Idle Hours In A Library — Two Novelists Of The English Restoration 2

These seven stories, therefore, are anything but pleasant reading, unless they be, like certain incidents referred to in the “New Atalantis,” “pleasant ...

to the ears of the vicious.

” It is not only that they are repulsive because of the undisguised licentiousness that everywhere prevails in them; they are occasionally disgusting on account of the large part played by the merely horrible.

So intimately related are unemotionalized passion and utter brutality, that, as might be expected, here, where the one is so conspicuous, the other has considerable place.

The revenge taken by the woman upon her worthless husband in “The Wife’s Resentment” (Did recollection of her own wrongs add bitterness to Rivella’s pen, we may well wonder?

) may be cited as an example of this.

Don Roderigo, a Spanish gentleman, after trying for fifteen months to seduce a poor girl named Violenta, marries her in a moment of thoughtlessness, but keeps the marriage a secret from his friends.

Before long he is forced by his family into a second and public union with a wealthy heiress.

The news of his inconstancy fills Violenta with delirious passion; and nothing will appease her but revenge, sudden and complete.

She decoys Roderigo into her apartment, murders him while he is asleep, and, not contented with this, deliberately tears out his eyes and mangles “his body all over with an infinite number of gashes” before throwing it out into the street.

And what is particularly noteworthy is, that the narrator herself does not seem to be in the least impressed by the loathsome details accumulated in her description.

She reports the incident as though it were a matter of course, and quietly tells us that when Violenta was brought to justice for her crime, the duke, the magistrates, and all the spectators were amazed “at the courage and magnanimity of the maid, and that one of so little rank should have so great a sense of her dishonor.

” Unquestionably the most pleasing of all these stories, alike from a literary and from a moral standpoint, is “The Happy Fugitives,” a simple tale, containing comparatively little to which exception could be taken.

The plots of “The Physician’s Stratagem” and “The Perjured Beauty,” on the other hand, are too hideous to be reproduced.

As a whole, the book is desperately dull and tiresome; for the pornographic horrors of its pages are unredeemed by any excellencies of style.

Its only interest for us here, therefore, is an historic one; and about this side of the matter, we shall have a general word or two to say later on.

* * * * * If, morally considered, she is equally open to stricture, our second woman-novelist, Mrs. Behn, at least bulks out as a more considerable figure in the annals of English letters.

Highly eulogized by some of the most distinguished of her contemporaries—Dryden, Otway, and Southerne among the number,—she must still be spoken of with the respect due to her undoubted talents, versatility, industry, and courage.

That she is to be regarded as “an honor and glory” to her sex, as one of her enthusiastic admirers roundly declared, it would now, for many reasons, be out of the question to maintain.

But the one fact that she was the first woman of her country to support herself entirely by the pen, itself establishes her right to a certain place in the long line of female writers who have since her day done so much for literature.

Aphra (or Aphara) Johnson, afterwards Behn, (known as the “Divine Astræa” in the exuberant language of the time,[12] and long commonly referred to as an “extraordinary woman,”[13]) was born towards the end of the reign of Charles the First.

While still a girl, she was taken to the West Indies by her father, who had been appointed lieutenant-general of Surinam.

[14] Johnson himself “died at sea, and never arrived to possess the honor designed him.

” But the family settled in the colony—a “land flowing with milk and honey,” they are said to have found it,—and continued to reside there till about 1653. A high-colored description of her life abroad is given in her best-known work, as it was during this period that she made her hero’s acquaintance, and became interested in the story of his love and tragic fate.

It is characteristic of the tendencies of the age that her biographer should feel it necessary to pause at this point in her narrative to contradict some current town gossip about the kind of relationship which had existed between Astræa and the African prince.

Returning to England, she married a man named Behn, who seems to have been “a merchant in the city, tho’ of Dutch extraction,” but concerning whom our information is of the most meagre sort.

Of him we hear little or nothing in connection with Aphra’s subsequent adventurous career; and she was a widow before 1666. Attached to the court of Charles the Second, she attracted so much attention, we are told, by her keenness of intellect, alertness, and wit, that she was employed by the Merry Monarch in some delicate diplomatic affairs during the Dutch war.

These took her to Antwerp in the character of a spy, in which capacity she succeeded so well that in course of time, and by means principally of her innumerable love intrigues, she obtained possession of some secrets of considerable value.

“They are mistaken who imagine that a _Dutchman_ can’t love,” remarks her biographer, in commenting upon these incidents; “for tho’ they are generally more phlegmatic than other men, yet it sometimes happens that love does penetrate their lump and dispense an enlivening fire,”—now and then with disastrous results, as we perceive.

Her information, however, was neglected by the English Government, and in disgust the patriotic lady threw up politics and diplomacy altogether, and presently returned to London, narrowly escaping death by shipwreck on the way.

Footnote 12: This is the name under which Mrs. Behn enters the satire of Pope:- “The stage how loosely doth Astræa tread!

” The second line of the couplet may be left unquoted.

Footnote 13: See “Apotheosis of Milton” in the “Gentleman’s Magazine,” for 1738 (vol. viii.

, p. 469).

Footnote 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.

----- Once more in London, Mrs. Behn, now thrown entirely upon her own resources, turned to her pen for the means of support, and thenceforth continued to occupy herself with literature and pleasure till her death, in 1689. Say what one may about the general quality of her work, its total amount remains remarkable, especially when one takes into consideration the conditions of poverty, failing health, and many harassing distractions under which it was produced.

For a number of years, with unabated industry but varying success, she poured out plays which were calculated, in style and morality, to hit the prevailing taste; and so boldly did she meet her masculine rivals on the common ground of licentiousness, that she earned for herself the highly significant nickname of “the female Wycherley.

” Miscellaneous tracts and translations kept her busy in the intervals of dramatic activity, during which time she also threw off a couple of very curious treatises, the characters of which are perhaps sufficiently indicated by their titles—“The Lover’s Watch; or, The Art of Making Love,” and “The Lady’s Looking-Glass to Dress Herself by; or, The Whole Art of Charming All Mankind.

” As manuals of conduct, it is to be feared that these lucubrations hardly tend to edification.

Finally, to leave out for the moment what is, of course, for us now the most important item, her experiments in fiction, which we will deal with by themselves, Mrs. Behn also managed to write and publish a good deal of verse.

As work actually done, this must be mentioned, because it swells her account; but it may be said at once that most of it—and particularly her one ambitious effort, the allegorical “Voyage to the Isle of Love,”—is without value or interest.

Here and there in her plays, however, she touches a true poetic note, as in the really fine song in “Abdelazer,” for which—though it is doubtless familiar to readers of the anthologies—space may be found here:— “Love in fantastic triumph sate, Whilst bleeding hearts about him flowed, For whom fresh pains he did create, And strange tyrannic power he showed;

From thy bright eyes he took his fires, Which round about in space he hurled;

But ’twas from mine he took desires Enough to undo the amorous world.

“From me he took his sighs and tears, From thee his pride and cruelty, From me his languishment and fears, And every killing dart from thee;

Thus thou and I the god have armed, And set him up a deity, But my poor heart alone is harmed, 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] Footnote 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.

) ----- 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.

” Footnote 16: “English Women of Letters,” vol. i.

, p. 31. ----- 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] Footnote 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.

----- 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.

Footnote 18: “The Fair Jilt.

” ----- * * * * * And now, in returning to the question of the historic significance of the two writers into whose books—habitually allowed to stand undisturbed upon the library shelf—we have here rather rashly ventured to pry, we shall find, if I mistake not, that little remains to be said.

Brief as our analysis of the heroic romances and the tales of Mrs. Behn and Mrs. Manley has necessarily been, it will, if it does not fail entirely of its purpose, suffice to mark the points of fundamental contrast between them.

The nature and importance of the changes exemplified in these story-tellers of the Restoration will thus be made clear.

Hitherto, as we have seen, fiction had made little or no attempt to deal frankly with life.

In other words, it had not as yet found its proper sphere.

Purely a thing of the imagination, it had sought its subjects afar, proudly ignoring the common matters of the world—the joys and sorrows, the hopes and struggles of every-day humanity.

The words which the author of a life of Sidney, prefixed to one of the early editions of the “Arcadia,” applies to that work, we might with equal fairness apply to almost the entire mass of fiction thus far written.

“The invention is wholly spun out of the fancy,” he says.

The scene was laid in some far-away dreamland, not the less remote and visionary because occasionally called by a familiar earthly name; the characters were swollen out to superhuman proportions, and were endowed with qualities that no mortal being has ever been known to possess; their adventures were on the face of them impossible; they thought, acted, talked as no man or woman had thought, acted, talked since the world began.

Life and fiction stood entirely apart.

The real world of tangible flesh and blood found for the time its only expression in the drama.

In fiction there was as yet no human interest whatever.

With Mrs. Behn commenced the tendency to deal with life—to make the novel in some sense a reproduction of actual experience.

We may regret that the special phases of the human comedy that she deliberately chose to write about, were only too often phases the least worthy of attention; that her interests were narrowed down, and her work crippled, by considerations of the most cramping and disastrous kinds; that she knew nothing of proportion and perspective, and little of the higher and finer developments of motive and character; that she could not see life steadily, and did not see it whole.

But all this must not stand in the way of our insisting that she was one of the first writers of prose fiction—perhaps the first in England—to substitute the solid stuff of reality for the flimsy material of the imagination.

Crude and partial as her observations were, she at least observed; sorry as are most of the results of her study of the world, she did study it at first hand—did hold the mirror up to nature.

What she accomplished in thus opening up the field of the modern novel, what Mrs. Manley accomplished in following her lead, are matters, therefore, of sufficient importance to call for distinct recognition.

We do not claim for the books of these two women any individual merit or interest.

But when we lay aside one of their stories, bearing in mind the conditions of the time at which it was written, we realize that, artistically, if not always morally, they represent a step in advance; that it was by such work as this—poor and hopelessly dull as it may seem to us to-day—that the folios of La Calprenède and De Scudéri were overthrown, the way made clear for Defoe and Richardson, and the foundations of modern fiction firmly laid.

But now let us notice the suggestive circumstance that, like nearly all innovators, these first realists seriously overstepped the mark.

In their early attempts to exchange Fairy Land for the actual world, we find too large a place given to fact, in the most hard and circumscribed sense of the word.

In place of pure fancy, they sought to give absolute and undiluted reality; in place of a picture without existing counterpart, they strove to secure the detailed verisimilitude of a photograph.

Indeed, for a time the aims and methods of fiction were almost entirely lost sight of.

And it is easy to see how this unfortunate result was brought about.

Weary of the conventionalities of the old romances, and of the shadowy heroes and heroines with whose tedious adventures and even more tedious disquisitions their pages were filled, the novelists of the Restoration made a bold endeavor to get back to the life with which they were familiar, and to deal with the world as they knew it to exist.

But for the moment, there seemed only one way of doing this.

Instead of fancy, they must have fact; instead of wandering off into the impossible, they must limit themselves to the things which had actually happened—which had really, in Charles Reade’s witty phrase, gone through the formality of taking place.

Hence, for the present, the constructive work of the imagination—which some of us, in these days of so-called Naturalism, are still old-fashioned enough to hold essentially important—was almost entirely neglected.

Nearly every story was statedly “founded on fact”; and the business of the novelist was practically reduced to the task of presenting, with but slight embellishment or rearrangement, specific occurrences in life.

Thus we have an early example of the tendency, just now so conspicuous, towards what M. Brunetière has happily called “reportage” in literature.

In the reaction against the school of heroic romance, the new story-writers, therefore, went to the other extreme.

To take the materials of familiar existence and to reorganize them, thus producing a work of art which is at once all compact of truth and imagination, was for the time being beyond their ken.

To their limited view, realism meant slavish reality.

It was only after this mistake had been made that the possibility of avoiding the airy unrealities of old romance, without being bound down to the skeleton facts of life, gradually became apparent.

The discovery that a writer could be true to experience and human nature without necessarily reproducing actual events or photographing individual men and women, was the outcome of many experiments and much failure, and was at length hit upon in a half-blind and fortuitous way.

It was only little by little that the element of acknowledged fiction was allowed to encroach upon the domain of truth; only little by little that people began to understand that the art of fiction and the art of lying are not one and the same, and that the boldest play of imagination in the treatment of life is not always to be associated with the distortion of reality.

In the works of Mrs. Manley and Mrs. Behn we see the English novel stumbling painfully towards the comprehension of its own objects.

We have reached firm ground, and that is a great achievement; for only when we move on firm ground is the novel possible.

But the dead weight of the actual is too heavy for us; we cannot synthesize the results of experience; we gather observations, but we are unable to make artistic productions out of them.

Thus, we have a “New Atalantis” (and the book is historically significant just for this reason) which is little more than a jumble of personal scandal, filled in with occasional false incidents and mendacious details; an “Oroonoko,” which is rather a fanciful biography than a tale; we have a “Wife’s Resentment,” a “Fair Jilt,” a “Lucky Mistake,”—stories all of which are based more or less exclusively on historic occurrences or on events that had come under the direct observation of the relaters.

[19] Even where there is a lack of truth, the appearance of truth is still carefully preserved.

Things which have not actually happened are nevertheless related as facts; real characters are put through unreal incidents; the novel is supposed to give history; fiction and falsehood are as yet confused.

Footnote 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.

” ----- * * * * * With this brief summary of the qualities and shortcomings of our two women-novelists, this little paper might properly close.

But it may be interesting if, having carried our inquiry thus far, we add a paragraph about the way in which the rigid reality of the works at which we have been glancing grew gradually out into the genuine realism of the later novel.

Properly to understand this tendency towards an equilibrium between fact and imagination, we should turn aside to examine the profound influence exerted over the fiction of the time of the “Tatler” and the “Spectator.

” But for our present purposes we shall find the movement forward clearly enough exemplified in the work of one man—the author of “Robinson Crusoe,” whose writings, therefore, we will take as our clue.

Beginning with the production of history, or semi-history, in which real characters, slightly exaggerated, move through real scenes, or through scenes to but small extent imaginary, Defoe proceeded little by little to import more of fiction into his narrative, to the detriment of the small substratum of truth still retained.

By and by, he did no more than preserve the mere frame-work of history—as in “The Journal of the Plague Year” and the “Memoirs of a Cavalier,” in which most of the characters and many of the incidents are purely fictitious.

After this, the remaining element of truth was gradually eliminated, and he reached the production of narratives of fictitious characters in fictitious settings and among fictitious scenes.

“From writing biographies with real names attached to them,” says Professor Minto, in his Life of Defoe, “it was but a short step to writing biographies with fictitious names.

” Even when that short step was taken, the artifices resorted to by him to preserve the apparent truthfulness of his narrations show us that he was by no means satisfied that it would be desirable to let matters of fact slip out of his work entirely.

Though what he wrote was false, he still tried to palm it off upon the world as true.

This makes the writing of Defoe more like lying than fiction, and goes far to explain the extraordinary minuteness of the circumstantial method adopted by him.

But it marks, also, the transitional quality of his work.

As Mr. Leslie Stephen has neatly put it, “Defoe’s novels are simply history _minus_ the facts.

” Only in his latest works do we find this pseudo-history making way for fiction proper; and then we recognize in Defoe the distinct forerunner of the great novelists of the eighteenth century.

But to follow this matter farther would take us beyond the due bounds, already somewhat transgressed, of our present study.

As we may now see, the story of English fiction from the period of the Anglo-French romance to the time of Fielding and Smollett, is a long one, and we have undertaken to deal with only one chapter here—the chapter which tells of Mrs. Behn and Mrs. Manley, of what they did, and of what they failed to do.

That finished, our task is at an end.

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