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.