whole, an unfortunate one, in spite of many unhappy episodes and a good
deal of misunderstanding; for even in the white glare of the Diary,
where every fleck shows, their home life often comes out in a very
pleasant light. Still there were unquestionably, even from the very
beginning, little rifts within the lute, and these rifts widen terribly,
we notice, as the journal runs its course. To the outside world, very
probably, such rifts were not often apparent; but we are privileged to
see matters close at hand, and from the inside; and this undercurrent of
tragedy, beneath the broad stream of prosperity and success, becomes at
times painfully manifest as we read.
I suppose it can hardly be said that in the case of Mr. and Mrs. Pepys’s
various matrimonial difficulties, the entire blame rested on either pair
of shoulders. Mrs. Pepys was extremely pretty and attractive, and her
husband admired her thoroughly, and was after his own rather singular
fashion, devotedly attached to her. Yet she was evidently whimsical,
somewhat capricious, apt to get into what Pepys calls “fusty” humors,
and at times exceedingly trying to the nerves. Many a little crisis, not
serious perhaps, but distinctly unpleasant, seems to have been brought
about by a word unnecessarily spoken, a look or a phrase interpreted
amiss. But, after all, we fear that the main burden of responsibility
rested with Pepys himself. Why would he undertake to teach the poor
young woman astronomy and arithmetic, when, admittedly, she had neither
taste nor talent for such subjects? Why was he so much upset on finding
that her ear for music was not nearly as good as he thought it should
have been? Why did he cut her short so peremptorily on one most
unfortunate occasion when she was telling that long-winded story of hers
from “The Grand Cyrus”? Why was he petulant with her, at another time,
for no better reason, as he himself confesses, than that he was hungry,
and she had dressed herself, as she not infrequently did, in a manner
that displeased him? Why, finally, when she was berating him rather
roundly about her deficient wardrobe, did he fall to reading Boyle’s
“Hydrostatics” aloud, “and let her talk till she was tired, and vexed
that I would not hear her”? It is surely, to say the least of it, far
from tactful in a husband to declaim from a treatise on hydrostatics,
when his wife is determined to discuss more serious matters. These may
be trifles; but such trifles are important things, when viewed from the
standpoint of domestic peace. But all this touches merely the fringe of
the problem. The really serious troubles were generally, if not always,
caused by poor Mr. Pepys’s fatal over-sensibility—that characteristic
weakness of his, to which he himself from time to time became only too
keenly alive. The simple fact of the matter is, that our diarist had a
fondness for the society of pretty women; that his wife, naturally
enough, grew jealous; and that all sorts of unpleasantness, deepening
sometimes into genuine domestic tragedy, was the inevitable result. I
have not time now to go into the ins and outs of what is really a very
long story, to follow the rapid fluctuations of feeling, or mark out the
converging lines of approach to the unavoidable catastrophe. But I
cannot resist the temptation of recounting one curious episode—that of a
neat joke once played by Mrs. Pepys on her susceptible better-half.
Pepys, early in the period of the Diary, had fallen in with his wife’s
desire to have a girl to live with them—a kind of companion and lady’s
maid. He did not like the expense incurred; but as long as the young
lady was sufficiently well-favored to be a pleasant object to look on,
he saw but little other cause for complaint—though cause for complaint,
and good cause too, Mrs. Pepys was presently to find. Well, on one
occasion his wife told him she had engaged a new maid—a girl so pretty
and winsome, she went on to say, that positively she was already
jealous. Mr. Pepys was a little uneasy about all this. However, he
concluded that she “meant it merrily,” and awaited with a good deal of
ill-repressed excitement the coming of the domestic beauty. In due
season, Hebe arrived; and judge his astonishment and disgust, when he
found, as he plaintively reports, that she was not pretty at all, but a
very ordinary wench! For once, at all events, the laugh was on Mrs.
Pepys’s side.
Towards the latter part of the Diary the conjugal misunderstandings pass
into a very acute stage, and for a time a break-up of the Pepys
establishment seems imminent. But we are glad to be able to record that
the crisis was a comparatively brief one. Mr. Pepys, sorrow-smitten and
full of remorse over his recent ill-doings, undertakes to mend his ways,
and sets manfully, though with some misgivings and much difficulty,
about the task of so doing. And thus the curtain falls upon what
promises to be a complete reconciliation; and we close the Diary with
the hope that the new peace lasted for the few brief years that were
destined to elapse before the life of poor Elizabeth Pepys was brought
to its untimely end. There is one odd commentary on matrimony, which I
must needs add for its characteristic strain. Pepys, going to church one
day, happens by accident to witness a wedding, and is much interested in
what Thackeray described as “the happy couple, as the saying is.” In
chronicling this incident, he makes the following extraordinary remark:
“Strange to see what delight we married people have to see these poor
fools decoyed into our condition, every man and woman gazing and smiling
upon them.”
There is much still on the purely personal side of the Diary about which
I should well have liked to speak; and, in particular, I had hoped to
dwell for a little on Pepys’s notices of the Great Plague (which are
much more interesting, as well as accurate, than Defoe’s well-known
romancing book), and on his graphic account of the fire of London, which
forms an admirable commentary on the second half of Dryden’s famous, if
somewhat unmanageable, poem, “Annus Mirabilis.” But these matters, and
many other such, cannot now be even touched upon. Meanwhile, in bringing
these rambling memoranda to a close, I do not feel inclined to apologize
for what may seem the frivolous character of my material. The unique
charm of Pepys’s Diary, as I said at the outset, lies very largely in
the frankness, the naïveté, the unsophisticated directness of its
record; it is, as I insisted, really and truly what other chronicles of
the kind have been simply in name, a _journal intime_. Something of this
frankness, this naïveté, it has been my aim to illustrate, and to show
you at the same time how quaint and startling are some of the results.
And let me ask you not to judge too harshly of the man into whose
existence we have thus ventured to pry. Remember that we have been
privileged in his case to push aside the curtain which men habitually
keep carefully drawn across the penetralia of their lives; that we have
caught him often enough at unfair advantage, and in a light fiercer than
that which, Tennyson says, beats upon a throne, blackening each blot. At
any rate, I, for my own part, see no reason why, as we lay his Diary
aside, we should indulge in platitudes of criticism—still less, why we
should console ourselves with the flattering thought of moral
superiority. Pepys was not a great man, it is true: he was often weak,
often foolish; the temptations of the world again and again proved too
much for him; at many important points, his theory and practice of life
were alike unsound. But it might be well perhaps, before we undertake to
throw stones at his glass house, to look a little carefully into the
vitreous mansion in which we ourselves dwell. And if you and I were
forced to lay bare, as he has done for himself, the secret thoughts and
feelings, the passing fancies, the unspoken desires, the foibles and
failures of our every-day existence, I wonder how many of us would see
reason to be proud of the revelation so made. O my brothers, let us be
humble and charitable! Humility and charity are excellent things; and
humility and charity, I confess, I find constantly forced upon me
whenever I dip, for an hour’s genuine amusement, into the Diary of old
Samuel Pepys.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Two Novelists of the English
Restoration.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Two Novelists of the English
Restoration.
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 cheerfully 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 in
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 æsthetic 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 fruitage 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 library 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.
Footnote 5:
Taking always in my own study of literature the wider line of inquiry
just indicated, I am grateful to Professor Royce for pointing out the
connection between two phenomena apparently so radically diverse as
the spread of prose fiction and the appearance of the Lockian
philosophy. (See his delightful volume—a model of popular
exposition—“The Spirit of Modern Philosophy,” pp. 80-81.)
-----
So thoroughly absorbed had men been in the drama, and so natural had it
seemed for those of 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 sketches 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 for 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 passionate and continuous
enjoyment, from their pages. But the famous Hôtel 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 “Polexandre” began in four volumes quarto, and in
its later editions comprised some six thousand pages; the “Cléopâtre” 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.
Footnote 6:
The reader of Pepys, recalling Mrs. Pepys’s fondness for these
interminable stories, will remember that, as we have seen, “Le Grand
Cyrus” once gave rise to considerable unpleasantness between husband
and wife.
-----
But 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,
till 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 Hôtel de
Rambouillet incessantly upon their lips.
Footnote 7:
Novel-readers will not need to be reminded that the
“story-within-story” device survived long after the classical-heroic
romance had passed into oblivion. It is employed, for instance, by
both Fielding and Smollett, and traces of it are to be found in the
earlier work of Dickens, and in other writers quite near our own time.
-----
It will be seen from this brief description that the classical-heroic
romance was absolutely artificial and unreal; that it had, and pretended
to have, 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.