lOOK S
243
the
malice of her wit and her superior stamina of will and spirit. They
are a brisk and shining company and they perform with the elegance
of ballet: Dorimant, Bellair, Medley, Loveless, Lovewell, Loveit, Aman–
da, Narcissa, Hillaria, Snap, Sly, Snake, Setter, Sir Fopling Flutter,
Sir Novelty Fashion, Sir Fretful Plagiary, Sir Tunbelly Clumsy, Fainall,
Mirabell, Witwoud, Petulant, Mincing and Millamant.
Mr. Kronenberger agrees with the general modern judgment that
Congreve's
Way
of the
W
orId
is the showpiece of the English comic
theater, that Gongreve's wit is superior to that of Etherege (though his
is
near the mark too), that both Etherege and Congreve escape the
morose,
anarchic moralism that in
The Plain Dealer
reduces Wycherley's
farcical wit to brutality and romantic misanthropy. Mr. Kronenberger
is
also properly impressed with how fleeting a moment of brilliance
history allowed the English comic stage. The whole brief tradition was
radically changed and, in a sense, ruined in the fifth act (one may
think)
of Gibber's
Love's Last Shift,
where after four acts of impartial
Restoration license and realism, virtue is said to be necessary and, what
is
worse, is rewarded by cash on the line. Ever since then the genteel
bourgeoisie has succeeded in impressing its sentimentality and hypocrisy
on the comic theater. Doubtless even the most rugged of moral realists
will
not be disposed to excuse the undercurrent of callousness in the
Restoration playwrights, nor the patent fraudulence of the intriguers
with whom they peopled the stage. But surely Mr. Kronenberger is a
thousand times correct in preferring the open falsity of the Restoration
rake to the hypocrisy of the professedly virtuous people who succeeded
him
on the stage in the bourgeois era.
Mr. Kronenberger is a genuinely witty writer himself and the
most eloquent of defenders of high comedy (blurb writers always call
him
"civilized"-fortunately this is not true, not the way they mean it,
they mean that he is tame and won't bite). His book is all the more
useful because the subject has not drawn many modern critics. The
English
comic drama does not offer a poetic texture of the kind that
interests
a "new critic"; the ritual or mythic origins are usually trans–
literated out of experience (although one might wish that Mr. Kronen–
berger had noted that they can be felt in such a playas
The Country
Wife).
The historical or ideological critic will find Congreve's society,
for example, too circumscribed to be of great interest and will soon
discover that Gongreve is hardly capable of thought, of entertaining an
idea except as it may be expressed in a limited repertoire of "manners."
The critic of high comedy must have a high degree of worldly wisdom,
which
will consist partly in a tactful sense of how much (or how little)
historical or ideological method is appropriate. A sense of the lyric
