The Supernatural in Modern English Fiction

by Dorothy Scarborough

Life after Death.

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

“Up stepped de debbil
Wid his iron wooden shubbil,
Tearin’ up de yearth wid his big-toe nail!”

while to others he is an iconoclastic new thought. Heaven and hell have been treated in every conceivable way in English fiction—conventionally, symbolically, humorously, and satirically, so that one may choose the type he prefers. There are enough kinds to go around.

Among the portrayers of the traditional heaven and hell Mrs. Elizabeth Stuart Phelps Ward is prominent. Her works on contemporary immortality are said to have had a tremendous vogue in the period following the Civil War, when death had claimed so many that the living were thinking of the other world more than of this. Her pictures of heaven in Gates Ajar are comforting, for she assures to each person his own dearest wish in fulfillment, to the ambitious youth his books, to the young girl her piano, and to the small child her ginger-snaps instead of earthly bread and butter. In The Gates Between the physician, suddenly killed, finds himself embarrassed by immortality. He doesn’t know how to adjust himself to eternity and at first brings many of earth’s problems with him. In the third of the series, The Gates Beyond, she describes a very material yet spiritual heaven. Bodies are much like those on earth, not vaporous projections; there are museums, hospitals, universities, telephones, concerts and all up-to-date improvements and conveniences. The dead woman discovers that she remembers what she read on earth, takes pleasure in simple things such as the smell of mignonette, hears the birds sing a Te Deum, while a brook and a bird sing a duet, and the leaves are also vocal. There is a Universal Language which must be learned by each soul, and heaven holds all sorts of occupations, material, mental, and spiritual. She says that near earth are many earth-bound spirits occupied in low and coarse and selfish ways, who lack “spiritual momentum to get away.” “They loved nothing, lived for nothing, believed in nothing, they cultivated themselves for nothing but the earth,”—which may be compared with the state of the souls on Fifth Avenue, described by Granville Barker.

Mrs. Ward’s pictures of heaven may seem sentimental and conventional to us to-day, yet to be appreciated they must be considered in relation to the religious thought of her time. She represented a reaction against the rigid theology, the stern concepts of an older generation than her own, and she wished to make heaven more homelike. She did have an influence in her day, as may be illustrated by a remark from a sermon recently delivered by a New York pastor, that the reading of her books had exerted a great influence over him, that they made heaven over for him.

Mrs. Oliphant is another of the conductors of fictive Cook’s tours through heaven and hell, after the fashion started by Dante and Milton, and modernized by Mrs. Ward. She devotes volumes to describing the future worlds in their relation to mortal destiny. One story[173] tells of a soul that comes back from purgatory to be comforted by the old minister and sent away happy; another[174] is the account of a spirit returning from heaven to right a wrong that her husband is doing another. Still another[175] gives the experiences of a woman who is distressed when she finds herself in heaven, because she has hidden her will and her young niece is thereby left penniless, but she asks advice of various celestial authorities and finally succeeds in returning to earth and righting matters. A Beleaguered City is a peculiar story of a French town besieged by the dead, who drive out the inhabitants because of their cruelty toward some nuns. A strange gloom pervades the place, the cathedral bells ring of themselves, and flaming signs appear on the church doors, till after much penance the citizens are allowed to return and the invading hosts from eternity withdraw. In one story,[176] Mrs. Oliphant gives her ideas of heaven, as a place of light, of rest, of joy, of service, where the great angel Pain helps the souls to wisdom. In a counter-picture,[177] she shows hell, the world of the unhappy dead, where are cruelty, selfishness, suffering, a world filled with tears that drip from earth. Yet it is a hell as well-regulated, as thoroughly disciplined as a German municipality, with various punishments,—the most terrible being a lecture platform from which are delivered eternal addresses.

These would-be-realistic stories of heaven and hell somehow leave the reader cold, after Dante and Milton, however much one may feel the sincerity of the authors. Heaven and hell are such vast provinces that one cannot chart them in imagination sufficiently to grasp somebody else’s concept in story.

Other stories of life after death, given from the spirit-angle rather than from the mortal point of view as in most ghost stories, are among the recent types of supernaturalism. Alice Brown has several stories of the kind, in one showing a woman who comes to tell her friend not to be afraid of dying, because There is much like Here, and another symbolic of the power of love to come back even from the pit of blackness after death. Olivia Howard Dunbar’s The Shell of Sense gives the psychosis of a woman who cannot go to heaven because she is jealous of her husband. She sees the form of the wind, hears the roses open in the garden, and senses many things unknown to human beings, yet is actuated by very human motives. Katherine Butler[178] suggests that death must be a painless process and the after life much like mortality, since the man doesn’t realize that he is dead but attempts to go about his affairs as usual.

The symbolic treatment of the theme of life after death is more effective and shows more literary art than the conventional pictures of Mrs. Ward’s and Mrs. Oliphant’s. No human vocabulary is able to describe immortality of glory or despair, hence it is more effective merely to suggest the thought by allegory or symbolism. Hawthorne gives us a symbolic morality in The Celestial Railroad, where he pictures the road between heaven and hell, drawing on Bunyan’s imagery to describe the landscape and characters. Apollyon is engineer and emits realistic blasts of smoke. Eugene Field[179] tells of a mother just entering heaven who asks an angel where she may find her little baby, dead long ago, to whom the angel whispers that she is the babe, grown to maturity in Paradise. Julian Hawthorne’s Lovers in Heaven is a symbolic picture of the after life, where a man just dead goes in search of the beloved he lost long before. He sees her on the far slope of a heavenly hill, but before he can reach her the devil appears to him in his own double, “the Satan of mine own self, the part of me wherein God had no share.” This is a quite modern concept of diabolism. But love struggles to save him, and he resists his evil self.

Ahrinziman, by Anita Silvani, shows lurid pictures of the world to come. In the Inferno of the Dark Star the soul sees the attendant genii of his life, each symbolizing some passion of his nature. There are horrible astral birds and beasts and combinations unknown to mortal biology, while vultures hover overhead and a foul astral odor fills the air. The spirits are of peculiar substance, for they fight and slay each other, some being torn to pieces. The soul is supposed to progress toward the Silver and later the Golden Star. Marie Corelli’s Romance of Two Worlds is a queer production, preaching the doctrine of psychical electricity, which is to be a sort of wonder-working magician, and in other novels she gives theories of radio-activity, a theosophical cure-all for this world and the next.

A Vision of Judgment, by H. G. Wells, is a satire on man’s judgment of sin and character and of destiny after death, showing the pettiness and folly of Ahab, proud of his sins, and the hypocrisy of a so-called saint, conceited over his self-torture. “At last the two sat side by side, stark of all illusions, in the shadow of the robe of God’s charity, like brothers.” The picture of God and the throne vanish and they behold a land austere and beautiful, with the enlightened souls of men in clean bodies all about him. This symbolic allegory setting forth the shallowness of human judgment as set against God’s clarity of vision and charity of wisdom is like Oscar Wilde’s The House of Judgment, a terrible piece of symbolism expressed in a few words. A soul who has been altogether evil comes at last before God to be judged. God speaks to him of his vileness, his cruelty, his selfishness, to all of which the soul makes confession of guilt.

And God, closing the book of the man’s Life, said, “Surely I will send thee into Hell. Even unto Hell will I send thee.”

And the man cried out, “Thou canst not!”

And God said to the man, “Wherefore can I not send thee to Hell, and for what reason?”

“Because in Hell I have always lived,” answered the man.

And there was silence in the house of judgment.

And after a space God spake and said to the man, “Seeing that I may not send thee into Hell, I will send thee into Heaven. Surely unto Heaven I will send thee.”

And the man cried out, “Thou canst not!”

And God said to the man, “Wherefore can I not send thee unto Heaven, and for what reason?”

“Because, never, and in no place, have I been able to imagine it!” answered the man.

And there was silence in the house of judgment.

The fact that a man’s thoughts make his heaven or his hell is brought out in a recent book, The Case of John Smith, by Elizabeth Bisland, where the central character receives a revelation while working at his typewriter one day. The message says, “Oh, Peevish and Perverse! How know you that you have not died elsewhere and that this is not the Heaven which there you dreamed? How know you that your Hell may not lie only in not recognizing this as Heaven?”

In many recent examples of allegory and symbolism we get suggestive impressions of the other life, of the soul’s realities. Some of these have the inevitable words, the fatal phrases that seem to penetrate into the real heaven and hell for us. The most remarkable instance of symbolic treatment of the after-life is in Souls on Fifth, by Granville Barker, where the spirits of the dead are represented as unable to rise above the level of the ideals they had held in life, and drift endlessly up and down the Avenue, some in the form of tarnished gilt, some with white plague spots of cowardice, or blisters of slanderous thoughts, some horny with selfishness, some with lines of secret cruelty. There are few squares but mostly irregular shapes of sin.

The purely humorous treatment of life after death, the comic pictures of heaven and hell, are of a piece with the humorous treatment of other phases of supernaturalism, and are distinctly modern. The flippant way in which sacred subjects are handled is a far cry from the heaven and hell of Dante and Milton. Modern writers slap the devil on the back, make fun of the archangels and appeal to the ridiculous in one-time sacred situations, with a freedom that would have made the Puritans gasp. For instance, St. Peter has been the butt of so many jokes that he is really hackneyed.

The Flying Dutchman, whom Brander Matthews introduces in his Primer of Imaginary Geography, and who says that the Wandering Jew is the only person he can have any satisfactory chats with now, speaks of knowing Charon, “who keeps the ferry across the Styx. I met him last month and he was very proud of his new electric launch with its storage battery.” He says that hell is now lighted by electricity and that Pluto has put in all the modern improvements. John Kendrick Bangs, in his House-boat on the Styx, brings together the shades of many illustrious persons; Queen Elizabeth, Walter Raleigh, Socrates, Xantippe, Captain Kidd, and many others. From them we get pictures of the life after death and of their characteristic attitudes toward it and each other. He continues the situation in The Pursuit of the House-boat, as the redoubtable Captain Kidd makes off with the ship and the ladies, leaving all the men behind. But they follow the bold buccaneer and after exciting adventures reaching from the Styx to Paris, they recapture the fair. Carolyn Wells has recently given us a Styx River Anthology. In modern stories we visit the comic devil on his native heath, see him in his own home town, as in previous chapters we discussed him in his appearances on earth. Kipling’s The Last of the Stories shows us the Hades of literary endeavor, the limbo of lost characters, presided over by a large and luminous devil of fluent tongue. Kipling recognizes many persons from fiction, and sees various tortures in process. All do obeisance to the shade of Rabelais, the Master. Kipling is terrified by the characters he himself has brought into being and begs to hide his face from them. F. Marion Crawford gives us another glimpse of literary eternity,[180] where the spirits of learned personages meet and discuss life. A recent poem describes a meeting and dialogue in Hades between Chaucer and Cressida.

It is possibly Bernard Shaw who would be most liable to prosecution by the devil for lèse-majesté, for in Man and Superman, Mine Host of the Pit is represented as an affable gentleman who tries to make hell attractive to his guests, and exercises not the least constraint on their movements. They are free to leave him and go to heaven if they like,—he only warns them that they will find it tiresome. He converses with Don Juan and a couple of other blasé mortals, uttering Shavian iconoclasms with an air of courteous boredom. He is very different from the sinister personage of conventional fiction.

Mark Twain has given humorous views of heaven in his Extract from Captain Stormfield’s Visit to Heaven. A bluff, hearty old salt finds the celestial regions very different from the traditional descriptions of them. The heavenly citizens are a polite set, wishful for him to do what he likes, yet he tires of the things he thought paradise consisted of, lays aside his harp and crown, and takes his wings off for greater ease. He finds his pleasures in the meeting of an occasional patriarch, or prophet, and the excitement of the entry of a converted bartender from Jersey City. He changes his views on many points, saying for instance, “I begin to see a man’s got to be in his own heaven to be happy,” and again, “Happiness ain’t a thing in itself,—it’s only a contrast with something that ain’t pleasant.” Again Sandy, his friend, says, “I wish there was something in that miserable Spiritualism so we could send the folks word about it.”

Something of the same combination of humor and earnestness is found in Nicholas Vachell Lindsay’s poem, General William Booth Enters into Heaven.

“Booth led boldly with his big bass drum,
Are you washed in the blood of the Lamb?
The saints smiled gravely as they said, ‘He’s come.’
Are you washed in the blood of the Lamb?
(Bass drums)
Walking lepers followed, rank on rank,
Lurching bravos from the ditches dank,
Drabs from the alley-ways and drug-fiends pale
Minds still passion-ridden, soul-power frail!
Vermin-eaten saints with mouldy breath,
Unwashed legions with the ways of death,—
Are you washed in the blood of the Lamb?

(Reverently sung—no instruments)
And while Booth halted by the curb for prayer
He saw his Master through the flag-filled air.
Christ came gently with a robe and crown
For Booth the soldier, while the crowd knelt down.
He saw King Jesus—they were face to face—
And he knelt a-weeping in that holy place.
Are you washed in the blood of the Lamb?”

This combination of realism with idealism, of homely details with celestial symbolism, is also seen in another recent poem, The Man with the Pigeons, by William Rose Benet, who shows us two pictures, the first of a tramp in Madison Square Garden, who loves the pigeons and has them ever clustering around him in devotion. The next is of heaven, with the celestial gardens, where among the goldhaired angels the old tramp stands at home, still wearing his rusty shoes and battered derby hat. The quaint commingling of fancy and fact reminds us of Hannele’s dreams of heaven, in Hauptmann’s Hannele, where the schoolmaster is confused with the angels, and heaven and the sordid little room are somehow united.

H. G. Wells, in A Wonderful Visit shows us another side of the picture, for he draws an angel down and lets him tell the citizens of the earth of the land he comes from. I make no attempt in this discussion to decide concerning the personality of angels, whether they are the spirits of the just made perfect or pre-Adamite creatures that never were and never could be man. For the present purpose, they are simply angels. This book of Wells’s is an example of the satiric treatment of heaven and earth that constitutes a special point of importance in the modern supernaturalism. It is a social satire, and a burlesque on the formal and insincere manifestations of religion. A vicar takes a pot shot at what he supposes is a rare bird, seeing a rainbow flash in the sky,—but instead, an angel comes tumbling down with a broken wing. This thrusts him upon the vicar as a guest for some time, and introduces complications in the village life. The parishioners do not believe in angels save in stained glass windows or in church on Sunday, and they make life difficult for the vicar and his guest. The angel shows a human sense of humor, that quaint philosophy of the incongruous which is the basis of all true humor, and his naïve comments on earthly conventions, his smiling wonder at the popular misconceptions in regard to his heaven—to which he is surprised to learn that mortals are thought to go, since he says he has never seen any there—make him a lovable character. But village custom compels him to fold his shining wings under a coat till he looks like a hunch-back, put boots on so that he “has hoofs like a hippogrif,” as he plaintively says to the vicar, and he finds conformity to convention a painful process. The novel ends sadly, symbolizing the world’s stupid harshness, for the angel is sent away from the village as unworthy to live among the people, and his heart is almost broken.

The same type of humor and satire may be found in James Stephens’s The Demi-Gods, and in Anatole France’s, The Revolt of the Angels. Stephens’s novel contains an insert of a short story of heaven previously published, which depicts a preliminary skirmish in heaven over a coin a corpse has had left in his hand and has taken to eternity with him. In each novel several angels come tumbling down from heaven and take up earthly life as they find it, engaging in affairs not considered angelic. Stephens, in addition to the two fighting celestials, gives us an archangel, a seraph, and a cherub. There is in both stories a certain embarrassment over clothes, the fallen ones arriving in a state of nudity. The necessity for donning earthly garments, the removal of the wings, and the adaptation to human life furnish complication and interest, with the added feminine element, though Stephens’s novel is not marred by the unclean imaginings of Anatole France.

The revolters in the French novel take up Parisian life, while Stephens’s angelic trio join an itinerant tinker and his daughter who are journeying aimlessly about, accompanied by a cart and a sad-eyed philosopher, an ass. They engage in activities and joys not conventionally archangelic, such as smoking corn-cob pipes, eating cold potatoes, and, when necessary, stealing the potatoes. The contrasts between heavenly ideas and Irish tramp life are inimitable. At last when the three, having decided to go back to heaven, don their wings and crowns and say good-bye, the cherub turns back for one more word of farewell with Mary. Seeing her tears over his going, he tears his shining wings to shreds and casts them from him, electing to stay on earth with the tinker’s cart, for the sake of love. It is really quite a demi-god-like thing to do.

Unlike France’s book, which is a blasting satire on religion, these two English novels are amusing, with a certain measure of satire, yet with a whimsicality that does not antagonize. France’s angels remain on earth and become more corrupt than men, and Wells’s wonderful visitor is banished from the village as an undesirable alien. Stephens’s archangel and seraph go back to heaven after their vacation, while the cherub turns his back on immortal glory rather than break a woman’s heart. In all three of these books we notice the same leveling tendency shown in characterization of the angels that we have observed heretofore in the case of ghosts and devils, werewolves, and witches. The angels are human, with charming personality and a piquant sense of humor, whose attempts to understand mortal conventions reveal the essential absurdity of earthly ideas in many instances. The three taken together constitute an interesting case of literary parallelism and it would be gratifying to discover whether France was influenced by Wells and Stephens, or Stephens by Wells and France,—but in any event Wells can prove a clear alibi as to imitation, since his novel appeared a number of years before the others. The possible inspiration for all of these in Byron’s Heaven and Earth suggests an interesting investigation. A more recent story, The Ticket-of-Leave Angel, brings an angel down to a New York apartment, where he has peculiar experiences and illustrates a new type of angelic psychology. The tendency to satirize immortality has crept even into poetry, for in a recent volume by Rupert Brooke there are several satiric studies. One, entitled On Certain Proceedings of the Psychical Research Society, ridicules the idea that spirits would return to earth to deliver the trivial messages attributed to them, and another, Heaven, is a vitriolic thrust at the hope of a better life after death, sneering at it with unpleasant imagery.

One of the recent instances of satiric pictures of the hereafter is Lord Dunsany’s The Glittering Gate, a one-act drama, where Bill and Jim, two burglars, crack the gate of heaven to get in. Sardonic laughter sounds while they are engaged in the effort to effect an entrance, and wondering what heaven will be like. Bill thinks that his mother will be there.

“I don’t know if they want a good mother in there who would be kind to the angels and sit and smile at them when they sing, and soothe them if they were cross. (Suddenly) Jim, they won’t have brought me up against her, will they?”

Jim: “It would be just like them to. Very like them.”

When the glittering gate of heaven swings open and the two toughs enter eagerly, they find nothing—absolutely nothing but empty space, and the sardonic laughter sounds in their ears. Bill cries out, “It is just like them! Very like them”!

Was not this suggested by Rupert Brooke’s poem, Failure?

In the stories treating satirically or humorously of the future life we find the purpose in reality to be to image this life by illustration of the other. Eternity is described in order that we may understand time a little better. Angels and devils are made like men, to show mortal potentialities either way. The absurdities of mankind are illustrated as seen by angel eyes, the follies as satirized by devils. The tendency now is to treat supernatural life humorously, satirically or symbolically, rather than with the conventional methods of the past. Commonplace treatment of great subjects is liable to be unsatisfactory, and any serious treatment, other than symbolically simple, of heaven or hell seems flat after Dante and Milton.

In considering these various types of stories dealing with supernatural life, whether continued beyond the mortal span on earth, renewed by reincarnation, or taken up in another world after death, we find that several facts seem to appear with reference to the type chosen for treatment by men as distinct from women, and vice versa. So far as my search has gone, I have found no instance in English literature where a woman has used either the motif of the Wandering Jew or the Elixir of Life. I do not say that no such instances exist, but I have not found them. Carmen Sylva is the only woman I know of at all who has taken up the characterization of the Wandering Jew. On the other hand, women write often of heaven, most of the stories of conventional ideas of heaven being by women. Where men have pictured heaven or hell they have done it for the most part humorously, satirically or symbolically. They seem to curve round the subject rather than to approach it directly. Yet where it is a question of continuing life here in this world, by means of an elixir or other method, or as an ever-living being like the Jew, men have used the theme frequently. Since fiction does reflect our thought-life and our individual as well as racial preferences, the conclusions that might be drawn, if one were sure of their basis, would be interesting. Can it be that men are more deeply interested in this life on earth and cling to it in thought more tenaciously than women, and that women are more truly citizens of the other world? Are men skeptical of the existence of any but a satiric or symbolic heaven, or merely doubtful of reaching there?

CHAPTER VI
The Supernatural in Folk-Tales

The folk-tale is one of the new fashions in fiction. True, folk-lore has long constituted an important element of literature, constantly recurring in poetry, particularly in the ballad, in the drama, the novel, and short story. Yet it has been in solution. It has not been thought important enough to merit consideration for its own sake, but has been rather apologized for, covered up with other materials, so that its presence is scarcely recognized. Now, however, as Professor Kittredge says, folk-lore is no longer on the defensive, which fact is evident in fiction as elsewhere. Scholars of our day are eagerly hunting down the various forms of folk-lore to preserve them in literature before they vanish completely, and learned societies are recording with care the myths and legends and superstitions of peasants. Many volumes have appeared giving in literary form the fictions of various races and tribes, and comparative folk-lore is found to be an engrossing science.

The supernatural forms a large element of folk-literature. The traditions and stories that come down to us from the childhood of any race are like the stories that children delight in, tales of the marvelous, of the impossible, of magic and wonder. Folk-literature recks little of realism. It revels in the romantic, the mystic. Tales of gods and demi-gods, of giants and demons, of fairy-folk, of animals endowed with human powers of speech and cunning, of supernatural flora as well as fauna, of ghosts, devils, of saints, and miracles, are the frame-work of such fiction. English literature is especially rich in these collections, for not only are the sections of English-speaking countries themselves fortunate fields for supernatural folk-tales, but the English, being a race of colonizers, have gone far in many lands and from the distant corners of the earth have written down the legends of many tribes and nations. This discussion does not take into consideration primarily folk-tales translated from other languages, but deals only with those appearing in English, though, of course, in many cases, they are transcripts from the spoken dialects of other people. But it is for their appearance as English fiction, not for their value as folk-lore, that they are taken up here.

Wherever in fiction the life of the peasant class is definitely treated, there is likely to be found a good deal of folk-lore in the form of superstitions, taboos, racial traditions of the supernatural. This is present to a marked degree in the stories of Sir Walter Scott, and in fact one might write a volume on the supernatural in Scott’s work alone. For example, we have Oriental magic and wonder,[181] supernatural vision,[182] superhuman foreknowledge,[183] unearthly “stirs,”[184] the White Lady of Avenel,[185] the bahrgeist,[186] besides his use of diabolism, witchcraft, and so forth already discussed. Thomas Hardy’s work, relating as it does almost wholly to rustic life, is rich in superstitions and traditions of the peasants. The Withered Arm gives a gruesome account of a woman’s attempt to cure her affliction by touching her arm to the corpse of a man who has been hanged, the complicating horror being furnished by the fact that the youth is her husband’s secret son. He gives a story[187] of a supernatural coach that heralds certain events in the family life, charms for securing love as for making refractory butter come when the churn is bewitched, and so forth. Similar elements occur in others of his novels and stories. Eden Phillpotts’ fiction[188] shows a large admixture of the folk-supernaturalism of the Dartmoor peasants, as do Lorna Doone, Wuthering Heights and numberless other novels and stories of other sections. There are guild superstitions reflected in the work of various writers of the sea, as in W. W. Jacobs’ stories, for instance, tales of mining life, and so on.

American fiction is equally rich in such material. Stories of the South, showing life in contact with the negroes, reveal it to a marked degree, as in the work of Thomas Nelson Page, Joel Chandler Harris, Ruth McEnery Stuart, Will Allen Dromgoole, and others. The Creole sense of the supernatural appears in George W. Cable’s novels and stories, the mountain superstitions in those of John Fox, Jr., and Charles Egbert Craddock, those of New England in Mary Wilkins Freeman, Alice Brown, and their followers, the Indian traditions in Helen Hunt Jackson, J. Fenimore Cooper, the Dutch supernaturalism in Washington Irving, who also gives us the legendry of Spain in his tales of the Alhambra. Thomas A. Janvier has recreated antique Mexico for us in his stories of ghosts and saints, of devils and miracles.

In most fiction that represents truly the life of simple people there will be found a certain amount of superstition which is inherent in practically every soul. There is no one of us but has his ideas of fate, of luck, of taboo. We are so used to these elements in life that we scarcely pay heed to them in fiction, yet a brief glance at books will recall their frequent appearance. They color poetry to a marked degree. In fact, without the sense of the marvelous, the unreal, the wonderful, the magical, what would poetry mean to us? So we should feel a keen loss in our fiction if all the vague elements of the supernatural were effaced. Absolute realism is the last thing we desire.

Now the folk-tale, told frankly as such, with no apology for its unreality, no attempt to make of it merely an allegory or vehicle for teaching moral truth, has taken its place in our literature. The science of ethnology has brought a wider interest in the oral heritage of the past, linking it to our life of the present. And the multiplication of volumes recording stories of symbolic phenomena of nature, of gods, demi-gods, and heroes, of supernormal animals and plants, of fairies, banshees, bogles, giants, saints, miracles, and what-not make it possible to compare the widely disseminated stories, the variants and contrasting types of folk-supernaturalism. But my purpose in this discussion is to show the presence of the folk-supernaturalism in literature, in prose fiction particularly. There is no science more fascinating than comparative folk-lore and no language affords so many original examples of oral literature as the English. As we study its influence on fiction and poetry, we feel the truth of what Tylor says[189]:

Little by little, in what seems the most spontaneous fiction, a more comprehensive study of the sources of poetry and romance begins to disclose a cause for each fancy, a story of inherited materials from which each province of the poet’s land has been shaped and built over and peopled.

The Celtic Revival, the renascence of wonder in Ireland, has done more than anything else to awaken modern love for antiquity, to bring over into literature the legends of gods and men

“Beyond the misty space
Of twice a thousand years.”

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

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One of the most interesting aspects of folk-loristic supernaturalism is that concerned with nature. The primitive mind needs no scientific proof for theories of causation, since, given a belief in gods, it can manage the rest for itself. With the Celts there is ever a feeling of nature as a mighty personality. Every aspect, every phase of her power is endowed with life and temperament. Celtic pantheism saw in every form a spirit, in every spring or cloud or hill-top, in every bird or blossom some unearthly divinity of being. A primrose is vastly more than a yellow primrose, but one of “the dear golden folk”; the hawthorn is the barking of hounds, leek is the tear of a fair woman, and so on, which poetic speech bears a likeness to the Icelandic court poetry. This figurative sense suggests “an after-thought of the old nature-worship lingering yet about the fjords and glens where Druidism never was quite overcome by Christianity.” It lends to the Celtic folk-tales their wild, unearthly beauty, their passionate poetry and mystic symbolism akin to the classic mythology and such as we find in no other folk-literature of the present time.

In the stories of Lady Gregory, John Synge, Yeats, Lady Wilde, and various other chroniclers of Celtic legendry, we find explanations of many phenomena, accounts of diverse occurrences. Lady Wilde[190] (Speranza) tells of natural appearances, such as a great chasm which was opened to swallow a man who incurred the anger of God by challenging Him to combat for destroying his crops. A supernatural whirlwind caught up the blasphemer and hurled him into the chasm that yawned to receive him. Many of the aspects of nature are attributed to the activities of giants, and later of demons; as the piling up of cyclopean walls, massive breast-works of earth, or gigantic masses of rocks said to be the work of playful or irate giants. The titans were frolicsome and delighted in feats to show off. There is a large body of legends of diabolized nature, as the changing of the landscape by demons, the sulphurizing of springs, and the cursing of localities.

Many other aspects of nature are made the basis for supernatural folk-tales too numerous to mention. Stories of the enchanted bird, music, and water appear in various forms, and the droll-tellers of the Cornish country tell many stories of the weird associated with out-of-doors. The Celtic superstitions and tales have lived on through successive invasions and through many centuries have been told beside the peat fire. They have been preserved as an oral heritage or else in almost illegible manuscripts in antique libraries, from which they are taken to be put into literature by the Celtic patriots of letters. The sense of terror and of awe, a belief in the darker powers, as well as an all-enveloping feeling of beauty is a heritage of the Celtic mind. It is interesting to note the obstinacy of these pantheistic, druidic stories in the face of Irish Catholicism. In many other bodies of folk-supernaturalism in English we have similar legends of nature, as in the Hawaiian, the Indian, African, Canadian, Mexican stories, and elsewhere. But the material is so voluminous that one can do no more than suggest the field.

Certain forces of nature are given supernatural power in drama and fiction, as the sea that is an awful, brooding Fate, in Synge’s drama, or the wind and the flame in Algernon Blackwood’s story, The Regeneration of Lord Ernie, or the goblin trees in another of his tales, that signify diabolic spirits, or the trees[191] that have a strange, compelling power over men, drawing them, going out bodily to meet them, luring them to destruction. Blackwood has stressed this form of supernaturalism to a marked degree. In Sand he shows desert incantations that embody majestic forces, evocations of ancient deities that bring the Sphynx to life, and other sinister powers. He takes the folk-loristic aspects of nature and makes them live, personifying the forces of out-door life as mythology did. The trees, the sand, the fire, the snow, the wind, the stream, the sea are all alive, with personality, with emotion, and definite being. His trees are more awesome than the woods of Dunsinane, for they actually do move upon their foe. In The Sea Fit he contends that the gods are not dead, but merely withdrawn, that one true worshiper can call them back to earth, especially the sea-gods. The sea comes in power for the man with the Viking soul and takes him to itself. His going is symbolic.

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

The uncanny potentialities of fire are revealed[192] where the internal flame breaks out of itself, the inner fire that burns in the heart of the earth and in men’s hearts. The artist trying to paint a great picture of the Fire-worshiper is consumed by an intense, rapturous fever, and as he dies his face is like a white flame. The snow appears embodied as a luring woman.[193] She tries to draw a man to his death, with dæmonic charm, seen as a lovely woman, but a snow demon. Blackwood shows the curious combination of the soul of a dead woman with the spirit of a place,[194] where a man is ejected by his own estate, turned out bodily as well as psychically, because he has become out of harmony with the locale. Nature here is sentient, emotional, possessing a child, expressing through her lips and hands a message of menace and warning. The moon is given diabolic power in one of Barry Pain’s stories, and the maelstrom described by Poe has a sinister, more than human, power. August Stramm, the German dramatist, has given an uncanny force to the moor in one of his plays, making it the principal character as well as the setting for the action. This embodiment of nature’s phases and phenomena as terrible powers goes back to ancient mythology with a revivifying influence.

The supernatural beast-tale has always been a beloved form, Æsop’s fables, the beast-cycles of medievalism, Reynard the Fox, the German Reinecke Fuchs, all show how fond humanity is of the story that endows animals with human powers. Naturally one thinks of Kipling’s Jungle Tales and Joel Chandler Harris’ Uncle Remus stories as the best modern examples, and these are so well known as to need but mention. Similar beast-cycles are found in the folk-fiction of other countries. Of course, it is understood that the Uncle Remus stories are not native to America, but were brought from Africa by the slaves and handed down through generations in the form in which Harris heard them by the cabin firesides in his boyhood. They are not “cooked” or edited any more than he could help, he tells us, but given in the dialectic form in which they came to him. There are various tales similar to this series, as Kaffir tales, collected by Theal, Amazonian tortoise myths brought together by Charles F. Hart, and Reynard, the Fox in South Africa, by W. H. I. Bleek. J. W. Powell in his investigations for the Smithsonian Institute found legends among the Indians that led him to believe the Uncle Remus stories were originally learned from the red men, but Harris thought there was no basis for such theory. Anansi Stories, by Mary Pamela Milne-Horne, includes animal tales of the African type. Anansi is a mysterious being, a supernatural old man like a Scandinavian troll or English lubber-fiend, who plays tricks like those of the fox and like the jackal in Hindu stories. He is a spider as well as a man and can assume either shape at will.

In primitive races and in the childhood of peoples there is the same element of close association between man and the animals that one finds in child-life. An animal is often nearer and dearer to a child than is a human being, as in crude races man is more like the animals, candid, careless, unreflecting. His sensations and emotions are simple, hunger, love, hate, fear. Animals, in turn, are lifted nearer the human in man’s thinking, and are given human attributes in folk-lore which bridges the gulf that civilization has tended to fix between man and animals, and gives one more of a sense of the social union that Burns longed for. There is in these stories of whatever country a naïveté reflecting the childhood of the race and of the world, a primitive simplicity in dealing with the supernatural.

The folk-fiction of each country gives stories of the animals common to that section. In tropic countries we have stories of supernatural snakes, who appear in various forms, as were-snakes, shall we say? by turns reptiles and men, who marry mortal women, or as diabolic creatures that, like the devil, lose their divinity and become evil powers. We also see in the tropics elephants, lions, tigers, baboons, gorillas, and so forth, as well as certain insects, while in colder climes we have the fox, the wolf, the bear, and their confrères. In island countries we find a large element of the supernatural associated with fishes and sea-animals. Hawaiian stories recount adventures of magic beings born of sharks and women, who are themselves, by turns, human beings living a normal human life, and sharks, devouring men and women. Several of Eugene Field’s stories are drawn from Hawaiian folk-supernaturalism, as The Eel-king, and The Moon Lady.

The Gaelic stories of Fiona McLeod show the supernatural relation existing between mortals and seals. The seals may wed human beings and their children are beings without souls, who may be either mortal or animal. The power of enchantment exercised by the creatures of the sea may turn men and women into sea-beasts, forever to lose their souls. This may be compared with The Pagan Seal-Wife, by Eugene Field, Hans Christian Andersen’s sad story of the little mermaid, and The Forsaken Merman, by Matthew Arnold. Fiona McLeod tells the story of the Dark Nameless One, a nun who became the prey of a seal and was cursed with the penalty of living under the sea to weave fatal enchantments. The mermaids, the kelpies, the sea-beasts are all half-human, half sea-beast, and have a fatal power over human souls, drawing them with a strange lure to give up their immortality. The kelpie appears in several of Fiona McLeod’s stories and in The Judgment of God the maighdeanhmara, a sea-maid, bewitches Murdoch, coming up out of the water as a seal and turning him into a beast, to live with her forever, a black seal that laughs hideously with the laughter of Murdoch. Edward Sheldon has recently written a play[195] using the mermaid motif, and H. G. Wells employs it as a vehicle for social satire[196] where a mermaid comes ashore from The Great Beyond and contrasts mortal life with hers. The Merman and the Seraph, by William Benjamin Smith, is an unusual combination of unearthly creatures.

In The Old Men of the Twilight, W. B. Yeats describes the enchantment inflicted on the old men of learning, the ancient Druids, who were cursed by being turned into gray herons that must stand in useless meditation in pools or flit in solitary flight cross the world, like passing sighs. Lady Gregory tells of magic by which Lugh of the Long Hand puts his soul into the body of a mayfly that drops into the cup that Dechtire drinks from, so that she drinks his soul and must follow him to the dwelling-place of the Sidhe, or fairy people. Her fifty maidens must go with her under a like spell that turns them into birds, that fly in nine flocks, linked together two by two with silver chains, save those that lead who have golden chains. These beautiful birds live in the enchanted land far away from their loved ones. J. H. Pearce tells a touching story of the Little Crow of Paradise, of the bird that was cursed and sent to hell because it mocked Christ on the cross, but because it had pity on a mortal sufferer in hell and brought some cooling drops of water in its bill to cool his parching tongue, it was allowed to fly up and light on the walls of Paradise where it remains forever. Oscar Wilde’s story The Nightingale and the Rose is symbolic of tragic genius, of vain sacrifice, where the tender-hearted bird gives his life-blood to stain a white rose red because a careless girl has told the poet who loves her that she must wear a red rose to the ball. But at the last she casts the rose aside and wears the jewels that a richer lover has sent, while the nightingale lies dead under the rose-tree.

So we see everywhere in folk-fiction the supernatural power given to animals, which acts as an aid to man, as a shield and protection for him, or for his undoing. We see human beings turned into beasts as a curse from the gods for sin or as expressing the kinship between man and nature. In the different cycles of beast-tales we find a large element of humor, the keener-witted animals possessing a rare sense of the comical and relishing a joke on each other as on man. The Uncle Remus stories are often laughable in the extreme, and Bre’er Rabbit, who, we might at first thought decide, would be stupid, is no mean wit. We see a tragic symbolism in the stories of unhappy beasts who must lure mortals to their damnation, yet feel a sense of human sorrow and remorse. In these animal stories we find most of the significant qualities of literature, humor, romance, tragedy, mysticism, and symbolic poetry, with a deep underlying philosophy of life pervading them all.

Lord Dunsany in his modern aspects of mythology, perhaps drawn in part from classic mythology though perhaps altogether Celtic in its material, brings together animals to which we are not accustomed. He has a story of a centaur, a frolicsome creature two hundred and fifty years young, who goes caracoling off the end of the world to find his bride. Algernon Blackwood tells of a man who remembers having been a centaur and lives in memory-metempsychosis his experiences of that far-off time. Dunsany introduces other curious, unfamiliar beasts to us, as the bride whom the man-horse seeks in her temple beside her sad lake-sepulchre, Sombelene, of immortal beauty, whose father was half centaur and half god, whose mother the child of a desert lion and the sphinx. There is the high-priest of Maharrion, who is neither bird nor cat, but a weird gray beast like both. There is the loathsome dragon with glittering golden scales that rattles up the London streets and seizes Miss Cubbige from her balcony and carries her off to the eternal lands of romance lying far away by the ancient, soundless sea. We must not forget the Gladsome Beast, he who dwells underneath fairyland, at the edge of the world, the beast that eats men and destroys the cabbages of the Old Man Who Looks after Fairyland, but is the synonym for joy. His joyous chuckles never cease till Ackronnion sings of the malignity of time, when the Gladsome Beast weeps great tears into an agate bowl. There are the hippogriffs, dancing and whirling in the far sunlight, coming to earth with whirring flight, bathing in the pure dawn, one to be caught with a magic halter, to carry its rider past the Under Pits to the City of Never. There are the gnoles in their high house, whose silence is unearthly “like the touch of a ghoul,” over which is “a look in the sky that is worse than a spoken doom,” that watch the mortals through holes in the trunks of trees and bear them away to their fate. Lord Dunsany looses the reins of his fancy to carry him into far, ancient lands, to show us the wonders that never were.

Magic forms an alluring element of the supernatural romance, and we find it manifesting itself in many ways. In the romances of William Morris, prose as well as poetry, we find enchantment recurring again and again, as in The Water of the Wondrous Isles, The Wood beyond the World, The Well at the World’s End, and others. Yeats said that Morris’s style in these old stories was the most beautiful prose he had ever read, and that it influenced his own work greatly. He has unearthly characters, such as the Witch-wife, the Wood-wife, the Stony People, and so forth. He shows us the enchanted boat, the Sending Boat, the cage with the golden bars which prison the three maidens, magic runes with mighty power, the Water of Might which gives to the one drinking it supernatural vision and magic power, the changing skin, the Wailing Tower, the Black Valley of the Greyweathers, and so forth. Birdalone’s swoon-dream in the White Palace is unearthly, as the witches’ wordless howls. Part of the weirdness of Morris’s prose is due to the antique tone, the forgotten words, the rune-like quality of the rhythm.

Yeats tells of magic whereby a woman is gifted with immortal youth and beauty, so that she may wed the prince of the fairies; of the glamour that falls on a mortal so that he loses his wits and remains “with his head on his knees by the fire to the day of his death”; of shadow hares, of fire-tongued hounds that follow the lost soul across the world, of whistling seals that sink great ships, of bat-like darker powers, of the little gray doves of the good.

Dr. Hyde, in his Paudeen O’Kelly and the Weasel, speaks of a sun-myth, of a haunted forest, of a princess supernaturally beautiful, of the witch who complains to the robber, “Why did you bring away my gold that I was for five hundred years gathering through the hills and hollows of the world?”

Lady Gregory tells of Diarmuid’s love-spot, where Youth touched him on the forehead, so that no woman could look upon him without giving him her love; of Miach who put the eye of a cat in a man’s head, with inconvenient results, for

when he wanted to sleep and take his rest, it is then the eye would start at the squeaking of the mice, or the flight of birds, or the movement of the rushes; and when he was wanting to watch an army or a gathering, it is then it was sure to be in a sound sleep.

She shows us Druid rods that change mortals into birds; of Druid mists that envelop armies and let the ancient heroes win; of Druid sleep that lasts sometimes for years; of the screaming stone; of kisses that turn into birds, some of them saying, “Come! Come!” and others “I go! I go!”; of invisible walls that shield one from sight; of magic that makes armies from stalks of grass; of wells of healing that cure every wound.

Oscar Wilde, in his fairy stories and symbolic allegories, tells of magic, whereby the Happy Prince, high on the pedestal on the square, has a heart of lead because he sees the misery of the people, and sends a swallow as his messenger to pick out his jeweled eyes and take them to the suffering ones. He speaks of the wonder by which the bodies of the mermaid and the fisherman who lost his soul for love of her, when they are buried in unconsecrated ground, send forth strange flowers that are placed on the sacred altar.

The dark enchantment appears in the poetry as often as in the prose, from Coleridge’s Christabel to the present. Gordon Bottomley’s The Crier by Night is a story of an evil presence that lurks in a pool, coming out to steal the souls of those it can lure into its waters. The woman, desperate from jealousy, who invokes its aid, says:

“For I can use this body worn to a soul
To barter with the Crier of hidden things
That if he tangle him in his chill hair
Then I will follow and follow and follow and follow
Past where the ringed stars ebb past the light
And turn to water under the dark world!”

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

Fairies exist, because in all essentials they appear to be the same as the intelligent forces now recognized by psychological researchers, be they thus collective units of consciousness like what William James calls soul-stuff or more individual units like veridical apparitions.

If it were left to me, I’d as soon not believe in fairies as have to think of them as veridical units! Mr. Wentz has never seen any fairies himself, but he tells a number of stories to substantiate his faith in them.

The volumes of fairy stories are by no means all for juvenile consumption, since the modern adult dearly loves the type himself. Many, or most, of the stories of fairies told frankly for children are adaptations or variants of continental folk-legends. The more literary side of fairy-literature has come from the Celtic lore, for the Dim People are dearest of all supernatural beings to the Celtic soul. The Irish, more innately poetic than most races, cling more fondly to the beings of beauty and gather round them delicate, undying stories. W. B. Yeats, Lady Gregory, Lady Wilde, Oscar Wilde, John Singe, and Fiona McLeod have given in poetry and lyric prose the Celtic fairy-lore, and have made us know the same wild, sweet thrill that the peasants feel. The poetic thought of the primitive races peoples everything in nature, every bird and blossom and tree, with its own fairy personality.

Thackeray has written a fairy pantomime for great and small children, as he says, in which the adventures of Prince Giglio and Prince Bulbo are recounted. Eugene Field has a charming story of the Fairies of Pesth, and Charles Kingsley’s Water Babies enriched the imagination of most of us in youthful or adult years with its charming nonsense of beings possible and impossible. J. M. Barrie in Peter Pan won the doubtful world over to a confessed faith in the fairy-folk, for did we not see the marvels before our eyes? In The Little White Bird Barrie tells us how fairies came to be,—that they have their origin in the first laugh of the first baby that broke into a million bits and went skipping about, each one a fairy. He shows us the wee folk in Kensington Gardens, where by the ignorant they are mistaken for flowers, but children and those with the poet heart can see the flashing faces and green garments of the fairies among the pansy beds.

W. B. Yeats is a favorite with the fairies, for they have given him the dower of magic vision, to glimpse the unseen things, to hear the faint, musical voices of fairy pipes and song. He tells us many stories of the Dim People, in his tales and dramas. The Land of Heart’s Desire, the story of the struggle between the divine and mortal forces and the powers of the Sidhe to claim the soul of the young wife and of the triumph of the fairies, by which the girl’s body falls lifeless by the hearth while her spirit speeds away to live forever in the land “where nobody gets old or sorry or poor,” has a poignant pathos, a wild, dreamy beauty that touches the heart. Yeats tells of the Imperishable Rose of Beauty, of fantastic doings of the fairy-folk who steal mortals away, especially new-born babies or new-wed brides, of evil fairies who slay men in malice, and of the dances by moonlit hillside when mortals are asleep.

James Stephens in The Crock of Gold mingles delightfully fairy-lore with other elements of the supernatural, as talking beasts, and insects, the gods, a leprechaun, and Pan, combining with the droll philosophy of the bachelor man to make a charming social satire. The union of the world of reality with that of the wee people is seen in the sad little story of H. G. Wells, The Man Who Had Been in Fairyland. A crude, materialistic middle-class Englishman, in love with an ordinary young woman, falls asleep on a fairy knoll one night and is kidnapped by the Dim People who take him to their country, where their queen falls in love with him. She vainly woos him, but he is stolidly true to the thick-ankled girl of the town, until the fairies send him back in sleep to mortal life. But when he wakes on the knoll he is home-sick for fairyland, he cares no more for the village girl who seems coarse and repulsive compared with the elfin creature whose love he might have kept in the land of wonder, so he is wretched, unable to fit again into mortal life and unable to reopen the doors that closed inexorably upon him by his wish. This is a modern version of the motif of the mortal lover and the fairy bride that we find so often in mediæval ballads and romances, a survival of the Celtic wonder-lore. Arthur Lewis in London Fairy Tales writes philosophic human stories in the guise of fairy tales, attempting frankly to bring the impossible into contact with daily life. They are weird little symbolic stories with an earthly wisdom associated with unearthly beings. The Passionate Crime, by E. Temple Thurston, is a symbolic fairy novel, the fairies being figures of the man’s besetting sins, bodiless presences blown on the winds of feeling, as the woman he loves is lured by the fairy of her own beauty.

Whether fairyland be an actual place or a state of mind, it is a province still open to romancers, and folklorists have aroused a new interest in the Little People who may come nearer to us than before. The flood of volumes recounting Celtic folk-tales with their fairy-lore alone would make a long catalogue, and one can do no more than suggest the presence of the fairy in English fiction. Andrew Lang was a faithful lover of the Sidhe and made many collections of fairy stories, Eden Phillpotts has written much of them, and various writers have opened their magic to us. Some place the land of faerie under the ground, some in secret caves, some in the mind, and Lord Dunsany says that the Old Man Who Looks after Fairyland lives in a house whose parlor windows look away from the world, and “empties his slops sheer on to the Southern Cross.”

We find many stories of gods, demigods, and heroes tangled up together in folk-tales and in the literature they have influenced. It is sometimes difficult to distinguish between them, and again it is interesting to note how the hero-myth has been converted into the tale of a god. Celtic romances and folk-supernaturalism give many stories of gods, demigods, and heroes of superhuman force. It would be interesting if one could trace them to their ultimate sources and discover how much they have been suggested or influenced by classical mythology. In Fiction of the Irish Celts, by Patrick Kennedy, are numberless stories of the Fianna Eironn, or Heroes of Ireland, some of whom really flourished in the third century and whose adventures were the favorite stories of the kings and chiefs as sung by the ancient bards. Kennedy also retells many of the Ossianic legends. In Bardic Stories of Ireland he relates the exploits of personages dating back to druidic times and earlier, who reflect the remote stages of the legendary history of the people, such as the antique King Fergus, who was given supernatural power by the fairies and slew the sea-monster; Cormac, who did many doughty deeds assisted by the powers of the Immortals, and many others. W. B. Yeats, in his Stories of Red Ranrahan, gives us glimpses of an Irish François Villon, a man of wandering nature, of human frailties, yet with a divine gift of song.

Lady Gregory tells the wonderful saga of Cuchulain, the hero-god of Ireland, in Cuchulain of Muirthemne, which W. B. Yeats calls “perhaps the best book that has ever come out of Ireland.” It was his mother Dechtire that drank the soul of Lugh of the Strong Hand, as he flew into her wine-cup in the form of a Mayfly, so that she was bound by enchantment and carried away with her fifty maidens as a flock of lovely birds. When anger came upon him the hero light would shine about his head, he understood all the arts of the druids and had supernatural beauty and strength in battle. Cuchulain, the Hound of Ulster, and his Red Branch have filled the legendry of Ireland with wonder.

Lady Gregory tells of the high king of Ireland who married Etain of the Sidhe; of the nine pipers that came out of the hill of the Sidhe, whom to fight with was to fight with a shadow, for they could not be killed; of Conchobar, the king, that loved Deirdre of the burning beauty for whom many candles of the Gael were blown out; of Cruachan, who knew druid enchantments greater than the magic of the fairies so that he was able to fight with the Dim People and overcome them, and to cover the whole province with a deep snow so that they could not follow him. In Gods and Fighting Men Lady Gregory tells of ancient divinities that met men as equals. We come to know Oisin, son of Finn, who is king over a divine country; of the Men of Dea who fought against the misshapen Fomer. Men are called to the country of Under-Wave where the gods promise them all their desires, as the god Medhir tells Queen Etain that in his country one never grows old, that there is no sorrow, no care among invisible gods. She tells us of Finn, who fought with monsters, who killed many great serpents in Loch Cuilinn, and Shadow-shapes at Loch Lein, and fought with the three-headed hag, and nine headless bodies that raised harsh screeches. We meet Diarmuid, who married a daughter of King Under-Wave, who raised a house by enchantment, and whom Grania, of the fatal beauty, loved.

Jeremiah Curtin, Aldis Dunbar, and many another writer have told us of the wonderful legends of the Celtic gods and heroes, who somehow seem more human than Arthur and his Table Round or any of the English mythical heroes.

It is Lord Dunsany, however, who specializes in gods in recent times. He fairly revels in divinities and demons, in idols and out-of-the-world creatures. His dramas of this nature are mentioned in another connection, as A Night at an Inn, where a jade idol slays with silent horror the men who have stolen his emerald eye; The Gods of the Mountains, where seven beggars masquerade as the mountain gods come to life, and some of the people believe but some doubt. But at last the seven gods from the mountain come down, terrible figures of green stone, and with sinister menace point terrible fingers at the beggars, who stiffen as on pedestals, draw their feet under them like the cross-legged posture of the images, and turn to stone, so that the people coming say: “They were the true gods. They have turned to stone because we doubted them.” In The Gods of Pegana are many fantastic tales of divinities never heard of before, whom Dunsany calls to life with the lavish ease of genius and makes immortal. In Time and the Gods we see many gods, with their servant the swart, sinister Time who serves them, but maliciously. The gods dream marble dreams that have magic power, for “with domes and pinnacles the dreams arose and stood up proudly between the river and the sky, all shimmering white to the morning.” But Sardathrion, this city of visions, is overthrown by hateful Time, whereat the mighty gods weep grievous tears. He tells us of Slid, a new god that comes striding through the stars, past where the ancient divinities are seated on their thrones, as a million waves march behind him; of Inzana, the daughter of all the gods who plays with the sun as her golden ball and weeps when it falls into the sea, so that Umborodom with his thunder hound must seek it again and again for her. He whispers to us of the prophet who saw the gods one night as they strode knee-deep in stars, and above them a mighty hand, showing a higher power. The gods are jealous of him that he has seen, so they rob him of knowledge of the gods, of moon and sky, of butterflies and flowers, and all lovely things. And last they steal his soul away from him, from which they make the South Wind, forever to roam the waste spaces of the world, mournful, unremembering.

In The Book of Wonder are still other gods, as Hlo-Hlo, who wears the haloes of other gods on golden hooks along his hunting-belt; the Sphinx, who “remembers in her smitten mind at which little boys now leer, that she once knew well those things at which man stands aghast”; the certain disreputable god who knows nothing of etiquette and will grant prayers that no respectable god would ever consent to hear; Chu-chu and Sheemish, who become angry with each other and raise rival earthquakes that destroy their temple and them. We are told of the Gibbelins that eat men, whose home is beyond the known regions, and whose treasures many burglars try in vain to steal only to meet death instead. Alderic tries a crafty way to evade them but they are waiting for him. “And without saying a word or even smiling they neatly hang him on the outer wall,—and the tale is one of those that have not a happy ending.” But enough of gods!—though we should not forget the Aztec legend on which Lew Wallace’s novel, The Fair God, was founded, of the white divinity who was to come and rule the people.

There are many other elements of folkloristic supernaturalism that cannot be mentioned, as the banshee, the wailful creature that is a presager of death and the loss of the soul; the fetches, ghosts of the living, whom John and Michael Banim write much about; the pixies, as appearing in such works as S. Baring-Gould’s Eve, and Stephens’s The Crock of Gold; the mountain trolls that play pranks on Ibsen’s Peer Gynt and Irving’s Rip van Winkle; the “worrie-cow” that Scott tells about; the saints and miracles that abound in Celtic literature as in that of any Catholic country, and such as Thomas A. Janvier has told of so delightfully in his legends of the City of Mexico. The giant has almost faded from fiction, since, poor thing, he doesn’t fit in well with the modern scheme of housing. He came into the Gothic novel from the Oriental tale where he had his origin, but now he appears in our fiction only sporadically, as in Oscar Wilde’s The Selfish Giant, in a couple of stories by Blackwood, and a few others. We are glad to meet him occasionally in frank folk-tales since literature at large repudiates this favorite of our youth. He would not suit well on the stage, for obvious reasons, and realism rejects him.

Lord Dunsany tells of elves and gnomes, of the Moomoo, of the magic sword called Mouse, of the gnoles that caught Tonker, of the ancient Thuls, of the window that opened to the magic of the world, and of many other things which only the very young or the very wise care for.

Arthur Machen deals with strange, sinister aspects of supernaturalism unlike the wholesome folklore that other writers reveal to us. He seems to take his material chiefly from the Pit, to let loose upon the world a slimy horde of unnamable spirits of ageless evil. One reads of the White People, who are most loathsome fairies under whose influence the rocks dance obscene dances in the Witches’ Sabbath, and the great white moon seems an unclean thing. Images of clay made by human hands come to diabolic life, and at mystic incantations the nymph Alanna turns the pool in the woodland to a pool of fire. In The Great God Pan the timeless menace comes to earth again, corrupting the souls of men and women, rendering them unbelievably vile. In The Red Hand he brings together ancient runes with magic power, black stones that tell secrets of buried treasure, flinty stone like obsidian ten thousand years old that murders a man on a London street, a whorl of figures that tell of the black heaven, giving an impression of vast ages of enigmatic power. One feels one should rinse his mind out after reading Arthur Machen’s stories, particularly the collection called The Three Impostors.

This discussion has taken more note of the Celtic folk-fiction than of any other group influence, because more than any other it has left its imprint on modern literature. There are hundreds of volumes of folk-tales of the supernatural in English, but the Celtic Revival has molded its legends into literature that is its own excuse for being. In the work of this school we get a passionate mysticism, a poetic symbolism that we find scarcely anywhere else in English prose, save in such rhapsodic passages as some of De Quincey’s impassioned prose. Melody, which forms so large a part of the effect of supernaturalism in poetry, is here employed to heighten lyric prose. Some of the wild stories are like the croon of the peasant mother by her cradle beside the peat-fire, some like wild barbaric runes of terrible unguessed import, some like the battle-cry of hero-gods, some like the keening of women beside their dead. The essential poetry of the Celtic soul pours itself forth in rapturous, wistful music, now like a chant, a hymn, a wedding-song, a lament for the lost soul.

In the Celtic folk-tales we get a mixture of romances, of the survivals of barbaric days, the ancient druid myths, the pagan legends, savage beliefs overlaid and interwoven with the later Christian traditions. Sometimes the old pagan myths themselves become moral allegories, the legend being used to tell a late-learned moral truth. But, for the most part, there is no attempt at teaching save that which comes spontaneously, the outburst of passionate, poetic romance, the heritage of a people that love wonder and beauty.

The pagan poetry of the Gaelic race lives on and throbs over again in Fiona McLeod’s symbolic moralities. The mystical figures of awe and woe appear from the dim past, a rapturous paganism showing through the medieval religious brooding. Yet they are so symbolic of the spirit that they are timeless. Coming as they do out of the dim legendary past, they may reflect the veiled years of the future. They are mystic chronicles of the soul, as in The Divine Adventure, where the Body and Will alike shrink back from that “silent, sad-eyed foreigner, the Soul.”

In the stories of Yeats we get similar effects, the weird power of the old curse-making bards, the gift of second-sight, a spiritual vision, the spiritual sense that hears past the broken discordant sounds the music of the world, the power to catch the moment “that trembles with the Song of Immortal Powers.” We hear faint whispers, catch fleeting glimpses of the Dim People, see again the druids, the culdees, the ancient bards and heroes. We discern in the Celtic literature a sadness, dim, unreasoning yet deep, such as we see in the faces of animals and little children. We see such symbolism as that of the self-centered lovers who have heart-shaped mirrors instead of hearts, seeing only their own images throughout eternity. We feel the poetic thoughts drifting past us like sweet falling rose-leaves, bright with the colors of bygone years, like fluttering bird-wings, like happy sighs. Yet again they are terrible trumpets blown in the day of doom. We have the modern mysticism and symbolism side by side with the old druidic mysticism, which seems like dream-stuff with deep spiritual import. Yeats makes us feel that the old divinities are not dead, but have taken up their abode in the hearts of poets and writers of romance, and that the land of faery is all about us if we would only see. But we lack the poetic vision. He makes us see the actuality of thought, that thinking has its own vital being and goes out into the world like a living thing, possessed by some wandering soul. He shows us that thought can create black hounds or silver doves to follow the soul, bring to life at will a divinity or a demon.

A certain supernatural element of style seems to lend itself to some of the writers of strange fiction. Some of Oscar Wilde’s sentences unfold like wild, exotic flowers, in a perfumed beauty that suggests a subtle poison at the heart. Lord Dunsany writes joyously of fantastic creatures with a happy grace, sometimes like a lilting laugh, sometimes a lyric rhapsody. His evoked beings are sportive or awesome but never unclean. Arthur Machen’s stories have an effect like a slimy trail of some loathly beast or serpent. William Morris’s style is like an old Norse rune, while Algernon Blackwood makes us think of awakened, elemental forces hostile to man. We feel bodiless emotions, feelings unclothed with flesh, sad formless spirits blown on the winds of the world. These folk-tales reflect the sweet carelessness of the Irish soul, the stern sadness of the Scotch, the psychic subtlety of the modern English. And as the study of folk-lore has influenced the fiction of the supernatural, so these published romances have aroused a wondering interest in the legendry of the past and made of folk-lore a science.

CHAPTER VII
Supernatural Science

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

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

The modern stories of magic have a skillful power of suggestiveness, being so cunningly contrived that on the surface they seem plausible and natural, with nothing supernatural about them. Yet behind this seeming simplicity lurks a mystery, an unanswered question, an unsolved problem. W. W. Jacobs’s The Monkey’s Paw, for instance, is one of the most effectively terrible stories of magic that one could conceive of. The shriveled paw of a dead monkey, that is believed by some to give its possessor the right to have three wishes granted, becomes the symbol of inescapable destiny, the Weird, or Fate of the old tragedy, though the horrors that follow upon the wishes’ rash utterance may be explained on natural grounds. The insidious enigma is what makes the story unforgettable. Barry Pain’s Exchange might be given as another example of problematic magic that owes its power to elusive mystery. The witch-woman, the solitary Fate, who appears to persons offering them such dreadful alternatives, might be conceived of as the figment of sick brains, yet the reader knows that she is not.

Richard Middleton’s The Coffin Merchant seems simple enough on the surface, and the literal-minded could explain the occurrence on normal grounds, yet the story has a peculiar haunting supernaturalism. A coffin merchant claims to be able to know who among passers-by will die soon, and hands a man an advertisement for a coffin, asserting that he will need it. The man later goes to the shop to rebuke the merchant for his methods but ends by signing a contract for his own funeral. On leaving, he shakes hands with the dealer, after which he unconsciously puts his hand to his lips, feeling a slight sting. He dies that night,—of what? Of poison, of fear, of supernatural suggestion, or in the natural course of events? The series called The Strange Cases of Dr. Stanchion, by Josephine Daskam Bacon, shows instances occurring among the clientele of a famous brain specialist, where the materialist might put aside the explanation of the supernatural, only to be confronted by still greater problems. The relation between insanity and ghostliness in recent fiction is significant and forms the crux of many a story since Poe. Mrs. Bacon’s The Miracle, for instance, has its setting in an insane asylum, but the uncanny happenings almost convince us of the sanity of the patients and the paranoia of the outsiders. We come to agree with the specialist that every person is more or less a paranoiac, and none more so than he who scoffs at the supernatural.

Another aspect of the transfer of magic in modern fiction to a scientific basis is that of second sight or supernatural vision. This motif still retains all its former effect of the unearthly, perhaps gaining more, since the scientific twist seems to give the idea that the ghostly power resides in the atoms and molecules and gases and machines themselves, rather than in the person who manipulates them, which is more subtly haunting in its impression. Second sight has been used as a means for producing uncanny effects all along the line of fiction. Defoe even used it in a number of his hoax pamphlets, as well as in his History of Duncan Campbell, and folk-lore is full of such stories, especially in the Highlands.

The modern use of supernatural vision is based apparently on natural science, which makes the weird power more striking. The Black Patch, by Randolph Hartley, tells of an experiment in optics that produces a strange result. Two students exchange left eyeballs for the purpose of studying the effects of the operation, leaving the right eye in each case unimpaired. When the young men recover from the operation and the bandages are removed, they discover that an extraordinary thing has taken place. The first, while seeing with his right eye his own surroundings as usual, sees also with his left—which is his friend’s left, that is—what that friend is looking at with his right eye, thousands of miles away. The severing of the optic nerve has not disturbed the sympathetic vision between the companion eyes, so this curious double sight results. In a quarrel arising from this peculiar situation, the first man kills the second, and sees on his left eye the hideous image of his own face distorted with murderous rage, as his friend saw it, which is never to be effaced, because the companion eye is dead and will see no more.

Another instance of farsightedness is told in John Kendrick Bangs’s The Speck on the Lens, where a man has such an extraordinary left eye that when he looks through a lens he sees round the world, and gets a glimpse of the back of his own head which he thinks is a speck on the lens. Only two men in the world are supposed to have that power.

The Remarkable Case of Davidson’s Eyes, by H. G. Wells, is an interesting example of this new scientific transference of magic vision. Davidson is working in a laboratory which is struck by lightning, and after the shock he finds himself unable to visualize his surroundings, but instead sees the other side of the world, ships, a sea, sands. The explanation given by a professor turns on learned theories of space and the Fourth Dimension. He thinks that Davidson, in stooping between the poles of the electro-magnet, experienced a queer twist in his mental retinal elements through the sudden force of the lightning. As the author says: “It sets one dreaming of the oddest possibilities of intercommunication in the future, of spending an intercalary five minutes on the other side of the world, of being watched in our most secret operations by unexpected eyes.” Davidson’s vision comes back queerly, for he begins to see the things around him by piecemeal, as apparently the two fields of vision overlap for a time.

Brander Matthews in The Kinetoscope of Time introduces an instrument with eyepieces that show magic vision. The beholder sees scenes from the past, from literature as well as from life, has glimpses of Salome dancing, of Esmerelda, witnesses the combat between Achilles and Hector, the tourney between Saladin and the Knight of the Leopard. The magician offers to show him his future—for a price—but he is wise enough to refuse.

Magic views of the future constitute an interesting aspect of the supernatural vision in modern stories. The Lifted Veil, by George Eliot, is an account of a man who has prophetic glimpses of his fate, which seem powerless to warn him, since he marries the woman who he knows will be his doom, and he is aware that he will die alone, deserted even by his servants, yet cannot help it. He sees himself dying, with the attendants off on their own concerns, knows every detail beforehand, but unavailingly. This suggests Amos Judd, by J. A. Mitchell, which is a curious instance of the transition stage of second sight, related both to the old sorcerer type and to the new scientific ideas. Amos Judd, so called, is the son of an Indian rajah, sent out of his country because of a revolution, and brought up in ignorance of his birth in a New England farmhouse. Vishnu, in the far past, has laid his finger on the brow of one of the rajah’s ancestors, thereby endowing him with the gift of magic vision, which descends once in a hundred years to some one of his line. Amos Judd therefore, can see the future by pictures, beholding clearly everything that will happen to him. He sees himself lying dead at a desk, on which stands a calendar marking the date, November 4th. His friends persuade him to live past the date, and they think all is well, till one day while he is on a visit to a strange house he is killed by an assassin. They find him lying at a desk, with an out-of-date calendar beside him, marking November 4th.

Barry Pain endows a bulldog with the power to foretell the future, to reveal disaster and oppose it. Zero, in the story by that name, is a common bulldog greatly valued because he has a supernatural knowledge of any evil that threatens those he loves, and by his canine sagacity he forestalls fate. In the end, in protecting his master’s little child, he is bitten by a mad dog, whose coming he has supernaturally foreseen, and he commits suicide as the only way out of the difficulty. Arthur Machen, in The Bowmen and Others, tells varied stories of supernatural vision associated with the war.

The Door in the Wall, by H. G. Wells, depicts a man who in his dreamy childhood wanders into a secret garden where he is shown the book of his past and future, but who afterwards is unable to find the door by which he enters, though he seeks it often. Later in life, at several times when he is in a special haste to reach some place for an important appointment, he sees the door, but does not enter. Finally he goes in to his death. This is an instance of the suggestive supernaturalism associated with dreams and visions.

The use of mirrors in supernatural vision is significant and appears in a number of ways in modern fiction. Scott’s My Aunt Margaret’s Mirror is an early instance, where the magician shows the seeker a glass wherein she sees what is taking place in another country, sees her husband on his way to the altar with another woman, sees a stranger stop the marriage, and witnesses the fatal duel. Hawthorne has used mirrors extensively as symbolic of an inner vision, of a look into the realities of the soul. For instance, when poor Feathertop, the make-believe man, the animated scarecrow, looks into the mirror he sees not the brave figure the world beholds in him, but the thing of sticks and straw, the sham that he is, as the minister shrinks from the mirrored reflection of the black veil, symbol of mystery that he wears. Hawthorne elsewhere speaks of Echo as the voice of the reflection in a mirror, and says that our reflections are ghosts of ourselves. Mr. Titbottom, in George William Curtis’s Prue and I, who has the power of seeing into the souls of human beings by means of his magic spectacles and catching symbolic glimpses of what they are instead of what they appear to be, beholds himself in a mirror and shrinks back aghast from the revelation of his own nature. Barry Pain’s story, referred to in another connection, shows a mirror wherein a supernatural visitant reveals to a young man the supreme moments of life, his own and those of others, pictures of the highest moments of ecstasy or despair, of fulfillment of dear dreams.

The Silver Mirror, by A. Conan Doyle, represents a man alone night after night, working with overstrained nerves on a set of books, who sees in an antique mirror a strange scene re-enacted and finds later that the glass has once belonged to Mary, Queen of Scots, and that he has seen the murder of Rizzio. Brander Matthews also has a story concerned with re-created images in an old mirror. The looking-glass in fiction seems to be not only a sort of hand conscience, as Markheim calls it, but a betrayer of secrets, a revealer of the forgotten past, a prophet of the future as well. It is also a strange symbol to show hearts as they are in reality, reflecting the soul rather than the body. It is employed in diverse ways and is an effective means of supernatural suggestion, of ghostly power.

The Fourth Dimension is another motif that seems to interest the writers of recent ghostly tales. They make use of it in various ways and seem to have different ideas concerning it, but they like to play with the thought and twist it to their whim. Ambrose Bierce has a collection of stories dealing with mysterious disappearances, in which he tells of persons who are transferred from the known, calculable space to some “non-Euclidean space” where they are lost. In some strange pockets of nowhere they fall, unable to see or to be seen, to hear or to be heard, neither living nor dying, since “in that space is no power of life or of death.” It is all very mysterious and uncanny. He uses the theme as the basis for a number of short stories of ghostly power, which offer no solution but leave the mystery in the air. In some of these stories Bierce represents the person as crying out, and being heard, but no help can go, because he is invisible and intangible, not knowing where he is nor what has happened to him. H. G. Wells, in The Plattner Case, which shows an obvious influence of Bierce, gives a similar case. He explains the extraordinary happenings by advancing the theory that Plattner has changed sides. According to mathematics, he says, we are told that the only way in which the right and left sides of a solid body can be changed is by taking that body clean out of space as we know it, out of ordinary existence, that is, and turning it somewhere outside space. Plattner has been moved out into the Fourth Dimension and been returned to the world with a curious inversion of body. He is absent from the world for nine days and has extraordinary experiences in the Other-World. This happens through an explosion in the laboratory where he is working, similarly to Wells’s story of Davidson, where the infringement on the Fourth Dimension is the result of a lightning stroke.

Mary Wilkins Freeman deals with the Fourth Dimension in The Hall Bedroom, where the boarder drifts off into unknown space, never to return, from gazing at a picture on the wall, as has happened in the case of previous occupants of the room. Richard Middleton employs the same idea in a story of a conjurer who nightly plays a trick in public, causing his wife to seem to disappear into space. One night she actually does so vanish, never to be seen again. Other instances of the form may be found in recent fiction. H. G. Wells uses the theme with a different twist in his Time Machine. Here the scientist insists that time is the Fourth Dimension, that persons who talk of the matter ordinarily have no idea of what it is, but that he has solved it. He constructs a machine which enables him to project himself into the future or into the past, and sees what will happen or what has happened in other centuries. He lives years in the space of a few moments and has amazing adventures on his temporal expeditions. But finally the Fourth Dimension, which may be thought of as a terrible Fate or inescapable destiny awaiting all who dally with it, gets him too, for he fails to return from one of his trips. Another story tells of a man who by drinking quantities of green tea could project himself into the Fourth Dimension.

A number of stories of scientific supernaturalism are concerned with glimpses into the future. The Time Machine, just mentioned, with its invasions of the unknown space and time, its trips into eternity by the agency of a miraculous vehicle, illustrates the method. The scientist finds that he can travel backwards or forwards, accelerating or retarding his speed as he will, and get a section of life in any age he wishes. He discovers that in the future which he visits many reforms have been inaugurated, preventive medicine established, noxious weeds eradicated, and yet strange conditions exist. Mankind has undergone a two-fold involution, the soft conditions of life having caused the higher classes to degenerate into flabby beings of no strength, while an underground race has grown up of horrible depraved nature, blind from living in subterranean passages, cannibalistic while the others are vegetarian. The lower classes are like hideous apes, while the higher are effeminate, relaxed. The traveler escapes a dire fate only by rushing to his machine and returning to his own time. Samuel Butler suggests that machines will be the real rulers in the coming ages, that man will be preserved only to feed and care for the machines which will have attained supernatural sensibility and power. He says that mechanisms will acquire feelings and tastes and culture, and that man will be the servant of steel and steam in the future, instead of master as now; that engines will wed and rear families which men, as slaves, must wait upon.

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

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Views of other planets form a feature of modern supernaturalism, for the writer now sets his stories not only on earth, in heaven, and in hell but on other worlds besides. The astrologer of ancient fiction, with his eye fixed ever on the stars, seeking to discern their influence on human destiny, appears no more among us. He has been replaced by the astronomer who scans the stars yet with a different purpose in fiction. He wishes to find out the life of citizens of other planets rather than to figure out the fate of mortals on the earth. Many stories of modern times cause new planets to swim into our literary ken and describe their citizens with ease. H. G. Wells stars here as elsewhere. In his War of the Worlds he depicts a struggle between the earth people and the Martians, in which many supernatural elements enter. The people of Mars are a repulsive horde of creatures, yet they have wonderful organization and command of resources, and they conquer the earth to prey upon it. This book has suffered the inevitable parody.[200] In The Crystal Egg, Wells describes a curious globe in which the gazer can see scenes reflected from Mars. The author suggests two theories as to the possibility of this,—either that the crystal is in both worlds at once, remaining stationary in one and moving in the other, and that it reflects scenes in Mars so that they are visible on earth, or else that by a peculiar sympathy with a companion globe on the other planet it shows on its surface what happens in the other world. It is hinted that the Martians have sent the crystal to the earth in order that they might catch glimpses of our life.

In The Star, Wells gives yet another story of the future, of other planetary influences. By the passing of a strange star, life on earth is convulsed and conditions radically changed. These conditions are observed by the astronomers on Mars, who are beings different from men, yet very intelligent. They draw conclusions as to the amount of damage done to the earth, satirizing human theories as to Mars. The Days of the Comet shows earthly life changed by the passing of a comet, but instead of the destruction described in the other story, the social conditions are vastly improved and a millennium is ushered in. Wells[201] makes a voyage to the moon possible by the discovery of a substance which resists gravity. Other instances might be given, for there has been no lack of lunar literature, but they are not usually worth much.

Du Maurier’s The Martian, which combines the elements of metempsychosis, automatic writing, and dream-supernaturalism, with the idea of ghostly astronomy, tells of a supernatural visitant from Mars. The Martian is a young woman whose spirit comes to inhabit a young man to whom she dictates wonderful books in his dreams. She writes letters to him in a sort of private code, in which she tells of her previous incarnations on Mars, of the Martians who are extraordinary amphibious beings, descended from a small sea animal. They have unusual acuteness of senses with an added sixth sense, a sort of orientation, a feeling of a magnetic current, which she imparts to her protégé, Barty Joscelyn. Jack London[202] tells a story of interplanetary metempsychosis, where the central character, a prisoner in San Quentin, finds himself able to will his body to die at times, thus releasing his spirit to fly through space and relive its experiences in previous incarnations.

Barry Pain’s The Celestial Grocery is a phantasy of insanity and the supernatural, with its setting on two planets. It contains a cab horse that talks and laughs, and other inversions of the natural. A man is taken on a journey to another world, sees the stars and the earth in space beneath him, and finds everything different from what he has known before. People there have two bodies and send them alternately to the wash, though they seldom wear them. The celestial shop sells nothing concrete, only abstractions, emotions, experiences. One may buy measures of love, requited or unselfishly hopeless, of political success, of literary fame, or of power or what-not. Happiness is a blend, however, for which one must mix the ingredients for himself. The story is symbolic of the ideals of earth, with a sad, effective satire. The end is insanity, leaving one wondering how much of it is pure phantasy of a mad man’s brain or how much actuality. It is reminiscent of Hawthorne’s Intelligence Office with its symbolic supernaturalism.

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Hypnotism enters largely into the fiction of modern times. Hypnotism may or may not be considered as supernatural, yet it borders so closely on to the realm of the uncanny, and is so related to science of to-day as well as to the sorcery of the past, that it should be considered in this connection for it carries on the traditions of the supernatural. In its earlier stages hypnotism was considered as distinctly diabolic, used only for unlawful purposes, being associated with witchcraft. It is only in more recent times that it has been rehabilitated in the public mind and thought of as a science which may be used for helpful ends. It is so mysterious in its power that it affords complications in plenty for the novelist and has been utilized in various ways. In some cases, as F. Marion Crawford’s The Witch of Prague, it is associated still with evil power and held as a black art. Unorna has an unearthly power gained through hypnotism which is more than hypnotic, and which she uses to further her own ends. Strange scientific ideas of life and of death are seen here, and someone says of her: “You would make a living mummy of a man. I should expect to find him with his head cut off and living by means of a glass heart and thinking through a rabbit’s brain.” She embalms an old man in a continuous hypnotic lethargy, recalling him only at intervals to do mechanically the things necessary to prolong life. She is trying to see if she can cause human tissue to live forever in this embalmed state, hoping to learn through it the secret of eternal life. This, of course, suggests Poe’s stories of the subject, Mesmeric Revelations and The Facts in the Case of M. Waldemar. The latter is one of the most revolting instances of scientific supernaturalism, for the dying man is mesmerized in the moment of death and remains in that condition, dead, yet undecaying, and speaking, repeating with his horrible tongue the statement, “I am dead.” After seven months, further experiments break the spell, and he, pleading to be allowed to be at peace in death, falls suddenly away into a loathsome, liquid putrescence before the eyes of the experimenters.

The Portent, by George MacDonald, is a curious study of hypnotic influence, of a woman who is her true self only when in a somnambulistic state. A supernatural connection of soul exists between her and a youth born on the same day, and it is only through his hypnotic aid that she gains her personality and sanity. James L. Ford plays with the subject by having a group of persons in an evening party submit themselves to be hypnotized in turn, each telling a true story of his life while in that condition. W. D. Howells combines mesmerism with spiritualism in his novel,[203] where the séances are really the result of hypnotism rather than supernatural revelation as the medium thinks. H. G. Wells has used this theme, as almost every other form of scientific ghostliness, though without marked success. The prize story of hypnotism, however, still remains Du Maurier’s Trilby, for no mesmerist in this fiction has been able to outdo Svengali.

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Uncanny chemistry forms the ingredient for many a modern story. The alchemist was the favored feature of the older supernatural fiction of science, and his efforts to discover the philosopher’s stone and to brew the magic elixir have furnished plots for divers stories. He does not often waste his time in these vain endeavors in recent stories, though his efforts have not altogether ceased, as we have seen in a previous chapter. A. Conan Doyle[204] is among the last to treat the theme, and makes the scientist find his efforts worse than useless, for the research student finds that his discovery of the art of making gold is disturbing the nice balance of nature and bringing injury to those he meant to help, so he destroys his secret formula and dies. The Elixir of Youth illustrates the transference of power from the sorcerer to the scientist, for the magician that gives the stranger a potion to restore his youth tells him that he is not a sorcerer, not a diabolic agent, but a scientist learning to utilize the forces that are at the command of any intelligence.

Barry Pain’s The Love Philter is related both to the old and the new types of supernatural chemistry. A man loves a woman who doesn’t care, so he asks aid of a wise woman, who gives him a potion that will surely win the stubborn heart. As he lies asleep in the desert, on his way back, he dreams that his love says to him that love gained by such means is not love, so he pours the liquid on the sand. When he returns, the woman tells him that she has been with him in his dreams and loves him because he would not claim her wrongly. Blue Roses is another of his stories of magic that bring love to the indifferent. Twilight, by Frank Danby, is a novel based on the relation between morphia and the supernatural. A woman ill of nervous trouble, under the influence of opiates, continually sees the spirit of a woman dead for years, who relives her story before her eyes, so that the personalities are curiously merged. This inevitably suggests De Quincey’s Confessions of an English Opium-Eater with its dream-wonders, yet it has a power of its own and the skillful blending of reality with dream-supernaturalism and insanity has an uncanny distinction.

Fu-Manchu, the Chinese wonder-worker in Sax Rohmer’s series of stories bearing that name, is a representative example of the modern use of chemistry for supernormal effect. He employs all the forces of up-to-the-minute science to compass his diabolic ends and works miracles of chemistry by seemingly natural methods. By a hypodermic injection he can instantly drive a man to acute insanity incurable save by a counter-injection which only Fu-Manchu can give, but which as instantly restores the reason. By another needle he can cause a person to die—to all intents and purposes, at least,—and after the body has been buried for days he can restore it to life by another prick of the needle. He terrorizes England by his infernal powers, killing off or converting to slavery the leading intelligences that oppose him.

Stevenson’s Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde is perhaps the best-known instance of chemical supernaturalism. Here the magic drug not only changes the body, evolving from the respectable Dr. Jekyll his baser self in the form of Mr. Hyde, enabling him to give rein to his criminal instincts without bringing reproach on his reputation, but has the subtle power to fix the personality of evil, so that each time the drug is used Hyde is given a stronger force and Jekyll is weakened. This fictive sermon on dual nature, the ascendence of evil over the nobler soul if it be indulged, seems yet an appallingly real story of human life. In a similar fashion Arthur Machen uses supernatural chemistry most hideously in The Three Impostors, where a certain powder perverts the soul, making man a sharer in the unspeakable orgies of ancient evil forces.

The Invisible Man, by H. G. Wells, shows an unusual application of chemistry to ghostly fiction that gives a peculiar effect of reality because its style is that of scientific realism. By experimentation with drugs a man finds a combination that will render living tissue absolutely invisible. When he swallows a portion of it, he cannot be seen. His clothes appear to be walking around by themselves and the complications are uncanny. As one may see, the comic possibilities are prominent and for a time we laugh over the mystification of the persons with whom he comes in contact, but soon stark tragedy results. During the man-chase, as the hunted creature seeks to escape, the people hear the thud-thud of running steps, watch bloody footprints form before their eyes, yet see nothing else. Here is a genuine thrill that is new in fiction. The man gradually becomes visible, but only in death is his dreadful figure seen completely again. This modern method of transferring to science the idea of invisibility so prominent in connection with ghosts, showing the invisibility as the result of a chemical compound, not of supernatural intervention, affecting a living man not a spirit, makes the effect of supernaturalism more vivid even than in the case of ghosts.

These are only suggestions of the varied uses to which chemistry has been put in producing ghostly plots and utilizing in novel ways the conventional motifs of older stories. These themes are more popular now than they would have been half a century ago because now the average reader knows more about scientific facts and is better prepared to appreciate them. A man ignorant of chemistry would care nothing for the throes of Dr. Jekyll or the complicating experiences of the invisible man, because he would have slight basis for his imagination to build upon. Each widening of the popular intelligence and each branch of science added to the mental store of the ordinary reader is a distinct gain to fiction.

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Supernatural biology looms large in modern fiction, though it is not always easy to differentiate between the predominance of chemical and biological motifs. In many cases the two are tangled up together, and as, in the stories of dual personality and invisibility just mentioned, one may not readily say which is uppermost, the biological or the chemical side, for the experiments are of the effects of certain drugs upon living human tissue. There are various similar instances in the fiction of scientific supernaturalism. Hawthorne’s The Birthmark is a case of chemical biology, where the husband seeking to remove by powerful drugs the mark from his wife’s cheek succeeds in doing so but causes her death. Here the supernaturalism is symbolic, suggested rather than boldly stated, as is usually the case with Hawthorne’s work.

A. Conan Doyle in The Los Amigos Fiasco shows supernaturalism based on the effect of electricity on the body, for the lynchers in trying to kill a man by connecting him with a dynamo succeed in so magnetizing him that he can’t be killed in any way. Sax Rohmer tells one Fu-Manchu story of a mysterious murder committed by means of an imprisoned gas that escapes from a mummy case and poisons those exposed to it, and, in another, he introduces a diabolic red insect attracted by the scent of a poisonous orchid, that bites the marked victim.

Wells’s The Island of Dr. Moreau is a ghastly study in vivisection. Two scientists on a remote island with no other human inhabitants try unspeakable experiments on animals, trying by pruning and grafting and training the living tissue to make them human. They do succeed in a measure, for they teach the beasts to talk and to observe a sort of jungle law laid down by man, yet the effect is sickening. The animals are not human and never can be, and these revolting experiments deprive them of all animal dignity without adding any of the human. In the end they revert to savagery, becoming even more bestial than before. The most dreadful biological experiments in recent fiction are described in Arthur Machen’s volume of short stories, The House of Souls. In one story an operation on the brain enables a victim to “see the great god Pan,” to have revelations of ancient supernaturalism wherein Pan and the devil are united in one character. In another, a delicate cutting of the brain removes the soul,—which takes the form of a wonderful jewel,—and utterly diabolizes the character. These curious and revolting stories are advanced instances of scientific diabolism and leave a smear on the mind. They are more horrible than the creation of Frankenstein’s man-monster, for here moral monsters are evolved.

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

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

Fu-Manchu, Sax Rohmer’s Chinese horror, performs various experiments in botany to further his dreadful ends. He develops a species of poisonous fungi till they become giant in size and acquire certain powers through being kept in the darkness. When a light is turned on them, the fungi explode, turning loose, on the men he would murder, fumes that drive them mad. From the ceiling above are released ripe spores of the giant Empusa, for the air in the second cellar, being surcharged with oxygen, makes them germinate instantly. They fall like powdered snow upon the victims and the horrible fungi grow magically, spreading over the writhing bodies of the mad-men and wrapping them in ghostly shrouds. In The Flower of Silence he describes a strange orchid that has the uncanny habit of stinging or biting when it is broken or roughly handled, sending forth a poison that first makes a man deaf then kills him. Fu-Manchu introduces this flower into the sleeping-rooms of those he wishes to put out of the way, and sends them into eternal silence. The Flowering of the Strange Orchid, by H. G. Wells, is the story of a murderous plant, a vampire that kills men in the jungle, and in a greenhouse in England sends out its tentacles that grip the botanist, drinking his blood and seeking to slay him. This orchid has the power to project its vampiric attacks when it is a shriveled bulb or in the flower. This reminds us of Algernon Blackwood’s story of the vampire soil, which after its psychic orgy burst into loathsome luxuriant bloom where before it had been barren.

It is a curious heightening of supernatural effect to give to beautiful flowers diabolical cunning and murderous motives, to endow them with human psychology and devilish designs. The magic associated with botany is usually black instead of white. One wonders if transmigration of soul does not enter subconsciously into these plots, and if a vampire orchid is not a trailing off of a human soul, the murderous blossom a revenge ghost expressing himself in that way. The plots in this type of fiction are wrought with much imagination and the scientific exactness combined with the supernatural gives a peculiar effect of reality.

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There are varied forms of supernatural science that do not come under any of the heads discussed. The applications of research to weird fiction are as diverse as the phases of investigation and only a few may be mentioned to suggest the variety of themes employed. Inversion of natural laws furnishes plots,—as in Frank R. Stockton’s Tale of Negative Gravity with its discovery of a substance that enables a man to save himself all fatigue by means of a something that inverts the law of gravity. With a little package in his pocket a man can climb mountains without effort, but the discoverer miscalculates the amount of energy required to move and finally rises instead of staying on the earth, till his wife has to fish him into the second-story window. Poe’s Loss of Breath illustrates another infringement of a natural law, as do several stories where a human being loses his shadow.

In The Diamond Lens, Fitz-James O’Brien tells of a man who looking at a drop of water through a giant microscope sees in the drop a lovely woman with whom he falls madly in love, only to watch her fade away under the lens as his despairing eyes see the water evaporate. Supernatural acoustics enters[206] in the story of a man who discovers the sound-center in an opera house and reads the unspoken thoughts of those around him. He applies the laws of acoustics to mentality and spirituality, making astounding discoveries. Bram Stoker combines superstition with modern science in his books, as[207] where Oriental magic is used to fight the encroachments of an evil force emanating from a mummy, as also to bring the mummy to life, while a respirator is employed to keep away the subtle odor. He brings in blood transfusion together with superstitious symbols, to combat the ravages of vampires.[208] Blood transfusion also enters into supernaturalism in Stephen French Whitney’s story, where a woman who has been buried in a glacier for two thousand years is recalled to life.

The Human Chord, by Algernon Blackwood, is a novel based on the psychic values of sounds, which claims that sounds are all powerful, are everything,—for forms, shapes, bodies are but vibratory activities of sound made visible. The research worker here believes that he who has the power to call a thing by its proper name is master of that thing, or of that person, and that to be able to call the name of Deity would be to enable one to become as God. He seeks to bring together a human chord, four persons in harmony as to voice and soul, who can pronounce the awful name and become divine with him. He can change the form or the nature of anything by calling its name, as a woman is deformed by mispronunciation, and the walls of a room expanded by his voice. He can make of himself a dwarf or a giant at will, by different methods of speaking his own name. He says that sound could re-create or destroy the universe. He has captured sounds that strain at their leashes in his secret rooms, gigantic, wonderful. But in the effort to call upon the mighty Name he mispronounces it, bringing a terrible convulsion of nature which destroys him. The beholders see an awful fire in which Letters escape back to heaven in chariots of flame.

Psychology furnishes some interesting contributions to recent fiction along the line of what might be called momentary or instantaneous plots. Ambrose Bierce’s The Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge is a good example,—where a man is being hanged and in the instant between the drop from the bridge and the breaking of the neck he lives through long and dramatic adventures, escaping his pursuers by falling into the river and swimming ashore, reaching home at last to greet his wife and children. Yet in a second his lifeless body swings from the bridge. The Warning, by Josephine Daskam Bacon, shows the case of a man who lives years in another country during a few moments of acute mental strain carried to the point of paranoia. Barry Pain has a story where in the time in which a man drives home from the theater he visits another planet and changes the current of his life, while Algernon Blackwood compresses a great experience into a few minutes of dreaming.

One noteworthy point in connection with the scientific supernaturalism is that these themes appear only in novels and short stories. They do not cross over into poetry as do most of the other forms of the ghostly art. Perhaps this is because the situations are intellectual rather than emotional, brain-problems or studies in mechanisms rather than in feelings or emotions. The province of science is removed from that of poetry because the methods and purposes are altogether different. The scientific methods are clear-cut, coldly intellectual. Science demands an exactness, a meticulous accuracy hostile to poetry which requires suggestion, vagueness, veiled mystery for its greatest effect. The Flower of Silence, for instance, would be a fitting title for a poem, but the poetic effect would be destroyed by the need for stating the genus and species of the orchid and analyzing its destruction of human tissue. Nature’s mysterious forces and elements in general and vaguely considered, veiled in mists of imagination and with a sense of vastness and beauty, are extremely poetic. But the notebook and laboratory methods of pure science are antagonistic to poetry, though they fit admirably into the requirements of fiction, whose purpose is to give an impression of actuality.

Another reason why these scientific themes do not pass over into poetry may be that scientific methods as we know them are new, and poetry clings to the old and established conventions and emotions. There is amazing human interest in these experiments, a veritable wealth of romance, with dramatic possibilities tragic and comic, yet they are more suited to prose fiction than to poetry. We have adapted our brain-cells to their concepts in prose, yet we have not thus molded our poetic ideas. It gives us a shock to have new concepts introduced into poetry. An instance of this clash of realism with sentiment is shown in a recent poem where the setting is a physics laboratory. Yet in a few more decades we may find the poets eagerly converting the raw materials of science into the essence of poetry itself, and by a mystic alchemy more wonderful than any yet known, transmuting intellectual problems of science into magic verse. Creation, by Alfred Noyes, is an impressive discussion of evolution as related to God.

Perhaps another reason why these themes have not been utilized in poetry is because they are too fantastic, too bizarre. They lack the proportion and sense of artistic harmony that poetry requires. Strangeness and wonder are true elements of poetry, and magic is an element of the greatest art, but in solution as it were, not in the form observed in science. The miracles of the laboratory are too abrupt, too inconceivable save by intellectual analysis, and present too great a strain upon the powers of the imagination. They are fantastic, while true poetry is concerned with the fancy. Magic and wonder in verse must come from concepts that steal upon the imagination and make appeal through the emotions. Thus some forms of supernaturalism are admirably adapted to the province of poetry, such as the presence of spirits, visitations of angels or demons, ancient witchcraft, and so forth. The elements that have universal appeal through the sense of the supernatural move us in poetry, but the isolated instances, the peculiar problems that occur in scientific research if transferred to poetry would leave us cold. Yet they may come to be used in the next vers libre.

Nor do these situations come over into the drama save in rare instances. Theodore Dreiser, in a recent volume, Plays of the Natural and the Supernatural, makes use of certain motifs that are striking and modern, as[209] where a physician goes on the operating-table, the dramatis personæ including Demyaphon (Nitrous Acid), and Alcepheron (a Power of Physics), as well as several Shadows, mysterious personages of vagueness. These Shadows here, as in The Blue Sphere, are not altogether clear as to motivation, yet they seem to stand for Fate interference in human destiny. In the latter play Fate is also represented by a Fast Mail which is one of the active characters, menacing and destroying a child.

One reason why these motifs of science are not used in drama to any extent is that they are impossible of representation on the stage. Even the wizardry of modern producers would be unable to show a Power of Physics, or Nitrous Acid, save as they might be embodied, as were the symbolic characters in Maeterlinck’s Blue Bird, which would mean that they would lose their effect. And what would a stage manager do with the rhythm of the universe, which enters into Dreiser’s play? Many sounds can be managed off stage, but hardly that, one fancies. These themes are not even found in closet drama, where many other elements of supernaturalism which would be difficult or impossible of presentation on the stage trail off. William Sharp’s Vistas, for instance, could not be shown on the stage, yet the little plays in that volume are of wonderful dramatic power. The drama can stand a good deal of supernaturalism of various kinds, from the visible ghosts and devils of the Elizabethans to the atmospheric supernaturalism of Maeterlinck, but it could scarcely support the presentations of chemicals and gases and supernatural botany and biology that fiction handles with ease. The miraculous machinery would balk at stage action. Fancy the Time Machine staged, for instance!

We notice in these scientific stories a widening of the sphere of supernatural fiction. It is extended to include more of the normal interests and activities of man than has formerly been the case. Here we notice a spirit similar to that of the leveling influence seen in the case of the ghosts, devils, witches, angels, and so forth, who have been made more human not only in appearance but in emotions and activities as well. Likewise these scientific elements have been elevated to the human. Supernatural as well as human attributes have been extended to material things, as animals are given supernormal powers in a sense different from and yet similar to those possessed by the enchanted animals in folk-lore. Science has its physical as well as psychic horrors which the scientific ghostly tales bring in.

Not only are animals gifted with supernatural powers but plants as well are humanized, diabolized. We have strange murderous trees, vampire orchids, flowers that slay men in secret ways with all the smiling loveliness of a treacherous woman. The dæmonics of modern botany form an interesting phase of ghostly fiction and give a new thrill to supernaturalism. Inanimate, concrete things are endowed with unearthly cunning and strength, as well as animals and plants. The new type of fiction gives to chemicals and gases a hellish intelligence, a diabolic force of minds. It creates machinery and gives it an excess of force, a supernatural, more than human cunning, sometimes helpful, sometimes dæmonic. Machines have been spiritualized and some engines are philanthropic while some are like damned souls.

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

CHAPTER VIII
Conclusion

In the previous chapters I have endeavored to show the continuance and persistence of the supernatural in English fiction, as well as in other forms of literature, and to give some idea of the variety of its manifestations. There has been no period in our history from Beowulf to the present when the ghostly was not found in our literature. Of course, there have been periods when the interest in it waned, yet it has never been wholly absent. There is at the present a definite revival of interest in the supernatural appearing in the drama, in poetry and in fiction, evident to anyone who has carefully studied the recent publications and magazines. Within the last few years, especially in the last two years, an astonishing amount of ghostly material has appeared. Some of these stories are of the hoax variety, others are suggestive, allegorical or symbolic, while others frankly accept the forces beyond man’s mortal life and human dominion. I hesitate to suggest a reason for this sudden rising tide of occultism at this particular time, but it seems clear to me that the war has had much to do with it. I have found a number of supernatural productions directly associated with the struggle. Among them might be mentioned Katherine Fullerton Gerould’s extraordinary, elusive story of horror[210]; The Second Coming, by Frederick Arnold Kummer and Henry P. Janes, where Christ walks the battlefields on Christmas Eve, pleading with the Kaiser to stop the slaughter of men, but in vain, and the carnage goes on till Easter, when the Christ stands beside the dying Emperor, with the roar of the rioting people heard in the streets outside, and softens his heart at last, so that he says, “Lord, I have sinned! Give my people peace!”; Kipling’s ghost-story,[211] with its specters of children slain by the Germans; The Gray Guest, showing Napoleon returning to lead the French forces to victory in a crisis; Jeanne, the Maid where the spirit of Joan of Arc descends upon a young French girl of to-day, enabling her to do wonderful things for her countrymen; War Letters from a Living Dead Man, a series of professed psychic communications from the other world, by Elsa Barker; Real Ghost Stories, a volume containing a number of stories by different writers, describing some of the phantoms seen by soldiers on the battlefield; and Arthur Machen’s The Bowmen, a collection of striking fictive instances of crowd-supernaturalism associated with the war. The last volume affords an interesting glimpse into the way in which legends are built up, for it is a contemporary legend in connection with the Angels at Mons. Carl Hauptmann has a striking play,[212] showing the use of war-supernaturalism in the drama. When the eyes of the world are turned toward the battlefields and death is an ever-present reality, it is natural that human thoughts occupy themselves with visions of a life after death. Kingdom Come, by Vida Sutton, shows the spirits of Russian peasants slain for refusing to fight, specters unaware that they are dead. Various martial heroes of the past are resurrected to give inspiration in battle in recent stories.

But whatever be the reason for this revival of the ghostly, the fact remains that this is distinctly the day for the phantom and his confrères. While romanticism is always with us, it appears in different manifestations. A few years ago the swashbuckling hero and his adventures seemed the most striking survival of the earlier days of romanticism, but now the weird and the ghostly have regained a popularity which they never surpassed even in the heyday of Gothic fiction. The slashing sword has been displaced by the psychographic pen. The crucial struggles now are occult, rather than adventurous, as before, and while realism in fiction is immensely popular—never more so than now—it is likely to have supernaturalism overlaid upon it, as in De Morgan’s work, to give a single example. Recent poetry manifests the same tendency, and likewise the drama, particularly the closet drama and the playlet. While literary history shows clearly the continuity of the supernatural, with certain rise and fall of interest in it at different periods, it is apparent that now there is a more general fondness for the form than at any other period in English literature. The supernatural is in solution and exists everywhere. Recent poetry shows a strong predilection for the uncanny, sometimes in the manner of the old ballads, while in other instances the ghostly is treated with a spirit of critical detachment as in Rupert Brooke’s sonnet,[213] or with skepticism as in his sardonic satire on faith.[214] In the recent volume of Brooke’s collected poems, there are about a dozen dealing with the supernatural. Maeterlinck expressed the feeling that a spiritual epoch is perhaps upon us, as Poe said that we are in the midst of great psychal powers. As Francis Thompson says in his Hound of Heaven, “Nature, poor step-dame, cannot slake our drought!” The interest in certain lines of thought which lead to the writing of supernatural fiction, as Spiritualism or folk-lore, or science or psychical research, may have the reflex action of arousing interest in the subjects themselves. But at all events, there is no lack of uncanny literature at present.

One feature of the modern supernatural literature as distinguished from that of other periods, is in the matter of length. Of course, the ballad and the folk-tale expressed the ghostly in brief form, but the epic held the stage longer, while in Elizabethan times the drama was the preferred form as in the eighteenth century the Gothic novel. During the nineteenth century, particularly the latter half, the preference was decidedly for the short story, while more recently the one-act play has come into vogue. But in the last few years the supernatural novel seems to be returning to favor, though without displacing the shorter forms. Brevity has much to commend it as a vehicle for the uncanny. The effect of the ghostly may be attained with much more unity in a short story or playlet than in a novel or long drama, for in the more lengthy form much outside matter is necessarily included. The whole plot could scarcely be made up of the unearthly, for that would mean a weakening of power through exaggeration, though this is sometimes found to be the case, as in several of Bram Stoker’s novels. Recently the number of novels dealing with supernatural themes has noticeably increased, which leads one to believe that the occult is transcending even the limitations of length and claiming all forms for its own. Now no literary type bars the supernatural, which appears in the novel as in the story, in the drama as in the playlet, and in narrative, dramatic, and lyric poetry. Even the epic of the more than mortal has not entirely vanished, as the work of Dr. William Cleaver Wilkinson attests, but popular taste does not really run to epics nowadays. The ghostly is more often seen in the shorter forms, where brevity gives a chance for compression and intensity of force difficult in longer vehicles. The rise of the one-act play in popular favor is significant in this connection. The short dramas of Synge, Yeats, Lady Gregory, William Sharpe, Gordon Bottomley, and Theodore Dreiser show the possibilities of the playlet for weird effect. Maeterlinck’s plays for marionettes are especially powerful, but the work of Lord Dunsany furnishes more peculiar ghostliness than that of any other present dramatist. His jade idols, for instance, that wake to terrible life and revenge themselves on presumptuous mortals, are a new touch in dramatics. Algernon Blackwood is doing more significant work in psychic fiction than anyone else, his prose showing poetic beauty as well as eerie power.

Another significant fact to be noted in connection with the later ghostly stories as compared with the Gothic is in the greater number and variety of materials employed. The early religious plays had introduced devils, angels, and divinity to a considerable extent, while the Elizabethan drama relied for its thrills chiefly on the witch and the revenge-ghost. The Gothic romance was strong for the ghost, with one or two Wandering Jews, occasional werewolves and lycanthropes, and sporadic satanity, but made no use of angels or of divinity. The modern fiction, however, gathers up all of these personages and puts them into service freely. In addition to these old themes brought up to date and varied astonishingly, the new fiction has adapted other types. The scientific supernaturalism is practically new—save for the Gothic employment of alchemy and astrology—and now all the discoveries and investigations of the laboratory are utilized and embued with supernaturalism. Diabolic botany, psychological chemistry, and supermortal biology appear in recent fiction. The countless arts and sciences, acoustics, optics, dietetics, and what-not are levied on for plots, while astronomy shows us wonders the astrologer never dreamed of. The stars knew their place and kept it in early romance, but they are given to strange aberration and unaccountable conduct in late narration.

The futuristic fiction gives us return trips into time to come, while we may be transported into the far past, as with Mark Twain’s Connecticut Yankee that visits King Arthur’s Court. The extent to which a homespun realist like Mark Twain uses the supernatural is significant. No province or small corner of science has failed to furnish material for the new ghostly fiction, and even the Fourth and Fifth Dimensions are brought in as plot complications. Microscopes are bewitched, mirrors are enchanted, and science reverses its own laws at will to suit the weird demands.

Another modern material is the mechanistic. This is the age of machinery, and even engines are run by ghost-power. Examples of the mechanical spook are legion. There is the haunted automobile in Harriet Prescott Spofford’s story, The Mad Lady, that reproduces through its speaking tube the long-dead voice, that runs away with its occupants, reliving previous tragic experiences. A phantom Ford is an idea combining romanticism with realism surely! In connection with this extraordinary car is a house that erects itself out of dreams and is substantial enough for living purposes. Other specimens are John Kendrick Bangs’s enchanted typewriter that clicks off psychograms in the dark, between midnight and three o’clock in the morning; Frank R. Stockton’s machine for negativing gravity; Poe’s balloon in which Hans Pfaal makes his magic trip to the moon; Wells’s new accelerator that condenses and intensifies vital energy, enabling a man to crowd the forces of a week into an hour of emergency, as likewise his time machine that permits the inventor to project himself into the future or the past at will, to spend a week-end in any era. The butterfly in Hawthorne’s story shows the spiritualization of machinery as the poor artist of the beautiful conceived it, the delicate toy imbibing a magnetism, a spiritual essence that gives it life and beauty and power of voluntary motion. This etherealized machinery is manifest in modern fiction as well as the diabolic constructions that wreck and ruin.

Inanimate objects have a strange power in later fiction as Poe’s ship that is said in certain seas to increase in size, as the trees told of by Algernon Blackwood that grow in the picture. There are various haunted portraits, as the picture of Dorian Gray that bears on its face the lines of sin the living face does not show, and whose hands are bloodstained when Dorian commits murder; and the painting told of in De Morgan’s A Likely Story, that overhears a quarrel between an artist and his wife, the woman wrongly suspecting her husband and leaving him. The picture relates the story to a man who has the painting photographed and a copy sent to the wife. There is the haunted tapestry[215] that is curiously related to the living and to the long dead.

Another aspect of the later as distinguished from the earlier occult literature is the attention paid to ghostly children. Youngsters are coming to the front of the stage everywhere nowadays, particularly in America, so it is but natural that they should demand to be heard as well as seen, in supernatural fiction. In the Gothic ghosts I found no individualized children, and children in groups only twice. In one of James Hogg’s short novels a vicious man is haunted on his death-bed by the specters of little ones dead because of him, but they are nameless and indistinguishable. In Maturin’s The Albigenses a relentless persecutor, while passing through a lonely forest, sees the phantoms of those he has done to death, little children and babes at the breast, as well as men and women. But here again they are not given separable character, but are merely group figures, hence do not count.

There is a ghost-child mentioned in Hawthorne’s Blithedale Romance, but it is not until more recent fiction that children’s ghosts enter personated and individualized. The exquisitely shy little ones in Kipling’s They are among the most wonderful of his child-creations, very human and lovable. In a war story,[216] he shows us the phantoms of several children whom the Germans have killed, natural youngsters with appealing childish attributes, especially the small boy with his pride in his first trousers. Arthur Machen[217] tells of a German soldier who has crucified a child against the church door and is driven to insanity by the baby spirit. Quiller-Couch[218] shows the specter of a little girl that returns at night to do housework for the living, visible only as two slender hands, who reminds us of the shepherd boy Richard Middleton tells of, who having died because of his drunken father’s neglect, comes back to help him tend the sheep. Algernon Blackwood relates the story of a little child who has been wont to pray for the unquiet ghost of Petavel, a wicked man who haunts his house. After the child is dead, the mother sees the little boy leading Petavel by the hand, and says, “He’s leading him into peace and safety. Perhaps that’s why God took him.”

Richard Middleton’s story of a little ghost-boy[219] is poignantly pathetic. The little chap comes back to play with his grieving sister, making his presence known by his gay feet dancing through the bracken, and his joyous imitations of an automobile’s chug-chug. Mary MacMillan speaks of the spirits of little children that are “out earlier at night than the older ghosts, you know, because they have to go to bed earlier, being so young.” Two very recent child ghosts are Wee Brown Elsbeth whom Frances Hodgson Burnett shows to us, the wraith of a little girl pitifully slain centuries ago by her father to save her from torture, who comes back to play with a living playmate; and the terrible revenge-ghost of the child slain by her stepfather, who comes back to cause his death, whom Ellen Glasgow describes.

The spirits of children that never were enter into the late stories, as in The Children, by Josephine Daskam Bacon, a story of confused paranoia and supernaturalism. A woman grieves over the children she never had till they assume personality and being for her. They become so real that they are finally seen by other children who wish to play with them. This reminds us of Thomas Bailey Aldrich’s imagined child, Miss Mehitabel’s son. Algernon Blackwood[220] shows us a multitude of baby spirits, with reaching arms, pattering steps, and lisping voices, spirits of the unborn that haunt childless women. The room which they enter seems sacred with the potentialities of motherhood, so that a man sleeping there sees his own dead mother return to him among the babes. These ghosts of little children that never were and never may be are like the spirits of the yet to be born children in Maeterlinck’s dream-drama,[221] where, in the Land of the Future, the child-souls wait for the angel to summon them to life. In these stories associating children with the ghostly there is always a tender pathos, a sad beauty that is appealing.

The spectral insect or animal is another innovation in recent fiction, though there have been occasional cases before, as Vergil’s Culex, the story of the ghost of a gnat killed thoughtlessly coming back to tell its murderer of its sufferings in the insect hades. Robert W. Chambers shows us several ghostly insects, a death’s head moth that is a presager of disaster, and a butterfly that brings a murderer to justice, while Frederick Swanson in a story[222] makes a spectral insect a minister of fate. The most curdling example, however, of the entomological supernaturalism, is Richard Marsh’s novel, The Beetle, a modernized version of the ancient superstitions of Egypt, whereby a priestess of Isis continues her mysterious, horrid life alternately as a human being and as a beetle. This lively scarab has mesmeric, magic power over mortals and by its sensational shape-shifting furnishes complicating terror to the plot.

The dog is frequently the subject of occult fiction, more so than any other animal, perhaps because the dog seems more nearly human than any save possibly the horse. Mrs. Elizabeth Stuart Phelps Ward shows us a dog very much at home in heaven, while she has a ghost-dog on earth coming back to march in a Decoration Day parade beside his master. Isabel Howe Fisk in a drama shows the Archangel Raphael accompanied by his dog, a cavortive canine, not apparently archangelic. Ambrose Bierce evokes one terrible revenge-ghost, a dog that kills the murderer of his master, while[223] Eden Phillpotts represents a pack of spectral dogs that pursue the Evil One over the earth till the Judgment Day, each being a lost soul. A young girl’s little unbaptized baby is thought to be one of the number. Conan Doyle’s Hound of the Baskervilles is a terrifying canine of legendary power. Kerfol by Edith Wharton shows the ghosts of five dogs, each carefully individualized,—a Chinese sleeve-dog, a rough brindled bulldog, a long-haired white mongrel, a large white pointer with one brown ear, and a small black grayhound. These specters of animals that have been killed by a jealous husband—he had the cheerful habit of strangling every pet his wife cared for and laying it without a word on her pillow—appear once a year on the anniversary of the day on which the wife in desperation slew him. They preserve a most undoglike silence and follow the beholder with strange gaze. Kipling’s dog Harvey is a supernatural beast, but what he represents I have never been able to determine. At the Gate is a recent story, showing a great concourse of dogs just outside the portals of heaven, unwilling to enter till their masters come to join them.

The diabolic horse in Poe’s Metzengerstein is a curious composite of metempsychosis, haunted inanimate object, and straight ghost, but at all events sufficiently terrifying to the victim it pursued. Algernon Blackwood in Wendigo has created a supernatural animal that flies through the air and carries men away to insanity and death. Henry Rideout shows the ghost of a white tiger, while there are assorted elephant spooks, and Miss Burns in her studies in Shropshire folk-tales relates stories of human beings whose ghosts appear as animals suited to the personality of the deceased, as bears, bulls, hogs, and so forth. That adds a new terror to death!

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Not only are new materials introduced in the later fiction of the uncanny but new types are stressed. In addition to the weird stories told with direct aim and art—ghosts for ghosts’ sake—there are tales where the supernatural element is of secondary importance, being used to teach some truth or ridicule some fallacy. The symbolistic, humorous, and satiric methods abound in modern occult fiction and when well done have a double effect, that of primary supernatural impressiveness, and, in addition, of the subtler purposes behind the stories. Moralized legends, spiritual allegories such as Hawthorne wrote with consummate art, have continued to the present and form a contrast to the crude machinery of Gothic horrors. The delicacy of suggestion, the power of hinted ghostliness, though manifest in Shakespeare, are really modern achievements, for no one save him attained to them in earlier art. Mystic poetic fiction, spiritual symbolism appears in much of the modern unearthly writing. In certain cases it is interesting to note the change of old mythological stories into moral allegory. The plays and the stories of Lord Dunsany are peculiarly symbolic and have the force of antique mythology made instant and real. Yet they have a distinctive touch all their own. For instance, the story of the king who goes over the world seeking his lost yesterday, his dear past, who is told by the weird keeper of the bygone years that he cannot have it back, no not one golden second, has a delicate pathos of poetry. When the mournful king has gone back to his palace, a hoar harper comes who plays for him, and lo! to the strings of the harp have clung the golden seconds of his happiest hours, so that he lives them over again while the music lasts. The Book of the Serpent tells symbolic stories that are poems in prose, fantastic fables. The Creator is making experiments with dust-heaps, while the Serpent, the Turtle, and the Grasshopper look on, ask questions, and offer comments. The Serpent trails all through the dust-heap meant as stuff for artists, and the Maker drops a tear in that whereof He means to make mothers. He experiments with monkeys trying to learn how best to make man, and after man is complete, He makes woman. The stories of Oscar Wilde have, some of them, a beauty like that of some antique illuminated missal, with its jeweled words, its mystic figures. Wilde’s ornate style, prose that trembles on the verge of poetry, full of passion and color and light, makes one think of his own words in The Nightingale and the Rose, where the poet’s song was “builded of music by moonlight and stained with his own heart’s blood.”

The delicate suggestion of the unearthly, the element of suspense that gives the sense of the supernatural to that which may be mortal, is seen in such stories as A Dream of Provence, by Frederick Wedmore. The ancient belief that the soul may return to the body within a few days after death forms the basis for this dream-poem in prose. It shows the soul on tiptoe for the Unseen, with a love transcending the barriers of the grave, revealing idyllic sorrow in a father’s love that denies death, and expresses the sense of expectancy in the hope of a miracle, with a beauty that is almost unbearable. Something of the same theme, of a father’s waiting by his daughter’s grave to hear the loved voice once more, is expressed in Andreyev’s story.[224] But here there is horror and remorse instead of holy love. When the father cries out, the silence that issues from the grave is more terrible than ghostly sounds would be, more dreadful in its supermortal suggestion.

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The purely humorous supernaturalism is essentially a new thing. The old religious dramas had used comic devils, and Peele’s Ghost of Jack is supposed to be humorous, but not at all in the modern sense. There was nothing in early drama or fiction like the rollicking fun of Richard Middleton’s Ghost Ship, or Frank R. Stockton’s spectral humorists. The work of John Kendrick Bangs illustrates the free and easy manner of the moderns toward ghosts, picturing them in unconventional situations and divesting them of all their ancient dignity. He shows us the wraith of the maiden who drowned herself in a fit of pique, for which she is punished by having to haunt the ancestral house as a shower-bath. His spectral cook of Bangletop is an original revenge-ghost, with a villainous inversion of h’s, who haunts an estate because a medieval baron discharged her without wages. His convivial spooks in their ghost club, his astrals who play pranks on mortals, and their confrères are examples of the modern flippancy toward supernaturals.

The satirical use of supernaturalism is also new. Late literature laughs at everything, with a daring familiarity undreamed of before, save in sporadic cases. The devil has been an ancient subject for laughter, but recent fiction ridicules him still more, so that we have scant respect for him, while the ghost, formerly a personage held in great respect, now comes in for his share of ragging. No being is too sacred to escape the light arrows of fun. Heaven is satirically exploited, and angels, saints, and even Deity have become subjects for jesting, conventionalized with the mother-in-law, the tenderfoot, the Irishman, and so forth. There is a considerable body of anecdotal literature of the supernatural, showing to what extent the levity of treatment has gone. Various aspects of mortal life are satirized, as in Inez Haynes Gilmore’s Angel Island, which is a campaign document for woman’s suffrage. Satiric supernaturalism is employed to drive home many truths, to puncture conceits of all kinds, and when well done is effective, for laughter is a clever weapon.

The advance of the later supernatural fiction over the earlier is nowhere seen more distinctly than in the increased effectiveness with which it manages the mechanics of emotion, its skill in selecting and elaborating the details by which terror and awe are produced. The present-day artist of the uncanny knows how to strike the varied tones of supernaturalism, the shrill notes of fear, the deep diapason of awe, the crashing chords of horror. The skillful writer chooses with utmost care the seemingly trivial details that go to make up the atmosphere of the unearthly. Shakespeare was a master of that, but none other of his time. The knocking at the gate in Macbeth, for instance, is a perfect example of the employment of a natural incident to produce an effect of the supernatural, as De Quincey has pointed out in his essay on the subject.

The Gothic novel relied largely for its impressiveness on emphasizing ghostly scenes by representing aspects of weather to harmonize with the emotions of the characters. This was overworked in terror fiction, and while it still possesses power it is a much less common method of technique than it used to be. Poe’s introductory paragraph in The Fall of the House of Usher is a notable example of skill in creating atmosphere of the supernatural by various details including phenomena of weather, and Hardy shows special power in harmonizing nature to the moods and purposes of his characters. Yet many a modern story produces a profound sense of awe, and purges the soul by means of terror with no reference at all to foreboding weather. However, the allusions now made are more skillful and show more selective power than of old.

Gothic fiction had much to say of melancholy birds that circled portentously over ancient castles filled with gloom and ghosts, but they were generic and not individual specimens. The fowl was always spoken of as “a bird of prey,” “a night bird,” “a bat,” “an owl,” or by some such vague term. Natural history has become more generally known since those times and writers of to-day introduce their ominous birds with more definiteness and appropriateness. The repulsive bat that clings to the window ledge in Bram Stoker’s novel is a vampire, a symbol of the whole horrible situation, as the kite that soars menacingly overhead in another of his novels is individualized and becomes a definite thing of terror. Poe’s raven is vastly more a bird of evil than any specimen in the Gothic aviary. Robert W. Chambers brings in a cormorant several times as a portent of ghostly disaster, particularly foreboding when it turns toward the land. “On the dark glistening cliffs, silhouetted against the glare of the sea, sat a cormorant, black, motionless, its horrible head raised toward heaven.” There is in recent fiction no bird more dreadful in import than the belled buzzard that Irvin Cobb makes the leading figure in his story by that name. This is an excellent example of the use of the natural to produce terror and awe, for the murderer sees in the bird a minister of fate, and the faint tinkle of its bell as it soars over the marsh where the body lies buried paralyzes him with horror. At last he can bear no more, and hearing it, as he thinks, close at hand, he shrieks out his confession,—only to find this time that it is not the belled buzzard at all that he hears, but only an old cowbell that a little negro child has picked up in the barnyard!

Robert W. Chambers in his early stories contrives to give varying supernatural effects by descriptions of shadows as symbolic of life and character. He speaks of shadows of spirits or of persons fated to disaster as white; again his supernatural shadows may be gray—gray is a favored shade for ghostly effect whether for witches or for phantoms—and sometimes they are perfectly black, to indicate differing conditions of destiny. Quiller-Couch has a strange little allegory, The Magic Shadow, and other writers have used similar methods to produce uncanny effects.

The Gothic romance made much use of portents of the supernatural, which later fiction does as well, but differently and with greater skill. The modern stories for the most part abandon the conventional portents, the dear old clock forever striking twelve or one—there was no Gothic castle so impoverished as to lack such ghostly horologue!—the abbey bell that tolls at touch of spirit hands or wizard winds, the statuesque nose-bleed, the fire that burns blue at approach of a specter, and so forth. The later story is more selective in its aids to ghostly effect, and adapts the means desired to each particular case, so that it hits the mark. For instance, the sardonic laughter that sounds as the burglars are cracking the gate of heaven to get in, and imagining what they will find, is prophetic of the emptiness, the nothingness, that meets their astounded gaze when they are within. Ambrose Bierce in some of his stories describes the repulsiveness of the fleshly corpse, reanimated by the spirit, perhaps not the spirit belonging to it, with a loathly effect more awful than any purely psychic phantom could produce, which reminds us somewhat of the corpse come to life in Thomas Lovell Beddoes’s Death’s Jest Book.

The horrors of invisibility in modern fiction avail to give a ghastly chill to the soul that visible apparitions rarely impart. Likewise the effect of mystery, of the incalculable element, in giving an impression of supernaturalism is a recognized method of technique in many stories, as the minister’s black veil in Hawthorne’s symbolic story. The unspeakable revolting suggestion in Edith Wharton’s The Eyes, where a man is haunted by two hideous eyes that “have the physical effect of a bad smell, whose look left a smear like a snail,” is built up with uncommon art. We do not realize how much is due to insanity and how much to the supernatural, when, after telling the story of his obsession, his fears that as a climax he will become like those Eyes, the man suddenly sees his reflection in the mirror and meets their dreadful gaze. “He and the image confronted each other with a glare of slowly gathering hate!” Mention might be made of an incident in a recently published literary drama, where a man seeks over the world for the unknown woman with whom he has fallen in love, and on his calling aloud in question as to who she is, “the grave, with nettle-bearded lips replied, ‘It is I, Death!’” These are only suggestions of numberless instances that might be given of a modern technique of supernaturalism that surpasses anything in Gothic fiction.

The effectiveness of modern ghostly stories is aided by the suggestiveness of the unearthly given by the use of “sensitives,” animals or persons that are peculiarly alert to the occult impressions. We see in many stories that children perceive the supernatural presences more quickly than adults, as in Mrs. Oliphant’s story of the ghost returning to right a wrong, trying strenuously to make herself known to the grown person and realized only by a little child. In Belasco’s play the little boy is the first and for a long time the only one to sense the return of Peter Grimm. In Maeterlinck’s The Blind, the baby in arms is aware of the unearthly presences better than the men and women. Sometimes the sensitive is a blind person, as the old grandfather in another of Maeterlinck’s short plays, who is conscious of the approaching Death before any of the others, or blind Anna in D’Annunzio’s drama, The Dead City.

Animals are quick to perceive supernatural manifestations. Cats in fiction are shown as being at ease in the presence of ghosts perhaps because of their uncanny alliance with witches, while dogs and horses go wild with fear. This is noticed in many stories, as in Bulwer-Lytton’s story of the haunted house where the dog dies of terror in the face of the ghostly phenomena. The Psychic Doctor told of in Blackwood’s uncanny stories, who goes to a house possessed by evil spirits, takes with him a cat and a dog which by their difference of action reveal to him the presence of the spirits long before they are visualized for him.

In general, there is more power of suggestion in the later ghostly stories than in the earlier. The art is more subtle, the technique more skillfully studied, more artfully accidental.

There is in modern fiction, notably the work of Poe, and that of many recent writers, Russian, French, and German as well as English, a type of supernaturalism that is closely associated with insanity. One may not tell just where the line is drawn, just how much of the element of the uncanny is the result of the broodings of an unbalanced brain, and how much is real ghostliness. Poe’s studies of madness verge on the unearthly, as do Maupassant’s, Hoffmann’s, and others. Josephine Daskam Bacon illustrates this genre in a recent volume of stories, The Strange Cases of Dr. Stanchion, the plots centering round instances of paranoia occurring in the practice of a famous alienist,—yet they are not paranoia alone! One instance is of a young girl who is haunted by the ghost of a nurse who has died because given the wrong medicine by mistake. She is on the border-line of insanity when her lover cries aloud that he would take the curse on himself for her if he could, which, by some unknown psychic law, does effect a transference which frees her and obsesses him. Another is that of a man in the insane asylum, who recognizes in a mysterious housekeeper the spirit of his wife, who comes from the grave to keep him company and vanishes on the day of his death. These are curious analyses of the idée fixe in its effect on the human mind, of insanity as a cause or effect of the supernatural. Barry Pain’s Celestial Grocery is a recent example, a story of a man whose madness carries him to another planet, showing him inverted aspects of life, where emotions are the only real things, all else but shadows. Du Maurier’s pathetic novel portraying the passion and anguish and joy of Peter Ibbetson that touches the thin line between sanity and madness, showing in his dream-metempsychosis a power to relive the past and even to live someone else’s life, is a striking example. One interesting aspect of that story is the point where the spirit of Mary changes from the dream-lover of twenty-eight to the ghost of the woman of fifty-two, since she has died and can no more come to her lover as she once did, but must come as her own phantom. There are extraordinary effects of insanity associated with the supernatural in the work of Ambrose Bierce, of Arthur Machen and others of the modern school. Italian literature shows some significant instances in Fogazzaro’s The Woman and D’Annunzio’s Sogno d’un Mattino di Primavera. As Lord Dunsany says of it, “Who can say of insanity,—whether it be divine or of the Pit?”

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We have noticed in preceding chapters two aspects of modern supernaturalism as distinguished from the Gothic,—the giving of cumulative and more terrible power to ghostly beings, and on the other hand the leveling influence that makes them more human. The access of horror and unearthly force as shown in the characters described by certain writers is significant. In the work of Bierce, Machen, Blackwood, Stoker, and others supernaturalism is raised to the nth power and every possible thrill is employed. The carrion ghosts of Bierce, animated by malignant foreign spirits, surpass the charnel shudders produced by the Gothic. Algernon Blackwood’s Psychic Invasions, where localities rather than mere apartments or houses alone are haunted, diabolized by undying evil influences with compound power, his Elementals that control the forces of wind and wave and fire to work their demon will, are unlike anything that the early terror novel conceived of. Horace Walpole and Mrs. Radcliffe knew no thrills like those of Bram Stoker’s Count Dracula who is an immemorial evil, a vampire and werewolf as well as man, with power to change himself into a vampire bat or animal of prey at will. The Unburied, by Josephine Daskam Bacon, is more horrific than any mere revenge ghost, however much it shrieked “Vindicta!” The diabolism in Arthur Machen’s work reeks obscurely of a Pit more horrible than epic or drama has portrayed. In general, many of the later ghostly characters are more complex, more intense in evil than the Gothic.

While it is true that certain writers show a tendency to create supernatural characters having an excess of evil power beyond the previous uncanny beings, on the other hand there is an equally strong and significant tendency to reduce the ghostly beings nearer to the human. Fiction here, as frequently, seems ahead of general belief, and refuses to believe in the altogether evil. Ghosts, angels, witches, devils, werewolves, and so forth are now made more human, more like to man, yet without losing any of their ancient power to thrill. Ghosts in late literature have more of the mortal characteristics than ever before, as has been pointed out in a previous chapter. They look more human, more normal, they are clad in everyday garments of varied colors, from red shirts and khaki riding-habits to ball-gowns,—though gray seems the favored shade for shades as well as witches,—and they have lost that look of pallor that distinguished early phantoms. Now they are more than merely vaporous projections as they used to be, more than merely phantasmogenetic apparitions,—but are healthy, red-blooded spooks. They are not tongue-tied as their ancestors were, but are very chatty, giving forth views on everything they are interested in, from socialism to the present war. And their range of interests has widened immeasurably. It would seem that the literacy test has been applied to ghosts in recent fiction. Modern specters are so normal in appearance that often no one recognizes them as ghosts,—as in Edith Wharton’s story Afterwards, where the peculiar thing about the apparition haunting a certain house is that it is not till long afterwards that one knows it was a ghost. The man in the gray suit whom the wife thinks a chance caller is the spirit of a man not yet dead, a terrible living revenge-ghost, who finally takes his victim mysteriously away with him. Modern ghosts have both motions and emotions like men, hence mortals are coming to regard them more sympathetically, to have more of a fellow-feeling for them.

Likewise the angels are now only a very little higher if any than men. Seraphs are democratic, and angels have developed a sense of humor that renders them more interesting than they used to be. The winged being that H. G. Wells’s vicar goes gunning for is a charming youth with a naïve satire, as the angels in Mark Twain’s story of heaven are realistically mortal and masculine in tastes. They care little for harps and crowns, grow fidgety under excess of rest, and engage in all sorts of activities, retaining their individual tastes. James Stephens’s archangel, seraph, and cherub are chatty, cordial souls with an avidity for cold potatoes and Irish companionship.

The demons as well have felt the same leveling influence experienced by the ghosts and the angels. Only, in their case, the thing is reversed, and they are raised to the grade of humanity. We are coming to see, in modern fiction, at least, that the devil is not really black, only a pleasant mottled gray like ourselves. Satan, in Mark Twain’s posthumous novel,[225] is an affable young fellow, claiming to be the nephew and namesake of the personage best known by that name. Bernard Shaw’s devil is of a Chesterfieldian courtesy, willing to speed the parting as to welcome the coming guest. I have found no comic use of the werewolf or of the vampire, though there are several comic witch stories, yet all these personages are humanized in modern fiction. We feel in some recent supernatural stories a sense of a continuing current of life. These ghosts, devils, witches, angels, and so forth are too real to be cut short by an author’s Finis.

Another aspect of the leveling influence is seen in the more than natural power of motion, feeling, and intelligence given to inanimate objects, machinery, plants, and animals, in late literature. The idea of endowing inanimate figures with life and personality is seen several times in Hawthorne’s stories, as his snow image, Drowne’s wooden image, the vivified scarecrow, Feathertop, that the witch makes. The clay figures that Satan in Mark Twain’s novel models, endues with life, then destroys with the fine, casual carelessness of a god, remind one of an incident from mythology. The statue in Edith Wharton’s The Duchess at Prayer that changes its expression, showing on its marble face through a century the loathing and horror that the living countenance wore, or Lord Dunsany’s jade idol[226] that comes with stony steps across the desolate moor to exact vengeance on four men helpless in its presence, has a more intense thrill than Otranto’s peripatetic statue. Lord Dunsany’s The Gods of the Mountains, of which Frank Harris says, “It is the only play which has meant anything to me in twenty years,” shows an inexorable fatality as in the Greek drama.

Science is revealing wonderful facts and fiction is quick to realize the possibilities for startling situations in every field. So diabolic botanical specimens, animals endowed with human or more than human craft—sometimes gifted with immortality as well—add a new interest to uncanny fiction. And the new machines that make all impossibilities come to pass inspire a significant class of supernatural stories. In general, a new force is given to all things, to raise them to the level of the human.

In the same way nature is given a new power and becomes man’s equal,—sometimes far his superior—in thought and action. The maelstrom in Poe’s story is more than merely a part of the setting,—it is a terrible force in action. Algernon Blackwood stresses this variously in his stories, as where Egypt is shown as a vital presence and power, or where the “goblin trees” are as awful as any of the other characters of evil, or in the wind and flame on the mountain that are elements of supernatural power, with a resistless lure for mortals, or in the vampire soil that steals a man’s strength. This may be illustrated as well from the drama, as in Maeterlinck’s where Death is the silent, invisible, yet dominant force, or in Synge’s where the sea is a terrible foe, lying in wait for man, or in August Stramm’s The Daughter of the Moor, where the moor is a compelling character of evil. Gothic fiction did associate the phenomena of nature with the moods of the action, yet in a less effective way. The aspects of nature in recent literature have been raised to the level of humanity, becoming mortal or else diabolic or divine.

In general, in modern fiction, man now makes his supernatural characters in his own image. Ghosts, angels, devils, witches, werewolves, are humanized, made like to man in appearance, passions, and powers. On the other hand, plants, inanimate objects, and animals, as well as the phenomena of nature, are raised to the human plane and given access of power. This leveling process democratizes the supernatural elements and tends to make them almost equal.

---

The present revival of interest in the supernatural and its appearance in literature are as marked in the drama as in fiction or poetry. Mr. E. C. Whitmore, in a recently published volume on The Supernatural in Tragedy, has ably treated the subject, especially in the Greek classic period and the Elizabethan age in England. His thesis is that the supernatural is most frequently associated with tragedy, and is found where tragedy is at its best. This may be true of earlier periods of the tragic drama, yet it would be going too far to make the assertion of the drama of the present time. The occult makes its appearance to a considerable extent now in melodrama and even in comedy, though with no decrease in the frequency and effectiveness of its use in tragedy. This only illustrates the widening of its sphere and its adaptability to varying forms of art.

A brief survey of some of the plays produced in the last few years, most of them being seen in New York, will illustrate the extent to which the ghostly motifs are used on the stage of to-day. Double personality is represented[227] by Edward Locke, in a play which is said by critics to be virtually a dramatization of Dr. Morton Prince’s study,[228] where psychological apparatus used in laboratory experiments to expel the evil intruder from the girl, a chronoscope, a dynograph, revolving mirrors, make the setting seem truly psychical. But the most dramatic instance of the kind, of course, is the dramatization of Dr. Jekyll’s alter ego.

The plays of Charles Rann Kennedy[229] and Jerome K. Jerome[230] are akin to the old mystery plays in that they personate divinity and show the miracle of Christly influence on sinful hearts. Augustus Thomas[231] and Edward Milton Royle[232] introduce hypnotism as the basis of complication and denouement. Supernatural healing, miraculous intervention of divine power, occur in plays by William Vaughan Moody,[233] Björnson,[234] and George M. Cohan.[235] Another[236] turns on converse with spirits, as does Belasco’s Return of Peter Grimm, while a war play by Vida Sutton[237] shows four ghosts on the stage at once, astonishing phantoms who do not realize that they are dead. Others[238] have for their themes miracles of faith and rescue from danger, though the first-named play satirizes such belief and the latter is a piece of Catholic propaganda.

Magic, by G. K. Chesterton, introduces supernatural forces whereby strange things are made to happen, such as the changing of the electric light from green to blue. Peter Ibbetson, the dramatization of Du Maurier’s novel, shows dream-supernaturalism, and various other psychic effects in a delicate and distinctive manner. And The Willow Tree, by Benrimo and Harrison Rhodes, is built upon an ancient Japanese legend, relating a hamadryad myth with other supermortal phantasies, such as representing a woman’s soul as contained in a mirror.

We have fairy plays by J. M. Barrie,[239] W. B. Yeats,[240] and Maeterlinck,[241] and the mermaid has even been staged,[242] Bernard Shaw shows us the devil in his own home town, while Hauptmann gives us Hannele’s visions of heaven. The Frankenstein theme is used to provoke laughter mixed with thrills.[243] Owen and Robert Davis[244] symbolize man’s better angel, while The Eternal Magdalene, a dream-drama, shows another piece of symbolic supernaturalism. Lord Dunsany’s plays have already been mentioned.

Yet the drama, though showing a definite revival of the supernatural, and illustrating various forms of it, is more restricted than fiction. Many aspects of the occult appear and the psychic drama is popular, but the necessities of presentation on the stage inevitably bar many forms of the ghostly art that take their place naturally in fiction. The closet drama does not come under this limitation, for in effect it is almost as free as fiction to introduce mystical, symbolic, and invisible presences. The closet drama is usually in poetic form and poetry is closer akin to certain forms of the supernatural than is prose, which makes their use more natural.

The literary playlet, so popular just now, uses the ghostly in many ways. One shows the Archangel Raphael with his dog, working miracles, while another includes in its dramatis personæ a faun and a moon goddess who insists on giving the faun a soul, at which he wildly protests. As through suffering and human pain he accepts the gift, a symbolic white butterfly poises itself on his uplifted hand, then flits toward Heaven. In another, Padraic yields himself to the fairies’ power as the price of bread for the girl he loves. Theodore Dreiser’s short plays bring in creatures impossible of representation on the stage, “persistences” of fish, animals, and birds, symbolic Shadows, a Blue Sphere, a Power of Physics, Nitrous Acid, a Fast Mail (though trains have been used on the stage), and so forth.

Instances from recent German drama might be given, as the work of August Stramm, who like Rupert Brooke and the ill-starred poets of the Irish revolution has fallen as a sacrifice to the war. An article in the Literary Digest says of Stramm that “he felt behind all the beauty of the world its elemental passions and believed these to be the projections of human passions in the waves of wind and light and water, in flames of earth.” He includes among his characters[245] a Spider, Nightingales, Moonlight, Wind, and Blossoms. Carl Hauptmann[246] likewise shows the elemental forces of nature and of super-nature. On the battlefield of death the dead arise to join in one dreadful chant of hate against their enemies.

Leonid Andreyev’s striking play[247] might be mentioned as an example from the Russian. King-Hunger, Death, and Old time Bell-Ringer, are the principal actors, while the human beings are all deformed and distorted, “one continuous malicious monstrosity bearing only a remote likeness to man.” The starving men are slain, but over the field of the dead the motionless figure of Death is seen silhouetted. But the dead arise, and a dull, distant, manifold murmur, as if underground, is heard, “We come! Woe unto the victorious!”

But as I have said, these are literary dramas, impossible of presentation on the stage, so that they are judged by literary rather than dramatic standards. For the most part fiction is infinitely freer in its range and choice of subjects from the supernatural than is the drama. The suggestive, symbolic, mystic effects which could not in any way be presented on the stage, but which are more truly of the province of poetry, are used in prose that has a jeweled beauty and a melody as of poetry. Elements such as invisibility, for instance, and various occult agencies may be stressed and analyzed in fiction as would be impossible on the stage. The close relation between insanity and the weird can be much more effectively shown in the novel or short story than in the drama, as the forces of mystery, the incalculable agencies can be thus better emphasized. Ghosts need to be seen on the stage to have the best effect, even if they are meant as “selective apparitions” like Banquo, and if thus seen they are too corporeal for the most impressive influence, while in fiction they can be suggested with delicate reserve. Supernatural presences that could not be imaged on the boards may be represented in the novel or story, as Blackwood’s Elementals or Psychic Invasions. How could one stage such action, for instance, as his citizens turning into witch-cats or his Giant Devil looming mightily in the heavens? Likewise in fiction the full presentation of scientific supernaturalism can be achieved, which would be impossible on the stage.

In conclusion, it might be said that fiction offers the most popular present vehicle for expression of the undoubtedly reviving supernaturalism in English literature. And fiction is likewise the best form, that which affords the more varied chances for effectiveness. The rising tide of the unearthly in art shows itself in all literary forms, as dramatic, narrative, and lyric poetry, with a few epics—in the playlet as in the standard drama, in the short story as in the novel. It manifests itself in countless ways in current literature and inviting lines of investigation suggest themselves with reference to various aspects of its study. The supernatural as especially related to religion offers an interesting field for research. The miracles from the Bible are often used, as in Lew Wallace’s Ben Hur, and Christ is introduced in other times and places, as the war novel,[248] or in Marie Corelli’s satire on Episcopacy,[249] where the cardinal finds the Christ child outside the cathedral. The more than mortal elements, as answers to prayer, the experience of conversion, spiritual miracles, and so forth, are present to a considerable extent in modern fiction. Two very recent novels of importance base their plots on the miraculous in religion, The Brook Kerith, by George Moore, and The Leather-wood God, by William Dean Howells. I have touched on this aspect of the subject in a previous article.[250]

One might profitably trace out the appearances of the ghostly in modern poetry, or one might study its manifestations in the late drama, including melodrama and comedy as well as tragedy. This present treatment of the supernatural in modern English fiction makes no pretensions to being complete. It is meant to be suggestive rather than exhaustive, and I shall be gratified if it may help to arouse further interest in a significant and vital phase of our literature and lead others to pursue the investigations.

INDEX

[A]	[B]	[C]	[D]	[E]
[F]	[G]	[H]	[I]	[J]
[K]	[L]	[M]	[N]	[O]
[P]	[Q]	[R]	[S]	[T]
[U]	[V]	[W]	[Y]	[Z]

• A
• Accusing Spirit, The, [21]
• Address to the De’il, An, [131]
• Æsop, Fables, [231]
• Affair of Dishonor, An, [91]
• Afterwards, [102], [202]
• Afterwards, [302]
• Ahasuerus, [176]
• Ahrinziman, [88], [183], [213]
• Aids to Gothic Effect, [36] et seq.
• Ainsworth, W. H., [181]
• Albigenses, The, [9], [11], [94], [168], [288]
• Aldrich, Thomas Bailey, [63]
• —— Miss Mehitabel’s Son, [68], [85], [287]
• —— Père Antoine’s Date Palm, [63]
• —— Queen of Sheba, The, [122]
• Amazonian Tortoise Myths, [232]
• Amboyna, [41]
• Amiel, Friedrich, [144]
• Among the Immortals, [217]
• Amos Judd, [40], [257]
• Amphitryon, [122]
• Amycus and Celestine, [63]
• Anansi Stories, [232]
• Ancient Legends and Superstitions of Ireland, [229]
• Ancient Records of the Abbey of St. Oswyth, [9], [21]
• Ancient Sorceries, [65], [105], [124], [153], [194]
• Andersen, Hans Christian, [155], [176], [233]
• —— The Little Mermaid, [155], [176], [233]
• Andreyev, Leonidas, [69]
• —— King-Hunger,308
• —— Red Laugh, The, [69]
• —— Silence, [293]
• Angel Island, [294]
• Angel Message, An, [207]
• Ankerwich Castle, [34]
• Another Little Heath Hound, [290]
• Anti-Jacobin, The, [51]
• Any House, [307]
• Apuleius, Lucius, Metamorphoses, [145]
• Applier, Arthur, Vendetta of the Jungles, A, [168]
• Arabian Nights’ Tales, [252]
• Architecture, Gothic, [8] et seq.
• Ariel, or the Invisible Monitor, [24]
• Arnim, Achim von, Die Beiden Waldemar, [122]
• Arnold, Edwin Lester, Strange Adventures of Phra, the Phœnician, The, [188]
• Arnold, Matthew:
• —— Forsaken Merman, The, [155],233
• —— Neckan, The, [155]
• Arrest, An, [85]
• Arthur and Gorlogon, [30]
• Arthur Mervyn, [35]
• Artist of the Beautiful, The, [287]
• Astral Bridegroom, An, [207]
• At the End of the Passage, [120]
• At the Gate, [201], [291]
• Auerbach, Berthold, [176]
• Austen, Jane, [47], [49]
• —— Northanger Abbey, [47], [51]
• Austin, Alfred, Peter Rugg, the Missing Man, [189]
• Austin, M. H., Readjustment, [107]
• Avengers, The, [56]
• Ayesha, [183], [193]

• B
• Bacon, Josephine Daskam, [94]
• —— Children, The, [289]
• —— Heritage, The, [94]
• —— Miracle, The, [254]
• —— Strange Cases of Dr. Stanchion, The, [254], [299]
• —— Unburied, The, [66], [301]
• —— Warning, The, [276]
• Bahr-geist, The, [115], [225]
• Balzac, Honoré de, [182]
• —— Elixir of Life, The, [60]
• —— Magic Skin, The, [60]
• —— Melmoth Réconcilié, [59]
• —— Unknown Masterpiece, The, [60]
• Bangs, John Kendrick, [112], [293]
• —— Enchanted Typewriter, The, [207], [286]
• —— House-boat on the Styx, The, [112], [216]
• —— Pursuit of the House-boat, The, [112], [187], [216]
• —— Rebellious Heroine, The, [197]
• —— Speck on the Lens, The, [255]
• —— Thurlow’s Christmas Story, [121]
• —— Water-Ghost and Others, The, [112]
• Banshee, The, [99]
• Bardic Stories of Ireland, [243]
• Baring-Gould, S., [181]
• —— Eve, [246]
• Barker, Elsa, [206], [207]
• —— Letters from a Living Dead Man, [207]
• —— War Letters from a Living Dead Man, [206], [292]
• Barker, Granville, [123], [198]
• —— Souls on Fifth, [123], [198], [215]
• Barrett, Eaton Stannard, [8], [49]
• —— Heroine, The, [49], [50]
• Barrie, J. M., [240]
• —— Little White Bird, The, [240]
• —— Peter Pan, [240], [306]
• Baynim, John, [246]
• Baynim, Michael, [246]
• Beckford, William, [17]
• —— Vathek, [8], [17], [22], [25], [29], [33], [37], [70]
• Beddoes, Thomas Lovell, [53], [297]
• —— Death’s Jest Book, [53], [115], [297]
• Beetle, The, [290]
• Belasco, David, Return of Peter Grimm, The, [201], [298]
• Beleaguered City, The, [211]
• Bellamy, Edward, [189]
• —— Looking Backward, [189], [262]
• Belled Buzzard, The, [296]
• Benet, William Rose, Man with the Pigeons, The, [218]
• Ben Hur, [309]
• Bennett, Arnold, Ghost, The, [117]
• Beowulf, [281]
• Berenice, [62]
• Besant, Walter, Ivory Gate, The, [122]
• Betrothed, The, [225]
• Beyond Their Strength, [306]
• Bierce, Ambrose, [53], [61], [109], [116], [290], [300]
• —— Arrest, An, [85]
• —— Damned Thing, The, [61], [92]
• —— Death of Halpin Frazer, The, [110], [192]
• —— Eyes of the Panther, The, [170], [271]
• —— Middle Toe of the Right Foot, The, [61], [92]
• —— Mysterious Disappearances, [259]
• —— Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge, The, [275]
• —— Two Military Executions, [116]
• —— Vine on the House, A, [90]
• Biology, Supernatural, [270]
• Biology, Supernatural in Gothicism, [34]
• Birthmark, The, [185], [270]
• Bisclavret, [30], [168]
• Bisland, Elizabeth, The Case of John Smith, [215]
• Björnson, Björnstjerne, [306]
• —— Beyond Their Strength, [306]
• Black Magic, [146]
• Black Monk, The, [69]
• Black Patch, The, [255]
• Blackmore, R. D., Lorna Doone, [226]
• Blackwood, Algernon, [68], [76], [79], [85], [96], [105], [166], [171], [235], [273], [285], [287], [300], [304], [309]
• —— Ancient Sorceries, [65], [124], [153], [194]
• —— Camp of the Dog, The, [170]
• —— Clairvoyance, [289]
• —— Empty House, The, [98], [117]
• —— Glamour of the Snow, The, [231]
• —— Haunted Island, A, [114]
• —— Heath Fire, The, [231]
• —— Human Chord, The, [275]
• —— Jules Le Vallon, [194]
• —— Keeping His Promise, [98]
• —— Man from the Gods, The, [121]
• —— Man Whom the Trees Loved, The, [230], [272]
• —— Nemesis of the Fire, A, [98]
• —— Old Clothes, [124], [194]
• —— Psychic Invasion, A, [106]
• —— Regeneration of Lord Ernie, The, [230]
• —— Return, The, [123], [198]
• —— Sand, [230]
• —— Sea Fit, The, [230]
• —— Secret Worship, [105], [117], [137]
• —— Temptation of the Clay, The, [231]
• —— Terror of the Twins, The, [122], [192]
• —— Transfer, The, [164]
• —— Wave, The, [194]
• —— With Intent to Steal, [62], [117]
• Bleek, W. H. I., Reynard, the Fox, in South Africa, [232]
• Blind, The, [64], [298]
• Blithedale Romance, The, [188], [199]
• Blue-Bird, The, [64], [278], [280], [306]
• Blue Roses, [268]
• Blue Sphere, The, [208], [278]
• Blythe, James, Mine Host and the Witch, [148]
• Bon Bon, [95], [141]
• Bones, Sanders, and Another, [156]
• Bonhote, Mrs., [20]
• —— Bungay Castle, [20], [45]
• Book of the Serpent, [292]
• Book of Wonder, The, [245]
• Borderland, The, [124]
• Botany, Supernatural, [272] et seq.
• Bottle Imp, The, [70]
• Bottomley, Gordon, [65], [153], [285]
• —— Crier by Night, The, [65], [238]
• —— Riding to Lithend, [152]
• Bowmen and Others, The, [204], [258], [282]
• Brand, [65]
• Brandes, Georg, [122]
• —— Romantic Reduplication and Personality, [122]
• Brentano, Die Mehreren Wehmüller, [122]
• Bride of Lammermoor, The, [38]
• Brieux, Eugene, [252]
• Brissot’s Ghost, [89]
• Brontë, Emily, [86]
• —— Wuthering Heights, [86], [226]
• Brook Kerith, The, [310]
• Brooke, Rupert, [308]
• —— Failure, [222]
• —— Heaven, [221], [283]
• —— On Certain Proceedings of the Psychical Research Society, [281], [283]
• Brown, Alice, [101], [211]
• —— Here and There, [101], [107]
• —— Tryst, The, [126], [211]
• Brown, Charles Brockden, [35]
• —— Arthur Mervyn, [35]
• —— Edgar Huntley, [39]
• —— Wieland, [35], [39]
• Brownie of Bodbeck, The, [26], [38]
• Browning, Elizabeth Barrett, [148]
• —— Drama of Exile, A, [133]
• —— Lay of the Brown Rosary, The, [148]
• Browning, Robert, [69]
• —— Sludge, the Medium, [69]
• Brushwood Boy, The, [195]
• Bubble Well Road, [138]
• Buchanan, Robert, [177]
• —— Wandering Jew, a Christmas Carol, The, [177], [180]
• —— Haunters and the Haunted, The, [60], [78], [188], [299]
• —— Strange Story, A, [90], [182]
• Bungay Castle, [20], [45]
• Bunyan, John, [213]
• Burger, [56]
• —— Lenore, [56]
• Burnett, Frances Hodgson, White People, The, [203], [298]
• Burns, Robert, [232]
• —— Address to the De’il, An, [131]
• —— Tam O’Shanter, [156]
• Burns, Miss, Shropshire Folk-tales, [291]
• Butler, Ellis Parker, Dey Ain’t No Ghosts, [128]
• Butler, Katherine,
• —— In No Strange Land, [96], [212]
• Butler, Samuel, [262]
• —— Erewhon, [262]
• By the Waters of Paradise, [83]
• Byron, Lord:
• —— Cain, [136]
• —— Giaour, The, [160]
• —— Heaven and Earth, [221]
• —— Vision of Judgment, A, [134]

• C
• Cable, George W., [226]
• Calderon, [27], [133]
• —— El Embozado, [119]
• —— El Magico Prodigioso, [100], [143]
• Camp of the Dog, The, [170]
• Campbell-Praed, Mrs., [207]
• —— Nyria, [207]
• Captain Stormfield’s Visit to Heaven, Extracts from, [201], [217]
• Car of Phœbus, The, [207]
• Carmen Sylva, [176], [233]
• Case of Becky, The, [305]
• Case of John Smith, The, [215]
• Castle of Caithness, The, [20]
• Castle of Otranto, The, [4], [8], [16], [25], [31], [36], [40], [52], [101]
• Castle of Wolfenbach, The, [48]
• Castle Specter, The, [53]
• Celestial Grocery, The, [265], [300]
• Celestial Railroad, The, [213], [265], [300]
• Celtic Revival, The, [227]
• Celtic Twilight, The, [239]
• Chambers, Robert W., [87], [290], [296]
• —— The Messenger, [88]
• Chamisso, [59], [176]
• —— Erscheinung, [122]
• Chansons de Gestes, [7]
• Chaucer, Geoffrey, [87], [140], [217]
• —— Friar’s Tale, The, [140]
• Chemistry, Supernatural, [267]
• Cher, Marie, [197]
• —— Immortal Gymnasts, The, [197]
• Chesterton, G. K., [306]
• —— Magic, [306]
• Children, The, [289]
• Children of the Mist, The, [226]
• Christabel, [148], [238]
• Clairvoyance, [289]
• Clara Militch, [68], [162]
• Clark, Rev. T., Wandering Jew, or the Travels of Bareach, the Prolonged, The, [178]
• Clarke, Laurence, [94]
• —— Grey Guest, The, [94], [282]
• Clermont, [48]
• Cloak, The, [68]
• Closed Cabinet, The, [107]
• Cobb, Irvin, Belled Buzzard, The, [296]
• Cobb, Palmer, Influence of E.T.A. Hoffmann on Edgar Allan Poe, The, [58]
• Cocotte, [61]
• Coffin Merchant, The, [254]
• Cohan, George M., [306]
• —— Miracle Man, The, [306]
• Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, [65], [118]
• —— Christabel, [148], [238]
• —— Wanderings of Cain, The, [118]
• Collins, Wilkie, [78]
• —— Dream Woman, The, [78]
• —— Ghost Touch, The, [103]
• —— Haunted Hotel, The, [89], [100]
• —— Queen of Hearts, The, [107], [113]
• Collins, William, Ode on the Popular Superstitions of the Highlands, [74]
• Collison-Morley, Lacy, [202]
• —— Greek and Roman Ghost Stories, [202]
• Comer, Cornelia A. P., Little Grey Ghost, The, [118]
• Comus, [7], [148]
• Confessions of a Justified Sinner, [29]
• Confessions of an English Opium-Eater, [268]
• Connecticut Yankee at King Arthur’s Court, A, [189], [262], [286]
• Converse, F., [93]
• —— Co-operative Ghosts, [93], [98]
• Conway, Hugh, [103]
• —— Our Last Walk, [103]
• Conway, M. D., [180]
• Cooper, J. Fenimore, [226]
• Co-operative Ghosts, [93], [98]
• Corbin, John, [76]
• Corelli, Marie:
• —— Master Christian, The, [309]
• —— Romance of Two Worlds, A, [213]
• —— Sorrows of Satan, The, [136], [144]
• Count Roderick’s Castle, or Gothic Times, [20]
• Countess Cathleen, [65], [143]
• Courting of Dinah Shadd, The, [152]
• Coward, The, [61]
• Craddock, Charles Egbert, [83], [104], [226]
• —— His Unquiet Ghost, [83]
• Crawford, F. Marion, [37], [68], [94], [109], [116], [117]
• —— Among the Immortals, [217]
• —— By the Waters of Paradise, [83]
• —— Dead Smile, The, [70], [109]
• —— Doll’s Ghost, A, [98]
• —— For the Blood Is the Life, [62], [78], [162]
• —— Khaled, [62], [70], [147]
• —— Man Overboard, [97]
• —— Mr. Isaacs, [37], [71]
• —— Screaming Skull, The, [60], [89], [92]
• —— Upper Berth, The, [100]
• —— Witch of Prague, The, [149], [195], [266]
• Crawford, Hope, Ida Lomond and Her Hour of Vision, [207]
• Creation, [277]
• Crier by Night, The, [65], [238]
• Crock of Gold, The, [241], [246]
• Croly, George, [179]
• —— Salathiel, or Tarry Thou Till I Come, [179]
• Crystal Egg, The, [263]
• Cuchulain of Muirthemne, [243]
• Culex, [290]
• Curran, Mrs. John H., Patience Worth, [197], [207]
• Curse of the Cashmere Shawl, The, [153]
• Curse of the Fires and the Shadows, The, [154]
• Curse of the Wandering Jew, The, [177]
• Curtin, Jeremiah, [244]
• Curtis, George William, [121], [258]
• —— Prue and I, [121], [258]

• D
• Dacre, Mrs., [10], [77]
• —— Zofloya, [10], [17], [28], [33], [35], [37], [38], [53], [154], [251]
• Damned Thing, The, [61], [92]
• Danby, Frank, Twilight, [268]
• Daniel and the Devil, [141]
• D’Annunzio, Gabriel, [66]
• —— Daughter of Jorio, The, [67], [149]
• —— La Città Morta, [66], [298]
• —— Sogno d’un Mattino di Primavera, [67], [300]
• —— Sogno d’un Tramonto d’Autunno, [67], [152]
• Dante, [27], [130], [133], [144], [209], [215]
• Dark Nameless One, The, [155]
• Darwin, Charles, [73], [251]
• Darwin, Erasmus, [14]
• Daughter of Jorio, The, [67], [149]
• Daughter of the Moor, The, [304]
• Davis, Owen, and Robert, Any House, [307]
• Davis, Richard Harding, Vera, the Medium, [200]
• Day of My Death, The, [199]
• Days of the Comet, The, [264]
• Dead Are Singing, The, [282]
• Dead City, The, [298]
• Dead Ship of Harpswell, The, [187]
• Dead Smile, The, [70], [109]
• Deakin, Lumley, [146]
• —— Red Debts, [146]
• Death of Halpin Frazer, The, [110], [192]
• Death’s Jest Book, [53], [115], [297]
• Defoe, Daniel, [205]
• —— Apparition of Mrs. Veal, [205]
• —— History of Duncan Campbell, The, [225]
• Demi-gods, [242]
• Demi-gods, The, [219], [221]
• Dæmonic Spirits, [158] et seq.
• Dæmonology, Gothic, [33]
• De Morgan, William Frend, [92], [283]
• —— Affair of Dishonor, An, [91]
• —— Likely Story, A, [287]
• De Quincey, Thomas
• —— Avengers, The, [56]
• —— Confessions of an English Opium-Eater, [268]
• —— Dream Fugue, [15]
• —— Klosterheim, [56]
• —— On the Knocking at the Gate in Macbeth, [295]
• Descent into the Maelstrom, The, [231], [253]
• Devil, The, [138]
• Devil and His Allies, The, [130] et seq.
• Devil, Gothic, The, [27] et seq.
• Devil and Tom Walker, The, [140]
• Devil in the Belfry, The, [141]
• Dey Ain’t No Ghosts, [128]
• Diamond Lens, The, [274]
• Dickey, Paul, [307]
• —— Last Laugh, The, [307]
• Dickens, Charles:
• —— Haunted House, The, [171]
• —— Signal Man, The, [114]
• Die Beiden Waldemar, [122]
• Die Braut von Corinth, [162]
• Die Mehreren Wehmüller, [122]
• Disassociation of a Personality, The, [305]
• Divine Adventure, The, [248]
• Dr. Bullivant, [185]
• Dr. Faustus, [15], [143]
• Dr. Heidigger’s Experiment, [184], [252]
• Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, [120], [268], [305]
• Dog Harvey, The, [291]
• Doings of Raffles Haw, The, [267]
• Dolliver Romance, The, [183], [184]
• Doll’s Ghost, A, [98]
• Door in the Wall, The, [258]
• Doppelgänger, [57], [119]
• Doppelgänger, The, [122]
• Dorset, St. John, [159]
• —— Vampire, The, [159]
• Double Personality, [305]
• Doyle, A. Conan, [79]
• —— Doings of Raffles Haw, The, [267]
• —— Hound of the Baskervilles, The, [290]
• —— Los Amigos Fiasco, The, [187], [270]
• —— Lot No. 49, [62]
• —— Secret of Goresthorpe Grange, The, [79]
• —— Silver Mirror, The, [259]
• —— Terror of Blue John Gap, The, [272]
• Dracula, [78], [163], [188], [301]
• Dream, The, [68]
• Dream Fugue, [15]
• Dream Gown of the Japanese Ambassador, The, [79]
• Dream of Armageddon, A, [196], [262]
• Dream of Provence, A, [293]
• Dream Woman, The, [78]
• Dreams, [13], [77]
• Dreiser, Theodore:
• —— Blue Sphere, The, [208], [278]
• —— In the Dark, [208]
• —— Laughing Gas, [278]
• —— Plays of the Natural and the Supernatural, [208]
• —— Spring Recital, A, [208]
• Dromgoole, Will Allen, [226]
• Dryden, John, [41]
• —— Amboyna, [41]
• Duchess at Prayer, The, [121], [303]
• Duchess of Malfi, The, [8], [166]
• Dumas, Alexandre, Père, [159]
• —— Le Vampire, [159]
• Du Maurier, George:
• —— Martian, The, [196], [207], [264]
• —— Peter Ibbetson, [186], [196], [206], [300]
• —— Trilby, [267]
• Dunbar, Aldis, [244]
• Dunbar, Olivia Howard, [85]
• —— Shell of Sense, The, [85], [212]
• Dunsany, Lord, [52], [63], [235], [242], [244], [247], [249], [285], [292], [300]
• —— Book of Wonder, The, [245]
• —— Glittering Gate, The, [221], [222]
• —— Gods of Pegana, The, [245]
• —— Gods of the Mountain, The, [244], [303]
• —— Night at an Inn, A, [244], [303]
• —— Time and the Gods, [245]
• —— Usury, [198]
• —— When the Gods Slept, [63], [74]

• E
• Edgar Huntley, [39]
• Edwards, Amelia, [86]
• —— Four-fifteen Express, The, [86]
• Eel-King, The, [233]
• Eighty-third, The, [61], [281]
• El Embozado, [119]
• Elementals, [300]
• Eleonora, [103]
• Eliot, George, [167], [257]
• —— Lifted Veil, The, [157]
• Elixiere des Teufels, [57]
• Elixir of Life, The, [35], [182] et seq.
• Elixir of Life, The, [60]
• Elixir of Youth, The, [186]
• Elizabethan Drama, The, [139]
• El Magico Prodigioso, [100], [143]
• Elsie Venner, [170]
• Elves, [247]
• Emperor and Galilean, [42], [66]
• Empty House, The, [98], [117]
• Enchanted Typewriter, The, [207], [286]
• Erckmann-Chatrian, [62]
• —— Invisible Eye, The, [62]
• —— Owl’s Ear, The, [62]
• —— Waters of Death, The, [62]
• Erewhon, [262]
• Erscheinung, [122]
• Eternal Magdalen, The, [27]
• Eternal Mystery, The, [306]
• Ethelwina, or the House of Fitz-Auburne, [25]
• Eubule-Evans, A., [177]
• —— Curse of the Wandering Jew, The, [177]
• Eve, [246]
• Evil Eye, The, [152]
• Exchange, The, [153], [156], [197]
• Extract from Captain Stormfield’s Visit to Heaven, An, [217]
• Eyes, The, [297]
• Eyes of the Panther, The, [170], [271]

• F
• Fable for Critics, A, [57]
• Fables, [231]
• Facts in the Case of M. Waldemar, [266]
• Faerie Queene, The, [7]
• Failure, [22]
• Fair God, The, [246]
• Fairies of Pesth, The, [240]
• Fairy Faith in Celtic Countries, [237]
• Fairy, The, [239] et seq.
• Faith Healer, The, [306]
• Fall of the House of Usher, The, [295]
• Faraway Melody, A, [97]
• Faust, [143], [175]
• Feathertop, [152], [156]
• Fenn, George M., Man with the Shadow, The, [122]
• Fiction of the Irish Celts, [243]
• Field, Eugene, [141]
• —— Daniel and the Devil, [141]
• —— Eel-King, The, [233]
• —— Holy Cross, The, [181]
• —— Moon Lady, The, [233]
• —— Mother in Paradise, The, [213]
• —— Pagan Seal-wife, The, [233]
• —— Werewolf, The, [169], [172]
• Finch, Lucine, Butterfly, The, [307]
• First Men in the Moon, The, [264]
• Fisherman and His Soul, The, [134], [153], [236]
• Fisk, Isabel Howe, [290]
• Flaireurs, [64]
• Flower of Silence, The, [273]
• Flowering of the Strange Orchid, The, [62], [164], [273]
• Flying Dutchman, The, [187]
• Fogazzaro, Antonio, [66]
• —— Saint, The, [66]
• —— Sinner, The, [66]
• —— Woman, The, [66], [194], [300]
• Folk-lore, [73]
• Ford, James L., [266]
• Forest Lovers, [149]
• Forsaken Merman, The, [155], [233]
• For the Blood Is the Life, [62], [78], [162]
• Fouqué, Henri Auguste, [57], [59]
• —— Undine, [57]
• Four-fifteen Express, The, [86]
• Fourth Dimension, The, [256]
• Fox, John, Jr., [226]
• France, Anatole, [63]
• —— Amycus and Celestine, [63]
• —— Isle of the Penguins, The, [63]
• —— Juggler of Notre Dame, The, [63]
• —— Mass of Shadows, The, [63]
• —— Putois, [63]
• —— Revolt of the Angels, The, [220]
• —— Scholasticus, [63]
• Frankenstein, [14], [17], [34]
• Franklin, Andrew, [176]
• —— Wandering Jew, The, [176]
• Freeman, Mary Wilkins, [78]
• —— Faraway Melody, [97]
• —— Hall Bedroom, The, [79], [260]
• —— Shadows on the Wall, The, [78], [99], [104], [226]
• Freud, [79]
• Friar’s Tale, The, [140]
• Fu Manchu Stories, [253], [268], [270], [272]
• Furnished Room, The, [60], [101]
• Future, Magic Views of the, [256]

• G
• Garland, Hamlin, [69], [76], [200]
• —— Shadow World, The, [200]
• —— Tyranny of the Dark, The, [200]
• Garments of Ghosts, [92] et seq.
• Gaston de Blondeville, [19]
• Gates Ajar, The, [210]
• Gates Between, The, [210]
• Gates Beyond, The, [210]
• Gautier, Théophile, [62]
• —— La Morte Amoreuse, [62], [163]
• —— Mummy’s Foot, The, [62]
• —— Romance of the Mummy, The, [62]
• General William Booth Enters into Heaven, [217]
• German Romanticism, [67]
• Gerould, Gordon H., [202]
• —— Grateful Dead, The, [202]
• Gerould, Katherine Fullerton, [61], [71], [104]
• —— Eighty-Third, The, [61], [281]
• —— Louquier’s Third Act, [61]
• —— On the Stairs, [83], [114], [122]
• Ghost, The, [60]
• Ghost at Point of Rock, The, [83]
• Ghost-children, [287] et seq.
• Ghost Moth, The, [290]
• Ghost of Miser Brimpson, The, [83]
• Ghost of the White Tiger, [291]
• Ghost Ship, The, [111], [293]
• Ghost of Futurity, [114]
• Ghost of Jack, The, [110]
• Ghost Touch, The, [101], [103]
• Ghostly Doubles, [119]
• Ghostly Odor, [100]
• Ghostly Perfume, [101]
• Ghostly Psychology, [106]
• Ghostly Sounds, [97] et seq.
• Ghosts, Gothic, [18] et seq.
• Ghosts, Modern, [81] et seq.
• Ghouls, [158]
• Giaour, The, [160]
• Gigantism, [36]
• Gilmore, Inez Haynes, [294]
• —— Angel Island, [294]
• Glamour of the Snow, The, [231]
• Glanville, Joseph, [191]
• Glasgow, Ellen, Shadowy Third, The, [203]
• Glass of Supreme Moments, The, [157]
• Glittering Gate, The, [221], [222]
• Glover, Richard, Ballad of Hosier’s Ghost, [89]
• Gnoles, [247]
• Gnomes, [247]
• Goblin Market, [148]
• Goddard, Charles W., [307]
• —— Last Laugh, The, [307]
• Gods, [242]
• Gods and Fighting Men, [244]
• Gods of Pegana, [245]
• Gods of the Mountains, The, [244], [303]
• Godwin, William, [35], [182]
• —— St. Leon, [35], [36]
• Goethe, [133], [162]
• —— Die Braut von Corinth, [162]
• —— Faust, [143], [175]
• Gogol, [68]
• —— Cloak, The, [68]
• Gothic Romance, [6] et seq.
• Granville, Charles, [179]
• —— Plaint of the Wandering Jew, The, [179]
• Great God Pan, The, [247]
• Great Stone of Sardis, The, [262]
• Greek and Roman Ghost Stories, [202]
• Gregory the Great, Dialogues, [202]
• Gregory, Lady, [229], [234], [237], [240], [285]
• —— Cuchulain of Muirthemne, [243]
• —— Gods and Fighting Men, [243]
• Grey Guest, The, [94], [282]
• Grosse, Marquis, [49]
• —— Horrid Mysteries, [49]
• Guy Mannering, [150]
• Gypsy Christ, The, [181]

• H
• Hag, The, [148]
• Haggard, Rider, [183], [193]
• —— Ayesha, [183], [193]
• —— She, [183]
• Hale, Lucretia P., Spider’s Eye, The, [62], [274]
• Hall Bedroom, The, [79], [260]
• Hall of Eblis, The, [8]
• Hamlet, [18], [118], [144]
• Hand, The, [61]
• Hannele, [218]
• Hans Pfaal, [286]
• Happy Prince, The, [238]
• Hardy, Thomas:
• —— Return of the Native, The, [150]
• —— Tess of the D’ Urbervilles, [143]
• —— Under the Greenwood Tree, [150]
• —— Withered Arm, The, [225]
• Harper, Olive, Sociable Ghost, The, [111]
• Harris, Joel Chandler, [74], [226]
• —— Uncle Remus Tales, [232], [235]
• Hart, Charles F., Amazonian Tortoise Myths, [232]
• Hartley, Randolph, Black Patch, The, [255]
• Haunted Hotel, The, [89], [100]
• Haunted House, The, [171]
• Haunted Island, A, [114]
• Haunted Subalterns, The, [138]
• Haunters and the Haunted, The, [60], [78], [188], [299]
• Hauptmann, Carl, [282]
• —— Dead Are Singing, The, [282]
• Hauptmann, Gerhardt:
• —— Hannele, [218]
• —— Sunken Bell, The, [158]
• Hawkesworth, John, [70], [190]
• —— Transmigration of a Soul, [190]
• Hawthorne, Julian, [121]
• —— Lovers in Heaven, [121], [144], [213]
• Hawthorne, Nathaniel:
• —— Artist of the Beautiful, The, [287]
• —— Birthmark, The, [185], [270]
• —— Blithedale Romance, The, [188], [199]
• —— Celestial Railroad, The, [213]
• —— Dr. Heidigger’s Experiment, [184], [252]
• —— Dolliver Romance, The, [183], [184]
• —— Feathertop, [152], [156]
• —— House of Seven Gables, The, [158]
• —— Howe’s Masquerade, [122]
• —— Intelligence Office, The, [265]
• —— Main Street, [152]
• —— Marble Faun, The, [57]
• —— Prophetic Pictures, [121]
• —— Rappacini’s Daughter, [252], [272]
• —— Scarlet Letter, The, [152]
• —— Select Party, A, [178]
• —— Septimius Felton, [143], [150], [183], [252]
• —— Virtuoso’s Collection, A, [78]
• —— Young Goodman Brown, [151]
• Hearn, Lafcadio, [1], [77]
• —— Interpretations of Literature, [1], [77]
• Heath Fire, The, [231]
• Heaven, [221], [283]
• Heaven and Earth, [221]
• Heijermans, [176]
• Hellas, [176]
• Henry, O., Furnished Room, The, [60], [101]
• Here and There, [101], [107]
• Heretic, The, [207]
• Heritage, The, [94]
• Herodotus, [166]
• Heroes, [242]
• Heroine, The, [49], [50]
• Herrick, Robert, Hag, The, [148]
• Hewlett, Maurice, Forest Lovers, [149]
• Heywood, Eliza, Lasselia, [42]
• His Unquiet Ghost, [83]
• History of Duncan Campbell, The, [255]
• History of Jack Smith, or the Castle of St. Donats, [20]
• Hoax Ghosts, [82]
• Hodder, Reginald, Vampire, The, [68], [163]
• Hoffmann, David, [181]
• Hoffmann, E. T. A., [51], [59], [69], [182], [190], [199]
• —— Doppelgänger, [58]
• —— Elixiere des Teufels, [58]
• —— Kater Murr, [58]
• —— Magnetiseur, [58]
• Hogg, James:
• —— Brownie of Bodbeck, [26], [38]
• —— Confessions of a Justified Sinner, [29]
• —— Hunt of Eildon, The, [26], [27], [30], [32]
• —— Witch of Fife, The, [148]
• —— Wool-gatherer, The, [23], [29], [30], [32]
• Holmes, Oliver Wendell, Elsie Venner, [170]
• Holy Cross, The, [181]
• Horrid Mysteries, [49]
• Horsley-Curties, T. J., [9]
• —— Ancient Records or the Abbey of St. Oswyth, [9], [12], [21], [32], [42], [43]
• —— Ethelwina, or the House of Fitz-Auburne, [25], [38]
• Hound of the Baskervilles, The, [290]
• Hound of Heaven, The, [283]
• House of Judgment, The, [214]
• House of Souls, The, [271]
• House-boat on the Styx, The, [112], [216]
• House of Seven Gables, The, [158]
• Howells, William Dean, [76]
• —— Leatherwood God, The, [310]
• —— Undiscovered Country, The, [200], [267]
• Howe’s Masquerade, [122]
• Human, Chord, The, [275]
• Human Personality, [202]
• Humorous Ghosts, [110]
• Hunt, Leigh, [105]
• Hunt of Eildon, The, [26], [27], [30], [32]
• Huxley, Thomas Henry, [73], [252]
• Hyde, Dr., Paudeen O’Kelley and the Weasel, [237]

• I
• Ibsen, Henrik, [35], [42]
• —— Brand, [65]
• —— Emperor and Galilean, [42], [66]
• —— Lady from the Sea, The, [66]
• —— Master Builder, [35], [66]
• —— Pretenders, The, [65]
• —— Rosmersholm, [66]
• —— Vikings of Helgeland, The, [65]
• Ida Lomond and Her Hour of Vision, [207]
• Immortal Gymnasts, The, [197]
• In Castle Perilous, [118]
• In Mr. Eberdeen’s House, [124]
• In No Strange Land, [96], [212]
• In the Dark, [208]
• In the House of Suddoo, [146]
• Inferno, [144]
• Insanity and the Supernatural, [69], [299]
• Insanity in Gothic Fiction, [35] et seq.
• Intelligence Office, The, [265]
• Interior, [64]
• Interpretations of Literature, [1], [77]
• Intricate Personality of Specters, [119]
• Invisible Man, The, [95], [269]
• Invisible Eye, The, [62]
• Irving, Washington, [110], [226]
• —— Devil and Tom Walker, The, [140]
• —— Legend of Sleepy Hollow, The, [89]
• —— Rip Van Winkle, [246]
• —— Specter Bridegroom, The, [83], [110]
• —— Tales of the Alhambra, [226]
• Island of Dr. Moreau, The, [271]
• Isle of the Penguins, The, [63]
• Italian, The, [48]
• Ivan, the Fool, [68], [138], [144]
• Ivory Gate, The, [122]
• In the Track of the Wandering Jew, [178]

• J
• Jacobs, W. W., Monkey’s Paw, The, [98], [253]
• James, Henry:
• —— Jolly Corner, The, [122]
• —— Turn of the Screw, The, [86], [91], [109]
• Janvier, Thomas A., Legends of the City of Mexico, [226]
• Jealousy of Ghosts, [117]
• Jeanne, The Maid, [282]
• Jerome, Jerome K., Passing of the Third Floor Back, The, [305]
• Jewel of Seven Stars, The, [191], [274]
• Jigar-Khor, The, [165]
• John Inglesant, [87], [98]
• Johnson, Arthur, In Mr. Eberdeen’s House, [124]
• Johnston, Mary, Witch, The, [150]
• Jolly Corner, The, [122]
• Joyzelle, [64]
• Judgment of God, The, [234]
• Juggler of Notre Dame, The, [63]
• Jules Le Vallon, [194]
• Julius Cæsar, [18], [84]
• Jungle Tales, [232]

• K
• Kaffir Tales, [232]
• Kater Murr, [58]
• Keats, John, [148]
• —— La Belle Dame sans Merci, [148]
• —— Lamia, [162]
• Keeping His Promise, [98]
• Kelpie, The, [155]
• Kennedy, Charles Rann, Servant in the House, The, [66], [305]
• Kennedy, Patrick, [243]
• —— Bardic Stories of Ireland, [243]
• —— Fiction of the Irish Celts, [243]
• Kentucky’s Ghost, [199]
• Kerfol, [290]
• Khaled, [62], [70], [147]
• Kinetoscope of Time, The, [256]
• King, Basil, [203]
• —— Old Lady Pingree, [203]
• King Lear, [13]
• Kingdom Come, [282], [306]
• Kingemann, [176]
• King Hunger, [207], [308]
• Kingsley, Charles, Water Babies, [240]
• Kipling, Rudyard, [53], [71], [99], [104], [180]
• —— At the End of the Passage, [120]
• —— Brushwood Boy, The, [195]
• —— Bubble Well Road, [138]
• —— Courting of Dinah Shadd, The, [152]
• —— Dog Harvey, The, [291]
• —— Haunted Subalterns, The, [138]
• —— In the House of Suddoo, [146]
• —— Jungle Tales, [232]
• —— Last of the Stories, The, [197],215
• —— Mark of the Beast, The, [100], [167]
• —— Phantom Rickshaw, The, [88], [94]
• —— Swept and Garnished, [94], [282], [288]
• —— They, [84], [93], [288]
• Kittredge, George Lyman, [30], [224]
• —— Arthur and Gorlogon, [30]
• Kleist, [59]
• Klosterheim, [56]
• Knock! Knock! Knock! [68]
• Kummer, Frederick Arnold, Second Coming, The, [281]
• Kundry, [181]

• L
• Le Belle Dame sans Merci, [148]
• La Città Morta, [66], [299]
• Lady from the Sea, The, [66]
• La Horla, [61], [95]
• Lair of the White Worm, The, [188]
• Lais, [7]
• Lamia, [162]
• La Morte Amoreuse, [62], [163]
• Land of Darkness, The, [212]
• Land of Heart’s Desire, The, [65], [240], [306]
• Lang, Andrew, [118], [188], [242]
• —— In Castle Perilous, [118]
• —— St. Germain, the Deathless, [188]
• Lasselia, [42]
• Last Ghost in Harmony, The, [104], [201]
• Last Laugh, The, [307]
• Last of the Stories, The, [197], [215]
• Later Influences, [54] et seq.
• Latham, Francis, Midnight Bell, [49]
• Laughing Gas, [278]
• Lay of the Brown Rosary, The, [148]
• Leatherwood God, The, [310]
• Leaves from the Autobiography of a Soul in Paradise, [207]
• Lee, Robert James:
• —— Astral Bridegroom, An, [207]
• —— Car of Phœbus, The, [207]
• —— Heretic, The, [207]
• —— Leaves from the Autobiography of a Soul in Paradise, [207]
• —— Life Elysian, The, [207]
• —— Through the Mists, [208]
• —— Vagrom Spirit, The, [207]
• Legend of Sleepy Hollow, The, [89]
• Legend of Sharp, A, [134]
• Leprechauns, [239]
• Letters from a Living Dead Man, [207]
• Le Vampire, [159]
• Lewis, Arthur, [242]
• —— London Fairy Tales, [242]
• Lewis, Mary L., Stranger than Fiction, [207]
• Lewis, Matthew Gregory (“Monk”), [14], [16], [77]
• —— Castle Specter, The, [53]
• —— Monk, The, [12], [16], [22], [24], [26], [27], [30], [33], [34], [35], [37], [177]
• Liebgeber Schappe, [122]
• Life after Death, [209] et seq.
• Lifted Veil, The, [257]
• Ligeia, [123], [191]
• Likely Story, A, [287]
• Lindsay, Nicholas Vachell, General William Booth Enters into Heaven, [217]
• Little Crow of Paradise, The, [234]
• Little Gray Ghost, The, [118]
• Little Mermaid, The, [155], [176], [233]
• Little Pilgrim in the Unseen, The, [212]
• Little White Bird, The, [240]
• Lloyd, N. M., Last Ghost in Harmony, The, [104], [201]
• Locke, Edward, Case of Becky, The, [305]
• Lodge, Sir Oliver, [74]
• —— Raymond, or Life and Death, [75]
• London Fairy Tales, [242]
• London, Jack:
• —— Scarlet Plague, The, [262]
• —— Star Rover, The, [264]
• Long Chamber, The, [118]
• Looking Backward, [189], [262]
• Los Amigos Fiasco, The, [187], [270]
• Loss of Breath, The, [74]
• Lot No. 49, [62]
• Louquier’s Third Act, [61]
• Love Philter, The, [267]
• Lovers in Heaven, [121], [144], [213]
• Lowell, James Russell, Fable for Critics, A, [57]
• Lucas, Charles, History of Jack Smith, or the Castle of St. Donats, The, [20]
• Lycanthrope, The, [39]
• Lytton, Edward George, Earle Lytton Bulwer-Lytton, 1st baron, [60]

• M
• Macaulay, Thomas Babington, [110]
• Macbeth, [18], [98], [153], [295]
• Machen, Arthur, [52], [70], [79], [117], [247], [250], [300], [301]
• —— Bowmen and Others, The, [204], [258], [282]
• —— Hill of Dreams, The, [79]
• —— House of Souls, The, [271]
• —— Monstrance, The, [288]
• —— Red Hand, The, [247]
• —— Seeing the Great God Pan, [139]
• —— Three Impostors, The, [247], [269]
• Mad, [61]
• Mad Lady, The, [286]
• Madness, [61]
• Maeterlinck, Maurice, [6], [42], [64], [299]
• —— Blind, The, [64], [298]
• —— Blue-bird, The, [64], [278], [289], [306]
• —— Interior,64
• —— Intruder, The, [64], [304]
• —— Joyzelle, [64]
• Magic, [306]
• Magic Shadow, The, [296]
• Magic Skin, The, [60]
• Magnetiseur, [58]
• Maighdeanmhara, The, [155]
• Main Street, [152]
• Man and Superman, [217]
• Man in Black, The, [137]
• Man from the Gods, The, [121]
• Man Overboard, [97]
• Man with a Shadow, The, [122]
• Man Whom the Trees Loved, The, [230], [272]
• Man with the Pigeons, The, [218]
• Man Who had been in Fairyland, The, [241]
• MS. found in a Bottle, The, [253]
• Marble Faun, The, [57]
• Marie de France, [30], [118]
• —— Bisclavret, [30], [168]
• Markheim, [120]
• Mark of the Beast, The, [100], [167]
• Marlowe, Christopher, [27], [153]
• —— Doctor Faustus, [15], [143]
• Marsh, Richard, Beetle, The, [290]
• Martian, The, [196], [207], [264]
• Mass of Shadows, The, [63]
• Master Builder, The, [35], [66]
• Master Christian, The, [309]
• Mather, Cotton, [130]
• Matthews, Brander:
• —— Dream Gown of the Japanese Ambassador, The, [79]
• —— Kinetoscope of Time, The, [256]
• —— Primer of Imaginary Geography, A, [181], [216]
• —— Rival Ghosts, [112]
• Maturin, Charles Robert, [9], [17], [38], [59], [182]
• —— Albigenses, The, [9], [11], [94], [168], [288]
• —— Melmoth, the Wanderer, [8], [10], [12], [24], [26], [36], [41], [44], [138]
• Maupassant, Guy de, [60], [69], [299]
• —— Cocotte, [61]
• —— Coward, The, [61]
• —— Ghost, The, [60]
• —— Hand, The, [61]
• —— La Horla, [61], [95]
• —— Mad, [61]
• —— Madness, [61]
• —— Tress, The, [61]
• —— Wolf, The, [172]
• McDonald, George, Portent, The, [266]
• McLeod, Fiona:
• —— Dark Nameless One, The, [155]
• —— Divine Adventure, The, [248]
• —— Judgment of God, The, [234]
• —— Sin Eater, The, [138]
• Mechanistic Supernaturalism, [286] et seq.
• Meg Merrilies, [150]
• Meinhold, [56]
• Melmoth Réconcilié, [59]
• Melmoth, the Wanderer, [8], [10], [12], [24], [26], [36], [41], [44], [138]
• Meredith, George, [71], [127]
• —— Shaving of Shagpat, The, [71]
• Merlin, [145]
• Mermaid, The, [234]
• Mermaid, The, [306]
• Merman and the Seraph, The, [234]
• Meroe, [145]
• Mesmeric Revelations, [266]
• Messenger, The, [88]
• Metamorphoses, [145]
• Metempsychosis, [180] et seq.
• Metzengerstein, [287], [291]
• Middle Toe of the Right Foot, The, [61], [92]
• Middleton, Jessie Adelaide, [92]
• —— Ghost with Half a Face, The, [92]
• Middleton, Richard, [111], [288]
• —— Coffin Merchant, The, [254]
• —— Ghost Ship, The, [111], [293]
• —— Passing of Edward, The, [99], [288]
• Midnight Bell, [49]
• Midsummer Night’s Dream, A, [64]
• Milne-Horne, Mary Pamela, Anansi Stories, [232]
• Milton, John, [27], [133], [239]
• —— Comus, [7], [148]
• —— Paradise Lost, [144], [209], [211], [215]
• Mine Host and the Witch, [148]
• Miracle, The, [254]
• Miracle Man, The, [306]
• Miss Mehitabel’s Son, [63], [68], [85], [287]
• Mistaken Ghost, The, [62]
• Mitchell, J. A., Amos Judd, [40], [257]
• Molnar, Fernac, Devil, The, [138]
• Monastery, The, [225]
• Monk, The, [12], [16], [22], [24], [26], [27], [30], [33], [35], [37], [177]
• Monkey’s Paw, The, [98]
• Monstrance, The, [288]
• Moody, William Vaughn, Faith Healer, The, [306]
• Moon Lady, The, [233]
• Moon Madness, [139], [231]
• Moore, George, Brook Kerith, The, [310]
• Morella, [123], [190]
• Morris, William, [236], [250]
• —— Water of the Wondrous Isle, The, [236]
• —— Well at the World’s End, The, [236]
• —— Wood beyond the World, The, [236]
• Mosen, Julius, [176]
• Mother in Paradise, The, [213]
• Motives for Ghost Appearance, [113]
• Mr. Isaacs, [37], [71]
• Mrs. Veal, [205]
• Mummy’s Foot, The, [62]
• Mummy’s Tale, The, [110]
• My Aunt Margaret’s Mirror, [225]
• Myers, Human Personality, [202]
• Mysteries of Udolpho, The, [9], [48]
• Mysterious Mother, The, [53]
• Mysterious Stranger, The, [142]
• Mysterious Warnings, [49]
• Mystery and Mystification in Gothicism, [43]
• Mystery of Joseph Laquedem, The, [181], [195]
• Myths and Legends of Our Land, [187]

• N
• Nathan, George Jean, Eternal Mystery, The, [306]
• Neckan, The, [155], [233]
• Nemesis of Fire, A, [98]
• Never Bet the Devil Your Head, [140]
• New Accelerator, The, [286]
• New Arabian Nights, The, [70]
• Night at an Inn, A, [244], [303]
• Night Call, The, [83]
• Nightingale and the Rose, The, [235], [293]
• Nightmare Abbey, [51]
• Norris, Frank, Vandover and the Brute, [167]
• Northanger Abbey, [47], [51]
• Notch on the Axe, The, [89], [188]
• Noyes, Alfred, Creation, [277]
• Nyria, [207]

• O
• O’Brien, Fitz-James, [61]
• —— Diamond Lens, The, [274]
• —— What Was It? A Mystery, [61], [96]
• Occult Magazine, The, [163]
• Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge, The, [275]
• Ode on the Popular Superstitions of the Highlands, [74]
• O’Donnell, Elliot, [88], [110]
• —— Mummy’s Tale, The, [110]
• —— Werewolves, [170]
• Old Clothes, [124], [194]
• Old English Baron, The, [16], [19], [40]
• Old Fires and Profitable Ghosts, [154]
• Old Lady Mary, [211]
• Old Men of the Twilight, The, [234]
• Old Wives’ Tale, [110], [145]
• Oliphant, Mrs. Margaret:
• —— Beleaguered City, The, [211]
• —— Land of Darkness, The, [212]
• —— Little Pilgrim in the Unseen, The, [212]
• —— Old Lady Mary, [211], [298]
• —— Open Door, The, [211]
• —— Portrait, The, [211]
• On Certain Proceedings of the Psychical Research Society, [221]
• On the Knocking at the Gate in Macbeth, [295]
• On the Stairs, [61], [114], [122]
• Open Door, The, [211]
• Origin of Individual Gothic Tales, [13] et seq.
• O’Shaughnessy, Arthur, [168]
• Our Last Walk, [103]
• Oval Portrait, The, [58]
• Ovid, [166]
• Owl’s Ear, The, [62]

• P
• Pagan Seal-wife, The, [233]
• Page, Thomas Nelson, [226]
• Pain, Barry, [53], [79], [157]
• —— Blue Roses, [268]
• —— Celestial Grocery, The, [265], [300]
• —— Exchange, The, [153], [156], [197]
• —— Glass of Supreme Moments, The, [157]
• —— Love Philter, The, [267]
• —— Moon Madness, [139], [231]
• —— Undying Thing, The, [271]
• —— Wrong Elixir, The, [186]
• —— Zero, [257]
• Paine, Albert Bigelow, Elixir of Youth, The, [186]
• Pair of Hands, A, [103], [288]
• Pangborn, Georgia Wood, Substitute, The, [88]
• Paradise Lost, [144], [209], [211], [215]
• Parsifal, [181]
• Parsons, Francis, Borderland, The, [124]
• Parsons, Mrs. M., Mysterious Warnings, [49]
• Passing of Edward, The, [99], [288]
• Passing of the Third Floor Back, The, [66], [303]
• Passionate Crime, The, [242]
• Patience Worth, [197], [207]
• Paudeen O’Kelley and the Weasel, [237]
• Peacock, Thomas Love, Nightmare Abbey, [51]
• Pearce, J. H., Little Crow of Paradise, The, [234]
• Peele, George, [145]
• —— Old Wives’ Tale, [110], [145], [202], [293]
• Père Antoine’s Date Palm, [63]
• Peter Ibbetson, [186], [196], [206], [300]
• Peter Pan, [240], [306]
• Peter Rugg, the Missing Man, [189]
• Phantom Rickshaw, The, [88], [94]
• Phantoms, [68]
• Phelps, William Lyon, [41]
• —— Beginnings of the English Romantic Movement, [41]
• Phillpotts, Eden, [83]
• —— Another Little Heath Hound, [290]
• —— Children of the Mist, [226]
• —— Ghost of Miser Brimpson, The, [83]
• —— Witch, The, [151], [226]
• Picture of Dorian Gray, The, [32], [60], [121], [134]
• Pit and the Pendulum, The, [253]
• Plaint of the Wandering Jew, The, [179]
• Planche, J. R., [160]
• —— Vampire, or the Bride of the Isles, [160]
• Plattner Case, The, [260]
• Plays of the Natural and the Supernatural, [208]
• Pliny, [72]
• Poe, Edgar Allan, [58], [69], [252], [299]
• —— Berenice, [62]
• —— Bon Bon, [41], [95]
• —— Descent into the Maelstrom, The, [231], [253]
• —— Devil in the Belfry, The, [141]
• —— Eleonora, [103]
• —— Facts in the Case of M. Waldemar, The, [266]
• —— Fall of the House of Usher, The, [295]
• —— Hans Pfaal, [286]
• —— Ligeia, [123], [191]
• —— Loss of Breath, [74]
• —— MS. Found in a Bottle, [253]
• —— Mesmeric Revelations, [266]
• —— Metzengerstein, [287], [291]
• —— Morella, [123], [190]
• —— Never Bet the Devil Your Head, [140]
• —— Oval Portrait, The, [58]
• —— Pit and the Pendulum, The, [253]
• —— Raven, The, [56]
• —— Tale of the Ragged Mountains, A, [58], [190]
• —— William Wilson, [58], [120]
• Polidior, Vampyre, The, [160]
• Pomponius Mela, [166]
• Portent, The, [266]
• Portents in Gothic Romance, [39]
• Portrait, The, [211]
• Powell, J. W., [232]
• Pretender, The, [65]
• Primer of Imaginary Geography, The, [181], [216]
• Primitive Culture, [227]
• Prince, Morton, [305]
• —— Disassociation of a Personality, The, [305]
• Prince of India, The, [179]
• Proby, W. C., Spirit of the Castle, The, [40]
• Prophetic Pictures, [121]
• Prue and I, [121], [258]
• Psychic Invasion, A, [106]
• Psychical Research, [73], [199] et seq.
• Pursuit of the House-boat, The, [112], [187], [216]
• Pushkin, Alexander, Queen of Spades, The, [69]
• Putois, [63]
• Pyle, Howard, Evil Eye, The, [152]

• Q
• Queen Mab, [176]
• Queen of Hearts, The, [107], [113]
• Queen of Sheba, The, [122]
• Queen of Spades, The, [69]
• Quiller-Couch, A. T., [154]
• —— Magic Shadow, The, [296]
• —— Mystery of Joseph Laquedem, The, [181], [195]
• —— Old Fires and Profitable Ghosts, [154]
• —— Pair of Hands, A, [103], [288]
• —— Roll-call of the Reef, The, [107]
• Quinet, Edgar, [176]

• R
• Radcliffe, Anne, [9], [16], [23], [43], [44], [45], [46], [71], [82]
• —— Gaston de Blondeville, [19]
• —— Italian, The, [48]
• —— Mysteries of Udolpho, The, [9], [48]
• —— Romance of the Castle, The, [44]
• —— Sicilian Romance, A, [45], [50], [301]
• Raleigh, Sir Walter, English Novel, The, [46]
• Rappacini’s Daughter, [252], [272]
• Raven, The, [56]
• Raymond, or Life and Death, [75]
• Readjustment, [107]
• Real Ghost Stories, [282]
• Rebellious Heroine, The, [197]
• Recent Carnival of Crime in Connecticut, The, [122]
• Red Debts, [146]
• Red Hand, The, [247]
• Red Ranrahan, [186], [243]
• Reeve, Clara, [16]
• —— Old English Baron, The, [16], [19], [40]
• Regeneration of Lord Ernie, The, [230]
• Reinecke Fuchs, [213]
• Religion in Recent American Novels, [310]
• Remarkable Case of Davidson’s Eyes, The, [256]
• Return, The, [123], [198]
• Return of Peter Grimm, The, [201], [298]
• Return of the Native, The, [150]
• Revolt, of the Angels, The, [220]
• Reynard the Fox, [231]
• Reynard the Fox, in South Africa, [232]
• Rhodes, Benrimo and Harrison, Willow Tree, The, [306]
• Richter, Jean Paul, Leibgeber Schappe, [122]
• Rideout, Henry, Ghost of the White Tiger, The, [291]
• Riders to the Sea, [10], [304]
• Riding to Lithend, [152]
• Rip Van Winkle, [246]
• Rival Ghosts, [112]
• Roche, Regina Maria, [10], [43], [45], [50]
• —— Clermont, [45], [49]
• Roger of Wendover’s Chronicles, [175]
• Rohmer, Sax, [146]
• —— Flower of Silence, The, [273]
• —— Fu-Manchu Stories, [253], [268], [270], [272]
• Roll-call of the Reef, The, [107]
• Romance of the Castle, The, [40]
• Romance of the Mummy, The, [62]
• Romance of Two Worlds, A, [213]
• Romantic Movement, [55]
• Romantic Reduplication and Psychology, [122]
• Rosary, The, [306]
• Rosmersholm, [66]
• Rossetti, Christina, Goblin Market, [148]
• Rossetti, Dante Gabriel, Sister Helen, [67], [153]
• Royle, Edward Milton, Unwritten Law, The, [306]
• Russian Literature, [67]

• S
• St. Germain, the Deathless, [188]
• St. Irvyne, the Rosicrucian, [17], [35], [36]
• St. Leon, [35], [36]
• St. Oswyth, [12]
• Saintsbury, George, Tales of Mystery, [48]
• Saint, The, [66]
• Salathiel, or Tarry Thou Till I Come, [179]
• Sancta Susanna, [307]
• Satire on Gothicism, [47] et seq.
• Satirical Supernaturalism, [294]
• Scarlet Letter, The, [152]
• Scarlet Plague, The, [262]
• Scenery, Gothic, [10]
• Schiller, Robbers, The, [16]
• Schlegel, [176]
• Scholasticus, [63]
• Science, Gothic, [33]
• Science, Supernatural, [251] et seq.
• Scott, Sir Walter, [38], [56], [115], [225], [246]
• —— Betrothed, The, [225]
• —— Bride of Lammermoor, The, [38]
• —— Guy Mannering, [150]
• —— Monastery, The, [225]
• —— My Aunt Margaret’s Mirror, [225]
• —— Talisman, The, [134], [146], [147], [225]
• —— Two Drovers, The, [151], [225]
• —— Woodstock, [225]
• Screaming Skull, The, [60], [89], [92]
• Sea Fit, The, [230]
• Sea Lady, The, [234]
• Second Coming, The, [281]
• Second Wife, The, [122]
• Secret of Goresthorpe Grange, The, [79]
• Secret Worship, [105], [117], [137]
• Seeing the Great God Pan, [139]
• Select Party, A, [178]
• Selfish Giant, The, [246]
• Sensitives, [298]
• Septimius Felton, [143], [150], [183], [252]
• Servant in the House, The, [66], [305]
• Shadow World, The, [200]
• Shadows on the Wall, The, [78], [99], [104], [226]
• Shadowy Third, The, [203]
• Shakespeare, [13], [18], [56], [84], [115], [119]
• —— Hamlet, [18], [118], [144]
• —— Julius Cæsar, [18], [84]
• —— King Lear, [13]
• —— Macbeth, [17], [98], [152], [153], [295]
• —— Midsummer Night’s Dream, [64]
• —— Tempest, The, [64]
• Sharp, William, [65], [285]
• —— Gypsy Christ, The, [181]
• —— Vistas, [65], [278]
• Shaving of Shagpat, The, [71]
• Shaw, George Bernard, Man and Superman, [217], [306]
• She, [183]
• Sheldon, Edward:
• —— Mermaid, The, [234]
• Shell of Sense, The, [85], [212]
• Shelley, Mary, [14]
• —— Frankenstein, [14], [17], [34]
• Shelley, Percy Bysshe, [17], [35], [176], [180],182
• —— Fragment of an Unfinished Drama, [48]
• —— Hellas, [176]
• —— Queen Mab, [176]
• —— St. Irvyne, the Rosicrucian, [17], [35], [36]
• —— Witch of Atlas, The, [148]
• —— Wandering Jew, The, [176]
• —— Zastrozzi, [10], [12]
• Shorthouse, J. H.:
• —— Countess Eve, [138]
• —— John Inglesant, [66], [87], [98]
• Shropshire Folk Tales, [291]
• Sicilian Romance, A, [45], [50], [301]
• Sidhe, The, [242]
• Signal Man, The, [114]
• Silence, [293]
• Silvani, Anita, [88], [207]
• —— Ahrinziman, [88], [183], [213]
• Silver Mirror, The, [259]
• Sin Eater, The, [138]
• Sinner, The, [66]
• Sister Helen, [67], [153]
• Skinner, C. M., [187]
• —— Myths and Legends of Our Land, [187]
• Smale, Fred C., Afterwards, [102], [202]
• Smith, Benjamin, Merman and the Seraph, The, [234]
• Sociable Ghost, The, [111]
• Sogno d’un Mattino di Primavera, [67], [300]
• Sogno d’un Tramonto d’Autunno, [67], [152]
• Solomon, Simeon, Vision of Love Revealed in Sleep, [79]
• Song of Love Triumphant, The, [68]
• Songs from a Vagrom Spirit, [207]
• Song of the Wandering Jew, The, [176]
• Sorcerer, The, [145]
• Sorrows of Satan, The, [136], [144]
• Soul of the Moor, The, [207]
• Soul on Fire, A, [193]
• Souls on Fifth, [123], [198], [215]
• Southey, Robert, Thalaba, [161]
• Spearmen, F. H., Ghost at Point of Rock, The, [83]
• Speck on the Lens, The, [255]
• Specter Bridegroom, The, [83], [110]
• Spectral Mortgage, The, [63]
• Spencer, Herbert, [251]
• Spenser, Edmund, [239]
• —— Faerie Queene, The, [7]
• Speranza (Lady Wilde), [229], [240]
• —— Ancient Legends and Superstitions of Ireland, [229]
• Spider’s Eye, The, [62], [274]
• Spirit of Turrettville, The, [23]
• Spiritualism, [73], [199] et seq.
• Spofford, Harriet Prescott, [286]
• —— Mad Lady, The, [286]
• Spring Recital, A, [208]
• Star, The, [264]
• Star Rover, The, [264]
• Stead, W. T., [74]
• Stephens, James, [219]
• —— Crock of Gold, The, [241], [246]
• —— Demi-gods, The, [219], [221]
• Stevenson, Robert Louis, [70]
• —— Bottle Imp, The, [70]
• —— Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, [120], [268], [305]
• —— Markheim, [120]
• —— New Arabian Nights, The, [70]
• —— Thrawn Janet, [137]
• Stockton, Frank R., [293]
• —— Great Stone of Sardis, The, [262]
• —— Spectral Mortgage, The, [63]
• —— Tale of Negative Gravity, A, [274], [286]
• —— Transferred Ghost, The, [63], [87], [111], [122]
• Stoker, Bram, [78], [92], [117], [180]
• —— Dracula, [78], [163], [188], [301]
• —— Jewel of Seven Stars, The, [191], [274]
• —— Lair of the White Worm, The, [188]
• Stories of Red Ranrahan, [186], [243]
• Story of Days to Come, A, [262]
• Story of the Late Mr. Elvesham, The, [122], [185]
• Stramm, August, [209], [251], [308]
• —— Daughter of the Moor, The, [304]
• —— Sancta Susanna, [307]
• Strange Adventures of Phra, the Phœnician, The, [188]
• Strange Cases of Dr. Stanchion, The, [254], [299]
• Strange Story, A, [90], [182]
• Stuart, Ruth McEnery, [226]
• Styx River Anthology, The, [216]
• Subjective Ghosts, [83]
• Substitute, The, [88]
• Sue, Eugene, [176], [178]
• —— Wandering Jew, The, [176], [180]
• Suggested by Some of the Proceedings of the Psychical Research Society, [283]
• Sunken Bell, The, [158]
• Supernatural in Folk-tales, [233] et seq.
• Supernatural in Tragedy, The, [305]
• Supernatural Life, [174] et seq.
• Supernatural Science, [251] et seq.
• Sutton, Vida, Kingdom Come, [282], [306]
• Swept and Garnished, [94], [282], [288]
• Synge, John, [10], [229], [240]
• —— Riders to the Sea, [10], [304]
• Swanson, Frederick, Ghost Moth, The, [290]
• Swift, Dean, [35]

• T
• Tale of Negative Gravity, A, [274], [286]
• Tale of the Ragged Mountains, A, [58], [190]
• Tales of the Alhambra, [226]
• Tales of Mystery, [48]
• Talisman, The, [134], [146], [147], [225]
• Tam O’Shanter, [156]
• Tchekhoff:
• —— Black Monk, The, [69]
• —— Sleepyhead, [69]
• —— Ward No. 6, [69]
• Temperament, Gothic, [46]
• Tempest, The, [64]
• Temptation of the Clay, The, [231]
• Terror of Blue John Gap, The, [272]
• Terror of the Twins, The, [122], [192]
• Tess of the D’ Urbervilles, [143]
• Thackeray, W. M., [55], [89]
• —— Fairy Pantomime, A, [240]
• —— Notch on the Axe, A, [89], [188]
• Thalaba, [161]
• Theal, Kaffir Tales, [232]
• Theodora, [103]
• They, [84], [93], [288]
• They That Mourn, [85], [108]
• They That Walk in Darkness, [136]
• Thomas, Augustus, [306]
• —— Witching Hour, The, [306]
• Thompson, Francis, Hound of Heaven, The, [283]
• Thorndike, Ashley Horace, [42]
• —— Tragedy, [42]
• Thrawn, Janet, [137]
• Three Impostors, The, [247], [269]
• Through the Mists, [207]
• Thurlow’s Christmas Story, [121]
• Thurston, E. Temple, Passionate Crime, The, [242]
• Ticket-of-leave Angel, The, [221]
• Tieck, Ludwig, [56], [59]
• Time and the Gods, [245]
• Time Machine, The, [189], [260]
• Tolstoi, Ivan, [68]
• —— Ivan, the Fool, [68], [138], [144]
• Tompkins, Juliet Wilbur, They That Mourn, [85], [108]
• Tragedy, [42]
• Transfer, The, [164]
• Transferred Ghost, The, [63], [87], [111], [122]
• Transmigration of a Soul, The, [190]
• Tress, The, [61]
• Trilby, [267]
• Triumph of Night, The, [121]
• Tryst, The, [126], [211]
• Turgeniev, Ivan, [68], [69], [163]
• —— Clara Militch, [68], [162]
• —— Dream, The, [68]
• —— Knock! Knock! Knock!, [68]
• —— Phantoms, [68]
• —— Song of Love Triumphant, The, [68]
• Turn of the Screw, The, [86], [91], [109]
• Twain, Mark, [142]
• —— Connecticut Yankee at King Arthur’s Court, A, [189], [262], [286]
• —— Extracts from Captain Stormfield’s Visit to Heaven, [201], [217]
• —— Mysterious Stranger, The, [142], [303]
• —— Recent Carnival of Crime in Connecticut, The, [122]
• Twilight, [268]
• Two Drovers, The, [151], [225]
• Two Military Executions, [116]
• Two Voices, [97]
• Tylor, Primitive Culture, [227]
• Tyranny of the Dark, The, [200]

• U
• Unburied, The, [66], [301]
• Uncle Remus Tales, [232], [235]
• Under the Greenwood Tree, [150]
• Undine, [57]
• Undiscovered Country, The, [200], [267]
• Unknown Masterpiece, The, [60]
• Undying Thing, The, [271]
• Unwritten Law, The, [306]
• Upper Berth, The, [100]
• Usury, [198]

• V
• Vampire, The, [159]
• Vampire, The, [68], [163]
• Vampire Bride, The, [159]
• Vampire, or the Bride of the Isles, The, [159]
• Vampires, [158] et seq.
• Vampyre, The, [160]
• Vandover and the Brute, [167]
• Van Dyke, Henry, Night Call, The, [83]
• Van Lerberghe, Charles, Flaireurs, [64]
• Vathek, [8], [17], [22], [25], [29], [33], [37], [70]
• Vendetta of the Jungle, A, [168]
• Vera, the Medium, [200]
• Vergil, Culex, [290]
• Views of Other Planets, [263]
• Vikings of Helgeland, The, [65]
• Vine on the House, The, [90]
• Virtuoso’s Collection, The, [78]
• Vision of Judgment, A, [214]
• Vision of Judgment, A, [134]
• Vision of Love Revealed in Sleep, A, [79]
• Vistas, [65], [278]
• Vorse, Mary Heaton, Second Wife, The, [122], [192]

• W
• Wallace, Edgar, Bones, Sanders, and Another, [156]
• Wallace, Lew, [179]
• —— Fair God, The, [256]
• —— Prince of India, [179]
• Wandering Jew, The, [8], [175] et seq.
• Wandering Jew, The, [176]
• Wandering Jew, The, [176]
• Wandering Jew, The, [176], [180]
• Wandering Jew, A Christmas Carol, The, [177]
• Wandering Jew, or the Travels of Bareach, the Prolonged, The, [178]
• Wanderings of Cain, The, [118]
• Walpole, Horace, [6], [8], [11], [14], [71], [92], [188], [309]
• —— Castle of Otranto, The, [6], [8], [16], [17], [25], [31], [32], [36], [40], [41], [52], [101]
• —— Mysterious Mother, The, [53]
• War Letters from a Living Dead Man, [207], [292]
• War of the Wenuses, The, [263]
• War of the Worlds, The, [263]
• Ward, Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, [199], [290]
• —— Day of My Death, The, [199]
• —— Gates Ajar, The, [210]
• —— Gates Between, The, [210]
• —— Gates Beyond, The, [210]
• —— Kentucky’s Ghost, [199]
• Ward No. 6, [69]
• Warning, The, [276]
• Water Babies, The, [240]
• Water Ghost and Others, The, [112]
• Water of the Wondrous Isle, The, [236]
• Waters of Death, The, [62]
• Wave, The, [194]
• Webster, John, Duchess of Malfi, The, [8], [166]
• Wedmore, Frederick, Dream of Provence, A, [293]
• Well at the World’s End, The, [236]
• Wells, Carolyn, Styx River Anthology, The, [216]
• Wells, H. G.:
• —— Crystal Egg, The, [263]
• —— Days of the Comet, The, [264]
• —— Door in the Wall, The, [258]
• —— Dream of Armageddon, A, [196], [262]
• —— First Men in the Moon, The, [264]
• —— Flowering of the Strange Orchid, [62], [164], [273]
• —— In the Days of the Comet, [264]
• —— Invisible Man, The, [95], [269]
• —— Island of Dr. Moreau, The, [271]
• —— Man Who Had Been in Fairyland, The, [241]
• —— New Accelerator, The, [286]
• —— Plattner Case, The, [260]
• —— Remarkable Case of Davidson’s Eyes, The, [256]
• —— Sea Lady, The, [234]
• —— Star, The, [264]
• —— Story of Days to Come, A, [262]
• —— Story of the Late Mr. Elvesham, The, [122], [185]
• —— Time Machine, The, [189], [260]
• —— Vision of Judgment, A, [214]
• —— War of the Worlds, The, [263]
• —— When the Sleeper Wakes, [262]
• —— Wonderful Visit, The, [218], [221], [302]
• Wentz, W. Y. E., [239]
• —— Fairy Faith in Celtic Countries, [239]
• Werewolf, The, [166] et seq.
• Werewolf, The, [169], [172]
• Werewolves, [170]
• Weston, Jessie Adelaide, [146]
• —— Black Magic, [146]
• —— Mummy’s Foot, The, [62]
• Wetmore, Elizabeth Bisland, Doppelgänger, The, [122]
• Weyman, Stanley J., Man in Black, The, [137]
• Wharton, Edith, [53], [121]
• —— Afterwards, [302]
• —— Duchess at Prayer, The, [121], [303]
• —— Eyes, The, [297]
• —— Kerfol, [290]
• —— Triumph of Night, The, [121]
• What Was It? A Mystery, [61], [96]
• When the Gods Slept, [63], [74]
• When the Sleeper Wakes, [262]
• Whicher, George Frisbee, Life and Romances of Mrs. Eliza Heywood, [42]
• White Lady of Avenel, [225]
• White People, The, [203], [298]
• White Sleep of Auber Hurn, The, [121]
• Whitman, Stephen French, Woman from Yonder, The, [126], [187]
• Whitmore, E. C., [305]
• —— Supernatural in Tragedy, The, [305]
• Wieland, [35], [39]
• Wilde, Oscar, [32], [240], [249]
• —— Fisherman and His Soul, The, [134], [153], [236]
• —— Happy Prince, The, [238]
• —— House of Judgment, The, [214]
• —— Legend of Sharp, A, [134]
• —— Nightingale and the Rose, The, [235], [293]
• —— Picture of Dorian Gray, The, [32], [60], [121], [134]
• —— Selfish Giant, The, [246]
• Wilkinson, William Cleaver, [284]
• William of Newbury, [159]
• William Wilson, [58], [120]
• Williams, Blanche Colton, [83]
• Williams, Frances Fenwick:
• —— Soul on Fire, A, [193]
• —— Theodora, [193]
• Willow Tree, The, [306]
• Wisdom of the King, The, [154]
• Witch, The, [149]
• Witch, The, [151]
• Witch, The, [145] et seq.
• Witch of Atlas, The, [148]
• Witch of Edmondton, The, [150]
• Witch of Endor, The, [145]
• Witch of Fife, The, [148]
• Witch of Prague, The, [149], [195], [266]
• Witch Hazel, [157]
• Witches, Gothic, [26] et seq.
• Witching Hour, The, [306]
• With Intent to Steal, [62], [117]
• Withered Arm, The, [225]
• Wizard, The, [145] et seq.
• Wolf, The, [172]
• Woman, The, [66], [194], [300]
• Woman from Yonder, The, [126], [187]
• Wonderful Visit, The, [218], [221], [302]
• Wood beyond the World, The, [236]
• Woodstock, [225]
• Wool-gatherer, The, [23], [29], [30]
• Word with a Mummy, A, [62]
• Wordsworth, William, Song of the Wandering Jew, The, [176]
• Wrong Elixir, The, [186]
• Wuthering Heights, [86], [226]

• Y
• Yeats, W. B., [226], [237], [240], [248], [285]
• —— Celtic Twilight, The, [239]
• —— Countess Cathleen, [65], [143]
• —— Curse of the Fires and the Shadows, The, [154]
• —— Land of Heart’s Desire, The, [65], [240], [306]
• —— Old Men of the Twilight, The, [234]
• —— Stories of Red Ranrahan, [186], [243]
• —— Wisdom of the King, The, [154]
• Young Goodman Brown, [151]

• Z
• Zangwill, Israel, They That Walk in Darkness, [136]
• Zastrozzi, [17]
• Zero, [257]
• Zofloya, [10], [17], [28], [33], [37], [38], [53], [154], [251]
• Zola, Émile, [252]