the case of Samuel Butler (so shamefully neglected by the court Butler had served) shows that the writer of even such heartless plays as The Country Wife may be familiar with generous impulses, while his uncompromising lines in defence of Buckingham, when the duke in his turn fell into trouble, show that the inventor of so shameless a fraud as that which forms the pivot of The Plain Dealer may in actual life possess that passion for fairplay which is believed to be a specially English quality. But among the “ninety-nine” religions with which Voltaire accredited England there is one whose permanency has never been shaken—the worship of gentility. To this Wycherley remained as faithful to the day of his death as Congreve himself. And, if his relations to that “other world beyond this,” which the Puritans had adopted, were liable to change with his environments, it was because that “other world” was really out of fashion altogether.
Wycherley's university career seems also to have been influenced by the same causes. Although Puritanism had certainly not contaminated the universities, yet English “quality and politeness” (to use Major Pack's words) have always, since the great rebellion, been rather ashamed of possessing too much learning. As a fellow-commoner of Queen's College, Oxford, Wycherley only lived (according to Wood) in the provost's lodgings, being entered in the public library under the title of “Philosophiae Studiosus” in July 1660. And he does not seem to have matriculated or to have taken a degree.
Nor when, on quitting Oxford, he took up his residence in the Inner Temple, where he had been entered in 1659, did he give any more attention to the dry study of the law than was proper to one so warmly caressed “by the persons most eminent for their quality or politeness.” Pleasure and the stage were alone open to him, and probably early in 1671 was produced, at the Theatre Royal, Love in a Wood. It was published the next year. With regard to this comedy Wycherley told Pope—told him “over and over” till Pope believed him—believed him, at least, until they quarrelled about Wycherley's verses—that he wrote it the year before he went to Oxford. But we need not believe him: the worst witness against a man is mostly himself. To pose as the wicked boy of genius has been the foolish ambition of many writers, but on inquiry it will generally be found that these inkhorn Lotharios are not nearly so wicked as they would have us believe. When Wycherley charges himself with having written, as a boy of nineteen, scenes so callous and so depraved that even Barbara Palmer's appetite for profligacy was, if not satisfied, appeased, there is, we repeat, no need to believe him. Indeed, there is every reason to disbelieve him,—not for the reasons advanced by Macaulay, however, who in challenging Wycherley's date does not go nearly deep enough. Macaulay points to the allusions in the play to gentlemen's periwigs, to guineas, to the vests which Charles ordered to be worn at court, to the great fire, &c., as showing that the comedy could not have been written the year before the author went to Oxford. We must remember, however, that even if the play had been written in that year, and delayed in its production till 1672, it is exactly this kind of allusion to recent events which any dramatist with an eye to freshness of colour would be certain to weave into his dialogue. It is not that “the whole air and spirit of the piece belong to a period subsequent to that mentioned by Wycherley,” but that “the whole air and spirit of the piece” belong to a man—an experienced and hardened young man of the world—and not to a boy who would fain pose as an experienced and hardened young man of the world. The real defence of Wycherley against his foolish impeachment of himself is this, that Love in a Wood, howsoever inferior in structure and in all the artistic economies to The Country Wife and The Plain Dealer, contains scenes which no inexperienced boy could have written—scenes which, not for moral hardness merely, but often for real dramatic ripeness, are almost the strongest to be found amongst his four plays. With regard to dramatic ripeness, indeed, if we were asked to indicate the finest touch in all Wycherley, we should very likely select a speech in the third scene of the third act of this very play, where the vain, foolish and boastful rake Dapperwit, having taken his friend to see his mistress for the express purpose of advertising his lordship over her, is coolly denied by her and insolently repulsed. “I think,” says Dapperwit, “women take inconstancy from me worse than from any man breathing.”
Now, does the subsequent development of Wycherley's dramatic genius lead us to believe that, at nineteen, he could have given this touch, worthy of the hand that drew Malvolio? Is there anything in his two masterpieces—The Country Wife or The Plain Dealer—that makes it credible that Wycherley, the boy, could have thus delineated by a single quiet touch vanity as a chain-armour which no shaft can pierce—vanity, that is to say, in its perfect development? However, Macaulay (forgetting that, among the myriad vanities of the writing fraternity, this of pretending to an early development of intellectual powers that ought not to be, even if they could be, developed early is at once the most comic and the most common) is rather too severe upon Wycherley's disingenuousness in regard to the dates of his plays. That the writer of a play far more daring than Etheredge's She Would if She Could—and far more brilliant too—should at once become the talk of Charles's court was inevitable; equally inevitable was it that the author of the song at the end of the first act, in praise of harlots and their offspring, should touch to its depths the soul of the duchess of Cleveland. Possibly Wycherley intended this famous song as a glorification of Her Grace and her profession, for he seems to have been more delighted than surprised when, as he passed in his coach through Pall Mail, he heard the duchess address him from her coach window as a “rascal,” a “villain,” and as a son of the very kind of lady his song had lauded. For his answer was perfect in its readiness: “Madam, you have been pleased to bestow a title on me which belongs only to the fortunate.” Perceiving that Her Grace received the compliment in the spirit in which it was meant, he lost no time in calling upon her, and was from that moment the recipient of those “favours” to which he alludes with pride in the dedication of the play to her. Voltaire's story (in his Letters on the English Nation) that Her Grace used to go to Wycherley's chambers in the Temple disguised as a country wench, in a straw hat, with pattens on and a basket in her hand, may be apocryphal—very likely it is—for disguise was quite superfluous in the case of the mistress of Charles II. and Jacob Hall, but it at least shows how general was the opinion that, under such patronage as this, Wycherley's fortune as poet and dramatist, “eminent for his quality and politeness,” was now made.
Charles, who had determined to bring up his son, the duke of Richmond, like a prince, was desirous of securing for tutor a man so entirely qualified as was Wycherley to impart what was then recognized as the princely education, and it seems pretty clear that, but for the accident, to which we shall have to recur, of his meeting the countess of Drogheda at Bath and secretly marrying her, the education of the young man would actually have been entrusted by his father to Wycherley as a reward for the dramatist's having written Love in a Wood.
Whether Wycherley's experiences as a naval officer, which he alludes to in his lines “On a Sea Fight which the Author was in betwixt the English and the Dutch,” occurred before or after the production of Love in a Wood is a point upon which opinions differ, but on the whole we are inclined to agree with Macaulay, against Leigh Hunt, that these experiences took place not only after the production of Love in a Wood but after the production of The Gentleman Dancing Master, in 1673. We also think, with Macaulay, that he went to sea simply because it was the “polite” thing to do so—simply because, as he himself in the epilogue to The Gentleman Dancing Master says, “all gentlemen must pack to sea.”
This second comedy was published in 1673, but was probably acted late in 1671. It is inferior to Love in a Wood. In The Relapse the artistic mistake of blending comedy and farce damages a splendid play, but leaves it a splendid play still. In The Gentleman Dancing Master this mingling of discordant
