Not only is architecture made subservient to the needs of Gothic fiction, but the scenery likewise is adapted to fit it. Before Mrs. Radcliffe wrote her stories interlarded with nature descriptions, scant notice had been paid to scenery in the novel. But she set the style for morose landscapes as Walpole had for glooming castles, and the succeeding romances of the genre combined both features. Mrs. Radcliffe was not at all hampered by the fact that she had never laid eyes on the scenes she so vividly pictures. She painted the dread scenery of awesome mountains and forests, beetling crags and dizzy abysses with fluent and fervent adjectives, and her successors imitated her in sketching nature with dark impressionism.
The scenery in general in the Gothic novel is always subjectively represented. Nature in itself and of itself is not the important thing. What the writer seeks to do is by descriptions of the outer world to emphasize the mental states of man, to reflect the moods of the characters, and to show a fitting background for their crimes and unearthly experiences. There is little of the light of day, of the cheerfulness of ordinary nature, but only the scenes and phenomena that are in harmony with the glooms of crimes and sufferings.
Like the scenery, the weather in the Gothic novel is always subjectively treated. There is ever an artistic harmony between man’s moods and the atmospheric conditions. The play of lightning, supernatural thunders, roaring tempests announce the approach and operations of the devil, and ghosts walk to the accompaniment of presaging tempests. In The Albigenses the winds are diabolically possessed and laugh fiendishly instead of moaning as they do as seneschals in most romances of terror. The storms usually take place at midnight, and there is rarely a peaceful night in Gothic fiction. The stroke of twelve generally witnesses some uproar of nature as some appearance of restless spirit. Whenever the heroines in Mrs. Radcliffe’s tales start on their midnight ramble through subterranean passages and halls of horror, the barometer becomes agitated. And another[6] says: “The storm, that at that moment was tremendous, could not equal that tempest which passed in the thoughts of the unhappy captive.”
In Zofloya Victoria’s meetings in the forest with the Moor, who is really the devil in disguise, are accompanied by supernatural manifestations of nature. The weather is ordered to suit the dark, unholy plots they make, and they plan murders against a background of black clouds, hellish thunder, and lurid lightning. When at last the Moor announces himself as the devil and hurls Victoria from the mountain top, a sympathetic storm arises and a flood sweeps her body into the river. This scene is accusingly like the one in the last chapter of Lewis’s Monk, where the devil throws Ambrosio from the cliff to the river’s brink.
Instantly a violent storm arose; the winds in fury rent up rocks and forests; the sky was now black with clouds, now sheeted with fire; the rain fell in torrents; it swelled the stream, the waves over-flowed their banks; they reached the spot where Ambrosio lay, and, when they abated, carried with them into the river the corse of the despairing monk.
No Gothic writer shows more power of harmonizing the tempests of the soul with the outer storms than does Charles Robert Maturin.[7] As Melmoth, doomed to dreadful life till he can find some tortured soul willing to exchange destinies with him, traverses the earth in his search, the preternatural aspects of weather both reflect and mock his despair. As the young nephew alone at midnight after his uncle’s death reads the fated manuscript, “cloud after cloud comes sweeping on like the dark banners of an approaching host whose march is for destruction.” Other references may illustrate the motif. “Clouds go portentously off like ships of war ... to return with added strength and fury.” “The dark and heavy thunder-clouds that advance slowly seem like the shrouds of specters of departed greatness. Peals of thunder sounded, every peal like the exhausted murmurs of a spent heart.”
In general, in the Gothic novel there is a decided and definite attempt to use the terrible forces of nature to reflect the dark passions of man, with added suggestiveness where supernatural agencies are at work in the events. This becomes a distinct convention, used with varying effectiveness. Nowhere in the fiction of the period is there the power such as Shakespeare reveals, as where Lear wanders on the heath in the pitiless clutch of the storm, with a more tragic tempest in his soul. Yet, although the idea of the inter-relation of the passions of man and nature is not original with the Gothicists, and though they show little of the inevitability of genius, they add greatly to their supernatural effect by this method. Later fiction is less barometric as less architectural than the Gothic.
The Origin of Individual Gothic Tales.
The psychological origin of the individual Gothic romances is interesting to note. Supernaturalism was probably more generally believed in then than now, and people were more given to the telling of ghost stories and all the folk-tales of terror than at the present time. One reason for this may be that they had more leisure; and their great open fires were more conducive to the retailing of romances of shudders than our unsocial steam radiators. The eighteenth century seemed frankly to enjoy the pleasures of fear, and the rise of the Gothic novel gave rein to this natural love for the uncanny and the gruesome.
Dreams played an important part in the inspiration of the tales of terror. The initial romance was, as the author tells us, the result of an architectural nightmare. Walpole says in a letter: