by Steven Moore
Haunting Schiller’s Ghost-seer is a mysterious figure known as the Armenian, who has taken a sinister interest in a 35-year-old prince in line for a throne. Negligently educated, a Protestant “by birth, not by investigating the matter, which was something he had never done” (6), the prince is stalked in Venice by the Armenian, who seems to save him from an elaborate scam by a Sicilian sorcerer who pretends to raise a former friend from the dead, a thrilling scene that must have had Thalia’s readers on the edge of their seats. After the Sicilian—modeled on the famous impostor Cagliostro—confesses how he performed his necromantic act, the prince is plunged into uncertainty about everything, including his religion, which he had previously associated with the world of magic and now suspects is likewise an elaborate scam. Swinging from one extreme to the other, the prince joins a secret society of libertines called the Bucentauro, living large until he runs out of money, at which point he falls in love with a mysterious woman he meets in a church. The novel sputters to a stop with unexplained references to her death, his conversion to Catholicism, and political upheavals back home, all of which seem to be the machinations of the Armenian.
The first half of the novel has the appeal of a Sherlock Holmes story as the prince “solves” the necromantic crime, logically deducing the Armenian’s part in the Sicilian’s scam. The second half takes the form of letters from one of the prince’s friends, a formal disruption (imitated by many Gothicists) that simulates the disruption of normalcy in this genre. It starts well as we’re told how a poorly educated person can do further harm to himself by reading at random: “the unskillful hand that was involved in the choice of these writings ensured that, unfortunately, he always came across the books that neither his reason nor his heart were much improved by” (63–64). The prince’s descent into financial ruin is less interesting, and there are only a few pages where the giant of German drama flexes his rhetorical muscles—specifically when the prince rants about how “uncertainty is the most terrible damnation” (39) and how utterly subjective theology is:
If we take away that which man has drawn from his own human breast and wrongly imagined to be the purpose of a deity and the law of Nature, what is left us?—What came before me and what will follow me I see as two black, impenetrable veils hanging down at either extremity of human existence and which no living man has yet drawn aside. Several hundred generations already stand before those veils with their torches, trying to guess what may lie behind. Many see their own shadows, the shapes of their passion, magnified and moving across the veil of futurity, and start in fear and trembling at the sight of their own image. Poets, philosophers and founders of states have painted their own dreams on them, cheerful or gloomy as the sky over their heads was darker or brighter; and distance always deceived them with its prospects. Many impostors too exploit this general curiosity and amaze people’s excited imaginations with their strange mummeries. Deep silence reigns behind this veil; nobody who has once gone behind it sends back any answer; all that can be heard is the hollow echo of the question, as if it had merely resounded in a tomb. (80–81)
Most people would rather hear anything than that “deep silence,” an anxiety exploited by theologians and impostors alike: the “strange mummeries” of the Mass, the séance, or the path to Nirvana answer the same fearful need.
Given that the novel is about the challenge of living with uncertainty—a challenge the prince fails by converting to Catholicism, seeing through a hokey ghost but not the Holy Ghost—it’s aesthetically appropriate that The Ghost-seer ends in uncertainty, and perhaps that, along with his declining interest in the work, is why Schiller left it unfinished. But even in its unfinished state, The Ghost-seer is an intriguing and influential work.
A secret society is also at the heart of the first full-length Gothic novel in German literature, Hermann von Inna (1788) by Christiane Benedikte Naubert (1756–1819), a remarkably prolific woman who published some 70 works of fiction and fairy tales between 1779 and her death. Set in Germany in the late 14th century, this lively Bundesroman features two virtuous characters attached to the Bavarian court, Ida Munster and the title character, who try to keep their hands clean amidst the dirty politics of the corrupt court while nurturing their secret love. Both are targeted by the infamous Vehmgericht, a secret tribunal that terrorized Westphalia in the late Middle Ages (and still active when Naubert wrote). A cross between the Masons and the Inquisition, they are, as Hermann tells Munster,
a formidable society, the members of which, spread over the earth, are informed almost in the twinkling of an eye of what passes in the most distant parts of their invisible empire, as if they were connected together by some magic chain. You have seen how numerous are the judges and associates of this tribunal; and I have reason to believe that it has more adherents among the people than among the nobility. Those of the former class constitute the links of that immense chain, the secret wheels of that fearful engine, with the thousand eyes of which the SEERS, as they call themselves, obtain knowledge of everything that is done, and discover mysteries that seem impenetrable.113
Both characters run afoul of the tribunal after they are framed—Ida for witchcraft, Hermann for murder—and there are spooky court scenes in the dead of night, daring escapes from agents of the Vehmgericht, machinations in a convent “in the depth of a forest amidst the Carpathian mountains,” festering family feuds and secrets (Ida turns out to be the kidnapped princess of Wirtemburg), a lecherous archbishop, a cemetery scene at midnight, a secret journal, and other tropes of Gothic fiction. There is even a hint of lesbianism: Ida bathes with a female friend named Imago and sometimes shares a bed with her—and that’s before she’s immured in a convent. A worldly observer, scornful of authority figures (both political and religious), Naubert deftly captures the suspicion and paranoia in the German air in the years leading up to the French Revolution.
A secret society and virtually every other Gothic cliché crowd the pages of The Victim of Magical Delusion: A Magico-Political Tale (Geschichte eines Geistersehers, 1790–93) by Cajetan Tschink (1763–1813), a spellbinding thriller that, as its German title suggests, was heavily influenced by Schiller’s Geisterseher. Tschink set out to write a complete novel along the lines suggested by Schiller’s incomplete one, substituting a credulous Portuguese duke for Schiller’s prince and a mysterious Irishman for the Armenian. Less subtle than Schiller but just as aware that “incertitude is the most painful thing” (1:50), Tschink dramatizes how easy it is for an intelligent person to fool people who rely on their senses, imagination, and faith.
The story involves Portugal’s revolt against Spain in 1640. The mysterious Irishman Hiermansor wins the young Duke Miguel to the Portuguese cause by convincing him that he (like any cult leader) possesses special powers, and does so by staging a variety of elaborate hoaxes involving every Gothic trick in the book: haunted castles, ghosts, “worm-eaten half-decayed pictures,” a secret society, premonitions, hauntings, necromantic rites, nightmares, bleeding specters, spies, fake deaths, cemetery scenes—you name it, it’s here somewhere in these garish pages. Periodically the natural explanation for these tricks is revealed to Miguel, only to be followed by new wonders that defy his much-tested credulity until he doesn’t know what to believe anymore. Things are complicated further by his love for a beautiful young widow, who dies before his eyes during a shipwreck. He then comes under the influence of a pious fraud named Alumbrado, who further befuddles Miguel with religious miracles that are as phony as the Irishman’s Gothic scams—Tschink tiptoes on edge of blasphemy—all of which are cover-ups for political machinations as different parties vie for control of the Portuguese throne.
The Irishman is sometimes called “the Unknown,” and the novel is very much about people’s fear of the unknown and their consequent willingness to accept any explanation, however ludicrous, to explain away the unknown rather than to put in the time-consuming work of investigating it. An intellectually mature person “soars above the common herd
by the power of reasoning” (1:143), and Hiermansor tries to educate Miguel by deluding him and then explaining how he did it—an educational tactic Miguel challenges, but a lesson the tricky author hopes to impart to the reader as well. The second half of the novel is filled with sophisticated discussions of whether the ends justify the means (the Irishman’s defense of his methods), the dangers of the imagination and of circumstantial evidence, faith versus reason, and other topics that offset the first half’s ludicrous, haunted house-ride quality. An early reference to Cervantes (1:85) suggests Tschink is having some fun with the Gothic genre, and with the practice of using asterisks to conceal real names (as in “Ma***d, the capital of Sp**n”). The author obviously delights in the intricacy of his work, taking as a compliment the complaint one of Miguel’s friends lodges against the ingenious Irishman:
I may be mistaken, your proceedings are however riddles to me, if I do not suppose that an arrogant activity has prompted you to contrive extraordinary intrigues and to have recourse to marvellous machineries. People of your genius are wont to do so. You despise the ways of common men, force new roads through insurmountable rocks, entangle your man in numberless magic fetters, with no other view than to have the pleasure of seeing your prisoner ensnare himself deeper and deeper by his attempts to regain his liberty. The simple, artless turn of a play does not suit a genius like yours, which delights only in knitting and dissolving intricate knots, and in having recourse to artificial, complicated machines; obstacles and dangers serve only to give additional energy to your activity. (3:184–85)
Those complications and that energy enable this classic Schauerroman (horror novel) to soar above the graveyard of Gothic novels, and its intelligent engagement with questions of ontology, unexamined belief, and political brainwashing (Hiermansor resembles a CIA recruitment officer) are as relevant today as they were in Tschink’s time.
Two other German Gothics owe their questionable immortality to Jane Austen: in chapter 6 of Northanger Abbey—written in the 1790s at the height of the Gothic fad, though not published until 1817—Isabella offers to lend Catherine a handful of “horrid” novels, two of which are translations from the German.
“The hurricane was howling, the hailstones beating against the windows, the hoarse croaking of the raven bidding adieu to autumn, and the weather-cock’s dismal creaking joined with the mournful dirge of the solitary owl” as I read The Necromancer, or The Tale of the Black Forest, an English adaptation of Der Geisterbanner (1792) by Karl Friedrich Kahlert (1765–1813) writing under the pseudonym Lorenz Flammenberg. I say “adaptation” because among the liberties taken by the English translator, Peter Will (who also did The Victim of Magical Delusion), he pads out Kahlert’s original novel with a true-crime story written by Schiller several years earlier.114 (Surprisingly, Kahlert approved of this unauthorized addition and translated it into German for a later edition of his novel.) Cobwebbed with hoary clichés (as the opening line quoted above indicates), lurching from third-person narrative to a first-person document with interpolated tales, The Necromancer begins like a ghost story but morphs into a detective novel about a man named Volkert who scams his way through Germany pretending to raise the dead (and in one case, the still-living). Kahlert doesn’t wait until the end to reveal the rational explanation for irrational events, as some Gothicists like Ann Radcliffe did, which dilutes the suspense, as the does the alternation of narrative forms. The author seems less interested in terrifying readers and mocking credulous citizens (though he does both) than in exploring the nature of the criminal mind, which is also the subject of the Schiller episode the translator added at the end. Volkert admits he undertook his scams from “the pleasure everyone feels when he can prove the superior powers of his genius, which is the headspring that animates us as well to good as to bad actions . . . and raises us above the common herd,” but he also notes his impostures were only made possible with the cooperation of others: “one is always certain to find people who will lend their assistance in cheating their fellow citizens” (164). Volker pulls one scam because a young woman offered sex in return for scaring her father into allowing her to marry her lover, and the narrator notes with disgust the “more than beastly satisfaction” of the crowd that gathers to watch Volker’s execution. Gothic novels tend to return to normalcy after teasing us with visions of supernatural malevolence, but The Necromancer, like The Victim of Magical Delusion, ends with a dour view of normalcy.
Speaking of normalcy: in his introduction to the Valancourt edition I’ve been quoting, Jeffrey Cass finds a homosexual subtext in The Necromancer—in keeping with with the outing of many Gothic texts by theorists recently—but which I find unconvincing, especially since Cass doesn’t even mention the one arguably homosexual attraction in the novel, that of Hellfried (the principal narrator) for an Austrian officer who he calls “the darling of my heart” (108) and who he dotes on long after they’ve parted (132). A more significant subtext is relationship between religion and the supernatural, and the implication that one is as phony as the other.
The other German translation on Isabella’s reading list is Horrid Mysteries, a ludicrous title for an ambitious novel called Der Genius (1791–95) by Carl Grosse (1768–1847). Austen may have chosen it because of a few lurid scenes featuring an Illuminati-like secret society that convinces a young nobleman named Carlos to join them in reforming the world, by violent means if necessary. As a blood-signing bonus, the society sends him a voluptuous woman who joins him “in a furious trance of the highest sensual gratification” (64)—a sex scene that must have brought a blush to Miss Austen’s cheek. (If she even read it; perhaps she only used the title.) Carlos quits the society after he realizes they want to use him as an assassin, and in revenge they send a “genius” (a guardian angel, malevolent in this instance) to harass him, but their machinations fade into the background as Carlos spends most of the long novel trying to find, in one critic’s opinion, a “way of life based on simple everyday virtues and values with sense replacing rationalism and imagination romantic excess.”115 This is a difficult task in a novel where characters often wear disguises, stage deceptions, and undergo unexpected changes. As in other Gothics, the supernatural is exposed as natural: Carlos’s “genius” turns out to be not a “transparent airy being” (86) but his trusted valet Alfonso, who is further revealed to be Carlos’s uncle. His true guardian angel, revealed on the last page in a rather ridiculous scene in Venice, is his unfaithful but repentant wife.
Grosse explores the related notions of paranoia, providence, destiny, conspiracy, fatalism, and “higher Powers” as Carlos wonders whether he can control his own life or whether he is controlled by others, and, at a higher level, whether world events are controlled by “invisible hands” working behind the scenes. He also explores the dangerous comfort of belonging to a group—even a nefarious one—versus the challenge of living apart from others, and whether one should try to improve society or improve oneself. The importance of male bonding and the danger of sexual relations are also dramatized, sometimes with unsubtle imagery. (The pent-up attraction between Carlos and his future wife explodes when he spies her fondling his cane in secret, surprises her, and accidentally discharges his rifle, which was “unhappily cocked”; the bullet nicks his finger, and “the blood streamed into the face and on the bosom of the Baroness” [267].) But Grosse seems to have been uncertain whether he wanted to write a Schauerroman, a Bundesroman, or a philosophical novel, and the result is an incongruous mixture of all three. But the horror is mild (and offset by some comic scenes), the secret society appears only sporadically, and the philosophy is overshadowed by the Gothic trappings. Grosse evidently wanted to distance himself from other novels of the time—Carlos’s best friend “had received some fatal lunatic spots from the reading of some German novels” (253)—but his attempt to use elements of pop fiction for serious purposes, while admirable, doesn’t quite succeed.116 We are not told whether Austen’s Catherine ever got around to reading Horrid Myste
ries, but I’m sure she would have been disappointed. “Are you sure they are all horrid?” she asks Isabella of her reading list. Not this one, dear.
But one young reader who was transported by Grosse’s novel is Ludwig Tieck (1773–1853), who, after a marathon reading of it in 1792, was so overwrought “that he afterwards experienced some kind of hallucinatory or psychic experience while in a state of exhausted semiconsciousness.”117 Three years later, Tieck—best known for his fairy tales and supernatural stories written later in the 19th century—published his first two novels: a derivative Oriental Gothic called Abdallah (1795), then a magniloquent epistolary novel entitled William Lovell (1795–96), the greatest German example of that genre in the 18th century (if you regard Goethe’s one-sided Werther more as a journal) and a key work in the transition from Gothicism to Romanticism.
The title character’s father, a wealthy Englishman concerned about “his son’s excessively sensitive sentimentality and enthusiasm” and his unsuitable attachment to a friend’s sister, sends William on a grand tour of Europe, which goes horribly wrong.118 First, William is seduced by a worldly Parisian woman who takes advantage of the young Englishman’s bookishness: “I am so sentimental,” she smirks to a confidant, “like Rousseau’s Julie, a bit melancholy, a tincture of something out of Young[’s Night Thoughts] with one of those insufferably sententious, windbaggish heroines of the English novels. You would hate me if you saw me in one of my tragic moods; but Lovell is positively enchanted by them; in his mind he takes me for a Richardsonian ideal, for a creature of divine and superterrestrial essence” (2.15). William is naïve enough to believe he seduced her, and callous enough to shrug off his infidelity to his girl back in England. In Paris he takes on two traveling companions, a melancholy German named Balder and an Italian named Rosa, the agent (we learn later) for a mysterious Italian out to get revenge on William’s father by leading the impressionable son into a life of vice once he reaches Rome, which William too easily succumbs to: consorting with courtesans, seducing a peasant girl, and joining a secret society, all of which William reports with specious, shameless pride. After he is throughly corrupted, he sneaks back to England, seduces a friend’s sister and attempts to poison her brother, and flees back to Italy, where he is tracked down and killed in a duel.
