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.”