Chapter V Satiric Representations of the Learned Lady in Comedy
The artificial comedy of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in England is of genuine significance as a social document. Its purpose was to hold up to ridicule whatever in contemporary life, especially the life of the every-day middle-class world, could be counted foolish or absurd. In its pages nearly every phase of ordinary human activity could look upon its more or less distorted image, and the taste and temper of the times are pretty fairly measured by the personages accepted by dramatists, actors, and audiences as legitimate sources of comic appeal.
Literature offered a surprisingly rich field to the writers of comedy. Tragedies and comedies, the new Italian opera, farces, pantomimes, harlequinades, pastoral dramas, were parodied, burlesqued, and criticized on the stage. Individual authors, theater-managers, actors, and actresses, were ever-recurring figures in the popular comedy. Quite a little library might, for instance, be gathered of the satiric representations of Colley Cibber, Theophilus Cibber, and Susanna Maria Cibber.
Other popular comic types were heroes and heroines marked by national characteristics. An illuminating social study might be made of the Irishman in comedy, the many ancestors of Sheridan’s “Sir Lucius O’Trigger,” as “Sir Teague O’Divelly,” “Sir Calligan O’Bralligan,” “Mr. O’Connor MacCormack,” “Major O’Flaherty,” and the rest of the truculent, honey-tongued, generous, blundering tribe. There are stage Scotchmen and Welshmen represented by “Sir Pertinax MacSycophant,” “Mr. Apreece,” and their congeners. The Frenchman as valet, music-master, dancing-master, and villain-in-ordinary to the heroes is ubiquitous.
Or we might study the professions. Physicians line up on the stage as quacks, charlatans, conscious impostors. Lawyers are pictured as men whose sole purpose is to hide ignorance and knavery in a cloud of words, and to empty the pockets of their clients in a trumped-up pursuit of justice.
The Church does not escape. The Puritan who in Restoration drama was represented as a psalm-singing, whining, long-faced hypocrite, concealing a vicious life under a pretense of rigid sanctity, was replaced as a comic type in the early eighteenth century by the non-juror, and when later Wesley’s tabernacle and Foote’s play-house were competing for popular favor, it was the Methodist who obtained the bright reversion, there being ascribed to him all the cant and hypocrisy of his forbears.
Society is likewise represented in all its follies and vices. Of genuine social importance is a study of the long line of “fops,” “coxcombs,” “pretty fellows,” “beaux,” “macaronies,” “dudes,” as they were variously called, from “Sir Solomon, the Cautious Coxcomb,” in 1669, through “Sir Fopling Flutter,” “Sir Courtly Nice,” “Sir Novelty Fashion,” “Lord Foppington,” “Sir William Mode,” “Mr. Apeall,” “Sir Brilliant Fashion,” “Lord Trinket,” “Brisk,” “Flutter,” “Sparkish,” and the rest of the inane tribe, with their laces and frills, their powdered wigs, their enameled snuff-boxes, their ivory combs and pocket-mirrors, their muffs and canes, their inordinate vanity, affectation, and empty-headedness.
Learning, too, found its place on the stage. From the establishment of the Royal Society in 1662, the work of the Gresham professors was the theme of unbridled ridicule. The virtuoso who spent his whole time with a telescope investigating the geography of the moon or with a microscope determining the nature of the bloom on a plum; the anatomist, the geologist, the antiquarian, were counted fair game for the satirist.
I. The Learned Lady as a Comic Type
In this multifarious activity of the comic spirit it would be strange if any pretense to learning on the part of women should escape. And we are, in fact, presented with a motley procession of mock Minervas. Even as early as Jonson there was some recognition of the comic potentialities of the learned lady as a type. In Epicœne (1609) Morose is warned against matrimony by Truewit who recounts the ways in which a learned wife could shatter his peace. Proud to show her Latin and Greek, she might talk all day like a parrot; or, cunning in controversy, she might attack the very knots of divinity; or, considering herself a critic, she might “censure poets, and authors, and stiles, and compare ’hem, Daniel with Spenser, Ionson with tother youth, and so foorth.”478 But this summary seems to be less a reflection of contemporary life than an echo from Juvenal’s Sixth Satire.479 More bitterly satirical is Jonson’s representation of the “Collegiate Ladies,” “an order between courtiers and country madams, that live from their husbands.” But these ladies make no pretense to learning. Lady Haughty and her coadjutors are frivolous, affected, profligate women whose “college-grammar” and “college-honours”480 have no significance beyond the amorous intrigue for which their order was founded. The play reads as if there had been some contemporary organization at which Jonson’s satire was directed, but no record of such an organization is extant. At any rate, the satire was against women who considered themselves emancipated from conjugal life, rather than against learned women as such. In The Devil is an Ass (1616) Jonson brings into some prominence “a Lady Projectress” who is said to deserve the gratitude of the commonwealth of ladies for her great undertakings in their behalf. But her solid service is in the realm of Spanish fashions and new cosmetics.
Jasper Mayne, in The City Match (1639), has a fling at the “new foundation” and “the philosophical Madams” in a manner even more contemptuous than that of Jonson. He also presents a Mrs. Scruple, a Puritan school-mistress learned in religious lore, who can expound the Scriptures, who “works Hebrew samplers and teaches to knit in Chaldee.” Her pupil Dorcas makes “religious petticoats,” substituting church histories for flowers, and sanctifying cushionets and smock-sleeves with holy embroideries. But it seems to be the religious zeal that is here satirized, with only an incidental reflection on the learning implied in a knowledge of Hebrew and Chaldee.
These remote hints did not result in the establishment of a stage type. It was through Molière that the learned lady took her place in English comedy. The immediate object of Molière’s attack was the coterie of the Hôtel de Rambouillet, a salon established about 1615. The avowed purposes of this exclusive literary circle were to rid the French tongue of impurities, to cultivate le beau and le vrai bel amour and bel conversation. They had a vocabulary peculiar to themselves, and they devulgarized French by calling common things by uncommon names. They improvised stories and rhymes, played literary games, called themselves by noms de Parnasse, and held exalted views on friendship, love, and marriage, which they endlessly discussed. In the time of its greatest power some of the most noted men and women of France belonged to this salon, but gradually pedantry and affectation had crept in, and the extravagances of the later Précieux and Précieuses in thought, speech, and manners awakened the ridicule of Molière. In his Preface to Les Précieuses (1659) he protested that the true Précieuses could not rightly be vexed at a satire meant only for those absurd people who wretchedly imitated them. But it is nevertheless apparent that his play was an attack on the whole assembly of learned or pseudo-learned ladies and gentlemen who made up the salon, with particular attention to the ladies. In this play he satirized especially bel amour, poetic improvisation, and fine language.
Thirteen years later he returned to the general subject in a more elaborate play, Les Femmes Savantes (1672), where, in the characters of Armande, Bélise, and Philaminte, he represented the false delicacy of the learned ladies, the absurdities of their struggle for pure diction, their puerile literary enthusiasms, their affected interest in science and philosophy, their neglect of all the ordinary duties of life, and the essential hypocrisy of their professedly platonic attitude towards husbands and lovers.
Molière’s plays were well known to the earliest English playwrights of the Restoration.481 Etherege had seen Les Précieuses482 on the French stage, and the impression it had made upon him was evidenced by his Sir Fopling Flutter, a brilliant English version of Molière’s Mascarille, but Etherege nowhere takes up the ideas represented by Madelon and Cathos. Wycherley had personally known the circle of the Hôtel de Rambouillet during his stay in France from 1655 to 1660,483 and he could not have failed to know of the sensation created by Molière’s attack on the noted salon. And throughout his work he was profoundly influenced by Molière in his general conception of true comic material and methods. But apparently the learned-lady theme did not appeal to him as especially suitable for English treatment. Or possibly the very fact of his close association with some of the most brilliant members of the salon made him averse to a satiric representation even of their absurdities.
The first comedy to show any direct influence of Madelon and Cathos is Dryden’s Mock Astrologer (1668).484 Donna Aurelia is like her ancestors in Les Précieuses in her attempts at fine language. She is unable “to speak ten words without some affected phrase that is in fashion.” In direct imitation of the French damsels she calls her looking-glass “the counsellor of the graces,” and urges upon her maid fashionable language and pronunciation. In her effort to secure striking phraseology she does not rise above the constant use of “furious.” She has a “furious inclination” for the occult sciences, a “furious tender” for Don Melchor, and a ghost is a “furiously furious” appearance. Her indigence of epithets puts her far behind Molière’s nimble-tongued young ladies, but she certainly strives to be in the same class.
The influence of Molière became more apparent after the presentation of Les Femmes Savantes in 1672. In Dryden’s Marriage à la Mode (1672) is a really vital and entertaining picture of a lady with a literary fad. Melantha is one of the sprightliest and most convincing of the comedy heroines before Congreve’s Millamant. Melantha is a Sicilian town lady, young, fair, and rich; a finished coquette, an inveterate news-monger, a hanger-on of the court. She would, she says, rather be “mal traitée at court than deified in the town.” She accordingly overdoes what she considers to be court characteristics. Especially does she ape the French. French dances and clothes, French plays and ballets, French words, all that’s writ in France, fill her with rapture. Her lover does not win her by his face or fortune, but by his rapid fire of French terms. Melantha belongs to the cult of the précieuses in her joy over fine language. An Indian gown, a gimp petticoat, a new point gorget, are tossed to her maid Philatio as a reward for any new words she may bring in. Melantha counts it an ignominy to use vulgar, threadbare words that are fit for nothing but to be thrown to peasants. She practices her vocabulary with her glances at the mirror, and makes up effective sentences into which she may run new acquisitions such as naïveté, sottises, embarrass, and is most unhappy when they prove recalcitrant and are lost in the rapid interplay of talk.
Melantha is an admirable example of social satire, a delightfully audacious representation of a contemporary folly. France was the recognized home of culture and good-breeding. No courtier or fashionable lady could be counted as having the last word in refinement who had not spent some time on French soil, and the French language was one of the most important studies of the higher classes in England. What was taken for granted in court circles became, of course, the ne plus ultra of the ambitious town lady. But her hastily acquired and imperfect knowledge would lead to mistakes and over-emphasis, the result being a character of genuinely comic import. For the stage interpretation of Melantha actresses doubtless had many a social model among the town ladies with violent court aspirations. Cibber says that Melantha was “as finish’d an Impertinent as ever flutter’d in a Drawing-Room,” and that she contained “the most compleat System of Female Foppery that could possibly be crowded into the tortured Form of a Fine Lady.” And chief among her fopperies was her preciosity, a characteristic marked in most of the learned ladies represented in seventeenth and eighteenth century comedy.
Mrs. Behn’s Sir Patient Fancy came out late in 1678 and was based for its chief intrigue on Molière’s Le Malade Imaginaire which had appeared in 1673. But the character of Lady Knowell, “an affected learned woman,” reverted to Les Femmes Savantes. She is the young stepmother of Lord Knowell’s marriageable son and daughter and is of considerable importance in the general movement of the play, but her real function is to present a caricature of a learned lady. She understands Greek, Latin, and Italian. She cannot endure “divine Homer” in a translation: “Ton d’apamibominous prosiphe podas ochus Achilleus! Ah how it sounds! which English’t dwindles into the most grating stuff:—Then the swift-footed Achilles made reply.” As she looks upon the frivolous young girls of the play she exclaims: “I’m for the substantial pleasure of an Author. Philosophemur! is my Motto.... Oh the delight of Books! When I was their age I always employed my looser Hours in reading—if serious, ’t was Tacitus, Seneca, Plutarch’s Morals, or some such useful Author; or in an Humour gay, I was for Poetry, Virgil, Homer, or Tasso.”
To this emphasis on the classics is added a preciosity which consists of misdirected attempts to use impressive language. Lady Knowell is an early and not very amusing Mrs. Malaprop. Her “hard words” are sometimes legitimate words to which she attaches a wrong meaning, as in the sentence, “There is much Volubility in Human Affairs,” when she means “variability.” But most of her words are compounded of portions of others each one of which contains some shade of her meaning; as, “Were I querimonious [querulous, acrimonious] I should resent the affront”; “Notwithstanding your Exprobations [expostulations, disapprobations]”; and “I saw your Reclination [revolt, declination] from my Addresses.” These bungling attempts to play with language are too far-sought, too puzzling, to bring instant laughter, but they suffice to establish Lady Knowell as at least a would-be precursor of Mrs. Malaprop a century later.
The young ladies make sport of Lady Knowell. Lucretia does not approve of her learning. “Methinks,” she says, “to be read in the Arts, as they call ’em, is the peculiar Province of the other Sex.” Isabella is of much the same opinion, yet she feels that women might easily surpass most University men: “Indeed the Men... boast their Learning and Languages; but if they can find any one of our Sex fuller of Words, and to so little Purpose as some of their Gownmen, I’ll be content to change my Petticoats for Pantaloons and go to a Grammar-school.”
In Shadwell’s Sullen Lovers (1669) is a Lady Vaine who calls herself a “Virtuosa” and is learned in medicaments. She boasts of her serviceableness with her “Flos Unguentorum, Paracelsian, and Green-salve,” and praises the Album Grecum as a salve of her own concoction.
Of much more interest is Shadwell’s Bury-Fair (1689). The chief characters are Lady Fantast, Mrs. Fantast, and Lady Fantast’s stepdaughter, Gertrude Oldwit, and their attendant cavaliers. The central action, the joke played on the Fantast ladies in imposing on them a barber dressed up to impersonate a French count, is taken from Les Précieuses. But Lady Fantast and her daughter have their direct ancestry in Philaminte and Armande in Les Femmes Savantes. Wildish who had at first loved Mrs. Fantast, but, on finding her a précieuse, had transferred his affections to Gertrude, is Molière’s Clitandre, while Gertrude herself and Mr. Oldwit are the Henriette and Chrysale of the French play. The common sense of the play is embodied in Wildish, Gertrude, and Mr. Oldwit. Lady Fantast is not herself especially learned, but all her ambitions in that line have been concentrated on her daughter. “I have bred my daughter a linguist,” she proudly exclaims when the young lady quotes Latin. The two ladies converse as follows:
Mrs. Fan. To all that, which the World calls Wit and Breeding, I have always had a natural Tendency, a penchen, deriv’d, as the Learned say, Ex traduce, from your Ladyship: Besides the great Prevalence of your Ladyship’s most shining Example has perpetually Stimulated me, to the Sacrificing all my Endeavours towards the attaining of those inestimable Jewels; than which, nothing in the Universe can be so much a mon gre, as the French say. And for Beauty, Madam, the Stock I am enrich’d with, comes by emanation from your Ladyship; who has been long held a Paragon of Perfection; Most Charmant, most Tuant.
L. Fan. Ah, my dear Child: I! Alas, Alas! Time has been, and yet I am not quite gone; but thou hast those Attractions, which I bewail the want of: Poetry, Latin, and the French tongue.
Mrs. Fan. I must confess, I have ever had a Tendress for the Muses, and have a due Reverence for Helicon, and Parnassus, and the Graces: But Heroick Numbers upon Love and Honour are most Ravissant, most Suprenant; and a Tragedy is so Touchant! I dye at a Tragedy; I’ll swear, I do.
Lady Fantast has an adoration of French equal to that of Melantha. “No Conversation,” she says, “can be refin’d and well-drest without French to lard it.” The false count wins his way with the ladies when he professes to believe them French:
Count. Me vil gage a hundred Pistol, dat dat fine Ladeè and her ver pretty Sister, are de French Ladeè.
L. Fan. We have often bewailed the not having had the honour to be born French.
Count. Pardon me, is impossible.
Mrs. Fan. Monfoy, je parle vray! we are meer English assurement.
Count. Mon foy, je parle vray! vat is dat Gibberish? Oh, lettè me see; de Fader is de Lawyere, an she learne of him at de Temple: is de Law French. I am amazè! French Lookè, French Ayre, French Mien, French Movement of de Bodee! Morbleu. Monsieur, I vil gage 4,500 Pistol, dat dese two Sister vere bred in France, yes. Teste bleau, I can no be deceive.
Mrs. Fan. Jee vous en prie, do not; we never had the blessing to be in France; you do us too much Honour. Alas, we are forc’d to be content with plain English Breeding: you will bring all my blood into a blush. I had indeed a penchen always to French.
The barber-count makes fun of the French of the ladies Fantast, but in one of the conversations the joke is turned the other way, for Mrs. Fantast’s learning very nearly proves fatal to the count:
Mrs. Fan. You know very well what the Poet says:
Res est Solliciti plena timoris amor.
Count. Ver well, Madam, you be de most profound Ladee, and de great Scholar.—[Aside.] Morbleu, she vill findé me out! Begar, I can no read.
Mrs. Fan. No, no assurement, pretty well read in the Classic Authors. Or so. Monsieur Scudery says very well:
L’amour est une grande chose.
Count. Hee bee ver pretty Poet too.
—Begar she will puzzle me.
Mrs. Fan. Poet, Monsieur! he writ Romances.
Count. Ah, Madam, in France we callè de Romance, de Posie.
Mrs. Fan. And as Monsieur Balzac says, Songez un peu.
Count. Dat Balzac write de very good Romance.
Mrs. Fan. Indeed! I never heard that.
Count. Je vous assure.—A pox on her reading!
Gertrude is the foil to Mrs. Fantast and she sees no necessity for the punctilious breeding of the ladies Fantast. “Breeding! I know no Breeding necessary, but Discretion to distinguish Company and Occasions; and Common Sense, to entertain Persons according to their Ranks; besides making a Curt’sie not awkwardly, and walking with one’s Toes out.”
To so low-bred a view of manners Mrs. Fantast can only exclaim, “Ars non habet Inimicum præter Ignorantem”; but Gertrude responds: “A Lady may look after the Affairs of a Family, the Demeanor of her Servants, take care of her Nursery, take all her Accounts every Week, obey her husband, and discharge all the Offices of a good Wife, with her Native Tongue; and this is all I desire to arrive at.”
The two ladies are especially obnoxious to Mr. Oldwit, who exhausts a Billingsgate vocabulary in his irritation at their follies. He sums up his misery in the exclamation, “He that would have the Devil more damn’d, let him get him to marry a She-Wit!”
Mr. Thomas Wright’s The Female Vertuosos (1693) is confessedly drawn from “the great Original of French Comedy.” Ten of the characters and most of the situations are plainly modeled on Les Femmes Savantes, but the name of the play and the idea of ridiculing the new science may have been suggested by Shadwell’s The Vertuoso, a popular attack on the Royal Society. Wright gains a trace of originality by transferring his chief learned ladies from the realm of word-mongery to that of pseudo-science. The tone of the play is indicated by the prefixed quotation from Dryden’s translation of Juvenal’s Sixth Satire:485
Oh what a Midnight Curse has he, whose Side
Is pester’d with a Mood and Figure Bride!
Let mine, ye Gods! if such must be my Fate,
No Logic learn, nor History translate,
But rather be a quiet, humble Fool:
I hate a Wife to whom I go to School.
The three “Vertuosos” are Lady Meanwell, Mrs. Lovewit, and Catchat. Mrs. Lovewit has been making laboratory experiments in behalf of the literati. She has collected all the plays that ever came out and is planning to put them in a limbeck and extract all the quintessence of wit that is in them to sell by drops to the poets of the age. Mrs. Meanwell has just made the great discovery that rain comes from clouds. With a housewifely objection to the wet streets of London and a corresponding sense of civic responsibility, she has invented a way of keeping the streets as dry and clean as a drawing-room the year round. She has just been to the Lord Mayor to propose her scheme, which is to erect a series of posts similar to the lamp-posts newly set up in London, equip them with great bellows, and have city watchmen to blow the clouds away. Catchat is interested in astronomy. Through a telescope she has seen men in the moon and been almost embarrassed by the loving looks cast upon her by the amorous sparks of that shining world.
While science is the main interest in this play, the other accepted traits of the learned woman are not neglected. Catchat, for instance, has been nurtured on the Grand Cyrus and theoretically accepts its cold guidance in matters of love. But her platonic ideals fade before her desires, and she becomes the most impassioned husband-hunter of the throng. Literary criticism is not omitted. Mr. Maggot Jingle’s poem “To the Countess of Squeezingham upon her Ague” gains rapturous praise from the ladies. The maid Lucy is about to be discharged for having committed “the horrid, scandalous, and exorbitant Offence” of saying that “Cowley, the wretched Cowley, was as good a poet as the incomparable Sir Maggot Jingle.”
The domestic infelicity of Lord and Lady Meanwell is described as a result of the lady’s learning. Lord Meanwell says of her, “My wife is a terrible Dragon when she is out of Humour; she makes indeed a High Boast of her Philosophy but she is not a bit the less Cholerick for it, and her Morals that teach her to look upon all Things with an indifferent Eye have not the least Influence on her Passions.” Lady Meanwell is a virago before whose hard words her husband shrinks into cowed submission.
As an outcome of their combined wits these ladies are about to open an “Academy of Beaux Esprits,” where they may communicate to each other such discoveries as they make, and which shall serve as an “Apollo’s Levee” to the Sapphos of the Age, and as a Sovereign Tribunal for all new books.
Congreve’s contribution to the learned lady in comedy comes in The Double Dealer (1694), in the admirable figure of Lady Froth, “a coquet pretender to poetry, wit, and learning.” Her pet affectation is that of an extravagant passion for her husband, Lord Froth, the solemn coxcomb of the play, and her affections have been bound up with her literary aspirations even from the days of their courtship. She had known love and sleepless nights and whimsies and vapors, but she had also known how to give them vent.
Cynthia. How pray, Madam?
Lady Froth. O I writ, writ abundantly;—do you never write?
Cynthia. Write what?
Lady Froth. Songs, elegies, satires, encomiums, panegyrics, lampoons, plays, or heroic poems.
By virtue of her learning and her lord’s title Lady Froth assumes superiority over Cynthia, the modest, sensible heroine.
Lady Froth. My Lord Froth is as fine a gentleman and as much a man of quality! Ah, nothing at all of the common air!... I think I may say he wants nothing but a blue ribbon and a star to make him shine, the very phosphorus of our hemisphere. Do you understand those two hard words?... Being derived from the Greek I thought you might have escaped the etymology.
Her ladyship is also an author and has written an heroic poem on her connubial bliss. She communicates this fact to Brisk, the foolish critic.
Lady Froth. Did my lord tell you? yes, I vow, and the subject is my lord’s love to me. And what do you think I call it? I dare swear you won’t guess—‘The Syllabub’; ha! ha! ha!
Brisk. Because my lord’s title’s Froth, egad; ha! ha! ha! deuce take me, very à propos and surprising, ha! ha! ha!
Lady Froth. He! ay, is not it?—And then I call my lord Spumoso, and myself—what d’ ye think I call myself?
Brisk. Lactilla, maybe;—‘gad I can not tell.
Lady Froth. Biddy, that’s all, just my own name.
Lady Froth was certainly not without a competent critical apparatus for writing poetry since she declares herself familiar with Bossu, Rapin, Dacier upon Aristotle, and Horace. The wittiest portion of the play is based on Molière’s scene where the lady critics praise the foolish poet. In Congreve the foolish poet is a woman and the critic a man, but the comic situation is essentially the same.
Lady Froth. Then you think that episode between Susan, the dairy-maid, and our coachman, is not amiss; you know I may suppose the dairy in town as well as in the country.
Brisk. Incomparable, let me perish!—But then being an heroic poem, had not you better call him a charioteer? charioteer sounds great; besides, your ladyship’s coachman having a red face, and you comparing him to the sun; and you know the sun is called Heaven’s charioteer.
Lady Froth. Oh, infinitely better! I am extremely beholden to you for the hint; stay, we’ll read over those half a score lines again. (Pulls out a paper.) Let me see here, you know what goes before,—the comparison, you know. (Reads.)
For as the sun shines every day.
So, of our coachman I may say—
Brisk. I’m afraid that simile won’t do in wet weather; because you say the sun shines every day.
Lady Froth. No, for the sun it won’t, but it will do for the coachman; for you know there’s most occasion for a coach in wet weather.
Brisk. Right, right, that saves all.
Lady Froth. Then, I don’t say the sun shines all the day, but that he peeps now and then; yet he does shine all the day too, you know, though we don’t see him.
Brisk. Right, but the vulgar will never comprehend that.
Lady Froth. Well, you shall hear—Let me see. (Reads.)
For as the sun shines every day,
So, of our coachman I may say,
He shows his drunken fiery face,
Just as the sun does more or less.
Brisk. That’s right, all’s well, all’s well—“More or less.”
Lady Froth. (Reads.)
And when at night his labour’s done,
Then too, like Heaven’s charioteer the sun.
Ay, charioteer does better.
Into the dairy he descends,
And there his whipping and his driving ends;
There he’s secure from danger of a bilk,
His fare is paid him, and he sets in milk.
For Susan, you know, is Thetis, and so—
Brisk. Incomparably well and proper, egad!—But I have one exception to make;—don’t you think bilk (I know it’s good rhyme), but don’t you think “bilk” and “fare” too like a hackney-coachman?
Lady Froth. I swear and vow, I am afraid so—And yet our Jehu was a hackney-coachman when my lord took him.
Brisk. Was he? I’m answered, if Jehu was a hackney-coachman.—You may put that in the marginal notes though, to prevent criticism, and say, “Jehu was formerly a hackney-coachman.”
Lady Froth. I will; you’d oblige me extremely to write notes on the whole poem.
In 1697 there appeared a play by “W. M.” entitled Female Wits. Up to this time the character of the learned lady had been general in type and based pretty closely on Molière, but with Female Wits the satire became personal. The point of the play was that the three “wits” should be recognized as representing specific ladies. Calista was Catherine Cockburn, a beautiful young girl who at seventeen had had the misfortune to have a tragedy brought out at the Theater Royal.486 She was treated rather gently, being merely bantered for pretending to understand Latin and Greek. On being asked if she had read Cicero’s Oration she answered, “I know it so well as to have turned it into Latin.” Marsilia was Mrs. Manley, two of whose tragedies, The Royal Mischief and The Lost Lover, had appeared the preceding year.487 She is represented as having a play in rehearsal. In the meantime she has a new project on the stocks. She is going to show the superiority of the moderns to the ancients by a revision of “Catiline’s Conspiracy.” The first speech is to remain as it is in the original, while the others, re-written with all the ornaments of modern rhetoric, will show up, by contrast, the poverty of the Latin style. The sample she gives of her new version was undoubtedly a fling at heroic tragedy. Her address to Rome begins: “Thy fated Stones, and thy cemented Walls, this Arm shall scatter into Atoms. Then on thy Ruins will I mount! Mount, my aspiring Spirit, mount! Hit yon azure Roof and justle Gods!” Mrs. Wellfed, “a fat female author,” was at once known to stand for Mrs. Pix,488 a writer of intolerable tragedies and poor comedies, and noted for her love of good living. Except for the personal reference this play offers little that can be of interest.
Vanbrugh’s Æsop (1699) is a play adapted from Boursault. Æsop is the sage to whom successive people bring their problems. To each one he gives a solution in a verse fable. Hortensia, the heroine of one of these episodes, is described by her maid as “the wise Lady, the great scholar, that nobody can understand.” She loves “Words of Erudition,” and waxes eloquent on philosophical abstractions. There is something in her nature that soars too high for the vulgar, but she hopes to find in Æsop a kindred soul because, as she says, “His Intellects are categorical.” But Æsop scorns her fine language. “Now by my Faith, Lady,” he answers, “I don’t know what Intellect is; and methinks categorical sounds as if you call’d me Names. Pray speak that you may be understood; Language was designed for it, indeed it was.”
When Hortensia’s lover asks Æsop’s advice as to the best way to manage a “Philosopheress,” the wise man advises retreat while there is yet time. The little apologue of “The Linnet and the Nightingale” embodies his views and is the most trenchant expression so far come upon of the supposed permanent opposition between learning and the eternal feminine:
Once on a time, a Nightingale
To Changes prone;
Unconstant, fickle, whimsical,
(A Female one)
Who sung like others of her kind,
Hearing a well-taught Linnet’s Airs,
Had other matters in her mind,
To imitate him she prepares.
Her Fancy strait was on the Wing:
I fly, quoth she,
As well as he;
I don’t know why
I should not try
As well as he to sing.
From that day forth she chang’d her Throat:
She did, as learned Women do,
Till every thing
That heard her sing
Wou’d run away from her—as I from you.
In Charles Gildon’s Comparison between the Two Stages (1702) we have a discussion by two gentlemen, Rambler and Sullen, and a critic, Chagrin, as to the comparative merits of Drury Lane and Lincoln’s Inn Fields. The most important reference to women playwrights is in the following passage:
Rambler. Proceed to the next.
Sullen. “The Lost Lover, or, The Jealous Husband.”
Rambler. I never heard of that.
Sullen. Oh this is a Lady’s!
Crit. How’s that?—Audetg; viris contendere virgo?
Rambler. See how Critick starts at the naming a lady.
Crit. What occasion had you to name a Lady in the confounded work you’re about?
Sullen. Here’s a Play of hers.
Crit. The Devil there is. I wonder in my heart we are so lost to all Sense and reason: What a Pox have the Women to do with the Muses? I grant you the Poets call the Nine Muses by the names of Women, but why so? not because the Sex had anything to do with Poetry, but because in that Sex they’re fitter for Prostitution.
Rambler. Abusive, now you’re abusive Mr. Critick.
Crit. Sir I tell you we are abus’d: I hate these Petticoat-Authors; ’t is false Grammar, there’s no Feminine for the Latin word, ’t is entirely of the Masculine Gender, and the Language won’t bear such a thing as a she-Author.
Sullen. Come, come, you forget your self; you know ’t was a Lady carry’d the Prize of Poetry in France t’other day; and I assure you, if the Account were fairly stated, there have been in England some of that Sex who have done admirably.
Crit. I’le hear no more on ’t: Come Sir, drink about.
Rambler. To the Fair Author of The Fatal Friendship.
Crit. Ay, come; away with it, anything that the Glass may go round....
In Farquhar’s The Inconstant (1703) one lady, named “Bisarre” because of her odd, capricious ways, illustrates Pope’s “Most women have no character at all,” so briskly does she change from “a starch’d piece of Austerity” to a pert madcap. As a prude she takes rank among the learned ladies. She has a grave, reverend air, and is dubbed “a Plato in Petticoats.” She wins the affections of Captain Duretete—a man socially hampered by a University education—when she talks to him in his own language. “The Forms that Logicians introduce,” she begins in pedantic tone, “and which proceed from simple Enumeration, are dubitable.” Duretete interrupts in an ecstasy, “She’s mine, Man; she’s mine: My own Talent to a T. I’ll match her in Dialectics, faith. I was seven Years at the University, Man, nurs’d up with Barbara, Celarunt, Darii, Ferio, Baralipton. Did you know that ’t was Metaphysics made me an Ass?” Bisarre is the only heroine whose learning wins her a husband.
In Mrs. Centlivre’s The Basset Table (1705) the charming young Valeria has a lover whom she intends to marry, but she is too much occupied with scientific research to have any time for darts and flames and lover’s sighs. Fortunately Ensign cares so much for Valeria and her ducats that he is able to endure the tediousness of courtship in which laboratory experiments supersede passion.
Ensign. ’T is true, that little She Philosopher has made me do Penance more heartily than ever my Sins did; I deserve her by mere dint of Patience. I have stood whole Hours to hear her assert, that Fire cannot burn, nor Water drown, nor Pain afflict, and Forty ridiculous Systems....
Sir Jam. And all her Experiments on Frogs, Fish, and Flies, ha, ha, without the least contradiction.
Ensign. Contradiction, no, no, I allow’d all she said, with, undoubtedly, Madam,—I am of your Mind, Madam, it must be so—Natural Causes, &c.
Sir Jam. Ha, ha, ha, I think it is a supernatural Cause, which enables thee to go thro’ this Fatigue; if it were not to raise thy Fortune, I should think thee mad to pursue her.
He cannot edge in a word of love so absorbed does she declare herself to be in observing the circulation of blood in a fish’s tail. Valeria is quite ahead of her time in her passion for dissection. She has devoted her pretty dove to the cause of research, and offers her jewels in return for her cousin’s fine Italian greyhound, likewise to be used in her pursuit of anatomical secrets. When accused of cruelty she exclaims in quite a modern tone, “Can Animals, Insects, or Reptiles be put to a nobler use than to increase our Knowledge?” She loses her sailor lover by breaking in upon his sea lingo with a request that he should speak, “properly, positively, laconically, and naturally” and by deluging him with questions about mermaids and the inhabitants of the stars. He quickly determines that he doesn’t regard a “Philosophical Gimcrack the value of a cockle-shell,” and considers the lovely young Valeria as “fitter for Moorfields than Matrimony.” She turns away from him with a sigh at the time wasted on a being so irrational as a suitor, and devotes herself again to the “immense Pleasures of dear, dear Philosophy.”
Lady Reveller and her woman, Alphiew, sharply criticize Valeria for her unfeminine occupations.
Lady. Will you ever be weary of these Whimsies?
Val. Whimsies! Natural Philosophy a Whimsy! Oh! the unlearned World.
Lady. Ridiculous Learning!
Alp. Ridiculous, indeed, for Women; Philosophy suits our Sex as Jack Boots would do.
Val. Custom would bring them as much in Fashion as Furbeloes, and Practice would make us as valiant as e’er a Hero of them all; the Resolution is in the Mind—Nothing can enslave that.
Lady. My Stars! this Girl will be mad, that’s certain.
Val. Mad! so Nero banish’d Philosophers from Rome, and the first Discoverer of the Antipodes was condemn’d for a Heretic.
Lady. In my Conscience, Alphiew, this pretty Creature’s spoil’d. Well, Cousin, might I advise, you should bestow your Fortune in founding a College for the Study of philosophy, where none but Women should be admitted; and to immortalize your Name, they should be called Valerians, ha, ha, ha.
Val. What you make a jest of, I’d execute were Fortune in my Power.
The heroine of Charles Johnson’s The Generous Husband (1711), Florida, is described as a “Pretender to Learning, a Philosophress.” She is young, beautiful and with a tolerable dower. But she is invincibly opposed to marriage. She gives caustic analyses of the lawyer, the courtier, the soldier, the country squire, proposed by her father with matrimonial intent. “I’ll not be married,” she says, “I’ll not submit myself to the uneven Temper of a Humourist; I’ll neither be a Prop to a Fool’s Fortune, nor a Bar to a Libertine’s Pleasure.” “I hate Men, I hate the Cumber of a Family, everything concurs to discourage me, to make me fear it, to make it my Aversion. Study has nothing in it but what is serene and calm.” When her father urges the loss of her inheritance if she does not marry, her unmoved answer is, “I shall have still a good Book—which I am persuaded I shall love much better than a bad Husband—I’ll tell you, Sir, for these three Years that I have been acquainted with Aristotle, we have not had the least difference together.” Various lovers present themselves. One of them says he trembles whenever he visits her because she puts him so in mind of his schoolmaster, but he determines to stand “a little Ear-bating before Marriage”—encouraged thereto by the lady’s money—with the hope of devising effective restraints after marriage. Another bold lover ventures upon her in her study where she sits surrounded by books and mathematical instruments. He is disguised as a traveling Japanese philosopher, and she enters upon the conversation with a learned salutation—Vir Colendissime si tu illorum Eruditorum, but he begs her in the name of Dr. Bentley not to repudiate her “vernacular Idiom,” and the interview proceeds in the English tongue. All goes prosperously until the pseudo-philosopher speaks of love. She dismisses him with “What a terrible Solecism in good Manners has this Fellow committed—Nunquam minus solus quam cum solus; excellent Scipio—I admire that thought.” She yields to love only when the learned Mr. Dypthong, who has “corrected every Nod in Homer,” appears as a suitor. He has just escaped from the “Gothic Persecution of a sort of Animalcula call’d Punsters” and comes to her as an Oracle of Reason. This is the right approach and his victory is assured when he praises her noble easy Odes that Horace would not blush to own, her immortal Sonnet on Cato, her mastery of “both the Ethos and the Pathos.” She pays him in kind with honeyed compliments from the Muses and the Graces. They discuss the Cartesian system, and the Epicurean, the Peripatetic and the Platonic Schools of Thought. The inhabitants of the moon come in for passing notice. The soul and the mind receive analysis. This sort of courtship suits her. ’T is thus a “Philosophress” should be wooed. She balks a little at the marriage articles, praying Mr. Grub to alter the savage style of them into something more genteel, at least in so far as to let the dates be “Calendar and Ides”; the pounds and pence, “Sesterces and Talents.” But she yields the point on making the unhappy discovery that to be learned and polite in dower articles would be illegal, that the law demands tautology, verbiage, an impertinent jargon. It is only when Mr. Dypthong is unmasked a villain that Florida becomes “sick of Letters,” lays aside the “Severity of Thought” along with her big folios, and accepts the paternal choice in the way of a husband. Her father, whose slightest remarks have received pitiless logical analysis from his daughter, who is urged to maintain silence or to speak “positively—laconically—naturally,” whose arguments are met with classic quotations that are but as gibberish to his uninstructed ear, hands her over to a husband with a sigh of relief. His conclusion is, “Wit in a Woman is like Mettle in a blind Mare.” The lover agrees that “a She-Understanding shou’d always be passive.” Learning, he says, may give a woman more Sail, but she’s sure to lack Ballast!
In January, 1717, there appeared a farce at Drury Lane entitled Three Hours after Marriage. It was the joint work of Gay, Pope, and Arbuthnot, but the character of the learned lady, Phœbe Clinket,489 was by Pope. Phœbe is not an important person in the plot. She was evidently drawn merely to caricature a learned lady, in this case an authoress. She comes upon the stage in an ink-stained dress with pens stuck in her hair. Her maid carries strapped to her back a desk on which Phœbe writes:
Maid. I had as good carry a raree-show about the street. Oh! how my back akes!
Clink. What are the labors of the back to those of the brain? Thou scandal to the muses, I have now lost a thought worth a folio, by thy impertinence.490
Maid. Have I not got a crick in my back already, that will make me good for nothing, with lifting your great books?
Clink. Folio’s, call them, and not great books, thou monster of impropriety. But have patience, and I will remember the three gallery-tickets I promis’d thee at my new Tragedy.
Maid. I shall never get my head-cloathes clear-starch’d at this rate.
Clink. Thou destroyer of learning, thou worse than a book-worm! Thou hast put me beyond all patience. Remember how my lyric ode bound about a tallow-candle; thy wrapping up snuff in an epigram; nay, the unworthy usage of my Hymn to Apollo, filthy creature! read me the last lines I wrote upon the Deluge, and take care to pronounce them as I taught you.
Maid. (Reads with an affected tone.)
Swell’d with a dropsy, sickly Nature lies,
And melting in a diabetes, dies.
Clink. Still without Cadence!
Maid.
Swell’d with a dropsy—
Clink. Hold. I conceive...
The roaring seas o’er the tall woods have broke,
And whales now perch upon the sturdy oak.
Roaring? Stay. Rumbling, roaring, rustling. No; raging seas. (Writing.)
The raging seas o’er the tall woods have broke,
Now perch, thou whale, upon the sturdy oak.
Sturdy oak? No; steady, strong, strapping, stiff. Stiff? No; stiff is too short.
What feast for fish! Oh too luxurious treat!
When hungry dolphins feed on butchers meat.
Foss. Niece, why, niece, niece! Oh, Melpomene, thou goddess of tragedy, suspend thy influence for a moment, and suffer my niece to give me a rational answer.
The main portion of the first act is devoted to a development of the satiric representation of an authoress, and the character is given special point by the fact that it was intended for Lady Winchilsea. Probably no woman of the time was more cruelly pilloried. Exactly why Pope chose to give so disagreeable a picture of her it would be difficult to say, but fortunately one is not obliged to give a reasonable basis for Pope’s satirical sketches. For the occasion it is sufficient to say that her dramatic attempts were not to his taste, and that some obscure personal irritation led him to take the opportunity of this play to speak his mind.
In minor points the character might be counted fairly applicable to Lady Winchilsea. Her learning, her devotion to literary pursuits, her fecundity in verse, her opposition to amatory themes, her detestation of the modern stage, are all characteristics that tally with the burlesque portrait. Lady Winchilsea was also very religious, and though herself maid of honor to Mary of Modena and so necessarily much in the corrupt Restoration court, was even unnecessarily strict and severe on the subject of morals and manners. This prudishness was satirized by Phœbe Clinket’s boast that she is “unwilling to stand even on the brink of an indecorum,” as a result of which delicacy she has never allowed in her plays “the libertinism of lip-embraces,” and this in spite of the fact that Aristotle never actually prohibited kissing on the stage. But in the main points of Phœbe Clinket’s self-confidence and her determination to push her play at all hazards to the point of public presentation, there is no hint of a likeness to Lady Winchilsea, who was exceedingly modest and deprecatory about her work. She never willingly allowed her dramatic writings to pass beyond a small domestic and literary circle, nor out of her voluminous verse did any but a very small portion reach publication with her permission. Furthermore, the tragedy of The Universal Deluge attributed to Phœbe Clinket bears no resemblance to any extant work by Lady Winchilsea.
Taken as a whole, quite apart from any personal application, Phœbe Clinket is the most detestable picture of a learned lady in any of the comedies. She is vain, boastful, and superficial; she is a pedant, a prude, and a hypocrite; and there are no mitigating traits.
Colley Cibber put on his play The Refusal at Covent Garden in 1721 and published it the same year. It is a close version of Les Femmes Savantes, the rich, middle-class family of Sir Gilbert Wrangle in Cibber’s play being the counterpart of the wealthy bourgeois family of Chrysal in Molière. The action follows that of Molière’s play, and Molière gives the model for many of the important situations and conversations. Curll called The Refusal merely “a Sampler, whereon Monsieur Molière’s Stitching may easily be perceived from Mr. Cibber’s canvas.”491 But Cibber’s play is a success in that it is a brilliant English adaptation of the French original. The two characters that represent learned ladies are Lady Wrangle and her daughter Sophronia.
Sir Gilbert thus describes his wife to Mr. Frankly: “She’s a great plague to me. Not but my lord bishop, her uncle, was a mighty good man; she lived all along with him; I took her upon his word; ’t was he made her a scholar; I thought her a miracle; before I had her I used to go and hear her talk Latin with him an hour together; and there I—I—I played the fool.” Throughout the play Sir Gilbert is very evidently a member of “the hen-pecked fraternity.” Lady Wrangle has an important place in but two scenes and in both of these she endeavors to domineer over her husband. In the scene with the maid he is completely cowed, and in the scene of the wedding contract he is triumphant only because of abundant friendly backing. Lady Wrangle’s quarrelsome, jealous disposition is perhaps more in evidence than her learning, but she has learning too. She quotes Latin whenever possible and is herself an authoress.
The famous scene in Molière where the maid Martine is to be dismissed for her indifference to Vaugelas and the laws of grammar, becomes in Cibber a similar hurly-burly against the maid and the cook for having used a sheet of one of Lady Wrangle’s productions in which to wrap the roast. The maid—“a brainless ideat,” “a dunce,” “an illiterate monster,” “an eleventh plague of Egypt,” according to the energetic vituperation of her mistress—seeing the leaf to be blotted and blurred took it for waste paper.
Blurred! you driveller! Was ever any piece perfect, that had not corrections, erasures, interlineations, and improvements! Does not the very original show, that when the mind is warmest, it is never satisfied with its words:
Incipit et dubitat; scribit, damnatque tabellas,
Et notat, et delet; mutat, culpatque probatque.
The leaf in question is a part of Lady Wrangle’s translation of the passion of Byblis. Her husband calls it the passion of Bibble-Babble, and says, “If a line on’t happens to be mislaid, she’s as mad as a blind mare that has lost her foal; she’ll run her head against a stone-wall to recover it. All the use I find of her learning is, that it furnishes her more words to scold with.”
Lady Wrangle’s creed as expressed to Charlotte is, “Refine your soul; give your happier hours up to science, arts, and letters; enjoy the raptures of philosophy, subdue your passions, and renounce the sensual commerce of mankind.” She, however, claims Frankly as her lover, a virtuous and platonic one, to be sure, but so irrevocably hers as to preclude significant attentions to others. When she learns of his open love to Charlotte—she exclaims, “I thought virtue, letters, and philosophy had only charms for him: I have known his soul all rapture in their praises.” And her indignation that he should “contaminate his intellects with such a chit of an animal” changes her platonic love into the most jealous hate. Her philosophy as to the proper conduct of the passions has no influence on her actions.
Sophronia is unlike her prototype Armande, in that Cibber converts her some time before the end of the play and she takes a husband with a delight equal to that of Charlotte herself. Sophronia was, on her father’s second marriage, when he was foolishly enamoured of Lady Wrangle’s Latin, put into the hands of the Bishop to be made by him into a second prodigy of learning. She had also the advantage of being instructed by her stepmother in the doctrines of platonic love. Her learning, her doctrine of the union of souls, her enthusiasm for poetry, all give an effect of genuineness. Her lover Granger understands her well. He grants her “half mad with learning and philosophy,” but still “a fool of parts and capable of thinking right.” Frankly had formerly made love to her in conventional fashion, but to him she had shown herself a marble-hearted lady, a proud and haughty prude. But Granger knows how to approach her. He humors all her romantic notions, chimes in with all her raptures in the air, scouts all love that is but an affair of the veins and the arteries, exalts only the sexless union of harmonious minds and souls, quotes Latin, declaims blank verse, makes slow and delicate and utterly submissive and reluctant approaches to so mundane a thought as marriage, and finally she falls a victim to blandishments so adroitly mingled. Granger’s words, like Hybla drops, distil upon her sense; faint philosophy deserts her; and “like a wounded dove” she “trembling hovers to her mate for succour” in the most approved romantic style. When her stepmother says accusingly, “What then becomes of your Platonic system?” she answers, “Dissolved, evaporated, impracticable, and fallacious all: you’ll own I have labour’d in the experiment, but found at last, that to try gold in a crucible of virgin-wax was a mere female folly.” And she closes the play with
In vain, against the force of nature’s law,
Would rigid morals keep our hearts in awe;
All our lost labours of the brain but prove,
In life there’s no philosophy like love.
The characters of Lady Wrangle and Sophronia with their affectations and useless learning are emphasized by the natural, sensible Charlotte who serves as a foil. She is a gay, laughing, wheedling, fascinating little rogue with a quick wit, and a genius for common sense. She cannot believe that a soul was crammed into a body just to spoil sport and she gives her whole nature free play. She loves Mr. Frankly and says so, and she avows her preference for marriage as against philosophical mysteries. Her praises are recited by Mr. Frankly in the words, “As she does not read Aristotle, Plato, Plutarch, or Seneca, she is neither romantic nor vain of her pedantry; and as her learning never went higher than Bickerstaff’s Letters, her manners are consequently natural, modest and agreeable.”
In Bickerstaff’s Lionel and Clarissa (1768), Sir John Flowerdew seems quite in advance of his age in securing a tutor for his daughter and in considering “a little knowledge” necessary for a woman. “I am far,” he says, “from considering ignorance as a desirable characteristic; when intelligence is not attended with impertinent affectation, it teaches them [women] to judge with precision, and gives them a degree of solidity necessary for the companion of a sensible man.” This, however, is a cool statement of theory. When his daughter outwits him and marries the tutor, he has a violent reaction in favor of the straitest training a maid can have:
Girls like squirrels oft appear,
In their cages, pleased with flav’ry,
But, in fact, ’t is all but knav’ry;
Less thro’ love than out of fear:
Only on their tricks relying,
Let them out, their hands untying,
And You’ll see the matter plain.
Once there’s naught their flight to hamper,
Presto—whisk-away they scamper;
Never to return again.
Wou’d you manage lasses rightly,
You must watch them daily, nightly,
Shut them close, and hold them tightly;
Never loose an inch of chain:
Freedom, run-aways will make ’em,
And the devil can’t o’ertake ’em.
Except for Lionel and Clarissa there were after Cibber’s Refusal few representations of the learned lady as a comic type, until after the revival of the comedy of manners under Sheridan and Goldsmith. The sentimental comedy was occupied in rescuing super-sensitive, over-refined, delicate, tearful, and helpless heroines from the plots of abnormally dark villains, and in bestowing the prizes thus captured on the high-minded, self-conscious Sir Charles Grandisons who posed as heroes of the play. Comic types fell by the way until Goldsmith succeeded in his knight-errantry in behalf of the goddess of fun, and routed sensibility, and sentimentality. And the learned ladies in the comedy after 1770 represent a new kind of learning, and the ladies themselves are in many respects unlike their sisters of an earlier date.
II. The Novel-Reading Girl as a Comic Type
The learned-lady theme had an interesting variant in the novel-reading girl. This type, as it appeared in comedy and fiction, is also of French origin. It finds its direct ancestry in Molière’s Les Précieuses (1659), a satiric representation of the vogue of the French romances, most of which appeared in the twenty-five years before Les Précieuses.492
Along with the vogue of the romances came the critical comment. Scarron’s Roman Comique (1651) burlesqued La Calprenède. Boileau’s Héros de Romans (1664) and L’Art Poétique (1674) satirized especially the romances of Scudéry. The two satires that showed the effect of the romances on the minds of young girls were Molière’s Les Précieuses and later Furetière’s Roman Bourgeois (1666).
These romances and satires were almost as well known in the original to cultivated Englishmen as they were to Frenchmen. There were also numerous translations. Between 1647 and 1660 Polexandre, Cassandre, Ibrahim, Artemène, Clélie, Almahide, Cléopâtre, all appeared in English versions, and some of them several times. And the satires were also promptly translated. There is no better illustration of the general English familiarity with those romances than that furnished by the letters Dorothy Osborne wrote to Sir William Temple in 1652-54. The Hôtel de Rambouillet coterie itself could hardly have been more nearly letter perfect in the details than was this young English lady. Her reading becomes so absorbing that her grave lover finds it necessary to caution her against the “late hours” reported to him. She is penitent, but her enthusiasm is unabated. Parts of Cléopâtre, she says, pleased her more than anything she had ever read in her life. She confesses that she cried an hour together over the sad story of Almanzor, and was so angry with Alcidiana that she could never love her after. But she is no uncritical admirer of the heroes and heroines. Her sense of humor does not forsake her. She laughs at L’Amant Jaloux, in Cyrus, as one who seeks his own vexation, and L’Amant mon Aimé was “an ass.” Sir William’s interest in the romances is hardly less than Dorothy’s. She sends him the separate volumes as she completes them, and there is a lively interchange of impressions and comments on various characters and situations.493
After the Restoration the fondness for romances may have been somewhat lessened by the new passion for the theater. But romance-readers were still numerous. Pepys tells us that his wife sat up till twelve over the Grand Cyrus. Again he says, “I find my wife troubled at my checking her last night in a coach in her long stories out of the Grand Cyrus which she would tell, though nothing to the purpose, nor in any good manner.” However, he must have repented of his rigor, for we find him later calling at Martin’s his book-seller’s, where he bought Cassandre and some other French books for his wife’s closet. And Mr. Pepys himself confesses to at least one Sunday devoted to French romances.494
That Mr. and Mrs. Pepys were not alone in their tastes is made evident by contemporary arraignment of the romances as harmful influences. Mr. Pepys records a conversation with a Mr. Wilson who protested passionately against them as perverters of history. The Ladies’ Calling (1673) brings the matter home to daily life:
There is another thing to which some devote a very considerable part of their time, and that is the reading Romances, which seems now to be thought the peculiar and only becoming study of young ladies. I confess their youth may a little adapt it to them when they were Children, and I wish they were always in their event as harmless; but I fear they often leave ill impressions behind them. Those amorous passions which ’t is their design to paint to the utmost life are apt to insinuate themselves into their unwary Readers, and by an unhappy inversion a Copy shall produce an Original. When a poor young Creature shall read there of some triumphant Beauty, that has I know not how many captiv’d Knights prostrate at her feet, she will probably be tempted to think it a fine thing; and may reflect how much she loses time, that has not yet subdued one heart; and then her business will be to spread her nets, lay her toils to catch somebody who will more fatally ensnare her. And when she has once worried herself into an amour, those authors are subtil Casuists for all difficult cases that may occur in it, will instruct in the necessary artifices of deluding parents and friends, and put her ruin perfectly in her own power. And truly this seems to be so natural a consequent of this sort of study, that of all the divertisements that look so innocently, they can scarce fall upon any more hazardous. Indeed ’t is very difficult to imagine what mischief is done to the world by the false notions and images of things: particularly of Love and Honour, those noblest concerns of human life, represented in these mirrors.495
The popularity of the French romances and the protests they aroused would naturally make the romance-loving girl a type of genuine social interest, and it is surprising that this element of Molière’s Les Précieuses was not sooner taken up in English comedy. There were, to be sure, occasional references to romance-reading something in the style of Molière. In Shadwell’s Bury-Fair (1689), for instance, Gertrude is apparently familiar “with Romances and Love and Honour Plays,” and she complains that all the lovers talk so in the style of the romances that a girl knows in advance just what compliments she must listen to.496 And in Wright’s Female Vertuosos (1693) Sir Maurice says, “O’ my Conscience, Women’s Heads, now-a-days, are so stuff’t up with their Trash of Romances and Poetry, that there is no Room left in ’em for Reason, or Common Sense.” Later he bewails his fate more bitterly: “This Plague of Wit has infected all my Servants, even my little Boy, forsooth, can not turn the Spit now without a Pharamond or a Cassandra in his hand.” But it was not till Steele’s Tender Husband in 1705 that the romance-reading girl appeared in England as a developed type. Steele’s Biddy Tipkin497 is nearly half a century later than Molière’s Madelon and Cathos, but they are her unquestioned ancestors.
In Molière’s play the two country girls endeavor to apply to real life the ideas they have gained from the romances. Gorgibus, the father of Madelon and uncle of Cathos, is a worthy citizen whose common-sense views of life subject him to the scornful raillery of the young ladies. He endeavors to provide them with good husbands, but his straightforward methods shock their romance-tutored minds. To be greeted at the first interview with marriage proposals is a crude and coarse proceeding. If Cyrus had married Mandane, and Clélie had married Aronce at once, what would have become of Mademoiselle de Scudéry’s romances Artemène and Clélie? The dull Gorgibus, and the lovers he has brought are hopelessly ignorant of le carte de Tendre, ignorant of the regions known as Billets-doux, Petits-soins, Billets-galants, Jolis-vers, and the other exactly marked stages of a well-wrought courtship. The young ladies even doubt the reality of their relationship to Gorgibus, and they reject the names Cathos and Madelon in favor of Polixène and Aminte. Gorgibus attributes all their vagaries to the reading of romances, and in the climax of his irritation exclaims to the stock of offending volumes, “Et vous, qui êtes cause de leur folie, sottes billeveseés, pernicieux amusements des esprits oisifs, romans, vers, chansons, sonnets et sonnettes, puissiez-vous être à tous les diables!”
The fundamental idea and many of the satiric details in the presentation of Biddy Tipkin in Steele’s The Tender Husband exactly follow the French model. Biddy’s reading is identical with that of Madelon and Cathos, but wider in scope. She refers familiarly to passages or characters in Cléopâtre, Cassandre, Pharamond, Ibrahim, Artemène, Clélie, and Almahide, showing that she had practically covered the field of romance. She is an heiress under the charge of her uncle, Hezekiah Tipkin, a banker of Lombard Street, and his sister, “an antiquated virgin with a mighty affectation for youth.” Pounce, a lawyer on the lookout for a rich match for his client, the impecunious Captain Cleremont, describes Biddy thus: “Well then, since we may be free, you must understand, the young lady, by being kept from the world, has made a world of her own. She has spent all her solitude in reading romances, her head is full of shepherds, knights, flowery meads, groves, and streams, so that if you talk like a man of this world to her, you do nothing.” But Cleremont, quite equal to the situation, responds, “Oh, let me alone—I have been a great traveller in fairy-land myself, I know Oroondates; Cassandra, Astræa, and Clelia are my intimate acquaintance.” Pounce predicts success for the fluent Captain, but there are other plans for Biddy. Her guardians wish her to marry her cousin, Humphry Gubbin, a country lout, familiarly known as “Numps.” Her attitude towards him and towards her prosaic aunt appears in the following conversation:
Niece. Was it not my gallant that whistled so charmingly in the parlour before he went out this morning? He’s a most accomplished cavalier.
Aunt. Come, niece, come; you don’t do well to make sport with your relations, especially with a young gentleman that has so much kindness for you.
Niece. Kindness for me! What a phrase is there to express the darts and flames, the sighs and languishings, of an expecting lover!
Aunt. Pray, niece, forbear this idle trash, and talk like other people. Your cousin Humphry will be true and hearty in what he says, and that’s a great deal better than the talk and compliment of romances.
Niece. Good madam, don’t wound my ears with such expressions; do you think I can ever love a man that’s true and hearty? What a peasant-like amour do these coarse words import! True and hearty! Pray, aunt, endeavour a little at the embellishment of your style.
Aunt. Alack-a-day, cousin Biddy, these idle romances have quite turned your head.
Niece. How often must I desire you, madam, to lay aside that familiar name, cousin Biddy? I never hear it without blushing—Did you ever meet with a heroine in those idle romances, as you call ’em, that was termed Biddy?
Aunt. Ah! cousin, cousin, these are mere vapours, indeed; nothing but vapours.
Niece. No, the heroine has always something soft and engaging in her name; something that gives us a notion of the sweetness of her beauty and behaviour; a name that glides through half-a-dozen tender syllables, as Elismonda, Clidamira, Deidamia, that runs upon vowels off the tongue; not hissing through one’s teeth, or breaking them with consonants. ’T is strange rudeness those familiar names they give us, when there is Aurelia, Sacharissa, Gloriana, for people of condition; and Celia, Chloris, Corinna, Mopsa, for their maids and those of lower rank.
Aunt. Look ye, Biddy, this is not to be supported. I know not where you learned this nicety; but I can tell you, forsooth, as much as you despise it, your mother was a Bridget afore you, and an excellent house-wife.
Niece. Good madam, don’t upbraid me with my mother Bridget, and an excellent house-wife.
Aunt. Yes, I say she was; and spent her time in better learning than you ever did—not in reading of fights and battles of dwarfs and giants, but in writing out receipts for broths, possets, caudles, and surfeit-waters, as became a good country gentlewoman.
Niece. My mother, and a Bridget!
Aunt. Yes, niece, I say again, your mother, my sister, was a Bridget! the daughter of her mother Margery, of her mother Sisly, of her mother Alice.
Niece. Have you no mercy? Oh, the barbarous genealogy!
Aunt. Of her mother Winifred, of her mother Joan.
Niece. Since you will run on, then I must needs tell you I am not satisfied in the point of my nativity. Many an infant has been placed in a cottage with obscure parents, till by chance some ancient servant of the family has known it by its marks.
Aunt. Ay, you had best be searched—That’s like your calling the winds the fanning gales, before I don’t know how much company; and the tree that was blown by it had, forsooth, a spirit imprisoned in the trunk of it.
Niece. Ignorance!
Aunt. Then a cloud this morning had a flying dragon in it.
Niece. What eyes had you, that you could see nothing? For my part I look upon it to be a prodigy, and expect something extraordinary will happen to me before night.... But you have a gross relish of things. What noble descriptions in romances had been lost, if the writers had been persons of your gout?
Aunt. I wish the authors had been hanged, and their books burnt, before you had seen ’em.
Niece. Simplicity!
Aunt. A parcel of improbable lies.
Niece. Indeed, madam, your raillery is coarse—
Aunt. Fit only to corrupt young girls, and fill their heads with a thousand foolish dreams of I don’t know what.
Niece. Nay, now, madam, you grow extravagant.
Aunt. What I say is not to vex, but advise you for your good.
Niece. What, to burn Philocles, Artaxeres, Oroondates, and the rest of the heroic lovers, and take my country booby, cousin Humphry, for a husband!
Aunt. Oh dear, oh dear, Biddy! Pray, good dear, learn to act and speak like the rest of the world; come, come, you shall marry your cousin and live comfortably.
Niece. Live comfortably! What kind of life is that? A great heiress live comfortably! Pray, aunt, learn to raise your ideas—What is, I wonder, to live comfortably?
Aunt. To live comfortably is to live with prudence and frugality, as we do in Lombard Street.
By mere force of contrast the way is open for the smooth-tongued Mr. Cleremont. He meets the ladies in the park with such phrases as “the cool breath of the morning,” “the season of pearly dews and gentle zephyrs,” and Biddy is enraptured. After the adroit withdrawal of the aunt by Pounce, Cleremont well maintains with Biddy his reputation as a traveler in fairy-land, and assumes likewise the military prowess without which no romance hero was complete. He soon cleverly turns the conversation to a proposal of marriage, but Biddy understands the laws of romance too well to yield immediately. They part in the true spirit of Cassandre.
Cler. We enjoy here, madam, all the pretty landscapes of the country without the pains of going thither.
Niece. Art and nature are in a rivalry, or rather a confederacy, to adorn this beauteous park with all the agreeable variety of water, shade, walks, and air. What can be more charming than these flowery lawns?
Cler. Or these gloomy shades—
Niece. Or these embroidered valleys—
Cler. Or that transparent stream—
Niece. Or these bowing branches on the banks of it, that seem to admire their own beauty in the crystal mirror?
Cler. I am surprised, madam, at the delicacy of your phrase. Can such expressions come from Lombard Street?
Niece. Alas, sir! what can be expected from an innocent virgin that has been immured almost one-and-twenty years from the conversation of mankind, under the care of an Urganda498 of an aunt?
Cler. Bless me, madam, how have you been abused! Many a lady before your age has had an hundred lances broken in her service, and as many dragons cut to pieces in honour of her.
Niece. Oh, the charming man! [Aside.]
Cler. Do you believe Pamela was one-and-twenty before she knew Musidorus?499
Niece. I could hear him ever. [Aside.]
Cler. A lady of your wit and beauty might have given occasion for a whole romance in folio before that age.
Niece. Oh, the powers! Who can he be?—Oh, youth unknown—But let me, in the first place, know whom I talk to, for, sir, I am wholly unacquainted both with your person and your history. You seem, indeed, by your deportment, and the distinguishing mark of your bravery which you bear, to have been in a conflict. May I not know what cruel beauty obliged you to such adventures till she pitied you?
Cler. Oh, the pretty coxcomb! [Aside.]—Oh, Blenheim, Blenheim! Oh, Cordelia, Cordelia!
Niece. You mention the place of battle. I would fain hear an exact description of it. Our public papers are so defective; they don’t so much as tell us how the sun rose on that glorious day—Were there not a great many flights of vultures before the battle began?
Cler. Oh, madam, they have eaten up half my acquaintance.
Niece. Certainly never birds of prey were so feasted; by report, they might have lived half-a-year on the very legs and arms our troops left behind ’em.
Cler. Had we not fought near a wood we should never have got legs enough to have come home upon. The joiner of the Foot Guards has made his fortune by it.
Niece. I shall never forgive your General. He has put all my ancient heroes out of countenance; he has pulled down Cyrus and Alexander, as much as Louis-le-Grand—But your own part in that action?
Cler. Only that slight hurt, for the astrologer said at my nativity, nor fire, nor sword, nor pike, nor musket shall destroy this child, let him but avoid fair eyes—But, madam, mayn’t I crave the name of her that has so captivated my heart?
Niece. I can’t guess whom you mean by that description; but if you ask my name, I must confess you put me upon revealing what I always keep as the greatest secret I have—for would you believe it, they have called me—I don’t know how to own it, but they have called me—Bridget.
Cler. Bridget?
Niece. Bridget.
Cler. Bridget?
Niece. Spare my confusion, I beseech you, sir; and if you have occasion to mention me, let it be by Parthenissa,500 for that’s the name I have assumed ever since I came to years of discretion.
Cler. The insupportable tyranny of parents, to fix names on helpless infants which they must blush at all their lives after! I don’t think there’s a surname in the world to match it.
Niece. No! What do you think of Tipkin?
Cler. Tipkin! Why, I think if I was a young lady that had it I’d part with it immediately.
Niece. Pray, how would you get rid of it?
Cler. I’d change it for another. I could recommend to you three very pretty syllables—What do you think of Cleremont?
Niece. Cleremont! Cleremont! Very well—but what right have I to it?
Cler. If you will give me leave, I’ll put you in possession of it. By a very few words I can make it over to you, and your children after you.
Niece. O fie! Whither are you running? You know a lover should sigh in private, and languish whole years before he reveals his passion; he should retire into some solitary grove, and make the woods and wild beasts his confidants. You should have told it to the echo half-a-year before you had discovered it, even to my handmaid.
Cler. What can a lover do, madam, now the race of giants is extinct? Had I lived in those days there had not been a mortal six foot high, but should have owned Parthenissa for the paragon of beauty, or measured his length on the ground—Parthenissa should have been heard by the brooks and deserts at midnight, the echo’s burden and the river’s murmur.
Niece. That had been a golden age, indeed! But see, my aunt has left her grave companion and is coming toward us—I command you to leave me.
Cler. Thus Oroondates, when Statira501 dismissed him her presence, threw himself at her feet, and implored permission but to live. [Offering to kneel.]
Niece. And thus Statira raised him from the earth, permitting him to live and love.
But Biddy has not the cold constitution of the romance heroines and she presently acknowledges that she finds in herself all the symptoms of a raging amour. “I love solitude,” she soliloquizes, “I grow pale, I sigh frequently. I call upon the name of Cleremont when I don’t think of it—His person is ever in my eyes, and his voice in my ears—Methinks I long to lose myself in some pensive grove, or to hang over the head of some warbling fountain, with a lute in my hand, softening the murmurs of the waters.” And in spite of her reluctance to abridge courtship and so shut off “all further decoration of disguise, serenade and adventure,” she finally consents to an immediate elopement, declaring that if Oroondates had been as pressing as Cleremont Cassandra would have been but a pocket-book.
Biddy, her aunt, and her two suitors, form the most delightful group of characters in the comedy of manners before Goldsmith and Sheridan. And Biddy can hold her own against any of the heroines except Congreve’s Millamant. Nance Oldfield created the character in 1705 and it continued to be a favorite on the stage. The play was given several times nearly every year to 1736 and occasionally afterwards, so that the character of Biddy was one often before the public.
There are also other indications that the topic of romance-reading was one of continued interest. In 1748 there appeared the second edition of an anonymous work entitled The Lady’s Drawing-Room. Being a Faithful Picture of the Great World. One chapter entitled “The Adventures of Marilla” presents a character following in the wake of “Biddy Tipkin” and antedating the Female Quixote by perhaps a decade:
Marilla was a young Lady, who, from her most early years, discover’d an uncommon Capacity, and, as she grew up, made a wonderful Progress, not only in those Accomplishments usually allowed to her own Sex, but also in some of those which more properly appertain to ours. While a Child herself, she despis’d all childish Diversions, and, as she was not a Companion for those of riper Years, instead of playing with those of her own, she amus’d herself with Reading, in which she took such an infinite Delight, that, for a Book she had never seen before, she would forego any other Satisfaction could be offer’d her; and, tho’ any one who had been present when she was thus employ’d, and saw with what Swiftness her Eye pass’d from the Top of every Page to the Bottom, would have thought it impossible for her to receive much Advantage from the Contents, yet was her Apprehension so acute, and her Memory so retentive, that whatever she look’d over in this Manner was as much her own, as if she had been the author of it.—What could be more amazing than to hear a Girl, of ten or eleven Years of Age, quote Passages from Pliny, Livy, and Sallust, talk of the Policies of Princes, compare their several Interests, and the Motives on which War and Peace were made, and make such Observations on them as could rarely be contradicted! What might not have been expected from such a Genius when Time had ripen’t it to Perfection?—She had also strong Notions of Philosophy, Morality, and Divinity, and had only such Books, as tended to the Improvement of her Mind, been thrown in her Way, she had doubtless made one of the most shining Characters that any Age or Nation has produced; but unhappily, she was likewise too well acquainted with Cassandra, Cleopatra, Grand Cyrus, Pharamond, and other fabulous Treatises, which poison’d her Way of Thinking, and gave her a certain Bent of Mind, to which she ow’d all the Misfortunes of her future Life. Indeed, I think, there cannot be any Thing more pernicious to Youth, than the suffering them to read those idle and voluminous Adventures, which have no Foundation either in Truth, or good Sense, and I heartily wish, for the Sake not only of the young Lady I am speaking of, but of many others whose Reason has been perverted by them, tho’ perhaps not in an equal Degree, that the Government would forbid all such Books from being sold or printed.... Marilla was always obliging, and affable to every Body, but those who, as I said before, declared themselves her Lovers; now was this owing to either the Insensibility of her Heart, or to an Imagination, that all who address’d her were unworthy to do so, but to those romantick Notions she had imbib’d, by reading in what Manner the fictitious Ladies of Antiquity had behav’d. She has often, since Time and a melancholy Experience of the World, has mortify’d this Foible, confess’d, That at that Time, she thought it the most audacious and presuming Thing in the World for a Man, to make any publick Declaration of his Passion, ’till he had suffer’d the Pangs of it, in secret, for three or four Years.—That, even then, he ought not to do it, unless Fortune had presented him with the Opportunity of ushering it in by some extraordinary Service, and that, whenever he express’d himself on that Head, it should be in such ambiguous Terms, and with so much Timidity, that it should rather be from his alter’d Countenance, and despairing Air The Object of his Affections should perceive he lov’d her, than by any Words he could be able to speak.—Then, as to her own Part in this Farce, it seem’d to her the utmost Indecency in a Woman to listen to any amorous Proposals, ’till the Lover had griev’d himself to a Skeleton, and was on the Point of falling on his own Sword; nor, when he had arriv’d at that Pitch of Desperation, was she to vouchsafe him any greater Favour than a Command to live.—That, after seven Years, she might, tho’ with an infinite Shew of Reluctance, allow him to kiss her Hand, confess she pity’d him, but no more;—And, if he persevered a second Apprenticeship in the same Manner, perhaps, that is, if she found none more worthy, reward his faithful Service, by giving herself to him.
These, she acknowledged, were the Ideas she had of Love and Courtship; but, none of her Admirers acting in any Degree answerable to them, she look’d on all the Professions of Love made to her, as so many Affronts, and return’d them only with picquant Repartees, or sullen Silence.
In 1752 Mrs. Charlotte Lennox, in The Female Quixote, gave an even more detailed picture of a girl obsessed by romances. Arabella was left motherless when very young, and her father lived in retirement with her on a vast estate in a remote province. She was very beautiful, and she was trained under the best masters in dancing, French, and Italian. But this excellent education had less influence on Arabella than the great store of French romances left by her mother who had bought them to relieve the tedium of life in the lonely castle. Supposing these romances to be pictures of real life, Arabella founded all her notions and expectations on them. She was on the alert for love adventures, and she misinterpreted the most ordinary actions or phrases into some romantic possibility. Arabella had a good mind, lively wit, a sweet temper, a thousand amiable qualities, but her romantic notions permeated her thoughts and feelings till she became involved in constant absurdities. Generosity, courage, virtue, love, were of value to her only as interpreted by the romances. Her lover, a courteous, frank, handsome man of the ordinary world, found all his attractions clouded over when he unfortunately fell asleep over some chapters in the romances especially selected for his admiration and imitation.
Mrs. Lennox’s story satirizes nearly all the salient characteristics of the French romances. She burlesques their length and the ever-recurring histories, adventures, episodes. The romance conception of courtship and marriage, the lady’s power of life and death over her lover, the exaggerated military prowess of the lover, the emphasis on unknown but illustrious birth, the bombastic language, the use of disguises, abductions, banishments, the long, argumentative conversations, the odd romance letters with high-flown superscriptions and signatures, and florid, stilted style, the romantic falsification of history, are some of the many elements clearly portrayed by Mrs. Lennox. But in spite of the minute accuracy of her work, Mrs. Lennox’s Arabella yields in definiteness of impression as well as in veracity and charm to Biddy Tipkin.
Shortly after The Female Quixote came a little poem by Mrs. Monk entitled “On a Romantick Lady” in which a lover says to his mistress:
This poring over your Grand Cyrus
Must ruin you, and will quite tire us.
It makes you think, that an affront ’t is,
Unless your lover ’s an Orontes,
And courts you with a passion frantick,
In manner and in stile romantick.
Now tho’ I count myself no Zero,
I don’t pretend to be an hero.
Or a by-blow of him that thunders,
Nor are you one of the sev’n wonders.
But a young damser very pretty,
And your true name is Mistress Betty.
With Mrs. Lennox and Mrs. Monk we seem to come to the end of the satire on the romance-reading girls. But in 1756 we find in Murphy’s Apprentice a young man, a Mr. Gargle, an apothecary’s apprentice, whose wits have gone astray through reading romances. “An absurd, ridiculous, a silly empty-headed coxcomb,” exclaims his exasperated father, “with his Cassanders and his Cloppatras, and his trumpery; with his Romances, and his damn’d plays and his Odyssey Popes, and a parcel of fellows not worth a groat!” Charlotte, Mr. Gargle’s innamorata, was “as innocent as water-gruel” before he taught her to read play-books; but she was not permanently injured by them, for before she had read far her father locked her books away and confined her in her room. In the projected romantic escape Charlotte is all practicality and good sense, but Mr. Gargle demands rope-ladders, moonlight, emotions, attitudes, and poetical quotations, and so spoils all.
But Mr. Gargle lags behind his generation. Romances were being rapidly replaced by the novel. Between 1740 and 1753 Pamela, Joseph Andrews, Jonathan Wild, Clarissa Harlowe, Tom Jones, Amelia, and Sir Charles Grandison had established the new species. And the romance-reading girl speedily gives way to the novel-reading girl.
The first representative of this type comes in 1760 in George Colman’s Polly Honeycomb, at the very end of the period we are considering. In the Prologue Colman shows a clear recognition of the change of type. He says:
Hither in days of yore, from Spain or France,
Came a dread sorceress, her name Romance.
O’er Britain’s isle her wayward spell she cast,
And common sense in magick chain bound fast.
In mad sublime did each fond lover wooe,
And in heroicks ran each billet-doux:
High deeds of chivalry their sole delight,
Each fair a maid distress’d, each swain a knight.
Then might Statira Oroondates see,
At tilts and tournaments, arm’d cap-a-pie.
She too, on milk-white palfrey, lance in hand,
A dwarf to guard her, pranc’d about the land.
But now, the dear delight of later years,
The younger sister of Romance appears:
Less solemn in her air, her drift the same,
And Novel her enchanting, charming, name.
Romance might strike our grave forfathers’ pomp,
But Novel for our buck and lively romp!
Cassandra’s folios now no longer read,
See, two neat pocket-volumes in their stead!
And then so sentimental is the stile.
So chaste, yet so bewitching all the while!
Plot, and elopement, passion, rape, and rapture,
The total sum of ev’ry dear—dear—Chapter.
’T is not alone the small-talk and the smart,
’T is Novel most beguiles the female heart.
Miss reads—she melts—she sighs—Love steals upon her—
And then—Alas, poor girl!—goodnight, poor honour!
When Colman published the play he prefixed a list of one hundred and eighty-two novels which purports to be an “Extract from the catalogue of one of our most popular circulating libraries; from which extract the reader may, without any great degree of shrewdness, strain the moral of this performance.”502 Of these books over one hundred are in the form of “Lives,” “Memoirs,” or “Adventures.” The list contains the principal novels of Richardson, Fielding, and Smollett, but the majority of the books have passed into the limbo of the forgotten, if, indeed, they ever existed. Polly gets her books from a circulating library in London, or purchases them from the bookseller, and she keeps up with the new books as they come out, but she does not mention any of the books in Colman’s list. The History of Sir George Truman and Emilia, The British Amazon, The Adventures of Tom Ramble, The History of Dick Carless, History of Amelia, are the only novels she speaks of by the title. Her familiarity with novels in general is such that she merely refers to the characters in an offhand fashion. Nurse indicates the scope of Polly’s reading in “Yes, yes, you are always reading your simple story-books. The Ventures of Jack this, the history of Betsey t’other, and Sir Humphreys, and women with hard Christian names.”503 But Polly merely refers to Clarinda and to Julia, to Betsey Thompson, to Sally Wilkins, as girls who eloped because they had obstinate, ill-natured parents; to Bob Lovelace as a writer of charming letters; to poor Clarissa and ugly Mr. Soames; to Nancy Howe and Mr. Hickman; to poor Sophy Western as one locked up by an irate father; to Tom Jones, a foundling and yet a gentleman’s son. She means to marry Scribble, though they “go through as many distresses as Booth and Amelia.” She belabors Mr. Ledger with “I hate you; you are as deceitful as Blifil, as rude as the Harlowes, and as ugly as Dr. Slop.” After she has assailed this unwelcome suitor from Change-alley with “You are a vile book of Arithmetick, a table of pounds, shillings, and pence; you are uglier than a figure of eight, and more tiresome than the multiplication-table,” she rejoices over her successful vituperation. “Ha, ha, ha! there he goes! ha, ha, ha! I have out-topped them all; Miss Howe, Narcissa, Clarinda, Polly Barnes, Sophy Willis, and all of them. None of them ever treated an odious fellow with so much spirit. This would make an excellent chapter in a new Novel. But here comes papa; in a violent passion, no doubt. No matter: It will only furnish materials for the next chapter.”
Though it is apparent that Polly was reading Richardson and Fielding, yet the book that held temporary ascendancy over her imagination was Sir George Truman. By a clever device she is introduced reading the book and giving lively comments thereon:
Polly. Well said, Sir George! Oh, the dear man. But so—“With these words the enraptur’d baronet [reading] concluded his declaration of love.”—So!—“But what heart can imagine, [reading] What tongue describe, or what pen delineate, the amiable confusion of Emilia?”—Well, now for it!—“Reader, if thou art a courtly reader, thou hast seen, at polite tables, iced cream crimsoned with raspberries; or, if thou art an uncourtly reader, thou hast seen the rosy-finger’d morning dawning in the golden East;” Dawning in the golden East! Very pretty.—“Thou hast seen, perhaps, [reading] the artificial vermilion on the cheeks of Cleora, or the vermilion of nature on those of Sylvia; thou hast seen—in a word, the lovely face of Emilia was overspread with blushes.” This is a most beautiful passage, I protest! Well, a Novel for my money!—[reading] “Sir George touched at her confusion, gently seized her hand, and softly pressing it to his bosom [acting it as she reads] where the pulses of his heart beat quick, throbbing with tumultuous passion, in a plaintive tone of voice, breathed out, ‘Will you not answer me, Emilia?’” Tender creature!—“She, half raising [reading and acting] her downcast eyes, and half inclining her averted head, said in faltering accents,—yes, Sir!” Well, now!—“Then, gradually recovering, with ineffable sweetness she prepared to address him: when Mrs. Jenkinson bounced into the room, threw down a set of china in her hurry, and strewed the floor with porcelain fragments: Then turning Emilia round and round, whirled her out of the apartment in an instant, and struck Sir George dumb with astonishment at her appearance. She raved; but the baronet resuming his accustomed effrontery....” Novels, Nursee, novels! [exclaims Polly.] A novel is the only thing to teach a girl life, and the way of the world, and elegant fancies, and love, to the end of the chapter!... Do you think, Nursee, I should have had such a good notion of love so early, if I had not read novels?... Oh, Nursee, a Novel is the only thing!... Lord, Nursee, if it was not for novels and love-letters a girl would have no use for her writing and reading.
It is from her precious novels that the energetic young Polly has a head so full of intrigues and contrivances. Rope-ladders or tied sheets and a feather-bed under the window, disguises, letters in lemon-juice, ink concealed in a pin-cushion, and paper and pens in a fan, all the devices of a thwarted amour, are as the alphabet of intrigue to Polly. No wonder the cautious Mr. Ledger finally withdraws his suit. “She’d make a terrible wife for a sober citizen. Who can answer for her behaviour? I would not underwrite her for ninety per cent.” Mr. Honeycomb attributes all Polly’s vagaries to “these damn’d story-books,” and concludes, “A man might as well turn his daughter loose in Covent-Garden, as trust the cultivation of her mind to A Circulating Library.”
Lydia Languish in Sheridan’s Rivals (1775) carries us beyond the limits of this study, but Lydia must be mentioned here because she brings this topic to a natural chronological close and because of her relationship to the characters already noted. Judged from the point of view of the books selected, Biddy, Marilla, and Arabella belong to the romance-readers, as opposed to Polly Honeycomb and Lydia Languish, the novel-readers. But the lists of Polly and Lydia are far from identical. Lydia is, indeed, quite up to date in her novels. Nine of the fifteen she mentions were first published between 1768 and 1773.504 And her reading is much less sensational and trashy than that of Polly. The bustling, executive Polly cannot for a moment be considered the real ancestor of Lydia. It is on Biddy Tipkin that Lydia is more nearly modeled. The points of similarity between The Tender Husband and The Rivals have often been noted, and it is in the Biddy and Lydia portion that this kinship is closest. Lydia with her two suitors and her aunt make up a group fundamentally like the one of which Biddy is the center, though, of course, Biddy’s “Urganda of an aunt” is infinitely less amusing than “the old weather-beaten she-dragon,” Mrs. Malaprop, and Numps and Captain Cleremont are but faint forerunners of Bob Acres and Captain Absolute. But the original conception, the general relationship of these characters, their function in the play, are much the same. Biddy and Lydia are alike in occasional details and almost identical as type characters. And Lydia as a heroine given over to mischievous reading is like the other heroines in arousing in the harassed guardian or parent numerous protests against romances and novels. Mrs. Malaprop and Sir Anthony Absolute sum up all that has been said in the earlier plays. Mrs. Malaprop would not have young women become “progenies” of learning, and her ideal maid who goes to school at nine to learn a “little ingenuity and artifice,” “a supercilious knowledge of accounts,” with a little geography and reading, pretty well represents the amount of education the ordinary young girl was getting. And Sir Anthony protests against the inevitable evils consequent on teaching girls to read:
All this is the natural consequence of teaching girls to read. Had I a thousand daughters, by Heavens! I’d as soon have them taught the black art as their alphabet!... Madam, a circulating library in a town is, as an evergreen tree, of diabolical knowledge... it blossoms through the year!