It is the object of this brief paper to introduce the good-natured reader, who, as a well-organized human being, is undoubtedly possessed of a proper love of fiction, to two women who had much to do with settling the English novel into its true line of development. I confess I could wish that the ladies in question were, socially and morally, a trifle more presentable. I can well remember the time when I myself made their acquaintance in the library of the British Museum, and how I was almost ashamed of myself, despite the fact that I had the definite purposes of a student to support me, when I thought of the hours I had been fain to spend in their singularly unedifying company. But in the study of literary evolution, as in that of the history of the world at large, it is not always possible to be over-fastidious. When we are interested in a thing done, we must consider, as 126cheerfully as may be, the doer and the doing of it, though we may have fault enough to find sometimes with the character of the former and the manner of the latter.

The women to whose personalities and writings we are presently to turn—Mrs. Behn and Mrs. Manley—stand out among the least attractive products of an age of low ideals and scandalous living. But they none the less remain figures of some permanent attractiveness to those of us who care to investigate the beginnings of our great modern prose fiction; and it is on account of their relative or historic importance that I have undertaken to say something about them in this place.

In order, however, to make such historic importance clear, we must go back a little in our inquiry.

The titanic imaginative energy of the Elizabethan and Jacobean periods had found its principal outlet in the drama. It was on the stage and through the literature of the stage that, during the most brilliant era of its intellectual activity, the genius of the English people, for the most part, sought expression. The drama thus became the representative and the embodiment of all that was strongest and most characteristic 127in the national life. In it we find the great mental and moral movements of the time gathered up and made vocal; to it we turn for the fullest and richest manifestation of the national mind. As Mr. Symonds truly said: “The drama, its own original creation, stood to the English nation in the place of all the other arts. England ... needed no ?sthetic outlet but the drama.”

But little by little the close connection between the stage and the national life was severed; and cut off from its sources of deepest impulse and inspiration, the drama fell gradually into a condition of decrepitude and decay. For many years before the Revolution the breach between theatre and people had been a slowly widening one; and by the time the Restoration once more gave free rein to dramatic art, the separation had become complete. No longer making catholic appeal to the whole community, no longer absorbing into itself, by way of nourishment and stimulation, the broad and generous interests of a varied social life, the drama now became the mouthpiece and the mirror of one class only—of the aristocratic class, which had brought foreign fashions, tastes, morality, with it from abroad. The theatre of Shakspere and his contemporaries had been, as it were, the flower and 128fruitage of a period of intense national vigor and excitement; the theatre of Congreve and Wycherley was little more than the passing amusement of the idle and demoralized fashionable world. Harassed by Puritan austerity on the one hand, and more seriously perverted by Royalist profligacy upon the other, the drama was forced into a relationship with the larger mass of the people at once unnatural and most disastrous; and thus the plays of the time, in spite of all their pungency of wit and glitter of dialogue, lack that breadth of horizon, earnestness of purpose, and firm grasp of life, without which no body of literature—and no body of dramatic literature especially—can lay claim to permanent value and significance.

Meanwhile a new taste was growing up, and with it a fresh channel was opened for imaginative activity. While the drama, sapped at its foundations, was sinking deeper and deeper into corruption, and before as yet any effort had been put forth to save it from its fate, the first noteworthy experiments were being made towards the development of a class of literature which has since acquired unrivalled popularity, and every year continues to fill a larger and larger place in public estimation, as well as upon our 129library shelves. The causes which combined to bring about the decline of the drama and the rise of the modern novel were so varied in character and intricate in their outworkings, that even the briefest discussion of them here would commit us to an unwarrantable digression; though it should be said, and said emphatically, that the change is not to be regarded as a mere matter of shifting literary taste, since it was unquestionably related, in the most direct and intimate way, with some of the largest and deepest movements of the time in society, manners, and general thought.[5] Suffice it for us now to remark the simple fact that, while the dramatists of the Restoration were engaged upon works which, fortunately for English society and letters, left but little permanent mark upon the history of the theatre, the foundations were being slowly but firmly laid upon which the vast superstructure of modern fiction was presently to be reared.

So thoroughly absorbed had men been in the drama, and so natural had it seemed for those 130of imaginative power to turn directly to the stage, that hitherto prose fiction, though by no means neglected, had done little towards making a decisive start. Some popular stories, then long current, had been gathered up and circulated in chap-books, and had in sundry cases furnished materials for contemporary playwrights; translations had been made from several foreign languages, and in this way “Don Quixote,” and the works of Rabelais, Boccaccio, Montemayor, and others, introduced to English readers; while such collections of versions and adaptations as those of Painter and Turbervile might have been found, it is said, so great had been their temporary vogue, on almost every London bookstall. Moreover, the form of fiction had been occasionally employed by philosophers for broaching new theories of life and government; as by More, in his “Utopia,” and Bacon, in his “New Atlantis.” And, far more important than any such sporadic efforts as these, there were the romances produced by some of the early dramatists—Lyly, and his most famous followers, Lodge and Greene, in particular. To these have to be added the chivalrous pastoral of Sir Philip Sidney, “warbler of poetic prose”; and in a very different category, the stories and 131sketches of Thomas Nash, Dekker, and Chettle, whose work, apart altogether from any question of absolute merit, is of supreme significance to the student of English fiction, because in it we find the crude beginnings of the picaresque novel of later times.

Lumped together in this way—and the above paragraph makes no pretence at completeness of statement,—the amount of prose fiction of one and another kind produced in England under Elizabeth and James the First may seem to be considerable, and certainly no student of the evolution of literature, or of the many-sided intellectual activity of the Shaksperian age, would to-day think of underrating it. Yet it is possible perhaps to go to the other extreme, and to exaggerate its historic importance. To trace the connection between the tentative output of the ’prentice-writers just referred to and the fully grown fiction of the eighteenth century—to indicate, for example, the lines along which Nash leads us through Defoe to Smollett and Fielding, and the points of unexpected contact between Sidney and Richardson is an inquiry full of curious interest for the special student. But too much might easily be made of the results brought to light thereby. After duly allowing 132for the isolated productions of the Elizabethan period, which undoubtedly broke ground in many directions, we come back still to the broad fact, that it was not until after the Restoration, and largely as a result of what was then undertaken and accomplished, that the novel firmly established itself as a well-defined form of literary art. With the Restoration, therefore, it may fairly be said that we open a new chapter in the history of English fiction.

The new era, however, began badly enough, in the midst of a byway of most absurd experiment, which could not, in the nature of things, lead to any permanent achievement. For along with so much else that was French in manners, fashions, morals, turns of speech, there had already been imported into England a taste for the peculiar form of romance—the roman à longue haleine—which was just then enjoying amazing popularity in the country of its birth, on the other side of the Channel. As we turn back to the dull and monstrous productions of the class now in question, we find it difficult enough to conceive that in any place, under any possible circumstances, there should have been men and women able to derive not simply enjoyment, but 133passionate and continuous enjoyment, from their pages. But the famous H?tel de Rambouillet had set its mark upon them, and in the well-prepared country of the “Arcadia,” they realized instant and complete success, not only among the ultra-fashionables of a Gallicized society, but also in the more general reading world.

We must glance for a moment at one or two of the most salient characteristics of the school of fiction which thus became for a time so widely influential, that we may at once appreciate its stultifying tendencies, and bring into clear perspective what we shall presently have to say about the work of Mrs. Manley and Mrs. Behn. In doing this we need go no farther than the examples furnished by the three most prominent French leaders of polite taste—Gomberville, La Calprenède, and Mlle. de Scudéri.

In the first place, the would-be student of the so-called classical-heroic romances of these once celebrated writers is staggered by their tremendous bulk and inordinate prolixity. The modern reader shudders at Richardson, and takes his “Pamela” and “Sir Charles Grandison” in condensed editions. But Richardson is brevity itself compared with these earlier indefatigable laborers in the field of the novel. Gomberville’s 134“Polexandre” began in four volumes quarto, and in its later editions comprised some six thousand pages; the “Cléopatre” of La Calprenède, when finished, filled twelve octavo volumes; “Pharamond,” written partly by the same author, and partly by Pierre d’Ortigue de Vaumorière, reached nearly the same length; while the “Clélie” and “Le Grand Cyrus” of Mlle. de Scudéri—who in the matter of resolute long-windedness was, naturally enough, more than a match for her masculine rivals—extended respectively to some eight thousand and fifteen thousand octavo pages.[6] These, and such as these, were the works that Pope was ridiculing when in “The Rape of the Lock” he built out of them an altar for the due celebration of the “adventurous baron’s” religious rites; and he was surely justified in describing them as “huge French romances.” It makes us feel how little of permanence and stability there is in any matter of taste, when we remember that these colossal productions, over which the most patient reader of to-day would soon catch himself yawning, were once awaited with interest and devoured with avidity.

135But even more important, from the standpoint of literary history, than the mere size of these overgrown absurdities were their structural principles and peculiarities of style. An offshoot apparently from the chivalrous and pastoral romances of earlier date, with the addition of what it pleased writers and readers alike to regard as an “historical” blend of interest, the classical-heroic romance proper presents a bewildering jumble of the most far-sought and incongruous materials. In fine disregard of anachronism and inconsistency, their authors carry us hither and thither about the world, introducing us to Greeks and Romans, Egyptians and Persians, Knights of the Round Table, Paladins of Charlemagne, shepherds and shepherdesses of nowhere in particular, and even Peruvian Incas. The main plot, as a rule deceptively simple, is complicated from first to last by enormous and intricate ramifications of secondary actions; a characteristic due to the fact that every fresh individual introduced, whether in the central narrative, or in some excrescence from it, persists in recounting his own adventures at tremendous length. Thus we have story within story, wheel within wheel, 136till the reader completely loses his hold upon the tangled threads of intrigue, and collapses into a condition of dazed despair.[7] But this is not the worst. The characters seem to be totally unable to tell their experiences in a straightforward fashion and have done with it. They linger by the way—time being of no importance to any of them—to indulge in everlasting conversations and soliloquies, discourse learnedly on delicate questions of gallantry and honor, quote, criticise, sentimentalize, pour out page after page of inflated rhapsody, and cavil remorselessly on the ninth part of a hair. Thus the so-called “historic” element in these romances, is nominal only. The heroes and heroines, of whatever race, clime, or era, are only masquerading men and women of seventeenth-century France, with the ridiculous jargon of the H?tel de Rambouillet incessantly upon their lips.

It will be seen from this brief description that the classical-heroic romance was absolutely artificial and unreal; that it had, and pretended to 137have, no touch or contact with the things of solid existence. Characters, incidents, sentiments, speech were all of a world apart—Utopia, Arcadia, No-Man’s-Land. Life was not distorted, as it is in the writings of many romantic novelists and most of our modern realists. It was simply not considered at all.

At the time when these ponderous and vapid productions reached the climax of their popularity on their native soil, French was well understood by the educated classes in England; and it was in their original tongue, therefore, that they made their way at first among the fellow-countrymen of Milton. But translations soon followed with a rapidity that bore startling testimony to the strength of the new taste. “Polexandre” appeared in an English version as early as 1647; “Ibrahim,” “Cassandra,” and “Cléopatre” in 1652; while “Clélie,” “Astrée,” “Scipion,” “Le Grand Cyrus,” “Zelinda,” and “Almahide” were all translated and published between the latter date and 1677. On the heels of these regular translations soon came sundry imitations which, after the manner of imitations in general, reproduced with scrupulous fidelity all the worst features of the original works. “Eliana,” issued in 1661, reads almost like a 138burlesque of the heroic style, and abounds in long-drawn descriptive passages of the most florid and fantastic kind. Running this very close in overwrought extravagance of theme and language, the “Pandion and Amphigenia” of Crowne the dramatist saw the light four years later. But the most celebrated of the English specimens of this exotic school is a somewhat earlier work—the “Parthenissa” of Roger Boyle, Earl of Orrery; a production left incomplete after reaching more than eight hundred folio pages. This is pronounced by Dunlop, whose industry and patience in reading the romances of this period must have been little short of superhuman, to be the best English specimen of its class; and most of us will probably be more ready to accept his judgment than to undertake its verification.[8]

Both “Eliana” and “Parthenissa” were broken off abruptly, the latter in the middle of one of its most interesting situations; and Dunlop is probably right in regarding this fact as 139evidence of the gradual decline of the taste out of which they had grown and to which they had appealed. Indeed, so far as England was concerned, the classical-heroic romance could not have been otherwise than ephemeral. It had no real hold upon English society, and was fundamentally out of harmony with the spirit of an age in which chivalry had degenerated into empty gallantry, and playing at pastoral simplicity had ceased to be an aristocratic amusement. The temper of which it was one manifestation for a time made its influence deeply felt in almost every department of literature; it invaded even poetry; and directly inspired that extraordinary form of drama, so familiar to the student of Davenant and Dryden—the heroic play. But the prose fiction to which it gave existence carried in its essential qualities the seeds of early decay. It is true that in certain quarters it retained a faint and shadowy kind of reputation longer than might have been expected.[9] But the rise of a totally different school of novelists in the last 140decades of the seventeenth century, practically marks the close of its career; and dying, it left no issue.

We are now at length prepared to appreciate the historic significance and interest of what, in a rather loose way, is commonly called the prose fiction of the Restoration.

Says Mrs. Manley, in the introductory address to the reader in her “Secret History of Queen Zarah”:—

“Romances in France have for a long time been the diversion and amusement of the whole world; the people ... have read these works with a most surprising greediness; but that fury is very much abated, and they are all fallen off from this distraction. The little histories of this kind have taken place [sic] of romances, whose prodigious number of volumes were sufficient to tire and satiate such whose heads were most filled with these notions.... These little pieces which have banished romances are much more agreeable to the brisk and impetuous humor of the English, who have naturally no taste for long-winded performances; for they have no sooner begun a book than they desire to see the end of it.”

These remarks will doubtless strike some readers as curious, and we may well wonder what the followers of Taine, particularly, would make of 141the “brisk and impetuous humor” here alleged to characterize the English people. But they are valuable to us, irrespective of their psychology, because they enable us to understand how the new fiction—the fiction in which, despite all adventitious differences, we can clearly recognize the beginnings of the modern novel—arose to take the place of the Anglo-French romance. The “little histories” to which Mrs. Manley refers grew up by the most natural process of reaction against the “prodigious number of volumes” into which, as we have noted, the older narratives had run. Nor was it in measure only that a change was initiated. As we shall presently see, the novel of the Restoration, broadly so-called, differed from its predecessors not merely in length, but also in the more important qualities of subject-matter, treatment, and style. The old Arcadia was finally forsaken for the solid earth, and lengthy descriptions, multifarious episodes, wearisome soliloquies, and needless tortuosities of plot were at the same time left behind. Real life now formed the basis of the story, and, despite occasional reminiscences of the older manner, crispness of narration became one of the writers’ principal aims.

We have here undertaken to consider a little 142this healthy and significant change from the romance to the novel in the writings of two of its representative exponents—Mrs. Behn and Mrs. Manley. It should be understood, however, that in adopting this course we have no intention of throwing their work into undue prominence. They were but part-factors in a general movement, and must be contented to share its honors with a number of their contemporaries. Nevertheless, they possess a special interest for the student of English literature, for two very good reasons. In the first place, taken together, they illustrate with remarkable clearness those broader characteristics of the new fiction which it is our principal concern in this little essay to bring to light; and, secondly, there is the fact that they were women. It is surely in itself instructive to find that while the great Elizabethan drama can adduce no example of a woman-writer, it is in the productions of a couple of women that we can study to the best advantage some of the rudimentary developments of the modern novel.[10]

143It will be convenient for us to ignore the strict demands of chronology and begin with the work of Mrs. Manley, which, though somewhat later in date than Mrs. Behn’s, may properly be taken first, since it is at once cruder in form and historically of minor importance.

Mrs. De la Riviere Manley—“poor Mrs. Manley,” as Swift calls her, in the “Journal to Stella”—enjoyed anything but a peaceful life. It seems to be an accepted tradition among biographers of men and women of letters to begin their narratives by protesting that the lives of authors seldom furnish exciting materials, and then to go on to add that their particular heroes or heroines are exceptions to the general rule. Certainly Mrs. Manley was an exception, if rule indeed it be, which I think open to question. She herself has given us some account of her adventures and misfortunes in different portions of her “New Atalantis,” and more particularly in “The History of Rivella”—an autobiography and apologia pro vita sua—published in 1714, under the pseudonym of Sir Charles Lovemore. 144There is no need for us to follow her through all her varied experiences, the record of which, though often lively enough, is seldom of a very improving character. It will be sufficient to give the briefest outline of her career.

She was born in Guernsey about the year 1677, her father, Sir Roger Manley, being, as is generally stated, governor, or, as seems more probable, deputy governor, of that island. According to her own account, she grew up into a sharp-witted, impressionable girl, who, receiving rather more than an average education, early gave signs of an intelligence beyond what, at that time, was considered the fair endowment of her sex. Her tribulations, too, began early. Her parents died when she was still very young, and she fell into the hands of a male cousin, who unfortunately became enamored of her. The man was known to be married already, but he asserted that his wife was dead; and Rivella, deceived by his protestations, entered into a secret marriage with him. The theme of one of her most unsavory stories seems to have been directly suggested by this tragic episode in her own life. After a while, of course, the truth came out. Then her scoundrelly husband abandoned her, and she was left to shift for herself as best she 145might. About this time she gained the patronage of the famous Duchess of Cleveland, one of Charles the Second’s mistresses, in attendance upon whom she remained during some six months. But the Duchess was a woman of fickle temper. She soon grew tired of Mrs. Manley; and, by pretending that she had discovered her in an intrigue with her son (and there may possibly have been more ground than poor Rivella admits for the allegation), found an excuse for dismissing her from her service. It was now that Mrs. Manley appears to have taken up her pen in earnest—and a very reckless and caustic pen it by and by turned out to be. Her tragedy, “The Royal Mistress,” acted in 1696, proved so successful that she found herself courted by all the dandies and witlings of the day; and for some years, as a consequence, she spent her time principally in getting out of one intrigue into another. Nevertheless, she found leisure, amid all her excitements, to write and produce her “Secret Memoirs and Manners of Several Persons of Quality, from the New Atalantis”—a work which, under the most thinly disguised names, attacked in an extremely violent and outspoken manner the men who had been mainly instrumental in bringing about the Revolution. 146In virtue of this production Mrs. Manley may be said to have secured the doubtful honor of being the first political woman-writer in England. So successful was the satire in reaching those for whom it was intended, that the printer was straightway apprehended; but Mrs. Manley—who, as Swift contemptuously put it, “had generous principles for one of her sort”—would not allow him to suffer in her behalf. She appeared before the Court of King’s Bench, and declared herself solely responsible for the entire undertaking, maintaining, moreover, “with unaltered constancy, that the whole work was mere invention, without any cynical allusion to real characters.”[11] Mrs. Manley, indeed, seems to have cared a great deal more about getting her printer out of a scrape than about sticking too solemnly to the simple truth; since, apart altogether from the manifestly satirical intention of the book, we know that she made its publication the basis of a personal application to the ministry. In the “Journal to Stella,” Swift tells us how he afterwards met Mrs. Manley at the house of Lord Peterborough, and adds that she was there “soliciting him to get some pension or reward for her service in the cause, by writing 147her ‘Atalantis.’” Still we must frankly admit that her loyalty to the printer in such a crisis throws her character into a rather favorable light.

However, after a short period of confinement, and sundry appearances before the court, Mrs. Manley was allowed to go free, and the matter dropped. After this adventure, she produced several dramatic pieces, wrote some pamphlets of a political kind, and for a time conducted “The Examiner,” which had then been relinquished by Swift. Indeed, she appears to have remained in the full swing of activity to the close of her life. She died, aged about forty-seven, in 1724, at the house of one John Barber, an alderman of the City of London, with whom it is supposed she had for some time past been living.

In person, as she herself very candidly tells us, Mrs. Manley was fat, and her face had been early marked by that terrible scourge of the age, the smallpox; notwithstanding which defects, her fascination of manner and conversation was so great, that she was always popular with the other sex. Of her moral character, perhaps, the less said the better. Circumstances had not been kind to Rivella; and at this distance of time, and with all the intrigues in which she was involved, it is not always easy to say how 148far she was sinned against, and how far sinning, or whether her own statement came anywhere near the facts of the case when she boldly declared that “her virtues” were “her own, her vices occasioned by her misfortunes.” Still we must admit the truth of the words which she has put into the mouth of d’Aumont in the “History of Rivella”: “If she have but half so much of the practice as the theory, in the way of love, she must certainly be a most accomplished person.” And a most accomplished person, after her own fashion, she evidently seems to have been.

The most famous of her writings—if the word famous can properly be used, when they have all passed into oblivion—is, of course, the “New Atalantis”—that veritable “cornucopia of scandal,” as Swift dubbed it. This work swept its author into temporary notoriety, and for a few years was perhaps as much talked of and discussed as any publication of the time. But the life has long since gone out of its personalities and topical allusions, and the ordinary reader of English literature, if he recall it even by name, is likely to remember it only for the use Pope makes of it in a well-known passage in “The Rape of the Lock”:—
149“Let wreaths of triumph now my temples twine!
(The victor cried); the glorious prize is mine!
While fish in streams, or birds delight in air,
Or in a coach and six the British fair;
As long as Atalantis shall be read,
Or the small pillow grace a lady’s bed;
While visits shall be paid on solemn days,
When numerous wax-lights in bright order blaze;
While nymphs take treats, or assignations give,
So long my honor, name, and praise shall live!”

But though this book, as we shall hereafter find, is not without its significance for the student of the English novel, it is less interesting and important from our point of view than “The Power of Love: In Seven Examples,” to which for the present we will confine our attention.

As the title indicates, this volume consists of seven separate stories—“The Fair Hypocrite,” “The Physician’s Stratagem,” “The Wife’s Resentment,” “The Husband’s Resentment” (in two examples), “The Happy Fugitives,” and “The Perjured Beauty.” The keynote of the whole collection is clearly struck in the following passage from the first-mentioned of the tales:—

“Of all those passions which may be said to tyrannize over the heart of man, love is not only the most violent, but the most persuasive.... A lover esteems nothing difficult in the pursuit of his desires. It is then that fame, honor, chastity, and glory have no longer 150their due estimation, even in the most virtuous breast. When love truly seizes the heart, it is like a malignant fever which thence disperses itself through all the sensible parts; the poison preys upon the vitals, and is only extinguished by death; or by as fatal a cure, the accomplishment of its own desires.”

The “love” shadowed forth in these sentences is that which dominates each of the seven “Examples” in this little book, which are thus only variations on a single persistent theme. It is the merest animal passion—passion unrefined by sentiment, uncolored by emotion; the love of Etheridge and Wycherley. Upon the gratification of this in a licit, or, as frequently happens, in an illicit way, the plot is, with the monotony of a modern French novel, everywhere made to turn. The heroes of her stories are all, like Mr. Slye, in the author’s rather amusing sketch, the “Stage-Coach Journey to Exeter,” “naturally amorous”; her heroines, like the Fair Princess in “The Happy Fugitives,” are one and all “born under an amorous constellation,” and like her, are forever “floating on the tempestuous sea of passion, guided by a master who is too often pleased with the shipwreck of those whom he conducts.” So violent are the experiences portrayed that we can hardly avoid the 151thought that Mrs. Manley must have adhered in practice to the maxim of “Astrophel and Stella”—“Look in thy heart, and write,”—and must have gone straight to some of the stormiest episodes of her own career for the pictures which she gives us. Passion and gratification—these, then, are the regular ingredients of her stories. Of the larger and finer influence of love; of its strengthening and ennobling power; of the way in which its subtle mastery will work through life,—
“Not only to keep down the base in man,
But teach high thought, and amiable words,
And courtliness, and the desire of fame,
And love of truth, and all that makes a man,”—

of all these things, famil............