THE SUPERNATURAL OMNIBUS Read Online Free PDF

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