394
PARTISAN REVIEW
return to Congreve--it is
Love for Love,
truly, which ushers in the age of
insolence. Hardness of heart (Valentine turning off his old mistress when
she comes to see him with one of his children), greed (Valentine's designs
on his father's property), voluptuousness (Valentine and Mrs. Frail) are
here presented for the first time as ornaments of the male character.
From the days of Plautus and Terence, comic plots have frequently
turned on money and inheritance, but this is the first major comedy in
which a mercenary attitude is struck charmingly by all the principals;
as though fortune-hunting were as pretty and pathetic as love. There
remains, however, in Valentine's nature something of the Renaissance
gentleman, a touch of chivalry and desperate bravado, particularly in
the scenes where he simulates madness, that wafts the Mayfair tea-table
back onto the battlements of Elsinore and reminds us that Hamlet, too,
was the glass of fashion and Mercutio a fop. And insofar as Valentine
is a man of parts, his position is that of a latter-day Hamlet. He is the
humanist hero surrounded by a swarm of monsters, the nature-monsters
of the past, personifications of appetite, and the unnatural monsters of
the future, dolls with sand inside them. Scandal, half-doll, half-human,
is his Horatio.
But this view of the play is too somber. Valentine's pathos is merely
a shadow that life casts for a moment on this art. The truth is that the
play is slapstick, and the Hamlet echo is part of the joke, like a Mona
Lisa on a moustache. The peculiar quality of
Love for Love
is that it
is not comedy in the classic sense, comedy critical of manners and
morals, aiming to delight and instruct according
to
the precepts of
Horace, but parody, and parody not of man's work but of God's. Where
Shakespeare and Moliere, say, hope for correction or improvement,
Congreve sees his people as mannerisms
of~Creation.
This lese-majeste
is what gives the play its atmosphere of danger, its wonderful headiness
and elation. Something of the spirit was inherited by Wilde, but Wilde's
parody is too catty; it caricatures experience and then parodies
that.
Congreve makes truth absurd; he is not afraid of the serious. The situa–
tion in
Love for Love
is not a construction; it is h6rrid probability itself.
The disinherited heir, the tradesmen with bills at the door, the cold
mistress, the false friends, the insensate father, these are no Algys and
Gwendolyns and Cicelys-Congreve here, like Beerbohm in his famous
Henry James parody, has hit off the style of the Master in His richest
and most tragic period. And, as with Beerbohm or any fine parodist,
the joke comes with the unexpected withholding of sympathy-a rug is
jerked from under the performer in his moment of splendor. This with–
holding of sympathy (which in Congreve is identical with the absence of
censure) ought, one would think, to make the play unpleasant. But in
fact it is not so. The author has participated sufficiently in the subject
to rise above it in triumphant laughter: mind has eluded matter, and
