WYCHERLEY

WYCHERLEY, WILLIAM, a comic dramatist of high reputation in the seventeenth century, was born at Clive, near Shrewsbury, about the year 1610. His father was a gentleman of fortune and of old family, who afterwards became one of the tellers of the Exchequer. He was, we may presume, a cavalier and royalist, for instead of sending his son to study at Cambridge or Oxford, then under the sway of Cromwell and the Puritans, he despatched him when only fifteen to France. On the banks of the Charente, young Wycherley, remarkable for his handsome appearance, was introduced to the brilliant society of the Montausiers and Rambouillets, and was induced to conform to the Church of Rome. The immediate agent in his "conversion" is said to have been the beautiful and accomplished Duchess de Montausier, best known as Julie d'Angennes de Rambouillet, the favourite of wits and poets, and a special object of commemoration in the letters of Voiture. Her husband, the duke, seems to have been a man of a different stamp. He was the prototype of Molière's Misanthrope and Wycherley's Plain Dealer, and as tutor to the daughter was as stern as George Buchanan was to his royal pupil, James the Sixth. Returning to England about the period of the Restoration, Wycherley was entered of Queen's College, Oxford, but only, as Anthony Wood says, in the character of Philosophia Studiosus, living with the Provost, and neither matriculating nor taking a degree. Dr (afterwards Bishop) Barlow reclaimed the student to Protestantism, but at no period of Wycherley's life was his religious profession more than nominal. According to Pope he died a Papist. From the university Wycherley went to the temple as a student of law. He does not seem to have seriously entertained any idea of following the legal profession, and while still a minor he is said to have betaken himself, like Fielding, to theatres and dramatic composition. His own statement, made to Pope, was, that he wrote his first play, Love in a Wood, at the age of nineteen, or in the year 1659. The vanity of Wycherley, however, was always greater than his love of truth, and in his latter years his memory was singularly defective. It is certain that his first play was not published before 1672, and it contains distinct references and allusions which show that it could not have been written as printed in 1659. There is an allusion, as Lord Macaulay has pointed out, to gentlemen's periwigs, which first came into fashion in 1663; an allusion to guineas, which were first struck in 1663; an allusion to the vests which Charles the Second ordered to be worn at court in 1666; and two allusions to the great fire of London in 1666. Wycherley's comedy was acted at the Theatre-Royal with great applause. Among its admirers was the Duchess of Cleveland, and the manner in which this abandoned but beautiful mistress of the king

Wycherley introduced herself to the dramatist is curiously characteristic of the times. "One day," says Pope, "as he (Wycherley) passed that duchess's coach in the ring (in Hyde Park), she leaned out of the window and cried out loud enough to be heard distinctly by him, 'Sir, you're a rascal; you are a villain!' Wycherley from that instant entertained hopes. He did not fail waiting on her the next morning, and with a very melancholy tone begged to know how it was possible for him to have so much disobliged her Grace. They were very good friends from that time." And "good friends" they unquestionably must have become if Voltaire's statement be true, that the duchess used to go to Wycherley's chambers in the Temple dressed like a country maid, in a straw hat, with pattens on, and a box or basket in her hand. Wycherley dedicated his play to the duchess, lauding her for perfection of beauty, generosity, spirit, wit, and judgment, and presenting his "humble acknowledgments" to her grace for the "favours he had received from her"—qualifying, though only seemingly, the last phrase by stating that the duchess had gone two successive nights to see his play. The successful dramatist was introduced at court, and soon rose to high favour. The Duke of Buckingham, as Master of the Horse, made him one of his equerries, and gave him a commission in his regiment; and the king on one occasion, when Wycherley was confined with a fever, visited him in his lodgings in Bow Street, and, recommending him to try the air of Montpellier, presented him, it is said, with £500 to defray the expenses of the journey. It is probable, however, that the royal generosity—a rare virtue at Whitehall—has been exaggerated, for Pope says that Charles only gave Wycherley a hundred pounds now and then, not often, and selected him to travel with the young Duke of Richmond (the king's son by Louise de Querouaille), which journey, we know, was never undertaken. During his intimacy with the Duke of Buckingham and the court, Wycherley performed what Macaulay considered "the only good action of his life;" he endeavoured to serve the poet Butler. He represented to the duke how well the author of Hudibras had deserved of the royal family, and that it was a reproach to the court that a person of his loyalty and wit should suffer under obscurity and want. Buckingham consented to meet Butler and Wycherley in a tavern. They met accordingly, but the door of the room in which they sat was open, and the duke observing a knight of his acquaintance—a worthless pimp—pass by with a couple of ladies, he ran after them, leaving Butler and his friend Wycherley to moralise on poetry and patronage. "From that hour to the day of his death," says Major Pack, to whom Wycherley related the story, "poor Butler never found the least effect of his (the duke's) promise."

"Yet think what fills the scholar's life assail,
Toll, envy, want, the patron, and the jail!"

"Poor Butler," however, found a generous friend, if not a patron, in a private individual, Mr. Longueville, who supported him in his old age, and defrayed the expenses of his funeral.

Wycherley followed up his first dramatic success by three other comedies, The Gentleman Dancing Master, 1673; The Country Wife, 1675; and The Plain Dealer, 1677. About this time it was common for young men of rank and fashion to take a trip to sea, and serve on board the king's ships. "All gentlemen must pack to sea," says Wycherley, and he himself followed the prevailing mode. He was present at a naval engagement, which he has commemorated in a copy of wretched verses entitled, On a Sea Fight which the Author was in betwixt the English and Dutch. There is nothing in the lines to indicate the name or date of the battle, the author contenting himself with stating that

"Each side, like fiends, in fire and smoke did fight,
And put the devil himself into a fright."

Whether the Dutch or English gained is left unrecorded, and Lord Macaulay conjectures that it was a drawn battle, one of those between Rupert and De Ruyter in 1673. The next memorable event in Wycherley's career was his marriage. Like Dryden and Addison, he married a titled lady, and like them also his experience was such as to offer little encouragement to poets to form ambitious alliances. Wycherley happened one day to be in a bookseller's shop at Tunbridge Wells, accompanied by a friend, Mr. Fairbeard, when a lady entered and asked the bookseller for the Plain Dealer. "Madam," said Mr. Fairbeard, "since you are for the Plain Dealer, there he is for you," pushing Wycherley towards her at the same time. Some complimentary badinage took place, and the result of the dramatic exordium, as Mr. Leigh Hunt says, was the usual termination of comedy—matrimony. The lady was a widow, the Countess of Drogheda, previously one of the Mesdemoiselles Robartes, mentioned in Grammont, daughter of Lord Robartes, afterwards Earl of Radnor and Lord-Lieutenant of Ireland. The Earl of Drogheda died (without issue) June 18, 1679, so that the marriage of his widow with Wycherley must have been subsequent to that date. It proved a troublesome if not unhappy union. The lady was of an imperious, suspicious temper; she had been a maid of honour, and knew something of the license of men of fashion, as well as of Wycherley's past life, and she became uneasy or infuriated whenever her husband was absent from her sight. He was permitted sometimes to dine with his old friends in the Cock Tavern in Bow Street, which was directly opposite her house; but on such occasions Lady Wycherley insisted that the tavern windows should be thrown open, that she might be assured there was no woman present! The marriage is also believed to have lost Wycherley the favour of the king, as it frustrated his plans with respect to the Duke of Richmond, to whom he had designed Wycherley to act as travelling tutor. But the enmity or alienation of Charles is more likely to have been caused by the dramatist's sympathy with his early patron the Duke of Buckingham, who had been committed to the Tower for uncourtly expressions used in debate. "Your late disgrace was but the court's disgrace," wrote Wycherley; and in a second copy of verses on the duke, when Villiers was "reduced to a little fortune," he celebrated his equanimity:—

"To thee external accidents are sport,
Who fear'st not fate and dost disdain to court."

This language of the Plain Dealer was not suited to Whitehall. Wycherley's jealous but not unloving wife did not long trouble him, and on her death she left him the whole of her fortune. The result, however, was only to add to his misery. The title under which he claimed the property was disputed, and the costs of a long litigation, added to his personal debts, were so heavy that he was unable to meet them, and was thrown into jail. He languished in the Fleet prison for seven years! His father refused to help him—the case was probably too desperate—and the bookseller who had profited largely by the copyright of his Plain Dealer would not even lend him twenty pounds. The gay world had forsaken and forgotten him, when fortunately James II., who had succeeded to the throne, happening to witness the representation of his last popular comedy, made inquiries concerning the author, and generously resolved to pay his debts and settle upon him a pension of £200 a-year. But even this windfall did not release him from difficulties. Ashamed to state the full amount of his debts, Wycherley named a much lower sum, and thus left a considerable balance, which he had no means of liquidating. At length

Wycherley his aged father died, and he was put in possession of the family estate. His circumstances were now made easier, but he seems never to have been free from incumbrances. His estate was strictly entailed, so that he could not borrow largely on it, and he was at variance with the heir-at-law, his nephew. He appears to have lived mostly in town, frequenting theatres and coffeehouses—a veteran rake, and decayed wit. Dryden wished him to join in writing a comedy, but he declined the honour in an encomiastic copy of verses. The great poet in turn spoke of

"The satire, wit, and strength of Manly Wycherley."

Rochester termed him "Slow Wycherley," and other contemporaries represent him as careful in composition. He had apparently exhausted his powers of invention before he had completed half of his term of existence. Lely had painted his portrait in his twenty-eighth year, and now in his sixty-third he had it engraved, affixing to the engraving the Virgilian motto, Quantum mutatus ab illo (how changed from him!)—words which Pope says he used to repeat with melancholy emphasis.

"Thus fares it still in our decay,
And yet the wiser mind
Mourns less for what age takes away
Than what it leaves behind."

So says Wordsworth, but Wycherley had not the "wiser mind." The literary ambition of the dramatist still remained, and in 1704 he published a folio volume of Miscellany Poems, remarkable only for bad rhymes and profligate sentiments. About the same time he made the acquaintance of Pope, then a youth of sixteen, immured amidst his solitary studies in Windsor Forest, but longing eagerly for personal and literary distinction. Pope courted the society of Wycherley, running after him in town, he says, like a dog, and trying, but in vain, to get him to visit the young poet's "paternal cell" at Binfield. Lady Mary Wortley Montagu attributed this to a sordid motive—to Pope's anxiety to secure a legacy, but it seems to have been prompted solely by his passion for literature and his desire to escape from rustic obscurity. A correspondence was opened between the dramatist of sixty-four and the pastoral poet of sixteen, in which, reversing the order of nature, the youth appears as preceptor and critic. The manner in which Pope "cooked" his letters for publication renders it difficult to tell what is genuine and what fabricated, but Wycherley appears to have asked the young student to correct his verses, and Pope set about the task vigorously. Some passages he lopped off, "as we take branches from a tree to add to the fruit," and others he "entirely new expressed and turned more into poetry." "Let them undergo your purgatory!" exclaimed the mortified senior, but at the same time hoping that his critic's "great mind" might not destroy his "little, tender, and crazy carcase." The result might have been foreseen: mutual dissatisfaction and aversion ensued; Pope returned the manuscripts, and the intercourse between the parties was broken up. It was afterwards partially renewed, Pope seeming to repent of his critical honesty, but there never was any cordiality between them. The correspondence closed in 1710. Wycherley lived five years afterwards, and when he saw that death was at hand he resolved to marry, in order to burden and injure the heir-at-law, his

nephew! "Some hundred pounds which he had with the Wycherley lady," says Pope, "discharged his debts. A jointure of four hundred a-year made her a recompense; and the nephew he left to comfort himself as well as he could with the miserable remains of a mortgaged estate." He survived his marriage eleven days, and the evening before he expired he called his young wife to his bedside, and entreated her not to deny him one request. "My dear," he said, "it is only this, that you will never marry an old man again"—a truly dramatic and characteristic close to his dramatic life! The woman married a Captain Shrimpton, who sold Wycherley's papers, and from these a volume of Posthumous Works was published in 1728, edited by Theobald, the original hero of the Dunciad. The manuscripts were much interlined, and scarce legible, thus supporting the sobriquet of "Slow Wycherley;" and in point of literary merit, or rather demerit, they fully justified Pope's deprecatory and contemptuous criticism. A few of the prose maxims are tersely expressed, and evince the observation of the man of the world, but the verses, which form the bulk of the volume, are utterly despicable. More of Wycherley's papers Theobald said remained behind, waiting publication if readers demanded further remains of the deceased wit, but no more was heard of them. Wycherley had outlived his fame. In his own walk of the drama Congreve had eclipsed him; the essays of Addison and Steele, and the masculine satire of Swift, had introduced a purer taste and higher standard of literary excellence, and in poetry Pope reigned supreme. Wycherley died in December 1715, and was buried in the vault of Covent Garden Church (St Paul's), where are also the remains of his contemporaries Butler and Lely.

As a dramatist, Wycherley is now known only to critics and literary students. The general reader and playgoer have long since lost sight of him. No manager would venture to reproduce any one of his comedies on the stage, and even his style of dialogue, once so popular, appears forced and unnatural to the present generation. It is often pointed and witty,¹ and it served as a model for Congreve and Farquhar, who in turn were the dramatic fathers of Sheridan and Colman; but all of these improved upon the original. They had equal or more wit, with greater variety and brilliancy. Their jests and epigrams are less laboured in appearance; they have fewer oaths and expletives; and if they are not more moral in tendency they are at least greatly more decent in discourse. Wycherley has only one character that has any pretensions to originality—the litigious and bustling Widow Blackacre. His Manly, the Plain Dealer, is an Anglicised copy of Molière's Misanthrope; and his Gentleman Dancing Master is borrowed in part from the Ecole des Femmes.² Indeed, most of his plots, intrigues, and contretemps are taken from the Spanish or French drama. And whatever Wycherley borrowed he debased. His taste was radically coarse and depraved, and his standard of morality never rose above that of Whitehall under Charles the Second. Of that period his plays afford a good illustration. We may also discover in them here and there a clever epigrammatic sentence or a lively comic illustration, but no one ever found in them a scene that touched his heart or elevated his imagination. (n. c.—s.)