The Gothic Revival.
One of Thomas Warton's sonnets was addressed to Richard Hurd, afterward
Bishop of Lichfield and Coventry, and later of Worcester. Hurd was a
friend of Gray and Mason, and his "Letters on Chivalry and Romance"
(1762) helped to initiate the romantic movement. They perhaps owed their
inspiration, in part, to Sainte Palaye's "Mémoires sur l'ancienne
Chevalerie," the first volume of which was issued in 1759, though the
third and concluding volume appeared only in 1781. This was a monumental
work and, as a standard authority, bears much the same relation to the
literature of its subject that Mallet's "Histoire de Dannemarc" bears to
all the writing on Runic mythology that was done in Europe during the
eighteenth-century. Jean Baptiste de la Curne de Sainte Palaye was a
scholar of wide learning, not only in the history of mediaeval
institutions but in old French dialects. He went to the south of France
to familiarize himself with Provençal: collected a large library of
Provençal books and manuscripts, and published in 1774 his "Histoire de
Troubadours." Among his other works are a "Dictionary of French
Antiquities," a glossary of Old French, and an edition of "Aucassin et
Nicolete." Mrs. Susannah Dobson, who wrote "Historical Anecdotes of
Heraldry and Chivalry" (1795), made an English translation of Sainte
Palaye's "History of the Troubadours" in 1779, and of his "Memoirs of
Ancient Chivalry" in 1784.
The purpose of Hurd's letters was to prove "the pre-eminence of the
Gothic manners and fictions, as adapted to the ends of poetry, above the
classic." "The greatest geniuses of our own and foreign countries," he
affirms, "such as Ariosto and Tasso in Italy, and Spenser and Milton in
England, were seduced by these barbarities of their forefathers; were
even charmed by the Gothic romances. Was this caprice and absurdity in
them? Or may there not be something in the Gothic Romance peculiarly
suited to the view of a genius and to the ends of poetry? And may not
the philosophic moderns have gone too far in their perpetual ridicule and
contempt of it?" After a preliminary discussion of the origin of
chivalry and knight-errantry and of the ideal knightly characteristics,
"Prowess, Generosity, Gallantry, and Religion," which he derives from the
military necessities of the feudal system, he proceeds to establish a
"remarkable correspondency between the manners of the old heroic times,
as painted by their romancer, Homer, and those which are represented to
us in the books of modern knight-errantry." He compares, _e.g._, the
Laestrygonians, Cyclopes_, _Circes, and Calypsos of Homer, with the
giants, paynims, sorceresses encountered by the champions of romance; the
Greek aoixoi with the minstrels; the Olympian games with tournaments; and
the exploits of Hercules and Theseus, in quelling dragons and other
monsters, with the similar enterprises of Lancelot and Amadis de Gaul.
The critic is daring enough to give the Gothic manners the preference
over the heroic. Homer, he says, if he could have known both, would have
chosen the former by reason of "the improved gallantry of the feudal
times, and the superior solemnity of their superstitions. The gallantry
which inspirited the feudal times was of a nature to furnish the poet
with finer scenes and subjects of description, in every view, than the
simple and uncontrolled barbarity of the Grecian. . . There was a
dignity, a magnificence, a variety in the feudal, which the other wanted."
An equal advantage, thinks Hurd, the romancers enjoyed over the pagan
poets in the point of supernatural machinery. "For the more solemn
fancies of witchcraft and incantation, the horrors of the Gothic were
above measure striking and terrible. The mummeries of the pagan priests
were childish, but the Gothic enchanters shook and alarmed all
nature. . . You would not compare the Canidia of Horace with the witches
in 'Macbeth.' And what are Virgil's myrtles, dropping blood, to Tasso's
enchanted forest?. . . The fancies of our modern bards are not only more
gallant, but . . . more sublime, more terrible, more alarming than those
of the classic fables. In a word, you will find that the manners they
paint, and the superstitions they adopt, are the more poetical for being
Gothic."
Evidently the despised "Gothick" of Addison--as Mr. Howells puts it--was
fast becoming the admired "Gothic" of Scott. This pronunciamento of very
advanced romantic doctrine came out several years before Percy's
"Reliques" and "The Castle of Otranto." It was only a few years later
than Thomas Warton's "Observations on the Faërie Queene" and Joseph's
"Essay on Pope," but its views were much more radical. Neither of the
Wartons would have ventured to pronounce the Gothic manners superior to
the Homeric, as materials for poetry, whatever, in his secret heart, he
might have thought.[1] To Johnson such an opinion must have seemed flat
blasphemy. Hurd accounts for the contempt into which the Gothic had
fallen on the ground that the feudal ages had never had the good fortune
to possess a great poet, like Homer, capable of giving adequate artistic
expression to their life and ideals. _Carent vate sacro_. Spenser and
Tasso, he thinks, "came too late, and it was impossible for them to paint
truly and perfectly what was no longer seen or believed. . . As it is,
we may take a guess of what the subject was capable of affording to real
genius from the rude sketches we have of it in the old romancers. . .
The ablest writers of Greece ennobled the system of heroic manners, while
it was fresh and flourishing; and their works being masterpieces of
composition, so fixed the credit of it in the opinion of the world, that
no revolution of time and taste could afterward shake it. Whereas the
Gothic, having been disgraced in their infancy by bad writers, and a new
set of manners springing up before there were any better to do them
justice, they could never be brought into vogue by the attempts of later
poets." Moreover, "the Gothic manners of chivalry, as springing out of
the feudal system, were as singular as that system itself; so that when
that political constitution vanished out of Europe, the manners that
belonged to it were no longer seen or understood. There was no example
of any such manners remaining on the face of the earth. And as they
never did subsist but once, and are never likely to subsist again, people
would be led of course to think and speak of them as romantic and
unnatural."
Even so, he thinks that the Renaissance poets, Ariosto and Spenser, owe
their finest effects not to their tinge of classical culture but to their
romantic materials. Shakspere "is greater when he uses Gothic manners
and machinery, than when he employs classical." Tasso, to be sure, tried
to trim between the two, by giving an epic form to his romantic
subject-matter, but Hurd pronounces his imitations of the ancients "faint
and cold and almost insipid, when compared with his original
fictions. . . If it was not for these _lies_ [_magnanima mensogna_] of
Gothic invention, I should scarcely be disposed to give the 'Gierusalemme
Liberata' a second reading." Nay, Milton himself, though finally
choosing the classic model, did so only after long hesitation. "His
favorite subject was Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table. On this
he had fixed for the greater part of his life. What led him to change
his mind was partly, as I suppose, his growing fanaticism; partly his
ambition to take a different route from Spenser; but chiefly, perhaps,
the discredit into which the stories of chivalry had now fallen by the
immortal satire of Cervantes. Yet we see through all his poetry, where
his enthusiasm flames out most, a certain predilection for the legends of
chivalry before the fables of Greece." Hurd says that, if the "Faërie
Queene" be regarded as a Gothic poem, it will be seen to have unity of
design, a merit which even the Wartons had denied it. "When an architect
examines a Gothic structure by the Grecian rules he finds nothing but
deformity. But the Gothic architecture has its own rules by which; when
it comes to be examined, it is seen to have its merit, as well as the
Grecian."
The essayist complains that the Gothic fables fell into contempt through
the influence of French critics who ridiculed and disparaged the Italian
romancers, Ariosto and Tasso. The English critics of the
Restoration--Davenant, Hobbes, Shaftesbury--took their cue from the
French, till these pseudo-classical principles "grew into a sort of a
cant, with which Rymer and the rest of that school filled their flimsy
essays and rumbling prefaces. . . The exact but cold Boileau happened to
say something about the _clinquant_ of Tasso," and "Mr. Addison,[2] who
gave the law in taste here, took it up and sent it about," so that "it
became a sort of watchword among the critics." "What we have gotten,"
concludes the final letter of the series, "by this revolution, is a great
deal of good sense. What we have lost is a world of fine fabling, the
illusion of which is so grateful to the _charméd spirit_ that, in spite
of philosophy and fashion 'Faery' Spenser still ranks highest among the
poets; I mean with all those who are earlier come of that house, or have
any kindness for it."
We have seen that, during the classical period, "Gothic," as a term in
literary criticism, was synonymous with barbarous, lawless, and tawdry.
Addison instructs his public that "the taste of most of our English
poets, as well as readers, is extremely Gothic."[3] After commending the
French critics, Bouhours and Boileau, for their insistence upon good
sense, justness of thought, simplicity, and naturalness he goes on as
follows: "Poets who want this strength of genius, to give that majestic
simplicity to nature which we so much admire in the works of the
ancients, are forced to hunt after foreign ornaments, and not to let any
piece of wit, of what kind soever, escape them. I look upon these
writers as Goths in poetry, who, like those in architecture, not being
able to come up to the beautiful simplicity of the old Greeks and Romans,
have endeavored to supply its place with all the extravagances of an
irregular fancy." In the following paper (No. 63), an "allegorical
vision of the encounter of True and False Wit," he discovers, "in a very
dark grove, a monstrous fabric, built after the Gothic manner and covered
with innumerable devices in that barbarous kind of sculpture." This
temple is consecrated to the God of Dullness, who is "dressed in the
habit of a monk." In his essay "On Taste" (No. 409) he says, "I have
endeavored, in several of my speculations, to banish this Gothic taste
which has taken possession among us."
The particular literary vice which Addison strove to correct in these
papers was that conceited style which infected a certain school of
seventeenth-century poetry, running sometimes into such puerilities as
anagrams, acrostics, echo-songs, rebuses, and verses in the shape of
eggs, wings, hour-glasses, etc. He names, as special representatives of
this affectation, Herbert, Cowley, and Sylvester. But it is significant
that Addison should have described this fashion as Gothic. It has in
reality nothing in common with the sincere and loving art of the old
builders. He might just as well have called it classic; for, as he
acknowledges, devices of the kind are to be found in the Greek anthology,
and Ovid was a poet given to conceits. Addison was a writer of pure
taste, but the coldness and timidity of his imagination, and the maxims
of the critical school to which he belonged, made him mistake for
spurious decoration the efflorescence of that warm, creative fancy which
ran riot in Gothic art. The grotesque, which was one expression of this
sappy vigor, was abhorrent to Addison. The art and poetry of his time
were tame, where Gothic art was wild; dead where Gothic was alive. He
could not sympathize with it, nor understand it. "Vous ne pouvez pas le
comprendre; vous avez toujours haï la vie."
I have quoted Vicesimus Knox's complaint that the antiquarian spirit was
spreading from architecture and numismatics into literature.[4] We meet
with satire upon antiquaries many years before this; in Pope, in
Akenside's Spenserian poem "The Virtuoso" (1737); in Richard Owen
Cambridge's "Scribleriad" (1751):
"See how her sons with generous ardor strive,
Bid every long-lost Gothic art revive,. . .
Each Celtic character explain, or show
How Britons ate a thousand years ago;
On laws of jousts and tournaments declaim,
Or shine, the rivals of the herald's fame.
But chief that Saxon wisdom be your care,
Preserve their idols and their fanes repair;
And may their deep mythology be shown
By Seater's wheel and Thor's tremendous throne."[5]
The most notable instance that we encounter of virtuosity invading the
neighboring realm of literature is in the case of Strawberry Hill and
"The Castle of Otranto." Horace Walpole, the son of the great prime
minister, Robert Walpole, was a person of varied accomplishments and
undoubted cleverness. He was a man of fashion, a man of taste, and a man
of letters; though, in the first of these characters, he entertained or
affected a contempt for the last, not uncommon in dilettante authors and
dandy artists, who belong to the _beau monde_ or are otherwise socially
of high place, _teste_ Congreve, and even Byron, that "rhyming peer."
Walpole, as we have seen, had been an Eton friend of Gray and had
traveled--and quarreled--with him upon the Continent. Returning home, he
got a seat in Parliament, the entrée at court, and various lucrative
sinecures through his father's influence. He was an assiduous courtier,
a keen and spiteful observer, a busy gossip and retailer of social
tattle. His feminine turn of mind made him a capital letter-writer; and
his correspondence, particularly with Sir Horace Mann, English ambassador
at Florence, is a running history of backstairs diplomacy, court
intrigue, subterranean politics, and fashionable scandal during the
reigns of the second and third Georges. He also figures as an historian
of an amateurish sort, by virtue of his "Catalogue of Royal and Noble
Authors," "Anecdotes of Painting," and "Historic Doubts on Richard III."
Our present concern with him, however, lies quite outside of these.
It was about 1750 that Walpole, who had bought a villa at Strawberry
Hill, on the Thames near Windsor, which had formerly belonged to Mrs.
Chenevix, the fashionable London toy-woman, began to turn his house into
a miniature Gothic castle, in which he is said to have "outlived three
sets of his own battlements." These architectural experiments went on
for some twenty years. They excited great interest and attracted many
visitors, and Walpole may be regarded as having given a real impetus to
the revival of pointed architecture. He spoke of Strawberry Hill as a
castle, but it was, in fact, an odd blend of ecclesiastical and
castellated Gothic applied to domestic uses. He had a cloister, a
chapel, a round tower, a gallery, a "refectory," a stair-turret with
Gothic balustrade, stained windows, mural scutcheons, and Gothic
paper-hangings. Walpole's mock-gothic became something of a
laughing-stock, after the true principles of medieval architecture were
better understood. Since the time when Inigo Jones, court architect to
James I., came back from Italy, where he had studied the works of
Palladio; and especially since the time when his successor, Sir
Christopher Wren, had rebuilt St. Paul's in the Italian Renaissance
style, after the great fire of London in 1664, Gothic had fallen more and
more into disuse. "If in the history of British art," says Eastlake,
"there is one period more distinguished than another for the neglect of
Gothic, it was certainly the middle of the eighteenth century." But
architecture had this advantage over other arts, it had left memorials
more obvious and imposing. Medieval literature was known only to the
curious, to collectors of manuscript romances and black-letter ballads.
The study of medieval arts like tempera painting, illuminating,
glass-staining, wood-carving, tapestry embroidery; of the science of
blazonry, of the details of ancient armor and costumes, was the pursuit
of specialists. But Westminster Abbey, the Tower of London, Salisbury
Cathedral, and York Minster, ruins such as Melrose and Fountain Abbeys,
Crichton Castle, and a hundred others were impressive witnesses for the
civilization that had built them and must, sooner or later, demand
respectful attention. Hence it is not strange that the Gothic revival
went hand in hand with the romantic movement in literature, if indeed it
did not give it its original impulse.
"It is impossible," says Eastlake,[6] speaking of Walpole, "to peruse
either the letters or the romances of this remarkable man, without being
struck by the unmistakable evidence which they contain of his medieval
predilections. His 'Castle of Otranto' was perhaps the first modern work
of fiction which depended for its interest on the incidents of a
chivalrous age, and it thus became the prototype of that class of novel
which was afterward imitated by Mrs. Radcliffe and perfected by Sir
Walter Scott. The feudal tyrant, the venerable ecclesiastic, the forlorn
but virtuous damsel, the castle itself with its moats and drawbridge, its
gloomy dungeons and solemn corridors, are all derived from a mine of
interest which has since been worked more efficiently and to better
profit. But to Walpole must be awarded the credit of its discovery and
first employment."
Walpole's complete works[7] contain elaborate illustrations and ground
plans of Strawberry Hill. Eastlake give a somewhat technical account of
its constructive features, its gables, buttresses, finials, lath and
plaster parapets, wooden pinnacles and, what its proprietor himself
describes as his "lean windows fattened with rich saints." From this I
extract only the description of the interior, which was "just what one
might expect from a man who possessed a vague admiration for Gothic
without the knowledge necessary for a proper adaptation of its features.
Ceilings, screens, niches, etc., are all copied, or rather parodied, from
existing examples, but with utter disregard for the original purpose of
the design. To Lord Orford, Gothic was Gothic, and that sufficed. He
would have turned an altar-slab into a hall-table, or made a cupboard of
a piscine, with the greatest complacency, if it only served his purpose.
Thus we find that in the north bed-chamber, when he wanted a model for
his chimney-piece, he thought he could not do better than adopt the form
of Bishop Dudley's tomb in Westminster Abbey. He found a pattern for the
piers of his garden gate in the choir of Ely Cathedral." The ceiling of
the gallery borrowed a design from Henry VII.'s Chapel; the entrance to
the same apartment from the north door of St. Alban's; and one side of
the room from Archbishop Bourchier's tomb at Canterbury. Eastlake's
conclusion is that Walpole's Gothic, "though far from reflecting the
beauties of a former age, or anticipating those which were destined to
proceed from a re-development of the style, still holds a position in the
history of English art which commands our respect, for it served to
sustain a cause which had otherwise been well-nigh forsaken."
James Fergusson, in his "History of the Modern Styles of Architecture,"
says of Walpole's structures: "We now know that these are very
indifferent specimens of the true Gothic art, and are at a loss to
understand how either their author or his contemporaries could ever fancy
that these very queer carvings were actual reproductions of the details
of York Minster, or other equally celebrated buildings, from which they
were supposed to have been copied." Fergusson adds that the fashion set
by Walpole soon found many followers both in church and house
architecture, "and it is surprising what a number of castles were built
which had nothing castellated about them except a nicked parapet and an
occasional window in the form of a cross." That school of bastard Gothic
illustrated by the buildings of Batty Langley, and other early restorers
of the style, bears an analogy with the imitations of old English poetry
in the last century. There was the same prematurity in both, the same
defective knowledge, crudity, uncertainty, incorrectness, feebleness of
invention, mixture of ancient and modern manners. It was not until the
time of Pugin[8] that the details of the medieval building art were well
enough understood to enable the architect to work in the spirit of that
art, yet not as a servile copyist, but with freedom and originality.
Meanwhile, one service that Walpole and his followers did, by reviving
public interest in Gothic, was to arrest the process of dilapidation and
save the crumbling remains of many a half-ruinous abbey, castle, or
baronial hall. Thus, "when about a hundred years since, Rhyddlan Castle,
in North Wales, fell into the possession of Dr. Shipley, Dean of St.
Asaph, the massive walls had been prescriptively used as stone quarries,
to which any neighboring occupier who wanted building materials might
resort; and they are honey-combed all round as high as a pick-ax could
reach."[9] "Walpole," writes Leslie Stephen, "is almost the first modern
Englishman who found out that our old cathedrals were really beautiful.
He discovered that a most charming toy might be made of medievalism.
Strawberry Hill, with all its gimcracks, its pasteboard battlements and
stained-paper carvings, was the lineal ancestor of the new law-courts.
The restorers of churches, the manufacturers of stained glass, the modern
decorators and architects of all varieties, the Ritualists and the High
Church party, should think of him with kindness. . . That he was quite
conscious of the necessity for more serious study, appears in his
letters; in one of which, _e.g._, he proposes a systematic history of
Gothic architecture such as has since been often executed."[10] Mr.
Stephen adds that Walpole's friend Gray "shared his Gothic tastes, with
greatly superior knowledge."
Walpole did not arrive at his Gothicism by the gate of literature. It
was merely a specialized development of his tastes as a virtuoso and
collector. The museum of curiosities which he got together at Strawberry
Hill included not only suits of armor, stained glass, and illuminated
missals, but a miscellaneous treasure of china ware, enamels, faïence,
bronzes, paintings, engravings, books, coins, bric-a-brac, and
memorabilia such as Cardinal Wolsey's hat, Queen Elizabeth's glove, and
the spur that William III. wore at the Battle of the Boyne. Walpole's
romanticism was a thin veneering; underneath it, he was a man of the
eighteenth century. His opinions on all subjects were, if not
inconsistent, at any rate notoriously whimsical and ill-assorted. Thus
in spite of his admiration for Gray and his--temporary--interest in
Ossian, Chatterton, and Percy's ballads, he ridiculed Mallet's and Gray's
Runic experiments, spoke contemptuously of Spenser, Thomson, and
Akenside, compared Dante to "a Methodist parson in bedlam," and
pronounced "A Midsummer Night's Dream" "forty times more nonsensical than
the worst translation of any Italian opera-books."[11] He said that
poetry died with Pope, whose measure and manner he employed in his own
verses. It has been observed that, in all his correspondence, he makes
but a single mention of Froissart's "Chronicle," and that a sneer at Lady
Pomfret for translating it.
Accordingly we find, on turning to "The Castle of Otranto," that, just as
Walpole's Gothicism was an accidental "sport" from his general
virtuosity; so his romanticism was a casual outgrowth of his
architectural amusements. Strawberry Hill begat "The Castle of Otranto,"
whose title is fitly chosen, since it is the castle itself that is the
hero of the book. The human characters are naught. "Shall I even
confess to you," he writes to the Rev. William Cole (March 9, 1765),
"what was the origin of this romance? I waked one morning in the
beginning of last June from a dream, of which all I could recover was,
that I had thought myself in an ancient castle (a very natural dream for
a head filled, like mine, with Gothic story), and that, on the uppermost
banister of a great staircase, I saw a gigantic hand in armor. In the
evening I sat down and began to write, without knowing in the least what
I intended to say or relate. The work grew on my hands. . . In short, I
was so engrossed with my tale, which I completed in less than two months,
that one evening I wrote from the time I had drunk my tea, about six
o'clock, till half an hour after one in the morning."
"The Castle of Otranto, A Gothic Story," was published in 1765.[12]
According to the title page, it was translated from the original Italian
of Onuphrio Muralto--a sort of half-pun on the author's surname--by W.
Marshall, Gent. This mystification was kept up in the preface, which
pretended that the book had been printed at Naples in black-letter in
1529, and was found in the library of an old Catholic family in the north
of England. In the preface to his second edition Walpole described the
work as "an attempt to blend the two kinds of romance, the ancient and
the modern": declared that, in introducing humorous dialogues among the
servants of the castle, he had taken nature and Shakspere for his models;
and fell foul of Voltaire for censuring the mixture of buffoonery and
solemnity in Shakspere's tragedies. Walpole's claim to having created a
new species of romance has been generally allowed. "His initiative in
literature," says Mr. Stephen, "has been as fruitful as his initiative in
art. 'The Castle of Otranto,' and the 'Mysterious Mother,' were the
progenitors of Mrs. Radcliffe's romances, and probably had a strong
influence upon the author of 'Ivanhoe.' Frowning castles and gloomy
monasteries, knights in armor and ladies in distress, and monks, and
nuns, and hermits; all the scenery and characters that have peopled the
imagination of the romantic school, may be said to have had their origin
on the night when Walpole lay down to sleep, his head crammed full of
Wardour Street curiosities, and dreamed that he saw a gigantic hand in
armor resting on the banisters of his staircase."
It is impossible at this day to take "The Castle of Otranto" seriously,
and hard to explain the respect with which it was once mentioned by
writers of authority. Warburton called it "a master-piece in the Fable,
and a new species likewise. . . The scene is laid in Gothic chivalry;
where a beautiful imagination, supported by strength of judgment, has
enabled the reader to go beyond his subject and effect the full purpose
of the ancient tragedy; _i.e._, to purge the passions by pity and terror,
in coloring as great and harmonious as in any of the best dramatic
writers." Byron called Walpole the author of the last tragedy[13] and
the first romance in the language. Scott wrote of "The Castle of
Otranto": "This romance has been justly considered, not only as the
original and model of a peculiar species of composition attempted and
successfully executed by a man of great genius, but as one of the
standard works of our lighter literature." Gray in a letter to Walpole
(December 30, 1764), acknowledging the receipt of his copy, says: "It
makes some of us cry a little, and all in general afraid to go to bed o'
nights." Walpole's masterpiece can no longer make anyone cry even a
little; and instead of keeping us out of bed, it sends us there--or
would, if it were a trifle longer. For the only thing that is tolerable
about the book is its brevity, and a certain rapidity in the action.
Macaulay, who confesses its absurdity and insipidity, says that no
reader, probably, ever thought it dull. "The story, whatever its value
may be, never flags for a single moment. There are no digressions, or
unreasonable descriptions, or long speeches. Every sentence carries the
action forward. The excitement is constantly renewed." Excitement is
too strong a word to describe any emotion which "The Castle of Otranto"
is now capable of arousing. But the same cleverness which makes
Walpole's correspondence always readable saves his romance from the
unpardonable sin--in literature--of tediousness. It does go along and
may still be read without a too painful effort.
There is nothing very new in the plot, which has all the stock properties
of romantic fiction, as common in the days of Sidney's "Arcadia" as in
those of Sylvanus Cobb. Alfonso, the former lord of Otranto, had been
poisoned in Palestine by his chamberlain Ricardo, who forged a will
making himself Alfonso's heir. To make his peace with God, the usurper
founded a church and two convents in honor of St. Nicholas, who "appeared
to him in a dream and promised that Ricardo's posterity should reign in
Otranto until the rightful owner should be grown too large to inhabit the
castle." When the story opens, this prophecy is about to be fulfilled.
The tyrant Manfred, grandson of the usurper, is on the point of
celebrating the marriage of his only son, when the youth is crushed to
death by a colossal helmet that drops, from nobody knows where, into the
courtyard of the castle. Gigantic armor haunts the castle piecemeal: a
monstrous gauntlet is laid upon the banister of the great staircase; a
mailed foot appears in one apartment; a sword is brought into the
courtyard on the shoulders of a hundred men. And finally the proprietor
of these fragmentary apparitions, in "the form of Alfonso, dilated to an
immense magnitude," throws down the walls of the castle, pronounces the
words "Behold in Theodore the true heir of Alfonso," and with a clap of
thunder ascends to heaven. Theodore is, of course, the young peasant,
grandson of the crusader by a fair Sicilian secretly espoused _en route_
for the Holy Land; and he is identified by the strawberry mark of old
romance, in this instance the figure of a bloody arrow impressed upon his
shoulder. There are other supernatural portents, such as a skeleton with
a cowl and a hollow voice, a portrait which descends from its panel, and
a statue that bleeds at the nose.
The novel feature in the "Castle of Otranto" was its Gothic setting; the
"wind whistling through the battlements"; the secret trap-door, with iron
ring, by which Isabella sought to make her escape. "An awful silence
reigned throughout those subterraneous regions, except now and then some
blasts of wind that shook the doors she had passed, and which, grating on
the rusty hinges, were re-echoed through that long labyrinth of darkness.
The wind extinguished her candle, but an imperfect ray of clouded
moonshine gleamed through a cranny in the roof of the vault and fell
directly on the spring of the trap-door." But Walpole's medievalism was
very thin. He took some pains with the description of the feudal
cavalcade entering the castle gate with the great sword, but the passage
is incorrect and poor in detail compared with similar things in Scott.
The book was not an historical romance, and the manners, sentiments,
language, all were modern. Walpole knew little about the Middle Ages and
was not in touch with their spirit. At bottom he was a trifler, a
fribble; and his incurable superficiality, dilettantism, and want of
seriousness, made all his real cleverness of no avail when applied to
such a subject as "The Castle of Otranto."[14]
Walpole's tragedy, "The Mysterious Mother," has not even that degree of
importance which secures his romance a niche in literary history. The
subject was too unnatural to admit of stage presentation. Incest, when
treated in the manner of Sophocles (Walpole justified himself by the
example of "Oedipus"), or even of Ford, or of Shelley, may possibly claim
a place among the themes which art is not quite forbidden to touch; but
when handled in the prurient and crudely melodramatic fashion of this
particular artist, it is merely offensive. "The Mysterious Mother,"
indeed, is even more absurd than horrible. Gothic machinery is present,
but it is of the slightest. The scene of the action is a castle at
Narbonne and the _châtelaine_ is the heroine of the play. The other
characters are knights, friars, orphaned damsels, and feudal retainers;
there is mention of cloisters, drawbridges, the Vaudois heretics, and the
assassination of Henri III. and Henri IV.; and the author's Whig and
Protestant leanings are oddly evidenced in his exposure of priestly
intrigues.
"The Castle of Otranto" was not long in finding imitators. One of the
first of these was Clara Reeve's "Champion of Virtue" (1777), styled on
its title-page "A Gothic Story," and reprinted the following year as "The
Old English Baron." Under this latter title it has since gone through
thirteen editions, the latest of which, in 1883, gave a portrait of the
author. Miss Reeve had previously published (1772) "The Phoenix," a
translation of "Argenis," "a romance written in Latin about the beginning
of the seventeenth century, by John Barclay, a Scotchman, and supposed to
contain an allegorical account of the civil wars of France during the
reign of Henry III."[15] "Pray," inquires the author of "The Champion of
Virtue" in her address to the reader, "did you ever read a book called,
'The Castle of Otranto'? If you have, you will willingly enter with me
into a review of it. But perhaps you have not read it? However, you
have heard that it is an attempt to blend together the most attractive
and interesting circumstances of the ancient romance and modern
novel. . . The conduct of the story is artful and judicious; and the
characters are admirably drawn and supported; the diction polished and
elegant; yet with all these brilliant advantages, it palls upon the
mind. . . The reason is obvious; the machinery is so violent that it
destroys the effect it is intended to excite. Had the story been kept
within the utmost _verge_ of probability, the effect had been
preserved. . . For instance, we can conceive and allow of the appearance
of a ghost; we can even dispense with an enchanted sword and helmet, but
then they must keep within certain limits of credibility. A sword so
large as to require a hundred men to lift it, a helmet that by its own
weight forces a passage through a court-yard into an arched
vault . . . when your expectation is wound up to the highest pitch, these
circumstances take it down with a witness, destroy the work of
imagination, and, instead of attention, excite laughter. . . In the
course of my observations upon this singular book, it seemed to me that
it was possible to compose a work upon the same plan, wherein these
defects might be avoided."
Accordingly Miss Reeve undertook to admit only a rather mild dose of the
marvelous in her romance. Like Walpole she professed to be simply the
editor of the story, which she said that she had transcribed or
translated from a manuscript in the Old English language, a now somewhat
threadbare device. The period was the fifteenth century, in the reign of
Henry VI., and the scene England. But, in spite of the implication of
its sub-title, the fiction is much less "Gothic" than its model, and its
modernness of sentiment and manners is hardly covered with even the
faintest wash of mediaevalism. As in Walpole's book, there are a murder
and a usurpation, a rightful heir defrauded of his inheritance and reared
as a peasant. There are a haunted chamber, unearthly midnight groans, a
ghost in armor, and a secret closet with its skeleton. The tale is
infinitely tiresome, and is full of that edifying morality, fine
sentiment and stilted dialogue--that "old perfumed, powdered D'Arblay
conversation," as Thackeray called it--which abound in "Evelina,"
"Thaddeus of Warsaw," and almost all the fiction of the last quarter of
the last century. Still it was a little unkind in Walpole to pronounce
his disciple's performance tedious and insipid, as he did.
This same lady published, in 1785, a work in two volumes entitled "The
Progress of Romance," a sort of symposium on the history of fiction in a
series of evening conversations. Her purpose was to claim for the prose
romance an honorable place in literature; a place beside the verse epic.
She discusses the definitions of romance given in the current
dictionaries, such as Ainsworth's and Littleton's _Narratio
ficta--Scriptum eroticum--Splendida fabula_; and Johnson's "A military
fable of the Middle Ages--A tale of wild adventures of war and love."
She herself defines it as "An heroic fable," or "An epic in prose." She
affirms that Homer is the father of romance and thinks it astonishing
that men of sense "should despise and ridicule romances, as the most
contemptible of all kinds of writing, and yet expatiate in raptures on
the beauties of the fables of the old classic poets--on stories far more
wild and extravagant and infinitely more incredible." After reviewing
the Greek romances, like Heliodorus' "Theagenes and Chariclea," she
passes on to the chivalry tales of the Middle Ages, which, she maintains,
"were by no means so contemptible as they have been represented by later
writers." Our poetry, she thinks, owes more than is imagined to the
spirit of romance. "Chaucer and all our old writers abound with it.
Spenser owes perhaps his immortality to it; it is the Gothic imagery that
gives the principal graces to his work. . . Spenser has made more poets
than any other writer of our country." Milton, too, had a hankering
after the romances; and Cervantes, though he laughed Spain's chivalry
away, loved the thing he laughed at and preferred his serious romance
"Persiles and Sigismonda" to all his other works.
She gives a list, with conjectural dates, of many medieval romances in
French and English, verse and prose; but the greater part of the book is
occupied with contemporary fiction, the novels of Richardson, Fielding,
Smollett, Crébillon, Marivaux, Rousseau, etc. She commends Thomas
Leland's historical romance "Longsword, Earl of Salisbury" (1762), as "a
romance in reality, and not a novel:--a story like those of the Middle
Ages, composed of chivalry, love, and religion." To her second volume
she appended the "History of Charoba, Queen of Egypt," englished from the
French of Vattier, professor of Arabic to Louis XIV., who had translated
it from a history of ancient Egypt written in Arabic. This was the
source of Landor's poem, "Gebir." When Landor was in Wales in 1797, Rose
Aylmer--
"Rose Aylmer, whom these wakeful eyes,
May weep but never see"--
lent him a copy of Miss Reeve's "Progress of Romance," borrowed from a
circulating library at Swansea. And so the poor forgotten thing retains
a vicarious immortality, as the prompter of some of the noblest passages
in modern English blank verse and as associated with one of the tenderest
passages in Landor's life.
Miss Reeve quotes frequently from Percy's "Essay on the Ancient
Minstrels," mentions Ossian and Chatterton and refers to Hurd, Warton,
and other authorities. "It was not till I had completed my design," she
writes in her preface, "that I read either Dr. Beattie's 'Dissertation on
Fable and Romance' or Mr. Warton's 'History of English Poetry.'" The
former of these was an essay of somewhat more than a hundred pages by the
author of "The Minstrel." It is of no great importance and follows
pretty closely the lines of Hurd's "Letters on Chivalry and Romance," to
which Beattie repeatedly refers in his footnotes. The author pursues the
beaten track in inquiries of the kind: discusses the character of the
Gothic tribes, the nature of the feudal system, and the institutions of
chivalry and knight-errantry. Romance, it seems, was "one of the
consequences of chivalry. The first writers in this way exhibited a
species of fable different from all that had hitherto appeared. They
undertook to describe the adventures of those heroes who professed
knight-errantry. The world was then ignorant and credulous and
passionately fond of wonderful adventures and deeds of valor. They
believed in giants, dwarfs, dragons, enchanted castles, and every
imaginable species of necromancy. These form the materials of the old
romance. The knight-errant was described as courteous, religious,
valiant, adventurous, and temperate. Some enchanters befriended and
others opposed him. To do his mistress honor, and to prove himself
worthy of her, he was made to encounter the warrior, hew down the giant,
cut the dragon in pieces, break the spell of the necromancer, demolish
the enchanted castle, fly through the air on wooden or winged horses, or,
with some magician for his guide, to descend unhurt through the opening
earth and traverse the caves in the bottom of the ocean. He detected and
punished the false knight, overthrew or converted the infidel, restored
the exiled monarch to his dominions and the captive damsel to her
parents; he fought at the tournament, feasted in the hall, and bore a
part in the warlike processions."
There is nothing very startling in these conclusions. Scholars like
Percy, Tyrwhitt, and Ritson, who, as collectors and editors, rescued the
fragments of ancient ministrelsy and gave the public access to concrete
specimens of mediaeval poetry, performed a more useful service than mild
clerical essayists, such as Beattie and Hurd, who amused their leisure
with general speculations about the origin of romance and whether it came
in the first instance from the troubadours or the Saracens or the
Norsemen. One more passage, however, may be transcribed from Beattie's
"Dissertation," because it seems clearly a suggestion from "The Castle of
Otranto." "The castles of the greater barons, reared in a rude but grand
style of architecture, full of dark and winding passages, of secret
apartments, of long uninhabited galleries, and of chambers supposed to be
haunted with spirits, and undermined by subterraneous labyrinths as
places of retreat in extreme danger; the howling of winds through the
crevices of old walls and other dreary vacuities; the grating of heavy
doors on rusty hinges of iron; the shrieking of bats and the screaming of
owls and other creatures that resort to desolate or half-inhabited
buildings; these and the like circumstances in the domestic life of the
people I speak of, would multiply their superstitions and increase their
credulity; and among warriors who set all danger at defiance, would
encourage a passion for wild adventure and difficult enterprise."
One of the books reviewed by Miss Reeve is worth mentioning, not for its
intrinsic importance, but for its early date. "Longsword, Earl of
Salisbury, An Historical Romance," in two volumes, and published two
years before "The Castle of Otranto," is probably the first fiction of
the kind in English literature. Its author was Thomas Leland, an Irish
historian and doctor of divinity.[16] "The outlines of the following
story," begins the advertisement, "and some of the incidents and more
minute circumstances, are to be found in some of the ancient English
histories." The period of the action is the reign of Henry III. The
king is introduced in person, and when we hear him swearing "by my
Halidome," we rub our eyes and ask, "Can this be Scott?" But we are soon
disabused, for the romance, in spite of the words of the advertisement,
is very little historical, and the fashion of it is thinly wordy and
sentimental. The hero is the son of Henry II. and Fair Rosamond, but his
speech is Grandisonian. The adventures are of the usual kind: the
_dramatis personae_ include gallant knights who go a-tilting with their
ladies' gloves upon their casques, usurpers, villains, pirates, a wicked
monk who tries to poison the hero, an oppressed countess, a distressed
damsel disguised as a page, a hermit who has a cave in a mountain side,
etc. The Gothic properties are few; though the frontispiece to the first
volume represents a cowled monk raising from the ground the figure of a
swooning knight in complete armor, in front of an abbey church with an
image of the Virgin and Child sculptured in a niche above the door; and
the building is thus described in the text: "Its windows crowded with the
foliage of their ornaments, and dimmed by the hand of the painter; its
numerous spires towering above the roof, and the Christian ensign on its
front, declared it a residence of devotion and charity." An episode in
the story narrates the death of a father by the hand of his son in the
Barons' War of Henry III. But no farther advantage is taken of the
historic background afforded by this civil conflict, nor is Simon de
Montfort so much as named in the whole course of the book.
Clara Reeve was the daughter of a clergyman. She lived and died at
Ipswich (1725-1803). Walter Scott contributed a memoir of her to
"Ballantyne's Novelists' Library," in which he defended Walpole's frank
use of the supernatural against her criticisms, quoted above, and gave
the preference to Walpole's method.[17] She acknowledged that her
romance was a "literary descendant of 'Otranto';" but the author of the
latter, evidently nettled by her strictures, described "The Old English
Baron," as "Otranto reduced to reason and probability," and declared that
any murder trial at the Old Bailey would have made a more interesting
story. Such as it is, it bridges the interval between its model and the
novels of Mrs. Radcliffe, Lewis' "Monk" (1795), and Maturin's "Fatal
Revenge, or the Family of Montorio" (1807).[18]
Anne Radcliffe--born Ward in 1764, the year of "Otranto"--was the wife of
an editor, who was necessarily absent from home much of the time until
late at night. A large part of her writing was done to amuse her
loneliness in the still hours of evening; and the wildness of her
imagination, and the romantic love of night and solitude which pervades
her books, are sometimes accounted for in this way. In 1809 it was
currently reported and believed that Mrs. Radcliffe was dead. Another
form of the rumor was that she had been insane by continually poring over
visions of horror and mystery. Neither report was true; she lived till
1823, in full possession of her faculties, although she published nothing
after 1797. The circulation of such stories shows how retired, and even
obscure, a life this very popular writer contrived to lead.
It would be tedious to give here an analysis of these once famous
fictions _seriatim_.[19] They were very long, very much alike, and very
much overloaded with sentiment and description. The plots were
complicated and abounded in the wildest improbabilities and in those
incidents which were once the commonplaces of romantic fiction and which
realism has now turned out of doors: concealments, assassinations, duels,
disguises, kidnappings, escapes, elopements, intrigues, forged documents,
discoveries of old crimes, and identifications of lost heirs. The
characters, too, were of the conventional kind. There were dark-browed,
crime-stained villains--forerunners, perhaps of Manfred and Lara, for the
critics think that Mrs. Radcliffe's stories were not without important
influence on Byron.[20] There were high-born, penitent dames who retired
to convents in expiation of sins which are not explained until the
general raveling of clews in the final chapter. There were bravoes,
banditti, feudal tyrants, monks, inquisitors, soubrettes, and simple
domestics _a la_ Bianca, in Walpole's romance. The lover was of the type
adored by our great-grandmothers, handsome, melancholy, passionate,
respectful but desperate, a user of most choice English; with large black
eyes, smooth white forehead, and jetty curls, now sunk, Mr. Perry says,
to the covers of prune boxes. The heroine, too, was sensitive and
melancholy. When alone upon the seashore or in the mountains, at sunset
or twilight, or under the midnight moon, or when the wind is blowing, she
overflows into stanza or sonnet, "To Autumn," "To Sunset," "To the Bat,"
"To the Nightingale," "To the Winds," "To Melancholy," "Song of the
Evening Hour." We have heard this pensive music drawing near in the
strains of the Miltonic school, but in Mrs. Radcliffe the romantic gloom
is profound and all-pervading. In what pastures she had fed is manifest
from the verse captions that head her chapters, taken mainly from Blair,
Thomson, Warton, Gray, Collins, Beattie, Mason, and Walpole's "Mysterious
Mother." Here are a few stanzas from her ode "To Melancholy":
"Spirit of love and sorrow, hail!
Thy solemn voice from far I hear,
Mingling with evening's dying gale:
Hail, with thy sadly pleasing tear!
"O at this still, this lonely hour--
Thine own sweet hour of closing day--
Awake thy lute, whose charmful power
Shall call up fancy to obey:
"To paint the wild, romantic dream
That meets the poet's closing eye,
As on the bank of shadowy stream
He breathes to her the fervid sigh.
"O lonely spirit, let thy song
Lead me through all thy sacred haunt,
The minster's moonlight aisles along
Where specters raise the midnight chant."
In Mrs. Radcliffe's romances we find a tone that is absent from
Walpole's: romanticism plus sentimentalism. This last element had begun
to infuse itself into general literature about the middle of the century,
as a protest and reaction against the emotional coldness of the classical
age. It announced itself in Richardson, Rousseau, and the youthful
Goethe; in the _comédie larmoyante_, both French and English; found its
cleverest expression in Sterne, and then, becoming a universal vogue,
deluged fiction with productions like Mackenzie's "Man of Feeling," Miss
Burney's "Evelina," and the novels of Jane Porter and Mrs. Opie.
Thackeray said that there was more crying in "Thaddeus of Warsaw" than in
any novel he ever remembered to have read.[21] Emily, in the "Mysteries
of Udolpho" cannot see the moon, or hear a guitar or an organ or the
murmur of the pines, without weeping. Every page is bedewed with the
tear of sensibility; the whole volume is damp with it, and ever and anon
a chorus of sobs goes up from the entire company. Mrs. Radcliffe's
heroines are all descendents of Pamela and Clarissa Harlowe, but under
more romantic circumstances. They are beset with a thousand
difficulties; carried off by masked ruffians, immured in convents, held
captive in robber castles, encompassed with horrors natural and
supernatural, persecuted, threatened with murder and with rape. But
though perpetually sighing, blushing, trembling, weeping, fainting, they
have at bottom a kind of toughness that endures through all. They rebuke
the wicked in stately language, full of noble sentiments and moral
truths. They preserve the most delicate feelings of propriety in
situations the most discouraging. Emily, imprisoned in the gloomy castle
of Udolpho, in the power of ruffians whose brawls and orgies fill night
and day with horror, in hourly fear for her virtue and her life, sends
for the lord of the castle,--whom she believes to have murdered her
aunt,--and reminds him that, as her protectress is now dead, it would not
be proper for her to stay any longer under his roof thus unchaperoned,
and will he please, therefore, send her home?
Mrs. Radcliffe's fictions are romantic, but not usually mediaeval in
subject. In the "Mysteries of Udolpho," the period of the action is the
end of the sixteenth century; in the "Romance of the Forest," 1658; in
"The Italian," about 1760. But her machinery is prevailingly Gothic and
the real hero of the story is commonly, as in Walpole, some haunted
building. In the "Mysteries of Udolpho" it is a castle in the Apennines;
in the "Romance of the Forest," a deserted abbey in the depth of the
woods; in "The Italian," the cloister of the Black Penitents. The
moldering battlements, the worm-eaten tapestries, the turret staircases,
secret chambers, underground passages, long, dark corridors where the
wind howls dismally, and distant doors which slam at midnight all derive
from "Otranto." So do the supernatural fears which haunt these abodes of
desolation; the strains of mysterious music, the apparitions which glide
through the shadowy apartments, the hollow voices that warn the tyrant to
beware. But her method here is quite different from Walpole's; she tacks
a natural explanation to every unearthly sight or sound. The hollow
voices turn out to be ventriloquism; the figure of a putrefying corpse
which Emily sees behind the black curtain in the ghost chamber at Udolpho
is only a wax figure, contrived as a _memento mori_ for a former
penitent. After the reader has once learned this trick he refuses to be
imposed upon again, and, whenever he encounters a spirit, feels sure that
a future chapter will embody it back into flesh and blood.
There is plenty of testimony to the popularity of these romances.
Thackeray says that a lady of his acquaintance, an inveterate novel
reader, names Valancourt as one of the favorite heroes of her youth.
"'Valancourt? And who was he?' cry the young people. Valancourt, my
dears, was the hero of one of the most famous romances which ever was
published in this country. The beauty and elegance of Valancourt made
your young grandmamma's' gentle hearts to beat with respectful sympathy.
He and his glory have passed away. . . Enquire at Mudie's or the London
Library, who asks for the 'Mysteries of Udolpho' now."[22] Hazlitt said
that he owed to Mrs. Radcliffe his love of moonlight nights, autumn
leaves and decaying ruins. It was, indeed, in the melodramatic
manipulation of landscape that this artist was most original. "The
scenes that savage Rosa dashed" seemed to have been her model, and
critics who were fond of analogy called her the Salvator Rosa of fiction.
It is here that her influence on Byron and Chateaubriand is most
apparent.[23] Mrs. Radcliffe's scenery is not quite to our modern taste,
any more than are Salvator's paintings. Her Venice by moonlight, her
mountain gorges with their black pines and foaming torrents, are not
precisely the Venice and the Alps of Ruskin; rather of the operatic
stage. Still they are impressive in their way, and in this department
she possessed genuine poetic feels and a real mastery of the art of
painting in distemper. Witness the picture of the castle of Udolpho, on
Emily's first sight of it, and the hardly less striking description, in
the "Romance of the Forest," of the ruined abbey in which the La Motte
family take refuge: "He approached and perceived the Gothic remains of an
abbey: it stood on a kind of rude lawn, overshadowed by high and
spreading trees, which seemed coeval with the building, and diffused a
romantic gloom around. The greater part of the pile appeared to be
sinking into ruins, and that which had withstood the ravages of time
showed the remaining features of the fabric more awful in decay. The
lofty battlements, thickly enwreathed with ivy, were half demolished and
become the residence of birds of prey. Huge fragments of the eastern
tower, which was almost demolished, lay scattered amid the high grass,
that waved slowly in the breeze. 'The thistle shook its lonely head: the
moss whistled to the wind.'[24] A Gothic gate, richly ornamented with
fretwork, which opened into the main body of the edifice, but which was
now obstructed with brushwood, remained entire. Above the vast and
magnificent portal of this gate arose a window of the same order, whose
pointed arches still exhibited fragments of stained glass, once the pride
of monkish devotion. La Motte, thinking it possible it might yet shelter
some human being, advanced to the gate and lifted a massy knocker. The
hollow sounds rung through the emptiness of the place. After waiting a
few minutes, he forced back the gate, which was heavy with iron-work, and
creaked harshly on its hinges. . . From this chapel he passed into the
nave of the great church, of which one window, more perfect than the
rest, opened upon a long vista of the forest, through which was seen the
rich coloring of evening, melting by imperceptible gradations into the
solemn gray of upper air."
Mrs. Radcliffe never was in Italy or Switzerland or the south of France;
she divined the scenery of her romances from pictures and descriptions at
second hand. But she accompanied her husband in excursions to the Lakes
and other parts of England, and in 1794 made the tour of the Rhine.[25]
The passages in her diary, recording these travels, are much superior in
the truthfulness and local color of their nature sketching to anything in
her novels. Mrs. Radcliffe is furthermore to be credited with a certain
skill in producing terror, by the use of that favorite weapon in the
armory of the romanticists, mystery. If she did not invent a new
shudder, as Hugo said of Baudelaire, she gave at least a new turn to the
old-fashioned ghost story. She creates in her readers a feeling of
impending danger, suspense, foreboding. There is a sense of unearthly
presences in these vast, empty rooms; the silence itself is ominous;
echoes sound like footfalls, ghostly shadows lurk in dark corners,
whispers come from behind the arras, as it stirs in the gusts of
wind.[26] The heroine is afraid to look in the glass lest she should see
another face there beside her own; her lamp expires and leaves her in the
dark just as she is coming to the critical point in the manuscript which
she has found in an old chest, etc., etc., But the tale loses its
impressiveness as soon as it strays beyond the shade of the battlements.
The Gothic castle or priory is still, as in Walpole, the nucleus of the
story.
Two of these romances, the earliest and the latest, though they are the
weakest of the series, have a special interest for us as affording points
of comparison with the Waverly novels. "The Castles of Athlin and
Dunbayne" is the narrative of a feud between two Highland clans, and its
scene is the northeastern coast of Scotland, "in the most romantic part
of the Highlands," where the castle of Athlin--like Uhland's "Schloss am
Meer"--stood "on the summit of a rock whose base was in the sea." This
was a fine place for storms. "The winds burst in sudden squalls over the
deep and dashed the foaming waves against the rocks with inconceivable
fury. The spray, notwithstanding the high situation of the castle, flew
up with violence against the windows. . . The moon shone faintly by
intervals, through broken clouds, upon the waters, illumining the white
foam which burst around. . . The surges broke on the distant shores in
deep resounding murmurs, and the solemn pauses between the stormy gusts
filled the mind with enthusiastic awe." Perhaps the description slightly
reminds of the picture, in "Marmion," of Tantallon Castle, the hold of
the Red Douglases on the German Ocean, a little north of Berwick, whose
frowning towers have recently done duty again in Stevenson's "David
Balfour." The period of the action is but vaguely indicated; but, as the
weapons used in the attack on the castle are bows and arrows, we may
regard the book as mediaeval in intention. Scott says that the scene of
the romance was Scotland in the dark ages, and complains that the author
evidently knew nothing of Scottish life or scenery. This is true; her
castles might have stood anywhere. There is no mention of the pipes or
the plaid. Her rival chiefs are not Gaelic caterans, but just plain
feudal lords. Her baron of Dunbayne is like any other baron; or rather,
he is unlike any baron that ever was on sea or land or anywhere else
except in the pages of a Gothic romance.
"Gaston de Blondville" was begun in 1802 and published posthumously in
1826, edited by Sergeant Talfourd. Its inspiring cause was a visit which
the author made in the autumn of 1802 to Warwick Castle and the ruins of
Kenilworth. The introduction has the usual fiction of an old manuscript
found in an oaken chest dug up from the foundation of a chapel of Black
Canons at Kenilworth: a manuscript richly illuminated with designs at the
head of each chapter--which are all duly described--and containing a
"trew chronique of what passed at Killingworth, in Ardenn, when our
Soveren Lord the Kynge kept ther his Fest of Seynt Michel: with ye
marveylous accident that there befell at the solempnissacion of the
marriage of Gaston de Blondeville. With divers things curious to be
known thereunto purtayning. With an account of the grete Turney there
held in the year MCCLVI. Changed out of the Norman tongue by Grymbald,
Monk of Senct Marie Priori in Killingworth." Chatterton's forgeries had
by this time familiarized the public with imitations of early English.
The finder of this manuscript pretends to publish a modernized version of
it, while endeavoring "to preserve somewhat of the air of the old style."
This he does by a poor reproduction, not of thirteenth-century, but of
sixteenth-century English, consisting chiefly in inversions of phrase and
the occasional use of a _certes_ or _naithless_. Two words in particular
seem to have struck Mrs. Radcliffe as most excellent archaisms: _ychon_
and _his-self_, which she introduces at every turn.
"Gaston de Blondville," then, is a tale of the time of Henry III. The
king himself is a leading figure and so is Prince Edward. Other
historical personages are brought in, such as Simon de Montfort and Marie
de France, but little use is made of them. The book is not indeed, in
any sense, an historical novel like Scott's "Kenilworth," the scene of
which is the same, and which was published in 1821, five years before
Mrs. Radcliffe's. The story is entirely fictitious. What differences it
from her other romances is the conscious attempt to portray feudal
manners. There are elaborate descriptions of costumes, upholstery,
architecture, heraldic bearings, ancient military array, a tournament, a
royal hunt, a feast in the great hall at Kenilworth, a visit of state to
Warwick Castle, and the session of a baronial court. The ceremony of the
"voide," when the king took his spiced cup, is rehearsed with a painful
accumulation of particulars. For all this she consulted Leland's
"Collectanea," Warton's "History of English Poetry," the "Household Book
of Edward IV.," Pegge's "Dissertation on the Obsolete Office of Esquire
of the King's Body," the publications of the Society of Antiquaries and
similar authorities, with results that are infinitely tedious. Walter
Scott's archaeology is not always correct, nor his learning always
lightly borne; but, upon the whole, he had the art to make his cumbrous
materials contributory to his story rather than obstructive of it.
In these two novels we meet again all the familiar apparatus of secret
trap-doors, sliding panels, spiral staircases in the thickness of the
walls, subterranean vaults conducting to a neighboring priory or a cavern
in the forest, ranges of deserted apartments where the moon looks in
through mullioned casements, ruinous turrets around which the night winds
moan and howl. Here, too, once more are the wicked uncle who seizes upon
the estates of his deceased brother's wife, and keeps her and her
daughter shut up in his dungeon for the somewhat long period of eighteen
years; the heroine who touches her lute and sings in pensive mood, till
the notes steal to the ear of the young earl imprisoned in the adjacent
tower; the maiden who is carried off on horseback by bandits, till her
shrieks bring ready aid; the peasant lad who turns out to be the baron's
heir. "His surprise was great when the baroness, reviving, fixed her
eyes mournfully upon him and asked him to uncover his arm." Alas! the
surprise is not shared by the reader, when "'I have indeed found my
long-lost child: that strawberry,'"[27] etc., etc. "Gaston de
Blondville" has a ghost--not explained away in the end according to Mrs.
Radcliffe's custom. It is the spirit of Reginald de Folville, Knight
Hospitaller of St. John, murdered in the Forest of Arden by Gaston de
Blondville and the prior of St. Mary's. He is a most robust apparition,
and is by no means content with revisiting the glimpses of the moon, but
goes in and out at all hours of the day, and so often as to become
somewhat of a bore. He ultimately destroys both first and second
murderer: one in his cell, the other in open tournament, where his
exploits as a mysterious knight in black armor may have given Scott a
hint for his black knight at the lists of Ashby-de-la-Zouche in "Ivanhoe"
(1819). His final appearance is in the chamber of the king, with whom he
holds quite a long conversation. "The worm is my sister," he says: "the
mist of death is on me. My bed is in darkness. The prisoner is
innocent. The prior of St. Mary's is gone to his account. Be warned."
It is not explained why Mrs. Radcliffe refrained from publishing this
last romance of hers. Perhaps she recognized that it was belated and
that the time for that sort of thing had gone by. By 1802 Lewis' "Monk"
was in print, as well as several translations from German romances;
Scott's early ballads were out, and Coleridge's "Ancient Mariner." That
very year saw the publication of the "Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border."
By 1826 the Waverley novels had made all previous fiction of the Gothic
type hopelessly obsolete. In 1834 two volumes of her poems were given to
the world, including a verse romance in eight cantos, "St. Alban's
Abbey," and the verses scattered through her novels. By this time Scott
and Coleridge were dead; Byron, Shelley, and Keats had been dead for
years, and Mrs. Radcliffe's poesies fell upon the unheeding ears of a new
generation. A sneer in "Waverley" (1814) at the "Mysteries of Udolpho"
had hurt her feelings;[28] but Scott made amends in the handsome things
which he said of her in his "Lives of the Novelists." It is interesting
to note that when the "Mysteries" was issued, the venerable Joseph Warton
was so much entranced that he sat up the greater part of the night to
finish it.
The warfare between realism and romance, which went on in the days of
Cervantes, as it does in the days of Zola and Howells, had its skirmished
also in Mrs. Radcliffe's time. Jane Austen's "Northanger Abbey," written
in 1803 but published only in 1817, is gently satirical of Gothic
fiction. The heroine is devoted to the "Mysteries of Udolpho," which she
discusses with her bosom friend. "While I have 'Udolpho' to read, I feel
as if nobody could make me miserable. O the dreadful black veil! My
dear Isabella, I am sure there must be Laurentina's skeleton behind it."
"When you have finished 'Udolpho,'" replies Isabella, "we will read 'The
Italian' together; and I have made out a list of ten or twelve more of
the same kind for you. . . I will read you their names directly. Here
they are in my pocket-book. 'Castle of Wolfenbach,' 'Clermont,'
'Mysterious Warnings,' 'Necromancer of the Black Forest,' 'Midnight
Bell,' 'Orphan of the Rhine,' and 'Horrid Mysteries.'"
When introduced to her friend's brother, Miss Morland asks him at once,
"Have you ever read 'Udolpho,' Mr. Thorpe?" But Mr. Thorpe, who is not a
literary man, but much given to dogs and horses, assures her that he
never reads novels; they are "full of nonsense and stuff; there has not
been a tolerably decent one come out since 'Tom Jones,' except the
'Monk.'" The scenery about Bath reminds Miss Morland of the south of
France and "the country that Emily and her father traveled through in the
'Mysteries of Udolpho.'" She is enchanted at the prospect of a drive to
Blaize Castle, where she hopes to have "the happiness of being stopped in
their way along narrow, winding vaults by a low, grated door; or even of
having their lamp--their only lamp--extinguished by a sudden gust of wind
and of being left in total darkness." She visits her friends, the
Tilneys, at their country seat, Northanger Abbey, in Glouchestershire;
and, on the way thither, young Mr. Tilney teases her with a fancy sketch
of the Gothic horrors which she will unearth there: the "sliding panels
and tapestry"; the remote and gloomy guest chamber, which will be
assigned her, with its ponderous chest and its portrait of a knight in
armor: the secret door, with massy bars and padlocks, that she will
discover behind the arras, leading to a "small vaulted room," and
eventually to a "subterraneous communication between your apartment and
the chapel of St. Anthony scarcely two miles off." Arrived at the abbey,
she is disappointed at the modern appearance of her room, but contrives
to find a secret drawer in an ancient ebony cabinet, and in this a roll
of yellow manuscript which, on being deciphered, proves to be a washing
bill. She is convinced, notwithstanding, that a mysterious door at the
end of a certain gallery conducts to a series of isolated chambers where
General Tilney, who is supposed to be a widower, is keeping his unhappy
wife immured and fed on bread and water. When she finally gains
admission to this Bluebeard's chamber and finds it nothing but a suite of
modern rooms, "the visions of romance were over. . . Charming as were
all Mrs. Radcliffe's works, and charming even as were the works of all
her imitators, it was not in them, perhaps, that human nature, at least
in the midland counties of England was to be looked for."
[1] But compare the passage last quoted with the one from Warton's essay
_ante_, p. 219.
[2] See _ante_, p. 49.
[3] _Spectator_, No. 62.
[4] See _ante_, p. 211.
[5] "Works of Richard Owen Cambridge," pp. 198-99. Cambridge was one of
the Spenserian imitators. See _ante_, p. 89, _note_. In Lady
Luxborough's correspondence with Shenstone there is much mention of a Mr.
Miller, a neighboring proprietor, who was devoted to Gothic. On the
appearance of "The Scribleriad," she writes (January 28, 1751), "I
imagine this poem is not calculated to please Mr. Miller and the rest of
the Gothic gentlemen; for this Mr. Cambridge expresses a dislike to the
introducing or reviving tastes and fashions that are inferior to the
modern taste of our country."
[6] "History of the Gothic Revival," p. 43.
[7] "Works of Horace Walpole, Earl of Orford," in five volumes, 1798. "A
Description of Strawberry Hill," Vol. II. pp. 395-516.
[8] Pugin's "True Principles of Gothic Architecture" was published in 1841.
[9] "Sketches of Eminent Statesmen and Writers," A. Hayward (1880). In a
note to "Marmion" (1808) Scott said that the ruins of Crichton Castle,
remarkable for the richness and elegance of its stone carvings, were then
used as a cattle-pen and a sheep-fold.
[10] "Hours in a Library," Second Series: article, "Horace Walpole."
[11] Letter to Bentley, February 23, 1755.
[12] Five hundred copies, says Walpole, were struck off December 24, 1764.
[13] "The Mysterious Mother," begun 1766, finished 1768.
[14] "The Castle of Otranto" was dramatized by Robert Jephson, under the
title "The Count of Narbonne," put on at Covent Garden Theater in 1781,
and afterward printed, with a dedication to Walpole.
[15] James Beattie, "Dissertation on Fable and Romance." "Argenius," was
printed in 1621.
[16] "The Dictionary of National Biography" miscalls it "Earl of
Canterbury," and attributes it, though with a query, to _John_ Leland.
[17] See also, for a notice of this writer, Julia Kavanagh's "English
Women of Letters."
[18] Maturin's "Melmoth the Wanderer" (1820) had some influence on the
French romantic school and was utilized, in some particulars, by Balzac.
[19] Following is a list of Mrs. Radcliffe's romances: "The Castles of
Athlin and Dunbayne" (1789); "Sicilian Romance" (1790); "Romance of the
Forest" (1791); "Mysteries of Udolpho" (1794); "The Italian" (1797);
"Gaston de Blondville" (1826). Collections of her poems were published
in 1816, 1834, and 1845.
[20] See "Childe Harold," canto iv, xviii.
[21] "Roundabout Papers," "A Peal of Bells." "Monk" Lewis wrote at
sixteen a burlesque novel, "Effusions of Sensibility," which remained in
MS.
[22] "O Radcliffe, thou once wert the charmer
Of girls who sat reading all night:
They heroes were striplings in armor,
Thy heroines, damsels in white."
--_Songs, Ballads and Other Poems_.
By Thos. Haynes Bayly, London, 1857, p. 141.
"A novel now is nothing more
Than an old castle and a creaking door,
A distant hovel,
Clanking of chains, a gallery, a light,
Old armor and a phantom all in white,
And there's a novel."
--_George Colman, "The Will."_
[23] Several of her romances were dramatized and translated into French.
It is curious, by the way, to find that Goethe was not unaware of
Walpole's story. See his quatrain "Die Burg von Otranto," first printed
in 1837.
"Sind die Zimmer sämmtlich besetzt der Burg von Otranto:
Kommt, voll innigen Grimmes, der erste Riesenbesitzer
Stuckweis an, and verdrängt die neuen falschen Bewohner.
Wehe! den Fliehenden, weh! den Bleibenden also geschiet es."
[24] Ossian.
[25] See her "Journey through Holland," etc. (1795)
[26] _cf._ Keats, "The Eve of Saint Agnes":
"The arras rich with hunt and horse and hound
Flattered in the besieging wind's uproar,
And the long carpets rose along the gusty floor."
[27] "Castles of Athlin and Dunbayne."
[28] See Julia Kavanagh's "English Women of Letters."