The House and the Brain.
By E. BULWER LYTTON.
“The House and the Brain” has been called by many critics the most powerful and appalling story of the supernatural ever written in the English language. It appeared in 1859 in the pages of Blackwood’s Magazine, where it was read by thousands with a fascinated horror. Sir Edward Hamley said of it: “So elusive is the atmosphere of the tale, so vivid the description of its terrifying appearances, and so effective their connection with the agency of a malignant being possessed of supernatural powers,” that many were half convinced of its actuality. Soon after its appearance in Blackwood’s, a gentleman wrote to the editor of that magazine: “For God’s sake tell me what truth there is in this terrible story! My daughter has known no rest or peace since reading it.”
Its author, Sir Edward Bulwer Lytton, was one who, like Scott, felt a profound interest in the world of mystery. He believed in the occult powers of nature and in the strange arts of those who sought to use them. He himself “dived into wizard lore, equipped himself with magical implements, and communed with mediums and spiritualists.” The literature of alchemy and divination he studied with intense eagerness. On one occasion he drew up what he called a “geomantic figure,” by means of which he foretold the future of Disraeli. This was before that brilliant personage was seriously regarded by his associates; yet Bulwer Lytton accurately predicted his coming political triumphs and the fact that he would be at some day Prime Minister of England. After his famous ghost-story had appeared in print, Bulwer Lytton saw that he had given to a short story an idea too valuable for so slight a treatment. Therefore, when the tale was subsequently reprinted, he suppressed the second half of it and made the story end with the discovery of the secret chamber in the haunted house. The latter part he made the basis of his weird and almost equally powerful romance of mystery “A Strange Story” which was published in 1862. This is constructed around the central notion that there are arts which can indefinitely prolong human life; and in his book the chief character is the human serpent, Margrave, infinitely depraved, possessed of supernatural power and renewing his youth by mystical arts so that he is ever young and capable of fresh evil even at the end of centuries of his existence. The conception is no less bold than fascinating, and it is worked out by its author in a terrifying way. Yet nowhere does it attain to the pitch of horror and to the power of affecting the human nerves which we find in the earlier short story of which the original title was “The Haunters and the Haunted.”
The story as printed here gives the complete text precisely as it was first published in the pages of Blackwood’s.
A friend of mine, who is a man of letters and a philosopher, said to me one day, as if between jest and earnest, “Fancy! since we last met I have discovered a haunted house in the midst of London.”
“Really haunted? and by what—ghosts?”
“Well, I can’t answer these questions; all I know is this: six weeks ago I and my wife were in search of a furnished apartment. Passing a quiet street, we saw on the window of one of the houses a bill, ‘Apartments Furnished.’ The situation suited us; we entered the house, liked the rooms, engaged them by the week, and left them the third day. No power on earth could have reconciled my wife to stay longer; and I don’t wonder at it.”
“What did you see?”
“Excuse me; I have no desire to be ridiculed as a superstitious dreamer, nor, on the other hand, could I ask you to accept on my affirmation what you would hold to be incredible, without the evidence of your own senses. Let me only say this: it was not so much what we saw or heard (in which you might fairly suppose that we were the dupes of our own excited fancy, or the victims of imposture in others) that drove us away, as it was an undefinable terror which seized both of us whenever we passed by the door of a certain unfurnished room, in which we neither saw nor heard anything; and the strangest marvel of all was that for once in my life I agreed with my wife, silly woman though she be, and allowed after the third night that it was impossible to stay a fourth in that house.