Astræa” 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
possess 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 Astræa
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, and 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.
Footnote 12:
This is the name under which Mrs. Behn enters the satire of Pope:-
“The stage how loosely doth Astræa tread!”
The second line of the couplet may be left unquoted.
Footnote 13:
See “Apotheosis of Milton” in the “Gentleman’s Magazine,” for 1738
(vol. viii., p. 469).
Footnote 14:
This, according to Mr. Gosse (“Dictionary of National Biography”) was
“a relative whom she called her father.” Mrs. Behn certainly does
speak of him as her father in “Oroonoko.” And in the Life, “by one of
the Fair Sex,” prefixed to the first collected edition of her works,
we read: “Her father’s name was _Johnson_, whose relation to the Lord
Willoughby, drew him, for the advantageous post of Lieutenant-General
of many isles, besides the continent of _Surinam_, from his quiet
retreat at Canterbury to run the hazardous voyage of the West Indies.”
I do not know what is the source and origin of Mr. Gosse’s implied
doubt.
-----
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 one 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 it
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,” it
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 Astræa’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 willing 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 of 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]
Footnote 15:
How vast was the change in taste between, say, the opening and the
close of the eighteenth century, is shown by Sir Walter Scott, in an
anecdote which has special interest for us here, as bearing directly
upon the woman now in question. A grand-aunt of his, Mrs. Keith, of
Ravelstone, towards the close of a very long life, asked Scott if he
had ever seen Mrs. Behn’s novels. “I confessed the charge. Whether I
could get her a sight of them?—I said, with some hesitation, I
believed I could; but that I did not think she would like either the
manners or the language, which approached too near that of Charles the
Second’s time to be quite proper reading. ‘Nevertheless,’ said the
good old lady, ‘I remember them being so much admired, and being so
interested in them myself, that I wish to look at them again.’ To hear
was to obey. So I sent Mrs. Aphra Behn, curiously sealed up, with
‘private and confidential’ on the packet, to my gay old grand-aunt.
The next time I saw her afterwards, she gave me back Aphra, properly
wrapped up, with merely these words: ‘Take back your bonny Mrs. Behn;
and, if you will take my advice, put her in the fire, for I found it
impossible to get through the very first novel. But is it not,’ she
said, ‘a very odd thing that I, an old woman of eighty and upwards,
sitting alone, feel myself ashamed to read a book which, sixty years
ago, I have heard read aloud for the amusement of large circles,
consisting of the first and most creditable society in London!’” (See
Lockhart’s Scott, chap. liv.)
-----
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
Ingenious 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 transcript 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.”
Footnote 16:
“English Women of Letters,” vol. i., p. 31.
-----
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 deemed 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 importance 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 from 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]
Footnote 17:
Another matter of curious interest in connection with “Oroonoko” calls
for passing mention, though too far removed from our special subject
to detain us here. This is the remarkable way in which, in its
presentation of the “noble savage,” and the innocence, purity, and
high moral character of the “natural man,” the story anticipates
Rousseau and the later romanticists. Jusserand, who points this out,
goes so far as to say that Mrs. Behn “carries us at once beyond the
times of Defoe, Richardson, and Fielding, and takes us among the
precursors of the French Revolution.” It may be added that, in the
hands of “Honest Tom Southerne,” the story of Oroonoko became a
successful play.
-----
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 passion 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 with 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.
Footnote 18:
“The Fair Jilt.”
-----
* * * * *
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
sphere. 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 regret
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 it
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 the 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 time being
beyond their ken. To their limited view, realism meant slavish reality.