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The ethos of the Restoration wits was, as a whole and with due reservations, not so much a licence of high spirits as a complacent cynicism. Out of this cynicism the drama of sensibility, preluding the rise of a whole new literature, came as a natural reaction, but it introduced an error as vicious in its consequences as that against which it revolted. At least the cynicism of disillusion was free of the lying spirit of flattery, the cowardly fear of facts, which has spread like a mouldy disease through so much of modern writing. "In this book," said Dr. Johnson of Lord Kames's Sketches of the History of Man, laying his finger as usual on the quick of the matter, "it is maintained that virtue is natural to man, and that if we would but consult our own hearts, we should be virtuous. Now, after consulting our own hearts all we can, and with all the helps we have, we find how few of us are virtuous. This is saying a thing which all mankind know not to be true." Far nearer the truth was the development of the wit of complacent cynicism into the wit of satire, as we see it in Swift and Pope. I would not place the êthos of this new satire too high; it retained too much of the Restoration one-sidedness, and restored too little of the more balanced view of human nature which was lost lost for how long a time? But the indignation of a Swift was altogether a sounder passion than the trifling mock-> ery of a Rochester, and the law of hatred that

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governed the little band of Tories who fell with Bolingbroke, indiscriminate though it may seem, was a tonic restorative after the kind of laughter that succeeded in the court of Charles the Second.

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In regard to the literary value of the comedy in which Mrs. Behn made her name critics will differ according to the degree of importance they attach to ethical tone as a factor of interest and according to the measure of their resistance to the deadening effects of monotony. For my part a few of these plays - notably two or three of Congreve's and Wycherley's never fail to intrigue me by their audacity and by their extraordinary resourcefulness within a narrowly circumscribed field; but in general the conventions of the genre are so apparent and so tyrannical that my attention soon flags and I find myself yawning. The Roman emperor discovered long ago the monotony of mere vice, but vice grows really pitiful when it has no more variety than it seems to have offered to these hard-worked panders of the stage. One often wishes they had taken to heart the advice of Rochester:

Farewell, woman, I intend

Henceforth every night to sit

With my lewd well-natured friend,
Drinking to engender wit.

I suspect the conversion of Rochester in the end was due less to the pious ministrations of

Dr. Burnet than to the memory of the frightful ennui that had pursued him and his kind in their heartless search for diversion. "The hand of God touched him; ... it was not only a general dark melancholy over his mind, such as he had formerly felt, but a most penetrating cuttng sorrow."

Such is the field in which our female comedian bravely raised a lance amid the masculine champions of the day, and if she did not prove herself quite the equal of her greater adversaries, she at least won no dishonourable place in the lists. Occasionally she shows the working of another spirit, as if a breath from an earlier world blew across the stage. There is, for example, a scene in A Night's Intrigue (IV, i) which is almost poetry and deserves a moment's special attention. Briefly the situation is this: Fillamour is in love with Marcella, who, being contracted to another man, has escaped to Rome disguised as a courtesan. Fillamour, with his less scrupulous friend Galliard, is discovered in her chamber, and we have a pretty play of cross-purposes, the lady making trial of his constancy under the protection of her disguise, and Fillamour being troubled by her resemblance to her real self:

Fil. Hah! the fair enchantress.

[Enter Mar. richly and loosely dressed. Mar. What, on your guard, my lovely cavalier? Lies

there a danger

In this face and eyes, that needs that rough resist

ance?

Hide, hide that mark of anger from my sight,
And if thou wouldst be absolute conqueror here,
Put on soft looks, with eyes all languishing,
Words tender, gentle sighs, and kind desires.

Gal. Death! with what unconcern he hears all this. Art thou possessed? Pox, why dost not answer her? Mar. (Aside.) I hope he will not yield. He stands unmoved.

Surely I was mistaken in this face,

And I believe in charms that have no power.

Gal. (Aside.) 'Sdeath, thou deservest not such a noble

creature;

I'll have 'em both myself.

Fil. (Pausingly.) Yes, thou hast wondrous power, And I have felt it long.

Mar. How!

Fil. I've often seen that face-but 't was in dreams

And sleeping loved extremely,

And waking, sighed to find it but a dream!

The lovely fantom vanished with my slumbers,

But left a strong Idea on my heart

Of what I find in perfect beauty here,

But with this difference, she was virtuous, too.
Mar. What silly she was that?

Fil. She whom I dreamed I loved.

Mar. You only dreamt that she was virtuous too;

Virtue itself 's a dream of so slight force,

The very fluttering of Love's wings destroys it; Ambition, or the meaner hope of interest, wakes it to nothing;

In men a feeble beauty shakes the dull slumber off

The whole scene is such as we might expect to find in a play of Fletcher's, and I doubt if there is

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anything better in Mrs. Behn's works; but how tame the language is in comparison with her predecessor's, how the pulse of emotion and the poetry save in the closing denial of virtue have gone out of it! That, in a word, is the mark of her hand throughout. When, as is more commonly the case, she abides within the prescribed circle of the Restoration convention, she will display endless cleverness in varying her combinations of the given material, her scenes will be full of bustle, but somehow the creative spark is missing, and her audacity fails to surprise. All the proper elements are here: the broad stream of ridicule flows over the pretenders to virtue and wit and the hypocrites of vice; the êthos is true to the norm of a society where "wisdom is but good success in things, and those that fail are fools"; the action is duly confined to the "damnable work this same womankind makes in a nation of fools that are lovers' she plays the game with zest and cunning, but we soon learn that she has no trump cards in her hand.

Perhaps the most curious proof of her complete subjugation to the material she worked in is the fact that through all her plays you will scarcely find a scene or a sentence indicative of her sex. When speaking for herself she has no such reticence, nor does she try to conceal her resentment for what she regarded as an unjust discrimination against the female wit. "I printed

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