The Tale of Terror Part 5

Radcliffe's Schedoni. From beneath his cowl flash the piercing eyes, whose very glance will daunt the bravest heart; his sallow visage is furrowed with the traces of bygone pa.s.sions; he shuns society, and is dreaded by his a.s.sociates. The oppressed maiden, driven into a nunnery, drugged and immured, the ambitious countess, the devoted, loquacious servant, the inhuman abbess--all play their accustomed parts. The background s.h.i.+fts from the robber's den to the ruined chapel, from the castle vault to the dungeon of the Inquisition, each scene being admirably suited to the situation contrived, or the emotion displayed.

Maturin had accurately inspected the pa.s.sages and trap-doors of Otranto. No item, not a rusty lock, not a creaking hinge, had escaped his vigilant eye. He knew intimately every nook and cranny of Mrs. Radcliffe's Gothic abbeys. He had viewed with trepidation their blood-stained floors, their skeletons and corpses, and had carefully calculated the psychological effect of these properties. He had gazed with starting eye on the lurid horrors of "Monk" Lewis, and had carried away impressions so distinct that he, perhaps unwittingly, transferred them to the pages of his own story. But Maturin's reading was not strictly confined to the school of terror. He had studied Shakespeare's tragedies, and these may have suggested to him the idea of enhancing the interest of his story by dissecting human motive and describing pa.s.sionate feeling. In depicting the remorse of the count and his wife Zen.o.bia, who had committed a murder to gratify their ambition, and who are tormented by ugly dreams, Maturin inevitably draws from _Macbeth_. Zen.o.bia, the stronger character, reviles her husband for indulging in sickly fancies and strives to embolden him:

"Like a child you run from a mask you have yourself painted."

He replies in a free paraphrase of _Hamlet_:

"It is this cursed domestic sensibility of guilt that makes cowards of us all."

Maturin is distinguished from the incompetent horde of romance-writers, whom Scott condemned, by the powerful eloquence of his style and by his ability to a.n.a.lyse emotion, to write as if he himself were swayed by the feeling he describes. His insane extravagances have at least the virtue that they come flaming hot from an excited imagination. The pa.s.sage quoted by Scott--Orazio's attempt to depict his state of mind after he had heard of his brother's perfidy--may serve to ill.u.s.trate the force and vigour of his language:

"Oh! that midnight darkness of the soul in which it seeks for something whose loss has carried away every sense but one of utter and desolate deprivation; in which it traverses leagues in motion and worlds in thought without consciousness of relief, yet with a dread of pausing. I had nothing to seek, nothing to recover; the whole world could not restore me an atom, could not show me again a glimpse of what I had been or lost, yet I rushed on as if the next step would reach shelter and peace."

_Melmoth the Wanderer_ has found many admirers. It fascinated Rossetti,[60] Thackeray[61] and Miss Mitford.[62] It was praised by Balzac, who wrote a satirical sequel--_Melmoth Reconcilie a L'Eglise_ (1835), and by Baudelaire, and exercised a considerable influence on French literature.[63] It consists of a series of tales, strung together in a complicated fas.h.i.+on. In each tale the Wanderer, who has bartered his soul in return for prolonged life, may, if he can, persuade someone to take the bargain off his hands.[64] He visits those who are plunged in despair. His approach is heralded by strange music, and his eyes have a preternatural l.u.s.tre that terrifies his victims. No one will agree to his "incommunicable condition."

The bird's-eye view of an Edinburgh Reviewer who described _Melmoth_ as "the sacrifice of Genius in the Temple of False Taste," will give some idea of the bewildering variety of its contents:

"His hero is a modern Faustus, who has bartered his soul with the powers of darkness for protracted life and unlimited worldly enjoyment; his heroine, a species of insular G.o.ddess, a virgin Calypso of the Indian Ocean, who, amid flowers and foliage, lives upon figs and tamarinds, a.s.sociates with peac.o.c.ks and monkeys, is wors.h.i.+pped by the occasional visitants of her island, finds her way into Spain where she is married to the aforesaid hero by the hand of a dead hermit, the ghost of a murdered domestic being the witness of her nuptials; and finally dies in a dungeon of the Inquisition at Madrid. To complete this phantasmagoric exhibition, we are presented with sybils and misers, parricides, maniacs in abundance, monks with scourges pursuing a naked youth streaming with blood; subterranean Jews surrounded by the skeletons of their wives and children; lovers blasted by lightning, Irish hags, Spanish grandees, s.h.i.+pwrecks, caverns, Donna Claras and Donna Isidoras--all exposed to each other in violent and glaring contrast and all their adventures narrated with the same undeviating display of turgid, vehement, and painfully elaborated language."[65]

This breathless sentence gives some conception of the delirious imagery of Maturin's romance, but the book is worthy of a more respectful, unhurried survey. _Melmoth_ shows a distinct advance on _Montorio_ in constructive power. Each separate story is perfectly clear and easy to follow, in spite of the elaborate interlacing. The romance opens with the death of a miser in a desolate Irish farmstead, with harpies cl.u.s.tering at his bedside.

His nephew and heir, John Melmoth, is adjured to destroy a certain ma.n.u.script and a portrait of an ancestor with eyes "such as one feels they wish they had never seen and feels they can never forget." Alone at midnight, John Melmoth reads the ma.n.u.script, which is reputed to have been written by Stanton, an English traveller in Spain, about 1676. The doc.u.ment relates a startling story of a mysterious Englishman who appears at a Spanish wedding with disastrous consequences, and reappears before Stanton in a madhouse offering release on dreadful conditions. After reading it, John Melmoth decides to burn the family portrait. He is visited by a sinister form, who proves that he is no figment of the imagination by leaving black and blue marks on his relative's wrist. The next night a s.h.i.+p is wrecked in a storm. The Wanderer appears, and mocks the victims with fiendish mirth. The sole survivor, Don Alonzo Moncada, unfolds his story to John Melmoth. The son of a great duke, he has been forced to become a monk to save his mother's honour. He dwells with the excruciating detail in which Maturin is inclined to revel, on the horrors of Spanish monasteries. Escaping through a subterranean pa.s.sage, he is guided by a parricide, who incidentally tells him a loathsome story of two immured lovers.

His plan of flight is foiled, and he is borne off to the dungeons of the Inquisition. Here the Wanderer, who has a miraculous power to enter where he will, offers, on the ineffable condition, to procure his freedom. Moncada repudiates the temptation, effects his own escape during a great fire, and catches sight of the stranger on the summit of a burning building. He takes refuge with a Jew, but, to evade the vigilance of the Inquisitors, disappears suddenly down an underground pa.s.sage, where he finds Adonijah, another Jew, who obligingly employs him as an amanuensis, and sets him to copy a ma.n.u.script. This gives Maturin the opportunity, for which he has been waiting, to introduce his "Tale of the Indian." The story of Immalee, who is visited on her desert island by the Wanderer in the guise of a lover as well as a tempter, forms the most memorable part of _Melmoth_. In the other stories the stranger has been a taciturn creature, relying on the l.u.s.tre of his eyes rather than on his powers of eloquence to win over his victims. To Immalee he pours forth floods of rhetoric on the sins and follies of mankind. Had she not been one of Rousseau's children of nature, and so innocent alike of a knowledge of Shakespeare and of the fault of impatience, she would surely have exclaimed: "If thou hast news, I prithee deliver them like a man of this world." When Immalee is transported to Spain and rea.s.sumes her baptismal name of Isidora, Melmoth follows her and their conversations are continued at dead of night through the lattice. Here they discourse on the real nature of love. At length the gloomy lover persuades Isidora to marry him. Their midnight nuptials take place against a weird background. By a narrow, precipitous path they approach the ruined chapel, and are united by a hand "as cold as that of death." Meanwhile, Don Francisco, Isidora's father, on his way home, spends the night at an inn, where a stranger insists on telling him "The Tale of Guzman." In this tale the tempter visits a father whose family is starving, but who resists the lure of wealth. Maturin portrays with extraordinary power the deterioration in the character of an old man Walberg, through the effects of poverty. At the close of the narration Don Francisco falls into a deep slumber, but is sternly awakened by a stranger with an awful eye, who insists on becoming his fellow traveller, and on telling, in defiance of protests, yet another story. The prologue to the Lover's Tale is almost Chaucerian in its humour:

"It was with the utmost effort of his mixed politeness and fear that he prepared himself to listen to the tale, which the stranger had frequently amid their miscellaneous conversation, alluded to, and showed an evident anxiety to relate. These allusions were attended with unpleasant reminiscences to the hearer--but he saw that it was to be, and armed himself as best he might with courage to hear. 'I would not intrude on you, Senhor,' says the stranger, 'with a narrative in which you can feel but little interest, were I not conscious that its narration may operate as a warning, the most awful, salutary and efficacious to yourself.'"

At this veiled hint Don Francisco discharges a volley of oaths, but he is silenced completely by the smile of the stranger--"that spoke bitterer and darker things than the fiercest frown that ever wrinkled the features of man." After this he cannot choose but hear, and the stranger seizes his opportunity to begin an uncommonly dull story, connected with a Shrops.h.i.+re family and intermingled with historical events. In this tale the Wanderer appears to a girl whose lover has lost his reason, and offers to restore him if she will accept his conditions. Once more the tempter is foiled. The story meanders so sluggishly that our sympathies are with Don Francisco, and we cannot help wis.h.i.+ng that he had adopted more drastic measures to quieten the insistent stranger. At the conclusion Francisco mutters indignantly:

"It is inconceivable to me how this person forces himself on my company, hara.s.ses me with tales that have no more application to me than the legend of the Cid, and may be as apocryphal as the ballad of Roncesvalles--"

but yet the stranger has not finished. He proceeds to tell him a tale in which he will feel a peculiar interest, that of Isidora, his own daughter, and finally urges him to hasten to her rescue.

Don Francisco wanders by easy stages to Madrid, and, on his arrival, marries Isidora against her will to Montilla. Melmoth, according to promise, appears at the wedding. The bridegroom is slain. Isidora, with Melmoth's child, ends her days in the dungeons of the Inquisition, murmuring: "Paradise! will he be there?" So far as one may judge from the close of the story, it seems not.

Moncada and John Melmoth, whom we left, at the beginning of the romance, in Ireland, are revisited by the Wanderer, whose time on earth has at last run out. He confesses his failure: "I have traversed the world in the search, and no one to gain that world, would lose his own soul." His words remind us of the text of the sermon which suggested to Maturin the idea of the romance. Like the companions of Dr. Faustus, Melmoth and Moncada hear terrible sounds from the room of the Wanderer in the last throes of agony.

The next morning the room is empty; but, following a track to the sea-cliffs, they see, on a crag beneath, the kerchief the Wanderer had worn about his neck. "Melmoth and Moncada exchanged looks of silent and unutterable horror, and returned slowly home."

This extraordinary romance, like _Montorio_, clearly owes much to the novels of Mrs. Radcliffe, and "Monk" Lewis. Immalee, as her name implies, is but a glorified Emily with a loxia on her shoulder instead of a lute in her hand. The monastic horrors are obviously a heritage from _The Monk_. The Rosicrucian legend, as handled in _St. Leon_, may have offered hints to Maturin, whose treatment is, however, far more imaginative and impressive than that of G.o.dwin. The resemblance to the legend of the Wandering Jew need not be laboured. Marlowe's _Dr. Faustus_ and the first part of Goethe's _Faust_ left their impression on the story. The closing scenes inevitably remind us of the last act of Marlowe's tragedy. But, when all these debts are acknowledged they do but serve to enhance the success of Maturin, who out of these varied strands could weave so original a romance. _Melmoth_ is not an ingenious patchwork of previous stories. It is the outpouring of a morbid imagination that has long brooded on the fearful and the terrific. Imbued with the grandeur and solemnity of his theme, Maturin endeavours to write in dignified, stately language. There are frequent lapses into bombast, but occasionally his rhetoric is splendidly effective:

"It was now the latter end of autumn; heavy clouds had all day been pa.s.sing laggingly and gloomily along the atmosphere, as the hours pa.s.s over the human mind and life. Not a drop of rain fell; the clouds went portentously off, like s.h.i.+ps of war reconnoitring a strong fort, to return with added strength and fury."

He takes pleasure in coining unusual, striking phrases, such as: "All colours disappear in the night, and despair has no diary,"

or "Minutes are hours in the _noctuary_ of terror," or "The secret of silence is the only secret. Words are a blasphemy against that taciturn and invisible G.o.d whose presence enshrouds us in our last extremity."

Maturin chooses his similes with discrimination, to heighten the effect he aims at producing:

"The locks were so bad and the keys so rusty that it was like the cry of the dead in the house when the keys were turned," or:

"With all my care, however, the lamp declined, quivered, flashed a pale light, like the smile of despair, on me, and was extinguished ... I had watched it like the last beatings of an expiring heart, like the s.h.i.+verings of a spirit about to depart for eternity."

There are no quiet scenes or motionless figures in _Melmoth_.

Everything is intensified, exaggerated, distorted. The very clouds fly rapidly across the sky, and the moon bursts forth with the "sudden and appalling effulgence of lightning." A shower of rain is perhaps "the most violent that was ever precipitated on the earth." When Melmoth stamps his foot "the reverberation of his steps on the hollow and loosened stones almost contended with the thunder." Maturin's use of words like "callosity,"

"induration," "defecated," "evanition," and his fondness for italics are other indications of his desire to force an impression by fair means or foul.

The gift of psychological insight that distinguishes _Montorio_ reappears in a more highly developed form in _Melmoth the Wanderer_. "Emotions," Maturin declares, "are my events," and he excels in depicting mental as well as physical torture. The monotony of a "timeless day" is suggested with dreary reality in the scene where Moncada and his guide await the approach of night to effect their escape from the monastery. The gradual surrender of resolution before slight, reiterated a.s.saults is cunningly described in the a.n.a.lysis of Isidora's state of mind, when a hateful marriage is forced upon her. Occasionally Maturin astonishes us by the subtlety of his thought:

"While people think it worth while to torment us we are never without some dignity, though painful and imaginary."

It is his faculty for describing intense, pa.s.sionate feeling, his power of painting wild pictures of horror, his gifts for conveying his thoughts in rolling, rhythmical periods of eloquence, that make _Melmoth_ a memory-haunting book. With all his faults Maturin was the greatest as well as the last of the Goths.

CHAPTER V - THE ORIENTAL TALE OF TERROR. BECKFORD.

Beckford's _History of the Caliph Vathek_, which was written in French, was translated by the Rev. Samuel Henley, who had the temerity to publish the English version--described as a translation from the Arabic--in 1786, before the original had appeared. The French version was published in Lausanne and in Paris in 1787. An interest in Oriental literature had been awakened early in the eighteenth century by Galland's epoch-making versions of _The Arabian Nights_ (1704-1717), _The Turkish Tales_ (1708) and _The Persian Tales_ (1714), which were all translated into English during the reign of Queen Anne. Many of the pseudo-translations of French authors, such as Gueulette, who compiled _The Chinese Tales_, _Mogul Tales_, _Tartarian Tales_, and _Peruvian Tales_, and Jean-Paul Bignon, who presented _The Adventures of Abdallah_, were quickly turned into English; and the Oriental story became so fas.h.i.+onable a form that didactic writers eagerly seized upon it as a disguise for moral or philosophical reflection. The Eastern background soon lost its glittering splendour and colour, and became a faded, tarnished tapestry, across which shadowy figures with outlandish names and English manners and morals flit to and fro. Addison's _Vision of Mirza_ (1711), Johnson's _Ra.s.selas_ (1759), and various essays in _The Rambler_, Dr. Hawkesworth's _Almoran and Hamet_ (1761), Langhorne's _Solyman and Almena_ (1762), Ridley's _Tales of the Genii_ (1764), and Mrs. Sheridan's _History of Nourjahad_ (1767) were among the best and most popular of the Anglo-Oriental stories that strove to inculcate moral truths. In their oppressive air of gravity, Beckford, with his implacable hatred of bores, could hardly have breathed. One of the most amazing facts about his wild fantasy is that it was the creation of an English brain. The idea of _Vathek_ was probably suggested to Beckford by the witty Oriental tales of Count Antony Hamilton and of Voltaire. The character of the caliph, who desired to know everything, even the sciences which did not exist, is sketched in the spirit of the French satirists, who turned Oriental extravagance into delightful mockery. Awed into reverence ere the close by the sombre grandeur of his own conception of the halls of Eblis, Beckford cast off the flippant mood in which he had set out and rose to an exalted solemnity.

Beckford's mind was so richly stored with the jewels of Eastern legend that it was inevitable he should shower from his treasury things new and old, but everything which pa.s.ses through the alembic of his imagination is trans.m.u.ted almost beyond recognition. The episode of the sinners with the flaming hearts has been traced[66] to a scene in the _Mogul Tales_, where Aboul a.s.sam saw three men standing mute in postures of sorrow before a book on which were inscribed the words: "Let no man touch this divine treatise who is not perfectly pure." When Aboul a.s.sam enquired of their fate they unb.u.t.toned their waistcoats, and through their skin, which appeared like crystal, he saw their hearts encompa.s.sed with fire. In Beckford's story this grotesque scene a.s.sumes an awful and moving dignity. From _The Adventure of Abdallah, Son of Hanif_, Beckford derived the conception of a visit to the regions of Eblis, whom, however, by a wave of his wand, he transforms from a revolting ogre to a stately prince.[67]

To read _Vathek_ is like falling asleep in a huge Oriental palace after wandering alone through great, echoing halls resplendent with a gorgeous arras, on which are displayed the adventures of the caliph who built the palaces of the five senses. In our dream the caliph and his courtiers come to life, and we awake dazzled with the memory of a myriad wonders. There throng into our mind a crowd of unearthly forms--aged astrologers, hideous Giaours, gibbering negresses, graceful boys and maidens, restless, pacing figures with their hands on their hearts, and a formidable prince--whose adventures are woven into a fantastic but distinct and definite pattern around the three central personages, the caliph Vathek, his exquisitely wicked mother Carathis, and the bewitching Nouronihar. The fatal palace of Eblis, with its lofty columns and gloomy towers of an architecture unknown in the annals of the earth, looms darkly in our imagination. Beckford alludes, with satisfaction, to _Vathek_ as a "story so horrid that I tremble while relating it, and have not a nerve in my frame but vibrates like an aspen,"[68] and in the _Episodes_ leads us with an unhallowed pleasure into other abodes of horror--a temple adorned with pyramids of skulls festooned with human hair, a cave inhabited by reptiles with human faces, and an apartment whose walls were hung with carpets of a thousand kinds and a thousand hues, which moved slowly to and fro as if stirred by human creatures stifling beneath their weight. But Beckford pa.s.ses swiftly from one mood to another, and was only momentarily fascinated by terror. So infinite is the variety of _Vathek_ in scenery and in temper that it seems like its wealthy, eccentric, author secluded in Fonthill Abbey, to dwell apart in defiant, splendid isolation.

It is impossible to understand or appreciate _Vathek_ apart from Beckford's life and character, which contain elements almost as grotesque and fantastic as those of his romance. He was no visionary dreamer, content to build his pleasure-domes in air. He revelled in the golden glories of good Haroun-Alraschid,[69] but he craved too for solid treasures he could touch and handle, for precious jewels, for rare, beautiful volumes, for curious, costly furniture. The scenes of splendour portrayed in _Vathek_ were based on tangible reality.[70] Beckford's schemes in later life--his purchase of Gibbon's entire library, his twice-built tower on Lansdown Hill, were as grandiose and ambitious as those of an Eastern caliph. The whimsical, Puckish humour, which helped to counteract the strain of gloomy bitterness in his nature, was early revealed in his _Biographical Memoirs of Extraordinary Painters_ and in his burlesques of the sentimental novels of the day, which were accepted by the compiler of _Living Authors_ (1817) as a serious contribution to fiction by one Miss Jacquetta Agneta Mariana Jenks. Moore,[71] in his _Journal_, October 1818, remarks:

"The two mock novels, _Azemia_ and _The Elegant Enthusiast_, were written to ridicule the novels written by his sister, Mrs. Harvey (I think), who read these parodies on herself quite innocently."

Even in the gloomy regions of Eblis, Beckford will not wholly repress his sense of the ridiculous. Carathis, unawed by the effulgence of his infernal majesty, behaves like a buffoon, shouting at the Dives and actually attempting to thrust a Soliman from his throne, before she is finally whirled away with her heart aflame. The calm politeness with which the dastardly Barkiaroukh consents to a blood-curdling murder, the sardonic dialogue between Vathek on the edge of the precipice and the Giaour concealed in the abyss, the buoyantly high-spirited description of the plump Indian kicked and pursued like "an invulnerable football," the oppressive horror of the subterranean recesses, the mischievous pleasantry of the Gulchenrouz idyll reveal different facets of Beckford's ever-varying temper. In _Vathek_, Beckford found expression not only for his devotion to the Eastern outlook on life, but also for his own strangely coloured, vehement personality. The interpreter walks ever at our elbow whispering into our ear his human commentary on Vathek's astounding adventures.

Beckford's pictures are remarkable for definite precision of outline. There are no vague hints and suggestions, no lurking shadows concealing untold horrors. The quaint dwarfs perched on Vathek's shoulders, the children chasing blue b.u.t.terflies, Nouronihar and her maidens on tiptoe, with their hair floating in the breeze, stand out in clear relief, as if painted on a fresco.

The imagery is so lucid that we are able to follow with effortless pleasure the intricate windings of a plot which at Beckford's whim twists and turns through scenes of wonderful variety. Amid his wild, erratic excursions he never loses sight of the end in view; the story, with all its vagaries, is perfectly coherent. This we should expect from one who "loved to bark a tough understanding."[72] It is the intellectual strength and exuberant vitality behind Beckford's Oriental scenes that lend them distinction and power.

_The History of the Caliph Vathek_ did not set a fas.h.i.+on. It is true that the Orient sometimes formed the setting of nineteenth century novels, as in Disraeli's _Alvoy_ (1833), where for a brief moment, when the hero's torch is extinguished by bats on his entry into subterranean portals, we find ourselves in the abode of wonder and terror; but not till Meredith's _Shaving of s.h.a.gpal_ (1856) do we meet again Beckford's kins.h.i.+p with the East, and his gift for fantastic burlesque.

CHAPTER VI - G.o.dWIN AND THE ROSICRUCIAN NOVEL.

When Miss Austen was asked to write a historical romance "ill.u.s.trative of the house of Coburg," she airily dismissed the suggestion, pleading mirthfully:

"I could not sit down seriously to write a serious romance under any other motive than to save my life, and if it were indispensable for me to keep it up and never relax into laughing at myself or at other people I am sure I should be hung before I had finished the first chapter."[73]

If G.o.dwin had been confronted with the same offer, he would have settled himself promptly to plot out a scheme, and within a few months a historical romance on the house of Coburg, accompanied perchance by a preface setting forth the evils of monarchy, would have been in the hands of the publisher. Unlike Miss Austen, G.o.dwin had neither a sense of humour nor a fastidious artistic conscience to save him from undertaking incongruous tasks. He seems never even to have suspected the humour of life, and would have perceived nothing ludicrous in the spectacle of the author of _Political Justice_ embarking on such a piece of work. Those disquieting flashes of self-revelation that more imaginative men catch in the mirror of their own minds and that awaken sometimes laughter and sometimes tears, never disturbed G.o.dwin's serenity.

He brooded earnestly over his speculations, quietly ignoring inconvenient facts and never shrinking from absurd conclusions.

In theory he aimed at disorganising the whole of human society, yet in actual life he was content to live un.o.btrusively, publis.h.i.+ng harmless books for children; and though he abhorred the principle of aristocracy, he did not scruple to accept a sinecure from government through Lord Grey. Notwithstanding his stolid inconsistency and his deficiency in humour, G.o.dwin is a figure whom it is impossible to ignore or to despise. He was not a frothy orator who made his appeal to the ma.s.ses, but the leader of the trained thinkers of the revolutionary party, a political rebel who, instead of fulminating wildly and impotently after the manner of his kind, expressed his theories in clear, reasonable and logical form. It is easy, but unprofitable, to sneer at the futility of some of G.o.dwin's conclusions or to complain of the aridity of his style. His _Political Justice_ remains, nevertheless, a lucidly written, well-ordered piece of intellectual reasoning. Sh.e.l.ley spoke of G.o.dwin's _Mandeville_ in the same breath with Plato's _Symposium_[74] and the ideas expressed in _Political Justice_ inspired him to write not merely _Queen Mab_ but the _Revolt of Islam_ and _Prometheus Unbound_.

G.o.dwin's plea for the freedom of the individual and his belief in the perfectibility of man through reason had a far-reaching effect that cannot be readily estimated, but, as his theories only concern us here in so far as they affect two of his novels, it is unnecessary to pursue the trail of his influence further.

That the readers of fiction in the last decade of the eighteenth century eagerly desired the mysterious and the terrible, Mrs.

Radcliffe's widespread popularity proved unmistakably. To satisfy this craving, G.o.dwin, who was ever on the alert to discover a subject which promised swift and adequate financial return, turned to novel-writing, and supplied a tale of mystery, _The Adventures of Caleb Williams_ (1794), and a supernatural, historical romance, _St. Leon_ (1799). As he was a political philosopher by nature and a novelist only by profession, he artfully inveigled into his romances the theories he wished to promote. The second t.i.tle of _Caleb Williams_ is significant.

_Things As They Are_ to G.o.dwin's mind was synonymous with "things as they ought not to be." He frankly a.s.serts: "_Caleb Williams_ was the offspring of that temper of mind in which the composition of my _Political Justice_ left me"[75]--a guileless confession that may well have deterred many readers who recoil shuddering from political treatises decked out in the guise of fiction. But alarm is needless; for, although _Caleb Williams_ attempts to reveal the oppressions that a poor man may endure under existing conditions, and the perversion of the character of an aristocrat through the "poison of chivalry," the story may be enjoyed for its own sake. We can read it, if we so desire, purely for the excitement of the plot, and quietly ignore the underlying theories, just as it is possible to enjoy Spenser's sensuous imagery without troubling about his allegorical meaning. The secret of G.o.dwin's power seems to be that he himself was so completely fascinated by the intricate structure of his story that he succeeds in absorbing the attention of his readers. He bestowed infinite pains on the composition of _Caleb Williams_, and conceived the lofty hope that it "would const.i.tute an epoch in the mind of every reader."[76] A friend to whom he submitted two-thirds of his ma.n.u.script advised him to throw it into the fire and so safeguard his reputation. The result of this criticism on a character less determined or less phlegmatic than G.o.dwin's would have been a violent reaction from hope to despair.

But G.o.dwin, who seems to have been independent of external stimulus, was not easily startled from his projects, and plodded steadily forward until his story was complete. He would have scorned not to execute what his mind had conceived. G.o.dwin's businesslike method of planning the story backwards has been adopted by Conan Doyle and other writers of the detective story.