decisive act of the great revolution which opened the nineteenth century; they destroyed the Bastille of classicism and supplanted

Influence of Scott.

that rigid literary uniformity which Johnson, as absolute as Louis XIV, had enforced upon English letters. The novels followed up this outbreak and, so to speak, established a popular constitution under which the new prose and the new poetry flourished in spite of the reactionaries of The Edinburgh Review. And it must not be forgotten that the hero of this revolution, the Wizard His critical of the North himself, was, behind the charms and capacity. spells he weaved, a very accomplished and judicious critic, a writer of articles and literary biographies which place him on a level with Coleridge, Lamb, and Hazlitt. He was not as philosophical as Coleridge, he had neither the golden impressionability of Lamb nor the pronounced dogmatism of Hazlitt, but he had even wider reading and broader sympathies than those voluminous and admirable critics. In his knowledge of the English drama he was not far behind any of the three; and, as it is incontestable that the critical genius of them all is seen most clearly in their revival of the dormant literature of the Elizabethan age, Scott's challenge to them on their own ground is all the more remarkable. No finer test of Scott's own genius, of the labour and research on which these great romances assumed so splendid a form, can be found than the critical notes to his own poems and novels, his prefaces, his introductory chapters, and the encyclopædia of illustrations and anecdotes which is comprised in his notes and appendices. These are small masterpieces by themselves, the work of a student whose scholarship is to himself a living thing. Like Coleridge and like Lamb in their various degrees, Scott was both scholar and creator; he had the critical faculty and the creative imagination, the first in a very unusual degree, the second in a degree that has never been excelled or even equalled.

Subdivisions

terror.

§ 9. The romantic movement in England starts from Scott and Scott alone. But there were others in whom the romantic instinct was strong, although far less powerfully of romance: developed, and of these writers, whose position in the tale of the evolution of prose fiction is irregular, we must now speak. Each in his own way contributed to the progress of English romanticism, or-so far as the older members of the band are concerned-showed that restless tendency which found its satisfaction in Scott. None of them had any inclination whatever to the imitation of real life; their minds were occupied with terrors and supernatural wonders, ineffectual ghosts and gentlemanlike bravoes. Their industry was too small to admit of their being called a "school"; they wrote idly of midnight horrors and vampires because it pleased them. This fashion, which at its worst was very innocent, was set by HORACE WALPOLE, the fastidious dilettante and brilliant chronicler of the Court scandal of his day, whose letters to

prepa

WALPOLE

The Castle of Otranto" (1764).

Sir Horace Mann place him among the most accomplished of English letter-writers. His Castle of Otranto (1764) was the first of a series of books which, until the arrival of Scott, followed the same kind of HORACE theme with very slight variations. It was a short (1717-1797). tale, written with great rapidity and without ration, in which the reader found himself carried back for the first time to the Middle Ages and placed in contact with something that stood for feudal society. It did not matter that the Gothic setting of the book was as unreal as Walpole's pseudo-Gothic villa at Strawberry Hill, that its feudal cavaliers spoke and behaved in a manner unknown to any age, that everything in it was extravagantly preposterous, and that the heroine, a creature of sentimental and unreasonable misfortune, had as little medieval warrant as any of Henry Mackenzie's lachrymose damsels. For the first time the English reader felt an emotion of superstitious terror as he gazed on print and saw the workings of supernatural machinery displayed in it. The medievalism of The Castle of Otranto was spurious, and the local colour might have done duty for any place as well as Otranto; but in the gigantic armed figures dimly seen at midnight as the watcher crossed a gloomy hall or echoing corridor, in the colossal helmet, fruitful of so much consternation, which made its irresponsible way into the courtyard, in the liberal allowance of secret panels, subterranean passages, breathless pursuit and escape, there was something promising. The Castle of Otranto and its successors were themselves the secret panels through which many crept into the undiscovered room of genuine romance.

The Castle of Otranto belongs, it will be noticed, to the last decade of the great eighteenth-century novel, the decade of Tristram Shandy and The Vicar of Wakefield. The thirty years which followed Humphrey Clinker (1771) were years of transition; and, in a later chapter, we shall see something more of the tendencies which, during this unsettled time, had their place in English fiction. It is now enough to say that the novel of mystery and terror was certainly the ruling influence of the period, and that it borrowed very freely from its more sentimental contemporaries. The tearfulness which had its origin in Sterne is found in most of these impossible narratives, invariably lending colour to the general behaviour of the heroine and the chivalry of the hero. Horace Walpole was followed by CLARA REEVE, whose Old English Baron REEVE (1777), originally called The Champion of Virtue, (1729-1807). was a painstaking and well-meant picture of feudal society. It belongs to this class of book rather by virtue of its medievalism than by any note of terror in its somewhat hum-drum plot; but its publication marks the fact that, during thirteen years, Horace Walpole's extraordinary romance had been gaining in popularity, and had encouraged a new writer to

CLARA

ANN

RADCLIFFE

make an experiment in the same field. But neither Walpole nor Miss Reeve had devoted themselves entirely to writing terrifying romances. This exclusive preoccupation was reserved for ANN RADCLIFFE, née Ward, whose numerous stories carried the art to its highest pitch and fascinated hosts of readers. Mrs. Radcliffe's heroines are sentimentality incarnate; (1764-1822). they are deserted by their lovers; they fall into the hands of wicked counts and are taken to remote castles amid the perpetual twilight of pine-woods and Pyrenean gorges, where mysterious doors clang and pictures speak, where hollow whispers echo up turret-stairs, and a faithful maidservant, full of dark anecdote, is the sole consolation of the fair prisoner. The most famous of these tales of mystery is, of course, The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794); but its predecessor, The Romance of the Forest (1791), and its successor, The Italian (1797), were also very popular. So far as any book which is founded on vulgar sensation can be a masterpiece, The Mysteries of Udolpho claims that distinction. Mrs. Radcliffe was innocent of any skill in painting character;, there is not much room for life in sighing heroines and phantom monks, and what there is she did not fill; but she excited terror by her accumulation of horrors and by an artistic gift of reticence which avoided too many details and left much to be explained. It was an unhappy blot on her art that, after she had succeeded in setting her readers' hair on end through the whole of a long book, she cleared up and rationalised all her mysteries. To deal in the supernatural so extensively and to disavow it so frankly is a weak paradox; and, had Mrs. Radcliffe been faithful to her ghosts and eerie noises, her romances might have lived longer. However, she had her vogue in a day when novels were few and far between; and many unsophisticated young ladies, like the heroine of Northanger Abbey, doubtless sympathised with her hapless virgins in their sorrows and distresses, and shared their suspense before forbidding portals and haunted alcoves. Mrs. Radcliffe, in everything but her romantic subjects, is of the eighteenth century; her sentimentalism and the verses which it inspires have that angularity of outline, that primness of complexion common to all the work of the half century before her. The natural advantages and the Italian Gothicism of the castle of Udolpho have more in common with the Castle of Indolence than with any of Scott's feudal keeps. Her observation of nature runs in that moralising vein which became so commonplace after a few great poets had worked it thoroughly; her style is never very brilliant, but is sententious, periphrastic, and Johnsonian. The quality which determined the popularity of her fictions was that, for those who came to them inquisitively and with the apprehension that sensitive people feel before the mouth of a dark crypt or cavern, she did not merely provide bare darkness and mystery, but set a substantial terror in every avenue and behind each pillar.

MATTHEW

Mrs. Radcliffe had her imitators, the majority of whom are Much about the same time as the not worth mentioning. Mysteries of Udolpho appeared an outrageously supernatural romance, Ambrosio, or the Monk (1795), which fastened on its author, MATTHEW GREGORY LEWIS, the perpetual He was a good- GREGORY nickname of "Monk" Lewis. natured, effeminate man of fashion, who owned LEWIS property in the West Indies and was member of Par- (1775–1818). liament for Hindon. The influence which directed his work was the German romanticism of Schiller, Bürger, and the rest; this fact and the impetus which he gave to Scott's early endeavours, place him in the straight line of romantic progress. The Monk contained many powerfully written passages; and the episode of the Bleeding Nun, with its introduction of the Wandering Jew, was an especially faithful imitation of the Teutonic model; the great popularity of the book depended, however, Lewis was on its morbid and feebly licentious suggestion. very prolific and wrote many other novels and ballads, in which he was alternately mysterious and plaintive. He was surpassed in his own line by CHARLES ROBERT MATURIN, an Irish clergyman of great promise and ROBERT greater vanity, whose character was, in all its MATURIN features, an extravagant caricature of the traits of (1782-1824). his nation. He wrote several romances, in one or two of which he essayed history; but the book by which he continues to be known is Melmoth the Wanderer (1820), a farrago of impossible and inconceivable adventures without plan or coherence, in which the Devil (represented as an Irish gentleman of good family) is the principal agent. Scott and Byron, who were both friends of "Monk "Lewis, recognised the talent of this curious person, who certainly could horrify his readers; and his first tragedy, Bertram (1816), with the help of favourable criticism, succeeded at Drury Lane. His life was short and unhappy; but his reputation lived for a long time in Melmoth, which was read on the Continent as well as in England.

CHARLES

MRS.

SHELLEY

Melmoth, in point of time, is the latest of the great tales of terror; but it is so obviously the eldest child of Lewis' Monk that its natural place is before the Frankenstein of MARY WOLLSTONECRAFT SHELLEY, the daughter of "Frankena novelist who belongs to a subsequent chapter, and (1797-1851). stein" (1818). the wife of a poet who himself had published (1810) two absurd tales in Lewis' manner, Zastrozzi and St. Irvyne. Frankenstein (1818) is immeasurably better than these, and is the only story of its kind that should have a lively interest for the student of the present day; it shows that this monstrous type of fiction was capable of a higher artistic virtue than Mrs. Radcliffe had communicated to it. A young physiologist succeeds in constructing out of the horrid remnants of the churchyard and dissecting-room a monster, to which he gives, by some galvanic agency artfully concealed to heighten

terror, a kind of spectral and convulsive life. This existence is insupportable to the monster, who vainly craves after human sympathy, and employs his time in avenging his creation upon his guilty creator. Some of his chief appearances, particularly the moment when he begins to move for the first time, and his sudden manifestation among the eternal snows of the Arctic circle, are managed with a striking and breathless effect that makes us for a moment forget the childish improbability and melodramatic extravagance of the tale.

Oriental Romances. WILLIAM BECKFORD (1759-1844). Vathek

(1787).

§ 10. Another subdivision of romance is, in its principal representative, very closely allied to the tale of terror. Perhaps Vathek (1787)-the earliest edition was a pirated translation in 1784-is best described as an "Oriental novel." WILLIAM BECKFORD was an extraordinary and eccentric person, who lived an elaborately artificial life and built himself a huge pseudoGothic mansion in Wiltshire-the famous Fonthill Abbey. The key to his character was madness; but he was at the same time a philosopher and something of a cynic, and borrowed much of his thought from the French Encyclopædists. Like Gibbon, he had a preference for French as a literary vehicle, and wrote Vathek at first in French; he subsequently translated it into English and gave it a permanent form. It is a very short book whose cold sarcasm and refinement of style show traces of Voltaire's Zadig. However, its satire is not conspicuously original, and its chief virtue consists in its imagination and fidelity to local colour. Indeed, if we set aside its ironical intention, it might pass for a translation of one of The Thousand and One Nights. Vathek is a haughty and effeminate Arabian monarch who, obeying the temptations of a malignant genie and the sophistries of a cruel and ambitious mother, is induced to commit all sorts of crimes, to abjure his faith, and to offer allegiance to Eblis, the Mohammedan Satan, in the hope of setting himself on the throne of the pre-Adamite sultans. The gradual development in his mind of sensuality, cruelty, atheism, and insane Titanic ambition, is far superior to the theatrical, lath-and-plaster character-painting of the best terrorists; the imagery throughout the book is consistently sustained; and the final scene is simply a florid piece of lyric prose, which may cautiously be compared with Coleridge's Kubla Khan. Vathek descends into Eblis' subterranean palace and wanders for awhile amid the splendours of that region of punishment. No imagination can be more terrible than that of "the vast multitude, incessantly passing, who severally kept their right hands on their heart, without once regarding anything around them. They all avoided each other, and, though surrounded by a multitude that no one could number, each wandered at random, unheedful of rest, as if alone on a desert where no foot had trodden."

Obviously, Vathek, with all its terrors, is better than the