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 roles. 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 a 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."