(Copyright 1927 by W. Paul Cook)
In this same period Sir Walter Scott frequently concerned himself with
the weird, weaving it into many of his novels and poems, and sometimes
producing such independent bits of narration as "The Tapestried
Chamber" or "Wandering Willie's Tale" in "Redgauntlet," in the latter
of which the force of the spectral and the diabolic is enhanced by a
grotesque homeliness of speech and atmosphere. In 1830 Scott published
his "Letters on Demonology and Witchcraft," which still forms one
of our best compendia of European witch-lore. Washington Irving is
another famous figure not unconnected with the weird; for though most
of his ghosts are too whimsical and humorous to form genuinely spectral
literature, a distinct inclination in this direction is to be noted in
many of his productions. "The German Student" in "Tales of a Traveller"
(1824) is a slyly concise and effective presentation of the old
legend of the dead bride, whilst woven into the cosmic tissue of "The
Money Diggers" in the same volume is more than one hint of piratical
apparitions in the realms which Captain Kidd once roamed. Thomas Moore
also joined the ranks of the macabre artists in the poem "Alciphron,"
which he later elaborated into the prose novel of "The Epicurean"
(1827). Though merely relating the adventurers of a young Athenian
duped by the artifice of cunning Egyptian priests, Moore manages to
infuse much genuine horror into his account of subterranean frights
and wonders beneath the primordial temples of Memphis. De Quincey more
than once revels in grotesque and arabesque terrors, though with a
desultoriness and learned pomp which deny him the rank of specialist.
This era likewise saw the rise of William Harrison Ainsworth, whose
romantic novels teem with the eerie and the gruesome. Capt. Marryat,
besides writing such short tales as "The Werewolf," made a memorable
contribution in "The Phantom Ship," (1839) founded on the legend of
the Flying Dutchman, whose spectral and accursed vessel sails for ever
near the Cape of Good Hope. Dickens now rises with occasional weird
bits like "The Signalman," a tale of ghostly warning conforming to a
very common pattern and touched with a verisimilitude which allies it
as much with the coming psychological school as with the dying Gothic
school. At this time a wave of interest in spiritualistic charlatanry,
mediumism, Hindoo theosophy, and such matters, much like that of the
present day, was flourishing; so that the number of weird tales with a
"psychic" or pseudo-scientific basis became very considerable. For a
number of these the prolific and popular Lord Edward Bulwer-Lytton was
responsible; and despite the large doses of turgid rhetoric and empty
romanticism in his products, his success in the weaving of a certain
kind of bizarre charm cannot be denied.
"The House and the Brain," which hints of Rosicrucianism and at a
malign and deathless figure perhaps suggested by Louis XV's mysterious
courtier St. Germain, yet survives as one of the best short haunted
house tales ever written. The novel "Zanoni" (1842) contains similar
elements more elaborately handled, and introduces a vast unknown sphere
of being pressing on our own world and guarded by a horrible "Dweller
of the Threshold" who haunts those who try to enter and fail. Here we
have a benign brotherhood kept alive from ages to ages till finally
reduced to a single member, and as a hero an ancient Chaldean sorceror
surviving in the pristine bloom of youth to perish on the guillotine
of the French Revolution. Though full of the conventional spirit
of romance, marred by a ponderous network of symbolic and didactic
meanings, and left unconvincing through lack of perfect atmospheric
realization of the situations hinging on the spectral world, "Zanoni"
is really an excellent performance as a romantic novel; and can be read
with genuine interest today by the not too sophisticated reader. It is
amusing to note that in describing an attempted initiation into the
ancient brotherhood, the author cannot escape using the stock Gothic
castle of Walpolian lineage.
In "A Strange Story" (1862) Bulwer-Lytton shows a marked improvement
in the creation of weird images and moods. The novel, despite
enormous length, a highly artificial plot bolstered up by opportune
coincidences, and an atmosphere of homiletic pseudo-science designed
to please the matter-of-fact and purposeful Victorian reader,
is exceedingly effective as a narrative; evoking instantaneous
and unflagging interest, and furnishing many potent--if somewhat
melodramatic--tableaux and climaxes. Again we have the mysterious user
of life's elixir in the person of the soulless magician Margrave,
whose dark exploits stand out with dramatic vividness against the
modern background of a quiet English town and of the Australian bush;
and again we have shadowy intimations of a vast spectral world of the
unknown in the very air about us--this time handled with much greater
power and vitality than in "Zanoni." One of the two great incantation
passages, where the hero is driven by a luminous evil spirit to rise at
night in his sleep, take a strange Egyptian wand, and invoke nameless
presences in the haunted and mausoleum-facing pavillian of a famous
Renaissance alchemist, truly stands among the major terror scenes of
literature. Just enough is suggested, and just little enough is told.
Unknown words are twice dictated to the sleep-walker, and as he repeats
them the ground trembles, and all the dogs of the countryside begin to
bay at half-seen amorphous shadows that stalk athwart the moonlight.
When a third set of unknown words is prompted, the sleep-walker's
spirit suddenly rebels at uttering them, as if the soul could recognize
ultimate abysmal horrors concealed from the mind; and at last an
apparition of an absent sweetheart and good angel breaks the malign
spell. This fragment well illustrates how far Lord Lytton was capable
of progressing beyond his usual pomp and stock romance toward that
crystalline essence of artistic fear which belongs to the domain of
poetry. In describing certain details of incantations, Lytton was
greatly indebted to his amusingly serious occult studies, in the course
of which he came in touch with that odd French scholar and cabalist
Alphonse Louis Constant ("Eliphas Levi") who claimed to possess the
secrets of ancient magic, and to have evoked the spectre of the old
Grecian wizard Appollonius of Tyana, who lived in Nero's time.
The romantic, semi-Gothic, quasi-moral tradition here represented was
carried far down the nineteenth century by such authors as Joseph
Sheridan LeFanu, Thomas Preskett with his famous "Varney, the Vampyre"
(1847), Wilkie Collins, the late Sir H. Rider Haggard, (whose "She" is
really remarkably good), Sir A. Conan Doyle, H. G. Wells, and Robert
Louis Stevenson--the latter of whom, despite an atrocious tendency
toward jaunty mannerisms, created permanent classics in Markheim,
"The Body Snatcher," and "Dr. Jekyl and Mr. Hyde." Indeed, we may
say that this school still survives; for to it clearly belong such
of our contemporary horror tales as specialise in events rather
than atmospheric details, address the intellect rather than the
impressionistic imagination, cultivate a luminous glamour rather than
a malign tensity or psychological verisimilitude, and take a definite
stand in sympathy with mankind and its welfare. It has its undeniable
strength, and because of its "human element" commands a wider audience
than does the sheer artistic nightmare. If not quite so potent as the
latter, it is because a diluted product can never achieve the intensity
of a concentrated essence.
Quite alone both as novel and as a piece of terror-literature stands
the famous "Wuthering Heights" (1847) by Emily Bronte, with its mad
vista of bleak, windswept Yorkshire moors and the violent, distorted
lives they foster. Though primarily a tale of life, and of human
passions in agony and conflict, its epically cosmic setting affords
room for horror of the most spiritual sort. Heathcliff, the modified
Byronic villain-hero, is a strange dark waif found in the streets as
a small child and speaking only a strange gibberish till adopted by
the family he ultimately ruins. That he is in truth a diabolic spirit
rather than a human being is more than once suggested, and the unreal
is further approached in the experience of the visitor who encounters
a plaintive child-ghost at a bough-brushed upper window. Between
Heathcliff and Catherine Earnshaw is a tie deeper and more terrible
than human love. After her death he twice disturbs her grave, and
is haunted by an impalpable presence which can be nothing less than
her spirit. The spirit enters his life more and more, and at last he
becomes confident of some imminent mystical reunion. He says he feels a
strange change approaching, and ceases to take nourishment. At night he
either walks abroad or opens the casement by his bed. When he dies the
casement is still swinging open to the pouring rain, and a queer smile
pervades the stiffened face. They bury him in a grave beside the mound
he has haunted for eighteen years, and small shepherd boys say that he
yet walks with his Catherine in the churchyard and on the moor when it
rains. Their faces, too, are sometimes seen on rainy nights behind that
upper casement at Wuthering Heights. Miss Bronte's eerie terror is no
mere Gothic echo, but a tense expression of man's shuddering reaction
to the unknown. In this respect, "Wuthering Heights" becomes the symbol
of a literary transition, and marks the growth of a new and sounder
school.
(Next month Mr. Lovecraft takes up "Spectral Literature of the
Continent")
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