“boasts an English heart,
Unused at ghosts or rattling bones to start.”
Jane Austen, of course, could never have written Northanger Abbey had she not enjoyed Mrs. Radcliffe; and we say at once that those delightfully absurd chapters in which Catherine is allowed to indulge in the most unfounded suspicions of General Tilney, are not substantially unfair to the famous wife of William Radcliffe, Esq.; as the artless conversations between Miss Morland and Miss Thorpe no doubt justly reflect the deep interest excited by her stories in the young and inexperienced. We do not readily, to-day, admire so much “exuberance and fertility of imagination”: we have little, or no, patience with “adventures heaped on adventures in quick and brilliant succession, with all the hairbreadth charms of escape or capture,” resembling some “splendid Oriental tale.”
But there can be no question that Mrs. Radcliffe achieved, in three admirable examples, a perfectly legitimate attempt—the establishment of that School of Terror inaugurated by no less brilliant a writer than Horace Walpole (in his Castle of Otranto, 1764), and seldom revived in England with any success.
It is true that very careful criticism of her methods may discover their artificiality. “Her heroines voluntarily expose themselves to situations which, in nature, a lonely female would certainly have avoided. They are too apt to choose the midnight hour for investigating the mysteries of a deserted chamber or secret passage, and generally are only supplied,” like Mr. Pickwick, “with an expiring lamp when about to read the most interesting documents.” But Emily St. Aubert is not surely designed for comparison with even that “imbecility in females” which Henry Tilney declared to be “a great enhancement of their personal charms.” She is a heroine, not a woman; and if, unlike Walpole, Mrs. Radcliffe demands, and supplies, a material explanation of all supernatural appearances, she yet allows her imagination to wander freely over the realms of superstitious alarm, wherein the reason of woman cannot presumably hold sway. Certainly, had Emily been less impulsive she would have missed many opportunities of proving herself courageous.
I cannot myself, however, entirely avoid the impression that, in their natural desire for classification, the critics have laid undue stress on Mrs. Radcliffe’s use of Mystery. In the three hundred and four, double column, pages of Udolpho there are, besides occasional voices, only three definite examples of this artifice—the waxen figure behind the veil, the moving pall, and the disappearance of Ludovico. The main plot is really no more than a spirited example of the conventional Romance-plan (in the development of which she is wittily said to have invented Lord Byron)—an involved narrative of terrible sufferings and dangers incurred by an immaculate heroine, of unmeasured tyranny and violence exerted by a melancholy villain, of protracted misunderstandings concerning the gallant hero, with hurried explanations all round in the last chapter to justify the wedding-bells.
Obviously there is no realism here. Everything depends upon conscious exaggeration: whether it be a description of “the Apennines in their darkest horrors,” or of a “gloomy and sublime” castle’s “mouldering walls”; of crime indulged without restraint, or innocence unsullied by the world. Montoni is not more inhuman in his passion than Emily in the “tender elevation of her mind.”
For despite the most solemn warnings of St. Aubert (quoted above), his Emily has far more sensibility than any of Miss Burney’s heroines, and exemplifies the dangerous doctrine that “virtue and taste are nearly the same.” She and Valancourt, indeed, were indifferent to “the frivolities of common life”; their “ideas were simple and grand, like the landscapes among which they moved”; their sentiments spontaneously “arranged themselves” in original verse.
The fact is, that Scott’s startlingly generous estimate suggests several sound conclusions: by dwelling upon the genuine poetical feeling to be observed in Mrs. Radcliffe’s romances, and the sincerity of her sympathy with nature. Though it has been remarked, with some justice, that “as her story is usually enveloped in mystery, so there is, as it were, a haze over her landscapes”; and that, “were six artists to attempt to embody the Castle of Udolpho upon canvas, they would probably produce six drawings entirely dissimilar to each other, all of them equally authorised by the printed description.”
Mrs. Inchbald (1753-1821), on the other hand, followed the new school in writing simple narratives of everyday life; but she produced little more than a pale imitation of The Man of Feeling (1771), by Henry Mackenzie, the only masculine exponent of “sensibility”; though her Simple Story (1791) and Nature and Art (1796) have been frequently reprinted. She aimed at dissecting the human heart, as Richardson had done; and there is, admittedly, a certain melodramatic, and almost decadent, charm in her work.
Maria Edgeworth (1767-1849) was, certainly, the most prominent of our novelists between Fanny Burney and Jane Austen. Being a girl of eleven when Evelina was published, she lived to witness the triumph of Vanity Fair. Living beyond her eighth decade, she produced over sixty books. Having inspired Scott, on his own testimony, to the production of the Waverley Novels, she actually inaugurated, promoted, or established at least four forms of fiction more or less new to her contemporaries.