preach from one character
incessantly cocking an eye at the audience, as in recent realistic French
Plays: but is in the heart of his work, throbbing with every pulsation of
an organic structure. If Life is likened to the comedy of Moliere, there
is no scandal in the comparison.

Congreve's Way of the World is an exception to our other comedies, his
own among them, by virtue of the remarkable brilliancy of the writing,
and the figure of Millamant. The comedy has no idea in it, beyond the
stale one, that so the world goes; and it concludes with the jaded
discovery of a document at a convenient season for the descent of the
curtain. A plot was an afterthought with Congreve. By the help of a
wooden villain (Maskwell) marked Gallows to the flattest eye, he gets a
sort of plot in The Double Dealer. {6} His Way of the World might be
called The Conquest of a Town Coquette, and Millamant is a perfect
portrait of a coquette, both in her resistance to Mirabel and the manner
of her surrender, and also in her tongue. The wit here is not so salient
as in certain passages of Love for Love, where Valentine feigns madness
or retorts on his father, or Mrs. Frail rejoices in the harmlessness of
wounds to a woman's virtue, if she 'keeps them from air.' In The Way of
the World, it appears less prepared in the smartness, and is more
diffused in the more characteristic style of the speakers. Here,
however, as elsewhere, his famous wit is like a bully-fencer, not ashamed
to lay traps for its exhibition, transparently petulant for the train
between certain ordinary words and the powder-magazine of the
improprieties to be fired. Contrast the wit of Congreve with Moliere's.
That of the first is a Toledo blade, sharp, and wonderfully supple for
steel; cast for duelling, restless in the scabbard, being so pretty when
out of it. To shine, it must have an adversary. Moliere's wit is like a
running brook, with innumerable fresh lights on it at every turn of the
wood through which its business is to find a way. It does not run in
search of obstructions, to be noisy over them; but when dead leaves and
viler substances are heaped along the course, its natural song is
heightened. Without effort, and with no dazzling flashes of achievement,
it is full of healing, the wit of good breeding, the wit of wisdom.

'Genuine humour and true wit,' says Landor, {7} 'require a sound and
capacious mind, which is always a grave one. Rabelais and La Font