Though the critic no longer feels that need of classifying and
sub-classifying the _genres_ which so preoccupied the contemporaries
of Wordsworth, there are, in all the arts, certain local products that
seem to necessitate a parenthesis.
Such, in fiction, is the use of the supernatural. It seems to have come
from mysterious Germanic and Armorican forests, from lands of long
twilights and wailing winds; and it certainly did not pass through
French or even Russian hands to reach us. Sorcerers and magic are of
the south, the Mediterranean; the witch of Theocritus brewed a brew fit
for her sister-hags of the Scottish heath; but the spectral apparition
walks only in the pages of English and Germanic fiction.
It has done so, to great effect, in some of the most original of our
great English short stories, from Scott’s “Wandering Willy” and Poe’s
awful hallucinations to Le Fanu’s “Watcher,” and from the “Thrawn
Janet” of Stevenson to “The Turn of the Screw” of Henry James, last
great master of the eerie in English.
All these tales, in which the effect sought is completely achieved, are
models of the subtlest artifice. It is not enough to believe in ghosts,
or even to have seen one, to be able to write a good ghost story. The
greater the improbability to be overcome the more studied must be the
approach, the more perfectly maintained the air of naturalness, the
easy assumption that things are always likely to happen in that way.
One of the chief obligations, in a short story, is to give the reader
an immediate sense of security. Every phrase should be a sign-post,
and never (unless intentionally) a misleading one: the reader must
feel that he can trust to their guidance. His confidence once gained,
he may be lured on to the most incredible adventures--as the Arabian
Nights are there to show. A wise critic once said: “You may ask your
reader to believe anything you can _make_ him believe.” It is never
the _genii_ who are unreal, but only their unconvinced historian’s
description of them. The least touch of irrelevance, the least chill of
inattention, will instantly undo the spell, and it will take as long
to weave again as to get Humpty Dumpty back on his wall. The moment
the reader loses faith in the author’s sureness of foot the chasm of
improbability gapes.
Improbability in itself, then, is never a danger, but the appearance
of improbability is; unless, indeed, the tale be based on what,
in my first chapter, I called pathological conditions--conditions
of body or mind outside the field of normal experience. But this
term, of course, does not apply to states of mind inherited from an
earlier phase of race-culture, such as the belief in ghosts. No one
with a spark of imagination ever objected to a good ghost story as
“improbable”--though Mrs. Barbauld, who doubtless lacked the spark, is
said to have condemned “The Ancient Mariner” on this ground. Most of us
retain the more or less shadowy memory of ancestral terrors, and airy
tongues that syllable men’s names. We cannot believe _a priori_ in the
probability of the actions of madmen, or neurasthenics, because their
reasoning processes escape most of us, or can at best be imagined only
as belonging to abnormal and exceptional people; but everybody knows a
good ghost when he reads about him.
When the reader’s confidence is gained the next rule of the game is to
avoid distracting and splintering up his attention. Many a would-be
tale of horror becomes innocuous through the very multiplication and
variety of its horrors. Above all, if they are multiplied they should
be cumulative and not dispersed. But the fewer the better: once the
preliminary horror posited, it is the harping on the same string--the
same nerve--that does the trick. Quiet iteration is far more racking
than diversified assaults; the expected is more frightful than the
unforeseen. The play of “Emperor Jones” is a striking instance of the
power of simplification and repetition to excite in an audience a
corresponding state of tension. By sheer voodoo-practice it shows how
voodoo acts.
In “The Turn of the Screw”--which stands alone among tales of the
supernatural in maintaining the ghostliness of its ghosts not only
through a dozen pages but through close on two hundred--the economy
of horror is carried to its last degree. What is the reader made to
expect? Always--all through the book--that somewhere in that hushed
house of doom the poor little governess will come on one of the two
figures of evil with whom she is fighting for the souls of her charges.
It will be either Peter Quint or the “horror of horrors,” Miss Jessel;
no diversion from this one dread is ever attempted or expected. It
is true that the tale is strongly held together by its profound, its
appalling moral significance; but most readers will admit that, long
before they are conscious of this, fear, simple shivering animal fear,
has them by the throat; which, after all, is what writers of ghost
stories are after.