Zanoni, who spends his life in the pursuit of pleasure, after fifty centuries at last falls in love with Viola, an Italian opera-singer. Like Melmoth the Wanderer, Zanoni is reluctant to bind the woman he loves to his own fate. He tries to renounce Viola to an Englishman, Glyndon, who eventually chooses to relinquish love for the sake of achieving the unearthly knowledge of Mejnour. Glyndon, however, fails in the trial, and is consequently haunted by the horror of the Dweller of the Threshold. Meanwhile Zanoni is united to Viola; and because he has succumbed to the force of love, his peculiar powers begin to fail. He can no longer see the beautiful, aerial intelligence, Adon-Ai. To save from death Viola and the child who is born to them, Zanoni ere long yields to the Dweller of the Threshold his gift of communion with the inhabitants of heaven. Later Viola, who incidentally typifies Superstition deserting Faith, leaves Zanoni at the call of Glyndon, and in Paris, during the Reign of Terror, is doomed to die. Zanoni invokes the aid of the mysterious Intelligences, and his courage at length brings Adon-Ai again to his side. He wins a day's reprieve for Viola, and is executed in her stead. The death of Robespierre releases the prisoners, but Viola dies the next day.
The compact between Zanoni and the Dweller of the Threshold is a renovation of the time-worn legend of the bargain with an evil spirit, but Lytton transforms it almost beyond recognition. Zanoni is no criminal. He has attained his secrets through will-power, self-conquest, and the subordination of the flesh to the spirit, and he surrenders his gifts willingly for the sake of another. Both Mejnour and Zanoni disclaim miraculous powers, yet Zanoni is ready to stake his mistress on a cast of the dice, and can cause the death of three sanguinary marauders without stirring from the apartment in which he ordinarily pursues his chemical studies. From such incidents as these it would seem as if Lytton, for the actual craftsmanship of Zanoni, may have gleaned stray hints from the novel of terror; but the spirit and intention of the book are entirely different. Though Lytton expressly declares that his Zanoni is not an allegory, he confesses that it has symbolical meanings. Zanoni is apt to assume the superior pose of a lecturer elucidating an abstruse subject to an unenlightened audience. The impression of artifice that the book makes upon us is probably due to the fact that Lytton first conceived his theories and then created personages to illustrate them. His characters have no power to act of their own volition or to do unexpected things, but must move along the lines laid down for them.
In The Haunted and the Haunters, or The House and the Brain, which appeared in Blackwood's Magazine in 1859, Bulwer Lytton lays aside the sin of over-elaboration and ornamentation that so easily besets him, and relies for his effect on the impalpable horror of his story. The calm, business-like overture, the accurate description of the position of the house in a street off the north side of Oxford Street, the insistence on the matter-of-fact attitude of the watcher, and on the cool courage of his servant, the abject fear of the dog, who dies in agony, all tend to create an atmosphere of grave conviction. The eerie child's footfall, the moving of the furniture by unseen hands, the wrinkled fingers that clutch the old letters, the faintly outlined wraiths of the man and woman in old-world garb with ruffles, lace, and buckles, the hideous phantom of the drowned man, the dark figure with malignant serpent eyes, shadow forth the story hinted at in the letters found in an old drawer. Haunted by loathly presences, the watcher experiences a sensation of almost intolerable horror, but saves himself at the worst by opposing his will to that of the haunters. He rightly surmises that the evil influences, which seem in some way to emanate from a small empty room, really proceed from a living being. His interpretation is skilful and subtle enough not to detract from the simple horror of the tale. A miniature, certain volatile essences, a compass, a lodestone and other properties are found in a room below that which appeared to be the source of the horrors. It proves that the man, whose face is portrayed on the miniature has been able through the exertion of will-power to prolong his life for two centuries, and to preserve a curse in a magical vessel. He is actually interviewed by the watcher, to whom he unfolds his remarkable history, and whom he mesmerises into silence on the subject of his experiences in the haunted house for a space of three months.
Lytton realises that it is not only what is told but what is left unsaid that requires consideration in a ghost story. His reticence and the entire absence of any note of mockery or doubt secure the "willing suspension of disbelief" necessary to the appreciation of the apparently supernatural.
In A Strange Story, which, at Dickens's invitation, appeared in All the Year Round (1861-2), Bulwer Lytton further elaborates his theories of mesmerism and willpower. He explains his purpose in the Preface:
"When the reader lays down this strange story, perhaps he will detect, through all the haze of Romance, the outlines of these images suggested to his reason: Firstly, the image of sensuous, soulless Nature, such as the Materialist had conceived it. Secondly, the image of Intellect, obstinately separating all its inquiries from the belief in the spiritual essence and destiny of man, and incurring all kinds of perplexity and resorting to all kinds of visionary speculation before it settles at last into the simple faith which unites the philosopher and the infant. And thirdly, the image of the erring but pure-thoughted Visionary, seeking overmuch on this earth to separate soul from mind, till innocence itself is led astray by a phantom and reason is lost in the space between earth and the stars."
These three conceptions are embodied in Margrave, who has renewed his life far beyond the limits allotted to man; a young doctor, Fenwick, who represents the intellectual divorced from the spiritual; and Lilian Ashleigh, a clairvoyante girl, who typifies the spiritual divorced from the intellectual. The interest of the story turns on the struggle of Fenwick to gain his bride, and to wrest her from the influence of Margrave. The plot, intricately tangled, is unravelled with patient skill. In spite of the wearisome explanations of Dr. Faber, who is lucid but verbose, there is a fascination about the book which compels us to go forward.
In Lytton's hands the barbarity of the novel of terror has been gracefully smoothed away. It has, indeed, become almost unrecognisably refined and elevated, and something of its native vigour is lost in the process. Amid all the amenities of Vrilya and Intelligences, we miss the vulgar blatancy of an honest, old-fashioned spectre.
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.