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The three novels collected here all belong to the later years of the eighteenth century. The first represents what may be called the last stand of Augustanism before that riot of fancy and imagination, as exemplified by the other two tales, that ushered in the Romantic Revival. Thus in Rasselas we have Johnson, with the fortitude of Atlas, supporting the miseries of the world on his broad shoulders; Horace Walpole shutting us up in his Castle of Otranto, away from reality and all reasonableness; and Beckford, in Vathek, transporting us on his magic carpet to the court of the grandson of Haroun al Raschid, and thence to a region of perdition and eternal fire, where all memory of Augustanism is irretrievably lost.

They are strange company these three books, but they are nevertheless infallible indexes to the taste of their time. The fact that Rasselas in 1759 met with such enormous success and that The Castle of Otranto four years later met with perhaps an equal success, indicates as plainly as anything could that although people had not lost their admiration for Johnson, they were already tiring of “good sense” and quite willing to give free play to those wilder impulses in their natures that Augustanism had sought to discipline. But this time the tide turned with a vengeance! The grave Wordsworth, a romantic himself, is found deploring the “frantic novels” of this time, although Shelley’s young and fiery imagination seized upon them with avidity, and, in Zastrozzi, he wrote an even more frantic one himself. But it was The Castle of Otranto, written in conscious reaction against the domesticities and sentiment of Richardson, with its plea that the material of the novel could be taken from anything but the events of ordinary life, that opened the gates onto the land of Romance. And in its train came all the rest of the “Gothic” and “terror” novelists—Clara Reeve, Mrs. Radcliffe, “Monk” Lewis, Charles Maturin—to mention only those who are now chiefly remembered. Vathek, however, stands alone, without predecessors or immediate followers, belonging to a quite un-English tradition, although the Oriental tale in one shape or another had quite a vogue in the eighteenth century—if we may include such things as Collins’s Persian Eclogues and Goldsmith’s Chinaman, or even Rasselas itself, which, at least, has a nominal setting in the East.

Rasselas was written, as every one knows, during the evenings of a week, when Johnson “had occasion for thirty pounds on Monday night,” as he wrote to the printer on 20 January, 1759. His mother had just died and he sat down in his Gough Square garret to earn the necessary money for her funeral and for paying off the few debts she had left. Her death, we are told, was a great loss to Johnson, and it is wonderful that what he wrote under pressure at that time should be free not only from bitterness but from a complaint of any kind. Melancholy it certainly is, but melancholy with a rare elevation of mind and no more weighed down with thought—a rather foolish charge that is sometimes levelled against it—than is any work that deals profoundly with the major problems of life. It has also been said of Rasselas, with more reason, that it is a test of the reader’s capacity to appreciate the peculiar qualities of Johnson’s thought. These qualities, as any one who takes the trouble to analyse them can see for himself, are a square face to face attitude to life that takes things as they come, realizing the futility of attempting “a choice of life,” and if without overmuch hope for the future, at least free from the disintegration of high hopes disappointed. There is nothing pedantic or high-flown in this attitude which, with a noble solemnity, enabled Johnson to bear up against all odds and to steer right on. Undeniably there is sustenance to be got from Rasselas. And if its author has certain qualities in common with his own “solemn elephant reposing in the shade,” they are, one feels, the product of a character that, like Donne’s elephant, could hardly be dislodged without the noise and cataclysm of a whole town undermined—whereas much of the style of to-day, which despises what it calls “Johnsonese,” could be blown away with a puff of wind. What obtuseness there is in Johnson’s attitude of mind is due to the qualities that he shared with “the giant of beasts,” a slow-movingness and an apparent lack of the more intricate nerves of feeling. Compare his prose with its antithesis, that of Donne, who, for all his medieval theology, was more modern in the working of his mind than Johnson; for whereas the author of Rasselas will bring you surely and by slow degrees to a conclusion, the mind of the author of Death’s Duel and the sermons seems to anticipate all conclusions at once with the rapidity and circuitousness of a thousand ants. Johnson will attack a problem broadside on, and it is to him we come for substantial resistance against life, but to Donne we go for an inward and self-conscious activity that undermines it. Yet one would read Rasselas ten times for every single reading of Donne’s sermons, which are as the fire of the spirit consuming.

Taken altogether, then, Rasselas is a prose Vanity of Human Wishes, a disquisition on the limitations of life rather than a novel holding our attention by a sequence of events. How characteristic is the passage on the pyramids! Only Johnson, who kept his head among the Highland mountains, could have written as he does here, summing up, in these two sentences, his whole attitude towards happiness and material possessions:

I consider this mighty structure as a monument of the insufficiency of human enjoyments. A king whose power is unlimited, and whose treasures surmount all real and imaginary wants, is compelled to solace, by the erection of a Pyramid, the satiety of dominion and tastelessness of pleasures, and to amuse the tediousness of declining life by seeing thousands labouring without end, and one stone, for no purpose, laid upon another.

Surely that is magnificent prose, and no one else could have written with just that fine balance and that same elevation of mind—unless it was Browne, also pitying the builder of the pyramids in Hydriotaphia.

To pass on to The Castle of Otranto from Rasselas is like going from the reality and reasonable order of Kew Gardens, with its noble lawns and splendidly cultivated trees, into some side-show of artificial medievalism, complete with ghosts in rattling armour, skeletons and knights, at the White City or the old Earl’s Court Exhibition. At a step we leave behind us the familiar light of day for a castle of uneasy spirits with the wind whining through its battlements. Otranto is such a castle, indeed, as never existed and its people were never anywhere but inside its walls. It is a Gothic “shocker” which is neither truly Gothic nor shocking; for its terror-apparatus has ceased to make us tremble and its chivalrous cant and heroical sentiments no longer quicken our heart. And yet there is something about this absurd tale that still holds our attention—a spark of genius perhaps that occasionally flashes out through the cracks in the rusty armour and the turret windows; and it is this that hurries it impetuously to its climax of furious bathos not altogether without the sweep of tragedy. Yet did one not know beforehand that the book was written in good faith, there would be every excuse for mistaking it for an uproarious parody of the old type of medieval romance.

To Sir Walter Scott, however, Horace Walpole’s castle was anything but an occasion for mirth. Evidently writing against the general opinion of the book at that time, he says, in his chapter on Walpole in The Lives of the Novelists, that it is doing the author an injustice to suppose that his sole purpose was to terrorize his readers. Walpole’s intention was, he assures us, to depict the social life of the Middle Ages about the time of the first Crusade, although he admits that “by the too frequent recurrence of his prodigies, Mr. Walpole ran, perhaps, his greatest risk of awakening la raison froide, that cold common sense, which he justly deemed the greatest enemy of the effect which he hoped to produce.” But it does not require very much cold common sense to discern that, for all this supernatural paraphernalia, The Castle of Otranto, unlike Mrs. Radcliffe’s books, lacks atmosphere—the first essential in preparing the mind for legendary happenings. It is simply foolish to bring what purport to be supernatural phenomena into broad daylight and then to expect us to believe in their reality. But when Scott writes of “the gigantic and preposterous figures dimly visible in the defaced tapestry—the remote clang of the distant doors which divide him from living society—the deep darkness which involves the high and fretted roof of the apartment—the dimly-seen pictures of ancient knights, renowned for their valour, and perhaps for their crimes—the varied and indistinct sounds which disturb the silent desolation of a half-deserted mansion,” he at once awakes the imagination and creates an atmosphere pregnant with the foreboding of invisible presences that prepares the reader to believe almost anything. Scott can raise our hair in a sentence, but all Walpole’s bleeding statues and sighing pictures can only move us to a certain mild amusement. It is obvious, too, that in his generous tribute to Walpole, Scott was carried away by a conception of his own of what his predecessor might have done. Moreover, he was anxious to own his debt to Walpole for introducing an element into the novel that he himself was to develop in a way that is still unsurpassed. For nowadays, although Walpole, and his immediate follower Clara Reeve, with her Old English Baron (1777), actually introduced it, it is not of Walpole or Reeve that we think when the historical novel is mentioned, but of Scott. But being the first attempt of its kind on any serious scale, it is natural that Scott should have respected The Castle of Otranto, although we of to-day, having the whole varied wealth of Scott’s imagination behind us, as well as the work of his many followers, find it harder to give Walpole the just measure of praise that, in spite of attendant absurdities, is his due.

The mysterious inconsistencies of Vathek (1786) have been sufficiently remarked. But every fresh reader cannot help being struck by the strange contrast between the cynical flippancies of the earlier portions and the sombre grandeur and moral conviction inspiring the scenes in the Hall of Eblis. Should we take Vathek merely as an extravaganza with a moral turn—which only serves to make it the more macabre—in which the characters, not being responsible for their actions, are scarcely culpable; or should we take it as an allegory of the vanity of unrestrained desires and inordinate ambition promoting “that blind curiosity which would transgress the bounds of wisdom the Creator has prescribed to human knowledge”? Perhaps Beckford did not intend his tale to be interpreted too solemnly. Some indication of his attitude is given in a letter to Henley dated 23 April, 1785, in which, speaking of the most innocent of his characters, he says: “I have always thought Nouronihar too severely punished, and if I knew how conveniently, would add a crime or two to her share. What say you?” But it would be a mistake to imagine that Beckford was in any way ashamed of his production—far from it!—and it may be that, like Voltaire, he was in the habit of saying the most serious things flippantly. As it is, Vathek himself with his basilisk glance and outrageous appetite is partly a figure of fun, and, by his black magic and pact with the powers of darkness, partly an Oriental Faust, helped on to damnation by his mother, the Princess Carathis, who with her insane thirst for supernatural dominion is a more ghastly Lady Macbeth. But however we regard the enigma of Vathek, Beckford’s real claim to remembrance rests on the half-dozen pages at the end of the book, where his description of the Hall of Eblis has been compared to Milton’s Pandemonium, Eblis himself being considered as a kind of inferior Satan. And perhaps there is a touch of Salammbô as well, as Vathek and Nouronihar stand before the ruins of Istakar, with their intolerable mystery and deathly stillness under the moon.

Thus, if The Castle of Otranto has suffered rather badly in its passage through time, although it will always remain one of the chief curiosities of our literature, and if we cannot altogether make up our minds about Vathek, there can be no doubt whatever of the permanent value of Rasselas. It is a greater and more subtle book than it is commonly thought to be. Too many people know only Boswell’s Johnson—here we have Johnson himself, discussing marriage, the art of flying, and the soul. And what strikes us most in re-reading him now, quite apart from the style which is essentially of its period, is the modernity of his thought. Even more than most profound thinkers who are modern for all time by having reached a certain depth of consciousness that never changes, Johnson in certain passages of his book astonishes by the way in which he has anticipated the conclusions of contemporary thinkers. His conception of the mind is essentially modern, showing it as at once the creator and destroyer of all values and systems, and yet “the continuance of reason” being uncertain—although madness is determined only by the degree to which one idea or one set of ideas predominates to the exclusion of others—he says, in effect, with Pirandello—“That’s the truth if you think it is!” But realizing the final inefficacy of any one system of belief, and being deficient in real faith, he was content, like his own Imlac, “to be driven along the stream of life, without directing his course to any particular port.” And so Rasselas ends, as all good discussions on life must, with a conclusion “in which nothing is concluded.”

PHILIP HENDERSON.

For biographical notes on the authors and short bibliographies see the beginning of each story.