A History of English Romanticism in the Eighteenth CenturyBeers, Henry A. (Henry Augustin)
History
A History of English Romanticism in the Eighteenth Century
Beers, Henry A. (Henry Augustin)
English literature -- 18th century -- History and criticism; Romanticism -- Great Britain -- History -- 18th century
In Mrs. Radcliffe's romances we find a tone that is absent from
Walpole's: romanticism plus sentimentalism. This last element had begun
to infuse itself into general literature about the middle of the century,
as a protest and reaction against the emotional coldness of the classical
age. It announced itself in Richardson, Rousseau, and the youthful
Goethe; in the _comedie larmoyante_, both French and English; found its
cleverest expression in Sterne, and then, becoming a universal vogue,
deluged fiction with productions like Mackenzie's "Man of Feeling," Miss
Burney's "Evelina," and the novels of Jane Porter and Mrs. Opie.
Thackeray said that there was more crying in "Thaddeus of Warsaw" than in
any novel he ever remembered to have read.[21] Emily, in the "Mysteries
of Udolpho" cannot see the moon, or hear a guitar or an organ or the
murmur of the pines, without weeping. Every page is bedewed with the
tear of sensibility; the whole volume is damp with it, and ever and anon
a chorus of sobs goes up from the entire company. Mrs. Radcliffe's
heroines are all descendents of Pamela and Clarissa Harlowe, but under
more romantic circumstances. They are beset with a thousand
difficulties; carried off by masked ruffians, immured in convents, held
captive in robber castles, encompassed with horrors natural and
supernatural, persecuted, threatened with murder and with rape. But
though perpetually sighing, blushing, trembling, weeping, fainting, they
have at bottom a kind of toughness that endures through all. They rebuke
the wicked in stately language, full of noble sentiments and moral
truths. They preserve the most delicate feelings of propriety in
situations the most discouraging. Emily, imprisoned in the gloomy castle
of Udolpho, in the power of ruffians whose brawls and orgies fill night
and day with horror, in hourly fear for her virtue and her life, sends
for the lord of the castle,--whom she believes to have murdered her
aunt,--and reminds him that, as her protectress is now dead, it would not
be proper for her to stay any longer under his roof thus unchaperoned,
and will he please, therefore, send her home?
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