VI. SPECTRAL LITERATURE ON THE CONTINENT
ON the continent literary horror fared well. The celebrated
short tales and novels of Ernst Theodor Wihelm Hoffmann (1776-1822) are
a by-word for mellowness of background and maturity of form, though they
incline to levity and extravagance, and lack the exalted moments of stark,
breathless terror which a less sophisticated writer might have achieved.
Generally they convey the grotesque rather than the terrible. Most artistic
of all the continental weird tales is the German classic Undine
(1814), by Friedrich Heinrich Karl, Baron de la Motte Fouqu&eeacute;.
In this story of a water-spirit who married a mortal and gained a human
soul there is a delicate fineness of craftsmanship which makes it notable
in any department of literature, and an easy naturalness which places it
close to the genuine folk-myth. It is, in fact, derived from a tale told
by the Renaissance physician and alchemist Paracelsus in his Treatise
on Elemental Sprites.
Undine, daughter of a powerful water-prince, was exchanged
by her father as a small child for a fisherman's daughter, in order that
she might acquire a soul by wedding a human being. Meeting the noble youth
Huldbrand at the cottage of her fosterfather by the sea at the edge of
a haunted wood, she soon marries him, and accompanies him to his ancestral
castle of Ringstetten. Huldbrand, however, eventually wearies of his wife's
supernatural affiliations, and especially of the appearances of her uncle,
the malicious woodland waterfall-spirit Kuhleborn; a weariness increased
by his growing affection for Bertalda, who turns out to be the fisherman's
child for whom Undine was changed. At length, on a voyage down the Danube,
he is provoked by some innocent act of his devoted wife to utter the angry
words which consign her back to her supernatural element; from which she
can, by the laws of her species, return only once -- to kill him, whether
she will of no, if ever he prove unfaithful to her memory. Later, when
Huldbrand is about to be married to Bertalda, Undine returns for her sad
duty, and bears his life away in tears. When he is buried among his fathers
in the village churchyard a veiled, snow-white female figure appears among
the mourners, but after the prayer is seen no more. In her place is seen
a little silver spring, which murmurs its way almost completely around
the new grave, and empties into a neighboring lake. The villagers show
it to this day, and say that Undine and her Huldbrand are thus united in
death. Many passages and atmospheric touches in this tale reveal Fouqué
as an accomplished artist in the field of the macabre; especially the descriptions
of the haunted wood with its gigantic snow-white man and various unnamed
terrors, which occur early in the narrative.
Not so well known as Undine, but remarkable for
its convincing realism and freedom from Gothic stock devices, is the Amber
Witch of Wilhelm Meinhold, another product of the German fantastic
genius of the earlier nineteenth century. This tale, which is laid in the
time of the Thirty Years' War, purports to be a clergyman's manuscript
found in an old church at Coserow, and centres round the writer's daughter,
Maria Schweidler, who is wrongly accused of witchcraft. She has found a
deposit of amber which she keeps secret for various reasons, and the unexplained
wealth obtained from this lends colour to the accusation; an accusation
instigated by the malice of the wolf-hunting nobleman Wittich Appelmann,
who has vainly pursued her with ignoble designs. The deeds of a real witch,
who afterward comes to a horrible supernatural end in prison, are glibly
imputed to the hapless Maria; and after a typical witchcraft trial with
forced confessions under torture she is about to be burned at the stake
when saved just in time by her lover, a noble youth from a neighboring
district. Meinho1d's great strength is in his air of casual and realistic
verisimilitude, which intensifies our suspense and sense of the unseen
by half persuading us that the menacing events must somehow be either the
truth or very dose to the truth. Indeed, so thorough is this realism that
a popular magazine once published the main points of The Amber Witch
as an actual occurrence of the seventeenth century!
In the present generation German horror-fiction is most
notably represented by Hanns Heinz Ewers, who brings to bear on his dark
conceptions an effective knowledge of modem psychology. Novels like The
Sorcerer's Apprentice and Alrune, and short stories like The
Spider, contain distinctive qualities which raise them to a classic
level.
But France as well as Germany has been active in the realm
of weirdness. Victor Hugo, in such tales as Hans of Iceland, and
Balzac, in The Wild Ass's Skin, Seraphita, and Louis Lambert,
both employ supernaturalism to a greater or less extent; though generally
only as a means to some more human end, and without the sincere and dæmonic
intensity which characterizes the born artist in shadows. It is in Theophile
Gautier that we first seem to find an authentic French sense of the unreal
world, and here there appears a spectral mystery which, though not continuously
used, is recognizable at once as something alike genuine and profound.
Short tales like Avatar, The Foot of the Mummy, and Clarimonde
display glimpses of forbidden vistas that allure, tantalize, and sometime
horrify; whilst the Egyptian visions evoked in One of Cleopatra's Nights
are of the keenest and most expressive potency. Gautier captured the inmost
soul of æon-weighted Egypt, with its cryptic life and Cyclopean architecture,
and uttered once and for all the eternal horror of its nether world of
catacombs, where to the end of time millions of stiff, spiced corpses will
stare up in the blackness with glassy eyes, awaiting some awesome and unrelatable
summons. Gustave Flaubert ably continued the tradition of Gautier in orgies
of poetic phantasy like The Temptation of St. Anthony, and but for
a strong realistic bias might have been an arch-weaver of tapestried terrors.
Later on we see the stream divide, producing strange poets and fantaisistes
of the symbolic and decadent schools whose dark interests really centre
more in abnormalities of human thought and instinct than in the actual
supernatural, and subtle story-tellers whose thrills are quite directly
derived from the night-black wells of cosmic unreality. Of the former class
of "artists in sin" the illustrious poet Baudelaire, influenced vastly
by Poe, is the supreme type; whilst the psychological novelist Joris-Karl
Huysmans, a true child of the eighteen-nineties, is at once the summation
and finale. The latter and purely narrative class is continued by Prosper
Merimée, whose Venus of Ille presents in terse and convincing
prose the same ancient statue-bride theme which Thomas Moore cast in ballad
form in The Ring.
The horror-tales of the powerful and cynical Guy de Maupassant,
written as his final madness gradually overtook him, present individualities
of their own; being rather the morbid outpourings of a realistic mind in
a pathological state than the healthy imaginative products of a vision
naturally disposed toward phantasy and sensitive to the normal illusions
of the unseen. Nevertheless they are of the keenest interest and poignancy;
suggesting with marvelous force the imminence of nameless terrors, and
the relentless dogging of an ill-starred individual by hideous and menacing
representatives of the outer blackness. Of these stories The Horla
is generally regarded as the masterpiece. Relating the advent to France
of an invisible being who lives on water and milk, sways the minds of others,
and seems to be the vanguard of a horde of extra-terrestrial organisms
arrived on earth to subjugate an4 overwhelm mankind, this tense narrative
is perhaps without a peer in its particular department; notwithstanding
its indebtedness to a tale by the American Fitz-James O'Brien for details
in describing the actual presence of the unseen monster. Other potently
dark creations of de Maupassant are Who Knows?, The Spectre,He,The
Diary of a Madman, The White Wolf, On the River, and
the grisly verses entitled Horror.
The collaborators Erckmann-Chatrian enriched French literature
with many spectral fancies like The Man-Wolf, in which a transmitted
curse works toward its end in a traditional Gothic-castle setting. Their
power of creating a shuddering midnight atmosphere was tremendous despite
a tendency toward natural explanations and scientific wonders; and few
short tales contain greater horror than The Invisible Eye, where
a malignant old hag weaves nocturnal hypnotic spells which induce the successive
occupants of a certain inn chamber to hang themselves on a cross-beam.
The
Owl's Ear and The Waters of Death are full of engulfing darkness
and mystery, the latter embodying the familiar over-grown-spider theme
so frequently employed by weird fictionists. Villiers de l'Isle Adam likewise
followed the macabre school; his Torture by Hope, the tale of a
stake-condemned prisoner permitted to escape in order to feel the pangs
of recapture, being held by some to constitute the most harrowing short
story in literature. This type, however, is less a part of the weird tradition
than a class peculiar to itself -- the so-called conte cruel, in
which the wrenching of the emotions is accomplished through dramatic tantalizations,
frustrations, and gruesome physical horrors. Almost wholly devoted to this
form is the living writer Maurice Level, whose very brief episodes have
lent themselves so readily to theatrical adaptation in the "thrillers"
of the Grand Guignol. As a matter of fact, the French genius is more naturally
suited to this dark realism than to the suggestion of the unseen; since
the latter process requires, for its best and most sympathetic development
on a large scale, the inherent mysticism of the Northern mind.
A very flourishing, though till recently quite hidden,
branch of weird literature is that of the Jews, kept alive and nourished
in obscurity by the sombre heritage of early Eastern magic, apocalyptic
literature, and cabbalism. The Semitic mind, like the Celtic and Teutonic,
seems to possess marked mystical inclinations; and the wealth of underground
horror-lore surviving in ghettoes and synagogues must be much more considerable
than is generally imagined. Cabbalism itself, so prominent during the Middle
Ages, is a system of philosophy explaining the universe as emanations of
the Deity, and involving the existence of strange spiritual realms and
beings apart from the visible world of which dark glimpses may be obtained
through certain secret incantations. Its ritual is bound up with mystical
interpretations of the Old Testament, and attributes an esoteric significance
to each letter of the Hebrew alphabet -- a circumstance which has imparted
to Hebrew letters a sort of spectral glamour and potency in the popular
literature of magic. Jewish folklore has preserved much of the terror and
mystery of the past, and when more thoroughly studied is likely to exert
considerable influence on weird fiction. The best examples of its literary
use so far are the German novel The Golem, by Gustave Meyrink, and
the drama The Dyhhuk, by the Jewish writer using the pseudonym "Ansky."
The former, with its haunting shadowy suggestions of marvels and horrors
just beyond reach, is laid in Prague, and describes with singular mastery
that city's ancient ghetto with its spectral, peaked gables. The name is
derived from a fabulous artificial giant supposed to be made and animated
by mediæval rabbis according to a certain cryptic formula. The
Dyhbuk, translated and produced in America in 1925, and more recently
produced as an opera, describes with singular power the possession of a
living body by the evil soul of a dead man. Both golems and dybbuks are
fixed types, and serve as frequent ingredients of later Jewish tradition.
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