III. THE EARLY GOTHIC NOVEL
THE shadow-haunted landscapes of Ossian, the chaotic visions
of William Blake, the grotesque witch dances in Burns's Tam O'Shanter,
the sinister dæmonism of Coleridge's Christobel and Ancient
Mariner, the ghostly charm of James Hogg's Kilmeny, and the
more restrained approaches to cosmic horror in Lamia and many of
Keats's other poems, are typical British illustrations of the advent of
the weird to formal literature. Our Teutonic cousins of the Continent were
equally receptive to the rising flood, and Burger's Wild Huntsman
and the even more famous dæmon-bridegroom ballad of Lenore
-- both imitated in English by Scott, whose respect for the supernatural
was always great -- are only a taste of the eerie wealth which German song
had commenced to provide. Thomas Moore adapted from such sources the legend
of the ghoulish statue-bride (later used by Prosper Merimée in The
Venus of Ille, and traceable back to great antiquity) which echoes
so shiveringly in his ballad of The Ring; whilst Goethe's deathless
masterpiece Faust, crossing from mere balladry into the classic,
cosmic tragedy of the ages, may be held as the ultimate height to which
this German poetic impulse arose.
But it remained for a very sprightly and worldly Englishman
-- none other than Horace Walpole himself -- to give the growing impulse
definite shape and become the actual founder of the literary horror-story
as a permanent form. Fond of mediæval romance and mystery as a dilettante's
diversion, and with a quaintly imitated Gothic castle as his abode at Strawberry
Hill, Walpole in 1764 published The Castle of Otranto; a tale of
the supernatural which, though thoroughly unconvincing and mediocre in
itself, was destined to exert an almost unparalleled influence on the literature
of the weird. First venturing it only as a "translation" by one "William
Marshal, Gent." from the Italian of a mythical "Onuphrio Muralto," the
author later acknowledged his connection with the book and took pleasure
in its wide and instantaneous popularity -- a popularity which extended
to many editions, early dramatization, and wholesale imitation both in
England and in Germany.
The story -- tedious, artificial, and melodramatic --
is further impaired by a brisk and prosaic style whose urbane sprightliness
nowhere permits the creation of a truly weird atmosphere. It tells of Manfred,
an unscrupulous and usurping prince determined to found a line, who after
the mysterious sudden death of his only son Conrad on the latter's bridal
morn, attempts to put away his wife Hippolita and wed the lady destined
for the unfortunate youth -- the lad, by the way, having been crushed by
the preternatural fall of a gigantic helmet in the castle courtyard. Isabella,
the widowed bride, flees from his design; and encounters in subterranean
crypts beneath the castle a noble young preserver, Theodore, who seems
to be a peasant yet strangely resembles the old lord Alfonso who ruled
the domain before Manfred's time. Shortly thereafter supernatural phenomena
assail the castle in diverse ways; fragments of gigantic armour being discovered
here and therd, a portrait walking out of its frame, a thunderclap destroying
the edifice, and a colossal armoured spectre of Alfonso rising out of the
rains to ascend through parting clouds to the bosom of St. Nicholas. Theodore,
having wooed Manfred's daughter Matilda and lost her through death -- for
she is slain by her father by mistake -- is discovered to be the son of
Alfonso and rightful heir to the estate. He concludes the tale by wedding
Isabella and preparing to live happily ever after, whilst Manfred -- whose
usurpation was the cause of his son's supernatural death and his own supernatural
harassings -- retires to a monastery for penitence; his saddened wife seeking
asylum in a neighbouring convent.
Such is the tale; flat stilted, and altogther devoid of
the true cosmic horror which makes weird literature. Yet such was the thirst
of the age for those touches of strangeness and spectral antiquity which
it reflects, that it was seriously received by the soundest readers and
raised in spite of its intrinsic ineptness to a pedestal of lofty importance
in literary history. What it did above all else was to create a novel type
of scene, puppet-characters, and incidents; which, handled to better advantage
by writers more naturally adapted to weird creation, stimulated the growth
of an imitative Gothic school which in turn inspired the real weavers of
cosmic terror -- the line of actual artists beginning with Poe. This novel
dramatic paraphernalia consisted first of all of the Gothic castle, with
its awesome antiquity, vast distances and famblings, deserted or ruined
wings, damp corridors, unwholesome hidden catacombs, and galaxy of ghosts
and appalling legends, as a nucleus of suspense and dæmoniac fright.
In addition, it included the tyrannical and malevolent nobleman as villain;
the saintly, long-persecuted, and generally insipid heroine who undergoes
the major terrors and serves as a point of view and focus for the reader's
sympathies; the valorous and immaculate hero, always of high birth but
often in humble disguise; the convention of high-sounding foreign names,
moistly Italian, for the characters; and the infinite array of stage properties
which includes strange lights, damp trap-doors, extinguished lamps, mouldy
hidden manuscripts, creaking hinges, shaking arras, and the like. All this
paraphernalia reappears with amusing sameness, yet sometimes with tremendous
effect, throughout the history of the Gothic novel; and is by no means
extinct even today, though subtler technique now forces it to assume a
less naive and obvious form. An harmonious milieu for a new school had
been found, and the writing world was not slow to grasp the opportunity.
German romance at once responded to the Walpole influence,
and soon became a byword for the weird and ghastly. In England one of the
first imitators was the celebrated Mrs. Barbauld, then Miss Aikin, who
in 1773 published an unfinished fragment called Sir Bertrand, in
which the strings of genuine terror were truly touched with no clumsy hand.
A nobleman on a dark and lonely moor, attracted by a tolling bell and distant
light, enters a strange and ancient turreted castle whose doors open and
close and whose bluish will-o'-the-wisps lead up mysterious staircases
toward dead hands and animated black statues. A coffin with a dead lady,
whom Sir Bertrand kisses, is finally reached; and upon the kiss the scene
dissolves to give place to a splendid apartment where the lady, restored
to life, holds a banquet in honor of her rescuer. Walpole admired this
tale, though he accorded less respect to an even more prominent offspring
of his Otranto -- The Old English Baron, by Clara Reeve,
published in 1777. Truly enough, this tale lacks the real vibration to
the note of outer darkness and mystery which distinguishes Mrs. Barbauld's
fragment; and though less crude than Walpole's novel, and more artistically
economical of horror in its possession of only one spectral figure, it
is nevertheless too definitely insipid for greatness. Here again we have
the virtuous heir to the castle disguised as a peasant and restored to
his heritage through the ghost of his father; and here again we have a
case of wide popularity leading to many editions, dramatization, and ultimate
translation into French. Miss Reeve wrote another weird novel, unfortunately
unpublished and lost.
The Gothic novel was now settled as a literary form, and
instances multiply bewilderingly as the eighteenth century draws toward
its close.
The Recess, written in 1785 by Mrs. Sophia Lee, has the
historic element, revolving round the twin daughters of Mary, Queen of
Scots; and though devoid of the supernatural, employs the Walpole scenery
and mechanism with great dexterity. Five years later, and all existing
lamps are paled by the rising of a fresh luminary order -- Mrs. Ann Radcliffe
(1764-1823), whose famous novels made terror and suspense a fashion, and
who set new and higher standards in the domain of macabre and fear-inspiring
atmosphere despite a provoking custom of destroying her own phantoms at
the last through labored mechanical explanations. To the familiar Gothic
trappings of her predecessors Mrs. Radcliffe added a genuine sense of the
unearthly in scene and incident which closely approached genius; every
touch of setting and action contributing artistically to the impression
of illimitable frightfulness which she wished to convey. A few sinister
details like a track of blood on castle stairs, a groan from a distant
vault, or a weird song in a nocturnal forest can with her conjure up the
most powerful images of imminent horror; surpassing by far the extravagant
and toilsome elaborations of others. Nor are these images in themselves
any the less potent because they are explained away before the end of the
novel. Mrs. Radcliffe's visual imagination was very strong, and appears
as much in her delightful landscape touches -- always in broad, glamorously
pictorial outline, and never in close detail -- as in her weird phantasies.
Her prime weaknesses, aside from the habit of prosaic disillusionment,
are a tendency toward erroneous geography and history and a fatal predilection
for bestrewing her novels with insipid little poems, attributed to one
or another of the characters.
Mrs. Radcliffe wrote six novels; The Castles of Athlin
and Dunbayne (1789), A Sicilian Romance (1790), The Romance
of the Forest (1792), The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794), The
Italian (1797), and Gaston de Blondeville, composed in 1802
but first published posthumously in 1826. Of these Udolpho is by
far the most famous, and may be taken as a type of the early Gothic tale
at its best. It is the chronicle of Emily, a young Frenchwoman transplanted
to an ancient and portentous castle in the Apennines through the death
of her parents and the marriage of her aunt to the lord of the castle --
the scheming nobleman, Montoni. Mysterious sounds, opened doors, frightful
legends, and a nameless horror in a niche behind a black veil all operate
in quick succession to unnerve the heroine and her faithful attendant,
Annette; but finally, after the death of her aunt, she escapes with the
aid of a fellow-prisoner whom she has discovered. On the way home she stops
at a chateau filled with fresh horrors -- the abandoned wing where the
departed chatelaine dwelt, and the bed of death with the black pall --
but is finally restored to security and happiness with her lover Valancourt,
after the clearing-up of a secret which seemed for a time to involve her
birth in mystery. Clearly, this is only familiar material re-worked; but
it is so well re-worked that Udolpho will always be a classic. Mrs.
Radcliffe's characters are puppets, but they are less markedly so than
those of her forerunners. And in atmospheric creation she stands preëminent
among those of her time.
Of Mrs. Radcliffe's countless imitators, the American
novelist Charles Brockden Brown stands the closest in spirit and method.
Like her, he injured his creations by natural explanations; but also like
her, he had in uncanny atmospheric power which gives his horrors a frightful
vitality as long as they remain unexplained. He differed from her in contemptuously
discarding the external Gothic paraphernalia and properties and choosing
modern American scenes for his Mysteries; but this repudiation did not
extend to the Gothic spirit and type of incident. Brown's novels involve
some memorably frightful scenes, and excel even Mrs. Radcliffe's in describing
the operations of the perturbed mind. Edgar Hunily starts with a
sleep-walker digging a grave, but is later impaired by touches of Godwinian
didacticism. Ormond involves a member of a sinister secret brotherhood.
That and Arthur Mervyn both describe the plague of yellow fever,
which the author had witnessed in Philadelphia and New York. But Brown's
most famous book is
Wieland; or, the Transformation (1798), in which
a Pennsylvania German, engulfed by a wave of religious fanaticism, hears
"voices" and slays his wife and children as a sacrifice. His sister Clara,
who tells the story, narrowly escapes. The scene, laid at the woodland
estate of Mittingen on the Schuylkill's remote reaches, is drawn with extreme
vividness; and the terrors of Clara, beset by spectral tones, gathering
fears, and the sound of strange footsteps in the lonely house, are all
shaped with truly artistic force. In the end a lame ventriloquial explanation
is offered, but the atmosphere is genuine while it lasts. Carwin, the malign
ventriloquist, is a typical villain of the Manfred or Montoni type.
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