1677-1707
THERE is a narrow dark Essex Street West in the city of Dublin, running
between Fishamble Street and Essex Gate, at the rear of the Lower
Blind Quay. The older people still bluntly call it what it was called
before 1830: Smock Alley. On its north side stands the sufficiently
ugly church of SS. Michael and John. The arched passage still in use,
parallel with the nave of this church, was the entrance to a theatre
on the same site; what is now the burial vault was once the pit, full
of ruddy and uproarious faces. The theatre, erected about 1660, which
had a long, stormy and eventful history, was rebuilt in 1735, and
having been turned into a warehouse, fell into decay, to be replaced
by a building of another clay. But while it was still itself, it was
great and popular, and the lane between Trinity College and the old
arched passage was choked every night with the press of jolly youths,
who, as Archbishop King pathetically complained, appeared to love the
play better than study! Among those who hung about Smock Alley like a
barnacle in the years 1694 and 1695, was a certain George Farquhar,
son of William,[37] a poor Londonderry clergyman of the Establishment;
a long-faced peculiar lad of mild mien but high spirits. He had come
from the north, under episcopal patronage, to wear a queer dress among
his social betters, to sweep and scour and carry tankards of ale to
the Fellows in hall; and incidentally, to imbibe, on his own part, the
lore of all the ages. The major event in his history is that, instead
of sitting up nights over _Isocrates de Pace_, he slipped off to see
Robert Wilkes and the stock company, and to decide that acting, or,
as he afterwards sarcastically defined it, “tearing his Lungs for a
Livelihood,” was also the thing for him. Wherefore, at eighteen, either
because his benefactor, Bishop Wiseman of Dromore, had died, or else,
as is not very credibly reported, because he was cashiered from his
class, Master Farquhar, cut loose from his old moorings, applied to
Manager Ashbury of the Dublin Theatre, and to such avail that he was
able presently to make his own appearance there as no less a personage
than Othello. He had a weak voice and a shy presence; but the public
encouraged him. One of his first parts was that of Guyomar, Montezuma’s
younger brother, in Dryden’s tragedy of _The Indian Emperor_. In the
fifth act, as soon as he had declaimed to Vasquez in sounding sing-song:
“Friendship with him whose hand did Odmar kill?
Base as he was, he was my brother still!
But since his blood has washed away his guilt,
Nature asks thine for that which thou hast spilt,”
he made, according to stage directions, a fierce lunge at his too
conciliatory foe. Guyomar had armed himself, inadvertently, with
a genuine sword, and Vasquez came near enough to being killed in
the flesh. The man eventually recovered; but it shows of what
impressionable stuff Farquhar was made, that his mental horror
and pain, during that moment while he believed he had slain a
fellow-creature, should have turned the course of his life. He left the
stage; nor would he return to it. Some eight years after, indeed, he
visited Dublin again, and on the old boards played Sir Harry Wildair
for his own benefit; but this was at a time when he forced himself to
undertake all honorable chances of money-making, out of his consuming
anxiety for his family.
Wilkes and his wife returned to London, and the lad Farquhar went with
them. He obtained a commission in the army from the Earl of Orrery;
he was in Holland on duty during a part of the year 1700, and came
back to England with one of her earliest military red coats on his
back, in the train of his much-approved sovereign, William III. He
had already written, thanks to Wilkes and his incessant urging, his
first two plays, and had seen them successful at Drury Lane;[38] he
had also overheard with enthusiasm, at the Mitre Tavern in St. James’s
Market, Mistress Nance Oldfield, an orphan of sixteen, niece of the
proprietress, reading _The Scornful Lady_ behind the bar. Captain
Vanbrugh was duly told of Farquhar’s delight and admiration, and on
the strength of them introduced the girl to Rich, who did few things
so good in his lifetime as when he put her upon the stage at fifteen
shillings a week. It was not long before this distinguished actress
and generous woman, destined to lend her gayety and beautiful bearing
to the interpretation of Farquhar’s women, enlivened the town as the
glorious Sylvia of _The Recruiting Officer_, who can “gallop all the
morning after a hunting-horn, and all the evening after a fiddle.”
“We hear of Farquhar at one time,” says Leigh Hunt, in a pretty
summary, “in Essex, hare-hunting (not in the style of a proficient);
at another, at Richmond, sick; and at a third, in Shropshire on a
recruiting party, where he was treated with great hospitality, and
found material for one of the best of his plays.”
_Love and a Bottle_ inaugurated the vogue of the Farquhar comedy; and
Wilkes, whose name in London carried favor and precedence, was the
Roebuck of the cast. Its successors, _The Constant Couple_ (with a
framework transferred and adapted from its author’s earlier _Adventures
of Covent Garden_), and its sequel, _Sir Harry Wildair_, again
championed by the “friendly and indefatigable” Wilkes, who impersonated
the engaging rakish heroes, had long runs, and firmly established
their author’s fame. In 1702 Farquhar produced _The Inconstant_ (which
he had perverted from Fletcher’s _Wild Goose Chase_, as if a fit
setting were sought for the wonderfully effective last act of his own
devising); and after _The Inconstant_, _The Twin Rivals_. _The Stage
Coach_, a one-act farce in which he had a collaborator,[39] dates from
1704, and _The Recruiting Officer_ from 1706; _The Beaux’ Stratagem_
was written in the spring of 1707. This is a working record of barely
nine years; it represents a secure and continuous artistic advance; and
it should have brought its patient originator something better than the
privilege of dying young, “broken-hearted,” as he confessed to Wilkes,
“and without a shilling.”
Farquhar had but the trifling income of an officer’s pay on which to
support his wife and his two little daughters. He seems to have sought
no political preferment, nor did his numerous patrons put themselves
out to advance him, although these were the very days when men of
letters were crowded into the public service. Ever and anon he received
fifteen guineas, then a very handsome sum, for a play. Perhaps,
like his rash gallants, he had “a head to get money, and a heart to
spend it.” He greatly wished success, for the sake of those never
absent from his thought; and he complained bitterly when the French
acrobats and rope-dancers took from _The Twin Rivals_ the attention of
pleasure-seeking Londoners, much as poor Haydon complained afterwards
of the crowds who surged down Piccadilly, to behold not his “Christ’s
Entry into Jerusalem” at all, but General Tom Thumb, holding court
under the same roof.
When Farquhar’s health was breaking, and debts began to involve him at
last, it appears that the Earl of Ormonde, his general, prompted him
to sell his commission in order to liquidate them, and agreed to give
him a captaincy. Or, as is yet more probable, in view of the fact that
Farquhar was already known by the title of captain, he was urged to
sell out of the army, on a given pledge that preferment of another sort
awaited him. His other industrious devices to secure support for four
having missed fire, he gladly performed his part of the transaction,
only to experience a fatal delay on the part of my Lord Ormonde,
whose mind had strayed to larger matters. In fine, the unkept promise
hurt the subaltern to the heart; he sank, literally from that hour,
of grief and disquietude. Lintott the stationer, and his old friend
Wilkes stood manfully by him, one with liberal payment in advance,
and one with affectionate furtherance and gifts; but Farquhar did not
rally. It was to Wilkes, as everybody knows, that he penned this most
touching testament: “Dear Bob, I have not anything to leave thee to
perpetuate my memory but two helpless girls. Look upon them sometimes!
and think of him who was, to the last moment of his life, thine.” The
end came on or about April 29, 1707, George Farquhar being just thirty
years of age. While he lay dying in Soho, his last and best comedy
was in progress at the new magnificent Haymarket, and his audiences,
with a barren benevolence not uncharacteristic of the unthinking human
species, are said to have wept for him. He was buried in the parish
church-yard of St. Martin-in-the-Fields,[40] where Nell Gwynne’s
contrite ashes lay, and where her legacied bells tolled for his passing.
Farquhar’s name is always coupled with those of Congreve, Wycherley,
and Vanbrugh, although in spirit and also in point of time he was
removed from the influences which formed them. Many critics, notably
Hazlitt, Macaulay, and Thackeray, have allowed him least mention of the
four, but he is, in reality, the best playwright among them; and it is
greatly to the credit of a discreditable period if he be taken as its
representative. He had Vanbrugh’s exuberant vivacity, Congreve’s grace,
Wycherley’s knack of climax. Wycherley, retiring into private life when
Farquhar was born, lived to see his exit; Etherege was then at his
zenith; Dryden’s _All for Love_ was in the printer’s case, and Otway,
almost on the point of his two great works, was coming home ragged
from Flanders: Otway, whose boyish ventures on the stage, and whose
subsequent soldiering, Farquhar was so closely to follow.
Pope, and a gentler observer, Steele, found Farquhar’s dialogue “low,”
and so it must have sounded between the brave surviving extravagances
of the Jacobean buskin and the modulated utterances of _Cato_ and _The
Revenge_. A practical talent like Farquhar’s was bound to provoke hard
little words from the Popes who shrank from his spontaneous style,
and the Steeles who could not approve of the gross themes he had
inherited. For sheer good-breeding, some scenes in _The Way of the
World_ can never be surpassed; they prove that one cannot hold the
stage by talk alone. It is fortunate for Farquhar that he could not
emulate the exquisitely civilized depravities of Congreve’s urban Muse.
But his dialogue is not “low” to modern tastes; it has, in general, a
simple, natural zest, infinitely preferable to the Persian apparatus
of the early eighteenth century. Even he, however, can rant and
deviate into rhetoric, as soon as his lovers drop upon one knee. More
plainly in Farquhar’s work than in that of any contemporary, we mark
the glamour of the Caroline literature fading, and the breath of life
blowing in. An essentially Protestant nationalism began to settle down
upon England for good and all with William and Mary, and it brought
subtle changes to bear upon the arts, the trades, the sports, and
the manners of the people. In Farquhar’s comedies we have the reflex
of a dulling and strengthening age; the fantasticalities of the last
three reigns are all but gone; the Vandyck dresses gleam and swish
no longer. Speech becomes more pert and serviceable, in a vocabulary
of lesser range; lives are vulgarizing, that is, humanizing, and
getting closer to common unromantic concerns; no such delicately unreal
creature as Millamant, all fire and dew and perfumery,—Millamant who
could not suffer to have her hair done up in papers written in prose,
and who, quite by herself, is a vindication of what Mr. Allibone is
pleased to call “Lamb’s sophistical and mischievous essay,”—walks the
world of Farquhar. With him, notwithstanding that the sorry business
to be despatched is the same old amorous intrigue, come in at once
less license, less affectation, less Gallicism. He reports from the
beginning what he himself apprehends; his plays are shorthand notes,
albeit timid in character, upon the transitional and prosaic time. His
company is made up of individuals he had seen in a thousand lights at
the Spread Eagle and the Rummer; in the Inner Temple and in St. James’s
Park; in barracks domestic and foreign; and in his native place, where
adventurers, eloquent in purest Londonderry,[41] stumbled along
full of whiskey and ideas. He anticipates certain phases of Private
Ortheris’s thorough-going love of London, and figures his exiled Dicky
as “just dead of a consumption, till the sweet smoke of Cheapside
and the dear perfume of Fleet-ditch” made him a man again. In this
laughing affectionate apprehension of the local and the temporal
lies Farquhar’s whole strength or weakness. From the poets of the
Restoration there escapes, most incongruously, now and then, something
which betokens a sense of natural beauty, or even a recognition of the
divine law; but Farquhar is not a poet, and this spray from the deeps
is not in him. He perceives nothing that is not, and opens no crack or
chink where the fancy can air itself for a moment and
—“step grandly out into the infinite.”
Such a lack would not be worth remarking in the debased and insincere
writers who but just preceded him. But from the very date of his
first dealings with London managers, idealism was abroad, and a man
with affinities for “the things that are more excellent” need have
feared no longer to divulge them, since the court and the people, if
not the dominant town gentry, were with him. Farquhar had neither the
full moral illumination nor the will, though he had the capacity,
to lend a hand to the blessed work waiting for the opportunist. He
was young, he was of provincial nurture; he was carried away by the
theatrical tradition. Yet his mind was a Medea’s kettle, out of which
everything issued cleaner and more wholesome. Despite the prodigious
animal spirits of his characters, they conduct their mad concerns with
sense and moderation; they manage tacitly to proclaim themselves as
temporarily “on a tear,” as going forth to angle in angling weather,
and as likely to lead sober citizen lives from to-morrow on. Under bad
old maintained conditions they develop traits approximately worthy of
the _Christian Hero_. They “look before and after.” They are to be
classed as neutrals and nondescripts, for they have all the swagger
of their lax progenitors, and none of their deviltry. They belong
professionally to one family, while they bear a tantalizing resemblance
to another. Farquhar himself, perhaps unaware that partisanship is
better than compromise, made his bold toss for bays both spiritual
and temporal. Imitating, as novices will ever do, the art back of
him, he adopted the claim to approbation which that art never dreamed
of. In the very good preface to _The Twin Rivals_ (which has always
been approved of critics rather than of audiences), he sets up for a
castigator of vice and folly, and he offers to appease “the ladies and
the clergy,” as, in some measure apparent to the more metaphysical
among them, he may have done. His friend, Mr. John Hopkins, the
author of _Amasia_, invited, on behalf of _The Constant Couple_, the
commendation of Collier. That open-minded censor may have seen with
satisfaction, in the general trend of Farquhar’s composition, the less
and less dubious day-beams of Augustan decency. Though Farquhar did not
live, like Vanbrugh and the magnanimous Dryden, to admit the abuse of a
gift, and to deplore it, he alone, of the minor dramatists, seems all
along to have had a negative sort of conscience better than none. His
instincts continually get the better not only of his environment, but
of his practice. Some uneasiness, some misgiving, are at the bottom of
his homely materialism. He thinks it best, on the whole, to forswear
the temptation to be sublime, and to keep to his cakes and ale; and
for cakes and ale he had an eminent and inborn talent. What was ably
said of Hogarth, the great exemplar, will cover all practicians of his
school: “He had an intense feeling for and command over the impressions
of senses and habit, of character and passion, the serious and the
comic; in a word, of nature as it fell in with his own observation, or
came into the sphere of his actual experience. But he had little power
beyond that sphere, or sympathy for that which existed only in idea. He
was ‘conformed to this world, not transformed.’” Or, as Leigh Hunt, in
his beautiful memoir, adds, with acuteness, of Farquhar himself: “He
could turn what he had experienced in common life to the best account,
but he required in all cases the support of ordinary associations, and
could not project his spirit beyond them.” In short, Farquhar lacked
imagination. He had insight, however, of another order, which is
his praise, and which distinguishes him from all his fellows: he had
sympathy and charity.
The major blot on the literature of the English stage of the period is
not its libertinism, but rather its concomitant utter heartlessness.
“Arrogance” (so, according to Erasmus, that ascetic scholar Dean Colet
used to remind his clergy) “is worse than a hundred concubines.” The
slight sporadic touches of tenderness, of pity, of disinterested
generosity, to be found by patient search in Congreve, come in boldly
with Farquhar, and boldly overrun his prompter’s books. Vanbrugh’s
scenes stand on nothing but their biting and extravagant sarcasm. As
Congreve’s characters are indiscriminately witty, so Vanbrugh’s are
universally and wearisomely cynical, and at the expense of themselves
and all society. His women in high life have no individuality; they
wear stings of one pattern. The genial conception of the shrewd,
material Mrs. Amlet, however, in _The Confederacy_, is worthy of
Farquhar, and certainly Congreve himself could not have bettered
her in the execution. Etherege’s typical Man of Mode is a tissue
of untruth, hardness, and scorn, all in impeccable attire; a most
mournful spectacle. Thinking of such dainty monsters, Macaulay let fly
his famous invective against their creators: “Foreheads of bronze,
hearts like the nether millstone, and tongues set on fire of hell!”
George Farquhar may be exempted altogether from this too-deserved
compliment. There is honest mirth in his world of fiction, there is
dutifulness, there is true love, there are good women; there is genuine
friendship between Roebuck and Lovewell, between Trueman and Hermes
Wouldbe, between Aimwell and Archer, and between the green Tummas of
_The Recruiting Officer_ and his Costar, whom he cannot leave behind.
Sylvia, Angelica, Constance, Leanthe, Oriana, Dorinda, free-spoken
as they are, how they shine, and with what morning freshness, among
the tiger-lilies of that evil garden of the Restoration drama! These
heroines are an innovation, for they are maids, not wedded wives.
As to the immortal periwigged young bloods their suitors, they are
“real gentlemen,” as Hazlitt, who loved Farquhar, called them, “and
only pretended impostors;” or, to quote Farquhar’s latest editor, Mr.
A. C. Ewald, they are “always men and never yahoos.” Their author
had no interest in “preferring vice, and rendering virtue dull and
despicable.” Their praise may be negative, but it establishes a wide
wall of difference between them and the fops and cads with whom they
have been confounded. In their conversations, glistening with epigram
and irony, malevolence has no part; they sneer at no virtue, they
tamper with none; and at every turn of a selfish campaign they find
opportunity for honorable behavior. From the mouths of these worldlings
comes satire, hot and piping, against worldliness; for Farquhar is
as moralizing, if not as moral, as he dares be. Some of the least
attractive of them, the most greedy and contriving, have moments of
sweetly whimsical and optimistic speech. Thus Benjamin Wouldbe, the
plotter against his elder brother in _The Twin Rivals_, makes his
adieu after the fashion of a true gallant: “I scorn your beggarly
benevolence! Had my designs succeeded, I would not have allowed you the
weight of a wafer, and therefore will accept none.” The same person
soars again into a fine Aurelian speculation: “Show me that proud stoic
that can bear success and champagne! Philosophy can support us in hard
fortune, but who can have patience in prosperity?” Over his men and
women in middle life Farquhar lingers with complacence entirely foreign
to his colleagues, to whom mothers, guardians, husbands, and other
apple-guarding dragons were uniformly ridiculous and odious. Justice
Balance is as attractive as a hearth-fire on a December night; so is
Lady Bountiful. Over Fairbank, the good goldsmith, Farquhar gets fairly
sentimental, and permits him to drop unaware into decasyllabics, like
the pastoral author of _Lorna Doone_. His rogues are merely roguish,
in the softened sense of the word; in his panorama, though black
villains come and go, it is only for an instant, and to further some
one dramatic effect. He has eulogy for his heroes when they deserve it,
and when they do not you may trust him to find a compassionate excuse;
as when poor Leanthe feelingly says of her lover that “his follies are
weakly founded upon the principles of honor, where the very foundation
helps to undermine the structure.” Even Squire Sullen, for his
lumpishness, is divorced without derision, and in a peal of harmless
laughter. Farquhar, indeed, is all gentleness, all kindness. He had the
pensive attitude of the true humorist towards the world he laughed at;
his characters let slip words too deep for their living auditors. It
is curious that to a Restoration dramatist, “a nether millstone,” we
should owe a perfect brief description of ideal married life. In the
scene of the fourth act of _Sir Harry Wildair_, where Lady Lurewell,
with her “petrifying affectation,” is trying to tease Sir Harry out
of all endurance on the subject of his wife (whom he believes to be
lost or dead), and the degree of affection he had for her, he makes
reply: “My own heart whispered me her desires, ’cause she herself was
there; no contention ever rose but the dear strife of who should most
oblige—no noise about authority, for neither would stoop to command,
where both thought it glory to obey.” This is meant to be spoken
rapidly, and not without its tantalizing lack of emphasis; but what a
pearl it is, set there in the superlatively caustic dialogue! English
chivalry and English literature have no such other golden passage in
their rubrics, unless it be the famous tribute to the Lady Elizabeth
Hastings that “to love her was a liberal education,” or Lovelace’s
unforgettable song:
“I could not love thee, dear, so much,
Loved I not Honour more!”
The passage takes on a very great accidental beauty when we remember
that it required courage, in its time and place, to have written it.
It is characteristic also of Farquhar that it should be introduced,
as it is, on the top wave of a vivacious and stormy conversation,
which immediately sweeps it under, as if in proof that he understood
both his art and his audience. The conjugal tie, among the leaders
of fashion, was still something to laugh at and to toy with. Captain
Vanbrugh, from whom nobody need expect much edification, had put in the
mouth of his Constant, in a play which was a favorite with Garrick,
a bit of sense and sincerity quoted, as it deserved to be, by Hunt:
“Though marriage be a lottery in which there are a wondrous many
blanks, yet there is one inestimable lot in which the only heaven on
earth is written.” And again: “To be capable of loving one is better
than to possess a thousand.” This was in 1698, and Farquhar therefore
was not first, nor alone, in daring to speak for the derided idea of
wedlock. Steele was soon to arise as the very champion of domestic
life; and English wit, since he wrote, has never subsisted by its
mockery of the conditions which create
“home-keeping days and household reverences.”
But it was Farquhar who spoke in behalf of these the most memorable
word of his generation. After that lofty evidence of what he must be
suspected to have been, it is well to see, as best we may, what manner
of man George Farquhar was. And first let us take some extracts from
his own account of himself, “candid and modest,” as Hunt named it.
He gives us to understand that he had an ardent temperament, held in
check by an introspective turn of thought, by natural bashfulness, and
by habits of consideration for others. The portrait is drawn from a
letter in the _Miscellanies_, of “a mind and person generally dressed
in black,” and might have come bodily, and with charming grace, from
_The Spectator_. “I have very little estate but what lies under the
circumference of my hat . . . and should I by misfortune come to lose
my head, I should not be worth a groat.” “I am seldom troubled by what
the world calls airs and caprices, and I think it an idiot’s excuse
for a foolish action to say: ‘’Twas my humor.’” “I cannot cheerfully
fix to any study which bears not a pleasure in the application.”
“Long expectation makes the blessing always less to me; I lose the
great transport of surprise.” “I am a very great epicure; for which
reason I hate all pleasure that’s purchased by excess of pain. I can’t
relish the jest that vexes another. In short, if ever I do a wilful
injury, it must be a very great one.” “I have many acquaintances, very
few intimates, but no friend; I mean, in the old romantic way.” “I
have no secret so weighty but that I can bear it in my own breast.”
“I would have my passion, if not led, at least waited on by my
reason.” This last text, repeated elsewhere by Farquhar, which is the
counterpart of one in Sir Philip Sidney’s _Arcadia_, has interest from
the lips of a child of the “dancing, drinking, and unthinking time.”
Farquhar’s face, in the old prints, is wonderfully of a piece with
these amiable reports: a handsome, humane, careworn, melancholy young
face, the negation of the contemporary idea of the man about town. His
constitution, at its best, was but frail. “You are as dear to me,” he
says, pathetically, to his Penelope, “as my hopes of waking in health
to-morrow morning.”
A tradition has been received without question by his many critics and
biographers, that his chief characters, all cast in the same animated
mould, are but incognitos of himself. Highly-colored projections of
himself, with latent traits exaggerated, and formed mental restraints
removed, they may indeed be. The public, which loves identifications,
insisted on finding him revealed in his Archers and Sir Harrys. Whether
or not the dramatists of the day had universally the Rembrandtesque
whim of painting themselves into their own foregrounds, they were
obstinately supposed to do so, with Etherege in Young Bellair, with
Otway in Jaffier. But the real Farquhar
—“courteous, facile, sweet,
Hating that solemn vice of greatness, pride,”
with his reserve, his simple dress, his thin, agreeable voice,
his early reputation at college for uncongeniality, acting in
every emergency whither we can fairly trace him with deliberate
high-mindedness, is far enough from the temper of his restless and
jocund creations. He wished to remove the impression that he could have
been his own model; for he took pains to inscribe _The Inconstant_ to
his classmate, Richard Tighe, and to compliment him upon his kinship
with Mirabel, “a gay, splendid, easy, generous, fine young gentleman”;
the applauded type, in short, of all that Farquhar’s heroes set out to
be. Again, lest he should pass for a realist as rabid as Mademoiselle
de Scudéry, who pinioned three hundred and seventy of her acquaintances
between the covers of _Clélie_, Farquhar adds this warning to his
enthusiastic dedication of _The Recruiting Officer_ “to all friends
round the Wrekin”: “Some little turns of humor that I met with almost
within the shade of that famous hill gave the rise to this comedy;
and people were apprehensive that, by the example of some others, I
would make the town merry at the expense of the country gentleman. But
they forgot that I was to write a comedy, not a libel.” He disclaims
everywhere, with the same playful decisiveness, the interpretations put
upon his designs and actions by the world of overgrown infants which he
entertained. Endowed with courage and much personal charm, he had small
chance of distinguishing himself upon the field, and for the most part
shone at a garrison mess; but he had led a not inadventurous life, in
which were incidents of the most pronounced melodrama, with a touch of
mystery to enhance their value for the curious. Farquhar had travelled,
and with an open, not an insular mind; he had, by his own confession,
too deep an acquaintance with wine, and with the nightingales of Spring
Gardens, outsinging “the chimes at midnight, Master Shallow”; he had
been, in short, though with “melancholy as his every-day apparel,”
alive and abroad as a private Whig of the Revolution, shy of ladies’
notice till it came, and proud of it ever after. When he printed, in
his twenty-first year, _The Adventures of Covent Garden_, he added to
it a boy’s bragging motto: _Et quorum pars magna fui_. The inference
seems to have clung closer to him than he found comfortable. He
complains, not without significance, in his prose essay upon the
drama, that the public think any rôle compounded of “practical rake
and speculative gentleman is, ten to one, the author’s own character.”
With the incident which furnished its thrilling closing scenes to _The
Inconstant_, Farquhar had probably no connection; he takes pains to
state that the hero of it was the Chevalier de Chastillon, quite as if
he feared another confusion of himself, as fearless and quick-witted
a man, with the “golden swashbucklers” of his imagination. The rumor
which confounded them with him has next to nothing to support it.
Fortune, fashion, foolhardiness, impudence, were not the stars which
shone upon Farquhar’s nativity. Such exotic and epic virtues as may
flourish under these, such as do adorn the delightful dandies he
depicted, surely belonged to him in person; and his quiet habit of
living apart and letting the town talk, fixed to perpetuity the belief
that he had exploited himself vicariously, for good and all, upon the
stage. Certain qualities of his, certain brave truces established with
adverse conditions, force one to consider him with more attention and
respect than even his brilliant pen invites. It is something to find
him diffident and studious in a bacchanalian society, and with such
scrupulous sensitiveness that a mere inadvertence in boyhood forbade
him ever to fence again;[42] but his outstanding characteristic, the
thing which sets him apart from his brocaded _dramatis personæ_, is his
known lasting devotion to the welfare of his family, and his admirable
behavior in relation to his early and extraordinary marriage.
In 1702, Farquhar issued a charming and little-known miscellany,
called _Love and Business_, “a collection of occasionary verse and
epistolary prose.” The poetic exercises are of small importance;
but the other data (which survive as a hindrance, rather than as a
help, to biographers) come near being of very definite value. All
manner of futile guesses have been expended upon the identification
of his Penelope. It is given to no mouser to name her with certainty;
but, despite the gossip of the greenroom, now as ever too ready to
weave romances about the name of George Farquhar, internal evidence
is strongly against her having been Anne Oldfield. Yet this is the
supposition of most of his editors. Commenting upon one passage
touching some villanous stratagem from which Farquhar says he was
able to rescue a friend in the Low Countries, a friend with whom he
afterwards condoles upon a robbery she had undergone, Leigh Hunt adds
that this may have been the woman whom Farquhar subsequently made his
wife. A widow, whose Christian name was Margaret, but of whom we know
so little else that we cannot say whether she was English, or whether
her age considerably exceeded his, conceived a passionate attachment
for him, and managed to have it represented to him from several
quarters not only that she was kindly disposed towards him, but that
it would be well for his opening career if he should seek her hand,
as she had estates and revenues. Eventually, after we know not what
hesitations natural to a fastidious temperament, he proposed to her
and was accepted, and it soon transpired that the bride was quite as
penniless as himself. Hunt does not follow out his own hint in the
matter of the robbery, though the question, when carefully considered,
has a vital import. If the victim were indeed the lady whom Farquhar
married later, and if she were indeed robbed, it should signify that
she must then have been possessed of some wealth, so that the report
given to Farquhar could not have been, up to that time at least, a
lie. On the other hand, casuists must decide whether, again in the
event of the victim having been correctly identified by Hunt, the
robbery itself may not have been an invention meant, after Farquhar had
declared his allegiance, to quicken his sympathy, and to soften the
coming revelation that the robbery could never have resulted, owing to
a defect in the premises! There is very much else about the _Letters_
which is confusing and inconsistent. They are so disconnected, and
they vary so in tone and manner, as to suggest a doubt whether, if not
altogether imaginary, they could have been meant for any one person. A
lady is announced as having returned them for publication; she dresses
in mourning, and resides now on the Continent, now in London or in the
country; her suitor very explicitly states that he had long solicited
in vain the honor of her hand; and, in the end, with farewells and an
abrupt and unexplained severing, he gives up the quest, with his own
admission that he has lost her and that her heart “had no room for
him.” Now that the recipient of this correspondence, Anne Oldfield
or another, should have returned it for commercial purposes, not
having been won by the very real passion exhibited in parts of it,
seems somewhat peculiar; but to accept as fact that Farquhar himself
actually asked these letters back from her, and printed them as they
stood, is, under the conditions, absurd, and irreconcilable with
our knowledge of his character from other and prior sources. Hunt
further suggests that the _Miscellany_ was gathered together in some
press of pecuniary trouble; and its title, indeed, may hint at a
whimsical expectation that Love, being harnessed and sent abroad to
arouse curiosity among readers, may return in the way of Business to
headquarters. But Farquhar, in his bachelor days, had a fair income,
and would not have been so likely to hear the wolf at the door as he
was later, when that sound would awake in him a dread not ominous to
himself alone. It is possible that the undiscovered register of his
marriage bears the date of 1702 or even of 1701; if it were so, that
might explain the issue of his only book not in dramatic dress, and the
emergency which called it forth. It is difficult indeed to suppose,
although modern delicacy in these matters was just then a somewhat
unknown quantity, that we have between its covers genuine love-letters
hot from the pen. Steele, of an August morning nine years later,
inserted in _The Spectator_ as the communication of a third person, six
of his own notes to his comely and noble _fiancée_, Mary Scurlock. But
Farquhar had not Steele’s earnestness and love of circumstantial truth,
nor his zest for pointing a moral. Or was this publication the sort of
thing he would be likely, for a not unworthy purpose, to do? Was he,
in reality, a shade more obtuse and misguided than Miss Fanny Brawne?
Rather let us believe the _Letters_ a work of fiction, and only founded
largely upon various bygone moods and incidents of the foregoing two
years, which for one reason or another might interest buyers. Such is
the description to “dear Sam” of Dryden’s erratic funeral, which is
almost too keenly rhetorical a summing-up to have been written the next
day, or the thoughtful and sensible surveys of the Dutch. The amatory
epistles, with their leaven of reality, are presumably edited out of
all recognition. They make no defined impression; they do not move
forward; they veil impenetrably the traits of the person addressed, who
is made to appear as a vanishing unrelenting goddess, deaf and blind to
George Farquhar pleading his best. Whatever were the facts, the report
of them is chivalrous. Assume for a moment that his wife stands behind
the whole of this correspondence, or even behind the latter part of
it, and what seemed to constitute a little betrayal in the very worst
taste turns out to be an innocent joke. Of course the “lady” (or one of
the ladies) lent the manuscripts to the printers; of course Farquhar
originated, in order to give color to Mistress Farquhar’s known
pretence of riches, and their joint subsequent poverty, the magnificent
thieving practised upon the never-thieved and the unthievable! One can
fancy them both, in their hard chairs in the bare room, laughing well
and long, between tears of anxious hope that the more personal element
in the _Miscellany_ might fetch them from the Covent Garden book-stalls
a parcel of fagots and a dinner.
Aside from all theorizing, it is pleasant to know that their life
together was a happy one. The consensus of all witnesses, in the
significant absence of any contrary voice, affirms that Farquhar,
having been trapped, bore himself like the gentleman he was. Two
children were born to him, to brighten, but also to sadden, his brief
and diligent life. Under his added anxieties he did his royal best; he
addressed to their mother, from first to last, no word of reproach for
her fraud.
“The secret pleasure of the generous act
Is the great mind’s great bribe.”
In its fragrance of faith and patience and self-sacrificing tenderness,
their domestic story can almost rank next after that sacred one of
Charles and Mary Lamb.
Farquhar’s widow, who had loved him, appears to have loved his
memory.[43] She did not survive her husband many years; for there is
reason to suppose she died before 1719, and in penury. Poor Farquhar
used to declare that the dread that his family might suffer want was
far more bitter to him than death. Wilkes gave at his theatre, in the
May of 1708, a benefit for Margaret Farquhar, and twelve years later
he was acting as trustee for the young girls Mary and Anne Margaret,
whose pension is said by the _Encyclopædia Britannica_ to have amounted
to thirty pounds; it was obtained through the exertions of Edmund
Challoner, to whom their father had dedicated his _Miscellanies_.
Wilkes seems to have again aided both the orphans when they came of
age. One of them married an humble tradesman, and died early; the
other was living in 1764, wholly uneducated, and, as it is said on
small authority, as a maid-servant. Farquhar’s elder biographers
and editors, Ware, Genest, Chetwood, and the rest, writing in this
daughter’s lifetime, were apparently unconscious of her existence; but
the thought of her father’s child, old, neglected, and in a menial
position, served to anger Leigh Hunt as late as 1842.
Fear and forecast of what is only too likely to befall the helpless,
depressed Farquhar in the April long ago, when he lay dying of
consumption, and when, with a fortitude which sustained him under
his bitter disappointment, for six weeks, he wrote and finished his
masterly comedy _The Beaux’ Stratagem_. As he drew near the end of the
second act he was told to give up hope; but the second act closes with
the famous rattling catechism between Cherry and Archer, and the best
bit of verse its author ever made; and the third starts in with the
hearty sweet laugh—Anne Oldfield’s laugh—of that “exquisite creature,
Mrs. Sullen.” On a fund of grief, Farquhar enriched his London with a
legacy of perpetual merriment. The unflagging impetus of his dramas,
above and beyond their very real intrinsic merit, accounts for their
great and yet unforfeited popularity. They descend to us associated
with the intellectual triumphs of the most dear and dazzling names
upon the English stage; they move upon the wings of intelligence
and good-nature; they “give delight, and hurt not.” They swarm with
soldiers, welcome figures long tacitly prohibited from the boards, as
too painful a reminder of the Civil Wars. They begin with the clatter
of spurs, the bang of doors, the hubbub of bantering voices in “a
broadside of damme’s.” Sergeant Kite appears, followed by a mob on
whom he lavishes his wheedling, inspiriting gibble-gabble; Roebuck
enters in fantastic colloquy with a beggar; Sir Harry crosses the road,
singing, with footmen after him, and Vizard meanwhile indicating him
to Standard as “the joy of the playhouse and the life of the park,
Sir Harry Wildair, newly come from Paris”; _The Twin Rivals_ opens
in a volley of epigrams; the rise of the curtain in _The Beaux’
Stratagem_ discloses sly old Boniface and the ingenious Cherry calling
and running, running and calling, in a fluster pregnant of farce and
revel. Farquhar’s pages are not for the closet; they have little
passive charm; to quote from them, full as they are of familiar saws
almost all his own, is hardly fair. His mother-wit arises from the
ludicrous and unforeseen predicament, not from vanity and conscious
power; it is integral, not mere repartee; and it never calls a halt to
the action. As was well said by Charles Cowden Clarke, “there are no
traps for jests” in Farquhar; “no trains laid to fire _équivoque_.” The
clear fun, spurting unannounced in dialogue after dialogue, in incident
after incident; the incessant Molière-like masquerades; the thousand
little issues depending upon by-play and transient inspiration; the
narrowing scope and deepening sentiment of the plot, like a secret
given to the players, to be told fully only to the audience most in
touch with them—these commend Farquhar’s vivacious rôles to actors, and
make them both difficult and desirable. With what unction, from an
actor’s lips, falls his manifold and glowing praise of theatres! What
a pretty picture, a broad wash of rose-purple and white, he can make
of the interior seen from the wings! “There’s such a hurry of pleasure
to transport us; the bustle, noise, gallantry, equipage, garters,
feathers, wigs, bows, smiles, ogles, love, music, and applause!” And
again, in another mood: “The playhouse is the element of poetry,
because the region of beauty; the ladies, methinks, have a more
inspiring, triumphant air in the boxes than anywhere else. They sit
commanding on their thrones, with all their subject slaves about them;
their best clothes, best looks; shining jewels, sparkling eyes; the
treasures of the world in a ring.” And Mirabel, who is speaking, ends
with an ecstatic sigh: “I could wish that my whole life long were the
first night of a new play!”
This is a drop, or a rise, from Congreve and his aristocratic
abstractions. Farquhar, in his youth, had modelled himself chiefly
upon the comedy of Congreve, and may be said to have perfected the
mechanism which the genius of Congreve had brought into vogue. He never
attained, nor could attain, Congreve’s scholarly elegance of proportion
and his consummate diction. But he had the happiness of being no purely
literary dramatist; he had technical knowledge and skill. He brought
the existing heroes with their conniving valets, the buxom equivocal
maids, the laughing, masking, conscienceless fine ladies, out of their
disreputable moonlight into healthful comic air; and added to them, in
the transfer, a leaven of homely lovableness which will forever keep
his masterpieces upon the stage.
Farquhar’s original intellect has a value only relative; he may be
considered as Goldsmith’s tutor rather than as Congreve’s disciple.
Goldsmith had no small knowledge of Farquhar, his forerunner by sixty
years as a sizar student of Trinity; and, like him, he is reported
to have been dropped from his class for a buffoonery. What friends
(_Arcades ambo_, in both Virgilian and blameless Byronese) might
these two parsons’ sons have been! Scrub, Squire Sullen’s servant,
in _The Beaux’ Stratagem_, who “on Saturday draws warrants, and on
Sunday draws beer,” was a part Goldy once greatly desired to act. He,
too, when he came to write plays, cast about for conventional types
to handle and improve. Tony and his incomparable mother would hardly
have been, without their first imperfect apparition in Wycherley’s
powerful (and stolen) _Plain Dealer_; and Young Marlow and Hastings
are frank reproductions of Archer and Aimwell, in a much finer
situation. Miss Hardcastle hopes that in her cap and apron she may
resemble Cherry. And no one seems to have traced a celebrated passage
in _The Vicar of Wakefield_ either to my Lady Howdye’s message to my
Lady Allnight repeated by Archer (who in this same scene introduces
the “topical song” upon the modern boards), or else to the example
of the manœuvring Bisarre in Act II., Scene I., of _The Inconstant_.
Surely, “forms which proceed from simple enumeration and are exposed to
validity from a contradictory instance” supplies the unique original
of the nonsense-rhetoric which so confounded poor Moses.[44] The talk
of Clincher Junior and Tim, of Kite, Bullock, Scrub, Lyric, and the
unbaptized wench Parly, of the constable showing the big bed to Hermes
Wouldbe, the talk, that is, of Farquhar’s common people, shows humor
altogether of what we may call the Goldsmith order: genial, odd,
grotesque paradox, springing from Irish inconsequence and love of human
kind.
In the sixth year of Queen Anne, when Farquhar died, Steele was married
to his “Prue,” and having seen the last of his three reformatory
dramas “damned for its piety,” sought Joseph Addison’s approval and
collaboration, and fell to designing _The Tatler_. Fielding was
newborn, Johnson just out of the cradle, Pope was trying a cunning
young hand at his first _Pastorals_; Defoe, an alumnus of Newgate, was
beating his way outward and upward; Swift, yet a Whig, was known but
for his _Tale of a Tub_. The fresh waters were rising on all sides to
vivify the sick lowlands of the decadence. The kingdoms had a forgotten
lesson, and long in the learning, set before them: to regain, as a
basis for legitimate results, their mental independence and simplicity;
to serve art for art’s sake, and to achieve, through the reactionary
formalism of the nascent eighteenth century, freedom and a broad ethic
outlook. It was as if Comedy, in her winning meretricious perfections,
had to die, that English prose might live. It is enough for an immature
genius of the third order, born under Charles the Second, to have
vaguely foreshadowed a just and imperative change. Farquhar certainly
does foreshadow it, albeit with what theologians might call absence of
the necessary intention.
He wrote excellent prefaces and prologues. His _Discourse upon Comedy_,
in the _Miscellanies_, did pioneer work for his theory, since
expounded by more authoritative critics, and received by the English
world, that the observance or non-observance of the dramatic unities
is at the will of the wise, and that for guidance in all such matters
playwrights should look to Shakespeare rather than to Aristotle. The
_Discourse_, in Farquhar’s clear, sunny, homespun, forceful style,
does him honor, and should be reprinted. His best charm is that he
cannot be didactic. His suasion is of the strongest, but he has the
self-consciousness of all sensitive and analytic minds, which keeps
him free here as elsewhere from the slightest assumption of despotism.
It is very refreshing, in the face of that incessant belaboring of
the reader which Lesage was setting as a contemporaneous fashion, to
come across Farquhar’s gentle good-humored salutatory: “If you like
the author’s book, you have all the sense he thought you had; if you
dislike it, you have more sense than he was aware of!” Had he lived
longer, or a little later, we should have found him as well, with his
turn for skirmishing psychology, among the essayists and the novelists.
There were in him a mellowness and an unction which have their fullest
play in professedly subjective writing. Farquhar, after all, did not
fulfil himself, for he followed an ill outgoing fashion in æsthetics
rather than further a right incoming one. No one can help begrudging
him to the period he adorned. He deserved to flourish on the manlier
morrow, and to hold a historic position with the regenerators of public
taste in England. “Ah, go hang thyself up, my brave Crillon, for at
Arques we had a fight, and thou wert NOT in it!” One can fancy Sir
Richard Steele forever quoting that at Captain George Farquhar, in some
roomy club-window in Paradise.