Part 8 (1/2)
Then came the tales of Winters, Summers, Springs At Bath and Brighton--they were pretty things!
No ghosts or spectres there were heard or seen, But all was love and flight to Gretna-green.
Perhaps your greater learning may despise What others like--and there your wisdom lies.”
To this attractive catalogue the preceptor husband, no doubt, listened with the expression of Crabbe's _Old Bachelor_:
”that kind of cool, contemptuous smile Of witty persons overcharged with bile,”
but she at least succeeds in interrupting his flow of information for the time being. He retires routed. Crabbe's close acquaintance with ”the flowery pages of sublime distress,” with ”vengeful monks who play unpriestly tricks,” with banditti
”who, in forest wide Or cavern vast, indignant virgins hide,”
was, as he confesses, a relic of those unregenerate days, when
”To the heroine's soul-distracting fears I early gave my sixpences and tears.”[108]
He could have groped his way through a Gothic castle without the aid of a talkative housekeeper:
”I've watched a wintry night on castle-walls, I've stalked by moonlight through deserted halls, And when the weary world was sunk to rest I've had such sights--as may not be expressed.
Lo! that chateau, the western tower decayed, The peasants shun it--they are all afraid; For there was done a deed--could walls reveal Or timbers tell it, how the heart would feel!
”Most horrid was it--for, behold, the floor Has stain of blood--and will be clean no more.
Hark to the winds! which through the wide saloon And the long pa.s.sage send a dismal tune, Music that ghosts delight in--and now heed Yon beauteous nymph, who must unmask the deed.
See! with majestic sweep she swims alone Through rooms, all dreary, guided by a groan, Though windows rattle and though tap'stries shake And the feet falter every step they take.
Mid groans and gibing sprites she silent goes To find a something which will soon expose The villainies and wiles of her determined foes, And having thus adventured, thus endured, Fame, wealth, and lover, are for life secured.”[109]
Crabbe's Ellen Orford in _The Borough_ (1810) is drawn from life, and in grim and bitter irony is intended as a contrast to these timorous and triumphant creatures
”borrowed and again conveyed, From book to book, the shadows of a shade.”
Ellen's adventures are sordid and gloomy, without a hint of the picturesque, her distresses horrible actualities, not the ”air-drawn” fancies that torture the sensitive Angelinas of Gothic fiction:
”But not like them has she been laid In ruined castle sore dismayed, Where naughty man and ghostly sprite Fill'd her pure mind with awe and dread, Stalked round the room, put out the light And shook the curtains round the bed.
No cruel uncle kept her land, No tyrant father forced her hand; She had no vixen virgin aunt Without whose aid she could not eat And yet who poisoned all her meat With gibe and sneer and taunt.”
Though Crabbe showed scant sympathy with the delicate sensibilities of girls who hung enraptured over the high-pitched heroics and miraculous escapes of Clementina and her kindred, he found pleasure in a robuster school of romance--the adventures of mighty Hickathrift, Jack the Giant-killer, and Robin Hood, as set forth and embellished in the chapbooks which cottagers treasured ”on the deal shelf beside the cuckoo-clock.”[110] And in his poem, _Sir Eustace Grey_, he presents with subtle art a mind tormented by terror.
CHAPTER VIII - SCOTT AND THE NOVEL OF TERROR.
In 1775 we find Miss Lydia Languish's maid ransacking the circulating libraries of Bath, and concealing under her cloak novels of sensibility and of fas.h.i.+onable scandal. Some twenty years later, in the self-same city, Catherine Morland is ”lost from all worldly concerns of dressing or dinner over the pages of _Udolpho_,” and Isabella Thorpe is collecting in her pocket-book the ”horrid” t.i.tles of romances from the German. In 1814, apparently, the vogue of the sentimental, the scandalous, the mysterious, and the horrid still persisted. Scott, in the introductory chapter to _Waverley_, disrespectfully pa.s.ses in review the modish novels, which, as it proved, were doomed to be supplanted by the series of romances he was then beginning:
”Had I announced in my frontispiece, 'Waverley, A Tale of Other Days,' must not every novel reader have antic.i.p.ated a castle scarce less than that of Udolpho, of which the eastern wing has been long uninhabited, and the keys either lost or consigned to the care of some aged butler or housekeeper, whose trembling steps about the middle of the second volume were doomed to guide the hero or heroine to the ruinous precincts?
Would not the owl have shrieked and the cricket cried in my very t.i.tle page? and could it have been possible to me with a moderate attention to decorum to introduce any scene more lively than might be produced by the jocularity of a clownish but faithful valet or the garrulous narrative of the heroine's _fille-de-chambre_, when rehearsing the stories of blood and horror which she had heard in the servant's hall? Again, had my t.i.tle borne 'Waverley, a Romance from the German,' what head so obtuse as not to image forth a profligate abbot, an oppressive duke, a secret and mysterious a.s.sociation of Rosycrucians and Illuminati, with all their properties of black cowls, caverns, daggers, electrical machines, trap-doors and dark lanterns? Or, if I had rather chosen to call my work, 'A Sentimental Tale,' would it not have been a sufficient presage of a heroine with a profusion of auburn hair, and a harp, the soft solace of her solitary hours, which she fortunately always finds means of transporting from castle to cottage, though she herself be sometimes obliged to jump out of a two-pair-of-stairs window and is more than once bewildered on her journey, alone and on foot, without any guide but a blowsy peasant girl, whose jargon she can scarcely understand? Or again, if my _Waverley_ had been ent.i.tled 'A Tale of the Times,' wouldst thou not, gentle reader, have demanded from me a das.h.i.+ng sketch of the fas.h.i.+onable world, a few anecdotes of private scandal ... a heroine from Grosvenor Square, and a hero from the Barouche Club or the Four in Hand, with a set of subordinate characters from the elegantes of Queen Anne Street, East, or the das.h.i.+ng heroes of the Bow Street Office?”
Yet Scott himself had once trodden in these well-worn paths of romance. In the general preface to the collected edition of 1829, wherein he seeks to ”ravel out his weaved-up follies,” he refers to ”a tale of chivalry planned thirty years earlier in the style of _The Castle of Otranto_, with plenty of Border characters and supernatural incident.” His outline of the plot and a fragment of the story, which was to be ent.i.tled _Thomas the Rhymer_, are printed as an appendix to the preface. Scott intended to base his story on an ancient legend, found in Reginald Scot's _Discovery of Witchcraft_, concerning the horn and sword of Thomas of Hercildoune. Cann.o.bie d.i.c.k, a jolly horse-cowper, was led by a mysterious stranger through an opening in a hillside into a long range of stables. In every stall stood a coal-black horse, and by every horse lay a knight in coal-black armour, with a drawn sword in his hand. All were as still and silent as if hewn out of marble. At the far end of a gloomy hall, illuminated, like the halls of Eblis, only by torches, there lay, upon an ancient table, a horn and a sword. A voice bade d.i.c.k try his courage, warning him that much depended upon his first choosing either the horn or the sword. d.i.c.k, whose stout heart quailed before the supernatural terrors of the hall, attempted to blow the horn before unsheathing the sword. At the first feeble blast the warriors and their steeds started to life, the knights fiercely brandis.h.i.+ng their weapons and clas.h.i.+ng their armour. d.i.c.k made a fruitless attempt to s.n.a.t.c.h the sword. After a mysterious voice had p.r.o.nounced his doom he was hurled out of the hall by a whirlwind of irresistible fury. He told his story to the shepherds, who found him dying on the cold hill side.
Regarding this legend as ”an unhappy foundation for a prose story,” Scott did not complete his fragment, which in style and treatment is not unlike the Gothic experiments of Mrs. Barbauld and Dr. Nathan Drake. Such a story as that of the magic horn and sword might have been told in the simple words that occur naturally to a shepherd, ”warmed to courage over his third tumbler,” like the old peasant to whom Stevenson entrusts the terrible tale of _Thrawn Janet_, or to Wandering Willie, who declared: