"an inspired and desperate alchymist Staking his very life on some dark hope,"
and cries:
"O that the dream
Of dark magician in his visioned cave
Raking the cinders of a crucible
For life and power, even when his feeble hand
Shakes in its last decay, were the true law
Of this so lonely world."
In the Ode to the West Wind his memories of an older and finer kind of romance suggested the fantastic comparison of the dead leaves to
"ghosts from an enchanter fleeing,"
and in Prometheus Unbound Panthea sees
"unimaginable shapes Such as ghosts dream dwell in the lampless deeps."
The poem Ginevra, which describes an enforced wedding and the death of the bride at the sight of her real lover, may well have been inspired by reading the romances of terror, where such events are an everyday occurrence. The gruesome descriptions in The Revolt of Islam, the decay of the garden in The Sensitive Plant, the tortures of Prometheus, all show how Shelley strove to work on the instinctive emotion of fear. In The Cenci he touches the profoundest depths of human passion, and shows his power of finding words, terrible in their simple grandeur, for a soul in agony. In the tragedies of Shakespeare and of his followers—Ford, Webster and Tourneur—Shelley had heard the true language of anguish and despair. The futile, frenzied shrieking of Matilda and her kind is forgotten in the passionate nobility or fearful calm of the speeches of Beatrice Cenci.
CHAPTER VII - SATIRES ON THE NOVEL OF TERROR.
A conflict between "sense and sensibility" was naturally to be expected; and, the year after Mrs. Radcliffe published The Italian, Jane Austen had completed her Northanger Abbey, ridiculing the "horrid" school of fiction. It is noteworthy that for the Mysteries of Udolpho Mrs. Radcliffe received £500, and for The Italian £800; while for the manuscript of Northanger Abbey, the bookseller paid Jane Austen the ungenerous sum of £10, selling it again later to Henry Austen for the same amount. The contrast in market value is significant. The publisher, who, it may be added, was not necessarily a literary critic, probably realised that if the mock romance were successful, its tendency would be to endanger the popularity of the prevailing mode in fiction. Hence for many years it was concealed as effectively as if it had lain in the haunted apartment of one of Mrs. Radcliffe's Gothic abbeys. Among Jane Austen's early unpublished writings were "burlesques ridiculing the improbable events and exaggerated sentiments which she had met with in sundry silly romances"; but her spirited defence of the novelist's art in Northanger Abbey is clear evidence that her raillery is directed not against fiction in general, but rather against such "horrid" stories as those included in the list supplied to Isabella Thorpe by "a Miss Andrews, one of the sweetest creatures in the world."