The personality of the narrator, swayed by the terror of his tale, would have cast the spell that Scott's carefully framed sentences fail to create. Another of Scott's disjecta membra, composed at the end of the eighteenth century, is the opening of a story called The Lord of Ennerdale, in which the family of Ratcliffe settle down before the fire to listen to a story "savouring not a little of the marvellous." As Lady Ratcliffe and her daughters
"had heard every groan and lifted every trapdoor in company with the noted heroine of Udolpho, had valorously mounted en croupe behind the horseman of Prague through all his seven translators, had followed the footsteps of Moor through the forests of Bohemia,"
and were even suspected of an acquaintance with Lewis's Monk, Scott was setting himself no easy task when he undertook to thrill these seasoned adventurers. After this prologue, which leads one to expect a banquet of horrors, only a very brief fragment of the story is forthcoming. Though he gently derides Lady Ratcliffe's literary tastes, Scott, too, was an admirer of Mrs. Radcliffe's novels, and had been so entranced by Burger's Lenore that he attempted an English version.[111] It was after hearing Taylor's translation of this ballad read aloud that he uttered his dismal ejaculation: "I wish to heaven I could get a skull and two crossbones"—a whim that was speedily gratified. He, too, like Lady Ratcliffe, had read Die Räuber; and he translated Goethe's Gëtz von Berlichingen. He delighted in Lewis's Tales of Wonder (1801) where the verse gallops through horrors so fearful that the "lights in the chamber burn blue," and himself contributed to the collection. He wrote "goblin dramas"[112] as terrific in intention, but not in performance, as Lewis's Castle Spectre and Maturin's Bertram. His Latin call-thesis dealt with the kind of subject "Monk" Lewis or Harrison Ainsworth or Poe might have chosen—the disposal of the dead bodies of persons legally executed. Scott continually added to his store of quaint and grisly learning both from popular tradition and from a library of such works as Bovet's Pandemonium, or the Devil's Cloyster Opened, Sinclair's Satan's Invisible World Discovered, whence he borrowed the name of the jackanapes in Wandering Willie's Tale, and the horse-shoe frown for the brow of the Redgauntlets, Heywood's Hierarchy of the Blessed Angels, Joseph Taylor's History of Apparitions, from which he quotes in Woodstock. He was familiar with all the niceties of ghostly etiquette; he could distinguish at a glance the various ranks and orders of demons and spirits; he was versed in charms and spells; he knew exactly how a wizard ought to be dressed. This lore not only stood him in good stead when he compiled his Letters on Demonology and Witchcraft (1830), but served to adorn his poems and novels. There was nothing unhealthy in his attitude towards the spectral world. At an inn he slept soundly in one bed of a double room, while a dead man occupied the other. Twice in his life he confessed to having felt "eerie"—once at Glamis Castle, which was said to be haunted by a Presence in a Secret Chamber, and once when he believed that he saw an apparition on his way home in the twilight; but he usually jests cheerfully when he speaks of the supernatural. He was interested in tracing the sources of terror and in studying the mechanism of ghost stories.
The axioms which he lays down are sound and suggestive:
"Ghosts should not appear too often or become too chatty. The magician shall evoke no spirits, whom he is not capable of endowing with manners and language corresponding to their supernatural character. Perhaps, to be circumstantial and abundant in minute detail and in one word … to be somewhat prosy, is the secret mode of securing a certain necessary degree of credulity from the hearers of a ghost story… The chord which vibrates and sounds at a touch remains in silent tension under continued pressure."[113]
Scott's ghost story, The Tapestried Chamber, or the Lady in the Sacque[114] which he heard from Miss Anna Seward, who had an unexpected gift for recounting such things at country house parties, gives the impression of being carefully planned according to rule. As a human being the Lady in the Sacque had a black record, but, considered dispassionately as a ghost, her manners and deportment are irreproachable. The ghost-seer's independence of character are so firmly insisted upon that it seems impertinent to doubt the veracity of his story. My Aunt Margaret's Mirror was told to Scott in childhood by an ancient spinster, whose pleasing fancy it was to read alone in her chamber by the light of a taper fixed in a candlestick which she had formed out of a human skull, and who was learned in superstitious lore. She describes accurately the mood, when "the female imagination is in due temperature to enjoy a ghost story":
"All that is indispensable for the enjoyment of the milder feeling of supernatural awe is that you should be susceptible of the slight shuddering which creeps over you when you hear a tale of terror—that well-vouched tale which the narrator, having first expressed his general disbelief of all such legendary lore, selects and produces, as having something in it which he has been always obliged to give up as inexplicable. Another symptom is a momentary hesitation to look round you, when the interest of the narrative is at the highest; and the third, a desire to avoid looking into a mirror, when you are alone, in your chamber, for the evening."[115]
In her story "Aunt Margaret" describes how, in a magic mirror belonging to Dr. Baptista Damiotti, Lady Bothwell and her sister Lady Forester see the wedding ceremony of Sir Philip Forester and a young girl in a foreign city interrupted by Lady Forester's brother, who is slain in the duel that ensues. Scott regarded these two stories as trifles designed to while away a leisure hour. On Wandering Willie's Tale—a masterpiece of supernatural terror—he bestowed unusual care. The ill fa'urd, fearsome couple—Sir Robert with his face "gash and ghastly as Satan's," and "Major Weir," the jackanape, in his red-laced coat and wig—Steenie's eerie encounter with the "stranger" on horseback, the ribald crew of feasters in the hall are described so faithfully and in such vivid phrases that it is no wonder Willie should remark at one point of the story: "I almost think I was there mysell, though I couldna be born at the same time." The power of the tale, which fascinates us from beginning to end and which can be read again and again with renewed pleasure, depends partly on Wandering Willie's gifts as a narrator, partly on the emotions that stir him as he talks. With unconscious art, he always uses the right word in his descriptions, and chooses those details that help us to fix the rapidly changing imagery of his scenes; and he reproduces exactly the natural dialogue of the speakers. He begins in a tone of calm, unhurried narration, with only a hint of fear in his voice, but, at the death of Sir Robert, grows breathless with horror and excitement. The uncanny incident of the silver whistle that sounds from the dead man's chamber is skilfully followed by a matter-of-fact account of Steenie's dealings with the new laird. The emotion culminates in the terror of the hall of ghastly revellers, whose wild shrieks "made Willie's gudesire's very nails grow blue and chilled the marrow in his banes." So lifelike is the scene, so full of colour and movement, that Steenie's descendants might well believe that their gudesire, like Dante, had seen Hell.
The notes, introductions and appendices to Scott's works are stored with material for novels of terror. The notes to Marmion, for instance, contain references to a necromantic priest whose story "much resembles that of Ambrosio in the Monk," to an "Elfin" warrior and to a chest of treasure jealously guarded for a century by the Devil in the likeness of a huntsman. In The Lady of the Lake there is a note on the ancient legend of the Phantom Sire, in Rokeby there is an allusion to the Demon Frigate wandering under a curse from harbour to harbour. To Scott "bogle-wark" was merely a diversion. He did not choose to make it the mainspring either of his poems or his romances. In The Lay of the Last Minstrel he had, indeed, intended to make the Goblin Page play a leading part, but the imp, as Scott remarked to Miss Seward, "by the natural baseness of his propensities contrived to slink downstairs into the kitchen." The White Lady of Avenel, who appears in The Monastery (1830)—a boisterous creature who rides on horseback, splashes through streams and digs a grave—was wisely withdrawn in the sequel, The Abbot. In the Introduction Scott states:
"The White Lady is scarcely supposed to have possessed either the power or the inclination to do more than inflict terror or create embarrassment, and is always subjected by those mortals who … could assert superiority over her."