Walter Theodore Watts-Dunton

“ If but few readers know how constantly the blunt sententious utterances of this character are reappearing, not on the stage alone, but in the novel and even in poetry, it is because a play whose motive is monstrous and intolerable can only live in a monstrous and intolerable state of society; it is because Wycherley's genius was followed by Nemesis, who always dogs the footsteps of the defiler of literary art. ”

“ No doubt it may be right to say, with Aristotle, that comedy is an imitation of bad characters, but this does not mean that in comedy art may imitate bad characters as earnestly as she may imitate good ones,—a fact which Thackeray forgot when he made Becky Sharp a murderess, thereby destroying at once what would otherwise have been the finest specimen of the comedy of convention in the world. And perhaps it was because Vanbrugh was conscious of this law of art that he blended comedy with farce. ”

“ Without being coldly artificial, like the rondeau, the sestina, the ballade, the villanelle, &c, the sonnet is yet so artistic in structure, its form is so universally known, recognized, and adopted as being artistic, that the too fervid spontaneity and reality of the poet's emotion may be in a certain degree veiled, and the poet can whisper, as from behind a mask, those deepest secrets of the heart which could otherwise only find expression in purely dramatic forms. ”

“ In modern Europe the sonnet has always had a peculiar fascination for poets of the first class—poets, that is, in whom poetic energy and plastic power are equally combined. It would seem that the very fact that the sonnet is a recognized structure suggestive of mere art—suggestive in some measure, indeed, of what Schiller would call “sport” in art—has drawn some of the most passionate poets in the world to the sonnet as the medium of their sincerest utterances. ”

“ We must remember, however, that even if the play had been written in that year, and delayed in its production till 1672, it is exactly this kind of allusion to recent events which any dramatist with an eye to freshness of colour would be certain to weave into his dialogue. It is not that “the whole air and spirit of the piece belong to a period subsequent to that mentioned by Wycherley,” but that “the whole air and spirit of the piece” belong to a man—an experienced and hardened young man of the world—and not to a boy who would fain pose as an experienced and hardened young man of the world. ”

“ The real defence of Wycherley against his foolish impeachment of himself is this, that Love in a Wood, howsoever inferior in structure and in all the artistic economies to The Country Wife and The Plain Dealer, contains scenes which no inexperienced boy could have written—scenes which, not for moral hardness merely, but often for real dramatic ripeness, are almost the strongest to be found amongst his four plays. ”

“ With regard to this comedy Wycherley told Pope—told him “over and over” till Pope believed him—believed him, at least, until they quarrelled about Wycherley's verses—that he wrote it the year before he went to Oxford. But we need not believe him: the worst witness against a man is mostly himself. To pose as the wicked boy of genius has been the foolish ambition of many writers, but on inquiry it will generally be found that these inkhorn Lotharios are not nearly so wicked as they would have us believe. ”

“ Plutarch's impeachment of Aristophanes, which affirms that the master of the old comedy wrote less for honest men than for men sunk in baseness and debauchery, was no doubt unjust to the Greek poet, one side of whose humour, and one alone, could thus be impeached. ”

“ When Wycherley charges himself with having written, as a boy of nineteen, scenes so callous and so depraved that even Barbara Palmer's appetite for profligacy was, if not satisfied, appeased, there is, we repeat, no need to believe him. ”

“ The Country Wife, produced in 1672 or 1673 and published in 1675, is so full of wit, ingenuity, animal spirits and conventional humour that, had it not been for its motive—a motive which in any healthy state of society must always be as repulsive to the most lax as to the most moral reader—it would probably have survived as long as the acted drama remained a literary form in England. ”

“ That effort of Wycherley's to bring to Buckingham's notice the case of Samuel Butler (so shamefully neglected by the court Butler had served) shows that the writer of even such heartless plays as The Country Wife may be familiar with generous impulses, while his uncompromising lines in defence of Buckingham, when the duke in his turn fell into trouble, show that the inventor of so shameless a fraud as that which forms the pivot of The Plain Dealer may in actual life possess that passion for fairplay which is believed to be a specially English quality. ”

“ The sonnet in the literature of modern Europe is a brief poetic form of fourteen rhymed verses, ranged according to prescription. Although in a language like the English it does no doubt require considerable ingenuity to construct a satisfactory sonnet of octave and sestet running upon four rhymes, this ingenuity is only a means to an end, the end being properly that a single wave of emotion, when emotion is either too deeply charged with thought, or too much adulterated with fancy, to pass spontaneously into the movements of pure lyric, shall be embodied in a single metrical flow and return. ”

“ That the impulse to select for the rendering of single phases of feeling or reflection a certain recognized form is born of a natural and universal instinct is perhaps evidenced by the fact that, even when a metrical arrangement discloses no structural law demanding a prescriptive number and arrangement of verses, the poet will nevertheless, in certain moods, choose to restrict himself to a prescribed number and arrangement, as in the cases of the Italian stomello, the Welsh triban, and the beautiful rhymeless short ode of Japanese poetry. ”

“ If, however, some writer should arise with sufficient originality of metrical endowment and sufficient poetic power to do what Keats, in a famous experiment of his, tried to do and failed—impress the public ear with a new sonnet structure, impress the public ear so powerfully that a new kind of expectance is created the moment the first verse of a sonnet is recited—then there will be three kinds of English sonnets instead of two. ”

“ For picturesque as is Borrow’s style, it is this subject-matter of his, the Romany world of Great Britain, which—if his pictures of that world are true—will keep his writings alive. Now that the better class of gipsies are migrating so rapidly to America that scarcely any are left in England, Borrow’s pictures of them are challenged as being too idealistic. It is unfortunate that no one who knew Borrow, and the gryengroes or horse-dealers with whom he associated, and whom he depicted, has ever written about him and them. ”

“ Now if we ask ourselves whether, beautiful as is this poem, “Work without Hope”, taken as a single and original metrical arrangement, we should get out of a series of poems modelled line for line upon it that pleasure of iteration which we get out of a series of Petrarchan sonnets, we shall easily see why the regular sonnet of octave and sestet on the one hand : and what is called the Shakespearean sonnet on the other, have survived all other competing forms. ”

“ It is nothing of the kind. It is (as was pointed out so long ago as 1699 by Dr Drake in his little-known vigorous reply to Collier) an attack upon the English drama generally, with a special reference to the case of Shakespeare. While dwelling upon that noxious and highly immoral play Hamlet, Collier actually leaves unscathed the author of The Country Wife, but fastens on Congreve and Vanbrugh, whose plays—profligate enough in all conscience—seem almost decent beside a comedy whose incredible vis matrix is “the modish distemper.” ”

“ And perhaps, if we probed the matter deeply, we should find that the recognized prescription of form gives a sense of oneness that nothing else save the refrain can give to a poem which, being at once too long for a stanza in a series and too short to have the self-sustaining power of the more extended kinds of poetic art, suffers by suggesting to the ear a sense of the fragmentary and the inchoate. ”

“ That a stage, indeed, upon which was given with applause A Woman Killed with Kindness (where a wife dies of a broken heart for doing what any one of Wycherley's married women would have gloried in doing) should, in seventy years, have given with applause The Country Wife shows that in historic and social evolution as in the evolution of organisms, “change” and “progress” are very far from being convertible terms. ”

“ If the prescriptive arrangement of three quatrains clinched by a couplet is not a metrical necessity, if it is not demanded in order to prevent the couplet from losing its power, such an arrangement is idle and worse than idle; just as in the case of the Petrarchan sonnet, if it can be shown that the solid unity of the outflowing wave can be maintained as completely upon three rhymes as upon two, then the restriction of the octave to two rhymes is simple pedantry. ”

“ Yet Collier leaves Wycherley unassailed, and classes Vanbrugh and Congreve with Shakespeare.
It was after the success of The Plain Dealer that the turning-point came in Wycherley's career. The great dream of all the men about town in Charles's time, as Wycherley's plays all show, was to marry a widow, young and handsome, a peer's daughter if possible—but in any event rich, and spend her money upon wine and women. ”

“ It has been said by Dr Knapp that Borrow never created a character, and that to one who thoroughly knows the times and Borrow’s writings the originals are easily recognizable. This is true, no doubt, as regards people whom he knew at Norwich, and indeed generally as regards those he knew before the period of his gipsy wanderings. It must not be supposed, however, that such a character as the man who “touched” to avert the evil chance is in any sense a portrait of an individual with whom he had been brought into contact. ”

“ It is his character, his unique character as expressed, or partially expressed, in his books. Among all the “remarkable individuals” (to use his favourite expression) who during the middle of the 19th century figured in the world of letters, Borrow was surely the most eccentric, the most whimsical, and in many ways the most extraordinary. There was scarcely a point in which he resembled any other writer of his time. With regard to Lavengro and The Romany Rye, there has been very much discussion as to how much Dichtung is mingled with the Wahrheit in those fascinating books. ”

“ This same little poem of Coleridge's also affords an excellent illustration of another point in connexion with the sonnet. If we trace the history and the development of the sonnet from Pier delle Vigne to D. G. Rossetti we shall find that the poet's quest from the very first has been to write a poem in fourteen verses so arranged that they should, better than any other number and arrangement of verses, produce a certain melodic effect upon the ear, and an effect, moreover, that should bear iteration and reiteration in other poems similarly constructed. ”

“ The character has so many of Borrow’s own eccentricities that it might rather be called a portrait of himself. There was nothing that Borrow strove against with more energy than the curious impulse, which he seems to have shared with Dr Johnson, to touch the objects along his path in order to save himself from the evil chance. He never conquered the superstition. In walking through Richmond Park with the present writer he would step out of his way constantly to touch a tree, and he was offended if the friend he was with seemed to observe it. ”

“ Wycherley wrote verses, and, when quite an old man, prepared them for the press by the aid of Alexander Pope, then not much more than a boy. But, notwithstanding all Pope's tinkering, they remain contemptible. Pope's published correspondence with the dramatist was probably edited by him with a view to giving an impression of his own precocity. The friendship between the two cooled, according to Pope's account, because Wycherley took offence at the numerous corrections on his verses. ”

“ Seven years after the events recorded in Lavengro and The Romany Rye Borrow obtained the post of agent to the Bible Society, in which capacity he visited St Petersburg (1833–1835) (where he published Targum, a collection of translations) , and Spain, Portugal and Morocco (1835–1839) . From 1837 to 1839 he acted as correspondent to the Morning Herald. The result of these travels and adventures was the publication, in 1841, of Zincali, or The Gypsies in Spain, the original MS. of which, in the hands of the present writer, shows how careful was Borrow’s method of work. ”

“ In 1874 he brought out a volume of ill-digested material upon the Romany tongue, Romano Lavo-lil, or Word-book of the Gypsy Language, a book which has been exhaustively analysed and criticized by Mr John Sampson. In the summer of 1874 he left London, bade adieu to Mr Murray and a few friends, and returned to Oulton. ”

“ S. Waddington, English Sonnets by Living Writers (1881) , and Sonnets of Europe (1886) ; T. Hall Caine, Sonnets of Three Centuries (1882) ; William Sharp, Sonnets of this Century (1886) , and American Sonnets (1889) ”