Text: Anonymous, “Mystery in Fiction and Real Life,” Saturday Review (London, UK), November 28, 1885, whole no. 1,570, 60:710-711

[page 710, column 2, continued:]

IT may at first seem strange that in a period like our own, when every line of life is more clearly marked and more deeply grooved than heretofore, when both our intellectual and our commercial enterprises have become, and are becoming, more mechanical from day to day, there should arise in England a late offspring of the romantic school, a number of persons who like to write, or at least to read, stories which are founded on the negation of commonplace — indeed, of all real life. On a second glance the matter does not seem so strange. Shepherds have always loved to sing of the fierce onset and the stolen bride, and soldiers of the charms of the quiet country-side, Every one seeks in his imagination the joys his own life does not supply. The child prefers fairy tales and battle-songs to the child idyls of Wordsworth. The pictures and sentiments which the latter afford are too familiar to attract him, his imagination wanders further afield — he desires to hear of heroes who accomplished a higher, a quite impossible destiny. He himself, as he fondly fancies, will be among them some day; so in preparation for the great future he girds his wooden sword to his tiny loins and goes forth to do battle with the turkey-cock. Ten years later he will have taken his place in the great treadmill of the world, and yet of an evening, when he lays his ledger or pushes his books aside, the old dreams will sometimes return — not only the blue eyes that watched him with such admiration when he boldly attacked the demon of the poultry yard, and which may still be not quite unattainable, but also the vision of such losses and such gains as in truth belong to Fairyland alone.

“With resignation life begins” and “Here or nowhere is America” were the morals Carlyle supposed that Goethe intended to draw from the history of Wilhelm Meister. This may have been the meaning of the German author, though the teaching of Dante, as great a poet, and, if we may venture to judge of those who rise so high above us, a greater man, was somewhat different; but still it remains true for most of us that where we are not is America. We have not resigned, and, though we no longer place any hope in the intervention of the Queen of the Fairies, or even in the sudden arrival of an unknown uncle from India, we still long, half unconsciously perhaps, for a region where dream might become reality, where we might live out our lives freely, untrammelled by the restrictions that confine us here, and be more truly ourselves, both for good and evil, than we are or ever can become in reality.

There is therefore something within us that responds quite naturally to stories of ghosts, fairies, and magic powers; and the more strictly regulated our life is the more likely we are to allow our imaginations to respond to the inward craving, much as Heine's little Dutch Jew indulged in a dream flirtation with the Queen of Sheba, two or three of Solomon's wives, or the fair Susanna, who on this occasion alone appeared without the Elders, whenever his own wife made herself particularly disagreeable. We have grown weary of surroundings which may be profitable, but are certainly monotonous. So The Earthly Paradise came as an emancipation to many of us; it gave us something better to dream of than the pettiness of our daily lives, The Land East of the San and West of the Moon is not laid down on any chart, and yet we feel it is our rightfulhome. Why will not the Swan-Maidens come to us, who would certainly behave so much better than those whom they visited ?

This is one of the characteristics of such fantastic stories; the reader is always inclined to identify himself with the hero. He is impatient of his blunders, he resents his follies with the sense of an almost personal disgrace, Who ever had such a feeling with respect to Tom Jones, Uncle Toby, or even Clive and Ethel Newcome, all of whom are nearer, and at least the three last dearer, to us than any child of Queen Mab can ever be? These [page 711:] have all a distinct individuality; they cannot act otherwise than they do. The hard world that closes us in encircles them also, a shilling is a shilling to them as well as to us, They are our own flesh and blood, and therefore they cannot set us quite free from the sordid cares to which they too are subject. Perhaps a little indistinctness of drawing is necessary in the hero of a marvellous story in order that for the time we may live and triumph or fail and be destroyed in him. For the time ; of course to-morrow we shall have our daily task to do and he will be forgotten.

Edgar Poe perceived this either consciously or unconsciously more clearly than any other writer of the kind with whom we are acquainted. The joy of the emancipation from reality does not necessarily depend on our being introduced to realms of beauty and pleasure ; terror and even horror the same power if only the charm can be brought to bear, he in each of us there is a capacity of pain and evil as well as of gladness and beneficence which the heavy atmosphere of earth blights and dwarfs. We are neither better nor worse, but only smaller and less important persons than we should be if we possessed all the powers of Merlin. Poe's imagination was essentially of a gloomy cast; at least when dealing with the mysterious he is always most successful when his subject is tragic. His best, the analytical, stories hardly touch the emotions at all; and his “Assignation,” in some respects the greatest of all his tales, is such a mixture of the bitter and the sweet that it clings to one's memory like an old ballad; but as soon as he deals with, or even verges on, the region behind the veil, he finds himself in the presence only of dark and hostile powers. He dwells among the graves; all his — is necromancy. But, then, what necromancy it is.

If we endeavour to fathom the depths of his art — and more than any other man who has adopted the same line and can be named in the same breath with him, if we except Clemens von Brentano, who wrought in a different material by different tales, and for a quite different from his — he was a conscious artist — we shall detect two principles which regulate the whole of his composition and his treatment when he is at his best. He never bases is story on a mere fancy. He seizes upon some such vague impression or emotion as comes to us all at times, and is banished as soon as it comes by reason or conscience, the shudder that an unexpected appearance in the twilight may cause, the gloom that falls upon most of us now and then, the sudden instinct of vengeance which is crushed underfoot as soon as we become conscious of it — these and such feelings Poe seizes before they have time to pass away and be forgotten, he embodies them in a distinct form, under his treatment they become the “ Black Cat,” “The Fall of the House of Usher,” “William Wilson,” and “The Cask of Amontillado.” Always the sentiment embodied in his story is one that all human beings have felt, and in his treatment he constantly retouches in a new and unexpected way the chord which he knows must thrill in his reader's heart. By this means he asserts and exercises a strong influence over — imagination which it is difficult, sometimes impossible, to ne.

This, however, would not alone entitle him to the position he may justly claim in literature. When he has grasped the vague and evanescent feeling, he at once embodies it in the most concrete and stable forms. His characters are sharply drawn and perfectly consistent. All their motives are clear and convincing; the more incredible the action becomes the more carefully realistic are all the details. This is art; but he did not reject artifice, if only it could lend reality to his story. He frequently states facts which he professes himself unable to explain, and insists on difficulties he cannot solve, though the intelligent reader at once grasps the true cause or reason; and, while thus feeling himself superior to the author, he lends a more implicit belief to his tale. There can be little doubt that Poe would have employed this method even more frequently than he has done if he could have counted on a more highly cultivated audience.

Edgar Allan Poe therefore holds his readers by a twofold band, the sentiment of his stories appeals to our unconscious nature, to feelings that rarely come to us in the broad light of day or on the market-place, but which, when thus recalled to memory, we cannot disown ; and then, again, he appeals to our reason and experience with such arguments as they cannot refuse to hear, and for the moment to assent to. If we were writing a criticism even on these mysterious tales of his, there would be much more to say in his behalf. The way in which the spiritual and material ruin of the chief characters advance hand-in-hand in such stories as “William Wilson” and the “Black Cat” is beyond all praise; and here, at least, a truly tragic note has been struck. Nothing, again, can show a greater mastery over the resources of his somewhat limited though powerful art than a comparison between the dim, formless terror and pathos of his poems and the distinct, sharply-detailed characters and incidents of his tales, both so different, and yet each in its own way so effective.

Mr. Fitz-James O’Brien is a writer of an altogether different cast. He is less powerful than Poe, but more attractive. The earlier writer holds one's attention as if with a vice, the later detains it with a touch as soft as that which a girl might lay on her lover's hand. He has none of Poe's psychological depth and but little of his peculiar realistic power. His most weird conception, that of a palpable but invisible ghost which dies of hunger, and whose cast is taken, is striking, novel, and impressive; but it appeals to no dim memory, to no secret dread of ourselves or the outside world that has haunted us since our earliest childhood. On the other hand, it is far more original than any [column 2:] of Poe's horrors. Indeed, O’Brien's fancy was altogether more fertile. This is his great power; he can create supernatural beings, while other writers who have trodden the same path, even. Hoffmann, have generally been content to repaint and to dress anew the somewhat battered puppets of popular superstition. Animula, the Wondersmith, and Piou-Lu are entirely new creations, They are akin to the witches and fairies of other days, but Fairyland and the Blocksberg know them not. They have started unexpectedly into being.

But after all it is little more than a half-being. Even “the Thing,” to which we have already referred, and which is certainly the most original and ghastly, though not, perhaps, the most powerful, of his conceptions, is wanting in that impression of inevitable reality which all Poe's characters and incidents possess. A second glance at the story shows why this is the case. The reference to Mr. A —— has nothing to do with the further history of the haunted house; the opium-smoking only detracts from the effect the tale would otherwise have. The more commonplace the man who through so strange an experience was, the more striking the narrative would appear. Hoffmann, it is true, indulges in such explanations; but it is only when he desires to leave the reader in uncertainty as to whether he is recording the dream of a madman or events that have actually happened. He does not pretend to have taken a cast of the Sandmann; he does not even provide a portrait of Seraphina. Almost all Mr. O’Brien's supernatural stories are marked by a similar want of imaginative tact. “The Wondersmith,” for instance, contains the material for several tales, each of which would have been more powerful than the one as it stands, if only it had been worked out with the rigid self-consistency of Poe. The murder in “The Diamond Lens,” on the other hand, is altogether admirable. The absence of all moral feeling on the part of the criminal is in entire accordance with the spirit of the story, and could only have been treated thus by a man of very unusual imaginative powers. In a word, O'Brien seems to us to have possessed a more fertile fancy than Poe, but to have been wanting both in his concentration and literary skill.

In our own days Robert Louis Stevenson has produced effects similar to those of the authors we have mentioned by entirely different means. There are no supernatural powers in the “Suicide Club,” or the “Rajah's Diamond,” but the impression which the two stories make is essentially the same as that which Hoffmann, Poe, and O’Brien aimed at; and here as with Poe the almost commonplace realism of the single scenes intensifies it, though Mr. Stevenson the irony on which the critics of the German romantic school insisted so strongly, and in which the other writers we have mentioned are somewhat wanting.

It will be seen from the above that we are by no means inclined to condemn the stories of this class which have of late been so favourably received. They supply a real want in our modern intellectual life, But what shall we say of those who cannot distinguish fact from fiction, of the magicians of the lawn-tennis ground and the wizards of the tea-table?

would probably be the best advice to the reader, But these strange figures remind us of another poet and a sunnier region. While Goethe was still young, Merck reproached him with the extravagances of some of his associates. The youthful author replied that his own follies were as great as theirs. “Yes,” was the answer; “but you always find in your excesses the suggestion for some new or drama; they seek in the new poems and dramas the suggestion for some excess which may make them interesting in their own eyes and those of their neighbours'.”