that arch suspended between two rocks

Connections! says Carlyle -- you act without knowing where your act will travel or what it will do after it's out of you. It's true that I wouldn't have read his Diamond Necklace if Ann Radcliffe hadn't borrowed the name La Motte, perhaps, or not. "[T]he name which La Motte [...] is given is one which had become notorious in the seventeen-eighties as a result of the trial, in France, resulting from "the affair of the queen's necklace" (a scandal which did some harm to the standing of the French monarchy) in which one of the accused was Jeanne de Luz, de Saint-Remy, or de Valois, comtesse de la Motte," explained Chloe Chard in the endnotes to Romance of the Forest. "This name might also have been suggested , however, by that of the 'Monsieur De La Motte' (the French poet and critic Antoine Houdart de la Motte, 1672 - 1731) whose fables are cited as the source of several poems in Dodsley (an anthology which contains a number of the works quoted in The Romance of the Forest)."

Fictional gambler, La Motte suggested both of these men to Chard, her brain saying, aha, and two antennae quivering off the gambler in two directions. (Is there money in this? he asks, cunning, cunning, cunning. Then what's the point?) Ann Radcliffe took out a sheet of paper and dipped her quill, gestating (not in herself but in time and history) future endnotes, which, now that she was writing, would be published in 1986 by Oxford University Press (herself not realising), nor did she foresee the life of Chard, "a lecturer in English literature at the university of of Osijek, in Yugoslavia" -- a country that didn't exist when Radcliffe was alive and doesn't exist now either -- nor would she have pictured the clean bloc biography that begins, "Ann Radcliffe (née Ward) was born in London in 1764. Her father was in trade ..." which is printed on the first page under a cardboard cover whose invention she would not have predicted, any more than Claudius Aelianus in the second century A.D. could have known that his description of a stingray would remind me of Steve Irwin every time I look at it.

The barb of the Sting-ray nothing can withstand. It wounds and kills instantly, and even those fishermen who have great knowledge of the sea dread its weapon. For no man can heal the wound, nor will the creature that inflicted it; that was a gift vouchsafed, most probably, to the ashen spear from mount Pelion alone.

(translated by A.F. Scholfield: On the Characteristics of Animals)

But my Steve Irwin is nothing but reports of Steve Irwin, since I never watched the show, only heard about it from others.

My thoughts run on in chains, and even the word "chains" would not have made it into this sentence if I hadn't found a copy of Paul Muldoon's New Selected Poems 1968 - 1994 at a secondhand bookshop that was going out of business on Tropicana Avenue, far down by Goodwill and a petrol station. If you open this book casually, without aiming for a specific area, then it will flip open automatically at page one hundred and twenty-five where you can read his 1987 poem Something Else, which ends with --

hanged himself from a lamp-post
with a length of chain, which made me think

of something else, then something else again.

Twelve lines earlier the poem starts with a lobster --

When your lobster was was lifted out of the tank
to be weighed
I thought of woad

-- and runs through other scenes before it reaches the lamp-post. The poet must have known that the human mind can connect these things, will do so willingly, and wants to. (Carlyle in On History, prefers webs to chains and now that I've mentioned it I think I do too.) In Radcliffe's last book, The Italian, the hero manages to accuse a monk of villainy by mentioning the word "friar" near the word "banditti" during a conversation about scenery.

"That arch," resumed Vivaldi, his eye still fixed on Schedoni, "that arch suspended between two rocks, the one overtopped by the towers of the fortress, the other shadowed with pine and broad oak, has a fine effect. But a picture of it would want human figures. Now either the grotesque shapes of banditti lurking within the ruin, as if ready to start out upon the traveller, or a friar rolled up in his black garments, just stealing forth from under the shade of the arch, and looking like some supernatural messenger of evil, would finish the piece."

Schedoni, sneering, hostile, bitter, detects the accusation instantly, and reacts with, "I cannot but admire the facility with which you have classed the monks together with banditti," but I am distracted by the hero's name, which I never can read without believing, for a second, each time, that he composed the Four Seasons. Because I am a human being who recently read Hazlitt's Table Talk I perceived a connection between his essay on actors and these sentences from Carlyle's book about the necklace: "As in looking at a finished Drama, it were nowise meet that the spectator first of all got behind the scenes, and saw the burnt-corks, brayed-resin, thunder-barrels, and withered hunger-bitten men and women, of which such heroic work was made: so herewith the reader. A peep into the side-scenes shall be granted him, from time to time. But, on the whole, repress, O reader, that too insatiable scientific curiosity of thine; let thy esthetic feeling first have play." But their points of view are too different, only editing makes them seem similar, you can only maintain the connection if you leave it pristine, deciding, pause here, do not feed your brain any material that might push it on to more advanced conclusions and take you away from the position you already hold: stand in that position and stay with that link, which reminds me of the unicyclist who told me that a unicycle will not coast when you stop pedalling.

The brain goes on, I pick up my copy of Balzac's History of the Thirteen whereat pages zero to seventy drop out in a fall of brown dry glue, an action that could be used, if I were writing a story, to suggest the disintegration of an attachment, perhaps a marriage between my characters, whoever they are, in other words this emblematic disintegration would not exist separately, it would be embedded in the chain or web of remarks that made up my book, not free, but hauled up and nailed into place, in my last paragraph maybe; maybe I could borrow it for a portentous ending.

to admit a view

Ann Radcliffe's calm tone in Romance of the Forest is the voice of the person who can see differences from a distance: she surveys each state clearly with her voice, the villain's badness is evident, the heroine is detectably good, and La Motte enters and exits obvious states of goodness and badness. La Motte's progress through the story is unique, lone twitch, he moves like a coin being flipped. Which side will be facing upwards when the end arrives? The decision to end the book won't be his. It will belong to the characters who move directly. He probably suspects it, powerless man, if characters can suspect anything, which they can't, but it would explain his moodiness if they could. "Why are you like that, La Motte? Why are you sneaky and grouchy and wayward?" "Because I know I have no power in this book, I'm going to be everybody's pet idiot, and readers will write abusive pen notes next to my name when all I'm trying to do is keep myself viable to the end of the chapter." "All right, that makes absolute sense."

If Lucien de Rubempré could separate out his states and foresee the consequences as clearly as Hazlitt, he would be happier.

Lucien would have been happier if he'd stayed home in his village, says Balzac, and Ann Radcliffe agrees, yes, innocence should stay away from the cities. "Here is the village!" indicates an honest servant at the end of Forest. "God bless! It is worth a million such places as Paris." Rustic dances forthwith and the protagonists retire to a chateau. "Here, nature was suffered to sport in all her beautiful luxuriance, except where here, and there, the hand of art formed the foliage to admit a view of the blue waters of the lake, with the white sail that glided by, or of the distant mountains." Adeline the virtuous heroine from Forest appears in Balzac's History of the Thirteen, where he is a man and his name is Auguste de Maulincour. Auguste was raised by his grandmother. "She transmitted all her own delicacy of feeling to him and made a timid man of him and apparently a very stupid one. His sensibility was preserved intact, was not blunted by contact with the world and remained so chaste, so vulnerable that he was acutely offended by actions and maxims to which mundane society attached no importance."

This is Adeline through other eyes, an intact sensitivity, chaste and "acutely offended" in exactly that way.

Misguided, easily outraged, Auguste becomes suspicious of a married woman; he spies on her, he wants to tell; he fills the role of Iago, suggests the translator Herbert J. Hunt in the introduction, he is a suspicion-spreader: Iago guileless. (Graham Robb, in his Balzac: a Biography, says that Hunt is "one of [Balzac's] most scrupulous translators," and they are alike, Robb and Hunt, they are both opinionated, they are both scrupulous, and they both admonish less scrupulous people. Hunt's footnotes and Robb's biography of (even more than the Balzac one) Victor Hugo have a similar rigorous critical tone, which Robb has found a word for, here, where he comments on Hunt: this behaviour is "scrupulous.")

But this Iago's Desdemona's father is a member of the untouchable Thirteen and he attacks Auguste in revenge, with hair-poison. Ann Radcliffe is right, her kind of innocence should stay out of the cities, it will be destroyed there, or impurified, it won't be able to live in the protagonist any more, it will have to migrate. If Adeline-innocence wants to survive then it should put its hands on the steering wheel of its vehicle-human and drive that body away.

And Hazlitt is right, presume: the state of fairy innocence he has described will be ruined too, if he goes backstage, he will have seen "the half-lighted candles stuck against the bare walls" "this insight into secrets I am not bound to know" but I still think, in spite of Lucien, that whatever will replace it might not be worse; in Dickens it is not worse, it gave him the Crummles in Nicholas Nickleby.

But we do not all have the same character, Hazlitt points out to me: I am not Dickens. "The stage is not a mistress that we are sworn to undress," he writes, and he might also (following that idea) have thought that other mysteries should not be penetrated, women's clothing for instance (since he is talking about mistresses and undressing), but nothing is alien to Balzac, and so when he wants to put Madame de Bargaton's intelligence and skill in perspective for us in Lost Illusions he can tell us how quickly she learnt to wear a hat, and how challenging it is, this hat-wearing. "There is an indefinable art in wearing a hat: wear it too far back, and it gives you a bold expression; too far forward, it has a sinister air; too far to the side, it gives you a jaunty look; but well-dressed women can put a hat on just as they like, and yet it will always look right. Mme de Bargaton had instantly mastered that curious problem."

I am not Balzac either, says Hazlitt.

There might have been some compensation for you, I say to him, if you had seen how Cato painted, or how Caesar combed, and you might have written another essay afterwards: "There is an indefinable art in brushing hair. This is how Caesar mastered that curious problem." No, replies Hazlitt. I would not. Now go and pester La Motte, he's used to it.

meet the prompt-boys in the passage

A Radcliffe villain is energetic and unfrugal; they love cities, which makes them Dickens and Balzac but not so much Hazlitt, who was a city man too, but a quieter one. Actors, he wrote in his essay Whether Actors Ought to Sit in the Boxes, from the 1822 collection Table Talk, actors should never sit prominently in the audience where everyone can see them; they should be subtle and sit in the pit. "For them to thrust themselves forward before the scenes, is to drag us behind them against our will, than which nothing can be more fatal to a true passion for the stage, and which is a privilege that should be kept sacred for impertinent curiosity." Oh! he wrote

while I live, let me not be admitted (under special favour) to an actor's dressing-room. Let me not see how Cato painted, or how Caesar combed! Let me not meet the prompt-boys in the passage, nor see the half-lighted candles stuck against the bare walls, nor hear the creaking of machines, or the fiddlers laughing; nor see a Columbine practising a pirouette in sober sadness, nor Mr. Grimaldi's face drop from mirth to sudden melancholy as he passes the side-scene, as if a shadow crossed it, nor witness the long-chinned generation of the pantomime sit twirling their thumbs, nor overlook the fellow who holds the candle for the moon in the scene between Lorenzo and Jessica! Spare me this insight into secrets I am not bound to know. The stage is not a mistress that we are sworn to undress. Why should we look behind the glass of fashion? Why should we prick the bubble that reflects the world, and turn it to a little soap and water? Trust a little to first appearances -- leave something to fancy.

Let secrets be hoarded, let there be a hoard and a hoard, and let there be some ignorance so that there can also be some wonder and amazement, a conservative position, the person wants conservation, they want to conserve and keep, and contemplate, and feel assured that there is always something in reserve, some secret they do not know -- they don't know the answers to those secrets but they want them to stay under their control as if they did -- and Radcliffe wants her characters to stay away from urban areas, always having the city there as a distant mystery they will never investigate, living instead in the country, having interior enjoyments, the source of pleasure coming through the eyes to the brain where it rarifies the emotions like a good sieve; and most of the exterior vigour can be spent on a lute. Her Clara dwells so much with her lute that she is ashamed. "This lute is my delight, and my torment!" Consternation over the lute. "This reflection occasioned her much internal debate; but before she could come to any resolution upon the point in question, she fell asleep."

The romantic landscape in Radcliffe is a mystery too, kept in reserve; the characters admire a mountain without wanting to climb the peak or study geology, they spy a crag, the eyes fill with tears, and melancholy floods the system gently, the absence of knowledge gently disincarnates the body, so that, detached from the solid, it achieves the sublime.

But Dickens goes behind the stage and in front of it and never wonders whether he should save some for later, and never behaves as though the lake of wonder might be drunk up if he comes too close to the backstage area, and yet he still has "fancy." Hazlitt's idea seems like logic until I look for examples and then there are plenty against it. I have been into the back area of a casino, and did that make the public area seem less strange, and did it feel as though a vital illusion-bubble had been pricked? It didn't; the front of the casino seemed more like a wonderful apparition, now that I knew how it had been segregated, the eccentricities seemed more pronounced now that I had seen the ordinary offices on the other side of the wall, the specifics of the difference were visible; I was not disillusioned after I spotted the costumes of a singing act inside a row of plastic bags on a rack in a corridor; I saw inside the walls between Harrah's and the Imperial Palace when the shops there were being knocked down (and our coupon for a free sundae at the chocolate shop would be useless now even if it hadn't expired already), iron spars crossed over one another, and a date written in chalk on the side of one beam, but that didn't make intact buildings seem smaller. I'm not convinced that anything can be more interesting if you know less about it.

I worked in a lower position for years, said a supervisor to me recently, and now that I see the job from here I realise that everything is different.

the indistinct and airy colours of fancy

So Ann Radcliffe believed that emotions could be understood, and then, a few years later, in one of his essays, not answering her but making an independent statement, William Hazlitt said that the feelings we don't understand are the ones we prefer. Baruch or Benedict de Spinoza in his Ethics (1677, posthumous, published by his friends) decided that anyone who thought God planned chains of events so that they would lead to an outcome addressed to human beings, was impious. These people, he said, chase every accident back toward its source until their imagination is exhausted and then they think they have found evidence of the divine. I suspected that Hazlitt had been reading Spinoza and became almost sure that I was right when I came across this sentence in his 1822 essay, On Going on a Journey: "We measure the universe by ourselves, and even comprehend the texture of our own being only piece-meal." Radcliffe, in her books, wrote a description of each character's emotion as it moved from cause to effect or vice versa, and doing this she imitated the manners that Spinoza described as impious, although there is no evidence as far as I can see that she was pursuing or proving the divine. What was she pursuing? Reason? She loves reason, as any reader can see for themselves. And the same reader, coming later to Hazlitt's essay, remembers that she loved reason and suspects therefore that it was far away from her; she did not possess it; it was distant -- reading thus -- "Distant objects please, because, in the first place, they imply an idea of space and magnitude, and because, not being obtruded too close upon the eye, we clothe them with the indistinct and airy colours of fancy." So says Hazlitt. Radcliffe was pleased by reason and her heroes and heroines were those characters who chose to view their situation through a reasonable frame of mind and not one of the other frames they might have chosen, for example, exasperation (which is one I select for myself very easily and normally and as proof I offer this vision of me standing in the bedroom yesterday exclaiming, "This is stupid, everything here is stupid," and otherwise denigrating the state of Nevada, which has done what exactly to deserve it I ask you, beyond being hot, this poor long state with the shape of a knife?). They do choose, it doesn't come naturally, they select it. The villains see that reason exists but decide to live unreasonably. Assume that each villain in Radcliffe is the same person, since they all reject reason, and you see she is testing (probably unconsciously) Boethius' suggestion that a bad person confronted by good people may on some occasions become good. The villainous Marquis in Romance of the Forest performs a good deed on his deathbed. Radcliffe, hopeful in her faith, has prepared for his change of heart, the story allows it to take place, and a balanced ending grows calmly from that root. The good characters not only succeed, their success is well-proportioned. Triumph is not excessive, which means that, according to the unstated calculations underneath her fiction, it is not villainous. No character can be good in Romance of the Forest unless they adhere to a set of nonextravagant proportions. A Radcliffe villain who managed to fit his wickedness into a set of reasonable proportions couldn't be a villain. He would have to be something not-quite.

by the fall of the walls

After I had finished Melmoth I opened William Hazlitt's Table Talk and voilà, he was making quotes as well, in the same slang way as Maturin, and the identical for Ann Radcliffe in The Romance of the Forest, which is flattened out right now on the chair beside me with the word Asshole written by the last owner in blue pen under one of La Motte's speeches to Adeline. "Your father may ere this have commenced these measures, and the effects of his vengeance may now be hanging over my head," says La Motte. "My regard for you, Adeline, has exposed me to this; had I resigned you to his will, I would have remained secure," and the top of the exclamation mark after the e in Asshole is almost touching the bottom prong of the r in secure. People insult fictional characters; sometimes they insult real ones through fictions, example, racist insults directed at groups of people you've never met; or they praise them too, through fictional names.

All three of those authors were alive at the same time, they crossed the bridge between the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries: deduction: quotes were a fashion in fiction back then: and when did they die out? On the first page of Chapter II Radcliffe makes a description of a ruined abbey longer by borrowing a sentence from the Songs of Ossian, by the Scotsman James Macpherson, which was published in 1765, when she was one year old, the same age that a child was when it died in Las Vegas a short while ago, bitten in the head by the family dog, and it was also the age of another Las Vegas child who flew two storeys into the arms of the crowd during a fire a day later, and survived, although, as if the disaster had happened in a mirror, the same fire killed a dog.

"The lofty battlements," Radcliffe says, "thickly enwreathed with ivy, were half demolished, and become the residence of birds of prey. Huge fragments of the eastern tower, which was almost demolished, lay scattered amid the high grass, that waved slowly to the breeze. 'The thistle shook its lonely head; the moss whistled to the wind.'"

The original author of the thistle shook its lonely, etc, is describing a ruined building too, so here, between Macpherson and Radcliffe, is the thematic connection that I couldn't see in Maturin's Bible quotes. "The stream of Clutha," writes Macpherson, "was removed from its place by the fall of the walls. The thistle shook there its lonely head: the moss whistled to the wind. The fox looked out from the windows, the rank grass of the wall waved round its head. Desolate is the dwelling of Moina, silence is in the house of her fathers."

And if I were following this theme of ancient ruined buildings for my own pleasure I would go now to the Anglo-Saxon Exeter Book of the late 900s, where a ruined building is the end of the world. "[T]hroughout this middle-earth walls are standing wind-blown, rime-covered, the ramparts are crumbling, the rulers are lying dead, deprived of pleasure, the whole proud company has fallen near the wall; some war snatched away and carried of along the onward road; one a bird bore away over the deep ocean; one a sad-faced man buried in a grave in the earth. Thus the Creator of men laid waste this earthly abode until, bereft of the sounds of the citizens' revelry, the ancient gigantic structures stood desolate." (Translated by S.A.J. Bradley.)

The priest in the Mishima novel burns down a building, the loss of a building starts the descent of the Pollitt family in The Man Who Loved Children, and all of the worthwhile people in the world will live in new buildings after Ragnorok, according to the Wise Woman in the Poetic Eddas. The most loving and generous character in Melmoth the Wanderer is the only person in the book who doesn't have to worry about buildings, for she lives on an island without them, off the coast of India. There are the crumbled remains of a temple but she ignores the bricks and prefers to live "amid the leafy colonnades of the banyan tree." And her serenity is explicable when you see how buildings treat people in this novel, constantly looming over them, trapping them, hugging them in cells, locking them up, trying to kill them in fires, and shoving them down underground tunnels in company with parricides who sing licentious songs and lose patience with you totally when you faint. Buildings in Maturin are bad news. If I'm ever in a Gothic novel I will avoid anything with walls.