The Tale of Terror

for sunrise and sunset, storm-winds and thunder, the origin of the earth and of mankind. The tales men told in the face of thes

B.C. The story of the Flood, as related on the eleventh tablet of the Gilgamesh epic, abounds in supernatural terror. To seek the gift of immortality from his ancestor, Ut-napishtim, the hero undertakes a weary and perilous journey. He passes the mountain gu

n the gods were afraid ... They drew back, they climbed up into the he

before Gilgamesh an apparition of his friend, Eabani, recalls the impress

fatal craft and sinks her in the sea, and the cannibal bridegroom, outwitted at last by the artfulness of one of his brides, appear in the folk-lore of many lands. Through every century there glide uneasy spirits, groaning for vengeance. Andrew Lang[2] mentions the existence of a papyrus fragment, found attached to a wooden statuette, in which an ancient Egyptian scribe addresses a letter to the Khou, or spirit, of his dead wife, beseeching her not to haunt him. One of the ancestors of the savage were-wolf, who figures in Marryat's Phantom Ship, may perhaps be discovered in Petronius' Supper of Trimalchio. The descent of Bram Stoker's infamous vampire Dracu

s and ballads that existed before literature became an art and that lived on side by side with it, vitalis

nd to the da

still Fie,

blood of a B

tation from the R

so, but, indeed, God for

visit of the three dead sailor sons "in earthly flesh and blood" to the wife of Usher's well, Sweet William's Ghost, the rescue of Tarn L

days and fo

ugh red bloo

neither s

he roaring

madas, the ghost of a merchant, whose corpse the knight had duteously redeemed from the hands of creditors, succours him at need. The shadow of terror lurks even amid the beauty of Spenser's fairyland. In the windings of its forests we come upon dark caves, mysterious castles and huts, from which there start fearsome creatures like Despair or the giant Orgoglio, hideous hags like Occasion, wicked witches and enchanters or frightful beings like the ghostly Maleger, who wore as his helmet a dead man's skull and rode upon a tiger swift as the wind. The Elizabethan dramatists were fascinated by the terrors of the invisible world

ment of terror to Christian's journey to the Celestial City. The widespread belief in witches and spirits to which Browne and Burton and many others bear witness in the seventeenth century, lived on in the eighteenth century, although the attitude of the "polite" in the age of reason was ostensibly incredulous and superior. A scene in one of the Spectator essays illustrates pleasantly the state of

or walked over a churchyard by moonlight; and others, who had

es the ridiculous superstitions which prevailed in his day;[4] and Sir Roger de Coverley frankly confesses his belief

n whatever shape he is pleased to appear in, he is not really qualifie

e ghostly Mrs. Veal in her "scoured" silk. John Wesley declares stoutly that he is convinced of the literal truth of the story of one Elizabeth Hobson, who professed to have been visited on several occasions by supernatural beings. He upho

witches and apparitions, as mere old wives' fables. I am sorry for it; and I willingly take this opportunity of entering

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 a

s little difficulty, for he that forsakes the probable may always find the marvellous. And it has little use; we

We are often thrown into a state of trepidation simply through the power

it was really a ghost, it could do one no harm at such a distance, and in

power to thrill and alarm, and gradually worked its way back into literature. Although Gray and Collins do not venture far beyond the bound

e on the Superstit

Home, the author

ming hide

isle, the gift

ntry cave with F

s of Uist's dar

sight such drea

vision oft as

wintry strath

liding ghosts

teenth century, but in the poem itself throws himself whole-heartedly into the hopes and f

s, 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 imaginati

haps based on a Scottish legend, learnt at the ing

ld houlet-h

serted by

ose himself, wh

at haunts auld

ng that dea

read in hell's

s and w

y the terrors that assail the reveller

birks and

Charlie brak

he whins, and

s fand the m

e thorn, ab

s mither han

rces 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.

him

emèd ther

ty 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

ace! as holy

th a waning m

ling for her

s often mysterious an

the Gothic hall in

use was heard

lamp was flicker

with horseman,

the besieging

pets rose along

t-maiden,

ce some penan

istress, or th

n Isabella of Lo

ghostly

t-gusts sepulchr

a rejected stanza of the Ode on Me

d build a bark of

hantom gibbe

together for a

t, blood-stai

rudder be a

yet still ha

arge uprootings

sa, certes y

the Mela

s not to be found am

h Beauty-Beauty

e hand is eve

ng ad

ouch the memory of the vision which haunts the knight,

kings and

, death-pale

La Belle Dam

ee in t

starv'd lip

d warning

e and foun

old hill

Scott and Lewis gloried in the gruesome details and spirited rhythm of the ballad, and in their supernatural poems wish to startle and terrify, not to awe, their readers. Those who revel in phosphorescent lights and in the rattle of the skeleton are apt to o'erleap themselves; and Scott's Glenfinlas, Lewis's Alonzo the Brave and the Fair Imoge

met at this period not by the novel, but by oral tradition and by such works as Galland's translation of The Arabian Nights, the Countess D'Aulnoy's collection of fairy tales, Perrault's Contes de ma Mère Oie. Chapbooks setting forth mediaeval legends of "The Wandering Jew," the "Demon Frigate," or "Dr. Faustus," and interspersed with anecdotes of freaks, monsters and murderers, satisfied the craving for excitement among humbler readers.[8] Smollett, who, in his

who eagerly explored Walpole's Gothic castle and who took pleasure in Miss Reeve's well-trained ghost, had previously enjoyed the thrill of chimney corner legends. The idea of the gigantic apparition was derived, no doubt, from the old legend of the figure seen by Wallace on the field of battle. The limbs, strewn carelessly about the staircase and the gallery of the castle, belong to a giant, very lik

oncealing nothing worse than one discarded wife, emaciated and dispirited, but still alive. The ghost-story, which Ludovico reads in the haunted chamber of Udolpho, is described by Mrs. Radcliffe as a Proven?al tale, but is in reality common to the folklore of all countries. The restless ghost, who yearns for the burial of his corpse, is as ubiquitous as the Wandering Jew. In the Iliad he appears as the shade of Patroclus, pleading with Achilles for his funeral rites. According to a letter of the younger Pliny,[11] he haunts a house in Athens, clanking his chains. He is found in every land, in every age. His feminine counterpart presented herself to Dickens' nurse requiring her bones, which were under a glass-case, to be "interred with every undertaking solemnity up to twenty-four pound ten, in another particular place."[12] Melmoth the Wanderer, when he becomes the wooer of Immalee, seems almost like a reincarnation of the Demon Lover. The wandering ball of fire that illuminates the dusky recesses of so many Gothic abbeys is but another manifestation of the Fate-Moon, which shines, foreboding death, after Thorgunna's