A Little English Gallery

by Louise Imogen Guiney

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.