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”:—