Heroines Of Fiction. William Dean HowellsЧитать онлайн книгу.
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."
What was behind the veil?
In a famous conversation between Catharine Morland and Isabella Thorp in " Northanger Abbey," Catharine says she has been reading " Udolpho " ever since she woke and is "got to the black veil." "Are you, indeed?" cries Isabella. "Oh, I would not tell you what is behind the black veil for the world! Are you not wild to know?" "Oh yes, quite; what can it be? But do not tell me; I would not be told on any account. I know it must be a skeleton; I am sure it is Laurentina's skeleton."
This conjecture of Catharine's is so much more effective than the fact that I prefer to leave it; but if any reader is impatient of it, he may satisfy his curiosity by turning to the last chapters of the romance, where all the "Mysteries of Udolpho" are conscientiously explained.
SCOTT'S REBECCA AND ROWENA, AND LUCY ASHTON
IT is not only in her conscientious explanation of the "Mysteries of Udolpho" that Mrs. Radcliffe pays tribute to the realistic ideal of her time. Her romances are as chaste in motive and as modest in material as Jane Austen's novels, and far decenter than most novels of any age. They might be blamed for their blending of sublimity and absurdity, but there is no specious mixture of good and bad in them to confound the conscience by the spectacle of noble rascality or virtuous depravity in any form. One may squander one's time on them, but one cannot get positive harm from them. They may misrepresent manners, but they do not misrepresent morals; and in their idyllic passages, such as that episode of the pastor La Luc in "The Romance of the Forest," they are refining, and even edifying. It is hard not to wish a little to be like Mrs. Radcliffe's good people, and one never wishes to be like her bad people. The love-making between her heroes and heroines is of virginal purity; the heroine is always a Nice Girl, just as a heroine of Jane Austen or Frances Burney is, even if she is not a Real Girl; and it is to be claimed for Anne Radcliffe that she too helped with the other great women authors of her time to characterize Anglo-Saxon fiction with decency. When the magic wand fell from her hold, it passed to the keeping of a man whose ideal was as high and pure as her own.
I
So far as any man may he said to invent anything, Walter Scott invented the historical novel. His fiction drew upon the life of the past for characters and events, which he colored and shaped and posed to serve the ends of a fancied scheme. Historical personages had been used before his time, as in those monstrous and tedious fables classified in the annals of fiction as the heroical romances. Many Asian and African princes, wondrously translated, figure in the illimitable pages of Gomberville, Calprenade, and Scuderi; the rival families of Granada, after valiant service in the supposititious Spanish chronicles, were made to amuse the vast leisure of the ladies and gentlemen of Louis XIV. 's court by the same authors. But these authors took liberties with the originals of their creations such as Scott never allowed himself. He did not mind forcing a civilization in the hot-bed of his fancy, or transposing the peculiarities of one epoch to another; but he kept a fairly good conscience as to personality, and his historical characters realize in reasonable measure the ideal of tradition, if not of veritable record.
His evolution as a historical novelist reveals the simplicity of his nature and the open-hearted directness of his aim so winningly that you love the man more and more, while you respect the artist less and less. It is not that in going from the desultory Scotch stories he began with to the English, Continental, and Oriental motives he ended with, he did not learn something more of form and effect. But what he gained in these, he lost in more vital things. He no longer wrote of what he knew and believed in, but what he studied and made-believe in. His earlier Scotch stories show his wish for truth to life, not only in the facts which he accumulates in prefaces and notes to attest the verity of the incidents, but in those finer things which the heart of the reader best corroborates. This wish was the principle of the realists whom he followed and surpassed in the popular favor, with a frank and generous shame for his triumph; but when he abandoned his native ground in the fear he so single-heartedly owns that his readers must get tired of his Scotch stories if he kept on with them, he did not perhaps abandon this principle, but he abandoned the best means of fulfilling it. He was a great literary force; he had got an immense creative impetus, and he could not help doing things that attracted and interested, but it must be confessed that he weakened more and more in the power of doing things that convinced. The early Scotch stories are those which his grown-up readers have not tired of; while all but boys and girls (and rather young boys and girls) have tired of the romances which he forsook them for. In these the characters degenerate into types, heroic, hollow, that resound with echoing verbiage, and personate one quality and tendency. This seems to me especially true of the women, or the types of women, who are what he makes them, not what he finds them. He clothes them in certain attributes, as he habits them in certain garments, and he appoints them certain ceremonial relations to the facts which are mostly outside of the real drama, or inessential to it. In " Ivanhoe " the action scarcely concerns either Rebecca or Rowena; the lovemaking, so far as there is any, is between Rebecca and Ivanhoe, and yet Ivanhoe placidly marries Rowena, with whom he has, to the reader's knowledge, not made love at all. In fiction women exist in the past, present, or future tenses, the infinitive, indicative, potential, or imperative moods of lovemaking; otherwise they do not exist at all, and no phantom of delight, masquerading in their clothes, suffices. Both Rowena and Rebecca might be left out of ''Ivanhoe,"