The Supernatural in Modern English Fiction. Dorothy Scarborough
for its eyes follow the beholder with awful meaning, and as the nephew in desperation tears it from its frame and burns it, the picture writhes in the flames, ironically, and mocks him. This might be compared with Oscar Wilde’s Picture of Dorian Gray and with other later stories.
The statue of Alfonso in Walpole’s Castle moves from its place with no visible means of support, and[21] a great effigy of black marble is said to “march all round and come back into its place again with a great groan.” In St. Oswyth the soil of the abbey grounds obtained by gross injustice is haunted by the ghost of the wronged nun who inflicts a curse upon it, rendering it “spell-blighted, unprolific, and impossible to till.” The key to the room in the old house in which Melmoth’s diabolic portrait is kept, turns in its lock with a sound like the cry of the dead.
Gothic romance contains magic mirrors wherein one can see any person he wishes no matter how distant he may be, and watch his movements after the fashion of a private moving-picture show—such as that used by Ambrosio.[22] There are enchanted wands with power to transform men to beasts or vice versa, as in The Hunt of Eildon. There are crystal balls that reveal not only what is going on in distant parts, but show the future as well.[23] The same volume describes magic swords that bear changing hieroglyphics to be read only by enchantment and other uncanny objects. These will serve to illustrate the preternatural powers possessed by inanimate objects in the terror literature. In some instances the motif is used with effectiveness, definitely heightening the impression of the weird in a way that human supernaturalism could not accomplish. We do not see here the mechanistic supernaturalism, which is to become important in later tales, and the effects here are crude, yet of interest in themselves and as suggesting later uses of the idea.
Dæmonology manifests itself in the supernatural science in the Gothic novels as well as in the characterization of the devil and his confreres. We have diabolical chemistry besides alchemy, astrology, hypnotism, ventriloquism, search for the philosopher’s stone, infernal biology, and the other scientific twists of supernaturalism. In Vathek, where we have a regular array of ghostliness, we see a magic potion that instantly cures any disease however deadly—the progenitor of the modern patent medicine. There is an Indian magician who writes his messages on the high heavens themselves. Vathek’s mother is an industrious alchemist strangling an assembly of prominent citizens in order to use their cadavers in her laboratory, where she stews them up with serpent’s oil, mummies, and skulls, concocting therefrom a powerful potion. Vathek has an uncurbed curiosity that leads him into various experiments, to peer into the secrets of astrology, alchemy, sorcery, and kindred sciences. He uses a magic drink that gives the semblance of death, like that used later in The Monk, as earlier, of course, in Romeo and Juliet, and elsewhere.
The Moor in Zofloya is well versed in dæmonic science. He tells of chemical experiments where he forces everyone to do his will or die. By his potions he can change hate into love or love into hate, and can give a drug which produces semi-insanity. Under the influence of this a man weds a dæmonic temptress thinking her the woman he loves, then commits suicide when he wakes to the truth. This reminds us of Sax Rohmer’s Fu-Manchu stories of diabolic hypodermics that produce insanity.
In Ankerwich Castle a woman lying at the point of death is miraculously cured by a drug whose prescription the author neglects to state. In the same story a child is branded in a peculiar fashion. A new-born babe whose birth must remain secret yet who must be recognizable in emergency, is marked on its side with letters burnt in with a strange chemical, which will remain invisible till rubbed with a certain liquid. Matilda in The Monk dabbles in satanic chemistry and compounds evil potions in her subterranean experiments.
Mary Shelley uses the idea of supernatural biology in her story of the man-monster, Frankenstein, the story of the young scientist who after morbid study and experiment, constructs a human frame of supernatural size and hideous grotesqueness and gives it life. But the thing created appalls its creator by its dreadful visage, its more than human size, its look of less than human intelligence, and the student flees in horror from the sight of it. Mrs. Shelley describes the emotions of the lonely, tragic thing thrust suddenly into a world that ever recoils shuddering from it. She reveals the slow hate distilled in its heart because of the harsh treatment it meets, till at last it takes diabolic revenge, not only on the man who has created it but on all held dear by him. The struggles that rend his soul between hate and remorse are impressive. The wretched being weeps in an agony of grief as it stands over the body of Frankenstein whom it has harried to death, then goes away to its own doom. The last sight of it, as the first, is effective, as, in tragic solitude, towering on the ice-floe, it moves toward the desolate North to its death.
In the characterization of this being, as in the unusual conception, Mrs. Shelley has introduced something poignantly new in fiction. It was a startling theme for the mind of a young girl, as were Vathek and The Monk for youths of twenty years, and only the abnormal psychological conditions she went through could have produced it. There is more curdling awfulness in Frankenstein’s monster than in the museum of armored ghosts, Bleeding Nuns, and accompanying horrors of the early Gothic novels. The employment of the Frankenstein motif in a play produced recently in New York,[24] illustrates anew the vitality of the idea.
The search for the philosopher’s stone appears in various novels of the period. St. Leon, by William Godwin, relates the story of a man who knew how to produce unlimited gold by a secret formula given him by a mysterious stranger who dies in his home. Shelley[25] brings in this power incidentally with the gift of endless life. There is an awe-inspiring use of ventriloquism in Charles Brockden Brown’s novel, Wieland, while Arthur Mervyn gives a study in somnambulism. Zofloya suggests hypnotism or mesmerism by saying that Victoria’s thought summoned the Moor to her—that they could have brought him had he been “at the further extremity of this terrestrial globe.” This seems a faint foreshadowing of Ibsen’s idea in The Master Builder. These may illustrate the use of science in Gothicism.
The elixir of life is brewed in divers Gothic novels. Dramatic and intense as are the psychological experiences connected with the discovery of the magic potion, the effects of the success are more poignant still. The thought that endless mortality, life that may not be laid down, becomes a burden intolerable has appeared in fiction since Swift’s account of the Struldbrugs, and perhaps before. Godwin’s St. Leon is a story of the secret of perpetual life. The tiresome Godwinistic hero is visited by a decrepit old man who wishes to tell him on a pledge of incommunicability what will give him the power of endless life and boundless wealth. The impoverished nobleman accepts with consequences less enjoyable than he has anticipated.
Shelley’s hectic romance,[26] whose idea, as Shelley admitted to Stockdale, came from Godwin’s book, uses the same theme. The young student with burning eyes, who has discovered the elixir of life, may be compared with Mary Shelley’s later picture of Frankenstein. Events are rather confused here, as the villain falls dead in the presence of the devil but comes to life again as another character later in the story—Shelley informing us of their identity but not troubling to explain it.
The most impressive instance of the theme of fleshly immortality in the early novels is found in Melmoth. Here the mysterious wanderer possesses the power of endless life, but not the right to lay it down when existence becomes a burden. Melmoth can win the boon of death only if he can find another mortal willing to change destinies with him at the price of his soul. He traverses the world in his search and offers the exchange to persons in direst need and suffering the extreme torments, offering to give them wealth as well as life eternal. Yet no man nor woman will buy life at the price of the soul.
Aids to Gothic Effect.
Certain themes appear recurringly as first aids to terror fiction. Some of them are found equally in later literature while others belong more particularly to the Gothic. An interesting aspect of the supernatural visitants is gigantism, or the superhuman size which they assume. In The Castle of Otranto, the sensational ghost is of enormous size, and his accouterments are colossal. In the last scene he is astounding:
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