In time Emily recovers, but the horror of the Black Veil preys on her mind until, near the close of the third volume, Mrs. Radcliffe mercifully consents to tell us not only what Emily thought that she beheld, but what was actually there.

"There appeared, instead of the picture she had expected, within the recess of the wall, a human figure of ghastly paleness, stretched at its length, and dressed in the habiliments of the grave. What added to the horror of the spectacle was that the face appeared partly decayed and disfigured by worms, which were visible on the features and hands... Had she dared to look again, her delusion and her fears would have vanished together, and she would have perceived that the figure before her was not human, but formed of wax... A member of the house of Udolpho, having committed some offence against the prerogative of the church, had been condemned to the penance of contemplating, during certain hours of the day, a waxen image made to resemble a human body in the state to which it is reduced after death ... he had made it a condition in his will that his descendants should preserve the image."

Mrs. Radcliffe, realising that the secret she had so jealously guarded is of rather an amazing character, asserts that it is "not without example in the records of the fierce severity which monkish superstition has sometimes inflicted on mankind." But the explanation falls so ludicrously short of our expectations and is so improbable a possibility, that Mrs. Radcliffe would have been wise not to defraud Catherine Morland and other readers of the pleasure of guessing aright. Few enjoy being baffled and thwarted in so unexpected a fashion. The skeleton of Signora Laurentina was the least that could be expected as a reward for suspense so patiently endured. But long ere this disclosure, we have learnt by bitter experience to distrust Mrs. Radcliffe's secrets and to look for ultimate disillusionment. The uncanny voice that ominously echoes Montoni's words is not the cry of a bodiless visitant striving to awaken "that blushing, shamefaced spirit that mutinies in a man's bosom," but belongs to an ordinary human being, the prisoner Du Pont, who has discovered one of Mrs. Radcliffe's innumerable concealed passages. The bed with the black velvet pall in the haunted chamber contains, not the frightful apparition that flashed upon the inward eye of Emily and of Annette, but a stalwart pirate who shrinks from discovery. The gliding forms which steal furtively along the ramparts and disappear at the end of dark passages become eventually, like the nun in Charlotte Bronte's Villette, sensible to feeling as to sight. The unearthly music which is heard in the woods at midnight proceeds, not from the inhabitants of another sphere, but from a conscience stricken nun with a lurid past. The corpse, which Emily believed to be that of her aunt, foully done to death by a pitiless husband, is the body of a man killed in a bandit's affray. Here Mrs. Radcliffe seems eager to show that she was not afraid of a corpse, but is careful that it shall not be the corpse which the reader anticipates. She deliberately excites trembling apprehensions in order that she may show how absurd they are. We are befooled that she may enjoy a quietly malicious triumph. The result is that we become wary and cautious. The genuine ghost story, read by Ludovico to revive his fainting spirits when he is keeping vigil in the "haunted" chamber, is robbed of its effect because we half expect to be disillusioned ere the close. It is far more impressive if read as a separate story apart from its setting. The idea of explaining away what is apparently supernatural may have occurred to Mrs. Radcliffe after reading Schiller's popular romance, Der Geisterseher (1789), in which the elaborately contrived marvels of the Armenian, who was modelled on Cagliostro, are but the feats of a juggler and have a physical cause. But more probably Mrs. Radcliffe's imagination was held in check by a sensitive conscience, which would not allow her to trade on the credulity of simple-minded readers.

It is noteworthy that Mrs. Radcliffe's last work—The Italian, published in 1797—is more skilfully constructed, and possesses far greater unity and concentration than The Mysteries of Udolpho. The Inquisition scenes towards the end of the book are unduly prolonged, but the story is coherent and free from digressions. The theme is less fanciful and far fetched than those of The Romance of the Forest and Udolpho. It seldom strays far beyond the bounds of the probable, nor overstrains our capacity for belief. The motive of the story is the Marchesa di Vivaldi's opposition to her son's marriage on account of Ellena's obscure birth. The Marchesa's far reaching designs are forwarded by the ambitious monk, Schedoni, who, for his own ends, undertakes to murder Ellena. The Italian abounds in dramatic, haunting scenes. The strangely effective overture, which describes the Confessional of the Black Penitents, the midnight watch of Vivaldi and his lively, impulsive servant, Paulo, amid the ruins of Paluzzi, the melodramatic interruption of the wedding ceremony, the meeting of Ellena and Schedoni on the lonely shore, the trial in the halls of the Inquisition, are all remarkably vivid. The climax of the story when Schedoni, about to slay Ellena, is arrested in the very act by her beauty and innocence, and then by the glimpse of the portrait which leads him to believe she is his daughter, is finely conceived and finely executed. Afterwards, Ellena proves only to be his niece, but we have had our thrill and nothing can rob us of it. The Italian depends for its effect on natural terror, rather than on supernatural suggestions. The monk, who haunts the ruins of Paluzzi, and who reappears in the prison of the Inquisition, speaks and acts like a being from the world of spectres, but in the fulness of time Mrs. Radcliffe ruthlessly exposes his methods and kills him by slow poison. She never completely explains his behaviour in the halls of the Inquisition nor accounts satisfactorily for the ferocity of his hatred of Schedoni. We are unintentionally led on false trails.

The character of Schedoni is undeniably Mrs. Radcliffe's masterpiece. No one would claim that his character is subtle study, but in his interviews with the Marchesa, Mrs. Radcliffe reveals unexpected gifts tor probing into human motives. He is an imposing figure, theatrical sometimes, but wrought of flesh and blood. In fiction, as in life, the villain has always existed, but it was Mrs. Radcliffe who first created the romantic villain, stained with the darkest crimes, yet dignified and impressive withal. Zeluco in Dr. John Moore's novel of that name (1789) is a powerful conception, but he has no redeeming features to temper our repulsion with pity. The sinister figures of Mrs. Radcliffe, with passion-lined faces and gleaming eyes, stalk—or, if occasion demand it, glide—through all her romances, and as she grows more familiar with the type, her delineations show increased power and vigour. When the villain enters, or shortly afterwards, a descriptive catalogue is displayed, setting forth, in a manner not unlike that of the popular feuilleton of to-day, the qualities to be expected, and with this he is let loose into the story to play his part and act up to his reputation. In the Sicilian Romance there is the tyrannical marquis who would force an unwelcome marriage on his daughter and who immures his wife in a remote corner of the castle, visiting her once a week with a scanty pittance of coarse food. In The Romance of the Forest we find a conventional but thorough villain in Montalt and a half-hearted, poor-spirited villain in La Motte, whose "virtue was such that it could not stand the pressure of occasion." Montoni, the desperate leader of the condottieri in The Mysteries of Udolpho, is endued with so vigorous a vitality that we always rejoice inwardly at his return to the forefront of the story. His abundant energy is refreshing after a long sojourn with his garrulous wife and tearful niece.

"He delighted in the energies of the passions, the difficulties and tempests of life which wreck the happiness of others roused and strengthened all the powers of his mind, and afforded him the highest enjoyment... The fire and keenness of his eye, its proud exaltation, its bold fierceness, its sudden watchfulness as occasion and even slight occasion had called forth the latent soul, she had often observed with emotion, while from the usual expression of his countenance she had always shrunk."

Schedoni is undoubtedly allied to this desperado, but his methods are quieter and more subtle:

"There was something terrible in his air, something almost superhuman. The cowl, too, as it threw a shade over the livid paleness of his face increased its severe character and gave an effect to his large, melancholy eye which approached to horror ... his physiognomy ... bore the traces of many passions which seemed to have fixed the features they no longer animated. An habitual gloom and severity prevailed over the deep lines of his countenance, and his eyes were so piercing that they seemed to penetrate at a single glance into the hearts of men, and to read their most secret thoughts—few persons could endure their scrutiny or even endure to meet them twice ... he could adapt himself to the tempers and passions of persons, whom he wished to conciliate, with astonishing facility."

The type undoubtedly owes something to Milton's Satan. Like Lucifer, he is proud and ambitious, and like him he retains traces of his original grandeur. Hints from Shakespeare helped to fashion him. Like Cassius, seldom he smiles, and smiles in such a sort

"As if he mock'd himself and scorn'd his spirit That could be moved to smile at anything."

Like King John,

"The image of a wicked heinous fault Lives in his eye: that close aspect of his Does show the mood of a much-troubled breast."

By the enormity of his crimes he inspires horror and repulsion, but by his loneliness he appeals, for a moment, like the consummate villain Richard III., to our pity:

"There is no creature loves me And if I die, no soul will pity me. Nay, wherefore should they, since that I myself Find in myself no pity to myself?"

Karl von Moor, the famous hero of Schiller's Die Raeuber (1781), is allied to this desperado. He is thus described in the advertisement of the 1795 edition:

"The picture of a great, misguided soul, endowed with every gift of excellence, yet lost in spite of all its gifts. Unbridled passions and bad companionship corrupt his heart, urge him on from crime to crime, until at last he stands at the head of a band of murderers, heaps horror upon horror, and plunges from precipice to precipice in the lowest depths of despair. Great and majestic in misfortune, by misfortune reclaimed and led back to the paths of virtue. Such a man shall you pity and hate, abhor yet love in the robber Moor."

Among the direct progeny of these grandiose villains are to be included those of Lewis and Maturin, and the heroes of Scott and Byron. We know them by their world-weariness, as well as by their piercing eyes and passion-marked faces, their "verra wrinkles Gothic." In The Giaour we are told:

"Dark and unearthly is the scowl That glares beneath his dusky cowl:

"The flash of that dilating eye Reveals too much of times gone by. Though varying, indistinct its hue Oft will his glance the gazer rue."

Of the Corsair, it is said:

"There breathe but few whose aspect might defy The full encounter of his searching eye."

Lara is drawn from the same model:

"That brow in furrowed lines had fixed at last And spoke of passions, but of passions past; The pride but not the fire of early days, Coldness of mien, and carelessness of praise; A high demeanour and a glance that took Their thoughts from others by a single look."

The feminine counterpart of these bold impersonations of evil is the tyrannical abbess who plays a part in The Romance of the Forest and in The Italian, and who was adopted and exaggerated by Lewis, but her crimes are petty and malicious, not daring and ambitious, like the schemes of Montoni and Schedoni.

One of Mrs. Radcliffe's contemporaries is said to have suggested that if she wished to transcend the horror of the Inquisition scenes in The Italian she would have to visit hell itself. Like her own heroines, Mrs. Radcliffe had too elegant and refined an imagination and too fearful a heart to undertake so desperate a journey. She would have recoiled with horror from the impious suggestion. In Gaston de Blondeville, written in 1802, but published posthumously with a memoir by Noon Talfourd, she ventures to make one or two startling innovations. Her hero is no longer a pale, romantic young man of gentle birth, but a stolid, worthy merchant. Here, at last, she indulges in a substantial spectre, who cannot be explained away as the figment of a disordered imagination, since he seriously alarms, not a solitary heroine or a scared lady's-maid, but Henry III. himself and his assembled barons. Yet apart from this daring escapade, it is timidity rather than the spirit of valorous enterprise that is urging Mrs. Radcliffe into new and untried paths. Her happy, courageous disregard for historical accuracy in describing far-off scenes and bygone ages has deserted her. She searches painfully in ancient records, instead of in her imagination, for mediaeval atmosphere. Her story is grievously overburdened with elaborate descriptions of customs and ceremonies, and she adds laborious notes, citing passages from learned authorities, such as Leland's Collectanea, Pegge's dissertation on the obsolete office of Esquire of the King's Body, Sir George Bulke's account of the coronation of Richard III., Mador's History of the Exchequer, etc. We are transported from the eighteenth century, not actually to mediaeval England, but to a carefully arranged pageant displaying mediaeval costumes, tournaments and banquets. The actors speak in antique language to accord with the picturesque background against which they stand. Gaston de Blondeville, which is noteworthy as an early attempt to shadow forth the days of chivalry, has far more colour than Leland's Longsword (1752), Miss Reeve's Old English Baron (1777), or Miss Sophia Lee's Recess (1785), from which rather than from Mrs. Radcliffe's earlier romances its descent may be traced. The attempt to avoid glaring anachronisms and to reproduce an accurate picture of a former age points forward to Scott. Strutt's Queenhoo Hall, which Scott completed, was a revolt against the unscrupulous inventions of romance-writers, and was crammed full of archaeological lore. The story of Gaston de Blondeville is tedious, the characters are shadowy and unreal, and we become, as the Ettric Shepherd remarked, in Noctes Ambrosianae, "somewhat too hand and glove with his ghostship"; yet, regarded simply as a spectacular effect, it is not without indications of skill and power. Miss Mitford based a drama on it, but it never attained the popularity of Mrs. Radcliffe's other novels. It was published when her reputation was on the wane.

Of the materials on which Mrs. Radcliffe drew in fashioning her romances it is impossible to speak with any certainty. Doubtless she had studied certain old chronicles, and she was deeply read in Shakespeare, especially in the tragedies. Much of her leisure, we are told, was spent in reading the literary productions of the day, especially poetry and novels. At the head of her chapters she often quotes Milton as well as the poets of her own century—Mason, Gray, Collins, and once "Ossian"—choosing almost inevitably passages which deal with the terrible or the ghostly. She must have known The Castle of Otranto, and in The Italian she quotes several passages from Walpole's melodrama The Mysterious Mother. But often she may have been dependent on the oral legends clustering round ancient abbeys for the background of her stories. Ghostly legends would always appeal to her, and she probably amassed a hoard of traditions when she visited English castles during her tours with her husband. The background of Gaston de Blondeville is Kenilworth Castle. That ancient ruins stirred her imagination profoundly is clear from passages in her notes on the journeys. In Furness Abbey she sees in her mind's eye "a midnight procession of monks," and at Brougham Castle:

"One almost saw the surly keeper descending through this door-case and heard him rattle the keys of the chamber above, listening with indifference to the clank of chains and to the echo of that groan below which seemed to rend the heart it burst from,"

or again:

"Slender saplings of ash waved over the deserted door cases, where at the transforming hour of twilight, the superstitious eye might mistake them for spectres of some early possessor of the castle, restless from guilt, or of some sufferer persevering for vengeance."

Mrs. Radcliffe's style compares favourably with that of many of her contemporaries, with that of Mrs. Roche, for instance, who wrote The Children of the Abbey and an array of other forgotten romances, but she is too fond of long, imperfectly balanced sentences, with as many awkward twists and turns as the winding stairways of her ancient turrets. Nobody in the novels, except the talkative, comic servant, who is meant to be vulgar and ridiculous, ever condescends to use colloquial speech. Even in moments of extreme peril the heroines are very choice in their diction. Dialogue in Mrs. Radcliffe's world is as stilted and unnatural as that of prim, old-fashioned school books. In her earliest novel she uses very little conversation, clearly finding the indirect form of narrative easier. Sometimes, in the more highly wrought passages of description, she slips unawares into a more daring phrase, e.g. in Udolpho, the track of blood "glared" upon the stairs, where the word suggests not the actual appearance of the bloodstain, but rather its effect on Emily's inflamed and disordered imagination. Dickens might have chosen the word deliberately in this connection, but he would have used it, not once, but several times to ensure his result and to emphasise the impression. This is not Mrs. Radcliffe's way. Her attention to style is mainly subconscious, her chief interest being in situation. Her descriptions of scenery have often been praised. Crabb Robinson declared in his diary that he preferred them to those of Waverley. When Byron visited Venice he found no better words to describe its beauty than those of Mrs. Radcliffe, who had never seen it:

"I saw from out the wave her structures rise As from the stroke of an enchanted wand."

In 1794 Mrs. Radcliffe and her husband made a journey through Holland and West Germany, of which she wrote an account, including with it observations made during a tour of the English Lakes. All her novels, except The Italian and Gaston de Blondeville, had been written before she went abroad, and in describing foreign scenery she relied on her imagination, aided perhaps by pictures and descriptions as well as by her recollections of English mountains and lakes. The attempt to blend into a single picture a landscape actually seen and a landscape only known at second-hand may perhaps account for the lack of distinctness in her pictures. Her descriptions of scenery are elaborate, and often prolix, but it is often difficult to form a clear image of the scene. In her novels she cares for landscape only as an effective background, and paints with the broad, careless sweep of the theatrical scene-painter. In the Journeys, where she depicts scenery for its own sake, her delineation is more definite and distinct. She reveals an unusual feeling for colour and for the lights and tones of a changing sea or sky:

"It is most interesting to watch the progress of evening and its effect on the waters; streaks of light scattered among the dark, western clouds after the sun had set, and gleaming in long reflection on the sea, while a grey obscurity was drawing over the east, as the vapours rose gradually from the ocean. The air was breathless, the tall sails of the vessel were without motion, and her course upon the deep scarcely perceptible; while above the planet burned with steady dignity and threw a tremulous line of light upon the sea, whose surface flowed in smooth, waveless expanse. Then other planets appeared and countless stars spangled the dark waters. Twilight now pervaded air and ocean, but the west was still luminous where one solemn gleam of dusky red edged the horizon from under heavy vapours."[37]

Sometimes her scenes are disappointingly vague. She describes Ingleborough as "rising from elegantly swelling ground," and attempts to convey a stretch of country by enumerating a list of its features in generalised terms:

"Gentle swelling slopes, rich in verdure, thick enclosures, woods, bowery hop-grounds, sheltered mansions announcing the wealth, and substantial farms with neat villages, the comfort of the country."

Yet she notices tiny mosses whose hues were "pea green and primrose," and sometimes reveals flashes of imaginative insight into natural beauty like "the dark sides of mountains marked only by the blue smoke of weeds driven in circles near the ground." These personal, intimate touches of detail are very different from the highly coloured sunrises and sunsets that awaken the raptures of her heroines.

With all her limitations, Mrs. Radcliffe is a figure whom it is impossible to ignore in the history of the novel. Her influence was potent on Lewis and on Maturin as well as on a host of forgotten writers. Scott admired her works and probably owed something in his craftsmanship to his early study of them. She appeals most strongly in youth. The Ettrick Shepherd, who was by nature and education "just excessive superstitious," declares:

"Had I read Udolpho and her other romances in my boyish days my hair would have stood on end like that o' other folk ... but afore her volumes fell into my hauns, my soul had been frichtened by a' kinds of traditionary terrors, and many hunder times hae I maist swarfed wi' fear in lonesome spots in muir and woods at midnight when no a leevin thing was movin but mysel' and the great moon."[38]

There are dull stretches in all her works, but, as Hazlitt justly claims, "in harrowing up the soul with imaginary horrors, and making the flesh creep and the nerves thrill with fond hopes and fears, she is unrivalled among her countrymen."[39]



CHAPTER IV - THE NOVEL OF TERROR. LEWIS AND MATURIN.

To pass from the work of Mrs. Radcliffe to that of Matthew Gregory Lewis is to leave "the novel of suspense," which depends for part of its effect on the human instinct of curiosity, for "the novel of terror," which works almost entirely on the even stronger and more primitive instinct of fear. Those who find Mrs. Radcliffe's unruffled pace leisurely beyond endurance, or who dislike her coldly reasonable methods of accounting for what is only apparently supernatural, or who sometimes feel stifled by the oppressive air of gentility that broods over her romantic world, will find ample reparation in the melodramatic pages of "Monk" Lewis. Here, indeed, may those who will and dare sup full with horrors. Lewis, in reckless abandonment, throws to the winds all restraint, both moral and artistic, that had bound his predecessor. The incidents, which follow one another in kaleidoscopic variety, are like the disjointed phases of a delirium or nightmare, from which there is no escape. We are conscious that his story is unreal or even ludicrous, yet Lewis has a certain dogged power of driving us unrelentingly through it, regardless of our own will. Literary historians have tended to over-emphasise the connection between Mrs. Radcliffe and Lewis. Their purposes and achievement are so different that it is hardly accurate to speak of them as belonging to the same school. It is true that in one of his letters Lewis asserts that he was induced to go on with his romance, The Monk, by reading The Mysteries of Udolpho, "one of the most interesting books that has (sic) ever been written," and that he was struck by the resemblance of his own character to that of Montoni;[40] but his literary debt to Mrs. Radcliffe is comparatively insignificant. His depredations on German literature are much more serious and extensive. Lewis, indeed, is one of the Dick Turpins of fiction and seizes his booty where he will in a high-handed and somewhat unscrupulous fashion, but for many of Mrs. Radcliffe's treasures he could find no use. Her picturesque backgrounds, her ingenious explanations of the uncanny, her uneventful interludes and long deferred but happy endings were outside his province. The moments in her novels which Lewis admired and strove to emulate were those during which the reader with quickened pulse breathlessly awaits some startling development. Of these moments, there are, it must be frankly owned, few in Mrs. Radcliffe's novels. Lewis's mistake lay in trying to induce a more rapid palpitation, and to prolong it almost uninterruptedly throughout his novel. By attempting a physical and mental impossibility he courts disaster. Mrs. Radcliffe's skeletons are decently concealed in the family cupboard, Lewis's stalk abroad in shameless publicity. In Mrs. Radcliffe's stories, the shadow fades and disappears just when we think we are close upon the substance; for, after we have long been groping in the twilight of fearful imaginings, she suddenly jerks back the shutter to admit the clear light of reason. In Lewis's wonder-world there are no elusive shadows; he hurls us without preparation or initiation into a daylight orgy of horrors.

Lewis was educated at Westminster and Christ Church, but a year spent in Weimar (1792-3), where he zealously studied German, and incidentally, met Goethe, seems to have left more obvious marks on his literary career. To Lewis, Goethe is pre-eminently the author of The Sorrows of Werther; and Schiller, he remarks casually, "has, written several other plays besides The Robbers."[41] He probably read Heinse's Ardinghello(1787), Tieck's Abdallah (1792-3), and William Lovell (1794-6), many of the innumerable dramas of Kotzebue, the romances of Weit Weber, and other specimens of what Carlyle describes as "the bowl and dagger department," where

"Black Forests and Lubberland, sensuality and horror, the spectre nun and the charmed moonshine, shall not be wanting. Boisterous outlaws also, with huge whiskers, and the most cat o' mountain aspect; tear-stained sentimentalists, the grimmest man-eaters, ghosts and the like suspicious characters will be found in abundance."[42]

Throughout his life he seems to have made a hobby of the literature that arouses violent emotion and mental excitement, or lacerates the nerves, or shocks and startles. The lifelike and the natural are not powerful enough for his taste, though some of his Romantic Tales(1808), such as My Uncle's Garret Window, are uncommonly tame. Like the painter of a hoarding who must at all costs arrest attention, he magnifies, exaggerates and distorts. Once when rebuked for introducing black guards into a country where they did not exist, he is said to have declared that he would have made them sky-blue if he thought they would produce any more effect.[43] Referring to The Monk, he confesses: "Unluckily, in working it up, I thought that the stronger my colours, the more effect would my picture produce."[44]

One of his early attempts at fiction was a romance which he later converted into his popular drama, The Castle Spectre. This play was staged in 1798, and was reconverted by Miss Sarah Wilkinson in 1820 into a romance. Lewis spreads his banquet with a lavish hand, and crudities and absurdities abound, but he has a knack of choosing situations well adapted for stage effect. The play, aptly described by Coleridge as a "peccant thing of Noise, Froth and Impermanence,"[45] would offer a happy hunting ground to those who delight in the pursuit of "parallel passages." At the age of twenty, during his residence at the Hague as attache to the British embassy, in the summer of 1794, he composed in ten weeks, his notorious romance, The Monk. On its publication in 1795 it was attacked on the grounds of profanity and indecency.

The Monk, despite its cleverness, is essentially immature, yet it is not a childish work. It is much less youthful, for instance, than Shelley's Zastrozzi and St. Irvyne. The inflamed imagination, the violent exaggeration of emotion and of character, the jeering cynicism and lack of tolerance, the incoherent formlessness, are all indications of adolescence. In The Monk there are two distinct stories, loosely related. The story of Raymond and Agnes, into which the legends of the bleeding nun and Wandering Jew are woven with considerable skill, was published more than once as a detached and separate work. It is concerned with the fate of two unhappy lovers, who are parted by the tyranny of their parents and of the church, and who endure manifold agonies. The physical torture of Agnes is described in revolting detail, for Lewis has no scruple in carrying the ugly far beyond the limits within which it is artistic. The happy ending of their harrowing story is incredible. By making Ambrosio, on the verge of his hideous crimes, harshly condemn Agnes for a sin of the same nature as that which he is about to commit, Lewis forges a link between the two stories. But the connection is superficial, and the novel suffers through the distraction of our interest. In the story of Ambrosio, Antonia plays no part in her own downfall. She is as helpless as a plaster statue demolished by an earthquake. The figure of Matilda has more vitality, though Lewis changes his mind about her character during the course of the book, and fails to make her early history consistent with the ending of his story. She is certainly not in league with the devil, when, in a passionate soliloquy, she cries to Ambrosio, whom she believes to be asleep: "The time will come when you will be convinced that my passion is pure and disinterested. Then you will pity me and feel the whole weight of my sorrows." But when the devil appears, he declares to Ambrosio:

"I saw that you were virtuous from vanity, not principle, and I seized the fit moment for your seduction. I observed your blind idolatry of the Madonna's picture. I bade a subordinate but crafty spirit assume a similar form, and you eagerly yielded to the blandishments of Matilda."

The discrepancy is obvious, but this blemish is immaterial, for the whole story is unnatural. The deterioration in Ambrosio's character—though Lewis uses all his energy in striving to make it appear probable by discussing the effect of environment—is too swift.

Lewis is at his best when he lets his youthful, high spirits have full play. His boyish exaggeration makes Leonella, Antonia's aunt, seem like a pantomime character, who has inadvertently stepped into a melodrama, but the caricature is amusing by its very crudity. She writes in red ink to express "the blushes of her cheek," when she sends a message of encouragement to the Conde d'Ossori. This and other puerile jests are more tolerable than Lewis's attempts to depict passion or describe character. Bold, flaunting splashes of colour, strongly marked, passionate faces, exaggerated gestures start from every page, and his style is as extravagant as his imagery. Sometimes he uses a short, staccato sentence to enforce his point, but more often we are engulfed in a swirling welter of words. He delights in the declamatory language of the stage, and all his characters speak as if they were behind the footlights, shouting to the gallery.

A cold-blooded reviewer, in whom the detective instinct was strong, indicated the sources of The Monk so mercilessly, that Lewis appears in his critique[46] rather as the perpetrator of a series of ingenious thefts than as the creator of a novel:

"The outline of the Monk Ambrosio's story was suggested by that of the Santon Barissa [Barsisa] in the Guardian:[47] the form of temptation is borrowed from The Devil in Love of Canzotte [Cazotte], and the catastrophe is taken from The Sorcerer. The adventures of Raymond and Agnes are less obviously imitations, yet the forest scene near Strasburg brings to mind an incident in Smollett's Count Fathom; the bleeding nun is described by the author as a popular tale of the Germans,[48] and the convent prison resembles the inflictions of Mrs. Radcliffe."

The industrious reviewer overlooks the legend of the Wandering Jew, which might have been added to the list of Lewis's "borrowings." It must be admitted that Lewis transforms, or at least remodels, what he borrows. Addison's story relates how a sage of reputed sanctity seduces and slays a maiden brought to him for cure, and later sells his soul. Lewis abandons the Oriental setting, converts the santon into a monk and embroiders the story according to his fancy. Scott alludes to a Scottish version of what is evidently a widespread legend.[49] The resemblance of the catastrophe—presumably the appearance of Satan in the form of Lucifer—to the scene in Mickle's Sorcerer, which was published among Lewis's Tales of Wonder (1801), is vague enough to be accidental. There are blue flames and sorcery, and an apparition in both, but that is all the two scenes have in common. The tyrannical abbess may be a heritage from The Romance of the Forest, but, if so she is exaggerated almost beyond recognition.

In fashioning as the villain of her latest novel, The Italian, a monk, whose birth is wrapt in obscurity, Mrs. Radcliffe may have been influenced by Lewis's Monk which had appeared two years before. Both Schedoni and Ambrosio are reputed saints, both are plunged into the blackest guilt, and both are victims of the Inquisition. Mrs. Radcliffe, it is true, recoils from introducing the enemy of mankind, but, before the secrets are finally revealed, we almost suspect Schedoni of having dabbled in the Black Arts, and his actual crime falls short of our expectations. The "explained supernatural" plays a less prominent part in The Italian than in the previous novels, and Mrs. Radcliffe relies for her effect rather on sheer terror. The dramatic scene where Schedoni stealthily approaches the sleeping Ellena at midnight recalls the more highly coloured, but less impressive scene in Antonia's bedchamber. The fate of Bianchi, Ellena's aunt, is strangely reminiscent of that of Elvira, Antonia's mother. The convent scenes and the overbearing abbess had been introduced into Mrs. Radcliffe's earlier novels; but in The Italian, the anti-Roman feeling is more strongly emphasised than usual. This may or may not have been due to the influence of Lewis. There is no direct evidence that Mrs. Radcliffe had read The Monk, but the book was so notorious that a fellow novelist would be almost certain to explore its pages. Hoffmann's romance, Elixir des Teufels (1816), is manifestly written under its inspiration. Coincidence could not account for the remarkable resemblances to incidents in the story of Ambrosio.

The far-famed collection of Tales of Terror appeared in 1799, The Tales of Wonder in 1801. The rest of Lewis's work consists mainly of translations and adaptations from the German. He revelled in the horrific school of melodrama. He delighted in the kind of German romance parodied by Meredith in Farina, where Aunt Lisbeth tells Margarita of spectres, smelling of murder and the charnel-breath of midnight, who "uttered noises that wintered the blood and revealed sights that stiffened hair three feet long; ay, and kept it stiff." The Bravo of Venice (1805) is a translation of Zschokke's Abellino, der Grosse Bandit, but Lewis invented a superfluous character, Monaldeschi, Rosabella's destined bridegroom, apparently with the object that Abellino might slay him early in the story—and added a concluding chapter. At the outset of the story, Rosalvo, a man after Lewis's own heart, declares:

"To astonish is my destiny: Rosalvo knows no medium: Rosalvo can never act like common men," and thereupon proceeds to prove by his extraordinary actions that this is no idle vaunt. He lives a double life: in the guise of Abellino, he joins the banditti, and by inexplicable methods rids Venice of her enemies; in the guise of a noble Florentine, Flodoardo, he woos the Doge's daughter, Rosabella. The climax of the story is reached when Flodoardo, under oath to deliver up the bandit Abellino, appears before the Doge at the appointed hour and reveals his double identity. He is hailed as the saviour of Hungary, and wins Rosabella as his bride. In the second edition of The Bravo of Venice, a romance in four volumes by M. G. Lewis, Legends of the Nunnery, is announced as in the press. There seems to be no record of it elsewhere. Feudal Tyrants (1806), a long romance from the German, connected with the story of William Tell, consists of a series of memoirs loosely strung together, in which the most alarming episode is the apparition of the pale spectre of an aged monk. In Blanche and Osbright, or Mistrust (1808),[50] which is not avowedly a translation, Lewis depicts an even more revolting portrait than that of Abellino in his bravo's disguise. He adds detail after detail without considering the final effect on the eye:

"Every muscle in his gigantic form seemed convulsed by some horrible sensation; the deepest gloom darkened every feature; the wind from the unclosed window agitated his raven locks, and every hair appeared to writhe itself. His eyeballs glared, his teeth chattered, his lips trembled; and yet a smile of satisfied vengeance played horribly around them. His complexion seemed suddenly to be changed to the dark tincture of an African; the expression of his countenance was dreadful, was diabolical. Magdalena, as she gazed upon his face, thought that she gazed upon a demon."

Here, to quote the Lady Hysterica Belamour, we have surely the "horrid, horrible, horridest horror." But in Koenigsmark the Robber, or The Terror of Bohemia (1818), Lewis's caste includes an enormous yellow-eyed spider, a wolf who changes into a peasant and disappears amid a cloud of sulphur, and a ghost who sheds three ominous drops of boiling blood. It was probably such stories as this that Peacock had in mind when he declared, through Mr. Flosky, that the devil had become "too base and popular" for the surfeited appetite of readers of fiction. Yet, as Carlyle once exclaimed of the German terror-drama, as exemplified in Kotzebue, Grillparzer and Klingemann, whose stock-in-trade is similar to that of Lewis: "If any man wish to amuse himself irrationally, here is the ware for his money."[51] Byron, who had himself attempted in Oscar and Alva (Hours of Idleness, 1807) a ballad in the manner of Lewis, describes with irony the triumphs of terror:

"Oh! wonderworking Lewis! Monk or Bard, Who fain would make Parnassus a churchyard! Lo! wreaths of yew, not laurel, bind thy brow, Thy muse a sprite, Apollo's sexton thou; Whether on ancient tombs thou tak'st thy stand, By gibbering spectres hailed, thy kindred band; Or tracest chaste descriptions on thy page To please the females of our modest age; All hail, M.P., from whose infernal brain Thin-sheeted phantoms glide, a grisly train; At whose command 'grim women' throng in crowds And kings of fire, of water, and of clouds With small grey men—wild yagers and what not, To crown with honour thee and Walter Scott; Again, all hail! if tales like thine may please, St. Luke alone can vanquish the disease. Even Satan's self with thee might dread to dwell, And in thy skull discern a deeper hell!"[52]

Scott's delightfully discursive review of The Fatal Revenge or The Family of Montorio (1810), not only forms a fitting introduction to the romances of Maturin, but presents a lively sketch of the fashionable reading of the day. It has been insinuated that the Quarterly Review was too heavy and serious, that it contained, to quote Scott's own words, "none of those light and airy articles which a young lady might read while her hair was papering." To redeem the reputation of the journal, Scott gallantly undertook to review some of the "flitting and evanescent productions of the times." After a laborious inspection of the contents of a hamper full of novels, he arrived at the painful conclusion that "spirits and patience may be as completely exhausted in perusing trifles as in following algebraical calculations." He condemns the authors of the Gothic romance, not for their extravagance, a venial offence, but for their monotony, a deadly sin.

"We strolled through a variety of castles, each of which was regularly called Il Castello; met with as many captains of condottieri, heard various ejaculations of Santa Maria and Diabolo; read by a decaying lamp and in a tapestried chamber dozens of legends as stupid as the main history; examined such suites of deserted apartments as might set up a reasonable barrack, and saw as many glimmering lights as would make a respectable illumination." It was no easy task to bore Sir Walter Scott, and an excursion into the byeways of early nineteenth century fiction proves abundantly the justice of his satire. Such novelists as Miss Sarah Wilkinson or Mrs. Eliza Parsons, whose works were greedily devoured by circulating library readers a hundred years ago, deliberately concocted an unappetising gallimaufry of earlier stories and practised the harmless deception of serving their insipid dishes under new and imposing names. A writer in the Annual Review, so early as 1802, complains in criticising Tales of Superstition and Chivalry:

"It is not one of the least objections against these fashionable fictions that the imagery of them is essentially monstrous. Hollow winds, clay-cold hands, clanking chains and clicking clocks, with a few similar etcetera are continually tormenting us."

Tales of terror were often issued in the form of sixpenny chapbooks, enlivened by woodcuts daubed in yellow, blue, red and green. Embellished with these aids to the imagination, they were sold in thousands. To the readers of a century ago, a "blue book" meant, as Medwin explains in his life of Shelley, not a pamphlet filled with statistics, but "a sixpenny shocker."[53] The notorious Minerva Press catered for wealthier patrons, and, it is said, sold two thousand copies of Mrs. Bennett's Beggar Girl and her Benefactors on the day of publication, at thirty-six shillings for the seven volumes. Samuel Rogers recalled Lane, the head of the firm, riding in a carriage and pair with two footmen, wearing gold cockades.[54] Scott was careful not to disclose the names of the novelists he derided, but his hamper probably contained a selection of Mrs. Parsons' sixty works, and perhaps two of Miss Wilkinson's, with their alluring titles, The Priory of St. Clair, or The Spectre of the Murdered Nun; The Convent of the Grey Penitents, or The Apostate Nun. Perchance, he found there Mrs. Henrietta Rouviere's romance, (published in the same year as Montorio,) A Peep at our Ancestors (1807), describing the reign of King Stephen. Mrs. Rouviere, in her preface,

"flatters herself that, aided by records and documents, she may have succeeded in a correct though faint sketch of the times she treats, and in affording, if through a dim yet not distorted nor discoloured glass, A Peep at our Ancestors";

but her story is entirely devoid of the colour with which Mrs. Radcliffe, her model, contrived to decorate the past. It is, moreover, written in a style so opaque that it obscures her images from view as effectually as a piece of ground glass. To describe the approach of twilight—an hour beloved by writers of romance—she attempts a turgid paraphrase of Gray's Elegy:

"The grey shades of an autumnal evening gradually stole over the horizon, progressively throwing a duskier hue on the surrounding objects till glimmering confusion encompassing the earth shut from the accustomed eye the well-known view, leaving conjecture to mark its boundaries."

The adventures of Adelaide and her lover, Walter of Gloucester, are so insufferably tedious that Scott doubtless decided to "leave to conjecture" their interminable vicissitudes. The names of other novels, whose pages he may impatiently have scanned, may be garnered by those who will, from such works as Living Authors (1817), or from the four volumes of Watts' elaborate compilation, the Bibliotheca Britannica (1824). The titles are, indeed, lighter and more entertaining reading than the books themselves. Anyone might reasonably expect to read Midnight Horrors, or The Bandit's Daughter, as Henry Tilney vows he read The Mysteries of Udolpho, with "hair on end all the time"; but the actual story, notwithstanding a wandering ball of fire, that acts as guide through the labyrinths of a Gothic castle, is conducive of sleep rather than shudders. The notoriety of Lewis's monk may be estimated by the procession of monks who followed in his train. There were, to select a few names at random, The New Monk, by one R.S., Esq.; The Monk of Madrid, by George Moore (1802); The Bloody Monk of Udolpho, by T.J. Horsley Curties; Manfroni, the One-handed Monk, whose history was borrowed, together with those of Abellino, the terrific bravo, and Rinaldo Rinaldini,[55] by "J.J." from Miss Flinders' library;[56] and lastly, as a counter-picture, a monk without a scowl, The Benevolent Monk, by Theodore Melville (1807). The nuns, including "Rosa Matilda's" Nun of St. Omer's, Miss Sophia Francis's Nun of Misericordia (1807) and Miss Wilkinson's Apostate Nun, would have sufficed to people a convent. Perhaps The Convent of the Grey Penitents would have been a suitable abode for them; but most of them were, to quote Crabbe, "girls no nunnery can tame." Lewis's Venetian bravo was boldly transported to other climes. We find him in Scotland in The Mysterious Bravo, or The Shrine of St. Alstice, A Caledonian Legend, and in Austria in The Bravo of Bohemia or The Black Forest. No country is safe from the raids of banditti. The Caledonian Banditti or The Banditti of the Forest, or The Bandit of Florence—all very much alike in their manners and morals—make the heroine's journey a perilous enterprise. The romances of Mrs. Radcliffe were rifled unscrupulously by the snappers-up of unconsidered trifles, and many of the titles are variations on hers. In emulation of The Romance of the Forest we find George Walker's Romance of the Cavern (1792) and Miss Eleanor Sleath's Mysteries of the Forest. Novelists appreciated the magnetic charm of the word "mystery" on a title-page, and after The Mysteries of Udolpho we find such seductive names as Mysterious Warnings and Mysterious Visits, by Mrs. Parsons; Horrid Mysteries, translated from the German of the Marquis von Grosse, by R. Will (1796); The Mystery of the Black Tower and The Mystic Sepulchre, by John Palmer, a schoolmaster of Bath; The Mysterious Wanderer (1807), by Miss Sophia Reeve; The Mysterious Hand or Subterranean Horrors (1811), by A.J. Randolph; and The Mysterious Freebooter (1805), by Francis Lathom. Castles and abbeys were so persistently haunted that Mrs. Rachel Hunter, a severely moral writer, advertises one of her stories as Letitia: A Castle Without a Spectre. Mystery slips, almost unawares, into the domestic story. There are, for instance, vague hints of it in Charlotte Smith's Old Manor House (1793). The author of The Ghost and of More Ghosts adopts the pleasing pseudonym of Felix Phantom. The gloom of night broods over many of the stories, for we know:

"affairs that walk, As they say spirits do, at midnight, have In them a wilder nature than the business That seeks despatch by day,"

and we are confronted with titles like Midnight Weddings, by Mrs. Meeke, one of Macaulay's favourite "bad-novel writers," The Midnight Bell, awakening memories of Duncan's murder, by George Walker, or The Nocturnal Minstrel (1809), by Miss Sleath. These "dismal treatises" abound in reminiscences of Mrs. Radcliffe and of "Monk" Lewis, and many of them hark back as far as The Castle of Otranto for some of their situations. The novels of Miss Wilkinson may perhaps serve as well as those of any of her contemporaries to show that Scott was not unduly harsh in his condemnation of the romances fashionable in the first decade of the nineteenth century, when "tales of terror jostle on the road."[57] The sleeping potion, a boon to those who weave the intricate pattern of a Gothic romance, is one of Miss Wilkinson's favourite devices, and is employed in at least three of her stories. In The Chateau de Montville (1803) it is administered to the amiable Louisa to aid Augustine in his sinister designs, but she ultimately escapes, and is wedded by Octavius, who has previously been borne off by a party of pirates. He "finds the past unfortunate vicissitudes of his life amply recompensed by her love." In The Convent of the Grey Penitents, Rosalthe happily avoids the opiate, as she overhears the plans of her unscrupulous husband, who, it seems, has "an unquenchable thirst of avarice," and desires to win a wealthier bride. She flees to a "cottage ornee" on Finchley Common, the home, it may be remembered, of Thackeray's Washerwoman; and the thrills we expect from a novel of terror are reserved for the second volume, and arise out of the adventures of the next generation. After Rosalthe's death, spectres, blue flames, corpses, thunderstorms and hairbreadth escapes are set forth in generous profusion.

In The Priory of St. Clair (1811), Julietta, who has been forced into a convent against her will, like so many other heroines, is drugged and conveyed as a corpse to the Count de Valve's Gothic castle. She comes to life only to be slain before the high altar, and revenges herself after death by haunting the count regularly every night. The Fugitive Countess or Convent of St. Ursula (1807) contains three spicy ingredients—a mock burial, a concealed wife and a mouldering manuscript. The social status of Miss Wilkinson's characters is invariably lofty, for no self-respecting ghost ever troubles the middle classes; and her manner is as ambitious as her matter. Her personages, in Lopez and Aranthe, behave and talk thus:

"Heavenly powers!" exclaimed Aranthe, "it is Dorimont, or else my eyes deceive me!" Overpowered with surprise and almost breathless, she sunk on the carpet. Lopez stood aghast, his countenance was of a deadly pale, a glass of wine he had in his hand he let fall to the floor, while he articulated: "What an alteration in that once beauteous countenance!"

Miss Wilkinson's sentences stagger and lurch uncertainly, but she delights in similes and other ornaments of style:

"Adeline Barnett was fair as a lily, tall as the pine, her fine dark eyes sparkling as diamonds, and she moved with the majestic air of a goddess, but pride and ambition appeared on the brow of this famed maiden, and destroying the effect of her charms."

She is, in fact, more addicted to "gramarye" than to "grammar"—the fault with which Byron, in a note to English Bards and Scotch Reviewers, charged the hero and heroine of Scott's Lay of the Last Minstrel. Her heroes do not merely love, they are "enamoured to a romantic degree." Her arbours are "composed of jasmine, white rose, and other odoriferous sweets of Flora." She sprinkles French phrases with an airy nonchalance worthy of the Lady Hysterica Belamour, whose memoirs are included in Barrett's Heroine. Her duchesses "figure away with eclat"—"a party quarrie assemble at their dejeune." It is noteworthy that by 1820 even Miss Wilkinson had learnt to despise the spectres in whom she had gloried during her amazing career. In The Spectre of Lanmere Abbey (1820) the ghost is ignominiously exposed, and proved to be "a tall figure dressed in white, and a long, transparent veil flowing over her whole figure," while the heroine Amelia speaks almost in the accents of Catherine Morland:

"My governess has been affirming that there are Gothic buildings without spectres or legends of a ghostly nature attached to them; now, what is a castle or abbey worth without such appendage?; do tell me candidly, are none of the turrets of your old family mansion in Monmouth rendered thus terrific by some unquiet, wandering spirit?, dare the peasantry pass it after twilight, or if they are forced into that temerity, do not their teeth chatter, their hair stand erect and their poor knees knock together?"

That Miss Wilkinson, who, for twenty years, had conscientiously striven to chill her readers' blood, should be compelled at last to turn round and gibe at her own spectres, reveals into what a piteous plight the novel of terror had fallen. When even the enchantress disavowed her belief in them, the ghosts must surely have fled shrieking and affrighted and thought never more to raise their diminished heads.

From a medley of novels, similar to those of Miss Wilkinson, Scott singled out for commendation The Fatal Revenge or The Family of Montorio, by "Jasper Denis Murphy," or the Rev. Charles Robert Maturin. Amid the chaos of horror into which Maturin hurls his readers, Scott shrewdly discerned the spirit and animation which, though often misdirected, pervade his whole work. The story is but a grotesque distortion of life, yet Scott found himself "insensibly involved in the perusal and at times impressed with no common degree of respect for the powers of the author." His generous estimate of Maturin's gifts and his prediction of future success is the more impressive, because The Fatal Revenge undeniably belongs to the very class of novels he was ridiculing.

Maturin was an eccentric Irish clergyman, who diverted himself by weaving romances and constructing tragedies. He loved to mingle with the gay and frivolous; he affected foppish attire, and prided himself on his exceptional skill in dancing. His indulgence in literary work was probably but another expression of his longing to escape from the strait and narrow way prescribed for a Protestant clergyman. Wild anecdotes are told of his idiosyncrasies.[58] He preferred to compose his stories in a room full of people, and he found a noisy argument especially invigorating. To prevent himself from taking part in the conversation, he used to cover his mouth with paste composed of flour and water. Sometimes, we are told, he would wear a red wafer upon his brow, as a signal that he was enduring the throes of literary composition and expected forbearance and consideration. It is said that he once missed preferment in the church because he absentmindedly interviewed his prospective vicar with his head bristling with quills like a porcupine. He is said to have insisted on his wife's using rouge though she had naturally a high colour, and to have gone fishing in a resplendent blue coat and silk stockings. Such was the flamboyant personality of the man whose first novel attracted the kindly attention of Scott. His oddities, which would have rejoiced the heart of Dickens, are not without significance in a study of his literary work, for his love of emphasis and exaggeration are reflected in both the substance and style of his novels.

Maturin's writings fall into three periods. Of his three early novels, The Fatal Revenge or The Family of Montorio (1807), The Wild Irish Boy (1808) and The Milesian Chief (1812), the first only is a tale of horror. The Wild Irish Boy is a domestic story, and forms a suitable companion for Lady Morgan's Wild Irish Girl. The Milesian Chief is a historical novel, and is now chiefly remembered on account of the likeness of the opening chapters to Scott's Bride of Lammermoor (1819). After the publication of these novels, Maturin turned his attention to the stage. His first tragedy, Bertram (1816), received the encouragement of Scott and Byron. The character of Bertram is modelled on that of Schiller's robber-chief, Karl von Moor, who captivated the imagination of Coleridge himself, and who is reflected in Osorio and perhaps in Mrs. Radcliffe's villains. The action of the melodrama moves swiftly, and abounds in the "moving situations" Maturin loved to handle. Bertram was succeeded in 1817 by Manuel, and in 1819 by Fredolfo. Meanwhile Maturin had returned to novel-writing. Women, or Pour et Contre, with its lifelike sketches of Puritanical society and clever characterisation, appeared in 1818, and was favourably reviewed by Scott.[59] Melmoth the Wanderer, Maturin's masterpiece, was published in 1820, and was succeeded in 1824 by his last work, The Albigenses, a historical romance, following Scott's design rather than that of Mrs. Radcliffe.

In reviewing The Family of Montorio, Scott prudently attempted only a brief survey of the plot, and forsook Maturin's sequence of events. In his sketch the outline of the story is comparatively clear. In the novel itself we wander, bewildered, baffled and distracted through labyrinthine mazes. No Ariadne awaits on the threshold with the magic ball of twine to guide us through the complicated windings. We stumble along blind alleys desperately retracing our weary steps, and, after stumbling alone and unaided to the very end, reach the darkly concealed clue when it has ceased to be either of use or of interest to us. Many an adventurer must have lain down, dispirited and exhausted, without ever reaching his distant and elusive goal. Disentangled and simplified almost beyond recognition, the story runs thus: In 1670, Count Orazio and his younger brother are the sole representatives of the family of Montorio. Orazio has married Erminia di Vivaldi, whom he loves devotedly. She does not return his love. The younger brother determines to take advantage of this circumstance to gain the title and estates for himself, and succeeds in arousing Orazio's jealousy against a young officer, Verdoni, to whom Erminia had formerly been deeply attached. In a violent passion Orazio slays Verdoni before the eyes of Erminia, who falls dead at his feet. This part of his design accomplished, the younger brother plots to murder Orazio himself, who, however, discovers the innocence of his wife and the hideous perfidy of his brother. Temporarily bereft of reason, Orazio sojourns alone on a desert island. When his senses are restored, he resolves to devote the rest of his life to vengeance. For fifteen years he buries himself in occult studies, and when his diabolical schemes have matured, returns, disguised as the monk Schemoli, to the scene of the murder. He becomes confessor to his brother, who has assumed the title and estates. It is his intention to compel the Count's sons, Annibal and Ippolito, to murder their father. Death at the hands of parricides seems to him the only appropriate catastrophe for the Count's career of infamy. To reconcile the two victims—Annibal and Ippolito—to their task, he "relies mainly on the doctrine of fatalism." The most complex and ingenious "machinery" is used to work upon their superstitious feelings. No device is too tortuous if it aid his purpose. Even the pressure of the Inquisition is brought to bear on one of the brothers. Each, after protracted agony, submits to his destiny, and the swords of the two brothers meet in the Count's body. When the murder is safely accomplished, it is proved that Annibal and Ippolito are the sons, not of the Count, but of Schemoli and Erminia. By the irony of fate the knowledge comes too late for Schemoli to save his children from the crime. At the close of a lengthy trial the two brothers are released, but deprived of their lands. Ultimately they die fighting in the siege of Barcelona. Schemoli perishes, in the approved Gothic manner, by self-administered poison. Intertwined with the main theme of Schemoli's fatal revenge are the love-stories of the two brothers. Rosolia, a nun, who seems to have been acquainted with Shakespeare's comedies, disguises herself as a page, and devotes her life to the service of Ippolito and to the composition of sentimental verses. She only reveals her sex just before her death, though we have guessed it from her first appearance. Ildefonsa, who is beloved of Annibal, has been forced into a convent against her will—a fate almost inevitable in the realm of Gothic romance. When letters are received authorising her release from the vows, a pitiless mother-superior reports that she is dead. She is immured, but an earthquake sets her free, for Maturin will move heaven and earth to effect his purposes. The ill-fated maiden dies shortly afterwards. Ere the close it proves that Ildefonsa was the daughter of Erminia, who had been secretly married to Verdoni before her union with Orazio. Such is the skeleton of Maturin's story, when its scattered members have been patiently collected and fitted together. The impressive figure of Schemoli, with his unholy power of fascinating his reluctant accomplices, lends to the book the only sort of unity it possesses. But even he fails to arouse a sense of fear strong enough to fix our attention to so wandering a story. Like the doomed brothers, we drift dejectedly through inexplicable terrors, and we re-echo with fervour Annibal's dolorous cry:

"Why should I be shut up in this house of horrors to deal with spirits and damned things and the secrets of the infernal world while there are so many paths open to pleasure, the varieties of human intercourse and the enjoyment of life?"

Maturin, a disciple of Mrs. Radcliffe, feels it his duty to explain away the apparently miraculous incidents in his story, but he lacks the persevering ingenuity that partly compensates for her frauds. On a single page he calmly discloses secrets which have harassed us for four volumes, and his long-deferred explanations are paltry and incredible. The bleeding figures that wrought so painfully on the sensitive nerves of Ippolito are merely waxen images that spout blood automatically. Disappearances and reappearances, which seemed supernatural, are simply effected by private exits and entrances. Other startling phenomena are accounted for in the same trivial fashion.

Maturin seems to have crowded into his story nearly every character and incident that had been employed in earlier Gothic romances. Schemoli is a remarkably faithful portrait of Mrs. Radcliffe's Schedoni. From beneath his cowl flash the piercing eyes, whose very glance will daunt the bravest heart; his sallow visage is furrowed with the traces of bygone passions; he shuns society, and is dreaded by his associates. The oppressed maiden, driven into a nunnery, drugged and immured, the ambitious countess, the devoted, loquacious servant, the inhuman abbess—all play their accustomed parts. The background shifts from the robber's den to the ruined chapel, from the castle vault to the dungeon of the Inquisition, each scene being admirably suited to the situation contrived, or the emotion displayed. Maturin had accurately inspected the passages and trap-doors of Otranto. No item, not a rusty lock, not a creaking hinge, had escaped his vigilant eye. He knew intimately every nook and cranny of Mrs. Radcliffe's Gothic abbeys. He had viewed with trepidation their blood-stained floors, their skeletons and corpses, and had carefully calculated the psychological effect of these properties. He had gazed with starting eye on the lurid horrors of "Monk" Lewis, and had carried away impressions so distinct that he, perhaps unwittingly, transferred them to the pages of his own story. But Maturin's reading was not strictly confined to the school of terror. He had studied Shakespeare's tragedies, and these may have suggested to him the idea of enhancing the interest of his story by dissecting human motive and describing passionate feeling. In depicting the remorse of the count and his wife Zenobia, who had committed a murder to gratify their ambition, and who are tormented by ugly dreams, Maturin inevitably draws from Macbeth. Zenobia, the stronger character, reviles her husband for indulging in sickly fancies and strives to embolden him:

"Like a child you run from a mask you have yourself painted."

He replies in a free paraphrase of Hamlet:

"It is this cursed domestic sensibility of guilt that makes cowards of us all."

Maturin is distinguished from the incompetent horde of romance-writers, whom Scott condemned, by the powerful eloquence of his style and by his ability to analyse emotion, to write as if he himself were swayed by the feeling he describes. His insane extravagances have at least the virtue that they come flaming hot from an excited imagination. The passage quoted by Scott—Orazio's attempt to depict his state of mind after he had heard of his brother's perfidy—may serve to illustrate the force and vigour of his language:

"Oh! that midnight darkness of the soul in which it seeks for something whose loss has carried away every sense but one of utter and desolate deprivation; in which it traverses leagues in motion and worlds in thought without consciousness of relief, yet with a dread of pausing. I had nothing to seek, nothing to recover; the whole world could not restore me an atom, could not show me again a glimpse of what I had been or lost, yet I rushed on as if the next step would reach shelter and peace."

Melmoth the Wanderer has found many admirers. It fascinated Rossetti,[60] Thackeray[61] and Miss Mitford.[62] It was praised by Balzac, who wrote a satirical sequel—Melmoth Reconcilie a L'Eglise (1835), and by Baudelaire, and exercised a considerable influence on French literature.[63] It consists of a series of tales, strung together in a complicated fashion. In each tale the Wanderer, who has bartered his soul in return for prolonged life, may, if he can, persuade someone to take the bargain off his hands.[64] He visits those who are plunged in despair. His approach is heralded by strange music, and his eyes have a preternatural lustre that terrifies his victims. No one will agree to his "incommunicable condition."

The bird's-eye view of an Edinburgh Reviewer who described Melmoth as "the sacrifice of Genius in the Temple of False Taste," will give some idea of the bewildering variety of its contents:

"His hero is a modern Faustus, who has bartered his soul with the powers of darkness for protracted life and unlimited worldly enjoyment; his heroine, a species of insular goddess, a virgin Calypso of the Indian Ocean, who, amid flowers and foliage, lives upon figs and tamarinds, associates with peacocks and monkeys, is worshipped by the occasional visitants of her island, finds her way into Spain where she is married to the aforesaid hero by the hand of a dead hermit, the ghost of a murdered domestic being the witness of her nuptials; and finally dies in a dungeon of the Inquisition at Madrid. To complete this phantasmagoric exhibition, we are presented with sybils and misers, parricides, maniacs in abundance, monks with scourges pursuing a naked youth streaming with blood; subterranean Jews surrounded by the skeletons of their wives and children; lovers blasted by lightning, Irish hags, Spanish grandees, shipwrecks, caverns, Donna Claras and Donna Isidoras—all exposed to each other in violent and glaring contrast and all their adventures narrated with the same undeviating display of turgid, vehement, and painfully elaborated language."[65]

This breathless sentence gives some conception of the delirious imagery of Maturin's romance, but the book is worthy of a more respectful, unhurried survey. Melmoth shows a distinct advance on Montorio in constructive power. Each separate story is perfectly clear and easy to follow, in spite of the elaborate interlacing. The romance opens with the death of a miser in a desolate Irish farmstead, with harpies clustering at his bedside. His nephew and heir, John Melmoth, is adjured to destroy a certain manuscript and a portrait of an ancestor with eyes "such as one feels they wish they had never seen and feels they can never forget." Alone at midnight, John Melmoth reads the manuscript, which is reputed to have been written by Stanton, an English traveller in Spain, about 1676. The document relates a startling story of a mysterious Englishman who appears at a Spanish wedding with disastrous consequences, and reappears before Stanton in a madhouse offering release on dreadful conditions. After reading it, John Melmoth decides to burn the family portrait. He is visited by a sinister form, who proves that he is no figment of the imagination by leaving black and blue marks on his relative's wrist. The next night a ship is wrecked in a storm. The Wanderer appears, and mocks the victims with fiendish mirth. The sole survivor, Don Alonzo Moncada, unfolds his story to John Melmoth. The son of a great duke, he has been forced to become a monk to save his mother's honour. He dwells with the excruciating detail in which Maturin is inclined to revel, on the horrors of Spanish monasteries. Escaping through a subterranean passage, he is guided by a parricide, who incidentally tells him a loathsome story of two immured lovers. His plan of flight is foiled, and he is borne off to the dungeons of the Inquisition. Here the Wanderer, who has a miraculous power to enter where he will, offers, on the ineffable condition, to procure his freedom. Moncada repudiates the temptation, effects his own escape during a great fire, and catches sight of the stranger on the summit of a burning building. He takes refuge with a Jew, but, to evade the vigilance of the Inquisitors, disappears suddenly down an underground passage, where he finds Adonijah, another Jew, who obligingly employs him as an amanuensis, and sets him to copy a manuscript. This gives Maturin the opportunity, for which he has been waiting, to introduce his "Tale of the Indian." The story of Immalee, who is visited on her desert island by the Wanderer in the guise of a lover as well as a tempter, forms the most memorable part of Melmoth. In the other stories the stranger has been a taciturn creature, relying on the lustre of his eyes rather than on his powers of eloquence to win over his victims. To Immalee he pours forth floods of rhetoric on the sins and follies of mankind. Had she not been one of Rousseau's children of nature, and so innocent alike of a knowledge of Shakespeare and of the fault of impatience, she would surely have exclaimed: "If thou hast news, I prithee deliver them like a man of this world." When Immalee is transported to Spain and reassumes her baptismal name of Isidora, Melmoth follows her and their conversations are continued at dead of night through the lattice. Here they discourse on the real nature of love. At length the gloomy lover persuades Isidora to marry him. Their midnight nuptials take place against a weird background. By a narrow, precipitous path they approach the ruined chapel, and are united by a hand "as cold as that of death." Meanwhile, Don Francisco, Isidora's father, on his way home, spends the night at an inn, where a stranger insists on telling him "The Tale of Guzman." In this tale the tempter visits a father whose family is starving, but who resists the lure of wealth. Maturin portrays with extraordinary power the deterioration in the character of an old man Walberg, through the effects of poverty. At the close of the narration Don Francisco falls into a deep slumber, but is sternly awakened by a stranger with an awful eye, who insists on becoming his fellow traveller, and on telling, in defiance of protests, yet another story. The prologue to the Lover's Tale is almost Chaucerian in its humour:

"It was with the utmost effort of his mixed politeness and fear that he prepared himself to listen to the tale, which the stranger had frequently amid their miscellaneous conversation, alluded to, and showed an evident anxiety to relate. These allusions were attended with unpleasant reminiscences to the hearer—but he saw that it was to be, and armed himself as best he might with courage to hear. 'I would not intrude on you, Senhor,' says the stranger, 'with a narrative in which you can feel but little interest, were I not conscious that its narration may operate as a warning, the most awful, salutary and efficacious to yourself.'"

At this veiled hint Don Francisco discharges a volley of oaths, but he is silenced completely by the smile of the stranger—"that spoke bitterer and darker things than the fiercest frown that ever wrinkled the features of man." After this he cannot choose but hear, and the stranger seizes his opportunity to begin an uncommonly dull story, connected with a Shropshire family and intermingled with historical events. In this tale the Wanderer appears to a girl whose lover has lost his reason, and offers to restore him if she will accept his conditions. Once more the tempter is foiled. The story meanders so sluggishly that our sympathies are with Don Francisco, and we cannot help wishing that he had adopted more drastic measures to quieten the insistent stranger. At the conclusion Francisco mutters indignantly:

"It is inconceivable to me how this person forces himself on my company, harasses me with tales that have no more application to me than the legend of the Cid, and may be as apocryphal as the ballad of Roncesvalles—"

but yet the stranger has not finished. He proceeds to tell him a tale in which he will feel a peculiar interest, that of Isidora, his own daughter, and finally urges him to hasten to her rescue. Don Francisco wanders by easy stages to Madrid, and, on his arrival, marries Isidora against her will to Montilla. Melmoth, according to promise, appears at the wedding. The bridegroom is slain. Isidora, with Melmoth's child, ends her days in the dungeons of the Inquisition, murmuring: "Paradise! will he be there?" So far as one may judge from the close of the story, it seems not.

Moncada and John Melmoth, whom we left, at the beginning of the romance, in Ireland, are revisited by the Wanderer, whose time on earth has at last run out. He confesses his failure: "I have traversed the world in the search, and no one to gain that world, would lose his own soul." His words remind us of the text of the sermon which suggested to Maturin the idea of the romance. Like the companions of Dr. Faustus, Melmoth and Moncada hear terrible sounds from the room of the Wanderer in the last throes of agony. The next morning the room is empty; but, following a track to the sea-cliffs, they see, on a crag beneath, the kerchief the Wanderer had worn about his neck. "Melmoth and Moncada exchanged looks of silent and unutterable horror, and returned slowly home."

This extraordinary romance, like Montorio, clearly owes much to the novels of Mrs. Radcliffe, and "Monk" Lewis. Immalee, as her name implies, is but a glorified Emily with a loxia on her shoulder instead of a lute in her hand. The monastic horrors are obviously a heritage from The Monk. The Rosicrucian legend, as handled in St. Leon, may have offered hints to Maturin, whose treatment is, however, far more imaginative and impressive than that of Godwin. The resemblance to the legend of the Wandering Jew need not be laboured. Marlowe's Dr. Faustus and the first part of Goethe's Faust left their impression on the story. The closing scenes inevitably remind us of the last act of Marlowe's tragedy. But, when all these debts are acknowledged they do but serve to enhance the success of Maturin, who out of these varied strands could weave so original a romance. Melmoth is not an ingenious patchwork of previous stories. It is the outpouring of a morbid imagination that has long brooded on the fearful and the terrific. Imbued with the grandeur and solemnity of his theme, Maturin endeavours to write in dignified, stately language. There are frequent lapses into bombast, but occasionally his rhetoric is splendidly effective:

"It was now the latter end of autumn; heavy clouds had all day been passing laggingly and gloomily along the atmosphere, as the hours pass over the human mind and life. Not a drop of rain fell; the clouds went portentously off, like ships of war reconnoitring a strong fort, to return with added strength and fury."

He takes pleasure in coining unusual, striking phrases, such as: "All colours disappear in the night, and despair has no diary," or "Minutes are hours in the noctuary of terror," or "The secret of silence is the only secret. Words are a blasphemy against that taciturn and invisible God whose presence enshrouds us in our last extremity."

Maturin chooses his similes with discrimination, to heighten the effect he aims at producing:

"The locks were so bad and the keys so rusty that it was like the cry of the dead in the house when the keys were turned," or:

"With all my care, however, the lamp declined, quivered, flashed a pale light, like the smile of despair, on me, and was extinguished ... I had watched it like the last beatings of an expiring heart, like the shiverings of a spirit about to depart for eternity."

There are no quiet scenes or motionless figures in Melmoth. Everything is intensified, exaggerated, distorted. The very clouds fly rapidly across the sky, and the moon bursts forth with the "sudden and appalling effulgence of lightning." A shower of rain is perhaps "the most violent that was ever precipitated on the earth." When Melmoth stamps his foot "the reverberation of his steps on the hollow and loosened stones almost contended with the thunder." Maturin's use of words like "callosity," "induration," "defecated," "evanition," and his fondness for italics are other indications of his desire to force an impression by fair means or foul.

The gift of psychological insight that distinguishes Montorio reappears in a more highly developed form in Melmoth the Wanderer. "Emotions," Maturin declares, "are my events," and he excels in depicting mental as well as physical torture. The monotony of a "timeless day" is suggested with dreary reality in the scene where Moncada and his guide await the approach of night to effect their escape from the monastery. The gradual surrender of resolution before slight, reiterated assaults is cunningly described in the analysis of Isidora's state of mind, when a hateful marriage is forced upon her. Occasionally Maturin astonishes us by the subtlety of his thought:

"While people think it worth while to torment us we are never without some dignity, though painful and imaginary."

It is his faculty for describing intense, passionate feeling, his power of painting wild pictures of horror, his gifts for conveying his thoughts in rolling, rhythmical periods of eloquence, that make Melmoth a memory-haunting book. With all his faults Maturin was the greatest as well as the last of the Goths.



CHAPTER V - THE ORIENTAL TALE OF TERROR. BECKFORD.

Beckford's History of the Caliph Vathek, which was written in French, was translated by the Rev. Samuel Henley, who had the temerity to publish the English version—described as a translation from the Arabic—in 1786, before the original had appeared. The French version was published in Lausanne and in Paris in 1787. An interest in Oriental literature had been awakened early in the eighteenth century by Galland's epoch-making versions of The Arabian Nights (1704-1717), The Turkish Tales (1708) and The Persian Tales (1714), which were all translated into English during the reign of Queen Anne. Many of the pseudo-translations of French authors, such as Gueulette, who compiled The Chinese Tales, Mogul Tales, Tartarian Tales, and Peruvian Tales, and Jean-Paul Bignon, who presented The Adventures of Abdallah, were quickly turned into English; and the Oriental story became so fashionable a form that didactic writers eagerly seized upon it as a disguise for moral or philosophical reflection. The Eastern background soon lost its glittering splendour and colour, and became a faded, tarnished tapestry, across which shadowy figures with outlandish names and English manners and morals flit to and fro. Addison's Vision of Mirza (1711), Johnson's Rasselas (1759), and various essays in The Rambler, Dr. Hawkesworth's Almoran and Hamet (1761), Langhorne's Solyman and Almena (1762), Ridley's Tales of the Genii (1764), and Mrs. Sheridan's History of Nourjahad (1767) were among the best and most popular of the Anglo-Oriental stories that strove to inculcate moral truths. In their oppressive air of gravity, Beckford, with his implacable hatred of bores, could hardly have breathed. One of the most amazing facts about his wild fantasy is that it was the creation of an English brain. The idea of Vathek was probably suggested to Beckford by the witty Oriental tales of Count Antony Hamilton and of Voltaire. The character of the caliph, who desired to know everything, even the sciences which did not exist, is sketched in the spirit of the French satirists, who turned Oriental extravagance into delightful mockery. Awed into reverence ere the close by the sombre grandeur of his own conception of the halls of Eblis, Beckford cast off the flippant mood in which he had set out and rose to an exalted solemnity.

Beckford's mind was so richly stored with the jewels of Eastern legend that it was inevitable he should shower from his treasury things new and old, but everything which passes through the alembic of his imagination is transmuted almost beyond recognition. The episode of the sinners with the flaming hearts has been traced[66] to a scene in the Mogul Tales, where Aboul Assam saw three men standing mute in postures of sorrow before a book on which were inscribed the words: "Let no man touch this divine treatise who is not perfectly pure." When Aboul Assam enquired of their fate they unbuttoned their waistcoats, and through their skin, which appeared like crystal, he saw their hearts encompassed with fire. In Beckford's story this grotesque scene assumes an awful and moving dignity. From The Adventure of Abdallah, Son of Hanif, Beckford derived the conception of a visit to the regions of Eblis, whom, however, by a wave of his wand, he transforms from a revolting ogre to a stately prince.[67]

To read Vathek is like falling asleep in a huge Oriental palace after wandering alone through great, echoing halls resplendent with a gorgeous arras, on which are displayed the adventures of the caliph who built the palaces of the five senses. In our dream the caliph and his courtiers come to life, and we awake dazzled with the memory of a myriad wonders. There throng into our mind a crowd of unearthly forms—aged astrologers, hideous Giaours, gibbering negresses, graceful boys and maidens, restless, pacing figures with their hands on their hearts, and a formidable prince—whose adventures are woven into a fantastic but distinct and definite pattern around the three central personages, the caliph Vathek, his exquisitely wicked mother Carathis, and the bewitching Nouronihar. The fatal palace of Eblis, with its lofty columns and gloomy towers of an architecture unknown in the annals of the earth, looms darkly in our imagination. Beckford alludes, with satisfaction, to Vathek as a "story so horrid that I tremble while relating it, and have not a nerve in my frame but vibrates like an aspen,"[68] and in the Episodes leads us with an unhallowed pleasure into other abodes of horror—a temple adorned with pyramids of skulls festooned with human hair, a cave inhabited by reptiles with human faces, and an apartment whose walls were hung with carpets of a thousand kinds and a thousand hues, which moved slowly to and fro as if stirred by human creatures stifling beneath their weight. But Beckford passes swiftly from one mood to another, and was only momentarily fascinated by terror. So infinite is the variety of Vathek in scenery and in temper that it seems like its wealthy, eccentric, author secluded in Fonthill Abbey, to dwell apart in defiant, splendid isolation.

It is impossible to understand or appreciate Vathek apart from Beckford's life and character, which contain elements almost as grotesque and fantastic as those of his romance. He was no visionary dreamer, content to build his pleasure-domes in air. He revelled in the golden glories of good Haroun-Alraschid,[69] but he craved too for solid treasures he could touch and handle, for precious jewels, for rare, beautiful volumes, for curious, costly furniture. The scenes of splendour portrayed in Vathek were based on tangible reality.[70] Beckford's schemes in later life—his purchase of Gibbon's entire library, his twice-built tower on Lansdown Hill, were as grandiose and ambitious as those of an Eastern caliph. The whimsical, Puckish humour, which helped to counteract the strain of gloomy bitterness in his nature, was early revealed in his Biographical Memoirs of Extraordinary Painters and in his burlesques of the sentimental novels of the day, which were accepted by the compiler of Living Authors (1817) as a serious contribution to fiction by one Miss Jacquetta Agneta Mariana Jenks. Moore,[71] in his Journal, October 1818, remarks:

"The two mock novels, Azemia and The Elegant Enthusiast, were written to ridicule the novels written by his sister, Mrs. Harvey (I think), who read these parodies on herself quite innocently."

Even in the gloomy regions of Eblis, Beckford will not wholly repress his sense of the ridiculous. Carathis, unawed by the effulgence of his infernal majesty, behaves like a buffoon, shouting at the Dives and actually attempting to thrust a Soliman from his throne, before she is finally whirled away with her heart aflame. The calm politeness with which the dastardly Barkiaroukh consents to a blood-curdling murder, the sardonic dialogue between Vathek on the edge of the precipice and the Giaour concealed in the abyss, the buoyantly high-spirited description of the plump Indian kicked and pursued like "an invulnerable football," the oppressive horror of the subterranean recesses, the mischievous pleasantry of the Gulchenrouz idyll reveal different facets of Beckford's ever-varying temper. In Vathek, Beckford found expression not only for his devotion to the Eastern outlook on life, but also for his own strangely coloured, vehement personality. The interpreter walks ever at our elbow whispering into our ear his human commentary on Vathek's astounding adventures.

Beckford's pictures are remarkable for definite precision of outline. There are no vague hints and suggestions, no lurking shadows concealing untold horrors. The quaint dwarfs perched on Vathek's shoulders, the children chasing blue butterflies, Nouronihar and her maidens on tiptoe, with their hair floating in the breeze, stand out in clear relief, as if painted on a fresco. The imagery is so lucid that we are able to follow with effortless pleasure the intricate windings of a plot which at Beckford's whim twists and turns through scenes of wonderful variety. Amid his wild, erratic excursions he never loses sight of the end in view; the story, with all its vagaries, is perfectly coherent. This we should expect from one who "loved to bark a tough understanding."[72] It is the intellectual strength and exuberant vitality behind Beckford's Oriental scenes that lend them distinction and power.

The History of the Caliph Vathek did not set a fashion. It is true that the Orient sometimes formed the setting of nineteenth century novels, as in Disraeli's Alvoy (1833), where for a brief moment, when the hero's torch is extinguished by bats on his entry into subterranean portals, we find ourselves in the abode of wonder and terror; but not till Meredith's Shaving of Shagpal (1856) do we meet again Beckford's kinship with the East, and his gift for fantastic burlesque.



CHAPTER VI - GODWIN AND THE ROSICRUCIAN NOVEL.

When Miss Austen was asked to write a historical romance "illustrative of the house of Coburg," she airily dismissed the suggestion, pleading mirthfully:

"I could not sit down seriously to write a serious romance under any other motive than to save my life, and if it were indispensable for me to keep it up and never relax into laughing at myself or at other people I am sure I should be hung before I had finished the first chapter."[73]

If Godwin had been confronted with the same offer, he would have settled himself promptly to plot out a scheme, and within a few months a historical romance on the house of Coburg, accompanied perchance by a preface setting forth the evils of monarchy, would have been in the hands of the publisher. Unlike Miss Austen, Godwin had neither a sense of humour nor a fastidious artistic conscience to save him from undertaking incongruous tasks. He seems never even to have suspected the humour of life, and would have perceived nothing ludicrous in the spectacle of the author of Political Justice embarking on such a piece of work. Those disquieting flashes of self-revelation that more imaginative men catch in the mirror of their own minds and that awaken sometimes laughter and sometimes tears, never disturbed Godwin's serenity. He brooded earnestly over his speculations, quietly ignoring inconvenient facts and never shrinking from absurd conclusions. In theory he aimed at disorganising the whole of human society, yet in actual life he was content to live unobtrusively, publishing harmless books for children; and though he abhorred the principle of aristocracy, he did not scruple to accept a sinecure from government through Lord Grey. Notwithstanding his stolid inconsistency and his deficiency in humour, Godwin is a figure whom it is impossible to ignore or to despise. He was not a frothy orator who made his appeal to the masses, but the leader of the trained thinkers of the revolutionary party, a political rebel who, instead of fulminating wildly and impotently after the manner of his kind, expressed his theories in clear, reasonable and logical form. It is easy, but unprofitable, to sneer at the futility of some of Godwin's conclusions or to complain of the aridity of his style. His Political Justice remains, nevertheless, a lucidly written, well-ordered piece of intellectual reasoning. Shelley spoke of Godwin's Mandeville in the same breath with Plato's Symposium[74] and the ideas expressed in Political Justice inspired him to write not merely Queen Mab but the Revolt of Islam and Prometheus Unbound. Godwin's plea for the freedom of the individual and his belief in the perfectibility of man through reason had a far-reaching effect that cannot be readily estimated, but, as his theories only concern us here in so far as they affect two of his novels, it is unnecessary to pursue the trail of his influence further.

That the readers of fiction in the last decade of the eighteenth century eagerly desired the mysterious and the terrible, Mrs. Radcliffe's widespread popularity proved unmistakably. To satisfy this craving, Godwin, who was ever on the alert to discover a subject which promised swift and adequate financial return, turned to novel-writing, and supplied a tale of mystery, The Adventures of Caleb Williams (1794), and a supernatural, historical romance, St. Leon (1799). As he was a political philosopher by nature and a novelist only by profession, he artfully inveigled into his romances the theories he wished to promote. The second title of Caleb Williams is significant. Things As They Are to Godwin's mind was synonymous with "things as they ought not to be." He frankly asserts: "Caleb Williams was the offspring of that temper of mind in which the composition of my Political Justice left me"[75]—a guileless confession that may well have deterred many readers who recoil shuddering from political treatises decked out in the guise of fiction. But alarm is needless; for, although Caleb Williams attempts to reveal the oppressions that a poor man may endure under existing conditions, and the perversion of the character of an aristocrat through the "poison of chivalry," the story may be enjoyed for its own sake. We can read it, if we so desire, purely for the excitement of the plot, and quietly ignore the underlying theories, just as it is possible to enjoy Spenser's sensuous imagery without troubling about his allegorical meaning. The secret of Godwin's power seems to be that he himself was so completely fascinated by the intricate structure of his story that he succeeds in absorbing the attention of his readers. He bestowed infinite pains on the composition of Caleb Williams, and conceived the lofty hope that it "would constitute an epoch in the mind of every reader."[76] A friend to whom he submitted two-thirds of his manuscript advised him to throw it into the fire and so safeguard his reputation. The result of this criticism on a character less determined or less phlegmatic than Godwin's would have been a violent reaction from hope to despair. But Godwin, who seems to have been independent of external stimulus, was not easily startled from his projects, and plodded steadily forward until his story was complete. He would have scorned not to execute what his mind had conceived. Godwin's businesslike method of planning the story backwards has been adopted by Conan Doyle and other writers of the detective story. The deliberate, careful analysis of his mode of procedure, so characteristic of his mind and temper, is full of interest:

"I bent myself to the conception of a series of adventures of flight and pursuit: the fugitive in perpetual apprehension of being overwhelmed with the worst calamities and the pursuer by his ingenuity and resources keeping the victim in a state of the most fearful alarm. This was the project of my third volume. I was next called upon to conceive a dramatic and impressive situation adequate to account for the impulse that the pursuer should feel incessantly to alarm and harass his victim, with an inextinguishable resolution never to allow him the least interval of peace and security. This I apprehended could best be effected by a secret murder, to the investigation of which the innocent victim should be impelled by an unconquerable spirit of curiosity. The murderer would thus have a sufficient motive to persecute the unhappy discoverer that he might deprive him of peace, character and credit, and have him for ever in his power. This constituted the outline of my second volume... To account for the fearful events of the third it was necessary that the pursuer should be invested with every advantage of fortune, with a resolution that nothing could defeat or baffle and with extraordinary resources of intellect. Nor could my purpose of giving an overpowering interest to my tale be answered without his appearing to have been originally endowed with a mighty store of amiable dispositions and virtues, so that his being driven to the first act of murder should be judged worthy of the deepest regret, and should be seen in some measure to have arisen out of his virtues themselves. It was necessary to make him ... the tenant of an atmosphere of romance, so that every reader should feel prompted almost to worship him for his high qualities. Here were ample materials for a first volume."[77]

Godwin hoped that an "entire unity of plot" would be the infallible result of this ingenious method of constructing his story, and only wrote in a high state of excitement when the "afflatus" was upon him. So far as we may judge from his description, he seems to have realised his story first as a complex psychological situation, not as a series of disconnected pictures. He thought in abstractions not in visual images, and he had next to make his abstractions concrete by inventing figures whose actions should be the result of the mental and moral conflict he had conceived. Godwin's attitude to his art forms a striking contrast to that of Mrs. Radcliffe. She has her set of marionettes, appropriately adorned, ready to move hither and thither across her picturesque background as soon as she has deftly manipulated the machinery which is to set them in motion. Godwin, on the other hand, first constructs his machinery, and afterwards, with laborious effort, carves the figures who are to be attached to the wires. He cares little for costume or setting, but much for the complicated mechanism that controls the destiny of his characters. The effect of this difference in method is that we soon forget the details of Mrs. Radcliffe's plots, but remember isolated pictures. After reading Caleb Williams we recollect the outline of the story in so far as it relates to the psychology of Falkland and his secretary; but of the actual scenes and people only vague images drift through our memory. Godwin's point of view was not that of an artist but of a scientist, who, after patiently investigating and analysing mental and emotional phenomena, chose to embody his results in the form of a novel. He spared no pains to make his narrative arresting and convincing. The story is told by Caleb Williams himself, who, in describing his adventures, revives the passions and emotions that had stirred him in the past. By this device Godwin trusted to lend energy and vitality to his story.