Chapter XII Conclusion
This book is an attempt to trace in outline the origin and development of the Gothic romance and the tale of terror. Such a survey is necessarily incomplete. For more than fifty years after the publication of The Castle of Otranto the Gothic Romance remained a definitely recognised kind of fiction; but, as the scope of the novel gradually came to include the whole range of human expression, it lost its individuality, and was merged into other forms. To follow every trail of its influence would lead us far afield. The Tale of Terror, if we use the term in its wider sense, may be said to include the magnificent story of the Writing on the Wall at Belshazzar’s Feast, the Book of Job, the legends of the Deluge and of the Tower of Babel, and Saul’s Visit to the Witch of Endor, which Byron regarded as the best ghost story in the world. In the Hebrew writings fear is used to endow a hero with superhuman powers or to instil a moral truth. The sun stands still in the heavens that Joshua may prevail over his enemies. In modern days the tale of terror is told for its own sake. It has become an end in itself, and is probably appreciated most fully by those who are secure from peril. It satisfies the human desire to experience new emotions and sensations, without actual danger.
There is little doubt that the Gothic Romance primarily made its appeal to women readers, though we know that Mrs. Radcliffe had many men among her admirers, and that Cherubina of The Heroine had a companion in folly, The Story-Haunted Youth. It is remotely allied, as its name implies, to the mediaeval romances, at which Cervantes tilts in Don Quixote. It was more closely akin, however, to the heroic romances satirised in Mrs. Charlotte Lennox’s Female Quixote (1752). When the voluminous works of Le Calprenède and of Mademoiselle de Scudéry were translated into English, they found many imitators and admirers, and their vogue outlasted the seventeenth century. Artamène ou le Grand Cyrus, out of which Mrs. Pepys told her husband long stories, “though nothing to the purpose, nor in any good manner,” is to be found, with a pin stuck through one of the middle leaves, in the lady’s library described by Addison in the Spectator, Mrs. Aphra Behn, in Oroonoko and The Fair Jilt, had made some attempt to bring romance nearer to real life; but it was not until the middle of the eighteenth century, when the novel, with the rise of Richardson, Fielding, Smollett and Sterne, took firm root on English soil, that the popularity of Cassandra, Parthenissa and Aretina was superseded. Then, if we may trust the evidence of Colman’s farce, Polly Honeycombe, first acted in 1760, Pamela, Clarissa Harlowe and Sophia Western reigned in their stead. For the reader who had patiently followed the eddying, circling course of the heroic romance, with its high-flown language and marvellous adventures, Richardson’s novel of sentiment probably held more attraction than Fielding’s novel of manners. Fielding, on his broad canvas, paints the life of his day on the highway, in coaches, taverns, sponging-houses or at Vauxhall masquerades. Every class of society is represented, from the vagabond to the noble lord. Richardson, in describing the shifts and subterfuges of Mr. B—and the elaborate intrigue of Lovelace, moves within a narrow circle, devoting himself, not to the portrayal of character, but to the minute analysis of a woman’s heart. The sentiment of Richardson descends to Mrs. Radcliffe. Her heroines are fashioned in the likeness of Clarissa Harlowe; her heroes inherit many of the traits of the immaculate Grandison. She adds zest to her plots by wafting her heroines to distant climes and bygone centuries, and by playing on their nerves with superstitious fears. Since human nature often looks to fiction for a refuge from the world, there is always room for the illusion of romance side by side with the picture of actual life. Fanny Burney’s spirited record of Evelina’s visit to her vulgar, but human, relatives, the Branghtons, in London, is not enough. We need too the sojourn of Emily, with her thick-coming fancies, in the castle of Udolpho.
The Gothic Romance did not reflect real life, or reveal character, or display humour. Its aim was different. It was full of sentimentality, and it stirred the emotions of pity and fear. The ethereal, sensitive heroine, suffering through no fault of her own, could not fail to win sympathy. The hero was pale, melancholy, and unfortunate enough to be attractive. The villain, bold and desperate in his crimes, was secretly admired as well as feared. Hairbreadth escapes and wicked intrigues in castles built over beetling precipices were sufficiently outside the reader’s own experience to produce a thrill. Ghosts, and rumours of ghosts, touched nearly the eighteenth century reader, who had often listened, with bated breath, to winter’s tales of spirits seen on Halloween in the churchyard, or white-robed spectres encountered in dark lanes and lonely ruins. In country houses like those described in Miss Austen’s novels, where life was diversified only by paying calls, dining out, taking gentle exercise or playing round games like “commerce” or “word-making and work-taking,” the Gothic Romances must have proved a welcome source of pleasurable excitement. Mr. Woodhouse, with his melancholy views on the effects of wedding cake and muffin, would have condemned them, no doubt, as unwholesome; Lady Catherine de Bourgh would have been too impatient to read them; but Lydia Bennet, Elinor Dashwood and Isabella Thorpe must have found in them an inestimable solace. Their fame was soon overshadowed by that of the Waverley Novels, but they had served their turn in providing an entertaining interlude before the arrival of Sir Walter Scott. Even at the very height of his vogue, they probably enjoyed a surreptitious popularity, not merely in the servants’ hall, but in the drawing room. Nineteenth century literature abounds in references to the vogue of this school of fiction. There were spasmodic attempts at a revival in an anonymous work called Forman (1819), dedicated to Scott, and in Ainsworth’s Rookwood (1834); and terror has never ceased to be used as a motive in fiction.
In Villette, Lucy Snowe, whose nerves Ginevra describes as “real iron and bend leather,” gazes steadily for the space of five minutes at the spectral “nun.” This episode indicates a change of fashion; for the lady of Gothic romance could not have submitted to the ordeal for five seconds without fainting. A more robust heroine, who thinks clearly and yet feels strongly, has come into her own. In Jane Eyre many of the situations are fraught with terror, but it is the power of human passion, transcending the hideous scenes, that grips our imagination. Terror is used as a means to an end, not as an end in itself. In Wuthering Heights the windswept Yorkshire moors are the background for elemental feelings. We no longer “tremble with delicious dread” or “snatch a fearful joy.” The gloom never lightens. We live ourselves beneath the shadow of Heathcliff’s awe-inspiring personality, and there is no escape from a terror, which passes almost beyond the bounds of speech. The Brontës do not trifle with emotion or use supernatural elements to increase the tension. Theirs are the terrors of actual life.
Other novelists, contemporary with the Brontës, revel in terror for its own sake. Wilkie Collins weaves elaborate plots of hair-raising events. The charm of The Moonstone and the Woman in White is independent of character or literary finish. It consists in the unravelling of a skilfully woven fabric. Le Fanu, who resented the term “sensational” which was justly applied to his works, plays pitilessly on our nerves with both real and fictitious horrors. He, like Wilkie Collins, made a cult of terror. Their literary descendants may perhaps be found in such authors as Richard Marsh or Bram Stoker, or Sax Rohmer. In Bram Stoker’s Dracula the old vampire legend is brought up to date, and we are held from beginning to end in a state of frightful suspense. No one who has read the book will fail to remember the picture of Dracula climbing up the front of the castle in Transylvania, or the scene in the tomb when a stake is driven through the heart of the vampire who has taken possession of Lucy’s form. The ineffable horror of the “Un-Dead” would repel us by its painfulness, if it were not made endurable by the love, hope and faith of the living characters, particularly of the old Dutch doctor, Van Helsing. The matter-of-fact style of the narrative, which is compiled of letters, diaries and journals, and the mention of such familiar places as Whitby and Hampstead, help to enhance the illusion.
The motive of terror has often been mingled with other motives in the novel as well as in the short tale. In unwinding the complicated thread of the modern detective story, which follows the design originated by Godwin and perfected by Poe, we are frequently kept to our task by the force of terror as well as of curiosity. In The Sign of Four and in The Hound of the Baskervilles, to choose two entirely different stories, Conan Doyle realises that darkness and loneliness place us at the mercy of terror, and he works artfully on our fears of the unknown. Phillips Oppenheim and William Le Queux, in romances which have sometimes a background of international politics, maintain our interest by means of mystifications, which screw up our imagination to the utmost pitch, and then let us down gently with a natural but not too obvious explanation. A certain amount of terror is almost essential to heighten the interest of a novel of costume and adventure, like The Prisoner of Zenda or Rupert of Hentzau, or of the fantastic, exciting romances of Jules Verne. Rider Haggard’s African romances, She and King Solomon’s Mines, belong to a large group of supernatural tales with a foreign setting. They combine strangeness, wonder, mystery and horror. The ancient theme of bartering souls is given a new twist in Robert Hichens’ novel, The Flames. E.F. Benson, in The Image in the Sand, experiments with Oriental magic. The investigations of the Society for Psychical Research gave a new impulse to stories of the occult and the uncanny. Algernon Blackwood is one of the most ingenious exponents of this type of story. By means of psychical explanations, he succeeds in revivifying many ancient superstitions. In Dr. John Silence, even the werewolf, whom we believed extinct, manifests himself in modern days among a party of cheerful campers on a lonely island, and brings unspeakable terror in his trail. Sometimes terror is used nowadays, as Bulwer Lytton used it, to serve a moral purpose. Oscar Wilde’s Picture of Dorian Gray is intended to show that sin must ultimately affect the soul; and the Sorrows of Satan, in Miss Corelli’s novel, are caused by the wickedness of the world. But apart from any ulterior motive there is still a desire for the unusual, there is still pleasure to be found in a thrill, and so long as this human instinct endures devices will be found for satisfying it. Of the making of tales of terror there is no end; and almost every novelist of note has, at one time or another, tried his hand at the art. Early in his career Arnold Bennett fashioned a novelette, Hugo, which may be read as a modernised version of the Gothic romance. Instead of subterranean vaults in a deserted abbey, we have the strong rooms of an enterprising Sloane Street emporium. The coffin, containing an image of the heroine, is buried not in a mouldering chapel, but in a suburban cemetery. The lovely but harassed heroine has fallen, indeed, from her high estate, for Camilla earns her living as a milliner. There are, it is true, no sonnets and no sunsets, but the excitement of the plot, which is partially unfolded by means of a phonographic record, renders them superfluous. H.G. Wells makes excursions into quasi-scientific, fantastic realms of grotesque horror in his First Men in the Moon, and in some of his sketches and short stories. Joseph Conrad has the power of fear ever at the command of his romantic imagination. In The Nigger of the Narcissus, in Typhoon, and, above all, in The Shadow-Line, he shows his supreme mastery over inexpressible mystery and nameless terror. The voyage of the schooner, doomed by the evil influence of her dead captain, is comparable only in awe and horror to that of The Ancient Mariner. Conrad touches unfathomable depths of human feelings, and in his hands the tale of terror becomes a finished work of art. The future of the tale of terror it is impossible to predict; but the experiments of living authors, who continually find new outlets with the advance of science and of psychological enquiry, suffice to prove that its powers are not yet exhausted. Those who make the ‘moving accident’ their trade will no doubt continue to assail us with the shock of startling and sensational events. Others with more insidious art, will set themselves to devise stories which evoke subtler refinements of fear. The interest has already been transferred from ‘bogle-wark’ to the effect of the inexplicable, the mysterious and the uncanny on human thought and emotion. It may well be that this track will lead us into unexplored labyrinths of terror.
Notes
[1: Frazer, Folklore of the Old Testament, I. iv. § 2.]
[2: Cock Lane and Common Sense, 1894.]
[3: Spectator, No. 12.]
[4: Spectator, No. 110.]
[5: Boswell, Life of Johnson, June 12th, 1784.]
[6: Tom Jones, Bk. xvi. ch. v.]
[7: Letter to Dr. Moore, Aug. 2, 1787.]
[8: Ashton, Chapbooks of the Eighteenth Century, 1882.]
[9: Advertisement to Cloudesley, 1830.]
[10: Preface to Mandeville, Oct. 25, 1817.]
[11: Letters, vii. 27.]
[12: The Uncommercial Traveller.]
[13: Odyssey, xi.]
[14: April 17, 1765.]
[15: Nov. 13, 1784.]
[16: June 12, 1753.]
[17: Remarks on Italy.]
[18: Aug. 4, 1753.]
[19: Diary and Letters of Madame D’Arblay, vol. ii. Appendix ii.: A Visit to Strawberry Hill in 1786.]
[20: Jan. 5, 1766.]
[21: July 15, 1783.]
[22: March 26, 1765.]
[23: Nov. 5, 1782.]
[24: It has been pointed out (Scott, Lives of the Novelists, note) that in Lope de Vega’s Jerusalem the picture of Noradine stalks from its panel and addresses Saladine.]
[25: Cf. Wallace, Blind Harry.]
[26: Preface, 1764.]
[27: Ch. XX.]
[28: Ch. XXXIV.]
[29: Ch. lxii.]
[30: Jan. 27, 1780.]
[31: Letters, April 8, 1778, and Jan. 27, 1780.]
[32: Poetical Works, ed. Sampson, p. 8.]
[33: Translated Blackwood’s Magazine, 1820 (Nov.). Cf. Scott, Bridal of Triermain.]
[34: E.g. Diary and Letters of Madame D’Arblay, June 18, 1795;
Mathias, Pursuits of Literature, 14th ed. 1808, p. 56;
Scott,
Lives of the Novelists; Extracts from the Diary of a
Lover of
Literature (1810); Byron, Childe Harold, iv. xviii.;
Thackeray, Newcomes, chs. xi., xxviii.; Brontë, Shirley,
ch.
xxvii; Trollope, Barchester Towers, ch. xv., etc.]
[35: Family Letters, 1908.]
[36: Reprinted, Romancist and Novelist’s Library.]
[37: Journeys of Mrs. Radcliffe, 2nd ed., 1795, vol. ii. p. 171.]
[38: Noctes Ambrosianae, ed. 1855, vol. i. p. 201.]
[39: Lecture on The English Novelists.]
[40: Life and Correspondence of M. G. Lewis, 1839, i. 122.]
[41: Life and Correspondence, July 22nd, 1794.]
[42: Essay on The State of German Literature.]
[43: Southey, Preface to Madoc.]
[44: Life and Correspondence, Feb. 23, 1798.]
[45: Letter to John Murray, Aug. 23rd, 1814.]
[46: Monthly Review, June, 1797.]
[47: No. 148.]
[48: Cf. Musaeus: Die Entführung.]
[49: Marmion, Canto ii. Intro.]
[50: Reprinted, Romancist and Novelist’s Library, vol. i. 1839.]
[51: Essay on German Playwrights.]
[52: English Bards and Scotch Reviewers (1809).]
[53: Many of these were issued by B. Crosby, Stationers’ Court.]
[54: Recollections of the Table-Talk of Samuel Rogers, 1856, p. 138.]
[55: Trans. from the German of Christian August Vulpius.]
[56: Cf. Thackeray, “Tunbridge Toys” (Roundabout Papers).]
[57: English Bards and Scotch Reviewers.]
[58: Gentleman’s Magazine, 1825; and memoir prefixed to the edition of Melmoth the Wanderer, published in 1892.]
[59: Prose Works, 1851, vol. xviii.]
[60: Letters and Memoir, 1895, vol. i. p. 101.]
[61: Life (Melville), 1909, vol. i. p. 79.]
[62: Letters, 2nd Series, 1872, vol. i. p. 101.]
[63: Gustave Planche, Portraits Littéraires.]
[64: Cf. Stevenson’s Bottle-Imp.]
[65: Edinburgh Review, July 1821.]
[66: Conant, The Oriental Tale in England, pp. 36-38.]
[67: Conant, The Oriental Tale in England, pp. 36-38.]
[68: Letter to Henley, Jan. 29, 1782.]
[69: Life and Letters, Melville, 1910, p. 20.]
[70: Life and Letters, 1910, p. 20.]
[71: Memoirs, Journal and Correspondence of Thomas Moore, 1853, vol. ii. p. 197.]
[72: Nov. 24, 1777, Life and Letters, p. 40.]
[73: Austen Leigh, Memoir of Jane Austen.]
[74: Letter to William Godwin, Dec. 7, 1817.]
[75: William Godwin: His Friends and Contemporaries. Kegan Paul, 1876, vol. i. p. 78.]
[76: Preface to Fleetwood, 1832.]
[77: Preface to Fleetwood, 1832.]
[78: Preface to Fleetwood, 1832, p. xi: “I read over a little
old
book entitled The Adventures of Mme. De St. Phale, I
turned
over the pages of a tremendous compilation entitled God’s
Revenge against Murder, where the beam of the eye of
omniscience was represented as perpetually pursuing the
guilty… I was extremely conversant with The Newgate
Calendar and The Lives of the Pirates. I rather amused
myself
with tracing a certain similitude between the story of
Caleb
Williams and the tale of Bluebeard;” and Preface to
Cloudesley: “The present publication may in the same
sense be
denominated a paraphrase of the old ballad of the Children
in
the Wood.”]
[79: Scott, Introduction to The Abbot, 1831.]
[80: William Godwin: His Friends and Contemporaries, 1876, vol. ii. p. 304.]
[81: Caleb Williams, ch. x.]
[82: William Godwin: His Friends and Contemporaries, vol. i. pp. 330-1.]
[83: Political Justice, bk. ii, ch. ii.]
[84: William Godwin: His Friends and Contemporaries, vol. i. pp. 330-1; Preface to 1st edition, 1799.]
[85: Hermippus Redivivus; or The Sage’s Triumph over Old Age
and
the Grave (translated from the Latin of Cohausen, with
annotations), 1743. Dr. Johnson pronounced the volume “very
entertaining as an account of the hermetic philosophy and as
furnishing a curious history of the extravagancies of the
human
mind,” adding “if it were merely imaginary it would be
nothing at
all.”]
[86: St. Leon, vol. iv. ch, xiii.]
[87: St. Leon, Bk. iv, ch. v.]
[88: Lives of the Necromancers, 1834, Preface. “The main purpose of this book is to exhibit a fair delineation of the credulity of the human mind. Such an exhibition cannot fail to be productive of the most salutary lessons.”]
[89: St. Godwin: A Tale of the 16th, 17th and 18th Century, by Count Reginald de St. Leon, 1800, p. 234.]
[90: Dowden, Life of Shelley, vol. i. p. 10.]
[91: Dowden, Life of Shelley, vol. i. p. 44.]
[92: Hogg, Life of Shelley, vol. i. p. 15.]
[93: Cf. Castle of Lindenberg story in The Monk, and ballad of Alonzo the Brave.]
[94: A versification of the story of the Wandering Jew, Bleeding Nun and Don Raymond in The Monk.]
[95: This poem was borrowed from Lewis’s Tales of Terror
(without
Shelley’s knowledge), where it is entitled The Black Canon
of
Elmham, or St. Edmond’s Eve.]
[96: Letter to Edward Fergus Graham, Ap. 23, 1810 (Letters, ed.
Ingpen, 1909, vol. i, pp. 4-6).]
[97: Letter to John Joseph Stockdale, Nov. 14, 1810.]
[98: Mme. de Montolieu, Caroline de Lichfield, translated by Thos. Holcroft, 1786.]
[99: Mme. de Genlis, translated by Rev. Beresford, 1796.]
[100: Peter Middleton Darling, Romance of the Highlands, 1810.]
[101: Regina Maria Roche, The Discarded Son, or The Haunt of the Banditti, 1806.]
[102: Agnes Musgrave, Cicely, or The Rose of Raby.]
[103: Aphra Behn, The Nun.]
[104: Charlotte Smith, Ethelinde, or The Recluse of the Lake, 1790.]
[105: The Relapse: a novel, 1780.]
[106: Tales of the Hall.]
[107: Crébillon, Les Égarements du Coeur et de l’Esprit.]
[108: The Borough, Ellen Orford, Letter xx.]
[109: The Borough, xx, ll. 56 seqq.]
[110: Parish Register.]
[111: William and Helen, 1796.]
[112: House of Aspen, 1799 (Keepsake, 1830). Doom of Devorgoil, 1817 (Keepsake, 1830).]
[113: Scott, Lives of the Novelists (on Clara Reeve and Mrs. Radcliffe and Maturin).]
[114: Keepsake, 1828.]
[115: Keepsake, 1828.]
[116: Journal, Feb. 23, 1826.]
[117: List of books read 1814-1816.]
[118: Fantasmagoriana: ou Recueil d’Histoires d’Apparitions, de
Spectres, de Revenans, trad. d’Allemand par un Amateur.
Paris,
1812.]
[119: Diary of John William Polidori, June 17, 1816.]
[120: Byron, Letters and Journals, 1899, iii. 446. Mary Shelley, Life and Letters, 1889, i. 586. Extract from Mary Shelley’s Diary, Aug. 14, 1816.]
[121: Nov. 15, 1823, Life and Letters of Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley (Marshall), ii. 52.]
[122: Life and Letters, ii. 88. ]
[123: Romancist and Novelist’s Library.]
[124: Reprinted in Treasure House of Tales by Great Authors, ed. Garnett, 1891.]
[125: Punch, vol. x. p. 31:
“Says Ainsworth to Colburn
A plan in my pate is
To give my romance, as
A supplement gratis.
Says Colburn to Ainsworth
’Twill do very nicely,
For that will be charging
Its value precisely.”]
[126: Life, Letters and Literary Remains, 1883, vol. ii. pp. 70 seqq.]
[127: Dublin University Magazine, 1862. “Forgotten Novels.”]
[128: Blackwood’s Magazine, 1830-1837.]
[129: Within the Tides, 1915.]
[130: Preface to The Algerine Captive (Walpole, Vermont, 1797) quoted Loshe, Early American Novel, N.Y. 1907.]
[131: Preface to Edgar Huntly.]
[132: Peacock, Memoirs of Shelley.]