Satire, he [Congreve] thinks, you ought not to expect;
For so reformed a town who dares correct? To please, this time, has been his sole pretence, He'll not instruct, lest it should give offence.
The Way of the World, like Congreve's earlier plays, reflected the author's view of the urbane society in which he moved: the primacy of male friendships, bonded as much by clubbing and card-playing as business contracts and kinship. Congreve complicates theatrical stereotypes by making the play's hero, Mirabell, one of these suave and socially adept young London gentlemen—qualities traditionally belonging to morally suspect stage villains. Mirabell's final proof of integrity in the play, furthermore, is his kindness to Mrs Fainall, his former mistress. Even today, the question of one's moral duties to one's ex-lovers would be subtle territory for a play; in 1700, facing an audience of Collierites, it was an astonishing question to pose.
Congreve laughs at the affectations of Mirabell's friends, in the characters of Witwoud and Petulant, yet at the same time invokes sympathy for the social insecurities that require such pretences, as when Witwoud laughs at Petulant's attempts to feign popularity by saying he will dress up in costume and ‘call for himself, wait for himself, nay and what's more, not finding himself [at home], sometimes leave a letter for himself’.60 The 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