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.