The Light Has Been Broken: 560+ Macabre Classics, Supernatural Mysteries & Dark Tales - Mary Shelley - E-Book

The Light Has Been Broken: 560+ Macabre Classics, Supernatural Mysteries & Dark Tales E-Book

Mary Shelley

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'The Light Has Been Broken: 560+ Macabre Classics, Supernatural Mysteries & Dark Tales' showcases a vast panorama of horror and supernatural literature, featuring works by prominent figures ranging from Mary Shelley to H.P. Lovecraft. This collection presents an expansive exploration of gothic terror, psychological unease, and eerie mysteries, encapsulating a rich diversity of literary styles from the grimly poetic to the starkly suspenseful. The anthology not only reinforces the traditional elements of the macabre but also challenges them, by including lesser-known yet equally gripping tales that broaden the reader's perception of the genre. The authors included are titans of their respective eras, each contributing uniquely to the fabric of dark literature. The collection is emotionally and historically wide-ranging, carrying readers through the fear-tinged narratives of the 18th century to the more visceral horrors of the early 20th century. Together, these authors have shaped much of the modern understanding of horror and supernatural fiction, offering narratives that reflect societal anxieties and personal nightmares, framed within their distinct cultural and historical contexts. This anthology invites readers on a meticulously curated journey into the depths of horror and mystery, making it an indispensable volume for both newcomers and connoisseurs of the genre. The breadth and depth of the collection offer a remarkable educational opportunity— to observe the evolution and variety of horror writing across different periods and cultures. Engaging with this collection promises not only a thrilling literary experience but also a profound understanding of the ways in which supernatural fiction can illuminate darker corners of human experience and cultural fear.

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Mary Shelley, H. P. Lovecraft, H. G. Wells, Edgar Allan Poe, Henry James, Hugh Walpole, M. R. James, Wilkie Collins, E. F. Benson, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Ambrose Bierce, Arthur Machen, William Hope Hodgson, Arthur Conan Doyle, Grant Allen, Bram Stoker, Théophile Gautier, Richard Marsh, Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu, Thomas Hardy, Charles Dickens, Rudyard Kipling, Guy de Maupassant, Elizabeth Gaskell, Mark Twain, Daniel Defoe, Jerome K. Jerome, Fitz-James O'Brien, Catherine Crowe, Émile Erckmann, Alexandre Chatrian, Pedro De Alarçon, Amelia B. Edwards, Washington Irving, John Meade Falkner, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Mary E. Wilkins Freeman, Louisa M. Alcott, Edith Nesbit, Mary Louisa Molesworth, Francis Marion Crawford, John Kendrick Bangs, John Buchan, Sabine Baring-Gould, Cleveland Moffett, Louis Tracy, Nikolai Gogol, James Malcolm Rymer, Thomas Peckett Prest, Frederick Marryat, Oscar Wilde, Robert Louis Stevenson, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, W. W. Jacobs, Robert Louis Stevenson, H. H. Munro (Saki), Wilhelm Hauff, Mary Elizabeth Braddon, Robert W. Chambers, Edward Bulwer-Lytton, Thomas De Quincey, William Makepeace Thackeray, E. T. A. Hoffmann, Robert E. Howard, David Lindsay, Marie Belloc Lowndes, Edward Bellamy, Jack London, Pliny the Younger, Helena Blavatsky, Fergus Hume, Florence Marryat, Villiers de l'Isle Adam, William Archer, William F. Harvey, Katherine Rickford, Ralph Adams Cram, Leopold Kompert, Brander Matthews, Vincent O'Sullivan, Ellis Parker Butler, A. T. Quiller-Couch, Fiona Macleod, Lafcadio Hearn, William T. Stead, Gambier Bolton, Andrew Jackson Davis, Nizida, Walter F. Prince, Chester Bailey Fernando, Brander Matthews, Leonard Kip, Frank R. Stockton, Bithia Mary Croker, Catherine L. Pirkis, Leonid Andreyev, Anatole France, Richard Le Gallienne, Lucy Maud Montgomery, Stanley G. Weinbaum, Horace Walpole, William Thomas Beckford, Matthew Gregory Lewis, Ann Radcliffe, Jane Austen, John William Polidori, Charlotte Brontë, Emily Brontë, Walter Hubbell, George W. M. Reynolds, M. P. Shiel, Adelbert von Chamisso

The Light Has Been Broken: 560+ Macabre Classics, Supernatural Mysteries & Dark Tales

The Mark of the Beast, The Ghost Pirates, The Vampyre, Sweeney Todd, The Sleepy Hollow…

Published by

Books

- Advanced Digital Solutions & High-Quality eBook Formatting -
2018 OK Publishing
ISBN 978-80-272-4710-3

Table of Contents

Introduction: Supernatural Horror in Literature by H. P. Lovecraft
Supernatural & Mystery Thrillers:
Edgar Allan Poe:
The Tell-Tale Heart
The Fall of the House of Usher
The Cask of Amontillado
The Pit and the Pendulum
The Masque of the Red Death
The Black Cat
The Oblong Box
The Murders in the Rue Morgue
The Purloined Letter
The Mystery of Marie Rogêt
The Gold-Bug
Metzengerstein
The Assignation
Berenice
Morella
King Pest
Shadow
Silence
Ligeia
William Wilson
The Man of the Crowd
The Oval Portrait
The Premature Burial
The Imp of the Perverse
The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar
Hop-Frog
H. P. Lovecraft:
The Call of Cthulhu
The Shadow over Innsmouth
Dagon
The Dunwich Horror
The Picture in the House
The Outsider
The Silver Key
In the Vault
The Whisperer in Darkness
The Thing on the Doorstep
The Shadow out of Time
The Colour out of Space
The Music of Erich Zann
The Haunter of the Dark
The Rats in the Walls
Pickman’s Model
From Beyond
Herbert West-Reanimator
At The Mountains of Madness
Henry James:
The Turn of the Screw
The Romance of Certain Old Clothes
Owen Wingrave
The Real Right Thing
Jolly Corner
Sir Edmund Orme
The Ghostly Rental
The Way It Came
The Third Person
Hugh Walpole:
Portrait of a Man with Red Hair
All Souls' Night:
The Whistle
The Silver Mask
The Staircase
A Carnation for an Old Man
Tarnhelm; or, The Death of my Uncle Robert
Mr. Oddy
Seashore Macabre. A Moment’s Experience
Lilac
The Oldest Talland
The Little Ghost
Mrs. Lunt
Sentimental but True
Portrait in Shadow
The Snow
The Ruby Glass
Spanish Dusk
Robert E. Howard:
Beyond the Black River
Devil in Iron
People of the Dark
People of the Black Circle
Witch from Hell's Kitchen
The 'John Kirowan' Saga:
The Black Stone
The Children of the Night
The Haunter of the Ring
The 'De Montour' Saga:
In The Forest Of Villefère
Wolfshead
The Weird West Stories:
The Horror From The Mound
The Man On The Ground
Old Garfield's Heart
Black Canaan
The Dead Remember
Pigeons From Hell
Cthulhu Mythos:
The Challenge from Beyond
Dig Me No Grave
The Fire of Asshurbanipal
The Thing on the Roof
Sea Curse
The Dream Snake
The Hyena
The Fearsome Touch Of Death
The Cairn On The Headland
The Weird Menace Stories:
Black Hound of Death
Black Talons
Black Wind Blowing
The Grisly Horror
Skull-Face
M. R. James
Ghost Stories of an Antiquary:
Canon Alberic's Scrap-Book
Lost Hearts
The Mezzotint
The Ash-Tree
Number 13
Count Magnus
'Oh, Whistle, and I'll Come to You, My Lad'
The Treasure of Abbot Thomas
Ghost Stories of an Antiquary Part 2:
A School Story
The Rose Garden
The Tractate Middoth
Casting the Runes
The Stalls of Barchester Cathedral
Martin's Close
Mr Humphreys and His Inheritance
A Thin Ghost and Others:
The Residence at Whitminster
The Diary of Mr. Poynter
An Episode of Cathedral History
The Story of a Disappearance and an Appearance
Two Doctors
Wilkie Collins
The Haunted Hotel
The Dead Secret
The Devil's Spectacles
A Terribly Strange Bed
Mrs Zant and the Ghost
The Last Stage Coachman
E. F. Benson
The Room in the Tower
The Man Who Went Too Far
Caterpillars
The Thing in the Hall
The Dust-Cloud
The Confession of Charles Linkworth
At Abdul Ali’s Grave
The Shootings of Achnaleish
How Fear Departed from the Long Gallery
The Cat
The Bus-Conductor
Between the Lights
Outside the Door
The Other Bed
The House with the Brick-Kiln
The Terror by Night
Reconciliation
The Face
Spinach
Bagnell Terrace
A Tale of an Empty House
Naboth's Vineyard
Expiation
Home, Sweet Home
"And No Bird Sings"
The Corner House
Corstophine
The Temple
The Step
The Bed by the Window
James Lamp
The Dance
The Hanging of Alfred Wadham
Pirates
The Wishing-Well
The Bath-Chair
Monkeys
Christopher Comes Back
The Sanctuary
Thursday Evenings
The Psychical Mallards
Negotium Perambulans
Nathaniel Hawthorne
Rappaccini's Daughter
The Birth Mark
Dr. Heidegger's Experiment
The Minister's Black Veil
Young Goodman Brown
Ambrose Bierce
Can Such Things Be?
The Death of Halpin Frayser
The Secret of Macarger’s Gulch
One Summer Night
The Moonlit Road
A Diagnosis of Death
Moxon’s Master
A Tough Tussle
One of Twins
The Haunted Valley
A Jug of Sirup
Staley Fleming’s Hallucination
A Resumed Identity
Hazen’s Brigade
A Baby Tramp
The Night-Doings at “Deadman’s”
A Story that is Untrue
Beyond the Wall
A Psychological Shipwreck
The Middle Toe of the Right Foot
John Mortonson’s Funeral
The Realm of the Unreal
John Bartine’s Watch
A Story by a Physician
The Damned Thing
Haïta the Shepherd
An Inhabitant of Carcosa
The Stranger
Present at a Hanging and Other Ghost Stories:
The Ways of Ghosts:
Present at a Hanging
A Cold Greeting
A Wireless Message
An Arrest
Soldier-Folk:
A Man with Two Lives
Three and One Are One
A Baffled Ambuscade
Two Military Executions
Some Haunted Houses:
The Isle of Pines
A Fruitless Assignment
A Vine on a House
At Old Man Eckert’s
The Spook House
The Other Lodgers
The Thing at Nolan
The Difficulty of Crossing a Field
An Unfinished Race
Charles Ashmore’s Trail
Science to the Front
Arthur Machen
The Great God Pan
The Three Impostors
The Hill of Dreams
The Terror
The Secret Glory
The White People
The Inmost Light
The Shining Pyramid
The Red Hand
The Great Return
The Happy Children
Out of the Earth
The Bowmen
William Hope Hodgson
The House on the Borderland
The Boats of the Glen Carrig
The Ghost Pirates
The Night Land
The Derelict
The Voice in the Night
Carnacki, the Ghost-Finder Stories:
The Gateway of the Monster
The House among the Laurels
The Whistling Room
The Searcher of the End House
The Thing Invisible
M. P. Shiel
Shapes in the Fire:
Vaila, or the House of Sounds
Maria in the Rose-bush
Xélucha
Tulsah
The Serpent-ship
Phorfor
Arthur Conan Doyle
The Hound of the Baskervilles
The Silver Hatchet
The Leather Funnel
The Beetle Hunter
The Man with the Watches
The Pot of Caviare
The Japanned Box
The Black Doctor
Playing with Fire
The Jew’s Breastplate
The Lost Special
The Club-footed Grocer
The Sealed Room
The Brazilian Cat
The Usher of Lea House School
The Brown Hand
The Fiend of the Cooperage
Jelland’s Voyage
B. 24
The Case of Lady Sannox
The Horror of the Heights
The New Catacomb
The Terror of Blue John Gap
The Nightmare Room
Lot No. 249
The Ring of Thoth
The Great Keinplatz Experiment
Playing with Fire
The Los Amigos Fiasco
How it Happened
The Lift
De Profundis
Ralph Adams Cram
Black Spirits and White:
No. 252 Rue M. Le Prince
In Kropfsberg Keep
The White Villa
Sister Maddelena
Notre Dame Des Eaux
The Dead Valley
Postscript
Grant Allen
The Reverend John Creedy
Dr. Greatrex's Engagement
Mr. Chung
The Curate of Churnside
An Episode in High Life
My New Year's Eve among the Mummies
The Foundering of the "Fortuna"
The Backslider
The Mysterious Occurrence in Piccadilly
Carvalho
Pausodyne
The Empress of Andorra
The Senior Proctor's Wooing
The Child of the Phalanstery
Our Scientific Observations on a Ghost
Ram Das of Cawnpore
The Essential Gothics:
Horace Walpole:
The Castle of Otranto
William Thomas Beckford:
Vathek
Matthew Gregory Lewis:
The Monk
Ann Radcliffe:
The Mysteries of Udolpho
The Italian
Jane Austen:
Northanger Abbey
Charlotte Brontë:
Jane Eyre
Emily Brontë:
Wuthering Heights
Nathaniel Hawthorne:
The House of the Seven Gables
Wilkie Collins:
The Woman in White
Charles Dickens:
The Mystery of Edwin Drood
Oscar Wilde:
The Picture of Dorian Gray
Gaston Leroux:
The Phantom of the Opera
Ghosts, Monsters & Creatures:
Mary Shelley:
Frankenstein (Original 1818 Version)
The Mortal Immortal
The Heir of Mondolfo
The Invisible Girl
The Dream
The Evil Eye
John William Polidori:
The Vampyre
Bram Stoker:
Dracula
The Jewel of Seven Stars
The Lair of the White Worm
Dracula's Guest
The Judge's House
The Squaw
The Secret of the Growing Gold
A Gipsy Prophecy
The Coming of Abel Behenna
The Burial of the Rats
A Dream of Red Hands
Crooken Sands
Théophile Gautier
Clarimonde
The Mummy's Foot
Richard Marsh:
The Beetle
Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu:
Carmilla
Uncle Silas
The Wyvern Mystery
The Dead Sexton
Green Tea
The Familiar
Mr Justice Harbottle
The Ghost and the Bone-Setter
The Fortunes of Sir Robert Ardagh
The Drunkard's Dream
Strange Event in the Life of Schalken the Painter
A Chapter in the History of a Tyrone Family
The Haunted Baronet
Madam Crowl's Ghost
Squire Toby's Will
Dickon the Devil
The Child That Went with the Fairies
The White Cat of Drumgunniol
An Account of Some Strange Disturbances in Aungier Street
Ghost Stories of Chapelizod
Wicked Captain Walshawe, of Wauling
Sir Dominick's Bargain
Ultor de Lacy
The Vision of Tom Chuff
Stories of Lough Guir
The Evil Guest
Laura Silver Bell
The Murdered Cousin
The Mysterious Lodger
An Authentic Narrative of a Haunted House
A Debt of Honor
Haunted
Pichon and Sons, of the Croix Rousse
The Spirit's Whisper
What Was It?
George W. M. Reynolds:
Wagner, the Wehr-Wolf
Thomas Hardy:
What the Shepherd Saw: A Tale of Four Moonlight Nights
The Grave by the Handpost
The Withered Arm
Charles Dickens:
The Signal-Man
The Hanged Man’s Bride; or, The Ghost in the Bride’s Chamber
The Queer Chair; or, The Bagman's Story
The Ghosts of the Mail; or, The Story of The Bagman's uncle
The Haunted House
The Trial for Murder; or, To Be Taken with a Grain of Salt
The Story of the Goblins Who Stole a Sexton
Doctor Marigold's Prescriptions
The Mortals in the House
To Be Read At Dusk
The Mothers’ Eyes; or, A Confession Found in Prison
Captain Murder and the Devil’s Bargain; or, Nurse’s Stories
Rudyard Kipling:
The Phantom Rickshaw
My Own True Ghost Story
The Strange Ride of Morrowbie Jukes
The Man Who Would Be King
"The Finest Story in the World"
The City of Dreadful Night
Sleipner, Late Thurinda
The Mark of the Beast
At The End of the Passage
Guy de Maupassant:
The Horla
The Diary of a Madman
The Flayed Hand
From the Tomb
The Man with the Blue Eyes
An Uncomfortable Bed
Ghosts
Fear
Elizabeth Gaskell:
The Old Nurse's Story
The Poor Clare
Lois the Witch
The Grey Woman
Curious, if True
Lafcadio Hearn:
A Ghost
The Story of Mimi-Nashi-Hoichi
Oshidori
The Story of O-Tei
Ubazakura
Diplomacy
Of a Mirror and a Bell
Jikininki
Mujina
Rokuro-Kubi
A Dead Secret
Yuki-Onna
The Story of Aoyagi
Jiu-Roku-Zakura
The Dream of Akinosuke
Riki-Baka
Hi-Mawari
Horai
The Reconciliation
A Legend of Fugen-Bosatsu
The Screen-Maiden
The Corpse-Rider
The Sympathy of Benten
The Gratitude of the Samébito
Jerome K. Jerome:
Told After Supper
Fitz-James O'Brien:
The Lost Room
The Diamond Lens
Catherine Crowe:
Ghosts and Family Legends
Émile Erckmann & Alexandre Chatrian:
The Man-Wolf
The Mysterious Sketch
The Owl's Ear
The Invisible Eye
The Waters of Death
Pedro De Alarçon:
The Nail
Walter Hubbell:
The Great Amherst Mystery
Amelia B. Edwards:
Monsieur Maurice
The Phantom Coach
A Night on the Borders of the Black Forest
The Story of Salome
In The Confessional
The Tragedy in the Palazzo Bardello
The Four-Fifteen Express
Sister Johanna's Story
All-Saints' Eve
Washington Irving:
The Legend of Sleepy Hollow
Rip Van Winkle
The Spectre Bridegroom
John Meade Falkner:
The Nebuly Coat
The Lost Stradivarius
Mary E. Wilkins Freeman:
The Wind in the Rose-bush
The Shadows on the Wall
Luella Miller
The Southwest Chamber
The Vacant Lot
The Lost Ghost
Louisa M. Alcott:
The Abbot's Ghost; or Maurice Treherne's Temptation
Lost in the Pyramid; or, The Mummy’s Curse
Lucy Maud Montgomery:
The House Party at Smoky Island
The Closed Door
The Red Room
The Girl at the Gate
Edith Nesbit:
The Ebony Frame
John Charrington's Wedding
Uncle Abraham's Romance
The Mystery of the Semi-detached
From the Dead
Man-Size in Marble
The Mass for the Dead
Mary Louisa Molesworth:
The Shadow in the Moonlight
The Man with the Cough
Half-Way between the Stiles
At the Dip of the Road
—Will Not Take Place
The Clock That Struck Thirteen
Lady Farquhar's Old Lady
Witnessed by Two
Unexplained
The Story of the Rippling Train
Francis Marion Crawford:
The Dead Smile
The Screaming Skull
Man Overboard!
For The Blood is the Life
The Upper Berth
By The Water of Paradise
The Doll's Ghost
John Kendrick Bangs:
Ghosts That Have Haunted Me
The Mystery of My Grandmother's Hair Sofa
The Mystery of Barney O'rourke
The Exorcism That Failed
The Dampmere Mystery
Carleton Barker, First and Second
The Water Ghost of Harrowby Hall
The Spectre Cook of Bangletop
The Speck on the Lens
A Midnight Visitor
A Quicksilver Cassandra
The Ghost Club
A Psychical Prank
The Literary Remains of Thomas Bragdon
John Buchan:
The Wind in the Portico
The Green Wildebeest
No-Man's-land
The Watcher by the Threshold
Space
Tendebaunt Manus
Witch Wood
A Journey of Little Profit
The Outgoing of the Tide
The Grove of Ashtaroth
Basilissa
Fullcircle
Skule Skerry
The Strange Adventure of Mr. Andrew Hawthorn
Sabine Baring-Gould:
Jean Bouchon
Pomps and Vanities
McAlister
The Leaden Ring
The Mother of Pansies
The Red-haired Girl
A Professional Secret
H.P.
Glámr
Colonel Halifax's Ghost Story
The Merewigs
The "Bold Venture"
Mustapha
Little Joe Gander
A Dead Finger
Black Ram
A Happy Release
The 9.30 Up-train
On the Leads
Aunt Joanna
The White Flag
Cleveland Moffett:
The Mysterious Card
Possessed
Louis Tracy:
The Late Tenant
Eerie & Macabre Tales:
Nikolai Gogol:
Dead Souls (Unfinished)
St, John’s Eve
The Viy
The Mysterious Portrait
May Night, or The Drowned Maiden
James Malcolm Rymer & Thomas Peckett Prest:
Sweeney Todd, the Demon Barber of Fleet Street
Frederick Marryat:
The Phantom Ship
The Were-Wolf
Robert Louis Stevenson:
Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde
Markheim
The Body-Snatcher
Thrawn Janet
The Waif Woman
H. G. Wells:
The Island of Doctor Moreau
Charlotte Perkins Gilman:
The Yellow Wallpaper
W. W. Jacobs:
The Monkey's Paw
H. H. Munro (Saki):
The Wolves of Cernogratz
Gabriel-Ernest
Sredni Vashtar
Laura
The Music on the Hill
The Interlopers
Esmé
Wilhelm Hauff:
The Severed Hand
Heart of Stone; or, The Cold Heart
Adelbert von Chamisso:
Shadowless Man
Mary Elizabeth Braddon:
At Chrighton Abbey
The Cold Embrace
The Shadow in the Corner
Good Lady Ducayne
Eveline's Visitant
Robert W. Chambers:
The King in Yellow
The Repairer of Reputations
The Mask
In The Court of the Dragon
The Yellow Sign
The Demoiselle D'ys
The Prophets' Paradise
The Street of the Four Winds
The Street of the First Shell
The Street of Our Lady of the Fields
Rue Barrée
Edward Bulwer-Lytton:
The Haunted and the Haunters; or, The House and the Brain
The Incantation
Thomas De Quincey:
The Avenger
William Makepeace Thackeray:
On Being Found Out
The Notch on the Ax
E. T. A. Hoffmann:
The Deserted House
The Cremona Violin
The Fermata
Signor Formica
The Sandman
The Entail
Arthur's Hall
The Doge and Dogess
Master Martin the Cooper
Mademoiselle De Scudéri
Gambler's Luck
Master Johannes Wacht
David Lindsay:
The Haunted Woman
Marie Belloc Lowndes:
From Out the Vast Deep
Edward Bellamy:
Miss Ludington's Sister
Dr. Heidenhoff's Process
Stanley G. Weinbaum:
The Dark Other
Miscellaneous Tales:
The Ghost in the Cap'n Brown House (Harriet Beecher Stowe)
The Apparition of Mrs. Veal (Daniel Defoe)
When the World Was Young (Jack London)
Uncle Cornelius His Story (George MacDonald)
Mr. Bloke's Item (Mark Twain)
To Sura: A Letter (Pliny the Younger)
The Open Door (Mrs. Margaret Oliphant)
A Witch's Den (Helena Blavatsky)
The Ghost's Touch (Fergus Hume)
The Box with the Iron Clamps (Florence Marryat)
The Torture by Hope (Villiers de l'Isle Adam)
My Fascinating Friend (William Archer)
The Great Valdez Sapphire (Anonymous)
The Beast with Five Fingers (William F. Harvey)
Joseph: A Story (Katherine Rickford)
The Silent Woman (Leopold Kompert)
The Interval (Vincent O'Sullivan)
Dey Ain't No Ghosts (Ellis Parker Butler)
The Roll-Call of the Reef (A. T. Quiller-Couch)
Green Branches (Fiona Macleod)
The Sin-Eater (Fiona Macleod)
Photographing Invisible Beings (William T. Stead)
Ghosts in Solid Form (Gambier Bolton)
The Portal of the Unknown (Andrew Jackson Davis)
Nature-Spirits, or Elementals (Nizida)
Some Remarkable Experiences of Famous Persons (Walter F. Prince)
Chan Tow The Highrob (Chester Bailey Fernald)
The Rival Ghosts (Brander Matthews)
The Ghosts at Grantley (Leonard Kip)
Old Applejoy's Ghost (Frank R. Stockton)
Number Ninety (Bithia Mary Croker)
The Black Bag Left on a Door-Step (Catherine L. Pirkis)
The Mass of Shadows (Anatole France)
The Haunted Orchard (Richard Le Gallienne)
Some Real American Ghosts
Some Chinese Ghosts

Introduction: Supernatural Horror in Literature by H. P. Lovecraft

Table of Contents
Introduction
The Dawn of the Horror-Tale
The Early Gothic Novel
The Apex of Gothic Romance
The Aftermath of Gothic Fiction
Spectral Literature on the Continent
Edgar Allan Poe
The Weird Tradition in America
The Weird Tradition in the British Isles
The Modern Masters

Introduction

Table of Contents

The oldest and strongest emotion of mankind is fear, and the oldest and strongest kind of fear is fear of the unknown. These facts few psychologists will dispute, and their admitted truth must establish for all time the genuineness and dignity of the weirdly horrible tale as a literary form. Against it are discharged all the shafts of materialistic sophistication which clings to frequently felt emotions and external events, and of a naively insipid idealism which deprecates the aesthetic motive and calls for a didactic literature to "uplift" the reader toward a suitable degree of smirking optimism. But in spite of all this opposition the weird tale has survived, developed, and attained remarkable heights of perfection; founded as it is on a profound and elementary principle whose appeal, if not always universal, must necessarily be poignant and permanent to minds of the requisite sensitiveness.

The appeal of the spectrally macabre is generally narrow because it demands from the reader a certain degree of imagination and a capacity for detachment from every-day life. Relatively few are free enough from the spell of the daily routine to respond to rappings from outside, and tales of ordinary feelings and events, or of common sentimental distortions of such feelings and events, will always take first place in the taste of the majority; rightly, perhaps, since of course these ordinary matters make up the greater part of human experience. But the sensitive are always with us, and sometimes a curious streak of fancy invades an obscure corner of the very hardest head; so that no amount of rationalisation, reform, or Freudian analysis can quite annul the thrill of the chimney-corner whisper or the lonely wood. There is here involved a psychological pattern or tradition as real and as deeply grounded in mental experience as any other pattern or tradition of mankind; coeval with the religious feeling and closely related to many aspects of it, and too much a part of our inmost biological heritage to lose keen potency over a very important, though not numerically great, minority of our species.

Man's first instincts and emotions formed his response to the environment in which he found himself. Definite feelings based on pleasure and pain grew up around the phenomena whose causes and effects he understood, whilst around those which he did not understand—and the universe teemed with them in the early days—were naturally woven such personifications, marvellous interpretations, and sensations of awe and fear as would be hit upon by a race having few and simple ideas and limited experience. The unknown, being likewise the unpredictable, became for our primitive forefathers a terrible and omnipotent source of boons and calamities visited upon mankind for cryptic and wholly extra-terrestrial reasons, and thus clearly belonging to spheres of existence whereof we know nothing and wherein we have no part. The phenomenon of dreaming likewise helped to build up the notion of an unreal or spiritual world; and in general, all the conditions of savage dawn-life so strongly conduced toward a feeling of the supernatural, that we need not wonder at the thoroughness with which man's very hereditary essence has become saturated with religion and superstition. That saturation must, as matter of plain scientific fact, be regarded as virtually permanent so far as the subconscious mind and inner instincts are concerned; for though the area of the unknown has been steadily contracting for thousands of years, an infinite reservoir of mystery still engulfs most of the outer cosmos, whilst a vast residuum of powerful inherited associations clings round all the objects and processes that were once mysterious, however well they may now be explained. And more than this, there is an actual physiological fixation of the old instincts in our nervous tissue, which would make them obscurely operative even were the conscious mind to be purged of all sources of wonder.

Because we remember pain and the menace of death more vividly than pleasure, and because our feelings toward the beneficent aspects of the unknown have from the first been captured and formalised by conventional religious rituals, it has fallen to the lot of the darker and more maleficent side of cosmic mystery to figure chiefly in our popular supernatural folklore. This tendency, too, is naturally enhanced by the fact that uncertainty and danger are always closely allied; thus making any kind of an unknown world a world of peril and evil possibilities. When to this sense of fear and evil the inevitable fascination of wonder and curiosity is super-added, there is born a composite body of keen emotion and imaginative provocation whose vitality must of necessity endure as long as the human race itself. Children will always be afraid of the dark, and men with minds sensitive to hereditary impulse will always tremble at the thought of the hidden and fathomless worlds of strange life which may pulsate in the gulfs beyond the stars, or press hideously upon our own globe in unholy dimensions which only the dead and the moonstruck can glimpse.

With this foundation, no one need wonder at the existence of a literature of cosmic fear. It has always existed, and always will exist; and no better evidence of its tenacious vigour can be cited than the impulse which now and then drives writers of totally opposite leanings to try their hands at it in isolated tales, as if to discharge from their minds certain phantasmal shapes which would otherwise haunt them. Thus Dickens wrote several eerie narratives; Browning, the hideous poem "'Childe Roland'"; Henry James, The Turn of the Screw; Dr. Holmes, the subtle novel Elsie Venner; F. Marion Crawford, "The Upper Berth" and a number of other examples; Mrs. Charlotte Perkins Gilman, social worker, "The Yellow Wall Paper"; whilst the humourist W. W. Jacobs produced that able melodramatic bit called "The Monkey's Paw".

This type of fear-literature must not be confounded with a type externally similar but psychologically widely different; the literature of mere physical fear and the mundanely gruesome. Such writing, to be sure, has its place, as has the conventional or even whimsical or humorous ghost story where formalism or the author's knowing wink removes the true sense of cosmic fear in its purest sense. The true weird tale has something more than secret murder, bloody bones, or a sheeted form clanking chains according to rule. A certain atmosphere of breathless and unexplainable dread of outer, unknown forces must be present; and there must be a hint, expressed with a seriousness and portentousness becoming its subject, of that most terrible conception of the human brain—a malign and particular suspension or defeat of those fixed laws of Nature which are our only safeguard against the assaults of chaos and the daemons of unplumbed space.

Naturally we cannot expect all weird tales to conform absolutely to any theoretical model. Creative minds are uneven, and the best of fabrics have their dull spots. Moreover, much of the choicest weird work is unconscious; appearing in memorable fragments scattered through material whose massed effect may be of a very different cast. Atmosphere is the all-important thing, for the final criterion of authenticity is not the dovetailing of a plot but the creation of a given sensation. We may say, as a general thing, that a weird story whose intent is to teach or produce a social effect, or one in which the horrors are finally explained away by natural means, is not a genuine tale of cosmic fear; but it remains a fact that such narratives possess, in isolated sections, atmospheric touches which fulfil every condition of true supernatural horror-literature. Therefore we must judge a weird tale not by the author's intent, or by the mere mechanics of the plot; but by the emotional level which it attains at its least mundane point. If the proper sensations are excited, such a "high spot" must be admitted on its own merits as weird literature, no matter how prosaically it is later dragged down. The one test of the really weird is simply this—whether or not there be excited in the reader a profound sense of dread, and of contact with unknown spheres and powers; a subtle attitude of awed listening, as if for the beating of black wings or the scratching of outside shapes and entities on the known universe's utmost rim. And of course, the more completely and unifiedly a story conveys this atmosphere, the better it is as a work of art in the given medium.

The Dawn of the Horror-Tale

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As may naturally be expected of a form so closely connected with primal emotion, the horror-tale is as old as human thought and speech themselves.

Cosmic terror appears as an ingredient of the earliest folklore of all races, and is crystallised in the most archaic ballads, chronicles, and sacred writings. It was, indeed, a prominent feature of the elaborate ceremonial magic, with its rituals for the evocation of daemons and spectres, which flourished from prehistoric times, and which reached its highest development in Egypt and the Semitic nations. Fragments like the Book of Enoch and the Claviculae of Solomon well illustrate the power of the weird over the ancient Eastern mind, and upon such things were based enduring systems and traditions whose echoes extend obscurely even to the present time. Touches of this transcendental fear are seen in classic literature, and there is evidence of its still greater emphasis in a ballad literature which paralleled the classic stream but vanished for lack of a written medium. The Middle Ages, steeped in fanciful darkness, gave it an enormous impulse toward expression; and East and West alike were busy preserving and amplifying the dark heritage, both of random folklore and of academically formulated magic and cabbalism, which had descended to them. Witch, werewolf, vampire, and ghoul brooded ominously on the lips of bard and grandam, and needed but little encouragement to take the final step across the boundary that divides the chanted tale or song from the formal literary compostion. In the Orient, the weird tale tended to assume a gorgeous colouring and sprightliness which almost transmuted it into sheer phantasy. In the West, where the mystical Teuton had come down from his black Boreal forests and the Celt remembered strange sacrifices in Druidic groves, it assumed a terrible intensity and convincing seriousness of atmosphere which doubled the force of its half-told, half-hinted horrors.

Much of the power of Western horror-lore was undoubtedly due to the hidden but often suspected presence of a hideous cult of nocturnal worshippers whose strange customs—descended from pre-Aryan and pre-agricultural times when a squat race of Mongoloids roved over Europe with their flocks and herds—were rooted in the most revolting fertility-rites of immemorial antiquity. This secret religion, stealthily handed down amongst peasants for thousands of years despite the outward reign of the Druidic, Graeco-Roman, and Christian faiths in the regions involved, was marked by wild "Witches' Sabbaths" in lonely woods and atop distant hills on Walpurgis-Night and Hallowe'en, the traditional breeding-seasons of the goats and sheep and cattle; and became the source of vast riches of sorcery-legend, besides provoking extensive witchcraft-prosecutions of which the Salem affair forms the chief American example. Akin to it in essence, and perhaps connected with it in fact, was the frightful secret system of inverted theology or Satan-worship which produced such horrors as the famous "Black Mass"; whilst operating toward the same end we may note the activities of those whose aims were somewhat more scientific or philosophical—the astrologers, cabbalists, and alchemists of the Albertus Magnus or Raymond Lully type, with whom such rude ages invariably abound. The prevalence and depth of the mediaeval horror-spirit in Europe, intensified by the dark despair which waves of pestilence brought, may be fairly gauged by the grotesque carvings slyly introduced into much of the finest later Gothic ecclesiastical work of the time; the daemonic gargoyles of Notre Dame and Mont St. Michel being among the most famous specimens. And throughout the period, it must be remembered, there existed amongst educated and uneducated alike a most unquestioning faith in every form of the supernatural; from the gentlest of Christian doctrines to the most monstrous morbidities of witchcraft and black magic. It was from no empty background that the Renaissance magicians and alchemists—Nostradamus, Trithemius, Dr. John Dee, Robert Fludd, and the like—were born.

In this fertile soil were nourished types and characters of sombre myth and legend which persist in weird literature to this day, more or less disguised or altered by modern technique. Many of them were taken from the earliest oral sources, and form part of mankind's permanent heritage. The shade which appears and demands the burial of its bones, the daemon lover who comes to bear away his still living bride, the death-fiend or psychopomp riding the night-wind, the man-wolf, the sealed chamber, the deathless sorcerer—all these may be found in that curious body of mediaeval lore which the late Mr. Baring-Gould so effectively assembled in book form. Wherever the mystic Northern blood was strongest, the atmosphere of the popular tales became most intense; for in the Latin races there is a touch of basic rationality which denies to even their strangest superstitions many of the overtones of glamour so characteristic of our own forest-born and ice-fostered whisperings.

Just as all fiction first found extensive embodiment in poetry, so is it in poetry that we first encounter the permanent entry of the weird into standard literature. Most of the ancient instances, curiously enough, are in prose; as the werewolf incident in Petronius, the gruesome passage in Apuleius, the brief but celebrated letter of Pliny the Younger to Sura, and the odd compilation On Wonderful Events by the Emperor Hadrian's Greek freedman, Phlegon. It is in Phlegon that we first find that hideous tale of the corpse-bride, "Philinnion and Machates", later related by Proclus and in modern forming the inspiration of Goethe's "Bride of Corinth" and Washington Irving's "German Student". But by the time the old Northern myths take literary form, and in that later time when the weird appears as a steady element in the literature of the day, we find it mostly in metrical dress; as indeed we find the greater part of the strictly imaginative writing of the Middle Ages and Renaissance. The Scandinavian Eddas and Sagas thunder with cosmic horror, and shake with the stark fear of Ymir and his shapeless spawn; whilst our own Anglo-Saxon Beowulf and the later Continental Nibelung tales are full of eldritch weirdness. Dante is a pioneer in the classic capture of macabre atmosphere, and in Spenser's stately stanzas will be seen more than a few touches of fantastic terror in landscape, incident, and character. Prose literature gives us Malory's Morte d'Arthur, in which are presented many ghastly situations taken from early ballad sources—the theft of the sword and silk from corpse in Chapel Perilous by Sir Launcelot, the ghost of Sir Gawaine, and the tomb-fiend seen by Sir Galahad—whilst other and cruder specimen were doubtless set forth in cheap and sensational "chapbooks" vulgarly hawked about and devoured by the ignorant. In Elizabethan drama, with its Dr. Faustus, the witches in Macbeth, the ghost in Hamlet, and the horrible gruesomeness of Webster, we may easily discern the strong hold of the daemoniac on the public mind; a hold intensified by the very real fear of living witchcraft, whose terrors, first wildest on the Continent, begin to echo loudly in English ears as the witch-hunting crusades of James the First gain headway. To the lurking mystical prose of the ages is added a long line of treatises on witchcraft and daemonology which aid in exciting the imagination of the reading world.

Through the seventeenth and into the eighteenth century we behold a growing mass of fugitive legendry and balladry of darksome cast; still, however, held down beneath the surface of polite and accepted literature. Chapbooks of horror and weirdness multiplied, and we glimpse the eager interest of the people through fragments like Defoe's "Apparition of Mrs. Veal", a homely tale of a dead woman's spectral visit to a distant friend, written to advertise covertly a badly selling theological disquisition on death. The upper orders of society were now losing faith in the supernatural, and indulging in a period of classic rationalism. Then, beginning with the translations of Eastern tales in Queen Anne's reign and taking definite form toward the middle of the century, comes the revival of romantic feeling—the era of new joy in Nature, and in the radiance of past times, strange scenes, bold deeds, and incredible marvels. We fell it first in the poets, whose utterances take on new qualitites of wonder, strangeness, and shuddering. And finally, after the timid appearance of a few weird scenes in the novels of the day—such as Smollett's Adventures of Ferdinand, Count Fathom—the released instinct precipitates itself in the birth of a new school of writing; the "Gothic" school of horrible and fantastic prose fiction, long and short, whose literary posterity is destined to become so numerous, and in many cases so resplendent in artistic merit. It is, when one reflects upon it, genuinely remarkable that weird narration as a fixed and academically recognised literary form should have been so late of final birth. The impulse and atmosphere are as old as man, but the typical weird tale of standard literature is a child of the eighteenth century.

The Early Gothic Novel

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The shadow-haunted landscapes of "Ossian", the chaotic visions of William Blake, the grotesque witch-dances in Burns's "Tam o'Shanter", the sinister daemonism of Coleridge's "Christabel" and "Ancient Mariner", the ghostly charm of James Hogg's "Kilmeny", and the more restrained approaches to cosmic horror in "Lamia" and many of Keats's other poems, are typical British illustrations of the advent of the weird to formal literature. Our Teutonic cousins of the Continent were equally receptive to the rising flood, and Brüger's "Wild Huntsman" and the even more famous daemon-bridegroom ballad of "Lenore"—both imitated in English by Scott, whose respect for the supernatural was always great—are only a taste of the eerie wealth which German song had commenced to provide. Thomas Moore adapted from such sources the legend of the ghoulish statue-bride (later used by Prosper Mérimée in "The Venus of Ille", and traceable back to great antiquity) which echoes so shiveringly in his ballad of "The Ring"; whilst Goethe's deathless masterpiece Faust, crossing from mere balladry into the classic, cosmic tragedy of the ages, may be held as the ultimate height to which this German poetic impulse arose.

But it remained for a very sprightly and worldly Englishman—none other than Horace Walpole himself—to give the growing impulse definite shape and become the actual founder of the literary horror-story as a permanent form. Fond of mediaeval romances and mystery as a dilettante's diversion, and with a quaintly imitated Gothic castle as his abode at Strawberry Hill, Walpole in 1764 published The Castle of Otranto; a tale of the supernatural which, though thoroughly unconvincing and mediocre in itself, was destined to exert an almost unparalleled influence on the literature of the weird. First venturing it only as a "translation" by one "William Marshal, Gent." from the Italian of a mythical "Onuphrio Muralt", the author later acknowledged his connexion with the book and took pleasure in its wide and instantaneous popularity—a popularity which extended to many editions, early dramatisation, and wholesale imitation both in England and in Germany.

The story—tedious, artificial, and melodramatic—is further impaired by a brisk and prosaic style whose urbane sprightliness nowhere permits the creation of a truly weird atmosphere. It tells of Manfred, an unscrupulous and usurping prince determined to found a line, who after the mysterious sudden death of his only son Conrad on the latter's bridal morn, attempts to put away his wife Hippolita and wed the lady destined for the unfortunate youth—the lad, by the way, having been crushed by the preternatural fall of a gigantic helmet in the castle courtyard. Isabella, the widowed bride, flees from this design; and encounters in subterranean crypts beneath the castle a noble young preserver, Theodore, who seems to be a peasant yet strangely resembles the old lord Alfonso who ruled the domain before Manfred's time. Shortly thereafter supernatural phenomena assail the castle in divers ways; fragments of gigantic armour being discovered here and there, a portrait walking out of its frame, a thunderclap destroying the edifice, and a colossal armoured spectre of Alfonso rising out of the ruins to ascend through parting clouds to the bosom of St. Nicholas. Theodore, having wooed Manfred's daughter Matilda and lost her through death—for she is slain by her father by mistake—is discovered to be the son of Alfonso and rightful heir to the estate. He concludes the tale by wedding Isabella and preparing to live happily ever after, whilst Manfred—whose usurpation was the cause of his son's supernatural death and his own supernatural harassing—retires to a monastery for penitence; his saddened wife seeking asylum in a neighbouring convent.

Such is the tale; flat, stilted, and altogether devoid of the true cosmic horror which makes weird literature. Yet such was the thirst of the age for those touches of strangeness and spectral antiquity which it reflects, that it was seriously received by the soundest readers and raised in spite of its intrinsic ineptness to a pedestal of lofty importance in literary history. What it did above all else was to create a novel type of scene, puppet-characters, and incidents; which, handled to better advantage by writers more naturally adapted to weird creation, stimulated growth of an imitative Gothic school which in turn inspired the real weavers of cosmic terror—the line of actual artists beginning with Poe. This novel dramatic paraphernalia consisted first of all of the Gothic castle, with its awesome antiquity, vast distances and rambling, deserted, or ruined wings, damp corridors, unwholesome hidden catacombs, and galaxy of ghosts and appalling legends, as a nucleus of suspense and daemoniac fright. In addition, it included the tyrannical and malevolent nobleman as villain; the saintly, long-persecuted, and generally insipid heroine who undergoes the major terrors and serves as a point of view and focus for the reader's sympathies; the valorous and immaculate hero, always of high birth but often in humble disguise; the convention of high-sounding foreign names, mostly Italian, for the characters; and the infinite array of stage properties which includes strange lights, damp trap-doors, extinguished lamps, mouldy hidden manuscripts, creaking hinges, shaking arras, and the like. All this paraphernalia reappears with amusing sameness, yet sometimes with tremendous effect, throughout the history of the Gothic novel; and is by no means extinct even today, though subtler technique now forces it to assume a less naive and obvious form. An harmonious milieu for a new school had been found, and the writing world was not slow to grasp the opportunity.

German romance at once responded to the Walpole influence, and soon became a byword for the weird and ghastly. In England one of the first imitators was the celebrated Mrs. Barbauld, then Miss Aikin, who in 1773 published an unfinished fragment called "Sir Bertrand", in which the strings of genuine terror were truly touched with no clumsy hand. A nobleman on a dark and lonely moor, attracted by a tolling bell and distant light, enters a strange and ancient turreted castle whose doors open and close and whose bluish will-o'-the-wisps lead up mysterious staircases toward dead hands and animated black statues. A coffin with a dead lady, whom Sir Bertrand kisses, is finally reached; and upon the kiss the scene dissolves to give place to a splendid apartment where the lady, restored to life, holds a banquet in honour of her rescuer. Walpole admired this tale, though he accorded less respect to an even more prominent offspring of his Otranto—The Old English Baron, by Clara Reeve, published in 1777. Truly enough, this tale lacks the real vibration to the note of outer darkness and mystery which distinguishes Mrs. Barbauld's fragment; and though less crude than Walpole's novel, and more artistically economical of horror in its possession of only one spectral figure, it is nevertheless too definitely insipid for greatness. Here again we have the virtuous heir to the castle disguised as a peasant and restored to his heritage through the ghost of his father; and here again we have a case of wide popularity leading to many editions, dramatisation, and ultimate translation into French. Miss Reeve wrote another weird novel, unfortunately unpublished and lost.

The Gothic novel was now settled as a literary form, and instances multiply bewilderingly as the eighteenth century draws toward its close. The Recess, written in 1758 by Mrs. Sophia Lee, has the historic element, revolving round the twin daughters of Mary, Queen of Scots; and though devoid of the supernatural, employs the Walpole scenery and mechanism with great dexterity. Five years later, and all existing lamps are paled by the rising of a fresh luminary of wholly superior order—Mrs. Ann Radcliffe (1764-1823), whose famous novels made terror and suspense a fashion, and who set new and higher standards in the domain of macabre and fear-inspiring atmosphere despite a provoking custom of destroying her own phantoms at the last through laboured mechanical explanations. To the familiar Gothic trappings of her predecessors Mrs. Radcliffe added a genuine sense of the unearthly in scene and incident which closely approached genius; every touch of setting and action contributing artistically to the impression of illimitable frightfulness which she wished to convey. A few sinister details like a track of blood on castle stairs, a groan from a distant vault, or a weird song in a nocturnal forest can with her conjure up the most powerful images of imminent horror; surpassing by far the extravagant and toilsome elaboration of others. Nor are these images in themselves any the less potent because they are explained away before the end of the novel. Mrs. Radcliffe's visual imagination was very strong, and appears as much in her delightful landscape touches—always in broad, glamorously pictorial outline, and never in close detail—as in her weird phantasies. Her prime weaknesses, aside from the habit of prosaic disillusionment, are a tendency toward erroneous geography and history and a fatal predilection for bestrewing her novels with insipid little poems, attributed to one or another of her characters.

Mrs. Radcliffe wrote six novels, The Castles of Athlin and Dunbayne (1789), A Sicilian Romance (1794), The Romance of the Forest (1791), The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794), The Italian (1797), and Gaston de Blondeville, composed in 1802 but first published posthumously in 1826. Of these Udolpho is by far the most famous, and may be taken as a type of early Gothic tale at its best. It is the chronicle of Emily, a young Frenchwoman transplanted to an ancient and portentous castle in the Appennines through the death of her parents and the marriage of her aunt to the lord of the castle—the scheming nobleman Montoni. Mysterious sounds, opened doors, frightful legends, and a nameless horror in a niche behind a black veil all operate in quick succession to unnerve the heroine and her faithful attendant Annette; but finally, after the death of her aunt, she escapes with the aid of a fellow-prisoner whom she has discovered. On the way home she stops at a chateau filled with fresh horrors—the abandoned wing where the departed chatelaine dwelt, and the bed of death with the black pall—but is finally restored to security and happiness with her lover Valacourt, after the clearing-up of a secret which seemed for a time to involve her birth in mystery. Clearly, this is the only familiar material re-worked; but it is so well re-worked that Udolpho will always be a classic. Mrs. Radcliffe's characters are puppets, but they are less markedly so than those of her forerunners. And in atmospheric creation she stands preëminent among those of her time.

Of Mrs. Radcliffe's countless imitators, the American novelist Charles Brockden Brown stands the closest in spirit and method. Like her, he injured his creations by natural explanations; but also like her, he had an uncanny atmospheric power which gives his horrors a frightful vitality as long as they remain unexplained. He differed from her in contemptuously discarding the external Gothic paraphernalia and properties and choosing modern American scenes for his mysteries; but his repudiation did not extend to the Gothic spirit and type of incident. Brown's novels involve some memorably frightful scenes, and excel even Mrs. Radcliffe's in describing the operations of the perturbed mind. Edgar Huntly starts with a sleep-walker digging a grave, but is later impaired by touches of Godwinian didacticism. Ormond involves a member of a sinister secret brotherhood. That and Arthur Mervyn both describe the plague of yellow fever, which the author had witnessed in Philadelphia and New York. But Brown's most famous book is Wieland; or, The Transformation (1798), in which a Pennsylvania German, engulfed by a wave of religious fanaticism, hears "voices" and slays his wife and children as a sacrifice. His sister Clara, who tells the story, narrowly escapes. The scene, laid at the woodland estate of Mittingen on the Schuylkill's remote reaches, is drawn with extreme vividness; and the terrors of Clara, beset by spectral tones, gathering fears, and the sound of strange footsteps in the lonely house, are all shaped with truly artistic force. In the end a lame ventriloquial explanation is offered, but the atmosphere is genuine while it lasts. Carwin, the malign ventriloquist, is a typical villain of the Manfred or Montoni type.

The Apex of Gothic Romance

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Horror in literature attains a new malignity in the work of Matthew Gregory Lewis (1775-1818), whose novel The Monk (1796) achieved marvellous popularity and earned him the nickname of "Monk" Lewis. This young author, educated in Germany and saturated with a body of wild Teuton lore unknown to Mrs. Radcliffe, turned to terror in forms more violent than his gentle predecessor had ever dared to think of; and produced as a result a masterpiece of active nightmare whose general Gothic cast is spiced with added stores of ghoulishness. The story is one of a Spanish monk, Ambrosio, who from a state of over-proud virtue is tempted to the very nadir of evil by a fiend in the guise of the maiden Matilda; and who is finally, when awaiting death at the Inquisition's hands, induced to purchase escape at the price of his soul from the Devil, because he deems both body and soul already lost. Forthwith the mocking Fiend snatches him to a lonely place, tells him he has sold his soul in vain since both pardon and a chance for salvation were apprroaching at the moment of his hideous bargain, and completes the sardonic betray by rebuking him for his unnatural crimes, and casting his body down a precipice whilst his soul is borne off forever to perdition. The novel contains appalling descriptions such as the incantation in the vaults beneath the convent cemetery, the burning of the convent, and the final end of the wretched abbot. In the sub-plot where the Marquis de las Cisternas meets the spectre of his erring ancestress, The Bleeding Nun, there are many enormously potent strokes; notably the visit of the animated corpse to the Marquis's bedside, and the cabbalistic ritual whereby the Wandering Jew helps him to fathom and banish his dead tormentor. Nevertheless The Monk drags sadly when read as a whole. It is too long and too diffuse, and much of its potency is marred by flippancy and by an awkwardly excessive reaction against those canons of decorum which Lewis at first despised as prudish. One great thing may be said of the author; that he never ruined his ghostly visions with a natural explanation. He succeeded in breaking up the Radcliffian tradition and expanding the field of the Gothic novel. Lewis wrote much more than The Monk. His drama, The Castle Spectre, was produced in 1798, and he later found time to pen other fictions in ballad form—Tales of Terror (1799), Tales of Wonder (1801), and a succession of translations from the German.

Gothic romances, both English and German, now appeared in multitudinous and mediocre profusion. Most of them were merely ridiculous in the light of mature taste, and Miss Austen's famous satire Northanger Abbey was by no means an unmerited rebuke to a school which had sunk far toward absurdity. This particular school was petering out, but before its final subordination there arose its last and greatest figure in the person of Charles Robert Maturin (1782-1824), an obscure and eccentric Irish clergyman. Out of an ample body of miscellaneous writing which includes one confused Radcliffian imitation called The Fatal Revenge; or, The Family of Montorio (1807), Maturin at length evolved the vivid horror-masterpiece of Melmoth the Wanderer (1820), in which the Gothic tale climbed to altitudes of sheer spiritual fright which it had never known before.

Melmoth is the tale of an Irish gentleman who, in the seventeenth century, obtained a preternaturally extended life from the Devil at the price of his soul. If he can persuade another to take the bargain off his hands, and assume his existing state, he can be saved; but this he can never manage to effect, no matter how assiduously he haunts those whom despair has made reckless and frantic. The framework of the story is very clumsy; involving tedious length, digressive episodes, narratives within narratives, and laboured dovetailing and coincidences; but at various points in the endless rambling there is felt a pulse of power undiscoverable in any previous work of this kind—a kinship to the essential truth of human nature, an understanding of the profoundest sources of actual cosmic fear, and a white heat of sympathetic passion on the writer's part which makes the book a true document of aesthetic self-expression rather than a mere clever compound of artifice. No unbiassed reader can doubt that with Melmoth an enormous stride in evolution of the horror-tale is represented. Fear is taken out of the realm of the conventional and exalted into a hideous cloud over mankind's very destiny. Maturin's shudders, the work of one capable of shuddering himself, are of the sort that convince. Mrs. Radcliffe and Lewis are fair game for the parodist, but it would be difficult to find a false note in the feverishly intensified action and high atmospheric tension of the Irishman whose less sophisticated emotions and strain of Celtic mysticism gave him the finest possible natural equipment for his task. Without a doubt Maturin is a man of authentic genius, and he was so recognised by Balzac, who grouped Melmoth with Molière's Don Juan, Goethe's Faust, and Byron's Manfred as the supreme allegorical figures of modern European literature, and wrote a whimsical piece called "Melmoth Reconciled", in which the Wanderer succeeds in passing his infernal bargain to a Parisian bank defaulter, who in turn hands it along a chain of victims until a revelling gambler dies with it in his possession, and by his damnation ends the curse. Scott, Rossetti, Thackeray, and Baudelaire are the other titans who gave Maturin their unqualified admiration, and there is much significance in the fact that Oscar Wilde, after his disgrace and exile, chose for his last days in Paris the assumed name of "Sebastian Melmoth".

Melmoth contains scenes which even now have not lost their power to evoke dread. It begins with a deathbed—an old miser is dying of sheer fright because of something he has seen, coupled with a manuscript he has read and a family portrait which hangs in an obscure closet of his centuried home in County Wicklow. He sends to Trinity College, Dublin, for his nephew John; and the latter upon arriving notes many uncanny things. The eyes of the portrait in the closet glow horribly, and twice a figure strangely resembling the portrait appears momentarily at the door. Dread hangs over the house of the Melmoths, one of whose ancestors, "J. Melmoth, 1646", the portrait represents. The dying miser declares that this man—at a date slightly before 1800—is alive. Finally the miser dies, and the nephew is told in the will to destroy both the portrait and the manuscript to be found in a certain drawer. Reading the manuscript, which was written late in the seventeenth century by an Englishman named Stanton, young John learns of a terrible incident in Spain in 1677, when the writer met a horrible fellow-countryman and was told of how he had stared to death a priest who tried to denounce him as one filled with fearsome evil. Later, after meeting the man again in London, Stanton is cast into a madhouse and visited by the stranger, whose approach is heralded by spectral music and whose eyes have a more than mortal glare. Melmoth the Wanderer—for such is the malign visitor—offers the captive freedom if he will take over his bargain with the Devil; but like all others whom Melmoth has approached, Stanton is proof against temptation. Melmoth's description of the horrors of a life in a madhouse, used to tempt Stanton, is one of the most potent passages of the book. Stanton is at length liberated, and spends the rest of his life tracking down Melmoth, whose family and ancestral abode he discovers. With the family he leaves the manuscript, which by young John's time is sadly ruinous and fragmentary. John destroys both portrait and manuscript, but in sleep is visited by his horrible ancestor, who leaves a black and blue mark on his wrist.

Young John soon afterward receives as a visitor a shipwrecked Spaniard, Alonzo de Monçada, who has escaped from compulsory monasticism and from the perils of the Inquisition. He has suffered horribly—and the descriptions of his experiences under torment and in the vaults through which he once essays escape are classic—but had the strength to resist Melmoth the Wanderer when approached at his darkest hour in prison. At the house of a Jew who sheltered him after his escape he discovers a wealth of manuscript relating other exploits of Melmoth, including his wooing of an Indian island maiden, Immalee, who later comes to her birthright in Spain and is known as Donna Isidora; and of his horrible marriage to her by the corpse of a dead anchorite at midnight in the ruined chapel of a shunned and abhorred monastery. Monçada's narrative to young John takes up the bulk of Maturin's four-volume book; this disproportion being considered one of the chief technical faults of the composition.

At last the colloquies of John and Monçada are interrupted by the entrance of Melmoth the Wanderer himself, his piercing eyes now fading, and decrepitude swiftly overtaking him. The term of his bargain has approached its end, and he has come home after a century and a half to meet his fate. Warning all others from the room, no matter what sounds they may hear in the night, he awaits the end alone. Young John and Monçada hear frightful ululations, but do not intrude till silence comes toward morning. They then find the room empty. Clayey1 footprints lead out a rear door to a cliff overlooking the sea, and near the edge of the precipice is a track indicating the forcible dragging of some heavy body. The Wanderer's scarf is found on a crag some distance below the brink, but nothing further is ever seen or heard of him.

Such is the story, and none can fail to notice the difference between this modulated, suggestive, and artistically moulded horror and—to use the words of Professor George Saintsbury—"the artful but rather jejune2 rationalism of Mrs. Radcliffe, and the too often puerile extravagance, the bad taste, and the sometimes slipshod style of Lewis." Maturin's style in itself deserves particular praise, for its forcible directness and vitality lift it altogether above the pompous artificialities of which his predecessors are guilty. Professor Edith Birkhead, in her history of the Gothic novel, justly observes that "with all his faults Maturin was the greatest as well as the last of the Goths." Melmoth was widely read and eventually dramatised, but its late date in the evolution of the Gothic tale deprived it of the tumultuous popularity of Udolpho and The Monk.

Endnote

1.clayey: muddy

2.jejune: dull

The Aftermath of Gothic Fiction

Table of Contents

Meanwhile other hands had not been idle, so that above the dreary plethora of trash like Marquis von Grosse's Horrid Mysteries (1796), Mrs. Roche's Children of the Abbey (1796), Miss Dacre's Zofloya; or, The Moor (1806), and the poet Shelley's schoolboy effusions Zastrozzi (1810) and St. Irvyne (1811) (both imitations of Zofloya), there arose many memorable weird works both in English and German. Classic in merit, and markedly different from its fellows because of its foundation in the Oriental tale rather than the Walpolesque Gothic Novel, is the celebrated History of the Caliph Vathek by the wealthy dilletante William Beckford, first written in the French language but published in an English translation before the appearance of the original. Eastern tales, introduced to European literature early in the eighteenth century through Galland's French translation of the inexhaustibly opulent Arabian Nights