For the readers of their own day the Gothic romances of Walpole,
Miss Reeve and Mrs. Radcliffe possessed the charm of novelty.
Before the close of the century we may trace, in the
conversations of Isabella Thorpe and Catherine Morland in
_Northanger Abbey_, symptoms of a longing for more poignant
excitement. It was at this time that Mrs. Radcliffe, after the
publication of _The Italian_ in 1797, retired quietly from the
field. From her obscurity she viewed no doubt with some disdain
the vulgar achievements of "Monk" Lewis and a tribe of imitators,
who compounded a farrago of horrors as thick and slab as the
contents of a witch's cauldron. Until the appearance in 1820 of
Maturin's _Melmoth_, which was redeemed by its psychological
insight and its vigorous style, the Gothic romance maintained a
disreputable existence in the hands of those who looked upon
fiction as a lucrative trade, not as an art. In the meantime,
however, an easy device had been discovered for pandering to the
popular craving for excitement. Ingenious authors realised that
it was possible to compress into the five pages of a short story
as much sensation as was contained in the five volumes of a
Gothic romance. For the brevity of the tales, which were issued
in chapbooks, readers were compensated by gaudily coloured
illustrations and by double-barrelled titles. An anthology called
"Wild Roses" (published by Anne Lemoine, Coleman Street, n.d.)
included: _Twelve O'Clock or the Three Robbers, The Monks of
Cluny, or Castle Acre Monastery, The Tomb of Aurora, or The
Mysterious Summons, The Mysterious Spaniard, or The Ruins of St.
Luke's Abbey_, and lastly, as a _bonne bouche_, _Barbastal, or
The Magician of the Forest of the Bloody Ash_.[127] There are
many collections of this kind, some of them dating back to 1806,
among the chapbooks in the British Museum. It is in these brief,
blood-curdling romances that we may find the origin of the short
tale of terror, which became so popular a form of literature in
the nineteenth century. The taste for these delicious morsels has
lingered long. Dante Gabriel Rossetti delighted in _Brigand
Tales, Tales of Chivalry, Tales of Wonder, Legends of Terror_;
and it was in search of such booty, "a penny plain and twopence
coloured" that, more than fifty years later, Robert Louis
Stevenson and his companions ransacked the stores of a certain
secluded stationer's shop in Edinburgh.
It was probably the success of the chapbook that encouraged the
editors of periodicals early in the nineteenth century to enliven
their pages with sensational fiction. The literary hack, who, if
he had lived a century earlier, would have been glad to turn a
Turkish tale for half-a-crown, now cheerfully furnished a
"fireside horror" for the Christmas number. In his search after
novelty he was often driven to wild and desperate expedients.
Leigh Hunt, who showed scant sympathy with Lewis's bleeding nun
and scoffed mercilessly at his "little grey men who sit munching
hearts," was bound to admit: "A man who does not contribute his
quota of grim story, now-a-days, seems hardly to be free of the
republic of letters." Accordingly, so that he too might wear a
death's head as part of his _insignia_, he included in _The
Indicator_ (1819-21) a supernatural story, entitled _A Tale for a
Chimney Corner_. Scorning to "measure talents with a leg of veal
or a German sausage," he unfortunately dismissed from his
imagination the nightmarish hordes of
"Haunting Old Women and Knocking Ghosts, and Solitary
Lean Hands, and Empusas on one leg, and Ladies growing
Longer and Longer, and Horrid Eyes meeting us through
Keyholes; and Plaintive Heads and Shrieking Statues and
Shocking Anomalies of Shape and Things, which, when
seen, drove people mad,"
and in their place he conjured up a placid, ladylike ghost from a
legend quoted in Sandys' commentary on Ovid. Leigh Hunt's story
has the air of having been written by one who cared for none of
these things; but there were others who wrote with more gusto.
Many of the tales in such collections as _The Story-Teller_
(1833) or _The Romancist and Novelist's Library_ (1839-42) show
the persistence of Gothic story. In these periodicals the grave
and the gay are intermingled, and when we are weary of dark
intrigues and impenetrable secrets we may turn to lighter
reading. Yet it is significant of the taste of our ancestors that
we cannot venture far without encountering a spectre of some
sort, or a villain with the baleful eye, disguised, it may be, as
a Spanish gipsy, a German necromancer or a Russian count. Many of
the stories are Gothic novels, reduced in size, but with room for
all the old machinery:
"A novel now is nothing more
Than an old castle, and a creaking door,
A distant hovel,
Clanking of chains--a galley--a light--
Old armour, and a phantom all in white,
And there's a novel."
In _The Story-Teller_, a magazine which reprinted many popular
tales, we find German legends like _The Three Students of
Göttingen_, a "True Story Very Strange and Very Pitiful"; _The
Wood Demon; The Wehr-Wolf; The Sexton of Cologne, or Lucifer_, a
striking story of an Italian artist who was haunted by a terrible
figure he had painted in the church at Arezzo. Yet the first tale
in the collection, _The Story-Haunted_, which describes the sad
fate of a youth brought up in a solitary library reading romances
to his mother, was intended, like _The Spectre-Smitten_, in
_Passages from the Diary of a Late Physician_,[128] as a solemn
warning against over-indulgence in fictitious terrors. The mother
dies in an agony of horror, as her son reads aloud the account of
the Gentleman of Florence, who was pursued by a spectre of
himself, which vanished with him finally into the earth, as the
priest endeavoured to bless him. The son, left alone, enters the
world, and judges the people around him by the standard of books.
The story-haunted youth falls in love with the phantom of his own
imagination, whom he endows with all the graces of the heroines
of romance. He finds her embodied at last, but she dies before
they are united. _The Romancist and Novelist's Library_, in ten
volumes, contains a comprehensive selection of tales of terror by
the "best authors." Walpole, Miss Reeve, Mrs. Radcliffe, "Monk"
Lewis, Maturin, Mrs. Shelley, and Charles Brockden Brown are all
represented; and there are many translations of tales by French
and German authors. We may take our choice of _The Spectre
Barber_ or _The Spectre Bride_, or, if we are inclined to
incredulity, see _The Spectre Unmasked_. The entertainment
offered is of bewildering variety. Some of the stories, such as
D.F. Hayne's _Romance of the Castle_, seem like familiar,
well-tried friends, and conceal no surprises for the readers of
Gothic romance. Others, like _The Sleepless Woman_, by W. Jerdan,
are more piquant. The hero is warned by his dying uncle to beware
of women's bright eyes. In spite of this he marries a lady, whose
eyes unite the qualities of the robin and the falcon. After the
wedding he makes the awful discovery that she is of too noble a
lineage ever to sleep. Turn where he may, her eyes are always
upon him. At last, we find him pallid, haggard, and emaciated,
wandering alone in an avenue of cedar trees beside a silent lake:
"At this moment a breath of wind blew a branch aside--a
sunbeam fell upon the baron's face; he took it for the
eyes of his wife. Alas! his remedy lay temptingly
before him, the still, the profound, the shadowy lake.
De Launaye took one plunge--it was into eternity."
The writer foolishly ruins the effect of this climax by
super-imposing an allegorical interpretation.
Like the _Story-Teller, The Romancist and Novelist's Library_
should be read
"At night when doors are shut,
And the wood-worm pricks,
And the death-watch ticks,
And the bar has a flag of smut,--
And the cat's in the water-butt--
And the socket floats and flares,
And the housebeams groan,
And a foot unknown
Is surmised on the garret stairs,
And the locks slip unawares."
But "tales of terror" lose some of their power when read one
after another; they are most effective read singly in
periodicals. _Blackwood's Magazine_ was especially famous for its
tales, the best of which have been collected and published
separately. The editor of the _Dublin University Magazine_ shows
a marked preference for tales of a supernatural or sensational
cast. Le Fanu, who claimed that his stories, like those of Sir
Walter Scott, belonged to the "legitimate school of English
tragic romance," was one of the best-known contributors. _All the
Year Round_ and _Household Words_, under the editorship of
Dickens, often found room for the occult and the uncanny. Wilkie
Collins' fascinating serial, _The Moonstone_, was published in
_All the Year Round_ in 1868; _The Woman in White_ had appeared
six years earlier in _Blackwood_. The stories included in these
magazines are of various types. The old-fashioned spook gradually
declines in popularity. He is ousted in a scientific age by more
recondite forms of terror. Before 1875, with a few belated
exceptions:
"Ghosts, wandering here and there
Troop home to churchyards, damned spirits all,
That in crossways and floods have burial,
Already to their wormy beds are gone."
The "explained supernatural" is skilfully improved and developed.
Le Fanu's _Green Tea_ is a story from the diary of a German
doctor, concerning a patient who was dogged by a black monkey.
The creature, "whose green eyes glow with an expression of
unfathomable malignity," is medically explained to be an
illusion; but it is so vividly presented that it fastens on our
imagination with remarkable tenacity. Wilkie Collins' short
story, _The Yellow Mask_, included in the series called _After
Dark_, is another experiment in the same kind. A jealous woman
appears among the dancers at a ball, wearing a waxen cast of the
face of the man's dead wife. The short story, in which the author
deliberately shakes our nerves and then soothes away our fears by
accounting naturally for startling phenomena, is an amazingly
popular type. It reappears continually in different guises.
Occasionally it merges into pleasant buffoonery. _Die
Geistertodtenglocke_, for instance, a story in the _Dublin
University Magazine_ (1862), is a burlesque, in which the
mysterious tolling of a bell is explained by the discovery that a
cow strolled into the ruin to eat the hay with which the rope was
mended. But, judiciously handled, this type of story makes a
strong appeal to human beings who like to know how much of the
terrible and painful they can endure, and who yet must ultimately
be reassured.
Another group of short tales of terror consists of those which
purport to be faithful renderings of the beliefs of simple
people. To this category belong Allan Cunningham's _Traditional
Tales of the English and Scottish Peasantry_, which first
appeared, with one exception, in the _London Magazine_ (1821-23).
Cunningham has the tact to preserve the legends of elves,
fairies, ghosts and bogles, as they were passed down from one
generation to another on the lips of living beings. Later he
attempted, in a novel, _Sir Michael Scott_ (1828), a kind of
Gothic romance; but there is no trace in the _Traditional Tales_
of the influence of the terrormongers with whose works he was
familiar. Perhaps the finest story of the collection is _The
Haunted Ships_, in which are embodied the traditions associated
with two black and decayed hulls, half immersed in the quicksands
of the Solway. Lewis would have dragged us on board ship, and
would have shown us the devil in his own person. Cunningham
wisely keeps ashore, and repeats the tales that are told
concerning the fiendish mirth and revelry to be heard, when, at
certain seasons of the year, they arise in their former beauty,
with forecastle and deck, with sail and pennon and shroud. James
Hogg, the Ettrick shepherd, who was a friend of Cunningham, was
steeped in the same folk-lore. _The Mysterious Bride_, printed
among his _Tales and Sketches_, tells of a beautiful spirit-lady,
dressed in white and green, who appears three times on St.
Lawrence's Eve to the Laird of Birkendelly. On the morning, after
the night on which she had promised to wed him, he is found, a
blackened corpse, on Birky Brow. _Mary Burnet_ is the story of a
maiden who is drowned when keeping tryst with her lover. She
returns to earth, like Kilmeny, and assures her parents of her
welfare. A demon woman, whose form resembles that of Mary, haunts
her lover, and entices him to evil. Since Hogg can give to his
legends a "local habitation and a name," pointing to the very
stretch of road on which the elfin lady first appeared, it seems
ungracious to doubt his veracity. The Ettrick Shepherd's most
memorable achievement, however, is his _Confessions of a Fanatic_
(1824), a terribly impressive account of a man afflicted with
religious mania, who believes himself urged into crime by a
mysterious being. The story abounds in frightful situations and
weird scenes, one of the most striking being the reflection, seen
at daybreak on Arthur's Seat, of a human head and shoulders,
dilated to twenty times its natural size. Professor Saintsbury
has suggested that Lockhart probably had the principal hand in
this story. "Christopher North" was another member of the
_Noctes_ confraternity who came sometimes under the spell of the
unearthly.
The supernatural tales of Mrs. Gaskell, whose gift for
story-telling made Dickens call her his Scheherazade, were, like
those of Cunningham, based directly on tradition. She was always
attracted by the subject of witchcraft; and she had collected a
store of "creepy" legends of the kind which made the nervous
ladies of Cranford bid their sedan-chairmen hasten rapidly down
Darkness Lane at nights. The best of Mrs. Gaskell's short tales
is perhaps _The Nurse's Story_, which appeared in the Christmas
number of _Household Words_ in 1852. Mrs. Gaskell has a happy
gift for preserving the natural aroma of a tale of bygone days.
_The Nurse's Story_ has a hint of the old-world grace of Lamb's
_Dream Children_. The carefully disposed tableau of ghosts--the
unforgiving old man, and the vindictive sister, spurning the lady
and her child from the hall--is too definite and distinct, but
the conception of the wraith of the dead child outside the manor,
pleading piteously to be let in, and luring away the living
child, is delicately wrought. The tale is told in the rambling,
circumstantial style, suitable to the fireside and the long
leisure of a winter's evening. Dickens tells a very different
nurse's story in one of the chapters of _An Uncommercial
Traveller_. The tone of Mrs. Gaskell's nurse is kindly and
protective; that of Dickens' nurse severe, admonitory and
emphatic. She, who told the grim legend of Captain Murderer,
meant, clearly, to scare as well as to entertain her hearer. She
leads up to the climax of her story, the deadly revenge of the
dark twin's poisoned pie, with admirable art. The nurse's name
was Mercy, but, as Dickens remarks, she showed none to him.
Though Dickens shrank timorously in childhood from her frightful
stories, he himself, like the fat boy in _Pickwick_, sometimes
"wants to make our flesh creep." It seems, indeed, an odd trait
of the humorist that he can at will wholly discard his gaiety,
and, like the Pied Piper, pipe to another measure. W.W. Jacobs,
besides his humorous sailor yarns, has given us _The Monkey's
Paw_; and Barry Pain's gruesome stories, _Told in the Dark_, are
as forcible as any of his humours to be read in the daylight.
Dickens, in his excursions into the supernatural, does not,
however, always cast off his mood of jocularity. His treatment of
Marley's ghost lacks dignity and decorum. Clanking its chains in
a remote cellar of the silent, empty house, it has the power to
disturb us, but we lose our respect for the shade when we gaze
upon it eye to eye. Applied to the spirit world, there is much
truth in the old adage that familiarity breeds contempt. The
account of the thirteenth juryman, in _Dr. Marigold's
Prescriptions_, is much more alarming. The story of the
signalman, No. 1 Branch line, in _Mugby Junction_, is indefinably
horrible. The signalman's anguish of mind, his exact description
of the Appearance, his sense of overhanging calamity, are all
strangely disquieting. The coincidence of the manner of his
death, with which the story closes, is wisely left to make its
own inevitable impression.
Some of the stories in _Blackwood_ are the more striking because
they depend for their effect on natural, not supernatural,
horror. We may feel we are immune from the visits of ghosts, but
the accident in _The Man in the Bell_ (1821) is one which might
happen to anyone. The maddening clangour of sound, the frightful
images that crowd into the reeling brain of the man suspended in
the belfry, are described with an unflinching realism that
reminds us of _The Pit and the Pendulum_. To the same class
belongs the skilfully constructed _Iron Shroud_ (1830), by
William Mudford, an author who, as Scott remarks in his journal,
"loves to play at cherry-pit with Satan." The suspense is
ingeniously maintained as, one by one, the windows of the iron
dungeon disappear, until, at last, the massive walls and
ponderous roof contract into the victim's iron shroud. Wilkie
Collins' story, _A Terribly Strange Bed_, which describes the
stratagem of a gang of cardsharpers for getting rid of those who
happen to win money from them, is in the same vein. The canopy
slowly descends during the night, and smothers its victim. A
similar motive is used, with immeasurably finer effect, by Joseph
Conrad in his story of the disappearance of the sailor at the
lonely inn in the mountains of Spain. The experience of Byrne in
_The Inn of the Two Witches_[129] is a masterpiece in the
psychology of terror. The dense darkness, in which the young
naval officer "steers his course only by the feel of the wind,"
the scene when the door of the inn bursts open and reveals in the
candlelight the savage beauty of the gipsy girl with evil,
slanting eyes, and the inhuman ugliness of the old hags, are a
fitting prelude to the horrors of the chamber, where the corpse
of the missing sailor is found in the wardrobe. We pass with
Byrne through the different stages of suspicion and dread until,
completely baffled in his attempt to account for the manner in
which Tom Corbin was done to death, we feel "the hot terror that
plays upon the heart like a tongue of flame that touches and
withdraws before it turns a thing to ashes."
In the short stories of the latter half of the nineteenth
century, it is hard to escape from the terrible. We light upon it
suddenly, here, there and everywhere. We find it in Stevenson's
_New Arabian Nights_, in his _Merry Men_, and his stories of the
South Seas, as indeed we should expect, when we recall the
tapping of the blind man's stick in _Treasure Island_, the scene
with the candles in the snow after the duel between the two
brothers in _The Master of Ballantrae_, or David Balfour's
perilous adventure on the broken staircase in _Kidnapped_.
Kipling is another expert in the art of eeriness, and has a wide
range. His Indian backgrounds are peculiarly adapted for tales of
terror. The loathsome horror of _The Mark of the Beast_, with its
intangible suggestion of mystery, the quiet restraint of _The
Return of Imray_, in which so much is left unsaid, are two
admirable illustrations of his gift.
The tale of terror wins its effect by ever-varying means.
Scientific discoveries open up new vistas, and the twentieth
century will evolve many fresh devices for torturing the nerves.
The telephone set ringing by a ghostly hand, the aeroplane with a
phantom pilot, will replace the Gothic machinery of ruined abbeys
and wandering lights. The possibilities of terror are manifold,
and it is impracticable here to do more than pick up a few
threads in the tangled skein. Terror becomes inextricably
interwoven with other motives according to the bent of the
author. It is allied with psychology in James' sinister _Turn of
the Screw_, with scientific phantasy in Wells' _Invisible Man_.
It may enhance the excitement of a spy story, add zest to the
study of crime, or act as a foil to a romantic love interest.