CHAPTER XV: THE SUPERNATURAL IN FICTION
It is a truism that the supernatural in fiction should, as a generalrule, be left in the vague. In the creepiest tale I ever read, thehorror lay in this--_there was no ghost_! You may describe a ghost withall the most hideous features that fancy can suggest--saucer eyes, redstaring hair, a forked tail, and what you please--but the reader onlylaughs. It is wiser to make as if you were going to describe thespectre, and then break off, exclaiming, "But no! No pen can describe,no memory, thank Heaven, can recall, the horror of that hour!" Sowriters, as a rule, prefer to leave their terror (usually styled "TheThing") entirely in the dark, and to the frightened fancy of the student.Thus, on the whole, the treatment of the supernaturally terrible infiction is achieved in two ways, either by actual description, or byadroit suggestion, the author saying, like cabmen, "I leave it toyourself, sir." There are dangers in both methods; the description, ifattempted, is usually overdone and incredible: the suggestion is apt toprepare us too anxiously for something that never becomes real, and toleave us disappointed.
Examples of both methods may be selected from poetry and prose. Theexamples in verse are rare enough; the first and best that occurs in theway of suggestion is, of course, the mysterious lady in "Christabel."
"She was most beautiful to see, Like a lady of a far countree."
Who was she? What did she want? Whence did she come? What was thehorror she revealed to the night in the bower of Christabel?
"Then drawing in her breath aloud Like one that shuddered, she unbound The cincture from beneath her breast. Her silken robe and inner vest Dropt to her feet, and full in view Behold her bosom and half her side-- A sight to dream of, not to tell! O shield her! shield sweet Christabel!"
And then what do her words mean?
"Thou knowest to-night, and wilt know to-morrow, This mark of my shame, this seal of my sorrow."
What was it--the "sight to dream of, not to tell?"
Coleridge never did tell, and, though he and Mr. Gilman said he knew,Wordsworth thought he did not know. He raised a spirit that he had notthe spell to lay. In the Paradise of Poets has he discovered the secret?We only know that the mischief, whatever it may have been, was wrought.
"O sorrow and shame! Can this be she-- The lady who knelt at the old oak tree?" . . . "A star hath set, a star hath risen, O Geraldine, since arms of thine Have been the lovely lady's prison. O Geraldine, one hour was thine." {11}
If Coleridge knew, why did he never tell? And yet he maintains that "inthe very first conception of the tale, I had the whole present to mymind, with the wholeness no less than with the liveliness of a vision,"and he expected to finish the three remaining parts within the year. Theyear was 1816, the poem was begun in 1797, and finished, as far as itgoes, in 1800. If Coleridge ever knew what he meant, he had time toforget. The chances are that his indolence, or his forgetfulness, wasthe making of "Christabel," which remains a masterpiece of supernaturalsuggestion.
For description it suffices to read the "Ancient Mariner." Thesemarvels, truly, are _speciosa miracula_, and, unlike Southey, we believeas we read. "You have selected a passage fertile in unmeaning miracles,"Lamb wrote to Southey (1798), "but have passed by fifty passages asmiraculous as the miracles they celebrate." Lamb appears to have beenalmost alone in appreciating this masterpiece of supernaturaldescription. Coleridge himself shrank from his own wonders, and wantedto call the piece "A Poet's Reverie." "It is as bad as Bottom theweaver's declaration that he is not a lion, but only the scenicalrepresentation of a lion. What new idea is gained by this title but onesubversive of all credit--which the tale should force upon us--of itstruth?" Lamb himself was forced, by the temper of the time, to declarethat he "disliked all the miraculous part of it," as if it were not _all_miraculous! Wordsworth wanted the Mariner "to have a character and aprofession," perhaps would have liked him to be a gardener, or a butler,with "an excellent character!" In fact, the love of the supernatural wasthen at so low an ebb that a certain Mr. Marshall "went to sleep whilethe 'Ancient Mariner' was reading," and the book was mainly bought byseafaring men, deceived by the title, and supposing that the "AncientMariner" was a nautical treatise.
In verse, then, Coleridge succeeds with the supernatural, both by way ofdescription in detail, and of suggestion. If you wish to see a failure,try the ghost, the moral but not affable ghost, in Wordsworth's"Laodamia." It is blasphemy to ask the question, but is the ghost in"Hamlet" quite a success? Do we not see and hear a little too much ofhim? Macbeth's airy and viewless dagger is really much more successfulby way of suggestion. The stage makes a ghost visible and familiar, andthis is one great danger of the supernatural in art. It is apt to insiston being too conspicuous. Did the ghost of Darius, in "AEschylus,"frighten the Athenians? Probably they smiled at the imperial spectre.There is more discretion in Caesar's ghost--
"I think it is the weakness of mine eyes That shapes this monstrous apparition,"
says Brutus, and he lays no very great stress on the brief visit of theappearance. For want of this discretion, Alexandre Dumas's ghosts, as in"The Corsican Brothers," are failures. They make themselves too commonand too cheap, like the spectre in Mrs. Oliphant's novel, "The Wizard'sSon." This, indeed, is the crux of the whole adventure. If you paintyour ghost with too heavy a hand, you raise laughter, not fear. If youtouch him too lightly, you raise unsatisfied curiosity, not fear. It maybe easy to shudder, but it is difficult to teach shuddering.
In prose, a good example of the over vague is Miriam's mysteriousvisitor--the shadow of the catacombs--in "Transformation; or, The MarbleFaun." Hawthorne should have told us more or less; to be sure hiscontemporaries knew what he meant, knew who Miriam and the Spectre were.The dweller in the catacombs now powerfully excites curiosity, and whenthat curiosity is unsatisfied, we feel aggrieved, vexed, and suspect thatHawthorne himself was puzzled, and knew no more than his readers. He hasnot--as in other tales he has--managed to throw the right atmosphereabout this being. He is vague in the wrong way, whereas George Sand, in_Les Dames Vertes_, is vague in the right way. We are left in _Les DamesVertes_ with that kind of curiosity which persons really engaged in theadventure might have felt, not with the irritation of having a secretkept from us, as in "Transformation."
In "Wandering Willie's Tale" (in "Redgauntlet"), the right atmosphere isfound, the right note is struck. All is vividly real, and yet, if youclose the book, all melts into a dream again. Scott was almost equallysuccessful with a described horror in "The Tapestried Chamber." The ideais the commonplace of haunted houses, the apparition is described asminutely as a burglar might have been; and yet we do not mock, butshudder as we read. Then, on the other side--the side ofanticipation--take the scene outside the closed door of the vanished Dr.Jekyll, in Mr. Stevenson's well-known apologue:
They are waiting on the threshold of the chamber whence the doctor hasdisappeared--the chamber tenanted by what? A voice comes from the room."Sir," said Poole, looking Mr. Utterson in the eyes, "was that mymaster's voice?"
A friend, a man of affairs, and a person never accused of being fanciful,told me that he read through the book to that point in a lonely Highlandchateau, at night, and that he did not think it well to finish the storytill next morning, but rushed to bed. So the passage seems "well-found"and successful by dint of suggestion. On the other side, perhaps, onlyScotsmen brought up in country places, familiar from childhood with theterrors of Cameronian myth, and from childhood apt to haunt the lonelychurchyards, never stirred since the year of the great Plague choked thesoil with the dead, perhaps _they_ only know how much shudder may befound in Mr. Stevenson's "Thrawn Janet." The black smouldering heat inthe hills and glens that are commonly so fresh, the aspect of the Man,the Tempter of the Brethren, we know them, and we have enough of the oldblood in us to be thrilled by that masterpiece of the describedsupernatural. It may be only a local success, it may not much affect theEnglish
reader, but it is of sure appeal to the lowland Scot. Theancestral Covenanter within us awakens, and is terrified by his ancientfears.
Perhaps it may die out in a positive age--this power of learning toshudder. To us it descends from very long ago, from the far-offforefathers who dreaded the dark, and who, half starved and all untaught,saw spirits everywhere, and scarce discerned waking experience fromdreams. When we are all perfect positivist philosophers, when a thousandgenerations of nurses that never heard of ghosts have educated thethousand and first generation of children, then the supernatural may fadeout of fiction. But has it not grown and increased since Wordsworthwanted the "Ancient Mariner" to have "a profession and a character,"since Southey called that poem a Dutch piece of work, since Lamb had topretend to dislike its "miracles"? Why, as science becomes more cock-sure, have men and women become more and more fond of old follies, andmore pleased with the stirring of ancient dread within their veins?
As the visible world is measured, mapped, tested, weighed, we seem tohope more and more that a world of invisible romance may not be far fromus, or, at least, we care more and more to follow fancy into these airyregions, _et inania regna_. The supernatural has not ceased to temptromancers, like Alexandre Dumas, usually to their destruction; morerarely, as in Mrs. Oliphant's "Beleaguered City," to such success as theydo not find in the world of daily occupation. The ordinary shillingtales of "hypnotism" and mesmerism are vulgar trash enough, and yet I canbelieve that an impossible romance, if the right man wrote it in theright mood, might still win us from the newspapers, and the stories ofshabby love, and cheap remorses, and commonplace failures.
"But it needs Heaven-sent moments for this skill."