56
PARTISAN REVIEW
... the great gate and Gothic window of the hall, the cloisters, and
the side of a chapel more remote; . . . a venerable arch, which had
once led to a part of the fabric now demolished, stood a majestic
ruin....
. . . while Blanche gazed with admiration on this venerable pile,
whose effect was heightened by the strong lights and shadows thrown
athwart it by a cloudy sunset, a sound of many voices, slowly chanting,
arose from within. . . . Blanche sighed: tears trembled in her eyes,
and her thoughts seemed wafted with the sounds to heaven. . . .
Substantially this is the common "romantic" response to "gothic"–
the response of Horace Walpole, Sir Walter Scott, Thomas Carlyle,
John Ruskin, and William Morris, a response in which the pragmatic
and the aesthetic are entirely alien, a characteristic predicament of
bourgeois romanticism. Ruskin, averse to mediaeval religious values,
accepted the cathedral as symbolic of aesthetic values, meanwhile
confusing
his
social values with both. The conclusive passage in this
regard is not in
Udolpho
but
The Italian,
where the superior of the
convent of Santa della Pieta runs things to the mood of Mrs. Rad–
cliffe's bourgeois-protestant creed. This superior "conformed to the
customs of the Roman church, without supposing a faith in all of
them to be necessary to salvation." Thus "her religion was neither
gloomy, nor bigoted" for she "seldom touched upon points of faith,
but explained and enforced the moral duties." In
The Italian
the
horrors of the Inquisition are evaluated by the same double vision.
The question of what seems horrible to Mrs. Radcliffe raises a
question of what is horrible in the whole gothic tradition of romanti–
cism (Parrington, for example, could have remedied his cursory treat–
ment of Poe by asking this question). In her ingenuous way Mrs.
Radcliffe specialized in horrors-confinement in charnel houses, the
discovery of corpses in bizarre putrefaction, groans, worms, epitaphs,
and all the graveyard goings-on that connote the "gothic." The
social implications of such horror are not much examined. Authentic
horror is horrible by its contexts. Psychologically, religiously, ethically
the corpses in Mrs. Radcliffe do not signify. Death is a physically
repulsive phenomenon, Death in the poetry of
Donnt~
or in Conrad's
Heart of Darkness
connotes a psychological horror of which Mrs.
Radcliffe is barren. The loathsomeness and anguish of Dante's In–
ferno or, again, the terror of the grave in Donne's sonnets exist by
their religious references. Henry James' beast in the jungle, or the
appalling Mixed Transport episode in Koestler's
Arrival and De–
parture,
achieve their horrors by ethical and social overtones. In
Mrs. Radcliffe and romantic writers proficient in the macabre, horror
causes purely aesthetic reverberations so far as it is effective at
all.
The reverberations-as in Maturin or the charnel passages in Lewis'
