o was he?' cry the young people. Valancourt, my
dears, was the hero of one of the most famous romances which ever was
published in this country. The beauty and elegance of Valancourt made
your young grandmamma's' gentle hearts to beat with respectful sympathy.
He and his glory have passed away. . . Enquire at Mudie's or the London
Library, who asks for the 'Mysteries of Udolpho' now."[22] Hazlitt said
that he owed to Mrs. Radcliffe his love of moonlight nights, autumn
leaves and decaying ruins. It was, indeed, in the melodramatic
manipulation of landscape that this artist was most original. "The
scenes that savage Rosa dashed" seemed to have been her model, and
critics who were fond of analogy called her the Salvator Rosa of fiction.
It is here that her influence on Byron and Chateaubriand is most
apparent.[23] Mrs. Radcliffe's scenery is not quite to our modern taste,
any more than are Salvator's paintings. Her Venice by moonlight, her
mountain gorges with their black pines and foaming torrents, are not
precisely the Venice and the Alps of Ruskin; rather of the operatic
stage. Still they are impressive in their way, and in this department
she possessed genuine poetic feels and a real mastery of the art of
painting in distemper. Witness the picture of the castle of Udolpho, on
Emily's first sight of it, and the hardly less striking description, in
the "Romance of the Forest," of the ruined abbey in which the La Motte
family take refuge: "He approached and perceived the Gothic remains of an
abbey: it stood on a kind of rude lawn, overshadowed by high and
spreading trees, which seemed coeval with the building, and diffused a
romantic gloom around. The greater part of the pile appeared to be
sinking into ruins, and that which had withstood the ravages of time
showed the remaining features of the fabric more awful in decay. The
lofty battlements, thickly enwreathed with ivy, were half demolished and
become the residence of birds of prey. Huge fragments of the eastern
tower, which was almost demolished, lay scattered amid the high grass,
that waved slowly in the breeze. 'The thistle shook its lonely head: the
moss whistled to the wind.'[24] A Gothic gate, richly ornamented with
fretwork, which opened into the main body of the edifice, but which was
now obstructed with brushwood, remained entire. Above the vast and
magnificent portal of this gate arose a window of the same order, whose
pointed arches still exhib