The caricature is entertaining in
itself, and would probably be enjoyed by those who are unfamiliar
with the romances ridiculed; but the interest of identifying the
booty, which Barrett rifles unceremoniously from his victims, is
a fascinating pastime.
Miss Austen, with her swift stiletto, and Barrett, with his
brutal bludgeon--to use a metaphor of "terror"--had each
delivered an attack; and in 1818, if we may judge by Peacock's
_Nightmare Abbey_, there is a change of fashion in fiction. How
far this change is due to the satirists it is impossible to
determine. Mr. Flosky, "who has seen too many ghosts himself to
believe in their external appearance," through whose lips Peacock
reviles "that part of the reading public which shuns the solid
food of reason," probably gives the true cause for the waning
popularity of the novel of terror:
"It lived upon ghosts, goblins and skeletons till even
the devil himself ... became too base, common and
popular for its surfeited appetite. The ghosts have
therefore been laid, and the devil has been cast into
outer darkness."
The novel of terror has been destroyed not by its enemies but by
its too ardent devotees. The horrid banquet, devoured with
avidity for so many years, has become so highly seasoned that the
jaded palate at last cries out for something different, and,
according to Peacock, finds what it desires in "the vices and
blackest passions of our nature tricked out in a masquerade dress
of heroism and disappointed benevolence"--an uncomplimentary
description of the Byronic hero.
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