The Tale of Terror Part 2

The architecture of the castle, with its gallery, staircase and subterranean vaults, closely resembles that of Walpole's Gothic structure. The "enormous sabres" too are familiar to readers of _The Castle of Otranto_. The gliding light, disquieting at the outset of the story but before the close familiar grown, is doomed to be the guide of many a distressed wanderer through the Gothic labyrinths of later romances. Mrs. Barbauld chose her properties with admirable discretion, but lacked the art to use them cunningly. A tolling bell, heard in the silence and darkness of a lonely moor, will quicken the beatings of the heart, but employed as a prompter's signal to herald the advance of a group of black statues is only absurd. After the grimly suggestive opening, the story gradually loses in power as it proceeds and the happy ending, which wings our thoughts back to the Sleeping Beauty of childhood, is wholly incongruous. If the fragment had ended abruptly at the moment when the lady arises in her shroud from the coffin, _Sir Bertrand_ would have been a more effective tale of terror. From the historical point of view Mrs. Barbauld's curious patchwork is full of interest. She seems to be reaching out wistfully towards the mysterious and the unknown. Genuinely anxious to awaken a thrill of excitement in the breast of her reader, she is hesitating and uncertain as to the best way of winning her effect. She is but a pioneer in the art of freezing the blood and it were idle to expect that she should rush boldly into a forest of horrors. Naturally she prefers to follow the tracks trodden by Walpole and Smollett; but with intuitive foresight she seems to have realised the limitations of Walpole's marvellous machinery, and to have attempted to explore the regions of the fearful unknown. Her opening scene works on that instinctive terror of the dark and the unseen, upon which Mrs.

Radcliffe bases many of her most moving incidents.

Among the _Poetical Sketches_ of Blake, written between 1768 and 1777, and published in 1783, there appears an extraordinary poem written in blank verse, but divided into quatrains, and ent.i.tled _Fair Elenor_. This juvenile production seems to indicate that Blake was familiar with Walpole's Gothic story.[32] The heroine, wandering disconsolately by night in the castle vaults--a place of refuge first rendered fas.h.i.+onable by Isabella in _The Castle of Otranto_--faints with horror, thinking that she beholds her husband's ghost, but soon:

"Fancy returns, and now she thinks of bones And grinning skulls and corruptible death Wrapped in his shroud; and now fancies she hears Deep sighs and sees pale, sickly ghosts gliding."

A reality more horrible than her imaginings awaits her. A bleeding head is abruptly thrust into her arms by an a.s.sa.s.sin in the employ of a villainous and anonymous "duke." Fair Elenor retires to her bed and gives utterance to an outburst of similes in praise of her dead lord. Thus encouraged, the b.l.o.o.d.y head of her murdered husband describes its lurid past, and warns Elenor to beware of the duke's dark designs. Elenor wisely avoids the machinations of the villain, and brings an end to the poem, by breathing her last. Blake's story is faintly reminiscent of the popular legend of Anne Boleyn, who, with her bleeding head in her lap, is said to ride down the avenue of Blickling Park once a year in a hea.r.s.e drawn by hors.e.m.e.n and accompanied by attendants, all headless out of respect to their mistress.

Blake's youthful excursion into the murky gloom of Gothic vaults resulted in a poem so crude that even "Monk" Lewis, who was no connoisseur, would have declined it regretfully as a contribution to his _Tales of Terror_, but _Fair Elenor_ is worthy of remembrance as an early indication of Walpole's influence, which was to become so potent on the history of Gothic romance.

The Gothic experiments of Dr. Nathan Drake, published in his _Literary Hours_ (1798), are extremely instructive as indicating the critical standpoint of the time. Drake, like Mrs. Barbauld and her brother, was deeply interested in the sources of the pleasure derived from tales of terror, and wrote his Gothic stories to confirm and ill.u.s.trate the theories propounded in his essays. He discusses gravely and learnedly the kinds of fict.i.tious horror that excite agreeable sensations, and then proceeds to arrange carefully calculated effects, designed to alarm his readers, but not to outrage their sense of decorum. He has none of the reckless daring of "Monk" Lewis, who flung restraint to the winds and raced in mad career through an orgy of horrors. In his enchanted castles we are disturbed by an uneasy suspicion that the inhabitants are merely allegorical characters, and that the spectre of a moral lurks in some dim recess ready to spring out upon us suddenly. Dr. Drake's mind was as a house divided against itself: he was a moralist, emulating the "sage and serious Spenser" in his desire to exalt virtue and abase vice, he was a critic working out, with calm detachment, practical ill.u.s.trations of the theories he had formulated, and he was a romantic enthusiast, imbued with a vague but genuine admiration for the wild superst.i.tions of a bygone age. His stories exhibit painful evidence of the conflict which waged between the three sides of his nature. In the essay prefixed to _Henry Fitzowen, a Gothic Tale_, he distinguishes between the two species of Gothic superst.i.tion, the gloomy and the sportive, and addresses an ode to the two G.o.ddesses of Superst.i.tion--one the offspring of Fear and Midnight, the other of Hesper and the Moon.

In his story the spectres of darkness are put to flight by a troop of aerial spirits. Dr. Drake knew the Gothic stories of Walpole, Mrs. Barbauld, Clara Reeve and Mrs. Radcliffe; and traces of the influence of each may be found in his work. Henry Fitzowen loves Adeline de Montfort, but has a powerful and diabolical rival--Walleran--whose character combines the most dangerous qualities of Mrs. Radcliffe's villains with the magical gifts of a wizard. Fitzowen, not long before the day fixed for his wedding, is led astray, while hunting, by an elusive stag, a spectral monk and a "wandering fire," and arrives home in a thunderstorm to find his castle enveloped in total darkness and two of his servants stretched dead at his feet. He learns from his mother and sister, who are shut in a distant room, that Adeline has been carried off by armed ruffians. Believing Walleran to be responsible for this outrage, Fitzowen sets out the next day in search of him. After weary wanderings he is beguiled into a Gothic castle by a foul witch, who resembles one of Spenser's loathly hags, and on his entrance hears peals of diabolical laughter. He sees spectres, blue lights, and the corpse of Horror herself. When he slays Walleran the enchantments disappear. At the end of a winding pa.s.sage he finds a cavern illuminated by a globe of light, and discovers Adeline asleep on a couch. He awakes her with a kiss. Thunder shakes the earth, a raging whirlwind tears the castle from its foundations, and the lovers awake from their trance in a beautiful, moonlit vale where they hear enchanting music and see knights, nymphs and spirits. A beauteous queen tells them that the spirits of the blest have freed them from Horror's dread agents. The music dies away, the spirits flee and the lovers find themselves in a country road. A story of the same type is told by De La Motte Fouque in _The Field of Terror_.[33] Before the steadfast courage of the labourer who strives to till the field, diabolical enchantments disappear. It is an ancient legend turned into moral allegory.

In the essay on _Objects of Terror_, which precedes _Montmorenci, a Fragment_, Drake discusses that type of terror, which is "excited by the interference of a simple, material causation,"

and which "requires no small degree of skill and arrangement to prevent its operating more pain than pleasure." He condemns Walpole's _Mysterious Mother_ on the ground that the catastrophe is only productive of horror and aversion, and regards the old ballad, _Edward_, as intolerable to any person of sensibility, but praises Dante and Shakespeare for keeping within the "bounds of salutary and grateful pleasure." The scene in _The Italian_, where Schedoni, about to plunge a dagger into Ellena's bosom, recoils, in the belief that he has discovered her to be his own daughter, is commended as "appalling yet delighting the reader."

In the productions of Mrs. Radcliffe, "the Shakespeare of Romance Writers, who to the wild landscape of Salvator Rosa has added the softer graces of a Claude," he declares,

"may be found many scenes truly terrific in their conception, yet so softened down, and the mind so much relieved, by the intermixture of beautiful description, or pathetic incident, that the impression of the whole never becomes too strong, never degenerates into horror, but pleasurable emotion is ever the predominating result."

The famous scene in _Ferdinand, Count Fathom_, the description of Danger in Collins' _Ode to Fear_, the Scottish ballad of _Hardyknute_ are mentioned as admirable examples of the fear excited by natural causes. In the fragment called _Montmorenci_, Drake aims at combining "picturesque description with some of those objects of terror which are independent of supernatural agency." As the curfew tolls sullenly, Henry de Montmorenci and his two attendants rush from a castle into the darkness of a stormy night. They hurry through a savage glen, in which a swollen torrent falls over a precipice. After hearing the crash of falling armour, they suddenly come upon a dying knight on whose pale features every mark of horror is depicted. Led by frightful screams of distress, Montmorenci and his men find a maiden, who has been captured by banditti. Montmorenci slays the leader, but is seized by the rest of the banditti and bound to a tree overlooking a stupendous chasm into which he is to be hurled. By almost superhuman struggles he effects his escape, when suddenly--there at this terror-fraught moment, the fragment wisely ends.

In _The Abbey of Clunedale_ Drake experiments feebly and ineffectively with the "explained supernatural" in which Mrs.

Radcliffe was an adept. The ruined abbey, deemed to be haunted, is visited at night as an act of penance by a man named Clifford who, in a fit of unfounded jealousy, has slain his wife's brother. Clifford, accompanied by his sister, and bearing a light, kneels at his wife's tomb, and is mistaken for a spectral being.

The Gothic tale ent.i.tled _Sir Egbert_ is based on an ancient legend a.s.sociated with one of the turrets of Rochester Castle.

Sir Egbert, searching for his friend, Conrad, who had disappeared in suspicious circ.u.mstances, hears from the Knights Templars, that the wicked Constable is believed to hold two lovers in a profound and deathlike sleep. He resolves to make an attempt to draw from its sheath the sword which separates them and so restore them to life and liberty. Undismayed by the fate of those who have fallen in the quest, Sir Egbert enters the castle, where he is entertained at a gorgeous feast. When the festivities are at their height, and Sir Egbert has momentarily forgotten his enterprise, a terrible shriek is heard. The revellers vanish, and Sir Egbert is left alone to face a spectral corpse, which beckons him onward to a vault, where in flaming characters are inscribed the words: "Death to him who violates the mysteries of Gundulph's Tower." Nothing daunted, Sir Egbert amid execrations of fiends, encounters delusive horrors and at last unsheathes the sword. The lovers awake, and the whole apparatus of enchantment vanishes.

Conrad tells how he and Bertha, six years before, had been lured by a wandering fire to a luxurious cavern, where they drank a magic potion. The story closes with the marriage of Conrad and Bertha, and of Egbert and Matilda, a sister of one of the other victims of the same enchanter.

In Dr. Drake's stories are patiently collected all the heirlooms necessary for the full equipment of a Gothic castle. Ma.s.sive doors, which sway ponderously on their hinges or are forcibly burst open and which invariably close with a resounding crash, dark, eerie galleries, broken staircases, decayed apartments, mouldering floors, tolling bells, skeletons, corpses, howling spectres--all are there; but the possessor, overwhelmed by the very profusion which surrounds him, is at a loss how to make use of them. He does not realise the true significance of a half-stifled groan or an unearthly yell heard in the darkness.

Each new horror indeed seems but to put new life into the heart of the redoubtable Sir Egbert, who, like Spenser's gallant knights, advances from triumph to triumph vanquis.h.i.+ng evil at every step. It is impossible to become absorbed in his personages, who have less body than his spectres, and whose adventures take the form of a walk through an exhibition of horrors, mechanically set in motion to prove their prowess. Dr.

Drake seems happier when the hideous beings are put to rout, and the transformation-scene, which places fairyland before us, suddenly descends on the stage. Yet the bungling attempts of Dr.

Drake are interesting as showing that grave and critical minds were prepared to consider the tale of terror as a legitimate form of literature, obeying certain definite rules of its own and aiming at the excitement of a pleasurable fear. The seed of Gothic story, sown at random by Horace Walpole, had by 1798 taken firm root in the soil. Drake's enthusiasm for Gothic story was a.s.sociated with his love for older English poetry and with his interest in Scandinavian mythology. He was a genuine admirer of Spenser and attempted imitations, in modern diction, of old ballads. It is for his bent towards the romantic, rather than for his actual accomplishments, that Drake is worthy of remembrance.

CHAPTER III - "THE NOVEL OF SUSPENSE." MRS. RADCLIFFE.

The enthusiasm which greeted Walpole's enchanted castle and Miss Reeve's carefully manipulated ghost, indicated an eager desire for a new type of fiction in which the known and familiar were superseded by the strange and supernatural. To meet this end Mrs.

Radcliffe suddenly came forward with her attractive store of mysteries, and it was probably her timely appearance that saved the Gothic tale from an early death. The vogue of the novel of terror, though undoubtedly stimulated by German influence, was mainly due to her popularity and success. The writers of the first half of the nineteenth century abound in references to her works,[34] and she thus still enjoys a shadowy, ghost-like celebrity. Many who have never had the curiosity to explore the labyrinths of the underground pa.s.sages, with which her castles are invariably honeycombed, or who have never shuddered with apprehension before the "black veil," know of their existence through _Northanger Abbey_, and have probably also read how Thackeray at school amused himself and his friends by drawing ill.u.s.trations of Mrs. Radcliffe's novels.

Of Mrs. Radcliffe's life few facts are known, and Christina Rossetti, one of her many admirers, was obliged, in 1883, to relinquish the plan of writing her biography, because the materials were so scanty.[35] From the memoir prefixed to the posthumous volumes, published in 1826, containing _Gaston de Blondeville_, and various poems, we learn that she was born in 1764, the very year in which Walpole issued _The Castle of Otranto_, and that her maiden name was Ann Ward. In 1787 she married William Radcliffe, an Oxford graduate and a student of law, who became editor of a weekly newspaper, _The English Chronicle_. Her life was so secluded that biographers did not hesitate to invent what they could not discover. The legend that she was driven frantic by the horrors that she had conjured up was refuted after her death.

It may have been the publication of _The Recess_ by Sophia Lee in 1785 that inspired Mrs. Radcliffe to try her fortune with a historical novel. _The Recess_ is a story of languid interest, circling round the adventures of the twin daughters of Mary Queen of Scots and the Duke of Norfolk. Yet as we meander gently through its mazes we come across an abbey "of Gothic elegance and magnificence," a swooning heroine who plays the lute, thunderstorms, banditti and even an escape in a coffin--items which may well have attracted the notice of Mrs. Radcliffe, whose first novel, _The Castles of Athlin and Dunbayne_,[36] appeared in 1789. Considered historically, this immature work is full of interest, for, with the notable exception of the supernatural, it contains in embryo nearly all the elements of Mrs. Radcliffe's future novels.

The scene is laid in Scotland, and the period, we are a.s.sured, is that of the "dark ages"; but almost at the outset we are startled rudely from our dreams of the mediaeval by the statement that

"the wrongfully imprisoned earl, when the sweet tranquillity of evening threw an air of tender melancholy over his mind ... composed the following sonnet, which, having committed it to paper, he, the next evening dropped upon the terrace."

The sonnet consists of four heroic quatrains somewhat curiously resembling the manner of Gray. From this episode it may be gathered that Mrs. Radcliffe did not aim at, or certainly did not achieve, historical accuracy, but evolved most of her descriptions, not from original sources in ancient doc.u.ments, but from her own inner consciousness. It was only in her last novel--_Gaston de Blondeville_--that she made use of old chronicles. Within the Scottish castle we meet a heroine with an "expression of pensive melancholy" and a "smile softly clouded with sorrow," a n.o.ble lord deprived of his rights by a villain "whose life is marked with vice and whose death with the bitterness of remorse." But these grey and ghostly shadows, who flit faintly through our imagination, are less prophetic of coming events than the properties with which the castle is endowed, a secret but accidently discovered panel, a trap-door, subterranean vaults, an unburied corpse, a suddenly extinguished lamp and a soft-toned lute--a goodly heritage from _The Castle of Otranto_. The situations which a villain of Baron Malcolm's type will inevitably create are dimly shadowed forth and involve, ere the close, the hairbreadth rescue of a distressed maiden, the reinstatement of the lord in his rights, and the identification of the long-lost heir by the convenient and time-honoured "strawberry mark." These promising materials are handled in a childish fas.h.i.+on. The faintly pencilled outlines, the characterless figures, the nerveless structure, give little presage of the boldly effective scenery, the strong delineations and the dexterously managed plots of the later novels. The gradual, steady advance in skill and power is one of the most interesting features of Mrs. Radcliffe's work. Few could have guessed from the slight sketch of Baron Malcolm, a merely slavish copy of the traditional villain, that he was to be the ancestor of such picturesque and romantic creatures as Montoni and Schedoni.

This tentative beginning was quickly followed by the more ambitious _Sicilian Romance_ (1790), in which we are transported to the palace of Ferdinand, fifth Marquis of Mazzini, on the north coast of Sicily. This time the date is fixed officially at 1580. The Marquis has one son and two daughters, the children of his first wife, who has been supplanted by a beautiful but unscrupulous successor. The first wife is reputed dead, but is, in reality, artfully and maliciously concealed in an uninhabited wing of the abbey. It is her presence which leads to disquieting rumours of the supernatural. Ferdinand, the son, vainly tries to solve the enigma of certain lights, which wander elusively about the deserted wing, and finds himself perilously suspended, like David Balfour in _Kidnapped_, on a decayed staircase, of which the lower half has broken away. In this hazardous situation, Ferdinand accidentally drops his lamp and is left in total darkness. An hour later he is rescued by the ladies of the castle, who, alarmed by his long absence, boldly come in search of him with a light. During another tour of exploration he hears a hollow groan, which, he is told, proceeds from a murdered spirit underground, but which is eventually traced to the unhappy marchioness. These two incidents plainly reveal that Mrs.

Radcliffe has now discovered the peculiar vein of mystery towards which she was groping in _The Castles of Athlin and Dunbayne_.

From the very first she explained away her marvels by natural means. If we scan her romances with a coldly critical eye--an almost criminal proceeding--obvious improbabilities start into view. For instance, the oppressed marchioness, who has not seen her daughter Julia since the age of two, recognises her without a moment's hesitation at the age of seventeen, and faints in a transport of joy. It is no small tribute to Mrs. Radcliffe's gifts that we often accept such incidents as these without demur.

So unnerved are we by the lurking shadows, the flickering lights, the fluttering tapestry and the unaccountable groans with which she lowers our vitality, that we tremble and start at the wagging of a straw, and have not the spirit, once we are absorbed into the atmosphere of her romance, to dispute anything she would have us believe. The interest of the _Sicilian Romance_, which is far greater than that of her first novel, arises entirely out of the situations. There is no gradual unfolding of character and motive. The high-handed marquis, the jealous marchioness, the imprisoned wife, the vapid hero, the two virtuous sisters, the leader of the banditti, the respectable, prosy governess, are a set of dolls fitted ingeniously into the framework of the plot.

They have more substance than the tenuous shadows that glide through the pages of Mrs. Radcliffe's first story, but they move only as she deftly pulls the strings that set them in motion.

In her third novel, _The Romance of the Forest_, published in 1792, Mrs. Radcliffe makes more attempt to discuss motive and to trace the effect of circ.u.mstances on temperament. The opening chapter is so alluring that callous indeed would be the reader who felt no yearning to pluck out the heart of the mystery. La Motte, a needy adventurer fleeing from justice, takes refuge on a stormy night in a lonely, sinister-looking house. With startling suddenness, a door bursts open, and a ruffian, putting a pistol to La Motte's breast with one hand, and, with the other, dragging along a beautiful girl, exclaims ferociously,

"You are wholly in our power, no a.s.sistance can reach you; if you wish to save your life, swear that you will convey this girl where I may never see her more... If you return within an hour you will die."

The elucidation of this remarkable occurrence is long deferred, for Mrs. Radcliffe appreciates fully the value of suspense in luring on her readers, but our attention is distracted in the meantime by a series of new events. Treasuring the unfinished adventure in the recesses of our memory, we follow the course of the story. When La Motte decides impulsively to reside in a deserted abbey, "not," as he once remarks, "in all respects strictly Gothic," but containing a trap-door and a human skeleton in a chest, we willingly take up our abode there and wait patiently to see what will happen. Our interest is inclined to flag when life at the abbey seems uneventful, but we are ere long rewarded by a visit from a stranger, whose approach flings La Motte into so violent a state of alarm that he vanishes with remarkable abruptness beneath a trapdoor. It proves, however, that the intruder is merely La Motte's son, and the timid marquis is able to emerge. Meanwhile, La Motte's wife, suspicious of her husband's morose habits and his secret visits to a Gothic sepulchre, becomes jealous of Adeline, the girl they have befriended. It later transpires that La Motte has turned highwayman and stores his booty in this secluded spot. The visits are so closely shrouded in obscurity, and we have so exhausted our imagination in picturing dark possibilities, that the simple solution falls disappointingly short of our expectations. The next thrill is produced by the arrival of two strangers, the wicked marquis and the n.o.ble hero, without whom the tale of characters in a novel of terror would scarcely be complete. The emotion La Motte betrays at the sight of the marquis is due, we are told eventually, to the fact that Montalt was the victim of his first robbery. Adeline, meanwhile, in a dream sees a beckoning figure in a dark cloak, a dying man imprisoned in a darkened chamber, a coffin and a bleeding corpse, and hears a voice from the coffin. The disjointed episodes and bewildering incoherence of a nightmare are suggested with admirable skill, and effectually prepare our minds for Adeline's discoveries a few nights later. Pa.s.sing through a door, concealed by the arras of her bedroom, into a chamber like that she had seen in her sleep, she stumbles over a rusty dagger and finds a roll of mouldering ma.n.u.scripts. This incident is robbed of its effect for readers of _Northanger Abbey_ by insistent reminiscences of Catherine Morland's discovery of the was.h.i.+ng bills. But Adeline, by the uncertain light of a candle, reads, with the utmost horror and consternation, the harrowing life-story of her father, who has been foully done to death by his brother, already known to us as the unprincipled Marquis Montalt. La Motte weakly aids and abets Montalt's designs against Adeline, and she is soon compelled to take refuge in flight. She is captured and borne away to an elegant villa, whence she escapes, only to be overtaken again.

Finally, Theodore arrives, as heroes will, in the nick of time, and wounds his rival. Adeline finds a peaceful home in the chateau of M. La Luc, who proves to be Theodore's father. Here the reader awaits impatiently the final solution of the plot.

Once we have been inmates of a Gothic abbey, life in a Swiss chateau, however idyllic, is apt to seem monotonous. In time Mrs.

Radcliffe administers justice. The marquis takes poison; La Motte is banished but reforms; and Adeline, after dutifully burying her father's skeleton in the family vault, becomes mistress of the abbey, but prefers to reside in a _chalet_ on the banks of Lake Geneva.

Although the _Romance of the Forest_ is considerably shorter than the later novels, the plot, which is full of ingenious complications, is unfolded in the most leisurely fas.h.i.+on. Mrs.

Radcliffe's tantalising delays quicken our curiosity as effectively as the deliberate calm of a _raconteur_, who, with a view to heightening his artistic effect, pauses to light a pipe at the very climax of his story. Suspense is the key-note of the romance. The characters are still subordinate to incident, but La Motte and his wife claim our interest because they are exhibited in varying moods. La Motte has his struggles and, like Macbeth, is haunted by compunctious visitings of nature. Unlike the thorough-paced villain, who glories in his misdeeds, he is worried and hara.s.sed, and takes no pleasure in his crimes. Madame La Motte is not a jealous woman from beginning to end like the marchioness in the _Sicilian Romance_. Her character is moulded to some extent by environment. She changes distinctly in her att.i.tude to Adeline after she has reason to suspect her husband.

Mrs. Radcliffe's psychology is neither subtle nor profound, but the fact that psychology is there in the most rudimentary form is a sign of her progress in the art of fiction. Theodore is as insipid as the rest of Mrs. Radcliffe's heroes, who are distinguishable from one another only by their names, and Adeline is perhaps a shade more emotional and pa.s.sionless than Emily and Ellena in _The Mysteries of Udolpho_ and _The Italian_. The lachrymose maiden in _The Castles of Athlin and Dunbayne_, who can a.s.sume at need "an air of offended dignity," is a preliminary sketch of Julia, Emily and Ellena in the later novels. Mrs.

Radcliffe's heroines resemble nothing more than a composite photograph in which all distinctive traits are merged into an expressionless "type." They owe something no doubt to Richardson's _Clarissa Harlowe_, but their feelings are not so minutely a.n.a.lysed. Their lady-like accomplishments vary slightly.

In reflective mood one may lightly throw off a sonnet to the sunset or to the nocturnal gale, while another may seek refuge in her water-colours or her lute. They are all dignified and resolute in the most distressing situations, yet they weep and faint with wearisome frequency. Their health and spirits are as precarious as their easily extinguished candles. Yet these exquisitely sensitive, well-bred heroines alienate our sympathy by their impregnable self-esteem, a disconcerting trait which would certainly have exasperated heroes less perfect and more human than Mrs. Radcliffe's Theodores and Valancourts. Their sorrows never rise to tragic heights, because they are only pa.s.sive sufferers, and the sympathy they would win as pathetic figures is obliterated by their unfailing consciousness of their own rect.i.tude. In describing Adeline, Mrs. Radcliffe attempts an unusually acute a.n.a.lysis:

"For many hours she busied herself upon a piece of work which she had undertaken for Madame La Motte, but this she did without the least intention of conciliating her favour, but because she felt there was something in thus repaying unkindness, which was suited to her own temper, her sentiments and her pride. Self-love may be the centre around which human affections move, for whatever motive conduces to self-gratification may be resolved into self-love, yet, some of these affections are in their nature so refined that, though we cannot deny their origin, they almost deserve the name of virtue: of this species was that of Adeline."

It is characteristic of Mrs. Radcliffe's tendency to overlook the obvious in searching for the subtle, that the girl who feels these recondite emotions expresses slight embarra.s.sment when unceremoniously flung on the protection of strangers. Emily, in _The Mysteries of Udolpho_, possesses the same protective armour as Adeline. When she is abused by Montoni, "Her heart swelled with the consciousness of having deserved praise instead of censure, and was proudly silent"; or again, in _The Italian_,

"Ellena was the more satisfied with herself because she had never for an instant forgotten her dignity so far as to degenerate into the vehemence of pa.s.sion or to falter with the weakness of fear."

Her father, M. St. Aubert, on his deathbed, bids Emily beware of "priding herself on the gracefulness of sensibility."

Fortunately the heroine is merely a figurehead in _The Mysteries of Udolpho_ (1794). The change of t.i.tle is significant. The two previous works have been romances, but it is now Mrs. Radcliffe's intention to let herself go further in the direction of wonder and suspense than she had hitherto ventured. She is like Scythrop in _Nightmare Abbey_, of whom it was said:

"He had a strong tendency to love of mystery for its own sake; that is to say, he would employ mystery to serve a purpose, but would first choose his purpose by its capability of mystery."

Yet Mrs. Radcliffe, at the opening of her story, is sparing in her use of supernatural elements. We live by faith, and are drawn forward by the hope of future mystifications. In the first volume we saunter through idyllic scenes of domestic happiness in the Chateau le Vert and wander with Emily and her dying father through the Apennines, with only faint suggestions of excitement to come. The second volume plunges us _in medias res_. The aunt, to whose care Emily is entrusted, has imprudently married a tempestuous tyrant, Montoni, who, to further his own ends, hurries his wife and niece from the gaiety of Venice to the gloom of Udolpho. After a journey fraught with terror, amid rugged, lowering mountains and through dusky woods, we reach the castle of Udolpho at nightfall. The sombre exterior and the shadow haunted hall are so ominous that we are prepared for the worst when we enter its portals. The antic.i.p.ation is half pleasurable, half fearful, as we shudder at the thought of what may befall us within its walls. At every turn something uncanny shakes our overwrought nerves; the sighing of the wind, the echo of distant footsteps, lurking shadows, gliding forms, inexplicable groans, mysterious music torture the sensitive imagination of Emily, who is mercilessly doomed to sleep in a deserted apartment with a door, which, as so often in the novel of terror, bolts only on the outside. More nerve wracking than the unburied corpse or even than the ineffable horror concealed behind the black veil are the imaginary, impalpable terrors that seize on Emily's tender fancy as she crosses the hall on her way to solve the riddle of her aunt's disappearance:

"Emily, deceived by the long shadows of the pillars and by the catching lights between, often stopped, imagining that she saw some person moving in the distant obscurity...and as she pa.s.sed these pillars she feared to turn her eyes towards them, almost expecting to see a figure start from behind their broad shaft."

Torn from the context, this pa.s.sage no longer congeals us with terror, but in its setting it conveys in a wonderfully vivid manner the tricks of a feverish imagination. So exhaustive--and exhausting--are the mysteries of Udolpho that it was a mistake to introduce another haunted castle, le Blanc, as an appendix.

Mrs. Radcliffe's long deferred explanations of what is apparently supernatural have often been adversely criticised. Her method varies considerably. Sometimes we are enlightened almost immediately. When the garrulous servant, Annette, is relating to Emily what she knows of the story of Laurentina, who had once lived in the castle, both mistress and servant are wrought up to a state of nervous tension:

"Emily, whom now Annette had infected with her own terrors, listened attentively, but everything was still, and Annette proceeded... 'There again,' cried Annette, suddenly, 'I heard it again.' 'Hus.h.!.+' said Emily, trembling. They listened and continued to sit quite still. Emily heard a slow knocking against the wall. It came repeatedly. Annette then screamed loudly, and the chamber door slowly opened--It was Caterina, come to tell Annette that her lady wanted her."

It is seldom that the rude awakening comes thus swiftly. More often we are left wondering uneasily and fearfully for a prolonged stretch of time. The extreme limit of human endurance is reached in the episode of the Black Veil. Early in the second volume, Emily, for whom the concealed picture had a fatal fascination, determined to gaze upon it.

"Emily pa.s.sed on with faltering steps and, having paused a moment at the door before she attempted to open it, she then hastily entered the chamber and went towards the picture, which appeared to be enclosed in a frame of uncommon size, that hung in a dark part of the room. She paused again and then, with a timid hand, lifted the veil, but instantly let it fall--perceiving that, what it had concealed was no picture and, before she could leave the chamber, she dropped senseless on the floor."