Uncle Silas: A Tale of Bartram-Haugh E-Book

Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu

• Herausgeber: Nonsuch Publishing
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2011

Seitenzahl: 851

Beschreibung

Silas Rutvyn is something of a riddle. To some, including his niece, he is something of a ghost. As Le Fanu gradually unfolds the layers of this story, we are irresistibly drawn into his world. There are, however, no simple answers. Le Fanu, whose writing inspired such classics as Bram Stoker's 'Dracula', is a masterful storyteller, and this work does not disappoint. From the writer of such works as 'Through a Glass Darkly' and 'The House by the Churchyard', this eerie and chilling tale is one of the finest examples of his art.

Leseprobe

UNCLE SILAS

UNCLE SILAS

A TALE OF BARTRAM-HAUGH

Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu

With an Introduction by Elizabeth Bowen

To the Right Hon. the Countess of Gifford, as a token of respect, sympathy, and admiration this tale is inscribed by the author

First published 1864

This edition 2006

Nonsuch Publishing Limited is an imprint of The History Press

The History Press,

The Mill, Brimscombe Port

Stroud, Gloucestershire, GL5 2QG

www.thehistorypress.co.uk

This ebook edition first published in 2011

All rights reserved

Copyright © in this edition 2006 Nonsuch Publishing Limited, 2011

This ebook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights, and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.

EPUB ISBN 978 0 7524 7174 7

MOBI ISBN 978 0 7524 7173 0

Original typesetting by The History Press

CONTENTS

Introduction by Elizabeth Bowen

A Preliminary Word

I

Austin Ruthyn, of Knowl, and his Daughter

II

Uncle Silas

III

A New Face

IV

Madame de la Rougierre

V

Sights and Noises

VI

A Walk in the Wood

VII

Church Scarsdale

VIII

The Smoker

IX

Monica Knollys

X

Lady Knollys Removes a Coverlet

XI

Lady Knollys sees the Features

XII

A Curious Conversation

XIII

Before and After Breakfast

XIV

Angry Words

XV

A Warning

XVI

Doctor Bryerly Looks In

XVII

An Adventure

XVIII

A Midnight Visitor

XIX

Au Revoir

XX

Austin Ruthyn sets out on his Journey

XXI

Arrivals

XXII

Somebody in the Room with the Coffin

XXIII

I Talk with Doctor Bryerly

XXIV

The Opening of the Will

XXV

I Hear from Uncle Silas

XXVI

The Story of Uncle Silas

XXVII

More about Tom Charke’s Suicide

XXVIII

I am Persuaded

XXIX

How the Ambassador Fared

XXX

On the Road

XXXI

Bartram-Haugh

XXXII

Uncle Silas

XXXIII

The Windmill Wood

XXXIV

Zamiel

XXXV

We Visit a Room in the Second Storey

XXXVI

An Arrival at Dead of Night

XXXVII

Doctor Bryerly Emerges

XXXVIII

A Midnight Departure

XXXIX

Cousin Monica and Uncle Silas Meet

XL

In Which I make another Cousin’s Acquaintance

XLI

My Cousin Dudley

XLII

Elverston and its People

XLIII

News at Bartram Gate

XLIV

A Friend Arises

XLV

A Chapter-full of Lovers

XLVI

The Rivals

XLVII

Doctor Bryerly Reappears

XLVIII

Question and Answer

XLIX

An Apparition

L

Milly’s Farewell

LI

Sarah Matilda comes to Light

LII

The Picture of a Wolf

LIII

An Odd Proposal

LIV

In Search of Mr. Charke’s Skeleton

LV

The Foot of Hercules

LVI

I Conspire

LVII

The Letter

LVIII

Lady Knollys’ Carriage

LIX

A Sudden Departure

LX

The Journey

LXI

Our Bedchamber

LXII

A Well-known Face Looks In

LXIII

Spiced Claret

LXIV

The Hour of Death

LXV

In the Oak Parlour

Conclusion

INTRODUCTION

I

UNCLE SILAS IS A ROMANCE of terror. Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu lets us know that he expanded it from a short story (length, about fifteen pages) which he wrote earlier in his literary life and published, anonymously, in a magazine—under the title of A Passage in the Secret History of an Irish Countess. As he does not give the name of the magazine I have not, so far, been able to trace the story. I should make further efforts to do so could I feel that its interest was very great: its initial interest, that is to say, qua story. It holds, it is true, the germ of the later novel—or, at least, of its plot. But about that plot itself there is little new. The exterior plot of Uncle Silas is traditional, well worn by the time Le Fanu took up his pen. What have we? The Wicked Uncle and the Endangered Heir. I need not point out the precedents even in English history. Also, this is the Babes in the Wood theme—but in Uncle Silas we have only one babe—feminine, in her late adolescence, and, therefore, the no less perpetual Beauty in Distress. Maud Ruthyn has her heroine-prototype in a large body of fiction which ran to excess in the gothic romances but is not finished yet—the distraught young lady clasping her hands and casting her eyes skyward to Heaven: she has no other friend … No, it is hard to see that simply uncle and niece, her sufferings, his designs, compressed, as they were at first, into a number of pages so small as to limit “treatment” (Le Fanu’s forte) could have made up into anything much more than the conventional magazine story of the day.

What is interesting is that Le Fanu, having written the story, should have been unable, still, to discharge its theme from his mind. He must have continued, throughout the years, to be obsessed, if subconsciously, by the niece and uncle. More, these two and their relationship to each other became magnetic to everything strangest and most powerful in his own imagination and temperament. The resultant novel, our Uncle Silas, owes the pressure, volume and spiritual urgency which make it comparable to Wuthering Heights to just this phenomenon of accretion. Accretion is a major factor in art. Le Fanu could not be rid of the niece and uncle till he had built around them a comprehensive book.

Something else draws my interest to the original story: its heroine, by the showing of the title, was Irish, by marriage if not birth. Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu (1814–73, grand-nephew of Sheridan the dramatist) was Irish; or rather Anglo-Irish. And Uncle Silas has always struck me as being an Irish story transposed to an English setting. The hermetic solitude and the autocracy of the great country house, the demonic power of the family myth, fatalism, feudalism and the “ascendency” outlook are accepted facts of life for the race of hybrids from which Le Fanu sprang. For the psychological background of Uncle Silas it was necessary for him to invent nothing. Rather, he was at once exploiting in art and exploring for its more terrible implications what would have been the norm of his own heredity. Having, for reasons which are inscrutable, pitched on England as the setting for Uncle Silas, he wisely chose the North, the wildness of Derbyshire. Up there, in the vast estates of the landed old stock, there appeared, in the years when Le Fanu wrote (and still more in the years of which he wrote: the early 1840s) a time lag—just such a time lag as, in a more marked form, separates Ireland from England more effectually than any sea.

Le Fanu was not, in his generation, alone in seeing the possibilities of the country house from the point of view of drama, tension and mystery. We may comment on “atmosphere”: almost all the Victorians who were novelists used it without fuss. Wilkie Collins, for instance, wrings the last drop of effect from the woodgirt Hampshire mansion in The Woman in White, with its muffling, oppressive silence and eerie lake. The castles, granges and lonely halls back through romantic fiction are innumerable. One might, even, say that Le Fanu showed himself as traditional, or unoriginal, in his choice of setting as in his choice of plot. Only, while his contemporaries, the by then urbanized Victorian English, viewed the ancestral scene from the outside, the Irishman wrote out of what was in his bones.

Uncle Silas is, as a novel, Irish in two other ways: it is sexless, and it shows a sublimated infantilism. It may, for all I know, bristle with symbolism; but I speak of the story, not of its implications—in the story, no force from any one of the main characters runs into the channel of sexual feeling. The reactions of Maud, the narrator-heroine, throughout are those of a highly intelligent, still more highly sensitive, child of twelve. This may, to a degree, be accounted for by seclusion and a repressive father—but not, I think, entirely: I should doubt whether Le Fanu himself realized Maud’s abnormality as a heroine. She is an uncertain keyboard on which some notes sound clearly, deeply and truly, others not at all. There is no question here, of Victorian censorship, with its suggestive gaps: Maud, on the subject of anything she does feel, is uninhibited, sometimes disconcerting. And equally, in the feeling of people round her we are to take it that, child-like, she misses nothing. The distribution of power throughout the writing is equal, even: the briefest scene is accorded brimming sensuous content. We must in fact note how Maud’s sensuousness (which is un-English) disperses, expends itself through the story in so much small change. She shows, at every turn, the carelessness, or acquiescence, of the predestined person: Maud is, by nature, a bride of Death. She delays, she equivocates, she looks wildly sideways; she delights in fire and candlelight, bedroom tea-drinking, cosy feminine company, but her bias is marked. The wind blowing her way from the family mausoleum troubles our heroine like a mating cry. Her survival after those frightful hours in the locked bedroom at Bartram-Haugh is, one can but feel, somewhat ghostly: she has cheated her Bridegroom only for the time being. Her human lover is colourless; her marriage unexceptionable as to level and in felicity—is little more than the shell of a happy ending. From the parenthesis in her “Conclusion” (Maud writes down her story after some years of marriage) we learn that the first of her children die.

Is, then, Uncle Silas “morbid”? I cannot say so. For one thing, morbidity seems to me little else than sentimentality of a peculiar tint, and nothing of that survives in the drastic air of the book. For another, Maud is counterpoised by two other characters, her unalike cousins Monica Knollys and Milly Ruthyn, who not only desire life but are its apostles. And, life itself is painted in brilliant colours—colours sometimes tantalizing, as though life were an alternative out of grasp; sometimes insidious, disturbing, as though life were a temptation. I know, as a matter of fact, of few Victorian novels in which cosiness, gaiety and the delights of friendship are so sweetly rendered or play such a telling part. Le Fanu’s style, translucent, at once simple and subtle, is ideal for such transitions. He has a genius for the unexpected—in mood as well as event. One example—a knowing twist of his art—is that Maud, whose arrival at Bartram-Haugh has been fraught with sinister apprehension, should, for the first few months, delight in her uncle’s house. After Knowl—overcast, repressive, stiff with proprieties—Bartram-Haugh seems to be Liberty Hall. She runs wild in the woods with her cousin Milly; for the first time, she has company of her own age. Really, it is the drama of Maud’s feelings, the heightening of conflict in her between hopes and fears, rather than the melodrama of her approaching fate, which ties one to Uncle Silas, page after page, breathless, unwilling to miss a word.

II

Le Fanu either felt or claimed to feel uneasy as to the reception of Uncle Silas. He mentions the genesis of the novel, not for its interest as a creative fact, but in order to clear himself, in advance, of the charge of plagiarism: his long-ago short story having been anonymous. And, in the same “Preliminary Word” he enters a plea that the novel be not dismissed as “sensation” fiction. Uncle Silas was published in 1864: the plea would not be necessary to-day. Sensationalism, for its own sake, does, it is true, remain in poor repute; but sensation (of the kind which packs Uncle Silas) is not only not disdained, it is placed in art. The most irreproachable pens, the most poetic imaginations pursue and refine it. The status of the psychological thriller is, to-day, high. Uncle Silas was in advance of, not behind, its time: it is not the last, belated Gothic romance but the first (or among the first) of the psychological thrillers. And it has, as terror-writing, a voluptuousness not approached since. (It was of the voluptuousness in his own writing that Le Fanu may, really, have been afraid.) The novel, like others of its now honoured type, relies upon suspense and mystification: I should be doing wrong to it and the reader were I to outline the story or more than hint at its end. To say that a rich, lonely girl is placed, by her father’s will, in charge of an uncle who, already suspected of one murder, would be the first to profit by her death is, I think, at once sufficient and fair. But, the real suspense of the story emanates from the characters; it is they who keep the tale charged with mystery. The people in Uncle Silas show an extraordinary power of doubling upon or of covering their tracks. Maud seldom knows where she stands with any of them; neither do we. They are all at one remove from us, seen through the eyes of Maud. The gain to a story of this nature of being told in the first person is obvious (but for the fact that the teller, for all her dangers, must, we take it, survive, in order to tell the tale). All the same, it is not to this device that Le Fanu owes the main part of his effects—you and I, as readers, constantly intercept glances or changes in tones of voice that Maud just notes but does not interpret aright. No, Maud has little advantage over you or me. Temperamentally, and because of her upbringing, she is someone who moves about in a world of strangers. She is alternately blind and unnecessarily suspicious. Her attitude towards every newcomer is one of fatalistic mistrust; and this attitude almost, but not quite (which is subtle) communicates itself to the reader. We do not, for instance, know, for an unreasonably but enjoyably long time, whether Milly, for all her rustic frankness, may not at heart be a Little Robber Girl, or Lady Knollys a schemer under her good nature.

You perceive [says Maud] that I had more spirit than courage. I think I had the mental attributes of courage; but then I was but an hysterical girl, and in so far neither more nor less than a coward.

No wonder I distrusted myself; no wonder my will stood out against my timidity. It was a struggle, then; a proud, wild struggle against constitutional cowardice.

Those who have ever had cast upon them more than their strength seems framed to bear—the weak, the aspiring, the adventurous in will, and the faltering in nerve—will understand the kind of agony which I sometimes endured.

And later, on receiving comforting news:

You will say then that my spirits and my serenity were quite restored. Not quite. How marvelously lie our anxieties, in filmy layers, one over the other! Take away that which has lain on the upper surface for so long—the care of cares—the only one, as it seemed to you, between your soul and the radiance of Heaven—and straight you find a new stratum there. As physical science tells us no fluid is without its skin, so does it seem with this fine medium of the soul, and those successive films of care that form upon its surface on mere contact with the upper air and light.

Who are the characters whom, in Uncle Silas, this at once nervous and spirited girl confronts? There is her father, Austin Ruthyn of Knowl, scion and reigning head of an ancient family, wealthy, recluse, widower, given up to Swedenborgian religion. There is Mr. Ruthyn’s spiritual director Dr. Bryerly—“bilious, bewigged, black-eyed”—whose nocturnal comings and goings seem to bode no good. There is Mr. Ruthyn’s first cousin Lady Knollys, woman of the world, who comes to stay at Knowl and interests herself in Maud. There is Maud’s French governess Madame de la Rougierre, who, arriving early on in the story, gibbers in moonlight outside the drawing-room window.

Half-way through, story and heroine cross sixty miles of country. Austin Ruthyn is dead: his place in Maud’s life is taken by his younger brother Silas, of Bartram-Haugh—reformed rake, widower and, again, religious recluse. Silas’s marriage to a barmaid had dealt the first, though not yet the worst, blow to Ruthyn family pride. Children of the marriage are Milly (“a very rustic Miranda”, her father says) and Dudley, a sinister Tony Lumpkin. In the Bartram-Haugh woods dwell an ill-spoken miller and his passionate daughter … In both great houses there is the usual cast of servants—at Knowl, correct, many and reassuring; at Bartram-Haugh few and queer. On from this point, characterization, in any full sense, stops: we are left with “types” existing, solely and flatly, for the requirements of the plot. A fortune-hunting officer, three clergymen, two lawyers and a thoughtful peer, Maud’s future husband, come under this heading.

That last group, uninspired and barely tinted in, represents Le Fanu’s one economy. In the main, it could be a charge against him that too many of the characters in Uncle Silas are overcharged and that they break their bounds. There is abnormal pressure from every side; the psychic air is often overheated. And all the time, we must remember, this is a story intended to be dominated by the figure of one man: Uncle Silas. All through, Uncle Silas meets competition. He is, I think, most nearly played off the stage by Madame de la Rougierre. Apart from that he is (as central character) at a disadvantage: is he, constantly, big enough for his own build-up? Is there or is there not, in scenes in which he actually appears, a just perceptible drop into anti-climax? Le Fanu, in dealing with Uncle Silas, was up against a difficulty inherent in his kind of oblique, suggestive art. He has overdrawn on his Silas in advance. In the flesh, Uncle Silas enters the story late: by this time, his build-up has reached towering heights. It is true that most of the time at Bartram-Haugh he remains offstage, and that those intervals allow of batteries being recharged. At Knowl, still only a name, he was ever-present—in the tormented silences of his brother, the hinting uneasy chatter of Lady Knollys, and Maud’s dreams.

I don’t [Lady Knollys admits, to Maud] understand metaphysics my dear, nor witchcraft. I sometimes believe in the supernatural and sometimes I don’t. Silas Ruthyn is himself alone, and I can’t define him because I don’t understand him. Perhaps other souls than human are sometimes born into the world, and clothed in flesh. It is not only about that dreadful occurrence, but nearly always throughout his life; early and late he has puzzled me … At one time of his life I am sure he was awfully wicked—eccentric indeed in his wickedness—gay, frivolous, secret and dangerous. At one time I think he could have made poor Austin do almost anything; but his influence vanished with his marriage, never to return again. No; I don’t understand him. He has always bewildered me, like a shifting face, sometimes smiling, but always sinister, in an unpleasant dream.

Here is Maud, on arrival at Bartram-Haugh, fresh from her first meeting with her uncle:

When I lay down in my bed and reviewed the day, it seemed like a month of wonders. Uncle Silas was always before me; the voice so silvery for an old man—so preternaturally soft; the manner so sweet, so gentle; the aspect smiling, suffering, spectral. It was no longer a shadow; I had now seen him in the flesh. But, after all, was he more than a shadow to me? When I closed my eyes I saw him before me still, in necromantic black, ashy with a pallor on which I looked with fear and pain, a face so dazzlingly pale, and those hollow, fiery, awful eyes! It sometimes seemed to me as though the curtain had opened, and I had seen a ghost.

“What a sweet, gentle, insufferable voice he has!” exclaims, later, Lady Knollys, who, for Maud’s sake, has tried to reopen relations with Bartram-Haugh. And, towards the end, we hear the beleaguered Maud: “There were the sensualities of the gourmet for his body, and there ended his human nature, as it seemed to me. Through that semi-transparent structure I thought I could now and then discern the light or glare of his inner life … Was, then, all his kindness but a phosphoric radiance covering something colder and more awful than the grave?”

Of the French governess, what is one to say? She is Uncle Silas’s rival or counterpart. She is physical as opposed to metaphysical evil. No question of “semi-transparent structure” here—the Frenchwoman is of the rankest bodily coarseness: one can smell her breath, as it were, at every turn. In the Uncle Silas atmosphere, bleached of sex, she is no more woman than he is man; yet, somehow, her marelike coquetry—that prinking with finery and those tales of lovers—is the final, grotesque element of offence. As a woman, she can intrude on the girl at all points. She is obscene; and not least so in the alternate pinchings and pawings to which she subjects Maud. While the uncle gains in monstrousness by distance, the governess gains in monstrousness by closeness.

Madame de la Rougierre is unhandicapped by a preliminary buildup: she enters the story without warning and makes growth, page by page, as she goes along. Le Fanu, through the mouths of his characters, is a crack marksman in the matter of epithets: nothing said of the governess goes wide. He had, it is true, with this Frenchwoman a great vein to work on: with Wilkie Collins and Dickens he could exploit the British concept of the foreigner as sinister. Her broken English (with its peculiar rhythm, like no other known broken English, specially coined for her) further twists, in speech, the thoughts of her hideous mind. Like Uncle Silas, Madame de la Rougierre is, morally, of an unrelieved black: considering how much we are in her company it is wonderful that she does not become monotonous—the variations Le Fanu has contrived to give her are to be admired. “When things went well,” we are told, “her soul lighted up into sulphureous good honour.” The stress is most often upon this woman’s mouth—a, “large-featured smirking phantom” is Maud’s first view of her, through the drawing-room window. We have her “wide, wet grin”. She would “smile with her great carious teeth”.

This creature’s background is never fully given, indeed, her engagement, as his daughter’s companion by Mr. Ruthyn of Knowl, is, with his obstinate tolerance of her presence, one of the first anomalies of the plot.

III

Uncle Silas, as a novel, derives its power from an inner momentum. In the exterior plot there are certain weaknesses—inconsistencies and loose ends. In this regard, the book has about it a sort of brilliant—nay, even inspired—amateurishness; a sort of negligent virtuosity in which Le Fanu shows his race. This may be the reason why Uncle Silas has never yet quite made the popular grade. It has not so far, that is to say, moved forward from being a favourite book of individual people into the rank of accepted Victorian classics.

It cannot, I think, be said that most Victorian novels are guiltless of loose ends. But, in their elaborate plots with their substructures, crowds of characters and varied, shifting scenes, there is usually more to distract the eye: reader as well as author may well overlook something. Uncle Silas is, in this matter, defenceless in its simplicity: it has no sub-plots and contains comparatively few people. The writing is no less simple: this, its beauty apart, is its great virtue. The effect of the simplicity is, that every sentence of Le Fanu’s—or, at least, its content—incises itself deeply upon one’s memory: one can forget not the slightest hint or statement or question. And, the excitingness of the story keeps one on the stretch, at once watchful and challenging, like a child listener. Like the child, one finds oneself breaking in, from time to time, with: “But—? … But, I thought you said—?”

The omissions or inconsistencies of the plot are not psychological; they are practical or mechanical. They do not, to my mind, detract from or injure the real story, because they are not on its reallest plane. However, there they are. I do not feel it to be the function of this Introduction to point them out to the reader in advance—I intend, therefore, only to mention one, which could hardly escape the most careless eye. Who was the concealed witness who relayed to Maud the conversation between Madame de la Rougierre and Dudley Ruthyn at Church Scarsdale? A witness who must, by the way, have been no less observant and subtle than Maud herself, for no inflection, gesture or glance is lost. We are never told who it is. The most likely bid is Tom Brice, the girl Beauty’s lover and, at one time, Dudley’s hangeron. Tom might have told Beauty, who might have told Maud. But the account does not sound as though it had come through the mouths of two peasants … Elsewhere, the fact that the degree and origin of the Frenchwoman’s relationship with the Bartram-Haugh Ruthyns is never stated may worry some readers. We are left to infer that she was, already, their agent from before the time she arrived at Knowl.

The plot is obfuscated (sometimes, one may say, helpfully) by an extraordinary vagueness about time. This is a book in which it is impossible to keep a check on the passage of weeks, months, years. The novel is dominated by one single season in whose mood it is pitched: autumn. Practically no other season is implied or named. (Yes, we have a Christmas visit to Elverston, and a mention, elsewhere, of January rain. And after Madame de la Rougierre’s departure from Knowl Maud, in the joy of her release, is conscious of singing birds and blue skies—but those could be in September.) The whole orchestral range of the novel’s weather is autumnal—tranced, dripping melancholy, crystal morning zest, the radiance of the magnified harvest moon, or the howl and straining of gales through not yet quite leafless woods. The daylight part of Maud’s drive to her uncle’s house is through an amber landscape. The opening words of the novel are, it is true, “It was winter …” But our heroine, contradictory with her first breath, then adds: “the second week in November”. By this reckoning Maud, in telling Lady Knollys that Madame de la Rougierre had arrived at Knowl “in February” is incorrect. The Frenchwoman, we had been clearly told, arrived “about a fortnight” after the opening scene … No, there is nothing for it: one must submit oneself to Le Fanu’s hypnotizing, perpetual autumn. One autumn merges into another: hopeless to ask how much has happened between! Yet always, against this nebulous flow of time stand out the moments—each unique, comprehensive, crystal, painfully sharp.

The inner, non-practical psychological plot of Uncle Silas is, I suggest, faultless: it has no inconsistencies. The story springs from and is rooted in an obsession, and the obsession never looses its hold. Austin Ruthyn of Knowl, by an inexorable posthumous act, engages his daughter’s safety in order to rescue his brother’s honour. Or rather, less Silas’s honour than the family name’s. Silas Ruthyn is a man under a cloud: he has never yet been cleared of a charge against him. Austin’s having committed Maud to his brother’s keeping is to demonstrate, to the eyes of a hostile world, his absolute faith in his brother’s innocence. By surviving years under his lonely roof, Maud, whose next heir he is, is to vindicate Silas. Maud has, during her father’s lifetime, agreed in principle to the trust. (She has still, be it said, to hear the terms of the will, and to learn the full story of Silas from Lady Knollys.)

I think [Austin says to his daughter] little Maud would like to contribute to the restitution of her family name … The character and influence of an ancient family is a peculiar heritage—sacred but destructible; and woe to him who either destroys or suffers it to perish.

Call this folie de grandeur, or a fanaticism of the Almanach de Gotha. It is the extreme of a point of view less foreign to Le Fanu than to his readers. It was a point of view that they, creatures of an industrialized English nineteenth century, were bound to challenge, and could deride. It could only hope to be made acceptable, as mainspring and premise of his story, by being challenged, criticized—even, by implication, derided—in advance, and on behalf of the reader, by a person located somewhere inside the story. The necessary mouthpiece is Dr. Bryerly. Dr. Bryerly’s little speech to Maud is a piece of, as it were, insurance, on Le Fanu’s part. “There are people”, remarks Dr. Bryerly, “who think themselves just as great as the Ruthyns, or greater; and your poor father’s idea of carrying it by a demonstration was simply the dream of a man who had forgotten the world, and learned to exaggerate himself by his long seclusion.” True—and how effective. The reader’s misgivings, his fear of being implicated in something insanely disproportionate, have been set at rest. He is now prepared to lean back and accept, as Le Fanu wished, the idea on one—but that a great—merit purely: its validity for the purposes of the tale.

One more comment, before we leave the plot. In the disposition of characters (including what I have called functional types) about the field of the story, Le Fanu shows himself; as a novelist, admirably professional, in a sense that few of his contemporaries were. Not a single, even the slightest, character is superfluous; not one fails to play his or her part in the plot, or detains us for a second after that part is played. One or two (such as the house party guests at Elverston) are merely called in to act on Maud’s state of mind. But Maud’s mind, we must remember, reflects, and colours according to its states, the action of the interior plot. No person is in the story simply to fill up space, to give the Victorian reader his money’s worth, or to revive flagging interest—Le Fanu, rightly, did not expect interest to flag.

IV

The background, or atmosphere, needs little discussion: in the first few pages one recognizes the master-touch. The story of Uncle Silas is, as I have indicated, as to scene divided between two houses: Knowl and Bartram-Haugh. The contrast between the two houses contributes drama. Knowl, black and white, timbered, set in well-tended gardens, is a rich man’s home. It is comfortable; fires roar in the grates; pictures and panelling gleam; the servants do all they should. As against this, Knowl is overcast, rigid, haunted: Mr. Ruthyn is closeted with dark mysteries; there are two ghosts, and, nearby, the family mausoleum, in which Maud’s young mother lies and to which her father is to be carried under the most charnel circumstances of death.

Maud, sitting with Lady Knollys after Austin’s death, hears the wind come roaring her way through the woods from the mausoleum. The wind, Lady Knollys can but point out, comes, too, from the more really threatening direction of Bartram-Haugh. Uncle Silas’s house, already the scene of one violent death, is, beforehand, invested with every terror. Bartram-Haugh, as first seen, demands a John Piper drawing:

I was almost breathless as I approached. The bright moon shining fully on the white front of the old house revealed not only its highly decorated style, its fluted pillars and doorway, rich and florid carving and balustraded summit, but also its stained and mossgrown front. Two giant trees, overthrown at last by the recent storm, lay with their upturned roots, and their yellow foliage still flickering on the sprays that were to bloom no more, where they had fallen, at the right side of the courtyard, which, like the avenue, was tufted with weeds and grass.

“The mind is”, as Maud elsewhere remarks, “a different organ by night and by day.” Next morning’s awakening is reassuring—a wakening to bright morning through bare windows, a cheerful breakfast, superb if neglected stretches of parkland, a blackberrying walk. Exploration, with Milly, of whole closed derelict floors and internal galleries brings only a fleeting memory of the ill-fated Charke. The psychological weather of those first Bartram-Haugh chapters is like the out-of-doors weather: gay and tingling. Till Milly is sent away, nothing goes wholly wrong.

From that point, the closing in is continuous. The ruined rooms, the discovery of the ogress-governess in hiding, introduce the beginning of the end … All through Le Fanu’s writing, there is an ecstatic sensitivity to light, and an abnormal recoil from its inverse, darkness. Uncle Silas is full of outdoor weather—we enjoy the rides and glades, cross the brooks and stiles, meet the cottagers and feel the enclosing walls of two kingdom-like great estates. Though static in ever-autumn, those scenes change: there is more than the rolling across them of clouds or sunshine. Indeed we are looking at their reflection in the lightening or darkening mirror of Maud’s mind.

V

Uncle Silas is a romance of terror, written more than eighty years ago. Between then and now, human susceptibilities have altered—some may have atrophied, others developed further. The terror-formula of yesterday might not work to-day. Will Uncle Silas act on the modern reader?

I think so, and for several reasons. Le Fanu’s strength, here, is not so much in his story as in the mode of its telling. Uncle Silas, as it is written, plays on one constant factor—our childish fears. These leave their work at the base of our natures, and are never to be rationalized away. Two things are terrible in childhood: helplessness (being in other people’s power) and apprehension—the apprehension that something is being concealed from us because it is too bad to be told. Maud Ruthyn, vehicle of the story, is helpless apprehension itself, in person: this is what gets under our skin. Maud, simplified (in the chemical sense, reduced) for her creator’s purpose, is, we may tell ourselves, an extreme case. She has a predisposition towards fear: we are to watch her—and be her—along her way towards the consummation of perfect terror—just as, were this a love story, we should be sharing her journey towards a consummation of a different kind. Proust has pointed out that the predisposition to love creates its own objects: is this not true of fear? At the start Maud, in her unconscious search, experiments with Dr. Bryerly: she fears him. He acts as the forecast shadow of Uncle Silas—and, that he may play this role for the first act, he is given all the necessary trappings. Then, the Doctor discloses a character in point-blank reverse: he is levelheaded, a man of daylight, unfailing good counsellor, champion, friend. But by that time, what the Doctor is does not matter: using the love-fear analogy, he is an off-cast love. He has been superseded by Uncle Silas, past whom Maud has no further to look.

Maud had suspected in Dr. Bryerly a supernatural element of evil: his influence on her father appeared malign. This brings us to another terror-ingredient: moral dread. Should one call this timeless, or is it modern? Let us say, it is timeless, but that its refinement in literature has been modern. (By modern I mean, modern at the best.) Henry James inspired, and remains at the head of, a whole school of moral horror stories—I need not point out that it is the stench of evil, not the mere fact of the supernatural, which is the genuine horror of The Turn of the Screw. Our ancestors may have had an agreeable-dreadful reflex from the idea of the Devil or a skull-headed revenant popping in and out through a closed door: we need, to make us shiver, the effluence from a damned soul. In Uncle Silas, there is no supernatural element in the ordinary sense—the Knowl ghosts exist merely to key Maud up. The genuine horror is the non-natural. Lady Knollys, in her chatter, suggests that Silas may be a non-human soul clothed in a human body.

What Maud dreads, face to face with Silas, is not her own death.

Physically, Maud’s nerve is extremely good. She stands up to Madame de la Rougierre, to whom her reactions are those of intense dislike, repugnance and disdain. She is frightened only of what she cannot measure, and she has got the governess taped. With the same blend of disdain and clear-sightedness, she stands up to Dudley. She shows, I think, remarkable nonchalance in re-exploring the top rooms alone, in the late dusk, after Milly’s departure. As the plot thickens round her and door after door clangs to, she shows herself fanatically disposed, up to the very last minute, to give her uncle the benefit of the doubt, Were she, in fact, a goose or weakling, the story would lack the essential tension: Uncle Silas would fail. As it is, we have the impact of a crescendo of hints and happenings on taut, hyper-controlled and thus very modern nerves. Is there to be a breaking-point? If so, why, how, when? That, not the question of Maud’s bodily fate, sets up the real excitement of Uncle Silas.

The let-up, the pause for recuperation, even the apparent solicitude: these are among the sciences of the torture chamber. The victim must regain his power to suffer fully. The let-ups in Uncle Silas—the fine days, the walks, the returned illusions of safety— are, for Maud and the reader, artfully timed. Nothing goes on for long enough either to dull you or to exhaust itself. And the light, the open air, the outdoor perspective enhance, by contrast, the last of the horror-constants— claustrophobia. On the keyboard of any normal reader Uncle Silas will not, I think, fail to strike one or another note: upon the claustrophobic it plays a fugue. The sense of the tightening circle, the shrinking and darkening room …

Just as the outer plot of Uncle Silas is traditional, or unoriginal, Le Fanu does draw also, for fear or horror, out of the traditional bag of tricks—the lonely ruinous house, the closed rooms, the burning eyes, the midnight voices, the hired assassins, and so on. Maud herself, exploring Bartram-Haugh in the dusk, has in mind the romances of Mrs. Radcliffe. The induction of misery and despair preparatory to slaughter is Elizabethan … In so far as Uncle Silas uses physical horror, the use is extremely sophisticated: Maud’s quick and almost voluptuous reactions to sound, sight, touch and smell make her the perfect reagent. The actual sound of a murder, a messy butchery, has probably, never, in any gangster story, been registered as it is here.

The function of an Introduction is, I think, to indicate the nature of a book and to suggest some angles for judgment. That judgment the reader himself must form. Uncle Silas will, in this new edition, reach, among others, a generation of readers who have grown up since the novel was last in print. They may read into it more than I have found. That it will have meaning for them I do not doubt.

Elizabeth Bowen1946

Note

Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu, 1814–1873

Born and died in Dublin. Great-nephew of Richard Brinsley Sheridan the dramatist. His family background is to be found in, and some part of his personal story gathered from, his brother W. R. Le Fanu’s Seventy Years of Irish Life (1893). J. S. Le Fanu for some time edited a magazine of Conservative bias; he wrote a drama, Beatrice; his Poems, which include two stirring Irish ballads, were edited by A. P. Graves in 1896. Le Fanu left behind him a body of miscellaneous writing, of unequal but seldom negligible interest. Of his mastery of the form of the short story we have the finest example in Green Tea. His best known works are:—The House by the Churchyard (1863), Uncle Silas (1864) and In a Glass Darkly (1872). E. B.

A PRELIMINARY WORD

THE WRITER OF THIS TALE ventures, in his own person, to address a very few words, chiefly of explanation, to his readers. A leading situation in this ‘Story of Bartram-Haugh’ is repeated, with a slight variation, from a short magazine tale of some fifteen pages written by him, and published long ago in a periodical under the title of A Passage in the Secret History of an Irish Countess, and afterwards, still anonymously, in a small volume under an altered title. It is very unlikely that any of his readers should have encountered, and still more so that they should remember, this trifle. The bare possibility, however, he has ventured to anticipate by this brief explanation, lest he should be charged with plagiarism—always a disrespect to a reader.

May he be permitted a few words also of remonstrance against the promiscuous application of the term ‘sensation’ to that large school of fiction which transgresses no one of those canons of construction and morality which, in producing the unapproachable Waverley Novels, their great author imposed upon himself? No one, it is assumed, would describe Sir Walter Scott’s romances as ‘sensation novels;’ yet in that marvellous series there is not a single tale in which death, crime, and, in some form, mystery, have not a place.

Passing by those grand romances of Ivanhoe, Old Mortality, and Kenilworth, with their terrible intricacies of crime and bloodshed, constructed with so fine a mastery of the art of exciting suspense and horror, let the reader pick out those two exceptional novels in the series which profess to paint contemporary manners and the scenes of common life; and remembering in the Antiquary the vision in the tapestried chamber, the duel, the horrible secret, and the death of old Elspeth, the drowned fisherman, and above all the tremendous situation of the tide-bound party under the cliffs; and in St. Ronan’s Well, the long-drawn mystery, the suspicion of insanity, and the catastrophe of suicide—determine whether an epithet which it would be a profanation to apply to the structure of any, even the most exciting of Sir Walter Scott’s stories, is fairly applicable to tales which, though illimitably inferior in execution, yet observe the same limitations of incident, and the same moral aims.

The author trusts that the Press, to whose masterly criticism and generous encouragement he and other humble labourers in the art owe so much, will insist upon the limitation of that degrading term to the peculiar type of fiction which it was originally intended to indicate, and prevent, as they may, its being made to include the legitimate school of tragic English romance, which has been ennobled, and in great measure founded, by the genius of Sir Walter Scott.

I

Austin Ruthyn, of Knowl, and his Daughter

IT WAS WINTER—THAT IS, about the second week in November—and great gusts were rattling at the windows, and wailing and thundering among our tall trees and ivied chimneys—a very dark night, and a very cheerful fire blazing, a pleasant mixture of good round coal and spluttering dry wood, in a genuine old fireplace, in a sombre old room. Black wainscoting glimmered up to the ceiling, in small ebony panels; a cheerful clump of wax candles on the tea-table; many old portraits, some grim and pale, others pretty, and some very graceful and charming, hanging from the walls. Few pictures, except portraits long and short, were there. On the whole, I think you would have taken the room for our parlour. It was not like our modern notion of a drawing-room. It was a long room too, and every way capacious, but irregularly shaped.

A girl, of a little more than seventeen, looking, I believe, younger still; slight and rather tall, with a great deal of golden hair, dark grey-eyed, and with a countenance rather sensitive and melancholy, was sitting at the tea-table, in a reverie. I was that girl.

The only other person in the room—the only person in the house related to me—was my father. He was Mr. Ruthyn, of Knowl, so called in his county, but he had many other places, was of a very ancient lineage, who had refused a baronetage often, and it was said even a viscounty, being of a proud and defiant spirit, and thinking themselves higher in station and purer of blood than two-thirds of the nobility into whose ranks, it was said, they had been invited to enter. Of all this family lore I knew but little and vaguely; only what is to be gathered from the fireside talk of old retainers in the nursery.

I am sure my father loved me, and I know I loved him. With the sure instinct of childhood I apprehended his tenderness, although it was never expressed in common ways. But my father was an oddity. He had been early disappointed in Parliament, where it was his ambition to succeed. Though a clever man, he failed there, where very inferior men did extremely well. Then he went abroad, and became a connoisseur and a collector; took a part, on his return, in literary and scientific institutions, and also in the foundation and direction of some charities. But he tired of this mimic government, and gave himself up to a country life, not that of a sportsman, but rather of a student, staying sometimes at one of his places and sometimes at another, and living a secluded life.

Rather late in life he married, and his beautiful young wife died, leaving me, their only child, to his care. This bereavement, I have been told, changed him—made him more odd and taciturn than ever, and his temper also, except to me, more severe. There was also some disgrace about his younger brother—my uncle Silas—which he felt bitterly.

He was now walking up and down this spacious old room, which, extending round an angle at the far end, was very dark in that quarter. It was his wont to walk up and down thus, without speaking—an exercise which used to remind me of Chateaubriand’s father in the great chamber of the Château de Combourg. At the far end he nearly disappeared in the gloom, and then returning emerged for a few minutes, like a portrait with a background of shadow, and then again in silence faded nearly out of view.

This monotony and silence would have been terrifying to a person less accustomed to it than I. As it was, it had its effect. I have known my father a whole day without once speaking to me. Though I loved him very much, I was also much in awe of him.

While my father paced the floor, my thoughts were employed about the events of a month before. So few things happened at Knowl out of the accustomed routine, that a very trifling occurrence was enough to set people wondering and conjecturing in that serene household. My father lived in remarkable seclusion; except for a ride, he hardly ever left the grounds of Knowl; and I don’t think it happened twice in the year that a visitor sojourned among us.

There was not even that mild religious bustle which sometimes besets the wealthy and moral recluse. My father had left the Church of England for some odd sect, I forget its name, and ultimately became, I was told, a Swedenborgian. But he did not care to trouble me upon the subject. So the old carriage brought my governess, when I had one, the old housekeeper, Mrs. Rusk, and myself to the parish church every Sunday. And my father, in the view of the honest rector who shook his head over him—‘a cloud without water, carried about of winds, and a wandering star to whom is reserved the blackness of darkness’—corresponded with the ‘minister’ of his church, and was provokingly contented with his own fertility and illumination; and Mrs. Rusk, who was a sound and bitter churchwoman, said he fancied he saw visions and talked with angels like the rest of that ‘rubbitch.’

I don’t know that she had any better foundation than analogy and conjecture for charging my father with supernatural pretensions; and in all points when her orthodoxy was not concerned, she loved her master and was a loyal housekeeper.

I found her one morning superintending preparations for the reception of a visitor, in the hunting-room it was called, from the pieces of tapestry that covered its walls, representing scenes à la Wouvermans, of falconry, and the chase, dogs, hawks, ladies, gallants, and pages. In the midst of whom Mrs. Rusk, in black silk, was rummaging drawers, counting linen, and issuing orders.

‘Who is coming, Mrs. Rusk?’

Well, she only knew his name. It was a Mr. Bryerly. My papa expected him to dinner, and to stay for some days.

‘I guess he’s one of those creatures, dear, for I mentioned his name just to Dr. Clay (the rector), and he says there is a Doctor Bryerly, a great conjurer among the Swedenborg sect—and that’s him, I do suppose.’

In my hazy notions of these sectaries there was mingled a suspicion of necromancy, and a weird freemasonry, that inspired something of awe and antipathy.

Mr. Bryerly arrived time enough to dress at his leisure, before dinner. He entered the drawing-room—a tall, lean man, all in ungainly black, with a white choker, with either a black wig, or black hair dressed in imitation of one, a pair of spectacles, and a dark, sharp, short visage, rubbing his large hands together, and with a short brisk nod to me, whom he plainly regarded merely as a child, he sat down before the fire, crossed his legs, and took up a magazine.

This treatment was mortifying, and I remember very well the resentment of which he was quite unconscious.

His stay was not very long; not one of us divined the object of his visit, and he did not prepossess us favourably. He seemed restless, as men of busy habits do in country houses, and took walks, and a drive, and read in the library, and wrote half a dozen letters.

His bed-room and dressing-room were at the side of the gallery, directly opposite to my father’s, which had a sort of ante-room en suite, in which were some of his theological books.

The day after Mr. Bryerly’s arrival, I was about to see whether my father’s water carafe and glass had been duly laid on the table in this ante-room, and in doubt whether he was there, I knocked at the door.

I suppose they were too intent on other matters to hear, but receiving no answer, I entered the room. My father was sitting in his chair, with his coat and waistcoat off, Mr. Bryerly kneeling on a stool beside him, rather facing him, his black scratch wig leaning close to my father’s grizzled hair. There was a large tome of their divinity lore, I suppose, open on the table close by. The lank black figure of Mr. Bryerly stood up, and he concealed something quickly in the breast of his coat.

My father stood up also, looking paler, I think, than I ever saw him till then, and he pointed grimly to the door, and said, ‘Go.’

Mr. Bryerly pushed me gently back with his hands to my shoulders, and smiled down from his dark features with an expression quite unintelligible to me.

I had recovered myself in a second, and withdrew without a word. The last thing I saw at the door was the tall, slim figure in black, and the dark, significant smile following me: and then the door was shut and locked, and the two Swedenborgians were left to their mysteries.

I remember so well the kind of shock and disgust I felt in the certainty that I had surprised them at some, perhaps, debasing incantation—a suspicion of this Mr. Bryerly, of the ill-fitting black coat, and white choker—and a sort of fear came upon me, and I fancied he was asserting some kind of mastery over my father, which very much alarmed me.

I fancied all sorts of dangers in the enigmatical smile of the lank high-priest. The image of my father, as I had seen him, it might be, confessing to this man in black, who was I knew not what, haunted me with the disagreeable uncertainties of a mind very uninstructed as to the limits of the marvellous.

I mentioned it to no one. But I was immensely relieved when the sinister visitor took his departure the morning after, and it was upon this occurrence that my mind was now employed.

Someone said that Dr. Johnson resembled a ghost, who must be spoken to before it will speak. But my father, in whatever else he may have resembled a ghost, did not in that particular; for no one but I in his household—and I very seldom—dared to address him until first addressed by him. I had no notion how singular this was until I began to go out a little among friends and relations, and found no such rule in force anywhere else.

As I leaned back in my chair thinking, this phantasm of my father came, and turned, and vanished with a solemn regularity. It was a peculiar figure, strongly made, thick-set, with a face large, and very stern; he wore a loose, black velvet coat and waistcoat. It was, however, the figure of an elderly rather than an old man—though he was then past seventy—but firm, and with no sign of feebleness.

I remember the start with which, not suspecting that he was close by me, I lifted my eyes, and saw that large, rugged countenance looking fixedly on me, from less than a yard away.

After I saw him, he continued to regard me for a second or two; and then, taking one of the heavy candlesticks in his gnarled hand, he beckoned me to follow him; which, in silence and wondering, I accordingly did.

He led me across the hall, where there were lights burning, and into a lobby by the foot of the back stairs, and so into his library.

It is a long, narrow room, with two tall, slim windows at the far end, now draped in dark curtains. Dusky it was with but one candle; and he paused near the door, at the left-hand side of which stood, in those days, an old-fashioned press or cabinet of carved oak. In front of this he stopped.

He had odd, absent ways, and talked more to himself, I believe, than to all the rest of the world put together.

‘She won’t understand,’ he whispered, looking at me enquiringly. ‘No, she won’t. Will she?’

Then there was a pause, during which he brought forth from his breast pocket a small bunch of some half-dozen keys, on one of which he looked frowningly, every now and then balancing it a little before his eyes, between his finger and thumb, as he deliberated.

I knew him too well, of course, to interpose a word.

‘They are easily frightened—ay, they are. I’d better do it another way.’

And pausing, he looked in my face as he might upon a picture.

‘They are—yes—I had better do it another way—another way; yes—and she’ll not suspect—she’ll not suppose.’

Then he looked steadfastly upon the key, and from it to me, suddenly lifting it up, and said abruptly, ‘See, child,’ and, after a second or two, ‘Remember this key.’

It was oddly shaped, and unlike others.

‘Yes, sir.’ I always called him ‘sir.’

‘It opens that,’ and he tapped it sharply on the door of the cabinet. ‘In the daytime it is always here,’ at which word he dropped it into his pocket again. ‘You see?—and at night under my pillow—you hear me?’

‘Yes, sir.’

‘You won’t forget this cabinet—oak—next the door—on your left—you won’t forget?’

‘No, sir.’

‘Pity she’s a girl, and so young—ay, a girl, and so young—no sense— giddy. You say, you’ll remember?’

‘Yes, sir.’

‘It behoves you.’

He turned round and looked full upon me, like a man who has taken a sudden resolution; and I think for a moment he had made up his mind to tell me a great deal more. But if so, he changed it again; and after another pause, he said slowly and sternly—‘You will tell nobody what I have said, under pain of my displeasure.’

‘Oh! no, sir!’

‘Good child!’

‘Except,’ he resumed, ‘under one contingency; that is, in case I should be absent, and Dr. Bryerly—you recollect the thin gentleman, in spectacles and a black wig, who spent three days here last month— should come and enquire for the key, you understand, in my absence.’

‘Yes, sir.’

So he kissed me on the forehead, and said—

‘Let us return.’

Which, accordingly, we did, in silence; the storm outside, like a dirge on a great organ, accompanying our flitting.

II

Uncle Silas

WHEN WE REACHED THE DRAWING-ROOM, I resumed my chair, and my father his slow and regular walk to and fro, in the great room. Perhaps it was the uproar of the wind that disturbed the ordinary tenor of his thoughts; but, whatever was the cause, certainly he was unusually talkative that night.

After an interval of nearly half an hour, he drew near again, and sat down in a high-backed arm-chair, beside the fire, and nearly opposite to me, and looked at me steadfastly for some time, as was his wont, before speaking; and said he:

‘This won’t do—you must have a governess.’

In cases of this kind I merely set down my book or work, as it might be, and adjusted myself to listen without speaking.

‘Your French is pretty well, and your Italian; but you have no German. Your music may be pretty good—I’m no judge—but your drawing might be better—yes—yes. I believe there are accomplished ladies—finishing governesses, they call them—who undertake more than any one teacher would have professed in my time, and do very well. She can prepare you, and next winter, then, you shall visit France and Italy, where you may be accomplished as highly as you please.’

‘Thank you, sir.’

‘You shall. It is nearly six months since Miss Ellerton left you—too long without a teacher.’

Then followed an interval.

‘Dr. Bryerly will ask you about that key, and what it opens; you show all that to him, and no one else.’

‘But,’ I said, for I had a great terror of disobeying him in ever so minute a matter, ‘you will then be absent, sir—how am I to find the key?’

He smiled on me suddenly—a bright but wintry smile—it seldom came, and was very transitory, and kindly though mysterious.

‘True, child; I’m glad you are so wise; that, you will find, I have provided for, and you shall know exactly where to look. You have remarked how solitarily I live. You fancy, perhaps, I have not got a friend, and you are nearly right—nearly