CHAPTER X - SHORT TALES OF TERROR.
For the readers of their own day the Gothic romances of Walpole, Miss Reeve and Mrs. Radcliffe possessed the charm of novelty. Before the close of the century we may trace, in the conversations of Isabella Thorpe and Catherine Morland in Northanger Abbey, symptoms of a longing for more poignant excitement. It was at this time that Mrs. Radcliffe, after the publication of The Italian in 1797, retired quietly from the field. From her obscurity she viewed no doubt with some disdain the vulgar achievements of "Monk" Lewis and a tribe of imitators, who compounded a farrago of horrors as thick and slab as the contents of a witch's cauldron. Until the appearance in 1820 of Maturin's Melmoth, which was redeemed by its psychological insight and its vigorous style, the Gothic romance maintained a disreputable existence in the hands of those who looked upon fiction as a lucrative trade, not as an art. In the meantime, however, an easy device had been discovered for pandering to the popular craving for excitement. Ingenious authors realised that it was possible to compress into the five pages of a short story as much sensation as was contained in the five volumes of a Gothic romance. For the brevity of the tales, which were issued in chapbooks, readers were compensated by gaudily coloured illustrations and by double-barrelled titles. An anthology called "Wild Roses" (published by Anne Lemoine, Coleman Street, n.d.) included: Twelve O'Clock or the Three Robbers, The Monks of Cluny, or Castle Acre Monastery, The Tomb of Aurora, or The Mysterious Summons, The Mysterious Spaniard, or The Ruins of St. Luke's Abbey, and lastly, as a bonne bouche, Barbastal, or The Magician of the Forest of the Bloody Ash.[127] There are many collections of this kind, some of them dating back to 1806, among the chapbooks in the British Museum. It is in these brief, blood-curdling romances that we may find the origin of the short tale of terror, which became so popular a form of literature in the nineteenth century. The taste for these delicious morsels has lingered long. Dante Gabriel Rossetti delighted in Brigand Tales, Tales of Chivalry, Tales of Wonder, Legends of Terror; and it was in search of such booty, "a penny plain and twopence coloured" that, more than fifty years later, Robert Louis Stevenson and his companions ransacked the stores of a certain secluded stationer's shop in Edinburgh.
It was probably the success of the chapbook that encouraged the editors of periodicals early in the nineteenth century to enliven their pages with sensational fiction. The literary hack, who, if he had lived a century earlier, would have been glad to turn a Turkish tale for half-a-crown, now cheerfully furnished a "fireside horror" for the Christmas number. In his search after novelty he was often driven to wild and desperate expedients. Leigh Hunt, who showed scant sympathy with Lewis's bleeding nun and scoffed mercilessly at his "little grey men who sit munching hearts," was bound to admit: "A man who does not contribute his quota of grim story, now-a-days, seems hardly to be free of the republic of letters." Accordingly, so that he too might wear a death's head as part of his insignia, he included in The Indicator (1819-21) a supernatural story, entitled A Tale for a Chimney Corner. Scorning to "measure talents with a leg of veal or a German sausage," he unfortunately dismissed from his imagination the nightmarish hordes of
"Haunting Old Women and Knocking Ghosts, and Solitary
Lean Hands, and Empusas on one leg, and Ladies growing
Longer and Longer, and Horrid Eyes meeting us through
Keyholes; and Plaintive Heads and Shrieking Statues and
Shocking Anomalies of Shape and Things, which, when
seen, drove people mad,"
and in their place he conjured up a placid, ladylike ghost from a legend quoted in Sandys' commentary on Ovid. Leigh Hunt's story has the air of having been written by one who cared for none of these things; but there were others who wrote with more gusto.
Many of the tales in such collections as The Story-Teller (1833) or The Romancist and Novelist's Library (1839-42) show the persistence of Gothic story. In these periodicals the grave and the gay are intermingled, and when we are weary of dark intrigues and impenetrable secrets we may turn to lighter reading. Yet it is significant of the taste of our ancestors that we cannot venture far without encountering a spectre of some sort, or a villain with the baleful eye, disguised, it may be, as a Spanish gipsy, a German necromancer or a Russian count. Many of the stories are Gothic novels, reduced in size, but with room for all the old machinery:
"A novel now is nothing more
Than an old castle, and a creaking door,
A distant hovel,
Clanking of chains—a galley—a light—
Old armour, and a phantom all in white,
And there's a novel."
In The Story-Teller, a magazine which reprinted many popular tales, we find German legends like The Three Students of Göttingen, a "True Story Very Strange and Very Pitiful"; The Wood Demon; The Wehr-Wolf; The Sexton of Cologne, or Lucifer, a striking story of an Italian artist who was haunted by a terrible figure he had painted in the church at Arezzo. Yet the first tale in the collection, The Story-Haunted, which describes the sad fate of a youth brought up in a solitary library reading romances to his mother, was intended, like The Spectre-Smitten, in Passages from the Diary of a Late Physician,[128] as a solemn warning against over-indulgence in fictitious terrors. The mother dies in an agony of horror, as her son reads aloud the account of the Gentleman of Florence, who was pursued by a spectre of himself, which vanished with him finally into the earth, as the priest endeavoured to bless him. The son, left alone, enters the world, and judges the people around him by the standard of books. The story-haunted youth falls in love with the phantom of his own imagination, whom he endows with all the graces of the heroines of romance. He finds her embodied at last, but she dies before they are united. The Romancist and Novelist's Library, in ten volumes, contains a comprehensive selection of tales of terror by the "best authors." Walpole, Miss Reeve, Mrs. Radcliffe, "Monk" Lewis, Maturin, Mrs. Shelley, and Charles Brockden Brown are all represented; and there are many translations of tales by French and German authors. We may take our choice of The Spectre Barber or The Spectre Bride, or, if we are inclined to incredulity, see The Spectre Unmasked. The entertainment offered is of bewildering variety. Some of the stories, such as D.F. Hayne's Romance of the Castle, seem like familiar, well-tried friends, and conceal no surprises for the readers of Gothic romance. Others, like The Sleepless Woman, by W. Jerdan, are more piquant. The hero is warned by his dying uncle to beware of women's bright eyes. In spite of this he marries a lady, whose eyes unite the qualities of the robin and the falcon. After the wedding he makes the awful discovery that she is of too noble a lineage ever to sleep. Turn where he may, her eyes are always upon him. At last, we find him pallid, haggard, and emaciated, wandering alone in an avenue of cedar trees beside a silent lake:
"At this moment a breath of wind blew a branch aside—a sunbeam fell upon the baron's face; he took it for the eyes of his wife. Alas! his remedy lay temptingly before him, the still, the profound, the shadowy lake. De Launaye took one plunge—it was into eternity."
The writer foolishly ruins the effect of this climax by super-imposing an allegorical interpretation.
Like the Story-Teller, The Romancist and Novelist's Library should be read
"At night when doors are shut,
And the wood-worm pricks,
And the death-watch ticks,
And the bar has a flag of smut,—
And the cat's in the water-butt—
And the socket floats and flares,
And the housebeams groan,
And a foot unknown
Is surmised on the garret stairs,
And the locks slip unawares."
But "tales of terror" lose some of their power when read one after another; they are most effective read singly in periodicals. Blackwood's Magazine was especially famous for its tales, the best of which have been collected and published separately. The editor of the Dublin University Magazine shows a marked preference for tales of a supernatural or sensational cast. Le Fanu, who claimed that his stories, like those of Sir Walter Scott, belonged to the "legitimate school of English tragic romance," was one of the best-known contributors. All the Year Round and Household Words, under the editorship of Dickens, often found room for the occult and the uncanny. Wilkie Collins' fascinating serial, The Moonstone, was published in All the Year Round in 1868; The Woman in White had appeared six years earlier in Blackwood. The stories included in these magazines are of various types. The old-fashioned spook gradually declines in popularity. He is ousted in a scientific age by more recondite forms of terror. Before 1875, with a few belated exceptions:
"Ghosts, wandering here and there
Troop home to churchyards, damned spirits all,
That in crossways and floods have burial,
Already to their wormy beds are gone."
The "explained supernatural" is skilfully improved and developed. Le Fanu's Green Tea is a story from the diary of a German doctor, concerning a patient who was dogged by a black monkey. The creature, "whose green eyes glow with an expression of unfathomable malignity," is medically explained to be an illusion; but it is so vividly presented that it fastens on our imagination with remarkable tenacity. Wilkie Collins' short story, The Yellow Mask, included in the series called After Dark, is another experiment in the same kind. A jealous woman appears among the dancers at a ball, wearing a waxen cast of the face of the man's dead wife. The short story, in which the author deliberately shakes our nerves and then soothes away our fears by accounting naturally for startling phenomena, is an amazingly popular type. It reappears continually in different guises. Occasionally it merges into pleasant buffoonery. Die Geistertodtenglocke, for instance, a story in the Dublin University Magazine (1862), is a burlesque, in which the mysterious tolling of a bell is explained by the discovery that a cow strolled into the ruin to eat the hay with which the rope was mended. But, judiciously handled, this type of story makes a strong appeal to human beings who like to know how much of the terrible and painful they can endure, and who yet must ultimately be reassured.
Another group of short tales of terror consists of those which purport to be faithful renderings of the beliefs of simple people. To this category belong Allan Cunningham's Traditional Tales of the English and Scottish Peasantry, which first appeared, with one exception, in the London Magazine (1821-23). Cunningham has the tact to preserve the legends of elves, fairies, ghosts and bogles, as they were passed down from one generation to another on the lips of living beings. Later he attempted, in a novel, Sir Michael Scott (1828), a kind of Gothic romance; but there is no trace in the Traditional Tales of the influence of the terrormongers with whose works he was familiar. Perhaps the finest story of the collection is The Haunted Ships, in which are embodied the traditions associated with two black and decayed hulls, half immersed in the quicksands of the Solway. Lewis would have dragged us on board ship, and would have shown us the devil in his own person. Cunningham wisely keeps ashore, and repeats the tales that are told concerning the fiendish mirth and revelry to be heard, when, at certain seasons of the year, they arise in their former beauty, with forecastle and deck, with sail and pennon and shroud. James Hogg, the Ettrick shepherd, who was a friend of Cunningham, was steeped in the same folk-lore. The Mysterious Bride, printed among his Tales and Sketches, tells of a beautiful spirit-lady, dressed in white and green, who appears three times on St. Lawrence's Eve to the Laird of Birkendelly. On the morning, after the night on which she had promised to wed him, he is found, a blackened corpse, on Birky Brow. Mary Burnet is the story of a maiden who is drowned when keeping tryst with her lover. She returns to earth, like Kilmeny, and assures her parents of her welfare. A demon woman, whose form resembles that of Mary, haunts her lover, and entices him to evil. Since Hogg can give to his legends a "local habitation and a name," pointing to the very stretch of road on which the elfin lady first appeared, it seems ungracious to doubt his veracity. The Ettrick Shepherd's most memorable achievement, however, is his Confessions of a Fanatic (1824), a terribly impressive account of a man afflicted with religious mania, who believes himself urged into crime by a mysterious being. The story abounds in frightful situations and weird scenes, one of the most striking being the reflection, seen at daybreak on Arthur's Seat, of a human head and shoulders, dilated to twenty times its natural size. Professor Saintsbury has suggested that Lockhart probably had the principal hand in this story. "Christopher North" was another member of the Noctes confraternity who came sometimes under the spell of the unearthly.
The supernatural tales of Mrs. Gaskell, whose gift for story-telling made Dickens call her his Scheherazade, were, like those of Cunningham, based directly on tradition. She was always attracted by the subject of witchcraft; and she had collected a store of "creepy" legends of the kind which made the nervous ladies of Cranford bid their sedan-chairmen hasten rapidly down Darkness Lane at nights. The best of Mrs. Gaskell's short tales is perhaps The Nurse's Story, which appeared in the Christmas number of Household Words in 1852. Mrs. Gaskell has a happy gift for preserving the natural aroma of a tale of bygone days. The Nurse's Story has a hint of the old-world grace of Lamb's Dream Children. The carefully disposed tableau of ghosts—the unforgiving old man, and the vindictive sister, spurning the lady and her child from the hall—is too definite and distinct, but the conception of the wraith of the dead child outside the manor, pleading piteously to be let in, and luring away the living child, is delicately wrought. The tale is told in the rambling, circumstantial style, suitable to the fireside and the long leisure of a winter's evening. Dickens tells a very different nurse's story in one of the chapters of An Uncommercial Traveller. The tone of Mrs. Gaskell's nurse is kindly and protective; that of Dickens' nurse severe, admonitory and emphatic. She, who told the grim legend of Captain Murderer, meant, clearly, to scare as well as to entertain her hearer. She leads up to the climax of her story, the deadly revenge of the dark twin's poisoned pie, with admirable art. The nurse's name was Mercy, but, as Dickens remarks, she showed none to him. Though Dickens shrank timorously in childhood from her frightful stories, he himself, like the fat boy in Pickwick, sometimes "wants to make our flesh creep." It seems, indeed, an odd trait of the humorist that he can at will wholly discard his gaiety, and, like the Pied Piper, pipe to another measure. W.W. Jacobs, besides his humorous sailor yarns, has given us The Monkey's Paw; and Barry Pain's gruesome stories, Told in the Dark, are as forcible as any of his humours to be read in the daylight. Dickens, in his excursions into the supernatural, does not, however, always cast off his mood of jocularity. His treatment of Marley's ghost lacks dignity and decorum. Clanking its chains in a remote cellar of the silent, empty house, it has the power to disturb us, but we lose our respect for the shade when we gaze upon it eye to eye. Applied to the spirit world, there is much truth in the old adage that familiarity breeds contempt. The account of the thirteenth juryman, in Dr. Marigold's Prescriptions, is much more alarming. The story of the signalman, No. 1 Branch line, in Mugby Junction, is indefinably horrible. The signalman's anguish of mind, his exact description of the Appearance, his sense of overhanging calamity, are all strangely disquieting. The coincidence of the manner of his death, with which the story closes, is wisely left to make its own inevitable impression.
Some of the stories in Blackwood are the more striking because they depend for their effect on natural, not supernatural, horror. We may feel we are immune from the visits of ghosts, but the accident in The Man in the Bell (1821) is one which might happen to anyone. The maddening clangour of sound, the frightful images that crowd into the reeling brain of the man suspended in the belfry, are described with an unflinching realism that reminds us of The Pit and the Pendulum. To the same class belongs the skilfully constructed Iron Shroud (1830), by William Mudford, an author who, as Scott remarks in his journal, "loves to play at cherry-pit with Satan." The suspense is ingeniously maintained as, one by one, the windows of the iron dungeon disappear, until, at last, the massive walls and ponderous roof contract into the victim's iron shroud. Wilkie Collins' story, A Terribly Strange Bed, which describes the stratagem of a gang of cardsharpers for getting rid of those who happen to win money from them, is in the same vein. The canopy slowly descends during the night, and smothers its victim. A similar motive is used, with immeasurably finer effect, by Joseph Conrad in his story of the disappearance of the sailor at the lonely inn in the mountains of Spain. The experience of Byrne in The Inn of the Two Witches[129] is a masterpiece in the psychology of terror. The dense darkness, in which the young naval officer "steers his course only by the feel of the wind," the scene when the door of the inn bursts open and reveals in the candlelight the savage beauty of the gipsy girl with evil, slanting eyes, and the inhuman ugliness of the old hags, are a fitting prelude to the horrors of the chamber, where the corpse of the missing sailor is found in the wardrobe. We pass with Byrne through the different stages of suspicion and dread until, completely baffled in his attempt to account for the manner in which Tom Corbin was done to death, we feel "the hot terror that plays upon the heart like a tongue of flame that touches and withdraws before it turns a thing to ashes."
In the short stories of the latter half of the nineteenth century, it is hard to escape from the terrible. We light upon it suddenly, here, there and everywhere. We find it in Stevenson's New Arabian Nights, in his Merry Men, and his stories of the South Seas, as indeed we should expect, when we recall the tapping of the blind man's stick in Treasure Island, the scene with the candles in the snow after the duel between the two brothers in The Master of Ballantrae, or David Balfour's perilous adventure on the broken staircase in Kidnapped. Kipling is another expert in the art of eeriness, and has a wide range. His Indian backgrounds are peculiarly adapted for tales of terror. The loathsome horror of The Mark of the Beast, with its intangible suggestion of mystery, the quiet restraint of The Return of Imray, in which so much is left unsaid, are two admirable illustrations of his gift.
The tale of terror wins its effect by ever-varying means. Scientific discoveries open up new vistas, and the twentieth century will evolve many fresh devices for torturing the nerves. The telephone set ringing by a ghostly hand, the aeroplane with a phantom pilot, will replace the Gothic machinery of ruined abbeys and wandering lights. The possibilities of terror are manifold, and it is impracticable here to do more than pick up a few threads in the tangled skein. Terror becomes inextricably interwoven with other motives according to the bent of the author. It is allied with psychology in James' sinister Turn of the Screw, with scientific phantasy in Wells' Invisible Man. It may enhance the excitement of a spy story, add zest to the study of crime, or act as a foil to a romantic love interest.