Spiritualism and Psychical Research.
The influence of modern Spiritualism and Psychical Research on the literature of supernaturalism has been marked, especially of late years. It would be inevitable that movements which interest so many persons, among them many of more than ordinary intelligence, should be reflected in fiction. These two aspects of the subject will be treated together since they are closely allied. For though Spiritualism is a form of religion and Psychical Research a new science,—and so-called religion and so-called science are not always parallel—the lines of investigation here are similar. While Spiritualism endeavors to get in touch with the spirits of the dead that the living may be comforted and enlightened, and Psychical Research attempts to classify the supposedly authentic cases of such communication, and in so much their methods of approach are different,—yet the results may be discussed together.
Hawthorne was interested in Spiritualism as literary material, since a discussion of it is introduced in Blithedale Romance and various passages in his notebooks treat of the matter showing the fascination it had for him. Mrs. Elizabeth Stuart Phelps Ward, in addition to her fictional treatises of heaven, takes up Spiritualism as well. In The Day of My Death she gives a satiric account of the return of a spirit who says he is a lost soul tortured in hell. He doubtless deserves it, for he sticks the baby full of pins and ties it to a tree, and folds the clothes from the wash in the shape of corpses. He is still interested in this life, however, since he requests a piece of squash pie. In Kentucky’s Ghost she depicts a spirit actuated by definite malice. In the previous story seven mediums tell a man that he will die at a certain day and hour, but he lives cheerfully on.
William Dean Howells has given a study in his usual kindly satire and sympathetic seriousness, of the phenomena of Spiritualism and mesmerism, in The Undiscovered Country. Dr. Boynton, a mistaken zealot, holds seances assisted by his daughter, a delicate, sensitive girl who is physically prostrated after each performance and begs her father to spare her. She acts as medium where the usual effects of rapping, table levitation, and so forth take place, where spirit hands wave in the air and messages, grave and jocular, are delivered. The characterization is handled with skill to bring out the sincerity of each person involved in the web of superstition and false belief, and Howells shows real sympathy with each, the scoffers as well as the misguided fanatics. It is only when the doctor looks death in the face that he realizes his error and seeks to know by faith in the Bible the truths of the far country of the soul.
Hamlin Garland has shown considerable interest in Spiritualism in his fiction. He refuses to commit himself as to his own opinion of the question, but he has written two novels dealing with it, The Tyranny of the Dark and The Shadow World. The former is considerably like Howells’s novel, for here also a young girl is made the innocent victim of fanatics, her mother and a preacher who has fallen in love with her. She is made to take part in spiritualistic manifestations, whether as a victim of fraud or as a genuine medium the author leaves in doubt. When the girl casts him off the preacher kills himself that he may come into closer communication with her after death than he has been able to do in life. Richard Harding Davis has contributed a volume with a similar plot, the exploitation of an innocent and, of course, beautiful girl by fanatics, in Vera the Medium. Here the girl is more than half aware that she is a fraud and in her last seance, at the conclusion of which she is to be carried triumphantly away by her lover, the New York district attorney, she dramatically confesses her deception. As a sympathy-getter, she pleads that she was very lonely, that because her grandmother and mother were mediums, she had been cut off from society. “I used to play round the kitchen stove with Pocahontas and Alexander the Great, and Martin Luther lived in our china closet.”
David Belasco’s The Return of Peter Grimm, drama and novel, is based upon spiritualistic manifestations. We are told that the “envelope” or shadow-self of a sleeper has been photographed by means of radio-photography. When a certain part of the shadow body is pricked with a pin, as the cheek, the corresponding portion of the sleeper’s body is seen to bleed. Peter Grimm comes back from the other world to direct the actions of the living, and though at first only a child sees him,—for children are the best sensitives save animals,—eventually the adults recognize him also and yield to his guidance. Spiritualism enters directly or indirectly into many works of fiction of late years. Whether people believe in it or not, they are thinking and writing about it. The subject receives its usual humorous turn in various stories, as Nelson Lloyd’s The Last Ghost in Harmony, the story of a specter who complains of the scientific unimaginativeness of his village, saying that though he had entreated the spooks to hold out for a little while as he had heard Spiritualism was headed that way and would bring about a revival of interest in ghosts, the spirits all got discouraged and quit the place. And we recall Sandy’s mournful comment to Mark Twain’s Captain Stormfield, that he wished there was something in that miserable Spiritualism, so he could send word back to the folks.
The Proceedings of the Psychical Research Society have a twofold association with literature, for not only have various modern novels and stories been inspired by such material, but the instances recorded are similar in many cases to the classical ghost stories. Lacy Collison-Morley in his Greek and Roman Ghost Stories says, “There are a number of stories of the passing of souls which are curiously like some of those collected by the Psychical Research Society, in the Fourth Book of Gregory the Great’s Dialogues.” The double source of many modern stories may be found by a comparative study of Collison-Morley’s book and Myers’s Human Personality, while G. H. Gerould’s volume, The Grateful Dead, introduces recent instances that are like classical stories. The inability of the soul to have rest in the other world if its body was unburied, as held by the ancients, is reflected in Gothic romance, Elizabethan drama as well as in the classics. The ghost of Jack, whom Peele tells us about, is a case of a ghost coming back to befriend his undertaker. From these comparisons it would appear that there is something inherently true to humanity in these beliefs, for the revenge ghost and the grateful dead have appeared all along the line. Perhaps human personality is largely the same in all lands and all times, and ghosts have the same elemental emotions however much they may have acquired a veneer of modernity.
There are many instances of the compact-ghost, the spirit who returns just after death in accordance with a promise made in life, to manifest himself to some friend or to some skeptic. Algernon Blackwood gives several stories based on that theme, one a curious case where the ghost is so lifelike his friend does not dream he is not the living man, and assigns him to a bedroom. Later he is invisible, yet undoubtedly present, for his heavy breathing, movements of the covers, and impress on the bed are beyond dispute. Afterwards, by Fred C. Smale, shows a ghost returning to attend a neighborhood club. When his name is called by mistake, he takes part on the program, speaking through the lips of a young man present, who goes off in a cataleptic trance. During this coma the youth, who is ignorant of music, gives a technical discussion of notation, analyzing diatonic semi-tones and discussing the note a nightingale trills on. When he wakes he says he has felt a chill and a touch. Alice Brown relates a story of a lover who promised to come to his sweetheart at the moment of death, but who, like Ahimeas in the Bible, runs before he is ready, and keeps his ghostly tryst while the rescuers bring him back to life. He hasn’t really been drowned at all.
A recent novelette by Frances Hodgson Burnett, called The White People, has psychical phenomena for its central interest. A little child, born after her father’s tragic death and when her dying mother is conscious of his spiritual presence, grows up with a strange sensitiveness to manifestations from the other world. Her home is on a lonely estate in Scotland, so that her chief companionship is with the “white people,” the spirits of the dead, though she does not so recognize them. Her playmate is Wee Brown Elsbeth, who has been murdered hundreds of years before, and she is able to see the dead hover near their loved ones wherever she goes. So when she comes to realize what a strange vision is hers, she has no horror of death, and when her lover dies she does not grieve, but waits to see him stand smiling beside her as in life. The theme of the story is the nearness of the dead to the living, the thin texture of the veil that separates the two worlds.
Basil King tells a poignant story of a soul trying vainly to return in body to right a wrong done in life but unable to accomplish her purpose by physical means. At last she effects it by impressing the mind of a living woman who carries out the suggestion psychically given. One of the most effective recent accounts of a spirit’s return to earth to influence the life of the living, to give messages or to control destiny, is in Ellen Glasgow’s The Shadowy Third. Here the ghost of a child, a little girl whom her stepfather has done to death for her money, returns to cause his death in an unusual way. She throws her little skipping-rope carelessly on the stairway where he must trip up in it when he sees her phantom figure in front of him in the gloom, so to fall headlong to his death. This is an impressive revenge ghost.
Henry James based his ghost story, The Turn of the Screw, on an incident reported to the Psychical Society, of a spectral old woman corrupting the mind of a child. The central character in Arnold Bennett’s novel, The Ghost, is a specter, one of the most rabid revenge ghosts in literature, who is eaten up with jealousy lest the woman he loved in life shall care for some one else. Algernon Blackwood uses much psychical material in his numberless stories of the supernatural, often mentioning the work of the Society, and Andrew Lang has contributed much to the subject. Arthur Machen has just published a collection of stories of war-apparitions that are interesting psychical specimens, called The Bowmen. In one story in the volume he shows us how a contemporary legend may be built up, since from a short piece of fiction written by him has evolved the mass of material relating to the angels at Mons. One tale is a story of the supernatural intervention of Saint George and his army to drive back the Germans and save the hour for the Allies, while another describes the vision of a soldier wounded in battle defending his comrades, who sees the long-dead heroes of England file past him to praise him for his valor. The minister gives him wine to drink and
His voice was hushed. For as he looked at the minister the fashion of his vesture was changed. He was all in armor, if armor be made of starlight, of the rose of dawn, and of sunset fires; and he lifted up a great sword of flame.
“Full in the midst, his Cross of Red
Triumphant Michael brandished
And trampled the Apostate’s pride.”
Another case of collective apparitions is the experience of a soldier, wounded in battle, who tells of strange fighters who have come in to aid the English. He thinks they are some of the tribesmen that Britain employs, but from his descriptions the minister knows that they are the long-dead Greeks who have arisen to take part in the struggle which their modern descendants are reluctant to share. These stories are only a few among the many instances of supernaturalism in fiction traceable to the influence of the war.
Certain volumes of ghost stories have appeared, claiming to be not fiction but fact, accounts of actual apparitions seen and snap-shotted. This sort of problematic fiction is not new, however, since Defoe long ago published one of the best of the kind, the story of Mrs. Veal, who appeared to her friend Mrs. Bargrave, and conversed with her, gravely telling her that heaven is much like the descriptions in a certain religious book written shortly before that. She seems very realistic, with her dress of newly scoured silk, which her friend rubs between her fingers, and her lifelike conversation. This story has usually been regarded as one of Defoe’s “lies like truth,” but recent evidence leads one to believe that it is a reportorial account of a ghost story current at the time, which missed being reported to the Society for Psychical Research merely because the organization did not exist then. The modern stories that stridently claim to be real lack the interest in many instances that Mrs. Veal is able to impart, and in most cases the reader loses his taste for that sort of fiction because it is rammed down his throat for fact. They don’t impress one, either as fact or as fiction.
One of the most interesting aspects of the literature relating to psychic matters in recent years is the number of books that claim to be spirit-inspired. These instances of psychography are not what we might expect immortals to indite, but it appears that there must be a marked decrease of intelligence when one reaches the other world. The messages sent back by dead genius lack the master style, even lacking that control over spelling and grammar which low, earth-bound editors consider necessary. But perhaps the spirits of the great grow tired of being made messenger boys, and show their resentment by literary strikes. Anita Silvani has published several volumes that she claims were written while she was in a semi-trance,—which statement no reader will doubt. Her accommodating dictator furnishes illustrations for her stuff, as well, for she says she would have inner visions of the scenes described, “as if a dioram passed” before her. These romances of three worlds are quite peculiar productions. The inner voices asked her in advance not to read any literature on theosophy or Spiritualism or the supernatural since they wished her mind to be free from any previous bias. Mrs. Elsa Barker is another of these literary mediums, for she has put out two volumes of letters in narrative form, which she makes affidavit were dictated to her by a disembodied spirit, the ghost of the late Judge Hatch, of California. She states that while she was sitting in her room in Paris one day, her hand was violently seized, a pencil thrust into it, and the automatic writing began. Mrs. Campbell-Praed is another of these feminine stenographers for spooks, but like the rest she has left nothing that could well be included in a literary anthology. These spirit-writers tell us of life after death, but nothing that is a contribution to existing ignorance on the subject. According to Judge Hatch, whose post-mortem pen-name is X, the present war has its parallel in a conflict of spirits, and the astral world is in dire confusion because of overcrowding, so that the souls of the slain must go through torments and struggle with demons.
The most recent instance of psychography comes to us by way of the ouija-board from St. Louis, the authenticity of which is vouched for by Mr. Casper Yost, of the editorial staff of the Globe-Democrat. But if the ouija-board dictated the stories and plays, giving the name of Patience Worth as the spirit author, and if Mrs. Curran took them down, why does Mr. Yost appear as the author? Patience Worth says that she lived a long time ago. Mr. Yost insists that her language is Elizabethan, but it seems rather a curious conglomeration, unlike any Elizabethan style I am familiar with. She has written stories, lyrics, a long drama, and other informal compositions, a marvelous output when one considers the slow movements of the ouija-board. The communications seem to have human interest and a certain literary value, though they bring us no messages from the Elizabethan section of eternity.[171]
Automatic writing appears in The Martian by Du Maurier, where the spirit from Mars causes Barty Joscelyn in his sleep to write books impossible to him in his waking hours. The type has been parodied by John Kendrick Bangs in his Enchanted Typewriter, which machine worked industriously recording telegraphic despatches from across the Styx. The invisible operator gives his name as Jim Boswell. The writer states:
The substance of the following pages has evolved itself between the hours of midnight and four o’clock, during a period of six months, from a type-writing machine standing in a corner of my library, manipulated by unseen hands.
It is astonishing how many ghosts are trying to break into print these days. And after all, what do the poor things get out of it? No royalties, scant praise, and much ridicule when their style fails to come up to specifications.
Interesting psychical material is found in a new volume of plays by Theodore Dreiser.[172] He gives curious twists to the unearthly, as in The Blue Sphere, where a shadow and a fast mail are among the dramatis personæ, typifying the fate idea of the old drama. The shadow lures a child monstrosity out on to the railway track, after he has caused the elders to leave the gate open, and the train, made very human, kills the child. The psychic effects in In the Dark are even more peculiar, the characters including various spirits, a wraith, and a ghost with red eyes, who circle round the human beings and force them to discover a murder that has been committed. The effect of supernatural manifestation on animals is brought out here, in the bellowing of the bull and the howling of the dogs as the ghosts pass by. In A Spring Recital troops of nymphs and hamadryads, fauns, clouds of loathsome spirits of hags and wastrels, “persistences” of fish, birds, and animals, “various living and newly dead spirits wandering in from the street,” the ghost of an English minister of St. Giles, who died in 1631, a monk of the Thebaid, of date 300 and three priests of Isis of 2840 B.C. enter to hear the organist play. He is unaware that anybody is hearing his music save the four human beings who have happened in. These dramas of course are purely literary plays, impossible of presentation on the stage, and in their curious character show a likeness to some of the late German supernaturalism, such as the plays of August Stramm. They show in an extreme form the tendency toward psychic material that the American and English drama has evidenced lately.