St. Leon was travestied, the year after it appeared, in a work called St. Godwin: A Tale of the 16th, 17th and 18th Century, by "Count Reginald de St. Leon," which gives a scathing survey of the plot, with all its improbabilities exposed. The bombastic style of St. Leon is imitated and only slightly exaggerated, and the author finally satirises Godwin bitterly:
"Thinking from my political writings that I was a good hand at fiction, I turned my thoughts to novel-writing. These I wrote in the same pompous, inflated style as I had used in my other publications, hoping that my fine high-sounding periods would assist to make the unsuspecting reader swallow all the insidious reasoning, absurdity and nonsense I could invent."[89]
The parodist takes Godwin almost as seriously as he took himself, and his attack is needlessly savage. Godwin's political opinions may account for the brutality of his assailant who doubtless belonged to the other camp. When Godwin attempts the supernatural in his other novels, he always fails to create an atmosphere of mystery. The apparition in Cloudesley appears, fades, and reappears in a manner so undignified as to remind us of the Cheshire Cat in Alice in Wonderland:
"I suddenly saw my brother's face looking out from among the trees as I passed. I saw the features as distinctly as if the meridian sun had beamed upon them… It was by degrees that the features showed themselves thus out of what had been a formless shadow. I gazed upon it intently. Presently it faded away by as insensible degrees as those by which it had become agonisingly clear. After a short time it returned."
Godwin describes a ghost as deliberately and exactly as he would describe a house, and his delineation causes not the faintest tremor. Having little imagination himself, he leaves nothing to the imagination of the reader. In his Lives of the Necromancers, he shows that he is interested in discovering the origin of a belief in natural magic; but the life stories of the magicians suggest no romantic pictures to his imagination. In dealing with the mysterious and the uncanny, Godwin was attempting something alien to his mind and temper.
In Godwin's St. Leon the elixir of life is quietly bestowed on the hero in a summer-house in his own garden. The poet, Thomas Moore, in his romance, The Epicurean (1827), sends forth a Greek adventurer to seek it in the secret depths of the catacombs beneath the pyramids of Egypt. He originally intended to tell his story in verse, but after writing a fragment, Alciphron, abandoned this design and decided to begin again in prose. His story purports to be a translation of a recently discovered manuscript buried in the time of Diocletian. Inspired by a dream, in which an ancient and venerable man bids him seek the Nile if he wishes to discover the secret of eternal life, Alciphron, a young Epicurean philosopher of the second century, journeys to Egypt. At Memphis he falls in love with a beautiful priestess, Alethe, whom he follows into the catacombs. Bearing a glimmering lamp, he passes through a gallery, where the eyes of a row of corpses, buried upright, glare upon him, into a chasm peopled by pale, phantom-like forms. He braves the terrors of a blazing grove and of a dark stream haunted by shrieking spectres, and finds himself whirled round in chaos like a stone shot in a sling. Having at length passed safely through the initiation of Fire, Water and Air, he is welcomed into a valley of "unearthly sadness," with a bleak, dreary lake lit by a "ghostly glimmer of sunshine." He gazes with awe on the image of the god Osiris, who presides over the silent kingdom of the dead. Watching within the temple of Isis, he suddenly sees before him the priestess, Alethe, who guides him back to the realms of day. At the close of the story, after Alethe has been martyred for the Christian faith, Alciphron himself becomes a Christian.
In The Epicurean, Moore shows a remarkable power of describing scenes of gloomy terror, which he throws into relief by occasional glimpses of light and splendour. The journey of Alciphron inevitably challenges comparison with that of Vathek, but the spirit of mockery that animates Beckford's story is wholly absent. Moore paints a theatrical panorama of effective scenes, but his figures are mere shadows.
The miseries of an existence, prolonged far beyond the allotted span, are depicted not only in stories of the elixir of life, but in the legends centring round the Wandering Jew. Croly's Salathiel (1829), like Eugene Sue's lengthy romance, Le Juif Errant, won fame in its own day, but is now forgotten. Some of Croly's descriptions, such as that of the burning trireme, have a certain dazzling magnificence, but the colouring is often crude and startling. The figure of the deathless Jew is apt to be lost amid the mazes of the author's rhetoric. The conception of a man doomed to wander eternally in expiation of a curse is in itself an arresting theme likely to attract a romantic writer, but the record of his adventures may easily become monotonous.
The "novel of terror" has found few more ardent admirers than the youthful Shelley, who saw in it a way of escape from the harsh realities and dull routine of ordinary existence. From his childhood the world of ideas seems to have been at least as real and familiar to him as the material world. The fabulous beings of whom he talked to his young sisters—the Great Tortoise in Warnham Pond, the snake three hundred years old in the garden at Field Place, the grey-bearded alchemist in his garret[90]—had probably for him as much meaning and interest as the living people around him. Urged by a restless desire to evade the natural and encounter the supernatural, he wandered by night under the "perilous moonshine," haunted graveyards in the hope of "high talk with the departed dead," dabbled in chemical experiments and pored over ancient books of magic. It was to be expected that an imagination reaching out so eagerly towards the unknown should find refuge from the uncongenial life of Sion House School in the soul-stirring region of romance. Transported by sixpenny "blue books" and the many volumed novels in the Brentford circulating library, Shelley's imagination fled joyously to that land of unlikelihood, where the earth yawns with bandits' caverns inhabited by desperadoes with bloody daggers, where the air continually resounds with the shrieks and groans of melancholy spectres, and where the pale moon ever gleams on dark and dreadful deeds. He had reached that stage of human development when fairies, elves, witches and dragons begin to lose their charm, when the gentle quiver of fear excited by an ogre, who is inevitably doomed to be slain at the last, no longer suffices. At the approach of adolescence with its surging emotions and quickening intellectual life, there awakens a demand for more thrilling incidents, for wilder passions and more desperate crimes, and it is at this period that the "novel of terror" is likely to make its strongest appeal. Youth, with its inexperience, is seldom tempted to bring fiction to the test of reality, or to scorn it on the ground of its improbability, and we may be sure that Shelley and his cousin, Medwin, as they hung spellbound over such treasures as The Midnight Groan, The Mysterious Freebooter, or Subterranean Horrors did not pause to consider whether the characters and adventures were true to life. They desired, indeed, not to criticise but to create, and in the winter of 1809-1810 united to produce a terrific romance, with the title Nightmare, in which a gigantic and hideous witch played a prominent part. After reading Schubert's Der Ewige Jude, they began a narrative poem dealing with the legend of the Wandering Jew,[91] who lingered in Shelley's imagination in after years, and whom he introduced into Queen Mab, Prometheus Unbound, and Hellas. The grim and ghastly legends included in "Monk" Lewis's Tales of Terror (1799) and Tales of Wonder (1801) fascinated Shelley;[92] and the suggestive titles Revenge;[93] Ghasta, or the Avenging Demon;[94] St. Edmund's Eve;[95] The Triumph of Conscience from the Poems by Victor and Cazire (1810), and The Spectral Horseman from The Posthumous Poems of Margaret Nicholson (1810), all prove his preoccupation with the supernatural. That Shelley's enthusiasm for the gruesome and uncanny was not merely morbid and hysterical, the mad, schoolboyish letter, written while he was in the throes of composing St. Irvyne, is sufficient indication. In a mood of grotesque fantasy and wild exhilaration, Shelley invites his friend Graham to Field Place. The postscript is in his handwriting, but is signed by his sister Elizabeth:
"The avenue is composed of vegetable substances moulded in the form of trees called by the multitude Elm trees. Stalk along the road towards them and mind and keep yourself concealed as my mother brings a blood-stained stiletto which she purposes to make you bathe in the lifeblood of your enemy. Never mind the Death-demons and skeletons dripping with the putrefaction of the grave, that occasionally may blast your straining eyeballs. Persevere even though Hell and destruction should yawn beneath your feet.