SOURCE: "Mrs. Radcliffe's Landscapes: The Eye and the Fancy," in The University of Windsor Review, Vol. 18, No. 1, Fall-Winter, 1984, pp. 7-19.

[In this essay, Murrah discusses how Radcliffe's reflective verbal pictures found in her published Journey serve as an introduction to her use of imaginative description of nature in her fiction.]

Only fifteen years ago, it was still possible to say of Ann Radcliffe that her immense popularity in her own day had not at all survived the early nineteenth century and that only the literary historian or the fancier of fictional oddities continued to appreciate her works. But since that time our contemporary Romantic Movement has so much broadened and diversified its influence that the Gothic novel of the eighteenth century seems to have regained a portion of its former reading public, and the "Great Enchantress" of the English Romantic poets once more receives a certain reverence as the early harbinger of an expanded aesthetic awareness, now associated with the rehabilitation of romance in various modern forms, including science fiction. Since the mid-sixties, all of Mrs. Radcliffe's prose fiction has appeared in new editions or reprints; the yearly output of scholarly and critical articles devoted to her has substantially increased; and the Radcliffean doctoral dissertation has ceased to be a rarity. It is doubtful, I think, that this recent spate of interest will persist, for, even in its midst, the abler critics of the Gothic Revival have remarked that Mrs. Radcliffe's works do not actually contain, in a fully developed form, those Gothic elements that have recently found most favor in the literary world. Nevertheless, the resurgent enthusiasm might have rewarding results if it redirects critical scrutiny to what the Radcliffe romances do contain and to a more careful reading of them as "documents in the history of the language of literary forms."

I suggest that such a scrutiny should include a careful analysis of Mrs. Radcliffe's descriptions of landscape. Long recognized as a particularly innovative and memorable literary achievement, these descriptive passages embody the most typical attitudes of her special artistic sensibility. They also indicate, in a way that has not been fully recognized, just how and why she failed to adapt that sensibility to the creation of wholly effective works of fiction.

As Raymond Havens has pointed out [in Modern Language Notes, 1951] Mrs. Radcliffe's "nature descriptions" exist in three forms: detailed and evocative notes that she jotted down in the unpublished journals of certain English tours, the more reflective and generalized verbal pictures of her published Journey, and the characteristically elaborated impressions of scenery that she included in her imaginative works. It will be informative to consider briefly the second of these types, as an introduction to their more important, fictive counterparts.

During the latter half of 1794, Ann Radcliffe and her husband made a sight-seeing tour of Holland, Germany, and the English Lakes. In her detailed journal of this expedition, published the next year, Mrs. Radcliffe describes the travelers' arrival at

Kendal, white-smoking in the dark vale. As we approached the outlines of its ruinous castle were just distinguishable through the gloom, scattered in masses over the top of a small round hill, on the right. At the entrance of the town, the river Kent dashed in foam down a weir; beyond it, on a green slope, the gothic tower of the church was half hid by a cluster of dark trees; gray fells glimmered in the distance.

Three pages later the Radcliffes pause in reverence before a monument to the "Revolution in 1688," and Mrs. Radcliffe remarks:

At a time, when the memory of that revolution is reviled, and the praises of liberty itself endeavoured to be suppressed by the artifice of imputing to it the crimes of anarchy, it was impossible to omit any act of veneration to the blessings of this event. Being thus led to ascend the hill, we had a view of the country over which it presides; a scene simple, great and free as the spirit revered amidst it.

Later, at Ullswater, Mrs. Radcliffe notes the disappearance of former "ruins of monasteries and convents, which though reason rejoices that they no longer exist, the eye may be allowed to regret." She sums up her impressions of Ullswater as follows:

Severe grandeur and sublimity; all that may give ideas of vast power and astonishing majesty. The effect of Ullswater is, that, awful as its scenery appears, it awakens the mind to expectations still more awful, and, touching all the powers of imagination, inspires that "fine phrensy" descriptive of the poet's eye, which not only bodies forth unreal forms, but imparts to substantial objects a character higher than their own.

The four passages sufficiently illustrate the leading qualities of thought and feeling that enter into Mrs. Radcliffe's descriptions of landscape. In the first passage, describing Kendal, one notes her close relationship to the Picturesque School. Mrs. Radcliffe has "composed a scene" in the manner of Gilpin and other "picturesque" travelers, and one recognizes the influence of the landscape artists—in this case, Salvator Rosa—whose treatment of scenery she had learned to appreciate from actual paintings and engravings, as well as from the nature poets, such as Thomson, whom Salvator, Claude, and other painters had influenced. The cascade in the foreground, the ruinous castle, and the Gothic tower half-hidden in the middle distance, against the background of glimmering gray fells, arrange themselves in a typical picturesque manner that Mrs. Radcliffe used again and again as an aesthetic norm—a point of view from which to observe and describe the external world.

But the same passage reveals another directing force in Mrs. Radcliffe's sensibility: Burke's Philosophical Enquiry into the Origins of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful. For, as Samuel H. Monk has shown [in The Sublime, 1935], "the two streams of tendency, the purely emotional response to the grand the terrible, and the picturesque appreciation of nature, flow together" in her works. In his widely influential treatise Burke identifies terror as the chief source of the sublime, a passion that may arise from "magnitude in buildings," as well as from a number of more general conditions, such as obscurity, darkness, vastness, and power. Mrs. Radcliffe obviously embodies his theories in the first and last of the passages I have quoted, as she does in countless others throughout her works. By sending the chief characters of her romances on an unceasing quest for sublimity in natural scenery and in architecture, she terrified and delighted the reading public of her time.

The reason why these romances once lost their charm, the reason why they may again interest only the student of literature, as distinct from the common reader, bears a significant relation to an attitude that Mrs. Radcliffe reveals in the second and third passages above, where she favorably contrasts her own England with the past. Here she declares herself a proud daughter of the Enlightenment, the Age of Reason, true to the whiggish principles of the urban, commercial middle class from which she came. In the third passage, she also calls attention to the purely aesthetic quality of her medievalism, for here and throughout her works she similarly derides "superstition" and the barbarism, tyranny, and ignorance of any age or nation deprived of the blessings of Protestantism and British constitutional monarchy.

At the same time, Mrs. Radcliffe yearned for romance, customarily announcing on her title pages that she had chosen it as the genre of her prose fiction. And "the hero of romance," as Northrop Frye reminds us [in Anatomy of Criticism, 1957] "moves in a world in which the ordinary laws of nature are slightly suspended: prodigies of courage and endurance, unnatural to us, are natural to him, and enchanted weapons, talking animals, terrifying ogres and witches, and talismans of miraculous power violate no rule of probability once the postulates of romance have been established."

Mrs. Radcliffe could accept some of these conventions. Her heroes and heroines display powers and perfections that one would not expect to encounter in real life, and they triumphantly oppose monsters in human form. But she could not accept the supernatural, and this refusal to exploit the full power of romance, to suspend disbelief for artistic reasons, led to the "difficulties and dilemmas" of which Scott complains in his perceptive estimate of her literary achievement. Granting her the power to titillate us with the possibility of ghosts and to arouse fearful curiosity, he cannot conceal his disappointment in her timidly rationalistic, often trivial explanations of all the mysteries.

Unbeknownst to Scott, Mrs. Radcliffe introduced a real ghost into her last, tedious romance, Gaston de Blondeville, but she withheld the manuscript from publication in her lifetime, and the elaborate framework with which she surrounds the actual ghost story casts doubt upon its authenticity. Again, in a dialogue "On the Supernatural in Poetry," which she excised from the manuscript of Gaston de Blondeville and also left unpublished at her death, one of the speakers affirms the possibility of supernatural visitations and defends their use in literature, especially in cases where the writer provides them with a suitably mysterious atmosphere. In practice, however, Mrs. Radcliffe never really adhered to this critical theory.

Her half-hearted approach to the tradition of romance helps to account for her unusual concern with the setting of her stories. That is to say, the castles and the landscapes existed; she could describe them as inanimate objects, involving the emotions of her characters, without sacrificing the decorum of probability as she understood it.

More significantly, in her glowing descriptions of the beauty and sublimity of nature, Mrs. Radcliffe hoped to achieve an effect not usually associated with romance: she hoped to display the refined good taste of her characters, as enlightened by reason, thereby elevating the tone of her works and imparting moral instruction to her readers, the great end and aim of art in her time. The danger of encouraging an immoral aestheticism did not concern her; she would portray heroic paragons of rationality and taste. And the wise old man, St. Aubert, in The Mysteries of Udolpho reassures us that "Virtue and taste are nearly the same, for virtue is little more than active taste, and the most delicate affections of each combine in real love."

In her words, Mrs. Radcliffe tried to "improve" the romance by combining it with the courtesy book or moral apologue. By relying on two approved aesthetic conventions—the sublime and the picturesque—by relating taste to reason and virtue, and by occasionally insinuating religious overtones into her descriptive passages, she sought to establish respectable authority and purpose for ecstasies of appreciation. Freed from their disreputable ancestral connections, her heroes and heroines could function as exemplary, romantic ladies and gentlemen of the eighteenth century. In certain respects, of course, they continue to resemble their forebears: they feel terror during their adventures and melancholy in their more pensive moments; moreover, once rescued from their perils by the ingenuity of comic servants (instead of friendly elves), they relax into traditional, charming attitudes and creative fantasy. But they remain sceptical about the marvelous, and the authorial voice is always didactic.

On the other hand, as I have just suggested, appreciation alone did not satisfy Mrs. Radcliffe in her timid exploration of man's relationship to his natural environment. In the fourth of the passages that I have quoted from her journal, where she speaks of inspiration as well as taste, she reveals her fascination with nature as a stimulus to artistic creativity. After the usual deference to Burke in the opening words, Mrs. Radcliffe expands the idea of sublimity in a manner only hinted at in the Enquiry. The great scenes of nature, she says, especially those scenes in which obscurity becomes a source of the sublime, have the special power of awakening the creative fancy, as they did for the great poets of the past. Transformed by rapture, the eye of the refined beholder becomes "the poet's eye, which not only bodies forth unreal forms, but imparts to substantial objects a character higher than their own." Thus the rational romancer cautiously permits at least one supernatural creature to inhabit her landscapes, at the behest of her fictional characters, and that creature is the muse.

In Mrs. Radcliffe's dialogue "On the Supernatural in Poetry" this idea receives an even more explicit statement and becomes slightly tinged with pantheism. Invoking the authority of Shakespeare for his own romantic literary theories, W—(Willoughton) asks:

Where is now the undying spirit . . . that could so exquisitely perceive and feel?—that could inspire itself with the various characters of this world, and create worlds of its own: to which the grand and the beautiful, the gloomy and the sublime of visible Nature, up-called not only corresponding feelings, but passions; which seemed to perceive a soul in everything: and thus in the secret workings of its own characters, and in the combinations of its incidents, kept the elements and local scenery always in unison with them, heightening their effect?

Having cited several examples in Shakespeare, Willoughton ascribes the same power to draw imaginative stimulation from "whatever is graceful, grand, and sublime" to Milton, Gray, Collins, Beattie, and Thomson. In Mrs. Radcliffe's journal she several times suggests that particular scenes inspired famous literary creations. Moreover, Gaston de Blonde ville, with its background of Kenilworth Castle; her metrical romance, St. Alban's Abbey; and a number of her shorter poems all demonstrate her own creative response to the genius of the place.

Since this element in Mrs. Radcliffe's work has received little attention heretofore, it is worthwhile to note just how and where the creative fancy evolves from the landscapes of her prose fiction and to suggest how this idea may have affected her development as a writer.

Even the first of her romances, The Castles of Athlin and Dunbayne, boasts a hero whose poetic imagination encourages him to seek inspiration from scenery.

His warm imagination directed him to poetry, and he followed where she led. He loved to wander among the romantic scenes of the Highlands, where the wild variety of nature inspired him with all the enthusiasm of his favourite art. He delighted in the terrible and in the grand, more than in the softer landscape, and, wrapt in the bright visions of fancy, would often lose himself in awful solitudes.

At one point, under the influence of "the sweet tranquillity of evening," Osbert composes a sonnet about his "visions of fancy;" in it his imagination permits him to observe a distant landscape, where Evening appears, personified, and "fairy echoes" are heard.

On the other hand, at this early stage in her career, Mrs. Radcliffe had by no means fully committed herself to the muse of landscapes, and The Castles of Athlin and Dunbayne contains less description of scenery in proportion to its length than any of her other prose works except Gaston de Blondeville, in which no character shows the sensitivity of nature that is indicated by the antiquarian, Willoughton (who appears in the introduction to the actual story, as well as in the rejected dialogue).

The proportion of descriptive passages increase in A Sicilian Romance. Even the wicked Duke de Luovo, in his pursuit of the fugitive heroine, rests on "the summit of some wild cliffs .. . to view the picturesque imagery of the scene below." The female characters respond more effusively. Madame de Menon, for instance, experiences the full gamut of approved passions in the presence of Nature's "sublime and striking attitudes," ending in creative imagination and deistic piety.

Fancy caught the thrilling sensation, and at her touch the towering steeps became shaded with unreal blooms; the caves more darkly frowned—the projecting cliffs assumed a more terrific aspect, and the wild overhanging shrubs waved to the gale in deeper murmurs. The scene inspired Madame with reverential awe, and her thoughts involuntarily rose "from Nature up to Nature's God."

Julia, the heroine, demonstrates equal passion and inspiration by composing an ode to Evening, in which "To Fancy's eye fantastic forms appear." In the first part of the romance, she, with her sister, their tutor, and Madame de Menon inhabit the Castle Mazzini on the northern coast of Sicily. "In the fine evenings of summer," they enjoy a most spectacular view from

a pavilion, which was built on an eminence in the woods belonging to the castle. From this spot the eye had an almost boundless range of sea and land. It commanded the straits of Messina, with the opposite shores of Calabria, and a great extent of the wild and picturesque scenery of Sicily. Mount Aetna, crowned with eternal snows, and shooting from among the clouds, formed a grand and sublime picture in the background of the scene. The city of Palermo was also distinguishable; and Julia, as she gazed on its glittering spires, would endeavour in imagination to depicture its beauties . . . .

Once again, the scene arouses the imagination. But here Mrs. Radcliffe has blundered. By making her setting more specific than the vaguely designated Scottish Highlands of her first work, she betrays her insufficient knowledge of the area that she describes. With the help of a map of Sicily, a good text book on mathematical geography, and a few other details supplied by the writer (which indicate that the castle must be situated near the northeastern tip of the island) one can calculate that the "eminence" behind the castle would have to rise to a height of at least 8800 feet in order to afford a view of both the shore of Calabria and the towers of Palermo—very inconvenient for climbing in the evening, and higher than any mountain in Sicily except Etna and the peaks immediately adjacent, "in the background of the scene."

Perhaps we should regard this absurdity as mere "carelessness"—imperfect map-reading in the form of correctly observed directions but misjudged distances. Mrs. Radcliffe had never been to Sicily, nor had most of her readers. If inaccuracy in details, of whatever sort, did not concern them, why should it now concern us, or in any way diminish the pleasure that we can still derive from the Radcliffe canon? Frederick Garber, one of Mrs. Radcliffe's modern editors, though acknowledging her partial failure to maintain a consistent tone, nevertheless insists that none of her lapses in realism really matters [in his introduction to The Italian, 1968]:

The basic pleasure in Mrs. Radcliffe's romances comes from a suspension of disbelief that leads to an enjoyment of the world of her fiction in and for itself. Cheerfully anachronistic in the tastes and attitudes she bestows upon her heroines, Mrs. Radcliffe is equally inaccurate in her descriptions of monastic life, the historical surroundings, and, we are told by some critics, even in the landscapes she describes. But this annoys us no more than it would in a fairytale or an opera.

But Ann Radcliffe certainly did not seek the kind of credulous tolerance that Burke identifies with the unrefined reader of the older romances:

In his favourite author he is not shocked with the continual breaches of probability, the confusion of times, the offences against manners, the trampling upon geography and chronology, and he has never examined the grounds of probability.

Mrs. Radcliffe clearly assumes a different tone, addressing herself to readers of education and taste. By abandoning enchanted lands for Sicily and by substituting well-bred young ladies for fairy princesses, she has justified the reader in a demand for certain minimum standards of mimetic credibility, which she has, at the same time, failed to uphold. And I think that in so doing she allowed her aesthetics to misdirect her art. Determined to provide Julia with a view magnificent enough to produce a romantic fantasy, Mrs. Radcliffe enables her to see "glittering spires" that she could only have imagined. The eye has usurped the domain of the fancy.

In a very real sense, errors of this sort do matter, to those who see them, more than Mrs. Radcliffe's vagueness about the natural environment of remote areas or the manners and mores of former ages, for here she has, at least minimally, belied the very nature of mankind. Characters in fiction whom we are to take seriously as representations of human beings, rather than personifications of abstract qualities, must limit themselves to behaviour that is possible for their species in actual life. Mrs. Radcliffe's attempt to have it both ways gave the special impetus to Jane Austen's superb parody of her gothicism in Northanger Abbey.

It is true, nonetheless, that this confusion of eye and fancy has gone almost unnoticed by Ann Radcliffe's multitudinous readers in the English-speaking world. And their error on the side of generosity seems all the more curious in juxtaposition with the keener awareness demonstrated by French critics, from the beginning. In his perceptive article on the influence of Mrs. Radcliffe on Stendhal [in Stendhal Club, 1974] Philippe Berthier comes closer than any one I know to the principal line of thought of the present essay. Without assigning to the unwarranted expansiveness of vision of the Radcliffe characters the underlying cause that I have suggested above and will continue to explore, he gives this vision more than ample illustration and characterizes the landscapes eloquently:

. . . Elles dressent en fait un decor "idéal" qui se soucie moins de reproduire une realité vérifiable sur le terrain que de dressent un cadre propice à la satisfaction de besoins parfaitement subjectifs.

Rien n'échappe à un regard prospectif et recapitulateur qui, à chaque instant, semble excéder ses pouvoirs pour atteindre à une perspicacité presque cosmique.

The Romance of the Forest, Mrs. Radcliffe's third attempt at prose fiction, contains no blunders of this sort, in spite of the fact that the author has once again increased the proportion of landscape description and chosen as her principal locale a traditional setting of the fairy story. Except for certain lavish and inaccurate botanical details, which also appear in other works, the views of her characters do not actually encompass the impossible, partly because she usually describes them in the "heightened," generalized style that is especially characteristic of her earlier writing.

On the other hand, the principal heroine of The Romance of the Forest, Adeline, displays an even more ecstatic response to natural beauty than her predecessors. She several times gives way to the creative impulse, and, during one such interlude, she addresses an ode "To the Visions of Fancy." Furthermore, Mrs. Radcliffe barely saves the secondary heroine, Clara, from merging reality into dream, in the manner of Julia. As she and a group of the other characters sail across the Gulf of Lyons,

La Luc amused himself at intervals with discoursing, and pointing out the situations of considerable ports on the coast, and the mouths of the rivers that, after wandering through Provence, disembogue themselves into the Mediterranean. The Rhone, however, was the only one of much consequence which he passed. On this object, though it was so distant that fancy, perhaps, rather than sense, beheld it, Clara gazed with peculiar pleasure, for it came from the banks of the Savoy; and the wave which she thought she perceived, had washed the feet of her dear native mountains.

In a sixteenth-century romance, Clara would probably have had an actual vision of her "dear native mountains," with the aid of some magical device, but here she gazes "with peculiar pleasure" upon what she, "perhaps," cannot see, and fancy assumes the role of the magician.

One of the heroines of The Mysteries of Udolpho, Mrs. Radcliffe's longest and best known romance, penetrates darkness as easily as Clara annihilates distance, by recourse to the same, unfailing power, her imaginative vision. With irrepressible enthusiasm she continues to enjoy her view of the landscape after night has fallen.

The windows, which were numerous and large, descended low, and afforded a very extensive, and what Blanche's fancy represented to be a very lovely prospect; and she stood for some time, surveying the grey obscurity, and depicting imaginary woods and mountains, vallies and rivers, on that scene of night. . . .

Mrs. Radcliffe has deepened Burkean "obscurity" into the total darkness of a dream world.

In none of the five romances that came out in her lifetime does Mrs. Radcliffe ever describe a landscape that she herself saw. Even after she had made her picturesque tour, she preferred to work from literary sources, which she embroidered with her own, ever-active fancy. In some cases she has transformed factual accounts of travels into outlandish landscapes that no traveler, however enthusiastic, could ever have beheld. Since The Mysteries of Udolpho contains twice the proportion of landscape that we find in any other of Mrs. Radcliffe's romances, it provides abundant material for the study of her methods. Two examples of fanciful description, seldom noted by other critics, will suffice to illustrate her misuse of literary sources.

Having consulted Hester Lynch Piozzi, Pierre Jean Grosley, and possibly Thomas Gray for her account of Emily St. Aubert's crossing of the Alps, Mrs. Radcliffe apparently returned to the first of these sources, the Observations and Reflections Made in the Course of a Journey Through France, Italy, and Germany, to garner some details about Turin. Mrs. Piozzi describes the city as "built in form of a star, with a large stone in its centre, on which you are desired to stand and see the streets all branch regularly from it, each street terminating with a beautiful view of the surrounding country . . ." Transformed for Emily this common sight assumes a form that would startle a torinese. Mrs. Radcliffe writes: "The general magnificence of that city, with its vistas of churches and palaces, branching from the grand square, each opening to a landscape of the distant Alps or Apennines, was not only such as Emily had never seen in France, but such as she had never imagined." But if this heroine's lust for mountain glory allowed her to see the Apennines from Turin, she must have used her imagination.

Yet another of Emily's visions seems to owe its extravagance to Mrs. Radcliffe's imperfect adaptation of Mrs. Piozzi's Observations. Describing the countryside near Pisa, Mrs. Piozzi remarks: "The roadside is indeed hedged with festoons of vines, crawling from olive to olive, which they plant in the ditches of Tuscany as we do willows in Britain: mulberry trees too by the thousand, and some pollarded poplars serve for support to the glorious grapes that will soon be gathered." As the principal heroine of The Mysteries of Udolpho descends from the Apennines into "the vale of Arno," Mrs. Radcliffe provides her with an impossibly dilated version of what Mrs. Piozzi observed so accurately:

At a distance, in the east, Emily discovered Florence, with its towers rising on the brilliant horizon, and its luxuriant plain, spreading to the feet of the Apennines, speckled with gardens and magnificent villas, or coloured with groves of orange and lemon, with vines, corn, and plantations of olives and mulberry; while to the west, the vale opened to the waters of the Mediterranean, so distant, that they were known only by a bluish line, that appeared upon the horizon, and by the light marine vapour, which just stained the aether above.

The daughter of St. Aubert has heeded all too well her father's encouragement to cultivate "that high enthusiasm, which wakes the poet's dream." In fact, both she and Blanche might remind the unsympathetic reader of Thackeray's "Little Billee," who climbs "the maintop-gallant mast" to escape being killed and eaten by his shipmates and finds deliverance in an astounding sight:

"There's land I see:
"There's Jerusalem and Madagascar, And North and South Ameri-key.
"There's the British fleet a-riding at anchor, With Admiral Napier, K.C.B."

Scott conjectured that Mrs. Radcliffe's actual experience with romantic scenery during her journey down the Rhine may have inpsired the detailed description of The Mysteries of Udolpho, but C. F. Mclntyre has shown that simple chronology makes the influence impossible. On the other hand, it is likely that the tour sharpened Mrs. Radcliffe's vision, turning her away from both generalized and fanciful landscapes to the less heady delights of close and accurate observation. For instance, in her description of the view from Penrith Beacon, she estimates quite accurately the extent of the horizon and we even find an occasional note of disillusionment with the pleasures of the imagination, as in this account of a German city:

But Nimeguen lost much of its dignity on a nearer approach; for many of the towers which the treachery of fancy had painted at a distance, changed into forms less picturesque; and its situation, which a bold sweep of the Waal had represented to be on a rising peninsula crowning the flood, was found to be only a steep beside it.

Furthermore, towards the end of her journal, Mrs. Radcliffe begins to recognize the essential poverty of her descriptive method—her excessive repetition of borrowed terminology, her weakening of the emotional effect of landscape by the elaboration of details. "It is difficult," she admits

to spread varied pictures of such scenes before the imagination. A repetition of the same images of rock, wood and water, and the same epithets of grand, vast and sublime, which necessarily occur, must appear tautologous, on paper, though their archetypes in nature, ever varying in outline, or arrangement, exhibit new visions to the eye, and produce new shades of effect on the mind. It is difficult also, where these delightful differences have been experienced, to forbear dwelling on the remembrance, and attempting to sketch the peculiarities which occasioned them.

In the "Memoir" that he wrote to accompany Mrs. Radcliffe's posthumous volumes, T.N. Talfourd quotes several notes that she made in the course of later tours in England. Here she sometimes expresses her sensitive response to landscape and landscape painting in a simple, impressionistic manner that contrasts strikingly with the ornate descriptive style of her published work. Burkean concepts still shape her responses, but she seems more content to observe and record without imaginative elaboration. At the conclusion of one of these notes she admits: "Here the imagination has nothing to do; we have only to preserve the impression of the living picture on the memory, in its own soft colours." Ironically enough, Burke himself would have encouraged Mrs. Radcliffe in a forbearance that she usually found difficult. His Enquiry warns the writer that "in reality poetry and rhetoric do not succeed in exact description so well as painting does; their business is to affect rather by sympathy than imitation; to display rather the effect of things on the mind of the speaker, or of others, than to present a clear idea of the things themselves."

Before making her later tours Mrs. Radcliffe had already experimented with certain new descriptive methods in her most competently written romance, The Italian. In comparison with The Mysteries of Udolpho this work contains a sharply reduced proportion of scenery, perhaps because certain reviewers had complained that Mrs. Radcliffe described too many landscapes. More importantly, her experiences as a traveler benefited Mrs. Radcliffe as a writer. In The Italian she never confuses the eye with the fancy, and, by adopting different modes of description she makes certain scenes more vivid and more effective than anything in her earlier fiction. Throughout this romance we notice her attempts—crude attempts, in some cases—to take the landscapes out of their picture frames and give them more fictive relevance.

In describing the Lake of Celano, for instance, Mrs. Radcliffe tries to relate background to character in a new way by contrasting the different reactions of Vivaldi, Ellena, and the servant, Paulo, to the view. Furthermore, a few of the more interesting places, such as the ruins of Paluzzi and the bridge across the chasm in Volume I, becomes so closely related to the events that occur there, at various times, that they remain memorable to the reader, who would have difficulty in recalling any specific scene of sublimity in The Romance of the Forest.

In one of the most admired episodes of The Italian, the attempt of the evil monk, Schedoni, to murder the heroine, Ellena, in a forlorn mansion on the Adriatic coast, Mrs. Radcliffe demonstrates considerable skill in weaving the description of an approaching storm into the sinister prelude to the actual murder scene. When Ellena encounters Schedoni on the shore, she becomes "alarmed by his manner, and awed by the encreasing gloom, and swelling surge, that broke in thunder on the beach. . . ." Here and elsewhere in the episode Mrs. Radcliffe suggests a symbolic relationship between the storm in external nature and the raging passions in the breast of Schedoni, her most effective villain. Furthermore, she doesn't overelaborate and overtly specify the symbolism; she has managed to avoid the "set piece," in which she so often tried to harmonize nature with the emotions of a heroine in her other stories. For the first time in this romance, Mrs. Radcliffe makes the events take place in her century rather than in a bygone age, though she again chooses a remote locale. Again for the first time, no character in The Italian gives vent to the creative impulse by writing verse. But Mrs. Radcliffe has not abandoned her fascination with landscape as a stimulus to the romantic imagination, as she explicitly informs us in this characterization of Ellena and Schedoni:

To the harassed spirits of Ellena the changing scenery was refreshing and she frequently yielded her cares to the influence of majestic nature. Over the gloom of Schedoni, no scenery had, at any moment, power; the shape and paint of external imagery gave neither impression or colour to his fancy. He contemned the sweet illusions, to which other spirits are liable, and which often confer a delight more exquisite, and not less innocent, than any, which deliberative reason can bestow.

By creating her hybrid of romance and courtesy book, which, in The Italian, begins to change into a novel, Mrs. Radcliffe tried to satisfy a rather demanding contemporary taste. Having reassured her readers with a certain amount of realism and moral instruction, she then encouraged them to luxuriate in sublimity, picturesque beauty, and creative fantasy. Those who have lost the taste for this ill-sorted accumulation of fictional elements and discover little redeeming artistry in Mrs. Radcliffe's works will not take much pleasure in them. But because her descriptions of landscape helped to stimulate a new sensitivity to natural beauty and because they bear a curious relationship to the fictive structure in which she embedded them, they will always remain interesting to the literary historian and the genre critic. From either point of view it is significant that Mrs. Radcliffe found in nature the ultimate source of the poet's fancy.