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.
FOOTNOTES:
[37] Incipit Annus Academicus Die Julii 9a 1694.
| Die 17a Julii | Georgius Farquhare Sizator | filius Gulielmi Farqhare Clerici | Annos 17 | Natus Londonderry | ibidem educatus sub magistro Walker | Eu. Lloyd (college tutor) |
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.