THE GOTHIC NOVEL
59
tude are of a different order from the aesthetic/socio-economic/reli–
gious ambiguities within the
Mysteries.
Further, as the already-quoted
closing words of the novel imply, a bourgeois religious faith necessi–
tates a God of reward and punishment, whereas Emily's pantheistic
optimism gushes up from the simple Wordsworthian trust that nature
never betrays the heart that loves her. Wordsworth, Shelley, Byron,
Carlyle, Ruskin, Morris, along with eighteenth-century deists and
men of feeling were victimized by the modern confusion of aesthetic
with social and religious responses.
The superficiality of romantic rebellion betrays itself in the social:
democratic/unsocial: undemocratic ambiguity that terminated in
"romantic isolation"-Byron's protest that "to fly from, need not be
to hate, mankind" because "all are not fit with them to stir and toil."
The Byronic revolt is as inconclusive as that of St. Aubert who,
disillusioned with bourgeois society, becomes a mirror-revolutionist.
He so little comprehends necessity that although "his principles re–
mained unshaken, his benevolence unchilled ... he retired from the
multitude, more in
pity
than in anger, to scenes of simple nature, to
the pure delights of literature, and to the exercise of domestic virtues"–
Wordsworth, sensitive to the still, sad music of humanity, nevertheless
found himself devoted not to men but to Man purified, the peasant
removed to a transcendental distance-Michael. One recalls Shelley's
frantic urge to flee to some far isle under Ionian skies where he can
look tranquilly on the world's tempestuous night and where dreams
do not need adjustment to reality. Prometheus thus retires with, Asia.
Even when romanticism cries up the rights of man (as Mrs. Rad–
cliffe does not) the clamor is political rather than social.
The most apparent schism between Mrs. Radcliffe's bourgeois
sentimentality and bourgeois ethics occurs in her pages upon love
and marriage. The aesthetic values of love, such as youth, sensitivity
to nature, innocence, and distress ("Her beauty, touched with the
languid delicacy of illness, gained from sentiment what it lost in
bloom"), are counterpoised by concern for economic security, the
proprietary gestures of the male, the "purity" of the female, and her
helplessness. Adeline, in
The Romance of the Forest,
intimates the
dilemma of the bourgeois heroine situated between ( 1) a wealthy
but "immoral" marquis, and (2) Theodore, who ("Let us fly; a
carriage waits to receive us") has rescued her from this same marquis.
"A marriage with the Marquis would be splendid," Adeline explains,
"but never happy." On the other hand, she cannot wed Theodore,
"to whose family and connections she had no sort of introduction."
When Theodore is "raised to a post of considerable rank in the
