The Tale of Terror written by Edith Birkhead
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Edith Birkhead >> The Tale of Terror
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In _Ormond_ and _Arthur Mervyn_, Brown describes the ravages of
the yellow fever, of which he had personal experience in New York
and Philadelphia. The hero of _Ormond_ is a member of a society
similar to that of the Illuminati, whose ceremonies and beliefs
are set forth in _Horrid Mysteries_ (1796). The heroine,
Constantia Dudley, who was Shelley's ideal feminine character, is
the embodiment of a theory, not a human being. She "walks always
in the light of reason," and decides that "to marry in extreme
youth would be a proof of pernicious and opprobrious temerity."
The most memorable of Brown's novels is _Edgar Huntly_, which
bears an obvious resemblance to _Caleb Williams_. Like Godwin,
Brown is deeply interested in morbid psychology. He finds
pleasure in tracing the workings of the brain in times of
emotional stress. The description of a sleepwalker digging a
grave--a picture which captivated Shelley's imagination--is the
starting-point of the book. Edgar Huntly is impelled by curiosity
to track him down. The somnambulist, Clithero, has, in
self-defence, killed the twin-brother of his patron, Mrs,
Lorimer, to whom he is deeply attached. Obsessed by the idea of
the misery his deed will arouse in her mind, he attempts, in a
moment of frenzy, to slay her. Believing that Mrs. Lorimer has
died after hearing of the murder, Clithero flees to America. When
he disappears from his home, Huntly resolves to follow him, and
in his search loses himself amid wild and desolate country. He is
attacked by Indians, and after frightful adventures at length
reaches his home. Clithero, whom he believed dead, has been
rescued. Mrs. Lorimer is still alive, and is married to a former
lover. This news, however, fails to restore Clithero, who, in a
fit of insanity, flings himself overboard when he is in a ship in
charge of Huntly.
Brown's plots, which often open well, are spoilt by hasty,
careless conclusions. It was his habit to write two or three
novels simultaneously. He was beset by the problem that exercised
even Scott's brain: "The devil of a difficulty is that one
puzzles the skein in order to excite curiosity, and then cannot
disentangle it for the satisfaction of the prying fiend they have
raised."
Brown takes very little trouble over his denouements, but his
characters leave so faint an impression on our minds that we are
not deeply concerned in their fates. He is interested rather in
conveying states of mind than in portraying character. We search
the windings of Clithero's tormented conscience without realising
him as an individual. The background of rugged scenery, though it
is described in vague, turgid language, is more definite and
distinct than the human figures. We feel that Brown is struggling
through the obscurity of his Latinised diction to depict
something he has actually seen. An air of dreadful solemnity
hangs heavily over each story. Every being is in deadly earnest.
Brown has Godwin's power of hypnotising us by his serious
persistence, and of reducing us to a mood of awestruck gravity by
the sonority of his pompous periods.
From the oppressive gloom of Brown's "novels with a purpose," it
is a relief to turn to the irresponsible gaiety of "Geoffrey
Crayon," whose tales of terror, published some twenty years
later, are usually fashioned in a jovial spirit, only faintly
tinged with awe and dread. In _The Spectre Bridegroom_, included
in _The Sketch Book_ (1820), the ghostly rider of Buerger's
far-famed ballad is set amid new surroundings and pleasantly
turned to ridicule. The "supernatural" wooer, who now and again
arouses a genuine thrill of fear, is merely playing a practical
joke on the princess by impersonating the dead bridegroom, and
all ends happily. The story of the Headless Horseman of Sleepy
Hollow is set against so picturesque a background that we are
almost inclined to quarrel with those who laughed and said that
Ichabod Crane was still alive, and that Bram Jones, the lovely
Katrina's bridegroom, knew more of the spectre than he chose to
tell. The drowsy atmosphere of Sleepy Hollow makes us see visions
and dream dreams. The group of "Strange Stories by a Nervous
Gentleman" in _Tales of a Traveller_ (1824) prove that Washington
Irving was well versed in ghostly lore. He, as well as any, can
call spirits from the vasty deep, but, when they appear in answer
to his summons, he can seldom refrain from receiving them in a
jocose, irreverent mood, ill befitting the solemn, dignified
spectre of a German legend. Even the highly qualified,
irrepressibly loquacious ghost of Lewis Carroll's
_Phantasmagoria_ would have resented his genial familiarity. The
strange stories are told at a hunting-party in a country-house, a
cheerful, comfortable background for ghost stories. A hoary,
one-eyed gentleman, "the whole side of whose head was dilapidated
and seemed like the wing of a house shut up and haunted," sets
the ball rolling with the old story of a spectre who glides into
the room, wringing her hands, and is later identified, like
Scott's Lady in the Sacque, by her resemblance to an ancestral
portrait in the gallery. The "knowing" gentleman tells of a
picture that winked in a startling and alarming fashion, and
immediately explains away this phenomenon by the presence of a
thief who has cut a spy-hole in the canvas. _The Bold Dragoon_ is
a spirited, riotous nightmare in which the furniture dances to
the music of the bellows played by an uncanny musician in a long
flannel gown and a nightcap. The _Story of the German Student_ is
in a different key. Here Irving strikes a note of real horror.
The student falls in love with an imaginary lady, woven out of
his dreams. He finds her in distress one night in the streets of
Paris, takes her home, only to find her a corpse in the morning.
A police-officer informs him that the lady was guillotined the
day before, and the student discovers the truth of this statement
when he unrolls a bandage and her head falls to the floor. The
young man loses his reason, and is tormented by the belief that
an evil spirit has reanimated a dead body to ensnare him. The
morning after the recital of this gruesome story, the host reads
aloud to his guests a manuscript entrusted to him, together with
a portrait, by a young Italian. This youth, it chances, learnt
painting with a monk, who, as a penance, drew pictures, or
modelled waxen images, representing death and corruption, a
detail which reminds us of what was concealed by the Black Veil
in _Udolpho_. He later falls in love with his model, Bianca, who,
during his absence abroad, marries his friend Filippo. In a
jealous rage the young Italian slays his rival, and is
unceasingly haunted by his phantom. Washington Irving has no
desire to endure for long the atmosphere of mystery and horror
his story has created, and quickly relieves the tension by a
return to ordinary life. The host promises to show the picture,
which is said to affect all beholders in an extraordinary
fashion, to each of his guests in turn. They all profess
themselves remarkably affected by it, until the host confesses
that he has too sincere a regard for the feelings of the young
Italian to reveal the actual picture to any of them; With this
moment of disillusionment the strange stories come to an end. The
title, _Tales of a Traveller_, under which Irving placed his
tales of terror, indicates the mood in which he fashioned them.
He regarded them much as he would regard the wonderful adventures
of Baron Munchausen. They were to be taken, like one of Dr.
Marigold's prescriptions, with a grain of salt. The idea of
blending levity with horror, suggested perhaps by German
influence, was very popular in England and France at this period.
Balzac's _L'Auberge Rouge_ and _L'Elixir de la Longue Vie_ are
written in a similar mood.
It is not always the boldest and most adventurous beings who
elect to dwell amid "calling shapes and beckoning shadows dire."
The "virtuous mind," whom supernatural horrors may "startle well
but not astound," sometimes finds a melancholy pleasure in
beguiling weaker mortals into haunted ruins to watch their firm
nerves tremble. Sometimes too, though a man be wholly innocent of
the desire to alarm, he is led astray, whether he will or not,
among the terrors of the invisible world. Grey ghosts steal into
his imagination unawares. It was so that they came to Nathaniel
Hawthorne, who speaks sorrowfully of "gaily dressed fantasies
turning to ghostly and black-clad images of themselves." He would
gladly have written a "sunshiny" book, but was capriciously fated
to live ever in the twilight, haunted by spectres and by "dark
ideas." He fashions his tales of terror delicately and
reluctantly, not riotously and shamelessly like Lewis and
Maturin.
An innate reticence and shyness of temper held Hawthorne, as if
by a spell, somewhat aloof from life, and no one realised more
clearly than he the limitations that his detachment from humanity
imposed upon his art.
Of _Twice-Told Tales_ he writes regretfully:
"They have the pale tint of flowers that blossomed in
too retired a shade... Instead of passion there is
sentiment and even in what purport to be pictures of
actual life we have allegory, not always so warmly
dressed in its habiliments of flesh and blood as to be
taken into the reader's mind without a shiver. Whether
from lack of power or an inconquerable reserve, the
author's touches have often an effect of tameness. The
book, if you would see anything in it, requires to be
read in the clear, brown twilight atmosphere in which
it was written; if opened in the sunshine, it is apt to
look exceedingly like a volume of blank pages";
and in his _Notebook_ (1840) he confesses:
"I used to think I could imagine all the passions, all
feelings and states of the heart and mind, but how
little did I know! Indeed we are but shadows, we are
not endowed with real life, and all that seems most
real about us is but the thinnest shadow of a
dream--till the heart be touched."
Whether he is threading the labyrinths of his imagination or
watching the human shadows come and go, Hawthorne lingers longer
in the shadow than in the sunshine. He was not a man of morose
and gloomy temper, disenchanted with life and driven by distress
or thwarted passion to brood in solitude. An irresistible,
inexplicable impulse drives him towards the sombre and the
gloomy. The delicacy and wistful charm of the words in which
Hawthorne criticises his own work and character reveal how
impossible it would have been for him to force his wayward
genius. His imagination hovers with curious persistence round
eerie, fantastic themes:
"An old looking-glass. Somebody finds out the secret of making
all the images reflected in it pass again across its surface"--a
hint skilfully introduced into the history of old Esther Dudley
in _The Legends of the Province House_, or:
"A dreadful secret to be communicated to several
persons of various character--grave or gay--and they
all to become insane, according to their characters, by
the influence of the secret"
--an idea modified and adapted in _The Marble Faun_. "An ice-cold
hand--which people ever afterwards remember when once they have
grasped it"--is bestowed on the Wandering Jew, the owner of the
marvellous _Virtuoso's Collection_, whose treasures include the
blood-encrusted pen with which Dr. Faustus signed away his
salvation, Peter Schlemihl's shadow, the elixir of life, and the
philosopher's stone. The form of a vampire, who apparently never
took shape on paper, flitted through the twilight of Hawthorne's
imagination:
"Stories to be told of a certain person's appearance in
public, of his having been seen in various situations,
and his making visits in private circles; but finally
on looking for this person, to come upon his old grave
and mossy tombstone."
With so many alluring suggestions floating shadowwise across his
mind, it is not wonderful that Hawthorne should have been
fascinated by the dream of a human life prolonged far beyond the
usual span--a dream, which, if realised, would have enabled him
to capture in words more of those "shapes that haunt thought's
wildernesses."
Although among the sketches collected in _Twice-Told Tales_ (vol.
i. 1837, vol. ii. 1842) some are painted in gay and lively hues,
the prevailing tone of the book is sad and mournful. The
light-hearted philosophy of the wanderers in _The Seven
Vagabonds_, the pretty, brightly coloured vignettes in _Little
Annie's Rambles_, the quiet cheerfulness of _Sunday at Home_ or
_The Rill from the Town Pump_, only serve to throw into darker
relief gloomy legends like that of _Ethan Brand_, the man who
went in search of the Unpardonable Sin, or dreary stories like
that of _Edward Fane's Rosebud_, or the ghostly _White Old Maid_.
One of the most carefully wrought sketches in _Twice-Told Tales_
is the weird story of _The Hollow of the Three Hills_. By means
of a witch's spell, a lady hears the far-away voices of her aged
parents--her mother querulous and tearful, her father calmly
despondent--and amid the fearful mirth of a madhouse
distinguishes the accents and footstep of the husband she has
wronged. At last she listens to the death-knell tolled for the
child she has left to die. The solemn rhythm of Hawthorne's
skilfully ordered sentences is singularly haunting and
impressive:
"The golden skirts of day were yet lingering upon the
hills, but deep shades obscured the hollow and the
pool, as if sombre night were rising thence to
overspread the world. Again that evil woman began to
weave her spell. Long did it proceed unanswered, till
the knolling of a bell stole in among the intervals of
her words, like a clang that had travelled far over
valley and rising ground and was just ready to die in
the air... Stronger it grew, and sadder, and deepened
into the tone of a death-bell, knolling dolefully from
some ivy-mantled tower, and bearing tidings of
mortality and woe to the cottage, to the hall and to
the solitary wayfarer that all might weep for the doom
appointed in turn to them. Then came a measured tread,
passing slowly, slowly on as of mourners with a coffin,
their garments trailing the ground so that the ear
could measure the length of their melancholy array.
Before them went the priest reading the burial-service,
while the leaves of his book were rustling in the
breeze. And though no voice but his was heard to speak
aloud, still here were revilings and anathemas
whispered, but distinct, from women and from men... The
sweeping sound of the funeral train faded away like a
thin vapour and the wind that just before had seemed to
shake the coffin-pall moaned sadly round the verge of
the hollow between three hills."
In a later collection of Hawthorne's short stories, _Mosses from
an Old Manse_, the grave and the gay, the terrific and the
sportive, are once more intermingled. Side by side with a forlorn
attempt at humorous allegory, Mrs. _Bullfrog_, we find the
serious moral allegories of _The Birthmark_ and _The
Bosom-Serpent_, the wild, mysterious forest-revels in _Goodman
Brown_, and the evil, sinister beauty of _Dr. Rappacini's
Daughter_, a modern rehandling of the ancient legend of the
poison-maiden, who was perhaps the prototype of Oliver Wendell
Holmes' heroine in _Elsie Venner_ (1861). The quiet grace and
natural ease of Hawthorne's style lend even to his least
ambitious tales a distinctive charm. If he chooses a slight and
simple theme, his touch is deft and sure. _Dr. Heidegger's
Experiment_, in which Hawthorne's delicate, whimsical fancy plays
round the idea of the elixir of life, is almost like a series of
miniature pictures, distinct and lifelike in form and colour,
seen through the medium of an old-fashioned magic-lantern. Yet
even in this fantastic trifle we can discern the feeling for
words and the sense of proportion that characterise Hawthorne's
longer works.
_The Scarlet Letter_ (1850) was originally intended to be one of
several short stories, but Hawthorne was persuaded to expand it
into a novel. He felt some misgivings as to the success of the
work:
"Keeping so close to the point as the tale does, and
diversified in no otherwise than by turning different
sides of the same dark idea to the reader's eye, it will
weary very many people and disgust some."
The plot bears a remarkable resemblance to that of Lockhart's
striking novel, _Adam Blair_. The "dark idea" that fascinates
Hawthorne is the psychological state of Hester Prynne and her
lover, Arthur Dimmesdale, in the long years that follow their
lawless passion. Their love story hardly concerns him at all. The
interest of the novel does not depend on the development of the
plot. No attempt is made to complicate the story by concealing
the identity of Hester's lover or of her husband. The action
takes place within the souls and minds of the characters, not in
their outward circumstances. The central chapter of the book is
named significantly: "The Interior of a Heart." The moral
situation described in _The Scarlet Letter_ did not present
itself to Hawthorne abstractly, but as a series of pictures. He
habitually thought in images, and he brooded so long over his
conceptions that his descriptions are almost as definite in
outline and as vivid in colour as things actually seen. His
pictures do not waver or fade elusively as the mind seeks to
realise them. The prison door, studded with pikes, before which
Hester Prynne first stands with the letter on her breast, the
pillory where Dimmesdale keeps vigil at midnight, the
forest-trees with pale, fitful gleams of sunshine glinting
through their leaves, are so distinct that we almost put out our
hands to touch them. Hawthorne's dream-imagery has the same
convincing reality. The phantasmagoric visions which float
through Hester's consciousness--the mirrored reflection of her
own face in girlhood, her husband's thin, scholar-like visage,
the grey houses of the cathedral city where she had spent her
early years--are more real to her and to us than the blurred
faces of the Puritans who throng the marketplace to gaze on her
ignominy. Although the moral tone of the book is one of almost
unrelieved gloom, the actual scenes are full of colour and light.
Pearl's scarlet frock with its fantastic embroideries, the
magnificent velvet gown and white ruff of the old dame who rides
off by night to the witch-revels in the forest, the group of Red
Indians in their deer-skin robes and wampum belts of red and
yellow ochre, the bronzed faces and gaudy attire of the Spanish
pirates, all stand out in bold relief among the sober greys and
browns of the Puritans. The tense, emotional atmosphere is
heightened by the festive brightness of the outer world.
The light of Hawthorne's imagination is directed mainly on three
characters--Hester, Arthur, and the elf-like child Pearl, the
living symbol of their union. Further in the background lurks the
malignant figure of Roger Chillingworth, contriving his fiendish
scheme of vengeance, "violating in cold blood the sanctity of a
human heart." The blaze of the Scarlet Letter compels us by a
strange magnetic power to follow Hester Prynne wherever she goes,
but her suffering is less acute and her character less intricate
than her lover's. She bears the outward badge of shame, but after
"wandering without a clue in the dark labyrinth of mind," wins a
dull respite from anguish as she glides "like a grey and sober
shadow" over the threshold of those who are visited by sorrow. At
the last, when Dimmesdale's spirit is "so shattered and subdued
that it could hardly hold itself erect," Hester has still energy
to plan and to act. His character is more twisted and tortuous
than hers, and to understand him we must visit him apart. The
sensitive nature that can endure physical pain but shrinks
piteously from moral torture, the capacity for deep and
passionate feeling, the strange blending of pride and abject
self-loathing, of cowardice and resolve, are portrayed with
extraordinary skill. The different strands of his character are
"intertwined in an inextricable knot." His is a living soul,
complicated and varying in its moods, but ever pursued by a sense
of sin. By one of Hawthorne's swift, uncanny flashes of insight,
as Dimmesdale goes home after the forest-meeting, we hear nothing
of the wild beatings of hope and dreary revulsions to despair,
but only of foul, grotesque temptations that assail him, just as
earlier--on the pillory--it is the grim humour and not the
frightful shame of the situation that strikes him, when by an odd
trick of his imagination he suddenly pictures a "whole tribe of
decorous personages starting into view with the disorder of a
nightmare in their aspects," to look upon their minister.
Hawthorne's delineation of character and motive is as
scrupulously accurate and scientific as Godwin's, but there is
none of Godwin's inhumanity in his attitude. His complete
understanding of human weakness makes pity superfluous and
undignified. He pronounces no judgment and offers no plea for
mercy. His instinct is to present the story as it appeared
through the eyes of those who enacted the drama or who witnessed
it. Stern and inexorable as one of his own witch-judging
ancestors, Hawthorne foils the lovers' plan of escape across the
sea, lets the minister die as soon as he has made the revelation
that gives him his one moment of victory, and in the conclusion
brings Hester back to take up her long-forsaken symbol of shame.
Pearl alone Hawthorne sets free, the spell which bound her human
sympathies broken by the kiss she bestows on her guilty father.
There are few passionate outbursts of feeling, save when Hester
momentarily unlocks her heart in the forest--and even here
Hawthorne's language is extraordinarily restrained:
"'What we did had a consecration of its own. We felt it
so! We said so to each other. Hast thou forgotten it?'
'Hush, Hester!' said Arthur Dimmesdale, rising from the
ground. 'No; I have not forgotten.'"
Or again, after Dimmesdale has confessed that he has neither
strength nor courage left him to venture into the world: "'Thou
shalt not go alone!' answered she, in a deep whisper. Then all
was spoken."
In _The House of the Seven Gables_ (1851), as in _The Scarlet
Letter_, Hawthorne again presents his scenes in the light of a
single, pervading idea, this time an ancestral curse, symbolised
by the portrait of Colonel Pyncheon, who condemned an innocent
man for witchcraft.
"To the thoughtful man there will be no tinge of
superstition in what we figuratively express, by
affirming that the ghost of a dead progenitor--perhaps
as a portion of his own punishment--is often doomed to
become the Evil Genius of his family."
Hawthorne wins his effect by presenting the idea to our minds
from different points of view, until we are obsessed by the curse
that broods heavily over the old house. Even the aristocratic
breed of fowls, of "queer, rusty, withered aspect," are an emblem
of the decay of the Pyncheon family. The people are apt to be
merged into the dense shadows that lurk in the gloomy passages,
but when the sun shines on them they stand out with arresting
distinctness. The heroic figure of Hepzibah Pyncheon, a little
ridiculous and a little forbidding of aspect, but cherishing
through weary years a passionate devotion to her brother, is
described with a gentle blending of humour and pathos. Clifford
Pyncheon--the sybarite made for happiness and hideously cheated
of his destiny--is delineated with curious insight and sympathy.
It is Judge Jaffery Pyncheon, with his "sultry" smile of
"elaborate benevolence"--unrelenting and crafty as his infamous
ancestor--who lends to _The House of Seven Gables_ the element of
terror. Hour after hour, Hawthorne, with grim and bitter irony,
mocks and taunts the dead body of the hypocritical judge until
the ghostly pageantry of dead Pyncheons--including at last Judge
Jaffery himself with the fatal crimson stain on his
neckcloth--fades away with the oncoming of daylight.
Hawthorne's mind was richly stored with "wild chimney-corner
legends," many of them no doubt gleaned from an old woman
mentioned in one of his _Tales and Sketches_. He takes over the
fantastic superstitions in which his ancestors had believed, and
uses them as the playthings of his fancy, picturing with
malicious mirth the grey shadows of his stern, dark-browed
forefathers sadly lamenting his lapse from grace and saying one
to the other:
"A writer of story-books! What kind of a business in
life, what manner of glorifying God, or being
serviceable to mankind in his day and generation may
that be? Why, the degenerate fellow might as well have
been a fiddler."
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