The Gothic tale entitled Sir Egbert is based on an ancient legend associated with one of the turrets of Rochester Castle. Sir Egbert, searching for his friend, Conrad, who had disappeared in suspicious circumstances, hears from the Knights Templars, that the wicked Constable is believed to hold two lovers in a profound and deathlike sleep. He resolves to make an attempt to draw from its sheath the sword which separates them and so restore them to life and liberty. Undismayed by the fate of those who have fallen in the quest, Sir Egbert enters the castle, where he is entertained at a gorgeous feast. When the festivities are at their height, and Sir Egbert has momentarily forgotten his enterprise, a terrible shriek is heard. The revellers vanish, and Sir Egbert is left alone to face a spectral corpse, which beckons him onward to a vault, where in flaming characters are inscribed the words: "Death to him who violates the mysteries of Gundulph's Tower." Nothing daunted, Sir Egbert amid execrations of fiends, encounters delusive horrors and at last unsheathes the sword. The lovers awake, and the whole apparatus of enchantment vanishes. Conrad tells how he and Bertha, six years before, had been lured by a wandering fire to a luxurious cavern, where they drank a magic potion. The story closes with the marriage of Conrad and Bertha, and of Egbert and Matilda, a sister of one of the other victims of the same enchanter.
In Dr. Drake's stories are patiently collected all the heirlooms necessary for the full equipment of a Gothic castle. Massive doors, which sway ponderously on their hinges or are forcibly burst open and which invariably close with a resounding crash, dark, eerie galleries, broken staircases, decayed apartments, mouldering floors, tolling bells, skeletons, corpses, howling spectres—all are there; but the possessor, overwhelmed by the very profusion which surrounds him, is at a loss how to make use of them. He does not realise the true significance of a half-stifled groan or an unearthly yell heard in the darkness. Each new horror indeed seems but to put new life into the heart of the redoubtable Sir Egbert, who, like Spenser's gallant knights, advances from triumph to triumph vanquishing evil at every step. It is impossible to become absorbed in his personages, who have less body than his spectres, and whose adventures take the form of a walk through an exhibition of horrors, mechanically set in motion to prove their prowess. Dr. Drake seems happier when the hideous beings are put to rout, and the transformation-scene, which places fairyland before us, suddenly descends on the stage. Yet the bungling attempts of Dr. Drake are interesting as showing that grave and critical minds were prepared to consider the tale of terror as a legitimate form of literature, obeying certain definite rules of its own and aiming at the excitement of a pleasurable fear. The seed of Gothic story, sown at random by Horace Walpole, had by 1798 taken firm root in the soil. Drake's enthusiasm for Gothic story was associated with his love for older English poetry and with his interest in Scandinavian mythology. He was a genuine admirer of Spenser and attempted imitations, in modern diction, of old ballads. It is for his bent towards the romantic, rather than for his actual accomplishments, that Drake is worthy of remembrance.
CHAPTER III - "THE NOVEL OF SUSPENSE." MRS. RADCLIFFE.
The enthusiasm which greeted Walpole's enchanted castle and Miss Reeve's carefully manipulated ghost, indicated an eager desire for a new type of fiction in which the known and familiar were superseded by the strange and supernatural. To meet this end Mrs. Radcliffe suddenly came forward with her attractive store of mysteries, and it was probably her timely appearance that saved the Gothic tale from an early death. The vogue of the novel of terror, though undoubtedly stimulated by German influence, was mainly due to her popularity and success. The writers of the first half of the nineteenth century abound in references to her works,[34] and she thus still enjoys a shadowy, ghost-like celebrity. Many who have never had the curiosity to explore the labyrinths of the underground passages, with which her castles are invariably honeycombed, or who have never shuddered with apprehension before the "black veil," know of their existence through Northanger Abbey, and have probably also read how Thackeray at school amused himself and his friends by drawing illustrations of Mrs. Radcliffe's novels.
Of Mrs. Radcliffe's life few facts are known, and Christina Rossetti, one of her many admirers, was obliged, in 1883, to relinquish the plan of writing her biography, because the materials were so scanty.[35] From the memoir prefixed to the posthumous volumes, published in 1826, containing Gaston de Blondeville, and various poems, we learn that she was born in 1764, the very year in which Walpole issued The Castle of Otranto, and that her maiden name was Ann Ward. In 1787 she married William Radcliffe, an Oxford graduate and a student of law, who became editor of a weekly newspaper, The English Chronicle. Her life was so secluded that biographers did not hesitate to invent what they could not discover. The legend that she was driven frantic by the horrors that she had conjured up was refuted after her death.
It may have been the publication of The Recess by Sophia Lee in 1785 that inspired Mrs. Radcliffe to try her fortune with a historical novel. The Recess is a story of languid interest, circling round the adventures of the twin daughters of Mary Queen of Scots and the Duke of Norfolk. Yet as we meander gently through its mazes we come across an abbey "of Gothic elegance and magnificence," a swooning heroine who plays the lute, thunderstorms, banditti and even an escape in a coffin—items which may well have attracted the notice of Mrs. Radcliffe, whose first novel, The Castles of Athlin and Dunbayne,[36] appeared in 1789. Considered historically, this immature work is full of interest, for, with the notable exception of the supernatural, it contains in embryo nearly all the elements of Mrs. Radcliffe's future novels.
The scene is laid in Scotland, and the period, we are assured, is that of the "dark ages"; but almost at the outset we are startled rudely from our dreams of the mediaeval by the statement that
"the wrongfully imprisoned earl, when the sweet tranquillity of evening threw an air of tender melancholy over his mind … composed the following sonnet, which, having committed it to paper, he, the next evening dropped upon the terrace."
The sonnet consists of four heroic quatrains somewhat curiously resembling the manner of Gray. From this episode it may be gathered that Mrs. Radcliffe did not aim at, or certainly did not achieve, historical accuracy, but evolved most of her descriptions, not from original sources in ancient documents, but from her own inner consciousness. It was only in her last novel—Gaston de Blondeville—that she made use of old chronicles. Within the Scottish castle we meet a heroine with an "expression of pensive melancholy" and a "smile softly clouded with sorrow," a noble lord deprived of his rights by a villain "whose life is marked with vice and whose death with the bitterness of remorse." But these grey and ghostly shadows, who flit faintly through our imagination, are less prophetic of coming events than the properties with which the castle is endowed, a secret but accidently discovered panel, a trap-door, subterranean vaults, an unburied corpse, a suddenly extinguished lamp and a soft-toned lute—a goodly heritage from The Castle of Otranto. The situations which a villain of Baron Malcolm's type will inevitably create are dimly shadowed forth and involve, ere the close, the hairbreadth rescue of a distressed maiden, the reinstatement of the lord in his rights, and the identification of the long-lost heir by the convenient and time-honoured "strawberry mark." These promising materials are handled in a childish fashion. The faintly pencilled outlines, the characterless figures, the nerveless structure, give little presage of the boldly effective scenery, the strong delineations and the dexterously managed plots of the later novels. The gradual, steady advance in skill and power is one of the most interesting features of Mrs. Radcliffe's work. Few could have guessed from the slight sketch of Baron Malcolm, a merely slavish copy of the traditional villain, that he was to be the ancestor of such picturesque and romantic creatures as Montoni and Schedoni.
This tentative beginning was quickly followed by the more ambitious Sicilian Romance (1790), in which we are transported to the palace of Ferdinand, fifth Marquis of Mazzini, on the north coast of Sicily. This time the date is fixed officially at 1580. The Marquis has one son and two daughters, the children of his first wife, who has been supplanted by a beautiful but unscrupulous successor. The first wife is reputed dead, but is, in reality, artfully and maliciously concealed in an uninhabited wing of the abbey. It is her presence which leads to disquieting rumours of the supernatural. Ferdinand, the son, vainly tries to solve the enigma of certain lights, which wander elusively about the deserted wing, and finds himself perilously suspended, like David Balfour in Kidnapped, on a decayed staircase, of which the lower half has broken away. In this hazardous situation, Ferdinand accidentally drops his lamp and is left in total darkness. An hour later he is rescued by the ladies of the castle, who, alarmed by his long absence, boldly come in search of him with a light. During another tour of exploration he hears a hollow groan, which, he is told, proceeds from a murdered spirit underground, but which is eventually traced to the unhappy marchioness. These two incidents plainly reveal that Mrs. Radcliffe has now discovered the peculiar vein of mystery towards which she was groping in The Castles of Athlin and Dunbayne. From the very first she explained away her marvels by natural means. If we scan her romances with a coldly critical eye—an almost criminal proceeding—obvious improbabilities start into view. For instance, the oppressed marchioness, who has not seen her daughter Julia since the age of two, recognises her without a moment's hesitation at the age of seventeen, and faints in a transport of joy. It is no small tribute to Mrs. Radcliffe's gifts that we often accept such incidents as these without demur. So unnerved are we by the lurking shadows, the flickering lights, the fluttering tapestry and the unaccountable groans with which she lowers our vitality, that we tremble and start at the wagging of a straw, and have not the spirit, once we are absorbed into the atmosphere of her romance, to dispute anything she would have us believe. The interest of the Sicilian Romance, which is far greater than that of her first novel, arises entirely out of the situations. There is no gradual unfolding of character and motive. The high-handed marquis, the jealous marchioness, the imprisoned wife, the vapid hero, the two virtuous sisters, the leader of the banditti, the respectable, prosy governess, are a set of dolls fitted ingeniously into the framework of the plot. They have more substance than the tenuous shadows that glide through the pages of Mrs. Radcliffe's first story, but they move only as she deftly pulls the strings that set them in motion.
In her third novel, The Romance of the Forest, published in 1792, Mrs. Radcliffe makes more attempt to discuss motive and to trace the effect of circumstances on temperament. The opening chapter is so alluring that callous indeed would be the reader who felt no yearning to pluck out the heart of the mystery. La Motte, a needy adventurer fleeing from justice, takes refuge on a stormy night in a lonely, sinister-looking house. With startling suddenness, a door bursts open, and a ruffian, putting a pistol to La Motte's breast with one hand, and, with the other, dragging along a beautiful girl, exclaims ferociously,
"You are wholly in our power, no assistance can reach you; if you wish to save your life, swear that you will convey this girl where I may never see her more… If you return within an hour you will die."
The elucidation of this remarkable occurrence is long deferred, for Mrs. Radcliffe appreciates fully the value of suspense in luring on her readers, but our attention is distracted in the meantime by a series of new events. Treasuring the unfinished adventure in the recesses of our memory, we follow the course of the story. When La Motte decides impulsively to reside in a deserted abbey, "not," as he once remarks, "in all respects strictly Gothic," but containing a trap-door and a human skeleton in a chest, we willingly take up our abode there and wait patiently to see what will happen. Our interest is inclined to flag when life at the abbey seems uneventful, but we are ere long rewarded by a visit from a stranger, whose approach flings La Motte into so violent a state of alarm that he vanishes with remarkable abruptness beneath a trapdoor. It proves, however, that the intruder is merely La Motte's son, and the timid marquis is able to emerge. Meanwhile, La Motte's wife, suspicious of her husband's morose habits and his secret visits to a Gothic sepulchre, becomes jealous of Adeline, the girl they have befriended. It later transpires that La Motte has turned highwayman and stores his booty in this secluded spot. The visits are so closely shrouded in obscurity, and we have so exhausted our imagination in picturing dark possibilities, that the simple solution falls disappointingly short of our expectations. The next thrill is produced by the arrival of two strangers, the wicked marquis and the noble hero, without whom the tale of characters in a novel of terror would scarcely be complete. The emotion La Motte betrays at the sight of the marquis is due, we are told eventually, to the fact that Montalt was the victim of his first robbery. Adeline, meanwhile, in a dream sees a beckoning figure in a dark cloak, a dying man imprisoned in a darkened chamber, a coffin and a bleeding corpse, and hears a voice from the coffin. The disjointed episodes and bewildering incoherence of a nightmare are suggested with admirable skill, and effectually prepare our minds for Adeline's discoveries a few nights later. Passing through a door, concealed by the arras of her bedroom, into a chamber like that she had seen in her sleep, she stumbles over a rusty dagger and finds a roll of mouldering manuscripts. This incident is robbed of its effect for readers of Northanger Abbey by insistent reminiscences of Catherine Morland's discovery of the washing bills. But Adeline, by the uncertain light of a candle, reads, with the utmost horror and consternation, the harrowing life-story of her father, who has been foully done to death by his brother, already known to us as the unprincipled Marquis Montalt. La Motte weakly aids and abets Montalt's designs against Adeline, and she is soon compelled to take refuge in flight. She is captured and borne away to an elegant villa, whence she escapes, only to be overtaken again. Finally, Theodore arrives, as heroes will, in the nick of time, and wounds his rival. Adeline finds a peaceful home in the chateau of M. La Luc, who proves to be Theodore's father. Here the reader awaits impatiently the final solution of the plot. Once we have been inmates of a Gothic abbey, life in a Swiss chateau, however idyllic, is apt to seem monotonous. In time Mrs. Radcliffe administers justice. The marquis takes poison; La Motte is banished but reforms; and Adeline, after dutifully burying her father's skeleton in the family vault, becomes mistress of the abbey, but prefers to reside in a châlet on the banks of Lake Geneva.
Although the Romance of the Forest is considerably shorter than the later novels, the plot, which is full of ingenious complications, is unfolded in the most leisurely fashion. Mrs. Radcliffe's tantalising delays quicken our curiosity as effectively as the deliberate calm of a raconteur, who, with a view to heightening his artistic effect, pauses to light a pipe at the very climax of his story. Suspense is the key-note of the romance. The characters are still subordinate to incident, but La Motte and his wife claim our interest because they are exhibited in varying moods. La Motte has his struggles and, like Macbeth, is haunted by compunctious visitings of nature. Unlike the thorough-paced villain, who glories in his misdeeds, he is worried and harassed, and takes no pleasure in his crimes. Madame La Motte is not a jealous woman from beginning to end like the marchioness in the Sicilian Romance. Her character is moulded to some extent by environment. She changes distinctly in her attitude to Adeline after she has reason to suspect her husband. Mrs. Radcliffe's psychology is neither subtle nor profound, but the fact that psychology is there in the most rudimentary form is a sign of her progress in the art of fiction. Theodore is as insipid as the rest of Mrs. Radcliffe's heroes, who are distinguishable from one another only by their names, and Adeline is perhaps a shade more emotional and passionless than Emily and Ellena in The Mysteries of Udolpho and The Italian. The lachrymose maiden in The Castles of Athlin and Dunbayne, who can assume at need "an air of offended dignity," is a preliminary sketch of Julia, Emily and Ellena in the later novels. Mrs. Radcliffe's heroines resemble nothing more than a composite photograph in which all distinctive traits are merged into an expressionless "type." They owe something no doubt to Richardson's Clarissa Harlowe, but their feelings are not so minutely analysed. Their lady-like accomplishments vary slightly. In reflective mood one may lightly throw off a sonnet to the sunset or to the nocturnal gale, while another may seek refuge in her water-colours or her lute. They are all dignified and resolute in the most distressing situations, yet they weep and faint with wearisome frequency. Their health and spirits are as precarious as their easily extinguished candles. Yet these exquisitely sensitive, well-bred heroines alienate our sympathy by their impregnable self-esteem, a disconcerting trait which would certainly have exasperated heroes less perfect and more human than Mrs. Radcliffe's Theodores and Valancourts. Their sorrows never rise to tragic heights, because they are only passive sufferers, and the sympathy they would win as pathetic figures is obliterated by their unfailing consciousness of their own rectitude. In describing Adeline, Mrs. Radcliffe attempts an unusually acute analysis:
"For many hours she busied herself upon a piece of work which she had undertaken for Madame La Motte, but this she did without the least intention of conciliating her favour, but because she felt there was something in thus repaying unkindness, which was suited to her own temper, her sentiments and her pride. Self-love may be the centre around which human affections move, for whatever motive conduces to self-gratification may be resolved into self-love, yet, some of these affections are in their nature so refined that, though we cannot deny their origin, they almost deserve the name of virtue: of this species was that of Adeline."
It is characteristic of Mrs. Radcliffe's tendency to overlook the obvious in searching for the subtle, that the girl who feels these recondite emotions expresses slight embarrassment when unceremoniously flung on the protection of strangers. Emily, in The Mysteries of Udolpho, possesses the same protective armour as Adeline. When she is abused by Montoni, "Her heart swelled with the consciousness of having deserved praise instead of censure, and was proudly silent"; or again, in The Italian,
"Ellena was the more satisfied with herself because she had never for an instant forgotten her dignity so far as to degenerate into the vehemence of passion or to falter with the weakness of fear."
Her father, M. St. Aubert, on his deathbed, bids Emily beware of "priding herself on the gracefulness of sensibility."
Fortunately the heroine is merely a figurehead in The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794). The change of title is significant. The two previous works have been romances, but it is now Mrs. Radcliffe's intention to let herself go further in the direction of wonder and suspense than she had hitherto ventured. She is like Scythrop in Nightmare Abbey, of whom it was said:
"He had a strong tendency to love of mystery for its own sake; that is to say, he would employ mystery to serve a purpose, but would first choose his purpose by its capability of mystery."
Yet Mrs. Radcliffe, at the opening of her story, is sparing in her use of supernatural elements. We live by faith, and are drawn forward by the hope of future mystifications. In the first volume we saunter through idyllic scenes of domestic happiness in the Chateau le Vert and wander with Emily and her dying father through the Apennines, with only faint suggestions of excitement to come. The second volume plunges us in medias res. The aunt, to whose care Emily is entrusted, has imprudently married a tempestuous tyrant, Montoni, who, to further his own ends, hurries his wife and niece from the gaiety of Venice to the gloom of Udolpho. After a journey fraught with terror, amid rugged, lowering mountains and through dusky woods, we reach the castle of Udolpho at nightfall. The sombre exterior and the shadow haunted hall are so ominous that we are prepared for the worst when we enter its portals. The anticipation is half pleasurable, half fearful, as we shudder at the thought of what may befall us within its walls. At every turn something uncanny shakes our overwrought nerves; the sighing of the wind, the echo of distant footsteps, lurking shadows, gliding forms, inexplicable groans, mysterious music torture the sensitive imagination of Emily, who is mercilessly doomed to sleep in a deserted apartment with a door, which, as so often in the novel of terror, bolts only on the outside. More nerve wracking than the unburied corpse or even than the ineffable horror concealed behind the black veil are the imaginary, impalpable terrors that seize on Emily's tender fancy as she crosses the hall on her way to solve the riddle of her aunt's disappearance:
"Emily, deceived by the long shadows of the pillars and by the catching lights between, often stopped, imagining that she saw some person moving in the distant obscurity…and as she passed these pillars she feared to turn her eyes towards them, almost expecting to see a figure start from behind their broad shaft."
Torn from the context, this passage no longer congeals us with terror, but in its setting it conveys in a wonderfully vivid manner the tricks of a feverish imagination. So exhaustive—and exhausting—are the mysteries of Udolpho that it was a mistake to introduce another haunted castle, le Blanc, as an appendix.
Mrs. Radcliffe's long deferred explanations of what is apparently supernatural have often been adversely criticised. Her method varies considerably. Sometimes we are enlightened almost immediately. When the garrulous servant, Annette, is relating to Emily what she knows of the story of Laurentina, who had once lived in the castle, both mistress and servant are wrought up to a state of nervous tension:
"Emily, whom now Annette had infected with her own terrors, listened attentively, but everything was still, and Annette proceeded… 'There again,' cried Annette, suddenly, 'I heard it again.' 'Hush!' said Emily, trembling. They listened and continued to sit quite still. Emily heard a slow knocking against the wall. It came repeatedly. Annette then screamed loudly, and the chamber door slowly opened—It was Caterina, come to tell Annette that her lady wanted her."
It is seldom that the rude awakening comes thus swiftly. More often we are left wondering uneasily and fearfully for a prolonged stretch of time. The extreme limit of human endurance is reached in the episode of the Black Veil. Early in the second volume, Emily, for whom the concealed picture had a fatal fascination, determined to gaze upon it.
"Emily passed on with faltering steps and, having paused a moment at the door before she attempted to open it, she then hastily entered the chamber and went towards the picture, which appeared to be enclosed in a frame of uncommon size, that hung in a dark part of the room. She paused again and then, with a timid hand, lifted the veil, but instantly let it fall—perceiving that, what it had concealed was no picture and, before she could leave the chamber, she dropped senseless on the floor."
In time Emily recovers, but the horror of the Black Veil preys on her mind until, near the close of the third volume, Mrs. Radcliffe mercifully consents to tell us not only what Emily thought that she beheld, but what was actually there.
"There appeared, instead of the picture she had expected, within the recess of the wall, a human figure of ghastly paleness, stretched at its length, and dressed in the habiliments of the grave. What added to the horror of the spectacle was that the face appeared partly decayed and disfigured by worms, which were visible on the features and hands… Had she dared to look again, her delusion and her fears would have vanished together, and she would have perceived that the figure before her was not human, but formed of wax… A member of the house of Udolpho, having committed some offence against the prerogative of the church, had been condemned to the penance of contemplating, during certain hours of the day, a waxen image made to resemble a human body in the state to which it is reduced after death … he had made it a condition in his will that his descendants should preserve the image."
Mrs. Radcliffe, realising that the secret she had so jealously guarded is of rather an amazing character, asserts that it is "not without example in the records of the fierce severity which monkish superstition has sometimes inflicted on mankind." But the explanation falls so ludicrously short of our expectations and is so improbable a possibility, that Mrs. Radcliffe would have been wise not to defraud Catherine Morland and other readers of the pleasure of guessing aright. Few enjoy being baffled and thwarted in so unexpected a fashion. The skeleton of Signora Laurentina was the least that could be expected as a reward for suspense so patiently endured. But long ere this disclosure, we have learnt by bitter experience to distrust Mrs. Radcliffe's secrets and to look for ultimate disillusionment. The uncanny voice that ominously echoes Montoni's words is not the cry of a bodiless visitant striving to awaken "that blushing, shamefaced spirit that mutinies in a man's bosom," but belongs to an ordinary human being, the prisoner Du Pont, who has discovered one of Mrs. Radcliffe's innumerable concealed passages. The bed with the black velvet pall in the haunted chamber contains, not the frightful apparition that flashed upon the inward eye of Emily and of Annette, but a stalwart pirate who shrinks from discovery. The gliding forms which steal furtively along the ramparts and disappear at the end of dark passages become eventually, like the nun in Charlotte Bronte's Villette, sensible to feeling as to sight. The unearthly music which is heard in the woods at midnight proceeds, not from the inhabitants of another sphere, but from a conscience stricken nun with a lurid past. The corpse, which Emily believed to be that of her aunt, foully done to death by a pitiless husband, is the body of a man killed in a bandit's affray. Here Mrs. Radcliffe seems eager to show that she was not afraid of a corpse, but is careful that it shall not be the corpse which the reader anticipates. She deliberately excites trembling apprehensions in order that she may show how absurd they are. We are befooled that she may enjoy a quietly malicious triumph. The result is that we become wary and cautious. The genuine ghost story, read by Ludovico to revive his fainting spirits when he is keeping vigil in the "haunted" chamber, is robbed of its effect because we half expect to be disillusioned ere the close. It is far more impressive if read as a separate story apart from its setting. The idea of explaining away what is apparently supernatural may have occurred to Mrs. Radcliffe after reading Schiller's popular romance, Der Geisterseher (1789), in which the elaborately contrived marvels of the Armenian, who was modelled on Cagliostro, are but the feats of a juggler and have a physical cause. But more probably Mrs. Radcliffe's imagination was held in check by a sensitive conscience, which would not allow her to trade on the credulity of simple-minded readers.
It is noteworthy that Mrs. Radcliffe's last work—The Italian, published in 1797—is more skilfully constructed, and possesses far greater unity and concentration than The Mysteries of Udolpho. The Inquisition scenes towards the end of the book are unduly prolonged, but the story is coherent and free from digressions. The theme is less fanciful and far fetched than those of The Romance of the Forest and Udolpho. It seldom strays far beyond the bounds of the probable, nor overstrains our capacity for belief. The motive of the story is the Marchesa di Vivaldi's opposition to her son's marriage on account of Ellena's obscure birth. The Marchesa's far reaching designs are forwarded by the ambitious monk, Schedoni, who, for his own ends, undertakes to murder Ellena. The Italian abounds in dramatic, haunting scenes. The strangely effective overture, which describes the Confessional of the Black Penitents, the midnight watch of Vivaldi and his lively, impulsive servant, Paulo, amid the ruins of Paluzzi, the melodramatic interruption of the wedding ceremony, the meeting of Ellena and Schedoni on the lonely shore, the trial in the halls of the Inquisition, are all remarkably vivid. The climax of the story when Schedoni, about to slay Ellena, is arrested in the very act by her beauty and innocence, and then by the glimpse of the portrait which leads him to believe she is his daughter, is finely conceived and finely executed. Afterwards, Ellena proves only to be his niece, but we have had our thrill and nothing can rob us of it. The Italian depends for its effect on natural terror, rather than on supernatural suggestions. The monk, who haunts the ruins of Paluzzi, and who reappears in the prison of the Inquisition, speaks and acts like a being from the world of spectres, but in the fulness of time Mrs. Radcliffe ruthlessly exposes his methods and kills him by slow poison. She never completely explains his behaviour in the halls of the Inquisition nor accounts satisfactorily for the ferocity of his hatred of Schedoni. We are unintentionally led on false trails.
The character of Schedoni is undeniably Mrs. Radcliffe's masterpiece. No one would claim that his character is subtle study, but in his interviews with the Marchesa, Mrs. Radcliffe reveals unexpected gifts tor probing into human motives. He is an imposing figure, theatrical sometimes, but wrought of flesh and blood. In fiction, as in life, the villain has always existed, but it was Mrs. Radcliffe who first created the romantic villain, stained with the darkest crimes, yet dignified and impressive withal. Zeluco in Dr. John Moore's novel of that name (1789) is a powerful conception, but he has no redeeming features to temper our repulsion with pity. The sinister figures of Mrs. Radcliffe, with passion-lined faces and gleaming eyes, stalk—or, if occasion demand it, glide—through all her romances, and as she grows more familiar with the type, her delineations show increased power and vigour. When the villain enters, or shortly afterwards, a descriptive catalogue is displayed, setting forth, in a manner not unlike that of the popular feuilleton of to-day, the qualities to be expected, and with this he is let loose into the story to play his part and act up to his reputation. In the Sicilian Romance there is the tyrannical marquis who would force an unwelcome marriage on his daughter and who immures his wife in a remote corner of the castle, visiting her once a week with a scanty pittance of coarse food. In The Romance of the Forest we find a conventional but thorough villain in Montalt and a half-hearted, poor-spirited villain in La Motte, whose "virtue was such that it could not stand the pressure of occasion." Montoni, the desperate leader of the condottieri in The Mysteries of Udolpho, is endued with so vigorous a vitality that we always rejoice inwardly at his return to the forefront of the story. His abundant energy is refreshing after a long sojourn with his garrulous wife and tearful niece.
"He delighted in the energies of the passions, the difficulties and tempests of life which wreck the happiness of others roused and strengthened all the powers of his mind, and afforded him the highest enjoyment… The fire and keenness of his eye, its proud exaltation, its bold fierceness, its sudden watchfulness as occasion and even slight occasion had called forth the latent soul, she had often observed with emotion, while from the usual expression of his countenance she had always shrunk."
Schedoni is undoubtedly allied to this desperado, but his methods are quieter and more subtle:
"There was something terrible in his air, something almost superhuman. The cowl, too, as it threw a shade over the livid paleness of his face increased its severe character and gave an effect to his large, melancholy eye which approached to horror … his physiognomy … bore the traces of many passions which seemed to have fixed the features they no longer animated. An habitual gloom and severity prevailed over the deep lines of his countenance, and his eyes were so piercing that they seemed to penetrate at a single glance into the hearts of men, and to read their most secret thoughts—few persons could endure their scrutiny or even endure to meet them twice … he could adapt himself to the tempers and passions of persons, whom he wished to conciliate, with astonishing facility."
The type undoubtedly owes something to Milton's Satan. Like Lucifer, he is proud and ambitious, and like him he retains traces of his original grandeur. Hints from Shakespeare helped to fashion him. Like Cassius, seldom he smiles, and smiles in such a sort
"As if he mock'd himself and scorn'd his spirit
That could be moved to smile at anything."
Like King John,
"The image of a wicked heinous fault
Lives in his eye: that close aspect of his
Does show the mood of a much-troubled breast."
By the enormity of his crimes he inspires horror and repulsion, but by his loneliness he appeals, for a moment, like the consummate villain Richard III., to our pity:
"There is no creature loves me
And if I die, no soul will pity me.
Nay, wherefore should they, since that I myself
Find in myself no pity to myself?"
Karl von Moor, the famous hero of Schiller's Die Räuber (1781), is allied to this desperado. He is thus described in the advertisement of the 1795 edition:
"The picture of a great, misguided soul, endowed with every gift of excellence, yet lost in spite of all its gifts. Unbridled passions and bad companionship corrupt his heart, urge him on from crime to crime, until at last he stands at the head of a band of murderers, heaps horror upon horror, and plunges from precipice to precipice in the lowest depths of despair. Great and majestic in misfortune, by misfortune reclaimed and led back to the paths of virtue. Such a man shall you pity and hate, abhor yet love in the robber Moor."
Among the direct progeny of these grandiose villains are to be included those of Lewis and Maturin, and the heroes of Scott and Byron. We know them by their world-weariness, as well as by their piercing eyes and passion-marked faces, their "verra wrinkles Gothic." In The Giaour we are told:
"Dark and unearthly is the scowl
That glares beneath his dusky cowl:
"The flash of that dilating eye
Reveals too much of times gone by.
Though varying, indistinct its hue
Oft will his glance the gazer rue."
Of the Corsair, it is said:
"There breathe but few whose aspect might defy
The full encounter of his searching eye."
Lara is drawn from the same model:
"That brow in furrowed lines had fixed at last
And spoke of passions, but of passions past;
The pride but not the fire of early days,
Coldness of mien, and carelessness of praise;
A high demeanour and a glance that took
Their thoughts from others by a single look."
The feminine counterpart of these bold impersonations of evil is the tyrannical abbess who plays a part in The Romance of the Forest and in The Italian, and who was adopted and exaggerated by Lewis, but her crimes are petty and malicious, not daring and ambitious, like the schemes of Montoni and Schedoni.
One of Mrs. Radcliffe's contemporaries is said to have suggested that if she wished to transcend the horror of the Inquisition scenes in The Italian she would have to visit hell itself. Like her own heroines, Mrs. Radcliffe had too elegant and refined an imagination and too fearful a heart to undertake so desperate a journey. She would have recoiled with horror from the impious suggestion. In Gaston de Blondeville, written in 1802, but published posthumously with a memoir by Noon Talfourd, she ventures to make one or two startling innovations. Her hero is no longer a pale, romantic young man of gentle birth, but a stolid, worthy merchant. Here, at last, she indulges in a substantial spectre, who cannot be explained away as the figment of a disordered imagination, since he seriously alarms, not a solitary heroine or a scared lady's-maid, but Henry III. himself and his assembled barons. Yet apart from this daring escapade, it is timidity rather than the spirit of valorous enterprise that is urging Mrs. Radcliffe into new and untried paths. Her happy, courageous disregard for historical accuracy in describing far-off scenes and bygone ages has deserted her. She searches painfully in ancient records, instead of in her imagination, for mediaeval atmosphere. Her story is grievously overburdened with elaborate descriptions of customs and ceremonies, and she adds laborious notes, citing passages from learned authorities, such as Leland's Collectanea, Pegge's dissertation on the obsolete office of Esquire of the King's Body, Sir George Bulke's account of the coronation of Richard III., Mador's History of the Exchequer, etc. We are transported from the eighteenth century, not actually to mediaeval England, but to a carefully arranged pageant displaying mediaeval costumes, tournaments and banquets. The actors speak in antique language to accord with the picturesque background against which they stand. Gaston de Blondeville, which is noteworthy as an early attempt to shadow forth the days of chivalry, has far more colour than Leland's Longsword (1752), Miss Reeve's Old English Baron (1777), or Miss Sophia Lee's Recess (1785), from which rather than from Mrs. Radcliffe's earlier romances its descent may be traced. The attempt to avoid glaring anachronisms and to reproduce an accurate picture of a former age points forward to Scott. Strutt's Queenhoo Hall, which Scott completed, was a revolt against the unscrupulous inventions of romance-writers, and was crammed full of archaeological lore. The story of Gaston de Blondeville is tedious, the characters are shadowy and unreal, and we become, as the Ettric Shepherd remarked, in Noctes Ambrosianae, "somewhat too hand and glove with his ghostship"; yet, regarded simply as a spectacular effect, it is not without indications of skill and power. Miss Mitford based a drama on it, but it never attained the popularity of Mrs. Radcliffe's other novels. It was published when her reputation was on the wane.
Of the materials on which Mrs. Radcliffe drew in fashioning her romances it is impossible to speak with any certainty. Doubtless she had studied certain old chronicles, and she was deeply read in Shakespeare, especially in the tragedies. Much of her leisure, we are told, was spent in reading the literary productions of the day, especially poetry and novels. At the head of her chapters she often quotes Milton as well as the poets of her own century—Mason, Gray, Collins, and once "Ossian"—choosing almost inevitably passages which deal with the terrible or the ghostly. She must have known The Castle of Otranto, and in The Italian she quotes several passages from Walpole's melodrama The Mysterious Mother. But often she may have been dependent on the oral legends clustering round ancient abbeys for the background of her stories. Ghostly legends would always appeal to her, and she probably amassed a hoard of traditions when she visited English castles during her tours with her husband. The background of Gaston de Blondeville is Kenilworth Castle. That ancient ruins stirred her imagination profoundly is clear from passages in her notes on the journeys. In Furness Abbey she sees in her mind's eye "a midnight procession of monks," and at Brougham Castle:
"One almost saw the surly keeper descending through this door-case and heard him rattle the keys of the chamber above, listening with indifference to the clank of chains and to the echo of that groan below which seemed to rend the heart it burst from,"
or again:
"Slender saplings of ash waved over the deserted door cases, where at the transforming hour of twilight, the superstitious eye might mistake them for spectres of some early possessor of the castle, restless from guilt, or of some sufferer persevering for vengeance."
Mrs. Radcliffe's style compares favourably with that of many of her contemporaries, with that of Mrs. Roche, for instance, who wrote The Children of the Abbey and an array of other forgotten romances, but she is too fond of long, imperfectly balanced sentences, with as many awkward twists and turns as the winding stairways of her ancient turrets. Nobody in the novels, except the talkative, comic servant, who is meant to be vulgar and ridiculous, ever condescends to use colloquial speech. Even in moments of extreme peril the heroines are very choice in their diction. Dialogue in Mrs. Radcliffe's world is as stilted and unnatural as that of prim, old-fashioned school books. In her earliest novel she uses very little conversation, clearly finding the indirect form of narrative easier. Sometimes, in the more highly wrought passages of description, she slips unawares into a more daring phrase, e.g. in Udolpho, the track of blood "glared" upon the stairs, where the word suggests not the actual appearance of the bloodstain, but rather its effect on Emily's inflamed and disordered imagination. Dickens might have chosen the word deliberately in this connection, but he would have used it, not once, but several times to ensure his result and to emphasise the impression. This is not Mrs. Radcliffe's way. Her attention to style is mainly subconscious, her chief interest being in situation. Her descriptions of scenery have often been praised. Crabb Robinson declared in his diary that he preferred them to those of Waverley. When Byron visited Venice he found no better words to describe its beauty than those of Mrs. Radcliffe, who had never seen it:
"I saw from out the wave her structures rise
As from the stroke of an enchanted wand."
In 1794 Mrs. Radcliffe and her husband made a journey through Holland and West Germany, of which she wrote an account, including with it observations made during a tour of the English Lakes. All her novels, except The Italian and Gaston de Blondeville, had been written before she went abroad, and in describing foreign scenery she relied on her imagination, aided perhaps by pictures and descriptions as well as by her recollections of English mountains and lakes. The attempt to blend into a single picture a landscape actually seen and a landscape only known at second-hand may perhaps account for the lack of distinctness in her pictures. Her descriptions of scenery are elaborate, and often prolix, but it is often difficult to form a clear image of the scene. In her novels she cares for landscape only as an effective background, and paints with the broad, careless sweep of the theatrical scene-painter. In the Journeys, where she depicts scenery for its own sake, her delineation is more definite and distinct. She reveals an unusual feeling for colour and for the lights and tones of a changing sea or sky:
"It is most interesting to watch the progress of evening and its effect on the waters; streaks of light scattered among the dark, western clouds after the sun had set, and gleaming in long reflection on the sea, while a grey obscurity was drawing over the east, as the vapours rose gradually from the ocean. The air was breathless, the tall sails of the vessel were without motion, and her course upon the deep scarcely perceptible; while above the planet burned with steady dignity and threw a tremulous line of light upon the sea, whose surface flowed in smooth, waveless expanse. Then other planets appeared and countless stars spangled the dark waters. Twilight now pervaded air and ocean, but the west was still luminous where one solemn gleam of dusky red edged the horizon from under heavy vapours."[37]
Sometimes her scenes are disappointingly vague. She describes Ingleborough as "rising from elegantly swelling ground," and attempts to convey a stretch of country by enumerating a list of its features in generalised terms:
"Gentle swelling slopes, rich in verdure, thick enclosures, woods, bowery hop-grounds, sheltered mansions announcing the wealth, and substantial farms with neat villages, the comfort of the country."
Yet she notices tiny mosses whose hues were "pea green and primrose," and sometimes reveals flashes of imaginative insight into natural beauty like "the dark sides of mountains marked only by the blue smoke of weeds driven in circles near the ground." These personal, intimate touches of detail are very different from the highly coloured sunrises and sunsets that awaken the raptures of her heroines.
With all her limitations, Mrs. Radcliffe is a figure whom it is impossible to ignore in the history of the novel. Her influence was potent on Lewis and on Maturin as well as on a host of forgotten writers. Scott admired her works and probably owed something in his craftsmanship to his early study of them. She appeals most strongly in youth. The Ettrick Shepherd, who was by nature and education "just excessive superstitious," declares:
"Had I read Udolpho and her other romances in my boyish days my hair would have stood on end like that o' other folk … but afore her volumes fell into my hauns, my soul had been frichtened by a' kinds of traditionary terrors, and many hunder times hae I maist swarfed wi' fear in lonesome spots in muir and woods at midnight when no a leevin thing was movin but mysel' and the great moon."[38]
There are dull stretches in all her works, but, as Hazlitt justly claims, "in harrowing up the soul with imaginary horrors, and making the flesh creep and the nerves thrill with fond hopes and fears, she is unrivalled among her countrymen."[39]
CHAPTER IV - THE NOVEL OF TERROR. LEWIS AND MATURIN.
To pass from the work of Mrs. Radcliffe to that of Matthew Gregory Lewis is to leave "the novel of suspense," which depends for part of its effect on the human instinct of curiosity, for "the novel of terror," which works almost entirely on the even stronger and more primitive instinct of fear. Those who find Mrs. Radcliffe's unruffled pace leisurely beyond endurance, or who dislike her coldly reasonable methods of accounting for what is only apparently supernatural, or who sometimes feel stifled by the oppressive air of gentility that broods over her romantic world, will find ample reparation in the melodramatic pages of "Monk" Lewis. Here, indeed, may those who will and dare sup full with horrors. Lewis, in reckless abandonment, throws to the winds all restraint, both moral and artistic, that had bound his predecessor. The incidents, which follow one another in kaleidoscopic variety, are like the disjointed phases of a delirium or nightmare, from which there is no escape. We are conscious that his story is unreal or even ludicrous, yet Lewis has a certain dogged power of driving us unrelentingly through it, regardless of our own will. Literary historians have tended to over-emphasise the connection between Mrs. Radcliffe and Lewis. Their purposes and achievement are so different that it is hardly accurate to speak of them as belonging to the same school. It is true that in one of his letters Lewis asserts that he was induced to go on with his romance, The Monk, by reading The Mysteries of Udolpho, "one of the most interesting books that has (sic) ever been written," and that he was struck by the resemblance of his own character to that of Montoni;[40] but his literary debt to Mrs. Radcliffe is comparatively insignificant. His depredations on German literature are much more serious and extensive. Lewis, indeed, is one of the Dick Turpins of fiction and seizes his booty where he will in a high-handed and somewhat unscrupulous fashion, but for many of Mrs. Radcliffe's treasures he could find no use. Her picturesque backgrounds, her ingenious explanations of the uncanny, her uneventful interludes and long deferred but happy endings were outside his province. The moments in her novels which Lewis admired and strove to emulate were those during which the reader with quickened pulse breathlessly awaits some startling development. Of these moments, there are, it must be frankly owned, few in Mrs. Radcliffe's novels. Lewis's mistake lay in trying to induce a more rapid palpitation, and to prolong it almost uninterruptedly throughout his novel. By attempting a physical and mental impossibility he courts disaster. Mrs. Radcliffe's skeletons are decently concealed in the family cupboard, Lewis's stalk abroad in shameless publicity. In Mrs. Radcliffe's stories, the shadow fades and disappears just when we think we are close upon the substance; for, after we have long been groping in the twilight of fearful imaginings, she suddenly jerks back the shutter to admit the clear light of reason. In Lewis's wonder-world there are no elusive shadows; he hurls us without preparation or initiation into a daylight orgy of horrors.
Lewis was educated at Westminster and Christ Church, but a year spent in Weimar (1792-3), where he zealously studied German, and incidentally, met Goethe, seems to have left more obvious marks on his literary career. To Lewis, Goethe is pre-eminently the author of The Sorrows of Werther; and Schiller, he remarks casually, "has, written several other plays besides The Robbers."[41] He probably read Heinse's Ardinghello(1787), Tieck's Abdallah (1792-3), and William Lovell (1794-6), many of the innumerable dramas of Kotzebue, the romances of Weit Weber, and other specimens of what Carlyle describes as "the bowl and dagger department," where
"Black Forests and Lubberland, sensuality and horror, the spectre nun and the charmed moonshine, shall not be wanting. Boisterous outlaws also, with huge whiskers, and the most cat o' mountain aspect; tear-stained sentimentalists, the grimmest man-eaters, ghosts and the like suspicious characters will be found in abundance."[42]
Throughout his life he seems to have made a hobby of the literature that arouses violent emotion and mental excitement, or lacerates the nerves, or shocks and startles. The lifelike and the natural are not powerful enough for his taste, though some of his Romantic Tales(1808), such as My Uncle's Garret Window, are uncommonly tame. Like the painter of a hoarding who must at all costs arrest attention, he magnifies, exaggerates and distorts. Once when rebuked for introducing black guards into a country where they did not exist, he is said to have declared that he would have made them sky-blue if he thought they would produce any more effect.[43] Referring to The Monk, he confesses: "Unluckily, in working it up, I thought that the stronger my colours, the more effect would my picture produce."[44]
One of his early attempts at fiction was a romance which he later converted into his popular drama, The Castle Spectre. This play was staged in 1798, and was reconverted by Miss Sarah Wilkinson in 1820 into a romance. Lewis spreads his banquet with a lavish hand, and crudities and absurdities abound, but he has a knack of choosing situations well adapted for stage effect. The play, aptly described by Coleridge as a "peccant thing of Noise, Froth and Impermanence,"[45] would offer a happy hunting ground to those who delight in the pursuit of "parallel passages." At the age of twenty, during his residence at the Hague as attaché to the British embassy, in the summer of 1794, he composed in ten weeks, his notorious romance, The Monk. On its publication in 1795 it was attacked on the grounds of profanity and indecency.
The Monk, despite its cleverness, is essentially immature, yet it is not a childish work. It is much less youthful, for instance, than Shelley's Zastrozzi and St. Irvyne. The inflamed imagination, the violent exaggeration of emotion and of character, the jeering cynicism and lack of tolerance, the incoherent formlessness, are all indications of adolescence. In The Monk there are two distinct stories, loosely related. The story of Raymond and Agnes, into which the legends of the bleeding nun and Wandering Jew are woven with considerable skill, was published more than once as a detached and separate work. It is concerned with the fate of two unhappy lovers, who are parted by the tyranny of their parents and of the church, and who endure manifold agonies. The physical torture of Agnes is described in revolting detail, for Lewis has no scruple in carrying the ugly far beyond the limits within which it is artistic. The happy ending of their harrowing story is incredible. By making Ambrosio, on the verge of his hideous crimes, harshly condemn Agnes for a sin of the same nature as that which he is about to commit, Lewis forges a link between the two stories. But the connection is superficial, and the novel suffers through the distraction of our interest. In the story of Ambrosio, Antonia plays no part in her own downfall. She is as helpless as a plaster statue demolished by an earthquake. The figure of Matilda has more vitality, though Lewis changes his mind about her character during the course of the book, and fails to make her early history consistent with the ending of his story. She is certainly not in league with the devil, when, in a passionate soliloquy, she cries to Ambrosio, whom she believes to be asleep: "The time will come when you will be convinced that my passion is pure and disinterested. Then you will pity me and feel the whole weight of my sorrows." But when the devil appears, he declares to Ambrosio:
"I saw that you were virtuous from vanity, not principle, and I seized the fit moment for your seduction. I observed your blind idolatry of the Madonna's picture. I bade a subordinate but crafty spirit assume a similar form, and you eagerly yielded to the blandishments of Matilda."
The discrepancy is obvious, but this blemish is immaterial, for the whole story is unnatural. The deterioration in Ambrosio's character—though Lewis uses all his energy in striving to make it appear probable by discussing the effect of environment—is too swift.
Lewis is at his best when he lets his youthful, high spirits have full play. His boyish exaggeration makes Leonella, Antonia's aunt, seem like a pantomime character, who has inadvertently stepped into a melodrama, but the caricature is amusing by its very crudity. She writes in red ink to express "the blushes of her cheek," when she sends a message of encouragement to the Conde d'Ossori. This and other puerile jests are more tolerable than Lewis's attempts to depict passion or describe character. Bold, flaunting splashes of colour, strongly marked, passionate faces, exaggerated gestures start from every page, and his style is as extravagant as his imagery. Sometimes he uses a short, staccato sentence to enforce his point, but more often we are engulfed in a swirling welter of words. He delights in the declamatory language of the stage, and all his characters speak as if they were behind the footlights, shouting to the gallery.
A cold-blooded reviewer, in whom the detective instinct was strong, indicated the sources of The Monk so mercilessly, that Lewis appears in his critique[46] rather as the perpetrator of a series of ingenious thefts than as the creator of a novel:
"The outline of the Monk Ambrosio's story was suggested by that of the Santon Barissa [Barsisa] in the Guardian:[47] the form of temptation is borrowed from The Devil in Love of Canzotte [Cazotte], and the catastrophe is taken from The Sorcerer. The adventures of Raymond and Agnes are less obviously imitations, yet the forest scene near Strasburg brings to mind an incident in Smollett's Count Fathom; the bleeding nun is described by the author as a popular tale of the Germans,[48] and the convent prison resembles the inflictions of Mrs. Radcliffe."
The industrious reviewer overlooks the legend of the Wandering Jew, which might have been added to the list of Lewis's "borrowings." It must be admitted that Lewis transforms, or at least remodels, what he borrows. Addison's story relates how a sage of reputed sanctity seduces and slays a maiden brought to him for cure, and later sells his soul. Lewis abandons the Oriental setting, converts the santon into a monk and embroiders the story according to his fancy. Scott alludes to a Scottish version of what is evidently a widespread legend.[49] The resemblance of the catastrophe—presumably the appearance of Satan in the form of Lucifer—to the scene in Mickle's Sorcerer, which was published among Lewis's Tales of Wonder (1801), is vague enough to be accidental. There are blue flames and sorcery, and an apparition in both, but that is all the two scenes have in common. The tyrannical abbess may be a heritage from The Romance of the Forest, but, if so she is exaggerated almost beyond recognition.
In fashioning as the villain of her latest novel, The Italian, a monk, whose birth is wrapt in obscurity, Mrs. Radcliffe may have been influenced by Lewis's Monk which had appeared two years before. Both Schedoni and Ambrosio are reputed saints, both are plunged into the blackest guilt, and both are victims of the Inquisition. Mrs. Radcliffe, it is true, recoils from introducing the enemy of mankind, but, before the secrets are finally revealed, we almost suspect Schedoni of having dabbled in the Black Arts, and his actual crime falls short of our expectations. The "explained supernatural" plays a less prominent part in The Italian than in the previous novels, and Mrs. Radcliffe relies for her effect rather on sheer terror. The dramatic scene where Schedoni stealthily approaches the sleeping Ellena at midnight recalls the more highly coloured, but less impressive scene in Antonia's bedchamber. The fate of Bianchi, Ellena's aunt, is strangely reminiscent of that of Elvira, Antonia's mother. The convent scenes and the overbearing abbess had been introduced into Mrs. Radcliffe's earlier novels; but in The Italian, the anti-Roman feeling is more strongly emphasised than usual. This may or may not have been due to the influence of Lewis. There is no direct evidence that Mrs. Radcliffe had read The Monk, but the book was so notorious that a fellow novelist would be almost certain to explore its pages. Hoffmann's romance, Elixir des Teufels (1816), is manifestly written under its inspiration. Coincidence could not account for the remarkable resemblances to incidents in the story of Ambrosio.
The far-famed collection of Tales of Terror appeared in 1799, The Tales of Wonder in 1801. The rest of Lewis's work consists mainly of translations and adaptations from the German. He revelled in the horrific school of melodrama. He delighted in the kind of German romance parodied by Meredith in Farina, where Aunt Lisbeth tells Margarita of spectres, smelling of murder and the charnel-breath of midnight, who "uttered noises that wintered the blood and revealed sights that stiffened hair three feet long; ay, and kept it stiff." The Bravo of Venice (1805) is a translation of Zschokke's Abellino, der Grosse Bandit, but Lewis invented a superfluous character, Monaldeschi, Rosabella's destined bridegroom, apparently with the object that Abellino might slay him early in the story—and added a concluding chapter. At the outset of the story, Rosalvo, a man after Lewis's own heart, declares:
"To astonish is my destiny: Rosalvo knows no medium: Rosalvo can never act like common men," and thereupon proceeds to prove by his extraordinary actions that this is no idle vaunt. He lives a double life: in the guise of Abellino, he joins the banditti, and by inexplicable methods rids Venice of her enemies; in the guise of a noble Florentine, Flodoardo, he woos the Doge's daughter, Rosabella. The climax of the story is reached when Flodoardo, under oath to deliver up the bandit Abellino, appears before the Doge at the appointed hour and reveals his double identity. He is hailed as the saviour of Hungary, and wins Rosabella as his bride. In the second edition of The Bravo of Venice, a romance in four volumes by M. G. Lewis, Legends of the Nunnery, is announced as in the press. There seems to be no record of it elsewhere. Feudal Tyrants (1806), a long romance from the German, connected with the story of William Tell, consists of a series of memoirs loosely strung together, in which the most alarming episode is the apparition of the pale spectre of an aged monk. In Blanche and Osbright, or Mistrust (1808),[50] which is not avowedly a translation, Lewis depicts an even more revolting portrait than that of Abellino in his bravo's disguise. He adds detail after detail without considering the final effect on the eye:
"Every muscle in his gigantic form seemed convulsed by some horrible sensation; the deepest gloom darkened every feature; the wind from the unclosed window agitated his raven locks, and every hair appeared to writhe itself. His eyeballs glared, his teeth chattered, his lips trembled; and yet a smile of satisfied vengeance played horribly around them. His complexion seemed suddenly to be changed to the dark tincture of an African; the expression of his countenance was dreadful, was diabolical. Magdalena, as she gazed upon his face, thought that she gazed upon a demon."
Here, to quote the Lady Hysterica Belamour, we have surely the "horrid, horrible, horridest horror." But in Königsmark the Robber, or The Terror of Bohemia (1818), Lewis's caste includes an enormous yellow-eyed spider, a wolf who changes into a peasant and disappears amid a cloud of sulphur, and a ghost who sheds three ominous drops of boiling blood. It was probably such stories as this that Peacock had in mind when he declared, through Mr. Flosky, that the devil had become "too base and popular" for the surfeited appetite of readers of fiction. Yet, as Carlyle once exclaimed of the German terror-drama, as exemplified in Kotzebue, Grillparzer and Klingemann, whose stock-in-trade is similar to that of Lewis: "If any man wish to amuse himself irrationally, here is the ware for his money."[51] Byron, who had himself attempted in Oscar and Alva (Hours of Idleness, 1807) a ballad in the manner of Lewis, describes with irony the triumphs of terror:
"Oh! wonderworking Lewis! Monk or Bard,
Who fain would make Parnassus a churchyard!
Lo! wreaths of yew, not laurel, bind thy brow,
Thy muse a sprite, Apollo's sexton thou;
Whether on ancient tombs thou tak'st thy stand,
By gibbering spectres hailed, thy kindred band;
Or tracest chaste descriptions on thy page
To please the females of our modest age;
All hail, M.P., from whose infernal brain
Thin-sheeted phantoms glide, a grisly train;
At whose command 'grim women' throng in crowds
And kings of fire, of water, and of clouds
With small grey men—wild yagers and what not,
To crown with honour thee and Walter Scott;
Again, all hail! if tales like thine may please,
St. Luke alone can vanquish the disease.
Even Satan's self with thee might dread to dwell,
And in thy skull discern a deeper hell!"[52]
Scott's delightfully discursive review of The Fatal Revenge or The Family of Montorio (1810), not only forms a fitting introduction to the romances of Maturin, but presents a lively sketch of the fashionable reading of the day. It has been insinuated that the Quarterly Review was too heavy and serious, that it contained, to quote Scott's own words, "none of those light and airy articles which a young lady might read while her hair was papering." To redeem the reputation of the journal, Scott gallantly undertook to review some of the "flitting and evanescent productions of the times." After a laborious inspection of the contents of a hamper full of novels, he arrived at the painful conclusion that "spirits and patience may be as completely exhausted in perusing trifles as in following algebraical calculations." He condemns the authors of the Gothic romance, not for their extravagance, a venial offence, but for their monotony, a deadly sin.
"We strolled through a variety of castles, each of which was regularly called Il Castello; met with as many captains of condottieri, heard various ejaculations of Santa Maria and Diabolo; read by a decaying lamp and in a tapestried chamber dozens of legends as stupid as the main history; examined such suites of deserted apartments as might set up a reasonable barrack, and saw as many glimmering lights as would make a respectable illumination." It was no easy task to bore Sir Walter Scott, and an excursion into the byeways of early nineteenth century fiction proves abundantly the justice of his satire. Such novelists as Miss Sarah Wilkinson or Mrs. Eliza Parsons, whose works were greedily devoured by circulating library readers a hundred years ago, deliberately concocted an unappetising gallimaufry of earlier stories and practised the harmless deception of serving their insipid dishes under new and imposing names. A writer in the Annual Review, so early as 1802, complains in criticising Tales of Superstition and Chivalry:
"It is not one of the least objections against these fashionable fictions that the imagery of them is essentially monstrous. Hollow winds, clay-cold hands, clanking chains and clicking clocks, with a few similar etcetera are continually tormenting us."
Tales of terror were often issued in the form of sixpenny chapbooks, enlivened by woodcuts daubed in yellow, blue, red and green. Embellished with these aids to the imagination, they were sold in thousands. To the readers of a century ago, a "blue book" meant, as Medwin explains in his life of Shelley, not a pamphlet filled with statistics, but "a sixpenny shocker."[53] The notorious Minerva Press catered for wealthier patrons, and, it is said, sold two thousand copies of Mrs. Bennett's Beggar Girl and her Benefactors on the day of publication, at thirty-six shillings for the seven volumes. Samuel Rogers recalled Lane, the head of the firm, riding in a carriage and pair with two footmen, wearing gold cockades.[54] Scott was careful not to disclose the names of the novelists he derided, but his hamper probably contained a selection of Mrs. Parsons' sixty works, and perhaps two of Miss Wilkinson's, with their alluring titles, The Priory of St. Clair, or The Spectre of the Murdered Nun; The Convent of the Grey Penitents, or The Apostate Nun. Perchance, he found there Mrs. Henrietta Rouvière's romance, (published in the same year as Montorio,) A Peep at our Ancestors (1807), describing the reign of King Stephen. Mrs. Rouvière, in her preface,
"flatters herself that, aided by records and documents, she may have succeeded in a correct though faint sketch of the times she treats, and in affording, if through a dim yet not distorted nor discoloured glass, A Peep at our Ancestors";
but her story is entirely devoid of the colour with which Mrs. Radcliffe, her model, contrived to decorate the past. It is, moreover, written in a style so opaque that it obscures her images from view as effectually as a piece of ground glass. To describe the approach of twilight—an hour beloved by writers of romance—she attempts a turgid paraphrase of Gray's Elegy:
"The grey shades of an autumnal evening gradually stole over the horizon, progressively throwing a duskier hue on the surrounding objects till glimmering confusion encompassing the earth shut from the accustomed eye the well-known view, leaving conjecture to mark its boundaries."
The adventures of Adelaide and her lover, Walter of Gloucester, are so insufferably tedious that Scott doubtless decided to "leave to conjecture" their interminable vicissitudes. The names of other novels, whose pages he may impatiently have scanned, may be garnered by those who will, from such works as Living Authors (1817), or from the four volumes of Watts' elaborate compilation, the Bibliotheca Britannica (1824). The titles are, indeed, lighter and more entertaining reading than the books themselves. Anyone might reasonably expect to read Midnight Horrors, or The Bandit's Daughter, as Henry Tilney vows he read The Mysteries of Udolpho, with "hair on end all the time"; but the actual story, notwithstanding a wandering ball of fire, that acts as guide through the labyrinths of a Gothic castle, is conducive of sleep rather than shudders. The notoriety of Lewis's monk may be estimated by the procession of monks who followed in his train. There were, to select a few names at random, The New Monk, by one R.S., Esq.; The Monk of Madrid, by George Moore (1802); The Bloody Monk of Udolpho, by T.J. Horsley Curties; Manfroni, the One-handed Monk, whose history was borrowed, together with those of Abellino, the terrific bravo, and Rinaldo Rinaldini,[55] by "J.J." from Miss Flinders' library;[56] and lastly, as a counter-picture, a monk without a scowl, The Benevolent Monk, by Theodore Melville (1807). The nuns, including "Rosa Matilda's" Nun of St. Omer's, Miss Sophia Francis's Nun of Misericordia (1807) and Miss Wilkinson's Apostate Nun, would have sufficed to people a convent. Perhaps The Convent of the Grey Penitents would have been a suitable abode for them; but most of them were, to quote Crabbe, "girls no nunnery can tame." Lewis's Venetian bravo was boldly transported to other climes. We find him in Scotland in The Mysterious Bravo, or The Shrine of St. Alstice, A Caledonian Legend, and in Austria in The Bravo of Bohemia or The Black Forest. No country is safe from the raids of banditti. The Caledonian Banditti or The Banditti of the Forest, or The Bandit of Florence—all very much alike in their manners and morals—make the heroine's journey a perilous enterprise. The romances of Mrs. Radcliffe were rifled unscrupulously by the snappers-up of unconsidered trifles, and many of the titles are variations on hers. In emulation of The Romance of the Forest we find George Walker's Romance of the Cavern (1792) and Miss Eleanor Sleath's Mysteries of the Forest. Novelists appreciated the magnetic charm of the word "mystery" on a title-page, and after The Mysteries of Udolpho we find such seductive names as Mysterious Warnings and Mysterious Visits, by Mrs. Parsons; Horrid Mysteries, translated from the German of the Marquis von Grosse, by R. Will (1796); The Mystery of the Black Tower and The Mystic Sepulchre, by John Palmer, a schoolmaster of Bath; The Mysterious Wanderer (1807), by Miss Sophia Reeve; The Mysterious Hand or Subterranean Horrors (1811), by A.J. Randolph; and The Mysterious Freebooter (1805), by Francis Lathom. Castles and abbeys were so persistently haunted that Mrs. Rachel Hunter, a severely moral writer, advertises one of her stories as Letitia: A Castle Without a Spectre. Mystery slips, almost unawares, into the domestic story. There are, for instance, vague hints of it in Charlotte Smith's Old Manor House (1793). The author of The Ghost and of More Ghosts adopts the pleasing pseudonym of Felix Phantom. The gloom of night broods over many of the stories, for we know:
"affairs that walk,
As they say spirits do, at midnight, have
In them a wilder nature than the business
That seeks despatch by day,"