THE TALE OF TERROR
A Study of the Gothic Romance
by
EDITH BIRKHEAD M.A.
Assistant Lecturer in English Literature in the University of Bristol
Formerly Noble Fellow in the University of Liverpool
London
Constable & Company Ltd.
1921
PREFACE
The aim of this book is to give some account of the growth of
supernatural fiction in English literature, beginning with the
vogue of the Gothic Romance and Tale of Terror towards the close
of the eighteenth century. The origin and development of the
Gothic Romance are set forth in detail from the appearance of
Walpole's _Castle of Otranto_ in 1764 to the publication of
Maturin's _Melmoth the Wanderer_ in 1820; and the survey of this
phase of the novel is continued, in the later chapters, to modern
times. One of these is devoted to the Tale of Terror in America,
where in the hands of Hawthorne and Poe its treatment became a
fine art. In the chapters dealing with the more recent forms of
the tale of terror and wonder, the scope of the subject becomes
so wide that it is impossible to attempt an exhaustive survey.
The present work is the outcome of studies begun during my tenure
of the William Noble Fellowship in the University of Liverpool,
1916-18. It is a pleasure to express here my thanks to Professor
R.H. Case and to Dr. John Sampson for valuable help and criticism
at various stages of the work. Parts of the MS. have also been
read by Professor C.H. Herford of the University of Manchester
and by Professor Oliver Elton of the University of Liverpool. To
Messrs. Constable's reader I am also indebted for several helpful
suggestions.--E.B.
THE UNIVERSITY OF BRISTOL,
December, 1920.
CONTENTS
CHAPTER I - INTRODUCTORY.
The antiquity of the tale of terror; the element of fear in
myths, heroic legends, ballads and folk-tales; terror in the
romances of the middle ages, in Elizabethan times and in the
seventeenth century; the credulity of the age of reason; the
renascence of terror and wonder in poetry; the "attempt to blend
the marvellous of old story with the natural of modern novels."
Pp. 1-15.
CHAPTER II - THE BEGINNINGS OF GOTHIC ROMANCE.
Walpole's admiration for Gothic art and his interest in the
middle ages; the mediaeval revival at the close of the eighteenth
century; _The Castle of Otranto_; Walpole's bequest to later
romance-writers; Smollett's incidental anticipation of the
methods of Gothic Romance; Clara Reeve's _Old English Baron_ and
her effort to bring her story "within the utmost verge of
probability"; Mrs. Barbauld's Gothic fragment; Blake's _Fair
Elenor_; the critical theories and Gothic experiments of Dr.
Nathan Drake. Pp. 16-37.
CHAPTER III - "THE NOVEL OF SUSPENSE." MRS. RADCLIFFE.
The vogue of Mrs. Radcliffe; her tentative beginning in _The
Castles of Athlin and Dunbayne_, and her gradual advance in skill
and power; _The Sicilian Romance_ and her early experiments in
the "explained" supernatural; _The Romance of the Forest_, and
her use of suspense; heroines: _The Mysteries of Udolpho_;
illustrations of Mrs. Radcliffe's methods; _The Italian_;
villains; her historical accuracy and "unexplained" spectre in
_Gaston de Blondeville_; her reading; style; descriptions of
scenery; position in the history of the novel.
Pp. 38-62.
CHAPTER IV - THE NOVEL OF TERROR. LEWIS AND MATURIN.
Lewis's methods contrasted with those of Mrs. Radcliffe; his debt
to German terror-mongers; _The Monk_; ballads; _The Bravo of
Venice_; minor works and translations; Scott's review of
Maturin's _Montorio_; the vogue of the tale of terror between
Lewis and Maturin; Miss Sarah Wilkinson; the personality of
Charles Robert Maturin; his literary career; the complicated plot
of _The Family of Montorio_; Maturin's debt to others; his
distinguishing gifts revealed in _Montorio_; the influence of
_Melmoth the Wanderer_ on French literature; a survey of
_Melmoth_; Maturin's achievement as a novelist. Pp. 63-93.
CHAPTER V - THE ORIENTAL TALE OF TERROR. BECKFORD.
The Oriental story in France and England in the eighteenth
century; Beckford's _Vathek_; Beckford's life and character; his
literary gifts; later Oriental tales. Pp. 94-99.
CHAPTER VI - GODWIN AND THE ROSICRUCIAN NOVEL.
Godwin's mind and temper; the plan of _Caleb Williams_ as
described by Godwin; his methods; the plot of _Caleb Williams_;
its interest as a story; Godwin's limitations as a novelist; _St.
Lean_; its origin and purpose; outline of the story; the
character of Bethlem Gabor; Godwin's treatment of the Rosicrucian
legend; a parody of _St. Lean_; the supernatural in _Cloudesley_
and in _Lives of the Necromancers_; Moore's _Epicurean_; Croly's
_Salathiel_; Shelley's youthful enthusiasm for the tale of
terror; _Zastrozzi_; its lack of originality; _St. Irvyne_;
traces of Shelley's early reading in his poems. Pp. 100-127.
CHAPTER VII - SATIRES ON THE NOVEL OF TERROR.
Jane Austen's raillery in _Northanger Abbey_; Barrett's mockery
in _The Heroine_; Peacock's _Nightmare Abbey_; his praise of C.B.
Brown in _Gryll Grange_; _The Mystery of the Abbey_, and its
misleading title; Crabbe's satire in _Belinda Waters_ and _The
Preceptor Husband_; his ironical attack on the sentimental
heroine in _The Borough_; his appreciation of folktales; _Sir
Eustace Grey_. Pp.
128-144.
CHAPTER VIII - SCOTT AND THE NOVEL OF TERROR.
Scott's review of fashionable fiction in the Preface to
_Waverley_; his early attempts at Gothic story in _Thomas the
Rhymer_ and _The Lord of Ennerdale_; his enthusiasm for Bürger's
_Lenore_ and for Lewis's ballads; his interest in demonology and
witchcraft; his attitude to the supernatural; his hints to the
writers of ghost-stories; his own experiments; Wandering Willie's
Tale, a masterpiece of supernatural horror; the use of the
supernatural in the Waverley Novels; Scott, the supplanter of the
novel of terror. Pp.
145-156.
CHAPTER IX - LATER DEVELOPMENTS OF THE TALE OF TERROR.
The exaggeration of the later terror-mongers; innovations; the
stories of Mary Shelley, Byron and Polidori; _Frankenstein_; its
purpose; critical estimate; _Valperga_; _The Last Man_; Mrs.
Shelley's short tales; Polidori's _Ernestus Berchtold_, a
domestic story with supernatural agency; _The_ FACES _Vampyre_;
later vampires; De Quincey's contributions to the tale of terror;
Harrison Ainsworth's attempt to revive romance; his early Gothic
stories; _Rookwood_, an attempt to bring the Radcliffe romance up
to date; terror in Ainsworth's other novels; Marryat's _Phantom
Ship_; Bulwer Lytton's interest in the occult; _Zanoni_, and
Lytton's theory of the Intelligences; _The Haunted and the
Haunters_; _A Strange Story_ and Lytton's preoccupation with
mesmerism. Pp. 157-184.
CHAPTER X - SHORT TALES OF TERROR.
The chapbook versions of the Gothic romance; the popularity of
sensational story illustrated in Leigh Hunt's _Indicator_;
collections of short stories; various types of short story in
periodicals; stories based on oral tradition; the humourist's
turn for the terrible; natural terror in tales from _Blackwood_
and in Conrad; use of terror in Stevenson and Kipling; future
possibilities of fear as a motive in short stories. Pp. 185-196.
CHAPTER XI - AMERICAN TALES OF TERROR.
The vogue of Gothic story in America; the novels of Charles
Brockden Brown; his use of the "explained" supernatural; his
Godwinian theory; his construction and style; Washington Irving's
genial tales of terror; Hawthorne's reticence and melancholy;
suggestions for eery stories in his notebooks; _Twice-Told
Tales_; _Mosses from an Old Manse; The Scarlet Letter_;
Hawthorne's sympathetic insight into character; _The House of the
Seven Gables_, and the ancestral curse; his half-credulous
treatment of the supernatural; unfinished stories; a contrast of
Hawthorne's methods with those of Edgar Allan Poe; _A Manuscript
found in a Bottle_, the first of Poe's tales of terror; the skill
of Poe illustrated in _Ligeia, The Fall of the House of Usher,
The Masque of the Red Death_, and _The Cash of Amontillado_;
Poe's psychology; his technique in _The Pit and the Pendulum_ and
in his detective stories; his influence; the art of Poe; his
ideal in writing a short story. Pp. 197-220.
CHAPTER XII - CONCLUSION.
The persistence of the tale of terror; the position of the Gothic
romance in the history of fiction; the terrors of actual life in
the Brontë's novels; sensational stories of Wilkie Collins, Le
Fanu and later authors; the element of terror in various types of
romance; experiments of living authors; the future of the tale of
terror. Pp
221-228.
INDEX. Pp. 229-241
CHAPTER I - INTRODUCTORY.
The history of the tale of terror is as old as the history of
man. Myths were created in the early days of the race to account
for sunrise and sunset, storm-winds and thunder, the origin of
the earth and of mankind. The tales men told in the face of these
mysteries were naturally inspired by awe and fear. The universal
myth of a great flood is perhaps the earliest tale of terror.
During the excavation of Nineveh in 1872, a Babylonian version of
the story, which forms part of the Gilgamesh epic, was discovered
in the library of King Ashurbanipal (668-626 B.C.); and there are
records of a much earlier version, belonging to the year 1966
B.C. The story of the Flood, as related on the eleventh tablet of
the Gilgamesh epic, abounds in supernatural terror. To seek the
gift of immortality from his ancestor, Ut-napishtim, the hero
undertakes a weary and perilous journey. He passes the mountain
guarded by a scorpion man and woman, where the sun goes down; he
traverses a dark and dreadful road, where never man trod, and at
last crosses the waters of death. During the deluge, which is
predicted by his ancestor, the gods themselves are stricken with
fear:
"No man beheld his fellow, no more could men know each
other. In heaven the gods were afraid ... They drew
back, they climbed up into the heaven of Anu. The gods
crouched like dogs, they cowered by the walls."[1]
Another episode in the same epic, when Nergal, the god of the
dead, brings before Gilgamesh an apparition of his friend,
Eabani, recalls the impressive scene, when the witch of Endor
summons the spirit of Samuel before Saul.
When legends began to grow up round the names of traditional
heroes, fierce encounters with giants and monsters were invented
to glorify their strength and prowess. David, with a stone from
his sling, slew Goliath. The crafty Ulysses put out the eye of
Polyphemus. Grettir, according to the Icelandic saga, overcame
Glam, the malevolent, death-dealing vampire who "went riding the
roofs." Beowulf fearlessly descended into the turbid mere to
grapple with Grendel's mother. Folktales and ballads, in which
incidents similar to those in myths and heroic legends occur, are
often overshadowed by terror. Figures like the Demon Lover, who
bears off his mistress in the fatal craft and sinks her in the
sea, and the cannibal bridegroom, outwitted at last by the
artfulness of one of his brides, appear in the folk-lore of many
lands. Through every century there glide uneasy spirits, groaning
for vengeance. Andrew Lang[2] mentions the existence of a papyrus
fragment, found attached to a wooden statuette, in which an
ancient Egyptian scribe addresses a letter to the Khou, or
spirit, of his dead wife, beseeching her not to haunt him. One of
the ancestors of the savage were-wolf, who figures in Marryat's
_Phantom Ship_, may perhaps be discovered in Petronius' _Supper
of Trimalchio_. The descent of Bram Stoker's infamous vampire
Dracula may be traced back through centuries of legend.
Hobgoblins, demons, and witches mingle grotesquely with the
throng of beautiful princesses, queens in glittering raiment,
fairies and elves. Without these ugly figures, folk-tales would
soon lose their power to charm. All tale tellers know that fear
is a potent spell. The curiosity which drove Bluebeard's wife to
explore the hidden chamber lures us on to know the worst, and as
we listen to horrid stories, we snatch a fearful joy. Human
nature desires not only to be amused and entertained, but moved
to pity and fear. All can sympathise with the youth, who could
not shudder and who would fain acquire the gift.
From English literature we gain no more than brief, tantalising
glimpses of the vast treasury of folk-tales and ballads that
existed before literature became an art and that lived on side by
side with it, vitalising and enriching it continually. Yet here
and there we catch sudden gleams like the fragment in _King
Lear_:
"Childe Roland to the dark tower came.
His word was still Fie, Foh and Fum,
I smell the blood of a British man."
or Benedick's quotation from the _Robber Bridegroom_:
"It is not so, it was not so, but, indeed, God forbid that
it should be so."
which hint at the existence of a hoard as precious and
inexhaustible as that of the Nibelungs. The chord of terror is
touched in the eerie visit of the three dead sailor sons "in
earthly flesh and blood" to the wife of Usher's well, Sweet
William's Ghost, the rescue of Tarn Lin on Halloween, when
Fairyland pays a tiend to Hell, the return of clerk Saunders to
his mistress, True Thomas's ride to Fairyland, when:
"For forty days and forty nights,
He wade through red blood to the knee,
And he saw neither sun nor moon,
But heard the roaring of the sea."
The mediaeval romances of chivalry, which embody stories handed
down by oral tradition, are set in an atmosphere of supernatural
wonder and enchantment. In Malory's _Morte d'Arthur_, Sir
Lancelot goes by night into the Chapel Perilous, wherein there is
only a dim light burning, and steals from the corpse a sword and
a piece of silk to heal the wounds of a dying knight. Sir Galahad
sees a fiend leap out of a tomb amid a cloud of smoke; Gawaine's
ghost, with those of the knights and ladies for whom he has done
battle in life, appears to warn the king not to begin the fight
against Modred on a certain day. In the romance of _Sir Amadas_,
the ghost of a merchant, whose corpse the knight had duteously
redeemed from the hands of creditors, succours him at need. The
shadow of terror lurks even amid the beauty of Spenser's
fairyland. In the windings of its forests we come upon dark
caves, mysterious castles and huts, from which there start
fearsome creatures like Despair or the giant Orgoglio, hideous
hags like Occasion, wicked witches and enchanters or frightful
beings like the ghostly Maleger, who wore as his helmet a dead
man's skull and rode upon a tiger swift as the wind. The
Elizabethan dramatists were fascinated by the terrors of the
invisible world. Marlowe's Dr. Faustus, round whose name are
clustered legends centuries old concerning bargains between man
and the devil, the apparitions and witches in _Macbeth_, the dead
hand, the corpse-like images, the masque of madmen, the tombmaker
and the passing-bell in Webster's sombre tragedy, _The Duchess of
Malfi_, prove triumphantly the dramatic possibilities of terror.
As a foil to his _Masque of Queens_ (1609) Ben Jonson introduced
twelve loathly witches with Até as their leader, and embellished
his description of their profane rites, with details culled from
James I.'s treatise on Demonology and from learned ancient
authorities.
In _The Pilgrim's Progress_, Despair, who "had as many lives as a
cat," his wife Diffidence at Doubting Castle, and Maul and
Slaygood are the ogres of popular story, whose acquaintance
Bunyan had made in chapbooks during his ungodly youth.
Hobgoblins, devils and fiends, "sturdy rogues" like the three
brothers Faintheart, Mistrust and Guilt, who set upon Littlefaith
in Dead Man's Lane, lend the excitement of terror to Christian's
journey to the Celestial City. The widespread belief in witches
and spirits to which Browne and Burton and many others bear
witness in the seventeenth century, lived on in the eighteenth
century, although the attitude of the "polite" in the age of
reason was ostensibly incredulous and superior. A scene in one of
the _Spectator_ essays illustrates pleasantly the state of
popular opinion. Addison, lodging with a good-natured widow in
London, returns home one day to find a group of girls sitting by
candlelight, telling one another ghost-stories. At his entry they
are abashed, but, on the widow's assuring them that it is only
the "gentleman," they resume, while Addison, pretending to be
absorbed in his book at the far end of the table, covertly
listens to their tales of
"ghosts that, pale as ashes, had stood at the feet of
the bed or walked over a churchyard by moonlight; and
others, who had been conjured into the Red Sea for
disturbing people's rest."[3]
In another essay Addison shows that he is strongly inclined to
believe in the existence of spirits, though he repudiates the
ridiculous superstitions which prevailed in his day;[4] and Sir
Roger de Coverley frankly confesses his belief in witches. Defoe,
in the preface to his _Essay on the History and Reality of
Apparitions_ (1727) states uncompromisingly:
"I must tell you, good people, he that is not able to
see the devil, in whatever shape he is pleased to
appear in, he is not really qualified to live in this
world, no, not in the quality of a common inhabitant."
Epworth Rectory, the home of John Wesley's father, was haunted in
1716-17 by a persevering ghost called Old Jeffrey, whose exploits
are recorded with a gravity and circumstantial exactitude that
remind us of Defoe's narrative concerning the ghostly Mrs. Veal
in her "scoured" silk. John Wesley declares stoutly that he is
convinced of the literal truth of the story of one Elizabeth
Hobson, who professed to have been visited on several occasions
by supernatural beings. He upholds too the authenticity of the
notorious Drummer of Tedworth, whose escapades are described in
chapbooks and in Glanvill's _Sadducismus Triumphatus_ (1666), a
book in which he was keenly interested. In his journal (May 25th,
1768) he remarks:
"It is true that the English in general, and indeed
most of the men of learning in Europe, have given up
all accounts of witches and apparitions, as mere old
wives' fables. I am sorry for it; and I willingly take
this opportunity of entering my solemn protest against
this violent compliment which so many that believe the
Bible pay to those who do not believe it."
The Cock Lane ghost gained very general credit, and was
considered by Mrs. Nickleby a personage of some importance, when
she boasted to Miss La Creevy that her great-grandfather went to
school with him--or her grandmother with the Thirsty Woman of
Tutbury. The appearance of Lord Lyttleton's ghost in 1779 was
described by Dr. Johnson, who was also disposed to believe in the
Cock Lane ghost, as the most extraordinary thing that had
happened in his day.[5] There is abundant evidence that the
people of the eighteenth century were extremely credulous, yet,
in literature, there is a tendency to look askance at the
supernatural as at something wild and barbaric. Such ghosts as
presume to steal into poetry are amazingly tame, and even
elegant, in their speech and deportment. In Mallet's _William and
Margaret_ (1759). which was founded on a scrap of an old ballad
out of _The Knight of the Burning Pestle_, Margaret's wraith
rebukes her false lover in a long and dignified oration. But
spirits were shy of appearing in an age when they were more
likely to be received with banter than with dread. Dr. Johnson
expresses the attitude of his age when, in referring to Gray's
poem, _The Bard_, he remarks:
"To select a singular event and swell it to a giant's
bulk by fabulous appendages of spectres and predictions
has little difficulty, for he that forsakes the
probable may always find the marvellous. And it has
little use; we are affected only as we believe; we are
improved only as we find something to be imitated or
declined." (1780.)
The dictum that we are affected only as we believe is open to
grave doubt. We are often thrown into a state of trepidation
simply through the power of the imagination. We are wise after
the event, like Partridge at the play:
"No, no, sir; ghosts don't appear in such dresses as
that neither... And if it was really a ghost, it could
do one no harm at such a distance, and in so much
company; and yet, if I was frightened, I am not the
only person."[6]
The supernatural which persisted always in legends handed down
from one generation to another on the lips of living people, had
not lost its power to thrill and alarm, and gradually worked its
way back into literature. Although Gray and Collins do not
venture far beyond the bounds of the natural, they were in
sympathy with the popular feelings of superstitious terror, and
realised how effective they would be in poetry.
Collins, in his _Ode on the Superstitions of the Scottish
Highlands_, adjures Home, the author of _Douglas_, to sing:
"how, framing hideous spells,
In Sky's lone isle, the gifted wizard-seer
Lodged in the wintry cave with Fate's fell spear
Or in the depths of Uist's dark forests dwells,
How they whose sight such dreary dreams engross
With their own vision oft astonished droop
When o'er the wintry strath or quaggy moss
They see the gliding ghosts unbodied troop."
Burns, in the foreword to _Halloween_ (1785), writes in the
"enlightened" spirit of the eighteenth century, but in the poem
itself throws himself whole-heartedly into the hopes and fears
that agitate the lovers. He owed much to an old woman who lived
in his home in infancy:
"She had ... the largest collection in the country
of tales and songs concerning devils, ghosts, fairies,
brownies, witches, warlocks, spunkies, kelpies, elf-candles,
dead-lights, wraiths, apparitions, cantraips, giants, enchanted
towers, dragons and other trumpery. This
cultivated the latent seeds of poetry, but had so strong
an effect on my imagination, that to this hour, in my
nocturnal rambles, I sometimes keep a sharp look-out in
suspicious places; it often takes an effort of philosophy
to shake off these idle terrors."[7]
_Tam o' Shanter_, written for Captain Grose, was perhaps based on
a Scottish legend, learnt at the inglenook in childhood, from
this old wife, or perhaps
"By some auld houlet-haunted biggin
Or kirk deserted by its riggin,"
from Captain Grose himself, who made to quake:
"Ilk ghaist that haunts auld ha' or chamer,
Ye gipsy-gang that deal in glamor,
And you, deep-read in hell's black grammar,
Warlocks and witches."
In it Burns reveals with lively reality the terrors that assail
the reveller on his homeward way through the storm:
"Past the birks and meikle stane
Where drunken Charlie brak's neck-bane;
And through the whins, and by the cairn
Where hunters fand the murdered bairn
And near the thorn, aboon the well
Where Mungo's mither hanged hersell."
For sheer terror the wild, fantastic witch-dance, seen through a
Gothic window in the ruins of Kirk-Alloway, with the light of
humour strangely glinting through, has hardly been surpassed. The
Ballad-collections, beginning with Percy's _Reliques of Ancient
English Poetry_ (1705), brought poets back to the original
sources of terror in popular tradition, and helped to revive the
latent feelings of awe, wonder and fear. In Coleridge's _Ancient
Manner_ the skeleton-ship with its ghastly crew--the
spectre-woman and her deathmate--the sensations of the mariner,
alone on a wide, wide sea, seize on our imagination with
irresistible power. The very substance of the poem is woven of
the supernatural. The dream imagery is thrown into relief by
occasional touches of reality--the lighthouse, the church on the
cliff, the glimpses of the wedding, the quiet song of the hidden
brook in the leafy month of June. We, like the mariner, after
loneliness so awful that
"God himself
Scarce seemèd there to be,"
welcome the firm earth beneath our feet, and the homely sound of
the vesper bell. In _Christabel_ we float dreamily through scenes
as unearthly and ephemeral as the misty moonlight, and the words
in which Coleridge conjures up his vision fall into music of
magic beauty. The opening of the poem creates a sense of
foreboding, and the horror of the serpent-maiden is subtly
suggested through her effect on Christabel. Coleridge hints at
the terrible with artistic reticence. In _Kubla Khan_ the chasm
is:
"A savage place! as holy and enchanted
As e'er beneath a waning moon was haunted
By woman wailing for her demon-lover."
The poetry of Keats is often mysterious and suggestive of terror.
The description of the Gothic hall in _The Eve of St. Agnes_:
"In all the house was heard no human sound;
A chain-drooped lamp was flickering by each door;
The arras, rich with horseman, hawk and hound,
Fluttered in the besieging wind's uproar;
And the long carpets rose along the gusty floor;"
the serpent-maiden, Lamia, who
"Seemed at once some penanced lady elf,
Some demon's mistress, or the demon's self;"
the grim story in _Isabella_ of Lorenzo's ghost, who
"Moaned a ghostly undersong
Like hoarse night-gusts sepulchral briers along."
all lead us over the borderland. In a rejected stanza of the _Ode
on Melancholy_, he abandons the horrible:
"Though you should build a bark of dead men's bones
And rear a phantom gibbet for a mast,
Stitch shrouds together for a sail, with groans
To fill it out, blood-stained and aghast;
Although your rudder be a dragon's tail
Long severed, yet still hard with agony,
Your cordage, large uprootings from the skull
Of bald Medusa, certes you would fail
To find the Melancholy--"
Keats's melancholy is not to be found amid images
of horror:
"She dwells with Beauty--Beauty that must die,
And Joy, whose hand is ever at his lips
Bidding adieu."
In _La Belle Dame sans Merci_ he conveys with delicate touch the
memory of the vision which haunts the knight, alone and palely
loitering. We see it through his eyes:
"I saw pale kings and princes too,
Pale warriors, death-pale were they all:
They cried--'La Belle Dame sans Merci
Hath thee in thrall!'
"I saw their starv'd lips in the gloam
With horrid warning gaped wide,
And I awoke and found me here,
On the cold hill's side."
From effects so exquisitely wrought as these it seems almost
profane to turn to the crude attempts of such poets as "Monk"
Lewis or Southey to sound the note of terror. Yet they too, in
their fashion, played a part in the "Renascence of Wonder."
Coleridge, fascinated by the spirit of "gramarye" in Bürger's
_Lenore_, etherealised and refined it. Scott and Lewis gloried in
the gruesome details and spirited rhythm of the ballad, and in
their supernatural poems wish to startle and terrify, not to awe,
their readers. Those who revel in phosphorescent lights and in
the rattle of the skeleton are apt to o'erleap themselves; and
Scott's _Glenfinlas_, Lewis's _Alonzo the Brave and the Fair
Imogene_ and Southey's _Old Woman of Berkeley_ fall into the
category of the grotesque. Hogg intentionally mingles the comic
and the terrible in his poem, _The Witch of Fife_, but his
prose-stories reveal his power of creating an atmosphere of
_diablerie_, undisturbed by intrusive mockery. In the poem
_Kilmeny_, he handles an uncanny theme with dreamy beauty.
From the earliest times to the present day, writers of fiction
have realised the force of supernatural terror. In the
_Babylonica_ of Iamblichus, the lovers evade their pursuers by
passing as spectres; the scene of the romance is laid in tombs,
caverns, and robbers' dens, a setting remarkably like that of
Gothic story. Into the English novel of the first half of the
eighteenth century, however, the ghost dares not venture. The
innate desire for the marvellous was met at this period not by
the novel, but by oral tradition and by such works as Galland's
translation of _The Arabian Nights_, the Countess D'Aulnoy's
collection of fairy tales, Perrault's _Contes de ma Mère Oie_.
Chapbooks setting forth mediaeval legends of "The Wandering Jew,"
the "Demon Frigate," or "Dr. Faustus," and interspersed with
anecdotes of freaks, monsters and murderers, satisfied the
craving for excitement among humbler readers.[8] Smollett, who,
in his _Adventures of Ferdinand, Count Fathom_ (1753), seems to
have been experimenting with new devices for keeping alive the
interest of a _picaresque_ novel, anticipates the methods of Mrs.
Radcliffe. Although he sedulously avoids introducing the
supernatural, he hovers perilously on the threshold. The
publication of _The Castle of Otranto_ in 1764 was not so wild an
adventure as Walpole would have his readers believe. The age was
ripe for the reception of the marvellous.
The supernatural had, as we have seen, begun to find its way back
into poetry, in the work of Gray and Collins. In Macpherson's
_Ossian_, which was received with acclamation in 1760-3, the
mountains, heaths and lakes are haunted by shadowy, superstitious
fears. Dim-seen ghosts wail over the wastes. There is abundant
evidence that "authentic" stories of ghostly appearances were
heard with respect. Those who eagerly explored Walpole's Gothic
castle and who took pleasure in Miss Reeve's well-trained ghost,
had previously enjoyed the thrill of chimney corner legends. The
idea of the gigantic apparition was derived, no doubt, from the
old legend of the figure seen by Wallace on the field of battle.
The limbs, strewn carelessly about the staircase and the gallery
of the castle, belong to a giant, very like those who are worsted
by the heroes of popular story. Godwin, in an unusual flight of
fancy, amused himself by tracing a certain similitude between
_Caleb Williams_ and _Bluebeard_, between _Cloudesley_ and _The
Babes in the Wood_,[9] and planned a story, on the analogy of the
Sleeping Beauty, in which the hero was to have the faculty of
unexpectedly falling asleep for twenty, thirty, or a hundred
years.[10]
Mrs. Radcliffe, who, so far as we may judge, did not draw her
characters from the creatures of flesh and blood around her,
seems to have adopted some of the familiar figures of old story.
Emily's guardian, Montoni, in _The Mysteries of Udolpho_, like
the unscrupulous uncle in Godwin's _Cloudesley_, may well have
been descended from the wicked uncle of the folk tale. The cruel
stepmother is disguised as a haughty, scheming marchioness in
_The Sicilian Romance_. The ogre drops his club, assumes a veneer
of polite refinement and relies on the more gentlemanlike method
of the dagger and stiletto for gaining his ends. The banditti and
robbers who infest the countryside in Gothic fiction are time
honoured figures. Travellers in Thessaly in Apuleius' _Golden
Ass_, like the fugitives in Shelley's _Zastrozzi_ and _St.
Irvyne_, find themselves in robbers' caves. The Gothic castle,
suddenly encountered in a dark forest, is boldly transported from
fairyland and set down in Italy, Sicily or Spain. The chamber of
horrors, with its alarming array of scalps or skeletons, is
civilised beyond recognition and becomes the deserted wing of an
abbey, concealing nothing worse than one discarded wife,
emaciated and dispirited, but still alive. The ghost-story, which
Ludovico reads in the haunted chamber of Udolpho, is described by
Mrs. Radcliffe as a Provençal tale, but is in reality common to
the folklore of all countries. The restless ghost, who yearns for
the burial of his corpse, is as ubiquitous as the Wandering Jew.
In the _Iliad_ he appears as the shade of Patroclus, pleading
with Achilles for his funeral rites. According to a letter of the
younger Pliny,[11] he haunts a house in Athens, clanking his
chains. He is found in every land, in every age. His feminine
counterpart presented herself to Dickens' nurse requiring her
bones, which were under a glass-case, to be "interred with every
undertaking solemnity up to twenty-four pound ten, in another
particular place."[12] Melmoth the Wanderer, when he becomes the
wooer of Immalee, seems almost like a reincarnation of the Demon
Lover. The wandering ball of fire that illuminates the dusky
recesses of so many Gothic abbeys is but another manifestation of
the Fate-Moon, which shines, foreboding death, after Thorgunna's
funeral, in the Icelandic saga. The witchcraft and demonology
that attracted Scott and "Monk" Lewis, may be traced far beyond
Sinclair's _Satan's Invisible World Discovered_ (1685), Bovet's
_Pandemonium or the Devil's Cloyster Opened_ (1683), or Reginald
Scot's _Discovery of Witchcraft_ (1584) to Ulysses' invocation of
the spirits of the dead,[13] to the idylls of Theocritus and to
the Hebrew narrative of Saul's visit to the Cave of Endor. There
are incidents in _The Golden Ass_ as "horrid" as any of those
devised by the writers of Gothic romance. It would, indeed, be no
easy task to fashion scenes more terrifying than the mutilation
of Socrates in _The Golden Ass_, by the witch, who tears out his
heart and stops the wound with a sponge which falls out when he
stoops to drink at a river, or than the strange apparition of a
ragged, old woman who vanishes after leading the way to the room,
where the baker's corpse hangs behind the door. Though the title
assumes a special literary significance at the close of the
eighteenth century, the tale of terror appeals to deeply rooted
instincts, and belongs, therefore, to every age and clime.