Pepys and His Diary
Pepys and His Diary
I have undertaken to talk to you this evening about a singular book—a book that holds a place practically by itself on our library shelves,—the Diary of Samuel Pepys.[[2]] The writer of this book was not a great man, or a strong man, or in any way a man of transcendent mental or moral characteristics. The work itself has none of those qualities by virtue of which a piece of literature will, in the average of cases, be found to survive the lapse of time and the changes of fashions and tastes. With the acknowledged masterpieces of autobiographic narration—with the “Confessions” of St. Augustine or Rousseau, for example, or the “Memoirs” of Benvenuto Cellini or Gibbon, or the “Dichtung und Wahrheit” of Goethe, or the “Journal” of Amiel, we should never think of comparing it; for Pepys’s garrulous pages have no eloquence, no literary quality, no magic of style—they record no intense spiritual struggles, reveal no deep upheavals of thought and feeling, flash no new light upon the dark places or into the mysterious recesses of motive and character. What, then, is the secret of Pepys’s enduring fascination? Wherein lies the curious spell, the undeniable vitality of his work? Why do we continue to read this chaotic chronicle of his, when, in the pressure of modern affairs, so many books of the past—better books, wiser books, nobler books—are left to slumber in serenity in those vast mausoleums of genius, our public libraries, undisturbed, all but forgotten?
I say nothing now about the historic value of Pepys’s journal—for historic value may have no kind of relationship with broad popular interest; and it is with the popular interest, and not with the special significance of the work before us, that we are at present concerned. And therefore my question, concretely put, is just this: How is it that you and I, who may care little or nothing for the information that Pepys gives us about the degraded politics and miserable court intrigues of the Restoration, may still find in his daily capricious jottings a charm which, as literature goes, is almost, if not absolutely, unique?
For any one who has ever dipped into the Diary at all, the answer to this question is not far to seek. Pepys’s memoranda have lasting interest for us on account of their naïve frankness, their plain and simple spontaneity, their transparent honesty of self-expression. As we read, we realize that, for once at least, we are brought into the closest, the most vital contact with a living man, and that this man speaks to us, who, by the irony of fate, chance to overhear his unconsidered utterances, without disguise, without reticence or reserve, of the things which stand nearest to his heart. The reader of Pepys’s Diary knows Pepys himself better than his acquaintances knew him at the office, in the coffee-house, at the street-corner; better than his friends knew him at the social board, spite of the truth that there is in wine; better even than his wife knew him in the intercourse of the home. To us he lays bare without sophistication or guile thoughts and impulses, desires and disappointments, concealed from them beneath the conventional wrappings of daily manners and life—personal criticisms and private experiences which, living, he confided to none. Does this strike you as a small matter? Then, pause for a moment and ask yourselves of what other man whose written words have ever come into the fierce white glare of publication such statements as these could truthfully be made? Autobiographies, memoirs, journals, confessions, letters we have, of course, without number, and the value of these as human documents may in most cases be great, in some cases inestimable. But do we, after all, accept literature of this character as the truth, the whole truth, nothing but the truth? Do we not rather know that, as a matter of course, such literature must almost always be, in varying degrees, forced, unreal, overwrought, theatrical? The moment a man begins to talk about himself, the dramatic instinct inevitably comes into play; the least vain of mortals colors his own experiences, the least self-conscious manipulates his motives and transfigures his feelings. That which we ought to know best—our own heart—is precisely that which of set purpose we are forever debarred from describing with more than an approximation to the stern and solid fact. You remember the famous words in which Rousseau announced his intention of writing the plain, unvarnished story of his life: “I enter upon an undertaking which never had an example, the execution of which will never have an imitation. I desire to show my fellow-creatures a man in all the truth of his nature—and this man will be myself.” And with this rhetorical exordium, the great sentimentalist proceeds, as Mr. Lowell happily phrased it, to throw “open his waistcoat, and make us the confidants of his dirty linen.” The very condition of deliberate self-revelation places an embargo on perfect candor and unconsciousness; an autobiographer, as George Sand said, always makes himself the hero of his own novel, even if he be a hero of the dirty vagabond type, as in the case just referred to. Here, then, is the ultimate secret of Pepys’s peculiar charm. Beside him, Rousseau is a mere poseur, and the rest are nowhere. “Is not,” asks Mr. Lowell, “is not old Samuel Pepys, after all, the only man who spoke to himself of himself with perfect simplicity, frankness, and unconsciousness?” That he should have done this is no trifling thing. He remains, seemingly for all time, “a creature unique as the dodo, a solitary specimen, to show that it was possible for nature once in the centuries to indulge in so odd a whimsey.”
In speaking of the difficulties inherent in autobiographical writing, I lay stress, it will be observed, on the set purpose, the deliberate intention, generally characterizing it. No small part of the secret of Pepys’s success as a diarist is to be found in the simple fact that with him the set purpose, the deliberate intention, and the resultant disturbing self-consciousness are almost entirely absent. Pepys did not write for the public eye, or for any glance save his own; he recorded his impressions and enterprises, his pleasures, anxieties, ambitions, aims, and passing fancies because he found satisfaction in thus summing up “the actions of the day each night before he slept”; and not at all because he proposed to draw a full-length portrait of himself for the benefit of his contemporaries or the amusement of posterity. It has been suggested by one of the wiseacres who can never leave a simple fact alone, that Pepys regarded his Diary as material towards a fully developed autobiography. Possibly so. But we may be certain that had such autobiography ever been written, the self-delineation of its pages would have differed in many important particulars—in details put in, and even more seriously in details left out—from that contained in the journal itself. As it is, we have an odd and uncomfortable sense, when we first open the Diary, of intruding where we have no proper business, of breaking in upon the privacy of a man’s life, and surprising him in the undress which he might wear for himself, but in which he would not willingly be caught by even his closest friend. For remember that the six small volumes which contain the manuscript diary are filled with densely packed short-hand, peppered with occasional words and phrases from the French, Spanish, Latin, and Greek; and that it was only after immense labor that the script was transliterated, and the secrets which poor Pepys had, as he fondly supposed, buried there forever, given to an impertinent and unsympathetic world.[[3]] Writing thus for himself, and for himself alone, and guarding himself by every means within his power against the possibility of exposure, our chronicler was enabled to make his narrative the luminous, because free and spontaneous, expression of his innermost life. A man may be honest with himself in cipher for whom long-hand, to say nothing of the thought of subsequent publication, would bring the inevitable and fatal temptations to sophistication. Could Pepys have foreseen the ultimate fate of his journal, it is safe to say that it would never have been written, or, once written, would have been discreetly burned. Poor fellow! His sense of complete security, of inviolable self-concealment, made possible such confidences as otherwise would never have been committed to paper.
But this is not all. Pepys’s unreserved frankness is to be partially accounted for by the fact that he had no fear lest any one but himself should ever read what he found such curious pleasure in writing down. Yet allowance must at the same time be made for a deeper cause, to be sought in an analysis of the character of the man himself. Plenty of people who can write short-hand and appreciate the usefulness of a diary, contrive none the less to go through life without finding themselves under the imperative necessity of recording the minute happenings, the petty annoyances and satisfactions, the casual meetings, conversations, comings and goings of the common routine of existence. They may enjoy their dinner without feeling impelled at the end of the day to make a solemn note of the fact and add the bill of fare; they may fall asleep during a sermon, and yet allow the astonishing circumstance to pass unrecorded; they may say and do a dozen foolish, hasty, and unnecessary things, and see no cause to dwell upon them, and perpetuate them, when the evening accounts are made up. But the little things of life were great to Pepys, its trifles singularly, grotesquely significant. He was a man, it is clear, of a curiously naïve and garrulous temper, a born lover of gossip, even when he was gossiping only of and to himself, and when some of the matters he found to talk about did not by any means redound to his credit.
Mr. Lowell somewhere speaks of the unconscious humor of the Diary. This unconscious humor is, I think, to be referred very largely to this extraordinary naïveté; to the irresponsible loquacity, the love of commonplace and frivolous detail, which seem to have been among Pepys’s most salient characteristics, and to his amazing lack of any sense of perspective—in other words, to his congenital inability to disentangle the momentous from the trivial in the complex occurrences of life. An interview with the King, a discussion with the naval authorities, the manning of a ship, the arrangements for a war, were serious matters to him; but so, too, were the purchase of a new periwig, the sight of a pretty face in the theatre, a specially succulent joint of meat at the midday repast, a game of billiards or ninepins. It is needful to lay stress on these personal qualities, because they are of the very essence of the man, of the very essence of the Diary. That it should have seemed to him worth while to place on record, if only for his own perusal, so many things that most of us would give no second thought to—that is the point to be noted, as one only a little less astonishing than the diarist’s odd plainness of dealing with himself. I have said that the use of a cipher which none of your family or acquaintances can read, is in itself a premium upon veracity. Yet Pepys’s singular, remorseless honesty of self-expression remains still in the last degree surprising. The Diary is full of confessions which, I venture to think, you and I would hardly feel called upon to make, even to ourselves, so strong, so irresistible does the dramatic tendency become in most of us the moment we begin to touch our own lives. If we are fond of reading, it would be natural to us, I suppose, to jot down the names of the books we buy or dip into, and any criticism we may have to make upon them; but I wonder how many of us would think it incumbent upon us to commit ourselves to such an entry as this?—“To the Strand, to my bookseller’s, and there bought an idle, roguish French book, ‘L’Escholle des Filles,’ which I have bought in plain binding, avoiding the buying of it better bound, because I resolved, as soon as I have read it, to burn it, that it may not stand in the list of my books, nor among them, to disgrace them if it should be found.” A declaration like this may strike us as absurdly familiar when we light upon it, but it takes a Pepys to make it, after all; and we therefore feel that in the solemnity and precision with which such an experience is recorded, rather perhaps than in the experience itself, which is neither very important, nor very creditable, nor very singular, is to be found the key to much that is most interesting and significant in the pages of the Diary. Pepys, for instance, quarrels with a captain in the army, and goes about in mortal dread of possible consequences. Thousands of men, I dare say, have found themselves in just such a predicament; but Pepys makes a note of the fact, plainly, straightforwardly, with no pretence at apology or self-deception, with no tendency towards heroics. Again, he lies awake one night quaking in fear of robbers, and starting at every sound. You and I may have done the same; but I do not imagine that our journals, if searched, would contain any indication of the fact. Take such an entry as the following: “After we had dined came Mr. Mallard, and I brought down my viol.... He played some very fine things of his own, but I was afraid to enter too far into their commendation, for fear he should offer to copy them for me out, and so I be forced to give or lend him something,”—and I wonder how many of us could lay our hands on our hearts and honestly say that this presentation of motive strikes us as remote, unfamiliar, alien. But while we would hardly dare to look a bit of conduct of this kind squarely in the face, Pepys does so, and unflinchingly sets down the not over-flattering results of his observation. And he does this not because he has the modern man’s morbid love of self-analysis, or any of the grim desire of many a recent writer to show himself up as a sorry fellow, but simply because it is his habit all through to report frankly and unreservedly the various circumstances of his life, withholding nothing, adding nothing, disguising nothing.
All this helps to bring the essential naïveté of Pepys’s character into high relief. He tears his new cloak on the latch of a door, and is greatly troubled, though the darning is successfully done; he rejoices when Mr. Pierce’s little girl draws him for her valentine, because a present to her will cost him less than one to a grown-up person; he drinks large quantities of milk and beer, and gets pains in consequence; he acts the sycophant and the tuft-hunter towards those in power, swallowing his own opinions and rejoicing in the success of his diplomacy; his appetite for supper is taken away by the sight of his aunt’s dirty hands; he makes up his mind to try how eating fish will suit him, before vowing to diet himself in Lent;—and down all such matters go pell-mell in the Diary. He wrangles with his mother; breaks an oath never to go to see a play without his wife; gets a headache by drinking overmuch wine; thinks he sees a ghost; rejoices to find himself addressed as Esquire;—and down go all these things, too. He puts his thumb out of joint boxing his footboy’s ears; in a fit of anger he tweaks Mrs. Pepys’s pretty nose; is “vext to the heart” when Sir William Pen’s page chances to catch him kicking his cook-maid, “because I know he will be telling their family of it”;—and all these occurrences, once again, are given due record and chronicle. Finally,—not to multiply, as one might do indefinitely, such illustrations of our writer’s singular simplicity and artlessness,—he even notes being “mightily troubled” with snoring in his sleep, a statement which I have reserved as a kind of climax, since I find the allegation of snoring to be about the last that sensitive humanity is willing to bear. Charge a man with theft, if you will; but, as you value your life, do not suggest that he snores.
To this brief analysis of some of the personal peculiarities upon which the curious charm of Pepys’s Diary so largely depends, it would be unfair to the writer not to add mention of a characteristic of a somewhat different order. If a diarist, like a poet, is rather born than made, then justice compels us to acknowledge that Pepys was a born diarist—a man who, by reason of his strength and his weakness alike, was an almost ideal chronicler of daily affairs and small beer. For he possessed something more than the native garrulousness, the itch to chatter and to tattle, of which we have already said enough. His, too, was another rare quality of equal importance for the success of his chosen undertaking—a keen, immense, tireless interest in “men, women, and things in general.” He was, in the fullest sense of the term, a viveur—a man who made it his business to get the most possible out of existence, and who, as matters went in his day, touched the world at an amazing variety of points. Immersed as he was in practical responsibilities, fond as he was of money and affairs, he nevertheless threw himself with the utmost avidity and ardor into the life of his time, an unheroic Ulysses, forever setting forth upon a voyage of new discovery and fresh adventure. He loved, after his own fashion, literature and painting; he was a devotee of music and an amateur of the drama; and he had the shrewdest eye for character, the largest appreciation of the picturesqueness resulting from the clash of motives, the contests of opinion and feeling, and outworkings of ambitions and passions in the tragedy and comedy of men’s every-day social world. He was indeed, as Sir Walter Scott said of him, a man of the “most undiscriminating, unsatiable, and miscellaneous curiosity.” Although “exceptionally busy and diligent in his attendance at the office,” this same writer continues, “he finds time to go to every play and every execution, to every procession, fire, concert, riot, trial, review, city feast, public dissection, or picture-gallery that he can hear of. Nay, there seems scarcely to have been a school examination, a wedding, christening, charity sermon, bull-baiting, philosophic meeting, or private merrymaking in his neighborhood at which he was not sure to make his appearance, and mindful to record all the particulars.” He had an unbounded love of pleasure, a craving for new sensations, an indefatigable courage in the pursuit of experience, a versatility of enthusiasm simply amazing, an industry in multitudinous enterprises which makes us breathless as we read. “He is the first to hear all the court scandal, and all the public news; to observe the changes of fashions, and the downfall of parties; to pick up family gossip, and retail philosophical intelligence; to criticise every new house or carriage that is built, every new book or new beauty that appears, every measure the King adopts, and every mistress he discards.” In one sentence he will report a debate in Parliament—in the next, carefully itemize the points in a lady’s dress; now he is deeply concerned over the problems of the navy, and anon is to be found mourning the death of a canary, or the ruin of his fine bands, which he has carelessly slobbered with chocolate. Accounts of state crises, details of court profligacy, particulars of his own matrimonial misunderstandings, literary criticisms, headings of sermons, accounts of plays, disquisitions on music and finance, on dinners and dancing, and a thousand other matters, important and petty, are jumbled together in bewildering confusion in his pages, along with sketches of character, bits of the frankest self-delineation, scraps of wisdom and folly, keen judgments of men and circumstances, and those notes of success and failure, of aspiration, achievement, disappointment, of penitence, and sometimes of remorse, which belong to the true story of his inner life. Such is Pepys’s Diary—the record of the daily doings and feelings of a busy, restless, vain, easy-tempered, pleasure-loving, ambitious, shrewd, yet often fatuous, man of the world; take it for all in all, a book without an equal, almost without a rival, in its class.
The author of this extraordinary book, despite some rather aristocratic connections, was the son of a not very successful tailor, and was born, perhaps in London, perhaps in Brampton, Huntingdonshire, (the point remains unsettled,) on 23d February, 1632. He seems to have been at one time at school in Huntingdon; but he afterwards entered regularly as a scholar of St. Paul’s, London, passing thence, in 1650, to the University of Cambridge. Of his college career we know little; but we have the record of one incident, interesting as foreshadowing the convivial tendencies which come out so often and so strongly in the pages of the Diary. In the Regents’ Book of Magdalene College appears the following highly suggestive entry:—
“Oct 21, 1653. Mem. That Peapys and Hind were solemnly admonished by myself and Mr. Hill for having been scandalously overserved with drink ye night before. This was done in the presence of all the fellows then resident, in Mr. Hill’s chamber.
“[Signed] John Wood, Registrar.”
Yet, notwithstanding this episode, and whatever it may be taken to stand for as an exemplification of Pepys’s way of life, as an undergraduate he became the good friend of some of the most industrious of his contemporaries, and, we have reason to believe, acquitted himself in his own studies, if not brilliantly, still with a very fair measure of success. At all events, he took his bachelor’s degree, in 1653—the very year, it will be observed, of his bacchanalian misadventure,—and received his mastership seven years later. Meanwhile, as we learn from a passing note in the Diary, made a long while after, he dabbled in literary composition to the extent of beginning a romance, called “Love a Cheat.” The manuscript of this he tore up and destroyed on 30th January, 1663, adding to his chronicle of the event: “I liked it very well, and wondered a little at myself, at my vein at that time, when I wrote it, doubting that I cannot do so well now if I would try.” Pepys may not have shown himself in every emergency of life a strong man or a brave; but thus to sacrifice the first heir of his invention, even on finding it, after all, rather better than he had imagined—let us recognize here resolution and courage not by any means to be sneered at.
Pepys was but twenty-three when he married Elizabeth St. Michel, an exceedingly pretty girl of fifteen, the daughter of a Huguenot who had come to England with Elizabeth Maria on her union with Charles the First. Of the relations of husband and wife we shall have something to say by and by. Poor St. Michel was a man of countless resources and infinite ingenuity, and in consequence was frequently both a burden to himself and a tax upon his friends. He had the genius for inventing things without, it would appear, the talent for turning his inventions to much practical account. He obtained a patent for curing smoky chimneys, and another for cleaning muddy pools; evolved plans for the raising of submerged ships; and in a moment of special illumination actually discovered the whereabouts of King Solomon’s gold and silver mines—in this respect anticipating the interesting performance of Mr. Rider Haggard. In view of these facts, it is hardly necessary to add that, Micawber-like, he was always in an impecunious condition, and, pending the establishment of the said mines on a modern working basis, was fain to support himself and wife on the offerings of his daughter’s husband, with an additional four shillings a week contributed out of the charitable fund of the French church in London. To one so keenly alive to the meaning and value of money, and so cautious and economical in the management of his own affairs, as Mr. Pepys, the visions and vagaries of such a father-in-law must have given constant cause for dissatisfaction and alarm.
Mrs. Pepys thus brought her husband no fortune but her beauty, and as, at the time of their marriage, Pepys himself had obtained no settled position, the early years of their wedded life were rendered picturesque (from an artistic point of view) by financial difficulties, and often harassed by the ancient problem of how to make one shilling do the work of two. The young couple, however, seem to have put a brave face on the matter, and to have kept faith in each other, and in the coming of better days. At this period, it must be remembered, the Diary had not been started, and direct information, therefore, fails us. But in after years, as wealth grew, and his prosperity became firmly established, Pepys would often cast a back-glance at these early times of anxiety and struggle, indulging, after his manner, in many quaint expressions of thankfulness to God over the change, and frequent prayers for strength and courage in case of sudden fall.
On the first page of his Diary he notes that, though “esteemed rich”, he was in reality “very poor,”—a combination of circumstances which is apt at times to be trying even to the most philosophical. His salary was then only fifty pounds a year, and the straitened character of his domestic conditions is shown by the fact that, when the curtain rises on the journal, we discover Mr. and Mrs. Pepys dining in the garret on the remains of a turkey—in the preparation of which, be it mentioned as matter of history, poor Mrs. Pepys burned her hand. But changes were pending. Chosen secretary to Sir Edward Montague on his taking command of the fleet sent to bring Charles the Second to England, Pepys was shortly afterwards made clerk to the King’s ships, a position in which, through his industry and astuteness, he was presently to be of great service to the country in very critical times. This appointment was not, however, secured without complications and difficulties. The actual incumbent of the coveted office—one Barlow—was a rival in the field, with personal prestige and influence strong enough to fill poor Pepys with dismal misgivings concerning his own chances of success. Matters at length were amicably settled between the candidates on the basis of a rather singular compromise. Pepys was inducted into the position on undertaking to pay the said Mr. Barlow fifty pounds a year so long as his (Pepys’s) salary was not increased, and one hundred pounds a year when it was raised to three hundred and fifty pounds or more. The tax seems a heavy one, but Pepys was willing to accept the responsibility on observing, as he duly notes in the Diary, that Mr. Barlow was “an old consumptive man,” and therefore, assumably, not one likely to call for many annual payments. The old consumptive man lived till 1665, and the entry made by Pepys on hearing of his decease is too characteristic not to be reproduced in full:—
“9 Feb., 1665. Sir William Petty tells me that Mr. Barlow is dead; for which, God knows my heart, I would be as sorry as it is possible for one to be for a stranger, by whose death he gets £100 per annum.”
While still a young man, Pepys was made Clerk of the Privy Seal, and a justice of the peace, the latter appointment “mightily” pleasing him, though he notes the somewhat unfortunate circumstance that he was “wholly ignorant” of the duties of the post. Little by little he rose to be the most important and influential of the naval officials, with a steadily improving financial condition, the record of which is given, year by year, in great detail in the Diary. Trouble came presently in the shape of failing eyesight, and by and by he lost his wife; but material fortune continued to attend him through years which were fraught, for the world of English politics, with vast fluctuation and change. At length reverses came. In 1679-80, he was imprisoned for alleged complicity in the famous Popish Plot. After his release he was made Secretary to the Admiralty, and was for two consecutive years President of the Royal Society. In 1690, he was again imprisoned, this time on the charge of Jacobinism. With this occurrence, Pepys’s active life may be said to have come to a close. His constitution had long been undermined by a malady which had been intensified by his sedentary existence, and in 1700 he was persuaded by his physicians to leave his house in York Buildings and take up his abode at the home of his old friend and servant, William Hewer, at Clapham. There he died on 26th May, 1703, having just passed the Scriptural term of life.
Pepys’s only acknowledged piece of literary work was “The Memoirs of the Royal Navy,” published in 1690, though a small volume entitled “Relation of the Troubles in the Court of Portugal.” and bearing the initials, S. P., is sometimes ascribed to him by bibliographers. Apart from the Diary, however,—the peculiar qualities of which, it will be understood, remove it altogether from the region of comparison—Pepys’s most useful and lasting achievement was the foundation of the famous library at Cambridge, which still bears his name—a collection of manuscript naval memoirs, prints, old English ballads, and curious miscellanea, which, by the judgment of high authorities, remains to-day one of the richest of its class. The visitor to Magdalene College, Cambridge, may still inspect this library as it stands in Pepys’s original book-presses; and if he be a student of the journal, and withal a man of any imaginative power, he will hardly fail to recall with what true bibliomaniac delight the old collector gathered these treasures about him in his own home, with what twinges of conscience he sometimes laid out larger sums than he felt he could well afford in their acquisition, with what enthusiasm he pored over their pages, with what satisfaction and pride he arranged and rearranged them on many a dull and tedious day.
I have sketched in brief the external history of Pepys’s life, but you must not be under the impression that the whole, or even the larger part of his career, is covered by the voluminous Diary. This daily record comprises some ten years only, extending from 1st January, 1659-60, when the writer was nearly twenty-seven, to May, 1669, when he had recently completed his thirty-seventh year. Just how and why he came to open his secret chronicle, he nowhere tells us; but he makes it very clear that he closed it at length, not because he had grown weary of it, or ceased to find satisfaction in its composition, but simply on account of the failure of eyesight, above referred to. Very pathetic is the final entry:—
“And thus ends all that I doubt I shall ever be able to do with my own eyes in the keeping of my journal, I not being able to do it any longer, having done now so long as to undo my eyes almost every time that I take a pen in my hand; and, therefore, whatever comes of it, I must forbear; and, therefore, resolve from this time forward to have it kept by my people in long-hand, and must be contented to set down no more than is fit for them and all the world to know; or if there be anything, I must endeavor to keep a margin in my book open, to add here and there a note in short-hand with my own hand. And so I betake myself to that course, which is almost as much as to see myself go into my grave; for which, and all the discomforts that will accompany my being blind, the good God prepare me.” May 31, 1669. S. P.
Few readers probably will rise from the perusal of the Diary, dismissing it with such an entry as this as the closing note, without regretting that the end should have come just when it did; for we would well have liked to know how Pepys responded to some of his later experiences, and especially in what spirit he accepted the tragic accidents which presently forced his manhood to the test. About these matters we can now only speculate, with the feeling that had the journal been continued for even a few years longer, we should perhaps have been brought into contact with a deeper, stronger, more earnest side of the writer’s character than actually makes itself apparent in the narrative. We little guess what resources of courage and power lie somewhere mysteriously stored up in men and women seemingly the least heroic, to be drawn upon only when the great and decisive moments of a lifetime come; and it might well give us, we fancy, a certain sense of satisfaction if we could follow the vain and garrulous Pepys through his season of growing wealth and prosperity onward to the time when he fell on evil days, and watch him in the enveloping darkness, bowing his head amid reverses of fortune, or standing face to face with death beside his wife’s open grave. But it is useless to indulge in hypothesis. We must accept the Diary as it is, and be thankful that the years covered by it were so full of matters of private interest and public importance.
And if we only think for a moment of all that happened in a public way during these ten critical years, and remember that Pepys, by virtue of his official position, was often drawn into very close relations with some of the moving forces and figures of the time—“names that in their motion were full-welling fountain-heads of change,”—we can realize at once that on the historical side this Diary has immense value. I do not dwell upon this side now, for time is limited, and there are other matters, not so frequently dealt with, to which I want to direct attention. Yet it is necessary just to say that, as documentary evidence concerning the inner life of the court and society, the inconceivable, the unutterable profligacy of the King and his followers, the irresponsibility of those in charge of public affairs, the complete demoralization of the upper classes during the early years of the Restoration, Pepys’s chronicle furnishes a record that we cannot afford to overlook. His simplicity, insouciance, and habitual self-possession are often more telling than the most eloquent descriptions of historians, the most fervid denunciations of moralists. An accidental word of his will often lay bare a condition of things which lengthy analysis, supported by innumerable references to authorities will hardly make us realize, a few passing sentences, penned au jour le jour, having frequently the power of throwing some circumstance, otherwise almost incredible, into sudden and lurid relief. Indeed, the mere fact that the temper of moral indignation is not one to which Pepys often or easily gives way, itself lends added force to all he writes, and intensifies the meaning of his rare exclamations of horror or protest. If Pepys had any political convictions at all, they were of the most flexible kind; he did not cultivate the sort of conscience which has the troublesome faculty of interfering at unexpected times with its owner’s chances of worldly advancement and success. Brought up under the Commonwealth, and, for a time at least, marked by Roundhead proclivities, he readily and rapidly transferred his allegiance to the new régime, his only anxiety being, it would seem, lest his earlier opinions should be resuscitated, with unpleasant practical results. Oddly enough, though the Diary opens in the midst of a great political crisis—when Monk was marching from Scotland, and English affairs were hanging poised in the balance of fate,—it nowhere contains any utterance of strong party feeling, any distinctly enunciated wish, either for the restoration of the Stuarts or for the preservation of the Commonwealth. When the Merry Monarch was settled upon the throne, Pepys quietly accepted the fact—along with the very desirable office in the Admiralty secured thereby. You say that the spirit thus shown is not a manly, not a noble one. Alas! no. Pepys, I am afraid, had but one firmly rooted political principle—the principle proverbially associated with the celebrated Vicar of Bray, of looking out for himself and his own welfare. Here, of course, we are strongly tempted to indulge by the way in a little conventional moralizing, and to congratulate ourselves that in our own days, in enlightened America, the low aims and sordid ambitions of poor old Pepys are quite unknown. But I restrain my eloquence, having other matters on hand. The point I want to dwell on for the moment is, that testimony to the political and social corruption following the Restoration, coming from such a man as this, is testimony of almost unique value, on account of the very character of the witness. To lead you through the miry places of the Diary is no part of my present plan; but let me just say that when such a man, albeit unused to the chiding mood, bursts out with the exclamation, “So they are all mad!—and thus the kingdom is governed!”—when, as sometimes happens, he speaks with genuine sorrow of what he has heard, or perhaps seen, in the high places of the land; when he scatters among his small talk and frivolous details sentences full of dismal apprehension concerning the country’s position and outlook,—then things must have come to a pretty pass indeed. Pepys was professionally committed to the Stuart dynasty; yet, as has been well said, a splendid eulogy of Cromwell could be gathered from the obiter dicta of his pages. Certainly, we need hardly travel outside the Diary itself, if we seek only to understand and estimate the iniquities and political short-sightedness of those who succeeded Cromwell in place and power.
But now we will descend from the dignity of history—if these things belong to the dignity of history—to the plane of common every-day life. Abandoning our quest for edification, we will wander for a little while about the Diary, for no other purpose than that of deriving what amusement we may from its personal banalities and social tittle-tattle. Pepys tempts us to be as unsystematic and inconsequential as himself. We will assume, therefore, the privilege which, according to Hazlitt, Coleridge so constantly abused in his conversational monologues—that of beginning nowhere in particular, and ending, if we see fit, in the same place.
It has been said that in Pepys’s ten years’ record there are more than five hundred references to dress and personal decoration. I have not checked the statement, but I can easily believe it. This gives, roughly speaking, an average of one such notice to each week covered by the journal. Dress and the affairs of the toilet were indeed for Pepys always matters of serious importance, not to be disregarded in the midst of the greatest strain of public events. We learn that at times Mrs. Pepys’s feminine desire for a new gown or some expensive bit of finery gave rise to domestic bickering and husbandly reproof, and that the money laid out on tailoring and haberdashery occasionally caused an uneasy hour. Yet, with all his thrift, Pepys seems to have had a remarkably free hand when questions of this kind stood in the way. He reports, without remorse, the payment of twenty-four pounds for a single suit—the best, he adds, “that I ever wore in my life”; and later on, notes the spending of eighty pounds for a necklace for his wife—though in this case he has misgivings. It is sad to relate that, on the whole, our diarist was much less concerned about his own personal extravagances than about the extravagances of his better-half—a fact which shows us that husbands, like other conveniences of life, have been improved by the course of civilization. At any rate, once noting, to his great sorrow and alarm, a month’s outlay of seventy-seven pounds on dress and its accompaniments, he adds that about twelve pounds of this had gone for his wife, and the small remaining balance—some fifty-five pounds—for himself. Charity begins at home; but economy, like justice, often starts next door. Pepys’s marital parsimoniousness frequently manifests itself in very petty ways; as when, for example, under date 14th February, 1666-7, he writes—“I am also this year my wife’s valentine, and it will cost me £5; but that I must have laid out if we had not been valentines.”
Once upon a time, Mr. and Mrs. Pepys went to the theatre together, and there they saw “Mrs. Stewart, very fine, with her locks done up with puffs, as my wife calls them, and several other great ladies had their hair so, though I do not like it; but my wife do mightily; but it is only because she sees it is the fashion.” This is all very well as a piece of superior masculine judgment; but unfortunately our moralist betrays no such scruples when social opinion prescribes a new departure in his own accoutrement. We notice with interest in the jottings of the journal the first appearance, or early reappearance, of several curious customs in dress. Patches were used by Mrs. Pepys, for the first time “since we were married,” on 30th August, 1660; and on 12th June, 1663, after observing the growth of the practice then indulged in by ladies, of wearing vizards, or masks, at the theatre—a practice we can understand better as we come to know more of the character of the performances given on the Restoration stage,—Mr. Pepys goes forthwith to the Exchange “to buy things with my wife; among others, a vizard for herself.” On 3d November, in this same year, he reports the adoption by himself of the new mode of wearing a periwig in place of the natural hair. It went a little to his heart, we find, to part with his own head-gear. However, he was somewhat reassured when, causing all his maids to look upon him, he observed their satisfaction with the result; though he notes intense self-consciousness and some embarrassment when, the next day, he went abroad for the first time in his new guise. About the same period he begins to shave himself—a performance which pleases him “mightily,” as promising to save both time and money. “Up betimes and shaved myself,” so runs a later entry, “after a week’s growth; but Lord! how ugly I was yesterday, and how fine to-day.”
One is sorely tempted here to reproduce a few of the many passages in which the vain old chronicler gloats over his handsome clothing, and the imposing figure cut by him at the theatre, or on the promenade, or in church. But one or two must suffice as specimens:—
“July 10, 1660. This day I put on my new silk suit, the first that ever I wore in my life.”
“Feb. 3, 1661, (Lord’s Day). This day I first begun [sic] to go forth in my coat and sword, as the manner now among gentlemen is.”
“April 22, 1661. Up early, and made myself as fine as I could.”
“Oct 19, 1662, (Lord’s Day). Put on my first new lace-band; and so neat it is, that I am resolved my great expense shall be lace-bands, and it will set off anything else the more.”
“May 17, 1668, (Lord’s Day). Up and put on my new stuff suit, with a shoulder belt, according to the new fashion, and the bands of my vest and tunique laced with silk lace of the colour of my suit; and so very handsome to church.”
Alas, poor Pepys! Where be your lace-bands now? your shoulder-belts? your rich silk vests?
The prominence of dress in the Diary may well surprise us, but we are scarcely less astonished by the amount of space given by our busy man of affairs to the most various kinds of pleasure and simple merrymaking. Amongst the games in which Mr. Secretary Pepys seems to have found special satisfaction, tennis, ninepins, and billiards hold high place; but these, after all, never yielded him a tithe of the pure enjoyment that he derived from his more intellectual pastimes, reading and music. Pepys was a genuine musician; and we get the impression from the journal that his love of music reached the proportions of a real passion—the only passion, indeed, of his life. On the other hand, he was not a systematic scholar, though he devoured books with avidity, keeping in touch with the literary output of his day, and at least tasting all sorts of things, from Cicero, the Hebrew grammar, and Hooker’s “Ecclesiastical Polity,” downward to Audley’s “Way to be Rich,” and the last-published comedy of the popular playwrights of his time. Here are a couple of sample entries:—
“Feb. 10, 1661-2. To Paul’s Churchyard, and there I met with Dr. Fuller’s ‘England’s Worthys,’ the first time that ever I saw it; and so I sat down reading in it; being much troubled that (though he had some discourse with me about my family and arms) he says nothing at all, nor mentions us either in Cambridgeshire or Norfolke. But I believe, indeed, our family were never considerable.”
“July 1, 1666. ... Walked to Woolwich, reading ‘The Rivall Ladys’[[4]] all the way, and find it a most pleasant and fine writ play.”
Pepys’s passing opinions have not much critical value, but they are his own, which is more than can be said of many literary dicta far more pretentious than his. It is rather instructive to follow some of his fluctuations in taste. We notice—to take a single illustration only—that when the first part of “Hudibras” was issued, he bought a copy for half a crown, having heard it much cried up for its pungent wit; but was so much disappointed when he came to dip into it, that he sold it again the same afternoon for eighteen-pence. Still every one talked of the poem, and Pepys began to wonder whether he had given it a fair trial. So a few days later he purchased another copy, resolved on closer study. Now, I will venture to say that in this emergency poor Pepys kept himself by no means free from the sham admiration and cuckoo-criticism which is the bane of our drawing-rooms, and, for that matter, of some of our college classrooms, at the present day. Had you met him in social gatherings, and had the talk turned on “Hudibras,” as it would almost certainly have done, then, doubtless, you would have found that Pepys, fearful of appearing deficient in acumen or taste, would have little or nothing to say about his adverse judgment, and might even consent to laugh perfunctorily at jokes he really did not think funny, and at doggerel rhymes which in his heart of hearts he held to be simply stupid. Meanwhile, he confides to his Diary the expression of his honest opinion, promising himself that, on the appearance of the second part of the poem, he will borrow it from some friend, and buy it only if, on inspection, it should turn out to be better than the first part. All this is surely edifying.
Here we ought perhaps to add that, in an ill-advised moment, Mr. Pepys undertook to learn to dance. “The truth is, I think it a thing very useful for a gentleman, and sometimes I may have occasion of using it, and though it cost me what I am heartily sorry it should,” (he deeply deplores the payment of ten shillings entrance fee to the class,) “yet I am resolved to get it up some other way.... So, though it be against my stomach, yet I will try it for a little while.” The subsequent introduction of a dancing-master, whose name was Pemberton, turned out, however, to be the introduction of a serpent into Pepys’s matrimonial Paradise. Mrs. Pepys, crazy over the new accomplishment, insisted on his coming twice a day, which, as Mr. Pepys properly protested, was “a folly.” Moreover, he by and by grew jealous of his wife’s attention to the said Pemberton, and some heartache and much petulance were the result. Pepys gives us one graphic description of himself, too angry to join his wife at her lesson, yet walking up and down in his own chamber, “listening to hear whether they danced or no.” But he presently became an adept in the art, and danced his own part, infinitely to his satisfaction, in many a corranto and jig.
For Pepys, as we have said, was a highly convivial person, and abandoned himself to the pleasure of the moment with an ardor and whole-heartedness which fill the grimly serious modern reader with something like amazement. The thought of the morrow rarely for him disturbed the enjoyment of to-day, though with the coming of the morrow he sometimes found that he had applied himself to the good things of this life not wisely but too well. Accounts of suppers, of social festivities kept up until ever so much o’clock in the morning, of mirthmaking of the most boisterous kind, abound in his pages, mixed up with matters of more serious import in quite a bewildering way. Pepys will often round off some such detailed report with a characteristic comment expressive of deep satisfaction; as, for example, “mighty merry,” or “so home, mighty pleased with this day’s sport.” Carpe diem was evidently his counsel of perfection. There is something charming about the man’s juvenile capacity for enjoyment, though we are frequently inclined to wonder how he managed in certain emergencies to keep his clear head and his steady hand. Yet only occasionally does the journal record any marked reaction from even the most roistering overnight carousal. Here, however, is just one case in point. On 14th August, 1666,—in the midst, be it noted, of a good deal of mental disturbance caused by a misunderstanding between himself and Lord Peterborough,—Pepys describes at length an evening of wild frolic and buffoonery. After dinner, with his wife and wife’s maid, Mercer (who played a rather prominent part in subsequent domestic unpleasantnesses), he takes a turn at the Bear Garden, where there is much wine-drinking.
“Then we supped at home, and very merry. And then about 9 o’clock to Mrs. Mercer’s gate, where the fire and boys expected us, and her son had provided abundance of serpents and rockets; and there mighty merry (my Lady Pen and Pegg going thither with us, and Nan Wright) till about 12 at night, flinging our fireworks and burning one another and the people over the way. At last our businesses being most spent, we into Mrs. Mercer’s, and there mighty merry, smutting one another with candle-grease and soot, till most of us were like devils. And that being done, then we broke up, and to my house, and there I made them drink; and upstairs we went, and there fell into dancing (W. Batelier dancing well), and dressing him and I and one Mr. Banister ... like women; and Mercer put on a suit of Tom’s like a boy, and mighty mirth we had; and Mercer danced a jig, and Nan Wright and my wife and Pegg Pen put on periwigs. Thus we spent till three or four in the morning, mighty merry; and then parted and to bed.”
Do we wonder that the next day’s entry should significantly open—“Mighty sleepy; slept till past eight of the clock”?
As wine-bibbing, and even downright drunkenness, occupy so large a space in our record, it may be proper to note indications contained in it of the rise of domestic forces destined to do much in a quiet way towards the gradual improvement of general manners in this particular respect. From the point of view of social history, there is much to interest us in Pepys’s occasional references to tea, coffee, and chocolate. These three beverages found their way into England within a few years of one another, about the middle of the seventeenth century, cocoa leading the way, and tea bringing up the rear. We have seen that on one occasion our diarist spoilt his bands by spilling chocolate upon them. The coffee-house was an accomplished fact in his time. There he often met distinguished men on business; there he passed many a chatty hour; there he once reports seeing “Dryden the poet ... and all the wits of the town.” For tea he never seems to have acquired special fondness. I have marked but two references to it in the Diary. Once, on 28th September, 1660, he notes: “I did send for a cup of tea (a China drink), of which I never had drank before,”—and unfortunately, for a wonder, he does not tell us how he liked it. And again, on 28th June, 1667, he chronicles returning home to find his wife “making of tea, a drink which Mr. Pelling, the Potticary, tells her is good for her cold.” Tea, by the way, was enormously dear in those days, and was supposed to possess astonishing and mysterious medicinal properties, concerning which we may read much in a broadside issued by Thomas Garway, the coffee-man of Change Alley,—a rare and curious document, a copy of which is still preserved in the British Museum.
It does not, of course, surprise us to learn that this pleasure-loving man of the town was a regular attendant at all the public amusements of his time. He visited the cockpit, the bear-garden, the gambling-room, the prize-ring; though, much to his credit, he found little pleasure in these places of popular resort—a fact which makes it harder for us to understand his frequent presence at public executions, in witnessing which, as many entries serve to show, he found a curious kind of satisfaction. On the other hand, his enthusiasm for everything connected with the theatre was simply unbounded; his Diary remaining to-day an important source of first-hand information on all matters pertaining to the drama of the Restoration. From his miscellaneous jottings we gain a wonderfully vivid impression of the manners and customs of the playhouse of the period, together with a sense of life in things otherwise dead beyond recall. For Pepys saw the great Betterton in all his glory, and was bewitched by the beautiful and fascinating Nell Gwynne. When his record opens, boys were still playing female parts, as they had done in Shakspere’s time, and the introduction of women to the English stage is duly registered by him as an event. He details, after his manner, all the odds and ends of scandal concerning prominent theatrical people; was himself on very friendly terms—somewhat too friendly at times for domestic peace—with various pretty actresses; and was an occasional visitor to that mysterious realm which lies behind the scenes. Once in a while, however, he acknowledges the disillusion caused by such excursions. The extremely human proportions into which the heroes and heroines of that magic stage-land dwindled when seen at close quarters,—the dust, noise, confusion, paint, powder, and general dinginess of the dressing-rooms and coulisses,—these are subjects of frequent remark. Perhaps his most disenchanting experience was one connected with Nell Gwynne—“pretty, witty Nelly,” as he fondly calls her,—(we will not forget that the Diary was written in cipher). He finds her once behind the curtain,—alas, that we should have to repeat it!—swearing like a trooper because of the smallness of the audience. Now, a small house is a trial sufficient to tax the philosophy of any actress; but we are sorry that pretty, witty Nelly, should have behaved herself in this way. Pepys confesses that on this occasion he went home a sadder and a wiser man.
Let us not imagine that Pepys followed his career of pleasure without twinges of conscience and occasional remorse. The expense involved frequently worried him, and again and again he reproved himself for wasting valuable time. It saddened him once in a while, too, to realize that he could not say “No” when temptation came in his way,—“a very great fault of mine which I must amend in.” Sometimes he argued the matter out to a logical issue; as, for instance, when, on 9th March, 1665, he writes:—
“The truth is I do indulge myself a little more in pleasure, knowing that this is the proper age of my life to do it; and out of my observation that most men that do thrive in the world do forget to take pleasure during the time they are getting their estate, but reserve that till they have got one, and then it is too late for them to enjoy it.”
This eminently philosophical generalization appears to have given him a good deal of relief. Still, the qualms would come, philosophy notwithstanding. The thought of neglected business is like a death’s head at the feast when he dines once with Lady Batten and Madame Williams; and when, on another memorable occasion, he goes to the playhouse when he knows well enough that he should have been elsewhere, he is so thoroughly ashamed of himself that he sneaks in and takes a back place—only to be immediately singled out by an acquaintance, who spies him out from afar, and, much to his mortification, insists on sitting beside him. Incidents of this kind are numerous enough to show us that the way of the transgressor was sometimes hard.
Pepys, however, managed upon occasion to get even with himself in these delicate matters by a very curious device. He registered solemn vows,—as, for instance, not to drink wine for a specified period, or not to go to the play till after a certain date,—inflicting various penalties upon himself for infraction. These penalties habitually took financial forms—payments to charities and the like; and we note that in cases of infraction—and these were sufficiently frequent—Pepys was more deeply concerned about the spent money than about the broken vow. Moreover, it has to be acknowledged that some fine casuistry is now and then shown by him in the way in which he manages to elude the sense of an obligation while technically fulfilling its letter. Under pledge not to touch wine, he consumes hypocras, a mixture of red and white wine with sugar and spices, and comforts himself with the extraordinary theory that this is, “to the best of my personal judgment, ... only a mixed compound drink, and not any wine.” Equally dubious are some of his theatrical doings. Once he congratulates himself that he has kept his vow because he arrives at the playhouse too late to make it worth his while to go in—a really magnificent confusion of intention with result. Once again, he allows an acquaintance to pay for him, and exonerates himself on the ground that he was taken to the performance, and did not, so to speak, take himself—did not, in other words, go as a free agent, and of his own impulse and will. And on yet another occasion,—such is his subtlety,—he gets Mr. Creed to treat him in this way, actually lending the said Mr. Creed the money necessary for the purpose. This, however, he felt to be going rather too far, even for an ethical theorist. In reporting the incident, he adds that this “is a fallacy that I have found now once, to avoid my vow with, but never to be more practised, I swear.”
I said that in this part of my lecture I should make no attempt to maintain logical consistency. This must be my excuse for leading you by an abrupt transition from the stage to the pulpit. Pepys occasionally stayed at home on Sundays to work up his accounts, or look over his papers, and once (but he was sick that day) to read plays; but he was, on the whole, a faithful church-goer, and, as we have had occasion to observe, made special use of the Lord’s Day for a display of his new clothes and finery, a practice which to modern readers must needs seem both strange and reprehensible. His notes of discourses heard by him are sometimes extremely interesting; while his criticisms—and he was evidently by no means easy to satisfy in the matter of sermons—are often as pungent and incisive as they are quaint and characteristic. “A lazy, poor sermon,” he writes, after hearing Dr. Fuller. Once he reports “an unnecessary sermon upon original sin, neither understood” by the preacher himself “nor the people”; and another time he hears a young man “play the fool upon the doctrine of Purgatory.” Considerable space is given in his jottings to a certain poor young Scotchman, who had a perfect genius for preaching “most tediously,” and who becomes for Pepys a sort of type and standard of dulness and nebulosity. Poor little Scot, thus to be pilloried to the end of time! Pepys had, however,—let us put it euphemistically,—a wonderful power of withdrawing into himself, when the exercises of the pulpit became unusually trying—when, to adapt the phrase of Madame de Sévigné, a preacher abused the privilege preachers have of being long-winded and tiresome. Over and over again he chronicles sleeping soundly through a sermon, and waking refreshed, if not edified, at the close. “After dinner, to church again, where the young Scot preaching, I slept all the while.”—“So up and to church, where Mr. Mills preached, but I know not how; I slept most of the sermon.”—“So to church, and slept all the sermon, the Scot, to whose voice I am not to be reconciled [one would suppose that he had become pretty well reconciled to it, judging by its soporific influences] preaching.” I pick these at random, as specimen entries. There were seasons, however, when, the sermon being bad, and himself unable to achieve the benign relief of slumber, Pepys confesses to killing time in less innocent ways. Susceptible to an extreme degree to feminine charms and graces, he often passed the hour of exhortation in looking out for pretty women, and in studying carefully their various styles of beauty and of dress. Here are a few instances to the point. “To church, where, God forgive me! I spent most of my time in looking on my new Morena [brunette] at the other side of the church.” So runs one of his confidences. And again: “After dinner, I by water alone to Westminster to the parish church, and there did entertain myself with my perspective-glass up and down the church, by which I had the great pleasure of seeing and gazing at a great many very fine women; and what with that and sleeping, I passed away the time till the sermon was done.” He even reports that once, at St. Dunstan’s, in the midst too of an “able sermon,” he found himself beside a “pretty, modest maid,” whom “I did labor to take by the hand, but she would not, but got further and further from me; and at last I could perceive her to take pins out of her pocket, to prick me if I should touch her again, which seeing I did forbear, and was glad I did spy her design. And then I fell to gaze upon another pretty maid in a pew close to me, and she on me; and I did go about to take her by the hand, which she suffered a little, and then withdrew. So the sermon ended, and the church broke up, and my amours ended also.”
This time, by a transition strictly logical, we are led to speak for a moment about the most intimate side of Pepys’s domestic existence—his relations with his wife. The subject is a difficult and delicate one; it is, moreover, too complicated to be dealt with in any detail here. A few general words must suffice.
Their marriage had been one of love, and it can hardly be called, on the whole, an unfortunate one, in spite of many unhappy episodes and a good deal of misunderstanding; for even in the white glare of the Diary, where every fleck shows, their home life often comes out in a very pleasant light. Still there were unquestionably, even from the very beginning, little rifts within the lute, and these rifts widen terribly, we notice, as the journal runs its course. To the outside world, very probably, such rifts were not often apparent; but we are privileged to see matters close at hand, and from the inside; and this undercurrent of tragedy, beneath the broad stream of prosperity and success, becomes at times painfully manifest as we read.
I suppose it can hardly be said that in the case of Mr. and Mrs. Pepys’s various matrimonial difficulties, the entire blame rested on either pair of shoulders. Mrs. Pepys was extremely pretty and attractive, and her husband admired her thoroughly, and was after his own rather singular fashion, devotedly attached to her. Yet she was evidently whimsical, somewhat capricious, apt to get into what Pepys calls “fusty” humors, and at times exceedingly trying to the nerves. Many a little crisis, not serious perhaps, but distinctly unpleasant, seems to have been brought about by a word unnecessarily spoken, a look or a phrase interpreted amiss. But, after all, we fear that the main burden of responsibility rested with Pepys himself. Why would he undertake to teach the poor young woman astronomy and arithmetic, when, admittedly, she had neither taste nor talent for such subjects? Why was he so much upset on finding that her ear for music was not nearly as good as he thought it should have been? Why did he cut her short so peremptorily on one most unfortunate occasion when she was telling that long-winded story of hers from “The Grand Cyrus”? Why was he petulant with her, at another time, for no better reason, as he himself confesses, than that he was hungry, and she had dressed herself, as she not infrequently did, in a manner that displeased him? Why, finally, when she was berating him rather roundly about her deficient wardrobe, did he fall to reading Boyle’s “Hydrostatics” aloud, “and let her talk till she was tired, and vexed that I would not hear her”? It is surely, to say the least of it, far from tactful in a husband to declaim from a treatise on hydrostatics, when his wife is determined to discuss more serious matters. These may be trifles; but such trifles are important things, when viewed from the standpoint of domestic peace. But all this touches merely the fringe of the problem. The really serious troubles were generally, if not always, caused by poor Mr. Pepys’s fatal over-sensibility—that characteristic weakness of his, to which he himself from time to time became only too keenly alive. The simple fact of the matter is, that our diarist had a fondness for the society of pretty women; that his wife, naturally enough, grew jealous; and that all sorts of unpleasantness, deepening sometimes into genuine domestic tragedy, was the inevitable result. I have not time now to go into the ins and outs of what is really a very long story, to follow the rapid fluctuations of feeling, or mark out the converging lines of approach to the unavoidable catastrophe. But I cannot resist the temptation of recounting one curious episode—that of a neat joke once played by Mrs. Pepys on her susceptible better-half. Pepys, early in the period of the Diary, had fallen in with his wife’s desire to have a girl to live with them—a kind of companion and lady’s maid. He did not like the expense incurred; but as long as the young lady was sufficiently well-favored to be a pleasant object to look on, he saw but little other cause for complaint—though cause for complaint, and good cause too, Mrs. Pepys was presently to find. Well, on one occasion his wife told him she had engaged a new maid—a girl so pretty and winsome, she went on to say, that positively she was already jealous. Mr. Pepys was a little uneasy about all this. However, he concluded that she “meant it merrily,” and awaited with a good deal of ill-repressed excitement the coming of the domestic beauty. In due season, Hebe arrived; and judge his astonishment and disgust, when he found, as he plaintively reports, that she was not pretty at all, but a very ordinary wench! For once, at all events, the laugh was on Mrs. Pepys’s side.
Towards the latter part of the Diary the conjugal misunderstandings pass into a very acute stage, and for a time a break-up of the Pepys establishment seems imminent. But we are glad to be able to record that the crisis was a comparatively brief one. Mr. Pepys, sorrow-smitten and full of remorse over his recent ill-doings, undertakes to mend his ways, and sets manfully, though with some misgivings and much difficulty, about the task of so doing. And thus the curtain falls upon what promises to be a complete reconciliation; and we close the Diary with the hope that the new peace lasted for the few brief years that were destined to elapse before the life of poor Elizabeth Pepys was brought to its untimely end. There is one odd commentary on matrimony, which I must needs add for its characteristic strain. Pepys, going to church one day, happens by accident to witness a wedding, and is much interested in what Thackeray described as “the happy couple, as the saying is.” In chronicling this incident, he makes the following extraordinary remark: “Strange to see what delight we married people have to see these poor fools decoyed into our condition, every man and woman gazing and smiling upon them.”
There is much still on the purely personal side of the Diary about which I should well have liked to speak; and, in particular, I had hoped to dwell for a little on Pepys’s notices of the Great Plague (which are much more interesting, as well as accurate, than Defoe’s well-known romancing book), and on his graphic account of the fire of London, which forms an admirable commentary on the second half of Dryden’s famous, if somewhat unmanageable, poem, “Annus Mirabilis.” But these matters, and many other such, cannot now be even touched upon. Meanwhile, in bringing these rambling memoranda to a close, I do not feel inclined to apologize for what may seem the frivolous character of my material. The unique charm of Pepys’s Diary, as I said at the outset, lies very largely in the frankness, the naïveté, the unsophisticated directness of its record; it is, as I insisted, really and truly what other chronicles of the kind have been simply in name, a journal intime. Something of this frankness, this naïveté, it has been my aim to illustrate, and to show you at the same time how quaint and startling are some of the results. And let me ask you not to judge too harshly of the man into whose existence we have thus ventured to pry. Remember that we have been privileged in his case to push aside the curtain which men habitually keep carefully drawn across the penetralia of their lives; that we have caught him often enough at unfair advantage, and in a light fiercer than that which, Tennyson says, beats upon a throne, blackening each blot. At any rate, I, for my own part, see no reason why, as we lay his Diary aside, we should indulge in platitudes of criticism—still less, why we should console ourselves with the flattering thought of moral superiority. Pepys was not a great man, it is true: he was often weak, often foolish; the temptations of the world again and again proved too much for him; at many important points, his theory and practice of life were alike unsound. But it might be well perhaps, before we undertake to throw stones at his glass house, to look a little carefully into the vitreous mansion in which we ourselves dwell. And if you and I were forced to lay bare, as he has done for himself, the secret thoughts and feelings, the passing fancies, the unspoken desires, the foibles and failures of our every-day existence, I wonder how many of us would see reason to be proud of the revelation so made. O my brothers, let us be humble and charitable! Humility and charity are excellent things; and humility and charity, I confess, I find constantly forced upon me whenever I dip, for an hour’s genuine amusement, into the Diary of old Samuel Pepys.
Two Novelists of the English
Restoration.
Two Novelists of the English
Restoration.
It is the object of this brief paper to introduce the good-natured reader, who, as a well-organized human being, is undoubtedly possessed of a proper love of fiction, to two women who had much to do with settling the English novel into its true line of development. I confess I could wish that the ladies in question were, socially and morally, a trifle more presentable. I can well remember the time when I myself made their acquaintance in the library of the British Museum, and how I was almost ashamed of myself, despite the fact that I had the definite purposes of a student to support me, when I thought of the hours I had been fain to spend in their singularly unedifying company. But in the study of literary evolution, as in that of the history of the world at large, it is not always possible to be over-fastidious. When we are interested in a thing done, we must consider, as cheerfully as may be, the doer and the doing of it, though we may have fault enough to find sometimes with the character of the former and the manner of the latter.
The women to whose personalities and writings we are presently to turn—Mrs. Behn and Mrs. Manley—stand out among the least attractive products of an age of low ideals and scandalous living. But they none the less remain figures of some permanent attractiveness to those of us who care to investigate the beginnings of our great modern prose fiction; and it is on account of their relative or historic importance that I have undertaken to say something about them in this place.
In order, however, to make such historic importance clear, we must go back a little in our inquiry.
The titanic imaginative energy of the Elizabethan and Jacobean periods had found its principal outlet in the drama. It was on the stage and through the literature of the stage that, during the most brilliant era of its intellectual activity, the genius of the English people, for the most part, sought expression. The drama thus became the representative and the embodiment of all that was strongest and most characteristic in the national life. In it we find the great mental and moral movements of the time gathered up and made vocal; to it we turn for the fullest and richest manifestation of the national mind. As Mr. Symonds truly said: “The drama, its own original creation, stood to the English nation in the place of all the other arts. England ... needed no æsthetic outlet but the drama.”
But little by little the close connection between the stage and the national life was severed; and cut off from its sources of deepest impulse and inspiration, the drama fell gradually into a condition of decrepitude and decay. For many years before the Revolution the breach between theatre and people had been a slowly widening one; and by the time the Restoration once more gave free rein to dramatic art, the separation had become complete. No longer making catholic appeal to the whole community, no longer absorbing into itself, by way of nourishment and stimulation, the broad and generous interests of a varied social life, the drama now became the mouthpiece and the mirror of one class only—of the aristocratic class, which had brought foreign fashions, tastes, morality, with it from abroad. The theatre of Shakspere and his contemporaries had been, as it were, the flower and fruitage of a period of intense national vigor and excitement; the theatre of Congreve and Wycherley was little more than the passing amusement of the idle and demoralized fashionable world. Harassed by Puritan austerity on the one hand, and more seriously perverted by Royalist profligacy upon the other, the drama was forced into a relationship with the larger mass of the people at once unnatural and most disastrous; and thus the plays of the time, in spite of all their pungency of wit and glitter of dialogue, lack that breadth of horizon, earnestness of purpose, and firm grasp of life, without which no body of literature—and no body of dramatic literature especially—can lay claim to permanent value and significance.
Meanwhile a new taste was growing up, and with it a fresh channel was opened for imaginative activity. While the drama, sapped at its foundations, was sinking deeper and deeper into corruption, and before as yet any effort had been put forth to save it from its fate, the first noteworthy experiments were being made towards the development of a class of literature which has since acquired unrivalled popularity, and every year continues to fill a larger and larger place in public estimation, as well as upon our library shelves. The causes which combined to bring about the decline of the drama and the rise of the modern novel were so varied in character and intricate in their outworkings, that even the briefest discussion of them here would commit us to an unwarrantable digression; though it should be said, and said emphatically, that the change is not to be regarded as a mere matter of shifting literary taste, since it was unquestionably related, in the most direct and intimate way, with some of the largest and deepest movements of the time in society, manners, and general thought.[[5]] Suffice it for us now to remark the simple fact that, while the dramatists of the Restoration were engaged upon works which, fortunately for English society and letters, left but little permanent mark upon the history of the theatre, the foundations were being slowly but firmly laid upon which the vast superstructure of modern fiction was presently to be reared.
So thoroughly absorbed had men been in the drama, and so natural had it seemed for those of imaginative power to turn directly to the stage, that hitherto prose fiction, though by no means neglected, had done little towards making a decisive start. Some popular stories, then long current, had been gathered up and circulated in chap-books, and had in sundry cases furnished materials for contemporary playwrights; translations had been made from several foreign languages, and in this way “Don Quixote,” and the works of Rabelais, Boccaccio, Montemayor, and others, introduced to English readers; while such collections of versions and adaptations as those of Painter and Turbervile might have been found, it is said, so great had been their temporary vogue, on almost every London bookstall. Moreover, the form of fiction had been occasionally employed by philosophers for broaching new theories of life and government; as by More, in his “Utopia,” and Bacon, in his “New Atlantis.” And, far more important than any such sporadic efforts as these, there were the romances produced by some of the early dramatists—Lyly, and his most famous followers, Lodge and Greene, in particular. To these have to be added the chivalrous pastoral of Sir Philip Sidney, “warbler of poetic prose”; and in a very different category, the stories and sketches of Thomas Nash, Dekker, and Chettle, whose work, apart altogether from any question of absolute merit, is of supreme significance to the student of English fiction, because in it we find the crude beginnings of the picaresque novel of later times.
Lumped together in this way—and the above paragraph makes no pretence at completeness of statement,—the amount of prose fiction of one and another kind produced in England under Elizabeth and James the First may seem to be considerable, and certainly no student of the evolution of literature, or of the many-sided intellectual activity of the Shaksperian age, would to-day think of underrating it. Yet it is possible perhaps to go to the other extreme, and to exaggerate its historic importance. To trace the connection between the tentative output of the ’prentice-writers just referred to and the fully grown fiction of the eighteenth century—to indicate, for example, the lines along which Nash leads us through Defoe to Smollett and Fielding, and the points of unexpected contact between Sidney and Richardson is an inquiry full of curious interest for the special student. But too much might easily be made of the results brought to light thereby. After duly allowing for the isolated productions of the Elizabethan period, which undoubtedly broke ground in many directions, we come back still to the broad fact, that it was not until after the Restoration, and largely as a result of what was then undertaken and accomplished, that the novel firmly established itself as a well-defined form of literary art. With the Restoration, therefore, it may fairly be said that we open a new chapter in the history of English fiction.
The new era, however, began badly enough, in the midst of a byway of most absurd experiment, which could not, in the nature of things, lead to any permanent achievement. For along with so much else that was French in manners, fashions, morals, turns of speech, there had already been imported into England a taste for the peculiar form of romance—the roman à longue haleine—which was just then enjoying amazing popularity in the country of its birth, on the other side of the Channel. As we turn back to the dull and monstrous productions of the class now in question, we find it difficult enough to conceive that in any place, under any possible circumstances, there should have been men and women able to derive not simply enjoyment, but passionate and continuous enjoyment, from their pages. But the famous Hôtel de Rambouillet had set its mark upon them, and in the well-prepared country of the “Arcadia,” they realized instant and complete success, not only among the ultra-fashionables of a Gallicized society, but also in the more general reading world.
We must glance for a moment at one or two of the most salient characteristics of the school of fiction which thus became for a time so widely influential, that we may at once appreciate its stultifying tendencies, and bring into clear perspective what we shall presently have to say about the work of Mrs. Manley and Mrs. Behn. In doing this we need go no farther than the examples furnished by the three most prominent French leaders of polite taste—Gomberville, La Calprenède, and Mlle. de Scudéri.
In the first place, the would-be student of the so-called classical-heroic romances of these once celebrated writers is staggered by their tremendous bulk and inordinate prolixity. The modern reader shudders at Richardson, and takes his “Pamela” and “Sir Charles Grandison” in condensed editions. But Richardson is brevity itself compared with these earlier indefatigable laborers in the field of the novel. Gomberville’s “Polexandre” began in four volumes quarto, and in its later editions comprised some six thousand pages; the “Cléopâtre” of La Calprenède, when finished, filled twelve octavo volumes; “Pharamond,” written partly by the same author, and partly by Pierre d’Ortigue de Vaumorière, reached nearly the same length; while the “Clélie” and “Le Grand Cyrus” of Mlle. de Scudéri—who in the matter of resolute long-windedness was, naturally enough, more than a match for her masculine rivals—extended respectively to some eight thousand and fifteen thousand octavo pages.[[6]] These, and such as these, were the works that Pope was ridiculing when in “The Rape of the Lock” he built out of them an altar for the due celebration of the “adventurous baron’s” religious rites; and he was surely justified in describing them as “huge French romances.” It makes us feel how little of permanence and stability there is in any matter of taste, when we remember that these colossal productions, over which the most patient reader of to-day would soon catch himself yawning, were once awaited with interest and devoured with avidity.
But even more important, from the standpoint of literary history, than the mere size of these overgrown absurdities were their structural principles and peculiarities of style. An offshoot apparently from the chivalrous and pastoral romances of earlier date, with the addition of what it pleased writers and readers alike to regard as an “historical” blend of interest, the classical-heroic romance proper presents a bewildering jumble of the most far-sought and incongruous materials. In fine disregard of anachronism and inconsistency, their authors carry us hither and thither about the world, introducing us to Greeks and Romans, Egyptians and Persians, Knights of the Round Table, Paladins of Charlemagne, shepherds and shepherdesses of nowhere in particular, and even Peruvian Incas. The main plot, as a rule deceptively simple, is complicated from first to last by enormous and intricate ramifications of secondary actions; a characteristic due to the fact that every fresh individual introduced, whether in the central narrative, or in some excrescence from it, persists in recounting his own adventures at tremendous length. Thus we have story within story, wheel within wheel, till the reader completely loses his hold upon the tangled threads of intrigue, and collapses into a condition of dazed despair.[[7]] But this is not the worst. The characters seem to be totally unable to tell their experiences in a straightforward fashion and have done with it. They linger by the way—time being of no importance to any of them—to indulge in everlasting conversations and soliloquies, discourse learnedly on delicate questions of gallantry and honor, quote, criticise, sentimentalize, pour out page after page of inflated rhapsody, and cavil remorselessly on the ninth part of a hair. Thus the so-called “historic” element in these romances, is nominal only. The heroes and heroines, of whatever race, clime, or era, are only masquerading men and women of seventeenth-century France, with the ridiculous jargon of the Hôtel de Rambouillet incessantly upon their lips.
It will be seen from this brief description that the classical-heroic romance was absolutely artificial and unreal; that it had, and pretended to have, no touch or contact with the things of solid existence. Characters, incidents, sentiments, speech were all of a world apart—Utopia, Arcadia, No-Man’s-Land. Life was not distorted, as it is in the writings of many romantic novelists and most of our modern realists. It was simply not considered at all.
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 “Cléopâtre” in 1652; while “Clélie,” “Astrée,” “Scipion,” “Le Grand Cyrus,” “Zelinda,” and “Almahide” were all translated and published between the latter date and 1677. On the heels of these regular translations soon came sundry imitations which, after the manner of imitations in general, reproduced with scrupulous fidelity all the worst features of the original works. “Eliana,” issued in 1661, reads almost like a burlesque of the heroic style, and abounds in long-drawn descriptive passages of the most florid and fantastic kind. Running this very close in overwrought extravagance of theme and language, the “Pandion and Amphigenia” of Crowne the dramatist saw the light four years later. But the most celebrated of the English specimens of this exotic school is a somewhat earlier work—the “Parthenissa” of Roger Boyle, Earl of Orrery; a production left incomplete after reaching more than eight hundred folio pages. This is pronounced by Dunlop, whose industry and patience in reading the romances of this period must have been little short of superhuman, to be the best English specimen of its class; and most of us will probably be more ready to accept his judgment than to undertake its verification.[[8]]
Both “Eliana” and “Parthenissa” were broken off abruptly, the latter in the middle of one of its most interesting situations; and Dunlop is probably right in regarding this fact as evidence of the gradual decline of the taste out of which they had grown and to which they had appealed. Indeed, so far as England was concerned, the classical-heroic romance could not have been otherwise than ephemeral. It had no real hold upon English society, and was fundamentally out of harmony with the spirit of an age in which chivalry had degenerated into empty gallantry, and playing at pastoral simplicity had ceased to be an aristocratic amusement. The temper of which it was one manifestation for a time made its influence deeply felt in almost every department of literature; it invaded even poetry; and directly inspired that extraordinary form of drama, so familiar to the student of Davenant and Dryden—the heroic play. But the prose fiction to which it gave existence carried in its essential qualities the seeds of early decay. It is true that in certain quarters it retained a faint and shadowy kind of reputation longer than might have been expected.[[9]] But the rise of a totally different school of novelists in the last decades of the seventeenth century, practically marks the close of its career; and dying, it left no issue.
We are now at length prepared to appreciate the historic significance and interest of what, in a rather loose way, is commonly called the prose fiction of the Restoration.
Says Mrs. Manley, in the introductory address to the reader in her “Secret History of Queen Zarah”:—
“Romances in France have for a long time been the diversion and amusement of the whole world; the people ... have read these works with a most surprising greediness; but that fury is very much abated, and they are all fallen off from this distraction. The little histories of this kind have taken place [sic] of romances, whose prodigious number of volumes were sufficient to tire and satiate such whose heads were most filled with these notions.... These little pieces which have banished romances are much more agreeable to the brisk and impetuous humor of the English, who have naturally no taste for long-winded performances; for they have no sooner begun a book than they desire to see the end of it.”
These remarks will doubtless strike some readers as curious, and we may well wonder what the followers of Taine, particularly, would make of the “brisk and impetuous humor” here alleged to characterize the English people. But they are valuable to us, irrespective of their psychology, because they enable us to understand how the new fiction—the fiction in which, despite all adventitious differences, we can clearly recognize the beginnings of the modern novel—arose to take the place of the Anglo-French romance. The “little histories” to which Mrs. Manley refers grew up by the most natural process of reaction against the “prodigious number of volumes” into which, as we have noted, the older narratives had run. Nor was it in measure only that a change was initiated. As we shall presently see, the novel of the Restoration, broadly so-called, differed from its predecessors not merely in length, but also in the more important qualities of subject-matter, treatment, and style. The old Arcadia was finally forsaken for the solid earth, and lengthy descriptions, multifarious episodes, wearisome soliloquies, and needless tortuosities of plot were at the same time left behind. Real life now formed the basis of the story, and, despite occasional reminiscences of the older manner, crispness of narration became one of the writers’ principal aims.
We have here undertaken to consider a little this healthy and significant change from the romance to the novel in the writings of two of its representative exponents—Mrs. Behn and Mrs. Manley. It should be understood, however, that in adopting this course we have no intention of throwing their work into undue prominence. They were but part-factors in a general movement, and must be contented to share its honors with a number of their contemporaries. Nevertheless, they possess a special interest for the student of English literature, for two very good reasons. In the first place, taken together, they illustrate with remarkable clearness those broader characteristics of the new fiction which it is our principal concern in this little essay to bring to light; and, secondly, there is the fact that they were women. It is surely in itself instructive to find that while the great Elizabethan drama can adduce no example of a woman-writer, it is in the productions of a couple of women that we can study to the best advantage some of the rudimentary developments of the modern novel.[[10]]
It will be convenient for us to ignore the strict demands of chronology and begin with the work of Mrs. Manley, which, though somewhat later in date than Mrs. Behn’s, may properly be taken first, since it is at once cruder in form and historically of minor importance.
Mrs. De la Riviere Manley—“poor Mrs. Manley,” as Swift calls her, in the “Journal to Stella”—enjoyed anything but a peaceful life. It seems to be an accepted tradition among biographers of men and women of letters to begin their narratives by protesting that the lives of authors seldom furnish exciting materials, and then to go on to add that their particular heroes or heroines are exceptions to the general rule. Certainly Mrs. Manley was an exception, if rule indeed it be, which I think open to question. She herself has given us some account of her adventures and misfortunes in different portions of her “New Atalantis,” and more particularly in “The History of Rivella”—an autobiography and apologia pro vitâ sua—published in 1714, under the pseudonym of Sir Charles Lovemore. There is no need for us to follow her through all her varied experiences, the record of which, though often lively enough, is seldom of a very improving character. It will be sufficient to give the briefest outline of her career.
She was born in Guernsey about the year 1677, her father, Sir Roger Manley, being, as is generally stated, governor, or, as seems more probable, deputy governor, of that island. According to her own account, she grew up into a sharp-witted, impressionable girl, who, receiving rather more than an average education, early gave signs of an intelligence beyond what, at that time, was considered the fair endowment of her sex. Her tribulations, too, began early. Her parents died when she was still very young, and she fell into the hands of a male cousin, who unfortunately became enamored of her. The man was known to be married already, but he asserted that his wife was dead; and Rivella, deceived by his protestations, entered into a secret marriage with him. The theme of one of her most unsavory stories seems to have been directly suggested by this tragic episode in her own life. After a while, of course, the truth came out. Then her scoundrelly husband abandoned her, and she was left to shift for herself as best she might. About this time she gained the patronage of the famous Duchess of Cleveland, one of Charles the Second’s mistresses, in attendance upon whom she remained during some six months. But the Duchess was a woman of fickle temper. She soon grew tired of Mrs. Manley; and, by pretending that she had discovered her in an intrigue with her son (and there may possibly have been more ground than poor Rivella admits for the allegation), found an excuse for dismissing her from her service. It was now that Mrs. Manley appears to have taken up her pen in earnest—and a very reckless and caustic pen it by and by turned out to be. Her tragedy, “The Royal Mistress,” acted in 1696, proved so successful that she found herself courted by all the dandies and witlings of the day; and for some years, as a consequence, she spent her time principally in getting out of one intrigue into another. Nevertheless, she found leisure, amid all her excitements, to write and produce her “Secret Memoirs and Manners of Several Persons of Quality, from the New Atalantis”—a work which, under the most thinly disguised names, attacked in an extremely violent and outspoken manner the men who had been mainly instrumental in bringing about the Revolution. In virtue of this production Mrs. Manley may be said to have secured the doubtful honor of being the first political woman-writer in England. So successful was the satire in reaching those for whom it was intended, that the printer was straightway apprehended; but Mrs. Manley—who, as Swift contemptuously put it, “had generous principles for one of her sort”—would not allow him to suffer in her behalf. She appeared before the Court of King’s Bench, and declared herself solely responsible for the entire undertaking, maintaining, moreover, “with unaltered constancy, that the whole work was mere invention, without any cynical allusion to real characters.”[[11]] Mrs. Manley, indeed, seems to have cared a great deal more about getting her printer out of a scrape than about sticking too solemnly to the simple truth; since, apart altogether from the manifestly satirical intention of the book, we know that she made its publication the basis of a personal application to the ministry. In the “Journal to Stella,” Swift tells us how he afterwards met Mrs. Manley at the house of Lord Peterborough, and adds that she was there “soliciting him to get some pension or reward for her service in the cause, by writing her ‘Atalantis.’” Still we must frankly admit that her loyalty to the printer in such a crisis throws her character into a rather favorable light.
However, after a short period of confinement, and sundry appearances before the court, Mrs. Manley was allowed to go free, and the matter dropped. After this adventure, she produced several dramatic pieces, wrote some pamphlets of a political kind, and for a time conducted “The Examiner,” which had then been relinquished by Swift. Indeed, she appears to have remained in the full swing of activity to the close of her life. She died, aged about forty-seven, in 1724, at the house of one John Barber, an alderman of the City of London, with whom it is supposed she had for some time past been living.
In person, as she herself very candidly tells us, Mrs. Manley was fat, and her face had been early marked by that terrible scourge of the age, the smallpox; notwithstanding which defects, her fascination of manner and conversation was so great, that she was always popular with the other sex. Of her moral character, perhaps, the less said the better. Circumstances had not been kind to Rivella; and at this distance of time, and with all the intrigues in which she was involved, it is not always easy to say how far she was sinned against, and how far sinning, or whether her own statement came anywhere near the facts of the case when she boldly declared that “her virtues” were “her own, her vices occasioned by her misfortunes.” Still we must admit the truth of the words which she has put into the mouth of d’Aumont in the “History of Rivella”: “If she have but half so much of the practice as the theory, in the way of love, she must certainly be a most accomplished person.” And a most accomplished person, after her own fashion, she evidently seems to have been.
The most famous of her writings—if the word famous can properly be used, when they have all passed into oblivion—is, of course, the “New Atalantis”—that veritable “cornucopia of scandal,” as Swift dubbed it. This work swept its author into temporary notoriety, and for a few years was perhaps as much talked of and discussed as any publication of the time. But the life has long since gone out of its personalities and topical allusions, and the ordinary reader of English literature, if he recall it even by name, is likely to remember it only for the use Pope makes of it in a well-known passage in “The Rape of the Lock”:—
“Let wreaths of triumph now my temples twine!
(The victor cried); the glorious prize is mine!
While fish in streams, or birds delight in air,
Or in a coach and six the British fair;
As long as Atalantis shall be read,
Or the small pillow grace a lady’s bed;
While visits shall be paid on solemn days,
When numerous wax-lights in bright order blaze;
While nymphs take treats, or assignations give,
So long my honor, name, and praise shall live!”
But though this book, as we shall hereafter find, is not without its significance for the student of the English novel, it is less interesting and important from our point of view than “The Power of Love: In Seven Examples,” to which for the present we will confine our attention.
As the title indicates, this volume consists of seven separate stories—“The Fair Hypocrite,” “The Physician’s Stratagem,” “The Wife’s Resentment,” “The Husband’s Resentment” (in two examples), “The Happy Fugitives,” and “The Perjured Beauty.” The keynote of the whole collection is clearly struck in the following passage from the first-mentioned of the tales:—
“Of all those passions which may be said to tyrannize over the heart of man, love is not only the most violent, but the most persuasive.... A lover esteems nothing difficult in the pursuit of his desires. It is then that fame, honor, chastity, and glory have no longer their due estimation, even in the most virtuous breast. When love truly seizes the heart, it is like a malignant fever which thence disperses itself through all the sensible parts; the poison preys upon the vitals, and is only extinguished by death; or by as fatal a cure, the accomplishment of its own desires.”
The “love” shadowed forth in these sentences is that which dominates each of the seven “Examples” in this little book, which are thus only variations on a single persistent theme. It is the merest animal passion—passion unrefined by sentiment, uncolored by emotion; the love of Etheridge and Wycherley. Upon the gratification of this in a licit, or, as frequently happens, in an illicit way, the plot is, with the monotony of a modern French novel, everywhere made to turn. The heroes of her stories are all, like Mr. Slye, in the author’s rather amusing sketch, the “Stage-Coach Journey to Exeter,” “naturally amorous”; her heroines, like the Fair Princess in “The Happy Fugitives,” are one and all “born under an amorous constellation,” and like her, are forever “floating on the tempestuous sea of passion, guided by a master who is too often pleased with the shipwreck of those whom he conducts.” So violent are the experiences portrayed that we can hardly avoid the thought that Mrs. Manley must have adhered in practice to the maxim of “Astrophel and Stella”—“Look in thy heart, and write,”—and must have gone straight to some of the stormiest episodes of her own career for the pictures which she gives us. Passion and gratification—these, then, are the regular ingredients of her stories. Of the larger and finer influence of love; of its strengthening and ennobling power; of the way in which its subtle mastery will work through life,—
“Not only to keep down the base in man,
But teach high thought, and amiable words,
And courtliness, and the desire of fame,
And love of truth, and all that makes a man,”—
of all these things, familiar enough, fortunately, to the reader of modern fiction, we have scarcely a trace. So far as the influence of love is shown at all, it is consistently shown as a debasing influence. This point, clearly set forth in the quotation already made, may be illustrated from the record of the writer’s own life. In the “History of Rivella,” she tells us that, when quite a girl, she was infatuated with a handsome young soldier who, when the gaming-tables were brought out, found, to his embarrassment, that he had no money to play with. Noticing this, Rivella went to her father’s drawer, stole some money, and gave it to him. Now, mark the author’s commentary upon the action: “Being perfectly just,” she says, “by nature, principle, and education, nothing but love, and that in a high degree, could have made her otherwise.” Here we have, then, a fair expression of the kind of love which is presented to us in these “Examples.” A despotic animal appetite, unchecked in its fierce, impulsive play by any nobler considerations whatever, it drives human nature downward, captive and slave to the “fury passions” which civilization has been struggling to bring under partial control.
These seven stories, therefore, are anything but pleasant reading, unless they be, like certain incidents referred to in the “New Atalantis,” “pleasant ... to the ears of the vicious.” It is not only that they are repulsive because of the undisguised licentiousness that everywhere prevails in them; they are occasionally disgusting on account of the large part played by the merely horrible. So intimately related are unemotionalized passion and utter brutality, that, as might be expected, here, where the one is so conspicuous, the other has considerable place. The revenge taken by the woman upon her worthless husband in “The Wife’s Resentment” (Did recollection of her own wrongs add bitterness to Rivella’s pen, we may well wonder?) may be cited as an example of this. Don Roderigo, a Spanish gentleman, after trying for fifteen months to seduce a poor girl named Violenta, marries her in a moment of thoughtlessness, but keeps the marriage a secret from his friends. Before long he is forced by his family into a second and public union with a wealthy heiress. The news of his inconstancy fills Violenta with delirious passion; and nothing will appease her but revenge, sudden and complete. She decoys Roderigo into her apartment, murders him while he is asleep, and, not contented with this, deliberately tears out his eyes and mangles “his body all over with an infinite number of gashes” before throwing it out into the street. And what is particularly noteworthy is, that the narrator herself does not seem to be in the least impressed by the loathsome details accumulated in her description. She reports the incident as though it were a matter of course, and quietly tells us that when Violenta was brought to justice for her crime, the duke, the magistrates, and all the spectators were amazed “at the courage and magnanimity of the maid, and that one of so little rank should have so great a sense of her dishonor.”
Unquestionably the most pleasing of all these stories, alike from a literary and from a moral standpoint, is “The Happy Fugitives,” a simple tale, containing comparatively little to which exception could be taken. The plots of “The Physician’s Stratagem” and “The Perjured Beauty,” on the other hand, are too hideous to be reproduced. As a whole, the book is desperately dull and tiresome; for the pornographic horrors of its pages are unredeemed by any excellencies of style. Its only interest for us here, therefore, is an historic one; and about this side of the matter, we shall have a general word or two to say later on.
If, morally considered, she is equally open to stricture, our second woman-novelist, Mrs. Behn, at least bulks out as a more considerable figure in the annals of English letters. Highly eulogized by some of the most distinguished of her contemporaries—Dryden, Otway, and Southerne among the number,—she must still be spoken of with the respect due to her undoubted talents, versatility, industry, and courage. That she is to be regarded as “an honor and glory” to her sex, as one of her enthusiastic admirers roundly declared, it would now, for many reasons, be out of the question to maintain. But the one fact that she was the first woman of her country to support herself entirely by the pen, itself establishes her right to a certain place in the long line of female writers who have since her day done so much for literature.
Aphra (or Aphara) Johnson, afterwards Behn, (known as the “Divine 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.
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]]
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.”
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]]
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.
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.
It was only after this mistake had been made that the possibility of avoiding the airy unrealities of old romance, without being bound down to the skeleton facts of life, gradually became apparent. The discovery that a writer could be true to experience and human nature without necessarily reproducing actual events or photographing individual men and women, was the outcome of many experiments and much failure, and was at length hit upon in a half-blind and fortuitous way. It was only little by little that the element of acknowledged fiction was allowed to encroach upon the domain of truth; only little by little that people began to understand that the art of fiction and the art of lying are not one and the same, and that the boldest play of imagination in the treatment of life is not always to be associated with the distortion of reality. In the works of Mrs. Manley and Mrs. Behn we see the English novel stumbling painfully towards the comprehension of its own objects. We have reached firm ground, and that is a great achievement; for only when we move on firm ground is the novel possible. But the dead weight of the actual is too heavy for us; we cannot synthesize the results of experience; we gather observations, but we are unable to make artistic productions out of them. Thus, we have a “New Atalantis” (and the book is historically significant just for this reason) which is little more than a jumble of personal scandal, filled in with occasional false incidents and mendacious details; an “Oroonoko,” which is rather a fanciful biography than a tale; we have a “Wife’s Resentment,” a “Fair Jilt,” a “Lucky Mistake,”—stories all of which are based more or less exclusively on historic occurrences or on events that had come under the direct observation of the relaters.[[19]] Even where there is a lack of truth, the appearance of truth is still carefully preserved. Things which have not actually happened are nevertheless related as facts; real characters are put through unreal incidents; the novel is supposed to give history; fiction and falsehood are as yet confused.
With this brief summary of the qualities and shortcomings of our two women-novelists, this little paper might properly close. But it may be interesting if, having carried our inquiry thus far, we add a paragraph about the way in which the rigid reality of the works at which we have been glancing grew gradually out into the genuine realism of the later novel.
Properly to understand this tendency towards an equilibrium between fact and imagination, we should turn aside to examine the profound influence exerted over the fiction of the time of the “Tatler” and the “Spectator.” But for our present purposes we shall find the movement forward clearly enough exemplified in the work of one man—the author of “Robinson Crusoe,” whose writings, therefore, we will take as our clue.
Beginning with the production of history, or semi-history, in which real characters, slightly exaggerated, move through real scenes, or through scenes to but small extent imaginary, Defoe proceeded little by little to import more of fiction into his narrative, to the detriment of the small substratum of truth still retained. By and by, he did no more than preserve the mere frame-work of history—as in “The Journal of the Plague Year” and the “Memoirs of a Cavalier,” in which most of the characters and many of the incidents are purely fictitious. After this, the remaining element of truth was gradually eliminated, and he reached the production of narratives of fictitious characters in fictitious settings and among fictitious scenes. “From writing biographies with real names attached to them,” says Professor Minto, in his Life of Defoe, “it was but a short step to writing biographies with fictitious names.” Even when that short step was taken, the artifices resorted to by him to preserve the apparent truthfulness of his narrations show us that he was by no means satisfied that it would be desirable to let matters of fact slip out of his work entirely. Though what he wrote was false, he still tried to palm it off upon the world as true. This makes the writing of Defoe more like lying than fiction, and goes far to explain the extraordinary minuteness of the circumstantial method adopted by him. But it marks, also, the transitional quality of his work. As Mr. Leslie Stephen has neatly put it, “Defoe’s novels are simply history minus the facts.” Only in his latest works do we find this pseudo-history making way for fiction proper; and then we recognize in Defoe the distinct forerunner of the great novelists of the eighteenth century.
But to follow this matter farther would take us beyond the due bounds, already somewhat transgressed, of our present study. As we may now see, the story of English fiction from the period of the Anglo-French romance to the time of Fielding and Smollett, is a long one, and we have undertaken to deal with only one chapter here—the chapter which tells of Mrs. Behn and Mrs. Manley, of what they did, and of what they failed to do. That finished, our task is at an end.