WILLIAM CONGREVE
1670–1729
The Way of the World
The greatness of this play starts with its title. All comedy is properly about “the way of the world”—about the way life actually is, in all its foolishness, and not the way it ought to be. It is astonishing that no comic playwright had used the title before; it was reserved, by some fortunate accident, for this, among the best of all comedies.
Born in 1670 near Leeds, William Congreve wrote only a handful of plays, but all were successful. He even wrote a tragedy, The Mourning Bride, which was successful, too. After writing The Way of the World, in 1700, when he was only thirty, he retired from the stage and devoted the rest of his life to being a gentleman. Voltaire traveled from France to seek him out. When they met, Voltaire praised Congreve’s plays. Congreve affected hardly remembering that he had written them; he was now engaged, he allowed, on more important business (giving and receiving invitations, going to dinner, and so forth). “But,” said Voltaire, “if you had not written them I would never have sought you out!” The resolution of this absurd impasse is not recorded, but the lesson of the tale is that Congreve ended up becoming one of his own fops.
Congreve’s next-to-last comedy was Love for Love, an erotic romp whose great popularity helped to call down the wrath of one Jeremy Collier, a reforming clergyman whose 1698 pamphlet, “A Short View of the Immorality and Profanity of the English Stage,” shocked London with its undeniable truths. Puritanism being a recurrent mania with the English, they turned upon the playwrights they had loved and drove them from the boards. Congreve composed a vapid “defense” of the comic drama of his epoch; more importantly, he wrote one more comedy before he ceased writing plays forever. The Way of the World has been called the only possible answer to Collier, among other things.
The play is not at all profane, and it is extremely moral. The good people are rewarded and the bad are punished, but in a comic way—that is, without much pain and certainly without bloodshed. But that is all merely superficial. The play is not moral in Collier’s sense of the term. The real conflicts are not between good and bad, but between witty and foolish, smart and dumb. The witty triumph, and the foolish come to grief.
The heroine, Millamant—she of a “thousand lovers”—is the wittiest of all and one of the great female characters in the drama. She teases all of her lovers. She admits, in an aside to the audience toward the end of the play, that Mirabell (“admirer of beauty”) has her heart and that without him she cannot live. She is young and worldly. She amuses herself in all the customary ways. But she is bored by her social whirl, desiring higher things. Congreve is able to suggest this about her without the slightest hint of priggishness, a remarkable achievement.
Mirabell is a wonderful part, too. So is Millamant’s aunt, who is also her guardian (and thereby hangs most of the plot), Lady Wishfort. (Pronounce the name quickly and you will know her character.) The impatient old lady is superb in her cupidity, vanity, and folly. The more foolish she is, the more delightful. In the end, of course, she has the opportunity to reveal her good heart. No other ending would be acceptable.
In the end, as well, Millamant and Mirabell find one another and plan to marry. Millamant, however, does not look forward to this union with the silly anticipation of other girls. She is highly intelligent and knows how much women—especially beautiful, rich, young women—give up when they marry. She therefore spells out, to Mirabell, the terms on which she will accept him. These terms are tough and unsentimental, and the scene in which these two young people, wild about one another, work out their mutual destiny and write a marriage contract, is one of the most bittersweet in the history of comedy.
The Way of the World long remained a standard dramatic work, but today it is hard to put on the stage; few actors can resurrect and maintain its languid grace. (Two of the few are Maggie Smith and Joan Plowright, who, in the parts of Millamant and Lady Wishfort, illuminated a production of the play during the 1984–85 London season which may have been the finest production the play has ever received. Incidentally, the audience cheered and applauded the famous proviso or marriage contract scene.) Despite such noble exceptions, the play is probably best put on in the theater of your mind. Say the lines softly out loud, half under your breath; imagine a proscenium arch lit by a thousand candles; and suppose an audience of beautiful women and gay blades, of whom you may decide to be one.
VOLTAIRE
1694–1778
Candide
François-Marie Arouet, who wrote under the non de plume “Voltaire,” besides being the most famous writer in Europe in the eighteenth century, was also the most sardonic. Brilliant, fascinating, and cynical, he believed in nothing except the power of the human mind, and especially his own mind, to pierce the fogs of ignorance and prejudice that enveloped Frenchmen in his time, and lead them to a world of wealth, comfort, and peace built on scientific progress.
Voltaire was born in Paris in 1694 and was well educated by the Jesuits. He early determined to be an author, and his first plays were successes. A quarrel with a favorite of the king led to his being exiled to England; as a result of this visit, in 1727–28, he decided that Englishmen had clearer heads and a more solid grasp of reality than did Frenchmen. He never ceased to admire the freedom of English institutions, a freedom conspicuously lacking in France. But the brutality of the English temperament (as he saw it) finally turned him against the English.
He returned to France in 1729 when he was thirty-five and began to build the fortune by speculation that allowed him later independence. He was one of the richest literary men who ever lived, thanks to his close friendship with Madame de Pompadour, mistress of Louis XV; he put to good use the inside information about the king’s plans she supplied him. But even her friendship, and that of others highly placed in the French court, could not save him from himself. His real foes were intolerance, tyranny, and official torture, and his long life—he died in 1778—was spent in continuous, often spectacular, protests against the cruelty that filled the world around him. But Voltaire had a tongue—and a pen—as sharp as a razor, and he made many enemies, some in high places. He was imprisoned more than once, harassed by the police of several countries, and exiled for many years from his native land.
Things came to a head in the year 1758. Voltaire had quarreled not only with his countrymen but also with Frederick the Great, who for a while had been a willing pupil. He had also insulted the Swiss with his article about Geneva in L’Encyclopedie. Madame de Pompadour was dead. Her successor, Madame de Berry, was a charming nitwit. At sixty-four; where was he to turn?
Voltaire outfaced the crisis with his customary bravura. He was rich enough to buy an estate, Ferney, on the Swiss side of the SwissFrench border, and another, Torney, just over the line in France. If the French police desired to interview him, “Pardon,” he would reply, “but I am just at the moment living in another country”; the same ruse worked in reverse when he was persecuted by Swiss officials. Furthermore he gained the adherence of the townspeople and the peasants, for he defended them for years, not only in his writings but also in the courts, arranging for reviews of particularly outrageous judicial decisions and calling for the removal of particularly cruel judges. Above all, he was world-famous, and tyrants preferred, at least until recently, to torture and kill small fry.