Delphi complete works of.., p.1552
Delphi Complete Works of William Dean Howells, page 1552
HEROINES OF MISS FERRIER, MRS. OPIE, AND MRS. RADCLIFFE
DE FOE, Richardson, Goldsmith, Frances Burney, Maria Edgeworth, Jane Austen: this is the lineage of the English fiction whose ideal is reality, whose prototype is nature. To this illustrious company there are others worthy to be added, especially that Miss Susan Edmondstone Ferrier, who wrote “Marriage,”
“Inheritance,” and “Destiny,” and whom Scott praised with his habitual generosity, and grouped with Miss Edgeworth and Miss Austen, as having “given portraits of real society far superior to anything” men had attempted. The more voluminous Mrs. Amelia Opie may be named with the others for the effect of nature which she secondarily achieved in her characters when primarily seeking the improvement of her readers. She was extolled by the highest criticism in the first quarter of the century for qualities that do not now appeal from her novels, but many of her tales can still be read with amusement, and with a sense of the helpless allegiance to life which her hyperethicized art could not withhold.
I
I do not know what measure of favor the recent London and Boston editions of Miss Ferrier’s novels have met with; but I think the reader can find an uncommon pleasure in them if he will first thoroughly advise himself that they are no such works of art as Jane Austen’s stories. Miss Ferrier was one who caricatured and Satirized and moralized; and yet her fiction is largely true, with delightful instances in which it is altogether true. In fact, any author who aims at truth to his own knowledge of what is just and right, can hardly fail of truth in portraying life. His conscience governs him in his art, his conscience becomes his art; and the two work together to an issue at once ethical and aesthetic.
Nearly every character in “Marriage,” which we may agree upon for the time as Miss Ferrier’s best story, has some touch of the amusing eccentricity, the lawless originality, which afterwards in much eviller times developed into the excesses of Dickensosity. But her people are not merely eccentrics or originals; and one remembers them for their qualities as well as for their singularities. Lady Juliana Courtland, who makes a runaway match with Henry Douglas, and who, when cast off by her father, goes with her lapdogs and parrots to find a home with her husband’s family in the Scotch Highlands, is only a superaccentuated expression of the weak, shallow, persistent selfishness of which the best society in all times and countries offers abundant examples. But she is skilfully differenced from other examples of the kind, and she passes through the story quite visibly and tangibly. The three old-maid sisters of the laird of Glenfern are eccentrics, without the inconsistency which distinguishes characters; they are as infallibly themselves as so many lunatics. Their devoutly admired Lady MacLaughlin, with her medicines and all her maxims, is also a type, inflexibly consistent, but capable of variation from her rude prepotence, in favor of the supercilious triviality of the English earl’s daughter, who promptly tramples the obsequious pride of the poor ladies of Glenfern under her silk-shod feet. She is a true aristocrat in the unfailing assertion of her superiority, and they are true aristocrats in their acknowledgment of it. When her captivity in the abhorred Highlands comes to an end through the good offices of that old friend of her husband’s who manages Douglas’s recall to his regiment, and makes him an allowance, she gladly leaves one of her twin daughters behind her with the sister-in-law who adopts it; and with insolent exultation before her husband’s family, she goes back to the spendthrift life in London from which her mistaken love-marriage had exiled her. She is studied in bold black and white; and there is little shading used or needed in the portrayal of her growth from a selfish young woman of fashion into a selfish old woman of fashion.
One of the prime virtues with which an aristocracy supplies itself at the expense of the lower classes is frankness; and the frankness with which Lady Juliana and all her noble family discover their good and bad traits is shown with perhaps more mastery than anything else in the story. Her niece, Lady Emily, is rather a pleasing accident of the kindly patrician wilfulness, such as Thackeray was fond of imagining; but neither she nor Lady Juliana’s spoiled daughter Adelaide, nor her neglected daughter Mary, is the heroine of “Marriage.” That is always Lady Juliana herself, who grudges letting Mary come to her for a few months, when the girl’s health is failing in Scotland, as shamelessly as she refuses following her husband to India when his regiment is ordered away. She has never in her whole selfish life had a doubt of her right to the things she enjoys wasting, and has never had a regret except for a pleasure she has missed. She grows older very naturally; her caprice becomes obstinacy, her wilfulness severity, her levity foolishness; she screeches, she scolds, she makes herself a bore and a nuisance. She is truly the incarnation of the meretricious spirit, and her instinct is to spoil and devour, to crave and to grudge.
II
Lady Juliana is as amusingly a warning as Emma Castlemain in Mrs. Opie’s “Temper” is intolerably an example. Few young women in fiction have been so offensively good, have had so few moments of passive virtue in which the reader could cease longing for their extirpation. It would be almost as hard to match her for the complications of her origin and destiny. She advances through the story, with a cloud upon the question of her mother’s marriage which is lifted just in season to prevent her own marriage with her half-brother; and all this in no obscure lands or times, but in England and France, at such a recent date that she narrowly misses seeing the First Consul review his troops before the Tuileries. A foreign sojourn and an atmosphere of contemporaneous history seem to be necessary, in the author’s view, to the development of a heroine who might have shown herself a prig, alternately sentimental and sarcastic, in far less formidable circumstances; but it cannot be honestly said that the political actualities are entertainingly employed in the story of Emma’s love-affairs. As far as this story is an illustration of the social spirit of the first decade of the century, it fails to convey any hint of that revolt which stirs in Jane Austen’s novels. In “Temper” there are some wicked people of good birth; but all the contemptible people are middle class or lower class. People in trade, or rich from trade, are invariably vulgar, as they are in “Evelina” and “Camilla” and “Cecilia,” and there is no recognition of snobbery, because for that time, at least, the author is a snob, as dear Fanny Burney was apparently at all times. The story is worth while chiefly as an instance of the prevailing literary tendency. It bears, in motive and object, an allegiance to the great school of nature which had flourished from the time of Richardson, but it refuses the simpler means by which the lessons of this school were enforced. It seeks its effects by tremendous feats of invention, by mysterious and prodigious accidents; and in this it forecasts the later moods of romanticism even more than it reflects the wild necromancy of Mrs. Radcliffe. In fact, I find myself disposed, not too strangely, I hope, to justify that poor, lady’s art, so long mocked and rejected, as something quite consistent in itself, as against the decadent naturalism of Mrs. Opie.
III
The heroines of Anne Radcliffe, who was born in 1764, may be claimed for our century, because their author did not die till 1823, and the romances, whose shades they still haunt, did not begin to appear until the last decade of the eighteenth century. Chief of those which still remain to touch or appall the reader, are “The House in the Forest,” published in 1791, and “The Mysteries of Udolpho,” published in 1794; and I have lately read both with a surprise I am not ashamed to confess at their vigorous handling of incident, and their fertility in gloomy and goose-fleshing situations. I can well understand why such an artist as Jane Austen must contest their universal acceptance, but I have not the least doubt she enjoyed them, and privately thrilled while she laughed at them. As literature they are distinctly not despicable, as Walpole’s “Castle of Otranto,” which presaged them, distinctly is. They abound in a poetry which makes itself felt nearly everywhere, except in the verse which they also abound in. They witness in the author a true feeling for nature, especially in the sombre aspects, and an unquestionable power of logically relating the emotions of personality to these. Her tremendous schemes sometimes broke under her, and the reader is left to confront an anticlimax, instead of a veridical phantom; but all the same there is sublimity in the vastness of her schemes; a certain force in the conception of her types, and no slight grasp of the social facts of such countries as her travels had acquainted her with, or as she had studied from her husband’s familiarity with them. Her Frenchmen and Italians are the Frenchmen and Italians of the prevailing Anglo-Saxon convention; but they are not therefore false, though they are inadequate and partial. Her villains are villains through and through, and never otherwise, and her good people always good, her fools always foolish, her sages always wise. Her heroines are never unworthy of their high mission of being rapt away by miscreants and held captive till their true lovers come to their relief. They have a gentle dignity, and a pious resignation in their trials, and at moments their emotions shape themselves in verse of indifferent quality. In any emergency they are apt to fall senseless, when it would be more convenient for them to command themselves; their morals are at all points unassailable; and under no stress will they yield to the voice of self-interest. Sometimes they are rather hard of hearing when common-sense speaks; yet they are by no means wanting in reason; and at the worst they are more probable and more lovable than such moralized heroines of the realistic decadence as Emma Castlemain. In “The Romance of the Forest” Adeline de Montait is almost a personality, and in her most insubstantial moments she is pleasing or pathetic, as the case happens to be. She has to sustain the rôle of a young girl ignorant of her parentage, who is pursued by the passion of a profligate uncle, equally ignorant of her parentage, and is only fitfully and partially protected by a gentleman hiding from justice among the ruins of an ancient abbey in the heart of a gloomy forest on her uncle’s estates. In circumstances which would be so difficult in real life, she has to suffer the jealousy of her uncertain protector’s wife, and to forbid the suit of their son, an amiable youth not unworthy of the love which is won by another. But this situation is by no means impossible to the heroine, even when aggravated by her uncle’s persecution of the excellent young officer to whom she gives her heart, and whom he manages to have sentenced to death for a breach of military discipline. One cannot be altogether surprised that she triumphs over her misfortunes, and is rewarded in the - same moment by the reversal of her lover’s sentence and the verification of her noble origin.
From the very beginning, indeed, one is taught to expect anything from a girl who is introduced to her protector, La Motte, under conditions of such a very extraordinary character as those portrayed in the opening chapter of the romance. In his flight from the King’s officers La Motte loses the road, and is attracted by the light from a lonely house on the borders of the forest. Entering to inquire his way, “between the pauses of the wind he thought he distinguished the sobs and moaning of a female,” and was presently confronted by a man “leading, or rather, forcibly dragging along a beautiful girl who appeared to be about eighteen. Her features were bathed in tears, and she seemed to suffer the utmost distress. The man... advanced towards La Motte, who had before observed other persons in the passage, and pointed a pistol at his breast. ‘You are wholly in our power,’ he cried. ‘No assistance can reach you; if you wish to save your life swear that you will convey this girl where I may never see her more.... Answer quickly; you have no time to lose,’ He... hurried her towards La Motte, whom surprise kept silent. She sunk at his feet, and with supplicating eyes that streamed with tears implored him to have pity on her.... Her features, which were delicately beautiful, had gained from distress a captivating sweetness, she had
‘ — An eye
As when the blue sky trembles through a cloud
Of purest white.’
A habit of gray camlet, with short slashed sleeves, showed but did not adorn her figure; it was thrown open at the bosom, upon which part of her hair had fallen in disorder, while the light veil, hastily thrown on, had in her confusion been suffered to fall back....
Such elegance and apparent refinement, contrasted with the desolation of the house, and the savage manners of its inhabitants, seemed to him like a romance of imagination rather than an occurrence of real life.” It well might seem so; but the horror (the eighteenth-century horror) of this incident is better calculated to fortify the reader against the events which ensue than the scenes of soft tranquillity which open the dark drama of “The Mysteries of Udolpho.” We first see Emily St. Aubert in the tender care of a dying mother and an idyllic father, who also dies before the story is far advanced. They are all people of sensibility, residing upon an ancestral estate in Gascony, surrounded by an operatic peasantry, who “in this gay climate were often seen on an evening, when the day’s labor was done, dancing in groups on the margin of the river.... Under the ample shade of a spreading palm-tree... St. Aubert loved to read and converse with Madam St. Aubert, or to play with his children, resigning himself to the influence of those sweet affections which are ever attendant on simplicity and nature.... In person Emily resembled her mother, having the same elegant symmetry of form, the same delicacy of features, and the same blue eyes, full of tender sweetness.... St. Aubert cultivated her understanding with the most scrupulous care. He gave her a general view of the sciences, and an exact acquaintance with every part of elegant literature. He taught her Latin and English, chiefly that she might understand the sublimity of their best poets.’
When deprived untimely of these tender parents, at once so academically and so pastorally pleasing, Emily becomes the ward of a worldly and vulgarly ambitious sister of her father, and goes to live with her at Toulouse. Here she meets again the young Valancourt whom she has already met on a journey with her father and given her heart. Her aunt is dazzled by the brilliancy of the match, and the lovers are about to be united, when the aunt marries an Italian, much younger than herself, and at the bidding of her husband, the lurid Count Montoni, breaks off Emily’s marriage. Montoni wishes to get possession of the niece’s property as well as the aunt’s; he travels suddenly into Italy with them, and after a sojourn amidst the pleasant corruptions of Venice, he carries them off to his castle of Udolpho in the Apennines, where the mysteries which give name to the story develop themselves, and Emily remains the prey of terror until Valancourt duly appears and effects her rescue.
The mysteries when you come to them are never quite so blood-curdling as they promise while you are working up to them; but it cannot be denied that Mrs. Radcliffe was mistress of the art of suspense in her effects. She knew how to paint a lonely landscape, and how to suggest the solitude and gloomy majesty of a fortress in the mountain forests. She understood how to touch the nerves, to blanch the cheek, to bid the hair rise and the pulse falter. In a fashion she could make the types she used do the office of characters; she almost persuades you that Montoni lives, and quite that his wife does. If she is not so convincing in the case of Emily, still with a youthful reader on her side she has little trouble in enlisting all the necessary sympathy, all the needed hopes and fears in her behalf. Who, indeed, can withhold an appropriate shudder, when in that vast silent chamber where the girl is put to sleep, away from all the other inhabitants of the castle, she hears the sliding of the rusty bolts on the outside of her door, which has no fastening within? Whose back can resist the cold chills that the midnight music of the unseen lute, moving mystically about the halls and corridors of the castle, invites to run down it? What heart is proof against the supreme terrors of the veiled picture?
“Emily passed on till she came to a chamber hung with pictures, and took the light to examine that of a soldier... resembling Montoni. She shuddered and turned from it; passing the light over several other pictures, she came to one concealed by a veil of black silk. The singularity of the circumstance struck her and she stopped before it, wishing to remove the veil, and examine what could be thus carefully concealed, but somewhat wanting courage. ‘Holy Virgin! What can this mean?’ exclaimed Annette. ‘This is surely the picture they told me of at Venice,’ Emily, turning round, saw Annette’s countenance grow pale. ‘And what have you heard of this picture to terrify you so, my good girl?’ said she. ‘Nothing, ma’amselle; I have heard nothing; only I have heard there is something very dreadful belonging to it,’ “It is not strange that those hints, and that tragical story of a former lady of the castle, who suddenly vanished and was never heard of more, should fix themselves in Emily’s fancy, or that the next day, when exploring the castle near her room, she should think of the veiled picture, and “resolve to examine it. As she passed through the chambers that led to this, she found herself somewhat agitated; its connection with the late lady of the castle, together with the circumstance of the veil, throwing a mystery over the object that excited a faint degree of terror. But a terror of this nature, as it occupies and expands the mind, and elevates it to high expectation, is purely sublime, and leads us, by a kind of fascination, to seek even the object from which we appear to shrink. Emily passed 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 dropped senseless upon the floor.”
