ess of Marlborough; that he was a creditable Government official; and
that at thirty, having written a certain number of plays, he suddenly
lost his interest in life and art, and wrote no more. But that is about
all. Thackeray's picture of him may be, and probably is, as unveracious
as his Fielding or his Dick Steele; but there is little or nothing to
show how far we can depend upon it. The character of the man escapes us,
and we have either to refrain from trying to see him or to content
ourselves with mere hypothesis. So abnormal is the mystery in which he
is enshrouded that what in the case of others would be notorious remains
in his case dubious and obscure: so that we cannot tell whether he was
Bracegirdle's lover or only her friend, and the secret of his relations
with the Duchess of Marlborough has yet to be discovered. Mr. Gosse
succeeded no better than they that went before in plucking out the heart
of Congreve's mystery. He was, and he remains, impersonal. At his most
substantial he is (as some one said of him) no more than 'vagueness
personified': at his most luminous only an appearance like the
_Scin-Laeca_, the shining shadow adapted in a moment of peculiar
inspiration by the late Lord Lytton.

The Dramatist.

But we have the plays, and who runs may read and admire. I say advisedly
who runs may read, and not who will may see. Congreve's plays are, one
can imagine, as dull in action as they are entertaining in print. They
have dropped out of the _repertoire_, and the truth is they merit no
better fate. They are only plays to the critic of style; to the actor
and the average spectator they are merely so much spoken weariness. To
begin with, they are marked by such a deliberate and immitigable baseness
of morality as makes them impossible to man. Wycherley has done more
vilely; Vanbrugh soars to loftier altitudes of filthiness. But neither
Wycherley nor Vanbrugh has any strain of the admirable intellectual
quality of Congreve. Villainy comes natural to the one, and beastliness
drops from the other as easily as honey from the comb; but in neither is
there evident that admirable effort of the intelligence which is a
distinguishing characteristic of Congreve, and with neither is the result
at once so consummate and so tame. For both Wycherley and Vanbrugh are
playwrights, and Congreve is not. Congreve is only an artist in style
writing for himself and half a dozen in the pit, while Wycherle