unable to hit upon a plot, but one evening after hearing a discussion of Erasmus Darwin’s attempts to create life by laboratory experiments, she had an idea in a half waking dream. She says:

And from this she wrote her story of the man-monster.

The relation of dreams to the uncanny tale is interesting. Dreams and visions, revelatory of the past and prophetic of the future, played an important part in the drama (as they are now widely used in motion-picture scenarios) and the Gothic novel continues the tradition. It would be impossible to discover in how many instances the authors were subconsciously influenced in their choice of material by dreams. The presaging dreams and visions attributed to supernatural agency appear frequently in Gothic fiction. The close relation between dreams and second sight in the terror novel might form an interesting by-path for investigation. Dream-supernaturalism becomes even more prominent in later fiction and contributes passages of extraordinary power of which De Quincey’s Dream-Fugue may be mentioned as an example.

The germinal idea for Melmoth, the Wanderer was contained in a paragraph from one of the author’s own sermons, which suggested a theme for the story of a doomed, fate-pursued soul.

True, the theme of such devil-pact had appeared in folk-tales and in the drama previously, notably in Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus, but Maturin here gives the idea a dramatic twist and psychologic poignancy by making a human being the one to seek to buy another’s soul to save his own. A mortal, cursed with physical immortality, ceaselessly harried across the world by the hounds of fate, forever forced by an irresistible urge to make his impitiable offer to tormented souls, and always meeting a tragic refusal, offers dramatic possibilities of a high order and Maturin’s story has a dreadful power.

Clara Reeve’s avowed purpose in writing The Old English Baron was to produce a ghost story that should be more probable and realistic than Walpole’s. She stated that her book was the literary offspring of the earlier romance, though Walpole disclaimed the paternity. She deplored the violence of the supernatural machinery that tended to defeat its own impressiveness and wished to avoid that danger in her work, though she announced: “We can conceive and allow for the appearance of a ghost.” Her prim recipe for Romantic fiction required, “a certain degree of the marvelous to excite the attention; enough of the manners of real life to give an air of probability to the work; and enough of the pathetic to engage the heart in its behalf.” But her ingredients did not mix well and the result was rather indigestible though devoured by hungry readers of her time.

Mrs. Anne Radcliffe, that energetic manipulator of Gothic enginery, wrote because she had time that was wasting on her hands,—which may be an explanation for other and later literary attempts. Her journalist husband was away till late at night, so while sitting up for him she wrote frightful stories to keep herself from being scared. During that waiting loneliness she doubtless experienced all those nervous terrors that she describes as being undergone by her palpitating maidens, whose emotional anguish is suffered in midnight wanderings through subterranean passages and ghosted apartments. There is one report that she went mad from over-much brooding on mormo, but that is generally discredited.

Matthew Gregory Lewis was impelled to write The Monk by reading the romances of Walpole and Mrs. Radcliffe, together with Schiller’s Robbers, which triple influence is discernible in his lurid tale. He defended the indecency of his book by asserting that he took the plot from a story in The Guardian,[8] ingeniously intimating that plagiarized immorality is less reprehensible than original material. Shelley, in his turn, was so strongly impressed by Lewis’s Monk, and Mrs. Dacre’s Zofloya in writing his Zastrozzi, and by William Godwin’s St. Leon in his St. Irvyne, or The Rosicrucian, that the adaptation amounts to actual plagiarism. Even the titles show imitation. In writing to Godwin, Shelley said he was “in a state of intellectual sickness” when he wrote these stories, and no one who is familiar with the productions will contradict him in the matter.

The influence of the crude scientific thought and investigation of the eighteenth century is apparent in the Gothic novels. Frankenstein, as we have seen, was the outcome of a Romantic, Darwinian dream, and novels by Godwin, Shelley, and Maturin deal with the theme of the elixir of life. William Beckford’s Vathek has to do with alchemy, sorcery, and other phases of supernatural science. Zofloya, Mrs. Dacre’s diabolical Moor, performs experiments in hypnotism, telepathy, sorcery, and satanic chemistry. And so in a number of the imitative and less known novels of the genre science plays a part in furnishing the material. There is much interest in the study of the relation of science to the literature of supernaturalism in the various periods and the discoveries of modern times as furnishing plot material. The Gothic contribution to this form of ghostly fiction is significant, though slight in comparison with later developments.