Restoration Portrait
The Incomparable Aphra: A Study of Mrs. Aphra Behn. By George Woodcock. (Boardman. 12s. 6d.) " MRS. BEHN suffered enough at the hands of supercilious prudes ... and because she had wit and beauty, she must likewise be charged with prostitution and irreligion." In writing that in his Lives of the Poets (1759), Theophilus Cibber put his finger on the vexing hostility which surrounded Mrs. Behn in her remarkable literary career. Two centuries before George Sand (to whom she bears a certain resemblance in achievement and personality), Mrs. Aphra Behn roundly trounced a male world untroubled by female emancipation ; she wrote romantic novels, first-class Restoration plays, lyrics which are still famous such as " Love in Fantastique Triumph satt," was probably the first female spy in Holland, served a term in prison for debt, and published a vast quantity of pamphlets on every subject. We see her now as the first female free-lance writer par excellence, with a philosophy peculiarly modern, struggling in a Restoration world, the friend of Dryden, " She who so well cou'd love's End Passion paint, We piously believe, must be a Saint,"
the enemy of competitor and critics, and the butt of Pope.
Mrs: Behn's 'life, indeed, demonstrates once again that candour in the expression of ideas is frequently more shocking to society than moral laxity. The Restoration, though it found plays such as Congreves quite natural where today they would have been banned by the censor, were patently shocked by Mrs. Behn's frank denuncia- tion of lust without feeling. Licentiousness, indeed, might have been a national masquerade for those who had ruined their nervous systems through excessive activity, but for Mrs. Behn, the lonely and isolated "Aphra" who had the detachment of the artist and the male desire to dominate, love was an agonising reality:
"You ought, Oh Faithless and infinitely adorable Lycidas ! to know and guess my tenderness. You ought to see it grow and daily increase under ydur Hands ; if it be troublesoine, 'tis because I fancy you lessen, whilest I increase, in-Passion ; or rather, that by your ill Judgement of mine, you never had any in your Soul for me."
But John Hoyle, to whoin she wrote such essays in unconcealed despair, was left unmoved.. Mrs. Behn suffered horribly ; love, as she so frequently dedlaimed in her plays and poems, was the one undeniable reality ; yet it was treated, in her time, more like a drug or a palliative. " I have Friendship, Love and Esteem for you, you may pawn your soul upon't," she assured the aloof John Hoyle once more, and, despite her humiliations, despite the fact that her cause
was hopeless, she arranged yet another rendez-vous : shou'd be glad to see you as soon as possible (you say Thursd4)., . . . I beg you will . . . fail me not."
But Mrs. Behn was not destined to be happy in her .private life ; success she certainly had (the whole of London, including the King, and to such successful plays as The Rover tid Sir Patient, Fancy), but being fashionable and brilliant hardly assuaged her aching heart. Perhaps she had too much personality—that abnormality " in a person as Ibsen once called it—ever to be happy ; certainly she had no illusions, and was qUick to point out self-deception in others whether they were audiences, critics or lovera. This alone was enough to guarantee her isolation, and, in a less strong character, might well have been her undoing. Her public life was one of ceaseless activity ; she was always explaining or defending herself, trying to make enough money from her journalism and play-writing (she scorned the then universal practice of having a " patron ") to live on ; and if she was cynical—" I never heard of mortal man, that has not broke a thousand vows "—it was not a mask which concealed an interior emptiness -but -a way of making palatable her disillusion. On the. whole Mr.- Woodcock is somewhat dry and judicial (he performs a literary autopsy more than bringing her to life) ; but on the whole the book is competent and reliable. ROBIN KING.
Previous page
