Adventures among Books

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So La Motte, Madame La Motte, and the beautiful girl drive away, La
Motte's one desire being to find a retreat safe from the police of an
offended justice.

Is this not a very original, striking, and affecting situation;
provocative, too, of the utmost curiosity? A fugitive from justice, in a
strange, small, dark, ancient house, is seized, threatened, and presented
with a young and lovely female stranger. In this opening we recognise
the hand of a master genius. There _must_ be an explanation of
proceedings so highly unconventional, and what can the reason be? The
reader is _empoigne_ in the first page, and eagerly follows the flight of
La Motte, also of Peter, his coachman, an attached, comic, and familiar
domestic. After a few days, the party observe, in the recesses of a
gloomy forest, the remains of a Gothic abbey. They enter; by the light
of a flickering lamp they penetrate "horrible recesses," discover a room
handsomely provided with a trapdoor, and determine to reside in a
dwelling so congenial, though, as La Motte judiciously remarks, "not in
all respects strictly Gothic." After a few days, La Motte finds that
somebody is inquiring for him in the nearest town. He seeks for a hiding-
place, and explores the chambers under the trapdoor. Here he finds, in a
large chest--what do you suppose he finds? It was a human skeleton! Yet
in this awful vicinity he and his wife, with Adeline (the fair stranger)
conceal themselves. The brave Adeline, when footsteps are heard, and a
figure is beheld in the upper rooms, accosts the stranger. His keen eye
presently detects the practicable trapdoor, he raises it, and the
cowering La Motte recognises in the dreaded visitor--his own son, who had
sought him out of filial affection.

Already Madame La Motte has become jealous of Adeline, especially as her
husband is oddly melancholy, and apt to withdraw into a glade, where he
mysteriously disappears into the recesses of a genuine Gothic sepulchre.
This, to the watchful eyes of a wife, is proof of faithlessness on the
part of a husband. As the son, Louis, really falls in love with Adeline,
Madame La Motte becomes doubly unkind to her, and Adeline now composes
quantities of poems to Night, to Sunset, to the Nocturnal Gale, and so
on.

In this uncomfortable situation, two strangers arrive in a terrific
thunderstorm. One is young, the other is a Marquis. On seeing this
nobleman, "La Motte's limbs trembled, and a ghastly paleness overspread
his countenance. The Marquis was little less agitated," and was, at
first, decidedly hostile. La Motte implored forgiveness--for what?--and
the Marquis (who, in fact, owned the Abbey, and had a shooting lodge not
far off) was mollified. They all became rather friendly, and Adeline
asked La Motte about the stories of hauntings, and a murder said to have
been, at some time, committed in the Abbey. La Motte said that the
Marquis could have no connection with such fables; still, there _was_ the
skeleton.

Meanwhile, Adeline had conceived a flame for Theodore, the young officer
who accompanied his colonel, the Marquis, on their first visit to the
family. Theodore, who returned her passion, had vaguely warned her of an
impending danger, and then had failed to keep tryst with her, one
evening, and had mysteriously disappeared. Then unhappy Adeline dreamed
about a prisoner, a dying man, a coffin, a voice from the coffin, and the
appearance within it of the dying man, amidst torrents of blood. The
chamber in which she saw these visions was most vividly represented. Next
day the Marquis came to dinner, and, _though reluctantly_, consented to
pass the night: Adeline, therefore, was put in a new bedroom. Disturbed
by the wind shaking the mouldering tapestry, she found a concealed door
behind the arras and a suite of rooms, _one of which was the chamber of
her dream_! On the floor lay a rusty dagger! The bedstead, being
touched, crumbled, and disclosed a small roll of manuscripts. They were
not washing bills, like those discovered by Catherine Morland in
"Northanger Abbey." Returning to her own chamber, Adeline heard the
Marquis professing to La Motte a passion for herself. Conceive her
horror! Silence then reigned, till all was sudden noise and confusion;
the Marquis flying in terror from his room, and insisting on instant
departure. His emotion was powerfully displayed.

What had occurred? Mrs. Radcliffe does not say, but horror, whether
caused by a conscience ill at ease, or by events of a terrific and
supernatural kind, is plainly indicated. In daylight, the Marquis
audaciously pressed his unholy suit, and even offered marriage, a hollow
mockery, for he was well known to be already a married man. The scenes
of Adeline's flight, capture, retention in an elegant villa of the
licentious noble, renewed flight, rescue by Theodore, with Theodore's
arrest, and wounding of the tyrannical Marquis, are all of breathless
interest. Mrs. Radcliffe excels in narratives of romantic escapes, a
topic always thrilling when well handled. Adeline herself is carried
back to the Abbey, but La Motte, who had rather not be a villain if he
could avoid it, enables her again to secure her freedom. He is clearly
in the power of the Marquis, and his life has been unscrupulous, but he
retains traces of better things. Adeline is now secretly conveyed to a
peaceful valley in Savoy, the home of the honest Peter (the coachman),
who accompanies her. Here she learns to know and value the family of La
Luc, the kindred of her Theodore (by a romantic coincidence), and, in the
adorable scenery of Savoy, she throws many a ballad to the Moon.

La Motte, on the discovery of Adeline's flight, was cast into prison by
the revengeful Marquis, for, in fact, soon after settling in the Abbey,
it had occurred to La Motte to commence highwayman. His very first
victim had been the Marquis, and, during his mysterious retreats to a
tomb in a glade in the forest, he had, in short, been contemplating his
booty, jewels which he could not convert into ready money. Consequently,
when the Marquis first entered the Abbey, La Motte had every reason for
alarm, and only pacified the vindictive aristocrat by yielding to his
cruel schemes against the virtue of Adeline.

Happily for La Motte, a witness appeared at his trial, who cast a lurid
light on the character of the Marquis. That villain, to be plain, had
murdered his elder brother (the skeleton of the Abbey), and had been
anxious to murder, it was added, his own natural daughter--that is,
Adeline! His hired felons, however, placed her in a convent, and, later
(rather than kill her, on which the Marquis insisted), simply thrust her
into the hands of La Motte, who happened to pass by that way, as we saw
in the opening of this romance. Thus, in making love to Adeline, his
daughter, the Marquis was, unconsciously, in an awkward position. On
further examination of evidence, however, things proved otherwise.
Adeline was _not_ the natural daughter of the Marquis, but his niece, the
legitimate daughter and heiress of his brother (the skeleton of the
Abbey). The MS. found by Adeline in the room of the rusty dagger added
documentary evidence, for it was a narrative of the sufferings of her
father (later the skeleton), written by him in the Abbey where he was
imprisoned and stabbed, and where his bones were discovered by La Motte.
The hasty nocturnal flight of the Marquis from the Abbey is thus
accounted for: he had probably been the victim of a terrific
hallucination representing his murdered brother; whether it was veridical
or merely subjective Mrs. Radcliffe does not decide. Rather than face
the outraged justice of his country, the Marquis, after these
revelations, took poison. La Motte was banished; and Adeline, now
mistress of the Abbey, removed the paternal skeleton to "the vault of his
ancestors." Theodore and Adeline were united, and virtuously resided in
a villa on the beautiful banks of the Lake of Geneva.

Such is the "Romance of the Forest," a fiction in which character is
subordinate to plot and incident. There is an attempt at character
drawing in La Motte, and in his wife; the hero and heroine are not
distinguishable from Julia and Hippolytus. But Mrs. Radcliffe does not
aim at psychological niceties, and we must not blame her for withholding
what it was no part of her purpose to give. "The Romance of the Forest"
was, so far, infinitely the most thrilling of modern English works of
fiction. "Every reader felt the force," says Scott, "from the sage in
his study, to the family group in middle life," and nobody felt it more
than Scott himself, then a young gentleman of nineteen, who, when asked
how his time was employed, answered, "I read no Civil Law." He did read
Mrs. Radcliffe, and, in "The Betrothed," followed her example in the
story of the haunted chamber where the heroine faces the spectre attached
to her ancient family.

"The Mysteries of Udolpho," Mrs. Radcliffe's next and most celebrated
work, is not (in the judgment of this reader, at least) her masterpiece.
The booksellers paid her what Scott, erroneously, calls "the
unprecedented sum of 500 pounds" for the romance, and they must have made
a profitable bargain. "The public," says Scott, "rushed upon it with all
the eagerness of curiosity, and rose from it with unsated appetite." I
arise with a thoroughly sated appetite from the "Mysteries of Udolpho."
The book, as Sir Walter saw, is "The Romance of the Forest" raised to a
higher power. We have a similar and similarly situated heroine, cruelly
detached from her young man, and immured in a howling wilderness of a
brigand castle in the Apennines. In place of the Marquis is a miscreant
on a larger and more ferocious scale. The usual mysteries of voices,
lights, secret passages, and innumerable doors are provided regardless of
economy. The great question, which I shall not answer, is, _what did the
Black Veil conceal_? _Not_ "the bones of Laurentina," as Catherine
Morland supposed.

Here is Emily's adventure with the veil. "She paused again, and then,
with a timid hand, lifted the veil; but instantly let it fall--perceiving
that what it had concealed was no picture, and before she could leave the
chamber she dropped senseless on the floor. When she recovered her
recollection, . . . horror occupied her mind." Countless mysteries
coagulate around this veil, and the reader is apt to be disappointed when
the awful curtain is withdrawn. But he has enjoyed, for several hundred
pages, the pleasures of anticipation. A pedantic censor may remark that,
while the date of the story is 1580, all the virtuous people live in an
idyllic fashion, like creatures of Rousseau, existing solely for
landscape and the affections, writing poetry on Nature, animate and
inanimate, including the common Bat, and drawing in water colours. In
those elegant avocations began, and in these, after an interval of
adventures "amazing horrid," concluded the career of Emily.

Mrs. Radcliffe keeps the many entangled threads of her complex web well
in hand, and incidents which puzzle you at the beginning fall naturally
into place before the end. The character of the heroine's silly, vain,
unkind, and unreasonable aunt is vividly designed (that Emily should
mistake the corse of a moustached bandit for that of her aunt is an
incident hard to defend). Valancourt is not an ordinary spotless hero,
but sows his wild oats, and reaps the usual harvest; and Annette is a
good sample of the usual _soubrette_. When one has said that the
landscapes and bandits of this romance are worthy of Poussin and Salvator
Rosa, from whom they were probably translated into words, not much
remains to be added. Sir Walter, after repeated perusals, considered
"Udolpho" "a step beyond Mrs. Radcliffe's former work, high as that had
justly advanced her." But he admits that "persons of no mean judgment"
preferred "The Romance of the Forest." With these amateurs I would be
ranked. The ingenuity and originality of the "Romance" are greater: our
friend the skeleton is better than that Thing which was behind the Black
Veil, the escapes of Adeline are more thrilling than the escape of Emily,
and the "Romance" is not nearly so long, not nearly so prolix as
"Udolpho."

The roof and crown of Mrs. Radcliffe's work is "The Italian" (1797), for
which she received 800 pounds. {6} The scene is Naples, the date about
1764; the topic is the thwarted loves of Vivaldi and Ellena; the villain
is the admirable Schedoni, the prototype of Byron's lurid characters.

"The Italian" is an excellent novel. The Prelude, "the dark and vaulted
gateway," is not unworthy of Hawthorne, who, I suspect, had studied Mrs.
Radcliffe. The theme is more like a theme of this world than usual. The
parents of a young noble might well try to prevent him from marrying an
unknown and penniless girl. The Marchese Vivaldi only adopts the
ordinary paternal measures; the Marchesa, and her confessor the
dark-souled Schedoni, go farther--as far as assassination. The casuistry
by which Schedoni brings the lady to this pass, while representing her as
the originator of the scheme, is really subtle, and the scenes between
the pair show an extraordinary advance on Mrs. Radcliffe's earlier art.
The mysterious Monk who counteracts Schedoni remains an unsolved mystery
to me, but of that I do not complain. He is as good as the Dweller in
the Catacombs who haunts Miriam in Hawthorne's "Marble Faun." The
Inquisition, its cells, and its tribunals are coloured

"As when some great painter dips
His pencil in the gloom of earthquake and eclipse."

The comic valet, Paulo, who insists on being locked up in the dungeons of
the Inquisition merely because his master is there, reminds one of Samuel
Weller, he is a Neapolitan Samivel. The escapes are Mrs. Radcliffe's
most exciting escapes, and to say that is to say a good deal. Poetry is
not written, or not often, by the heroine. The scene in which Schedoni
has his dagger raised to murder Ellena, when he discovers that she is his
daughter, "is of a new, grand, and powerful character" (Scott), while it
is even more satisfactory to learn later that Ellena was _not_ Schedoni's
daughter after all.

Why Mrs. Radcliffe, having reached such a pitch of success, never again
published a novel, remains more mysterious than any of her Mysteries.
Scott justly remarks that her censors attacked her "by showing that she
does not possess the excellences proper to a style of composition totally
different from that which she has attempted." This is the usual way of
reviewers. Tales that fascinated Scott, Fox, and Sheridan, "which
possess charms for the learned and unlearned, the grave and gay, the
gentleman and clown," do not deserve to be dismissed with a sneer by
people who have never read them. Following Horace Walpole in some
degree, Mrs. Radcliffe paved the way for Scott, Byron, Maturin, Lewis,
and Charlotte Bronte, just as Miss Burney filled the gap between Smollett
and Miss Austen. Mrs. Radcliffe, in short, kept the Lamp of Romance
burning much more steadily than the lamps which, in her novels, are
always blown out, in the moment of excited apprehension, by the night
wind walking in the dank corridors of haunted abbeys. But mark the
cruelty of an intellectual parent! Horace Walpole was Mrs. Radcliffe's
father in the spirit. Yet, on September 4, 1794, he wrote to Lady
Ossory: "I have read some of the descriptive verbose tales, of which your
Ladyship says I was the patriarch by several mothers" (Miss Reeve and
Mrs. Radcliffe?). "All I can say for myself is that I do not think my
concubines have produced issue more natural for excluding the aid of
anything marvellous."




CHAPTER VII: A SCOTTISH ROMANTICIST OF 1830


The finding of a rare book that you have wanted long is one of the
happier moments in life. Whatever we may think of life when we
contemplate it as a whole, it is a delight to discover what one has
sought for years, especially if the book be a book which you really want
to read, and not a thing whose value is given by the fashion of
collecting. Perhaps nobody ever collected before

THE
DEATH-WAKE, OR LUNACY
A NECROMAUNT

In Three Chimeras

BY THOMAS T. STODDART.

"Is't like that lead contains her?--
It were too gross
To rib her cerecloth in the obscure grave."--
_Shakespeare_.

EDINBURGH:
Printed for HENRY CONSTABLE, Edinburgh,
And HURST, CHANCE, & CO., London.

MDCCCXXXI.

This is my rare book, and it is rare for an excellent good reason, as
will be shown. But first of the author. Mr. Thomas Tod Stoddart was
born in 1810. He died in 1880. Through all his pilgrimage of
three-score years and ten, his "rod and staff did comfort him," as the
Scottish version of the Psalms has it; nay, his staff was his rod. He
"was an angler," as he remarked when a friend asked: "Well, Tom, what are
you doing now." He was the patriarch, the Father Izaak, of Scottish
fishers, and he sleeps, according to his desire, like Scott, within
hearing of the Tweed. His memoir, published by his daughter, in
"Stoddart's Angling Songs" (Blackwood), is an admirable biography, _quo
fit ut omnis Votiva pateat veluti descripta tabella Vita senis_.

But it is with the "young Tom Stoddart," the poet of twenty, not with the
old angling sage, that we have to do. Miss Stoddart has discreetly
republished only the Angling Songs of her father, the pick of them being
classical in their way. Now, as Mr. Arnold writes:--

"Two desires toss about
The poet's feverish blood,
One drives him to the world without,
And one to solitude."

The young Stoddart's two desires were poetry and fishing. He began with
poetry. "At the age of ten his whole desire was to produce an immortal
tragedy . . . Blood and battle were the powers with which he worked, and
with no meaner tool. Every other dramatic form he despised." It is
curious to think of the schoolboy, the born Romanticist, labouring at
these things, while Gerard de Nerval, and Victor Hugo, and Theophile
Gautier, and Petrus Borel were boys also--boys of the same ambitions, and
with much the same romantic tastes. Stoddart had, luckily, another love
besides the Muse. "With the spring and the May fly, the dagger dipped in
gore paled before the supple rod, and the dainty midge." Finally, the
rod and midge prevailed.

"Wee dour-looking hooks are the thing,
Mouse body and laverock wing."

But before he quite abandoned all poetry save fishing ditties, he wrote
and published the volume whose title-page we have printed, "The Death
Wake." The lad who drove home from an angling expedition in a hearse had
an odd way of combining his amusements. He lived among poets and critics
who were anglers--Hogg, the Ettrick Shepherd (who cast but a heavy line,
they say, in Yarrow), Aytoun, Christopher North, De Quincey--

"No fisher
But a well-wisher
To the game,"

as Scott has it--these were his companions, older or younger. None of
these, certainly not Wilson, nor Hogg, nor Aytoun, were friends of the
Romantic school, as illustrated by Keats and Shelley. None of them
probably knew much of Gautier, De Nerval, Borel, le lycanthrope, and the
other boys in that boyish movement of 1830. It was only Stoddart,
unconsciously in sympathy with Paris, and censured by his literary
friends, who produced the one British Romantic work of 1830. The title
itself shows that he was partly laughing at his own performance; he has
the mockery of _Les Jeunes France_ in him, as well as the wormy and
obituary joys of _La Comedie de la Mort_. The little book came out,
inspired by "all the poetasters." Christopher North wrote, four years
later, in _Blackwood's Magazine_, a tardy review. He styled it "an
ingeniously absurd poem, with an ingeniously absurd title, written in a
strange, namby-pamby sort of style, between the weakest of Shelley and
the strongest of Barry Cornwall." The book "fell dead from the Press,"
far more dead than "Omar Khayyam." Nay, misfortune pursued it, Miss
Stoddart kindly informs me, and it was doomed to the flames. The
"remainder," the bulk of the edition, was returned to the poet in sheets,
and by him was deposited in a garret. The family had a cook, one Betty,
a descendant, perhaps, of "that unhappy Betty or Elizabeth Barnes, cook
of Mr. Warburton, Somerset Herald," who burned, among other quartos,
Shakespeare's "Henry I.," "Henry II.," and "King Stephen." True to her
inherited instincts, Mr. Stoddart's Betty, slowly, relentlessly, through
forty years, used "The Death Wake" for the needs and processes of her
art. The whole of the edition, except probably a few "presentation
copies," perished in the kitchen. As for that fell cook, let us hope
that

"The Biblioclastic Dead
Have diverse pains to brook,
They break Affliction's bread
With Betty Barnes, the Cook,"

as the author of "The Bird Bride" sings.

Miss Stoddart had just informed me of this disaster, which left one
almost hopeless of ever owning a copy of "The Death Wake," when I found a
brown paper parcel among many that contained to-day's minor poetry "with
the author's compliments," and lo, in this unpromising parcel was the
long-sought volume! Ever since one was a small boy, reading Stoddart's
"Scottish Angler," and old _Blackwood's_, one had pined for a sight of
"The Necromaunt," and here, clean in its "pure purple mantle" of smooth
cloth, lay the desired one!

"Like Dian's kiss, unasked, unsought,
It gave itself, and was not bought,"

being, indeed, the discovery and gift of a friend who fishes and studies
the Lacustrine Muses.

The copy has a peculiar interest; it once belonged to Aytoun, the writer
of "The Scottish Cavaliers," of "The Bon Gaultier Ballads," and of
"Firmilian," the scourge of the Spasmodic School. Mr. Aytoun has adorned
the margins with notes and with caricatures of skulls and cross-bones,
while the fly-leaves bear a sonnet to the author, and a lyric in
doggerel. Surely this is, indeed, a literary curiosity. The sonnet runs
thus:--

"O wormy Thomas Stoddart, who inheritest
Rich thoughts and loathsome, nauseous words and rare,
Tell me, my friend, why is it that thou ferretest
And gropest in each death-corrupted lair?
Seek'st thou for maggots such as have affinity
With those in thine own brain, or dost thou think
That all is sweet which hath a horrid stink?
Why dost thou make Haut-gout thy sole divinity?
Here is enough of genius to convert
Vile dung to precious diamonds and to spare,
Then why transform the diamond into dirt,
And change thy mind, which should be rich and fair,
Into a medley of creations foul,
As if a Seraph would become a Ghoul?"

No doubt Mr. Stoddart's other passion for angling, in which he used a
Scottish latitude concerning bait, {7} impelled him to search for "worms
and maggots":--

"Fire and faggots,
Worms and maggots,"

as Aytoun writes on the other fly-leaf, are indeed the matter of "The
Death Wake."

Then, why, some one may ask, write about "The Death Wake" at all? Why
rouse again the nightmare of a boy of twenty? Certainly I am not to say
that "The Death Wake" is a pearl of great price, but it does contain
passages of poetry--of poetry very curious because it is full of the new
note, the new melody which young Mr. Tennyson was beginning to waken. It
anticipates Beddoes, it coincides with Gautier and _Les Chimeres_ of
Gerard, it answers the accents, then unheard in England, of Poe. Some
American who read out of the way things, and was not too scrupulous,
recognised, and robbed, a brother in Tom Stoddart. Eleven years after
"The Death Wake" appeared in England, it was published in _Graham's
Magazine_, as "Agatha, a Necromaunt in Three Chimeras," by Louis
Fitzgerald Tasistro. Now Poe was closely connected with _Graham's
Magazine_, and after "Arthur Gordon Pym," "Louis Fitzgerald Tasistro"
does suggest Edgar Allen Poe. But Poe was not Tasistro.

So much for the literary history of the Lunacy.

The poem begins--Chimera I. begins:--

"An anthem of a sister choristry!
And, like a windward murmur of the sea,
O'er silver shells, so solemnly it falls!"

The anthem accompanies a procession of holy fathers towards a bier;

"Agathe
Was on the lid--a name. And who? No more!
'Twas only Agathe."

A solitary monk is prowling around in the moonlit cathedral; he has a
brow of stony marble, he has raven hair, and he falters out the name of
Agathe. He has said adieu to that fair one, and to her sister Peace,
that lieth in her grave. He has loved, and loves, the silent Agathe. He
was the son of a Crusader,

"And Julio had fain
Have been a warrior, but his very brain
Grew fevered at the sickly thought of death,
And to be stricken with a want of breath."

On the whole he did well not to enter the service. Mr. Aytoun has here
written--"A rum Cove for a hussar."