regarded as an independent style alike in building and in literature.

Perhaps the most striking of the conventions adopted and exploited by these eighteenth century designers, artists and writers was the convention of the ruin. This was not in itself a novelty. The classical enthusiasts of the preceding decades had returned from Italy and Greece with so keen an appreciation of the survivals of antiquity that they adorned their parks with miniature Parthenons and set up shattered porticoes on the banks of most unsuitable lakes. But such classical ruin-builders regarded their efforts rather as the modern sightseer regards his diary or his sketch-book. They wanted a memento of the grand tour; they wanted to perpetuate in English meadows the glories of a vanished civilization. Consequently their ruins were only ruins because the buildings that inspired them were also in decay; they were not dilapidated for dilapidation's sake.

To the Gothistic eye, however, a ruin was in itself a thing of loveliness—and for interesting reasons. A mouldering building is a parable of the victory of nature over man's handiwork. The grass growing rankly in a once stately courtyard; the ivy creeping over the broken tracery of a once sumptuous window; the glimpse of sky through the fallen roof of a once proud banqueting hallall of these moved to melancholy pleasure minds which dwelt gladly on the impermanence of human life and effort, which sought on every hand symbols of a pantheist philosophy.

Then again, a ruin expresses the triumph of chaos over order, and the Gothistic movement was, in origin at least, a movement toward freedom and away from the controls of discipline. Creepers and weeds, as year by year they riot over sill and pavingstone, defy a broken despotism; every coping-stone that crashes from a castle-battlement into the undergrowth beneath is a small victory for liberty, a snap of the fingers in the face of autocratic power. Indeed, in these early enthusiasms of the Gothistic pioneers there may be seen with astonishing clearness the impulses that, politically, expressed themselves in the French Revolution. The pastoral chic of the pre-revolution aristocracy in France was another aspect of the same inclination; and there is at once irony and much historic precedent and sequel in the fact that the very folk who thus gave rein to their instinct for revolt lived to suffer, to tremble or to flee from that instinct's logical development.

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And, finally, the appeal of the ruin-as also of the towering crag (another frequent phenomenon of the Gothistic picturesque) —was an appeal of the perpendicular as opposed to the horizontal, alike in structural alignment and in the disposition of shadows. The long lines of classical design, though perpendicular to a certain height, are squared off with the ultimate horizontal of an architrave or with the wide sloping angle of a pediment; the flat surfaces of classical design-whether they be masonry or gaps of shadow-are as integral a part of its style as are columns and projecting cornices. The antithetic pattern in building is one of pinnacles, of fretted surfaces, of intricate broken shadows; and as a basis for such novelty the rebels of the mid-eighteenth century naturally looked to Gothic art and to those aspects of nature, the forest vista and the wooded crag, which were originally the inspiration of Gothic artists.

From this adoption of Gothic forms it was an easy transition to the adoption of similar mental attitudes. The ruin, the bristling silhouette, the flowing untidy lines of piled masonry or creeper-clad rocks became, in terms of emotion, "sensibility and an elegant disequilibrium of the spirit. Thus were enthroned, alike in visual and in ethical appreciation, ideals of luxuriance, of profuse ornament, and of a rather heady liberty.

Of the application to novel-writing of the general principles of Gothistic art much evidence may be found in the seven horrid fictions recommended to the heroine of "Northanger Abbey" by her gushful friend. Within the limits of that brief selection are found three or four distinct "make-ups," assumed by novelists of the day for the greater popularity of their work. And this fact strengthens the suspicion that Jane Austen's pick of Gothic novels was rather deliberate than random, was made for the stories, rather than for their titles' sake. Chance alone could hardly have achieved so representative a choice; the chooser, had she merely wished to startle by violence or absurdity of title, could have improved without difficulty on more than one of her selection; finally, as we know from her letters, " Our family are great novel readers and not ashamed of being so," and there is actual evidence that the Steventon household read "The Midnight Bell," Sydney Owenson's early works, and various other fictions. Wherefore is there good ground for assuming that Miss

Austen knew what she was doing, when she compiled her seemingly casual list of Northanger Novels.

These fall into three divisions, of which one is itself subdivisible. "Clermont," by Regina Maria Roche, first published in 1798, is the rhapsodical sensibility romance in its finest form. "The Castle of Wolfenbach," "The Mysterious Warning," "The Orphan of the Rhine" (this is an assumption, but I think a certain one) and "The Midnight Bell" are terror-novels that pretend for fashion's sake-to be translations from the German, but are in fact British-made goods in German fancy dress. "The Necromancer of the Black Forest " is of this same class, but with a difference it probably represents the manipulation of genuine German material to create something to English taste, bearing the same relation to its Teutonic original that the Englische Sportskleidung, which filled the Berlin shops in the years before the war, had to the actual shooting and hunting kit worn by English sportsmen-that is to say, the cloth came from Bradford, but the ensemble was such as Savile Row had never dreamed of. "Horrid Mysteries " remains,-a book not only quite distinct in nature and origin from its fellows, but on a different and higher plane of intrinsic importance and interest. It pretends to be an autobiography; and if it is luridly written in its German original, it has been rendered still more sensational by the mingled guile and incompetence of its translator.

Let us now examine in rather more detail these remote but-of their epoch-so typical romances. Of Regina Roche's novel, "Clermont," the enthusiast could make a manageable essay, so plentiful is its store of period-ornament, so opulent its rhetoric. Here is Madeline Clermont, the Gothistic heroine par excellence, a sort of compendium of the qualities and colours, mental and physical, that were most utterly the mode :

She was tall and delicately made, nor was the symmetry of her features inferior to that of her bodily form. Her eyes, large and of the darkest hazel, ever true to the varying emotions of her soul, languished beneath their long silken lashes with all the softness of sensibility and sparkled with all the fire of animation; her hair, a rich auburn, added luxuriance to her beauty and, by a natural curl, gave an expression of the greatest innocence to her face; the palest blush of health just tinted her dimpled cheek and her mouth, adorned by smiles, appeared like the half-blown rose when moistened with the dews of early morn.

This entrancing creature lived with a father (over whose past VOL. 246. NO. 501.

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brooded a shadow of mystery) in a charming cottage not far from a" shattered pile of ruins " in which, after sunset-according to local legend-" horrid noises and still more horrid sights were heard and beheld." But, of course, "though feared by superstition," these ruins were "the favourite haunt of taste and sensibility," and Madeline spent much of her time wandering about the grass-grown courts or climbing to the broken (but, apparently, still practicable) battlements. From a meeting in this place with an elusive youth of settled melancholy, the adventures of Madeline start on their sensational course. She is taken by an amiable but invalid countess to a distant castle, where she attends routs and makes sylvan excursions, every now and again encountering (and often in the most unlikely places) her mysterious young man, whose name is de Sevignie, and whose occupation is vaguely described as that of an "officer."

One night the countess-in the course of an unexplained and seemingly irrational stroll-is savagely attacked by masked men in a ruined chapel in the park. She lingers for a few weeks and dies. Terror now takes possession of the stage. Such a transference from domestic felicity to the dramatics of horror is very characteristic of this type of Gothic romance. And Madeline's escape from the once bounteous and hospitable castle by a secret passage to a grotto; her flight thence from the son-in-law of her late benefactress, who has designs upon her virtue, to Paris where (by the machinations of her persecutor) she is lured into a house of ill-fame; her rescue thence; the lengthy revealing of her father's unhappy secret; her realisation of her own noble birth and her ultimate union with de Sevignie, who has at last succeeded in clearing up the mystery of his own identity and emerges as a nobleman of unbounded wealth-compose a narrative than which none is more superbly expressive of the aspiration, the absurdities, but also of the attractive qualities of the Gothic romance.

Mrs. Roche knew precisely the ingredients necessary to fashionable fiction, and blended them with admirable dexterity. A summary of the incidental features of" Clermont "is a summary of the compulsory qualities of Gothic fiction. A low burst of music is the accepted interruption of any reverie in a ruin. De Sevignie carries an oboe wherever he goes and continually " rivets Madeline to her seat " on a mossy bank or a crumbling stone by the exquisite taste with which he controls the " soft breathings

of his instrument. Both hero and heroine are "children of sorrow" (this feature, inherited from " Werter's Leiden," persists like the Hapsburg nose through the family of Gothic romance) and their mutual sympathy has its origin in a common melancholy. The minor characters include a monk, a comic serving wench, a sinister nobleman with dissolute companions, a sprightly girl friend for the heroine, several elderly countesses, and the necessary peasants, banditti, and retainers. Very characteristic also, alike of the school of fiction to which it belongs and of that school's claim to drug uneasy readers against a painful actuality, is the social background of the tale. Mrs. Roche is careful to give no detailed indication of the date of her narrative, and events of contemporary history, though here and there skilfully implied, are never definitely stated. But the unhampered lives of the nobility, the peasants' submissiveness, and the ease with which persons of quality evade all economic consequences of their very irrational lives, give an impression of the gilded unreality of pre-revolutionary France. "Clermont," in fact, translates the reader to a vanished paradise of cultured pleasure-seeking where, to those fortunate enough to have been born to wealth and education, all is ease and peace and gaiety. One can understand with what wistful eagerness the elegant but nervous readers of 1798 would follow in this novelist's wake and for a few hours escape the disquietude of fact.

Mrs. Roche was particularly qualified to lull her admirers into a dream of security, because, with all her florid unreality, she had a shrewd sense of social values. "Clermont," stripped of its Gothic trappings, and when allowance has been made for the modish emotionalism of the time, is really a tale of the day, with characters of recognisable humanity and situations which, exaggeration apart, are not intrinsically improbable. It may be compared with George IV's Pavilion at Brighton, a dignified and normal late-Georgian house, over which has been fitted a shell of tortured oriental ornament.

Finally, this authoress can manage incident. Her plots are complex as are those of the twentieth century thriller, and for the rapid handling of complex plot a definite skill is necessary. Just as the best stories of Mr. Edgar Wallace owe their popularity to the swift manipulation of successive excitements, so Mrs. Roche deserved her public if only for her skill as a sensationalist.