ond George's reign, would not be apt to
think that it called for special measures of restriction. The vices of
the Restoration period had apparently worked out their own cure. The
hideous indecency of Dryden, of Wycherley, and of Vanbrugh had brought
about a certain reaction. The indecency of such authors as these was
not merely a coarseness of expression such as most of the Elizabethan
writers freely indulged in, and which has but little to do with the
deeper questions of morality; nor did its evil consist merely in the
choice of subjects which are painful to study, and of questionable
influence on the mind. Many of the finest plays of Ford and Massinger
and Webster turn on sin and crime, the study of which it might
reasonably be contended must always have the effect of disturbing the
moral sense, if not of actually depraving the mind. But no one can
pretend to find in the best of the Elizabethan writers any sympathy
with viciousness, any stimulus to immorality. Of the Restoration
authors, in general, the very contrary has to be said. They revel in
uncleanness; they glorify immorality. It is the triumph and the honor
of a gentleman to seduce his friend's wife or his neighbor's daughter.
The business and the glory of men is the seduction of women. The
sympathy of the dramatic author and his readers goes always with the
seducer. The husband of the {94} faithless wife is a subject of
inextinguishable merriment and laughter. His own friends are made to
laugh at him, and to feel a genuine delight in his suffering and his
shame. The question of morality altogether apart, it seems positively
wonderful to an English reader of to-day why the writers of the
Restoration period should have always felt such an exuberant joy in the
thought that a man's wife was unfaithful to him. The common feeling of
all men, even the men meant to be best, in the plays of Wycherley and
Vanbrugh, seems one that might find expression in some such words as
these: "I should like to seduce every pretty married woman if I could,
but if I have not time or chance for such delight it is at least a
great pleasure and comfort to me to know that she has been seduced by
somebody; it is always a source of glee to me to know that a husband
has been deceived; and, if the husband himself comes to know it too,
that makes my joy all the greater." The delight in sin seems to have
made men in a certain sinful sense unselfish. They delighted so in
vice tha