was a different matter when it came to dealing for the most part with the prepossessions of a soul. The writer must look around for all possible means of subduing it to the proper key of tremulous expectation. And what more conducive to such a result than the varied aspects of physical suffering touching the spirit through a series of quivering

nerves.

Considering the time in which these stories were laid, very obviously the tyrannous power of church. and prelate lay easily in the path of the writer who was seeking for scenes of physical oppression. Mrs. Radcliffe seized eagerly on these elements; and thus it was that the convent powers rose imposingly into view, and that the dread halls of the Inquisition swung back their heavy doors to the airy touch of imagination. And if ever a suit of libel is justifiable surely the venerable Mother Church would have right to bring one against our author and her successors. The monasteries are almost uniformly represented as the abodes of depravity, and we give our heroine up for lost whenever she comes in sight of one. But however much or however little foundation there may be for these representations they are certainly used to great effect. Around these convent walls hangs a veil of mystery and dread. We tremble in the wind-swept turret with Ellena as she sits alone in the twilight meditating on the pit yawning at her feet by the machinations of the treacherous abbess. We shiver in the midnight dusk of the vast, desolate church as we watch the penitent monk at his devotions. We enter shudderingly the dungeon where the recreant nun, her dead baby at her breast, lies languishing, shut in from light and air. In all these convent glimpses Mrs. Radcliffe is admirable. But she is not so successful in her dealing with the Inquisition. It may be said, however, that on the whole, she succeeds finely in her use of this element of physical terror which she has brought from comparative insignificance into striking prominence. And to her great credit it must be noted that she never violates its artistic subservience to the supernatural element. Later writers, we shall see, revelled in morbid physical horror for its own sake. Of this outrage Mrs. Radcliffe is never guilty.

Little need be said of the well-recognized descriptive power of Mrs. Radcliffe. All know how her books abound in exquisite landscapes, notably at sunset. Her purples and golds and blues are lovely, and tiresomely familiar. One phase, or rather tendency, of this descriptive power, however, does not seem to have been sufficiently, if at all, recognized. It is a tendency which dignifies it as expression does a lovely face.

To appreciate fully this tendency we must note one curious fact, namely, that our old poets and writers as a rule shrank from the more savage as

pects of nature, dwelling almost uniformly on its gentler summer side. Shakespeare, to be sure, heightened the horror of Lear's madness by a tempest; and through all ages writers including our Terrorists, have turned to good account in terrific situations the power of the stormy elements. But these were not regarded as in themselves, capable of affording a high degree of aesthetic pleasure. It remained for Shelley and his age to say, "I love winds and waves and storms."

Now Radcliffe, however antiquated in other respects, was in this point quite up to date. She might almost be called Wordsworthian. Her characters, however wooden, are yet possessed of "that pervading love of nature," by which the Lake Poet meant spiritual sympathy with nature. They are filled with that "extrinsic" passion for nature which is, being interpreted, that love for natural phenomena which is not limited to smooth landscapes and sunny aspects. Emily in "Udolpho" and Ellena in "The Italian," when carried off by enemies, the one to the castle, the other to the convent, passed through scenery stupendous and awful with roaring torrent and beetling crag. One would suppose that these unhappy girls, forced towards unknown horrors, would be depressed by the gloomy majesty of the surrounding landscape. Not at all. They forget their troubles as they gaze into the dizzy ravines and up to the towering precipicesscenery such as older writers and tourists had spoken of with half impatient horror, and about which Gray had scarcely dared to rave for fear of being called romantic, a fear which is, in itself, a tribute to these writers as evidencing a tendency in them toward the large universal love of nature to ring out later from Wordsworth's muse. than this, our Ellena and our Emily gained calmness and strength for future struggle from the awful majesty of mountains. We can imagine the austere Lake Poet, shaking his head with disgust over these wild novels, surprised into an approving nod at lighting, in these scenes, on so signal an illustration of his own theory of a spiritual connection between the soul of man and of nature.

More

We have said that in Radcliffe the Conventional Terror novels culminated. The unprecedented popularity of her books led to a deluge of imitations which went far towards discountenancing the whole School. From her time on, symptoms of reaction began to appear. In 1797 Jane Austen wrote her delicious burlesque on the "Udolpho" novels, "Northanger Abbey." The fact that she could not, during her lifetime, find a publisher for this book, shows that, as an expression of public opinion, it was premature. While Radcliffe lived and wrote, the reaction was slow and unobtrusive, making itself felt rather by the appearance of new tendencies in the novels of the school than in open expressions

of disapproval. To the consideration of these tendencies we now turn our attention.

II. THE REACTIONARY NOVELS.

This class of novels may be called Reactionary, because it is marked by more or less revolt against the Walpole-Radcliffe machinery. The first example of this Reactionary class appeared while the old Conventional Novels were in the full blast of their popularity-away back in 1777. Beckford's "Vathek," in its bold originality and distinctness from the fashionable type, was a child born before its time; and in it appears all the brilliant quality which occasionally accompanies such premature birth. "Vathek" is in a sense the masterpiece of the whole school.

There are in it three marked points of departure from the old type; first, an entire dropping of Gothic mediaeval coloring; second, the introduction of genuine humor; third, a glimpse now and then of something resembling lifelikeness of character. Concerning the first point, it need only be said that the author discards entirely Gothic castles and knights and the rest of the old machinery, and sets us down in the midst of dazzling Oriental scenes. His success in this line is evidenced by Byron's dictum that, as an Eastern tale, even "Rasselas" must bow before it. As for the vein of humor hitherto absent from the Terror Tales, it is so subtile and delicious that any quotation is impossible. Indeed, so delicate is this humor, that we question how large a percentage of readers would be much affected by it. But to a mind susceptible to its influence, this little book is a spring of delight. The half page describing the encounter between Carathis and Evlis, and the scrap concerning one of the Genii who played the flute, are good tests by which to discover the presence or absence of this susceptibility.

The successful bits of character-glimpses deserve especial notice. It must not be for a moment supposed that in this fantastic little book there is anything like a successful full-length portrait. But there is here and there an approach to reality, which is more than can be said for previous writers. Carathis, for instance, is more than impossibly wicked. But there is a distinct smack of life in the nonchalant manner in which she carries off her evil deeds and spurs on her vacillating kinsman. acts are incredibly atrocious, but she goes about them in precisely the debonair self-possessed spirit of an unscrupulous woman of the world, who encounters failure coolly enough, confident of bringing it in the end to success. In fact, the very Genii in their brisk attendance on their special charges and their helpful little ways of raising castles in a night, are far more characteristic indivi

Her

duals than any who have hitherto appeared in the pages of the Terror School.

One minor innovation of Beckford's was the introduction of the devil. Hitherto it was only the spirits of just men made perfect who interfered in mundane affairs. We shall see how popular his Satanic Majesty became in following novels.

We have said that "Vathek" was an instance of merely individual revolt from the Radcliffe School. The man who first gave expression to the premonitory symptoms of general uneasiness appeared some seventeen years later. It was the high-pressure moral tone of the old novels that was too much for Lewis. He flew straight to the other extreme, and, still holding to the old machinery of ghosts and Gothic castles, published what has been justly called one of the worst books in the English language. I think I am not wrong in saying that there is one scene in "The Monk" which must cast a deep shadow on any pure spirit who has once gazed upon it.

Another point worthy of noticing in Lewis is the undue emphasis given to the element of physical terror. We have seen how in Mrs. Radcliffe's hands this element was always kept in artistic subservience. Lewis is the first who handles material horror for mere love of it. Indeed we may say that the immorality of his book consists in the brutal frankness with which he details physical outrages worse than death. He thus strikes a new key for following writers. Not that any other of them, so far as I know, actually allows this tendency to sully the moral purity of his pages. But henceforward we shall perceive a distinct interest in personal horror per se till, in Maturin, it reaches a point wellnigh intolerable.

Lewis likewise emphasizes the more sprightly tone of "Vathek." The story moves at a more rapid pace than in Radcliffe's pages. The language of Lorenzo and Raymond sounds at times almost like modern club slang, while in one scene Agnes chatters like an up-to-date society girl. Of course such a modern air cannot from an artistic point of view be justified in a novel laid in the Middle Ages. Scott's magical manner of imparting vitality to figures who speak and act in a manner entirely in keeping with the age in which they live, is far better. But Lewis cannot be blamed for not being Scott; and he at least deserves credit for having, in any manner, imparted vivacity to the ponderous movement of these stories.

Lewis follows Beckford in his interest in the Infernal Powers. He seizes on the old legend of a being who has sold his soul to the devil, and works it with considerable ingenuity, though not with the wonderful success with which Maturin, years later followed him along the same line.

In the same year with "The Monk" appeared a

book which, though it cannot be properly included in the school we are studying, yet contained many elements in common with it; it must be mentioned in this connection because of its effect upon an able writer who carried the influence of the English Terror Tales into American literature-a writer who was in a sense the precursor of Hawthorne. This book is "Caleb Williams," and to "Caleb Williams" surely belongs the literary paternity of "Edgar Huntly," "Arthur Mervyn," and most of Charles Brockden Brown's heroes.

Never was the influence of one man upon another more strongly defined than in the case before us. In "Edgar Huntly" the hero is precisely the same morbid, super-sensitive soul as in "Caleb Williams" and "Deloraine." In the opening chapter, he, like Caleb and Deloraine, utters the most extravagant self-denunciation. Nothing can equal his abject remorse. We are horrified! This man must at the very least have slaughtered his entire family in their beds! We discover at last that he has merely killed his enemy in the very clearest case of self-defense. All the principal characters in Brown's novels, Arthur Mervyn conspicuously, are possessed of the same insatiable curiosity that plunged Caleb into his scrapes; they pry into people's boxes with the same unscrupulousness, and tell of it with the same naivete.

The most noticeable point in Brown is the manner in which, at one explicit stroke of the pen, he abolishes much of the old machinery to which even "Monk" Lewis had clung. In his preface to "Huntly" he says: "One merit at least the writer may claim, that of calling up the passions and engaging the sympathy of the reader by means hitherto unemployed. Puerile superstitions and exploded manners, Gothic castles and chimeras, are the materials usually employed for such ends. The incidents. of Indian hostility and the perils of the wilderness are far more suitable for a native of America. These, therefore, are in part the ingredients of this tale, and these he has been ambitious to detail in vivid and faithful colors." In other words, Charles Brockden Brown has removed his scenes and characters from old feudal days and scenes, and planted them squarely down in the America of his own generation. His heroes are no longer mediæval knights but modern Americans. What a change! From what resources has he excluded the Engine of Terror! Ghosts and superstitions may, presumably, dwell in the hoary castles of Chivalry. But modern scepticism has refused them entrance to the mansions and huts of the American colonists. What, then, shall take their place? Brown glances back at the subjective tendency that marked Mrs. Radcliffe's work. He will develop it to perfection. His field shall be the realm of the psychical. Psychical phenomena shall be his Terror-engine.

Thus it is that we find no ghosts in Brown's books-not one so much as dares to show its head. But our nerves are not calmed by this circumstance. We would rather any day or night-encounter a good old-fashioned apparition than one of his sleepwalkers or ventriloquists. It is in specifically psychological problems, then, that Brown is cheifly interested. "Wieland" is full of ventriloquism, “Huntly" of somnambulism. The former is by far the most powerful. The fascination of the story lies in the thrilling effect with which the author has used the uncanny power which forms its motive. From the moment when, on the stormy night, the tones of the wife, whom he knows to be far distant, floats weirdly to Wieland up the wooded slope, our attention is held and bewildered. The soft voice which thrills in on Clara through the thunderous twilight-which breathed at her pillow at midnightwhich shrieked at her very ear as she was making her way up the dark staircase, touches us with the same horror that enveloped the haunted girl. The face revealed to her in the flash of the lamp as she turns wildly, "every muscle tense, forehead and brow drawn into vehement expression, lips stretched as in the act of shrieking, eyes emitting sparks," out-terrorizes a whole phalanx of ghosts. An indescribably weird effect is imparted to the scene by the words, "The sound and the vision were present and departed at the same instant, but the cry was blown into my very ears while the face was many paces distant!" "Edgar Huntly," with its somnambulism, is not equally successful. The first appearance of the sleep-walker is somewhat impressive. But this auspicious opening is a promise unfulfilled. Clithero's history and remorse are too absurd, and after that the whole book resolves itself into a tale of Indian adventure, which, indeed, in its prophecy of Cooper, is the most interesting part of the story.

"Arthur Mervyn," a story of the Yellow Fever Plague of 1798 in New York, gives ample scope for the growing interest in physical horrors which, as we have seen, is a characteristic of the School of Terror. Though Brown certainly dwells far too much on the physical horror for its own sake, he is yet eminently skillful, also, in using it justifiably for the artistic enhancement of higher sensations. One striking instance of his power in such combination is that in which the apparition appears to Arthur as he stands alone in the desolate chambers of a feversmitten house from which all the inhabitants have been removed for burial. "The door opened," it reads, "and a figure glided in. The portmanteau dropped from my hands, and my heart's blood was chilled. If an apparition of the dead were possible, and that possibility I could not deny, this was such an apparition. A hue yellowish and livid, bones uncovered by flesh, eyes ghastly, hollow and woe

begone, and fixed in an agony of wonder on me, locks matted and negligent, constituted the vision I now beheld. My belief in somewhat preternatural in this appearance was confirmed by recollection of resemblances between these features and those of one that was dead." Bear in mind that we have been prepared for this appearance by following Arthur for hours through the streets of the deathstricken city, that the lamps of infection and disease are rotting the very walls of the house in which he stands, and the reader may perhaps gain some idea of the shock of this sudden appearance. No ghost that I can think of was ever more effective than the ghastly figure of this plague-stricken man.

Brown served as a channel through which the spirit of the Terror School flowed into American literature. His red Indian is only another shape of the wandering terrors, in the form of bandits and outlaws, who pursue adventurous knights and distressed damsels through the pages of the older novels; and this wild man of the woods Brown introduced into literature and handed down to Cooper. The Coras and Alices and Heywoods of the latter novelist, pursued through forests and caves by the savage Hurons with their war paint and tomahawks, inspire us with the same sort of sympathy with which we accompanied Radcliffe's Emilys and Julias over mountains inhabited by bandits. To be sure, the wind that blows through Cooper's forest is fresh and exhilarating and very different from the artificial atmosphere of Mrs. Radcliffe's. But the same appeal to our emotions of fear and sympathy is evident. As for Brown's Indian, he is a mere lay figure compared with the subtle form gliding through Cooper's pages. But the panther scene in "Huntly" is worthy of anything Cooper, or anybody else, ever wrote in the wild beast line.

In Cooper, then, through Brown, we see culminating the element of wild outdoor adventure which holds a not inconsiderable place in the novels we have been studying. Another writer of far greater genius followed Brown along another line. Hawthorne's "House of the Seven Gables" is, from a psychological view, the descendant of Brown's novels.

We have seen how Brown turned away from the palpable absurdities of the old school to the eerie mysteries of mental phenomena. Hawthorne followed his lead. The problem of mesmerism is airily touched in the novel to which we have referred.

The point which especially strikes us in Hawthorne's romance is that this problem does not, after Brown's style, form the hinge of the story. It is used here, rather, as an airy accompaniment, a strain of weird music breaking now and then upon our ears like the uncanny melody that floated through the gloomy gables from the long-untouch

ed keys of the old harpsichord; or, better, the whole story of the Judge and Clifford and Hepzibah is only a parable whose meaning lies in the essence of that mysterious power which, years and years before, threw a curse upon their line. The persecution of Clifford by the Judge-his dreary imprisonment on a false accusation in which consisted the Judge's hold upon him-his quivering dread when at last, for a moment, his tyrant lifts his heavy hand and lets the victim breathe a moment in free sunshine-his wild cry at the Judge's approach, "Hepzibah! Hepzibah! go down on your knees to him, kiss his feet, entreat him not to come in! Oh, let him have mercy on me-mercy-mercy!"-his mad exultation at the Judge's ghastly death, "As for us, Hepzibah, we can dance now, sing, laugh, play, do what we will! The weight is gone, Hepzibah, gone off this weary world, and we may be as light hearted as little Phoebe herself!"-all this story of a life's bondage to another's will is a more striking type of the spiritual fetters, which, by a mysterious occult power, one soul can throw over another.

It is this handling of the marvelous as an accompaniment to the story rather than as its heart, that Hawthorne has shown his peculiar insight. Hitherto all the stories along this line have been selfconscious and labored. A series of sensations is expected at the beginning by both reader and writer, and these sensations form the very essence of the tale. For the purpose of arousing bewilderment and awe, the authors, as a rule, throw their characters into the most strained and unnatural situations. Girls are sent flying through woods and over mountains in search of adventures, and even Brown feels obliged to call in the Yellow Fever Plague. Hawthorne saw deeper. He understood that there is no need of uncommon situations-that through even the simplest of human lives there runs a strain of mystery. Prosaic little Phoebe, working in the garden among commonplace flowers and vegetables, is conscious of strange terror as the Family curse threatens her for a moment from the eyes of the young artist. Poor old Hepzibah goes about her round of daily drudgery as nurse and shopwoman; but over her from the gables of the old New England house fall shadows and whispers from the past. In short, Hawthorne's alchemy has transmuted the palpable terrors of former writers into that subtle general atmosphere of mystery and awe which, to the thoughtful mind, pervades all human life. Into such actual relation to life has Hawthorne succeeded in raising the eerie element of Psychological terror which seemed, in other hands, destined only for a tool of literary sensation. In him culminated this element of Psychological terror, as distinguished from the ready-made ghosts of Reeve and Walpole.

III. THE NOVELS CONTAINING THE GERM OF

HISTORICAL FICTION.

An interesting article by Mr. Saintsbury in "Macmillan's Magazine," August, 1894, demonstrates the fact that the birth of the Historical Novel proper is directly due to two tendencies of the latter part of the eighteenth century: first, that which labored for a wider, more accurate knowledge of historical facts, under the inspiration of Hume, Gibbon and Robertson; and second, that which sought to revive romantic interest in the customs and life of former ages. Saintsbury goes so far as to say, "When in very different ways Walpole, Percy and Gray, with many others, excited curiosity about the incidents, manners and literature of former times, they made the Historical Novel inevitable."

From this point of view it must at once be seen that the works embodying an element essential to so important a development of Prose Literature contains for the student an interest disproportionate to its intrinsic value. Authentic historical facts could be drawn from the great trio of historians. But the attempt to vivify the past, to make us breathe its airs, to realize its sensations, all this was first clumsily attempted in the work before us.

From this point of view, then, all these Romantic Terror Tales may be said to contain seed of the Historical Novel. In one group of them, however, the groping effort towards Scott is so much more labored and self-conscious, that it seems, of itself, to divide them from the rest into a distinct germinal class.

It is an interesting fact that the first effort along this line occurred two years before "The Castle of Otranto." But for one important omission, this little book, "Longsword," might seem justly to claim "Otranto's" pioneer position. So important is this omission, however, that it leaves Walpole's prestige unchallenged. Though he writes in the very spirit of the Terrorists, it is evident that Leland felt himself under restraint. Having chosen really historical personages for his subjects, he evidently made them the victims of supernatural experiences for fear of discrediting the whole story. It is apparent in more than one place how the author chafed under this restriction. A ghost now! How well it would have suited that dismal dungeon scene, and how effectively it would have glided along that dim corridor before Reginald's guilty eyes! Indeed, so entirely is the book in the spirit of our School, so evidently does the author regret his enforced limitation, and so completely do all other essential ingredients make their appearance, that it would be absurd to deny its claim to membership in the Terror School on the ground of the omission of the supernatural, just as it would be absurd to allow it in spite of this omission, to usurp

Walpole's novel as pioneer. Here the Romance heroine makes her first appearance, of course in tears. Her gallant cavalier stalks over land and sea, performing all manner of feats. The young woman, fallen into the clutches of villainy, bullies her keeper until we almost feel sorry for him, and, though for a time vice triumphs over virtue to an alarming extent, in the end we are soothed and delighted by seeing the two villains strung up on the same tree with a rapidity well calculated to take away one's breath.

Leland's novel, then, acquires its peculiar tone by an attempt to depict not only the local coloring of an historical period, but events and circumstances in the lives of actual personages. Two points in its preface are worthy of notice.

One principle which he lays down separates his book from any previous work along the same line. Such previous work had been, in a manner, a fraud. Tales of adventure had been deliberately intended. to deceive the public. Sir John Mandeville's "Travels" are full of impossible incidents which he gravely attempts to foist upon the people. "Robinson Crusoe" is presented to the world as an authentic personage, and Defoe's "Memoirs of a Cavalier" have the same marks of artifice. Leland works a new vein. He says frankly: "The outlines of the following incidents and more minute circumstances are to be found in the ancient English historians. If too great liberties have been taken in altering or enlarging these incidents, the reader who looks only for amusement will probably forgive it." Thus we see laid down in this insignificant book a cardinal principle which should govern the mental attitude of the reader and which emancipates the imagination of the writer from the thraldom of literal fact. His words unite in square and open union the charms of History and Fiction, a union which previous writers had apparently not conceived.

Another point interests us in Leland's preface as striking a modern note. He says, "It is generally expected that pieces of this kind should convey some useful moral"-(this certainly sounds antiquated enough, but let us go on)—which moral is sometimes made to float upon the surface of the narrative, or is plucked up at the proper moment and presented to the reader with great solemnity. The author hath too high an opinion of the judgment and penetration of his reader to pursue this method. If anything lies at the bottom that is worth picking up, it will be discovered without his direction." Now this reads like an article I saw yesterday in a recent number of "The Atlantic Monthly." How far ahead of the sentiment of its day when moral purposes rode Walpole and the rest like "Old Men of the Mountain!"

In these two points, then, the liberty of adapting historical fact to the exigencies of art, and the dis