The Werewolf and Others.
Another dæmonic figure popular in fiction is the werewolf. The idea is a very old one, having been mentioned by various classical writers, it is said, including Pomponius Mela, Herodotus, and Ovid. The legend of the werewolf is found in practically all European countries, especially those where the wolf is common. In France many stories of the loup-garou are current. The werewolf is a human being cursed with the power or the obligation to be transformed into an animal who goes forth to slay and devour. Like a vampire, he might become such as a curse from God, or he might be an innocent victim, or might suffer from an atavistic tendency, a cannibalistic craving for blood. Distinction is to be made between the real werewolf and the lycanthrope,—the latter a human being who, on account of some peculiar twist of insanity, fancies himself a wolf and acts accordingly. There is such a character in The Duchess of Malfi, a maniac who thinks himself a mad wolf, and another in The Albigenses, a creature that crouches in a corner of its lair, gnawing at a skull snatched from the graveyard, uttering bestial growls. Algernon Blackwood has a curdling story of lycanthropy, where the insane man will eat nothing but raw meat and devours everything living that he can get hold of. He confesses to a visitor that he used to bite his old servant, but that he gave it up, since the old Jew tasted bitter. The servant also is mad, and “hides in a vacuum” when his master goes on a rampage. Stories of lycanthropy illustrate an interesting aspect of the association between insanity and the supernatural in fiction.
The most revolting story of lycanthropy is in Frank Norris’s posthumous novel, Vandover and the Brute. This is a study in soul degeneration, akin to the moral decay that George Eliot has shown in the character of Tito Melema, but grosser and utterly lacking in artistic restraint. We see a young man, at first sensitive, delicate, and with high ideals, gradually through love of ease and self-indulgence, through taking always the line of least resistance, becoming a moral outcast. The brute that ever strains at the leash in man gains the mastery and the artist soul ends in a bestial creature. Dissipation brings on madness, called by the doctors “lycanthropy-mathesis.” In his paroxysms of insanity the wretch thinks that his body is turned into the beast that his soul symbolizes, and runs about his room, naked, four-footed, growling like a jungle animal and uttering harsh, raucous cries of Wolf-wolf!
Kipling’s The Mark of the Beast is midway between a lycanthrope and a werewolf story, for while the soul of the beast—or whatever passes for the brutish soul—enters into the man and drives out his spirit, and while many bestial characteristics result, including the revolting odor, the man does not change his human form.
While lycanthropy has never been a frequent theme in fiction, the werewolf is a common figure, appearing in various forms of literature, from medieval ballads and legends to modern short stories. Marie de France, the Anglo-Norman writer,[153] tells of a werewolf that is by day a gallant knight and kindly gentleman, yet goes on nocturnal marauding expeditions. When his wife shows curiosity concerning his absences and presses him for an explanation, he reluctantly tells her that he is a werewolf, hiding his clothes in a hollow tree, and that if they were removed he would have to remain a wolf. She has her lover steal his clothes, then marries the lover. One day long afterward the king’s attention is called to a wolf that runs up to him and acts strangely. It is a tame and well-mannered beast till the false knight and his wife appear, when he tries to tear their throats. Investigation reveals the truth, the clothes are fetched, and the curse removed. Arthur O’Shaughnessy’s modern version of this, as of others of Marie’s lais, is charming.
Like the vampire, the werewolf is under a curse that impels him to prey upon those dearest to him. Controlled by a dæmonic spirit, the human being, that in his normal personality is kindly and gentle, becomes a jungle beast with ravening instincts. The motif is obviously tangled up with the vampire superstition here, and it would be interesting, if possible, to trace out the two to a point of combination. This irresistible impulse to slay his dear ones introduces a dramatic element into the plot, here as in the vampire stories. The wolf is not the only animal around whom such plots center, but being most common he has given his name to the type. The Albigenses tell of a young husband who, as a werewolf, slays his bride, then vanishes to be seen no more.
There are interesting variants of the werewolf story, introducing other elements of supernaturalism. In A Vendetta of the Jungle,[154] we have the idea of successive infection of the moral curse, similar to the continuation of vampirism. Mrs. Crump, a lady in India, is eaten by a tiger, who has a good digestion for he assimilates not only her body but her soul. So that now it is Mrs. Crump-Tiger, we might say, that goes about the jungle eating persons. In time she devours her successor in her husband’s affection. The man is aware that it is his first wife who has eaten his second, so he starts out to kill the animal to clear off the score. But by the time he reaches the jungle the beast has had time to digest his meal and when the husband levels his gun to fire, the eyes that look out at him from the brutish face are his beloved’s eyes. What could he do?
Eugene Field gives a new turn to the idea by representing the werewolf curse as a definite atavistic throw-back. His wolf-man is an innocent marauder, the reincarnation of a wicked grandfather, yet a gentle, chivalrous soul very different from his grandparent. The old gentleman has left him heir to nothing but the curse and a magic spear given him by the witch Brunhilde. The werewolf bears a charmed life against which no weapon of man can avail, and the country is panic-stricken over his ravages. The legend is that the beast’s fury cannot be stopped till some man offers himself as a voluntary sacrifice to the wolf. The youth does not know that he is the guilty one until his reprehensible grandfather appears to him in a vision, demanding his soul. He hears that there is to be a meeting in the sacred grove on a certain day and begs his beloved to remain away, lest the werewolf come. But when she insists that she will go, he gives her his magic spear, telling her to strike the wolf through the heart if he approaches her. True to his accursed destiny the wolf does come to the grove and lunges at the girl. All the men flee but one, and his weapons fail,—then the terrified girl hurls the spear, striking the beast to the heart. But when he falls, it is young Harold who is dying, who has given himself a voluntary sacrifice to save others. The curse is lifted but he is dead.
In The Camp of the Dog, by Algernon Blackwood, we have another unconscious werewolf, a gentle, modest, manly young fellow madly in love with a girl who doesn’t care for him. In his sleep he goes questing for her. While his body lies shrunken on a cot in his tent, his soul takes the form of a wolf and goes to the hilltop, uttering unearthly howls. By an equally strong psychic disturbance the girl is impelled to go in a somnambulistic state to the hilltop. Each is in waking hours utterly unaware of their strange jaunts, till the father shoots the wolf. The young man in this case suffers only curious psychic wounds, from which he recovers when the girl promises to marry him, and the wolf is seen no more.
The panther plays his part in this were-menagerie. Ambrose Bierce, in The Eyes of the Panther, tells of a young girl who, because of a prenatal curse similar to that affecting Elsie Venner, is not wholly human. She is conscious of her dual nature and tells the man she loves that she cannot marry him since she is a panther by night. He thinks her mildly insane till one night a settler sees a beast’s eyes glaring into his window and fires. When they follow the blood-tracks, they find the girl dying. This is one of the conventions of the werewolf story, the wounding of an animal that escapes and the blood-trail that leads to a human being wounded just as the beast was.
Elliott O’Donnell, in a volume called Werewolves published in London in 1912, gives serious credence to the existence of werewolves not only in the past but also in the present. He tells a number of stories of what he claims are authenticated instances of such beings in actual life. He relates the experience of a man who told him that he had himself seen a youth turn himself into a tiger after preparatory passes of enchantment. The watcher made haste to climb a sacred Vishnu tree when the transformation was complete. O’Donnell tells a tale of a widow with three children that married a Russian nobleman. She saw him and his servant change into werewolves, at least partially, remaining in a half state, devouring her children whom she left behind in her escape.
O’Donnell relates several stories of authentic (according to him) werewolf stories of England in recent times, giving the dates and places and names of the persons who saw the beasts. The incidents may be similar to those spoken of in Dickens’s Haunted House, where the famous “’ooded woman with the howl” was seen,—or at least, many persons saw the owl and knew that the woman must be near by. These witnesses of werewolves may have seen animals, all right enough. Modernity is combined with medieval superstition here, and it seems uncanny, for instance, to identify a werewolf by means of an electric pocket flashlight.
In collections of folk-tales, the tribal legends of the American redmen as well as of Kipling’s India and of England, there are various stories of werewolves. Among primitive peoples there is a close relation between the brute and the human and the attributing of human characteristics and powers to the beast and vice versa is common, so that this supernatural transfer of personality is natural enough. A madwolf might suggest the idea for a werewolf.
Algernon Blackwood advances the theory that the werewolf is a true psychical fact of profound importance, however it may have been garbled by superstition. He thinks that the werewolf is the projection of the untamed slumbering sanguinary instincts of man, “scouring the world in his fluidic body, the body of desire.” As the mind wanders free from the conscious control of the will in sleep, so the body may free itself from the fetters of mind or of custom and go forth in elemental form to satisfy its craving to slay, to slake its wild thirst for blood. O’Donnell says that werewolves may be phantasms of the dead that cannot be at peace, or a certain kind of Elementals. He also thinks that they may be the projection of one phase of man’s nature, of the cruelty latent in mankind that seeks expression in this way. According to that theory, a chap might have a whole menagerie inside him, to turn loose at intervals, which would be exciting but rather risky for society. It was doubtless a nature such as this that Maupassant attempts to describe in his story The Wolf, where the man has all the instincts of the wolf yet never changes his human form.
The werewolf in fiction has suffered the same leveling influence that we have observed in the case of the ghost, the devil, the witch, and the vampire. He is becoming a more psychical creature, a romantic figure to be sympathized with, rather than a beast to be utterly condemned. In recent fiction the werewolf is represented as an involuntary and even unconscious departure from the human, who is shocked when he learns the truth about himself. Whether he be the victim of a divine curse, an agent of atavistic tendencies, or a being who thus gives vent to his real and brutish instincts, we feel a sympathy with him. We analyze his motives—at a safe distance—seek to understand his vagaries and to estimate his kinship with us. We think of him now as a noble figure in fiction, a lupine Galahad like Blackwood’s, a renunciatory hero like Eugene Field’s or what not. Or we reflect that he may be a case of metempsychosis and treat him courteously, for who knows what we may be ourselves some day? The werewolf has not figured in poetry or in the drama as have other supernatural beings, as the ghost, the devil, the witch, the vampire,—one wonders why. He is a dramatic figure and his character-analysis might well furnish themes for poetry though stage presentation would have its difficulties.
Perhaps the revival of interest in Elizabethan literature has had a good deal to do with the use of supernatural beings in literature of recent times. The devil and the dæmonic spirits he controls, the witches and wizards, the vampires, the enchanted animals, to whom he delegates a part of his infernal power, appear as impressive moral allegories, mystical stories of life, symbols of truths. As literature is a reflection of life, the evil as well as the good enters in. But since the things of the spirit are intangible they must be represented in concrete form, as definite beings whom our minds can apprehend. Thus the poets and dramatists and story-makers must show us images to shadow forth spiritual things. As with a shudder we close the books that tell us horrifying tales of satanic spirits, of accursed beings that are neither wholly animal nor human, of mortals with diabolic powers, we shrink from the evils of the soul that they represent, and recognize their essential truth in the guise of fiction.
CHAPTER V
Supernatural Life
The fiction dealing with immortal life shows, more than any other aspect of the subject, humanity’s deep hunger for the supernatural. Whether it be stories of continuance of earthly existence without death as in the legends of the undying persons like the Wandering Jew; or of supernaturally renewed or preserved youth as described in the tales of the elixir of life; or of the transference of the soul after death into another body; or of life continued in the spirit in other worlds than this after the body’s death,—all show our craving for something above and beyond what we know here and now. Conscious of our own helplessness we long to feel ourselves leagued with immortal powers; shrinking affrighted from the grave’s near brink we yearn for that which would spare us death’s sting and victory. Sadly knowing with what swift, relentless pace old age is overtaking us we would fain find something to give us eternal youth. But since we cannot have these gifts in our own persons we seek them vicariously in fiction, and for a few hours’ leisured forgetfulness we are endowed with immortal youth and joy. Or, looking past death, we can feel ourselves more than conquerors in a life beyond.
“Oh world unknowable, we touch thee!
Inapprehensible, we clutch thee!”
We somehow snatch a strange comfort from these stories of a life beyond our own. We are comforted for our mortality when we see the tragedy that dogs the steps of those who may not die, whether Swift’s loathsome Struldbrugs or the Wandering Jew. Our own ignorance of the future makes us credulous of any man’s dream of heaven and at the same time sceptical of anybody else’s hell. We are such indestructible optimists that we can take any sort of raw material of fiction and transmute it into stuff that hope is made of.