The Kit-Cat Club: Friends Who Imagined a Nation. Ophelia Field

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СКАЧАТЬ mutual exposure of faults and fears is simultaneously cruel and affectionate, as male friendships so often are. The author showcases the men's conversation, and hence his own, while implying that they are balancing on their tightropes of wit above great social uncertainty.

      When the play moves on to women, courtship and marriage, it mixes traditional complaints against the marriage yoke with a more honest account of which partner really lost their rights through marriage in the 1700s. In the famous ‘proviso scene’ where Millamant and Mirabell lay out their conditions of engagement, Millamant tries to preserve her rights, while her lover, Mirabell, tries to encroach upon them. The scene has often been complimented for showing equality between the sexes, yet it is a deceptive sort of equality: the couple are well matched in their knowledge of literature and parity of wit, but for Millamant her wit and coquetry are her only means of exercising some small power. She asks for a less conventional marriage because she fears to ‘dwindle into a wife’.⁶¹

      Congreve was troubled by the discordance between patriarchal laws and the reality of several strong women he knew and admired. In 1695, he wrote, ‘We may call them the weaker Sex, but I think the true Reason is because our Follies are Stronger and our Faults the more prevailing.’⁶² In The Way of the World, Congreve emphasizes that women are often less delusional in love than men, and in Millamant—a part written with Bracey specifically in mind—he celebrates the attractions of an intelligent, spirited woman. Mirabell's speech explaining why he loves Millamant is the writing of an author who loved, at this point, without illusions: ‘I like her with all her faults, like her for her faults. Her follies are so natural, or so artful, that they become her; and those affectations, which in another woman would be odious, serve but to make her more agreeable.’⁶³

      As late as September 1698, nearly six years since their first meeting, Congreve was still being teased that he ‘need not covet to go to Heaven at all, but to stay and Ogle his dear Bracilla, with sneaking looks under his Hat, in the little side Box’.⁶⁴ Tom Browne commented sceptically on Bracey's famed chastity, noting that Congreve ‘dines with her almost every day, yet She's a Maid; he rides out with her, and visits her in Public and Private, yet She's a Maid; if I had not a particular respect for her, I should go so near to say he lies with her, yet She's a Maid’.⁶⁵ Several later satires suggested Congreve and Bracey secretly married, though this is improbable since, when Bracey died in 1748, her will described her as a ‘spinster’.⁶⁶

      The Way of the World went over the heads of its first audience in March 1700, as its author had expected, one observer saying it was ‘hissed by Barbarous Fools in the Acting; and an impertinent Trifle was brought on after it, which was acted with vast Applause’.⁶⁷ Dryden was too ill to attend its opening night, but there is something poignant about the fact that Congreve's masterpiece, so far ahead of its time and predictive of so much later eighteenth-century literature, was one of the last works Dryden read before he died. He recognized its genius, and told Congreve not to mind its disappointing reception by everyone but, as Steele put it, ‘the Few refined’.⁶⁸

      The Way of the World was to be Congreve's last play; he retired from dramatic writing at 30. This was not a fit of pique because his masterpiece failed to gain universal acclaim, as is sometimes said. Rather, he felt he had reached the height of his powers and had nothing further to prove to an audience becoming increasingly censorious, bourgeois and unimaginative.

      Just as the play's early closure was a blow for Betterton's struggling company, so too Congreve's retirement from playwriting in 1700 must have been a blow for his publisher, Tonson, so close upon the death of Dryden. Dryden's name had been a critical seal of approval on any book that bore it in the preface or dedication. The editions of Miscellany Poems Dryden had edited for Tonson since 1684, for example, had become the most prestigious anthology of England, such that Tonson continued to produce the series long after Dryden's death. As one poem in the third Miscellany put it, Dryden's opinion was like a monarch's face stamped on a coin, giving value in an otherwise uncertain age.

      A Satyr against Wit (1699), by Richard Blackmore, reversed this metaphor to mock the authors mentored by Dryden and the patrons assembled by Tonson. Describing the writings of those Montagu patronized as being like clipped or devalued coin, a sideswipe at Montagu's failed recoinage scheme of 1696, Blackmore suggested that Congreve and Vanbrugh would be left with little reputation were their work cleansed of its impurities. Blackmore further proposed Somers, Dorset and Montagu should underwrite a ‘bank of wit’ to reform the currency of English poetry, meaning that they should give their support to worthier poets, like him.⁶⁹ Garth, Steele and Walsh contributed, on behalf of Dryden and his Witty Club, to a collected volume of verses as a counter-attack to Blackmore,⁷⁰ and this literary skirmish on the eve of Dryden's death did much to consolidate the Kit-Cat Club's sense that it must ensure Dryden's critical standards for English literature were not forgotten. In June 1700, a young man wrote to Garth on behalf of a group of unknown poets who had compiled a collection of elegies for Dryden, asking forlornly, ‘who shall make us known, and stamp Esteem, / On what we write…?’ He begged for the book to be commended by Dr Garth, even though the young man and his friends had no ‘swelling Kit-cat’ patron on their title page.⁷¹

      After Dryden's death, Tonson used the Kit-Cat Club's collective opinion as a replacement for Dryden's critical taste when evaluating works submitted for publication or when compiling the Miscellanies, letters of acceptance from Tonson to various writers often referring to work having passed the test of the ‘best judges’.⁷² One Tonson biographer has even conjectured that the anonymous poems in the later Miscellanies ‘as a whole represent the literary activities of the Kit-Cat Club’.⁷³

      Critical taste was understood to require cultivation, so that a true critic was made, not born. The paradox that this was believed by some of the highest born men in England was awkwardly explained by another shared belief: that a gentleman who had no need to work or seek a patron should, thanks to such independence, be the most impartial critic and arbiter of taste. Fresh works were therefore submitted to the Kit-Cat Club's ‘peer review’ not merely to seek patronage but also because of a residual respect for aristocratic opinion, according to classical theory. In an age that believed ‘Fame consists in the Opinion of wise and good Men’,⁷⁴ the Kit-Cat Club sought to be the makers of fame. As its own fame grew, the Club became a whetstone for sharpening its members' critical faculties, and a practical help to Tonson's publishing firm in the absence of paid editorial staff.

      Dryden's Witty Club had been attacked for being self-serving, selfimportant and malicious. The Kit-Cat Club now became the new target for such envy and resentment, as it sat and decided what writing should go to Tonson's presses and what into the tavern fireplace. Ned Ward was among those who questioned the Whig lords' right to sit as the self-styled custodians of English literature and who complained that the Kit-Cats, unlike Dryden, now made the critical process too Whiggishly ideological: ‘[T]hey began to set themselves up for Apollo's court of judicature, where every author's performance, from the stage poet to the garret-drudge, was to be read, tried, applauded, or condemned, according to the new system of Revolutionary Principles.’⁷⁵

      Soon the Kit-Cats СКАЧАТЬ