Woman's Work in English Fiction, from the Restoration to the Mid-Victorian Period

by Clara Helen Whitmore

  CHAPTER VI

  Clara Reeve. Ann Radcliffe. Harriet and Sophia Lee

  The novel of the mysterious and the supernatural did not appear inmodern literature until Horace Walpole wrote _The Castle of Otranto_ in1764, during the decade that was dominated by the realism of Smollettand Sterne. The author says it was an attempt to blend two kinds ofromance, the ancient, which was all improbable, and the modern, whichwas a realistic copy of nature. The machinery of this novel is clumsy.An enormous helmet and a huge sword are the means by which an ancestorof Otranto, long since dead, restores the castle to a seeming peasant,who proves to be the rightful heir.

  * * * * *

  This book produced no imitators until 1777, when Clara Reeve wrote _TheOld English Baron_, which was plainly suggested by Walpole's novel, butis more delicate in the treatment of its ghostly visitants. Here, as in_The Castle of Otranto_, the rightful heir has been brought up apeasant, ignorant of his high birth. Again his ancestors, supposedlydead and gone, bring him into his own. One night he is made to sleep inthe haunted part of the castle, where his parents reveal to him in adream things which he is later able to prove legally. He learns thetruth about his birth, comes into his estate, and wins the lady of hisheart. When he returns to the castle as its master, all the doors flyopen through the agency of unseen hands to welcome their feudal lord.

  The characters of both these novels are without interest, and themysterious element fails to produce the slightest creepy thrill.

  * * * * *

  Twelve years passed before Walpole's novel found another imitator inMrs. Ann Radcliffe, who so far excelled her two predecessors that shehas been called the founder of the Gothic romance, and in this field sheremains without a peer. In her first novel, _The Castles of Athlin andDunbayne_, as in _The Old English Baron_ by Clara Reeve, a peasantrenowned for his courage and virtue loves and is beloved by a lady ofrank. A strawberry mark on his arm proves that he is the Baron Malcolmand owner of the castle of Dunbayne, at which juncture amid greatrejoicings the story ends.

  The characters and the style foreshadow Mrs. Radcliffe's later work.The usurping Baron of Dunbayne, who has imprisoned in his castle thewomen who might oppose his ambition; the two melancholy widows; theirgentle and pensive daughters; their brave, loyal, and virtuous sons inlove respectively with the two daughters; the Count Santmorin, bold andpassionate, who endeavours by force to carry off the woman heloves--these are types that Mrs. Radcliffe repeatedly developed until inher later novels they became real men and women with strong conflictingemotions.

  But superior to all her other powers is her ability to awaken a feelingof the presence of the supernatural. The castle of Dunbayne has secretdoors and subterranean passages. The mysterious sound, as of a lute, iswafted on the air from an unknown source. Alleyn, in endeavouring toescape through a secret passage, stumbles over something in the dark,and, on stooping to learn what it is, finds the cold hand of a corpse inhis grasp. This dead man has nothing to do with the story, but isintroduced merely to make the reader shudder, which Mrs. Radcliffe neverfails to do, even after we have learned all the secrets of her art. Welearn later in the book how the corpse happened to be left hereunburied; for in that day of intense realism, half-way between theancient belief in ghosts and the modern interest in mental suggestion,every occurrence outside the known laws of physics was greeted with acynical smile. But, although Mrs. Radcliffe always explains the mysteryin her books, we hold our breath whenever she designs that we shall.

  _The Sicilian Romance_, _The Romance of the Forest_, _The Mysteries ofUdolpho_, and _The Italian_ were written and published during the nextseven years and each one shows a marked artistic advance over itspredecessor. With the opening paragraph of each, we are carried at onceinto the land of the unreal, into regions of poetry rather than ofprose. Rugged mountains with their concealed valleys, whispering forestswhich the eye cannot penetrate, Gothic ruins with vaulted chambers andsubterranean passages, are the scenes of her stories; while event afterevent of her complicated plot happens either just as the mists ofevening are obscuring the sun, or while the moonlight is throwingfantastic shadows over the landscape. It is an atmosphere of mystery inwhich one feels the weird presence of the supernatural. This isheightened by the ghostly suggestions she brings to the mind, asincorporeal as spirits. A low hurried breathing in the dark, lightsflashing out from unexpected places, forms gliding noiselessly along thedark corridors, a word of warning from an unseen source, cause thereader to wait with hushed attention for the unfolding of the mystery.

  Sometimes the solution is trivial. The reader and the inmates of Udolphoare held in suspense chapter after chapter by some terrible appearancebehind a black veil. When Emily ventures to draw the curtain, she dropssenseless to the ground. But this appearance turns out to be merely awax effigy placed there by chance. Often the explanation is moresatisfactory. The disappearance of Ludovico during the night from thehaunted chamber where he was watching in hopes of meeting the spiritsthat infested it, makes the most sceptical believe for a time in thereality of the ghostly visitants; and his reappearance at the close ofthe book, the slave of pirates who had found a secret passage leadingfrom the sea to this room, and had used it as a place of rendezvous, isdeclared by Sir Walter Scott to meet all the requirements of romance.

  But by a series of strange coincidences and dreams Mrs. Radcliffe stillmakes us feel that the destiny of her characters is shaped by an unseenpower. Adeline is led by chance to the very ruin where her unknownfather had been murdered years before. She sees in dreams all theincidents of the deed, and a manuscript he had written while in thepower of his enemies falls into her hands. Again by chance she finds anasylum in the home of a clergyman, Arnaud La Luc, who proves to be thefather of her lover, Theodore Peyrou. It seems to be by theinterposition of Providence that Ellena finds her mother and isrecognised by her father. So in every tale we are made aware of powersnot mortal shaping human destiny.

  Mrs. Radcliffe adds to this consciousness of the presence of thesupernatural by another, perhaps more legitimate, method. She felt whatWordsworth expressed in _Tintern Abbey_, written the year after her lastnovel was published:

  And I have felt A presence that disturbs me with the joy Of elevated thoughts; a sense sublime Of something far more deeply interfused, Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns, And the round ocean and the living air, And the blue sky, and in the mind of man; A motion and a spirit, that impels All thinking things, all objects of all thought, And rolls through all things.

  Mrs. Radcliffe seldom loses her feeling for nature, and has a strongsense of the effect of environment on her characters. Julia, when indoubt about the fate of Hippolitus, often walked in the evening underthe shade of the high trees that environed the abbey. "The dewy coolnessof the air refreshed her. The innumerable roseate tints which theparting sun-beams reflected on the rocks above, and the fine vermilglow diffused over the romantic scene beneath, softly fading from theeye as the night shades fell, excited sensations of a sweet and tranquilnature, and soothed her into a temporary forgetfulness of her sorrow."As the happy lovers, Vivaldi and Ellena, are gliding along the Bay ofNaples, they hear from the shore the voices of the vine-dressers, asthey repose after the labours of the day, and catch the strains of musicfrom fishermen who are dancing on the margin of the sea.

  Sometimes nature is prophetic. The whole description of the castle ofUdolpho, when Emily first beholds it, is symbolical of the sufferingsshe is to endure there: "As she gazed, the light died away on its walls,leaving a melancholy purple tint, which spread deeper and deeper, as thethin vapour crept up the mountain, while the battlements above werestill tipped with splendour. From these, too, the rays soon faded, andthe whole edifice was invested with the solemn duskiness of evening.Silent, lonely, and sublime it seemed to stand the sovereign of thescene, and to frown defiance on all who dared invade its solitaryreign." When Emily is happy in the
peasant's home in the valley below,she lingers at the casement after the sun has set: "But a clearmoonlight that succeeded gave to the landscape what time gives to thescenes of past life, when it softens all their harsh features, andthrows over the whole the mellowing shade of distant contemplation." Itis this feeling for nature as a constant presence in daily life, nowelating the mind with joy, now awakening a sense of foreboding orinspiring terror, and again soothing the mind to repose, that gives toher books a permanent hold upon the imagination and marks their authoras a woman of genius.

  In her response to nature, she belongs to the Lake School. Scott said ofher: "Mrs. Radcliffe has a title to be considered as the first poetessof romantic fiction, that is, if actual rhythm shall not be deemedessential to poetry." Mrs. Smith describes nature as we all know it, asit appears on the canvasses of Constable and Wilson. Mrs. Radcliffe'sdescriptions of ideal and romantic nature have earned for her the nameof the English Salvator Rosa.

  Mrs. Radcliffe's characters are not without interest, although they areoften mere types. All her heroes and heroines are ladies and gentlemenof native courtesy, superior education, and accomplishments. In _TheMysteries of Udolpho_ she has set forth the education which St. Aubertgave to his daughter, Emily: "St. Aubert cultivated her understandingwith the most scrupulous care. He gave her a general view of thesciences, and an exact acquaintance with every part of elegantliterature. He taught her Latin and English, chiefly that she mightunderstand the sublimity of their best poets. She discovered in herearly years a taste for works of genius; and it was St. Aubert'sprinciple, as well as his inclination, to promote every innocent meansof happiness. 'A well informed mind,' he would say, 'is the bestsecurity against the contagion of vice and folly.'"

  In all their circumstances her characters are well-bred. This type hasbeen nearly lost in literature, due, perhaps, to the minuter study ofmanners and the analysis of character. When an author surveys his ladiesand gentlemen through a reading-glass, and points the finger at theiroddities and pries into their inmost secrets, even the Chesterfieldsbecome awkward and clownish. But Mrs. Radcliffe, like Mrs. Smith, is atrue gentlewoman, and speaks of her characters with the delicate respectof true gentility. Julia, Adeline, Emily, and Ellena, the heroines offour of her books, love nature, and while away the melancholy hours byplaying on the lute or writing poetry, and are, moreover, well qualifiedto have charge of a baronial castle and its dependencies. Her heroes areworthy of her heroines. As they are generally seen in the presence ofladies, if they have vices there is no occasion for their display.

  It is only in the characters of her villains that good and evil areintertwined, and she awakens our sympathy for them equally with ourhorror. Monsieur La Motte, a weak man in the power of an unscrupulousone, is the best drawn character in _The Romance of the Forest_. He hastaken Adeline under his protection and has been as a father to her. Butbefore this he had committed a crime which has placed his life in thehands of a powerful marquis. To free himself he consents to surrenderAdeline to the marquis, who has become enamoured of her beauty, hopingby the sacrifice of her honour to save his own life. He is agitated inthe presence of Adeline, and trembles at the approach of any stranger.Scott said of him, "He is the exact picture of the needy man who hasseen better days."

  In _The Italian_, Schedoni, a monk of the order of Black Penitents forwhom the novel is named, is guilty of the most atrocious crimes in orderthat he may further his own ambition, but he is not devoid of naturalfeeling. Scott says the scene in which he "is in the act of raising hisarm to murder his sleeping victim, and discovers her to be his ownchild, is of a new, grand, and powerful character; and the horrors ofthe wretch who, on the brink of murder, has just escaped from committinga crime of yet more exaggerated horror, constitute the strongestpainting which has been produced by Mrs. Radcliffe's pencil, and form acrisis well fitted to be actually embodied on canvas by some greatmaster."

  Every book has one or more gloomy, deep-plotting villains. But all thepeople of rank bear unmistakable marks of their nobility, even whentheir natures have become depraved by crime. In this she is the equal ofScott.

  In every ruined abbey and castle there is a servant who brings in acomic element and relieves the strained feelings. Peter, Annette, andPaulo are all faithful but garrulous, and often bring disaster upontheir masters by overzeal in their service.

  When Vivaldi, the hero of _The Italian_, is brought before the tribunalof the inquisition, his faithful servant, Paulo, rails bitterly at thetreatment his master has received. Vivaldi, well knowing the dangerwhich they both incur by too free speech, bids him speak in a whisper:

  "'A whisper,' shouted Paulo, 'I scorn to speak in a whisper. I willspeak so loud that every word I say shall ring in the ears of all thoseold black devils on the benches yonder, ay, and those on that mountebankstage, too, that sit there looking so grim and angry, as if they longedto tear us in pieces. They--'

  "'Silence,' said Vivaldi with emphasis. 'Paulo, I command you to besilent.'

  "'They shall know a bit of my mind,' continued Paulo, without noticingVivaldi. 'I will tell them what they have to expect from all their cruelusage of my poor master. Where do they expect to go to when they die, Iwonder? Though for that matter, they can scarcely go to a worse placethan that they are in already, and I suppose it is knowing that whichmakes them not afraid of being ever so wicked. They shall hear a littleplain truth for once in their lives, however; they shall hear--'"

  But by this time Paulo is dragged from the room.

  The plots of all Mrs. Radcliffe's novels are complicated. A whole skeinis knotted and must be unravelled thread by thread. _The Mysteries ofUdolpho_ is the most involved. Characters are introduced that are for atime apparently forgotten; one sub-plot appears within another, but atthe end each is found necessary to the whole.

  _The Italian_ is simpler than the others: the plot is less involved, andthere are many strong situations. The opening sentence at once arousesthe interests of the reader: "Within the shade of the portico, a personwith folded arms, and eyes directed towards the ground, was pacingbehind the pillars the whole extent of the pavement, and was apparentlyso engaged by his own thoughts as not to observe that strangers wereapproaching. He turned, however, suddenly, as if startled by the soundof steps, and then, without further pausing, glided to a door thatopened into the church, and disappeared." Another scene in which theMarchesa Vivaldi and Schedoni are plotting the death of Ellena, isjustly famous. The former is actuated by the desire to prevent her son'smarriage to a woman of inferior rank; the latter hopes that he may gainan influence over the powerful Marchesa that will lead to his promotionin the church. Their conference, which takes place in the choir of theconvent of San Nicolo, is broken in upon by the faint sound of the organfollowed by slow voices chanting the first requiem for the dead.

  _The Italian_ is generally considered the strongest of Mrs. Radcliffe'snovels. It was published in 1797, and was as enthusiastically receivedas were its predecessors, but for some reason it was the last book Mrs.Radcliffe published. Neither the fame it brought her, nor the eighthundred pounds she received for it from her publishers, tempted itsauthor from her life of retirement. Publicity was distasteful to her. Atthe age of thirty-four, at an age when many novelists had writtennothing, she ceased from writing, and spent the rest of her years eitherin travel or in the seclusion of her own home.

  The novel at this time was not considered seriously as a work of art,and Mrs. Radcliffe may have considered that she was but trifling withtime by employing her pen in that way. In looking over the book reviewsin _The Gentlemen's Magazine_ for the years from 1790 to 1800, it issignificant that, while column after column is spent in lavish praise ofa book of medicine or science which the next generation proved to befalse, and of poetry that had no merit except that its feet could becounted, seldom is a novel reviewed in its pages. _The Mysteries ofUdolpho_ was criticised for its lengthy descriptions, and _The Italian_was ignored.

  The direct influence of these novels on the
literature of the nineteenthcentury cannot be estimated. Mrs. Radcliffe's influence upon hercontemporaries can be more easily traced. The year after the publicationof _The Mysteries of Udolpho_ Lewis wrote _The Monk_. This has all thehorrors but none of the refined delicacy of Mrs. Radcliffe's work.Robert Charles Maturin borrowed many suggestions from her, and thegentle satire of _Northanger Abbey_ could never have been written ifJane Austen had not herself come under the influence of _The Romance ofthe Forest_.

  But her greatest influence was upon Scott. The four great realisticnovelists of the eighteenth century, Richardson, Fielding, Smollett andSterne whose influence can be so often traced in Thackeray and Dickens,seem never to have touched the responsive nature of Scott. He editedtheir works and often spoke in their praise, but that which was deepestand truest in him, which gave birth to his poetry and his novels, seemsnever to have been aware of their existence. Mrs. Radcliffe and MariaEdgewood were his most powerful teachers.

  Andrew Lang in the introduction to _Rob Roy_ in the Border edition ofthe _Waverley Novels_ calls attention to the fact that Waverley, GuyMannering, Lovel of _The Antiquary_, and Frank Osbaldistone were allpoets. Not only these men, but others, as Edward Glendinning and EdgarRavenswood, bear a strong family resemblance to Theodore Peyrou,Valancourt, and Vivaldi, as well as to some of the other less importantmale characters in Mrs. Radcliffe's novels. Scott's men stand forth moreclearly drawn, while Mrs. Radcliffe's are often but dimly outlined.Ellen Douglas, the daughter of an exiled family; the melancholy FloraMacIvor, who whiled away her hours by translating Highland poetry intoEnglish; Mary Avenel, dwelling in a remote castle, are all refined,educated gentlewomen such as Mrs. Smith and Mrs. Radcliffe delighted in,and are placed in situations similar to those in which Julia, Adeline,and Emily are found.

  But the heroines of Mrs. Smith and Mrs. Radcliffe have a quality whichnot even Scott has been able to give to his women. It is expressed by aword often used during the reign of the Georges, but since gone out offashion. They were women of fine sensibilities. Johnson defines this asquickness of feeling, and it has been used to mean a quickness ofperception of the soul as distinguished from the intellect. Thesensibilities of women may not be finer than those of men, but theyrespond to a greater variety of emotions. This gives to them a certainevanescent quality which we find in Elizabeth Bennet, Jane Eyre, MaggieTulliver, Romola, the portraits of Madame Le Brun and Angelica Kauffman,and the poetry of Elizabeth Barrett Browning. This quality men havealmost never grasped whether working with the pen or the brush.Rosalind, Juliet, Viola, Beatrice, all possess it; and in a less degree,Diana of the Crossways is true to her sex in this respect. But thefeatures of nearly every famous Madonna, no matter how skilful theartist that painted her, are stiff and wooden when looked at from thispoint of view, and Scott's heroines, with the possible exception ofJeanie Deans, are immobile when compared with woman as portrayed by manyan inferior artist of her own sex.

  Scott's complicated plots and his constant introduction of characterswho are surrounded by mystery or are living in disguise again suggestMrs. Radcliffe. Again and again he selected the same scenes that hadappealed to her, and in his earlier novels and poems he filled them inwith the same details which she had chosen. Perhaps it is due to herinfluence that all the hills of Scotland, as some critic has observed,become mountains when he touches them: "The sun was nearly set behindthe distant mountain of Liddesdale" was the beginning of an earlyromance to have been entitled _Thomas the Rhymer_. Knockwinnock Bay in_The Antiquary_ is first seen at sunset, and it is night when GuyMannering arrives at Ellangowan Castle. Melrose is described bymoonlight. The sun as it sets in the Trossachs brings to the mind ofScott the very outlines and colours which Mrs. Radcliffe had used ingiving the first appearance of Udolpho, a scene which Scott has highlypraised; while these famous lines of James Fitz-James have caught thevery essence of one of her favourite spots:

  On this bold brow, a lordly tower; In that soft vale, a lady's bower; On yonder meadow, far away, The turrets of a cloister grey! How blithely might the bugle horn Chide, on the lake, the lingering morn! How sweet, at eve, the lover's lute Chime, when the groves were still and mute! And, when the midnight moon should lave Her forehead in the silver wave, How solemn on the ear would come The holy matin's distant hum.

  In his later works Scott is tediously prosaic in description, farinferior to Mrs. Radcliffe, and in the romantic description of sceneryhe never excels her. It would seem to be no mere chance that in hispoetry and in his earlier novels he has so often struck the same key asdid the author of _The Mysteries of Udolpho_.

  * * * * *

  Two sisters, Harriet and Sophia Lee, were writing books and findingreaders during the time of Mrs. Smith, Mrs. Inchbald, and Mrs.Radcliffe. In 1784, Sophia Lee published a three-volume novel, _TheRecess_, a story of the time of Queen Elizabeth, in which Elizabeth,Mary Queen of Scots, and the earls Leicester, Norfolk, and Essex playimportant roles. The two heroines are unacknowledged daughters of MaryQueen of Scots and Norfolk, to whom she has been secretly married duringher imprisonment in England. Many other situations in the book areequally fictitious.

  The historical novels written in France during the reign of Louis XIVpaid no heed to chronology, but men and women whom the author knew wellwere dressed in the garb of historical personages, and various periodsof the past were brought into the space of the story. _The Recess_ wasnot a masquerade, but the plot and characters slightly picture the reignof Elizabeth. This was one of the first novels in which there was anattempt to represent a past age with something like accuracy. As thiswas one of the first historical novels, using the term in the modernsense, it had perhaps a right to be one of the poorest; for it isimpossible to conceive three volumes of print in which there are fewersentences that leave any impress on the mind than this once popularnovel.

  Sophia Lee wrote other novels which are said to be worse than this; butin 1797 she and her sister Harriet, who had the greater imagination,published _The Canterbury Tales_. Some of those written by Harriet areexcellent. According to the story a group of travellers have met at aninn in Canterbury, where they are delayed on account of a heavy fall ofsnow. To while away the weary hours of waiting, as they are gatheredabout the fire in true English fashion, they agree, as did theCanterbury pilgrims of long ago, that each one shall tell a story. Butthe pilgrims whom Chaucer accompanied to the shrine of Thomas a Becketare accurately described, and between the tales they discuss the storiesand exchange lively banter in which the nature of each speaker isclearly revealed. In _The Canterbury Tales_ there is littlecharacter-drawing. Any one of the stories might have been told by anyone of the narrators, and before the conclusion the authors dropped thisdevice.

  In the stories that are told the characters are weak, but the plots areinteresting and many of them original and clever. These _Tales_represent the beginning of the modern short story.

  In a preface to a complete edition of the _Tales_ published in 1832,Harriet Lee wrote:

  "Before I finally dismiss the subject, I think I may be permitted toobserve that, when these volumes first appeared, a work bearingdistinctly the title of _Tales_, professedly adapted to differentcountries, and either abruptly commencing with, or breaking suddenlyinto, a sort of dramatic dialogue, was a novelty in the fiction of theday. Innumerable _Tales_ of the same stamp, and adapted in the samemanner to all classes and all countries, have since appeared; with manyof which I presume not to compete in merit, though I think I may fairlyclaim priority of design and style."

  _The Canterbury Tales_ were read and reread a long time after they werewritten. A critic in _Blackwood's_ says of them:

  "They exhibit more of that species of invention which, as we havealready remarked, was never common in English literature than any of theworks of the first-rate novelists we have named, with the singleexception of Fielding."

  The most famous story of the collection is _Kruitzener, or the German'sTale_. Part of the story is laid in Silesia
during the Thirty Years'War. Frederick Kruitzener, a Bohemian, is the hero, if such a term maybe used for so weak a man. In his youth he is thus described:

  "The splendour, therefore, which the united efforts of education,fortune, rank, and the merits of his progenitors threw around him, wasearly mistaken for a personal gift--a sort of emanation proceeding fromthe lustre of his own endowments, and for which, as he believed, he wasindebted to nature, he resolved not to be accountable to man.... He wasdistinguished!--he saw it--he felt it--he was persuaded he should everbe so; and while yet a youth in the house of his father--dependent onhis paternal affection, and entitled to demand credit of the worldmerely for what he was to be--he secretly looked down on that world asmade only for him."

  The tale traces the troubles which Kruitzener brings upon himself, hismisery and his death. It belongs to romantic literature; the mountainscenes, a palace with secret doors, a secret gallery, a false friend, amysterious murder, all these remind us of Mrs. Radcliffe's novels, butthe story does not possess her power or her poetic charm. ErnestHartley Coleridge said of this tale: "But the _motif_--a son predestinedto evil by the weakness and sensuality of his father, a father'spunishment for his want of rectitude by the passionate criminality ofhis son, is the very key-note of tragedy."

  Byron read this story when he was about fourteen, and it affected himpowerfully. By a strange coincidence Kruitzener bears a strongresemblance to Lord Byron himself. He was proud and melancholy, and,while he led a life of pleasure, his spirits were always wrapped ingloom. "It made a deep impression on me," writes Byron, "and may,indeed, be said to contain the germ of much that I have since written."In 1821, he dramatised it under the title of _Werner, or theInheritance_. The play follows the novel closely both in plot andconversation. An editor of Byron's works wrote of it: "There is not oneincident in his play, not even the most trivial, that is not in MissLee's novel. And then as to the characters--not only is every one ofthem to be found in _Kruitzener_, but every one is there more fully andpowerfully developed."

  _The Landlady's Tale_ is far superior to all others in the collection,if judged by present-day standards. This story of sin and its punishmentreminds one in its moral earnestness of George Eliot. Mr. Mandeville hadbrought ruin upon a poor girl, Mary Lawson, whose own child died, whenshe became the wet nurse of Robert, Mr. Mandeville's legitimate son andheir. Mary grew to love the boy, but, when the father threatened toexpose her character unless she would continue to be his mistress, sheran away, taking the infant with her. She became a servant in alodging-house in Weymouth, where she lived for fifteen years, respectedand beloved. At the end of that time, Mr. Mandeville came to the houseas a lodger, where he neither recognised Mary nor knew his son. But hedisliked Robert, and paid no heed to the fact that one of his ownservants was leading the boy into evil ways. When Robert was accused ofa crime which his own servant had committed, he saw him sent to prisonand later transported with indifference. The grief of the father when helearned that Robert was his own child was most poignant, and hisunavailing efforts to save him are vividly told. He is left bowed withgrief, for he suffers under the double penalty of "a reproachful worldand a reproaching conscience."