A History of English Romanticism in the Eighteenth Century Part 31

Scott's modesty led him to depreciate his own verses as compared with Lewis', some of which he recited to Ballantyne, in 1799, speaking of their author, says Lockhart, "with rapture." But however fine an ear for rhythm Lewis may have had, his verse is for the most part execrable; and his jaunty, jiggling anapaests and pragmatic manner are ludicrously out of keeping with the horrors of his tale, increasing the air of bathos which distinguishes his poetry:

"A toad still alive in the liquor she threw, And loud shrieked the toad as in pieces it flew: And ever, the cauldron as over she bent, She muttered strange words of mysterious intent:"

or this from the same ballad:[33]

"Wild laughing, the Fiend caught the hand from the floor, Releasing the babe, kissed the wound, drank the gore; A little jet ring from her finger then drew, Thrice shrieked a loud shriek and was borne from their view."

Lewis would appear to have inherited his romantic turn from his mother, a sentimental little dame whose youthful looks caused her often to be taken for Mat's sister, and whose reading was chiefly confined to novels. The poor lady was something of a blue-stocking and aspired, herself, to literary honors. Lewis' devotion to her is very charming, and the elder-brotherly tone of his letters to her highly amusing. But he had a dislike of "female authorship": and the rumor having reached his ear that his mother had written a novel and a tragedy and was preparing to print them, he wrote to her in alarm, begging her to stay her hand. "I hold that a woman has no business to be a public character, and that, in proportion as she acquires notoriety, she loses delicacy. I always consider a female author as a sort of half-man." He was also, quite properly, shocked at some gossip which attributed "The Monk," to his mother instead of to his mother's son.

We read in the "Life and Correspondence of Matthew Gregory Lewis" (2 vols., London, 1839), that one of Mrs. Lewis' favorite books was "Glanvil on Witches." Glanvil was the seventeenth-century writer whose "Vanity of Dogmatizing,"[34] and "Sadduceismus Triumphatus" rebuked the doubter and furnished arguments for Cotton Mather's "Wonders of the Invisible World"

(1693), an apology for his share in the Salem witchcraft trials; and whose description of a ghostly drum, that was heard to beat every night in a Wiltshire country house, gave Addison the hint for his comedy of "The Drummer." Young Lewis gloated with a pleasing horror over Glanvil's pages and the wonderful copperplates which embellished them; particularly the one which represents the devil beating his airy tympanum over Mr.

Mompesson's house. In the ancient mansion of Stanstead Hall, belonging to a kinsman of his father, where the boy spent a part of his childhood, there was a haunted chamber known as the cedar room. "In maturer years,"

says his biographer, "Lewis has frequently been heard to declare that at night, when he was conducted past that gloomy chamber, on the way to his dormitory, he would cast a glance of terror over his shoulder, expecting to see the huge and strangely carved folding doors fly open and disclose some of those fearful shapes that afterward resolved themselves into the ghastly machinery of his works."

Lewis' first and most celebrated publication was "Ambrosio, or the Monk"

(1795), a three-volume romance of the Gothic type, and a lineal descendant of Walpole and Mrs. Radcliffe. He began it at Oxford in 1792, describing it in a letter to his mother as "a romance in the style of 'The Castle of Otranto.'" But in the summer of the same year he went to Germany and took up his residence at Weimar, where he was introduced to Goethe and made eager acquaintance with the bizarre productions of the _Sturm- und Drangperiode_. For years Lewis was one of the most active intermediaries between the German purveyors of the terrible and the English literary market. He fed the stage with melodramas and operas, and stuffed the closet reader with ballads and prose romances.[35]

Meanwhile, being at The Hague in the summer of 1794, he resumed and finished his "Monk," in ten weeks. "I was induced to go on with it," he wrote to his mother, "by reading the 'Mysteries of Udolpho,' which is, in my opinion, one of the most interesting books that has ever been published. . . When you read it, tell me whether you think there is any resemblance between the character given of Montoni . . . and my own. I confess that it struck me." This innocent vanity of fancying a likeness between Anne Radcliffe's dark-browed villain and his own cherubic personality recalls Scott's story about the picture of Lewis, by Saunders, which was handed round at Dalkeith House. "The artist had ingeniously flung a dark folding-mantle around the form, under which was half-hid a dagger, a dark lantern, or some cut-throat appurtenance; with all this, the features were preserved and enn.o.bled. It pa.s.sed from hand to hand into that of Henry, Duke of Buccleuch, who, hearing the general voice affirm that it was very like, said aloud, 'Like Mat Lewis! Why, that picture's like a man.'" "The Monk" used, and abused, the now familiar apparatus of Gothic romance. It had Spanish grandees, heroines of dazzling beauty, bravoes and forest banditti, foolish duennas and gabbling domestics, monks, nuns, inquisitors, magic mirrors, enchanted wands, midnight incantations, sorcerers, ghosts, demons; haunted chambers, wainscoated in dark oak; moonlit castles with ruined towers and ivied battlements, whose galleries rang with the shrieks and blasphemies of guilty spirits, and from whose portals issued, when the castle clock tolled one, the specter of a bleeding nun, with dagger and lamp in hand.

There were poisonings, stabbings, and ministrations of sleeping potions; beauties who masqueraded as pages, and pages who masqueraded as wandering harpers; secret springs that gave admittance to winding stairs leading down into the charnel vaults of convents, where erring sisters were immured by cruel prioresses and fed on bread and water among the loathsome relics of the dead.

With all this, "The Monk" is a not wholly contemptible work. There is a certain narrative power about it which puts it much above the level of "The Castle of Otranto." And though it partakes of the stilted dialogue and false conception of character that abound in Mrs. Radcliffe's romances, it has neither the excess of scenery nor of sentiment which distinguishes that very prolix narrator. There is nothing strictly mediaeval about it. The knight in armor cuts no figure and the historical period is not precisely indicated. But the ecclesiastical features lend it a semblance of mediaevalism; and one is reminded, though but faintly, by the imprisonment of the offending sister in the sepulcher of the convent, of the scene in "Marmion" where Constance is immured in the vaults of Lindisfarne--a frank anachronism, of course, on Scott's part, since Lindisfarne had been in ruins centuries before the battle of Flodden. The motto from Horace on the t.i.tle page of "The Monk" sums up its contents, and indeed the contents of most of its author's writings, prose and verse--

"Somnia, terrores magicos, miracula, sagas, Nocturnos lemures portentaque."

The hero Ambrosio is the abbot of St. Francis' Capuchin monastery in Madrid; a man of rigid austerity, whose spiritual pride makes him an easy prey to the temptations of a female demon, who leads him by degrees through a series of crimes, including incest and parricide, until he finally sells his soul to the devil to escape from the dungeons of the Inquisition and the _auto da fe_, subscribing the agreement, in approved fashion, upon a parchment scroll with an iron pen dipped in blood from his own veins. The fiend, who enters with thunder and lightning, over whose shoulders "waved two enormous sable wings," and whose hair "was supplied by living snakes," then s.n.a.t.c.hes up his victim and soars with him to a peak of the Sierra Morena, where in a Salvator Rosa landscape of torrents, cliffs, caverns, and pine forests, by the light of an opera moon, and to the sound of the night wind sighing hoa.r.s.ely and "the shrill cry of mountain eagles," he drops him over a precipice and makes an end of him.

A pa.s.sage from the episode of Agnes de Medina, the incarcerated nun, will ill.u.s.trate Lewis' wonder-working arts: "A faint glimmering of light which strained through the bars permitted me to distinguish the surrounding horrors. I was oppressed by a noisome, suffocating smell; and perceiving that the grated door was unfastened, I thought that I might possibly effect my escape. As I raised myself with this design, my hand rested upon something soft. I grasped it and advanced it toward the light. Almighty G.o.d! what was my disgust! my consternation! In spite of its putridity and the worms which preyed upon it, I perceived a corrupted human head, and recognized the features of a nun who had died some months before. . . A sepulchral lamp was suspended from the roof by an iron chain and shed a gloomy light through the dungeon. Emblems of death were seen on every side; skills, shoulder-blades, thigh-bones and other relics of mortality were scattered upon the dewy ground. . . As I shrunk from the cutting wind which howled through my subterraneous dwelling, the change seemed so striking, so abrupt, that I doubted its reality. . .

Sometimes I felt the bloated toad, hideous and pampered with the poisonous vapors of the dungeon, dragging his loathsome length along my bosom; sometimes the quick, cold lizard roused me, leaving his slimy track upon my face, and entangling itself in the tresses of my wild and matted hair. Often have I, at waking, found my fingers ringed with the long worms which bred in the corrupted flesh of my infant."

"The Monk" won for its author an immediate and wide celebrity, a.s.sisted no doubt by the outcry against its immorality. Lewis tried to defend himself by pleading that the outline and moral of his story were borrowed from "The History of Santon Barsisa" in the _Guardian_ (No. 148). But the voluptuous nature of some of the descriptions induced the Attorney General to enjoin the sale of the book, and Lewis bowed to public opinion so far as to suppress the objectionable pa.s.sages in later editions.

Lewis' melodrama "The Castle Specter" was first performed December 14, 1797, at Drury Lane, ran sixty nights and "continued popular as an acting play," says the biographer, "up to a very recent period."[36] This is strong testimony to the contemporary appet.i.te for nightmare, for the play is a trumpery affair. Sheridan, who had a poor opinion of it, advised the dramatist to keep the specter out of the last scene. "It had been said," explains Lewis in his preface, "that if Mr. Sheridan had not advised me to content myself with a single specter, I meant to have exhibited a whole regiment of ghosts." The prologue, spoken by Mr.

Wroughton, invokes "the fair enchantress, Romance":

"The moonstruck child of genius and of woe,"

who

"--Loathes the sun or blazing taper's light: The moonbeamed landscape and tempestuous night Alone she loves; and oft with glimmering lamp Near graves new opened, or midst dungeons damp, Drear forests, ruined aisles and haunted towers, Forlorn she roves and raves away the hours."

The scene of the drama is Conway Castle in Wales, where abides Earl Osmond, a feudal tyrant of the "Otranto" type, who is planning an incestuous marriage with his own niece, concerning which he thus soliloquizes: "What though she prefer a basilisk's kiss to mine? Because my short-lived joy may cause her eternal sorrow, shall I reject those pleasures sought so long, desired so earnestly? That will I not, by Heaven! Mine she is, and mine she shall be, though Reginald's bleeding ghost flit before me and thunder in my ear 'Hold! Hold!'--Peace, stormy heart, she comes." Reginald's ghost does not flit, because Reginald is still in the flesh, though not in very much flesh. He is Osmond's brother and Angela's father, and the wicked Earl thought that he had murdered him. It turns out, however, that, though left for dead, he had recovered of his hurts and has been kept unbeknown in solitary confinement, in a dungeon vault under the castle, for the somewhat long period of sixteen years. He is discovered in Act V., "emaciated, in coa.r.s.e garments, his hair hanging wildly about his face, and a chain bound round his body."

Reginald's ghost does not flit, but Evelina's does. Evelina is Reginald's murdered wife, and her specter in "white and flowing garments, spotted with blood," appears to Angela in the oratory communicating with the cedar room, which is furnished with an antique bedstead and the portrait of a lady on a sliding panel. In truth, the castle is uncommonly well supplied with apparitions. Earl Herbert rides around it every night on a white horse; Lady Bertha haunts the west pinnacle of the chapel tower; and Lord Hildebrand may be seen any midnight in the great hall, playing football with his own head. So says Motley the jester, who affords the comedy element of the play, with the help of a fat friar who guzzles sack and stuffs venison pasties, and a soubrette after the "Otranto" pattern.

A few poems were scattered through the pages of "The Monk," including a ballad from the Danish, and another from the Spanish. But the most famous of these was "Alonzo the Brave and the Fair Imogene," original with Lewis, though evidently suggested by "Lenore." It tells how a lover who had gone to Palestine presented himself at the bridal feast of his faithless fair one, just as the clock struck one and the lights burned blue. At the request of the company, the strange knight raises his visor and discloses a skeleton head:

"All present then uttered a terrified shout; All turned with disgust from the scene; The worms they crept in and the worms they crept out, And sported his eyes and his temples about While the spectre addressed Imogene."

He winds his arms about her and sinks with his prey through the yawning ground; and

"At midnight four times in each year does her sprite, When mortals in slumber are bound.

Arrayed in her bridal apparel of white, Appear in the hall with a skeleton knight And shriek as he whirls her around.

"While they drink out of skulls newly torn from the grave, Dancing round them pale spectres are seen.

Their liquor is blood, and this horrible stave They how: 'To the health of Alonzo the Brave And his consort, the Fair Imogene!'"

Lewis' own contributions to his "Tales of Terror" and "Tales of Wonder,"

were of his same raw-head and b.l.o.o.d.y-bones variety. His imagination rioted in physical horrors. There are demons who gnash with iron fangs and brandish gore-fed scorpions; maidens are carried off by the Winter King, the Water King, the Cloud King, and the Sprite of the Glen; they are poisoned or otherwise done to death, and their wraiths revisit their guilty lovers in their shrouds at midnight's dark hour and imprint clammy kisses upon them with livid lips; gray friars and black canons abound; requiem and death knell sound through the gloom of the cloisters; echo roars through high Gothic arches; the anchorite mutters in his mossy cell; tapers burn dim, torches cast a red glare on vaulted roofs; the night wind blows through dark aisles; the owl hoots in the turret, and dying groans are heard in the lonely house upon the heath, where the black and tattered arras molders on the wall.

The "Tales of Wonder" included translations by Lewis from Goethe's "Fisher" and "Erl-King," and from German versions of Runic ballads in Herder's "Stimmen der Volker." Scott's "Wild Huntsman," from Burger, was here reprinted, and he contributed, in addition, "Frederick and Alice,"

paraphrased from a romance-fragment in Goethe's opera "Claudina von Villa Bella"; and three striking ballads of his own, "The Fire King," a story of the Crusades, and "Glenfinlas" and "The Eve of St. John," Scottish tales of "gramarye." There were two or three old English ballads in the collection, such as "Clerk Colvin" and "Tam Lin"; a contribution from George Colman, Jr., the dramatist, and one from Scott's eccentric friend Leyden; and the volume concluded with Taylor's "Lenora."[37]

It is comical to read that the Monk gave Scott lectures in the art of versification and corrected the Scotticisms and false rhymes in his translations from Burger; and that Scott respectfully deferred to his advice. For nothing can be in finer contrast with Lewis' penny dreadful, than the martial ring of the verse and the manly vigor of the style in Scott's part of the book. This is how Lewis writes anapaests, _e.g._:

"All shrouded she was in the garb of the tomb, Her lips they were livid, her face it was wan; A death the most horrid had rifled her bloom And each charm of beauty was faded and gone."

And this is how Scott writes them:

"He clenched his set teeth and his gauntleted hand, He stretched with one buffet that page on the sand. . .

For down came the Templars like Cedron in flood, And dyed their long lances in Saracen blood."

It is no more possible to take Monk Lewis seriously than to take Horace Walpole seriously. They are both like children telling ghost-stories in the dark and trying to make themselves shudder. Lewis was even frivolous enough to compose paradies on his own ballads. A number of these _facetiae_--"The Mud King," "Giles Jollup the Grave and Brown Sally Green," etc.--diversify his "Tales of Wonder."

Scott soon found better work for his hands to do than translating German ballads and melodramas; but in later years he occasionally went back to these early sources of romantic inspiration. Thus his poem "The n.o.ble Moringer" was taken from a "Sammlung Deutscher Volkslieder" published at Berlin in 1807 by Busching and Von der Hagen. In 1799 he had made a _rifacimento_ of a melodrama ent.i.tles "Der Heilige Vehme" in Veit Weber's "Sagen der Vorzeit." This he found among his papers thirty years after (1829) and printed in "The Keepsake," under the t.i.tle of "The House of Aspen." Its most telling feature is the description of the Vehm-Gericht or Secret Tribunal, but it has little importance. In his "Historic Survey," Taylor said that "Gotz von Berlichingen" was "translated into English in 1799 at Edinburgh, by Wm. Scott, Advocate; no doubt the same person who, under the poetical but a.s.sumed name of Walter, had since become the most extensively popular of the British writers"! This amazing statement is explained by a blunder on the t.i.tle-page of Scott's "Gotz," where the translator's name is given as _William_ Scott. But it led to a slightly acrimonious correspondence between Sir Walter and the Norwich reviewer.[38]

The tide of German romance had begun to ebb before the close of the century. It rose again a few years later, and left perhaps more lasting tokens this second time; but the ripple-marks of its first invasion are still discernible in English poetry and prose. Southey was clearly in error when he wrote to Taylor, September 5, 1798: "Coleridge's ballad, 'The Ancient Mariner' is, I think, the clumsiest attempt at German sublimity I ever saw."[39] The "Mariner" is not in the least German, and when he wrote it, Coleridge had not been in Germany and did not know the language. He had read "Die Rauber," to be sure, some years before in Tytler's translation. He was at Cambridge at the time, and one night in winter, on leaving the room of a college friend, carelessly picked up and took away with him a copy of the tragedy, the very name of which he had never heard before. "A winter midnight, the wind high and 'The Robbers'

for the first time. The readers of Schiller will conceive what I felt."

He recorded, in the sonnet "To Schiller" (written December, 1794, or January, 1795), the terrific impression left upon his imagination by

--"The famished father's cry From the dark dungeon of the tower time-rent,"

and wish that he might behold the bard himself, wandering at eve--

"Beneath some vast old tempest-swinging wood."

Coleridge was destined to make the standard translation of "Wallenstein"; and there are motives borrowed from "The Robbers" and "The Ghost-Seer" in his own very rubbishy dramas, "Zapolya"--of which Scott made some use in "Peveril of the Peak"--and "Osorio" (1797). The latter was rewritten as "Remorse," put on at Drury Lane January 23, 1813, and ran twenty nights.

It had been rejected by Sheridan, who expressed a very proper contempt for it as an acting play. The Rev. W. L. Bowles and Byron, who had read it in ma.n.u.script and strangely overvalued it, both made interest with the manager to have it tried on the stage. "Remorse" also took some hints from Lewis' "Monk."

But Coleridge came in time to hold in low esteem, if not precisely "The Robbers" itself, yet that school of German melodrama of which it was the grand exemplar. In the twenty-third chapter of the "Biographia Literaria" (1817) he reviewed with severity the Rev. Charles Robert Maturin's tragedy "Bertram, or the Castle of St. Aldobrand,"[40] and incidentally gave the genesis of that whole theatric species "which it has been the fashion, of late years, at once to abuse and to enjoy under the name of the German Drama. Of this latter Schiller's 'Robbers' was the earliest specimen, the first-fruits of his youth. . . Only as _such_ did the maturer judgment of the author tolerate the play." Coleridge avows that "The Robbers" and its countless imitations were due to the popularity in Germany of the translations of Young's "Night Thoughts,"

Hervey's "Meditations," and Richardson's "Clarissa Harlowe." "Add the ruined castles, the dungeons, the trap-doors, the skeletons, the flesh-and-blood ghosts, and the perpetual moonshine of a modern author[41] (themselves the literary brood of the 'Castle of Otranto,' the translations of which, with the imitations and improvements aforesaid, were about that time beginning to make as much noise in Germany as their originals were making in England), and, as the compound of these ingredients duly mixed, you will recognize the so-called _German_ Drama,"

which "is English in its origin, English in its materials, and English by readoption; and till we can prove that Kotzebue, or any of the whole breed of Kotzebues, whether dramatists or romantic writers or writers of romantic dramas, were ever admitted to any other shelf in the libraries of well-educated Germans than were occupied by their originals . . . in their mother country, we should submit to carry our own brat on our own shoulders."

Germany, rather than Italy or Spain, became under these influences for a time the favored country of romance. English tale-writers chose its forests and dismantled castles as the scenes of their stories of brigandage and a.s.sa.s.sination. One of the best of a bad cla.s.s of fictions, _e.g._, was Harriet Lee's "The German's Tale: Kruitzner," in the series of "Canterbury Tales" written in conjunction with her sister Sophia (1797-1805). Byron read it when he was fourteen, was profoundly impressed by it, and made it the basis of "Werner," the only drama of his which had any stage success. "Kruitzner" is conceived with some power, but monotonously and ponderously written. The historic period is the close of the Thirty Years' War. It does not depend mainly for its effect upon the time-honored "Gothic" machinery, though it makes a moderate use of the sliding panel and secret pa.s.sage once again.

We are come to the gate of the new century, to the date of the "Lyrical Ballads" (1798) and within sight of the Waverly novels. Looking back over the years elapsed since Thomson put forth his "Winter," in 1726, we ask ourselves what the romantic movement in England had done for literature; if indeed that deserves to be called a "movement" which had no leader, no programme, no organ, no theory of art, and very little coherence. True, as we have learned from the critical writings of the time, the movement, such as it was, was not all unconscious of its own aims and directions. The phrase "School of Warton" implies a certain solidarity, and there was much interchange of views and some personal contact between men who were in literary sympathy; some skirmishing, too, between opposing camps. Gray, Walpole, and Mason const.i.tute a group, encouraging each other's studies in their correspondence and occasional meetings. Shenstone was interested in Percy's ballad collections, and Gray in Warton's "History of English Poetry." Akenside read Dyer's "Fleece," and Gray read Beattie's "Minstrel" in MS. The Wartons were friends of Collins; Collins a friend and neighbor of Thomson; and Thomson a frequent visitor at Hagley and the Leasowes. Chatterton sought to put Rowley under Walpole's protection, and had his verses examined by Mason and Gray. Still, upon the whole, the English romanticists had little community; they worked individually and were scattered and isolated as to their residence, occupations, and social affiliation. It does not appear that Gray ever met Collins, or the Wartons, or Shenstone or Akenside; nor that MacPherson, Clara Reeve, Mrs. Radcliffe, and Chatterton ever saw each other or any of those first mentioned. There was none of that united purpose and that eager partisanship which distinguished the Parisian _cenacle Romantische Schule_ whose members have been so brilliantly sketched by Heine.

But call it a movement, or simply a drift, a trend; what had it done for literature? In the way of stimulus and preparation, a good deal. It had relaxed the cla.s.sical bandages, widened the range of sympathy, roused a curiosity as to novel and diverse forms of art, and brought the literary mind into a receptive, expectant att.i.tude favorable to original creative activity. There never was a generation more romantic in temper than that which stepped upon the stage at the close of the eighteenth century: a generation fed upon "Ossian" and Rousseau and "The Sorrows of Werther"

and Percy's "Reliques" and Mrs. Radcliffe's romances. Again, in the department of literary and antiquarian scholarship much had been accomplished. Books like Tyrwhitt's "Chaucer" and Warton's "History of English Poetry" had a real importance, while the collection and preservation of old English poetry, before it was too late, by scholars like Percy, Ritson, Ellis, and others was a pious labor.

But if we inquire what positive additions had been made to the modern literature of England, the reply is disappointing. No one will maintain that the Rowley poems, "Caractacus," "The Monk," "The Grave of King Arthur," "The Friar of Orders Gray," "The Castle of Otranto," and "The Mysteries of Udolpho" are things of permanent value: or even that "The Bard," "The Castle of Indolence," and the "Poems of Ossian" take rank with the work done in the same spirit by Coleridge, Scott, Keats, Rossetti, and William Morris. The two leading British poets of the _fin du siecle_, Cowper and Burns, were not among the romanticists. It was left for the nineteenth century to perform the work of which the eighteenth only prophesied.