Chapter VII: The Gothic Revival (2)

There is plenty of testimony to the popularity of these romances. Thackeray says that a lady of his acquaintance, an inveterate novel reader, names Valancourt as one of the favorite heroes of her youth. "'Valancourt? And who was he?' cry the young people. Valancourt, my dears, was the hero of one of the most famous romances which ever was published in this country. The beauty and elegance of Valancourt made your young grandmamma's' gentle hearts to beat with respectful sympathy. He and his glory have passed away. . . Enquire at Mudie's or the London Library, who asks for the 'Mysteries of Udolpho' now."[22] Hazlitt said that he owed to Mrs. Radcliffe his love of moonlight nights, autumn leaves and decaying ruins. It was, indeed, in the melodramatic manipulation of landscape that this artist was most original. "The scenes that savage Rosa dashed" seemed to have been her model, and critics who were fond of analogy called her the Salvator Rosa of fiction. It is here that her influence on Byron and Chateaubriand is most apparent.[23] Mrs. Radcliffe's scenery is not quite to our modern taste, any more than are Salvator's paintings. Her Venice by moonlight, her mountain gorges with their black pines and foaming torrents, are not precisely the Venice and the Alps of Ruskin; rather of the operatic stage. Still they are impressive in their way, and in this department she possessed genuine poetic feels and a real mastery of the art of painting in distemper. Witness the picture of the castle of Udolpho, on Emily's first sight of it, and the hardly less striking description, in the "Romance of the Forest," of the ruined abbey in which the La Motte family take refuge: "He approached and perceived the Gothic remains of an abbey: it stood on a kind of rude lawn, overshadowed by high and spreading trees, which seemed coeval with the building, and diffused a romantic gloom around. The greater part of the pile appeared to be sinking into ruins, and that which had withstood the ravages of time showed the remaining features of the fabric more awful in decay. The lofty battlements, thickly enwreathed with ivy, were half demolished and become the residence of birds of prey. Huge fragments of the eastern tower, which was almost demolished, lay scattered amid the high grass, that waved slowly in the breeze. 'The thistle shook its lonely head: the moss whistled to the wind.'[24] A Gothic gate, richly ornamented with fretwork, which opened into the main body of the edifice, but which was now obstructed with brushwood, remained entire. Above the vast and magnificent portal of this gate arose a window of the same order, whose pointed arches still exhibited fragments of stained glass, once the pride of monkish devotion. La Motte, thinking it possible it might yet shelter some human being, advanced to the gate and lifted a massy knocker. The hollow sounds rung through the emptiness of the place. After waiting a few minutes, he forced back the gate, which was heavy with iron-work, and creaked harshly on its hinges. . . From this chapel he passed into the nave of the great church, of which one window, more perfect than the rest, opened upon a long vista of the forest, through which was seen the rich coloring of evening, melting by imperceptible gradations into the solemn gray of upper air."

Mrs. Radcliffe never was in Italy or Switzerland or the south of France; she divined the scenery of her romances from pictures and descriptions at second hand. But she accompanied her husband in excursions to the Lakes and other parts of England, and in 1794 made the tour of the Rhine.[25] The passages in her diary, recording these travels, are much superior in the truthfulness and local color of their nature sketching to anything in her novels. Mrs. Radcliffe is furthermore to be credited with a certain skill in producing terror, by the use of that favorite weapon in the armory of the romanticists, mystery. If she did not invent a new shudder, as Hugo said of Baudelaire, she gave at least a new turn to the old-fashioned ghost story. She creates in her readers a feeling of impending danger, suspense, foreboding. There is a sense of unearthly presences in these vast, empty rooms; the silence itself is ominous; echoes sound like footfalls, ghostly shadows lurk in dark corners, whispers come from behind the arras, as it stirs in the gusts of wind.[26] The heroine is afraid to look in the glass lest she should see another face there beside her own; her lamp expires and leaves her in the dark just as she is coming to the critical point in the manuscript which she has found in an old chest, etc., etc., But the tale loses its impressiveness as soon as it strays beyond the shade of the battlements. The Gothic castle or priory is still, as in Walpole, the nucleus of the story.

Two of these romances, the earliest and the latest, though they are the weakest of the series, have a special interest for us as affording points of comparison with the Waverly novels. "The Castles of Athlin and Dunbayne" is the narrative of a feud between two Highland clans, and its scene is the northeastern coast of Scotland, "in the most romantic part of the Highlands," where the castle of Athlin--like Uhland's "Schloss am Meer"--stood "on the summit of a rock whose base was in the sea." This was a fine place for storms. "The winds burst in sudden squalls over the deep and dashed the foaming waves against the rocks with inconceivable fury. The spray, notwithstanding the high situation of the castle, flew up with violence against the windows. . . The moon shone faintly by intervals, through broken clouds, upon the waters, illumining the white foam which burst around. . . The surges broke on the distant shores in deep resounding murmurs, and the solemn pauses between the stormy gusts filled the mind with enthusiastic awe." Perhaps the description slightly reminds of the picture, in "Marmion," of Tantallon Castle, the hold of the Red Douglases on the German Ocean, a little north of Berwick, whose frowning towers have recently done duty again in Stevenson's "David Balfour." The period of the action is but vaguely indicated; but, as the weapons used in the attack on the castle are bows and arrows, we may regard the book as mediaeval in intention. Scott says that the scene of the romance was Scotland in the dark ages, and complains that the author evidently knew nothing of Scottish life or scenery. This is true; her castles might have stood anywhere. There is no mention of the pipes or the plaid. Her rival chiefs are not Gaelic caterans, but just plain feudal lords. Her baron of Dunbayne is like any other baron; or rather, he is unlike any baron that ever was on sea or land or anywhere else except in the pages of a Gothic romance.

"Gaston de Blondville" was begun in 1802 and published posthumously in 1826, edited by Sergeant Talfourd. Its inspiring cause was a visit which the author made in the autumn of 1802 to Warwick Castle and the ruins of Kenilworth. The introduction has the usual fiction of an old manuscript found in an oaken chest dug up from the foundation of a chapel of Black Canons at Kenilworth: a manuscript richly illuminated with designs at the head of each chapter--which are all duly described--and containing a "trew chronique of what passed at Killingworth, in Ardenn, when our Soveren Lord the Kynge kept ther his Fest of Seynt Michel: with ye marveylous accident that there befell at the solempnissacion of the marriage of Gaston de Blondeville. With divers things curious to be known thereunto purtayning. With an account of the grete Turney there held in the year MCCLVI. Changed out of the Norman tongue by Grymbald, Monk of Senct Marie Priori in Killingworth." Chatterton's forgeries had by this time familiarized the public with imitations of early English. The finder of this manuscript pretends to publish a modernized version of it, while endeavoring "to preserve somewhat of the air of the old style." This he does by a poor reproduction, not of thirteenth-century, but of sixteenth-century English, consisting chiefly in inversions of phrase and the occasional use of a _certes_ or _naithless_. Two words in particular seem to have struck Mrs. Radcliffe as most excellent archaisms: _ychon_ and _his-self_, which she introduces at every turn.

"Gaston de Blondville," then, is a tale of the time of Henry III. The king himself is a leading figure and so is Prince Edward. Other historical personages are brought in, such as Simon de Montfort and Marie de France, but little use is made of them. The book is not indeed, in any sense, an historical novel like Scott's "Kenilworth," the scene of which is the same, and which was published in 1821, five years before Mrs. Radcliffe's. The story is entirely fictitious. What differences it from her other romances is the conscious attempt to portray feudal manners. There are elaborate descriptions of costumes, upholstery, architecture, heraldic bearings, ancient military array, a tournament, a royal hunt, a feast in the great hall at Kenilworth, a visit of state to Warwick Castle, and the session of a baronial court. The ceremony of the "voide," when the king took his spiced cup, is rehearsed with a painful accumulation of particulars. For all this she consulted Leland's "Collectanea," Warton's "History of English Poetry," the "Household Book of Edward IV.," Pegge's "Dissertation on the Obsolete Office of Esquire of the King's Body," the publications of the Society of Antiquaries and similar authorities, with results that are infinitely tedious. Walter Scott's archaeology is not always correct, nor his learning always lightly borne; but, upon the whole, he had the art to make his cumbrous materials contributory to his story rather than obstructive of it.

In these two novels we meet again all the familiar apparatus of secret trap-doors, sliding panels, spiral staircases in the thickness of the walls, subterranean vaults conducting to a neighboring priory or a cavern in the forest, ranges of deserted apartments where the moon looks in through mullioned casements, ruinous turrets around which the night winds moan and howl. Here, too, once more are the wicked uncle who seizes upon the estates of his deceased brother's wife, and keeps her and her daughter shut up in his dungeon for the somewhat long period of eighteen years; the heroine who touches her lute and sings in pensive mood, till the notes steal to the ear of the young earl imprisoned in the adjacent tower; the maiden who is carried off on horseback by bandits, till her shrieks bring ready aid; the peasant lad who turns out to be the baron's heir. "His surprise was great when the baroness, reviving, fixed her eyes mournfully upon him and asked him to uncover his arm." Alas! the surprise is not shared by the reader, when "'I have indeed found my long-lost child: that strawberry,'"[27] etc., etc. "Gaston de Blondville" has a ghost--not explained away in the end according to Mrs. Radcliffe's custom. It is the spirit of Reginald de Folville, Knight Hospitaller of St. John, murdered in the Forest of Arden by Gaston de Blondville and the prior of St. Mary's. He is a most robust apparition, and is by no means content with revisiting the glimpses of the moon, but goes in and out at all hours of the day, and so often as to become somewhat of a bore. He ultimately destroys both first and second murderer: one in his cell, the other in open tournament, where his exploits as a mysterious knight in black armor may have given Scott a hint for his black knight at the lists of Ashby-de-la-Zouche in "Ivanhoe" (1819). His final appearance is in the chamber of the king, with whom he holds quite a long conversation. "The worm is my sister," he says: "the mist of death is on me. My bed is in darkness. The prisoner is innocent. The prior of St. Mary's is gone to his account. Be warned." It is not explained why Mrs. Radcliffe refrained from publishing this last romance of hers. Perhaps she recognized that it was belated and that the time for that sort of thing had gone by. By 1802 Lewis' "Monk" was in print, as well as several translations from German romances; Scott's early ballads were out, and Coleridge's "Ancient Mariner." That very year saw the publication of the "Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border." By 1826 the Waverley novels had made all previous fiction of the Gothic type hopelessly obsolete. In 1834 two volumes of her poems were given to the world, including a verse romance in eight cantos, "St. Alban's Abbey," and the verses scattered through her novels. By this time Scott and Coleridge were dead; Byron, Shelley, and Keats had been dead for years, and Mrs. Radcliffe's poesies fell upon the unheeding ears of a new generation. A sneer in "Waverley" (1814) at the "Mysteries of Udolpho" had hurt her feelings;[28] but Scott made amends in the handsome things which he said of her in his "Lives of the Novelists." It is interesting to note that when the "Mysteries" was issued, the venerable Joseph Warton was so much entranced that he sat up the greater part of the night to finish it.

The warfare between realism and romance, which went on in the days of Cervantes, as it does in the days of Zola and Howells, had its skirmished also in Mrs. Radcliffe's time. Jane Austen's "Northanger Abbey," written in 1803 but published only in 1817, is gently satirical of Gothic fiction. The heroine is devoted to the "Mysteries of Udolpho," which she discusses with her bosom friend. "While I have 'Udolpho' to read, I feel as if nobody could make me miserable. O the dreadful black veil! My dear Isabella, I am sure there must be Laurentina's skeleton behind it."

"When you have finished 'Udolpho,'" replies Isabella, "we will read 'The Italian' together; and I have made out a list of ten or twelve more of the same kind for you. . . I will read you their names directly. Here they are in my pocket-book. 'Castle of Wolfenbach,' 'Clermont,' 'Mysterious Warnings,' 'Necromancer of the Black Forest,' 'Midnight Bell,' 'Orphan of the Rhine,' and 'Horrid Mysteries.'"

When introduced to her friend's brother, Miss Morland asks him at once, "Have you ever read 'Udolpho,' Mr. Thorpe?" But Mr. Thorpe, who is not a literary man, but much given to dogs and horses, assures her that he never reads novels; they are "full of nonsense and stuff; there has not been a tolerably decent one come out since 'Tom Jones,' except the 'Monk.'" The scenery about Bath reminds Miss Morland of the south of France and "the country that Emily and her father traveled through in the 'Mysteries of Udolpho.'" She is enchanted at the prospect of a drive to Blaize Castle, where she hopes to have "the happiness of being stopped in their way along narrow, winding vaults by a low, grated door; or even of having their lamp--their only lamp--extinguished by a sudden gust of wind and of being left in total darkness." She visits her friends, the Tilneys, at their country seat, Northanger Abbey, in Glouchestershire; and, on the way thither, young Mr. Tilney teases her with a fancy sketch of the Gothic horrors which she will unearth there: the "sliding panels and tapestry"; the remote and gloomy guest chamber, which will be assigned her, with its ponderous chest and its portrait of a knight in armor: the secret door, with massy bars and padlocks, that she will discover behind the arras, leading to a "small vaulted room," and eventually to a "subterraneous communication between your apartment and the chapel of St. Anthony scarcely two miles off." Arrived at the abbey, she is disappointed at the modern appearance of her room, but contrives to find a secret drawer in an ancient ebony cabinet, and in this a roll of yellow manuscript which, on being deciphered, proves to be a washing bill. She is convinced, notwithstanding, that a mysterious door at the end of a certain gallery conducts to a series of isolated chambers where General Tilney, who is supposed to be a widower, is keeping his unhappy wife immured and fed on bread and water. When she finally gains admission to this Bluebeard's chamber and finds it nothing but a suite of modern rooms, "the visions of romance were over. . . Charming as were all Mrs. Radcliffe's works, and charming even as were the works of all her imitators, it was not in them, perhaps, that human nature, at least in the midland counties of England was to be looked for."

[1] But compare the passage last quoted with the one from Warton's essay _ante_, p. 219.

[2] See _ante_, p. 49.

[3] _Spectator_, No. 62.

[4] See _ante_, p. 211.

[5] "Works of Richard Owen Cambridge," pp. 198-99. Cambridge was one of the Spenserian imitators. See _ante_, p. 89, _note_. In Lady Luxborough's correspondence with Shenstone there is much mention of a Mr. Miller, a neighboring proprietor, who was devoted to Gothic. On the appearance of "The Scribleriad," she writes (January 28, 1751), "I imagine this poem is not calculated to please Mr. Miller and the rest of the Gothic gentlemen; for this Mr. Cambridge expresses a dislike to the introducing or reviving tastes and fashions that are inferior to the modern taste of our country."

[6] "History of the Gothic Revival," p. 43.

[7] "Works of Horace Walpole, Earl of Orford," in five volumes, 1798. "A Description of Strawberry Hill," Vol. II. pp. 395-516.

[8] Pugin's "True Principles of Gothic Architecture" was published in 1841.

[9] "Sketches of Eminent Statesmen and Writers," A. Hayward (1880). In a note to "Marmion" (1808) Scott said that the ruins of Crichton Castle, remarkable for the richness and elegance of its stone carvings, were then used as a cattle-pen and a sheep-fold.

[10] "Hours in a Library," Second Series: article, "Horace Walpole."

[11] Letter to Bentley, February 23, 1755.

[12] Five hundred copies, says Walpole, were struck off December 24, 1764.

[13] "The Mysterious Mother," begun 1766, finished 1768.

[14] "The Castle of Otranto" was dramatized by Robert Jephson, under the title "The Count of Narbonne," put on at Covent Garden Theater in 1781, and afterward printed, with a dedication to Walpole.

[15] James Beattie, "Dissertation on Fable and Romance." "Argenius," was printed in 1621.

[16] "The Dictionary of National Biography" miscalls it "Earl of Canterbury," and attributes it, though with a query, to _John_ Leland.

[17] See also, for a notice of this writer, Julia Kavanagh's "English Women of Letters."

[18] Maturin's "Melmoth the Wanderer" (1820) had some influence on the French romantic school and was utilized, in some particulars, by Balzac.

[19] Following is a list of Mrs. Radcliffe's romances: "The Castles of Athlin and Dunbayne" (1789); "Sicilian Romance" (1790); "Romance of the Forest" (1791); "Mysteries of Udolpho" (1794); "The Italian" (1797); "Gaston de Blondville" (1826). Collections of her poems were published in 1816, 1834, and 1845.

[20] See "Childe Harold," canto iv, xviii.

[21] "Roundabout Papers," "A Peal of Bells." "Monk" Lewis wrote at sixteen a burlesque novel, "Effusions of Sensibility," which remained in MS.

[22] "O Radcliffe, thou once wert the charmer
Of girls who sat reading all night:
They heroes were striplings in armor,
Thy heroines, damsels in white."
--_Songs, Ballads and Other Poems_.

By Thos. Haynes Bayly, London, 1857, p. 141.

"A novel now is nothing more
Than an old castle and a creaking door,
A distant hovel,
Clanking of chains, a gallery, a light,
Old armor and a phantom all in white,
And there's a novel."
--_George Colman, "The Will."_

[23] Several of her romances were dramatized and translated into French. It is curious, by the way, to find that Goethe was not unaware of Walpole's story. See his quatrain "Die Burg von Otranto," first printed in 1837.

"Sind die Zimmer saemmtlich besetzt der Burg von Otranto:
Kommt, voll innigen Grimmes, der erste Riesenbesitzer
Stuckweis an, and verdraengt die neuen falschen Bewohner.
Wehe! den Fliehenden, weh! den Bleibenden also geschiet es."

[24] Ossian.

[25] See her "Journey through Holland," etc. (1795)

[26] _cf._ Keats, "The Eve of Saint Agnes":

"The arras rich with hunt and horse and hound
Flattered in the besieging wind's uproar,
And the long carpets rose along the gusty floor."

[27] "Castles of Athlin and Dunbayne."

[28] See Julia Kavanagh's "English Women of Letters."