V. THE AFTERMATH OF GOTHIC FICTION
MEANWHILE other hands had not been idle, so that above
the dreary plethora of trash like Marquis von Grosse's Horrid Mysteries
(1796), Mrs. Roche's Children of the Abbey (1798), Mrs. Dacre's
Zofloya;
or, the Moor (1806), and the poet Shelley's schoolboy effusions
Zastro
(1810) and St. Irvine (1811) (both imitations of Zofloya)
there arose many memorable weird works both in English and German. Classic
in merit, and markedly different from its fellows because of its foundation
in the Oriental tale rather than the Walpolesque Gothic novel, is the celebrated
History
of the Caliph Vathek by the wealthy dilettante William Beckford, first
written in the French language but published in an English translation
before the appearance of the original. Eastern tales, introduced to European
literature early in the eighteenth century through Galland's French translation
of the inexhaustibly opulent Arabian Nights, had become a reigning
fashion; being used both for allegory and for amusement. The sly humour
which only the Eastern mind knows how to mix with weirdness had captivated
a sophisticated generation, till Bagdad and Damascus names became as freely
strewn through popular literature as dashing Italian and Spanish ones were
soon to be. Beckford, well read in Eastern romance, caught the atmosphere
with unusual receptivity; and in his fantastic volume reflected very potently
the haughty luxury, sly disillusion, bland cruelty, urbane treachery, and
shadowy spectral horror of the Saracen spirit. His seasoning of the ridiculous
seldom mars the force of his sinister theme, and the tale marches onward
with a phantasmagoric pomp in which the laughter is that of skeletons feasting
under arabesque domes. Vathek is a tale of the grandson of the Caliph
Haroun, who, tormented by that ambition for super-terrestrial power, pleasure
and learning which animates the average Gothic villain or Byronic hero
(essentially cognate types), is lured by an evil genius to seek the subterranean
throne of the mighty and fabulous pre-Adamite sultans in the fiery halls
of Eblis, the Mahometan Devil. The descriptions of Vathek's palaces and
diversions, of his scheming soweress-mother Carathis and her witch-tower
with the fifty one-eyed negresses, of his pilgrimage to the haunted ruins
of Istakhar (Persepolis) and of the impish bride Nouronihar whom he treacherously
acquired on the way, of Istakhar's primordial towers and terraces in the
burning moonlight of the waste, and of the terrible Cyclopean halls of
Eblis, where, lured by glittering promises, each victim is compelled to
wander in anguish for ever, his right hand upon his blazingly ignited and
eternally burning heart, are triumphs of weird colouring which raise the
book to a permaneat place in English letters. No less notable are the three
Episodes
of Vathek, intended for insertion in the tale as narratives of Vathek's
fellow-victims in Eblis' infernal halls, which remained unpublished throughout
the author's lifetime and were discovered as recently as 1909 by the scholar
Lewis Melville whilst collecting material for his Life and Letters of
William Beckford. Beckford, however, lacks the essential mysticism
which marks the acutest form of the weird; so that his tales have a certain
knowing Latin hardness and clearness preclusive of sheer panic fright.
But Beckford remained alone in his devotion to the Orient.
Other writers, closer to the Gothic tradition and to European life in general,
were content to follow more faithfully in the lead of Walpole. Among the
countless producers of terror-literature in these times may be mentioned
the Utopian economic theorist William Godwin, who followed his famous but
non-supernatural Caleb Williams (1794) with the intendedly weird
St.
Leon (1799), in which the theme of the elixir of life, as developed
by the imaginary secret order of "Rosicrucians," is handled with ingeniousness
if not with atmospheric convincingness. This element of Rosicrucianism,
fostesed by a wave of popular magical interest exemplified in the vogue
of the charlatan Cagliostro and the publication of Francis Barrett's The
Magus (1801), a curious and compendious treatise on occult principles
and ceremonies, of which a reprint was made as lately as 1896, figures
in Bulwer-Lytton and in many late Gothic novels, especially that remote
and enfeebled posterity which straggled far down into the nineteenth century
and was represented by George W.M. Reynold's Faust and the Demon
and Wagner the Wehr-Wolf.Caleb Williams, though non-supernatural,
has many authentic touches of terror. It is the tale of a servant persecuted
by a master whom he has found guilty of murder, and displays an invention
and skill which have kept it alive in a fashion to this day. It was dramatized
as The Iron Chest, and in that form was almost equally celebrated.
Godwin, however, was too much the conscious teacher and prosaic man of
thought to create a genuine weird masterpiece.
His daughter, the wife of Shelley, was much more successful;
and her inimitable Frankenstein; or, the Modern Prometheus (1817)
is one of the horror-classics of all time. Composed in competition with
her husband, Lord Byron, and Dr. John William Polidori in an effort to
prove supremacy in horror-making, Mrs. Shelley's Frankenstein was
the only one of the rival narratives to be brought to an elaborate completion;
and criticism has failed to prove that the best parts are due to Shelley
rather than to her. The novel, somewhat tinged but scarcely marred by moral
didacticism, tells of the artificial human being moulded from charnel fragments
by Victor Frankenstein, a young Swiss medical student. Created by its designer
"in the mad pride of intellectuality," the monster possesses full intelligence
but owns a hideously loathsome form. It is rejected by mankind, becomes
embittered, and at length begins the successive murder of all whom Frankenstein
loves best, friends and family. It demands that Frankenstein create a wife
for it; and when the student finally refuses in horror lest the world be
populated with such monsters, it departs with a hideous threat "to be with
him on his wedding night." Upon that night the bride is strangled, and
from that time on Frankenstein hunts down the monster, even into the wastes
of the Arctic. In the end, whilst seeking shelter on the ship of the man
who tells the story, Frankenstein himself is killed by the shocking object
of his search and creation of his presumptuous pride. Some of the scenes
in Frankenstein are unforgettable, as when the newly animated monster
enters its creator's room, parts the curtains of his bed, and gazes at
him in the yellow moonlight with watery eyes -- "if eyes they may be called."
Mrs. Shelley wrote other novels, including the fairly notable Last Man;
but never duplicated the success of her first effort. It has the true touch
of cosmic fear, no matter how much the movement may lag in places. Dr.
Polidori developed his competing idea as a long short story, The Vampyre;
in which we behold a suave villain of the true Gothic or Byronic type,
and encounter some excellent passages of stark fright, including a terrible
nocturnal experience in a shunned Grecian wood.
In this same period Sir Walter Scott frequently concerned
himself with the weird, weaving it into many of his novels and poems, and
sometimes producing such independent bits of narration as The Tapestried
Chamber or Wandering Willie's Tale in Redgauntlet, in
the latter of which the force of the spectral and the diabolic is enhanced
by a grotesque homeliness of speech and atmosphere. In 1830 Scott published
his Letters on Demonology and Witchcraft, which still forms one
of our best compendia of European witch-lore. Washington Irving is another
famous figure not unconnected with the weird; for though most of his ghosts
are too whimsical and humorous to form genuinely spectral literature, a
distinct inclination in this direction is to be noted in many of his productions.
The
German Student in Tales of a Traveler (1824) is a slyly concise
and effective presentation of the old legend of the dead bride, whilst
woven into the cosmic tissue of The Money Diggers in the same volume
is more than one hint of piratical apparitions in the realms which Captain
Kidd once roamed. Thomas Moore also joined the ranks of the macabre artists
in the poem Alciphron, which he later elaborated into the prose
novel of The Epicurean (1827). Though merely relating the adventures
of a young Athenian duped by the artifice of cunning Egyptian priests,
Moore manages to infuse much genuine horror into his account of subterranean
frights and wonders beneath the primordial temples of Memphis. De Quincey
more than once revels in grotesque and arabesque terrors, though with a
desultoriness and learned pomp which deny him the rank of specialist.
This era likewise saw the rise of William Harrison Ainsworth,
whose romantic novels teem with the eerie and the gruesome. Capt. Marryat,
besides writing such short tales as The Werewolf, made a memorable
contribution in The Phantom Ship (1839), founded on the legend of
the Flying Dutchman, whose spectral and accursed vessel sails for ever
near the Cape of Good Hope. Dickens now rises with occasional weird bits
like The Signalman, a tale of ghastly warning conforming to a very
common pattern and touched with a verisimilitude which allied it as much
with the coming psychological school as with the dying Gothic school. At
this time a wave of interest in spiritualistic charlatanry, mediumism,
Hindoo theosophy, and such matters, much like that of the present day,
was flourishing; so that the number of weird tales with a "Psychic" or
pseudo-scientific basis became very considerable. For a number of these
the prolific and popular Edward Bulwer-Lytton was responsible; and despite
the large doses of turgid rhetoric and empty romanticism in his products,
his success in the weaving of a certain kind of bizarre charm cannot be
denied.
The House and the Brain, which hints of Rosicrucianism
and at a malign and deathless figure perhaps suggested by Louis XV's mysterious
courtier St. Germain, yet survives as one of the best short haunted-house
tales ever written. The novel Zanoni (1842) contains similar elements
more elaborately handled, and introduces a vast unknown sphere of being
pressing on our own world and guarded by a horrible "Dweller of the Threshold"
who haunts those who try to enter and fail. Here we have a benign brotherhood
kept alive from age to age till finally reduced to a single member, and
as a hero an ancient Chaldaean sorcerer surviving in the pristine bloom
of youth to perish on the guillotine of the French Revolution. Though full
of the conventional spirit of romance, marred by a ponderous network of
symbolic and didactic meanings, and left unconvincing through lack of perfect
atmospheric realization of the situations hinging on the spectral world,
Zanoni
is really an excellent performance as a romantic novel; and can be read
with genuine interest by the not too sophisticated reader. It is amusing
to note that in describing an attempted initiation into the ancient brotherhood
the author cannot escape using the stock Gothic castle of Walpolian lineage.
In A Strange Story (1862) Bulwer-Lytton shows a
marked improvement in the creation of weird images and moods. The novel,
despite enormous length, a highly artificial plot bolstered up by opportune
coincidences, and an atmosphere of homiletic pseudo-science designed to
please the matter-of-fact and purposeful Victorian reader, is exceedingly
effective as a narrative; evoking instantaneous and unflagging interest,
and furnishing many potent -- if somewhat melodramatic -- tableaux and
climaxes. Again we have the mysterious user of life's elixir in the person
of the soulless magician Margrave, whose dark exploits stand out with dramatic
vividness against the modern background of a quiet English town and of
the Australian bush; and again we have shadowy intimations of a vast spectral
world of the unknown in the very air about us -- this time handled with
much greater power and vitality than in Zanoni. One of the two great
incantation passages, where the hero is driven by a luminous evil spirit
to rise at night in his sleep, take a strange Egyptian wand, and evoke
nameless presences in the haunted and mausoleum-facing pavilion of a famous
Renaissance alchemist, truly stands among the major terror scenes of literature.
Just enough is suggested, and just little enough is told. Unknown words
are twice dictated to the sleep-walker, and as he repeats them the ground
trembles, and all the dogs of the countryside begin to bay at half-seen
amorphous shadows that stalk athwart the moonlight. When a third set of
unknown words is prompted, the sleep-walker's spirit suddenly rebels at
uttering them, as if the soul could recognize ultimate abysmal horrors
concealed from the mind; and at last an apparition of an absent sweetheart
and good angel breaks the malign spell. This fragment well illustrates
how far Lord Lytton was capable of progressing beyond his usual pomp and
stock romance toward that crystalline essence of artistic fear which belongs
to the domain of poetry. In describing certain details of incantations,
Lytton was greatly indebted to his amusingly serious occult studies, in
the course of which he came in touch with that odd French scholar and cabalist
Alphonse Louis Constant ("Eliphas Levy"), who claimed to possess the secrets
of ancient magic, and to have evoked the spectre of the old Grecian wizard
Apollonius of Tyana, who lived in Nero's times.
The romantic, semi-Gothic, quasi-moral tradition here
represented was carried far down the nineteenth century by such authors
as Joseph Sheridan LeFanu, Wilkie Collins, the late Sir H. Rider Haggard
(whose
She is really remarkably good), Sir A. Conan Doyle, H. G.
Wells, and Robert Louis Stevenson -- the latter of whom, despite an atrocious
tendency toward jaunty mannerisms, created permanent classics in Markheim,The
Body Snatcher, and Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. Indeed, we may say
that this school still survives; for to it clearly belong such of our contemporary
horror-tales as specialise in events rather than atmospheric details, address
the intellect rather than a malign tensity or psychological verisimilitude,
and take a definite stand in sympathy with mankind and its welfare. It
has its undeniable strength, and because of its "human element" commands
a wider audience than does the sheer artistic nightmare. If not quite so
potent as the latter, it is because a diluted product can never achieve
the intensity of a concentrated essence.
Quite alone both as a novel and as a piece of terror-literature
stands the famous Wuthering Heights (1847) by Emily Brontë,
with its mad vistas of bleak, windswept Yorkshire moors and the violent,
distorted lives they foster. Though primarily a tale of life, and of human
passions in agony and conflict, its epically cosmic setting affords room
for horror of the most spiritual sort. Heathcliff, the modified Byronic
villain-hero, is a strange dark waif found in the streets as a small child
and speaking only a strange gibberish till adopted by the family he ultimately
ruins. That he is in truth a diabolic spirit rather than a human being
is more than once suggested, and the unreal is further approached in the
experience of the visitor who encounters a plaintive child-ghost at a bough-brushed
upper window. Between Heathcliff and Catherine Earnshaw is a tie deeper
and more terrible than human love. After her death he twice disturbs her
grave, and is haunted by an impalpable presence which can be nothing less
thin her spirit. The spirit enters his life more and more, and at last
he becomes confident of some imminent mystical reunion. He says he feels
a strange change approaching, and ceases to take nourishment. At night
he either walks abroad or opens the casement by his bed. When he dies the
casement is still swinging open to the pouring rain, and a queer smile
pervades the stiffened face. They bury him in a grave beside the mound
he has haunted for eighteen years, and small shepherd boys say that he
yet walks with his Catherine in the churchyard and on the moor when it
rains. Their faces, too, are sometimes seen on rainy nights behind that
upper casement at Wuthering Heights. Miss Bront&eeuml;'s eerie terror
is no mere Gothic echoe, but a tense expression of man's shuddering reaction
to the unknown. In this respect, Wuthering Heights becomes the symbol
of a literary transition, and marks the growth of a new and sounder school.
.....
