represented to me an absolute
idea of the first state of innocence, before man knew how to sin: and
'tis most evident and plain that single nature is the most harmless,
inoffensive and virtuous mistress. 'Tis she alone, if she were
permitted, that better instructs the world than all the inventions of
man. Religion would here but destroy that tranquillity they possess by
ignorance, and laws would but teach 'em to know offences of which now
they have no notion. They made once mourning and fasting for the death
of the English governor who had given his hand to come on such a day to
'em and neither came nor sent; believing when a man's word is past,
nothing but death could or should prevent his keeping it."

The words "humanity," "mankind," are repeated also with a frequency
worthy of Rousseau, and the religion of humanity is set in opposition to
the religion of God with a clearness foreshadowing the theories of
Auguste Comte. When the sea captain refuses to take the word of Oroonoko
as a pledge equivalent to his own, "which if he should violate, he must
expect eternal torments in the world to come,"--"Is that all the
obligations he has to be just to his oath? replyed Oroonoko. Let him
know, I swear by my honour; which to violate, would not only render me
contemptible and despised by all brave and honest men, and so give me
perpetual pain, but it would be eternally offending and displeasing to
all mankind, harming, betraying, circumventing and outraging all
men."[371]

Most of these ideas, including an embryo-taste for landscape painting,
were to be cherished and eloquently defended by Rousseau. Mrs. Behn, as
a novelist, can only be studied with the authors of the middle of the
eighteenth century; she carries us at once beyond the times of Defoe,
Richardson, and Fielding, and takes us among the precursors of the
French Revolution. With the change she foreshadows, philosophy and
social science are perhaps more concerned than the novel proper.

It can, all things considered, be stated with truth that, between the
age of Elizabeth, and the age of Anne and the Georges, there is in the
history of the novel a long period of semi-stagnation. The seventeenth
century, which furnishes hardly any important name, added very little,
apart from an exaggerated heroism, to the art of the novel. Defoe,
Richardson and Fielding are, as novelists, more nearly related to the
men of the time of Shakespeare than to the men of the time of Dryden