Such novels as Maturin's Family of Montorio, though "full of sound and fury," fail piteously to vibrate the chords of terror, which had trembled beneath Mrs. Radcliffe's gentle fingers. The instrument, smitten forcibly, repeatedly, desperately, resounds not with the answering note expected, but with an ugly, metallic jangle. Melmoth the Wanderer, Maturin's extraordinary masterpiece, was to prove—as late as 1820—that there were chords in the orchestra of horror as yet unsounded; but in 1816, when Mary Shelley and her companions set themselves to compose supernatural stories, it was wise to dispense with the shrieking chorus of malevolent abbesses, diabolical monks, intriguing marquises, Wandering Jews or bleeding spectres, who had been so grievously overworked in previous performances. Dr. Polidori's skull-headed lady, Byron's vampire-gentleman, Mrs. Shelley's man-created monster—a grotesque and gruesome trio—had at least the attraction of novelty. It is indeed remarkable that so young and inexperienced a writer as Mary Shelley, who was only nineteen when she wrote Frankenstein, should betray so slight a dependence on her predecessors. It is evident from the records of her reading that the novel of terror in all its guises was familiar to her. She had beheld the majestic horror of the halls of Eblis; she had threaded her way through Mrs. Radcliffe's artfully constructed Gothic castles; she had braved the terrors of the German Ritter-, Raeuber- und Schauer-Romane; she had assisted, fearful, at Lewis's midnight diablerie; she had patiently unravelled the "mystery" novels of Godwin and of Charles Brockden Brown.[117] Yet, despite this intimate knowledge of the terrible and supernatural in fiction, Mrs. Shelley's theme and her way of handling it are completely her own. In an "acute mental vision," as real as the visions of Blake and of Shelley, she beheld her monster and the "pale student of unhallowed arts" who had created him, and then set herself to reproduce the thrill of horror inspired by her waking dream. Frankenstein has, indeed, been compared to Godwin's St. Leon, but the resemblance is so vague and superficial, and Frankenstein so immeasurably superior, that Mrs. Shelley's debt to her father is negligible. St. Leon accepts the gift of immortality, Frankenstein creates a new life, and in both novels the main interest lies in tracing the effect of the experiment on the soul of the man, who has pursued scientific inquiry beyond legitimate limits. But apart from this, there is little resemblance. Godwin chose the supernatural, because it chanced to be popular, and laboriously built up a cumbrous edifice, completing it by a sheer effort of will-power. His daughter, with an imagination naturally more attuned to the gruesome and fantastic, writes, when once she has wound her way into the heart of the story, in a mood of breathless excitement that drives the reader forward with feverish apprehension.

The name of Mrs. Shelley's Frankenstein is far-famed; but the book itself, overshadowed perhaps by its literary associations, seems to have withdrawn into the vast library of famous works that are more often mentioned than read. The very fact that the name is often bestowed on the monster instead of his creator seems to suggest that many are content to accept Mrs. Shelley's "hideous phantom" on hearsay evidence rather than encounter for themselves the terrors of his presence. The story deserves a happier fate, for, if it be read in the spirit of willing surrender that a theme so impossible demands, it has still power momentarily "to make the reader dread to look round, to curdle the blood and to quicken the beatings of the heart." The record of the composition of Frankenstein has been so often reiterated that it is probably better known than the tale itself. In the summer of 1816—when the Shelleys were the neighbours of Byron near Lake Geneva—Byron, Shelley, Mary Shelley and Dr. Polidori, after reading some volumes of ghost stories[118] and discussing the supernatural and its manifestations, each agreed to write a ghost story. It has been asserted that an interest in spectres was stimulated by a visit from "Monk" Lewis, but we have evidence that Mrs. Shelley was already writing her story in June,[119] and that Lewis did not arrive at the Villa Diodati till August 14th.[120] The conversation with him about ghosts took place four days later. Shelley's story, based on the experiences of his early youth, was never completed. Byron's fragment formed the basis of Dr. Polidori's Vampyre. Dr. Polidori states that his supernatural novel, Ernestus Berchtold, was begun at this time; but the skull-headed lady, alluded to by Mary Shelley as figuring in Polidori's story, is disappointingly absent. It was an argument between Byron and Shelley about Erasmus Darwin's theories that brought before Mary Shelley's sleepless eyes the vision of the monster miraculously infused by its creator with the spark of life. Frankenstein was begun immediately, completed in May, 1817, and published in 1818.

Mrs. Shelley has been censured for setting her tale in a clumsy framework, but she tells us in her preface that she began with the words: "It was on a dreary night of November." This sentence now stands at the opening of Chapter IV., where the plot begins to grip our imagination; and it seems not unfair to assume that the introductory letters and the first four chapters, which contain a tedious and largely unnecessary account of Frankenstein's early life, were written in deference to Shelley's plea that the idea should be developed at greater length, and did not form part of her original plan. The uninteresting student, Robert Walton, to whom Frankenstein, discovered dying among icebergs, tells his story, is obviously an afterthought. If Mrs. Shelley had abandoned the awkward contrivance of putting the narrative into the form of a dying man's confession, reported verbatim in a series of letters, and had opened her story, as she apparently intended, at the point where Frankenstein, after weary years of research, succeeds in creating a living being, her novel would have gained in force and intensity. From that moment it holds us fascinated. It is true that the tension relaxes from time to time, that the monster's strange education and the Godwinian precepts that fall so incongruously from his lips tend to excite our mirth, but, though we are mildly amused, we are no longer merely bored. Even the protracted descriptions of domestic life assume a new and deeper meaning, for the shadow of the monster broods over them. One by one those whom Frankenstein loves fall victims to the malice of the being he has endowed with life. Unceasingly and unrelentingly the loathsome creature dogs our imagination, more awful when he lurks unseen than when he stands actually before us. With hideous malignity he slays Frankenstein's young brother, and by a fiendish device causes Justine, an innocent girl, to be executed for the crime. Yet ere long our sympathy, which has hitherto been entirely with Frankenstein, is unexpectedly diverted to the monster who, it would seem, is wicked only because he is eternally divorced from human society. Amid the magnificent scenery of the Valley of Chamounix he appears before his creator, and tells the story of his wretched life, pleading: "Everywhere I see bliss from which I alone am irrevocably excluded. I was benevolent and good; misery made me a fiend. Make me happy, and I shall again be virtuous."

He describes how his physical ugliness repels human beings, who fail to realise his benevolent intentions. A father snatches from his arms the child he has rescued from death; the virtuous family, whom he admires and would fain serve, flee affrighted from his presence. To educate the monster, so that his thoughts and emotions may become articulate, and, incidentally, to accentuate his isolation from society, Mrs. Shelley inserts a complicated story about an Arabian girl, Sofie, whose lover teaches her to read from Plutarch's Lives, Volney's Ruins of Empire, The Sorrows of Werther, and Paradise Lost. The monster overhears the lessons, and ponders on this unique library, but, as he pleads his own cause the more eloquently because he knows Satan's passionate outbursts of defiance and self-pity, who would cavil at the method by which he is made to acquire his knowledge? "The cold stars shone in mockery, and the bare trees waved their branches above me; now and then the sweet voice of a bird burst forth amidst the universal stillness. All save I were at rest or in enjoyment. I, like the arch fiend, bore a hell within me." And later, near the close of the book: "The fallen angel becomes a malignant devil. Yet even that enemy of God and man had friends and associates in his desolation; I am alone," His fate reminds us of that of Alastor, the Spirit of Solitude, who:

"Over the world wanders for ever Lone as incarnate death."

After the long and moving recital of his woes, even the obdurate Frankenstein cannot resist the justice of his demand for a partner like himself. Yet when the student recoils with horror from his half-accomplished task and sees the creature maliciously peering through the window, our hatred leaps to life once more and burns fiercely as the monster adds to his crimes the murder of Clerval, Frankenstein's dearest friend, and of Elizabeth on her wedding night. We follow with shuddering anticipation the long pursuit of the monster, expectant of a last, fearful encounter which shall decide the fate of the demon and his maker. Amid the region of eternal ice, Frankenstein catches sight of him; but fails to reach him. At last, beside the body of his last victim—Frankenstein himself—the creature is filled with remorse at the "frightful catalogue" of his sins, and makes a final bid for our sympathy in the farewell speech to Walton, before climbing on an ice-raft to be "borne away by the waves and lost in darkness and distance."

Like Alastor, Frankenstein was a plea for human sympathy, and was, according to Shelley's preface, intended "to exhibit the amiableness of domestic affection and the excellence of universal virtue." The monster has the perception and desire of goodness, but, by the circumstances of his abnormal existence, is delivered over to evil. It is this dual nature that prevents him from being a mere automaton. The monster indeed is far more real than the shadowy beings whom he pursues. Frankenstein is less an individual than a type, and only interests us through the emotions which his conflict with the monster arouses. Clerval, Elizabeth and Frankenstein's relatives are passive sufferers whose psychology does not concern us. Mrs. Shelley rightly lavishes her skill on the central figure of the book, and succeeds, as effectually as Frankenstein himself, in infusing into him the spark of life. Mrs. Shelley's aim is to "awaken thrilling horror," and, incidentally, to "exhibit the excellence of domestic virtue," and for her purpose the demon is of paramount importance. The involved, complex plot of a novel seemed to pass beyond Mrs. Shelley's control. A short tale she could handle successfully, and Shelley was unwise in inciting her to expand Frankenstein into a long narrative. So long as she is completely carried away by her subject Mrs. Shelley writes clearly, but when she pauses to regard the progress of her story dispassionately, she seems to be overwhelmed by the wealth of her resources and to have no power of selecting the relevant details. The laborious introductory letters, the meticulous record of Frankenstein's education, the story of Felix and Sofie, the description of the tour through England before the creation of the second monster is attempted, are all connected with the main theme by very frail links and serve to distract our attention in an irritating fashion from what really interests us. In the novel of mystery a tantalising delay may be singularly effective. In a novel which depends chiefly for its effect on sheer horror, delays are merely dangerous. By resting her terrors on a pseudo-scientific basis and by placing her story in a definite locality, Mrs. Shelley waives her right to an entire suspension of disbelief. If it be reduced to its lowest terms, the plot of Frankenstein, with its bewildering confusion of the prosaic and the fantastic, sounds as crude, disjointed and inconsequent as that of a nightmare. Mrs. Shelley's timid hesitation between imagination and reality, her attempt to reconcile incompatible things and to place a creature who belongs to no earthly land in familiar surroundings, prevents Frankenstein from being a wholly satisfactory and alarming novel of terror. She loves the fantastic, but she also fears it. She is weighted down by commonsense, and so flutters instead of soaring, unwilling to trust herself far from the material world. But the fact that she was able to vivify her grotesque skeleton of a plot with some degree of success is no mean tribute to her gifts. The energy and vigour of her style, her complete and serious absorption in her subject, carry us safely over many an absurdity. It is only in the duller stretches of the narrative, when her heart is not in her work, that her language becomes vague, indeterminate and blurred, and that she muffles her thoughts in words like "ascertain," "commencement," "peruse," "diffuse," instead of using their simpler Saxon equivalents. Stirred by the excitement of the events she describes, she can write forcibly in simple, direct language. She often frames short, hurried sentences such as a man would naturally utter when breathless with terror or with recollections of terror. The final impression that Frankenstein leaves with us is not easy to define, because the book is so uneven in quality. It is obviously the shapeless work of an immature writer who has had no experience in evolving a plot. Sometimes it is genuinely moving and impressive, but it continually falls abruptly and ludicrously short of its aim. Yet when all its faults have been laid bare, the fact remains that few readers would abandon the story half-way through. Mrs. Shelley is so thoroughly engrossed in her theme that she impels her readers onward, even though they may think but meanly of her story as a work of art.

Mrs. Shelley's second novel, Valperga, or the Life and Adventures of Castruccio, Prince of Lucca, published in 1823, was a work on which she bestowed much care and labour, but the result proves that she writes best when the urgency of her imagination leaves her no leisure either to display her learning or adorn her style. She herself calls Valperga a "child of mighty slow growth," and Shelley adds that it was "raked out of fifty old books." Mrs. Shelley, always an industrious student, made a conscientious survey of original sources before fashioning her story of mediaeval Italy, and she is hampered by the exuberance of her knowledge. The novel is not a romance of terror; but Castruccio, though his character is sketched from authentic documents, seems towards the end of the story to resemble the picturesque villain who numbered among his ancestry Milton's Satan. He has "a majestic figure and a countenance beautiful but sad, and tarnished by the expression of pride that animated it." Beatrice, the gifted prophetess who falls deep in love with Castruccio, ends her days in the dungeons of the Inquisition. Mrs. Shelley's aim, however, is not to arouse fear, but to trace the gradual deterioration of Castruccio's character from an open-hearted youth to a crafty tyrant. The blunt remarks of Godwin, who revised the manuscript, are not unjust, but fall with an ill grace from the pen of the author of St. Leon: "It appears in reading, that the first rule you prescribed was: 'I will let it be long.' It contains the quantity of four volumes of Waverley. No hard blow was ever hit with a woodsaw."[121]

In The Last Man, which appeared in 1825, Mrs. Shelley attempted a stupendous theme, no less then a picture of the devastation of the human race by plague and pestilence. She casts her imagination forward into the twenty-first century, when the last king of England has abdicated the throne and a republic is established. Very wisely, she narrows the interest by concentrating on the pathetic fate of a group of friends who are among the last survivors, and the story becomes an idealised record of her own sufferings. The description of the loneliness of the bereft has a personal note, and reminds us of her journal, where she expresses the sorrow of being herself the last survivor, and of feeling like a "cloud from which the light of sunset has passed."[122] Raymond, who dies in an attempt to place the standard of Greece in Stamboul, is a portrait of Byron; and Adrian, the late king's son, who finally becomes Protector, is clearly modelled on Shelley. Yet in spite of these personal reminiscences, their characters lack distinctness. Idris, Clara and Perdita are faintly etched, but Evadne, the Greek artist, who cherishes a passion for Raymond, and dies fighting against the Turks, has more colour and body than the other women, though she is somewhat theatrical. Mrs. Shelley conveys emotion more faithfully than character, and the overwrought sensibilities and dark forebodings of the diminished party of survivors who leave England to distract their minds by foreign travel are artfully suggested. The leaping, gesticulating figure, whom their jaded nerves and morbid fancy transform into a phantom, is a delirious ballet-dancer; and the Black Spectre, mistaken for Death Incarnate, proves only to be a plague-stricken noble, who lurks near the party for the sake of human society. These "reasonable" solutions of the apparently supernatural remind us of Mrs. Radcliffe's method, and Mrs. Shelley shows keen psychological insight in her delineation of the state of mind which readily conjures up imaginary terrors. When Lionel Verney is left alone in the universe, her power seems to flag, and instead of the final crescendo of horror, which we expect at the end of the book, we are left with an ineffective picture of the last man in Rome in 2005 deciding to explore the countries he has not yet viewed. As he wanders amid the ruins he recalls not only "the buried Caesars," but also the monk in The Italian, of whom he had read in childhood—a striking proof of Mrs. Shelley's faith in the permanence of Mrs. Radcliffe's fame.

Though the style of The Last Man is often tediously prolix and is disfigured by patches of florid rhetoric and by inappropriate similes scattered broadcast, occasional passages of wonderful beauty recall Shelley's imagery; and, in conveying the pathos of loneliness, personal feeling lends nobility and eloquence to her style. With so ambitious a subject, it was natural that she should only partially succeed in carrying her readers with her. Though there are oases, the story is a somewhat tedious and dreary stretch of narrative that can only be traversed with considerable effort.

Mrs. Shelley's later works—Perkin Warbeck (1830), a historical novel; Lodore (1835), which describes the early life of Shelley and Harriet; Falkner (1837), which was influenced by Caleb Williams—do not belong to the history of the novel of terror; but some of her short tales, contributed to periodicals and collected in 1891, have gruesome and supernatural themes. A Tale of the Passions, or the Death of Despina[123] a story based on the struggles of the Guelphs and the Ghibellines, contains a perfect specimen of the traditional villain of the novel of terror:

"Every feature of his countenance spoke of the struggle of passions and the terrible egotism of one who would sacrifice himself to the establishment of his will: his black eyebrows were scattered, his grey eyes deep-set and scowling, his look at once stern and haggard. A smile seemed never to have disturbed the settled scorn which his lips expressed; his high forehead was marked by a thousand contradictory lines."

This terrific personage spends the last years of his life in orthodox fashion as an austere saint in a monastery.

The Mortal Immortal, a variation on the theme of St. Leon, is the record of a pupil of Cornelius Agrippa, who drank half of the elixir his master had compounded in the belief that it was a potion to destroy love. It is written on his three hundred and twenty-third birthday. Transformation, like Frankenstein, dwells on the pathos of ugliness and deformity, but the subject is treated rather in the spirit of an eastern fairy tale than in that of a novel of terror. The dwarf, in return for a chest of treasure, borrows a beautiful body, and, thus disguised, wins the love of Juliet, and all ends happily. Mrs. Shelley's short stories[124] reveal a stronger sense of proportion than her novels, and are written in a more graceful, fluent style than the books on which she expended great labour.

The literary history of Byron's fragmentary novel and of Polidori's short story, The Vampyre, is somewhat tangled, but the solution is to be found in the diary of Dr. John William Polidori, edited and elucidated by William Michael Rossetti. The day after that on which Polidori states that all the competitors, except himself, had begun their stories, he records the simple fact: "Began my ghost-story after tea." He gives no hint as to the subject of his tale, but Mrs. Shelley tells us that Polidori had some idea of a "skull-headed lady, who was so punished for looking through a key-hole, and who was finally buried in the tomb of the Capulets." In the introduction to Ernestus Berchtold, or the Modern OEdipus, he states definitely:

"The tale here presented to the public is one I began at Coligny, when Frankenstein was planned, and when a noble author, having determined to descend from his lofty range, gave up a few hours to a tale of terror, and wrote the fragment published at the end of Mazeppa."

As no skull-headed lady appears in Ernestus Berchtold, it is probable that her career was only suggested to the rest of the party as an entrancing possibility, and never actually took shape. This theme would certainly have proved more frightful and possibly more interesting than the one which Polidori eventually adopted in Ernestus Berchtold, a rambling, leisurely account of the adventures of a Swiss soldier, whose wife afterwards proves to be his own sister. Their father has accepted from a malignant spirit the gift of wealth, but each time that the gift is bestowed some great affliction follows. This secret is not divulged until we are quite near the close of the story, and have waited so long that our interest has begun to wane. Ernestus Berchtold is, as a matter of fact, not a novel of terror at all. The supernatural agency, which should have been interlaced with the domestic story from beginning to end, is only dragged in because it was one of the conditions of the competition, as indeed Polidori frankly confesses in his introduction:

"Many readers will think that the same moral and the same colouring might have been given to characters acting under the ordinary agencies of life. I believe it, but I agreed to write a supernatural tale, and that does not allow of a completely everyday narrative."

The candour of this admission forestalls criticism. Strangely enough, Polidori adds that he has thrown the "superior agency" into the background, because "a tale that rests upon improbabilities must generally disgust a rational mind." With so decided a preference for the reasonable and probable, it is remarkable that Polidori should treat the vampire legend successfully. It has frequently been stated that Byron's story was completed by Polidori; but this assertion is not precisely accurate. Polidori made no use of the actual fragment, but based his story upon the groundwork on which the fragment was to have been continued. Byron's story describes the arrival of two friends amid the ruins of Ephesus. One of them, Darvell, who, like most of Byron's heroes, is enshrouded in mystery, and is a prey to some cureless disquiet, falls ill and dies. Before his death he demands that his companion shall on a certain day throw a ring into the salt springs that run into the bay of Eleusis. If we may trust Polidori's account, Byron intended that the survivor, on his return to England, should be startled to behold his companion moving in society, and making love to his sister. On this foundation Polidori constructed The Vampyre. The story opens with the description of a nobleman, Lord Ruthven, whose appearance and character excite great interest in London society. His face is remarkable for its deadly pallor, and he has a "dead, grey eye, which, fixing upon the object's face, did not seem to penetrate and at one glance to pierce through to the inward workings of the heart, but fell upon the cheek with a leaden ray that laid (sic) upon the skin it could not pass." A young man named Aubrey, who arrives in London about the same time, becomes deeply interested in the study of Ruthven's character. When he joins him on a tour abroad he discovers that his companion takes a fiendish delight in ruining the innocent at the gaming-table; and, after receiving a warning of Ruthven's reputation, decides to leave him, but to continue to watch him closely. He succeeds in foiling his designs against a young Italian girl in Rome. Aubrey next travels to Greece, where he falls in love with Ianthe. One day, in spite of warnings that the place he purposes to visit is frequented by vampires, Aubrey sets off on an excursion. Benighted in a lonely forest, he hears the terror-stricken cries of a woman in a hovel, and, on attempting to rescue her, finds himself in the grasp of a being of superhuman strength, who cries: "Again baffled!" When light dawns, Aubrey makes the terrible discovery that Ianthe has become the prey of a vampire. He carries away from the spot a blood-stained dagger. In the delirious fever, which ensues on his discovery of Ianthe's fate, Aubrey is nursed by Lord Ruthven. While they are travelling in Greece, Ruthven is shot in the shoulder by a robber, and, before dying, exacts from Aubrey a solemn oath that he will not reveal for a year and a day what he knows of his crimes or death. In accordance with a promise made to Ruthven, his body is conveyed to a mountain to be exposed to the rays of the moon. The corpse disappears. Among Ruthven's possessions Aubrey finds a sheath, into which the dagger he has found in the hovel fits exactly. On passing through Rome he learns that the girl he had once saved from Ruthven has vanished. When he returns to London, Aubrey is horrified to behold the figure of Lord Ruthven almost on the very spot where he had first seen him. He dare not break his oath, and soon becomes almost demented. The news of his sister's marriage seems to rouse him momentarily from his lethargy, and when he discovers that Ruthven is to be the bridegroom he urges her to delay the marriage. His warnings are disregarded, and the ceremony takes place. Aubrey relates to his sister's guardians all that he knows of Ruthven, but it is too late. Ruthven has disappeared, and she has "glutted the thirst of a vampyre."

Polidori's manner of telling the story is curiously matter of fact and restrained. He relates the incidents as they occur, and leaves the reader to form his own conclusions. If Lewis had been handling the theme he would have wallowed in gory details, and would have expatiated on the agonies of his victims. Polidori wisely keeps his story in a quiet key, depending for his effect on the terror of the bare facts. He realises that he is on the verge of the unspeakable.

Polidori's story set a fashion in vampires, who appear as characters in fiction all through the nineteenth century. A writer in the Dublin University Magazine tells of a vampire who plays an admirable game of whist! There is an "explained" vampire in one of George Macdonald's stories, Adela Cathcart. The prince of vampires is, however, Bram Stoker's Dracula, round whom centres a story of absorbing interest.

De Quincey, who might have selected from the novel of terror many admirable illustrations for his essay on Murder, Considered as one of the Fine Arts, and who seems to have been attracted by the German type of horrific story, shows some facility in sensational fiction. In Klosterheim, a one-volumed novel published in 1832, the interest circles round the machinations of an elusive, ubiquitous "Masque," eventually revealed to be none other than the son of the late Landgrave, who, like many a man before him in the tale of terror, has been done to death by a usurper. Disappearances through trap-doors, and escapes down subterranean passages are effected with a dexterity suggestive of Mrs. Radcliffe's methods; and the inexplicable murders, with the exception of that of an aged seneschal accidentally betrayed, are not real. In certain of his moods and habits, the Masque bears a likeness to Lewis's "Bravo," but the setting of De Quincey's story is very different. The adventures of the Masque and of the Lady Pauline are cast in Germany amid the confusion of the Thirty Years' War. In The Household Wreck, published in Blackwood's Magazine, January 1838, De Quincey shows his power of conveying a sense of foreboding, that anticipation of horror which is often more harrowing than the reality. Another tale of terror, The Avenger, published in the same year, describes a series of bloodcurdling murders which baffle the skill of the police, but which eventually prove to have been committed by a son to avenge dishonour done to his Jewish mother. For a collection of Popular Tales and Romances of the Northern Nations, published in 1823, De Quincey translated Der Freischuetz from the German of J.A. Apel, under the title of The Fatal Marksman. By means of ill-gotten magic bullets the marksman wins his bride, but by one of those little ironies in which the devil delights to indulge, she is slain on the wedding-day by a bullet, which is aimed straight, but goes askew. In The Dice, another short story from the German, De Quincey once again exploits the old theme of a bargain with the devil.

De Quincey's contributions to the tale of terror shrink into unimportance beside the rest of his work, and are not in themselves remarkable. They are of interest as showing the widespread and long-enduring vogue of the species. It is noteworthy how many writers, whose main business lay elsewhere, have found time to make erratic excursions into the realms of the supernatural.

So late as 1834—more than a decade after the appearance of Melmoth—Harrison Ainsworth, whose imagination was steeped in terror, sought once more to revive the "feeble and fluttering pulses of old Romance." Among his earliest experiments were tales obviously fashioned in the Gothic manner. His Imperishable One, the hero of a tale first published in the European Magazine for 1822, bemoans the burden of immortality in the listless tones of Godwin's St. Leon, and is tempted by the fallen angel in the self-same guise in which he appeared to Lewis's notorious monk. In The Test of Affection (European Magazine, 1822) a wealthy man avails himself of Mrs. Radcliffe's supernatural trickery to test the loyalty of his friends, whom he succeeds in alarming by noises and a skeleton apparition. In Arliss's Pocket Magazine (1822) there appeared The Spectre Bride; and in the European Magazine (1823) Ainsworth attempted a theme that would have attracted Poe in The Half Hangit. The Boeotian for 1824 contained A Tale of Mystery, and the Literary Souvenir for 1825 The Fortress of Saguntum, a story in the style of Lewis. Ainsworth's first novel, Rookwood (1834), was inspired by a visit to Cuckfield Place, an old manor house which had reminded Shelley of "bits of Mrs. Radcliffe":

"Wishing to describe somewhat minutely the trim gardens, the picturesque domains, the rook-haunted groves, the gloomy chambers and gloomier galleries of an ancient hall with which I was acquainted, I resolved to attempt a story in the bygone style of Mrs. Radcliffe, substituting an old English squire, an old manorial residence and an old English highwayman for the Italian marchise, the castle and the brigand of that great mistress of romance... The attempt has succeeded beyond my most sanguine expectation. Romance, if I am not mistaken, is destined shortly to undergo an important change. Modified by the German and French writers—Hoffmann, Tieck, Victor Hugo, Alexander Dumas, Balzac and Paul Lacroix—the structure commenced in our land by Horace Walpole, 'Monk' Lewis, Mrs. Radcliffe and Maturin, but, left imperfect and inharmonious, requires, now that the rubbish which choked up its approach is removed, only the hand of the skilful architect to its entire renovation and perfection."

In Rookwood, Ainsworth disdains Mrs. Radcliffe's reasonable elucidations of the supernatural, and introduces spectres whose existence it would be impossible to deny. Once, however, a supposed ghost becomes substantial, and proves to be none other than a human being called Jack Palmer. The sexton, Luke Bradley, alias Alan Rookwood, has inherited two of the Wanderer's traits—the fear-impelling eyes of intolerable lustre, and the habit of indulging in wild, screaming laughter on the most inauspicious occasions.

Gothic properties are scattered with indiscriminate extravagance—skeleton hands, suddenly extinguished candles, sliding panels, sepulchral vaults. The plot of Rookwood is too complicated and too overcrowded with incident to keep our attention. The terrors are so unremitting that they fail to strike home. The only part of the book which holds us enthralled is the famous description of Dick Turpin's ride to York. Here we forget Ainsworth's slip-shod style in the excitement of the chase. In his later novels Ainsworth abandoned the manner of Mrs. Radcliffe, but did not fail to make use of the motive of terror and mystery. The scenes of horror which he strove to convey in words were often more admirably depicted in the illustrations of Cruikshank. The sorcerer's sabbath in Crichton, the historical scenes of horror in The Tower of London, the masque of the Dance of Death in Old St. Paul's, the appearance of Herne the Hunter, heralded by phosphoric lights, in Windsor Castle, the terrible orgies of The Lancashire Witches, are described with more striking effect because of Ainsworth's early reading in the school of terror. In Auriol, which was first published in Ainsworth's Magazine (1844-5) under the title Revelations of London, was issued in 1845 as a gratuitous supplement to the New Monthly, and greeted with derision,[125] Ainsworth handled once again the theme that fascinated Lytton. The Prologue (1599) describes the death of Dr. Lamb, whose elixir is seized by his great-grandson. In 1830 London is haunted by a stranger, who involves Auriol in wildly fantastic and frightful adventures. The book closes in Dr. Lamb's laboratory; the intervening scenes are but dream imagery. Phiz's sketch of the Ruined House is the most lasting memory left by the book.

Captain Marryat, whose mind was well stored with sailors' yarns, retells in The Phantom Ship (1839) the old legend of the Flying Dutchman. At one time the doomed vessel is an unsubstantial vision, which can pass clean through the Utrecht; at another she is a real craft, whose deck can be boarded by mortal men. The one-eyed pilot, Schriften, with his malignant hatred of the hero, Philip, is a terrifying figure. The story is embroidered by the invention of a wife of Arab extraction, who is constantly attempting to recall the half-forgotten magical arts which her mother had practised. Marryat makes an opportunity in the history of Krantz, the second mate of the Vrou Katerina, to introduce the Scandinavian legend of the werewolf, which is related with grisly detail.

The novel of terror, with all its faults, had seldom been guilty of demanding intellectual strain or of overburdening itself with erudition. It was the dignified task of Lord Lytton to rationalise and elevate the novel of terror, to evolve the "man of reason" from the "child of nature." Although time has tarnished the brilliance of his reputation, George Edward Bulwer was an imposing figure in the history of nineteenth century fiction. Throughout his life, in spite of political and social distractions and of matrimonial disaster, he continued to engage with unwearying industry in literary work. He was not a man of genius in whom the creative impulse found its own expression, but a versatile and accomplished gentleman who could direct his talents into any channel he pleased. Essays, translations, verses, plays, novels flowed from his pen in rapid succession, and he won his meed of applause and fame, as well as his share of execration and derision, in his own lifetime. Quick to discern the popular taste of the hour, and eager to gratify it, Lytton, with the resourceful agility of a lightning impersonator, turns in his novels from Wertherism to dandyism, from criminal psychology to fairy folk-lore, from historical romance to domestic romance, from pseudo-philosophic occultism to pseudo-scientific fantasy. He ranges at will in the past, the present or the future, consorting indifferently with impalpable wraiths, Vrilya or mysterious Sages. It is to his credit that this unusual gift of adaptability does not result in incompetency. Though he attempts a variety of manners, it must in justice be acknowledged that he does most of them well. He constructs his plots with laborious art, and pays a deliberate, if sometimes misguided, attention to style. When he fails, it is less from lack of effort than from over-elaboration and excess of zeal.

Bulwer Lytton's predilection for the supernatural was neither a theatrical pose nor a passing folly excited by the fashionable craze for psychical research, but a genuine and enduring interest, inherited, it may be, from his ancestor, the learned, eccentric savant, Dr. Bulwer, who studied the Black Art and dabbled in astrology and palmistry. He was a member of the society of Rosicrucians, and, to quote the words of his grandson, "he certainly did not study magic for the sake of writing about it, still less did he write about it, without having studied it, merely for the sake of making his readers' flesh creep." From his early years Lytton seems to have been keenly interested in supernatural manifestations. He was inspired by the deserted rooms at the end of a long gallery in Knebworth House to set down the story of the ghost, Jenny Spinner, who was said to haunt them; and the concealed chamber in The Haunted and the Haunters may have been a revived memory of the trap-door down which Lytton as a boy had "peeped with bristling hair into the shadowy abysses of hellhole." In Glenallan,[126] an early fragment, we find promising material for a tale of mystery—a villain with a "strange and sinister expression," a boy who, like the youthful Shelley, steals forth by night to graveyards, hoping to attain to fearful secrets, and an aged servant, a living chronicle of horrors, who relates the doings of an Irish wizard, Morshed Tyrone, of such awful power that the spirits of the earth, air and ocean ministered to him. In Godolphin (1833) there is an astrologer with the furrowed brow and awful eye, so common among the people of terror, and a strangely gifted girl, Lucilla, who turns soothsayer. But when Bulwer Lytton attempts a supernatural romance he leaves far behind him the sphere of Gothic terrors and soars into rarefied, exalted regions that inspire awe rather than horror. The Dweller of the Threshold in Zanoni is no red-cloaked, demoniacal figure springing from a trap-door with a deafening clap of thunder, but a "Colossal Shadow" brooding over the crater of Vesuvius.

The romance, Zanoni (1842), which Lytton considered the greatest of his works and which Carlyle praised with what now seems extravagant fervour, was based on an earlier sketch, Zicci (1838), and embodies a complicated theory which he had conceived several years earlier after reading some mediaeval treatises on astrology and the occult sciences. While his mind was occupied with these studies, the character of Mejnour and the main outlines of the story were inspired by a dream, which he related to his son. According to Lytton's theory, the air is peopled with Intelligences, of whom some are favourable, others hostile to man. The earth contains certain plants, which, rightly used, have power to arrest the decay of the human body, and to enable man, by quickening his physical senses and mental gifts, to perceive the aerial beings and to discover the secrets of nature. This supernatural knowledge is in possession of a brotherhood of whom two only, Mejnour and his pupil Zanoni, are in existence. The initiation involves the surrender of all violent passions and emotions, and the neophyte must be brought into contact with the powerful and malignant being called the Dweller of the Threshold:

"Whose form of giant mould No mortal eye can fixed behold,"

Mejnour and Zanoni are supposed to have been initiated—the former in old age, the latter in youth—more than five thousand years before the story opens. Thus Mejnour remains for ever a vigorous old man; while Zanoni, his pupil, enjoys perpetual youth. Mejnour is purely intellectual, and spends his life in contemplation; while Zanoni, though he must avoid love and friendship which are unknown to the passionless Intelligences, feels sympathy with human beings.

Zanoni, who spends his life in the pursuit of pleasure, after fifty centuries at last falls in love with Viola, an Italian opera-singer. Like Melmoth the Wanderer, Zanoni is reluctant to bind the woman he loves to his own fate. He tries to renounce Viola to an Englishman, Glyndon, who eventually chooses to relinquish love for the sake of achieving the unearthly knowledge of Mejnour. Glyndon, however, fails in the trial, and is consequently haunted by the horror of the Dweller of the Threshold. Meanwhile Zanoni is united to Viola; and because he has succumbed to the force of love, his peculiar powers begin to fail. He can no longer see the beautiful, aerial intelligence, Adon-Ai. To save from death Viola and the child who is born to them, Zanoni ere long yields to the Dweller of the Threshold his gift of communion with the inhabitants of heaven. Later Viola, who incidentally typifies Superstition deserting Faith, leaves Zanoni at the call of Glyndon, and in Paris, during the Reign of Terror, is doomed to die. Zanoni invokes the aid of the mysterious Intelligences, and his courage at length brings Adon-Ai again to his side. He wins a day's reprieve for Viola, and is executed in her stead. The death of Robespierre releases the prisoners, but Viola dies the next day.

The compact between Zanoni and the Dweller of the Threshold is a renovation of the time-worn legend of the bargain with an evil spirit, but Lytton transforms it almost beyond recognition. Zanoni is no criminal. He has attained his secrets through will-power, self-conquest, and the subordination of the flesh to the spirit, and he surrenders his gifts willingly for the sake of another. Both Mejnour and Zanoni disclaim miraculous powers, yet Zanoni is ready to stake his mistress on a cast of the dice, and can cause the death of three sanguinary marauders without stirring from the apartment in which he ordinarily pursues his chemical studies. From such incidents as these it would seem as if Lytton, for the actual craftsmanship of Zanoni, may have gleaned stray hints from the novel of terror; but the spirit and intention of the book are entirely different. Though Lytton expressly declares that his Zanoni is not an allegory, he confesses that it has symbolical meanings. Zanoni is apt to assume the superior pose of a lecturer elucidating an abstruse subject to an unenlightened audience. The impression of artifice that the book makes upon us is probably due to the fact that Lytton first conceived his theories and then created personages to illustrate them. His characters have no power to act of their own volition or to do unexpected things, but must move along the lines laid down for them.

In The Haunted and the Haunters, or The House and the Brain, which appeared in Blackwood's Magazine in 1859, Bulwer Lytton lays aside the sin of over-elaboration and ornamentation that so easily besets him, and relies for his effect on the impalpable horror of his story. The calm, business-like overture, the accurate description of the position of the house in a street off the north side of Oxford Street, the insistence on the matter-of-fact attitude of the watcher, and on the cool courage of his servant, the abject fear of the dog, who dies in agony, all tend to create an atmosphere of grave conviction. The eerie child's footfall, the moving of the furniture by unseen hands, the wrinkled fingers that clutch the old letters, the faintly outlined wraiths of the man and woman in old-world garb with ruffles, lace, and buckles, the hideous phantom of the drowned man, the dark figure with malignant serpent eyes, shadow forth the story hinted at in the letters found in an old drawer. Haunted by loathly presences, the watcher experiences a sensation of almost intolerable horror, but saves himself at the worst by opposing his will to that of the haunters. He rightly surmises that the evil influences, which seem in some way to emanate from a small empty room, really proceed from a living being. His interpretation is skilful and subtle enough not to detract from the simple horror of the tale. A miniature, certain volatile essences, a compass, a lodestone and other properties are found in a room below that which appeared to be the source of the horrors. It proves that the man, whose face is portrayed on the miniature has been able through the exertion of will-power to prolong his life for two centuries, and to preserve a curse in a magical vessel. He is actually interviewed by the watcher, to whom he unfolds his remarkable history, and whom he mesmerises into silence on the subject of his experiences in the haunted house for a space of three months.

Lytton realises that it is not only what is told but what is left unsaid that requires consideration in a ghost story. His reticence and the entire absence of any note of mockery or doubt secure the "willing suspension of disbelief" necessary to the appreciation of the apparently supernatural.

In A Strange Story, which, at Dickens's invitation, appeared in All the Year Round (1861-2), Bulwer Lytton further elaborates his theories of mesmerism and willpower. He explains his purpose in the Preface:

"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 space 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-fashioned 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 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 Goettingen, 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.



CHAPTER XI - AMERICAN TALES OF TERROR.

In 1797 we are told that in America "the dairymaid and hired man no longer weep over the ballad of the cruel stepmother, but amuse themselves into an agreeable terror with the haunted houses and hobgoblins of Mrs. Radcliffe."[130] In The Asylum, or Alonzo and Melissa, published in Ploughkeepsie in 1811, the Gothic castle, with its full equipment of "explained ghosts," has been safely conveyed across the Atlantic and set up in South Carolina; and The Sicilian Pirate or the Pillar of Mystery: a Terrific Romance, is, if we may trust its title, a hair-raising story, in the style of "Monk" Lewis. Charles Brockden Brown, one of the earliest American novelists, prides himself on "calling forth the passions and engaging the sympathy of the reader by means not hitherto employed by preceding authors," and speaks slightingly of "puerile superstitions and exploded manners, Gothic castles and chimeras."[131] Brown, who, like Shelley, was an enthusiastic admirer of Godwin, sought to embody the theories of Political Justice in romances describing American life. The works, which are said by Peacock to have taken deepest root in Shelley's mind and to have had the strongest influence in the formation of his character, are Schiller's Robbers, Goethe's Faust, and four novels—Wieland, Ormond, Edgar Huntly, and Mervyn—by C.B. Brown.[132]

Notwithstanding his lofty scorn for "Gothic castles and chimeras," even Brown himself condescended to take over from the despised Mrs. Radcliffe the device of introducing apparently supernatural occurrences which are ultimately traced to natural causes. Like Mrs. Radcliffe he is at the mercy of a conscience which forbids him to thrust upon his readers spectres in which he himself does not believe. He lacks Lewis's reckless mendacity. In Wieland mysterious voices are heard at intervals by various members of the family. To the hero, who has inherited a tendency to religious fanaticism, they seem to be of divine origin, and when a voice bids him sacrifice those who are dearest to him, he obeys implicitly. He slays his wife and children, and his sister only escapes death by accident. After this catastrophe it proves that the voices are produced by a skilled ventriloquist, Carwin, who has been admitted as an intimate friend of the family. Realising that this explanation may seem somewhat incredible, Brown seeks to make it appear more plausible by dwelling on Wieland's abnormal state of mind, which would render him peculiarly open to suggestion. Carwin's motive for thus persecuting the Wieland family with his accursed gift is never satisfactorily explained. His attitude is apparently that of an obtuse psychologist, who does not realise how serious the consequence of his experiments may be.

In Ormond and Arthur Mervyn, Brown describes the ravages of the yellow fever, of which he had personal experience in New York and Philadelphia. The hero of Ormond is a member of a society similar to that of the Illuminati, whose ceremonies and beliefs are set forth in Horrid Mysteries (1796). The heroine, Constantia Dudley, who was Shelley's ideal feminine character, is the embodiment of a theory, not a human being. She "walks always in the light of reason," and decides that "to marry in extreme youth would be a proof of pernicious and opprobrious temerity." The most memorable of Brown's novels is Edgar Huntly, which bears an obvious resemblance to Caleb Williams. Like Godwin, Brown is deeply interested in morbid psychology. He finds pleasure in tracing the workings of the brain in times of emotional stress. The description of a sleepwalker digging a grave—a picture which captivated Shelley's imagination—is the starting-point of the book. Edgar Huntly is impelled by curiosity to track him down. The somnambulist, Clithero, has, in self-defence, killed the twin-brother of his patron, Mrs, Lorimer, to whom he is deeply attached. Obsessed by the idea of the misery his deed will arouse in her mind, he attempts, in a moment of frenzy, to slay her. Believing that Mrs. Lorimer has died after hearing of the murder, Clithero flees to America. When he disappears from his home, Huntly resolves to follow him, and in his search loses himself amid wild and desolate country. He is attacked by Indians, and after frightful adventures at length reaches his home. Clithero, whom he believed dead, has been rescued. Mrs. Lorimer is still alive, and is married to a former lover. This news, however, fails to restore Clithero, who, in a fit of insanity, flings himself overboard when he is in a ship in charge of Huntly.

Brown's plots, which often open well, are spoilt by hasty, careless conclusions. It was his habit to write two or three novels simultaneously. He was beset by the problem that exercised even Scott's brain: "The devil of a difficulty is that one puzzles the skein in order to excite curiosity, and then cannot disentangle it for the satisfaction of the prying fiend they have raised."

Brown takes very little trouble over his denouements, but his characters leave so faint an impression on our minds that we are not deeply concerned in their fates. He is interested rather in conveying states of mind than in portraying character. We search the windings of Clithero's tormented conscience without realising him as an individual. The background of rugged scenery, though it is described in vague, turgid language, is more definite and distinct than the human figures. We feel that Brown is struggling through the obscurity of his Latinised diction to depict something he has actually seen. An air of dreadful solemnity hangs heavily over each story. Every being is in deadly earnest. Brown has Godwin's power of hypnotising us by his serious persistence, and of reducing us to a mood of awestruck gravity by the sonority of his pompous periods.

From the oppressive gloom of Brown's "novels with a purpose," it is a relief to turn to the irresponsible gaiety of "Geoffrey Crayon," whose tales of terror, published some twenty years later, are usually fashioned in a jovial spirit, only faintly tinged with awe and dread. In The Spectre Bridegroom, included in The Sketch Book (1820), the ghostly rider of Buerger's far-famed ballad is set amid new surroundings and pleasantly turned to ridicule. The "supernatural" wooer, who now and again arouses a genuine thrill of fear, is merely playing a practical joke on the princess by impersonating the dead bridegroom, and all ends happily. The story of the Headless Horseman of Sleepy Hollow is set against so picturesque a background that we are almost inclined to quarrel with those who laughed and said that Ichabod Crane was still alive, and that Bram Jones, the lovely Katrina's bridegroom, knew more of the spectre than he chose to tell. The drowsy atmosphere of Sleepy Hollow makes us see visions and dream dreams. The group of "Strange Stories by a Nervous Gentleman" in Tales of a Traveller (1824) prove that Washington Irving was well versed in ghostly lore. He, as well as any, can call spirits from the vasty deep, but, when they appear in answer to his summons, he can seldom refrain from receiving them in a jocose, irreverent mood, ill befitting the solemn, dignified spectre of a German legend. Even the highly qualified, irrepressibly loquacious ghost of Lewis Carroll's Phantasmagoria would have resented his genial familiarity. The strange stories are told at a hunting-party in a country-house, a cheerful, comfortable background for ghost stories. A hoary, one-eyed gentleman, "the whole side of whose head was dilapidated and seemed like the wing of a house shut up and haunted," sets the ball rolling with the old story of a spectre who glides into the room, wringing her hands, and is later identified, like Scott's Lady in the Sacque, by her resemblance to an ancestral portrait in the gallery. The "knowing" gentleman tells of a picture that winked in a startling and alarming fashion, and immediately explains away this phenomenon by the presence of a thief who has cut a spy-hole in the canvas. The Bold Dragoon is a spirited, riotous nightmare in which the furniture dances to the music of the bellows played by an uncanny musician in a long flannel gown and a nightcap. The Story of the German Student is in a different key. Here Irving strikes a note of real horror. The student falls in love with an imaginary lady, woven out of his dreams. He finds her in distress one night in the streets of Paris, takes her home, only to find her a corpse in the morning. A police-officer informs him that the lady was guillotined the day before, and the student discovers the truth of this statement when he unrolls a bandage and her head falls to the floor. The young man loses his reason, and is tormented by the belief that an evil spirit has reanimated a dead body to ensnare him. The morning after the recital of this gruesome story, the host reads aloud to his guests a manuscript entrusted to him, together with a portrait, by a young Italian. This youth, it chances, learnt painting with a monk, who, as a penance, drew pictures, or modelled waxen images, representing death and corruption, a detail which reminds us of what was concealed by the Black Veil in Udolpho. He later falls in love with his model, Bianca, who, during his absence abroad, marries his friend Filippo. In a jealous rage the young Italian slays his rival, and is unceasingly haunted by his phantom. Washington Irving has no desire to endure for long the atmosphere of mystery and horror his story has created, and quickly relieves the tension by a return to ordinary life. The host promises to show the picture, which is said to affect all beholders in an extraordinary fashion, to each of his guests in turn. They all profess themselves remarkably affected by it, until the host confesses that he has too sincere a regard for the feelings of the young Italian to reveal the actual picture to any of them; With this moment of disillusionment the strange stories come to an end. The title, Tales of a Traveller, under which Irving placed his tales of terror, indicates the mood in which he fashioned them. He regarded them much as he would regard the wonderful adventures of Baron Munchausen. They were to be taken, like one of Dr. Marigold's prescriptions, with a grain of salt. The idea of blending levity with horror, suggested perhaps by German influence, was very popular in England and France at this period. Balzac's L'Auberge Rouge and L'Elixir de la Longue Vie are written in a similar mood.

It is not always the boldest and most adventurous beings who elect to dwell amid "calling shapes and beckoning shadows dire." The "virtuous mind," whom supernatural horrors may "startle well but not astound," sometimes finds a melancholy pleasure in beguiling weaker mortals into haunted ruins to watch their firm nerves tremble. Sometimes too, though a man be wholly innocent of the desire to alarm, he is led astray, whether he will or not, among the terrors of the invisible world. Grey ghosts steal into his imagination unawares. It was so that they came to Nathaniel Hawthorne, who speaks sorrowfully of "gaily dressed fantasies turning to ghostly and black-clad images of themselves." He would gladly have written a "sunshiny" book, but was capriciously fated to live ever in the twilight, haunted by spectres and by "dark ideas." He fashions his tales of terror delicately and reluctantly, not riotously and shamelessly like Lewis and Maturin.

An innate reticence and shyness of temper held Hawthorne, as if by a spell, somewhat aloof from life, and no one realised more clearly than he the limitations that his detachment from humanity imposed upon his art.

Of Twice-Told Tales he writes regretfully:

"They have the pale tint of flowers that blossomed in too retired a shade... Instead of passion there is sentiment and even in what purport to be pictures of actual life we have allegory, not always so warmly dressed in its habiliments of flesh and blood as to be taken into the reader's mind without a shiver. Whether from lack of power or an inconquerable reserve, the author's touches have often an effect of tameness. The book, if you would see anything in it, requires to be read in the clear, brown twilight atmosphere in which it was written; if opened in the sunshine, it is apt to look exceedingly like a volume of blank pages";

and in his Notebook (1840) he confesses:

"I used to think I could imagine all the passions, all feelings and states of the heart and mind, but how little did I know! Indeed we are but shadows, we are not endowed with real life, and all that seems most real about us is but the thinnest shadow of a dream—till the heart be touched."

Whether he is threading the labyrinths of his imagination or watching the human shadows come and go, Hawthorne lingers longer in the shadow than in the sunshine. He was not a man of morose and gloomy temper, disenchanted with life and driven by distress or thwarted passion to brood in solitude. An irresistible, inexplicable impulse drives him towards the sombre and the gloomy. The delicacy and wistful charm of the words in which Hawthorne criticises his own work and character reveal how impossible it would have been for him to force his wayward genius. His imagination hovers with curious persistence round eerie, fantastic themes:

"An old looking-glass. Somebody finds out the secret of making all the images reflected in it pass again across its surface"—a hint skilfully introduced into the history of old Esther Dudley in The Legends of the Province House, or:

"A dreadful secret to be communicated to several persons of various character—grave or gay—and they all to become insane, according to their characters, by the influence of the secret"

—an idea modified and adapted in The Marble Faun. "An ice-cold hand—which people ever afterwards remember when once they have grasped it"—is bestowed on the Wandering Jew, the owner of the marvellous Virtuoso's Collection, whose treasures include the blood-encrusted pen with which Dr. Faustus signed away his salvation, Peter Schlemihl's shadow, the elixir of life, and the philosopher's stone. The form of a vampire, who apparently never took shape on paper, flitted through the twilight of Hawthorne's imagination:

"Stories to be told of a certain person's appearance in public, of his having been seen in various situations, and his making visits in private circles; but finally on looking for this person, to come upon his old grave and mossy tombstone."

With so many alluring suggestions floating shadowwise across his mind, it is not wonderful that Hawthorne should have been fascinated by the dream of a human life prolonged far beyond the usual span—a dream, which, if realised, would have enabled him to capture in words more of those "shapes that haunt thought's wildernesses."

Although among the sketches collected in Twice-Told Tales (vol. i. 1837, vol. ii. 1842) some are painted in gay and lively hues, the prevailing tone of the book is sad and mournful. The light-hearted philosophy of the wanderers in The Seven Vagabonds, the pretty, brightly coloured vignettes in Little Annie's Rambles, the quiet cheerfulness of Sunday at Home or The Rill from the Town Pump, only serve to throw into darker relief gloomy legends like that of Ethan Brand, the man who went in search of the Unpardonable Sin, or dreary stories like that of Edward Fane's Rosebud, or the ghostly White Old Maid. One of the most carefully wrought sketches in Twice-Told Tales is the weird story of The Hollow of the Three Hills. By means of a witch's spell, a lady hears the far-away voices of her aged parents—her mother querulous and tearful, her father calmly despondent—and amid the fearful mirth of a madhouse distinguishes the accents and footstep of the husband she has wronged. At last she listens to the death-knell tolled for the child she has left to die. The solemn rhythm of Hawthorne's skilfully ordered sentences is singularly haunting and impressive:

"The golden skirts of day were yet lingering upon the hills, but deep shades obscured the hollow and the pool, as if sombre night were rising thence to overspread the world. Again that evil woman began to weave her spell. Long did it proceed unanswered, till the knolling of a bell stole in among the intervals of her words, like a clang that had travelled far over valley and rising ground and was just ready to die in the air... Stronger it grew, and sadder, and deepened into the tone of a death-bell, knolling dolefully from some ivy-mantled tower, and bearing tidings of mortality and woe to the cottage, to the hall and to the solitary wayfarer that all might weep for the doom appointed in turn to them. Then came a measured tread, passing slowly, slowly on as of mourners with a coffin, their garments trailing the ground so that the ear could measure the length of their melancholy array. Before them went the priest reading the burial-service, while the leaves of his book were rustling in the breeze. And though no voice but his was heard to speak aloud, still here were revilings and anathemas whispered, but distinct, from women and from men... The sweeping sound of the funeral train faded away like a thin vapour and the wind that just before had seemed to shake the coffin-pall moaned sadly round the verge of the hollow between three hills."

In a later collection of Hawthorne's short stories, Mosses from an Old Manse, the grave and the gay, the terrific and the sportive, are once more intermingled. Side by side with a forlorn attempt at humorous allegory, Mrs. Bullfrog, we find the serious moral allegories of The Birthmark and The Bosom-Serpent, the wild, mysterious forest-revels in Goodman Brown, and the evil, sinister beauty of Dr. Rappacini's Daughter, a modern rehandling of the ancient legend of the poison-maiden, who was perhaps the prototype of Oliver Wendell Holmes' heroine in Elsie Venner (1861). The quiet grace and natural ease of Hawthorne's style lend even to his least ambitious tales a distinctive charm. If he chooses a slight and simple theme, his touch is deft and sure. Dr. Heidegger's Experiment, in which Hawthorne's delicate, whimsical fancy plays round the idea of the elixir of life, is almost like a series of miniature pictures, distinct and lifelike in form and colour, seen through the medium of an old-fashioned magic-lantern. Yet even in this fantastic trifle we can discern the feeling for words and the sense of proportion that characterise Hawthorne's longer works.

The Scarlet Letter (1850) was originally intended to be one of several short stories, but Hawthorne was persuaded to expand it into a novel. He felt some misgivings as to the success of the work:

"Keeping so close to the point as the tale does, and diversified in no otherwise than by turning different sides of the same dark idea to the reader's eye, it will weary very many people and disgust some."

The plot bears a remarkable resemblance to that of Lockhart's striking novel, Adam Blair. The "dark idea" that fascinates Hawthorne is the psychological state of Hester Prynne and her lover, Arthur Dimmesdale, in the long years that follow their lawless passion. Their love story hardly concerns him at all. The interest of the novel does not depend on the development of the plot. No attempt is made to complicate the story by concealing the identity of Hester's lover or of her husband. The action takes place within the souls and minds of the characters, not in their outward circumstances. The central chapter of the book is named significantly: "The Interior of a Heart." The moral situation described in The Scarlet Letter did not present itself to Hawthorne abstractly, but as a series of pictures. He habitually thought in images, and he brooded so long over his conceptions that his descriptions are almost as definite in outline and as vivid in colour as things actually seen. His pictures do not waver or fade elusively as the mind seeks to realise them. The prison door, studded with pikes, before which Hester Prynne first stands with the letter on her breast, the pillory where Dimmesdale keeps vigil at midnight, the forest-trees with pale, fitful gleams of sunshine glinting through their leaves, are so distinct that we almost put out our hands to touch them. Hawthorne's dream-imagery has the same convincing reality. The phantasmagoric visions which float through Hester's consciousness—the mirrored reflection of her own face in girlhood, her husband's thin, scholar-like visage, the grey houses of the cathedral city where she had spent her early years—are more real to her and to us than the blurred faces of the Puritans who throng the marketplace to gaze on her ignominy. Although the moral tone of the book is one of almost unrelieved gloom, the actual scenes are full of colour and light. Pearl's scarlet frock with its fantastic embroideries, the magnificent velvet gown and white ruff of the old dame who rides off by night to the witch-revels in the forest, the group of Red Indians in their deer-skin robes and wampum belts of red and yellow ochre, the bronzed faces and gaudy attire of the Spanish pirates, all stand out in bold relief among the sober greys and browns of the Puritans. The tense, emotional atmosphere is heightened by the festive brightness of the outer world.