The Novels of Mrs Aphra Behn E-Book

Aphra Behn

• Herausgeber: WS
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2018

Seitenzahl: 675

Beschreibung

Aphra Behn (1640-1689) was a spy for Charles II, a playwright, poet, and novelist, and the first English woman to make a living from writing. Her pen name was Astrea. Ernest A. Baker (1869-1941) was an English writer and historian of literature. In 1905, 216 years after Mrs Behn's death, he introduced this collection of ten of her novels in the language of his day, a form which was not a facsimile of her texts. This ebook, prepared 329 years after her death, silently corrects some typos, and makes further changes. The Introduction and three of the stories contain many poems. The ten stories are: Oronooko, The Fair Jilt, The Nun, Agnes de Castro, The Lover's Watch, The Case for the Watch, The Lady's Looking Glass, The Lucky Mistake, The Court of the King of Bantam, and, The Adventure of the Black Lady.

Leseprobe

The Novels of Mrs Aphra Behn

with an Introduction by Ernest A. Baker

Contents

About this edition

The Novels of Mrs Aphra Behn

Introduction

Oronooko

The Fair Jilt

The Nun

Agnes de Castro

The Lover’s Watch

The Case for the Watch

The Lady’s Looking Glass

The Lucky Mistake

The Court of the King of Bantam

The Adventure of the Black Lady

About this edition

Aphra Behn (1640-1689) was a spy for Charles II, a playwright, poet, and novelist, and the first English woman to make a living from writing. Her pen name was Astrea.

Ernest A. Baker (1869-1941) was an English writer and historian of literature. In 1905, 216 years after Mrs Behn’s death, he introduced this collection of ten of her novels in the language of his day, a form which was not a facsimile of her texts. This ebook, prepared 329 years after her death, silently corrects some typos, and makes further changes. The Introduction and three of the stories contain many poems.

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No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

Introduction

To most people nowadays the name of Aphra Behn conveys nothing more intelligible than certain vague associations of license and impropriety. She is dimly remembered as the author of plays and novels, now unread, that embodied the immorality of Restoration times, and were all the more scandalous in that they were written by a woman. Her works are to be found in few libraries, and are rarely met with at the booksellers’. Although they were republished in an expensive form and in a limited edition in 1871, they have now been many years out of print. Nor is this much to be regretted. Her novels are worth reprinting now and again, not because they are more clever, but because they are less offensive to modern taste than her comedies; and in addition to their intrinsic merits, they have an interest for the student of literature. But a general reprint of the plays would hardly be justified, at least, in anything like a cheap and popular form. This is a case where, for many reasons, it is best to have one’s reading done by proxy.

The obstacles which she herself has set to our appreciation have done her an injustice. In dismissing her merely as a purveyor of scandalous amusement in a profligate age, we are apt to give her none of the credit due to a long career of arduous work and of persevering struggle against adverse circumstances. Mrs. Behn was not only the first Englishwoman who became a novelist and a playwright, but the first of all those numerous women who have earned their livelihood by their pens.

We can form a better idea of the once popular Astrea from her works than from the scanty memorials that have come down to us; more is known of her personal character than about the events of her life. The so-called History of the Life and Memoirs of Mrs. Aphra Behn, written by one of the Fair Sex, and prefixed to the collection of her histories and novels published in 1735, is rather of the nature of a eulogium and of a vindication from certain aspersions on her conduct and originality than of any biographical value. The admiring writer, although she describes herself as an intimate friend, seems to have known less about her subject than the average jounialist who is called upon to produce an obituary notice in a hurry, and to have pressed into her service a great deal of gossip, with letters, presumably written by Mrs. Behn, but undated, recounting tender episodes from Astrea’s own history and that of her acquaintances, which read more like studies for her novels than authentic epistles. Astrea, probably, whilst she affected to pour out the secrets of her heart into the bosom of her friend, preferred to wrap the actual incidents of her life in romantic obscurity. Thus we are told that “She was a gentlewoman by birth, of a good family in the city of Canterbury in Kent; 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. With him he took his chief riches, his wife and children, and in that number, Afra, his promising darling, our future heroine, and admired Astrea, who even in the first bud of infancy discovered such early hopes of her riper years, that she was equally her parents’ joy and fears.” But the recent discovery of Aphra’s baptismal register has shown that she was born at Wye, and that her father was a barber; and, furthermore, whoever the friend or relative was with whom she went to Surinam, there is little reason to believe that he was her father. However that may be, this protector died on the voyage out; whilst the family did not return forthwith, but settled at St. John’s Hill, the best house in Surinam – a house described very seductively in the pages of Oroonoko. Here befell the chapter of tragic events afterwards related, with a certain amount of idealisation, in the story of that famous negro prince. “One of the fair sex” makes it her business to defend Astrea from the scandalous gossip that arose about her friendship for Oroonoko – quite an unnecessary task. When the colony was ceded to the Dutch, Aphra, an attractive girl of eighteen, returned to England. As a matter of fact, this was before the Restoration, but her fair biographer states that she gave Charles II “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, and was satisfied of her abilities in the management of business, and the fidelity of our heroine to his interest.” It was most likely through her marriage, later on, to Mr. Behn, a Dutchman who had become a wealthy merchant of the city of London, that she gained admittance to the Court. By the year 1666 he was dead, and Astrea was sent by the Government as a secret agent to the Low Countries, which were then at war with England.

Her memoirist gives a flowery account of her love adventures in Antwerp, with the letters of one of her suitors, Van Bruin – who was about twice the age and bulk of a more favoured lover, Van der Albert – and Astrea’s replies. The episode and the letters, as they are given us, are like the burlesque of some tale of high-flown sentiment. “Most Transcendent Charmer,” writes that elephantine euphuist, Van Bruin, “I have strove often to tell you the tempests of my heart, and with my own mouth scale the walls of your affections; but terrified with the strength of your fortifications, I concluded to make more regular approaches, and first attack you at a farther distance, and try first what a bombardment of letters would do; whether these carcasses of love, thrown into the sconces of your eyes, would break into the midst of your breast, beat down the court of guard of your aversion, and blow up the magazine of your cruelty, that you might be brought to a capitulation, and yield upon reasonable terms.” This warlike language, perhaps, derives some appropriateness from the fact that the bulky Dutchman was addressing one of his country’s foes. But Van Bruin was at no loss for metaphors, and he goes on to compare his inamorata, somewhat indelicately, with a ship, in a style that reminds one of a facetious dialogue in Sam Slick, clinching the simile with a rhetorical appeal: “Is it not a pity that so spruce a ship should be unmanned, should lie in the harbour for want of her crew?” Though she had the cruelty to encourage this “Most Magnificent Hero,” as she addresses him in her reply, by answering him in the same rhapsodical vein, Mrs. Behn eventually dismissed him, and turned her attention to Albert. What follows is too like an incident repeatedly utilised in her comedies, and taxes credulity to the utmost. Albert, as wicked a young man as any of her favourite heroes, Willmore, Wilding, or the Rover, is already married, but has deserted his bride on the wedding day. To punish him Mrs. Behn contrives, like Isabella in Measure for Measure, to put the forsaken wife in her place, but, unfortunately, without succeeding in re-tying the marriage knot. Albert’s subsequent stratagem for retaliating the affront in kind upon Astrea, is discomfited in a farcical manner by the substitution of a young gallant for the heroine.

The end of it was that Mrs. Behn promised to marry Albert, but before the union could be consummated he died; and soon after she returned to England, all but losing her life by shipwreck on the way. Her services as a spy had met with a severe snub from the Government Through Van der Albert she had obtained early information of De Witt’s intended raid upon the Thames. Though she sent instant intelligence of this to London, her warning was treated with ridicule; the Dutch fleet sailed, and she had the painful satisfaction of seeing her accuracy verified by the misfortunes of her country. She seems to have received no reward from the Government, and having been left by her husband without means, she now found herself obliged to write for a living. Henceforward tragedies, comedies, novels, and poems came in rapid succession from her pen. No literary task came amiss to her: she translated Van Dale’s Latin History of Oracles, La Rochefoucauld’s Maxims, and Fontenelle’s Plurality of Worlds, prefixing to the last an able essay on translated prose. She collaborated in an English translation of Ovid’s Heroical Epistles in 1683; and few occasions of public rejoicing passed uncelebrated by an ode from Astrea. The brief memoir already quoted contains a series of perfervid letters, signed Astrea, to one Lycidas, who appears to have treated her advances with indifference. Doubtless, her life was as free and unconventional for the seventeenth century as that of certain emancipated women of letters was for the nineteenth; but we must not suppose her own conduct was as irregular as the life depicted in her comedies. Let the warm affection of her friend speak once more as to her personal character:

She was of a generous and open temper, something passionate, very serviceable to her friends in all that was in her power; and could sooner forgive an injury than do one. She was mistress of all the pleasing arts of conversation, but used them not to any but those who love plain dealing. She was a woman of sense, and by consequence a lover of pleasure, as indeed all, both men and women, are; but only some would be thought to be above the conditions of humanity, and place their chief pleasure in a proud vain hypocrisy. For my part, I knew her intimately, and never saw aught unbecoming the just modesty of our sex, though more gay and free than the folly of the precise will allow. She was, I’m satisfied, a greater honour to our sex than all the canting tribe of dissemblers that die with the false reputation of saints.

She died on the 16th of April, 1689, and was buried in Westminster Abbey, the marble slab that covered her being inscribed with “two wretched verses,” made, so her friend relates, “by a very ingenious gentleman, though no poet – the very person whom the envious of our sex, and the malicious of the other, would needs have the author of most of hers.” The person referred to is the playwright, Edward Ravenscroft, with whom she was on very intimate terms. There is no reason to believe that he was the author or part author of any of her works, although he wrote a number of her epilogues.

It is usual to add a piquancy to reminiscences of ladies who write by giving particulars as to their earnings. All that we may be sure of in the case of Mrs. Aphra Behn is that she must have obtained a good deal more by her plays than by her novels. In her collected works, the latter are scarcely able to fill out two volumes of large print; whereas the former occupy four thick and closely printed volumes, even with the omission of one or two inferior productions. Then, as now, there was a huge disproportion between the profits of fiction and of writing for the stage. Astrea’s first attempt was a tragedy, written partly in rhyme and partly in prose, and entitled The Young King; or, the Mistake. It was adapted from a romance by La Calprenède. The scene is Dacia; the Dacians and the Scythians are at war; and the dramatis personae consist of the hostile princes and their soldiers, with a crowd of shepherds and shepherdesses. No further description is necessary. The play failed to obtain either a manager or a publisher. Her next effort was more fortunate. This was The Forced Marriage; or, the Jealous Bridegroom, a tragi-comedy in blank verse, which was produced at the Duke’s Theatre in 1671. Betterton and his wife took the part of the two lovers, and young Otway, a boy from college, appeared on the boards for the first and only time as the king. I need say no more about this work than that the scene is laid “within the Court of France,” and the characters bear such names as Alcippus, Orgulius, Cleontius, Galatea. A very gross and immoral comedy, The Amorous Prince, was brought out the same year at the Duke’s Theatre, and afterwards published.

An equally objectionable play, The Dutch Lover, was published in 1673. Here, though she drew upon her Dutch experiences in depicting the boorish Haunce van Ezel, a sort of gasconading Van Bruin, there is not much advance in realism. The plot is a series of errors of identity, blunders in the dark, mistaken relationships, with the ensuing complications. We have a man in love with his supposed sister, and engaged in mortal combat with his alleged brother; a gallant colonel impersonating the Dutch fop, in order to secure a bride with whom he falls in love by accident; stage tears, and conventional passion to excess. But if the incidents are far-fetched, they are brought about with exemplary skill. In spite of its intricacy, the plot is clearly developed; the dialogue is smooth and tripping, always lively, and sometimes witty. The play has, at all events, one excellence – that of workmanship. The blank verse, however, and the serious passages generally, are the most arrant bombast.

The next play was all in blank verse. Abdelazar; or, the Moor’s Revenge, which was played at the Duke’s Theatre in 1676, is an adaptation of the old tragedy, Lust’s Dominion, erroneously ascribed to Marlowe; it reads like a travesty of Macbeth, ambition, however, playing in the long run a secondary part to sexual passion, as might be expected in a drama by Mrs. Behn. The usurper who murders his trusting sovereign, and puts to death all who oppose his way to the throne, is the Moorish chieftain, Abdelazar; and the woman who assists at his career of crime, and hopes to reign by his side, is the wife of the betrayed king. She helps on the death of her husband to pave the way for her paramour, and then by coquetting with another lover paralyses the opposition to Abdelazar. He meanwhile makes a handle of the new king’s passion for his own wife, whom he loves, but sacrifices without a scruple to ambition. His rivals are overthrown, the crown of Spain is in his grasp, the infamous queen is no longer of use as an instrument of his villainy. He murders her. But, according to the ideas of Mrs. Behn and her public, what swayed most potently the greatest saint and the greatest sinner was sexual passion. The ferocious Abdelazar, who has slaughtered friend and foe without a qualm, now gives way to a fatal madness for the daughter of the royal house, throws the crown into her lap, and becomes the prey of his enemies.

This is a theme worthy of the early unchastened Elizabethans, Marlowe, Nash, and Kyd, who preceded Shakespeare, or of the school of Dryden, who succeeded him; it is what the age considered a pre-eminently tragic theme. As Mrs. Behn treated it, Abdelazar is merely rant and melodrama, masquerading as tragedy. Yet there are echoes of Elizabethan poetry in the distichs at the end of the scenes; and some of the lyrics are pure in feeling. Let me quote two, the second of them a favourite of Mr. Swinburne’s, who justly styles it “that melodious and magnificent song.”

1

Make haste, Amyntas, come away,

The sun is up and will not stay;

And oh! how very short’s a lover’s day!

Make haste, Amyntas, to this grove,

Beneath whose shade so oft I’ve sat.

And heard my dear loved swain repeat

How much he Galatea loved;

Whilst all the list’ning birds around,

Sung to the music of the blessed sound.

Make haste, Amyntas, come away

The sun is up and will not stay;

And oh! how very short’s a lover’s day!

2

Love in fantastic triumph sat,

 Whilst bleeding hearts around 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 sport he hurled;

But ’twas from mine he took desires,

 Enough t’ undo the amorous world.

From me he took his sighs and tears,

 From thee his pride and cruelty;

From me his languishments 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.

 Whilst thine the victor is, and free.

Often in reading Abdelazar one seems to recognise a suggestion from Shakespeare used or misused, travestied, yet not deprived entirely of dramatic force. Edmund, in King Lear, is brought to mind when we read:

Abdelazar

So I thank thee, Nature, that in making me

Thou did’st design me villain,

Hitting each faculty for active mischief:

Thou skilful artist, thank thee for my face,

It will discover nought that’s hid within.

Thus armed for ills,

Darkness and Horror, I invoke your aid;

And thou dread Night, shade all your busy stars

In blackest clouds.

And let my dagger’s brightness only serve

To guide me to the mark, and guide it so,

It may undo a kingdom at one blow.

Abdelazar’s speech before the king’s murder, on the other hand, is a crude parody of the famous prelude to Duncan’s murder.

‘Tis now dead time of night, when rapes, and murders

Are hid beneath the horrid veil of darkness –

I’ll ring through all the court, with doleful sound.

The sad alarms of murder – Murder – Zarrack –

Take up thy standing yonder – Osmin, thou

At the queen’s apartment – cry out Murder –

Whilst I, like his ill genius, do awake the king;

Perhaps in this disorder I may kill him.

But we get bombast surpassing this as we approach the dimax.

Prince Philip and the Cardinal now ride

Like Jove in thunder; we in storms must meet them.

To arms! to arms! and then to victory,

Resolved to conquer, or resolved to die.

This grandiloquence subsides into the most astounding bathos.

Sebastian

Advance, advance, my lord, with all your force,

Or else the prince and victory is lost,

Which now depends upon his single valour;

Who, like some ancient hero, or some god,

Thunders amongst the thickest of his enemies,

Destroying all before him in such numbers,

That piles of dead obstruct his passage to the living –

Relieve him straight, my lord, with our last cavalry and hopes.

Perhaps in this case, the faulty scansion and doubtful grammar are evidence of a corrupt text. Here is a sentimental passage, a description of night, intended to be poetical.

Queen.

Let all the chambers too be filled with lights:

There’s a solemnity, methinks, in night,

That does insinuate love into the soul.

And makes the bashful lover more assured.

Elvira.

Madam,

You speak as if this were your first enjoyment.

Queen.

My first! Oh, Elvira, his powers, like his charms.

His wit, or bravery, every hour renews;

Love gathers sweets like flowers, which grow more fragrant

The nearer they approach maturity.

[Knock.]

– Hark! ’tis my Moor, – give him admittance straight.

The thought comes o’er me like a gentle gale,

Raising my blood into a thousand curls.

There are ranting passages, too long to quote, that merit the ridicule cast upon the Drydenian drama in Chronon­hotontkologos, with its inimitable⁠ ⁠–

Bombardinian.

A blow! – Shall Bombardinian take a blow?

Blush – blush, thou sun! – start back, thou rapid ocean!

Hills! vales! seas! mountains! – all commixing, crumble,

And into chaos pulverise the world!

For Bombardinian has received a blow,

And Chronon­hotonthologos shall die!

In her next play, The Rover, Mrs. Behn left these crude heroics for what was to be her most prolific comedy vein. It appeared anonymously, and was so successful that she followed it up immediately with another anonymous play. The Debauchee, which has been described as the worst and least original of all her dramatic works. The Rover was produced in 1677, and held the stage the longest of any of her plays. In 1681 she brought out a second part, changing the scene from Naples to Madrid; otherwise the sequel is almost a replica of the first.

What helped to make The Rover so popular was the subject. As she said in the Epilogue –

The banished Cavaliers! a roving blade!

A Popish carnival! a masquerade!

The devil’s in it if this will please the nation,

In these our blessed times of reformation.

When conventicling is so much in fashion,

And yet –

Her argument is in the aposiopesis. This was the year before Titus Gates denounced the alleged Popish Plot; Shaftesbury was in opposition, the champion of Nonconformity, the idol of the populace, and the bugbear of the Court party, who believed him to be fomenting heresy and sedition. A year or two later, Mrs. Behn was to caricature him at full length in The City Heiress; or, Sir Timothy Treat-all. In The Rover, she was making the same political appeal to the party prejudices of the Tories. Almighty rabble, says the Prologue to the second part, “’tis to you this day our humble author dedicates the play.”

A band of exiled Royalists are engaged in the chase of pleasure in a foreign capital. The most reckless and dissipated of the merry crew is Willmore, the Rover, one of those swaggering inconstants whom, according to Mrs. Behn, no woman can resist. A certain lady, nevertheless, observes, “I should as soon be enamoured on the north wind, a tempest, or a clap of thunder. Bless me from such a blast.” The most prominent female character in each of the two plays bearing the name of “The Rover” is set down in the bill as “a famous curtezan”; so the indescribable nature of the incidents may be imagined. Willmore was born to dash the matrimonial schemes of soberer men; he cuts the knot of all the intrigues, licit or illicit; he is the impersonation of Astrea’s code of sexual morality, of which the two most salient definitions are summed up as follows:

“Conscience: a cheap pretence to cozen fools withal⁠ ⁠–”

“Constancy, that current coin for fools.”

The dialogue is always full of life and vigour, often sparkling with wit, never quotable; arid it is the same with the highly diverting scenes of both these plays. One marvels at the state of society when such impudent things could be put on the stage, and an audience applaud them.

In Sir Patient Fancy, Mrs. Behn borrowed her plot from Molière’s Malade Imaginaire. It is one of the most vivacious of her plays, and the most completely devoid of moral feeling. The valetudinarian is a rich old alderman, married to a beautiful young wife, who has a gallant. His suspicions being awakened, the jealous old man is persuaded, on what must be confessed very inadequate evidence, that Wittmore, the gallant, is really a suitor for his daughter. But the daughter has a lover already whom he dislikes, and so we have two intrigues going on – with divers others, be it understood – the lover and the gallant both in seeming rivalry courting the daughter of the house, whilst Wittmore and Lady Fancy are scheming to outwit the doubly deluded husband. The usual complications are provided in the usual way. There is a double assignation in the dark; the gallant is mistaken for the lover, and the lover for the gallant; and at the critical moment Sir Patient appears on the scene. Lady Fancy is one of the shameless and absolutely unscrupulous women Astrea loved to portray. She carries off the situation with unabashed address, continues to hoodwink her spouse, until, by a combination of accidents, her perfidy is revealed. But all the characters are so entirely absorbed in self that there is no bias in the reader’s mind in favour either of the hypochondriacal knight, the clever unfaithful wife, or the honest lovers; and the confusion of the intriguers gives real satisfaction to nobody.

Betterton took the part of Wittmore, and Mrs. Gwyn that of the affected learned woman Lady Knowell, who must have been a very comic figure on the stage, well acted.

She is one of those who think there is no learning but what is comprised in the tongues of antiquity: she is a Mrs. Malaprop in Latin.

O faugh! Mr. Fancy, what have you said, mother tongue! Can anything that’s great or moving be expressed in filthy English? – I’ll give you an energetic proof, Mr. Fancy; observe but divine Homer in the Grecian language – Ton apamibomenos prosiphe podas ochus Achilles! ah, how it sounds! which Englished dwindles into the most grating stuff – Then the swift-foot Achilles made reply; oh faugh!

Her niece has very different views, and expresses the commoner opinion of her sex in the remark, “Sure he’s too much a gentleman to be a scholar.”

Lady Knowell’s excessive conversation bores Sir Patient dreadfully, though he is no less a bore with his anxious absorption in the progress of his imaginary ailments. Says one of the characters, “He has been on the point of going off this twenty years.” He is continually setting his affairs in order. His favourite reading is furnished by prescriptions and apothecaries’ bills, which provide him with a sort of diary. “By this rule, good Mr. Doctor,” says he, “I am sicker this month than I was the last.”

Broader farce comes in with the daughter’s clownish suitor. Sir Credulous Easy, “a foolish Devonshire squire.”

Sir Credulous.

Come, undo my portmantle, and equip me, that I may look like some body before I see the ladies – Curry, thou shalt e’en remove now from groom to footman; for I’ll ne’er keep horse more, no, nor mare neither, since my poor Gillian’s departed this life.

Curry.

Nay, to say truth, sir, ’twas a good-natured civil beast, and so she remained to her last gasp, for she could never have left this world in a better time, as the saying is, so near her journey’s end.

Sir Credulous.

A civil beast! Why was it civilly done of her, thinkest thou, to die at Brentford when had she lived till tomorrow, she had been converted into money and have been in my pocket? for now I am to marry and live in town, I’ll sell off all my pads; poor fool, I think she e’en died of grief I would have sold her.

Curry.

Well, well, sir, her time was come you must think, and we are all mortal as the saying is.

Sir Credulous.

Well, ’twas the loving’st tit – but grass and hay, she’s gone – where be her shoes, Curry?

Curry.

Here, sir, her skin went for good ale at Brentford. [Gives him the shoes.]

Sir Credulous.

Ah, how often has she carried me upon these shoes to Mother Jumbles. What pure ale she brewed!

At a later stage Sir Credulous enacts the part of Falstaff, taking refuge in a basket, in which he has to submit to various indignities without daring to move a muscle lest he betray himself. Mrs. Behn must have had indulgent audiences, who were satisfied with a very cheap kind of humour. In one scene, which has no more affectation of probability than a harlequinade, Sir Credulous is persuaded to feign dumbness, and to court his mistress by signs, whilst his pretended interpreter relieves him of his diamond ring, his cambric handkerchief, and his purse, as presents to the lady.

The enfant terrible is already a figure in low comedy. Sir Patient’s seven-year-old daughter admonishes her father, when he tries to escape the loquacious Lady Knowell, in these terms:

Fanny.

Should I tell a lie, Sir Father, and to a lady of her quality?

Sir Patience.

Her quality and she are a couple of impertinent things, which are very troublesome, and not to be endured I take it.

Fanny.

Sir, we should bear with things we do not love sometimes, ’tis a sort of trial, sir, a kind of mortification fit for a good Christian.

Sir Patience.

Why, what a notable talking baggage is this? How came you by this doctrine?

Fanny.

I remember, sir, you preached it once to my sister, when the old alderman was the text, whom you exhorted her to marry, but the wicked creature made ill use on’t.

Unfortunately, Mrs. Behn’s sense of propriety is so defective that she makes this precocious child the confidante of her elder sister’s highly improper love affairs. ‘For I have heard you say,’ this budding coquette remarks, ‘women were born to no other end than to love; and ’tis fit I should learn to live and die in my calling.’ Such is the cynicism of one who has no faith in the virtue of her own sex, and less in that of men. Yet she could say, in her epilogue, to the coxcomb who cried ‘Ah rot it – ’tis a woman’s comedy,’

‘What has poor woman done, that she must be

Debarred from sense, and sacred poetry?’

Sacred poetry indeed!

In 1682, her most successful year, she brought out, besides The Fake Count, two political comedies, or at least, comedies that owed much of their popularity to their direct appeal to party feeling. The Roundheads; or, the Good Old Cause is a scurrilous lampoon on the Commonwealth. It represents the Parliamentarian generals, Fleetwood, Lambert, and Desborough, as sanctimonious hypocrites, each scheming to betray his comrades and raise himself to supreme office in the state, largely by the efforts of his wife. A traitor in the camp, Corporal Right, is described in the playbill as, ‘An Oliverian commander, but honest and a cavalier in his heart.’ This is an index to the character of the piece, which, if a man had written it, we should speak of as a cowardly attack on the fallen – a shameless appeal to the basest instincts of the mob. For the most part the abuse is too offensive to quote, but the following scene representing a meeting of the council of ladies will illustrate the spirit of Mrs. Behn’s satire:

[Enter page with women, and Loveless dressed as a woman.]

Lady Lambert.

Gentlewomen, what’s your business with us?

Loveless.

Gentlewomen! some of us are ladies.

Lady Lambert.

Ladies, in good time; by what authority, and from whom do you derive your title of ladies?

Loveless.

From our husbands.

Gilliflower.

Husbands, who are they, and of what standing?

Second Lady.

Of no long standing, I confess.

Gilliflower.

That’s a common grievance indeed.

Lady Desborough.

And ought to be redressed.

Lady Lambert.

And that shall be taken into consideration; write it down. Gilliflower, who made your husband a knight, woman?

Loveless.

Oliver the first, an’t please ye.

Lady Lambert.

Of horrid memory; write that down – who yours?

Second Lady.

Richard the fourth, an’t like your honour.

Gilliflower.

Of sottish memory; shall I write that down too?

Lady Desborough.

Most remarkably.

Lady Cromwell.

Heav’ns! can I hear this profanation of our Royal Family.

Loveless.

I petition for a pension; my husband, deceased, was a constant active man, in all the late rebellion, against the Man; he plundered my Lord Capel, he betrayed his dearest friend, Brown Bushel, who trusted his life in his hands, and several others; plundering their wives and children even to their smocks.

Lady Lambert.

Most considerable service, and ought to be considered.

Second Lady.

And most remarkably, at the trial of the late Man, I spat in his face, and betrayed the Earl of Holland to the Parliament.

Lady Cromwell.

In the king’s face, you mean – it showed your zeal for the good cause.

Second Lady.

And ’twas my husband that headed the rabble, to pull down Gog and Magog, the bishops, broke the idols in the windows, and turned the churches into stables and dens of thieves; robbed the altar of the cathedral of the twelve pieces of plate called the twelve Apostles, turned eleven of them into money, and kept Judas for his own use at home.

Lady Fleetwood.

On my word, most wisely performed, note it down –

Third Lady.

And my husband made libels on the Man from the first troubles to this day, defamed and profaned the Woman and her children, printed all the Man’s letters to the Woman with burlesque marginal notes, pulled down the sumptuous shrines in churches, and with the golden and popish spoils adorned his house and chimney-pieces.

Lady Lambert.

We shall consider these great services.

We must stop here; the rest of the scene is a more ribald kind of invective even than the foregoing.

In The City Heiress (1682), based on Middleton’s A Mad World, My Masters, the satire is not so heavy, and has far more wit. There is, no need to describe the plot, which has a family resemblance to most of the others. The hero is a certain Tom Wilding, the very counterpart of Wittmore and Willmore the Rover. He is the scapegrace nephew of Sir Timothy Treat-all, who is undisguisedly intended for Shaftesbury, Dryden’s ‘false Achitophel.’ Sir Timothy is, of course, the general butt of the satire, being cozened of his property, tricked by his nephew into receiving him as an emissary from the Polish electors, and, to cap the whole, married to a supposed heiress, who turns out to be an impostor. In the scene where Wilding carries out his trickery the political meaning is very obvious.

[Enter Wilding in disguise, Dresswell, footmen and pages.]

Wilding.

Sir, by your reverend aspect, you should be the renowned Maitre de Hotel.

Sir Timothy.

Mater de Otell! I have not the honour to know any of that name, I am called Sir Timothy Treat-all. [Bowing.]

Wilding.

The same, sir; I have been bred abroad, and thought all persons of quality had spoke French.

Sir Timothy.

Not City persons of quality, my lord.

Wilding.

I’m glad on’t, sir; for ’tis a nation I hate, as indeed I do all monarchies.

Sir Timothy.

Hum! Hate monarchy! Your lordship is most welcome. [Bows,]

Wilding.

Unless elective monarchies, which so resemble a commonwealth.

Sir Timothy.

Right, my lord; where every man may hope to take his turn – Your lordship is most singularly welcome. [Bows low.]

Wilding.

And though I am a stranger to your person, I am not to your fame, amongst the sober party of the Amsterdamians, all the French Huguenots throughout Geneva; even to Hungary and Poland, fame’s trumpet sounds your praise, making the Pope to fear, the rest to admire you.

Sir Timothy.

I’m much obliged to the renowned mobile.

Wilding.

So you will say, when you shall hear my embassy. The Polanders by me salute you, sir, and have in the next new election pricked ye down for their succeeding king.

Sir Timothy.

How, my lord, pricked me down for their king! Why this is wonderful! pricked me, unworthy me down for a king! How could I merit this amazing glory!

Wilding.

They know, he that can be so great a patriot to his native countiy, when but a private person, what must he be when power is on his side?

Sir Timothy.

Ay, my lord, my country, my bleeding country! there’s the stop to all my rising greatness. Shall I be so ungrateful to disappoint this big expecting nation? defeat the sober party, and my neighbours, for any Polish crown? But yet, my lord, I will consider on’t: meantime my house is yours;

Wilding.

I’ve brought you, sir, the measure of the crown: ha, it fits you to a hair. [Pulls out a riband, measures his head.] You were by heaven and nature framed that monarch.

When Sir Timothy finds out the trick that has been played upon him, he cries, ‘Undone, undone! I shall never make Guildhall speech more: but he shall hang for it, if there be ever a witness between this and Salamanca for money.’ There are many more hits against false witnesses and credulous juries. When hard pressed, Sir Timothy is quite ready to protest himself a good friend even to the Pope.

Sir Timothy.

Nay, gentlemen, not but I love and honour his Holiness with all my soul; and if his Grace did but know what I’ve done for him, d’ye see –

Fop.

You done for the Pope, sirrah! Why what have you done for the Pope?

Sir Timothy.

Why, sir, an’t like ye, I have done you very great service, very great service; for I have been, d'ye see, in a small trial I had, the cause and occasion of invalidating the evidence to that degree, that I suppose no jury in Christendom will ever have the impudence to believe them hereafter, should they swear against his Holiness and all the conclave of cardinals.

And when his house is found to be full of ‘knavery, sedition, libels, rights and privileges, with a new fashioned oath of abjuration, called the Association,’ he shouts,

‘Why I’ll deny it, sir; for what jury will believe so wise a magistrate as I could communicate such secrets to such as you? I’ll say you forged them, and put them in – or print every one of them, and own them, as long as they were writ and published in London, sir. Come, come, the world is not so bad yet, but a man may speak treason within the walls of London, thanks be to God, and honest conscientious jurymen.’

Two later plays, The Lucky Chance, a comedy, and The Emperor of the Moon, a farce, were both failures. In The Widow Ranter Astrea tells the story of Bacon’s rebellion in Virginia, and makes use of her own experiences of life in the American colonies.

It was the truth and power with which she recounted what she had herself witnessed in Surinam that has singled out for permanence the best of her novels, the story of the royal slave, Oroonoko. We need not give ear to the whispers of a liaison with the heroic black. A very different emotion inspires the tale, the same feeling of outraged humanity that in after days inflamed Mrs. Stowe. Oroonoko is the first emancipation novel. It is also the first glorification of the Natural Man. Mrs. Behn was, in a manner, the precursor of Bernardin de Saint-Pierre; and in her attempts to depict the splendour of tropical scenery she foreshadows, though feebly, the prose epics of Chateaubriand. There is fierce satire in Oroonoko. Who would think that Astrea, who entertained the depraved pit at the Duke’s Theatre, could have drawn those idyllic pictures of Oroonoko in his native Coromantien, of the truth and purity of the savage uncontaminated with the vices of Christian Europe, or have written such vehement invectives against the baseness and utter falsehood of the whites?

‘These people represented to me,’ she said, ‘an absolute idea of the first state of innocence, before man knew how to sin: and ’tis most evident and plain that simple nature is the most harmless, inoffensive and virtuous mistress. ’Tis she alone, if she were permitted, that better instructs the world than all the inventions of man: religion would here but destroy that tranquillity they possess by ignorance; and laws would teach them to know offences of which now they have no notion. They once made mourning and fasting for the death of the English governor, who had given his hand to come on such a day to them, and neither came nor sent; believing when a man’s word was past, nothing but death could or should prevent his keeping it: and when they saw he was not dead, they asked him what name they had for a man who promised a thing he did not do? The governor told them such a man was a liar, which was a word of infamy to a gentleman. Then one of them replied, ‘Governor, you are a liar, and guilty of that infamy.’

It is said further on, ‘such ill morals are only practiced in Christian countries, where they prefer the bare name of religion; and, without virtue and morality, think that sufficient.’

Oroonoko is no savage, but the ideal man, as conceived by Mrs. Behn, the man out of Eden; and in him she has an absolute criterion by which to judge and condemn the object of her satire – European civilisation. His bravery, wisdom, chastity, his high sense of honour, are the idealisations of a sentimental young lady, carried away by her admiration for a truly heroic figure, and disgusted by the vicious manners of the colonists, whom she describes as ‘rogues and renagades, that have abandoned their own countries for rapine, murder, theft and villainies.’ ‘Do you not hear,’ says Oroonoko, ‘how they upbraid each other with infamy of life, below the wildest savages? And shall we render obedience to such a degenerate race, who have no one human virtue left, to distinguish them from the vilest creatures?’

The story has the natural elements of drama. Southern wrote a very bad tragedy on the theme of Mrs. Behn’s narrative, altering it slightly, and adding a great deal of foulness that is, happily, not in the original. Oroonoko loves the beautiful Imoinda, a maiden of his own race, not the child of a European who has adopted a savage life, as in Southern’s play. But when they are on the brink of happiness, the old king, Oroonoko’s grandfather, demands her for his harem. Imoinda acts the part of Abishag the Shunamite, and her lover that of Adonijah. The vengeful monarch discovers their attachment, and sells her into slavery. Oroonoko, soon afterwards, is kidnapped, and finds himself in Surinam, where Imoinda is already famous as the beautiful slave, as chaste as she is beautiful. They recognise each other in a touching scene, and are suffered to be re-united. Oroonoko distinguishes himself by his virtue and prowess. But he quickly finds that his tyrants promise freedom to himself and Imoinda merely to delude them into good behaviour. He flies into the wilderness at the head of a body of slaves. The planters follow, the blacks fling down their arms, and Oroonoko surrenders on the assurance that they shall not be chastised. The white governor is a scoundrel. The magnanimous negro is put in irons and tortured. Imoinda is set apart for a worse fate. But she prefers to die at his beloved hands, rather than bear dishonour. Oroonoko, with Roman fortitude, slays his wife, and with the stoicism of the Indian smokes a pipe of tobacco while his captors execute him piecemeal.

The Fair Jilt; or, the Amours of Prince Tarquin and Miranda, also purports to be a recital of incidents Astrea herself had witnessed. ‘As Love,’ it begins, ‘is the most noble and divine passion of the soul, so it is that to which we may justly attribute all the real satisfactions of life; and without it man is unfinished and unhappy.” She hardly succeeds in proving the divinity of the passion she portrays. Miranda is only a false name for a Beguine at Antwerp, who had many lovers; Tarquin is the real name of a German prince, the most illustrious of her votaries. It is the story of a fair hypocrite, whose beauty drives men mad. Miranda, whose raging fever of desire reminds one of Phaedra, being repulsed by a handsome young friar, falls back on the device of Potiphar’s wife, to secure revenge. This episode is full of force and vigour; but Tarquin’s subjugation to the enchantress, his complaisant obedience to her criminal schemes, which is offered for our admiration as an example of the illimitable power of love, does not strike us so. Passion, Mrs. Behn maintains, condones everything. There is nothing too heinous, too flagitious, to attain a sort of dignity if done in the cause of love. Tarquin attempts to assassinate the Fair Jilt’s sister, and is deservedly condemned to death. The novelist depicts him as a martyr, and has a tear to spare even for the more culpable Miranda.

At last the bell tolled, and he was to take leave of the princess, as his last work of life, and the most hard he had to accomplish. He threw himself at her feet, and gazing on her as she sat more dead than alive, overwhelmed with silent grief, they both remained some moments speechless; and then, as if one rising tide of tears had supplied both their eyes, it burst out in tears at the same instant: and when his sighs gave way, he uttered a thousand farewells, so soft, so passionate, and moving, that all who were by were extremely touched with it, and said, ‘That nothing could be seen more deplorable and melancholy.’

All that can be said in in comment, is that there have been novelists since Mrs. Behn who have written stuff that is quite as false, lurid, and depraved, and readers, who have gushed over it. Only the sinners begotten of later romancers do not sin with such abandon. Astrea has never lacked successors, though the cut of her mantle has been altered to suit the changes of the mode.

The omnipotence of love is again the theme in another ‘true novel,’ The Nun; or, the Perjured Beauty, in which a similar heroine is also the villain of the plot. Astrea frankly accepted Charles the Second’s well known opinion as to the frailty of woman. ‘Virtue,’ she makes one of her characters say,’ is but a name kept from scandal, which the most base of women best preserve.’ But Ardelia does not even trouble about appearances. She is one of those passionate, insatiable, capricious women who play a leading rô1e in every one of Astrea’s comedies, and are always drawn with energy and truth because their author’s heart was in them. The plot is worked out with great ingenuity in this story, and also in a later one, The Lucky Mistake, in which the reader is kept in the titillations of suspense to the final page. In the last named, also, there is some attempt at character drawing.

Oroonoko was not the only novel in which Mrs. Behn tried to portray ideal feelings and elevated morality. Agnes de Castro is a sweet, sentimental tragedy, which at least has the merit of being free from errors of taste. Agnes is maid of honour to Donna Constantia, wife of the Prince of Portugal, and has the misfortune to be loved by her mistress’s husband. But there is no foul intrigue in the story. Don Pedro struggles honourably against his passion: ‘his fault was not voluntary’ … ‘a commanding power, a fatal star, had forced him to love in spite of himself.’ The Princess is so high-minded – after the seventeenth-century pattern of high-mindedness – that she admits his innocence. ‘I have no reproaches to make against you, knowing that ’tis inclination that disposes hearts, and not reason.” Her complaisance goes so far that she even conjures Agnes not to deprive him of her society, since it is necessary to his happiness. But the truce is brought to a fatal ending by the malice of an envious woman, who persuades Constantia that the lovers are guilty, and so breaks her heart. The novel is painfully stilted, and reads like the discarded sketch for a tragedy, which had been worked up to suit another style.

It must be confessed that, apart from Oroonoko, Mrs. Behn’s fiction is of very little importance in the history of our literature. Her best work was put into her comedies, which contain, not only much diversion, but also strong, and perhaps too highly coloured, pictures of the manners and morals of the pleasure-seekers of her time, in all classes. Unfortunately, it would be difficult indeed to compile even a book of elegant extracts that would give the modern reader any adequate idea of their merits, without either emasculating them altogether or nauseating him with their coarseness.

Ernest A. Baker

February, 1905.

Oronooko

I do not pretend, in giving you the history of this Royal Slave, to entertain my reader with 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.

I was myself an eyewitness to a great part of what you will find here 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, who gave us the whole transactions of his youth; and though I shall omit, for brevity’s sake, a thousand little accidents of his life, which, however pleasant to us, where history was scarce and adventures very rare, yet might prove tedious and heavy to my reader, in a world where he finds diversions for every minute, new and strange. But we who were perfectly charmed with the character of this great man were curious to gather every circumstance of his life.

The scene of the last part of his adventures lies in a colony in America, called Surinam, in the West Indies.

But before I give you the story of this gallant slave, it is fit I tell you the manner of bringing them to these new colonies; those they make use of there not being natives of the place; for those we live with in perfect amity, without daring to command them; but, on the contrary, caress them with all the brotherly and friendly affection in the world; trading with them for their fish, venison, buffalo’s skins, and little rarities; as marmosets, a sort of monkey, as big as a rat or weasel, but of marvelous and delicate shape, having face and hands like a human creature; and cousheries, a little beast in the form and fashion of a lion, as big as a kitten, but so exactly made in all parts like that noble beast that it is it in miniature. Then for little parakeets, great parrots, macaws, and a thousand other birds and beasts of wonderful and surprising forms, shapes, and colours. For skins of prodigious snakes, of which there are some threescore yards in length; as is the skin of one that may be seen at his Majesty’s Antiquary’s; where are also some rare flies, of amazing forms and colours, presented to them by myself; some as big as my fist, some less; and all of various excellencies, such as art cannot imitate. Then we trade for feathers, which they order into all shapes, make themselves little short habits of them and glorious wreaths for their heads, necks, arms, and legs, whose tinctures are unconceivable. I had a set of these presented to me, and I gave them to the King’s Theatre, and it was the dress of the Indian Queen, infinitely admired by persons of quality; and was unimitable. Besides these, a thousand little knacks and rarities in nature; and some of art, as their baskets, weapons, aprons, etc. We dealt with them with beads of all colours, knives, axes, pins, and needles; which they used only as tools to drill holes with in their ears, noses, and lips, where they hang a great many little things; as long beads, bits of tin, brass or silver beat thin, and any shining trinket. The beads they weave into aprons about a quarter of an ell long, and of the same breadth; working them very prettily in flowers of several colours; which apron they wear just before them, as Adam and Eve did the fig leaves; the men wearing a long stripe of linen, which they deal with us for. They thread these beads also on long cotton threads, and make girdles to tie their aprons to, which come twenty times, or more, about the waist, and then cross, like a shoulder-belt, both ways, and round their necks, arms, and legs. This adornment, with their long black hair, and the face painted in little specks or flowers here and there, makes them a wonderful figure to behold. Some of the beauties, which indeed are finely shaped, as almost all are, and who have pretty features, are charming and novel; for they have all that is called beauty, except the colour, which is a reddish yellow; or after a new oiling, which they often use to themselves, they are of the colour of a new brick, but smooth, soft, and sleek. They are extreme modest and bashful, very shy, and nice of being touched. And though they are all thus naked, if one lives forever among them there is not to be seen an indecent action, or glance; and being continually used to see one another so unadorned, so like our first parents before the Fall, it seems as if they had no wishes, there being nothing to heighten curiosity; but all you can see, you see at once, and every moment see; and where there is no novelty, there can be no curiosity. Not but I have seen a handsome young Indian dying for love of a very beautiful young Indian maid; but all his courtship was to fold his arms, pursue her with his eyes, and sighs were all his language; while she, as if no such lover were present, or rather as if she desired none such, carefully guarded her eyes from beholding him; and never approached him but she looked down with all the blushing modesty I have seen in the most severe and cautious of our world. And these people represented to me an absolute idea of the first state of innocence, before man knew how to sin. And it is most evident and plain that simple Nature is the most harmless, inoffensive, and virtuous mistress. It is she alone, if she were permitted, that better instructs the world than all the inventions of man. Religion would here but destroy that tranquillity they possess by ignorance; and laws would but teach them to know offence, of which now they have no notion. They once made mourning and fasting for the death of the English Governor, who had given his hand to come on such a day to them, and neither came nor sent; believing, when a man’s word was past, nothing but death could or should prevent his keeping it; and when they saw he was not dead, they asked him what name they had for a man who promised a thing he did not do. The Governor told them, such a man was a liar, which was a word of infamy to a gentleman. Then one of them replied, ‘Governor, you are a liar, and guilty of that infamy.’ They have a native justice, which knows no fraud; and they understand no vice, or cunning, but when they are taught by the white men. They have plurality of wives; which, when they grow old, serve those that succeed them, who are young, but with a servitude easy and respected; and unless they take slaves in war, they have no other attendants.

Those on that continent where I was had no king; but the oldest war-captain was obeyed with great resignation.

A war-captain is a man who has led them on to battle with conduct and success; of whom I shall have occasion to speak more hereafter, and of some other of their customs and manners, as they fall in my way.

With these people, as I said, we live in perfect tranquillity and good understanding, as it behoves us to do; they knowing all the places where to seek the best food of the country, and the means of getting it; and for very small and invaluable trifles, supply us with that it is impossible for us to get; for they do not only in the woods, and over the savannahs, in hunting, supply the parts of hounds, by swiftly scouring through those almost impassable places, and by the mere activity of their feet run down the nimblest deer and other eatable beasts; but in the water, one would think they were gods of the rivers, or fellow citizens of the deep; so rare an art they have in swimming, diving, and almost living in water; by which they command the less swift inhabitants of the floods. And then for shooting, what they cannot take, or reach with their hands, they do with arrows; and have so admirable an aim that they will split almost an hair, and at any distance that an arrow can reach; they will shoot down oranges and other fruit, and only touch the stalk with the dart’s point, that they may not hurt the fruit. So that they being on all occasions very useful to us, we find it absolutely necessary to caress them as friends, and not to treat them as slaves, nor dare we do other, their numbers so far surpassing ours in that continent.

Those then whom we make use of to work in our plantations of sugar are negroes, black slaves altogether, who are transported thither in this manner.

Those who want slaves make a bargain with a master or a captain of a ship, and contract to pay him so much apiece, a matter of twenty pound a head, for as many as he agrees for, and to pay for them when they shall be delivered on such a plantation; so that when there arrives a ship laden with slaves, they who have so contracted go aboard, and receive their number by lot; and perhaps in one lot that may be for ten, there may happen to be three or four men, the rest women and children. Or be there more or less of either sex, you are obliged to be contented with your lot.