from the Examiner, when noticing Planché’s melodrama wrote: “There are Vampires who waste the heart and happiness of those they are connected with, Vampires of avarice, Vampires of spleen, Vampires of debauchery, Vampires in all the shapes of selfishness and domestic tyranny.” This is his theme, and although his pages have considerable merit I do not conceive that his scenes would have been entirely successful on the stage, since they are poetical and reflective rather than dramatic.
In Germany sensational fiction was long largely influenced by Polidori, and we have such romances as Zschokke’s Der tote Gast, Spindler’s Der Vampyr und seine Brant, Theodor Hildebrand’s Der Vampyr, oder die Totenbraut. Edwin Bauer’s roman à clef the clever Der Baron Vampyr,[61] which was published at Leipzig in 1846, hardly concerns as here, whilst Ewald August König’s sensational Ein moderner Vampyr,[62] which appeared in 1883, or Franz Hirsch’s Moderne Vampyr,[63] 1873, productions which only use in their titles the word “Vampire” to attract,—one might say, to ensnare attention, are in this connexion no more deserving of consideration than mere chap-books and pedlar’s penny-ware such as Fiorelli’s Der Vampyr, and Dr. Seltzam’s pornographic Die Vampyre der Residenz.
Undoubtedly the vampire tradition has never been treated with such consummate skill as by Théophile Gautier in his exquisite prose poem La Morte Amoureuse, which first appeared in the Chronique de Paris on 23rd and 26th June, 1836, when the young author was not quite twenty-five. Although the theme is not original yet perhaps nowhere beside has it been so ingeniously moulded with such delicacy of style, with such rich and vivid colouring, with such emotion and such repression. The darker shadows of the tradition are suggested rather than portrayed, yet none can deny that there is an atmosphere of sombre mystery, even a touch of morbid horror which with complete artistry the writer allows us to suspect rather than to comprehend. The very vagueness of the relation adds to the illusion. We hardly know whether Romuald is the young country priest occupied in prayer and good works, or whether he is the Renaissance seignior living a life of passion and hot extravagance. As he himself cries: “Sometimes I thought I was a priest who dreamed every night that he was a nobleman, sometimes that I was a nobleman who dreamed that he was a
