by Janet Todd
The instability here—the pride in her past earning power and indifference to money, together with the pleading in an attenuated present—echoes Behn’s begging Antwerp letters of nearly twenty years before.
Although he had advanced £11 to Otway, and Brown referred to him as often keeping ‘the Infant-Poet warm’, Tonson was not a generous man and he must have considered he had not offered a poor fee for the volume in the first place. It did not approach the £50 Dryden got for a translation, a figure the poet was trying to negotiate up to fifty guineas—and never in her life did Behn come near the 250 guineas Dryden received in 1699 for his Fables—but it was not contemptible for a poet of her standing.38 Perhaps nothing came of the appeal and both felt aggrieved. Although Behn used Tonson as surety for a small loan in the following year, she did not publish with him again.
Henry Higden, a translator and friend of Dryden’s, knew that poetry needed to arrive in a panoply of recommendations, sometimes written by the author in self-praise. Behn too knew how to present a volume and her Poems appeared embroidered with hyperbole of the sort she supplied for others. The commendations functioned like modern blurbs rather than reviews, written to puff and advertise the book. They would have been glanced through by prospective purchasers, who would have encountered a coterie of mutually admiring men and women; they conversed with each other in a charmed circle which both excluded and invited readers. The entry fee for the reader was the purchase price.
In Behn’s volume, there was of course Creech, as well as John Adams, a fellow scholar of King’s College and commender of Creech’s Lucretius, and John Cooper (possibly appearing twice as J. Cooper and J.C.), her ‘Brother of the Pen’ who had written the alternative ‘Oenone’ for Dryden. The general sentiment was that, had Behn lived of old, she would have been worshipped as a divinity and, more pertinently, that, despite her long ‘translation’ of The Island of Love and the accusations of plagiarism, she had no need of ‘foreign aid’, having ‘wondrous store’ in her own ‘tunefull breast’.39 ‘To the excellent Astrea’, declaring humility that the writer cannot equal Behn in wit and poetry, is signed J.W., possible initials of the theatre historian, James Wright.
One poem, ‘To the Lovely Witty Astrea’, conventionally praising her ‘beauteous’ face and mind, had seemingly been supplied by Dryden and Behn was sensible of the ‘honor’. Unfortunately, Tonson had either been precipitate in promising to deliver the Laureate or Dryden had forgotten his obligation. Most likely, he demurred when he read the book with its erotic poems. He was no longer as sure of Behn as he had been in 1680 when he received her ‘Oenone’ for his volume. Elegising the young poet Anne Killigrew, formerly Queen Mary of Modena’s Maid of Honour, he paused to lament that the muse had been made ‘prostitute and profligate... / Debased to each obscene and impious use’—although happily Anne Killigrew’s poetry was ‘Unmixed with foreign filth, and undefiled’.40 Dryden did not mention Behn in this passage, but neither did he include her in his short list of famous women poets, Katherine Philips and Sappho.41 In Behn’s volume, the poem that appeared to be by Dryden was actually by Tonson himself. Later he owned to writing it, for he had a healthy contempt for authorship. On occasion, he could be as free with poets’ names as the forging Tom Brown and Sam Briscoe.42
If the choice of puffers was, in the main, personal, the choice of dedicatee was political. Poems upon Several Occasions with the Island of Love, Behn’s only original volume of verse, was dedicated to James Cecil, son of another of Colepeper’s Sidney cousins, the eighteen-year-old youth who had just become fourth Earl of Salisbury. Behn intended to arrive early, being ‘ambitious to be first in the Croud of Your Admirers, that shall have the honour to celibrate your name’. Perhaps because of the indecorousness of a middle-aged woman’s addressing a youth, some coupling of her name with young men, or the inclusion of the erotic Island of Love, lampooners immediately raised eyebrows at the dedication, as Gould had over her poem for Mulgrave:
Astrea with her soft gay Sighing Swains
And rural virgins on the flowery Plains
The lavish Peers profuseness may reprove
Who gave her Guineas for the Isle of Love.43
Yet the address probably represents no more than an astute approach to a man just arrived at his honours, who shared Behn’s devotion to the Duke of York—Salisbury was a Tory despite his father’s Whig allegiance—and who had ‘Guineas’ to give.
As Silvia had argued in Love-Letters, and Behn never wearied of emphasising, the aristocracy had its purpose in the monarchy’s defence: ‘You that are great, are born the Bulwarks of sacred Majesty.’ Now a new theme was grafted on to the political one: stability also needed the artist. Aristocracy must support the throne above and sustain the poet below. So the patron of the poet is the patron of England. Culture and politics should go together. The theme coincided with Behn’s greater need for patronage owing to her loss of theatre revenue, but it was also a political insight which she would develop over the next years.
Behn’s working conception of this poet remained contradictory, however. She claimed that her ‘little Piece’ was begotten in ‘lazy Minutes’. The claim refers either to the general poetry in the volume and may be true, or to The Island of Love, in which case it belies the ‘deal of labour’ admitted in the letter to Tonson. In both cases, it associates its author with the ‘gentlemen’ poets—despite the fact that ‘hard Fate has oblig’d me to bring [poetry] forth into the censuring World.’ Behn was consistent in tying an elite art to an elite political system, but she had not yet worked out the position of the professional poet in the scheme.
The next dedication of poetry, to a collection of her own and others’ work, entitled Miscellany and published early in the following year, 1685, enlarged on the political theme of the Salisbury dedication. Consequently, it became the clearest statement of Behn’s political views in the mid-1680s. The dedicatee, the eligible and much-pursued bachelor Sir William Clifton, was a rich Nottinghamshire gentleman and landowner of the old breed, a Royalist whose worth ‘bore the Royal stamp’.44 In the stiff hierarchy Behn wished England to be, the Stuarts were at the apex, with the Sir Williams below, their ‘Quality and Fortune’ in turn elevating them ‘above the common Crowd’. Although Behn never accepted the basis of the hierarchy in the domination of man over woman, she yet saw the analogy of the King to the nation with the gentleman to his neighbourhood.
Acting as a kind of monarch and representative of the great Monarch, the landlord civilised his community with ‘Noble Hospitality’: Clifton treated ‘the under-world’ around him and made people honest and loyal
where else-where for want of such great Patrons and Presidents [precedents], Faction and Sedition have over-run those Villages where Ignorance abounded, and got footing almost every where, whose Inhabitants are a sort of Bruits, that ought no more to be left to themselves than Fire, and are as Mischievous and as Destructive. While every great Landlord is a kind of Monarch that awes and civillizes ’em into Duty and Allegiance; and whom because they know, they Worship with a Reverence equal to what they would pay the King, whose Representative they take him at least to be if not of God himself... he’s their Oracle, their very Gospel, and whom they’ll sooner credit; never was new Religion, Misunderstanding, and Rebellion known in Countries [counties] till Gentlemen of ancient Families reformed their way of living to the new Mode, pulled down their great Halls, retrenched their Servants, and confined themselves to scanty Lodgings in the City....45
Behn did not question why these admirable men were rushing to London or why she herself did not try to become a poet in a country hall. In fact she did not question much at all, for she was largely expressing Royalist ideology.
After the disasters of the Popish Plot and the Exclusion Crisis, through sheer indolence and the luck of a better economy the King had temporarily stabilised his vacillating and duplicitous domestic policies in an alliance of crown and gentry. This gave an appearance of peace to the next few y
ears—for some that is, since there were many Dissenting victims about which Behn cared not a fig. On a larger timescale, however, the old patriarchal concept of squirearchy supporting monarchy was at odds with the monarchy’s efforts to centralise royal power—with which Behn also agreed, since it stressed the King as absolute ruler.46 Indeed, even as she addressed Clifton, he was helping Secretary of State Sunderland to pack Parliament with Tory Anglicans on the King’s behalf. Seeing politics in terms of personalities, Behn never thought out how squires could be analogous to an absolute monarch who would need precisely to break their powers to be absolute. The vision she had was not unlike James’s: of a fatherly monarch sustained by devoted nobility and squirearchy, both helping to control a foolish Parliament, city and rabble. It may have been the consonance of their confused opinions that helped make Behn one of the Duke of York’s most devoted followers; conversely, it may have been her desire to be considered James’s devoted follower that made her express such opinions.
If Behn’s leaning towards the Duke of York’s views was evident, her attitude to Charles II as a man (though not as a king) was more ambivalent, as this dedication suggests. Sir William valued the court, but did not shine there: he was content, Behn wrote, not always to behold ‘the Illustrious Pattern of all Glorious Vertue in your King’, whose bounty he did not need—and presumably was not getting. Behn’s slight ambivalence to the King was augmented by her choice for her volume of her friend Nahum Tate’s long, violent poem, ‘Old England’.47 This was in the advice-to-a-painter mode that Marvell had made famous after the disastrous Second Dutch War in 1667. Swerving from lambasting the encroaching City and ‘fanatics’, it rendered the times a confusion of cast-off mistresses, catamites, wine and effeminate fops, and it ended with warnings to Charles to stir himself to secure his brother’s succession.
Miscellany included ten recent works of Behn’s, among which were two curious ones, a paraphrase on the Lord’s Prayer and an epitaph for the last of seven dead children. Both were in common genres—Waller and Anne Wharton had made paraphrases of the Lord’s Prayer for example—the curiosity is that Behn should have written them. The Epitaph was, however, probably commissioned and, in transforming the dead child into a cupid-like angel babbling heavenly music, it showed more conceit than feeling. As for the paraphrase, it quickly shifted from God to the King, to whom honour, glory and praise were as appropriate on earth as to the deity in heaven. It also sheered off from amazement at the ‘Wondrous condescension of a God’ to more mundane thoughts of its author’s own predicament: ‘With all our flatter’d Wit’ she and her friends could not earn their ‘daily Bread’ and ‘Trespasses’ were so seductive they could hardly be resisted:
... how sweet were made
The pleasures, our resistless hearts invade!
Of all my Crimes, the breach of all thy Laws
Love, soft bewitching Love! has been the cause;
Of all the Paths that Vanity has trod,
That sure will soonest be forgiven of God.
Charles II had much the same attitude and had been taken to task by Burnet for it. When, after her death, Tom Brown mocked the Catholic converts, he included a dig at Behn’s poem, her ‘strange fit of Piety’ interrupted by ‘Cupid’ a ‘private Act of Toleration for a little Harmless Love’.48
By now Tom Brown seems to have replaced Creech in Behn’s affections, for, apart from the ambiguously named ‘Out of Horace, omitted in Mr. Creech’, Creech’s name is missing from the volume with its many translations. Perhaps relations had changed since the jolly Twelfth Night, perhaps Behn had been really upset by Creech’s public emphasis on her sexiness. Or she may have offended a moody man. It was easy to do. In response, her pastoral to John Howard, son of the executed Viscount Stafford, made the insulting claim that Howard outshone ‘Daphnis’ (Creech’s sobriquet) at translating.49
With the eclipse of Creech, Behn seems to have moved colleges, from Wadham in Oxford to King’s in Cambridge. There Henry Crisp and John Adams, both acquaintances of Creech, were fellows. Crisp was a young relative of Thomas Colepeper’s, his father having been the executor of Colepeper’s father’s will. Behn must have liked the young man and patronised him for friendship and old times’ sake, since his many rhymes in Miscellany are dire.
Hoyle too was probably still on the scene since lampooners found no one else with whom consistently to link Behn. She had always been fascinated, enthralled or amused by self-regarding masculinity, the shifty glamour of some men, their egoistic vitality, their subtle indulgences of themselves that allowed them to talk when they would, be silent when they wished and silence women at will. Such men always found Behn too overwhelming and garrulous, and, instead of countering her, took refuge in taciturnity and disdain. A man might ignore such emotional behaviour in another man, but a woman, raised to please, could not simply withdraw and needed instead to probe until she had upset herself and allowed him the indulgent comfort of rage.
The type, clear in the early Hoyle, recurs in Alexis, who may have been another poetic image of Hoyle, but is more likely to be a replacement, a second version of the same type. Alexis’s poetic theme is that it is best not to consummate love since it always leads to disappointment—eternal dissatisfaction, tied not so much to the nature of things as to an assumption of superior sensitivity in the man, was a traditional male theme. As a woman, Behn inevitably redefined the concept, so that what men tried to write as universal metaphysical dissatisfaction became simply a male sexual peculiarity. Alexis fears consummation as the end of love with women because men have the sexual habit of scorning women after sex: ‘’tis a fatal lesson he has learn’d, / After fruition ne’re to be concern’d.’ So women, however beautiful and intelligent, are downgraded:
In vain the mind with brighter Glories Grace,
While all our joys are stinted to the space
Of one betraying enterview
With one surrender to the eager will
We’re short-liv’d nothing....
Men, not women, always love the absent and find fault with the cruel and the kind, as Silvio in The Dutch Lover amply showed when he blamed his beloved for not taking pity on him and threatened her with death when she apparently did. Here Behn restates the female double bind that had concerned her throughout her writing years:
Since Man with that inconstancy was born,
To love the absent, and the present scorn.
Why do we deck, why do we dress
For such a short-liv’d happiness?
Why do we put Attraction on,
Since either way ’tis we must be undon?
They fly if Honour take our part,
Our Virtue drives ’em o’re the field.
We lose ’em by too much desert,
And Oh! they fly us if we yeild.
Ye God! is there no charm in all the fair
To fix this wild, this faithless, wanderer.50
Dissatisfaction was predicated on male disdain for women; as for women, they were too busy trying to please to have time for such inward-looking thoughts.
Behn knew she opened herself to abuse by her familiarity with young and old; Alexis obliged, for he could be priggish as well as silly. If he is indeed Hoyle, then Hoyle was still attacking her garrulity as well; if not, then, Behn was still talkative and attracted to men exasperated by this trait. Both piqued and amused on this occasion, she decided to answer the ‘kind opinion’, that ‘unflattering Glass, / In which my mind found how deform’d it was’. She had been having a pleasant, animated talk with a man, knowing well that a sexual charge enlivened her wit. Sounding like the morose Hoyle of the letters, Alexis had watched the flirtatious discourse sourly and then expressed his disdain. Behn’s response to his carping was a witty fantasy of female humility. Although she had been impertinent and vivacious all her life, she would now try to become as ‘perfect’ as Alexis saw himself. She would eschew vain men who prided themselves on their ‘prate’ and admire only the taciturn: ‘For ever may
I listning sit, / Tho but each hour a word be born.’ It was a neat turn of reproach.51
Perhaps, like so many of Behn’s characters, Alexis was a composite. If so, a component might have been the dedicatee of Love-Letters, Thomas Condon, who according to Behn chose rather to ‘be singular, and sullenly retire, than heard with that noisie Crowd’. Setting ‘just value’ on himself, he shunned ‘the publick haunts, Cabals and conversations of the Town’. Another component might be George Granville, Behn’s probable acquaintance in France. He was out of London during most of these years, so is less likely than Condon or Hoyle to have been present at a social gathering with Behn, but he might have held Alexis’ views of female inadequacy and he did not marry until 1711.
If Granville did contribute to ‘Alexis’, however, he could also be supportive and kind, as when he wrote this tribute to his friend:
Some for your Wit, some for your Eyes declare;
Debates arise, which captivates us most,
And none can tell the Charm by which he’s lost.
The Bow and Quiver does DIANA bear;
VENUS the Dove; PALLAS the Shield and Spear:
Poets such Emblems to their Gods assign,
Hearts bleeding by the Dart, and Pen be thine.52
It was conventional stuff, but Aphra Behn, smarting from Alexis’ criticism, was glad she could inspire it.
Chapter 24