Complete Works of Bram Stoker

by Bram Stoker

  My father led the stranger aside, and the General followed. I know that he had led them out of hearing, that he might relate my case, and I saw them glance often quickly at me, as the discussion proceeded.

  My father came to me, kissed me again and again, and leading me from the chapel, said:

  “It is time to return, but before we go home, we must add to our party the good priest, who lives but a little way from this; and persuade him to accompany us to the schloss.”

  In this quest we were successful: and I was glad, being unspeakably fatigued when we reached home. But my satisfaction was changed to dismay, on discovering that there were no tidings of Carmilla. Of the scene that had occurred in the ruined chapel, no explanation was offered to me, and it was clear that it was a secret which my father for the present determined to keep from me.

  The sinister absence of Carmilla made the remembrance of the scene more horrible to me. The arrangements for the night were singular. Two servants, and Madame were to sit up in my room that night; and the ecclesiastic with my father kept watch in the adjoining dressing room.

  The priest had performed certain solemn rites that night, the purport of which I did not understand any more than I comprehended the reason of this extraordinary precaution taken for my safety during sleep.

  I saw all clearly a few days later.

  The disappearance of Carmilla was followed by the discontinuance of my nightly sufferings.

  You have heard, no doubt, of the appalling superstition that prevails in Upper and Lower Styria, in Moravia, Silesia, in Turkish Serbia, in Poland, even in Russia; the superstition, so we must call it, of the Vampire.

  If human testimony, taken with every care and solemnity, judicially, before commissions innumerable, each consisting of many members, all chosen for integrity and intelligence, and constituting reports more voluminous perhaps than exist upon any one other class of cases, is worth anything, it is difficult to deny, or even to doubt the existence of such a phenomenon as the Vampire.

  For my part I have heard no theory by which to explain what I myself have witnessed and experienced, other than that supplied by the ancient and well-attested belief of the country.

  The next day the formal proceedings took place in the Chapel of Karnstein.

  The grave of the Countess Mircalla was opened; and the General and my father recognised each his perfidious and beautiful guest, in the face now disclosed to view. The features, though a hundred and fifty years had passed since her funeral, were tinted with the warmth of life. Her eyes were open; no cadaverous smell exhaled from the coffin. The two medical men, one officially present, the other on the part of the promoter of the inquiry, attested the marvelous fact that there was a faint but appreciable respiration, and a corresponding action of the heart. The limbs were perfectly flexible, the flesh elastic; and the leaden coffin floated with blood, in which to a depth of seven inches, the body lay immersed.

  Here then, were all the admitted signs and proofs of vampirism. The body, therefore, in accordance with the ancient practice, was raised, and a sharp stake driven through the heart of the vampire, who uttered a piercing shriek at the moment, in all respects such as might escape from a living person in the last agony. Then the head was struck off, and a torrent of blood flowed from the severed neck. The body and head was next placed on a pile of wood, and reduced to ashes, which were thrown upon the river and borne away, and that territory has never since been plagued by the visits of a vampire.

  My father has a copy of the report of the Imperial Commission, with the signatures of all who were present at these proceedings, attached in verification of the statement. It is from this official paper that I have summarized my account of this last shocking scene.

  XVI

  Conclusion

  I write all this you suppose with composure. But far from it; I cannot think of it without agitation. Nothing but your earnest desire so repeatedly expressed, could have induced me to sit down to a task that has unstrung my nerves for months to come, and reinduced a shadow of the unspeakable horror which years after my deliverance continued to make my days and nights dreadful, and solitude insupportably terrific.

  Let me add a word or two about that quaint Baron Vordenburg, to whose curious lore we were indebted for the discovery of the Countess Mircalla’s grave.

  He had taken up his abode in Gratz, where, living upon a mere pittance, which was all that remained to him of the once princely estates of his family, in Upper Styria, he devoted himself to the minute and laborious investigation of the marvelously authenticated tradition of Vampirism. He had at his fingers’ ends all the great and little works upon the subject.

  “Magia Posthuma,” “Phlegon de Mirabilibus,” “Augustinus de cura pro Mortuis,” “Philosophicae et Christianae Cogitationes de Vampiris,” by John Christofer Herenberg; and a thousand others, among which I remember only a few of those which he lent to my father. He had a voluminous digest of all the judicial cases, from which he had extracted a system of principles that appear to govern — some always, and others occasionally only — the condition of the vampire. I may mention, in passing, that the deadly pallor attributed to that sort of revenants, is a mere melodramatic fiction. They present, in the grave, and when they show themselves in human society, the appearance of healthy life. When disclosed to light in their coffins, they exhibit all the symptoms that are enumerated as those which proved the vampire-life of the long-dead Countess Karnstein.

  How they escape from their graves and return to them for certain hours every day, without displacing the clay or leaving any trace of disturbance in the state of the coffin or the cerements, has always been admitted to be utterly inexplicable. The amphibious existence of the vampire is sustained by daily renewed slumber in the grave. Its horrible lust for living blood supplies the vigor of its waking existence. The vampire is prone to be fascinated with an engrossing vehemence, resembling the passion of love, by particular persons. In pursuit of these it will exercise inexhaustible patience and stratagem, for access to a particular object may be obstructed in a hundred ways. It will never desist until it has satiated its passion, and drained the very life of its coveted victim. But it will, in these cases, husband and protract its murderous enjoyment with the refinement of an epicure, and heighten it by the gradual approaches of an artful courtship. In these cases it seems to yearn for something like sympathy and consent. In ordinary ones it goes direct to its object, overpowers with violence, and strangles and exhausts often at a single feast.

  The vampire is, apparently, subject, in certain situations, to special conditions. In the particular instance of which I have given you a relation, Mircalla seemed to be limited to a name which, if not her real one, should at least reproduce, without the omission or addition of a single letter, those, as we say, anagrammatically, which compose it.

  Carmilla did this; so did Millarca.

  My father related to the Baron Vordenburg, who remained with us for two or three weeks after the expulsion of Carmilla, the story about the Moravian nobleman and the vampire at Karnstein churchyard, and then he asked the Baron how he had discovered the exact position of the long-concealed tomb of the Countess Mircalla? The Baron’s grotesque features puckered up into a mysterious smile; he looked down, still smiling on his worn spectacle case and fumbled with it. Then looking up, he said:

  “I have many journals, and other papers, written by that remarkable man; the most curious among them is one treating of the visit of which you speak, to Karnstein. The tradition, of course, discolors and distorts a little. He might have been termed a Moravian nobleman, for he had changed his abode to that territory, and was, beside, a noble. But he was, in truth, a native of Upper Styria. It is enough to say that in very early youth he had been a passionate and favored lover of the beautiful Mircalla, Countess Karnstein. Her early death plunged him into inconsolable grief. It is the nature of vampires to increase and multiply, but according to an ascertained and ghostly law.

  “Assume, at st
arting, a territory perfectly free from that pest. How does it begin, and how does it multiply itself? I will tell you. A person, more or less wicked, puts an end to himself. A suicide, under certain circumstances, becomes a vampire. That specter visits living people in their slumbers; they die, and almost invariably, in the grave, develop into vampires. This happened in the case of the beautiful Mircalla, who was haunted by one of those demons. My ancestor, Vordenburg, whose title I still bear, soon discovered this, and in the course of the studies to which he devoted himself, learned a great deal more.

  “Among other things, he concluded that suspicion of vampirism would probably fall, sooner or later, upon the dead Countess, who in life had been his idol. He conceived a horror, be she what she might, of her remains being profaned by the outrage of a posthumous execution. He has left a curious paper to prove that the vampire, on its expulsion from its amphibious existence, is projected into a far more horrible life; and he resolved to save his once beloved Mircalla from this.

  “He adopted the stratagem of a journey here, a pretended removal of her remains, and a real obliteration of her monument. When age had stolen upon him, and from the vale of years, he looked back on the scenes he was leaving, he considered, in a different spirit, what he had done, and a horror took possession of him. He made the tracings and notes which have guided me to the very spot, and drew up a confession of the deception that he had practiced. If he had intended any further action in this matter, death prevented him; and the hand of a remote descendant has, too late for many, directed the pursuit to the lair of the beast.”

  We talked a little more, and among other things he said was this:

  “One sign of the vampire is the power of the hand. The slender hand of Mircalla closed like a vice of steel on the General’s wrist when he raised the hatchet to strike. But its power is not confined to its grasp; it leaves a numbness in the limb it seizes, which is slowly, if ever, recovered from.”

  The following Spring my father took me a tour through Italy. We remained away for more than a year. It was long before the terror of recent events subsided; and to this hour the image of Carmilla returns to memory with ambiguous alternations — sometimes the playful, languid, beautiful girl; sometimes the writhing fiend I saw in the ruined church; and often from a reverie I have started, fancying I heard the light step of Carmilla at the drawing room door.

  The Biography

  PERSONAL REMINISCENCES OF HENRY IRVING

  Stoker published this two-volume biography about his friend the English actor Sir Henry Irving in 1906. As the manager of the Lyseum theatre and the personal assistant of Irving, Stoker’s memoir reveals not only invaluable insight of theVictorian theatre, but also many interesting accounts of his own life.

  The first edition

  CONTENTS

  VOLUME I

  PREFACE

  CHAPTER I

  EARLIEST RECOLLECTIONS OF HENRY IRVING

  CHAPTER II

  THE OLD SCHOOL AND THE NEW

  CHAPTER III

  FRIENDSHIP

  CHAPTER IV

  HONOURS FROM DUBLIN UNIVERSITY

  CHAPTER V

  CONVERGING STREAMS

  CHAPTER VI

  JOINING FORCES

  CHAPTER VII

  THE LYCEUM PRODUCTIONS

  CHAPTER VIII

  IRVING BEGINS MANAGEMENT

  CHAPTER IX

  SHAKESPEARE PLAYS — I

  CHAPTER X

  SHAKESPEARE PLAYS — II

  CHAPTER XI

  SHAKESPEARE PLAYS — III

  CHAPTER XII

  SHAKESPEARE PLAYS — IV

  CHAPTER XIII

  IRVING’S METHOD

  CHAPTER XIV

  ART-SENSE

  CHAPTER XV

  STAGE EFFECTS

  CHAPTER XVI

  THE VALUE OF EXPERIMENT

  CHAPTER XVII

  THE PULSE OF THE PUBLIC

  CHAPTER XVIII

  TENNYSON AND HIS PLAYS — I

  CHAPTER XIX

  TENNYSON AND HIS PLAYS — II

  CHAPTER XX

  TENNYSON AND HIS PLAYS — III

  CHAPTER XXI

  TENNYSON AND HIS PLAYS — IV

  CHAPTER XXII

  “WATERLOO “ — ” KING ARTHUR “ — ” DON QUIXOTE”

  CHAPTER XXIII

  ART AND HAZARD

  CHAPTER XXIV

  VANDENHOFF

  CHAPTER XXV

  CHARLES MATHEWS

  CHAPTER XXVI

  CHARLES DICKENS AND HENRY IRVING

  CHAPTER XXVII

  MR. J. M. LEVY

  CHAPTER XXVIII

  VISITS TO AMERICA

  CHAPTER XXIX

  WILLIAM WINTER

  CHAPTER XXX

  PERFORMANCE AT WEST POINT

  CHAPTER XXXI

  AMERICAN REPORTERS

  CHAPTER XXXII

  TOURS-DE-FORCE

  CHAPTER XXXIII

  CHRISTMAS

  CHAPTER XXXIV

  IRVING AS A SOCIAL FORCE

  CHAPTER XXXV

  VISITS OF FOREIGN WARSHIPS I

  CHAPTER XXXVI

  IRVING’S LAST RECEPTION AT THE LYCEUM

  CHAPTER XXXVII

  THE VOICE OF ENGLAND

  CHAPTER XXXVIII

  RIVAL TOWNS

  CHAPTER XXXIX

  TWO STORIES

  CHAPTER XL

  SIR RICHARD BURTON

  CHAPTER XLI

  SIR HENRY MORTON STANLEY

  CHAPTER XLII

  ARMINIUS VAMBERY

  VOLUME II

  CHAPTER XLIII

  IRVING’S PHILOSOPHY OF HIS ART

  CHAPTER XLIV

  THE RIGHT HON. WILLIAM EWART GLADSTONE

  CHAPTER XLV

  THE EARL OF BEACONSFIELD

  CHAPTER XLVI

  SIR WILLIAM PEARCE, BART.

  CHAPTER XLVII

  STEPNIAK

  CHAPTER XLVIII

  E. ONSLOW FORD, R.A.

  CHAPTER XLIX

  SIR LAURENCE ALMA-TADEMA, R.A.

  CHAPTER L

  SIR EDWARD BURNE-JONES, BART.

  CHAPTER LI

  EDWIN A. ABBEY, R.A.

  CHAPTER LII

  J. BERNARD PARTRIDGE

  CHAPTER LIII

  ROBERT BROWNING

  CHAPTER LIV

  WALT WHITMAN

  CHAPTER LV

  JAMES WHITCOMB RILEY

  CHAPTER LVI

  ERNEST RENAN

  CHAPTER LVII

  HALL CAINE

  CHAPTER LVIII

  IRVING AND DRAMATISTS

  CHAPTER LIX

  MUSICIANS

  CHAPTER LX

  LUDWIG BARNAY

  CHAPTER LXI

  CONSTANT COQUELIN (AIN E)

  CHAPTER LXII

  SARAH BERNHARDT

  CHAPTER LXIII

  GENEVIEVE WARD

  CHAPTER LXIV

  JOHN LAWRENCE TOOLE

  CHAPTER LXV

  ELLEN TERRY

  CHAPTER LXVI

  FRESH HONOURS IN DUBLIN

  CHAPTER LXVII

  PERFORMANCES AT SANDRINGHAM AND WINDSOR

  CHAPTER LXVIII

  PRESIDENTS OF THE UNITED STATES

  CHAPTER LXIX

  KNIGHTHOOD

  CHAPTER LXX

  HENRY IRVING AND UNIVERSITIES

  CHAPTER LXXI

  ADVENTURES

  CHAPTER LXXII

  BURNING OF THE LYCEUM STORAGE

  CHAPTER LXXIII

  FINANCE

  CHAPTER LXXIV

  THE TURN OF THE TIDE

  VOLUME I

  Sir Henry Irving, as Hamlet in 1893

  PREFACE

  WERE my book a “life” of Henry Irving instead of a grouping of such matters as came into my own purview, I should probably feel some embarrassment in the commencement of a preface. Logically speaking, even the life of an actor has no preface. He begins, a
nd that is all. And such beginning is usually obscure; but faintly remembered at the best. Art is a completion; not merely a history of endeavour. It is only when completeness has been obtained that the beginnings of endeavour gain importance, and that the steps by which it has been won assume any shape of permanent interest. After all, the struggle for supremacy is so universal that the matters of hope and difficulty of one person are hardly of general interest. When the individual has won out from the huddle of strife, the means and steps of his succeeding become of interest, either historically or in the educational aspect — but not before. From every life there may be a lesson to some one; but in the teeming millions of humanity such lessons can but seldom have any general or exhaustive force. The mere din of strife is too incessant for any individual sound to carry far. Fame, who rides in higher atmosphere, can alone make her purpose heard. Well did the framers of picturesque idea understand their work when in her hand they put a symbolic trumpet.

  The fame of an actor is won in minutes and seconds, not in years. The latter are only helpful in the recurrence of opportunities; in the possibilities of repetition. It is not feasible, therefore, adequately to record the progress of his work. Indeed that work in its perfection cannot be recorded; words are, and can be, but faint suggestions of awakened emotion. The student of history can, after all, but accept in matters evanescent the judgment of contemporary experience. Of such, the weight of evidence can at best incline in one direction; and that tendency is not susceptible of further proof. So much, then, for the work of art that is not plastic and permanent. There remains therefore but the artist. Of him the other arts can make record in so far as external appearance goes. Nay, more, the genius of sculptor or painter can suggest — with an understanding as subtle as that of the sun-rays which on sensitive media can depict what cannot be seen by the eye — the existence of these inner forces and qualities whence accomplished works of any kind proceed. It is to such art that we look for the teaching of our eyes. Modern science can record something of the actualities of voice and tone. Writers of force and skill and judgment can convey abstract ideas of controlling forces and purposes; of thwarting passions; of embarrassing weaknesses; of all the bundle of inconsistencies which make up an item of concrete humanity. From all these may be derived some consistent idea of individuality. This individuality is at once the ideal and the objective of portraiture.