THE SUPERNATURAL OMNIBUS (4 page)

Mr. Elliot O'Donnell has given us a long series of ghost tales and of studies in phantom lore which will be familiar to all who are interested in that misty borderland. Such are his
Ghostly Phenomena; Ghostland; Twenty Years' Experiences as a Ghost Hunter
(in which there is a most creepy chapter: "A Haunted Mine in Wales");
Animal Ghosts; Scottish Ghosts; Byways of Ghostland
. Personally I am inclined to rate his
Some Haunted Houses of England and Wales
(1908);
Haunted Houses of London
; and
More Haunted Houses of London
as among the best of his work. This latter has a horrible tale, The Door that would never keep Shut; and the first relates some fully authenticated narratives of the West Country.

The Ghost of Broughton Hall in Miss Violet Tweedale's
Ghosts I Have Seen
, second edition, 1920, is well within the good old-fashioned, but none the less matter-of-fact, tradition; whilst the account of the hideous satyr, Prince Valori's familiar, is so incontestably attested, that it should "furiously give to think" those, if any there be, who cling to what Stead justly termed the out-worn superstition of a denial of supernatural agencies.

Very many more collections might be cited; many admirable, some few a little weak, perhaps; but it is high time we passed from fact to fiction. It must not be thought that this review "gat-tothed," insufficient and scanty to the last degree as it is, of books relating to the actuality of the supernatural, is in any way impertinent, since it is these veridical narratives which supply the background to romance and fiction self-confessed.

Even although we are to be entirely concerned with prose fiction, the extraordinary popularity of the "Drama of Blood and Horror" evoking whole crowded cemeteries of ghosts upon the Elizabethan stage must not be passed over without a word. The earlier Elizabethan ghosts were copied from the formal phantoms of Seneca and his Italian imitators. The Umbra Tantali and the fury Megæra commence the
Thyestes
with a declamatory duologue of one hundred and twenty lines. Nor did these spectres lose one whit of their loquaciousness when they crossed to English shores. They are, one and all, extremely voluble. Thus Jonson's
Catiline His Conspiracy
, acted in 1611, opens with a monologue of over seventy lines delivered by Sylla's ghost. It must be acknowledged that this is a magnificent speech, but not all spectres in tragedy had such splendid periods. In fact, many of the phantoms were unmercifully parodied, and Kyd's
Spanish Tragedy
in particular (which, it is interesting to note, was attracting audiences as late as 1668) became a very nayword for mockery and burlesque. In that curious yet striking drama,
A Warning for Faire Women
, 4to, 1599, at the very outset are introduced Tragedy and Comedy, and the latter jeers her august sister in this wise:

 A Chorus too comes howling in,

And tels us of the worrying of a cat,

Then of a filthie whining ghost,

Lapt in some fowle sheete, or a leather perch,

Comes shreaming like a pigge halfe sticks,

And cries Vindicta, revenge, revenge:

With that a little Rosenflasheth forth,

Like smoke out of a Tabacco pipe, or a boyes squib.

It may be remarked that the ghost upon the Elizabethan stage was plainly visible to the audience. He presented himself very materially, all blotched with blood, with chalked face and linen shroud. When Kemble at Drury Lane in 1794 let Macbeth gaze upon an empty seat in the scene of royal revelry and apostrophise the vacant air, all this was absolutely alien to Shakespeare's intention and practice. The spectre of Banquo must be to vision clear, "with twenty trenched gashes on his head."

 Thus in Webster's great play
The White Devil
we see "Brachiano's Ghost in his leather cassock and breeches, boots; a cowl; a pot of lily-flowers, with a skull in't." The minute details of the stage direction, if nothing else, are proof that the ghost was no shadow seen in the mind's eye alone. Moreover, when Flaminio addresses it, "the Ghost throws earth upon him, and shows him the skull."

It has been observed that "tragedy was the main channel of romanticism" in England during the seventeenth century and the earlier part of the eighteenth. Accordingly when Horace Walpole, who if not actually the very first was certainly the most important pioneer of prose romanticism, brought out in 1764 his
Castle of Otranto
, we are not surprised to find that the corridors and chambers of his Castle are haunted indeed, so much so in fact that eventually, like Manfred, we become "inured to the supernatural," and when we enter the chapel and see a figure "in a long woollen weed" are hardly the least surprised as it turns towards us to behold "the fleshless jaws and empty sockets of a skeleton, wrapt in a hermit's cowl."

Nevertheless, with all its faults and furbelows,
The Castle of Otranto
is a romance of extraordinary fascination. It may seem to us nowadays that the raptures — they were no less — with which Walpole's rococo was received cannot have been other than monstrously unreal, a tribute to the author rather than to his work. Yet such assuredly was not the case. The Critical Review was certainly unfriendly at the time, and Hazlitt later damned Otranto as "dry, meagre, and without effect." But Byron, writing in 1820, spoke of Walpole as "the father of the first romance and of the last tragedy in our language, and surely worthy of a higher place than any living writer, be he who he may." Sir Walter Scott, too, was lavish in his eulogy of Otranto: "This romance has been justly considered not only as the original and model of a peculiar species of composition, attempted and successfully executed by a man of great genius, but as one of the standard works of our lighter literature."

Otranto, at any rate, primarily inspired that notable revival — we might say creation — of romantic fiction which may conveniently be termed the Gothic Novel, and which drinks deep of two springs: the sentimental and the supernatural. The genius of Ann Radcliffe stands out pre-eminent far above all her contemporaries and disciples, but two at least, Matthew Gregory Lewis and Charles Maturin, had something of her quality, and were both writers of fearful if fantastic power. The villains may talk ever and anon in the richest vein of Surrey-side and Coburg melodrama; their heroines are all peerless, fleckless, graceful, lovelier than nymphs who trip the lawn; their dungeons may be murmurous with sepulchral groans; their corridors labyrinthing beyond aught that Dædalus could ever contrive, and a shudder at every turn; but in spite of crudities, of absurdities if you will, at the very moment when bathos seems irretrievably to have wrecked the situation, genius kindles to a flame and carries them through triumphant to the end.

Lewis and Maturin never shrank before the supernatural. Ghosts, the grislier the better, throng their pages.

Mrs. Radcliffe, however — and this is her one and only fault — could not bring herself frankly to engage the supernatural. At least, only her last and posthumous work,
Gaston de Blondeville,
admits the genuine supernatural, and even here the treatment is almost timid in its reticence. At the close of her romances it is explained that the marvels of the story are due to some natural agency, that we have shuddered all in vain and idly trembled in the shadowed halls of Udolpho, or amid the Black Penitents, what time we paced the cloisters of Paluzzi.

This is a blemish, and the critic of the Quarterly Review for May, 1810, was just, if severe, when he wrote that he heartily disapproved "of the mode introduced by Mrs. Radcliffe, and followed by Mr. Murphy and her other imitators, of winding up their story with a solution, by which all the incidents appearing to partake of the mystic and marvellous are resolved by very simple and natural causes." So we find that even in an ultra-Gothic tale rejoicing in so delightful a title as
The Phantom, or Mysteries of the Castle
when Mowbray cries: "My Matilda, blest shade!" a moment later Mrs. Mathews dashes us with "Matilda was still mortal," and we have been duly awed by her ghost for a couple of hundred pages! In The Spirit of Turrettville two youths are attracted by the sound of mysterious music to a distant room, where they see a veiled figure softly touching the strings of a harp. As they advance, the apparition turns towards them "a grinning mouldering skull." Eventually it is discovered she is the living wife who thus endeavours to frighten the villain into a confession. Even in Vesuvia, where the mysterious incidents are puzzling but hardly supernatural, a very careful and rational explanation is provided.

None the less, I would hasten to add that there are ghosts who haunt Gothic novels. T.J. Horsley-Curties scorned to tamper with the supernatural.
Ancient Records, or, The Abbey of St. Oswyth,
which is generally esteemed his best work, has spectres who shriek and moan and threaten the guilty to great effect. In the P
reface to Ethelwina; or, The House of Fitz-Auburne
he makes confession of his literary creed, and writes: "The Author of this Work . . . in one circumstance . . . has stepped beyond the modern writers of Romance, by introducing a Real Ghost — to many, such a circumstance will not appear unnatural or improbable; but he neither apologises, nor justifies on that ground — he only pleads the example of the immortal Bard of Avon, who found a spectre necessary for his purpose to heighten his story, or to 'harrow up the soul,' but never thought it necessary to account for the 'unreal mockery.'" In
The Accusing Spirit
a headless and mangled figure glides through the haunted convent, the tortured shade of the sinful Benedicta. The spirit of the old marquis appears in W.C. Proby's
The Spirit of the Castle
; in
The Priory of St. Clair, or, The Spectre of the Murdered Nun,
the dead Julietta is nightly seen. There are literally dozens of romances in which ghosts play a great part. Thus we have
Phantoms of the Cloyster; The Vindictive Spirit; The Spectre of Lamnere Abbey; The Spectre Mother; Eleanor, or The Spectre of St. Michel's; The Haunted Tavern; The Haunted Palace; The Haunted Priory; The Haunted Tower;
and very many more. In fact, Mrs. Rachel Hunter felt constrained to name one of her novels
Letitia: A Castle Without a Spectre
, whilst the author of
The Ghost and More Ghosts
merrily dubbed himself Felix Phantom.

Again, we have such popular romances as
The Midnight Groan; or, The Spectre of the Chapel
(1808), which "presents to view . . . a man spectre" and "a perfect skeleton";
The Convent Spectre
, published in the same year;
The Forest Phantom, or, The Golden Crucifix
, in which a ghost in armour stands "visible on the top of a coffin" and exhibits "features blanched by the hand of death"; and Isaac Crookenden's
Spectre of the Turret; or, Guolto Castle.
There is also an amazing collection,
Tales of Terror! or More Ghosts. Forming a Complete Phantasmagoria
, which has the appropriate motto:

Twelve o'clock's the Time of Night

 That the Graves, all gaping wide,

Quick send forth the airy Sprite

 In the Churchway Path to glide.

There was even published in 1823
Ghost Stories, Collected with a Particular View to Counteract the Vulgar Belief in Ghost and Apparitions, and to Promote a Rational Estimate of the Nature of Phenomena commonly considered as Supernatural.
The book, now very rare, was issued by Ackermann, and the six coloured engravings with which it is embellished possess the greatest charm. In fact, they are far too good for their setting, inasmuch as the stories themselves,
The Green Mantle of Venice, The Ghost of Larneville, The Village Apparition
, and the rest, are extremely tame. Nothing could be more disappointing, since the titles promise most palatable fare. What could be more tempting than the
Haunted Castle,
or,
The Ghost of Count Walkenried
, or
The Haunted Inn
? And it all fritters away into accounts of imposture, or somnambulism at the best. I protest this is not playing the game.

In James Hogg's
The Wool-Gatherer
a man of vicious life is haunted by the wraiths of those whom he has wronged, and as he lies in the throes of death he hears the sad voices of women in torment and the pitiful wailing of infants. After he is dead, the cries become so insistent that "the corpse sits up in the bed, pawls wi' its hands and stares round wi' its dead face." Not dissimilar is the adventure of de Montfort in Maturin's
The Albigenses
. As he is passing through the depths of a gloomy wood, there presses round him a throng of those who have fallen in the religious wars, a hideous company with "clattering bones, eyeless sockets, and grinning jaws."

Unfortunately, most novelists preferred to imitate Mrs. Radcliffe in her explanations, and even among her later followers the best are at some pains to throw down the whole edifice they have so adroitly constructed and with such toil. That fine romance of G.P.R. James,
The Castle of Ehrenstein, Its Lords Spiritual and Temporal, its Inhabitants Earthly and Unearthly
, is completely spoiled for me by the last chapter, and I reject the explanation "that the whole of this vast structure, solid as it seems, and solid as it indeed is, in reality is double," so that the phantoms were the Count and his faithful band who dwelt there secretly until such time as he should dispossess his usurping brother. It is they who appear as the Black Huntsman and his demon train. I am satisfied, none the less, that "The Ghost" and "The Black Huntsman" as depicted by Phiz when the first few chapters of
Ehrenstein
appeared in Ainsworth's Magazine, 1845, are supernatural. It is a fearsome phantom who terrifies Sickendorf and Bertha; it is the "wild Jager" himself who careers in awful chase.

There was one professed disciple of that "great mistress of romance" who happily disdained these subterfuges, and he has reaped his reward in that his name is remembered, his works are read, when so many another is forgotten and scarcely to be traced, nay, not even in the pages of Shobert and Watkins, or Upcott, or Allibone. It may, I think, almost undeniably be granted that his sense of the supernatural, and the truly admirable way in which he utilised awe and mystery in his romances, have at least culled one and that not the least green, laurel in the stephane of immortality which crowns Ainsworth's brow.