The delicious persiflage in which Jane Austen hits off the fiction of the day may be illustrated by a bit of conversation between two young girls.

Mr. George Saintsbury[37] expresses himself as sceptical of this list as a catalogue of actual romances, stating that he has never read one of them and should like some other authority than Miss Andrews for their existence. He is mistaken in his doubt, however, since during the progress of this investigation four out of the eight have been identified as to authorship, and doubtless the others are lurking in some antique library. Clermont is by Maria Regina Roche; Mysterious Warnings by Mrs. Parsons, in London, 1796; Midnight Bell by Francis Latham; and Horrid Mysteries by Marquis Grosse, London, 1796.

Jane Austen’s stupid bore, John Thorpe, and Mr. Tilney, the impeccable, pedantic hero, add their comment to Gothic fiction, one saying with a yawn that there hasn’t been a decent novel since Tom Jones, except The Monk, and the other that he read Udolpho in two days with his hair standing on end all the time.

But the real cleverness of the work consists in the burlesque of Gothic experiences that Catherine, because of the excited condition of her mind induced by excess of romantic fiction, goes through with on her visit to Northanger Abbey. She explores secret wings in a search for horrors, only to find sunny rooms, with no imprisoned wife, not a single maniac, and never skeleton of tortured nun. Mr. Tilney’s ironic jests satirize all the elements of Gothic romance. Opening a black chest at midnight, she finds a yellowed manuscript, but just as she is about to read it her candle flickers out. In the morning sunshine she finds that it is an old laundry list. The only result of her suspicious explorings is that she is caught in such prowlings by the young man whose esteem she wishes to win. He sarcastically assures her that his father is not a wife-murderer, that his mother is not immured in a dungeon, but died of a bilious attack. These delicately tipped shafts of ridicule riddle the armor of medievalism and give it at the same time a permanency of interest because of Jane Austen’s treatment of it. The Gothic novel will be remembered, if for nothing else, for her parody of it.

But Miss Austen is not the only satirist of the genre. In The Heroine, Eaton Stannard Barrett gives an amusing burlesque of it. It is interesting to note in this connection that while Northanger Abbey was written and sold in 1797 it was not published till 1818, and Barrett’s book, while written later, was published in 1813.

In the introduction, an epistle, supposed to be endited by one Cherubina, says:

Cherry, an unsophisticated country girl, becomes Cherubina after reading romantic tales. She decides that she is an heiress kept in unwarranted seclusion, and tells her father that he cannot possibly be her father since he is “a fat, funny farmer.” She rummages in his desk for private papers, discovering a torn scrap that she interprets to her desires. She flies, leaving a note to tell the fleshy agriculturist that she is gone “to wander over the convex earth in search of her parents,” with what comic experiences one may imagine. There is much discussion of the Gothic heroine, particularly those from Mrs. Radcliffe’s and Regina Maria Roche’s pages. The girl sprinkles her letters with verse. She passes through storms, explores deserted houses, and comes to what she thinks is her ancestral castle in London, but is told that it is Covent Garden Theatre. She decides that she is Nell Gwynne’s niece and goes to that amiable person to demand all her property. She pokes around in the cellar to find her captive mother, and discovers an enormously fat woman playing with frogs, who drunkenly insists that she is her mother. Leaving that place in disgust she takes possession of somebody else’s castle and orders it furnished in Gothic style, according to romance. She has the fat farmer shut up in the madhouse.

The book is very amusing, and a more pronounced parody on Gothicism than Northanger Abbey because the whole story turns round that theme,—but, of course, it is not of so great literary value. It seems strange, however, that it is so little known. It burlesques every feature of terror fiction, the high-flown language, the excited oaths, the feudal furniture, the medieval architecture, the Gothic weather, the supernatural tempers, the spectral apparitions—one of which is so muscular that he struggles with the heroine as she locks him in a closet, after throwing rapee into his face, which makes him sputter in a mortal fashion. Cherubina finds a blade bone of mutton in some Gothic garbage and takes it for a bone of an ancestor. Radcliffian adjectives reel across the pages and the whole plays up in a delightful parody the ludicrous weaknesses and excesses of the terror fiction.

Likewise the Anti-Jacobin parodies the Gothic ghost and there is considerable satire directed at the whole Gothic genre in Thomas Love Peacock’s novel Nightmare Abbey.

In general, Gothicism had a tonic effect on English literature, and influenced the continental fiction to no small degree. By giving an interest and excitement gained from ghostly themes to fiction, the terror writers made romance popular as it had never been before and immensely extended the range of its readers. The novel has never lost the hold on popular fancy that the Gothic ghost gave to it. This interest has increased through the various aspects of Romanticism since then and in every period has found some form of supernaturalism on which to feed. True, the machinery of Gothicism creaks audibly at times, some of the specters move too mechanically, and there is a general air of unreality that detracts from the effect. The supernaturalism often lacks the naturalness which is necessary. Yet it is not fair to apply to these early efforts the same standards by which we judge the novels of to-day. While their range is narrow they do achieve certain impressive effects. Though the class became conventionalized to an absurd degree and the later examples are laughable, while a host of imitations made the type ridiculous, the Gothic novel has an undeniable force.

Besides the bringing of supernaturalism definitely into fiction, which is a distinct gain, we find other benefits as well. In Gothicism, if we examine closely, we find the beginnings of many forms of supernaturalism that are crude here, but that are to develop into special power in later novels and short stories. The terror novel excites our ridicule in some respects, yet, like other things that arouse a certain measure of laughter, it has great value. It seems a far cry from the perambulating statue in Otranto to Lord Dunsany’s jade gods that move with measured, stony steps to wreak a terrible vengeance on mortals who have defied them, but the connection may be clearly enough seen. The dreadful experiments by which Frankenstein’s monster is created are close akin to the revolting vivisections of Wells’s Dr. Moreau, or the operations described by Arthur Machen whereby human beings lose their souls and become diabolized, given over utterly to unspeakable evil. The psychic elements in Zofloya are crudely conceived, yet suggestive of the psychic horrors of the work of Blackwood, Barry Pain, and Theodore Dreiser, for example. The animal supernaturalism only lightly touched on in Gothic novels is to be elaborated in the stories of ghostly beasts like those by Edith Wharton, Kipling, Ambrose Bierce, and others. In fact, the greater number of the forms of the supernatural found in later fiction and the drama are discoverable, in germ at least, in Gothic romance. The work of this period gave a tremendous impetus to the uncanny elements of romanticism and the effect has been seen in the fiction and drama and poetry since that time. Its influence on the drama of its day may be seen in Walpole’s Mysterious Mother and Lewis’s Castle Specter. Thomas Lovell Beddoe’s extraordinary tragedy, Death’s Jest Book, while largely Elizabethan in materials and method, is closely related to the Gothic as well. It would be impossible to understand or appreciate the supernatural in the nineteenth-century literature and that of our own day without a knowledge of the Gothic to which most of it goes back. Like most beginnings, Gothicism is crude in its earlier forms, and conventional in the flood of imitations that followed the successful attempts. But it is really vital and most of the ghostly fiction since that time has lineally descended from it rather than from the supernaturalism of the epic or of the drama.

CHAPTER II
Later Influences

With the dying out of the genre definitely known as the Gothic novel and the turning of Romanticism into various new channels, we might expect to see the disappearance of the ghostly element, since it had been overworked in terrorism. It is true that the prevailing type of fiction for the succeeding period was realism, but with a large admixture of the supernormal or supernatural. The supernatural machinery had become so well established in prose fiction that even realists were moved by it, some using the motifs with bantering apology—even Dickens and Thackeray, some with rationalistic explanation, but practically all using it. Man must and will have the supernatural in his fiction. The very elements that one might suppose would counteract it,—modern thought, invention, science,—serve as feeders to its force. In the inexplicable alchemy of literature almost everything turns to the unearthly in some form or other.

We have seen the various sources from which the Gothic novel drew its plots, its motifs for ghostly effect. The supernatural fiction following it still had the same sources on which to draw, and in addition had various other influences and veins of literary inspiration not open to Gothicism. Modern science, with the new miracles of its laboratories, proved suggestive of countless plots; the new study of folk-lore and the scholarly investigations in that field unearthed an unguessed wealth of supernatural material; Psychical Research societies with their patient and sympathetic records of the forces of the unseen; modern Spiritualism with its attempts to link this world to the next; the wizardry of dreams studied scientifically,—all suggested new themes, novel complications, hitherto unknown elements continuing the supernatural in fiction.

With the extension of general reading, and the greater range of translations from other languages, the writers of England and America were affected by new influences with respect to their use of the supernatural. Their work became less insular, wider in its range of subject-matter and of technical methods, and in our fiction we find the effect of certain definite outside forces.

The overlapping influences of the Romantic movement in England and America, France and Germany, form an interesting but intricate study. It is difficult to point out marked points of contact, though the general effect may be evident, for literary influences are usually very elusive. It is easy to cry, “Lo, here! lo, there!” with reference to the effect of certain writers on their contemporaries or successors, but it is not always easy to put the finger on anything very tangible. And even so, that would not explain literature. If one could point with absolute certainty to the source for every one of Shakespeare’s plots, would that explain his art? Poe wrote an elaborate essay to analyze his processes of composition for The Raven, but the poem remains as enigmatic as ever.

As German Romanticism had been considerably affected by the Gothic novel in England, it in turn showed an influence on later English and American ghostly fiction. Scott was much interested in the German literature treating of evil magic, apparitions, castles in ruins, and so forth, and one critic says of him that his dealings with subjects of this kind are midway between Meinhold and Tieck. He was fascinated with the German ballads of the supernatural, especially Burger’s ghostly Lenore, which he translated among others. De Quincey likewise was a student of German literature, though he was not so accurate in his scholarship as Scott. His horror tale, The Avengers, as well as Klosterheim, has a German setting and tone.

There has been some discussion over the question of Hawthorne’s relation to German Romanticism. Poe made the charge that Hawthorne drew his ideas and style from Ludwig Tieck, saying in a criticism:

Various critics have discussed this matter with no very definite conclusions. It should be remembered that Poe was a famous plagiary-hunter, hence his comments may be discounted. Yet Poe knew German, it is thought, and in his writings often referred to German literature, while Hawthorne, according to his journal, read it with difficulty and spoke of his struggles with a volume of Tieck.

Hawthorne and Tieck do show certain similarities, as in the use of the dream element, the employment of the allegory as a medium for teaching moral truths, and the choice of the legend as a literary form. Both use somewhat the same dreamy supernaturalism, yet in style as in subject-matter Hawthorne is much the superior and improved whatever he may have borrowed from Tieck. Hawthorne’s vague mystery, cloudy symbolism, and deep spiritualism are individual in their effect and give to his supernaturalism an unearthly charm scarcely found elsewhere. Hawthorne’s theme in The Marble Faun, of the attaining to a soul by human suffering, is akin to the idea in Fouqué’s Undine. There the supernaturalism is franker, while that of Hawthorne’s novel is more evasive and delicate, yet the same suggestion is present in each case. Lowell in his Fable for Critics speaks of Hawthorne as “a John Bunyan Fouqué, a Puritan Tieck.”

There are still more striking similarities to be pointed out between the work of Poe and that of E. T. A. Hoffmann. As Hawthorne was, to a slight extent, at least, affected by German legends and wonder tales, Poe was influenced by Hoffmann’s horror stories. Poe has been called a Germanic dreamer, and various German and English critics mention the debt that he owes to Hoffmann. Mr. Palmer Cobb[38] brings out some interesting facts in connection with the two romanticists. He says:

Mr. Cobb points out in detail the similarities between Poe’s stories of dual personality and the German use of the theme as found in Fouqué, Novalis, and Hoffmann, particularly the last. Hoffmann’s exaggerated use of this idea is to be explained on the ground that he was obsessed by the thought that his double was haunting him, and he, like Maupassant under similar conditions of mind, wrote of supernaturalism associated with madness. Hoffmann uses the theme of double personality.[39] In Poe’s William Wilson the other self is the embodiment of good, a sort of incarnate conscience, as in Stevenson’s Markheim, while Hoffmann’s Elixiere represents the evil. Poe has here reversed the idea. In Hoffmann’s Magnetiseur we find the treatment of hypnotism and metempsychosis and the dream-supernaturalism in the same combination that Poe uses.[40] Hoffmann[41] and Poe[42] relate the story of a supernatural portrait, where the wife-model dies as the sacrifice to the painting.

Both Hoffmann and Poe use the grotesquerie of supernaturalism, the fantastic element of horror that adds to the effect of the ghostly. Even the generic titles are almost identical.[43] But in spite of these similarities in theme and in grouping, there is no basis for a charge that Poe owes a stylistic debt to Hoffmann. In his manner he is original and individual. He uses his themes with much greater art, with more dramatic and powerful effect than his German contemporary. Though he employs fewer of the crude machineries of the supernatural, his ghostly tales are more unearthly than Hoffmann’s. His horrors have a more awful effect because he is an incomparably greater artist. He knows the economy of thrills as few have done. His is the genius of compression, of suggestion. His dream elements, for instance, though Hoffmann uses the dream to as great extent as Poe—are more poignant, more unbearable.

The cult of horror in German literature, as evidenced in the work of Hoffmann, Kleist, Tieck, Arnim, Fouqué, Chamisso, had an influence on English and American literature of supernaturalism in general. The grotesque diablerie, the use of dream elements, magnetism, metempsychosis, ghosts, the elixir of life—which theme appears to have a literary elixir of life—are reflected to a certain degree in the English ghostly tales of the generation following the Gothic romance.

A French influence is likewise manifest in the later English fiction. The Gothic novel had made itself felt in France as well as in Germany, a proof of which is the fact that Balzac was so impressed by Maturin’s novel that he wrote a sequel to it.[44] The interrelations of the English, French, and German supernatural literature are nowhere better illustrated than in the work of Balzac. He admits Hoffmann’s inspiration of his Elixir of Life, that horrible story of reanimation, where the head is restored to life and youth but the body remains that of an old man, dead and decaying, from which the head tears itself loose in the church and bites the abbot to the brain, shrieking out, “Idiot, tell me now if there is a God!” Balzac’s influence over Bulwer-Lytton is seen in such stories as The Haunters and the Haunted, or the House and the Brain, and A Strange Story, in each of which the theme of supernaturally continued life is used. Balzac’s Magic Skin is a symbolic story of supernaturalism that suggests Hawthorne’s allegoric symbolism and may have influenced it in part. It is a new application of the old theme, used often in the drama as in Gothic romance, of the pledge of a soul for earthly gratification. A magic skin gives the man his heart’s desires, yet each granted wish makes the talisman shrink perceptibly, with an inexorable decrease. This theme, symbolic of the truth of life, is such a spiritual idea used allegorically as Hawthorne chose frequently and doubtless influenced Oscar Wilde’s Picture of Dorian Gray. Balzac’s Unknown Masterpiece is another example of his supernaturalism that has had its suggestive effect on English ghostly fictions.

Guy de Maupassant has doubtless influenced English tales of horror more than any foreign writer since Hoffmann. As a stylist he exercised a definite and strong influence over the short-story form, condensing it, making it more economical, more like a fatal bullet that goes straight to the mark, and putting into a few hundred words a story of supernatural horror relentless in its effect. O. Henry’s delicately perfect ghost story, The Furnished Room, is reminiscent of Maupassant’s technique as seen in The Ghost. And surely F. Marion Crawford’s Screaming Skull and Ambrose Bierce’s Middle Toe of the Right Foot are from the same body as Maupassant’s Hand. What a terrible corpus it must be! There is the same gruesome mystery, the same implacable horror in each story of a mutilated ghost.

Maupassant’s stories of madness, akin to Poe’s analyses of mental decay, of the slow corruption of the brain, are among his most dreadful triumphs of style, and have influenced various English stories of insanity. In Maupassant’s own tottering reason we find the tragic explanation of his constant return to this type of story. Such tales as Mad, where a husband goes insane from doubt of his wife; Madness, where a man has a weird power over human beings, animals, and even inanimate objects, making them do his will, so that he is terrified of his own self, of what his horrible hands may do mechanically; Cocotte, where the drowned dog, following its master a hundred miles down the river, drives him insane; The Tress, a curdling story of the relation between insanity and the supernatural, so that one is unable to say which is cause and which effect, illustrate Maupassant’s unusual association between madness and uncanny fiction. Who but Maupassant could make a story of ghastly hideousness out of a parrot that swears? As Maupassant was influenced by Poe, in both subject matter and technique, so he has affected the English writers since his time in both plot material and treatment of the supernatural. And as his La Horla strongly reflects FitzJames O’Brien’s What Was It? A Mystery that anticipated it by a number of years, so it left its inevitable impress on Bierce’s The Damned Thing and succeeding stories of supernatural invisibility. A recent story by Katherine Fullerton Gerould, Louquier’s Third Act, seems clearly to indicate the De Maupassant influence, reflecting the method and motifs of La Horla and The Coward. Maupassant’s tales have a peculiar horror possessed by few, partly because of his undoubted genius and partly the result of his increasing madness.

Other French writers have also influenced the uncanny story in English. Théophile Gautier has undoubtedly inspired various tales, such as The Mummy’s Foot, by Jessie Adelaide Weston, which is the match, though not in beauty or form, to his little masterpiece of that title. A. Conan Doyle’s Lot No. 249, a horrible story of a reanimated mummy, bears an unquestionable resemblance to Gautier’s The Romance of the Mummy as well as The Mummy’s Foot, though Poe’s A Word with a Mummy, a fantastic story emphasizing the science of miraculous embalming of living persons so that they would wake to life after thousands of years, preceded it. Something of the same theme is also used by F. Marion Crawford,[45] where the bodies in the old studio awake to menacing life. This motif illustrates the prevalence of the Oriental material in recent English fiction. Gautier’s La Morte Amoureuse has exercised suggestive power over later tales, such as Crawford’s vampire story,[46] though it is significant to recall that Poe’s Berenice preceded Gautier’s story by a year, and the latter must have known Poe’s work.

The fiction of Erckmann-Chatrian appears to have suggested various English stories. The Owl’s Ear obviously inspired another,[47] both being records of supernatural acoustics the latter dealing with spiritual sounds. The Invisible Eye, a fearsome story of hypnotism, has an evident parental claim on Algernon Blackwood’s story,[48] though the latter is psychically more gruesome. The Waters of Death, an account of a loathsome, enchanted crab, suggests H. G. Wells’s story of the plant vampire.[49]

Likewise Anatole France’s Putois, the narrative of the man who came to have an actual existence because someone spoke of him as an imaginary person, is associated with the drolleries of supernaturalism, such as are used by Thomas Bailey Aldrich in the story of an imagined person, Miss Mehitabel’s Son, and by Frank R. Stockton.[50] Anatole France has several delicately wrought idylls of the supernatural, as The Mass of Shadows, where the ghosts of those who have sinned for love may meet once a year to be reunited with their loved ones, and in the church, with clasped hands, celebrate the spectral mass, or such tender miracles as The Juggler of Notre Dame, where the juggler throws his balls before the altar as an act of worship and is rewarded by a sight of the Virgin, or Scholasticus, a symbolic story much like one written years earlier by Thomas Bailey Aldrich,[51] where a plant miraculously springs from the heart of a dead woman. Amycus and Celestine, the story of the faun and the hermit, of whom he tells us that “the hermit is a faun borne down by the years” is suggestive of the wonderful little stories of Lord Dunsany. Lord Dunsany, while startlingly original in most respects, seems a bit influenced by Anatole France. His When the Gods Slept seems reminiscent of The Isle of the Penguins. In France’s satire the gods change penguins into men whose souls will be lost, because the priest has baptized them by mistake, while in Dunsany’s story the baboons pray to the Yogis, who promise to make them men in return for their devotion.

Maeterlinck, influenced by his fellow-Belgian, Charles Van Lerberghe, whose Flaireurs appeared before Maeterlinck’s plays of the uncanny and to whom he acknowledges his indebtedness, has strongly affected ghostly literature since his rise to recognition. In his plays we find an atmospheric supernaturalism. The settings are of earth, yet with an unearthly strangeness, with no impression of realism, of the familiar, the known. In Maeterlinck’s plays we never breathe the air of actuality, never feel the footing of solid earth, as we always do in Shakespeare, even in the presence of ghosts or witches. Shakespeare’s visitants are ghostly enough, certainly, but the scenes in which they appear are real, are normal, while in the Belgian’s work there is a fluidic supernaturalism that transforms everything to unreality. We feel the grip of fate, as in the ancient Greek tragedies, the inescapable calamity that approaches with swift, silent pace. Yet Maeterlinck’s is essentially static drama. There is very little action, among the human beings, at least, for Fate is the active agent. In The Blind, The Intruder, and Interior the elements are much the same, the effects wrought out with the same unearthly manner. But in Joyzelle, which shows a certain similarity to Midsummer Night’s Dream and The Tempest, we have a different type of supernaturalism, the use of enchantment, of fairy magic that comes to a close happily. In the dream-drama[52] there is a mixture of realism and poetic symbolism, the use of the dream as a vehicle for the supernormal, and many aspects of the weird combined in a fairy play of exquisite symbolism.

The influence of Maeterlinck is apparent in the work of English writers, particularly of the Celtic school. W. B. Yeats’s fairy play, The Land of Heart’s Desire, with its pathetic beauty, Countess Cathleen, his tragedy of the countess who sells her soul to the devil that her people may be freed from his power, as well as his stories, show the traces of Maeterlinck’s methods. William Sharp, in his sketches and his brief plays in the volume called Vistas, reflects the Belgian’s technique slightly, though with his own individual power. Sharp’s other literary self, Fiona McLeod, likewise shows his influence, as does Synge in his Riders to the Sea, and Gordon Bottomley in his Crier by Night, that eerie tragedy of an unseen power. Maeterlinck’s supernaturalism seems to suggest the poetry of Coleridge, with its elusive, intangible ghostliness. The effect of naïveté observable in Coleridge’s work is in Maeterlinck produced by a child-like simplicity of style, a monosyllabic dialogue, and a monotonous, unreasoning repetition that is at once real and unreal. The dramatist has brought over from the poet the same suggestive use of portents and symbols for prefiguring death or disaster that lurks just outside. The ghostliness is subtle, rather than evident, the drama static rather than dynamic.

Ibsen, also, has strongly influenced the supernatural in both our drama and our fiction. His own work has a certain kinship with that of Hawthorne, showing a like symbolism and mysticism, a like transfusion of the unreal with the natural, so that one scarcely knows just how far he means our acceptance of the unearthly to extend. He leaves it in some cases an open question, while in others he frankly introduces the supernatural. The child’s vision of the dead heroes riding to Valhalla, with his own mother who has killed herself, leading them,[53] the ghost that tries to make an unholy pact with the king,[54] the apparition and the supernatural voice crying out “He is the God of Love!”[55] illustrate Ibsen’s earlier methods. The curious, almost inexplicable Peer Gynt, with its mixture of folk-lore and symbolism, its ironic laughter and satiric seriousness, seems to have had a suggestive influence on other works, such as Countess Eve,[56] where the personification of temptation in the form of committed sin reflects Ibsen’s idea of Peer Gynt’s imaginary children. The uncanny power of unspoken thought, the haunting force of ideas rather than the crude visible phantasms of the dead, as in the telepathy, or hypnotism, or what you will, in The Master Builder, the evasive, intangible haunting of the living by the dead as in Rosmersholm, the strange powers at work as in The Lady from the Sea, have had effect on the numerous psychic dramas and stories in English. The symbolic mysticism in Emperor and Galilean, showing the spirits of Cain and of Judas, with their sad ignorance of life’s riddles, the vision of Christ in person, with His unceasing power over men’s souls, foreshadowed the plays and stories bringing in the personality of Christ, as The Servant in the House, and The Passing of the Third Floor Back.

Modern Italian literature, as represented by Fogazzaro and D’Annunzio, introduces the ghostly in fiction and in the drama, and has had its effect on our literature. Fogazzaro’s novels are essentially realistic in pattern, yet he uses the supernatural in them, as in miraculous visions,[57] and metempsychosis and madness associated with the supernatural.[58] D’Annunzio’s handling of the unearthly is more repulsive, more psychically gruesome, as the malignant power of the ancient curse in La Città Morta, where the undying evil in an old tomb causes such revolting horror in the action of the play. This has a counterpart in a story,[59] by Josephine Daskam Bacon, where a packet of letters from two evil lovers lie buried in a hearth and by their subtle influence corrupt the soul of every woman who occupies the room. D’Annunzio uses the witch motive powerfully,[60] madness that borders on the supernatural,[61] and the idea of evil magic exorcised by melting an image of wax to cause an enemy’s death[62] which suggests Rossetti’s poem using that incident, the unforgettable Sister Helen.

Likewise a new force in the work of the Russian school has affected our fiction of the ghostly in recent years. Russian literature is a new field of thought for English people, since it is only of late years that translations have been easily accessible, and, because of the extreme difficulty of the language, very few outsiders read Russian. As German Romanticism began to have its definite power over English supernatural fiction in the early part of the nineteenth century by the extension of interest in and study of German literature, and the more frequent translation of German works, so in this generation Russian literature has been introduced to English people and is having its influence.

A primitive, still savage race like the Russians naturally shows a special fondness for the supernatural. Despite the fact that literature is written for the higher classes, a large peasant body, illiterate and superstitious, will influence the national fiction. In the Russian works best known to us there is a large element of the uncanny, of a type in some respects different from that of any other country. Like the Russian national character, it is harsh, brutal, violent, yet sentimental. One singular thing to be noted about it is the peculiar combination of supernaturalism with absolute realism. The revolting yet dreadfully effective realism of the Russian literature is never more impressive than in its union with ghostly horror, which makes the impossible appear indubitable. In Gogol’s The Cloak, for instance, the fidelity to homely details of life, the descriptions of pinching poverty, of tragic hopes that waited so long for fulfillment, are painful in themselves and give verisimilitude to the element of the unearthly that follows. You feel that a poor Russian clerk who had stinted himself from necessity all his life would come back from the dead to claim his stolen property and demand redress. The supernatural gains a new power, a more tremendous thrill when set off against the every-dayness of sordid life. We find something of the same effect in the stories of Algernon Blackwood and Ambrose Bierce and F. Marion Crawford.

Tolstoi’s symbolic story of Ivan the Fool is an impressive utterance of his views of life, expressed by the allegory of man’s folly and wisdom and the schemes of devils.

Turgeniev’s pronounced strain of the unearthly has had its influence on English fiction. He uses the dream elements to a marked degree, as in The Song of Love Triumphant, a story of Oriental magic employed through dreams and music, and The Dream, an account of a son’s revelatory visions of his unknown father. The dream element has been used considerably in our late fiction, some of which seems to reflect Turgeniev. Another motive that he uses effectively is that of suggested vampirism,[63] and of psychical vampirism,[64] where a young man is “set upon” by the spirit of a dead woman he has scarcely known, till he dies under the torment. This seems to have affected such stories as that of psychical vampirism in The Vampire, by Reginald Hodder. We find in much of Turgeniev’s prose the symbolic, mystical supernaturalism besides his use of dreams, visions, and a distinct Oriental element. In Knock! Knock! Knock! the treatment of whose spiritualism reminds one somewhat of Browning’s,[65] in its initial skepticism and later hesitation, the final effect of which is to impress one with a sense of supernaturalism working extraordinarily through natural means, so that it is more powerful than the mere conventional ghostly could be, we see what may have been the inspiration for certain spiritualistic novels and stories in English. The same tone is felt in Hamlin Garland’s treatment of the subject, for instance. The mystical romanticism of Turgeniev is less brutally Russian than that of most of his compeers.

Like Maupassant and Hoffman and Poe, the Russian writers use to a considerable extent the association between insanity and the supernatural to heighten the effect of both. They may have been influenced in this by Poe’s studies of madness, as by Maupassant’s, and they appear to have an influence over certain present-day writers. It would be difficult to say which is the stronger influence in the treatment of abnormal persons, Maupassant or the Russian writers. One wonders what type of mania obsesses certain of the Russian fictionists of to-day, for surely they cannot be normal persons. Examples of such fiction are: Alexander Pushkin’s story of mocking madness resulting from a passion for cards, whose ghostly motif has a sardonic diabolism,[66] Tchekhoff’s story of abnormal horror,[67] a racking account of insanity,[68] and The Black Monk, a weird story of insanity brought on by the vision of a supernatural being, a replicated mirage of a black monk a thousand years old. But it is in the work of Leonidas Andreyev that we get the ultimate anguish of madness. The Red Laugh, an analysis of the madness of war, of the insanity of nations as of individuals, seems to envelop the world in a sheet of flame. Its horrors go beyond words and the brain reels in reading. There are in English a number of stories of insanity associated with the supernatural which may have been influenced by the Russian method, though Ambrose Bierce’s studies in the abnormality of soldier life preceded Andreyev by years. F. Marion Crawford’s The Dead Smile and various stories of Arthur Machen have a Russian horror, and other instances might be mentioned.

The Russian fiction with its impersonality of pessimism, its racial gloom, its terrible sordid realism forming a basis for awesome supernaturalism, is of a type foreign to our thought, yet, as is not infrequently the case, the radically different has a strange appeal, and the effect of it on our stories of horror is undoubted. English and American readers are greatly interested in Russian literature just now and find a peculiar relish in its terrors, though the harsher elements are somewhat softened in transference to our language.

Other fields of thought have been opened to us within this generation by the widening of our knowledge of the literature of other European countries. Books are much more freely translated now than formerly and no person need be ignorant of the fiction of other lands. From the Spanish, the Portuguese, the Chinese, Japanese, and other tongues we are receiving stories of supernaturalism that give us new ideas, new points of view. The greater ease of travel, the opportunity to study once-distant lands and literatures have been reflected in our fiction. Some one should write a monograph on the literary influence of Cook’s tours! Our later work has a strong touch of the Oriental,—not an entirely new thing, since we find it in Beckford’s Vathek and the pre-Gothic tales of John Hawkesworth,—but more noticeable now. Examples are Stevenson’s New Arabian Nights, Bottle Imp, and others, F. Marion Crawford’s Khaled and Mr. Isaacs, Blackwood’s stories of Elementals, George Meredith’s fantasy, The Shaving of Shagpat, though many others might be named. The Oriental fiction permits the use of magic, sorcery, and various elements that seem out of place in ordinary fiction. The popularity of Kipling’s tales of Indian native life and character illustrates our fondness for this aspect of supernaturalism.

Apart from the foreign influences that affect it we notice a certain change in the materials and methods of ghostly fiction in English. New elements had entered into Gothic tales as an advance over the earlier forms, yet conventions had grown up so that even such evasive and elusive personalities as ghosts were hidebound by precedent. While the decline of the genre definitely known as the Gothic novel in no sense put an end to the supernatural in English fiction, it did mark a difference in manner. The Gothic ghosts were more elementary in their nature, more superficial, than those of later times. Life was, in the days of Walpole and Mrs. Radcliffe, more local because of the limitations of travel and communication, it being considered astounding in Gothic times that a ghost could travel a thousand miles with ease while mortals moved snail-like. Scientific investigation was crude compared with the present and had not greatly touched fiction. Scientific folk-lore investigations were as unknown as societies of psychical research, hence neither had aided in the writing of ghostly fiction.

The mass of ghostly stuff which has appeared in English since the Gothic period, and which will be classified and discussed under different motifs in succeeding chapters, shows many of the same characteristics of the earlier, yet exhibits also a decided development over primitive, classical and Gothic forms. The modern supernaturalism is more complex, more psychological than the terroristic, perhaps because nowadays man is more intellectual, his thought-processes more subtle. Humanity still wants ghosts, as ever, but they must be more cleverly presented to be convincing. The ghostly thrill is as ardently desired by the reading public, as eagerly striven for by the writers as ever, though it is more difficult of achievement now than formerly. Yet when it is attained it is more poignant and lasting in its effects because more subtle in its art. The apparition that eludes analysis haunts the memory more than do the comparatively simple forms of the past. Compare, for instance, the spirits evoked by Henry James and Katherine Fullerton Gerould with the crude clap-trap of cloistered spooks and armored knights of Gothic times. How cheap and melodramatic the earlier attempts seem!

The present-day ghost is at once less terrible and more terrible than those of the past. There is not so much a sense of physical fear now, as of psychic horror. The pallid specters that glide through antique castles are ineffectual compared with the maleficent psychic invasions of modernity. On the other hand, the recent ghostly story frequently shows a strong sense of humor unknown in Gothicism, and only suggested in earlier forms, as in the elder Pliny’s statement that ghosts would not visit a person afflicted with freckles, which shows at least a germinal joviality in classical spooks.

One feature that distinguishes the uncanny tales of to-day from the Gothic is their greater range of material. The early terror story had its source in popular superstition, classical literature, medieval legends, or the Elizabethan drama, while in the century that has elapsed since the decay of the Gothic novel as such, new fields of thought have been opened up, and new sources for ghostly plots have been discovered which the writers of modern stories are quick to utilize. Present-day science with its wonderful development has provided countless plots for supernatural stories. Comparative study of folk-lore, with the activities of the numerous associations, has brought to light fascinating material. Modern Spiritualism, with its seances, its mediumistic experiments, has inspired many novels and stories. The Psychical Research Society, with branches in various parts of the world and its earnest advocates and serious investigations, has collected suggestive stuff for many ghostly stories. The different sources for plot material and mechanics for awesome effect, added to these from which the terror novel drew its inspiration, have incalculably enriched the supernatural fiction and widened the limits far beyond the restrictions of the conventionalized Gothic.

Science has furnished themes for many modern stories of the supernatural. Modern science itself, under normal conditions, seems like necromancer’s magic, so its incursion into thrilling fiction is but natural. Every aspect of research and discovery has had its exponent in fictive form, and the skill with which the material is handled constitutes one point of difference between the present ghostly stories and the crude scientific supernaturalism of the early novels. The influence of Darwin, Spencer, Huxley, and other scientists of the last century did much to quicken fiction as well as thought, and the effects can be traced in the work of various authors.

The widespread interest in folk-lore in recent years has had an appreciable influence on the stories of the supernatural. While the methods of investigation followed by the serious students of folk-lore are scientific and the results are tabulated in an analytic rather than a literary style, yet the effect is helpful to fiction. Comparative studies in folk-lore, by the bringing together of a mass of material from diverse sources, establishes the fact of the universal acceptance of supernaturalism in some form. Ethnic superstitions vary, yet there is enough similarity between the ideas held by tribes and races so widely separated as to discredit any basis of imitation or conscious influence between them, to be of great interest to scientists. No tribe, however low in the social scale, has been found that has no belief in powers beyond the mortal.

Folk-lore associations are multiplying and the students of literature and anthropology are joining forces in the effort to discover and classify the variant superstitions and legends of the past and of the races and tribes still in their childhood. Such activities are bringing to light a fascinating wealth of material from which the writers of ghostly tales may find countless plots. Such studies show how close akin the world is after all. A large number of books relating stories of brownies, bogles, fairies, banshees, wraiths, hobgoblins, witches, vampires, ghouls, and other superhuman personages have appeared. I am not including in this list the fairy stories that are written for juvenile consumption, but merely the folk-loristic or literary versions for adults.

The most marked instance of the influence of folk-lore in supplying subject matter for literature is shown in the recent Celtic revival. The supernatural elements in the folk-tales of Ireland, Scotland, and Wales have been widely used in fiction, poetry, and the drama. In this connection one is reminded of Collins’s Ode on the Popular Superstitions of the Highlands Considered as the Subject for Poetry. The Irish National School, with W. B. Yeats, John Synge, and Lady Gregory as leaders, have made the folk-tales of Ireland live in literature and the ghostly thrill of the old legends comes down to us undiminished. Lord Dunsany’s work is particularly brilliant, going back to ancient times and re-creating the mythologic beings for us, making us friendly with the gods, the centaurs, the giants, and divers other long-forgotten characters. Kipling has made the lore of the Indian towns and jungles live for us, as Joel Chandler Harris has immortalized the legends of the southern negro. Thomas A. Janvier in his tales of old Mexico calls back the ghosts of Spanish conquerors and Aztec men and women, repeopling the ancient streets with courtly specters. The fondness for folk-loristic fiction is one of the marked aspects of Romanticism at the present time.

The activities of the Society for Psychical Research have had decided effect in stimulating ghostly stories. When so many intelligent persons turn their attention to finding and classifying supernatural phenomena the currents of thought thus set up will naturally influence fiction. Nowadays every interest known to man is reflected in literature. The proceedings of the association have been so widely advertised and so open to the public that persons who would not otherwise give thought to the supernatural have considered the matter. Such thinkers as W. T. Stead and Sir Oliver Lodge, to mention only two, would inevitably influence others. In this connection it is interesting to note the recent claims by Stead’s daughter that her father has communicated with the living, and Lodge’s book, just published, Raymond, or Life and Death, that gives proof of what he considers incontrovertible messages from his son killed in battle. The collection of thousands of affirmative answers to the question as to whether one had ever felt a ghostly presence not to be explained on natural grounds brought out a mass of material that might serve for plot-making. Haunted houses have been catalogued and the census of specters taken.

The investigations in modern Spiritualism have done much to affect ghostly literature. The terrors of the later apparitions are not physical, but psychical, and probably the stories of the future will be more and more allied to Spiritualism. Hamlin Garland, John Corbin, William Dean Howells, Algernon Blackwood, Arnold Bennett, and others have written novels and stories of this material, though scarcely the fringe of the garment of possibilities has yet been touched. If one but grant the hypothesis of Spiritualism, what vistas open up for the novelist! What thrilling complications might come from the skillful manipulation of astrals alone,—as aids in establishing alibis, for instance! Even the limitations that at present bind ghost stories would be abolished and the effects of the dramatic employment of spiritualistic faith would be highly sensational. If the will be all powerful, then not only tables but mountains may be moved. The laws of physics would be as nothing in the presence of such powers. A lovelorn youth bent on attaining the object of his desires could, by merely willing it so, sink ocean liners, demolish skyscrapers, call up tempests, and rival German secret agents in his havoc. Intensely dramatic psychological material might be produced by the conflict resulting from the double or multiple personalities in one’s own nature, according to spiritualistic ideas. There might be complicated crossings in love, wherein one would be jealous of his alter ego, and conflicting ambitions of exciting character. The struggle necessary for the model story might be intensely dramatic though altogether internal, between one’s own selves. One finds himself so much more interesting in the light of such research than one has ever dreamed. The distinctions between materializations and astralizations, etherealizations and plain apparitions might furnish good plot structure. The personality of the “sensitives” alone would be fascinating material and the cosmic clashes of will possible under these conceived conditions suggest thrilling stories.

Dreams constitute another definite source for ghostly plots in modern literature. While this was true to a certain extent in the Gothic novel, it is still more so in later fiction. Lafcadio Hearn[69] advances the theory that all the best plots for ghost stories in any language come from dreams. He advises the person who would write supernatural thrillers to study the phases of his own dream life. It would appear that all one needs to do is to look into his own nightmares and write. Hearn says: “All the great effects produced by poets and story writers and even by religious teachers, in the treatment of the supernatural fear or mystery, have been obtained directly or indirectly from dreams.” Though one may not literally accept the whole of that statement, one must feel that the relation between dreams and supernatural impressions is strikingly close. The feeling of supernatural presence comes almost always at night when one is or has been asleep. The guilty man, awaking from sleep, thinks that he sees the specters of those he has wronged—because his dreams have embodied them for him. The lover beholds the spirit of his dead love, because in dreams his soul has gone in search of her. Very young children are unable to distinguish between dreams and reality, as is the case of savages of a low order, believing in the actuality of what they experience in dreams. And who can say that our dream life is altogether baseless and unreal?

The different nightmare sensations, acute and vivid as they are, can be analyzed to find parallelisms between them and the ghostly plots. For example, take the sensation, common in nightmares, of feeling yourself falling from immeasurable height. The same thrill of suspense is communicated by the climax in Lewis’s and Mrs. Dacre’s Gothic novels, where the devil takes guilty mortals to the mountain top and hurls them down, down. The horrible potentialities of shadows suggested frequently in dreams is illustrated by Mary Wilkins Freeman’s story where the accusing spirit comes back as a haunting shadow on the wall, rather than as an ordinary ghost, tormenting the living brother till his shadow also appears, a portent of his death.[70] The awful grip of causeless horror, of nameless fear which assails one so often in nightmares is represented in The Red Room,[71] where black Fear, the Power of Darkness, haunts the room rather than any personal spirit. It is disembodied horror itself. Wilkie Collins illustrates the presaging vision of approaching disaster in The Dream Woman. The nightmare horror of supernaturalism is nowhere better shown than in Maupassant’s La Horla where the sleeper wakes with a sense of leaden weight upon his breast, and knows that night after night some dreadful presence is shut in with him, invisible yet crushing the life out of him and driving him mad.

The nightmare motifs are present to a remarkable degree in Bulwer-Lytton’s The Haunted and the Haunters, or the House and the Brain. There we have the gigantism of the menacing Thing, the supernatural power given to inanimate objects, the ghostly chill, the darkness, and the intolerable oppression of a nameless evil thing beside one. Vampirism might easily be an outcome of dreams, since based on a physical sensation of pricking at the throat, combined with debility caused by weakness, which could be attributed to loss of blood from the ravages of vampires. F. Marion Crawford’s story, For the Blood Is the Life, is more closely related to dreams than most of the type, though probably Bram Stoker’s Dracula is the most horrible.

The curious side of supernaturalism as related to dreams is illustrated by The Dream Gown of the Japanese Ambassador,[72] and the more beautiful by Simeon Solomon’s Vision of Love Revealed in Sleep. Mary Wilkins Freeman has a remarkable short story, The Hall Bedroom, which is one of the best illustrations of the use of dream imagery and impressions. Here the effects are alluring and beautiful, with the horror kept in the background, but perhaps the more effective because of the artistic restraint. Odors, sights, sounds, feelings, are all raised to an intensity of sensuous, slumbrous enjoyment, all subliminated above the mortal. The description of the river in the picture, on which the young man floats away to dreamy death, similar to the Japanese story referred to by Hearn, helps to give the impression of infinity that comes only in dreams. Algernon Blackwood in numerous stories not only uses the elements of dreams and nightmares but explicitly calls attention to the fact. Dream supernaturalism is employed in Barry Pain’s stories, in Arthur Machen’s volume,[73] and in many others. Freud’s theory of dreams as the invariable result of past experiences or unconscious desires has not been stressed in fiction, though doubtless it will have its inning presently. A. Conan Doyle’s The Secret of Goresthorpe Grange is an amusing story of the relation of definite wishes and dreams of the ghostly.

These are some of the sources from which the later writers of occultism have drawn their plots. They represent a distinct advance over the Gothic and earlier supernaturalism in materials, for the modern story has gained the new elements without loss of the old. The ghostly fiction of to-day has access to the animistic or classical or medieval themes, yet has the unlimited province of present thought to furnish additional inspiration. There never was a time when thinking along general lines was more spontaneously reflected in fiction than now, and supernatural literature claims all regions for its own. Like every other phase of man’s thought, ghostly fiction shows the increasing complexity of form and matter, the wealth of added material and abounding richness of style, the fine subtleties that only modernity can give.