Neither has it been possible to represent Mrs. Shelley, whom I omit with reluctance. Frankenstein is a classic of the occult, but it must be read entire. It seemed equally difficult to make any extract, which by itself would not appear inadequate, from her other work; although she was deeply versed in the art of shudders and fear.
Fortunately Sir Walter Scott has left us stories which may stand apart from their setting. Wandering Willie's Tale in Red Gauntlet (1824) is of consummate artistry; as also is The Tapestried Chamber (1829), but both are too easily accessible to be given here. I have no defence save human limitations of space if I am told that both should be included.
Few books have a greater reputation than the Ingoldsby Legends. There are — all power to them — Ingoldsby enthusiasts; but I question (I hope, sincerely hope, I may be wrong) whether outside this devoted band the Ingoldsby poems are appreciated and loved as they deserve. To the Ingoldsby Legends we may safely and literally apply the word "unique." There is nothing like them, not merely in degree but also in kind, in any literature I know. Perhaps the nearest rhymes are the maccaronics of Folengo, which again sui generis have never been excelled and hardly approached. Yet Ingoldsby is altogether different, and, when one seeks to compare any juxtaposition eludes and escapes. The witches of the Maccaronea are grotesque, evil, ridiculous, just as are old Goody Price and old Goody Jones; whilst Father Francis, Father Fothergill, Mess Michael, Roger the Monk, can be amply paralleled by Fra Jacopino, the village priest, "Master Adrianus, Constantius atque Jachettus."
Curiously enough, even those who know the poems of the Ingoldsby Legends well are often somewhat indifferent to Barham's prose, which is, in my opinion at any rate, of a very high quality. Accordingly I have included two of his stories in this collection. I hesitated whether The Spectre of Tappington should not make a third, but it belongs to a species of ghost story of which I disapprove: the humorous; nor is it, indeed, strictly a ghost story; that is to say, it does not introduce the supernatural, and there are Radcliffian explanations to boot. However, The Spectre of Tappington is the exception that proves the rule. The genius of Barham has triumphed and given us a tale of the first order, although it belongs to an illegitimate genre. There is only one other humorous ghost story which justifies itself — Oscar Wilde's fantasy The Canterville Ghost. This ranks with The Spectre of Tappington among the foremost. Yet it will not escape attention that Wilde has mingled with his brilliant wit a touch of pathos, and more than a touch of beauty, that even in his liveliest passages he gives an undercurrent of something running much deeper and touching us more nearly than mere persiflage, however exquisitely wrought and pointed.
"Death must be so beautiful. To lie in the soft brown earth, with the grasses waving above one's head, and listen to silence. To have no yesterday, and no to-morrow. To forget time, to forgive life, to be at peace."
Hardly a disciple, but in his day certainly a rival, and a very formidable rival of Ainsworth, was G.W.M. Reynolds, whose output is equal to, even if it does not o'ertop, those of Defoe or the prolific water-poet himself. The lengthy novels of Reynolds teem with mystery and the supernatural. To name but a few of many, Faust, based upon the old legend but almost infinitely varied; Wagner, the Wehr-Wolf; The Necromancer; all have as their theme diabolic contracts and the fearful retribution that results therefrom.
A contemporary of Reynolds, who was as prolific indeed as he, but who has been almost entirely forgotten, was Thomas Preskett Prest, the author of The Skeleton Clutch; or, The Goblet of Gore; The Black Monk, or, The Secret of the Grey Turret; The Rivals, or, The Spectre of the Hall; Varney the Vampire, or, The Feast of Blood, and many more. This latter, although of inordinate length, is powerfully told, and has hardly, I think, been excelled even by the famous Dracula.
It is impossible to name a tithe of these writers who dealt with the supernatural in its most terrible manifestations. Lengthy bibliographies might be compiled of fiction alone which had the vampire and the werewolf as its themes. Of vampire tales we might instance Le Fanu's Carmilla; Bram Stoker's Dracula, mentioned above; E.F. Benson's The Room in the Tower; Mrs. Ammorth in Visible and Invisible; F.G. Loring's The Tomb of Sarah; F. Marion Crawford's For the Blood is the Life (Uncanny Tales); Conan Doyle's The Parasite; E. and H. Heron's The Story of Baelbrow; Victor Roman's Four Wooden Stakes; X.L.'s The Kiss of Judas; Eric Count Stenbock's The True Story of a Vampire; and a score beside.
The werewolf boasts an almost richer library. There is Captain Marryat's fine tale from The Phantom Ship; Mrs. Crowe's A Story of a Weir-Wolf; H. Beaugrand's The Werwolves; Saki's Gabriel; Ainskallas' The Wolf's Bride; Fred Whishaw's The Were-wolf, Eric Count Stenbock's The Other Side; Charles Severn's Were Wolf; Ambrose Bierce's The Eyes of the Panther; "cum multis aliis quos nunc perscribere longum est," as the old Latin Grammar has it.
Reynold's Miscellany contained not a few well-told tales of the supernatural, and this magazine gave rise to many more which flourished exceedingly for the last half of the nineteenth century. Edwin J. Brett was a wholesale purveyor of these ephemera, and one may remark that latterly he concentrated almost entirely upon boys' books. The history of boys' books, which is of extraordinary interest, has yet to be written. Thus running through Boys of the Empire, vol. ix., 1892, I find a really thrilling serial, Doctor or Demon?, a romance of the Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde type.
At the same time as Reynolds, Prest and others were writing, one of the supreme masters of English fiction, Charles Dickens, was showing his keen interest in the supernatural, which lurks in the background of, and sensibly informs, some among his finest works. Moreover, as Mr. S.M. Ellis has well said in his essay, The Ghost Story and its Exponents (Mainly Victorian):
"In Household Words and All the Year Round, both under Dickens's editorship, are to be found some of the best ghost stories ever written."
I have not, of course, failed to include in this collection of tales by Amelia B. Edwards, Rosa Mulholland and Charles Collins, who were all contrihutors to these periodicals.
It was for All the Year Round that Dickens asked Bulwer-Lytton to furnish a serial, and this resulted in A Strange Story (1861). Andrew Lang was of opinion that "There is no better romance of the supernatural than A Strange Story; and perhaps a kind of sketch for it, The Haunted and the Haunters, is at least as good." The only reason I have omitted to give this latter tale, which I immensely admire, is that it has been very frequently reprinted. It is said to be founded upon the succession of noises and apparitions that so disturbed the haunted mill at Willington when the Procter family, serious and devout members of the Society of Friends, resided there. This is one of the best known veridical histories in all psychic lore. There were legends of earlier troubles at Willington in 1806, and there were poltergeist vexations in 1823, but it was not until January, 1835, that the actual hauntings at the mill itself assumed serious proportions. In 1847 the Procters moved to Newcastle, but as late as 1867 and 1870 tenants who wished to reside at the mill were driven out by supernatural alarms.
Bulwer-Lytton was a serious and discriminating student of the occult, and that is why he was able to write so well and so convincingly of the supernatural. Glenallan, an early work, gives evidence of this; and it is made even more clear by Zanoni, which he enlarged and completed from his Zicci, published in the Monthly Chronicle for 1838. When A Strange Story appeared, "He beats one on one's own ground!" cried Wilkie Collins, a generous apprisal, which perhaps must not be pressed to the letter, for there have been few, if any, writers to excel Collins at his best. A master of detective and "mystery" fiction — and one may draw attention to the close connexion between "mystery" fiction and the ghost story — Collins has also left some fine tales of the eerie and the weird. He was a past master of the art of creating an atmosphere of Suspense and loneliness, of awe and trembling fear. He even achieved that most difficult of feats, a full-length ghost story. It is, I think, well-nigh essential for success that the ghost story should be short. Only the adroitest skill and
talent of no ordinary kind can avail to keep the reader in that state of expectancy bordering on the unpleasant yet never quite overstepping the line which is the true triumph of this genre. All too frequently a tale spun in many chapters is apt either, on the one hand, to fall slovenly flat, to become banal and to bore; or else on the other to swear into crude physical disgust and end as a mere mixen of horror. The Haunted Hotel, however, is wrought with consummate ability.
In 1847 the famous military novelist James Grant published The Phantom Regiment, in which, although it be confessed that the main narrative runs rather thin, the episodes — from one of which the book takes its name — are splendidly done. The story tells of a phantom regiment, accursed and banned, doomed on each anniversary of that foul butchery to march from "hell to Culloden." Grant also has two short stories of the macabre, The Dead Tryst and A Haunted Life, which appeared in 1866.
Other full-length ghost stories to be placed in the first class are Mrs. Riddell's The Haunted River, whose pages are dank with a mist that is not wholly material, with shadows and doom; Lanoe Falconer's Cecilia de Noel, a book of real genius, in which the effect of an apparition on varying individuals is shown; Lucas Malet's The Gateless Barrier and The Tall Villa; Mrs. Oliphant's The Beleaguered City; The White People by Francis Hodgson Burnett.
All these are works of great beauty, and this they owe to their apprehension of the spiritual. In other phrase, to produce a flawless piece of work the writer must believe in the motive of the tale. This indeed I have emphasised before, and I will not enlarge upon the point now. I would merely add that if a ghost story has not the note of spirituality which may be beauty — a beauty not without awe — or may be horror, it will fail because of its insincerity and untruth. I do not know, and I do not care to know, how far Henry James believed in the possibility of The Turn of the Screw, but his genius succeeded in creating an atmosphere of spiritual dread because he realised that this was necessary to his art. I understand that actually The Turn of the Screw is a brilliant tour de force, but I am convinced that Henry James was less sceptic than appears.
It seems to me that it is exactly this lack of spirituality which so fatally flaws the vast majority of the tales in a series generally known as "Not at Night," which has now attained six volumes of similar if slightly varying titles. If there is a note of spiritual horror, whether it be vampire horror, as in Four Wooden Stakes, or Satanism, as in The Devil's Martyr and The Witch-Baiter, the story is raised to another plane far higher than the rather nauseous sensationalism of fiendish serums, foul experiments of lunatic surgeons, half-human plants, monstrous insects and the like.
Not forgetting the admirable work that has been done in the last thirty years, the nineteenth century may be acclaimed as the hey-day of the good old-fashioned ghost story, even if only in view of the fact that from 1838 to 1873 was writing one who has been justly termed "the Master of Horror and the Mysterious," Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu, whose place in literature has been so precisely estimated by Mr. S.M. Ellis in a fine essay in Mainly Victorian. Dr. M.R. James, who is, with the exception of Vernon Lee, of all writers of ghost stories to-day facile princeps, has also declared his admiration for Le Fanu, and has collected with a valuable preface and bibliographical notes some dozen or more of Le Fanu's stories in Madam Crowl's Ghost. Both Mr. Ellis and Dr. James are agreed that Le Fanu was the supreme master of the supernatural, and I am glad to pay my own tribute also by writing that certainly in my opinion he has seldom, if ever, been approached, and most assuredly never excelled. It should be remarked that Le Fanu had the habit of refashioning his tales, and would often develop a short story until it was of considerable length. Finally it might even attain the dimensions of a three-volume novel. I mention this inasmuch as An Account of some Strange Disturbances in Aungier Street (1853) is the first form of Mr. Justice Harbottle which appeared in the volume published in 1872 under the title In a Glass Darkly. These stories, once difficult to procure, have of late years been reissued, but I felt that, however accessible they may be, no collection of the supernatural could go forth without the seal of Le Fanu.
It should be remarked, and I hardly think that the point has been noticed before in this connexion, what gloomy yet intensive delight the mid-Victorians took in funerals, interments, and all the trappings of mortuary woe. How raven-black was the velvet pall, how solemnly nodded the hearse-plumes, how awful stood the train of mutes, how long was the deep crape worn by relicts of the deceased, how fruity was the old port wine, how rich the slabs of cake! Their minds loved to dwell upon sepulture and the charnel. Dickens, in Martin Chuzzlewit and other of his novels, has shown how prominent a part was played by the undertakers, Mr. Mould, Mr. Sowerby, Mr. Joram, and the rest. What an event was a funeral from a house! The way to all these sadly sentimental lachrymals had been paved before by the lugubrious cortèges of the time of Anne, the funerals at night with a train of flambeaux, the mourning coaches, and all the rest of the lugubrious paraphernalia. We must not forget, too, those expressions of elegant piety such as Blair's The Grave, Young's The Last Day, Samuel Boyse's A Deity, and Death by Bishop Beilby Porteus, which for a century and a half exercised an almost universal influence in the spheres of such theology as loved to ponder upon the skull, the hour-glass, crossbones, hatchments, mournful and sorrowing cherubim.
A typically Victorian writer was Mrs. Riddell, whose The Haunted River I have mentioned above, and who published in one volume half a dozen tales under the attractive title Weird Stories, 1885. Miss Braddon and Mrs. Henry Wood both wrote some first rate ghost stories. The Cold Embrace and Eveline's Visitant (which I have included here) by the former lady are particularly good, and, although it does not actually deal with the supernatural, I am constrained to mention as an example of her uncanny power The Mystery at Fernwood, where Laurence Wendale is horribly murdered apparently by himself, as through the door of the billiard-room is seen his exact image bending over and slashing at the corpse. The double suddenly mops and grins furiously. It is the dead man's twin brother, an idiot, whose brain was injured owing to an accident in earliest childhood.
A large number of stories of the supernatural may be found in the magazines: in Tinsley's Magazine, Temple Bar, Belgravia, London Society, Blackwood's, the Argosy, the English Illustrated, as also in the forgotten Family Herald Supplement and Young Ladies' Journal. To come to a later date, there was no richer storehouse than the Pall Mall Magazine. In this last, in May, June and October, 1893, was published a study by James Mew, The Black Art, which is particularly interesting as a young and unknown artist, Aubrey Beardsley, contributed a full-page illustration (June, 1893, p. 177), "Of a Neophyte And How The Black Art Was Revealed Unto Him By The Fiend Asomuel." In July, 1893, of the Pall Mall Magazine appeared The Last of the Flying Dutchman, by W.L. Alden, which cleverly ended with a query; and A Kiss of Judas, a vampire story by X.L., the author of a tale of Satanism, Aut Diabolus aut Nihil, and who in the same magazine (September to December, 1898) published With All the Powders of the Merchant. In October, 1893, appeared The Luck of the Devil; in May, 1894, A Cry Across the Black Water, and in August of the same year Howard Pease's Mine Host the Cardinal, an excellent ghost story. In January, 1895, was given The Devil Stone, by Beatrice Heron Maxwell; in March, The Hands of Earl Rothes, by L. M. Hewitt, and also Huguenin's Wife, by M.P. Shiel. In December of that year we welcomed one of Dr. M.R. James's best stories, Lost Hearts. It is interesting to notice that some four years later, in April, 1899, another of our leading writers of ghost fiction, Algernon Blackwood, was represented by his The Haunted Island. June, 1896, has The Story of a Tusk, by H.A. Boyden, and The Stone Chamber of Taverndale Manor House, this latter a good spooky yarn of the real old Christmassy kind. In March, 1897, a horrible tale of psychic invasion, The Case of the Rev. Mr. Toomey, was given, as also Doctor Armstrong, which tells how to a leading surgeon was brought for a serious operation a man in feeblest health, who had suffered terribly all his life. In this invalid Doctor Armstrong, who has never
known a day's illness, recognises by some uprush from a past life the Grand Inquisitor, who at Toledo centuries before had doomed him to the rack and the screw, to a death of agony by fire. In a moment of time, as it were, he passes through those days and months of excruciating anguish once more and is convulsed in throes of fiercest pain. Revenge, completest revenge, is in his grasp. He takes the steel instruments, and, administering no anæsthetic, in his turn becomes tormentor. He wrenches the muscles, tears the flesh and twists the nerves of the helpless writhing thing before him until the unhappy wretch draws his last moaning breath. But then a voice of infinite pity, yet infinitely just, sounds in the doctor's ear, telling him that by indulging his own bad passions and wreaking vengeance instead of showing mercy so has he forfeited his claim upon the mercy of Heaven.
August and September of the Pall Mall Magazine, 1897, gave A Tribute of Souls, by Lord Frederic Hamilton and Robert Hichens, which was afterwards reprinted in the latter writer's Byways. October, 1900, had A Night on the Moor, by R. Murray Gilchrist, and one of the best vampire stories I know appropriately appeared in December of that year — The Tomb of Sarah, by F.G. Loring.
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