Oysters in Winter  by John Mortimer

      “Restoration comedy.”  Does the phrase conjure up a vision of perruqued, red-heeled actors chasing bosomy, beauty-spotted actresses round small, gilt-legged sofas with cries of “Stap me vitals” and “Fi on you for a rogue, my Lord Screaming?”  Does it recall old plays put on, it sometimes seemed, only for the costumes and the furniture, acted in a kind of high camp crescendo on distant matinees?  Does the heart sink at the expectation of some kind of romp?  Even if the spectator is made of sterner stuff and can relish the vital stapping and fluttering fans of many of the plays written in the reign of Charles II, these works are not usually thought of as providing great insights into the human condition, or as vehicles for prose writing as musical and evocative as the finest poetry.  We don’t go to much Restoration drama to learn the truth.
      The truth is what Ben, the sailor brother in Congreve’s Love for Love describes with noble simplicity.  “It’s but a folly to lie.  For to speak one thing, and to think just the contrary way is, as it were, to look one way and to row another.”  And then, as the girl he is meant to be courting calls him a sea calf, he takes off in dialogue that becomes as touched with magic as that of Trinculo in The Tempest.  “Sea calf?  I ain’t calf enough to lick your chalked face, you cheese curd you—Marry thee!  Ouns I’ll marry a Lapland witch as soon, and live upon selling of contrary winds and wracked vessels.”
      Congreve’s play tells uncomfortable truths about money, vanity, hypocrisy and growing old.  They are not only comedies about the manners of a period, they deal with our unchanging problems.  What is our exact responsibility to the children to whom we have given life, and how much gratitude are we entitled to expect for this dubious gift?  Congreve follows such thoughts with great daring to their logical and comical extreme.  “Did you come a volunteer into the world?” the appalling Sir Sampson asks his son,  “Or did I beat up for you with the lawful authority of a parent, and press you into service?”  “I know no more why I came, than you do why you called me,” Valentine tells him, “But here I am, and if you don’t mean to provide for me, I desire you would leave me as you found me.”  Never has the eternal conflict between parents and children been more elegantly and bleakly put.
      So the social observation in Congreve is not merely mocking fashionable manners; although he can do that wonderfully well, it goes deeper.  Sir Sampson, shocked to think that the lower orders should have the same tastes as their betters, rails as the rich have often longed to, although no ordinary snob could command his style.  “S’heart what should he do with a distinguishing taste?” he asks of Jeremy the servant.  “I warrant now he’d rather eat a pheasant than a piece of poor John and smell now, why I warrant he can smell, and loves perfume above a stink—why there’s it, and music, don’t you love music, scoundrel? . . . how were you engendered, muckworm?”  Jeremy’s answer is one of those great poetic sentences Congreve gives to his simplest characters and says all that needs saying about class distinctions.  “I am, by my father, the son of a chairman, my mother sold oysters in winter and cucumbers in summer; and I came upstairs in the world, for I was born in a cellar.”
      Born near Leeds, the son of a soldier, educated in Ireland (which must have done wonders for the rhythm of his dialogue), student at the Inns of Court, friend of Swift and protegé of Dryden, Congreve was an undoubted literary genius and a permanent reminder of the truth that great theatre is also great literature.  Although it harks back to the comedy in Shakespeare and Ben Jonson, Congreve’s prose has echoed on down the years.  Th discussion of marriage between Mirabell and Millament in The Way of the World seems the model for the deadly persiflage in the tea party scene in The Importance of Being Earnest.  Congreve’s style affected the novels of Ronald Firbank and, perhaps through Firbank, Evelyn Waugh.  It can be heard clearly in the more outrageous fantasies of Joe Orton.  With his perfect ear, and brilliant management of long speeches, he will always be a model for the writer of truthful comedy.
      Congreve was writing in the reign of William III, after the first permissive outburst of the Restoration was over.  The Puritans were back and attacked him in the shape of a clergyman named Jeremy Collier, the High Tory Mrs. Whitehouse of his day. Collier, mistakenly, thought Congreve’s plays immoral.  He failed to understand that they deal more seriously with life’s problems.  And by far the best way of being serious in the face of life is to write comedies about it.

  JULY 1695:  CONGREVE WRITES TO THE CRITIC JOHN DENNIS ON The Subject of Humour in Comedy
      ‘. . . For my part, I am willing to laugh as any Body, and as easily diverted with an Object truly ridiculous:  But at the same time, I can never care for seeing Things that force me to entertain low Thoughts of my Nature.  I do not know how it is with others, but I confess freely to you, I could never look long upon a Monkey, without very mortifying Reflections . . .
      ‘I should be unwilling to venture even on a bare Description of Humor, much more to make a Definition of it; but now my Hand is in, I will tell you what serves me instead of either.  I take it to be, a singular and unavoidable manner of doing or saying anything, peculiar and natural to one man only; by which his speech and actions are distinguished from those of other men.
      ‘Our Humor has Relation to us, and to what proceeds from us, as the Accidents have to a Substance; it is a Color, Taste, and Smell, diffused through all; though our Actions are never so many, and different in Form, they are all Splinters of the same Wood, and have naturally one Complexion; which, though it may be disguised by Art, yet cannot be wholly changed:  We may paint it with other Colors, but we cannot change the Grain . . .
      ‘I will make but one Observation to you more, and have done . . . viz:  That there is more of Humor in our English Comic Writers than in any others.  I do not at all wonder at it, for I look upon Humor to be almost of English Growth; at least, it does not seem to have found such increase on any other soil.  And what appears to me to be the Reason of it, is the great Freedom, privilege, and Liberty which the Common People of England enjoy.  Any Man that has a Humor is under no Restraint, or Fear of giving Vent; they have a Proverb among them, which maybe will show the Bent and Genius of the People as well as a longer Discourse:  He that will have a Maypole, shall have a Maypole.  This is a Maxim with them, and their Practice is agreeable to it.  I believe something considerable too may be ascribed to their feeding so much on Flesh, and the Grossness of their diet in general.  But I have done, let the Physicians agree that.   William Congreve

Hazlitt on Congreve

      His style is inimitable, nay perfect  It is the highest model of comic dialogue.  Every sentence is replete with sense and satire, conveyed in the most polished and pointed terms.  Every page presents a shower of brilliant conceits, is a tissue of epigrams in prose, is a new triumph of wit, a new conquest over dullness. The fire of artful raillery is nowhere else so well kept up.  This style, which he was almost the first to introduce, and which he carried to the utmost pitch of classical refinement, reminds one exactly of Collin’s description of wit as opposed to humor.  

‘Whose jewels in his crisped hair  
Are placed each other’s light to share.’

      Sheridan will not bear a comparison with him in the regular antithetical construction of his sentences, and in the mechanical artifices of his style . . . It bears every mark of being what he himself in the dedication of one of his plays tells us that it was, a spirited copy taken off and carefully revised from the most select society of his time, exhibiting all the sprightliness, ease, and animation of familiar conversation, with the correctness and delicacy of the most finished composition.  His works are a singular treat to those who have cultivated a taste for the niceties of English style:  there is a peculiar flavor in the very words, which is to be found in hardly any other writer.  To the mere reader his writings would be an irreparable loss:  to the stage they are already become a dead letter, with the exception of one of them, Love for Love.  This play is full of character, incident, and stage-effect, as almost any of those of his contemporaries, and fuller of wit than any of his own, except perhaps The Way of the World.