Part 8

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 9^a 1694.

+---------+----------+-----+-----------+------------+----------+ Die |Georgius | filius | | Natus | ibidem | Eu. Lloyd 17a |Farquhare| Gulielmi |Annos|Londonderry|educatus sub|(college Julii | Sizator | Farqhare | 17 | | magistro | tutor) | | Clerici | | | Walker | ------+---------+----------+-----+-----------+------------+----------+

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.

[38] This was the theatre built by Sir Christopher Wren in 1672.

[39] Peter Anthony Motteux, the wild and clever linguist and dramatist, who made the best English translation of _Don Quixote_. _The Stage Coach_, itself an adaptation, has little merit beyond its liveliness.

[40] The register of burial is dated a month later than the received date of his death. It reads simply: “23 May, George Falkwere, M.” The initial is the sapient sexton’s indication that this was neither a W (woman) nor a C (child). The spelling of the name betokens its usual and original pronunciation. The present famous porticoed church was not built for nineteen years after Farquhar died.

[41] The not altogether foolish censure has been cast upon the rogue Teague in _The Twin Rivals_ that he speaks an impossible brogue, which might as well be Welsh. Farquhar did not succeed in transferring to paper the weird and unlovely Ulster dialect with which he was familiar in boyhood, and which had figured already in the third act of _Henry the Fifth_, in Jonson’s Irish masque, in Shadwell’s _Lancashire Witches_; which was simultaneously being used in his farce _The Committee_, by Dryden’s friend Howard, and which was afterwards to have good corroboration in Aytoun’s _Massacre of the MacPherson_. Farquhar employs it twice elsewhere, passably well in the case of Torlough Macahone of the parish of Curroughabegley (the personage who built a mansion-house for himself and his predecessors after him), and with lamentable flatness in that of Dugard in his last comedy. Dugard is a rival of the nursery-maid dear to almanac humorists, who is wont to exclaim: “Can’t ye tell boi me accint that ’tis Frinch Oi am!” It was one of Farquhar’s inartistic mistakes that he made no loving study of this or of anything touching nearly his own people. His Irishmen, with the exception of Roebuck, are either rascals or characterless nobodies. The name Teague, or Teig, which Howard had also employed, is old and pure North Irish; and no less pleasant an authority than George Borrow reminds us in the _Romano Lavo-Lil_ that it is Danish in origin.

[42] Dear Dick Steele, in 1701, while Captain of Fusileers, had a duel thrust upon him; and in parrying, his sword pierced his man. To his remorse may be ascribed his hatred of the custom of duelling, expressed afterwards on every occasion. Steele owed his start in life to James Butler, Duke of Ormonde, who entered him among the boys on the Charterhouse foundation. This peer was grandfather to the man who failed George Farquhar.

[43] Mrs. Farquhar published in 1711 an octavo volume of the _Plays, Letters, and Verses_. Among the verses figures a poem of six cantos dedicated to the victorious Earl of Peterborough, entitled _Barcelona_. “It was found among my dear deceased husband’s writings,” says the widow, in her prefatory note. He was not at the siege, and it is possible that the six cantos were a manuscript copy of the effusion of some former comrade. Farquhar was the author of several songs, one, of highly didactic complexion, having emanated from him at the reputed age of ten. Of these, only two are of fair lyrical quality: the page’s song in _Love and a Bottle_, and “Tell me, Aurelia, tell me, pray,” which Robert Southey included in his collection.

[44] _The Vicar of Wakefield_ dates from 1766. Almost twenty years before that, the immortal Partridge had remarked to Tom Jones, quoting his schoolmaster: “Polly matete cry town is my daskalon.” Noble nonsense hath her pedigree. Goldsmith, however, is not so likely to have taken his cue from Fielding.

IV

TOPHAM BEAUCLERK

1739-1780

AND

BENNET LANGTON

1741-1800

IN Samuel Johnson’s famous circle nearly every man stands for himself, full of definite purpose and power. But two young men are there who did nothing of moment, whose names chime often down the pages of all his biographies, and to whom the world must pay honor, if only for the friendship they took and gave. As Apollo should be set about with his Graces “tripping neatly,” so the portentous old apparition of Johnson seems never so complete and endearing as when attended by these two above all things else Johnsonians. When the Turk’s Head is ajar in Gerrard Street, in shadow-London; when the “unclubable” Hawkins strides over the threshold, and Hogarth goes by the window with his large nod and smile; when Chamier is there reading, Goldsmith posing in purple silk small-clothes, Sir Joshua fingering his trumpet, Burke and little brisk Garrick stirring “bishop”[45] in their glasses, and the king of the hour, distinguished by his lack of ruffles, is rolling about in his chair of state, saying something prodigiously humorous and wise, it is still Bennet Langton and Topham Beauclerk who most give the scene its human genial lustre, standing with laughter behind him, arm in arm. They were his favorites, and it is the most adorable thing about them both that they made out to like James Boswell, who was jealous of them. (Perhaps they had apprehended thoroughly Newman’s fine aphorism concerning a bore: “You may yield, or you may flee: you cannot conquer!”) The rare glimpses we have of their brotherly lives is through the door which opens or shuts for Johnson. Between him and them was deep and enduring affection, and what little is known of them has a right to be more, for his sake.

Bennet Langton, born in 1741 in the very neighborhood famous now as the birthplace of Tennyson, was the elder son of the odd and long-descended George Langton of Langton, and of Diana his wife, daughter of Edmund Turnor, Esquire, of Stoke Rochford, Lincolnshire. While a lad in the fen-country, he read _The Rambler_, and conceived the purest enthusiasm for its author. He came to London, indeed, on the ideal errand of seeking him out, and, thanks to the kind apothecary Levett, found the idol of his imagination at home at No. 17 Gough Square, Fleet Street. Despite the somewhat staggering circumstances of Johnson’s attire,—for the serious boy had rashly presupposed a stately, fastidious, and well-mannered figure,—he paid his vows, and commended himself to his new friend for once and all. Langton entered Trinity College, Oxford, in 1757, at the age of sixteen.[46] The Doctor, who had known him about three years, followed his career at the university with interest, writing to Langton’s tutor, then “dear Tom Warton,” just appointed to the professorship of poetry held by his father, and afterwards poet-laureate: “I see your pupil: his mind is as exalted as his stature,” and to Langton’s self the sweet generality: “I love, dear sir, to think of you.” He even paid his Freshman a visit, and swam sportively across a dangerous pool in the Isis, in the teeth of his warning; and here also, in the Oxford which was long ago his own “tent of a night,” he fell across a part of his destiny in the shape of that strange bird, Mr. Topham Beauclerk, then a taking scapegrace of eighteen. The Doctor must have shaken his head at first, and wondered at the juxtaposition of this arrant Lord of Misrule and the “evangelical goodness” of his admirable Langton, until mollified by the knowledge that a species of cult for himself, and ardent perusal of his writings, had first brought them together. It was a pleasant thought to him, that of the two young ribboned heads high in the quadrangle, bending for the ninth time over _The Reasons Why Advice is Generally Ineffectual_, _The Mischief of Unbounded Raillery_, and the jolly satire on _Screech-Owls_; or smiling over the shy Verecundulus and the too-celebrated Misellus who were part of the author’s machinery for adding “Christian ardor to virtue, and Christian confidence to truth.”

Beauclerk, like Langton, was a critic and a student; he was well-bred, urbane, and of excellent natural parts; moreover, he was a wit, one of the very foremost of his day, when wits grew in every garden. An only child, he was born in London in the December of 1739, and named after that benevolent Topham of Windsor who left the manors of Clewer Brocas and Didworth and a collection of paintings and drawings to his father, the handsome wild Lord Sydney Beauclerk, fifth son of the first Duke of St. Albans, and also, in his time, a gentleman commoner of Trinity. Lord Sydney died early, in the autumn of 1744, and was buried in Westminster Abbey with his hero-brother Aubrey, whose epitaph, still to be read there, Thomson seems to have written. All the pretty toys and curios passed to Topham the little boy, under the guardianship of Lady Beauclerk, his excellent but literal mother, once Mary Norris of Speke in Lancashire. His tutor was named Parker, and must have been a much-enduring man. Young Beauclerk grew up, bearing a resemblance in many ways to Charles II.; and so it befell that with his aggravating flippancy, his sharp sense, his quiver full of gibes, his time-wasting, money-wasting moods, foreign as Satan and his pomps to those of his sweet-natured college companion, he was able to strike Dr. Johnson in his own political weak spot. A flash of the liquid Stuart eye was enough to disarm Johnson at the very moment when he was calling up his most austere frown; it was enough to turn the vinegar of his wrath to the honey of kindness. _Il ne nous reste qu’une chose à faire: embrassons-nous!_ as the wheedling Prince, at a crisis, says to Henry Esmond. Johnson, as everybody knows, was a Jacobite. No sincerer testimony could he have given to his inexplicable liking for a royal rogue than that he allowed Nell Gwynn’s great-grandson to tease him and tyrannize over him during an entire lifetime. A choice spectacle this: Mr. Topham Beauclerk, on his introduction, literally bewitching Dr. Samuel Johnson! The stolid moralist was enraptured with his Jack-o’-lantern antics; he rejoiced in his manners, his taste and literary learning; admired him indiscreetly, rich clothes, equipage, and all; followed his whims meekly, expostulated with him almost against his traitorous impulses, and clung to him to the end in unbroken fondness and faith.

Beauclerk had immense gayety and grace, and the full force given by high spirits. His accurate, ever-widening knowledge of books and men, his consummate culture, and his fearlessness, sat handsomely on one who was regarded by contemporary old ladies as a mere “macaroni.” It was a matter of course that he tried for no degree at college. The mistress of Streatham Park, who was by no means his adorer, and who remembered his chief wickedness in remembering that “he wished to be accounted wicked,” informs us in a private jotting since published that he was “a man of very strict veracity.” A philosopher and a truth-teller, whatever his worldly weaknesses, was sure to be a character within the range of Johnson’s affections. It was he who most troubled the good Doctor, he for whom he suffered in silence, with whom he wrangled; he whose insuperable taunting promise, never reaching any special development, vexed and disheartened him; yet, perhaps because of these very things, though Bennet Langton was infinitely more to his mind, it was Absalom, once again, whom the old fatherly heart loved best. Nor was he unrepaid. None loved him better, in return, than his “Beau,” the very mirror of the name, who was wont to pick his way up the grimy Fleet Street courts “with veneration,” as Boswell records.

Bennet Langton, as Mr. Forster expresses it in his noble _Life of Goldsmith_, was “an eminent example of the high and humane class who are content to ‘ring the bell’ to their friends.” He was a mild young visionary, scrupulous, tolerant, and generous in the extreme; modest, contemplative, averse to dissipation; a perfect talker and reader, and a perfect listener; with a face sweet as a child’s, fading but now, among his kindred, on the canvas of Sir Joshua Reynolds. He left a gracious memory behind at Oxford, where his musing bust adorns the old monastic library of Trinity. He was six feet six inches tall, slenderly built, and slightly stooping. “The ladies got about him in drawing-rooms,” said Edmund Burke, “like maids about the Maypole!”