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Title: The Tale of Terror

Author: Edith Birkhead

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THE TALE OF TERROR

A Study of the Gothic Romance

by

EDITH BIRKHEAD M.A.

Assistant Lecturer in English Literature in the University of Bristol
Formerly Noble Fellow in the University of Liverpool

London
Constable & Company Ltd.

1921







PREFACE


The aim of this book is to give some account of the growth of
supernatural fiction in English literature, beginning with the
vogue of the Gothic Romance and Tale of Terror towards the close
of the eighteenth century. The origin and development of the
Gothic Romance are set forth in detail from the appearance of
Walpole's _Castle of Otranto_ in 1764 to the publication of
Maturin's _Melmoth the Wanderer_ in 1820; and the survey of this
phase of the novel is continued, in the later chapters, to modern
times. One of these is devoted to the Tale of Terror in America,
where in the hands of Hawthorne and Poe its treatment became a
fine art. In the chapters dealing with the more recent forms of
the tale of terror and wonder, the scope of the subject becomes
so wide that it is impossible to attempt an exhaustive survey.

The present work is the outcome of studies begun during my tenure
of the William Noble Fellowship in the University of Liverpool,
1916-18. It is a pleasure to express here my thanks to Professor
R.H. Case and to Dr. John Sampson for valuable help and criticism
at various stages of the work. Parts of the MS. have also been
read by Professor C.H. Herford of the University of Manchester
and by Professor Oliver Elton of the University of Liverpool. To
Messrs. Constable's reader I am also indebted for several helpful
suggestions.--E.B.

THE UNIVERSITY OF BRISTOL,

December, 1920.





CONTENTS



CHAPTER I - INTRODUCTORY.



The antiquity of the tale of terror; the element of fear in
myths, heroic legends, ballads and folk-tales; terror in the
romances of the middle ages, in Elizabethan times and in the
seventeenth century; the credulity of the age of reason; the
renascence of terror and wonder in poetry; the "attempt to blend
the marvellous of old story with the natural of modern novels."
Pp. 1-15.



CHAPTER II - THE BEGINNINGS OF GOTHIC ROMANCE.


Walpole's admiration for Gothic art and his interest in the
middle ages; the mediaeval revival at the close of the eighteenth
century; _The Castle of Otranto_; Walpole's bequest to later
romance-writers; Smollett's incidental anticipation of the
methods of Gothic Romance; Clara Reeve's _Old English Baron_ and
her effort to bring her story "within the utmost verge of
probability"; Mrs. Barbauld's Gothic fragment; Blake's _Fair
Elenor_; the critical theories and Gothic experiments of Dr.
Nathan Drake. Pp. 16-37.



CHAPTER III - "THE NOVEL OF SUSPENSE." MRS. RADCLIFFE.


The vogue of Mrs. Radcliffe; her tentative beginning in _The
Castles of Athlin and Dunbayne_, and her gradual advance in skill
and power; _The Sicilian Romance_ and her early experiments in
the "explained" supernatural; _The Romance of the Forest_, and
her use of suspense; heroines: _The Mysteries of Udolpho_;
illustrations of Mrs. Radcliffe's methods; _The Italian_;
villains; her historical accuracy and "unexplained" spectre in
_Gaston de Blondeville_; her reading; style; descriptions of
scenery; position in the history of the novel.
Pp. 38-62.



CHAPTER IV - THE NOVEL OF TERROR. LEWIS AND MATURIN.


Lewis's methods contrasted with those of Mrs. Radcliffe; his debt
to German terror-mongers; _The Monk_; ballads; _The Bravo of
Venice_; minor works and translations; Scott's review of
Maturin's _Montorio_; the vogue of the tale of terror between
Lewis and Maturin; Miss Sarah Wilkinson; the personality of
Charles Robert Maturin; his literary career; the complicated plot
of _The Family of Montorio_; Maturin's debt to others; his
distinguishing gifts revealed in _Montorio_; the influence of
_Melmoth the Wanderer_ on French literature; a survey of
_Melmoth_; Maturin's achievement as a novelist. Pp. 63-93.



CHAPTER V - THE ORIENTAL TALE OF TERROR. BECKFORD.


The Oriental story in France and England in the eighteenth
century; Beckford's _Vathek_; Beckford's life and character; his
literary gifts; later Oriental tales. Pp. 94-99.



CHAPTER VI - GODWIN AND THE ROSICRUCIAN NOVEL.

Godwin's mind and temper; the plan of _Caleb Williams_ as
described by Godwin; his methods; the plot of _Caleb Williams_;
its interest as a story; Godwin's limitations as a novelist; _St.
Lean_; its origin and purpose; outline of the story; the
character of Bethlem Gabor; Godwin's treatment of the Rosicrucian
legend; a parody of _St. Lean_; the supernatural in _Cloudesley_
and in _Lives of the Necromancers_; Moore's _Epicurean_; Croly's
_Salathiel_; Shelley's youthful enthusiasm for the tale of
terror; _Zastrozzi_; its lack of originality; _St. Irvyne_;
traces of Shelley's early reading in his poems. Pp. 100-127.



CHAPTER VII - SATIRES ON THE NOVEL OF TERROR.


Jane Austen's raillery in _Northanger Abbey_; Barrett's mockery
in _The Heroine_; Peacock's _Nightmare Abbey_; his praise of C.B.
Brown in _Gryll Grange_; _The Mystery of the Abbey_, and its
misleading title; Crabbe's satire in _Belinda Waters_ and _The
Preceptor Husband_; his ironical attack on the sentimental
heroine in _The Borough_; his appreciation of folktales; _Sir
Eustace Grey_. Pp.
128-144.



CHAPTER VIII - SCOTT AND THE NOVEL OF TERROR.


Scott's review of fashionable fiction in the Preface to
_Waverley_; his early attempts at Gothic story in _Thomas the
Rhymer_ and _The Lord of Ennerdale_; his enthusiasm for Bürger's
_Lenore_ and for Lewis's ballads; his interest in demonology and
witchcraft; his attitude to the supernatural; his hints to the
writers of ghost-stories; his own experiments; Wandering Willie's
Tale, a masterpiece of supernatural horror; the use of the
supernatural in the Waverley Novels; Scott, the supplanter of the
novel of terror. Pp.
145-156.



CHAPTER IX - LATER DEVELOPMENTS OF THE TALE OF TERROR.


The exaggeration of the later terror-mongers; innovations; the
stories of Mary Shelley, Byron and Polidori; _Frankenstein_; its
purpose; critical estimate; _Valperga_; _The Last Man_; Mrs.
Shelley's short tales; Polidori's _Ernestus Berchtold_, a
domestic story with supernatural agency; _The_ FACES _Vampyre_;
later vampires; De Quincey's contributions to the tale of terror;
Harrison Ainsworth's attempt to revive romance; his early Gothic
stories; _Rookwood_, an attempt to bring the Radcliffe romance up
to date; terror in Ainsworth's other novels; Marryat's _Phantom
Ship_; Bulwer Lytton's interest in the occult; _Zanoni_, and
Lytton's theory of the Intelligences; _The Haunted and the
Haunters_; _A Strange Story_ and Lytton's preoccupation with
mesmerism. Pp. 157-184.



CHAPTER X - SHORT TALES OF TERROR.


The chapbook versions of the Gothic romance; the popularity of
sensational story illustrated in Leigh Hunt's _Indicator_;
collections of short stories; various types of short story in
periodicals; stories based on oral tradition; the humourist's
turn for the terrible; natural terror in tales from _Blackwood_
and in Conrad; use of terror in Stevenson and Kipling; future
possibilities of fear as a motive in short stories. Pp. 185-196.



CHAPTER XI - AMERICAN TALES OF TERROR.


The vogue of Gothic story in America; the novels of Charles
Brockden Brown; his use of the "explained" supernatural; his
Godwinian theory; his construction and style; Washington Irving's
genial tales of terror; Hawthorne's reticence and melancholy;
suggestions for eery stories in his notebooks; _Twice-Told
Tales_; _Mosses from an Old Manse; The Scarlet Letter_;
Hawthorne's sympathetic insight into character; _The House of the
Seven Gables_, and the ancestral curse; his half-credulous
treatment of the supernatural; unfinished stories; a contrast of
Hawthorne's methods with those of Edgar Allan Poe; _A Manuscript
found in a Bottle_, the first of Poe's tales of terror; the skill
of Poe illustrated in _Ligeia, The Fall of the House of Usher,
The Masque of the Red Death_, and _The Cash of Amontillado_;
Poe's psychology; his technique in _The Pit and the Pendulum_ and
in his detective stories; his influence; the art of Poe; his
ideal in writing a short story. Pp. 197-220.



CHAPTER XII - CONCLUSION.


The persistence of the tale of terror; the position of the Gothic
romance in the history of fiction; the terrors of actual life in
the Brontë's novels; sensational stories of Wilkie Collins, Le
Fanu and later authors; the element of terror in various types of
romance; experiments of living authors; the future of the tale of
terror. Pp
221-228.




INDEX.  Pp. 229-241




CHAPTER I - INTRODUCTORY.


The history of the tale of terror is as old as the history of
man. Myths were created in the early days of the race to account
for sunrise and sunset, storm-winds and thunder, the origin of
the earth and of mankind. The tales men told in the face of these
mysteries were naturally inspired by awe and fear. The universal
myth of a great flood is perhaps the earliest tale of terror.
During the excavation of Nineveh in 1872, a Babylonian version of
the story, which forms part of the Gilgamesh epic, was discovered
in the library of King Ashurbanipal (668-626 B.C.); and there are
records of a much earlier version, belonging to the year 1966
B.C. The story of the Flood, as related on the eleventh tablet of
the Gilgamesh epic, abounds in supernatural terror. To seek the
gift of immortality from his ancestor, Ut-napishtim, the hero
undertakes a weary and perilous journey. He passes the mountain
guarded by a scorpion man and woman, where the sun goes down; he
traverses a dark and dreadful road, where never man trod, and at
last crosses the waters of death. During the deluge, which is
predicted by his ancestor, the gods themselves are stricken with
fear:

     "No man beheld his fellow, no more could men know each
     other. In heaven the gods were afraid ... They drew
     back, they climbed up into the heaven of Anu. The gods
     crouched like dogs, they cowered by the walls."[1]

Another episode in the same epic, when Nergal, the god of the
dead, brings before Gilgamesh an apparition of his friend,
Eabani, recalls the impressive scene, when the witch of Endor
summons the spirit of Samuel before Saul.

When legends began to grow up round the names of traditional
heroes, fierce encounters with giants and monsters were invented
to glorify their strength and prowess. David, with a stone from
his sling, slew Goliath. The crafty Ulysses put out the eye of
Polyphemus. Grettir, according to the Icelandic saga, overcame
Glam, the malevolent, death-dealing vampire who "went riding the
roofs." Beowulf fearlessly descended into the turbid mere to
grapple with Grendel's mother. Folktales and ballads, in which
incidents similar to those in myths and heroic legends occur, are
often overshadowed by terror. Figures like the Demon Lover, who
bears off his mistress in the fatal craft and sinks her in the
sea, and the cannibal bridegroom, outwitted at last by the
artfulness of one of his brides, appear in the folk-lore of many
lands. Through every century there glide uneasy spirits, groaning
for vengeance. Andrew Lang[2] mentions the existence of a papyrus
fragment, found attached to a wooden statuette, in which an
ancient Egyptian scribe addresses a letter to the Khou, or
spirit, of his dead wife, beseeching her not to haunt him. One of
the ancestors of the savage were-wolf, who figures in Marryat's
_Phantom Ship_, may perhaps be discovered in Petronius' _Supper
of Trimalchio_. The descent of Bram Stoker's infamous vampire
Dracula may be traced back through centuries of legend.
Hobgoblins, demons, and witches mingle grotesquely with the
throng of beautiful princesses, queens in glittering raiment,
fairies and elves. Without these ugly figures, folk-tales would
soon lose their power to charm. All tale tellers know that fear
is a potent spell. The curiosity which drove Bluebeard's wife to
explore the hidden chamber lures us on to know the worst, and as
we listen to horrid stories, we snatch a fearful joy. Human
nature desires not only to be amused and entertained, but moved
to pity and fear. All can sympathise with the youth, who could
not shudder and who would fain acquire the gift.

From English literature we gain no more than brief, tantalising
glimpses of the vast treasury of folk-tales and ballads that
existed before literature became an art and that lived on side by
side with it, vitalising and enriching it continually. Yet here
and there we catch sudden gleams like the fragment in _King
Lear_:

  "Childe Roland to the dark tower came.
  His word was still Fie, Foh and Fum,
  I smell the blood of a British man."

or Benedick's quotation from the _Robber Bridegroom_:

  "It is not so, it was not so, but, indeed, God forbid that
  it should be so."

which hint at the existence of a hoard as precious and
inexhaustible as that of the Nibelungs. The chord of terror is
touched in the eerie visit of the three dead sailor sons "in
earthly flesh and blood" to the wife of Usher's well, Sweet
William's Ghost, the rescue of Tarn Lin on Halloween, when
Fairyland pays a tiend to Hell, the return of clerk Saunders to
his mistress, True Thomas's ride to Fairyland, when:

  "For forty days and forty nights,
  He wade through red blood to the knee,
  And he saw neither sun nor moon,
  But heard the roaring of the sea."

The mediaeval romances of chivalry, which embody stories handed
down by oral tradition, are set in an atmosphere of supernatural
wonder and enchantment. In Malory's _Morte d'Arthur_, Sir
Lancelot goes by night into the Chapel Perilous, wherein there is
only a dim light burning, and steals from the corpse a sword and
a piece of silk to heal the wounds of a dying knight. Sir Galahad
sees a fiend leap out of a tomb amid a cloud of smoke; Gawaine's
ghost, with those of the knights and ladies for whom he has done
battle in life, appears to warn the king not to begin the fight
against Modred on a certain day. In the romance of _Sir Amadas_,
the ghost of a merchant, whose corpse the knight had duteously
redeemed from the hands of creditors, succours him at need. The
shadow of terror lurks even amid the beauty of Spenser's
fairyland. In the windings of its forests we come upon dark
caves, mysterious castles and huts, from which there start
fearsome creatures like Despair or the giant Orgoglio, hideous
hags like Occasion, wicked witches and enchanters or frightful
beings like the ghostly Maleger, who wore as his helmet a dead
man's skull and rode upon a tiger swift as the wind. The
Elizabethan dramatists were fascinated by the terrors of the
invisible world. Marlowe's Dr. Faustus, round whose name are
clustered legends centuries old concerning bargains between man
and the devil, the apparitions and witches in _Macbeth_, the dead
hand, the corpse-like images, the masque of madmen, the tombmaker
and the passing-bell in Webster's sombre tragedy, _The Duchess of
Malfi_, prove triumphantly the dramatic possibilities of terror.
As a foil to his _Masque of Queens_ (1609) Ben Jonson introduced
twelve loathly witches with Até as their leader, and embellished
his description of their profane rites, with details culled from
James I.'s treatise on Demonology and from learned ancient
authorities.

In _The Pilgrim's Progress_, Despair, who "had as many lives as a
cat," his wife Diffidence at Doubting Castle, and Maul and
Slaygood are the ogres of popular story, whose acquaintance
Bunyan had made in chapbooks during his ungodly youth.
Hobgoblins, devils and fiends, "sturdy rogues" like the three
brothers Faintheart, Mistrust and Guilt, who set upon Littlefaith
in Dead Man's Lane, lend the excitement of terror to Christian's
journey to the Celestial City. The widespread belief in witches
and spirits to which Browne and Burton and many others bear
witness in the seventeenth century, lived on in the eighteenth
century, although the attitude of the "polite" in the age of
reason was ostensibly incredulous and superior. A scene in one of
the _Spectator_ essays illustrates pleasantly the state of
popular opinion. Addison, lodging with a good-natured widow in
London, returns home one day to find a group of girls sitting by
candlelight, telling one another ghost-stories. At his entry they
are abashed, but, on the widow's assuring them that it is only
the "gentleman," they resume, while Addison, pretending to be
absorbed in his book at the far end of the table, covertly
listens to their tales of

     "ghosts that, pale as ashes, had stood at the feet of
     the bed or walked over a churchyard by moonlight; and
     others, who had been conjured into the Red Sea for
     disturbing people's rest."[3]

In another essay Addison shows that he is strongly inclined to
believe in the existence of spirits, though he repudiates the
ridiculous superstitions which prevailed in his day;[4] and Sir
Roger de Coverley frankly confesses his belief in witches. Defoe,
in the preface to his _Essay on the History and Reality of
Apparitions_ (1727) states uncompromisingly:

     "I must tell you, good people, he that is not able to
     see the devil, in whatever shape he is pleased to
     appear in, he is not really qualified to live in this
     world, no, not in the quality of a common inhabitant."

Epworth Rectory, the home of John Wesley's father, was haunted in
1716-17 by a persevering ghost called Old Jeffrey, whose exploits
are recorded with a gravity and circumstantial exactitude that
remind us of Defoe's narrative concerning the ghostly Mrs. Veal
in her "scoured" silk. John Wesley declares stoutly that he is
convinced of the literal truth of the story of one Elizabeth
Hobson, who professed to have been visited on several occasions
by supernatural beings. He upholds too the authenticity of the
notorious Drummer of Tedworth, whose escapades are described in
chapbooks and in Glanvill's _Sadducismus Triumphatus_ (1666), a
book in which he was keenly interested. In his journal (May 25th,
1768) he remarks:

     "It is true that the English in general, and indeed
     most of the men of learning in Europe, have given up
     all accounts of witches and apparitions, as mere old
     wives' fables. I am sorry for it; and I willingly take
     this opportunity of entering my solemn protest against
     this violent compliment which so many that believe the
     Bible pay to those who do not believe it."

The Cock Lane ghost gained very general credit, and was
considered by Mrs. Nickleby a personage of some importance, when
she boasted to Miss La Creevy that her great-grandfather went to
school with him--or her grandmother with the Thirsty Woman of
Tutbury. The appearance of Lord Lyttleton's ghost in 1779 was
described by Dr. Johnson, who was also disposed to believe in the
Cock Lane ghost, as the most extraordinary thing that had
happened in his day.[5] There is abundant evidence that the
people of the eighteenth century were extremely credulous, yet,
in literature, there is a tendency to look askance at the
supernatural as at something wild and barbaric. Such ghosts as
presume to steal into poetry are amazingly tame, and even
elegant, in their speech and deportment. In Mallet's _William and
Margaret_ (1759). which was founded on a scrap of an old ballad
out of _The Knight of the Burning Pestle_, Margaret's wraith
rebukes her false lover in a long and dignified oration. But
spirits were shy of appearing in an age when they were more
likely to be received with banter than with dread. Dr. Johnson
expresses the attitude of his age when, in referring to Gray's
poem, _The Bard_, he remarks:

     "To select a singular event and swell it to a giant's
     bulk by fabulous appendages of spectres and predictions
     has little difficulty, for he that forsakes the
     probable may always find the marvellous. And it has
     little use; we are affected only as we believe; we are
     improved only as we find something to be imitated or
     declined." (1780.)

The dictum that we are affected only as we believe is open to
grave doubt. We are often thrown into a state of trepidation
simply through the power of the imagination. We are wise after
the event, like Partridge at the play:

     "No, no, sir; ghosts don't appear in such dresses as
     that neither... And if it was really a ghost, it could
     do one no harm at such a distance, and in so much
     company; and yet, if I was frightened, I am not the
     only person."[6]

The supernatural which persisted always in legends handed down
from one generation to another on the lips of living people, had
not lost its power to thrill and alarm, and gradually worked its
way back into literature. Although Gray and Collins do not
venture far beyond the bounds of the natural, they were in
sympathy with the popular feelings of superstitious terror, and
realised how effective they would be in poetry.

Collins, in his _Ode on the Superstitions of the Scottish
Highlands_, adjures Home, the author of _Douglas_, to sing:

            "how, framing hideous spells,
  In Sky's lone isle, the gifted wizard-seer
  Lodged in the wintry cave with Fate's fell spear
  Or in the depths of Uist's dark forests dwells,
  How they whose sight such dreary dreams engross
  With their own vision oft astonished droop
  When o'er the wintry strath or quaggy moss
  They see the gliding ghosts unbodied troop."

Burns, in the foreword to _Halloween_ (1785), writes in the
"enlightened" spirit of the eighteenth century, but in the poem
itself throws himself whole-heartedly into the hopes and fears
that agitate the lovers. He owed much to an old woman who lived
in his home in infancy:

  "She had ... the largest collection in the country
  of tales and songs concerning devils, ghosts, fairies,
  brownies, witches, warlocks, spunkies, kelpies, elf-candles,
  dead-lights, wraiths, apparitions, cantraips, giants, enchanted
  towers, dragons and other trumpery. This
  cultivated the latent seeds of poetry, but had so strong
  an effect on my imagination, that to this hour, in my
  nocturnal rambles, I sometimes keep a sharp look-out in
  suspicious places; it often takes an effort of philosophy
  to shake off these idle terrors."[7]

_Tam o' Shanter_, written for Captain Grose, was perhaps based on
a Scottish legend, learnt at the inglenook in childhood, from
this old wife, or perhaps

  "By some auld houlet-haunted biggin
  Or kirk deserted by its riggin,"

from Captain Grose himself, who made to quake:

  "Ilk ghaist that haunts auld ha' or chamer,
  Ye gipsy-gang that deal in glamor,
  And you, deep-read in hell's black grammar,
         Warlocks and witches."

In it Burns reveals with lively reality the terrors that assail
the reveller on his homeward way through the storm:

  "Past the birks and meikle stane
  Where drunken Charlie brak's neck-bane;
  And through the whins, and by the cairn
  Where hunters fand the murdered bairn
  And near the thorn, aboon the well
  Where Mungo's mither hanged hersell."

For sheer terror the wild, fantastic witch-dance, seen through a
Gothic window in the ruins of Kirk-Alloway, with the light of
humour strangely glinting through, has hardly been surpassed. The
Ballad-collections, beginning with Percy's _Reliques of Ancient
English Poetry_ (1705), brought poets back to the original
sources of terror in popular tradition, and helped to revive the
latent feelings of awe, wonder and fear. In Coleridge's _Ancient
Manner_ the skeleton-ship with its ghastly crew--the
spectre-woman and her deathmate--the sensations of the mariner,
alone on a wide, wide sea, seize on our imagination with
irresistible power. The very substance of the poem is woven of
the supernatural. The dream imagery is thrown into relief by
occasional touches of reality--the lighthouse, the church on the
cliff, the glimpses of the wedding, the quiet song of the hidden
brook in the leafy month of June. We, like the mariner, after
loneliness so awful that

        "God himself
  Scarce seemèd there to be,"

welcome the firm earth beneath our feet, and the homely sound of
the vesper bell. In _Christabel_ we float dreamily through scenes
as unearthly and ephemeral as the misty moonlight, and the words
in which Coleridge conjures up his vision fall into music of
magic beauty. The opening of the poem creates a sense of
foreboding, and the horror of the serpent-maiden is subtly
suggested through her effect on Christabel. Coleridge hints at
the terrible with artistic reticence. In _Kubla Khan_ the chasm
is:

  "A savage place! as holy and enchanted
  As e'er beneath a waning moon was haunted
  By woman wailing for her demon-lover."

The poetry of Keats is often mysterious and suggestive of terror.
The description of the Gothic hall in _The Eve of St. Agnes_:

  "In all the house was heard no human sound;
  A chain-drooped lamp was flickering by each door;
  The arras, rich with horseman, hawk and hound,
  Fluttered in the besieging wind's uproar;
  And the long carpets rose along the gusty floor;"

the serpent-maiden, Lamia, who

  "Seemed at once some penanced lady elf,
  Some demon's mistress, or the demon's self;"

the grim story in _Isabella_ of Lorenzo's ghost, who

  "Moaned a ghostly undersong
  Like hoarse night-gusts sepulchral briers along."

all lead us over the borderland. In a rejected stanza of the _Ode
on Melancholy_, he abandons the horrible:

  "Though you should build a bark of dead men's bones
  And rear a phantom gibbet for a mast,
  Stitch shrouds together for a sail, with groans
  To fill it out, blood-stained and aghast;
  Although your rudder be a dragon's tail
  Long severed, yet still hard with agony,
  Your cordage, large uprootings from the skull
  Of bald Medusa, certes you would fail
  To find the Melancholy--"

Keats's melancholy is not to be found amid images
of horror:

  "She dwells with Beauty--Beauty that must die,
  And Joy, whose hand is ever at his lips
  Bidding adieu."

In _La Belle Dame sans Merci_ he conveys with delicate touch the
memory of the vision which haunts the knight, alone and palely
loitering. We see it through his eyes:

  "I saw pale kings and princes too,
  Pale warriors, death-pale were they all:
  They cried--'La Belle Dame sans Merci
  Hath thee in thrall!'

  "I saw their starv'd lips in the gloam
  With horrid warning gaped wide,
  And I awoke and found me here,
  On the cold hill's side."

From effects so exquisitely wrought as these it seems almost
profane to turn to the crude attempts of such poets as "Monk"
Lewis or Southey to sound the note of terror. Yet they too, in
their fashion, played a part in the "Renascence of Wonder."
Coleridge, fascinated by the spirit of "gramarye" in Bürger's
_Lenore_, etherealised and refined it. Scott and Lewis gloried in
the gruesome details and spirited rhythm of the ballad, and in
their supernatural poems wish to startle and terrify, not to awe,
their readers. Those who revel in phosphorescent lights and in
the rattle of the skeleton are apt to o'erleap themselves; and
Scott's _Glenfinlas_, Lewis's _Alonzo the Brave and the Fair
Imogene_ and Southey's _Old Woman of Berkeley_ fall into the
category of the grotesque. Hogg intentionally mingles the comic
and the terrible in his poem, _The Witch of Fife_, but his
prose-stories reveal his power of creating an atmosphere of
_diablerie_, undisturbed by intrusive mockery. In the poem
_Kilmeny_, he handles an uncanny theme with dreamy beauty.

From the earliest times to the present day, writers of fiction
have realised the force of supernatural terror. In the
_Babylonica_ of Iamblichus, the lovers evade their pursuers by
passing as spectres; the scene of the romance is laid in tombs,
caverns, and robbers' dens, a setting remarkably like that of
Gothic story. Into the English novel of the first half of the
eighteenth century, however, the ghost dares not venture. The
innate desire for the marvellous was met at this period not by
the novel, but by oral tradition and by such works as Galland's
translation of _The Arabian Nights_, the Countess D'Aulnoy's
collection of fairy tales, Perrault's _Contes de ma Mère Oie_.
Chapbooks setting forth mediaeval legends of "The Wandering Jew,"
the "Demon Frigate," or "Dr. Faustus," and interspersed with
anecdotes of freaks, monsters and murderers, satisfied the
craving for excitement among humbler readers.[8] Smollett, who,
in his _Adventures of Ferdinand, Count Fathom_ (1753), seems to
have been experimenting with new devices for keeping alive the
interest of a _picaresque_ novel, anticipates the methods of Mrs.
Radcliffe. Although he sedulously avoids introducing the
supernatural, he hovers perilously on the threshold. The
publication of _The Castle of Otranto_ in 1764 was not so wild an
adventure as Walpole would have his readers believe. The age was
ripe for the reception of the marvellous.

The supernatural had, as we have seen, begun to find its way back
into poetry, in the work of Gray and Collins. In Macpherson's
_Ossian_, which was received with acclamation in 1760-3, the
mountains, heaths and lakes are haunted by shadowy, superstitious
fears. Dim-seen ghosts wail over the wastes. There is abundant
evidence that "authentic" stories of ghostly appearances were
heard with respect. Those who eagerly explored Walpole's Gothic
castle and who took pleasure in Miss Reeve's well-trained ghost,
had previously enjoyed the thrill of chimney corner legends. The
idea of the gigantic apparition was derived, no doubt, from the
old legend of the figure seen by Wallace on the field of battle.
The limbs, strewn carelessly about the staircase and the gallery
of the castle, belong to a giant, very like those who are worsted
by the heroes of popular story. Godwin, in an unusual flight of
fancy, amused himself by tracing a certain similitude between
_Caleb Williams_ and _Bluebeard_, between _Cloudesley_ and _The
Babes in the Wood_,[9] and planned a story, on the analogy of the
Sleeping Beauty, in which the hero was to have the faculty of
unexpectedly falling asleep for twenty, thirty, or a hundred
years.[10]

Mrs. Radcliffe, who, so far as we may judge, did not draw her
characters from the creatures of flesh and blood around her,
seems to have adopted some of the familiar figures of old story.
Emily's guardian, Montoni, in _The Mysteries of Udolpho_, like
the unscrupulous uncle in Godwin's _Cloudesley_, may well have
been descended from the wicked uncle of the folk tale. The cruel
stepmother is disguised as a haughty, scheming marchioness in
_The Sicilian Romance_. The ogre drops his club, assumes a veneer
of polite refinement and relies on the more gentlemanlike method
of the dagger and stiletto for gaining his ends. The banditti and
robbers who infest the countryside in Gothic fiction are time
honoured figures. Travellers in Thessaly in Apuleius' _Golden
Ass_, like the fugitives in Shelley's _Zastrozzi_ and _St.
Irvyne_, find themselves in robbers' caves. The Gothic castle,
suddenly encountered in a dark forest, is boldly transported from
fairyland and set down in Italy, Sicily or Spain. The chamber of
horrors, with its alarming array of scalps or skeletons, is
civilised beyond recognition and becomes the deserted wing of an
abbey, concealing nothing worse than one discarded wife,
emaciated and dispirited, but still alive. The ghost-story, which
Ludovico reads in the haunted chamber of Udolpho, is described by
Mrs. Radcliffe as a Provençal tale, but is in reality common to
the folklore of all countries. The restless ghost, who yearns for
the burial of his corpse, is as ubiquitous as the Wandering Jew.
In the _Iliad_ he appears as the shade of Patroclus, pleading
with Achilles for his funeral rites. According to a letter of the
younger Pliny,[11] he haunts a house in Athens, clanking his
chains. He is found in every land, in every age. His feminine
counterpart presented herself to Dickens' nurse requiring her
bones, which were under a glass-case, to be "interred with every
undertaking solemnity up to twenty-four pound ten, in another
particular place."[12] Melmoth the Wanderer, when he becomes the
wooer of Immalee, seems almost like a reincarnation of the Demon
Lover. The wandering ball of fire that illuminates the dusky
recesses of so many Gothic abbeys is but another manifestation of
the Fate-Moon, which shines, foreboding death, after Thorgunna's
funeral, in the Icelandic saga. The witchcraft and demonology
that attracted Scott and "Monk" Lewis, may be traced far beyond
Sinclair's _Satan's Invisible World Discovered_ (1685), Bovet's
_Pandemonium or the Devil's Cloyster Opened_ (1683), or Reginald
Scot's _Discovery of Witchcraft_ (1584) to Ulysses' invocation of
the spirits of the dead,[13] to the idylls of Theocritus and to
the Hebrew narrative of Saul's visit to the Cave of Endor. There
are incidents in _The Golden Ass_ as "horrid" as any of those
devised by the writers of Gothic romance. It would, indeed, be no
easy task to fashion scenes more terrifying than the mutilation
of Socrates in _The Golden Ass_, by the witch, who tears out his
heart and stops the wound with a sponge which falls out when he
stoops to drink at a river, or than the strange apparition of a
ragged, old woman who vanishes after leading the way to the room,
where the baker's corpse hangs behind the door. Though the title
assumes a special literary significance at the close of the
eighteenth century, the tale of terror appeals to deeply rooted
instincts, and belongs, therefore, to every age and clime.




CHAPTER II - THE BEGINNINGS OF GOTHIC ROMANCE.


To Horace Walpole, whose _Castle of Otranto_ was published on
Christmas Eve, 1764, must be assigned the honour of having
introduced the Gothic romance and of having made it fashionable.
Diffident as to the success of so "wild" a story in an age
devoted to good sense and reason, he sent forth his mediaeval
tale disguised as a translation from the Italian of "Onuphrio
Muralto," by William Marshall. It was only after it had been
received with enthusiasm that he confessed the authorship. As he
explained frankly in a letter to his friend Mason: "It is not
everybody that may in this country play the fool with
impunity."[14] That Walpole regarded his story merely as a
fanciful, amusing trifle is clear from the letter he wrote to
Miss Hannah More reproving her for putting so frantic a thing
into the hands of a Bristol milkwoman who wrote poetry in her
leisure hours.[15] _The Castle of Otranto_ was but another
manifestation of that admiration for the Gothic which had found
expression fourteen years earlier in his miniature castle at
Strawberry Hill, with its old armour and "lean windows fattened
with rich saints."[16] The word "Gothic" in the early eighteenth
century was used as a term of reproach. To Addison, Siena
Cathedral was but a "barbarous" building, which might have been a
miracle of architecture, had our forefathers "only been
instructed in the right way."[17] Pope in his _Preface to
Shakespeare_ admits the strength and majesty of the Gothic, but
deplores its irregularity. In _Letters on Chivalry and Romance_,
published two years before _The Castle of Otranto_, Hurd pleads
that Spenser's _Faerie Queene_ should be read and criticised as a
Gothic, not a classical, poem. He clearly recognises the right of
the Gothic to be judged by laws of its own. When the nineteenth
century is reached the epithet has lost all tinge of blame, and
has become entirely one of praise. From the time when he began to
build his castle, in 1750, Walpole's letters abound in references
to the Gothic, and he confesses once: "In the heretical corner of
my heart I adore the Gothic building."[18] At Strawberry Hill the
hall and staircase were his special delight and they probably
formed the background of that dream in which he saw a gigantic
hand in armour on the staircase of an ancient castle. When Dr.
Burney visited Walpole's home in 1786 he remarked on the striking
recollections of _The Castle of Otranto_, brought to mind by "the
deep shade in which some of his antique portraits were placed and
the lone sort of look of the unusually shaped apartments in which
they were hung."[19] We know how in idle moments Walpole loved to
brood on the picturesque past, and we can imagine his falling
asleep, after the arrival of a piece of armour for his
collection, with his head full of plans for the adornment of his
cherished castle. His story is but an expansion of this
dilettante's nightmare. His interest in things mediaeval was not
that of an antiquary, but rather that of an artist who loves
things old because of their age and beauty. In a delightfully gay
letter to his friend, George Montagu, referring flippantly to his
appointment as Deputy Ranger of Rockingham Forest, he writes,
after drawing a vivid picture of a "Robin Hood reformé":

     "Visions, you know, have always been my pasture; and so
     far from growing old enough to quarrel with their
     emptiness, I almost think there is no wisdom comparable
     to that of exchanging what is called the realities of
     life for dreams. Old castles, old pictures, old
     histories and the babble of old people make one live
     back into centuries that cannot disappoint one. One
     holds fast and surely what is past. The dead have
     exhausted their power of deceiving--one can trust
     Catherine of Medicis now. In short, you have opened a
     new landscape to my fancy; and my lady Beaulieu will
     oblige me as much as you, if she puts the long bow into
     your hands. I don't know, but the idea may produce some
     other _Castle of Otranto_."[20]

So Walpole came near to anticipating the greenwood scenes of
_Ivanhoe_. The decking and trappings of chivalry filled him with
boyish delight, and he found in the glitter and colour of the
middle ages a refuge from the prosaic dullness of the eighteenth
century. A visit from "a Luxembourg, a Lusignan and a Montfort"
awoke in his whimsical fancy a mental image of himself in the
guise of a mediaeval baron: "I never felt myself so much in _The
Castle of Otranto_. It sounded as if a company of noble crusaders
were come to sojourn with me before they embarked for the Holy
Land";[21] and when he heard of the marvellous adventures of a
large wolf who had caused a panic in Lower Languedoc, he was
reminded of the enchanted monster of old romance and declared
that, had he known of the creature earlier, it should have
appeared in _The Castle of Otranto_.[22] "I have taken to
astronomy," he declares on another occasion,

     "now that the scale is enlarged enough to satisfy my
     taste, who love gigantic ideas--do not be afraid; I am
     not going to write a second part to _The Castle of
     Otranto_, nor another account of the Patagonians who
     inhabit the new Brobdingnag planet."[23]

These unstudied utterances reveal, perhaps more clearly than
Walpole's deliberate confessions about his book, the mood of
irresponsible, light-hearted gaiety in which he started on his
enterprise. If we may rely on Walpole's account of its
composition, _The Castle of Otranto_ was fashioned rapidly in a
white heat of excitement, but the creation of the story probably
cost him more effort than he would have us believe. The result,
at least, lacks spontaneity. We never feel for a moment that we
are living invisible amidst the characters, but we sit aloof like
Puck, thinking: "Lord, what fools these mortals be!" His
supernatural machinery is as undignified as the pantomime
properties of Jack the Giant-killer. The huge body scattered
piecemeal about the castle, the unwieldy sabre borne by a hundred
men, the helmet "tempestuously agitated," and even the "skeleton
in a hermit's cowl" are not only unalarming but mildly
ridiculous. Yet to the readers of his day the story was
captivating and entrancing. It satisfied a real craving for the
romantic and marvellous. The first edition of five hundred copies
was sold out in two months, and others followed rapidly. The
story was dramatised by Robert Jephson and produced at Covent
Garden Theatre under the title of _The Count of Narbonne_, with
an epilogue by Malone. It was staged again later in Dublin,
Kemble playing the title rôle. It was translated into French,
German and Italian. In England its success was immediate, though
several years elapsed before it was imitated. Gray, to whom the
story was first attributed, wrote of it in March, 1765: "It
engages our attention here (at Cambridge), makes some of us cry a
little, and all in general afraid to go to bed o' nights." Mason
praised it, and Walpole's letters refer repeatedly to the vogue
it enjoyed. This widespread popularity is an indication of the
eagerness with which readers of 1765 desired to escape from the
present and to revel for a time in strange, bygone centuries.
Although Walpole regarded the composition of his Gothic story as
a whim, his love of the past was shared by others of his
generation. Of this Macpherson's _Ossian_ (1760-3), Kurd's
_Letters on Chivalry and Romance_ (1762), and Percy's _Reliques_
(1765), are, each in its fashion, a sufficient proof. The
half-century from 1760 to 1810 showed remarkably definite signs
of a renewed interest in things written between 1100 and 1650,
which had been neglected for a century or more. _The Castle of
Otranto_, which was "an attempt to blend the marvellous of old
story with the natural of modern novels" is an early symptom of
this revulsion to the past; and it exercised a charm on Scott as
well as on Mrs. Radcliffe and her school. _The Castle of Otranto_
is significant, not because of its intrinsic merit, but because
of its power in shaping the destiny of the novel.

The outline of the plot is worth recording for the sake of
tracing ancestral likenesses when we reach the later romances.
The only son of Manfred--the villain of the piece--is discovered
on his wedding morning dashed to pieces beneath an enormous
helmet. Determined that his line shall not become extinct,
Manfred decides to divorce Hippolyta and marry Isabella, his
son's bride. To escape from her pursuer, Isabella takes flight
down a "subterraneous passage," where she is succoured by a
"peasant" Theodore, who bears a curious resemblance to a portrait
of the "good Alfonso" in the gallery of the castle. The servants
of the castle are alarmed at intervals by the sudden appearance
of massive pieces of armour in different parts of the building. A
clap of thunder, which shakes the castle to its foundations,
heralds the culmination of the story. A hundred men bear in a
huge sabre; and an apparition of the illustrious Alfonso--whose
portrait in the gallery once walks straight out of its
frame[24]--appears, "dilated to an immense magnitude,"[25] and
demands that Manfred shall surrender Otranto to the rightful
heir, Theodore, who has been duly identified by the mark of a
"bloody arrow." Alfonso, thus pacified, ascends into heaven,
where he is received into glory by St. Nicholas. As Matilda, who
was beloved of Theodore, has incidentally been slain by her
father, Theodore consoles himself with Isabella. Manfred and his
wife meekly retire to neighbouring convents. With this
anti-climax the story closes. To present the "dry bones" of a
romantic story is often misleading, but the method is perhaps
justifiable in the case of _The Castle of Otranto_, because
Walpole himself scorned embellishments and declared in his
grandiloquent fashion:

     "If this air of the miraculous is excused, the reader
     will find nothing else unworthy of his perusal. There
     is no bombast, no similes, flowers, digressions or
     unnecessary descriptions. Everything tends directly to
     the catastrophe."[26]

But with all its faults _The Castle of Otranto_ did not fall
fruitless on the earth. The characters are mere puppets, yet we
meet the same types again and again in later Gothic romances.
Though Clara Reeve renounced such "obvious improbabilities" as a
ghost in a hermit's cowl and a walking picture, she was an
acknowledged disciple of Walpole, and, like him, made an
"interesting peasant" the hero of her story, _The Old English
Baron_. Jerome is the prototype of many a count disguised as
father confessor, Bianca the pattern of many a chattering
servant. The imprisoned wife reappears in countless romances,
including Mrs. Radcliffe's _Sicilian Romance_ (1790), and Mrs.
Roche's _Children of the Abbey_ (1798). The tyrannical father--no
new creation, however--became so inevitable a figure in fiction
that Jane Austen had to assure her readers that Mr. Morland "was
not in the least addicted to locking up his daughters," and Miss
Martha Buskbody, the mantua-maker of Gandercleugh, whom Jedediah
Cleishbotham ingeniously called to his aid in writing the
conclusion of _Old Mortality_, assured him, as the fruit of her
experience in reading through the stock of three circulating
libraries that, in a novel, young people may fall in love without
the countenance of their parents, "because it is essential to the
necessary intricacy of the story." But apart from his characters,
who are so colourless that they hardly hold our attention,
Walpole bequeathed to his successors a remarkable collection of
useful "properties." The background of his story is a Gothic
castle, singularly unenchanted it is true, but capable of being
invested by Mrs. Radcliffe with mysterious grandeur. Otranto
contains underground vaults, ill-fitting doors with rusty hinges,
easily extinguished lamps and a trap-door--objects trivial and
insignificant in Walpole's hands, but fraught with terrible
possibilities. Otranto would have fulfilled admirably the
requirements of Barrett's Cherubina, who, when looking for
lodgings demanded--to the indignation of a maidservant, who came
to the door--old pictures, tapestry, a spectre and creaking
hinges. Scott, writing in 1821, remarks:

     "The apparition of the skeleton-hermit to the prince of
     Vicenza was long accounted a masterpiece of the
     horrible; but of late the valley of Jehosaphat could
     hardly supply the dry bones necessary for the
     exhibition of similar spectres."

But Cherubina, whose palate was jaded by a surfeit of the pungent
horrors of Walpole's successors, would probably have found _The
Castle of Otranto_ an insipid romance and would have lamented
that he did not make more effective use of his supernatural
machinery. His story offered hints and suggestions to those whose
greater gifts turned the materials he had marshalled to better
account, and he is to be honoured rather for what he instigated
others to perform than for what he actually accomplished himself.
_The Castle of Otranto_ was not intended as a serious
contribution to literature, but will always survive in literary
history as the ancestor of a thriving race of romances.

More than ten years before the publication of _The Castle of
Otranto_, Smollett, in his _Adventures of Ferdinand, Count
Fathom_, had chanced upon the devices employed later in the tale
of terror. The tremors of fear to which his rascally hero is
subjected lend the spice of alarm to what might have been but a
monotonous record of villainy. Smollett depicts skilfully the
imaginary terrors created by darkness and solitude. As the Count
travels through the forest:

     "The darkness of the night, the silence and solitude of
     the place, the indistinct images of the trees that
     appeared on every side, stretching their extravagant
     arms athwart the gloom, conspired, with the dejection
     of spirits occasioned by his loss, to disturb his fancy
     and raise strange phantoms in his imagination. Although
     he was not naturally superstitious, his mind began to
     be invaded with an awful horror that gradually
     prevailed over all the consolations of reason and
     philosophy; nor was his heart free from the terrors of
     assassination. In order to dissipate these agreeable
     reveries, he had recourse to the conversation of his
     guide, by whom he was entertained with the history of
     divers travellers who had been robbed and murdered by
     ruffians, whose retreat was in the recesses of that
     very wood."[27]

The sighing of the trees, thunder and sudden flashes of lightning
add to the horror of a journey, which resembles Mrs. Radcliffe's
description of Emily's approach to Udolpho. When Count Fathom
takes refuge in a robber's hut, he discovers in his room, which
has no bolt on the inside of the door, the body of a recently
murdered man, concealed beneath some bundles of straw. Effecting
his escape by placing the corpse in his own bed to deceive the
robbers, the count is mistaken for a phantom by the old woman who
waits upon him. In carrying out his designs upon Celinda, the
count aggravates her natural timidity by relating dismal stories
of omens and apparitions, and then groans piteously outside her
door and causes the mysterious music of an Æolian harp to sound
upon the midnight air. Celinda sleeps, too, like the ill-starred
heroine of the novel of terror, "at the end of a long gallery,
scarce within hearing of any other inhabited part of the
house."[28] The scene in _Count Fathom_, in which Renaldo, at
midnight, visits, as he thinks, the tomb of Monimia, is
surrounded with circumstances of gloom and mystery:

     "The uncommon darkness of the night, the solemn silence
     and lonely situation of the place, conspired with the
     occasion of his coming and the dismal images of his
     fancy, to produce a real rapture of gloomy
     expectation... The clock struck twelve, the owl
     screeched from the ruined battlement, the door was
     opened by the sexton, who, by the light of a glimmering
     taper, conducted the despairing lover to a dreary
     aisle."

As he watches again on a second night:

     "His ear was suddenly invaded with the sound of some
     few, solemn notes, issuing from the organ which seemed
     to feel the impulse of an invisible hand ... reason
     shrunk before the thronging ideas of his fancy, which
     represented this music as the prelude to something
     strange and supernatural."[29]

The figure of a woman, arrayed in a flowing robe and veil,
approaches--and proves to be Monimia in the flesh. Although
Smollett precedes Walpole, in point of time, he is, in these
scenes, nearer in spirit to Udolpho than Otranto. His use of
terror, however, is merely incidental; he strays inadvertently
into the history of Gothic romance. The suspicions and
forebodings, with which Smollett plays occasionally upon the
nerves of his readers, become part of the ordinary routine in the
tale of terror.

Clara Reeve's Gothic story, first issued under the title of _The
Champion of Virtue_, but later as _The Old English Baron_, was
published in 1777--twelve years after Walpole's _Castle of
Otranto_, of which, as she herself asserted, it was the "literary
offspring." By eliminating all supernatural incidents save one
ghost, she sought to bring her story "within the utmost verge of
probability." Walpole, perhaps displeased by the slighting
references in the preface to some of the more extraordinary
incidents in his novel, received _The Old English Baron_ with
disdain, describing it as "totally void of imagination and
interest."[30] His strictures are unjust. There are certainly no
wild flights of fancy in Clara Reeve's story, but an even level
of interest is maintained throughout. Her style is simple and
refreshingly free from affectation. The plot is neither rapid nor
exhilarating, but it never actually stagnates. Like Walpole's
Gothic story, _The Old English Baron_ is supposed to be a
transcript from an ancient manuscript. The period, we are
assured, is that of the minority of Henry VI., but despite an
elaborately described tournament, we never really leave
eighteenth century England. Edmund Twyford, the reputed son of a
cottager, is befriended by a benevolent baron Fitzowen, but,
through his good fortune and estimable qualities, excites the
envy of Fitzowen's nephews and his eldest son. To prove the
courage of Edmund, who has been basely slandered by his enemies,
the baron asks him to spend three nights in the haunted apartment
of the castle. Up to this point, there has been nothing to
differentiate the story from an uneventful domestic novel. The
ghost is of the mechanical variety and does not inspire awe when
he actually appears, but Miss Reeve tries to prepare our minds
for the shock, before she introduces him. The rusty locks and the
sudden extinction of the lamp are a heritage from Walpole, but
the "hollow, rustling noise" and the glimmering light, naturally
explained later by the approach of a servant with a faggot,
anticipate Mrs. Radcliffe. Like Adeline later, in _The Romance of
the Forest_, Edmund is haunted by prophetic dreams. The second
night the ghost violently clashes his armour, but still remains
concealed. The third night dismal groans are heard. The ghost
does not deign to appear in person until the baron's nephews
watch, and then:

     "All the doors flew open, a pale glimmering light
     appeared at the door from the staircase, and a man in
     complete armour entered the room: he stood with one
     hand extended pointing to the outward door."

It is to vindicate the rights of this departed spirit that Sir
Ralph Harclay challenges Sir Walter Lovel to a "mediaeval"
tournament. Before the story closes, Edmund is identified as the
owner of Castle Lovel, and is married to Lady Emma, Fitzowen's
daughter. The narration of the unusual circumstances connected
with his birth takes some time, as the foster parents suffer from
what is described by writers on psychology as "total recall," and
are unable to select the salient details. The characters are
rather dim and indistinct, the shadowiest of all being Emma, who
has no personality at all, and is a mere complement to the
immaculate Edmund's happiness. The good and bad are sharply
distinguished. There are no "doubtful cases," and consequently
there is no difficulty in distributing appropriate rewards and
punishments at the close of the story--the whole "furnishing a
striking lesson to posterity of the overruling hand of providence
and the certainty of retribution." Clara Reeve was fifty-two
years of age when she published her Gothic story, and she writes
in the spirit of a maiden aunt striving to edify as well as to
entertain the younger generation. When Edmund takes Fitzowen to
view the fatal closet and the bones of his murdered father, he
considers the scene "too solemn for a lady to be present at"; and
his love-making is as frigid as the supernatural scenes. The hero
is young in years, but has no youthful ardour. The very ghost is
manipulated in a half-hearted fashion and fails to produce the
slightest thrill. The natural inclination of the authoress was
probably towards domestic fiction with a didactic intention, and
she attempted a "mediaeval" setting as a _tour de force_, in
emulation of Walpole's _Castle of Otranto_. The hero, whose birth
is enshrouded in mystery, the restless ghost groaning for the
vindication of rights, the historical background, the archaic
spelling of the challenge, are all ineffective fumblings towards
the romantic. _The Old English Baron_ is an unambitious work, but
it has a certain hold upon our attention because of its limpidity
of style. It can be read without discomfort and even with a mild
degree of interest simply as a story, while _The Castle of
Otranto_ is only tolerable as a literary curiosity. A tragedy,
_Edmond_, _Orphan of the Castle_ (1799), was founded upon the
story, which was translated into French in 1800. Miss Reeve
informs the public in a preface to a late edition of _The Old
English Baron_ that, in compliance with the suggestion of a
friend, she had composed _Castle Connor, an Irish Story_, in
which apparitions were introduced. The manuscript of this tale
was unfortunately lost. Not even a mouldering fragment has been
rescued from an ebony cabinet in the deserted chamber of an
ancient abbey, and we are left wondering whether the ghosts spoke
with a brogue.

When Walpole wrote disparagingly of Clara Reeve's imitation of
his Gothic story, he singled out for praise a fragment which he
attributes to Mrs. Barbauld. The story to which he alludes is
evidently the unfinished _Sir Bertrand_, which is contained in
one of the volumes entitled _Miscellaneous Pieces in Prose_,
published jointly by J. and A.L. Aikin in 1773, and preceded by
an essay _On the Pleasure Derived from Objects of Terror_. Leigh
Hunt, who reprinted _Sir Bertrand_, which had impressed him very
strongly in his boyhood, in his _Book for a Corner_ (1849)
ascribes the authorship of the tale to Dr. Aikin, commenting on
the fact that he was "a writer from whom this effusion was hardly
to have been looked for." It is probably safe to assume that
Walpole, who was a contemporary of the Aikins and who took a
lively interest in the literary gossip of the day, was right in
assigning _Sir Bertrand_ to Miss Aikin,[31] afterwards Mrs.
Barbauld, though the story is not included in _The Works of Anne
Letitia Barbauld_, edited by Miss Lucy Aikin in 1825. That the
minds of the Aikins were exercised about the sources of pleasure
in romance, especially when connected with horror and distress,
is clear not only from this essay and the illustrative fragment
but also from other essays and stories in the same
collection--_On Romances, an Imitation_, and _An Enquiry into
those Kinds of Distress which Excite Agreeable Sensations_. In
the preliminary essay to _Sir Bertrand_ an attempt is made to
explain why terrible scenes excite pleasurable emotions and to
distinguish between two different types of horror, as illustrated
by _The Castle of Otranto_, which unites the marvellous and the
terrible, and by a scene of mere natural horror in Smollett's
_Count Fathom_. The story _Sir Bertrand_ is an attempt to combine
the two kinds of horror in one composition. A knight, wandering
in darkness on a desolate and dreary moor, hears the tolling of a
bell, and, guided by a glimmering light, finds "an antique
mansion" with turrets at the corners. As he approaches the porch,
the light glides away. All is dark and still. The light reappears
and the bell tolls. As Sir Bertrand enters the castle, the door
closes behind him. A bluish flame leads him up a staircase till
he comes to a wide gallery and a second staircase, where the
light vanishes. He grasps a dead-cold hand which he severs from
the wrist with his sword. The blue flame now leads him to a
vault, where he sees the owner of the hand "completely armed,
thrusting forwards the bloody stump of an arm, with a terrible
frown and menacing gesture and brandishing a sword in the
remaining hand." When attacked, the figure vanishes, leaving
behind a massive, iron key which unlocks a door leading to an
apartment containing a coffin, and statues of black marble,
attired in Moorish costume, holding enormous sabres in their
right hands. As the knight enters, each of them rears an arm and
advances a leg and at the same moment the lid of the coffin opens
and the bell tolls. Sir Bertrand, guided by the flames,
approaches the coffin from which a lady in a shroud and a black
veil arises. When he kisses her, the whole building falls asunder
with a crash. Sir Bertrand is thrown into a trance and awakes in
a gorgeous room, where he sees a beautiful lady who thanks him as
her deliverer. At a banquet, nymphs place a laurel wreath on his
head, but as the lady is about to address him the fragment breaks
off.

The architecture of the castle, with its gallery, staircase and
subterranean vaults, closely resembles that of Walpole's Gothic
structure. The "enormous sabres" too are familiar to readers of
_The Castle of Otranto_. The gliding light, disquieting at the
outset of the story but before the close familiar grown, is
doomed to be the guide of many a distressed wanderer through the
Gothic labyrinths of later romances. Mrs. Barbauld chose her
properties with admirable discretion, but lacked the art to use
them cunningly. A tolling bell, heard in the silence and darkness
of a lonely moor, will quicken the beatings of the heart, but
employed as a prompter's signal to herald the advance of a group
of black statues is only absurd. After the grimly suggestive
opening, the story gradually loses in power as it proceeds and
the happy ending, which wings our thoughts back to the Sleeping
Beauty of childhood, is wholly incongruous. If the fragment had
ended abruptly at the moment when the lady arises in her shroud
from the coffin, _Sir Bertrand_ would have been a more effective
tale of terror. From the historical point of view Mrs. Barbauld's
curious patchwork is full of interest. She seems to be reaching
out wistfully towards the mysterious and the unknown. Genuinely
anxious to awaken a thrill of excitement in the breast of her
reader, she is hesitating and uncertain as to the best way of
winning her effect. She is but a pioneer in the art of freezing
the blood and it were idle to expect that she should rush boldly
into a forest of horrors. Naturally she prefers to follow the
tracks trodden by Walpole and Smollett; but with intuitive
foresight she seems to have realised the limitations of Walpole's
marvellous machinery, and to have attempted to explore the
regions of the fearful unknown. Her opening scene works on that
instinctive terror of the dark and the unseen, upon which Mrs.
Radcliffe bases many of her most moving incidents.

Among the _Poetical Sketches_ of Blake, written between 1768 and
1777, and published in 1783, there appears an extraordinary poem
written in blank verse, but divided into quatrains, and entitled
_Fair Elenor_. This juvenile production seems to indicate that
Blake was familiar with Walpole's Gothic story.[32] The heroine,
wandering disconsolately by night in the castle vaults--a place
of refuge first rendered fashionable by Isabella in _The Castle
of Otranto_--faints with horror, thinking that she beholds her
husband's ghost, but soon:

  "Fancy returns, and now she thinks of bones
  And grinning skulls and corruptible death
  Wrapped in his shroud; and now fancies she hears
  Deep sighs and sees pale, sickly ghosts gliding."

A reality more horrible than her imaginings awaits her. A
bleeding head is abruptly thrust into her arms by an assassin in
the employ of a villainous and anonymous "duke." Fair Elenor
retires to her bed and gives utterance to an outburst of similes
in praise of her dead lord. Thus encouraged, the bloody head of
her murdered husband describes its lurid past, and warns Elenor
to beware of the duke's dark designs. Elenor wisely avoids the
machinations of the villain, and brings an end to the poem, by
breathing her last. Blake's story is faintly reminiscent of the
popular legend of Anne Boleyn, who, with her bleeding head in her
lap, is said to ride down the avenue of Blickling Park once a
year in a hearse drawn by horsemen and accompanied by attendants,
all headless out of respect to their mistress.

Blake's youthful excursion into the murky gloom of Gothic vaults
resulted in a poem so crude that even "Monk" Lewis, who was no
connoisseur, would have declined it regretfully as a contribution
to his _Tales of Terror_, but _Fair Elenor_ is worthy of
remembrance as an early indication of Walpole's influence, which
was to become so potent on the history of Gothic romance.

The Gothic experiments of Dr. Nathan Drake, published in his
_Literary Hours_ (1798), are extremely instructive as indicating
the critical standpoint of the time. Drake, like Mrs. Barbauld
and her brother, was deeply interested in the sources of the
pleasure derived from tales of terror, and wrote his Gothic
stories to confirm and illustrate the theories propounded in his
essays. He discusses gravely and learnedly the kinds of
fictitious horror that excite agreeable sensations, and then
proceeds to arrange carefully calculated effects, designed to
alarm his readers, but not to outrage their sense of decorum. He
has none of the reckless daring of "Monk" Lewis, who flung
restraint to the winds and raced in mad career through an orgy of
horrors. In his enchanted castles we are disturbed by an uneasy
suspicion that the inhabitants are merely allegorical characters,
and that the spectre of a moral lurks in some dim recess ready to
spring out upon us suddenly. Dr. Drake's mind was as a house
divided against itself: he was a moralist, emulating the "sage
and serious Spenser" in his desire to exalt virtue and abase
vice, he was a critic working out, with calm detachment,
practical illustrations of the theories he had formulated, and he
was a romantic enthusiast, imbued with a vague but genuine
admiration for the wild superstitions of a bygone age. His
stories exhibit painful evidence of the conflict which waged
between the three sides of his nature. In the essay prefixed to
_Henry Fitzowen, a Gothic Tale_, he distinguishes between the two
species of Gothic superstition, the gloomy and the sportive, and
addresses an ode to the two goddesses of Superstition--one the
offspring of Fear and Midnight, the other of Hesper and the Moon.
In his story the spectres of darkness are put to flight by a
troop of aerial spirits. Dr. Drake knew the Gothic stories of
Walpole, Mrs. Barbauld, Clara Reeve and Mrs. Radcliffe; and
traces of the influence of each may be found in his work. Henry
Fitzowen loves Adeline de Montfort, but has a powerful and
diabolical rival--Walleran--whose character combines the most
dangerous qualities of Mrs. Radcliffe's villains with the magical
gifts of a wizard. Fitzowen, not long before the day fixed for
his wedding, is led astray, while hunting, by an elusive stag, a
spectral monk and a "wandering fire," and arrives home in a
thunderstorm to find his castle enveloped in total darkness and
two of his servants stretched dead at his feet. He learns from
his mother and sister, who are shut in a distant room, that
Adeline has been carried off by armed ruffians. Believing
Walleran to be responsible for this outrage, Fitzowen sets out
the next day in search of him. After weary wanderings he is
beguiled into a Gothic castle by a foul witch, who resembles one
of Spenser's loathly hags, and on his entrance hears peals of
diabolical laughter. He sees spectres, blue lights, and the
corpse of Horror herself. When he slays Walleran the enchantments
disappear. At the end of a winding passage he finds a cavern
illuminated by a globe of light, and discovers Adeline asleep on
a couch. He awakes her with a kiss. Thunder shakes the earth, a
raging whirlwind tears the castle from its foundations, and the
lovers awake from their trance in a beautiful, moonlit vale where
they hear enchanting music and see knights, nymphs and spirits. A
beauteous queen tells them that the spirits of the blest have
freed them from Horror's dread agents. The music dies away, the
spirits flee and the lovers find themselves in a country road. A
story of the same type is told by De La Motte Fouqué in _The
Field of Terror_.[33] Before the steadfast courage of the
labourer who strives to till the field, diabolical enchantments
disappear. It is an ancient legend turned into moral allegory.

In the essay on _Objects of Terror_, which precedes _Montmorenci,
a Fragment_, Drake discusses that type of terror, which is
"excited by the interference of a simple, material causation,"
and which "requires no small degree of skill and arrangement to
prevent its operating more pain than pleasure." He condemns
Walpole's _Mysterious Mother_ on the ground that the catastrophe
is only productive of horror and aversion, and regards the old
ballad, _Edward_, as intolerable to any person of sensibility,
but praises Dante and Shakespeare for keeping within the "bounds
of salutary and grateful pleasure." The scene in _The Italian_,
where Schedoni, about to plunge a dagger into Ellena's bosom,
recoils, in the belief that he has discovered her to be his own
daughter, is commended as "appalling yet delighting the reader."
In the productions of Mrs. Radcliffe, "the Shakespeare of Romance
Writers, who to the wild landscape of Salvator Rosa has added the
softer graces of a Claude," he declares,

     "may be found many scenes truly terrific in their
     conception, yet so softened down, and the mind so much
     relieved, by the intermixture of beautiful description,
     or pathetic incident, that the impression of the whole
     never becomes too strong, never degenerates into
     horror, but pleasurable emotion is ever the
     predominating result."

The famous scene in _Ferdinand, Count Fathom_, the description of
Danger in Collins' _Ode to Fear_, the Scottish ballad of
_Hardyknute_ are mentioned as admirable examples of the fear
excited by natural causes. In the fragment called _Montmorenci_,
Drake aims at combining "picturesque description with some of
those objects of terror which are independent of supernatural
agency." As the curfew tolls sullenly, Henry de Montmorenci and
his two attendants rush from a castle into the darkness of a
stormy night. They hurry through a savage glen, in which a
swollen torrent falls over a precipice. After hearing the crash
of falling armour, they suddenly come upon a dying knight on
whose pale features every mark of horror is depicted. Led by
frightful screams of distress, Montmorenci and his men find a
maiden, who has been captured by banditti. Montmorenci slays the
leader, but is seized by the rest of the banditti and bound to a
tree overlooking a stupendous chasm into which he is to be
hurled. By almost superhuman struggles he effects his escape,
when suddenly--there at this terror-fraught moment, the fragment
wisely ends.

In _The Abbey of Clunedale_ Drake experiments feebly and
ineffectively with the "explained supernatural" in which Mrs.
Radcliffe was an adept. The ruined abbey, deemed to be haunted,
is visited at night as an act of penance by a man named Clifford
who, in a fit of unfounded jealousy, has slain his wife's
brother. Clifford, accompanied by his sister, and bearing a
light, kneels at his wife's tomb, and is mistaken for a spectral
being.

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,