The Works of Aphra Behn, Vol. I | Page 7

doubt took steps
to insure that she should not, if it lay in her power, be so situated again.
I would suggest, indeed, that about this period, 1669, she accepted the
protection of some admirer. Who he may have been at first, how many
more there were than one, how long the various amours endured, it is
idle to speculate. She was for her period as thoroughly unconventional
as many another woman of letters has been since in relation to later
times and manners, as unhampered and free as her witty successor, Mrs.
de la Riviere Manley, who lived for so long as Alderman Barber's kept
mistress and died in his house. Mrs. Behn has given us poetic
pseudonyms for many of her lovers, Lycidas, Lysander, Philaster,
Amintas, Alexis, and the rest, but these extended over many years, and
attempts at identification, however interesting, are fruitless.[16]
[Footnote 16: Amintas repeatedly stands for John Hoyle. In Our Cabal,
however (vide Vol. VI, p. 160), Hoyle is dubbed Lycidas.]
There has been no more popular mistake, nor yet one more productive,
not merely of nonsense and bad criticism but even of actual malice and
evil, than the easy error of confounding an author with the characters he
creates. Mrs. Behn has not been spared. Some have superficially argued
from the careless levity of her heroes: the Rover, Cayman, Wittmore,
Wilding, Frederick; and again from the delightful insouciance of Lady

Fancy, Queen Lucy, and the genteel coquette Mirtilla, or the torrid
passions of Angelica Bianca, Miranda and la Nuche; that Aphra herself
was little better, in fact a great deal worse, than a common prostitute,
and that her works are undiluted pornography.
In her own day, probably for reasons purely political, a noisy clique
assailed her on the score of impropriety; a little later came Pope with
his jaded couplet
The stage how loosely does Astrea tread Who fairly puts all characters
to bed;
and the attack was reinforced by an anecdote of Sir Walter Scott and
some female relative who, after having insisted upon the great novelist
lending her Mrs. Behn, found the Novels and Plays too loose for her
perusal, albeit in the heyday of the lady's youth they had been popular
enough. As one might expect, Miss Julia Kavanagh, in the
mid-Victorian era[17] (English Women of Letters 1863), is sad and
sorry at having to mention Mrs. Behn-- 'Even if her life remained
pure,[18] it is amply evident her mind was "tainted to the very core.
Grossness was congenial to her.... Mrs. Behn's indelicacy was useless
and worse than useless, the superfluous addition of a corrupt mind and
vitiated taste".' One can afford to smile at and ignore these modest
outbursts, but it is strange to find so sound and sane a critic as Dr.
Doran writing of Aphra Behn as follows: 'No one equalled this woman
in downright nastiness save Ravenscroft and Wycherley.... With
Dryden she vied in indecency and was not overcome.... She was a mere
harlot, who danced through uncleanness and dared them [the male
dramatists] to follow.' Again, we have that she was 'a wanton hussy';
her 'trolloping muse' shamefacedly 'wallowed in the mire'; but finally
the historian is bound to confess 'she was never dull'.
[Footnote 17: The Retrospective Review, however (Vol. I, November,
1852), has an article, 'Mrs. Behn's Dramatic Writings,' which warmly
praises her comedies. The writer very justly observes that 'they exhibit
a brilliance of conversation in the dialogue, and a skill in arranging the
plot and producing striking situations, in which she has few equals.' He
frequently insists upon her 'great skill in conducting the intrigue of her

pieces', and with no little acumen declares that 'her comedies may be
cited as the most perfect models of the drama of the latter half of the
seventeenth century.']
[Footnote 18: Which it certainly was not secundum mid-Victorian
morals.]
The morality of her plays is au fond that of many a comedy of to-day:
that the situations and phrasing in which she presents her amorous
intrigues and merry cuckoldoms do not conform with modern
exposition of these themes we also show yet would not name, is but our
surface gloss of verbal reticence; we hint, point, and suggest, where she
spoke out broad words, frank and free; the motif is one and the same. If
we judge Mrs. Behn's dramatic output in the only fair way by
comparing it legitimately with the theatre of her age, we simply shall
not find that superfluity of naughtiness the critics lead us to expect and
deplore. There are not infrequent scenes of Dryden, of Wycherley, of
Vanbrugh, Southerne, Otway, Ravenscroft, Shadwell, D'Urfey, Crowne,
full as daring as anything Aphra wrote; indeed, in some instances, far
more wanton. Particularizing, it has been objected that although in most
Restoration comedies