I. — Mrs. Radcliffe’s faculties of describing and picturing scenes and appropriate figures was of the highest order. Her accurate observation of inanimate nature, prompted by an intense love of all its varieties, supplied the materials for those richly coloured representations, which her genius presented. Without this perception of the true, the liveliest fancy will only produce a chaos of beautiful images, like the remembered fragments of a gorgeous dream. How singularly capable Mrs. Radcliffe was of painting the external world, in its naked grandeur, her published tour among the English Lakes, and, perhaps still more, the notes made on her journeys for her own amusement, abundantly prove. In the first, the boldness and simplicity of her strokes, conveying the clear images to the eye of the mind, with scarcely any incrustation of sentiment, or perplexing dazzle of fancy, distinguish her from almost all other descriptive tourists. Still the great charm of simplicity was hardly so complete, as in her unstudied notices of scenery; because in writing for the press, it is scarcely possible to avoid altogether the temptation of high so unding and ambiguous expressions, which always impede the distant presentiment of material forms. To this difficulty, she thus adverts in her account of Ulswater. “It is difficult to spread varied picture s of such scenes before the imagination. A repetition of the same images of rock, wood, and water, and the same epithets of grand, vast, and sublime, which necessarily occur, must appear tautologous, though their archetypes in nature, ever varying in outline or arrangement, exhibit new visions to the eye, and produce new shades of effect on the mind.” In the journals, as no idea of authorship interposed to give restraint to her style, there is entire fidelity and truth. She seems the very chronicler and secretary of nature; makes us feel the freshness of the air; and listen to the gentlest sounds. Not only does she keep each scene distinct from ail others, however similar in general character; but discriminates its shifting aspects with the most delicate exactness. No aerial tint of a fleecy cloud is too evanescent to be imaged in her transparent style. Perhaps no writer in prose, or verse, has been so happy in describing the varied effects of light in winged words. It is true, that there is not equal discrimination in the views of natural scenery, which she presents in her romances. In them she writes of places, which she has not visited; and, like a true lover, invests absent nature with imaginary loveliness. She looks at the grandeurs and beauties of création through a soft and tender medium, in which its graces are heightened, but some of its delicate varieties are lost. Still it is nature that we see, though touched with the hues of romance, and which could only be thus presented by one who had known, and studied its simple charms.
In the estimate of Mrs. Radcliffe’s pictorial powers, we must include her persons as well as her scenes. It must be admitted that, with scarcely an exception, they are figures rather than characters. No writer ever produced so powerful an effect, without the aid of sympathy. Her machinery acts directly on her readers, and makes them tremble and weep, not for others, but for themselves. Adeline, Emily, Vivaldi, and Ellena, are nothing to us, except as fîlling up the scene; but it is we ourselves, who discover the manuscript in the deserted abbey; we, who are prisoners in the castle of Udolpho; we, who are inmates of Spalatro’s cottage; we, who stand before the secret tribunal of the Inquisition, and even there are startled by the mysterious voice deepening its horrors. The whole is prodigious painting, so entire as to surround us with illusion; so cunningly arranged as to harrow up the soul; and the presence of a real person would spoil its completeness. As figures, all the persons are adapted with peculiar skill to the scenes in which they appear; — the more, as they are part of one entire conception. Schedoni is the most individual and fearful; but through all the earlier parts of the romance, he stalks like a being not of this world; and works out his purposes by that which, for the time at least, we feel to be superhuman agency. But when, after glaring out upon us so long as a present demon; or felt, when unseen, as directing the whole by his awful energies; he is brought within the range of human emotion by the discovery of his supposed daughter, and an anxiety for her safety and marriage; the spell is broken. We feel the incongruity; as if a spectre should weep. To develope character was not within the scope of Mrs. Radcliffe’s plan, nor compatible with her style. At one touch of human pathos the enchantment would have been dissolved, as spells are broken by a holy word, or as the ghost of Protesilaus vanished before the earthly passion of his enamoured widow.
As the absence of discriminated feeling and character was necessary to the completeness of the effect Mrs. Radcliffe sought to produce, so she was rather assisted by manners peculiarly straight-laced and timorous. A deep vein of sentiment would have suggested thoughts and emotions inconsistent with that “wise passiveness,” in which the mind should listen to the soft murmur of her “most musical, most melancholy” spells. A moral paradox could not co-exist with a haunted tower in the mind of her readers. The exceeding coldness and prudence of her heroines do not abstract them from the scenes of loveliness and terror through which we desire to follow them. If her scrupulous sense of propriety had not restrained her comic powers, Mrs. Radcliffe would probably have displayed considerable talent for the humorous. But her talkative servants are all very guarded in their loquacity; and even Annette, quaintly and pleasantly depicted, fairly belongs to the scene. Her old-fashioned primness of thought, which with her was a part of conscience, with all its cumbrous accompaniments, serves at once to render definite, and to set off, her fanciful creations. Romance, as exhibited by her, “tricked in antique ruff and bonnet,” has yet eyes of youth; and the beauty is not diminished by the folds of the brocade, or the stiffness of the damask stomacher.
These remarks apply, in their fullest effect, only to “The Mysteries of Udolpho,” and “The ïtalian in which alone the chief peculiarities of Mrs. Radcliffe’s genius are decidedly marked. In her first work, “The Castles of Athlin and Dunbayne” it is scarcely possible to discover their germ. Its scene is laid “ in the most romantic part of the Highlands of Scotland,” yet it is without local truth or striking picture. It is at once extravagant and cold. Except one scene, where the Earl of Athlin pursues two strangers through the vaults of his castle, and is stabbed by one of them in the darkness, nothing is delineated; but incredible events foliow each other in quick succession, without any attempt to realize them. Those, who complain of the minuteness of Mrs. Radcliffe’s descriptions, should read this work, where every thing passes with headlong rapidity, and be convinced of their error. In some few instances, perhaps, in “The Mysteries of Udolpho,” the descriptions of external scenery may occur too often; but her best style is essentially pictorial; and a slow development of events was, therefore, necessary to her success.
The “Sicilian Romance” is a work of much more “mark and likelihood and, very soon after its first appearance, attracted a considerable share of public attention. Here the softer blandishments of our author’s style, which were scarcely perceptible in her first production, were spread forth to captivate the fancy. Transported to the “sweet south,” her genius, which had shrunk in the bleak, atmosphère of Scotland, caught the luxurious spirit of a happier clime. Never was a title more justly applied than to this romance; it reminds the reader of “Sicilian fruitfulness.” In tender and luxurious description of natural scenery, it is surpassed by none of Mrs. Radcliffe’’s productions. The flight of her heroine is like a strain of “lengthened sweetness long drawn out — as one series of delicious valleys opens on us after another; and the purple light of love is shed over all. Still she had not yet acquired a mastery over her own power of presenting terrific incidents and scenes to the eye of the mind, and awakening the throbs of suspense by mysterious suggestions. The light seen through the closed windows of the deserted rooms — the confession of Vincent stopped by death — the groans heard from beneath Ferdinands prison — and the figure perceived stealing among the vaults, are not introduced with sufficient earnestness, and lose all claim to belief, by the utter incredibility of the incidents,
with which they are surrounded. Escapes, recaptions, encounters with fathers and banditti, surprising partings, and more surprising meetings, follow each other as quickly as the changes of a pantomime, and with almost as little of intelligible connexion. One example may suffice. — Hippolitus enters a ruin by moonlight, for shelter; hears a voice as of a person in agony; sees, through a shattered casement, a group of banditti plundering a man, who turns out to be Ferdinand, his intended brother-in-law; finds himself, he knows not how, in a vault; hears a scream from an inner apartment; bursts open the door and discovers a lady fainting, whom he recognizes as his mistress; overhears a quarrel and combat for the lady between two of the banditti, which ends in the death of one of them; fights with the survivor, and kills him; endeavours to escape with Julia; finds his way into a “dark abyss,” which is no other than the burial-place of the victims of the banditti, marked with graves, and strewed with unburied carcases; climbs to a grate, and witnesses a combat between the robbers and officers of justice; escapes with the lady through a secret door into the forest, where they are pursued by her father’s party; but, while he fights at the mouth of a cavern, she loses her way in its recesses, tili they actually conduct her to the dungeon where her mother, who had been considered dead for fifteen years, is imprisoned; — and all this in a few pages! There are, in this short story, incidents enough for two such works as “ The Mysteries of Udolpho,” where, as in that great romance, they should not only be told, but painted; and where reality and grandeur should be given to their terrors.
In “The Romance of the Forest,” Mrs. Radcliffe, who, since the dawn of her powers, had been as one “moving about in worlds unrealized,” first exhibited the faculty of controlling and fîxing the wild images which floated around her, and of stamping on them the impress of consistency and truth. This work is, as a whole, the most faultless of all her productions; but it is of an inferior order to “The Mysteries of Udolpho” and “ The Italian and can only be preferred by those, who think the absence of error of more importance than original excellence. There is a just proportion between all its parts; its mysteries are adequately explained; it excites and gratifies a very pleasant degree of curiosity; but it does not seem to dilate the imagination, nor does it curdle the blood. Its opening after a sentence of marvellous commonplace, is striking; the midnight journey of La Motte and his family they know not whither, and the introduction of the heroine, under extraordinary circumstances, to their care, rivet attention to all that is to follow. The scenes in the forest where they take up their abode are charming. This seems the most delicious asylum for the persecuted outlaw; its wood-walks and glades glisten before us with the morning dew; and there is something in the idea of finding a home in a deserted abbey, which answers to some of the wildest dreams of childhood, and innocently gratifies that partiality for unlicensed pleasure, or repose, which is so natural to the heart. The whole adventure of La Motte and the Marquis is sufficiently probable and interesting; and the influence, which it ultimately enables the more resolute villain to exercise over the weaker, is managed with peculiar skill, and turned to great account in the progress of the story. There is here scarcely any hint of the supernatural; but the skeleton in the chest of the vaulted chamber; the dagger, spotted with rust; the manuscript of the prisoner, which Adeline reads by the fitful light of her lamp, and which proves to be written by her own father, possess us with the apprehension of some secret crime, which acquires importance from its circumstances and its mystery. There are some highly-finished scenes; as that where Adeline, in her solitary chamber, dares not raise her eyes to her glass, lest another face than her own should meet them; her escape with a man whom she supposes to be the servant she had trusted, and who startles her with a strange voice; the luxurious pavilion of the Marquis, to which we are introduced after afrightful journey through a storm; and, above ail, the conversation, in which the Marquis, after a seriés of dark solicitations, understood by La Motte, as pointing to Adeline’s dishonour, proposes her death. This last, as a piece of dramatic effect, is perhaps equal to any passage in the author’s works. The closing chapters of the work are inferior in themselves to its commencement; but they gratify by affording a worthy solution of the intricacies of a plot, which has excited so deep an interest in its progress.
“The Mysteries of Udolpho” is by far the most popular of Mrs. Radcliffe’s works. To this preeminence it is, we think, justly entitled; for, although “ The Italian” may display more purely intellectual power, it is far less enchanting. Of ail the romances in the world, this is perhaps the most romantic. Its outline is noble, it is fîlled with majestic or beautiful imagery; and it is touched throughout with a dreamy softness, which harmonizes all its scenes, and renders its fascination irrésistible. It rises from the gentlest beauty by just gradations to the terrific and the sublime. Nothing can be fancied more soothing to the mind, fevered with the bustle of the world, than the picture of domestic repose, with which it opens. We are dwellers in the home of the good St. Aubert, who has retired to a beautiful spot, once the favourite scene of his youthful excursions; and sharers in its elegant and tranquil pleasures. Next come the exquisite journey of the father and daughter through the heart of the Pyrenees, where we trace out every variety of mountain grandeur; the richly-coloured scene of vintage gaiety among the woods of the chateau; and the death of St. Aubert in the neighbourhood of a place, which we und erstand to be connected with his destiny, and where strains of unearthly music are heard in sad accordance with human sorrow. When Emily’s aunt, to whose care she is consigned, marries the desperate Montoni, we feel that the clouds are gathering round her progress, and we shudder at the forebodings of approaching péril. A little interval is given among the luxuries of Venice, which are painted with exquisite delicacy and lightness; and then the work of terror begins. Nothing can be more picturesque than the ascent of the Apennines; mountain seems to rise above mountain in gloomy stateliness before us, tili we skirt the inmost valley, far shut out from the world, and Montoni, breaking a long silence, utters the charmed words, “There is Udolpho!” The ideas of extent, of massiveness, and austere grandeur, conveyed in the description of the castle, have matchless force and distinctness, and prepare the mind for the crimes and wonders, of which it is the silent witness. Every thing beneath “these dark battlements” is awful; the slightest incidents wear a solemn hue, and “Fate in sullen echoes” seems to “tell of some nameless deed.” Not only the mysterious appearances and sounds appal us, but the rushing wind, a rustling curtain, the lonely watchword on the terrace, have power to startle, and keep curiosity awake. The whole persecution and death of Madame Montoni seem prodigious, as though they were something out of nature; yet they derive ali this importance from the circumstances, with which they are invested; for there is nothing extraordinary in the fate of a despicable woman, worried into the grave by her husband, because she will not give up her settlement. The mysteries of Chateau le Blanc are less majestic than those of Udolpho, but perhaps they are even more touching; at least, the visit of Emily to the chamber where the Marchioness died, twenty years before, not without suspicion of poison, and which had been shut up ever since, is most affecting and fearful. The faded magnificence of the vast apartment; the black pall lying on the bed, as when it decked the corpse; the robe and articles of dress remaining as they had been carelessly scattered in the lifetime of their owner; her veil, which hand had never approached since, now dropping into pieces; her lute on the table, as it was touched on the evening of her death; would be solemn and spectral, even if the pall did not move and a face arise from beneath it. This scene derives a tenderer interest from the strange likeness, which Emily seems to bear to the deceased lady, and which is artfully heightened by the action of the old housekeeper throwing the black veil over her, and by her touching the long-neglected lute. Such are some among the many striking features of this romance; its defects are great and obvious. Its mysteries are not only resolved into natural causes, but are explained by circumsta
nces provokingly trivial. What reader would bear to be told that the black veil, from which his imagination has scarcely been allowed to turn for three volumes, conceals a waxen image; that the wild music, which has chanced to float on the air, in all the awful pauses of action, proceeded from an insane nun, permitted to wander about the woods; and that the words, which startled Montoni and his friends, at their guilty carousals, were uttered by a man wandering through a secret passage almost without motive; unless the power and sweetness of the spell remained after it was thus rudely broken?
Delphi Complete Works of Ann Radcliffe (Illustrated) Page 332