Clara Reeve. Ann Radcliffe. Harriet and Sophia Lee
The novel of the mysterious and the supernatural did not appear in modern literature until Horace Walpole wrote The Castle of Otranto in 1764, during the decade that was dominated by the realism of Smollett and Sterne. The author says it was an attempt to blend two kinds of romance, the ancient, which was all improbable, and the modern, which was a realistic copy of nature. The machinery of this novel is clumsy. An enormous helmet and a huge sword are the means by which an ancestor of Otranto, long since dead, restores the castle to a seeming peasant, who proves to be the rightful heir.
This book produced no imitators until 1777, when Clara Reeve wrote The Old English Baron, which was plainly suggested by Walpole's novel, but is more delicate in the treatment of its ghostly visitants. Here, as in The Castle of Otranto, the rightful heir has been brought up a peasant, ignorant of his high birth. Again his ancestors, supposedly dead and gone, bring him into his own. One night he is made to sleep in the haunted part of the castle, where his parents reveal to him in a dream things which he is later able to prove legally. He learns the truth about his birth, comes into his estate, and wins the lady of his heart. When he returns to the castle as its master, all the doors fly open through the agency of unseen hands to welcome their feudal lord.
The characters of both these novels are without interest, and the mysterious element fails to produce the slightest creepy thrill.
Twelve years passed before Walpole's novel found another imitator in Mrs. Ann Radcliffe, who so far excelled her two predecessors that she has been called the founder of the Gothic romance, and in this field she remains without a peer. In her first novel, The Castles of Athlin and Dunbayne, as in The Old English Baron by Clara Reeve, a peasant renowned for his courage and virtue loves and is beloved by a lady of rank. A strawberry mark on his arm proves that he is the Baron Malcolm and owner of the castle of Dunbayne, at which juncture amid great rejoicings the story ends.
The characters and the style foreshadow Mrs. Radcliffe's later work. The usurping Baron of Dunbayne, who has imprisoned in his castle the women who might oppose his ambition; the two melancholy widows; their gentle and pensive daughters; their brave, loyal, and virtuous sons in love respectively with the two daughters; the Count Santmorin, bold and passionate, who endeavours by force to carry off the woman he loves—these are types that Mrs. Radcliffe repeatedly developed until in her later novels they became real men and women with strong conflicting emotions.
But superior to all her other powers is her ability to awaken a feeling of the presence of the supernatural. The castle of Dunbayne has secret doors and subterranean passages. The mysterious sound, as of a lute, is wafted on the air from an unknown source. Alleyn, in endeavouring to escape through a secret passage, stumbles over something in the dark, and, on stooping to learn what it is, finds the cold hand of a corpse in his grasp. This dead man has nothing to do with the story, but is introduced merely to make the reader shudder, which Mrs. Radcliffe never fails to do, even after we have learned all the secrets of her art. We learn later in the book how the corpse happened to be left here unburied; for in that day of intense realism, half-way between the ancient belief in ghosts and the modern interest in mental suggestion, every occurrence outside the known laws of physics was greeted with a cynical smile. But, although Mrs. Radcliffe always explains the mystery in her books, we hold our breath whenever she designs that we shall.
The Sicilian Romance, The Romance of the Forest, The Mysteries of Udolpho, and The Italian were written and published during the next seven years and each one shows a marked artistic advance over its predecessor. With the opening paragraph of each, we are carried at once into the land of the unreal, into regions of poetry rather than of prose. Rugged mountains with their concealed valleys, whispering forests which the eye cannot penetrate, Gothic ruins with vaulted chambers and subterranean passages, are the scenes of her stories; while event after event of her complicated plot happens either just as the mists of evening are obscuring the sun, or while the moonlight is throwing fantastic shadows over the landscape. It is an atmosphere of mystery in which one feels the weird presence of the supernatural. This is heightened by the ghostly suggestions she brings to the mind, as incorporeal as spirits. A low hurried breathing in the dark, lights flashing out from unexpected places, forms gliding noiselessly along the dark corridors, a word of warning from an unseen source, cause the reader to wait with hushed attention for the unfolding of the mystery.
Sometimes the solution is trivial. The reader and the inmates of Udolpho are held in suspense chapter after chapter by some terrible appearance behind a black veil. When Emily ventures to draw the curtain, she drops senseless to the ground. But this appearance turns out to be merely a wax effigy placed there by chance. Often the explanation is more satisfactory. The disappearance of Ludovico during the night from the haunted chamber where he was watching in hopes of meeting the spirits that infested it, makes the most sceptical believe for a time in the reality of the ghostly visitants; and his reappearance at the close of the book, the slave of pirates who had found a secret passage leading from the sea to this room, and had used it as a place of rendezvous, is declared by Sir Walter Scott to meet all the requirements of romance.
But by a series of strange coincidences and dreams Mrs. Radcliffe still makes us feel that the destiny of her characters is shaped by an unseen power. Adeline is led by chance to the very ruin where her unknown father had been murdered years before. She sees in dreams all the incidents of the deed, and a manuscript he had written while in the power of his enemies falls into her hands. Again by chance she finds an asylum in the home of a clergyman, Arnaud La Luc, who proves to be the father of her lover, Theodore Peyrou. It seems to be by the interposition of Providence that Ellena finds her mother and is recognised by her father. So in every tale we are made aware of powers not mortal shaping human destiny.
Mrs. Radcliffe adds to this consciousness of the presence of the supernatural by another, perhaps more legitimate, method. She felt what Wordsworth expressed in Tintern Abbey, written the year after her last novel was published:
And I have felt
A presence that disturbs me with the joy
Of elevated thoughts; a sense sublime
Of something far more deeply interfused,
Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns,
And the round ocean and the living air,
And the blue sky, and in the mind of man;
A motion and a spirit, that impels
All thinking things, all objects of all thought,
And rolls through all things.
Mrs. Radcliffe seldom loses her feeling for nature, and has a strong sense of the effect of environment on her characters. Julia, when in doubt about the fate of Hippolitus, often walked in the evening under the shade of the high trees that environed the abbey. "The dewy coolness of the air refreshed her. The innumerable roseate tints which the parting sun-beams reflected on the rocks above, and the fine vermil glow diffused over the romantic scene beneath, softly fading from the eye as the night shades fell, excited sensations of a sweet and tranquil nature, and soothed her into a temporary forgetfulness of her sorrow." As the happy lovers, Vivaldi and Ellena, are gliding along the Bay of Naples, they hear from the shore the voices of the vine-dressers, as they repose after the labours of the day, and catch the strains of music from fishermen who are dancing on the margin of the sea.
Sometimes nature is prophetic. The whole description of the castle of Udolpho, when Emily first beholds it, is symbolical of the sufferings she is to endure there: "As she gazed, the light died away on its walls, leaving a melancholy purple tint, which spread deeper and deeper, as the thin vapour crept up the mountain, while the battlements above were still tipped with splendour. From these, too, the rays soon faded, and the whole edifice was invested with the solemn duskiness of evening. Silent, lonely, and sublime it seemed to stand the sovereign of the scene, and to frown defiance on all who dared invade its solitary reign." When Emily is happy in the peasant's home in the valley below, she lingers at the casement after the sun has set: "But a clear moonlight that succeeded gave to the landscape what time gives to the scenes of past life, when it softens all their harsh features, and throws over the whole the mellowing shade of distant contemplation." It is this feeling for nature as a constant presence in daily life, now elating the mind with joy, now awakening a sense of foreboding or inspiring terror, and again soothing the mind to repose, that gives to her books a permanent hold upon the imagination and marks their author as a woman of genius.
In her response to nature, she belongs to the Lake School. Scott said of her: "Mrs. Radcliffe has a title to be considered as the first poetess of romantic fiction, that is, if actual rhythm shall not be deemed essential to poetry." Mrs. Smith describes nature as we all know it, as it appears on the canvasses of Constable and Wilson. Mrs. Radcliffe's descriptions of ideal and romantic nature have earned for her the name of the English Salvator Rosa.
Mrs. Radcliffe's characters are not without interest, although they are often mere types. All her heroes and heroines are ladies and gentlemen of native courtesy, superior education, and accomplishments. In The Mysteries of Udolpho she has set forth the education which St. Aubert gave to his daughter, Emily: "St. Aubert cultivated her understanding with the most scrupulous care. He gave her a general view of the sciences, and an exact acquaintance with every part of elegant literature. He taught her Latin and English, chiefly that she might understand the sublimity of their best poets. She discovered in her early years a taste for works of genius; and it was St. Aubert's principle, as well as his inclination, to promote every innocent means of happiness. 'A well informed mind,' he would say, 'is the best security against the contagion of vice and folly.'"
In all their circumstances her characters are well-bred. This type has been nearly lost in literature, due, perhaps, to the minuter study of manners and the analysis of character. When an author surveys his ladies and gentlemen through a reading-glass, and points the finger at their oddities and pries into their inmost secrets, even the Chesterfields become awkward and clownish. But Mrs. Radcliffe, like Mrs. Smith, is a true gentlewoman, and speaks of her characters with the delicate respect of true gentility. Julia, Adeline, Emily, and Ellena, the heroines of four of her books, love nature, and while away the melancholy hours by playing on the lute or writing poetry, and are, moreover, well qualified to have charge of a baronial castle and its dependencies. Her heroes are worthy of her heroines. As they are generally seen in the presence of ladies, if they have vices there is no occasion for their display.
It is only in the characters of her villains that good and evil are intertwined, and she awakens our sympathy for them equally with our horror. Monsieur La Motte, a weak man in the power of an unscrupulous one, is the best drawn character in The Romance of the Forest. He has taken Adeline under his protection and has been as a father to her. But before this he had committed a crime which has placed his life in the hands of a powerful marquis. To free himself he consents to surrender Adeline to the marquis, who has become enamoured of her beauty, hoping by the sacrifice of her honour to save his own life. He is agitated in the presence of Adeline, and trembles at the approach of any stranger. Scott said of him, "He is the exact picture of the needy man who has seen better days."
In The Italian, Schedoni, a monk of the order of Black Penitents for whom the novel is named, is guilty of the most atrocious crimes in order that he may further his own ambition, but he is not devoid of natural feeling. Scott says the scene in which he "is in the act of raising his arm to murder his sleeping victim, and discovers her to be his own child, is of a new, grand, and powerful character; and the horrors of the wretch who, on the brink of murder, has just escaped from committing a crime of yet more exaggerated horror, constitute the strongest painting which has been produced by Mrs. Radcliffe's pencil, and form a crisis well fitted to be actually embodied on canvas by some great master."
Every book has one or more gloomy, deep-plotting villains. But all the people of rank bear unmistakable marks of their nobility, even when their natures have become depraved by crime. In this she is the equal of Scott.
In every ruined abbey and castle there is a servant who brings in a comic element and relieves the strained feelings. Peter, Annette, and Paulo are all faithful but garrulous, and often bring disaster upon their masters by overzeal in their service.
When Vivaldi, the hero of The Italian, is brought before the tribunal of the inquisition, his faithful servant, Paulo, rails bitterly at the treatment his master has received. Vivaldi, well knowing the danger which they both incur by too free speech, bids him speak in a whisper:
"'A whisper,' shouted Paulo, 'I scorn to speak in a whisper. I will speak so loud that every word I say shall ring in the ears of all those old black devils on the benches yonder, ay, and those on that mountebank stage, too, that sit there looking so grim and angry, as if they longed to tear us in pieces. They—'
"'Silence,' said Vivaldi with emphasis. 'Paulo, I command you to be silent.'
"'They shall know a bit of my mind,' continued Paulo, without noticing Vivaldi. 'I will tell them what they have to expect from all their cruel usage of my poor master. Where do they expect to go to when they die, I wonder? Though for that matter, they can scarcely go to a worse place than that they are in already, and I suppose it is knowing that which makes them not afraid of being ever so wicked. They shall hear a little plain truth for once in their lives, however; they shall hear—'"
But by this time Paulo is dragged from the room.
The plots of all Mrs. Radcliffe's novels are complicated. A whole skein is knotted and must be unravelled thread by thread. The Mysteries of Udolpho is the most involved. Characters are introduced that are for a time apparently forgotten; one sub-plot appears within another, but at the end each is found necessary to the whole.
The Italian is simpler than the others: the plot is less involved, and there are many strong situations. The opening sentence at once arouses the interests of the reader: "Within the shade of the portico, a person with folded arms, and eyes directed towards the ground, was pacing behind the pillars the whole extent of the pavement, and was apparently so engaged by his own thoughts as not to observe that strangers were approaching. He turned, however, suddenly, as if startled by the sound of steps, and then, without further pausing, glided to a door that opened into the church, and disappeared." Another scene in which the Marchesa Vivaldi and Schedoni are plotting the death of Ellena, is justly famous. The former is actuated by the desire to prevent her son's marriage to a woman of inferior rank; the latter hopes that he may gain an influence over the powerful Marchesa that will lead to his promotion in the church. Their conference, which takes place in the choir of the convent of San Nicolo, is broken in upon by the faint sound of the organ followed by slow voices chanting the first requiem for the dead.
The Italian is generally considered the strongest of Mrs. Radcliffe's novels. It was published in 1797, and was as enthusiastically received as were its predecessors, but for some reason it was the last book Mrs. Radcliffe published. Neither the fame it brought her, nor the eight hundred pounds she received for it from her publishers, tempted its author from her life of retirement. Publicity was distasteful to her. At the age of thirty-four, at an age when many novelists had written nothing, she ceased from writing, and spent the rest of her years either in travel or in the seclusion of her own home.
The novel at this time was not considered seriously as a work of art, and Mrs. Radcliffe may have considered that she was but trifling with time by employing her pen in that way. In looking over the book reviews in The Gentlemen's Magazine for the years from 1790 to 1800, it is significant that, while column after column is spent in lavish praise of a book of medicine or science which the next generation proved to be false, and of poetry that had no merit except that its feet could be counted, seldom is a novel reviewed in its pages. The Mysteries of Udolpho was criticised for its lengthy descriptions, and The Italian was ignored.
The direct influence of these novels on the literature of the nineteenth century cannot be estimated. Mrs. Radcliffe's influence upon her contemporaries can be more easily traced. The year after the publication of The Mysteries of Udolpho Lewis wrote The Monk. This has all the horrors but none of the refined delicacy of Mrs. Radcliffe's work. Robert Charles Maturin borrowed many suggestions from her, and the gentle satire of Northanger Abbey could never have been written if Jane Austen had not herself come under the influence of The Romance of the Forest.
But her greatest influence was upon Scott. The four great realistic novelists of the eighteenth century, Richardson, Fielding, Smollett and Sterne whose influence can be so often traced in Thackeray and Dickens, seem never to have touched the responsive nature of Scott. He edited their works and often spoke in their praise, but that which was deepest and truest in him, which gave birth to his poetry and his novels, seems never to have been aware of their existence. Mrs. Radcliffe and Maria Edgewood were his most powerful teachers.
Andrew Lang in the introduction to Rob Roy in the Border edition of the Waverley Novels calls attention to the fact that Waverley, Guy Mannering, Lovel of The Antiquary, and Frank Osbaldistone were all poets. Not only these men, but others, as Edward Glendinning and Edgar Ravenswood, bear a strong family resemblance to Theodore Peyrou, Valancourt, and Vivaldi, as well as to some of the other less important male characters in Mrs. Radcliffe's novels. Scott's men stand forth more clearly drawn, while Mrs. Radcliffe's are often but dimly outlined. Ellen Douglas, the daughter of an exiled family; the melancholy Flora MacIvor, who whiled away her hours by translating Highland poetry into English; Mary Avenel, dwelling in a remote castle, are all refined, educated gentlewomen such as Mrs. Smith and Mrs. Radcliffe delighted in, and are placed in situations similar to those in which Julia, Adeline, and Emily are found.
But the heroines of Mrs. Smith and Mrs. Radcliffe have a quality which not even Scott has been able to give to his women. It is expressed by a word often used during the reign of the Georges, but since gone out of fashion. They were women of fine sensibilities. Johnson defines this as quickness of feeling, and it has been used to mean a quickness of perception of the soul as distinguished from the intellect. The sensibilities of women may not be finer than those of men, but they respond to a greater variety of emotions. This gives to them a certain evanescent quality which we find in Elizabeth Bennet, Jane Eyre, Maggie Tulliver, Romola, the portraits of Madame Le Brun and Angelica Kauffman, and the poetry of Elizabeth Barrett Browning. This quality men have almost never grasped whether working with the pen or the brush. Rosalind, Juliet, Viola, Beatrice, all possess it; and in a less degree, Diana of the Crossways is true to her sex in this respect. But the features of nearly every famous Madonna, no matter how skilful the artist that painted her, are stiff and wooden when looked at from this point of view, and Scott's heroines, with the possible exception of Jeanie Deans, are immobile when compared with woman as portrayed by many an inferior artist of her own sex.
Scott's complicated plots and his constant introduction of characters who are surrounded by mystery or are living in disguise again suggest Mrs. Radcliffe. Again and again he selected the same scenes that had appealed to her, and in his earlier novels and poems he filled them in with the same details which she had chosen. Perhaps it is due to her influence that all the hills of Scotland, as some critic has observed, become mountains when he touches them: "The sun was nearly set behind the distant mountain of Liddesdale" was the beginning of an early romance to have been entitled Thomas the Rhymer. Knockwinnock Bay in The Antiquary is first seen at sunset, and it is night when Guy Mannering arrives at Ellangowan Castle. Melrose is described by moonlight. The sun as it sets in the Trossachs brings to the mind of Scott the very outlines and colours which Mrs. Radcliffe had used in giving the first appearance of Udolpho, a scene which Scott has highly praised; while these famous lines of James Fitz-James have caught the very essence of one of her favourite spots:
On this bold brow, a lordly tower;
In that soft vale, a lady's bower;
On yonder meadow, far away,
The turrets of a cloister grey!
How blithely might the bugle horn
Chide, on the lake, the lingering morn!
How sweet, at eve, the lover's lute
Chime, when the groves were still and mute!
And, when the midnight moon should lave
Her forehead in the silver wave,
How solemn on the ear would come
The holy matin's distant hum.
In his later works Scott is tediously prosaic in description, far inferior to Mrs. Radcliffe, and in the romantic description of scenery he never excels her. It would seem to be no mere chance that in his poetry and in his earlier novels he has so often struck the same key as did the author of The Mysteries of Udolpho.
Two sisters, Harriet and Sophia Lee, were writing books and finding readers during the time of Mrs. Smith, Mrs. Inchbald, and Mrs. Radcliffe. In 1784, Sophia Lee published a three-volume novel, The Recess, a story of the time of Queen Elizabeth, in which Elizabeth, Mary Queen of Scots, and the earls Leicester, Norfolk, and Essex play important rôles. The two heroines are unacknowledged daughters of Mary Queen of Scots and Norfolk, to whom she has been secretly married during her imprisonment in England. Many other situations in the book are equally fictitious.
The historical novels written in France during the reign of Louis XIV paid no heed to chronology, but men and women whom the author knew well were dressed in the garb of historical personages, and various periods of the past were brought into the space of the story. The Recess was not a masquerade, but the plot and characters slightly picture the reign of Elizabeth. This was one of the first novels in which there was an attempt to represent a past age with something like accuracy. As this was one of the first historical novels, using the term in the modern sense, it had perhaps a right to be one of the poorest; for it is impossible to conceive three volumes of print in which there are fewer sentences that leave any impress on the mind than this once popular novel.
Sophia Lee wrote other novels which are said to be worse than this; but in 1797 she and her sister Harriet, who had the greater imagination, published The Canterbury Tales. Some of those written by Harriet are excellent. According to the story a group of travellers have met at an inn in Canterbury, where they are delayed on account of a heavy fall of snow. To while away the weary hours of waiting, as they are gathered about the fire in true English fashion, they agree, as did the Canterbury pilgrims of long ago, that each one shall tell a story. But the pilgrims whom Chaucer accompanied to the shrine of Thomas à Becket are accurately described, and between the tales they discuss the stories and exchange lively banter in which the nature of each speaker is clearly revealed. In The Canterbury Tales there is little character-drawing. Any one of the stories might have been told by any one of the narrators, and before the conclusion the authors dropped this device.
In the stories that are told the characters are weak, but the plots are interesting and many of them original and clever. These Tales represent the beginning of the modern short story.
In a preface to a complete edition of the Tales published in 1832, Harriet Lee wrote:
"Before I finally dismiss the subject, I think I may be permitted to observe that, when these volumes first appeared, a work bearing distinctly the title of Tales, professedly adapted to different countries, and either abruptly commencing with, or breaking suddenly into, a sort of dramatic dialogue, was a novelty in the fiction of the day. Innumerable Tales of the same stamp, and adapted in the same manner to all classes and all countries, have since appeared; with many of which I presume not to compete in merit, though I think I may fairly claim priority of design and style."
The Canterbury Tales were read and reread a long time after they were written. A critic in Blackwood's says of them:
"They exhibit more of that species of invention which, as we have already remarked, was never common in English literature than any of the works of the first-rate novelists we have named, with the single exception of Fielding."
The most famous story of the collection is Kruitzener, or the German's Tale. Part of the story is laid in Silesia during the Thirty Years' War. Frederick Kruitzener, a Bohemian, is the hero, if such a term may be used for so weak a man. In his youth he is thus described:
"The splendour, therefore, which the united efforts of education, fortune, rank, and the merits of his progenitors threw around him, was early mistaken for a personal gift—a sort of emanation proceeding from the lustre of his own endowments, and for which, as he believed, he was indebted to nature, he resolved not to be accountable to man.... He was distinguished!—he saw it—he felt it—he was persuaded he should ever be so; and while yet a youth in the house of his father—dependent on his paternal affection, and entitled to demand credit of the world merely for what he was to be—he secretly looked down on that world as made only for him."
The tale traces the troubles which Kruitzener brings upon himself, his misery and his death. It belongs to romantic literature; the mountain scenes, a palace with secret doors, a secret gallery, a false friend, a mysterious murder, all these remind us of Mrs. Radcliffe's novels, but the story does not possess her power or her poetic charm. Ernest Hartley Coleridge said of this tale: "But the motif—a son predestined to evil by the weakness and sensuality of his father, a father's punishment for his want of rectitude by the passionate criminality of his son, is the very key-note of tragedy."
Byron read this story when he was about fourteen, and it affected him powerfully. By a strange coincidence Kruitzener bears a strong resemblance to Lord Byron himself. He was proud and melancholy, and, while he led a life of pleasure, his spirits were always wrapped in gloom. "It made a deep impression on me," writes Byron, "and may, indeed, be said to contain the germ of much that I have since written." In 1821, he dramatised it under the title of Werner, or the Inheritance. The play follows the novel closely both in plot and conversation. An editor of Byron's works wrote of it: "There is not one incident in his play, not even the most trivial, that is not in Miss Lee's novel. And then as to the characters—not only is every one of them to be found in Kruitzener, but every one is there more fully and powerfully developed."
The Landlady's Tale is far superior to all others in the collection, if judged by present-day standards. This story of sin and its punishment reminds one in its moral earnestness of George Eliot. Mr. Mandeville had brought ruin upon a poor girl, Mary Lawson, whose own child died, when she became the wet nurse of Robert, Mr. Mandeville's legitimate son and heir. Mary grew to love the boy, but, when the father threatened to expose her character unless she would continue to be his mistress, she ran away, taking the infant with her. She became a servant in a lodging-house in Weymouth, where she lived for fifteen years, respected and beloved. At the end of that time, Mr. Mandeville came to the house as a lodger, where he neither recognised Mary nor knew his son. But he disliked Robert, and paid no heed to the fact that one of his own servants was leading the boy into evil ways. When Robert was accused of a crime which his own servant had committed, he saw him sent to prison and later transported with indifference. The grief of the father when he learned that Robert was his own child was most poignant, and his unavailing efforts to save him are vividly told. He is left bowed with grief, for he suffers under the double penalty of "a reproachful world and a reproaching conscience."