The Argosy — page 63: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

& | ; e e 59 THE Aucosy. Past “ Sensationalists. 53 the North” was further assisted by the pure pen of Washington Irving, by the correct taste of Professor Wilson, by the witty effusions of Theo- dore Hook, and by the genial and elegant productions of the many celebrated names whose powers seem to have culminated in the works of Thackeray, Eliot, and Dickens. Long prior, however, to the appearance of Maturin and Matthew Lewis, our grandfathers had been thrilled and terrified by a series of romances which, though probably owing their birth to the suggestion of the ‘Castle of Otranto,” yet claimed a merit which had never before been attempted, and which, allowing something to priority of conception, has never yet been excelled. Anne Radcliffe has been called the Salvator Rosa of British Novelists ; and if force of conception, a power of grouping together whatever is imposing, grand, or terrible, a nice discrimination in the adjustment of the parts of her involved stories, and a thorough knowledge of the effects to be evolved from particular distribution of colours, can sup- port the judgment of her admirers, then it must be allowed that she 1s fairly entitled to the appellation. Her first novel was ‘‘ The Castles of Athlin and Dunbayne,” which, unlke most of the earliest com- positions of authors who afterwards become celebrated, evinced no promise of the marked success she was subsequently to achieve. Then followed “The Sicilian Romance.” This book succeeded in attracting a tolerable amount of attention. Though written in the d/ack and white style, and though displaying little subtlety of perception, the “Sicilian ‘Romance ” 1s full of fine descriptions of natural scenery and accounts of adventures, which, though mostly improbable, are forcibly and cleverly expressed. This work gained for Mrs. Radcliffe the flattering comment of Sir Walter Scott, that “Fielding, Richardson, Smollett, and even Walpole, though wmting upon an imaginative subject, are decidedly prose authors. Mrs. Radcliffe has a title to be considered as the first poetess of romantic fiction; that 1s, if actual rhyme shall not be deemed essential to poetry.” ‘The Sicilian Romance” was fol- lowed by “ The Romance of the Forest,” ‘‘ The Mysteries of Udolpho,” “The Italian,” and ‘Gaston de Blondeville.” Mrs. Radcliffe from the first had displayed great descriptive powers ; 1t was reserved for her later works to show that she united to this faculty the art of delineating passion as it had not often been delineated before. The character of La Motte may be ranked amongst the most admirable melodramatic portraitures in fiction. Nor do I employ the term “melodramatic” at all in a detracting sense. The various elements that interpenetrate her conceptions, indeed, of which her conceptions are composed, render her, as they render Shakespeare, Scott, Lytton, Hugo, intensely melo- ‘dramatic. A wide survey of life invariably entails the melodramatic ‘spirit. Life itself is a melodrama. The common-place yields to the romantic, the romantic to the ridiculous, the ndiculous to the sublime. COIN @ lDOOl|KS .CO©