CHAPTER I - INTRODUCTORY.
The history of the tale of terror is as old as the history ofman. Myths were created in the early days of the race to accountfor sunrise and sunset, storm-winds and thunder, the origin ofthe earth and of mankind. The tales men told in the face of thesemysteries were naturally inspired by awe and fear. The universalmyth of a great flood is perhaps the earliest tale of terror.During the excavation of Nineveh in 1872, a Babylonian version ofthe story, which forms part of the Gilgamesh epic, was discoveredin the library of King Ashurbanipal (668-626 B.C.); and there arerecords of a much earlier version, belonging to the year 1966B.C. The story of the Flood, as related on the eleventh tablet ofthe Gilgamesh epic, abounds in supernatural terror. To seek thegift of immortality from his ancestor, Ut-napishtim, the heroundertakes a weary and perilous journey. He passes the mountainguarded by a scorpion man and woman, where the sun goes down; hetraverses a dark and dreadful road, where never man trod, and atlast crosses the waters of death. During the deluge, which ispredicted by his ancestor, the gods themselves are stricken withfear:
"No man beheld his fellow, no more could men know each other. In heaven the gods were afraid ... They drew back, they climbed up into the heaven of Anu. The gods crouched like dogs, they cowered by the walls."[1]
Another episode in the same epic, when Nergal, the god of thedead, brings before Gilgamesh an apparition of his friend,Eabani, recalls the impressive scene, when the witch of Endorsummons the spirit of Samuel before Saul.
When legends began to grow up round the names of traditionalheroes, fierce encounters with giants and monsters were inventedto glorify their strength and prowess. David, with a stone fromhis sling, slew Goliath. The crafty Ulysses put out the eye ofPolyphemus. Grettir, according to the Icelandic saga, overcameGlam, the malevolent, death-dealing vampire who "went riding theroofs." Beowulf fearlessly descended into the turbid mere tograpple with Grendel's mother. Folktales and ballads, in whichincidents similar to those in myths and heroic legends occur, areoften overshadowed by terror. Figures like the Demon Lover, whobears off his mistress in the fatal craft and sinks her in thesea, and the cannibal bridegroom, outwitted at last by theartfulness of one of his brides, appear in the folk-lore of manylands. Through every century there glide uneasy spirits, groaningfor vengeance. Andrew Lang[2] mentions the existence of a papyrusfragment, found attached to a wooden statuette, in which anancient Egyptian scribe addresses a letter to the Khou, orspirit, of his dead wife, beseeching her not to haunt him. One ofthe ancestors of the savage were-wolf, who figures in Marryat's_Phantom Ship_, may perhaps be discovered in Petronius' _Supperof Trimalchio_. The descent of Bram Stoker's infamous vampireDracula may be traced back through centuries of legend.Hobgoblins, demons, and witches mingle grotesquely with thethrong of beautiful princesses, queens in glittering raiment,fairies and elves. Without these ugly figures, folk-tales wouldsoon lose their power to charm. All tale tellers know that fearis a potent spell. The curiosity which drove Bluebeard's wife toexplore the hidden chamber lures us on to know the worst, and aswe listen to horrid stories, we snatch a fearful joy. Humannature desires not only to be amused and entertained, but movedto pity and fear. All can sympathise with the youth, who couldnot shudder and who would fain acquire the gift.
From English literature we gain no more than brief, tantalisingglimpses of the vast treasury of folk-tales and ballads thatexisted before literature became an art and that lived on side byside with it, vitalising and enriching it continually. Yet hereand there we catch sudden gleams like the fragment in _KingLear_:
"Childe Roland to the dark tower came. His word was still Fie, Foh and Fum, I smell the blood of a British man."
or Benedick's quotation from the _Robber Bridegroom_:
"It is not so, it was not so, but, indeed, God forbid that it should be so."
which hint at the existence of a hoard as precious andinexhaustible as that of the Nibelungs. The chord of terror istouched in the eerie visit of the three dead sailor sons "inearthly flesh and blood" to the wife of Usher's well, SweetWilliam's Ghost, the rescue of Tarn Lin on Halloween, whenFairyland pays a tiend to Hell, the return of clerk Saunders tohis mistress, True Thomas's ride to Fairyland, when:
"For forty days and forty nights, He wade through red blood to the knee, And he saw neither sun nor moon, But heard the roaring of the sea."
The mediaeval romances of chivalry, which embody stories handeddown by oral tradition, are set in an atmosphere of supernaturalwonder and enchantment. In Malory's _Morte d'Arthur_, SirLancelot goes by night into the Chapel Perilous, wherein there isonly a dim light burning, and steals from the corpse a sword anda piece of silk to heal the wounds of a dying knight. Sir Galahadsees a fiend leap out of a tomb amid a cloud of smoke; Gawaine'sghost, with those of the knights and ladies for whom he has donebattle in life, appears to warn the king not to begin the fightagainst Modred on a certain day. In the romance of _Sir Amadas_,the ghost of a merchant, whose corpse the knight had duteouslyredeemed from the hands of creditors, succours him at need. Theshadow of terror lurks even amid the beauty of Spenser'sfairyland. In the windings of its forests we come upon darkcaves, mysterious castles and huts, from which there startfearsome creatures like Despair or the giant Orgoglio, hideoushags like Occasion, wicked witches and enchanters or frightfulbeings like the ghostly Maleger, who wore as his helmet a deadman's skull and rode upon a tiger swift as the wind. TheElizabethan dramatists were fascinated by the terrors of theinvisible world. Marlowe's Dr. Faustus, round whose name areclustered legends centuries old concerning bargains between manand the devil, the apparitions and witches in _Macbeth_, the deadhand, the corpse-like images, the masque of madmen, the tombmakerand the passing-bell in Webster's sombre tragedy, _The Duchess ofMalfi_, prove triumphantly the dramatic possibilities of terror.As a foil to his _Masque of Queens_ (1609) Ben Jonson introducedtwelve loathly witches with Ate as their leader, and embellishedhis description of their profane rites, with details culled fromJames I.'s treatise on Demonology and from learned ancientauthorities.
In _The Pilgrim's Progress_, Despair, who "had as many lives as acat," his wife Diffidence at Doubting Castle, and Maul andSlaygood are the ogres of popular story, whose acquaintanceBunyan had made in chapbooks during his ungodly youth.Hobgoblins, devils and fiends, "sturdy rogues" like the threebrothers Faintheart, Mistrust and Guilt, who set upon Littlefaithin Dead Man's Lane, lend the excitement of terror to Christian'sjourney to the Celestial City. The widespread belief in witchesand spirits to which Browne and Burton and many others bearwitness in the seventeenth century, lived on in the eighteenthcentury, although the attitude of the "polite" in the age ofreason was ostensibly incredulous and superior. A scene in one ofthe _Spectator_ essays illustrates pleasantly the state ofpopular opinion. Addison, lodging with a good-natured widow inLondon, returns home one day to find a group of girls sitting bycandlelight, telling one another ghost-stories. At his entry theyare abashed, but, on the widow's assuring them that it is onlythe "gentleman," they resume, while Addison, pretending to beabsorbed in his book at the far end of the table, covertlylistens to their tales of
"ghosts that, pale as ashes, had stood at the feet of the bed or walked over a churchyard by moonlight; and others, who had been conjured into the Red Sea for disturbing people's rest."[3]
In another essay Addison shows that he is strongly inclined tobelieve in the existence of spirits, though he repudiates theridiculous superstitions which prevailed in his day;[4] and SirRoger de Coverley frankly confesses his belief in witches. Defoe,in the preface to his _Essay on the History and Reality ofApparitions_ (1727) states uncompromisingly:
"I must tell you, good people, he that is not able to see the devil, in whatever shape he is pleased to appear in, he is not really qualified to live in this world, no, not in the quality of a common inhabitant."
Epworth Rectory, the home of John Wesley's father, was haunted in1716-17 by a persevering ghost called
Old Jeffrey, whose exploitsare recorded with a gravity and circumstantial exactitude thatremind us of Defoe's narrative concerning the ghostly Mrs. Vealin her "scoured" silk. John Wesley declares stoutly that he isconvinced of the literal truth of the story of one ElizabethHobson, who professed to have been visited on several occasionsby supernatural beings. He upholds too the authenticity of thenotorious Drummer of Tedworth, whose escapades are described inchapbooks and in Glanvill's _Sadducismus Triumphatus_ (1666), abook in which he was keenly interested. In his journal (May 25th,1768) he remarks:
"It is true that the English in general, and indeed most of the men of learning in Europe, have given up all accounts of witches and apparitions, as mere old wives' fables. I am sorry for it; and I willingly take this opportunity of entering my solemn protest against this violent compliment which so many that believe the Bible pay to those who do not believe it."
The Cock Lane ghost gained very general credit, and wasconsidered by Mrs. Nickleby a personage of some importance, whenshe boasted to Miss La Creevy that her great-grandfather went toschool with him--or her grandmother with the Thirsty Woman ofTutbury. The appearance of Lord Lyttleton's ghost in 1779 wasdescribed by Dr. Johnson, who was also disposed to believe in theCock Lane ghost, as the most extraordinary thing that hadhappened in his day.[5] There is abundant evidence that thepeople of the eighteenth century were extremely credulous, yet,in literature, there is a tendency to look askance at thesupernatural as at something wild and barbaric. Such ghosts aspresume to steal into poetry are amazingly tame, and evenelegant, in their speech and deportment. In Mallet's _William andMargaret_ (1759). which was founded on a scrap of an old balladout of _The Knight of the Burning Pestle_, Margaret's wraithrebukes her false lover in a long and dignified oration. Butspirits were shy of appearing in an age when they were morelikely to be received with banter than with dread. Dr. Johnsonexpresses the attitude of his age when, in referring to Gray'spoem, _The Bard_, he remarks:
"To select a singular event and swell it to a giant's bulk by fabulous appendages of spectres and predictions has little difficulty, for he that forsakes the probable may always find the marvellous. And it has little use; we are affected only as we believe; we are improved only as we find something to be imitated or declined." (1780.)
The dictum that we are affected only as we believe is open tograve doubt. We are often thrown into a state of trepidationsimply through the power of the imagination. We are wise afterthe event, like Partridge at the play:
"No, no, sir; ghosts don't appear in such dresses as that neither... And if it was really a ghost, it could do one no harm at such a distance, and in so much company; and yet, if I was frightened, I am not the only person."[6]
The supernatural which persisted always in legends handed downfrom one generation to another on the lips of living people, hadnot lost its power to thrill and alarm, and gradually worked itsway back into literature. Although Gray and Collins do notventure far beyond the bounds of the natural, they were insympathy with the popular feelings of superstitious terror, andrealised how effective they would be in poetry.
Collins, in his _Ode on the Superstitions of the ScottishHighlands_, adjures Home, the author of _Douglas_, to sing:
"how, framing hideous spells, In Sky's lone isle, the gifted wizard-seer Lodged in the wintry cave with Fate's fell spear Or in the depths of Uist's dark forests dwells, How they whose sight such dreary dreams engross With their own vision oft astonished droop When o'er the wintry strath or quaggy moss They see the gliding ghosts unbodied troop."
Burns, in the foreword to _Halloween_ (1785), writes in the"enlightened" spirit of the eighteenth century, but in the poemitself throws himself whole-heartedly into the hopes and fearsthat agitate the lovers. He owed much to an old woman who livedin his home in infancy:
"She had ... the largest collection in the country of tales and songs concerning devils, ghosts, fairies, brownies, witches, warlocks, spunkies, kelpies, elf-candles, dead-lights, wraiths, apparitions, cantraips, giants, enchanted towers, dragons and other trumpery. This cultivated the latent seeds of poetry, but had so strong an effect on my imagination, that to this hour, in my nocturnal rambles, I sometimes keep a sharp look-out in suspicious places; it often takes an effort of philosophy to shake off these idle terrors."[7]
_Tam o' Shanter_, written for Captain Grose, was perhaps based ona Scottish legend, learnt at the inglenook in childhood, fromthis old wife, or perhaps
"By some auld houlet-haunted biggin Or kirk deserted by its riggin,"
from Captain Grose himself, who made to quake:
"Ilk ghaist that haunts auld ha' or chamer, Ye gipsy-gang that deal in glamor, And you, deep-read in hell's black grammar, Warlocks and witches."
In it Burns reveals with lively reality the terrors that assailthe reveller on his homeward way through the storm:
"Past the birks and meikle stane Where drunken Charlie brak's neck-bane; And through the whins, and by the cairn Where hunters fand the murdered bairn And near the thorn, aboon the well Where Mungo's mither hanged hersell."
For sheer terror the wild, fantastic witch-dance, seen through aGothic window in the ruins of Kirk-Alloway, with the light ofhumour strangely glinting through, has hardly been surpassed. TheBallad-collections, beginning with Percy's _Reliques of AncientEnglish Poetry_ (1705), brought poets back to the originalsources of terror in popular tradition, and helped to revive thelatent feelings of awe, wonder and fear. In Coleridge's _AncientManner_ the skeleton-ship with its ghastly crew--thespectre-woman and her deathmate--the sensations of the mariner,alone on a wide, wide sea, seize on our imagination withirresistible power. The very substance of the poem is woven ofthe supernatural. The dream imagery is thrown into relief byoccasional touches of reality--the lighthouse, the church on thecliff, the glimpses of the wedding, the quiet song of the hiddenbrook in the leafy month of June. We, like the mariner, afterloneliness so awful that
"God himself Scarce seemed there to be,"
welcome the firm earth beneath our feet, and the homely sound ofthe vesper bell. In _Christabel_ we float dreamily through scenesas unearthly and ephemeral as the misty moonlight, and the wordsin which Coleridge conjures up his vision fall into music ofmagic beauty. The opening of the poem creates a sense offoreboding, and the horror of the serpent-maiden is subtlysuggested through her effect on Christabel. Coleridge hints atthe terrible with artistic reticence. In _Kubla Khan_ the chasmis:
"A savage place! as holy and enchanted As e'er beneath a waning moon was haunted By woman wailing for her demon-lover."
The poetry of Keats is often mysterious and suggestive of terror.The description of the Gothic hall in _The Eve of St. Agnes_:
"In all the house was heard no human sound; A chain-drooped lamp was flickering by each door; The arras, rich with horseman, hawk and hound, Fluttered in the besieging wind's uproar; And the long carpets rose along the gusty floor;"
the serpent-maiden, Lamia, who
"Seemed at once some penanced lady elf, Some demon's mistress, or the demon's self;"
the grim story in _Isabella_ of Lorenzo's ghost, who
"Moaned a ghostly undersong Like hoarse night-gusts sepulchral briers along."
all lead us over the borderland. In a rejected stanza of the _Odeon Melancholy_, he abandons the horrible:
"Though you should build a bark of dead men's bones And rear a phantom gibbet for a mast, Stitch shrouds together for a sail, with groans To fill it out, blood-stained and aghast; Although your rudder be a dragon's tail Long severed, yet still hard with agony, Your cordage, large uprootings from the skull Of bald Medusa, certes you would fail To find the Melancholy--"
Keats's melancholy is not to be found amid imagesof horror:
"She dwells with Beauty--Beauty that must die, And Joy, whose hand is ever at his lips Bidding adieu."
In
_La Belle Dame sans Merci_ he conveys with delicate touch thememory of the vision which haunts the knight, alone and palelyloitering. We see it through his eyes:
"I saw pale kings and princes too, Pale warriors, death-pale were they all: They cried--'La Belle Dame sans Merci Hath thee in thrall!'
"I saw their starv'd lips in the gloam With horrid warning gaped wide, And I awoke and found me here, On the cold hill's side."
From effects so exquisitely wrought as these it seems almostprofane to turn to the crude attempts of such poets as "Monk"Lewis or Southey to sound the note of terror. Yet they too, intheir fashion, played a part in the "Renascence of Wonder."Coleridge, fascinated by the spirit of "gramarye" in Buerger's_Lenore_, etherealised and refined it. Scott and Lewis gloried inthe gruesome details and spirited rhythm of the ballad, and intheir supernatural poems wish to startle and terrify, not to awe,their readers. Those who revel in phosphorescent lights and inthe rattle of the skeleton are apt to o'erleap themselves; andScott's _Glenfinlas_, Lewis's _Alonzo the Brave and the FairImogene_ and Southey's _Old Woman of Berkeley_ fall into thecategory of the grotesque. Hogg intentionally mingles the comicand the terrible in his poem, _The Witch of Fife_, but hisprose-stories reveal his power of creating an atmosphere of_diablerie_, undisturbed by intrusive mockery. In the poem_Kilmeny_, he handles an uncanny theme with dreamy beauty.
From the earliest times to the present day, writers of fictionhave realised the force of supernatural terror. In the_Babylonica_ of Iamblichus, the lovers evade their pursuers bypassing as spectres; the scene of the romance is laid in tombs,caverns, and robbers' dens, a setting remarkably like that ofGothic story. Into the English novel of the first half of theeighteenth century, however, the ghost dares not venture. Theinnate desire for the marvellous was met at this period not bythe novel, but by oral tradition and by such works as Galland'stranslation of _The Arabian Nights_, the Countess D'Aulnoy'scollection of fairy tales, Perrault's _Contes de ma Mere Oie_.Chapbooks setting forth mediaeval legends of "The Wandering Jew,"the "Demon Frigate," or "Dr. Faustus," and interspersed withanecdotes of freaks, monsters and murderers, satisfied thecraving for excitement among humbler readers.[8] Smollett, who,in his _Adventures of Ferdinand, Count Fathom_ (1753), seems tohave been experimenting with new devices for keeping alive theinterest of a _picaresque_ novel, anticipates the methods of Mrs.Radcliffe. Although he sedulously avoids introducing thesupernatural, he hovers perilously on the threshold. Thepublication of _The Castle of Otranto_ in 1764 was not so wild anadventure as Walpole would have his readers believe. The age wasripe for the reception of the marvellous.
The supernatural had, as we have seen, begun to find its way backinto poetry, in the work of Gray and Collins. In Macpherson's_Ossian_, which was received with acclamation in 1760-3, themountains, heaths and lakes are haunted by shadowy, superstitiousfears. Dim-seen ghosts wail over the wastes. There is abundantevidence that "authentic" stories of ghostly appearances wereheard with respect. Those who eagerly explored Walpole's Gothiccastle and who took pleasure in Miss Reeve's well-trained ghost,had previously enjoyed the thrill of chimney corner legends. Theidea of the gigantic apparition was derived, no doubt, from theold legend of the figure seen by Wallace on the field of battle.The limbs, strewn carelessly about the staircase and the galleryof the castle, belong to a giant, very like those who are worstedby the heroes of popular story. Godwin, in an unusual flight offancy, amused himself by tracing a certain similitude between_Caleb Williams_ and _Bluebeard_, between _Cloudesley_ and _TheBabes in the Wood_,[9] and planned a story, on the analogy of theSleeping Beauty, in which the hero was to have the faculty ofunexpectedly falling asleep for twenty, thirty, or a hundredyears.[10]
Mrs. Radcliffe, who, so far as we may judge, did not draw hercharacters from the creatures of flesh and blood around her,seems to have adopted some of the familiar figures of old story.Emily's guardian, Montoni, in _The Mysteries of Udolpho_, likethe unscrupulous uncle in Godwin's _Cloudesley_, may well havebeen descended from the wicked uncle of the folk tale. The cruelstepmother is disguised as a haughty, scheming marchioness in_The Sicilian Romance_. The ogre drops his club, assumes a veneerof polite refinement and relies on the more gentlemanlike methodof the dagger and stiletto for gaining his ends. The banditti androbbers who infest the countryside in Gothic fiction are timehonoured figures. Travellers in Thessaly in Apuleius' _GoldenAss_, like the fugitives in Shelley's _Zastrozzi_ and _St.Irvyne_, find themselves in robbers' caves. The Gothic castle,suddenly encountered in a dark forest, is boldly transported fromfairyland and set down in Italy, Sicily or Spain. The chamber ofhorrors, with its alarming array of scalps or skeletons, iscivilised beyond recognition and becomes the deserted wing of anabbey, concealing nothing worse than one discarded wife,emaciated and dispirited, but still alive. The ghost-story, whichLudovico reads in the haunted chamber of Udolpho, is described byMrs. Radcliffe as a Provencal tale, but is in reality common tothe folklore of all countries. The restless ghost, who yearns forthe burial of his corpse, is as ubiquitous as the Wandering Jew.In the _Iliad_ he appears as the shade of Patroclus, pleadingwith Achilles for his funeral rites. According to a letter of theyounger Pliny,[11] he haunts a house in Athens, clanking hischains. He is found in every land, in every age. His femininecounterpart presented herself to Dickens' nurse requiring herbones, which were under a glass-case, to be "interred with everyundertaking solemnity up to twenty-four pound ten, in anotherparticular place."[12] Melmoth the Wanderer, when he becomes thewooer of Immalee, seems almost like a reincarnation of the DemonLover. The wandering ball of fire that illuminates the duskyrecesses of so many Gothic abbeys is but another manifestation ofthe Fate-Moon, which shines, foreboding death, after Thorgunna'sfuneral, in the Icelandic saga. The witchcraft and demonologythat attracted Scott and "Monk" Lewis, may be traced far beyondSinclair's _Satan's Invisible World Discovered_ (1685), Bovet's_Pandemonium or the Devil's Cloyster Opened_ (1683), or ReginaldScot's _Discovery of Witchcraft_ (1584) to Ulysses' invocation ofthe spirits of the dead,[13] to the idylls of Theocritus and tothe Hebrew narrative of Saul's visit to the Cave of Endor. Thereare incidents in _The Golden Ass_ as "horrid" as any of thosedevised by the writers of Gothic romance. It would, indeed, be noeasy task to fashion scenes more terrifying than the mutilationof Socrates in _The Golden Ass_, by the witch, who tears out hisheart and stops the wound with a sponge which falls out when hestoops to drink at a river, or than the strange apparition of aragged, old woman who vanishes after leading the way to the room,where the baker's corpse hangs behind the door. Though the titleassumes a special literary significance at the close of theeighteenth century, the tale of terror appeals to deeply rootedinstincts, and belongs, therefore, to every age and clime.
The Tale of Terror: A Study of the Gothic Romance Page 8