Heroines Of Fiction - William Dean Howells

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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 worthwhile 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 somber 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 Montalt 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 role 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 tranquility 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

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