by Janet Todd
Behn probably shared the nation’s cynicism and, feeling her own relative obscurity, she may, in a moment of pique against a man she envied as well as admired, have written a vicious and popular attack on the conversion. It was called by various names from ‘Satyr on Doctor Dryden’ to ‘On Dryden Renegade’ and it mocked the Poet Laureate for his opportunism. On more than one manuscript, Aphra Behn’s name has been added to the poem and this is sufficient to make her a serious candidate for authorship. The lampoon’s mockery of Catholic doctrine would be unusual for her, but not quite foreign: in The Island of Love, she had recently written, ‘No pamper’d Levits are in Pension here; / ... No Oyl, fine Flower, or Wines of mighty price, / The subtle Holy Cheats to Gormandize’—not the words of someone who valued priests or transubstantiation, a major Catholic belief. In The Fair Jilt, the story she now created from the sensational events in Antwerp in the 1660s, Behn exploited English obsession with popery as extravagant ritual and secret vice by setting her heroine in a beguinage so lax it comes close to the lewd picture of nuns as cloistered whores so beloved of contemporary pornographers.
Yet, there is much against Behn’s writing the verses on Dryden too. First is that she herself was hinting publicly at a leaning towards the faith.1 It is unlikely that she ever became an open Catholic—or she would have been mocked along with other converts. She might have been a ‘Church-Papist’, someone who was a Catholic in some circles, but attended Anglican services to be on the safe side; more likely, given her repeated scepticism, she used her cultural sympathy for Catholicism to suggest a beneficial belief. Second, although Behn’s relationship with the Laureate had been chequered and she may privately have assumed something of Rochester’s later dislike, Dryden had been conspicuously kind in taking her into his Ovid project and praising her verse. She was always complimentary of him in her published poetry and, only a few years earlier, she had written to Tonson of Dryden ‘in whose esteeme I wou’d chuse to be rather than any bodys in the world’; in a recent dedication she called him ‘the charming and Incomparable Mr Dryden’. True, he did omit her from his tradition of modest female poets (all dead it should be noted), and, after her death, he referred to the licence which gave ‘some scan dall to the modesty of her sex’. Yet he also accepted that times had changed and that Behn had never been more lewd than himself: ‘I am the last man who ought, in justice to arraign her, who have been myself too much a libertine.’2
A further three considerations are, first, that the verses are rather out of Behn’s own line—her accepted satire tends to be more baroque, more suggestive, less crude, less explicit and less funny than this poem; second, that, at about the time Dryden’s conversion was provoking satire among the wits, she copied ‘Dryden Renegade’ into ‘Astrea’s Booke’ under the heading, ‘Another on Mr Bays’, an oddly unpossessive action if she had in fact authored it. Finally, Behn was a firm and sometimes paid supporter of the monarch whose chief poetic servant Dryden was and whose religion he now shared.
If Behn did not write the satire, someone wished to make it appear that she did, perhaps to deflect attention from another, perhaps to make tension between two of the foremost ‘Tory Poets’. As with the posthumous short stories, a candidate may again be the violently anti-Catholic Tom Brown, who made great literary hay out of Dryden’s conversion. He acknowledged verses beginning ‘Traytor to God, and Rebel to thy Pen, / Priest-ridden Poet’; he also wrote a lampoon called The Laureat (1687) in which Dryden is ‘Condemn’d to Live in thy Apostate Rhimes’ and is abused as a ‘Scandal to all Religions, New and Old’, a ‘lewd... Profligate’.3 Brown badgered Dryden throughout his life and even after it: ‘His Death, alas! affected ev’ry Body, / And fetcht deep Sighs and Tears from ev’ry Noddy,’ he mocked.4 It does not seem beyond possibility that he was the author of the earlier mockery as well.
As for Behn, Dryden’s friends cannot have assumed any ill-will in her, or suspected her authorship. In his elegy, Alexander Oldys imagined her as one of the poets greeting Dryden on his arrival in heaven—incidentally providing the only image of Behn in a Christian afterlife.
In reality Dryden, Behn, and the other playwrights were all in the same boat, all searching for any means to make an adequate living, whether this meant trying to ingratiate themselves with the court, writing lampoons, or copying for whoever would pay. From the ascribed publications of the time, it seems above all to have meant making ‘Servile translation[s]’. Over these years they poured from Behn’s pen.
Although it was considered a lesser art than original composition, translation had some status through association with the classics. So, in this necessary strategy, as in her switch to state panegyrics, Behn increased her literary if not her financial status. Indeed, her very casualness in translating for publication suggests a new and comfortable confidence.
She had given the subject much thought, some of which she expressed in a commendatory poem to Henry Higden, Dryden’s friend, yet another witty lawyer from the Middle Temple with poetic ambition. He had translated a satire of the Roman Juvenal for Tonson, putting it into modern dress on the reasonable assumption that Juvenal’s brutal Rome much resembled Restoration London. His ‘Brat’, as he called his work, was not popular, and either Tonson dropped Higden, or Higden dropped Tonson. When he translated a further Juvenal satire, Higden turned to Randal Taylor, the trade publisher who had brought out part of Behn’s Love-Letters and whom he probably had to subsidise. To gain a better reception for this second volume, he commissioned some renowned praise-writers: Dryden, Behn and Elkanah Settle.
Higden had been thoroughly vexed by the Whig playwright Thomas Shadwell, who had borrowed his manuscript of the Juvenal translation, quickly printed his own version, and then mocked those who paraphrased the ancients, or in his image ‘patched silk with homely wool’. Shadwell’s insistence that only a few elite moderns like himself could understand the classical writers was directed, Behn surmised, at herself as well as Higden, since Shadwell cared for her no more than Higden. She was, therefore, doubly pleased to be asked to write for the new volume, which quite flouted Shadwell’s opinion on classical translation. In his commendatory poem, Dryden saw Higden tempering Juvenal, making us ‘laugh our Spleen away’. Behn, however, saw him as actually allowing greater expression to spleen; to Higden’s list of bêtes noires—fops, rich upstart citizens, the waddling ‘Body Politick’, gigolos and the decaying old—she could therefore add her own personal ones: clergymen and canting female spectators.
Behn knew Higden’s previous volume had failed and she was ready with comfort. Some had agreed with Shadwell in being uneasy at a modern-dress production of Juvenal and Higden had been blamed for choosing to render Latin hexameters as English tetrameters, where heroic couplets might have seemed more proper. (Dryden later chose this form when he himself wrote an English rendition of Juvenal.) So, Behn repeated what she had said to Edward Howard back in 1671 when his play had flopped: failure was the fault not of the ambitious and innovative author, but of unsophisticated and conventional readers.
Perhaps there may be found some Carping Wit,
May blame the Measures of thy Lines,
And cry,—Not so the Roman Poet writ;
Who drest his Satyr in more lofty Rhimes.
But thou for thy Instructor Nature chose,
That first best Principle of Poetry,
And to thy Subject didst thy Verse dispose,
While in Harmonious Union both agree.
Had the Great Bard thy Properer Numbers view’d,
He wou’d have lay’d his stiff Heroicks by,
And this more Gay, more Airy Path pursu’d,
That so much better leads to Ralliery
Wit is no more than Nature well exprest;
And He fatigues and toyles in vain
With Rigid Labours, breaks his Brain,
That has Familiar Thought in lofty Numbers drest.5
Now that she considered poets with aristocrats as the guardians of the ordered
state, Behn was eager to defend those who were attacked for serious work. Sensible poets must stick together as surely as peers. As for translators, the best principle was to follow nature, to write what came naturally to the time and place in which they lived.
Behn herself could not work on the classics without help and for her own next translation she turned from the crude satirical Juvenal to the smooth, sceptical and epigrammatic Frenchman, the Duke of La Rochefoucauld. He was a daring choice for a woman author, since he was famous for finding vice in the apparently most robust virtue, a habit more suited to an aristocratic man than to a common woman.6 Inevitably La Rochefoucauld associated Behn again with the Hobbes—Lucretius group of freethinkers and sceptics, and with the pre-conversion Rochester. Despite all the pressures to Catholic piety, it seems that she had not much changed her religious views.
Yet Behn’s attraction to the Maximes suggests some subtle movement within her overall sceptical position. Lucretius had allowed a vision of pastoral serenity, but now Behn saw something more savage in human nature, while her faith in reason, so ringingly expressed in her poem to Thomas Creech, had shifted towards Rochester’s doubt—albeit without Rochester’s Christian tinge. La Rochefoucauld too was thoroughly sceptical of reason’s ability to control the needs and desires of the body. He revealed his opinion in mockery of the Stoical Roman philosopher, Seneca, who believed that virtuous action could be brought about by right reason. In contrast to Seneca, La Rochefoucauld saw virtue linked to far less savoury impulses. This mockery Behn made central to her cynical translation, which, consequently, she called Seneca Unmasqued.
La Rochefoucauld was merciless in analysing the self-interest involved in human conduct, even in behaviour of the most idealistic type. He showed that ‘there are very few Virtues very pure in the World, and that in the greatest part of our Actions, there is a mixture of Error, and Truth, of Perfection, and Imperfection, of Vice and of Virtue’. He found the heart of ‘villanous Man corrupted by Pride and Self-Love’. Behn had long thought as much herself.
The cynical remarks on royal statecraft—clemency often being a mixture of laziness, fear and vanity, for example—had pertinence to the Stuarts, but she avoided noticing it. She also left without comment maxims about the supreme importance of chance or luck in life and of temperament in happiness. About three-quarters of the way through, however, she awoke and reordered maxims to create a section entitled ‘Of Love’. Here people became foolish through overwhelming, often contrary passions in which self-interest always functioned: ‘Even the most uninterested Love is no other than a Commerce where our Selflove proposes a Gain.’ Closer to hatred than friendship, love was indefinable, softening the mind and pushing the body towards enjoyment ‘after a great deal of mysterious trouble and expectation’.7
Seneca Unmasqued was far less polished than Behn’s earlier French ‘translation’, The Island of Love. She had spent a great deal of costly time on the latter, and she could not afford as much again: writing was physically laborious and she probably did not wish the expense of an amanuensis. So Seneca Unmasqued was often careless and incorrect, as when Behn rendered ‘On est quelquefois aussi différent de soi-même que des autres’ as the muddled, ‘We are oftentimes farther from knowing our selves than we are from that of others.’ Whatever its difference in quality, however, the work was mischievously tied to The Island of Love through the two characters, Lysander and Aminta, who intruded into several maxims on love. Behn even personalised the pair to herself and a lover when she translated the French ‘on’ as ‘I’.
Three maxims in particular suggest self-reference: ‘If you believe you love Amynta, for the love of Amynta, you are deceived,’ ‘You ought to indure and bear with that fault in Amynta, which she has Wit and Candor to own,’ and ‘I am more happy in being deceived by Lysander than in being undeceived.’ They lead intentionally and codedly to the dedication of the work by ‘Astrea’ or Behn, so often called ‘Aminta’ in poems, to a man named ‘Lysander’. He is the double of the person who entered The Luckey Chance to accuse the heroine of talkativeness and who, as Alexis, had blamed Aphra Behn for the same fault.
As ever, she guarded more than she revealed, for much of the jokesy, seemingly intimate address to Lysander in her dedication was actually an unacknowledged translation of a French foreword to a 1665 edition of La Rochefoucauld. This tried to place the Maximes in a Christian context in which self-love was also condemned, and was probably added to counter church criticism of its pervasive cynicism. Behn omitted the Christian placing, but kept the familiar tone. Thus, with the help of the French mediator, she was ‘at this time’ able to put herself on to a level with the aristocratic La Rochefoucauld, the ‘Duke’—and the English earls, Rochester and Mulgrave: ‘speaking for him, and my self... I can speak of nothing under Monsieur the Duke and I’. She could then assume the prestige of the amateur aristocrat: if the work does not please, she quipped, ‘’twill spoil neither of our Reputations: since we both of us pretend to some other Pieces, that have indured the Test, and passed for Good and Currant Wit.’ In this insouciant mode Behn could separate herself from ‘the Dramatick poor Devils that depend on the uncertain Humours of the Stage and Town’ and from the ‘trading Poet[s]’; instead she could become a courtly ‘Man of Quality and Wit’.8 The manoeuvre by which she feigned being what she so palpably was not resembles her ploy at the beginning of The False Count when, in a violently Tory prologue, she declared herself a convert Whig.
Yet this time Behn wanted to be part of what she counterfeited. Consequently, she could not easily keep up the pretence. When she mocked Seneca for despising worldly blessings while enjoying wealth, love and pleasure, she made him into an early Roman version of the hypocritical Puritan and alluded to her own real predicament: ‘I should have loved to have been a Philosopher at this rate, and could be contented amidst such abundance, to have recommended and extoll’d Moderation and Poverty to the World.’
‘Lysander’ emerges vibrantly from the dedication. He sounds a little like the old Hoyle in his censorious self-satisfaction, and a lot like the recent Alexis. There is more about business and virtue than Hoyle provoked, less about political difference, which, since Behn had been so thoroughly and publicly politicised by the Popish Plot years, would now have been a chasm.9 Hoyle was apparently taciturn with her, but otherwise a facetious wit, as well as a bully and a brawler, whereas this Lysander is a grave young man. While Behn is teasingly fond of Lysander-Alexis, she does not appear romantically obsessed with him as she had been, fitfully, with Hoyle. Although he appears with the ‘Complexion’ of a lover, Lysander with Alexis seems to be holding back for some reason. By now Behn knew the best and worst of Hoyle—as did the public—and would not have had to speculate from ‘Complexion’:
there is not one Sentence but is applicable to some body or other, so you will find many that will touch your self: and many more that I doubt not but you will lay at my door, especially any Satyr on our Sex: but since there is wherewithal to quit Scores, do your worst. I know too well you have abundance of Gravity, to the loss and destruction of many an honest hour, which might have been past more gayly if you had pleased to have laid by that (sometimes necessary) humour; and that face of dull business, enough to mortifie all thoughts of Mirth about one. I know you have a great deal of that which my Reflections tell you passes for Vertue, nay even your self it deludes with that Opinion, as well as the World: you should be a Lover too, if one will believe you or your Complexion; and to my knowledge you have goodness enough to pardon all the faults you will find here, at least you dissemble it well, and that will do as well. These Motives, joyned to the desire I have to let you see you are more in my head than you imagine, oblige me to chuse you from out the number of my few Friends, to address this part of my handy-work to.
Again Behn refers to the man’s taciturnity and his criticism of her loquaciousness, as she had in the supposed letters to Hoyle and in the more recent Alexis poems:
I am so us’d
to be impertinent in Lysanders Company that ’twill appear no more strange than what he is entertained with every time I have the happiness of seeing him: where his grave silence, and scarcity of speaking (afflicting enough to me) gives me an occasion to run into the other Extreme of talking all, purely to prevent a dumb Entertainment, for which I have many times met with wise Reproofs, as ’tis very likely I may now, and which will as little work upon the temper of a Woman of my humour, as Mercy to a hardened Whig.10
This was no dedication to the great for money. That Behn decided to throw away a begging opportunity argues either a sense of the carelessness of her work or an overpowering personal need to say something in public to this fascinating and infuriating man. Presumably her ‘few Friends’ recognised the portrait.
An equal mixture of the carelessness and skill displayed in Seneca Unmasqued went into the rendition of Aesop’s Fables soon afterwards. Behn’s recent poetic publications, especially the Poems upon Several Occasions with The Island of Love, had given her a reputation for competence, and, when the (predominantly) Whig Francis Barlow, the painter and engraver, wanted to reissue his 1666 volume of Aesop engravings, a work dear to his heart, he turned to her despite their political differences. The original work, some sheets of which might have perished in the Great Fire which destroyed so many publications, had had verses by Thomas Philipott stretching from six to sixteen lines. The irregularity made the engraved pages untidy, the longer poems often being squashed to fit the space allowed. The work might be better served with her tiny, concise and uniform verses of four lines for the fable and two for the moral.11
Behn’s main source for her verses was Philipott, his words and rhymes sometimes being identical to hers. As no doubt with some of the collaborative theatrical updating, Behn was here refashioning an English style of twenty years earlier, smoothing, generalising, omitting out-of-date linguistic crudeness and, in this case, infiltrating her own views. In the process she lost some of the earlier vigour. All being elegant, it was difficult to inject a shock into mock heroics, and the fable in which a rhetorical wolf leisurely questions a drowning vernacular fox loses its comedy. (Indeed the colloquial Philipott is generally better at animal ‘speech’ than Behn.) Sometimes, too, Behn was just more slapdash than Philipott and in Fable XL, ‘The Porcupines and Adders’, she made a moral in which his contrast of force and fraud was collapsed into a similarity of force and war. But sometimes her elegance worked: