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.