GEORGE FARQUHAR

THE BEAUX' STRATAGEM

GEORGE FARQUHAR's life-portrait may be viewed as a composite of the features of several other dramatists in our volume. In the circumstances of his Irish birth and Dublin University training, the last of the Restoration writers of comedy closely resembles Goldsmith, whose chief stage-success owes to him so much. In his youthful failure as an actor, in his triumphant decade as a playwright, and in his early and wretched end, he recalls the unhappy Otway. In the large sympathy of his intellect with the robust and joyous life of town and country, he has much in common with Harry Fielding, who drew his first breath in pleasant Somerset just a week before Farquhar died, April 29, 1707, in his London garret.

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Very little is known of Farquhar's origin. The date of his birth, 1677 or 1678, the gentility of his parentage, the site of his father's Irish parish, are alike uncertain. The poems of his boyhood, moral verses" and pompous "Pindaricks," bred in him no jigging vein, for knack at rime was ever denied him. His hazy career as sizar at Trinity College, Dublin, after his Londonderry lessons were over in 1694, was perhaps stopped short by a bit of boyish irreverence; but this inglorious tradition is of the vaguest. In his twentieth year he is suffering the horrors of stage fright on Dublin boards, ridiculously enough in his first rôle of "valiant Othello." He essays many other parts with no marked success, but his accidental wounding of a brother-actor soon drives him from the stage in disgust. Then he is off to London by the advice of the famous English actor, Robert Wilks, whose friendship always stands him in stead. If unlike many another fortuneseeking youth, he has no play in his pocket, one is soon in the making, and Love and a Bottie is staged at the end of 1698. Here, as so often in Farquhar's later comedies, the temptation is strong to identify the penniless young Irish rake of the piece with the adventurous author, but it is dangerous to push such a parallel. Not to pause over that bit of picaresque writing, which may or may not be Farquhar's own, The Adventures of Covent Garden, the next year sees the production of his second comedy, The Constant Couple, which ran for over fifty nights with Wilks in the chief rôle of Sir Harry Wildair and with Norris in the laughable part of Dicky, the

servant. Far inferior is the sequel, Sir Harry Wildair, acted in 1701; but there is no need to explain this inferiority as the unhappy result of Farquhar's infatuation for a fair unknown-some say, Anne Oldfield, whom the dramatist had discovered, a rich-voiced girl of sixteen, in her aunt's tavern and introduced to the stage. Though that charming woman graced later the rôles of Farquhar's chief heroines, as Mrs. Barry did those of Otway, and maintained always her friendship with the dramatist, we have small reason to suspect that she is the "Penelope" of his fervent love-letters. Farquhar's marriage, a year or two later, furnishes nought of romance but a grim suggestion of a comic motive that serves him well in his greatest play. Some feminine Aimwell from the North dupes the gay, handsome, young fellow by large pretensions to wealth; but Farquhar, though a fortune-hunter, is of gentler stuff than Thackeray's Deuce-ace and greatly to his honor "never once upbraided her with the cheat."

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Farquhar's pen is still busy, and to some purpose. In 1702 appears his Love and Business,-a miscellany of stray verses, letters from Holland, a sensible essay upon Comedy," and copies of love-letters-revealing the author as "half an actor, a quarter a poet, and altogether a very honest and gallant gentleman." Two unsuccessful comedies, The Inconstant and The Twin-Rivals (a thing of merit), a farce adapted from the French, The Stage Coach, and a halting epic, Barcelona, occupy the time between 1702 and 1705. For several years he has held an army commission, like Steele and Vanbrugh, his friends, and in 1706 he turns to capital account his own experience at Shrewsbury in his joyous comedy, The Recruiting Officer, with its memorable figures of Captain Plume and Silvia and, best of all, Sergeant Kite. After this signal triumph dark days come upon him, as upon Otway. Relying upon the assurances of the Duke of Ormond, whose "Grace makes promises trifles indeed" (see Archer's song in The Beaux' Stratagem, III, iii), he sells, in confident hope of other preferment, his commission for the benefit of his creditors and is soon plunged in misery and poverty. No final stage-scene is more replete with irony than the last act of Farquhar's own life-drama. The poor jester must "go to bed at noon "-he is barely thirtybut, though overwhelmed with want and settled sickness, he still has strength in him for his merriest peal of laughter. A dying man, he writes in six weeks, at the urging of the loyal Wilks, who provides a retainer of twenty guineas, his greatest comedy-perhaps the greatest, as it is the last, of all the comedies of the so-called Restoration period. While the Haymarket is ringing with the applause that greets The Beaux Stratagem in April, 1707 (see the pathetic epilogue), Farquhar passes away in his wretched attic in St. Martin's Lane, entrusting his "two helpless girls" to his friend's protection. The situation rivals in grisly mockery the expiring Molière's mirth in his last interpretation of Le Malade Imaginaire.

The dates of Farquhar's plays suggest a seeming paradox. All the work of the last Restoration dramatist was done after Jeremy Collier's

vehement philippic, A Short View of the Immorality and Profaneness of the English Stage (1698), had dealt, thus many have maintained, a death-blow to the Restoration drama. As if in despite, Farquhar's gay world of riotous animal spirits seems abundantly alive. And yet his essay upon “Comedy," and his prologues show that the playwright was profoundly influenced by the preacher, at least in his professions. Amusingly enough, he sets up as a censor of morals. "Comedy," he declares, “is a well-framed tale handsomely told as an agreeable vehicle for counsel and reproof." It is his boast that he will improve upon Collier's invective and "make the stage flourish by virtue of his satire." More than once he assures the ladies that they may smile without blushing for "here's no slander, no smut, no lewd-tongued beau, no double-entendre." All this is very well; but, as with Fielding, who takes the same tone in his engaging prefaces, the gap between precept and practice is enormous. The color must have been fast set by art in cheeks that are unchanged in hue when Farquhar and Fielding laugh the loudest. The little homily is over and forgotten, and the "modest air" yields to "waggish action" (the phrases are Farquhar's own). It's a mad world, my masters, life seems but a turmoil of the senses, a riot of wild blood; and youth, pledged to love and a bottle, is willing to forego none of its trinity of joys, not even song. Let us be grateful for this much of virtue—that Restoration Comedy now abandons the covert wink and cruel leer, the unclean innuendo, the prurient suggestion, and becomes wholesome, if not always decent. In Farquhar there is, of course, not the faintest element of the simpering prudery and tearful sentimentality of the bourgeois comedy of reaction against the drama of large license.

The difference between Farquhar and his immediate forerunners in comedy is rather of temperament than of time. Unlike them he has a generous nature overflowing with sympathy and charity. In his modest account of himself he reveals a temper the reverse of libertine: "I hate all pleasure that's purchased by excess of pain;" "The greatest proof of my affection that a lady must expect is this-I would run any hazard to make us both happy, but would not for any transitory pleasure make us both miserable." Hence his dashing beaux, his Harry Wildair, his Archer and Aimwell, have not, like the gallants of Wycherley and Congreve, "foreheads of bronze, hearts like the nether millstone and tongues set on fire of hell" (Macaulay). Rattle-brained scapegraces they are to be sure, but they are quite without malice and inspire no contempt and loathing. Joyous adventurers, they fight, love, and banter in a breath, but their warm hearts preserve them from selfish irresponsibility and render them quite unequal to the task of villains. Reason, honor, and gratitude are as strong in these delightful rascals as in the high-spirited prodigals of Goldsmith and Sheridan; for they are, in Hazlitt's happy phrase, "real gentlemen and only pretended impostors." Archer's voluble good-fellowship in his footman's cloak renders him everybody's friend and equal, and Aimwell's scruples assert themselves even at

the cost of his marriage prospects. Miss Guiney puts it prettily-" none of the old deviltry, though much of the old swagger."

A marked sign of changing taste is observed in Farquhar's extension of the range of comic interest. His predecessors had been content to paint "beaux and belles enamored of themselves in one another's follies and fluttering like gilded butterflies in giddy mazes through the walks of St. James's Park," and in his earlier plays he followed their example. But in his two later and better comedies he deserts the conventional West End background of Park and Mall, he turns away even from "the sweet smoke of Cheapside and the dear perfume of Fleet Ditch," and to the ringing notes of his merry ballad-music, "Over the hills and far away," carries his audience with him to some county- or cathedral-town deep in the provinces, to Shrewsbury or Lichfield. Instead of the inevitable seventeenth-century drawing-room or city-lodging of Wycherley and Congreve, his scenes are those most familiar in eighteenth-century fiction, the market-place, the broad highway, the river walk, the country-inn, the squire's hall. And in this new setting, what a host of new characters! Every figure of The Beaux' Stratagem is memorable:-the rollicking "knight-errants," Aimwell and Archer; the knavish landlord drawn very much from life, Boniface-whose name has become proverbial of his class-confederate of highwaymen yet honestly eloquent over the merits of his Anno Domini; Gibbet and his brace of rogues, no idealized Turpins or Du Vals, but as humorously realistic ruffians as Stevenson's greedy pirates; Scrub, a real person too, one of the most amusing serving men of the comic stage with his cowardice and his itching palm; and the delicious Cherry, tight of waist, quick of eye, and true of heart. The provincial gentle folk are equally amusing:-that best of women, Lady Bountiful, ever "spreading of plasters, brewing of diet-drinks and stilling rosemary-water"; Squire Sullen, her son, not a fiend like Vanbrugh's Sir John Brute, not a savage like Fielding's Western, but a dull animal sodden with drink and hence thick of speech and loutish of manner, perpetual offence to the fine lady from London, his wife, sprightly, witty, and far more alluring than her sister-in-law, the somewhat shadowy Dorinda. Strangely enough the only failure among the persons is the author's own countryman, the Jesuit priest, Foigard, who arouses with his wonderful jargon the wrath of sensitive Irish editors. Even the Frenchman Bellair, though omitted in acting versions, is more convincing.

Not only through genial characterization, but through laughing mastery over action is Farquhar eminent. In this high quality indeed he seems easily the first of his group. "The Beaux' Stratagem," says Hazlitt, "is infinitely lively, bustling and full of point and interest; the assumed disguise of Archer and Aimwell is a perpetual amusement to the mind." In this straightforward story we are never confused as by the labyrinthine intricacy of The Way of the World. The plot knows no dull moments, but from its breezy beginning in the arrival of the crowd on the London coach develops

steadily and rapidly, with the interest shifting gaily from inn to hall, through a series of incidents at once humorous and sensational though never unnatural, to a highly agreeable resolution in the beaux' full triumph. At the mutual separation of Squire Sullen and his wife in the last scene, Nance Oldfield, the actress, was the first to cavil; but her objection, turned aside by Farquhar with a death-bed jest, is answered by William Archer, who deems "this discussion of the ethics of divorce not only the admission of a moral standard, but a homage to the idea of marriage which Wycherley, Congreve, or Vanbrugh would never have dreamt of paying." In any case we could ill afford to spare one of the cleverest bits of give and take in the comic drama. Single scenes of the play are admirable. In Farquhar's merriest vein are Cherry's love-catechism, Mrs. Sullen's lively picture of her drunken husband's home-coming, Aimwell's laughable account of the appearance of the stranger in the country church, and Archer's delightful diagnosis of his friend's stroke of love. Only the scene between Archer and Foigard in Act IV clamors loudly for reconstruction.

All critics have noticed that Farquhar's finest effects are derived rather from the humor of his situations than from the wit of his dialogues. Not that wit is wanting in him, as Mrs. Sullen's brilliancy amply attests, nor that he disdains the miniature social essay, for the gossipy news of the town in the first scene and the delicious criticism of country life in the second act anticipate the urban chat of Will Honeycomb of The Spectator. He can make, too, such famously happy phrases as Scrub's “I believe, they talked of me, for they laughed consumedly," and Gibbet's "'Twas for the good of my country that I should be abroad." His style is ever easy and natural. But conduct rather than conversation being his study, he is, unlike the inimitable Congreve, no consummate master of the quick foil of delicate repartee and artful innuendo. He seldom dazzles us with flashing epigrams and sparkling conceits, airy trifles of the Restoration smart set. Because in him this fineness, this preciosity of the inner circle, yields to the provincial and the picaresque, because his accent is not of "modish wit," but, as Mr. William Archer says, of "unforced buoyant gaiety." his diction has been forever branded by Pope, the arch-poet of artificial life, in the single line, "What pert low dialogue has Farquhar writ!"

An interesting phase of Farquhar's art is his intense hatred of formalism. "The rules of English comedy," he writes in that admirable essay of 1702, 'don't lie in the compass of Aristotle or his followers, but in the pit, box, and galleries. . . . We shall find that these gentlemen [Shakspere, Jonson, Fletcher] have fairly dispensed with the greatest part of critical formalities; the decorums of time and place, so much cried up of late, had no force of decorum with them; the economy of their plays was ad libitum, and the extent of their plays only limited by the convenience of action. . . . A play may be written with all the exactness imaginable, in respect of unity in time and place; but if you inquire its character of any person, though of the