The Tale of Terror Part 12

"A skilful literary artist has constructed a tale ...

having conceived, with deliberate care, a certain unique or single effect to be wrought out, he then invents such incidents--he then combines such events--as may best aid him in establis.h.i.+ng this preconceived effect. If his very initial sentence tend not to the outbringing of this effect, he has failed in the first step. In the whole composition there should be no word written of which the tendency direct or indirect is not to the one pre-established design."

While he was writing, Poe did not for a moment let his imagination run riot. The outline of the story was so distinctly conceived, its atmosphere so familiar to him, that he had leisure to choose his words accurately, and to dispose his sentences harmoniously, with the final effect ever steadily in view. The impression that he swiftly flashes across our minds is deep and enduring.

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 Calprenede and of Mademoiselle de Scudery were translated into English, they found many imitators and admirers, and their vogue outlasted the seventeenth century. _Artamene 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 Ca.s.sandra, 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 cla.s.s of society is represented, from the vagabond to the n.o.ble lord. Richardson, in describing the s.h.i.+fts 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 a.n.a.lysis of a woman's heart. The sentiment of Richardson descends to Mrs. Radcliffe. Her heroines are fas.h.i.+oned 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 superst.i.tious 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.

f.a.n.n.y 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 m.u.f.fin, 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 surrept.i.tious 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 s.p.a.ce of five minutes at the spectral "nun." This episode indicates a change of fas.h.i.+on; 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 pa.s.sion, 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 Yorks.h.i.+re moors are the background for elemental feelings. We no longer "tremble with delicious dread" or "s.n.a.t.c.h 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 pa.s.ses almost beyond the bounds of speech. The Brontes 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 Brontes, 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 fict.i.tious 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 G.o.dwin 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 superst.i.tions. 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 fas.h.i.+oned 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 hara.s.sed 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 n.i.g.g.e.r 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 a.s.sail 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: _c.o.c.k 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: Advertis.e.m.e.nt 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. x.x.xIV.]

[29: Ch. lxii.]

[30: Jan. 27, 1780.]