What does it mean,to say Ann Radcliffe made the gothic tradition respectable? Scott knew Radcliffe personally and his critique, the words of a friend and fellow artist, carry extra weight.
First he sketches her background.
"She was born in London, in the year 1764, ... the daughter of William and Ann Ward, who, though in trade, were nearly the only persons of their two families not living in handsome, or at least easy independence. ...
Regarding the function of such fiction, Scott sounds very modern:
...a general tribute to the genius of the author. One...[may not find] a different and higher description, in the dwelling of the lonely invalid, or neglected votary of celibacy, who was bewitched away from a sense of solitude, of indisposition, of the neglect of the world, or of secret sorrow, by the potent charm of this mighty enchantress. Perhaps the perusal of such works may, without injustice, be compared with the use of opiates, baneful, when habitually and constantly resorted to, but of most blessed power in those moments of pain and of languor, when the whole head is sore, and the whole heart sick. If those who rail indiscriminately at this species of composition, were to consider the quantity of actual pleasure which it produces, and the much greater proportion of real sorrow and distress which it alleviates, their philanthropy ought to moderate their critical pride, or religious intolerance.
Comparing her to other artists he says:
It may be stated, to the additional confusion of such hypercritics as we allude to, that not only does the infinite variety of human tastes require different styles of composition for their gratification; but if there were to be selected one particular structure of fiction, which possesses charms for the learned and unlearned, the grave and gay, the gentleman and the clown, it would be perhaps that of those very romances which the severity of their criticism seeks to depreciate. There are many men too mercurial to be delighted by Richardson's beautiful, but protracted display of the passions; and there are some too dull to comprehend the wit of Le Sage, or too saturnine to relish the nature and spirit of Fielding: And yet these very individuals will with difficulty be divorced from The Romance of the Forest,[1791] or The Mysteries of Udolpho [1794]; for curiosity and a lurking love of mystery, together with a germ of superstition, are more general ingredients in the human mind, and more widely diffused through the mass of humanity, than either taste or feeling.
Gothic fiction depends:
... upon the sensations of natural and superstitious fear.... Mrs Radcliffe has made much use of obscurity and suspense, the most fertile source, perhaps, of sublime emotion; for there are few dangers that do not become familiar to the firm mind, if they are presented to consideration as certainties, and in all their open and declared character, whilst, on the other hand, the bravest have shrunk from the dark and the doubtful. To break off the narrative, when it seemed at the point of becoming most interesting—to extinguish a lamp just when a parchment containing some hideous secret ought to have been read—to exhibit shadowy forms and half-heard sounds of woe, were resources which Mrs Radcliffe has employed with more effect than any other writer of romance. It must be confessed, that, in order to bring about these situations, some part or contrivance, on the art of the author, is rather too visible. Her heroines voluntarily expose themselves to situations, which in nature a lonely female would certainly have avoided. They are too apt to choose the midnight hour for investigating the mysteries of a deserted chamber or secret passage, and generally are only supplied with an expiring lamp, when about to read the most interesting documents. The simplicity of the tale is thus somewhat injured—it is as if we witnessed a dressing up of the very phantom by which we are to be startled; and the imperfection, though redeemed by many beauties, did not escape the censure of criticism.
A principal characteristic of Mrs Radcliffe's romances, is the rule which the author imposed upon herself, that all the circumstances of her narrative, however mysterious, and apparently superhuman, were to be accounted for on natural principles, at the winding up of the story.....
Were these great magicians, who deal in the wonderful and fearful, permitted to dismiss their spectres as they raise them, amidst the shadowy and indistinct light so favourable to the exhibition of phantasmagoria, without compelling them into broad daylight, the task were comparatively easy... But the modern author is not permitted to escape in that way. We are told of a formal old judge, before whom evidence was tendered of the ghost of a murdered person having declared to a witness, that the prisoner at the bar was guilty, who admitted the evidence of the spirit to be excellent, but denied his right to be [heard]...
There are some modern authors, indeed, who have endeavoured, ingeniously enough, to compound betwixt ancient faith and modern incredulity. They have exhibited phantoms, and narrated prophecies strangely accomplished, without giving a defined or absolute opinion, whether these are to be referred to supernatural agency, or whether the apparitions were produced (no uncommon case) by an overheated imagination, and the accompanying presages by a casual, though singular, coincidence of circumstances. This is, however, an evasion of the difficulty, not a solution; ....[although] a painter of actual life,... [may be] entitled to leave something in shade, when the natural course of events conceals so many incidents in total darkness. Perhaps, upon the whole, this is the most artful mode of terminating such a tale of wonder,.... for... the more imaginative class, who, resembling men that walk for pleasure through a moonlight landscape, are more teazed than edified by the intrusive minuteness with which some well-meaning companion disturbs their reveries, divesting stock and stone of the shadowy semblances in which fancy had dressed them, and pertinaciously restoring to them the ordinary forms and common-place meanness of reality.
....
We have already, in some brief remarks on The Castle of Otranto, [written by Horace Walpole, 1764] avowed some preference for the more simple mode, of boldly avowing the use of supernatural machinery. Ghosts and witches, and the whole tenets of superstition, having once, and at no late period, been matter of universal belief, warranted by legal authority, it would seem no great stretch upon the reader's credulity to require him, while reading of what his ancestors did, to credit for the time what those ancestors devoutly believed in. And yet, notwithstanding the success of Walpole and Maturin... the management of such machinery must be acknowledged a task of a most delicate nature. "There is but one step, ...betwixt the sublime and the ridiculous and in an age of universal incredulity, we must own it would require, at the present day, the support of the highest powers, to save the supernatural from slipping into the ludicrous". ....
It may indeed be claimed as meritorious in Mrs Radcliffe's mode of expounding her mysteries, that it is founded in possibilities. Many situations have occurred, highly tinctured with romantic incident and feeling, the mysterious obscurity of which has afterwards been explained by deception and confederacy. Such have been the impostures of superstition in all ages, and such delusions were also practised by the members of the Secret Tribunal, in the middle ages, and in more modern times by the Rosicrucians and Illuminati, upon whose machinations Schiller has founded the fine romance of "The Ghost-Seer".
... upon the sensations of natural and superstitious fear.... Mrs Radcliffe has made much use of obscurity and suspense, the most fertile source, perhaps, of sublime emotion; for there are few dangers that do not become familiar to the firm mind, if they are presented to consideration as certainties, and in all their open and declared character, whilst, on the other hand, the bravest have shrunk from the dark and the doubtful. To break off the narrative, when it seemed at the point of becoming most interesting—to extinguish a lamp just when a parchment containing some hideous secret ought to have been read—to exhibit shadowy forms and half-heard sounds of woe, were resources which Mrs Radcliffe has employed with more effect than any other writer of romance. It must be confessed, that, in order to bring about these situations, some part or contrivance, on the art of the author, is rather too visible. Her heroines voluntarily expose themselves to situations, which in nature a lonely female would certainly have avoided. They are too apt to choose the midnight hour for investigating the mysteries of a deserted chamber or secret passage, and generally are only supplied with an expiring lamp, when about to read the most interesting documents. The simplicity of the tale is thus somewhat injured—it is as if we witnessed a dressing up of the very phantom by which we are to be startled; and the imperfection, though redeemed by many beauties, did not escape the censure of criticism.
A principal characteristic of Mrs Radcliffe's romances, is the rule which the author imposed upon herself, that all the circumstances of her narrative, however mysterious, and apparently superhuman, were to be accounted for on natural principles, at the winding up of the story.....
Were these great magicians, who deal in the wonderful and fearful, permitted to dismiss their spectres as they raise them, amidst the shadowy and indistinct light so favourable to the exhibition of phantasmagoria, without compelling them into broad daylight, the task were comparatively easy... But the modern author is not permitted to escape in that way. We are told of a formal old judge, before whom evidence was tendered of the ghost of a murdered person having declared to a witness, that the prisoner at the bar was guilty, who admitted the evidence of the spirit to be excellent, but denied his right to be [heard]...
There are some modern authors, indeed, who have endeavoured, ingeniously enough, to compound betwixt ancient faith and modern incredulity. They have exhibited phantoms, and narrated prophecies strangely accomplished, without giving a defined or absolute opinion, whether these are to be referred to supernatural agency, or whether the apparitions were produced (no uncommon case) by an overheated imagination, and the accompanying presages by a casual, though singular, coincidence of circumstances. This is, however, an evasion of the difficulty, not a solution; ....[although] a painter of actual life,... [may be] entitled to leave something in shade, when the natural course of events conceals so many incidents in total darkness. Perhaps, upon the whole, this is the most artful mode of terminating such a tale of wonder,.... for... the more imaginative class, who, resembling men that walk for pleasure through a moonlight landscape, are more teazed than edified by the intrusive minuteness with which some well-meaning companion disturbs their reveries, divesting stock and stone of the shadowy semblances in which fancy had dressed them, and pertinaciously restoring to them the ordinary forms and common-place meanness of reality.
....
We have already, in some brief remarks on The Castle of Otranto, [written by Horace Walpole, 1764] avowed some preference for the more simple mode, of boldly avowing the use of supernatural machinery. Ghosts and witches, and the whole tenets of superstition, having once, and at no late period, been matter of universal belief, warranted by legal authority, it would seem no great stretch upon the reader's credulity to require him, while reading of what his ancestors did, to credit for the time what those ancestors devoutly believed in. And yet, notwithstanding the success of Walpole and Maturin... the management of such machinery must be acknowledged a task of a most delicate nature. "There is but one step, ...betwixt the sublime and the ridiculous and in an age of universal incredulity, we must own it would require, at the present day, the support of the highest powers, to save the supernatural from slipping into the ludicrous". ....
It may indeed be claimed as meritorious in Mrs Radcliffe's mode of expounding her mysteries, that it is founded in possibilities. Many situations have occurred, highly tinctured with romantic incident and feeling, the mysterious obscurity of which has afterwards been explained by deception and confederacy. Such have been the impostures of superstition in all ages, and such delusions were also practised by the members of the Secret Tribunal, in the middle ages, and in more modern times by the Rosicrucians and Illuminati, upon whose machinations Schiller has founded the fine romance of "The Ghost-Seer".
But Mrs Radcliffe has not had recourse to so artificial a solution. Her heroines often sustain the agony of fear, and her readers that of suspense, from incidents which, when explained, appear of an ordinary and trivial nature.... A stealthy step behind the arras, may doubtless, in some situations, and when the nerves are tuned to a certain pitch, have no small influence upon the imagination; but if the conscious listener discovers it to be only the noise made by the cat, the solemnity of the feeling is gone, and the visionary is at once angry with his senses for having been cheated, and with his reason for having acquiesced in the deception. We fear that some such feeling of disappointment and displeasure attends most readers, when they read for the first time the unsatisfactory solution of the mysteries ...[which they once felt were] something suppressed, because too horrible for the ear.
Mrs Radcliffe's powers, both of language and description, have been justly estimated very highly. .....[She] has taken the lead in a line of composition, appealing to those powerful and general sources of interest, a latent sense of supernatural awe, and curiosity concerning whatever is hidden and mysterious ...[and in this] she has never been excelled or even equalled.
Mrs Radcliffe's powers, both of language and description, have been justly estimated very highly. .....[She] has taken the lead in a line of composition, appealing to those powerful and general sources of interest, a latent sense of supernatural awe, and curiosity concerning whatever is hidden and mysterious ...[and in this] she has never been excelled or even equalled.
Radcliffe made the gothic story respectable because [she]....., refer[s] to natural agency the whole materials of ...[the] story. Scott's analysis above is interesting because he addresses these questions in a world in transition from superstitious to more worldly times. We have no record of Radcliffe's reaction to the parody of her work by another novelist, in Northanger Abbey (1818).
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