•272 



discovi:hy 



penalties of inferiority, if \vc persist in not allowing supe- 

 riority to reap any thinp like the full rewards of superiority, 

 we are assuredly making for trouble. So some brave men 

 would return to Lycurgan nietho<ls, to Plato's purgation 

 of the State. But we cannot do this wisely, we have not 

 knowledge enough ; and we would not if we could. . . . 

 We must juilgf physical operations not only in them- 

 selves, but in the light of biological ideals, and biological 

 operations in the light of the psychological, and psycho- 

 logical changes in the light of the social, which includes 

 the ethical." 



Readers who like this book might read along with it 

 other bt^oks oti the bearing of material progress upon life. 

 Among such are Sir Richard Gregory's Discovery (Mac- 

 millan), Professor Soddy's Science and Life (John Murray), 

 and Science and the Nation, published by the Cambridge 

 University Press. 



The Talc' oj Terror : A Study oj the Gothic Romance. 



Bv Edith Birkhe.\d, M.A. (Constable & Co., 



Ltd., 15s.) 

 The emotion of fear is based on one of man's primarj' 

 instincts, that of self-preservation. It is little wonder, 

 then, that from the earliest known days of their art story- 

 tellers have concentrated their efforts on exciting this 

 emotion in their audience, and there are few novels wTitten 

 to-day which do not somewhere or other in their pages 

 inspire ns with suspense or fear in order to add zest and 

 colour to their plots. But it is a rare fashion in story- 

 telling when the whole of the plot is subordinated to 

 arousing fear, and every other emotion is used merely to 

 obtain this single result. Such a fashion came into full 

 swing in the second half of the eighteenth century, and it 

 is with this fashion that Miss Birkhead deals in the most 

 exhaustive and scholarly treatise yet devoted to the sub- 

 ject. 



The great mass of literature which this fashion brought 

 to birth is now dead. Had it not ceased in later years to 

 produce those " sensations of terror " so dear to the hearts 

 of eighteenth-century readers, there might have been a 

 chance for its continued existence as a classic literature of 

 decadence. Its only interest to the mind of the twentieth 

 century lies in its psychological significance, and we feel 

 that this has not been sufficiently examined by Miss Birk- 

 head. It is very noticeable that, as the first impulse of the 

 Renaissance in England began to lose power, a greater 

 earnestness, gradually deepening into gloom, took the place 

 of the gaiety and joie de vivrc that had flooded life and 

 thought in the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries. 

 The earliest important literary echoes of this are to be 

 foimfl in Marlowe's tragedies and Shakespeare's tragedies 

 and sonnets ; depression deepens and terror increases 

 in the drama of Webster, IBeaumont and Fletcher, and 

 Tourneur ; the strengthened Puritanism of the Common- 

 wealth becomes reflected in the cold, gloomy religiousness 

 of Milton, and it survives the Restoration in the uncertain 

 introspective poetry of John Donne and other writers. 

 Eighteenth-century thought and literature, with its 

 materialism, its common sense, and its drv wit, is a 



reaction to all this; but it is only a superficial reaction, 

 and we can detect beneath it, in such phenomena as the 



truly horrid novel " and its pwpular reception, the 

 irresistible tendencies which were affecting and shaping 

 our national mentality. The very fact that so many of 

 these novels cultivate a supernatural terror seems to us 

 to be an unconscious protest against the unspirituality 

 of the age, to be an attempt to fill its place, as it were ; 

 while their romantic qualities cry out against its prosaic- 

 ness. Moreover, in the dearth of adventure and war 

 during the eighteenth century, the novel of terror created 

 the needed diversion from humdrum contentment, and 

 it had time to develop the impossibilities of its far-fetched 

 romanticism before the nineteenth century arrived, with 

 the rise of science and a popular mentality whose tastes 

 were for a more realistic crystallisation of life in literature. 



One of the most peculiar "signs of the times" was the 

 cultivation of the mood of " melancholy." This has, we 

 feel, never been sufficiently examined in connection with 

 the Gothic romance and novel of terror, many of whose 

 writers tell us in their prefaces that they wish to inspire 

 us with feelings of " melancholy." Our belief is that 

 it was a concomitant of the increasing earnestness and 

 introspection, which we have mentioned, that began to 

 appear in the late fifteenth century, and that its main 

 origins lie in Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy (1621) and 

 in Milton's // Penseroso (1632). From then onwards we 

 find increasing references amongst writers to the word 

 which appears to have been descriptive of a mood of 

 depression, usually experienced in loneliness— a somewhat 

 artificially created " sweet sadness." By the middle of the 

 eighteenth century nearly every poetaster tried his hand 

 at an ode to Melancholy, or at verses which were designed 

 to produce the effect of it. This is how Dr. Johnson's 

 friend, Elizabeth 'Carter, apostrophises it : 



" Come, Melancholy, silent pow'r. 

 Companion of my lonely hour. 



To sober thought confin'd ! 

 Thou sweetly sad ideal guest. 

 In all thy soothing charms confest. 



Indulge my pensive mind." 



Ogilvie addresses it in very similar notes, the poet Gray 

 refers to it as a " pleasant sadness " in one of his letters, 

 and his famous Elegy in a Country Churchyard (1750) is 

 a typical though outstandingly good example of the 

 pathetic and sentimental poetry of the later eighteenth 

 century, other fairly well-known types of which may be 

 found in Young's Xight Thoughts, Blair's elegies, Bowles' 

 Sonnets, certain of Burns' poems, and even as late as in 

 the youthful Shelley's productions. Churchyards, rotting 

 corpses, yew trees, the weirdness and solitude of moonlit 

 wastes, are the invariable stage-scenery of these pwems, 

 which all aim at producing the sensation of melancholy. 



The aims of the novelists of terror were generally 

 identical with those of the pathetic poets. The methods 

 of the novelists were various, and Miss Birkhead has been 

 careful to distinguish the different schools. The earliest 

 was that of the Gothic romance started by Horace Walpole 

 in The Castle ofOtranto, whose far-fetched supernaturalism 



