The Supernatural in Fiction - Page 2

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 making 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 all miraculous! 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? Probably they smiled at the imperial spectre. There is more discretion in Caesar's ghost--

"I think it is the weakness of mine eyes That shapes this monstrous apparition,"

says Brutus, and he lays no very great stress on the brief visit of the appearance. For want of this discretion, Alexandre Dumas's ghosts, as in "The Corsican Brothers," are failures. They make themselves too common and too cheap, like the spectre in Mrs. Oliphant's novel,