Part 10 (1/2)
”When the reader lays down this strange story, perhaps he will detect, through all the haze of Romance, the outlines of these images suggested to his reason: Firstly, the image of sensuous, soulless Nature, such as the Materialist had conceived it. Secondly, the image of Intellect, obstinately separating all its inquiries from the belief in the spiritual essence and destiny of man, and incurring all kinds of perplexity and resorting to all kinds of visionary speculation before it settles at last into the simple faith which unites the philosopher and the infant. And thirdly, the image of the erring but pure-thoughted Visionary, seeking overmuch on this earth to separate soul from mind, till innocence itself is led astray by a phantom and reason is lost in the s.p.a.ce between earth and the stars.”
These three conceptions are embodied in Margrave, who has renewed his life far beyond the limits allotted to man; a young doctor, Fenwick, who represents the intellectual divorced from the spiritual; and Lilian Ashleigh, a clairvoyante girl, who typifies the spiritual divorced from the intellectual. The interest of the story turns on the struggle of Fenwick to gain his bride, and to wrest her from the influence of Margrave. The plot, intricately tangled, is unravelled with patient skill. In spite of the wearisome explanations of Dr. Faber, who is lucid but verbose, there is a fascination about the book which compels us to go forward.
In Lytton's hands the barbarity of the novel of terror has been gracefully smoothed away. It has, indeed, become almost unrecognisably refined and elevated, and something of its native vigour is lost in the process. Amid all the amenities of Vrilya and Intelligences, we miss the vulgar blatancy of an honest, old-fas.h.i.+oned spectre.
CHAPTER X - SHORT TALES OF TERROR.
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 ill.u.s.trations and by double-barrelled t.i.tles. 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 b.l.o.o.d.y 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, ent.i.tled _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 Gottingen_, a ”True Story Very Strange and Very Pitiful”; _The Wood Demon; The Wehr-Wolf; The s.e.xton 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 _Pa.s.sages from the Diary of a Late Physician_,[128] as a solemn warning against over-indulgence in fict.i.tious 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. Sh.e.l.ley, 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 n.o.ble 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 p.r.i.c.ks, And the death-watch ticks, And the bar has a flag of s.m.u.t,-- And the cat's in the water-b.u.t.t-- 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 editors.h.i.+p of d.i.c.kens, 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-fas.h.i.+oned 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, d.a.m.ned 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 rea.s.sured.
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 pa.s.sed 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 s.h.i.+ps_, in which are embodied the traditions a.s.sociated with two black and decayed hulls, half immersed in the quicksands of the Solway. Lewis would have dragged us on board s.h.i.+p, and would have shown us the devil in his own person. Cunningham wisely keeps ash.o.r.e, 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 a.s.sures 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 princ.i.p.al 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 d.i.c.kens 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.