otherwise than it did. Those who might be otherwise inclined to take Mr. Shaw's defence of the Bishop of Beauvais seriously, should read M. Champion's remarks upon the evidence in his admirable edition of the trial.*

In brief, the Inquisition was a tribunal with almost unexampled possibilities for evil, in an age far less sensitive than ours to bodily suffering or death. It was like a revolver in the Far West. The man behind it might often be peaceful enough, but there always was the deadly tool ready to kill at any moment. We must not measure merely by the totals of actual slain; even more effectual was its constant influence over the mass of men, who, naturally enough, had no desire to risk their lives. A small gang holds up a railway train without firing a single shot; the travellers know that the bullets are there, and they want to know no more. So also must the Inquisition be held responsible not only for the lives that it took, but for the progress which it arrested. The barrenness of medieval thought in certain important directions cannot easily be accounted for on any other theory; those who forget the Inquisition in this matter are describing the Revolution without the guillotine. We must not merely count by the number of saints the Inquisition burned. The million little tyrannies which a Reign of Terror exercises over a million little people count for more, when the ledger of history is accurately balanced, than one startling injustice done to one extraordinary person. The medieval thinker was, doubtless, free in some directions; but there were many avenues, most homely and familiar to his modern descendant, and most fruitful in results for civilization, which no contemporary of St. Joan could explore unless he was prepared to carry his life in his hand. Those who laugh and cry most sincerely with Mr. Shaw's Joan may yet feel that the spectacular martyrdom of a dozen such saints would have been less fatal to progress than that prosaic, unremitting, leaden, stupefying pressure upon the intellect—and, as many of us may feel, over the soul itself-of all those unsainted millions for whom we may borrow Abraham Lincoln's phrase, and say that God has made so many of them because God loves that kind of person.

G. G. COULTON

*"Procès de condamnation de Jeanne d'Arc." Vol. I, 1920; introd. pp. xix-xxx.

THE NORTHANGER NOVELS

A FOOTNOTE TO JANE AUSTEN

When you have finished' Udolpho '(said Isabella Thorp) “ we will read 'The Italian' together; and I have made out a list of ten or twelve more of the same kind for you."

"Have you, indeed!" (cried Catherine). "How glad I am! What are they all?"

"I will read you their names directly-here they are in my pocketbook: Castle of Wolfenbach,' Clermont,'' Mysterious Warnings,' 'Necromancer of the Black Forest,'' Midnight Bell,'' Orphan of the Rhine,' and Horrid Mysteries.'

"Are they all horrid? Are you sure they are all horrid ? " "Yes; quite sure."

these few lines from "Northanger Abbey" seven fictions, which would otherwise have faded into complete oblivion, owe a rueful immortality. So long as Jane Austen is readwhich will be for as long as there are readers at all—the titles at least of "The Castle of Wolfenbach," " Clermont," "The Mysterious Warning,"*" The Necromancer of the Black Forest," "The Midnight Bell," " The Orphan of the Rhine," and " Horrid Mysteries "will survive as tiny stitches in the immense tapestry of English literature. Perhaps such miniature and derisive perpetuity is all that they deserve. But there is at least ground for satisfying oneself on this point by examining the books themselves, so that, having examined them, one may endorse or revise Jane Austen's raillery.

It may be presumptuous to claim for such an investigation that it provides a "footnote to Jane Austen." Admittedly-save during its actual pause beneath the Gothic porch of Northanger Abbey-the argument must travel roads which, so far as historical evidence is concerned, Miss Austen herself was content to leave unexplored. And yet it seems probable that the spinster-genius had in her time actually more pleasure and even profit from the Gothic romance than she saw occasion to record; and certainly a woman of her sympathy and perception-however ready she

*This is the correct title; Miss Thorp was inaccurate.

may have been publicly to make fun of the excesses of a prevailing chic-would in her heart have given to that chic as much credit for its qualities as mockery for its absurdities.

For qualities it had, and good historical and psychological justification also. The Gothic romance was not by any meansas it is nowadays generally regarded—a mere crazy extravagance. Like most artistic movements, it had its primitive incompetence and its over-ripe elaboration; but it sprang from a genuine spiritual impulse, and during its period of florescence produced work of real and permanent beauty.

It is interesting to consider the analogy between the Gothic romantic epoch from (roughly) 1775 to 1815, and the æsthetic romantic epoch from (even more roughly) 1875 to the beginning of the twentieth century. Both of these epochs represented an uprush of the desire for freedom and beauty and, conversely, a reaction from formalism and dignified reserve. By the middle of the eighteenth century the classical enthusiasms, which had in their day been an inspiration to loveliness and had revitalised European taste, had become set. The influences which had once awoken to self-respect and to alertness a culture both flaccid and apathetic, had themselves become a cause of impotence. In its eternal swing from liberty to discipline and back again, the pendulum of taste had reached to the extreme limit of fastidious rigidity. It paused, turned slowly on its tracks and then, swinging ever more rapidly toward luxuriance and freedom once again, swept artists, writers and political philosophers into the seething excitement of a new romanticism.

And precisely similar was the reaction of the late 'seventies, the 'eighties and the 'nineties of last century from the controls and prosperous obtuseness of mid-Victorianism. There was more of economic than of artistic arrogance in the last phase of midVictorianism; and in consequence more of jealous political discontent and less of pure æsthetic idealism in the rebels of the late nineteenth than in those of the late eighteenth century. But fundamentally the two repulsions were alike and, strangely enough, assumed in certain details of their history a very similar guise.

With the political aspect of these movements of reaction the present argument is not (save very casually) concerned. But it is essential to remember, when considering the artistic features of the romantic revivals of the seventeen-seventies and of the

eighteen-seventies, that, parallel with the experiments of painters, poets and novelists, went experiments of philosophers and political theorists; that having sprung from dissatisfactions both general and profound-the Gothic romance and the French symbolist movement were in their small way as much an expression of a deep subversive impulse as were the French Revolution itself and the grim gathering of forces for industrial war.

Of the purely artistic manifestations of these century-apart rebellions, it will immediately be observed that, whereas in the eighteenth century the romantic revival affected primarily literature and architecture, in the nineteenth century the arts most ready to take the new infection were literature and painting. The difference is interesting and, as it happens, helps to prove the statement already made that, in contrast to the eighteenth century movement, that of the nineteenth was economic rather than æsthetic, social rather than philosophical. In 1770, architecture— and its at that time important subsidiary, landscape gardeningwere still within the province of the artist, who could impose his ideas, subject only to the easily influenced taste of a wealthy and educated patron. But by 1870 the artist had virtually lost control of architectural fashion, having (along with his intelligent Mæcenas) been supplanted, on the one hand by speculative builders who built for profit and without other thought than the margin between cost and saleability, on the other by large commercial corporations whose taste was not only naturally, but also obstinately bad. Wherefore on the picture-painter of the eighteen'seventies devolved the subversive duty of the architect of a hundred years before.

A further significant fact in the tale of these strangely analogous revolts is that both movements began with a return to a wholly ictitious age of chivalry. It is a solemn tribute to the power of legend over history that the undoubted squalors and cruelties of the real dark ages should, by lapse of time and with the help of sentimental visionaries, have been transformed into the shining features of a golden age. What Macpherson's " Ossian," "The Percy Reliques" and Hurd's" Letters on Chivalry and Romance did for the romantics of the eighteenth century, the PreRaphaelites, with the "Morte d'Arthur" as their Holy Writ, did for the æsthetics of a century later.

It is difficult to say which of the two enthusiasms was the more admirable in impulse, which the more self-contradictory in

practice. Both began as inspirations, both ended as opiatesand opiates against the very same turbulence that they once inspired. Although the neo-chivalry of the eighteenth and the nineteenth centuries was a direct outcome of a fundamental desire for change, or if you wish-of an instinctive destructionism-it won to wide popularity as a way of escape for minds bored with ordinary life, or, more importantly, for spirits uneasy or terrified before the menace of the future. In other words, the persons who launched the new romanticism were in each century prophets of iconoclasm, and yet lived to see the very language of their prophecies turned to the opposite use, to see their once inflammatory art become a drug for harassed minds, a refuge for imaginations in flight from menacing reality.

Seeing that the Gothic romantic movement was part of a general reaction against an exhausted classicism; seeing further that, having started as a tonic against restraints, it ended as a drug against a disagreeable actuality, its methods of selfexpression were necessarily varied and even contradictory.

But, beneath the multifarious crotchets and pinnacles, with which the Gothic novelist (working side by side with architects from Strawberry Hill via Sheffield Place, Hagley and Fonthill to the Brighton Pavilion) adorned his fictional fantasies, lay certain general principles of structure and aspiration. These principles give not only a unity to the neo-Gothic movement, but also a logic and a respectability. They were related directly to the reaction from classical forms and modes of thought and are interesting as showing what "classicism" (as opposed to "Gothicism") meant to the mid-eighteenth century; what conventions and formulæ grew up from a determination to evolve an art as different from the classical as possible; and how this determination produced a stylised Gothic quite individual to the eighteenth century and not at all—either in proportion or design— a reproduction of a medieval original. In other words, by the way of these principles the student comes at any rate to the threshold of a much-needed investigation-an investigation of those specific qualities of " Gothistic " art* which entitle it to be

*This phrase is preferable to "sham " or " neo-gothic," which should be applied rather to Pugin's and, later, to Ruskin's nineteenth century outbreaks of careful revivalism.