Adventures Among Books

“His words nigh made me weep, but while he spokeI noted how a mocking smile just brokeThe thin line of the Prince’s lips, and heWho carried the afore-named armouryPuffed out his wind-beat cheeks and whistled low:But the King smiled, and said, ‘Can it be so?I know not, and ye twain are such as findThe things whereto old kings must needs be blind.For you the world is wide – but not for me,Who once had dreams of one great victoryWherein that world lay vanquished by my throne,And now, the victor in so many an one,Find that in Asia Alexander diedAnd will not live again; the world is wideFor you I say, – for me a narrow spaceBetwixt the four walls of a fighting place.Poor man, why should I stay thee? live thy fillOf that fair life, wherein thou seest no illBut fear of that fair rest I hope to winOne day, when I have purged me of my sin.Farewell, it yet may hap that I a kingShall be remembered but by this one thing,That on the morn before ye crossed the seaYe gave and took in common talk with me;But with this ring keep memory with the morn,O Breton, and thou Northman, by this hornRemember me, who am of Odin’s blood.’”

All this encounter is a passage of high invention. The adventures in Anahuac are such as Bishop Erie may have achieved when he set out to find Vinland the Good, and came back no more, whether he was or was not remembered by the Aztecs as Quetzalcoatl. The tale of the wanderers was Mr. Morris’s own; all the rest are of the dateless heritage of our race, fairy tales coming to us, now “softly breathed through the flutes of the Grecians,” now told by Sagamen of Iceland. The whole performance is astonishingly equable; we move on a high tableland, where no tall peaks of Parnassus are to be climbed. Once more literature has a narrator, on the whole much more akin to Spenser than to Chaucer, Homer, or Sir Walter. Humour and action are not so prominent as contemplation of a pageant reflected in a fairy mirror. But Mr. Morris has said himself, about his poem, what I am trying to say: —

“Death have we hated, knowing not what it meant;Life have we loved, through green leaf and through sere,Though still the less we knew of its intent;The Earth and Heaven through countless year on year,Slow changing, were to us but curtains fair,Hung round about a little room, where playWeeping and laughter of man’s empty day.”

Mr. Morris had shown, in various ways, the strength of his sympathy with the heroic sagas of Iceland. He had rendered one into verse, in “The Earthly Paradise,” above all, “Grettir the Strong” and “The Volsunga” he had done into English prose. His next great poem was “The Story of Sigurd,” a poetic rendering of the theme which is, to the North, what the Tale of Troy is to Greece, and to all the world. Mr. Morris took the form of the story which is most archaic, and bears most birthmarks of its savage origin – the version of the “Volsunga,” not the German shape of the “Nibelungenlied.” He showed extraordinary skill, especially in making human and intelligible the story of Regin, Otter, Fafnir, and the Dwarf Andvari’s Hoard.

“It was Reidmar the Ancient begat me; and now was he waxen old,And a covetous man and a king; and he bade, and I built him a hall,And a golden glorious house; and thereto his sons did he call,And he bade them be evil and wise, that his will through them might be wrought.Then he gave unto Fafnir my brother the soul that feareth nought,And the brow of the hardened iron, and the hand that may never fail,And the greedy heart of a king, and the ear that hears no wail.“But next unto Otter my brother he gave the snare and the net,And the longing to wend through the wild-wood, and wade the highways wet;And the foot that never resteth, while aught be left aliveThat hath cunning to match man’s cunning or might with his might to strive.“And to me, the least and the youngest, what gift for the slaying of ease?Save the grief that remembers the past, and the fear that the future sees;And the hammer and fashioning-iron, and the living coal of fire;And the craft that createth a semblance, and fails of the heart’s desire;And the toil that each dawning quickens, and the task that is never done;And the heart that longeth ever, nor will look to the deed that is won.“Thus gave my father the gifts that might never be taken again;Far worse were we now than the Gods, and but little better than men.But yet of our ancient might one thing had we left us still:We had craft to change our semblance, and could shift us at our willInto bodies of the beast-kind, or fowl, or fishes cold;For belike no fixèd semblance we had in the days of old,Till the Gods were waxen busy, and all things their form must takeThat knew of good and evil, and longed to gather and make.”

But when we turn to the passage of the éclaircissement between Sigurd and Brynhild, that most dramatic and most modern moment in the ancient tragedy, the moment where the clouds of savage fancy scatter in the light of a hopeless human love, then, I must confess, I prefer the simple, brief prose of Mr. Morris’s translation of the “Volsunga” to his rather periphrastic paraphrase. Every student of poetry may make the comparison for himself, and decide for himself whether the old or the new is better. Again, in the final fight and massacre in the hall of Atli, I cannot but prefer the Slaying of the Wooers, at the close of the “Odyssey,” or the last fight of Roland at Roncesvaux, or the prose version of the “Volsunga.” All these are the work of men who were war-smiths as well as song-smiths. Here is a passage from the “murder grim and great”: —

“So he saith in the midst of the foemen with his war-flame reared on high,But all about and around him goes up a bitter cryFrom the iron men of Atli, and the bickering of the steelSends a roar up to the roof-ridge, and the Niblung war-ranks reelBehind the steadfast Gunnar: but lo, have ye seen the corn,While yet men grind the sickle, by the wind streak overborneWhen the sudden rain sweeps downward, and summer groweth black,And the smitten wood-side roareth ’neath the driving thunder-wrack?So before the wise-heart Hogni shrank the champions of the EastAs his great voice shook the timbers in the hall of Atli’s feast,There he smote and beheld not the smitten, and by nought were his edges stopped;He smote and the dead were thrust from him; a hand with its shield he lopped;There met him Atli’s marshal, and his arm at the shoulder he shred;Three swords were upreared against him of the best of the kin of the dead;And he struck off a head to the rightward, and his sword through a throat he thrust,But the third stroke fell on his helm-crest, and he stooped to the ruddy dust,And uprose as the ancient Giant, and both his hands were wet:Red then was the world to his eyen, as his hand to the labour he set;Swords shook and fell in his pathway, huge bodies leapt and fell;Harsh grided shield and war-helm like the tempest-smitten bell,And the war-cries ran together, and no man his brother knew,And the dead men loaded the living, as he went the war-wood through;And man ’gainst man was huddled, till no sword rose to smite,And clear stood the glorious Hogni in an island of the fight,And there ran a river of death ’twixt the Niblung and his foes,And therefrom the terror of men and the wrath of the Gods arose.”

I admit that this does not affect me as does the figure of Odysseus raining his darts of doom, or the courtesy of Roland when the blinded Oliver smites him by mischance, and, indeed, the Keeping of the Stair by Umslopogaas appeals to me more vigorously as a strenuous picture of war. To be just to Mr. Morris, let us give his rendering of part of the Slaying of the Wooers, from his translation of the “Odyssey”: —

“And e’en as the word he uttered, he drew his keen sword outBrazen, on each side shearing, and with a fearful shoutRushed on him; but Odysseus that very while let flyAnd smote him with the arrow in the breast, the pap hard by,And drove the swift shaft to the liver, and adown to the ground fell the swordFrom out of his hand, and doubled he hung above the board,And staggered; and whirling he fell, and the meat was scattered around,And the double cup moreover, and his forehead smote the ground;And his heart was wrung with torment, and with both feet spurning he smoteThe high-seat; and over his eyen did the cloud of darkness float.“And then it was Amphinomus, who drew his whetted swordAnd fell on, making his onrush ’gainst Odysseus the glorious lord,If perchance he might get him out-doors: but Telemachus him forewent,And a cast of the brazen war-spear from behind him therewith sentAmidmost of his shoulders, that drave through his breast and out,And clattering he fell, and the earth all the breadth of his forehead smote.”

There is no need to say more of Mr. Morris’s “Odysseus.” Close to the letter of the Greek he usually keeps, but where are the surge and thunder of Homer? Apparently we must accent the penultimate in “Amphinomus” if the line is to scan. I select a passage of peaceful beauty from Book V.: —

“But all about that cavern there grew a blossoming wood,Of alder and of poplar and of cypress savouring good;And fowl therein wing-spreading were wont to roost and be,For owls were there and falcons, and long-tongued crows of the sea,And deeds of the sea they deal with and thereof they have a careBut round the hollow cavern there spread and flourished fairA vine of garden breeding, and in its grapes was glad;And four wells of the white water their heads together had,And flowing on in order four ways they thence did get;And soft were the meadows blooming with parsley and violet.Yea, if thither indeed had come e’en one of the Deathless, e’en heHad wondered and gladdened his heart with all that was there to see.And there in sooth stood wondering the Flitter, the Argus-bane.But when o’er all these matters in his soul he had marvelled amain,Then into the wide cave went he, and Calypso, Godhead’s Grace,Failed nowise there to know him as she looked upon his face;For never unknown to each other are the Deathless Gods, though theyApart from one another may be dwelling far away.But Odysseus the mighty-hearted within he met not there,Who on the beach sat weeping, as oft he was wont to wearHis soul with grief and groaning, and weeping; yea, and heAs the tears he was pouring downward yet gazed o’er the untilled sea.”

This is close enough to the Greek, but

“And flowing on in order four ways they thence did get”

is not precisely musical. Why is Hermes “The Flitter”? But I have often ventured to remonstrate against these archaistic peculiarities, which to some extent mar our pleasure in Mr. Morris’s translations. In his version of the rich Virgilian measure they are especially out of place. The “Æneid” is rendered with a roughness which might better befit a translation of Ennius. Thus the reader of Mr. Morris’s poetical translations has in his hands versions of almost literal closeness, and (what is extremely rare) versions of poetry by a poet. But his acquaintance with Early English and Icelandic has added to the poet a strain of the philologist, and his English in the “Odyssey,” still more in the “Æneid,” is occasionally more archaic than the Greek of 900 B.C. So at least it seems to a reader not unversed in attempts to fit the classical poets with an English rendering. But the true test is in the appreciation of the lovers of poetry in general.

To them, as to all who desire the restoration of beauty in modern life, Mr. Morris has been a benefactor almost without example. Indeed, were adequate knowledge mine, Mr. Morris’s poetry should have been criticised as only a part of the vast industry of his life in many crafts and many arts. His place in English life and literature is unique as it is honourable. He did what he desired to do – he made vast additions to simple and stainless pleasures.

CHAPTER VI: MRS. RADCLIFFE’S NOVELS

Does any one now read Mrs. Radcliffe, or am I the only wanderer in her windy corridors, listening timidly to groans and hollow voices, and shielding the flame of a lamp, which, I fear, will presently flicker out, and leave me in darkness? People know the name of “The Mysteries of Udolpho;” they know that boys would say to Thackeray, at school, “Old fellow, draw us Vivaldi in the Inquisition.” But have they penetrated into the chill galleries of the Castle of Udolpho? Have they shuddered for Vivaldi in face of the sable-clad and masked Inquisition? Certainly Mrs. Radcliffe, within the memory of man, has been extremely popular. The thick double-columned volume in which I peruse the works of the Enchantress belongs to a public library. It is quite the dirtiest, greasiest, most dog’s-eared, and most bescribbled tome in the collection. Many of the books have remained, during the last hundred years, uncut, even to this day, and I have had to apply the paper knife to many an author, from Alciphron (1790) to Mr. Max Müller, and Dr. Birkbeck Hill’s edition of Bozzy’s “Life of Dr. Johnson.” But Mrs. Radcliffe has been read diligently, and copiously annotated.

This lady was, in a literary sense, and though, like the sire of Evelina, he cast her off, the daughter of Horace Walpole. Just when King Romance seemed as dead as Queen Anne, Walpole produced that Gothic tale, “The Castle of Otranto,” in 1764. In that very year was born Anne Ward, who, in 1787, married William Radcliffe, Esq., M.A., Oxon. In 1789 she published “The Castles of Athlin and Dunbayne.” The scene, she tells us, is laid in “the most romantic part of the Highlands, the north-east coast of Scotland.” On castles, anywhere, she doted. Walpole, not Smollett or Miss Burney, inspired her with a passion for these homes of old romance. But the north-east coast of Scotland is hardly part of the Highlands at all, and is far from being very romantic. The period is “the dark ages” in general. Yet the captive Earl, when “the sweet tranquillity of evening threw an air of tender melancholy over his mind.. composed the following sonnet, which (having committed it to paper) he the next evening dropped upon the terrace. He had the pleasure to observe that the paper was taken up by the ladies, who immediately retired into the castle.” These were not the manners of the local Mackays, of the Sinclairs, and of “the small but fierce clan of Gunn,” in the dark ages.

But this was Mrs. Radcliffe’s way. She delighted in descriptions of scenery, the more romantic the better, and usually drawn entirely from her inner consciousness. Her heroines write sonnets (which never but once are sonnets) and other lyrics, on every occasion. With his usual generosity Scott praised her landscape and her lyrics, but, indeed, they are, as Sir Walter said of Mrs. Hemans, “too poetical,” and probably they were skipped, even by her contemporary devotees. “The Castles of Athlin and Dunbayne” frankly do not permit themselves to be read, and it was not till 1790, with “A Sicilian Romance,” that Mrs. Radcliffe “found herself,” and her public. After reading, with breathless haste, through, “A Sicilian Romance,” and “The Romance of the Forest,” in a single day, it would ill become me to speak lightly of Mrs. Radcliffe. Like Catherine Morland, I love this lady’s tender yet terrific fancy.

Mrs. Radcliffe does not always keep on her highest level, but we must remember that her last romance, “The Italian,” is by far her best. She had been feeling her way to this pitch of excellence, and, when she had attained to it, she published no more. The reason is uncertain. She became a Woman’s Rights woman, and wrote “The Female Advocate,” not a novel! Scott thinks that she may have been annoyed by her imitators, or by her critics, against whom he defends her in an admirable passage, to be cited later. Meanwhile let us follow Mrs. Radcliffe in her upward course.

The “Sicilian Romance” appeared in 1790, when the author’s age was twenty-six. The book has a treble attraction, for it contains the germ of “Northanger Abbey,” and the germ of “Jane Eyre,” and – the germ of Byron! Like “Joseph Andrews,” “Northanger Abbey” began as a parody (of Mrs. Radcliffe) and developed into a real novel of character. So too Byron’s gloomy scowling adventurers, with their darkling past, are mere repetitions in rhyme of Mrs. Radcliffe’s Schedoni. This is so obvious that, when discussing Mrs. Radcliffe’s Schedoni, Scott adds, in a note, parallel passages from Byron’s “Giaour.” Sir Walter did not mean to mock, he merely compared two kindred spirits. “The noble poet” “kept on the business still,” and broke into octosyllabics, borrowed from Scott, his descriptions of miscreants borrowed from Mrs. Radcliffe.

“A Sicilian Romance” has its scene in the palace of Ferdinand, fifth Marquis of Mazzini, on the northern coast of Sicily. The time is about 1580, but there is nothing in the manners or costume to indicate that, or any other period. Such “local colour” was unknown to Mrs. Radcliffe, as to Clara Reeve. In Horace Walpole, however, a character goes so far in the mediæval way as to say “by my halidome.”

The Marquis Mazzini had one son and two daughters by his first amiable consort, supposed to be long dead when the story opens. The son is the original of Henry Tilney in “Northanger Abbey,” and in General Tilney does Catherine Morland recognise a modern Marquis of Mazzini. But the Marquis’s wife, to be sure, is not dead; like the first Mrs. Rochester she is concealed about the back premises, and, as in “Jane Eyre,” it is her movements, and those of her gaolers, that produce mystery, and make the reader suppose that “the place is haunted.” It is, of course, only the mystery and the “machinery” of Mrs. Radcliffe that Miss Brontë adapted. These passages in “Jane Eyre” have been censured, but it is not easy to see how the novel could do without them. Mrs. Radcliffe’s tale entirely depends on its machinery. Her wicked Marquis, having secretly immured Number One, has now a new and beautiful Number Two, whose character does not bear inspection. This domestic position, as Number Two, we know, was declined by the austere virtue of Jane Eyre.

“Phenomena” begin in the first chapter of “A Sicilian Romance,” mysterious lights wander about uninhabited parts of the castle, and are vainly investigated by young Ferdinand, son of the Marquis. This Hippolytus the Chaste, loved all in vain by the reigning Marchioness, is adored by, and adores, her stepdaughter, Julia. Jealousy and revenge are clearly indicated. But, in chasing mysterious lights and figures through mouldering towers, Ferdinand gets into the very undesirable position of David Balfour, when he climbs, in the dark, the broken turret stair in his uncle’s house of Shaws (in “Kidnapped”). Here is a fourth author indebted to Mrs. Radcliffe: her disciples are Miss Austen, Byron, Miss Brontë, and Mr. Louis Stevenson! Ferdinand “began the ascent. He had not proceeded very far, when the stones of a step which his foot had just quitted gave way, and, dragging with them those adjoining, formed a chasm in the staircase that terrified even Ferdinand, who was left tottering on the suspended half of the steps, in momentary expectation of falling to the bottom with the stone on which he rested. In the terror which this occasioned, he attempted to save himself by catching at a kind of beam which suspended over the stairs, when the lamp dropped from his hand, and he was left in total darkness.”

Can anything be more “amazing horrid,” above all as there are mysterious figures in and about the tower? Mrs. Radcliffe’s lamps always fall, or are blown out, in the nick of time, an expedient already used by Clara Reeve in that very mild but once popular ghost story, “The Old English Baron” (1777). All authors have such favourite devices, and I wonder how many fights Mr. Stanley Weyman’s heroes have fought, from the cellar to their favourite tilting ground, the roof of a strange house!

Ferdinand hung on to the beam for an hour, when the ladies came with a light, and he scrambled back to solid earth. In his next nocturnal research, “a sullen groan arose from beneath where he stood,” and when he tried to force a door (there are scores of such weird doors in Mrs. Radcliffe) “a groan was repeated, more hollow and dreadful than the first. His courage forsook him” – and no wonder! Of course he could not know that the author of the groans was, in fact, his long-lost mother, immured by his father, the wicked Marquis. We need not follow the narrative through the darkling crimes and crumbling galleries of this terrible castle on the north coast of Sicily. Everybody is always “gazing in silent terror,” and all the locks are rusty. “A savage and dexterous banditti” play a prominent part, and the imprisoned Ferdinand “did not hesitate to believe that the moans he heard came from the restless spirit of the murdered della Campo.” No working hypothesis could seem more plausible, but it was erroneous. Mrs. Radcliffe does not deal in a single avowed ghost. She finally explains away, by normal causes, everything that she does not forget to explain. At the most, she indulges herself in a premonitory dream. On this point she is true to common sense, without quite adopting the philosophy of David Hume. “I do not say that spirits have appeared,” she remarks, “but if several discreet unprejudiced persons were to assure me that they had seen one – I should not be bold or proud enough to reply, it is impossible!” But Hume was bold and proud enough: he went further than Mrs. Radcliffe.

Scott censures Mrs. Radcliffe’s employment of explanations. He is in favour of “boldly avowing the use of supernatural machinery,” or of leaving the matter in the vague, as in the appearance of the wraith of the dying Alice to Ravenswood. But, in Mrs. Radcliffe’s day, common sense was so tyrannical, that the poor lady’s romances would have been excluded from families, if she had not provided normal explanations of her groans, moans, voices, lights, and wandering figures. The ghost-hunt in the castle finally brings Julia to a door, whose bolts, “strengthened by desperation, she forced back.” There was a middle-aged lady in the room, who, after steadily gazing on Julia, “suddenly exclaimed, ‘My daughter!’ and fainted away.” Julia being about seventeen, and Madame Mazzini, her mamma, having been immured for fifteen years, we observe, in this recognition, the force of the maternal instinct.

The wicked Marquis was poisoned by the partner of his iniquities, who anon stabbed herself with a poniard. The virtuous Julia marries the chaste Hippolytus, and, says the author, “in reviewing this story, we perceive a singular and striking instance of moral retribution.”

We also remark the futility of locking up an inconvenient wife, fabled to be defunct, in one’s own country house. Had Mr. Rochester, in “Jane Eyre,” studied the “Sicilian Romance,” he would have shunned an obsolete system, inconvenient at best, and apt, in the long run, to be disastrous.

In the “Romance of the Forest” (1791), Mrs. Radcliffe remained true to Mr. Stanley Weyman’s favourite period, the end of the sixteenth century. But there are no historical characters or costumes in the story, and all the persons, as far as language and dress go, might have been alive in 1791.

The story runs thus: one de la Motte, who appears to have fallen from dissipation to swindling, is, on the first page, discovered flying from Paris and the law, with his wife, in a carriage. Lost in the dark on a moor, he follows a light, and enters an old lonely house. He is seized by ruffians, locked in, and expects to be murdered, which he knows that he cannot stand, for he is timid by nature. In fact, a ruffian puts a pistol to La Motte’s breast with one hand, while with the other he drags along a beautiful girl of eighteen. “Swear that you will convey this girl where I may never see her more,” exclaims the bully, and La Motte, with the young lady, is taken back to his carriage. “If you return within an hour you will be welcomed with a brace of bullets,” is the ruffian’s parting threat.

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 empoigné 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.