The Tale of Terror written by Edith Birkhead
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Edith Birkhead >> The Tale of Terror
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"Now I have still so much of our family spirit as
enables me to be as composed in danger as most of my
sex, and upon two occasions in the course of our
journey--a threatened attack by banditti, and the
overturn of our carriage--I had the fortune so to
conduct myself as to convey to my uncle a very
favourable idea of my intrepidity."
Jeanie Deans, the most admirable and the most skilfully drawn of
Scott's women, is a daring contrast to the traditional heroine of
romance. The "delicate distresses" of persecuted Emilies shrink
into insignificance amid the tragedy and comedy of actual life
portrayed in The Waverley Novels. The tyrannical marquises,
vindictive stepmothers, dark-browed villains, scheming monks,
chattering domestics and fierce banditti are thrust aside by a
motley crowd of living beings--soldiers, lawyers, smugglers,
gypsies, shepherds, outlaws and beggars. The wax-work figures,
guaranteed to thrill with nervous suspense or overflow with
sensibility at the appropriate moments, are replaced by real folk
like "Old Mortality," Andrew Fairservice, Dugald Dalgetty and
Peter Peebles, whose humour and pathos are those of our own
world. The historical background, faint, misty and unreal in Mrs.
Radcliffe's novels, becomes, in those of Scott, arresting and
substantial. The grave, artificial dialogue in which Mrs.
Radcliffe's characters habitually discourse descends to some of
Scott's personages, but is often exchanged for the natural idiom
of simple people. The Gothic abbey, dropped down in an uncertain,
haphazard fashion, in some foreign land, is deserted for huts,
barns inns, cottages and castles, solidly built on Scottish soil.
We leave the mouldy air of the subterranean vault for the keen
winds of the moorland. The terrors of the invisible world only
fill the stray corners of his huge scene. He creates romance out
of the stuff of real life.
CHAPTER IX - LATER DEVELOPMENTS OF THE TALE OF TERROR.
As the novel of terror passes from the hands of Mrs. Radcliffe to
those of "Monk" Lewis, Maturin and their imitators, there is a
crashing crescendo of emotion. The villain's sardonic smile is
replaced by wild outbursts of diabolical laughter, his scowl
grows darker and darker, and as his designs become more bloody
and more dangerous, his victims no longer sigh plaintively, but
give utterance to piercing shrieks and despairing yells; tearful
Amandas are unceremoniously thrust into the background by
vindictive Matildas, whose passions rage in all their primitive
savagery; the fearful ghost "fresh courage takes," and stands
forth audaciously in the light of day; the very devil stalks
shamelessly abroad in manifold disguises. We are caught up from
first to last in the very tempest, torrent and whirlwind of
passion. When the novel of terror thus throws restraint to the
winds, outrageously o'ersteps the modesty of nature and indulges
in a farrago of frightfulness, it begins to defeat its own
purposes and to fail in its object of freezing the blood. The
limit of human endurance has been reached--and passed. Emphasis
and exaggeration have done their worst. Battle, murder, and
sudden death--even spectres and fiends--can appal no more. If the
old thrill is to be evoked again, the application of more
ingenious methods is needed.
Such novels as Maturin's _Family of Montorio_, though "full of
sound and fury," fail piteously to vibrate the chords of terror,
which had trembled beneath Mrs. Radcliffe's gentle fingers. The
instrument, smitten forcibly, repeatedly, desperately, resounds
not with the answering note expected, but with an ugly, metallic
jangle. _Melmoth the Wanderer_, Maturin's extraordinary
masterpiece, was to prove--as late as 1820--that there were
chords in the orchestra of horror as yet unsounded; but in 1816,
when Mary Shelley and her companions set themselves to compose
supernatural stories, it was wise to dispense with the shrieking
chorus of malevolent abbesses, diabolical monks, intriguing
marquises, Wandering Jews or bleeding spectres, who had been so
grievously overworked in previous performances. Dr. Polidori's
skull-headed lady, Byron's vampire-gentleman, Mrs. Shelley's
man-created monster--a grotesque and gruesome trio--had at least
the attraction of novelty. It is indeed remarkable that so young
and inexperienced a writer as Mary Shelley, who was only nineteen
when she wrote _Frankenstein_, should betray so slight a
dependence on her predecessors. It is evident from the records of
her reading that the novel of terror in all its guises was
familiar to her. She had beheld the majestic horror of the halls
of Eblis; she had threaded her way through Mrs. Radcliffe's
artfully constructed Gothic castles; she had braved the terrors
of the German Ritter-, Raeuber- und Schauer-Romane; she had
assisted, fearful, at Lewis's midnight diablerie; she had
patiently unravelled the "mystery" novels of Godwin and of
Charles Brockden Brown.[117] Yet, despite this intimate knowledge
of the terrible and supernatural in fiction, Mrs. Shelley's theme
and her way of handling it are completely her own. In an "acute
mental vision," as real as the visions of Blake and of Shelley,
she beheld her monster and the "pale student of unhallowed arts"
who had created him, and then set herself to reproduce the thrill
of horror inspired by her waking dream. _Frankenstein_ has,
indeed, been compared to Godwin's _St. Leon_, but the resemblance
is so vague and superficial, and _Frankenstein_ so immeasurably
superior, that Mrs. Shelley's debt to her father is negligible.
St. Leon accepts the gift of immortality, Frankenstein creates a
new life, and in both novels the main interest lies in tracing
the effect of the experiment on the soul of the man, who has
pursued scientific inquiry beyond legitimate limits. But apart
from this, there is little resemblance. Godwin chose the
supernatural, because it chanced to be popular, and laboriously
built up a cumbrous edifice, completing it by a sheer effort of
will-power. His daughter, with an imagination naturally more
attuned to the gruesome and fantastic, writes, when once she has
wound her way into the heart of the story, in a mood of
breathless excitement that drives the reader forward with
feverish apprehension.
The name of Mrs. Shelley's _Frankenstein_ is far-famed; but the
book itself, overshadowed perhaps by its literary associations,
seems to have withdrawn into the vast library of famous works
that are more often mentioned than read. The very fact that the
name is often bestowed on the monster instead of his creator
seems to suggest that many are content to accept Mrs. Shelley's
"hideous phantom" on hearsay evidence rather than encounter for
themselves the terrors of his presence. The story deserves a
happier fate, for, if it be read in the spirit of willing
surrender that a theme so impossible demands, it has still power
momentarily "to make the reader dread to look round, to curdle
the blood and to quicken the beatings of the heart." The record
of the composition of _Frankenstein_ has been so often reiterated
that it is probably better known than the tale itself. In the
summer of 1816--when the Shelleys were the neighbours of Byron
near Lake Geneva--Byron, Shelley, Mary Shelley and Dr. Polidori,
after reading some volumes of ghost stories[118] and discussing
the supernatural and its manifestations, each agreed to write a
ghost story. It has been asserted that an interest in spectres
was stimulated by a visit from "Monk" Lewis, but we have evidence
that Mrs. Shelley was already writing her story in June,[119] and
that Lewis did not arrive at the Villa Diodati till August
14th.[120] The conversation with him about ghosts took place four
days later. Shelley's story, based on the experiences of his
early youth, was never completed. Byron's fragment formed the
basis of Dr. Polidori's _Vampyre_. Dr. Polidori states that his
supernatural novel, _Ernestus Berchtold_, was begun at this time;
but the skull-headed lady, alluded to by Mary Shelley as figuring
in Polidori's story, is disappointingly absent. It was an
argument between Byron and Shelley about Erasmus Darwin's
theories that brought before Mary Shelley's sleepless eyes the
vision of the monster miraculously infused by its creator with
the spark of life. _Frankenstein_ was begun immediately,
completed in May, 1817, and published in 1818.
Mrs. Shelley has been censured for setting her tale in a clumsy
framework, but she tells us in her preface that she began with
the words: "It was on a dreary night of November." This sentence
now stands at the opening of Chapter IV., where the plot begins
to grip our imagination; and it seems not unfair to assume that
the introductory letters and the first four chapters, which
contain a tedious and largely unnecessary account of
Frankenstein's early life, were written in deference to Shelley's
plea that the idea should be developed at greater length, and did
not form part of her original plan. The uninteresting student,
Robert Walton, to whom Frankenstein, discovered dying among
icebergs, tells his story, is obviously an afterthought. If Mrs.
Shelley had abandoned the awkward contrivance of putting the
narrative into the form of a dying man's confession, reported
verbatim in a series of letters, and had opened her story, as she
apparently intended, at the point where Frankenstein, after weary
years of research, succeeds in creating a living being, her novel
would have gained in force and intensity. From that moment it
holds us fascinated. It is true that the tension relaxes from
time to time, that the monster's strange education and the
Godwinian precepts that fall so incongruously from his lips tend
to excite our mirth, but, though we are mildly amused, we are no
longer merely bored. Even the protracted descriptions of domestic
life assume a new and deeper meaning, for the shadow of the
monster broods over them. One by one those whom Frankenstein
loves fall victims to the malice of the being he has endowed with
life. Unceasingly and unrelentingly the loathsome creature dogs
our imagination, more awful when he lurks unseen than when he
stands actually before us. With hideous malignity he slays
Frankenstein's young brother, and by a fiendish device causes
Justine, an innocent girl, to be executed for the crime. Yet ere
long our sympathy, which has hitherto been entirely with
Frankenstein, is unexpectedly diverted to the monster who, it
would seem, is wicked only because he is eternally divorced from
human society. Amid the magnificent scenery of the Valley of
Chamounix he appears before his creator, and tells the story of
his wretched life, pleading: "Everywhere I see bliss from which I
alone am irrevocably excluded. I was benevolent and good; misery
made me a fiend. Make me happy, and I shall again be virtuous."
He describes how his physical ugliness repels human beings, who
fail to realise his benevolent intentions. A father snatches from
his arms the child he has rescued from death; the virtuous
family, whom he admires and would fain serve, flee affrighted
from his presence. To educate the monster, so that his thoughts
and emotions may become articulate, and, incidentally, to
accentuate his isolation from society, Mrs. Shelley inserts a
complicated story about an Arabian girl, Sofie, whose lover
teaches her to read from Plutarch's _Lives_, Volney's _Ruins of
Empire, The Sorrows of Werther_, and _Paradise Lost_. The monster
overhears the lessons, and ponders on this unique library, but,
as he pleads his own cause the more eloquently because he knows
Satan's passionate outbursts of defiance and self-pity, who would
cavil at the method by which he is made to acquire his knowledge?
"The cold stars shone in mockery, and the bare trees waved their
branches above me; now and then the sweet voice of a bird burst
forth amidst the universal stillness. All save I were at rest or
in enjoyment. I, like the arch fiend, bore a hell within me." And
later, near the close of the book: "The fallen angel becomes a
malignant devil. Yet even that enemy of God and man had friends
and associates in his desolation; I am alone," His fate reminds
us of that of _Alastor, the Spirit of Solitude_, who:
"Over the world wanders for ever
Lone as incarnate death."
After the long and moving recital of his woes, even the obdurate
Frankenstein cannot resist the justice of his demand for a
partner like himself. Yet when the student recoils with horror
from his half-accomplished task and sees the creature maliciously
peering through the window, our hatred leaps to life once more
and burns fiercely as the monster adds to his crimes the murder
of Clerval, Frankenstein's dearest friend, and of Elizabeth on
her wedding night. We follow with shuddering anticipation the
long pursuit of the monster, expectant of a last, fearful
encounter which shall decide the fate of the demon and his maker.
Amid the region of eternal ice, Frankenstein catches sight of
him; but fails to reach him. At last, beside the body of his last
victim--Frankenstein himself--the creature is filled with remorse
at the "frightful catalogue" of his sins, and makes a final bid
for our sympathy in the farewell speech to Walton, before
climbing on an ice-raft to be "borne away by the waves and lost
in darkness and distance."
Like _Alastor_, _Frankenstein_ was a plea for human sympathy, and
was, according to Shelley's preface, intended "to exhibit the
amiableness of domestic affection and the excellence of universal
virtue." The monster has the perception and desire of goodness,
but, by the circumstances of his abnormal existence, is delivered
over to evil. It is this dual nature that prevents him from being
a mere automaton. The monster indeed is far more real than the
shadowy beings whom he pursues. Frankenstein is less an
individual than a type, and only interests us through the
emotions which his conflict with the monster arouses. Clerval,
Elizabeth and Frankenstein's relatives are passive sufferers
whose psychology does not concern us. Mrs. Shelley rightly
lavishes her skill on the central figure of the book, and
succeeds, as effectually as Frankenstein himself, in infusing
into him the spark of life. Mrs. Shelley's aim is to "awaken
thrilling horror," and, incidentally, to "exhibit the excellence
of domestic virtue," and for her purpose the demon is of
paramount importance. The involved, complex plot of a novel
seemed to pass beyond Mrs. Shelley's control. A short tale she
could handle successfully, and Shelley was unwise in inciting her
to expand _Frankenstein_ into a long narrative. So long as she is
completely carried away by her subject Mrs. Shelley writes
clearly, but when she pauses to regard the progress of her story
dispassionately, she seems to be overwhelmed by the wealth of her
resources and to have no power of selecting the relevant details.
The laborious introductory letters, the meticulous record of
Frankenstein's education, the story of Felix and Sofie, the
description of the tour through England before the creation of
the second monster is attempted, are all connected with the main
theme by very frail links and serve to distract our attention in
an irritating fashion from what really interests us. In the novel
of mystery a tantalising delay may be singularly effective. In a
novel which depends chiefly for its effect on sheer horror,
delays are merely dangerous. By resting her terrors on a
pseudo-scientific basis and by placing her story in a definite
locality, Mrs. Shelley waives her right to an entire suspension
of disbelief. If it be reduced to its lowest terms, the plot of
Frankenstein, with its bewildering confusion of the prosaic and
the fantastic, sounds as crude, disjointed and inconsequent as
that of a nightmare. Mrs. Shelley's timid hesitation between
imagination and reality, her attempt to reconcile incompatible
things and to place a creature who belongs to no earthly land in
familiar surroundings, prevents _Frankenstein_ from being a
wholly satisfactory and alarming novel of terror. She loves the
fantastic, but she also fears it. She is weighted down by
commonsense, and so flutters instead of soaring, unwilling to
trust herself far from the material world. But the fact that she
was able to vivify her grotesque skeleton of a plot with some
degree of success is no mean tribute to her gifts. The energy and
vigour of her style, her complete and serious absorption in her
subject, carry us safely over many an absurdity. It is only in
the duller stretches of the narrative, when her heart is not in
her work, that her language becomes vague, indeterminate and
blurred, and that she muffles her thoughts in words like
"ascertain," "commencement," "peruse," "diffuse," instead of
using their simpler Saxon equivalents. Stirred by the excitement
of the events she describes, she can write forcibly in simple,
direct language. She often frames short, hurried sentences such
as a man would naturally utter when breathless with terror or
with recollections of terror. The final impression that
_Frankenstein_ leaves with us is not easy to define, because the
book is so uneven in quality. It is obviously the shapeless work
of an immature writer who has had no experience in evolving a
plot. Sometimes it is genuinely moving and impressive, but it
continually falls abruptly and ludicrously short of its aim. Yet
when all its faults have been laid bare, the fact remains that
few readers would abandon the story half-way through. Mrs.
Shelley is so thoroughly engrossed in her theme that she impels
her readers onward, even though they may think but meanly of her
story as a work of art.
Mrs. Shelley's second novel, _Valperga, or the Life and
Adventures of Castruccio, Prince of Lucca_, published in 1823,
was a work on which she bestowed much care and labour, but the
result proves that she writes best when the urgency of her
imagination leaves her no leisure either to display her learning
or adorn her style. She herself calls _Valperga_ a "child of
mighty slow growth," and Shelley adds that it was "raked out of
fifty old books." Mrs. Shelley, always an industrious student,
made a conscientious survey of original sources before fashioning
her story of mediaeval Italy, and she is hampered by the
exuberance of her knowledge. The novel is not a romance of
terror; but Castruccio, though his character is sketched from
authentic documents, seems towards the end of the story to
resemble the picturesque villain who numbered among his ancestry
Milton's Satan. He has "a majestic figure and a countenance
beautiful but sad, and tarnished by the expression of pride that
animated it." Beatrice, the gifted prophetess who falls deep in
love with Castruccio, ends her days in the dungeons of the
Inquisition. Mrs. Shelley's aim, however, is not to arouse fear,
but to trace the gradual deterioration of Castruccio's character
from an open-hearted youth to a crafty tyrant. The blunt remarks
of Godwin, who revised the manuscript, are not unjust, but fall
with an ill grace from the pen of the author of _St. Leon_: "It
appears in reading, that the first rule you prescribed was: 'I
will let it be long.' It contains the quantity of four volumes of
_Waverley_. No hard blow was ever hit with a woodsaw."[121]
In _The Last Man_, which appeared in 1825, Mrs. Shelley attempted
a stupendous theme, no less then a picture of the devastation of
the human race by plague and pestilence. She casts her
imagination forward into the twenty-first century, when the last
king of England has abdicated the throne and a republic is
established. Very wisely, she narrows the interest by
concentrating on the pathetic fate of a group of friends who are
among the last survivors, and the story becomes an idealised
record of her own sufferings. The description of the loneliness
of the bereft has a personal note, and reminds us of her journal,
where she expresses the sorrow of being herself the last
survivor, and of feeling like a "cloud from which the light of
sunset has passed."[122] Raymond, who dies in an attempt to place
the standard of Greece in Stamboul, is a portrait of Byron; and
Adrian, the late king's son, who finally becomes Protector, is
clearly modelled on Shelley. Yet in spite of these personal
reminiscences, their characters lack distinctness. Idris, Clara
and Perdita are faintly etched, but Evadne, the Greek artist, who
cherishes a passion for Raymond, and dies fighting against the
Turks, has more colour and body than the other women, though she
is somewhat theatrical. Mrs. Shelley conveys emotion more
faithfully than character, and the overwrought sensibilities and
dark forebodings of the diminished party of survivors who leave
England to distract their minds by foreign travel are artfully
suggested. The leaping, gesticulating figure, whom their jaded
nerves and morbid fancy transform into a phantom, is a delirious
ballet-dancer; and the Black Spectre, mistaken for Death
Incarnate, proves only to be a plague-stricken noble, who lurks
near the party for the sake of human society. These "reasonable"
solutions of the apparently supernatural remind us of Mrs.
Radcliffe's method, and Mrs. Shelley shows keen psychological
insight in her delineation of the state of mind which readily
conjures up imaginary terrors. When Lionel Verney is left alone
in the universe, her power seems to flag, and instead of the
final crescendo of horror, which we expect at the end of the
book, we are left with an ineffective picture of the last man in
Rome in 2005 deciding to explore the countries he has not yet
viewed. As he wanders amid the ruins he recalls not only "the
buried Caesars," but also the monk in _The Italian_, of whom he
had read in childhood--a striking proof of Mrs. Shelley's faith
in the permanence of Mrs. Radcliffe's fame.
Though the style of _The Last Man_ is often tediously prolix and
is disfigured by patches of florid rhetoric and by inappropriate
similes scattered broadcast, occasional passages of wonderful
beauty recall Shelley's imagery; and, in conveying the pathos of
loneliness, personal feeling lends nobility and eloquence to her
style. With so ambitious a subject, it was natural that she
should only partially succeed in carrying her readers with her.
Though there are oases, the story is a somewhat tedious and
dreary stretch of narrative that can only be traversed with
considerable effort.
Mrs. Shelley's later works--_Perkin Warbeck_ (1830), a historical
novel; _Lodore_ (1835), which describes the early life of Shelley
and Harriet; _Falkner_ (1837), which was influenced by _Caleb
Williams_--do not belong to the history of the novel of terror;
but some of her short tales, contributed to periodicals and
collected in 1891, have gruesome and supernatural themes. _A Tale
of the Passions, or the Death of Despina_[123] a story based on
the struggles of the Guelphs and the Ghibellines, contains a
perfect specimen of the traditional villain of the novel of
terror:
"Every feature of his countenance spoke of the struggle
of passions and the terrible egotism of one who would
sacrifice himself to the establishment of his will: his
black eyebrows were scattered, his grey eyes deep-set
and scowling, his look at once stern and haggard. A
smile seemed never to have disturbed the settled scorn
which his lips expressed; his high forehead was marked
by a thousand contradictory lines."
This terrific personage spends the last years of his life in
orthodox fashion as an austere saint in a monastery.
_The Mortal Immortal_, a variation on the theme of _St. Leon_, is
the record of a pupil of Cornelius Agrippa, who drank half of the
elixir his master had compounded in the belief that it was a
potion to destroy love. It is written on his three hundred and
twenty-third birthday. _Transformation_, like _Frankenstein_,
dwells on the pathos of ugliness and deformity, but the subject
is treated rather in the spirit of an eastern fairy tale than in
that of a novel of terror. The dwarf, in return for a chest of
treasure, borrows a beautiful body, and, thus disguised, wins the
love of Juliet, and all ends happily. Mrs. Shelley's short
stories[124] reveal a stronger sense of proportion than her
novels, and are written in a more graceful, fluent style than the
books on which she expended great labour.
The literary history of Byron's fragmentary novel and of
Polidori's short story, _The Vampyre_, is somewhat tangled, but
the solution is to be found in the diary of Dr. John William
Polidori, edited and elucidated by William Michael Rossetti. The
day after that on which Polidori states that all the competitors,
except himself, had begun their stories, he records the simple
fact: "Began my ghost-story after tea." He gives no hint as to
the subject of his tale, but Mrs. Shelley tells us that Polidori
had some idea of a "skull-headed lady, who was so punished for
looking through a key-hole, and who was finally buried in the
tomb of the Capulets." In the introduction to _Ernestus
Berchtold, or the Modern OEdipus_, he states definitely:
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