THE ORIGINALITY OF WILLIAM WYCHERLEY

T

GEORGE B. CHURCHILL

Professor of English Literature, Amherst College

O the student of English society in the Restoration period, as to the student of the dramatic art, the plays of William Wycherley offer a material of peculiar interest and value. When Wycherley's first comedy was presented, a decade had passed since the restoration of the monarchy and the reopening of the theaters. The advent of Charles II had brought to England a court deeply inoculated with French manners and French standards of life. The ordered elegance of French society had captivated the Englishman of Charles's train, and he introduced it, at least as an ideal, into England, when he had once more a court of his own. But there were some things both in his own nature and in that of the Frenchman of which he was not fully aware. He did not realize that social satisfactions could never conquer or suppress the clamor of his nature for the satisfactions of the individual. It is extremely doubtful if the Englishman of Charles's court ever had any clear vision of society as an organization whose laws profoundly modify the norms and standards of the individual, an organization whose demands not seldom rise into a sphere where the common sense and the social judgment become almost, if not quite, a moral law.

By the beginning of the seventies it was plain how far the admiration of the English court for what was French had gone in the way of actual assimilation, and how far it remained truly English. It was a society highly self-conscious and interested in nothing so much as itself. Certain very definite ideals of social intercourse, the admiration of witty converse, of fidelity to social conventions, of savoir-vivre, the love of ease and gaiety and glitter, testify to the lasting influence of France. But it had already proved to itself, and more, it had come to protest openly with a certain satisfaction, that it was not French. It had not only largely cast off the imitation of externals-so that a Monsieur de Paris had become a ridiculous

figure, the butt of society and of comedy; it had flung away all the trammels of elegant speech and conduct, and revealed and flaunted the unashamed vulgarity of the Englishman given over to the pursuit of sensual gratification. ""Tis too bold for the French manners," wrote Voltaire of Wycherley's Country Wife. An audacious shamelessness is the characteristic that in 1671 chiefly distinguished the court of Charles from that of Louis XIV.

The development of an adequate self-expression in the drama, the establishment of a new comedy, was a process coincident in time with that by which English society had "found" itself. It was subject to the same influences and reached the same goal. As English society found its inspiration and model in French society, only to discover eventually that the ideal was wholly unfitted to its own true nature, so the Restoration comedy sought its model in the work of Molière, only to discover that the standards and purposes of Molière were quite different from its own. By 1668, in Etheredge's She Would If She Could, apart from some borrowing of material, and inspiration of the animation and ease of scene and dialogue, the influence of Molière is confined to the conception of a comedy whose sufficient subject and interest is "manners," the behavior of society as it is. Etheredge had no standards, social or moral, that differed from those of the society he portrayed. He had no share in Molière's conception of the sanative, rationalizing, ordering values of right social standards. "It is a heartless world he presents, and he laughs with an entire acquiescence in its point of view." 1

The work of William Wycherley was subject to the same influences as those which molded the work of Etheredge. Like the latter, he had spent some years in France, and through his connection with the circle of the Hôtel de Rambouillet had become acquainted with the best that French society had to offer. He had had the opportunity to see the production of some of Molière's earlier work, and had made a close study of the Frenchman's later plays. He had shared intimately the life of the English court. But when in 1673 and 1675-6 he produced The Country Wife and The Plain Dealer, he presented a portrait and expression of English society in certain

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1 Macaulay, "Comic Dramatists of the Restoration."

For the evidence for these dates, see the introduction to the author's forthcoming edition of Wycherley's plays, from which, with the permission of the publishers, Messrs. Heath & Co., much of the material of this paper is drawn.

respects markedly different from that of Etheredge, and revealed a markedly different use of the work of his French model.

It is the chief distinction of Wycherley that he of all the writers of Restoration comedy most accurately and most fully expressed the society for which he wrote. What was French, what was English in his world, is plainest in his comedies. If his dialogue lacks the grace, the sustained ease of wit that is to be found in Congreve's, it is a more faithful presentation of what was to be heard in the fashionable circle of his day; if corruption is nakeder and more shameless in his plays than in any others, it is because he was truer to the fact. It is an English sensual society that he depicts, along with what it had really acquired and retained from the influence of France. And it is to be added that he came nearer than any other to a real comprehension of the French social ideal, especially as that is revealed in the plays of Molière. More than this, Wycherley, alone among the comic playwrights of the Restoration, appears to have had some notion-vague and even grotesque as it was-of the true fruit of a genuine social consciousness; and alone among his fellows in the midst of his unsparing realism made some attempt to depict ideal characters that should express the common sense and controlled judgment, the passion for sincerity, the faithfulness of love, which must have lurked somewhere, if only as a vision of despair, in that society which we are perhaps too ready to call utterly corrupt.

That The Country Wife and The Plain Dealer are portraits and criticisms of English society is apparent at a glance. In what respects does Wycherley's portrait differ from that drawn by his fellows? In what respects does he differ from them in his attitude toward what he sees? That The Country Wife is to a certain extent an imitation and adaptation of Molière's L'École des Femmes and L'Ecole des Maris, and The Plain Dealer of Le Misanthrope, is equally apparent. What is the degree and the nature of this dependence?

To these questions very various answers have been given. Macaulay,' too obsessed by his moral thesis for either a careful eye to facts or a calm critical analysis, declared that Wycherley "has scarcely more claim to originality than Terence. It is not too much to say that there is hardly anything of the least value in his plays.

1 "The Comic Dramatists."

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is as

of which the hint is not to be found elsewhere." Hazlitt bluntly on the other side: "the best things are his own." Both critics confused the question of originality with that of moral and dramatic values. Modern critics have had a surer view. Of The Plain Dealer, W. C. Ward 2 declares that it "appears almost equally a masterpiece of originality as of ingenuity," and A. W. Ward that Wycherley must in this play be allowed to have given proofs of genuine force and of essential originality. . . . To no other of his dramatic works can a similar praise be given." Schelling's judgment contains a clearer indication of the nature and value of this originality. "Wycherley was as frank a plagiary as any of his contemporaries . . . his Country Wife . . . derives its plot from the popular comedies of Molière. The Plain Dealer . . . however it may have been suggested by certain scenes and personages of Le Misanthrope, was certainly made over by the English dramatist into something new and distinctive. . . . The thing which raises Wycherley above his class, strange as it may appear, is a certain moral earnestness which . . . causes the careful reader to discern in all this brutality and plain speaking not a little of the gravity of true satire."

In this paper I purpose to consider once more the question of Wycherley's originality, and offer a contribution in such detail as its necessarily narrow limits will allow toward a more nearly complete answer than has yet been given. There are two distinct questions involved: In what and in what degree is Wycherley original? and What is his originality worth? These questions must be settled apart from each other.

In the two Écoles of Molière the basic idea is the same. In each an old bachelor brings up a young ward with the intent that she shall become his wife. Each guardian distrusts the world and keeps his ward far from it, in the determination that she shall be safe from its seductions, and deliberately refuses her an education, that ignorance may prevent her from learning how to deceive him. But youth and age will not together, compulsion awakens the desire for freedom, a youthful, romantic lover calls to the heart of each girl, and each, the one through a series of happy chances, the other by "the

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Lectures on the English Comic Writers, 3rd ed., p. 149.

Wycherley (Mermaid Series), p. 365.

A History of English Dramatic Literature, II, 466.

'F. E. Schelling, English Drama, pp. 263, 264.