Imagens das páginas
PDF
ePub

long before it made conquest of the novel. Not that Romance- invasion was not frequently attempted; Beckford. but, from lack of genius or other causes, in every case it was doomed to failure. The first of these ventures was made by Beckford, son of the famous alderman who bearded the king and was among the chief supporters of Chatham. Vathek, the young millionaire's one effort in serious fiction, was written in 1782, and written in French. The translation, made more or less with the author's cooperation, was first published, but without his sanction, in 1786. The inspiration of this remarkable book is certainly French, rather than English. Its subject is clearly suggested by the eastern tales, so popular in France at the end of the seventeenth and the beginning of the eighteenth century. It owes something, though not much, to Marmontel; something perhaps to the Lettres Persanes; and more, especially in its earlier pages, to the "philosophical" tales of Voltaire. In English literature it was, therefore, an exotic, and that, rather than any lack of brilliance, must be held to account for its comparative failure. It seems to have passed almost unheeded by a generation more engrossed in admiring its own portrait than in the fantasies of the East; and it was reserved for the age of Byron to acknowledge its merits. The imagination of the book is, in truth, extremely striking; and it is of a typically romantic cast. The oriental splendours of the Caliph's palace of pleasure are painted with the zest of one born to

the purple; the world of Djinns and Ghouls and enchanters, with the ardour of one who has almost persuaded himself to believe in them. And through it all, there are flashes of mockery hardly less sudden than Voltaire's; the mockery of the sceptic who rejoices in turning his own creations into ridicule; the mockery of the voluptuary who knows in his heart that all is vanity. At the close, however,and it is only then that he rises to his full power,all mockery is thrown aside; and the doom of the Caliph, his punishment in the hall of Eblis, is told with a dæmonic fury which has seldom been surpassed. But it was not until a generation had gone by that any of these things found an echo.

With Mrs Radcliffe the case is almost the reverse. Her powers were far inferior to Beckford's; but, such as they were, they secured fame for her at

Mrs Radcliffe.

once. Her chief works belong to the last decade of the century-The Sicilian Romance (1790), The Romance of the Forest (1791), The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794), and The Italian (1797). Her name is now little better than a bye-word. But in her day she was probably the most popular of romance-writers; and a generation later, Byron boldly mentioned her in the same breath with Shakespeare. And, extravagant as such an estimate is, she was not only a marked figure in her own time, but, as pioneer, she played an important part in the history of the romantic novel. This is true in at least three particulars. She was the first to make sensational incident the staple of the story, and thus, in spite of her

cloying sentiment, she may fairly be regarded as founder of the sensation novel. She was the first, if we except leaders without followers such as Beckford, to employ supernatural, or at the least mysterious, machinery. And she was the first, the above limitation being again understood, to group her incidents round distinctively romantic characters; the first, in particular, to recognise the full virtue of the picturesque, the mysterious, villain. To these, as a point of less but still of considerable importance, it may be added that she was the first, in this country, to make the set description of nature a standing garnish of the novelist's banquet. None of these inventions, however, is worked in other than a most bungling fashion. Her descriptions are monotonous; her sensation is too often a blind passage leading to nothing; her villains, with the possible exception of Schedoni in her last novel, are uncommonly poor creatures; and her supernatural machinery-it was not for nothing that she was a child of the age of reason—is explained away with provoking regularity. Moreover, her local colouring is glaringly at fault. She may cast her scene in Italy or France, in the sixteenth century or the seventeenth. It makes not the slightest difference. Whatever the period, whatever the country, it is the sentiment, it is the social manners of England under George III., that she puts before us. On the whole, she may be said to have rather modelled the scattered limbs of the romantic novel-and that very imperfectly- than to have created it as an organic whole. Even this, however,

was a considerable achievement. And though her influence on individual writers of a later date may have been exaggerated-she has been too unreservedly credited with the parentage of Byron and of Charlotte Brontë-yet there is no doubt that, as romantic and sensational novelist, she was feeling after a notable ideal; an ideal which it required greater genius than hers to attain.

Mackenzie stands somewhat apart among the novelists of the time; and he does so, because he combines tendencies which hitherto

Mackenzie. had existed in separation. His first and best known work, The Man of Feeling (1771), is one of the few attempts to carry on the tradition of Sterne. But the attempt is crude, and it may be doubted whether Sterne himself would have recognised the succession. The Man of the World (1775) has a dash of Rousseau,-the Rousseau not of Heloise, but of the humanitarian propaganda. In Julia de Roubigné (1777), a far more powerful novel than either of the foregoing, the star of Heloise is in the ascendant. But, as emphatically is not the case in Rousseau's romance, jealousy is the main theme of the story; and it is handled with a tragic ruthlessness which recalls the manner of Calderon rather than of any more northern writer. Certainly, Julia has far more of the legitimate romance than either of the earlier stories; and, Clarissa apart, it may fairly claim to be the earliest tragic novel in the language. Yet, with curious perversity, it is by his earlier efforts, it is as high-priest

of sensibility, that the world has decided to remember Mackenzie.

Godwin.

Equally hard to class are the novels of Godwin. His first and most famous attempt in this kind, Caleb Williams (1794), has certain elements of romance; but its primary purpose is to expose the abuses of society; and its chief interest lies in its command of morbid psychology. It is with his next story, St Leon (1799), that he definitely enters the lists of romance, the romance of the impossible; and St Leon, fittingly enough, is the parent of Frankenstein. The hero of the story is entrusted, under the seal of silence, with the secret of the philosophers' stone and the "elixir vita"; and the drift of the resulting romance is to show the misery which such powers would entail, "cutting off the possessor from the dearest ties of human existence and rendering him a solitary, cold, self-centred "-and it might have been added, powerless-" individual.” These consequences are grasped and presented with marvellous vividness, and with not more than the due mixture of oblique satire upon the perversity of human nature and the iniquities of superstition. But it must be confessed that Godwin shares with Mrs Radcliffe the incapacity to seize the local and historical atmosphere of the scenes which he sets himself to describe; and that the sentimental opening of the story, which fills one volume out of four, is detestable. Yet, in spite of these defects, St Leon is both a notable book. in itself and forms a notable landmark in the rough beginnings of the romantic novel, though it is hard to

« AnteriorContinuar »