A History of English Romanticism in the Eighteenth Century Part 18

[14] "Eighteenth Century Literature," pp. 401-03.

[15] It is curious, however, to find Warton describing Villon as "a pert and insipid ballad-monger, whose thoughts and diction were as low and illiberal as his life," Vol. II. p. 338 (Fifth Edition, 1806).

[16] Warton quotes the follow bathetic opening of a "Poem in Praise of Blank Verse" by Aaron Hill, "one of the very first persons who took notice of Thomson, on the publication of 'Winter'":

"Up from Rhyme's poppied vale! And ride the storm That thunders in blank verse!"

--Vol. II. p. 186.

[17] See _ante_, p. 57.

[18] See _ante_, p. 181.

[19] To Richard West, April, 1742.

[20] See _ante_, p. 94.

CHAPTER VII.

The Gothic Revival.

One of Thomas Warton's sonnets was addressed to Richard Hurd, afterward Bishop of Lichfield and Coventry, and later of Worcester. Hurd was a friend of Gray and Mason, and his "Letters on Chivalry and Romance"

(1762) helped to initiate the romantic movement. They perhaps owed their inspiration, in part, to Sainte Palaye's "Memoires sur l'ancienne Chevalerie," the first volume of which was issued in 1759, though the third and concluding volume appeared only in 1781. This was a monumental work and, as a standard authority, bears much the same relation to the literature of its subject that Mallet's "Histoire de Dannemarc" bears to all the writing on Runic mythology that was done in Europe during the eighteenth-century. Jean Baptiste de la Curne de Sainte Palaye was a scholar of wide learning, not only in the history of mediaeval inst.i.tutions but in old French dialects. He went to the south of France to familiarize himself with Provencal: collected a large library of Provencal books and ma.n.u.scripts, and published in 1774 his "Histoire de Troubadours." Among his other works are a "Dictionary of French Antiquities," a glossary of Old French, and an edition of "Auca.s.sin et Nicolete." Mrs. Susannah Dobson, who wrote "Historical Anecdotes of Heraldry and Chivalry" (1795), made an English translation of Sainte Palaye's "History of the Troubadours" in 1779, and of his "Memoirs of Ancient Chivalry" in 1784.

The purpose of Hurd's letters was to prove "the pre-eminence of the Gothic manners and fictions, as adapted to the ends of poetry, above the cla.s.sic." "The greatest geniuses of our own and foreign countries," he affirms, "such as Ariosto and Ta.s.so in Italy, and Spenser and Milton in England, were seduced by these barbarities of their forefathers; were even charmed by the Gothic romances. Was this caprice and absurdity in them? Or may there not be something in the Gothic Romance peculiarly suited to the view of a genius and to the ends of poetry? And may not the philosophic moderns have gone too far in their perpetual ridicule and contempt of it?" After a preliminary discussion of the origin of chivalry and knight-errantry and of the ideal knightly characteristics, "Prowess, Generosity, Gallantry, and Religion," which he derives from the military necessities of the feudal system, he proceeds to establish a "remarkable correspondency between the manners of the old heroic times, as painted by their romancer, Homer, and those which are represented to us in the books of modern knight-errantry." He compares, _e.g._, the Laestrygonians, Cyclopes_, _Circes, and Calypsos of Homer, with the giants, paynims, sorceresses encountered by the champions of romance; the Greek aoixoi with the minstrels; the Olympian games with tournaments; and the exploits of Hercules and Theseus, in quelling dragons and other monsters, with the similar enterprises of Lancelot and Amadis de Gaul.

The critic is daring enough to give the Gothic manners the preference over the heroic. Homer, he says, if he could have known both, would have chosen the former by reason of "the improved gallantry of the feudal times, and the superior solemnity of their superst.i.tions. The gallantry which inspirited the feudal times was of a nature to furnish the poet with finer scenes and subjects of description, in every view, than the simple and uncontrolled barbarity of the Grecian. . . There was a dignity, a magnificence, a variety in the feudal, which the other wanted."

An equal advantage, thinks Hurd, the romancers enjoyed over the pagan poets in the point of supernatural machinery. "For the more solemn fancies of witchcraft and incantation, the horrors of the Gothic were above measure striking and terrible. The mummeries of the pagan priests were childish, but the Gothic enchanters shook and alarmed all nature. . . You would not compare the Canidia of Horace with the witches in 'Macbeth.' And what are Virgil's myrtles, dropping blood, to Ta.s.so's enchanted forest?. . . The fancies of our modern bards are not only more gallant, but . . . more sublime, more terrible, more alarming than those of the cla.s.sic fables. In a word, you will find that the manners they paint, and the superst.i.tions they adopt, are the more poetical for being Gothic."

Evidently the despised "Gothick" of Addison--as Mr. Howells puts it--was fast becoming the admired "Gothic" of Scott. This p.r.o.nunciamento of very advanced romantic doctrine came out several years before Percy's "Reliques" and "The Castle of Otranto." It was only a few years later than Thomas Warton's "Observations on the Faerie Queene" and Joseph's "Essay on Pope," but its views were much more radical. Neither of the Wartons would have ventured to p.r.o.nounce the Gothic manners superior to the Homeric, as materials for poetry, whatever, in his secret heart, he might have thought.[1] To Johnson such an opinion must have seemed flat blasphemy. Hurd accounts for the contempt into which the Gothic had fallen on the ground that the feudal ages had never had the good fortune to possess a great poet, like Homer, capable of giving adequate artistic expression to their life and ideals. _Carent vate sacro_. Spenser and Ta.s.so, he thinks, "came too late, and it was impossible for them to paint truly and perfectly what was no longer seen or believed. . . As it is, we may take a guess of what the subject was capable of affording to real genius from the rude sketches we have of it in the old romancers. . .

The ablest writers of Greece enn.o.bled the system of heroic manners, while it was fresh and flouris.h.i.+ng; and their works being masterpieces of composition, so fixed the credit of it in the opinion of the world, that no revolution of time and taste could afterward shake it. Whereas the Gothic, having been disgraced in their infancy by bad writers, and a new set of manners springing up before there were any better to do them justice, they could never be brought into vogue by the attempts of later poets." Moreover, "the Gothic manners of chivalry, as springing out of the feudal system, were as singular as that system itself; so that when that political const.i.tution vanished out of Europe, the manners that belonged to it were no longer seen or understood. There was no example of any such manners remaining on the face of the earth. And as they never did subsist but once, and are never likely to subsist again, people would be led of course to think and speak of them as romantic and unnatural."

Even so, he thinks that the Renaissance poets, Ariosto and Spenser, owe their finest effects not to their tinge of cla.s.sical culture but to their romantic materials. Shakspere "is greater when he uses Gothic manners and machinery, than when he employs cla.s.sical." Ta.s.so, to be sure, tried to trim between the two, by giving an epic form to his romantic subject-matter, but Hurd p.r.o.nounces his imitations of the ancients "faint and cold and almost insipid, when compared with his original fictions. . . If it was not for these _lies_ [_magnanima mensogna_] of Gothic invention, I should scarcely be disposed to give the 'Gierusalemme Liberata' a second reading." Nay, Milton himself, though finally choosing the cla.s.sic model, did so only after long hesitation. "His favorite subject was Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table. On this he had fixed for the greater part of his life. What led him to change his mind was partly, as I suppose, his growing fanaticism; partly his ambition to take a different route from Spenser; but chiefly, perhaps, the discredit into which the stories of chivalry had now fallen by the immortal satire of Cervantes. Yet we see through all his poetry, where his enthusiasm flames out most, a certain predilection for the legends of chivalry before the fables of Greece." Hurd says that, if the "Faerie Queene" be regarded as a Gothic poem, it will be seen to have unity of design, a merit which even the Wartons had denied it. "When an architect examines a Gothic structure by the Grecian rules he finds nothing but deformity. But the Gothic architecture has its own rules by which; when it comes to be examined, it is seen to have its merit, as well as the Grecian."

The essayist complains that the Gothic fables fell into contempt through the influence of French critics who ridiculed and disparaged the Italian romancers, Ariosto and Ta.s.so. The English critics of the Restoration--Davenant, Hobbes, Shaftesbury--took their cue from the French, till these pseudo-cla.s.sical principles "grew into a sort of a cant, with which Rymer and the rest of that school filled their flimsy essays and rumbling prefaces. . . The exact but cold Boileau happened to say something about the _clinquant_ of Ta.s.so," and "Mr. Addison,[2] who gave the law in taste here, took it up and sent it about," so that "it became a sort of watchword among the critics." "What we have gotten,"

concludes the final letter of the series, "by this revolution, is a great deal of good sense. What we have lost is a world of fine fabling, the illusion of which is so grateful to the _charmed spirit_ that, in spite of philosophy and fas.h.i.+on 'Faery' Spenser still ranks highest among the poets; I mean with all those who are earlier come of that house, or have any kindness for it."

We have seen that, during the cla.s.sical period, "Gothic," as a term in literary criticism, was synonymous with barbarous, lawless, and tawdry.

Addison instructs his public that "the taste of most of our English poets, as well as readers, is extremely Gothic."[3] After commending the French critics, Bouhours and Boileau, for their insistence upon good sense, justness of thought, simplicity, and naturalness he goes on as follows: "Poets who want this strength of genius, to give that majestic simplicity to nature which we so much admire in the works of the ancients, are forced to hunt after foreign ornaments, and not to let any piece of wit, of what kind soever, escape them. I look upon these writers as Goths in poetry, who, like those in architecture, not being able to come up to the beautiful simplicity of the old Greeks and Romans, have endeavored to supply its place with all the extravagances of an irregular fancy." In the following paper (No. 63), an "allegorical vision of the encounter of True and False Wit," he discovers, "in a very dark grove, a monstrous fabric, built after the Gothic manner and covered with innumerable devices in that barbarous kind of sculpture." This temple is consecrated to the G.o.d of Dullness, who is "dressed in the habit of a monk." In his essay "On Taste" (No. 409) he says, "I have endeavored, in several of my speculations, to banish this Gothic taste which has taken possession among us."

The particular literary vice which Addison strove to correct in these papers was that conceited style which infected a certain school of seventeenth-century poetry, running sometimes into such puerilities as anagrams, acrostics, echo-songs, rebuses, and verses in the shape of eggs, wings, hour-gla.s.ses, etc. He names, as special representatives of this affectation, Herbert, Cowley, and Sylvester. But it is significant that Addison should have described this fas.h.i.+on as Gothic. It has in reality nothing in common with the sincere and loving art of the old builders. He might just as well have called it cla.s.sic; for, as he acknowledges, devices of the kind are to be found in the Greek anthology, and Ovid was a poet given to conceits. Addison was a writer of pure taste, but the coldness and timidity of his imagination, and the maxims of the critical school to which he belonged, made him mistake for spurious decoration the efflorescence of that warm, creative fancy which ran riot in Gothic art. The grotesque, which was one expression of this sappy vigor, was abhorrent to Addison. The art and poetry of his time were tame, where Gothic art was wild; dead where Gothic was alive. He could not sympathize with it, nor understand it. "Vous ne pouvez pas le comprendre; vous avez toujours ha la vie."

I have quoted Vicesimus Knox's complaint that the antiquarian spirit was spreading from architecture and numismatics into literature.[4] We meet with satire upon antiquaries many years before this; in Pope, in Akenside's Spenserian poem "The Virtuoso" (1737); in Richard Owen Cambridge's "Scribleriad" (1751):

"See how her sons with generous ardor strive, Bid every long-lost Gothic art revive,. . .

Each Celtic character explain, or show How Britons ate a thousand years ago; On laws of jousts and tournaments declaim, Or s.h.i.+ne, the rivals of the herald's fame.

But chief that Saxon wisdom be your care, Preserve their idols and their fanes repair; And may their deep mythology be shown By Seater's wheel and Thor's tremendous throne."[5]

The most notable instance that we encounter of virtuosity invading the neighboring realm of literature is in the case of Strawberry Hill and "The Castle of Otranto." Horace Walpole, the son of the great prime minister, Robert Walpole, was a person of varied accomplishments and undoubted cleverness. He was a man of fas.h.i.+on, a man of taste, and a man of letters; though, in the first of these characters, he entertained or affected a contempt for the last, not uncommon in dilettante authors and dandy artists, who belong to the _beau monde_ or are otherwise socially of high place, _teste_ Congreve, and even Byron, that "rhyming peer."

Walpole, as we have seen, had been an Eton friend of Gray and had traveled--and quarreled--with him upon the Continent. Returning home, he got a seat in Parliament, the entree at court, and various lucrative sinecures through his father's influence. He was an a.s.siduous courtier, a keen and spiteful observer, a busy gossip and retailer of social tattle. His feminine turn of mind made him a capital letter-writer; and his correspondence, particularly with Sir Horace Mann, English amba.s.sador at Florence, is a running history of backstairs diplomacy, court intrigue, subterranean politics, and fas.h.i.+onable scandal during the reigns of the second and third Georges. He also figures as an historian of an amateurish sort, by virtue of his "Catalogue of Royal and n.o.ble Authors," "Anecdotes of Painting," and "Historic Doubts on Richard III."

Our present concern with him, however, lies quite outside of these.

It was about 1750 that Walpole, who had bought a villa at Strawberry Hill, on the Thames near Windsor, which had formerly belonged to Mrs.

Chenevix, the fas.h.i.+onable London toy-woman, began to turn his house into a miniature Gothic castle, in which he is said to have "outlived three sets of his own battlements." These architectural experiments went on for some twenty years. They excited great interest and attracted many visitors, and Walpole may be regarded as having given a real impetus to the revival of pointed architecture. He spoke of Strawberry Hill as a castle, but it was, in fact, an odd blend of ecclesiastical and castellated Gothic applied to domestic uses. He had a cloister, a chapel, a round tower, a gallery, a "refectory," a stair-turret with Gothic bal.u.s.trade, stained windows, mural scutcheons, and Gothic paper-hangings. Walpole's mock-gothic became something of a laughing-stock, after the true principles of medieval architecture were better understood. Since the time when Inigo Jones, court architect to James I., came back from Italy, where he had studied the works of Palladio; and especially since the time when his successor, Sir Christopher Wren, had rebuilt St. Paul's in the Italian Renaissance style, after the great fire of London in 1664, Gothic had fallen more and more into disuse. "If in the history of British art," says Eastlake, "there is one period more distinguished than another for the neglect of Gothic, it was certainly the middle of the eighteenth century." But architecture had this advantage over other arts, it had left memorials more obvious and imposing. Medieval literature was known only to the curious, to collectors of ma.n.u.script romances and black-letter ballads.

The study of medieval arts like tempera painting, illuminating, gla.s.s-staining, wood-carving, tapestry embroidery; of the science of blazonry, of the details of ancient armor and costumes, was the pursuit of specialists. But Westminster Abbey, the Tower of London, Salisbury Cathedral, and York Minster, ruins such as Melrose and Fountain Abbeys, Crichton Castle, and a hundred others were impressive witnesses for the civilization that had built them and must, sooner or later, demand respectful attention. Hence it is not strange that the Gothic revival went hand in hand with the romantic movement in literature, if indeed it did not give it its original impulse.

"It is impossible," says Eastlake,[6] speaking of Walpole, "to peruse either the letters or the romances of this remarkable man, without being struck by the unmistakable evidence which they contain of his medieval predilections. His 'Castle of Otranto' was perhaps the first modern work of fiction which depended for its interest on the incidents of a chivalrous age, and it thus became the prototype of that cla.s.s of novel which was afterward imitated by Mrs. Radcliffe and perfected by Sir Walter Scott. The feudal tyrant, the venerable ecclesiastic, the forlorn but virtuous damsel, the castle itself with its moats and drawbridge, its gloomy dungeons and solemn corridors, are all derived from a mine of interest which has since been worked more efficiently and to better profit. But to Walpole must be awarded the credit of its discovery and first employment."

Walpole's complete works[7] contain elaborate ill.u.s.trations and ground plans of Strawberry Hill. Eastlake give a somewhat technical account of its constructive features, its gables, b.u.t.tresses, finials, lath and plaster parapets, wooden pinnacles and, what its proprietor himself describes as his "lean windows fattened with rich saints." From this I extract only the description of the interior, which was "just what one might expect from a man who possessed a vague admiration for Gothic without the knowledge necessary for a proper adaptation of its features.

Ceilings, screens, niches, etc., are all copied, or rather parodied, from existing examples, but with utter disregard for the original purpose of the design. To Lord Orford, Gothic was Gothic, and that sufficed. He would have turned an altar-slab into a hall-table, or made a cupboard of a piscine, with the greatest complacency, if it only served his purpose.

Thus we find that in the north bed-chamber, when he wanted a model for his chimney-piece, he thought he could not do better than adopt the form of Bishop Dudley's tomb in Westminster Abbey. He found a pattern for the piers of his garden gate in the choir of Ely Cathedral." The ceiling of the gallery borrowed a design from Henry VII.'s Chapel; the entrance to the same apartment from the north door of St. Alban's; and one side of the room from Archbishop Bourchier's tomb at Canterbury. Eastlake's conclusion is that Walpole's Gothic, "though far from reflecting the beauties of a former age, or antic.i.p.ating those which were destined to proceed from a re-development of the style, still holds a position in the history of English art which commands our respect, for it served to sustain a cause which had otherwise been well-nigh forsaken."

James Fergusson, in his "History of the Modern Styles of Architecture,"

says of Walpole's structures: "We now know that these are very indifferent specimens of the true Gothic art, and are at a loss to understand how either their author or his contemporaries could ever fancy that these very queer carvings were actual reproductions of the details of York Minster, or other equally celebrated buildings, from which they were supposed to have been copied." Fergusson adds that the fas.h.i.+on set by Walpole soon found many followers both in church and house architecture, "and it is surprising what a number of castles were built which had nothing castellated about them except a nicked parapet and an occasional window in the form of a cross." That school of b.a.s.t.a.r.d Gothic ill.u.s.trated by the buildings of Batty Langley, and other early restorers of the style, bears an a.n.a.logy with the imitations of old English poetry in the last century. There was the same prematurity in both, the same defective knowledge, crudity, uncertainty, incorrectness, feebleness of invention, mixture of ancient and modern manners. It was not until the time of Pugin[8] that the details of the medieval building art were well enough understood to enable the architect to work in the spirit of that art, yet not as a servile copyist, but with freedom and originality.

Meanwhile, one service that Walpole and his followers did, by reviving public interest in Gothic, was to arrest the process of dilapidation and save the crumbling remains of many a half-ruinous abbey, castle, or baronial hall. Thus, "when about a hundred years since, Rhyddlan Castle, in North Wales, fell into the possession of Dr. s.h.i.+pley, Dean of St.

Asaph, the ma.s.sive walls had been prescriptively used as stone quarries, to which any neighboring occupier who wanted building materials might resort; and they are honey-combed all round as high as a pick-ax could reach."[9] "Walpole," writes Leslie Stephen, "is almost the first modern Englishman who found out that our old cathedrals were really beautiful.

He discovered that a most charming toy might be made of medievalism.

Strawberry Hill, with all its gimcracks, its pasteboard battlements and stained-paper carvings, was the lineal ancestor of the new law-courts.

The restorers of churches, the manufacturers of stained gla.s.s, the modern decorators and architects of all varieties, the Ritualists and the High Church party, should think of him with kindness. . . That he was quite conscious of the necessity for more serious study, appears in his letters; in one of which, _e.g._, he proposes a systematic history of Gothic architecture such as has since been often executed."[10] Mr.

Stephen adds that Walpole's friend Gray "shared his Gothic tastes, with greatly superior knowledge."

Walpole did not arrive at his Gothicism by the gate of literature. It was merely a specialized development of his tastes as a virtuoso and collector. The museum of curiosities which he got together at Strawberry Hill included not only suits of armor, stained gla.s.s, and illuminated missals, but a miscellaneous treasure of china ware, enamels, faence, bronzes, paintings, engravings, books, coins, bric-a-brac, and memorabilia such as Cardinal Wolsey's hat, Queen Elizabeth's glove, and the spur that William III. wore at the Battle of the Boyne. Walpole's romanticism was a thin veneering; underneath it, he was a man of the eighteenth century. His opinions on all subjects were, if not inconsistent, at any rate notoriously whimsical and ill-a.s.sorted. Thus in spite of his admiration for Gray and his--temporary--interest in Ossian, Chatterton, and Percy's ballads, he ridiculed Mallet's and Gray's Runic experiments, spoke contemptuously of Spenser, Thomson, and Akenside, compared Dante to "a Methodist parson in bedlam," and p.r.o.nounced "A Midsummer Night's Dream" "forty times more nonsensical than the worst translation of any Italian opera-books."[11] He said that poetry died with Pope, whose measure and manner he employed in his own verses. It has been observed that, in all his correspondence, he makes but a single mention of Froissart's "Chronicle," and that a sneer at Lady Pomfret for translating it.

Accordingly we find, on turning to "The Castle of Otranto," that, just as Walpole's Gothicism was an accidental "sport" from his general virtuosity; so his romanticism was a casual outgrowth of his architectural amus.e.m.e.nts. Strawberry Hill begat "The Castle of Otranto,"

whose t.i.tle is fitly chosen, since it is the castle itself that is the hero of the book. The human characters are naught. "Shall I even confess to you," he writes to the Rev. William Cole (March 9, 1765), "what was the origin of this romance? I waked one morning in the beginning of last June from a dream, of which all I could recover was, that I had thought myself in an ancient castle (a very natural dream for a head filled, like mine, with Gothic story), and that, on the uppermost banister of a great staircase, I saw a gigantic hand in armor. In the evening I sat down and began to write, without knowing in the least what I intended to say or relate. The work grew on my hands. . . In short, I was so engrossed with my tale, which I completed in less than two months, that one evening I wrote from the time I had drunk my tea, about six o'clock, till half an hour after one in the morning."

"The Castle of Otranto, A Gothic Story," was published in 1765.[12]

According to the t.i.tle page, it was translated from the original Italian of Onuphrio Muralto--a sort of half-pun on the author's surname--by W.

Marshall, Gent. This mystification was kept up in the preface, which pretended that the book had been printed at Naples in black-letter in 1529, and was found in the library of an old Catholic family in the north of England. In the preface to his second edition Walpole described the work as "an attempt to blend the two kinds of romance, the ancient and the modern": declared that, in introducing humorous dialogues among the servants of the castle, he had taken nature and Shakspere for his models; and fell foul of Voltaire for censuring the mixture of buffoonery and solemnity in Shakspere's tragedies. Walpole's claim to having created a new species of romance has been generally allowed. "His initiative in literature," says Mr. Stephen, "has been as fruitful as his initiative in art. 'The Castle of Otranto,' and the 'Mysterious Mother,' were the progenitors of Mrs. Radcliffe's romances, and probably had a strong influence upon the author of 'Ivanhoe.' Frowning castles and gloomy monasteries, knights in armor and ladies in distress, and monks, and nuns, and hermits; all the scenery and characters that have peopled the imagination of the romantic school, may be said to have had their origin on the night when Walpole lay down to sleep, his head crammed full of Wardour Street curiosities, and dreamed that he saw a gigantic hand in armor resting on the banisters of his staircase."

It is impossible at this day to take "The Castle of Otranto" seriously, and hard to explain the respect with which it was once mentioned by writers of authority. Warburton called it "a master-piece in the Fable, and a new species likewise. . . The scene is laid in Gothic chivalry; where a beautiful imagination, supported by strength of judgment, has enabled the reader to go beyond his subject and effect the full purpose of the ancient tragedy; _i.e._, to purge the pa.s.sions by pity and terror, in coloring as great and harmonious as in any of the best dramatic writers." Byron called Walpole the author of the last tragedy[13] and the first romance in the language. Scott wrote of "The Castle of Otranto": "This romance has been justly considered, not only as the original and model of a peculiar species of composition attempted and successfully executed by a man of great genius, but as one of the standard works of our lighter literature." Gray in a letter to Walpole (December 30, 1764), acknowledging the receipt of his copy, says: "It makes some of us cry a little, and all in general afraid to go to bed o'

nights." Walpole's masterpiece can no longer make anyone cry even a little; and instead of keeping us out of bed, it sends us there--or would, if it were a trifle longer. For the only thing that is tolerable about the book is its brevity, and a certain rapidity in the action.

Macaulay, who confesses its absurdity and insipidity, says that no reader, probably, ever thought it dull. "The story, whatever its value may be, never flags for a single moment. There are no digressions, or unreasonable descriptions, or long speeches. Every sentence carries the action forward. The excitement is constantly renewed." Excitement is too strong a word to describe any emotion which "The Castle of Otranto"

is now capable of arousing. But the same cleverness which makes Walpole's correspondence always readable saves his romance from the unpardonable sin--in literature--of tediousness. It does go along and may still be read without a too painful effort.

There is nothing very new in the plot, which has all the stock properties of romantic fiction, as common in the days of Sidney's "Arcadia" as in those of Sylva.n.u.s Cobb. Alfonso, the former lord of Otranto, had been poisoned in Palestine by his chamberlain Ricardo, who forged a will making himself Alfonso's heir. To make his peace with G.o.d, the usurper founded a church and two convents in honor of St. Nicholas, who "appeared to him in a dream and promised that Ricardo's posterity should reign in Otranto until the rightful owner should be grown too large to inhabit the castle." When the story opens, this prophecy is about to be fulfilled.

The tyrant Manfred, grandson of the usurper, is on the point of celebrating the marriage of his only son, when the youth is crushed to death by a colossal helmet that drops, from n.o.body knows where, into the courtyard of the castle. Gigantic armor haunts the castle piecemeal: a monstrous gauntlet is laid upon the banister of the great staircase; a mailed foot appears in one apartment; a sword is brought into the courtyard on the shoulders of a hundred men. And finally the proprietor of these fragmentary apparitions, in "the form of Alfonso, dilated to an immense magnitude," throws down the walls of the castle, p.r.o.nounces the words "Behold in Theodore the true heir of Alfonso," and with a clap of thunder ascends to heaven. Theodore is, of course, the young peasant, grandson of the crusader by a fair Sicilian secretly espoused _en route_ for the Holy Land; and he is identified by the strawberry mark of old romance, in this instance the figure of a b.l.o.o.d.y arrow impressed upon his shoulder. There are other supernatural portents, such as a skeleton with a cowl and a hollow voice, a portrait which descends from its panel, and a statue that bleeds at the nose.

The novel feature in the "Castle of Otranto" was its Gothic setting; the "wind whistling through the battlements"; the secret trap-door, with iron ring, by which Isabella sought to make her escape. "An awful silence reigned throughout those subterraneous regions, except now and then some blasts of wind that shook the doors she had pa.s.sed, and which, grating on the rusty hinges, were re-echoed through that long labyrinth of darkness.

The wind extinguished her candle, but an imperfect ray of clouded moons.h.i.+ne gleamed through a cranny in the roof of the vault and fell directly on the spring of the trap-door." But Walpole's medievalism was very thin. He took some pains with the description of the feudal cavalcade entering the castle gate with the great sword, but the pa.s.sage is incorrect and poor in detail compared with similar things in Scott.

The book was not an historical romance, and the manners, sentiments, language, all were modern. Walpole knew little about the Middle Ages and was not in touch with their spirit. At bottom he was a trifler, a fribble; and his incurable superficiality, dilettantism, and want of seriousness, made all his real cleverness of no avail when applied to such a subject as "The Castle of Otranto."[14]

Walpole's tragedy, "The Mysterious Mother," has not even that degree of importance which secures his romance a niche in literary history. The subject was too unnatural to admit of stage presentation. Incest, when treated in the manner of Sophocles (Walpole justified himself by the example of "Oedipus"), or even of Ford, or of Sh.e.l.ley, may possibly claim a place among the themes which art is not quite forbidden to touch; but when handled in the prurient and crudely melodramatic fas.h.i.+on of this particular artist, it is merely offensive. "The Mysterious Mother,"

indeed, is even more absurd than horrible. Gothic machinery is present, but it is of the slightest. The scene of the action is a castle at Narbonne and the _chatelaine_ is the heroine of the play. The other characters are knights, friars, orphaned damsels, and feudal retainers; there is mention of cloisters, drawbridges, the Vaudois heretics, and the a.s.sa.s.sination of Henri III. and Henri IV.; and the author's Whig and Protestant leanings are oddly evidenced in his exposure of priestly intrigues.

"The Castle of Otranto" was not long in finding imitators. One of the first of these was Clara Reeve's "Champion of Virtue" (1777), styled on its t.i.tle-page "A Gothic Story," and reprinted the following year as "The Old English Baron." Under this latter t.i.tle it has since gone through thirteen editions, the latest of which, in 1883, gave a portrait of the author. Miss Reeve had previously published (1772) "The Phoenix," a translation of "Argenis," "a romance written in Latin about the beginning of the seventeenth century, by John Barclay, a Scotchman, and supposed to contain an allegorical account of the civil wars of France during the reign of Henry III."[15] "Pray," inquires the author of "The Champion of Virtue" in her address to the reader, "did you ever read a book called, 'The Castle of Otranto'? If you have, you will willingly enter with me into a review of it. But perhaps you have not read it? However, you have heard that it is an attempt to blend together the most attractive and interesting circ.u.mstances of the ancient romance and modern novel. . . The conduct of the story is artful and judicious; and the characters are admirably drawn and supported; the diction polished and elegant; yet with all these brilliant advantages, it palls upon the mind. . . The reason is obvious; the machinery is so violent that it destroys the effect it is intended to excite. Had the story been kept within the utmost _verge_ of probability, the effect had been preserved. . . For instance, we can conceive and allow of the appearance of a ghost; we can even dispense with an enchanted sword and helmet, but then they must keep within certain limits of credibility. A sword so large as to require a hundred men to lift it, a helmet that by its own weight forces a pa.s.sage through a court-yard into an arched vault . . . when your expectation is wound up to the highest pitch, these circ.u.mstances take it down with a witness, destroy the work of imagination, and, instead of attention, excite laughter. . . In the course of my observations upon this singular book, it seemed to me that it was possible to compose a work upon the same plan, wherein these defects might be avoided."