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 “Cléopâtre” 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 burlesque 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]
Footnote 8:
A delightfully witty account of this work, and of the classical-heroic
romance at large, will be found in Jusserand’s “English Novel in the
Time of Shakspere,” a book which combines with the erudition of the
German specialist the verve, tact, and lucidity of the
French—qualities which are commonly to be sought in vain in the
voluminous and too often chaotic lucubrations of Teutonic scholarship.
-----
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 evidence 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 decades of the seventeenth century, practically
marks the close of its career; and dying, it left no issue.
Footnote 9:
Translations of several of the great French romances, including
“Clelia,” “which opened of itself in the place that described two
lovers in a bower,” are given in the list of books on Leonora’s
shelves (“Spectator,” No. 37); and suggestive mention is made of
“Pharamond” and “Cassandra” as late as 1711 (“Spectator,” No. 92).
Mrs. Lennox’s satire, “The Female Quixote,” may be taken to show that
even in 1752 these works were still sometimes read.
-----
* * * * *
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 the
“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 this 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]
Footnote 10:
Common fairness leads me to state, though it must be in the
quasi-obscurity of a foot-note, that in any exhaustive treatment of
the Restoration novel, place should be found for a third female
name—that of Swift’s “stupid, infamous, scribbling woman,” Mrs.
Haywood. But though this lady produced, between 1720 and 1730, a
number of short stories that might fittingly be touched upon here, her
best-known works, “The History of Miss Betsy Thoughtless” (1751) and
“The History of Jeremy and Jenny Jessamy” (1754), belong to the times
of Richardson, Fielding, and Smollett, and therefore to another school
and period of fiction entirely. She would thus be very likely to tempt
us too far afield for the purposes we have here in view.
-----
It 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 vitâ sua_—published in 1714, under the pseudonym of Sir
Charles Lovemore. There 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 might.
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. In 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 her ‘Atalantis.’” Still we must frankly admit that her loyalty
to the printer in such a crisis throws her character into a rather
favorable light.
Footnote 11:
Scott’s edition of Swift’s works (1824), vol. ii., p. 303, _note_.
-----
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 far 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”:—
“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 their 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
thought 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 went 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 worthless
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 little 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” to 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.