In a later collection of Hawthorne's short stories, Mosses from an Old Manse, the grave and the gay, the terrific and the sportive, are once more intermingled. Side by side with a forlorn attempt at humorous allegory, Mrs. Bullfrog, we find the serious moral allegories of The Birthmark and The Bosom-Serpent, the wild, mysterious forest-revels in Goodman Brown, and the evil, sinister beauty of Dr. Rappacini's Daughter, a modern rehandling of the ancient legend of the poison-maiden, who was perhaps the prototype of Oliver Wendell Holmes' heroine in Elsie Venner (1861). The quiet grace and natural ease of Hawthorne's style lend even to his least ambitious tales a distinctive charm. If he chooses a slight and simple theme, his touch is deft and sure. Dr. Heidegger's Experiment, in which Hawthorne's delicate, whimsical fancy plays round the idea of the elixir of life, is almost like a series of miniature pictures, distinct and lifelike in form and colour, seen through the medium of an old-fashioned magic-lantern. Yet even in this fantastic trifle we can discern the feeling for words and the sense of proportion that characterise Hawthorne's longer works.
The Scarlet Letter (1850) was originally intended to be one of several short stories, but Hawthorne was persuaded to expand it into a novel. He felt some misgivings as to the success of the work:
"Keeping so close to the point as the tale does, and diversified in no otherwise than by turning different sides of the same dark idea to the reader's eye, it will weary very many people and disgust some."
The plot bears a remarkable resemblance to that of Lockhart's striking novel, Adam Blair. The "dark idea" that fascinates Hawthorne is the psychological state of Hester Prynne and her lover, Arthur Dimmesdale, in the long years that follow their lawless passion. Their love story hardly concerns him at all. The interest of the novel does not depend on the development of the plot. No attempt is made to complicate the story by concealing the identity of Hester's lover or of her husband. The action takes place within the souls and minds of the characters, not in their outward circumstances. The central chapter of the book is named significantly: "The Interior of a Heart." The moral situation described in The Scarlet Letter did not present itself to Hawthorne abstractly, but as a series of pictures. He habitually thought in images, and he brooded so long over his conceptions that his descriptions are almost as definite in outline and as vivid in colour as things actually seen. His pictures do not waver or fade elusively as the mind seeks to realise them. The prison door, studded with pikes, before which Hester Prynne first stands with the letter on her breast, the pillory where Dimmesdale keeps vigil at midnight, the forest-trees with pale, fitful gleams of sunshine glinting through their leaves, are so distinct that we almost put out our hands to touch them. Hawthorne's dream-imagery has the same convincing reality. The phantasmagoric visions which float through Hester's consciousness—the mirrored reflection of her own face in girlhood, her husband's thin, scholar-like visage, the grey houses of the cathedral city where she had spent her early years—are more real to her and to us than the blurred faces of the Puritans who throng the marketplace to gaze on her ignominy. Although the moral tone of the book is one of almost unrelieved gloom, the actual scenes are full of colour and light. Pearl's scarlet frock with its fantastic embroideries, the magnificent velvet gown and white ruff of the old dame who rides off by night to the witch-revels in the forest, the group of Red Indians in their deer-skin robes and wampum belts of red and yellow ochre, the bronzed faces and gaudy attire of the Spanish pirates, all stand out in bold relief among the sober greys and browns of the Puritans. The tense, emotional atmosphere is heightened by the festive brightness of the outer world.
The light of Hawthorne's imagination is directed mainly on three characters—Hester, Arthur, and the elf-like child Pearl, the living symbol of their union. Further in the background lurks the malignant figure of Roger Chillingworth, contriving his fiendish scheme of vengeance, "violating in cold blood the sanctity of a human heart." The blaze of the Scarlet Letter compels us by a strange magnetic power to follow Hester Prynne wherever she goes, but her suffering is less acute and her character less intricate than her lover's. She bears the outward badge of shame, but after "wandering without a clue in the dark labyrinth of mind," wins a dull respite from anguish as she glides "like a grey and sober shadow" over the threshold of those who are visited by sorrow. At the last, when Dimmesdale's spirit is "so shattered and subdued that it could hardly hold itself erect," Hester has still energy to plan and to act. His character is more twisted and tortuous than hers, and to understand him we must visit him apart. The sensitive nature that can endure physical pain but shrinks piteously from moral torture, the capacity for deep and passionate feeling, the strange blending of pride and abject self-loathing, of cowardice and resolve, are portrayed with extraordinary skill. The different strands of his character are "intertwined in an inextricable knot." His is a living soul, complicated and varying in its moods, but ever pursued by a sense of sin. By one of Hawthorne's swift, uncanny flashes of insight, as Dimmesdale goes home after the forest-meeting, we hear nothing of the wild beatings of hope and dreary revulsions to despair, but only of foul, grotesque temptations that assail him, just as earlier—on the pillory—it is the grim humour and not the frightful shame of the situation that strikes him, when by an odd trick of his imagination he suddenly pictures a "whole tribe of decorous personages starting into view with the disorder of a nightmare in their aspects," to look upon their minister.
Hawthorne's delineation of character and motive is as scrupulously accurate and scientific as Godwin's, but there is none of Godwin's inhumanity in his attitude. His complete understanding of human weakness makes pity superfluous and undignified. He pronounces no judgment and offers no plea for mercy. His instinct is to present the story as it appeared through the eyes of those who enacted the drama or who witnessed it. Stern and inexorable as one of his own witch-judging ancestors, Hawthorne foils the lovers' plan of escape across the sea, lets the minister die as soon as he has made the revelation that gives him his one moment of victory, and in the conclusion brings Hester back to take up her long-forsaken symbol of shame. Pearl alone Hawthorne sets free, the spell which bound her human sympathies broken by the kiss she bestows on her guilty father. There are few passionate outbursts of feeling, save when Hester momentarily unlocks her heart in the forest—and even here Hawthorne's language is extraordinarily restrained:
"'What we did had a consecration of its own. We felt it so! We said so to each other. Hast thou forgotten it?' 'Hush, Hester!' said Arthur Dimmesdale, rising from the ground. 'No; I have not forgotten.'"
Or again, after Dimmesdale has confessed that he has neither strength nor courage left him to venture into the world: "'Thou shalt not go alone!' answered she, in a deep whisper. Then all was spoken."
In The House of the Seven Gables (1851), as in The Scarlet Letter, Hawthorne again presents his scenes in the light of a single, pervading idea, this time an ancestral curse, symbolised by the portrait of Colonel Pyncheon, who condemned an innocent man for witchcraft.
"To the thoughtful man there will be no tinge of superstition in what we figuratively express, by affirming that the ghost of a dead progenitor—perhaps as a portion of his own punishment—is often doomed to become the Evil Genius of his family."
Hawthorne wins his effect by presenting the idea to our minds from different points of view, until we are obsessed by the curse that broods heavily over the old house. Even the aristocratic breed of fowls, of "queer, rusty, withered aspect," are an emblem of the decay of the Pyncheon family. The people are apt to be merged into the dense shadows that lurk in the gloomy passages, but when the sun shines on them they stand out with arresting distinctness. The heroic figure of Hepzibah Pyncheon, a little ridiculous and a little forbidding of aspect, but cherishing through weary years a passionate devotion to her brother, is described with a gentle blending of humour and pathos. Clifford Pyncheon—the sybarite made for happiness and hideously cheated of his destiny—is delineated with curious insight and sympathy. It is Judge Jaffery Pyncheon, with his "sultry" smile of "elaborate benevolence"—unrelenting and crafty as his infamous ancestor—who lends to The House of Seven Gables the element of terror. Hour after hour, Hawthorne, with grim and bitter irony, mocks and taunts the dead body of the hypocritical judge until the ghostly pageantry of dead Pyncheons—including at last Judge Jaffery himself with the fatal crimson stain on his neckcloth—fades away with the oncoming of daylight.
Hawthorne's mind was richly stored with "wild chimney-corner legends," many of them no doubt gleaned from an old woman mentioned in one of his Tales and Sketches. He takes over the fantastic superstitions in which his ancestors had believed, and uses them as the playthings of his fancy, picturing with malicious mirth the grey shadows of his stern, dark-browed forefathers sadly lamenting his lapse from grace and saying one to the other:
"A writer of story-books! What kind of a business in life, what manner of glorifying God, or being serviceable to mankind in his day and generation may that be? Why, the degenerate fellow might as well have been a fiddler."
The story of Alice Pyncheon, the maiden under the dreadful power of a wizard, who, to wreak his revenge, compelled her to surrender her will to his and to do whatsoever he list, the legends of ghosts and spectres in the Twice-Told Tales, the allusions to the elixir of life in his Notebooks, the introduction of witches into The Scarlet Letter, of mesmerism into The Blithedale Romance, show how often Hawthorne was pre-occupied with the terrors of magic and of the invisible world. He handles the supernatural in a half-credulous, half-sportive spirit, neither affirming nor denying his belief. One of his artful devices is wilfully to cast doubt upon his fancies, and so to pique us into the desire to be momentarily at least one of the foolish and imaginative.
After writing The Blithedale Romance, in which he embodied his experiences at Brook Farm, and his Italian romance, Transformation, or The Marble Faun, Hawthorne, when his health was failing, strove to find expression for the theme of immortality, which had always exercised a strange fascination upon him. In August, 1855, during his consulate in Liverpool, he visited Smithell's Hall, near Bolton, and heard the legend of the Bloody Footstep. He thought of uniting this story with that of the elixir of life, but ultimately decided to treat the story of the footstep in Dr. Grimshawe's Secret, of which only a fragment was written, and to embody the elixir idea in a separate work, Septimius Felton, of which two unfinished versions exist. Septimius Felton, a young man living in Concord at the time of the war of the Revolution, tries to brew the potion of eternity by adding to a recipe, which his aunt has derived from the Indians, the flowers which spring from the grave of a man whom he has slain. In Dr. Dolliver's Romance, Hawthorne, so far as we may judge from the fragment which remains, seems to be working out an idea jotted down in his notebook several years earlier:
"A man arriving at the extreme point of old age grows young again at the same pace at which he had grown old, returning upon his path throughout the whole of life, and thus taking the reverse view of matters. Methinks it would give rise to some odd concatenations."
The story, which opens with a charming description of Dr. Dolliver and his great-grandchild, Pansie, breaks off so abruptly that it is impossible to forecast the "odd concatenations" that had flashed through Hawthorne's mind.
Although Hawthorne is preoccupied continually with the thought of death, his outlook is melancholy, not morbid. He recoils fastidiously from the fleshly and loses himself in the spiritual. He is concerned with mournful reflections, not frightful events. It is the mystery of death, not its terror, that fascinates him. Sensitive and susceptible himself, he never startles us with physical horrors. He does not search with curious ingenuity for recondite terrors. He was compelled as if by some wizard's strange power, to linger in earth's shadowed places; but the scenes that throng his memory are reflected in quiet, subdued tones. His pictures are never marred by harsh lines or crude colours.
While Hawthorne in his Twice-Told Tales was toying pensively with spectral forms and "dark ideas," Edgar Allan Poe was penetrating intrepidly into trackless regions of terror. Where Hawthorne would have shrunk back, repelled and disgusted, Poe, wildly exhilarated by the anticipation of a new and excruciating thrill, forced his way onwards. He sought untiringly for unusual situations, inordinately gloomy or terrible, and made them the starting point for excursions into abnormal psychology. Just as Hawthorne harps with plaintive insistence on the word "sombre," Poe again and again uses the epithet "novel." His tales are never, as Hawthorne's often are, pathetic. His instinct is always towards the dramatic. Sometimes he rises to tragic heights, sometimes he is merely melodramatic. He rejoices in theatrical effects, like the death-throes of William Wilson, the return of the lady Ligeia, or the entry, awaited with torturing suspense, of the "lofty" and enshrouded figure of the Lady Madeline of Usher. Like Hawthorne, Poe was fascinated by the thought of death, "the hemlock and the cypress overshadowed him night and day," but he describes death accompanied by its direst physical and mental agonies. Hawthorne broods over the idea of sin, but Poe probes curiously into the psychology of crime. The one is detached and remote, the other inhuman and passionless. The contrast in style between Hawthorne and Poe reflects clearly their difference in temper. Hawthorne writes always with easy, finished perfection, choosing the right word unerringly, Poe experiments with language, painfully acquiring a conscious, studied form of expression which is often remarkably effective, but which almost invariably suggests a sense of artifice. In reading The Scarlet Letter we do not think of the style; in reading The Masque of the Red Death we are forcibly impressed by the skilful arrangement of words, the alternation of long and short sentences, the device of repetition and the deliberate choice of epithets. Hawthorne uses his own natural form of expression. Poe, with laborious art, fashions an instrument admirably adapted to his purposes.
Poe's earliest published story, A Manuscript Found in a Bottle—the prize tale for the Baltimore Saturday Visitor, 1833—proves that he soon recognised his peculiar vein of talent. He straightway takes the tale of terror for his own. The experiences of a sailor, shipwrecked in the Simoom and hurled on the crest of a towering billow into a gigantic ship manned by a hoary crew who glide uneasily to and fro "like the ghosts of buried centuries," forecast the more frightful horrors of A Descent into the Maelstrom (1841). Poe's method in both stories is to induce belief by beginning with a circumstantial narrative of every-day events, and by proceeding to relate the most startling phenomena in the same calm, matter-of-fact manner. The whirling abyss of the Maelstrom in which the tiny boat is engulfed, and the sensations of the fishermen—awe, wonder, horror, curiosity, hope, alternating or intermingled—are described with the same quiet precision as the trivial preliminary adventures. The man's dreary expectation of incredulity seals our conviction of the truth of his story. In The Manuscript Found in a Bottle, too, we may trace the first suggestion of that idea which finds its most complete and memorable expression in Ligeia (1837). The antique ship, with its preternaturally aged crew "doomed to hover continually upon the brink of eternity, without taking a final plunge into the abyss," is an early foreshadowing of the fulfilment of Joseph Glanvill's declaration so strikingly illustrated in the return of Ligeia: "Man doth not yield himself to the angels, nor unto death utterly, save only through the weakness of his feeble will." In Ligeia, Poe concentrates on this idea with singleness of purpose. He had striven to embody it in his earlier sketches, in Morella, where the beloved is reincarnated in the form of her own child, in the musical, artificial Eleonora and in the gruesome Berenice. In Ligeia, at last, it finds its appropriate setting in the ebony bridal-chamber, hung with gold tapestries grotesquely embroidered with fearful shapes and constantly wafted to and fro, like those in one of the Episodes of Vathek. In The Fall of the House of Usher he adapts the theme which he had approached in the sketch entitled Premature Burial, and unites with it a subtler conception, the sentience of the vegetable world. Like the guest of Roderick Usher, as we enter the house we fall immediately beneath the overmastering sway of its irredeemable, insufferable gloom. The melancholy building, Usher's wild musical improvisations, his vague but awful paintings, his mystical reading and his eerie verses with the last haunting stanza:
"And travellers now within that valley
Through the red-litten windows, see
Vast forms that move fantastically
To a discordant melody;
While, like a rapid, ghastly river,
Through the pale door,
A hideous throng rush out forever
And laugh—but smile no more,"
are all in harmony with the fate that broods over the family of Usher. Poe's gift for avoiding all impressions alien to his effect lends to his tales extraordinary unity of tone and colour. He leads up to his crisis with a gradual crescendo of emotion. The climax, hideous and terrifying, relieves the intensity of our feelings, and once it is past Poe rapidly hastens to the only possible conclusion. The dreary house with its vacant, eye-like windows reflected at the outset in the dark, unruffled tarn, disappears for ever beneath its surface.
In The Masque of the Red Death the imagery changes from moment to moment, each scene standing out clear in colour and sharp in outline; but from first to last the perspective of the whole is kept steadily in view. No part is disproportionate or inappropriate. The arresting overture describing the swift and sudden approach of the Red Death, the gay, thoughtless security of Prince Prospero and his guests within the barricaded abbey, the voluptuous masquerade held in a suite of seven rooms of seven hues, the disconcerting chime of the ebony clock that momentarily stills the grotesque figures of the dancers, prepare us for the dramatic climax, the entry of the audacious guest, the Red Death, and his struggle with Prince Prospero. The story closes as it began with the triumph of the Red Death. Poe achieves his powerful effect with rigid economy of effort. He does not add an unnecessary touch.
In The Cask of Amontillado—perhaps the most terrible and the most perfectly executed of all Poe's tales—the note of grim irony is sustained throughout. The jingling of the bells and the devilish profanity of the last three words—Requiescat in pace—add a final touch of horror to a revenge, devised and carried out with consummate artistry.
Poe, like Hawthorne, loved to peer curiously into the dim recesses of conscience. Hawthorne was concerned with the effect of remorse on character. Poe often exhibits a conscience possessed by the imp of the perverse, and displays no interest in the character of his victim. He chooses no ordinary crimes. He considers, without De Quincey's humour, murder as a fine art. In The Black Cat the terrors are calculated with cold-blooded nicety. Every device is used to deepen the impression and to intensify the agony. In The Tell-Tale Heart, so unremitting is the suspense, as the murderer slowly inch by inch projects his head round the door in the darkness, that it is well-nigh intolerable. The close of the story, which errs on the side of the melodramatic, is less cunningly contrived than Poe's endings usually are. In William Wilson, Poe handles the subject of conscience in an allegorical form, a theme essayed by Bulwer Lytton in one of his sketches in The Student, Monos and Daimonos. He probably influenced Stevenson's Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.
In The Pit and the Pendulum, Poe seems to start from the very border-line of the most hideous nightmare that the human mind can conceive, yet there is nothing hazy or indefinite in his analysis of the feelings of his victim. He speaks as one who has experienced the sensations himself, not as one who is making a wild surmise. To read is, indeed, to endure in some measure the torture of the prisoner; but our pain is alleviated not only by the realisation that we at least may win respite when we will, but by our appreciation of Poe's subtle technique. He notices the readiness of the mind, when racked unendurably, to concentrate on frivolous trifles—the exact shape and size of the dungeon; or the sound of the scythe cutting through cloth. Mental and physical agonies are interchanged with careful art.
Poe's constructive power fitted him admirably to write the detective story. In The Mystery of M. Roget he adopts a dull plot without sufficient vigour and originality to rivet our attention, but The Murders of the Rue Morgue secures our interest from beginning to end. As in the case of Godwin's Caleb Williams, the end was conceived first and the plot was carefully woven backwards. No single thread is left loose. Dupin's methods of ratiocination are similar to those of Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes. Poe never shirks a gory detail, but the train of reasoning not the imagery absorbs us in his detective stories. In his treasure story—The Gold Bug, which may have suggested Stevenson's Treasure Island—he compels our interest by the intricacy and elaboration of his problem.
The works of Mrs. Radcliffe, Lewis, and Maturin were not unknown to Poe, and he refers more than once to the halls of Vathek. From Gothic romance he may perhaps vivid that they make the senses ache. Like Maturin, he even resorts to italics to enforce his effect. He crashes down heavily on a chord which would resound at a touch. He is liable too to descend into vulgarity in his choice of phrases. His tales consequently gain in style in the translations of Baudelaire. But these aberrations occur mainly in his inferior work. In his most highly wrought stories, such as Amontillado, The House of Usher, or The Masque of the Red Death, the execution is flawless. In these, Poe never lost sight of the ideal, which, in his admirable review of Hawthorne's Twice-Told Tales and Mosses from an Old Manse, he set before the writer of short stories:
"A skilful literary artist has constructed a tale … having conceived, with deliberate care, a certain unique or single effect to be wrought out, he then invents such incidents—he then combines such events—as may best aid him in establishing this preconceived effect. If his very initial sentence tend not to the outbringing of this effect, he has failed in the first step. In the whole composition there should be no word written of which the tendency direct or indirect is not to the one pre-established design."
While he was writing, Poe did not for a moment let his imagination run riot. The outline of the story was so distinctly conceived, its atmosphere so familiar to him, that he had leisure to choose his words accurately, and to dispose his sentences harmoniously, with the final effect ever steadily in view. The impression that he swiftly flashes across our minds is deep and enduring.
CHAPTER XII - CONCLUSION.
This book is an attempt to trace in outline the origin and development of the Gothic romance and the tale of terror. Such a survey is necessarily incomplete. For more than fifty years after the publication of The Castle of Otranto the Gothic Romance remained a definitely recognised kind of fiction; but, as the scope of the novel gradually came to include the whole range of human expression, it lost its individuality, and was merged into other forms. To follow every trail of its influence would lead us far afield. The Tale of Terror, if we use the term in its wider sense, may be said to include the magnificent story of the Writing on the Wall at Belshazzar's Feast, the Book of Job, the legends of the Deluge and of the Tower of Babel, and Saul's Visit to the Witch of Endor, which Byron regarded as the best ghost story in the world. In the Hebrew writings fear is used to endow a hero with superhuman powers or to instil a moral truth. The sun stands still in the heavens that Joshua may prevail over his enemies. In modern days the tale of terror is told for its own sake. It has become an end in itself, and is probably appreciated most fully by those who are secure from peril. It satisfies the human desire to experience new emotions and sensations, without actual danger.
There is little doubt that the Gothic Romance primarily made its appeal to women readers, though we know that Mrs. Radcliffe had many men among her admirers, and that Cherubina of The Heroine had a companion in folly, The Story-Haunted Youth. It is remotely allied, as its name implies, to the mediaeval romances, at which Cervantes tilts in Don Quixote. It was more closely akin, however, to the heroic romances satirised in Mrs. Charlotte Lennox's Female Quixote (1752). When the voluminous works of Le Calprenède and of Mademoiselle de Scudéry were translated into English, they found many imitators and admirers, and their vogue outlasted the seventeenth century. Artamène ou le Grand Cyrus, out of which Mrs. Pepys told her husband long stories, "though nothing to the purpose, nor in any good manner," is to be found, with a pin stuck through one of the middle leaves, in the lady's library described by Addison in the Spectator, Mrs. Aphra Behn, in Oroonoko and The Fair Jilt, had made some attempt to bring romance nearer to real life; but it was not until the middle of the eighteenth century, when the novel, with the rise of Richardson, Fielding, Smollett and Sterne, took firm root on English soil, that the popularity of Cassandra, Parthenissa and Aretina was superseded. Then, if we may trust the evidence of Colman's farce, Polly Honeycombe, first acted in 1760, Pamela, Clarissa Harlowe and Sophia Western reigned in their stead. For the reader who had patiently followed the eddying, circling course of the heroic romance, with its high-flown language and marvellous adventures, Richardson's novel of sentiment probably held more attraction than Fielding's novel of manners. Fielding, on his broad canvas, paints the life of his day on the highway, in coaches, taverns, sponging-houses or at Vauxhall masquerades. Every class of society is represented, from the vagabond to the noble lord. Richardson, in describing the shifts and subterfuges of Mr. B—and the elaborate intrigue of Lovelace, moves within a narrow circle, devoting himself, not to the portrayal of character, but to the minute analysis of a woman's heart. The sentiment of Richardson descends to Mrs. Radcliffe. Her heroines are fashioned in the likeness of Clarissa Harlowe; her heroes inherit many of the traits of the immaculate Grandison. She adds zest to her plots by wafting her heroines to distant climes and bygone centuries, and by playing on their nerves with superstitious fears. Since human nature often looks to fiction for a refuge from the world, there is always room for the illusion of romance side by side with the picture of actual life. Fanny Burney's spirited record of Evelina's visit to her vulgar, but human, relatives, the Branghtons, in London, is not enough. We need too the sojourn of Emily, with her thick-coming fancies, in the castle of Udolpho.
The Gothic Romance did not reflect real life, or reveal character, or display humour. Its aim was different. It was full of sentimentality, and it stirred the emotions of pity and fear. The ethereal, sensitive heroine, suffering through no fault of her own, could not fail to win sympathy. The hero was pale, melancholy, and unfortunate enough to be attractive. The villain, bold and desperate in his crimes, was secretly admired as well as feared. Hairbreadth escapes and wicked intrigues in castles built over beetling precipices were sufficiently outside the reader's own experience to produce a thrill. Ghosts, and rumours of ghosts, touched nearly the eighteenth century reader, who had often listened, with bated breath, to winter's tales of spirits seen on Halloween in the churchyard, or white-robed spectres encountered in dark lanes and lonely ruins. In country houses like those described in Miss Austen's novels, where life was diversified only by paying calls, dining out, taking gentle exercise or playing round games like "commerce" or "word-making and work-taking," the Gothic Romances must have proved a welcome source of pleasurable excitement. Mr. Woodhouse, with his melancholy views on the effects of wedding cake and muffin, would have condemned them, no doubt, as unwholesome; Lady Catherine de Bourgh would have been too impatient to read them; but Lydia Bennet, Elinor Dashwood and Isabella Thorpe must have found in them an inestimable solace. Their fame was soon overshadowed by that of the Waverley Novels, but they had served their turn in providing an entertaining interlude before the arrival of Sir Walter Scott. Even at the very height of his vogue, they probably enjoyed a surreptitious popularity, not merely in the servants' hall, but in the drawing room. Nineteenth century literature abounds in references to the vogue of this school of fiction. There were spasmodic attempts at a revival in an anonymous work called Forman (1819), dedicated to Scott, and in Ainsworth's Rookwood (1834); and terror has never ceased to be used as a motive in fiction.
In Villette, Lucy Snowe, whose nerves Ginevra describes as "real iron and bend leather," gazes steadily for the space of five minutes at the spectral "nun." This episode indicates a change of fashion; for the lady of Gothic romance could not have submitted to the ordeal for five seconds without fainting. A more robust heroine, who thinks clearly and yet feels strongly, has come into her own. In Jane Eyre many of the situations are fraught with terror, but it is the power of human passion, transcending the hideous scenes, that grips our imagination. Terror is used as a means to an end, not as an end in itself. In Wuthering Heights the windswept Yorkshire moors are the background for elemental feelings. We no longer "tremble with delicious dread" or "snatch a fearful joy." The gloom never lightens. We live ourselves beneath the shadow of Heathcliff's awe-inspiring personality, and there is no escape from a terror, which passes almost beyond the bounds of speech. The Brontës do not trifle with emotion or use supernatural elements to increase the tension. Theirs are the terrors of actual life.
Other novelists, contemporary with the Brontës, revel in terror for its own sake. Wilkie Collins weaves elaborate plots of hair-raising events. The charm of The Moonstone and the Woman in White is independent of character or literary finish. It consists in the unravelling of a skilfully woven fabric. Le Fanu, who resented the term "sensational" which was justly applied to his works, plays pitilessly on our nerves with both real and fictitious horrors. He, like Wilkie Collins, made a cult of terror. Their literary descendants may perhaps be found in such authors as Richard Marsh or Bram Stoker, or Sax Rohmer. In Bram Stoker's Dracula the old vampire legend is brought up to date, and we are held from beginning to end in a state of frightful suspense. No one who has read the book will fail to remember the picture of Dracula climbing up the front of the castle in Transylvania, or the scene in the tomb when a stake is driven through the heart of the vampire who has taken possession of Lucy's form. The ineffable horror of the "Un-Dead" would repel us by its painfulness, if it were not made endurable by the love, hope and faith of the living characters, particularly of the old Dutch doctor, Van Helsing. The matter-of-fact style of the narrative, which is compiled of letters, diaries and journals, and the mention of such familiar places as Whitby and Hampstead, help to enhance the illusion.
The motive of terror has often been mingled with other motives in the novel as well as in the short tale. In unwinding the complicated thread of the modern detective story, which follows the design originated by Godwin and perfected by Poe, we are frequently kept to our task by the force of terror as well as of curiosity. In The Sign of Four and in The Hound of the Baskervilles, to choose two entirely different stories, Conan Doyle realises that darkness and loneliness place us at the mercy of terror, and he works artfully on our fears of the unknown. Phillips Oppenheim and William Le Queux, in romances which have sometimes a background of international politics, maintain our interest by means of mystifications, which screw up our imagination to the utmost pitch, and then let us down gently with a natural but not too obvious explanation. A certain amount of terror is almost essential to heighten the interest of a novel of costume and adventure, like The Prisoner of Zenda or Rupert of Hentzau, or of the fantastic, exciting romances of Jules Verne. Rider Haggard's African romances, She and King Solomon's Mines, belong to a large group of supernatural tales with a foreign setting. They combine strangeness, wonder, mystery and horror. The ancient theme of bartering souls is given a new twist in Robert Hichens' novel, The Flames. E.F. Benson, in The Image in the Sand, experiments with Oriental magic. The investigations of the Society for Psychical Research gave a new impulse to stories of the occult and the uncanny. Algernon Blackwood is one of the most ingenious exponents of this type of story. By means of psychical explanations, he succeeds in revivifying many ancient superstitions. In Dr. John Silence, even the werewolf, whom we believed extinct, manifests himself in modern days among a party of cheerful campers on a lonely island, and brings unspeakable terror in his trail. Sometimes terror is used nowadays, as Bulwer Lytton used it, to serve a moral purpose. Oscar Wilde's Picture of Dorian Gray is intended to show that sin must ultimately affect the soul; and the Sorrows of Satan, in Miss Corelli's novel, are caused by the wickedness of the world. But apart from any ulterior motive there is still a desire for the unusual, there is still pleasure to be found in a thrill, and so long as this human instinct endures devices will be found for satisfying it. Of the making of tales of terror there is no end; and almost every novelist of note has, at one time or another, tried his hand at the art. Early in his career Arnold Bennett fashioned a novelette, Hugo, which may be read as a modernised version of the Gothic romance. Instead of subterranean vaults in a deserted abbey, we have the strong rooms of an enterprising Sloane Street emporium. The coffin, containing an image of the heroine, is buried not in a mouldering chapel, but in a suburban cemetery. The lovely but harassed heroine has fallen, indeed, from her high estate, for Camilla earns her living as a milliner. There are, it is true, no sonnets and no sunsets, but the excitement of the plot, which is partially unfolded by means of a phonographic record, renders them superfluous. H.G. Wells makes excursions into quasi-scientific, fantastic realms of grotesque horror in his First Men in the Moon, and in some of his sketches and short stories. Joseph Conrad has the power of fear ever at the command of his romantic imagination. In The Nigger of the Narcissus, in Typhoon, and, above all, in The Shadow-Line, he shows his supreme mastery over inexpressible mystery and nameless terror. The voyage of the schooner, doomed by the evil influence of her dead captain, is comparable only in awe and horror to that of The Ancient Mariner. Conrad touches unfathomable depths of human feelings, and in his hands the tale of terror becomes a finished work of art. The future of the tale of terror it is impossible to predict; but the experiments of living authors, who continually find new outlets with the advance of science and of psychological enquiry, suffice to prove that its powers are not yet exhausted. Those who make the 'moving accident' their trade will no doubt continue to assail us with the shock of startling and sensational events. Others with more insidious art, will set themselves to devise stories which evoke subtler refinements of fear. The interest has already been transferred from 'bogle-wark' to the effect of the inexplicable, the mysterious and the uncanny on human thought and emotion. It may well be that this track will lead us into unexplored labyrinths of terror.
NOTES:
[1: Frazer, Folklore of the Old Testament, I. iv. § 2.]
[2: Cock Lane and Common Sense, 1894.]
[3: Spectator, No. 12.]
[4: Spectator, No. 110.]
[5: Boswell, Life of Johnson, June 12th, 1784.]
[6: Tom Jones, Bk. xvi. ch. v.]
[7: Letter to Dr. Moore, Aug. 2, 1787.]
[8: Ashton, Chapbooks of the Eighteenth Century, 1882.]
[9: Advertisement to Cloudesley, 1830.]
[10: Preface to Mandeville, Oct. 25, 1817.]
[11: Letters, vii. 27.]
[12: The Uncommercial Traveller.]
[13: Odyssey, xi.]
[14: April 17, 1765.]
[15: Nov. 13, 1784.]
[16: June 12, 1753.]
[17: Remarks on Italy.]
[18: Aug. 4, 1753.]
[19: Diary and Letters of Madame D'Arblay, vol. ii. Appendix ii.: A Visit to Strawberry Hill in 1786.]
[20: Jan. 5, 1766.]
[21: July 15, 1783.]
[22: March 26, 1765.]
[23: Nov. 5, 1782.]
[24: It has been pointed out (Scott, Lives of the Novelists, note) that in Lope de Vega's Jerusalem the picture of Noradine stalks from its panel and addresses Saladine.]
[25: Cf. Wallace, Blind Harry.]
[26: Preface, 1764.]
[27: Ch. XX.]
[28: Ch. XXXIV.]
[29: Ch. lxii.]
[30: Jan. 27, 1780.]
[31: Letters, April 8, 1778, and Jan. 27, 1780.]
[32: Poetical Works, ed. Sampson, p. 8.]
[33: Translated Blackwood's Magazine, 1820 (Nov.). Cf. Scott, Bridal of Triermain.]
[34: E.g. Diary and Letters of Madame D'Arblay, June 18, 1795;
Mathias, Pursuits of Literature, 14th ed. 1808, p. 56;
Scott,
Lives of the Novelists; Extracts from the Diary of a
Lover of
Literature (1810); Byron, Childe Harold, iv. xviii.;
Thackeray, Newcomes, chs. xi., xxviii.; Brontë, Shirley,
ch.
xxvii; Trollope, Barchester Towers, ch. xv., etc.]
[35: Family Letters, 1908.]
[36: Reprinted, Romancist and Novelist's Library.]
[37: Journeys of Mrs. Radcliffe, 2nd ed., 1795, vol. ii. p. 171.]
[38: Noctes Ambrosianae, ed. 1855, vol. i. p. 201.]
[39: Lecture on The English Novelists.]
[40: Life and Correspondence of M. G. Lewis, 1839, i. 122.]
[41: Life and Correspondence, July 22nd, 1794.]
[42: Essay on The State of German Literature.]
[43: Southey, Preface to Madoc.]
[44: Life and Correspondence, Feb. 23, 1798.]
[45: Letter to John Murray, Aug. 23rd, 1814.]
[46: Monthly Review, June, 1797.]
[47: No. 148.]
[48: Cf. Musaeus: Die Entführung.]
[49: Marmion, Canto ii. Intro.]
[50: Reprinted, Romancist and Novelist's Library, vol. i. 1839.]
[51: Essay on German Playwrights.]
[52: English Bards and Scotch Reviewers (1809).]
[53: Many of these were issued by B. Crosby, Stationers' Court.]
[54: Recollections of the Table-Talk of Samuel Rogers, 1856, p. 138.]
[55: Trans. from the German of Christian August Vulpius.]
[56: Cf. Thackeray, "Tunbridge Toys" (Roundabout Papers).]
[57: English Bards and Scotch Reviewers.]
[58: Gentleman's Magazine, 1825; and memoir prefixed to the edition of Melmoth the Wanderer, published in 1892.]
[59: Prose Works, 1851, vol. xviii.]
[60: Letters and Memoir, 1895, vol. i. p. 101.]
[61: Life (Melville), 1909, vol. i. p. 79.]
[62: Letters, 2nd Series, 1872, vol. i. p. 101.]
[63: Gustave Planche, Portraits Littéraires.]
[64: Cf. Stevenson's Bottle-Imp.]
[65: Edinburgh Review, July 1821.]
[66: Conant, The Oriental Tale in England, pp. 36-38.]
[67: Conant, The Oriental Tale in England, pp. 36-38.]
[68: Letter to Henley, Jan. 29, 1782.]
[69: Life and Letters, Melville, 1910, p. 20.]
[70: Life and Letters, 1910, p. 20.]
[71: Memoirs, Journal and Correspondence of Thomas Moore, 1853, vol. ii. p. 197.]
[72: Nov. 24, 1777, Life and Letters, p. 40.]
[73: Austen Leigh, Memoir of Jane Austen.]
[74: Letter to William Godwin, Dec. 7, 1817.]
[75: William Godwin: His Friends and Contemporaries. Kegan Paul, 1876, vol. i. p. 78.]
[76: Preface to Fleetwood, 1832.]
[77: Preface to Fleetwood, 1832.]
[78: Preface to Fleetwood, 1832, p. xi: "I read over a little
old
book entitled The Adventures of Mme. De St. Phale, I
turned
over the pages of a tremendous compilation entitled God's
Revenge against Murder, where the beam of the eye of
omniscience was represented as perpetually pursuing the
guilty… I was extremely conversant with The Newgate
Calendar and The Lives of the Pirates. I rather amused
myself
with tracing a certain similitude between the story of
Caleb
Williams and the tale of Bluebeard;" and Preface to
Cloudesley: "The present publication may in the same
sense be
denominated a paraphrase of the old ballad of the Children
in
the Wood."]
[79: Scott, Introduction to The Abbot, 1831.]
[80: William Godwin: His Friends and Contemporaries, 1876, vol. ii. p. 304.]
[81: Caleb Williams, ch. x.]
[82: William Godwin: His Friends and Contemporaries, vol. i. pp. 330-1.]
[83: Political Justice, bk. ii, ch. ii.]
[84: William Godwin: His Friends and Contemporaries, vol. i. pp. 330-1; Preface to 1st edition, 1799.]
[85: Hermippus Redivivus; or The Sage's Triumph over Old Age
and
the Grave (translated from the Latin of Cohausen, with
annotations), 1743. Dr. Johnson pronounced the volume "very
entertaining as an account of the hermetic philosophy and as
furnishing a curious history of the extravagancies of the
human
mind," adding "if it were merely imaginary it would be
nothing at
all."]
[86: St. Leon, vol. iv. ch, xiii.]
[87: St. Leon, Bk. iv, ch. v.]
[88: Lives of the Necromancers, 1834, Preface. "The main purpose of this book is to exhibit a fair delineation of the credulity of the human mind. Such an exhibition cannot fail to be productive of the most salutary lessons."]
[89: St. Godwin: A Tale of the 16th, 17th and 18th Century, by Count Reginald de St. Leon, 1800, p. 234.]
[90: Dowden, Life of Shelley, vol. i. p. 10.]
[91: Dowden, Life of Shelley, vol. i. p. 44.]
[92: Hogg, Life of Shelley, vol. i. p. 15.]
[93: Cf. Castle of Lindenberg story in The Monk, and ballad of Alonzo the Brave.]
[94: A versification of the story of the Wandering Jew, Bleeding Nun and Don Raymond in The Monk.]
[95: This poem was borrowed from Lewis's Tales of Terror
(without
Shelley's knowledge), where it is entitled The Black Canon
of
Elmham, or St. Edmond's Eve.]
[96: Letter to Edward Fergus Graham, Ap. 23, 1810 (Letters, ed.
Ingpen, 1909, vol. i, pp. 4-6).]
[97: Letter to John Joseph Stockdale, Nov. 14, 1810.]
[98: Mme. de Montolieu, Caroline de Lichfield, translated by Thos. Holcroft, 1786.]
[99: Mme. de Genlis, translated by Rev. Beresford, 1796.]
[100: Peter Middleton Darling, Romance of the Highlands, 1810.]
[101: Regina Maria Roche, The Discarded Son, or The Haunt of the Banditti, 1806.]
[102: Agnes Musgrave, Cicely, or The Rose of Raby.]
[103: Aphra Behn, The Nun.]
[104: Charlotte Smith, Ethelinde, or The Recluse of the Lake, 1790.]
[105: The Relapse: a novel, 1780.]
[106: Tales of the Hall.]
[107: Crébillon, Les Égarements du Coeur et de l'Esprit.]
[108: The Borough, Ellen Orford, Letter xx.]
[109: The Borough, xx, ll. 56 seqq.]
[110: Parish Register.]
[111: William and Helen, 1796.]
[112: House of Aspen, 1799 (Keepsake, 1830). Doom of Devorgoil, 1817 (Keepsake, 1830).]
[113: Scott, Lives of the Novelists (on Clara Reeve and Mrs. Radcliffe and Maturin).]
[114: Keepsake, 1828.]
[115: Keepsake, 1828.]
[116: Journal, Feb. 23, 1826.]
[117: List of books read 1814-1816.]
[118: Fantasmagoriana: ou Recueil d'Histoires d'Apparitions, de
Spectres, de Revenans, trad. d'Allemand par un Amateur.
Paris,
1812.]
[119: Diary of John William Polidori, June 17, 1816.]
[120: Byron, Letters and Journals, 1899, iii. 446. Mary Shelley, Life and Letters, 1889, i. 586. Extract from Mary Shelley's Diary, Aug. 14, 1816.]
[121: Nov. 15, 1823, Life and Letters of Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley (Marshall), ii. 52.]
[122: Life and Letters, ii. 88. ]
[123: Romancist and Novelist's Library.]
[124: Reprinted in Treasure House of Tales by Great Authors, ed. Garnett, 1891.]
[125: Punch, vol. x. p. 31:
"Says Ainsworth to Colburn
A plan in my pate is
To give my romance, as
A supplement gratis.
Says Colburn to Ainsworth
'Twill do very nicely,
For that will be charging
Its value precisely."]
[126: Life, Letters and Literary Remains, 1883, vol. ii. pp. 70 seqq.]
[127: Dublin University Magazine, 1862. "Forgotten Novels."]
[128: Blackwood's Magazine, 1830-1837.]
[129: Within the Tides, 1915.]
[130: Preface to The Algerine Captive (Walpole, Vermont, 1797) quoted Loshe, Early American Novel, N.Y. 1907.]
[131: Preface to Edgar Huntly.]
[132: Peacock, Memoirs of Shelley.]