the modern poets
Have left Stage-practice, chang’d their old Vocations,
Atoning for bad Plays with worse Translations.
In some instances this was true enough, but when the writer attacks Dryden he becomes ridiculous and imprecates
May he still split on some unlucky Coast,
And have his Works or Dictionary lost:
That he may know what Roman Authors mean,
No more than does our blind Translatress Behn,[55]
The Female Wit, who next convicted stands,
Not for abusing Ovid’s verse but Sand’s:
She might have learn’d from the ill-borrow’d Grace,
(Which little helps the Ruin of her Face)
That Wit, like Beauty, triumphs o’er the Heart
When more of Nature’s seen, and less of Art:
Nor strive in Ovid’s Letters to have shown
As much of Skill, as Lewdness in her own.
Then let her from the next inconstant Lover,
Take a new Copy for a second Rover.
Describe the Cunning of a jilting Whore,
From the ill Arts herself has us’d before;
Thus let her write, but Paraphrase no more.
These verses are verjuiced, unwarranted, unfair. Tom Brown too in his Letters from the Dead to the Living has a long epistle ‘From worthy Mrs. Behn the Poetess, to the famous Virgin Actress,’ (Mrs. Bracegirdle), in which the Diana of the stage is crudely rallied. ‘The Virgin’s Answer to Mrs. Behn’ contains allusions to Aphra’s intrigue with some well-known dramatic writer, perhaps Ravenscroft, and speaks of many an other amour beside. But then for a groat Brown would have proved Barbara Villiers a virgin, and taxed Torquemada with unorthodoxy. Brown has yet another gird at Mrs. Behn in his The Late Converts Exposed, or the Reason of Mr. Bays’s Changing his Religion &c. Considered in a Dialogue (1690, a quarto tract; and reprinted in a Collection of Brown’s Dialogues, 8vo, 1704). Says Eugenius: ‘You may remember Mr. Bays, how the famed Astrea, once in her Life-time unluckily lighted upon such a Sacred Subject, and in a strange fit of Piety, must needs attempt a Paraphrase on the Lord’s Prayer. But alas poor Gentlewoman! She had scarce travell’d half way, when Cupid served her as the Cut-Purse did the Old Justice in Bartholmew Fair, tickled her with a Straw in her Ear, and then she could not budge one foot further, till she had humbly requested her Maker to grant her a private Act of Toleration for a little Harmless Love, otherwise called Fornication.’ There is a marginal note to this passage: ‘Mrs. Behn’s Miscell. Printed by Jos. Hindmarsh.’ In a Letter from the Dead Thomas Brown to the Living Heraclitus (1704), a sixpenny tract, this wag is supposed to meet Mrs. Behn in the underworld, and anon establishes himself on the most familiar terms with his ‘dear Afra’; they take, indeed, ‘an extraordinary liking to one another’s Company’ for ‘good Conversation is not so overplentiful in these Parts.’ A bitterer attack yet, An Epistle to Julian (c. 1686-7), paints her as ill, feeble, dying:—
Doth that lewd Harlot, that Poetick Quean,
Fam’d through White Fryars, you know who I mean,
Mend for reproof, others set up in spight,
To flux, take glisters, vomits, purge and write.
Long with a Sciatica she’s beside lame,
Her limbs distortur’d, Nerves shrunk up with pain,
And therefore I’ll all sharp reflections shun,
Poverty, Poetry, Pox, are plagues enough for one.
In truth, Aphra Behn’s life was not one of mere pleasure, but a hard struggle against overwhelming adversity, a continual round of work. We cannot but admire the courage of this lonely woman, who, poor and friendless, was the first in England to turn to the pen for a livelihood, and not only won herself bread but no mean position in the world of her day and English literature of all time. For years her name to a new book, a comedy, a poem, an essay from the French, was a word to conjure with for the booksellers. There are anecdotes in plenty. Some true, some not so reliable. She is said to have introduced milk-punch into England.[56] We are told that she could write a page of a novel or a scene of a play in a room full of people and yet hold her own in talk the while.[57] Her popularity was enormous, and edition after edition of her plays and novels was called for.
In 1690, there was brought out on the stage a posthumous comedy, The Widow Ranter.[58] But without her supervision, it was badly cast, the script was mauled, and it failed. In 1696 Charles Gildon, who posed as her favourite protégé (and edited her writings), gave The Younger Brother. He had, however, himself tampered with the text. The actors did it scant justice and it could not win a permanent place in the theatrical repertory. In May, 1738, The Gentleman’s Magazine published The Apotheosis of Milton, a paper, full of interest, which ran through several numbers. It is a Vision, in which the writer, having fallen asleep in Westminster Abbey, is conducted by a Genius into a spacious hall, ‘sacred to the Spirits of the Bards, whose Remains are buried, or whose Monuments are erected within this Pile. To night an Assembly of the greatest Importance is held upon the Admission of the Great Milton into this Society.’ The Poets accordingly appear either in the habits which they were wont to wear on earth, or in some suitable attire. We have Chaucer, Drayton, Beaumont, Ben Jonson, and others who are well particularized, but when we get to the laureates and critics of a later period there are some really valuable touches. In 1738 there must have been many alive who could well remember Dryden, Shadwell, Otway, Prior, Philips, Sheffield Duke of Buckinghamshire, Dennis, Atterbury, Lee, Congreve, Rowe, Addison, Betterton, Gay. In the course of his remarks the guide exclaims to the visitor: ‘Observe that Lady dressed in the loose Robe de Chambre with her Neck and Breasts bare; how much Fire in her Eye! what a passionate Expression in her Motions; And how much Assurance in her Features! Observe what an Indignant Look she bestows on the President [Chaucer], who is telling her, that none of her Sex has any Right to a Seat there. How she throws her Eyes about, to see if she can find out any one of the Assembly who inclines to take her Part. No! not one stirs; they who are enclined in her favour are overawed, and the rest shake their Heads; and now she flings out of the Assembly. That extraordinary Woman is Afra Behn.’ The passage is not impertinent, even though but as showing how early condemnatory tradition had begun to incrustate around Astrea. Fielding, however, makes his Man of the World tell a friend that the best way for a man to improve his intellect and commend himself to the ladies is by a course of Mrs. Behn’s novels. With the oncoming of the ponderous and starched decorum of the third George’s reign her vogue waned apace, but she was still read and quoted. On 12 December, 1786, Horace Walpole writes to the Countess of Upper Ossory, ‘I am going to Mrs. Cowley’s new play,[59] which I suppose is as instructive as the Marriage of Figaro, for I am told it approaches to those of Mrs. Behn in Spartan delicacy; but I shall see Miss Farren, who, in my poor opinion is the first of all actresses.’ Sir Walter Scott admired and praised her warmly. But the pinchbeck sobriety of later times was unable to tolerate her freedom. She was condemned in no small still voice as immoral, loose, scandalous; and writer after writer, leaving her unread, reiterated the charge till it passed into a byword of criticism, and her works were practically taboo in literature, a type and summary of all that was worst and foulest in Restoration days. The absurdities and falsity or this extreme are of course patent now, and it was inevitable the recoil should come.
It is a commonplace to say that her novels are a landmark in the history of fiction. Even Macaulay allowed that the best of Defoe was ‘in no respect... beyond the reach of Afra Behn’. Above all Oroonoko can be traced directly and indirectly, perhaps unconsciously, in many a descendant. Without assigning her any direct influence on Wilberforce, much of the feeling of this novel is the same as inspired Harriet Beecher Stowe. She has been claimed to be the literary ancestress of Bernardin de Saint-Pierre and Chateaubriand; nor is it any exaggeration to find Byron and Rousseau in her train. Her lyrics, it has been well said, are often of ‘quite bewildering beauty’, but her comedies represent her best work and she is worthy to be ranked with the greatest dramatists of her day, with Vanbrugh and Etheredge; not so strong as Wycherley, less polished than Congreve. Such faults as she has are obviously owing to the haste with which circumstances compelled her to write her scenes. That she should ever recover her pristine reputation is of course, owing to the passing of time with its change of manners, fashions, thought and style, impossible. But there is happily every indication that —long neglected and traduced—she will speedily vindicate for herself, as she is already beginning to do, her rightful claim to a high and honourable place in our glorious literature.