Part 6

[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.