The Tale of Terror. Edith Birkhead
is true that the English in general, and indeed most of the men of learning in Europe, have given up all accounts of witches and apparitions, as mere old wives' fables. I am sorry for it; and I willingly take this opportunity of entering my solemn protest against this violent compliment which so many that believe the Bible pay to those who do not believe it."
The Cock Lane ghost gained very general credit, and was considered by Mrs. Nickleby a personage of some importance, when she boasted to Miss La Creevy that her great-grandfather went to school with him—or her grandmother with the Thirsty Woman of Tutbury. The appearance of Lord Lyttleton's ghost in 1779 was described by Dr. Johnson, who was also disposed to believe in the Cock Lane ghost, as the most extraordinary thing that had happened in his day.[5] There is abundant evidence that the people of the eighteenth century were extremely credulous, yet, in literature, there is a tendency to look askance at the supernatural as at something wild and barbaric. Such ghosts as presume to steal into poetry are amazingly tame, and even elegant, in their speech and deportment. In Mallet's William and Margaret (1759). which was founded on a scrap of an old ballad out of The Knight of the Burning Pestle, Margaret's wraith rebukes her false lover in a long and dignified oration. But spirits were shy of appearing in an age when they were more likely to be received with banter than with dread. Dr. Johnson expresses the attitude of his age when, in referring to Gray's poem, The Bard, he remarks:
"To select a singular event and swell it to a giant's bulk by fabulous appendages of spectres and predictions has little difficulty, for he that forsakes the probable may always find the marvellous. And it has little use; we are affected only as we believe; we are improved only as we find something to be imitated or declined." (1780.)
The dictum that we are affected only as we believe is open to grave doubt. We are often thrown into a state of trepidation simply through the power of the imagination. We are wise after the event, like Partridge at the play:
"No, no, sir; ghosts don't appear in such dresses as that neither … And if it was really a ghost, it could do one no harm at such a distance, and in so much company; and yet, if I was frightened, I am not the only person."[6]
The supernatural which persisted always in legends handed down from one generation to another on the lips of living people, had not lost its power to thrill and alarm, and gradually worked its way back into literature. Although Gray and Collins do not venture far beyond the bounds of the natural, they were in sympathy with the popular feelings of superstitious terror, and realised how effective they would be in poetry.
Collins, in his Ode on the Superstitions of the Scottish Highlands, adjures Home, the author of Douglas, to sing:
"how, framing hideous spells,
In Sky's lone isle, the gifted wizard-seer
Lodged in the wintry cave with Fate's fell spear
Or in the depths of Uist's dark forests dwells,
How they whose sight such dreary dreams engross
With their own vision oft astonished droop
When o'er the wintry strath or quaggy moss
They see the gliding ghosts unbodied troop."
Burns, in the foreword to Halloween (1785), writes in the "enlightened" spirit of the eighteenth century, but in the poem itself throws himself whole-heartedly into the hopes and fears that agitate the lovers. He owed much to an old woman who lived in his home in infancy:
"She had … the largest collection in the country of tales and songs concerning devils, ghosts, fairies, brownies, witches, warlocks, spunkies, kelpies, elf-candles, dead-lights, wraiths, apparitions, cantraips, giants, enchanted towers, dragons and other trumpery. This cultivated the latent seeds of poetry, but had so strong an effect on my imagination, that to this hour, in my nocturnal rambles, I sometimes keep a sharp look-out in suspicious places; it often takes an effort of philosophy to shake off these idle terrors."[7]
Tam o' Shanter, written for Captain Grose, was perhaps based on a Scottish legend, learnt at the inglenook in childhood, from this old wife, or perhaps
"By some auld houlet-haunted biggin
Or kirk deserted by its riggin,"
from Captain Grose himself, who made to quake:
"Ilk ghaist that haunts auld ha' or chamer,
Ye gipsy-gang that deal in glamor,
And you, deep-read in hell's black grammar,
Warlocks and witches."
In it Burns reveals with lively reality the terrors that assail the reveller on his homeward way through the storm:
"Past the birks and meikle stane
Where drunken Charlie brak's neck-bane;
And through the whins, and by the cairn
Where hunters fand the murdered bairn
And near the thorn, aboon the well
Where Mungo's mither hanged hersell."
For sheer terror the wild, fantastic witch-dance, seen through a Gothic window in the ruins of Kirk-Alloway, with the light of humour strangely glinting through, has hardly been surpassed. The Ballad-collections, beginning with Percy's Reliques of Ancient English Poetry (1705), brought poets back to the original sources of terror in popular tradition, and helped to revive the latent feelings of awe, wonder and fear. In Coleridge's Ancient Manner the skeleton-ship with its ghastly crew—the spectre-woman and her deathmate—the sensations of the mariner, alone on a wide, wide sea, seize on our imagination with irresistible power. The very substance of the poem is woven of the supernatural. The dream imagery is thrown into relief by occasional touches of reality—the lighthouse, the church on the cliff, the glimpses of the wedding, the quiet song of the hidden brook in the leafy month of June. We, like the mariner, after loneliness so awful that
"God himself
Scarce seemèd there to be,"
welcome the firm earth beneath our feet, and the homely sound of the vesper bell. In Christabel we float dreamily through scenes as unearthly and ephemeral as the misty moonlight, and the words in which Coleridge conjures up his vision fall into music of magic beauty. The opening of the poem creates a sense of foreboding, and the horror of the serpent-maiden is subtly suggested through her effect on Christabel. Coleridge hints at the terrible with artistic reticence. In Kubla Khan the chasm is:
"A savage place! as holy and enchanted
As e'er beneath a waning moon was haunted
By woman wailing for her demon-lover."
The poetry of Keats is often mysterious and suggestive of terror.
The description of the Gothic hall in The Eve of St. Agnes:
"In all the house was heard no human sound;
A chain-drooped lamp was flickering by each door;
The arras, rich with horseman, hawk and hound,
Fluttered in the besieging wind's uproar;
And the long carpets rose along the gusty floor;"
the serpent-maiden, Lamia, who
"Seemed at once some penanced lady elf,
Some demon's mistress, or the demon's self;"
the grim story in Isabella of Lorenzo's ghost, who
"Moaned a ghostly undersong
Like hoarse night-gusts sepulchral briers along."
all lead us over the borderland. In a rejected stanza of the Ode on Melancholy, he abandons the horrible:
"Though you should build a bark of dead men's bones
And rear a phantom gibbet for a mast,
Stitch shrouds together for a sail, with groans
To fill it