it is the object of this brief paper to introduce the good-natured reader, who, as a well-organized human being, is undoubtedly possessed of a proper love of fiction, to two women who had much to do with settling the english novel into its true line of development. i confess i could wish that the ladies in question were, socially and morally, a trifle more presentable. i can well remember the time when i myself made their acquaintance in the library of the british museum, and how i was almost ashamed of myself, despite the fact that i had the definite purposes of a student to support me, when i thought of the hours i had been fain to spend in their singularly unedifying company. but in the study of literary evolution, as in that of the history of the world at large, it is not always possible to be over-fastidious. when we are interested in a thing done, we must consider, as 126cheerfully as may be, the doer and the doing of it, though we may have fault enough to find sometimes with the character of the former and the manner of the latter.
the women to whose personalities and writings we are presently to turn—mrs. behn and mrs. manley—stand out among the least attractive products of an age of low ideals and scandalous living. but they none the less remain figures of some permanent attractiveness to those of us who care to investigate the beginnings of our great modern prose fiction; and it is on account of their relative or historic importance that i have undertaken to say something about them in this place.
in order, however, to make such historic importance clear, we must go back a little in our inquiry.
the titanic imaginative energy of the elizabethan and jacobean periods had found its principal outlet in the drama. it was on the stage and through the literature of the stage that, during the most brilliant era of its intellectual activity, the genius of the english people, for the most part, sought expression. the drama thus became the representative and the embodiment of all that was strongest and most characteristic 127in the national life. in it we find the great mental and moral movements of the time gathered up and made vocal; to it we turn for the fullest and richest manifestation of the national mind. as mr. symonds truly said: “the drama, its own original creation, stood to the english nation in the place of all the other arts. england ... needed no ?sthetic outlet but the drama.”
but little by little the close connection between the stage and the national life was severed; and cut off from its sources of deepest impulse and inspiration, the drama fell gradually into a condition of decrepitude and decay. for many years before the revolution the breach between theatre and people had been a slowly widening one; and by the time the restoration once more gave free rein to dramatic art, the separation had become complete. no longer making catholic appeal to the whole community, no longer absorbing into itself, by way of nourishment and stimulation, the broad and generous interests of a varied social life, the drama now became the mouthpiece and the mirror of one class only—of the aristocratic class, which had brought foreign fashions, tastes, morality, with it from abroad. the theatre of shakspere and his contemporaries had been, as it were, the flower and 128fruitage of a period of intense national vigor and excitement; the theatre of congreve and wycherley was little more than the passing amusement of the idle and demoralized fashionable world. harassed by puritan austerity on the one hand, and more seriously perverted by royalist profligacy upon the other, the drama was forced into a relationship with the larger mass of the people at once unnatural and most disastrous; and thus the plays of the time, in spite of all their pungency of wit and glitter of dialogue, lack that breadth of horizon, earnestness of purpose, and firm grasp of life, without which no body of literature—and no body of dramatic literature especially—can lay claim to permanent value and significance.
meanwhile a new taste was growing up, and with it a fresh channel was opened for imaginative activity. while the drama, sapped at its foundations, was sinking deeper and deeper into corruption, and before as yet any effort had been put forth to save it from its fate, the first noteworthy experiments were being made towards the development of a class of literature which has since acquired unrivalled popularity, and every year continues to fill a larger and larger place in public estimation, as well as upon our 129library shelves. the causes which combined to bring about the decline of the drama and the rise of the modern novel were so varied in character and intricate in their outworkings, that even the briefest discussion of them here would commit us to an unwarrantable digression; though it should be said, and said emphatically, that the change is not to be regarded as a mere matter of shifting literary taste, since it was unquestionably related, in the most direct and intimate way, with some of the largest and deepest movements of the time in society, manners, and general thought.[5] suffice it for us now to remark the simple fact that, while the dramatists of the restoration were engaged upon works which, fortunately for english society and letters, left but little permanent mark upon the history of the theatre, the foundations were being slowly but firmly laid upon which the vast superstructure of modern fiction was presently to be reared.
so thoroughly absorbed had men been in the drama, and so natural had it seemed for those 130of imaginative power to turn directly to the stage, that hitherto prose fiction, though by no means neglected, had done little towards making a decisive start. some popular stories, then long current, had been gathered up and circulated in chap-books, and had in sundry cases furnished materials for contemporary playwrights; translations had been made from several foreign languages, and in this way “don quixote,” and the works of rabelais, boccaccio, montemayor, and others, introduced to english readers; while such collections of versions and adaptations as those of painter and turbervile might have been found, it is said, so great had been their temporary vogue, on almost every london bookstall. moreover, the form of fiction had been occasionally employed by philosophers for broaching new theories of life and government; as by more, in his “utopia,” and bacon, in his “new atlantis.” and, far more important than any such sporadic efforts as these, there were the romances produced by some of the early dramatists—lyly, and his most famous followers, lodge and greene, in particular. to these have to be added the chivalrous pastoral of sir philip sidney, “warbler of poetic prose”; and in a very different category, the stories and 131sketches of thomas nash, dekker, and chettle, whose work, apart altogether from any question of absolute merit, is of supreme significance to the student of english fiction, because in it we find the crude beginnings of the picaresque novel of later times.
lumped together in this way—and the above paragraph makes no pretence at completeness of statement,—the amount of prose fiction of one and another kind produced in england under elizabeth and james the first may seem to be considerable, and certainly no student of the evolution of literature, or of the many-sided intellectual activity of the shaksperian age, would to-day think of underrating it. yet it is possible perhaps to go to the other extreme, and to exaggerate its historic importance. to trace the connection between the tentative output of the ’prentice-writers just referred to and the fully grown fiction of the eighteenth century—to indicate, for example, the lines along which nash leads us through defoe to smollett and fielding, and the points of unexpected contact between sidney and richardson is an inquiry full of curious interest for the special student. but too much might easily be made of the results brought to light thereby. after duly allowing 132for the isolated productions of the elizabethan period, which undoubtedly broke ground in many directions, we come back still to the broad fact, that it was not until after the restoration, and largely as a result of what was then undertaken and accomplished, that the novel firmly established itself as a well-defined form of literary art. with the restoration, therefore, it may fairly be said that we open a new chapter in the history of english fiction.
the new era, however, began badly enough, in the midst of a byway of most absurd experiment, which could not, in the nature of things, lead to any permanent achievement. for along with so much else that was french in manners, fashions, morals, turns of speech, there had already been imported into england a taste for the peculiar form of romance—the roman à longue haleine—which was just then enjoying amazing popularity in the country of its birth, on the other side of the channel. as we turn back to the dull and monstrous productions of the class now in question, we find it difficult enough to conceive that in any place, under any possible circumstances, there should have been men and women able to derive not simply enjoyment, but 133passionate and continuous enjoyment, from their pages. but the famous h?tel de rambouillet had set its mark upon them, and in the well-prepared country of the “arcadia,” they realized instant and complete success, not only among the ultra-fashionables of a gallicized society, but also in the more general reading world.
we must glance for a moment at one or two of the most salient characteristics of the school of fiction which thus became for a time so widely influential, that we may at once appreciate its stultifying tendencies, and bring into clear perspective what we shall presently have to say about the work of mrs. manley and mrs. behn. in doing this we need go no farther than the examples furnished by the three most prominent french leaders of polite taste—gomberville, la calprenède, and mlle. de scudéri.
in the first place, the would-be student of the so-called classical-heroic romances of these once celebrated writers is staggered by their tremendous bulk and inordinate prolixity. the modern reader shudders at richardson, and takes his “pamela” and “sir charles grandison” in condensed editions. but richardson is brevity itself compared with these earlier indefatigable laborers in the field of the novel. gomberville’s 134“polexandre” began in four volumes quarto, and in its later editions comprised some six thousand pages; the “cléopatre” of la calprenède, when finished, filled twelve octavo volumes; “pharamond,” written partly by the same author, and partly by pierre d’ortigue de vaumorière, reached nearly the same length; while the “clélie” and “le grand cyrus” of mlle. de scudéri—who in the matter of resolute long-windedness was, naturally enough, more than a match for her masculine rivals—extended respectively to some eight thousand and fifteen thousand octavo pages.[6] these, and such as these, were the works that pope was ridiculing when in “the rape of the lock” he built out of them an altar for the due celebration of the “adventurous baron’s” religious rites; and he was surely justified in describing them as “huge french romances.” it makes us feel how little of permanence and stability there is in any matter of taste, when we remember that these colossal productions, over which the most patient reader of to-day would soon catch himself yawning, were once awaited with interest and devoured with avidity.
135but even more important, from the standpoint of literary history, than the mere size of these overgrown absurdities were their structural principles and peculiarities of style. an offshoot apparently from the chivalrous and pastoral romances of earlier date, with the addition of what it pleased writers and readers alike to regard as an “historical” blend of interest, the classical-heroic romance proper presents a bewildering jumble of the most far-sought and incongruous materials. in fine disregard of anachronism and inconsistency, their authors carry us hither and thither about the world, introducing us to greeks and romans, egyptians and persians, knights of the round table, paladins of charlemagne, shepherds and shepherdesses of nowhere in particular, and even peruvian incas. the main plot, as a rule deceptively simple, is complicated from first to last by enormous and intricate ramifications of secondary actions; a characteristic due to the fact that every fresh individual introduced, whether in the central narrative, or in some excrescence from it, persists in recounting his own adventures at tremendous length. thus we have story within story, wheel within wheel, 136till the reader completely loses his hold upon the tangled threads of intrigue, and collapses into a condition of dazed despair.[7] but this is not the worst. the characters seem to be totally unable to tell their experiences in a straightforward fashion and have done with it. they linger by the way—time being of no importance to any of them—to indulge in everlasting conversations and soliloquies, discourse learnedly on delicate questions of gallantry and honor, quote, criticise, sentimentalize, pour out page after page of inflated rhapsody, and cavil remorselessly on the ninth part of a hair. thus the so-called “historic” element in these romances, is nominal only. the heroes and heroines, of whatever race, clime, or era, are only masquerading men and women of seventeenth-century france, with the ridiculous jargon of the h?tel de rambouillet incessantly upon their lips.
it will be seen from this brief description that the classical-heroic romance was absolutely artificial and unreal; that it had, and pretended to 137have, no touch or contact with the things of solid existence. characters, incidents, sentiments, speech were all of a world apart—utopia, arcadia, no-man’s-land. life was not distorted, as it is in the writings of many romantic novelists and most of our modern realists. it was simply not considered at all.
at the time when these ponderous and vapid productions reached the climax of their popularity on their native soil, french was well understood by the educated classes in england; and it was in their original tongue, therefore, that they made their way at first among the fellow-countrymen of milton. but translations soon followed with a rapidity that bore startling testimony to the strength of the new taste. “polexandre” appeared in an english version as early as 1647; “ibrahim,” “cassandra,” and “cléopatre” in 1652; while “clélie,” “astrée,” “scipion,” “le grand cyrus,” “zelinda,” and “almahide” were all translated and published between the latter date and 1677. on the heels of these regular translations soon came sundry imitations which, after the manner of imitations in general, reproduced with scrupulous fidelity all the worst features of the original works. “eliana,” issued in 1661, reads almost like a 138burlesque of the heroic style, and abounds in long-drawn descriptive passages of the most florid and fantastic kind. running this very close in overwrought extravagance of theme and language, the “pandion and amphigenia” of crowne the dramatist saw the light four years later. but the most celebrated of the english specimens of this exotic school is a somewhat earlier work—the “parthenissa” of roger boyle, earl of orrery; a production left incomplete after reaching more than eight hundred folio pages. this is pronounced by dunlop, whose industry and patience in reading the romances of this period must have been little short of superhuman, to be the best english specimen of its class; and most of us will probably be more ready to accept his judgment than to undertake its verification.[8]
both “eliana” and “parthenissa” were broken off abruptly, the latter in the middle of one of its most interesting situations; and dunlop is probably right in regarding this fact as 139evidence of the gradual decline of the taste out of which they had grown and to which they had appealed. indeed, so far as england was concerned, the classical-heroic romance could not have been otherwise than ephemeral. it had no real hold upon english society, and was fundamentally out of harmony with the spirit of an age in which chivalry had degenerated into empty gallantry, and playing at pastoral simplicity had ceased to be an aristocratic amusement. the temper of which it was one manifestation for a time made its influence deeply felt in almost every department of literature; it invaded even poetry; and directly inspired that extraordinary form of drama, so familiar to the student of davenant and dryden—the heroic play. but the prose fiction to which it gave existence carried in its essential qualities the seeds of early decay. it is true that in certain quarters it retained a faint and shadowy kind of reputation longer than might have been expected.[9] but the rise of a totally different school of novelists in the last 140decades of the seventeenth century, practically marks the close of its career; and dying, it left no issue.
we are now at length prepared to appreciate the historic significance and interest of what, in a rather loose way, is commonly called the prose fiction of the restoration.
says mrs. manley, in the introductory address to the reader in her “secret history of queen zarah”:—
“romances in france have for a long time been the diversion and amusement of the whole world; the people ... have read these works with a most surprising greediness; but that fury is very much abated, and they are all fallen off from this distraction. the little histories of this kind have taken place [sic] of romances, whose prodigious number of volumes were sufficient to tire and satiate such whose heads were most filled with these notions.... these little pieces which have banished romances are much more agreeable to the brisk and impetuous humor of the english, who have naturally no taste for long-winded performances; for they have no sooner begun a book than they desire to see the end of it.”
these remarks will doubtless strike some readers as curious, and we may well wonder what the followers of taine, particularly, would make of 141the “brisk and impetuous humor” here alleged to characterize the english people. but they are valuable to us, irrespective of their psychology, because they enable us to understand how the new fiction—the fiction in which, despite all adventitious differences, we can clearly recognize the beginnings of the modern novel—arose to take the place of the anglo-french romance. the “little histories” to which mrs. manley refers grew up by the most natural process of reaction against the “prodigious number of volumes” into which, as we have noted, the older narratives had run. nor was it in measure only that a change was initiated. as we shall presently see, the novel of the restoration, broadly so-called, differed from its predecessors not merely in length, but also in the more important qualities of subject-matter, treatment, and style. the old arcadia was finally forsaken for the solid earth, and lengthy descriptions, multifarious episodes, wearisome soliloquies, and needless tortuosities of plot were at the same time left behind. real life now formed the basis of the story, and, despite occasional reminiscences of the older manner, crispness of narration became one of the writers’ principal aims.
we have here undertaken to consider a little 142this healthy and significant change from the romance to the novel in the writings of two of its representative exponents—mrs. behn and mrs. manley. it should be understood, however, that in adopting this course we have no intention of throwing their work into undue prominence. they were but part-factors in a general movement, and must be contented to share its honors with a number of their contemporaries. nevertheless, they possess a special interest for the student of english literature, for two very good reasons. in the first place, taken together, they illustrate with remarkable clearness those broader characteristics of the new fiction which it is our principal concern in this little essay to bring to light; and, secondly, there is the fact that they were women. it is surely in itself instructive to find that while the great elizabethan drama can adduce no example of a woman-writer, it is in the productions of a couple of women that we can study to the best advantage some of the rudimentary developments of the modern novel.[10]
143it will be convenient for us to ignore the strict demands of chronology and begin with the work of mrs. manley, which, though somewhat later in date than mrs. behn’s, may properly be taken first, since it is at once cruder in form and historically of minor importance.
mrs. de la riviere manley—“poor mrs. manley,” as swift calls her, in the “journal to stella”—enjoyed anything but a peaceful life. it seems to be an accepted tradition among biographers of men and women of letters to begin their narratives by protesting that the lives of authors seldom furnish exciting materials, and then to go on to add that their particular heroes or heroines are exceptions to the general rule. certainly mrs. manley was an exception, if rule indeed it be, which i think open to question. she herself has given us some account of her adventures and misfortunes in different portions of her “new atalantis,” and more particularly in “the history of rivella”—an autobiography and apologia pro vita sua—published in 1714, under the pseudonym of sir charles lovemore. 144there is no need for us to follow her through all her varied experiences, the record of which, though often lively enough, is seldom of a very improving character. it will be sufficient to give the briefest outline of her career.
she was born in guernsey about the year 1677, her father, sir roger manley, being, as is generally stated, governor, or, as seems more probable, deputy governor, of that island. according to her own account, she grew up into a sharp-witted, impressionable girl, who, receiving rather more than an average education, early gave signs of an intelligence beyond what, at that time, was considered the fair endowment of her sex. her tribulations, too, began early. her parents died when she was still very young, and she fell into the hands of a male cousin, who unfortunately became enamored of her. the man was known to be married already, but he asserted that his wife was dead; and rivella, deceived by his protestations, entered into a secret marriage with him. the theme of one of her most unsavory stories seems to have been directly suggested by this tragic episode in her own life. after a while, of course, the truth came out. then her scoundrelly husband abandoned her, and she was left to shift for herself as best she 145might. about this time she gained the patronage of the famous duchess of cleveland, one of charles the second’s mistresses, in attendance upon whom she remained during some six months. but the duchess was a woman of fickle temper. she soon grew tired of mrs. manley; and, by pretending that she had discovered her in an intrigue with her son (and there may possibly have been more ground than poor rivella admits for the allegation), found an excuse for dismissing her from her service. it was now that mrs. manley appears to have taken up her pen in earnest—and a very reckless and caustic pen it by and by turned out to be. her tragedy, “the royal mistress,” acted in 1696, proved so successful that she found herself courted by all the dandies and witlings of the day; and for some years, as a consequence, she spent her time principally in getting out of one intrigue into another. nevertheless, she found leisure, amid all her excitements, to write and produce her “secret memoirs and manners of several persons of quality, from the new atalantis”—a work which, under the most thinly disguised names, attacked in an extremely violent and outspoken manner the men who had been mainly instrumental in bringing about the revolution. 146in virtue of this production mrs. manley may be said to have secured the doubtful honor of being the first political woman-writer in england. so successful was the satire in reaching those for whom it was intended, that the printer was straightway apprehended; but mrs. manley—who, as swift contemptuously put it, “had generous principles for one of her sort”—would not allow him to suffer in her behalf. she appeared before the court of king’s bench, and declared herself solely responsible for the entire undertaking, maintaining, moreover, “with unaltered constancy, that the whole work was mere invention, without any cynical allusion to real characters.”[11] mrs. manley, indeed, seems to have cared a great deal more about getting her printer out of a scrape than about sticking too solemnly to the simple truth; since, apart altogether from the manifestly satirical intention of the book, we know that she made its publication the basis of a personal application to the ministry. in the “journal to stella,” swift tells us how he afterwards met mrs. manley at the house of lord peterborough, and adds that she was there “soliciting him to get some pension or reward for her service in the cause, by writing 147her ‘atalantis.’” still we must frankly admit that her loyalty to the printer in such a crisis throws her character into a rather favorable light.
however, after a short period of confinement, and sundry appearances before the court, mrs. manley was allowed to go free, and the matter dropped. after this adventure, she produced several dramatic pieces, wrote some pamphlets of a political kind, and for a time conducted “the examiner,” which had then been relinquished by swift. indeed, she appears to have remained in the full swing of activity to the close of her life. she died, aged about forty-seven, in 1724, at the house of one john barber, an alderman of the city of london, with whom it is supposed she had for some time past been living.
in person, as she herself very candidly tells us, mrs. manley was fat, and her face had been early marked by that terrible scourge of the age, the smallpox; notwithstanding which defects, her fascination of manner and conversation was so great, that she was always popular with the other sex. of her moral character, perhaps, the less said the better. circumstances had not been kind to rivella; and at this distance of time, and with all the intrigues in which she was involved, it is not always easy to say how 148far she was sinned against, and how far sinning, or whether her own statement came anywhere near the facts of the case when she boldly declared that “her virtues” were “her own, her vices occasioned by her misfortunes.” still we must admit the truth of the words which she has put into the mouth of d’aumont in the “history of rivella”: “if she have but half so much of the practice as the theory, in the way of love, she must certainly be a most accomplished person.” and a most accomplished person, after her own fashion, she evidently seems to have been.
the most famous of her writings—if the word famous can properly be used, when they have all passed into oblivion—is, of course, the “new atalantis”—that veritable “cornucopia of scandal,” as swift dubbed it. this work swept its author into temporary notoriety, and for a few years was perhaps as much talked of and discussed as any publication of the time. but the life has long since gone out of its personalities and topical allusions, and the ordinary reader of english literature, if he recall it even by name, is likely to remember it only for the use pope makes of it in a well-known passage in “the rape of the lock”:—
149“let wreaths of triumph now my temples twine!
(the victor cried); the glorious prize is mine!
while fish in streams, or birds delight in air,
or in a coach and six the british fair;
as long as atalantis shall be read,
or the small pillow grace a lady’s bed;
while visits shall be paid on solemn days,
when numerous wax-lights in bright order blaze;
while nymphs take treats, or assignations give,
so long my honor, name, and praise shall live!”
but though this book, as we shall hereafter find, is not without its significance for the student of the english novel, it is less interesting and important from our point of view than “the power of love: in seven examples,” to which for the present we will confine our attention.
as the title indicates, this volume consists of seven separate stories—“the fair hypocrite,” “the physician’s stratagem,” “the wife’s resentment,” “the husband’s resentment” (in two examples), “the happy fugitives,” and “the perjured beauty.” the keynote of the whole collection is clearly struck in the following passage from the first-mentioned of the tales:—
“of all those passions which may be said to tyrannize over the heart of man, love is not only the most violent, but the most persuasive.... a lover esteems nothing difficult in the pursuit of his desires. it is then that fame, honor, chastity, and glory have no longer 150their due estimation, even in the most virtuous breast. when love truly seizes the heart, it is like a malignant fever which thence disperses itself through all the sensible parts; the poison preys upon the vitals, and is only extinguished by death; or by as fatal a cure, the accomplishment of its own desires.”
the “love” shadowed forth in these sentences is that which dominates each of the seven “examples” in this little book, which are thus only variations on a single persistent theme. it is the merest animal passion—passion unrefined by sentiment, uncolored by emotion; the love of etheridge and wycherley. upon the gratification of this in a licit, or, as frequently happens, in an illicit way, the plot is, with the monotony of a modern french novel, everywhere made to turn. the heroes of her stories are all, like mr. slye, in the author’s rather amusing sketch, the “stage-coach journey to exeter,” “naturally amorous”; her heroines, like the fair princess in “the happy fugitives,” are one and all “born under an amorous constellation,” and like her, are forever “floating on the tempestuous sea of passion, guided by a master who is too often pleased with the shipwreck of those whom he conducts.” so violent are the experiences portrayed that we can hardly avoid the 151thought that mrs. manley must have adhered in practice to the maxim of “astrophel and stella”—“look in thy heart, and write,”—and must have gone straight to some of the stormiest episodes of her own career for the pictures which she gives us. passion and gratification—these, then, are the regular ingredients of her stories. of the larger and finer influence of love; of its strengthening and ennobling power; of the way in which its subtle mastery will work through life,—
“not only to keep down the base in man,
but teach high thought, and amiable words,
and courtliness, and the desire of fame,
and love of truth, and all that makes a man,”—
of all these things, familiar enough, fortunately, to the reader of modern fiction, we have scarcely a trace. so far as the influence of love is shown at all, it is consistently shown as a debasing influence. this point, clearly set forth in the quotation already made, may be illustrated from the record of the writer’s own life. in the “history of rivella,” she tells us that, when quite a girl, she was infatuated with a handsome young soldier who, when the gaming-tables were brought out, found, to his embarrassment, that he had no money to play with. noticing this, rivella 152went to her father’s drawer, stole some money, and gave it to him. now, mark the author’s commentary upon the action: “being perfectly just,” she says, “by nature, principle, and education, nothing but love, and that in a high degree, could have made her otherwise.” here we have, then, a fair expression of the kind of love which is presented to us in these “examples.” a despotic animal appetite, unchecked in its fierce, impulsive play by any nobler considerations whatever, it drives human nature downward, captive and slave to the “fury passions” which civilization has been struggling to bring under partial control.
these seven stories, therefore, are anything but pleasant reading, unless they be, like certain incidents referred to in the “new atalantis,” “pleasant ... to the ears of the vicious.” it is not only that they are repulsive because of the undisguised licentiousness that everywhere prevails in them; they are occasionally disgusting on account of the large part played by the merely horrible. so intimately related are unemotionalized passion and utter brutality, that, as might be expected, here, where the one is so conspicuous, the other has considerable place. the revenge taken by the woman upon her 153worthless husband in “the wife’s resentment” (did recollection of her own wrongs add bitterness to rivella’s pen, we may well wonder?) may be cited as an example of this. don roderigo, a spanish gentleman, after trying for fifteen months to seduce a poor girl named violenta, marries her in a moment of thoughtlessness, but keeps the marriage a secret from his friends. before long he is forced by his family into a second and public union with a wealthy heiress. the news of his inconstancy fills violenta with delirious passion; and nothing will appease her but revenge, sudden and complete. she decoys roderigo into her apartment, murders him while he is asleep, and, not contented with this, deliberately tears out his eyes and mangles “his body all over with an infinite number of gashes” before throwing it out into the street. and what is particularly noteworthy is, that the narrator herself does not seem to be in the least impressed by the loathsome details accumulated in her description. she reports the incident as though it were a matter of course, and quietly tells us that when violenta was brought to justice for her crime, the duke, the magistrates, and all the spectators were amazed “at the courage and magnanimity of the maid, and that one of so 154little rank should have so great a sense of her dishonor.”
unquestionably the most pleasing of all these stories, alike from a literary and from a moral standpoint, is “the happy fugitives,” a simple tale, containing comparatively little to which exception could be taken. the plots of “the physician’s stratagem” and “the perjured beauty,” on the other hand, are too hideous to be reproduced. as a whole, the book is desperately dull and tiresome; for the pornographic horrors of its pages are unredeemed by any excellencies of style. its only interest for us here, therefore, is an historic one; and about this side of the matter, we shall have a general word or two to say later on.
if, morally considered, she is equally open to stricture, our second woman-novelist, mrs. behn, at least bulks out as a more considerable figure in the annals of english letters. highly eulogized by some of the most distinguished of her contemporaries—dryden, otway, and southerne among the number,—she must still be spoken of with the respect due to her undoubted talents, versatility, industry, and courage. that she is to be regarded as “an honor and glory” 155to her sex, as one of her enthusiastic admirers roundly declared, it would now, for many reasons, be out of the question to maintain. but the one fact that she was the first woman of her country to support herself entirely by the pen, itself establishes her right to a certain place in the long line of female writers who have since her day done so much for literature.
aphra (or aphara) johnson, afterwards behn, (known as the “divine astr?a” in the exuberant language of the time,[12] and long commonly referred to as an “extraordinary woman,”[13]) was born towards the end of the reign of charles the first. while still a girl, she was taken to the west indies by her father, who had been appointed lieutenant-general of surinam.[14] johnson himself “died at sea, and never arrived to 156possess the honor designed him.” but the family settled in the colony—a “land flowing with milk and honey,” they are said to have found it,—and continued to reside there till about 1653. a high-colored description of her life abroad is given in her best-known work, as it was during this period that she made her hero’s acquaintance, and became interested in the story of his love and tragic fate. it is characteristic of the tendencies of the age that her biographer should feel it necessary to pause at this point in her narrative to contradict some current town gossip about the kind of relationship which had existed between astr?a and the african prince. returning to england, she married a man named behn, who seems to have been “a merchant in the city, tho’ of dutch extraction,” but concerning whom our information is of the most meagre sort. of him we hear little or nothing in connection with aphra’s subsequent adventurous career; and she was a widow before 1666. attached to the court of charles the second, she attracted so much attention, we are told, by her keenness of intellect, alertness, 157and wit, that she was employed by the merry monarch in some delicate diplomatic affairs during the dutch war. these took her to antwerp in the character of a spy, in which capacity she succeeded so well that in course of time, and by means principally of her innumerable love intrigues, she obtained possession of some secrets of considerable value. “they are mistaken who imagine that a dutchman can’t love,” remarks her biographer, in commenting upon these incidents; “for tho’ they are generally more phlegmatic than other men, yet it sometimes happens that love does penetrate their lump and dispense an enlivening fire,”—now and then with disastrous results, as we perceive. her information, however, was neglected by the english government, and in disgust the patriotic lady threw up politics and diplomacy altogether, and presently returned to london, narrowly escaping death by shipwreck on the way.
once more in london, mrs. behn, now thrown entirely upon her own resources, turned to her pen for the means of support, and thenceforth continued to occupy herself with literature and pleasure till her death, in 1689. say what one may about the general quality of her work, its total amount remains remarkable, especially when 158one takes into consideration the conditions of poverty, failing health, and many harassing distractions under which it was produced. for a number of years, with unabated industry but varying success, she poured out plays which were calculated, in style and morality, to hit the prevailing taste; and so boldly did she meet her masculine rivals on the common ground of licentiousness, that she earned for herself the highly significant nickname of “the female wycherley.” miscellaneous tracts and translations kept her busy in the intervals of dramatic activity, during which time she also threw off a couple of very curious treatises, the characters of which are perhaps sufficiently indicated by their titles—“the lover’s watch; or, the art of making love,” and “the lady’s looking-glass to dress herself by; or, the whole art of charming all mankind.” as manuals of conduct, it is to be feared that these lucubrations hardly tend to edification.
finally, to leave out for the moment what is, of course, for us now the most important item, her experiments in fiction, which we will deal with by themselves, mrs. behn also managed to write and publish a good deal of verse. as work actually done, this must be mentioned, because 159it swells her account; but it may be said at once that most of it—and particularly her one ambitious effort, the allegorical “voyage to the isle of love,”—is without value or interest. here and there in her plays, however, she touches a true poetic note, as in the really fine song in “abdelazer,” for which—though it is doubtless familiar to readers of the anthologies—space may be found here:—
“love in fantastic triumph sate,
whilst bleeding hearts about him flowed,
for whom fresh pains he did create,
and strange tyrannic power he showed;
from thy bright eyes he took his fires,
which round about in space he hurled;
but ’twas from mine he took desires
enough to undo the amorous world.
“from me he took his sighs and tears,
from thee his pride and cruelty,
from me his languishment and fears,
and every killing dart from thee;
thus thou and i the god have armed,
and set him up a deity,
but my poor heart alone is harmed,
while thine the victor is, and free.”
her biographer tells us that mrs. behn “was a woman of sense, and by consequence [mark the consequence!] a lover of pleasure; as indeed,” 160it is added, “all, both men and women, are,” though “some would be thought above the conditions of humanity, and place their chief pleasure in a proud, vain hypocrisy.” it needs hardly to be said here that i am not at all concerned to defend the character of astr?a’s life or the tone of her writings; and at this time of day any denunciation of the one or the other would surely be a work of supererogation. but we should at least try to be fair in our judgments; and if the very flattering description given “by one of the fair sex” who “knew her intimately” is even approximately correct, she must have been generous, frank, and thoroughly good-hearted. these are not bad qualities in a world which in practice knows only too little about them, though we might hesitate to add, with her anonymous friend, that, being thus endowed, “she was, i’m satisfied, a greater honor to our sex than all the canting tribe of dissemblers that die with the false reputation of saints.” so far as her writings themselves are concerned, it has only to be said that when she found herself dependent for a livelihood upon her talents and industry, she took what seemed to be the shortest and easiest way open to success, and undertook to produce just what the reading public of her day was most 161willing to pay for—and the reading public of her day was unfortunately ready to pay highest for the most wanton and scandalous things. herein she was neither better nor worse than the majority of her contemporaries who, like her, wielded the professional pen, though the fact that she was a woman undoubtedly adds heinousness to her offences against the ordinary decencies of life. “let any one of common sense and reason,” she says in her own defence—and the circumstance that, like dryden and others, she was driven into explanation and apology is noteworthy,—“read one of my comedies, and compare it with others of this age; and if they can find one word which can offend the chastest ear, i will submit to all their peevish cavils.” this is the familiar argument—however bad i may be, my neighbors are a trifle worse. i should be very sorry, for mrs. behn’s sake, to take up her challenge; sorrier for my own to have it supposed that what has been said above was said in the way of palliation or excuse. mrs. behn wrote foully; and this for most of us, and very properly, is an end of the whole discussion. but it is as idle in these matters of sentiment, taste, expression, as it is elsewhere, to ignore in any final judgment the subtle but profound influence 162of the time-spirit; and though we may regret that such a distinction should have to be made, we must still, in common fairness, remember that mrs. behn was a woman of the seventeenth century, and not of our own generation.[15]
but we must now turn to her novels—her “incomparable novels,” as they used to be called. the collected edition of 1705, containing, according to its own statement, “all the histories and novels written by the late 163ingenious mrs. behn,” includes, besides the two treatises to which reference has been made, the following stories: “the history of oroonoko; or, the royal slave,” “the fair jilt,” “the nun,” “agnes de castro,” “the lucky mistake,” “memoirs of the court of the king of bantam,” and “the adventure of the black lady.”
the first-mentioned of these—“oroonoko,” the novel with which mrs. behn’s name is to-day almost exclusively associated—is from every point of view by far the most interesting of her works. it represents the first really noteworthy experiment in the fiction of the time to descend from the misty realms of the old romance to the plain ground of actual life. the history—which, as miss kavanagh has said, “is the only one of her tales that, spite of all its defects, can still be read with entertainment”[16]—was written at the special request of charles the second, to whom mrs. behn, on her return from the west indies, had given “so pleasant and rational an account of his affairs there, and particularly of the misfortunes of oroonoko, that he desired her to deliver them publicly to the world.” the narrative is, indeed, represented by the author as a direct 164transcript from her own experiences. “i was,” she says, “myself an eye-witness to a great part of what you will here find set down; and what i could not be witness of, i received from the mouth of the chief actor in this history, the hero himself.”
the motive of the story is the tragedy of oroonoko’s life, and this is worked out simply, but with a good deal of power. the grandson of an african king, and a youth of great strength, courage, and intelligence, oroonoko early becomes enamored of imoinda—“a beauty, that to describe her truly, one need only say she was female to the noble male,”—but to whom, unfortunately, his grandfather also takes a fancy. the young people are secretly married; notwithstanding which, the old king has the girl carried to his palace and placed among his mistresses. in desperation, the husband makes his way by night to imoinda’s chamber. here he is discovered by the king’s guards; imoinda is sold into slavery; and after a while oroonoko shares the same fate—“a lion taken in a toil.” by a remarkable coincidence, they are brought at length to the same place—the colony where aphra and her family were then living. thus unexpectedly reunited to the woman he had 165deemed lost to him forever, oroonoko is for a time contented with his lot; but presently, growing weary of captivity, he plans a revolt among the slaves, upon the suppression of which he is brutally punished. after this he escapes to the woods with his young wife, whose fidelity and never-failing devotion are very touchingly set forth. then comes the final tragedy. dreading that she may fall into the hands of the whites, he deliberately and with her full consent, murders her; and after remaining for several days half-insensible beside her corpse, he is again taken by the colonists, and hacked to pieces limb by limb. with his death, the simple story ends.
now, in the first and casual reading of this novel, we may very probably be struck rather by its points of similarity to the older romances than by its qualities of essential difference from them. for mrs. behn frequently adopts the heroic, or “big bow-wow” strain, especially in her sentimental situations, and where she desires to be particularly effective. her language is often stilted and conventional, and there are occasions when we are more than half-convinced that surinam is, after all, only another way of spelling arcadia. but further study of the work will convince us that we must not attach too much 166importance to what are really superficial characteristics. in the deeper matters of substance and purpose, the story belongs not to the old school of fiction, but to the new; and that mrs. behn herself understood what she was about, is, i think, made clear by what she says in the opening paragraph:—
“i do not pretend, in giving you the history of this royal slave, to entertain my reader with the adventures of a feigned hero, whose life and fortunes fancy may manage at the poet’s pleasure; nor in relating the truth, design to adorn it with any accidents, but such as arrived in earnest to him. and it shall come simply into the world, recommended by its own proper merits and natural intrigues; there being enough of reality to support it, and to render it diverting, without the addition of invention.”
two points, then, are noticeable in this work. in the first place, it depends for its interest not on astonishing adventures, high-flown diction, or extravagant play of fancy, but simply on the sterling humanity of the narrative. the unfortunate hero and his wife are, of course, drawn upon the heroic scale, but they still possess the solid traits of real manhood and womanhood, and, applying the supreme test in all such cases, we find that we can believe in them. the chasm which separates such an achievement as this 167from the windy sentimentalities of the anglo-french romance is a very wide one, and mrs. behn’s boldness of innovation was, therefore, the more remarkable. in the second place, “oroonoko” is written with a well-defined didactic aim. it is a novel with a purpose—the remote forerunner of “uncle tom’s cabin,” and the whole modern school of ethical fiction. thus, together with a marked tendency towards realism, mrs. behn’s book exhibits a no less marked bias in the direction of practical teaching. its historic significance is therefore twofold.[17]
mrs. behn’s other tales show less originality, and are neither so attractive nor so valuable. they are short love-stories which, though not so radically and aggressively impure as her plays, are still tainted through and through by the prevailing grossness of the time. like mrs. manley, mrs. behn makes mere physical appetite—the 168passion which “rages beyond the inspirations of a god all soft and gentle, and reigns more like a fury from hell”[18]—the turning-point of all her plots; like mrs. manley, she centres the entire interest of her narratives in the gratification, not in the influences, of this passion. like mrs. manley, too,—and here the severest judgment might well pass unprotested,—she is as harsh and free-spoken as the most profligate of male cynics regarding the foibles of her own sex. vain, selfish, salacious, intriguing, spiteful, her female figures, as a whole, are simply repulsive in their unqualified animality; and as we read of their lives and their doings, we no longer wonder at the open savagery of a wycherley, or the undisguised contempt of a congreve, in an age when a woman could thus write of women, without fear, almost without reproach. finally, like mrs. manley, mrs. behn is ready at times to indulge not only in scenes of the utmost coarseness, but also in pictures of the most revolting brutality. an instance of this might be given from “the fair jilt”, where the unskilful execution of tarquin is detailed with horrible minuteness. the best of these shorter stories is “the lucky mistake,” a tale written throughout 169with comparatively good taste. they are nearly all based on fact—many on direct observation; and this renders them, from a student’s point of view, interesting. but there is a great sameness in the incidents described, and on the side of characterization they are very weak indeed. the plots are all made up out of the same classes of material; and the men and women of any one story are hardly to be distinguished otherwise than by name from those of any other.
and now, in returning to the question of the historic significance of the two writers into whose books—habitually allowed to stand undisturbed upon the library shelf—we have here rather rashly ventured to pry, we shall find, if i mistake not, that little remains to be said. brief as our analysis of the heroic romances and the tales of mrs. behn and mrs. manley has necessarily been, it will, if it does not fail entirely of its purpose, suffice to mark the points of fundamental contrast between them. the nature and importance of the changes exemplified in these story-tellers of the restoration will thus be made clear.
hitherto, as we have seen, fiction had made little or no attempt to deal frankly with life. in other words, it had not as yet found its proper 170sphere. purely a thing of the imagination, it had sought its subjects afar, proudly ignoring the common matters of the world—the joys and sorrows, the hopes and struggles of every-day humanity. the words which the author of a life of sidney, prefixed to one of the early editions of the “arcadia,” applies to that work, we might with equal fairness apply to almost the entire mass of fiction thus far written. “the invention is wholly spun out of the fancy,” he says. the scene was laid in some far-away dreamland, not the less remote and visionary because occasionally called by a familiar earthly name; the characters were swollen out to superhuman proportions, and were endowed with qualities that no mortal being has ever been known to possess; their adventures were on the face of them impossible; they thought, acted, talked as no man or woman had thought, acted, talked since the world began. life and fiction stood entirely apart. the real world of tangible flesh and blood found for the time its only expression in the drama. in fiction there was as yet no human interest whatever.
with mrs. behn commenced the tendency to deal with life—to make the novel in some sense a reproduction of actual experience. we may 171regret that the special phases of the human comedy that she deliberately chose to write about, were only too often phases the least worthy of attention; that her interests were narrowed down, and her work crippled, by considerations of the most cramping and disastrous kinds; that she knew nothing of proportion and perspective, and little of the higher and finer developments of motive and character; that she could not see life steadily, and did not see it whole. but all this must not stand in the way of our insisting that she was one of the first writers of prose fiction—perhaps the first in england—to substitute the solid stuff of reality for the flimsy material of the imagination. crude and partial as her observations were, she at least observed; sorry as are most of the results of her study of the world, she did study it at first hand—did hold the mirror up to nature. what she accomplished in thus opening up the field of the modern novel, what mrs. manley accomplished in following her lead, are matters, therefore, of sufficient importance to call for distinct recognition. we do not claim for the books of these two women any individual merit or interest. but when we lay aside one of their stories, bearing in mind the conditions of the time at which 172it was written, we realize that, artistically, if not always morally, they represent a step in advance; that it was by such work as this—poor and hopelessly dull as it may seem to us to-day—that the folios of la calprenède and de scudéri were overthrown, the way made clear for defoe and richardson, and the foundations of modern fiction firmly laid.
but now let us notice the suggestive circumstance that, like nearly all innovators, these first realists seriously overstepped the mark. in their early attempts to exchange fairy land for the actual world, we find too large a place given to fact, in the most hard and circumscribed sense of the word. in place of pure fancy, they sought to give absolute and undiluted reality; in place of a picture without existing counterpart, they strove to secure the detailed verisimilitude of a photograph. indeed, for a time the aims and methods of fiction were almost entirely lost sight of. and it is easy to see how this unfortunate result was brought about. weary of the conventionalities of the old romances, and of the shadowy heroes and heroines with whose tedious adventures and even more tedious disquisitions their pages were filled, the novelists of the restoration made a bold endeavor to get back to 173the life with which they were familiar, and to deal with the world as they knew it to exist. but for the moment, there seemed only one way of doing this. instead of fancy, they must have fact; instead of wandering off into the impossible, they must limit themselves to the things which had actually happened—which had really, in charles reade’s witty phrase, gone through the formality of taking place. hence, for the present, the constructive work of the imagination—which some of us, in these days of so-called naturalism, are still old-fashioned enough to hold essentially important—was almost entirely neglected. nearly every story was statedly “founded on fact”; and the business of the novelist was practically reduced to the task of presenting, with but slight embellishment or rearrangement, specific occurrences in life. thus we have an early example of the tendency, just now so conspicuous, towards what m. brunetière has happily called “reportage” in literature. in the reaction against the school of heroic romance, the new story-writers, therefore, went to the other extreme. to take the materials of familiar existence and to reorganize them, thus producing a work of art which is at once all compact of truth and imagination, was for the 174time being beyond their ken. to their limited view, realism meant slavish reality.
it was only after this mistake had been made that the possibility of avoiding the airy unrealities of old romance, without being bound down to the skeleton facts of life, gradually became apparent. the discovery that a writer could be true to experience and human nature without necessarily reproducing actual events or photographing individual men and women, was the outcome of many experiments and much failure, and was at length hit upon in a half-blind and fortuitous way. it was only little by little that the element of acknowledged fiction was allowed to encroach upon the domain of truth; only little by little that people began to understand that the art of fiction and the art of lying are not one and the same, and that the boldest play of imagination in the treatment of life is not always to be associated with the distortion of reality. in the works of mrs. manley and mrs. behn we see the english novel stumbling painfully towards the comprehension of its own objects. we have reached firm ground, and that is a great achievement; for only when we move on firm ground is the novel possible. but the dead weight of the actual is too heavy for us; we cannot synthesize 175the results of experience; we gather observations, but we are unable to make artistic productions out of them. thus, we have a “new atalantis” (and the book is historically significant just for this reason) which is little more than a jumble of personal scandal, filled in with occasional false incidents and mendacious details; an “oroonoko,” which is rather a fanciful biography than a tale; we have a “wife’s resentment,” a “fair jilt,” a “lucky mistake,”—stories all of which are based more or less exclusively on historic occurrences or on events that had come under the direct observation of the relaters.[19] even where there is a lack of truth, the appearance of truth is still carefully preserved. things which have not actually happened are nevertheless related as facts; real characters are put through unreal incidents; the novel is supposed to give history; fiction and falsehood are as yet confused.
with this brief summary of the qualities and shortcomings of our two women-novelists, this little paper might properly close. but it may be interesting if, having carried our inquiry thus far, 176we add a paragraph about the way in which the rigid reality of the works at which we have been glancing grew gradually out into the genuine realism of the later novel.
properly to understand this tendency towards an equilibrium between fact and imagination, we should turn aside to examine the profound influence exerted over the fiction of the time of the “tatler” and the “spectator.” but for our present purposes we shall find the movement forward clearly enough exemplified in the work of one man—the author of “robinson crusoe,” whose writings, therefore, we will take as our clue.
beginning with the production of history, or semi-history, in which real characters, slightly exaggerated, move through real scenes, or through scenes to but small extent imaginary, defoe proceeded little by little to import more of fiction into his narrative, to the detriment of the small substratum of truth still retained. by and by, he did no more than preserve the mere frame-work of history—as in “the journal of the plague year” and the “memoirs of a cavalier,” in which most of the characters and many of the incidents are purely fictitious. after this, the remaining element of truth was gradually 177eliminated, and he reached the production of narratives of fictitious characters in fictitious settings and among fictitious scenes. “from writing biographies with real names attached to them,” says professor minto, in his life of defoe, “it was but a short step to writing biographies with fictitious names.” even when that short step was taken, the artifices resorted to by him to preserve the apparent truthfulness of his narrations show us that he was by no means satisfied that it would be desirable to let matters of fact slip out of his work entirely. though what he wrote was false, he still tried to palm it off upon the world as true. this makes the writing of defoe more like lying than fiction, and goes far to explain the extraordinary minuteness of the circumstantial method adopted by him. but it marks, also, the transitional quality of his work. as mr. leslie stephen has neatly put it, “defoe’s novels are simply history minus the facts.” only in his latest works do we find this pseudo-history making way for fiction proper; and then we recognize in defoe the distinct forerunner of the great novelists of the eighteenth century.
but to follow this matter farther would take us beyond the due bounds, already somewhat 178transgressed, of our present study. as we may now see, the story of english fiction from the period of the anglo-french romance to the time of fielding and smollett, is a long one, and we have undertaken to deal with only one chapter here—the chapter which tells of mrs. behn and mrs. manley, of what they did, and of what they failed to do. that finished, our task is at an end.
