The Tale of Terror 10LATER DEVELOPMENTS OF THE TALE OF TERROR
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Literature · Horror
The Tale of Terror 10
LATER DEVELOPMENTS OF THE TALE OF TERROR
BirkheadEnglish
As the novel of terror passes from the hands of Mrs. Radcliffe to those of "Monk" Lewis, Maturin and their imitators, there is a crashing crescendo of emotion. The villain's sardonic smile is replaced by wild outbursts of diabolical laughter, his scowl grows darker and darker, and as his designs become more bloody and more dangerous, his victims no longer sigh plaintively, but give utterance to piercing shrieks and despairing yells; tearful Amandas are unceremoniously thrust into the background by vindictive Matildas, whose passions rage in all their primitive savagery; the fearful ghost "fresh courage takes," and stands forth audaciously in the light of day; the very devil stalks shamelessly abroad in manifold disguises. We are caught up from first to last in the very tempest, torrent and whirlwind of passion. When the novel of terror thus throws restraint to the winds, outrageously o'ersteps the modesty of nature and indulges in a farrago of frightfulness, it begins to defeat its own purposes and to fail in its object of freezing the blood. The limit of human endurance has been reached--and passed. Emphasis and exaggeration have done their worst. Battle, murder, and sudden death--even spectres and fiends--can appal no more. If the old thrill is to be evoked again, the application of more ingenious methods is needed.
Such novels as Maturin's Family of Montorio, though "full of sound and fury," fail piteously to vibrate the chords of terror, which had trembled beneath Mrs. Radcliffe's gentle fingers. The instrument, smitten forcibly, repeatedly, desperately, resounds not with the answering note expected, but with an ugly, metallic jangle. Melmoth the Wanderer, Maturin's extraordinary masterpiece, was to prove--as late as 1820--that there were chords in the orchestra of horror as yet unsounded; but in 1816, when Mary Shelley and her companions set themselves to compose supernatural stories, it was wise to dispense with the shrieking chorus of malevolent abbesses, diabolical monks, intriguing marquises, Wandering Jews or bleeding spectres, who had been so grievously overworked in previous performances. Dr. Polidori's skull-headed lady, Byron's vampire-gentleman, Mrs. Shelley's man-created monster--a grotesque and gruesome trio--had at least the attraction of novelty. It is indeed remarkable that so young and inexperienced a writer as Mary Shelley, who was only nineteen when she wrote Frankenstein, should betray so slight a dependence on her predecessors. It is evident from the records of her reading that the novel of terror in all its guises was familiar to her. She had beheld the majestic horror of the halls of Eblis; she had threaded her way through Mrs. Radcliffe's artfully constructed Gothic castles; she had braved the terrors of the German Ritter-, Räuber- und Schauer-Romane; she had assisted, fearful, at Lewis's midnight diablerie; she had patiently unravelled the "mystery" novels of Godwin and of Charles Brockden Brown. Yet, despite this intimate knowledge of the terrible and supernatural in fiction, Mrs. Shelley's theme and her way of handling it are completely her own. In an "acute mental vision," as real as the visions of Blake and of Shelley, she beheld her monster and the "pale student of unhallowed arts" who had created him, and then set herself to reproduce the thrill of horror inspired by her waking dream. Frankenstein has, indeed, been compared to Godwin's St. Leon, but the resemblance is so vague and superficial, and Frankenstein so immeasurably superior, that Mrs. Shelley's debt to her father is negligible. St. Leon accepts the gift of immortality, Frankenstein creates a new life, and in both novels the main interest lies in tracing the effect of the experiment on the soul of the man, who has pursued scientific inquiry beyond legitimate limits. But apart from this, there is little resemblance. Godwin chose the supernatural, because it chanced to be popular, and laboriously built up a cumbrous edifice, completing it by a sheer effort of will-power. His daughter, with an imagination naturally more attuned to the gruesome and fantastic, writes, when once she has wound her way into the heart of the story, in a mood of breathless excitement that drives the reader forward with feverish apprehension.
The name of Mrs. Shelley's Frankenstein is far-famed; but the book itself, overshadowed perhaps by its literary associations, seems to have withdrawn into the vast library of famous works that are more often mentioned than read. The very fact that the name is often bestowed on the monster instead of his creator seems to suggest that many are content to accept Mrs. Shelley's "hideous phantom" on hearsay evidence rather than encounter for themselves the terrors of his presence. The story deserves a happier fate, for, if it be read in the spirit of willing surrender that a theme so impossible demands, it has still power momentarily "to make the reader dread to look round, to curdle the blood and to quicken the beatings of the heart." The record of the composition of Frankenstein has been so often reiterated that it is probably better known than the tale itself. In the summer of 1816--when the Shelleys were the neighbours of Byron near Lake Geneva--Byron, Shelley, Mary Shelley and Dr. Polidori, after reading some volumes of ghost stories and discussing the supernatural and its manifestations, each agreed to write a ghost story. It has been asserted that an interest in spectres was stimulated by a visit from "Monk" Lewis, but we have evidence that Mrs. Shelley was already writing her story in June, and that Lewis did not arrive at the Villa Diodati till August 14th. The conversation with him about ghosts took place four days later. Shelley's story, based on the experiences of his early youth, was never completed. Byron's fragment formed the basis of Dr. Polidori's Vampyre. Dr. Polidori states that his supernatural novel, Ernestus Berchtold, was begun at this time; but the skull-headed lady, alluded to by Mary Shelley as figuring in Polidori's story, is disappointingly absent. It was an argument between Byron and Shelley about Erasmus Darwin's theories that brought before Mary Shelley's sleepless eyes the vision of the monster miraculously infused by its creator with the spark of life. Frankenstein was begun immediately, completed in May, 1817, and published in 1818.
Mrs. Shelley has been censured for setting her tale in a clumsy framework, but she tells us in her preface that she began with the words: "It was on a dreary night of November." This sentence now stands at the opening of Chapter IV., where the plot begins to grip our imagination; and it seems not unfair to assume that the introductory letters and the first four chapters, which contain a tedious and largely unnecessary account of Frankenstein's early life, were written in deference to Shelley's plea that the idea should be developed at greater length, and did not form part of her original plan. The uninteresting student, Robert Walton, to whom Frankenstein, discovered dying among icebergs, tells his story, is obviously an afterthought. If Mrs. Shelley had abandoned the awkward contrivance of putting the narrative into the form of a dying man's confession, reported verbatim in a series of letters, and had opened her story, as she apparently intended, at the point where Frankenstein, after weary years of research, succeeds in creating a living being, her novel would have gained in force and intensity. From that moment it holds us fascinated. It is true that the tension relaxes from time to time, that the monster's strange education and the Godwinian precepts that fall so incongruously from his lips tend to excite our mirth, but, though we are mildly amused, we are no longer merely bored. Even the protracted descriptions of domestic life assume a new and deeper meaning, for the shadow of the monster broods over them. One by one those whom Frankenstein loves fall victims to the malice of the being he has endowed with life. Unceasingly and unrelentingly the loathsome creature dogs our imagination, more awful when he lurks unseen than when he stands actually before us. With hideous malignity he slays Frankenstein's young brother, and by a fiendish device causes Justine, an innocent girl, to be executed for the crime. Yet ere long our sympathy, which has hitherto been entirely with Frankenstein, is unexpectedly diverted to the monster who, it would seem, is wicked only because he is eternally divorced from human society. Amid the magnificent scenery of the Valley of Chamounix he appears before his creator, and tells the story of his wretched life, pleading: "Everywhere I see bliss from which I alone am irrevocably excluded. I was benevolent and good; misery made me a fiend. Make me happy, and I shall again be virtuous."
He describes how his physical ugliness repels human beings, who fail to realise his benevolent intentions. A father snatches from his arms the child he has rescued from death; the virtuous family, whom he admires and would fain serve, flee affrighted from his presence. To educate the monster, so that his thoughts and emotions may become articulate, and, incidentally, to accentuate his isolation from society, Mrs. Shelley inserts a complicated story about an Arabian girl, Sofie, whose lover teaches her to read from Plutarch's Lives, Volney's Ruins of Empire, The Sorrows of Werther, and Paradise Lost. The monster overhears the lessons, and ponders on this unique library, but, as he pleads his own cause the more eloquently because he knows Satan's passionate outbursts of defiance and self-pity, who would cavil at the method by which he is made to acquire his knowledge? "The cold stars shone in mockery, and the bare trees waved their branches above me; now and then the sweet voice of a bird burst forth amidst the universal stillness. All save I were at rest or in enjoyment. I, like the arch fiend, bore a hell within me." And later, near the close of the book: "The fallen angel becomes a malignant devil. Yet even that enemy of God and man had friends and associates in his desolation; I am alone," His fate reminds us of that of Alastor, the Spirit of Solitude, who:
"Over the world wanders for ever
Lone as incarnate death."
After the long and moving recital of his woes, even the obdurate Frankenstein cannot resist the justice of his demand for a partner like himself. Yet when the student recoils with horror from his half-accomplished task and sees the creature maliciously peering through the window, our hatred leaps to life once more and burns fiercely as the monster adds to his crimes the murder of Clerval, Frankenstein's dearest friend, and of Elizabeth on her wedding night. We follow with shuddering anticipation the long pursuit of the monster, expectant of a last, fearful encounter which shall decide the fate of the demon and his maker. Amid the region of eternal ice, Frankenstein catches sight of him; but fails to reach him. At last, beside the body of his last victim--Frankenstein himself--the creature is filled with remorse at the "frightful catalogue" of his sins, and makes a final bid for our sympathy in the farewell speech to Walton, before climbing on an ice-raft to be "borne away by the waves and lost in darkness and distance."
Like Alastor, Frankenstein was a plea for human sympathy, and was, according to Shelley's preface, intended "to exhibit the amiableness of domestic affection and the excellence of universal virtue." The monster has the perception and desire of goodness, but, by the circumstances of his abnormal existence, is delivered over to evil. It is this dual nature that prevents him from being a mere automaton. The monster indeed is far more real than the shadowy beings whom he pursues. Frankenstein is less an individual than a type, and only interests us through the emotions which his conflict with the monster arouses. Clerval, Elizabeth and Frankenstein's relatives are passive sufferers whose psychology does not concern us. Mrs. Shelley rightly lavishes her skill on the central figure of the book, and succeeds, as effectually as Frankenstein himself, in infusing into him the spark of life. Mrs. Shelley's aim is to "awaken thrilling horror," and, incidentally, to "exhibit the excellence of domestic virtue," and for her purpose the demon is of paramount importance. The involved, complex plot of a novel seemed to pass beyond Mrs. Shelley's control. A short tale she could handle successfully, and Shelley was unwise in inciting her to expand Frankenstein into a long narrative. So long as she is completely carried away by her subject Mrs. Shelley writes clearly, but when she pauses to regard the progress of her story dispassionately, she seems to be overwhelmed by the wealth of her resources and to have no power of selecting the relevant details. The laborious introductory letters, the meticulous record of Frankenstein's education, the story of Felix and Sofie, the description of the tour through England before the creation of the second monster is attempted, are all connected with the main theme by very frail links and serve to distract our attention in an irritating fashion from what really interests us. In the novel of mystery a tantalising delay may be singularly effective. In a novel which depends chiefly for its effect on sheer horror, delays are merely dangerous. By resting her terrors on a pseudo-scientific basis and by placing her story in a definite locality, Mrs.
Shelley waives her right to an entire suspension of disbelief. If it be reduced to its lowest terms, the plot of Frankenstein, with its bewildering confusion of the prosaic and the fantastic, sounds as crude, disjointed and inconsequent as that of a nightmare. Mrs. Shelley's timid hesitation between imagination and reality, her attempt to reconcile incompatible things and to place a creature who belongs to no earthly land in familiar surroundings, prevents Frankenstein from being a wholly satisfactory and alarming novel of terror. She loves the fantastic, but she also fears it. She is weighted down by commonsense, and so flutters instead of soaring, unwilling to trust herself far from the material world. But the fact that she was able to vivify her grotesque skeleton of a plot with some degree of success is no mean tribute to her gifts. The energy and vigour of her style, her complete and serious absorption in her subject, carry us safely over many an absurdity. It is only in the duller stretches of the narrative, when her heart is not in her work, that her language becomes vague, indeterminate and blurred, and that she muffles her thoughts in words like "ascertain," "commencement," "peruse," "diffuse," instead of using their simpler Saxon equivalents. Stirred by the excitement of the events she describes, she can write forcibly in simple, direct language. She often frames short, hurried sentences such as a man would naturally utter when breathless with terror or with recollections of terror. The final impression that Frankenstein leaves with us is not easy to define, because the book is so uneven in quality. It is obviously the shapeless work of an immature writer who has had no experience in evolving a plot. Sometimes it is genuinely moving and impressive, but it continually falls abruptly and ludicrously short of its aim. Yet when all its faults have been laid bare, the fact remains that few readers would abandon the story half-way through. Mrs. Shelley is so thoroughly engrossed in her theme that she impels her readers onward, even though they may think but meanly of her story as a work of art.
Mrs. Shelley's second novel, Valperga, or the Life and Adventures of Castruccio, Prince of Lucca, published in 1823, was a work on which she bestowed much care and labour, but the result proves that she writes best when the urgency of her imagination leaves her no leisure either to display her learning or adorn her style. She herself calls Valperga a "child of mighty slow growth," and Shelley adds that it was "raked out of fifty old books." Mrs. Shelley, always an industrious student, made a conscientious survey of original sources before fashioning her story of mediaeval Italy, and she is hampered by the exuberance of her knowledge. The novel is not a romance of terror; but Castruccio, though his character is sketched from authentic documents, seems towards the end of the story to resemble the picturesque villain who numbered among his ancestry Milton's Satan. He has "a majestic figure and a countenance beautiful but sad, and tarnished by the expression of pride that animated it." Beatrice, the gifted prophetess who falls deep in love with Castruccio, ends her days in the dungeons of the Inquisition. Mrs. Shelley's aim, however, is not to arouse fear, but to trace the gradual deterioration of Castruccio's character from an open-hearted youth to a crafty tyrant. The blunt remarks of Godwin, who revised the manuscript, are not unjust, but fall with an ill grace from the pen of the author of St. Leon: "It appears in reading, that the first rule you prescribed was: 'I will let it be long.' It contains the quantity of four volumes of Waverley. No hard blow was ever hit with a woodsaw."
In The Last Man, which appeared in 1825, Mrs. Shelley attempted a stupendous theme, no less then a picture of the devastation of the human race by plague and pestilence. She casts her imagination forward into the twenty-first century, when the last king of England has abdicated the throne and a republic is established. Very wisely, she narrows the interest by concentrating on the pathetic fate of a group of friends who are among the last survivors, and the story becomes an idealised record of her own sufferings. The description of the loneliness of the bereft has a personal note, and reminds us of her journal, where she expresses the sorrow of being herself the last survivor, and of feeling like a "cloud from which the light of sunset has passed." Raymond, who dies in an attempt to place the standard of Greece in Stamboul, is a portrait of Byron; and Adrian, the late king's son, who finally becomes Protector, is clearly modelled on Shelley. Yet in spite of these personal reminiscences, their characters lack distinctness. Idris, Clara and Perdita are faintly etched, but Evadne, the Greek artist, who cherishes a passion for Raymond, and dies fighting against the Turks, has more colour and body than the other women, though she is somewhat theatrical. Mrs. Shelley conveys emotion more faithfully than character, and the overwrought sensibilities and dark forebodings of the diminished party of survivors who leave England to distract their minds by foreign travel are artfully suggested. The leaping, gesticulating figure, whom their jaded nerves and morbid fancy transform into a phantom, is a delirious ballet-dancer; and the Black Spectre, mistaken for Death Incarnate, proves only to be a plague-stricken noble, who lurks near the party for the sake of human society. These "reasonable" solutions of the apparently supernatural remind us of Mrs. Radcliffe's method, and Mrs. Shelley shows keen psychological insight in her delineation of the state of mind which readily conjures up imaginary terrors. When Lionel Verney is left alone in the universe, her power seems to flag, and instead of the final crescendo of horror, which we expect at the end of the book, we are left with an ineffective picture of the last man in Rome in 2005 deciding to explore the countries he has not yet viewed. As he wanders amid the ruins he recalls not only "the buried Cæsars," but also the monk in The Italian, of whom he had read in childhood--a striking proof of Mrs. Shelley's faith in the permanence of Mrs. Radcliffe's fame.
Though the style of The Last Man is often tediously prolix and is disfigured by patches of florid rhetoric and by inappropriate similes scattered broadcast, occasional passages of wonderful beauty recall Shelley's imagery; and, in conveying the pathos of loneliness, personal feeling lends nobility and eloquence to her style. With so ambitious a subject, it was natural that she should only partially succeed in carrying her readers with her. Though there are oases, the story is a somewhat tedious and dreary stretch of narrative that can only be traversed with considerable effort.
Mrs. Shelley's later works--Perkin Warbeck (1830), a historical novel; Lodore (1835), which describes the early life of Shelley and Harriet; Falkner (1837), which was influenced by Caleb Williams--do not belong to the history of the novel of terror; but some of her short tales, contributed to periodicals and collected in 1891, have gruesome and supernatural themes. A Tale of the Passions, or the Death of Despina a story based on the struggles of the Guelphs and the Ghibellines, contains a perfect specimen of the traditional villain of the novel of terror:
"Every feature of his countenance spoke of the struggle of passions and the terrible egotism of one who would sacrifice himself to the establishment of his will: his black eyebrows were scattered, his grey eyes deep-set and scowling, his look at once stern and haggard. A smile seemed never to have disturbed the settled scorn which his lips expressed; his high forehead was marked by a thousand contradictory lines."
This terrific personage spends the last years of his life in orthodox fashion as an austere saint in a monastery.
The Mortal Immortal, a variation on the theme of St. Leon, is the record of a pupil of Cornelius Agrippa, who drank half of the elixir his master had compounded in the belief that it was a potion to destroy love. It is written on his three hundred and twenty-third birthday. Transformation, like Frankenstein, dwells on the pathos of ugliness and deformity, but the subject is treated rather in the spirit of an eastern fairy tale than in that of a novel of terror. The dwarf, in return for a chest of treasure, borrows a beautiful body, and, thus disguised, wins the love of Juliet, and all ends happily. Mrs. Shelley's short stories reveal a stronger sense of proportion than her novels, and are written in a more graceful, fluent style than the books on which she expended great labour.
The literary history of Byron's fragmentary novel and of Polidori's short story, The Vampyre, is somewhat tangled, but the solution is to be found in the diary of Dr. John William Polidori, edited and elucidated by William Michael Rossetti. The day after that on which Polidori states that all the competitors, except himself, had begun their stories, he records the simple fact: "Began my ghost-story after tea." He gives no hint as to the subject of his tale, but Mrs. Shelley tells us that Polidori had some idea of a "skull-headed lady, who was so punished for looking through a key-hole, and who was finally buried in the tomb of the Capulets." In the introduction to Ernestus Berchtold, or the Modern OEdipus, he states definitely:
"The tale here presented to the public is one I began at Coligny, when Frankenstein was planned, and when a noble author, having determined to descend from his lofty range, gave up a few hours to a tale of terror, and wrote the fragment published at the end of Mazeppa."
As no skull-headed lady appears in Ernestus Berchtold, it is probable that her career was only suggested to the rest of the party as an entrancing possibility, and never actually took shape. This theme would certainly have proved more frightful and possibly more interesting than the one which Polidori eventually adopted in Ernestus Berchtold, a rambling, leisurely account of the adventures of a Swiss soldier, whose wife afterwards proves to be his own sister. Their father has accepted from a malignant spirit the gift of wealth, but each time that the gift is bestowed some great affliction follows. This secret is not divulged until we are quite near the close of the story, and have waited so long that our interest has begun to wane. Ernestus Berchtold is, as a matter of fact, not a novel of terror at all. The supernatural agency, which should have been interlaced with the domestic story from beginning to end, is only dragged in because it was one of the conditions of the competition, as indeed Polidori frankly confesses in his introduction:
"Many readers will think that the same moral and the same colouring might have been given to characters acting under the ordinary agencies of life. I believe it, but I agreed to write a supernatural tale, and that does not allow of a completely everyday narrative."
The candour of this admission forestalls criticism. Strangely enough, Polidori adds that he has thrown the "superior agency" into the background, because "a tale that rests upon improbabilities must generally disgust a rational mind." With so decided a preference for the reasonable and probable, it is remarkable that Polidori should treat the vampire legend successfully. It has frequently been stated that Byron's story was completed by Polidori; but this assertion is not precisely accurate. Polidori made no use of the actual fragment, but based his story upon the groundwork on which the fragment was to have been continued. Byron's story describes the arrival of two friends amid the ruins of Ephesus. One of them, Darvell, who, like most of Byron's heroes, is enshrouded in mystery, and is a prey to some cureless disquiet, falls ill and dies. Before his death he demands that his companion shall on a certain day throw a ring into the salt springs that run into the bay of Eleusis. If we may trust Polidori's account, Byron intended that the survivor, on his return to England, should be startled to behold his companion moving in society, and making love to his sister. On this foundation Polidori constructed The Vampyre. The story opens with the description of a nobleman, Lord Ruthven, whose appearance and character excite great interest in London society. His face is remarkable for its deadly pallor, and he has a "dead, grey eye, which, fixing upon the object's face, did not seem to penetrate and at one glance to pierce through to the inward workings of the heart, but fell upon the cheek with a leaden ray that laid (sic) upon the skin it could not pass." A young man named Aubrey, who arrives in London about the same time, becomes deeply interested in the study of Ruthven's character. When he joins him on a tour abroad he discovers that his companion takes a fiendish delight in ruining the innocent at the gaming-table; and, after receiving a warning of Ruthven's reputation, decides to leave him, but to continue to watch him closely. He succeeds in foiling his designs against a young Italian girl in Rome. Aubrey next travels to Greece, where he falls in love with Ianthe. One day, in spite of warnings that the place he purposes to visit is frequented by vampires, Aubrey sets off on an excursion. Benighted in a lonely forest, he hears the terror-stricken cries of a woman in a hovel, and, on attempting to rescue her, finds himself in the grasp of a being of superhuman strength, who cries: "Again baffled!" When light dawns, Aubrey makes the terrible discovery that Ianthe has become the prey of a vampire. He carries away from the spot a blood-stained dagger. In the delirious fever, which ensues on his discovery of Ianthe's fate, Aubrey is nursed by Lord Ruthven. While they are travelling in Greece, Ruthven is shot in the shoulder by a robber, and, before dying, exacts from Aubrey a solemn oath that he will not reveal for a year and a day what he knows of his crimes or death. In accordance with a promise made to Ruthven, his body is conveyed to a mountain to be exposed to the rays of the moon. The corpse disappears. Among Ruthven's possessions Aubrey finds a sheath, into which the dagger he has found in the hovel fits exactly. On passing through Rome he learns that the girl he had once saved from Ruthven has vanished. When he returns to London, Aubrey is horrified to behold the figure of Lord Ruthven almost on the very spot where he had first seen him. He dare not break his oath, and soon becomes almost demented. The news of his sister's marriage seems to rouse him momentarily from his lethargy, and when he discovers that Ruthven is to be the bridegroom he urges her to delay the marriage. His warnings are disregarded, and the ceremony takes place. Aubrey relates to his sister's guardians all that he knows of Ruthven, but it is too late. Ruthven has disappeared, and she has "glutted the thirst of a vampyre."
Polidori's manner of telling the story is curiously matter of fact and restrained. He relates the incidents as they occur, and leaves the reader to form his own conclusions. If Lewis had been handling the theme he would have wallowed in gory details, and would have expatiated on the agonies of his victims. Polidori wisely keeps his story in a quiet key, depending for his effect on the terror of the bare facts. He realises that he is on the verge of the unspeakable.
Polidori's story set a fashion in vampires, who appear as characters in fiction all through the nineteenth century. A writer in the Dublin University Magazine tells of a vampire who plays an admirable game of whist! There is an "explained" vampire in one of George Macdonald's stories, Adela Cathcart. The prince of vampires is, however, Bram Stoker's Dracula, round whom centres a story of absorbing interest.
De Quincey, who might have selected from the novel of terror many admirable illustrations for his essay on Murder, Considered as one of the Fine Arts, and who seems to have been attracted by the German type of horrific story, shows some facility in sensational fiction. In Klosterheim, a one-volumed novel published in 1832, the interest circles round the machinations of an elusive, ubiquitous "Masque," eventually revealed to be none other than the son of the late Landgrave, who, like many a man before him in the tale of terror, has been done to death by a usurper. Disappearances through trap-doors, and escapes down subterranean passages are effected with a dexterity suggestive of Mrs. Radcliffe's methods; and the inexplicable murders, with the exception of that of an aged seneschal accidentally betrayed, are not real. In certain of his moods and habits, the Masque bears a likeness to Lewis's "Bravo," but the setting of De Quincey's story is very different. The adventures of the Masque and of the Lady Pauline are cast in Germany amid the confusion of the Thirty Years' War. In The Household Wreck, published in Blackwood's Magazine, January 1838, De Quincey shows his power of conveying a sense of foreboding, that anticipation of horror which is often more harrowing than the reality. Another tale of terror, The Avenger, published in the same year, describes a series of bloodcurdling murders which baffle the skill of the police, but which eventually prove to have been committed by a son to avenge dishonour done to his Jewish mother. For a collection of Popular Tales and Romances of the Northern Nations, published in 1823, De Quincey translated Der Freischütz from the German of J.A. Apel, under the title of The Fatal Marksman. By means of ill-gotten magic bullets the marksman wins his bride, but by one of those little ironies in which the devil delights to indulge, she is slain on the wedding-day by a bullet, which is aimed straight, but goes askew. In The Dice, another short story from the German, De Quincey once again exploits the old theme of a bargain with the devil.
De Quincey's contributions to the tale of terror shrink into unimportance beside the rest of his work, and are not in themselves remarkable. They are of interest as showing the widespread and long-enduring vogue of the species. It is noteworthy how many writers, whose main business lay elsewhere, have found time to make erratic excursions into the realms of the supernatural.
So late as 1834--more than a decade after the appearance of Melmoth--Harrison Ainsworth, whose imagination was steeped in terror, sought once more to revive the "feeble and fluttering pulses of old Romance." Among his earliest experiments were tales obviously fashioned in the Gothic manner. His Imperishable One, the hero of a tale first published in the European Magazine for 1822, bemoans the burden of immortality in the listless tones of Godwin's St. Leon, and is tempted by the fallen angel in the self-same guise in which he appeared to Lewis's notorious monk. In The Test of Affection (European Magazine, 1822) a wealthy man avails himself of Mrs. Radcliffe's supernatural trickery to test the loyalty of his friends, whom he succeeds in alarming by noises and a skeleton apparition. In Arliss's Pocket Magazine (1822) there appeared The Spectre Bride; and in the European Magazine (1823) Ainsworth attempted a theme that would have attracted Poe in The Half Hangit. The Boeotian for 1824 contained A Tale of Mystery, and the Literary Souvenir for 1825 The Fortress of Saguntum, a story in the style of Lewis. Ainsworth's first novel, Rookwood (1834), was inspired by a visit to Cuckfield Place, an old manor house which had reminded Shelley of "bits of Mrs. Radcliffe":
"Wishing to describe somewhat minutely the trim gardens, the picturesque domains, the rook-haunted groves, the gloomy chambers and gloomier galleries of an ancient hall with which I was acquainted, I resolved to attempt a story in the bygone style of Mrs. Radcliffe, substituting an old English squire, an old manorial residence and an old English highwayman for the Italian marchise, the castle and the brigand of that great mistress of romance... The attempt has succeeded beyond my most sanguine expectation. Romance, if I am not mistaken, is destined shortly to undergo an important change. Modified by the German and French writers--Hoffmann, Tieck, Victor Hugo, Alexander Dumas, Balzac and Paul Lacroix--the structure commenced in our land by Horace Walpole, 'Monk' Lewis, Mrs. Radcliffe and Maturin, but, left imperfect and inharmonious, requires, now that the rubbish which choked up its approach is removed, only the hand of the skilful architect to its entire renovation and perfection."
In Rookwood, Ainsworth disdains Mrs. Radcliffe's reasonable elucidations of the supernatural, and introduces spectres whose existence it would be impossible to deny. Once, however, a supposed ghost becomes substantial, and proves to be none other than a human being called Jack Palmer. The sexton, Luke Bradley, alias Alan Rookwood, has inherited two of the Wanderer's traits--the fear-impelling eyes of intolerable lustre, and the habit of indulging in wild, screaming laughter on the most inauspicious occasions.
Gothic properties are scattered with indiscriminate extravagance--skeleton hands, suddenly extinguished candles, sliding panels, sepulchral vaults. The plot of Rookwood is too complicated and too overcrowded with incident to keep our attention. The terrors are so unremitting that they fail to strike home. The only part of the book which holds us enthralled is the famous description of Dick Turpin's ride to York. Here we forget Ainsworth's slip-shod style in the excitement of the chase. In his later novels Ainsworth abandoned the manner of Mrs. Radcliffe, but did not fail to make use of the motive of terror and mystery. The scenes of horror which he strove to convey in words were often more admirably depicted in the illustrations of Cruikshank. The sorcerer's sabbath in Crichton, the historical scenes of horror in The Tower of London, the masque of the Dance of Death in Old St. Paul's, the appearance of Herne the Hunter, heralded by phosphoric lights, in Windsor Castle, the terrible orgies of The Lancashire Witches, are described with more striking effect because of Ainsworth's early reading in the school of terror. In Auriol, which was first published in Ainsworth's Magazine (1844-5) under the title Revelations of London, was issued in 1845 as a gratuitous supplement to the New Monthly, and greeted with derision, Ainsworth handled once again the theme that fascinated Lytton. The Prologue (1599) describes the death of Dr. Lamb, whose elixir is seized by his great-grandson. In 1830 London is haunted by a stranger, who involves Auriol in wildly fantastic and frightful adventures. The book closes in Dr. Lamb's laboratory; the intervening scenes are but dream imagery. Phiz's sketch of the Ruined House is the most lasting memory left by the book.
Captain Marryat, whose mind was well stored with sailors' yarns, retells in The Phantom Ship (1839) the old legend of the Flying Dutchman. At one time the doomed vessel is an unsubstantial vision, which can pass clean through the Utrecht; at another she is a real craft, whose deck can be boarded by mortal men. The one-eyed pilot, Schriften, with his malignant hatred of the hero, Philip, is a terrifying figure. The story is embroidered by the invention of a wife of Arab extraction, who is constantly attempting to recall the half-forgotten magical arts which her mother had practised. Marryat makes an opportunity in the history of Krantz, the second mate of the Vrou Katerina, to introduce the Scandinavian legend of the werewolf, which is related with grisly detail.
The novel of terror, with all its faults, had seldom been guilty of demanding intellectual strain or of overburdening itself with erudition. It was the dignified task of Lord Lytton to rationalise and elevate the novel of terror, to evolve the "man of reason" from the "child of nature." Although time has tarnished the brilliance of his reputation, George Edward Bulwer was an imposing figure in the history of nineteenth century fiction. Throughout his life, in spite of political and social distractions and of matrimonial disaster, he continued to engage with unwearying industry in literary work. He was not a man of genius in whom the creative impulse found its own expression, but a versatile and accomplished gentleman who could direct his talents into any channel he pleased. Essays, translations, verses, plays, novels flowed from his pen in rapid succession, and he won his meed of applause and fame, as well as his share of execration and derision, in his own lifetime. Quick to discern the popular taste of the hour, and eager to gratify it, Lytton, with the resourceful agility of a lightning impersonator, turns in his novels from Wertherism to dandyism, from criminal psychology to fairy folk-lore, from historical romance to domestic romance, from pseudo-philosophic occultism to pseudo-scientific fantasy. He ranges at will in the past, the present or the future, consorting indifferently with impalpable wraiths, Vrilya or mysterious Sages. It is to his credit that this unusual gift of adaptability does not result in incompetency. Though he attempts a variety of manners, it must in justice be acknowledged that he does most of them well. He constructs his plots with laborious art, and pays a deliberate, if sometimes misguided, attention to style. When he fails, it is less from lack of effort than from over-elaboration and excess of zeal.
Bulwer Lytton's predilection for the supernatural was neither a theatrical pose nor a passing folly excited by the fashionable craze for psychical research, but a genuine and enduring interest, inherited, it may be, from his ancestor, the learned, eccentric savant, Dr. Bulwer, who studied the Black Art and dabbled in astrology and palmistry. He was a member of the society of Rosicrucians, and, to quote the words of his grandson, "he certainly did not study magic for the sake of writing about it, still less did he write about it, without having studied it, merely for the sake of making his readers' flesh creep." From his early years Lytton seems to have been keenly interested in supernatural manifestations. He was inspired by the deserted rooms at the end of a long gallery in Knebworth House to set down the story of the ghost, Jenny Spinner, who was said to haunt them; and the concealed chamber in The Haunted and the Haunters may have been a revived memory of the trap-door down which Lytton as a boy had "peeped with bristling hair into the shadowy abysses of hellhole." In Glenallan, an early fragment, we find promising material for a tale of mystery--a villain with a "strange and sinister expression," a boy who, like the youthful Shelley, steals forth by night to graveyards, hoping to attain to fearful secrets, and an aged servant, a living chronicle of horrors, who relates the doings of an Irish wizard, Morshed Tyrone, of such awful power that the spirits of the earth, air and ocean ministered to him. In Godolphin (1833) there is an astrologer with the furrowed brow and awful eye, so common among the people of terror, and a strangely gifted girl, Lucilla, who turns soothsayer. But when Bulwer Lytton attempts a supernatural romance he leaves far behind him the sphere of Gothic terrors and soars into rarefied, exalted regions that inspire awe rather than horror. The Dweller of the Threshold in Zanoni is no red-cloaked, demoniacal figure springing from a trap-door with a deafening clap of thunder, but a "Colossal Shadow" brooding over the crater of Vesuvius.
The romance, Zanoni (1842), which Lytton considered the greatest of his works and which Carlyle praised with what now seems extravagant fervour, was based on an earlier sketch, Zicci (1838), and embodies a complicated theory which he had conceived several years earlier after reading some mediaeval treatises on astrology and the occult sciences. While his mind was occupied with these studies, the character of Mejnour and the main outlines of the story were inspired by a dream, which he related to his son. According to Lytton's theory, the air is peopled with Intelligences, of whom some are favourable, others hostile to man. The earth contains certain plants, which, rightly used, have power to arrest the decay of the human body, and to enable man, by quickening his physical senses and mental gifts, to perceive the aerial beings and to discover the secrets of nature. This supernatural knowledge is in possession of a brotherhood of whom two only, Mejnour and his pupil Zanoni, are in existence. The initiation involves the surrender of all violent passions and emotions, and the neophyte must be brought into contact with the powerful and malignant being called the Dweller of the Threshold:
"Whose form of giant mould
No mortal eye can fixed behold,"
Mejnour and Zanoni are supposed to have been initiated--the former in old age, the latter in youth--more than five thousand years before the story opens. Thus Mejnour remains for ever a vigorous old man; while Zanoni, his pupil, enjoys perpetual youth. Mejnour is purely intellectual, and spends his life in contemplation; while Zanoni, though he must avoid love and friendship which are unknown to the passionless Intelligences, feels sympathy with human beings.
Zanoni, who spends his life in the pursuit of pleasure, after fifty centuries at last falls in love with Viola, an Italian opera-singer. Like Melmoth the Wanderer, Zanoni is reluctant to bind the woman he loves to his own fate. He tries to renounce Viola to an Englishman, Glyndon, who eventually chooses to relinquish love for the sake of achieving the unearthly knowledge of Mejnour. Glyndon, however, fails in the trial, and is consequently haunted by the horror of the Dweller of the Threshold. Meanwhile Zanoni is united to Viola; and because he has succumbed to the force of love, his peculiar powers begin to fail. He can no longer see the beautiful, aerial intelligence, Adon-Ai. To save from death Viola and the child who is born to them, Zanoni ere long yields to the Dweller of the Threshold his gift of communion with the inhabitants of heaven. Later Viola, who incidentally typifies Superstition deserting Faith, leaves Zanoni at the call of Glyndon, and in Paris, during the Reign of Terror, is doomed to die. Zanoni invokes the aid of the mysterious Intelligences, and his courage at length brings Adon-Ai again to his side. He wins a day's reprieve for Viola, and is executed in her stead. The death of Robespierre releases the prisoners, but Viola dies the next day.
The compact between Zanoni and the Dweller of the Threshold is a renovation of the time-worn legend of the bargain with an evil spirit, but Lytton transforms it almost beyond recognition. Zanoni is no criminal. He has attained his secrets through will-power, self-conquest, and the subordination of the flesh to the spirit, and he surrenders his gifts willingly for the sake of another. Both Mejnour and Zanoni disclaim miraculous powers, yet Zanoni is ready to stake his mistress on a cast of the dice, and can cause the death of three sanguinary marauders without stirring from the apartment in which he ordinarily pursues his chemical studies. From such incidents as these it would seem as if Lytton, for the actual craftsmanship of Zanoni, may have gleaned stray hints from the novel of terror; but the spirit and intention of the book are entirely different. Though Lytton expressly declares that his Zanoni is not an allegory, he confesses that it has symbolical meanings. Zanoni is apt to assume the superior pose of a lecturer elucidating an abstruse subject to an unenlightened audience. The impression of artifice that the book makes upon us is probably due to the fact that Lytton first conceived his theories and then created personages to illustrate them. His characters have no power to act of their own volition or to do unexpected things, but must move along the lines laid down for them.
In The Haunted and the Haunters, or The House and the Brain, which appeared in Blackwood's Magazine in 1859, Bulwer Lytton lays aside the sin of over-elaboration and ornamentation that so easily besets him, and relies for his effect on the impalpable horror of his story. The calm, business-like overture, the accurate description of the position of the house in a street off the north side of Oxford Street, the insistence on the matter-of-fact attitude of the watcher, and on the cool courage of his servant, the abject fear of the dog, who dies in agony, all tend to create an atmosphere of grave conviction. The eerie child's footfall, the moving of the furniture by unseen hands, the wrinkled fingers that clutch the old letters, the faintly outlined wraiths of the man and woman in old-world garb with ruffles, lace, and buckles, the hideous phantom of the drowned man, the dark figure with malignant serpent eyes, shadow forth the story hinted at in the letters found in an old drawer. Haunted by loathly presences, the watcher experiences a sensation of almost intolerable horror, but saves himself at the worst by opposing his will to that of the haunters. He rightly surmises that the evil influences, which seem in some way to emanate from a small empty room, really proceed from a living being. His interpretation is skilful and subtle enough not to detract from the simple horror of the tale. A miniature, certain volatile essences, a compass, a lodestone and other properties are found in a room below that which appeared to be the source of the horrors. It proves that the man, whose face is portrayed on the miniature has been able through the exertion of will-power to prolong his life for two centuries, and to preserve a curse in a magical vessel. He is actually interviewed by the watcher, to whom he unfolds his remarkable history, and whom he mesmerises into silence on the subject of his experiences in the haunted house for a space of three months.
Lytton realises that it is not only what is told but what is left unsaid that requires consideration in a ghost story. His reticence and the entire absence of any note of mockery or doubt secure the "willing suspension of disbelief" necessary to the appreciation of the apparently supernatural.
In A Strange Story, which, at Dickens's invitation, appeared in All the Year Round (1861-2), Bulwer Lytton further elaborates his theories of mesmerism and willpower. He explains his purpose in the Preface:
"When the reader lays down this strange story, perhaps he will detect, through all the haze of Romance, the outlines of these images suggested to his reason: Firstly, the image of sensuous, soulless Nature, such as the Materialist had conceived it. Secondly, the image of Intellect, obstinately separating all its inquiries from the belief in the spiritual essence and destiny of man, and incurring all kinds of perplexity and resorting to all kinds of visionary speculation before it settles at last into the simple faith which unites the philosopher and the infant. And thirdly, the image of the erring but pure-thoughted Visionary, seeking overmuch on this earth to separate soul from mind, till innocence itself is led astray by a phantom and reason is lost in the space between earth and the stars."
These three conceptions are embodied in Margrave, who has renewed his life far beyond the limits allotted to man; a young doctor, Fenwick, who represents the intellectual divorced from the spiritual; and Lilian Ashleigh, a clairvoyante girl, who typifies the spiritual divorced from the intellectual. The interest of the story turns on the struggle of Fenwick to gain his bride, and to wrest her from the influence of Margrave. The plot, intricately tangled, is unravelled with patient skill. In spite of the wearisome explanations of Dr. Faber, who is lucid but verbose, there is a fascination about the book which compels us to go forward.
In Lytton's hands the barbarity of the novel of terror has been gracefully smoothed away. It has, indeed, become almost unrecognisably refined and elevated, and something of its native vigour is lost in the process. Amid all the amenities of Vrilya and Intelligences, we miss the vulgar blatancy of an honest, old-fashioned spectre.
