Dracula by Bram Stoker

By no means can this be called a cheerful book, but it is one nevertheless, that most readers will peruse with intense interest, held to the end by that peculiar fascination which all supernatural subjects invariably excite in the human mind when they are treated by a writer who wields a vivid pen. Throughout the work, from a literary point of view, is of the highest character. Mr. Stoker has started with the tacit assumption that the horrible creatures he describes do really exist, and by so doing he shows that he has grasped the true spirit of all romance. The weirdness of the subject cannot fail to attract attention, and the manner in which the author has worked out his story, and made the strange old superstition such a seemingly possible factor in latter-day life, is certain to add considerably to his reputation.

Mr. Bram Stoker should have labelled his book "For Strong Men Only," or words to that effect. Left lying carelessly around, it might get into the hands of your maiden aunt who believes devoutly in the man under the bed, or of the new parlourmaid with unsuspected hysterical tendencies. "Dracula" to such would be manslaughter. It is for the man with a sound conscience and digestion, who can turn out the gas and go to bed without having to look over his shoulder more than half a dozen times as he goes upstairs, or more than mildly wishing that he had a crucifix and some garlic handy to keep the vampires from getting at him. That is to say, the story deals with the Vampire King, and it is horrid and creepy to the last degree. It is also excellent, and one of the best things in the supernatural line that we have been lucky enough to hit upon.

It is said of Mrs. Radcliffe that when writing her now almost forgotten romances she shut herself up in absolute seclusion, and fed upon raw beef, in order to give her work the desired atmosphere of gloom, tragedy and terror. If one had no assurance to the contrary one might well suppose that a similar method and regimen had been adopted by Mr. Bram Stoker while writing his new novel "Dracula." In seeking for a parallel to this weird, powerful, and horrorful story our mind reverts to such tales as "The Mysteries of Udolpho," "Frankenstein," "Wuthering Heights," "The Fall of the House of Usher," and "Marjery of Quether." But "Dracula" is even more appalling in its gloomy fascination than any one of these.

It is an eerie and gruesome tale which Mr. Stoker tells, but it is much the best book he has written. The reader is held with a spell similar to that of Wilkie Collins's "The Moonstone," and indeed in many ways the form of narrative by diaries and letters and extracts from newspapers neatly fitted into each other recalls Wilkie Collins's style. Mr. Stoker keeps his devilry well in hand, if such an expression is allowable; as strange event follows strange event, the narrative might in less skilful hands become intolerably improbable; but "Dracula" to the end seems only too reasonably and sanely possible. Henceforth we shall wreathe ourselves in garlic when opportunity offers, and firmly decline all invitations to visit out-of-the-way clients in castles in the South-East of Europe. "Dracula" is a first rate book of adventure.

A writer who attempts in the nineteenth century to rehabilitate the ancient legends of the were-wolf and the vampire has set himself a formidable task. Most of the delightful old superstitions of the past have an unhappy way of appearing limp and sickly in the glare of a later day, and in such a story as "Dracula" the reader must reluctantly acknowledge that the region of horrors has shifted its ground. Man is no longer in dread of the monstrous and the unnatural, and although Mr. Stoker has tackled his gruesome subject with enthusiasm, the effect is more often grotesque than terrible. The Transylvanian site of Castle Dracula is skilfully chosen, and the picturesque region is well described. Count Dracula himself has been in his day a medieval noble, who, by reason of his vampire qualities, is unable to die properly, but from century to century resuscitates his life of the "Un-Dead," as the author terms it, by nightly draughts of blood from the throats of living victims, with the appalling consequence that those once so bitten must become vampire in their turn. The plot is too complicated for reproduction, but it says no little for the author's powers that in spite of its absurdities the reader can follow the story with interest to the end. It is, however, an artistic mistake to fill the whole volume with horrors. A touch of the mysterious, the terrible, or the supernatural is infinitely more effective and credible.

Mr. Bram Stoker has chosen a theme which, though not absolutely new, has seldom been treated with so much seriousness and circumstantial detail. The story is told in the form of diaries, letters, and newspaper cuttings — a method which gives it an air of verisimilitude that is at once its strength and its weakness. The reader is made to feel that these events actually happened, that this vampire count from the Carpathians is a real and present danger. Yet the very accumulation of evidence, the piling of horror upon horror, defeats its own end. We grow weary of the incessant dread. The character of Dracula himself is kept wisely in the background, a dim shape that is all the more terrible for being half-seen. Mr. Stoker writes with a businesslike fluency that carries the story forward, and there are scenes — the voyage of the Demeter, the pursuit of the Count through London — that are handled with real power. But the book is too long. The Transylvanian chapters are excellent; the later English scenes drag. The reader who is not put off by the subject matter will find much to admire, but little to love.

In "Dracula" Mr. Bram Stoker has given us a story which, for sheer horror and grotesque imagination, has few parallels in recent fiction. It is not a pleasant book. It is not a book that one would recommend to persons of weak nerves or to young ladies of sensitive disposition. But it is a book of undeniable power. The narrative is constructed with a skill that compels admiration, even from those who find the subject-matter repugnant. The opening chapters, describing young Harker's sojourn in the Carpathian fastnesses, are as fine a piece of atmospheric writing as we have seen in a long while. The castle of Dracula, with its unexplained silences and its stealthy sounds, is a masterpiece of suggestion. Later, when the scene shifts to England, the story loses something of its peculiar charm. The everyday world intrudes too much upon the supernatural. But the final chase, with its breathless urgency, recovers much of the early tension. On the whole, "Dracula" is a notable addition to the literature of the marvellous. It will find its readers — and they will not soon forget it.

Most people are familiar with the stories of the awful doings in the Dark Ages of the werewolf and the vampires; those strange beings from the other world which took human form and sucked away the lives of unwary men, women, and children as they slept in their beds. Mr. Bram Stoker, in his new book "Dracula," treats of vampires, however, as present-day troubles, and not merely as pests of gone ages. They are introduced to the reader in London, and are fully up-to-date with nineteenth-century civilisation. The story told in "Dracula" is about as weird and gruesome as any we have ever come across. Mr. Bram Stoker speaks as one sure of his ground, and he tells his tale with a fulness and tone betokening simple faith. Altogether "Dracula" may be fairly described as the sensation of the period. It is full of horrors, which make one's blood curdle to read them, but fortunately when he has done with his nineteenth-century vampires or werewolves, Mr. Bram Stoker consigns them to their original dust, and there let us hope they will remain. The impossibilities of the subject are handled with such fertility and ingenuity that "Dracula" is not likely to leave room for imitators, and Mr. Stoker's vampire will remain unique amongst the terrors which paralyse our nerves at bed-time.

Since Wilkie Collins left us we have had no tale of mystery so liberal in manner and so closely woven. But it is something of a triumph for the writer that neither the improbability, nor the unnecessary number of hideous incidents recounted of the man-vampire, are long foremost on the reader's mind, but that the interest of the danger, of the complications, of the pursuit of the villain, of human skill and courage pitted against inhuman wrong and superhuman strength, rises always to the top. We read nearly the whole thing with rapt attention, and can only say that "Dracula" will hold its own with the most powerful and sensational of modern stories. Keep Dracula out of the way of nervous children.

That there are such beings as vampires we have never ourselves encountered, but we are assured on good authority that the belief in them is widespread and of great antiquity. Mr. Stoker has taken this ancient superstition and built upon it a romance of considerable power. His method is the now familiar one of the epistolary novel, and he uses it with skill. The gradual unfolding of the horror — from Jonathan Harker's uneasy journey to Count Dracula's castle, through the terrible homecoming of the ship Demeter, to the final pursuit across Europe — is managed with a steady hand. The women of the story come off less well. Mina Harker is a paragon of Victorian womanhood, too perfect to be quite interesting, and Lucy Westenra is a mere victim. It is the men — Harker, Dr. Seward, the Dutch professor Van Helsing — who carry the weight of the narrative. Van Helsing, with his broken English and his strange learning, is the most vivid of the company. The book will not be to every taste. It deals in horrors that are rather too palpable for the sensitive reader. But those who enjoy a well-told tale of the supernatural will find "Dracula" a satisfying entertainment.

Mr. Bram Stoker has produced a very remarkable book — one that, for sheer audacity of conception, may fairly claim a place beside the best works of the fantastic school. The vampire legend, that grisly growth of medieval superstition, has been treated before in fiction, but never, we think, with such elaborate and painstaking realism. The author has ransacked the folklore of Eastern Europe for his material, and has woven it into a narrative that grips the attention from the first page to the last. The central figure, Count Dracula, is a creation of no ordinary power — a being of ancient evil, whose malign influence reaches across centuries and continents. Mr. Stoker has wisely chosen to show us his monster mainly through the effects he produces, rather than through direct description, and the result is a figure of almost unbearable menace. The book is not without its faults. The style is sometimes crude, the dialogue occasionally stilted. But these are minor blemishes in a work of such sustained imaginative force. "Dracula" will be read — and shuddered over — for many years to come.

By Bram Stoker. (Constable & Co.)

Stories and novels appear just now in plenty stamped with a more or less genuine air of belief in the visibility of supernatural agency. The strengthening of a bygone faith in the fantastic and magical view of things in lieu of the purely material is a feature of the hour, a reaction — artificial, perhaps, rather than natural — against late tendencies in thought. Mr. Stoker is the purveyor of so many strange wares that Dracula reads like a determined effort to go, as it were, "one better" than others in the same field. How far the author is himself a believer in the phenomena described is not for the reviewer to say. He can but attempt to gauge how far the general faith in witches, warlocks, and vampires — supposing it to exist in any general and appreciable measure — is likely to be stimulated by this story.

The vampire idea is very ancient indeed, and there are in nature, no doubt, mysterious powers to account for the vague belief in such beings. Mr. Stoker's way of presenting his matter, and still more the matter itself, are of too direct and uncompromising a kind. They lack the essential note of awful remoteness and at the same time subtle affinity that separates while it links our humanity with unknown beings and possibilities hovering on the confines of the known world.

Dracula is highly sensational, but it is wanting in the constructive art as well as in the higher literary sense. It reads at times like a mere series of grotesquely incredible events; but there are better moments that show more power, though even these are never productive of the tremor such subjects evoke under the hand of a master. An immense amount of energy, a certain degree of imaginative faculty, and many ingenious and gruesome details are there. At times Mr. Stoker almost succeeds in creating the sense of possibility in impossibility; at others he merely commands an array of crude statements of incredible actions.

The early part goes best, for it promises to unfold the roots of mystery and fear lying deep in human nature; but the want of skill and fancy grows more and more conspicuous. The people who band themselves together to run the vampire to earth have no real individuality or being. The German man of science is particularly poor, and indulges, like a German, in much weak sentiment. Still Mr. Stoker has got together a number of "horrid details," and his object, assuming it to be ghastliness, is fairly well fulfilled.