comedy was written: at which time love and wenching were the business of life, and the gallant manner of pursuing women was the best recommendation at court." The moral censors complained that the dramatist had made him successful in his illicit amours and had let him escape without reprimand. To this charge Mr. Bernbaum replies that "Horner's successes were a necessary means to the satiric ends of the play, -to the thorough exposure of Mrs. Fidget and Mrs. Squeamish, women who were at heart unchaste but who were scrupulously careful of their reputation, and the hollowness of whose virtue could not have been fully demonstrated except under the circumstances which Horner created. These women, as well as Pinchwife and Margery, comprised the principal objects of Wycherley's satire, and were duly punished; but it was a practical impossibility to visit poetic justice upon every character of the play."

Now, Mr. Bernbaum is no doubt right in saying that the object of the play was the exposure of pretension, although he rather unduly limits the scope of the satire: one need look at the first scene only to see that the exposure includes the pretension of a Sparkish to wit as well as that of a Mrs. Fidget and a Mrs. Squeamish to chastity. That double theme of ridicule was in fact the constant and infallible resource of all the comedians; but we shall miss the point if we fail to

observe a radical difference in their modes of attacking these two forms of charlatanry. The name of virtue was in their eyes equivalent to the assumption of something that did not exist. I do not, of course, mean such a statement to be taken too absolutely, for they could not altogether forget that they were human beings, even when they wrote for the stage. The cleverest of the rogues may suffer the defeat of marriage, and a play may end with the seeming propriety of a Victorian novel; but no one is deceived: the priest is only pander writ large. There is, in this very play, The Country Wife, a virgin who utters an occasional sentiment both virtuous and magnanimous, and various other decent characters managed to show themselves on the stage without contamination; but they are extremely few and mostly fools; the whole zest of this world of the footlights lay in the "privation of moral light."

With the matter of wit, however, it was different. These stimulators of pleasure for the court may not have believed in virtue, or may have believed in it very feebly, but they had a strong conviction of the reality and value of wit. Indeed the soul of wit lay in its ability to detect the hollowness of pretending to a thing that did not exist, and in its power to "accelerate felicity" out of what one of Mrs. Behn's women calls the "volubility and vicissitude in human affairs.”

It was no mechanic limit to the possibility of visiting poetic justice that tied Wycherley's hands; his lusty scapegrace escaped censure because by a clever and successful ruse he proved himself a true hero of wit. In this The Country Wife may justly be regarded as a model play of its school: it does not penalize vice, but only the profession of virtue; folly is satirized, whether in its own dull complacent self or in its pretension to wit; but the worst of all offenders is the pretender at once to wit and successful vice, of which damnable hypocrisy Mr. Horner is the shining opposite.

Ethically considered this wit of the Restoration belongs to a brief interval of transition, and needs to be distinguished from what preceded and what followed. In one point its tone may seem to agree with that of comedy before the Rebellion, but even here the difference is more significant than the resemblance. In the earlier writers the darkness of evil is made hateful by an implied or explicit contrast with the light of a traditional ideal of virtue. The ideal may not be very certain, it may be almost lost, so that ethical judgement fades away into the licence of rollicking fun; but it is not denied as a convention, and it can be found lurking somewhere in the background, if not in full sight. Even in the comedy of a Fletcher, where the belief in virtue is already vanishing in a cloud of indifference, there

is a feeling of abundant animal life which still retains the faculty of resisting a universal corruption, and there are isolated scenes in which the loveliness of chastity is painted with exquisite tenderness. But with the gloomy failure of the Commonwealth of the saints a change comes. It was the very creed of those who were now thrown to the surface in the boiling cauldron of the age to deny the reality of those ideas of virtue and sanctity which had been the occasion of so much confusion. So Robert Gould writes his Satire Against Man, half in the sceptical tone of the reigning school, half in a spirit of alarm at the completeness of their scepticism:

Slave to his passions, ev'ry sev'ral lust

Whisks him about, as whirlwinds do the dust;
And dust he is indeed, a senseless clod,

That swells, and would be yet believed a God....

That is Gould's own notion of mankind, though he has the proper indignation against the wits who live and write accordingly:

But that we may the monster undisguise
We'll first (as in the scale of truth it lies)
Lay open what a modern wit implies:
An impious wretch that Scripture ridicules,
And thinks the men that dare not do it fools;

A lustful goat, who to be fully known

For what he is, does pick and cull the town
For maids and wives ·

the rest is better unquoted.

The ethos of the Restoration wits was, as a whole and with due reservations, not so much a licence of high spirits as a complacent cynicism. Out of this cynicism the drama of sensibility, preluding the rise of a whole new literature, came as a natural reaction, but it introduced an error as vicious in its consequences as that against which it revolted. At least the cynicism of disillusion was free of the lying spirit of flattery, the cowardly fear of facts, which has spread like a mouldy disease through so much of modern writing. “In this book," said Dr. Johnson of Lord Kames's Sketches of the History of Man, laying his finger as usual on the quick of the matter, "it is maintained that virtue is natural to man, and that if we would but consult our own hearts, we should be virtuous. Now, after consulting our own hearts all we can, and with all the helps we have, we find how few of us are virtuous. This is saying a thing which all mankind know not to be true." Far nearer the truth was the development of the wit of complacent cynicism into the wit of satire, as we see it in Swift and Pope. I would not place the êthos of this new satire too high; it retained too much of the Restoration one-sidedness, and restored too little of the more balanced view of human nature which was lost lost for how long a time? But the indignation of a Swift was altogether a sounder passion than the trifling mockery of a Rochester, and the law of hatred that