On the continent literary horror fared well. The celebrated short
tales and novels of Ernst Theodor Wilhelm Hoffmann (1776-1822) are a
byword for mellowness of background and maturity of form, though they
incline to levity and extravagance, and lack the exalted moments of
stark, breathless terror which a less sophisticated writer might have
achieved. Generally they convey the grotesque rather than the terrible.
Most artistic of all the continental weird tales is the German classic
_Undine_, (1814) by Friedrich Hein-Karl, Baron de la Motte Fouque. In
this story of a water-spirit who married a mortal and gained a human
soul there is a delicate fineness of craftsmanship which makes it
notable in any department of literature, and an easy naturalness which
places it close to the genuine folk-myth. It is, in fact, derived from
a tale told by the Renaissance physician and alchemist Paracleus in his
_Treatise on Elemental Sprites_.
Undine, daughter of a powerful water-prince, was exchanged by her
father as a small child for a fisherman's daughter, in order that
she might acquire a soul by wedding a human being. Meeting the noble
youth Huldbrand at the cottage of her foster-father by the sea at the
edge of a haunted wood, she soon marries him, and accompanies him to
his ancestral castle of Ringstetten. Huldbrand, however, eventually
wearies of his wife's supernatural affiliations, and especially of
the appearances of her uncle, the malicious woodland waterfall-spirit
Kugleborn; a weariness increased by his growing affection for Bertalda,
who turns out to be the fisherman's child for whom Undine was
exchanged. At length, on a voyage down the Danube, he is provoked by
some innocent act of his devoted wife to utter the angry words which
consign her back to her supernatural element; from which she can,
by the laws of her species, return only once--to kill him, whether
she will no, if ever he prove unfaithful to her memory. Later, when
Huldbrand is about to be married to Bertalda, Undine returns for her
sad duty, and bears his life away in tears. When he is buried among
his fathers in the village churchyard a veiled, snow-white female
figure appears among the mourners, but after the prayer is seen no
more. In her place is a little silver spring, which murmurs its way
almost completely around the new grave and empties into a neighbouring
lake. The villagers show it to this day, and say that Undine and her
Huldbrand are thus united in death. Many passages and atmospheric
touches in this tale reveal Fouque as an accomplished artist in the
field of the macabre; especially the descriptions of the haunted wood
with its gigantic snow-white man and various unnamed terrors, which
occur early in the narrative.
Not so well known as _Undine_, but remarkable for its convincing
realism and freedom from Gothic stock devices, is the _Amber Witch_ of
Wilhelm Meinhold, another product of the German fantastic genius of the
earlier nineteenth century. This tale, which is laid in the time of
the Thirty Years' War, purports to be a clergyman's manuscript found
in an old church at Coserow, and centres round the writer's daughter,
Maria Schweidler, who is wrongly accused of witchcraft. She has found
a deposit of amber which she keeps secret for various reasons, and the
unexplained wealth obtained from this lends colour to the accusation;
an accusation instigated by the malice of the wolf-hunting nobleman
Wittich Appelmann, who has vainly pursued her with ignoble designs. The
deeds of a real witch, who afterward comes to a horrible supernatural
end in prison, are glibly imputed to the hapless Maria; and after a
typical witchcraft trial with forced confessions under torture she is
about to be burned at the stake when saved just in time by her lover,
a noble youth from a neighbouring district. Meinhold's great strength
is in his air of casual and realistic verisimilitude, which intensifies
our suspense and sense of the unseen by half persuading us that the
menacing events must somehow be either the truth or very close to the
truth. Indeed, so thorough is this realism that a popular magazine once
published the main points of _The Amber Witch_ as an actual occurrence
of the seventeenth century!
In the present generation German horror-fiction is most notably
represented by Hanns Heinz Ewers who brings to bear on his dark
conceptions an effective knowledge of modern psychology. Novels like
_The Sorcerer's Apprentice, Alranae_, and short stories like _The
Spider_ contain distinctive qualities which raise them to a classic
level.
But France as well as Germany has been active in the realm of
weirdness. Victor Hugo, in such tales as _Hans of Iceland_, and Balzac,
in _The Wild Ass's Skin_, _Seraphita_, and _Louis Lambert_, both employ
supernaturalism to a great or less extent; though generally only as
a means to some more human end, and without the sincere and daemonic
intensity which characterises the born artist in shadows. It is in
Theopile Gautier that we first seem to find an authentic French sense
of the unreal world, and here there appears a spectral mastery which,
though not continuously used, is recognisable at once as something
alike genuine and profound. Short tales like _Atavar_, _The Foot of
the Mummy_, and _Clarimonde_ display glimpses of forbidden vistas that
allure, tantalise, and sometimes horrify; whilst the Egyptian visions
evoked in _One of Cleopatra's Nights_ are of the keenest and most
expressive potency. Gautier captured the inmost soul of aeon-weighted
Egypt, with its cryptic life and Cyclopean architecture, and uttered
once and for all the eternal horror of its nether world of catacombs,
where to the end of time millions of stiff, spiced corpses will stare
up in the blackness with glassy eyes, awaiting some awesome and
unrelatable summons. Gustave Flaubert ably continued the tradition
of Gautier in orgies of poetic phantasy like _The Temptation of St.
Anthony_, and but for a strong realistic bias might have been an
arch-weaver of tapestried terrors. Later on we see the stream divide,
producing strange poets and fantasists of the symbolist and decadent
schools whose dark interests really centre more in abnormalities
of human thought and instinct than in the actual supernatural, and
subtle story-tellers whose thrills are quite directly derived from
the night-black wells of cosmic unreality. Of the former class of
"artists in sin" the illustrious poet Baudelaire, influenced vastly
by Poe, is the supreme type; whilst the psychological novelist
Joris-Karl Huysmans, a true child of the eighteen nineties, is at once
the summation and finale. The latter and purely narrative class is
continued by Prosper Merimee, whose _Venus of Ille_ presents in terse
and convincing prose the same ancient statue-bride theme which Thomas
Moore cast in ballad form in _The Ring_.
The horror-tales of the powerful and cynical Guy de Maupassant, written
as his final madness gradually over-took him, presents individualities
of their own; being rather the morbid outpourings of a realistic
mind in a pathological state than the healthily imaginative product
of a vision naturally disposed toward phantasy and sensitive to the
normal illusions of the unseen. Nevertheless they are of the keenest
interest and poignancy; suggesting with marvelous force the imminence
of nameless terrors, and the relentless dogging of an ill-starred
individual by hideous and menacing representatives of the outer
blackness. Of these stories _The Horla_ is generally regarded as the
masterpiece. Relating the advent to France of an invisible being who
lives on water and milk, sways the minds of others, and seems to be the
vanguard of a horde of extra-terrestrial organisms arrived on earth
to subjugate and overwhelm mankind, this tense narrative is perhaps
without a peer in its particular department; notwithstanding its
indebtedness to a tale by the American Fitz-James O'Brien for details
in describing the actual presence of the unseen monster. Other potently
dark creations of de Maupassant are _Who Knows?_, _The Spectre, He_,
_The Diary of a Madman_, _The White Wolf_, _On the River_, and the
grisly verse entitled _Horror_.
(Continued Next Month)
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