MATTHEW GREGORY LEWIS
(1775 - 1818)

English novelist, playwright, diarist, prose writer, and poet.

Lewis is best known as the author of The Monk (1796), a notorious eighteenth-century novel of horror that is considered one of the greatest examples of English Gothic fiction. Unlike Horace Walpole and Ann Radcliffe, his predecessors in the Gothic school who created genteel novels of suspense, Lewis emphasized the graphic and the sensational. The Monk's blend of overt sexuality and terror created a scandal in England, and its author, branded licentious and perverse, came to be known solely as "Monk" Lewis. While the lurid elements of Lewis's work are still controversial, modern critics acknowledge his talent as an innovative writer of prose and verse who contributed to the Gothic literary tradition as well as the development of the English Romantic movement.

BIOGRAPHICAL INFORMATION

Lewis was born into a wealthy and socially prominent London family. His mother and father separated while he was young, and his attempts to remain on good terms with both parents created an emotional strain that endured throughout his life. Some biographers contend, in fact, that this stress resulted in an emotional immaturity that manifested itself in Lewis's work. Although Lewis displayed a talent for writing at an early age and was encouraged to write by his mother, his father urged him to pursue a diplomatic career instead. After graduation from Oxford in 1794, Lewis became an attaché to the British Embassy in Holland, an assignment he despised. To ease his boredom, Lewis wrote The Monk during a ten week period. The notoriety that accompanied The Monk's publication in 1796 made Lewis a financially successful, if infamous, author. Led by Samuel Taylor Coleridge, contemporary critics labeled Lewis's tale of Ambrosio, the wayward monk, immoral and obscene. Lewis had recently been elected to the House of Commons, and The Monk proved so controversial that, in order to retain his position, he was required to issue an expurgated edition. Shortly therafter, Lewis left politics and began writing drama. In the years before his death, Lewis spent most of his time on the Jamaican estates he had inherited, which were maintained by slaves. By all accounts, Lewis was a compassionate man who advocated the abolition of slavery and retained his plantations solely at the request of his slaves, who feared the financial responsibility of freedom. During his final trip to Jamaica, Lewis tried desperately to improve the living conditions of his slaves. Despite his efforts, he was able to implement little change and, despondent, decided to return home. By the time Lewis boarded a ship for England, he had already developed yellow fever. He died several days later. His crew prepared to bury him at sea, but as they lowered the casket, its shroud caught in the wind and the coffin sailed slowly back to Jamaica.

MAJOR WORKS

The Monk's protagonist, Ambrosio, who is a monk as well as a foundling of mysterious past and parentage, has risen to the position of abbot of the Capuchins, becoming a well-respected figure in medieval Madrid, revered by the populace. At the monastery, a young novitiate named Rosario approaches Ambrosio and reveals that he is actually a woman named Matilda de Villanges, whose love for Ambrosio has led her to disguise herself in order to be nearer to him. The two consummate a sexual relationship, though Ambrosio later feels remorse and disgust for his actions. After his interlude with Matilda, while visiting the nearby convent of St. Clare, Ambrosio discovers that Agnes, a nun, desires to elope with her lover, Don Raymond de las Cisternas. The monk discloses this information to Mother St. Agatha, prioress of the convent, who punishes Agnes by imprisoning her in a dungeon beneath the convent. Later, Ambrosio travels to the house of the ailing Donna Elvira Dalfa and there falls in love with her young daughter, Antonia. With the aid of Matilda and her knowledge of black magic, the monk summons a demon so that he might violate the girl. Ambrosio returns to Donna Elvira's house, kills her, and abducts Antonia, now unconscious through the action of a magical potion. In the meantime, Agnes's brother, Lorenzo, accuses Mother St. Agatha of murdering his sister and wins a warrant for her arrest. An angry mob forms in response to the accusation, and the crowd razes the convent, murdering the prioress and many innocent nuns. Amid the chaos, Lorenzo enters the convent grounds in search of his sister. When he finds her she is close to death and clutching the decaying body of her dead child. Hearing the screams of a young girl nearby, Lorenzo discovers Antonia's ravished and stabbed body and observes her attacker, Ambrosio, as he flees; later he notifies the Inquisition of Ambrosio's crimes. Ordered to be burned at the stake, Ambrosio, at the urgings of Matilda, makes a pact with Satan, exchanging his soul for freedom. The devil appears and saves him from the flames of the Inquisition, only to reveal that in killing Donna Elvira and raping Antonia, he has murdered his own mother and committed incest with his sister. The story ends as the monk's forfeit soul is cast into hell.

Scholars observe that the thematic character of The Monk departs somewhat from that of the traditional Gothic novel. While it favors the evocation of grotesque horror rather than the rendering of a sentimental theme of justice based upon divine Providence, Lewis's novel nevertheless presents a critique of human vice and explores the conflict between religion and human sexuality. This conflict is dramatized in the character of Ambrosio through the juxtaposition of the monk's pride and destructive sexual appetite with the innocent virtue of Antonia and the forthrightness of Lorenzo. Many commentators note, however, that the dullness of the novel's virtuous characters fails to match the depth and complexity of Ambrosio and Matilda, and instead locate evidence of the novel's primary theme in the psychological exploration of its fallen protagonist and his accomplice. Likewise, many have observed that Matilda's strong will and intelligence make her far more compelling than her counterpart Antonia, despite her manipulative behavior and demonic nature. Others have commented on Lewis's attempts to establish an unsettling parallel between the violence of the riotous mob in his novel and that of the French Revolution, or on his deft integration of legends and folk tales, such as those of the Bleeding Nun and the Wandering Jew, in order to illicit terror and add universal appeal to his story.

Of Lewis's plays, the best known is The Castle Spectre (1797), a Gothic production that met the current demand for melodrama, spectacle, and two-dimensional characterization. Although it helped establish Lewis as one of the era's most popular playwrights, The Castle Spectre is largely overlooked by modern critics. In 1801, Lewis published Tales of Wonder, a collection of poems dealing with the supernatural that also includes works by Sir Walter Scott and Robert Southey. Lewis also composed poetry that he included in his plays and later published, as well as two novels that never enjoyed the success or notoriety of The Monk. He ceased writing fiction in 1812, when his father died and left him a great deal of money. Lewis's posthumously-published Journal of a West India Proprietor, Kept during a Residence in the Island of Jamaica (1834) recounts his voyages to Jamaica, inspections of the plantations, and plans for change. Written in lively prose, the Journal reveals Lewis as a sensitive and perceptive observer of the natural world. Though it is seldom read today, critics who have studied the work consider it one of Lewis's greatest achievements.

CRITICAL RECEPTION

With the exception of the Journal, Lewis's works were ignored from the time of his death until the twentieth century, when critics began to recognize Lewis's influence on the Romantic movement. When it was first published, The Monk created a considerable stir and earned Lewis instant fame, even infamy, as its author. Labeled obscene by a cast of critics, including Coleridge—who acknowledged that despite its immorality the novel was the "offspring of no common genius"—it was nevertheless extremely popular, and went through five editions before the end of the century. The controversy that the first edition sparked prompted Lewis to expurgate certain passages from these later printings, though scholars now agree that his changes were largely superficial. Early critics emphasized the lewdness and irreligion of the work, especially of a scene in which Antonia reads an edited version of the Bible given to her by her mother, and maintained that The Monk was a product of the revolutionary atmosphere of the late eighteenth century. In the twentieth century critics reevaluated the influence of the work on the writers of the Romantic movement. Modern scholars have since observed that The Monk represents a successful synthesis of the techniques and materials used by Gothic horror writers, leading many to take a renewed interest in the work. Recent critics have applied the tools of psychological criticism to The Monk, examining its sexual imagery and applying biographical information about Lewis's childhood development and psyche to understanding the novel. Later studies have probed the conflict between sexuality and religion and the juxtaposition of violence and passion within the novel. Angela Wright traces parallels between The Monk and the Marquis de Sade's novel Justine, noting that the two works influenced one another in significant ways, including in their narrative technique and portrayal of heroines. Montague Summers asserted that Lewis "introduced new and essential features both by his prose works, his verse and his dramas into the Gothic novel, upon which he exercised so tremendous, one might almost say so illimitable, an influence" and declared that "the vast imaginative force derived from Lewis which energized and inspired numerical novels and impelled the incidence of romance in particular directions,… [can] very clearly be related to and are in effect resultant from the genius, often morbid and wayward, yet ever vital and compelling, of Matthew Gregory Lewis."

PRINCIPAL WORKS

The Monk: A Romance. 3 vols. (novel) 1796
Village Virtues: A Dramatic Satire. In Two Parts (play) 1796
The Castle Spectre: A Drama. In Five Acts (play) 1797
The Twins; or, Is It He, or His Brother? A Farce in Two Acts (play) 1799
The East Indian: A Comedy. In Five Acts (play) 1800
Adelmorn, the Outlaw: A Romantic Drama, in Three Acts (play) 1801
Tales of Wonder; Written and Collected by M. G. Lewis. 2 vols. [with Sir Walter Scott and Robert Southey] (poetry) 1801
Alfonso, King of Castile: A Tragedy, in Five Acts (play) 1802
The Captive: A Scene in a Private Mad-House (play) 1803
Rugantino; or, The Bravo of Venice. A Grand Romantic Melo-Drama, in Two Acts (play) 1805
Adelgitha; or, The Fruits of a Single Error. A Tragedy, in Five Acts (play) 1806
The Wood Daemon; or, The Clock Has Struck. A Grand Romantic Melo-Drama, in Two Acts (play) 1807
Romantic Tales. 4 vols. (poetry and prose) 1808
Twelve Ballads, the Words and Music by M. G. Lewis (poetry) 1808
Venoni, or, The Novice of St. Mark's: A Drama, in Three Acts (play) 1809
Timour the Tartar: A Grand Romantic Melo-Drama, in Two Acts (play) 1811
Poems (poetry) 1812
The Harper's Daughter; or, Love and Ambition: A Tragedy (play) 1813
The Isle of Devils. A Historical Tale, Founded on an Anecdote in the Annals of Portugal (poem) 1827
Journal of a West India Proprietor, Kept during a Residence in the Island of Jamaica (diary) 1834

PRIMARY SOURCES

MATTHEW GREGORY LEWIS (POEM DATE 1796)

SOURCE: Lewis, Matthew Gregory. "Preface." In The Monk: A Romance. 1796. Third edition, pp. iii-v. London: J. Bell, 1797.

In the following poem, a preface to his well-known novel first published in 1796, Lewis addresses his work, minimizing both its merit and his own talent.

Imitation of Horace, Ep. 20.—B. 1.

    Methinks, Oh! vain ill-judging book,
    I see thee cast a wishful look,
    Where reputations won and lost are
    In famous row called Paternoster.
    Incensed to find your precious olio
    Buried in unexplored port-folio,
    You scorn the prudent lock and key,
    And pant well bound and gilt to see
    Your volume in the window set
    Of Stockdale, Hookham, or Debrett.
 
    Go then, and pass that dangerous bourn
    Whence never book can back return:
    And when you find, condemned, despised
    Neglected, blamed, and criticised,
    Abuse from all who read you fall,
    (If haply you be read at all)
    Sorely will you your folly sigh at,
    And wish for me, and home, and quiet.
 
      Assuming now a conjuror's office, I
    Thus on your future fortune prophesy:—
    Soon as your novelty is o'er,
    And you are young and new no more,
    In some dark dirty corner thrown,
    Mouldy with damps, with cobwebs strown,
    Your leaves shall be the book-worm's prey;
    Or sent to chandler-shop away,
    And doomed to suffer public scandal,
    Shall line the trunk, or wrap the candle!
 
      But should you meet with approbation,
    And some one find an inclination
    To ask, by natural transition,
    Respecting me and my condition;
    That I am one, the enquirer teach,
    Nor very poor, nor very rich;
    Of passions strong, of hasty nature,
    Of graceless form and dwarfish stature;
    By few approved, and few approving;
    Extreme in hating and in loving;
    Abhorring all whom I dislike,
    Adoring who my fancy strike;
    In forming judgments never long,
    And for the most part judging wrong;
    In friendship firm, but still believing
    Others are treacherous and deceiving,
    And thinking in the present æra
    That friendship is a pure chimæra:
    More passionate no creature living,
    Proud, obstinate, and unforgiving;
    But yet for those who kindness show,
    Ready through fire and smoke to go.
 
      Again, should it be asked your page,
    "Pray, what may be the author's age?"
    Your faults, no doubt, will make it clear,
    I scarce have seen my twentieth year,
    Which passed, kind Reader, on my word,
    While England's throne held George the Third.
 
      Now then your venturous course pursue:
    Go, my delight!—Dear book, adieu!

MATTHEW GREGORY LEWIS (ESSAY DATE 1798)

SOURCE: Lewis, Matthew Gregory. "To the Reader." In The Castle Spectre: A Drama. In Five Acts, pp. 100-03. London: J. Bell, 1798.

In the following essay, Lewis addresses readers of The Castle Spectre, informing them of the inspirations for his narrative and characters, and defending his work against negative criticism.

Many erroneous assertions have been made respecting this Drama; some, that the language was originally extremely licentious; others, that the sentiments were violently democratic; and others again, that if Mr. Sheridan had not advised me to content myself with a single Spectre, I meant to have exhibited a whole regiment of Ghosts. To disprove these reports I have deviated from the usual mode of publishing Plays, as performed, and have printed mine almost verbatim, as originally written. Whether it merited the above accusations, the reader has now had an opportunity of judging for himself. I must just mention that the last line of the Piece is altered, and that in the Second Scene of the Fifth Act, The Friar was made to stick in the door-way, whereas he now makes his exit without difficulty.

Other charges, however, have been brought against me on better grounds, and I must request the reader's patience while I say a few words respecting them. To originality of character I make no pretence. Persecuted heroines and consciencestung villains certainly have made their courtesies and bows to a British audience long before the appearance of "The Castle Spectre;" the Friar and Alice are copies, but very faint ones, from Juliet's Nurse, and Sheridan's Father Paul, and Percy is a mighty pretty-behaved young gentleman with nearly no character at all. I shall not so readily give up my claim to novelty, when I mention my misanthropic Negro: He has been compared to Zanga; but Young's Hero differs widely from what I meant in Hassan. Zanga's hatred is confined to one object; to destroy the happiness of that object is his sole aim, and his vengeance is no sooner ac-complished, than he repents its gratification. Hassan is a man of violent passions, and warm feelings, whose bosom is filled with the milk of human kindness, but that milk is soured by despair; whose nature was susceptible of the tenderest affections, but who feels that all the chains of his affections are broken for ever. He has lost every thing, even hope; he has no single object against which he can direct his vengeance, and he directs it at large against mankind. He hates all the world, hates even himself; for he feels that in that world there is no one that loves him.

    "Lorsque l'on peut souffrir, sure que ses douleurs
    "D'aucun mortel ne font jamais couler les pleurs,
    "On se desinteresse à la fin de soi-même;
    "On cesse de s'aimer, si quelqu'un ne nous aime!"

But though Hassan's heart is changed by disappointment and misfortune, that heart once was feeling and kind; nor could he hate with such inveteracy, if he had not loved with extreme affection. In my opinion this character is not Zanga's; but this I must leave to the public decision. I may, however, boldly, and without vanity, assert, that Motley is quite new to the Stage. In other plays the Fool has always been a sharp knave, quick in repartee, and full of whim, fancy, and entertainment; whereas my Fool (but I own I did not mean to make him so) is a dull, flat, good sort of plain matter of fact fellow, as in the course of the performance Mr. Bannister discovered to his great sorrow.

That Osmond is attended by negroes is an anachronism, I allow; but from the great applause which Mr. Dowton constantly received in Hassan (a character which he played extremely well), I am inclined to think that the audience was not greatly offended at the impropriety. For my own part, I by no means repent the introduction of my Africans: I thought it would give a pleasing variety to the characters and dresses, if I made my servants black; and could I have produced the same effect by making my heroine blue, blue I should have made her.

In the Friar's defence, when he most ungallantly leaves Angela in the cavern to shift for herself, I can only plead the necessity of the case. Stay where he was he could not; go he must at any rate: I trundled him off in the best way that I could; and, for the sake of the public, I heartily wish that way had been better. With regard to his not meeting Osmond in his flight, a little imagination will soon conquer that difficulty: It may be supposed, that as he lost his way in coming, he lost it again in going; or, that he concealed himself till the Earl had passed him; or, that he tumbled down and broke his neck; or, that he … did any thing else you like better. I leave this matter entirely to the reader's fancy.

Against mySpectre many objections have been urged: one of them I think rather curious. She ought not to appear, because the belief in Ghosts no longer exists! In my opinion, this is the very reason why she may be produced without danger; for there is now no fear of increasing the influence of superstition, or strengthening the prejudices of the weak-minded. I confess I cannot see any reason why Apparitions may not be as well permitted to stalk in a tragedy, as Fairies be suffered to fly in a pantomime, or Heathen Gods and Goddesses to cut capers in a grand ballet; and I should rather imagine that Oberon and Bacchus now find as little credit to the full as the Cock-lane Ghost, or the Spectre of Mrs. Veal.

Never was any poor soul so ill-used as Evelina's, previous to her presenting herself before the audience. The Friends to whom I read my Drama, the Managers to whom I presented it, the Actors who were to perform in it—all combined to persecute my Spectre, and requested me to confine my Ghost to the Green-Room. Aware that without her my catastrophe would closely resemble that of the Grecian Daughter, I persisted in retaining her. The event justified my obstinacy: The Spectre was as well treated before the curtain as she had been ill-used behind it; and as she continues to make her appearance nightly with increased applause, I think myself under great obligations both to her and her representative.

But though I am conscious that it is very imperfect, I shall not so far offend my own feelings, or insult the judgment of the public, which has given it a very favourable reception, as to say that I think my Play very bad. Had such been my opinion, instead of producing it on the stage, or committing it to the press, I should have put it behind the fire, or, throwing it into the Thames, made a present of it to the British Scombri. Still its success on the stage (great enough to content even an author) does not prevent my being very doubtful as to its reception in the closet, when divested of its beautiful music, splendid scenery, and, above all, of the acting, excellent throughout. Without detracting from the merits of the other performers (to all of whom I think myself much indebted for their respective exertions), I must here be permitted to return particular thanks to Mrs. Jordan, whose manner of sustaining her character exceeded my most sanguine hopes, and in whose hands my heroine acquired an importance for which she was entirely indebted to the talents of the actress.

GENERAL COMMENTARY

MONTAGUE SUMMERS (ESSAY DATE 1938)

SOURCE: Summers, Montague. "Matthew Gregory Lewis." In The Gothic Quest: A History of the Gothic Novel. 1938. Reprint edition, pp. 202-38. New York: Russell & Russell, 1964.

In the following excerpt from his influential study of Gothic literature first published in 1938, Summers surveys Lewis's fictional and dramatic works and asserts that Lewis had tremendous influence upon other authors who wrote in the Gothic tradition.

He was a child, and a spoiled child, but a child of high imagination…. He had the finest ear for the rhythm of verse I ever heard—finer than Byron's…. He was one of the kindest and best creatures that ever lived.

                                    Sir Walter Scott

Lewis was a good man.

               I would give many a Sugar Cane
               Monk Lewis were alive again!
                                             BYRON

"Names, madam! names! Whoever heard of such names as mine?—names, madam, that have ever been my horror, my abomination … think ma'am, think of my two—two ugly names! Matthew! Gregory! Heavens, madam! not content with permitting my helpless infancy to be outraged by the name of Matthew, you, without a murmur, permitted the additional infliction of Gregory! Two-fold barbarity ma'am; I repeat, two-fold barbarity!" Thus Lewis delighted in quizzing his mother, who used to become earnest and explanatory, "Why, really my dear, Matthew being the name of your father, and Gregory the name of ―" "Barbarity, ma'am, two-fold barbarity!" and so well did he use to act his imaginary grievance that Mrs. Lewis never perceived the joke, nay, more she often expressed her surprise that a sensible young man, like her son, could make so much of a trifle. All the while, perhaps his vehement expostulations had a grain of truth in their fret and fume for Lewis, indeed, felt a particular aversion to his own Christian names, and frequently avowed a decided preference for his sobriquet "Monk."

Matthew Gregory Lewis was born in London, July 9th, 1775, being the eldest son of Matthew Lewis and Frances Maria, the third daughter of Sir Thomas Sewell, K. G., Master of the Rolls, 1764–84. The Lewises, who were an ancient house, not only possessed extensive West Indian property, as did the Sewells, but also a fine estate in the immediate neighbourhood of the Sewell seat, Ottershaw Park, Surrey. Hence an acquaintance sprung up between the two families and this at length ripened into the closer relationship of marriage. At this time Matthew Lewis occupied the position of Deputy-Secretary at War, in which office he was ever held to have acquitted himself with the strictest probity and honour. Of a tall and commanding person, stately, and in his manners formal even to coldness, his was a nature more like to be respected than loved. Nor can it be denied that he was ill-matched when on February 22nd, 1773, he led Fanny Sewell to the altar. She married when very young, and her artless simplicity of character was scarcely improved by a secluded girlhood, without companionship or regular culture. Her beauty, indeed, was very remarkable, and upon her introduction to London life the lovely bride was warmly, it may even be too warmly admired by the votaries of foppery and fashion. None the less, there was also a grave and serious, even a devout side to her character, which further exhibited itself hereditarily in her elder son and his absorption with the supernatural. For example, one of her favourite works for more studious reading was Joseph Glanvil's Saducismus Triumphatus,¹ and this she happened to possess in the first complete edition, 8vo, 1681, with Faithorne's two plates, the frontispiece depicting King Saul and the Witch of Endor and the panelled illustration of several apparitions,² the Dæmon of Tedworth; "the villainous feats of that rampant hagg Margaret Agar of Brewham"; the Somersetshire witch, Julian Cox; and other visions and sorceries. Over these engravings the young Mat used to pore with fearful interest,

     For in the wax of a soft infant's memory
     Things horrible sink deep and sternly settle.

It is significant, too, that a considerable portion of Lewis' childhood was passed at Stanstead Hall, Essex, a very ancient mansion, the family seat of a near relation on his father's side. A certain wing of the Hall had long been disused and closed, owing, it was said, to ghostly hauntings. There was, in particular, one magnificent apartment, the "Cedar Room," which the domestics expressly stipulated no one should be required to enter after dusk. The huge and strangely carved folding-doors gave on to a large landing, and in after years Lewis often recalled how when he was taken to bed at night and the moon shone palely through the painted oriel upon the sombre portals, with a quick glance of terror over his shoulder he hastened his steps, clinging closer to his companion's hand lest the leaves should fly apart and there stalk forth some grisly phantom of the dark, some bleeding apparition or carious skeleton. He added that to these dim memories he actually ascribed some of the most striking episodes in his famous play, The Castle Spectre.

In the Life, Letters and Literary Remains of Edward Bulwer, Lord Lytton,³ by his Son, we are told that at Knebworth "two wings that contained apartments known by the name of 'The Haunted Chambers,' together with the whole character of the house, in itself a romance, powerfully and permanently influenced Lord Lytton's whole charcater. There were mysterious trap-doors and hiding-places, and in particular a kind of oubliette called 'Hell-hole.' As a child Lord Lytton was immensely impressed by the house, and himself in a letter recalled these early memories in vivid phrase: "I remember especially a long narrow gallery adjoining the great drawing-room (and hung with faded and grim portraits) which terminated in rooms that were called 'haunted.'… How could I help writing romances when I had walked, trembling at my own footsteps, through that long gallery, with its ghostly portraits, mused in those tapestried chambers, and peeped, with bristling hair, into the shadowy abysses of Hell-hole?"⁴

..…

The summer vacation of 1791 Matthew Lewis spent in Paris. He did not meet his mother as she had already returned to London, but in a letter dated September 7th, he speaks of a farce, The Epistolary Intrigue, which he has written, and the script of which he submits for her opinion. He has also commenced a novel, and composed a number of verses. This earliest essay of fiction, which was to be in the form of letters, rejoiced in the farcical mock-sentimental title The Effusions of Sensibility; or, Letters from Lady Honoria Harrowheart to Miss Sophonisba Simper, "a Pathetic Novel in the Modern Taste, being the first literary attempt of a Young Lady of tender feelings." The only portion which was ever printed occupies some nine and twenty pages (241-270) of the Second Volume of The Life and Correspondence of M. G. Lewis, 1839. It is extremely amusing and often very witty, amply sufficing to show that Lewis had a keen sense of humour. The first letter which describes the Lady Honoria's departure for Portman Square from the antique towers and verdant bowers of Dunderhead Castle, the sensation she caused at the Duchess of Dingleton's ball, and the jealousy of Lady Mountain Mapletree, is written in a most mirthful vein and the adroit parody of such conventional openings is indeed a remarkable achievement for a boy of sixteen. Whether the author could have completely sustained the burlesque is another matter, a question it were unjust to inquire. Although he spoke of finishing it before his return to England, he does not appear to have carried the design beyond the second volume.

His farce, The Epistolary Intrigue, which he had written with the chief character Caroline intended for Mrs. Jordan, was refused by two managers, Lewis of Drury Lane, and Harris of Covent Garden, and he expresses himself in a letter to his mother as greatly mortified. None the less, not to be lightly discouraged, he set to work upon and in the same year had ready a comedy, The East Indian, which, however, was not to be produced until the spring of 1799. He also translated a play which he called Felix. This was never printed and cannot certainly be identified, but it may well be Les Deux Amis⁵ (1770) of Beaumarchais. In writing to his mother from Oxford he promises that he will bring this with him when he comes down, so that it may be sent to Lewis of the Lane, but he adds: "I have begun something which I hope, and am indeed certain, will, hereafter, produce you a little money; though it will be some time before it is completed from the length of it, and the frequent interruption, and necessity of concealment, I am obliged to use in writing it. It is a romance, in the style of the 'Castle of Otranto.'… I have not yet quite finished the first volume." This romance, if completed, was never published, but Lewis subsequently founded upon these chapters the famous Castle Spectre.

It will not escape remark that young Lewis commenced author, translated plays, wrote a farce, composed a comedy, and employed himself upon a novel with the object of earning money for his mother. She seems at this time to have shown herself hysterical and exacting, but he never reproaches her for so frequent demands upon his purse;⁶ at the most he remarks in an Oxford letter that if he enjoyed a fixed income he would gladly act as her banker, but since he had not as yet been made any settled allowance by his father, to him he was obliged to apply to meet her requirements, and this was a humiliating and disagreeable task, since he hated encroaching on a bounty which had never failed and never shown itself less than most liberal and kind. Accordingly he could but endeavour to furnish these extra subsidies from the profits of his pen. The point is important. Not only does it show Lewis in a most amiable and unselfish light, but it also reveals the motive which made him turn so early to literature. He was no dilettante, no coxcombical undergraduate with the sophomore's eternal itch for scribbling, but a worker, a practical writer whose output meant, if not bread and butter, at any rate the complement of strawberry jam, and that not for himself but for the mother whom he loved so tenderly and so well.

Matthew Gregory was intended by his father for the diplomatic service, and since for this career a knowledge of German was not merely useful but well-nigh essential, he proceeded to Weimar in the summer of 1792 in order to acquire the language of the country. After a tedious journey, and much suffering from sea-sickness during the crossing from Harwich to Helvoet, Lewis arrived at the capital of Saxe-Weimar-Eisenach on July 27th, 1792. Here the English Ambassador, to whom he carried personal letters of introduction, was Sir Brooke Boothby, Bart., himself a poet, and well known as a friend of the Edgeworths and the Lichfield literary circle. Weimar, although a small town, was at that period, the reign of Duke Karl-August, one of the most illustrious in Europe, owing to the presence at the ducal court of Goethe,⁷ who had in the previous year been appointed Director of the State Theatre; Schiller⁸; Johann Gottfried Herder, first preacher in the town church; the romantic Wieland; and many other literary and artistic figures of great fame. Indeed, within three days of his arrival Lewis writes to his mother that he has been introduced not only to the original Iphigenia, the fair court-singer, Corona Elisabeth Wihelmina Schröter, but even to "M. de Goethe, the celebrated author of Werter," adding the jest "so you must not be surprised if I should shoot myself one of these fine mornings." Of Werther three translations had already appeared in England⁹; the first, a version through the medium of the French, in 1779, when it proved a huge success, new editions appearing at intervals until 1795; the second, this time from the author's text, in 1786; and the third in 1789. With one, perhaps with all of these, Lewis was familiar. He determined to read the original too. Eager and enthusiastic in his very first letter, July 30th, he says "I am now knocking my brains against German, as hard as ever I can…. As to my own nonsense, I write and write, and yet do not find I have got a bit further." The fact was that he could not conclude the second volume of the romance 'in the style of the Castle of Otranto' which had so long occupied his thoughts. As he himself declared, "an infernal dying man" clogged his pen, and finish him off he could not. "He has talked for half a volume already," is the plaint of the poor author. This moribund but verbose gentleman was to make his appearance as the "pale and emaciated" Reginald in The Castle Spectre, who certainly refuses to expire and is exceedingly loquacious.

That Matthew Gregory's residence in Weimar at a most impressionable age should have had a lasting influence upon his whole life, should have moulded his taste, directed his interests, and formed his literary style is a thing neither to be wondered at nor regretted. His enthusiasm directly inspired Scott, Shelley, Byron, and Coleridge, although the latter was ungenerous enough to gird at the very poetry to which he owed not a little of his own stimulation.¹⁰ How vitally German Romanticism energized our literature and what it lent us need not be emphasized at this point, since these correspondences are amply discussed in another chapter, but undervalued and underrated—nay, even jeered and fleered—as the work of Lewis has been, the fact remains that his mystery and terror and his German sensationalism (I do not burke the phrase) for many years permeated English romance, and they have even to-day left us a legacy in the pages of many applauded and popularly approved writers, who with all their striving and pains do not possess a spark of that genius, which dark, fantastic and wayward as it may have shown, was undoubtedly his….

At the end of April, 1794, had appeared Mrs. Radcliffe's The Mysteries of Udolpho, which Lewis commenced reading before he set out on his journey and finished immediately after his arrival at the Hague. It is, he cries, "in my opinion, one of the most interesting books ever published." It is significant, however, that he regarded the first nine chapters, as comparatively insipid, and yet these very passages with their exquisite descriptions of mountain scenery are among the finest of Mrs. Radcliffe's work. His imagination, however, was set afire by the lone Castle amid the far Appenines, those awful halls of dread where the dark Montoni was lord of life and death. Once more inspired to continue his own romance "in the style of The Castle of Otranto," he set to work to extricate the dying man from his difficulties, but finding himself unable to carry the story further, he was soon obliged yet again to lay it on one side.¹¹

Not to be baffled, he wisely determined to begin altogether anew, on an entirely fresh track and this time things went smoothly, for on September 23rd. he triumphantly asks his mother: "What do you think of my having written, in the space of ten weeks, a romance of between three and four hundred pages octavo? I have even written out half of it fair. It is called The Monk, and I am myself so much pleased with it that, if the booksellers will not buy it, I shall publish it myself." Two months after, his last letter from the Hague, November 22nd, tells Mrs. Lewis that he will not send her the manuscript of The Monk since he prefers to hand it to her himself when they meet in London. "For my own part, I have not written a line excepting the Farce, and The Monk, which is a work of some length, and will make an octavo volume of 420 pages. There is a great deal of poetry inserted," and so as a bonne bouche he encloses a copy of the "Inscription in an Hermitage" which occurs in Chapter II. (In the printed text of The Monk there are some few trifling variants.) As Lewis signed his octosyllabic Preface, Imitation of Horace, Epistles, Book I, Ep. 20, "Hague, Oct. 28th, 1794," we may assume that he then completed his fair copy, and his pages were ready for the press.

Lewis' father now recalled him to England, and in December Matthew Gregory was back in London. He spent the Christmas of 1794 at Devonshire-place.

Very soon he set about finding a publisher for his romance, nor did he experience much difficulty in the quest. In March, 1796,¹²The Monk was first published, in three volumes, duodecimo, by John Bell, 148 Oxford Street, at nine shillings. It was re-issued in April¹³ at half a guinea, whilst in October of the same year appeared a second edition, so designated on the title-page. The third, fourth, and fifth editions, all severally distinguished on their titles, followed in 1797, 1798, and 1800. In the fourth and fifth editions the title was changed to Ambrosio, or The Monk. Bell's advertisement, however, on the last leaf of The Castle Spectre, published, octavo, early in 1798, runs: "In a few Days will be published, By Joseph Bell, No. 148, Oxford Street, The Fourth Edition, With considerable Additions and Alterations, Of The Monk, A Romance, In Three Volumes. By M. G. Lewis, Esq. M. P. Author Of The Castle Spectre, Etc. Price 10s. 6d."

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It might seem difficult to decide whether it was Ann Radcliffe or Matthew Gregory Lewis who exerted the more powerful effect upon the temper and shaping of the Gothic Novel as it went its varied course, and since actually the influence of the former was far greater than that of the author of The Monk, it may appear a paradox to say that none the less it was the latter upon whom contemporary writers of fiction the more closely modelled certain prominent aspects of their work. The reason for this lies in the very practical consideration that the romances of Lewis were found to be far easier to copy, although we may add that the prentice pens showed themselves apter to reproduce and even to exaggerate his faults rather than to exhibit a tithe of his vigour and power, fastening upon his weakness and unable to reach after his strength.

The followers of both Mrs. Radcliffe and Lewis are legion, and very often the imitation is not only confined to theme, characters, incidents, all of which are repeated again and again in a hundred chapters with exemplary fidelity, but there are also very distinct verbal echoes to be heard, dialogue at second-hand which merely differs from the original by a bombast word inserted here and there, or a phrase dropped out for the worse.

In all essentials, it must be emphasized, Mrs. Radcliffe and Lewis differ very widely from one another. They have certain romantic subject-matter in common, but so entirely opposite are their several methods of approach and treatment that although casually they may appear at some points to contact this similarity is extremely superficial and proves but a deceptive glamour of resembling. Both employ picturesque properties, convents, castles, the Holy Office. Such a figure as the austere and stately Abbess of San Stephano in The Italian, although altogether improbable and exceptional, is barely possible; such a figure as Lewis' domina of S. Clare, Mother St. Agatha, is altogether chimerical, fantastic, and absurd. Lewis recked nothing of Mrs. Radcliffe's suspense, her sensibility, her landscape pictures which are not the least lovely passages of her genius. Indeed, he pronounced these uncommonly dull, and fervently wished that they had been left out, and something substituted in their room.¹⁴ Certes, The Mysteries of Udolpho influenced him, but not so much as he thought and liked to make himself believe. Mrs. Radcliffe shrank from the dark diablerie of Lewis; his matricides, incests, rapes, extremely shocked her; never did she admit his mouldering cerements and atomies; his Paphian encounters would have cruddled her very ink. Her terrors were spiritual, and for that reason her influence has most clearly shown itself in the writings of those authors whose natural reserve and a certain delicacy of talent would not have tolerated the high colouring and eroticism of The Monk. By his very violence, his impassioned realism, Lewis is widely separated from Mrs. Radcliffe and her school. It is the more pity that these two great writers have been so frequently and so erroneously confounded, and their work all lumped together as if they had exhibited precisely the same characteristics, developed the same style, and elaborated the same sensationalism. It is true that in their own day many minor novelists with a curious lack of perception repeatedly endeavoured to combine Udolpho and The Monk in their pages, to make one peerless heroine of Emily and Antonia, to bring an Ambrosio Montoni upon the scene, but these attempts were fore-doomed to failure; the pieces do not fit; there are awkward creaking joints, and untenoned mortises, discrepancy, contradictions even and incongruity both in the narrative and the springs of action.

The expert cook would have disdained to serve up so ill dressed an olio. The shrewder intelligencies were more quick to model their story either upon Mrs. Radcliffe or upon Lewis alone without commixture.

The novels which directly derive from The Monk are in themselves so numerous a company that rather than set down a large quota of parallel passages from a dozen writers it will be best to examine here in some detail two or three of the more important as a sample of the stuff. Other novels will be more conveniently noticed under their respective authors.

Charlotte Dacre, "better known as Rosa Matilda," was a professed disciple of The Monk, and her Zofloya; or The Moor, A Romance of the Fifteenth Century, 3 vols., 1806,¹⁵ shows that she had learned her lesson well.

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In Germany "the arch-priest of ultra-German romanticism," as he has been called, Ernst Theodor Wilhelm Hoffmann (1776–1822),¹⁶ amply showed the influence of Lewis in one of his most powerfully fantastic tales, Die Elixiere des Teufels (1816),¹⁷ of which an English translation appeared 2 vols., 1824, as The Devil's Elixir. For example, the first chapter of The Monk commences: "Scarcely had the abbey bell tolled for five minutes, and already was the church of the Capuchins thronged with auditors."

When a stranger makes inquiry concerning the crowds the answer is returned: "Can you possibly be ignorant that Ambrosio, Abbot of this monastery, pronounces sermon in this church every Thursday?" In Hoffmann's novel Medardus is a Capuchin,¹⁸ and his sermons are crowded in similar fashion, a fact which ministers inordinately to his vanity. Thus: "An hour before the bells for assembling, the most aristocratic and cultured portion of the town's inhabitants crowded into the monastery church, no very large building, to hear the sermon of Brother Medardus."¹⁹ A number of other passages might be instanced especially since in The Monk the painting of the Madonna which Ambrosio so admired is drawn from Matilda, so in Die Elixiere, des Teufels Medardus hears the confession of an unknown lady who acknowledges a forbidden yearning, and suddenly cries: "Thou thyself, Medardus, art the consecrated being whom I so unspeakably love!" The Capuchin is racked with concupiscence. "An impulse, till now never known, almost raged in my bosom. A passionate desire to behold her features—to press her to my heart—to perish at once in delight and despair—wholly took possession of me!" In agony he flies to kneel before the altar of S. Rosalia, which is crowned by a picture of the Saint. "In this picture which had never particularly struck me before, I now at once recognized the likeness of my beloved! Even her dress resembled the foreign habit of the unknown!"²⁰ It may be further remarked that in The Monk Antonia "Knelt before a statue of St. Rosolia [sic] her patroness, and sang a 'Midnight Hymn.'"

The adventures of Die Elixiere des Teufels differ considerably, of course, from those of The Monk in many ways, but generally it may be remarked that Monk Medardus corresponds to Ambrosio, Euphemia to Matilda, and Aurelia to Antonia.

It has been said by J. T. Bealby that Die Elixiere des Teufels can "scarcely be read without shuddering," and he further describes it as a "dark maze of human emotion and human weakness—a mingling of poetry, sentimentality, rollicking humour, wild remorse, stern gloom, blind delusion, dark insanity, over all which is thrown a veil steeped in the fantastic and the horrible."²¹

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The Castle Spectre is the most famous and the most typical specimen of all Gothic melodramas. It must not indeed be judged from a purely literary point of view, for there are then very many quite palpable faults at which it is easy enough to smile with critical disdain. It has not, for example, the poetry and extraordinary power of Maturin's Bertram, but little imagination can be required to appreciate how upon the stage Lewis' scenes proved supremely effective. Personally, of all dramas, this "crusted grizzly skeleton melodrama" as my old friend Chance Newton who knew and loved it used to call The Castle Spectre, is the one I should most like to see, but unhappily the last revival in London was, more than half a century ago, at the Gaiety Theatre, for two matinée performances on May 5th and 12th, 1880, when John Hollingshead was giving "Palmy Day Neglected Dramas."²²…

The scene is Conway Castle, now in possession of the villainous Earl Osmond, a usurper, who has caused his brother, Earl Reginald, and his brother's wife, to be murdered some sixteen years before. Unknown to his master, however, Kenric, major-domo of the Castle and Osmond's trusted accomplice, a character curiously compounded of greed, cruelty, pity and remorse, aided Earl Reginald, whom he has immured in a dungeon of the Castle, a secret prison of which he alone has the key. The rightful heiress of Conway, a mere babe, was scarcely saved from Osmond's wrath, but at length at Kenric's prayers she was concealed in a villager's cottage, where she grew to be the lovely Angela. She was wooed, and gave her heart to the peasant Edwy, who is none other than Percy, Earl of Northumberland. Osmond, knowing this and fearing that if she were to wed so powerful a supporter his guilt would be discovered, reclaims her from her rustic guardian, and, enraptured by her charms, designs himself to marry her, giving out that she has been discovered to be the daughter of Sir Malcolm Mowbray, long since deceased. Angela rejects his suit with scorn, whilst Earl Percy who has penetrated to the Castle to bear her thence, is recognized and held in confinement by Osmond. By a stratagem he escapes, and gathers his forces. Meanwhile Osmond compels Angela to keep her chamber, the Cedar Room, until the morrow when he threatens to espouse her by force. Here Kenric visits her and tells her that Earl Reginald, her father, still lives. They are surprised by Osmond who overhears the tale. Angela, however, is encouraged by a vision of her mother. Father Philip, who is her friend, contrives her escape from the Cedar Room by a subterranean passage, which leads them out through the vaults where she meets her father. Osmond and his minions burst in upon them, but at this very moment Percy who has gained admittance with his followers drives back the assassins, and when Osmond with a frantic gesture is about to cut down Reginald, the Spectre suddenly rises between them, and as he staggers back distraught, Angela stabs him with her poniard. He is borne away about to breathe his last, soothed by the forgiveness of his long injured and suffering brother.

I am very well aware that this bald outline can only give a poor idea of the effectiveness of the play, but even in the reading it does not require much visualization to see how skilfully the incidents have been managed and how admirably adapted they are to impress an audience. I would not seem to labour this point repeatedly, but it is distressing to read such ineptitudes as "we cannot to-day esteem Lewis any other than a mediocre dramatist intent upon the cheapest of effects."²³

In various footnotes to the printed play,²⁴ and in a little appendix addressed "To The Reader," Lewis quite candidly draws attention to several hints he has adopted and in some cases improved. Thus in Act II, Scene I, the animated portrait of The Castle of Otranto suggested a striking bit of business; the escape of Earl Percy comes from a German play whose main incident was a similar escape of Ludwig, a Landgrave of Thuringia. When he wrote Motley's song, Lewis remembered Burgoyne's "Historical Romance" Richard Cœur de Lion.²⁵ The circumstance of Father Philip concealing himself in the bed and thus frightening Alice is from The Mysteries of Udolpho, where Emily and old Dorothée are alarmed when they visit at midnight the lone chamber where the Marchioness de Villeroi died.²⁶ In the Romance it brings forward a terrific scene. In the Play it is intended to produce an effect entirely ludicrous.²⁷

Earl Reginald concealed in a secret vault may be a variation of the theme of A Sicilian Romance, where the Marquis of Mazzini imprisons his first wife in a subterranean abode belonging to the southern buildings of the castle of Mazzini, and gives out that she is dead. Lewis admired Marsollier's play Camille, ou le Souterrain²⁸ (1791) founded upon this very situation which is derived from the Adèle et Theodore (1782) of Madame de Genlis.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
LORD BYRON ON "MONK" LEWIS

Lewis was a good man, a clever man, but a bore, a damned bore, one may say. My only revenge or consolation used to be, setting him by the ears with some vivacious person who hated Bores, especially M^e. de Stael, or Hobhouse, for example. But I liked Lewis: he was a Jewel of a Man had he been better set. I don't mean personally, but less tiresome; for he was tedious, as well as contradictory, to every thing and every body.

Being short-sighted, when we used to ride out together near the Brenta in the twilight in Summer, he made me go before to pilot him. I am absent at times, especially towards evening; and the consequence of this pilotage was some narrow escapes to the Monk on horseback. Once I led him into a ditch, over which I had passed as usual forgetting to warn my convoy. Once I led him nearly into the river, instead of on the moveable bridge which incommodes passengers; and twice did we both run against the diligence, which, being heavy and slow, did communicate less damage than it received in its leaders, who were terrassé'd by the charge. Thrice did I lose him in the gray of the Gloaming, and was obliged to bring to to his distant signals of distance and distress. All the time he went on talking without intermission, for he was a man of many words.

Poor fellow, he died, a martyr to his new riches, of a second visit to Jamaica—

  "I'll give the lands of Deloraine
  Dark Musgrave were alive again!"
 
               that is
 
  I would give many a Sugar Cane
  Monk Lewis were alive again!

SOURCE: Byron, George Gordon, Lord. "A journal entry of October 15, 1821." In The Works of Lord Byron: Letters and Journals, Vol. V, edited by Rowland E. Prothero, 1821. Reprint edition, p. 418. New York: Octagon Books, 1966.

The Castle Spectre was most harshly criticized by those who were jealous of the young author's genius and success. Genest, who is always very severe on Lewis, is bound to allow that "Osmond, Father Philip, and Alice are very good characters—but the great run which this piece had, is a striking proof that success is a very uncertain criterion of merit."²⁹ It was said that Father Philip was copied from Sheridan's Father Paul; that Hassan was closely modelled on Zanga. In fact, that Os-mond should be attended by negroes was an anachronism and yet Lewis was bold enough to protest "I by no means regret the introduction of my Africans." He comically added that black servants gave a pleasing variety to the characters, "and could I have produced the same effect by making my heroine blue, blue I should have made her." Against the Spectre ridiculous objections were urged. "She ought not to appear because the belief in Ghosts no longer exists." It was bruited abroad that if Sheridan had not advised the author to content himself with a single Spectre, his purpose was "to have exhibited a whole regiment of Ghosts." The managers, the actors, the friends to whom the play was read, all begged Lewis to confine the Ghost to the Green-room. He persisted, and "The Spectre was as well treated before the curtain as she had been ill-used behind it." The two apparition scenes were greeted with tumultuous appluase. Lewis quite candidly and very properly adds that if he with mock-modesty declared he thought The Castle Spectre very bad, what would such an avowal be save to insult the judgement of the public "which has given it a very favourable reception…. Still its success on the stage (great enough to content even an author) does not prevent my being very doubtful as to its reception in the closet, when divested of its beautiful music, splendid scenery, and above all, of the acting, excellent throughout."³⁰ None the less, The Castle Spectre was greeted with avidity by the reading public, and ran through no less than seven editions in 1798, whilst an eighth edition appeared in 1799, and a tenth edition in 1803.³¹ The prolific Miss Sarah Wilkinson was not ill-advised when she turned the popular The Castle Spectre into a prose romance (1820).

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In 1804 Lewis published with J. F. Hughes of Wigmore Street what is perhaps the most popular of his lesser works, The Bravo of Venice, "a Romance, Translated from the German" of Zschokke's Abœllino, der grosse Bandit (1794). The brief dedication to the Earl of Moira³² is dated from Inverary Castle, October 27th, 1804. The fifth edition of The Bravo of Venice appeared in 1807. This tale is also the first number³³ of The Romancist and Novelist's Library, 1839, and there were constant reprints until the end of the century. In some of the later editions the form of the story is slightly altered, but although some minor details are perhaps more closely knit and the pace correspondingly quickened, the narrative can hardly be considered in every respect improved.

Lewis has pretty freely adapted from Zschokke as the fancy took him, and not without much profit to his pages. It cannot be needful to do more than remind ourselves very briefly of the theme of so famous a story. The riddling intrigue turns upon the disguise of the Neapolitan Count Rosalvo, who presents himself in Venice as Count Flodoardo, desirous of serving the Republic. He also fills the rôle of the mysterious and terrible Abellino, a monster of ugliness and ferocity, in which character he is able to penetrate the haunts of the banditti who are terrorizing Venice, and to unmask the conspirators who are plotting her downfall. As Flodoardo he wins the love of the Doge's fair niece, Rosabella of Corfu; she clings to him even when she believes Flodoardo to be the murderous Bandit; as Rosalvo he weds her and is acclaimed the saviour of the City.

Additions were also made by Lewis who in the Advertisement writes: "I have taken some liberties with the original—Every thing that relates to Monaldeschi (a personage who does not exist in the German romance), and the whole of the concluding chapter (with the exception of a very few sentences) have been added by myself."

The Critical Review, Series the Third, Vol. V, No. 3, July, 1805, devoted an article of several pages (pp. 252-6) to a detailed examination of The Bravo of Venice, although the writer confessed he was so inured as now to be able "to turn over the leaves of a Germanico-terrific Romance with an untrembling hand." He allowed that "The history of the Bravo of Venice is interesting, the language glows with animation, and the denouement is rapid and surprising." "Novels have commonly been divided into the pathetic, the sentimental and the humorous; but the writers of the German school have introduced a new class, which may be called the electric. Every chapter contains a shock; and the reader not only stares, but starts, at the close of every paragraph; so that we cannot think the wit of a brother-critic farfetched, when he compared that shelf in his library, on which the Tales of Wonder, the Venetian Bravo, and other similar productions were piled, to a galvanic battery.

Mr. Lewis possesses a fertile imagination and considerable genius: we would therefore advise him to quit the beaten track of imitation. "'Ohe! jam satis est!' We have had enough of ghastly visages, crawling worms, death's heads and cross-bones. When we first visited Mrs. Salmon's wax-work, Mother Shipton's sudden kick startled us, and we were terrified at the monster who darts from the corner cupboard to devour Andromeda; but we can now visit this scene of wonders without terror or alarm, and if we affect surprise, it is merely in compliment to the woman, who exhibits them, that she may not be disappointed of her grin."

This is something more than severe, even a little ill-natured, for I do not think any reader could disentangle the thread of The Bravo of Venice, and he is certainly not to be envied whose interest is not held fast until the very end of this fascinating romance. Naturally when once we know the secret we peruse these chapters a second time with interest and with keenest admiration of the workmanship, but we cannot reasonably expect the same thrill.

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In the winter of 1804 there occurred an unhappy difference between Lewis and his father, which caused the former, at least, great pain and anxiety. The facts may be briefly told. The elder Mr. Lewis had commenced an acquaintance and maintained no very proper intimacy with a lady of fashion and ton, Mrs. R―, who after being a constant visitor to Devonshire Place, presently not only became an inmate of the house but was recognized as mistress of the establishment, where her son Frederick also made his home. Mr. Lewis' two daughters were now married, but Matthew could not help expressing his displeasure, not so much perhaps in words as by actions at seeing another woman installed in his mother's room. Mr. Lewis took pepper in the nose upon his son's eminently correct attitude, and with great severity informed him that he was no longer welcome under the paternal roof. It is true that Matthew occasionally visited the house, but only to be subjected to extreme mortification and open slights. At one period the father most wickedly and dishonourably curtailed his son's income by one half, contrary to his solemn promise and pledge. However the injustice, one is pleased to know, was not of long continuance, for Mr. Lewis soon came to a sense of his own gross misbehaviour in this regard, and Matthew's allowance was restored to the proper figure, as had been expressly engaged. A complete reconciliation between father and son, owing to the elder man's obstinacy and sullen brooding temper, could not be effected for some years.

Matthew certainly had need of literary success to support him under these domestic trials. In 1806 he published, 8vo, a tragedy Adelgitha; or The Fruits of a Single Error, which ran into no less than three editions during the one year, and reached a fifth edition in 1817. The play, which had thus already won its way into popular favour, was not produced until Thursday, April 30th, 1807, when it was given at Drury Lane with Mrs. Powell in the title-rôle; Henry Siddons, Robert Guiscard, Prince of Apulia; Elliston, Lothair; Raymond, Michael Ducas; and Mrs. H. Siddons, Imma. The scene, Otranto. The year, 1080.

Lewis himself quite frankly acknowledged that the quasi-historical background of Guiscard and Michael of Byzantium is a flam. He had constructed his plot, sketched his characters, and then last of all fitted them into a striking framework, allowing stage pictures of "a Gothic room," "a splendidly illuminated Gothic hall," wherein an ancient minstrel strikes his harp, a grove terminated by a cloister which gives scope for that procession of nuns Lewis so loved to present.

Adelgitha, who is the wife of Guiscard, when very young had been seduced by George of Clermont, the fruit of the amour being Lothair, whom she represents to her husband as an orphan. Michael Ducas, Emperor of Byzantium, driven into exile by rebels, seeks the shelter of Guiscard's court, and here Lothair, who has risen to high honour by his valour and virtues, falls in love with the Princess Imma. Whilst Guiscard is absent waging war on behalf of Ducas, this latter attempts to win Adelgitha, and when she rejects his disloyal suit with scorn, he threatens to expose her secret which has become known to him. Immediately after Guiscard's return she resolves to acquaint him with the whole, relating her story as having happened to another. A very powerful and well-written scene follows in which Guiscard shows himself implacable and relentless in his anger against the unnamed deliquent. Adelgitha now implores Michael Ducas to return the letters which he holds and which prove her first unchastity. Mockingly he refuses, whereupon in a tumult of passion she drives a dagger to his heart. Lothair, who by the treachery of the dead emperor, is already suspect of being Adelgitha's lover, is accused of the murder, but as he is led to execution she avows the whole. After a struggle of agony her husband out of his tender love forgives, where-upon exclaiming:

    I'm happy! Guiscard, Guiscard! thus I thank thee
    And next reward thee thus!

she embraces him for the last time, and stabs herself.

Adelgitha is a very fine tragedy, and fully deserved the favour with which it was received by crowded houses. The music was composed by Michael Kelly.

..…

During half a century and more, criticism of Lewis, such as it is, obvious and facile to the last degree, for the most part hardly seems to have gone beyond The Monk, and hence it has been necessary to consider both the romances and the ballads, and the plays at some length, since consciously or unwittingly he introduced new and essential features both by his prose works, his verse and his dramas into the Gothic novel, upon which he exercised so tremendous, one might almost say so illimitable, an influence. It is, I think, more useful for the purpose of our survey specifically to indicate (as indeed I have already done) the vast imaginative force derived from Lewis which energized and inspired numerical novels and impelled the incidence of romance in particular directions, rather than at this one point by summarizing to present what must necessarily become a vague, undefined, and in many respects incomplete and inadequate analysis of both those prominent characteristics and the many undercurrents of supernatural suggestion, which eddying fainter and fainter, it may be, through channels now brackish, now fair, until almost lost or sublimated in the chaotic spate of modern fiction, can none the less very clearly be related to and are in effect resultant from the genius, often morbid and wayward, yet ever vital and compelling, of Matthew Gregory Lewis.

Notes

1. "Saducismus Triumphatus: Or, Full and Plain Evidence Concerning Witches And Apparitions…. By Joseph Glanvil late Chaplain in Ordinary to his Majesty, and Fellow of the Royal Society. With a Letter of Dr. Henry More on the same Subject." The more usual spelling (of later editions) is Sadducismus Triumphatus. The earliest draft, Philosophical considerations touching Witches and Witchcraft, was published 1666. Dr. E. A. Baker, History of the English Novel, Vol. V (1934), p. 208, describes Saducismus Triumphatus as a "chamber of horrors," which this fine work most certainly is not. Nor do I conceive that a rather flippant and wholly unapt label would have been very acceptable to the great and profoundly philosophical divine who was the author.

2. "King Saul and the Witch of Endor" was reproduced in my History of Witchcraft and Demonology, 1926, p. 178. The panelled illustration of several apparitions was reproduced as the frontispiece to my Geography of Witchcraft, 1927.

3. Two volumes, 1883. Vol. I, chapter iv, pp. 32-8.

4. Unfortunately the haunted rooms were pulled down in 1812, when, after the death of Richard Warburton Lytton, December, 1810, Mrs. Bulwer (now Bulwer-Lytton) settled at Knebworth, but resolved to demolish three sides of the great quadrangle and confine the house to the fourth side. The haunted rooms, however, are minutely described in a little story by Miss James, entitled Jenny Spinner; or, The Ghost of Knebworth House, which was never published, but of which a few copies only were printed and preserved at Knebworth.

5. Used by the elder Colman in his The Man of Business, produced at Covent Garden, January 29th, 1774; and translated by C. H. as The Two Friends, or, The Liverpool Merchant, 8vo, 1800.

6. Many of Mrs. Lewis' difficulties were due to a number of persons who imposed upon her, and whose avidity she satisfied when in fact unable to supply their wants, had such even been genuine and well founded. See The Life and Correspondence of M. G. Lewis, 1839, Vol. I, p. 67.

7. Goethe had been invited to Weimar, where he took up his residence, November 7th, 1775, by the Duke. He died here March 22nd, 1832.

8. Actually Schiller had been appointed to a Professorship at Jena in 1789, which he resigned in 1799.

9. T. M. Carré, Goethe en Angleterre (1920), Chapter I; also Bibliographie de Goethe en Angleterre, Chapter I. Further, see the article by A. E. Turner in the Modern Language Review, Vol. XVI (July-October), 1921, pp. 364-70.

10. Coleridge, Biographia Literaria, 2 vols., London, 1817; Vol. II, p. 28.

11. In his fuliginous book with the fierce title La Carne, La Morte e il Diavolo nella letteratura romantica! (discreetly and appropriately translated, be it noted, into English as The Romantic Agony) Signor Mario Praz, amongst other errors in reference to Lewis, confuses The Monk with the first unfinished romance (see p. 60 of The Romantic Agony, English translation by Angus Davidson, 1933). I might hesitate, however, to suggest that Signor Praz is at fault, since Mr. Wyndham Lewis, in Men Without Art, p. 175, in reference to The Romantic Agony, spoke of "This gigantic pile of satanic bric-a-brac, so industriously assembled, under my directions by Professor Praz." This was repeated by Mr. Stephen Spender, The Destructive Element, p. 206. But Signor Praz wrote hotly to The Times Literary Supplement, August 8th, 1935, "to point out" that Mr. Wyndham Lewis' words were "grossly misleading." He added: "I am afraid I must disclaim the honour of being ranked as his disciple, sorry as I am to deprive him of this satisfaction." Actum est de Mr. Wyndham Lewis! After all it does not in the least matter who is responsible for such disjointed gimcrack as The Romantic Agony.

The Sosii were celebrated booksellers in Rome. Lewis aptly has "Stockdale, Hookham, or Debrett."

12. Monthly Magazine or British Register, March, 1796. The List of new publications. In The Life and Correspondence of M. G. Lewis, 1839, Vol. I, p. 151, there is a bad blunder in regard to The Monk: "The first and greatest era in the literary life of Lewis was the publication of 'Ambrosio, or The Monk,' which event took place in the summer of 1795." Several writers have repeated the error that 1795 is the date of the first edition of The Monk. Thus Elton, A Survey of English Literature, 1780–1830, 1912, Vol. I, p. 215. Railo, The Haunted Castle, 1927, p. 89. Rudolf Schneider, Der Mônch in der englischen Dichtung bis auf Lewis's "Monk," 1795, 1927, p. 168. Herr Brauchli, Der englische Schauerroman um1800, 1928, pp. 200, 235, 254. Miss J. M. S. Tompkins, The Popular Novel in England, 1770–1800, 1932, p. 278. E. A. Baker, The History of the English Novel, Vol. V (1934), p. 205. Both Baker, who is responsible for an edition of The Monk (1907), and Railo fall into a further mistake when they assert that the original title of Lewis' romance was Ambrosio, or The Monk.

13. Monthly Magazine or British Register, April, 1796. I have generally used the copy of The Monk which belonged to Francis Douce (1757–1834), and which is preserved in the Bodleian Library, Shelfmark, Douce: L. 307. This contains some interesting contemporary notes and cuttings.

14. Lewis in a letter from The Hague to his mother, May 18th, 1794. Life and Correspondence of M. G. Lewis, Vol. I, p. 123.

15. Longman, Hurst, Rees, and Orme, June, 1806, 13s. 6d. There is a reprint in the volume of Zofloya with an Introduction by the present writer, 1927.

16. E. T. A. Hoffmann's Leben und Nachlass, "von J. G. Hitzig, herausg. von Micheline Hoffmann, geb. Rorer," 5 vols., Stuttgart, 1839. See also Erinnerungen aus meinem Leben, von Z. Funck [G. Kunz], Leipzig, 1836.

17. The first volume was completed in less than a month. The second volume (after a considerable interval) was finished before the end of 1815. The work is, as Hoffmann himself avowed, something disjointed.

18. It should be said that in 1812 Hoffmann paid a visit to the Kapuziner-Kloster at Bamberg, and was extremely impressed by what he saw and by the conversation of a venerable friar, Father Cyrillus. See Erinnerungen, p. 60, sqq.

19. The Devil's Elixir. From the German of E. T. A. Hoffmann. Blackwood and Cadell, 1824, Vol. I, p. 78.

20. Ibid., pp. 87, 89. S. Rosalia "born of the royal blood of Charlemagne," is the especial patroness of Palermo. Major feast, September 4th. I suppose the name was suggested to Lewis by a certain picturesqueness and beauty. The Saint was not, however, a martyr, as Hoffmann (p. 89) represents.

21. E. T. W. Hoffmann, Weird Tales. A new translation by J. T. Bealby. 2 vols., Nimmo, 1885. Vol. I, Biographical Notice, p. xlviii.

22. J. D. Beveridge acted Earl Osmond; J. B. Johnstone, Earl Reginald; Crawford, Percy; J. L. Shine, Father Philip; W. Elton, Motley; T. Squire, Kenric; Miss Louise Willes, Angela; Mrs. Leigh, Alice; and Miss Hobbes, the Spectre. See John Hollingshead's Footlights, 8vo, 1883; also Clement Scott and Cecil Howard, Edward Leman Blanchard, 2 vols., 1891; Vol. II, p. 501, n. 5.

23. J. R. A. Nicoll, A History of Late Eighteenth Century Drama, 1927, p. 100. This writer with rather heavy wit talks of the Spectre as "an exceedingly solid ghost."

24. 8vo, Printed for J. Bell, 1798; pp. 28, 41, 58, 69, and 100-3.

25. From the French of M. J. Sedaine. Produced at Drury Lane, October 24th, 1786. The original music by Grétry was arranged by Thomas Linley. This work proved exceedingly popular. Another adaptation from Sedaine, Richard Cœur de Lion, by Leonard Macnally, produced at Covent Garden, October 16th, 1786, was not so successful.

26. 1794; Vol. IV, chapter lv.

27. Note by Lewis. The Castle Spectre, 8vo, 1798, p. 58.

28. Life and Correspondence of M. G. Lewis, Vol. II, pp. 60-1.

29. Some Account of the English Stage, 1832, Vol. VII, pp. 332-3.

30. The Castle Spectre, 8vo, 1798, p. 103.

31. It was continually reprinted throughout the nineteenth century and appears in very many collections; for example, Cumberland's British Theatre, Vol. XV, 1827, "Printed from the Acting Copy"; Dicks Standard Plays, No. 35.

32. Francis Rawdon Hastings, first Marquis of Hastings and second Earl of Moira, 1754–1826.

33. Price 2d. J. Clements, 21 and 22 Little Pulteney Street, Regent Street.

TITLE COMMENTARY

The Monk

SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE (REVIEW DATE FEBRUARY 1797)

SOURCE: Coleridge, Samuel Taylor. "A review of The Monk." The Critical Review 19 (February 1797): 194-200.

In the following excerpt from a review of The Monk, Coleridge acknowledges Lewis's genius but objects to what he perceives as The Monk's indecency, immorality, and irreligious air.

[Cheaply] as we estimate romances in general, we acknowledge, [The Monk: a Romance ], the offspring of no common genius…. Ambrosio, a monk, surnamed the Man of Holiness, proud of his own undeviating rectitude, and severe to the faults of others, is successfully assailed by the tempter of mankind, and seduced to the perpetration of rape and murder, and finally precipitated into a contract in which he consigns his soul to everlasting perdition.

The larger part of the three volumes is occupied by the underplot, which, however, is skilfully and closely connected with the main story, and is subservient to its development. The tale of the bleeding nun is truly terrific; and we could not easily recollect a bolder or more happy conception than that of the burning cross on the forehead of the wandering Jew…. But the character of Matilda, the chief agent in the seduction of Antonio, appears to us to be the author's master-piece. It is, indeed, exquisitely imagined, and as exquisitely supported. The whole work is distinguished by the variety and impressiveness of its incidents; and the author every-where discovers an imagination rich, powerful, and fervid. Such are the excellencies;—the errors and defects are more numerous, and (we are sorry to add) of greater importance.

All events are levelled into one common mass, and become almost equally probable, where the order of nature may be changed whenever the author's purposes demand it. No address is requisite to the accomplishment of any design; and no pleasure therefore can be received from the perception of difficulty surmounted. The writer may make us wonder, but be cannot surprise us. For the same reasons a romance is incapable of exemplifying a moral truth…. As far, therefore, as the story is concerned, the praise which a romance can claim, is simply that of having given pleasure during its perusal; and so many are the calamities of life, that he who has done this, has not written uselessly. The children of sickness and of solitude shall thank him.—To this praise, however, our author has not entitled himself. The sufferings which he describes are so frightful and intolerable, that we break with abruptness from the delusion, and indignantly suspect the man of a species of brutality, who could find a pleasure in wantonly imagining them; and the abominations which he pourtrays with no hurrying pencil, are such as the observation of character by no means demanded, such as 'no observation of character can justify, because no good man would willingly suffer them to pass, however transiently, through his own mind.' The merit of a novelist is in proportion (not simply to the effect, but) to the pleasurable effect which he produces. Situations of torment, and images of naked horror, are easily conceived; and a writer in whose works they abound, deserves our gratitude almost equally with him who should drag us by way of sport through a military hospital, or force us to sit at the dissecting-table of a natural philosopher…. Figures that shock the imagination, and narratives that mangle the feelings, rarely discover genius, and always betray a low and vulgar taste. Nor has our author indicated less ignorance of the human heart in the management of the principal character. The wisdom and goodness of providence have ordered that the tendency of vicious actions to deprave the heart of the perpetrator, should diminish in proportion to the greatness of his temptations. Now, in addition to constitutional warmth and irresistible opportunity, the monk is impelled to incontinence by friendship, by compassion, by gratitude, by all that is amiable, and all that is estimable; yet in a few weeks after his first frailty, the man who had been described as possessing much general humanity, a keen and vigorous understanding with habits of the most exalted piety, degenerates into an uglier fiend than the gloomy imagination of Danté would have ventured to picture. Again, the monk is described as feeling and acting under the influence of an appetite which could not co-exist with his other emotions. The romance-writer possesses an unlimited power over situations; but he must scrupulously make his characters act in congruity with them. Let him work physical wonders only, and we will be content to dream with him for a while; but the first moral miracle which he attempts, he disgusts and awakens us. Thus our judgment remains unoffended, when, announced by thunders and earthquakes, the spirit appears to Ambrosio involved in blue fires that increase the cold of the cavern; and we acquiesce in the power of the silver myrtle which made gates and doors fly open at its touch, and charmed every eye into sleep. But when a mortal, fresh from the impression of that terrible appearance, and in the act of evincing for the first time the witching force of this myrtle is represented as being at the same moment agitated by so fleeting an appetite as that of lust, our own feelings convince us that this is not improbable, but impossible; not preternatural, but contrary to nature. The extent of the powers that may exist, we can never ascertain; and therefore we feel no great difficulty in yielding a temporary belief to any, the strangest, situation of things. But that situation once conceived, how beings like ourselves would feel and act in it, our own feelings sufficiently instruct us; and we instantly reject the clumsy fiction that does not harmonise with them. These are the two principal mistakes in judgment, which the author has fallen into; but we cannot wholly pass over the frequent incongruity of his style with his subjects. It is gaudy where it should have been severely simple; and too often the mind is offended by phrases the most trite and colloquial, when it demands and had expected a sterness and solemnity of diction.

A more grievous fault remains,—a fault for which no literary excellence can atone,—a fault which all other excellence does but aggravate, as adding subtlety to a poison by the elegance of its preparation. Mildness of censure would here be criminally misplaced, and silence would make us accomplices. Not without reluctance then, but in full conviction that we are performing a duty, we declare it to be our opinion, that The Monk is a romance, which if a parent saw in the hands of a son or daughter, he might reasonably turn pale. The temptations of Ambrosio are described with a libidinous minuteness, which, we sincerely hope, will receive its best and only adequate censure from the offended conscience of the author himself. The shameless harlotry of Matilda, and the trembling innocence of Antonia, are seized with equal avidity, as vehicles of the most voluptuous images; and though the tale is indeed a tale of horror, yet the most painful impression which the work left on our minds was that of great acquirements and splendid genius employed to furnish a mormo for children, a poison for youth, and a provocative for the debauchee. Tales of enchantments and witchcraft can never be useful: our author has contrived to make them pernicious, by blending, with an irreverent negligence, all that is most awfully true in religion with all that is most ridiculously absurd in superstition. He takes frequent occasion, indeed, to manifest his sovereign contempt for the latter, both in his own person, and (most incongruously) in that of his principal characters; and that his respect for the former is not excessive, we are forced to conclude from the treatment which its inspired writings receive from him….

If it be possible that the author of these blasphemies is a Christian, should he not have reflected that the only passage in the scriptures [Ezekiel, Chap. xxiii], which could give a shadow of plausiblity to the weakest of these expressions, is represented as being spoken by the Almighty himself? But if he be an infidel, he has acted consistently enough with that character, in his endeavours first to inflame the fleshly appetites, and then to pour contempt on the only book which would be adequate to the task of recalming them. We believe it not absolutely impossible that a mind may be so deeply depraved by the habit of reading lewd and voluptuous tales, as to use even the Bible in conjuring up the spirit of uncleanness. The most innocent expressions might become the first link in the chain of association, when a man's soul had been so poisoned; and we believe it not absolutely impossible that he might extract pollution from the word of purity and, in a literal sense, turn the grace of God into wantonness.

We have been induced to pay particular attention to this work from the unusual success which it has experienced. It certainly possesses much real merit, in addition to its meretricious attractions. Nor must it be forgotten that the author is a man of rank and fortune.—Yes! the author of The Monk signs himself a LEGISLATOR!—We stare and tremble.

The poetry interspersed through the volumes is, in general, far above mediocrity.

A FRIEND TO GENIUS (REVIEW DATE APRIL 1797)

SOURCE: A Friend to Genius. "An Apology for The Monk." The Monthly Mirror 3 (April 1797): 210-15.

In the following essay, the psuedonymous critic maintains that The Monk advocates virtue, rather than—as many reviewers have contended—vice.

It is with no inconsiderable pain that I have remarked the numerous attacks which have been made by the host of critics on the ingenious author of The Monk, for the supposed vicious tendency of that excellent romance. The author is universally allowed to be endowed with nature's best gift, genius, and in the work before us is generally acknowledged to discover throughout an imagination, rich, powerful, and fervid. This able writer is, however, attacked on a point which, I am sure, must make him feel little satisfaction in the applause which his genius commands. It is asserted by almost all the critics who have sat in judgment on this admirable performance, that its tendency is to deprave the heart, to vitiate the understanding, and to enlist the passions in the cause of vice. Differing as I do with these censors, as to this and other objections, I wish, through the medium of your impartial publication, to rescue his production from this undeserved obloquy. I have not the pleasure of Mr. Lewis's acquaintance, and I know not how this apology may be received on his part, but the defence of genius is the common cause of all men of the least pretensions to literature; and every person who can enjoy works of taste, has the right of rescuing them from unmerited attacks. I should, as little as the critics, wish to be the apologist of vice, or the defender of lasciviousness; but justice requires that error, and error of such magnitude, as it regards Mr. Lewis's character, should be detected and exposed.

The error of the principal objection to this romance, viz. that of its vicious tendency, appears to me entirely to arise from inaccuracy of observation of the author's work, of the human heart, and of the meaning of the word tendency. It is not a temporary effect, produced upon the imagination or the passions, by particular passages, which can fairly be cited as the tendency of the work; we must examine what are the probable general results from the whole, and not judge from these partial and fleeting effects.

In this view, I maintain, this beautiful romance is well calculated to support the cause of virtue, and to teach her lessons to man. I am not old enough to have my heart steeled against the effects of the strongest of the human passions, nor young enough to riot in lascivious description, or wanton in the regions of obscene imagery. I can feel as disgusted as the critics with such defects; but I entreat these grey bearded gentleman to consider again whether there are any such images in the work before us. The lessons of virtue which I see in the Monk, are striking and impressive. In the character of Ambrosio we see a man delineated of strong passions, which have been for a long period subdued by as strong resolution; of a natural disposition to virtue, but, like all other men, with some portion of vice, which has been fostered by the situation into which his fate had thrown him; he is haughty, vindictive, and austere. The greatest error of which he is guilty, is too great a confidence in his own virtue, too great a reliance on his own hatred of vice. We are taught by his conduct that this unbounded confidence, by blinding the mind as to the real consequences which result, lays the foundation for vice, and opens an easy road to great excesses. We have again a very forcible illustration in Ambrosio, a man of the strongest understanding and the highest powers of reason, of the danger of receding even in the least from the path of virtue, or giving way in the slightest degree to the insidious approaches of vice. C'est te premier pas qui coute, is a truth long established, and is well illustrated in the present instance. We see and feel strongly this danger, and the lesson is the more forcible, in proportion to the strength of understanding which is shown in the Monk. We learn that when once a man ventures into the pool of vice, that he plunges deeper and deeper till he is completely overwhelmed. These are striking and impressive lessons.

There are many other moral lessons which are inculcated by the work in the strongest manner; the tendency, therefore, i. e. the general effect likely to result, is favourable to the cause of virtue and morality. We are however told, that "the temptations of Ambrosio are described with a libidinous minuteness, which leaves the painful impression of great acquirements and splendid genius, employed to furnish poison for youth, and a provocative for the debauchee." [Critical Review, for February, 1797.] If this were the case, I must give up my author in part, though still the tendency of the whole would be good. But I deny the fact. I request that the character and circumstances of Ambrosio may be seriously considered. To a man of strong understanding, austerity of manners, and great self command, strong temptations must be offered. If the author had made the Monk sink under a slight temptation, he would have offended against the laws of probability, and shocked the reason of his readers. I ask if it be possible to describe such temptations as were calculated to seduce such a man, with greater delicacy and decorum than our author has done: and I will take for example the strongest instances—the conclusion of chapter 2. vol. I p. 253 of vol. 2. and his attack on Antonia in p. 36 and 37 of vol. 3. The answer, I am persuaded, must be—No! Highly coloured as these passages are, I maintain that no heart but one already depraved, could rise from them, if the preceding part of the work had been perused, with the least impurity. The mind that could draw food for vicious appetites from this work, must have made no little progress in the paths of profligacy and debauchery; so strong are the entrenchments erected before the heart, by the general tendency, of the work.

The previous part is calculated to prevent all the evil which may arise from warmth of description, by the interest we take in observing the gradual progress of vice in Ambrosio's bosom, and the hatred we of course must feel for this insiduous adversary. The work can be read only by three descriptions of persons; either those whose minds, by habitual vice, are prepared to turn every the least hint to the purposes of food for their depraved appetites, or as incitements to their dormant desires, which require stimulants; or those who are wavering between vice and virtue, whose minds may be led to either, by interesting their passions strongly for one or the other; or else, young, innocent, and undepraved persons. The first deserve not notice: purity itself would be poison to their hearts, and the modestest allusion would excite depraved ideas. The passions of the second will be, I contend, excited more strongly to virtue than to vice by The Monk, because the horrors consequent on his vicious conduct are so strongly pourtrayed, as to destroy the momentary effect, if any were produced, of the passages which are rather warm in description. The last, from the very supposition of their being yet innocent and unpolluted, and in consequence ignorant, can not have improper ideas excited, or their passions roused to vice; as, in the first place, they will not be able to understand as much as our knowing critics, nor can the confused notions of felicity which may be excited destroy the purity of their minds, or the effect of the moral lessons inculcated. The writer of this paper felt not a single loose idea excited by the warmest passages, so perfectly had he imbibed the moral lessons which the author has so forcibly brought forward.

The critics themselves seem aware of this tendency of the work, and therefore endeavour to deprive the author of the defence, by roundly asserting that "a romance is incapable of exemplifying moral truth; and that he who could rise superior to all earthly temptation, and whom the strength of the spiritual world alone would be adequate to overwhelm, might reasonably be proud, and would fall with glory" As applied to The Monk, there are two errors in this assertion. The reader of this romance has no reason to imagine, till the greater part of the mischief has been done, that any but earthly temptations are used against the hero. The fall of Ambrosio is precisely that which would happen to any man of a similar character, assailed as he was by the fascinating arts of a woman, skilled in exciting the strongest passions, and endowed with the most attractive charms. We see the gradual progress she makes in undermining his virtue by merely human means. His feelings, his gratitude, and finally the strong desires of human nature are all combined to ensure his fall. But still the temptations appear to be no more than human. We see where a man of truly virtuous principles would have commenced resistance; we observe and lament his first deviation from the path of virtue; and cannot withhold our wishes that he may remain firm when the first disposition to yield manifests itself. Matilda appears to be merely a woman, though a woman of the greatest charms, and of an extraordinary character; but still there is nothing improbable or unnatural in the means of temptation, nothing that a man of a strong mind and pure virtue would not have resisted. The lesson therefore is taught and deeply imbibed before the discovery of supernatural agency is made, and that discovery does not and cannot eradicate the morality before inculcated.

Nor is it true in general that moral truth cannot be conveyed in romance. The general sense of mankind is against the critics in this assertion. From the earliest ages fiction, and incredible fiction, has been thought a proper vehicle for moral instruction, from the fables of Æsop, to the tales, allegories, and visions of modern days. The religion itself which these gentlemen profess inculcates the notion that Lucifer is the author of all our vicious propensities, and that he is the continual seducer of man. An allegorical representation of this being visibly interfering is no more therefore than adopting popular belief, and turning it to the purposes of instruction. It is no more improbable, on the notion of this great tempter, that a man should yield to his agency, when he himself assumes the human figure, than when he is supposed, as he is, to inhabit the bodies of all the vicious, and supply the crafty and artful with the means of operating on inferior minds. We do not the less blame Eve, because we are told that she yielded to the temptation of the serpent.

As to the minor objections made to the conduct of parts of the story, and defects of style and description, I feel not myself called on to defend, my object not being to establish the literary but moral excellence of the work. The only remaining objection which I shall attempt to answer is that "our author has contrived to make his romance pernicious, by blending, with an irreverent negligence, all that is most awfully true in religion, with all that is most ridiculously absurd in superstition. He takes frequent occasion, indeed, to manifest his sovereign contempt for the latter, both in his own person and in that of his principal characters; and that his respect for the former is not excessive we are forced to conclude from the treatment which its inspired writers receive from him."

In support of this observation we have a garbled passage quoted by the critics, in which the author has noticed with too much warmth, we must confess, some of the passages of the bible, which are undoubtedly improper for the eye of a young female. It is not fair to quote this passage without adding the eulogiums which the author has passed on the morality of the sacred writings, both in that passage and others in the work, Whether the author be or be not a Christian, is not the inquiry, but whether there be any foundation for the observation made on the indecency of some parts of our religious code; this the critics are obliged to allow is the case in one instance, viz. Ezekiel chap. 23. There are also other examples which must be in the eye of every man who has react these writings with attention. The indiscriminate perusal of such passages as occur, in which every thing is called by its vulgar name, in which the most luxuriant images are described, as in Solomon's Song, must certainly be improper for young females. So fully aware were the Jews of this truth, that they prohibited the reading of Solomon's Song, till a certain age, when the passions are in subjection. The warmth of expression is too great, but we may pardon this, since we see a desire of preventing the mischievous effects of even the most generally excellent productions.—The author, so far from deserving to be stigmatized as an enemy to Christianity, appears to me to be acting as one of its best friends, when he endeavours to prevent the mischief which may ensue from mixing what may be improper for young minds, with the rest of a work so generally excellent in its morality, so pure in its doctrines. The mischief which might be produced would be the greater, because of the reverence with which young persons are generally, taught to regard the sacred writings. The impressions of such images as are blamed, would be the more deeply engraven on the mind, as they believe that nothing can be learned there but purity and innocence. I should have thought that these critics might have over-looked an error into which they themselves have fallen to a still greater excess: for they cannot allow the moral tendency of the romance to plead the pardon of two or three passages, which appear to them to be too luxuriant, and too replete with wanton imagery.

I have thus, Sir, endeavoured to shew that the attacks made on Mr. Lewis are unfounded, and that when the critic stares and trembles to find the author of The Monk a legislator, his horror is not reasonable; and that with propriety we may apply to those men who can drink vice at the fountain of the Monk, the expression of this very critic: "The most innocent expressions may become the first link in the chain of association, when a man's soul has been poisoned and depraved by the habit of reading lewd and voluptuous tales; and we believe it not absolutely impossible that he might extract pollution from the word of purity, and turn the grace of God into wantonness."

I hope I have succeeded in showing, that "the author has not endeavoured to inflame the fleshly appetites, and then to pour contempt on the only book which would be adequate to the task of reclaiming them." If I have not failed in this object, I shall feel a satisfaction in having employed a leisure horror in a task so delightful as rescuing from disgrace, in my opinion unmerited, a man of such talents, taste, and brilliancy of imagination, as the author of The Monk. I hope this attempt will not be displeasing to him who is the most concerned, nor fail of its effect on the public mind. My motives are, however, pure; I know I am as great an enemy to licentiousness as the critics them selves, and I trust I have shewn thyself

A FRIEND TO GENIUS.

THE MONTHLY REVIEW (REVIEW DATE AUGUST 1797)

SOURCE: A review of The Monk. The Monthly Review 23 (August 1797): 451.

In the following review, the critic discusses the literary sources for The Monk and adds that obscenity "pervades and deforms the whole organization of this novel."

[The Monk ] has a double plot. The outline of the monk Ambrosio's story was suggested by that of the Santon Barsisa, in the Guardian: the form of temptation is borrowed from the Devil in Love of Cazotte; and the catastrophe is taken from the Sorcerer. The adventures of Raymond and Agnes are less obviously imitations; yet the forest-scene near Strasburgh brings to mind an incident in Smollet's Ferdinand Count Fathom: the bleeding Nun is described by the author as a popular tale of the Germans; and the convent-prison resembles the inflictions of Mrs. Radcliffe. This may be called plagiarism; yet it deserves some praise. The great art of writing consists in selecting what is most stimulant from the works of our predecessors, and in uniting the gathered beauties in a new whole, more interesting than the tributary models. This is the essential process of the imagination, and excellence is no otherwise attained. All invention is but new combination. To invent well is to combine the impressive.

Of the poetry, we have been best pleased with the Water-Ring, and with Alonzo the brave and the fair Imogene, the latter of which is written in a manner much resembling and little inferior to the Lenardo and Blandine of Bürger. A vein of obscenity, however, pervades and deforms the whole organization of this novel, which must ever blast, in a moral view, the fair fame that, in point of ability, it would have gained for the author; and which renders the work totally unfit for general circulation.

MARK M. HENNELLY, JR. (ESSAY DATE 1987)

SOURCE: Hennelly, Jr., Mark M. "The Monk's Gothic Bosh and Bosch's Gothic Monks." Comparative Literature Studies 24, no. 2 (1987): 146-64.

In the following essay, Hennelly interprets the artistic significance and utility of the "Gothic machinery" in The Monk by comparing Lewis's use of these devices to that of painter Hieronymous Bosch, noting similarities between the two and commenting on the possible sources for their works.

    Oh! wonder-working Lewis! monk, or bard,
    Who fain wouldst make Parnassus a churchyard!
    Lo! wreaths of yew, not laurel, bind thy brow,
    Thy muse a sprite, Apollo's sexton thou!

    Whether on ancient tombs thou tak'st thy stand,
    By gibb'ring spectres hailed, thy kindred band;
    Or tracest chaste descriptions on thy page,
    To please the females of our modest age;
    All hail, M.P.! from whose infernal brain
    Thin-sheeted phantoms glide, a grisly train,
    At whose command 'grim women' throng in crowds,
    And kings of fire, of water, and of clouds,
    With 'small gray men,' 'wild yagers,' and what not,
    To crown with honour thee and Walter Scott;
    Again all hail! if tales like thine may please,
    St. Luke alone can vanquish the disease,
    Even Satan's self with thee might dread to dwell,
    And in thy skull discern a deeper hell.
 
      Lord Byron, English Bards and Scotch Reviewers,
                              1809 (117, ll. 265-82)

Following the lead of Byron's early lampoon of The Monk (1896), criticism has remained generally unkind to what it considers the novel's Gothic bosh or absurd machinery. In fact, Nina da Vinci Nichols's recent appraisal concludes that the "mechanical grotesqueries" (200) in The Monk "hold no symbolic value, evoke no mystery, intimate no hidden identity" (204), and thus the novel clearly does "not integrate [its machinery] with the theme" (187).¹ And yet Lewis's preoccupation with voyeurism and penetrating prefabricated veils of repression and hyprocrisy suggests that the "gibb'ring spectres" lurking in his Gothic machine may have a significant, if ambivalent, tale to tell. And this tale begins in the novel's introit or first chapter, which offers a series of suggestive vignettes that unfold like some surreal triptych in the Madrid Cathedral.

The "crowds" that Byron derides initially flock to the Cathedral, betraying secular and especially sexual rather than spiritual motives, since they treat the service as if it were a "play" performance and since "the women came to show themselves, the men to see the women" (35).² This lonely crowd also confuses the "true devotion" of religious love with the indoctrinated idolatry of violent power and with fear because "superstition reigns with despotic sway … in Madrid" (35). And the crowd's overriding "curiosity" to see the celebrated Monk Ambrosio reflects the obsessive sin of the "prying eye" (109) whose exposed voyeurism more particularly reveals the related concerns of Byron's "deeper hell" and da Vinci Nichols's "hidden identity." For instance, Antonia's natural "features were hidden" so scrupulously "by a thick veil," and "her bosom was [so] carefully veiled" that Lorenzo is artificially aroused and begs to be allowed "to remove the gauze" from her face (37-39). Since Lorenzo is "our hero" (55), the reader presumably is also guilty of complicity in his voyeurism and his compulsion to strip Antonia, although, ambiguously, Antonia's false modesty needs to be stripped away to reveal her natural self. Similarly, when Agnes "took the veil" to become a nun, she symbolizes her unnatural "seclusion from the world" and reinforces her mother's crime of "immuring so charming a girl within the walls of a cloister" (51).³

Next, Lorenzo's portentous dream in "the gothic obscurity of the church" reveals the shared extent of his own and Ambrosio's ambivalent desires as his marriage ceremony with Antonia, conducted by the Monk, is abortively interrupted by a savage ravisher. Thus, "half-hoping, half-fearing," Lorenzo passively watches as his Nemesis enacts the dreamer's about-to-be sanctified lust and prefigures Ambrosio's own later rape of Antonia, his unknown sister. At the same time, the schizoid vertical polarities of the Cathedral collapse, and the ravisher falls through the floor to the fiery vaults foretold in Ambrosio's sermon, while, naked, Antonia ascends through the "vaulted roof" toward a heavenly choir (52-54). Not having learned the severity of his own repressed and then projected desires, Lorenzo indulges in yet more voyeurism when minutes later he and Don Christoval agree to return to the Cathedral that night and secretly spy on the young nuns who must "take off their veils" before confession. "The gaze of such impure eyes" is ultimately punished when Lorenzo finds himself leering at his own unveiled sister, who is secretly receiving a love letter. At this point, Don Christoval cries, "What, your sister? Diavolo! Then somebody, I suppose, will have to pay for our peeping" (55-56), thus previewing the ambiguous value of symbolic stripteases of both body and soul throughout the novel.

The point of recounting these episodes from Chapter One is not only to remark that such a preoccupation with cloistered innocence, repressed sexuality, violent rebellion, and an enforced ambiguity between sacred and profane values recurs throughout The Monk, but also to emphasize that, contrary to prevalent criticism, the novel offers an integrated or at least repeated coordination of its Gothic machinery, especially the sense of place or space, and its Gothic visions. But for a fuller understanding of this coordination, we must ask why Lewis chose a Madrid cathedral and its adjoining "burial ground common" (228) to both the Capuchin monastery and the convent of St. Clare as the primary symbolic machines for transmitting his Gothic visions. Perhaps it was because Spanish Gothic cathedrals, partially due to the prevalent Moorish influence, are uniquely known for "their rejas or wrought iron screens," which seem to be part of the same tradition as the Hispanic love of cloaks and fans (Sitwell 139), all of which promote an atmosphere of veiled, partial concealment. It is certainly also true that, as with the Church of San Lorenzo opening Ann Radcliffe's The Italian (itself clearly a critical response to The Monk ), the Latin flavoring here helps season the novel's exposé of repressed fiery passion. Moreover, Spain is the native home of the Inquisition so dear to Lewis and other Gothicists; in fact, in Melmoth the Wanderer "all Spain is but one great monastery" (143) policed by the Inquisition. And yet in 1796, there was no Gothic cathedral in Madrid, only the Jesuit church of San Isidro el Real, which John Harvey describes as "a grim monument of the severest classicism" whose presence "startlingly suggests the portals of a prison" (198-201). But, of course, Lewis may simply have appropriated this relevant suggestion of repression and then altered it to suit his own Gothic specifications.

There may, however, be yet another possible reason for his choice of Madrid, one revealed in G. B. Street's chatty 1914 account of Gothic Architecture in Spain, namely, that although there are really "no old churches," still "there is one great attraction to me in Madrid, and only one—the Picture Gallery" (1:279), or Museo del Prado, the famous home of the more enigmatic canvases of Hieronymous Bosch, which Philip II brought to Madrid from the Netherlands around 1560. Philip hung twelve in his palace and treasury and twelve in his hunting lodge at El Prado. In 1574 the nine most significant were secretly "hidden away in his monastery stronghold, the Escorial" (Fraenger 8). Since that time, the name of Bosch and the Madrid repositories have become nearly synonymous. And the bizarre Gothic machinery in these works seems so close to the symbolic machinery in Lewis's novel that a survey of Bosch and the relevance of what Carl Justi calls "the most important of his works" (48)—his paintings of The Table of Wisdom (c. 1475–85), The Hay Wain (c. 1485–90), The Garden of Earthly Delights (c. 1485–1505), and The Temptation of Saint Anthony (c. 1505–16)—should place The Monk 's Gothic bosh in the proper clarifying context of Bosch's Gothic monks.⁴ Of course, unless fresh evidence is uncovered, it will always remain debatable whether or not Lewis actually studied Bosch's canvases and exorcised their eerie spirit in The Monk. It does seem clear, however, that the haunting correspondences between the work of the painter and the novelist at the least reveal them to be "kindred spirits."

Bosch spent his entire life in his birthplace (which also gave him his name), the Dutch city of 's-Hertogenbosch, close to what is now the border of Belgium. This is significant because, besides Lewis's journeys to the continent in 1791 and 1792, which may well have introduced him to the art and architecture of Madrid, he spent much of 1794 at The Hague in the Netherlands serving as a staff member of the British embassy, but also writing The Monk (Irwin 18-22). And this locale too would have provided him with access to other examples of Bosch's art which were collected in the Low Countries at sites like The Hague, Rotterdam, and Brussels. Significantly, Bosch's visual perspective itself had been nurtured by the great Gothic Cathedral of St. John in his native town, and the curious gargoyles sitting on its roof but-tresses perhaps turn up even more transmogrified in his own monastic and satanic grotesques (Gibson 14-16). In fact, like Lewis, Bosch too is often regarded as merely a faiseur de diables, and both were probably influenced by the notorious Malleus Maleficarum, or Witches' Hammer (1494), which schematically outlines the relationship between Satan and succubi, like Matilda, who use their sexual charms to debase and then damn ascetics. Thus, and again prefiguring Lewis, Bosch's work repeatedly excoriates the veiled evils of monastic life, particularly the lust of monks and the hypocritical virginity of nuns, perhaps recalling Saint Paul's second letter to Timothy in which he decries the doomed city of man as a Vanity Fair where clerics are "lovers of pleasures more than lovers of God; having the form of godliness, but denying the power thereof…. For of this sort are they which creep into houses, and lead captive silly women laden with sins, led away with divers lusts" (II Tim. 3:4-4, Fraenger 20).

It is further relevant that in 1947 Wilhelm Fraenger published a revolutionary study of Bosch's work that drastically revises the older view of him as primarily a painter of devotional altar pieces, but sees him rather as a practising member of the Adamites or Brethren of the Free Spirits, who allegedly indulged in religious rituals of free love, reflecting their desire to return to a state of prelapsarian innocence.⁵ Thus Fraenger's Bosch emerges as a kind of complex Fra Lippo Lippi whose work manifestly preaches a gospel of the spirit while latently promoting the enjoyment of the flesh. In Fraenger's own words, Bosch "freed medieval art from its subjection to the church and, in the phantom world that he made his own creative domain, distorted the fear of God, which the church kept under control, into a terrifying pandemonium of lust." Thus he dramatizes "a new religious will to life, which clashed with the tradition of the church" and offered "the road to salvation of a religious doctrine of love, a mystery of eroticism" (15). Although art historians disagree on the validity of such a thesis, there can be little doubt that Fraenger honestly confronts the central paradox of Bosch's art, which seems simultaneously to scourge and sanctify sensual pleasures. And this, of course, is also the central paradox of The Monk. Equally relevant is Fraenger's attention to Bosch's manipulation of his onlooker's voyeuristic tendencies as his paintings stereoscopically focus on both sensual degradation and sexual innocence by setting "a trap for the viewer's eye" (42) at almost every point on its visual quest through the optical mine fields Bosch's canvases become.

What Fraenger at one point calls Bosch's "pupillary magic" (270) is perhaps nowhere more evidently relevant to The Monk than in The Table of Wisdom, once known as The Seven Deadly Sins. On this forboding tabletop, Bosch presents a central sphere whose outer circumference displays a sevenfold pageantry illustrating each sin and whose inner circumference recreates Christ's emergence from His sarcophagus within the image of the Eye of God itself, which is captioned, "Beware, Beware, God sees." Flanking this central circle in each corner of the table hang smaller spheres limning the four last things: Death, Judgment, Heaven, and Hell. As with each of Bosch's pertinent works, we can only mention a fraction of the relevant detail here, but the provocative conversion of the Beatific Vision into a Divine Voyeur commands the viewer's own attention in much the same way as human voyeurism captivates and involves the reader of The Monk. In fact, the bottom scroll warns us of God's ubiquitous, veiled presence: "I will hide my face from them, I will see what their end shall be" (Deut. 32:20). What God sees, of course, is a reflection of the viewer's own collective experiences in the cartoonish allegories of the Seven Deadly Sins, which, like The Monk, feature follies from every rank of life including hypocritical monks and nuns. Thus the outer macrocosm of the earth and the inner microcosm of the eye coincide here, just as the image of the mirror, repeatedly associated with the sin of Superbia, may remind us not only that Lewis's own "passion for mirrors" (Irwin 26) is reflected in the magic glass exposing the bathing Antonia to Ambrosio, but also that Pride personified in Ambrosio controls each of its satellite pecadillos like Beatrice's lust, Baptiste's thieving avarice, Donna Rodolpha's envy of Agnes, Mother Agatha's raging anger, the parody of sloth in the "soporific draught" (321) which symbolizes the embowered Antonia as "the prey of ennui" (305), and even Flora's comically gluttonous feasting on fowl on Friday (314-15).

More particularly, the tableau of Death reminds us of the psychomachia staged during Ambrosio's execution vigil since dire Death and his satanic familiar seem at least as potent as the dour friars and nuns in the picture. This kind of doubling ironically implies that even the Church itself must invoke such spiritual horrors to frighten the departing soul to heaven, if the induced despair doesn't first precipitate the sinner, like Ambrosio, to hell. As Agnes cries apropos of the Draconian nuns who guard her, "they think themselves holy, while they torture me like fiends!… 'tis they who threaten me with eternal perdition!" (356). Moreover, in the vignette of Hell itself, which illustrates the particular punishment of each Deadly Sin, the burning towers stoked by demons recall the flaming convent torched by the demonic crowd in The Monk, and the nude female whose genitals are appropriately covered by a verminous toad is paradoxically reminiscent of the imprisoned and "half naked" (355) Agnes "who felt the bloated toad … dragging his loathsome length along my bosom" (395). The implication here is that, although Agnes's concupiscence may be less noxious in the viewer's eyes than that of Bosch's fleshly sinner, still her punishment identically fits her crime since she admits "I violated my vows of chastity," which Ambrosio rephrases as "you have defiled the sacred habit by your impurity" (71, 70).

Next, The Hay Wain triptych at the Escorial (another version survives in the Museo del Prado) presents two outer wings illustrating the Wayfarer or earthly Pilgrim travelling, much like Raymond, through a treacherous terrain of stylized robbers, executions, and sensual peasants, each of which, in different ways, anticipates the sensuous saraband depicted on the inner panels. Here an allegorical procession, praising folly like the Cathedral crowd in The Monk, quite literally "worships" hay or meaningless mercenary goods (Gibson 70, 73) and is flanked by smaller panels of Paradise and Hell, just as the images of "the garden and cemetery" (335) dominate monastic life in the novel. In fact, the eye's pilgrimage through these three panels and their visual snares traces a kind of typically Gothic W pattern as it sinks through Paradise, ascends to the crest of the wagon, and then plummets again through the topography of Hell. In this sense, it is significant that both Paradise and Hell are similarly structured according to analogous vertical levels, suggesting that the fall of innocence is as naturally inherent to both conditions as the repeated intrusion of the serpent. Both innocence and experience, according to Lewis's contemporary Blake, are "the Two Contrary States of the Human Soul" (Blake 171). Thus, as our eye descends through the planes of Paradise, it is as if we are psychonauts exploring the rough underbelly of embowered innocence. Adam and Eve first appear gracefully unclothed; then Eve cautiously veils herself with a figleaf during the temptation, and finally both are shamefully veiled upon being driven from the Garden. In Hell, although the figleaf is replaced first by the emblematic toad and then by the coiling serpent, the viewer's sense of the dialectic between innocence and experience is much the same, only darkened because of the infernal chromatic scale. Together both panels remind us that The Monk similarly moves from the monastery garden to Ambrosio's concluding inferno in a valley landscaped like Jehosaphat.

In the central panel, the symbolic bower of bliss crowning the hay wagon is complete with both a resident angel and serpentine demon, but the attitudes of the lovers suggest that the latter has won the day as they are about to "make hay." This kind of visual pun, so dear to Bosch, implies that here Luxuria, or Queen Lust, dominates the other Deadly Sins emblemized in the procession, as the seductress Matilda seems to dominate so much of the central action in The Monk. In fact, when Ambrosio is stung as he "stopped to pluck one of the roses" for Matilda in the monastery garden, his hand "swelled to an extraordinary size." The consequent sexual implications of his fall and the repeated poison-passion analogy suggest not only that "concealed among the roses" (92) of every innocent garden is a serpent, even if it is only the serpent of mutability, but also that the fall can always be a prelude to "extraordinary" self-development. Furthermore, the swarthy devils and burning towers in Hell and the secular prelates and worldly monks and nuns at the Hay festival suggest the mise en scène of Lorenzo's dream, besides the religious danse macabre of "grotesque attitudes" in the Procession of St. Clare, which precedes the burning of the convent (336). More generally, though, the sense of déja vù one feels when examining these uncanny panels is due to their strange Gothic intermixture of tones, which ineffably blends the blessed and bestial into a kind of consecrated cartoon like The Monk. In this sense, both viewer and reader feel much as Agnes does upon awakening in her crypt: "my senses were so bewildered, and my brain so dizzy, that I strove in vain to arrange the strange images which floated in wild confusion before me" (384).

At any rate, the paradoxes of the garden that Lewis and Bosch similarly dramatize are the primary focus of the triptych of The Garden of Earthly Delights, which flanks the central panel of the Earthly Paradise again with side panels of Eden and Hell. As in The Monk, the painting's visual challenge involves its questioning ambivalence toward love and sensual fulfillment. That is, does the canvas, like a traditional allegory of the Bower of Bliss, warn us, with Keats that we "dwell with Beauty—Beauty that must die?" This Et in Arcadia Ego motif was popularly rendered during the Renaissance in ivory miniatures exposing entwined lovers or an inviting nude female, behind whom lurks a decomposing grim reaper (Gibson 87-88) whose memento mori punishes the initial voyeurism much as the veiled, rotten corpse of the Bleeding Nun rebukes Raymond's fascination with Agnes (170). On the other hand, does the painting suggest that sensual fulfillment leads to Hell only if, like Lorenzo, one is guiltily programmed by orthodoxy to view pleasure as precipitating a sinful fall from the graceful innoncence of Paradise? The canvas's provocative marriage of heaven and hell seems to support both readings, and in this sense it closely resembles The Monk.

More specifically, it again prefigures the "voluptuous tranquility" of the "abbey-garden" (73-74) where Matilda first visually tempts Ambrosio with the "beauteous orb" of her "half exposed" breast (87). And the ocular geometry of the central pool of nude female bathers surrounded by the frenzied cavalcade of male voyeurs makes us wonder whether Bosch means to pluck out our eye or to glorify its gifts.⁶ As Walter S. Gibson contends, Bosch's Earthly Paradise probably owes much of its landscaping to the Romance of the Rose (83-87), and Lewis's version is clearly in the same romance tradition: "Fountains, springing from the basons [sic] of white marble, cooled the air with perpetual showers, and the walls were entirely covered by jessamine, vines, and honeysuckles … a gentle breeze breathed the fragrance of orange-blossoms along the alleys, and the nightingale poured forth her melodious murmur from the shelter of an artificial wilderness" (73). Lewis even includes a "hermitage" or "rustic grotto" nestled in "the bosom of this little grove" where Matilda and Ambrosio hold their trysts and where similarly, in the lower right foreground of Bosch's hortus conclusus, a hirsute Adam and Eve peep out from their cover. Fraenger again finds such a grotto to be of central importance to the Adamite cult which saw "Adam as the Christlike bearer of revelation, the underground cave as Paradise, and ritual nakedness associated with markedly religious love, which was regarded as innocent and above all sensuality, and was usually called 'angelic love'" (19).

We must remember, however, that the Hell panel restages this scenario like some monstrous immorality play, where the reign of Queen Lust becomes a reign of terror. The romance motif of "the music of the flesh" (Gibson 98) is here particularly punished, and the naked figure crucified on the serpent-entwined harp reminds us that Matilda beguiles Ambrosio's senses with her harp-playing, which suggestively "proves her a perfect mistress of the instrument" (95). Again and by now almost predictably, crumbling, burning towers overlay Bosch's topsy-turvy Gehenna structured partially like a Gothic monastery and Inquisition chamber, where the prisoners are judging their hypocritical judges and where a monkish confessor sodomistically ruts with his penitent and simultaneously reads about unpardonable sins from his confession manual. At the same time, a lascivious sow in a nun's habit, recalling Matilda's religious disguise, clutches a naked prelate and urges him to consign his estate to the priory as well as his soul to the pit. This quantitative approach to religion recalls Jacintha's comic concern with simony when she "purchased as many pardons from the pope as would buy off Cain's punishment" (313). Finally, the Prince of Darkness himself is here reminiscent of the winged Satan and his eagle familiars which alternately punish Ambrosio (420), since Lucifer is depicted as an insatiable bird of prey with a chamber pot, who engorges himself on one victim as he vents others into even lower depths of the infernal sewer from which peeps a parody of our first parents in their paradisal cave in the center panel. Thus love quite literally "pitches his mansion in the place of excrement," and yet the combined effect of all three panels is closer to Crazy Jane's major argument to her bishop (in Yeats's poem, not Lewis's own popular "Crazy Jane Ballad" ):

    'Fair and foul are near of kin,
    And fair needs foul,' I cried!
                             .....
 
    'For nothing can be sole or whole
    That has not been rent.'
                                (254-55, ll. 7-8, 17-18)

Finally, Fraenger reminds us that "Bosch's favorite theme [is] the temptation of St. Anthony" (305). And the painter's renditions of this theme are very relevant to our understanding of the temptations of Ambrosio in The Monk, who clearly identifies with the sense-plagued saint: "St Anthony had withstood all seductions to lust, then why should not he? Besides, St. Anthony was tempted by the devil …" (103). Thus, much more than their common Franciscan order link Bosch's and Lewis's frairs, not the least of which being that Antonia (Ambrosio's sister) is the feminine form of Anthony. Fraenger's masterful analysis of Bosch's late treatment of his other-worldly recluse, which hangs in the Prado, is especially perceptive in contrasting St. Anthony's external visual serenity with what the landscape reveals as tumultuous internal visions rivaling Ambrosio's: "the images generated by his unconscious instinctual drives usually represent masked and disguised sexuality" (307). These drives are especially personified in that "unknown brother" who peeps at Bosch's meditative monk from the pool before him like the dark paraclete in Lorenzo's dream: "With its cry of 'In vain!' this unexpectedly emerging self seeks to unmask the saint's ascetic effort as worthless self-deception and hopeless effort, since neither mortification of the flesh nor contemplative sublimation has been able to overcome his inborn nature" (308).

Much more famous and pertinent, however, is The Temptation of Saint Anthony triptych (c. 1485–1505), now in Lisbon, which grotesquely revises the hagiographical legends recounting Anthony's attack by demons while he was praying near a desert sepulchre, their second attack when they toss him skyward and allow him to fall battered back to earth, and his final test by the Devil Queen whose apparent compassion veils her carnal temptations. Thus, as Lewis's Ambrosio presents his reader with a kind of visual ambrosia, so too Bosch's Anthony fascinates our voyeuristic curiosities and is perhaps even a symbolic self-portrait of his creator (Justi 55). In Fraenger's words, Bosch "has called upon the four elements, plunging them into spooky tumult in which sexuality intertwines with the trefoil of idolatry, magic, and sodomy and serves above all to excite the roving eye" (346). And relevantly it was during Bosch's life that the Humanists began to question the real value of Anthony's brand of cloistered and solipsistic innocence (Gibson 152), as Lewis later does with Ambrosio's "total exclusion from the world" which prevents him from knowing "in what consists the difference of man and woman" (44) and which repressively precludes even "the opportunity to be guilty" (47)—at least until such repression spawns instinctual rebellion.

More particularly, Anthony's vertical double exposure in the upper and lower sections of the right panel clarifies the similar trajectory of Ambrosio's fall, suggesting that the self-denying ascetic who overreaches human limits ultimately disembodies himself to less than human proportions as his pride goes before his fall. Furthermore, the burning monastery in the central panel is again relevant to the inferno which engulfs the convent and suggests the metaphoric context of the disease of ergotism or St. Anthony's fire, one of whose symptoms is satanic hallucinations (Gibson 145). The Black Mass offered next to the obelisk recalls Matilda's and Ambrosio's devil worship. But more significantly, at the center of the main panel is the parodic willow hag with her spectral infant and ghastly paramour, dubbed the "virgin" and noble "young man" (Fraenger 391), who seem disturbing prototypes of the cadaverous Agnes, her dead child, and the diseased Raymond. Finally, in the right panel, when the Devil Queen tries to veil her nudity with assumed modesty, Anthony's consequent resistance to this enforced voyeurism only drives his averted glance to the devil's obscene banquet being prepared in the lower left foreground, which seems to offer the anchorite only more fascinating sexual and satanic indelicacies, just as Ambrosio is driven from the affected modesty of Matilda to the artificially conditioned modesty of Antonia and finally to the black magic of Satan. In sum, whether or not Bosch's Anthony is indicted as Fraenger argues, his temptations, like Ambrosio's, appear self-conceived, and his demons and their familiars seem to be as much mentors as tormentors.

Thus, like the ambiguous vertical extremes in Lorenzo's dream, Bosch's ambivalent presentation of Anthony's descent helps prepare us for Lewis's ultimate presentation of Ambrosio's climactic rise and fall in the last paragraph of The Monk (419-20): "The daemon continued to soar aloft, till reaching a dreadful height, he released the sufferer. Headlong fell the monk through the airy waste; the sharp point of a rock received him; and he rolled from precipice to precipice, till, bruised and mangled, he rested on the river's banks." Subsequently, for "six miserable days did the villain languish. On the seventh a storm arose: … the waves overflowed their banks; they reached the spot where Ambrosio lay, and when they abated, carried with them into the river the corse of the despairing monk." These prolonged final moments of Ambrosio broadcast several significantly mixed extratextual and textual allusions which finally enlarge Lewis's indictment of voyeurism into the Gothic dialectical vision of the human condition, which Byron's Manfred summarizes as "Half dust, half deity, alike unfit / To sink or soar" (393, I, ii, 40-41).⁷

For example, besides its rather remarkable resemblance to Bosch's depiction of St. Anthony's satanically controlled descent, Ambrosio's fall recalls Adam's fall from grace and Lucifer's from heaven in Paradise Lost, and "his broken and dislocated limbs" suggest the consequent self-division which St. Anthony, Adam, and Satan all, at least symbolically, suffer. His wracked limbs may even conjure associations with Christ's crucifixion, and certainly the Abbot's early promise and sanctity render him as a figure of Christ before he devolves into an Antichrist. Further-more, the seven day ordeal implies a chaotic parody of Creation (much as when "Universal Darkness buries All" at the end of Pope's The Dunciad, 584, IV, 655), although the cleansing river and storm may also refer to Noah's purging and purifying final flood. But then again the wrathful environment here also connotes the apocalyptic Dies Irae traditionally associated with the Valley of Jehosaphat. Moreover, the plague of insects which drink Ambrosio's blood as "they fastened upon his sores, darted their strings into his body, and covered him with their multitudes" seems at first glance almost a parasitic parody of his own violation of Antonia, and thus his punishment befits his crime. It also, however, represents one of several reversals of the legends of St. Ambrose documented in Jacobus de Voragine's medieval collection of the lives of the saints, The Golden Legend, which certainly influenced Bosch. Voragine describes not only how Ambrose was destined for greatness when, as a child, a swarm of bees flew into his mouth and then soared away toward heaven, but also how he affected paganism and whoremongering to avoid the honor of election to a bishop, how he prophesied his sister would one day kiss him earnestly when he attained an episcopacy, and how he was especially versed in exorcising demons (24-33)—all of which legends seem parodied in Ambrosio's insect attack, sin of incest, and demonic idolatry.

Besides such paradoxically mixed allusions to sacred writings, there are other profane, classical allusions to the various tortures of Tartarus, especially the frustrations of Tantalus and Sisyphus since, though "a burning thirst tormented" Ambrosio, he "strove in vain to drag himself towards" the nearby river. The classical motif is rendered more relevant when "the eagles of the rock tore his flesh piecemeal, and dug out his eyeballs with their crooked beaks," since these predators seem to be grotesque exaggerations of the "tame linnet" which, while Ambrosio watched, "nibbled" Antonia's breast "in wanton play" as she "strove in vain to shake off the bird from its delightful harbour" (269). On the other hand, of course, their persecution recalls the plight of Prometheus and suggests the titanic scope of Ambrosio's rebellion against God. Finally, his symbolic blinding directly implies Oedipus's sin of incest, besides providing a final chastisement of his voyeurism.

Moreover, placed as it is at the very end of the novel, like Melmoth the Wanderer's fall from the sea cliff, Ambrosio's unrepentant tragic downfall radically rejects (rather than reinforces) the sense of Providential order and renewal which the Duke of Medina's political "prudence and moderation" (378) and the social contracts of the final marriages seem to establish. Thus, like Fortinbras at the end of Hamlet, Medina apparently insures that "order and tranquility once more prevailed through Madrid" (377), and yet the reader's actual response to the novel's political and social sense of retributive justice may share more with Elvira's earlier conclusions: "in a world so base, so perfidious and depraved, her heart swelled with the bitterness of apprehension" (277). As Lewis himself once observed in a letter to his mother, "in my opinion, the acuteness of pleasure in this world bears no proportion to the acuteness of pain" (Peck 222). Again, then, Ambrosio resembles Bosch's ambiguous monk because his diabolic punishment cannot be easily judged and, in fact, casts serious doubts on any facile, reductive reading of the novel as Lewis's self-indulgence in Gothic machinery.

In this context, when Ambrosio languishes "execrating his existence" after his fall, his possibly sympathetic Angst repeats the earlier existential agonies of Antonia and Agnes, just as the splintered selves of Bosch's Anthony are personified throughout the unspeakable practices fragmenting his canvases. Agnes's recalled notes from the underground (390-97) in her "subterraneous dwelling" partially reinforce this ultimate tone of Gothic existentialism,⁸ which outlasts the questionable nature of her marital bliss. They also tend to duplicate Bosch's painted notes from his underground charnel and carnal houses. Thus Agnes is nearly "driven by despair to madness" when she finds herself "in silence and fortitude" forced to "drag on a miserable existence" in the subterranean torture chamber which also "terminated my sweet babe's short and painful existence." In fact, so memorable is this solitary confinement that her subsequent and almost absurd "sudden transition from misery to bliss" seems illusory; and her earlier captivity, like Ambrosio's final moments, becomes an existential paradigm of the prevalent human condition in the novel: "So lately a captive, oppressed with chains, perishing with hunger, suffering every inconvenience of cold and want, hidden from the light, excluded from society, hopeless, neglected, and, as I feared, forgotten." Consequently, her long-awaited marriage to Raymond (like the union of Bosch's Willow Hag and Noble Young Man) and Lorenzo's to Virginia hardly provide a happily-ever-after romance closure. Rather, they are like Theodore and Isabella's warped wedding at the end of The Castle of Otranto when, after the mayhem of Walpole's Gothic excess, the sober ceremony simply provides the bereaved Theodore with a receptive ear for his lamenting the loss of Matilda, that is, "the society of one, with whom he could for ever indulge the melancholy that had taken possession of his soul" (106). Here, too, the nuptials are suitably somber since Lorenzo's feeling for Virginia "partook not of the ardent character which had marked his affections for Antonia" (399). And like Bosch's black humor, Lewis's sense of absurdity, which Walpole sadly lacks, makes Agnes's marriage more sardonic than somber since she ominously suggests to Raymond that her premarital sexuality shall be replaced with complete marital chastity: "the more culpable have been the errors of your mistress, the more exemplary shall be the conduct of your wife" (398). Thus the veil prematurely removed would now seem to become a chastity belt locked forever, thereby perpetuating the repressive value systems which have plagued everyone in the novel.

In sum, just as hints of St. Anthony's damnation darken the tone of Bosch's canvases, so too the Gothic machinery of Ambrosio's climactic damnation casts a retrospective pall over The Monk's several ambivalent soliloquies in a Spanish cloister. It reminds us of Ambroisio's tongue-in-cheek remark that the "sepulchre seems to me to be Love's bower" (366) and of Medina's more cynical echo from As You Like It: "men have died, and worms have ate them, but not for love" (381). It even reminds us of the profound sense of Gothic ruin which the many "objects of mortality" (367) and "images of corruption" (368), like "graves, and tombs, and skeletons" (366), instill in the novel. Ultimately, it may remind us that whether we take pride in, or feel pity for, Ambrosio's capital punishment, our response entraps us in bogs of moral ambiguity as deep and sticky as those in Bosch's work, since if we self-righteously exult in the Monk's torture, we grow like the sadistic Prioress or ironically like the brutal mob whose "barbarous vengeance" wrongfully punishes her. On the other hand, if we forgive Ambrosio as Agnes forgives Mother St. Agatha (395), our kindness seems a form of wilfull blindness, and our pardon may almost criminally betray an inner weakness. Thus neither a sense of retributive justice, nor a sense of forgiveness seems entirely defensible here. Even though the Inquisitorial ministers of God pardon the Abbot's unpardonable sin, his preemptive despair makes a mockery of that pardon and of his own opportunistic faith. And when we consider that Satan thus appears to have "triumphed" (418) in his battle with God over Ambrosio's soul, or at least that God must depend on Satan as His Executioner, the novel's assault on Divine Providence and Omnipotence seems equally disturbing.

As a matter of fact, the counterpointing energies in Lewis's Gothic romance, as in Bosch's Gothic art, create an honest doubt and healthy skepticism that are ultimately more redemptive than the warped value systems both artists condemn. Lord Holland meant gently to lament such iconoclasm in Lewis some years after his friend's death, but actually reveals the strength of Lewis's (and Bosch's) appeal: "his mind was vitiated with a mystical, though irreligious, philosophy; his taste in reading, writing, and thinking, corrupted by paradox; and his conversation disfigured by captious perverseness in controversy" (Peck 176). Thus, like Bosch's work, The Monk accommodates both God and ghosts, recalling Shelley's rather dismayed description of the way Lewis and Byron equated both forms of Gothic machinery, while he himself believed only in unholy spirits. While "Apollo's Sexton" (Byron's name for Lewis) rationally may have disbelieved in either, imaginatively the "many mysteries of his trade" in The Monk demanded both. In Shelley's words, "We talk of Ghosts. Neither Lord Byron nor M. G. L. seems to believe in them; and they both agree, in the very face of reason, that none could believe in ghosts without believing in God. I do not think that all persons who profess to discredit these visitations, really discredit them; or, if they do in the daylight, are not admonished, by the approach of loneliness and midnight, to think more respectfully of the world of shadows" (Shelley 147).

But Shelley slights Lewis's uncompromising intellectual integrity, for his Gothic vision, like Bosch's, insists upon our remaining open to conflicting solutions to the human dilemma. Although both raise our eyebrows, these kindred spirits also open our eyes to the radical tolerance of "the innocent eye" or dialectical condition of "alert suspense" that their brother Gothicist,⁹ Sir Herbert Read, ultimately advocates: "For in the end I have put all in doubt / God, man; earth, heaven: I live on in alert suspense. / I believe in my unbelief" ("The Golden Disc," 242, ll. 91-93). Or as Lewis confessed to his mother after finishing The Monk, "I prefer knowing the whole, or nothing; for I have an admirable talent for tormenting myself, and the truth can never be worse, tha[n] what I imagine when left to myself" (Peck 216).

Notes

1. Several other critical responses have also addressed the problem of formal unity and the relevance of Gothic machinery in The Monk. Brooks and Grudin find an historical and philosophical unity in the novel, but for different reasons. The former believes "the novel can in fact be read as one of the first and most lucid contextualizations of life in a world where reason has lost its prestige, yet the Godhead has lost its otherness; where the Sacred has been reacknowledged but atomized, and its ethical imperatives psychologized" (249). The latter, on the other hand, sees The Monk reflecting "pre-enlightenment" rather than post-enlightenment ideas: "Unwilling to rely solely on the shopworn machinery of castles, armor and crypts, [Lewis] created a Gothic atmosphere with a fidelity that Walpole and Radcliffe never achieved. His novel recreates a world that is theologically as well as physically archaic" (144). Other relevant studies argue sporadically that Lewis's manipulation of reader response helps to coordinate his otherwise disparate material. For instance, Lydenberg's pertinent treatment of narrative "ambivalence" in The Monk finds that "Lewis' repeated ironic undercutting of the trappings of Gothic fiction, which he nevertheless persists in employing to maximum effect, reveals the same tentativeness which leads him to affect a flippancy and indifference towards all literary activity" (65). Kiely feels that "it is almost as though Lewis had played an unfair trick on the reader by endowing his Gothic stereotypes with life at unexpected and fatal moments" (114). And lastly Punter insists that, "above all," Lewis "wants the reader to see essentially private faults exposed mercilessly on a more or less public stage, and he wants to mock his confused reactions. For Lewis, at all points, tries to be more cynical than his audience, and to dominate it by means of this cynicism" (92).

2. All future page references to The Monk are from the Evergreen edition and are included in the text.

3. For an excellent general discussion of the Gothic imagery of veils and surfaces, see Sedgwick.

4. The interested reader should consult Justi's entire discussion of "The Works of Hieronymous Bosch in Spain."

5. I am using Putnam's edition of Fraenger because it is a "complete edition" (506) of Fraenger's work on Bosch, including revisions of his seminal 1947 study and his later analyses of individual paintings. This Putnam edition also provides large illustrative plates and numerous helpful close-ups of detail from all of the paintings discussed in this essay. For a judicious evaluation of Fraenger's controlling hypothesis and its place in Bosch studies, see Patrik Reuterswärd's Postscript (499-506).

6. See MacAndrew for a discussion of this garden as "a distortion of the devices of the Sentimental novel" (92-93).

7. For other brief treatments of Ambrosio's final "downfall," see Gose (37-38), Fogle (43-44), Kiely (117), and Hallie (78-79).

8. Brooks also implies an existential reading of the novel (262-63). For an account of the relationships between Gothicism and Existentialism, see Hennelly's discussion of "Gothic Existentialism" with special reference to Melmoth the Wanderer (particularly 666-71).

9. The Innocent Eye is the relevant title of Read's autobiography. For an example of Read's interest in Gothicism, see his Introduction to Wilhelm Worringer's architectural study, Form in Gothic, where he not only defends Gothic machinery, but also finds in it a dialectical temper close to his own: "Gothic art must no longer be the romantic predilection of the traveller and archaeologist: it takes its place as the highest and most accurate expression of a great phase in the history of European culture." Consequently, Worringer's analysis of Gothic architectural psychology "necessarily makes demands on the reader: it exacts a close attention and a 'willing suspension' of prejudice" (xii).

Works Cited

Blake, William. Engraved and Etched Writings. William Blake's Writings. Ed. G. E. Bentley, Jr. 2 vols. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1978. Vol. 2.

Brooks, Peter. "Virtue and Terror: The Monk." English Literary History 40 (1973): 249-63.

Byron, George Gordon Lord. Byron: Poetical Works. Ed. Frederick Page. London: Oxford Univ. Press, 1970.

da Vinci Nichols, Nina. "Place and Eros in Radcliffe, Lewis, and Brontë." The Female Gothic. Ed. Juliann E. Fleenor. Montreal and London: Eden Press, 1983. 187-206.

de Voragine, Jacobus. The Golden Legend. Trans. Granger Ryan and Helmut Ripperger. New York: Longmans, Green and Co., 1941.

Fogle, Richard Harter. "The Passions of Ambrosio." The Classic British Novel. Ed. Howard M. Harper, Jr. and Charles Edge. Athens: Univ. of Georgia Press, 1972. 36-50.

Fraenger, Wilhelm. Hieronymous Bosch. Trans. Helen Sebba. New York: G.P. Putnam's Sons, 1983.

Gibson, Walter S. Hieronymous Bosch. New York and Washington: Praeger, 1973.

Gose, Elliott B. Imagination Indulged: The Irrational in the Nineteenth-Century Novel. Montreal: McGill-Queen's Univ. Press, 1972. 27-40.

Grudin, Peter. "The Monk: Matilda and the Rhetoric of Deceit." Journal of Narrative Technique 5 (1975): 136-146.

Hallie, Philip P. The Paradox of Cruelty. Middleton, Conn.: Wesleyan Univ. Press, 1969. 63-84 passim.

Harvey, John. The Cathedrals of Spain. New York: Hastings House, 1957.

Hannelly, Mark M., Jr. "Gothic Existentialism in Melmoth the Wanderer." Studies in English Literature 21 (1981): 665-79.

Irwin, Joseph James. M. G. "Monk" Lewis. Boston: Twayne, 1976.

Justi, Carl. "The Works of Hieronymous Bosch in Spain." Bosch in Perspective. Ed. James Snyder. Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey: Prentice-Hall, 1973.

Kiely, Robert. The Romantic Novel in England. Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1972. 98-117.

Lewis, Matthew Gregory. The Monk. Ed. Louis F. Peck. Intro. John Berryman. New York: Evergreen Book, 1959.

Lydenburg, Robin. "Ghostly Rhetoric: Ambivalence in M.G. Lewis' The Monk." Ariel 10 (1979): 65-78.

MacAndrew, Elizabeth. The Gothic Tradition in Fiction. New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1979. 86-93.

Maturin, Charles Robert. Melmoth the Wanderer. Intro. William F. Axton. Lincoln: Univ. Nebraska Press, Bison Book, 1961.

Peck, Louis. A Life of Matthew G. Lewis. Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1961.

Pope, Alexander. Poetical Works. Ed. Herbert Davis. London: Oxford Univ. Press, 1966.

Punter, David. The Literature of Terror: A History of Gothic Fiction from 1765 to the present day. London and New York: Longman, 1980. 60-97 passim.

Read, Herbert. Collected Poems. New York: Horizon Press, 1966.

――――――. The Innocent Eye. New York: Holt, 1947.

――――――. Trans., ed., and intro. Form in Gothic. By Wilhelm Worringer. rev. ed. New York: Schocken Books, 1957.

Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky. "The Character in the Veil: Imagery of the Surface in the Gothic Novel." PMLA 96 (1981): 255-70.

Shelley, Percy Bysshe. The Complete Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley. Ed. Roger Ingpen and Walter E. Peck. 10 vols. London: Ernest Benn and New York: Gordian Press, 1965. Vol. 6.

Sitwell, Sacheverell. Gothic Europe. New York: Holt, 1969.

Street, George Edmund. Some Account of Gothic Architecture in Spain. Ed. Georgiana Goddard King. 2 vols. New York and London: Benjamin Blom, 1914. Vol. 1.

Walpole, Horace. The Castle of Otranto. Three Gothic Novels. ed. E. F. Bleiler. New York: Dover, 1966. 1-106.

Yeats, William Butler. The Collected Poems of W. B. Yeats. New York: Macmillan, 1956.

ANGELA WRIGHT (ESSAY DATE 2002)

SOURCE: Wright, Angela. "European Disruptions of the Idealized Woman: Matthew Lewis's The Monk and the Marquis de Sade's La Nouvelle Justine." In European Gothic: A Spirited Exchange, 1760–1960, edited by Avril Horner, pp. 39-54. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2002.

In the following essay, Wright traces parallels between The Monk and the Marquis de Sade's novel Justine and maintains that the two works influenced one another in significant ways, including in their narrative technique and portrayal of heroines.

Matthew Gregory Lewis and the Marquis de Sade are, in their own rights, well-researched authors. Lewis is rightfully accorded a prominent position in critical surveys of the English Gothic novel due to his notorious production The Monk (Miles 1993; Kilgour 1995; Botting 1996; Punter 1996); the Marquis de Sade has also recently been afforded a great deal of critical and biographical attention (Lever 1991; Schaeffer 1999). What is less well documented, however, is the mutually influential relationship under which both authors' work flourished.

The tracing of Matthew Lewis's numerous 'borrowed' sources in The Monk began swiftly after the novel's publication. In 1797, for example, an article in the Monthly Review took pleasure in identifying in The Monk a number of plot motifs taken from, amongst other sources, Smollett's Ferdinand Count Fathom, Cazotte's Le Diable amoureux (1772), and numerous German romances. The review, however, was surprisingly favourable of these 'borrowings'. It argued:

This may be called plagiarism, yet it deserves some praise. The great art of writing consists in selecting what is most stimulant from the works of our predecessors, and in uniting the gathered beauties in a new whole, more interesting than the tributary models. This is the essential process of the imagination, and excellence is no otherwise attained. All invention is but new combination. To invent well is to combine the impressive.

                       (Anon. 1797b: 451, n. 23)

Such accusations of lightly veiled plagiarism, coupled with the extensive documentation of Lewis's familiarity with and translations of German terror literature, have haunted the publication history of The Monk to such an extent that we are now inclined to read it as a Barthesian tis-sue of other stories, rather than search for coherency of themes. This chapter, however, will begin by tracing the mutual influences which the texts of de Sade and Lewis shared, and conclude by charting the reciprocity of themes and ideas between Lewis and de Sade.

Matthew Lewis published The Monk in 1796, subsequent to some time spent in Paris. While he was in Paris in the summer of 1791, he acquired and read the second edition of the Marquis de Sade's novel Justine, ou les malheurs de la vertu, published in that same year. The reading of Justine undoubtedly influenced Lewis's subsequent novelistic creation, for The Monk sent the English Gothic novel in a radical new direction, on account of the terrors to which its pious female characters are subjected. The Monk, indeed, bears far more comparison with de Sade's libertine novels than with the English Gothic novel form because, as many critics have noted, it is a novel that focuses entirely upon the revelatory aspect of narrative. In this way, it clearly maps on to de Sade's project of 'tout révéler', or 'the revelation of all'. Having acknowledged that de Sade's creation Justine was undoubtedly a source of inspiration for Lewis, the latter part of this chapter will chart how, in return, Lewis's novel appears to have influenced de Sade's third and final reprise of the story of Justine. Significantly, Lewis's The Monk was translated into French for the first time in 1797 under the simple title of Le Moine. ¹ The publication date of this first translation is significant, for 1797 also marked the year in which, after a lapse of six years, de Sade revised the notorious Justine, ou les malheurs de la vertu, into a third and final edition entitled La Nouvelle Justine. Crucially, Lewis's novel lies between the second and third editions of de Sade's creation, and, I would argue, provided a stimulus for de Sade's comprehensive thematic revisions.

The first edition of de Sade's novel, Les Infortunes de la vertu, was written during his imprisonment in the Bastille between 1787 and 1788. Les Infortunes recounts the story of a pious and innocent girl named Justine, who, upon the death of her parents, is thrown out onto the streets from the convent where she has been living. She has an older sister called Juliette who is licentious by nature and who resolves to maintain herself by prostitution; to the fervently religious Justine, however, this is a fate worse than death. She resolves to earn her living through honesty and charity, but in the cruel world that de Sade depicts, she soon discovers that honesty and virtue are worthless commodities. Her starkly depicted naivety make her a victim of constant rape and torture from the figureheads of the institutions in which she places her faith.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
JOSEPH JAMES IRWIN ON LEWIS'S MASTERY OF HORROR AND TERROR

The Gothic novel has been reborn in the last half of the twentieth century, but it did not really need rediscovery, since M. G. Lewis's Monk has been almost continuously in print since its first publication in 1796. The new Gothic novel owes a debt to it and to its nineteen-year-old author, Matthew Gregory Lewis, better known by his nickname "Monk," for the new novel can hardly be written without some imitation, conscious or unconscious, of the old one. Monk brought terror literature to a high state of accomplishment in the approximately fifteen years in which he flourished as a writer. Although he did not try to write another novel, he worked on terror plays and terror poems in which he perfected three genre techniques that have become so traditional that they are almost the only methods used to present the pleasurable thrills of horror and of terror. Although the dominance of The Monk has obscured Lewis's other literary works, he wrote not only terror plays, such as his very popular Castle Spectre, but also legitimate tragedies and comedies, some of which were acted before enthusiastic audiences in spite of the unkind remarks of his critics and which are examples of the dramatic taste of the late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century British theater. Despite such drama, Lewis was at his best in the horrific and the spectacular.

SOURCE: Irwin, Joseph James. "Writer and Humanitarian." In M. G. "Monk" Lewis, pp. 11-34. Boston: Twayne, 1976.

This first edition of de Sade's novel was a modest two hundred pages in length and was described by its author as a 'conte philosophique' or 'philosophical tale'. De Sade never published Les Infortunes and it did not see the light of day until 1930, when it was edited by Maurice Heine. De Sade's second edition, Justine, ou les malheurs de la vertu, published in 1791, retained the first-person narrative of the previous edition but redoubled the narrative of the heroine's distresses, and embodied much more salacious detail. It is this second edition of the novel that Lewis would have bought and read in Paris. Both Maurice Heine and Béatrice Didier have described the evolution between these first two versions as the progression from a simple tale to that of a romantic Gothic novel due to the subsequent additions of underground cells, macabre moments and reveries (Didier 1976: 106). In addition, Heine has drawn parallels between the trope of the 'explained supernatural' in Ann Radcliffe's novels, and de Sade's frequent and abrupt alternations between Gothic scenarios and their rational explanations (Heine 1973: III 36).

Such Gothic additions to de Sade's novel clearly influenced some of the scenarios in Lewis's novel. For example, the sepulchral location of Antonia's rape by Ambrosio in The Monk bears a strong resemblance to the underground seraglio in the Sainte-Marie-des-Bois monastery where Justine is raped and tortured. Besides locational and atmospheric resemblances, there are also clear thematic parallels between Justine, ou les malheurs de la vertu, The Monk, and de Sade's subsequent La Nouvelle Justine. One of the most striking themes which is shared by both authors lies in the brutal collation of their novelistic heroines with idolized versions of the Madonna. It was through this key coupling of their heroines with the Madonna that Lewis and de Sade launched a critique of the privileging of such iconography in religion.

In Ways of Seeing, John Berger has famously commented on the portrayal of women as visions that: 'Women watch themselves being looked at … The surveyor of woman in herself is male: the surveyed female. Thus she turns herself into an object—and most particularly an object of vision: a sight …' (1972: 47). According to Berger, then, there is little or no distinction between this 'sight', conjured by the female to flatter the male, and becoming an 'object of vision'. The word 'vision' is of vital importance in the way that the heroines of both The Monk and the various versions of Justine are portrayed. At the beginning of their novels, Lewis and de Sade both establish a discourse of spectacle in which both characters and readers are compelled to participate.

Lewis's novel The Monk signals its participation in this complicitous spectatorial discourse on the very first page, where an audience is gathered at the Church of the Capuchins to hear the eponymous monk Ambrosio preach:

Scarcely had the Abbey-Bell tolled for five minutes, and already was the Church of the Capuchins thronged with Auditors. Do not encourage the idea that the Crowd was assembled from motives of piety or thirst of information … The Women came to show themselves, the Men to see the Women: Some were attracted by curiosity to hear an Orator so celebrated; Some came because they had no better means of employing their time till the play began; Some, from being assured that it would be impossible to find places in the Church; and one half of Madrid was brought thither by expecting to see the other half.

                                  (Lewis 1980: 7)

By establishing at the very beginning of this novel unstable connections between female beauty, male desire and religion, the novel immediately establishes the themes that it wishes to undermine. The narrator's stark honesty at the beginning of the novel provides a sharp contrast to the characters' own lack of motivational awareness. It also, however, forces the reader into a passive position where there is no mystery to be worked out. Everything is on display in The Monk : sexual desire, hypocrisy and naivety are all presented to us, forcing us into a spectatorial position.

Such a revelatory beginning to The Monk bears comparison with de Sade's second edition of Justine in 1791. In Justine, ou les malheurs de la vertu, Justine as first-person narrator is coaxed by her otherwise silent auditors at one point in the narrative to continue her revelation of all the horrors that have been forced upon her. Her delicacy makes her pause and consider the effects of the story on her audience. However, the audience, being comprised of her libertine sister Juliette and her lover de Corville, urges her to recount all:

Mais comment abuser de votre patience pour vous raconter ces nouvelles horreurs? N'ai-je pas déjà trop souillé votre imagination par d'infâmes récits? Dois-je en hasarder de nouveaux?

Oui,… dit Monsieur de Corville, oui, nous exigeons de vous tous ces détails, vous les gagez avec une décence qui en émousse toute l'horreur;

                         (de Sade 1986: III 240)

(But how can I abuse your patience by relating these new horrors? Have I not already more than soiled your imagination with infamous recitations? Dare I hazard additional ones?

'Yes,…' Monsieur de Corville put in, 'yes, we insist upon these details, you veil them with a decency that removes their edge of horror;'

               (Seaver and Wainhouse 1991: 670)²

Every tiny detail of libertinism, horror and misfortune must be recounted in this novel, and contrary to de Corville's justifications, Justine's narrative does not gloss over the horror of the repeated violations. Although the first-person narrator, Justine, has reservations about revealing all, in contrast to Lewis's later anonymous narrator, the reader of both tales is none the less compelled to adopt the same prurient role, having duly been warned by the narrators of the horrors that await. In relation to The Monk, David Punter has demonstrated how Lewis 'tries constantly to challenge his audience, to upset its security, to give the reader a moment of doubt about whether he may not himself be guilty of the complicated faults attributed to Ambrosio' (Punter 1996: I 79), and Punter's argument here is equally applicable to de Sade's Justine.

If de Sade's and Lewis's narrative techniques are both brutally revelatory, then their portrayal of their heroines are similarly so. Berger's use of the term 'vision' is of vital importance in the way that the heroines of both The Monk and the various versions of Justine are characterized. At the beginning of their novels, Lewis and de Sade both immediately create very pictorial images of their heroines. These images establish the heroines as modest, virginal, religiously devout and naive. Such textual characterizations are knowingly situated within an eighteenth-century literary tradition which equated feminine beauty and distress. In Les Malheurs de la vertu, for example, there is a moment when Justine describes the effect that her distress has on the monk Antonin:

La violence de mes mouvements avait fait disparaître les voiles qui couvraient mon sein; il était nu, mes cheveux y flottaient en désordre, il était inondé de mes larmes; j'inspire des désirs à ce malhonnête homme

                      (de Sade 1986: III 291)

(The violence of my movements had disturbed what veiled my breast, it was naked, my dishevelled hair fell in cascades upon it, it was wetted thoroughly by my tears; I quicken desires in the dishonest man)

               (Seaver and Wainhouse 1991: 720)

Here, Justine's self-depiction creates a tableau of distressed beauty which is, however, knowingly eroticized, revealing the tale's French literary heritage. For example, in Diderot's earlier novel La Religieuse (1780), the heroine Suzanne Simonin is similarly aware of the effect that she has on her male persecutors.³ This earlier heroine does, however, admit to some possible complicity on her own part, stating: 'Je suis une femme, peutêtre un peu coquette, que sais-je?' (Diderot 1961: 178) or 'Perhaps I am slightly flirtatious, who knows? I am a woman' (my translation). Diderot's Suzanne appears in many ways to be the French literary precursor to de Sade's Justine in her knowing admission of the desire she inspires in her persecutors. As such, she provides literary inspiration for both de Sade's and Lewis's critique of religion in her persecution by monks, and also in her confused couplings of her own beauty and distress with the desire that they inspire.

Such equations of beauty and distress inform, in turn, the construction of the English Gothic novel. The opening chapter of Ann Radcliffe's 1791 The Romance of the Forest (Radcliffe 1992) contains a similar scene. Here, through the focalization of a Monsieur La Motte, the heroine Adeline's features are described as having 'gained from distress an expression of captivating sweetness' and her clothes are described as having been 'thrown open at the bosom, upon which part of the hair had fallen in disorder' (Radcliffe 1992: 7). However, the crucial difference lies between the knowing eroticization provided by the female first-person narrators in the French novels, and the male-focalized third-person narratives that create these tableaux in the English Gothic novels.⁴

Our introduction to one of the principal female victims of The Monk, Antonia, confirms the spectatorial role into which Lewis's narrator forces us. When Antonia's veil is dislodged as she passes in the Church, we discover 'a neck which for symmetry and beauty might have vied with the Medicean Venus' (Lewis 1980: 9). What is more, through the focalization of the hero Lorenzo, she is also compared to an 'Hamadryad'. This choice of comparison is particularly telling and ironic: in Greek mythology, the Hamadryad is a tree nymph who dies when the tree dies. Inextricably bound in a symbiotic relationship, there is no autonomous existence for this creature. Desire is ineffably linked to the dual commodities of beauty and virginity in The Monk. Antonia is awarded attributes by her several admirers which can only be associated with purity. Therefore, once she is raped towards the end of the novel, she must die. Stripped of her perfect virginity, her most precious commodity in the eyes of the male, Antonia becomes as nothing.

Later in the novel, when Antonia has been fatally raped by the Monk Ambrosio, who claims that he has been seduced into violently raping her because of her perfect virginal beauty, she becomes simply a mirror who reflects his crimes. Ambrosio reproaches Antonia for his crime as follows:

What seduced me into crimes, whose bare remembrance makes me shudder? Fatal witch! Was it not thy beauty? Have you not plunged my soul into infamy? Have you not made me a perjured Hypocrite, a Ravisher, an Assassin! Nay, at this moment, does not that angel look bid me despair of God's forgiveness? Oh! When I stand before his judgement throne, that look will suffice to damn me! You will tell my Judge, that you were happy, till I saw you; that you were innocent, till I polluted you!

                             (Lewis 1980: 385)

Once Antonia's virginal integrity is shattered, her fragmented image mirrors Ambrosio's crime alone. The reproaches with which he loads her here are reminiscent of the blame that both Diderot's Suzanne and de Sade's second Justine inflict upon themselves. In all three cases, it is not the male authority figure to blame, but the female's irresistible beauty. Antonia's 'angel look' reminds Ambrosio of his irrecoverable sin, and shame and remorse subsume his previous identity as the pious, confident and irreproachable monk.

Antonia cannot survive the loss of her innocence in the textual space that this novel offers her precisely because of the unreality of her construction. In the eyes of the male characters, she is attributed solely the properties of virginal beauty, and, when this is taken from her, she mirrors only what passion has led Ambrosio to. Her death is a direct indictment of her textual establishment as an icon of modesty in the eyes of the male characters. Maggie Kilgour has commented that in the cases of both Ambrosio and Lorenzo, 'the attainment of sexual fantasies produces disgust, while the enlightened attempt to demystify only produces a deeper darkness' (1995: 160). This 'deeper darkness', as Robert Miles has suggested, is a consequence of the 'taboo territory' that their desire inhabits (1993: 27). This 'taboo territory' lies in the sublimation of their sexual fantasies within artistic representations of women.

Thus far, Lewis's novel has not really destabilized the connections between femininity, modesty and religion. If anything, it has reinforced them with the brutal death of Antonia. However, bearing in mind Teresa de Lauretis's point that 'to perform the terms of the production of woman as text, as image, is to resist identification with that image' (1984: 36), we will now turn our attention to the second female image in The Monk, offered by the demon lover Matilda. Matilda is important in this novel precisely because she seduces Ambrosio through his own constructions of the idealized female. By this, I refer to his key idealization of femininity as being necessarily equated with the Virgin Mary. When he has preached a particularly pious sermon, the monk Ambrosio returns to his cell to worship a portrait of the Madonna that hangs there. He congratulates himself on being above fleshly temptation:

'I must accustom my eyes to Objects of temptation, and expose myself to the seduction of luxury and desire. Should I meet in that world which I am constrained to enter some lovely Female, lovely … as you Madona …!'

As he said this, He fixed his eyes upon a picture of the Virgin, which was suspended opposite to him: This for two years had been the Object of his increasing wonder and adoration. He paused, and gazed upon it in delight.

'What beauty in that countenance!' He continued after a silence of some minutes; 'How graceful is the turn of that head! What sweetness, yet what majesty in her divine eyes!… Oh, if such a creature existed, and existed but for me!…

Fool that I am! Whither do I suffer my admiration of this picture to hurry me? Away, impure ideas! Let me remember, that Woman is for ever lost to me. Never was mortal formed so perfect as this picture … What charms me, when ideal and considered as a superior being, would disgust me, become Woman and tainted with all the failings of Mortality.

                               (Lewis 1980: 41)

Ambrosio's use of the words 'charm' and 'disgust', in reference to the Virgin and Woman, indicate his differing perceptions of the iconized Madonna and the reality of Womanhood. Women to him are tainted and impure: their presence threatens to taint him. It is gradually revealed to Ambrosio, however, that the image of the Madonna that hangs in his room, a painting that he venerates, is in fact a portrait of Matilda. Matilda herself, hitherto disguised as a novice, effects this shattering revelation. Matilda's declaration of love for Ambrosio occurs in parallel with her revelation of her true gender to him: she controls Ambrosio's responses and interests, just as she has controlled his desire for this portrait of the alleged Madonna. Equally, the gender-switch which she effects also disrupts Ambrosio's 'normative', heterosexual, desire for the portrait.

When Matilda, having nursed the dying Ambrosio back to health, gradually reveals her true identity as the woman portrayed in the portrait, Ambrosio's confusion over the idolized Madonna and the sexualized female is complete, and he falls prey to her desire. Ambrosio and Matilda embark upon a passionate sexual relationship where the monk's lust is given full vent upon her willing body. Their sexual relationship also involves their collusion in order to conceal it from the rest of the monastery. However, when Matilda begins to dominate their machinations, and coldly to plan their hypocrisy, Ambrosio begins to become disillusioned with her:

Left to himself He could not reflect without surprize on the sudden change in Matilda's character and sentiments. But a few days had past, since She appeared the mildest and softest of her sex, devoted to his will, and looking up to him as a superior Being. But now she assumed a sort of courage and manliness in her manners but ill calculated to please him … what she gained in the opinion of the Man, She lost with interest in the affection of the Lover.

                           (Lewis 1980: 231-232)

In order to remain sexually appealing to Ambrosio, Matilda should remain 'submissive' and, consequently, in his eyes, feminine. Ambrosio desires a reinforcement of the distinctions between male and female: he looks for someone to affirm his ideal of himself as a 'superior being' and confirm his elevated status in society. Matilda initially secures Ambrosio to herself by her very self-positioning as gentle and submissive. In order to continue to remain in his favour, such posturing should be maintained, but Matilda discards it once she has secured Ambrosio. It is only when Matilda discards submission that she, as the double of the Madonna portrait, no longer satisfies.

This thematic enjambment is fully explored by Julia Kristeva in her essay 'Stabat Mater' where she questions the supremacy of images of the Madonna in Western culture. She locates Mary and the Lady as: 'the focal point of men's desires and aspirations. Moreover, because they were unique and thus excluded all other women, both the Lady and the Virgin embodied an absolute authority the more attractive as it appeared removed from paternal sternness' (1986: 170). When Matilda transgresses the boundary of ideal, feminine behaviour and becomes masterful, she no longer doubles the Madonna portrait and consequently no longer mirrors Ambrosio's desires. She ceases to represent his image of an ideal love, and is thus replaced with Antonia, another virginal object. None the less, it is Matilda who is responsible in this novel for destabilizing the equation of woman and modesty, and, as such, she occupies an important space. By portraying Ambrosio's fatal passion as being so linked to his love of the Madonna, Lewis also effectively critiques the location of the Virgin Mary as an icon in Western culture.

This critique offered by Lewis seems to be supported by a significant addition that he made to the ending of the second edition of the novel. Following the outraged reception of the first edition of The Monk in 1796, Lewis added an extra passage to the ending of the second, third and fourth editions of the novel.⁵ In the first edition, the villainous monk Ambrosio is dashed to pieces and left to rot at the foot of a mountain by Lucifer, as a suitable punishment for his various crimes. The second edition kept that conclusion, but added a more moral note as the final closure to the tale:

Haughty Lady, why shrunk you back when yon poor frail one drew near? Was the air infected by her errors? Was your purity soiled by her passing breath? Ah! Lady, smooth that insulting brow: stifle the reproach just bursting from your scornful lip: wound not a soul, that bleeds already! She has suffered, suffers still. Her air is gay, but her heart is broken: her dress sparkles, but her bosom groans.

Lady, to look with mercy on the conduct of others, is a virtue no less than to look with severity on your own.

                              (Lewis 1796: III 314-315)

Recent editors of The Monk have chosen largely to ignore this addition, only acknowledg-ing its existence in a note upon the text. However, if we take into consideration the themes that we have just been exploring, it appears to offer a thematically tighter conclusion. By dwelling on the external appearances of two seemingly diametrically opposed female characters, named only 'Haughty Lady' and 'yon poor frail one', the author himself has cast two nameless women into stereotypical positions. However, Lewis has at the same time undermined this by his appeal for our compassion, and for external appearances to be mistrusted.

In this novel, a critique of the masculine tendency to veil the reality of the female presence is offered on several levels. One of these levels is the equation of the female form with artistic, religious representations of it. As Jerry Hogle has argued, 'all passionate desire in this book is really aroused, intensified, and answered by images more than objects or bodies, by signifiers more often than by signifieds or referents.' (1997: 1) The 'Haughty Lady' of this second edition, contrasted with the 'poor frail one' does not need a specific identity. Rather, she appears to signify the idealized versions of the Madonna, offered throughout this novel in various images, portraits and representations of women. She is also specifically contrasted with the 'poor frail one' who may represent the wronged heroines of this novel, wronged because of their unwitting similarities to the Virgin Mary.

In all, The Monk offers three core models of femininity that are both indebted to previous literary representations and intended to disrupt them. The first, Antonia, is a clear embodiment of previous literary representations drawn from, amongst others, Diderot, de Sade and Radcliffe. The second model, Agnes, who like Diderot's Suzanne is a nun who cannot disentangle herself from her orders, provides a remarkable representation of what happens when the flesh-and-blood reality of motherhood is neglected. The tale of her illegitimate baby, left to die on her chest as a 'suitable' punishment by her convent for fornication, is grotesquely realized. Finally, although Matilda is, as the Monthly Review noted in 1797, remarkably similar to Jacques Cazotte's devil Biondetta in The Devil in Love, she remains none the less a remarkable and unique indictment of the roles played by male desire in the previous models. Her ability to gender-switch, to posture submission when required, and her mimicry of the Madonna all undermine previous literary constructions of femininity. The character of Matilda incorporates Suzanne Simonin's knowledge of her effect on men and parodies the earlier Justine's naivety in Lewis's endeavour to untangle the links between femininity, desire and the Madonna.

In his critical work 'Idée sur les romans', first published in 1800 as a preface to Les Crimes de l'amour, the Marquis de Sade praised Lewis's The Monk for being superior, in every respect, to the brilliantly imaginative novels of Ann Radcliffe. Paradoxically, however, it was also in this same work that de Sade famously disclaimed his authorship of Justine, an assertion which he persisted in repeating throughout his life. In this essay, he protested, 'I have never written any such immoral works, and I never shall' (1970: 63, my translation). Given that de Sade had only recently published his third edition of his Justine tale, La Nouvelle Justine, his critical and literary personae appear to be clearly at odds with each other. De Sade the public author, who writes with such authority in 'Idée sur les romans' on Richardson, Lewis and Radcliffe, clearly wanted to dissociate himself from his own literary efforts. Perhaps such vehement denial was due to the fact that Alexandre-Louis de Villeterque identified the Justine novels as de Sade's and subsequently calumniated them in the Journal des arts, des sciences et de littérature (de Villeterque 1800). However, de Sade's very obvious admiration of Matthew Lewis in his own critical essay does appear to undermine his self-distancing from the immoral works of Justine.

La Nouvelle Justine, ou les malheurs de la vertu, suivi de l'histoire de Juliette, sa soeur was a work of ten volumes, with a hundred obscene engravings. It was supposedly printed 'in Holland' in 1797, although it was actually typeset in Paris by de Sade's publisher Nicolas Massé. However, Jean-Jacques Pauvert, one of the co-editors of de Sade's complete works, has raised justifiable questions about the date, 1797, and the order of publication of La Nouvelle Justine and L'Histoire de Juliette. He argues that the third Justine followed an earlier 1796 version of Juliette in August 1800 (de Sade 1986: VIII 18). This third reprisal of the story tripled the length of the second edition, and added yet more persecution and torture.

Given Pauvert's correction of the dates of La Nouvelle Justine, it appears highly probable that some of the much-admired Matthew Lewis's methods of inscribing virtue in distress had an impact on de Sade's revisions. In this third edition, for the first time the character Justine is denied the first-person narrative voice and the entire story is told in the third person. It is equally as important to note that this third version of the novel is not a Gothic novel. As Didier has noted, with this third Justine we witness an 'explosion' of the Gothic novel (1976: 106). Whereas in the previous two editions we had some sympathy for the unfortunate heroine, here, instead, the third-person narrator makes us entirely complicit in his mockery of Justine. Like the narrative voice at the beginning of The Monk which urges us not to encourage the idea that piety attracts people to church, de Sade's narrator in this final edition mocks the ineffectual piety of Justine. At one point, for example, he castigates religion for promoting self-interest (1986: 100); later he relentlessly pursues Justine for crying when her religious consolation is revealed to be illogical by the Comte du Bressac, stating that tears are 'la ressource du faible, en se voyant ravir la chimère qui le consolait', or 'the resource of a weak person, when they have their last source of consolation torn away' (1986: 141, my translation). In this final, more picaresque edition, de Sade finally achieved exactly the disruption of the idolized feminine form which he wished.⁶ What his libertine characters pursue with such violence are females who idolize the Madonna with such force that they are unwittingly seen to dress like her, and shown to act with a concomitant naivety that is breathtaking.

Why was de Sade so haunted by this tale that he revised it twice over the space of ten years? As with Lewis's novel, some of the answers lie in the portrayal of virtue in distress, and with the essential linkage of that virtue to religious piety. The narrator himself justifies this assumption on the very second page of this third edition, where he states that 'Il est essentiel que les sots cessent d'encenser cette ridicule idole de la vertu, qui ne les a jusqu'ici payés que d'ingratitude' (1986: IV 26). 'It is essential that fools stop worshipping this ridiculous idol of virtue, which until now has only repaid them with ingratitude' (my translation). What is interesting here is the deliberate confusion about the subject of de Sade's attack. Virtue as a concept is what he most wishes to denigrate for his readers; but equally, one could conclude that the 'ridiculous idol of virtue' could be his character Justine, made famous through the previous two editions of the novel, and clearly associated with both purity and religion. In all three editions, Justine's beauty is compared to that of Raphael's beautiful virgins. Like Lewis, then, de Sade makes implicit connections between Justine, virginity and painting. However, in contrast, his project is clearly stated at the very beginning of the tale. He wishes to use the character Justine to teach moralists a violent lesson about idolizing virtue. The subsequent linking of this virtue to specifically Catholic institutions such as monasteries display a disgust with the artifices and ornaments of the Catholic Church. De Sade's atheistic castigation of the ritualistic worship of artifices in the Catholic Church is remarkably similar to Lewis's Anglican-Protestant condemnation of the sensuality of this worship.

The trajectory of the unfortunate adventures of Justine involves successive encounters with different institutions. The foremost of these institutions in each edition is a monastery called SainteMarie-des-Bois where Justine goes to confess and be comforted by the monks. Justine's naivety, coupled with her religious fervour, makes her a desirable prey for the libertine monks who run this monastery, and want to admit her to their seraglio. A very detailed passage in the third edition, La Nouvelle Justine, describes Justine's confession:

Justine, éblouie par les illusions de son ardente piété, n'entend rien, ne voit rien, et se prosterne;…

Justine, immobile, fermement persuadée que tout ce qu'on lui fait n'a d'autre but que de la conduire pas à pas vers la perfection céleste, souffre tout avec une indicible résignation; pas une plainte … pas un mouvement ne lui échappe; son esprit était tellement élevé vers les choses célestes, que le bourreau l'eût déchirée sans qu'elle eût seulement osé s'en plaindre.

                          (de Sade, 1986: IV 249-250)

(Overcome by the illusions of her boundless piety, Justine hears nothing, sees nothing and kneels down;… motionless, certain that everything that she is subjected to has no other aim than to lead her step by step to celestial perfection, Justine suffers everything with an ineffable resignation; not one complaint passes her lips … not one movement comes from her; so much was her spirit transported on to a higher plane that her tormentor might have ripped her to pieces without her once even daring to protest.)

                                     (my translation)

This description situates Justine firmly on the side of innocence and piety, whilst simultaneously destroying this picture of innocence by describing the libertine monks' desecration of her. Thus fixed in her adoration of the Virgin Mary, Justine becomes blind to the immediate danger posed by the monks who lasciviously watch her devotions and undress her. De Sade firmly makes the point in this edition of the novel that it is precisely Jus-tine's obsession with the Virgin Mary, her fervent piety, which delivers her so easily to the cruelties of the monks of Sainte-Marie-des-Bois. Justine adopts the posture of the Virgin Mary, and the posturing incites the monks' violent desires. What the monks wish to attain, apart from sexual gratification, is the violent destruction of this virginal image by reminding Justine of her all too mortal qualities. Her innocence here appears to owe more to Lewis's portrayal of Antonia (who is shrouded in both a 'bandage of ignorance' as well as a 'veil of innocence' (1980: 264)) than to the more wordly wise characterizations of Justine in the two previous versions of de Sade's own text.

Both Matthew Lewis and the Marquis de Sade embarked upon disrupting the collation of the venerated Madonna and women. They both used fairly brutal methods to destabilize these connections in their texts. Lewis portrayed one lascivious monk who falls prey to a lustful demon who deliberately postures herself as the Madonna. De Sade's relentless destabilization comes through the successive and ever-more-brutal revision of a rape scene in a monastery where the heroine becomes so lost in her devotions to the Madonna that she forgets the real dangers which surround her. In de Sade's La Nouvelle Justine we, as readers, are brutally taught of the follies of Justine's posturing by being forced to laugh at both her innocence and devotion. Lewis's The Monk conveys its message in slightly different terms—one of these terms, as I have argued, lies in the addition of the 'Haughty Lady' to the subsequent editions, the other term is by teaching Ambrosio through damnation that the ideal and the real, such as the Madonna, doubled by Matilda and Antonia, must remain forever separate. In the words of Angela Carter: 'Even if it is the dream made flesh, the real, once it becomes real, can be no more than real' (Carter 1982: 201).

Notes

1. Anon. 1797a. Although this four-volume edition is translated anonymously, it has been identified, and is widely acknowledged on library catalogues, as having been translated by four different translators: namely, Jacques-Marie Deschamps, Jean-Baptiste Desprès, Pierre Vincent Benoist and Pierre Bernard Lamare.

2. Where available, I have used authoritative translations of de Sade's works. However, in the case of La Nouvelle Justine and 'Idée sur les romans', where no translations have been available, I have used my own. These instances are marked in the body of the text.

3. As Peter France has documented, Diderot in fact wrote La Religieuse in 1760. However, it was published in the Correspondance littéraire in 1780, though a teasing set of letters, which describe the circumstances of composition, had been made public in 1770 (France 1983: 37). The Monthly Magazine noted in December 1797 the translation of La Religieuse: 'Two novels have been translated from the French of Diderot, with considerable vivacity, "The Nun" and "James the Fatalist": in each of these works are some masterly delineations of character, but the pen of Diderot is not remarkable for its chastity' (Anon. 1797c: 518).

4. For a fuller exploration of the similarities and differences between The Romance of the Forest and de Sade's second Justine, see Clery 1994. Clery discusses the similar plot motifs of both novels, but demonstrates the two novels' entirely different philosophical approaches.

5. Lewis, of course, reserved the most significant changes to the text for the fourth edition of the novel, Ambrosio, or The Monk: A Romance (1798). However, the crucial addition to the ending is present from the second edition. The British Library carries an annotated copy of the third edition owned by Lewis where he wrote in the vital changes to be made. The copy makes for interesting reading not only because of the corrections, but also because of the bitter asides that Lewis has scribbled in. For example, a scribbled footnote to his 'Imitation of Horace' epigraph 'And when you find, condemned, despised, / Neglected, blamed, and criticised.' bitterly records of the novel's reception 'Neglected it has not been, but criticised enough of all conscience' (BL: C.28. b 4-6: iv).

6. I would justify my use of the term 'picaresque' for this final edition of the novel because the overarching am of the novel, thanks to the editorial inventions, is to satirize virtue, and its embodiment in the naive character of Justine, whose travels take her from master to master.

References

Anon. (1797a) Le Moine, traduit de l'anglais, 4 vols, Paris, Maradan.

Anon. (1797b) Monthly Review, 23.

Anon. (1797c) Monthly Magazine, December.

Berger, J. (1972) Ways of Seeing, Harmondsworth, Penguin.

Botting, F. (1996) Gothic, London, Routledge.

Carter, A. (1982) The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman, Harmondsworth, Penguin [1972].

Cazotte, J. (1772) Le Diable amoureux. Nouvelle espagnole, Naples and Paris, n.p.

Clery, E. J. (1994) 'Ann Radcliffe and D. A. F. de Sade: thoughts on heroinism', Women's Writing, 1:2.

Diderot, D. (1961) La Religieuse, Paris, Armand Colin [1780].

Didier, B. (1976) Sade: Une écriture du désir, Paris, Denoel/Gonthier.

France, P. (1983) Diderot, Oxford, Oxford University Press.

Heine, M. (1973) 'Le Marquis de Sade et le roman noir', in A. Le Brun and J.-J. Pauvert (eds) Oeuvres complètes du Marquis de Sade, 16 vols, Paris, Société Nouvelle des Editions Pauvert.

Hogle, J. 'The Ghost of the Counterfeit—and the Closet—in The Monk', in Romanticism on the Net 8 (November 1997) 〈http://users.ox.ac.uk/~scat0385/ghost.html〉.

Kilgour, M. (1995) The Rise of the Gothic Novel, London, Routledge.

Kristeva, J. (1986) 'Stabat Mater', trans. L. Roudiez, in T. Moi (ed.) The Kristeva Reader, Oxford, Blackwell.

de Lauretis, T. (1984) Alice Doesn't: Feminism, Semiotics, Cinema, Bloomington, Indiana University Press.

Lever, M. (1991) Donatien Alphonse François, Marquis de Sade, Paris, Fayard.

Lewis, M. G. (1796) The Monk; a Romance, 2nd edn, 3 vols. London, J. Bell.

――――――. (1797) The Monk; a Romance, 3rd edn, annotated copy: BL c.175. l13. 3 vols, London, J. Bell.

――――――. (1798) Ambrosio, or The Monk; A Romance, London, J. Bell.

――――――. (1980) The Monk; a Romance ed. H. Anderson, Oxford, Oxford University Press [1796].

Miles, R. (1993) Gothic Writing: A Genealogy, London, Routledge.

Punter, D. (1996) The Literature of Terror, 2nd edn, 2 vols, London and New York, Longman.

Radcliffe, A. (1992) The Romance of the Forest: Interspersed with Some Pieces of Poetry, ed. C. Chard, Oxford, Oxford University Press [1791].

de Sade, D. A. F. (1970) 'Idée sur les romans', Paris, Ducros.

――――――. (1986) Oeuvres complètes du Marquis de Sade, eds A. Le Brun and J.-J.

Pauvert, 16 vols, Paris, Société Nouvelle des Editions Pauvert [1800].

――――――. (1991) Three Complete Novels and Other Writings, trans. R. Seaver and A. Wainhouse, London, Arrow.

Schaeffer, N. (1999) The Marquis de Sade: A Life, London, Hamish Hamilton.

de Villeterque, A.-L. (1800) Journal des arts, des sciences et delittérature, 22 October.

FURTHER READING

Bibliography

Frank, Frederick S. "The Monk: A Bicentenary Bibliography." Romanticism on the Net 8 (November 1997): 〈http://users.ox.ac.uk/~scat0385/monkbiblio.html〉.

Frank states: "[d]esigned to be consulted sequentially, the bibliography conducts a census of contemporary and historical criticism appearing in books, monographs, scholarly journals, and doctoral dissertations, with the eleven individual sections containing complete and compendious data except for Section VII, 'Eighteenth-and Nineteenth-Century Editions of The Monk' and Section IX, 'Chapbooks, Shilling Shocker Condensations, and Plagiarized Abridgements of The Monk,' which are selectively compiled and annotated."

Biography

Peck, Louis F. A Life of Matthew G. Lewis. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1961, 331 p.

Comprehensive biography of Lewis.

Criticism

Birkhead, Edith. "The Novel of Terror: Lewis and Maturin." In The Tale of Terror: A Study of the Gothic Romance, pp. 63-93. New York: E. P. Dutton & Company Publishers, 1921.

A chapter from what is considered one of the first significant studies of the Gothic movement, in which Birkhead centers on the terrifying, evocative, and melodramatic elements of Lewis's works.

Blakemore, Steven. "Matthew Lewis's Black Mass: Sexual, Religious Inversion in The Monk." Studies in the Novel 30, no. 4 (winter 1998): 521-39.

Argues that in The Monk Lewis subverts traditional religious and gender roles.

Gose, Eliot B., Jr. "The Monk." In Imagination Indulged: The Irrational in the Nineteenth-Century Novel, pp. 27-40. Montreal, Quebec and Kingston, Ontario: McGillQueen's University Press, 1972.

Undertakes a psychoanalytic survey of The Monk, noting its "unresolved tensions" of "sexual conflict, violated taboos, and self-destructive impulses."

Grudin, Peter. "The Monk: Matilda and the Rhetoric of Deceit." The Journal of Narrative Technique 5, no. 2 (May 1975): 136-46.

Assesses the "formal coherence" of The Monk, claiming that evidence for its structural unity exists in an interpretation of Matilda as a demonic being.

Hogle, Jerrold E. "The Ghost of the Counterfeit—and the Closet—in The Monk." Romanticism On the Net 8 (November 1997): 〈http://users.ox.ac.uk/~scat0385/ghost.html〉.

Maintains that "Lewis' daemonic novel has the shocking force in our culture that it still does, not because of the sexual license or the use of German sources in it so fervently attacked at the time, but because it enacts and thus partially exposes a particular cultural agenda of both its time and today that underlies and motivates what I call 'the ghost of the counterfeit' in the rise of the Gothic during the later eighteenth century."

Jones, Wendy. "Stories of Desire in The Monk." ELH 57, no. 1 (spring 1990): 129-50.

Illustrates how the narrative structure of The Monk and its social and political stance are related and declares that Lewis offers in his novel "a defense of the concept of individual desire and of the right to articulate that desire in both speech and action."

Kauhl, Gudrun. "On the Release from Monkish Fetters: Matthew Lewis Reconsidered." Dutch Quarterly Review 19, no. 4 (1989): 264-80.

Examines the motif of transgression as both a psychological and a political fact in The Monk.

Lydenberg, Robin. "Ghostly Rhetoric: Ambivalence in M. G. Lewis' The Monk." Ariel: A Review of International English Literature 10, no. 2 (April 1979): 65-79.

Investigates "Lewis's ambivalence toward his authorial responsibility" as moral judge in The Monk.

Mulman, Lisa Naomi. "Sexuality on the Surface: Catholicism and the Erotic Object in Lewis's The Monk." Bucknell Review 42, no. 1 (1998): 98-110.

Focuses on "Lewis's use of … objects (precisely the veil, mirror, lamp, rosary, face) as sites of religious, aesthetic, and social anxiety rather than substitutive or fetishized sexual desire."

Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky. "The Character in the Veil: Imagery of the Surface in the Gothic Novel." PMLA: Publications of the Modern Language Association of America 96, no. 2 (March 1981): 255-70.

Studies works by Ann Radcliffe and Lewis's The Monk "to show that an analysis of the thematic attention to surfaces changes the traditional view of the Gothic contribution to characterization and figuration in fiction."

OTHER SOURCES FROM GALE:

Additional coverage of Lewis's life and career is contained in the following sources published by Thomson Gale: Dictionary of Literary Biography, Vols. 39, 158, 178; Literary Movements for Students, Vol. 1; Literature Resource Center; Nineteenth-Century Literature Criticism, Vols. 11, 62; Reference Guide to English Literature, Ed. 2; St. James Guide to Horror, Ghost & Gothic Writers; and Supernatural Fiction Writers.