Chapter III: Part 3

Though the Silurist had in him the possibilities of a great elegiac poet, and his laments for his dead are many and memorable, there is not one sustained masterpiece among them; nothing to equal or approach, for example, Cowley’s _Ode on the Death of Mr. William Hervey_, in the qualities which abide, and are visited with the honors of the class-book and the library shelf. Yet Vaughan’s elegies are exquisite and endearing; they haunt one with the conviction that they stop short of immortality, not because their author had too little skill, but because, between his repressed speech and his extreme emotions, no art could make out to live. He had a deep heart, such as deep hearts will always recognize and reverence:

“And thy two wings were grief and love.”

In the face of eternity he seems so to accord with the event which all but destroys him, that sorrow inexpressible becomes suddenly unexpressed, and his funeral music ends in a high enthusiasm and serenity open to no misconception. Distance, and the lapse of time, and his own utter reconciliation to the play of events make small difference in his utterance upon the old topic. The thought of his friend, forty years after, is the same mystical rapture:

“O could I track them! but souls must
Track one the other;
And now the spirit, not the dust,
Must be thy brother:
Yet I have one pearl by whose light
All things I see,
And in the heart of death and night,
Find Heaven and thee.”

_Daphnis_, the eclogue to the memory of Thomas Vaughan, is the only one of these elegies which, possessing a surplus of beautiful lines, is not even in the least satisfying. “R. Hall,” “no woolsack soldier,” who was slain at the siege of Pontefract, won from Henry Vaughan a passionate requiem, which opens with a gush of agony, “I knew it would be thus!” as affecting as anything in the early ballads; and the battle of Rowton Heath took from him “R. W.,” the comrade of his youth. But it was in one who bore his sovereign’s name (hitherto unidentified, although he is said to have been the subject of a “public sorrow”) that Vaughan lost the friend upon whom his whole nature seemed to lean. The soldier-heart in himself spoke out firmly in the cry he consecrated _To the Pious Memory of C. W._ Its masculine dignity; the pride and soft triumph which it gathers about it, advancing; the plain heroic ending which sweeps away all images of remoteness and gloom, in

“Good-morrow to dear Charles! for it is day,”

can be compared to nothing but an _agitato_ of Schubert’s mounting strings, slowing to their major chord with a courage and cheer that bring tears to the eyes. Vaughan’s tender threnodies would make a small but precious volume. _To the Pious Memory_, with _Thou that Knowest for Whom I Mourn_, _Silence and Stealth of Days_, _Joy of my Life while Left me Here_, _I Walked the other Day to spend my Hour_, _The Morning Watch_, and _Beyond the Veil_, are alone enough to give him rank forever as a genius and a good man.

“C. W.’s” death was one of the things which turned him forever from temporal pursuits and pleasures. Of his first wife we can find none but conjectural traces in his books, for he was shy of using the beloved name. The sense of those departed is never far from him. The air of melancholy recollection, not morbid, which hangs over his maturer lyrics, is directly referable to the close-following calamities which estranged him from the presence of “the blessèd few,” and sent him, as he nobly hoped,

“Home from their dust to empty his own glass.”

His thoughts centred, henceforward, in their full intensity, on the supernatural world; nay, if he were irremediably depressed, not only on the persistence of resolved matter, by means of which buried men come forth again in the color of flowers and the fragrance of the wind, but even on the physical damp and dark which confine our mortality. It is the poet of dawn and of crisp mountain air who can pack horror on horror into his nervous quatrains about Death:

“A nest of nights; a gloomy sphere
Where shadows thicken, and the cloud
Sits on the sun’s brow all the year,
And nothing moves without a shroud.”

This is masterly; but here, again, there is reserve, the curbing hand of a man who holds, with Plato, a wilful indulgence in the “realism” of sadness to be an actual crime. Vaughan’s dead dwell, indeed, as his own mind does, in “the world of light.” As his corporeal sight is always upon the zenith or the horizon, so his fancy is far away, with his radiant ideals, and with the virtue and beauty he has walked with in the flesh. He takes his harp to the topmost hill, and sits watching

“till the white-winged reapers come.”

He thinks of his obscured self, the child he was, and of “the narrow way” (an ever-recurrent Scriptural phrase in his poetry) by which he shall “travel back.” To leave the body is merely to start anew and recover strength, and, with it, the inspiring companionship of which he is inscrutably deprived.

Chambers’ _Cyclopædia_ made an epic blunder, long ago, when it ascribed to this gentlest of Anglicans a “gloomy sectarianism.” He, of all religious poets, makes the most charming secular reading, and may well be a favorite with the heathen for whom Herbert is too decorative, Crashaw too hectic and intense, Cowper too fearful, and Faber too fluent; _Lyra Apostolica_ a treatise, though a glorious one, on Things which Must be Revived, and _Hymns Ancient and Modern_ an exceeding weariness to the spirit. It is a saw of Dr. Johnson’s that it is impossible for theology to clothe itself in attractive numbers; but then Dr. Johnson was ignorant of Vaughan. It is not in human nature to refuse to cherish the “holy, happy, healthy Heaven” which he has left us (in a graded alliteration which smacks of the physician rather than of the “gloomy sectarian”), his very social “angels talking to a man,” and his bright saints, hovering and smiling nigh, who

“are indeed our pillar-fires
Seen as we go;
They are the city’s shining spires
We travel to.”

Who can resist the earnestness and candor with which, in a few sessions, he wrote down the white passion of the last fifty years of his life? No English poet, unless it be Spenser, has a piety so simple and manly, so colored with mild thought, so free from emotional consciousness. The elect given over to continual polemics do not count Henry Vaughan as one of themselves. His double purpose is to make life pleasant to others and to praise God; and he considers that he is accomplishing it when he pens a compliment to the valley grass, or, like Coleridge, caresses in some affectionate strophes the much-abused little ass. All this liberal sweetness and charity heighten Vaughan’s poetic quality, as they deepen the impression of his practical Christianity. The nimbus is about his laic songs. When he talks of moss and rocks, it is as if they were incorporated into the ritual. He has the genius of prayer, and may be recognized by “those graces which walk in a veil and a silence.” He is full of distinction, and of a sort of golden idiosyncrasy. Vaughan’s true “note” is—Vaughan. To read him is like coming alone to a village church-yard with trees, where the west is dying, in hues of lilac and rose, behind the low ivied Norman tower. The south windows are open, the young choir are within, and the organist, with many a hushed unconventional interlude of his own, is rehearsing with them the psalm of “pleasures for evermore.”

FOOTNOTES:

[20] Siluria comprised the shires of Monmouth, Hereford, Glamorgan, Radnor, and Brecon.

[21] The Reverend H. F. Lyte, Vaughan’s enthusiastic editor, best known as the author of _Abide with Me_, reminds us that there was another Henry Vaughan of the same college and the same neighborhood at home—a pleasant theological person not to be confounded with the poet. It was probably he, and not the Silurist, who devoted some verses to Charles the First in the book called _Eucharistica Oxoniensis_, 1641.

[22] These deep Augustinian lines are Carew’s, gay Carew’s; and they mark the highest religious expression of their time.

[23] Vaughan apparently enjoyed that privilege of genius, acquaintance with a London garret, if we may take autobiographically the fine brag worthy of the tribe of Henri Mürger:

“I scorn your land, So far it lies below me; here I see How all the sacred stars do circle me.”

[24] The King lodged at Christchurch, the Queen and my Lady Castlemaine (together, alas!) at Merton, amid endless hawking, tennis, boating, basset, and general revelry.

[25] Orinda’s own verses, scattered in manuscript among her friends, were collected and printed without her knowledge, and much against her desire, in 1663: a piece of treachery which threw her into a severe indisposition. She could therefore condole more than enough with Henry Vaughan. Friends were officious creatures in those days.

[26] This, to say the least, was not “pretty” of Campbell, who thought so well of the “world’s grey fathers” congregated to gaze at Vaughan’s _Rainbow_ that he conveyed them bodily into the foreground of his own.

[27] Per´-spective was, of course, the general pronunciation from Shakespeare to Dr. Johnson, and is used with great beauty in Dryden’s _Ode to the Memory of Mrs. Anne Killigrew_. But it is a characteristic word with Vaughan, and it was from Vaughan that Wordsworth took it.

[28] Vaughan had a relish for damp weather, the thing which makes the loveliness of the British isles, and which the ungrateful islanders are prone to revile. He never passes a sheet of water without looking upward for the forming cloud:

“That drowsy lake From her faint bosom breathed thee!”

[29] Sometimes erroneously printed “bowers.”

[30] It was kind of the ever-kind Hunt to include America in his enumeration, at a time when the United States were supposed by his fellow-countrymen to have no literature at all of their own. The circumstance that his challenge appeared in the preface to _The Book of the Sonnet_, which was edited by Hunt in conjunction with an American, and published at Boston in 1868, may help to account for the mannerliness of the reference.

[31] In the _Letters and Memorials of Archbishop Trench_, vol. ii., p. 57, there is a letter bearing upon this point from Mr. Frank Millson, dated 1868, which deserves serious consideration from Vaughan’s forthcoming editors. “I think,” he writes the Dean, “that your supposition that the 1655 edition is the same book as the one of 1650, with a new title-page and additions, can hardly be correct, though I know that Lyte, the editor of Pickering’s reprint, thinks as you do. The preface to the 1655 edition is dated September 30, 1654, and contains this passage” (not given in the _Memorials_) “which seems to me to refer to the fact of a new edition. A comparison of my two copies shows that the 1650 edition consists of half a sheet, title and dedication, and 110 pages. The second edition has title, preface, dedication, motto, the 110 pages of the first edition, with 84 pages of new matter, and a table of first lines. A noticeable thing in the arrangement is that the sheets do not begin with new printer’s marks, as they might be expected to do if the second part were simply new matter added to the first volume, but begin with A, the last sheet of the former volume having ended with G. I am sorry to trouble you with these trifling details; but as Vaughan has long been a favorite author of mine, they have an interest for me, and if they help to show that he was not neglected by readers of his own time, I shall be glad.”

[32] Anthologies and cyclopædias nowadays, especially since Dr. John Brown and Principal Shairp drew attention to the Silurist in their pages, are more than likely to admit him. It was not so always. Winstanley, sharp as was his eye, let Vaughan escape him in his _Lives of the Poets_, published in 1687. He is not in the _Theatrum Poetarum_, nor in Johnson’s _Lives_. He is in neither of Southey’s collections. Mr. Palgrave allows him, in _The Golden Treasury_, but a song and a half; Ellis’s sheaf of excellent _Specimens_ of 1811 furnishes eighteen lines of a wedding blessing on the _Best and Most Accomplished Couple_ apologizing for “their too much quaintness and conceit”; and in Willmott’s _Sacred Poets_ Vaughan occupies four pages, as against Crashaw’s thirty-five, Herbert’s thirty-seven, and Wither’s one hundred and thirty-two. But Vaughan fares well in Dr. George Macdonald’s _England’s Antiphon_, and in Archbishop Trench’s _Household Book_. Ward’s _English Poets_, in the second volume, has a conventional selection from him, as has, at greater length, Fields’ and Whipple’s _Family Library of British Poetry_. There is a goodly list entered under Vaughan’s name in Gilfillan’s _Less-Known British Poets_, all chosen from his devotional work. Thirty-seven religious lyrics again adorn the splendid _Treasury of Sacred Song_. Vaughan’s secular numbers yet await their proper bays, although a limited edition of most of them, containing a bibliography, was printed in 1893 by J. R. Tutin of Hull. Mr. Saintsbury, in his _Seventeenth Century Lyrics_, has a small and very choice group of Vaughan’s songs, and Professor Palgrave, having to do with him for the third time, gives him large and cordial honor in the eleventh volume of _Y Cymmrodor_. In Emerson’s Parnassus he appears but once. He had his most graceful and grateful American tribute when Mr. Lowell, long ago, named him in passing as “dear Henry Vaughan,” in _A Certain Condescension in Foreigners_.

[33] In one of his prefaces, Vaughan hits neatly at the crowd of Herbertists: “These aim more at verse than at perfection.” Where there are noble resemblances, it is well to remember that two sides have the right to be heard. Mrs. Thoreau used to say: “Mr. Emerson imitates Henry!” And she was at least as accurate as the critics who annoyed her old age by the reversed statement.

[34] Mr. R. H. Stoddard owns a copy of the first edition of _Nieremberg’s Meditations_, translated by Vaughan in 1654, and published the following year, which has upon the title-page an autographic “J. M.” supposed, by every evidence, to be Milton’s. If it be so, the busy Latin Secretary, meditating his grand work, must have been, on his part, a reader and a lover of the man who was almost his equal at golden phrases.

[35] Congreve and Waller employ the same rather too obvious love-name for their serenaded divinities.

[36] Vaughan openly wears jewels which belong to Jonson.

“Go seek thy peace in war: Who falls for love of God shall rise a star!”

wrote brave Father Ben; and no Englishman of spirit, between 1642 and the Restoration, was likely to forget it. The passage certainly clung to Vaughan’s mind, for he assimilated it later in a sweet line all for peace:

“Do thou the works of day, and rise a star.”

III

GEORGE FARQUHAR

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.