The Supernatural in Modern English Fiction Dorothy Scarborough 1972 downloads.pdf

The Project Gutenberg eBook of The Supernatural in Modern
English Fiction

This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and
most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions
whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms
of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online at
www.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States, you
will have to check the laws of the country where you are located
before using this eBook.

Title: The Supernatural in Modern English Fiction

Author: Dorothy Scarborough

Release date: October 26, 2014 [eBook #47204]
Most recently updated: October 24, 2024

Language: English

Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/47204

Credits: Produced by Jana Srna, eagkw and the Online Distributed
Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net (This file was
produced from images generously made available by The
Internet Archive/American Libraries.)

*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE
SUPERNATURAL IN MODERN ENGLISH FICTION ***

The
Supernatural in Modern
English Fiction

By

Dorothy Scarborough, Ph.D.
Instructor in English in Extension, Columbia University

G. P. Putnam’s Sons
New York and London
The Knickerbocker Press
1917

Copyright, 1917
by
G. P. PUTNAM’S SONS

The Knickerbocker Press, New York

To

GEORGE AND ANNE SCARBOROUGH

PREFACE

T
HE subject of the supernatural in modern English fiction has been
found difficult to deal with because of its wealth of material. While
there has been no previous book on the topic, and none related to it,
save Mr. C. E. Whitmore’s work on The Supernatural in Tragedy, the mass
of fiction itself introducing ghostly or psychic motifs is simply enormous. It
is manifestly impossible to discuss, or even to mention, all of it. Even in my
bibliography which numbers over three thousand titles, I have made no
effort to list all the available examples of the type. The bibliography, which
I at first intended to publish in connection with this volume, is far too
voluminous to be included here, so will probably be brought out later by
itself.
It would have been impossible for me to prosecute the research work or
to write the book save for the assistance generously given by many persons.
I am indebted to the various officials of the libraries of Columbia University
and of New York City, particularly to Miss Isadore Mudge, Reference
Librarian of Columbia, and to the authorities of the New York Society
Library for permission to use their priceless out-of-print novels in the
Kennedy Collection. My interest in English fiction was increased during my
attendance on some courses in the history of the English novel, given by Dr.
A. J. Carlyle, in Oxford University, England, several years ago. I have
received helpful bibliographical suggestions from Professor Blanche Colton
Williams, Dr. Dorothy Brewster, Professor Nelson Glenn McCrea,
Professor John Cunliffe, and Dean Talcott Williams, of Columbia, and
Professor G. L. Kittredge, of Harvard. Professors William P. Trent, George
Philip Krapp, and Ernest Hunter Wright very kindly read the book in
manuscript and gave valuable advice concerning it, Professor Wright going
over the material with me in detail. But my chief debt of gratitude is to
Professor Ashley H. Thorndike, Head of the Department of English and

Comparative Literature in Columbia, whose stimulating criticism and
kindly encouragement have made the book possible. To all of these—and
others—who have aided me, I am deeply grateful, and I only wish that the
published volume were more worthy of their assistance.
D. S.
Columbia University,
April, 1917.

CONTENTS

PAGE
Introduction 1
CHAPTER
I.—The Gothic Romance 6
II.—Later Influences 54
III.—Modern Ghosts 81
IV.—The Devil and His Allies 130
V.—Supernatural Life 174
VI.—The Supernatural in Folk-Tales 242
VII.—Supernatural Science 251
VIII.—Conclusion 281

The
Supernatural in Modern
English Fiction

INTRODUCTION

T
HE supernatural is an ever-present force in literature. It colors our
poetry, shapes our epics and dramas, and fashions our prose till we
are so wonted to it that we lose sense of its wonder and magic. If all
the elements of the unearthly were removed from our books, how shrunken
in value would seem the residue, how forlorn our feelings! Lafcadio Hearn
in the recently published volume, Interpretations of Literature, says:
There is scarcely any great author in European literature, old or new, who has not distinguished
himself in his treatment of the supernatural. In English literature I believe there is no exception from
the time of the Anglo-Saxon poets to Shakespeare, and from Shakespeare to our own day. And this
introduces us to the consideration of a general and remarkable fact, a fact that I do not remember to
have seen in any books, but which is of very great philosophical importance: there is something
ghostly in all great art, whether of literature, music, sculpture, or architecture. It touches something
within us that relates to infinity.[1]

This continuing presence of the weird in literature shows the popular
demand for it and must have some basis in human psychosis. The night side
of the soul attracts us all. The spirit feeds on mystery. It lives not by fact
alone but by the unknowable, and there is no highest mystery without the
supernatural. Man loves the frozen touch of fear, and realizes pure terror
only when touched by the unmortal. The hint of spectral sounds or
presences quickens the imagination as no other suggestion can do, and no
human shapes of fear can awe the soul as those from beyond the grave.
Man’s varying moods create heaven, hell, and faery wonder-lands for him,
and people them with strange beings.
Man loves the supernatural elements in literature perhaps because they
dignify him by giving his existence a feeling of infinity otherwise denied.
They grant him a sense of being the center of powers more than earthly, of
conflicts supermortal. His own material life may be however circumscribed
and trivial yet he can loose his fancy and escape the petty tragedies of his
days by flight beyond the stars. He can widen the tents of his mortal life,
create a universe for his companionship, and marshal the forces of demons
and unknown gods for his commands. To his narrow rut he can join the
unspaced firmament; to his trivial hours add eternity; to his finite, infinity.
He is so greedy of power, and has so piteously little that he must look for
his larger life in dreams and in the literature of the supernatural.

But, whatever be the reasons, there has been a continuity of the ghostly in
literature, with certain rise and fall of interest. There is in modern English
fiction, as likewise in poetry and the drama, a great extent of the
supernatural, with wide diversity of elements. Beginning with the Gothic
romance, that curious architectural excrescence that yet has had enormous
influence on our novel, the supernatural is found in every period and in
every form of fiction. The unearthly beings meet us in all guises, and
answer our every mood, whether it be serious or awed, satiric or
humoresque.
Literature, always a little ahead of life, has formed our beliefs for us,
made us free with spirits, and given us entrance to immortal countries. The
sense of the unearthly is ever with us, even in the most commonplace
situations,—and there is nothing so natural to us as the supernatural. Our
imagination, colored by our reading, reveals and transforms the world we
live in. We are aware of unbodied emotions about us, of discarnate moods
that mock or invite us. We go a-ghosting now in public places, and a specter
may glide up to give us an apologia pro vita sua any day in Grand Central
or on Main Street of Our-Town. We chat with fetches across the garden
fence and pass the time of day with demons by way of the dumb-waiter.
That gray-furred creature that glooms suddenly before us in the winter
street is not a chauffeur, but a were-wolf questing for his prey. Yon whirring
thing in the far blue is not an aeroplane but a hippogriff that will presently
alight on the pavement beside us with thundering golden hoofs to bear us
away to distant lovely lands where we shall be untroubled by the price of
butter or the articles lost in last week’s wash. That sedate middle-aged ferry
that transports us from Staten Island is a magic Sending Boat if only we
knew its potent runes! The old woman with the too-pink cheeks and
glittering eye, that presses August bargains upon us with the argument that
they will be in style for early fall wear, is a witch wishful to lure away our
souls. We may pass at will by the guardian of the narrow gate and traverse
the regions of the Under-world. True, the materialist may argue that the
actual is more marvelous than the imagined, that the aeroplane is more a
thing of wonder than was the hippogriff, that the ferry is really the
enchanted boat, after all, and that Dante would write a new Inferno if he
could see the subway at the rush hour, but that is another issue.
We might have more psychal experiences than we do if we would only
keep our eyes open, but most of us do have more than we admit to the

neighbors. We have an early-Victorian reticence concerning ghostly things
as if it were scandalous to be associated with them. But that is all wrong.
We should be proud of being singled out for spectral confidences and
should report our ghost-guests to the society columns of the newspaper. It is
hoped that this discussion of comparative ghost-lore may help to establish a
better sense of values.
In this book I deal with ghosts and devils by and large, in an
impressionistic way. I don’t know much about them; I have no learned
theories of causation. I only love them. I only marvel at their infinite variety
and am touched by their humanity, their likeness to mortals. I am fond of
them all, even the dejected, dog-eared ghosts that look as if they were
wraiths of poor relations left out in the rain all night, or devils whose own
mothers wouldn’t care for them. It gives me no holier-than-thou feeling of
horror to sit beside a vampire in the subway, no panic to hear a banshee shut
up in a hurdy-gurdy box. I give a cordial how-do-you-do when a dragon
glides up and puts his paw in mine, and in every stray dog I recognize a
Gladsome Beast. Like us mortals, they all need sympathy, none more so
than the poor wizards and bogles that are on their own, as the Scotch say.
While discussing the nineteenth century as a whole, I have devoted more
attention to the fiction of the supernatural in the last thirty years or so,
because there has been much more of it in that time than before. There is
now more interest in the occult, more literature produced dealing with
psychal powers than ever before in our history. It is apparent in poetry, in
the drama, the novel, and the short story. I have not attempted, even in my
bibliography, to include all the fiction of the type, since that would be
manifestly impossible. I have, however, mentioned specimens of the
various forms, and have listed the more important examples. The treatment
here is meant to be suggestive rather than exhaustive and seeks to show that
there is a genuine revival of wonder in our time, with certain changes in the
characterization of supernatural beings. It includes not only the themes that
are strictly supernatural, but also those which, formerly considered
unearthly, carry on the traditions of the magical. Much of our material of
the weird has been rationalized, yet without losing its effect of wonder for
us in fact or in fiction. If now we study a science where once men believed
blindly in a Black Art, is the result really less mysterious?

CHAPTER I
The Gothic Romance

T
HE real precursor of supernaturalism in modern English literature
was the Gothic novel. That odd form might be called a brief in
behalf of banished romance, since it voiced a protest against the
excess of rationalism and realism in the early eighteenth century. Too great
correctness and restraint must always result in proportionate liberty. As the
eternal swing of the pendulum of literary history, the ebb and flow of fiction
inevitably bring a reaction against any extreme, so it was with the fiction of
the period. The mysterious twilights of medievalism invited eyes tired of
the noonday glare of Augustan formalism. The natural had become familiar
to monotony, hence men craved the supernatural. And so the Gothic novel
came into being. Gothic is here used to designate the eighteenth-century
novel of terror dealing with medieval materials.
There had been some use of the weird in English fiction before Horace
Walpole, but the terror novel proper is generally conceded to begin with his
Romantic curiosity, The Castle of Otranto. The Gothic novel marks a
distinct change in the form of literature in which supernaturalism manifests
itself. Heretofore the supernatural elements have appeared in the drama, in
the epic, in ballads and other poetry, and in folk-tales, but not noticeably in
the novel. Now, however, for a considerable time the ghostly themes are
most prominent in lengthy fiction, contrasted with the short story which
later is to supersede it as a vehicle for the weird. This vacillation of form is
a distinct and interesting aspect of the development of supernaturalism in
literature and will be discussed later.
With this change in form comes a corresponding change in the materials
of ghostly narration. Poetry in general in all times has freely used the
various elements of supernaturalism. The epic has certain distinct themes,
such as visits to the lower world, visions of heaven, and conflict between

mortal and divine powers, and brings in mythological characters, gods,
goddesses, demigods, and the like. Fate is a moving figure in the older
dramas, while the liturgical plays introduced devils, angels, and even the
Deity as characters in the action. In the classical and Elizabethan drama we
see ghosts, witches, magicians, as dramatis personæ. Medieval romances,
prose as well as metrical and alliterative, chansons de geste, lais, and so
forth, drew considerably on the supernatural for complicating material in
various forms, and undoubtedly much of our present element comes from
medievalism. Tales of the Celtic Otherworld, of fairy-lore, of magic, so
popular in early romance, show a strong revival to-day.
The Gothic novel is more closely related to the drama than to the epic or
to such poetry as The Faerie Queene or Comus. On the other hand, the later
novels and stories, while less influenced by the dramatic tradition, show
more of the epic trace than does the Gothic romance. The epic tours through
heaven and hell, the lavish use of angels, devils, and even of Deity, the
introduction of mythological characters and figures which are not seen in
Gothic fiction, appear to a considerable extent in the stories of recent times.
In Gothicism we find that the Deity disappears though the devil remains.
There are no vampires, so far as I have been able to find, though the were-
wolf and the lycanthrope appear, which were absent from the drama (save
in The Duchess of Malfi). Other elements are seen, such as the beginnings
of the scientific supernaturalism which is to become so prominent in later
times. The Wandering Jew comes in and the elixir of life and the
philosopher’s stone achieve importance. Mechanical supernaturalism and
the uncanny power given to inanimate objects seem to have their origins
here, to be greatly developed further on. Supernaturalism associated with
animals, related both to the mythological stories of the past and to the more
horrific aspects of later fiction, are noted in the terror romance.
Allegory and symbolism are present in a slight degree, as in Melmoth and
Vathek’s Hall of Eblis, though not emphasized as in more modern literature.
Humor is largely lacking in the Gothic romance, save as the writers furnish
it unintentionally. In Gothicism itself we have practically no satire, though
Jane Austen and Barrett satirize the terror novel itself in delicious
burlesques that laugh it out of court.
Elements of Gothicism. In the terror tale the relationship between
supernatural effect and Gothic architecture, scenery, and weather is strongly
stressed. Everything is ordered to fit the Gothic plan, and the conformity

becomes in time conventionally monotonous. Horace Walpole, the father of
the terror novel, had a fad for medievalism, and he expressed his
enthusiasm in that extraordinary building at Strawberry Hill, courteously
called a Gothic castle. From a study of Gothic architecture was but a step to
the writing of romance that should reproduce the mysteries of feudal times,
for the shadows of ancient, gloomy castles and cloisters suggested the
shades of ghost-haunted fiction, of morbid terrors. The Castle of Otranto
was the outcome of a dream suggested by the author’s thinking about
medieval structures.
The Gothic castle itself is represented as possessing all the antique
glooms that increase the effect of mystery and awe, and its secret passage-
ways, its underground vaults and dungeons, its trap-doors, its mouldy,
spectral chapel, form a fit setting for the unearthly visitants that haunt it. A
feudal hall is the suitable domicile for ghosts and other supernatural
revenants, and the horrific romance throughout shows a close kinship with
its architecture. The novels of the class invariably lay their scenes in
medieval buildings, a castle, a convent, a monastery, a château or abbey, or
an inquisitional prison. The harassed heroine is forever wandering through
midnight corridors of Gothic structure. And indeed, the opportunity for
unearthly phenomena is much more spacious in the vast piles of antiquity
than in our bungalows or apartment-houses.
Mrs. Radcliffe erected many ruinous structures in fiction. Her Mysteries
of Udolpho shows a castle, a convent, a château, all Gothic in terror and
gloomy secrets, with rooms hung with rotting tapestry, or wainscoted with
black larch-wood, with furniture dust-covered and dropping to pieces from
age, with palls of black velvet waving in the ghostly winds. In other
romances she depicts decaying castles with treacherous stairways leading to
mysterious rooms, halls of black marble, and vaults whose great rusty keys
groan in the locks. One heroine says:[2] “When I entered the portals of this
Gothic structure a chill—surely prophetic—chilled my veins, pressed upon
my heart, and scarcely allowed me to breathe.”
The Ancient Records of the Abbey of St. Oswyth[3] says of its setting:
“The damp, cold, awe-inspiring hall seemed to conjure up ten thousand
superstitious horrors and terrific imaginary apparitions.” In Maturin’s
Albigenses the knights assemble round the great fire in the baronial hall and
tell ghost tales while the storm rages outside. In Melmoth, the Wanderer the
scene changes often, yet it is always Gothic and terrible,—the monastery

with its diabolical punishments, the ancient castle, the ruined abbey by
which the wanderer celebrates his marriage at midnight with a dead priest
for the celebrant, the madhouse, the inquisition cells, which add gloom and
horror to the supernatural incidents and characters. In Zofloya,[4] the maiden
is imprisoned in an underground cave similar to that boasted by other
castles. This novel is significant because of the freedom with which Shelley
appropriated its material for his Zastrozzi, which likewise has the true
Gothic setting. In Shelley’s other romance he erects the same structure and
has the devil meet his victim by the desolate, dear old Gothic abbey.
Regina Maria Roche wrote a number of novels built up with crumbling
castles, awesome abbeys, and donjon-keeps whose titles show the
architectural fiction that dominates them. A list of the names of the Gothic
novels will serve to show the general importance laid on antique setting. In
fact, the castle, abbey, monastery, château, convent, or inquisition prison
occupied such an important place in the story that it seemed the leading
character. It dominated the events and was a malignant personality, that laid
its spell upon those within its bounds. It shows something of the character
that Hawthorne finally gives to his house of seven gables, or the brooding,
relentless power of the sea in Synge’s drama.[5] The ancient castle becomes
not merely haunted itself but is the haunter as well.
Not only is architecture made subservient to the needs of Gothic fiction,
but the scenery likewise is adapted to fit it. Before Mrs. Radcliffe wrote her
stories interlarded with nature descriptions, scant notice had been paid to
scenery in the novel. But she set the style for morose landscapes as Walpole
had for glooming castles, and the succeeding romances of the genre
combined both features. Mrs. Radcliffe was not at all hampered by the fact
that she had never laid eyes on the scenes she so vividly pictures. She
painted the dread scenery of awesome mountains and forests, beetling crags
and dizzy abysses with fluent and fervent adjectives, and her successors
imitated her in sketching nature with dark impressionism.
The scenery in general in the Gothic novel is always subjectively
represented. Nature in itself and of itself is not the important thing. What
the writer seeks to do is by descriptions of the outer world to emphasize the
mental states of man, to reflect the moods of the characters, and to show a
fitting background for their crimes and unearthly experiences. There is little
of the light of day, of the cheerfulness of ordinary nature, but only the

scenes and phenomena that are in harmony with the glooms of crimes and
sufferings.
Like the scenery, the weather in the Gothic novel is always subjectively
treated. There is ever an artistic harmony between man’s moods and the
atmospheric conditions. The play of lightning, supernatural thunders,
roaring tempests announce the approach and operations of the devil, and
ghosts walk to the accompaniment of presaging tempests. In The Albigenses
the winds are diabolically possessed and laugh fiendishly instead of
moaning as they do as seneschals in most romances of terror. The storms
usually take place at midnight, and there is rarely a peaceful night in Gothic
fiction. The stroke of twelve generally witnesses some uproar of nature as
some appearance of restless spirit. Whenever the heroines in Mrs.
Radcliffe’s tales start on their midnight ramble through subterranean
passages and halls of horror, the barometer becomes agitated. And
another[6] says: “The storm, that at that moment was tremendous, could not
equal that tempest which passed in the thoughts of the unhappy captive.”
In Zofloya Victoria’s meetings in the forest with the Moor, who is really
the devil in disguise, are accompanied by supernatural manifestations of
nature. The weather is ordered to suit the dark, unholy plots they make, and
they plan murders against a background of black clouds, hellish thunder,
and lurid lightning. When at last the Moor announces himself as the devil
and hurls Victoria from the mountain top, a sympathetic storm arises and a
flood sweeps her body into the river. This scene is accusingly like the one in
the last chapter of Lewis’s Monk, where the devil throws Ambrosio from the
cliff to the river’s brink.
Instantly a violent storm arose; the winds in fury rent up rocks and forests; the sky was now black
with clouds, now sheeted with fire; the rain fell in torrents; it swelled the stream, the waves over-
flowed their banks; they reached the spot where Ambrosio lay, and, when they abated, carried with
them into the river the corse of the despairing monk.

No Gothic writer shows more power of harmonizing the tempests of the
soul with the outer storms than does Charles Robert Maturin.[7] As
Melmoth, doomed to dreadful life till he can find some tortured soul willing
to exchange destinies with him, traverses the earth in his search, the
preternatural aspects of weather both reflect and mock his despair. As the
young nephew alone at midnight after his uncle’s death reads the fated
manuscript, “cloud after cloud comes sweeping on like the dark banners of
an approaching host whose march is for destruction.” Other references may

illustrate the motif. “Clouds go portentously off like ships of war ... to
return with added strength and fury.” “The dark and heavy thunder-clouds
that advance slowly seem like the shrouds of specters of departed greatness.
Peals of thunder sounded, every peal like the exhausted murmurs of a spent
heart.”
In general, in the Gothic novel there is a decided and definite attempt to
use the terrible forces of nature to reflect the dark passions of man, with
added suggestiveness where supernatural agencies are at work in the events.
This becomes a distinct convention, used with varying effectiveness.
Nowhere in the fiction of the period is there the power such as Shakespeare
reveals, as where Lear wanders on the heath in the pitiless clutch of the
storm, with a more tragic tempest in his soul. Yet, although the idea of the
inter-relation of the passions of man and nature is not original with the
Gothicists, and though they show little of the inevitability of genius, they
add greatly to their supernatural effect by this method. Later fiction is less
barometric as less architectural than the Gothic.
The Origin of Individual Gothic Tales. The psychological origin of the
individual Gothic romances is interesting to note. Supernaturalism was
probably more generally believed in then than now, and people were more
given to the telling of ghost stories and all the folk-tales of terror than at the
present time. One reason for this may be that they had more leisure; and
their great open fires were more conducive to the retailing of romances of
shudders than our unsocial steam radiators. The eighteenth century seemed
frankly to enjoy the pleasures of fear, and the rise of the Gothic novel gave
rein to this natural love for the uncanny and the gruesome.
Dreams played an important part in the inspiration of the tales of terror.
The initial romance was, as the author tells us, the result of an architectural
nightmare. Walpole says in a letter:
Shall I even confess to you what was the origin of this romance? I waked one morning from a
dream, of which all that I could recall was that I had thought myself in an ancient castle (a very
natural dream for a head filled like mine with Gothic story) and that at the uppermost banister of a
great staircase I saw a gigantic hand in armor. In the evening I sat down and began to write, without
knowing in the least what I intended to say or relate. The work grew on my hands.

Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein was likewise born of a dream. “Monk”
Lewis had interested Byron, Polidori, and the Shelleys in supernatural tales
so much so that after a fireside recital of German terror stories Byron
proposed that each member of the group should write a ghostly romance to

be compared with the compositions of the others. The results were
negligible save Frankenstein, and it is said that Byron was much annoyed
that a mere girl should excel him. At first Mrs. Shelley was unable to hit
upon a plot, but one evening after hearing a discussion of Erasmus Darwin’s
attempts to create life by laboratory experiments, she had an idea in a half
waking dream. She says:
I saw—with shut eyes but acute mental vision—I saw the pale student of unhallowed arts kneeling
beside the thing he had put together. I saw the hideous phantasm of a man stretched out, and then, on
the working of some powerful engine, show signs of life.... The artist sleeps but he is awakened; and
behold, the horrid thing stands at his bedside, looking on him with watery, yellow yet speculative
eyes!

And from this she wrote her story of the man-monster.
The relation of dreams to the uncanny tale is interesting. Dreams and
visions, revelatory of the past and prophetic of the future, played an
important part in the drama (as they are now widely used in motion-picture
scenarios) and the Gothic novel continues the tradition. It would be
impossible to discover in how many instances the authors were
subconsciously influenced in their choice of material by dreams. The
presaging dreams and visions attributed to supernatural agency appear
frequently in Gothic fiction. The close relation between dreams and second
sight in the terror novel might form an interesting by-path for investigation.
Dream-supernaturalism becomes even more prominent in later fiction and
contributes passages of extraordinary power of which De Quincey’s Dream-
Fugue may be mentioned as an example.
The germinal idea for Melmoth, the Wanderer was contained in a
paragraph from one of the author’s own sermons, which suggested a theme
for the story of a doomed, fate-pursued soul.
At this moment is there one of us present, however we may have departed from the Lord,
disobeyed His will, and disregarded His word—is there one of us who would, at this moment, accept
all that man could bestow or earth could afford, to resign the hope of his salvation? No, there is not
one—not such a fool on earth were the enemy of mankind to traverse it with the offer!

True, the theme of such devil-pact had appeared in folk-tales and in the
drama previously, notably in Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus, but Maturin here
gives the idea a dramatic twist and psychologic poignancy by making a
human being the one to seek to buy another’s soul to save his own. A
mortal, cursed with physical immortality, ceaselessly harried across the
world by the hounds of fate, forever forced by an irresistible urge to make
his impitiable offer to tormented souls, and always meeting a tragic refusal,

offers dramatic possibilities of a high order and Maturin’s story has a
dreadful power.
Clara Reeve’s avowed purpose in writing The Old English Baron was to
produce a ghost story that should be more probable and realistic than
Walpole’s. She stated that her book was the literary offspring of the earlier
romance, though Walpole disclaimed the paternity. She deplored the
violence of the supernatural machinery that tended to defeat its own
impressiveness and wished to avoid that danger in her work, though she
announced: “We can conceive and allow for the appearance of a ghost.” Her
prim recipe for Romantic fiction required, “a certain degree of the
marvelous to excite the attention; enough of the manners of real life to give
an air of probability to the work; and enough of the pathetic to engage the
heart in its behalf.” But her ingredients did not mix well and the result was
rather indigestible though devoured by hungry readers of her time.
Mrs. Anne Radcliffe, that energetic manipulator of Gothic enginery,
wrote because she had time that was wasting on her hands,—which may be
an explanation for other and later literary attempts. Her journalist husband
was away till late at night, so while sitting up for him she wrote frightful
stories to keep herself from being scared. During that waiting loneliness she
doubtless experienced all those nervous terrors that she describes as being
undergone by her palpitating maidens, whose emotional anguish is suffered
in midnight wanderings through subterranean passages and ghosted
apartments. There is one report that she went mad from over-much
brooding on mormo, but that is generally discredited.
Matthew Gregory Lewis was impelled to write The Monk by reading the
romances of Walpole and Mrs. Radcliffe, together with Schiller’s Robbers,
which triple influence is discernible in his lurid tale. He defended the
indecency of his book by asserting that he took the plot from a story in The
Guardian,[8] ingeniously intimating that plagiarized immorality is less
reprehensible than original material. Shelley, in his turn, was so strongly
impressed by Lewis’s Monk, and Mrs. Dacre’s Zofloya in writing his
Zastrozzi, and by William Godwin’s St. Leon in his St. Irvyne, or The
Rosicrucian, that the adaptation amounts to actual plagiarism. Even the
titles show imitation. In writing to Godwin, Shelley said he was “in a state
of intellectual sickness” when he wrote these stories, and no one who is
familiar with the productions will contradict him in the matter.

The influence of the crude scientific thought and investigation of the
eighteenth century is apparent in the Gothic novels. Frankenstein, as we
have seen, was the outcome of a Romantic, Darwinian dream, and novels
by Godwin, Shelley, and Maturin deal with the theme of the elixir of life.
William Beckford’s Vathek has to do with alchemy, sorcery, and other
phases of supernatural science. Zofloya, Mrs. Dacre’s diabolical Moor,
performs experiments in hypnotism, telepathy, sorcery, and satanic
chemistry. And so in a number of the imitative and less known novels of the
genre science plays a part in furnishing the material. There is much interest
in the study of the relation of science to the literature of supernaturalism in
the various periods and the discoveries of modern times as furnishing plot
material. The Gothic contribution to this form of ghostly fiction is
significant, though slight in comparison with later developments.
The Gothic Ghosts. The Ghost is the real hero or heroine of the Gothic
novel. The merely human characters become for the reader colorless and
dull the moment a specter glides up and indicates a willingness to relate the
story of his life. The continuing popularity of the shade in literature may be
due to the fact that humanity finds fear one of the most pleasurable of
emotions and truly enjoys vicarious horrors, or it may be due to a childish
delight in the sensational. At all events, the ghost haunts the pages of terror
fiction, and the trail of the supernatural is over them all. In addition to its
association with ancient superstitions, survivals of animistic ideas in
primitive culture, we may see the classical and Elizabethan influence in the
Gothic specter. The prologue-ghost, naturally, is not needed in fiction, but
the revenge-ghost is as prominent as ever. The ghost as a dramatic
personage, his talkativeness, his share in the action, reflect the dramatic
tradition, with a strong Senecan touch. The Gothic phantoms have not the
power of Shakespeare’s apparitions, nothing approaching the psychologic
subtlety of Hamlet or Julius Cæsar or the horrific suggestiveness of
Macbeth, yet they are related to them and are not altogether poor. Though
imitative of the dramatic ghosts they have certain characteristics peculiar to
themselves and are greatly worth consideration in a study of literary
supernaturalism.
There are several clearly marked classes of ghosts in Gothicism. There is
the real ghost that anybody can pin faith to; there is the imagined apparition
that is only a figment of hysterical fear or of a guilty conscience; and there
is the deliberate hoax specter. There are ghosts that come only when called,

—sometimes the castle dungeons have to be paged for retiring shades;
others appear of their own free will. Some have a local habitation and a
name and haunt only their own proper premises, while others have the
wanderlust. There are innocent spirits returning to reveal the circumstances
of their violent demise and to ask Christian burial; we meet guilty souls sent
back to do penance for their sins in the place of their commission; and there
are revenge ghosts of multiple variety. There are specters that yield to
prayers and strong-minded shades that resist exorcism. It is difficult to
classify them, for the lines cross inextricably.
The genealogical founder of the family of Gothic ghosts is the giant
apparition in The Castle of Otranto. He heralds his coming by an enormous
helmet, a hundred times larger than life size, which crashes into the hall,
and a sword which requires a hundred men to bear it in. The ghost himself
appears in sections. We first see a Brobdignagian foot and leg, with no
body, then a few chapters later an enormous hand to match. In the last scene
he assembles his parts, after the fashion of an automobile demonstration,
supplies the limbs that are lacking and stands forth as an imposing and
portentous shade. After receiving Alfonso’s specter—Alfonso will be
remembered as the famous statue afflicted with the nose-bleed—he “is
wrapt from mortal eyes in a blaze of glory.” That seems singular,
considering the weighty material of which he and his armor are made.
There is another interesting specter in the castle, the monk who is seen
kneeling in prayer in the gloomy chapel and who, “turning slowly round
discovers to Frederick the fleshless jaws and empty sockets of a skeleton
wrapped in a hermit’s cowl.”
Clara Reeve’s young peasant in The Old English Baron, the unrecognized
heir to the estate, who is spending a night in the haunted apartment, sees
two apparitions, one a woman and the other a gentleman in armor though
not of such appalling size as the revenant in Otranto. The two announce
themselves as his long-lost parents and vanish after he is estated and
suitably wed. Mrs. Radcliffe[9] introduces the shade of a murdered knight, a
chatty personage who haunts a baronial hall full of men, and at another time
engages in a tournament, slaying his opponent.
Mrs. Bonhote[10] shows us a migratory ghost of whom the old servant
complains in vexation:
Only think, Miss, of a ghost that should be at home minding its own business at the Baron’s own
castle, taking the trouble to follow him here on special business it has to communicate! However,

travelling three or four hundred miles is nothing to a ghost that can, as I have heard, go at the rate of
a thousand miles a minute on land or sea.

In this romance the baron goes to visit the vault and has curdling
experiences.
“A deep groan issues from the coffin and a voice exclaims, ‘You hurt me!
Forbear or you will crush my bones to powder!’” He knocks the coffin in
pieces, whereupon the vocal bones demand decent burial and his departure
from the castle. Later the baron sees the ghost of his first wife, who objects
to his making a third matrimonial venture, though she has apparently
conceded the second. In the same story a young woman’s spook pursues
one Thomas, almost stamping on his heels, and finally vanishing like a sky-
rocket, leaving an odor of brimstone behind. A specter rises from a well in
The History of Jack Smith, or the Castle of Saint Donats,[11] and shakes its
hoary head at a group of men who fire pistols at it.
The Castle of Caithness[12] shows a murdered father indicating his
wounds to his son and demanding vengeance. An armored revenge ghost
appears in Count Roderick’s Castle, or Gothic Times, an anonymous
Philadelphia novel, telling his son the manner of his murder, and scaring the
king, who has killed him, to madness. The revenge ghosts in the Gothic do
not cry “Vindicta!” as frequently as in the early drama, but they are as
relentless in their hate. In Ancient Records, or The Abbey of St. Oswyth,[13]
the spirit of a nun who has been wronged and buried alive by the wicked
baron returns with silent, tormenting reproach. She stands beside him at
midnight, with her dead infant on her breast.
Suddenly the eyes of the specter become animated. Oh!—then what flashes of appalling anger dart
from their hollow orbits on the horror-stricken Vortimer! Three dreadful shrieks ring pealing through
the chamber now filled with a blaze of sulphurous light. The specter suddenly becomes invisible and
the baron falls senseless on his couch.

Scant wonder! In the same story Rosaline, the distressed heroine, is about to
wed against her will, when a specter appears and forbids the bans. Again,
Gondemar has a dagger at her throat with wicked intent, when a spook “lifts
up his hollow, sunken countenance and beckons with angry gestures for his
departure.” Gondemar departs!
Another revenge ghost creates excitement in The Accusing Spirit. A
murdered marquis appears repeatedly to interested parties and demands
punishment on his brother who has slain him. Another inconsiderate specter
in the same volume wakes a man from his sleep, and beckoning him to

follow, leads him to a subterranean vault, stamps his foot on a certain stone,
shows a ghastly wound in his throat and vanishes. On investigation,
searchers find a corpse in a winding-sheet beneath the indicated spot.
Another accusing spirit appears in the same story—that of Benedicta, a
recreant nun, who glides as a headless and mutilated figure through the
cloisters and hovers over the convent bed where she “breathed out her
guilty soul.” The young heroine who has taken temporary refuge in the
convent and has to share the cell with this disturbing room-mate, is
informed by an old nun that, “Those damned spirits who for mysterious
purposes receive permission to wander over the earth can possess no power
to injure us but that which they may derive from the weakness of our
imagination.” Nevertheless, the nervous girl insists on changing her room!
Another famous cloistered ghost, one of the pioneer female apparitions of
note, is the Bleeding Nun in Lewis’s The Monk, that hall of Gothic horrors.
He provides an understudy for her, who impersonates the nun in times of
emergency, providing complicating confusion for the other characters and
for the reader.
Ghosts begin to crowd upon each others’ heels in later Gothic novels. No
romance is so poor as not to have a retinue of specters, or at least, a ghost-
of-all-work. Emboldened by their success as individuals, spooks appear in
groups and mobs. William Beckford in his Vathek presents two thousand
specters in one assembly. Beckford was no niggard! In Maturin’s The
Albigenses, de Montfort, passing alone through a dark forest, meets the
phantoms of countless victims of his religious persecution. Men, women,
young maidens, babes at the breast, all move toward him with unspeakable
reproach, with “clattering bones, eyeless sockets, bare and grinning jaws.”
Aside from Dante the most impressive description of unhappy spirits in a
large number is given in Vathek in that immortal picture of the Hall of Eblis.
Beckford shows here a concourse of doomed souls, each with his hand
forever pressed above his burning heart, each carrying his own hell within
him, having lost heaven’s most precious boon, the soul’s hope! In the Hall
of Eblis there are the still living corpses, “the fleshless forms of the pre-
adamite kings, who still possess enough life to be conscious of their
deplorable condition; they regard one another with looks of the deepest
dejection, each holding his right hand motionless above his heart.” The
prophet Soliman is there, from whose livid lips come tragic words of his sin

and punishment. Through his breast, transparent as glass, the beholder can
see his heart enveloped in flames.
In James Hogg’s The Wool-Gatherer, a man of very evil life is haunted
by the wraiths of those he has wronged. As he lies on his death-bed, not
only he, but those around him as well, hear the pleading voices of women,
the pitiful cries of babes around his bed, though nothing is visible. We have
here a suggestion of the invisible supernaturalism that becomes so frequent
and effective a motif in later fiction. After the man is dead, the supernatural
sounds become so dreadful that “the corpse sits up in the bed, pawls wi’ its
hands and stares round wi’ its dead face!” When the watchers leave the
room for a few moments, the body mysteriously disappears and is never
found. A somewhat similar instance occurs in one of Ambrose Bierce’s
modern stories of dead bodies.
There is some attempt to exorcise restless spirits in a number of Gothic
novels. On various occasions the priests come forth with bell, book, and
candle to pronounce anathema against the troublesome visitants. In one
story a monk crosses his legs to scare away the specter, but forgets and
presently tumbles over. In another,[14] the priest peremptorily bids the
ghosts depart and breaks the news firmly to them that they cannot return for
a thousand years. But one bogle, whether of feeble understanding or strong
will, comes in to break up the ceremonies of incantation, and scares the
priest into hysterics.
The imagined ghost appears in many of the Gothic tales, whose writers
lack the courage of their supernaturalism. Mrs. Radcliffe, for instance, loves
to build up a tissue of ghostly horrors, yet explains them away on natural
grounds after the reader fancies he sees a spirit around every corner.
The ghosts that are deliberately got up for the purposes of deception form
an interesting feature of Gothic methods. The reasons behind the spectral
impersonations are various, to frighten criminals into restitution after
confession, to further crime, or merely to enliven the otherwise lagging
story. In The Spirit of Turrettville two youths follow the sounds of plaintive
music till, in a deserted, spookish apartment, they see a woman playing at
an old harp. As they draw near, they see only skeleton hands on the keys
and the apparition turns toward them “a grinning, mouldering skull.” She
waves her hands with haughty rebuke for their intrusion and “stalks” out of
the oratory. She gives further performances, however, singing a song
composed for the occasion. But the reader, after such thrills, resents finding

out later that she is the living wife, attempting to frighten the villain into
confession.
In The Accusing Spirit a bogus spook is constructed by means of
phosphorus, aided by a strong resemblance between two men, to accuse an
innocent man of murder. The apparition dramatically makes his charge, but
is unmasked just in time to save the victim’s life. A tall, cadaverous young
man makes up for a ghost in an anonymous novel,[15] while a mysterious
woman in a black veil attends a midnight funeral in the castle, then
unaccountably disappears.
In Melmoth the monks persecute a despised brother by impersonating
spirits in his cell. They cover the walls with images of fiends, over which
they smear phosphorus, and burn sulphur to assist the deception. They utter
mocking cries as of demons, seeking to drive him mad. In Lewis’s Monk
there is a false Bleeding Nun as well as the bona fide specter. In other
Gothic novels there are various spectral frauds cleverly planned, and then
revealed, but their explanation does not altogether dispel the uncanny
impression they make.
The ghost that stays at home in a definite place, haunting its own
demesne, is a familiar figure in the fiction of the period. Every castle has its
haunted tower or dungeon or apartment with its shade that walks by night.
Several appear carrying candles or lamps to light them through the
blackness of architectural labyrinths. Several evince a fondness for bells
and herald their coming by rings. In one romance,[16] the ghost takes the
form of a white cow. (Doubtless many ghosts in real life have had a similar
origin.) In another,[17] a specter in armor appears to terrify his murderer, and
supernatural lightning aids in his revenge.
It would be impossible to designate all the ghosts in Gothic fiction for
there is wholesale haunting. They appear in the plot to warn, to comfort or
command, and seem to have very human characteristics on the whole. Yet
they are not so definitely personated, not so individual and realistic as the
spirits in later fiction, though they do achieve some creepy effects. It is not
their brute force that impresses us. We are less moved by the armored
knight and the titanic adversary in Otranto than by the phantoms in the Hall
of Eblis. The vindictive ghosts, mouldy from the vault, are less appalling
than the bodiless voices of wronged women and children that haunt the
death-bed and bring a corpse back to dreadful life. The specters with
flamboyant personality, that oppress us with their egotistic clamor, may be

soon forgotten, but the ghostly suggestiveness of other spirits has a haunting
power that is inescapable. Some of the Gothic ghosts have a strange vitality,
—and, after all, where would be the phantoms of to-day but for their early
services?
Witches and Warlocks. While not at all equal in importance to the ghosts,
witches and warlocks add to the excitement in Gothic fiction. There is but
little change from the witch of dramatic tradition, for we have both the real
and the reputed witch in the terror novel, the genuine antique hag who has
powers given her from the devil, and the beautiful young girl who is
wrongly suspected of an unholy alliance with the dark spirits.
In Melmoth, there is an old woman doctor who has uncanny ability. She
tells fortunes, gives spells against the evil eye and produces weird results
“by spells and such dandy as is beyond our element.” She turns the mystic
yarn to be dropped into the pit, on the brink of which stands “the shivering
inquirer into futurity, doubtful whether the answer to her question ‘Who
holds?’ is to be uttered by the voice of a demon or lover.” In The Albigenses
three Weird Sisters appear that are not altogether poor imitations of
Shakespeare’s own. Matilda in The Monk possesses dæmonic power of
enchantment and in the subterranean passages of the monastery she works
her unhallowed arts. The hag Carathis, in Vathek, is a witch of rare skill,
who concocts her magic potions and by supernatural means forces all things
to her will. There are several witches and warlocks in James Hogg’s The
Hunt of Eildon, who work much mischief but at last are captured and
convicted. They have the choice of being burned alive or being baptized,
but with wild cries they struggle against the holy water and face the flames.
In Hogg’s Brownie of Bodbeck, Marion Linton believes her own daughter
is a witch and thinks she should be given the trial by fire or water. There is
an innocent young reputed witch in The Hunt of Eildon, who is sentenced to
death for her art.
The Devil. The devil incarnate is one of the familiar figures in the terror
novel. Here, as in the case of the ghost, we see the influence of the dramatic
rather than of the epic tradition. He is akin to Calderon’s wonder-working
magician and Marlowe’s Dr. Faustus rather than to the satanic creations of
Dante and Milton. He is not a dread, awe-inspiring figure either physically
or as a personality, though he does assume terrifying, almost epic
proportions in the closing scenes of The Monk and Zofloya. Neither is he as
human, as appealing to our sympathies as the lonely, misjudged,

misunderstood devils in later fiction. We neither love nor greatly fear the
Gothic demon. Yet he does appear in interesting variants and deserves our
study.
In Hogg’s Hunt of Eildon the devil comes in as a strange old man who
yet seems curiously familiar to the king and to everyone who sees him,
though no one can remember just when he knew him. There is a clever
psychologic suggestiveness here, which perhaps inspired a similar idea in a
recent play, The Eternal Magdalen. Later he is recognized and holy water
thrown on him.
The whole form and visage of the creature was changed in a moment to that of a furious fiend. He
uttered a yell that made all the abbey shake to its foundations and forthwith darted away into the air,
wrapt in flames. As he ascended, he waved his right hand and shook his fiery locks at his inquisitors.

There is nothing dubious about his personality here, certainly!
Satan appears dramatically in The Monk as well. His first visits are made
in the form of attractive youth. Ambrosio, who has been led into sin by the
dæmonic agent, Matilda, is awaiting death in the Inquisition cell, when she
comes to see him to urge that he win release by selling his soul to the devil.
But the repentant monk refuses her advice, so she departs in a temper of
blue flame. Then he has a more dread visitant,—Lucifer himself, described
as follows:
His blasted limbs still bore the marks of the Almighty’s thunders; a swarthy darkness spread itself
over his gigantic form; his hands and feet were armed with long talons.... Over his huge shoulders
waved two enormous sable wings; and his hair was supplied by living snakes which twined
themselves with frightful hissings. In one hand he held a roll of parchment, and in the other an iron
pen. Still the lightnings flashed around him and the thunder bursts seemed to announce the
dissolution of nature.

Ambrosio is overawed into selling his soul and signs the compact with his
blood, as per convention.
The devil doesn’t keep to his agreement to release him, however, for
Lewis tells us that taking his victim to the top of a mountain and “darting
his talons into the monk’s shaven crown, he sprang with him from the rock.
The caves and mountains rang with Ambrosio’s shrieks. The demon
continued to soar aloft till, reaching a dreadful height, he released the
sufferer. Headlong fell the monk.” He plunges to the river’s brink, after
which a storm is evoked by the devil and his body swept away in the flood.
A similar dæmonic manifestation occurs in Zofloya. Victoria has been
induced to bind herself to the Evil One, who has appeared as a Moorish
servant of impressive personality and special powers. He grants her wishes

hostile to her enemies, holding many conferences with her in the dark forest
where he is heralded by flute-like sounds. He appears sometimes like a
flame, sometimes like a lightning flash. He comes with the swiftness of the
wind and tells her that her thoughts summoned him. At last, he announces
himself as Satan, and assumes his own hideous form of gigantism.
Behold me as I am, no longer that which I appeared to be, but the sworn enemy of all created
nature, by men called Satan. Yes, it was I that under semblance of the Moor appeared to thee.
As he spoke, he grasped more firmly the neck of Victoria, with one push he whirled her headlong
down the dreadful abyss!—as she fell his loud dæmonic laugh, his yells of triumph echoed in her
ears; and a mangled corpse she fell, she was received into the foaming waters below.

The devil is seen in Vathek as a preternaturally ugly old man with strange
powers. James Hogg has rather a penchant for the demon, for he uses him
in The Wool-Gatherer, and in Confessions of a Justified Sinner, which is a
story of religious superstition, of the use of diablerie and witchcraft,
introducing a satanic tempter. On the whole, the appearances of the devil in
Gothic fiction lack impressiveness, are weak in psychologic subtlety, and
have not the force either of the epic or of the dramatic representations. Nor
have they the human appeal that the incarnations of the devil in later fiction
make to our sympathies.
In addition to the unholy powers possessed by the devil and given by him
to his agents, the witches, warlocks and magicians, we see in Gothic fiction
other aspects of dæmonology, such as that associated with animals and with
inanimate objects. Supernaturalism in the horror novel is by no means
confined to human beings, but extends to beasts as well. Animals are
supposed to be peculiarly sensitive to ghostly impressions, more so than
men, and the appearance of a specter is often first announced by the
extreme terror of some household pet, or other animal. Gothic dogs have
very keen noses for ghosts and howl lugubriously when an apparition
approaches. Ravens are represented as showing the presence of evil powers,
somewhat as the Southern darkey believes that the jay-bird is the ally of the
devil and spends every Friday in torment. And one does not forget the snaky
coiffure that writhed around the demon’s head in The Monk.
Maturin’s Albigenses introduces the story of a gruesome loup-garou, or
werewolf, which figures extensively in folk-tales. In this case the husband
of a beautiful young woman is a werewolf who during his savage
metamorphosis tears her to pieces then disappears to return no more. This is
suggestive—with a less satisfactory ending—of Marie de France’s

charming little lai, Le Bisclavret. Professor Kittridge has shown the
frequency of the werewolf motif in medieval story, by the variants he brings
together in his Arthur and Gorlogon. In The Albigenses a lycanthrope also
is described, a hideous human being that fancies himself a mad wolf.
There is much use of animal supernaturalism in James Hogg’s romances.
In one,[18] Sandy is saved from going over a precipice by the warning of a
hare that immediately after vanishes, having left no tracks in the snow. In
another,[19] the two white beagles that the king uses in hunting are in reality
maidens bound by enchantment, who are forced to slay human beings then
transform them into deer for the king and his company to eat. The other
dogs are aware of the unnatural state of affairs, while the men are too stupid
to realize it. The clownish Croudy is changed into a hog, which brings
amusing and almost tragic complications into his life. His old dog knows
him and follows him pathetically, and a drove of cows go off in a stampede
at his approach, for they, too, sense the supernatural spell. Croudy is put on
the block to be killed for pork, when the fairy changes him back suddenly to
the consternation of the butcher. But Croudy does not behave well after his
transformation, so he is changed into a cat with endless life. He may resume
mortal shape one night in the year and relate his feline experiences.
In the same story the king of Scotland is proposing a toast when his
favorite dog dashes the cup from his hand. This is repeated several times,
till the king learns that the drink is poisoned, and the dog has thus by
supernatural knowledge saved his life. An innocent young girl, sentenced to
death for witchcraft because a fairy has taken her form and worked
enchantment, and her lover are transformed into white birds that fly out of
the prison the night before the execution and live eternally on the shores of
a far lake.
The ghostly power extends to inanimate objects as well as to human
beings and animals. Armor and costumes seem to have a material
immortality of their own, for it is quite common to recognize spectral
visitants by their garments or accouterments. Armor clanks audibly in the
terror scenes. In The Castle of Otranto, the giant ghost sends his immense
helmet crashing into the hall to shatter the would-be-bridegroom and the
hopes of his father. The head-gear has power of voluntary motion and
moves around with agility, saves the heroine from danger by waving its
plumes at the villain and generally adds excitement to the scenes. Later a
titanic sword leaps into place of itself, after having been borne to the

entrance by a hundred men fainting under the weight of it, while a statue of
Alfonso sheds three drops of blood from its nose and a portrait turns round
in its frame and strolls out into the open.
Pictures in general take a lively part in horrific fiction. The portrait of a
murdered man in The Spirit of the Castle picks itself up from the lumber
heap where it has been thrown, cleans itself and hangs itself back on the
wall, while[20] a portrait in a deserted chamber wags its head at a servant
who is making the bed. The portrait of Melmoth is endowed with
supernatural power, for its eyes follow the beholder with awful meaning,
and as the nephew in desperation tears it from its frame and burns it, the
picture writhes in the flames, ironically, and mocks him. This might be
compared with Oscar Wilde’s Picture of Dorian Gray and with other later
stories.
The statue of Alfonso in Walpole’s Castle moves from its place with no
visible means of support, and[21] a great effigy of black marble is said to
“march all round and come back into its place again with a great groan.” In
St. Oswyth the soil of the abbey grounds obtained by gross injustice is
haunted by the ghost of the wronged nun who inflicts a curse upon it,
rendering it “spell-blighted, unprolific, and impossible to till.” The key to
the room in the old house in which Melmoth’s diabolic portrait is kept,
turns in its lock with a sound like the cry of the dead.
Gothic romance contains magic mirrors wherein one can see any person
he wishes no matter how distant he may be, and watch his movements after
the fashion of a private moving-picture show,—such as that used by
Ambrosio.[22] There are enchanted wands with power to transform men to
beasts or vice versa, as in The Hunt of Eildon. There are crystal balls that
reveal not only what is going on in distant parts, but show the future as
well.[23] The same volume describes magic swords that bear changing
hieroglyphics to be read only by enchantment and other uncanny objects.
These will serve to illustrate the preternatural powers possessed by
inanimate objects in the terror literature. In some instances the motif is used
with effectiveness, definitely heightening the impression of the weird in a
way that human supernaturalism could not accomplish. We do not see here
the mechanistic supernaturalism, which is to become important in later
tales, and the effects here are crude, yet of interest in themselves and as
suggesting later uses of the idea.

Dæmonology manifests itself in the supernatural science in the Gothic
novels as well as in the characterization of the devil and his confreres. We
have diabolical chemistry besides alchemy, astrology, hypnotism,
ventriloquism, search for the philosopher’s stone, infernal biology, and the
other scientific twists of supernaturalism. In Vathek, where we have a
regular array of ghostliness, we see a magic potion that instantly cures any
disease however deadly,—the progenitor of the modern patent medicine.
There is an Indian magician who writes his messages on the high heavens
themselves. Vathek’s mother is an industrious alchemist strangling an
assembly of prominent citizens in order to use their cadavers in her
laboratory, where she stews them up with serpent’s oil, mummies, and
skulls, concocting therefrom a powerful potion. Vathek has an uncurbed
curiosity that leads him into various experiments, to peer into the secrets of
astrology, alchemy, sorcery, and kindred sciences. He uses a magic drink
that gives the semblance of death, like that used later in The Monk, as
earlier, of course, in Romeo and Juliet, and elsewhere.
The Moor in Zofloya is well versed in dæmonic science. He tells of
chemical experiments where he forces everyone to do his will or die. By his
potions he can change hate into love or love into hate, and can give a drug
which produces semi-insanity. Under the influence of this a man weds a
dæmonic temptress thinking her the woman he loves, then commits suicide
when he wakes to the truth. This reminds us of Sax Rohmer’s Fu-Manchu
stories of diabolic hypodermics that produce insanity.
In Ankerwich Castle a woman lying at the point of death is miraculously
cured by a drug whose prescription the author neglects to state. In the same
story a child is branded in a peculiar fashion. A new-born babe whose birth
must remain secret yet who must be recognizable in emergency, is marked
on its side with letters burnt in with a strange chemical, which will remain
invisible till rubbed with a certain liquid. Matilda in The Monk dabbles in
satanic chemistry and compounds evil potions in her subterranean
experiments.
Mary Shelley uses the idea of supernatural biology in her story of the
man-monster, Frankenstein, the story of the young scientist who after
morbid study and experiment, constructs a human frame of supernatural
size and hideous grotesqueness and gives it life. But the thing created
appalls its creator by its dreadful visage, its more than human size, its look
of less than human intelligence, and the student flees in horror from the

sight of it. Mrs. Shelley describes the emotions of the lonely, tragic thing
thrust suddenly into a world that ever recoils shuddering from it. She
reveals the slow hate distilled in its heart because of the harsh treatment it
meets, till at last it takes diabolic revenge, not only on the man who has
created it but on all held dear by him. The struggles that rend his soul
between hate and remorse are impressive. The wretched being weeps in an
agony of grief as it stands over the body of Frankenstein whom it has
harried to death, then goes away to its own doom. The last sight of it, as the
first, is effective, as, in tragic solitude, towering on the ice-floe, it moves
toward the desolate North to its death.
In the characterization of this being, as in the unusual conception, Mrs.
Shelley has introduced something poignantly new in fiction. It was a
startling theme for the mind of a young girl, as were Vathek and The Monk
for youths of twenty years, and only the abnormal psychological conditions
she went through could have produced it. There is more curdling awfulness
in Frankenstein’s monster than in the museum of armored ghosts, Bleeding
Nuns, and accompanying horrors of the early Gothic novels. The
employment of the Frankenstein motif in a play produced recently in New
York,[24] illustrates anew the vitality of the idea.
The search for the philosopher’s stone appears in various novels of the
period. St. Leon, by William Godwin, relates the story of a man who knew
how to produce unlimited gold by a secret formula given him by a
mysterious stranger who dies in his home. Shelley[25] brings in this power
incidentally with the gift of endless life. There is an awe-inspiring use of
ventriloquism in Charles Brockden Brown’s novel, Wieland, while Arthur
Mervyn gives a study in somnambulism. Zofloya suggests hypnotism or
mesmerism by saying that Victoria’s thought summoned the Moor to her,—
that they could have brought him had he been “at the further extremity of
this terrestrial globe.” This seems a faint foreshadowing of Ibsen’s idea in
The Master Builder. These may illustrate the use of science in Gothicism.
The elixir of life is brewed in divers Gothic novels. Dramatic and intense
as are the psychological experiences connected with the discovery of the
magic potion, the effects of the success are more poignant still. The thought
that endless mortality, life that may not be laid down, becomes a burden
intolerable has appeared in fiction since Swift’s account of the Struldbrugs,
and perhaps before. Godwin’s St. Leon is a story of the secret of perpetual
life. The tiresome Godwinistic hero is visited by a decrepit old man who

wishes to tell him on a pledge of incommunicability what will give him the
power of endless life and boundless wealth. The impoverished nobleman
accepts with consequences less enjoyable than he has anticipated.
Shelley’s hectic romance,[26] whose idea, as Shelley admitted to
Stockdale, came from Godwin’s book, uses the same theme. The young
student with burning eyes, who has discovered the elixir of life, may be
compared with Mary Shelley’s later picture of Frankenstein. Events are
rather confused here, as the villain falls dead in the presence of the devil but
comes to life again as another character later in the story,—Shelley
informing us of their identity but not troubling to explain it.
The most impressive instance of the theme of fleshly immortality in the
early novels is found in Melmoth. Here the mysterious wanderer possesses
the power of endless life, but not the right to lay it down when existence
becomes a burden. Melmoth can win the boon of death only if he can find
another mortal willing to change destinies with him at the price of his soul.
He traverses the world in his search and offers the exchange to persons in
direst need and suffering the extreme torments, offering to give them wealth
as well as life eternal. Yet no man nor woman will buy life at the price of
the soul.
Aids to Gothic Effect. Certain themes appear recurringly as first aids to
terror fiction. Some of them are found equally in later literature while others
belong more particularly to the Gothic. An interesting aspect of the
supernatural visitants is gigantism, or the superhuman size which they
assume. In The Castle of Otranto, the sensational ghost is of enormous size,
and his accouterments are colossal. In the last scene he is astounding:
A clap of thunder shook the castle to its foundations; the earth rocked and the clank of more than
mortal armor was heard behind.... The walls of the castle behind Manfred were thrown down with a
mighty force, and the form of Alfonso, dilated to an immense magnitude, appeared in the center of
the ruins. “Behold the true heir of Alfonso!” said the vision.

This reminds one of an incident in F. Marion Crawford’s Mr. Isaacs, where
the Indian magician expands to awful size, miraculously draws down a mist
and wraps it round him as a cloak. Zofloya is frequently spoken of as
immense, and it is said that “common objects seem to sink in his presence.”
In the last scene the wicked Victoria sees the Moor change from a
handsome youth to a fierce gigantic figure. A diabolic apparition eight or
nine feet high pursues a monk,[27] and the knight[28] engages in combat with
a dæmonic giant who slays him. The devil in The Monk is represented as

being of enormous stature, and much of the horror excited by the man-
monster that Frankenstein created arises from the creature’s superhuman
size. In most cases gigantism connotes evil power and rouses a supernatural
awe in the beholder. The giant is an Oriental figure and appears in Vathek,
along with genii, dwarfs, and kindred personages, but the Gothic giant has
more diabolism than the mere Oriental original. He seems to fade out from
fiction, appearing only occasionally in later stories, while he has practically
no place in the drama, owing doubtless to the difficulties of stage
presentation.

Insanity as contributing to the effect of supernaturalism affords many
gruesome studies in psychiatry. Madness seems a special curse of the gods
or torment from the devil and various instances of its use occur in Gothic
fiction. The devil in Zofloya, at Victoria’s request, gives Henrique an
enchanted drug which renders him temporarily insane, during which time
he marries Victoria, imagining her to be Lilla whom he loves. When he
awakes to the realization of what he has done, real madness drives him to
suicide. In The Castle of Caithness the wicked misanthrope goes mad from
remorse. He imagines that the different ones he has murdered are hurling
him into the pit of hell, until, in a maniac frenzy, he dashes his brains out
against the prison walls. In Ethelwina the father who has sold his daughter
to dishonor flies shrieking in madness through the corridors of the dungeon
to escape the sight of his child’s accusing specter. Poor Nanny in Hogg’s
Brownie of Bodbeck is described as having “a beam of wild delight in her
eye, the joy of madness.” She sings wild, unearthly songs and talks
deliriously of incomprehensible things, of devilish struggles.
Melmoth uses the idea with special effectiveness. The insanity of the
young husband whose bride is mysteriously slain on their wedding day by
the supernatural power accompanying Melmoth, may be compared with the
madness of the wife in Scott’s Bride of Lammermoor. Maturin also shows
us a scene in a mad-house, where a sane man, Stanton, is confined, whom
Melmoth visits to offer exchange of destinies. Melmoth taunts him cruelly
with his hopeless situation and prophecies that he, too, will go mad from
despair. We hear Stanton’s wild cry, echoed by a hundred yells like those of
demons, but the others are stilled when the mad mother begins her
lamentation,—the mother who has lost husband, home, children, reason, all,
in the great London fire. At her appalling shrieks all other voices are

hushed. Another impressive figure in the mad-house is the preacher who
thinks himself a demon and alternately prays and blasphemes the Lord.
Charles Brockden Brown rivals Maturin in his terrible use of insanity for
supernatural effect. The demented murderer in Edgar Huntley gives an
impression of mystery and awe that is unusual, while Wieland with its
religious mania produced by diabolic ventriloquism is even more
impressive. Brown knew the effect of mystery and dread on the human
mind and by slow, cumulative suggestion he makes us feel a creeping awe
that the unwieldy machinery of pure Gothicism never could achieve. In
studies of the morbid mentality he has few equals. For psychologic subtlety,
for haunting horror, what is a crashing helmet or a dismembered ghost
compared with Brown’s Wieland? What are the rackings of monkish
vindictiveness when set against the agonies of an unbalanced mind turned
in upon itself? What exterior torture could so appeal to our sympathies as
Wieland’s despair, when, racked with religious mania, he feels the
overwhelming conviction that the voice of God—which is but the fiendish
trick of a ventriloquist—is calling him to murder his wife and children as a
sacrifice to Deity? Such a tragedy of dethroned reason is intolerably
powerful; the dark labyrinths of insanity, the gloom-haunted passages of the
human mind, are more terrible to traverse than the midnight windings of
Gothic dungeons. We feel that here is a man who is real, who is human, and
suffering the extremity of anguish.
Perhaps the most hideous aspect of insanity in the terror novel is that of
the lycanthrope in The Albigenses. The tragic wolf-man imagines himself to
be a mad wolf and cowers in his lair, glaring with gleaming, awful eyes at
all who approach him, gnawing at a human head snatched from the
graveyard. There are various other uses of insanity in the novel of the
period, but these will serve to illustrate. The relation between insanity and
the supernatural has been marked in later literature.

The use of portents is a distinct characteristic of the horror romance.
Calamity is generally preceded by some sign of the supernatural influence
at work, some presentment of dread. Crime and catastrophe are forefelt by
premonition of woe and accompaniment of horror. In The Accusing Spirit
supernatural thunder heralds the discovery of the corpse in its winding-
sheet, and the monk says, “Yes, some dread discovery is at hand. These
phenomena are miraculous; when the common laws of nature are violated,

the awful portents are not sent in vain.” In The Romance of the Castle, an
anonymous story, a woman hears the clock strike two and announces that
she will be dead at three.
This night an awful messenger sent from that dread tribunal from whose power there is no appeal,
by signs terrific foretold my fate approached—foretold my final moment. “Catherine, behold!” was
all that issued from the specter’s lips, but in its hand it held a scroll which fixed my irrevocable
doom, in letters which fascinated while they appalled my sight.

She keeps her appointment promptly. Her experience might be compared
with the vision which revealed his date of death to Amos Judd in James
Mitchell’s novel of that name, and to the foreknowledge in George Eliot’s
The Lifted Veil.
In The Spirit of the Castle,[29] the ghost of the old marquis knocks three
times on the door preceding the arrival of the heir, and a black raven flies
away as he enters. At the approach of the true heir to the estate from which
he has been kept by fraud in The Old English Baron, the doors of the
ancient castle fly open, upon which the servants cry, “The doors open of
themselves to receive their master!” When Walpole’s usurping Manfred
sees the plumage on the miraculous casque shaken in concert with the
brazen trumpet, he exclaims, “What mean these portents? If I have offended
——” At this point the plumes are shaken still more strenuously, and the
helmet is equally agitated when the great sword leaps in. Manfred cries to
the apparition, “If thou art a true knight, thou wilt scorn to employ sorcery
to carry thy power. If these omens be from heaven or hell, Manfred trusts to
righteousness to protect his cause.” But the omens bring bad luck to
Manfred.
There is much use of portent in Melmoth. The specter of the Wanderer
appearing just before the old man’s death predicts the spiritual doom of the
dying. As the old uncle is almost breathing his last, he cries out, “What the
devil brings you here?” at which the servants cross themselves and cry,
“The devil in his mouth!” Melmoth, the Wanderer, is a walking portent of
evil, for the priest is unable to pray in his presence, the communion bread
turns viperous when he is there and the priest falls dead in the attempt to
exorcise the fiendish power. Mysterious strains of music sound as heralds of
disaster in several Gothic novels, as[30] where the inexplicable strains are
heard only by the bride and groom preceding the strange tragedy that
befalls them.

At the approach of a supernatural visitant in the terror novel the fire
always burns blue,—where there is a fire, and the great hearth usually
affords ample opportunity for such portentous blaze. The thermometer itself
tends to take a downward path when a ghost draws near. The three drops of
blood shed from the statue’s nose in Otranto, while ridiculed by the critics,
are meant simply as a portent of evil. Prof. William Lyon Phelps points
out[31] that the idea did not originate with Walpole, but was familiar as a
superstition regarding premonition of ill, as referred to in Dryden’s
Amboyna, IV., 1. This instance may be compared with the much more
skillfully handled omens in later drama, as Maeterlinck’s and Ibsen’s,
particularly in The Emperor and Galilean. Various other portents of ill
appear in Gothic fiction.[32]
The symbols of dread and the ghostly are used to good effect in the terror
romance. The cumulative effects of supernatural awe are carefully built up
by the use of gruesome accompaniments and suggestions. The triple veil of
night, desolation, and silence usually hangs over the haunter and the
haunted, predisposing to an uncanny psychosis. The Gothic ghost does not
love the garish day, and the terror castle, gloomy even under the brightest
sun, is of unimaginable darkness at night. Certain houses add especially to
the impression of fear. At crucial moments the stroke of twelve or one
o’clock is sure to be sounded appallingly by some abbey bell or castle clock
or other rusty horologue. In addition to its services as time-keeper, the bell
has a predisposition to toll.
Melancholy birds fly freely through these medieval tales, their dark
wings adding to the general gloom. The principal specimens in the Gothic
aviary are the common owl, the screech or “screeching” owl, the bat and the
raven, while the flock is increased by anonymous “birds of prey,” “night
birds,” “gloomy birds” and so forth. In St. Oswyth, as the murderer steals at
midnight through the corridor toward his helpless victim, “the ill-boding
bird of night that sat screeching on the battlement of the prison tower,
whose harsh, discordant notes were echoed by the hoarse croaking of the
ominous raven” terrifies but does not deter the villain.
The “moping, melancholy screech owl” is one of the prominent
personages in The Accusing Spirit, emphasizing the moments of special
suspense, as in St. Oswyth as the wicked baron lies quaking in remorse for
having caused a nun to be buried alive, the condemning cry of the doleful
birds increases his mental anguish. Similar instances, with or without

special nomenclature, occur in countless Gothic novels. Much use is also
made of the dark ivy in its clambering over medieval architecture, shutting
out the light and adding to the general gloom. The effect of horror is
increased frequently by the location of the scenes in vaults and graveyards
with all their gruesome accessories, and skulls are used as mural ornaments
elsewhere, or as library appointments by persons of morbid temperament.
Enough skeletons are exhumed to furnish as large a pile of bones as may be
seen in certain antique churches in Italy and Mexico.

The element of mystery and mystification is another family feature of the
novel of suspense. There is no proper thrill without the suspense attained by
supernatural mystery. Even the novels that in the end carefully explain
away all the ghostly phenomena on a natural basis strive with care to build
up plots which shall contain astounding discoveries. Mrs. Radcliffe and
Regina Maria Roche are noted in this respect. They have not the courage of
their ghosts as such but, after they have thrilled the reader to the desired
extent, they tear down the fabric of mystification that they have constructed
and meticulously explain everything.
The black veil constitutes a favorite method of suspense with Mrs.
Radcliffe. On various occasions Emily pales and quivers before a dark
velvet pall uncannily swaying in the midnight wind, and on one such
ramble she draws aside the curtain and finds a hideous corpse, putrid and
dropping to decay, lying on a couch behind the pall. Many chapters further
on she learns that this is a wax figure made to serve as penance for an
ancient sinner. Again she shivers in front of the inky curtain, watching its
fold move unaccountably, when a repulsive face peers out at her. She
shrieks and flees, thinking she has seen a ghost, but discovers later that it is
only one of a company of bandits that have taken up their secret abode in
the house. Black veils are in fashion in all of Mrs. Radcliffe’s romances and
she drapes them very effectively, while the arras waves likewise in other
tales as well.
Mysterious manuscripts are another means of mystification. Mrs.
Radcliffe’s novels also abound in such scripts. In The Romance of the
Forest Adeline discovers a decaying paper which reads, “Oh, ye, whoever
ye are, that chance or misfortune may direct to this spot, to you I speak, to
you reveal the story of my wrongs and ask you to avenge them.” This
injunction to avenge wrongs is a frequent assignment, though rather much

to ask in most cases. The Spirit of the Castle has its dusty document that
starts off: “Already my hand brandishes the dagger that shall close my eyes
forever. (Mysterious manuscripts are not strong on grammar and make
slight attempt to avoid mixed figures.) I will expire by the side of the clay-
cold corpse of my Antoinette.” In St. Oswyth the paper says, “Beneath the
deep foundations of the ruin the recorded mystery of the house of Oswyth
lies buried from all mortal discovery.” But the most impressive manuscript
is the one in Melmoth that records the wanderings of the agonized fate-
harried man and those whose tortures he witnesses. A codicil to the old
uncle’s will advises his nephew against reading the document, but of course
he does read it, since what are mouldy manuscripts in Gothic novels for, but
to be deciphered by the hero or heroine?
Reference to dread secrets occur otherwise than in written form. In one
favored tale,[33] we are told of “a mystery whose elucidation I now have a
presentiment would fill me with horror!” In another,[34] Vincent on his
death-bed speaks of “a horrid secret which labors at my breast,” and the
Abate speaks to the marquis of “a secret which shall make your blood run
cold!” In St. Oswyth we hear that “an impenetrable cloud of cureless sorrow
hung over Sir Alfred and there was a dreadful mystery in his life destiny,
unknown, as it should seem, to any one, and which he was unwilling should
be questioned.” The dungeoned prisoner in Bungay Castle cries, “Were I at
liberty to speak I could a tale unfold would tempt you to curse the world
and even detest those claims which bind man to man. You would be ready
to forego the ties of nature and shun society. Time must, it will develop the
whole of this mystery!” And so on.
Inexplicable music forms one of the commonest elements of
mystification in these romances. Its constant recurrence suggests that there
must have been victrolas in medieval times. The music is chiefly
instrumental, sometimes on a harp, sometimes on a violin, though
occasionally it is vocal. Mrs. Radcliffe and Regina Maria Roche accompany
the heroine’s musings at all hours with doleful strains suspected to be of
supernatural performance. The appearance of the devil masquerading as the
Moor[35] is heralded by flute-like sounds, and in The Spirit of Turrettville
the specter plays on the harp and sings. The recurrence of the theme is so
constant that it acquires the monotony of a tantalizing refrain.
Groans and wails of unexplained origin also aid in building up suspense.
In fact, a chorus of lugubriousness arises so that the Gothic pages groan as

they are turned. Mysterious disappearances likewise increase the tension.
Lights appear and vanish with alarming volition, doors open and close with
no visible human assistance, and various other supernatural phenomena aid
in Gothic mystery and mystification.

Although the ghosts and devils occupy the center of interest in the
horrific romance, the human characters must not be lightly passed over.
There are terror temperaments as well as Gothic castles, tempests, and
scenes. The interfering father or other relative, brutal in threats and
breathing forth slaughter, comes in frequently to oppress the hero or heroine
into a loathed marriage. The hero is of Radcliffian gloom, a person of vague
past and saturnine temper, admired and imitated by Byron. Sir Walter
Raleigh,[36] says, “The man that Byron tried to be was the invention of Mrs.
Radcliffe.” The officials of the Inquisition and the dominant figures in
convents and monasteries show fiendish cruelty toward helpless inmates,
gloating in Gothic diabolism over their tortures. There are no restful human
shades of gray, only unrelieved black and white characters. The Romantic
heroine is a peculiar creature, much given to swooning and weeping, yet
always impeccably clad in no matter what nocturnal emergency she is
surprised. She tumbles into verse and sketching on slight provocation, but
her worst vice is that of curiosity. In her search for supernatural horrors she
wanders at midnight through apartments where she does not belong, breaks
open boxes, desks, and secret hiding-places to read whatever letters or
manuscripts she can lay her hands on, behaving generally like the yellow
journalist of fiction.
The pages of the Gothic novel are smeared with gore and turn with
ghostly flutter. The conversation is like nothing on land or sea or in the
waters under the earth, for the tadpoles talk like Johnsonian whales and the
reader grows restless under Godwinistic disquisitions. The authors are
almost totally lacking in a sense of humor, yet the Gothic novel, taken as a
whole, is one of the best specimens of unconscious humor known to
English literature.
Conclusion. Perhaps the most valuable contribution that the Gothic school
made to English literature is Jane Austen’s inimitable satire of it,
Northanger Abbey. Though written as her first novel and sold in 1797, it did
not appear till after her death, in 1818. Its purpose is to ridicule the
Romanticists and the book in itself would justify the terroristic school, but

she was ahead of her times, so the editor feared to publish it. In the
meantime she wrote her other satires on society and won immortality for
her work which might never have been begun save for her satiety of
medieval romances. The title of the story itself is imitative, and the well-
known materials are all present, yet how differently employed! The setting
is a Gothic abbey tempered to modern comfort; the interfering father is not
vicious, merely ill-natured; the pursuing, repulsive lover is not a villain,
only a silly bore. The heroine has no beauty, nor does she topple into
sonnets nor snatch a pencil to sketch the scene, for we are told that she has
no accomplishments. Yet she goes through palpitating adventures mostly
modelled on Mrs. Radcliffe’s incidents. She is hampered in not being
supplied with a lover who is the unrecognized heir to vast estates, since all
the young men in the county are properly provided with parents.
The delicious persiflage in which Jane Austen hits off the fiction of the
day may be illustrated by a bit of conversation between two young girls.
“My dearest Catherine, what have you been doing with yourself all the morning? Have you gone
on with Udolpho?”
“Yes; I have been reading it ever since I woke, and I have got to the black veil.”
“Are you, indeed? How delightful! Oh, I would not tell you what is behind that black veil for the
world! Are you not wild to know?”
“Oh, yes, quite! What can it be? But do not tell me—I would not be told on any account. I know it
must be a skeleton; I am sure it is Laurentina’s skeleton. Oh, I am delighted with the book! I should
like to spend my whole life reading it, I assure you. If it had not been to meet you, I would not have
come away from it for the world.”
“Dear creature! How much obliged I am to you; and when you have finished Udolpho, we will
read The Italian together; and I have made out a list of ten or twelve more of the same kind for you.”
“Have you, indeed? How glad I am! What are they all?”
“I will read you their names directly; here they are, in my pocket-book: Castle of Wolfenbach,
Clermont, Mysterious Warnings, Necromancer of the Black Forest, Midnight Bell, Orphan of the
Rhine, and Horrid Mysteries. These will last us some time.”
“Yes, pretty well; but are they all horrid? Are you sure they are all horrid?”
“Yes, quite sure; for a particular friend of mine, a Miss Andrews—a sweet girl, one of the sweetest
creatures in the world—has read every one of them!”

Mr. George Saintsbury[37] expresses himself as sceptical of this list as a
catalogue of actual romances, stating that he has never read one of them and
should like some other authority than Miss Andrews for their existence. He
is mistaken in his doubt, however, since during the progress of this
investigation four out of the eight have been identified as to authorship, and
doubtless the others are lurking in some antique library. Clermont is by
Maria Regina Roche; Mysterious Warnings by Mrs. Parsons, in London,

1796; Midnight Bell by Francis Latham; and Horrid Mysteries by Marquis
Grosse, London, 1796.
Jane Austen’s stupid bore, John Thorpe, and Mr. Tilney, the impeccable,
pedantic hero, add their comment to Gothic fiction, one saying with a yawn
that there hasn’t been a decent novel since Tom Jones, except The Monk,
and the other that he read Udolpho in two days with his hair standing on
end all the time.
But the real cleverness of the work consists in the burlesque of Gothic
experiences that Catherine, because of the excited condition of her mind
induced by excess of romantic fiction, goes through with on her visit to
Northanger Abbey. She explores secret wings in a search for horrors, only
to find sunny rooms, with no imprisoned wife, not a single maniac, and
never skeleton of tortured nun. Mr. Tilney’s ironic jests satirize all the
elements of Gothic romance. Opening a black chest at midnight, she finds a
yellowed manuscript, but just as she is about to read it her candle flickers
out. In the morning sunshine she finds that it is an old laundry list. The only
result of her suspicious explorings is that she is caught in such prowlings by
the young man whose esteem she wishes to win. He sarcastically assures
her that his father is not a wife-murderer, that his mother is not immured in
a dungeon, but died of a bilious attack. These delicately tipped shafts of
ridicule riddle the armor of medievalism and give it at the same time a
permanency of interest because of Jane Austen’s treatment of it. The Gothic
novel will be remembered, if for nothing else, for her parody of it.
But Miss Austen is not the only satirist of the genre. In The Heroine,
Eaton Stannard Barrett gives an amusing burlesque of it. It is interesting to
note in this connection that while Northanger Abbey was written and sold in
1797 it was not published till 1818, and Barrett’s book, while written later,
was published in 1813.
In the introduction, an epistle, supposed to be endited by one Cherubina,
says:
Moon, May 1, 1813.
Know that the moment that a mortal manuscript is written in a legible hand and the word End or
Finis attached thereto, whatever characters happen to be sketched therein acquire the quality of
creating a soul or spirit which takes flight and ascends immediately through the regions of the air till
it arrives at the moon, where it is embodied and becomes a living creature, the precise counterpart of
the literary prototype.
Know farther that all the towns, villages, rivers, hills, and valleys of the moon also owe their origin
to the descriptions which writers give of the landscapes of the earth.

By means of a book, The Heroine, I became a living inhabitant of the moon. I met with the
Radclyffian and Rochian heroines, and others, but they tossed their heads and told me pertly that I
was a slur on the sisterhood, and some went so far as to say that I had a design on their lives.

Cherry, an unsophisticated country girl, becomes Cherubina after reading
romantic tales. She decides that she is an heiress kept in unwarranted
seclusion, and tells her father that he cannot possibly be her father since he
is “a fat, funny farmer.” She rummages in his desk for private papers,
discovering a torn scrap that she interprets to her desires. She flies, leaving
a note to tell the fleshy agriculturist that she is gone “to wander over the
convex earth in search of her parents,” with what comic experiences one
may imagine. There is much discussion of the Gothic heroine, particularly
those from Mrs. Radcliffe’s and Regina Maria Roche’s pages. The girl
sprinkles her letters with verse. She passes through storms, explores
deserted houses, and comes to what she thinks is her ancestral castle in
London, but is told that it is Covent Garden Theatre. She decides that she is
Nell Gwynne’s niece and goes to that amiable person to demand all her
property. She pokes around in the cellar to find her captive mother, and
discovers an enormously fat woman playing with frogs, who drunkenly
insists that she is her mother. Leaving that place in disgust she takes
possession of somebody else’s castle and orders it furnished in Gothic style,
according to romance. She has the fat farmer shut up in the madhouse.
The book is very amusing, and a more pronounced parody on Gothicism
than Northanger Abbey because the whole story turns round that theme,—
but, of course, it is not of so great literary value. It seems strange, however,
that it is so little known. It burlesques every feature of terror fiction, the
high-flown language, the excited oaths, the feudal furniture, the medieval
architecture, the Gothic weather, the supernatural tempers, the spectral
apparitions—one of which is so muscular that he struggles with the heroine
as she locks him in a closet, after throwing rapee into his face, which makes
him sputter in a mortal fashion. Cherubina finds a blade bone of mutton in
some Gothic garbage and takes it for a bone of an ancestor. Radcliffian
adjectives reel across the pages and the whole plays up in a delightful
parody the ludicrous weaknesses and excesses of the terror fiction.
Likewise the Anti-Jacobin parodies the Gothic ghost and there is
considerable satire directed at the whole Gothic genre in Thomas Love
Peacock’s novel Nightmare Abbey.

In general, Gothicism had a tonic effect on English literature, and
influenced the continental fiction to no small degree. By giving an interest
and excitement gained from ghostly themes to fiction, the terror writers
made romance popular as it had never been before and immensely extended
the range of its readers. The novel has never lost the hold on popular fancy
that the Gothic ghost gave to it. This interest has increased through the
various aspects of Romanticism since then and in every period has found
some form of supernaturalism on which to feed. True, the machinery of
Gothicism creaks audibly at times, some of the specters move too
mechanically, and there is a general air of unreality that detracts from the
effect. The supernaturalism often lacks the naturalness which is necessary.
Yet it is not fair to apply to these early efforts the same standards by which
we judge the novels of to-day. While their range is narrow they do achieve
certain impressive effects. Though the class became conventionalized to an
absurd degree and the later examples are laughable, while a host of
imitations made the type ridiculous, the Gothic novel has an undeniable
force.
Besides the bringing of supernaturalism definitely into fiction, which is a
distinct gain, we find other benefits as well. In Gothicism, if we examine
closely, we find the beginnings of many forms of supernaturalism that are
crude here, but that are to develop into special power in later novels and
short stories. The terror novel excites our ridicule in some respects, yet, like
other things that arouse a certain measure of laughter, it has great value. It
seems a far cry from the perambulating statue in Otranto to Lord Dunsany’s
jade gods that move with measured, stony steps to wreak a terrible
vengeance on mortals who have defied them, but the connection may be
clearly enough seen. The dreadful experiments by which Frankenstein’s
monster is created are close akin to the revolting vivisections of Wells’s Dr.
Moreau, or the operations described by Arthur Machen whereby human
beings lose their souls and become diabolized, given over utterly to
unspeakable evil. The psychic elements in Zofloya are crudely conceived,
yet suggestive of the psychic horrors of the work of Blackwood, Barry Pain,
and Theodore Dreiser, for example. The animal supernaturalism only lightly
touched on in Gothic novels is to be elaborated in the stories of ghostly
beasts like those by Edith Wharton, Kipling, Ambrose Bierce, and others. In
fact, the greater number of the forms of the supernatural found in later
fiction and the drama are discoverable, in germ at least, in Gothic romance.

The work of this period gave a tremendous impetus to the uncanny
elements of romanticism and the effect has been seen in the fiction and
drama and poetry since that time. Its influence on the drama of its day may
be seen in Walpole’s Mysterious Mother and Lewis’s Castle Specter.
Thomas Lovell Beddoe’s extraordinary tragedy, Death’s Jest Book, while
largely Elizabethan in materials and method, is closely related to the Gothic
as well. It would be impossible to understand or appreciate the supernatural
in the nineteenth-century literature and that of our own day without a
knowledge of the Gothic to which most of it goes back. Like most
beginnings, Gothicism is crude in its earlier forms, and conventional in the
flood of imitations that followed the successful attempts. But it is really
vital and most of the ghostly fiction since that time has lineally descended
from it rather than from the supernaturalism of the epic or of the drama.

CHAPTER II

Later Influences

T
HE Gothic period marked a change in the vehicle of
supernaturalism. In ancient times the ghostly had been expressed in
the epic or the drama, in medievalism in the romances, metrical and
prose, as in Elizabethan literature the drama was the specific form. But
Gothicism brought it over frankly into the novel, which was a new thing.
That is noteworthy, since supernaturalism seems more closely related to
poetry than to prose; and as the early dramas were for the most part poetic,
it did not require such a stretch of the imagination to give credence to the
unearthly. The ballad, the epic, the drama, had made the ghostly seem
credible. But prose fiction is so much more materialistic that at first thought
supernaturalism seems antagonistic to it. That this is not really the case is
evidenced from the fact that fiction since the terror times has retained the
elements of awe then introduced, has developed, and has greatly added to
them.
With the dying out of the genre definitely known as the Gothic novel and
the turning of Romanticism into various new channels, we might expect to
see the disappearance of the ghostly element, since it had been overworked
in terrorism. It is true that the prevailing type of fiction for the succeeding
period was realism, but with a large admixture of the supernormal or
supernatural. The supernatural machinery had become so well established in
prose fiction that even realists were moved by it, some using the motifs
with bantering apology—even Dickens and Thackeray, some with
rationalistic explanation, but practically all using it. Man must and will have
the supernatural in his fiction. The very elements that one might suppose
would counteract it,—modern thought, invention, science,—serve as
feeders to its force. In the inexplicable alchemy of literature almost
everything turns to the unearthly in some form or other.

We have seen the various sources from which the Gothic novel drew its
plots, its motifs for ghostly effect. The supernatural fiction following it still
had the same sources on which to draw, and in addition had various other
influences and veins of literary inspiration not open to Gothicism. Modern
science, with the new miracles of its laboratories, proved suggestive of
countless plots; the new study of folk-lore and the scholarly investigations
in that field unearthed an unguessed wealth of supernatural material;
Psychical Research societies with their patient and sympathetic records of
the forces of the unseen; modern Spiritualism with its attempts to link this
world to the next; the wizardry of dreams studied scientifically,—all
suggested new themes, novel complications, hitherto unknown elements
continuing the supernatural in fiction.
With the extension of general reading, and the greater range of
translations from other languages, the writers of England and America were
affected by new influences with respect to their use of the supernatural.
Their work became less insular, wider in its range of subject-matter and of
technical methods, and in our fiction we find the effect of certain definite
outside forces.
The overlapping influences of the Romantic movement in England and
America, France and Germany, form an interesting but intricate study. It is
difficult to point out marked points of contact, though the general effect
may be evident, for literary influences are usually very elusive. It is easy to
cry, “Lo, here! lo, there!” with reference to the effect of certain writers on
their contemporaries or successors, but it is not always easy to put the
finger on anything very tangible. And even so, that would not explain
literature. If one could point with absolute certainty to the source for every
one of Shakespeare’s plots, would that explain his art? Poe wrote an
elaborate essay to analyze his processes of composition for The Raven, but
the poem remains as enigmatic as ever.
As German Romanticism had been considerably affected by the Gothic
novel in England, it in turn showed an influence on later English and
American ghostly fiction. Scott was much interested in the German
literature treating of evil magic, apparitions, castles in ruins, and so forth,
and one critic says of him that his dealings with subjects of this kind are
midway between Meinhold and Tieck. He was fascinated with the German
ballads of the supernatural, especially Burger’s ghostly Lenore, which he
translated among others. De Quincey likewise was a student of German

literature, though he was not so accurate in his scholarship as Scott. His
horror tale, The Avengers, as well as Klosterheim, has a German setting and
tone.
There has been some discussion over the question of Hawthorne’s
relation to German Romanticism. Poe made the charge that Hawthorne
drew his ideas and style from Ludwig Tieck, saying in a criticism:
The fact is, he is not original in any sense. Those who speak of him as original mean nothing more
than that he differs in his manner or tone, and in his choice of subjects, from any author of their
acquaintance—their acquaintance not extending to the German Tieck, whose manner in some of his
works is absolutely identical with that habitual to Hawthorne.... The critic (unacquainted with Tieck)
who reads a single tale by Hawthorne may be justified in thinking him original.

Various critics have discussed this matter with no very definite conclusions.
It should be remembered that Poe was a famous plagiary-hunter, hence his
comments may be discounted. Yet Poe knew German, it is thought, and in
his writings often referred to German literature, while Hawthorne,
according to his journal, read it with difficulty and spoke of his struggles
with a volume of Tieck.
Hawthorne and Tieck do show certain similarities, as in the use of the
dream element, the employment of the allegory as a medium for teaching
moral truths, and the choice of the legend as a literary form. Both use
somewhat the same dreamy supernaturalism, yet in style as in subject-
matter Hawthorne is much the superior and improved whatever he may
have borrowed from Tieck. Hawthorne’s vague mystery, cloudy symbolism,
and deep spiritualism are individual in their effect and give to his
supernaturalism an unearthly charm scarcely found elsewhere. Hawthorne’s
theme in The Marble Faun, of the attaining to a soul by human suffering, is
akin to the idea in Fouqué’s Undine. There the supernaturalism is franker,
while that of Hawthorne’s novel is more evasive and delicate, yet the same
suggestion is present in each case. Lowell in his Fable for Critics speaks of
Hawthorne as “a John Bunyan Fouqué, a Puritan Tieck.”
There are still more striking similarities to be pointed out between the
work of Poe and that of E. T. A. Hoffmann. As Hawthorne was, to a slight
extent, at least, affected by German legends and wonder tales, Poe was
influenced by Hoffmann’s horror stories. Poe has been called a Germanic
dreamer, and various German and English critics mention the debt that he
owes to Hoffmann. Mr. Palmer Cobb[38] brings out some interesting facts in
connection with the two romanticists. He says:

The verification of Poe’s indebtedness to German is to be sought in the similarity of the treatment of
the same motives in the work of both authors. The most convincing evidence is furnished by the way
in which Poe has combined the themes of mesmerism, metempsychosis, dual existence, the dream
element, and so forth, in exact agreement with the grouping employed by Hoffmann. Notable
examples of this are the employment of the idea of double existence in conjunction with the struggle
of good and evil forces in the soul of the individual, and the combination of mesmerism and
metempsychosis as leading motives in one and the same story.

Mr. Cobb points out in detail the similarities between Poe’s stories of
dual personality and the German use of the theme as found in Fouqué,
Novalis, and Hoffmann, particularly the last. Hoffmann’s exaggerated use
of this idea is to be explained on the ground that he was obsessed by the
thought that his double was haunting him, and he, like Maupassant under
similar conditions of mind, wrote of supernaturalism associated with
madness. Hoffmann uses the theme of double personality.[39] In Poe’s
William Wilson the other self is the embodiment of good, a sort of incarnate
conscience, as in Stevenson’s Markheim, while Hoffmann’s Elixiere
represents the evil. Poe has here reversed the idea. In Hoffmann’s
Magnetiseur we find the treatment of hypnotism and metempsychosis and
the dream-supernaturalism in the same combination that Poe uses.[40]
Hoffmann[41] and Poe[42] relate the story of a supernatural portrait, where
the wife-model dies as the sacrifice to the painting.
Both Hoffmann and Poe use the grotesquerie of supernaturalism, the
fantastic element of horror that adds to the effect of the ghostly. Even the
generic titles are almost identical.[43] But in spite of these similarities in
theme and in grouping, there is no basis for a charge that Poe owes a
stylistic debt to Hoffmann. In his manner he is original and individual. He
uses his themes with much greater art, with more dramatic and powerful
effect than his German contemporary. Though he employs fewer of the
crude machineries of the supernatural, his ghostly tales are more unearthly
than Hoffmann’s. His horrors have a more awful effect because he is an
incomparably greater artist. He knows the economy of thrills as few have
done. His is the genius of compression, of suggestion. His dream elements,
for instance, though Hoffmann uses the dream to as great extent as Poe—
are more poignant, more unbearable.
The cult of horror in German literature, as evidenced in the work of
Hoffmann, Kleist, Tieck, Arnim, Fouqué, Chamisso, had an influence on
English and American literature of supernaturalism in general. The
grotesque diablerie, the use of dream elements, magnetism,

metempsychosis, ghosts, the elixir of life—which theme appears to have a
literary elixir of life—are reflected to a certain degree in the English ghostly
tales of the generation following the Gothic romance.
A French influence is likewise manifest in the later English fiction. The
Gothic novel had made itself felt in France as well as in Germany, a proof
of which is the fact that Balzac was so impressed by Maturin’s novel that he
wrote a sequel to it.[44] The interrelations of the English, French, and
German supernatural literature are nowhere better illustrated than in the
work of Balzac. He admits Hoffmann’s inspiration of his Elixir of Life, that
horrible story of reanimation, where the head is restored to life and youth
but the body remains that of an old man, dead and decaying, from which the
head tears itself loose in the church and bites the abbot to the brain,
shrieking out, “Idiot, tell me now if there is a God!” Balzac’s influence over
Bulwer-Lytton is seen in such stories as The Haunters and the Haunted, or
the House and the Brain, and A Strange Story, in each of which the theme
of supernaturally continued life is used. Balzac’s Magic Skin is a symbolic
story of supernaturalism that suggests Hawthorne’s allegoric symbolism
and may have influenced it in part. It is a new application of the old theme,
used often in the drama as in Gothic romance, of the pledge of a soul for
earthly gratification. A magic skin gives the man his heart’s desires, yet
each granted wish makes the talisman shrink perceptibly, with an inexorable
decrease. This theme, symbolic of the truth of life, is such a spiritual idea
used allegorically as Hawthorne chose frequently and doubtless influenced
Oscar Wilde’s Picture of Dorian Gray. Balzac’s Unknown Masterpiece is
another example of his supernaturalism that has had its suggestive effect on
English ghostly fictions.
Guy de Maupassant has doubtless influenced English tales of horror
more than any foreign writer since Hoffmann. As a stylist he exercised a
definite and strong influence over the short-story form, condensing it,
making it more economical, more like a fatal bullet that goes straight to the
mark, and putting into a few hundred words a story of supernatural horror
relentless in its effect. O. Henry’s delicately perfect ghost story, The
Furnished Room, is reminiscent of Maupassant’s technique as seen in The
Ghost. And surely F. Marion Crawford’s Screaming Skull and Ambrose
Bierce’s Middle Toe of the Right Foot are from the same body as
Maupassant’s Hand. What a terrible corpus it must be! There is the same

gruesome mystery, the same implacable horror in each story of a mutilated
ghost.
Maupassant’s stories of madness, akin to Poe’s analyses of mental decay,
of the slow corruption of the brain, are among his most dreadful triumphs of
style, and have influenced various English stories of insanity. In
Maupassant’s own tottering reason we find the tragic explanation of his
constant return to this type of story. Such tales as Mad, where a husband
goes insane from doubt of his wife; Madness, where a man has a weird
power over human beings, animals, and even inanimate objects, making
them do his will, so that he is terrified of his own self, of what his horrible
hands may do mechanically; Cocotte, where the drowned dog, following its
master a hundred miles down the river, drives him insane; The Tress, a
curdling story of the relation between insanity and the supernatural, so that
one is unable to say which is cause and which effect, illustrate
Maupassant’s unusual association between madness and uncanny fiction.
Who but Maupassant could make a story of ghastly hideousness out of a
parrot that swears? As Maupassant was influenced by Poe, in both subject
matter and technique, so he has affected the English writers since his time
in both plot material and treatment of the supernatural. And as his La Horla
strongly reflects FitzJames O’Brien’s What Was It? A Mystery that
anticipated it by a number of years, so it left its inevitable impress on
Bierce’s The Damned Thing and succeeding stories of supernatural
invisibility. A recent story by Katherine Fullerton Gerould, Louquier’s Third
Act, seems clearly to indicate the De Maupassant influence, reflecting the
method and motifs of La Horla and The Coward. Maupassant’s tales have a
peculiar horror possessed by few, partly because of his undoubted genius
and partly the result of his increasing madness.
Other French writers have also influenced the uncanny story in English.
Théophile Gautier has undoubtedly inspired various tales, such as The
Mummy’s Foot, by Jessie Adelaide Weston, which is the match, though not
in beauty or form, to his little masterpiece of that title. A. Conan Doyle’s
Lot No. 249, a horrible story of a reanimated mummy, bears an
unquestionable resemblance to Gautier’s The Romance of the Mummy as
well as The Mummy’s Foot, though Poe’s A Word with a Mummy, a fantastic
story emphasizing the science of miraculous embalming of living persons
so that they would wake to life after thousands of years, preceded it.
Something of the same theme is also used by F. Marion Crawford,[45] where

the bodies in the old studio awake to menacing life. This motif illustrates
the prevalence of the Oriental material in recent English fiction. Gautier’s
La Morte Amoureuse has exercised suggestive power over later tales, such
as Crawford’s vampire story,[46] though it is significant to recall that Poe’s
Berenice preceded Gautier’s story by a year, and the latter must have known
Poe’s work.
The fiction of Erckmann-Chatrian appears to have suggested various
English stories. The Owl’s Ear obviously inspired another,[47] both being
records of supernatural acoustics the latter dealing with spiritual sounds.
The Invisible Eye, a fearsome story of hypnotism, has an evident parental
claim on Algernon Blackwood’s story,[48] though the latter is psychically
more gruesome. The Waters of Death, an account of a loathsome, enchanted
crab, suggests H. G. Wells’s story of the plant vampire.[49]
Likewise Anatole France’s Putois, the narrative of the man who came to
have an actual existence because someone spoke of him as an imaginary
person, is associated with the drolleries of supernaturalism, such as are used
by Thomas Bailey Aldrich in the story of an imagined person, Miss
Mehitabel’s Son, and by Frank R. Stockton.[50] Anatole France has several
delicately wrought idylls of the supernatural, as The Mass of Shadows,
where the ghosts of those who have sinned for love may meet once a year to
be reunited with their loved ones, and in the church, with clasped hands,
celebrate the spectral mass, or such tender miracles as The Juggler of Notre
Dame, where the juggler throws his balls before the altar as an act of
worship and is rewarded by a sight of the Virgin, or Scholasticus, a
symbolic story much like one written years earlier by Thomas Bailey
Aldrich,[51] where a plant miraculously springs from the heart of a dead
woman. Amycus and Celestine, the story of the faun and the hermit, of
whom he tells us that “the hermit is a faun borne down by the years” is
suggestive of the wonderful little stories of Lord Dunsany. Lord Dunsany,
while startlingly original in most respects, seems a bit influenced by
Anatole France. His When the Gods Slept seems reminiscent of The Isle of
the Penguins. In France’s satire the gods change penguins into men whose
souls will be lost, because the priest has baptized them by mistake, while in
Dunsany’s story the baboons pray to the Yogis, who promise to make them
men in return for their devotion.
And the baboons arose from worshipping, smoother about the face and a little shorter in the arms,
and went away and hid themselves in clothing and herded with men. And men could not discern what

they were for their bodies were bodies of men though their souls were still the souls of beasts and the
worship went to the Yogis, spirits of ill.

Maeterlinck, influenced by his fellow-Belgian, Charles Van Lerberghe,
whose Flaireurs appeared before Maeterlinck’s plays of the uncanny and to
whom he acknowledges his indebtedness, has strongly affected ghostly
literature since his rise to recognition. In his plays we find an atmospheric
supernaturalism. The settings are of earth, yet with an unearthly
strangeness, with no impression of realism, of the familiar, the known. In
Maeterlinck’s plays we never breathe the air of actuality, never feel the
footing of solid earth, as we always do in Shakespeare, even in the presence
of ghosts or witches. Shakespeare’s visitants are ghostly enough, certainly,
but the scenes in which they appear are real, are normal, while in the
Belgian’s work there is a fluidic supernaturalism that transforms everything
to unreality. We feel the grip of fate, as in the ancient Greek tragedies, the
inescapable calamity that approaches with swift, silent pace. Yet
Maeterlinck’s is essentially static drama. There is very little action, among
the human beings, at least, for Fate is the active agent. In The Blind, The
Intruder, and Interior the elements are much the same, the effects wrought
out with the same unearthly manner. But in Joyzelle, which shows a certain
similarity to Midsummer Night’s Dream and The Tempest, we have a
different type of supernaturalism, the use of enchantment, of fairy magic
that comes to a close happily. In the dream-drama[52] there is a mixture of
realism and poetic symbolism, the use of the dream as a vehicle for the
supernormal, and many aspects of the weird combined in a fairy play of
exquisite symbolism.
The influence of Maeterlinck is apparent in the work of English writers,
particularly of the Celtic school. W. B. Yeats’s fairy play, The Land of
Heart’s Desire, with its pathetic beauty, Countess Cathleen, his tragedy of
the countess who sells her soul to the devil that her people may be freed
from his power, as well as his stories, show the traces of Maeterlinck’s
methods. William Sharp, in his sketches and his brief plays in the volume
called Vistas, reflects the Belgian’s technique slightly, though with his own
individual power. Sharp’s other literary self, Fiona McLeod, likewise shows
his influence, as does Synge in his Riders to the Sea, and Gordon Bottomley
in his Crier by Night, that eerie tragedy of an unseen power. Maeterlinck’s
supernaturalism seems to suggest the poetry of Coleridge, with its elusive,
intangible ghostliness. The effect of naïveté observable in Coleridge’s work

is in Maeterlinck produced by a child-like simplicity of style, a
monosyllabic dialogue, and a monotonous, unreasoning repetition that is at
once real and unreal. The dramatist has brought over from the poet the same
suggestive use of portents and symbols for prefiguring death or disaster that
lurks just outside. The ghostliness is subtle, rather than evident, the drama
static rather than dynamic.
Ibsen, also, has strongly influenced the supernatural in both our drama
and our fiction. His own work has a certain kinship with that of Hawthorne,
showing a like symbolism and mysticism, a like transfusion of the unreal
with the natural, so that one scarcely knows just how far he means our
acceptance of the unearthly to extend. He leaves it in some cases an open
question, while in others he frankly introduces the supernatural. The child’s
vision of the dead heroes riding to Valhalla, with his own mother who has
killed herself, leading them,[53] the ghost that tries to make an unholy pact
with the king,[54] the apparition and the supernatural voice crying out “He is
the God of Love!”[55] illustrate Ibsen’s earlier methods. The curious, almost
inexplicable Peer Gynt, with its mixture of folk-lore and symbolism, its
ironic laughter and satiric seriousness, seems to have had a suggestive
influence on other works, such as Countess Eve,[56] where the
personification of temptation in the form of committed sin reflects Ibsen’s
idea of Peer Gynt’s imaginary children. The uncanny power of unspoken
thought, the haunting force of ideas rather than the crude visible phantasms
of the dead, as in the telepathy, or hypnotism, or what you will, in The
Master Builder, the evasive, intangible haunting of the living by the dead as
in Rosmersholm, the strange powers at work as in The Lady from the Sea,
have had effect on the numerous psychic dramas and stories in English. The
symbolic mysticism in Emperor and Galilean, showing the spirits of Cain
and of Judas, with their sad ignorance of life’s riddles, the vision of Christ
in person, with His unceasing power over men’s souls, foreshadowed the
plays and stories bringing in the personality of Christ, as The Servant in the
House, and The Passing of the Third Floor Back.
Modern Italian literature, as represented by Fogazzaro and D’Annunzio,
introduces the ghostly in fiction and in the drama, and has had its effect on
our literature. Fogazzaro’s novels are essentially realistic in pattern, yet he
uses the supernatural in them, as in miraculous visions,[57] and
metempsychosis and madness associated with the supernatural.[58]
D’Annunzio’s handling of the unearthly is more repulsive, more psychically

gruesome, as the malignant power of the ancient curse in La Città Morta,
where the undying evil in an old tomb causes such revolting horror in the
action of the play. This has a counterpart in a story,[59] by Josephine
Daskam Bacon, where a packet of letters from two evil lovers lie buried in a
hearth and by their subtle influence corrupt the soul of every woman who
occupies the room. D’Annunzio uses the witch motive powerfully,[60]
madness that borders on the supernatural,[61] and the idea of evil magic
exorcised by melting an image of wax to cause an enemy’s death[62] which
suggests Rossetti’s poem using that incident, the unforgettable Sister Helen.
Likewise a new force in the work of the Russian school has affected our
fiction of the ghostly in recent years. Russian literature is a new field of
thought for English people, since it is only of late years that translations
have been easily accessible, and, because of the extreme difficulty of the
language, very few outsiders read Russian. As German Romanticism began
to have its definite power over English supernatural fiction in the early part
of the nineteenth century by the extension of interest in and study of
German literature, and the more frequent translation of German works, so in
this generation Russian literature has been introduced to English people and
is having its influence.
A primitive, still savage race like the Russians naturally shows a special
fondness for the supernatural. Despite the fact that literature is written for
the higher classes, a large peasant body, illiterate and superstitious, will
influence the national fiction. In the Russian works best known to us there
is a large element of the uncanny, of a type in some respects different from
that of any other country. Like the Russian national character, it is harsh,
brutal, violent, yet sentimental. One singular thing to be noted about it is the
peculiar combination of supernaturalism with absolute realism. The
revolting yet dreadfully effective realism of the Russian literature is never
more impressive than in its union with ghostly horror, which makes the
impossible appear indubitable. In Gogol’s The Cloak, for instance, the
fidelity to homely details of life, the descriptions of pinching poverty, of
tragic hopes that waited so long for fulfillment, are painful in themselves
and give verisimilitude to the element of the unearthly that follows. You
feel that a poor Russian clerk who had stinted himself from necessity all his
life would come back from the dead to claim his stolen property and
demand redress. The supernatural gains a new power, a more tremendous
thrill when set off against the every-dayness of sordid life. We find

something of the same effect in the stories of Algernon Blackwood and
Ambrose Bierce and F. Marion Crawford.
Tolstoi’s symbolic story of Ivan the Fool is an impressive utterance of his
views of life, expressed by the allegory of man’s folly and wisdom and the
schemes of devils.
Turgeniev’s pronounced strain of the unearthly has had its influence on
English fiction. He uses the dream elements to a marked degree, as in The
Song of Love Triumphant, a story of Oriental magic employed through
dreams and music, and The Dream, an account of a son’s revelatory visions
of his unknown father. The dream element has been used considerably in
our late fiction, some of which seems to reflect Turgeniev. Another motive
that he uses effectively is that of suggested vampirism,[63] and of psychical
vampirism,[64] where a young man is “set upon” by the spirit of a dead
woman he has scarcely known, till he dies under the torment. This seems to
have affected such stories as that of psychical vampirism in The Vampire,
by Reginald Hodder. We find in much of Turgeniev’s prose the symbolic,
mystical supernaturalism besides his use of dreams, visions, and a distinct
Oriental element. In Knock! Knock! Knock! the treatment of whose
spiritualism reminds one somewhat of Browning’s,[65] in its initial
skepticism and later hesitation, the final effect of which is to impress one
with a sense of supernaturalism working extraordinarily through natural
means, so that it is more powerful than the mere conventional ghostly could
be, we see what may have been the inspiration for certain spiritualistic
novels and stories in English. The same tone is felt in Hamlin Garland’s
treatment of the subject, for instance. The mystical romanticism of
Turgeniev is less brutally Russian than that of most of his compeers.
Like Maupassant and Hoffman and Poe, the Russian writers use to a
considerable extent the association between insanity and the supernatural to
heighten the effect of both. They may have been influenced in this by Poe’s
studies of madness, as by Maupassant’s, and they appear to have an
influence over certain present-day writers. It would be difficult to say which
is the stronger influence in the treatment of abnormal persons, Maupassant
or the Russian writers. One wonders what type of mania obsesses certain of
the Russian fictionists of to-day, for surely they cannot be normal persons.
Examples of such fiction are: Alexander Pushkin’s story of mocking
madness resulting from a passion for cards, whose ghostly motif has a
sardonic diabolism,[66] Tchekhoff’s story of abnormal horror,[67] a racking

account of insanity,[68] and The Black Monk, a weird story of insanity
brought on by the vision of a supernatural being, a replicated mirage of a
black monk a thousand years old. But it is in the work of Leonidas
Andreyev that we get the ultimate anguish of madness. The Red Laugh, an
analysis of the madness of war, of the insanity of nations as of individuals,
seems to envelop the world in a sheet of flame. Its horrors go beyond words
and the brain reels in reading. There are in English a number of stories of
insanity associated with the supernatural which may have been influenced
by the Russian method, though Ambrose Bierce’s studies in the abnormality
of soldier life preceded Andreyev by years. F. Marion Crawford’s The Dead
Smile and various stories of Arthur Machen have a Russian horror, and
other instances might be mentioned.
The Russian fiction with its impersonality of pessimism, its racial gloom,
its terrible sordid realism forming a basis for awesome supernaturalism, is
of a type foreign to our thought, yet, as is not infrequently the case, the
radically different has a strange appeal, and the effect of it on our stories of
horror is undoubted. English and American readers are greatly interested in
Russian literature just now and find a peculiar relish in its terrors, though
the harsher elements are somewhat softened in transference to our language.
Other fields of thought have been opened to us within this generation by
the widening of our knowledge of the literature of other European
countries. Books are much more freely translated now than formerly and no
person need be ignorant of the fiction of other lands. From the Spanish, the
Portuguese, the Chinese, Japanese, and other tongues we are receiving
stories of supernaturalism that give us new ideas, new points of view. The
greater ease of travel, the opportunity to study once-distant lands and
literatures have been reflected in our fiction. Some one should write a
monograph on the literary influence of Cook’s tours! Our later work has a
strong touch of the Oriental,—not an entirely new thing, since we find it in
Beckford’s Vathek and the pre-Gothic tales of John Hawkesworth,—but
more noticeable now. Examples are Stevenson’s New Arabian Nights,
Bottle Imp, and others, F. Marion Crawford’s Khaled and Mr. Isaacs,
Blackwood’s stories of Elementals, George Meredith’s fantasy, The Shaving
of Shagpat, though many others might be named. The Oriental fiction
permits the use of magic, sorcery, and various elements that seem out of
place in ordinary fiction. The popularity of Kipling’s tales of Indian native
life and character illustrates our fondness for this aspect of supernaturalism.

Apart from the foreign influences that affect it we notice a certain change
in the materials and methods of ghostly fiction in English. New elements
had entered into Gothic tales as an advance over the earlier forms, yet
conventions had grown up so that even such evasive and elusive
personalities as ghosts were hidebound by precedent. While the decline of
the genre definitely known as the Gothic novel in no sense put an end to the
supernatural in English fiction, it did mark a difference in manner. The
Gothic ghosts were more elementary in their nature, more superficial, than
those of later times. Life was, in the days of Walpole and Mrs. Radcliffe,
more local because of the limitations of travel and communication, it being
considered astounding in Gothic times that a ghost could travel a thousand
miles with ease while mortals moved snail-like. Scientific investigation was
crude compared with the present and had not greatly touched fiction.
Scientific folk-lore investigations were as unknown as societies of psychical
research, hence neither had aided in the writing of ghostly fiction.
The mass of ghostly stuff which has appeared in English since the Gothic
period, and which will be classified and discussed under different motifs in
succeeding chapters, shows many of the same characteristics of the earlier,
yet exhibits also a decided development over primitive, classical and Gothic
forms. The modern supernaturalism is more complex, more psychological
than the terroristic, perhaps because nowadays man is more intellectual, his
thought-processes more subtle. Humanity still wants ghosts, as ever, but
they must be more cleverly presented to be convincing. The ghostly thrill is
as ardently desired by the reading public, as eagerly striven for by the
writers as ever, though it is more difficult of achievement now than
formerly. Yet when it is attained it is more poignant and lasting in its effects
because more subtle in its art. The apparition that eludes analysis haunts the
memory more than do the comparatively simple forms of the past.
Compare, for instance, the spirits evoked by Henry James and Katherine
Fullerton Gerould with the crude clap-trap of cloistered spooks and armored
knights of Gothic times. How cheap and melodramatic the earlier attempts
seem!
The present-day ghost is at once less terrible and more terrible than those
of the past. There is not so much a sense of physical fear now, as of psychic
horror. The pallid specters that glide through antique castles are ineffectual
compared with the maleficent psychic invasions of modernity. On the other
hand, the recent ghostly story frequently shows a strong sense of humor

unknown in Gothicism, and only suggested in earlier forms, as in the elder
Pliny’s statement that ghosts would not visit a person afflicted with freckles,
which shows at least a germinal joviality in classical spooks.
One feature that distinguishes the uncanny tales of to-day from the
Gothic is their greater range of material. The early terror story had its
source in popular superstition, classical literature, medieval legends, or the
Elizabethan drama, while in the century that has elapsed since the decay of
the Gothic novel as such, new fields of thought have been opened up, and
new sources for ghostly plots have been discovered which the writers of
modern stories are quick to utilize. Present-day science with its wonderful
development has provided countless plots for supernatural stories.
Comparative study of folk-lore, with the activities of the numerous
associations, has brought to light fascinating material. Modern Spiritualism,
with its seances, its mediumistic experiments, has inspired many novels and
stories. The Psychical Research Society, with branches in various parts of
the world and its earnest advocates and serious investigations, has collected
suggestive stuff for many ghostly stories. The different sources for plot
material and mechanics for awesome effect, added to these from which the
terror novel drew its inspiration, have incalculably enriched the
supernatural fiction and widened the limits far beyond the restrictions of the
conventionalized Gothic.
Science has furnished themes for many modern stories of the
supernatural. Modern science itself, under normal conditions, seems like
necromancer’s magic, so its incursion into thrilling fiction is but natural.
Every aspect of research and discovery has had its exponent in fictive form,
and the skill with which the material is handled constitutes one point of
difference between the present ghostly stories and the crude scientific
supernaturalism of the early novels. The influence of Darwin, Spencer,
Huxley, and other scientists of the last century did much to quicken fiction
as well as thought, and the effects can be traced in the work of various
authors.
The widespread interest in folk-lore in recent years has had an
appreciable influence on the stories of the supernatural. While the methods
of investigation followed by the serious students of folk-lore are scientific
and the results are tabulated in an analytic rather than a literary style, yet the
effect is helpful to fiction. Comparative studies in folk-lore, by the bringing
together of a mass of material from diverse sources, establishes the fact of

the universal acceptance of supernaturalism in some form. Ethnic
superstitions vary, yet there is enough similarity between the ideas held by
tribes and races so widely separated as to discredit any basis of imitation or
conscious influence between them, to be of great interest to scientists. No
tribe, however low in the social scale, has been found that has no belief in
powers beyond the mortal.
Folk-lore associations are multiplying and the students of literature and
anthropology are joining forces in the effort to discover and classify the
variant superstitions and legends of the past and of the races and tribes still
in their childhood. Such activities are bringing to light a fascinating wealth
of material from which the writers of ghostly tales may find countless plots.
Such studies show how close akin the world is after all. A large number of
books relating stories of brownies, bogles, fairies, banshees, wraiths,
hobgoblins, witches, vampires, ghouls, and other superhuman personages
have appeared. I am not including in this list the fairy stories that are
written for juvenile consumption, but merely the folk-loristic or literary
versions for adults.
The most marked instance of the influence of folk-lore in supplying
subject matter for literature is shown in the recent Celtic revival. The
supernatural elements in the folk-tales of Ireland, Scotland, and Wales have
been widely used in fiction, poetry, and the drama. In this connection one is
reminded of Collins’s Ode on the Popular Superstitions of the Highlands
Considered as the Subject for Poetry. The Irish National School, with W. B.
Yeats, John Synge, and Lady Gregory as leaders, have made the folk-tales
of Ireland live in literature and the ghostly thrill of the old legends comes
down to us undiminished. Lord Dunsany’s work is particularly brilliant,
going back to ancient times and re-creating the mythologic beings for us,
making us friendly with the gods, the centaurs, the giants, and divers other
long-forgotten characters. Kipling has made the lore of the Indian towns
and jungles live for us, as Joel Chandler Harris has immortalized the
legends of the southern negro. Thomas A. Janvier in his tales of old Mexico
calls back the ghosts of Spanish conquerors and Aztec men and women,
repeopling the ancient streets with courtly specters. The fondness for folk-
loristic fiction is one of the marked aspects of Romanticism at the present
time.
The activities of the Society for Psychical Research have had decided
effect in stimulating ghostly stories. When so many intelligent persons turn

their attention to finding and classifying supernatural phenomena the
currents of thought thus set up will naturally influence fiction. Nowadays
every interest known to man is reflected in literature. The proceedings of
the association have been so widely advertised and so open to the public
that persons who would not otherwise give thought to the supernatural have
considered the matter. Such thinkers as W. T. Stead and Sir Oliver Lodge, to
mention only two, would inevitably influence others. In this connection it is
interesting to note the recent claims by Stead’s daughter that her father has
communicated with the living, and Lodge’s book, just published, Raymond,
or Life and Death, that gives proof of what he considers incontrovertible
messages from his son killed in battle. The collection of thousands of
affirmative answers to the question as to whether one had ever felt a ghostly
presence not to be explained on natural grounds brought out a mass of
material that might serve for plot-making. Haunted houses have been
catalogued and the census of specters taken.
The investigations in modern Spiritualism have done much to affect
ghostly literature. The terrors of the later apparitions are not physical, but
psychical, and probably the stories of the future will be more and more
allied to Spiritualism. Hamlin Garland, John Corbin, William Dean
Howells, Algernon Blackwood, Arnold Bennett, and others have written
novels and stories of this material, though scarcely the fringe of the garment
of possibilities has yet been touched. If one but grant the hypothesis of
Spiritualism, what vistas open up for the novelist! What thrilling
complications might come from the skillful manipulation of astrals alone,—
as aids in establishing alibis, for instance! Even the limitations that at
present bind ghost stories would be abolished and the effects of the
dramatic employment of spiritualistic faith would be highly sensational. If
the will be all powerful, then not only tables but mountains may be moved.
The laws of physics would be as nothing in the presence of such powers. A
lovelorn youth bent on attaining the object of his desires could, by merely
willing it so, sink ocean liners, demolish skyscrapers, call up tempests, and
rival German secret agents in his havoc. Intensely dramatic psychological
material might be produced by the conflict resulting from the double or
multiple personalities in one’s own nature, according to spiritualistic ideas.
There might be complicated crossings in love, wherein one would be
jealous of his alter ego, and conflicting ambitions of exciting character. The
struggle necessary for the model story might be intensely dramatic though

altogether internal, between one’s own selves. One finds himself so much
more interesting in the light of such research than one has ever dreamed.
The distinctions between materializations and astralizations,
etherealizations and plain apparitions might furnish good plot structure. The
personality of the “sensitives” alone would be fascinating material and the
cosmic clashes of will possible under these conceived conditions suggest
thrilling stories.
Dreams constitute another definite source for ghostly plots in modern
literature. While this was true to a certain extent in the Gothic novel, it is
still more so in later fiction. Lafcadio Hearn[69] advances the theory that all
the best plots for ghost stories in any language come from dreams. He
advises the person who would write supernatural thrillers to study the
phases of his own dream life. It would appear that all one needs to do is to
look into his own nightmares and write. Hearn says: “All the great effects
produced by poets and story writers and even by religious teachers, in the
treatment of the supernatural fear or mystery, have been obtained directly or
indirectly from dreams.” Though one may not literally accept the whole of
that statement, one must feel that the relation between dreams and
supernatural impressions is strikingly close. The feeling of supernatural
presence comes almost always at night when one is or has been asleep. The
guilty man, awaking from sleep, thinks that he sees the specters of those he
has wronged—because his dreams have embodied them for him. The lover
beholds the spirit of his dead love, because in dreams his soul has gone in
search of her. Very young children are unable to distinguish between dreams
and reality, as is the case of savages of a low order, believing in the
actuality of what they experience in dreams. And who can say that our
dream life is altogether baseless and unreal?
The different nightmare sensations, acute and vivid as they are, can be
analyzed to find parallelisms between them and the ghostly plots. For
example, take the sensation, common in nightmares, of feeling yourself
falling from immeasurable height. The same thrill of suspense is
communicated by the climax in Lewis’s and Mrs. Dacre’s Gothic novels,
where the devil takes guilty mortals to the mountain top and hurls them
down, down. The horrible potentialities of shadows suggested frequently in
dreams is illustrated by Mary Wilkins Freeman’s story where the accusing
spirit comes back as a haunting shadow on the wall, rather than as an
ordinary ghost, tormenting the living brother till his shadow also appears, a

portent of his death.[70] The awful grip of causeless horror, of nameless fear
which assails one so often in nightmares is represented in The Red Room,
[71] where black Fear, the Power of Darkness, haunts the room rather than
any personal spirit. It is disembodied horror itself. Wilkie Collins illustrates
the presaging vision of approaching disaster in The Dream Woman. The
nightmare horror of supernaturalism is nowhere better shown than in
Maupassant’s La Horla where the sleeper wakes with a sense of leaden
weight upon his breast, and knows that night after night some dreadful
presence is shut in with him, invisible yet crushing the life out of him and
driving him mad.
The nightmare motifs are present to a remarkable degree in Bulwer-
Lytton’s The Haunted and the Haunters, or the House and the Brain. There
we have the gigantism of the menacing Thing, the supernatural power given
to inanimate objects, the ghostly chill, the darkness, and the intolerable
oppression of a nameless evil thing beside one. Vampirism might easily be
an outcome of dreams, since based on a physical sensation of pricking at
the throat, combined with debility caused by weakness, which could be
attributed to loss of blood from the ravages of vampires. F. Marion
Crawford’s story, For the Blood Is the Life, is more closely related to
dreams than most of the type, though probably Bram Stoker’s Dracula is
the most horrible.
The curious side of supernaturalism as related to dreams is illustrated by
The Dream Gown of the Japanese Ambassador,[72] and the more beautiful
by Simeon Solomon’s Vision of Love Revealed in Sleep. Mary Wilkins
Freeman has a remarkable short story, The Hall Bedroom, which is one of
the best illustrations of the use of dream imagery and impressions. Here the
effects are alluring and beautiful, with the horror kept in the background,
but perhaps the more effective because of the artistic restraint. Odors,
sights, sounds, feelings, are all raised to an intensity of sensuous, slumbrous
enjoyment, all subliminated above the mortal. The description of the river
in the picture, on which the young man floats away to dreamy death, similar
to the Japanese story referred to by Hearn, helps to give the impression of
infinity that comes only in dreams. Algernon Blackwood in numerous
stories not only uses the elements of dreams and nightmares but explicitly
calls attention to the fact. Dream supernaturalism is employed in Barry
Pain’s stories, in Arthur Machen’s volume,[73] and in many others. Freud’s
theory of dreams as the invariable result of past experiences or unconscious

desires has not been stressed in fiction, though doubtless it will have its
inning presently. A. Conan Doyle’s The Secret of Goresthorpe Grange is an
amusing story of the relation of definite wishes and dreams of the ghostly.
These are some of the sources from which the later writers of occultism
have drawn their plots. They represent a distinct advance over the Gothic
and earlier supernaturalism in materials, for the modern story has gained the
new elements without loss of the old. The ghostly fiction of to-day has
access to the animistic or classical or medieval themes, yet has the
unlimited province of present thought to furnish additional inspiration.
There never was a time when thinking along general lines was more
spontaneously reflected in fiction than now, and supernatural literature
claims all regions for its own. Like every other phase of man’s thought,
ghostly fiction shows the increasing complexity of form and matter, the
wealth of added material and abounding richness of style, the fine subtleties
that only modernity can give.

CHAPTER III
MODERN GHOSTS

T
HE ghost is the most enduring figure in supernatural fiction. He is
absolutely indestructible. He glides from the freshly-cut pages of
magazines and books bearing the date of the year of our Lord
nineteen hundred and seventeen as from the parchment rolls of ancient
manuscripts. He appears as unapologetically at home in twentieth century
fiction as in classical mythology, Christian hagiology, medieval legend, or
Gothic romance. He changes with the styles in fiction but he never goes out
of fashion. He is the really permanent citizen of this earth, for mortals, at
best, are but transients. Even the athlete and the Methusaleh must in the end
give up the flesh, but the wraith goes on forever. In form, too, he wears
well. Ghostly substance of materialization, ethereal and vaporous as it
appears to be, is yet of an astonishing toughness. It seems to possess an
obstinate vitality akin to that attributed to the boll weevil in a negro ballad,
that went on undaunted by heat or cold, rain or drought, time or tide. The
ghost, like death, has all seasons for its own and there is no closed season
for spooks. It is much the case now as ever that all the world loves a ghost,
yet we like to take our ghosts vicariously, preferably in fiction. We’d rather
see than be one.
One point of difference between the ghostly fiction of the past and of the
present is in the matter of length. The Gothic novel was often a three- or
four-decker affair in whose perusal the reader aged perceptibly before the
ghost succeeded or was foiled in his haunting designs. There was obviously
much more leisure on the part of spooks as well as mortals then than now.
Consequently the ghost story of to-day is told in short-story form for the
most part. Poe knew better than anybody before him what was necessary for
the proper economy of thrills when he gave his dictum concerning the
desirable length for a story, which rule applies more to the ghostly tale than

to any other type, for surely there is needed the unity of impression, the
definiteness of effect which only continuity in reading gives. The ghostly
narrative that is too long loses in impressiveness, whether it is altogether
supernatural or mixed with other elements. In either case, it is less
successful than the shorter, more poignant treatment possible in the
compressed form. The tabloid ghost can communicate more thrills than the
one in diluted narration.
The apparitions in later English fiction fall naturally into several distinct
classes with reference to the reality of their appearance. There are the
mistaken apparitions, there are the purely subjective specters, evoked by the
psychic state of the percipients, and there are the objective ghosts,
independent of the mental state of the witnesses, appearing to persons who
are not mentally prepared to see them.
The mistaken ghost is an old form, for most of Mrs. Radcliffe’s
interesting apparitions belong to this class and others of the Gothic writers
used subterfuge to cheat the reader. In the early romance there was
frequently deliberate deception for a definite purpose, the ghosts with the
histrionic temperament using a make-up of phosphorus, bones, and other
contrivances to create the impression of unearthly visitation. Recent fiction
is more cleverly managed than that. Rarely now does one find a story where
the ghost-seer is deliberately imposed upon, for in most modern cases the
mistake occurs by accident or misapprehension on the part of the percipient,
for which nobody and nothing but his own agitation is responsible. Yet
there are occasional hoax ghosts even yet, for example, The Ghost of Miser
Brimpson,[74] where a specter is rigged up as the scheme of a clever girl to
win over an obdurate lover, and The Spectre Bridegroom, which is a well-
known example of the pseudo-spook whose object is matrimony. His
Unquiet Ghost[75] is a delightful story of a fake burial to evade the revenue
officials. Watt, the “corp,” says: “I was a powerful onchancy, onquiet ghost.
I even did my courtin’ whilst in my reg’lar line o’ business a’harntin’ a
graveyard!” His sweetheart sobs out her confession of love to “his pore
ghost,” an avowal she has denied the living man. Examples of the
apparitions that unwittingly deceive mortals are found in The Ghost at Point
of Rock,[76] where the young telegraph operator, alone at night on a prairie,
sees a beautiful girl who enters and announces that she is dead,—how is he
to know that she is in a somnambulistic stupor, and has wandered from a
train? Another is[77] a story where the young man falls in love with what he

thinks is a wraith of the water luring him to his death, but learns that she is
a perfectly proper damsel whose family he knows. The Night Call[78] is less
simple than these, a problematic story that leaves one wondering as to just
what is meant.[79]
The subjective ghosts are legion in modern fiction. They are those
evoked by the mental state of the percipients so that they become realities to
those beholding them. The mind rendered morbid by grief or remorse is
readily prepared to see the spirits of the dead return in love or with
reproach. The apparitions in animistic beliefs, as in classical stories and
Gothic romance, were usually subjective, born of brooding love or remorse
or fear of retribution, appearing to the persons who had cause to expect
them and coming usually at night when the beholders would be alone and
given over to melancholy thought or else to troubled sleep. Shakespeare’s
ghosts were in large measure subjective, “selective apparitions.” When
Brutus asked the specter what he was, the awful answer came, “Thy evil
genius, Brutus!” Macbeth saw the witches who embodied for him his own
secret ambitions, and he alone saw the ghost of Banquo, because he had the
weight of murder on his heart.
The subjective ghost story is difficult to write, as the effect must be
subtly managed yet inescapably impressive. If done well it is admirable,
and there are some writers who, to use Henry James’s words concerning his
own work, are “more interested in situations obscure and subject to
interpretation than the gross rattle of the foreground.” The reader, as well as
the writer, must put himself in the mental attitude of acceptance of the
supernatural else the effect is lacking, for the ghostly thrill is
incommunicable to those beyond the pale of at least temporary credulity.
Kipling’s They is an extraordinary ghost story of suggestion rather than
of bald fact. It is like crushing the wings of a butterfly to analyze it, but it
represents the story of a man whose love for his own dead child enabled
him to see the spirits of other little children, because he loved. As the blind
woman told him, only those who were spiritually prepared could see them,
for “you must bear or lose!” before glimpsing them. Thomas Bailey
Aldrich’s Miss Mehitabel’s Son is a humorously pathetic account of the
subjective spirit of a child that was never born. Algernon Blackwood’s
ghosts are to a great extent subjective. As John Silence, the psychic doctor,
says to the shuddering man who has had a racking experience: “Your deeply
introspective mood had already reconstructed the past so intensely that you

were en rapport at once with any forces of those past days that chanced to
be still lingering. And they swept you up all unresistingly.” In The Shell of
Sense,[80] the woman who is about to accept her dead sister’s husband feels
such a sense of disloyalty that she sees the sister’s spirit reproaching her.
Her conscience has prepared her for the vision. Juliet Wilbur Tompkins
shows us the spirit of a mother returning to comfort the daughter who has in
life misunderstood and neglected her, but now, realizing the truth, is
grieving her heart out for her.[81] Ambrose Bierce tells of a prisoner who
murders his jailer to escape, but is arrested and brought back by the spirit of
the dead man.[82] Any number of instances might be given of ghosts
appearing to those who are mentally prepared to be receptive to
supernatural visions, but these will serve to illustrate the type.
Objective ghosts are likewise very numerous in modern fiction. The
objective spirits are those that, while they may be subjective on the part of
the persons chiefly concerned, to begin with, are yet visible to others as
well, appearing not only to those mentally prepared to see them but to
others not thinking of such manifestations and even sceptical of their
possibility. The objective ghosts have more definite visibility, more reality
than the purely subjective spirits. They are more impressive as haunters.
There is a plausibility, a corporeality about the later apparitions that shows
their advance over the diaphanous phantoms of the past. Ghosts that eat and
drink, play cards, dance, duel, and do anything they wish, that are so lifelike
in their materialization that they would deceive even a medium, are more
terrifying than the helpless specters of early times that could only give
orders for the living to carry out. The modern ghost has lost none of his
mortal powers but has gained additional supermortal abilities, which gives
him an unsportsmanlike advantage over the mere human being he may take
issue with.
Henry James’s The Turn of the Screw is a remarkable example of the
objective ghost story. It is one of the best ghostly stories in English, because
more philosophical, showing more knowledge of the psychology not only
of the adult but of the child, not only of the human being but of the ghost,
than most fiction of the type. Peter Quint and Miss Jessel with their
diabolical conspiracy of evil against the two children are so real that they
are seen not only by the children they hound but by the unsuspecting
governess as well. She is able to describe them so accurately that those who
knew them in life—as she did not at all—recognize them instantly. In The

Four-fifteen Express,[83] John Derringer’s ghost is seen by a man that does
not know he is dead, and who has not been thinking of him at all. The ghost
reveals incontrovertible proof of his presence, even leaving his cigar-case
behind him,—which raises the question as to whether ghosts smoke in the
hereafter in more ways than one. The ghastly incident in Emily Brontë’s
Wuthering Heights where the agonized ghost comes to the window, gashing
its wrist on the broken pane, is strikingly objectified, for she comes to a
person who never knew her and is not thinking of any supernatural
manifestation. Shadows on the Wall,[84] that story of surpassing power of
suggestion, is objective in its method, for not only the man who has
wronged his dead mother sees his spirit returning, not in the ordinary way
but as an accusing shadow on the wall, but the sisters see it as well.
In John Inglesant,[85] the spirit of Lord Strafford is seen by the young lad
in the vestibule as well as by the king whose conscience burns for having
left him to die undefended. Frank R. Stockton’s transferred ghost is an
objective apparition, for surely the guest in the upper chamber was not
expecting to see the shade of a living man perch itself on the foot of his bed
at midnight. The horrible specter in The Messenger,[86] is seen by various
persons at different times, some of whom are totally unprepared for such
exhibition. And many similar instances might be given.
Whether ghosts be mistaken, subjective or objective, their appearance has
always elicited considerable interest on the part of humanity. Their
substance of materialization, their bearing, dress, and general demeanor are
matters of definite concern to those who expect shortly to become ghosts
themselves. In some instances the modern ghost sticks pretty closely to the
animistic idea of spirit material, which was that the shade was a sort of
vapory projection of the body, intangible, impalpable, yet easily recognized
with reference to previous personality. Chaucer describes some one as being
“nat pale as a forpyned goost,” which illustrates the conception in his day,
and the Gothic specimen was usually a pallid specter, though Walpole
furnished one robust haunter of gigantic muscle. Yet for the most part the
Gothic ghosts were misty wraiths, through which the sword could plunge
without resistance. They were fragile and helpless as an eighteenth-century
heroine when it came to a real emergency, and were useful chiefly for
frightening the guilty and consoling the innocent. In some stories of the
present we have a similar materialization. The spirit woman in Kipling’s
Phantom Rickshaw is so ethereal that the horse and its rider plunge through

her without resistance, and Dickens’s Mr. Marley is of such vapory
substance that Scrooge can see clear through him to count the coat-tail
buttons at his back. In a recent story, The Substitute,[87] the spirit is said to
evade her friend like a mist.
The Gothic ghost frequently walked forth as a skeleton, clad in nothing
but his bones and a lurid scowl. Skeletons still perambulate among us, as in
The Messenger, where the stripped-off mask shows a hideous skull.

The skeleton burst from out the rotting robes and collapsed on the ground before us. From between
the staring ribs and the grinning teeth spurted a torrent of black blood, showering the shrinking
grasses, and then the thing shuddered and fell over into the black ooze of the bog.

The ghost of Zuleika[88] is described as “a skeleton woman robed in the
ragged remains of a black mantle. Near this crumbling earth body there lay
the spirit of Zuleika attached to it by a fine thread of magnetic ether. Like
the earthly body it was wrapped in a robe of black of which it seemed the
counterpart.” Elliott O’Donnell has a story of a mummy that in a soldier’s
tent at night sobs, breathes, moves, sits up, and with ghastly fingers unfolds
its cere-cloth wrappings, appearing to him as the counterpart of his long-
dead mother, looking at him with the eyes he had worshiped in his
boyhood.
I fell on my knees before her and kissed—what? Not the feet of my mother but those of the long-
buried dead! Sick with repulsion and fear I looked up and there bending over me and peering into my
eyes was the face, the fleshless, mouldering face of the foul corpse!

But on the whole, though skeletons do appear in later fiction, the rattle of
bones is not heard as often as in Gothic times.
Ghostly apparitions are more varied in form than in early times. The
modern ghost does not require a whole skeleton for his purposes, but he can
take a single bone and put the hardiest to flight with it. It is a dreadful thing
to realize that a ghost can come in sections, which indefinitely multiplies its
powers of haunting. F. Marion Crawford has a story of a diabolical skull,
one of the most rabid revenge ghosts on record. A man has murdered his
wife by pouring melted lead into her ear while she slept, in accordance with
a suggestion from a casually told story of a guest. The dead woman’s skull
—the husband cut the head off for fear people would hear the lead rattle,
and buried it in the garden—comes back to haunt the husband, with that
deadly rattle of the lump of lead inside. The teeth bite him, the skull rolls up
a hill to follow him, and finally kills him, then sets in to haunt the visitor
who told the suggestive story.[89] Elsewhere as well Crawford shows us
skulls that have uncanny powers of motion and emotion. In Wilkie Collins’s
Haunted Hotel the specter is seen as a bodiless head floating near the
ceiling of the room where the man was murdered and his body concealed.
Thackeray[90] describes a ghost with its head on its lap, and of course every
one will remember the headless horseman with his head carried on the
pommel of his saddle that frightened poor Ichabod Crane out of his wits.

We get a rabble of headless apparitions in Brissot’s Ghost, one of the
Anti-Jacobin parodies (ridiculing Richard Glover’s ballad of Hosier’s
Ghost):
Sudden up the staircase sounding
Hideous yells and shrieks were heard;
Then, each guest with fear confounding,
A grim train of ghosts appeared;
Each a head in anguish gasping
(Himself a trunk deformed with gore)
In his hand, terrific clasping,
Stalked across the wine-stained floor.

In Bulwer-Lytton’s The Haunters and the Haunted a woman’s hand
without a body rises up to clutch the ancient letters, then withdraws, while
in his Strange Story the supernatural manifestation comes as a vast Eye
seen in the distance, moving nearer and nearer, “seeming to move from the
ground at a height of some lofty giant.” Then other Eyes appear. “Those
Eyes! Those terrible Eyes! Legions on legions! And that tramp of
numberless feet! they are not seen, but the hollows of the earth echo to their
tread!” The supernatural phenomena in Ambrose Bierce’s stories have an
individual horror. In A Vine on the House he shows a hideous revenge ghost
manifested in a peculiar form. A couple of men take refuge in a deserted
house and note a strange vine covering the porch that shakes unaccountably
and violently. In mystification they dig it up, to find the roots in the form of
a woman’s body, lacking one foot, as had been the case with the woman
who had lived there and whose husband had killed her secretly and buried
her beside the porch.
The revenge ghost in modern fiction frequently manifests itself in this
form, mutilated or dismembered, each disfigurement of the mortal body
showing itself in a relentless immortality and adding to the horror of the
haunting. There seems to be no seat of ghostly mind or soul, for the body
can perform its function of haunting in whole or in part, unaided by the
head or heart, like a section of a snake that has life apart from the main
body. And this idea of detached part of the form acting as a determined
agent for revenge adds a new horror to fiction. I haven’t as yet found an
instance of a woman’s heart, bleeding and broken, coming up all by itself to
haunt the deserting lover, but perhaps such stories will be written soon. And
think what terrors would await the careless physician or surgeon if each
outraged organ or dismembered limb came back to seek vengeance on him!

Ghosts of modern fiction are more convincing in their reality than the
specters of early times. They are stronger, more vital; there seems to be a
strengthening of ghostly tissue, a stiffening of supernatural muscle in these
days. Ghosts are more healthy, more active, more alive than they used to be.
There is now as before a strong resemblance to the personality before death,
the same immortality of looks that is discouraging to the prospects of
homely persons who have hoped to be more handsome in a future state.
Fiction gives no basis for such hope. Peculiarities of appearance are carried
over with distressing faithfulness to detail, each freckle, each wrinkle, each
gray hair showing with the clearness of a photographic proof. Note the
lifelikeness of the governess’s description of Peter Quint in The Turn of the
Screw.
He has red hair, very red, very close-curling, and a pale face, long in shape, with straight, good
features and little queer whiskers that are as red as his hair. His eyebrows are somehow darker and
particularly arched as if they might move a good deal. His eyes are sharp, strange, awful. His mouth
is wide, his lips thin.

This seems an unspectral description, for red hair is not wraith-like, yet a
red-headed ghost that lifted its eyebrows unnaturally would be alarming.
She says of him: “He was absolutely, on this occasion, a living, dangerous,
detestable presence.”
Each minor disfigurement is retained, as the loss of the tooth in
Crawford’s screaming skull, the missing toe in Bierce’s Middle Toe of the
Right Foot, the lacking foot in the ghostly vine, and so forth. Nothing is
neglected to make identification absolute in present tales of horror. The
spirits described by Bram Stoker have red, voluptuous lips and pink cheeks,
and the spirit of Sir Oliver’s mother, in De Morgan’s An Affair of Dishonor,
that comes to meet him as he passes her mausoleum on his way to the
shameful duel, limps as in life, so that he recognizes her, though the cloaked
and hooded figure has its face turned from him. Jessie Adelaide Middleton
shows us one ghost with half a face.
Ghostly apparel constitutes an interesting feature of supernaturalism in
literature. There seem to be as definite conventions concerning spectral
clothes as regarding the garb of the living fashionables. It is more difficult
to understand the immortality of clothes than of humanity, for bodily tissue
even of ghosts might quite conceivably renew itself, but not so with the
ghostly garments. Of what stuff are ghost-clothes made? And why do they
never wear out?

In olden times when people wore clothes of less radical styles than now
and fewer of them, masculine spirits were in part identified by their familiar
armor. Armor is so material and heavy that it seems incongruous to the
ghostly function, yet shields and accouterments were necessary
accompaniments of every knightly spook. He must be ever ready to tilt with
rival ghost. The Gothic phantoms were well panoplied and one remembers
particularly the giant armor in Walpole’s novel. Nowadays the law forbids
the carrying of weapons, which restriction seems to have been extended to
ghostdom as well. Specters are thus placed at a disadvantage, for one would
scarcely expect to see even the wraith of a Texas cow-boy toting a pistol.
Specters usually appear in the garments in which the beholder saw them
last in life. Styles seem petrified at death so that old-time ghosts now look
like figures from the movies or guests at a masquerade ball. One other point
to be noted is that women phantoms are frequently seen in black or in
white. White seems reminiscent of the shroud, as well as of youth and
innocence, so is appropriate, while black connotes gloom, so is suitable, yet
the really favored color is gray. Most of the specters this season are dressed
in gray. I scarcely know why this is affected by shades, yet the fact remains
that many wraiths both men and women are thus attired. Gray is the tone
that witches of modern tastes choose also, whereas their ancient forbears
went in black and red. Modern ghosts are at a disadvantage in the matter of
clothes compared with the earlier ones, since the styles now change so
quickly and so decidedly that a ghost is hopelessly passé before he has time
to materialize at all in most instances.
Examples of ghostly garments in later fiction evidence their variety.
Katherine Fullerton Gerould[91] shows us three ghosts, one of a woman in a
blue dress, one of a rattlesnake, and one of a Zulu warrior wearing only a
loin-cloth, a nose-ring, and a scowl. (We do not often see the nude in
ghosts, perhaps because they have a shade of modesty.) Co-operative
Ghosts[92] depicts a man clad in the wraith of a tweed suit, mid-Victorian,
“with those familiar Matthew Arnold side-whiskers.” In addition to Mr.
Morley’s coat-tail buttons which we glanced through him to see, we
observe that he wears ghostly spectacles, a pig-tail, tights and boots, and a
prim waist-coat. In Kipling’s They we see the glint of a small boy’s blue
blouse, while another Kipling youngster, a war-ghost,[93] struts around in
his comical first trousers which he would not be robbed of even by the
German soldiers that murdered him. Other children in the same story are

said to have on “disgracefully dirty clothes.” I do not recall any soilure on
Gothic garments, save spectral blood-stains and the mold of graves. Neither
did I discover any child wraith in Gothicism save the pitiful spirits of baby
victims in The Albigenses and the baby wraiths in Hogg’s The Wool-
gatherer. The Englishman driven mad by the apparition of the woman he
has wronged in Kipling’s story[94] is described by him as “wearing the dress
in which I saw her last alive; she carried the same tiny handkerchief in her
right hand and the same card-case in her left.” (A woman eight months dead
with a card-case!) Blackwood shows us a ghost in purple knee-breeches and
velvet coat; in The Gray Guest[95] the returning Napoleon wears a long
military cloak of gray and military boots, while Crawford has one dreadful
ghost coming back to wreak revenge in wet oil-skins. The eccentric spook
in Josephine Daskam Bacon’s The Heritage is dressed in brown and sits
stolidly and silently on the side of the bed with its back turned. Think of
being haunted by an unbudging brown back! No wonder it drove the young
husband to spend his wedding night huddled on the stairs. We have
instances of a ghost in a red vest, a relentless revenge spirit that hounds
from ocean to ocean his murderer and the betrayer of his daughter, and
another of a ghost in a red shirt. There is on the whole as much variety and
appropriateness of costume in modern ghost fiction as in Broadway
melodrama.
Another point of difference between the specters of to-day and those of
the past is in the extension of their avenues of approach to us. Ghostly
appeal to the senses is more varied now than in earlier times. The classical
as well as the Gothic ghosts appealed in general only to the sight and
hearing, as well as, of course, to the sixth sense that realizes the presence of
a supernatural being. Ghosts were seen and heard and were content with
that. But nowadays more points of contact are open to them and they haunt
us through the touch, the smell, as well as sight and hearing. The taste as a
medium of impression has not yet been exploited by fiction writers though
doubtless it will be worked out soon. There is a folk-tale of the Skibos that
wolves eat ghosts and find them very appetizing and the devil in Poe’s Bon
Bon says he eats the spirits of mortals. One might imagine what haunting
dyspepsia could result if an ill-tempered spook were devoured against his
will. It is conceivable, too, that gastronomic ghosts might haunt cannibals;
and who knows that the dark brown taste in the mouths of riotous livers is

not some specter striving to express itself through that medium instead of
being merely riotous livers?
The appeal of ghosts to the sight has already been discussed so need not
be mentioned here. But the element of invisibility enters in as a new and
very terrible form of supernatural manifestation in later fiction. In spite of
the general visibility, some of the most horrible tales turn on the fact that
the haunter is unseen. H. G. Wells’s Invisible Man is a human being, not a
ghost; yet the story has a curdling power that few straight ghost stories
possess. Maupassant’s La Horla is a nightmare story of an invisible being
that is terrific in its effect. The victim knows that an unseen yet definite and
determined something is shut in his room with him night after night, eating,
drinking, reading, sitting on his chest, driving him mad. Ambrose Bierce’s
The Damned Thing is a gruesome story of invisibility, of a something that is
abroad with unearthly power of evil, whose movements can be measured by
the bending of the grasses, which shuts off the light from other objects as it
passes, which struggles with the dogs and with men, till it finally kills and
horribly mangles the man who has been studying it, but is never seen.
Another[96] has for its central figure a being that violently attacks men and
is overpowered and tied only by abnormal strength, that struggles on the
bed, showing its imprint on the mattress, that is imprisoned in a plaster cast
to have its mold taken, that is heard breathing loudly till it dies of
starvation, yet is absolutely never visible. Blackwood’s Fire Elemental may
be seen moving along only by the bending of the grass beneath it and by the
trail it leaves behind, for though it is audible yet it is never seen. As a brave
man said of it, “I am not afraid of anything that I can see!” so these stories
of supernatural invisibility have a chilling horror more intense than that of
most ghostly tales. The element of invisibility of unmistakably present
spirits is shown in other stories.
One tender story of an invisible ghost is told in In No Strange Land,[97]
of a man killed suddenly in a wreck while on his way home to the birthday
dinner his wife is preparing for him. He does not know that he has been
hurt; but while his dead body lies mangled under the wreckage his spirit
hurries home. He swears whimsically under his breath at some interruption
and thinks with joy of the happy little group he will meet. But when he
enters his home he cannot make them see or hear him. They are vaguely
aware of some strange influence, are awed by it, and the little son with the
poet’s heart whispers that he hears something, but that is all. The man

stands by, impotently stretching out his arms to them till he hears the
messenger tell them that he is dead.
Ghosts are variable with respect to sounds as well as appearance. The
early ghosts were for the most part silent, yet could talk on occasion, and
classical apparitions were sometimes vocal and sometimes silent. The
Gothic ghost sometimes had an impediment in his speech while at other
times he could converse fluently. The Gothic specter, real as well as faked,
frequently lifted voice in song and brought terror to the guilty bosom by
such strains. Yet when he spoke he was usually brief in utterance. Perhaps
the reason for that lay in the lack of surety on the part of the writers as to
the proper ghostly diction. Gothic authors were not overstrong on technique
and they may have hesitated to let their specters be too fluent lest they be
guilty of dialectic errors. It would seem incongruous for even an illiterate
ghost to murder the king’s English, which presents a difficulty in the matter
of realism, so perchance the writers dodged the issue by giving their ghosts
brevity of speech, or in some cases by letting them look volumes of threats
but utter no word. This may explain the reason for the non-speaking ghosts
in classical and Elizabethan drama. There is a similar variation in the later
fiction, for many of the ghosts are eloquently silent, while other phantoms
are terrifyingly fluent. All this goes to prove the freedom of the modern
ghost for he does what he takes a notion to do. The invisible ghosts are as a
rule voiceless as well.
The Gothic romance was fond of mysterious music as an accompaniment
of supernatural visitation, but ghostly music is less common than it used to
be. Yet it does come at times, as in A Far-away Melody,[98] where two
spinster sisters living alone hear heavenly music as portent of their death.
Ghostly song is heard in another case,[99] where a woman’s spirit comes
back to sing in a duet at her funeral, and Crawford’s ghost[100] constantly
whistles a tune he had been fond of during life. In Co-operative Ghosts the
wraith of the young girl who in Cromwellian times betrayed her father’s
cause to save her lover’s life sings sadly,
“I could not love thee, dear, so much,
Loved I not honor more!”

In Crawford’s A Doll’s Ghost, that peculiar example of preternatural
fiction, not a children’s story as one might think, nor yet humorous, the
mechanical voice of the doll and the click of its tiny pattering feet occur as

strange sounds. Lord Strafford[101] walks with a firm, audible tread on his
way to appall the king, and in Blackwood’s Empty House the ghosts move
with sounds of heavy, rushing feet, followed by a noise of scuffling and
smothered screams as the ancient murder is re-enacted, then the thud of a
body thrown down the stairs,—after which is a terrible silence. The awful
effect of a sudden silence after supernatural sounds is nowhere shown more
tensely than in The Monkey’s Paw,[102] that story of superlative power of
suggestion. When the ghostly visitant knocks loudly at the outer door, we
feel the same thrill of chilling awe as in the knocking at the gate in
Macbeth, and more, for the two who hear are sure that this is a presence
come back from the dead. Then when the last magic wish has been
breathed, utter silence comes, a silence more dreadful in its import than the
clamor has been.
New sounds are introduced in modern ghostly tales, such as the peculiar
hissing that is a manifestation of the presence of the ancient spirit[103]
followed by the crackling and crashing of the enchanted flames. In
Blackwood’s Keeping His Promise the heavy, stertorous breathing of the
invisible Thing is heard, and the creaking of the bed weighted down by the
body. Mary Wilkins Freeman brings in ghostly crying in a story, while
Blackwood speaks of his Wendigo as having “a sort of windy, crying voice,
as of something lonely and untamed, wild and of abominable power.”
Kipling introduces novel and touching sounds in his stories of ghostly
children. The child-wraiths are gay, yet sometimes near to tears. He speaks
of “the utterly happy chuckle of a child absorbed in some light mischief,”
“sudden, squeaking giggles of childhood,” “the rustle of a frock and the
patter of feet in the room beyond,” “joyous chuckles of evasion,” and so
forth. These essentially childlike and lifelike sounds are deeply pathetic as
coming from the ghosts of little ones that hover, homesick, near the earth
they dread to leave. The little ghost boy in Richard Middleton’s story,[104]
manifests himself, invisibly, through the little prancing steps, the rustling of
the leaves through which he runs, and the heart-breaking imitations of an
automobile. Later ghostly fiction introduces few of the clankings of chains
and lugubrious groans that made the Gothic romance mournful, and the
modern specters are less wailful than the earlier, but more articulate in their
expression. There are definite ghostly sounds that recur in various stories,
such as the death-rap above the bed of the dying, the oft-mentioned
mocking laughter in empty places, the cry of the banshee which is the

presage of death not only of the body but of the soul, as well. On the whole,
the sounds in modern supernatural stories are more varied in their types,
more expressive of separate and individual horror, and with an intensified
power of haunting suggestion than was the case with the earlier forms.
The sense of smell was not noticeably exploited in the ancient or Gothic
ghost stories, though certain folk-tales, as Hawaiian stories of the lower
world, speak of it. The devil was supposed to be in bad odor, for he was
usually accompanied by sulphurous scents, as we notice in Calderon’s
drama,[105] and some of the Gothic novels, but that seems to be about the
extent of the matter. But moderns, while not so partial to brimstone, pay
considerable attention to supernatural odors. The devil has been dry-
cleaned, but the evil odors of later fiction are more objectionable than the
fumes of the pit, are more variant, more individual and distinctive. Odors
seem less subjective than sights or sounds, and are not so conventionalized
in ghostly fiction, hence when they are cleverly evoked they are unusually
effective. These supernatural scents have a very lasting quality too, for they
linger on after the other manifestations of the preternatural are past. In The
Haunted Hotel,[106] the ghost manifests itself through the nostrils. In room
number thirteen there is an awful stench for which no one can account, and
which cannot be removed by any disinfectants. Finally when a woman
especially sympathetic to a man mysteriously dead is put in the room, the
ghost appears as a decaying head, floating near the ceiling and emitting an
intolerable odor. The Upper Berth[107] tells of a strange, foul sea odor that
infests a certain stateroom and that no amount of fumigating or airing will
remove. As the Thing comes out of the sea to carry its victim away with it,
the man in the lower berth gets the full force of the unearthly smell. There
are definite foul supernatural odors associated with supernatural animals in
recent ghostly tales, as that “ghost of an unforgettable strange odor, of a
queer, acrid, pungent smell like the odor of lions,” which announces the
presence of the awful out-door something called by the Indians, the
Wendigo. In Kipling’s story[108] of a man whose soul has been stolen by
Indian magic through the curse of a leper priest and a beast’s soul put in its
place,—his companions are sickened by an intolerable stench as of wild
beasts, and when the curse is removed and he comes back to himself, he
sniffs the air and asks what causes “such a horrid doggy smell in the air.”
Sometimes the ghastly presence comes as a whiff of perfume,[109] where
the spirit of the dead woman brings with it flowers in masses, with a

heavenly perfume which lingers after the spirit in visible form has departed.
The subtlest and most delicately haunting story of this type is O. Henry’s,
[110] where the loved, dead girl reveals herself to the man who is desperately
hunting the big city over for her, merely as a whiff of mignonette, the
flower she most loved.
But it is through the sense of touch that the worst form of haunting
comes. Seeing a supernatural visitant is terrible, hearing him is direful,
smelling him is loathsome, but having him touch you is the climax of
horror. This element comes in much in recent stories. The earlier ghosts
seemed to be more reserved, to know their spectral place better, were not so
ready to presume on unwelcome familiarities as those in later fiction, but
spooks have doubtless followed the fashion of mortals in this easy, relaxed
age and have become a shade too free in their manners. Of course, one
remembers the crushing specter in Otranto castle that flattened the hapless
youth out so effectually, and there are other instances less striking. But as a
general thing the Gothic ghost was content to stand at a distance and hurl
curses. Fortunately for our ancestors’ nerves, he did not incline much to the
laying on of hands. Modern ghosts, however, have not been taught to
restrain their impulses and they venture on liberties that Radcliffian
romance would have disapproved of.
The Damned Thing gives an example of muscular supernaturalism, for
the mysterious being kills a dog in a stiff fight, then later slays the master
after a terrible struggle in which the man is disfigured beyond words to
describe. O’Brien shows a terrible being of abnormal power that is tied only
after a tremendous effort, and which fights violently to free itself. And the
Thing in the upper berth had an awesome strength.
It was something ghostly, horrible, beyond words, and it moved in my grasp. It was like the body
of a man long dead and yet it moved, and had the strength of ten men living, but I gripped it with all
my might, the slippery, oozy, horrible thing. I wrestled with the dead thing; it thrust itself upon me
and nearly broke my arms; it wound its corpselike arms around my neck, the living death, and
overpowered me, so that at the last I cried aloud and fell and left my hold.
As I fell the thing sprang across me and seemed to throw itself upon the captain. When I last saw
him on his feet his face was white and his lips set. It seemed to me that he struck a violent blow at the
dead being, and then, he, too, fell forward on his face.

The ghostly touch is frequently described, not only in fiction but in
reports of the Psychical Society as well, as being of supernatural chill or of
burning heat. Afterwards[111] brings in the icy touch of the spirit hand. In
certain cases the ghost touch leaves a burn or mark that never goes away.

Yet the touch of horror is not the only one introduced in fiction of the
supernatural. There are tender and loving touches as well, expressing
yearning love and a longing to communicate with the living. What could be
more beautiful than the incident in They? “I felt my relaxed hand taken and
turned softly between the soft hands of a child. The little brushing kiss fell
in the center of my palm—as gift on which the fingers were once expected
to close—a fragment of a mute code devised very long ago.” And in a
similar story,[112] the woman says, “I will swear to my dying day that two
little hands stole and rested—for a moment only—in mine!” Wilkie Collins
speaks of his story, The Ghost’s Touch, as follows:
The course of this narrative leads the reader on new and strange ground. It describes the return of a
disembodied spirit to earth—not occurring in the obscurity of midnight but in the searching light of
day; neither seen as a vision nor heard as a voice—revealing itself to mortal knowledge through the
sense that is least easily self-deceived, the sense that feels.

The widow feels the clasp of her husband’s hands, not only psychically
but physically, and when she asks for a further sign, the ghost kisses her
unmistakably on the lips. Another widow[113] feels her hand clasped by the
hand of her husband who has mysteriously disappeared after having
presumably absconded with trust funds—and knows that he is dead and
seeking to give her some message. His hand gently leads her to the edge of
the cliff where he has fallen over and been killed, so that she may know the
truth. The lover in Poe’s Eleonora feels a “spiritual kiss” from the lips of
his beloved. The ghost touch is an impressive motif of strength in recent
fiction and marks an advance over the earlier forms, showing an access of
imaginative power and psychological analysis.

Another point of contrast between the modern and the older ghosts is in
the greater freedom enjoyed by those of to-day. The ghosts of our ancestors
were weak and helpless creatures in the main and the Gothic specter was
tyrannized over to such an extent that he hardly dared call his shade his
own. The spook of to-day has acquired a latchkey and asserted his
independence. He may have a local habitation but he isn’t obliged to stay
there. Now-a-days even the spectral women are setting up to be feminists
and have privileges that would have caused the Gothic wraiths to swoon
with horror. Ghosts are not so sensitive to the barometer now as they used
to be, nor do they have such an active influence over the weather as did the
Gothic phantoms. They do not need a tempest for their materialization nor a

supernatural play of lightning for their wild threats, and comparatively few
storms occur in later fiction. Yet there is certainly no lessening of the
ghostly thrill in consequence.
Neither are the spirits of to-day limited to any set hours as was the rule in
Gothicism. The tyranny of the dark, the autocratic rule of twelve or one
o’clock as the arbitrary hour for apparitions, has been removed. Katherine
Fullerton Gerould shows an interesting collection of ghosts that come at
eleven o’clock in the morning, Georgia Wood Pangborn brings one out on
the seashore in mid-afternoon, and Kipling has various ghosts that appear in
daylight and in the open air.
Ghosts in modern fiction are not dependent upon a setting of sullen
scenery as in Gothicism, but may choose any surroundings they like. Since
modern household arrangements do not include family vaults as a general
thing, and since cemeteries are inconveniently located, there is a tendency
on the part of haunters to desert such quarters. Mary Wilkins Freeman and
Charles Egbert Craddock each has one ghost story located in a graveyard,
and The Last Ghost in Harmony[114] is set in a burying-ground, but the
specter complains loudly of the unsentimental mind of the town which has
lost interest in ghosts, and leaves in disgust. Likewise the domination of the
Gothic castles, those “ghaist-alluring edifices,” has passed away and
modern spooks are not confined to any one locality as in the past. They
appear where they will, in the most prosaic places, in cheap lodging-houses,
in hall bedrooms, in bungalows, in the staterooms of steamers, on tramp
ships, and so forth. Algernon Blackwood has set a number of thrilling ghost
stories out in the open, in the woods, in the desert sand wastes, and similar
places. One effect of such realistic and unspectral setting is to give a greater
verisimilitude to the events described, and the modern tale bears out Leigh
Hunt’s suggestion that “a ghost story, to be a good one, should unite, as
much as possible, objects as they are in life, with a preternatural spirit.” Yet
here are ghosts that do haunt certain rooms as relentlessly as ever Gothic
specter did.
The modern ghost has power over certain localities rather than mere
houses or apartments. If the house he calls his own is torn down, he bides
his time and haunts the new structure built on the same spot. Or if no new
house goes up, he hangs around and haunts the vacant lot, which is a more
reprehensible procedure than the ordinary habits of spooks. One story
concerns a house so persistently ghosted that its owner took it down section

by section, trying to arrive at the location of the curse, but to no avail. When
the whole building had been razed and the site plowed over, the ghost
undiscouraged haunted merrily on. Then the owner left in disgust. Algernon
Blackwood is fond of situations where localities are haunted by evil spirits,
[115] where a whole village is inhabited by the ghosts of long-dead witches,
or Secret Worship that relates the experience of a man who wanders within
the limits of a place made horrible by devil-worshipers, long-dead, but life-
like, and inhabiting a house that has been torn down years before but
appears as usual, where they entrap the souls of the living for their fiendish
sacrifice. Another[116] is the record of a spirit of frightful evil that haunts a
house built on the spot where an older house once stood, whose diabolism
lingers on to curse the living. The spirit that haunts a locality rather than
one room or house has a more malignant power than the more restricted
ghost and this adds a new element of definite supernaturalism to modern
fiction. But as houses are so much less permanent now than formerly,
ghosts would be at a terrible disadvantage if they had to be evicted every
time a building was torn down.

Ghostly psychology is a fascinating study. The development of spectral
personality is one of the evident facts gained from a historical survey of
supernatural fiction. The modern ghost has more individuality, more
distinctiveness, in the main, than his forbears. The ghosts of medievalism,
of ancient superstition, and the drama were for the most part pallid,
colorless beings in character as in materialization. The ancient ghosts were
more mournful than the moderns, since the state of the dead in early times
was by no means enviable. The most one could hope for then was Hades,
while the spirits who hadn’t been buried couldn’t find entrance even there
but were forced by relentless spectral police to keep forever moving. The
Christian religion furnishes a more cheerful outlook, so in later
manifestations the gloom is considerably lightened. Yet even so the Gothic
ghosts were morbid, low-minded specters not much happier than the
unlucky wights they felt it their business to haunt. Their woe-begone
visages, their clanking chains, and other accompaniments of woe betokened
anything but cheer.
There are some unhappy spirits in recent fiction, but not such a large
proportion as in the past. And there is usually some basis for their
joylessness; they don’t have general melancholia with no grounds for it.

The ghost of the dead wife in Readjustment[117] is miserable because she
has never understood her husband, either in life or in death, and she comes
back seeking an explanation. Another spectral woman[118] is wretched
because she has the double crime of murder and suicide on her soul. Poor
Marley grieves because he is doomed to see the opportunities that life has
offered him to serve others and that he has neglected, being forced to see
with the clear vision of the other world the evil results of his own neglect,
which is enough to make any one wretched. A guilty conscience is like the
burning heart that each spirit in the Hall of Eblis bore in his breast. In The
Roll-call of the Reef,[119] the troop of drowned soldiers, infantry, and
horsemen, come rising out of the surf to answer to their names. Each man is
asked by name, “How is it with you?” and answers with the deadly sin that
has damned him. In Wilkie Collins’s gruesome tale[120] there is one spirit
that is unhappy because his body lies unburied, a recurrence of a theme
frequent in classical stories and Gothic romance, but rare in later fiction.
For the most part the later ghosts are something more than merely unhappy
spirits. They are more positive, more active, more individualistic, too
philosophical to waste time in useless grieving.
Nor are there many simply happy spirits, perhaps because the joyous
souls are likely to seek their paradise and forget about the earth. Yet there
are instances, such as the light-hearted spirits of children in various stories,
that with the resilience of childhood shake off gloom and are gay;
Rosamond,[121] that comes back to tell her friend how happy the other life
is, the peacefully content mother,[122] and others.
The ghosts that are actively vicious are the most vivid and numerous in
later fiction. The spirits of evil seem to have a terrible cumulative force,
being far more maleficent than the earlier ones, and more powerful in
carrying out their purposes. Every aspect of supernaturalism seems to be
keyed up to a higher pitch of terror. Evil seems to have a strangely greater
power of immortality over that of good, judging from the proportion
employed in modern fiction. Has evil so much more strength of will, so
much more permanence of power that it lives on through the years and
centuries, while good deeds perish with the body? It would appear so from
fiction. The ghosts of good actions do not linger round the abode of the
living to any noticeable extent, but evil deeds are deathless. We have many
stories of places and persons haunted by the embodied evil of the past, but

few by the embodied good. The revenge ghosts outnumber the grateful dead
by legions.
Modern specters have a more complex power than the old. They are more
awful in their import, for they haunt not merely the body, but the soul. The
wicked spirits will to work dreadful harm to the soul as well as the body,
and drive the victim to spiritual insanity, seeking to damn him for the life
everlasting, making him, not merely their victim, but through eternity their
co-worker in awful evil. The victim of the vampire, for instance, who dies
as a result of the attack, has to become in his turn a loathsome vampire to
prey on other souls and bodies. Blackwood’s Devil-worshipers seek to kill
the soul as well as the body of their victim. The deathlessness of evil is
shown in Lytton’s[123] and in many of Blackwood’s stories, as where the
psychic doctor says to a man, “You are now in touch with certain violent
emotions, passions, purposes, still active in this house, that were produced
in the past by some powerful and evil personality that lived here.”
Few writers have equaled F. Marion Crawford in the modern ghost story.
His tales have a curdling intensity, a racking horror that set them far above
the ordinary supernatural fiction. They linger in the mind long after one has
tried in vain to forget them, if indeed one ever does forget their sense of evil
power. There is in each of his stories an individual horror that marks it as
distinct from its fellows, a power chiefly won by delineation of this
immortality of evil, as in The Dead Smile, with its description of the
hideous smile that pollutes the lips of the living and of the dead. “Nurse
McDonald said that when Sir Hugh Ockram smiled, he saw the faces of two
women in hell, two dead women he had betrayed.” His vicious impulses
last after death and from his grave he reaches out to curse his own children,
seeking to drive them to awful, though unconscious sin.
Henry James has drawn for us two characters of unmitigated evil in Peter
Quint and Miss Jessel, who, he says, are “hovering, prowling, blighting
presences.” They are agents on whom is laid the dire duty of causing the air
to reek with evil. He says, “I recognize that they are not ghosts at all, as we
now know the ghost, but goblins, elves, imps, demons. The essence of the
matter was the villainy of the motive in the evoked predatory creature.”
What he wishes to do in this story is to express a general sense of spiritual
infamy, not specialized, as the hot breath of the Pit usually confines itself to
some one particular psychical brutality, but as capable of everything, the

worst that can be conceived. How well he has succeeded in his effort, those
who know the story can testify.
Ambrose Bierce’s stories are in many instances remarkable examples of
this psychic horror. The Death of Halpin Frazer has a touch of almost
unbearable dreadfulness. Frazer is assaulted by an evil spirit in a wood at
night and choked to death, the spirit inhabiting the dead body of the man’s
own mother who has idolized him. His dead mother’s face, transfixed with
diabolical hate, is thrust upon him, and the loved hands that have caressed
him strangle him. This is similar to the situation of an evil spirit occupying
the body of a loved dead mother in The Mummy’s Tale, by Elliot O’Donnell.
Bierce’s stories beat upon the mind like bludgeons and his morbid plots are
among the most dreadful in our literature. One wonders what abnormality
of mind conceives such themes, evolves such situations. If it be true, as
Macaulay suggests, that not only every poet but every person who
appreciates poetry is slightly unbalanced mentally, surely every writer of
such extreme and horrific stories must be abnormal. There is more than one
writer of modern ghostly fiction of whom it might be said that “his soul is
open on the Hell side.”
Another temperament found distinctively in the later fiction is the
humorous ghost. He is a recent development, and as might be supposed, is
characteristically American. There were a few burlesque ghosts in
Elizabethan drama, the Ghost of Jack,[124] for instance, and one colored
ghost that would seem to connote mirth, but the really humorous specter did
not come till later. It remained for the Yankee to evoke the spook with a
sense of humor. Ghosts are not essentially laughable, and to make them
comic without coarseness or irreverence is an achievement. Numerous
writers have busied their pens with the funny spook and now we have
ghostly laughter that is mirthful and not horrisonous as in other types.
Specters now laugh with us instead of at us, and instead of the mocking
laughter heard in lonely places we have “heart-easing mirth.” Washington
Irving evokes several humorous hoax ghosts, such as the headless horseman
that created excitement in Sleepy Hollow and the serenading phantom in
The Specter Bridegroom.
Richard Middleton in his Ghost Ship shows some very informal
humorous ghosts. The girls and boys rise from their graves to flirt over their
tombstones on moonlight nights, and the children play with the village
specters as companions, their favorite being the man that sits on the

wellcurbing with his severed head held in his hands. The cottagers rebuke
the spooks overhead when they grow too noisy, and a general good-
fellowship prevails. Into this setting the ghost ship sails one night,
anchoring itself in the middle of a turnip patch, and the riotous captain
demoralizes the men of the village, ghosts and all, with his rum and his
jokes. After a stay of some time, one night in a storm the villagers look out.
Over our heads, sailing very comfortably through the windy stars, was the ship that had passed the
summer in landlord’s field. Her portholes and her windows were ablaze with lights and there was a
noise of singing and fiddling on her decks.... They do say that since then the turnips on landlord’s
field have tasted of rum.

Olive Harper tells[125] of a reporter who is invited by a cordial spook—
who has been a New York social leader—to a spectral banquet and ball
underneath Old Trinity. She satirizes human foibles and weaknesses,
showing ghosts that gossip and gormandize, simper and swear as they did in
life. They learn to play poker, dance, and kill time as they used to do. Frank
R. Stockton has written several delicious drolleries of supernaturalism, as
The Transferred Ghost, where the spook of a living man, the irascible uncle
of the charming Madeline, terrifies the young suitor who lacks courage to
propose. The audacious and ever-present ghost swings his feet from the
porch railing, invisible to the girl as inaudible by her, and breaks in on the
conversation in a most disconcerting way. The young man at last cries out
in desperation, “What are you waiting for? I have nothing to say to you?”
whereat the girl, who has been undoubtedly waiting to hear the proposal the
embarrassed youth was trying to make, thinks he is speaking to her and
departs in high dudgeon. On a later occasion the specter comes to announce
to him that he has got his transfer and may be somebody else’s ghost
instead of that of the man who was expected to die and didn’t, when the
lover cries out, “I wish to Heaven you were mine!” And Madeline, melting
in a sigh, whispers, “I am yours!” The sequel to this is also comic.[126]
Brander Matthews has several stories of humorous supernaturalism, Rival
Ghosts being the account of ancestral spooks belonging to a young
bridegroom, and who resent being brought into enforced companionship by
his sudden elevation to a title, since one ghost must haunt the house and one
the heir. The ingenious groom, at last harassed to invention by the continual
squabbling of the ghosts, brings about a wedding between them. This is the
only instance I have found of a wedding between two specters, though there
are various cases on record of marriage between one living and one spectral

personage. John Kendrick Bangs devotes several volumes to the doings and
sayings of spooks, describing parties in a house-boat on the Styx, where the
shades of the departed great gather together and engage in festivities and
discussions, and showing types of water-ghosts and various kinds of
spooks. The humorous ghost is a more frequent person than one would
suppose without giving some thought to the subject, for many writers have
sharpened their wits on the comic haunt.
As may be seen from the examples mentioned, the ghost has made
perceptible progress in psychology. The modern apparition is much more
complex in personality than the crude early type, and shows much more
variety. The up-to-date spook who has a chance to talk things over with
William James, and knows the labyrinths of the human mind is much better
adapted to inflict psychal terrors than the illiterate specter of the past. He
can evolve mental tortures more subtle and varied than ever, or he can
amuse a downcast mortal by his gambols.

Stories of to-day show a decided advance over the Gothic in the matter of
motives for spectral appearance. There are, it is true, certain motives in
common between them, but the present-day spirit is less limited, for he has
gained the new without loss of the old, if he wishes to keep the old. The
principal impulse that impelled classical shades to walk the earth was to
request burial, since lacking that he could not enter into the abode of the
dead. This appears frequently also in Gothic romance. It is shown but little
in recent fiction, perhaps because the modern ghost is reconciled to
cremation or is blithely indifferent to what becomes of his body since it no
longer rules him. The Queen of Hearts is one of the few instances of its use
in modern fiction, for it is a vanishing motive for the most part. Gothic
ghosts were also wont to return to show the hiding-place of treasure, but
that, too, is dying out as an incentive to haunting. The prosaic explanation
here may be that now persons put their treasure in safety deposits, hence
there is scant occasion for mystery concerning its location after death.
Gothic spooks came back on occasion to reveal parentage, for parents, like
valuables, were frequently mislaid in terror romance. This is not so
important now, since vital statistics usually keep such matters duly
recorded, yet instances do sometimes occur.
Ghosts in the terror romance came to make requests, apart from the
petition for burial, which tendency is still observed on the part of later

spooks, though not to the same extent as formerly. The requests are
psychologically interesting, as they usually relate to simple ties of affection,
illustrated by the mother-spirit[127] who asks her friend to take her children.
Gothic spirits came back often to make revelations concerning the manner
of their death, which is not often the case now, though it does sometimes
happen. And Dickens shows us one ghost returning to influence the jury
that is trying a man for murder. Specters used to appear to forewarn the
living against impending danger, which impulse is rather lacking in later
fiction though it still occurs. The curious element of futurity enters into
several of these ghostly warnings, as in Dickens’s The Signal Man where
the apparition presages the man’s death, as in Algernon Blackwood’s
story[128] is related the incident of a man who saw the two Indians scalp a
white man and drag his body away, at last crying out, “I saw the body, and
the face was my own.” Warning spirits of futurity are seen in On the Stairs,
where each man beholds his own destiny,—one seeing the spectral snake
that afterwards kills him in a hunting expedition, one the ghost of a Zulu,
the savage that almost destroys him some time afterwards, and the last the
ghost of a young woman in a blue dress, the woman whom he marries and
who hounds him to his death. She presently sees her own fate, too, but what
it is the author does not tell us. One curious incident in the story is the
instantaneous appearance on the stairs of the woman herself and her ghostly
double, one in a white dress, one in the fatal blue. This sort of spectral
warning, this wireless service for the conveyance of bad news and hint of
threatening danger, serves to link the ghost story of the present with those
of the past. The records of the Psychical Society show hundreds of such
instances, and much use is made in fiction of plots hinging on such motif.
Scott’s White Lady of Avenel appears as a death portent, as also the “Bahr-
geist” in another novel.
The revenge ghost looms large in fiction as in the drama. He was the
most important figure in Elizabethan as in classical drama, and
Shakespeare’s ghosts are principally of that class. A terrible example of the
type is in Robert Lovell Beddoes’ Death’s Jest-Book, that extraordinary
example of dramatic supernaturalism, where the ghost of the murdered man
comes back embodied from the grave and is an active character to the end
of the play. He is summoned to life through a hideous mistake, the murderer
having asked the magician to call up the spirit of his dead wife, but the
body of his victim having been secretly buried beside her so that the

murderer may have no rest even in the grave, the awful accusing spirit rises
to confront him, instead of his wife’s phantom. The revenge ghost is both
objective and subjective in his manifestation and his impelling motive adds
a touch of frozen horror to his appearance. He appears in various forms, as
dismembered parts of the body—illustrated in the stories above referred to,
—in a horrific invisibility, in a shape of fear visible only to the guilty, or in
a body so objectified as to seem absolutely real and living to others beside
the one haunted. The apparently casual, idle figure that strolls about the
docks and streets in The Detective, seen by different persons and taken for a
man interested only in his own pursuits, is a revenge ghost so relentless that
he hounds his victim from country to country, at last killing him by sheer
force of terror as he sits on his bed at night, leaving the imprint of his body
on the mattress beside the dead man whose face is rigid with mad horror.
He has come back in physical embodiment to avenge the betrayal of his
daughter. Ambrose Bierce shows us many spirits animated by cold and
awful revenge, sometimes visible and sometimes unseen, as where a soldier
killed for striking an officer answers, “Here!” to the roll-call, just at which
moment a mysterious bullet from nowhere strikes the officer through the
heart.[129] Crawford sends a drowned sailor back in wet oil-skins to slay his
twin brother who has impersonated him to win the girl they both loved.
When the two bodies wash ashore one is a newly dead corpse, the other a
skeleton in oil skins; while the dreadful rattle of the accusing lump of lead
in the wife’s skull in another story is a turn of the screw of her horrid
revenge. The revenge ghost in modern fiction is more varied in forms of
manifestation, at times more subtle in suggestion and ghostly psychology,
than the conventionalized type of the drama and remains one of the most
dreadful of the forms of fear.
In general, the modern stories show a greater intensity of power in
employing the motives that earlier forms had used as well as far greater
range of motivation. The earlier ghosts were limited in their impulses, and
their psychology was comparatively simple. Not so with the apparitions of
to-day. They have a far wider range of motives, are moved by more
complex impulses and mixed motivation in many cases difficult to analyze.
The Gothic ghost had some conscience about whom he haunted. He had
too much reserve to force himself needlessly upon those that had no
connection with his past. If he knew someone that deserved punishment for
wrong done him or his, he tried to haunt him and let others alone. The

modern ghost is not so considerate. He is actuated in many cases by sheer
evil that wreaks itself upon anyone in range. Death gives a terrible
immortality and access of power to those whose lives have been particularly
evil, and the results are dangerous to society. Dark discarnate hate manifests
itself to those within reach. Algernon Blackwood would have us believe
that all around us are reservoirs of unspeakable horror and that any moment
of weakness on our part may bring down the hosts of damnation upon us.
This is illustrated in such stories as With Intent to Steal, where the spirit of a
man who has hanged himself comes back with hypnotic power forcing
others to take their lives in the same way, or in another,[130] showing power
exerted viciously against human beings in a certain building, or still
another[131] where the witchcraft holds the village in thrall, and elsewhere.
Ambrose Bierce, Bram Stoker, F. Marion Crawford, and Arthur Machen
have written a number of stories bringing out this side of ghostly
psychology, showing the bands of outlawed spirits that prey on society.
There are spectral bandits and bravos that answer the call of any force
hostile to man, or act of their own accord from an impulse of malicious
mischief.
The jealous ghost is somewhat common of late, showing that human
emotions are carried over into the life beyond. In various stories we find the
dead wife interfering to prevent a second marriage, or to make life wretched
for the interloper even after the ceremony. But the most extreme case of
jealousy—even exceeding the instance of the man whose wife and
physician conspired to give him an overdose to put him out of the way and
who is frantic to prevent their marriage—is found in Arnold Bennett’s
novel, The Ghost. Here the spirit of a man who has madly loved an opera-
singer haunts every suitor of hers and either drives him to abandon his
courtship or kills him, till finally the singer begs the ghost to spare the man
she loves, which he sadly does, and departs. This is reminiscent of one of
Marie de France’s lais.
The varying motives for appearance may be illustrated by reference to a
few ghosts in modern fiction, such as the woman[132] who comes to drive
away a writer’s sense of humor,—than which there could be no greater
spiritual brutality,—and set him to writing vile, debased tragedies. Perhaps
she has transferred her attentions to other authors than the one in the story!
Other instances are the little Gray Ghost in Cornelia A. P. Comer’s story by
that name, who impels a stranger to take her child from an orphan asylum

and adopt it, much against his will; the immortal lovers that haunt a woman
who has made a marriage of convenience—which has turned out to be a
marriage of inconvenience for her husband[133]; the talkative spook in
Andrew Lang’s In Castle Perilous, that discourses learnedly on its own
materialization, speaking in technical terms, pokes fun at Shakespeare for
the glow-worm on a winter night, and the cockcrow in his Hamlet, and—
but these are perhaps enough. If one may judge from ghostly fiction, death
subtracts nothing from human emotion but rather adds to it, so that the
spectral impulses are more poignant and intense. The darker passions are
retained with cumulative power, and there is a terrible immortality of hate,
of jealousy and revenge.
There is no more impressive revenant than one Coleridge gives in his
Wanderings of Cain, the mournful phantom of Abel appearing to Cain and
his little son, Enos. The child says to his father, “I saw a man in unclean
garments and he uttered a sweet voice, full of lamentations.” Cain asks the
unhappy spirit, “But didst thou not find favor in the sight of the Lord thy
God?” to which the shape answers, “The Lord is God of the living only. The
dead have another God!”
“Cain ran after the shape and the shape fled shrieking over the sands, and the sands rose like white
mists behind the steps of Cain but the feet of him that was like Abel disturbed not the sands.”

One of the most interesting phases of comparative ghost-lore is the study
of the intricate personality of specters. With respect to dual personality the
late supernatural stories are curiously reminiscent of the animistic belief
that a ghost is a double of the mortal, a vapory projection of his actual body,
to be detached at will during life and permanently at death. I do not know of
any instances of doubles in classical literature, nor is the idea used in
Gothic romance. Likewise Shakespeare’s ghosts are all spirits of persons
safely dead. It remained for the modern writer with his expertness in
psychology and psychiatry to evoke the ghosts of the living persons, the
strange cases of dual personality and of separate personalities
supernaturally merged into one, and those inexplicable ghosts of subliminal
memories. All these forms appear in elusive analysis, in complex
suggestiveness, in modern uncanny stories, and constitute one of the
distinct marks of advance over the earlier types.
The double, a frequent figure in English fiction, bears a resemblance to
the Doppelgänger of German folk-tales. Numerous examples of dual
personality, of one being appearing in two forms, are seen, with different

twists to the idea, yet much alike. It has been suggested that these stories
have their germinal origin in Calderon’s play,[134] where a man is haunted
by himself. Poe’s William Wilson is a tense and tragic story of a man
pursued by his double, till in desperation he kills him, only to realize that he
has slain his better self, his conscience. His duplicate cries out,
“Henceforward thou art also dead, dead to the world, to Heaven and to
hope! In me thou didst exist and in my death, see by this thine image, which
is thine own, how utterly thou hast murdered thyself!” Stevenson’s
Markheim shows in the person of the stranger the incarnate conscience, an
embodiment of a man’s nobler self that leads him through the labyrinth of
self-examination to the knowledge of the soul’s truth. The stranger tests the
murderer by offering him a way of escape, by suggesting further crime to
him, by showing him relentlessly what the consequence of each act will be,
till in despair Markheim, realizing that his life is hopelessly weak and
involved, decides to surrender it rather than to sin further. Step by step the
nameless visitor leads him, Markheim shuddering back from the evil that is
suggested, thinking the stranger is a demonic tempter, till at last the
transfigured face shows him to be the nobler angel. Stevenson’s Dr. Jekyll
and Mr. Hyde is, of course, the best-known instance of this sort of dual
personality, this walking forth in physical form of the evil in one’s own
nature, with a separate existence of its own. No writer could hope to express
this idea more powerfully than has been done in this chemical allegory, this
biological dissection of the soul. The thrill of suspense, the seemingly
inexplicable mystery, the dramatic tenseness of the closing scenes make this
sermon in story form unforgettable. Kipling has given a striking story of a
man haunted by his own phantom body, in At the End of the Passage. His
own figure slipped silently before him as he went through his lonely house.
“When he came in to dinner he found himself seated at the table. The vision
rose and walked out hastily. Except that it cast no shadow it was in all
respects real.” The horror of this haunting specter of himself, this double of
his own body and soul, drives the man to suicide, after which a peculiar
twist of horror is given by the detail at the close, of the discovery by his
comrade, of the man’s own photograph imprinted on the dead retina and
reproduced by the camera hours after his death. In Julian Hawthorne’s
allegory,[135] the dead man’s spirit meets the devil, who is his own evil self
incarnate.

Edith Wharton’s Triumph of Night reveals a ghost of a living man
standing behind his double’s chair, visible to the person opposite and
showing on the ghostly face the evil impulses that the living countenance
cleverly masks. John Kendrick Bangs has his hero say,[136] “I came face to
face with myself, with that other self in which I recognized, developed to
the fullest extent, every bit of my capacity for an evil life,” and
Blackwood[137] relates the meeting of a musician and his ghostly double in
an opera hall. Mr. Titbottom,[138] through the power of his magic spectacles
reflecting his image in a mirror, sees himself as he really is, as he looks to
God, and flees horror-stricken from the sight. This symbolic representation
is akin to the Prophetic Pictures of Hawthorne, where a woman’s griefs and
marks of age are shown in her pictured face before they are revealed in her
actual experience, a pictured futurity. The most impressive instance of this
relation between a human being and his portrait is in Oscar Wilde’s Picture
of Dorian Gray, that strange study of a man’s real nature expressing itself
on his painted likeness, while the living face bears no mark of sin or shame
or age, until the tragic revelation at the end. Edith Wharton[139] also
represents a supernatural dualism, the woman’s statue showing on its
marble face the changing horror of her own stricken countenance. The
White Sleep of Auber Hurn is a curious story of a spiritual double, a
psychological study of a man who was in two places at once, seen by
various persons who knew him in each case, being killed in a train wreck
many miles away from his room where he was lying asleep in his bed,—a
sleep that knows no waking.[140]
Distinct from the expression of one personality in two bodies, the
supernatural merging of two separate personalities into one appears in
recent ghostly fiction. It forms a subtle psychologic study and is uncannily
effective. H. G. Wells’s Story of the Late Mr. Elvesham is a peculiar
narrative of a transfer of personality as the result of a mysterious drink, by
which an old man takes possession of a young man’s body, leaving the
youth to inhabit the worn-out shell of the dotard. Algernon Blackwood in
The Terror of the Twins describes a supernatural merging of two natures
into one by the power of a dead father’s insane curse. The younger son
loses his vitality, his mind, his personality, all of which is supermortally
given to his older brother, while the deprived son dies a drivelling idiot of
sheer inertia and utter absence of vital power. Mary Heaton Vorse[141]
describes a neurotic woman who comes back from the grave to obsess and

possess the interloper in her home, through the immortal force of her
jealousy, making the living woman actually become the reincarnation of the
dead wife. This story naturally suggests Poe’s Ligeia which is the climax of
ghostly horror of this motif, with its thesis that “man doth not yield himself
to the angels nor unto death utterly save through the weakness of his own
feeble will” expressed in a terrible crescendo of ghastly horror. Poe’s
Morella is a similar study of the supernatural merging of an exterior
personality into a living body, where the dead mother and her child are
literally one flesh and one spirit. Blackwood’s The Return is an example of
the compact-ghost, that comes back at the hour of death to reveal himself to
his friend as he long ago promised he would. The dead artist manifests
himself through a sudden and wonderful realization of the beauty of the
world to which the materialistic friend has heretofore been blinded and
indifferent. Feeling this sudden rapturous sweep of beauty through his soul,
the living man knows that his artist friend is dead and that his spirit has
become a part of his own being. In the same manner the little lonely soul in
Granville Barker’s wonderful piece of symbolism, Souls on Fifth, enters
into the being of the man who has the understanding heart and continues her
existence as a part of him.
An essentially modern type of ghost story is that which has its
explanation on the basis of subliminal memories. It seems that all around us
are reservoirs of ancestral memories, records of the vital thoughts and
actions of the long dead, psychical incarnations of their supreme moments,
their striking hours, into which the living at times stumble and are
submerged. Some slight spiritual accident may bring down upon mortals the
poignant suffering and bliss of the dead in whose personality they are
curiously duplicated. These ghosts of dead selves from the past are different
from the doubles that are projections of the living, or prophetic specters of
the future, and are clearly distinguished. The Borderland, by Francis
Parsons, tells of a young army officer who is obsessed by subliminal self,
the ghost of his grandfather. He feels that he is his grandfather, living
another existence, yet he lacks the pluck, the manhood, that the old pioneer
possessed. At a crisis in his military affairs, the old frontiersman comes
visibly forward to give him the courage that is needed, after which he
manifests himself no more. The scene of this subliminal haunting is a Texas
prairie, during a border fight, rather an unghostly setting yet one which
makes the supernatural seem more actual. Arthur Johnson[142] presents the

case of a man who sees the ghosts of ancestral memory in a vivid form. He
sees and hears his own double wildly accuse his wife—who is the double of
his own—betrothed, after having killed her lover. His hand is wounded and
the fingers leave bloodstains as they snatch at the gray chiffon round his
wife’s throat. After a fit of unconsciousness into which he falls is over, the
modern man awakes to find his hand strangely wounded, and on the floor of
the upper room he picks up a scrap of bloodstained gray chiffon!
Blackwood’s Old Clothes shows a little girl obsessed by subliminal
memories. She is haunted by terrible experiences in which she says that she
and some of those around her have been concerned. She goes into
convulsions if anything is fastened around her waist, and she cries out that
some cruel man has shut her up in the wall to die and has cut off Philip’s
hands so that he cannot save her. Investigations bring to light the facts that a
long-dead ancestress, living in the same house, had been walled up alive by
her husband after he had cut off her lover’s hands before her face. The
skeleton is found chained by the waist inside the ancient wall. Blackwood’s
Ancient Sorceries depicts the ghosts of buried life, of a whole village
enchanted by the past and living over again the witchcraft of the long ago.
As John Silence, the psychic doctor, tells of the Englishman who drops
casually into the village and is drawn into the magic:
Vesin was swept into the vortex of forces arising out of the intense activities of a past life and lived
over again a scene in which he had often played a part centuries ago. For strong actions set up forces
that are so slow to exhaust themselves that they may be said in a sense never to die. In this case they
were not complete enough to render the illusion perfect, so the little man was confused between the
present and the past.

That story of unusual psychical experience, An Adventure, by two Oxford
women, can be explained on no other basis than some such theory as this.
The book claims to be a truthful account of a happening at Versailles, where
two English women, teachers and daughters of clergymen, saw in broad
daylight the ghosts of the past, the figures of Marie Antoinette and her
court. The writers offer the explanation that they stumbled into a sort of
pocket of the unhappy queen’s memories and saw the past relived before
their eyes because she had felt it so keenly and vividly long ago. Other
instances might be given, but these are sufficient to illustrate the type. Such
stories have a curious haunting power and are among the most effective
narratives. The idea is modern and illustrates the complexity of later
thought as compared with the simplicity of earlier times.

A comparative study of ghost stories leads one to the conclusion that the
ghost is the most modern of ancients and the most ancient of moderns. In
some respects the present specter is like and in some unlike the previous
forms. Ghosts, whether regarded as conjective or purely subjective, are
closely related to the percipients’ thoughts. Primitive times produced a
primitive supernaturalism and the gradual advance in intellectual
development has brought about a heightening and complexity of the weird
story. ’Tis in ourselves that ghosts are thus and so!
The spook of to-day is of a higher nervous organization than his forbears.
In many instances the latter-day ghost is so distracted by circumstances that
he hardly knows where he’s at, as for instance, the ghost in such case as The
Tryst, by Alice Brown, where a man is thought to be drowned and his ghost
comes out to comfort his sweetheart, only to have the drowned man brought
back to life presently; and in The Woman from Yonder, by Stephen French
Whitman, where a scientist with impertinent zeal brings life back to the
body of a woman who had bled to death while Hannibal was crossing the
Alps and been buried in a glacier till the glacier spat her out. Now, what
was the status of those ghosts? Was there a ghost if the person wasn’t really
dead? But if a woman isn’t dead after she has been in an ice-pack for two
thousand years or thereabouts what surety is there for the standing of any
ghost?
The apparitions of to-day have more lines of interest than the ancient
ghosts. The Gothic specter was a one-idea creature, with a single-track
brain. He was not a ghost-of-all-work as are some of the later spooks. He
was a simple-souled being who felt a call to haunt somebody for some
purpose or other, so he just went and did it. The specters of to-day are more
versatile,—they can turn their hand to any kind of haunting that is desired
and show an admirable power of adaptability, though there are highly
developed specialists as well. The psychology of the primitive ghost and of
the Gothic specter was simple. They knew only the elemental passions of
love and hate. Gothic spooks haunted the villain or villainess to foil them in
their wicked designs or punish them for past misdeeds, or hovered over the
hero or heroine to advise, comfort, and chaperon them. But the modern
ghosts are not satisfied with such sit-by-the-fire jobs as these. They like to
keep in the van of activity and do what mortals do. They run the whole
scale of human motions and emotions and one needs as much handy
psychology to interpret their hauntings as to read George Meredith. They

are actuated by subtle motivations of jealousy, ardent love, tempered
friendship, curiosity, mischief, vindictiveness, revenge, hate, gratitude, and
all other conceivable impulses. The Billy Sunday sort of ghost who wants to
convert the world, the philanthropic spirit who wants to help humanity, the
socialist specter that reads the magazine, the friendly visitor that sends its
hands back to wash the dishes, the little shepherd lad that returns to tend the
sheep, are among the new concepts in fiction of the supernatural. The ghost
of awful malice, to be explained only on the basis of compound interest of
evil stored up for many years, is a new force.
Though the ghostly narrative has shifted its center of gravity from the
novel to the short story since Gothic times, and many more of the modern
instances are in that form, the supernatural novel has recently taken on a
new lease of life. Honors are almost even between the English and the
American ghost story, as most of the representative writers on each side
turn their pen at some time to write terror tales. The ghost has never lost his
power over the human mind. Judging from the past, one may say that the
popularity of the ghost story will continue undiminished and will perhaps
increase. Certainly there has been a new influx of stories within later times.
What mines of horror yet remain untouched for writers of the future, it
would be hard to say, yet we do not fear for the exhaustion of the type. On
the contrary, ghosts in fiction are becoming so numerous that one wonders
if the Malthusian theory will not in time affect them. We are too fond of
being fooled by phantoms to surrender them, for “the slow touch of a frozen
finger tracing out the spine” is an awesome joy. For ourselves, we are
content for the present to function on one plane, but we love to adventure
on another plane through spectral substitutes. We may give up the mortal
but we’ll not willingly give up the ghost. We love him. We believe in him.
Our attitude towards specters is much like that of the little black boy that
Ellis Parker Butler tells about in Dey Ain’t No Ghosts, who sees a terrifying
array of “all de sperits in de world, an’ all de ha’nt in de world, an’ all de
hobgoblins in de world, an’ all spicters in de world, an’ all de ghostes in de
world,” come out to bring a fearsome message to a frightened pickaninny.
De king ob de ghostes, whut name old Skull-an’-Bones, he place he hand on de head ob li’l black
Mose, an’ de hand feel like a wet rag, an’ he say:
“Dey ain’no ghosts!”
An’ one ob de hairs on de head ob li’l black Mose turn’ white.
An’ de monstrous big ha’nt what he name Bloody Bones he lay he hand on de head ob li’l black
Mose, an’ he hand feel like a toad-stool in de cool ob de day, an’ he say:

“Dey ain’ no ghosts!”
An’ anudder one ob de hairs whut on de head ob li’l black Mose turn’ white.
An’ a heejus sperit whut he name Moldy Pa’m place he hand on de head ob li’l black Mose, an’ he
hand feel like de yunner side ob a lizard, an’ he say:
“Dey ain’ no ghosts!”

And so on through the assembly. Small wonder that the terrified
youngster is loath to go up to the loft to bed alone that night and demurs to
the demand.
So he ma she say, “Git erlong wid you! Whut you skeered ob when dey ain’ no ghosts?”
An’ li’l black Mose he scrooge an’ he twist an’ he pucker up he mouf an’ he rub he eyes an’
prisintly he say right low:
“I ain’ skeered ob de ghosts whut am, ca’se dey ain’ no ghosts.”
“Den whut am you skeered ob?” ask he ma.
“Nuffin,” say de li’l black boy whut he name am Mose, “but I jes’ feel kinder oneasy ’bout de
ghosts whut ain’t!”
Jes’ lack white folks. Jes’ lack white folks.

CHAPTER IV

The Devil and His Allies

“G
HOSTS are few but devils are plenty,” said Cotton Mather, but
his saying would need to be inverted to fit present-day English
fiction. Now we have ghosts in abundance but devils are
scarce. In fact, they bid fair to become extinct in our romances, at least in
the form that is easily recognizable. Satan will probably soon be in solution,
identified merely as a state of mind. He has been so Burbanked of late, with
his dæmonic characteristics removed and humanities added that, save for
sporadic reversion to type, the old familiar demon is almost a vanished
form. The modern mind seems to cling with a new fondness to the ghost but
has turned the cold shoulder to the devil, perhaps because many modernists
believe more in the human and less in the supernatural—and after all,
ghosts are human and devils are not. The demon has disported himself in
various forms in literature, from the scarlet fiend of monkish legend, the
nimble imp and titanic nature-devil of folk-lore to Milton’s epic, majestic
Satan, and Goethe’s mocking Mephistopheles, passing into allegoric,
symbolic, and satiric figures in later fiction. He has been an impressive
character in the drama, the epic, the novel, in poetry, and the short story. We
have seen him as a loathly, brutish demon in Dante, as a superman, as an
intellectual satirist, and as a human being appealing to our sympathy. He
has gradually lost his epic qualities and become human. He is not present in
literature now to the extent to which he was known in the past, is not so
impressive a figure as heretofore, and at times when he does appear his
personality is so ambiguously set forth that it requires close literary analysis
to prove his presence.
In this chapter the devil will be discussed with reference to his
appearances on earth, while in a later division he will be seen in his own
home. It would be hard to say with certainty when and where the devil

originated, yet he undoubtedly belongs to one of our first families and is
said to have been born theologically in Persia about the year 900 B.C. He has
appeared under various aliases, as Ahriman of the Zoroastrian system, Pluto
in classical mythology, Satan, Beelzebub, Prince of Darkness, and by many
other titles. In his Address to the De’il Burns invokes him thus:
“Oh, Thou! whatever title suit thee,—
Auld Hornie, Satan, Nick or Cloutie!”

He has manifested himself in fiction under diverse names, as Demon,
Lucifer, Satan, Mephistopheles, Prince Lucio, The Man in Black, and so
forth, but whatever the name he answers to, he is known in every land and
has with astonishing adaptability made himself at home in every literature.
The devil has so changed his form and his manner of appearance in later
literature that it is hard to identify him as his ancient self. In early stories he
was heralded by supernatural thunder and lightning and accompanied by a
strong smell of sulphur. He dressed in character costume, sometimes in red,
sometimes in black, but always indubitably diabolic. He wore horns, a
forked tail, and cloven hoofs and was a generally unprepossessing creature
whom anyone could know for a devil. Now his rôle is not so typical and his
garb not so declarative. He wears an evening suit, a scholar’s gown, a
parson’s robe, a hunting coat, with equal ease, and it is sometimes difficult
to tell the devil from the hero of a modern story. He has been deodorized
and no longer reeks warningly of the Pit.
The mediæval mind conceived of the devil as a sort of combination of
mythologic satyr and religious dragon. It is interesting to note how the
pagan devil-myths have been engrafted upon the ideas of Christianity, to
fade out very slowly and by degrees. In monkish legends the devil was an
energetic person who would hang round a likely soul for years, if need be,
on the chance of nabbing him. Many monkish legends have come down to
us.
The diabolic element in English folk-lore shows a rich field for study.
The devil here as in the monkish legendry appears as an enemy of souls, a
tireless tempter. He lies in wait for any unwary utterance, and the least
mention of his name, any thoughtless expletive, such as “The devil take me
if—” brings instant response from him to clinch the bargain. Yet the devil of
rustic folk-lore is of a bucolic dullness, less clever than in any phase of
literature, more gullible, more easily imposed on. English folk-lore,

especially the Celtic branches, shows the devil as very closely related to
nature. He was wont to work off his surplus energy or his wrath by
disturbing the landscape, and many stories of his prankish pique have come
down to us. If anything vexed him he might stamp so hard upon a plain that
the print of his cloven hoof would be imprinted permanently. He was fond
of drinking out of pure springs and leaving them cursed with sulphur, and
he sometimes showed annoyance by biting a section out of a mountain,
Devil’s Bit Mountain in Ireland being one of the instances. In general, any
peculiarity of nature might be attributed to the activities of Auld Hornie.
The devil has always been a pushing, forward sort of person, so he was
not content with being handed round by word of mouth in monkish legend
or rustic folk-lore, but must worm his way into literature in general. Since
then many ink-pots have been emptied upon him besides the one that
Luther hurled against his cloister wall. The devil is seen frequently in the
miracle plays, showing grotesquerie, the beginnings of that sardonic humor
he is to display in more important works later. In his appearance in
literature the devil is largely anthropomorphic. Man creates the devil in his
own image, one who is not merely personal but racial as well, reflecting his
creator. In monkish tradition an adversary in wait for souls, in rustic folk-
lore a rollicking buffoon with waggish pranks, in miracle plays reflecting
the mingled seriousness and comic elements of popular beliefs, he mirrors
his maker. But it is in the great poems and dramas and stories that we find
the more personal aspects of devil-production, and it is these epic and
dramatic concepts of the devil that have greatly influenced modern fiction.
While the Gothic romance was but lightly touched by the epic
supernaturalism, the literature since that time has reflected it more, and the
Satanic characters of Dante, Milton, Calderon, Marlowe, and Goethe have
cast long shadows over modern fiction. The recent revival of interest in
Dante has doubtless had its effect here.
Burns in his Address to the De’il shows his own kindly heart and honest
though ofttimes misdirected impulses by suggesting that there is still hope
for the devil to repent and trusting that he may do so yet. Mrs. Browning, in
her Drama of Exile, likewise shows in Lucifer some appeal to our
sympathies, reflecting the pitying heart of the writer,—showing a certain
kinship to Milton’s Satan yet with weakened intellectual power. She makes
Gabriel say to him:
“Angel of the sin,

Such as thou standest,—pale in the drear light
Which rounds the rebel’s work with Maker’s wrath—
Thou shalt be an Idea to all souls,
A monumental, melancholy gloom,
Seen down all ages whence to mark despair
And measure out the distances from good.”
Byron’s devil in A Vision of Judgment is, like Caliban’s ideas of Setebos,
“altogether such an one” as Byron conceived himself to be. He is a terrible
figure, whose
“Fierce and unfathomable thoughts engraved
Eternal wrath on his immortal face.”

He shows diabolical sarcasm when he says, “I’ve kings enough below,
God knows!” And how like Oscar Wilde is the devil he pictures to us in his
symbolic story, The Fisherman and his Soul. The prince of darkness who
appears to the young fisherman that wishes to sell his soul to the devil is “a
man dressed in a suit of black velvet cut in Spanish fashion. His proud face
was strangely pale, but his lips were like a proud red flower. He seemed
weary and was leaning back toying in a listless manner with the pommel of
his saddle.” When the fisherman unthoughtedly utters a prayer that baffles
the fiend for the time, the demon mounts his jennet with the silver harness
and rides away, still with the proud, disdainful face, sad with a blasé
weariness unlike the usual alertness of the devil. He has a sort of Blessed
Damozel droop to his figure, and the bored patience of a lone man at an
afternoon tea. Wilde shows us some little mocking red devils in another of
his stories,[143] and The Picture of Dorian Gray is a concept of diabolism.
Scott in The Talisman puts a story of descent from the Evil One in the
mouth of the Saracen, the legend of the spirits of evil who formed a league
with the cruel Zohauk, by which he gained a daily sacrifice of blood to feed
two hideous serpents that had become a part of himself. One day seven
sisters of wonderful beauty are brought, whose loveliness appeals to the
immortals. In the midst of supernatural manifestations the earth is rent and
seven young men appear. The leader says to the eldest sister:
I am Cothreb, king of the subterranean world. I and my brethren are of those who, created out of
elementary fire, disdained even at the command of Omnipotence, to do homage to a clod of earth
because it is called man. Thou mayest have heard of us as cruel, unrelenting, and persecuting. It is
false. We are by nature kind and generous, vengeful only when insulted, cruel only when affronted.
We are true to those that trust us; and we have heard the invocations of thy father the sage Mithrasp,
who wisely worships not only the Origin of Good, but that which is called the Source of Evil. You
and your sisters are on the eve of death; but let each give to us one hair from your fair tresses in token

of fealty, and we will carry you many miles to a place of safety where you may bid defiance to
Zohauk and his ministers.

The maidens accept the offer and become the brides of the spirits of evil.
The devil in Scott’s Wandering Willie’s Tale,[144] also speaks a good word
for himself. When the gudesire meets in the woods the stranger who
sympathizes with his obvious distress, the unknown offers to help him,
saying, “If you will tell me your grief, I am one that, though I have been
sair miscaa’d in the world, am the only hand for helping my freends.” The
gudesire tells his woes and says that he would go to the gates of hell, and
farther, to get the receipt due him, upon which the hospitable stranger
conducts him to the place mentioned. The canny Scot obtains the document,
outwits the devil, and wins his way back to earth unscathed.
One marked aspect of recent devil-fiction is the tendency to gloze over
his sins and to humanize him. This is shown to a marked degree in Marie
Corelli’s sentimental novel, The Sorrows of Satan, where she expends much
anxious sympathy over the fiend. To Miss Corelli’s agitated mind Satan is a
much maligned martyr who regretfully tempts mortals and is grieved when
they yield to his beguilements. Her perfervid rhetoric pictures him as a
charming prince, handsome, wealthy, yet very lonesome, who warns
persons in advance that he is not what he seems and that they would do well
to avoid him. But the fools rush in crowds to be damned. According to her
theory, the devil is attempting to work out his own salvation and could do
so save for the weakness of man. He is able to get a notch nearer heaven for
every soul that resists his wiles, though in London circles his progress is
backward rather than forward. How is Lucifer fallen! To be made a hero of
by Marie Corelli must seem to Mephisto life’s final indignity! Her
characterization of the fiend shows some reminiscence of a hasty reading of
Milton, Goethe, and the Byronic Cain.
The devil has a human as well as dæmonic spirit in Israel Zangwill’s
They that Walk in Darkness, where he appears as Satan Maketrig, a red-
haired hunchback, with “gigantic marble brow, cold, keen, steely eyes, and
handsome, clean-shaven lips.” He seems a normal human being in this
realistic Ghetto setting, though he bears a nameless sense of evil about with
him. In his presence, or as he passes by, all the latent evil in men’s souls
comes to the surface. He lures the rabbi away from his wife, from God, and
from all virtue, yet to see him at the end turn away again in spirit to the
good, spurning the tempter whom he recognizes at last as dæmonic. There

is a human anguish in the eyes of Satan Maketrig, that shows him to be not
altogether diabolic, and he seems mournful and appealing in his wild
loneliness. His nature is in contrast to that of the fiend in Stanley J.
Weyman’s The Man in Black. Here his cold, sardonic jesting that causes
him to play with life and death, so lightly, his diabolic cunning, his
knowledge of the human heart and how to torture it, remind us of Iago. The
dark shade extends to the skin as well as to the heart in the man in black in
Stevenson’s Thrawn Janet, for he exercises a weird power over his vassal,
the old servant, and terrifies even the minister. And War Letters from a
Living Dead Man, written by Elsa Parker but said to be dictated by a
correspondent presumably from somewhere in hell, shows us His Satanic
Majesty with grim realism up to date.
The devil appears with mournful, human dignity, yet with superhuman
gigantism in Algernon Blackwood’s Secret Worship, where the lost souls
enter into a riot of devil-worship, into which they seek to draw living
victims, to damn them body and soul. One victim sees the devil thus:
At the end of the room where the windows seemed to have disappeared so that he could see the
stars, there rose up into view, far against the sky, grand and terrible, the outline of a man. A kind of
gray glory enveloped him so that it resembled a steel-cased statue, immense, imposing, horrific in its
distant splendor. The gray radiance from its mightily broken visage, august and mournful, beat down
upon his soul, pulsing like some dark star with the powers of spiritual evil.

Here, as in many instances elsewhere, the sadness of the diabolic
character is emphasized, a definite human element. The Miltonic influence
seems evident in such cases.
Kipling has a curious dæmonic study in Bubble Well Road, a story of a
patch of ground filled with devils and ghosts controlled by an evil-minded
native priest, while in Haunted Subalterns the imps terrorize young army
officers by their malicious mischief.
The allegorical and symbolic studies of diabolism are among the more
impressive creations in later fiction, as in Tolstoi’s Ivan, the Fool, where the
demons are responsible for the marshaling of armies, the tyranny of money,
and the inverted ideas of the value of service. The appearance of the devil in
later stories is more terrible and effective in its variance of type and its
secret symbolism than the crude enginery of diabolism in Gothic fiction, as
the muscular fiend[145] that athletically hurls the man and woman from the
mountain top, or the invisible physical strength manifested in Melmoth, the
Wanderer. The crude violence of these novels is in keeping with the fiction

of the time, yet modern stories show a distinct advance, as such instances as
J. H. Shorthouse’s Countess Eve, where the devil appears differently to each
tempted soul, embodying with hideous wisdom the form of the sin that that
particular soul is most liable to commit. He bears the shape of committed
sin, suggesting that evil is so powerful as to have an independent existence
of its own, apart from the mind that gave it birth, as the devil appears as evil
thought materialized in Fernac Molnar’s drama, The Devil. Fiona McLeod’s
strange Gaelic tale, The Sin-Eater introduces demons symbolically. The sin-
eater is a person that by an ancient formula can remove the sins from an
unburied corpse and let them in turn be swept away from him by the action
of the pure air. But if the sin-eater hates the dead man, he has the power to
fling the transgressions into the sea, to turn them into demons that pursue
and torment the flying soul till Judgment Day.
One aspect of the recent stories of diabolism is the subtleness by which
the evil is suggested. The reader feels a miasmatic atmosphere of evil, a
smear on the soul, and knows that certain incidents in the action can be
accounted for on no other basis than that of dæmonic presence, as in Barry
Pain’s Moon Madness, where the princess is moved by a strange irresistible
lure to dance alone night after night in the heart of the secret labyrinth to
mystic music that the white moon makes. But one night, after she is dizzy
and exhausted but impelled to keep on, she feels a hot hand grasp hers;
someone whirls her madly round and she knows that she is not dancing
alone! She is seen no more of men, and searchers find only the prints of her
little dancing slippers in the sand, with the mark of a cloven hoof beside
them. The most revolting instances of suggestive diabolism are found in
Arthur Machen’s stories, where supernatural science opens the way for the
devil to enter the human soul, since the biologist by a cunning operation on
the brain removes the moral sense, takes away the soul, and leaves a being
absolutely diabolized. Worse still is the hideousness of Seeing the Great
God Pan, where the dæmonic character is a composite of the loathsome
aspects of Pan and the devil, from which horrible paternity is born a child
that embodies all the unspeakable evil in the world.
In pleasant contrast to dreadful stories are the tales of the amusing devils
that we find frequently. The comic devil is much older than the comic
ghost, as authors showed a levity toward demons long before they treated
the specter with disrespect,—one rather wonders why. Clownish devils that
appeared in the miracle plays prepared the way for the humorous and satiric

treatment of the Elizabethan drama and late fiction. The liturgical imps
were usually funny whether their authors intended them as such or not, but
the devils in fiction are quite conscious of their own wit, in fact, are rather
conceited about it. Poe shows us several amusing demons who display his
curious satiric humor,—for instance, the old gentleman in Never Bet the
Devil your Head. When Toby Dammit makes his rash assertion, he beholds
the figure of a little lame old gentleman of venerable aspect. Nothing could be more reverend than his
whole appearance; for he not only had on a full suit of black, but his shirt was perfectly clean and the
collar turned down very neatly over a white cravat, while his hair was parted in front like a girl’s. His
hands were clasped pensively over his stomach, and his two eyes were carefully rolled up into the top
of his head.

This clerical personage who reminds us of the devil in Peer Gynt, who
also appears as a parson, claims the better’s head and neatly carries it off.
This is a modern version of an incident similar to Chaucer’s Friar’s Tale,
where the devil claimed whatever was offered him in sincerity. The
combination of humor and mystery in Washington Irving’s The Devil and
Tom Walker shows the black woodsman in an amusing though terrifying
aspect, as he claims the keeping of the contracts made with him by Tom and
his miserly wife. When Tom goes to search for his spouse in the woods, he
fails to find her.
She had probably attempted to deal with the black man as she had been accustomed to deal with
her husband; but though the female scold is generally considered a match for the devil, yet in this
instance she appears to have had the worst of it. She must have died game, however, for it is said
Tom noticed many prints of cloven feet deeply stamped about the tree, and found handsful of hair
that looked as if they had been plucked from the coarse shock of the black woodsman. Tom knew his
wife’s prowess by experience. He shrugged his shoulders as he looked at the fierce signs of clapper-
clawing. “Egad!” he said to himself, “Old Scratch must have had a tough time of it!”

The devil amuses himself in various ways, as is seen by the antics of the
mysterious stranger in Poe’s The Devil in the Belfry, who comes curvetting
into the old Dutch village with his audacious and sinister face and curious
costume, to upset the sacred time of the place. The visitant in Bon Bon is
likewise queer as to dress and habits. He wears garments in the style of a
century before, having a queue but no shirt, a cravat with an ecclesiastic
suggestion, also a stylus and black book. His facial expression is such as
would have struck Uriah Heap dumb with envy, and the hint of hoofs and a
forked tail is cleverly given though not obtruded. The most remarkable
feature of his appearance, however, is that he has no eyes, simply a dead
level of flesh. He declares that he eats souls and prefers to buy them alive to

insure freshness. He has a taste for philosophers, when they are not too
tough.
The satiric devil, like the satiric ghost, is seen in modern fiction. Eugene
Field has a story of a demon who seems sympathetic, weeping large,
gummy tears at hearing a mortal’s woes, and signing the conventional
contract on a piece of asbestos paper. He agrees to do everything the man
wishes, for a certain term of years, in return for which he is to get the soul.
If the devil forfeits the contract, he loses not only that victim but the souls
of two thousand already in his clutches. The man shrewdly demands trying
things of him, but the demon is game, building and endowing churches,
carrying on philanthropic and reform work without complaint, but balking
when the man asks him to close the saloons on Sunday. Rather than do that,
he releases the two thousand and one souls and flies away twitching his tail
in wrath.[146]
The most recent, as perhaps the most striking, instance of the satiric devil
is in Mark Twain’s posthumous novel, The Mysterious Stranger. A youth,
charming, courtly, and handsome appears in a medieval village, confessing
to two boys that he is Satan, though not the original of that name, but his
nephew and namesake. He insists that he is an unfallen angel, since his
uncle is the only member of his family that has sinned. Satan reads the
thoughts of mortals, kindles fire in his pipe by breathing on it, supplies
money and other desirable things by mere suggestion, is invisible when he
wills it so, and is generally a gifted being. This perennial boy—only sixteen
thousand years old—makes a charming companion. He says to Marget that
his papa is in shattered health and has no property to speak of,—in fact,
none of any earthly value,—but he has an uncle in business down in the
tropics, who is very well off, and has a monopoly, and it is from this uncle
that he drew his support. Marget expresses the hope that her uncle and his
would meet some day, and Satan says he hoped so, too. “May be they will,”
says Marget. “Does your uncle travel much?”
“Oh, yes, he goes all about,—he has business everywhere.”
The book is full of this oblique humor, satirizing earth, heaven, and hell.
The stranger by his comments on theological creeds satirizes religion, and
Satan is an intended parody of God. He sneers at man’s “mongrel moral
sense,” which tells him the distinction between good and evil, insisting that
he should have no choice, that the right to choose makes him inevitably
choose the wrong. He makes little figures out of clay and gives them life,

only to destroy them with casual ruthlessness a little later and send them to
hell. In answer to the old servant’s faith in God, when she says that He will
care for her and her mistress, since “not a sparrow falleth to the ground
without His Knowledge,” he sneers, “But it falls, just the same! What’s the
good of seeing it fall?” He is a new diabolic figure, yet showing the
composite traits of the old, the dæmonic wisdom and sarcasm, the
superhuman magnetism to draw men to him, and the human qualities of
geniality, sympathy, and boyish charm.
One of the most significant and frequent motifs of the diabolic in
literature is that of the barter of the human soul for the devil’s gift of some
earthly boon, long life or wealth or power, or wisdom, or gratification of the
senses. It is a theme of unusual power,—what could be greater than the
struggle over one’s own immortal soul?—and well might the great minds of
the world engage themselves with it. Yet that theme is but little apparent in
later stories. We have no such character in recent literature that can compare
with Marlowe’s Dr. Faustus or Goethe’s Mephistopheles or Calderon’s
wonder-working magician. Hawthorne’s Septimius Felton makes a bargain
with the devil to secure the elixir of life, there is a legend in Hardy’s Tess of
the D’ Urbervilles of a man that sold himself to the minister of evil, and the
incident occurs in various stories of witchcraft, yet with waning power and
less frequence. The most significant recent use of it is in W. B. Yeats’s
drama.[147] This is a drama of Ireland, where the peasants have been driven
by famine to barter their souls to the devil to buy their children food, but
their Countess sells her own soul to the demon that they may save theirs.
This vicarious sacrifice adds a new poignancy to the situation and Yeats has
treated it with power. This is the only recent appearance of the devil on the
stage for he has practically disappeared from English drama, where he was
once so prominent. The demon was a familiar and leading figure on the
miracle and Elizabethan stage, but, like the ghost, he shows more vitality
now in fiction. The devil is an older figure in English drama than is the
ghost, but he seems to have played out.
The analysis and representation of the devil as a character in literature
have covered a great range, from the bestiality of Dante’s Demon in the
Inferno to Milton’s mighty angel in ruins, with all sorts of variations
between, from the sneering cynicism of Goethe’s Mephisto to the pinchbeck
diabolism of Marie Corelli’s sorrowful Satan, and the merry humor and
blasphemous satire of Mark Twain’s mysterious stranger. We note an

especial influence of Goethe’s Mephistopheles in the satiric studies of the
demon, an echo of his diabolic climax when in answer to Faust’s outcry
over Margaret’s downfall and death, he says, “She is not the first!” One
hears echoing through all literature Man Friday’s unanswerable question,
“Why not God kill debbil?” The uses of evil in God’s eternal scheme, the
soul’s free choice yet pitiful weakness, are sounded again and again. The
great diabolic figures, in their essential humanity, their intellectual dignity,
their sad introspection, their pitiless testing of the human soul to its
predestined fall, are terrible allegorical images of the evil in man himself, or
concepts of social sins, as in Ivan, the Fool. The devils of the great writers,
reflecting the time, the racial characteristics, the personal natures of their
creators, are deeply symbolic. Each man creates the devil that he can
understand, that represents him, for, as Amiel says, we can comprehend
nothing of which we have not the beginnings in ourselves. As each man
sees a different Hamlet, so each one has his own devil, or is his own devil.
This is illustrated by the figure in Julian Hawthorne’s Lovers in Heaven,
where the dead man’s spirit meets the devil in the after life,—who is his
own image, his dæmonic double. Some have one great fiend, while others
keep packs of little, snarling imps of darkness. A study of comparative
diabolics is illuminating and might be useful to us all.
The Wizard and the Witch. The demon has his earthly partners in evil
members of the firm of Devil and Company. Certain persons that have
made a pact with him are given a share in his power, and a portion of his
dark mantle falls upon them. The sorcerer and the witch are ancient figures
in literature, and like others of the supernatural kingdom, notably the devil,
they have their origin in the East, the cuneiform writings of the Chaldeans
showing belief in witchcraft. And the Witch of Endor, summoning the spirit
of Samuel to confront Saul, is a very real figure in the Old Testament. The
Greeks believed in witches, as did the Romans. Meroe, a witch, is described
in the Metamorphoses of Lucius Appuleius, from whom perhaps the witch
Meroe in Peele’s Old Wives’ Tale gets her name and character. In classical
times witches were thought to have power to turn men into beasts, tigers,
monkeys, or asses—some persons still believe that women have that power
and might give authenticated instances.
The sorcerer, or wizard, or warlock, or magician, as he is variously
called, was a more common figure in early literature than in later, perhaps
because, as in so many other cases, his profession has suffered a feminine

invasion. The Anglo-Saxon word wicca, meaning “witch,” is masculine,
which may or may not mean that witchcraft was a manly art in those days,
and the most famous medieval enchanter, Merlin, was a man, it should be
noted. The sorcerer of primitive times has been gradually reduced in power,
changing through the astrologer and alchemist of medieval and Gothic
romance into the bacteriologist and biologist of recent fiction, where he
works other wonders. In general, warlocks and wizards, while frequent
enough in early literature and in modern folk-tales, have become less
numerous in later fiction. Scott[148] has a medical magician with
supernatural power of healing by means of an amulet, which, put to the
nostrils of a person practically dead, revives him at once, but which loses its
efficacy if given in exchange for money. Hawthorne has an old Indian
sachem with wizard power,[149] who has concocted the elixir of life. We see
the passing of the ancient sorcerer into the scientific wonder-worker in such
fiction as Sax Rohmer’s Fu-Manchu stories that depict a Chinese terror, or
in H. G. Wells’s supernatural investigators in his various stories of science.
The magician is not really dead in fiction but has passed over into another
form, for the most part.
We still have the hoodoo man of colored persuasion, and the redskin
medicine-man, together with Oriental sorcerers from Kipling and others.
Examples are: In the House of Suddoo, by Kipling, where the wonder-
worker unites a canny knowledge of the telephone and telegraph along with
his unholy art; Red Debts, by Lumley Deakin, where the Indian magician
exacts a terrible penalty for the wrong done him, and where his diabolic
appearance to claim his victim leaves one in doubt as to whether he has not
sent his chief in his place; The Monkey’s Paw, by W. W. Jacobs, a curdling
story of a magic curse given by an Oriental sorcerer, by which the paw of a
dead monkey grants three wishes that have a dreadful boomerang power;
Black Magic, by Jessie Adelaide Weston,—who claims that all her
supernatural stories are strictly true—the narrative of an old Indian sorcerer
that changes himself into a hair mat and is shot for his pains. He has
obtained power over the house by being given a hair from the mat by the
uninitiated mistress. Hair, you must know, has great power of evil in the
hands of witches and sorcerers, as in the case of the evil ones in The
Talisman, who received their thrall over the maidens by one hair from each
head. F. Marion Crawford’s Khaled is a story of magic art. Khaled is one of
the genii converted by reading the Koran, who wishes to be a mortal man

with a soul. He is given the right to do so if he can win the love of a certain
woman. Hence he is born into the world, like Adam, a full-grown man, to
be magically clothed and equipped, by the transformation of leaves and
twigs into garments and armor, and the changing of a locust into an Arabian
steed. After many supernatural adventures, he receives his soul from an
angel. The soul, at first a crescent flame,
immediately took shape and became the brighter image of Khaled himself. And when he had looked
at it fixedly for a few minutes—the vision of himself had disappeared and before he was aware it had
entered his own body and taken up its life with him.

This is a parallel to the cases of ghostly doubles discussed in the previous
chapter.
The magician shows a disposition to adapt himself to contemporary
conditions and to change his personality with the times. Not so the witch.
She is a permanent figure. She has appeared in the various forms of
literature, in Elizabethan drama, in Gothic romance, in modern poetry, the
novel and the short story, and is very much alive to-day. We have witches
young and old. We have the fake witch, like the hoax ghost; the imputed
witch and the genuine article. We have witch stories melodramatic,
romantic, tragic, comic, and satiric, showing the influence of the great
creations of past literature with modern adaptations and additions. English
poetry is full of witchery, perhaps largely the result of the Celtic influence
on our literature. The poetic type of witchcraft is brought out in such poems
as Coleridge’s Christabel, where the beauty and suggestiveness veil the
sense of unearthly evil; or in Shelley’s Witch of Atlas, where the woman
appears as a symbol of alluring loveliness possessing none of the hideous
aspects seen in other weird women. The water enchantress in Shelley’s
fragment of an unfinished drama might be mentioned as another example
while Keats’s La Belle Dame sans Merci has a magical charm all her own.
Christina Rossetti’s Goblin Market shows a peculiar aspect of magic, as
also Mrs. Browning’s The Lay of the Brown Rosary. On the contrary,
Milton’s Comus, Robert Herrick’s The Hag, and James Hogg’s The Witch of
Fife illustrate the uglier aspects of enchantment.
There are two definite types of witches seen in English fiction, the first
being merely the reputed witch, the woman who is falsely accused or
suspected of black arts, and who either is persecuted, or else gains what she
wishes by hints of her traffic in evil, like the Old Granny Young in Mine
Host and the Witch, by James Blythe, who chants as a charm-rune,

“A curse shall lay on water and land
For the thing denied the witch’s hand,”

so that everybody is afraid to refuse her whatever she demands. This is a
highly conventionalized type of the motif and, though it is found in great
numbers in modern fiction, is not particularly important. The principal
complications of the plot are usually the same, the character known as the
witch being either an appealing figure winning sympathy because of her
beauty and youth, or else touching to pity because of her age and
infirmities. No person of average age or pulchritude is ever accused of
witchcraft in English fiction. She is always very old and poor or young and
lovely. Item also, she invariably has two lovers, in the latter case. She is
merely a romantic peg on which to hang a story, not always real as a human
being and not a real witch. In these stories the only magic used is love, the
fair maid having unintentionally charmed the heart of a villain, who, failing
to win her, accuses her of witchcraft in order to frighten her into love. In
some of the novels and stories the victim is actually executed, while in
others she is rescued by her noble lover at the fifty-ninth second. We have
the pursuing villain, the distressed innocence, the chivalric lover disporting
themselves in late Gothic fashion over many romances. Even Mary
Johnston with her knowledge of Colonial times and her power to give
atmosphere to the past does not succeed in imparting the breath of life to
her late novel of witchcraft, The Witch. These pink-and-white beauties who
speak in Euphuistic sentences, who show a lamblike defiance toward the
dark tempters, who breathe prayers to heaven for protection and forgiveness
to their enemies in one breath, who die or are rescued with equal grace and
propriety,—one is carried away from the scaffold by Kidd, the pirate, thus
delaying for several chapters her rescue by her faithful lover—do not really
touch the heart any more than they interest the intellect. Yet there are
occasional instances of the imputed witch who seems real despite her
handicap of beauty and youth, as Iseult le Desireuse, in Maurice Hewlett’s
Forest Lovers, whom Prosper le Gai weds to save from the hangman. The
young woman in F. Marion Crawford’s Witch of Prague might be called a
problematic witch, for while she does undoubtedly work magic, it is for the
most part attributed to her powers of hypnotism rather than to the black art
itself. We find an excellent example of the reputed witch who is a woman of
real charm and individuality, in D’Annunzio’s The Daughter of Jorio,
where the young girl is beset by cruel dangers because of her charm and her

lonely condition, and who rises to tragic heights of sacrifice to save her
lover from death, choosing to be burned to death as a witch to save him
from paying the penalty of murder. She actually convinces him, as well as
the others, that she has bewitched him by unholy powers, that she has slain
his father and made him believe that he himself did it to save her honor, and
she goes to her death with a white fervor of courage, with no word of
complaint, save one gentle rebuke to him that he should not revile her.
The aged pseudo-witch is in the main more appealing than the young
one, because more realistic. Yet there is no modern instance that is so
touching as the poor old crone in The Witch of Edmonton, who is persecuted
for being a witch and who turns upon her tormentors with a speech that
reminds us of Shylock’s famous outcry, showing clearly how their suspicion
and accusation have made her what she is. We see here a witch in the
making, an innocent old woman who is harried by human beings till she
makes a compact with the devil. Meg Merrilies[150] is a problematic witch,
a majestic, sibylline figure, very individual and human, yet with more than
a suggestion of superhuman wisdom and power. Scott limned her with a
loving hand, and Keats was so impressed with her personality that he wrote
a poem concerning her. Elizabeth Enderfield, in Hardy’s Under the
Greenwood Tree, is a reputed witch and witch-pricking is also tried in his
Return of the Native. Various experiments with magic are used in Hardy’s
work, as the instance of the woman’s touching her withered arm to the neck
of a man that had been hanged, consulting the conjurer concerning butter
that won’t come, and so forth. Old Aunt Keziah in Hawthorne’s Septimius
Felton might be called a problematic witch, as the woman in The Witch by
Eden Phillpotts. She has a great number of cats, and something dreadful
happens to anyone who injures one of them; she calls the three black toads
her servants and goes through incantations over a snake skeleton, the
carcass of a toad, and the mummy of a cat. Mother Tab may or may not be a
bona fide witch, but she causes much trouble to those associated with her.
The unquestioned witch, possessing indubitable powers of enchantment,
occurs frequently and conveys a genuine thrill. Her attributes have been less
conventionalized than those of her youthful companions who are merely
under the imputation of black art, and she possesses a diabolic individuality.
Though she may not remain long in view, she is an impressive figure not
soon forgotten. The old crone in Scott’s The Two Drovers gives warning to
Robin Oig, “walking the deasil,” as it is called, around him, tracing the

propitiation which some think a reminiscence of Druidical mythology,—
which is performed by walking three times round the one in danger, moving
according to the course of the sun. In the midst of her incantation the hag
exclaims, “Blood on your hand, and it is English blood!” True enough,
before his journey’s end young Robin does murder his English companion.
In the same story other evidences of witchcraft are shown, as the directions
for keeping away the evil influence from cattle by tying St. Mungo’s knot
on their tails.
The subject of witchcraft greatly interested Hawthorne, for he introduces
it in a number of instances. Young Goodman Brown shows the aspects of the
diabolic union between the devil and his earthly companions, their unholy
congregations in the forest, reports their sardonic conversations and
suggestions of evil in others, and pictures the witches riding on broomsticks
high in the heavens and working their magic spells. The young husband
sees in that convocation all the persons whom he has most revered—his
minister, his Sabbath-school teacher, and even his young wife, so that all his
after-life is saddened by the thought of it. Witchcraft enters into The Scarlet
Letter, Main Street, and Feathertop, and is mentioned in other stories.
Old Mother Sheehy in Kipling’s The Courting of Dinah Shadd
pronounces a malediction against Private Mulvany and the girl he loves,
prophesying that he will be reduced in rank instead of being promoted, will
be a slave to drink so that his young wife will take in washing for officers’
wives instead of herself being the wife of an officer, and that their only
child will die,—every bitter word of which comes true in after years. The
old witch mother in Howard Pyle’s The Evil Eye inspires her daughter to
cast a spell over the man she loves but who does not think of her, causing
him to leave his betrothed and wed the witch daughter. When understanding
comes to him, and with it loathing, the girl seeks to regain his love by
following the counsel of an old magician, who gives her an image to be
burnt. But that burning of the image kills her and looses the man from her
spell. That incident is similar to that in D’Annunzio’s Sogno d’un Tramonto
d’Autunno where the Dogaressa seeks to slay her rival, both probably being
based on the unforgettable employment of the theme in Rossetti’s Sister
Helen, where the young girl causes the death of her betrayer by melting the
image.
In Gordon Bottomley’s play, Riding to Lithend, three old women enter,
who seem to partake of the nature of the Parcæ as well as of Shakespeare’s

Weird Sisters. They have bat-webbed fingers, the hound bays uncannily at
their approach, they show supernatural knowledge of events, and they chant
a wild prophecy of doom, then mysteriously disappear. Fate marches
swiftly on as they foretell.
The young and beautiful witch can work as much evil as the ancient
crone, perhaps more, since her emotions are wilder and more unrestrained.
She can project a curse that reaches its victim across the ocean, when the
one who sent the curse is rotting in the tomb, as in The Curse of the
Cashmere Shawl, where a betrayed and deserted woman in India sends a
rare shawl to her rival, then drowns herself. Months after, when the
husband, forgetful of the source, lays the shawl around his wife’s shoulders,
the dead woman takes her place. After this gruesome transfer of personality,
the wife, impelled by a terrible urge she cannot understand, drowns herself
as the other has done months before. Oscar Wilde[151] shows a young and
lovely witch with a human longing for the love of the young man who
throws away his soul for love of a mermaid. Through life’s tragic satire, she
is compelled, in spite of her entreaties, to show him how he may damn
himself and win the other’s affection. The jealousy shown here and in other
instances is an illustration of the human nature of the witch, who, like the
devil, makes a strong appeal to our sympathy in spite of the undoubted
iniquity.
The element of symbolism enters largely into the witch-creations, even
from the time of Shakespeare’s Three in Macbeth, who are terrible symbolic
figures of the evil in man’s soul. They appear as the visible embodiment of
Macbeth’s thoughts, and by their mysterious suggestive utterances tempt
him to put his unlawful dreams into action. They seem both cause and effect
here, for though when they first appear to him his hands are innocent of
blood, his heart is tainted with selfish ambition, and their whispers of
promise hurry on the deed. In Ancient Sorceries, by Algernon Blackwood,
the village is full of persons who at night by the power of an ancestral
curse, a heritage of subliminal memory, become witches, horrible cat-
creatures, unhuman, that dance the blasphemous dance of the Devil’s
Sabbath. The story symbolizes the eternal curse that rests upon evil, the
undying quality of thought and action that cannot cease when the body of
the sinner has become dust, but reaches out into endless generations.
In Old Fires and Profitable Ghosts by A. T. Quiller-Couch, we see a
witch, a young woman whose soul is under a spell from the devil. She gives

rich gifts to the church, but her offerings turn into toads and vipers, defiling
the sanctuary, and as she sings her wild songs the bodies of drowned men
come floating to the surface of the water and join in the words of her song.
Her beauty is supernatural and accursed, yet her soul is innocent of wish to
do evil, though it leaves her body and goes like a cresseted flame at night to
follow the devil, while the body is powerless in sleep. Finally the devil
comes in the form of a Moor, possibly a suggestion from Zofloya, and
summons her, when she dies, with a crucifix clasped over her heart.
W. B. Yeats has pictured several witches for us, as the crone of the gray
hawk, in The Wisdom of the King, a woman tall with more than mortal
height, with feathers of the gray hawk growing in her hair, who stoops over
the royal cradle and whispers a strange thing to the child, as a result of
which he grows up in a solitude of his own mystic thoughts with dreams
that are like the marching and counter-marching of armies. When he
realizes that the simple joys of life and love are not for him, he disappears,
some say to make his home with the immortal demons, some say with the
shadowy goddesses that haunt the midnight pools in the forest. In The
Curse of the Fires and the Shadows, Yeats pictures another witch, tall and in
a gray gown, who is standing in the river and washing, washing the dead
body of a man. As the troopers who have murdered the friars and burned
down the church ride past, each man recognizes in the dead face his own
face,—just a moment before they all plunge over the abyss to death.
There are witches in most collections of English folk-tales, for the
simpler people, the more elemental natures, have a strong feeling for the
twilight of nature and of life. The weird woman has power over the forces
of nature and can evoke the wrath of the elements as of unholy powers
against her enemies. Stories of witches, as of sorcerers, occur in Indian
folk-tales, as well as in those of the American Indian, differing in details in
the tribal collections yet showing similar essential ideas. The Scotch show
special predilection for the witch, since with their tense, stern natures, they
stand in awe of the darker powers and of those that call them forth. They
relate curious instances of the relations between the animal world and
witchcraft, as in The Dark Nameless One, by Fiona McLeod, the story of a
nun that falls in love with a seal and is forced to live forever in the sea,
weaving her spells where the white foam froths, and knowing that her soul
is lost. This is akin to the theme that Matthew Arnold uses,[152] though with
a different treatment, showing similarity to Hans Christian Andersen’s tale

of The Little Mermaid. The cailleachuisge, or the water-witch, and the
maighdeanmhara, the mermaid, and the kelpie, the sea-beast, are cursed
with dæmonic spells and live forever in their witchery. When mortals
forsake the earth and follow them their children are beings that have no
souls. The Irish folk-tales, on the other hand, while having their quota of
witches, do not think so much about them or take them quite so seriously,
inclining more to the faëry forms of supernaturalism suited to their poetic
natures. The sense of beauty of the Irish is so vivid and their innate poetry
so intense that they glimpse the loveliness of magic, and their enchanted
beings are of beauty rather than of horror.
We even have the humorous and satiric witch, to correspond to similar
representations of the ghost and the devil in modern fiction. The instance in
Burns’s Tam O’Shanter needs only to be recalled, with the ludicrous
description of the wild race at night to escape the dread powers. Bones,
Sanders, and Another, by Edgar Wallace, introduces a witch with comic
qualities, a woman whose husband has been a magician, and the reputed
familiar of a devil. She cures people by laying her hands on them, once
causing a bone that was choking a child to fly out with “a cry terrible to
hear, such a cry as a leopard makes when pursued by ghosts.” When this
witch with a sense of humor is arrested as a trouble-maker by an army
officer, she “eradicates” her clothes, causing very comic complications. The
best example of the satiric witch is Hawthorne’s Mother Rigby, in
Feathertop, who constructs a man from a broomstick and other materials
for a scarecrow. In this satiric sermon upon the shams and hypocrisies of
life, Mother Rigby, with her sardonic humor, her cynical comments,
parodies society, holds the mirror up to human life and shows more than
one poor painted scarecrow, simulacrum of humanity, masquerading as a
man. The figure that she creates, with his yearnings and his pride, his horror
when he realizes his own falsity and emptiness, is more human, more a
man, than many a being we meet in literature or in life.
Barry Pain has several witch stories that do not fall readily into any
category, curious stories of scientific dream-supernaturalism, in the realm of
the unreal. Exchange is the account of a supernatural woman, whether a
witch or one of the Fates, one does not know, who comes, clad in scarlet
rags, to show human souls their destinies. She permits an exchange of fate,
if one is willing to pay her price, which is in each case terrible enough. One
young girl gives up her pictured future of life and love, and surrenders her

mind for the purpose of saving her baby brother from his destined fate of
suicide in manhood. The crone appears to an old man that loves the child,
who takes upon himself her fate of being turned into a bird to be tortured
after human death, so that the young girl may have his future, to be turned
into a white lamb that dies after an hour, then be a soul set free. The Glass
of Supreme Moments is another story of prophetic witchery, of revealed fate
seen in supernatural dreams. A young man in his college study sees the
fireplace turn into a silver stairway down which a lovely gray-robed woman
comes to him. She shows him a mirror, the glass of supreme moments, in
which the highest instants of each man’s life are shown. She says of it, “All
the ecstasy of the world lies there. The supreme moments of each man’s
life, the scene, the spoken words—all lie there. Past and present and future
—all are there.” She shows an emotion meter that measures the thrill of joy.
After he has seen the climactic instants of his friends’ lives he asks to see
his own, when she tells him his are here and now. She tells him that her
name is Death and that he will die if he kisses her, but he cries out, “I will
die kissing you!” And presently his mates return to find his body fallen dead
across his table.
There is something infinitely appealing about the character of the witch.
She seems a creature of tragic loneliness, conscious of her own dark
powers, yet conscious also of her exile from the good, and knowing that all
the evil she evokes will somehow come back to her, that her curses will
come home, as in the case of Witch Hazel, where the witch, by making a
cake of hair to overcome her rival in love, brings on a tempest that kills her
lover and drives her mad. Each evil act, each dark imagining seems to
create a demon and turn him loose to harry humanity with unceasing force,
as Matthew Maule’s curse in The House of Seven Gables casts a spiritual
shadow on the home. Yet the witch is sometimes a minister of good, as
Mephistopheles says of himself, achieving the good where he meant evil;
sometimes typifying the mysterious mother nature, as the old Wittikin in
Hauptmann’s Sunken Bell, neither good nor evil, neither altogether human
nor supernatural. Her strange symbolism is always impressive.

Dæmonic Spirits—Vampires. Closely related to the devil are certain
diabolic spirits that are given supernatural power by him and acknowledge
his suzerainty. These include ghouls, vampires, werewolves, and other
demoniac animals, as well as the human beings that through a compact with
the fiend share in his dark force. Since such creatures possess dramatic
possibilities, they have given interest to fiction and other literature from
early times. This idea of an unholy alliance between earth and hell, has
fascinated the human mind and been reflected astonishingly in literature. In
studying the appearance of these beings in English fiction, we note, as in
the case of the ghost, the witch, and the devil, a certain leveling influence, a
tendency to humanize them and give them characteristics that appeal to our
sympathy.
The vampire and the ghoul are closely related and by some authorities
are considered the same, yet there is a distinction. The ghoul is a being, to
quote Poe, “neither man nor woman, neither brute nor human” that feeds
upon corpses, stealing out at midnight for loathsome banquets in
graveyards. He devours the flesh of the dead, while the vampire drains the
blood of the living. The ghoul is an Asiatic creature and has left but slight
impress upon English literature, while the vampire has been a definite
motif. The vampire superstition goes back to ancient times, being referred
to on Chaldean and Assyrian tablets. William of Newbury, of the twelfth
century in England, relates several stories of them; one vampire was burned
in Melrose Abbey, and tourists in Ireland are still shown the grave of a
vampire. Perhaps the vampire superstition goes back to the savagery of
remote times, and is an animistic survival of human sacrifices, of
cannibalism and the like. The vampire is thought of as an evil spirit issuing
forth at night to attack the living in their sleep and drain the blood which is
necessary to prolong its own revolting existence. Certain persons were
thought to be especially liable to become vampires at death, such as
suicides, witches, wizards, persons who in life had been attacked by
vampires, outcasts of various kinds, as well as certain animals, werewolves,
dead lizards, and others.
The vampire superstition was general in the East and extended to Europe,
it is thought, by way of Greece. The Greeks thought of the vampire as a
beautiful young woman, a lamia, who lured young men to their death. The
belief was particularly strong in central Europe, but never seemed to gain
the same foothold in England that it did on the continent, though it is

evident here and has influenced literature. The vampire has been the
inspiration for several operas, and has figured in the drama, in poetry, in the
novel and short story, as well as in folk-tales and medieval legends. The
stories show the various aspects of the belief and its ancient hold on the
popular mind. The vampire, as well as the ghost, the devil, and the witch,
has appeared on the English stage. The Vampire, an anonymous melodrama
in two acts, The Vampire, a tragedy by St. John Dorset (1821), The Vampire
Bride, a play, Le Vampire, by Alexander Dumas père, and The Vampire, or
the Bride of the Isles, by J. R. Planche, were presented in the London
theater. The latter which was published in 1820 is remarkably similar to The
Vampyre, a novelette by Polidori, published in 1819,—the story written
after the famous ghost session where Byron, the Shelleys, and Polidori
agreed each to write a ghostly story, Mary Shelley writing Frankenstein.
Polidori’s story, like the play referred to, has for its principal character an
Englishman, Lord Ruthven, the Earl of Marsden, who is the vampire. In
each case there is a supposed death, where the dying man asks that his body
be placed where the last rays of the moon can fall upon it. The corpse then
mysteriously vanishes. In each story there is a complication of a rash pledge
of silence made by a man that discovers the diabolical nature of the earl,
who, having risen from the dead, is ravaging society as a vampire. In each
case a peculiar turn of the story is that the masculine vampire requires for
his subsistence the blood of young women, to whom he must be married.
He demands a new victim, hence a hurried wedding is planned. In the play
the ceremony is interrupted by the bride’s father, but in the novelette the
plot is finished and the girl becomes the victim of the destroyer. It is a
question which of these productions was written first, and which imitated
the other, or if they had a common source. The author of the drama admits
getting his material from a French play, but where did Polidori get his?
Byron seems to have been fascinated with the vampire theme, for in
addition to his unsuccessful short story, he has used the theme in his poem,
The Giaour. Here he brings in the idea that the vampire curse is a judgment
from God for sin, and that the most terrible part of the punishment is the
being forced to prey upon those who in life were dearest to him, which idea
occurs in various stories.
“But first on earth as Vampyre sent
Thy corse shall from its tomb be rent;
Then ghastly haunt thy native place

And suck the blood of all thy race;
There from thy daughter, sister, wife,
At midnight drain the stream of life;
Yet loathe the banquet which perforce
Must feed thy livid, living corse.
Thy victims, ere they yet expire
Shall know the demon for their sire;
As, cursing thee, thou cursing them,
Thy flowers are withered on the stem.
But one, that for thy crime must fall,
The youngest, best-beloved of all,
Shall bless thee with a father’s name—
That word shall wrap thy heart in flame!
Yet must thou end the task and mark
Her cheek’s last tinge, her eye’s last spark,
And the last glassy glance must view
Which freezes o’er its lifeless blue;
Then with unhallowed hand shall tear
The tresses of her yellow hair,
Of which, in life, a lock when shorn
Affection’s fondest pledge was worn,—
But now is borne away by thee
Memorial of thine agony!
Yet with thine own best blood shall drip
Thy gnashing teeth and haggard lip;
Then stalking to thy sullen grave
Go—and with ghouls and Afrits rave,
Till these in horror shrink away
From specter more accursed than they!”
Southey in his Thalaba shows us a vampire, a young girl in this case,
who has been torn away from her husband on their wedding day. The curse
impels her to attack him, to seek to drain his lifeblood. He becomes aware
of the truth and takes her father with him to the tomb, to await her coming
forth at midnight, which is the striking hour for vampires. When she
appears, “in her eyes a brightness more terrible than all the loathsomeness
of death,” her father has the courage to strike a lance through her heart to
dispel the demon and let her soul be at peace.
“Then howling with the wound
The fiendish tenant fled....
And garmented with glory in their sight
Oneiza’s spirit stood.”

Keats uses the Greek idea of the vampire as a lamia or beautiful young
woman luring young men to death,—the same theme employed by Goethe
in his Die Braut von Corinth. In Lamia, when the evil spirit in the form of a
lovely, alluring woman, is accused by the old philosopher, she gives a

terrible scream and vanishes. This vanishing business is a favorite trick with
vampires—they leave suddenly when circumstances crowd them.
F. Marion Crawford, in For the Blood Is the Life, has given us a terrible
vampire story, in which the dream element is present to a marked degree.
The young man, who has been vainly loved by a young girl, is after her
death vampirized by her, something after the fashion of Turgeniev’s Clara
Militch, and when his friends get an inkling of the truth, and go to rescue
him, they find him on her grave, a thin red line of blood trickling from his
throat.
And the flickering light of the lantern played upon another face that looked up from the feast,—
upon two deep, dead eyes that saw in spite of death—upon parted lips redder than life itself—upon
gleaming teeth on which glistened a rosy drop.

The hawthorne stake is driven through her heart and the vampire expires
after a terrific struggle, uttering diabolic, human shrieks. There is a certain
similarity between this and Gautier’s La Morte Amoreuse, where the truth is
concealed till the last of the story and only the initiated would perhaps
know that the reincarnated woman was a vampire. It is also a bit like
Turgeniev’s Phantoms, where a subtle suggestion at the last gives the reader
the clue to vampirism, though the author really asks the question at the
close, Was she a vampire? The character of the woman is problematic here,
as in Gautier’s story, less pronounced than in Crawford’s.
The idea of occult vampirism used by Turgeniev is also employed by
Reginald Hodder in his work, The Vampire. Here peculiar power is
possessed by a woman leader of an occult band, who vampirizes by means
of a talisman. Her ravages are psychic rather than physical. Theosophists,
according to the Occult Magazine, believe in vampires even in the present.
According to their theory, one who has been very wicked in life is in death
so inextricably entangled with his evil motives and acts that he is hopelessly
lost and knows it, yet seeks to delay for a time his final damnation. He can
ward off spiritual death so long as he can keep alive by means of blood his
physical corpse. The Occult Review believes that probably only those
acquainted with black magic in their lifetime can become vampires,—a
thought comforting to some of us.
It is in Bram Stoker’s Dracula that one finds the tensest, most dreadful
modern story of vampirism. This novel seems to omit no detail of terror, for
every aspect of vampire horror is touched upon with brutal and ghastly
effect. The combination of ghouls, vampires, ghosts, werewolves, and other

awful elements is almost unendurable, yet the book loses in effect toward
the last, for the mind cannot endure four hundred pages of vampiric outrage
and respond to fresh impressions of horror. The initial vampire here is a
Hungarian count, who, after terrorizing his own country for years,
transports himself to England to start his ravages there. Each victim in turn
becomes a vampire. The combination of modern science with medieval
superstition to fight the scourge, using garlic and sprigs of the wild rose
together with blood transfusion, is interesting. All the resources of modern
science are pitted against the infection and the complications are
dramatically thrilling. The book is not advised as suitable reading for one
sitting alone at night.
There are other types of vampirism in addition to the conventional theme
and the occult vampirism. H. G. Wells gives his customary twist of novelty
to supernaturalism by the introduction of a botanical vampire in his The
Flowering of the Strange Orchid. An orchid collector is found
unaccountably dead in a jungle in the Andaman Islands, with a strange bulb
lying under him, which bulb is brought to England and watched carefully
by a botanist there till it comes to flower. When at last its blossoms burst
open, great tentacles reach out to grasp the man, sucking his blood and
strangling him. The tentacles dripping blood have to be torn away and the
man snatched violently from the plant just in time to save his life.
Algernon Blackwood, who has touched upon every terrible aspect of
supernaturalism, gives us two types of vampires in his story, The Transfer.
The one is a psychic vampire, stealing the vital power from others, a human
sponge, absorbing the strength, the ideas, the soul, of others. The governess
describes him: “I watched his hard, bleak face; I noticed how thin he was,
and the curious, oily brightness of his steady eyes. And everything he said
or did announced what I may dare to call the suction of his presence.” This
human vampire comes in contact with one of another sort, a soil vampire,
the Forbidden Corner, a bald, sore place in the rose garden, like a dangerous
bog. The woman and a little child know the truth of this spot so barren in
the midst of luxurious growth, so sinister in its look and implication. The
child says of it, “It’s bad. It’s hungry. It’s dying because it can’t get the food
it wants. But I know what would make it feel right.” The earth vampire
stretches out silent feelers from its secret strength when the man comes near
the evil spot; the empty, yawning spot gives out audible cries, then laughs
hideously as the man falls forward into the middle of the patch. “His eyes,

as he dropped, faded shockingly, and across the countenance was written
plainly what I can only call an expression of destruction.” The man lives on
physically, yet without vitality, without real life. But it was otherwise with
the Forbidden Corner, for soon “it lay untouched, full of great, luscious,
driving weeds and creepers, very strong, full-fed and bursting thick with
life.”
And so the vampire stories vary in theme and in treatment. Indian folk-
tales appearing in English show that the Jigar-Khor, or Liver-eater of India
is a cousin to the vampire, for he can steal your liver by just looking at you.
(It has long been known that hearts can be filched in this way, but the liver
wrinkle is a new one.) There are several points to be noted in connection
with these stories of the Un-dead, the incorruptible corpses, the loathsome
spirits that haunt the living. Many of the stories have a setting in the
countries where the vampire superstition has been most common, though
there are English settings as well. Continental countries are richer in
vampire lore than England, which explains the location of the incidents
even in many English stories and poems. Another point to be noted is the
agreement of the stories in the essential features. While there are numerous
variants, of course, there is less divergence than in the case of ghosts, for
instance. The description of the dæmonic spirit tenanting the body of a dead
person, driving him by a dreadful urge to attack the living, especially those
dear to him in life, is much the same. The personality of the vampire may
vary, in one line of stories being a young woman who lures men to death, in
the other a man who must quench his thirst with the blood of brides. These
are the usual types, though there are other variants.
The Werewolf and Others. Another dæmonic figure popular in fiction is
the werewolf. The idea is a very old one, having been mentioned by various
classical writers, it is said, including Pomponius Mela, Herodotus, and
Ovid. The legend of the werewolf is found in practically all European
countries, especially those where the wolf is common. In France many
stories of the loup-garou are current. The werewolf is a human being cursed
with the power or the obligation to be transformed into an animal who goes
forth to slay and devour. Like a vampire, he might become such as a curse
from God, or he might be an innocent victim, or might suffer from an
atavistic tendency, a cannibalistic craving for blood. Distinction is to be
made between the real werewolf and the lycanthrope,—the latter a human
being who, on account of some peculiar twist of insanity, fancies himself a

wolf and acts accordingly. There is such a character in The Duchess of
Malfi, a maniac who thinks himself a mad wolf, and another in The
Albigenses, a creature that crouches in a corner of its lair, gnawing at a skull
snatched from the graveyard, uttering bestial growls. Algernon Blackwood
has a curdling story of lycanthropy, where the insane man will eat nothing
but raw meat and devours everything living that he can get hold of. He
confesses to a visitor that he used to bite his old servant, but that he gave it
up, since the old Jew tasted bitter. The servant also is mad, and “hides in a
vacuum” when his master goes on a rampage. Stories of lycanthropy
illustrate an interesting aspect of the association between insanity and the
supernatural in fiction.
The most revolting story of lycanthropy is in Frank Norris’s posthumous
novel, Vandover and the Brute. This is a study in soul degeneration, akin to
the moral decay that George Eliot has shown in the character of Tito
Melema, but grosser and utterly lacking in artistic restraint. We see a young
man, at first sensitive, delicate, and with high ideals, gradually through love
of ease and self-indulgence, through taking always the line of least
resistance, becoming a moral outcast. The brute that ever strains at the leash
in man gains the mastery and the artist soul ends in a bestial creature.
Dissipation brings on madness, called by the doctors “lycanthropy-
mathesis.” In his paroxysms of insanity the wretch thinks that his body is
turned into the beast that his soul symbolizes, and runs about his room,
naked, four-footed, growling like a jungle animal and uttering harsh,
raucous cries of Wolf-wolf!
Kipling’s The Mark of the Beast is midway between a lycanthrope and a
werewolf story, for while the soul of the beast—or whatever passes for the
brutish soul—enters into the man and drives out his spirit, and while many
bestial characteristics result, including the revolting odor, the man does not
change his human form.
While lycanthropy has never been a frequent theme in fiction, the
werewolf is a common figure, appearing in various forms of literature, from
medieval ballads and legends to modern short stories. Marie de France, the
Anglo-Norman writer,[153] tells of a werewolf that is by day a gallant knight
and kindly gentleman, yet goes on nocturnal marauding expeditions. When
his wife shows curiosity concerning his absences and presses him for an
explanation, he reluctantly tells her that he is a werewolf, hiding his clothes
in a hollow tree, and that if they were removed he would have to remain a

wolf. She has her lover steal his clothes, then marries the lover. One day
long afterward the king’s attention is called to a wolf that runs up to him
and acts strangely. It is a tame and well-mannered beast till the false knight
and his wife appear, when he tries to tear their throats. Investigation reveals
the truth, the clothes are fetched, and the curse removed. Arthur
O’Shaughnessy’s modern version of this, as of others of Marie’s lais, is
charming.
Like the vampire, the werewolf is under a curse that impels him to prey
upon those dearest to him. Controlled by a dæmonic spirit, the human
being, that in his normal personality is kindly and gentle, becomes a jungle
beast with ravening instincts. The motif is obviously tangled up with the
vampire superstition here, and it would be interesting, if possible, to trace
out the two to a point of combination. This irresistible impulse to slay his
dear ones introduces a dramatic element into the plot, here as in the vampire
stories. The wolf is not the only animal around whom such plots center, but
being most common he has given his name to the type. The Albigenses tell
of a young husband who, as a werewolf, slays his bride, then vanishes to be
seen no more.
There are interesting variants of the werewolf story, introducing other
elements of supernaturalism. In A Vendetta of the Jungle,[154] we have the
idea of successive infection of the moral curse, similar to the continuation
of vampirism. Mrs. Crump, a lady in India, is eaten by a tiger, who has a
good digestion for he assimilates not only her body but her soul. So that
now it is Mrs. Crump-Tiger, we might say, that goes about the jungle eating
persons. In time she devours her successor in her husband’s affection. The
man is aware that it is his first wife who has eaten his second, so he starts
out to kill the animal to clear off the score. But by the time he reaches the
jungle the beast has had time to digest his meal and when the husband
levels his gun to fire, the eyes that look out at him from the brutish face are
his beloved’s eyes. What could he do?
Eugene Field gives a new turn to the idea by representing the werewolf
curse as a definite atavistic throw-back. His wolf-man is an innocent
marauder, the reincarnation of a wicked grandfather, yet a gentle, chivalrous
soul very different from his grandparent. The old gentleman has left him
heir to nothing but the curse and a magic spear given him by the witch
Brunhilde. The werewolf bears a charmed life against which no weapon of
man can avail, and the country is panic-stricken over his ravages. The

legend is that the beast’s fury cannot be stopped till some man offers
himself as a voluntary sacrifice to the wolf. The youth does not know that
he is the guilty one until his reprehensible grandfather appears to him in a
vision, demanding his soul. He hears that there is to be a meeting in the
sacred grove on a certain day and begs his beloved to remain away, lest the
werewolf come. But when she insists that she will go, he gives her his
magic spear, telling her to strike the wolf through the heart if he approaches
her. True to his accursed destiny the wolf does come to the grove and lunges
at the girl. All the men flee but one, and his weapons fail,—then the
terrified girl hurls the spear, striking the beast to the heart. But when he
falls, it is young Harold who is dying, who has given himself a voluntary
sacrifice to save others. The curse is lifted but he is dead.
In The Camp of the Dog, by Algernon Blackwood, we have another
unconscious werewolf, a gentle, modest, manly young fellow madly in love
with a girl who doesn’t care for him. In his sleep he goes questing for her.
While his body lies shrunken on a cot in his tent, his soul takes the form of
a wolf and goes to the hilltop, uttering unearthly howls. By an equally
strong psychic disturbance the girl is impelled to go in a somnambulistic
state to the hilltop. Each is in waking hours utterly unaware of their strange
jaunts, till the father shoots the wolf. The young man in this case suffers
only curious psychic wounds, from which he recovers when the girl
promises to marry him, and the wolf is seen no more.
The panther plays his part in this were-menagerie. Ambrose Bierce, in
The Eyes of the Panther, tells of a young girl who, because of a prenatal
curse similar to that affecting Elsie Venner, is not wholly human. She is
conscious of her dual nature and tells the man she loves that she cannot
marry him since she is a panther by night. He thinks her mildly insane till
one night a settler sees a beast’s eyes glaring into his window and fires.
When they follow the blood-tracks, they find the girl dying. This is one of
the conventions of the werewolf story, the wounding of an animal that
escapes and the blood-trail that leads to a human being wounded just as the
beast was.
Elliott O’Donnell, in a volume called Werewolves published in London in
1912, gives serious credence to the existence of werewolves not only in the
past but also in the present. He tells a number of stories of what he claims
are authenticated instances of such beings in actual life. He relates the
experience of a man who told him that he had himself seen a youth turn

himself into a tiger after preparatory passes of enchantment. The watcher
made haste to climb a sacred Vishnu tree when the transformation was
complete. O’Donnell tells a tale of a widow with three children that married
a Russian nobleman. She saw him and his servant change into werewolves,
at least partially, remaining in a half state, devouring her children whom she
left behind in her escape.
O’Donnell relates several stories of authentic (according to him)
werewolf stories of England in recent times, giving the dates and places and
names of the persons who saw the beasts. The incidents may be similar to
those spoken of in Dickens’s Haunted House, where the famous “’ooded
woman with the howl” was seen,—or at least, many persons saw the owl
and knew that the woman must be near by. These witnesses of werewolves
may have seen animals, all right enough. Modernity is combined with
medieval superstition here, and it seems uncanny, for instance, to identify a
werewolf by means of an electric pocket flashlight.
In collections of folk-tales, the tribal legends of the American redmen as
well as of Kipling’s India and of England, there are various stories of
werewolves. Among primitive peoples there is a close relation between the
brute and the human and the attributing of human characteristics and
powers to the beast and vice versa is common, so that this supernatural
transfer of personality is natural enough. A madwolf might suggest the idea
for a werewolf.
Algernon Blackwood advances the theory that the werewolf is a true
psychical fact of profound importance, however it may have been garbled
by superstition. He thinks that the werewolf is the projection of the untamed
slumbering sanguinary instincts of man, “scouring the world in his fluidic
body, the body of desire.” As the mind wanders free from the conscious
control of the will in sleep, so the body may free itself from the fetters of
mind or of custom and go forth in elemental form to satisfy its craving to
slay, to slake its wild thirst for blood. O’Donnell says that werewolves may
be phantasms of the dead that cannot be at peace, or a certain kind of
Elementals. He also thinks that they may be the projection of one phase of
man’s nature, of the cruelty latent in mankind that seeks expression in this
way. According to that theory, a chap might have a whole menagerie inside
him, to turn loose at intervals, which would be exciting but rather risky for
society. It was doubtless a nature such as this that Maupassant attempts to

describe in his story The Wolf, where the man has all the instincts of the
wolf yet never changes his human form.
The werewolf in fiction has suffered the same leveling influence that we
have observed in the case of the ghost, the devil, the witch, and the
vampire. He is becoming a more psychical creature, a romantic figure to be
sympathized with, rather than a beast to be utterly condemned. In recent
fiction the werewolf is represented as an involuntary and even unconscious
departure from the human, who is shocked when he learns the truth about
himself. Whether he be the victim of a divine curse, an agent of atavistic
tendencies, or a being who thus gives vent to his real and brutish instincts,
we feel a sympathy with him. We analyze his motives—at a safe distance—
seek to understand his vagaries and to estimate his kinship with us. We
think of him now as a noble figure in fiction, a lupine Galahad like
Blackwood’s, a renunciatory hero like Eugene Field’s or what not. Or we
reflect that he may be a case of metempsychosis and treat him courteously,
for who knows what we may be ourselves some day? The werewolf has not
figured in poetry or in the drama as have other supernatural beings, as the
ghost, the devil, the witch, the vampire,—one wonders why. He is a
dramatic figure and his character-analysis might well furnish themes for
poetry though stage presentation would have its difficulties.

Perhaps the revival of interest in Elizabethan literature has had a good
deal to do with the use of supernatural beings in literature of recent times.
The devil and the dæmonic spirits he controls, the witches and wizards, the
vampires, the enchanted animals, to whom he delegates a part of his
infernal power, appear as impressive moral allegories, mystical stories of
life, symbols of truths. As literature is a reflection of life, the evil as well as
the good enters in. But since the things of the spirit are intangible they must
be represented in concrete form, as definite beings whom our minds can
apprehend. Thus the poets and dramatists and story-makers must show us
images to shadow forth spiritual things. As with a shudder we close the
books that tell us horrifying tales of satanic spirits, of accursed beings that
are neither wholly animal nor human, of mortals with diabolic powers, we
shrink from the evils of the soul that they represent, and recognize their
essential truth in the guise of fiction.

CHAPTER V

Supernatural Life

T
HE fiction dealing with immortal life shows, more than any other
aspect of the subject, humanity’s deep hunger for the supernatural.
Whether it be stories of continuance of earthly existence without
death as in the legends of the undying persons like the Wandering Jew; or of
supernaturally renewed or preserved youth as described in the tales of the
elixir of life; or of the transference of the soul after death into another body;
or of life continued in the spirit in other worlds than this after the body’s
death,—all show our craving for something above and beyond what we
know here and now. Conscious of our own helplessness we long to feel
ourselves leagued with immortal powers; shrinking affrighted from the
grave’s near brink we yearn for that which would spare us death’s sting and
victory. Sadly knowing with what swift, relentless pace old age is
overtaking us we would fain find something to give us eternal youth. But
since we cannot have these gifts in our own persons we seek them
vicariously in fiction, and for a few hours’ leisured forgetfulness we are
endowed with immortal youth and joy. Or, looking past death, we can feel
ourselves more than conquerors in a life beyond.
“Oh world unknowable, we touch thee!
Inapprehensible, we clutch thee!”

We somehow snatch a strange comfort from these stories of a life beyond
our own. We are comforted for our mortality when we see the tragedy that
dogs the steps of those who may not die, whether Swift’s loathsome
Struldbrugs or the Wandering Jew. Our own ignorance of the future makes
us credulous of any man’s dream of heaven and at the same time sceptical
of anybody else’s hell. We are such indestructible optimists that we can take

any sort of raw material of fiction and transmute it into stuff that hope is
made of.
The Wandering Jew. There is no legend more impressive than that of the
Wandering Jew, and none save the Faust theme that has so influenced
literature. The story is as deathless as the person it portrays and has
wandered into as many lands, though it is impossible to trace with certainty
its origin or first migrations. There is an Arabian legend of one Samiri who
forever wanders, crying, “Touch me not!” as there is a Buddhist account of
a man cursed for working miracles for show, to whom Buddha said, “Thou
shalt not attain Nirvana while my religion lasts.” There are similar Chinese
and Indian versions and the idea occurs in English folk-tales, where the
plovers are thought to be the souls of those that crucified Christ, condemned
to fly forever over the world, uttering their plaintive cry.
The first appearance of the Wandering Jew in English literature is in the
Chronicles of Roger of Wendover, who reports the legend as being told at
the monastery of St. Albans by an Armenian bishop, in 1228, but to hearers
already familiar with it. There are two distinct versions of the story
appearing in English literature. One relates that the wanderer is a certain
Cartapholus, a servant in Pilate’s palace, who struck Jesus a brutal blow as
He was led forth to death, and to whom He said, “Thou shalt wander till I
come!” The other is of German origin giving the personality of Ahasuerus,
a shoemaker of Jerusalem, who mocked the Savior as He passed to
Golgotha. Bowed under the weight of the cross, Christ leaned for a
moment’s rest against the door of the little shop, but Ahasuerus said
scornfully, “Go faster, Jew!” With one look of deep reproach, Christ
answered, “I go, but tarry thou till I come!”
The Wandering Jew story is cosmopolitan, used in the literature of many
lands. In Germany it has engaged the attention of Berthold Auerbach,
Kingemann, Schlegel, Julius Mosen, and Chamisso, in France that of Edgar
Quinet and Eugene Sue. Hans Christian Andersen has used it while
Heijermans has written a Dutch play on it and Carmen Sylva, late Queen of
Roumania, made it the basis for a long dramatic poem.
The theme has appeared in various forms in English literature, besides in
fiction where it has been most prominent. A comedy[155] was published in
1797, by Andrew Franklin, though the wanderer is here used only as a hoax.
Wordsworth has a poem entitled The Song of the Wandering Jew, and
Shelley was fascinated by the legend, as we see from the fact that he used it

three times. One of his first poems, a long dramatic attempt, written at
eighteen, is The Wandering Jew, a fevered poem showing the same
weaknesses that his Gothic romances reveal, yet with a hint of his later
power. The Wandering Jew appears as a definite character in both Queen
Mab and Hellas, in the first Ahasuerus being summoned to testify
concerning God, while he appears in the latter to give supernatural vision of
events. In both poems he is very old, for in the first it is said:
“His port and mien bore marks of many years....
“Yet his cheek bore the mark of youth,” while in the latter he is described
as being “so old he seems to have outlived a world’s decay.” Shelley
follows the German version, as used in a fragment he picked up torn and
soiled in Lincoln’s Inn Fields, whose author he did not know.
Mr. Eubule-Evans, in a long dramatic poem of considerable power,[156]
tells the story of Theudas, who could be released from his doom of
immortality if only he would repent, but he will not. He renews his youth
every forty years, growing suddenly from a decrepit man to a handsome,
gifted youth, which naturally suggests complications of human love-affairs.
Other elements of supernaturalism are used, as angels, demons, and so forth
while the Æons and the Intermedii (whoever they are!) appear as chorus.
The Wandering Jew, a Christmas Carol,[157] retells the story with
variations and with some power. The Jew here is shown to be very old and
feeble, clad in antique raiment, with stigmata of the wounds on hands and
feet. He is symbolic of the Christ, of His failure to win men.
“For lo, at last I knew
The lineaments of that diviner Jew,
That like a Phantom passeth everywhere,
The world’s last hope and bitterest despair,
Deathless, yet dead!
And lo! while all men come and pass away
That phantom of the Christ, forlorn and gray,
Haunteth the earth, with desolate footfall.”

The Wandering Jew is seen definitely once in Gothic fiction, in Lewis’s
The Monk, where a mysterious stranger, bearing on his forehead a burning
cross imprinted, appears and is spoken of as the Wandering Jew. He is
unable to stay more than fourteen days in any one place but must forever
hurry on. Rev. T. Clark[158] gives a bird’s-eye view of history such as a
person of the long life and extensive migrations of the wanderer would see
it.

The idea of a deathless man appealed strongly to Hawthorne, who plays
with the theme in various passages in his works and notebooks. In A
Virtuoso’s Collection, where Peter Rugg, the Missing Man, is door-keeper
and where the collection includes a letter from the Flying Dutchman to his
wife, together with a flask of the elixir of life, the virtuoso himself is none
other than the Wandering Jew. He speaks of his destiny and says that human
prayers will not avail to aid him. The touch of his hand is like ice,
conveying a sense of spiritual as well as physical chill. The character
appears also as one of the guests in A Select Party, of whom the author
remarks: “This personage, however, had latterly grown so common by
mingling in all sorts of society and appearing at the beck of every
entertainer that he could hardly be deemed a proper guest in an exclusive
circle.” This bit of satire illustrates how common the theme had become at
that time in fiction.
There are various threads of narration tangled up with the Wandering Jew
motif. He is said by some writers to have supernatural power to heal
disease, while by others he is thought to be the helpless bearer of evil and
death. Eugène Sue in his novel represents him as carrying the plague,
knowing his awful destiny, yet, while wildly regretting it, powerless in the
clutch of fate. Here he appears as a voluntary agent of good toward the
Rennepont family and an involuntary minister of evil in other ways. An
anonymous story[159] uses the same idea of the plague association but
carries it further, for here the wanderer is not a personality but the plague
itself, passing like a doom over the world, which shows how far that phase
of the legend has gone.
The legend has been utilized variously to impress religious truths.
Charles Granville[160] writes a symbolic story with a definite religious
message. The idea of the immortal wanderer is represented as the concept
of a part of humanity urged by an earnest longing which dominates their
whole life and thought, the desire that a new kingdom of God might come.
The book is a social satire, an appeal for the coming of a real democracy,
real justice and genuine spirituality. George Croly[161] has for his purpose
the proving that Christ’s second coming is near at hand. Lew Wallace, who
himself uses the theme of the Wanderer, thought this book one of the half
dozen volumes which taken alone would constitute a British literature. We
are likely to find ourselves questioning Wallace’s judgment in the matter,
for while the novel is interesting and has a sermon impressed with some

interest, it is by no means a great piece of literature. Salathiel is pictured as
a young, enthusiastic, passionate Jew striving to defend his country against
the woes that threaten her. His life is given in detail immediately following
his unpardonable sin, and his definite career ends with the destruction of
Jerusalem, though his immortality is suggested at the close. The book
describes many supernatural happenings, the miraculous phenomena
accompanying the death of Christ and manifestations following the fate of
the city.
In Lew Wallace’s The Prince of India the deathless man appears again. In
the beginning of the story he enters a vault from which he removes the
treasure from mummy cases, remarking that the place has not been visited
since he was there a thousand years before. He has numerous impressive
experiences, such as seeing a monk that seems the reincarnation of Jesus,
and hearing again the centurion’s call to him. Wallace pictures the Jew as
old, a philosopher, in contrast to Salathiel’s impetuous youth. He is striving
to bring the sons of men into closer spiritual truth with each other and with
God, as Salathiel tries to prevent the material destruction of the city. The
sense of responsibility, the feeling of a mission toward others, expressed in
this novel, may be compared with that of Eugène Sue’s Wandering Jew who
acts as a friend to the Rennepont family, protecting their interests against
the wily Jesuits.
The Wandering Jew has been represented in many ways, with stress
placed on various aspects of his life and character. He has been depicted
psychologically, as a suffering human being, mythologically to illustrate the
growth and change in life, religiously to preach certain tenets and beliefs,
and symbolically to show forth the soul of man. He appears symbolically as
the creature accursed of God, driven forever in the face of doom. Shelley
and others show him as vainly attempting suicide, but living on, anguished
yet deathless, in the face of every effort to take his own life as in the teeth
of torture from others. He stands at once for the undying power of God’s
plan, and, as in Robert Buchanan’s version, for the typified failure of
Christ’s mission. He is used to prove that Christ’s second coming is near,
and to prove also that He will never come. To the Christian he stands for the
evidence of Christ’s power of divinity, while to the Jew he is a symbol of
that unhappy race that wanders ever, with no home in any land.
Besides those mentioned, other English and American writers who have
made use of the legend are Kipling; Bram Stoker, who discusses him in his

assembly of Famous Impostors; M. D. Conway, who gives various versions
of the story; David Hoffman, Henry Seton Merriman, S. Baring-Gould,
W. H. Ainsworth, and others.
A legend closely associated with this and yet separate, is that of a woman
who bore the curse of eternal wandering. One version brings in Herodias as
the doomed woman, while the character of Kundry in Parsifal represents
another feminine wanderer. William Sharp, in his Gypsy Christ, gives the
story differently still, saying that it is not correctly told in Parsifal. As
Sharp tells it, it is a piece of tragic symbolism. Kundry, a gypsy woman of
evil life, mocks Christ on Golgotha and demands of Him a sign, to whom
He says, “To thee and thine I bequeath the signs of my Passion to be a
shame and horror among thy people forevermore!” Upon her hands and feet
appear the stigmata of His wounds, never to fade away, and to be borne by
her descendants in every third generation. Various ones of her descendants
are crucified, and wherever the wanderers go on earth they bear the marks
of horror. The curse would be lifted from them only when a Gypsy Christ
should be born of a virgin; but then the Children of the Wind should be
dispersed and vanish from among men. In the last chapter Naomi
prophesies that she is to give birth to the Gypsy Christ.
The theme of the Wandering Jew, while rivalling the Faust legend in
impressiveness and in the frequence with which it has been used in
literature, yet is different in having had no adequate representation. No truly
great poem or drama or novel has been written concerning this tragic,
deathless character. Perhaps it may come yet. Only hints of his personality
have appeared in very recent fiction, such as the reincarnation in the
character of the young Jew in A. T. Quiller-Couch’s story, The Mystery of
Joseph Laquedem, or the humorous reference to him in Brander Matthews’s
Primer of Imaginary Geography, or The Holy Cross by Eugene Field,
where the wanderer is pitied by a Spanish priest in Cortez’s train in Mexico.
His prayers win forgiveness and the tortured Jew dies. After his death an
earthquake supernaturally splits a gulf on each side of the grave and a cross
of snow appears there, to remain forever. Perhaps the theme is fading out
now in fiction and drama, to disappear completely, or perhaps it is lying
forgotten for a while, waiting the master hand that shall give it adequate
treatment.
Elixir of Life. Immortality that proves such a curse in the case of the
Wandering Jew forms the basis for various other stories. The elixir of life

was a favorite theme with the Gothicists, being used by Maturin, Godwin,
and Shelley, and has continued to furnish complication for fiction since that
time. The theme has been popular on the continent as well as in England,
Balzac and Hoffman being the most impressive users of it.
Bulwer-Lytton, in A Strange Story, introduces the elixir of life together
with other forms of supernaturalism, such as mesmerism, magic, spectral
apparitions, invisible manifestations, awful bodiless Eyes, a gigantic Foot,
and so forth. Margrave attempts to concoct the potion that shall give him
endless life, but after mysterious preparations, incantations, and
supernatural manifestations, at the crucial moment a stampede of maddened
beasts, urged forward by the dreadful Foot, dashes the beaker from his lips.
The irreplaceable liquid wastes its force on the desert sands, where a magic
richness of herbage instantly springs up in contrast to the barrenness around
it. Flowers bloom, myriads of insects hover round them, and all is life, but
the man who sought the elixir with such pains lies dead. The author
suggests a symbolic meaning for his story, hinting that the scientist’s
laboratory holds many elixirs of life, that all growth and life are magical,
that all being is miraculous.
Rider Haggard, in She and Ayesha, its sequel, describes a wonderful
woman who possesses the secret of eternal life and has lived for thousands
of years, ever young and beautiful, supernaturally enchanting. Her magic
potion not only gives her length of days but protection against danger as
well, for her rival’s dagger glances harmlessly away from her, and she is
proof against chance and fate. She gains her immortal life partly by bathing
in a secret essence or vapor whose emanations give her mystic force and
immortal beauty. There are many other elements of supernaturalism in
association with the not impossible She,—magic vision, reincarnation, a
mystic light that envelops her body, the power to call up the dead, to
reanimate the skeletons in the desert and raise them to dreadful life. She is
an interesting but fearsome personality.
In Ahrinziman, by Anita Silvani, we have magic chemistry yielding up
the elixir of life. Jelul-uh-din has lived for five hundred years and looks
forward to a still more protracted existence. His magic drug not only gives
him prolonged life but will do anything he wishes besides, since he has
hypnotized it. Yet he is found dead. “On his wrists were marks of giant
fingers, scorched and burnt into the flesh like marks of hot iron. And on his
throat were marks of a similar hand which had evidently strangled him.” It

is apparent that his master, the De’il, got impatient and cut short the
leisurely existence that he felt belonged to him.
Hawthorne was greatly interested in the theme of the elixir of life. He
gives us two brews of it in Septimius Felton, one an Indian potion
concocted by an old sachem. The red man gets so old that his tribe find him
a great nuisance and obstacle to progress so they gravely request permission
to kill him. But his skull is so hard that the stone hammers are smashed
when they try to brain him, his skin so tough that no arrows will pierce it,
and nothing seems to avail. Finally they fill his mouth and nostrils with clay
and put him in the sun to bake, till presently his heart bursts with a loud
explosion, tearing his body to fragments. This brew of his is matched by
one made by an European scientist after long endeavors. Here the ultimate
ingredient is supposed to be a strange herb that grows from a mysterious
grave. At last, just when the youth thinks he has the right combination, the
woman who has lured him on to destruction dashes the cup from his lips,
saving him from the poison he would have drunk. The flower has grown
from the grave of her lover, whom the young scientist has murdered.
In The Dolliver Romance, that pathetic fragment Hawthorne left
unfinished at his death, we find another treatment of the theme. It seems
symbolic that in his old age and failing powers, he should have been
thinking of immortal youth, of deathless life. In this story various magical
elements are introduced. The herbs grown in old Grandsir Dolliver’s garden
have a strange power, for when a woman lays a flower from one on her
breast, it glows like a gem and lends a bloom of youth to her cheeks. The
old man seeks the one unknown essence, the incalculable element necessary
to make up the elixir of life, as did the youth in Septimius Felton. He drinks
occasional mouthfuls of a strange cordial that he finds in an old bottle on
the shelf, and seems to grow younger and stronger. He, too, like Septimius,
has a visitor; a man that demands the cordial as belonging to him by
ancestral right, snatches it from the aged hands, drinks it down at a draught
and grows violently young, but dies in convulsions.
In Dr. Heidigger’s Experiment Hawthorne gives us another sad symbolic
story of the quest of the elixir of youth. The old physician invites four aged
friends to make an experiment, to drink of a cordial which shall restore
youth, but which he himself is too wise to share. The strange potion proves
its power by restoring to beauty and perfume a rose that has been dead for
over fifty years. When the old persons drink they become young and happy

and beautiful once more. Age drops from them like a mantle discarded and
the world glows again with passion and color and joy. But alas! it is only
ephemeral, for the effects soon pass away and senility is doubly tragic after
one snatched hour of joy and youth. There is a sad philosophy of life
expressed in these symbolic allegories such as Hawthorne alone knows how
to tell.
Elsewhere Hawthorne shows his deep interest in the theme. In The
Birthmark the scientist intimates that he could brew the life elixir if he
would, but that it would produce a discord in nature such as all the world,
and chiefly he that drank it, would curse at last. The subject is referred to in
other places,[162] and a flask of the precious, dreadful elixir is one of the
treasures in the Virtuoso’s collection. In a note concerning his use of the
theme in The Dolliver Romance Hawthorne states that he has been accused
of plagiarizing from Dumas, but that in reality Dumas plagiarized from him,
since his book was many years the earlier.
H. G. Wells[163] uses this theme combined with the transfer of
personality. An aged man bargains with a youth to make him his heir on
certain conditions. The purpose, unknown to the young fellow, is to rob him
of his youth to reanimate the old man. A magic drink transfers the
personality of the octogenarian to the body of youth and leaves the young
man’s soul cabined in the worn-out frame. But the drug is more powerful
than Mr. Elvesham supposed, for it brings death to both who drink it and
the bargain has a ghastly climax. Barry Pain has a somewhat similar
situation of the tragic miscalculation, in The Wrong Elixir, the story of an
alchemist who brews the life-giving potion but means to keep it all to
himself. On a certain night he will drink it and become immortally young,
in a world of dying men. While he waits, a gypsy girl asks him to give her a
poison to kill a man she hates. He prepares the potion for her and sets it
aside. He drinks at the time he planned, but instead of eternal life, the
draught brings him swift-footed death. Does he drink the wrong elixir, or
have all his calculations been wrong?
An example of the way in which the magic of the old fiction of
supernaturalism has been transferred into the scientific in modern times, is
seen in The Elixir of Youth, by Albert Bigelow Paine. A man in an upper
room alone is wishing that he had the gift of immortal youth, when a
stranger in black enters and answers his thought. He tells him that to read
the mind is not black magic, but science; that he is not a magician, but a

scientist, and as such he has compounded the elixir of youth, which he will
give to him. This drug will enable a man to halt his age at any year he
chooses and to make it permanent, as Peter Ibbetson and the Duchess of
Towers did in their dream-life. The stranger leaves the flask with the man
and goes away. But the one who wished for immortal life decides that after
all God must know best, and, though his decision not to drink has not
crystalized, he is not greatly sorry when the flask is shattered and the liquid
spilled. This is symbolic of the real wisdom of life.
The frequent use of the theme of the elixir of life, of deathless youth,
illustrates how humanity clutches at youth with pathos and shrinks from
age. Red Ranrahan, the loved singer of Ireland, whom W. B. Yeats creates
for us with unforgettable words, makes a curse against old age when he
feels it creeping on him.
Various other stories of supernatural length of years appear in English
fiction, besides those based on the definite use of the life elixir. The Woman
from Yonder, by Stephen French Whitman, shows us the revived,
reanimated body of a woman who has been buried in a glacier since
Hannibal crossed the Alps, till she is dug out and miraculously restored, by
blood-transfusion, by an interfering scientist. The writer queries, “If the
soul exists, where had that soul been? What regions did it relinquish at the
command of the reviving body?” A humorous application of the idea of the
deathless man is seen in A. Conan Doyle’s The Los Amigos Fiasco, where
the citizens of a frontier town, wishing to kill a criminal by some other
method than the trite rope, try to kill him by putting him in connection with
a big dynamo. But their amateur efforts have a peculiar effect. They
succeed only in so magnetizing his body that it is impossible for him to die.
They try shooting, hanging, and so forth, but he has gained such an access
of vitality from electricity that he comes out unscathed through everything,
resembling the ancient sachem in Hawthorne’s novel.
The Flying Dutchman forms the theme for stories in folklore, of a
wanderer of the seas condemned to touch shore only once in seven years,
because he swore he would round Cape Horn in spite of heaven and hell.
Hawthorne has preserved a letter from the Dutchman to his wife, in the
Virtuoso’s collection, and John Kendrick Bangs has furnished the inevitable
parody in his Pursuit of the Houseboat. The Dead Ship of Harpwell is
another story of a wandering, accursed ship. There is a similar legend told

by C. M. Skinner,[164] of a man, who, for a cruel murder of a servant, was
condemned to wear always a halter round his neck and was unable to die.
Bram Stoker furnishes us with several interesting specimens of
supernatural life, always tangled with other uncanny motives. The count, in
Dracula, who has lived his vampire life for centuries, is said to be hale and
fresh as if he were forty. Of course, all vampires live to a strange lease on
life, but most of them are spirits rather than human beings as was Dracula.
In The Lair of the White Worm, Stoker tells of a woman who was at once an
alluring woman and a snake thousands of years old. The snake is so large
that, when it goes out to walk, it looks like a high white tower, and can gaze
over the tops of the trees.
Bulwer-Lytton’s The Haunters and the Haunted tells the story of a
mysterious being who passes through untold years with a strange power
over life and the personality of others. He appears, no man knows whence
nor why, and disappears as strangely, while about his whole career is a
shroud of mystery. Thackeray, in his Notch on the Axe, burlesques this and
similar stories in playful satire, yet seems to enjoy his theme. It is not
wholly a burlesque, we may suppose. He adds a touch of realism to his
humorous description by the fact that, throughout his hero’s long-continued
life, or series of lives—one doesn’t know which—he retains always his
German-Jewish accent. Andrew Lang describes[165] the person who may
have been the original of these stories in real life. Horace Walpole has
mentioned him in his letters and he seems to have a teasing mystery about
his life and career that makes him much talked-of.
Edwin Lester Arnold[166] tells a story of continued life with an Oriental
setting and mystery. Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward, by the
introduction of a magic sleep makes a man live far beyond the natural span
and be able to see into the distant future, while the youth in Mark Twain’s A
Connecticut Yankee at King Arthur’s Court has a magic length of life, living
a dual existence, in Arthurian England and in present-day America. H. G.
Wells[167] uses something of the same idea, in that he makes his hero live a
very long time in a few hours, compressing time into minute tabules, as it
were, as he does in another story of the magic accelerator that makes a man
live fast and furiously with tenfold powers at crucial moments. The story of
Peter Rugg, the Missing Man, is that of another immortal wanderer, whose
story is told in Myths and Legends of Our Land, and utilized by Alfred
Austin. He goes out into a storm, saying, “I will see home to-night or I will

never see it!” He flies forever pursued by the storm, never resting, and
never seeing his home. This is symbolic of the haunted soul pursued by its
own destiny.
The theme of the elixir of life is one of the old motifs of supernaturalism
retained in modern fiction. The conventional alchemist has given place to a
more up-to-date investigator in the chemical laboratory, yet the same thrill
of interest is imparted by the thought of a magic potion prepared by man
that shall endow him with earthly immortality. The theme has changed less
in its treatment and symbolism than most of the supernatural elements in
fiction, for though we see the added elements of modern satire and
symbolism, its essential aspects remain the same.
Metempsychosis. The idea of metempsychosis, the thought that at death
the soul of a human being may pass into another mortal body or into a
lower stage, into an animal or even a plant, has been used considerably in
English fiction. This Oriental belief has its basis in antiquity, in animistic
ideas in primitive culture. One of the earliest appearances of the theme in
English fiction is that middle-eighteenth-century story of Dr. John
Hawkesworth’s,[168] an account of a soul that has not behaved itself seemly,
so descends in the spiritual scale till it ends by being a flea. The German
Hoffmann used the theme repeatedly, and Poe, who was to a certain extent
influenced by his supernaturalism, employs it in several stories. In A Tale of
the Ragged Mountains, the young man named Bedlo experiences, in dreams
of extraordinary vividness, the life of battle, of confusion, ending in death,
in a tropical city. He sees himself die, struck on the temple by a poisoned
arrow. He is recognized by an elderly man as the exact counterpart of a Mr.
Oldeb who perished in the manner dreamed of in a battle in Benares. Mr.
Bedlo, while wandering in the mountains of Virginia, contracts a cold and
fever, for the cure of which leeches are applied, but by mistake a poisonous
sangsue is substituted for the leech, and the patient dies of a wound on the
temple, similar to that caused by a poisoned arrow. Poe’s concept in other
stories is not that of the conventionally easy passage of the soul into the
body of a new-born babe that wouldn’t be expected to put up much of a
fight, but he makes the psychic feature the central horror, saying in that
connection that man is on the brink of tremendous psychical discoveries. In
Morella the theme is used with telling power, where the wife, once greatly
loved but now loathed, on her deathbed tells her husband that her child will
live after her. The daughter grows up into supernatural likeness of her

mother, but remains nameless, since her father, for a reason he cannot
analyze, hesitates to give her any name. But at last, as she stands before the
altar to be christened, some force outside the father causes him to call her
Morella.
What more than fiend convulsed the features of my child, and overspread them with the hues of
death, as, starting at that scarcely audible sound, she turned her glassy eyes from earth to heaven, and
falling prostrate on the black slabs of our ancestral vault, responded, “I am here”!

The young girl is found to be dead and the father says: “With my own
hands I bore her to the tomb; and I laughed, with a long and bitter laugh, as
I found no traces of the first in the charnel where I laid the second Morella.”
An obvious imitation of Poe’s story is found in Bram Stoker’s novel, The
Jewel of Seven Stars, where the soul of an Egyptian princess enters into the
body of a baby born to one of the explorers who rifle her tomb. The child
grows into the perfect duplicate of the princess, even showing on her wrists
the marks of violence that cut off the mummy’s hand. The Egyptian’s
familiar, a mummified cat, comes to life to revenge itself upon the
archæologists who have disturbed the tomb. When by magic incantations
and scientific experiments combined, the collectors try to revivify the
mummy, the body mysteriously disappears, and the young girl is found
dead, leading us to suppose that the reanimated princess has stolen the girl’s
life for her own.
In Ligeia, another of Poe’s morbid studies of metempsychosis, the theme
is clearly announced, as quoted from Joseph Glanville: “Man doth not yield
himself to the angels nor unto death utterly save only through the weakness
of his own feeble will.” The worshipped Ligeia dies, and in an hour of
madness her husband marries the Lady Rowena. The bride soon sickens and
as the husband watches alone by her bed at midnight, he sees drops of ruby
liquid fall from some mysterious source, into the wine he is offering her.
When the Lady Rowena presently dies, the husband, again alone with her,
sees the corpse undergo an awful transformation. It is reanimated, but the
body that lives is not that of Rowena, but of Ligeia, who has come back to
life again by exerting her deathless will over the physical being of her rival.
The climax with which the story closes has perhaps no parallel in fiction.
As for the ruby drops, are we to think of them as an elixir of life for the
dead Ligeia struggling back to being, or as poison to slay the living
Rowena?

Ligeia’s story is reflected, or at least shows an evident influence, in The
Second Wife, by Mary Heaton Vorse. Here again the dead wife comes to
oust her supplanter, but in this instance the interloper does not die, but
without dying merely becomes the person and the personality of the first
wife. The change is gradual but incontrovertible, felt by the woman herself
before it is complete, and noticed by the husband and the mother-in-law.
Here the human will, indestructible by death, asserts itself over mortal flesh
and effects a transfer of personality. But where did the second wife’s soul
go, pray,—the “she o’ the she” as Patience Worth would say?
A similar transfer of soul, effected while both persons are living but
caused by the malignance of an evil dead spirit, is found in Blackwood’s
The Terror of the Twins. A father, who resents the fact that instead of a
single heir twins are born to him, swears in his madness before he dies, that
before their majority he will bring it to pass that there shall be only one. By
the help of powers from the Pit he filches from the younger his vitality, his
strength of mind and soul and body, his personality, and gives this access of
power to the elder. The younger dies a hopeless idiot and the elder lives on
with a double dower of being. Ambrose Bierce carries this idea to a climax
of horror,[169] when he makes an evil spirit take possession of a dead
mother’s body and slay her son, who recognizes his loved mother’s face,
knows that it is her eyes that glare fiend-like at him, her hands that are
strangling him,—yet cannot know that it is a hideous fiend in her corpse.
The theme of metempsychosis is found tangled up with various other
motives in fiction, the use of the elixir of life, hypnotism, dream-
supernaturalism, witchcraft and so forth. Rider Haggard has given a curious
combination of metempsychosis, and the supernatural continuance of life
by means of the elixir, in She and its sequel, Ayesha. The wonderful woman,
the dread She-who-must-be-obeyed who keeps her youth and beauty by
means of bathing in the magic fluid, recognizes in various stages of her
existence the lover whom she has known thousands of years before. Not
having the advantage of the Turkish bath or patent medicine, he dies
periodically and has to be born all over again in some other century. This is
agitating to the lady, so she determines to inoculate him with immortality so
that they can reign together without those troublesome interruptions of
mortality. But the impatient lover insists on kissing her, which proves too
much for him, since her divinity is fatal to mere mankind, so he dies again.

The close relation between metempsychosis and hypnotism is shown in
various stories. Several cases of troublesome atavistic personality or
reincarnation are cured by psychotherapy. Theodora, a young woman in a
novel by Frances Fenwick Williams, bearing that title-name, realizes herself
to be the reincarnation of a remote ancestress, an Orientalist, a witch, who
has terrorized the country with her sorceries. She is cured of her mental
hauntings by means of hypnotism. Another novel by the same author,[170]
gives also the reincarnation of a witch character in modern life, with a cure
effected by psycho-analysis. The young woman discovers herself to be the
heiress of a curse, which is removed only after study of pre-natal influences
and investigations concerning the subconscious self.
As is seen by these examples, the relation between witchcraft and
metempsychosis is very close, since in recent fiction the witch characters
have unusual powers of returning to life in some other form. In Algernon
Blackwood’s Ancient Sorceries, we have witch-metempsychosis on a large
scale, the population of a whole village being but the reanimations of long-
dead witches and wizards who once lived there. I know of no other case of
mob-metempsychosis in English fiction, but the instances where several are
reincarnated at once are numerous. Algernon Blackwood’s recent novel,
Jules Le Vallon, is based on a story of collective reincarnation, the chief
characters in the dramatic action realizing that they have lived and been
associated with each other before, and feeling that they must expiate a sin
of a previous existence. Another recent novel by Blackwood, The Wave, has
for its theme the reincarnation of the principal characters, realized by them.
Blackwood has been much drawn to psychic subjects in general and
metempsychosis in particular, for it enters into many of his stories. In Old
Clothes he gives us an instance of a child who knows herself to be the
reborn personality of some one else and suffers poignantly in reliving the
experiences of that long-dead ancestress, while those around her are
recognized as the companions of her life of the far past, though they are
unaware of it. The fatuous remark of lovers in fiction, that they feel that
they have lived and loved each other in a previous existence, is a literary
bromide now, but has its basis in a recurrence in fiction. Antonio
Fogazzaro’s novel, The Woman, is a good example in Italian,—for the
woman feels that she and her lover are reincarnations of long-dead selves
who have suffered tragic experiences together, which morbid idea
culminates in tragic madness.

The Mystery of Joseph Laquedem, by A. T. Quiller-Couch, is a striking
story of dual reincarnation. A young Jew in England and a half-witted girl, a
farmer’s daughter, recognize in each other and in themselves, the
personalities of a young Jew led to the lions for becoming a Christian, and a
Roman princess who loved him. They recall their successive lives wherein
they have known and loved each other, to be separated by cruel destiny
each time, but at last they die a tragic death together. The character of the
man here is given additional interest for us in that he is said to be a
reincarnation of Cartapholus, Pilate’s porter, who struck Jesus, bidding Him
go faster, and who is immortalized as the Wandering Jew. Here he lives
successive lives rather than a continuous existence. Somewhat similar to
this is another combination of hypnotism and metempsychosis in The Witch
of Prague, by F. Marion Crawford, where Uorna makes Israel Kafka go
through the physical and psychical tortures of Simon Abeles, a young Jew
killed by his people for becoming a Christian. By hypnotism the young man
is made to pass through the experiences of a dead youth of whom he has
never heard, and to die his death anew.
There is a close relation between dreams and metempsychosis, as is seen
in certain stories. Kipling’s charming prose idyll, The Brushwood Boy, may
be called a piece of dream-metempsychosis, for the youth and girl when
they first meet in real life recognize in each other the companions of their
childhood and adolescent dream-life, and complete their dual memories.
They have dreamed the same dreams even to minute details of
conversation, and familiar names. Du Maurier combines the two motives
very skillfully in his novels, for it is in successive dreams that the Martian
reveals herself to Barty Joscelyn telling him of her life on another planet,
and inspiring him to write—or writing for him—books of genius, before
she takes up earthly life in one of his children. She tells him that she will
come to him no more in dreams, but that she will live in the child that is to
be born. And in dual dreams Peter Ibbetson and the Duchess of Towers live
over again their childhood life together, are able to find at will their golden
yesterdays, and know in happy reality the joys of the past, while the present
keeps them cruelly apart. They are able to call back to shadowy life their
common ancestors, to see and hear the joys, the work, the griefs they knew
so long ago. They plumb their sub-consciousness, dream over again their
sub-dreams, until they at last not only see these long-dead men and women,
but become them.

We could each be Gatienne for a space (though not both of us together) and when we resumed our
own personality again we carried back with it a portion of hers, never to be lost again—strange
phenomenon if the reader will but think of it, and constituting the germ of a comparative personal
immortality on earth.

Not only does Peter live in the past, but he has the power to transport
these dead ancestors of his to his present and let them share in his life, so
that Gatienne, a French woman dead for generations, lives over again in an
English prison as Peter Ibbetson, or travels as Mary Towers, seeing things
she never had dreamed of in her own life.
H. G. Wells in A Dream of Armageddon gives a curious story of the
dream-future. A man in consecutive visions sees himself killed. He then
dreams that he is another man, living in a different part of the world, far in
the future, till he sees himself die in his second personality. He describes his
experiences as given in “a dream so accurate that afterwards you remember
little details you had forgotten.” He suffers tortures of love and grief, so that
his dream-life of the future is infinitely more real to him than his actual
existence of his own time. What was the real “him o’ him,” to quote
Patience Worth, the man of the dream-future, or the business man of the
present telling the story to his friend?
A different version of metempsychosis is shown in The Immortal
Gymnasts, by Marie Cher, for here the beloved trio, Pantaloon, Harlequin
and Columbine are embodied as human beings and come to live among
men. Harlequin has the power of magic vision which enables him to see
into the minds and hearts of mortals by means of “cloud-currents.” This
question of—shall we say transmigration?—of fictive characters into actual
life is found in various stories, such as Kipling’s The Last of the Stories,
John Kendrick Bangs’ The Rebellious Heroine, and others. It illustrates the
fantastic use to which every serious theme is sooner or later put. There is no
motif in supernatural literature that is not parodied in some form or other, if
only by suggestion.
The symbolic treatment of metempsychosis is strongly evident in recent
fiction, as the theme lends itself particularly well to the allegoric and
symbolic style. Barry Pain’s Exchange shows aspects of transmigration
different from the conventional treatment, for he describes the soul of the
old man as giving up its right to peace that it might purchase ease for a soul
he loved. He passes into the body of a captive bird beating its hopeless
wings against the bars and tortured with pain and thirst, as a mark of the

witch woman’s wrath, while the soul of the young girl goes into the body of
a snow-white lamb that lives a day then is set free. As she passes by, in the
state of a freed soul, she sees the piteous bird, and says to herself, “I am
glad I was never a bird.”
Algernon Blackwood, in The Return, gives a peculiar story of
metempsychosis, where the selfish materialist finds himself suddenly
reinforced with a new personality from without. His eyes are opened
miraculously to the magic and beauty of the world, and he knows beyond
doubt that his friend, the artist, who promised to come to him when he died,
has died and that his soul has become a part of his own being. The most
impressive example of this sudden merging of two natures, two souls into
one, is found in Granville Barker’s Souls on Fifth. Here a man suddenly
acquires, or recognizes, the power to see the souls that linger earth-bound
around him, and comes to have a strange sympathy with that of a woman,
whom he calls the “Little Soul.” When he speaks of going away, after a
time, she begs him not to leave her since she is very lonely in this
wilderness of unbodied souls. She asks that if he will not take her into his
soul, he carry her to some wide prairie, and there in the unspaced expanse
leave her,—but instead he gives a reluctant consent for her to enter into his
life. He presses the little symbolic figure to his heart, then feels a new sense
of being, of personality, and knows that her soul has become forever a part
of his.
Lord Dunsany, who lends a strange, new beauty to every supernatural
theme he touches, has a little prose-poem of symbolic metempsychosis,
called Usury, where Yohu, one of the evil spirits, lures the shadows to work
for him by giving them gleaming lives to polish.
And ever Yohu lures more shadows and sends them to brighten his Lives, sending the old Lives
out again to make them brighter still; and sometimes he gives to a shadow a Life that was once a
king’s and sendeth him with it down to the earth to play the part of a beggar, or sometimes he sendeth
a beggar’s Life to play the part of a king. What careth Yohu?

Spiritualism and Psychical Research. The influence of modern
Spiritualism and Psychical Research on the literature of supernaturalism has
been marked, especially of late years. It would be inevitable that
movements which interest so many persons, among them many of more
than ordinary intelligence, should be reflected in fiction. These two aspects
of the subject will be treated together since they are closely allied. For
though Spiritualism is a form of religion and Psychical Research a new

science,—and so-called religion and so-called science are not always
parallel—the lines of investigation here are similar. While Spiritualism
endeavors to get in touch with the spirits of the dead that the living may be
comforted and enlightened, and Psychical Research attempts to classify the
supposedly authentic cases of such communication, and in so much their
methods of approach are different,—yet the results may be discussed
together.
Hawthorne was interested in Spiritualism as literary material, since a
discussion of it is introduced in Blithedale Romance and various passages in
his notebooks treat of the matter showing the fascination it had for him.
Mrs. Elizabeth Stuart Phelps Ward, in addition to her fictional treatises of
heaven, takes up Spiritualism as well. In The Day of My Death she gives a
satiric account of the return of a spirit who says he is a lost soul tortured in
hell. He doubtless deserves it, for he sticks the baby full of pins and ties it
to a tree, and folds the clothes from the wash in the shape of corpses. He is
still interested in this life, however, since he requests a piece of squash pie.
In Kentucky’s Ghost she depicts a spirit actuated by definite malice. In the
previous story seven mediums tell a man that he will die at a certain day
and hour, but he lives cheerfully on.
William Dean Howells has given a study in his usual kindly satire and
sympathetic seriousness, of the phenomena of Spiritualism and mesmerism,
in The Undiscovered Country. Dr. Boynton, a mistaken zealot, holds
seances assisted by his daughter, a delicate, sensitive girl who is physically
prostrated after each performance and begs her father to spare her. She acts
as medium where the usual effects of rapping, table levitation, and so forth
take place, where spirit hands wave in the air and messages, grave and
jocular, are delivered. The characterization is handled with skill to bring out
the sincerity of each person involved in the web of superstition and false
belief, and Howells shows real sympathy with each, the scoffers as well as
the misguided fanatics. It is only when the doctor looks death in the face
that he realizes his error and seeks to know by faith in the Bible the truths
of the far country of the soul.
Hamlin Garland has shown considerable interest in Spiritualism in his
fiction. He refuses to commit himself as to his own opinion of the question,
but he has written two novels dealing with it, The Tyranny of the Dark and
The Shadow World. The former is considerably like Howells’s novel, for
here also a young girl is made the innocent victim of fanatics, her mother

and a preacher who has fallen in love with her. She is made to take part in
spiritualistic manifestations, whether as a victim of fraud or as a genuine
medium the author leaves in doubt. When the girl casts him off the preacher
kills himself that he may come into closer communication with her after
death than he has been able to do in life. Richard Harding Davis has
contributed a volume with a similar plot, the exploitation of an innocent
and, of course, beautiful girl by fanatics, in Vera the Medium. Here the girl
is more than half aware that she is a fraud and in her last seance, at the
conclusion of which she is to be carried triumphantly away by her lover, the
New York district attorney, she dramatically confesses her deception. As a
sympathy-getter, she pleads that she was very lonely, that because her
grandmother and mother were mediums, she had been cut off from society.
“I used to play round the kitchen stove with Pocahontas and Alexander the
Great, and Martin Luther lived in our china closet.”
David Belasco’s The Return of Peter Grimm, drama and novel, is based
upon spiritualistic manifestations. We are told that the “envelope” or
shadow-self of a sleeper has been photographed by means of radio-
photography. When a certain part of the shadow body is pricked with a pin,
as the cheek, the corresponding portion of the sleeper’s body is seen to
bleed. Peter Grimm comes back from the other world to direct the actions
of the living, and though at first only a child sees him,—for children are the
best sensitives save animals,—eventually the adults recognize him also and
yield to his guidance. Spiritualism enters directly or indirectly into many
works of fiction of late years. Whether people believe in it or not, they are
thinking and writing about it. The subject receives its usual humorous turn
in various stories, as Nelson Lloyd’s The Last Ghost in Harmony, the story
of a specter who complains of the scientific unimaginativeness of his
village, saying that though he had entreated the spooks to hold out for a
little while as he had heard Spiritualism was headed that way and would
bring about a revival of interest in ghosts, the spirits all got discouraged and
quit the place. And we recall Sandy’s mournful comment to Mark Twain’s
Captain Stormfield, that he wished there was something in that miserable
Spiritualism, so he could send word back to the folks.
The Proceedings of the Psychical Research Society have a twofold
association with literature, for not only have various modern novels and
stories been inspired by such material, but the instances recorded are similar
in many cases to the classical ghost stories. Lacy Collison-Morley in his

Greek and Roman Ghost Stories says, “There are a number of stories of the
passing of souls which are curiously like some of those collected by the
Psychical Research Society, in the Fourth Book of Gregory the Great’s
Dialogues.” The double source of many modern stories may be found by a
comparative study of Collison-Morley’s book and Myers’s Human
Personality, while G. H. Gerould’s volume, The Grateful Dead, introduces
recent instances that are like classical stories. The inability of the soul to
have rest in the other world if its body was unburied, as held by the
ancients, is reflected in Gothic romance, Elizabethan drama as well as in the
classics. The ghost of Jack, whom Peele tells us about, is a case of a ghost
coming back to befriend his undertaker. From these comparisons it would
appear that there is something inherently true to humanity in these beliefs,
for the revenge ghost and the grateful dead have appeared all along the line.
Perhaps human personality is largely the same in all lands and all times, and
ghosts have the same elemental emotions however much they may have
acquired a veneer of modernity.
There are many instances of the compact-ghost, the spirit who returns
just after death in accordance with a promise made in life, to manifest
himself to some friend or to some skeptic. Algernon Blackwood gives
several stories based on that theme, one a curious case where the ghost is so
lifelike his friend does not dream he is not the living man, and assigns him
to a bedroom. Later he is invisible, yet undoubtedly present, for his heavy
breathing, movements of the covers, and impress on the bed are beyond
dispute. Afterwards, by Fred C. Smale, shows a ghost returning to attend a
neighborhood club. When his name is called by mistake, he takes part on
the program, speaking through the lips of a young man present, who goes
off in a cataleptic trance. During this coma the youth, who is ignorant of
music, gives a technical discussion of notation, analyzing diatonic semi-
tones and discussing the note a nightingale trills on. When he wakes he says
he has felt a chill and a touch. Alice Brown relates a story of a lover who
promised to come to his sweetheart at the moment of death, but who, like
Ahimeas in the Bible, runs before he is ready, and keeps his ghostly tryst
while the rescuers bring him back to life. He hasn’t really been drowned at
all.
A recent novelette by Frances Hodgson Burnett, called The White People,
has psychical phenomena for its central interest. A little child, born after her
father’s tragic death and when her dying mother is conscious of his spiritual

presence, grows up with a strange sensitiveness to manifestations from the
other world. Her home is on a lonely estate in Scotland, so that her chief
companionship is with the “white people,” the spirits of the dead, though
she does not so recognize them. Her playmate is Wee Brown Elsbeth, who
has been murdered hundreds of years before, and she is able to see the dead
hover near their loved ones wherever she goes. So when she comes to
realize what a strange vision is hers, she has no horror of death, and when
her lover dies she does not grieve, but waits to see him stand smiling beside
her as in life. The theme of the story is the nearness of the dead to the
living, the thin texture of the veil that separates the two worlds.
Basil King tells a poignant story of a soul trying vainly to return in body
to right a wrong done in life but unable to accomplish her purpose by
physical means. At last she effects it by impressing the mind of a living
woman who carries out the suggestion psychically given. One of the most
effective recent accounts of a spirit’s return to earth to influence the life of
the living, to give messages or to control destiny, is in Ellen Glasgow’s The
Shadowy Third. Here the ghost of a child, a little girl whom her stepfather
has done to death for her money, returns to cause his death in an unusual
way. She throws her little skipping-rope carelessly on the stairway where he
must trip up in it when he sees her phantom figure in front of him in the
gloom, so to fall headlong to his death. This is an impressive revenge ghost.
Henry James based his ghost story, The Turn of the Screw, on an incident
reported to the Psychical Society, of a spectral old woman corrupting the
mind of a child. The central character in Arnold Bennett’s novel, The Ghost,
is a specter, one of the most rabid revenge ghosts in literature, who is eaten
up with jealousy lest the woman he loved in life shall care for some one
else. Algernon Blackwood uses much psychical material in his numberless
stories of the supernatural, often mentioning the work of the Society, and
Andrew Lang has contributed much to the subject. Arthur Machen has just
published a collection of stories of war-apparitions that are interesting
psychical specimens, called The Bowmen. In one story in the volume he
shows us how a contemporary legend may be built up, since from a short
piece of fiction written by him has evolved the mass of material relating to
the angels at Mons. One tale is a story of the supernatural intervention of
Saint George and his army to drive back the Germans and save the hour for
the Allies, while another describes the vision of a soldier wounded in battle

defending his comrades, who sees the long-dead heroes of England file past
him to praise him for his valor. The minister gives him wine to drink and
His voice was hushed. For as he looked at the minister the fashion of his vesture was changed. He
was all in armor, if armor be made of starlight, of the rose of dawn, and of sunset fires; and he lifted
up a great sword of flame.

“Full in the midst, his Cross of Red
Triumphant Michael brandished
And trampled the Apostate’s pride.”

Another case of collective apparitions is the experience of a soldier,
wounded in battle, who tells of strange fighters who have come in to aid the
English. He thinks they are some of the tribesmen that Britain employs, but
from his descriptions the minister knows that they are the long-dead Greeks
who have arisen to take part in the struggle which their modern descendants
are reluctant to share. These stories are only a few among the many
instances of supernaturalism in fiction traceable to the influence of the war.
Certain volumes of ghost stories have appeared, claiming to be not
fiction but fact, accounts of actual apparitions seen and snap-shotted. This
sort of problematic fiction is not new, however, since Defoe long ago
published one of the best of the kind, the story of Mrs. Veal, who appeared
to her friend Mrs. Bargrave, and conversed with her, gravely telling her that
heaven is much like the descriptions in a certain religious book written
shortly before that. She seems very realistic, with her dress of newly
scoured silk, which her friend rubs between her fingers, and her lifelike
conversation. This story has usually been regarded as one of Defoe’s “lies
like truth,” but recent evidence leads one to believe that it is a reportorial
account of a ghost story current at the time, which missed being reported to
the Society for Psychical Research merely because the organization did not
exist then. The modern stories that stridently claim to be real lack the
interest in many instances that Mrs. Veal is able to impart, and in most cases
the reader loses his taste for that sort of fiction because it is rammed down
his throat for fact. They don’t impress one, either as fact or as fiction.
One of the most interesting aspects of the literature relating to psychic
matters in recent years is the number of books that claim to be spirit-
inspired. These instances of psychography are not what we might expect
immortals to indite, but it appears that there must be a marked decrease of
intelligence when one reaches the other world. The messages sent back by
dead genius lack the master style, even lacking that control over spelling

and grammar which low, earth-bound editors consider necessary. But
perhaps the spirits of the great grow tired of being made messenger boys,
and show their resentment by literary strikes. Anita Silvani has published
several volumes that she claims were written while she was in a semi-
trance,—which statement no reader will doubt. Her accommodating dictator
furnishes illustrations for her stuff, as well, for she says she would have
inner visions of the scenes described, “as if a dioram passed” before her.
These romances of three worlds are quite peculiar productions. The inner
voices asked her in advance not to read any literature on theosophy or
Spiritualism or the supernatural since they wished her mind to be free from
any previous bias. Mrs. Elsa Barker is another of these literary mediums,
for she has put out two volumes of letters in narrative form, which she
makes affidavit were dictated to her by a disembodied spirit, the ghost of
the late Judge Hatch, of California. She states that while she was sitting in
her room in Paris one day, her hand was violently seized, a pencil thrust
into it, and the automatic writing began. Mrs. Campbell-Praed is another of
these feminine stenographers for spooks, but like the rest she has left
nothing that could well be included in a literary anthology. These spirit-
writers tell us of life after death, but nothing that is a contribution to
existing ignorance on the subject. According to Judge Hatch, whose post-
mortem pen-name is X, the present war has its parallel in a conflict of
spirits, and the astral world is in dire confusion because of overcrowding, so
that the souls of the slain must go through torments and struggle with
demons.
The most recent instance of psychography comes to us by way of the
ouija-board from St. Louis, the authenticity of which is vouched for by Mr.
Casper Yost, of the editorial staff of the Globe-Democrat. But if the ouija-
board dictated the stories and plays, giving the name of Patience Worth as
the spirit author, and if Mrs. Curran took them down, why does Mr. Yost
appear as the author? Patience Worth says that she lived a long time ago.
Mr. Yost insists that her language is Elizabethan, but it seems rather a
curious conglomeration, unlike any Elizabethan style I am familiar with.
She has written stories, lyrics, a long drama, and other informal
compositions, a marvelous output when one considers the slow movements
of the ouija-board. The communications seem to have human interest and a
certain literary value, though they bring us no messages from the
Elizabethan section of eternity.[171]

Automatic writing appears in The Martian by Du Maurier, where the
spirit from Mars causes Barty Joscelyn in his sleep to write books
impossible to him in his waking hours. The type has been parodied by John
Kendrick Bangs in his Enchanted Typewriter, which machine worked
industriously recording telegraphic despatches from across the Styx. The
invisible operator gives his name as Jim Boswell. The writer states:
The substance of the following pages has evolved itself between the hours of midnight and four
o’clock, during a period of six months, from a type-writing machine standing in a corner of my
library, manipulated by unseen hands.

It is astonishing how many ghosts are trying to break into print these
days. And after all, what do the poor things get out of it? No royalties, scant
praise, and much ridicule when their style fails to come up to specifications.
Interesting psychical material is found in a new volume of plays by
Theodore Dreiser.[172] He gives curious twists to the unearthly, as in The
Blue Sphere, where a shadow and a fast mail are among the dramatis
personæ, typifying the fate idea of the old drama. The shadow lures a child
monstrosity out on to the railway track, after he has caused the elders to
leave the gate open, and the train, made very human, kills the child. The
psychic effects in In the Dark are even more peculiar, the characters
including various spirits, a wraith, and a ghost with red eyes, who circle
round the human beings and force them to discover a murder that has been
committed. The effect of supernatural manifestation on animals is brought
out here, in the bellowing of the bull and the howling of the dogs as the
ghosts pass by. In A Spring Recital troops of nymphs and hamadryads,
fauns, clouds of loathsome spirits of hags and wastrels, “persistences” of
fish, birds, and animals, “various living and newly dead spirits wandering in
from the street,” the ghost of an English minister of St. Giles, who died in
1631, a monk of the Thebaid, of date 300 and three priests of Isis of 2840
B.C. enter to hear the organist play. He is unaware that anybody is hearing
his music save the four human beings who have happened in. These dramas
of course are purely literary plays, impossible of presentation on the stage,
and in their curious character show a likeness to some of the late German
supernaturalism, such as the plays of August Stramm. They show in an
extreme form the tendency toward psychic material that the American and
English drama has evidenced lately.
Life after Death. Mankind is immensely interested in heaven and hell,
though he knows but little concerning these places. But man is a born

traveler and gives much thought to distant countries, whether he definitely
expects to go there or not. This interest is no new thing, for classical
mythology is full of doleful accounts of the after life. The early English
stage represented heaven and hell in addition to the earth, and Elizabethan
drama shows many references to the underworld, with a strong Senecan
influence. There are especially frequent allusions to certain famous
sufferers in Hades, as Ixion, Tantalus, Sisyphus, and Tityus. Modern
English fiction has likewise been influenced by the epic supernaturalism,
reflecting the heaven and hell of Dante and Milton. Yet as in his own
thinking each person lays out a Celestial City for himself and pictures his
own inferno to fit his ideas of mercy and justice, peopling them with
appropriate beings, changing and coloring the conceptions of Bunyan, for
instance, to suit his own desires, so it is in fiction. Some think of heaven
and hell as definite places, while to others they are states of mind. To some
the devil is as real as in the darkey folk-song, where,
“Up stepped de debbil
Wid his iron wooden shubbil,
Tearin’ up de yearth wid his big-toe nail!”

while to others he is an iconoclastic new thought. Heaven and hell have
been treated in every conceivable way in English fiction—conventionally,
symbolically, humorously, and satirically, so that one may choose the type
he prefers. There are enough kinds to go around.
Among the portrayers of the traditional heaven and hell Mrs. Elizabeth
Stuart Phelps Ward is prominent. Her works on contemporary immortality
are said to have had a tremendous vogue in the period following the Civil
War, when death had claimed so many that the living were thinking of the
other world more than of this. Her pictures of heaven in Gates Ajar are
comforting, for she assures to each person his own dearest wish in
fulfillment, to the ambitious youth his books, to the young girl her piano,
and to the small child her ginger-snaps instead of earthly bread and butter.
In The Gates Between the physician, suddenly killed, finds himself
embarrassed by immortality. He doesn’t know how to adjust himself to
eternity and at first brings many of earth’s problems with him. In the third
of the series, The Gates Beyond, she describes a very material yet spiritual
heaven. Bodies are much like those on earth, not vaporous projections;
there are museums, hospitals, universities, telephones, concerts and all up-
to-date improvements and conveniences. The dead woman discovers that

she remembers what she read on earth, takes pleasure in simple things such
as the smell of mignonette, hears the birds sing a Te Deum, while a brook
and a bird sing a duet, and the leaves are also vocal. There is a Universal
Language which must be learned by each soul, and heaven holds all sorts of
occupations, material, mental, and spiritual. She says that near earth are
many earth-bound spirits occupied in low and coarse and selfish ways, who
lack “spiritual momentum to get away.” “They loved nothing, lived for
nothing, believed in nothing, they cultivated themselves for nothing but the
earth,”—which may be compared with the state of the souls on Fifth
Avenue, described by Granville Barker.
Mrs. Ward’s pictures of heaven may seem sentimental and conventional
to us to-day, yet to be appreciated they must be considered in relation to the
religious thought of her time. She represented a reaction against the rigid
theology, the stern concepts of an older generation than her own, and she
wished to make heaven more homelike. She did have an influence in her
day, as may be illustrated by a remark from a sermon recently delivered by
a New York pastor, that the reading of her books had exerted a great
influence over him, that they made heaven over for him.
Mrs. Oliphant is another of the conductors of fictive Cook’s tours
through heaven and hell, after the fashion started by Dante and Milton, and
modernized by Mrs. Ward. She devotes volumes to describing the future
worlds in their relation to mortal destiny. One story[173] tells of a soul that
comes back from purgatory to be comforted by the old minister and sent
away happy; another[174] is the account of a spirit returning from heaven to
right a wrong that her husband is doing another. Still another[175] gives the
experiences of a woman who is distressed when she finds herself in heaven,
because she has hidden her will and her young niece is thereby left
penniless, but she asks advice of various celestial authorities and finally
succeeds in returning to earth and righting matters. A Beleaguered City is a
peculiar story of a French town besieged by the dead, who drive out the
inhabitants because of their cruelty toward some nuns. A strange gloom
pervades the place, the cathedral bells ring of themselves, and flaming signs
appear on the church doors, till after much penance the citizens are allowed
to return and the invading hosts from eternity withdraw. In one story,[176]
Mrs. Oliphant gives her ideas of heaven, as a place of light, of rest, of joy,
of service, where the great angel Pain helps the souls to wisdom. In a
counter-picture,[177] she shows hell, the world of the unhappy dead, where

are cruelty, selfishness, suffering, a world filled with tears that drip from
earth. Yet it is a hell as well-regulated, as thoroughly disciplined as a
German municipality, with various punishments,—the most terrible being a
lecture platform from which are delivered eternal addresses.
These would-be-realistic stories of heaven and hell somehow leave the
reader cold, after Dante and Milton, however much one may feel the
sincerity of the authors. Heaven and hell are such vast provinces that one
cannot chart them in imagination sufficiently to grasp somebody else’s
concept in story.
Other stories of life after death, given from the spirit-angle rather than
from the mortal point of view as in most ghost stories, are among the recent
types of supernaturalism. Alice Brown has several stories of the kind, in one
showing a woman who comes to tell her friend not to be afraid of dying,
because There is much like Here, and another symbolic of the power of love
to come back even from the pit of blackness after death. Olivia Howard
Dunbar’s The Shell of Sense gives the psychosis of a woman who cannot go
to heaven because she is jealous of her husband. She sees the form of the
wind, hears the roses open in the garden, and senses many things unknown
to human beings, yet is actuated by very human motives. Katherine
Butler[178] suggests that death must be a painless process and the after life
much like mortality, since the man doesn’t realize that he is dead but
attempts to go about his affairs as usual.
The symbolic treatment of the theme of life after death is more effective
and shows more literary art than the conventional pictures of Mrs. Ward’s
and Mrs. Oliphant’s. No human vocabulary is able to describe immortality
of glory or despair, hence it is more effective merely to suggest the thought
by allegory or symbolism. Hawthorne gives us a symbolic morality in The
Celestial Railroad, where he pictures the road between heaven and hell,
drawing on Bunyan’s imagery to describe the landscape and characters.
Apollyon is engineer and emits realistic blasts of smoke. Eugene Field[179]
tells of a mother just entering heaven who asks an angel where she may find
her little baby, dead long ago, to whom the angel whispers that she is the
babe, grown to maturity in Paradise. Julian Hawthorne’s Lovers in Heaven
is a symbolic picture of the after life, where a man just dead goes in search
of the beloved he lost long before. He sees her on the far slope of a
heavenly hill, but before he can reach her the devil appears to him in his
own double, “the Satan of mine own self, the part of me wherein God had

no share.” This is a quite modern concept of diabolism. But love struggles
to save him, and he resists his evil self.
Ahrinziman, by Anita Silvani, shows lurid pictures of the world to come.
In the Inferno of the Dark Star the soul sees the attendant genii of his life,
each symbolizing some passion of his nature. There are horrible astral birds
and beasts and combinations unknown to mortal biology, while vultures
hover overhead and a foul astral odor fills the air. The spirits are of peculiar
substance, for they fight and slay each other, some being torn to pieces. The
soul is supposed to progress toward the Silver and later the Golden Star.
Marie Corelli’s Romance of Two Worlds is a queer production, preaching
the doctrine of psychical electricity, which is to be a sort of wonder-
working magician, and in other novels she gives theories of radio-activity, a
theosophical cure-all for this world and the next.
A Vision of Judgment, by H. G. Wells, is a satire on man’s judgment of
sin and character and of destiny after death, showing the pettiness and folly
of Ahab, proud of his sins, and the hypocrisy of a so-called saint, conceited
over his self-torture. “At last the two sat side by side, stark of all illusions,
in the shadow of the robe of God’s charity, like brothers.” The picture of
God and the throne vanish and they behold a land austere and beautiful,
with the enlightened souls of men in clean bodies all about him. This
symbolic allegory setting forth the shallowness of human judgment as set
against God’s clarity of vision and charity of wisdom is like Oscar Wilde’s
The House of Judgment, a terrible piece of symbolism expressed in a few
words. A soul who has been altogether evil comes at last before God to be
judged. God speaks to him of his vileness, his cruelty, his selfishness, to all
of which the soul makes confession of guilt.
And God, closing the book of the man’s Life, said, “Surely I will send thee into Hell. Even unto
Hell will I send thee.”
And the man cried out, “Thou canst not!”
And God said to the man, “Wherefore can I not send thee to Hell, and for what reason?”
“Because in Hell I have always lived,” answered the man.
And there was silence in the house of judgment.
And after a space God spake and said to the man, “Seeing that I may not send thee into Hell, I will
send thee into Heaven. Surely unto Heaven I will send thee.”
And the man cried out, “Thou canst not!”
And God said to the man, “Wherefore can I not send thee unto Heaven, and for what reason?”
“Because, never, and in no place, have I been able to imagine it!” answered the man.
And there was silence in the house of judgment.

The fact that a man’s thoughts make his heaven or his hell is brought out in
a recent book, The Case of John Smith, by Elizabeth Bisland, where the
central character receives a revelation while working at his typewriter one
day. The message says, “Oh, Peevish and Perverse! How know you that you
have not died elsewhere and that this is not the Heaven which there you
dreamed? How know you that your Hell may not lie only in not recognizing
this as Heaven?”
In many recent examples of allegory and symbolism we get suggestive
impressions of the other life, of the soul’s realities. Some of these have the
inevitable words, the fatal phrases that seem to penetrate into the real
heaven and hell for us. The most remarkable instance of symbolic treatment
of the after-life is in Souls on Fifth, by Granville Barker, where the spirits of
the dead are represented as unable to rise above the level of the ideals they
had held in life, and drift endlessly up and down the Avenue, some in the
form of tarnished gilt, some with white plague spots of cowardice, or
blisters of slanderous thoughts, some horny with selfishness, some with
lines of secret cruelty. There are few squares but mostly irregular shapes of
sin.
The purely humorous treatment of life after death, the comic pictures of
heaven and hell, are of a piece with the humorous treatment of other phases
of supernaturalism, and are distinctly modern. The flippant way in which
sacred subjects are handled is a far cry from the heaven and hell of Dante
and Milton. Modern writers slap the devil on the back, make fun of the
archangels and appeal to the ridiculous in one-time sacred situations, with a
freedom that would have made the Puritans gasp. For instance, St. Peter has
been the butt of so many jokes that he is really hackneyed.
The Flying Dutchman, whom Brander Matthews introduces in his Primer
of Imaginary Geography, and who says that the Wandering Jew is the only
person he can have any satisfactory chats with now, speaks of knowing
Charon, “who keeps the ferry across the Styx. I met him last month and he
was very proud of his new electric launch with its storage battery.” He says
that hell is now lighted by electricity and that Pluto has put in all the
modern improvements. John Kendrick Bangs, in his House-boat on the
Styx, brings together the shades of many illustrious persons; Queen
Elizabeth, Walter Raleigh, Socrates, Xantippe, Captain Kidd, and many
others. From them we get pictures of the life after death and of their
characteristic attitudes toward it and each other. He continues the situation

in The Pursuit of the House-boat, as the redoubtable Captain Kidd makes
off with the ship and the ladies, leaving all the men behind. But they follow
the bold buccaneer and after exciting adventures reaching from the Styx to
Paris, they recapture the fair. Carolyn Wells has recently given us a Styx
River Anthology. In modern stories we visit the comic devil on his native
heath, see him in his own home town, as in previous chapters we discussed
him in his appearances on earth. Kipling’s The Last of the Stories shows us
the Hades of literary endeavor, the limbo of lost characters, presided over
by a large and luminous devil of fluent tongue. Kipling recognizes many
persons from fiction, and sees various tortures in process. All do obeisance
to the shade of Rabelais, the Master. Kipling is terrified by the characters he
himself has brought into being and begs to hide his face from them. F.
Marion Crawford gives us another glimpse of literary eternity,[180] where
the spirits of learned personages meet and discuss life. A recent poem
describes a meeting and dialogue in Hades between Chaucer and Cressida.
It is possibly Bernard Shaw who would be most liable to prosecution by
the devil for lèse-majesté, for in Man and Superman, Mine Host of the Pit is
represented as an affable gentleman who tries to make hell attractive to his
guests, and exercises not the least constraint on their movements. They are
free to leave him and go to heaven if they like,—he only warns them that
they will find it tiresome. He converses with Don Juan and a couple of other
blasé mortals, uttering Shavian iconoclasms with an air of courteous
boredom. He is very different from the sinister personage of conventional
fiction.
Mark Twain has given humorous views of heaven in his Extract from
Captain Stormfield’s Visit to Heaven. A bluff, hearty old salt finds the
celestial regions very different from the traditional descriptions of them.
The heavenly citizens are a polite set, wishful for him to do what he likes,
yet he tires of the things he thought paradise consisted of, lays aside his
harp and crown, and takes his wings off for greater ease. He finds his
pleasures in the meeting of an occasional patriarch, or prophet, and the
excitement of the entry of a converted bartender from Jersey City. He
changes his views on many points, saying for instance, “I begin to see a
man’s got to be in his own heaven to be happy,” and again, “Happiness ain’t
a thing in itself,—it’s only a contrast with something that ain’t pleasant.”
Again Sandy, his friend, says, “I wish there was something in that miserable
Spiritualism so we could send the folks word about it.”

Something of the same combination of humor and earnestness is found in
Nicholas Vachell Lindsay’s poem, General William Booth Enters into
Heaven.
“Booth led boldly with his big bass drum,
Are you washed in the blood of the Lamb?
The saints smiled gravely as they said, ‘He’s come.’
Are you washed in the blood of the Lamb?
(Bass drums)
Walking lepers followed, rank on rank,
Lurching bravos from the ditches dank,
Drabs from the alley-ways and drug-fiends pale
Minds still passion-ridden, soul-power frail!
Vermin-eaten saints with mouldy breath,
Unwashed legions with the ways of death,—
Are you washed in the blood of the Lamb?
(Reverently sung—no instruments)
And while Booth halted by the curb for prayer
He saw his Master through the flag-filled air.
Christ came gently with a robe and crown
For Booth the soldier, while the crowd knelt down.
He saw King Jesus—they were face to face—
And he knelt a-weeping in that holy place.
Are you washed in the blood of the Lamb?”

This combination of realism with idealism, of homely details with
celestial symbolism, is also seen in another recent poem, The Man with the
Pigeons, by William Rose Benet, who shows us two pictures, the first of a
tramp in Madison Square Garden, who loves the pigeons and has them ever
clustering around him in devotion. The next is of heaven, with the celestial
gardens, where among the goldhaired angels the old tramp stands at home,
still wearing his rusty shoes and battered derby hat. The quaint
commingling of fancy and fact reminds us of Hannele’s dreams of heaven,
in Hauptmann’s Hannele, where the schoolmaster is confused with the
angels, and heaven and the sordid little room are somehow united.
H. G. Wells, in A Wonderful Visit shows us another side of the picture, for
he draws an angel down and lets him tell the citizens of the earth of the land
he comes from. I make no attempt in this discussion to decide concerning
the personality of angels, whether they are the spirits of the just made
perfect or pre-Adamite creatures that never were and never could be man.
For the present purpose, they are simply angels. This book of Wells’s is an
example of the satiric treatment of heaven and earth that constitutes a
special point of importance in the modern supernaturalism. It is a social

satire, and a burlesque on the formal and insincere manifestations of
religion. A vicar takes a pot shot at what he supposes is a rare bird, seeing a
rainbow flash in the sky,—but instead, an angel comes tumbling down with
a broken wing. This thrusts him upon the vicar as a guest for some time,
and introduces complications in the village life. The parishioners do not
believe in angels save in stained glass windows or in church on Sunday, and
they make life difficult for the vicar and his guest. The angel shows a
human sense of humor, that quaint philosophy of the incongruous which is
the basis of all true humor, and his naïve comments on earthly conventions,
his smiling wonder at the popular misconceptions in regard to his heaven—
to which he is surprised to learn that mortals are thought to go, since he
says he has never seen any there—make him a lovable character. But
village custom compels him to fold his shining wings under a coat till he
looks like a hunch-back, put boots on so that he “has hoofs like a
hippogrif,” as he plaintively says to the vicar, and he finds conformity to
convention a painful process. The novel ends sadly, symbolizing the world’s
stupid harshness, for the angel is sent away from the village as unworthy to
live among the people, and his heart is almost broken.
The same type of humor and satire may be found in James Stephens’s
The Demi-Gods, and in Anatole France’s, The Revolt of the Angels.
Stephens’s novel contains an insert of a short story of heaven previously
published, which depicts a preliminary skirmish in heaven over a coin a
corpse has had left in his hand and has taken to eternity with him. In each
novel several angels come tumbling down from heaven and take up earthly
life as they find it, engaging in affairs not considered angelic. Stephens, in
addition to the two fighting celestials, gives us an archangel, a seraph, and a
cherub. There is in both stories a certain embarrassment over clothes, the
fallen ones arriving in a state of nudity. The necessity for donning earthly
garments, the removal of the wings, and the adaptation to human life
furnish complication and interest, with the added feminine element, though
Stephens’s novel is not marred by the unclean imaginings of Anatole
France.
The revolters in the French novel take up Parisian life, while Stephens’s
angelic trio join an itinerant tinker and his daughter who are journeying
aimlessly about, accompanied by a cart and a sad-eyed philosopher, an ass.
They engage in activities and joys not conventionally archangelic, such as
smoking corn-cob pipes, eating cold potatoes, and, when necessary, stealing

the potatoes. The contrasts between heavenly ideas and Irish tramp life are
inimitable. At last when the three, having decided to go back to heaven, don
their wings and crowns and say good-bye, the cherub turns back for one
more word of farewell with Mary. Seeing her tears over his going, he tears
his shining wings to shreds and casts them from him, electing to stay on
earth with the tinker’s cart, for the sake of love. It is really quite a demi-
god-like thing to do.
Unlike France’s book, which is a blasting satire on religion, these two
English novels are amusing, with a certain measure of satire, yet with a
whimsicality that does not antagonize. France’s angels remain on earth and
become more corrupt than men, and Wells’s wonderful visitor is banished
from the village as an undesirable alien. Stephens’s archangel and seraph go
back to heaven after their vacation, while the cherub turns his back on
immortal glory rather than break a woman’s heart. In all three of these
books we notice the same leveling tendency shown in characterization of
the angels that we have observed heretofore in the case of ghosts and devils,
werewolves, and witches. The angels are human, with charming personality
and a piquant sense of humor, whose attempts to understand mortal
conventions reveal the essential absurdity of earthly ideas in many
instances. The three taken together constitute an interesting case of literary
parallelism and it would be gratifying to discover whether France was
influenced by Wells and Stephens, or Stephens by Wells and France,—but
in any event Wells can prove a clear alibi as to imitation, since his novel
appeared a number of years before the others. The possible inspiration for
all of these in Byron’s Heaven and Earth suggests an interesting
investigation. A more recent story, The Ticket-of-Leave Angel, brings an
angel down to a New York apartment, where he has peculiar experiences
and illustrates a new type of angelic psychology. The tendency to satirize
immortality has crept even into poetry, for in a recent volume by Rupert
Brooke there are several satiric studies. One, entitled On Certain
Proceedings of the Psychical Research Society, ridicules the idea that spirits
would return to earth to deliver the trivial messages attributed to them, and
another, Heaven, is a vitriolic thrust at the hope of a better life after death,
sneering at it with unpleasant imagery.
One of the recent instances of satiric pictures of the hereafter is Lord
Dunsany’s The Glittering Gate, a one-act drama, where Bill and Jim, two
burglars, crack the gate of heaven to get in. Sardonic laughter sounds while

they are engaged in the effort to effect an entrance, and wondering what
heaven will be like. Bill thinks that his mother will be there.
“I don’t know if they want a good mother in there who would be kind to the angels and sit and
smile at them when they sing, and soothe them if they were cross. (Suddenly) Jim, they won’t have
brought me up against her, will they?”
Jim: “It would be just like them to. Very like them.”

When the glittering gate of heaven swings open and the two toughs enter
eagerly, they find nothing—absolutely nothing but empty space, and the
sardonic laughter sounds in their ears. Bill cries out, “It is just like them!
Very like them”!
Was not this suggested by Rupert Brooke’s poem, Failure?
In the stories treating satirically or humorously of the future life we find
the purpose in reality to be to image this life by illustration of the other.
Eternity is described in order that we may understand time a little better.
Angels and devils are made like men, to show mortal potentialities either
way. The absurdities of mankind are illustrated as seen by angel eyes, the
follies as satirized by devils. The tendency now is to treat supernatural life
humorously, satirically or symbolically, rather than with the conventional
methods of the past. Commonplace treatment of great subjects is liable to
be unsatisfactory, and any serious treatment, other than symbolically
simple, of heaven or hell seems flat after Dante and Milton.
In considering these various types of stories dealing with supernatural
life, whether continued beyond the mortal span on earth, renewed by
reincarnation, or taken up in another world after death, we find that several
facts seem to appear with reference to the type chosen for treatment by men
as distinct from women, and vice versa. So far as my search has gone, I
have found no instance in English literature where a woman has used either
the motif of the Wandering Jew or the Elixir of Life. I do not say that no
such instances exist, but I have not found them. Carmen Sylva is the only
woman I know of at all who has taken up the characterization of the
Wandering Jew. On the other hand, women write often of heaven, most of
the stories of conventional ideas of heaven being by women. Where men
have pictured heaven or hell they have done it for the most part
humorously, satirically or symbolically. They seem to curve round the
subject rather than to approach it directly. Yet where it is a question of
continuing life here in this world, by means of an elixir or other method, or
as an ever-living being like the Jew, men have used the theme frequently.

Since fiction does reflect our thought-life and our individual as well as
racial preferences, the conclusions that might be drawn, if one were sure of
their basis, would be interesting. Can it be that men are more deeply
interested in this life on earth and cling to it in thought more tenaciously
than women, and that women are more truly citizens of the other world?
Are men skeptical of the existence of any but a satiric or symbolic heaven,
or merely doubtful of reaching there?

CHAPTER VI

The Supernatural in Folk-Tales

T
HE folk-tale is one of the new fashions in fiction. True, folk-lore has
long constituted an important element of literature, constantly
recurring in poetry, particularly in the ballad, in the drama, the novel,
and short story. Yet it has been in solution. It has not been thought important
enough to merit consideration for its own sake, but has been rather
apologized for, covered up with other materials, so that its presence is
scarcely recognized. Now, however, as Professor Kittredge says, folk-lore is
no longer on the defensive, which fact is evident in fiction as elsewhere.
Scholars of our day are eagerly hunting down the various forms of folk-lore
to preserve them in literature before they vanish completely, and learned
societies are recording with care the myths and legends and superstitions of
peasants. Many volumes have appeared giving in literary form the fictions
of various races and tribes, and comparative folk-lore is found to be an
engrossing science.
The supernatural forms a large element of folk-literature. The traditions
and stories that come down to us from the childhood of any race are like the
stories that children delight in, tales of the marvelous, of the impossible, of
magic and wonder. Folk-literature recks little of realism. It revels in the
romantic, the mystic. Tales of gods and demi-gods, of giants and demons, of
fairy-folk, of animals endowed with human powers of speech and cunning,
of supernatural flora as well as fauna, of ghosts, devils, of saints, and
miracles, are the frame-work of such fiction. English literature is especially
rich in these collections, for not only are the sections of English-speaking
countries themselves fortunate fields for supernatural folk-tales, but the
English, being a race of colonizers, have gone far in many lands and from
the distant corners of the earth have written down the legends of many
tribes and nations. This discussion does not take into consideration

primarily folk-tales translated from other languages, but deals only with
those appearing in English, though, of course, in many cases, they are
transcripts from the spoken dialects of other people. But it is for their
appearance as English fiction, not for their value as folk-lore, that they are
taken up here.
Wherever in fiction the life of the peasant class is definitely treated, there
is likely to be found a good deal of folk-lore in the form of superstitions,
taboos, racial traditions of the supernatural. This is present to a marked
degree in the stories of Sir Walter Scott, and in fact one might write a
volume on the supernatural in Scott’s work alone. For example, we have
Oriental magic and wonder,[181] supernatural vision,[182] superhuman
foreknowledge,[183] unearthly “stirs,”[184] the White Lady of Avenel,[185] the
bahrgeist,[186] besides his use of diabolism, witchcraft, and so forth already
discussed. Thomas Hardy’s work, relating as it does almost wholly to rustic
life, is rich in superstitions and traditions of the peasants. The Withered Arm
gives a gruesome account of a woman’s attempt to cure her affliction by
touching her arm to the corpse of a man who has been hanged, the
complicating horror being furnished by the fact that the youth is her
husband’s secret son. He gives a story[187] of a supernatural coach that
heralds certain events in the family life, charms for securing love as for
making refractory butter come when the churn is bewitched, and so forth.
Similar elements occur in others of his novels and stories. Eden Phillpotts’
fiction[188] shows a large admixture of the folk-supernaturalism of the
Dartmoor peasants, as do Lorna Doone, Wuthering Heights and numberless
other novels and stories of other sections. There are guild superstitions
reflected in the work of various writers of the sea, as in W. W. Jacobs’
stories, for instance, tales of mining life, and so on.
American fiction is equally rich in such material. Stories of the South,
showing life in contact with the negroes, reveal it to a marked degree, as in
the work of Thomas Nelson Page, Joel Chandler Harris, Ruth McEnery
Stuart, Will Allen Dromgoole, and others. The Creole sense of the
supernatural appears in George W. Cable’s novels and stories, the mountain
superstitions in those of John Fox, Jr., and Charles Egbert Craddock, those
of New England in Mary Wilkins Freeman, Alice Brown, and their
followers, the Indian traditions in Helen Hunt Jackson, J. Fenimore Cooper,
the Dutch supernaturalism in Washington Irving, who also gives us the
legendry of Spain in his tales of the Alhambra. Thomas A. Janvier has

recreated antique Mexico for us in his stories of ghosts and saints, of devils
and miracles.
In most fiction that represents truly the life of simple people there will be
found a certain amount of superstition which is inherent in practically every
soul. There is no one of us but has his ideas of fate, of luck, of taboo. We
are so used to these elements in life that we scarcely pay heed to them in
fiction, yet a brief glance at books will recall their frequent appearance.
They color poetry to a marked degree. In fact, without the sense of the
marvelous, the unreal, the wonderful, the magical, what would poetry mean
to us? So we should feel a keen loss in our fiction if all the vague elements
of the supernatural were effaced. Absolute realism is the last thing we
desire.
Now the folk-tale, told frankly as such, with no apology for its unreality,
no attempt to make of it merely an allegory or vehicle for teaching moral
truth, has taken its place in our literature. The science of ethnology has
brought a wider interest in the oral heritage of the past, linking it to our life
of the present. And the multiplication of volumes recording stories of
symbolic phenomena of nature, of gods, demi-gods, and heroes, of
supernormal animals and plants, of fairies, banshees, bogles, giants, saints,
miracles, and what-not make it possible to compare the widely disseminated
stories, the variants and contrasting types of folk-supernaturalism. But my
purpose in this discussion is to show the presence of the folk-
supernaturalism in literature, in prose fiction particularly. There is no
science more fascinating than comparative folk-lore and no language
affords so many original examples of oral literature as the English. As we
study its influence on fiction and poetry, we feel the truth of what Tylor
says[189]:
Little by little, in what seems the most spontaneous fiction, a more comprehensive study of the
sources of poetry and romance begins to disclose a cause for each fancy, a story of inherited materials
from which each province of the poet’s land has been shaped and built over and peopled.

The Celtic Revival, the renascence of wonder in Ireland, has done more
than anything else to awaken modern love for antiquity, to bring over into
literature the legends of gods and men
“Beyond the misty space
Of twice a thousand years.”

While the movement concerns itself more with poetry and the drama than
with prose,—Ireland has been likened to “a nest of singing birds,” though
the voices of some have been sadly silenced of late—yet fiction has felt its
influence as well. The land of the immortals glooms and gleams again for
us in storied vision, and the ancient past yields up to us its magic, its
laughter, its tears. These romances are written, not in pedestrian prose as
ordinary folk-tales, but with a bardic beauty that gives to style the lifting
wings of verse. Each fact and figure is expressed in poetic symbols, which
Yeats calls “streams of passion poured about concrete forms.” A sense of
ancient, divine powers is in every bush and bog, every lake and valley.
Ireland has enriched universal fancy and the effect on literature will perhaps
never be lost.

One of the most interesting aspects of folk-loristic supernaturalism is that
concerned with nature. The primitive mind needs no scientific proof for
theories of causation, since, given a belief in gods, it can manage the rest
for itself. With the Celts there is ever a feeling of nature as a mighty
personality. Every aspect, every phase of her power is endowed with life
and temperament. Celtic pantheism saw in every form a spirit, in every
spring or cloud or hill-top, in every bird or blossom some unearthly divinity
of being. A primrose is vastly more than a yellow primrose, but one of “the
dear golden folk”; the hawthorn is the barking of hounds, leek is the tear of
a fair woman, and so on, which poetic speech bears a likeness to the
Icelandic court poetry. This figurative sense suggests “an after-thought of
the old nature-worship lingering yet about the fjords and glens where
Druidism never was quite overcome by Christianity.” It lends to the Celtic
folk-tales their wild, unearthly beauty, their passionate poetry and mystic
symbolism akin to the classic mythology and such as we find in no other
folk-literature of the present time.
In the stories of Lady Gregory, John Synge, Yeats, Lady Wilde, and
various other chroniclers of Celtic legendry, we find explanations of many
phenomena, accounts of diverse occurrences. Lady Wilde[190] (Speranza)
tells of natural appearances, such as a great chasm which was opened to
swallow a man who incurred the anger of God by challenging Him to
combat for destroying his crops. A supernatural whirlwind caught up the
blasphemer and hurled him into the chasm that yawned to receive him.
Many of the aspects of nature are attributed to the activities of giants, and

later of demons; as the piling up of cyclopean walls, massive breast-works
of earth, or gigantic masses of rocks said to be the work of playful or irate
giants. The titans were frolicsome and delighted in feats to show off. There
is a large body of legends of diabolized nature, as the changing of the
landscape by demons, the sulphurizing of springs, and the cursing of
localities.
Many other aspects of nature are made the basis for supernatural folk-
tales too numerous to mention. Stories of the enchanted bird, music, and
water appear in various forms, and the droll-tellers of the Cornish country
tell many stories of the weird associated with out-of-doors. The Celtic
superstitions and tales have lived on through successive invasions and
through many centuries have been told beside the peat fire. They have been
preserved as an oral heritage or else in almost illegible manuscripts in
antique libraries, from which they are taken to be put into literature by the
Celtic patriots of letters. The sense of terror and of awe, a belief in the
darker powers, as well as an all-enveloping feeling of beauty is a heritage of
the Celtic mind. It is interesting to note the obstinacy of these pantheistic,
druidic stories in the face of Irish Catholicism. In many other bodies of
folk-supernaturalism in English we have similar legends of nature, as in the
Hawaiian, the Indian, African, Canadian, Mexican stories, and elsewhere.
But the material is so voluminous that one can do no more than suggest the
field.
Certain forces of nature are given supernatural power in drama and
fiction, as the sea that is an awful, brooding Fate, in Synge’s drama, or the
wind and the flame in Algernon Blackwood’s story, The Regeneration of
Lord Ernie, or the goblin trees in another of his tales, that signify diabolic
spirits, or the trees[191] that have a strange, compelling power over men,
drawing them, going out bodily to meet them, luring them to destruction.
Blackwood has stressed this form of supernaturalism to a marked degree. In
Sand he shows desert incantations that embody majestic forces, evocations
of ancient deities that bring the Sphynx to life, and other sinister powers. He
takes the folk-loristic aspects of nature and makes them live, personifying
the forces of out-door life as mythology did. The trees, the sand, the fire, the
snow, the wind, the stream, the sea are all alive, with personality, with
emotion, and definite being. His trees are more awesome than the woods of
Dunsinane, for they actually do move upon their foe. In The Sea Fit he
contends that the gods are not dead, but merely withdrawn, that one true

worshiper can call them back to earth, especially the sea-gods. The sea
comes in power for the man with the Viking soul and takes him to itself. His
going is symbolic.

Uttering the singing sound of falling waters, he bent forward, turned. The next instant, curving
over like a falling wave he swept along the glistening surface of the sands and was gone. In fluid
form, wave-like, his being slipped away into the Being of the Sea.

The uncanny potentialities of fire are revealed[192] where the internal
flame breaks out of itself, the inner fire that burns in the heart of the earth
and in men’s hearts. The artist trying to paint a great picture of the Fire-
worshiper is consumed by an intense, rapturous fever, and as he dies his
face is like a white flame. The snow appears embodied as a luring woman.
[193] She tries to draw a man to his death, with dæmonic charm, seen as a
lovely woman, but a snow demon. Blackwood shows the curious
combination of the soul of a dead woman with the spirit of a place,[194]
where a man is ejected by his own estate, turned out bodily as well as
psychically, because he has become out of harmony with the locale. Nature
here is sentient, emotional, possessing a child, expressing through her lips
and hands a message of menace and warning. The moon is given diabolic
power in one of Barry Pain’s stories, and the maelstrom described by Poe
has a sinister, more than human, power. August Stramm, the German
dramatist, has given an uncanny force to the moor in one of his plays,
making it the principal character as well as the setting for the action. This
embodiment of nature’s phases and phenomena as terrible powers goes
back to ancient mythology with a revivifying influence.
The supernatural beast-tale has always been a beloved form, Æsop’s
fables, the beast-cycles of medievalism, Reynard the Fox, the German
Reinecke Fuchs, all show how fond humanity is of the story that endows
animals with human powers. Naturally one thinks of Kipling’s Jungle Tales
and Joel Chandler Harris’ Uncle Remus stories as the best modern
examples, and these are so well known as to need but mention. Similar
beast-cycles are found in the folk-fiction of other countries. Of course, it is
understood that the Uncle Remus stories are not native to America, but were
brought from Africa by the slaves and handed down through generations in
the form in which Harris heard them by the cabin firesides in his boyhood.
They are not “cooked” or edited any more than he could help, he tells us,
but given in the dialectic form in which they came to him. There are various
tales similar to this series, as Kaffir tales, collected by Theal, Amazonian
tortoise myths brought together by Charles F. Hart, and Reynard, the Fox in
South Africa, by W. H. I. Bleek. J. W. Powell in his investigations for the
Smithsonian Institute found legends among the Indians that led him to

believe the Uncle Remus stories were originally learned from the red men,
but Harris thought there was no basis for such theory. Anansi Stories, by
Mary Pamela Milne-Horne, includes animal tales of the African type.
Anansi is a mysterious being, a supernatural old man like a Scandinavian
troll or English lubber-fiend, who plays tricks like those of the fox and like
the jackal in Hindu stories. He is a spider as well as a man and can assume
either shape at will.
In primitive races and in the childhood of peoples there is the same
element of close association between man and the animals that one finds in
child-life. An animal is often nearer and dearer to a child than is a human
being, as in crude races man is more like the animals, candid, careless,
unreflecting. His sensations and emotions are simple, hunger, love, hate,
fear. Animals, in turn, are lifted nearer the human in man’s thinking, and are
given human attributes in folk-lore which bridges the gulf that civilization
has tended to fix between man and animals, and gives one more of a sense
of the social union that Burns longed for. There is in these stories of
whatever country a naïveté reflecting the childhood of the race and of the
world, a primitive simplicity in dealing with the supernatural.
The folk-fiction of each country gives stories of the animals common to
that section. In tropic countries we have stories of supernatural snakes, who
appear in various forms, as were-snakes, shall we say? by turns reptiles and
men, who marry mortal women, or as diabolic creatures that, like the devil,
lose their divinity and become evil powers. We also see in the tropics
elephants, lions, tigers, baboons, gorillas, and so forth, as well as certain
insects, while in colder climes we have the fox, the wolf, the bear, and their
confrères. In island countries we find a large element of the supernatural
associated with fishes and sea-animals. Hawaiian stories recount adventures
of magic beings born of sharks and women, who are themselves, by turns,
human beings living a normal human life, and sharks, devouring men and
women. Several of Eugene Field’s stories are drawn from Hawaiian folk-
supernaturalism, as The Eel-king, and The Moon Lady.
The Gaelic stories of Fiona McLeod show the supernatural relation
existing between mortals and seals. The seals may wed human beings and
their children are beings without souls, who may be either mortal or animal.
The power of enchantment exercised by the creatures of the sea may turn
men and women into sea-beasts, forever to lose their souls. This may be
compared with The Pagan Seal-Wife, by Eugene Field, Hans Christian

Andersen’s sad story of the little mermaid, and The Forsaken Merman, by
Matthew Arnold. Fiona McLeod tells the story of the Dark Nameless One, a
nun who became the prey of a seal and was cursed with the penalty of
living under the sea to weave fatal enchantments. The mermaids, the
kelpies, the sea-beasts are all half-human, half sea-beast, and have a fatal
power over human souls, drawing them with a strange lure to give up their
immortality. The kelpie appears in several of Fiona McLeod’s stories and in
The Judgment of God the maighdeanhmara, a sea-maid, bewitches
Murdoch, coming up out of the water as a seal and turning him into a beast,
to live with her forever, a black seal that laughs hideously with the laughter
of Murdoch. Edward Sheldon has recently written a play[195] using the
mermaid motif, and H. G. Wells employs it as a vehicle for social satire[196]
where a mermaid comes ashore from The Great Beyond and contrasts
mortal life with hers. The Merman and the Seraph, by William Benjamin
Smith, is an unusual combination of unearthly creatures.
In The Old Men of the Twilight, W. B. Yeats describes the enchantment
inflicted on the old men of learning, the ancient Druids, who were cursed by
being turned into gray herons that must stand in useless meditation in pools
or flit in solitary flight cross the world, like passing sighs. Lady Gregory
tells of magic by which Lugh of the Long Hand puts his soul into the body
of a mayfly that drops into the cup that Dechtire drinks from, so that she
drinks his soul and must follow him to the dwelling-place of the Sidhe, or
fairy people. Her fifty maidens must go with her under a like spell that turns
them into birds, that fly in nine flocks, linked together two by two with
silver chains, save those that lead who have golden chains. These beautiful
birds live in the enchanted land far away from their loved ones. J. H. Pearce
tells a touching story of the Little Crow of Paradise, of the bird that was
cursed and sent to hell because it mocked Christ on the cross, but because it
had pity on a mortal sufferer in hell and brought some cooling drops of
water in its bill to cool his parching tongue, it was allowed to fly up and
light on the walls of Paradise where it remains forever. Oscar Wilde’s story
The Nightingale and the Rose is symbolic of tragic genius, of vain sacrifice,
where the tender-hearted bird gives his life-blood to stain a white rose red
because a careless girl has told the poet who loves her that she must wear a
red rose to the ball. But at the last she casts the rose aside and wears the
jewels that a richer lover has sent, while the nightingale lies dead under the
rose-tree.

So we see everywhere in folk-fiction the supernatural power given to
animals, which acts as an aid to man, as a shield and protection for him, or
for his undoing. We see human beings turned into beasts as a curse from the
gods for sin or as expressing the kinship between man and nature. In the
different cycles of beast-tales we find a large element of humor, the keener-
witted animals possessing a rare sense of the comical and relishing a joke
on each other as on man. The Uncle Remus stories are often laughable in
the extreme, and Bre’er Rabbit, who, we might at first thought decide,
would be stupid, is no mean wit. We see a tragic symbolism in the stories of
unhappy beasts who must lure mortals to their damnation, yet feel a sense
of human sorrow and remorse. In these animal stories we find most of the
significant qualities of literature, humor, romance, tragedy, mysticism, and
symbolic poetry, with a deep underlying philosophy of life pervading them
all.
Lord Dunsany in his modern aspects of mythology, perhaps drawn in part
from classic mythology though perhaps altogether Celtic in its material,
brings together animals to which we are not accustomed. He has a story of a
centaur, a frolicsome creature two hundred and fifty years young, who goes
caracoling off the end of the world to find his bride. Algernon Blackwood
tells of a man who remembers having been a centaur and lives in memory-
metempsychosis his experiences of that far-off time. Dunsany introduces
other curious, unfamiliar beasts to us, as the bride whom the man-horse
seeks in her temple beside her sad lake-sepulchre, Sombelene, of immortal
beauty, whose father was half centaur and half god, whose mother the child
of a desert lion and the sphinx. There is the high-priest of Maharrion, who is
neither bird nor cat, but a weird gray beast like both. There is the loathsome
dragon with glittering golden scales that rattles up the London streets and
seizes Miss Cubbige from her balcony and carries her off to the eternal
lands of romance lying far away by the ancient, soundless sea. We must not
forget the Gladsome Beast, he who dwells underneath fairyland, at the edge
of the world, the beast that eats men and destroys the cabbages of the Old
Man Who Looks after Fairyland, but is the synonym for joy. His joyous
chuckles never cease till Ackronnion sings of the malignity of time, when
the Gladsome Beast weeps great tears into an agate bowl. There are the
hippogriffs, dancing and whirling in the far sunlight, coming to earth with
whirring flight, bathing in the pure dawn, one to be caught with a magic
halter, to carry its rider past the Under Pits to the City of Never. There are

the gnoles in their high house, whose silence is unearthly “like the touch of
a ghoul,” over which is “a look in the sky that is worse than a spoken
doom,” that watch the mortals through holes in the trunks of trees and bear
them away to their fate. Lord Dunsany looses the reins of his fancy to carry
him into far, ancient lands, to show us the wonders that never were.
Magic forms an alluring element of the supernatural romance, and we
find it manifesting itself in many ways. In the romances of William Morris,
prose as well as poetry, we find enchantment recurring again and again, as
in The Water of the Wondrous Isles, The Wood beyond the World, The Well
at the World’s End, and others. Yeats said that Morris’s style in these old
stories was the most beautiful prose he had ever read, and that it influenced
his own work greatly. He has unearthly characters, such as the Witch-wife,
the Wood-wife, the Stony People, and so forth. He shows us the enchanted
boat, the Sending Boat, the cage with the golden bars which prison the three
maidens, magic runes with mighty power, the Water of Might which gives
to the one drinking it supernatural vision and magic power, the changing
skin, the Wailing Tower, the Black Valley of the Greyweathers, and so forth.
Birdalone’s swoon-dream in the White Palace is unearthly, as the witches’
wordless howls. Part of the weirdness of Morris’s prose is due to the
antique tone, the forgotten words, the rune-like quality of the rhythm.
Yeats tells of magic whereby a woman is gifted with immortal youth and
beauty, so that she may wed the prince of the fairies; of the glamour that
falls on a mortal so that he loses his wits and remains “with his head on his
knees by the fire to the day of his death”; of shadow hares, of fire-tongued
hounds that follow the lost soul across the world, of whistling seals that
sink great ships, of bat-like darker powers, of the little gray doves of the
good.
Dr. Hyde, in his Paudeen O’Kelly and the Weasel, speaks of a sun-myth,
of a haunted forest, of a princess supernaturally beautiful, of the witch who
complains to the robber, “Why did you bring away my gold that I was for
five hundred years gathering through the hills and hollows of the world?”
Lady Gregory tells of Diarmuid’s love-spot, where Youth touched him on
the forehead, so that no woman could look upon him without giving him
her love; of Miach who put the eye of a cat in a man’s head, with
inconvenient results, for
when he wanted to sleep and take his rest, it is then the eye would start at the squeaking of the mice,
or the flight of birds, or the movement of the rushes; and when he was wanting to watch an army or a

gathering, it is then it was sure to be in a sound sleep.

She shows us Druid rods that change mortals into birds; of Druid mists
that envelop armies and let the ancient heroes win; of Druid sleep that lasts
sometimes for years; of the screaming stone; of kisses that turn into birds,
some of them saying, “Come! Come!” and others “I go! I go!”; of invisible
walls that shield one from sight; of magic that makes armies from stalks of
grass; of wells of healing that cure every wound.
Oscar Wilde, in his fairy stories and symbolic allegories, tells of magic,
whereby the Happy Prince, high on the pedestal on the square, has a heart
of lead because he sees the misery of the people, and sends a swallow as his
messenger to pick out his jeweled eyes and take them to the suffering ones.
He speaks of the wonder by which the bodies of the mermaid and the
fisherman who lost his soul for love of her, when they are buried in
unconsecrated ground, send forth strange flowers that are placed on the
sacred altar.
The dark enchantment appears in the poetry as often as in the prose, from
Coleridge’s Christabel to the present. Gordon Bottomley’s The Crier by
Night is a story of an evil presence that lurks in a pool, coming out to steal
the souls of those it can lure into its waters. The woman, desperate from
jealousy, who invokes its aid, says:
“For I can use this body worn to a soul
To barter with the Crier of hidden things
That if he tangle him in his chill hair
Then I will follow and follow and follow and follow
Past where the ringed stars ebb past the light
And turn to water under the dark world!”

The fairy has always been a favorite being with poets, dramatists, and
romancers, from Shakespeare, Spenser, and Milton to the present time.
There is no figure more firmly established in folk-literature, none more
difficult to dislodge despite their delicacy and ethereal qualities than the
Little People. The belief in fairies is firmly established in Gaelic-speaking
sections and the Celtic peasant would as soon give up his religion as his
belief in the Sidhe. W. B. Yeats, in Celtic Twilight, tells of an Irish woman
of daring unbelief in hell, or in ghosts who, she held, would not be
permitted to go trapsin’ about the earth at their own free will, but who
asserted, “There are fairies, and little leprechauns, and water-horses, and
fallen angels.” Everybody among the peasantry believes in fairies, “for they

stand to reason.” And there are not wanting others more learned that believe
in the small folk, as W. Y. E. Wentz, who in his volume Fairy Faith in
Celtic Countries puts up a loyal argument for the existence of the Sidhe. He
says:
Fairies exist, because in all essentials they appear to be the same as the intelligent forces now
recognized by psychological researchers, be they thus collective units of consciousness like what
William James calls soul-stuff or more individual units like veridical apparitions.

If it were left to me, I’d as soon not believe in fairies as have to think of
them as veridical units! Mr. Wentz has never seen any fairies himself, but he
tells a number of stories to substantiate his faith in them.
The volumes of fairy stories are by no means all for juvenile
consumption, since the modern adult dearly loves the type himself. Many,
or most, of the stories of fairies told frankly for children are adaptations or
variants of continental folk-legends. The more literary side of fairy-
literature has come from the Celtic lore, for the Dim People are dearest of
all supernatural beings to the Celtic soul. The Irish, more innately poetic
than most races, cling more fondly to the beings of beauty and gather round
them delicate, undying stories. W. B. Yeats, Lady Gregory, Lady Wilde,
Oscar Wilde, John Singe, and Fiona McLeod have given in poetry and lyric
prose the Celtic fairy-lore, and have made us know the same wild, sweet
thrill that the peasants feel. The poetic thought of the primitive races
peoples everything in nature, every bird and blossom and tree, with its own
fairy personality.
Thackeray has written a fairy pantomime for great and small children, as
he says, in which the adventures of Prince Giglio and Prince Bulbo are
recounted. Eugene Field has a charming story of the Fairies of Pesth, and
Charles Kingsley’s Water Babies enriched the imagination of most of us in
youthful or adult years with its charming nonsense of beings possible and
impossible. J. M. Barrie in Peter Pan won the doubtful world over to a
confessed faith in the fairy-folk, for did we not see the marvels before our
eyes? In The Little White Bird Barrie tells us how fairies came to be,—that
they have their origin in the first laugh of the first baby that broke into a
million bits and went skipping about, each one a fairy. He shows us the wee
folk in Kensington Gardens, where by the ignorant they are mistaken for
flowers, but children and those with the poet heart can see the flashing faces
and green garments of the fairies among the pansy beds.

W. B. Yeats is a favorite with the fairies, for they have given him the
dower of magic vision, to glimpse the unseen things, to hear the faint,
musical voices of fairy pipes and song. He tells us many stories of the Dim
People, in his tales and dramas. The Land of Heart’s Desire, the story of the
struggle between the divine and mortal forces and the powers of the Sidhe
to claim the soul of the young wife and of the triumph of the fairies, by
which the girl’s body falls lifeless by the hearth while her spirit speeds
away to live forever in the land “where nobody gets old or sorry or poor,”
has a poignant pathos, a wild, dreamy beauty that touches the heart. Yeats
tells of the Imperishable Rose of Beauty, of fantastic doings of the fairy-
folk who steal mortals away, especially new-born babies or new-wed
brides, of evil fairies who slay men in malice, and of the dances by moonlit
hillside when mortals are asleep.
James Stephens in The Crock of Gold mingles delightfully fairy-lore with
other elements of the supernatural, as talking beasts, and insects, the gods, a
leprechaun, and Pan, combining with the droll philosophy of the bachelor
man to make a charming social satire. The union of the world of reality with
that of the wee people is seen in the sad little story of H. G. Wells, The Man
Who Had Been in Fairyland. A crude, materialistic middle-class
Englishman, in love with an ordinary young woman, falls asleep on a fairy
knoll one night and is kidnapped by the Dim People who take him to their
country, where their queen falls in love with him. She vainly woos him, but
he is stolidly true to the thick-ankled girl of the town, until the fairies send
him back in sleep to mortal life. But when he wakes on the knoll he is
home-sick for fairyland, he cares no more for the village girl who seems
coarse and repulsive compared with the elfin creature whose love he might
have kept in the land of wonder, so he is wretched, unable to fit again into
mortal life and unable to reopen the doors that closed inexorably upon him
by his wish. This is a modern version of the motif of the mortal lover and
the fairy bride that we find so often in mediæval ballads and romances, a
survival of the Celtic wonder-lore. Arthur Lewis in London Fairy Tales
writes philosophic human stories in the guise of fairy tales, attempting
frankly to bring the impossible into contact with daily life. They are weird
little symbolic stories with an earthly wisdom associated with unearthly
beings. The Passionate Crime, by E. Temple Thurston, is a symbolic fairy
novel, the fairies being figures of the man’s besetting sins, bodiless

presences blown on the winds of feeling, as the woman he loves is lured by
the fairy of her own beauty.
Whether fairyland be an actual place or a state of mind, it is a province
still open to romancers, and folklorists have aroused a new interest in the
Little People who may come nearer to us than before. The flood of volumes
recounting Celtic folk-tales with their fairy-lore alone would make a long
catalogue, and one can do no more than suggest the presence of the fairy in
English fiction. Andrew Lang was a faithful lover of the Sidhe and made
many collections of fairy stories, Eden Phillpotts has written much of them,
and various writers have opened their magic to us. Some place the land of
faerie under the ground, some in secret caves, some in the mind, and Lord
Dunsany says that the Old Man Who Looks after Fairyland lives in a house
whose parlor windows look away from the world, and “empties his slops
sheer on to the Southern Cross.”
We find many stories of gods, demigods, and heroes tangled up together
in folk-tales and in the literature they have influenced. It is sometimes
difficult to distinguish between them, and again it is interesting to note how
the hero-myth has been converted into the tale of a god. Celtic romances
and folk-supernaturalism give many stories of gods, demigods, and heroes
of superhuman force. It would be interesting if one could trace them to their
ultimate sources and discover how much they have been suggested or
influenced by classical mythology. In Fiction of the Irish Celts, by Patrick
Kennedy, are numberless stories of the Fianna Eironn, or Heroes of Ireland,
some of whom really flourished in the third century and whose adventures
were the favorite stories of the kings and chiefs as sung by the ancient
bards. Kennedy also retells many of the Ossianic legends. In Bardic Stories
of Ireland he relates the exploits of personages dating back to druidic times
and earlier, who reflect the remote stages of the legendary history of the
people, such as the antique King Fergus, who was given supernatural power
by the fairies and slew the sea-monster; Cormac, who did many doughty
deeds assisted by the powers of the Immortals, and many others. W. B.
Yeats, in his Stories of Red Ranrahan, gives us glimpses of an Irish
François Villon, a man of wandering nature, of human frailties, yet with a
divine gift of song.
Lady Gregory tells the wonderful saga of Cuchulain, the hero-god of
Ireland, in Cuchulain of Muirthemne, which W. B. Yeats calls “perhaps the
best book that has ever come out of Ireland.” It was his mother Dechtire

that drank the soul of Lugh of the Strong Hand, as he flew into her wine-
cup in the form of a Mayfly, so that she was bound by enchantment and
carried away with her fifty maidens as a flock of lovely birds. When anger
came upon him the hero light would shine about his head, he understood all
the arts of the druids and had supernatural beauty and strength in battle.
Cuchulain, the Hound of Ulster, and his Red Branch have filled the
legendry of Ireland with wonder.
Lady Gregory tells of the high king of Ireland who married Etain of the
Sidhe; of the nine pipers that came out of the hill of the Sidhe, whom to
fight with was to fight with a shadow, for they could not be killed; of
Conchobar, the king, that loved Deirdre of the burning beauty for whom
many candles of the Gael were blown out; of Cruachan, who knew druid
enchantments greater than the magic of the fairies so that he was able to
fight with the Dim People and overcome them, and to cover the whole
province with a deep snow so that they could not follow him. In Gods and
Fighting Men Lady Gregory tells of ancient divinities that met men as
equals. We come to know Oisin, son of Finn, who is king over a divine
country; of the Men of Dea who fought against the misshapen Fomer. Men
are called to the country of Under-Wave where the gods promise them all
their desires, as the god Medhir tells Queen Etain that in his country one
never grows old, that there is no sorrow, no care among invisible gods. She
tells us of Finn, who fought with monsters, who killed many great serpents
in Loch Cuilinn, and Shadow-shapes at Loch Lein, and fought with the
three-headed hag, and nine headless bodies that raised harsh screeches. We
meet Diarmuid, who married a daughter of King Under-Wave, who raised a
house by enchantment, and whom Grania, of the fatal beauty, loved.
Jeremiah Curtin, Aldis Dunbar, and many another writer have told us of
the wonderful legends of the Celtic gods and heroes, who somehow seem
more human than Arthur and his Table Round or any of the English
mythical heroes.
It is Lord Dunsany, however, who specializes in gods in recent times. He
fairly revels in divinities and demons, in idols and out-of-the-world
creatures. His dramas of this nature are mentioned in another connection, as
A Night at an Inn, where a jade idol slays with silent horror the men who
have stolen his emerald eye; The Gods of the Mountains, where seven
beggars masquerade as the mountain gods come to life, and some of the
people believe but some doubt. But at last the seven gods from the

mountain come down, terrible figures of green stone, and with sinister
menace point terrible fingers at the beggars, who stiffen as on pedestals,
draw their feet under them like the cross-legged posture of the images, and
turn to stone, so that the people coming say: “They were the true gods. They
have turned to stone because we doubted them.” In The Gods of Pegana are
many fantastic tales of divinities never heard of before, whom Dunsany
calls to life with the lavish ease of genius and makes immortal. In Time and
the Gods we see many gods, with their servant the swart, sinister Time who
serves them, but maliciously. The gods dream marble dreams that have
magic power, for “with domes and pinnacles the dreams arose and stood up
proudly between the river and the sky, all shimmering white to the
morning.” But Sardathrion, this city of visions, is overthrown by hateful
Time, whereat the mighty gods weep grievous tears. He tells us of Slid, a
new god that comes striding through the stars, past where the ancient
divinities are seated on their thrones, as a million waves march behind him;
of Inzana, the daughter of all the gods who plays with the sun as her golden
ball and weeps when it falls into the sea, so that Umborodom with his
thunder hound must seek it again and again for her. He whispers to us of the
prophet who saw the gods one night as they strode knee-deep in stars, and
above them a mighty hand, showing a higher power. The gods are jealous of
him that he has seen, so they rob him of knowledge of the gods, of moon
and sky, of butterflies and flowers, and all lovely things. And last they steal
his soul away from him, from which they make the South Wind, forever to
roam the waste spaces of the world, mournful, unremembering.
In The Book of Wonder are still other gods, as Hlo-Hlo, who wears the
haloes of other gods on golden hooks along his hunting-belt; the Sphinx,
who “remembers in her smitten mind at which little boys now leer, that she
once knew well those things at which man stands aghast”; the certain
disreputable god who knows nothing of etiquette and will grant prayers that
no respectable god would ever consent to hear; Chu-chu and Sheemish,
who become angry with each other and raise rival earthquakes that destroy
their temple and them. We are told of the Gibbelins that eat men, whose
home is beyond the known regions, and whose treasures many burglars try
in vain to steal only to meet death instead. Alderic tries a crafty way to
evade them but they are waiting for him. “And without saying a word or
even smiling they neatly hang him on the outer wall,—and the tale is one of
those that have not a happy ending.” But enough of gods!—though we

should not forget the Aztec legend on which Lew Wallace’s novel, The Fair
God, was founded, of the white divinity who was to come and rule the
people.
There are many other elements of folkloristic supernaturalism that cannot
be mentioned, as the banshee, the wailful creature that is a presager of death
and the loss of the soul; the fetches, ghosts of the living, whom John and
Michael Banim write much about; the pixies, as appearing in such works as
S. Baring-Gould’s Eve, and Stephens’s The Crock of Gold; the mountain
trolls that play pranks on Ibsen’s Peer Gynt and Irving’s Rip van Winkle;
the “worrie-cow” that Scott tells about; the saints and miracles that abound
in Celtic literature as in that of any Catholic country, and such as Thomas A.
Janvier has told of so delightfully in his legends of the City of Mexico. The
giant has almost faded from fiction, since, poor thing, he doesn’t fit in well
with the modern scheme of housing. He came into the Gothic novel from
the Oriental tale where he had his origin, but now he appears in our fiction
only sporadically, as in Oscar Wilde’s The Selfish Giant, in a couple of
stories by Blackwood, and a few others. We are glad to meet him
occasionally in frank folk-tales since literature at large repudiates this
favorite of our youth. He would not suit well on the stage, for obvious
reasons, and realism rejects him.
Lord Dunsany tells of elves and gnomes, of the Moomoo, of the magic
sword called Mouse, of the gnoles that caught Tonker, of the ancient Thuls,
of the window that opened to the magic of the world, and of many other
things which only the very young or the very wise care for.
Arthur Machen deals with strange, sinister aspects of supernaturalism
unlike the wholesome folklore that other writers reveal to us. He seems to
take his material chiefly from the Pit, to let loose upon the world a slimy
horde of unnamable spirits of ageless evil. One reads of the White People,
who are most loathsome fairies under whose influence the rocks dance
obscene dances in the Witches’ Sabbath, and the great white moon seems an
unclean thing. Images of clay made by human hands come to diabolic life,
and at mystic incantations the nymph Alanna turns the pool in the woodland
to a pool of fire. In The Great God Pan the timeless menace comes to earth
again, corrupting the souls of men and women, rendering them
unbelievably vile. In The Red Hand he brings together ancient runes with
magic power, black stones that tell secrets of buried treasure, flinty stone
like obsidian ten thousand years old that murders a man on a London street,

a whorl of figures that tell of the black heaven, giving an impression of vast
ages of enigmatic power. One feels one should rinse his mind out after
reading Arthur Machen’s stories, particularly the collection called The
Three Impostors.
This discussion has taken more note of the Celtic folk-fiction than of any
other group influence, because more than any other it has left its imprint on
modern literature. There are hundreds of volumes of folk-tales of the
supernatural in English, but the Celtic Revival has molded its legends into
literature that is its own excuse for being. In the work of this school we get
a passionate mysticism, a poetic symbolism that we find scarcely anywhere
else in English prose, save in such rhapsodic passages as some of De
Quincey’s impassioned prose. Melody, which forms so large a part of the
effect of supernaturalism in poetry, is here employed to heighten lyric
prose. Some of the wild stories are like the croon of the peasant mother by
her cradle beside the peat-fire, some like wild barbaric runes of terrible
unguessed import, some like the battle-cry of hero-gods, some like the
keening of women beside their dead. The essential poetry of the Celtic soul
pours itself forth in rapturous, wistful music, now like a chant, a hymn, a
wedding-song, a lament for the lost soul.
In the Celtic folk-tales we get a mixture of romances, of the survivals of
barbaric days, the ancient druid myths, the pagan legends, savage beliefs
overlaid and interwoven with the later Christian traditions. Sometimes the
old pagan myths themselves become moral allegories, the legend being
used to tell a late-learned moral truth. But, for the most part, there is no
attempt at teaching save that which comes spontaneously, the outburst of
passionate, poetic romance, the heritage of a people that love wonder and
beauty.
The pagan poetry of the Gaelic race lives on and throbs over again in
Fiona McLeod’s symbolic moralities. The mystical figures of awe and woe
appear from the dim past, a rapturous paganism showing through the
medieval religious brooding. Yet they are so symbolic of the spirit that they
are timeless. Coming as they do out of the dim legendary past, they may
reflect the veiled years of the future. They are mystic chronicles of the soul,
as in The Divine Adventure, where the Body and Will alike shrink back
from that “silent, sad-eyed foreigner, the Soul.”
In the stories of Yeats we get similar effects, the weird power of the old
curse-making bards, the gift of second-sight, a spiritual vision, the spiritual

sense that hears past the broken discordant sounds the music of the world,
the power to catch the moment “that trembles with the Song of Immortal
Powers.” We hear faint whispers, catch fleeting glimpses of the Dim
People, see again the druids, the culdees, the ancient bards and heroes. We
discern in the Celtic literature a sadness, dim, unreasoning yet deep, such as
we see in the faces of animals and little children. We see such symbolism as
that of the self-centered lovers who have heart-shaped mirrors instead of
hearts, seeing only their own images throughout eternity. We feel the poetic
thoughts drifting past us like sweet falling rose-leaves, bright with the
colors of bygone years, like fluttering bird-wings, like happy sighs. Yet
again they are terrible trumpets blown in the day of doom. We have the
modern mysticism and symbolism side by side with the old druidic
mysticism, which seems like dream-stuff with deep spiritual import. Yeats
makes us feel that the old divinities are not dead, but have taken up their
abode in the hearts of poets and writers of romance, and that the land of
faery is all about us if we would only see. But we lack the poetic vision. He
makes us see the actuality of thought, that thinking has its own vital being
and goes out into the world like a living thing, possessed by some
wandering soul. He shows us that thought can create black hounds or silver
doves to follow the soul, bring to life at will a divinity or a demon.
A certain supernatural element of style seems to lend itself to some of the
writers of strange fiction. Some of Oscar Wilde’s sentences unfold like
wild, exotic flowers, in a perfumed beauty that suggests a subtle poison at
the heart. Lord Dunsany writes joyously of fantastic creatures with a happy
grace, sometimes like a lilting laugh, sometimes a lyric rhapsody. His
evoked beings are sportive or awesome but never unclean. Arthur Machen’s
stories have an effect like a slimy trail of some loathly beast or serpent.
William Morris’s style is like an old Norse rune, while Algernon
Blackwood makes us think of awakened, elemental forces hostile to man.
We feel bodiless emotions, feelings unclothed with flesh, sad formless
spirits blown on the winds of the world. These folk-tales reflect the sweet
carelessness of the Irish soul, the stern sadness of the Scotch, the psychic
subtlety of the modern English. And as the study of folk-lore has influenced
the fiction of the supernatural, so these published romances have aroused a
wondering interest in the legendry of the past and made of folk-lore a
science.

CHAPTER VII

Supernatural Science

T
HE application of modern science to supernaturalism, or of the
supernatural to modern science, is one of the distinctive features of
recent literature. Ghostly fiction took a new and definite turn with
the rapid advance in scientific knowledge and investigation in the latter part
of the nineteenth century, for the work of Darwin, Spencer, Huxley, and
their co-laborers did as much to quicken thought in romance as in other
lines. Previous literature had made but scant effort to reflect even the crude
science of the times, and what was written was so unconvincing that it
made comparatively little impress. Almost the only science that Gothic
fiction dealt with, to any noticeable extent, was associated with alchemy
and astrology. The alchemist sought the philosopher’s stone and the elixir of
life while the astrologer tried to divine human destiny by the stars. Zofloya
dabbled in diabolic chemistry, and Frankenstein created a man-monster that
was noteworthy as an incursion into supernatural biology, yet they are
almost isolated instances. Now each advance in science has had its
reflection in supernatural fiction and each phase of research contributes plot
material, while some of the elements once considered wholly of the devil
are now scientific. The sorcerer has given place to the bacteriologist and the
botanist, the marvels of discovery have displaced miracles as basis for
unearthly plot material, and it is from the laboratory that the ghostly stories
are now evolved, rather than from the vault and charnel-room as in the past.
Science not only furnishes extraordinary situations for curdling tales, but it
is an excellent hook to hang supernatural tales upon, for it gives an excuse
for believing anything, however incredible. Man is willing to accept the
impossible, if he be but given a modern excuse for it. He will swallow the
wildest improbability if the bait be labeled science or psychical research.
No supernaturalism is incredible if it is expressed in technical terminology,

and no miracle will be rejected if its setting be in a laboratory. One peculiar
thing about modern scientific thought in its reaction upon fiction is that it is
equally effective in realism, such as shown in the naturalistic novels of
Zola, the plays of Brieux and others, and in supernaturalism, as in the work
of H. G. Wells, for instance, where the ghostly is grafted on to cold realism.
The transition from the sorcerer, the wizard, the warlock of older fiction
to the scientist in the present has been gradual. The sorcerer relied wholly
upon supernatural, chiefly diabolic, agencies for his power, while the
wizard of the modern laboratory applies his knowledge of molecules and
gases to aid his supermortal forces. Modern science itself seems
miraculous, so its employment in ghostly stories is but natural. The Arabian
Nights’ Tales seem not more marvelous than the stories of modern
investigations. Hawthorne’s narratives stand between the old and the new
types of science, his Rappaccini, Dr. Heidigger, Gaffer Dolliver, Septimius
Felton and his rivals in search for the elixir of youth, as well as the husband
who sought to efface the birthmark from his young wife’s cheek, being
related in theme to the older conventional type and in treatment to the new.
Poe’s scientific stories are more modern in method and material, and in fact
he made claim of originality of invention for the idea of making fiction
plausible by the use of scientific laws. His Descent into the Maelstrom, MS.
Found in a Bottle, and other stories were novel in the manner in which they
united the scientifically real and the supernatural. The Pit and the
Pendulum, with its diabolical machinery, is akin to the modern mechanistic
stories rather than to anything that had preceded it. Poe paved the way for
H. G. Wells’s use of the ghostly mechanical and scientific narratives, as his
stories of hypnotism with its hideous aftermath of horror must have given
suggestion for Arthur Machen’s revolting stories of physical operations with
unearthly consequences. An example of the later manifestations of
supernaturalism in connection with science is in Sax Rohmer’s tales of Fu-
Manchu, the Chinese terror, the embodied spirit of an ancient evil that
entered into him at his birth, because of his nearness to an old burying-
ground, and who, to his unholy alliance unites a wizard knowledge of
modern science in its various aspects. With every power of cunning and
intellect intensified, with a technical knowledge of all means with which to
fight his enemies, he ravages society as no mere sorcerer of early fiction
could do.

The modern stories of magic have a skillful power of suggestiveness,
being so cunningly contrived that on the surface they seem plausible and
natural, with nothing supernatural about them. Yet behind this seeming
simplicity lurks a mystery, an unanswered question, an unsolved problem.
W. W. Jacobs’s The Monkey’s Paw, for instance, is one of the most
effectively terrible stories of magic that one could conceive of. The
shriveled paw of a dead monkey, that is believed by some to give its
possessor the right to have three wishes granted, becomes the symbol of
inescapable destiny, the Weird, or Fate of the old tragedy, though the
horrors that follow upon the wishes’ rash utterance may be explained on
natural grounds. The insidious enigma is what makes the story
unforgettable. Barry Pain’s Exchange might be given as another example of
problematic magic that owes its power to elusive mystery. The witch-
woman, the solitary Fate, who appears to persons offering them such
dreadful alternatives, might be conceived of as the figment of sick brains,
yet the reader knows that she is not.
Richard Middleton’s The Coffin Merchant seems simple enough on the
surface, and the literal-minded could explain the occurrence on normal
grounds, yet the story has a peculiar haunting supernaturalism. A coffin
merchant claims to be able to know who among passers-by will die soon,
and hands a man an advertisement for a coffin, asserting that he will need it.
The man later goes to the shop to rebuke the merchant for his methods but
ends by signing a contract for his own funeral. On leaving, he shakes hands
with the dealer, after which he unconsciously puts his hand to his lips,
feeling a slight sting. He dies that night,—of what? Of poison, of fear, of
supernatural suggestion, or in the natural course of events? The series called
The Strange Cases of Dr. Stanchion, by Josephine Daskam Bacon, shows
instances occurring among the clientele of a famous brain specialist, where
the materialist might put aside the explanation of the supernatural, only to
be confronted by still greater problems. The relation between insanity and
ghostliness in recent fiction is significant and forms the crux of many a
story since Poe. Mrs. Bacon’s The Miracle, for instance, has its setting in an
insane asylum, but the uncanny happenings almost convince us of the sanity
of the patients and the paranoia of the outsiders. We come to agree with the
specialist that every person is more or less a paranoiac, and none more so
than he who scoffs at the supernatural.

Another aspect of the transfer of magic in modern fiction to a scientific
basis is that of second sight or supernatural vision. This motif still retains all
its former effect of the unearthly, perhaps gaining more, since the scientific
twist seems to give the idea that the ghostly power resides in the atoms and
molecules and gases and machines themselves, rather than in the person
who manipulates them, which is more subtly haunting in its impression.
Second sight has been used as a means for producing uncanny effects all
along the line of fiction. Defoe even used it in a number of his hoax
pamphlets, as well as in his History of Duncan Campbell, and folk-lore is
full of such stories, especially in the Highlands.
The modern use of supernatural vision is based apparently on natural
science, which makes the weird power more striking. The Black Patch, by
Randolph Hartley, tells of an experiment in optics that produces a strange
result. Two students exchange left eyeballs for the purpose of studying the
effects of the operation, leaving the right eye in each case unimpaired.
When the young men recover from the operation and the bandages are
removed, they discover that an extraordinary thing has taken place. The
first, while seeing with his right eye his own surroundings as usual, sees
also with his left—which is his friend’s left, that is—what that friend is
looking at with his right eye, thousands of miles away. The severing of the
optic nerve has not disturbed the sympathetic vision between the
companion eyes, so this curious double sight results. In a quarrel arising
from this peculiar situation, the first man kills the second, and sees on his
left eye the hideous image of his own face distorted with murderous rage, as
his friend saw it, which is never to be effaced, because the companion eye is
dead and will see no more.
Another instance of farsightedness is told in John Kendrick Bangs’s The
Speck on the Lens, where a man has such an extraordinary left eye that
when he looks through a lens he sees round the world, and gets a glimpse of
the back of his own head which he thinks is a speck on the lens. Only two
men in the world are supposed to have that power.
The Remarkable Case of Davidson’s Eyes, by H. G. Wells, is an
interesting example of this new scientific transference of magic vision.
Davidson is working in a laboratory which is struck by lightning, and after
the shock he finds himself unable to visualize his surroundings, but instead
sees the other side of the world, ships, a sea, sands. The explanation given
by a professor turns on learned theories of space and the Fourth Dimension.

He thinks that Davidson, in stooping between the poles of the electro-
magnet, experienced a queer twist in his mental retinal elements through the
sudden force of the lightning. As the author says: “It sets one dreaming of
the oddest possibilities of intercommunication in the future, of spending an
intercalary five minutes on the other side of the world, of being watched in
our most secret operations by unexpected eyes.” Davidson’s vision comes
back queerly, for he begins to see the things around him by piecemeal, as
apparently the two fields of vision overlap for a time.
Brander Matthews in The Kinetoscope of Time introduces an instrument
with eyepieces that show magic vision. The beholder sees scenes from the
past, from literature as well as from life, has glimpses of Salome dancing,
of Esmerelda, witnesses the combat between Achilles and Hector, the
tourney between Saladin and the Knight of the Leopard. The magician
offers to show him his future—for a price—but he is wise enough to refuse.
Magic views of the future constitute an interesting aspect of the
supernatural vision in modern stories. The Lifted Veil, by George Eliot, is an
account of a man who has prophetic glimpses of his fate, which seem
powerless to warn him, since he marries the woman who he knows will be
his doom, and he is aware that he will die alone, deserted even by his
servants, yet cannot help it. He sees himself dying, with the attendants off
on their own concerns, knows every detail beforehand, but unavailingly.
This suggests Amos Judd, by J. A. Mitchell, which is a curious instance of
the transition stage of second sight, related both to the old sorcerer type and
to the new scientific ideas. Amos Judd, so called, is the son of an Indian
rajah, sent out of his country because of a revolution, and brought up in
ignorance of his birth in a New England farmhouse. Vishnu, in the far past,
has laid his finger on the brow of one of the rajah’s ancestors, thereby
endowing him with the gift of magic vision, which descends once in a
hundred years to some one of his line. Amos Judd therefore, can see the
future by pictures, beholding clearly everything that will happen to him. He
sees himself lying dead at a desk, on which stands a calendar marking the
date, November 4th. His friends persuade him to live past the date, and they
think all is well, till one day while he is on a visit to a strange house he is
killed by an assassin. They find him lying at a desk, with an out-of-date
calendar beside him, marking November 4th.
Barry Pain endows a bulldog with the power to foretell the future, to
reveal disaster and oppose it. Zero, in the story by that name, is a common

bulldog greatly valued because he has a supernatural knowledge of any evil
that threatens those he loves, and by his canine sagacity he forestalls fate. In
the end, in protecting his master’s little child, he is bitten by a mad dog,
whose coming he has supernaturally foreseen, and he commits suicide as
the only way out of the difficulty. Arthur Machen, in The Bowmen and
Others, tells varied stories of supernatural vision associated with the war.
The Door in the Wall, by H. G. Wells, depicts a man who in his dreamy
childhood wanders into a secret garden where he is shown the book of his
past and future, but who afterwards is unable to find the door by which he
enters, though he seeks it often. Later in life, at several times when he is in
a special haste to reach some place for an important appointment, he sees
the door, but does not enter. Finally he goes in to his death. This is an
instance of the suggestive supernaturalism associated with dreams and
visions.
The use of mirrors in supernatural vision is significant and appears in a
number of ways in modern fiction. Scott’s My Aunt Margaret’s Mirror is an
early instance, where the magician shows the seeker a glass wherein she
sees what is taking place in another country, sees her husband on his way to
the altar with another woman, sees a stranger stop the marriage, and
witnesses the fatal duel. Hawthorne has used mirrors extensively as
symbolic of an inner vision, of a look into the realities of the soul. For
instance, when poor Feathertop, the make-believe man, the animated
scarecrow, looks into the mirror he sees not the brave figure the world
beholds in him, but the thing of sticks and straw, the sham that he is, as the
minister shrinks from the mirrored reflection of the black veil, symbol of
mystery that he wears. Hawthorne elsewhere speaks of Echo as the voice of
the reflection in a mirror, and says that our reflections are ghosts of
ourselves. Mr. Titbottom, in George William Curtis’s Prue and I, who has
the power of seeing into the souls of human beings by means of his magic
spectacles and catching symbolic glimpses of what they are instead of what
they appear to be, beholds himself in a mirror and shrinks back aghast from
the revelation of his own nature. Barry Pain’s story, referred to in another
connection, shows a mirror wherein a supernatural visitant reveals to a
young man the supreme moments of life, his own and those of others,
pictures of the highest moments of ecstasy or despair, of fulfillment of dear
dreams.

The Silver Mirror, by A. Conan Doyle, represents a man alone night after
night, working with overstrained nerves on a set of books, who sees in an
antique mirror a strange scene re-enacted and finds later that the glass has
once belonged to Mary, Queen of Scots, and that he has seen the murder of
Rizzio. Brander Matthews also has a story concerned with re-created
images in an old mirror. The looking-glass in fiction seems to be not only a
sort of hand conscience, as Markheim calls it, but a betrayer of secrets, a
revealer of the forgotten past, a prophet of the future as well. It is also a
strange symbol to show hearts as they are in reality, reflecting the soul
rather than the body. It is employed in diverse ways and is an effective
means of supernatural suggestion, of ghostly power.
The Fourth Dimension is another motif that seems to interest the writers
of recent ghostly tales. They make use of it in various ways and seem to
have different ideas concerning it, but they like to play with the thought and
twist it to their whim. Ambrose Bierce has a collection of stories dealing
with mysterious disappearances, in which he tells of persons who are
transferred from the known, calculable space to some “non-Euclidean
space” where they are lost. In some strange pockets of nowhere they fall,
unable to see or to be seen, to hear or to be heard, neither living nor dying,
since “in that space is no power of life or of death.” It is all very mysterious
and uncanny. He uses the theme as the basis for a number of short stories of
ghostly power, which offer no solution but leave the mystery in the air. In
some of these stories Bierce represents the person as crying out, and being
heard, but no help can go, because he is invisible and intangible, not
knowing where he is nor what has happened to him. H. G. Wells, in The
Plattner Case, which shows an obvious influence of Bierce, gives a similar
case. He explains the extraordinary happenings by advancing the theory that
Plattner has changed sides. According to mathematics, he says, we are told
that the only way in which the right and left sides of a solid body can be
changed is by taking that body clean out of space as we know it, out of
ordinary existence, that is, and turning it somewhere outside space. Plattner
has been moved out into the Fourth Dimension and been returned to the
world with a curious inversion of body. He is absent from the world for nine
days and has extraordinary experiences in the Other-World. This happens
through an explosion in the laboratory where he is working, similarly to
Wells’s story of Davidson, where the infringement on the Fourth Dimension
is the result of a lightning stroke.

Mary Wilkins Freeman deals with the Fourth Dimension in The Hall
Bedroom, where the boarder drifts off into unknown space, never to return,
from gazing at a picture on the wall, as has happened in the case of previous
occupants of the room. Richard Middleton employs the same idea in a story
of a conjurer who nightly plays a trick in public, causing his wife to seem to
disappear into space. One night she actually does so vanish, never to be
seen again. Other instances of the form may be found in recent fiction.
H. G. Wells uses the theme with a different twist in his Time Machine. Here
the scientist insists that time is the Fourth Dimension, that persons who talk
of the matter ordinarily have no idea of what it is, but that he has solved it.
He constructs a machine which enables him to project himself into the
future or into the past, and sees what will happen or what has happened in
other centuries. He lives years in the space of a few moments and has
amazing adventures on his temporal expeditions. But finally the Fourth
Dimension, which may be thought of as a terrible Fate or inescapable
destiny awaiting all who dally with it, gets him too, for he fails to return
from one of his trips. Another story tells of a man who by drinking
quantities of green tea could project himself into the Fourth Dimension.
A number of stories of scientific supernaturalism are concerned with
glimpses into the future. The Time Machine, just mentioned, with its
invasions of the unknown space and time, its trips into eternity by the
agency of a miraculous vehicle, illustrates the method. The scientist finds
that he can travel backwards or forwards, accelerating or retarding his speed
as he will, and get a section of life in any age he wishes. He discovers that
in the future which he visits many reforms have been inaugurated,
preventive medicine established, noxious weeds eradicated, and yet strange
conditions exist. Mankind has undergone a two-fold involution, the soft
conditions of life having caused the higher classes to degenerate into flabby
beings of no strength, while an underground race has grown up of horrible
depraved nature, blind from living in subterranean passages, cannibalistic
while the others are vegetarian. The lower classes are like hideous apes,
while the higher are effeminate, relaxed. The traveler escapes a dire fate
only by rushing to his machine and returning to his own time. Samuel
Butler suggests that machines will be the real rulers in the coming ages, that
man will be preserved only to feed and care for the machines which will
have attained supernatural sensibility and power. He says that mechanisms
will acquire feelings and tastes and culture, and that man will be the servant

of steel and steam in the future, instead of master as now; that engines will
wed and rear families which men, as slaves, must wait upon.
Frank R. Stockton[197] gives another supernatural scientific glimpse into
the future, showing as impossibilities certain things that have since come to
pass, while some of the changes prophesied as imminent are yet unrealized
and apparently far from actualities. Jack London’s Scarlet Plague pictures
the earth returned to barbarism, since most of the inhabitants have been
swept away by a scourge and the others have failed to carry on the torch of
civilization. H. G. Wells[198] gives account of a tour into futurity, wherein
the miracles of modern science work revolutions in human life, and[199] he
satirizes society, showing a topsy-turvy state of affairs in A.D. 2100. His
Dream of Armageddon is a story of futurity wherein a man has continuous
visions of what his experiences will be in another life far in the future. That
life becomes more real to him than his actual existence, and he grows
indifferent to events taking place around him while rent with emotion over
the griefs to come in another age. Of course, Edward Bellamy’s Looking
Backward, with its social and mechanistic miracles that now seem flat and
tame to us, might be said to be the father of most of these modern
prophecies of scientific futurity. Samuel Butler’s Erewhon contains many
elements of impossibility in relation to life, and is a satire on society,
though perhaps not, strictly speaking, supernatural. These prophecies of the
time to come are in the main intended as social satires, as symbolic analyses
of the weaknesses of present life. They evince vivid imagination and much
ingenuity in contriving the mechanisms that are to transform life, yet they
are not examples of great fiction. Mark Twain reverses the type in his
Connecticut Yankee at King Arthur’s Court, for he shows a man of the
present taking part in the life of the far past, managing to parody both
mediævalism and the Yankee character at once. H. G. Wells is particularly
interested in studying the unused forces of the world and fancying what
would happen under other conditions. His play of scientific speculation has
produced many stories that he does not greatly value now himself, but
which are of interest as showing certain tendencies of fiction.

Views of other planets form a feature of modern supernaturalism, for the
writer now sets his stories not only on earth, in heaven, and in hell but on
other worlds besides. The astrologer of ancient fiction, with his eye fixed
ever on the stars, seeking to discern their influence on human destiny,

appears no more among us. He has been replaced by the astronomer who
scans the stars yet with a different purpose in fiction. He wishes to find out
the life of citizens of other planets rather than to figure out the fate of
mortals on the earth. Many stories of modern times cause new planets to
swim into our literary ken and describe their citizens with ease. H. G. Wells
stars here as elsewhere. In his War of the Worlds he depicts a struggle
between the earth people and the Martians, in which many supernatural
elements enter. The people of Mars are a repulsive horde of creatures, yet
they have wonderful organization and command of resources, and they
conquer the earth to prey upon it. This book has suffered the inevitable
parody.[200] In The Crystal Egg, Wells describes a curious globe in which
the gazer can see scenes reflected from Mars. The author suggests two
theories as to the possibility of this,—either that the crystal is in both
worlds at once, remaining stationary in one and moving in the other, and
that it reflects scenes in Mars so that they are visible on earth, or else that
by a peculiar sympathy with a companion globe on the other planet it shows
on its surface what happens in the other world. It is hinted that the Martians
have sent the crystal to the earth in order that they might catch glimpses of
our life.
In The Star, Wells gives yet another story of the future, of other planetary
influences. By the passing of a strange star, life on earth is convulsed and
conditions radically changed. These conditions are observed by the
astronomers on Mars, who are beings different from men, yet very
intelligent. They draw conclusions as to the amount of damage done to the
earth, satirizing human theories as to Mars. The Days of the Comet shows
earthly life changed by the passing of a comet, but instead of the destruction
described in the other story, the social conditions are vastly improved and a
millennium is ushered in. Wells[201] makes a voyage to the moon possible
by the discovery of a substance which resists gravity. Other instances might
be given, for there has been no lack of lunar literature, but they are not
usually worth much.
Du Maurier’s The Martian, which combines the elements of
metempsychosis, automatic writing, and dream-supernaturalism, with the
idea of ghostly astronomy, tells of a supernatural visitant from Mars. The
Martian is a young woman whose spirit comes to inhabit a young man to
whom she dictates wonderful books in his dreams. She writes letters to him
in a sort of private code, in which she tells of her previous incarnations on

Mars, of the Martians who are extraordinary amphibious beings, descended
from a small sea animal. They have unusual acuteness of senses with an
added sixth sense, a sort of orientation, a feeling of a magnetic current,
which she imparts to her protégé, Barty Joscelyn. Jack London[202] tells a
story of interplanetary metempsychosis, where the central character, a
prisoner in San Quentin, finds himself able to will his body to die at times,
thus releasing his spirit to fly through space and relive its experiences in
previous incarnations.
Barry Pain’s The Celestial Grocery is a phantasy of insanity and the
supernatural, with its setting on two planets. It contains a cab horse that
talks and laughs, and other inversions of the natural. A man is taken on a
journey to another world, sees the stars and the earth in space beneath him,
and finds everything different from what he has known before. People there
have two bodies and send them alternately to the wash, though they seldom
wear them. The celestial shop sells nothing concrete, only abstractions,
emotions, experiences. One may buy measures of love, requited or
unselfishly hopeless, of political success, of literary fame, or of power or
what-not. Happiness is a blend, however, for which one must mix the
ingredients for himself. The story is symbolic of the ideals of earth, with a
sad, effective satire. The end is insanity, leaving one wondering how much
of it is pure phantasy of a mad man’s brain or how much actuality. It is
reminiscent of Hawthorne’s Intelligence Office with its symbolic
supernaturalism.

Hypnotism enters largely into the fiction of modern times. Hypnotism
may or may not be considered as supernatural, yet it borders so closely on
to the realm of the uncanny, and is so related to science of to-day as well as
to the sorcery of the past, that it should be considered in this connection for
it carries on the traditions of the supernatural. In its earlier stages hypnotism
was considered as distinctly diabolic, used only for unlawful purposes,
being associated with witchcraft. It is only in more recent times that it has
been rehabilitated in the public mind and thought of as a science which may
be used for helpful ends. It is so mysterious in its power that it affords
complications in plenty for the novelist and has been utilized in various
ways. In some cases, as F. Marion Crawford’s The Witch of Prague, it is
associated still with evil power and held as a black art. Unorna has an
unearthly power gained through hypnotism which is more than hypnotic,

and which she uses to further her own ends. Strange scientific ideas of life
and of death are seen here, and someone says of her: “You would make a
living mummy of a man. I should expect to find him with his head cut off
and living by means of a glass heart and thinking through a rabbit’s brain.”
She embalms an old man in a continuous hypnotic lethargy, recalling him
only at intervals to do mechanically the things necessary to prolong life.
She is trying to see if she can cause human tissue to live forever in this
embalmed state, hoping to learn through it the secret of eternal life. This, of
course, suggests Poe’s stories of the subject, Mesmeric Revelations and The
Facts in the Case of M. Waldemar. The latter is one of the most revolting
instances of scientific supernaturalism, for the dying man is mesmerized in
the moment of death and remains in that condition, dead, yet undecaying,
and speaking, repeating with his horrible tongue the statement, “I am dead.”
After seven months, further experiments break the spell, and he, pleading to
be allowed to be at peace in death, falls suddenly away into a loathsome,
liquid putrescence before the eyes of the experimenters.
The Portent, by George MacDonald, is a curious study of hypnotic
influence, of a woman who is her true self only when in a somnambulistic
state. A supernatural connection of soul exists between her and a youth born
on the same day, and it is only through his hypnotic aid that she gains her
personality and sanity. James L. Ford plays with the subject by having a
group of persons in an evening party submit themselves to be hypnotized in
turn, each telling a true story of his life while in that condition. W. D.
Howells combines mesmerism with spiritualism in his novel,[203] where the
séances are really the result of hypnotism rather than supernatural
revelation as the medium thinks. H. G. Wells has used this theme, as almost
every other form of scientific ghostliness, though without marked success.
The prize story of hypnotism, however, still remains Du Maurier’s Trilby,
for no mesmerist in this fiction has been able to outdo Svengali.

Uncanny chemistry forms the ingredient for many a modern story. The
alchemist was the favored feature of the older supernatural fiction of
science, and his efforts to discover the philosopher’s stone and to brew the
magic elixir have furnished plots for divers stories. He does not often waste
his time in these vain endeavors in recent stories, though his efforts have
not altogether ceased, as we have seen in a previous chapter. A. Conan
Doyle[204] is among the last to treat the theme, and makes the scientist find

his efforts worse than useless, for the research student finds that his
discovery of the art of making gold is disturbing the nice balance of nature
and bringing injury to those he meant to help, so he destroys his secret
formula and dies. The Elixir of Youth illustrates the transference of power
from the sorcerer to the scientist, for the magician that gives the stranger a
potion to restore his youth tells him that he is not a sorcerer, not a diabolic
agent, but a scientist learning to utilize the forces that are at the command
of any intelligence.
Barry Pain’s The Love Philter is related both to the old and the new types
of supernatural chemistry. A man loves a woman who doesn’t care, so he
asks aid of a wise woman, who gives him a potion that will surely win the
stubborn heart. As he lies asleep in the desert, on his way back, he dreams
that his love says to him that love gained by such means is not love, so he
pours the liquid on the sand. When he returns, the woman tells him that she
has been with him in his dreams and loves him because he would not claim
her wrongly. Blue Roses is another of his stories of magic that bring love to
the indifferent. Twilight, by Frank Danby, is a novel based on the relation
between morphia and the supernatural. A woman ill of nervous trouble,
under the influence of opiates, continually sees the spirit of a woman dead
for years, who relives her story before her eyes, so that the personalities are
curiously merged. This inevitably suggests De Quincey’s Confessions of an
English Opium-Eater with its dream-wonders, yet it has a power of its own
and the skillful blending of reality with dream-supernaturalism and insanity
has an uncanny distinction.
Fu-Manchu, the Chinese wonder-worker in Sax Rohmer’s series of
stories bearing that name, is a representative example of the modern use of
chemistry for supernormal effect. He employs all the forces of up-to-the-
minute science to compass his diabolic ends and works miracles of
chemistry by seemingly natural methods. By a hypodermic injection he can
instantly drive a man to acute insanity incurable save by a counter-injection
which only Fu-Manchu can give, but which as instantly restores the reason.
By another needle he can cause a person to die—to all intents and purposes,
at least,—and after the body has been buried for days he can restore it to
life by another prick of the needle. He terrorizes England by his infernal
powers, killing off or converting to slavery the leading intelligences that
oppose him.

Stevenson’s Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde is perhaps the best-known instance
of chemical supernaturalism. Here the magic drug not only changes the
body, evolving from the respectable Dr. Jekyll his baser self in the form of
Mr. Hyde, enabling him to give rein to his criminal instincts without
bringing reproach on his reputation, but has the subtle power to fix the
personality of evil, so that each time the drug is used Hyde is given a
stronger force and Jekyll is weakened. This fictive sermon on dual nature,
the ascendence of evil over the nobler soul if it be indulged, seems yet an
appallingly real story of human life. In a similar fashion Arthur Machen
uses supernatural chemistry most hideously in The Three Impostors, where
a certain powder perverts the soul, making man a sharer in the unspeakable
orgies of ancient evil forces.
The Invisible Man, by H. G. Wells, shows an unusual application of
chemistry to ghostly fiction that gives a peculiar effect of reality because its
style is that of scientific realism. By experimentation with drugs a man
finds a combination that will render living tissue absolutely invisible. When
he swallows a portion of it, he cannot be seen. His clothes appear to be
walking around by themselves and the complications are uncanny. As one
may see, the comic possibilities are prominent and for a time we laugh over
the mystification of the persons with whom he comes in contact, but soon
stark tragedy results. During the man-chase, as the hunted creature seeks to
escape, the people hear the thud-thud of running steps, watch bloody
footprints form before their eyes, yet see nothing else. Here is a genuine
thrill that is new in fiction. The man gradually becomes visible, but only in
death is his dreadful figure seen completely again. This modern method of
transferring to science the idea of invisibility so prominent in connection
with ghosts, showing the invisibility as the result of a chemical compound,
not of supernatural intervention, affecting a living man not a spirit, makes
the effect of supernaturalism more vivid even than in the case of ghosts.
These are only suggestions of the varied uses to which chemistry has
been put in producing ghostly plots and utilizing in novel ways the
conventional motifs of older stories. These themes are more popular now
than they would have been half a century ago because now the average
reader knows more about scientific facts and is better prepared to appreciate
them. A man ignorant of chemistry would care nothing for the throes of Dr.
Jekyll or the complicating experiences of the invisible man, because he
would have slight basis for his imagination to build upon. Each widening of

the popular intelligence and each branch of science added to the mental
store of the ordinary reader is a distinct gain to fiction.

Supernatural biology looms large in modern fiction, though it is not
always easy to differentiate between the predominance of chemical and
biological motifs. In many cases the two are tangled up together, and as, in
the stories of dual personality and invisibility just mentioned, one may not
readily say which is uppermost, the biological or the chemical side, for the
experiments are of the effects of certain drugs upon living human tissue.
There are various similar instances in the fiction of scientific
supernaturalism. Hawthorne’s The Birthmark is a case of chemical biology,
where the husband seeking to remove by powerful drugs the mark from his
wife’s cheek succeeds in doing so but causes her death. Here the
supernaturalism is symbolic, suggested rather than boldly stated, as is
usually the case with Hawthorne’s work.
A. Conan Doyle in The Los Amigos Fiasco shows supernaturalism based
on the effect of electricity on the body, for the lynchers in trying to kill a
man by connecting him with a dynamo succeed in so magnetizing him that
he can’t be killed in any way. Sax Rohmer tells one Fu-Manchu story of a
mysterious murder committed by means of an imprisoned gas that escapes
from a mummy case and poisons those exposed to it, and, in another, he
introduces a diabolic red insect attracted by the scent of a poisonous orchid,
that bites the marked victim.
Wells’s The Island of Dr. Moreau is a ghastly study in vivisection. Two
scientists on a remote island with no other human inhabitants try
unspeakable experiments on animals, trying by pruning and grafting and
training the living tissue to make them human. They do succeed in a
measure, for they teach the beasts to talk and to observe a sort of jungle law
laid down by man, yet the effect is sickening. The animals are not human
and never can be, and these revolting experiments deprive them of all
animal dignity without adding any of the human. In the end they revert to
savagery, becoming even more bestial than before. The most dreadful
biological experiments in recent fiction are described in Arthur Machen’s
volume of short stories, The House of Souls. In one story an operation on
the brain enables a victim to “see the great god Pan,” to have revelations of
ancient supernaturalism wherein Pan and the devil are united in one
character. In another, a delicate cutting of the brain removes the soul,—

which takes the form of a wonderful jewel,—and utterly diabolizes the
character. These curious and revolting stories are advanced instances of
scientific diabolism and leave a smear on the mind. They are more horrible
than the creation of Frankenstein’s man-monster, for here moral monsters
are evolved.
Medicated supernaturalism associated with prenatal influence occurs in
various stories where a supernormal twist is given because of some event
out of the ordinary. Ambrose Bierce’s The Eyes of the Panther, a story of a
young woman who is a panther for part of the time as a result of a shock, is
associated with the snake nature of Elsie Venner. Barry Pain’s The Undying
Thing is one of the most horrible of such complications, for because of a
mother’s fright over a pack of wolves a monster is born, neither wolf nor
human, neither animal nor man, neither mortal nor immortal. It is hidden in
a secret cave to die, yet lives on, though not living, to fulfil a curse upon the
ancient house. A. Conan Doyle’s The Terror of Blue John Gap is a story of
a monstrous animal, like a bear yet bigger than an elephant, that ravages the
countryside. The theory for its being is that it is a survival, in a subterranean
cave, of a long-extinct type, from prehistoric times, that comes out in its
blindness to destroy. There are other examples of supernormal animals in
modern fiction, yet these suffice to illustrate the genre.

Botany furnishes its ghostly plots in fiction as well as other branches of
science, for we have plant vampires and witches and devils. Trees and
flowers are highly psychic and run a gamut of emotions. Hawthorne shows
us supernatural plants in several of his novels and stories, such as the
mysterious plant growing from a secret grave, which has a strange
poisonous power, or the flowers from Gaffer Dolliver’s garden that shine
like jewels and lend a glow to the living face near them, when worn on a
woman’s breast. In Rappaccini’s Daughter the garden is full of flowers of
subtle poison, so insidious that their venom has entered into the life of the
young girl, rendering her a living menace to those around her. She is the
victim of her father’s dæmonic experiments in the effects of poison on the
human body, and her kiss means death. Algernon Blackwood[205] tells of the
uncanny power of motion and emotion possessed by the trees, where the
forest exercises a magnetic force upon human beings sympathetic to them,
going out after men and luring them to their fate. He describes the cedar as

friendly to man and attempting but in vain to protect him from the creeping
malignant power of the forest.
Fu-Manchu, Sax Rohmer’s Chinese horror, performs various experiments
in botany to further his dreadful ends. He develops a species of poisonous
fungi till they become giant in size and acquire certain powers through
being kept in the darkness. When a light is turned on them, the fungi
explode, turning loose, on the men he would murder, fumes that drive them
mad. From the ceiling above are released ripe spores of the giant Empusa,
for the air in the second cellar, being surcharged with oxygen, makes them
germinate instantly. They fall like powdered snow upon the victims and the
horrible fungi grow magically, spreading over the writhing bodies of the
mad-men and wrapping them in ghostly shrouds. In The Flower of Silence
he describes a strange orchid that has the uncanny habit of stinging or biting
when it is broken or roughly handled, sending forth a poison that first
makes a man deaf then kills him. Fu-Manchu introduces this flower into the
sleeping-rooms of those he wishes to put out of the way, and sends them
into eternal silence. The Flowering of the Strange Orchid, by H. G. Wells, is
the story of a murderous plant, a vampire that kills men in the jungle, and in
a greenhouse in England sends out its tentacles that grip the botanist,
drinking his blood and seeking to slay him. This orchid has the power to
project its vampiric attacks when it is a shriveled bulb or in the flower. This
reminds us of Algernon Blackwood’s story of the vampire soil, which after
its psychic orgy burst into loathsome luxuriant bloom where before it had
been barren.
It is a curious heightening of supernatural effect to give to beautiful
flowers diabolical cunning and murderous motives, to endow them with
human psychology and devilish designs. The magic associated with botany
is usually black instead of white. One wonders if transmigration of soul
does not enter subconsciously into these plots, and if a vampire orchid is
not a trailing off of a human soul, the murderous blossom a revenge ghost
expressing himself in that way. The plots in this type of fiction are wrought
with much imagination and the scientific exactness combined with the
supernatural gives a peculiar effect of reality.

There are varied forms of supernatural science that do not come under
any of the heads discussed. The applications of research to weird fiction are
as diverse as the phases of investigation and only a few may be mentioned

to suggest the variety of themes employed. Inversion of natural laws
furnishes plots,—as in Frank R. Stockton’s Tale of Negative Gravity with its
discovery of a substance that enables a man to save himself all fatigue by
means of a something that inverts the law of gravity. With a little package in
his pocket a man can climb mountains without effort, but the discoverer
miscalculates the amount of energy required to move and finally rises
instead of staying on the earth, till his wife has to fish him into the second-
story window. Poe’s Loss of Breath illustrates another infringement of a
natural law, as do several stories where a human being loses his shadow.
In The Diamond Lens, Fitz-James O’Brien tells of a man who looking at
a drop of water through a giant microscope sees in the drop a lovely woman
with whom he falls madly in love, only to watch her fade away under the
lens as his despairing eyes see the water evaporate. Supernatural acoustics
enters[206] in the story of a man who discovers the sound-center in an opera
house and reads the unspoken thoughts of those around him. He applies the
laws of acoustics to mentality and spirituality, making astounding
discoveries. Bram Stoker combines superstition with modern science in his
books, as[207] where Oriental magic is used to fight the encroachments of an
evil force emanating from a mummy, as also to bring the mummy to life,
while a respirator is employed to keep away the subtle odor. He brings in
blood transfusion together with superstitious symbols, to combat the
ravages of vampires.[208] Blood transfusion also enters into supernaturalism
in Stephen French Whitney’s story, where a woman who has been buried in
a glacier for two thousand years is recalled to life.
The Human Chord, by Algernon Blackwood, is a novel based on the
psychic values of sounds, which claims that sounds are all powerful, are
everything,—for forms, shapes, bodies are but vibratory activities of sound
made visible. The research worker here believes that he who has the power
to call a thing by its proper name is master of that thing, or of that person,
and that to be able to call the name of Deity would be to enable one to
become as God. He seeks to bring together a human chord, four persons in
harmony as to voice and soul, who can pronounce the awful name and
become divine with him. He can change the form or the nature of anything
by calling its name, as a woman is deformed by mispronunciation, and the
walls of a room expanded by his voice. He can make of himself a dwarf or a
giant at will, by different methods of speaking his own name. He says that
sound could re-create or destroy the universe. He has captured sounds that

strain at their leashes in his secret rooms, gigantic, wonderful. But in the
effort to call upon the mighty Name he mispronounces it, bringing a terrible
convulsion of nature which destroys him. The beholders see an awful fire in
which Letters escape back to heaven in chariots of flame.
Psychology furnishes some interesting contributions to recent fiction
along the line of what might be called momentary or instantaneous plots.
Ambrose Bierce’s The Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge is a good example,
—where a man is being hanged and in the instant between the drop from
the bridge and the breaking of the neck he lives through long and dramatic
adventures, escaping his pursuers by falling into the river and swimming
ashore, reaching home at last to greet his wife and children. Yet in a second
his lifeless body swings from the bridge. The Warning, by Josephine
Daskam Bacon, shows the case of a man who lives years in another country
during a few moments of acute mental strain carried to the point of
paranoia. Barry Pain has a story where in the time in which a man drives
home from the theater he visits another planet and changes the current of
his life, while Algernon Blackwood compresses a great experience into a
few minutes of dreaming.
One noteworthy point in connection with the scientific supernaturalism is
that these themes appear only in novels and short stories. They do not cross
over into poetry as do most of the other forms of the ghostly art. Perhaps
this is because the situations are intellectual rather than emotional, brain-
problems or studies in mechanisms rather than in feelings or emotions. The
province of science is removed from that of poetry because the methods and
purposes are altogether different. The scientific methods are clear-cut,
coldly intellectual. Science demands an exactness, a meticulous accuracy
hostile to poetry which requires suggestion, vagueness, veiled mystery for
its greatest effect. The Flower of Silence, for instance, would be a fitting
title for a poem, but the poetic effect would be destroyed by the need for
stating the genus and species of the orchid and analyzing its destruction of
human tissue. Nature’s mysterious forces and elements in general and
vaguely considered, veiled in mists of imagination and with a sense of
vastness and beauty, are extremely poetic. But the notebook and laboratory
methods of pure science are antagonistic to poetry, though they fit
admirably into the requirements of fiction, whose purpose is to give an
impression of actuality.

Another reason why these scientific themes do not pass over into poetry
may be that scientific methods as we know them are new, and poetry clings
to the old and established conventions and emotions. There is amazing
human interest in these experiments, a veritable wealth of romance, with
dramatic possibilities tragic and comic, yet they are more suited to prose
fiction than to poetry. We have adapted our brain-cells to their concepts in
prose, yet we have not thus molded our poetic ideas. It gives us a shock to
have new concepts introduced into poetry. An instance of this clash of
realism with sentiment is shown in a recent poem where the setting is a
physics laboratory. Yet in a few more decades we may find the poets
eagerly converting the raw materials of science into the essence of poetry
itself, and by a mystic alchemy more wonderful than any yet known,
transmuting intellectual problems of science into magic verse. Creation, by
Alfred Noyes, is an impressive discussion of evolution as related to God.
Perhaps another reason why these themes have not been utilized in poetry
is because they are too fantastic, too bizarre. They lack the proportion and
sense of artistic harmony that poetry requires. Strangeness and wonder are
true elements of poetry, and magic is an element of the greatest art, but in
solution as it were, not in the form observed in science. The miracles of the
laboratory are too abrupt, too inconceivable save by intellectual analysis,
and present too great a strain upon the powers of the imagination. They are
fantastic, while true poetry is concerned with the fancy. Magic and wonder
in verse must come from concepts that steal upon the imagination and make
appeal through the emotions. Thus some forms of supernaturalism are
admirably adapted to the province of poetry, such as the presence of spirits,
visitations of angels or demons, ancient witchcraft, and so forth. The
elements that have universal appeal through the sense of the supernatural
move us in poetry, but the isolated instances, the peculiar problems that
occur in scientific research if transferred to poetry would leave us cold. Yet
they may come to be used in the next vers libre.
Nor do these situations come over into the drama save in rare instances.
Theodore Dreiser, in a recent volume, Plays of the Natural and the
Supernatural, makes use of certain motifs that are striking and modern,
as[209] where a physician goes on the operating-table, the dramatis personæ
including Demyaphon (Nitrous Acid), and Alcepheron (a Power of
Physics), as well as several Shadows, mysterious personages of vagueness.
These Shadows here, as in The Blue Sphere, are not altogether clear as to

motivation, yet they seem to stand for Fate interference in human destiny.
In the latter play Fate is also represented by a Fast Mail which is one of the
active characters, menacing and destroying a child.
One reason why these motifs of science are not used in drama to any
extent is that they are impossible of representation on the stage. Even the
wizardry of modern producers would be unable to show a Power of Physics,
or Nitrous Acid, save as they might be embodied, as were the symbolic
characters in Maeterlinck’s Blue Bird, which would mean that they would
lose their effect. And what would a stage manager do with the rhythm of the
universe, which enters into Dreiser’s play? Many sounds can be managed
off stage, but hardly that, one fancies. These themes are not even found in
closet drama, where many other elements of supernaturalism which would
be difficult or impossible of presentation on the stage trail off. William
Sharp’s Vistas, for instance, could not be shown on the stage, yet the little
plays in that volume are of wonderful dramatic power. The drama can stand
a good deal of supernaturalism of various kinds, from the visible ghosts and
devils of the Elizabethans to the atmospheric supernaturalism of
Maeterlinck, but it could scarcely support the presentations of chemicals
and gases and supernatural botany and biology that fiction handles with
ease. The miraculous machinery would balk at stage action. Fancy the Time
Machine staged, for instance!
We notice in these scientific stories a widening of the sphere of
supernatural fiction. It is extended to include more of the normal interests
and activities of man than has formerly been the case. Here we notice a
spirit similar to that of the leveling influence seen in the case of the ghosts,
devils, witches, angels, and so forth, who have been made more human not
only in appearance but in emotions and activities as well. Likewise these
scientific elements have been elevated to the human. Supernatural as well
as human attributes have been extended to material things, as animals are
given supernormal powers in a sense different from and yet similar to those
possessed by the enchanted animals in folk-lore. Science has its physical as
well as psychic horrors which the scientific ghostly tales bring in.
Not only are animals gifted with supernatural powers but plants as well
are humanized, diabolized. We have strange murderous trees, vampire
orchids, flowers that slay men in secret ways with all the smiling loveliness
of a treacherous woman. The dæmonics of modern botany form an
interesting phase of ghostly fiction and give a new thrill to supernaturalism.

Inanimate, concrete things are endowed with unearthly cunning and
strength, as well as animals and plants. The new type of fiction gives to
chemicals and gases a hellish intelligence, a diabolic force of minds. It
creates machinery and gives it an excess of force, a supernatural, more than
human cunning, sometimes helpful, sometimes dæmonic. Machines have
been spiritualized and some engines are philanthropic while some are like
damned souls.
This scientific supernaturalism concerns itself with mortal life, not with
immortality as do some of the other aspects of the genre. It is concrete in its
effects, not spiritual. Its incursions into futurity are earthly, not of heaven or
hell, and its problems are of time, not of eternity. The form shows how
clear, cold intelligence plays with miracles and applies the supernatural to
daily life. The enthusiasm, wild and exaggerated in some ways, that sprang
up over the prospects of what modern science and investigation would
almost immediately do for the world in the latter half of the nineteenth
century, had no more interesting effect than in the stimulating of scientific
fictive supernaturalism. And though mankind has learned that science will
not immediately bring the millennium, science still exercises a strong power
over fiction. This type shows a strange effect of realism in supernaturalism,
because of the scientific methods, for supernaturalism imposed on material
things produces an effect of verisimilitude not gained in the realm of pure
spirit. Too intellectually cold for the purposes of poetry, too abstract and
elusive for presentation in drama, and too removed by its association with
the fantastic aspects of investigation and the curiosities of science to be
very appropriate for tragedy, which has hitherto been the chief medium of
expressing the dramatic supernatural, science finds its fitting expression in
prose fiction. It is an illustration of the widening range of the supernatural
in fiction and as such is significant.

CHAPTER VIII

Conclusion

I
N the previous chapters I have endeavored to show the continuance and
persistence of the supernatural in English fiction, as well as in other
forms of literature, and to give some idea of the variety of its
manifestations. There has been no period in our history from Beowulf to the
present when the ghostly was not found in our literature. Of course, there
have been periods when the interest in it waned, yet it has never been
wholly absent. There is at the present a definite revival of interest in the
supernatural appearing in the drama, in poetry and in fiction, evident to
anyone who has carefully studied the recent publications and magazines.
Within the last few years, especially in the last two years, an astonishing
amount of ghostly material has appeared. Some of these stories are of the
hoax variety, others are suggestive, allegorical or symbolic, while others
frankly accept the forces beyond man’s mortal life and human dominion. I
hesitate to suggest a reason for this sudden rising tide of occultism at this
particular time, but it seems clear to me that the war has had much to do
with it. I have found a number of supernatural productions directly
associated with the struggle. Among them might be mentioned Katherine
Fullerton Gerould’s extraordinary, elusive story of horror[210]; The Second
Coming, by Frederick Arnold Kummer and Henry P. Janes, where Christ
walks the battlefields on Christmas Eve, pleading with the Kaiser to stop
the slaughter of men, but in vain, and the carnage goes on till Easter, when
the Christ stands beside the dying Emperor, with the roar of the rioting
people heard in the streets outside, and softens his heart at last, so that he
says, “Lord, I have sinned! Give my people peace!”; Kipling’s ghost-story,
[211] with its specters of children slain by the Germans; The Gray Guest,
showing Napoleon returning to lead the French forces to victory in a crisis;
Jeanne, the Maid where the spirit of Joan of Arc descends upon a young

French girl of to-day, enabling her to do wonderful things for her
countrymen; War Letters from a Living Dead Man, a series of professed
psychic communications from the other world, by Elsa Barker; Real Ghost
Stories, a volume containing a number of stories by different writers,
describing some of the phantoms seen by soldiers on the battlefield; and
Arthur Machen’s The Bowmen, a collection of striking fictive instances of
crowd-supernaturalism associated with the war. The last volume affords an
interesting glimpse into the way in which legends are built up, for it is a
contemporary legend in connection with the Angels at Mons. Carl
Hauptmann has a striking play,[212] showing the use of war-supernaturalism
in the drama. When the eyes of the world are turned toward the battlefields
and death is an ever-present reality, it is natural that human thoughts occupy
themselves with visions of a life after death. Kingdom Come, by Vida
Sutton, shows the spirits of Russian peasants slain for refusing to fight,
specters unaware that they are dead. Various martial heroes of the past are
resurrected to give inspiration in battle in recent stories.
But whatever be the reason for this revival of the ghostly, the fact
remains that this is distinctly the day for the phantom and his confrères.
While romanticism is always with us, it appears in different manifestations.
A few years ago the swashbuckling hero and his adventures seemed the
most striking survival of the earlier days of romanticism, but now the weird
and the ghostly have regained a popularity which they never surpassed even
in the heyday of Gothic fiction. The slashing sword has been displaced by
the psychographic pen. The crucial struggles now are occult, rather than
adventurous, as before, and while realism in fiction is immensely popular—
never more so than now—it is likely to have supernaturalism overlaid upon
it, as in De Morgan’s work, to give a single example. Recent poetry
manifests the same tendency, and likewise the drama, particularly the closet
drama and the playlet. While literary history shows clearly the continuity of
the supernatural, with certain rise and fall of interest in it at different
periods, it is apparent that now there is a more general fondness for the
form than at any other period in English literature. The supernatural is in
solution and exists everywhere. Recent poetry shows a strong predilection
for the uncanny, sometimes in the manner of the old ballads, while in other
instances the ghostly is treated with a spirit of critical detachment as in
Rupert Brooke’s sonnet,[213] or with skepticism as in his sardonic satire on
faith.[214] In the recent volume of Brooke’s collected poems, there are about

a dozen dealing with the supernatural. Maeterlinck expressed the feeling
that a spiritual epoch is perhaps upon us, as Poe said that we are in the
midst of great psychal powers. As Francis Thompson says in his Hound of
Heaven, “Nature, poor step-dame, cannot slake our drought!” The interest
in certain lines of thought which lead to the writing of supernatural fiction,
as Spiritualism or folk-lore, or science or psychical research, may have the
reflex action of arousing interest in the subjects themselves. But at all
events, there is no lack of uncanny literature at present.
One feature of the modern supernatural literature as distinguished from
that of other periods, is in the matter of length. Of course, the ballad and the
folk-tale expressed the ghostly in brief form, but the epic held the stage
longer, while in Elizabethan times the drama was the preferred form as in
the eighteenth century the Gothic novel. During the nineteenth century,
particularly the latter half, the preference was decidedly for the short story,
while more recently the one-act play has come into vogue. But in the last
few years the supernatural novel seems to be returning to favor, though
without displacing the shorter forms. Brevity has much to commend it as a
vehicle for the uncanny. The effect of the ghostly may be attained with
much more unity in a short story or playlet than in a novel or long drama,
for in the more lengthy form much outside matter is necessarily included.
The whole plot could scarcely be made up of the unearthly, for that would
mean a weakening of power through exaggeration, though this is sometimes
found to be the case, as in several of Bram Stoker’s novels. Recently the
number of novels dealing with supernatural themes has noticeably
increased, which leads one to believe that the occult is transcending even
the limitations of length and claiming all forms for its own. Now no literary
type bars the supernatural, which appears in the novel as in the story, in the
drama as in the playlet, and in narrative, dramatic, and lyric poetry. Even
the epic of the more than mortal has not entirely vanished, as the work of
Dr. William Cleaver Wilkinson attests, but popular taste does not really run
to epics nowadays. The ghostly is more often seen in the shorter forms,
where brevity gives a chance for compression and intensity of force
difficult in longer vehicles. The rise of the one-act play in popular favor is
significant in this connection. The short dramas of Synge, Yeats, Lady
Gregory, William Sharpe, Gordon Bottomley, and Theodore Dreiser show
the possibilities of the playlet for weird effect. Maeterlinck’s plays for
marionettes are especially powerful, but the work of Lord Dunsany

furnishes more peculiar ghostliness than that of any other present dramatist.
His jade idols, for instance, that wake to terrible life and revenge
themselves on presumptuous mortals, are a new touch in dramatics.
Algernon Blackwood is doing more significant work in psychic fiction than
anyone else, his prose showing poetic beauty as well as eerie power.
Another significant fact to be noted in connection with the later ghostly
stories as compared with the Gothic is in the greater number and variety of
materials employed. The early religious plays had introduced devils, angels,
and divinity to a considerable extent, while the Elizabethan drama relied for
its thrills chiefly on the witch and the revenge-ghost. The Gothic romance
was strong for the ghost, with one or two Wandering Jews, occasional
werewolves and lycanthropes, and sporadic satanity, but made no use of
angels or of divinity. The modern fiction, however, gathers up all of these
personages and puts them into service freely. In addition to these old themes
brought up to date and varied astonishingly, the new fiction has adapted
other types. The scientific supernaturalism is practically new—save for the
Gothic employment of alchemy and astrology—and now all the discoveries
and investigations of the laboratory are utilized and embued with
supernaturalism. Diabolic botany, psychological chemistry, and supermortal
biology appear in recent fiction. The countless arts and sciences, acoustics,
optics, dietetics, and what-not are levied on for plots, while astronomy
shows us wonders the astrologer never dreamed of. The stars knew their
place and kept it in early romance, but they are given to strange aberration
and unaccountable conduct in late narration.
The futuristic fiction gives us return trips into time to come, while we
may be transported into the far past, as with Mark Twain’s Connecticut
Yankee that visits King Arthur’s Court. The extent to which a homespun
realist like Mark Twain uses the supernatural is significant. No province or
small corner of science has failed to furnish material for the new ghostly
fiction, and even the Fourth and Fifth Dimensions are brought in as plot
complications. Microscopes are bewitched, mirrors are enchanted, and
science reverses its own laws at will to suit the weird demands.
Another modern material is the mechanistic. This is the age of
machinery, and even engines are run by ghost-power. Examples of the
mechanical spook are legion. There is the haunted automobile in Harriet
Prescott Spofford’s story, The Mad Lady, that reproduces through its
speaking tube the long-dead voice, that runs away with its occupants,

reliving previous tragic experiences. A phantom Ford is an idea combining
romanticism with realism surely! In connection with this extraordinary car
is a house that erects itself out of dreams and is substantial enough for
living purposes. Other specimens are John Kendrick Bangs’s enchanted
typewriter that clicks off psychograms in the dark, between midnight and
three o’clock in the morning; Frank R. Stockton’s machine for negativing
gravity; Poe’s balloon in which Hans Pfaal makes his magic trip to the
moon; Wells’s new accelerator that condenses and intensifies vital energy,
enabling a man to crowd the forces of a week into an hour of emergency, as
likewise his time machine that permits the inventor to project himself into
the future or the past at will, to spend a week-end in any era. The butterfly
in Hawthorne’s story shows the spiritualization of machinery as the poor
artist of the beautiful conceived it, the delicate toy imbibing a magnetism, a
spiritual essence that gives it life and beauty and power of voluntary
motion. This etherealized machinery is manifest in modern fiction as well
as the diabolic constructions that wreck and ruin.
Inanimate objects have a strange power in later fiction as Poe’s ship that
is said in certain seas to increase in size, as the trees told of by Algernon
Blackwood that grow in the picture. There are various haunted portraits, as
the picture of Dorian Gray that bears on its face the lines of sin the living
face does not show, and whose hands are bloodstained when Dorian
commits murder; and the painting told of in De Morgan’s A Likely Story,
that overhears a quarrel between an artist and his wife, the woman wrongly
suspecting her husband and leaving him. The picture relates the story to a
man who has the painting photographed and a copy sent to the wife. There
is the haunted tapestry[215] that is curiously related to the living and to the
long dead.
Another aspect of the later as distinguished from the earlier occult
literature is the attention paid to ghostly children. Youngsters are coming to
the front of the stage everywhere nowadays, particularly in America, so it is
but natural that they should demand to be heard as well as seen, in
supernatural fiction. In the Gothic ghosts I found no individualized
children, and children in groups only twice. In one of James Hogg’s short
novels a vicious man is haunted on his death-bed by the specters of little
ones dead because of him, but they are nameless and indistinguishable. In
Maturin’s The Albigenses a relentless persecutor, while passing through a
lonely forest, sees the phantoms of those he has done to death, little children

and babes at the breast, as well as men and women. But here again they are
not given separable character, but are merely group figures, hence do not
count.
There is a ghost-child mentioned in Hawthorne’s Blithedale Romance,
but it is not until more recent fiction that children’s ghosts enter personated
and individualized. The exquisitely shy little ones in Kipling’s They are
among the most wonderful of his child-creations, very human and lovable.
In a war story,[216] he shows us the phantoms of several children whom the
Germans have killed, natural youngsters with appealing childish attributes,
especially the small boy with his pride in his first trousers. Arthur
Machen[217] tells of a German soldier who has crucified a child against the
church door and is driven to insanity by the baby spirit. Quiller-Couch[218]
shows the specter of a little girl that returns at night to do housework for the
living, visible only as two slender hands, who reminds us of the shepherd
boy Richard Middleton tells of, who having died because of his drunken
father’s neglect, comes back to help him tend the sheep. Algernon
Blackwood relates the story of a little child who has been wont to pray for
the unquiet ghost of Petavel, a wicked man who haunts his house. After the
child is dead, the mother sees the little boy leading Petavel by the hand, and
says, “He’s leading him into peace and safety. Perhaps that’s why God took
him.”
Richard Middleton’s story of a little ghost-boy[219] is poignantly pathetic.
The little chap comes back to play with his grieving sister, making his
presence known by his gay feet dancing through the bracken, and his joyous
imitations of an automobile’s chug-chug. Mary MacMillan speaks of the
spirits of little children that are “out earlier at night than the older ghosts,
you know, because they have to go to bed earlier, being so young.” Two
very recent child ghosts are Wee Brown Elsbeth whom Frances Hodgson
Burnett shows to us, the wraith of a little girl pitifully slain centuries ago by
her father to save her from torture, who comes back to play with a living
playmate; and the terrible revenge-ghost of the child slain by her stepfather,
who comes back to cause his death, whom Ellen Glasgow describes.
The spirits of children that never were enter into the late stories, as in The
Children, by Josephine Daskam Bacon, a story of confused paranoia and
supernaturalism. A woman grieves over the children she never had till they
assume personality and being for her. They become so real that they are
finally seen by other children who wish to play with them. This reminds us

of Thomas Bailey Aldrich’s imagined child, Miss Mehitabel’s son.
Algernon Blackwood[220] shows us a multitude of baby spirits, with
reaching arms, pattering steps, and lisping voices, spirits of the unborn that
haunt childless women. The room which they enter seems sacred with the
potentialities of motherhood, so that a man sleeping there sees his own dead
mother return to him among the babes. These ghosts of little children that
never were and never may be are like the spirits of the yet to be born
children in Maeterlinck’s dream-drama,[221] where, in the Land of the
Future, the child-souls wait for the angel to summon them to life. In these
stories associating children with the ghostly there is always a tender pathos,
a sad beauty that is appealing.
The spectral insect or animal is another innovation in recent fiction,
though there have been occasional cases before, as Vergil’s Culex, the story
of the ghost of a gnat killed thoughtlessly coming back to tell its murderer
of its sufferings in the insect hades. Robert W. Chambers shows us several
ghostly insects, a death’s head moth that is a presager of disaster, and a
butterfly that brings a murderer to justice, while Frederick Swanson in a
story[222] makes a spectral insect a minister of fate. The most curdling
example, however, of the entomological supernaturalism, is Richard
Marsh’s novel, The Beetle, a modernized version of the ancient
superstitions of Egypt, whereby a priestess of Isis continues her mysterious,
horrid life alternately as a human being and as a beetle. This lively scarab
has mesmeric, magic power over mortals and by its sensational shape-
shifting furnishes complicating terror to the plot.
The dog is frequently the subject of occult fiction, more so than any other
animal, perhaps because the dog seems more nearly human than any save
possibly the horse. Mrs. Elizabeth Stuart Phelps Ward shows us a dog very
much at home in heaven, while she has a ghost-dog on earth coming back to
march in a Decoration Day parade beside his master. Isabel Howe Fisk in a
drama shows the Archangel Raphael accompanied by his dog, a cavortive
canine, not apparently archangelic. Ambrose Bierce evokes one terrible
revenge-ghost, a dog that kills the murderer of his master, while[223] Eden
Phillpotts represents a pack of spectral dogs that pursue the Evil One over
the earth till the Judgment Day, each being a lost soul. A young girl’s little
unbaptized baby is thought to be one of the number. Conan Doyle’s Hound
of the Baskervilles is a terrifying canine of legendary power. Kerfol by
Edith Wharton shows the ghosts of five dogs, each carefully individualized,