>>Reverend father, replied Magdalen, hast thou never heard that there are spirits, powerful to rend the walls of a castle asunder when once admitted, which yet cannot enter the house unless they are invited, nay, dragged over the threshold.<< The most picturesque use of this belief occurs in Coleridge's beautiful and tantalizing fragment of >>Christabel<< (15th passage, pag. 109), where she conducts into her fathers castle a mysterious and malevolent being under the guise of a distressed female stranger: >> The lady sank, belike thro' pain, And Christabel with might and main Over the threshold of the gate : Then the lady rose again, And moved as she were not in pain.<<< The Bethrothed. >>The spirit of the haunted chamber is wisely left unexplained: she has certainly a tendency to follow the White Lady of Avenel. It would be interesting to know, whether Sir Walter borrowed this idea of a mysterious room, which each woman of the family must visit once in her lifetime, from the traditions of Glammis-Castle. There, according to a widely circulated legend, is a secret chamber, which the heir must enter once, on attaining his majority. In 1793 Scott passed a night at Glammis, and this was one of the occasions when he »experienced that degree of superstitious awe which his countrymen call eerie«.* Scott, however, says nothing of this legend akin to that of the Bahr-Geist. In his notes he only points out that the idea was taken from a passage in the Memoirs of Lady Faushand. Some resemblance to the >>Monk«< is perhaps to be suggested in the stirring episode of Eveline's immurement in the >>damp, earthy, subterranean apartment (page 327), where her hands, which groped round, encountered. . . . the smouldering bones of the dead.<< Woodstock. >> On February 23, 1820 Scott remarks that Ballantyne complains of imitations of Mrs Radcliffe in Woodstock. The scenes in secret passages, the viewless shapes that syllable Everards name, the supposed apparitions in the royal lodge were offensive to the originality of James<<.** Assuredly Ballantyne is right, as the following few passages may show: I 202. >>A loud clap of thunder, or a noise as formidable, rang through the Lodge .<<< I 257. >>He was awakened from sleep by a slow and solemn strain of Music, which died away at a distance *) Lang in introduction, pag. XII. He felt that undefined and thrilling species of tremor which attends a sense that danger is near, and an uncertainty concerning its cause and character.... He feared he knew not what.<< I 261. »><A wild strain of melody, beginning at a distance, and growing louder as it advanced, seemed to pass from room to room, from cabinet to gallery, from hall to bower, through the deserted and dishonoured ruins of the ancient residence of so many sovereigns; and, as it approached, no soldier gave alarm, nor did any of the numerous guests of various degrees, who spent an unpleasant and terrified night in that ancient mansion, seem to dare to announce to each other the inexplicable cause of apprehension.<<< The same favourite topics of Mrs Radcliffe are also suggested by the whole mechanism and the appearances and disappearances of the heroine in >>Anne of Geierstein.<<< Zum Schluss ist es mir eine angenehme Pflicht, meinem hochverehrten Lehrer Herrn Professor Dr. F. Lindner für das meiner Arbeit entgegengebrachte Interesse meinen wärmsten Dank auszusprechen. |