Chapter I: The Gothic Romance (2)

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.

[24] _The Last Laugh._

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.

[25] In _St. Irvyne_.

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.

[26] _St. Irvyne or the Rosicrucian._

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:

A clap of thunder shook the castle to its foundations; the earth
rocked and the clank of more than mortal armor was heard behind....
The walls of the castle behind Manfred were thrown down with a
mighty force, and the form of Alfonso, dilated to an immense
magnitude, appeared in the center of the ruins. "Behold the true
heir of Alfonso!" said the vision.

This reminds one of an incident in F. Marion Crawford's _Mr. Isaacs_, where the Indian magician expands to awful size, miraculously draws down a mist and wraps it round him as a cloak. Zofloya is frequently spoken of as immense, and it is said that "common objects seem to sink in his presence." In the last scene the wicked Victoria sees the Moor change from a handsome youth to a fierce gigantic figure. A diabolic apparition eight or nine feet high pursues a monk,[27] and the knight[28] engages in combat with a dæmonic giant who slays him. The devil in _The Monk_ is represented as being of enormous stature, and much of the horror excited by the man-monster that Frankenstein created arises from the creature's superhuman size. In most cases gigantism connotes evil power and rouses a supernatural awe in the beholder. The giant is an Oriental figure and appears in _Vathek_, along with genii, dwarfs, and kindred personages, but the Gothic giant has more diabolism than the mere Oriental original. He seems to fade out from fiction, appearing only occasionally in later stories, while he has practically no place in the drama, owing doubtless to the difficulties of stage presentation.

[27] In _The Spirit of the Castle_.

[28] In _The Spirit of Turrettville_.

* * * * *

Insanity as contributing to the effect of supernaturalism affords many gruesome studies in psychiatry. Madness seems a special curse of the gods or torment from the devil and various instances of its use occur in Gothic fiction. The devil in _Zofloya_, at Victoria's request, gives Henrique an enchanted drug which renders him temporarily insane, during which time he marries Victoria, imagining her to be Lilla whom he loves. When he awakes to the realization of what he has done, real madness drives him to suicide. In _The Castle of Caithness_ the wicked misanthrope goes mad from remorse. He imagines that the different ones he has murdered are hurling him into the pit of hell, until, in a maniac frenzy, he dashes his brains out against the prison walls. In _Ethelwina_ the father who has sold his daughter to dishonor flies shrieking in madness through the corridors of the dungeon to escape the sight of his child's accusing specter. Poor Nanny in Hogg's _Brownie of Bodbeck_ is described as having "a beam of wild delight in her eye, the joy of madness." She sings wild, unearthly songs and talks deliriously of incomprehensible things, of devilish struggles.

Melmoth uses the idea with special effectiveness. The insanity of the young husband whose bride is mysteriously slain on their wedding day by the supernatural power accompanying Melmoth, may be compared with the madness of the wife in Scott's _Bride of Lammermoor_. Maturin also shows us a scene in a mad-house, where a sane man, Stanton, is confined, whom Melmoth visits to offer exchange of destinies. Melmoth taunts him cruelly with his hopeless situation and prophecies that he, too, will go mad from despair. We hear Stanton's wild cry, echoed by a hundred yells like those of demons, but the others are stilled when the mad mother begins her lamentation,--the mother who has lost husband, home, children, reason, all, in the great London fire. At her appalling shrieks all other voices are hushed. Another impressive figure in the mad-house is the preacher who thinks himself a demon and alternately prays and blasphemes the Lord.

Charles Brockden Brown rivals Maturin in his terrible use of insanity for supernatural effect. The demented murderer in _Edgar Huntley_ gives an impression of mystery and awe that is unusual, while _Wieland_ with its religious mania produced by diabolic ventriloquism is even more impressive. Brown knew the effect of mystery and dread on the human mind and by slow, cumulative suggestion he makes us feel a creeping awe that the unwieldy machinery of pure Gothicism never could achieve. In studies of the morbid mentality he has few equals. For psychologic subtlety, for haunting horror, what is a crashing helmet or a dismembered ghost compared with Brown's Wieland? What are the rackings of monkish vindictiveness when set against the agonies of an unbalanced mind turned in upon itself? What exterior torture could so appeal to our sympathies as Wieland's despair, when, racked with religious mania, he feels the overwhelming conviction that the voice of God--which is but the fiendish trick of a ventriloquist--is calling him to murder his wife and children as a sacrifice to Deity? Such a tragedy of dethroned reason is intolerably powerful; the dark labyrinths of insanity, the gloom-haunted passages of the human mind, are more terrible to traverse than the midnight windings of Gothic dungeons. We feel that here is a man who is real, who is human, and suffering the extremity of anguish.

Perhaps the most hideous aspect of insanity in the terror novel is that of the lycanthrope in _The Albigenses_. The tragic wolf-man imagines himself to be a mad wolf and cowers in his lair, glaring with gleaming, awful eyes at all who approach him, gnawing at a human head snatched from the graveyard. There are various other uses of insanity in the novel of the period, but these will serve to illustrate. The relation between insanity and the supernatural has been marked in later literature.

* * * * *

The use of portents is a distinct characteristic of the horror romance. Calamity is generally preceded by some sign of the supernatural influence at work, some presentment of dread. Crime and catastrophe are forefelt by premonition of woe and accompaniment of horror. In _The Accusing Spirit_ supernatural thunder heralds the discovery of the corpse in its winding-sheet, and the monk says, "Yes, some dread discovery is at hand. These phenomena are miraculous; when the common laws of nature are violated, the awful portents are not sent in vain." In _The Romance of the Castle_, an anonymous story, a woman hears the clock strike two and announces that she will be dead at three.

This night an awful messenger sent from that dread tribunal from
whose power there is no appeal, by signs terrific foretold my fate
approached--foretold my final moment. "Catherine, behold!" was all
that issued from the specter's lips, but in its hand it held a
scroll which fixed my irrevocable doom, in letters which fascinated
while they appalled my sight.

She keeps her appointment promptly. Her experience might be compared with the vision which revealed his date of death to Amos Judd in James Mitchell's novel of that name, and to the foreknowledge in George Eliot's _The Lifted Veil_.

In _The Spirit of the Castle_,[29] the ghost of the old marquis knocks three times on the door preceding the arrival of the heir, and a black raven flies away as he enters. At the approach of the true heir to the estate from which he has been kept by fraud in _The Old English Baron_, the doors of the ancient castle fly open, upon which the servants cry, "The doors open of themselves to receive their master!" When Walpole's usurping Manfred sees the plumage on the miraculous casque shaken in concert with the brazen trumpet, he exclaims, "What mean these portents? If I have offended----" At this point the plumes are shaken still more strenuously, and the helmet is equally agitated when the great sword leaps in. Manfred cries to the apparition, "If thou art a true knight, thou wilt scorn to employ sorcery to carry thy power. If these omens be from heaven or hell, Manfred trusts to righteousness to protect his cause." But the omens bring bad luck to Manfred.

[29] By W. C. Proby.

There is much use of portent in _Melmoth_. The specter of the Wanderer appearing just before the old man's death predicts the spiritual doom of the dying. As the old uncle is almost breathing his last, he cries out, "What the devil brings you here?" at which the servants cross themselves and cry, "The devil in his mouth!" Melmoth, the Wanderer, is a walking portent of evil, for the priest is unable to pray in his presence, the communion bread turns viperous when he is there and the priest falls dead in the attempt to exorcise the fiendish power. Mysterious strains of music sound as heralds of disaster in several Gothic novels, as[30] where the inexplicable strains are heard only by the bride and groom preceding the strange tragedy that befalls them.

[30] In _Melmoth_.

At the approach of a supernatural visitant in the terror novel the fire always burns blue,--where there is a fire, and the great hearth usually affords ample opportunity for such portentous blaze. The thermometer itself tends to take a downward path when a ghost draws near. The three drops of blood shed from the statue's nose in _Otranto_, while ridiculed by the critics, are meant simply as a portent of evil. Prof. William Lyon Phelps points out[31] that the idea did not originate with Walpole, but was familiar as a superstition regarding premonition of ill, as referred to in Dryden's _Amboyna_, IV., 1. This instance may be compared with the much more skillfully handled omens in later drama, as Maeterlinck's and Ibsen's, particularly in _The Emperor and Galilean_. Various other portents of ill appear in Gothic fiction.[32]

[31] In his _Beginnings of the English Romantic Movement_, p.
108.

[32] Eliza Heywood's romance, _Lasselia: or, the Self-Abandoned_,
shows a similar portent, as Dr. George Frisbee Whicher notes in
his _The Life and Romances of Mrs. Eliza Heywood_.

Professor Ashley H. Thorndike, in his _Tragedy_, in speaking
of the plays of the Restoration dramatist John Banks (p. 273),
says: "Even the portents are reduced to a peculiar decorum:--

"Last night no sooner was I laid to rest
Than just three drops of blood fell from my nose!"

These three drops of blood probably have a much more extended
history in romance and the drama, which it would be interesting
to trace out.

The symbols of dread and the ghostly are used to good effect in the terror romance. The cumulative effects of supernatural awe are carefully built up by the use of gruesome accompaniments and suggestions. The triple veil of night, desolation, and silence usually hangs over the haunter and the haunted, predisposing to an uncanny psychosis. The Gothic ghost does not love the garish day, and the terror castle, gloomy even under the brightest sun, is of unimaginable darkness at night. Certain houses add especially to the impression of fear. At crucial moments the stroke of twelve or one o'clock is sure to be sounded appallingly by some abbey bell or castle clock or other rusty horologue. In addition to its services as time-keeper, the bell has a predisposition to toll.

Melancholy birds fly freely through these medieval tales, their dark wings adding to the general gloom. The principal specimens in the Gothic aviary are the common owl, the screech or "screeching" owl, the bat and the raven, while the flock is increased by anonymous "birds of prey," "night birds," "gloomy birds" and so forth. In _St. Oswyth_, as the murderer steals at midnight through the corridor toward his helpless victim, "the ill-boding bird of night that sat screeching on the battlement of the prison tower, whose harsh, discordant notes were echoed by the hoarse croaking of the ominous raven" terrifies but does not deter the villain.

The "moping, melancholy screech owl" is one of the prominent personages in _The Accusing Spirit_, emphasizing the moments of special suspense, as in _St. Oswyth_ as the wicked baron lies quaking in remorse for having caused a nun to be buried alive, the condemning cry of the doleful birds increases his mental anguish. Similar instances, with or without special nomenclature, occur in countless Gothic novels. Much use is also made of the dark ivy in its clambering over medieval architecture, shutting out the light and adding to the general gloom. The effect of horror is increased frequently by the location of the scenes in vaults and graveyards with all their gruesome accessories, and skulls are used as mural ornaments elsewhere, or as library appointments by persons of morbid temperament. Enough skeletons are exhumed to furnish as large a pile of bones as may be seen in certain antique churches in Italy and Mexico.

* * * * *

The element of mystery and mystification is another family feature of the novel of suspense. There is no proper thrill without the suspense attained by supernatural mystery. Even the novels that in the end carefully explain away all the ghostly phenomena on a natural basis strive with care to build up plots which shall contain astounding discoveries. Mrs. Radcliffe and Regina Maria Roche are noted in this respect. They have not the courage of their ghosts as such but, after they have thrilled the reader to the desired extent, they tear down the fabric of mystification that they have constructed and meticulously explain everything.

The black veil constitutes a favorite method of suspense with Mrs. Radcliffe. On various occasions Emily pales and quivers before a dark velvet pall uncannily swaying in the midnight wind, and on one such ramble she draws aside the curtain and finds a hideous corpse, putrid and dropping to decay, lying on a couch behind the pall. Many chapters further on she learns that this is a wax figure made to serve as penance for an ancient sinner. Again she shivers in front of the inky curtain, watching its fold move unaccountably, when a repulsive face peers out at her. She shrieks and flees, thinking she has seen a ghost, but discovers later that it is _only_ one of a company of bandits that have taken up their secret abode in the house. Black veils are in fashion in all of Mrs. Radcliffe's romances and she drapes them very effectively, while the arras waves likewise in other tales as well.

Mysterious manuscripts are another means of mystification. Mrs. Radcliffe's novels also abound in such scripts. In _The Romance of the Forest_ Adeline discovers a decaying paper which reads, "Oh, ye, whoever ye are, that chance or misfortune may direct to this spot, to you I speak, to you reveal the story of my wrongs and ask you to avenge them." This injunction to avenge wrongs is a frequent assignment, though rather much to ask in most cases. _The Spirit of the Castle_ has its dusty document that starts off: "Already my hand brandishes the dagger that shall close my eyes forever. (Mysterious manuscripts are not strong on grammar and make slight attempt to avoid mixed figures.) I will expire by the side of the clay-cold corpse of my Antoinette." In _St. Oswyth_ the paper says, "Beneath the deep foundations of the ruin the recorded mystery of the house of Oswyth lies buried from all mortal discovery." But the most impressive manuscript is the one in _Melmoth_ that records the wanderings of the agonized fate-harried man and those whose tortures he witnesses. A codicil to the old uncle's will advises his nephew against reading the document, but of course he does read it, since what are mouldy manuscripts in Gothic novels for, but to be deciphered by the hero or heroine?

Reference to dread secrets occur otherwise than in written form. In one favored tale,[33] we are told of "a mystery whose elucidation I now have a presentiment would fill me with horror!" In another,[34] Vincent on his death-bed speaks of "a horrid secret which labors at my breast," and the Abate speaks to the marquis of "a secret which shall make your blood run cold!" In _St. Oswyth_ we hear that "an impenetrable cloud of cureless sorrow hung over Sir Alfred and there was a dreadful mystery in his life destiny, unknown, as it should seem, to any one, and which he was unwilling should be questioned." The dungeoned prisoner in _Bungay Castle_ cries, "Were I at liberty to speak I could a tale unfold would tempt you to curse the world and even detest those claims which bind man to man. You would be ready to forego the ties of nature and shun society. Time must, it will develop the whole of this mystery!" And so on.

[33] Regina Maria Roche's _Clermont_.

[34] _A Sicilian Romance_, by Mrs. Radcliffe.

Inexplicable music forms one of the commonest elements of mystification in these romances. Its constant recurrence suggests that there must have been victrolas in medieval times. The music is chiefly instrumental, sometimes on a harp, sometimes on a violin, though occasionally it is vocal. Mrs. Radcliffe and Regina Maria Roche accompany the heroine's musings at all hours with doleful strains suspected to be of supernatural performance. The appearance of the devil masquerading as the Moor[35] is heralded by flute-like sounds, and in _The Spirit of Turrettville_ the specter plays on the harp and sings. The recurrence of the theme is so constant that it acquires the monotony of a tantalizing refrain.

[35] In _Zofloya_.

Groans and wails of unexplained origin also aid in building up suspense. In fact, a chorus of lugubriousness arises so that the Gothic pages groan as they are turned. Mysterious disappearances likewise increase the tension. Lights appear and vanish with alarming volition, doors open and close with no visible human assistance, and various other supernatural phenomena aid in Gothic mystery and mystification.

* * * * *

Although the ghosts and devils occupy the center of interest in the horrific romance, the human characters must not be lightly passed over. There are terror temperaments as well as Gothic castles, tempests, and scenes. The interfering father or other relative, brutal in threats and breathing forth slaughter, comes in frequently to oppress the hero or heroine into a loathed marriage. The hero is of Radcliffian gloom, a person of vague past and saturnine temper, admired and imitated by Byron. Sir Walter Raleigh,[36] says, "The man that Byron tried to be was the invention of Mrs. Radcliffe." The officials of the Inquisition and the dominant figures in convents and monasteries show fiendish cruelty toward helpless inmates, gloating in Gothic diabolism over their tortures. There are no restful human shades of gray, only unrelieved black and white characters. The Romantic heroine is a peculiar creature, much given to swooning and weeping, yet always impeccably clad in no matter what nocturnal emergency she is surprised. She tumbles into verse and sketching on slight provocation, but her worst vice is that of curiosity. In her search for supernatural horrors she wanders at midnight through apartments where she does not belong, breaks open boxes, desks, and secret hiding-places to read whatever letters or manuscripts she can lay her hands on, behaving generally like the yellow journalist of fiction.

[36] In _The English Novel_, p. 228.

The pages of the Gothic novel are smeared with gore and turn with ghostly flutter. The conversation is like nothing on land or sea or in the waters under the earth, for the tadpoles talk like Johnsonian whales and the reader grows restless under Godwinistic disquisitions. The authors are almost totally lacking in a sense of humor, yet the Gothic novel, taken as a whole, is one of the best specimens of unconscious humor known to English literature.

=Conclusion.= Perhaps the most valuable contribution that the Gothic school made to English literature is Jane Austen's inimitable satire of it, _Northanger Abbey_. Though written as her first novel and sold in 1797, it did not appear till after her death, in 1818. Its purpose is to ridicule the Romanticists and the book in itself would justify the terroristic school, but she was ahead of her times, so the editor feared to publish it. In the meantime she wrote her other satires on society and won immortality for her work which might never have been begun save for her satiety of medieval romances. The title of the story itself is imitative, and the well-known materials are all present, yet how differently employed! The setting is a Gothic abbey tempered to modern comfort; the interfering father is not vicious, merely ill-natured; the pursuing, repulsive lover is not a villain, only a silly bore. The heroine has no beauty, nor does she topple into sonnets nor snatch a pencil to sketch the scene, for we are told that she has no accomplishments. Yet she goes through palpitating adventures mostly modelled on Mrs. Radcliffe's incidents. She is hampered in not being supplied with a lover who is the unrecognized heir to vast estates, since all the young men in the county are properly provided with parents.

The delicious persiflage in which Jane Austen hits off the fiction of the day may be illustrated by a bit of conversation between two young girls.

"My dearest Catherine, what have you been doing with yourself all
the morning? Have you gone on with _Udolpho_?"

"Yes; I have been reading it ever since I woke, and I have got to
the black veil."

"Are you, indeed? How delightful! Oh, I would not tell you what is
behind that black veil for the world! Are you not wild to know?"

"Oh, yes, quite! What can it be? But do not tell me--I would not be
told on any account. I know it must be a skeleton; I am sure it is
Laurentina's skeleton. Oh, I am delighted with the book! I should
like to spend my whole life reading it, I assure you. If it had not
been to meet you, I would not have come away from it for the world."

"Dear creature! How much obliged I am to you; and when you have
finished _Udolpho_, we will read _The Italian_ together; and I have
made out a list of ten or twelve more of the same kind for you."

"Have you, indeed? How glad I am! What are they all?"

"I will read you their names directly; here they are, in my
pocket-book: _Castle of Wolfenbach_, _Clermont_, _Mysterious
Warnings_, _Necromancer of the Black Forest_, _Midnight Bell,
Orphan of the Rhine_, and _Horrid Mysteries_. These will last us
some time."

"Yes, pretty well; but are they all horrid? Are you sure they are
all horrid?"

"Yes, quite sure; for a particular friend of mine, a Miss
Andrews--a sweet girl, one of the sweetest creatures in the
world--has read every one of them!"

Mr. George Saintsbury[37] expresses himself as sceptical of this list as a catalogue of actual romances, stating that he has never read one of them and should like some other authority than Miss Andrews for their existence. He is mistaken in his doubt, however, since during the progress of this investigation four out of the eight have been identified as to authorship, and doubtless the others are lurking in some antique library. _Clermont_ is by Maria Regina Roche; _Mysterious Warnings_ by Mrs. Parsons, in London, 1796; _Midnight Bell_ by Francis Latham; and _Horrid Mysteries_ by Marquis Grosse, London, 1796.

[37] In his introduction to his pocket volume of _Tales of
Mystery_.

Jane Austen's stupid bore, John Thorpe, and Mr. Tilney, the impeccable, pedantic hero, add their comment to Gothic fiction, one saying with a yawn that there hasn't been a decent novel since _Tom Jones_, except _The Monk_, and the other that he read _Udolpho_ in two days with his hair standing on end all the time.

But the real cleverness of the work consists in the burlesque of Gothic experiences that Catherine, because of the excited condition of her mind induced by excess of romantic fiction, goes through with on her visit to Northanger Abbey. She explores secret wings in a search for horrors, only to find sunny rooms, with no imprisoned wife, not a single maniac, and never skeleton of tortured nun. Mr. Tilney's ironic jests satirize all the elements of Gothic romance. Opening a black chest at midnight, she finds a yellowed manuscript, but just as she is about to read it her candle flickers out. In the morning sunshine she finds that it is an old laundry list. The only result of her suspicious explorings is that she is caught in such prowlings by the young man whose esteem she wishes to win. He sarcastically assures her that his father is not a wife-murderer, that his mother is not immured in a dungeon, but died of a bilious attack. These delicately tipped shafts of ridicule riddle the armor of medievalism and give it at the same time a permanency of interest because of Jane Austen's treatment of it. The Gothic novel will be remembered, if for nothing else, for her parody of it.

But Miss Austen is not the only satirist of the _genre_. In _The Heroine_, Eaton Stannard Barrett gives an amusing burlesque of it. It is interesting to note in this connection that while _Northanger Abbey_ was written and sold in 1797 it was not published till 1818, and Barrett's book, while written later, was published in 1813.

In the introduction, an epistle, supposed to be endited by one Cherubina, says:

MOON, May 1, 1813.

Know that the moment that a mortal manuscript is written in a
legible hand and the word End or Finis attached thereto, whatever
characters happen to be sketched therein acquire the quality
of creating a soul or spirit which takes flight and ascends
immediately through the regions of the air till it arrives at the
moon, where it is embodied and becomes a living creature, the
precise counterpart of the literary prototype.

Know farther that all the towns, villages, rivers, hills, and
valleys of the moon also owe their origin to the descriptions which
writers give of the landscapes of the earth.

By means of a book, _The Heroine_, I became a living inhabitant
of the moon. I met with the Radclyffian and Rochian heroines, and
others, but they tossed their heads and told me pertly that I was a
slur on the sisterhood, and some went so far as to say that I had a
design on their lives.

Cherry, an unsophisticated country girl, becomes Cherubina after reading romantic tales. She decides that she is an heiress kept in unwarranted seclusion, and tells her father that he cannot possibly be her father since he is "a fat, funny farmer." She rummages in his desk for private papers, discovering a torn scrap that she interprets to her desires. She flies, leaving a note to tell the fleshy agriculturist that she is gone "to wander over the convex earth in search of her parents," with what comic experiences one may imagine. There is much discussion of the Gothic heroine, particularly those from Mrs. Radcliffe's and Regina Maria Roche's pages. The girl sprinkles her letters with verse. She passes through storms, explores deserted houses, and comes to what she thinks is her ancestral castle in London, but is told that it is Covent Garden Theatre. She decides that she is Nell Gwynne's niece and goes to that amiable person to demand all her property. She pokes around in the cellar to find her captive mother, and discovers an enormously fat woman playing with frogs, who drunkenly insists that she is her mother. Leaving that place in disgust she takes possession of somebody else's castle and orders it furnished in Gothic style, according to romance. She has the fat farmer shut up in the madhouse.

The book is very amusing, and a more pronounced parody on Gothicism than _Northanger Abbey_ because the whole story turns round that theme,--but, of course, it is not of so great literary value. It seems strange, however, that it is so little known. It burlesques every feature of terror fiction, the high-flown language, the excited oaths, the feudal furniture, the medieval architecture, the Gothic weather, the supernatural tempers, the spectral apparitions--one of which is so muscular that he struggles with the heroine as she locks him in a closet, after throwing rapee into his face, which makes him sputter in a mortal fashion. Cherubina finds a blade bone of mutton in some Gothic garbage and takes it for a bone of an ancestor. Radcliffian adjectives reel across the pages and the whole plays up in a delightful parody the ludicrous weaknesses and excesses of the terror fiction.

Likewise the Anti-Jacobin parodies the Gothic ghost and there is considerable satire directed at the whole Gothic _genre_ in Thomas Love Peacock's novel _Nightmare Abbey_.

In general, Gothicism had a tonic effect on English literature, and influenced the continental fiction to no small degree. By giving an interest and excitement gained from ghostly themes to fiction, the terror writers made romance popular as it had never been before and immensely extended the range of its readers. The novel has never lost the hold on popular fancy that the Gothic ghost gave to it. This interest has increased through the various aspects of Romanticism since then and in every period has found some form of supernaturalism on which to feed. True, the machinery of Gothicism creaks audibly at times, some of the specters move too mechanically, and there is a general air of unreality that detracts from the effect. The supernaturalism often lacks the naturalness which is necessary. Yet it is not fair to apply to these early efforts the same standards by which we judge the novels of to-day. While their range is narrow they do achieve certain impressive effects. Though the class became conventionalized to an absurd degree and the later examples are laughable, while a host of imitations made the type ridiculous, the Gothic novel has an undeniable force.

Besides the bringing of supernaturalism definitely into fiction, which is a distinct gain, we find other benefits as well. In Gothicism, if we examine closely, we find the beginnings of many forms of supernaturalism that are crude here, but that are to develop into special power in later novels and short stories. The terror novel excites our ridicule in some respects, yet, like other things that arouse a certain measure of laughter, it has great value. It seems a far cry from the perambulating statue in _Otranto_ to Lord Dunsany's jade gods that move with measured, stony steps to wreak a terrible vengeance on mortals who have defied them, but the connection may be clearly enough seen. The dreadful experiments by which Frankenstein's monster is created are close akin to the revolting vivisections of Wells's Dr. Moreau, or the operations described by Arthur Machen whereby human beings lose their souls and become diabolized, given over utterly to unspeakable evil. The psychic elements in _Zofloya_ are crudely conceived, yet suggestive of the psychic horrors of the work of Blackwood, Barry Pain, and Theodore Dreiser, for example. The animal supernaturalism only lightly touched on in Gothic novels is to be elaborated in the stories of ghostly beasts like those by Edith Wharton, Kipling, Ambrose Bierce, and others. In fact, the greater number of the forms of the supernatural found in later fiction and the drama are discoverable, in germ at least, in Gothic romance. The work of this period gave a tremendous impetus to the uncanny elements of romanticism and the effect has been seen in the fiction and drama and poetry since that time. Its influence on the drama of its day may be seen in Walpole's _Mysterious Mother_ and Lewis's _Castle Specter_. Thomas Lovell Beddoe's extraordinary tragedy, _Death's Jest Book_, while largely Elizabethan in materials and method, is closely related to the Gothic as well. It would be impossible to understand or appreciate the supernatural in the nineteenth-century literature and that of our own day without a knowledge of the Gothic to which most of it goes back. Like most beginnings, Gothicism is crude in its earlier forms, and conventional in the flood of imitations that followed the successful attempts. But it is really vital and most of the ghostly fiction since that time has lineally descended from it rather than from the supernaturalism of the epic or of the drama.