A History of English Romanticism in the Eighteenth Century

by Henry A. Beers

that is,

"I would give many a sugar cane
Monk Lewis were alive again."

Scott's modesty led him to depreciate his own verses as compared with Lewis', some of which he recited to Ballantyne, in 1799, speaking of their author, says Lockhart, "with rapture." But however fine an ear for rhythm Lewis may have had, his verse is for the most part execrable; and his jaunty, jiggling anapaests and pragmatic manner are ludicrously out of keeping with the horrors of his tale, increasing the air of bathos which distinguishes his poetry:

"A toad still alive in the liquor she threw,
And loud shrieked the toad as in pieces it flew:
And ever, the cauldron as over she bent,
She muttered strange words of mysterious intent:"

or this from the same ballad:[33]

"Wild laughing, the Fiend caught the hand from the floor,
Releasing the babe, kissed the wound, drank the gore;
A little jet ring from her finger then drew,
Thrice shrieked a loud shriek and was borne from their view."

Lewis would appear to have inherited his romantic turn from his mother, a sentimental little dame whose youthful looks caused her often to be taken for Mat's sister, and whose reading was chiefly confined to novels. The poor lady was something of a blue-stocking and aspired, herself, to literary honors. Lewis' devotion to her is very charming, and the elder-brotherly tone of his letters to her highly amusing. But he had a dislike of "female authorship": and the rumor having reached his ear that his mother had written a novel and a tragedy and was preparing to print them, he wrote to her in alarm, begging her to stay her hand. "I hold that a woman has no business to be a public character, and that, in proportion as she acquires notoriety, she loses delicacy. I always consider a female author as a sort of half-man." He was also, quite properly, shocked at some gossip which attributed "The Monk," to his mother instead of to his mother's son.

We read in the "Life and Correspondence of Matthew Gregory Lewis" (2 vols., London, 1839), that one of Mrs. Lewis' favorite books was "Glanvil on Witches." Glanvil was the seventeenth-century writer whose "Vanity of Dogmatizing,"[34] and "Sadduceismus Triumphatus" rebuked the doubter and furnished arguments for Cotton Mather's "Wonders of the Invisible World" (1693), an apology for his share in the Salem witchcraft trials; and whose description of a ghostly drum, that was heard to beat every night in a Wiltshire country house, gave Addison the hint for his comedy of "The Drummer." Young Lewis gloated with a pleasing horror over Glanvil's pages and the wonderful copperplates which embellished them; particularly the one which represents the devil beating his airy tympanum over Mr. Mompesson's house. In the ancient mansion of Stanstead Hall, belonging to a kinsman of his father, where the boy spent a part of his childhood, there was a haunted chamber known as the cedar room. "In maturer years," says his biographer, "Lewis has frequently been heard to declare that at night, when he was conducted past that gloomy chamber, on the way to his dormitory, he would cast a glance of terror over his shoulder, expecting to see the huge and strangely carved folding doors fly open and disclose some of those fearful shapes that afterward resolved themselves into the ghastly machinery of his works."

Lewis' first and most celebrated publication was "Ambrosio, or the Monk" (1795), a three-volume romance of the Gothic type, and a lineal descendant of Walpole and Mrs. Radcliffe. He began it at Oxford in 1792, describing it in a letter to his mother as "a romance in the style of 'The Castle of Otranto.'" But in the summer of the same year he went to Germany and took up his residence at Weimar, where he was introduced to Goethe and made eager acquaintance with the bizarre productions of the Sturm- und Drangperiode. For years Lewis was one of the most active intermediaries between the German purveyors of the terrible and the English literary market. He fed the stage with melodramas and operas, and stuffed the closet reader with ballads and prose romances.[35] Meanwhile, being at The Hague in the summer of 1794, he resumed and finished his "Monk," in ten weeks. "I was induced to go on with it," he wrote to his mother, "by reading the 'Mysteries of Udolpho,' which is, in my opinion, one of the most interesting books that has ever been published. . . When you read it, tell me whether you think there is any resemblance between the character given of Montoni . . . and my own. I confess that it struck me." This innocent vanity of fancying a likeness between Anne Radcliffe's dark-browed villain and his own cherubic personality recalls Scott's story about the picture of Lewis, by Saunders, which was handed round at Dalkeith House. "The artist had ingeniously flung a dark folding-mantle around the form, under which was half-hid a dagger, a dark lantern, or some cut-throat appurtenance; with all this, the features were preserved and ennobled. It passed from hand to hand into that of Henry, Duke of Buccleuch, who, hearing the general voice affirm that it was very like, said aloud, 'Like Mat Lewis! Why, that picture's like a man.'" "The Monk" used, and abused, the now familiar apparatus of Gothic romance. It had Spanish grandees, heroines of dazzling beauty, bravoes and forest banditti, foolish duennas and gabbling domestics, monks, nuns, inquisitors, magic mirrors, enchanted wands, midnight incantations, sorcerers, ghosts, demons; haunted chambers, wainscoated in dark oak; moonlit castles with ruined towers and ivied battlements, whose galleries rang with the shrieks and blasphemies of guilty spirits, and from whose portals issued, when the castle clock tolled one, the specter of a bleeding nun, with dagger and lamp in hand. There were poisonings, stabbings, and ministrations of sleeping potions; beauties who masqueraded as pages, and pages who masqueraded as wandering harpers; secret springs that gave admittance to winding stairs leading down into the charnel vaults of convents, where erring sisters were immured by cruel prioresses and fed on bread and water among the loathsome relics of the dead.

With all this, "The Monk" is a not wholly contemptible work. There is a certain narrative power about it which puts it much above the level of "The Castle of Otranto." And though it partakes of the stilted dialogue and false conception of character that abound in Mrs. Radcliffe's romances, it has neither the excess of scenery nor of sentiment which distinguishes that very prolix narrator. There is nothing strictly mediaeval about it. The knight in armor cuts no figure and the historical period is not precisely indicated. But the ecclesiastical features lend it a semblance of mediaevalism; and one is reminded, though but faintly, by the imprisonment of the offending sister in the sepulcher of the convent, of the scene in "Marmion" where Constance is immured in the vaults of Lindisfarne—a frank anachronism, of course, on Scott's part, since Lindisfarne had been in ruins centuries before the battle of Flodden. The motto from Horace on the title page of "The Monk" sums up its contents, and indeed the contents of most of its author's writings, prose and verse—