The Supernatural in Modern English Fiction

by Dorothy Scarborough

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

The 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

The 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.

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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.

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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.

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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

“Ghosts 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.