Complete Works of Sheridan Le Fanu (Illustrated)

by Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu

  Charlotte Brontë’s possible forgetfulness, if she had seen the story, and Thackeray’s dim recollection are equally explicable. The tale of actual and intended bigamy which Sheridan Le Fanu contributed to the Dublin University Magazine in 1839 was just one of those stories eminently adapted to floating in the back of the mind. In the strange fictions of Le Fanu the reader’s feelings are deeply moved without his either seeing the actual occurrences face to face or believing them to be real.... While nothing could be more probable than that the author of The Irish Sketch Book and Barry Lyndon had read this story, it is clear that Charlotte could have had access to it.... Charlotte Brontë herself, in requesting Messrs. Aylett & Jones to send out review copies of the Poems, mentions alone among Irish papers the Dublin University Magazine. A favorable notice appeared and in writing the editor to thank him for it, 6th October, 1846, she signs herself “Your grateful and constant reader.” Later, 9th October, 1847, she makes a special request that Messrs. Elder & Smith should send Jane Eyre to the same review. It is not improbable that a forgotten remembrance of Le Fanu’s story, read years before, supplied what was never a fertile inventiveness with the machinery it wanted.

  Le Fanu’s story of “actual and intended bigamy”, A Chapter in the History of a Tyrone Family, the tenth of The Purcell Papers, is the story of Fanny Richardson, told by herself and set down by Father Purcell. Lord Glenfallen pretends to marry her and takes her to Cahergillagh Court which boasted legends in plenty, with an old housekeeper, Martha, for teller of tales. Martha’s first recital concerned the ominous fate of Lady Jane. There is a mysterious part of the castle which Fanny is forbidden to visit, but its mysterious dweller visits her, announcing herself as the true Lady Glenfallen and demanding that Fanny depart. This and succeeding visits Lord Glenfallen explains by saying that the lady is mad. She is blind, not mad; but at the end there is a murderous attack upon Fanny in her bedroom which is more than a little reminiscent of many things. The blind woman is hanged; Lord Glenfallen cuts his throat in mania and Fanny retreats to a convent. So much — and so very little — for one of The Purcell Papers in a Brontëan light. Professor Jack does much more with it; but nothing, of course, can convey the same delightfully piquant analogy as the Le Fanu story itself, to which, if he can obtain it today, the reader is cheerfully referred.

  III

  Now there are many reasons why the anonymous Purcell Papers, all of them, should have keenly interested the Brontë sisters in their fanciful girlhood. The tales were “Irish”, they were “ghostly”, above all, they were filled to running over with “coincidences”, “correspondences”, “identifications”. Bronte family names abounded — Patricks and Emilys and Janes and Marys and Hughs. If Lady Glenfallen had for servant an “old Martha”, so had the Haworth parsonage. If Father Purcell, “the wonderful priest of Drumcoolagh”, lived in a mythical parish, Patrick Brontë, priest of Haworth, had served his tutor apprenticeship in the literal Irish parish of Drumgooland.

  Professor Jack’s suggested sources for plots end with A Tyrone Family and Jane Eyre. But speculation can go further and fare more abundantly with others of The Purcell Papers and their correspondences with Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights. For the Second, Fifth and Sixth of the Papers bear the oddest resemblances to that novel with its “greatest villain”, and they too are tales “eminently adapted to floating in the back of the mind”. In each of them there is a Lady Emily, and in each of them there is an arch villain. In each of them there is a superlatively lonely house, and in two of them the revengeful inferior becomes the brutal master. In the first, The Fortunes of Sir Robert Ardagh, there are three sisters, the second of whom, Lady Emily, lives with her husband at Castle Ardagh. Sir Robert has a mysterious valet, whose malignant will dominates his master’s fortunes and who at last destroys him. The second tale, A Passage in the Secret History of an Irish Countess, has the forced-marriage plot, wickedly manoeuvred by Sir Arthur T — n, father of an Emily and an Edward, and uncle of a Margaret, sincerely intent upon acquiring his niece’s fortune either through her marriage with his son or by her murder. Murder it is, but all mistakenly not of the heroine — Emily is slain, and Margaret ends her story in the very mood of the end of Wuthering Heights, the wish that Emily “had been spared and that in her stead I were mouldering in the grave, forgotten and at rest”.

  But The Bridal of Carrigvarah yields the most of reminiscent likenesses, of suggestions for Heathcliffe’s villainy, revenge and love, of “correspondences’! and “identifications”. Here also is a Lady Emily’, sadly figuring as a minor deserted character.

  It will be recalled that the old servant, Ellen Dean, tells the tangled tale of Wuthering Heights, most of it, of Heathcliffe’s servitude and later mastership. In The Bridal of Carrigvarah, Ellen Heathcote, daughter of a stern father, has at the outset two lovers, Richard O’Mara and Edward Dwyer, the latter a servant of the O’Maras, malignant, revengeful, plotting, their downfall. Having forced his young master into insincere assertion of his indifference to Ellen, Dwyer dickers for Heathcote’s farm lease and his daughter. Refused both, he muses thus:

  Insolent young spawn of ingratitude and guilt, how long must I submit to be trod upon thus; and yet why should I murmur — his day is even now declining.... But I must wait — I am but a pauper now.... Were I independent once, I’d make them feel my power, and feel it so, that I should die the richest or the best avenged servant, of a great man that has ever been heard of.

  Through Dwyer’s devices, O’Mara, though betrothed to Lady Emily, marries Ellen Heathcote secretly, “madly, fervently, irrevocably in love”, and hides her in the lonely Lodge, set in bleak and heathy hills. Again, through Dwyer’s villainy, O’Mara is challenged by Lady Emily’s brother and slain. While believing herself deserted, Ellen gives birth to a child and at its death sends for “the wonderful priest of Drumcoolagh”, who finds the Lodge as dreary as ever Ellen Dean found Heathcliffe’s Wuthering Heights. Ellen Heathcote dies, glad to know she was widowed, not deserted, and Dwyer completes the overthrow of the hated O’Maras.

  “Correspondences” are, of course, a most delicate matter of shades, even shades of shades; things to be felt, not seen. Professor Jack’s launching of his little boat of surmise, on so cool an ocean of documents as make up The Cambridge History of English Literature, argues strongly for the strength of his feeling. Taking his tip and playing it farther, his “measure of correspondence,” as he calls it, between The Purcell Papers and the Brontë novels is largely increased. There is also, for the added amusement of “connections”, Le Fanu’s Uncle Silas, published nine years after Charlotte Brontë’s death, but of interest notwithstanding. This is no more than a three-volume extension of The Secret History of an Irish Countess, with many names changed and with a governess, Madame de la Rougierre, added to brim the cup of villainy. On Uncle Silas Sheridan Le Fanu won his first wide fame. It is a queer old book, yet queerer books have survived, by their titles at least, to keep the memories of their authors green. But Uncle Silas too has passed — until the other day when it was included in an “old novels” series. And, once again, Le Fanu’s fate of frustration has been operative. Since he was to be reprinted, why Uncle Silas, instead of those “occult” old tales by which alone, and by the smallest of small groups, the author has been remembered!

  IV

  It was some years ago, during an evening of talk on “horror” tales (the cataleptic, the vampiric, the “buried alive”, the tangible ghostly and the intangible obsessionistic) that a title, “Green Tea,” floated suddenly to the surface. Just the title, nothing more. I recalled it (no one else had ever heard of it) as a tale, vaguely, of a physician, a clergyman and an obsession — a little black monkey visible always by a halo of reddish light. “Nothing of the story remained — only the impression of its effect, which is indeed all any old forgotten tale can ask. Most of us who like to read can recall “the look of the page,” but this too had vanished.

  A few days later the arm of coincid
ence reached across an old bookstall and laid a finger on Ignorant Essays, by Richard Dowling (1888). Both book and author were unknown, but a note of “authority” rang out on the contents page: “The Only Real Ghost in Fiction”, and the book fell open at the. fifteenth page and at this paragraph:

  I am very bad at dates, but I think Le Fanu wrote “Green Tea” before a whole community of Canadian nuns were thrown into the most horrible state of nervous misery by excessive indulgence in that drug. Of all the horrible tales that are revolting, “Green Tea” is I think, the most horrible. The bare statement that an estimable and pious man is haunted by the ghost of a monkey is at first blush funny. But if you have not read this story read it and see how little of fun there is in it. The horror of the tale lies in the fact that this apparition of a monkey is the only probable ghost in fiction....

  Sheridan Le Fanu, of course, and In a Glass Darkly! I saw again the little volume of ghostly tales of which “Green Tea” was one. I read on, and, in face of Mr. Richard Dowling’s naïve summary of it, interest lapsed. It seemed too sufficiently obvious; I explained its enduring impression by the surmise that a youthful faith in the goodness of all clergymen must have been extreme; better never go back to the story itself.

  But later I was to go back to its author for other reasons, and I reread “Green Tea” and the other case histories of Dr. Hesselius. Le Fanu’s Father Purcell of Drumcoolagh may or may not lie back of Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights, but his Dr. Hesselius was John the Baptist for the little gods of later fiction — the psychic doctors. (Balzac’s Dr. Desplein is the great father of them all!)

  “In Dr. Martin Hesselius,” writes his “Watson,” a young surgeon frustrated of a great career by the loss of two fingers, “I found my master.... His knowledge was immense, his grasp of a case was an intuition.... For nearly 20 years I acted as his medical secretary. His immense collection of papers he has left in my care to be arranged, indexed, and bound. His treatment of some of these cases is curious. He writes in two distinct characters. He describes what he saw and heard, as an intelligent layman might, and when in this style of narrative he has seen the patient either through his own hall door to the light of day or through the gates of darkness to the caverns of the dead, he returns upon the narrative, and in the terms of his art and with all the force and originality of genius proceeds to the work of analysis, diagnosis, and illustration.”

  On these lines precisely “Green Tea” is done, in letters to a friend, Professor Van Loo of Leyden. These letters trace the strange case of the Rev. Mr. Jennings, a wealthy bachelor clergyman, beginning with Dr. Hesselius’s first observations of him at an evening party.

  “Mr. Jennings,” writes the good doctor, “has a way of looking sidelong upon the carpet as if his eye followed the movements of something there. This, of course, is not always. It occurs only now and then. But often enough to give a certain oddity to his manner, and in this glance travelling along the floor there is something both shy and anxious.”

  Mr. Jennings drinks too much green tea, but his troubles are not born of that. Later he brings his hallucination to the doctor, who traces its developments, observing, after some time, “He has not yet given me his full and unreserved confidence”. He never does, and goes down to a bitter death. And, after Dr. Hesselius has seen him “through the gates of darkness to the caverns of the dead,” he “returns upon the narrative” and sums up.

  No bad pattern, this, by which to cut one’s dark psychologic cloth, in 1872. Dr. Hesselius was a gold mine for any novelist interested in the psychologic and the occult. In this German physician and metaphysician of the mind and soul, Le Fanu had hit upon more than a cunning device in the way of a reservoir for learning, intuition, magic or psychology to be tapped at will; he had hit upon a character as well, one that, had he lived to work with it, might have towered high in the heavens of ghostly fiction. But he had come upon it too late; he died the following year. The rest is silence, complete mysterious silence. He was famous; he was read; he “sold”; he’ was of the Sheridan blood; he was filially reprinted no more than a quarter century after his death, and that death is only half a century back. But his very name is lost to present-day historians of his age. His novels, so multitudinously printed and reprinted, have simply disappeared. They areas rare on old bookstalls as black swans on old lakes.

  Sheridan Le Fanu himself was “rare,” after his wife’s death, which occurred in 1858. He had been wit and scholar of old Dublin society; but, says Graves:

  From this society he vanished so entirely, that Dublin, always ready with a nickname, dubbed him “The Invisible Prince”, and, indeed, he was for a long time almost invisible, except to his family and most familiar friends, unless at odd hours of the evening, when he might occasionally be seen stealing, like the ghost of his former self, between his newspaper office and his home in Merrion Square. Sometimes, too, he was to be encountered in an old, out-of-the-way book shop, pouring, over some rare Astrology or Demonology....

  If it is ever discovered that the Dublin University Magazine of 1838 and 1839 was in the parsonage at Haworth — was even in the little circulating library at Keighley where the Brontë sisters walked for books to read — was even in the libraries of those purgartorial homes where the sisters were sad governesses, Sheridan Le Fanu’s Purcell Papers may easily become the generating cause of a little literary thunderclap.

  Meantime, Dr. Hesselius of “Green Tea” of In a Glass Darkly stands as the forerunner of the “soul doctors” so liberally employed by later writers in the supernatural field. On “Green Tea” alone (let pass the rest of his occult tales) Le Fanu, particularly charming descendant of the famous Sheridans, earned his right of way into any studies of the supernatural in fiction. That he has disappeared so completely from lists and records, even from the footnotes, of the Victorians, is so inexplicable as to be of itself almost “supernatural.”

  SHERIDAN LE FANU by E. F. Benso

  n

  from The Spectator, Vol. 146, 1931

  THE writer of ghost stories and of tales which are designed to make the flesh creep embarks on hazardous voyages. If he does not scare his readers or inspire in them those precious uncomfortable impulses that cause them to glance hastily round in order to make sure that the creaking board or the wail of the wind did not betoken some dreadful presence even now making itself manifest to their horrified eyes, he has failed more ruinously than can any other class of narrator. The writer of humorous stories, though he may not amuse, may still interest his readers, the writer of serious psychological stuff may, though unwittingly, amuse; but no such adventitious good fortune can befall the author whose sole aim is to terrify. If he does not do that, he is naught, he falls completely flat, and no interest in side issues, whether intentional or not, will put him on his feet again. He must be all artist of no common sort, for the fearful lies but a hairbreadth away from the grotesque and the ludicrous, and his phantoms will terrify none unless they are surrounded by the phantasmal atmosphere in which alone they can live and breathe. Of all atmospheres, that is the most difficult to produce: it is easier to amuse, it is even easier to edify than, by suggestion, to alarm.

  Sometimes a novelist whose métier and methods are purely psychological brings off a tremendous hit in the creepy line. The classical instance of such a happening was when Henry James wrote The Turn of the Screw. Not one of his most fervent admirers ever imagined that he could frighten them, but that appalling tale has probably alarmed more readers than the collected ghost stories of most other authors who make a speciality of creepiness. He tried it again, but with less success, in The Sense of the Past. Perhaps he would have been wiser to rest on one unfading laurel.

  But there is one author, far too little known by those in search of creepy lore, who seldom fails in his high mission: his name is Sheridan Le Fanu. He produces, page for page, a far higher percentage of terror than the more widely read Edgar Allan Poe, and whether he deals in ghosts direct or in more material horrors, hi
s success in making his readers very uneasy is amazing. Though we may already know the story we select to give us some insupportable moments on a lonely evening, there is a quality about most of his tales which seldom fails to alarm: familiarity with them does not breed comfort. Many ghost stories are efficacious for a first reading, but few, when we already know the worst that the author has to tell us, preserve untainted the atmosphere of horror as do the tales in In a Glass Darkly. The best of these, “Green Tea,” “The Familiar,” and “Mr. Justice Hartbottle,” are instinct with air awfulness which custom cannot stale, and this quality is due, as in The Turn of the Screw, to Le Fanu’s admirably artistic methods in setting and narration. They begin quietly enough, the tentacles of terror are applied so softly that the reader hardly notices them till they are sucking tile courage from his blood. A darkness gathers, like dusk gently falling, and then something obscurely stirs in it . . . . Dickens, in his Christmas Carol, which is one of the most famous ghost stories in literature, goes the other way about it, and the wrong way. He leads off with the appearance of Marley’s ghost, and then he has done his worst. The darkness brightens and we end on a grievous anti-climax of roast goose, Tiny Tim and a regenerated Scrooge. The moral is excellent, but who wants a moral in a ghost story? We can unbend our minds over morals afterwards.