Notwithstanding his lofty scorn for "Gothic castles and chimeras," even Brown himself condescended to take over from the despised Mrs. Radcliffe the device of introducing apparently supernatural occurrences which are ultimately traced to natural causes. Like Mrs. Radcliffe he is at the mercy of a conscience which forbids him to thrust upon his readers spectres in which he himself does not believe. He lacks Lewis's reckless mendacity. In Wieland mysterious voices are heard at intervals by various members of the family. To the hero, who has inherited a tendency to religious fanaticism, they seem to be of divine origin, and when a voice bids him sacrifice those who are dearest to him, he obeys implicitly. He slays his wife and children, and his sister only escapes death by accident. After this catastrophe it proves that the voices are produced by a skilled ventriloquist, Carwin, who has been admitted as an intimate friend of the family. Realising that this explanation may seem somewhat incredible, Brown seeks to make it appear more plausible by dwelling on Wieland's abnormal state of mind, which would render him peculiarly open to suggestion. Carwin's motive for thus persecuting the Wieland family with his accursed gift is never satisfactorily explained. His attitude is apparently that of an obtuse psychologist, who does not realise how serious the consequence of his experiments may be.
In Ormond and Arthur Mervyn, Brown describes the ravages of the yellow fever, of which he had personal experience in New York and Philadelphia. The hero of Ormond is a member of a society similar to that of the Illuminati, whose ceremonies and beliefs are set forth in Horrid Mysteries (1796). The heroine, Constantia Dudley, who was Shelley's ideal feminine character, is the embodiment of a theory, not a human being. She "walks always in the light of reason," and decides that "to marry in extreme youth would be a proof of pernicious and opprobrious temerity." The most memorable of Brown's novels is Edgar Huntly, which bears an obvious resemblance to Caleb Williams. Like Godwin, Brown is deeply interested in morbid psychology. He finds pleasure in tracing the workings of the brain in times of emotional stress. The description of a sleepwalker digging a grave—a picture which captivated Shelley's imagination—is the starting-point of the book. Edgar Huntly is impelled by curiosity to track him down. The somnambulist, Clithero, has, in self-defence, killed the twin-brother of his patron, Mrs, Lorimer, to whom he is deeply attached. Obsessed by the idea of the misery his deed will arouse in her mind, he attempts, in a moment of frenzy, to slay her. Believing that Mrs. Lorimer has died after hearing of the murder, Clithero flees to America. When he disappears from his home, Huntly resolves to follow him, and in his search loses himself amid wild and desolate country. He is attacked by Indians, and after frightful adventures at length reaches his home. Clithero, whom he believed dead, has been rescued. Mrs. Lorimer is still alive, and is married to a former lover. This news, however, fails to restore Clithero, who, in a fit of insanity, flings himself overboard when he is in a ship in charge of Huntly.
Brown's plots, which often open well, are spoilt by hasty, careless conclusions. It was his habit to write two or three novels simultaneously. He was beset by the problem that exercised even Scott's brain: "The devil of a difficulty is that one puzzles the skein in order to excite curiosity, and then cannot disentangle it for the satisfaction of the prying fiend they have raised."
Brown takes very little trouble over his dénouements, but his characters leave so faint an impression on our minds that we are not deeply concerned in their fates. He is interested rather in conveying states of mind than in portraying character. We search the windings of Clithero's tormented conscience without realising him as an individual. The background of rugged scenery, though it is described in vague, turgid language, is more definite and distinct than the human figures. We feel that Brown is struggling through the obscurity of his Latinised diction to depict something he has actually seen. An air of dreadful solemnity hangs heavily over each story. Every being is in deadly earnest. Brown has Godwin's power of hypnotising us by his serious persistence, and of reducing us to a mood of awestruck gravity by the sonority of his pompous periods.
From the oppressive gloom of Brown's "novels with a purpose," it is a relief to turn to the irresponsible gaiety of "Geoffrey Crayon," whose tales of terror, published some twenty years later, are usually fashioned in a jovial spirit, only faintly tinged with awe and dread. In The Spectre Bridegroom, included in The Sketch Book (1820), the ghostly rider of Bürger's far-famed ballad is set amid new surroundings and pleasantly turned to ridicule. The "supernatural" wooer, who now and again arouses a genuine thrill of fear, is merely playing a practical joke on the princess by impersonating the dead bridegroom, and all ends happily. The story of the Headless Horseman of Sleepy Hollow is set against so picturesque a background that we are almost inclined to quarrel with those who laughed and said that Ichabod Crane was still alive, and that Bram Jones, the lovely Katrina's bridegroom, knew more of the spectre than he chose to tell. The drowsy atmosphere of Sleepy Hollow makes us see visions and dream dreams. The group of "Strange Stories by a Nervous Gentleman" in Tales of a Traveller (1824) prove that Washington Irving was well versed in ghostly lore. He, as well as any, can call spirits from the vasty deep, but, when they appear in answer to his summons, he can seldom refrain from receiving them in a jocose, irreverent mood, ill befitting the solemn, dignified spectre of a German legend. Even the highly qualified, irrepressibly loquacious ghost of Lewis Carroll's Phantasmagoria would have resented his genial familiarity. The strange stories are told at a hunting-party in a country-house, a cheerful, comfortable background for ghost stories. A hoary, one-eyed gentleman, "the whole side of whose head was dilapidated and seemed like the wing of a house shut up and haunted," sets the ball rolling with the old story of a spectre who glides into the room, wringing her hands, and is later identified, like Scott's Lady in the Sacque, by her resemblance to an ancestral portrait in the gallery. The "knowing" gentleman tells of a picture that winked in a startling and alarming fashion, and immediately explains away this phenomenon by the presence of a thief who has cut a spy-hole in the canvas. The Bold Dragoon is a spirited, riotous nightmare in which the furniture dances to the music of the bellows played by an uncanny musician in a long flannel gown and a nightcap. The Story of the German Student is in a different key. Here Irving strikes a note of real horror. The student falls in love with an imaginary lady, woven out of his dreams. He finds her in distress one night in the streets of Paris, takes her home, only to find her a corpse in the morning. A police-officer informs him that the lady was guillotined the day before, and the student discovers the truth of this statement when he unrolls a bandage and her head falls to the floor. The young man loses his reason, and is tormented by the belief that an evil spirit has reanimated a dead body to ensnare him. The morning after the recital of this gruesome story, the host reads aloud to his guests a manuscript entrusted to him, together with a portrait, by a young Italian. This youth, it chances, learnt painting with a monk, who, as a penance, drew pictures, or modelled waxen images, representing death and corruption, a detail which reminds us of what was concealed by the Black Veil in Udolpho. He later falls in love with his model, Bianca, who, during his absence abroad, marries his friend Filippo. In a jealous rage the young Italian slays his rival, and is unceasingly haunted by his phantom. Washington Irving has no desire to endure for long the atmosphere of mystery and horror his story has created, and quickly relieves the tension by a return to ordinary life. The host promises to show the picture, which is said to affect all beholders in an extraordinary fashion, to each of his guests in turn. They all profess themselves remarkably affected by it, until the host confesses that he has too sincere a regard for the feelings of the young Italian to reveal the actual picture to any of them; With this moment of disillusionment the strange stories come to an end. The title, Tales of a Traveller, under which Irving placed his tales of terror, indicates the mood in which he fashioned them. He regarded them much as he would regard the wonderful adventures of Baron Munchausen. They were to be taken, like one of Dr. Marigold's prescriptions, with a grain of salt. The idea of blending levity with horror, suggested perhaps by German influence, was very popular in England and France at this period. Balzac's L'Auberge Rouge and L'Elixir de la Longue Vie are written in a similar mood.
It is not always the boldest and most adventurous beings who elect to dwell amid "calling shapes and beckoning shadows dire." The "virtuous mind," whom supernatural horrors may "startle well but not astound," sometimes finds a melancholy pleasure in beguiling weaker mortals into haunted ruins to watch their firm nerves tremble. Sometimes too, though a man be wholly innocent of the desire to alarm, he is led astray, whether he will or not, among the terrors of the invisible world. Grey ghosts steal into his imagination unawares. It was so that they came to Nathaniel Hawthorne, who speaks sorrowfully of "gaily dressed fantasies turning to ghostly and black-clad images of themselves." He would gladly have written a "sunshiny" book, but was capriciously fated to live ever in the twilight, haunted by spectres and by "dark ideas." He fashions his tales of terror delicately and reluctantly, not riotously and shamelessly like Lewis and Maturin.
An innate reticence and shyness of temper held Hawthorne, as if by a spell, somewhat aloof from life, and no one realised more clearly than he the limitations that his detachment from humanity imposed upon his art.
Of Twice-Told Tales he writes regretfully:
"They have the pale tint of flowers that blossomed in too retired a shade… Instead of passion there is sentiment and even in what purport to be pictures of actual life we have allegory, not always so warmly dressed in its habiliments of flesh and blood as to be taken into the reader's mind without a shiver. Whether from lack of power or an inconquerable reserve, the author's touches have often an effect of tameness. The book, if you would see anything in it, requires to be read in the clear, brown twilight atmosphere in which it was written; if opened in the sunshine, it is apt to look exceedingly like a volume of blank pages";
and in his Notebook (1840) he confesses: