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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:

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

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:

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

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

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.

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 manoeuvring 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.

[37] Incipit Annus Academicus Die Julii 9^a 1694.

This matriculation entry from the register of Trinity does away with our sizar’s presumed father, Rev. John Farquhar, prebendary of Raphoe. We hear nothing more, ever after, of the Farquhar family, who henceforth leave young George to his own profane devices; nor can any certainty be attached to additional information, sometimes proffered, that the father had seven children in all, and held a living of only one hundred and fifty pounds a year. One other point is fixed by the entry, to wit: if George Farquhar was seventeen in the July of 1694, he cannot have been born in 1678.