It is a truism that the supernatural in fiction should, as a general rule, be left in the vague. In the creepiest tale I ever read, the horror lay in this--THERE WAS NO GHOST! You may describe a ghost with all the most hideous features that fancy can suggest--saucer eyes, red staring hair, a forked tail, and what you please--but the reader only laughs. It is wiser to make as if you were going to describe the spectre, and then break off, exclaiming, "But no! No pen can describe, no memory, thank Heaven, can recall, the horror of that hour!" So writers, as a rule, prefer to leave their terror (usually styled "The Thing") entirely in the dark, and to the frightened fancy of the student. Thus, on the whole, the treatment of the supernaturally terrible in fiction is achieved in two ways, either by actual description, or by adroit suggestion, the author saying, like cabmen, "I leave it to yourself, sir."There are dangers in both methods; the description, if attempted, is usually overdone and incredible: the suggestion is apt to prepare us too anxiously for something that never becomes real, and to leave us disappointed.
Examples of both methods may be selected from poetry and prose.
The examples in verse are rare enough; the first and best that occurs in the way of suggestion is, of course, the mysterious lady in "Christabel.""She was most beautiful to see, Like a lady of a far countree."Who was she? What did she want? Whence did she come? What was the horror she revealed to the night in the bower of Christabel?
"Then drawing in her breath aloud Like one that shuddered, she unbound The cincture from beneath her breast.
Her silken robe and inner vest Dropt to her feet, and full in view Behold her bosom and half her side -A sight to dream of, not to tell!
O shield her! shield sweet Christabel!"
And then what do her words mean?
"Thou knowest to-night, and wilt know to-morrow, This mark of my shame, this seal of my sorrow."What was it--the "sight to dream of, not to tell?"Coleridge never did tell, and, though he and Mr. Gilman said he knew, Wordsworth thought he did not know. He raised a spirit that he had not the spell to lay. In the Paradise of Poets has he discovered the secret? We only know that the mischief, whatever it may have been, was wrought.
"O sorrow and shame! Can this be she -
The lady who knelt at the old oak tree?"
. . .
"A star hath set, a star hath risen, O Geraldine, since arms of thine Have been the lovely lady's prison.
O Geraldine, one hour was thine."
If Coleridge knew, why did he never tell? And yet he maintains that "in the very first conception of the tale, I had the whole present to my mind, with the wholeness no less than with the liveliness of a vision," and he expected to finish the three remaining parts within the year. The year was 1816, the poem was begun in 1797, and finished, as far as it goes, in 1800. If Coleridge ever knew what he meant, he had time to forget. The chances are that his indolence, or his forgetfulness, was the ****** of "Christabel," which remains a masterpiece of supernatural suggestion.
For description it suffices to read the "Ancient Mariner." These marvels, truly, are speciosa miracula, and, unlike Southey, we believe as we read. "You have selected a passage fertile in unmeaning miracles," Lamb wrote to Southey (1798), "but have passed by fifty passages as miraculous as the miracles they celebrate."Lamb appears to have been almost alone in appreciating this masterpiece of supernatural description. Coleridge himself shrank from his own wonders, and wanted to call the piece "A Poet's Reverie." "It is as bad as Bottom the weaver's declaration that he is not a lion, but only the scenical representation of a lion.
What new idea is gained by this title but one subversive of all credit--which the tale should force upon us--of its truth?" Lamb himself was forced, by the temper of the time, to declare that he "disliked all the miraculous part of it," as if it were not ALLmiraculous! Wordsworth wanted the Mariner "to have a character and a profession," perhaps would have liked him to be a gardener, or a butler, with "an excellent character!" In fact, the love of the supernatural was then at so low an ebb that a certain Mr. Marshall "went to sleep while the 'Ancient Mariner' was reading," and the book was mainly bought by seafaring men, deceived by the title, and supposing that the "Ancient Mariner" was a nautical treatise.
In verse, then, Coleridge succeeds with the supernatural, both by way of description in detail, and of suggestion. If you wish to see a failure, try the ghost, the moral but not affable ghost, in Wordsworth's "Laodamia." It is blasphemy to ask the question, but is the ghost in "Hamlet" quite a success? Do we not see and hear a little too much of him? Macbeth's airy and viewless dagger is really much more successful by way of suggestion. The stage makes a ghost visible and familiar, and this is one great danger of the supernatural in art. It is apt to insist on being too conspicuous.
Did the ghost of Darius, in "AEschylus," frighten the Athenians?