“The stage how loosely doth Astræa tread!”
The second line of the couplet may be left unquoted.
[13]. See “Apotheosis of Milton” in the “Gentleman’s Magazine,” for 1738 (vol. viii., p. 469).
[14]. This, according to Mr. Gosse (“Dictionary of National Biography”) was “a relative whom she called her father.” Mrs. Behn certainly does speak of him as her father in “Oroonoko.” And in the Life, “by one of the Fair Sex,” prefixed to the first collected edition of her works, we read: “Her father’s name was Johnson, whose relation to the Lord Willoughby, drew him, for the advantageous post of Lieutenant-General of many isles, besides the continent of Surinam, from his quiet retreat at Canterbury to run the hazardous voyage of the West Indies.” I do not know what is the source and origin of Mr. Gosse’s implied doubt.
[15]. How vast was the change in taste between, say, the opening and the close of the eighteenth century, is shown by Sir Walter Scott, in an anecdote which has special interest for us here, as bearing directly upon the woman now in question. A grand-aunt of his, Mrs. Keith, of Ravelstone, towards the close of a very long life, asked Scott if he had ever seen Mrs. Behn’s novels. “I confessed the charge. Whether I could get her a sight of them?—I said, with some hesitation, I believed I could; but that I did not think she would like either the manners or the language, which approached too near that of Charles the Second’s time to be quite proper reading. ‘Nevertheless,’ said the good old lady, ‘I remember them being so much admired, and being so interested in them myself, that I wish to look at them again.’ To hear was to obey. So I sent Mrs. Aphra Behn, curiously sealed up, with ‘private and confidential’ on the packet, to my gay old grand-aunt. The next time I saw her afterwards, she gave me back Aphra, properly wrapped up, with merely these words: ‘Take back your bonny Mrs. Behn; and, if you will take my advice, put her in the fire, for I found it impossible to get through the very first novel. But is it not,’ she said, ‘a very odd thing that I, an old woman of eighty and upwards, sitting alone, feel myself ashamed to read a book which, sixty years ago, I have heard read aloud for the amusement of large circles, consisting of the first and most creditable society in London!’” (See Lockhart’s Scott, chap. liv.)
[16]. “English Women of Letters,” vol. i., p. 31.
[17]. Another matter of curious interest in connection with “Oroonoko” calls for passing mention, though too far removed from our special subject to detain us here. This is the remarkable way in which, in its presentation of the “noble savage,” and the innocence, purity, and high moral character of the “natural man,” the story anticipates Rousseau and the later romanticists. Jusserand, who points this out, goes so far as to say that Mrs. Behn “carries us at once beyond the times of Defoe, Richardson, and Fielding, and takes us among the precursors of the French Revolution.” It may be added that, in the hands of “Honest Tom Southerne,” the story of Oroonoko became a successful play.
[18]. “The Fair Jilt.”
[19]. Mrs. Manley, in her Dedication to Lady Lansdowne, says that her stories have truth for their foundation—i.e., are based on fact. Mrs. Behn calls her “Nun” a “true novel.”
[20]. “La Vie de Bohème,” act i., scene 8.