Читать книгу Heroines Of Fiction - William Dean Howells - Страница 35

IT is not only in her conscientious explanation of the "Mysteries of Udolpho" that Mrs. Radcliffe pays tribute to the realistic ideal of her time. Her romances are as chaste in motive and as modest in material as Jane Austen's novels, and far decenter than most novels of any age. They might be blamed for their blending of sublimity and absurdity, but there is no specious mixture of good and bad in them to confound the conscience by the spectacle of noble rascality or virtuous depravity in any form. One may squander one's time on them, but one cannot get positive harm from them. They may misrepresent manners, but they do not misrepresent morals; and in their idyllic passages, such as that episode of the pastor La Luc in "The Romance of the Forest," they are refining, and even edifying. It is hard not to wish a little to be like Mrs. Radcliffe's good people, and one never wishes to be like her bad people. The love-making between her heroes and heroines is of virginal purity; the heroine is always a Nice Girl, just as a heroine of Jane Austen or Frances Burney is, even if she is not a Real Girl; and it is to be claimed for Anne Radcliffe that she too helped with the other great women authors of her time to characterize Anglo-Saxon fiction with decency. When the magic wand fell from her hold, it passed to the keeping of a man whose ideal was as high and pure as her own.