least as exclusive in their focus, and in some ways more so. I

shall return to the matter of exclusivity later on.

To begin with, though, I should note another aspect of the distinction

between tragedy and comedy in Neoclassical theory. The distinction had

vital stylistic implications. The high status of the characters of tragedy

went with an elevated mode of expression. And the elevated mode of

expression excluded reference to mundane quotidian reality. France was

the culture which produced (in the person of Jean Racine) the greatest

Neoclassical tragedy; and it was a Frenchman of a later age, Victor Hugo,

reacting as any good Romantic would against Neoclassical theory and

practice, who remarked that in classical tragedy the king never asked

what the time of day was. He didn’t need to, as the answer would always

have been, now and forever. Theory decreed that the subject of tragedy

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should always be taken from history – meaning distant, probably ancient,

history. But, however specific the historical setting, the action was taken

to embody universal values, and in that sense could happen anywhere at

any time. So the Neoclassical tragic playwright ensures that the action is

stripped of its material anchorage to historical time and place. High

passions are played out within a bubble of magnificent abstraction. The

elevated manner of speech is intensely artificial, and the conduct of the

action is similarly stately and consciously wrought. Material, historical

reality doesn’t impinge. (This, at any rate, was the intention. The first

audiences would readily recognize, or even create, contemporary

references and ‘relevance’.)

It was left to comedy to give us everyday life, with its accidents and

indignities, and its turns of phrase which could be heard out there on the

streets and in the fashionable parkland resorts – or indeed in there in the

drawing room or the Coffee House or the private chamber. There is a

paradox involved here: tragic subjects were, according to the rules, to be

taken from history – something that really happened; comic subjects, on

the contrary, could be freely invented and intricately organized into

highly artificial plots, involving stock characters doing predictable things.

Yet at any given point the kind of play that looked and sounded more

realistic – using that term in the naïve sense (‘like real life’, copying

social surfaces) – was obviously comedy. If, that is, you’d walked out

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onto the streets (the stinking streets – that would have struck you most

forcibly) of seventeenth century London, what you would have seen was

obviously not noble warriors or patriarchs striking poses in robes, togas

or armour, but beaux in carefully chosen finery, servants in uniform,

tradespeople in working togs and beggars in rags; what you would have

heard is not measured pentameters or hexameters in patient high

articulation but strenuous attempts at wit and aphorism, purposeful

business negotiations and busy oaths.

Comedy, then, offers the beginnings of what we now think of (very

loosely) as dramatic realism – the plausible imitation of a range of

observable social surfaces: typical appearances, typical speech, typical

behaviours, typical human relations and so forth. It is the theatrical womb

of the novel. And yet comedy is at the same time the most blatantly, self-

advertisingly artificial of forms. No hiding of convention here! There are

the characters’ names; there is the stock nature of their functions; there

are the familiar kinds of situation that they must find themselves in. And

there are the variations on the same old plots. All these signs and patterns

are readily recognizable (even if only from the plays we have read so far)

and in fact very ancient: they have been around in the theatre since

antiquity.

Consider the names in The Way of the World. Forgive me for spelling

out the obvious: Mirabell admires the beauties, Millamant has a thousand

6
lovers, Marwood would mar, Fainall fains all, Witwoud would be witty,

Lady Wishfort wishes for it, Petulant and Waitwell don’t even require

this level of decoding. They all live up or down to their names, and these

names, to a certain extent, indicate not just character but function.

Marwood would mar the most genuine of Millamant’s thousand loves,

and Fainall fains all to ruin Mirabell’s admiration of genuine beauty. In a

very basic way, then, the plot is encoded in the names.

This plot is itself a variant of an ancient pattern. Of course one can

reduce any variety of different phenomena to a spurious unity by

operating at a sufficiently attenuated level of abstraction, but the common

shape of the plots of the three plays we have looked at so far (and of the

fourth we shall look at next time) would be apparent even to one who

insisted on the unique artistic qualities of each. In each play, an Agent

pursues a Target and encounters a Block. Less abstractly, the hero wants

the young woman but the guardian won’t allow it. This is the

fundamental shape of many comedies since antiquity. The plot of each

play is constituted by the efforts of the Agent to circumvent or thwart the

Block and achieve the Target. In 2Gents and The Rover the tripartite

pattern is doubled: there are two of each element. In The Way of the

World and The School for Scandal, the Target is single and the Agent

doubled. It would be dizzying to pursue the fourfold comparison and

contrast any further, though it can be helpful to bear any two of the plays

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in mind at any one point. In the Congreve and the Sheridan, the tripartite

pattern (Agent-Block-Target) is enclosed within a determinative

parameter – that is, a condition which controls everything – and this is the

concern with reputation. When asked by Mrs Fainall why he made her

marry Fainall, Mirabell prefaces his self-justification with a general truth:

‘Why do we daily commit disagreeable and dangerous actions? To save

that idol, reputation’ (271). Lady Wishfort’s ‘cabal’ meets to – in

Fainall’s words – ‘sit upon the murdered reputations of the week’ (256).

This is like the scandal school in Sheridan’s later play. Marwood remarks

to Fainall of Lady Wishfort that she ‘will come to any composition to

save her [daughter’s] reputation’ – which is of course by implication her

own. Reputation as keynote is struck immediately in the play. Fainall

remarks of gambling to Mirabell at the very opening: ‘I’d no more play

with a man that slighted his ill fortune than I’d make love to a woman

who undervalued the loss of her reputation’ (255).

Fainall is formidable because he recognizes precisely what is at stake

in these matters – and that is the metaphor: at stake. The best model for

understanding the action of this play is indeed gaming – gambling. It is

(as critics tiresomely say) no accident that the whole piece opens just

after a card game. Fainall conceives of his plans in gaming terms. When

Marwood says of Mrs Fainall, ’I dare swear she had given up her game

before she was married’ (290), ‘game’ means her sexual liaison with

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Mirabell. When Fainall retorts, taking up the same metaphor, it is cards

he thinks through: ‘That may be’, he says, ‘She might throw up her cards;

but I’ll be hanged if she did not put Pam in her pocket’ (meaning ‘reserve

her best card’ – that is, Mirabell). And a moment later he sums up his

confidence by declaring, ‘’Tis against all rule of play that I should lose to

one who has not wherewithal to stake’ (291). Having both risen from

cards in the first scene – with Mirabell there a loser – what Mirabell and

Fainall are engaged in, during the remainder of the action, is a game with

high stakes and valuable prizes, with reputation as the determinative

factor. The game frames the action. Surface manners are polite, but the

‘rule of play’ is not noticeably so.

The nature of the rewards deserves consideration. Because, to put it

bluntly, what the hero usually – conventionally – gets, along with the girl,

is the money. Now, unless the dramatist wants the audience the regard the

hero as cynical or merely greedy, he or she has to avoid the implication

that money is the sole or real motivation for the love-pursuit. The less

interesting the target of the pursuit (the girl) the more of a problem the

dramatist sets himself or herself. The more blank she is as a character, the

more likely we are to regard her merely as a totem symbolizing money.

Of our four plays this is least a problem in The Rover – not because

money isn’t at stake (as usual, it is), but because the women are all

energetically characterized and lively: Florinda is virtually a co-

9
conspirator with her lover Belvile, and Hellena presents herself as a witty

match and worthy moral counterpart for the Rover himself. In fact in this

play, it is the Target which is doubled, through the irresistible

involvement of Willmore with both Hellena and the formidable

Angellica. In contrast, the silence of Silvia in the final scene of 2Gents is

a problem – though hardly a unique one, even in Shakespeare. Actually,

Silvia has been characterized well enough beforehand to convince us that

she is more than merely a totem to which a fortune is attached – and

Valentine is not made out to be seeking a fortune anyway. But if we

compare the situation with that in The School for Scandal we can see the

problem. The worst we can say about the silence of Silvia is that it is

puzzling because she hasn’t been presented as a passive nullity in the play

generally. In other words, the inconsistency of her character in the final

scene actually saves the play from implying that, whatever Valentine or

Proteus say, the mainspring of the action is money. So this weakness in

the play actually stops it from being a lesser play. In the Sheridan, as we

shall see, the characterization of the Target, the young woman Maria,

with whom the money comes, is uniformly uninteresting, if not insipid;

and as her competing suitors, the brothers Surface, are both in need of

money, the cynical implication – though it is unintended – is harder to

eliminate. Sheridan tries to secure the right response by making sure that

the successful suitor, the charming libertine wastrel, Charles, is seen as

10
penniless precisely because he is careless about money in every way – so

love is his only motivation where Maria is concerned. Conversely, his

brother and competitor for Maria, Joseph, is an egregious fashionable

hypocrite who is interested only in the fortune that comes with the girl,

and hardly at all in the girl herself. So our evaluation of the competing

suitors is never at issue – even though the wicked Joseph is predictably

the more interesting of the two. Nonetheless, given the blank that Maria

is, the audience is still left feeling that the money will come in very handy

to pay off Charles’s debts. The situation at the happy end is warmly

sentimental, but the floating sense of cynicism, for the audience, ends up

attaching itself to the playwright.

So how does Congreve handle this problem? Very surely, I should say.

It helps that, in this play where Mincing is not just an activity but a

character (‘Exit with MINCING’), words about money are never minced.

The subject is up-front from the word go. The Target (to use the terms

I’ve introduced) is Millamant, and a fortune comes with her. But, as

Fainall puts it, ‘half her fortune depends upon her marrying with my lady

[Wishfort]’s approbation’ (256). The Agent, Mirabell, wants, needs, all

the money as well as the woman, but is fiercely resented by Lady

Wishfort. That is his game-position at the outset. The competitor is a

competitor for money alone: Fainall may fain all, yet he never fains an

erotic interest in Millamant. Indeed, erotic passion, in the shape of Mrs

11
Marwood, runs directly athwart Fainall’s intentions. But for her, none of

this action would have happened: Mirabell would have run off with

Millamant, thus forfeiting the moiety of her fortune, which would have

come to Fainall through Mrs Fainall, who is the daughter of this play’s

Block, Lady Wishfort. But Marwood, out of her intense love-hate for

Mirabell, has revealed his plans. All this before the play’s action begins.

Where Congreve confirms his sureness of touch, though, is in the

characterization of the Target, Millamant. We think of her as a dominant

figure in the play, and in the person of Mrs Bracegirdle, who played her,

she has the last word, in the Epilogue. So it comes as a jolt to realise that

in the final Act – which in a previous instance (2Gents) we have used as

an index of the significance of the Target-figure – she has no more than

half-a-dozen speeches; of these all except two are single lines and only

one is of substantive importance. She has no role in the working out of

the plot except to consent to it. Thus technically, although she is the

object of the plot, she has no importance, no agency, within it. It is no

wonder, then, that she hardly figures: she is so important that she has no

role. In fact, after the so-called Proviso scene in Act IV (295-99) she

fades out of the action as the intrigue – plot and counter-plot – gathers

towards resolution. It is not even clear that she knows about Mirabell’s

plot – though Foible does tell Mirabell (276) that she told Millamant

about it. (This has to be downplayed, presumably, so that the idea of

12
Millamant as virtuous woman is not compromised by the status of

conspirator.)

And yet we do think of her as important. Lively, independent (despite

her financial position), combative, affectionate: she is a figure not just of

wit and resource but of self-confronting honesty. We feel this because

Congreve develops her scenes with Mrs Fainall, Marwood and Mirabell

himself with such care and tact, even though these scenes are structurally

marginal to the central intrigues. In particular, the Proviso scene of Act

IV is genuinely convincing as a witty negotiation of a marriage between

equals: a man and a woman projecting a close and honest relation

involving mutual independence in the context of the formal constraints

and peculiar freedoms of a specific society.

Earlier I placed an emphasis upon comic convention – to put it

crudely, the way comedies copy other, earlier, comedies rather than

copying life. And I have been speaking about certain technical problems

of comic plotting. But in describing Millamant I have been obliged to use

terms which are more familiar in the discussion of realistic art than

conventional art. She is psychologically plausible and interesting. Thus,

having indicated some (but by no means all) of the conventional features

of The Way of the World, I am forced to return to my paradoxical

suggestion that comedy is the most realistic of the dramatic genres.

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 Let us continue to ask for a moment about psychological plausibility –

as a quality which makes for something we would recognize as realism.

The most interesting character in the play, in respect of psychology, is

another who is also, strictly speaking, aside from the thrust of the plot –

Mrs Marwood. She is a kind of dark shadow of Millamant, a negative

counterpart. Like Millamant, she is in love with Mirabell; but this love,

once denied, has been distorted to hatred without losing any of its

vehemence. Like Millamant, she makes the action necessary – but in the

negative sense (as I’ve already noted): had she not thwarted the earlier

plans of Mirabell and Millamant, her lover Fainall would have gained the

money for which they now scheme, and which would (he says) have

benefited her as much as him. In other words, such is the irresistible force

of her negative passion that it works against her own interests. Where

Millamant is a spirit of assent and positivity, Marwood, as her name

indicates, is a spirit of denial and negativity.

The power and fascination of a figure such as Marwood derives from

the fact that the thwarted erotic passion that drives her has the lid held

down on it by a society whose codes of behaviour and speech demand

immense self-control at all times. If Congreve convinces one as being

meticulous in his rendering of these codes and their everyday workings,

he does so in part by being so careful in suggesting how the signs of

genuine feeling are evident under or through this carefully composed

14
surface. He shows us people expert at regulating their strong passions, but

also extremely alert to the signs in others of those passions which must

exist below the surface of social codes. In the society of the play, people

betray feelings and are betrayed by them, and others are as watchful as

cruel teenagers. Blood in or out of the face is the greatest betrayer of

truth, and the characters of this play are quick to notice a blush or a flush

or their opposite. Here are Mrss. Marwood and Fainall – mistress and

wife – happening upon the truth about each other in Act II, and letting

each other know it, without being anything other than consistently polite.

The blood of each betrays her. Marwood declares that she would

consummate her hatred of men by doing herself ‘the violence of

undergoing the ceremony’ of marriage to one that genuinely loved her.

She would leave him in permanent uncertainty about her own faithfulness

to him, because she ‘would have him ever to continue upon the rack of

fear and jealousy’:

MRS FAINALL
Ingenious mischief! Would thou wert married to Mirabell.
MRS MARWOOD
Would I were!
MRS FAINALL
You change colour.
MRS MARWOOD
Because I hate him.

When Mrs Fainall seems to be defending Mirabell, Marwood retorts:

15
 MRS MARWOOD
Oh, then it seems you are one of his favourable enemies! Methinks
you look a little pale, and now you flush again.
MRS FAINALL
Do I? I think I am a little sick o’ the sudden.
MRS MARWOOD
What ails you?
(267)

Only the entrance of the hated husband himself enables Mrs Fainall to

escape scrutiny. A few moments later, even as she insinuates that there is

a ‘fellow-feeling’ between his wife and Mirabell, Fainall makes clear to

Marwood that her own passion for Mirabell, whether love or hate, is

perfectly clear in her face:

FAINALL
I do now begin to apprehend it.
MRS MARWOOD
What?
FAINALL
That I have been deceived, Madam, and you are false.
MRS MARWOOD
That I am false? What mean you?
FAINALL
To let you know I see through all your little arts. Come, you both
love him; and both have equally dissembled your aversion. Your
mutual jealousies of one another have made you clash till you have
both struck fire. I have seen the warm confession reddening on your
cheeks, and sparkling from your eyes.
MRS MARWOOD
You do me wrong.
FAINALL
I do not.
(268-9)

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In this society, maintaining composure – of colour as well as gesture and

deportment – is a primary necessity. When Millamant is annoyed by

Petulant and, underneath it all (we infer) anxious about Mirabell,

Marwood observes, ‘You have a colour’ (283), and later, ‘Indeed, my

dear, you’ll tear another fan, if you don’t mitigate those violent airs’

(284). At the climax, with Mrs Fainall protesting her innocence

passionately, Marwood observes, ‘More temper [moderation] would look

more like innocence’ (309). At the very end of the play we know Fainall

has lost the game when he loses his composure. Moments earlier he had

responded to Sir Wilfull Witwoud’s offer of a duel by remarking coolly,

‘You may draw your fox [sword] if you please, sir, and make a bear-

garden flourish somewhere else; for here it will not avail’ (315). When he

has been defeated by Mirabell’s deed of conveyance at the end, Fainall

draws his sword to run at his wife, but Sir Wilful now prevents him and

offers tit for tat: ‘Hold, sir! Now you may make your bear-garden flourish

somewhere else, sir’ (317). The point is that the bear-garden is home to a

low-class entertainment which the likes of Fainall would never normally

associate himself with: his final gesture of frustration embodies not just a

loss of composure but a momentary breach of social comportment. He

has compromised his social rank by the breach of polite conduct, and is at

that moment no better than the uncouth bumpkin he scorns.

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 Congreve’s hints at character-psychology, therefore, involve the

interaction of a composed surface and a potentially discomposed depth.

The characters need to compose themseves, in both senses, and stay

composed. Passion is suggested by the fracturing or unavoidable staining

of a constructed surface. We are made aware that this is a society in

which, metaphorically as well as actually, roles have to be played and

maintained. Apart from psychology, though, there is another, quite

different way in which The Way of the World can be thought of as

offering realism as well as convention.

What I have referred to as the world of this play (the world of The

Way of the World) is that of what we might call (in a 1950s phrase) High

Society. It is composed of gentry and minor aristocracy – poised socially

between the two, in fact. It is, as we’ve seen, a world of serious game and

carefully wrought surface. True to 1700-life it might be (we can never

know), and in that sense an accurate imitation, but the world imitated is

already highly artificial: it is perhaps this that would make many hesitate

before describing it as realistic. The more accurately this world is

represented, the more artificial it is likely to appear. (We seem here to

have reached the borders of the working definition of realism which I

have assumed up to now.) But the world of the play is not quite so closed

as it might have been. It is open, socially and linguistically, at the bottom.

Consider the servants.

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 Of course there are comic servants in Shakespeare – generally, but

with two good examples in 2Gents in particular. Speed and Lance talk in

a lively, colloquial fashion, which perhaps approximates to Elizabethan

street-talk with the addition (one hopes, for the sake of ordinary

Elizabethans) of large quantities of quibbling. Recall, though, their

function in the play. They are there to provide an ironic counterpoint to

the activities and emotions of the masters. Plot-wise they function as

messengers and go-betweens: in fact they are of little significance to the

plot. Others could have fulfilled that function. They have comic scenes,

which relate perspectivally to the main plot: that is their function.

Although generalizations are dangerous, one could say that these early

clowns are not untypical of clowns throughout Shakespeare, who tend to

be commentators rather than plot-functionaries. One of Shakespeare’s

favourite moves is to have the clowns resolve a plot inadvertently by their

very incompetence, which is always a enjoyable irony. Nonetheless this is

a different sort of comic servant from the ones which derive from Italian

comedy. This kind figures in The Taming of the Shrew and The Comedy

of Errors, perhaps, but Shakespeare was never as Italian as that again in

his later career. The Italian comedy, by general contrast, had the tricky

servant and the idiot servant, and without them the plot could hardly

function. Those we should think of in this connection are Polly and

Manuel in Fawlty Towers, which, as English sitcoms go, was really (and

19
ironically) very continental. Foible and Waitwell are in this tradition: they

are the tricky servants who prosecute the plot laid by their master, and do

so with considerable relish, resource and initiative. It says rather a lot

about them – about their resourcefulness – that Mirabell has to ensure

they are married so that they don’t double-cross him.

These two, then, are straight out of a comic tradition. But what they

bring with them is a different world from the one we see on the stage.

This world is glimpsed in Lady Wishfort’s furious reaction when she

realizes she has been betrayed by Foible, the world of street ‘trade’ from

which she claims to have saved her servant:

Away! out! out! Go set up for yourself again! Do, drive a trade, do,
with your three-pennyworth of small ware, flaunting upon a pack-
thread, under a brandy-seller’s bulk, or against a dead wall by a
ballad-monger! Go, hang out an old frisoneer gorget, with a yard of
yellow colberteen again. Do! an old gnawed mask, two rows of pins,
and a child’s fiddle; a glass necklace with the beads broken, and a
quilted nightcap with one ear. Go, go, drive a trade! These were your
commodities, you treacherous trull! (306)

The reason we need notes for this, of course, is its very specificity – a

street-specificity. The speaker’s disgust at the world she conjures is

palpable. Yet, like Ben Jonson (from whom he would have got this sort of

writing) and, later, Dickens, Congreve accesses a linguistic energy in

contemplating, very briefly, a world entirely other than the one we

witness on the stage. There are other examples in the play (such as

Marwood’s evocation of the horrors of the law-courts, 310). They are

20
being used rhetorically by particular characters, of course, but they work

to produce a perspective on the world of the play’s action which

intensifies its artificiality and its preciosity. Somewhere, aside from the

ways of the stage-world, these other worlds are flourishing, and they offer

a concurrent presence and sound, if not a distant threat. We had thought

the play was exclusive. These moments of linguistic inclusivity bring

with them an enhanced sense of the play’s relation to social reality. There

is a world elsewhere, and it has a distinctive language.

Throughout this lecture I have been attempting to distinguish elements

of comic convention from elements of realism in The Way of the World.

To end up with I had better try to say what is at stake in this. Realism – as

I have been employing the term – puts its premium, by definition, on

accurate imitation of social reality as it exists at a particular time and in a

particular place. And this view of what reality consists of (there are after

all different views) regards the human individual in a particular way. As

we’ve seen, Congreve is able to suggest very powerfully the violent

passions that are working underneath, that are regulated and sublimated

by the intricate masks and manners of the play’s social world. It is in the

gap between surface and depth that we locate the psychology of the

characters. To put this another way: we see characters playing roles –

sometimes literally (like Waitwell as Sir Rowland) but mostly

metaphorically, within the social scene. On occasion a gap opens between

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character and role, and this gap we think of as opening onto a

psychological dimension. Implicit in this gap we have something that has

become very familiar to us: the assumption of the private self, apart from

any social role, free-standing and separate and self-sufficient. We have,

that is, the modern individual, who comes to be represented for us in the

novels of the eighteenth, nineteenth and twentieth centuries. It has, as I

say, become familiar to us, but here, in this period, we see it emerging, in

particular social and political circumstances. Congreve’s play, appearing

in 1700 and evoking a highly artificial and rule-governed social

environment, enables us to observe that emergence.

This is the significance of Congreve’s own definition of Humour in his

1695 letter-essay, ‘Concerning Humour in Comedy’. It is clear from the

piece that Congreve has in mind the ancient medical theory of the four

humours as determining types of human character and personality. Yet

his idea of Humour indicates a move away from the context of pre-

modern medicine: ‘I take [Humour] to be’, he says, ‘A singular and

unavoidable manner of doing or saying anything, peculiar and natural to

one man only, by which his speech and actions are distinguished from

those of other men’ (478, Congreve’s italics). Although there is nothing

necessarily funny about this ‘manner’, one can see how it is especially

relevant to comic writing and acting. Paradoxically, although the so-

called Comedy of Humours is based on moral types (as indicated by

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characters’ names, as in this play), Congreve’s insistence is upon the

uniqueness of the individual as a source of humour – or should we say

laughter? Everyone as an eccentric, perhaps. And there is a political

charge to this. Summing up, Congreve says this:

I look upon Humour to be almost of English growth; at least, it

does not seem to have found such increase on any other soil.
And what appears to me to be the reason of it is the great
freedom, privilege, and liberty which the common people of
England enjoy. Any man that has a Humour is under no
restraint or fear of giving it a vent; they have a proverb among
them which, maybe, will show the bent and genius of the
people as well as a longer discourse. ‘He that will have a May
pole shall have a May pole’ (481).

I think it was Sir William Empson, himself nothing if not unconcentric to

critical orthodoxy, who said that the English eccentric – that figure which

is still recognized as a type throughout the world – has an obvious

political meaning, which can be summed up thus: ‘Well, at least we don’t

lock them up’. And so it is with Congreve’s (very serious) idea of

Humour: it represents the precious liberty of the individual, the Humour-

ous man (sic) in the national (Protestant) culture. Or at least since the

Glorious Revolution of 1688 it could be said by its proponents to do so.

That individual is, after 1688, the modern bourgeois individual. The

threat of Catholic absolutism is banished; freedoms, privileges and

liberties have now passed from exclusive court to polite society.

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 Works Cited

Bate, W. Jackson. The Burden of the Past and the English Poet. Chatto &
Windus, 1971.
McMillin, Scott, ed. Restoration and Eighteenth Century Comedy, 2nd ed.
Norton, 1997.
[Including: William Congreve, The Way of the World, 251-319;
Congreve, ‘Concerning Humour in Comedy’, 474-80; Oliver
Goldsmith, ‘An Essay on the Theatre’, 489-92.]

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