'_Duke._ Deceived and disappointed vain desires! Why laugh I not, and ridicule myself? 'Tis still, and cold, and nothing in the air But an old grey twilight, or of eve or morn I know not which, dim as futurity, And sad and hoary as the ghostly past Fills up the space. Hush! not a wind is there, Not a cloud sails over the battlements, Not a bell tolls the hour. Is there an hour? Or is not all gone by which here did hive Of men and their life's ways? Could I but hear The ticking of a clock, or someone breathing, Or e'en a cricket's chirping, or the grating Of the old gates amid the marble tombs, I should be sure that this was still the world. Hark! Hark! Doth nothing stir? No light, and still no light, besides this ghost That mocks the dawn, unaltered? Still no sound? No voice of man? No cry of beast? No rustle Of any moving creature? And sure I feel That I remain the same: no more round blood drops Roll joyously along my pulseless veins: The air I seem to breathe is still the same: And the great dreadful thought that now comes o'er me Must remain ever as it is, unchanged. This moment doth endure for evermore; Eternity hath overshadowed time; And I alone am left of all that lived.'
The writer of these lines might have been a great tragic poet, if he could have achieved the construction of a coherent plot. Congreve might have been a greater, but for the conventions of an age that required his _dramatis personae_ to be remote by a thousand years or a thousand miles.
The dazzle of Congreve's wit has perhaps blinded critics to his more serious powers, and it may be that its brilliancy has been even exaggerated. What is chiefly admirable is perhaps not so much the occasional flashes and strokes, felicitous as they are, as the unflagging verve, energy, and gaiety. His plays are not of the kind that keep the audience in a roar from first to last, but they never cease to stimulate the spirits; the fire does not always blaze, but it never burns low: there is not a dull scene, or a tiresome or useless character. The general tone of good breeding, if it does not purify the pervading atmosphere of profligacy, at any rate prevents it from becoming offensive. In verbal impropriety and _double entendre_ Congreve is even worse than Wycherley, but his plays are far from giving the same impression of a thoroughly obnoxious state of society. It is true that the pursuit of women seems the sole business of the men, and the pursuit of men the business of half the women; but the universal passion is so pleasantly variegated with extraneous humours and oddities that it is far from producing the monotony of a modern French novel. Thus, there is an amourette between Brisk and Lady Froth in _The Double Dealer_, but the pair are æsthetic as well as amorous, and the blue-stocking is more conspicuous than the unfaithful wife. The scene where Brisk corrects Lady Froth's poetry, imitated but not servilely copied from one in _Les Femmes Savantes_, is a good specimen of the humour and sparkle of Congreve's dialogue: