So late as 1834—more than a decade after the appearance of Melmoth—Harrison Ainsworth, whose imagination was steeped in terror, sought once more to revive the "feeble and fluttering pulses of old Romance." Among his earliest experiments were tales obviously fashioned in the Gothic manner. His Imperishable One, the hero of a tale first published in the European Magazine for 1822, bemoans the burden of immortality in the listless tones of Godwin's St. Leon, and is tempted by the fallen angel in the self-same guise in which he appeared to Lewis's notorious monk. In The Test of Affection (European Magazine, 1822) a wealthy man avails himself of Mrs. Radcliffe's supernatural trickery to test the loyalty of his friends, whom he succeeds in alarming by noises and a skeleton apparition. In Arliss's Pocket Magazine (1822) there appeared The Spectre Bride; and in the European Magazine (1823) Ainsworth attempted a theme that would have attracted Poe in The Half Hangit. The Boeotian for 1824 contained A Tale of Mystery, and the Literary Souvenir for 1825 The Fortress of Saguntum, a story in the style of Lewis. Ainsworth's first novel, Rookwood (1834), was inspired by a visit to Cuckfield Place, an old manor house which had reminded Shelley of "bits of Mrs. Radcliffe":
"Wishing to describe somewhat minutely the trim gardens, the picturesque domains, the rook-haunted groves, the gloomy chambers and gloomier galleries of an ancient hall with which I was acquainted, I resolved to attempt a story in the bygone style of Mrs. Radcliffe, substituting an old English squire, an old manorial residence and an old English highwayman for the Italian marchise, the castle and the brigand of that great mistress of romance… The attempt has succeeded beyond my most sanguine expectation. Romance, if I am not mistaken, is destined shortly to undergo an important change. Modified by the German and French writers—Hoffmann, Tieck, Victor Hugo, Alexander Dumas, Balzac and Paul Lacroix—the structure commenced in our land by Horace Walpole, 'Monk' Lewis, Mrs. Radcliffe and Maturin, but, left imperfect and inharmonious, requires, now that the rubbish which choked up its approach is removed, only the hand of the skilful architect to its entire renovation and perfection."
In Rookwood, Ainsworth disdains Mrs. Radcliffe's reasonable elucidations of the supernatural, and introduces spectres whose existence it would be impossible to deny. Once, however, a supposed ghost becomes substantial, and proves to be none other than a human being called Jack Palmer. The sexton, Luke Bradley, alias Alan Rookwood, has inherited two of the Wanderer's traits—the fear-impelling eyes of intolerable lustre, and the habit of indulging in wild, screaming laughter on the most inauspicious occasions.
Gothic properties are scattered with indiscriminate extravagance—skeleton hands, suddenly extinguished candles, sliding panels, sepulchral vaults. The plot of Rookwood is too complicated and too overcrowded with incident to keep our attention. The terrors are so unremitting that they fail to strike home. The only part of the book which holds us enthralled is the famous description of Dick Turpin's ride to York. Here we forget Ainsworth's slip-shod style in the excitement of the chase. In his later novels Ainsworth abandoned the manner of Mrs. Radcliffe, but did not fail to make use of the motive of terror and mystery. The scenes of horror which he strove to convey in words were often more admirably depicted in the illustrations of Cruikshank. The sorcerer's sabbath in Crichton, the historical scenes of horror in The Tower of London, the masque of the Dance of Death in Old St. Paul's, the appearance of Herne the Hunter, heralded by phosphoric lights, in Windsor Castle, the terrible orgies of The Lancashire Witches, are described with more striking effect because of Ainsworth's early reading in the school of terror. In Auriol, which was first published in Ainsworth's Magazine (1844-5) under the title Revelations of London, was issued in 1845 as a gratuitous supplement to the New Monthly, and greeted with derision,[125] Ainsworth handled once again the theme that fascinated Lytton. The Prologue (1599) describes the death of Dr. Lamb, whose elixir is seized by his great-grandson. In 1830 London is haunted by a stranger, who involves Auriol in wildly fantastic and frightful adventures. The book closes in Dr. Lamb's laboratory; the intervening scenes are but dream imagery. Phiz's sketch of the Ruined House is the most lasting memory left by the book.
Captain Marryat, whose mind was well stored with sailors' yarns, retells in The Phantom Ship (1839) the old legend of the Flying Dutchman. At one time the doomed vessel is an unsubstantial vision, which can pass clean through the Utrecht; at another she is a real craft, whose deck can be boarded by mortal men. The one-eyed pilot, Schriften, with his malignant hatred of the hero, Philip, is a terrifying figure. The story is embroidered by the invention of a wife of Arab extraction, who is constantly attempting to recall the half-forgotten magical arts which her mother had practised. Marryat makes an opportunity in the history of Krantz, the second mate of the Vrou Katerina, to introduce the Scandinavian legend of the werewolf, which is related with grisly detail.
The novel of terror, with all its faults, had seldom been guilty of demanding intellectual strain or of overburdening itself with erudition. It was the dignified task of Lord Lytton to rationalise and elevate the novel of terror, to evolve the "man of reason" from the "child of nature." Although time has tarnished the brilliance of his reputation, George Edward Bulwer was an imposing figure in the history of nineteenth century fiction. Throughout his life, in spite of political and social distractions and of matrimonial disaster, he continued to engage with unwearying industry in literary work. He was not a man of genius in whom the creative impulse found its own expression, but a versatile and accomplished gentleman who could direct his talents into any channel he pleased. Essays, translations, verses, plays, novels flowed from his pen in rapid succession, and he won his meed of applause and fame, as well as his share of execration and derision, in his own lifetime. Quick to discern the popular taste of the hour, and eager to gratify it, Lytton, with the resourceful agility of a lightning impersonator, turns in his novels from Wertherism to dandyism, from criminal psychology to fairy folk-lore, from historical romance to domestic romance, from pseudo-philosophic occultism to pseudo-scientific fantasy. He ranges at will in the past, the present or the future, consorting indifferently with impalpable wraiths, Vrilya or mysterious Sages. It is to his credit that this unusual gift of adaptability does not result in incompetency. Though he attempts a variety of manners, it must in justice be acknowledged that he does most of them well. He constructs his plots with laborious art, and pays a deliberate, if sometimes misguided, attention to style. When he fails, it is less from lack of effort than from over-elaboration and excess of zeal.
Bulwer Lytton's predilection for the supernatural was neither a theatrical pose nor a passing folly excited by the fashionable craze for psychical research, but a genuine and enduring interest, inherited, it may be, from his ancestor, the learned, eccentric savant, Dr. Bulwer, who studied the Black Art and dabbled in astrology and palmistry. He was a member of the society of Rosicrucians, and, to quote the words of his grandson, "he certainly did not study magic for the sake of writing about it, still less did he write about it, without having studied it, merely for the sake of making his readers' flesh creep." From his early years Lytton seems to have been keenly interested in supernatural manifestations. He was inspired by the deserted rooms at the end of a long gallery in Knebworth House to set down the story of the ghost, Jenny Spinner, who was said to haunt them; and the concealed chamber in The Haunted and the Haunters may have been a revived memory of the trap-door down which Lytton as a boy had "peeped with bristling hair into the shadowy abysses of hellhole." In Glenallan,[126] an early fragment, we find promising material for a tale of mystery—a villain with a "strange and sinister expression," a boy who, like the youthful Shelley, steals forth by night to graveyards, hoping to attain to fearful secrets, and an aged servant, a living chronicle of horrors, who relates the doings of an Irish wizard, Morshed Tyrone, of such awful power that the spirits of the earth, air and ocean ministered to him. In Godolphin (1833) there is an astrologer with the furrowed brow and awful eye, so common among the people of terror, and a strangely gifted girl, Lucilla, who turns soothsayer. But when Bulwer Lytton attempts a supernatural romance he leaves far behind him the sphere of Gothic terrors and soars into rarefied, exalted regions that inspire awe rather than horror. The Dweller of the Threshold in Zanoni is no red-cloaked, demoniacal figure springing from a trap-door with a deafening clap of thunder, but a "Colossal Shadow" brooding over the crater of Vesuvius.
The romance, Zanoni (1842), which Lytton considered the greatest of his works and which Carlyle praised with what now seems extravagant fervour, was based on an earlier sketch, Zicci (1838), and embodies a complicated theory which he had conceived several years earlier after reading some mediaeval treatises on astrology and the occult sciences. While his mind was occupied with these studies, the character of Mejnour and the main outlines of the story were inspired by a dream, which he related to his son. According to Lytton's theory, the air is peopled with Intelligences, of whom some are favourable, others hostile to man. The earth contains certain plants, which, rightly used, have power to arrest the decay of the human body, and to enable man, by quickening his physical senses and mental gifts, to perceive the aerial beings and to discover the secrets of nature. This supernatural knowledge is in possession of a brotherhood of whom two only, Mejnour and his pupil Zanoni, are in existence. The initiation involves the surrender of all violent passions and emotions, and the neophyte must be brought into contact with the powerful and malignant being called the Dweller of the Threshold:
"Whose form of giant mould
No mortal eye can fixed behold,"
Mejnour and Zanoni are supposed to have been initiated—the former in old age, the latter in youth—more than five thousand years before the story opens. Thus Mejnour remains for ever a vigorous old man; while Zanoni, his pupil, enjoys perpetual youth. Mejnour is purely intellectual, and spends his life in contemplation; while Zanoni, though he must avoid love and friendship which are unknown to the passionless Intelligences, feels sympathy with human beings.